A paralyzed man who hasn’t spoken in 15 years uses a brain-computer interface that decodes his intended speech, one word at a time.
Chemists have long conceptualized tiny machines that could fabricate drugs, plastics, and other polymers that are hard to build with bigger tools.
Black holes have properties characteristic of quantum particles, a new study reveals, suggesting that the puzzling cosmic objects can be at the same time small and big, heavy and light, or dead and alive, just like the legendary Schrödinger’s cat.
The new study, based on computer modeling, aimed to find the elusive connection between the mind-boggling time-warping physics of supermassive objects such as black holes and the principles guiding the behavior of the tiniest subatomic particles.
Personal computing has gotten smaller and more intimate over the years—from the desktop computer to the laptop, to smartphones and tablets, to smart watches and smart glasses.
But the next generation of wearable computing technology—for health and wellness, social interaction and myriad other applications—will be even closer to the wearer than a watch or glasses: It will be affixed to the skin.
Continue reading “New ‘smart tattoos’ tackle tech challenges of on-skin computing” »
The computing power of quantum machines is currently still very low. Increasing performance is a major challenge. Physicists at the University of Innsbruck, Austria, now present a new architecture for a universal quantum computer that overcomes such limitations and could be the basis of the next generation of quantum computers soon.
Quantum bits (qubits) in a quantum computer serve as a computing unit and memory at the same time. Because quantum information cannot be copied, it cannot be stored in memory as in a classical computer. Due to this limitation, all qubits in a quantum computer must be able to interact with each other.
This is currently still a major challenge for building powerful quantum computers. In 2015, theoretical physicist Wolfgang Lechner, together with Philipp Hauke and Peter Zoller, addressed this difficulty and proposed a new architecture for a quantum computer, now named LHZ architecture after the authors.
Quantum computers, which can perform calculations much faster than traditional computers, have a big problem: They are prone to data storage and processing errors caused by disturbances from the environment like vibrations and radiation from warm objects.
But a discovery by scientists led by Nanyang Technological University, Singapore (NTU Singapore), on how electrons can be controlled at very low temperatures, suggests a way for addressing this problem and developing more robust and accurate quantum computers.
The team’s findings, which were published online in the Nature Communications journal in October 2022, showed, for the first time, that electrons can have strong interactions between them under certain conditions.
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In the previous episode we saw how civilizations might not simply survive after all the stars in the Universe had died, but might indeed thrive far better during the Black Hole Era of the Universe. Today, we will go beyond even the Dark Era to examine the concepts or Iron Star Civilizations, Boltzmann Brains, Reversible Computing, and even reversing Entropy itself.
Continue reading “Civilizations at the End of Time: Iron Stars” »
(https://hannalabweb.weizmann.ac.il/) is a Senior Scientist and Professor in the Department of Molecular Genetics at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel, where his lab, and the interdisciplinary group of scientists within it, are focused on understanding the complexity of early embryonic stem cell biology and early developmental dynamics, as well as advancing human disease modeling.
More specifically, Dr. Hanna’s lab investigates the detailed process of cellular reprogramming, in which induced pluripotent stem cells are generated from somatic cells, and they investigate how pluripotency is maintained throughout development in mouse and human. In their studies they employ a diverse arsenal of biological experimentation methods, high throughput screening, advanced microscopy and genomic analyses seeking to combine biological experimentation with computational biology, theory and modeling, to elucidate various biological questions.
Ultra-pure diamond wafers could be used for quantum memory in tomorrow’s ultra-powerful quantum computers.
If it’s been a while since you’ve tackled the art of origami, don’t worry—you don’t need any crafty folding skills to prep the Air.o for use. Squeezing the sides of the flattened Air.o pushes it into its mouse formation, while a small but mighty magnet holds everything together. Dissembling the Air.o is said to be as easy as undoing the magnet and pushing down on the mouse to turn it into a geometric pancake. According to Air.o, the mouse’s vegan leather (AKA plastic) skin will retain its integrity even after being manipulated again and again. It’ll even survive nasty falls onto hard surfaces if Air.o’s Kickstarter page is anything to go off of.
For those who enjoy the “digital nomad” lifestyle but hate using a trackpad, the Air.o could be a game-changer. There are plenty of lightweight Bluetooth computer mice on the market these days, but none of them flatten into something that could pass as a bookmark in a pinch. Air.o’s Kickstarter page says the team elected to make a full-size mouse to avoid the fatigue that comes with using a mini mouse—a tiny (and frankly irritating to use) device that often ends up being added to people’s go bags for lack of better options.
As with any other Kickstarter campaign, there’s no saying whether the Air.o will ever make it to adopters’ bags and pockets (though this campaign in particular has surpassed its fundraising goal by a long shot, so there’s hope). It’s also difficult to say exactly how easy the Air.o is to use for long periods of time; the mouse’s design, though clever, might be uncomfortable for some. At only $49 USD per mouse, however, the Air.o does appear to be worth trying, if only to impress the people sitting near you at a cafe or on your next flight.
