Unlimited Power Source Deep Inside the Earth

Scientists and engineers at Quaise Energy, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology spinoff

have made a significant breakthrough in harnessing an abundant, largely untapped energy source beneath our feet using powerful microwave-emitting drills called gyrotrons.

Many energy companies and governments are eyeing geothermal energy — produced by extracting hot water and steam in underground reservoirs heated by Earth's core to generate power — as a way to bolster intermittent energy from solar and wind power.

Diversifying energy sources is also critical to reducing the planet-warming pollution driving extreme weather, worldwide crop failures, and higher energy prices because of increased strain on the grid. A well-rounded renewable energy mix will help lower energy bills while safeguarding people from the increasing threat of natural disasters.  READ MORE...

The Cat's Paw Nebula

An illustration of 2-Methoxyethanol found in space for the first time using radio telescope observations of the star-forming region NGC 6334I. (Image credit: Fried, et al)





Scientists have discovered a hitherto unknown space molecule while investigating a relatively nearby region of intense star birth, a cosmic spot about 5,550 light-years away. It's part of the Cat's Paw Nebula, also known as NGC 6334.


The team, led by Zachary Fried, a graduate student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), examined a section of the nebula known as NGC 6334I with the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA). This revealed the presence of a complex molecule known as 2-methoxyethanol, which had never been seen before in the natural world, though its properties had been simulated in labs on Earth.     READ MORE...

Tesla Magnet Lowers Nuclear Fusion Costs

A new 20 Tesla Superconducting magnet reduces the cost per watt of a fusion reactor by a factor of almost 40. MIT worked with Commonwealth Fusion Systems, a startup with over $2 billion in funding. The funders of CFS include Temasek Holdings (Singpore), the U.S. Department of Energy, Tiger Global Management, Bill Gates, Google and Breakthrough Energy Ventures.

Commercial nuclear fusion now has a chance of being economical.

In the last few years, a newer material nicknamed REBCO, for rare-earth barium copper oxide, was added to fusion magnets, and allows them to operate at 20 kelvins, a temperature that despite being only 16 kelvins warmer, brings significant advantages in terms of material properties and practical engineering.   READ MORE...

A New Way to Clean up Air Pollution

Carbon capture — commonly thought of as the use of technology to remove carbon dioxide from the air — is a hotly debated topic.

Though the U.S. Department of Energy committed $131 million to various carbon capture projects, opponents claim that focus on carbon capture distracts from other, more effective strategies for combating our warming planet.

Now, an MIT research team may have found a way to make everybody happy: by removing carbon dioxide from the world’s oceans.

In a paper published in the journal Energy & Environmental Science, six MIT engineers have detailed a comprehensive plan for cleansing seawater of carbon dioxide.

The process utilizes two asymmetrical electrochemical cells consisting of silver and bismuth electrodes. The first cell releases protons into the water that converts to carbon dioxide that is then collected by a vacuum. The second cell then returns the seawater to a more basic state before releasing it back into the ocean, free from carbon dioxide.  READ MORE...

Trillion Frames Per Second Camera

A new camera developed at MIT can photograph a trillion frames per second.

Compare that with a traditional movie camera which takes a mere 24. This new advancement in photographic technology has given scientists the ability to photograph the movement of the fastest thing in the Universe, light.

The actual event occurred in a nano second, but the camera has the ability to slow it down to twenty seconds.

For some perspective, according to New York Times writer, John Markoff, "If a bullet were tracked in the same fashion moving through the same fluid, the resulting movie would last three years."  READ MORE...

AI Becoming More Secretive

A damning assessment of 10 key AI foundation models in a new transparency index is stoking new pressure on AI developers to share more information about their products — and on legislators and regulators to require such disclosures.

Why it matters: The Stanford, MIT and Princeton researchers who created the index say that unless AI companies are more forthcoming about the inner workings, training data and impacts of their most advanced tools, users will never be able to fully understand the risks associated with AI, and experts will never be able to mitigate them.

The big picture: Self-regulation hasn't moved the field toward transparency. In the year since ChatGPT kicked the AI market into overdrive, leading companies have become more secretive, citing competitive and safety concerns."Transparency should be a top priority for AI legislation," according to a paper the researchers published alongside their new index.

Driving the news: A Capitol Hill AI forum led by Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer Tuesday afternoon will put some of AI's biggest boosters and skeptics in the same room, as Congress works to develop AI legislation.

Details: The index measures models based on 100 transparency indicators, covering both the technical and social aspects of AI development, with only 2 of 10 models scoring more than 50% overall.

All 10 models had major transparency holes, and the mean score for the models is 37 out of 100. "None release information about the real-world impact of their systems," one of the co-authors, Kevin Klyman, told Axios.

Because 82 of the 100 criteria are met by at least one developer, the index authors say there are dozens of options for developers to copy or build on the work of their competitors to improve their own transparency.

The researchers urge policymakers to develop precise definitions of transparency requirements,. They advise large customers of AI companies to push for more transparency during contract negotiations — or partner with their peers to "to increase their collective bargaining power."  READ MORE...

Boosting Quantum Devices

MIT physicists, inspired by noise-canceling headphones, have advanced the coherence time of quantum bits by 20-fold, marking significant progress for quantum computing. The team used an “unbalanced echo” technique to counteract system noise, and they believe further improvements are possible. This breakthrough has vast potential, from quantum sensors in biology to advancements in quantum memory.



MIT researchers develop a protocol to extend the life of quantum coherence.

For years, researchers have tried various ways to coax quantum bits — or qubits, the basic building blocks of quantum computers — to remain in their quantum state for ever-longer times, a key step in creating devices like quantum sensors, gyroscopes, and memories.

A team of physicists from MIT have taken an important step forward in that quest, and to do it, they borrowed a concept from an unlikely source — noise-canceling headphones.


Led by Ju Li, the Battelle Energy Alliance Professor in Nuclear Engineering and professor of materials science and engineering, and Paola Cappellaro, the Ford Professor of Engineering in the Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering and Research Laboratory of Electronics, and a professor of physics, the team described a method to achieve a 20-fold increase in the coherence times for nuclear-spin qubits. 

The work is described in a paper published in Physical Review Letters. The first author of the study is Guoqing Wang PhD ’23, a recent doctoral student in Cappellaro’s lab who is now a postdoc at MIT.


“This is one of the main problems in quantum information,” Li says. “Nuclear spin (ensembles) are very attractive platforms for quantum sensors, gyroscopes, and quantum memory, (but) they have coherence times on the order of 150 microseconds in the presence of electronic spins … and then the information just disappears. 

What we have shown is that, if we can understand the interactions, or the noise, in these systems, we can actually do much better.”  READ MORE...

Tougher Than Kevlar

Numerous scientists aspire to unlock the remarkable capability of spiders to spin silk threads that are immensely strong, lightweight, and flexible. In fact, pound for pound, spider silk is stronger than steel and tougher than Kevlar. However, no one has been able to replicate the spiders’ work yet.

If we ever manage to develop a synthetic equivalent with these characteristics, a whole new world of possibilities may open: Artificial spider silk could replace materials like Kevlar, polyester, and carbon fiber in industries and be used, for example, to make lightweight and flexible bulletproof vests.

Postdoc and biophysicist Irina Iachina from the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, University of Southern Denmark (SDU), is involved in this race to uncover the recipe for super silk.

She has been fascinated by spider silk since her time as a master’s student at SDU, and currently, she is researching the topic at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Boston with support from the Villum Foundation.

As part of her research, she is collaborating with associate professor and biophysicist Jonathan Brewer at SDU, who is an expert in using various types of microscopes to peer into biological structures.

Together, they have now, for the first time, studied the internal parts of spider silk using an optical microscope without cutting or opening the silk in any way. This work has now been published in the journals Scientific Reports and Scanning.

“We have used several advanced microscopy techniques, and we have also developed a new kind of optical microscope that allows us to look all the way into a piece of fiber and see what’s inside,” explains Jonathan Brewer.  READ MORE...

Turning Concrete into a Energy-Storing Supercapacitor

What if you could turn concrete into a viable and effective energy storage option? While that might seem a bit out-of-this-world, that’s exactly what MIT researchers have managed to do, according to reports from New Atlas. A paper on the new concrete supercapacitor is also available in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

According to this research, MIT researchers were able to take an idea from 2021 – which said that you could store useful amounts of energy in concrete – and scale it up effectively by simply adding a single additive to the concrete mix. The mixture thus became a combination of concrete, water, and carbon black.

When combined, the three components allowed the researchers to create an energy-storing concrete supercapacitor that was easy to scale up, with it only requiring a change from “1-millimeter-thick electrodes to 1-meter-thick electrodes” to go from powering simple things like LED lights to full-blown buildings and homes.

Further, because many homes are already built on concrete foundations, it’s a system that should be able to easily scale up and at the least negate some of the cost of the power consumption that homeowners are already undertaking through normal electricity bills.

It’s an intriguing idea and one that bodes well for the future of building and architecture, especially given that the researchers say a 1,589-cu-ft block of the concrete supercapacitor would be capable of storing up to 10kWh of electricity, roughly a third of the energy needed to power a home.

From there, it could also be paired with next-generation solar panels, and since concrete is available everywhere, it wouldn’t be hard to incorporate it more widely. However, it’s unclear at the moment just how effective this type of concrete would be outside, where it could get wet, so the experiment certainly requires some more thought and testing before widespread use.   READ MORE...

Link Between Math & Genes

Researchers have discovered an unexpected link between number theory in mathematics and genetics, providing critical insight into the nature of neutral mutations and the evolution of organisms. The team found the maximal robustness of mutations—mutations that can occur without changing an organism’s characteristics—is proportional to the logarithm of all possible sequences that map to a phenotype, with a correction provided by the sums-of-digits function from number theory.


An interdisciplinary team of mathematicians, engineers, physicists, and medical scientists has discovered a surprising connection between pure mathematics and genetics. ThAnd yet, again and again, number theory finds unexpected applications in science and engineering, from leaf angles that (almost) universally follow the Fibonacci sequence, to modern encryption techniques based on factoring prime numbers. Now, researchers have demonstrated an unexpected link between number theory and evolutionary genetics.

Specifically, the team of researchers (from Oxford, Harvard, Cambridge, GUST, MIT, Imperial, and the Alan Turing Institute) have discovered a deep connection between the sums-of-digits function from number theory and a key quantity in genetics, the phenotype mutational robustness. This quality is defined as the average probability that a point mutation does not change a phenotype (a characteristic of an organism).

The discovery may have important implications for evolutionary genetics. Many genetic mutations are neutral, meaning that they can slowly accumulate over time without affecting the viability of the phenotype. These neutral mutations cause genome sequences to change at a steady rate over time. Because this rate is known, scientists can compare the percentage difference in the sequence between two organisms and infer when their latest common ancestor lived.is connection sheds light on the structure of neutral mutations and the evolution of organisms.

Number theory, the study of the properties of positive integers, is perhaps the purest form of mathematics. At first sight, it may seem far too abstract to apply to the natural world. In fact, the influential American number theorist Leonard Dickson wrote “Thank God that number theory is unsullied by any application.”     READ MORE...

Robots For Home Motion & Planning

Why aren’t there more robots in homes? This a surprising complex question — and our homes are surprisingly complex places. A big part of the reason autonomous systems are thriving on warehouse and factory floors first is the relative ease of navigating a structured environment. Sure, most systems still require a space be mapped prior to getting to work, but once that’s in place there tends to be little in the way of variation.

Homes, on the other hand, are kind of a nightmare. Not only do they vary dramatically from unit to unit, they’re full of unfriendly obstacles and tend to be fairly dynamic, as furniture is moved around or things are left on the floor. Vacuums are the most prevalent robots in the home, and they’re still being refined after decades on the market.

This week, researchers at MIT CSAIL are showcasing PIGINet (Plans, Images, Goal, and Initial facts), which is designed to bring task and motion planning to home robotic systems. The neural network is designed to help streamline their ability to create plans of action in different environments.

MIT explains PIGINet thusly:
[I]t employs a transformer encoder, a versatile and state-of-the-art model designed to operate on data sequences. The input sequence, in this case, is information about which task plan it is considering, images of the environment, and symbolic encodings of the initial state and the desired goal. The encoder combines the task plans, image, and text to generate a prediction regarding the feasibility of the selected task plan.

The system is largely focused on kitchen-based activities at present. It draws on simulated home environments to build plans that require interactions with various different elements of the environment, like counters, cabinets, the fridge, sinks, etc. The researchers say that in simpler scenarios, PIGINet was able to reduce planning time by 80%. For more complex situations, that number was generally around 20-50%.

The team suggests that houses are just the start.  READ MORE...

Rewriting Laws of the Universe

When we look out at the night sky across vast, cosmic distances using our most sensitive and advanced telescopes, we look back in time. Einstein taught us that light has a finite speed; therefore, it takes light longer to travel to us the further one looks.

Thanks to this, cosmologists have been able to see light dating back to about 14 billion years ago. This light reveals something spectacular and mysterious – the Universe is filled with a sea of energy, waves of tangled electrons and photons in the form of a hot fluid, known as a plasma. We call this plasma the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB).

We cosmologists have precise theoretical and observational evidence that this plasma underwent gravitational collapse with the aid of an invisible form of matter, called dark matter, forming the first stars and eventually forming the organised superstructure that inhabits the current Universe.

However, a mystery still lurked: the properties of this sea of energy seem to originate from what Einstein called “spooky action-at-a-distance” - objects communicating with each other at instantaneous speeds across ridiculously large distances. This is known as the horizon problem.

In 1981, my colleague, Alan Guth of MIT, proposed an elegant solution to this problem. The idea was to introduce a new player called the inflation field that filled the Universe, and whose energy caused space to expand extremely rapidly. The repulsion that arises due to gravitational effects caused by inflation neatly solves the horizon problem – it makes those regions that we thought to be spookily interacting subject to the weird, but well-confirmed, laws of quantum physics.

The theory of cosmic inflation also provided us with a physical mechanism that answers a question that had long troubled cosmologists: how did the seeds of structure originate in a seemingly featureless primordial Universe over 14 billion years ago?  READ MORE...

Saturn's Missing Moon

Scientists propose a lost moon of Saturn, which they call Chrysalis, pulled on the planet until it ripped apart, forming rings and contributing to Saturn’s tilt. This natural color view of Saturn was created by combining six images captured by NASA’s Cassini spacecraft on May 6, 2012. It features Saturn’s huge moon Titan, which is larger than the planet Mercury. Below Titan are the shadows cast by Saturn’s rings. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute




According to a new study, a “grazing encounter” may have smashed the moon to bits to form Saturn’s rings.

Swirling around the planet’s equator, the rings of Saturn are an obvious indicator that the planet is spinning at a tilt. The belted gas giant rotates at a 26.7-degree angle relative to the plane in which it orbits the sun. Because Saturn’s tilt precesses, like a spinning top, at nearly the same rate as the orbit of its neighbor Neptune, astronomers have long suspected that this tilt comes from gravitational interactions with Neptune.

However, a new modeling study by astronomers at MIT and elsewhere has found that, while the two planets may have once been in sync, Saturn has since escaped Neptune’s pull. What was responsible for this planetary realignment? The research team has one meticulously tested hypothesis: a missing moon. Their study was published in the journal Science on September 15.  READ MORE...

Ultrasound Stickers See Inside the Body

MIT engineers designed an adhesive patch that produces ultrasound images of the body. The stamp-sized device sticks to skin and can provide continuous ultrasound imaging of internal organs for 48 hours. Credit: Felice Frankel



New stamp-sized ultrasound adhesives deliver clear images of the heart, lungs, and other internal organs.

When clinicians need live images of a patient’s internal organs, they often turn to ultrasound imaging for a safe and noninvasive window into the body’s workings. In order to capture these insightful images, trained technicians manipulate ultrasound wands and probes to direct sound waves into the body. These waves reflect back out and are used to produce high-resolution images of a patient’s heart, lungs, and other deep organs.

Ultrasound imaging currently requires bulky and specialized equipment available only in hospitals and doctor’s offices. However, a new design developed by MIT engineers might make the technology as wearable and accessible as buying Band-Aids at the drugstore.

The engineers presented the design for the new ultrasound sticker in a paper published on July 28 in the journal Science. The stamp-sized device sticks to skin and can provide continuous ultrasound imaging of internal organs for 48 hours.

To demonstrate the invention, the researchers applied the stickers to volunteers. They showed the devices produced live, high-resolution images of major blood vessels and deeper organs such as the heart, lungs, and stomach. As the volunteers performed various activities, including sitting, standing, jogging, and biking, the stickers maintained a strong adhesion and continued to capture changes in underlying organs.

In the current design, the stickers must be connected to instruments that translate the reflected sound waves into images. According to the researchers, the stickers could have immediate applications even in their current form. 

For example, the devices could be applied to patients in the hospital, similar to heart-monitoring EKG stickers, and could continuously image internal organs without requiring a technician to hold a probe in place for long periods of time.  READ MORE...

A Semiconductor Better Than Silicon

MIT researchers say cubic boron arsenide is the best semiconductor material ever found, and 

maybe the best possible one. Credit: Christine Daniloff, MIT

Researchers from MIT and elsewhere have found a material that can perform much better than silicon. The next step is finding practical and economic ways to manufacture it.

Silicon is one of the most plentiful elements on Earth, and in its pure form, the semiconductor material has become the foundation of much of modern technology, including microelectronic computer chips and solar cells. However, silicon’s properties as a semiconductor are actually far from ideal.

One reason is that although silicon allows electrons to readily flow through its structure, it is much less accommodating to “holes” — electrons’ positively charged counterparts —and harnessing both is crucial for particular types of devices. 

Furthermore, silicon does a poor job of transporting heat, which contributes to the frequent overheating problems and pricey cooling systems in computers.

Now, a team of scientists from MIT, the University of Houston, and other institutions has carried out experiments showing that a material called cubic boron arsenide overcomes both of these limitations. 

In addition to providing high mobility to both electrons and holes, it has excellent thermal conductivity. It is the best semiconductor material ever found, and maybe the best possible one, according to the researchers.

Cubic boron arsenide has so far only been made and tested in small, lab-scale batches that are not uniform. In fact, in order to test small regions within the material, the scientists had to use special methods originally developed by former MIT postdoc Bai Song. 

More work will be needed to determine whether cubic boron arsenide can be made in a practical, economical form, much less replace the ubiquitous silicon. But even in the near future, the researchers say, the material could find some uses where its unique properties would make a significant difference.  READ MORE...

MIT: Building with Biology

Ritu Raman leads the Raman Lab, where she creates adaptive biological materials for applications in medicine and machines.

It seems that Ritu Raman was born with an aptitude for engineering. You may say it is in her blood since her mother is a chemical engineer, her father is a mechanical engineer, and her grandfather is a civil engineer. Throughout her childhood, she repeatedly witnessed firsthand the beneficial impact that engineering careers could have on communities. 

In fact, watching her parents build communication towers to connect the rural villages of Kenya to the global infrastructure is one of her earliest memories. She still vividly remembers the excitement she felt watching the emergence of a physical manifestation of innovation that would have a long-lasting positive impact on the community.

Raman is “a mechanical engineer through and through,” as she puts it. She earned her BS, MS, and PhD in mechanical engineering. Her postdoctoral work at MIT was supported by a L’Oréal USA for Women in Science Fellowship and a Ford Foundation Fellowship from the National Academies of Sciences Engineering and Medicine.

Today, Ritu Raman leads the Raman Lab and is an assistant professor in MIT’s Department of Mechanical Engineering. However, she is not constrained by traditional ideas of what mechanical engineers should be building or the materials typically associated with the field.

 “As a mechanical engineer, I’ve pushed back against the idea that people in my field only build cars and rockets from metals, polymers, and ceramics. I’m interested in building with biology, with living cells,” she says.  READ MORE...

The Revolutionary World of Quantum Computers

The inside of an IBM System One quantum computer.  Bryan Walsh/Vox

A few weeks ago, I woke up unusually early in the morning in Brooklyn, got in my car, and headed up the Hudson River to the small Westchester County community of Yorktown Heights. There, amid the rolling hills and old farmhouses, sits the Thomas J. Watson Research Center, the Eero Saarinen-designed, 1960s Jet Age-era headquarters for IBM Research.

Deep inside that building, through endless corridors and security gates guarded by iris scanners, is where the company’s scientists are hard at work developing what IBM director of research Dario Gil told me is “the next branch of computing”: quantum computers.

I was at the Watson Center to preview IBM’s updated technical roadmap for achieving large-scale, practical quantum computing. This involved a great deal of talk about “qubit count,” “quantum coherence,” “error mitigation,” “software orchestration” and other topics you’d need to be an electrical engineer with a background in computer science and a familiarity with quantum mechanics to fully follow.

I am not any of those things, but I have watched the quantum computing space long enough to know that the work being done here by IBM researchers — along with their competitors at companies like Google and Microsoft, along with countless startups around the world — stands to drive the next great leap in computing. Which, given that computing is a “horizontal technology that touches everything,” as Gil told me, will have major implications for progress in everything from cybersecurity to artificial intelligence to designing better batteries.

Provided, of course, they can actually make these things work.

Entering the quantum realm
The best way to understand a quantum computer — short of setting aside several years for grad school at MIT or Caltech — is to compare it to the kind of machine I’m typing this piece on: a classical computer.

My MacBook Air runs on an M1 chip, which is packed with 16 billion transistors. Each of those transistors can represent either the “1” or “0” of binary information at a single time — a bit. The sheer number of transistors is what gives the machine its computing power.

Sixteen billion transistors packed onto a 120.5 sq. mm chip is a lot — TRADIC, the first transistorized computer, had fewer than 800. The semiconductor industry’s ability to engineer ever more transistors onto a chip, a trend forecast by Intel co-founder Gordon Moore in the law that bears his name, is what has made possible the exponential growth of computing power, which in turn has made possible pretty much everything else.  READ MORE...

Good Gut Bacteria

Researchers of synthetic biology based at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the US have devised a system to protect the gut microbiome from the effects of antibiotics.

The new study, published in Nature Biomedical Engineering, reports on the successful use in mice of a “live biotherapeutic” – a genetically engineered bacterium that produces an enzyme which breaks down antibiotics in the gut.

“This work shows that synthetic biology can be harnessed to create a new class of engineered therapeutics for reducing the adverse effects of antibiotics,” says MIT professor James Collins, the paper’s senior author.
The dark side of antibiotics

Antibiotics – substances that kill or inhibit the growth of bacteria – are hugely important in fighting bacterial infections.

But there’s a dark side to antibiotics too. Increasing human use of antibiotics has contributed to the rise of antibiotic resistance, which has made many bacterial diseases increasingly difficult to successfully treat.

Antibiotic treatment can also kill off bacteria in our resident healthy gut microbiome – the trillions of microbes that live in our gastrointestinal tract and assist with food digestion, immune development and vitamin synthesis.

This causes two problems: firstly, we can lose the benefits provided by our good bacteria; and secondly, this disruption can tip the balance of the microbial ecosystem towards species that cause harm.

In some cases, these indiscriminate effects of antibiotics can have life-threatening consequences. In the US, about 15,000 deaths each year are attributed to diarrhoea and colitis (inflammation of the colon) caused by overgrowth of the bacterium Clostridium difficile following antibiotic overuse.

So, while antibiotics are an important and necessary tool to fight bacterial infections, working to limit antibiotic resistance and damage to the gut microbiome are key priorities for research.  READ MORE...

Aircraft Without Moving Parts

As a kid, steven barrett, an associate professor of aeronautics and astronautics at MIT, would watch the movie and tv series ‘star trek’ during his free time. his young eyes would gaze upon the shuttle crafts, so futuristic and dystopian that they would glide through the horizon at a lightning speed. barrett noticed how these space crafts seemed frameless, bare of their moving parts such as the propellers, and noiseless. such an observation still influences him today to the extent that he thinks, in the long-term future, planes should be stripped of their turbines and propellers to be more like the shuttle crafts of ‘star trek’ in their glowing light. at MIT, the professor did just that.

MIT engineers, led by barrett, have introduced the world’s first plan without moving parts, bare from any propellers and turbines. the lightweight aircraft relies on an ‘ionic wind’, or the abundant flow of ions produced aboard the plane that generates enough force to thrust the plane over a steady and sustained flight. through this concept and design, the plane ditches the use of fossil fuels, an element that adds to its silent glide.

As the professor spoke to the university’s official news site, he describes how the plane is the first-ever sustained flight with no moving parts in the propulsion system. ‘this has potentially opened new and unexplored possibilities for aircraft which are quieter, mechanically simpler, and do not emit combustion emissions.’ the design weighs about five pounds and has a five-meter wingspan attached to thin wires resembling fences. these wires act as positively charged electrodes, while similarly arranged thicker wires, running along the back end of the plane’s wing, serve as negative electrodes.

The fuselage of the plane holds a stack of lithium-polymer batteries. barrett’s ion plane team included members of professor david perreault’s power electronics research group in the research laboratory of electronics, who designed a power supply that would convert the batteries’ output to a sufficiently high voltage to propel the plane. in this way, the batteries supply electricity at 40,000 volts to positively charge the wires via a lightweight power converter.  READ MORE...

New programming Language

While the nascent field of quantum computing can feel flashy and futuristic, quantum computers have the potential for computational breakthroughs in classically unsolvable tasks, like cryptographic and communication protocols, search, and computational physics and chemistry. Photo: Graham Carlow/IBM


Programming quantum computers require awareness of entanglement, the phenomenon in which measurement outcomes of qubits are correlated. Entanglement can determine the correctness of algorithms and the suitability of programming patterns.

Entangled qubits give rise to Einstein’s characterization of “spooky action at a distance.” But that potency is equal parts a source of weakness. While programming, discarding one qubit without being aware of its entanglement with one more qubit can obliterate the information put away in the other, endangering the accuracy of the program.

MIT scientists have created their programming language for quantum computing. This new language, called Twist, can describe and verify which pieces of data are entangled in a quantum program.

To create this new language, scientists used a concept called Purity. It enforces the absence of entanglement and results in more intuitive programs, with ideally fewer bugs.

Charles Yuan, an MIT Ph.D. student in electrical engineering and computer science and the lead author of a new paper about Twist, said, “Our language Twist allows a developer to write safer quantum programs by explicitly stating when a qubit must not be entangled with another. Because understanding quantum programs requires understanding entanglement, we hope that Twist paves the way to languages that make the unique challenges of quantum computing more accessible to programmers.”  READ MORE...