Lifeboat Foundation

The most promising application in biomedicine is in computational chemistry, where researchers have long exploited a quantum approach. But the Fraunhofer Society hopes to spark interest among a wider community of life scientists, such as cancer researchers, whose research questions are not intrinsically quantum in nature.

“It’s uncharted territory,” says oncologist Niels Halama of the DKFZ, Germany’s national cancer center in Heidelberg. Working with a team of physicists and computer scientists, Halama is planning to develop and test algorithms that might help stratify cancer patients, and select small subgroups for specific therapies from heterogeneous data sets.

This is important for precision medicine, he says, but classic computing has insufficient power to find very small groups in the large and complex data sets that oncology, for example, generates. The time needed to complete such a task may stretch out over many weeks—too long to be of use in a clinical setting, and also too expensive. Moreover, the steady improvements in the performance of classic computers are slowing, thanks in large part to fundamental limits on chip miniaturization.

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What are the quantum technologies that are now attracting so much research funding? In this video I go through the most important ones: quantum computing, quantum metrology, the quantum internet, and quantum simulations. I explain what these are all about and how likely they are to impact our lives soon. I also tell you what frequently headline blunders to watch out for.

Continue reading “Don’t fall for quantum hype” »

Work has potential applications in quantum computing, and introduces new way to plumb the secrets of superconductivity. MIT physicists and colleagues have demonstrated an exotic form of superconductivity in a new material the team synthesized only about a year ago. Although predicted in the 1960s.

“An important theme of our research is that new physics comes from new materials,” says Joseph Checkelsky, lead principal investigator of the work and the Mitsui Career Development Associate Professor of Physics. “Our initial report last year was of this new material. This new work reports the new physics.”

Checkelsky’s co-authors on the current paper include lead author Aravind Devarakonda PhD ’21, who is now at Columbia University. The work was a central part of Devarakonda’s thesis. Co-authors are Takehito Suzuki, a former research scientist at MIT now at Toho University in Japan; Shiang Fang, a postdoc in the MIT Department of Physics; Junbo Zhu, an MIT graduate student in physics; David Graf of the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory; Markus Kriener of the RIKEN Center for Emergent Matter Science in Japan; Liang Fu, an MIT associate professor of physics; and Efthimios Kaxiras of Harvard University.

Continue reading “Exotic New Material Could Be Two Superconductors in One — With Serious Quantum Computing Applications” »

Using a focused laser beam, scientists can manipulate properties of nanomaterials, thus ‘writing’ information onto monolayer materials. By this means, the thinnest light disk at atomic level was demonstrated.

The bottleneck in atomic-scale data storage area may be broken by a simple technique, thanks to recent innovative studies conducted by scientists from Nanjing Normal University (NJNU) and Southeast University (SEU).

Through a simple, efficient and low-cost technique involving the focused laser beam and ozone treatment, the NJNU and SEU research teams, leading by Prof. Hongwei Liu, Prof. Junpeng Lu and Prof. Zhenhua Ni demonstrated that the photoluminescence (PL) emission of WS₂ monolayers can be controlled and modified, and consequently, it works as the thinnest light disk with rewritable data storage and encryption capability.

Circa 2020

Glass could play an important role in the world’s first petabyte hard disk drive as an answer to the growing demand for better data storage capacity.

Continue reading “World’s First Petabyte Hard Disk Drive Contains Glass for Better Storage Capacity” »

But IBM’s latest quantum chip and its competitors face a long path towards making the machines useful.

Can you imagine a brain and its workings being replicated on a computer? That is what the EBRAINS Cellular Level Simulation Platform aims to do. The Platform is available to researchers worldwide, so that they can compare their experimental results with model predictions and conduct investigations that are not possible experimentally.

Simulation also aims to replicate work on animal models, such as the mouse. In addition, the computing environment used for simulation offers the possibility of studying disease processes electronically.

However, the challenge is a complex one, as the human brain contains 86 billion brain cells (known as neurons) each with an average of 7,000 connections to other neurons (known as synapses). Current computer power is insufficient to model a entire human brain at this level of interconnectedness.

Intel NUC 11 is no longer the only ‘desktop’ system with Tiger Lake silicon.

If Maxsun were to release their newest motherboard a month earlier, this would actually be the first proper desktop platform featuring Intel 10nm node. However, this is no longer the case since Alder Lake desktop CPUs with Intel 7 (10nm Enhanced SuperFin) are now available in stores.

The Dimensity 9,000 is both the first smartphone chip to be built using TSMC’s new 4nm process and the first chip to feature Arm’s new Cortex-X2 CPU core. The flagship chip is based on the new ArmV9 architecture and will feature the Cortex X2 as an “ultra” performance core, three Cortex-A710 cores as general “super” performance cores, and four Cortex-A510 efficiency cores. The Dimensity 9,000 will support LPDDR5x memory at bandwidths of up to 7,500 Mbps.

The big jumps in performance don’t stop there: The Dimensity 9,000 is also the first chip to feature Arm’s Mali G710-MC10 GPU, along with industry-leading support for raytracing via the Vulkan SDK for Android. And while there aren’t any phones currently available that have pushed refresh rates this high, MediaTek claims the Dimensity 9,000 can handle screens with up to a 180Hz refresh rate at FHD+ resolutions.

The Dimensity 9,000 also supports the first 18-bit image signal processor, which gives the chip the ability to capture 4K HDR video using up to three cameras at the same time, or still photos using up to a massive 320-MP sensor (assuming device makers can find a 320-MP sensor that fits in a phone).