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Blog – Page 518

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TeleAbsence: Poetic encounters with the past

In the dim light of the lab, friends, family, and strangers watched the image of a pianist playing for them, the pianist’s fingers projected onto the moving keys of a real grand piano that filled the space with music.

Watching the ghostly musicians, faces and bodies blurred at their edges, several listeners shared one strong but strange conviction: “feeling someone’s presence” while “also knowing that I am the only one in the room.”

“It’s tough to explain,” another listener said. “It felt like they were in the room with me, but at the same time, not.”

Discovery of extended slip bands reshapes understanding of material deformation under stress

University of California, Irvine scientists have expanded on a longstanding model governing the mechanics behind slip banding, a process that produces strain marks in metals under compression, gaining a new understanding of the behavior of advanced materials critical to energy systems, space exploration and nuclear applications.

In a paper published recently in Nature Communications, researchers in UC Irvine’s Samueli School of Engineering report the discovery of extended slip bands—a finding that challenges the classic model developed in the 1950s by physicists Charles Frank and Thornton Read.

While the Frank–Read theory attributes slip band formation to continuous dislocation multiplication at active sources, the UC Irvine team found that extended slip bands emerge from source deactivation followed by the dynamic activation of new dislocation sources.

Benchmarking quantum gates: New protocol paves the way for fault-tolerant computing

Researchers have developed a new protocol for benchmarking quantum gates, a critical step toward realizing the full potential of quantum computing and potentially accelerating progress toward fault-tolerant quantum computers.

The new protocol, called deterministic benchmarking (DB), provides a more detailed and efficient method for identifying specific types of quantum noise and errors compared to widely used existing techniques.

The work is published in the journal Chemical Reviews.

UPS Explores Humanoid Robots As Figure AI Secures $675M From Jeff Bezos, OpenAI, And Intel, Targeting $9B Revenue By 2029

Figure AI, the robotics company aiming to build the first commercially viable humanoid worker, recently announced it secured a staggering $675 million in funding from some of the biggest names in tech and venture capital, including Jeff Bezos, Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT), Nvidia (NASDAQ:NVDA), OpenAI, and Intel (NASDAQ:INTC). Now valued at $2.6 billion, the San Jose, California-based startup is in talks with United Parcel Service (NYSE:UPS) to integrate its humanoid robots into the global shipping g