Lifeboat Foundation

The cultivation of triploid genetics could be the game changer for the cannabis industry, as it promises to deliver higher THC levels, larger yields, faster growth, and seedless flowers.

The application of triploids is not a new concept in agriculture. Consuming seedless fruit generally enhances the eating experience for most people.

Consider bananas, for instance. Bananas lack seeds because the parent banana tree is triploid, even though pollination normally occurs.

Infleqtion is unique amongst quantum companies due its participation in so many different segments of the quantum computing industry including quantum components, quantum computers, quantum software, and quantum sensors. This strategy of a broad product portfolio provides both advantages and disadvantages for a company. The potential advantages include achieving synergy between different product areas with the neutral atom, atomic prism, photonic, software, and other technologies they have developed over the years. It also brings some diversity in the revenue streams because some products will provide early revenue while others might take a few years of development before they can make a revenue contribution. The potential disadvantages could include execution risks if the engineering resources are spread too thin. Also, there may be different sets of customers and sales channels for the different product lines which can increase the complexities of managing a sales force, calling on customers, and generating new business.

Nonetheless, Infleqtion has made some interesting announcements in the past few months. In 2023 alone, the Quantum Computing Report by GQI ran 17 different stories that included Infleqtion. This week they hosted a webinar to discuss their product roadmaps for sensors, software, and computing. The highlight of the webinar was the announcement of their quantum computing roadmap. In this article, we will cover their plans for quantum computing, but first we will start with the progress they talked about in quantum sensors and quantum software and then discuss quantum computing afterwards.

Infleqtion’s discussion of sensor products included ones named Tiqker, Sqywire, and eXaqt. Tiqker is a small form factor ultra-accurate clock intended for use in navigation, data centers, and communication networks. The company asserts that this clock is 100X more accurate than cesium beam atomic clocks and 100,000X more accurate than a crystal oscillator. In navigation applications it can be used in GPS-denied environments and in communication networks it can help increase bandwidth and reduce latencies due to the more precise clocking of the data signals. The company mentioned that they are partnering with a large company for use of Tiqker in data center applications and that Tiqker is now available for pre-order. Sqywire is an ultra-sensitive radio frequency (RF) receiver that senses RF signals with Rydberg state atom-based sensing. It can be used installed of a classical antenna and provides high sensitivity, lower power, and ultra-wide bandwidth in a form factor.

The super thin solar cell material is flexible without sacrificing power conversion efficiency, researchers say.

Diagnosing schizophrenia as early as possible helps minimize the toll the neurological disorder takes on the body and the mind. Unfortunately the condition’s signs can be difficult to spot in the early stages.

That’s why researchers led by a team from the Indiana University School of Medicine have developed a test which offers a relatively simple and reliable way to check for current schizophrenia severity and future risk.

“Psychosis usually manifests in young adulthood – a prime period of life,” says neuroscientist Alexander Niculescu from the Indiana University School of Medicine. “Stress and drugs, including marijuana, are precipitating factors on a background of genetic vulnerability.”

Drug discovery is being transformed by advances in computational protein structure prediction and protein design.

Researchers from the University of Wisconsin-Madison (UW-Madison) have developed a novel approach for 3D printing functional human brain tissue.

The 3D printing process can create active neural networks in and between tissues that grow in a matter of weeks.

The researchers believe that their 3D bioprinted brain tissue provides an effective tool for modeling brain network activity under physiological and pathological conditions, and can also serve as a platform for drug testing.

Neutron stars in the universe, ultracold atomic gases in the laboratory, and the quark–gluon plasma created in collisions of atomic nuclei at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC): they may seem totally unrelated but, surprisingly enough, they have something in common. They are all a fluid-like state of matter made up of strongly interacting particles. Insights into the properties and behavior of any of these almost-perfect liquids may be key to understanding nature across scales that are orders of magnitude apart.

In a new paper, the CMS collaboration reports the most precise measurement to date of the speed at which sound travels in the quark–gluon plasma, offering new insights into this extremely hot state of matter.

Sound is a longitudinal wave that travels through a medium, producing compressions and rarefactions of matter in the same direction as its movement. The speed of sound depends on the medium’s properties, such as its density and viscosity. It can, therefore, be used as a probe of the medium.

Ever since the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) captured its first glimpse of the early universe, astronomers have been surprised by the presence of what appear to be more “ultramassive” galaxies than expected. Based on the most widely accepted cosmological model, they should not have been able to evolve until much later in the history of the universe, spurring claims that the model needs to be changed.

This would upend decades of established science.

“The development of objects in the universe is hierarchical. You start small and get bigger and bigger,” said Julian Muñoz, an assistant professor of astronomy at The University of Texas at Austin and co-author of a recent paper published in Physical Review Letters that tests changes to the cosmological model. The study concludes that revising the standard cosmological model is not necessary. However, astronomers may have to revisit what they understand about how the first galaxies formed and evolved.

Transposable elements are mobile genetic elements that can relocate within the genome and disrupt the normal function of genes, but are at the same time a source of evolutionary diversity. The lab of Tugce Aktas at the Max Planck Institute for Molecular Genetics has identified a novel pathway that keeps the activity of transposons in somatic cells in check after they have been transcribed.

Their findings have now been published in Nature. The work is a collaboration with the labs of Zachary D. Smith at the Yale Stem Cell Center, U.S., and Franz-Josef Müller from the Universitätsklinikum Schleswig-Holstein, Germany.

Over the course of evolution, the genomes of many organisms have become cluttered with ancient genetic remnants from evolution or parts of retroviruses that inserted their genetic code millions of years ago. Nearly half of the human genome consists of these transposable elements, or transposons.