Lifeboat Foundation

An international team of scientists has succeeded in making further improvements to the lifetime of superconducting quantum circuits. An important prerequisite for the realization of high-performance quantum computers is that the stored data should remain intact for as long as possible. The researchers, including Jülich physicist Dr. Gianluigi Catelani, have developed and tested a technique that removes unpaired electrons from the circuits. These are known to shorten the qubit lifetime (Science, DOI: 10.1126/science.aah5844).

Quantum computers could one day achieve significantly higher computing speeds than conventional digital computers in performing certain types of tasks. Superconducting circuits belong to the most promising candidates for implementing quantum bits, known as qubits, with which quantum computers can store and process information. The high error rates associated with previously available qubits have up to now limited the size and efficiency of quantum computers. Dr. Gianluigi Catelani of the Peter Grünberg Institute (PGI-2) in Jülich, together with his colleagues has now found a way to prolong the time in which the superconducting circuits are able to store a “0” or a “1” without errors. Beside Catelani, the team comprises researchers working in the USA (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Lincoln Laboratory, and the University of California, Berkeley), Japan (RIKEN), and Sweden (Chalmers University of Technology).

When superconducting materials are cooled below a material-specific critical temperature, electrons come together to form pairs; then current can flow without resistance. However, so far it has not been possible to build superconducting circuits in which all electrons bundle together. Single electrons remain unpaired and are unable to flow without resistance. Due to these so-called quasiparticles, energy is lost and this limits the length of time that the circuits can store data.

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Nantero Inc., the nanotechnology company developing next-generation memory using carbon nanotubes, today announced the closing of an over $21 million financing round. The lead investor in the round was Globespan Capital Partners and also included participation from both new and existing strategic and financial investors. Nantero currently has more than a dozen partners and customers in the consumer electronics, enterprise systems, and semiconductor industries actively working on NRAM®. The new funding will enable the company to support these partners in bringing multiple products into the market, while also enabling new customers to begin development. This financing round brings the total invested in Nantero to date to over $110 million.

“This round enables Nantero to accelerate its pace in product development, especially of its multi-gigabyte DDR4-compatible memory product,” said David Poltack, Managing Director, Globespan Capital Partners. “Nantero has multiple industry-leading customers who would like to receive NRAM even sooner. The fact that several of these customers, as well as key partners in the ecosystem, have decided to also invest in Nantero is a strong sign of confidence given how well they know Nantero and its product from years of working together.”

“The customer traction we’ve achieved at Nantero has been overwhelming, as evidenced by our recent announcement that NRAM had been selected by both Fujitsu Semiconductor and Mie Fujitsu Semiconductor,” said Greg Schmergel, Co-Founder & CEO of Nantero. “With this additional funding, we will be able to help these existing customers speed their time to market while also supporting the many other companies that have approached us about using Nantero NRAM in their next generation products.”

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Developments in computing are driving the transformation of entire systems of production, management, and governance. In this interview Justine Cassell, Associate Dean, Technology, Strategy and Impact, at the School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University, and co-chair of the Global Future Council on Computing, says we must ensure that these developments benefit all society, not just the wealthy or those participating in the “new economy”.

Why should the world care about the future of computing?

Today computers are in virtually everything we touch, all day long. We still have an image of computers as being rectangular objects either on a desk, or these days in our pockets; but computers are in our cars, they’re in our thermostats, they’re in our refrigerators. In fact, increasingly computers are no longer objects at all, but they suffuse fabric and virtually every other material. Because of that, we really do need to care about what the future of computing holds because it is going to impact our lives all day long.

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Creative Machines; however, are they truly without a built in bias due to their own creator/s?

Despite nature’s bewildering complexity, the driving force behind it is incredibly simple. ‘Survival of the fittest’ is an uncomplicated but brutally effective optimization strategy that has allowed life to solve complex problems, like vision and flight, and colonize the harshest of environments.

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Why Synbio computing is where we ultimately want to more and more progress towards especially once the basic infrastructure is updated with technology like QC.

Cells are often likened to computers, running an operating system that receives signals, processes their input, and responds, according to programming, with cellular output. Yet untangling computer-like pathways in cells is anything but simple, say Denise Montell, professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and Aviv Regev, a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Broad Institute. However, both are eager to try and will outline their latest efforts at the “Logic of Signaling” symposium at the 2016 ASCB Annual Meeting.

“My lab is understanding how cells maintain and build normal tissues. We’re studying cellular behaviors that underlie normal behavior and tumor metastasis, a great unsolved question in cancer,” Montell said. Her lab recently discovered that cells can bounce back from the brink of apoptotic cell death. “This wasn’t known before so now we’re looking at how cells do it, when do they do it, under what circumstances, and what does it mean,” Montell said.

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The nation needs a workforce that can pursue quantum computing.

Quantum computing might be closer than we thought, thanks to a series of newly developed scientific methods. Furthermore, a new implementation of Shor’s algorithm increases the urgency of getting Bitcoin ready for the advent of quantum computing.

Also read: NIST Starts Developing Quantum-Resistant Cryptography Standards.

Although mainstream quantum computing is still years off, agencies are starting to experiment with D-Wave machines for optimization problems.

More folks warning others that you better be planning for a QC transformation as it is coming and is going to be probably the largest scale transformation the we have seen in the history of technology.

Former communications minister, Stephen Conroy has warned that Australian government technology decision makers need to start preparing for the development of quantum computing.

The former senator made the warning during a panel session at the Australian Computer Society’s Reimagination conference late last week. While still in its nascent development stages, the former minister for broadband communications and the digital economy said that it could have major national security implications.

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