Science

Knocking on Turing’s door: Quantum Computing and Machine Learning

Exponential compute power shrouded by decoherence and cryogenic requirements—our quest to wield quantum computers is a tale of David and the Goliath.

What does evolution make? Learning in living lineages and machines.

What is the origin of the complex, highly functional patterns of form and behavior observed in the living world? Specifically, how does the information in the genome unfold and give rise to self-constructing living organisms with problem-solving capacities implemented at all levels of organization? Here we review recent progress that unifies work in developmental genetics and machine learning, in a powerful way that goes beyond traditional mappings of genes to traits. We emphasize the discovery of deep symmetries between evolution and learning, which cast the genome as instantiating a generative model. The layer of physiological computations between genotype and phenotype provides a powerful degree of plasticity and robustness, not merely complexity and indirect mapping, which strongly impacts individual and evolutionary scale dynamics. Powerful ideas from machine learning and neuroscience now provide a versatile, quantitative formalism for understanding what evolution learns and how developmental and regenerative morphogenesis interpret the deep lessons of the past to solve new problems. This emerging understanding of the informational architecture of living material is poised to impact not only genetics and evolutionary developmental biology but also regenerative medicine and synthetic morphoengineering.

We've been wrong about math for 2300 years

A radical conceptualist take on the foundations of mathematics

Instagram

Could New Clocks Keep Airplanes Safe From GPS Jamming? - Slashdot

Geoffrey.landis writes: Over the last three months of 2024, more than 800 cases of GPS interference were recorded in Lithuanian airspace. Estonia and Finland have also raised concerns, accusing Russia of deploying technology to jam satellite navigation signals near Nato's eastern flank. A group of...

- YouTube

Enjoy the videos and music you love, upload original content, and share it all with friends, family, and the world on YouTube.

Scientists Create 'Woolly Mice' - Slashdot

EmagGeek shares a report: Scientists have genetically engineered mice with some key characteristics of an extinct animal that was far larger -- the woolly mammoth. This "woolly mouse" marks an important step toward achieving the researchers' ultimate goal -- bringing a woolly mammoth-like creature b...

World's first "Synthetic Biological Intelligence" runs on living human cells

The world's first "biological computer" that fuses human brain cells with silicon hardware to form fluid neural networks has been commercially launched, ushering in a new age of AI technology. The CL1, from Australian company Cortical Labs, offers a whole new kind of computing intelligence – one…

- YouTube

Enjoy the videos and music you love, upload original content, and share it all with friends, family, and the world on YouTube.

The Antibody That Tricks Tumors into Exposing Themselves - SynBioBeta

Scientists have developed an antibody-toxin conjugate (ATC) that forces the immune system to recognize and attack tumors, offering a new approach to cancer treatment

- YouTube

Enjoy the videos and music you love, upload original content, and share it all with friends, family, and the world on YouTube.

What's Real About Race? | Broadcast

How the Human Genome Project, which should have buried the concept of race forever, remains mired in old lies about human difference.

A single-fibre computer enables textile networks and distributed inference - Nature

A textile fibre computer combining sensing, memory, processing and communication in a 5-g mass has been developed, enabling distributed computation on the human body through garments.

- YouTube

Enjoy the videos and music you love, upload original content, and share it all with friends, family, and the world on YouTube.

Achieving kilowatt-scale elastocaloric cooling by a multi-cell architecture - Nature

An elastocaloric cooling platform is constructed based on shape memory alloys with a cellular architecture that enables cooling powers above 1 kW.

Introduction to Stochastic Calculus

A beginner-friendly introduction to stochastic calculus, focusing on intuition and calculus-based derivations instead of heavy probability theory formalism.

Teach your microscope how to print: Low-cost and rapid-iteration microfabrication for biology

The application of traditional microfabrication techniques to biological research is hindered by their reliance on clean rooms, expensive or toxic materials, and slow iteration cycles. We present an accessible microfabrication workflow that addresses these challenges by integrating consumer 3D printing techniques and repurposing standard fluorescence microscopes equipped with DMDs for maskless photolithography. Our method achieves micrometer-scale precision across centimeter-sized areas without clean room infrastructure, using affordable and readily available consumables. We demonstrate the versatility of this approach through four biological applications: inducing cytoskeletal protrusions via 1 μm-resolution surface topographies; micropatterning to standardize cell and tissue morphology; fabricating multilayer microfluidic devices for confined cell migration studies; imprinting agar chambers for long-time tracking of C. elegans . Our protocol drastically reduces material costs compared to conventional methods and enables design-to-device turnaround within a day. By leveraging open-source microscope control software and existing lab equipment, our workflow lowers the entry barrier to microfabrication, enabling labs to prototype custom solutions for diverse experimental needs while maintaining compatibility with soft lithography and downstream biological assays. ### Competing Interest Statement The authors have declared no competing interest.

x.com

Trump’s siege of science: how the first 30 days unfolded and what’s next

The breakneck pace and devastating impact of the administration’s policy changes has researchers shocked.

x.com

Microsoft’s Majorana 1 chip carves new path for quantum computing - Source

Majorana 1, the first quantum chip powered by a new Topological Core architecture

Ettore Majorana: genius and mystery – CERN Courier

Antonino Zichichi provides a dual insight into Ettore Majorana: the genius of his many contributions to physics, and the mystery that surrounds his disappearance.

- YouTube

Enjoy the videos and music you love, upload original content, and share it all with friends, family, and the world on YouTube.

Funding science is actually a badass thing to do

OR: The Three Sirens of Entropy

Emergence of opposing arrows of time in open quantum systems - Scientific Reports

Deriving an arrow of time from time-reversal symmetric microscopic dynamics is a fundamental open problem in many areas of physics, ranging from cosmology, to particle physics, to thermodynamics and statistical mechanics. Here we focus on the derivation of the arrow of time in open quantum systems and study precisely how time-reversal symmetry is broken. This derivation involves the Markov approximation applied to a system interacting with an infinite heat bath. We find that the Markov approximation does not imply a violation of time-reversal symmetry. Our results show instead that the time-reversal symmetry is maintained in the derived equations of motion. This imposes a time-symmetric formulation of quantum Brownian motion, Lindblad and Pauli master equations, which hence describe thermalisation that may occur into two opposing time directions. As a consequence, we argue that these dynamics are better described by a time-symmetric definition of Markovianity. Our results may reflect on the formulations of the arrow of time in thermodynamics, cosmology, and quantum mechanics.

x.com

The Year in Computer Science | Quanta Magazine

Researchers got a better look at chatbots’ thoughts, amateurs learned just how complicated simple systems can be, and codes became expert self-fixers.

Distributed quantum computing across an optical network link - Nature

The distribution of quantum computations is demonstrated between two photonically interconnected trapped-ion modules, using repeatable, deterministic teleported controlled-Z gates to perform Grover’s search algorithm.

Twisted Graphene Sheets Reveal 'Unconventional' Superconductivity Governed by Quantum Geometry - Slashdot

Twisting two atomically thin sheets of graphene enables "a host of exceptional properties," writes MIT News, "including unconventional superconductivity." (Which makes this graphene "a promising building block for future quantum-computing devices.") And now "We find the superfluid stiffness to b...