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Category: computing

Social media giant Facebook Inc. is planning to acquire CTRL-Labs, a technology startup that is working on a software to let people control a digital avatar using only with their thoughts. Apparently, as per reports, Facebook is ready to strike a deal between $500 million and $1 billion.

The closely held four-year-old startup, which has dozens of employees and has raised tens of millions in venture capital, uses a bracelet to measure neuron activity in a subject’s arm to determine movement that person is thinking about, even if they aren’t physically moving. That neuron activity is then translated into movement on a digital screen. However, Facebook has declined to comment on the price of the acquisition.

Technology like CTRL-Labs’s may sometime in the future play a crucial part of products like augmented reality glasses, where a user might want to control a computer without the need for buttons or a keyboard. “Your hands could be in your pocket, behind you,” explained Thomas Reardon, chief executive officer of CTRL-Labs, at an industry conference last December. “It’s the intention [to move], not the movement” itself that controls the avatar, he said.

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Quantum computing has the potential to revolutionize technology, medicine, and science by providing faster and more efficient processors, sensors, and communication devices.

But transferring information and correcting errors within a remains a challenge to making effective quantum computers.

In a paper in the journal Nature, researchers from Purdue University and the University of Rochester, including John Nichol, an assistant professor of physics, and Rochester Ph.D. students Yadav P. Kandel and Haifeng Qiao, demonstrate their method of relaying information by transferring the state of electrons. The research brings scientists one step closer to creating fully functional quantum computers and is the latest example of Rochester’s initiative to better understand and develop novel quantum systems. The University recently received a $4 million grant from the Department of Energy to explore quantum materials.

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IBM has a fleet of quantum computers. That much is fairly well known since IBM has been actively promoting quantum computing for several years. But IBM’s quantum story will get all the more interesting next month, when a 53 qubit computer joins the line, making it the most powerful quantum computer available for use outside IBM.

“Next month, IBM will make a 53-qubit quantum available to clients via its Q Network quantum cloud computing service,” said Bits&Chips. That network, said Asian Scientist Magazine, and grew into an “ecosystem of Fortune 500 companies, , universities and national research labs.”

IBM’s new machine will be part of the company’s quantum computation center in Poughkeepsie, New York State, marking an unveiling of its 14th quantum computer. The center “is essentially a for IBM’s quantum machines,” said Frederic Lardinois in TechCrunch.

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The need to make some hardware systems tinier and tinier and others bigger and bigger has been driving innovations in electronics for a long time. The former can be seen in the progression from laptops to smartphones to smart watches to hearables and other “invisible” electronics. The latter defines today’s commercial data centers—megawatt-devouring monsters that fill purpose-built warehouses around the world. Interestingly, the same technology is limiting progress in both arenas, though for different reasons.

The culprit, we contend, is the printed circuit board. And the solution is to get rid of it.

Our research shows that the printed circuit board could be replaced with the same material that makes up the chips that are attached to it, namely silicon. Such a move would lead to smaller, lighter-weight systems for wearables and other size-constrained gadgets, and also to incredibly powerful high-performance computers that would pack dozens of servers’ worth of computing capability onto a dinner-plate-size wafer of silicon.

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D-Wave today announced its next generation “Advantage” quantum computer system. It’ll pack a whopping 5,000 qubits and myriad improvements to processing speed and power. And the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico will be among the first to have access.

According to a press release from D-Wave, the new Advantage system improves on the previous generation’s 2000Q model – which sports a paltry-by-comparison 2,048 qubits – in nearly every conceivable way:

Designed to speed the development of commercial quantum applications, the Advantage quantum system will power a new hardware and software platform that will accelerate and ease the delivery of quantum computing applications. Reflecting years of customer feedback, the platform captures users’ priorities and business requirements and will deliver significant performance gains and greater solution precision.

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A nanoelectrode array that can simultaneously obtain intracellular recordings from thousands of connected mammalian neurons in vitro.

How our brain cells, or neurons, use electrical signals to communicate and coordinate for higher brain function is one of the biggest questions in all of science.

For decades, researchers have used electrodes to listen in on and record these signals. The patch clamp electrode, an electrode in a thin glass tube, revolutionized neurobiology in the 1970’s with its ability to penetrate a neuron and to record quiet but telltale signals from inside the cell. But this tool lacks the ability to record a ; it can measure only about 10 cells in parallel.

Now, researchers from Harvard University have developed an electronic that can perform high-sensitivity intracellular recording from thousands of connected simultaneously. This breakthrough allowed them to map synaptic connectivity at an unprecedented level, identifying hundreds of synaptic connections.

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O.o.

Control of spin waves in magnonic crystals is essential for magnon-based computing. Crystals made of ferromagnetic metals offer versatility in band structure design, but strong magnetic damping restricts their transmission efficiency. Yttrium iron garnet (YIG) with ultralow damping is the palpable alternative, yet its small saturation magnetization limits dipolar coupling between discrete units. Here, we experimentally demonstrate low-loss spin-wave manipulation in magnonic crystals of physically separated nanometer-thick YIG stripes. We enhance the transmission of spin waves in allowed minibands by filling the gaps between YIG stripes with CoFeB. Thus-formed magnonic crystals exhibit tunable bandgaps of 50–200 MHz with nearly complete suppression of the spin-wave signal. We also show that Bragg scattering on only two units produces clear frequency gaps in spin-wave transmission spectra. The integration of strong ferromagnets in nanometer-thick YIG-based magnonic crystals provides effective spin-wave manipulation and low-loss propagation, a vital parameter combination for magnonic technologies.

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Theorists attribute the unexpectedly slow thermalization of cold atoms seen in recent experiments to an effect called quantum many-body scarring.

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Researchers still have some way to go before they can assemble enough quantum bits (qubits) to make a practical, large-scale quantum computer. But already the best prototypes, made up of several tens of qubits, are opening our eyes to new behavior in the quantum realm. Last year, a team from Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) unveiled a quantum “simulator” made up of a row of 51 interacting atoms [1]. Exciting the individual atoms in various patterns (Fig. 1), they discovered something unexpected: atoms in certain patterns took at least 10 times longer to relax towards thermal equilibrium than atoms in other patterns. Four groups of theorists have tried to make sense of this observation [2–6], in all cases attributing the slow thermalization to a never-before-seen effect called quantum many-body scarring.

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