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The world’s oldest living couple celebrated another major milestone when their senior living community in Austin, Texas, threw them a party for their 80th wedding anniversary.

John and Charlotte Henderson have an aggregate age of 211 years and 175 days, and a love story that has quite literally stood the test of time.

To celebrate their 80th year together, 106-year-old John picked up 105-year-old Charlotte in a 1920s roadster — much like he did on their first date — with a beautiful bouquet of flowers.

Continue reading “The world’s oldest couple — ages 106 and 105 — celebrate their 80th wedding anniversary” | >

For $999, the Skydio 2 does something no other drone can do — intelligently follow you while dodging obstacles instead of crashing to its doom. It’s affordable compared to the $2,500 prototype the startup introduced last year, plus it’s smaller and lighter, with longer battery life and a far better camera, too.

As the cars we drive become increasingly sophisticated, the technology that underpins them poses a unique set of challenges.

“Currently, technology is more likely to create distractions in vehicles than it is to combat it,” Alain Dunoyer, SBD Automotive’s head of autonomous research and consulting, said in a statement sent to CNBC via email earlier this month.

“These days, cars have a shopping list of features which has led to tasks that were historically quite simple becoming drastically more complicated and distracting,” he added.

Continue reading “Bosch develops A.I. system in cars to detect distracted, tired drivers” | >

Circa 2005

We search for translationally invariant states of qubits on a ring that maximize the nearest neighbor entanglement. This problem was initially studied by O’Connor and Wootters [Phys. Rev. A {\bf 63}, 052302 (2001)]. We first map the problem to the search for the ground state of a spin 1/2 Heisenberg XXZ

Model. Using the exact Bethe ansatz solution in the limit of an infinite ring.

We prove the correctness of the assumption of O’Connor and Wootters that the state of maximal entanglement does not have any pair of neighboring spins.

“down’’ (or, alternatively spins “up’‘).

Continue reading “[quant-ph/0512214] Infinite qubit rings with maximal nearest neighbor entanglement: the Bethe ansatz solution” | >

The unique ability of cuttlefish, squid and octopuses to hide by imitating the colors and texture of their environment has fascinated natural scientists since the time of Aristotle. Uniquely among all animals, these mollusks control their appearance by the direct action of neurons onto expandable pixels, numbered in millions, located in their skin. Scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Brain Research and the Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies/Goethe University used this neuron-pixel correspondence to peer into the brain of cuttlefish, inferring the putative structure of control networks through analysis of skin pattern dynamics.

Cuttlefish, squid and octopus are a group of marine mollusks called coleoid cephalopods that once included ammonites, today only known as spiral fossils of the Cretaceous era. Modern coleoid cephalopods lost their external shells about 150 million years ago and took up an increasingly active predatory lifestyle. This development was accompanied by a massive increase in the size of their brains: modern cuttlefish and octopus have the largest brains (relative to body size) among invertebrates with a size comparable to that of reptiles and some mammals. They use these large brains to perform a range of intelligent behaviors, including the singular ability to change their skin pattern to camouflage, or hide, in their surroundings.

Cephalopods control camouflage by the direct action of their brain onto specialized skin cells called chromatophores, that act as biological color “pixels” on a soft skin display. Cuttlefish possess up to millions of chromatophores, each of which can be expanded and contracted to produce local changes in skin contrast. By controlling these chromatophores, cuttlefish can transform their appearance in a fraction of a second. They use camouflage to hunt, to avoid predators, but also to communicate.

Similarly, quantum computing started as a specialized field, only accessible to researchers and scientists. Today, millions of developers can access quantum processors via the cloud, bringing about a surge in early adoption and the identification of hundreds of early applications. We’re already seeing companies apply quantum computers in problems with potential real-world impact — everything from optimizing taxi routes to digital advertising.

A major catalyst for this momentum toward commercialization was the aforementioned emergence of cloud access to quantum computers at accessible price points. Now that the barriers to access have dramatically diminished, we’re seeing three key indicators emerge that signal quantum’s commercial viability: an increase in early adoption from category leaders, the emergence of entrepreneurial “quantum pioneers” and the rise of a supporting ecosystem in the form of independent software vendors (ISVs) and consulting firms.

Rather than representing an entirely different take on the flying car, the helicopter’s new brains are more equivalent to the “self-driving” features you see in contemporary cars — an effort to make vehicles safer and more accessible than ever before.

“Today, we design our lives around traffic and make decisions about where we live and work based on how hard it is to get there,” Mark Groden, Skyryse CEO and founder, said in a statement. “To get there, we need to make urban flying as safe as riding an elevator and as accessible and affordable as riding a bus.”

Continue reading “Watch the First Commercial Self-Flying Helicopter Take Off” | >