Lifeboat Foundation

Physicists at MIT have designed a quantum “light squeezer” that reduces quantum noise in an incoming laser beam by 15 percent. It is the first system of its kind to work at room temperature, making it amenable to a compact, portable setup that may be added to high-precision experiments to improve laser measurements where quantum noise is a limiting factor.

The heart of the new squeezer is a marble-sized optical cavity, housed in a vacuum chamber and containing two mirrors, one of which is smaller than the diameter of a human hair. The larger mirror stands stationary while the other is movable, suspended by a spring-like cantilever.

The shape and makeup of this second “nanomechanical” mirror is the key to the system’s ability to work at room temperature. When a laser beam enters the cavity, it bounces between the two mirrors. The force imparted by the light makes the nanomechanical mirror swing back and forth in a way that allows the researchers to engineer the light exiting the cavity to have special quantum properties.

EVANSTON, Ill.— Packing for outer space? Here’s one thing you won’t want to forget.

Northwestern University researchers have synthesized a new form of melanin enriched with selenium. Called selenomelanin, this new biomaterial shows extraordinary promise as a shield for human tissue against harmful radiation.

“Given the increased interest in space travel, and the general need for lightweight, multifunctional and radioprotective biomaterials, we’ve become excited about the potential of melanin,” said Northwestern’s Nathan Gianneschi, who led the research. “It occurred to our postdoctoral fellow Wei Cao that melanin containing selenium would offer better protection than other forms of melanin. That brought up the intriguing possibility that this as-yet undiscovered melanin may very well exist in nature, being used in this way. So we skipped the discovery part and decided to make it ourselves.”

A mobile autonomous robotic lab assistant developed by researchers from the University of Liverpool is 1,000 times faster than human researchers at performing experiments. It uses LIDAR to navigate the lab and can handle equipment like a human.

NASA is about to begin building its latest spacecraft. Called “Psyche” it will explore a 140 miles/226 kilometers-wide asteroid called “16 Psyche.” Today it’s passed a major milestone.

Why is NASA going to ‘16 Psyche?’

Located in the Solar System’s main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, metal-rich 16 Psyche is thought to be the exposed metallic iron, nickel and gold core of a protoplanet. Most asteroids are rocky or icy.

Team members at Adobe have built a new way to use artificial intelligence to automatically personalize a blog for different visitors.

This tool was built as part of the Adobe Sneaks program, where employees can create demos to show off new ideas, which are then showcased (virtually, this year) at the Adobe Summit. While the Sneaks start out as demos, Adobe Experience Cloud Senior Director Steve Hammond told me that 60% of Sneaks make it into a live product.

Hyman Chung, a senior product manager for Adobe Experience Cloud, said that this Sneak was designed for content creators and content marketers who are probably seeing more traffic during the coronavirus pandemic (Adobe says that in April, its own blog saw a 30% month-over-month increase), and who may be looking for ways to increase reader engagement while doing less work.

Hello, planetary delivery service? I’ll take one gas giant, hold the gas.

UK neurologists publish details of mildly affected or recovering Covid-19 patients with serious or potentially fatal brain conditions.

Look deep inside our cells, and you’ll find that each has an identical genome –a complete set of genes that provides the instructions for our cells’ form and function.

But if each blueprint is identical, why does an eye cell look and act differently than a skin cell or brain cell? How does a stem cell—the raw material with which our organ and tissue cells are made—know what to become?

In a study published July 8, University of Colorado Boulder researchers come one step closer to answering that fundamental question, concluding that the molecular messenger RNA (ribonucleic acid) plays an indispensable role in cell differentiation, serving as a bridge between our genes and the so-called “epigenetic” machinery that turns them on and off.

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Quantum computers (QC) are poised to drive important advances in several domains, including medicine, material science and internet security. While current QC systems are small, several industry and academic efforts are underway to build large systems with many hundred qubits.

Towards this, computer scientists at Princeton University and physicists from Duke University collaborated to develop methods to design the next generation of quantum computers. Their study focused on QC systems built using trapped ion (TI) technology, which is one of the current front-running QC hardware technologies. By bringing together computer architecture techniques and device simulations, the team showed that co-designing near-term hardware with applications can potentially improve the reliability of TI systems by up to four orders of magnitude.

Continue reading “Examining trapped ion technology for next generation quantum computers” »