Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
Toggle light / dark theme

Blog – Page 811

On October 7, 2024, the XB-1, Boom Supersonic’s groundbreaking supersonic demonstrator, completed its fifth test flight from the Mojave Air & Space Port, reaching a new top speed of Mach 0.69 (324 KIAS) and a maximum altitude of 17,800 feet.

Flown by Chief Test Pilot Tristan “Geppetto” Brandenburg, the aircraft remained airborne for approximately 50 minutes, setting a new record for the program in terms of speed, altitude, and flight duration.

This flight marked a key milestone as the halfway point of the planned 10 subsonic test flights, all leading toward supersonic speeds later this year. A crucial element of the test was the continued use of the flutter excitation system (FES), which was repaired and reinstalled to gather data at Mach 0.6, helping to expand the flight envelope towards transonic speeds. Additionally, the landing gear was retracted immediately after takeoff, a procedure that will now be standard in upcoming flights.

Read more | >

Summary: Scientists have identified how genetic variants influence the risk of neurological and psychiatric disorders, including schizophrenia and autism. Using live neural cells and DNA sequencing, researchers discovered thousands of “non-coding” genetic variants with context-dependent functions, activated during brain development.

These variants act like switches, turning genes on or off depending on cellular pathways. This research offers new insights into the biological mechanisms behind psychiatric disorders and could lead to personalized treatments based on genetic profiles.

Read more | >

Quantum state tomography plays a fundamental role in characterizing and evaluating the quality of quantum states produced by quantum devices. It serves as a crucial element in the advancement of quantum hardware and software, regardless of the underlying physical implementation and potential applications1,2,3. However, reconstructing the full quantum state becomes prohibitively expensive for large-scale quantum systems that exhibit potential quantum advantages4,5, as the number of measurements required increases exponentially with system size.

Recent protocols try to solve this challenge through two main steps: efficient parameterization of quantum states and utilization of carefully designed measurement schemes and classical data postprocessing algorithms. For one-dimensional (1D) systems with area law entanglement, the matrix product state (MPS)6,7,8,9,10,11,12 provides a compressed representation. It requires only a polynomial number of parameters that can be determined from local or global measurement results. Two iterative algorithms using local measurements, singular value thresholding (SVT)13 and maximum likelihood (ML)14, have been demonstrated in trapped-ion quantum simulators with up to 14 qubits15. However, SVT is limited to pure states and thus impractical for noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) systems. Meanwhile, although ML can handle mixed states represented as matrix product operators (MPOs)16,17, it suffers from inefficient classical data postprocessing.

Read more | >

TL;DR

Using a precise parallax method, scientists measured the distance to a star-forming region 66,000 light-years away on the far side of the Milky Way. This discovery, using the Very Long Baseline Array, confirmed the existence of the Scutum-Centaurus Arm and uncovered its undulating shape. The interstellar dust obstructing visible light made this feat more challenging, but tracking molecules like methanol and water helped scientists achieve this. This is part of a larger effort to map the entire Milky Way, with about a quarter still unexplored, offering more insights into the galaxy’s true structure.

Read more | >

To realize the full potential of DNA nanotechnology in nanoelectronics applications requires addressing a number of scientific and engineering challenges: how to create and manipulate DNA nanostructures? How to use them for surface patterning and integrating heterogeneous materials at the nanoscale? And how to use these processes to produce electronic devices at lower cost and with better performance? These topics are the focus of a recent reviewarticle.

Read more | >