Lifeboat Foundation

Your phone’s GPS, the Wi-Fi in your house and communications on aircraft are all powered by radio-frequency, or RF, waves, which carry information from a transmitter at one point to a sensor at another. The sensors interpret this information in different ways. For example, a GPS sensor uses the angle at which it receives an RF wave to determine its own relative location. The more precisely it can measure the angle, the more accurately it can determine location.

In a new paper published in Physical Review Letters, University of Arizona engineering and optical sciences researchers, in collaboration with engineers from General Dynamics Mission Systems, demonstrate how a combination of two techniques—radio frequency photonics sensing and quantum metrology—can give sensor networks a previously unheard-of level of precision. The work involves transferring information from electrons to photons, then using quantum entanglement to increase the photons’ sensing capabilities.

“This quantum sensing paradigm could create opportunities to improve GPS systems, astronomy laboratories and biomedical imaging capabilities,” said Zheshen Zhang, assistant professor of materials science and engineering and optical sciences, and principal investigator of the university’s Quantum Information and Materials Group. “It could be used to improve the performance of any application that requires a network of sensors.”

Here’s another neat thing drones can do—beam power across the sky to recharge sensors in hard-to-reach places.

Remote sensors play a valuable role in collecting data—but recharging these devices while they are scattered over vast and isolated areas can be tedious. A new system is designed to make the charging process easier by using unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to deliver power using radio waves during a flyby. A specialized antenna on the sensor harvests the signals and converts them into electricity. The design is described in a study published 23 March in IEEE Sensors Letters.

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In this video, we’ll be discussing 5G – more specifically, what it is and its ability to change our world! 5G is a core technology in establishing the digital infrastructure of the future and will be essential in how all of the over 50 billion mobile and connected devices by 2020 will communicate together!

[0:25–2:55] First we’ll take a quick look at the history of mobile networks, and how they have evolved over the years to present day.

Continue reading “What Is 5G (5G Explained)” »

Expert Systems and Sociometrica analyze the sentiment of 63,000 social media posts each day to … [+] determine the emotional state of the internet in response to COVID-19.

PCs, tablets, 5G-powered live streams, and cloud platforms are all expected to see more demand from the education sector in China, with the coronavirus outbreak accelerating a digital shift, according to a report from research firm IDC China.

The mysterious sight has been caught on camera everywhere from Spain to the US and Australia over the past few weeks.

AT&T is connecting IoT robots, in new partnerships with Xenex and Brain Corp., that aim to help hospitals and retail establishments like grocery stores keep facilities clean, kill germs and keep shelves stocked more efficiently.

Chris Penrose, SVP of Advanced Solutions at AT&T, told FierceWireless that the robots are riding on the carrier’s 4G LTE network, rather than narrowband IoT (NB-IoT) or LTE-M networks. That’s because of the large amounts of data they need to push, along with latency and speed requirements for these particular use cases.

Continue reading “AT&T 4G LTE connects IoT robots to kill germs, keep shelves stocked” »

Cygnus-X1.Net: A Tribute to Star Trek.

Ions trapped nanoscale optical cavities could be used to distribute entangled quantum particles over large distances. That is the conclusion of Jonathan Kindem and colleagues at Caltech in the US, who showed that a trapped ion of ytterbium can remain entangled with a photon for long periods of time. Furthermore, the team showed that the ion’s quantum state can be read out when manipulated by laser and microwave pulses. Their achievement could lay the foundations for a future quantum internet.

Quantum computers are becoming a reality as research labs and companies roll out nascent devices. An important next step in this quantum revolution is creating a “quantum internet” across which quantum information can be shared. The delicate nature of quantum information, however, means that it is very difficult to connect quantum computers over long distances.

Most quantum computers encode quantum bits (qubits) of information into the quantum states of matter – trapped atoms or superconducting circuits, for example. However, the best way to transmit quantum information over long distances is to encode it into a photon of light. An important challenge is how to transfer quantum information from stationary matter-based qubits to photon-based “flying” qubits and then back again.