Month: November 2018

Enlarge / Whatever format quantum memory takes, it's not going to look like this. (credit: Matthew Dillon)

I’m a simple person. To me, a computer consists of three parts: data that goes in and out, operations that modify the data, and storage that holds the data. It is no different for quantum computing, though all three parts of the solution are still undefined: no one is exactly sure of what medium is best to represent and transport data. Different ways to encode operations are being fought over.

We're probably the furthest from having a solution when it comes to memory. But a new laser-hammer approach to storing qubits might be a step forward.

Screwdrivers for atomic physicists

In a quantum network, quantum information (or qubits) will be transported using light—single photons of light hold a qubit. But that means you also need a way to store photons, which are famous for moving very fast. One option is to store the qubit in the quantum state of a very cold gas; this works, provided you can emit the qubit as a photon later on.

Enlarge / An opium poppy field in Afghanistan. (credit: United Nations)

After she admitted swallowing 30 packs of opium, a 51-year-old woman was brought to a hospital emergency room in Tehran, the New England Journal of Medicine reported yesterday. When a CT scan confirmed the presence of several small oval objects in her abdomen, the doctors gave her laxatives. She passed a collection of small, sausage-like opium packs “without complication,” report doctors Nasim Zamani and Hossein Hassanian-Moghaddam.

One of those packs was sent for lab analysis, and results came back confirming opium and also the presence of lead—a lot of lead. Luckily for this particular patient, she didn’t seem to be showing any symptoms of lead poisoning, but she appears to have gotten off lightly. Over the past few years, the problem of lead-contaminated opium has become increasingly urgent in Iran, which is used as a major pathway for opium trafficking from Afghanistan.

In early 2016, write Zamani and Hassanian-Moghaddam in a CDC report, another patient case report found blood lead levels 14 times higher than normal. The patient in question didn’t have any obvious exposure to lead but was known to use oral opium. That prompted tracking of another 800 patients over the next few months, whose blood lead levels ranged from about five times higher than normal to 1,100 times higher. These blood lead levels were substantially higher than earlier reports of lead poisoning in opium users.

Enlarge / Laser based gyroscopes can get rather large—even ones we send to space. (credit: Gravity Probe B)

The modern smartphone is only possible because of sensors. Their svelte form factor conceals accelerometers, magnetometers, temperature sensors, a GPS unit, and gyroscopes. They all consume volume and power, meaning that each sensor, even as it makes your phone smarter, induces battery-sucking anxiety.

Which makes a report of a very tiny laser gyroscope pretty interesting, even if it still has a way to go before being found in your cellphone. Laser gyroscopes are pretty much the "if only" of tiny sensors. Essentially, they seem like they should rule the roost in terms of providing a clean and clear signal. But, so far at least, they don’t.

Good things go bad

To see why this is so, let’s take a look at how a laser gyroscope works. Essentially, light is sent into a ring; half of the light travels around the ring clockwise, and the other half counter-clockwise. The two light beams meet at the opposite side of the ring, where they exit together.

Enlarge / Inside that tiny box is the same open-source emulator you can download right now on your PC (plus 20 game files). (credit: Sony)

Sony's upcoming PlayStation Classic uses the open-source emulator PCSX ReARMed to recreate its selection of 20 classic games. Kotaku's recent hands-on report with the plug-and-play HDMI system noticed an on-screen menu listing a legal license for the emulator.

ReARMed is a popular, modernized branch of the original PCSX emulator, which was actively developed from 2000 to 2003 for Linux, Mac, and Windows. A new branch called PCSX Reloaded picked up that development later in the decade, adding new features and fixing bugs and eventually leading to the ReARMed fork. The emulator supports network play and a "save rewind" feature that lets you easily reverse recent gameplay, two features which seem to be missing from the PlayStation Classic.

For its recently released NES and SNES Classic micro-consoles, Nintendo used specially crafted emulators developed by its European Research and Development division. That emulator offered more vibrant colors and less blurriness than Nintendo's previous Virtual Console emulators for the Wii, Wii U, and 3DS.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | Westend61)

We've all been there. You've been paying an annoyingly large sum for Internet and/or TV service each month for the past couple of years, and suddenly your ISP tells you it's time to pay even more.

Your promotional rate has expired, and now you'll have to pay the "real" price of service. You're free to switch to another provider—if there's another one in your neighborhood.

And so, the ritual of calling your ISP to demand—or beg for—a lower price begins again. There's no guarantee that it'll work, but in our experience it's worth trying to negotiate a better rate using whatever amount of leverage you have.

Enlarge / It's here, and it's beautiful. (credit: Enhance Games / Aurich)

Before I began playing this week's new game, Tetris Effect, I found myself tempted to compare it to other versions of the puzzle series. That's an easy trap to fall into—a bullet-point sorting of tweaks, features, and differences—and one that gets pretty unwieldy with decades of Tetris games to compare to.

But shortly after I dove into Tetris Effect, with a PlayStation VR headset firmly strapped to my head, my thinking about this game drifted somewhere surprising: not to another game or sequel, but to an event. Specifically, I thought of the latest Classic Tetris World Championship, held in Portland, Oregon, in October.

There, a 16-year-old named Joseph Saelee rocked the gaming world by besting seasoned veterans of the game's 1989 NES version and winning it all. You've seen Tetris before, but never like this—with a multi-camera rig showing pros' gamer faces as they pound through ultra-fast sessions in incredible fashion (aided in no small part by a "hyper-tapping" technique used to keep sessions going beyond that version's "kill screen"). I'll never forget what I saw. What unfolded was not revolutionary, but its presentation, drama, and feeling of an oldie born anew made the competition particularly thrilling to watch.

Enlarge / The extent that chimps engage in social grooming is different between groups. (credit: flickr user: Tambako The Jaguar)

Human cultures have widely varying norms when it comes to friendliness and politeness. Make accidental eye contact with a Londoner on public transport and suffer mutual horror, but go to South Africa and find yourself routinely embraced by complete strangers. For researchers studying human behavior, there’s a strong push to study a wider variety of different populations around the world in an effort to expand focus beyond rich westerners. But when it comes to animal behavior, differences between populations have come under less scrutiny.

A paper in PNAS this week explored differences in social behavior between four different populations of chimpanzees, finding that the groups had very different norms when it came to hanging out together and grooming one another. They point out that this means studying one population of chimps might not always be enough for accurate claims about the species as a whole.

Midwestern vs. New Yorker chimps

The Chimfunshi Wildlife Orphanage Trust in Zambia is an ideal place to investigate differences between chimpanzee groups. It's home to 120 chimpanzees, some of whom were wild-born but needed to be rescued and some of whom were born in the orphanage. The sanctuary has distinct populations separated from each other but all living in the same ecological environment.