Lifeboat Foundation

Their answers have been edited and condensed.

This article is part of a series called Turning Points, in which writers explore what critical moments from this year might mean for the year ahead. You can read more by visiting the Turning Points series page.

During the life-changing Covid-19 pandemic, millions of people were fortunate enough to work from home during lockdowns, while others were called upon to put themselves at physical risk to keep cities and economies from collapsing. As the world re-emerges from Covid, we are seeing renewed attention in the workplace to issues of social injustice, economic inequality, corporate social responsibility, and diversity and inclusion.

Continue reading “The Big Question: Is the World of Work Forever Changed?” »

By Stina Andersson and Ellinor Wanzambi

Researchers have been working on quantum algorithms since physicists first proposed using principles of quantum physics to simulate nature decades. One important component in many quantum algorithms is quantum walks, which are the quantum equivalent of the classical Markov chain, i.e., a random walk without memory. Quantum walks are used in algorithms in areas such as searching, node ranking in networks, and element distinctness.

Consider the graph in Figure 1 and imagine that we randomly want to move between nodes A, B, C, and D in the graph. We can only move between nodes that are connected by an edge, and each edge has an associated probability that decides how likely we are to move to the connected node. This is a random walk. In this article, we are working only with Markov chains, also called the memory-less random walks, meaning that the probabilities are independent of the previous steps. For example, the probabilities of arriving at node A are the same no matter if we got there from node B or node D.

There’s nothing easy about searching for evidence of life on Mars. Here’s why pseudo-fossils and other structures could make things resembling life.

Musk also added that he’s “not aware of any secret technology to combat aging.”

I do support his space adventures, but this is not the first time he has spoken against life extension though he seems to realize it is inevitable.

SpaceX and Tesla CEO Elon Musk has some strong feelings when it comes to our fate as a civilization.

Continue reading “Elon Musk Says That Immortality Tech Would Be Very Dangerous” »

A team of theoretical researchers have found it might be possible to detect Q-balls in gravitational waves, and their detection would answer why more matter than anti-matter to be left over after the Big Bang, reports a new study in Physical Review Letters.

The reason humans exist is because at some time in the first second of the Universe’s existence, somehow more matter was produced than anti-matter. The asymmetry is so small that only one extra particle of matter was produced every time ten billion particles of anti matter were produced. The problem is that even though this asymmetry is small, current theories of physics cannot explain it. In fact, standard theories say matter and anti matter should have been produced in exactly equal quantities, but the existence of humans, Earth, and everything else in the universe proves there must be more, undiscovered physics.

Currently, a popular idea shared by researchers is that this asymmetry was produced just after inflation, a period in the early universe when there was a very rapid expansion. A blob of field could have stretched out over the horizon to evolve and fragment in just the right way to produce this asymmetry.

Quantum computers have the potential to solve important problems that are beyond reach even for the most powerful supercomputers, but they require an entirely new way of programming and creating algorithms.

Universities and major tech companies are spearheading research on how to develop these new algorithms. In a recent collaboration between University of Helsinki, Aalto University, University of Turku, and IBM Research Europe-Zurich, a team of researchers have developed a new method to speed up calculations on quantum computers. The results are published in the journal PRX Quantum of the American Physical Society.

“Unlike classical computers, which use bits to store ones and zeros, information is stored in the qubits of a quantum processor in the form of a quantum state, or a wavefunction,” says postdoctoral researcher Guillermo García-Pérez from the Department of Physics at the University of Helsinki, first author of the paper.

Recent theoretical breakthroughs have settled two long-standing questions about the viability of simulating quantum systems on future quantum computers, overcoming challenges from complexity analyses to enable more advanced algorithms. Featured in two publications, the work by a quantum team at Los Alamos National Laboratory shows that physical properties of quantum systems allow for faster simulation techniques.

“Algorithms based on this work will be needed for the first full-scale demonstration of quantum simulations on quantum computers,” said Rolando Somma, a quantum theorist at Los Alamos and coauthor on the two papers.

SpaceX aims to launch the first orbital test of a full-stack Starship as soon as January. But instead of the Texas “Starbase” facility where prototypes of Starship’s upper stage have been made and tested, the orbital flight will launch from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, CEO Elon Musk said Friday.

“Construction of Starship orbital launch pad at the Cape has begun,” Musk tweeted. In later comments he confirmed that the launch pad is located at the historic Launch Complex 39A, the same pad used for SpaceX commercial crew flights to the International Space Station for NASA.

“39A is hallowed spaceflight ground—no place more deserving of a Starship launch pad!” Musk explained in a separate tweet. “Will have similar, but improved, ground systems and tower to Starbase.”

Plasma from voluntarily running mice reduces baseline expression of neuroinflammatory genes and experimentally induced brain inflammation when infused into sedentary mice.