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A “huge” stash of helium discovered in East Africa could ease a decades-long shortage of the rare and valuable gas.

Researchers in the United Kingdom and Norway say the newly discovered helium gas field, found in the East African Rift Valley region of Tanzania, has the potential to ease a critical global shortage of helium, a gas that is vital to many high-tech applications, such as the magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scanners used in many hospitals.

The researchers say the discovery is the result of a new approach to searching for helium that combines prospecting methods from the oil industry with scientific research that reveals the role of volcanic heat in the production of pockets of helium gas. [Elementary, My Dear: 8 Elements You Never Heard Of].

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Geez! Is no one safe anymore; Google’s CEO has been hacked. Oh boy; guess there is definitely a bigger message to Google and others of big tech around this one. Whose next Bezos, Schmidt, etc? BTW — how is that AI working out.

Google CEO Sundar Pichai has become the latest tech executive to have a social media account hacked, and the group responsible says more targets will follow.

On Sunday, a group of hackers calling themselves OurMine briefly took over Pichai’s account on Quora, a question-and-answer site.

“We are just testing your security,” the hackers wrote, with the same message auto-posted via Quora to Pichai’s Twitter account. On Monday, the posts had been deleted.

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We’re on a roll with QC.

The era of quantum computers is one step closer as a result of research published in the current issue of the journal Science. The research team has devised and demonstrated a new way to pack a lot more quantum computing power into a much smaller space and with much greater control than ever before. The research advance, using a 3-dimensional array of atoms in quantum states called quantum bits—or qubits—was made by David S. Weiss, professor of physics at Penn State University, and three students on his lab team. He said “Our result is one of the many important developments that still are needed on the way to achieving quantum computers that will be useful for doing computations that are impossible to do today, with applications in cryptography for electronic data security and other computing-intensive fields.”

The new technique uses both laser light and microwaves to precisely control the switching of selected individual qubits from one quantum state to another without altering the states of the other atoms in the cubic array. The new technique demonstrates the potential use of atoms as the building blocks of circuits in future quantum computers.

The scientists invented an innovative way to arrange and precisely control the qubits, which are necessary for doing calculations in a quantum computer. “Our paper demonstrates that this novel approach is a precise, accurate, and efficient way to control large ensembles of qubits for quantum computing,” Weiss said.

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We now have a way to do tracibility in QC.

Shutterstock.

Chinese scientists won a major victory recently, by proving that the Majorana fermion — a particle we’ve found tantalizing hints of for years — genuinely exists. This discovery has huge implications for quantum computing, and it might change the world. But how?

A Majorana fermion is weird even by the standards of quantum physics. If you remember your high school physics, you remember that atomic particles like protons and electrons have a charge, positive or negative. The Majorana fermion, however, doesn’t have a charge, which allows it to be matter and anti-matter at the same time. Yes, that is incredibly confusing, even to quantum physicists, and they’re still arguing over how that even works.

Continue reading “How The Majorana Fermion Is Going To Change The World” | >

20th Century Fox has released the first full Morgan trailer online. The debut film from Luke Scott (commercial director and son of Ridley Scott) stars Kate Mara as a corporate troubleshooter sent to evaluate a terrifying incident at a remote, top-secret lab where she discovers the scientists have created a new form of evil inhabiting a human form.

This modern-day spin on Frankenstein looks promising, especially when you’ve got The Witch star Anya Taylor-Joy in the title role. If anything is detracting from the film, it’s the Labor Day weekend release date, which is usually a sign of dumping the film. That being said, it’s possible that Fox doesn’t know what they have or that it’s just too niche to be widely appreciated in the heart of the summer or the fall seasons. Either way, I’m definitely keeping this flick on my radar due to its intriguing premise and terrific cast. At the very least, this should be an interesting showcase for Taylor-Joy, who was just outstanding in The Witch, and I’m eager to see what she does next.

Check out the Morgan trailer below. The film also stars Rose Leslie, Boyd Holbrook, Michelle Yeoh, Jennifer Jason Leigh, and Paul Giamatti.

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This experiment has accessed the conditions under which hydrogen starts to transition from a gas to a metal. What the researchers find is that the transition to a fully metallic state occurs at significantly higher pressures and temperatures than predicted. And during that transition the hydrogen is not only somewhat conducting, but also opaque to visible light, while still transparent to infrared wavelengths.

The implication is that planets like Jupiter and Saturn should actually have thick interior layers of this ‘dark’ hydrogen above their conductive, metallic hydrogen zones. And the infrared transparency of dark hydrogen may help explain how heat leaks out and allows these, and any other, gas-giant worlds to cool and evolve.

Perhaps the most remarkable discovery is that even the simplest element in the universe still has some tricks up its sleeve — if pushed into the right conditions.

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