Lifeboat Foundation

The founders all believed that the traditional method of building a quantum computer of a useful size would take too long. At the company’s inception, the PsiQuantum team established its goal to build a million qubit, fault-tolerant photonic quantum computer. They also believed the only way to create such a machine was to manufacture it in a semiconductor foundry.

Early alerts

PsiQuantum first popped up on my quantum radar about two years ago when it received $150 million in Series C funding which upped total investments in the company to $215 million.

Impaired reduction/oxidation (redox) metabolism is a key contributor to the etiology of many diseases, including primary mitochondrial disorders, cancer, neurodegeneration, and aging. However, mechanistic studies of redox imbalance remain challenging due to limited strategies which can perturb cellular redox metabolism and model pathology in various cellular, tissue, or organismal backgrounds without creating additional and potentially confounding metabolic perturbations. To date, most studies involving impaired redox metabolism have focused on oxidative stress and reactive oxygen species (ROS) production; consequently, less is known about the settings where there is an overabundance of reducing equivalents, termed reductive stress. NADH reductive stress has been modeled using pharmacologic inhibition of the electron transport chain (ETC) and ethanol supplementation. Still, both these methods have significant drawbacks. Here, we introduce a soluble transhydrogenase from E. coli (Ec STH) as a novel genetically encoded tool to promote NADH overproduction in living cells. When expressed in mammalian cells, Ec STH, and a mitochondrially-targeted version (mito Ec STH), can elevate the NADH/NAD⁺ ratio in a compartment-specific manner. Using this tool, we determine the metabolic and transcriptomic signatures of NADH reductive stress in mammalian cells. We also find that cellular responses to NADH reductive stress, including blunted proliferation, are dependent on cellular background and identify the metabolic reactions that sense changes in the cellular NADH/NAD⁺ balance. Collectively, our novel genetically encoded tool represents an orthogonal strategy to perturb redox metabolism and characterize the impact on normal physiology and disease states.

The authors have declared no competing interest.

Neutronium was the material used in the hull of the doomsday machine in Star Trek.

Now I’m not terribly sure what the mechanical properties of neutronium would be like. It certainly is very dense (about a billion tons per cm3, about the volume of the end of your little finger), but it interacts with matter only weakly. I would expect both it to be pretty inefficient at stopping both electromagnetic radiation (neutrons only have a magnetic moment), and matter.

Continue reading “The Doomsday Explosive! (The Neutronium Bomb)” »

Have you ever been watching a sci-fi show like Star Trek or Stargate, and someone mentions neutronium? Ever wonder what neutronium even is? I this video I give a quick run down of the interesting properties and meanings of this very strange, and very dangerous hypothetical element.

Want to help the channel? You can via

Continue reading “What is neutronium?” »

There has been a lot of buzz about quantum computers and for good reason. The futuristic computers are designed to mimic what happens in nature at microscopic scales, which means they have the power to better understand the quantum realm and speed up the discovery of new materials, including pharmaceuticals, environmentally friendly chemicals, and more. However, experts say viable quantum computers are still a decade away or more. What are researchers to do in the meantime?

A new Caltech-led study in the journal Science describes how machine learning tools, run on classical computers, can be used to make predictions about quantum systems and thus help researchers solve some of the trickiest physics and chemistry problems. While this notion has been shown experimentally before, the new report is the first to mathematically prove that the method works.

“Quantum computers are ideal for many types of physics and materials science problems,” says lead author Hsin-Yuan (Robert) Huang, a graduate student working with John Preskill, the Richard P. Feynman Professor of Theoretical Physics and the Allen V. C. Davis and Lenabelle Davis Leadership Chair of the Institute for Quantum Science and Technology (IQIM). “But we aren’t quite there yet and have been surprised to learn that classical machine learning methods can be used in the meantime. Ultimately, this paper is about showing what humans can learn about the physical world.”

After failing to reproduce last year’s record-breaking fusion-energy shot, scientists at the US National Ignition Facility have gone back to the drawing board. Edwin Cartlidge discusses their next steps.

On September 22, the US Air Force announced that Raytheon Technologies, a US-based defense giant, had been awarded a $1 billion contract to continue the development of the Hypersonic Attack Cruise Missile (HACM).

Raytheon Technologies, which outbid Lockheed Martin and Boeing to win the contract, is now well-positioned to become the leading supplier of hypersonic cruise missiles for the USAF.

Electrostriction enhanced by interfaces in multi-layer structure.

Strenuous cognitive work leads to an accumulation of glutamate in the prefrontal cortex, according to new research published in the journal Current Biology. The new findings suggest that mental fatigue is a neuropsychological mechanism that helps to avert the build up of potentially toxic byproducts of prolonged cognitive activity.

“Nobody knows what mental fatigue is, how it is generated and why we feel it,” said study author Antonius Wiehler, a member of the Motivation, Brain and Behavior Lab at Pitié Salpêtrière Hospital in Paris. “It has remained a mystery despite more than a century of scientific research. Machines can do cognitive tasks continuously without fatigue, the brain is different and we wanted to understand how and why. Mental fatigue has important consequences: for economic decisions, for management at work, for education at school, for clinical cure, etc.”

The researchers were particularly interested in the role of glutamate, an excitatory neurotransmitter that is involved in a variety of cognitive functions, including learning and memory. In addition, glutamate plays a role in controlling the strength of synaptic connections. Too much or too little glutamate can lead to neuronal dysfunction, so it is critical that this neurotransmitter is tightly regulated.