Feb 20 (Reuters) — The first human patient implanted with a brain-chip from Neuralink appears to have fully recovered and is able to control a computer mouse using their thoughts, the startup’s founder Elon Musk said late on Monday.
“Progress is good, and the patient seems to have made a full recovery, with no ill effects that we are aware of. Patient is able to move a mouse around the screen by just thinking,” Musk said in a Spaces event on social media platform X.
Musk said Neuralink was now trying to get as many mouse button clicks as possible from the patient.
Quantum computing engineers at UNSW Sydney have shown they can encode quantum information—the special data in a quantum computer—in four unique ways within a single atom, inside a silicon chip.
The feat could alleviate some of the challenges in operating tens of millions of quantum computing units in just a few square millimeters of a silicon quantum computer chip.
In a paper published in Nature Communications, the engineers describe how they used the 16 quantum ‘states’ of an antimony atom to encode quantum information.
The U.S. government is giving chip maker GlobalFoundries $1.5 billion in grants to build and expand facilities in New York and Vermont, the first major award in a program that aims to reinvigorate domestic chip production.
The award from the Commerce Department kicks off what is expected to be a series of cash injections into semiconductor manufacturing projects in Arizona, Texas, New York and Ohio in the coming weeks. Chip makers Intel, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing, Samsung Electronics and Micron Technology have all submitted applications for the government to cover a portion of the billions of dollars it costs to build cutting-edge factories.
RFID tags are commonly used to verify the authenticity of products, but they have some drawbacks. They are relatively large, expensive, and vulnerable to counterfeiting. A team of MIT engineers has developed a new type of ID tag that overcomes these limitations by using terahertz waves, which are smaller and faster than radio waves.
The new tag is a cryptographic chip several times smaller and cheaper than RFID tags. It also offers improved security, using the unique pattern of metal particles in the glue that attaches the tag to the item as a fingerprint. This way, the authentication system will detect tampering if someone tries to peel off the tag and stick it to a fake item.
Apart from these two found, there is one other Q1 computer in the world.
Two of the world’s first desktop computers have been found during a London house clearance. The Q1, launched in 1972, paved the way for computing as we know it today.
Last year, a Quantinuum-led team of scientists announced that they were able to realize and control a state of matter known as non-Abelian topological order within a quantum processor. The team published their results in the pre-print server ArXiv, outlining how they accomplished what many experts considered a far-off advance — if possible at all – and what the scientists hoped could be an advance toward revolutionizing the way we approach quantum computing.
That advance has now been officially peer reviewed in Nature, marking another important step in the scientific process – and maybe even a significant step in the quest for fault-tolerant quantum computers, a quantum device that could handle operations with unprecedented accuracy and efficiency.
“Our key finding is that non-Abelian topological orders can experimentally be prepared with high fidelities on par with Abelian states like the surface code,” the team writes. “Non-Abelian states are among the most intricately entangled quantum states theoretically known to exist, and carry promise for new types of quantum information processing. Their realization evidences the rapid development of quantum devices and opens several new questions.”
In this study, a novel rapid diagnostic method was developed for optimizing the production of transplutonium isotope through high flux reactor irradiation. The proposed method was based on the concept of “Single Energy Interval Value (SEIV)” and “Energy Spectrum Total Value (ESTV)”, which significantly improved the production efficiency of isotopes such as 252Cf (by 15.08 times), 244Cm (by 65.20 times), 242Cm (by 11.98 times), and 238Pu (by 7.41 times). As a promising alternative to the traditional Monte Carlo burnup calculation method, this method offers a more efficient approach to evaluate radiation schemes and optimize the design parameters. The research discovery provides a theoretical basis for further refining the analysis of transplutonium isotope production, leading to more efficient and sustainable production methods. Future studies could focus on the implementation of energy spectrum conversion technology to further improve the optimal energy spectrum.
The production of transplutonium isotope, which are essential in numerous fields such as military and space technology, remains inefficient despite being produced through irradiation in a high flux reactor. Past studies on the optimization of transplutonium isotope production through irradiation in a high flux reactor have been limited by the computational complexity of traditional methods such as Monte Carlo burnup calculation. These limitations have hindered the refinement of the evaluation, screening, and optimization of the irradiation schemes. Hence, this research aimed to develop a rapid diagnostic method for evaluating radiation schemes that can improve the production efficiency of isotopes such as 252Cf, 244Cm, 242Cm, and 238Pu. The outcome of the study showed great potential in advancing the production of transplutonium isotope, which have numerous applications in fields such as military, energy, and space technology.
