Lifeboat Foundation

Physicists Successfully Demonstrate Quantum Energy Teleportation in Lab Experiments

TL;DR

Bob finds himself in need of energy — he wants to charge that fanciful quantum battery — but all he has access to is empty space. Fortunately, his friend Alice has a fully equipped physics lab in a far-off location. Alice measures the field in her lab, injecting energy into it there and learning about its fluctuations. This experiment bumps the overall field out of the ground state, but as far as Bob can tell, his vacuum remains in the minimum-energy state, randomly fluctuating. But then Alice texts Bob her findings about the vacuum around her location, essentially telling Bob when to plug in his battery. After Bob reads her message, he can use the newfound knowledge to prepare an experiment that extracts energy from the vacuum — up to the amount injected by Alice.

Scraps of DNA discarded by our neurons’ power units are being absorbed into our nuclear genome far more frequently than assumed, potentially putting our brains at greater risk of developing life-threatening conditions.

An investigation by a team of researchers led by Columbia University in the US has found individuals with higher numbers of nuclear mitochondrial insertions – or NUMTs (pronounced new-mites) – in their brain cells are more likely to die earlier than those with fewer DNA transfers.

Continue reading “Mitochondria Dump DNA in The Brain, Potentially Cutting Years Off Our Lives” »

Helical Fusion, a Tokyo-based startup, is developing a groundbreaking steady-state fusion reactor that could provide limitless clean energy.

What could be faster than the long-range, high-altitude, Mach 3+ strategic reconnaissance aircraft, the Lockheed SR-71 ‘Blackbird’

“If pursued, we might see by the end of the decade advances in AI as drastic as the difference between the rudimentary text generation of GPT-2 in 2019 and the sophisticated problem-solving abilities of GPT-4 in 2023,” Epoch wrote in a recent research report detailing how likely it is this scenario is possible.

But modern AI already sucks in a significant amount of power, tens of thousands of advanced chips, and trillions of online examples. Meanwhile, the industry has endured chip shortages, and studies suggest it may run out of quality training data. Assuming companies continue to invest in AI scaling: Is growth at this rate even technically possible?

Continue reading “AI Models Scaled Up 10,000x Are Possible by 2030, Report Says” »

A small team of engineers and geophysicists from Northwestern University, the University of Chicago, and the University of Central Florida has found, via modeling, that creating millions of metal nanorods from material on the Martian surface and then blasting them into the atmosphere would be a more efficient way to heat the planet than generating greenhouse gases. Their paper is published in the journal Science Advances.

Science fiction writers have for many years envisioned a future when Mars is made habitable through terraforming techniques, allowing humans to survive without the need for special buildings and spacesuits. Recently, scientists have begun looking at the possibility, though most project ideas are far less ambitious.

Instead of completely transforming the planet, many are looking at simply warming it up a bit to make it more habitable. Most such ideas have centered on releasing greenhouse gases into the atmosphere to capture more heat from the sun. Unfortunately, there are few ingredients on the Martian surface that could be used to create and release such gases.

A study out recently has prompted much media attention about the role of plastics in developing autism.

In particular, the study focused on exposure to a component of hard plastics—bisphenol A, or BPA—in the womb and the risk of boys developing this neurodevelopmental disorder.

Importantly, the study doesn’t show plastics containing BPA cause autism.

The secrets of black holes and dark matter could lie before the Big Bang, a new study of “bouncing” cosmology hints.

The three final algorithms, which have now been released, are ML-KEM, previously known as kyber; ML-DSA (formerly Dilithium); and SLH-DSA (SPHINCS+). NIST says it will release a draft standard for FALCON later this year. “These finalized standards include instructions for incorporating them into products and encryption systems,” says NIST mathematician Dustin Moody, who heads the PQC standardization project. “We encourage system administrators to start integrating them into their systems immediately.”

Duncan Jones, head of cybersecurity at the firm Quantinuum welcomes the development. “[It] represents a crucial first step towards protecting all our data against the threat of a future quantum computer that could decrypt traditionally secure communications,” he says. “On all fronts – from technology to global policy – advancements are causing experts to predict a faster timeline to reaching fault-tolerant quantum computers. The standardization of NIST’s algorithms is a critical milestone in that timeline.”