Category Archives: Science

Science

Non-Running Quantum Program Gives Answer

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From the “my brain hurts” department..

New Scientist magazine is reporting that:

[..] researchers from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign have improved on the original design and built a non-running quantum computer that really works

Yes, you read that correctly.. they’ve built a quantum computer that doesn’t do anything but provides the correct answer.

This is from something called the Zeno Effect that has been exploited here to allow a photon to be influenced on a quantum level with a non-operational quantum computing program, but (through the constant measurement inherent in the Zeno Effect) not be allowed to actually execute the program. Through this influence the answer appears, even though you’ve never run the program.

One of the developers said:

“It is very bizarre that you know your computer has not run but you also know what the answer is,”

and

“A non-running computer produces fewer errors,”

I couldn’t put it better myself! 😎

Computer Aided Heart Surgery

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This is pretty amazing, an imaging system linked to robotic surgical instruments have been developed that compensates for the beating of the heart possibly allowing surgeons to operate without having to stop or slow it during an operation.

Whilst they’ve only tested it on an artificial silicone heart the fact that this could end the trauma of open heart surgery and removing the need to break open the patients chest sounds wonderful. I’d speculate that this would reduce the risk to people from such surgery significantly…

Pioneer 10: Last Chance to Phone Home

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Pioneer 10 (c) NASA

Just listening to a podcast of the Planetary Society where they were talking to John Anderson (Senior Research Scientist, JPL) about their research in to the Pioneer Anomaly and he mentioned that the last possible chance to communicate with Pioneer 10 will be coming up around the 4th March this year.

To give you an idea of the difficulties they face, they will be trying to detect a signal strength of around 8 watts coming from a craft 3 times as far away as Pluto is from us. Imagine having to first of all turn on a lightbulb 90 times as far away as the Sun by sending a signal, waiting over 12 hours for it to get there and (hopefully) start transmitting back and then waiting another 12 and a bit hours for that signal to come back to Earth and then try and catch it!

If the Deep Space Network does come onboard for this, and it works, then this will be the final icing on the cake for the Pioneer Anomaly team as that’ll be yet more red shift information to add to the the almost 40GB of data they’ve recovered from both the Pioneer 10 and 11 missions.