Lifeboat Foundation

This week, UK-based futurologist Ian Pearson announced humanity will achieve immortality by the year 2050. Is he right?

According to the former rocket scientist and IT engineer – who claims to have an 85 percent success rate “when looking 10–15 years ahead” – recent advances in biomedical and computing technology will inevitably lead to victory over death via one of three means:

Continue reading “Are Humans Really On The Brink Of Achieving Immortality?” »

At the chemical level, diamonds are no more than carbon atoms aligned in a precise, three-dimensional (3D) crystal lattice. However, even a seemingly flawless diamond contains defects: spots in that lattice where a carbon atom is missing or has been replaced by something else. Some of these defects are highly desirable; they trap individual electrons that can absorb or emit light, causing the various colors found in diamond gemstones and, more importantly, creating a platform for diverse quantum technologies for advanced computing, secure communication and precision sensing.

Quantum technologies are based on units of quantum information known as “qubits.” The spin of electrons are prime candidates to serve as qubits; unlike binary computing systems where data takes the form of only 0s or 1s, electron spin can represent information as 0, 1, or both simultaneously in a quantum superposition. Qubits from diamonds are of particular interest to quantum scientists because their quantum-mechanical properties, including superposition, exist at room temperature, unlike many other potential quantum resources.

The practical challenge of collecting information from a single atom deep inside a crystal is a daunting one, however. Penn Engineers addressed this problem in a recent study in which they devised a way to pattern the surface of a diamond that makes it easier to collect light from the defects inside. Called a metalens, this surface structure contains nanoscale features that bend and focus the light emitted by the defects, despite being effectively flat.

Continue reading “Engineers design nanostructured diamond metalens for compact quantum technologies” »

Any day now, quantum computers will solve a problem too hard for a classical computer to take on. Or at least, that’s what we’ve been hoping. Scientists and companies are racing toward this computing milestone, dubbed quantum supremacy and seemingly just beyond our reach, and if you’ve been following the quantum computing story, you might wonder why we’re not there yet, given all the hype.

The short answer is that controlling the quantum properties of particles is hard. And even if we could use them to compute, “quantum supremacy” is a misleading term. The first quantum supremacy demonstration will almost certainly be a contrived problem that won’t have a practical or consumer use. Nonetheless, it’s a crucial milestone when it comes to benchmarking these devices and establishing what they can actually do. So what’s holding us back from the future?

A key obstacle to controlling on Earth the fusion that powers the sun and stars is leakage of energy and particles from plasma, the hot, charged state of matter composed of free electrons and atomic nuclei that fuels fusion reactions. At the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL), physicists have been focusing on validating computer simulations that forecast energy losses caused by turbulent transport during fusion experiments.

Researchers used codes developed at General Atomics (GA) in San Diego to compare theoretical predictions of electron and ion turbulent transport with findings of the first campaign of the laboratory’s compact—or “low-aspect ratio”—National Spherical Torus Experiment-Upgrade (NSTX-U). GA, which operates the DIII-D National Fusion Facility for the DOE, has developed codes well-suited for this purpose.

Low-aspect ratio tokamaks are shaped like cored apples, unlike the more widely used conventional tokamaks that are shaped like doughnuts.

Continue reading “Tracking major sources of energy loss in compact fusion facilities” »

The IceCube Laboratory at the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station, in Antarctica, hosts the computers that collect raw data from the sensors buried in the ice below.

Website of the IceCube Neutrino Observatory, featuring news, galleries, and information about the mission of IceCube, the IceCube Collaboration, and IceCube’s scientific outcomes.

Caltech engineers have constructed a new kind of microchip that can learn to heal its own information pathways.

• By Marshall Honorof, TechNewsDaily on March 12, 2013

Dielectric laser accelerators (DLAs) provide a compact and cost-effective solution to this problem by driving accelerator nanostructures with visible or near-infrared (NIR) pulsed lasers, resulting in a 10,000 times reduction of scale. Current implementations of DLAs rely on free-space lasers directly incident on the accelerating structures, limiting the scalability and integrability of this technology. Researchers present the first experimental demonstration of a waveguide-integrated DLA, designed using a photonic inverse design approach. These on-chip devices accelerate sub-relativistic electrons of initial energy 83.4 keV by 1.21 keV over 30 µm, providing peak acceleration gradients of 40.3 MeV/m. This progress represents a significant step towards a completely integrated MeV-scale dielectric laser accelerator.

Dielectric laser accelerators have emerged as a promising alternative to conventional RF accelerators due to the large damage threshold of dielectric materials the commercial availability of powerful NIR femtosecond pulsed lasers, and the low-cost high-yield nanofabrication processes which produce them. Together, these advantages allow DLAs to make an impact in the development of applications such as tabletop free-electron-lasers, targeted cancer therapies, and compact imaging sources.

They have designed and experimentally verified the first waveguide-integrated DLA structure. The design of this structure was made possible through the use of photonics inverse design methodologies developed by the team members. The fabricated and experimentally demonstrated devices accelerate electrons of an initial energy of 83.4 keV by a maximum energy gain of 1.21 keV over 30 µm, demonstrating acceleration gradients of 40.3 MeV/m. In this integrated form, these devices can be cascaded to reach MeV-scale energies, capitalizing on the inherent scalability of photonic circuits. Future work will focus on multi-stage demonstrations, as well as exploring new design and material solutions to obtain larger gradients.

Continue reading “Laser-driven Particle Accelerator Made Ten Thousand Times Smaller” »

We can do this by shrinking the size and mass of the spacecraft, allowing many to be launched together.

The Sprite is a tiny (3.5 by 3.5 centimeter) single-board spacecraft. It has a microcontroller, radio, and solar cells and is capable of carrying single-chip sensors, such as thermometers, magnetometers, gyroscopes, and accelerometers. To lower costs, Sprites are designed to be deployed hundreds at a time in low Earth orbit and to simultaneously communicate with a ground station receiver.

Chemical engineers at UCLA have been demonstrating what they argue is scientific evidence that bunches of synthetically grown nanowires exhibit behaviors similar to that of memory in a living brain. Whether you believe their claim depends on what you think memory actually is.