Meanwhile, LIVE in Hollywood, FL today.
Brian Manning Delaney will join us with a presentation on “Navigating the Labyrinth of Dietary Restriction Methods.“
Followed with an Age Reversal Update by William Faloon.
“A software tool called CaImAn automates the arduous process of tracking the location and activity of neurons. It accomplishes this task using a combination of standard computational methods and machine-learning techniques. In a new paper, the software’s creators demonstrate that CaImAn achieves near-human accuracy in detecting the locations of active neurons based on calcium imaging data.”
Journal Article: https://www.simonsfoundation.org/…/caiman-calcium-imaging-…/
D-Wave, the well-funded quantum computing company, today announced its next-gen quantum computing platform with 5,000 qubits, up from 2,000 in the company’s current system. The new platform will come to market in mid-2020.
The company’s new so-called Pegasus topology connects every qubit to 15 other qubits, up from six in its current topology. With this, developers can use the machine to solve larger problems with fewer physical qubits — or larger problems in general.
It’s worth noting that D-Wave’s qubits are different from those of the company’s competitors like Rigetti, IBM and Google, with shorter coherence times and a system that mostly focuses on solving optimization problems. To do that, D-Wave produces lots of qubits, but in a relatively high-noise environment. That means you can’t compare D-Wave’s qubit count to that of its competitors (with D-Wave claiming the superiority of its machine for certain problems), which are building universal quantum computers.
Continue reading “D-Wave announces its next-gen quantum computing platform” »
Center for Nanoscale Materials researchers present a quantum model for achieving ground-state cooling in low frequency mechanical resonators and show how cooperativity and entanglement are key factors to enhance the cooling figure of merit.
A resonator with near-zero thermal noise has better performance characteristics in nanoscale sensing, quantum memories, and quantum information processing applications. Passive cryogenic cooling techniques, such as dilution refrigerators, have successfully cooled high-frequency resonators but are not sufficient for lower frequency systems. The optomechanical effect has been applied successfully to cool low-frequency systems after an initial cooling stage. This method parametrically couples a mechanical resonator to a driven optical cavity, and, through careful tuning of the drive frequency, achieves the desired cooling effect. The optomechanical effect is expanded to an alternative approach for ground-state cooling based on embedded solid-state defects. Engineering the atom-resonator coupling parameters is proposed, using the strain profile of the mechanical resonator allowing cooling to proceed through the dark entangled states of the two-level system ensemble.
FedEx is the latest company to join the delivery robot craze.
The company said Wednesday it will test a six-wheeled, autonomous robot called the SameDay Bot in Memphis, Tenn. this summer and plans to expand to more cities.
It’s partnering with major brands, including Walmart, Target, Pizza Hut and AutoZone, to understand how delivery robots could help other businesses.
Continue reading “FedEx turns to Segway inventor to build delivery robot” »
A team of researchers at The University of Cambridge has recently introduced a unique experimental testbed that could be used for experiments in cooperative driving. This testbed, presented in a paper pre-published on arXiv, consists of 16 miniature Ackermann-steering vehicles called Cambridge Minicars.
“Using true-scale facilities for vehicle testbeds is expensive and requires a vast amount of space,” Amanda Prorok. “Our main objective was to build a low-cost, multi-vehicle experimental setup that is easy to maintain and that is easy to use to prototype new autonomous driving algorithms. In particular, we were interested in testing and tangibly demonstrating the benefits of cooperative driving on multi-lane road topographies.”
IonQ used its trapped-ion computer and a scalable co-design framework for solving chemistry problems. They applied it to compute the ground-state energy of the water molecule. The robust operation of the trapped ion quantum computer yields energy estimates with errors approaching the chemical accuracy, which is the target threshold necessary for predicting the rates of chemical reaction dynamics.
Quantum chemistry is a promising application where quantum computing might overcome the limitations of known classical algorithms, hampered by an exponential scaling of computational resource requirements. One of the most challenging tasks in quantum chemistry is to determine molecular energies to within chemical accuracy.
At the end of 2018, IonQ announced that they had loaded 79 operating qubits into their trapped ion system and had loaded 160 ions for storage in another test. This new research shows that they are making progress applying their system to useful quantum chemistry problems. They are leveraging the trapped-ions system longer stability to process many steps. The new optimization methods developed for this first major quantum chemistry problem can also be used to solve significant optimization and machine learning problems.
For the first time, researchers have demonstrated a way to map and measure large-scale photonic quantum correlation with single-photon sensitivity. The ability to measure thousands of instances of quantum correlation is critical for making photon-based quantum computing practical.
In Optica, The Optica l Society’s journal for high impact research, a multi-institutional group of researchers reports the new measurement technique, which is called correlation on spatially-mapped photon-level image (COSPLI). They also developed a way to detect signals from single photons and their correlations in tens of millions of images.
“COSPLI has the potential to become a versatile solution for performing quantum particle measurements in large-scale photonic quantum computers,” said the research team leader Xian-Min Jin, from Shanghai Jiao Tong University, China. “This unique approach would also be useful for quantum simulation, quantum communication, quantum sensing and single-photon biomedical imaging.”
