Lifeboat Foundation

In the 2016 sci-fi movie “Arrival,” a linguist and a theoretical physicist race against time to communicate with endangered extraterrestrial heptapods wishing to share their wisdom and technologies with the human race so it will survive and one day return the favor.

At the University of California, Berkeley, a real and more down-to-earth mission to decode an unknown form of communication is underway. Linguist Gasper Begus and computer scientist Shafi Goldwasser are part of an international team of researchers attempting interspecies communication with sperm whales by deciphering their deafening, 200-plus decibel clicking sounds, or codas.

They are among the key members of the Cetacean Translation Initiative (CETI), a newly launched, five-year multidisciplinary project aimed at cracking sperm whales’ Morse code-like communications off the Caribbean island of Dominica, to gain a deeper knowledge of the ocean’s brainiest predators and to preserve their habitat from further human disruption.

Before quantum computers and quantum networks can fulfil their huge potential, scientists have got several difficult problems to overcome – but a new study outlines a potential solution to one of these problems.

As we’ve seen in recent research, the silicon material that our existing classical computing components are made out of has shown potential for storing quantum bits, too.

These quantum bits – or qubits – are key to next-level quantum computing performance, and they come in a variety of types.

Understanding the difference between serverless computing and PaaS is the first step in deciding which is best for your organization.

Moore’s law has driven the semiconductor industry to continue downscaling the critical size of transistors to improve device density. At the beginning of this century, traditional scaling started to encounter bottlenecks. The industry has successively developed strained Si/Ge, high-K/metal gate, and Fin-FETs, enabling Moore’s Law to continue.

Now, the critical size of FETs is down to 7 nm, which means there are almost 7 billion transistors per square centimeter on one chip, which brings huge challenges for fin-type structure and nanomanufacturing methods. Up to now, extreme ultraviolet lithography has been used in some critical steps, and it is facing alignment precision and high costs for high-volume manufacturing.

Meanwhile, the introduction of new materials and 3D complex structures brings serious challenges for top-down methods. Newly developed bottom-up manufacturing serves as a good complementary method and provides technical driving force for nanomanufacturing.

NVIDIA introduces QODA, a new platform for hybrid quantum-classical computing, enabling easy programming of integrated CPU, GPU, and QPU systems.

The past decade has seen quantum computing leap out of academic labs into the mainstream. Efforts to build better quantum computers proliferate at both startups and large companies. And while it is still unclear how far we are away from using quantum advantage on common problems, it is clear that now is the time to build the tools needed to deliver valuable quantum applications.

To start, we need to make progress in our understanding of quantum algorithms. Last year, NVIDIA announced cuQuantum, a software development kit (SDK) for accelerating simulations of quantum computing. Simulating quantum circuits using cuQuantum on GPUs enables algorithms research with performance and scale far beyond what can be achieved on quantum processing units (QPUs) today. This is paving the way for breakthroughs in understanding how to make the most of quantum computers.

Continue reading “Introducing QODA: The Platform for Hybrid Quantum-Classical Computing” »

The paradox startled scientists at the U.S Department of Energy’s (DOE) Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) more than a dozen years ago. The more heat they beamed into a spherical tokamak, a magnetic facility designed to reproduce the fusion energy that powers the sun and stars, the less the central temperature increased.

Big mystery

“Normally, the more beam power you put in, the higher the temperature gets,” said Stephen Jardin, head of the theory and computational science group that performed the calculations, and lead author of a proposed explanation published in Physical Review Letters. “So this was a big mystery: Why does this happen?”

Researchers uncover a new vulnerability in AMD and Intel microprocessors that could bypass current protections and lead to Specter-based attacks.

Researchers at ESET have discovered three new buffer overflow vulnerabilities in the UEFI firmware of several Lenovo Notebook devices.

A series of recent experiments between quantum and classical computers shows the term’s ever-evolving meaning.

Under a microscope, mammalian tissues reveal their intricate and elegant architectures. But if you look at the same tissue after tumour formation, you will see bedlam. Itai Yanai, a computational biologist at New York University’s Grossman School of Medicine in New York City, is trying to find order in this chaos. “There is a particular logic to how things are arranged, and spatial transcriptomics is helping us see that,” he says.

‘Spatial transcriptomics’ is a blanket term covering more than a dozen techniques for charting genome-scale gene-expression patterns in tissue samples, developed to complement single-cell RNA-sequencing techniques. Yet these single-cell sequencing methods have a downside — they can rapidly profile the messenger RNA content (or transcriptome) of large numbers of individual cells, but generally require physical disruption of the original tissue, which sacrifices crucial information about how cells are organized and can alter them in ways that might muddy later analyses. Immunologist Ido Amit at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel, says that such experiments would sometimes leave his group questioning their results. “Is this really the in situ state, or are we just looking at something which is either not a major [factor] or even not real at all?”

By contrast, spatial transcriptomics allows researchers to study gene expression in intact samples, opening frontiers in cancer research and revealing previously inaccessible biology of otherwise well-characterized tissues. The resulting ‘atlases’ of spatial information can tell scientists which cells make up each tissue, how they are organized and how they communicate. But compiling those atlases isn’t easy, because methods for spatial transcriptomics generally represent a tension between two competing goals: broader transcriptome coverage and tighter spatial resolution. Developments in experimental and computational methods are now helping researchers to balance those aims — and improving cellular resolution in the process.