Lifeboat Foundation

Early in its history, computing was dominated by time-sharing systems. These systems were powerful machines (for their time, at least) that multiple users connected to in order to perform computing tasks. To an extent, quantum computing has repeated this history, with companies like Honeywell, IBM, and Rigetti making their machines available to users via cloud services. Companies pay based on the amount of time they spend executing algorithms on the hardware.

For the most part, time-sharing works out well, saving companies the expenses involved in maintaining the machine and its associated hardware, which often includes a system that chills the processor down to nearly absolute zero. But there are several customers—companies developing support hardware, academic researchers, etc.—for whom access to the actual hardware could be essential.

The fact that companies aren’t shipping out processors suggests that the market isn’t big enough to make production worthwhile. But a startup from the Netherlands is betting that the size of the market is about to change. On Monday, a company called QuantWare announced that it will start selling quantum processors based on transmons, superconducting loops of wire that form the basis of similar machines used by Google, IBM, and Rigetti.

Future chips may feature watercooling integrated into the silicon.

TSMC is in the process of testing and designing water cooling delivery straight to the heart of your future chips — a mandatory exploration in wake of vertically-integrated silicon.

To the moon — and beyond.

A new partnership just announced by NASA makes it official that the space agency is very much in the business of getting back to the moon.

Many people with rheumatoid arthritis, or RA, report having trouble thinking clearly, problems with memory, and difficulty concentrating.

These symptoms, known as brain fog, are widespread in people with chronic inflammatory conditions, including RA, Sjogren’s syndrome, and multiple sclerosis.

A RIFF on what country is really about.

China currently has one of the most expansive and impressive high-speed rail networks on Earth, and they aren’t showing signs of slowing. As their network reaches the far corners of their nation, Beijing could be setting its eyes on what lies beyond – far, far beyond.

According to reports, China wishes to build a high-speed, 13000-kilometer (8078-mile) train that travels from mainland China, up through Siberia in Eastern Russia, under the sea through the Bering Strait into Alaska, across the rocky peaks of Canada’s Yukon and British Columbia, and into the USA. Once constructed, they have could further extend their international bullet train into every corner of the US.

The price of such an outlandish proposal? A cool $200 billion. A price tag so high, even the likes of Jeff Bezos probably couldn’t reach it.

A team of researchers affiliated with multiple institutions in China, working at the University of Science and Technology of China, has achieved another milestone in the development of a usable quantum computer. The group has written a paper describing its latest efforts and have uploaded it to the arXiv preprint server.

Back in 2019, a team at Google announced that they had achieved “quantum supremacy” with their Sycamore machine—a 54 qubit processor that carried out a calculation that would have taken a traditional computer approximately 10000 years to complete. But that achievement was soon surpassed by other teams from Honeywell and a team in China. The team in China used a different technique, one that involved the use of photonic qubits—but it was also a one-trick pony. In this new effort, the new team in China, which has been led by Jian-Wei Pan, who also led the prior team at the University of Science and Technology has achieved another milestone.

The new effort was conducted with a 2D programable computer called Zuchongzhi—one equipped to run with 66 qubits. In their demonstration, the researchers used only 56 of those qubits to tackle a well-known computer problem—sampling the output distribution of random quantum circuits. The task requires a variety of computer abilities that involve mathematical analysis, matrix theory, the complexity of certain computations and probability theory—a task approximately 100 times more challenging than the one carried out by Sycamore just two years ago. Prior research has suggested the task set before the Chinese machine would take a conventional computer approximately eight years to complete. Zuchongzhi completed the task in less than an hour and a half. The achievement by the team showed that the Zuchongzhi machine is capable of tackling more than just one kind of task.

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Richard Branson has finally launched to the edge of space aboard his Virgin Galactic space plane, a flight more than 15 years in the making. The billionaire has narrowly become the first person to fly on a spacecraft of their own making, beating Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos by a matter of days.

Continue reading “Richard Branson reaches the edge of space on Virgin Galactic flight” »

Circa 2014 😀😍🤩

Thanks to recent breakthroughs, the insides of our refrigerators could work very differently in the coming years. Scientists at GE are perfecting a method of transferring heat that uses magnets to achieve temperatures cold enough to freeze water.