Lifeboat Foundation

While we were all busy watching the Perseverance rover head off on its journey to Mars, NASA’s asteroid sample mission has been gearing up for its big moment. The Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, Security, Regolith Explorer (OSIRIS-REx for short) has completed its final test approach of the surface. The next time it descends, OSIRIS-REx will scoop up pieces of the asteroid Bennu for return to Earth.

NASA launched OSIRIS-REx in 2016, sending it off to intercept 101955 Bennu, a carbonaceous asteroid about 1,610 feet (490 meters) in diameter. Bennu does get very close to Earth at points in its orbit — there’s even a small chance that it could impact the Earth in the next few centuries. Currently, it’s safely out of the way about 2 AU distant (an AU is the distance between Earth and the sun).

Continue reading “NASA’s Asteroid Mission Completes Final Test Before Sampling Run” »

Although true “cyborgs”—part human, part robotic beings—are science fiction, researchers are taking steps toward integrating electronics with the body. Such devices could monitor for tumor development or stand in for damaged tissues. But connecting electronics directly to human tissues in the body is a huge challenge. Now, a team is reporting new coatings for components that could help them more easily fit into this environment.

The researchers will present their results today at the American Chemical Society (ACS) Fall 2020 Virtual Meeting & Expo.

“We got the idea for this project because we were trying to interface rigid, inorganic microelectrodes with the brain, but brains are made out of organic, salty, live materials,” says David Martin, Ph.D., who led the study. “It wasn’t working well, so we thought there must be a better way.”

The universe may have started with a Big Bang, but it will most likely end in an utterly anticlimactic way, slowly fading to black over trillions and trillions of years. Now, a theoretical physicist at Illinois State University has calculated what might just be the last interesting event that will ever happen – the explosions of stars called black dwarfs, which don’t even exist yet.

The ultimate fate of the universe is still up for debate, but one of the leading hypotheses is that it will undergo a “heat death.” Basically, all the stars will cool down and fizzle out, black holes will evaporate, and the never-ending expansion of the universe will stretch the fabric of reality so far that the remaining subatomic particles will rarely have the chance to whiz within a parsec of each other.

And now, thanks to theoretical physicist Matt Caplan, we have an idea of what might be one of the last things that will ever happen – black dwarf supernovae.

A new study makes a compelling case for the development of “NEMO”—a new observatory in Australia that could deliver on some of the most exciting gravitational-wave science next-generation detectors have to offer, but at a fraction of the cost.

The study, co-authored by the ARC Center of Excellence for Gravitational Wave Discovery (OzGrav), coincides with an Astronomy Decadal Plan mid-term review by Australian Academy of Sciences where “NEMO” is identified as a priority goal.

“Gravitational-wave astronomy is reshaping our understanding of the Universe,” said one of the study’s lead authors OzGrav Chief Investigator Paul Lasky, from Monash University.

For the first time ever, scientists have witnessed the interaction of a new phase of matter known as “time crystals”.

The discovery, published in Nature Materials, may lead to applications in quantum information processing because time crystals automatically remain intact—coherent—in varying conditions. Protecting coherence is the main difficulty hindering the development of powerful quantum computers.

Dr. Samuli Autti, lead author from Lancaster University, said: “Controlling the interaction of two time crystals is a major achievement. Before this, nobody had observed two time crystals in the same system, let alone seen them interact.

Dopamine, dopamine, wherefore art thou my dopamine?

Oh wait, I just need to press a button on my computer for that!

The American Chemical Society (ACS) are closer to using electronics in the body, to diagnose tumours and track illnesses: Read about it on OAG.

Quantum computing requires meticulously prepared hardware and big budgets, but cloud-based solutions could make the technology available to broader business audiences Several tech giants are racing to achieve “quantum supremacy”, but reliability and consistency in quantum output is no simple trick Covid-19 has prompted some researchers to look at how quantum computing could mitigate future pandemics with scientific precision and speed Quantum computing (QC) has been theorized for decades and has evolved rapidly over the last few years. An escalation in spend and development has seen powerhouses IBM, Microsoft, and Google race for ‘quantum supremacy’ — whereby quantum reliably and consistently outperforms existing computers. But do quantum computers remain a sort of elitist vision of the future or are we on course for more financially and infrastructurally viable applications across industries?

Getting to grips with qubits How much do you know? Ordinary computers (even supercomputers) deploy bits, and these bits comprise of traditional binary code. Computer processes – like code – are made up of countless combinations of 0’s and 1’s. Quantum computers, however, are broken down into qubits. Qubits are capable of ‘superpositions’: effectively adopting both 1 and 0 simultaneously, or any space on the spectrum between these two formerly binary points. The key to a powerful, robust, and reliable quantum computer is more qubits. Every qubit added exponentially increases the processing capacity of the machine.

Qubits and the impact of the superposition give quantum computers the ability to process large datasets within seconds, doing what it would take humans decades to do. They can decode and deconstruct, hypothesize and validate, tackling problems of absurd complexity and dizzying magnitude — and can do so across many different industries.

Continue reading “The quantum state of play — cloud-based QCaaS and Covid-19” »

Circa 2007

The first air-powered cars could hit showrooms as early as August of 2008.

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