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It costs $199.99 and includes a monitor and tripod mount.

Dell has launched a high-end UltraSharp webcam that costs $199.99 and is available now worldwide. Its cylindrical design is reminiscent of Apple’s old but iconic iSight external webcam, but its features are aimed to compete with Logitech’s Brio and other modern 4K-ready webcams. In addition, it aims to serve as a more affordable and easier-to-set up alternative to mounting a DSLR camera behind your monitor.

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University of Colorado Boulder researchers have discovered that minuscule, self-propelled particles called “nanoswimmers” can escape from mazes as much as 20 times faster than other passive particles, paving the way for their use in everything from industrial clean-ups to medication delivery.

The findings, published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, describe how these tiny synthetic nanorobots are incredibly effective at escaping cavities within maze-like environments. These nanoswimmers could one day be used to remediate contaminated soil, improve water filtration or even deliver drugs to targeted areas of the body, like within dense tissues.

“This is the discovery of an entirely new phenomenon that points to a broad potential range of applications,” said Daniel Schwartz, senior author of the paper and Glenn L. Murphy Endowed Professor of chemical and biological engineering.

Microsoft is looking to simplify the process of programming, the area where the company got its start in 1975. That could keep programmers who already use the company’s tools satisfied and also attract new ones.

The system, called GitHub Copilot, draws on source code uploaded to code-sharing service GitHub, which Microsoft acquired in 2018, as well as other websites. Microsoft and GitHub developed it with help from OpenAI, an AI research start-up that Microsoft backed in 2019.

Researchers at Microsoft and other institutions have been trying to teach computers to write code for decades. The concept has yet to go mainstream, at times because programs to write programs have not been versatile enough. The GitHub Copilot effort is a notable attempt in the field, relying as it does on a large volume of code in many programming languages and vast Azure cloud computing power.

A team of neuroscientists at the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology, led by Baher Ibrahim and Dr. Daniel Llano, has published a study in eLife that furthers our understanding of how the brain perceives everyday sensory inputs.

“There is a traditional idea that the way that we experience the world is sort of like a movie being played on a projector. All the sensory information that is coming in is being played on our cerebral cortex and that’s how we see things and hear things,” said Llano, a Beckman researcher and associate professor in the Department of Molecular and Integrative Physiology at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

However, quite a few studies over the years have challenged this traditional view of how we perceive the world. These studies present a new model: Rather than projecting information onto the cortex, the thalamus might be selecting information that is already present in the cortex, based on our learned experiences.

Research from the McKelvey School of Engineering at Washington University in St. Louis has found a missing piece in the puzzle of optical quantum computing.

Jung-Tsung Shen, associate professor in the Department of Electrical & Systems Engineering, has developed a deterministic, high-fidelity two-bit quantum logic gate that takes advantage of a new form of light. This new logic gate is orders of magnitude more efficient than the current technology.

“In the ideal case, the fidelity can be as high as 97%,” Shen said.

Russian scientists have experimentally proved the existence of a new type of quasiparticle—previously unknown excitations of coupled pairs of photons in qubit chains. This discovery could be a step towards disorder-robust quantum metamaterials. The study was published in Physical Review B.

Superconducting qubits are a leading qubit modality today that is currently being pursued by industry and academia for quantum computing applications. However, the performance of quantum computers is largely affected by decoherence that contributes to a qubit’s extremely short lifespan and causes computational errors. Another major challenge is low controllability of large qubit arrays.

Metamaterial quantum simulators provide an alternative approach to quantum computing, as they do not require a large amount of control electronics. The idea behind this approach is to create artificial matter out of qubits, the physics of which will obey the same equations as for some real matter. Conversely, you can program the simulator in such a way as to embody matter with properties that have not yet been discovered in nature.

A new WHO reports lays out ethical principles for AI in medicine, but applying them won’t be easy.

Find out how the U.K.’s largest laboratory can accelerate electrons to nearly the speed of light.

A quantum-computing startup announced Tuesday that its future quantum processor designs will differ significantly from its current offerings. Rather than building a monolithic processor as everyone else has, Rigetti Computing will build smaller collections of qubits on chips that can be physically linked together into a single functional processor. This isn’t multiprocessing so much as modular chip design.

The move is consequential for both Rigetti processors and quantum computing more generally.