Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
Toggle light / dark theme

Blog – Page 7,388

Get the latest international news and world events from around the world.

Log in for authorized contributors

‘Excitons’ Show Potential for Low-Power Quantum Computing

Circa 2019

LONDON — A laboratory in Switzerland has found a way of using a laser to change and regulate the polarization, wavelength and intensity of light in “excitons” in 2D materials, creating the potential for a new generation of transistors with less energy loss and heat dissipation, opening up the potential for low-power quantum computing.

Excitons are created when an electron absorbs light and moves into a higher energy level, or “energy band” as it is called in solid quantum physics. This excited electron leaves behind an “electron hole” in its previous energy band. And because the electron has a negative charge and the hole a positive charge, the two are bound together by an electrostatic force called a Coulomb force. It’s this electron-electron hole pair that is referred to as an exciton.

Scientists from EPFL’s Laboratory of Nanoscale Electronics and Structures (LANES) had already developed a method to control exciton flows at room temperature last year. In the latest development, they have discovered new properties of these quasiparticles that can lead to more energy-efficient electronic devices and have found a way to control some of the properties and change the polarization of the light they generate. The scientists’ discovery forms part of a relatively new field of research called valleytronics and has just been published in Nature Photonics.

Solving Quantum Ground-State Problems with Nuclear Magnetic Resonance

Circa 2012

Quantum ground-state problems are computationally hard problems for general many-body Hamiltonians; there is no classical or quantum algorithm known to be able to solve them efficiently. Nevertheless, if a trial wavefunction approximating the ground state is available, as often happens for many problems in physics and chemistry, a quantum computer could employ this trial wavefunction to project the ground state by means of the phase estimation algorithm (PEA). We performed an experimental realization of this idea by implementing a variational-wavefunction approach to solve the ground-state problem of the Heisenberg spin model with an NMR quantum simulator. Our iterative phase estimation procedure yields a high accuracy for the eigenenergies (to the 10–5 decimal digit).

Power of Light and Oxygen Clears Alzheimer’s Disease Protein in Brains of Live Mice

New photo-oxygenation catalyst targets amyloid structure, recruits brain immune system cells.

A small, light-activated molecule recently tested in mice represents a new approach to eliminating clumps of amyloid protein found in the brains of Alzheimer’s disease patients. If perfected in humans, the technique could be used as an alternative approach to immunotherapy and used to treat other diseases caused by similar amyloids.

Researchers injected the molecule directly into the brains of live mice with Alzheimer’s disease and then used a specialized probe to shine light into their brains for 30 minutes each day for one week. Chemical analysis of the mouse brain tissue showed that the treatment significantly reduced amyloid protein. Results from additional experiments using human brain samples donated by Alzheimer’s disease patients supported the possibility of future use in humans.

Big Tech is replacing human artists with AI

I wish I had some sort of different response to give than this, but this summary is totally clear-eyed about the coming Semantic Apocalypse.

Artistic corpocracy

It’s actually even worse (in a way aptly not noticed by the Google employee). Because as we discussed, in the future advanced versions of this sort of AI will be solely owned and developed by Big Tech due the scaling laws around how they’re trained and run. The immediate licensing of GPT-3 by Microsoft was an augury of this. Indeed, the rights to interact with these AIs will be some of the most valuable licenses on the planet in the next decade. Consumers, even academic AI researchers, will communicate with company-owned trillion-parameter AIs solely via oracles, getting nowhere near the source code. The future of this technology belongs to huge corporations with major resources. So it’s not really that “AI is automating art”—no, corporations are automating art. And writing. And translation. And illustration. And music. And the thousand other human forms of creativity that give life meaning. They are now the province of Big Tech.

Department of Commerce establishes National Artificial Intelligence Advisory Committee

US Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo has announced that the Commerce Department has established a high-level committee to advise the President and other federal agencies on a range of issues related to artificial intelligence (AI). Working with the National AI Initiative Office (NAIIO) in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), the Department is now seeking to recruit top-level candidates to serve on the committee.

A formal notice describing the National Artificial Intelligence Advisory Committee (NAIAC) and the call for nominations for the committee and its Subcommittee on Artificial Intelligence and Law Enforcement appears in the Federal Register published today.

“AI presents an enormous opportunity to tackle the biggest issues of our time, strengthen our technological competitiveness, and be an engine for growth in nearly every sector of the economy,” said Secretary Raimondo. “But we must be thoughtful, creative, and wise in how we address the challenges that accompany these new technologies. That includes, but is not limited to, ensuring that President Biden’s comprehensive commitment to advancing equity and racial justice extends to our development and use of AI technology. This committee will help the federal government to do that by providing insights into a full range of issues raised by AI.”

Artificial brain networks simulated with new quantum materials

Isaac Newton’s groundbreaking scientific productivity while isolated from the spread of bubonic plague is legendary. University of California San Diego physicists can now claim a stake in the annals of pandemic-driven science.

A team of UC San Diego researchers and colleagues at Purdue University have now simulated the foundation of new types of artificial intelligence computing devices that mimic brain functions, an achievement that resulted from the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown. By combining new supercomputing materials with specialized oxides, the researchers successfully demonstrated the backbone of networks of circuits and devices that mirror the connectivity of neurons and synapses in biologically based neural networks.

The simulations are described in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

FutureMan: The Future of Health and Fitness 2021–2150

My eBook and Training Program: https://www.thebioneer.com/product/superfunctional/

My physical book: https://www.thebioneer.com/product/functional-training-and-beyond/

The full post: https://www.thebioneer.com/future-of-fitness-2/(opens in a new tab)

This post explores the possible future of health and fitness! I made this into a pseudo-science-fiction narrative, just for the fun of it! This is, however, all just my own opinion and speculation! Very biased, and just a bit of fun.

Also, I’m not saying even I think all of this *will* happen… But most of it could!

A few of the predictions for the future of health and fitness, as discussed here:

Continue reading “FutureMan: The Future of Health and Fitness 2021−2150” | >

AMD teleportation patent could be ‘Zen moment’ for quantum computing

The patent in question is for a system that would use quantum teleportation in order to boost a quantum computer’s reliability, while at the same time reducing the number of qubits required for a given calculation. This “teleportation” technology would help solve scaling issues and calculation errors that arise from system instability.

One of the main issues behind quantum development is once you start pushing the pedal to the metal, there are major issues when it comes to scalability and stability. Quantum computing is far different to the 0s and 1s of traditional technology, so AMD’s new teleportation patent is quite an important step towards solving that issue.