DTN 126: Deep Sea Desalination

Plus: Taiwan’s weakening silicon shield, mind-reading brain implants, San Francisco's robot fight club, inside NVIDIA's research lab, and more.

“The competition is really about changing the conversation from ‘quantum computers will eventually solve everything’ to ‘here’s exactly how quantum computers can solve this specific important problem, and here’s what we need to build to make it happen.’”

“From Cape Town to Tehran to Lima to Phoenix, dozens of cities across the globe have experienced water shortages recently. And in the next five years the world’s demand for fresh water could significantly outpace supply, according to a United Nations forecast. Now several companies are turning to an unexpected source for a solution: the bottom of the ocean.”

Screenshot of the video demo that showcases new AI-powered tool of potential use in quantum computers

A research team created a cartoon video of Schrödinger’s cat to illustrate a breakthrough system for rapidly rearranging thousands of atoms, a critical step toward building quantum computers, which rely on qubits for their computational power. In the video, each yellow dot represents one of 549 rubidium atoms being precisely moved within an array just 230 microns wide. The atoms fluoresce in response to a laser, allowing their positions to be tracked in real time. To efficiently guide the atoms to their target locations, the researchers developed an AI model that calculates the optimal laser path on the fly. The process is extremely fast—the video is slowed down by a factor of 33—and highly scalable: the system currently handles up to 2,024 atoms, with the potential to scale to thousands more. (via Science) 

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