Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Advancing the state of the art in superconducting qubit hardware requires knowledge across a range of disciplines, including materials, fabrication, circuit design and simulation, packaging, cryogenics, low-noise measurement, hardware-software interfacing, and quantum compilation. As understanding of materials and processes has advanced over time, fabricating the highest-quality qubits increasingly relies on millions of dollars of fabrication equipment and countless hours of process development and sustainment.

“It has become increasingly challenging for individual organizations to maintain this full stack of expertise, particularly as circuits become more complex to design, fabricate, and measure,” Schwartz says. “As a result, superconducting qubit hardware research has remained centralized into a relatively small number of laboratories and large universities capable of developing and sustaining this expertise.”

MIT Lincoln Laboratory is one of these laboratories, with more than 20 years of research and development in superconducting qubits and demonstrations of world-leading qubit performance. The qubits are made on-site at the Microelectronics Laboratory, considered to be one of the U.S. government’s most advanced foundries, and in specialized prototyping facilities. The collective expertise and equipment of this facility have made it possible to stand-up the SQUILL Foundry.

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An international team of physicists has succeeded in measuring a property of the electron known as topological spin winding for the first time. The team obtained this result by studying the behaviour of electrons in so-called kagome metals, which are materials that have unique quantum properties related to their physical shape, or topology. The work could advance our understanding of the physics of superconductors and other systems that contain strongly correlated electrons.

Kagome metals are named after a traditional Japanese basket-weaving technique that produces a lattice of interlaced, symmetrical triangles with shared corners. When the atoms of a metal or other conductor are arranged in this kagome pattern, their electrons behave in unusual ways. For example, the wavefunctions of the electrons can interfere destructively, resulting in highly localized electronic states in which the particles interact strongly with each other. These strong interactions lead to a range of quantum phenomena, including magnetic ordering of unpaired electrons spins that can produce, for example, ferro-or antiferromagnetic phases, superconducting structures, quantum spin liquids and abnormal topological phases. All these phases have applications in advanced nanoelectronics and spintronics technologies.

In the new work, researchers led by Domenico Di Sante of the University of Bologna in Italy studied the spin and electronic structure of XV6Sn6, where X is a rare-earth element. These recently-discovered kagome metals contain a Dirac electronic band and a nearly flat electronic band. At the point at which these bands meet, an effect called spin-orbit coupling creates a narrow gap between the bands. This spin-orbit coupling also creates special type of electronic ground state at the material’s surface.

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NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has unveiled a stunning 3D visualization of 5,000 galaxies, providing a glimpse into the vast cosmic expanse.

The visualization, part of the Cosmic Evolution Early Release Science (CEERS) Survey, takes viewers on a journey through nearby galaxies to those in the far reaches of the universe, including one that has never been seen before by the telescope.

The area highlighted in the visualization represents a small portion of the Extended Groth Strip, which the Hubble Space Telescope initially observed. Although this region contains around 100,000 galaxies, the visualization specifically focuses on approximately 5,000 galaxies.

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SAN FRANCISCO, July 11 (Reuters) — International Business Machines (IBM) (IBM.N) is considering the use of artificial intelligence chips that it designed in-house to lower the costs of operating a cloud computing service it made widely available this week, an executive said Tuesday.

In an interview with Reuters at a semiconductor conference in San Francisco, Mukesh Khare, general manager of IBM Semiconductors, said the company is contemplating using a chip called the Artificial Intelligence Unit as part of its new “watsonx” cloud service.

IBM is hoping to take advantage of the boom in generative AI technologies that can write human-like text more than a decade after Watson, its first major AI system, failed to gain market traction.

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Autophagy plays important but complex roles in aging, affecting health and longevity. We found that, in the general population, the levels of ATG4B and ATG4D decreased during aging, yet they are upregulated in centenarians, suggesting that overexpression of ATG4 members could be positive for healthspan and lifespan. We therefore analyzed the effect of overexpressing Atg4b (a homolog of human ATG4D) in Drosophila, and found that, indeed, Atg4b overexpression increased resistance to oxidative stress, desiccation stress and fitness as measured by climbing ability. The overexpression induced since mid-life increased lifespan. Transcriptome analysis of Drosophila subjected to desiccation stress revealed that Atg4b overexpression increased stress response pathways. In addition, overexpression of ATG4B delayed cellular senescence, and improved cell proliferation.

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There’s a bouncer in everyone: The blood-brain barrier, a layer of cells between blood vessels and the rest of the brain, kicks out toxins, pathogens and other undesirables that can sabotage the brain’s precious gray matter.

When the bouncer is off its guard and a rowdy element gains entry, a variety of conditions can crop up. Barrier-invading cancer cells can develop into tumors, and multiple sclerosis can occur when too many white blood cells slip pass the barrier, leading to an autoimmune attack on the protective layer of brain nerves, hindering their communication with the rest of the body.

“A leaky blood-brain barrier is a common pathway for a lot of brain diseases, so to be able to seal off the barrier has been a long sought-after goal in medicine,” said Calvin Kuo, MD, PhD, the Maureen Lyles D’Ambrogio Professor and a professor of hematology.

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Cedars-Sinai investigators have identified several steps in a cellular process responsible for triggering one of the body’s important inflammatory responses. Their findings, published in the journal Science Immunology, open up possibilities for modulating the type of inflammation associated with several infections and inflammatory diseases.

Specifically, the investigators have improved understanding of the steps that lead to the production of IL-1 beta, a potent inflammatory protein signal released during many inflammatory responses.

“We now have a clearer understanding of the stepwise process that leads to the production of IL-1 beta,” said Andrea Wolf, Ph.D., assistant professor of Biomedical Sciences and Medicine at Cedars-Sinai, and a senior and corresponding author on the new study. “By understanding the process, we hope to one day find a treatment for diseases associated with this inflammatory response.”

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