Lifeboat Foundation

WASHINGTON – U.S. Reps. Lamar Smith (R-Texas) and Eddie Bernice Johnson (D-Texas), who serve as the chairman and ranking member of the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, and U.Sens. John Thune (R-S.D.) and Bill Nelson (D-Fla.), who serve as the chairman and ranking member of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, today announced the introduction of House and Senate companions of the National Quantum Initiative Act. The legislation would accelerate and coordinate public and private quantum science research, standards, and workforce development to give the United States a competitive advantage as China and Europe vie to achieve technological breakthroughs in this field.

Chairman Smith: “The National Quantum Initiative Act will accelerate the development of quantum information science in the United States and secure our leadership in the quantum sector. As other nations are rapidly developing their own quantum programs, the U.S. faces the risk of falling behind. This legislation provides a path forward to ensure that the U.S. secures its influence in the next generation of science and technology. I am glad that Senator John Thune has joined me in introducing this legislation, along with our respective Ranking Democrat Committee Members Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson and Senator Bill Nelson.

”The bill creates a 10-year federal program that will significantly develop our quantum knowledge. It will bring a whole of government approach to advance QIS to the next level of research and development, while also creating public-private partnerships, leveraging the resources and expertise of government, industry and academia. Through new research facilities and a strong workforce pipeline, students and researchers will have greater resources and opportunities to develop their quantum skills and create the next great computing innovation. There is no doubt quantum technology will revolutionize our world to come. This bill secures American leadership in quantum science and guarantees a first place finish in the great quantum race.”

The whole thing starts with cerebral cortex. It is divided into four major parts, or sometime people call it lobes.

1. Frontal

2. Parietal

Continue reading “The Connection Of Point Brain Computer Interface — The Cerebral Cortex” »

Researchers at the University of California San Diego have demonstrated the world’s first laser based on an unconventional wave physics phenomenon called bound states in the continuum. The technology could revolutionize the development of surface lasers, making them more compact and energy-efficient for communications and computing applications. The new BIC lasers could also be developed as high-power lasers for industrial and defense applications.

“Lasers are ubiquitous in the present day world, from simple everyday laser pointers to complex laser interferometers used to detect gravitational waves. Our current research will impact many areas of laser applications,” said Ashok Kodigala, an electrical engineering Ph.D. student at UC San Diego and first author of the study.

“Because they are unconventional, BIC lasers offer unique and unprecedented properties that haven’t yet been realized with existing laser technologies,” said Boubacar Kanté, electrical engineering professor at the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering who led the research.

Continue reading “New laser based on unusual physics phenomenon could improve telecommunications, computing” »

A team of researchers from several institutions in Iceland and the U.S. has conducted a unique blood serum investigation and discovered multiple protein networks that are involved in the aging process. In their paper published in the journal Science, the group describes their study and what they found.

Prior research has shown that when older mice have their blood systems connected to younger mice, the older mice experience improvements in age-related organ deterioration. This finding has led scientists to suspect that aging might be caused by something in the blood. In this new effort, the researchers sought to test this idea by studying proteins in the circulatory system.

The study consisted of analyzing blood samples from 5,457 people living in Iceland, all of whom were over the age of 65 and who were participants in an ongoing study called Age, Gene/Environment Susceptibility. The volunteers had also been chosen specifically to represent a cross section of the people living in Iceland. The major part of the blood analysis involved creating a panel of DNA aptamers (short sequences that bind to proteins) that could be used to recognize proteins, both known and unknown. Blood serum from the volunteers was then compared against the panels and the results were analyzed by a computer looking for patterns.

Continue reading “Blood serum study reveals networks of proteins that impact aging” »

A new bill aims to support a growing quantum industry by training a new cross-disciplinary workforce.

This article is part of a series about how OS Fund (OSF) companies are radically redefining our future by rewriting the operating systems of life. Or as we prefer to think about it: Step 1: Put a dent into the universe. And Step 2: Rewrite the universe. You can see the full OSF collection here and read more about Building a Biological Immune System.

In contemplating the future, I love imagining how our daily lives today will be thought of in the future. What appears sci-fi to us today but will be “normal” 50 years from now? What inefficient and boneheaded things do we do today that future generations will look back and laugh at?

Continue reading “Beyond the Hard Drive: Encoding Data in DNA” »

OS Fund invests in quantum-leap developments that promise to rewrite the operating systems of life.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has selected the teams for two research programs that the agency hopes will provide technologies to transcend the limits of Moore’s Law.

As part of DARPA’s $1.5 billion Electronics Resurgence Initiative (ERI) to “jumpstart innovation in the electronics industry,” the Three Dimensional Monolithic System-on-a-Chip (3DSoC) program and the Foundations Required for Novel Compute (FRANC) program are focused on developing chip-level innovations that lead to more powerful and efficient computing systems. We reported on both programs last September, just after they were announced.

Last week, during DARPA’s first ERI Summit in San Francisco, the agency revealed the research teams selected to drive each of these efforts. For the 3DSoC program, groups from the Georgia Institute of Technology, Stanford University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Skywater Technology Foundry were tapped. The corresponding research teams for the FRANC program will come from HRL Laboratories; Applied Materials, Inc.; Ferric, Inc.; the University of California, Los Angeles; the University of Minnesota; and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Continue reading “DARPA Picks Research Teams for Post-Moore’s Law Work” »

Next time you eat a blueberry (or chocolate chip) muffin consider what happened to the blueberries in the batter as it was baked. The blueberries started off all squished together, but as the muffin expanded they started to move away from each other. If you could sit on one blueberry you would see all the others moving away from you, but the same would be true for any blueberry you chose. In this sense galaxies are a lot like blueberries.

Since the Big Bang, the universe has been expanding. The strange fact is that there is no single place from which the universe is expanding, but rather all galaxies are (on average) moving away from all the others. From our perspective in the Milky Way galaxy, it seems as though most galaxies are moving away from us – as if we are the centre of our muffin-like universe. But it would look exactly the same from any other galaxy – everything is moving away from everything else.

To make matters even more confusing, new observations suggest that the rate of this expansion in the universe may be different depending on how far away you look back in time. This new data, published in the Astrophysical Journal, indicates that it may time to revise our understanding of the cosmos.

Continue reading “New Physics Needed to Resolve Universe Expansion Debate?” »