Lifeboat Foundation

Circa 2006

MIT researchers are putting a tiny gas-turbine engine inside a silicon chip about the size of a quarter. The resulting device could run 10 times longer than a battery of the same weight can, powering laptops, cell phones, radios and other electronic devices.

It could also dramatically lighten the load for people who can’t connect to a power grid, including soldiers who now must carry many pounds of batteries for a three-day mission — all at a reasonable price.

Continue reading “Engine on a chip promises to best the battery” »

Another step on the road towards quantum scalability.

Isaac Nape, an emerging South African talent in the study of quantum optics, is part of a crack team of Wits physicists who led an international study that revealed the hidden structures of quantum entangled states. The study was published in the renowned scientific journal, Nature Communications, on Friday, 27 August 2021.

Nape is pursuing his Ph.D. at Wits University and focuses on harnessing structured patterns of light for high dimensional information encoding and decoding for use in quantum communication.

Earlier this year he scooped up two awards at the South African Institute of Physics (SAIP) conference to add to his growing collection of accolades in the field of optics and photonics. He won the award for “Best Ph.D. oral presentation in applied physics,” and jointly won the award for “Best Ph.D. oral presentation in photonics.”

The price of chips and devices is on track to rise into 2022 as the world’s biggest contract chipmakers are ramping up productions fees.

A new report indicates that the price of chips and devices, in general, are on track to rise into 2022 as the world’s biggest contract chipmakers are ramping up productions fees, which could end up impacting Apple and its chipmaker TSMC.

Continue reading “Rising chip prices expected to continue into 2022, potentially impacting Apple and TSMC” »

Theories that try to explain these big metaphysical mysteries fall short, making agnosticism the only sensible stance.

The plan will need regulatory approval to go forward.

Mobileye, a computer vision company owned by Intel, announced plans to launch a robotaxi service in Germany in 2022. The company says it plans on working with rental car provider Sixt, as well as Moovit, a mobility data company owned by Intel.

Chip-scale device achieves record speeds using vacuum fluctuations as its source of truly random numbers.

Quantum Machines, an Israeli startup that is building the classical hardware and software infrastructure to help run quantum machines, announced a $50 million Series B investment today.

Today’s round was led by Red Dot Capital Partners with help from Exor, Claridge Israel, Samsung NEXT, Valor Equity Partners, Atreides Management, LP, as well as TLV Partners, Battery Ventures, 2i Ventures and other existing investors. The company has now raised approximately $83 million, according to Crunchbase data.

While quantum computing in general is in its early days, Quantum Machines has developed a nice niche by building a hardware and software system, what they call The Quantum Orchestration Platform, that helps run the burgeoning quantum machines, leaving it plenty of room to grow as the industry develops.

Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley have outlined details of an optical antenna they claim could provide almost limitless bandwidth.

They suggest the key to the breakthrough is a method of being able to take full advantage of the orbital angular momentum (OAM) properties of a coherent light source, thus enabling multiplexing, or simultaneous transmission.

According to Boubacar Kante, the principal investigator of the Berkeley project “it is the first time that lasers producing twisted light have been directly multiplexed.” He is an associate professor in the university’s Electronic Engineering and Computer Sciences Department, and the initial results of the work have just been published in Nature Physics.