Lifeboat Foundation

Quantum’s natural selection explored.

There might be no getting around what Albert Einstein called “spooky action at a distance.” With an experiment described today in Physical Review Letters — a feat that involved harnessing starlight to control measurements of particles shot between buildings in Vienna — some of the world’s leading cosmologists and quantum physicists are closing the door on an intriguing alternative to “quantum entanglement.”

“Technically, this experiment is truly impressive,” said Nicolas Gisin, a quantum physicist at the University of Geneva who has studied this loophole around entanglement.

Continue reading “Experiment Reaffirms Quantum Weirdness” »

When light shines on certain materials, it causes them to emit electrons. This is called “photoemission” and it was discovered by Albert Einstein in 1905, winning him the Nobel Prize. But only in the last few years, with advancements in laser technology, have scientists been able to approach the incredibly short timescales of photoemission. Researchers at EPFL have now determined a delay of one billionth of one billionth of a second in photoemission by measuring the spin of photoemitted electrons without the need of ultrashort laser pulses. The discovery is published in Physical Review Letters.

Photoemission

Photoemission has proven to be an important phenomenon, forming a platform for cutting-edge spectroscopy techniques that allow scientists to study the properties of electrons in a solid. One such property is spin, an intrinsic quantum property of particles that makes them look like as if they were rotating around their axis. The degree to which this axis is aligned towards a particular direction is referred to as spin polarization, which is what gives some materials, like iron, magnetic properties.

Continue reading “Measuring Time Without a Clock” »

Our story on QC just keeps advancing as I cannot wait to see this technology on our smart devices.

Holographic atomic memory, invented and constructed by physicists from the Faculty of Physics at the University of Warsaw, is the first device able to generate single photons on demand in groups of several dozen or more. The device, successfully demonstrated in practice, overcomes one of the fundamental obstacles towards the construction of some type of quantum computer.

Completely secure, high-speed quantum communication, or even a model of quantum computer, may be among the possible applications for the new source of single photons recently built at the Faculty of Physics at the University of Warsaw (UW Physics), Poland. An unprecedented feature of this new device is that for the first time it enables the on-demand production of a precisely controlled group of photons, as opposed to just a single one.

Continue reading “Large groups of photons on demand — an equivalent of photonic ‘integrated circuit’” »

Think patches that measure your blood chemistry and rooms geared toward your individual health are sci-fi concepts? Think again. Futuristic tech is improving health already — and it’s about to explode in popularity.

Teaching robots to communicate more effectively with humans will allow for a smoother transition into a more automated workplace.

The question is not whether disruptive technologies will transform the healthcare job market, but rather how and when will it happen. Healthcare navigators, augmented/virtual reality operation planners and nanomedicine engineers in the second part of my article series about future jobs in healthcare.

Top teams will compete in a simulated Mars mission.

Is committed to curing, preventing, or managing all disease in our children’s lifetime. Biohub is a part of CZI.

The Chan Zuckerberg Biohub, a non-profit medical research organization started by Priscilla Chan and Mark Zuckerberg (and not to be confused with the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, a limited liability corporation to advance human potential) today announced it would be doling out a total of $50 million to its first cohort of disease investigators.

The Biohub brings together Bay Area universities including the University of California, Berkeley; the University of California, San Francisco; and Stanford. One of the keystones to this collaboration effort is the investigative program.