Enlarge (credit: Donald Jorgensen | Pacific Northwest National Laboratory ) Quantum computing has come on in leaps and bounds in the last few years. Indeed, once the big technology companies like IBM, Microsoft, and Google started showing an interest, I kind of stopped keeping track. Nevertheless, research on the basic elements of quantum computing continues […]
Enlarge / The three-dimensional structures of proteins provide many opportunities for specific interactions. (credit: Getty Images) Thanks in part to the large range of shapes they can adopt and the chemical environments those shapes create, proteins can perform an amazing number of functions. But there are many proteins we wish didn’t function quite so well, […]
Enlarge / Plasma inside the tokamak at the EPFL. (credit: EPFL) As the world waits for construction of the largest fusion reactor yet, called ITER, smaller reactors with similar designs are still running. These reactors, called tokamaks, help us test both hardware and software. The hardware testing helps us refine things like the materials used […]
Enlarge (credit: Getty Images ) Training AIs remains very processor-intensive, in part because traditional processing architectures are poor matches for the sorts of neural networks that are widely used. This has led to the development of what has been termed neuromorphic computing hardware, which attempts to model the behavior of biological neurons in hardware. But […]
Enlarge (credit: Getty | Joe Amon) Misinformation about the pandemic and the health measures that are effective against SARS-CoV-2 has been a significant problem in the US. It’s led to organized resistance against everything from mask use to vaccines and has undoubtedly ended up killing people. Plenty of factors have contributed to this surge of […]
Enlarge / The Aspen-M 40-qubit chip and its housing. (credit: Rigetti) On Wednesday, quantum computing startup Rigetti announced a number of interesting hardware developments. To begin with, its users would now have access to its next-generation chip, called Apsen-M, with 40 qubits and improved performance. While that’s well below the qubit count achieved by IBM, […]
Enlarge / Google’s Sycamore processor. (credit: Google) Recently, when researchers were testing error correction on Google’s quantum processor, they noted an odd phenomenon where the whole error-correction scheme would sporadically fail badly. They chalked this up to background radiation, a combination of cosmic rays and the occasional decay of a naturally occurring radioactive isotope. It […]
Enlarge / Given the right data, a neural network can infer what radar maps would have looked like, were they available. (credit: NOAA/CIMSS. ) It’s become increasingly clear that quantum computers won’t possess a single moment when they become clearly superior to classical hardware. Instead, we’re likely to see them becoming useful for a narrow […]
Enlarge / Top row: the hallucination and actual structure. Bottom row: the two structures superimposed. (credit: Anishchenko et. al.) Chemically, proteins are just a long string of amino acids. Their amazing properties come about because that chain can fold up into a complex, three-dimensional shape. So understanding the rules that govern this folding can not […]
Enlarge / The crescent-shaped balls of cells would travel in circles, piling up cells that could grow into mobile clusters. (credit: Sam Kriegman and Douglas Blackiston) Scientists on Monday announced that they’d optimized a way of getting mobile clusters of cells to organize other cells into smaller clusters that, under the right conditions, could be […]