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Archive for the ‘computing’ category: Page 251

Feb 18, 2023

Researchers think alien civilizations might be creating black holes to store quantum data

Posted by in categories: alien life, computing, existential risks, quantum physics

A new paper has proposed an absolutely wild idea. What if aliens are creating black holes to use as quantum storage? It sounds crazy, but some scientists say it could give us a solution to the Fermi Paradox, which essentially states that if life is common in our universe, why have we not found evidence of it beyond Earth?

This paradox has caused quite a few ripples throughout the scientific community, especially within parts that believe alien life is out there, just waiting to be discovered. The new paper has yet to be peer-reviewed, but it was created by a team of German and Georgian scientists who say we may be looking in the wrong direction in our search for alien life.

Currently, we rely on radio signals to search for signs of life out in the universe. But, these researchers suggest that we should instead approach black holes as if alien civilizations created them as massive quantum computers to store data in. As such, we should be looking for technosignatures emanating from megastructures like pulsars, white dwarf stars, and black holes.

Feb 17, 2023

A new elastic polymer dielectric to create wafer-scale stretchable electronics

Posted by in categories: computing, transportation, wearables

Over the past few years, material scientists and electronics engineers have been trying to fabricate new flexible inorganic materials to create stretchable and highly performing electronic devices. These devices can be based on different designs, such as rigid-island active cells with serpentine-shape/fractal interconnections, neutral mechanical planes or bunked structures.

Despite the significant advancements in the fabrication of stretchable materials, some challenges have proved difficult to overcome. For instance, materials with wavy or serpentine interconnect designs commonly have a limited area density and fabricating proposed stretchable materials is often both difficult and expensive. In addition, the stiffness of many existing stretchable materials does not match that of human skin tissue, making them uncomfortable on the skin and thus not ideal for creating wearable technologies.

Researchers at Sungkyunkwan University (SKKU), Institute for Basic Science (IBS), Seoul National University (SNU), and Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) have recently fabricated a vacuum-deposited elastic polymer for developing stretchable electronics. This material, introduced in Nature Electronics, could be used to create stretchy field-effect transistors (FETs), which are primary components of most electronic devices on the market today.

Feb 17, 2023

Will “The Singularity” rescue us from death?

Posted by in categories: alien life, computing, singularity, transhumanism

Yeah, death is scary and freaky, but on the other hand, I have no direct idea of what it actually involves (having never been dead myself). Given that reality, my job is to live this life as completely as possible. You can engage fully in its richness, its sorrows, and its beauty, or you can miss it by worrying about when or how this aspect of being ends.

From this perspective, the transhumanist desire to “conquer” death sounds like the worst forms of religious zeal. Both science and spiritual practice are supposed to help us look directly into the truth of life, the Universe, and Everything. Death, whatever it means, is part of all three. To spend effort thinking otherwise is to, quite sadly, miss the point profoundly.

Even more important, however, is the wrong-headedness of the transhuman conception of what it means to be human. Their idea is that it’s literally all in the head. Your life, in the transhumanist conception, is reducible to the computations happening in your brain. The totality of your experience — its vibrancy and immediacy and the strange inescapable luminosity of its presence — is all just meat computing. And if that’s the case, who needs the meat? Let’s just swap out the neurons for silicon chips, and it will all be the same. Heck, it will be better, and it gets to go on forever and ever.

Feb 17, 2023

6 Quantum Algorithms That Will Change Computing Forever

Posted by in categories: computing, information science, quantum physics, security

Here is a list of some of the most popular quantum algorithms highlighting the significant impact quantum can have on the classical world:

Shor’s Algorithm

Our entire data security systems are based on the assumption that factoring integers with a thousand or more digits is practically impossible. That was until Peter Shor in 1995 proposed that quantum mechanics allows factorisation to be performed in polynomial time, rather than exponential time achieved using classical algorithms.

Feb 17, 2023

Options for using Windows 11 with Mac® computers with Apple® M1® and M2™ chips

Posted by in category: computing

Windows 11 runs best on a PC designed for Windows. When such an option is not available, here are two different ways to use Windows with Mac.

Feb 17, 2023

Passengers Take 16-Hour Flight to Nowhere After Auckland to New York U-Turn

Posted by in categories: computing, Elon Musk, neuroscience

Elon Musk’s company Neuralink wants to put a computer chip in everyone’s brain. But the new tech comes with big risk.

Feb 16, 2023

Perovskites, a ‘dirt cheap’ alternative to silicon, just got a lot more efficient

Posted by in categories: computing, solar power, sustainability

Silicon, the standard semiconducting material used in a host of applications—computer central processing units (CPUs), semiconductor chips, detectors, and solar cells—is an abundant, naturally occurring material. However, it is expensive to mine and to purify.

Feb 16, 2023

Towards defect engineering: Identifying universal structures on the atomic scale

Posted by in categories: computing, engineering

How will materials behave under certain conditions? And how to make materials more robust? These two questions are crucial to design advanced materials for structural and functional components and applications. A close look at the underlying atomic structures and especially their defects is necessary to understand and predict material behavior.

Electrical conductivity, strength and fracture resistance are for example influenced by grain boundaries. It is known that grain boundaries—despite being defects—have their own ordered , which can influence or even dominate . However, their requires precise and time-consuming atomic resolution imaging and is limited to the investigation of specific, individual cases.

But are these cases generalizable for all metals? A researcher team of the Max-Planck-Institut für Eisenforschung (MPIE) utilized to show that the same atomic arrangements occur in a whole group of metals, namely fcc metals, thus proving that the “special cases” investigated in the experiments are not really exotic, but common.

Feb 16, 2023

Chat GPT on Extending Healthy Lifespan and Epigenetic Cellular Rejuvenation.pdf

Posted by in categories: computing, genetics, life extension

I wanted to test how well endowed is ChatGPT in the field of Longevity. For that matter I asked the following two questions: Which are the most promising therapies which are being developed to significantly extend healthy lifespan in humans using 4,000 characters (about maximum lenght to be readable in one page).

Which are the most promising therapies to achieve epigenetic cellular rejuvenation.

I created a two-page document in PDF with a screenshot of the responses for the two questions, so to show them exactly as they appeared in my laptop (no editing by me whatsoever).

Feb 16, 2023

Thin-film transistor strategy to enhance flexible display panel performance

Posted by in categories: computing, materials

Advances in display technologies prompt the development of electronic products with foldable and flexible panels. Flexible displays have thin-film transistors (TFTs) built in that act as an on/off light switch for the display. At the same time, important considerations for the advancement of next generation displays include electrical charge transmission velocity, operation stability, and production cost reduction.

Recently, a research team at POSTECH has proposed a highly efficient crosslinking strategy for a dense and defect-free thin-film organic-inorganic hybrid . The findings from the study were published in Nature Communications.

The global evolution of IoT has raised interest in metal-oxide semiconductor-based circuits with low standby power consumption. Attention has been particularly keen on TFT materials capable of low-cost solution processing. Among several solution-processable semiconductors, are regarded as the most successful material platforms for TFTs mainly because of their high charge carrier mobility and operational stability.