Self-Healing chips for long space travels

A far better approach, argues Moon, is to let the devices suffer damage but then to add a an extra contact to the transistors, and use this contact to heal the devices with heating.

Sources

Self-Healing Transistors for Chip-Scale Starships - IEEE Spectrum
2016 IEEE International Electron Devices Meeting (IEDM) 2016 IEEE International Electron Devices Meeting (IEDM)

Satellite for quantum communications

Qbits in orbit...

The technology on board China's new satellite is simple in design and almost magical in operation. A special crystal divides a laser into two beams that are then directed to independent receiving stations on Earth. These beams share a property of quantum mechanics known as entanglement, which links them together even when they are far apart. Actions performed on one beam will also affect the other beam.

Sources

China's quantum satellite could make data breaches a thing of the past

The best practices on AI

Established to study and formulate best practices on AI technologies, to advance the public’s understanding of AI, and to serve as an open platform for discussion and engagement about AI and its influences on people and society.

Sources

Home | Partnership on Artificial Intelligence to Benefit People and Society

Google, Facebook, Microsoft team up to clear the air about AI

10bits for each photon...

New research provides encoding technique for transport 10 bits of informatino into a photon.

Encoding information in the position of single photons has no known limits, given infinite resources. Using a heralded single-photon source and a Spatial Light Modulator (SLM), we steer single photons to specific positions in a virtual grid on a large-area spatially resolving photon-counting detector (ICCD).

Sources

[1609.04200] Transmitting more than 10 bit with a single photon

Single Photon Carries 10 Bits of Information

Soft robots

“Through our hybrid assembly approach, we were able to 3-D print each of the functional components required within the soft robot body, including the fuel storage, power, and actuation, in a rapid manner,” said Lewis. “The octobot is a simple embodiment designed to demonstrate our integrated design and additive fabrication strategy for embedding autonomous functionality.”

Sources

The first autonomous, entirely soft robot | Harvard Gazette

Public access to scientific data of NASA

The NASA agency provides new services for public access to scientific data.

NASA has developed an agency plan, and associated policy, outlining a framework for activities to increase public access to scientific publications and digital scientific data resulting from NASA-funded research.

Sources
Public Access to Results of NASA-Funded Research | NASA

The Cyber Grand Challenge (DARPA)

This DARPA Cyber show is about impresive computer power and technical skill on different data and communications patterns. CPU vs CPU... but the bugs come from 'human designed' protocols and systems...

The Cyber Grand Challenge featured never-before-seen autonomous systems and highly trained experts, many of whom compete regularly on a global “Capture the Flag” tournament circuit. 

Sources

DARPA | Cyber Grand Challenge
Watch AI hack into AI at DARPA's Cyber Grand Challenge

Connected to the Cosmos

The new protocol designed by NASA could provide a better 'transport layer' for 'cosmical' nodes...

This month, NASA took a major step toward creating a Solar System Internet by establishing operational Delay/Disruption Tolerant Networking (DTN) service on the International Space Station. The DTN service will help automate and improve data availability for space station experimenters and will result in more efficient bandwidth utilization and more data return. 

Sources
Solar System Internet Technology Debuts on the International Space Station
ISS installs networking tech that may soon connect the whole Solar System | TechCrunch

New research for easy program quantum systems

The demonstration of digitized adiabatic quantum computing in the solid state opens a path to synthesizing long-range correlations and solving complex computational problems. When combined with fault-tolerance, our approach becomes a general-purpose algorithm that is scalable.

Sources

Digitized adiabatic quantum computing with a superconducting circuit : Nature : Nature Research
Google Reports Progress on a Shortcut to Quantum Supremacy
Google moves closer to a universal quantum computer : Nature News & Comment

Program and learn Quantum computing...

IBM has a new website to learn a use Quantum algorithms in real quantum computer...

• Qbit
• Bloch sphere
• Excited states and Pauli operators... 
• Q-gate operators
• Superposition
• Decoherence
• GHZ states (Cat states)

... a lot of more... 

Sources

IBM Inches Ahead of Google in Race for Quantum Computing Power

IBM Research Quantum Experience

Portable on-demand pharmaceutical factory

Bad news for 'pharmaceutical mafias'...
... god news for human health...

No more need big lab-factories... a 'refrigerator-sized' machine could produce medicament...

Continuous end-to-end synthesis in the refrigerator-sized [1.0 meter (width) × 0.7 meter (length) × 1.8 meter (height)] system produces sufficient quantities per day to supply hundreds to thousands of oral or topical liquid doses of diphenhydramine hydrochloride, lidocaine hydrochloride, diazepam, and fluoxetine hydrochloride that meet U.S. Pharmacopeia standards. 

 Sources

On-demand continuous-flow production of pharmaceuticals in a compact, reconfigurable system | Science

Scalable neurosynapitic computer chips

The neurosynapitic IBM chip now could be scalable...

Based on a breakthrough neurosynaptic computer chip called IBM TrueNorth, the scalable platform will process the equivalent of 16 million neurons and 4 billion synapses and consume the energy equivalent of a tablet computer – a mere 2.5 watts of power for the 16 TrueNorth chips. 

Sources

IBM News room - 2016-03-29 Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and IBM Collaborate to Build Brain-Inspired Supercomputer - United States

W3C HTML 5.1 draft

This specification defines the 5th major version, first minor revision of the core language of the World Wide Web: the Hypertext Markup Language (HTML). In this version, new features continue to be introduced to help Web application authors, new elements continue to be introduced based on research into prevailing authoring practices, and special attention continues to be given to defining clear conformance criteria for user agents in an effort to improve interoperability.

 Sources
HTML 5.1

Open Connectivity Foundation (IoT group)

.. a substitute for "Open Interconnect Consortium"...

an entity whose goal will be to help unify IoT standards so that companies and developers can create IoT solutions and devices that work seamlessly together. Via cross-industry collaboration, the OCF will work towards unlocking the massive opportunity of the future global IoT segment, accelerate industry innovation and help all developers and companies create solutions that map to a single, open IoT interoperability specification. Ultimately, with OCF specifications, protocols and open source projects, a wide-range of consumer, enterprise and embedded devices and sensors from a variety of manufacturers, can securely and seamlessly interact with one another.

 Sources
OPEN CONNECTIVITY FOUNDATION (OCF)

OCF - Open Connectivity Foundation Brings Massive Scale to IoT Ecosystem

Future of Humanity Institute... (by humans in Oxford)

Thinking about the future... and human priorities.

The Future of Humanity Institute is a multidisciplinary research institute at the University of Oxford. Based in the Faculty of Philosophy, it enables leading researchers to bring the tools of mathematics, philosophy, and science to bear on big-picture questions about humanity and its prospects.

Sources
Future of Humanity Institute | University of Oxford

The Global Priorities Project | Prioritisation and policy research

Laser for communicate with satellites

New laser relay technology for satellite communications... up to 1.8 Gbit/s.

The European Data Relay System’s first laser terminal has reached space aboard its host satellite and is now under way to its final operating position.

Sources

First SpaceDataHighway laser relay in orbit / Telecommunications & Integrated Applications / Our Activities / ESA

Telecommunications & Integrated Applications / Our Activities / ESA