Lifeboat Foundation

Drug discovery is a long and difficult process that requires a comprehensive understanding of the molecular structures of compounds under investigation. It’s difficult to have an idea of the precise shape of complex molecules such as proteins, but researchers at University of Melbourne in Australia have come up with a way of seeing the location of individual atoms within biomolecules.

Using quantum bits, most notably utilized in quantum computer research, the investigators offer a way of producing a magnetic resonance sensor and a magnetic field gradient that can work as a tiny MRI machine. The machine would have the resolution capable of seeing single atoms components of larger molecules. This MRI machine has yet to be actually built, but the steps have been laid out based on comprehensive theoretical work. If it proves successful in practice, the technology may overcome current imaging techniques that rely on statistical averages and don’t work well on molecules that don’t crystallize well.

“In a conventional MRI machine large magnets set up a field gradient in all three directions to create 3D images; in our system we use the natural magnetic properties of a single atomic qubit,” said lead author of the research Viktor Perunicic. “The system would be fabricated on-chip, and by carefully controlling the quantum state of the qubit probe as it interacts with the atoms in the target molecule, we can extract information about the positions of atoms by periodically measuring the qubit probe and thus create an image of the molecule’s structure.”

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Investors from Amazon to the CIA are excited about secretive startup Kindred Systems and its ‘human-like intelligence’ advances.

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The Beijing-Shanghai project will form the backbone of the nation’s quantum communications network.

Physicists at The Australian National University (ANU) and University of Queensland (UQ) have produced near-perfect clones of quantum information using a new method to surpass previous cloning limits.

A global race is on to use quantum physics for ultra-secure encryption over long distances according to Prof Ping Koy Lam, node director of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Quantum Computation and Communication Technology (CQC2T) at ANU.

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In Brief:

• Scientists have formulated a mathematical theorem which shows that Newton’s Second Law may, at least, have a loophole.
• The finding may provide the foundation for future discoveries that may allow us to power devices remotely.

Using machine learning, computers have come up with codes that let them send secret messages to each other – but they’re still a long way off humans.

Elon Musk is obsessed with space. At age 30, he founded SpaceX. At age 41, he oversaw the first cargo mission to the International Space Station by a private company. And at age 12, as a kid living in South Africa, he made a space-themed PC game called Blastar. Now, thanks to the power of the internet, you can play that game.

Musk sold the code for Blastar for $500 to the magazine PC and Office Technology, and a reproduction of the page it appeared on was published in Ashlee Vance’s biography Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future. From there, Tomas Lloret Llinares — a software engineer at Google — took the code and rebuilt the game to work in HTML5.

Your mission, as the game’s lonely space pilot, is to “destroy [the] alien freighter carrying deadly hydrogen bombs and status beam machines.” Blastar is mostly a mix of Space Invaders and Asteroid, though it’s much more basic. There is never more than two ships on the screen, there are few sound effects, and — like many games of its time — it really has no ending. It’s almost unimpressive; that is, until you remember that it was made by a 12-year-old in 1984.

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