Lifeboat Foundation

Benchmark results have started to surface for MSI’s new GE76 Raider, one of the first laptops to be powered by Intel’s new 12th-generation Core i9 processor.

Intel previously said that its new high-end Core i9 processor is faster than Apple’s M1 Max chip in the 16-inch MacBook Pro and, as noted by Macworld, early Geekbench 5 results do appear to confirm this claim, but there are several caveats as usual.

Yale researchers were awarded a grant from the Swebilius Foundation for their breakthroughs in increasing the functionality of brain-machine interface chips designed to treat epilepsy.

For humans, background noise is generally just a minor irritant. But for quantum computers, which are very sensitive, it can be a death knell for computations. And because “noise” for a quantum computer increases as the computer is tasked with more complex calculations, it can quickly become a major obstacle.

But because quantum computers could be so incredibly useful, researchers have been experimenting with ways to get around the noise problem. Typically, they try to measure the noise in order to correct for it, with mixed success.

A group of scientists from the University of Chicago and Purdue University collaborated on a new technique: Instead of directly trying to measure the noise, they instead construct a unique “fingerprint” of the noise on a quantum computer as it is seen by a program run on the computer.

The team was able to maintain this state of superposition among hundreds of vibrating pairs of fermions. In so doing, they achieved a new “quantum register,” or system of qubits, that appears to be robust over relatively long periods of time. The discovery, published today in the journal Nature, demonstrates that such wobbly qubits could be a promising foundation for future quantum computers.

New qubits stay in “superposition” for up to 10 seconds, and could make a promising foundation for quantum computers.

Continue reading “Vibrating atoms make robust qubits, physicists find” »

Texas Instruments kicked off earnings season for the U.S.’s semiconductor manufacturers with a bang.

The profit report, seen as an indicator of what investors can expect from other chip makers, sent the shares higher in extended trading. Profits were higher than expected and management pointed to strong demand from customers in the industrial and automotive markets.

Protective coatings are common for many things in daily life that see a lot of use. We coat wood floors with finish; apply Teflon to the paint on cars; even use diamond coatings on medical devices. Protective coatings are also essential in many demanding research and industrial applications.

Now, researchers at Los Alamos National Laboratory have developed and tested an atomically thin graphene coating for next-generation, electron-beam accelerator equipment—perhaps the most challenging technical application of the technology, the success of which bears out the potential for “Atomic Armor” in a range of applications.

“Accelerators are important tools for addressing some of the grand challenges faced by humanity,” said Hisato Yamaguchi, member of the Sigma-2 group at the Laboratory. “Those challenges include the quest for sustainable energy, continued scaling of computational power, detection and mitigation of pathogens, and study of the structure and dynamics of the building blocks of life. And those challenges all require the ability to access, observe and control matter on the frontier timescale of electronic motion and the spatial scale of atomic bonds.”

A team of engineers and neurosurgeons developed a state-of-the-art brain sensor that could greatly enhance the treatment of cancer and epilepsy, according to a press statement from the University of California San Diego.

The new apparatus can record electrical signals from the brain’s surface in a never-before-seen resolution for such a device.

Continue reading “Novel Ultra-Thin Sensor Records Brain Activity in Record-Breaking Resolution” »

Using hundreds of computer simulations, the researchers found that the gravitational wave signals from GW150521 are best explained by a high-eccentricity, according to the statement.

The study also sheds new light on how some of the black hole mergers detected by the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO) and its European counterpart, Virgo, are so much heavier than previously thought possible. Their findings were published Jan. 20 in the journal Nature Astronomy.

A new biosensor chip can observe direct electrical measurements of single-molecule interactions. This could enable faster and cheaper DNA sequencing, disease surveillance, and precision medicine on portable devices.