Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Category: computing

Her computer, Karin Strauss says, contains her “digital attic”—a place where she stores that published math paper she wrote in high school, and computer science schoolwork from college.

She’d like to preserve the stuff “as long as I live, at least,” says Strauss, 37. But computers must be replaced every few years, and each time she must copy the information over, “which is a little bit of a headache.”

It would be much better, she says, if she could store it in DNA—the stuff our genes are made of.

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(A computer simulation of a black hole. NASA, ESA, and D. Coe, J. Anderson, and R. van der Marel (STScI))

In case you haven’t heard, there is a very, very big problem with the universe: About 80% of all of the stuff inside it is missing.

Astronomers call this material “dark matter.” They know it’s out there because its huge mass tugs on and shapes galaxies, but no one has ever detected the material itself. Aside from exerting a gravitational pull, dark matter doesn’t seem to interact with stars, planets, dust, atoms, subatomic particles, or any other “normal” matter as we know it. It’s essentially invisible.

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Wanted to share because I found this extremely interesting in what we’re discovery on implants and cells. I predict we are going to find out that in the next 7 to 10 years that we had some key things wrong as well as learned some new amazing things about cells especially with the synthetic cell & cell circuitry work that is happening for bio computing.

By Bikramjit Basu & his group Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore

For a variety of medical treatments these days, artificial, synthetic materials are inserted into the human body. Common examples include treatment for artery blockage and orthopaedic surgeries, like hip and knee replacements. Human bodies are not very receptive to foreign objects; most synthetic materials are rejected by the body. The choice of material that can be inserted, therefore, has to be very specific.

We do not yet have a material that is easily accepted inside the human body. A variety of materials are used for the different kinds of functions they are intended to perform once inserted inside. At our group, we have been trying to develop a comprehensive understanding of how biological cells in human bodies interact with a material surface. The idea is to recreate conditions that allow human cells to grow and function normally on a synthetic material. If we are able to do that, these materials, or biomaterials as we like to call them, can be used as various implants.

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Another major leap forward in controlling system noise in QC.

A breakthrough into the full characterisation of quantum states has been published today as a Editors’ Suggestion in the journal Physical Review Letters.

The full characterisation (tomography) of quantum states is a necessity for future quantum computing. However, standard techniques are inadequate for the large quantum bit-strings necessary in full scale quantum computers.

A research team from the Quantum Photonics Laboratory at RMIT University and EQuS at the University of Sydney has demonstrated a new technique for quantum tomography — self-guided quantum tomography — which opens future pathways for characterisation of large quantum states and provides robustness against inevitable system noise.

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Good for USC.

Following a recent upgrade, the USC-Lockheed Martin Quantum Computing Center (QCC) based at the USC Information Sciences Institute (ISI) is now the leader in quantum processing capacity.

With the upgrade — to 1,098 qubits from 512 — the D-Wave 2X™ processor is enabling QCC researchers to continue their efforts to close the gap between academic research in quantum computation and real-world critical problems.

The new processor will be used to study how and whether quantum effects can speed up the solution of tough optimization, machine learning and sampling problems. Machine-learning algorithms are widely used in artificial intelligence tasks.

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Storage tech doesn’t get much better than this. Scientists at TU Delft have developed a technique that uses chlorine atom positions as data bits, letting the team fit 1KB of information into an area just 100 nanometers wide. That may not sound like much, but it amounts to a whopping 62.5TB per square inch — about 500 times denser than the best hard drives. The scientists coded their data by using a scanning tunneling microscope to shuffle the chlorine atoms around a surface of copper atoms, creating data blocks where QR code -style markers indicate both their location and whether or not they’re in good condition.

Not surprisingly, the technology isn’t quite ready for prime time. At the moment, this storage only works in extremely clean conditions, and then only in extreme cold (77 kelvin, or −321F). However, the approach can easily scale to large data sizes, even if the copper is flawed. Researchers suspect that it’s just a matter of time before their storage works in normal conditions. If and when it does, you could see gigantic capacities even in the smallest devices you own — your phone could hold dozens of terabytes in a single chip.

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