Lifeboat Foundation

For years, they had been losing their central vision—what allows people to see letters, faces, and details clearly. The light-receiving cells in their eyes had been deteriorating, gradually blurring their sight.

But after receiving an experimental eye implant as part of a clinical trial, some study participants can now see well enough to read from a book, play cards, and fill in a crossword puzzle despite being legally blind. Science Corporation, the California-based brain-computer interface company developing the implant, announced the preliminary results this week.

When Max Hodak, CEO of Science and former president of Neuralink, first saw a video of a blind patient reading while using the implant, he was stunned. It led his company, which he founded in 2021 after leaving Neuralink, to acquire the technology from Pixium Vision earlier this year.

Dallas’ Texas Instruments just got a payday through the CHIPS and Science Act, which funds companies manufacturing and researching semiconductors in the U.S.

A QUT-led research team has developed an ultra-thin, flexible film that could power next-generation wearable devices using body heat, eliminating the need for batteries.

This technology could also be used to cool electronic chips, helping smartphones and computers run more efficiently.

Professor Zhi-Gang Chen, whose team’s new research was published in the prestigious journal Science , said the breakthrough tackled a major challenge in creating flexible thermoelectric devices that converted body heat into power.

Quantum teleportation, once confined to the pages of science fiction, is steadily becoming a tangible scientific achievement. Advances in quantum mechanics over the last decade have transformed teleportation from a theoretical concept into an experimental reality.

These breakthroughs have revealed innovative methods for transmitting information instantaneously over vast distances, offering transformative possibilities for computing, communication, and cryptography. Scientists are now closer than ever to bridging the gap between imagination and reality in this cutting-edge field.

At its core, teleportation in the quantum world isn’t about physically transporting objects or people, as popularized by franchises like Star Trek. Instead, it involves transmitting quantum states—essentially the fundamental properties of particles like electrons or photons—without physical movement of the particles themselves.

The research team, led by physics professor Nuh Gedik, concentrated on a material called FePS₃, a type of antiferromagnet that transitions to a non-magnetic state at around −247°F. They hypothesized that precisely exciting the vibrations of FePS₃’s atoms with lasers could disrupt its typical antiferromagnetic alignment and induce a new magnetic state.

In conventional magnets (ferromagnets), all atomic spins align in the same direction, making their magnetic field easy to control. In contrast, antiferromagnets have a more complex up-down-up-down spin pattern that cancels out, resulting in zero net magnetization. While this property makes antiferromagnets highly resistant to stray magnetic influences – an advantage for secure data storage – it also creates challenges in intentionally switching them between “0” and “1” states for computing.

Gedik’s innovative laser-driven approach seeks to overcome this obstacle, potentially unlocking antiferromagnets for future high-performance memory and computational technologies.

Northwestern University engineers are the first to successfully demonstrate quantum teleportation over a fiber optic cable already carrying Internet traffic.

The discovery, published in the journal Optica, introduces the new possibility of combining quantum communication with existing Internet cables — greatly simplifying the infrastructure required for for advanced sensing technologies or quantum computing applications.

Asus is only teasing its new Zenbook at this time, so we’ll have to wait until its formal introduction at the Always Incredible launch event on January 7 to get the full scoop. Given the battery life claims, however, it is likely that this new Copilot+ PC will be powered by a Snapdragon X chip.

The manic pace of sharing, storing, securing, and serving data has a manic price—power consumption. To counter this, Virginia Tech mathematicians are leveraging algebraic geometry to target the inefficiencies of data centers.

“We as individuals generate tons of data all the time, not to mention what large companies are producing,” said Gretchen Matthews, mathematics professor and director of the Southwest Virginia node of the Commonwealth Cyber Initiative. “Backing up that data can mean replicating and storing twice or three times as much information if we don’t consider smart alternatives.”

Instead of energy-intensive data replication, Matthews and Hiram Lopez, assistant professor of mathematics, explored using certain algebraic structures to break the information into pieces and spread it out among servers in close proximity to each other. When one server goes down, the algorithm can poll the neighboring servers until it recovers the missing data.

At the Berlin synchrotron radiation source BESSY II, the largest magnetic anisotropy of a single molecule ever measured experimentally has been determined. The larger a molecule’s anisotropy is, the better suited it is as a molecular nanomagnet. Such nanomagnets have a wide range of potential applications, for example, in energy-efficient data storage.

Researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Kohlenforschung (MPI KOFO), the Joint Lab EPR4Energy of the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Energy Conversion (MPI CEC) and the Helmholtz-Zentrum Berlin were involved in the study.

The research involved a bismuth complex synthesized in the group of Josep Cornella (MPI KOFO). This molecule has unique magnetic properties that a team led by Frank Neese (MPI KOFO) recently predicted in theoretical studies. So far, however, all attempts to measure the magnetic properties of the bismuth complex and thus experimentally confirm the theoretical predictions have failed.