The same four chemical building blocks behind almost all life on earth could one day be used replace traditional computer storage.
A new study challenges the common belief that human brain’s functions such as learning, memory, and perception occur in the central part of neurons called soma. In a brain structure, neurons’ three-like feature has soma in the middle and branches called dendrites. Soma will spike whenever there is data that needs processing and dendrites will communicate with each other — but not until the University of California, Los Angeles discovered the opposite.
UCLA team tested the theory of “soma to dendrites” and found a contradicting result. Dendrites are electrically active and generate 10 times more spikes that somas. Scientists are now on to new finding that dendrites’ role is to form and store memories.
The brain is neither analog nor digital, but works using a signal processing paradigm that has some properties in common with both. Unlike a digital computer, the brain does not use binary logic or binary addressable memory, and it does not perform binary arithmetic.
For engineers, the question of whether to store information in analog or discrete form is easy to answer. Discrete data storage has clear advantages, not least of which is that it is much more robust against degradation.
Engineers have exploited this property. Provided noise is below some threshold level, digital music can be copied endlessly. By contrast, music stored in analog form, such as on cassette or vinyl LP, can be copied only a few times before noise degrades the recording beyond recognition.
When Michael Schneider’s anxiety and PTSD flare up, he reaches for the ukulele he keeps next to his computer.
“I can’t actually play a song,” says Schneider, who suffered two serious brain injuries during nearly 22 years in the Marines. “But I can play chords to take my stress level down.”
It’s a technique Schneider learned through Creative Forces, an arts therapy initiative sponsored by the National Endowment for the Arts, in partnership with the departments of Defense and Veterans Affairs.
“It’s a really old question inherited from condensed matter physics,” said David Weld, an experimental physicist at UCSB with specialties in ultracold atomic physics and quantum simulation. The question falls into the category of ‘many-body’ physics, which interrogates the physical properties of a quantum system with multiple interacting parts. While many-body problems have been a matter of research and debate for decades, the complexity of these systems, with quantum behaviors such as superposition and entanglement, leads to multitudes of possibilities, making it impossible to solve through calculation alone. “Many aspects of the problem are beyond the reach of modern computers,” Weld added.
About a quarter of the world’s internet users live in countries that are more susceptible than previously thought to targeted attacks on their internet infrastructure. Many of the at-risk countries are located in the Global South.
That’s the conclusion of a sweeping, large-scale study conducted by computer scientists at the University of California San Diego. The researchers surveyed 75 countries.
“We wanted to study the topology of the internet to find weak links that, if compromised, would expose an entire nation’s traffic,” said Alexander Gamero-Garrido, the paper’s first author, who earned his Ph.D. in computer science at UC San Diego.
The 2022 Nobel Prize in Physics honors research on the foundations of quantum mechanics, which opened up the quantum information frontier.
7 October 2022: We have replaced our initial one-paragraph announcement with a full-length Focus story.
The Nobel Prize in Physics this year recognizes efforts to take quantum weirdness out of philosophy discussions and to place it on experimental display for all to see. The award is shared by Alain Aspect, John Clauser, and Anton Zeilinger, all of whom showed a mastery of entanglement—a quantum relationship between two particles that can exist over long distances. Using entangled photons, Clauser and Aspect performed some of the first “Bell tests,” which confirmed quantum mechanics predictions while putting to bed certain alternative theories based on classical physics. Zeilinger used some of those Bell-test techniques to demonstrate entanglement control methods that can be applied to quantum computing, quantum cryptography, and other quantum information technologies.
Intel has just announced a monumental achievement that could make quantum processors available at scale.
Intel Corp.’s two primary research organizations, Intel Labs and Components Research, announced today that they’re making big progress as they work toward large-scale production of quantum computing processors.
At the 2022 Silicon Quantum Electronics Workshop in Orford, Quebec, Intel’s researchers said that they’ve been able to demonstrate the highest reported yield and uniformity rate when manufacturing “silicon spin qubit devices” at the company’s transistor research and development facility. The research is believed to be a key milestone for Intel as it moves toward being able to fabricate quantum computing chips on its existing transistor manufacturing processes.
Intel is a key player in the race to build quantum computers, which are more advanced machines that encode data as “qubits,” as opposed to the conventional bits used in traditional computers. The advantage of qubits is they’re not restricted to states of 1 or 0. They can also exist as both states at the same time, a characteristic that’s known as superposition.
