Lifeboat Foundation

An international team, led by a scientist from the University of Sussex, have today unveiled the first practical blueprint for how to build a quantum computer, the most powerful computer on Earth.

This huge leap forward towards creating a universal quantum computer is published today (1 February 2017) in the influential journal Science Advances. It has long been known that such a computer would revolutionise industry, science and commerce on a similar scale as the invention of ordinary computers. But this new work features the actual industrial blueprint to construct such a large-scale machine, more powerful in solving certain problems than any computer ever constructed before.

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Credit: TED / Yuan-Sen Ting.

The robot is building a tesseract. He motions at a glowing cube floating before him, and an identical cube emerges. He drags it to the left, but the two cubes stay connected, strung together by glowing lines radiating from their corners. The robot lowers its hands, and the cubes coalesce into a single shape—with 24 square faces, 16 vertices, and eight connected cubes existing in four dimensions. A tesseract.

This isn’t a video game. It’s a classroom. And the robot is Brian Greene, a physicist at Columbia University and bestselling author of several popular science books. His robot avatar teaches a semicircle of student robots, each wearing a shoulder badge of their home country’s flag. The classroom is outer space: Greene and the arc of student-robots orbit Earth. After he shows the students the tesseract, Greene directs his class to try making four, five, even six dimension objects. This is a virtual reality course on string theory; the lesson happens to be about objects with more than three dimensions.

In real life, Greene is wearing a dark blue shirt, black jeans, and boots, and his normal, non-hovering chair is sitting in a concrete-floored VR business called Step Into the Light planted firmly on Earth’s surface—Manhattan’s Lower East Side. An HTC Vive headset covers his face, and he gestures effusively—he’s a New York native—with the controllers.

Continue reading “String Theory’s Weirdest Ideas Finally Make Sense—Thanks to VR” »

We think there is a real signal there and this implies an additional planet.

Some of the world’s most renowned scientists are questioning whether the cosmos has an inner life similar to our own.

Ready and waiting at an arms reach from the government, the Research and Development Corporation (RAND) has helped the U.S. think through some of the toughest scientific and regulatory challenges since the 1940s. This year, the think tank is opening its first office in the San Francisco Bay Area. Its positioning itself to weigh in on some of Silicon Valleys largest research projects, like autonomous vehicles, drones, AI, cybersecurity and telemedicine.

But unlike the RAND of the past, this new version embodies the scrappiness of startup culture. Formally based out of a WeWork space, office director Nidhi Kalra and the rest of her SF team largely work decentralized from homes and coffee shops around the Bay Area.

The team of a dozen researchers is here to study the development of new technologies and the way in which state and local authorities are working side-by-side with startups to keep everyone safe without sundering innovation.

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Firmamentum, a division of Tethers Unlimited Inc. in Bothell. Wash… says it has won $750.000 in NASA funding to build a combination 3D printer and plastic recycler for the International Space Station.

The device, known as the Refabricator, is due to be delivered to NASA next year, said Rob Hoyt, president of TUI/Firmamentum.

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Starting with just a digital file, scientists manufactured the common flu virus.

It’s been 55 years since satellite communications became the first commercial space frontier, and space tourism is looming as the next frontier. But what comes after that? Would you believe in-space mining and manufacturing?

Those are the opportunities that came to the fore on Saturday when members of the Association of Professional Futurists gathered at Seattle’s Museum of Flight.

Continue reading “Why asteroids loom as a future space frontier for mining and manufacturing” »