Lifeboat Foundation

Meet Saya — the computer generated schoolgirl created by a tech-savvy Japanese couple.

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When people talk about the next-generation of computers, they’re usually referring to one of two things: quantum computers – devices that will have exponentially greater processing power thanks to the addition of quantum superposition to the binary code – and optical computers, which will beam data at the speed of light without generating all the heat and wasted energy of traditional electronic computers.

Both of those have the power to revolutionise computing as we know it, and now scientists at the University of Technology, Sydney have discovered a material that has the potential to combine both of those abilities in one ridiculously powerful computer of the future. Just hold on for a second while we freak out over here.

The material is layered hexagonal boron nitride, which is a bit of a mouthful, but all you really need to know about it is that it’s only one atom thick – just like graphene – and it has the ability to emit a single pulse of quantum light on demand at room temperature, making it ideal to help build a quantum optical computer chip.

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In general relativity, closed timelike curves can break causality with remarkable and unsettling consequences. At the classical level, they induce causal paradoxes disturbing enough to motivate conjectures that explicitly prevent their existence. At the quantum level such problems can be resolved through the Deutschian formalism, however this induces radical benefits—from cloning unknown quantum states to solving problems intractable to quantum computers. Instinctively, one expects these benefits to vanish if causality is respected. Here we show that in harnessing entanglement, we can efficiently solve NP-complete problems and clone arbitrary quantum states—even when all time-travelling systems are completely isolated from the past. Thus, the many defining benefits of Deutschian closed timelike curves can still be harnessed, even when causality is preserved. Our results unveil a subtle interplay between entanglement and general relativity, and significantly improve the potential of probing the radical effects that may exist at the interface between relativity and quantum theory.

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“I believe the children are our future,” philosopher Whitney Houston once opined. Well, if she was talking about car design, she wasn’t wrong.

OK, not ‘children’ exactly. But certainly students. Audi has today unveiled the results of its ‘Design Universe’ think-tank, in which young designers at four top universities have explored how the Audi of tomorrow might look.

Take the car above, as an example. It’s called the Audi Quantum, and was designed by a pair of students at the Scuola Politecnica di Design in Milan. Looks suitably futuristic, no? There are retina scanners that, um, scan the driver’s retina and configure the interior settings before he or she climbs in.

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Samsung on Thursday revealed it is now mass producing memory modules boasting the largest capacity and the highest energy efficiency of any DRAM module. The 128GB DDR4 sticks in question were made possible by utilizing the through silicon via (TSV) interconnect technique.

Foregoing traditional wire bonding, the TSV technique involves grinding chips down to a few dozen micrometers, piercing them with hundreds of tiny holes and vertically connecting them with electrodes passing through the holes. Although not new, the advanced circuitry does allow for a significant boost in signal transmission.

The 128GB modules are comprised of 144 DDR4 chips arranged into 4GB DRAM packages (18 per side for a total of 36), each containing four 20nm 8Gb chips. Samsung says the modules have a special design in which the master chip of each 4GB package embeds the data buffer function, further optimizing performance and power consumption.

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Watch Arthur C. Clarke describe the Internet — in 1974.

In ‘C for Computer’, first broadcast on 29 May 1974, he told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) that by 2001 every household will have a computer and be connected all over the world. — with Arthur C. Clarke.

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By combining experiments with computer simulations, scientists have come up with a mathematical model that explains blood vessel formation.

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An international team of researchers has predicted the existence of a new type of particle called the type-II Weyl fermion in metallic materials. When subjected to a magnetic field, the materials containing the particle act as insulators for current applied in some directions and as conductors for current applied in other directions. This behavior suggests a range of potential applications, from low-energy devices to efficient transistors.

The researchers theorize that the particle exists in a material known as tungsten ditelluride (WTe2), which the researchers liken to a “material universe” because it contains several particles, some of which exist under normal conditions in our universe and others that may exist only in these specialized types of crystals. The research appeared in the journal Nature this week.

The new particle is a cousin of the Weyl fermion, one of the particles in standard quantum field theory. However, the type-II particle exhibits very different responses to electromagnetic fields, being a near perfect conductor in some directions of the field and an insulator in others.

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A company has announced its intention to resurrect the dead by storing their memories and using artificial intelligence to return them to life. In the future, of course.

Yeaaaaaah. What?

The company is called Humai, and at the moment, it is pretty sparse on details – and we’re still not sure it’s not a marketing ploy or a hoax. At any rate, the company says they want to store the “conversational styles, behavioral patterns, thought processes and information about how your body functions from the inside-out” on a silicon chip using AI and nanotechnology, according to their website.

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