Lifeboat Foundation

A galaxy that has taunted astronomers since they first detected a hint of its presence more than 20 years ago has finally emerged from hiding.

It’s called HIPASS J1131-31, or Peekaboo, and it is located just 22 million light-years away. And it was so hard to see because it’s teeny tiny and obscured by a bright star in the Milky Way that sits almost directly in front of it.

Through a collaborative effort that involved space-and ground-based telescopes, scientists have learned that the extremely small Peekaboo is also extremely young and close – offering a snapshot of galactic infancy.

In the cons column, quantum computers are hard to use, require a very controlled set up to operate, and have to contend with “decoherence” or losing their quantum state which gives weird results. They’re also rare, expensive, and for most tasks, way less efficient than a traditional computer.

Still, a lot of these issues can be offset by combining a quantum computer with a traditional computer, just as VTT has done. Researchers can create a hybrid algorithm that has LUMI, the traditional supercomputer, handle the parts it does best while handing off anything that could benefit from quantum computing to HELMI. LUMI can then integrate the results of HELMI’s quantum calculations, perform any additional calculations necessary or even send more calculations to HELMI, and return the complete results to the researchers.

Finland is now one of few nations in the world with a quantum computer and a supercomputer, and LUMI is the most powerful quantum-enabled supercomputer. While quantum computers are still a way from being broadly commercially viable, these kinds of integrated research programs are likely to accelerate progress. VTT is currently developing a 20-qubit quantum computer with a 50-qubit upgrade planned for 2024.

In a new study published by Alzheimer’s & Dementia, scientists from Rush University and Tufts University were the first to compare cognitive decline factors to vitamin D concentrations not only in the blood, but in the brain as well.

Researchers analyzed participants of the Rush Memory and Aging Project (MAP)—an ongoing longitudinal study that aims to identify risk factors for Alzheimer’s disease and other cognitive decline disorders—before and after death to see how their vitamin D levels impacted cognitive function in their later years.

Free of known dementia at the time of enrollment, all MAP participants agreed to participate in annual evaluations and organ donation when they died. In this study, the average age of participants was 92 at the time of death.

A large universal quantum computer is still an engineering dream, but machines designed to leverage quantum effects to solve specific classes of problems—such as D-wave’s computers—are alive and well. But an unlikely rival could challenge these specialized machines: computers built from purposely noisy parts.

This week at the IEEE International Electron Device Meeting (IEDM 2022), engineers unveiled several advances that bring a large-scale probabilistic computer closer to reality than ever before.

Quantum computers are unrivaled for any algorithm that relies on quantum’s complex amplitudes. “But for problems where the numbers are positive, sometimes called stochastic problems, probabilistic computing could be quite competitive,” says Supriyo Datta, professor of electrical and computer engineering at Purdue University and one of the pioneers of probabilistic computing.

Summary: Tracking eye movements as a person views an image of a face in different lights provides vital clues about visual perception and consciousness overall.

Source: Yale.

Since he was a kid Hal Blumenfeld has wondered about the nature of human consciousness.

Summary: Researchers discover changes to the brain’s salience network occur when a person experiences trauma.

Source: University of Rochester.

Exposure to trauma can be life-changing—and researchers are learning more about how traumatic events may physically change our brains. But these changes are not happening because of physical injury; rather, the brain appears to rewire itself after these experiences.

A Japanese billionaire picked his crewmates for the first-ever artist-centered mission.

Yusaku Maezawa, who made his fortune as an online fashion retailer, announced the eight people who would be flying with him on the dearMoon mission, which aims to use a SpaceX Starship to fly around the moon as soon as next year.

Discusses the possibility of Femtotech and the technological possibilities it may unlock. Not long ago nanotechnology was a fringe topic; now it’s a flourishing engineering field, and fairly mainstream. For example, while writing this article, I happened to receive an email advertisement for the “Second World Conference on Nanomedicine and Drug Delivery,” in Kerala, India. It wasn’t so long ago that nanomedicine seemed merely a flicker in the eyes of Robert Freitas and a few other visionaries!

But nano is not as small as the world goes. A nanometer is 10–9 meters – the scale of atoms and molecules. A water molecule is a bit less than one nanometer long, and a germ is around a thousand nanometers across. On the other hand, a proton has a diameter of a couple femtometers – where a femtometer, at 10–15 meters, makes a nanometer seem positively gargantuan. Now that the viability of nanotech is widely accepted (in spite of some ongoing heated debates about the details), it’s time to ask: what about femtotech? Picotech or other technologies at the scales between nano and femto seem relatively uninteresting, because we don’t know any basic constituents of matter that exist at those scales. But femtotech, based on engineering structures from subatomic particles, makes perfect conceptual sense, though it’s certainly difficult given current technology.

Continue reading “Hugo de Garis — From Nanotech to Femtotech — There’s Plenty More Room at the Bottom” »

De GARIS ESSAYS

Essay No.

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