Lifeboat Foundation

Ultimately, every problem in the constantly evolving IT software stack becomes a database problem, which is why there are 418 different databases and datastores in the DB Engines rankings and there are really only a handful of commercially viable operating systems. But what if the operating system is the problem?

We are so used to thinking of the operating system as the foundation of the system that this kind of talk seems more weird than it does heresy, but make no mistake. When Michael Stonebraker and Matei Zaharia and a team of techies from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Stanford University are involved in creating a new operating system, it is definitely going to be heresy.

Stonebraker says that the spark for the idea for DBOS, which is short for database operating system, came when he was listening to a talk by Zacharia, who among other things was the creator of the Spark in-memory database while at the AMPLab at the University of California Berkeley and the co-founder and chief technology officer of Databricks, which has commercialized Spark.

There’s a lot to like about brain-computer interfaces, those sci-fi-sounding devices that jack into your skull and turn neural signals into software commands. Experimental BCIs help paralyzed people communicate, use the internet, and move prosthetic limbs. In recent years, the devices have even gone wireless. If mind-reading computers become part of everyday life, we’ll need doctors to install the tiny electrodes and transmitters that make them work. So if you have steady hands and don’t mind a little blood, being a BCI surgeon might be a job for you.

Shahram Majidi, a neurosurgeon at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York, began operating in clinical trials for a BCI called the Stentrode in 2022. (That’s “stent” as in a tube that often sits inside a vein or artery.) Here he talks about a not-too-distant future where he’s performing hundreds of similar procedures a year.

Brain-computer interfaces have been around for a few decades, and there are different kinds of implants now. Some have electrodes attached to your brain with wires sticking out of your head and connecting to a computer. I think that’s great as a proof of concept, but it requires an engineer sitting there and a big computer next to you all the time. You can’t just use it in your bedroom. The beauty of a BCI like the Stentrode, which is what I’ve worked with, is that nothing is sticking out of your brain. The electrodes are in blood vessels next to the brain, and you get there by going through the patient’s jugular. The receiver is underneath the skin in their chest and connected to a device that decodes the brain signals via Bluetooth. I think that’s the future.

Researchers at ETH have managed to trap ions using static electric and magnetic fields and to perform quantum operations on them. In the future, such traps could be used to realize quantum computers with far more quantum bits than have been possible up to now.

Electronic states that resemble molecules and are promising for use in future quantum computers have been created in superconducting circuits by physicists at RIKEN.

Imagine your laptop running twice as fast without any hardware upgrades; only the application of smarter software algorithms. That’s the promise of new research that could change how today’s devices function.

The team behind the research, from the University of California, Riverside (UCR), says that the work has huge potential, not just for boosting hardware performance but also increasing efficiency and significantly reducing energy use.

Referred to as simultaneous and heterogeneous multithreading (SHMT), the innovative process takes advantage of the fact modern phones, computers, and other gadgets usually rely on more than one processor to do their thinking.

A group of Tohoku University researchers has developed a theoretical model for a high-performance spin wave reservoir computing (RC) that utilizes spintronics technology. The breakthrough moves scientists closer to realizing energy-efficient, nanoscale computing with unparalleled computational power.

Credit: Springer Nature Limited

JILA breakthrough in integrating artificial atoms with photonic circuits advances quantum computing efficiency and scalability.

In quantum information science, many particles can act as “bits,” from individual atoms to photons. At JILA, researchers utilize these bits as “qubits,” storing and processing quantum 1s or 0s through a unique system.

While many JILA Fellows focus on qubits found in nature, such as atoms and ions, JILA Associate Fellow and University of Colorado Boulder Assistant Professor of Physics Shuo Sun is taking a different approach by using “artificial atoms,” or semiconducting nanocrystals with unique electronic properties. By exploiting the atomic dynamics inside fabricated diamond crystals, physicists like Sun can produce a new type of qubit, known as a “solid-state qubit,” or an artificial atom.

The work, facilitated by the Chicago Quantum Exchange (CQE) and led by a team that includes UD, Argonne, JPMorgan Chase and University of Chicago scientists, lays groundwork for future applications—and highlights the need for cross-sector collaboration.

The third category, stochastic modeling, is used across the sciences to predict the spread of disease, the evolution of a chemical reaction, or weather patterns. The mathematical technique models complex processes by making random changes to a variable and observing how the process responds to the changes.

The method is used in finance, for instance, to describe the evolution of stock prices and interest rates. With the power of quantum computing behind it, stochastic modeling can provide faster and more accurate predictions about the market.

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Superconductivity makes physics seem like magic. At cold temperatures, superconducting materials allow electricity to flow indefinitely while expelling outside magnetic fields, causing them to levitate above magnets. MRIs, maglev trains, and high-energy particle accelerators use superconductivity, which also plays a crucial role in quantum computing, quantum sensors, and quantum measurement science. Someday, superconducting electric grids might deliver power with unprecedented efficiency.

Challenges with Superconductors

Yet scientists lack full control over conventional superconductors. These solid materials often comprise multiple kinds of atoms in complicated structures that are difficult to manipulate in the lab. It’s even harder to study what happens when there’s a sudden change, such as a spike in temperature or pressure, that throws the superconductor out of equilibrium.