Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
Toggle light / dark theme

Blog – Page 5

Get the latest international news and world events from around the world.

Log in for authorized contributors

Helios quantum computer tops 99.9% fidelity rates for one- and two-qubit operations

A public-private partnership in the Mountain West announced new results today that mark steady progress toward the Department of Energy’s goal of fault-tolerant quantum computing, systems large and reliable enough to solve complex problems.

Sandia National Laboratories, home to the DOE’s longest-running quantum computing program, and tech company Quantinuum published a paper today in Nature reporting the performance of the company’s 98-qubit commercial system, Helios, which debuted last year.

In operations that involved only one or two qubits, or quantum bits, the system demonstrated very high fidelity—99.9975% and 99.921%, respectively. The results establish Helios as the company’s largest and most reliable quantum computer to date.

‘Contaminated’ cultures: Can conservation protect nature while excluding Indigenous peoples?

At an international heritage symposium in Japan, I heard a word that stayed with me: “contaminated.” The discussion concerned whether Indigenous peoples needed to be named explicitly in a new World Heritage framework. One argument was that Indigenous cultures had changed through contact, survival and adaptation, and therefore no longer required distinct recognition. I found that deeply troubling.

Survival is not contamination. Indigenous peoples have survived colonization, displacement, assimilation and state violence. They have also adapted, moved, rebuilt and carried knowledge into new circumstances. None of this erases their rights, identities or relationships with ancestral lands.

That experience became one of the reasons I wrote my recent commentary on the Gunma Declaration on Heritage Ecosystems, a new World Heritage framework developed after the 2025 ICOMOS Japan symposium in Gunma Prefecture. The work is published in the International Journal of Cultural Property.

Superconducting TES array X-ray spectrometer goes into operation at BESSY II

Europe’s first and only TES spectrometer at a synchrotron source is now in operation at BESSY II, developed within a collaboration between the HZB, the MPI-CEC (Mühlheim-an-der-Ruhr, Germany) and the NIST (Boulder, Colorado, U.S.). The photon detection efficiency of the new instrument exceeds that of wavelength-dispersive X-ray emission spectrometers by a factor of 100 to 1,000. It will be used to investigate the electronic properties of atomically thin layers, nanostructures and highly diluted atomic and molecular samples. The team is looking forward to receiving exciting research proposals from the user community.

Synchrotron radiation sources such as BESSY II provide intense, highly brilliant X-ray light that can be used to examine a wide variety of samples. However, X-ray emission spectroscopy (XES) and Resonant Inelastic X-ray Scattering (RIXS), where the photons emitted from the sample are detected, are extremely photon-hungry techniques. Therefore, XES and RIXS have so far been largely limited to high-concentration and bulk samples. The details are presented in the journal Review of Scientific Instruments.

Flexible cryogenic cables for dilution refrigerators could pave path to practical quantum computers

Necessary for quantum system development is an environment in which the fragile nature of quantum bits (qubits) is stabilized and the thermal noise (fluctuations in current/voltage) inherent in superconducting electronics is dampened. That environment requires cryogenic temperatures, those ranging from 5 to 10 millikelvins, colder than the extreme temperatures encountered in space. Dilution refrigerators create this needed cryogenic condition.

Dilution refrigerators used for quantum R&D need a wiring system that can operate in cryogenic temperatures, maintain a power-efficient direct current, and support high-speed data transmission. Researchers at MIT Lincoln Laboratory have prototyped flexible, ribbon-like, low-frequency (LF) cables that not only meet these demands, but also are compatible with commercial circuit-board manufacturing processes. Maybell Quantum, a Colorado-based company supplying hardware for developing quantum systems, licensed the design for these cables and is adapting them for use in their dilution refrigerators.

/* */