Lifeboat Foundation

“If you want to measure something with very high precision, you almost always use an optical interferometer, because light makes for a very precise ruler,” says Jaime Cardenas, assistant professor of optics at the University of Rochester.

Now, the Cardenas Lab has created a way to make these optical workhorses even more useful and sensitive. Meiting Song, a Ph.D. student, has for the first time packaged an experimental way of amplifying interferometric signals—without a corresponding increase in extraneous, unwanted input, or “noise”—on a 1 mm by 1 mm integrated photonic chip. The breakthrough, described in Nature Communications, is based on a theory of weak value amplification with waveguides that was developed by Andrew Jordan, a professor of physics at Rochester, and students in his lab.

It reduces the operational carbon footprint while making inspections more efficient and cost-effective.

In the race toward practical fusion energy, tokamaks (donut-shaped plasma devices) are the leading concept—they have achieved better confinement and higher plasma temperatures than any other configuration. Two major magnetic fields are used to contain the plasma: a toroidal field (along the axes of the donut) produced by external coils and the field from a ring current flowing in the plasma itself. The performance of a tokamak, however, comes with an Achilles heel—the possibility of disruptions, a sudden termination of the plasma driven by instabilities in the plasma current. Since the plasma current provides the equilibrium and confinement for the tokamak, the challenge of taming disruptions must be addressed and solved.

As the magnitudes of the plasma current and plasma energy increase, disruptions can cause more damage. As such, they are a particularly important concern for the newest and most powerful machines, such as the SPARC tokamak. SPARC is a compact, high-magnetic–field tokamak under design and in the early stages of construction by a joint team from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Commonwealth Fusion Systems. The SPARC plasma is predicted to produce more than 10 times the power than is required to maintain its 250 million F temperatures. All tokamaks of this performance class must develop strategies to protect the machine against disruptions.

A solution, however, may be in hand. Prompted by a theoretical idea from Prof. Allen Boozer of Columbia University, the SPARC design includes an innovative new coil structure which promises fully passive protection from the threat of runaway electrons.

A long-term fallout of the Covid crisis has been the rise of the contactless enterprise, in which customers, and likely employees, interact with systems to get what they need or request. This means a pronounced role for artificial intelligence and machine learning, or conversational AI, which add the intelligence needed to deliver superior customer or employee experience.

Deloitte analysts recently analyzed patents in the area of conversational AI to assess the direction of the technology and the market — and the technology has been fast developing. “Rapid adoption of conversational AI will likely be underpinned by innovations in the various steps of chatbot development that have the potential to hasten the creation and training of chatbots and enable them to efficiently handle complex requests — with a personal touch,” the analyst team, led by Deloitte’s Sherry Comes, observes.

Conversational AI is a ground-breaking application for AI, agrees Chris Hausler, director of data science for Zendesk. “Organizations saw a massive 81% increase in customer interactions with automated bots last year, and no doubt these will continue to be key to delivering great experiences.”

Inventors from more than 40 countries are in Qatar for the week-long Challenge and Innovation Forum on technology.
Super computers, cloud technology and robots are among the innovations on display.
Al Jazeera’s Victoria Gatenby reports from Doha.

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Putin stressed that the work on a unified system of reference data for shaping the program was already underway at the Ministry.

“The key task here is to ensure the weapon systems and equipment that will be manufactured and supplied to the armed forces under this program should reliably protect Russia from potential threats,” he concluded.

Germany’s COVID infections are now higher than ever. And the numbers keep growing.

That’s despite a relatively high vaccination rate. Almost 70 percent of Germans are fully vaccinated against the virus.

Continue reading “COVID-19 infections are rising dramatically in Germany | COVID-19 Special” »

A breakthrough by UK researchers could make ultra-high density, 5D optical storage practical for long-term data archiving.

During the mid-twentieth century, managing the household was transformed by the mainstreaming of technological innovations such as washing machines, dishwashers, and vacuum cleaners.

Perhaps in three decades from now, technology will have evolved to a level to allow humanoid robots, such as Andrew played by the late Robin Williams in the 1999 movie Bicentennial Man, to take over the household chores entirely.

Whether or not this represents a flight of fancy, what we know is that technological advancement rarely happens in great leaps but rather, through incremental steps.