Lifeboat Foundation

A research team has succeeded in implementing a distributed quantum sensor that can measure multiple spatially distributed physical quantities with high precision beyond the standard quantum limit with few resources. Their findings are published in the journal Nature Communications.

Sharing the exact time between distant locations is becoming increasingly important in all areas of our lives, including finance, telecommunications, security, and other fields that require improved accuracy and precision in sending and receiving data.

Quantum phenomena such as superposition and entanglement can be used to more precisely measure the time of different clocks in two distant spaces. Similarly, if you have two physical quantities, one in Seoul and one in Busan, you can share the entanglement state in Seoul and Busan and then measure the two physical quantities simultaneously with greater precision than if you measure the physical quantities in Seoul and Busan separately.

Two tech titans are now duking it out in the headset wars. Apple’s Vision Pro and Meta’s Quests offer different price points, different specs, and most importantly, different visions of the future of virtual reality. And both have big hurdles to clear. This week on TechCheck, why the headset battle is Apple’s to lose.

Chapters:
0:00 – Who will win the headset wars?
0:42 – The case for Apple.
5:35 – The case for Meta.
7:56 – The case for both… or neither.

Continue reading “The headset wars: Why it’s Apple’s to lose” »

Authored by James Rickards via DailyReckoning.com,

I’ve covered a wide variety of potential crises over the years.

These include natural disasters, pandemics, social unrest and financial collapse. That’s a daunting list.

Cryptocurrency is usually “mined” through the blockchain by asking a computer to perform a complicated mathematical problem in exchange for tokens of cryptocurrency. But in research appearing in the journal Chem a team of chemists has repurposed this process, asking computers to instead generate the largest network ever created of chemical reactions which may have given rise to prebiotic molecules on early Earth.

This work indicates that at least some primitive forms of metabolism might have emerged without the involvement of enzymes, and it shows the potential to use blockchain to solve problems outside the financial sector that would otherwise require the use of expensive, hard to access supercomputers.

“At this point we can say we exhaustively looked for every possible combination of chemical reactivity that scientists believe to had been operative on primitive Earth,” says senior author Bartosz A. Grzybowski of the Korea Institute for Basic Science and the Polish Academy of Sciences.

Bluesheets, an AI-powered financial data startup based in Singapore, announced Tuesday it raised $6.5 million in a Series A funding round led by fintech-focused VC Illuminate Financial, bringing the four-year-old startup’s total funding to $12.5 million.

Participating in the round were returning investors Insignia Ventures Partners, Antler Elevate–the emerging growth fund of VC firm Antler–and 1982 Ventures. The Series A values the startup at $30 million.

“A lot of organizations are trying to implement [AI] applications, but are struggling quite a lot,” says Luca Zorzino, general partner and head of Asia at Illuminate Financial, in a video interview. “What we liked about Bluesheets is that not only have they implemented AI themselves, but they can actually form the foundational layer for more AI adoption in financial services.”

Continue reading “Singapore Financial Data Startup Raises $6.5 Million Series A To Double Down On AI” »

With the insertion of a little math, Sandia National Laboratories researchers have shown that neuromorphic computers, which synthetically replicate the brain’s logic, can solve more complex problems than those posed by artificial intelligence and may even earn a place in high-performance computing.

The findings, detailed in a recent article in the journal Nature Electronics, show that neuromorphic simulations employing the statistical method called random walks can track X-rays passing through bone and soft tissue, disease passing through a population, information flowing through social networks and the movements of financial markets, among other uses, said Sandia theoretical neuroscientist and lead researcher James Bradley Aimone.

Continue reading “Brain-based computing chips not just for AI anymore” »

Thomvest Ventures is popping into 2024 with a new $250 million fund and the promotion of Umesh Padval and Nima Wedlake to the role of managing directors.

The Bay Area venture capital firm was started about 25 years ago by Peter Thomson, whose family is the majority owners of Thomson Reuters.

“Peter has always had a very strong interest in technology and what technology would do in terms of shaping society and the future,” Don Butler, Thomvest Ventures’ managing director, told TechCrunch. He met Thomson in 1999 and joined the firm in 2000.

Many electric vehicles are powered by batteries that contain cobalt — a metal that carries high financial, environmental, and social costs.

MIT researchers have now designed a battery material that could offer a more sustainable way to power electric cars. The new lithium-ion battery includes a cathode based on organic materials, instead of cobalt or nickel (another metal often used in lithium-ion batteries).

In a new study, the researchers showed that this material, which could be produced at much lower cost than cobalt-containing batteries, can conduct electricity at similar rates as cobalt batteries. The new battery also has comparable storage capacity and can be charged up faster than cobalt batteries, the researchers report.

When Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC) is prepping to roll out an all-new process technology, it usually builds a new fab to meet demand of its alpha customers and then either adds capacity by upgrading existing fabs or building another facility. With N2 (2nm-class), the company seems to be taking a slightly different approach as it is already constructing two N2-capable fabs and is awaiting for a government approval for the third one.

We are also preparing our N2 volume production starting in 2025,” said Mark Liu, TSMC’s outgoing chairman, at the company’s earnings call with financial analysts and investors. “We plan to build multiple fabs or multiple phases of 2nm technologies in both Hsinchu and Kaohsiung science parks to support the strong structural demand from our customers. […] “In the Taichung Science Park, the government approval process is ongoing and is also on track.”

Continue reading “TSMC 2nm Update: Two Fabs in Construction, One Awaiting Government Approval” »