Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
Toggle light / dark theme

Blog

Category: internet

A photodetector converts light into an electrical signal, causing the light to be lost. Researchers led by Tracy Northup at the University of Innsbruck have now built a quantum sensor that can measure light particles non-destructively. It can be used to further investigate the quantum properties of light.

Physicist Tracy Northup is currently researching the development of quantum internet at the University of Innsbruck. The American citizen builds interfaces with which can be transferred from matter to and vice versa. Over such interfaces, it is anticipated that quantum computers all over the world will be able to communicate with each other via fiber optic lines in the future. In their research, Northup and her team at the Department of Experimental Physics have now demonstrated a method with which visible light can be measured non-destructively. The development follows the work of Serge Haroche, who characterized the quantum properties of microwave fields with the help of neutral atoms in the 1990s and was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2012.

In work led by postdoc Moonjoo Lee and Ph.D. student Konstantin Friebe, the researchers place an ionized calcium atom between two hollow mirrors through which visible laser light is guided. “The ion has only a weak influence on the light,” explains Tracy Northup. “Quantum measurements of the ion allow us to make statistical predictions about the number of light particles in the chamber.” The physicists were supported in their interpretation of the measurement results by the research group led by Helmut Ritsch, a Innsbruck quantum optician from the Department of Theoretical Physics. “One can speak in this context of a for light particles”, sums up Northup, who has held an Ingeborg Hochmair professorship at the University of Innsbruck since 2017. One application of the new method would be to generate special tailored light fields by feeding the measurement results back into the system via a feedback loop, thus establishing the desired states.

Read more

When 5G mobile services start to roll out worldwide from next year, smart cities such as Hangzhou are expected to get smarter as the next-generation wireless technology helps industries realise the full potential of the internet of things (IoT).

The stakes are high for industries around the world, as global spending on the internet of things is forecast to exceed US$1 trillion in 2022, up from an estimated US$745 billion this year.

Read more

Robotics specialist German Bionic is to present the first connected robot exoskeleton for use with the industrial internet of things, at the Hannover Messe industrial technology show.

The German Bionic IO cloud platform connects the third generation of the Cray X exoskeleton with all common enterprise solutions and networked manufacturing systems, enabling complete integration into “smart factory” and Industry 4.0 environments.

Besides cloud services such as wireless software updates – over the air – and predictive maintenance, German Bionic IO facilitates the continuous optimization of the intelligent control system through machine learning and lays the data-scientific foundation for the next development stages of bionics.

Read more

A new way to store information in molecules could preserve the contents of the New York Public Library in a teaspoon of protein, without energy, for millions of years.

Books can burn. Computers get hacked. DVDs degrade. Technologies to store information–ink on paper, computers, CDs and DVDs, and even DNA–continue to improve. And yet, threats as simple as water and as complex as cyber-attacks can still corrupt our records.

As the data boom continues to boom, more and more information gets filed in less and less space. Even the cloud–whose name promises opaque, endless space–will eventually run out of space, can’t thwart all hackers, and gobbles up energy. Now, a new way to store information could stably house data for millions of years, lives outside the hackable internet, and, once written, uses no energy. All you need is a chemist, some cheap molecules, and your precious information.

Read more

Some 70% of Earth’s surface is covered by water, and yet nearly all earthquake detectors are on land. Aside from some expensive battery-powered sensors dropped to the sea floor and later retrieved, and a few arrays of near-shore detectors connected to land, seismologists have no way of monitoring the quakes that ripple through the sea floor and sometimes create tsunamis. Now, a technique described online in Science this week promises to take advantage of more than 1 million kilometers of fiber optic cables that crisscross the ocean floors and carry the world’s internet and telecom traffic. By looking for tiny changes in an optical signal running along the cable, scientists can detect and potentially locate earthquakes. The technique requires little more than lasers at each end of the cable and access to a small portion of the cable’s bandwidth. Crucially, it requires no modification to the cable itself and does not interfere with its everyday use.

Read more

Smart watches. Pacemakers. Internet-connected glasses. These are devices designed to make life easier. And yet, all this wearable technology can be hacked. The devices send personal health information to your smartphone over the airways, so anyone with the know-how could scoop it up and steal it. But now, researchers at Northeastern have a better, more secure idea: Send data through your body.

Associate professor Kaushik Chowdhury worked with a team of researchers from the Draper Laboratory in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and the Federal University of Paraná in Brazil to develop a safe, hacker-proof method to transmit sensitive data.

“The truth is, no matter what I do when it comes to wireless devices, I’m radiating the signal through the air,” Chowdhury says. “There is the danger that the signal can be jammed, or analyzed by someone else. Our method secures this so it can’t be leaked.”

Read more

The recent clinical trial was only conducted on patients with lymphoma, but the researchers suggested their approach could be potentially used to treat other types of cancer — and that it could improve the efficacy of other immunotherapies, including checkpoint blockade.

“The in situ vaccine approach has broad implications for multiple types of cancer,” said Brody, the study’s lead author and the director of the Lymphoma Immunotherapy Program at The Tisch Cancer Institute at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. “This method could also increase the success of other immunotherapies such as checkpoint blockade.”

Related Articles Around the Web.

Read more

Researchers at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) have, for the first time, used a semiconductor laser to send and receive radio signals. The hybrid electronic-photonic device uses a laser to extract and transmit microwave signals, providing a data rate that may one day lead to ultra-high-speed Wi-Fi.

Read more