Lifeboat Foundation

The M3 chips come in three versions: the M3, the M3 Pro, and the M3 Max.

Since moving away from Intel to develop its in-house PC chips laid on the foundation of its mobile A-series chips, Apple’s M series desktop chips have changed the dynamics of the PC industry. The M1 not only proved to be successful but also powerful and efficient at the same time, earning early adopter’s trust for reliability to move to a new ARM-based desktop architecture. With Apple’s Rosetta at play, early adopters could bet on moving away from Intel chips to try their beloved apps and software suits within the new ARM system.

M3 chips: Apple’s billion-dollar gamble

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Batteries are regarded as crucial technologies in the battle against climate change, particularly for electric vehicles and storing energy from renewable sources. Anthro Energy’s novel flexible batteries are presently available to wearable manufacturers and could be employed in a variety of areas, including electric cars and laptops.

The innovative batteries score well in fire safety, thanks to new materials and design features that eliminate internal and external mechanical safety risks like explosions. Many of today’s batteries, such as lithium-ion batteries, contain a flammable liquid as an electrolyte.

Anthro Energy’s David Mackaniac and his team have created a flexible polymer electrolyte that is malleable like rubber. The new technology provides increased design flexibility for use across a range of devices, with adaptable shapes and sizes to suit specific applications.

The Geekbench database’s benchmark speed test results show Apple’s on target with its claims about M3 chip speed.

Breakthrough realized for retaining quantum information in a single-electron quantum bit.

A record-breaking superatomic semiconductor material allows particles to traverse it between 100 and 1,000 times faster than electrons pass through a silicon chip.

By Matthew Sparkes

Researchers in Germany and the U.S. have produced the first theoretical demonstration that the magnetic state of an atomically thin material, α-RuCl₃, can be controlled solely by placing it into an optical cavity. Crucially, the cavity vacuum fluctuations alone are sufficient to change the material’s magnetic order from a zigzag antiferromagnet into a ferromagnet. The team’s work has been published in npj Computational Materials.

A recent theme in material physics research has been the use of intense laser light to modify the properties of magnetic materials. By carefully engineering the laser light’s properties, researchers have been able to drastically modify the electrical conductivity and optical properties of different materials.

However, this requires continuous stimulation by high-intensity lasers and is associated with some practical problems, mainly that it is difficult to stop the material from heating up. Researchers are therefore looking for ways to gain similar control over materials using light, but without employing intense lasers.

Technology to control and harness light has existed for centuries, often as static solutions that must be custom-designed. It is only in the past couple of decades that the digital era of micro-electronics and computing has seen fast rewritable technology meant for displays find its way into the mainstream of optics.

In a new review published in Opto-Electronic Science, the authors showcase the recent advances in replacing the traditional static optical toolkit with a modern digital toolkit for “light on demand.” The result has been the introduction of digitally controlled light to nearly all major optical laboratories worldwide, opening new paths for the creation, control, detection, and harnessing of exotic forms of structured light. The advanced toolkit promises novel applications from classical to quantum, ushering in a new chapter in on-demand structured light.

The authors of this article reviewed recent progress in using a modern digital toolkit for on-demand forms of sculptured light, offering new insights and perspectives on this nascent topic. The core technology that has advanced this field is the liquid crystal spatial light modulator (SLM), allowing high resolution tailoring of light in amplitude, phase, polarization, or even more exotic degrees of freedom such as path, orbital angular momentum, and even spatiotemporal control. These simple yet highly effective devices are made up of millions of pixels that can be modulated in phase, for spatial control of light in an in-principle lossless manner.

To build highly performing quantum computers, researchers should be able to reliably derive information about the noise inside them, while also identifying effective strategies to suppress this noise. In recent years, significant progress has been made in this direction, enabling operation errors below 1% in various quantum computing platforms.

A research team at Tokyo Institute of Technology and RIKEN recently set out to reliably quantify the correlations between the noise produced by pairs of semiconductor-based qubits, which are very appealing for the development of scalable quantum processors. Their paper, published in Nature Physics, unveiled strong interqubit noise correlations between a pair of neighboring silicon spin qubits.

“A useful quantum computer would practically require millions of densely packed, well-controlled qubits with errors not only small but also sufficiently uncorrelated,” Jun Yoneda, one of the researchers who carried out the study, told Phys.org. “We set out to address the potentially serious issue of error correlation in silicon qubits, as they have become a compelling platform for large quantum computations otherwise.”

A team of environmental and molecular biologists at the Weizmann Institute of Science, working with a colleague from the Edmond and Lily Safra Children’s Hospital and another with The Hebrew University-Hadassah Medical School, all in Israel, has conducted a census of the immune cells that reside in the human body. The group describes their endeavor in a paper published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Prior research has shown that there are many kinds of immune cells in the human body and that they reside in different locations. Most if not all of them have been identified as well. But until now, it was not known how many of each type of cell exist in the average human body, how much room they take up or how much they weigh. In this new effort, the research team filled in that gap by conducting a three-pronged survey of immune cells in three types of average human bodies—a grown male, a grown woman and a child.

The three-pronged approached involved first studying available literature to obtain as much data as possible regarding the different types of immune cells. The second part involved conducting cell imaging to categorize cell phenotypes and complex immune cell types—a means of describing how much room different immune cells take up, wherever they may live. And the third part consisted of computational techniques to estimate cell numbers in different parts of the body, with which the team was able to calculate weights and mass.