Very nice; we’re getting closer.
But superposition is fragile, and finding ways to preserve it is one of the chief obstacles to developing large, general-purpose quantum computers. In today’s Nature, MIT researchers describe a new approach to preserving superposition in a class of quantum devices built from synthetic diamonds. The work could ultimately prove an important step toward reliable quantum computers.
In most engineering fields, the best way to maintain the stability of a physical system is feedback control. You make a measurement — the current trajectory of an airplane, or the temperature of an engine — and on that basis produce a control signal that nudges the system back toward its desired state.
The problem with using this technique to stabilize a quantum system is that measurement destroys superposition. So quantum-computing researchers have traditionally had to do without feedback.
What if prospective parents had the opportunity to make decisions ahead of time about the combination of genetic traits their child would inherit? The question is more than science fiction, says Hank Greely, a law professor at Stanford University.
The underlying science and technology are advancing rapidly—and now is the time to consider carefully “what kind of legal changes would be necessary to try to maximize the benefits and minimize the harm of this new approach to making babies,” he says.
Greely explored the legal, ethical, and societal implications of emerging biotechnologies for a new book, The End of Sex and The Future of Human Reproduction (Harvard University Press, 2016), that envisions a world where procreation may not start in bedrooms, but rather in a petri dish in a medical clinic.
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A near-record supermassive black hole discovered in a sparse area of the local universe indicates that these monster objects — this one equal to 17 billion suns — may be more common than once thought, according to University of California, Berkeley, astronomers.
Until now, the biggest supermassive black holes — those with masses around 10 billion times that of our sun — have been found at the cores of very large galaxies in regions loaded with other large galaxies. The current record holder, discovered in the Coma Cluster by the UC Berkeley team in 2011, tips the scale at 21 billion solar masses and is listed in the Guinness Book of World Records.
The newly discovered black hole is in a galaxy, NGC 1600, in the opposite part of the sky from the Coma Cluster in a relative desert, said the leader of the discovery team, Chung-Pei Ma, a UC Berkeley professor of astronomy and head of the MASSIVE Survey, a study of the most massive galaxies and black holes in the local universe with the goal of understanding how they form and grow supermassive.
“Misinterpreting signals to make them consistent with a pre-determined outcome is, psychologists tell us, a common phenomenon in human nature. Unfortunately, it is also a frequent dynamic in modern financial markets, particularly when it comes to sustainability.”
In an ever expanding universe of wearables, Samsung is doing its best to keep all bases covered. Today, the publication of a patent application shows the company is developing smart contact lenses.
The patent application, filed in South Korea, shows a contact lens equipped with a tiny display, a camera, an antenna, and several sensors that detect movement and the most basic form of input using your eyes: blinking.
