Lifeboat Foundation

Children with a rare neurological disease were recently given the chance to walk for the first time thanks to a new robotic exoskeleton. These devices – which are essentially robotic suits that give artificial movement to a user’s limbs – are set to become an increasingly common way of helping people who’ve lost the use of their legs to walk. But while today’s exoskeletons are mostly clumsy, heavy devices, new technology could make them much easier and more natural to use by creating a robotic skin.

Exoskeletons have been in development since the 1960s. The first one was a bulky set of legs and claw-like gloves reminiscent of the superhero, Iron Man, designed to use hydraulic power to help industrial workers lift hundreds of kilogrammes of weight. It didn’t work, but since then other designs for both the upper and lower body have successfully been used to increase people’s strength, help teach them to use their limbs again, or even as a way to interact with computers using touch or “haptic” feedback.

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Good work by Microsoft.

Autism is a spectrum disorder, meaning not all people that meet the classification have identical behaviors. Some of these folks are very functional, while others may struggle more to socialize, or not be able to hold jobs.

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A team of scientists from Oxford University has shown how the natural movement of bacteria could be harnessed to assemble and power microscopic ‘windfarms’ — or other man-made micromachines such as smartphone components.

The study, published in the journal Science Advances (“Active micromachines: Microfluidics powered by mesoscale turbulenceence”), uses computer simulations to demonstrate that the chaotic swarming effect of dense active matter such as bacteria can be organised to turn cylindrical rotors and provide a steady power source.

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Your body’s natural camera may eventually stream video.

Luv it.

Microsoft and genetics boffins predict genetics in the datacenter.

Finding evidence of many-body localization in a closed quantum system.

During equilibration ordinary many-body systems lose all information about the initial state. Every morning we experience an example for this behaviour. Milk poured into a cup of coffee mixes perfectly and after some time it is impossible to say how exactly the two fluids were put together. The same behaviour holds for almost all quantum systems. However, recently a new phenomenon called “many-body localization” has been predicted theoretically, which allows well insulated quantum systems to preserve memory of the initial state forever. Now a team of scientists around Dr. Christian Groß and Professor Immanuel Bloch (Director at MPQ and Chair of Quantum Optics at LMU Munich), in cooperation with David Huse (Princeton University), has obtained evidence of such a behaviour in a two-dimensional quantum system of cold rubidium atoms trapped in an optical lattice.

The scientists observed that – beyond a certain degree of disorder imprinted on the particle ensemble in the beginning – the system would relax into a steady state still containing detailed microscopic information about its past. “We were able to observe the transition from a thermalized state into a many-body localized phase”, Christian Groß points out. “It is the first observation of that kind in a regime that is not accessible with state-of-the-art simulations on classical computers.” The experiment is not only of fundamental interest; the results might also lead to new ways for storing quantum information.

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More steps forward for QC through the discovery of a versatile effective spin system suitable for quantum simulations and universal quantum computation.

Using trapped atomic ions, we demonstrate a tailored and versatile effective spin system suitable for quantum simulations and universal quantum computation. By simply applying microwave pulses, selected spins can be decoupled from the remaining system and, thus, can serve as a quantum memory, while simultaneously, other coupled spins perform conditional quantum dynamics. Also, microwave pulses can change the sign of spin-spin couplings, as well as their effective strength, even during the course of a quantum algorithm. Taking advantage of the simultaneous long-range coupling between three spins, a coherent quantum Fourier transform—an essential building block for many quantum algorithms—is efficiently realized. This approach, which is based on microwave-driven trapped ions and is complementary to laser-based methods, opens a new route to overcoming technical and physical challenges in the quest for a quantum simulator and a quantum computer.

To truly reach a fully connected world/ singularity we have to move tech into more and more bio-computing world. I do believe QC will assist us in getting the fundamental infrastructure we need for singularity.

We already must deal with computers too much rather than too little, and there is already lots of advanced computing done also for example in materials science and nanotechnology, for example molecular dynamics (MD) and Monte Carlo simulations.[2] The molecular biologist’s programs for predicting protein folding can also count as nanotechnology. Nevertheless, all of our previous articles concluded that we need more computing, and several mentioned statistics. This would sound predictable if coming from a statistical physicist with a background in computing, advertising his skills. However, we mean a more efficient computing rather than simply more.

We started the type of computing we do only recently and for reasons not yet mentioned: Given complex nano-micro compounds, materials’ characterization is difficult due to the three-dimensional complexity of the structures. We originally integrated image analysis with simulation in order to derive 3D structure from 2D images (SEM) and projections (TEM).[3,4] The most fruitful result was however the insight into how easy it is to create adaptable software that analyzes images and keeps track of all the data, calculating anything desired such as comparisons with numerical simulations, all in one integrated system.[5,6] Many of the previously discussed issues, for example error reporting, are thereby basically already automatically solved!

Adapting software sounds prohibitively difficult: Who in my lab can modify software? Nowadays everybody! Today, programming is done partially graphically, for example with LabView™, where no programming language appears anymore. We work with Mathematica and therefore with programming code, but we mostly just download parts of code and adapt them playfully until they behave as desired. To whomever such does not count as the ability to program, we cannot program!

Continue reading “A Flexible Evolving Approach To Computing” »