Lifeboat Foundation

Winfried Hensinger likes Star Trek. “It goes all the way back to primary school,” said the director of the Sussex Centre for Quantum Technologies in England. “I wanted to be science officer on the Enterprise, so I worked out in about grade five that I wanted to study physics.”

Today, his day-to-day work on abstract notions of quantum mechanics would make even Spock’s ears perk up.

Continue reading “Quantum computing will make your PC look like a graphing calculator” »

It’s all just ones and zeros. Except when it’s both.

If I had to pick my least favorite subject in high school, it would be physics.

The concepts themselves were challenging. The math was even more challenging.

However, my views on physics quickly changed when my teacher mentioned the words “quantum mechanics.”

Continue reading “OPINION — Quantum physics provides new world perspective” »

No surprise; we knew this was going to happen.

China launched its second space lab, Tiangong-2, on Thursday, paving the way for a permanent space station that the country plans to build around 2022. In a space science first, a human brain-computer interaction test system, developed by Tianjin University, has been installed in the lab and it is set to conduct a series of experiments in space, People’s Daily reported. According to Ming Dong, the leader of the research team in charge of the brain-computer test system, the brain-computer interaction will eventually be the highest form of human-machine communication.

Scientists are gearing up to create supersecure global quantum networks.

Scientists have shown they can teleport matter across a city, a development that has been hailed as “a technological breakthrough”.

However, do not expect to see something akin to the Star Trek crew beaming from the planet’s surface to the Starship Enterprise.

Instead, in the two studies, published today in Nature Photonics, separate research groups have used quantum teleportation to send photons to new locations using fibre-optic communications networks in the cities of Hefei in China and Calgary in Canada.

Continue reading “Science breakthrough – light particles teleported across cities” »

“History “teaches us that order in international relations is the exception, rather than the rule,” Kevin Rudd, the former Australian prime minister, writes in a new report on the uncertain future of the UN.”

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““A woman of firsts” is perhaps only a summary description of Dame Margaret Anstee, the first woman to serve as a United Nations Under-Secretary-General.”

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“Hopes of a fast and effective response to the global refugee crisis now rest on a summit convened by Barack Obama on Tuesday in New York, after negotiations before a meeting of world leaders at the UN on Monday failed to produce any concrete measures.”

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