Lifeboat Foundation

Circa 2020 o.o…

Google’s Sycamore used to be the world’s fastest quantum computer on the planet, with 54 cubits of quantum computational power. Google declared Quantum Supremacy with Sycamore in October 2019 by running a calculation in 200s that would have taken the world’s fastest supercomputer 10000 years the execute. (in case you’re wondering; Quantum Supremacy is when a quantum computer can complete a task that no supercomputer could achieve.)

The research team at the University of Science and Technology of China ran a similar simulated comparison to its quantum calculation. China’s top quantum computer, dubbed Jiuzhang, completed a calculation in 3 minutes that would have taken TaihuLight, the country’s fastest supercomputer, and third fastest in the world, 2 billion years to complete.

Continue reading “China’s new Quantum tech is 100 trillion times faster than Google’s” »

Zoledronate is a biophosphonate, a drug used to strengthen bones and reduce the risk of osteoporosis-related bone fractures. It is well-absorbed into the bones, so it only needs to be administered through infusion once a year.

A 2010 study had found that people who were given zoledronate after experiencing hip fractures showed slightly reduced all-cause mortality compared to a control group. Patients who took the drug were at significantly lower risk for heart arrhythmias and pneumonia.

As this is a drug that is already being given to people, the choice to go back to genetically modified fruit flies, a much simpler model of aging, may seem counterintuitive. The team chose to test these insects for two principal reasons. The first is that Drosophila flies are a common subject of studies on basic aging pathways, which the researchers wished to explore. The second is simpler: Drosophila flies lack bones, making the bone-affecting properties of zoledronate irrelevant to the study.

The smart farm: To show just how much these technologies could help farmers, CSU and Food Agility have partnered to create the Global Digital Farm (GDF).

The smart farm will be built at CSU’s Wagga Wagga campus, and it will feature autonomous tractors, harvesters, and other farming robots, as well as AI programs designed to help with farm management and more.

Teachable moments: The plan isn’t for the GDF to simply demonstrate what a smart farm can look like — CSU and Food Agility want to use it to teach Australia’s farmers how to take advantage of all the tech that will be on display.

Scientists at KAIST have fabricated a laser system that generates highly interactive quantum particles at room temperature. Their findings, published in the journal Nature Photonics, could lead to a single microcavity laser system that requires lower threshold energy as its energy loss increases.

The system, developed by KAIST physicist Yong-Hoon Cho and colleagues, involves shining light through a single hexagonal-shaped microcavity treated with a loss-modulated silicon nitride substrate. The system design leads to the generation of a polariton laser at room temperature, which is exciting because this usually requires cryogenic temperatures.

The researchers found another unique and counter-intuitive feature of this design. Normally, energy is lost during laser operation. But in this system, as energy loss increased, the amount of energy needed to induce lasing decreased. Exploiting this phenomenon could lead to the development of high efficiency, low threshold lasers for future quantum optical devices.

The spooky-looking amphibian is less scary than it appears to be. But it might already be endangered, as deforestation rates continue to go up.

Researchers tested a four-legged robot on sand, oil, rocks and other tricky surfaces.

Evidence suggests that what happens in one generation—diet, toxin exposure, trauma, fear—can have lasting effects on future generations. Scientists believe these effects result from epigenetic changes that occur in response to the environment and turn genes on or off without altering the genome or DNA sequence.

But how these changes are passed down through generations has not been understood, in part, because scientists have not had a simple way to study the phenomenon. A new study by researchers at the University of Maryland provides a potential tool for unraveling the mystery of how experiences can cause inheritable changes to an animal’s biology. By mating nematode worms, they produced permanent epigenetic changes that lasted for more than 300 generations. The research was published on July 9, 2021, in the journal Nature Communications.

“There’s a lot of interest in heritable epigenetics,” said Antony Jose, associate professor of cell biology and molecular genetics at UMD and senior author of the study. “But getting clear answers is difficult. For instance, if I’m on some diet today, how does that affect my children and grandchildren and so on? No one knows, because so many different variables are involved. But we’ve found this very simple method, through mating, to turn off a single gene for multiple generations. And that gives us a huge opportunity to study how these stable epigenetic changes occur.”

From above, the Antarctic Ice Sheet might look like a calm, perpetual ice blanket that has covered Antarctica for millions of years. But the ice sheet can be thousands of meters deep at its thickest, and it hides hundreds of meltwater lakes where its base meets the continent’s bedrock. Deep below the surface, some of these lakes fill and drain continuously through a system of waterways that eventually drain into the ocean.

Now, with the most advanced Earth-observing laser instrument NASA has ever flown in space, scientists have improved their maps of these hidden lake systems under the West Antarctic ice sheet—and discovered two more of these active subglacial lakes.

The new study provides critical insight for spotting new subglacial lakes from space, as well as for assessing how this hidden plumbing system influences the speed at which ice slips into the Southern Ocean, adding freshwater that may alter its circulation and ecosystems.

Methane at Enceladus: biotic or abiotic origin?

Here we go again: biology or unknown abiotic process?