https://youtube.com/watch?v=nbC7BxXtOlo
In October 1961, the Soviet Union dropped the most powerful nuclear bomb in history over a remote island north of the Arctic Circle.
Though the bomb detonated nearly 2.5 miles (4 kilometers) above ground, the resulting shockwave stripped the island as bare and flat as a skating rink.
Spiros Michalakis is the Caltech quantum physicist who served as the science advisor on Bill & Ted: Face The Music and he was kind enough to sit down and chat about quantum physics, the nature of time, and the brilliant minds behind Bill & Ted.
Check out IQIM at http://www.iqim.caltech.edu
“The participants treated with AMX0035 demonstrated a significant slowing of ALS disease progression as measured by the ALSFRS-R. This is a milestone in our fight against ALS,” said Sabrina Paganoni, MD, Ph.D., principal investigator of the CENTAUR study.
An experimental medication slows the progression of the neurodegenerative disease called Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), or Lou Gehrig’s disease, according to recently released results from a clinical trial run by investigators at the Sean M. Healey & AMG Center for ALS at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) and Amylyx Pharmaceuticals, Inc., the company that manufactures the medication. The findings, reported in the New England Journal of Medicine, offer hope that a treatment may one day be available for patients with ALS, a fatal condition with no cure that attacks the nerve cells in the brain and the spinal cord to progressively hinder individuals’ ability to move, speak, eat, and even breathe.
Called AMX0035, the oral medication is a combination of two drugs, sodium phenylbutyrate and taurursodiol, that each target a different cell component important for protecting against nerve cell death.
Continue reading “Investigational ALS drug generates promising clinical trial results” »
Although we are currently in an era of quantum computers with tens of noisy qubits, it is likely that a decisive, practical quantum advantage can only be achieved with a scalable, fault-tolerant, error-corrected quantum computer. Therefore, development of quantum error correction is one of the central themes of the next five to ten years. Our article “Topological and subsystem codes on low-degree graphs with flag qubits” [1], published in Physical Review X, takes a bottom-up approach to quantum error correcting codes that are adapted to a heavy-hexagon lattice – a topology that all our new premium quantum processors use, including IBM Quantum Falcon (d=3) and Hummingbird (d=5).
Many in the quantum error correction community pursue a top-down computer science approach, i.e., designing the best codes from an abstract perspective to achieve the smallest logical error rate with minimal resource. Along this path, the surface code is the most famous candidate for near-term demonstrations (as well as mid- to long-term applications) on a two-dimensional quantum computer chip. The surface code naturally requires a two-dimensional square lattice of qubits, where each qubit is coupled to four neighbors.
We started with the surface code architecture on our superconducting devices and demonstrated an error detection protocol as a building block of the surface code around 2015 [2]. While the experimental team at IBM made steady progress with cross-resonance (CR) gates, achieving gate fidelities near 99%, an experimental obstacle appeared along the path of scaling up the surface code architecture. The specific way to operate the CR gates requires the control qubit frequency to be detuned from all its neighboring target qubits, such that the CNOT gates between any pair of control and target can be individually addressed.
Black holes can expel a thousand times more matter than they capture. The mechanism that governs both ejection and capture is the accretion disk, a vast mass of gas and dust spiraling around the black hole at extremely high speeds. The disk is hot and emits light as well as other forms of electromagnetic radiation. Part of the orbiting matter is pulled toward the center and disappears behind the event horizon, the threshold beyond which neither matter nor light can escape. Another, much larger, part is pushed further out by the pressure of the radiation emitted by the disk itself.
Every galaxy is thought to have a supermassive black hole at its center, but not all galaxies have, or still have, accretion disks. Those that do are known as active galaxies, on account of their active galactic nuclei. The traditional model posits two phases in the matter that accumulates in the central region of an active galaxy: a high-speed ionized gas outflow of matter ejected by the nucleus, and slower molecules that may flow into the nucleus.
A new model that integrates the two phases into a single scenario has now been put forward by Daniel May, a postdoctoral researcher in the University of São Paulo’s Institute of Astronomy, Geophysics and Atmospheric Sciences (IAG-USP) in Brazil. “We found that the molecular phase, which appears to have completely different dynamics from the ionized phase, is also part of the outflow. This means there’s far more matter being blown away from the center, and the active galactic nucleus plays a much more important role in the structuring of the galaxy as a whole,” May told Agência FAPESP.
New research shows how the next generation of ultra-secure communication could be possible with existing infrastructure.
It’s like something out of Stranger Things, but with fewer Demogorgons and less of the sinister darkness: physicists have flipped reality on its head, creating their own ‘upside down’ by getting small boats to float underneath a levitating liquid.
Seeing it in action, you would think you were watching some kind of sci-fi movie effect, but it’s all to do with the forces of vertical vibration. It’s already been established that some carefully calibrated vertical shaking can keep liquid suspended inside a container, and here the team has taken advantage of the phenomenon.
Continue reading “Physicists Made Boats Sail Upside-Down on an Ocean of Levitating Liquid” »
Capable of connecting eight or more users across distances of 17 kilometers, the demonstration is another milestone toward developing a fully quantum Internet.
Rabia Nusrat, an environmental engineering student, Global UGRAD alumni, in her final year at University of Engineering and Technology, UET, Lahore, Pakistan and the first ideaXme public interviewer, interviews Shayan Sohail Sarwar, Forbes 30 Under 30 Asia Innovator and Chief Technology Officer PakVitae.
PakVitae:
An artificial intelligence algorithm can detect subtle differences in the way people with Alzheimer’s use language.
