Lifeboat Foundation

A group of researchers led by Andreas Wallraff, Professor of Solid State Physics at ETH Zurich, has performed a loophole-free Bell test to disprove the concept of “local causality” formulated by Albert Einstein in response to quantum mechanics.

By showing that quantum mechanical objects that are far apart can be much more strongly correlated with each other than is possible in conventional systems, the researchers have provided further confirmation for quantum mechanics. What’s special about this experiment is that the researchers were able for the first time to perform it using superconducting circuits, which are considered to be promising candidates for building powerful quantum computers.

A Bell test is based on an experimental setup that was initially devised as a thought experiment by British physicist John Bell in the 1960s. Bell wanted to settle a question that the greats of physics had already argued about in the 1930s: Are the predictions of quantum mechanics, which run completely counter to everyday intuition, correct, or do the conventional concepts of causality also apply in the atomic microcosm, as Albert Einstein believed?

In a result decades in the making, Los Alamos scientists have achieved light amplification with electrically driven devices based on solution-cast semiconductor nanocrystals—tiny specs of semiconductor matter made via chemical synthesis and often called colloidal quantum dots.

This demonstration, reported in the journal Nature, opens the door to a completely new class of electrically pumped lasing devices—highly flexible, solution-processable laser diodes that can be prepared on any crystalline or non-crystalline substrate without the need for sophisticated vacuum-based growth techniques or a highly controlled clean-room environment.

“The capabilities to attain light amplification with electrically driven colloidal quantum dots have emerged from decades of our previous research into syntheses of nanocrystals, their photophysical properties and optical and electrical design of quantum dot devices,” said Victor Klimov, Laboratory Fellow and leader of the quantum dot research initiative.

Scientists have been dreaming about nuclear fusion for decades. Microsoft thinks the technology is nearly ready to plug into the grid.

Microsoft just signed a jaw-dropping agreement to purchase electricity from a nuclear fusion generator. Nuclear fusion, often called the Holy Grail of energy, is a potentially limitless source of clean energy that scientists have been chasing for the better part of a century.

Continue reading “Microsoft just made a huge, far-from-certain bet on nuclear fusion” »

At its I/O developer conference, the search giant needs to rethink its AI strategy if it wants to catch Microsoft. The missing element? Experimentation.

Google has had a rough six months. Since ChatGPT launched last November — followed by the new Bing in February and GPT-4 in March — the company has failed to establish its AI credentials. Its own offering, the “experimental” chatbot Bard, compares poorly to rivals, and insider reports have portrayed a company in panic and disarray. Today, at its annual I/O conference, the company needs to convince the public (and shareholders) that it has a meaningful response. But to do that, it needs a new playbook.

AI outputs are increasingly defining the cultural moment — just not Google’s.

Continue reading “Google needs to stop throwing good money after Bard” »

The demo is clever, questionably real, and prompts a lot of questions about how this device will actually work.

Buzz has been building around the secretive tech startup Humane for over a year, and now the company is finally offering a look at what it’s been building. At TED last month, Humane co-founder Imran Chaudhri gave a demonstration of the AI-powered wearable the company is building as a replacement for smartphones. Bits of the video leaked online after the event, but the full video is now available to watch.

The device appears to be a small black puck that slips into your breast pocket, with a camera, projector, and speaker sticking out the top.

Continue reading “Humane’s new wearable AI demo is wild to watch — and we have lots of questions” »

Mandopop singer Stefanie Sun has gone viral on Bilibili, China’s largest user-generated video streaming site. But the sudden revival of interest in Sun, who hasn’t released an album since 2017, comes not from the artist having another moment of genius.

The songs that have attracted millions of views on Bilibili feature Sun’s voice cloned by artificial intelligence, raising questions about copyright protection.

Reminiscing on the golden age of Mandarin pop music, tech-savvy Chinese internet users took the liberty of mimicking Sun’s voice using singing voice conversion, a deep learning method that lets a user deliver one person’s singing in another person’s voice, and swap it into a compilation of Mandpop classics.

An innovative method decodes and finds hidden relationships in jointly recorded neural and behavioural data.

Summary: Researchers proposed the need for a legal framework to guide the conversation on whether or not human brain organoids can be considered people.

Brain organoids are grown from stem cells in a lab, mimicking the growth and structure of real brains. However, they do not fulfill the requirements to be considered natural persons, according to the researchers.

The study explores the potential juridical personhood of human brain organoids, and whether they can be considered legal entities.

Ktsimage/iStock.

So does that mean the internet will also crash by 2026? Well, it won’t if tech companies start using synthetic DNA instead of hard drives to store their data. You may not believe it, but according to Greef and his team, DNA strands can store large amounts of digital data, and in many ways, they have more advantages over modern-day data centers.