Tag: science

Quantum leap: Has next-gen computing moved from hype to hope?

Australian scientists believe they have taken a key step towards building a silicon quantum computer – a device that could take quantum computing from hype to mainstream.

Silicon quantum computers marry quantum technology with the same element – silicon – used in existing computer chips, so can hopefully be easily mass-produced. Australia leads the world in the technology, which competes with at least eight other types of quantum computer.

But despite a decade of hype and billions of dollars in investment, quantum computing in general remains a long way off fulfilling its full promise, experts admit. At this stage, there are few uses for such a computer and scientists remain a long way from building a device that could calculate serious equations.

The Australian-led study, published on the front cover of leading journal Nature in January, shows silicon quantum computers can now be operated with better than 99 per cent accuracy.

“This has long been understood as the next big step you needed to take,” says Professor Andrea Morello of the University of NSW, who led the work.

Being 99 per cent-plus accurate seems a small achievement for a computer, but it’s a big deal in quantum because it is considered the threshold at which you could scale quantum processors into an actual computer, he says.

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U.S. Govt Spent Over $2.3 Million Injecting Puppies With Cocaine.

The National Institutes of Health spent over $2.3 million on studies that injected puppies with cocaine.

The experiment, revealed through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request filed by the White Coat Waste Project, follows previously unearthed studies funded by National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease Director Anthony Fauci that “debarked” beagle puppies.

Seven six-month-old Beagle puppies were forced to wear a drug-injecting jacket that allowed them to be dosed with cocaine again and again and again for months, along with an ‘experimental compound,’ to see how the two drugs interacted.

The year-long experiment, which began in September 2020, was filmed so research could evaluate the puppies’ adverse reactions” to the drugs. Prior to the drugs being administered, the puppies were forced to undergo surgery, where they were implanted with a “telemetry unit” to monitor their vital signs throughout the experiment.

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Researchers regrow frog’s lost leg

For millions of patients who have lost limbs for reasons ranging from diabetes to trauma, the possibility of regaining function through natural regeneration remains out of reach. Regrowth of legs and arms remains the province of salamanders and superheroes.

But in a study published in the journal Science Advances, scientists at Tufts University and Harvard University’s Wyss Institute have brought us a step closer to the goal of regenerative medicine.

On adult frogs, which are naturally unable to regenerate limbs, the researchers were able to trigger regrowth of a lost leg using a five-drug cocktail applied in a silicone wearable bioreactor dome that seals in the elixir over the stump for just 24 hours. That brief treatment sets in motion an 18-month period of regrowth that restores a functional leg.

Many creatures have the capability of full regeneration of at least some limbs, including salamanders, starfish, crabs, and lizards. Flatworms can even be cut up into pieces, with each piece reconstructing an entire organism. Humans are capable of closing wounds with new tissue growth, and our livers have a remarkable, almost flatworm-like capability of regenerating to full size after a 50% loss.

But loss of a large and structurally complex limb—an arm or leg—cannot be restored by any natural process of regeneration in humans or mammals. In fact, we tend to cover major injuries with an amorphous mass of scar tissue, protecting it from further blood loss and infection and preventing further growth.

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‘Strange Metal’ Discovered by Scientists Could Lead to Understanding of Three-Decade-Long Mystery

So-called “strange metals” do not behave in ways typical to other metals when they are heated or cooled, deviating from the usual rules of physics.Scientists have discovered a new “strange metal” with a behaviour they do not seem to understand. The moment occurred when looking into bosonic systems, where such behaviour had not been spotted before.The new research was published in Nature on Wednesday, titled “Signatures of a strange metal in a bosonic system”. The scientists discovered a never-before-seen type of metal behaviour in the system, where an electrical charge is not carried by electrons, as usual, but by so-called Cooper pairs.Cooper pairs are bosons — particular kinds of subatomic particles. Electrons are fermions, another kind of such particles.

“We have these two fundamentally different types of particles whose behaviours converge around a mystery”, Jim Valles, a professor of physics at Brown and an author of the new study, said, as cited by The Independent. “What this says is that any theory to explain strange metal behaviour can’t be specific to either type of particle. It needs to be more fundamental than that”.The new research could open the door to solving a mystery that has been troubling scientists for almost three decades, since cuprates — a class of materials that tend to behave in ways different to other metals — were discovered.These “strange materials” do not appear to display the same characteristics as other other metals when they are heated. Normally, their resistance goes up until the point when it becomes constant. Cuprates, however, do not follow these rules, and scientists are still struggling to figure out why.

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