Lifeboat Foundation

Deep inside the electronic devices that proliferate in our world, from cell phones to solar cells, layer upon layer of almost unimaginably small transistors and delicate circuitry shuttle all-important electrons back and forth.

It is now possible to cram 6 million or more transistors into a single layer of these chips. Designers include layers of glassy materials between the electronics to insulate and protect these delicate components against the continual push and pull of heating and cooling that often causes them to fail.

A paper published today in the journal Nature Materials reshapes our understanding of the materials in those important protective layers. In the study, Stanford’s Reinhold Dauskardt, a professor of materials science and engineering, and doctoral candidate Joseph Burg reveal that those glassy materials respond very differently to compression than they do to the tension of bending and stretching. The findings overturn conventional understanding and could have a lasting impact on the structure and reliability of the myriad devices that people depend upon every day.

Continue reading “Research may lead to more durable electronic devices such as cellphones” »

Great that they didn’t have to use a super computer to do their prescribed, lab controlled experiments. However, to limit QC to a super computer and experimental computations only is a big mistake; I cannot stress this enough. QC is a new digital infrastructure that changes our communications, cyber security, and will eventually (in the years to come) provide consumers/ businesses/ and governments with the performance they will need for AI, Biocomputing, and Singularity.

A group of physicists from the Skobeltsyn Institute of Nuclear Physics, the Lomonosov Moscow State University, has learned to use personal computer for calculations of complex equations of quantum mechanics, usually solved with help of supercomputers. This PC does the job much faster. An article about the results of the work has been published in the journal Computer Physics Communications.

Senior researchers Vladimir Pomerantcev and Olga Rubtsova, working under the guidance of Professor Vladimir Kukulin (SINP MSU) were able to use on an ordinary desktop PC with GPU to solve complicated integral equations of quantum mechanics — previously solved only with the powerful, expensive supercomputers. According to Vladimir Kukulin, personal computer does the job much faster: in 15 minutes it is doing the work requiring normally 2–3 days of the supercomputer time.

Continue reading “No need in supercomputers” »

If the “hints” of new particles turn out to be nothing but noise, it’s a nightmare scenario for many. But one physicist hopes for the nightmare to be real.

In DARPA’s words, “Speed is the new stealth.”

In 2012, DARPA noted the United States is gradually losing the “strategic advantage” that its stealth warplanes have long provided since competitor countries’ stealth and counter-stealth capabilities are improving.

To arrest this decline, DARPA strongly argues the U.S. will need “the new stealth” of hypersonic aircraft.

Continue reading “DARPA Moving Fast to Replace US Stealth Fighters with Hypersonic Fighters” »

Very nice.

ARLINGTON, Va., 27 June 2016. U.S. military researchers are asking industry for new algorithms and protocols for large, mission-aware, computer, communications, and battlefield network systems that physically are dispersed over large forward-deployed areas.

Officials of the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in Arlington, Va., issued a broad agency announcement on Friday (DARPA-BAA-16–41) for the Dispersed Computing project, which seeks to boost application and network performance of dispersed computing architectures by orders of magnitude with new algorithms and protocol stacks.

Continue reading “DARPA approaches industry for new battlefield network algorithms and network protocols” »

Results from quantitative MRI and neuropsychological testing show unprecedented improvements in ten patients with early Alzheimer’s disease (AD) or its precursors following treatment with a programmatic and personalized therapy. Results from an approach dubbed metabolic enhancement for neurodegeneration are now available online in the journal Aging.

The study, which comes jointly from the Buck Institute for Research on Aging and the UCLA Easton Laboratories for Neurodegenerative Disease Research, is the first to objectively show that memory loss in patients can be reversed, and improvement sustained, using a complex, 36-point therapeutic personalized program that involves comprehensive changes in diet, brain stimulation, exercise, optimization of sleep, specific pharmaceuticals and vitamins, and multiple additional steps that affect brain chemistry.

“All of these patients had either well-defined mild cognitive impairment (MCI), subjective cognitive impairment (SCI) or had been diagnosed with AD before beginning the program,” said author Dale Bredesen, MD, a professor at the Buck Institute and professor at the Easton Laboratories for Neurodegenerative Disease Research at UCLA, who noted that patients who had had to discontinue work were able to return to work and those struggling at their jobs were able to improve their performance. “Follow up testing showed some of the patients going from abnormal to normal.”

Continue reading “Pre and post testing show reversal of memory loss from Alzheimer’s disease in 10 patients” »

Want to simulate the creation of the Universe — use QC.

Scientists have for the first time simulated the creation of particle and antiparticle pairs in a quantum computer.

(Photo : gr8effect / Pixabay)

Continue reading “The Beginning of the Universe? Quantum Computer Could Simulate Particle Physics” »

Hawking repeats Zoltan Istvan’s worries:

“Governments seem to be engaged in an AI arms race, designing planes and weapons with intelligent technologies,” Hawking told veteran interviewer Larry King. “The funding for projects directly beneficial to the human race, such as improved medical screening, seems a somewhat lower priority.”

British physicist Stephen Hawking sees signs that the applications for artificial intelligence are already going down the wrong track.

Shutterstock.

Alphabet’s “improved city living” company, Sidewalk Labs – the group behind the futuristic digital city story a while back – is already getting its feet wet in real-life situations. The Guardian has obtained documents and emails that detail a proposal made by Sidewalk Labs to the city of Columbus, Ohio. It essentially allows Google to assume control of the city’s public transport and parking system.

The information was obtained through public records laws and details an offer made by Sidewalk Labs to provide the city of Columbus with its cloud-based program called Flow for free. Flow would put the city’s public transit, public parking and transit subsidy program under the control of Google.

Continue reading “This is how Google plans to take control of public transit and parking in the U.S” »