Lifeboat Foundation

A way to speed up quantum computer tech progress has arrived from Intel. If you are interested in following the waves and advances in quantum computing, then get familiar with this word trio: Cryogenic Wafer Prober. Before their design, the electrical characterization of qubits was slower than with traditional transistors. Even small subsets of data might take days to collect.

Drug development. Chemistry. Climate change. Financial modeling. Scientists in all areas look forward to more advancements to push quantum computers to the frontlines. Speeding progress could also mean speeding up advancements in science and industry.

“Quantum computing, in essence, is the ultimate in parallel computing, with the potential to tackle problems conventional computers can’t handle,” said Intel.

IonQ used its trapped-ion computer and a scalable co-design framework for solving chemistry problems. They applied it to compute the ground-state energy of the water molecule. The robust operation of the trapped ion quantum computer yields energy estimates with errors approaching the chemical accuracy, which is the target threshold necessary for predicting the rates of chemical reaction dynamics.

Quantum chemistry is a promising application where quantum computing might overcome the limitations of known classical algorithms, hampered by an exponential scaling of computational resource requirements. One of the most challenging tasks in quantum chemistry is to determine molecular energies to within chemical accuracy.

At the end of 2018, IonQ announced that they had loaded 79 operating qubits into their trapped ion system and had loaded 160 ions for storage in another test. This new research shows that they are making progress applying their system to useful quantum chemistry problems. They are leveraging the trapped-ions system longer stability to process many steps. The new optimization methods developed for this first major quantum chemistry problem can also be used to solve significant optimization and machine learning problems.

Continue reading “Progress Towards Using Quantum Computers for Solving Quantum Chemistry and Machine Learning” »

A new chemical process could turn about 90% of the world’s grocery bags, shrink wrap, and other polypropylene waste into clean fuel.

Grocery bags and other trash could be melted down to yield useful products like oil and gas.

The problem: The world’s landfill sites and oceans are being flooded with plastic. A mere 9% of the 8.3 billion tons of plastic produced over the last 65 years has been recycled, according to the United Nations. Over eight million tons of plastic flow into our oceans every year, harming wildlife.

Continue reading “A new chemical process could turn a quarter of our plastic waste into clean fuel” »

‘’We find selection rules driving interactions in chemistry as a result of environmental conditions; or emergent properties such as catalytic activity, self-assembly and self-replication; or even as a result of the specifics of chemical reactions.’’

Just like the mythical creation stories that depict the formation of the world as the story of order from chaos, the early Earth was home to a chaotic clutter of organic molecules from which, somehow, more complex biological structures such as RNA and DNA emerged.

There was no guiding hand to dictate how the molecules within that prebiotic clutter should interact to form life. Yet, had those molecules just interacted randomly then, in all likelihood, that they would never have chanced upon the right interactions to ultimately lead to life.

Continue reading “Cleaning up the clutter: How proto-biology arose from the prebiotic clutter” »

Researchers at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh used water collected from the Faroe-Shetland Channel and the Firth of Forth to set up their experiments. Plastics were added to the seawater and then incubated in conditions simulating the ocean’s surface. Within minutes, the minuscule pieces of plastic grouped together with bacteria, algae and other organic particles. The scientists are said to have been surprised to discover large masses of biopolymers formed the bulk of these plastic agglomerates. Team member Stephen Summers said: “This is a first step towards understanding how nanoplastics interact with natural biopolymers throughout the world’s oceans. ”This is very important, as it is at this small scale that much of the world’s biogeochemistry occurs. ”We found that the biopolymers envelope or engulf the nanoplastic particles, which caused the plastics to agglomerate into clumps. ”The nanoplastics, which are 100–200 times smaller than a bacterial cell, were actually incorporated into the agglomerates, which became visible to the naked eye in our lab experiments. ”The fact that these agglomerates become large enough to see raises concern, as they are likely to be seen as a food source by small marine animals.” We found that the biopolymers envelope or engulf the nanoplastic particles, which caused the plastics to agglomerate into clumps.

Researchers said micro and nano plastic particles mix with the bacteria secretions within minutes, forming clumps.

Continue reading “Plastics are being glued together in the ocean by bacteria, scientists find” »

#HiddenFigures #Friday Here we spotlight some of the women who revolutionized our understanding of the elements. Marie Curie is the most celebrated, for her double Nobel-prizewinning research on radioactivity and for discovering polonium and radium. Stories of other women’s roles are scarce. So, too, is an appreciation of the skills required, including tenacity and diligence in performing experiments, sifting through data and reassessing theories.

Brigitte Van Tiggelen and Annette Lykknes spotlight female researchers who discovered elements and their properties.

How much do you know about the iconic symbol of science pinned to every classroom wall?

Scientists made a ‘new’ periodic table of elements to show how smartphones (and party balloons) are draining Earth’s resources.