Lifeboat Foundation

Portable hard drives seem like they’re bound to go way of the dinosaur, thanks to the rise of services like Dropbox and Google Drive. But if you wanted to take a large file home with you back in 1985, you didn’t have quite so many options. Your best bet? Maybe this hard drive from Maynard.

“Leave the computer, take the drive!” the ad said in big, bold letters in the July 1985 issue of Byte magazine. And look at just how portable that thing is!

In 2016, the Nobel Prize in Physics went to three British scientists for their work on superconductors and superfluids, which included the explanation of a rather odd phase of matter.

Now, for the first time, their discovery has a practical application – shrinking an electrical component to a size that will help quantum computers reach a scale that just might make them useful.

In a collaboration with Stanford University in the US, a team of scientists from the University of Sydney and Microsoft have used the newly found phase of matter — topological insulator — in shrinking an electrical component called a circulator 1,000 times smaller.

Continue reading “Physicists Just Invented an Essential Component Needed For Quantum Computers” »

Yes.

Physicists in the QUTIS Quantum Biomimetics and Quantum Artificial Life research group at the Department of Physical Chemistry, University of the Basque Country in Spain have harnessed the unprecedented power of the IBM Q Cloud Quantum Computer —recently made available for public use ( IBM makes 20 qubit quantum computing machine available as a cloud service) —to reproduce the hallmark features of Darwinian life and evolution in microscopic quantum systems, proving they can efficiently encode quantum features and biological behaviors that are usually associated with living systems and natural selection.

Continue reading “Is quantum artificial life possible?” »

There weren’t too many historical events on December 3, 1992, but the date is an important one for mobile fans: 25 years ago today, the very first text message was sent. It simply read, “Merry Christmas”

On the same day that Whitney Houston’s I will always love you was the number 1 song in the US and Home Alone 2 topped the box office, 22-year-old Sema Group software architect Neil Papworth sent the first SMS (Short Message Service).

It was sent over the Vodafone GSM network in the UK, though back then handsets could only receive messages, not send them. Papworth sent it to an Orbitel 901 handset belonging to the then-director of Vodafone, Richard Jarvis, using a computer.

Continue reading “The SMS text message turns 25 today” »

Dr. Aubrey de Grey Summarizes Rejuvenation Research at the MIT Technology Review. To learn more about the work of Dr. Aubrey de Grey and the SENS Foundation visit http://www.sens.org/

Since the dawn of medicine, aging has been doctors’ foremost challenge. Three unsuccessful approaches to conquering it have failed: treating components of age-related ill health as curable diseases, extrapolating from differences between species in the rate of aging, and emulating the life extension that famine elicits in short-lived species. SENS Research Foundation is spearheading the fourth age of anti-aging research: the repair of age-related damage, that is, rejuvenation biotechnology.

The Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence (SENS) approach was first proposed in 2002. “Senescence,” here, refers to the actuarial phenomenon—the trend that individuals within a population suffer from an increasing morbidity and mortality rate in (typically exponential) relation to their chronological age. “Negligible” is used in a statistical sense: we consider a level of senescence negligible if no age-related contribution to mortality is statistically demonstrable within a population, given the “background noise” of age-independent mortality (such as unfortunate encounters with motor vehicles). Finally, by “Engineered,” we indicate that this state is achieved by the deliberate application of biomedical therapies, and is not the normal situation. The goal of SENSE is thus unambiguously defined; we seek methods to convert a population experiencing a non-negligible level of senescence into one experiencing a negligible level.

Continue reading “Undoing Aging with Molecular and Cellular Damage Repair” »

Just need to prevent brain hacking.

Eric Leuthardt believes that in the near future we will allow doctors to insert electrodes into our brains so we can communicate directly with computers and each other.

(Phys.org)—Physicists have experimentally demonstrated quantum entanglement with 10 qubits on a superconducting circuit, surpassing the previous record of nine entangled superconducting qubits. The 10-qubit state is the largest multiqubit entangled state created in any solid-state system and represents a step toward realizing large-scale quantum computing.

Lead researcher Jian-Wei Pan and co-workers at the University of Science and Technology of China, Zhejiang University, Fuzhou University, and the Institute of Physics, China, have published a paper on their results in a recent issue of Physical Review Letters.

In general, one of the biggest challenges to scaling up multiqubit entanglement is addressing the catastrophic effects of decoherence. One strategy is to use superconducting circuits, which operate at very cold temperatures and consequently have longer qubit coherence times.

A team at the University of Sydney and Microsoft, in collaboration with Stanford University in the US, has miniaturised a component that is essential for the scale-up of quantum computing. The work constitutes the first practical application of a new phase of matter, first discovered in 2006, the so-called topological insulators.

Beyond the familiar phases of matter — solid, liquid, or gas — topological insulators are materials that operate as insulators in the bulk of their structures but have surfaces that act as conductors. Manipulation of these materials provide a pathway to construct the circuitry needed for the interaction between quantum and classical systems, vital for building a practical quantum computer.

Theoretical work underpinning the discovery of this new phase of matter was awarded the 2016 Nobel Prize in Physics.

Researchers from Google and the University of California Santa Barbara have taken an important step towards the goal of building a large-scale quantum computer.

Writing in the journal Quantum Science and Technology, they present a new process for creating superconducting interconnects, which are compatible with existing superconducting qubit technology.

The race to develop the first large-scale error-corrected quantum computer is extremely competitive, and the process itself is complex. Whereas classical computers encode data into binary digits (bits) that exist in one of two states, a quantum computer stores information in quantum bits (qubits) that may be entangled with each other and placed in a superposition of both states simultaneously.

Continue reading “Superconducting qubit 3D integration prospects bolstered” »