Lifeboat Foundation

Raise your hand if you ever wanted to get beamed onto the transport deck of the USS Enterprise. Maybe we haven’t reached the point of teleporting entire human beings yet (sorry Scotty), but what we have achieved is a huge breakthrough towards quantum internet.

Led by Caltech, a collaborative team from Fermilab, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab, Harvard University, the University of Calgary and AT&T have now successfully teleported qubits (basic units of quantum info) across almost 14 miles of fiber optic cables with 90 percent precision. This is because of quantum entanglement, the phenomenon in which quantum particles which are mysteriously “entangled” behave exactly the same even when far away from each other.

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The US space agency releases an animation to show how its Perseverance robot will land on Mars.

The world’s first robotic kitchen is officially launched this month. The Moley Kitchen, created by British technology company, Moley Robotics, is a fully automated unit that prepares freshly cooked meals at the touch of a button. It consists of cabinets, robotic arms, a motion capture system, a connected graphical user interface with access to a library of recipes, and a full set of kitchen appliances and equipment, optimised for both robot and human use.

The Moley Kitchen – first revealed publicly in April 2015 – is the product of six years of research and development by an international team of 100 engineers, product and luxury interior designers and three award-winning chefs.

At the heart of this new technology are two robotic arms featuring fully articulated ‘hands’, developed in collaboration with world-leading German robotics company SCHUNK. Following 11 exhaustive development cycles, they can now reliably reproduce the movements of human hands. This means the robot can retrieve ingredients from the smart fridge, adjust hob temperature, use the sink to fill pans and pour, mix and plate up just as a human cook would. The robot even cleans up after itself.

Electricity is a key ingredient in living bodies. We know that voltage differences are important in biological systems; they drive the beating of the heart and allow neurons to communicate with one another. But for decades, it wasn’t possible to measure voltage differences between organelles—the membrane-wrapped structures inside the cell—and the rest of the cell.

A pioneering technology created by UChicago scientists, however, allows researchers to peer into cells to see how many different organelles use voltages to carry out functions.

“Scientists had noticed for a long time that charged dyes used for staining cells would get stuck in the mitochondria,” explained graduate student Anand Saminathan, the first author for the paper, which was published in Nature Nanotechnology. “But little work has been done to investigate the membrane potential of other organelles in live cells.”

No, it’s not a DeLorean, but it’s still pretty sweet.

Follow the links in the story for sources, the text is in red. A new strain of COVID-19 is causing a wave of new lockdowns in London and travel restrictions for those coming from the U.K. because some are worried that this may be an even more contagious version of the coronavirus. Experts say it’s definitely something to watch out for, but it’s not clear whether or not this variant is actually more transmissible—and there’s no reason to think the current COVID-19 vaccines won’t be effective against it. So what exactly is different about this new strain of COVID-19? Well, this variant (also called B. 1. 1. 7.) has a few mutations, 17 to be exact. Not all of them are concerning, but a few are. The mutations that have experts a little on edge have to do with genes that encode the virus’s spike protein, which is located on the surface of the virus and is the piece of the virus that helps it actually bind to human cells. (That’s the first step in becoming infected.) One of these mutations (called N501Y) may make it easier for the spike protein to bind to the receptors on our cells, Science explains. Another mutation (called 69-70del) affects the number of amino acids (the building blocks that make up a protein) in the spike protein, and variants with this mutation have been previously identified in some immunocompromised people whose bodies were unable to muster the necessary immune response to protect them from the virus.

It’s causing new lockdowns and travel restrictions.

In their latest experiment, researchers from Caltech, NASA, and Fermilab (Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory) built a unique system between two labs separated by 27 miles (44km).

The system comprises three nodes which interact with one another to trigger a sequence of qubits, which pass a signal from one place to the other instantly.

The ‘teleportation’ is instant, occurring faster than the speed of light, and the researchers reported a fidelity of more than 90 percent, according to the new study, published in PRX Quantum.

The Big Bang might never have existed as many cosmologists start to question the origin of the Universe. The Big Bang is a point in time defined by a mathematical extrapolation. The Big Bang theory tells us that something has to have changed around 13.7 billion years ago. So, there is no “point” where the Big Bang was, it was always an extended volume of space, according to the Eternal Inflation model. In light of Digital Physics, as an alternative view, it must have been the Digital Big Bang with the lowest possible entropy in the Universe — 1 bit of information — a coordinate in the vast information matrix. If you were to ask what happened before the first observer and the first moments after the Big Bang, the answer might surprise you with its straightforwardness: We extrapolate backwards in time and that virtual model becomes “real” in our minds as if we were witnessing the birth of the Universe.

In his theoretical work, Andrew Strominger of Harvard University speculates that the Alpha Point (the Big Bang) and the Omega Point form the so-called ‘Causal Diamond’ of the conscious observer where the Alpha Point has only 1 bit of entropy as opposed to the maximal entropy of some incredibly gigantic amount of bits at the Omega Point. While suggesting that we are part of the conscious Universe and time is holographic in nature, Strominger places the origin of the Universe in the infinite ultra-intelligent future, the Omega Singularity, rather than the Big Bang.

The Universe is not what textbook physics tells us except that we perceive it in this way — our instruments and measurement devices are simply extensions of our senses, after all. Reality is not what it seems. Deep down it’s pure information — waves of potentiality — and consciousness orchestrating it all. The Big Bang theory, drawing a lot of criticism as of late, uses a starting assumption of the “Universe from nothing,” (a proverbial miracle, a ‘quantum fluctuation’ christened by scientists), or the initial Cosmological Singularity. But aside from this highly improbable happenstance, we can just as well operate from a different set of assumptions and place the initial Cosmological Singularity at the Omega Point — the transcendental attractor, the Source, or the omniversal holographic projector of all possible timelines.

Shares in Carmat SA posted their biggest gain in more than seven years after the company got approval to sell the first-ever total artificial heart in Europe, the culmination of a 27-year effort that began with a pitch from a French cardiac surgeon to an aerospace company.