Lifeboat Foundation

Imagine if your dead laptop or phone could charge in a minute or if an electric car could be fully powered in 10 minutes. While not possible yet, new research by a team of CU Boulder scientists could potentially lead to such advances.

Published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers in Ankur Gupta’s lab discovered how ions, move within a complex network of minuscule pores. The breakthrough could lead to the development of more efficient energy storage devices, such as supercapacitors, said Gupta, an assistant professor of chemical and biological engineering.

“Given the critical role of energy in the future of the planet, I felt inspired to apply my chemical engineering knowledge to advancing energy storage devices,” Gupta said. “It felt like the topic was somewhat underexplored and, as such, the perfect opportunity.”

Researchers discovered that bismuth atoms embedded in calcium oxide can function as qubits for quantum computers, providing a low-noise, durable, and inexpensive alternative to current materials. This groundbreaking study highlights its potential to transform quantum computing and telecommunications.

Calcium oxide is an inexpensive, chalky chemical compound frequently used in the manufacturing of cement, plaster, paper, and steel. However, the common material may soon have a more high-tech application.

Scientists used theoretical and computational approaches to discover how tiny, lone atoms of bismuth embedded within solid calcium oxide can act as qubits — the building blocks of quantum computers and quantum communication devices. These qubits were described by University of Chicago Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering researchers and their collaborator in Sweden on June 6 in the scientific journal Nature Communications.

As ESA’s satellite INTEGRAL scanned the skies, it detected a surge of gamma-rays emanating from the nearby galaxy M82. Shortly after this observation, ESA’s XMM-Newton X-ray space telescope sought any residual glow from the event but detected nothing. An international research group, with contributors from the University of Geneva (UNIGE), concluded that the burst was an extragalactic flare from a magnetar, a young neutron star known for its intense magnetic field. This finding was documented in the journal Nature.

On 15 November 2023, ESA’s satellite INTEGRAL spotted a sudden explosion from a rare object. For only a tenth of a second, a short burst of energetic gamma-rays appeared in the sky. “The satellite data were received in the INTEGRAL Science Data Centre (ISDC), based on the Ecogia site of the UNIGE Astronomy Department, from where a gamma-ray burst alert was sent out to astronomers worldwide, only 13 seconds after its detection,” explains Carlo Ferrigno, senior research associate in the Astronomy Department at UNIGE Faculty of Science, PI of the ISDC and co-author of the publication. The IBAS (Integral Burst Alert System) software gave an automatic localization coinciding with the galaxy M82, 12 million light-years away. This alert system was developed and is operated by scientists and engineers from the UNIGE in collaboration with international colleagues.

Paul Terry, CEO of Photonic Inc., explores the crucial phases needed to develop large-scale, fault-tolerant quantum systems.

Open synthetic data generation pipeline for training LLMs.

We release the Nemotron-4 340B model family, including Nemotron-4-340B-Base, Nemotron-4-340B-Instruct, and Nemotron-4-340B-Reward. Our models are open access under the NVIDIA Open Model License Agreement, a permissive license similar to Apache 2.0. These models perform competitively to open access models on a wide range of evaluation benchmarks, and were sized to fit on a single DGX H100 with 8 GPUs when deployed in FP8 precision.

The researchers compared two variants of their MatMul-free LM against the advanced Transformer++ architecture, used in Llama-2, on multiple model sizes.

Interestingly, their scaling projections show that the MatMul-free LM is more efficient in leveraging additional compute resources to improve performance in comparison to the Transformer++ architecture.

The researchers also evaluated the quality of the models on several language tasks. The 2.7B MatMul-free LM outperformed its Transformer++ counterpart on two advanced benchmarks, ARC-Challenge and OpenbookQA, while maintaining comparable performance on the other tasks.

Computer scientist Lance Fortnow writes that by embracing the computations that surround us, we can begin to understand and tame our seemingly random world.

What does “equals” mean? For mathematicians, this simple question has more than one answer, which is causing issues when it comes to using computers to check proofs. The solution might be to tear up the foundations of maths.

By Alex Wilkins

The complex computer model takes into account weather and climate systems as well as our impact on the planet.