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Scientists at the National University of Singapore (NUS) have used bacteria for recording, storing, and retrieving images in DNA. This biological analog to a digital camera, which the authors have named “BacCam,” is a crucial step for DNA data storage techniques and the merging of biological and electronic systems.

The article, “A biological camera that captures and stores images directly into DNA,” was published in Nature Communications.

Prior to this publication, there were two landmark papers that addressed either the use of cells to capture light or the storage of images into DNA, but not the two together. In May 2017, researchers from the lab of Christopher Voigt, PhD, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) developed a system to produce ‘color photographs’ on bacterial culture plates by controlling pigment production and to redirect metabolic flux by expressing CRISPRi guide RNAs. Two months later, researchers in the lab of George Church, PhD, at Harvard Medical School demonstrated a method for encoding images via de novo DNA synthesis before insertion into the bacterial genome.

Physicist Lennard Kwakernaak finds the “complexity of simple things” intriguing, and it is a tough ask to make an inanimate object count.

A collaboration between researchers at Leiden University and AMOLF in Amsterdam has yielded a new metamaterial, a rubber block that can count. The researchers are calling it a Beam Counter and it is pretty nifty.

Continue reading “European researchers design a rubber block that can count to ten” »

One of the greatest challenges facing the future of clean nuclear energy is scientists’ ability to recover heavy metals from nuclear waste, such as lanthanides and actinides. A new computational tool could help chemists design ligands to selectively bind valuable metals in organometallic complexes.

Nuclear waste contains a smorgasbord of elements from across the periodic table, including transition metals, lanthanides, and actinides. Ideally, scientists would like to reduce the amount of waste generated from nuclear reactors by separating out elements that could be repurposed elsewhere. To tackle these tricky chemical separation techniques, chemists often start with 3D structural models to design ligands that can selectively bind the desired metal to form an organometallic complex that can later be isolated.

Though researchers working with d-block organometallics have an arsenal of structural prediction tools at their disposal, there are no resources available to do the same for the full range of lanthanide and actinide complexes. That’s partly because these f-block elements can form higher coordinate complexes with ligands compared to d-block transition metals, according to Ping Yang and Michael G. Taylor, computational chemists at Los Alamos National Laboratory.

When you turn on a lamp to brighten a room, you are experiencing light energy transmitted as photons, which are small, discrete quantum packets of energy.

These photons must obey the sometimes strange laws of quantum mechanics, which, for instance, dictate that photons are indivisible, but at the same time, allow a photon to be in two places at once.

Continue reading “A New Kind of Quantum Computer Could Be Built on The Strange Physics of Sound Waves” »

Using nanostructured glass, scientists from the University of Southampton’s Optoelectronics Research Centre (ORC) have developed the recording and retrieval processes of five dimensional (5D) digital data by femtosecond laser writing.

The storage allows unprecedented properties including 360 TB/disc data capacity, thermal stability up to 1,000°C and virtually unlimited lifetime at room temperature (13.8 billion years at 190°C) opening a new era of eternal data archiving. [source].

New research by the University of Liverpool could signal a step change in the quest to design the new materials that are needed to meet the challenge of net zero and a sustainable future.

Published in the journal Nature, Liverpool researchers have shown that a mathematical algorithm can guarantee to predict the structure of any material just based on knowledge of the atoms that make it up.

Developed by an interdisciplinary team of researchers from the University of Liverpool’s Departments of Chemistry and Computer Science, the algorithm systematically evaluates entire sets of possible structures at once, rather than considering them one at a time, to accelerate identification of the correct solution.

Camera sensitive enough to spot a single photon finally achieved by researchers in colorado.

A team of researchers from the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Boulder, Colorado, has successfully developed a super-sensitive camera capable of detecting a single photon.

This remarkable achievement opens up new avenues for scientific exploration and holds significant potential for applications in quantum computing, communications, space exploration, and medical research.

Continue reading “Camera Sensitive Enough to Spot Single Photons Finally Achieved by Colorado Researchers” »

Sponges might not look like particularly complex animals, but they’ve had billions of years to evolve their own special systems. And one of those systems might involve sending messages through their body in the form of light.

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Continue reading “Can Sponges ‘Think’ Using Light?” »

The term ‘quantum computer’ gets usually tossed around in the context of hyper-advanced, state-of-the-art computing devices, but much as how a 19th century mechanical computer, a discrete computer created from individual transistors, and a human being are all computers, the important quantifier is how fast and accurate the system is at the task, whether classical or quantum computing. This is demonstrated succinctly by [Davide ‘dakk’ Gessa] with 200 lines of BASIC code on a Commodore 64 (GitHub), implementing a range of quantum gates.

Much like a transistor in classical computing, the qubit forms the core of quantum computing, and we have known for a long time that a qubit can be simulated, even on something as mundane as an 8-bit MPU. Ergo [Davide]’s simulations of various quantum gates on a C64, ranging from Pauli-X, Pauli-Y, Pauli-Z, Hadamard, CNOT and SWAP, all using a two-qubit system running on a system that first saw the light of day in the early 1980s.

Naturally, the practical use of simulating a two-qubit system on a general-purpose MPU running at a blistering ~1 MHz is quite limited, but as a teaching tool it’s incredibly accessible and a fun way to introduce people to the world of quantum computing.