Lifeboat Foundation

German Bionic.

German Bionic was a pioneer in the field of wearable suits when it became the first firm to introduce connected exoskeletons for workplaces. The suit supports users in lifting movements and prevents poor posture. The award-winning Cray X exoskeleton, which is featured in the CES 2023 “Best of Innovation” (Wearable Technologies) category, will be available for demonstrations at the event from January 5–8.

The race is on to develop a quantum computer that can outpace a conventional supercomputer, and researchers from around the world are full-steam ahead. If scaled to adequate sizes, quantum computers represent the largest leap forward in computing for decades, carrying the potential to leave our current machines in the dust, but significant hurdles still remain.

Now, a team of researchers from China have created a superconducting quantum processor with 66 functional qubits which, when faced with a complex sampling task, was able to blast past even the most powerful supercomputers and complete it in just a fraction of the time. What makes the research so impressive is how it demonstrates a huge leap towards quantum primacy, a milestone in which quantum computers complete a task that is infeasible for a conventional computer to complete.

Check out all the on-demand sessions from the Intelligent Security Summit here.

Over the last half-decade, quantum computing has attracted tremendous media attention. Why?

After all, we have computers already, which have been around since the 1940s. Is the interest because of the use cases? Better AI? Faster and more accurate pricing for financial services firms and hedge funds? Better medicines once quantum computers get a thousand times bigger?

New research published in the Annals of Clinical and Translational Neurology on December 7 has identified three genes and their expressed proteins that may be involved in the pathogenesis of multiple sclerosis.

By comparing information on the genes and proteins expressed in the brains of thousands of individuals with and without multiple sclerosis, investigators discovered different expression levels of the SHMT1, FAM120B, and ICA1L genes (and their proteins) in brain tissues of patients versus controls.

Studying the functions of these genes may uncover new information on the mechanisms involved in the development and progression of multiple sclerosis. “Our findings shed new light on the pathogenesis of MS and prioritized promising targets for future therapy research,” the authors wrote.

New approaches to the biology of senescence can make lives longer and healthier.

A new study shows that AI makes doctors better at screening cancer even when the AI sorts over half of scans automatically, dramatically reducing radiologists’ workloads.

Lasers find applications across several fields ranging from telecommunications and remote sensing to medicine. There are many ways in which one can generate laser emission, or lasing, from a device or material. Consequently, there are many types of lasers with different principles of operation.

One emerging and promising method to achieve lasing with high energy efficiency is by leveraging what are known as “bound states in the continuum” (BICs). In simple terms, these states describe waves that remain highly localized in space but coexist with a continuous spectrum of waves that are not localized (traveling waves). When dealing with light, an electromagnetic wave, BICs can be realized by carefully designing the geometry of a confining periodic structure.

Although scientists have already reported a few types of BIC-based lasers, most of them can only emit a beam in a perfectly or almost perfectly vertical direction away from the surface of the device. This limitation hinders the use of such BIC lasers in applications where angling the emitted beam is necessary.

Studies of how a nitrogen-vacancy center’s spin interacts with a surrounding 2D layer of spins could lead to new platforms for quantum metrology and simulation.

Diamond defects, nitrogen-vacancy (NV) centers in particular, serve as a rich playground for studies of spin physics. Over the past two decades, techniques for manipulating and reading out the quantum states of NVs with optical and microwave radiation have been fine-tuned for applications of these defects as magnetometers and qubits. An important research direction involves understanding and controlling how interactions with the environment can affect the NV’s quantum properties. Now two independent teams, led by Nathalie de Leon at Princeton University [1] and by Norman Yao at the University of California, Berkeley [2], respectively, have addressed this question for a configuration relevant to multiple applications: an NV center interacting with a 2D ensemble of spins formed by unpaired surface electrons or by impurities engineered within the diamond.

Researchers have studied how irregularly shaped particles travel through microchannels. Their work could have relevance to the transport of red blood cells through capillaries.