Galen Buckwalter says brain-computer interfaces will have to be enjoyable to use if the technology is going to be successful.
Category: computing
Quantum magnetism: Spin-flip process in atomic nucleus does not account for all magnetic behavior
In the air people breathe, the water on Earth, the stars in the sky and more, atoms are the building blocks that make up the universe. Understanding the structure of the atomic nucleus is crucial for research with implications for astrophysics and in applications such as medical imaging and data storage.
A new study conducted by Department of Physics researchers using the John D. Fox Superconducting Linear Accelerator Laboratory at Florida State University examined titanium-50 nuclei and showed that a long-standing explanation for where magnetism in atomic nuclei comes from does not fully work for titanium-50. The research, which was published in Physical Review Letters, suggests that scientists may need to rethink how they explain nuclear magnetism.
“What current models propose is that magnetic strength is largely generated by spin-flip excitations, that means when flipping proton or neutron spins from up to down between so-called spin-orbit partner orbitals,” said Associate Professor Mark Spieker, a co-author on the multi-institution study. “For the first time, we showed that this type of spin-flip cannot be the only mechanism that generates nuclear magnetism.”
Racetrack-shaped lasers developed for bright, stable frequency combs
A new, miniature laser source developed by applied physicists in the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) and the Technical University of Vienna (TU Wien) could soon pack the power of a laboratory-based spectrometer—an important workhorse tool for precision environmental gas analysis—onto a single microchip.
The device, a ring-shaped, “racetrack” quantum cascade laser, generates a specific type of light source, called a frequency comb, in the difficult-to-access mid-infrared region of the electromagnetic spectrum. It was developed in the lab of Federico Capasso, the Robert L. Wallace Professor of Applied Physics and Vinton Hayes Senior Research Fellow in Electrical Engineering, in collaboration with co-senior author Benedikt Schwarz and colleagues at TU Wien.
The research was co-led by first author Ted Letsou, a postdoctoral researcher in the Capasso group, and Johannes Fuchsberger, a graduate student at TU Wien, and is published in Optica.
GIGABYTE Control Center vulnerable to arbitrary file write flaw
The GIGABYTE Control Center is vulnerable to an arbitrary file-write flaw that could allow a remote, unauthenticated attacker to access files on vulnerable hosts.
The hardware maker says that successful exploitation could potentially lead to code execution on the underlying system, privilege escalation, and a denial-of-service condition.
The GIGABYTE Control Center (GCC), which comes pre-installed on all the company’s laptops and motherboards, is GIGABYTE’s all-in-one Windows utility that lets users manage and configure their hardware.
Apple adds macOS Terminal warning to block ClickFix attacks
Apple has introduced a security feature in macOS Tahoe 26.4 that blocks pasting and executing potentially harmful commands in Terminal and alerts users to possible risks.
The new mechanism appears to be aimed primarily at blocking ClickFix attacks and has been reported by macOS users since the release candidate version of the operating system. Apple didn’t specifically mention it in macOS Tahoe 26.4 release notes.
ClickFix is a social engineering technique that tricks users into pasting malicious commands into the command line interface under the pretense of fixing a problem or a verification process.
Fragmented phone use—not total screen time—is the main driver of information overload, study finds
Amid hot discussion on screen time, social media use and the impact of digital devices on our well-being, a seven-month study from Aalto University in Finland sheds new light on what overwhelms users the most—and the results aren’t what you might think.
“Screen time does matter, but the heaviest users aren’t the most overloaded,” says doctoral researcher Henrik Lassila. “Those who feel most overwhelmed are the ones who return to their phone again and again for brief moments and then put it down shortly after.”
The seven-month study followed the digital behavior of nearly 300 adults in Germany across smartphones and computers. Participants completed repeated surveys about information overload, while all apps and websites used were logged, creating a rich longitudinal dataset of real world device use.
Silicon quantum computer performs logical operations for the first time
Silicon is ubiquitous in modern electronics, and now it is becoming increasingly useful in quantum computing. In particular, silicon’s compatibility with existing chip technology and its long coherence times in silicon-based spin qubits make it a promising material for scalable quantum computing. A new study, published in Nature Nanotechnology, has demonstrated silicon’s use in a logical quantum processor, representing the first of its kind.
Quantum computers are highly sensitive to errors from environmental noise, creating hurdles for practical quantum computation. To help suppress these errors, information can be encoded in logical qubits using fault-tolerant quantum computation (FTQC). Prior to this study, silicon had not been used for logical operations in FTQC.
“In silicon-based quantum processors, frequency crowding and cross-talk further exacerbate the errors as the system scales. To address these errors, logical encoding stands as the only viable solution by redundantly storing quantum information across multiple physical qubits. While logical qubits and operations have been successfully demonstrated in platforms such as superconducting circuits, neutral atoms, nitrogen-vacancy centers and trapped ions, their implementation in silicon-based spin qubits poses notable technical challenges,” the study authors write.
Stabilized laser components could shrink quantum computers from room- to chip-scale
Scientists in the Riccio College of Engineering at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and the University of California Santa Barbara have demonstrated key laser and ion trap components necessary to help drastically shrink the size of quantum computers, an achievement aligned with the shrinking of integrated microprocessors in the 1970s, 80s and 90s that allowed computers to move from room-sized behemoths to today’s ultrathin smartphones.
The current state-of-the-art technology for quantum computing is too large and complex to scale and too sensitive and bulky to be portable. The largest and most sensitive components of these quantum systems are the optics, which include multiple lasers and vibration-isolated, temperature-controlled vacuum chambers that contain ultrastable optical cavities. These cavities stabilize the lasers to extremely high precision in order to control trapped ions for quantum computing and optical clocks.