Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Circa 2021 face_with_colon_three

In the cosmological context, space can get similarly stuck in a false vacuum state. A speck of false vacuum will occasionally relax into true vacuum (likely through a random quantum event), and this true vacuum will balloon outward as a swelling bubble, feasting on the false vacuum’s excess energy, in a process called false vacuum decay. It’s this process that may have started our cosmos with a bang. “A vacuum bubble could have been the first event in the history of our universe,” said Hiranya Peiris, a cosmologist at University College London.

But physicists struggle mightily to predict how vacuum bubbles behave. A bubble’s future depends on countless minute details that add up. Bubbles also change rapidly — their walls approach the speed of light as they fly outward — and feature quantum mechanical randomness and waviness. Different assumptions about these processes give conflicting predictions, with no way to tell which ones might resemble reality. It’s as though “you’ve taken a lot of things that are just very hard for physicists to deal with and mushed them all together and said, ‘Go ahead and figure out what’s going on,’” Braden said.

Since they can’t prod actual vacuum bubbles in the multiverse, physicists have sought digital and physical analogs of them.

Continue reading “Physicists Study How Universes Might Bubble Up and Collide” | >

“We do not use any ancilla qubits,” Yan says. “Instead, we use ancilla states.”

In the new study, the scientists implemented quantum AND gates on a superconducting quantum processor with tunable-coupling architecture. Google also employs this architecture with its quantum computers, and IBM plans to start using it in 2023.

“We think that our scheme is well-suited for superconducting qubit systems where ancilla states are abundant and easy to access,” Yan says.

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DNA — nicknamed “nature’s storage medium” — has accurately stored the instruction sets for all life on Earth for billions of years. But it also may hold the keys to managing explosive data growth and storing archival data for generations to come.

The idea of storing digital data in DNA dates back more than a half century, but making it a reality has accelerated in recent years with advances in biotechnology and declining costs of genome sequencing.

Dave Landsman is the senior director of industry standards and a distinguished engineer at Western Digital. For the past two years, he’s been one of the principals in the company’s exploration of DNA data storage.

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The idea of human ectogenesis — growing a baby in an artificial environment outside of the human body — has always been considered in the realms of science fiction, however it may not be for much longer.

Scientific developments in this field have been taking big steps forward in recent years, particularly in our ability to care for extremely preterm babies. However, just how close are we to being able to create human life entirely outside of the human body? And in a potential future, where women no longer had to give birth, what societal impacts might that have on gender equality and our conceptions of what it means to be a mother?

Video by izabela cardoso & fernando teixeira.

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Error-prone qubits mean quantum systems do not yet surpass classical methods.

In a talk at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1981, Richard Feynman spoke about ‘simulating physics with computers’. This was already being done at the time, but Feynman said he wanted to talk ‘about the possibility that there is to be an exact simulation, that the computer will do exactly the same as nature.’ But as nature is quantum-mechanical, he pointed out, what you need for that is a quantum computer.

The rest is history – but history still in the making. When I recently asked David Deutsch, the visionary physicist who in 1985 laid out what quantum computing might look like, whether he was surprised at how quickly the idea became a practical technology, he replied with characteristic terseness: ‘It hasn’t.’ You can see his point. Sure, in October President Joe Biden visited IBM’s new quantum data centre in Poughkeepsie, New York, to see an entire room filled with the company’s quantum computers. And on 9 November IBM announced its 433-quantum-bit (qubit) Osprey processor, although it seems only yesterday that we were getting excited at Google’s 53-qubit Sycamore chip – with which the Google team claimed in 2016 to demonstrate ‘quantum supremacy’, meaning that it could perform a calculation in a few days that would take the best classical computer many millennia.1 This claim has since been disputed.

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Guarding Against Future Global Biological Risks — Dr. Margaret “Peggy” Hamburg, MD — Chair Nuclear Threat Initiative, bio Advisory Group; Commissioner, Bipartisan Commission on Biodefense; former Commissioner, U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA)

Dr. Margaret “Peggy” Hamburg, MD is an internationally recognized leader in public health and medicine, who currently serves as chair of the Nuclear Threat Initiative’s (NTI) bio Advisory Group (https://www.nti.org/about/people/margaret-hamburg-md/), where she has also served as founding vice president and senior scientist. She also currently holds a role as Commissioner on the Bipartisan Commission on Biodefense (https://biodefensecommission.org/teams/margaret-a-hamburg/).

Dr. Hamburg previously served as foreign secretary of the National Academy of Medicine and is a former Commissioner of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), having served for almost six years where she was well known for advancing regulatory science, modernizing regulatory pathways, and globalizing the agency. Previous government positions include Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Health Commissioner for New York City, and Assistant Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, National Institutes of Health.

Continue reading “Dr. Peggy Hamburg, MD — Chair, Nuclear Threat Initiative (NTI), bio Advisory Group” | >