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NASA is already so impressed by the Starship that it has contracted SpaceX to build a lunar-landing version of it to return astronauts to the moon as early as 2024. The selection has enraged Musk’s rivals such as Blue Origin’s Jeff Bezos Jeffrey (Jeff) Preston BezosSeat on Bezos-backed space flight sells for million at auction Researchers: Wealth accumulation at Ivy League presents ‘fundamental threat to our democracy’ Democrats reintroduce bill to create ‘millionaires surtax’ MORE and has perturbed some members of Congress. Both have only themselves to blame — Blue Origin for offering an inferior design and Congress for underfunding the Human Landing System project.

Military technology development has often been defined by the advent of new ways to transport people and cargo. The racing galleon of the 16th century became the frigates and ships of the line that defined naval warfare in the 18th and early 19th centuries. The steam engine and iron and steel armor led to the dreadnoughts of the early 20th century. Modern warships incorporate nuclear power. Air travel has caused the same sort of evolution, from the motorized kites of World War I to modern jets that can deliver destruction and death from thousands of miles away.

Now, space transportation technology is poised to cause a similar revolution in the military’s ability to defend the United States and its allies and to inflict mayhem and death on any enemy that would propose to make war on America. The great irony is that the Starship will be used by a branch of the military that Musk once compared to Starfleet, the fictional service depicted in the “Star Trek” television shows and movies. The thought would likely bring a smile to the face of the franchise’s creator, Gene Roddenberry, in whatever afterlife one envisions him inhabiting.

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“These are novel living machines. They are not a traditional robot or a known species of animals. It is a new class of artifacts: a living and programmable organism,” says Joshua Bongard, an expert in computer science and robotics at the University of Vermont (UVM) and one of the leaders of the find.

As the scientist explains, these living bots do not look like traditional robots : they do not have shiny gears or robotic arms. Rather, they look more like a tiny blob of pink meat in motion, a biological machine that researchers say can accomplish things traditional robots cannot.

Xenobots are synthetic organisms designed automatically by a supercomputer to perform a specific task, using a process of trial and error (an evolutionary algorithm), and are built by a combination of different biological tissues.

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“Conditional witnessing” technique makes many-body entangled states easier to measure.

Quantum error correction – a crucial ingredient in bringing quantum computers into the mainstream – relies on sharing entanglement between many particles at once. Thanks to researchers in the UK, Spain and Germany, measuring those entangled states just got a lot easier. The new measurement procedure, which the researchers term “conditional witnessing”, is more robust to noise than previous techniques and minimizes the number of measurements required, making it a valuable method for testing imperfect real-life quantum systems.

Quantum computers run their algorithms on quantum bits, or qubits. These physical two-level quantum systems play an analogous role to classical bits, except that instead of being restricted to just “0” or “1” states, a single qubit can be in any combination of the two. This extra information capacity, combined with the ability to manipulate quantum entanglement between qubits (thus allowing multiple calculations to be performed simultaneously), is a key advantage of quantum computers.

The problem with qubits

Continue reading “New quantum entanglement verification method cuts through the noise” | >

Physics World

Quantum mechanics describes this frustration by suggesting that the orientation of the spins is not rigid. Instead, it constantly changes direction in a fluid-like way to produce an entangled ensemble of spin-ups and spin-downs. Thanks to this behaviour, a spin liquid will remain in a liquid state even at temperatures near absolute zero, where most materials usually freeze solid.

The holon and the spinon

To describe this behaviour in mathematical terms, the late Nobel laureate Philip W Anderson, who predicted the existence of spin liquids in 1973, proposed that in the quantum regime, an electron might in fact be composed of two distinct particles. The first, known as a “holon”, would bear the electron’s negative charge, while the second “spinon” particle would carry its spin. Anderson later suggested that this spin-charge separation might provide a microscopic mechanism to explain the high superconducting transition temperatures (Tc) that were observed in copper oxides, or cuprates, beginning in the late 1980s.

Continue reading “Electrons dual nature appears in a quantum spin liquid” | >

Circa 2018

The death-cap mushroom has a long history as a tool of murder and suicide, going back to ancient Roman times. The fungus, Amanita phalloides, produces one of the world’s deadliest toxins: α-amanitin. While it may seem ill-advised, researchers are eager to synthesize the toxin because studies have shown that it could help fight cancer. Scientists now report in the Journal of the American Chemical Society how they overcame obstacles to synthesize the death-cap killer compound.

α-Amanitin achieves its impressive deadliness by acting as a potent inhibitor of RNA polymerase II, the enzyme primarily responsible for transcribing genes into the messenger molecule RNA. Using α-amanitin bound to antibodies against tumor molecules, cancer researchers have reportedly cured mice of pancreatic cancer. These conjugates are currently in human trials; however, the only way to obtain α-amanitin so far has been to harvest mushrooms, which is time-consuming and results in relatively small amounts of the compound. Synthetic production approaches have been hampered by α-amanitin’s unusual bicyclic structure, among other tricky features. David M. Perrin and colleagues decided to take on the challenge to produce the toxin in the laboratory, once and for all.

The researchers had to work through three key obstacles to produce α-amanitin in the laboratory: production of the “oxidatively delicate” 6-hydroxy-tryptathionine, the an enantio-selective synthesis of (2 S, 3 R, 4 R)-4, 5-dihydroxy-isoleucine and a diastereoselective sulfoxidation to favor the (R)-sulfoxide. Due to its toxic nature, the researchers limited production to less than a milligram, but based on their results, they are confident that good yields are can be readily obtained by scaling up the process. The researchers also say that the development of this synthetic route will enable chemists to attenuate the toxicity and potentially improve α-amanitin’s activity against cancer, something that is only made possible by the use of synthetic derivatives.

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THIS is that upward exponential point that heralds the arrival of the Technological Singularity.

This is an Inside Science story.

Artificial intelligence can design computer microchips that perform at least as well as those designed by human experts, devising such blueprints thousands of times faster. This new research from Google is already helping with the design of microchips for the company’s next generation of AI computer systems.

The process of designing the physical layout of a chip’s parts, known as floor planning, is key to a device’s ultimate performance. This complex task often requires months of intense efforts from experts, and despite five decades of research, no automated floorplanning technique has reached human-level performance until now.

Continue reading “Google researchers show artificial intelligence can design microchips better and faster than humans” | >