Lifeboat Foundation

“Hyperdegeneracy” could be used in quantum computing.

Microscopic oil droplets held aloft with optical tweezers can contain more than 200 resonant optical modes of similar energies, creating “hyperdegeneracy” for the first time. That is the claim of researchers in Israel, Spain and the US, who say that their breakthrough could ultimately find application in high-speed optical communications, sensing, quantum data processing and even the creation of dynamic optical circuits.

When optical materials with a high refractive index are formed into certain symmetrical shapes — such as rings, cylinders or spheres —light can be repeatedly reflected around the inside of the material, much in the same way that sound waves pass around the inside edge of St Paul’s Cathedral’s famous “whispering gallery”. The circulating light undergoes constructive interference, forming discrete resonant modes – or so-called degenerate states – with similar energies.

Continue reading “Floating oil droplet contains hundreds of degenerate optical modes” »

Circa 2015 one day a whole skin computer could be not just a computer in skin but actually made from skin.

Forget click wheels, computer mice, and touch screens, we can now control our cell phones with our forearms.

O,.o.

This stunning image captured last year by physicists at the University of Glasgow in Scotland is the first-ever photo of quantum entanglement — a phenomenon so strange, physicist Albert Einstein famously described it as ‘spooky action at a distance’.

It might not look like much, but just stop and think about it for a second: this fuzzy grey image was the first time we’d seen the particle interaction that underpins the strange science of quantum mechanics and forms the basis of quantum computing.

Continue reading “Looking Back on The First-Ever Photo of Quantum Entanglement” »

Does the enormous computing power of neurons mean consciousness can be explained within a purely neurobiological framework, or is there scope for quantum computation in the brain?

Are you ready?

“if you were the type of geek, growing up, who enjoyed taking apart mechanical things and putting them back together again, who had your own corner of the garage or the basement filled with electronics and parts of electronics that you endlessly reconfigured, who learned to solder before you could ride a bike, your dream job would be at the Intelligent Systems Center of the Applied Physics Laboratory at Johns Hopkins University. Housed in an indistinct, cream-colored building in a part of Maryland where you can still keep a horse in your back yard, the ISC so elevates geekdom that the first thing you see past the receptionist’s desk is a paradise for the kind of person who isn’t just thrilled by gadgets, but who is compelled to understand how they work.”

Continue reading “The brain-computer interface is coming, and we are so not ready for it” »

Returning to the theme of what might be dubbed “UFO Realism” I would like to address a topic that exercises the minds of a lot of UFO conspiracy theorists, namely, reverse engineered alien technologies.

First, is there any evidence at all that any technology we currently have has any extraterrestrial element? For example, one famous claim by Colonel Corso is that much modern technology was derived from the Roswell Incident. To quote the Wikipedia entry the list includes “…particle beam devices, fiber optics, lasers, integrated circuit chips and Kevlar material”, not to mention the transistor itself.

The initial problem with these claims is twofold.

Modern construction is a precision endeavor. Builders must use components manufactured to meet specific standards — such as beams of a desired composition or rivets of a specific size. The building industry relies on manufacturers to create these components reliably and reproducibly in order to construct secure bridges and sound skyscrapers.

Now imagine construction at a smaller scale — less than 1/100th the thickness of a piece of paper. This is the nanoscale. It is the scale at which scientists are working to develop potentially groundbreaking technologies in fields like quantum computing. It is also a scale where traditional fabrication methods simply will not work. Our standard tools, even miniaturized, are too bulky and too corrosive to reproducibly manufacture components at the nanoscale.

Researchers at the University of Washington have developed a method that could make reproducible manufacturing at the nanoscale possible. The team adapted a light-based technology employed widely in biology — known as optical traps or optical tweezers — to operate in a water-free liquid environment of carbon-rich organic solvents, thereby enabling new potential applications.

When a virus invades your cells, it changes your body. But in the process, the pathogen changes its shape, too. A new mathematical model predicts the points on the virus that allow this shape-shifting to occur, revealing a new way to find potential drug and vaccine targets. The unique math-based approach has already identified potential targets in the coronavirus that causes COVID-19.

Outlined in April in the Journal of Computational Biology, the strategy predicts protein sites on viruses that stash energy—important spots that drugs could disable. In a rare feat, the work proceeds from pure mathematics, says study author and mathematician Robert Penner of the Institute of Advanced Scientific Studies in France. “There’s precious little pure math in biology,” he adds. The paper’s predictions face a long road before they can be verified experimentally, says John Yin, who studies viruses at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and was not involved in the research. But he agrees that Penner’s approach has potential. “He’s coming at this from a mathematician’s point of view—but a very scientifically informed mathematician,” Yin says. “So that’s highly rare.”

Penner’s method takes advantage of the fact that certain viral proteins alter their shape dramatically when viruses breach cells, and this transformation depends on unstable features. (A stable protein site, by definition, resists change.) By identifying “high free energy sites”—areas on a viral protein that store lots of energy—Penner realized he could spot likely “spring” points that mediate this change in shape. He calls such high-energy spots exotic sites. Finding them required some complex math.

Tucked in the back of a laboratory at the IBM Research facility less than an hour north of New York City is a hulking mass of stainless steel and aluminum that looks like a sci-fi teleportation machine.

IBM promises a super-powerful quantum computer by decade’s end as it races against Google, Honeywell, and other rivals.