Lifeboat Foundation

‘Optical Accelerators’ ditch electricity, favoring light as an exchange medium.

Researchers with IBM and Moscow’s Skolkovo Institute have developed “optical accelerators” — optical switches that use light instead of electricity to convey state changes and transmit information. The inventors claim an up to 1,000x speedup compared to traditional transistor-based switches — and there are applications for both classical and quantum computing.

If China — and then Russia and other nuclear powers — get gliders, however, these defensive systems will be obsolete. Nuclear payloads could then zip around the South Pole instead, for instance. They’d never even exit the atmosphere. And they could change their trajectory, being controlled all along by a Chinese operator with a joystick.

All this makes China sound menacing and aggressive. In that sense, the news seems to rhyme with revelations that China is also building a couple of hundred silos for more conventional intercontinental missiles that could carry nukes.

In reality, China probably appears so aggressive only because it feels incredibly insecure. The greatest fear in Beijing is that in an escalating conflict — over Taiwan or whatever else — the U.S. might be tempted one day to launch preemptive nuclear strikes to take out all or most of China’s arsenal. The Americans would only contemplate such a drastic step, of course, if they thought that their own defenses could parry any remaining missiles coming from China in retaliation.

While the metaverse might seem like a far off dream, more fit for the pages of a Neal Stephenson novel than reality, some are already attempting to cash in the concept — and even provide a digital workforce for it.

Enter Soul Machines 0 a New Zealand-based company that says it’s designing AI-driven digital humans for clients to use for things like customer service, promotional videos, and education. However, the company also has its sights set on the future — with co-founder Greg Cross saying it plans to create a “digital workforce” for a potential metaverse, according to The Verge.

Continue reading “A Startup Is Creating Digital Human Servants to Work in the Metaverse” »

Quantum physicists at the University of Copenhagen are reporting an international achievement for Denmark in the field of quantum technology. By simultaneously operating multiple spin qubits on the same quantum chip, they surmounted a key obstacle on the road to the supercomputer of the future. The result bodes well for the use of semiconductor materials as a platform for solid-state quantum computers.

One of the engineering headaches in the global marathon towards a large functional quantum computer is the control of many basic memory devices—qubits—simultaneously. This is because the control of one qubit is typically negatively affected by simultaneous control pulses applied to another qubit. Now, a pair of young quantum physicists at the University of Copenhagen’s Niels Bohr Institute working in the group of Assoc. Prof. Ferdinand Kuemmeth, have managed to overcome this obstacle.

Global qubit research is based on various technologies. While Google and IBM have come far with quantum processors based on superconductor technology, the UCPH research group is betting on semiconductor qubits—known as spin qubits.

An international team of researchers wants to find people who are genetically resistant to SARS-CoV-2, in the hope of developing new drugs and treatments.

Imagine being born naturally resistant to SARS-CoV-2, and never having to worry about contracting COVID-19 or spreading the virus. If you have this superpower, researchers want to meet you, to enrol you in their study.

As described in a paper in Nature Immunology¹ this month, an international team of scientists has launched a global hunt for people who are genetically resistant to infection with the pandemic virus. The team hopes that identifying the genes protecting these individuals could lead to the development of virus-blocking drugs that not only protect people from COVID-19, but also prevent them from passing on the infection.

Continue reading “The search for people who never get COVID” »

SpaceX had to fix the toilet on its capsule before this mission could fly.

Early in the morning on October 31st, SpaceX will launch its next astronauts to the International Space Station for NASA, part of the company’s Crew-3 mission. Liftoff is scheduled for 2:21AM ET out of Cape Canaveral, Florida.

Continue reading “How to watch SpaceX’s Crew-3 mission to the International Space Station” »

When it launches in 2,022 the GOES-T satellite will watch over Earth and give us early warning of natural disasters. But preparing it is an epic task for Lockheed Martin.

Physicists and engineers have long been interested in creating new forms of matter, those not typically found in nature. Such materials might find use someday in, for example, novel computer chips. Beyond applications, they also reveal elusive insights about the fundamental workings of the universe. Recent work at MIT both created and characterized new quantum systems demonstrating dynamical symmetry—particular kinds of behavior that repeat periodically, like a shape folded and reflected through time.

“There are two problems we needed to solve,” says Changhao Li, a graduate student in the lab of Paola Cappellaro, a professor of nuclear science and engineering. Li published the work recently in Physical Review Letters, together with Cappellaro and fellow graduate student Guoqing Wang. “The first problem was that we needed to engineer such a system. And second, how do we characterize it? How do we observe this symmetry?”

Concretely, the quantum system consisted of a diamond crystal about a millimeter across. The crystal contains many imperfections caused by a nitrogen atom next to a gap in the lattice—a so-called nitrogen-vacancy center. Just like an electron, each center has a quantum property called a spin, with two discrete energy levels. Because the system is a quantum system, the spins can be found not only in one of the levels, but also in a combination of both energy levels, like Schrodinger’s theoretical cat, which can be both alive and dead at the same time.

As humanity continues its exploration of the universe, the low-gravity environment of space presents unusual challenges for scientists and engineers.

Researchers at the FAMU-FSU College of Engineering and the Florida State University-headquartered National High Magnetic Field Laboratory have developed a new tool to help meet that challenge—a novel design for a low-gravity simulator that promises to break new ground for future space research and habitation.

Their new design for a magnetic levitation-based low-gravity simulator can create an area of low gravity with a volume about 1,000 times larger than existing simulators of the same type. The work was published in the journal npj Microgravity.