Lifeboat Foundation

Conventional light sources for fiber-optic telecommunications emit many photons at the same time. Photons are particles of light that move as waves. In today €™s telecommunication networks, information is transmitted by modulating the properties of light waves traveling in optical fibers, similar to how radio waves are modulated in AM and FM channels.

In quantum communication, however, information is encoded in the phase of a single photon – the photon €™s position in the wave in which it travels. This makes it possible to connect quantum sensors in a network spanning great distances and to connect quantum computers together.

Researchers recently produced single-photon sources with operating wavelengths compatible with existing fiber communication networks. They did so by placing molybdenum ditelluride semiconductor layers just atoms thick on top of an array of nano-size pillars (Nature Communications, “Site-Controlled Telecom-Wavelength Single-Photon Emitters in Atomically-thin MoTe 2 ”).

Saturn’s moon Titan is one of the weirdest and most intriguing worlds in our solar system. It is the only place we know of in the universe for sure beyond Earth that has rivers, lakes and larger bodies of liquid, but on Titan these features are filled with flammable hydrocarbons like methane and ethane.

Studying Titan in depth has been difficult due to a thick atmosphere of clouds and haze, but NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is giving scientists their first detailed glimpse of those clouds, and by extension, the weather patterns at work on this unique world.

“We had waited for years to use Webb’s infrared vision to study Titan’s atmosphere,” said JWST Principal Investigator Conor Nixon. “Detecting clouds is exciting because it validates long-held predictions from computer models about Titan’s climate, that clouds would form readily in the mid-northern hemisphere during its late summertime when the surface is warmed by the Sun.”

An unusual teleportation experiment uses ordinary quantum physics, but was inspired by tunnels in an exotic ‘toy universe’.

A small satellite developed by MIT engineers has set a new record for data transmission between a satellite and Earth. The TeraByte InfraRed Delivery (TBIRD) system used a laser to beam huge amounts of data at up to 100 gigabits per second (Gbps).

This data transmission speed is far greater than most connections you’ll get between the sky and the ground. SpaceX’s Starlink satellite internet offers up to 500 Mbps to Premium customers, and even the International Space Station’s data transmission tops out around 600 Mbps. That makes TBIRD up to 200 times faster.

The key difference is that most satellites communicate with ground stations via radio waves. TBIRD, on the other hand, uses laser light, which can carry up to 1,000 times more data in each transmission. Lasers come with their own hurdles though – the beams are much narrower, requiring more precise alignment between transmitter and receiver. And the light can be distorted by the atmosphere, leading to data loss. So TBIRD was designed to overcome these issues.

Cajal Neuroscience, a biotechnology company integrating human genetics, functional genomics and advanced microscopy to discover novel targets and therapeutics for neurodegeneration, has launched with the completion of a $96 million Series A financing.

The financing was led by The Column Group and Lux Capital, with additional participation from Two Sigma Ventures, Evotec, Bristol Myers Squibb, Alexandria Venture Investments, Dolby Family Ventures and other investors.

Longevity. Technology: Seattle-based Cajal is committed to discovering novel therapeutics for neurodegeneration; by focusing on the mechanistic, spatial and temporal complexity of neurodegeneration, the biotech’s powerful platform is designed to unlock the complexity of disease at unprecedented scale, and integrates expertise in neuroscience, neuroanatomy and computational biology with state-of-the-art technologies for high-throughput functional validation.

Quantum experiment conducted on Google’s Sycamore 2 computer transferred data across two simulated black holes, adding weight to the holographic principle of the universe.

Elon Musk is trying to help the paralyzed to move again, through electrodes in the cerebral cortex.

Neuralink, the strange and somewhat vague brainchild of Elon Musk, held an event Wednesday that the CEO of Tesla, SpaceX and Twitter called a “show and tell.” And show and tell it did — as a monkey welcomed the audience by typing a message through a brain-computer interface.

Neuralink’s product records action potentials of neurons in the brain. This is done by placing an electrode close enough to the synapse of two neurons in the brain and taking a recording of its electrical impulse.

Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. will offer advanced 4-nanometer chips when its new $12 billion plant in Arizona opens in 2024, an upgrade from its previous public statements, after US customers such as Apple Inc. pushed the company to do so, according to people familiar with the matter.

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In science fiction – think films and TV like “Interstellar” and “Star Trek” – wormholes in the cosmos serve as portals through space and time for spacecraft to traverse unimaginable distances with ease. If only it were that simple.

Scientists have long pursued a deeper understanding of wormholes and now appear to be making progress. Researchers announced on Wednesday that they forged two minuscule simulated black holes – those extraordinarily dense celestial objects with gravity so powerful that not even light can escape – in a quantum computer and transmitted a message between them through what amounted to a tunnel in space-time.