Lifeboat Foundation

Whether it’s the smartphone in your pocket or the laptop on your desk, all current computer devices are based on electronic technology. But this has some inherent drawbacks; in particular, they necessarily generate a lot of heat, especially as they increase in performance, not to mention that fabrication technologies are approaching the fundamental limits of what is theoretically possible.

As a result, researchers explore alternative ways to perform computation that can tackle these problems and ideally offer some new functionality or features too.

One possibility lies in an idea that has existed for several decades but has yet to break through and become commercially viable, and that’s in optical computing.

Understanding this unique form of superconductivity is crucial and could lead to exciting applications, like functional quantum computers.

A newly synthesized material made from rhodium, selenium, and tellurium, has been found to exhibit superconductivity at extremely low temperatures.

“The scientists believe the material’s behavior might stem from the excitation of quasiparticles — disturbances within the material that behave like particles — making it a ” topological” superconductor. This is significant because these quasiparticles’ quantum states could potentially be more resilient, remaining stable even when the material or its environment changes.

Tackling heat transfer, diamond layers help build 3D circuits with lower power consumption, faster signaling, and increased performance.

Scientists have discovered that adding diamond layers to computer chips significantly boosts heat transfer, paving the way for faster, more powerful computers.

Their research revealed that this combination improves heat transfer by tenfold, a feat that could lead to more efficient designs like 3D circuits, where electronic components are stacked vertically, and heterogeneous integration, which combines different types of components in a single chip.

Researchers have made an edible transistor out of a toothpaste ingredient, which could help with edible healthcare electronics.

How will climate change alter winter weather in the future? This is what a recent study published in npj Climate and Atmospheric Science hopes to address as a team of researchers investigated the long-term effects of climate change on winter weather precipitation, or wetness. This study has the potential to help researchers, climate scientists, policymakers, and the public understand the long-term consequences of global climate change and the steps that can be taken to mitigate it.

For the study, the researchers used computer models to compare precipitation levels between 1985 and 2014 and compared these to model-predicted data spanning from 2070 to 2099 across seven subregions across the United States. In the end, the researchers estimate an increase between 2 to 5 percent of precipitation for every degree increase before the end of the century, noting this increase will hit the Northwest and Northeast regions of the United States the hardest.

“We found that, unlike summer and other seasons where projected changes in precipitation is highly uncertain, there will be a robust future intensification of winter precipitation,” said Dr. Akintomide Akinsanola, who is an assistant professor in the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences at the University of Illinois Chicago and lead author of the study. “It will accelerate well past what we have seen in historic data.”

With this success, Synchon is looking to take its experiments to the next level by adding more participants in a larger study. CEO Tom Oxley claims that their future study would focus more on ‘gathering brain data to improve the BCI.

Are Brain-Computer Interfaces the Future of Technology?

Different companies have already begun their developments and clinical trials of their brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) which need to be implanted on human test subjects, centering mostly on paraplegic patients. One of the most famous companies behind this is Elon Musk’s Neuralink, and their first patient, Noland Arbaugh, testified how the implant can help in controlling technology, and in his case, gaming.

Imagine being able to create incredibly tiny structures with the same ease and sustainability as printing on paper.

This is the frontier of microfabrication—the process of making microscopic structures that are crucial for the operation of everything from computer chips to medical devices.

…

Continue reading “A breakthrough by UChicago scientists enables greener microfabrication” »

The team says that DNA — known for its stability and density — could be an ideal candidate for MRI data storage.

Brain MRI scans provide invaluable insights into our bodies.

Continue reading “250,000 DNA sequences successfully store 11.28 MB of MRI information” »

Entanglement is the essential resource that enables quantum information and processing tasks. Historically, sources of entangled light were developed as experimental tools to test the foundations of quantum mechanics. In this study, we make an extreme version of such a source, where the entangled photons are separated in energy by 5 orders of magnitude, to engineer a quantum interconnect between light and superconducting microwave devices.

Our entanglement source is an integrated chip-scale device with a specially designed acoustic transducer, whose vibrations can simultaneously modulate the frequency of an optical cavity and generate an oscillating voltage in a superconducting electrical resonator. We operate this transducer at cryogenic temperatures to maintain the acoustic and electrical components of the device close to their quantum ground state and excite it with laser pulses to generate entangled pairs. We measure statistical correlations between the optical and microwave emission to verify entanglement.

Our work demonstrates a fundamental prerequisite for a quantum information processing architecture in which room-temperature optical communication links may be used to network superconducting quantum-bit processors in distant cryogenic setups.