Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Blog – Page 5908

By Sieglinde Pfaendler, Omar Costa Hamido, Eduardo Reck Miranda

Science and the arts have increasingly inspired each other. In the 20th century, this has led to new innovations in music composition, new musical instruments, and changes to the way that the music industry does business to day. In turn, art has helped scientists think in new ways, and make advances of their own.

An emerging community leveraging quantum computing in music and the music industry has inspired us to organize the “1st International Symposium on Quantum Computing and Musical Creativity.” This symposium will bring together pioneering individuals from academia, industry, and music. They will present research, new works, share ideas, and learn new tools for incorporating quantum computation into music and the music industry. This symposium was made possible through the funding of the QuTune Project kindly provided by the United Kingdom National Quantum Technologies Programme’s Quantum Computing and Simulation Hub (QCS Hub).

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Any discussion on UBI eventually boils down to a question of belief in the nature of humans and the role of government. Most analysis further add wood to the fire by fueling these discussions instead of proposing valid alternatives which addresses these differences. It usually boils down to the classic question of handouts, who should pay for it, and why should we pay for it. Yet the answer lies right before our very eyes. The most valuable commodity today is data not oil or gold. Data wealth is a direct outcome of data diversity, data representation and data scale (i wrote a post on that recently which expands on that, if you’re interested). So, Instead of giving away our data for free to trickle-down techno believers (who may or may not give some of it back), pay me for it. I’ll fund my own income, thank you very much. Every human is unique. Therefore we are all data billionaires. This comment is a charitable contribution to the new data economy by the Marc O Principle; Things are not always as complex as they seem.

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Technologists envisage an electronically interconnected future that will depend on cheap, lightweight, flexible devices. Efforts to optimize the semiconductor materials needed for these electronic devices are therefore necessary. Researchers from the University of Tsukuba have reported a record-breaking germanium (Ge) thin film on a plastic substrate that offers flexibility without compromising performance. Their findings are published in ACS Applied Electronic Materials.

Ge is a popular semiconductor for use in transistors because it has high charge carrier mobility (charge carrier refers to the electrons and electron holes that move through the material). Ge can also be processed at the relatively of ~500 degrees Celsius and has a low Young’s modulus, which means it is a softer alternative to commonly used materials such as silicon.

Ge can be grown using the solid-phase crystallization technique. These thin films are polycrystalline, meaning they are made up of many Ge crystals. In general, larger crystals lead to greater carrier mobilities because bigger crystals form fewer that obstruct the current. Recent increases in have therefore led to effective Ge thin-film transistors on rigid substrates such as glass.

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Drug-target interaction is a prominent research area in drug discovery, which refers to the recognition of interactions between chemical compounds and the protein targets. Chemists estimate that 1,060 compounds with drug-like properties could be made—that’s more than the total number of atoms in the Solar System, as an article reported in the journal Nature in 2017.

Drug development, on average, takes about 14 years and costs up to 1.5 billion dollars. During the journey of in this vast “galaxy,” it is apparent that traditional biological experiments for DTI detection are normally costly and time-consuming.

Prof. Hou Tingjun is an expert in computer-aided drug design (CADD) at the Zhejiang University College of Pharmaceutical Sciences. In the past decades, he has been committed to developing drugs using computer technology. “The biggest challenge lies in the interactions between unknown targets and drug molecules. How can we discover them more efficiently? This involves a new breakthrough in method.”

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It’s really happening. After all the years of delays, reschedulings, budget shortfalls, and even more delays, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) launched on December 25 and is now successfully on its way to is destination at the second LaGrange point (L2), about 1.5 million km (1 million miles) from Earth.

If you celebrate Christmas and are astronomically inclined, the launch feels like a true Christmas miracle.

The footage of JWST’s separation from the Ariane 5 rocket, as seen from a camera on the rocket’s second stage is just absolutely stunning.

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Did you watch the James Webb Space Telescope launch? If you did–and you stayed with the broadcast beyond the successful launch–you will have seen some dramatic images of it separating from the Ariane 5 launch vehicle and beginning its one million miles journey.

That key moment occurred when Webb was 75 miles/120 kilometers above the Earth, with Webb almost immediately unfolding its solar array to give it power. The mission was live!

The first of three mid-course correction burns was made 12 hours and 30 minutes after launch, firing Webb’s thrusters to manoeuvre the spacecraft on a trajectory toward its destination.

A joint effort between NASA, ESA (European Space Agency) and the CSA (Canadian Space Agency), Webb is the most advanced space telescope yet and is expected to begin a new era in cosmology.

Webb will now begin a month-long journey to orbit the second Lagrange point (L2), a point in space where it can follow Earth in orbit of the Sun, but in the direction away from the Sun.

Continue reading “In Photos: See The Dramatic Final Images Of NASA’s Billion Webb Space Telescope After Its Christmas Day Launch” | >

Experts are estimating the crisis will last till 2023.

There’s no denying that there is a global chip shortage. Last month, we reported how Japan had committed $5.2 billion (roughly 600 billion yen) toward providing support for semiconductor manufacturers in a bid to help solve the world’s ongoing chip shortage.

But is that enough? It seems not. During a recent earnings call, Micron CEO, Sanjay Mehrotra, told investors that it is clearly not.

“Across the PC industry, demand for DDR5 products is significantly exceeding supply due to non-memory component shortages impacting memory suppliers’ ability to build DDR5 modules. We expect these shortages to moderate through 2022, enabling bit shipments of DDR5 to grow to meaningful levels in the second half of calendar 2022,” said the CEO.

What does this mean for consumers? Cars are more expensive, computer makers are struggling to keep up with consumer demand, and many products have been severely delayed such as PlayStation 5 which is still impossible to order a year after its launch, according to Yahoo Finance.

Continue reading “Get Used to Chip Shortages: They Are Not Going Away Anytime Soon” | >