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Category: engineering

More news on Qubits that are surprisingly intrinsically resilient to noise.

While a classical bit found in conventional electronics exists only in binary 1 or 0 states, the more resourceful quantum bit, or ‘qubit’ is represented by a vector, pointing to a simultaneous combination of the 1 and 0 states. To fully implement a qubit, it is necessary to control the direction of this qubit’s vector, which is generally done using fine-tuned and noise-isolated procedures.

Researchers at the University of Chicago’s Institute for Molecular Engineering and the University of Konstanz have demonstrated the ability to generate a quantum logic operation, or rotation of the qubit, that — surprisingly — is intrinsically resilient to noise as well as to variations in the strength or duration of the control. Their achievement is based on a geometric concept known as the Berry phase and is implemented through entirely optical means within a single electronic spin in diamond.

Their findings were published online Feb. 15, 2016, in Nature Photonics and will appear in the March print issue. “We tend to view quantum operations as very fragile and susceptible to noise, especially when compared to conventional electronics,” remarked David Awschalom, the Liew Family Professor of Molecular Engineering and senior scientist at Argonne National Laboratory, who led the research. “In contrast, our approach shows incredible resilience to external influences and fulfills a key requirement for any practical quantum technology.”

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If you have money in the stock market, I highly recommend that you buy as many shares of Alphabet, as much as you can, as soon as you can. Alphabet was spun out of it’s parent company, Google. It’s important, critical even, to take notice of the fact that all of Google’s “moon shot” R&D programs, from it’s X division to it’s marketing department, have been transferred to this new company. Why does this matter so very much? The answer to that question is this: The evolutionary scientific and engineering breakthroughs are nearing completion. When that happens, in the very near future, it is going to leave humanity in a state of stunned awe.

Welcome to the singularity, my friends.

Shares of Alphabet, the parent company of Google, rose nearly 4% Tuesday morning thanks to its strong earnings report.

As a result, Alphabet (GOOGL, Tech30) started the day with a market valuation of about $551 billion. Apple’s (AAPL, Tech30) stock fell 1%, pushing its market value down to $531 billion.

Alphabet — can I just call it Google in the way the Arsenio Hall barber character in “Coming To America” refused to refer to Cassius Clay as Muhammad Ali? — wowed Wall Street with its fourth quarter results after the closing bell Monday.

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Amazing.

The Singularity isn’t NEAR…

It’s in progress.

For the first time ever, researchers have successfully demonstrated a system that enables a person to move the individual fingers of a prosthetic hand using just their thoughts.

To test the device, scientists at Johns Hopkins University recruited the help of an epilepsy patient who was preparing for surgery to pinpoint the source of his seizures. (The patient himself was not missing a limb.) The scientists used the same electrode array implanted in his brain to control the prosthetic limb. After mapping the parts of the brain responsible for individual finger control movements, the researchers programmed the prosthesis to move the corresponding finger. The details of the experiment can now be found in the Journal of Neural Engineering.

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Cotton Candy’s new inspiration.

Scientists are now able to spin a three-dimensional slab of gelatin that contains a microvascular network, something very like our capillaries, using a cotton candy-esque machine.

What do cotton candy and artificial organs have in common? More than you might think.

Leon Bellan, assistant professor of mechanical engineering at Vanderbilt University, is using a cotton candy machine to spin out networks of tiny threads comparable in size, density, and complexity to the patterns formed by capillaries.

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This is wonderful program for students wanting to learn robotics. I do believe for real AI/ traditional Robotics (not referring to nanobots or microbots) to truly accelerate in capabilities; it will require technology like Quantum.

Two young engineering students are making robotics more accessible to enthusiasts across the country

A spartan apartment at a nondescript housing society in Pashan is filled with robots of all shapes and sizes. Among the curious looking machines are two robotic hands that mimic the movement of a human body and a large quadcopter that looks as if it’s ready to fly. This is the working space of College of Engineering, Pune (CoEP) alumni Amol Gulhane and Pratik Pravin Deshmukh — the 20-something founders of Robolab, a venture that’s making robotics accessible to the masses by building robotics labs across the country.

“We were inspired to start Robolab because of two reasons. Being members of the Robot Study Circle, a college group dedicated to robotics at CoEP, we were passionate about building robots. Although we were specialising in electronics and telecommunications, robotics brought out the best in us. When the time approached for graduation in 2013, the thought of having to give up our hobby was depressing. So, the idea to start Robolab in November 2013 was born out of the desire to stay true to our calling,” said Deshmukh. The second reason, revealed the youngsters, was more idealistic. In the course of launching Robolab, the duo conducted a survey to find out the number of colleges in India having labs dedicated to robotics. “We found out there were just a handful of colleges like the IITs who had such labs. Since not many people can make it to the IITs, we decided to take robotics to the masses with Robolab.”

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Minduploading.org is a collection of pages and articles designed to explore the concepts underlying mind uploading. The articles are intended to be a readable introduction to the basic technical and philosophical topics covering mind uploading and substrate-independent minds. The focus is on careful definitions of the common terms and what the implications are if mind uploading becomes possible.

Mind uploading is an ongoing area of active research, bringing together ideas from neuroscience, computer science, engineering, and philosophy. This site refers to a number of participants and researchers who are helping to make mind uploading possible.

Realistically, mind uploading likely lies many decades in the future, but the short-term offers the possibility of advanced neural prostheses that may benefit us.

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Human and animal movements generate slight neural signals from their brain cells. These signals obtained using a neural interface are essential for realizing brain-machine interfaces (BMI). Such neural recording systems using wires to connect the implanted device to an external device can cause infections through the opening in the skull. One method of solving this issue is to develop a wireless neural interface that is fully implantable on the brain.

However, the neural interface implanted on the brain surface should be of small size and minimally invasive. Furthermore, it requires the integration of a power source, antenna for wireless communication, and many functional circuits.

Now, a research team at the Department of Electrical and Electronic Information Engineering at Toyohashi University of Technology has developed a wafer-level packaging technique to integrate a silicon large-scale integration (LSI) chip in a very thin film of a thickness 10 µm (Sensors, “Co-design method and wafer-level packaging technique of thin-film flexible antenna and silicon CMOS rectifier chips for wireless-powered neural interface systems”).

Wirelessly Supplying Power To Brain

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