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Sep 29, 2020

‘Schrödinger’s Web’ offers a sneak peek at the quantum internet

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, computing, government, internet, quantum physics

Quantum computers, which harness the strange probabilities of quantum mechanics, may prove revolutionary. They have the potential to achieve an exponential speedup over their classical counterparts, at least when it comes to solving some problems. But for now, these computers are still in their infancy, useful for only a few applications, just as the first digital computers were in the 1940s. So isn’t a book about the communications network that will link quantum computers — the quantum internet — more than a little ahead of itself?

Surprisingly, no. As theoretical physicist Jonathan Dowling makes clear in Schrödinger’s Web, early versions of the quantum internet are here already — for example, quantum communication has been taking place between Beijing and Shanghai via fiber-optic cables since 2016 — and more are coming fast. So now is the perfect time to read up.

Dowling, who helped found the U.S. government’s quantum computing program in the 1990s, is the perfect guide. Armed with a seemingly endless supply of outrageous anecdotes, memorable analogies, puns and quips, he makes the thorny theoretical details of the quantum internet both entertaining and accessible.

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Sep 29, 2020

New Intelligence: Chinese Copy Of US Navy’s Sea Hunter USV

Posted by in category: drones

A candid photograph posted on Chinese social media sheds light on a Chinese project to develop a drone-ship similar to the U.S. Navy’s Sea Hunter. The trimaran is remarkably similar to the Sea Hunter in almost every respect.

Although the designation of the project is unknown, based on imagery analysis the builder and and dimensions have been established.

Sep 29, 2020

Air leaking from International Space Station but no danger to crew: Roscosmos agency

Posted by in category: space

MOSCOW (Reuters) — The International Space Station is leaking air in above-normal volumes, but the leak presents no danger to the Russian-American crew, the Russian space agency Roscosmos said on Tuesday.

The leak has been localised to one section of a service module and the crew, made up of U.S. astronaut Chris Cassidy and Russian cosmonauts Anatoly Ivanishin and Ivan Vagner, plan to eliminate it in the coming days, Russia’s RIA news agency quoted Roscosmos executive director Sergei Krikalev as saying.

Roscosmos said additional air may be delivered to the station.

Sep 29, 2020

MIT Researchers Say Their Fusion Reactor Is “Very Likely to Work”

Posted by in category: nuclear energy

A team of researchers at MIT and other institutions say their “SPARC” compact fusion reactor should actually work — at least in theory, as they argue in a series of recently released research papers.

In a total of seven papers penned by 47 researchers from 12 institutions, the team argues that no unexpected impediments or surprises have shown up during the planning stages.

In other words, the research “confirms that the design we’re working on is very likely to work,” Martin Greenwald, deputy director of MIT’s Plasma Science and Fusion Center and project lead, told The New York Times.

Sep 29, 2020

D-Wave announces Leap 2, its cloud service for quantum computing applications

Posted by in categories: business, computing, quantum physics

https://youtube.com/watch?v=62gDQ14pjwM

D-Wave today launched its next-generation quantum computing platform available via its Leap quantum cloud service. The company calls Advantage “the first quantum computer built for business.” In that vein, D-Wave today also debuted Launch, a jump-start program for businesses that want to begin building hybrid quantum applications.

“The Advantage quantum computer is the first quantum computer designed and developed from the ground up to support business applications,” D-Wave CEO Alan Baratz told VentureBeat. “We engineered it to be able to deal with large, complex commercial applications and to be able to support the running of those applications in production environments. There is no other quantum computer anywhere in the world that can solve problems at the scale and complexity that this quantum computer can solve problems. It really is the only one that you can run real business applications on. The other quantum computers are primarily prototypes. You can do experimentation, run small proofs of concept, but none of them can support applications at the scale that we can.”

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Sep 29, 2020

Understanding the effect of aging on the genome

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, genetics, life extension

Not too much here, but longevity research fans might like.


Time may be our worst enemy, and aging its most powerful weapon. Our hair turns gray, our strength wanes, and a slew of age-related diseases represent what is happening at the cellular and molecular levels. Aging affects all the cells in our body’s different tissues, and understanding its impact would be of great value in fighting this eternal enemy of all ephemeral life forms.

The key is to first observe and measure. In a paper published in Cell Reports, scientists led by Johan Auwerx at EPFL started by asking a simple question: how do the tissues of aging mice differ from those of mice that are mere adults?

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Sep 29, 2020

People who speak two languages experience time differently, study finds

Posted by in category: neuroscience

Researchers suggested being bilingual may also bring long-term benefits for mental wellbeing.

Sep 29, 2020

This Robot Is So Tiny You Could Fit Ten of Them on a Single Period

Posted by in category: robotics/AI

Building a microscopic robot wasn’t hard — but developing working legs small enough to carry it around was a real challenge.

Sep 29, 2020

D-Wave’s 5,000-qubit quantum computing platform handles 1 million variables

Posted by in categories: business, computing, quantum physics

D-Wave has launched next-gen quantum computing platform Advantage, and Launch, a service to help businesses build hybrid quantum applications.

Sep 29, 2020

Blocking enzyme’s self-destruction process may mitigate age-related diseases

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, life extension

Stopping the cannibalistic behavior of a well-studied enzyme could be the key to new drugs to fight age-related diseases, according to a new study published online in Nature Cell Biology. For the first time, researchers in the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania show how the self-eating cellular process known as autophagy is causing the SIRT1 enzyme, long known to play a role in longevity, to degrade over time in cells and tissue in mice. Identifying an enzymatic target is an important step that may lead to new or modified existing therapeutics.

“Blocking this pathway could be another potential approach to restore the level of SIRT1 in patients to help treat or prevent age-related organ and immune system decline,” said first author Lu Wang, Ph.D., a postdoctoral researcher in the lab of Shelly Berger, Ph.D., a professor of Cell and Developmental Biology in the Perelman School of Medicine and a professor of Biology in the School of Arts and Sciences at Penn. Berger also serves as senior author on the paper.

“The findings may be of most interest to the immune aging field, as autophagy’s role in SIRT1 in immune is a concept that hasn’t been shown before,” Wang added. “Exploiting this mechanism presents us with a new possibility of restoring immune function.”