Lifeboat Foundation

The previously “impossible to solve” problems for some of the biggest financial, technological and academic institutions will soon be solved in Poughkeepsie.

That’s according to IBM, which announced the opening of its first Quantum Computing Center on Wednesday, based on its Poughkeepsie campus.

Quantum computing is “nothing short of a revolution for how we are going to process information,” Director of IBM Research Dario Gil said. While computers have traditionally processed binary code — a collection of ones and zeroes — quantum computers, he said, process information in qubits, or quantum bits.

IBM continues to push its quantum computing efforts forward and today announced that it will soon make a 53-qubit quantum computer available to clients of its IBM Q Network. The new system, which is scheduled to go online in the middle of next month, will be the largest universal quantum computer available for external use yet.

The new machine will be part of IBM’s new Quantum Computation Center in New York State, which the company also announced today. The new center, which is essentially a data center for IBM’s quantum machines, will also feature five 20-qubit machines, but that number will grow to 14 within the next month. IBM promises a 95 percent service availability for its quantum machines.

IBM notes that the new 53-qubit system introduces a number of new techniques that enable the company to launch larger, more reliable systems for cloud deployments. It features more compact custom electronics for improves scaling and lower error rates, as well as a new processor design.

A team from Dartmouth College and MIT has designed and conducted the first lab test to successfully detect and characterize a class of complex, “non-Gaussian” noise processes that are routinely encountered in superconducting quantum computing systems.

The characterization of non-Gaussian noise in superconducting quantum bits is a critical step toward making these systems more precise.

The joint study, published in Nature Communications, could help accelerate the realization of quantum computing systems. The experiment was based on earlier theoretical research conducted at Dartmouth and published in Physical Review Letters in 2016.

Generally girls lose interest in STEM careers as they get older. But, according to a new study, small changes at school and at home can have a profound impact on how girls perceive STEM careers, how confident they feel in class and how likely they are to pursue STEM academically and into their careers.

The study, “Closing the STEM Gap,” published today by Microsoft, surveyed more than 6,000 girls and young women on their interests and perceptions of science, technology, engineering and math. It found that girls tended to lose interest in STEM as they headed toward adulthood. And, by the time they’d finished high school, their interest had dropped substantially. For example, the report found that interest in computer science among females dropped 27 percentage points between middle school and college. According to the report: “In middle school … 31 percent of girls believe that jobs requiring coding and programming are ‘not for them.’ In high school, that percentage jumps up to 40. By the time they’re in college, 58 percent of girls count themselves out of these jobs.”

But, the study found, countermeasures both large and small can have a profound effect, including:

Lab chemists and computer scientists are joining forces to find a nerve-agent antidote that will go where today €™s antidotes can €™t go €“ the brain. Read more about in the latest issue of our Science & Technology Review magazine †’ https://str.llnl.gov/2019-06/valdez

A new Royal Society report called “iHuman: blurring lines between mind and machine” is for the first time systematically exploring whether it is “right” or not to use neural interfaces – machines implanted in or worn over the body to pick up or stimulate nervous activity in the brain or other parts of the nervous system. It also sets out recommendations to ensure the ethical risks are understood, and to set up a transparent, public-driven but flexible regulatory framework which will allow the UK to lead innovative technology in this field.

“DNA is like a computer program but far, far more advanced than any software ever created.” Bill Gates wrote this in 1995, long before synthetic biology – a scientific discipline focused on reading, writing, and editing DNA – was being harnessed to program living cells. Today, the cost to order a custom DNA sequence has fallen faster than Moore’s law; perhaps that’s why the Microsoft founder is turning a significant part of his attention, and wallet, towards this exciting field.

Bill Gates is not the only tech founder billionaire that sees a parallel between bits and biology, either. Many other tech founders – the same people that made their money programming 1s and 0s – are now investing in biotech founders poised to make their own fortunes by programming A’s, T’s, G’s and C’s.

The industry has raised more than $12.3B in the last 10 years and last year, 98 synthetic biology companies collectively raised $3.8 billion, compared to just under $400 million total invested less than a decade ago. Synthetic biology companies are disrupting nearly every industry, from agriculture to medicine to cell-based meats. Engineered microorganisms are even being used to produce more sustainable fabrics and manufacture biofuels from recycled carbon emissions.

The day is coming when we will be able to scan our entire consciousness into a computer. How will we coexist with our digital replicas?

Brain-to-computer interfaces and intelligence boosting chips implanted in the brain could soon make their way out of the realms of science fiction and into reality.

Already, some of the biggest tech giants in the industry like Elon Musk and Facebook are working to create brain-computer interfaces.

CBS Chicago recently spoke to Dr. Moran Cerf, a neuroscientist at Northwestern University, who is currently developing a non-invasive computer chip that when implanted in the brain could give an individual super intelligence.