Monthly Archives: January 2022

Quantum computers made from the same raw materials as standard computer chips hold obvious promise, but so far theyve struggled with high error rates. That seems set to change after new research showed silicon qubits are now accurate enough to run a popular error-correcting code.

The quantum computers that garner all the headlines today tend to be made using superconducting qubits, such as those from Google and IBM, or trapped ions, such as those from IonQ and Honeywell. But despite their impressive feats, they take up entire rooms and have to be painstakingly handcrafted by some of the worlds brightest minds.

Thats why others are keen to piggyback on the miniaturization and fabrication breakthroughs weve made with conventional computer chips by building quantum processors out of silicon. Research has been going on in this area for years, and its unsurprisingly the route that Intel is taking in the quantum race. But despite progress, silicon qubits have been plagued by high error rates that have limited their usefulness.

The delicate nature of quantum states means that errors are a problem for all of these technologies, and error-correction schemes will be required for any of them to reach significant scale. But these schemes will only work if the error rates can be kept sufficiently low; essentially, you need to be able to correct errors faster than they appear.

The most promising family of error-correction schemes today are known as surface codes and they require operations on, or between, qubits to operate with a fidelity above 99 percent. That has long eluded silicon qubits, but in the latest issue of Nature three separate groups report breaking this crucial threshold.

The first two papers from researchers at RIKEN in Japan and QuTech, a collaboration between Delft University of Technology and the Netherlands Organization for Applied Scientific Research, use quantum dots for qubits. These are tiny traps made out of semiconductors that house a single electron. Information can be encoded into the qubits by manipulating the electrons spin, a fundamental property of elementary particles.

The key to both groups breakthroughs was primarily down to careful engineering of the qubits and control systems. But the QuTech group also used a diagnostic tool developed by researchers at Sandia National Laboratories to debug and fine-tune their system, while the RIKEN team discovered that upping the speed of operations boosted fidelity.

A third group from the University of New South Wales took a slightly different approach, using phosphorus atoms embedded into a silicon lattice as their qubits. These atoms can hold their quantum state for extremely long times compared to most other qubits, but the tradeoff is that its hard to get them to interact. The groups solution was to entangle two of these phosphorus atoms with an electron, which enables them to talk to each other.

All three groups were able to achieve fidelities above 99 percent for both single qubit and two-qubit operations, which crosses the error-correction threshold. They even managed to carry out some basic proof-of-principle calculations using their systems. Nonetheless, they are still a long way from making a fault-tolerant quantum processor out of silicon.

Achieving high-fidelity qubit operations is only one of the requirements for effective error correction. The other is having a large number of spare qubits that can be dedicated to this task, while the remaining ones focus on whatever problem the processor has been set.

As an accompanying analysis in Nature notes, adding more qubits to these systems is certain to complicate things, and maintaining the same fidelities in larger systems will be tough. Finding ways to connect qubits across large systems will also be a challenge.

However, the promise of being able to build compact quantum computers using the same tried-and-true technology as existing computers suggests these are problems worth trying to solve.

Image Credit: UNSW/Tony Melov

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Jan 7, 2022 marked a medical breakthrough. For the first time ever, surgeons transplanted a genetically modified pig heart into a living human. Two weeks later, David Bennett is doing well, with the heart pumping away and sustaining his life.

The surgery brings xenotransplantationtransplanting organs between speciesfrom a wild science fiction dream to reality. Its a milestone that paves the road for more people to receive animal organs, making up for donor organ shortages and potentially saving hundreds of thousands of lives. For now, its just a single case. The technology is still fraught with technical and ethical conundrums. But by carefully monitoring Bennett, scientists are hopeful they can access a trove of unprecedented data to aid future xenotransplants.

Make no mistake: whether youd call this opening a Pandoras box or a medical miracle, xenotransplants are taking off after decades of turmoil. Bennett is far from a one-off. Big players in the field are aiming for clinically controlled trials and have readily begun building clinic-grade facilities to raise pigs that meet the FDAs strict demands.

Heres how the team pulled it off.

Xenotransplantation has had quite the ride. First dreamed up in the 1960s, the idea languished for decades due to its sheer complexity. For one, theres no chance of an animal organ matching a human recipient, as transplants usually require. This generates a severe immune storm, destroying the organ and also damaging the host.

Another concern is animal viruses, which donor pigs can tolerate but wreak havoc on human cells. Some of these are tough to get rid of. Take PERVsporcine endogenous retroviruseswhich are embedded inside pigs DNA and need to be accurately snipped out with gene editing. For years, scientists worked out genetic changes that would transform a pig heart into one more amenable to a human chest. The problem? There was no way to make these changes.

Enter CRISPR. Due to the gene editors precision, xenotransplant enthusiasts finally have a tool to test out those theories. The field took off. In 2015 eGenesis, a life-science company, announced it had edited 62 segments of the pig genome responsible for immune rejection and infections. Genetically engineered pig hearts were soon transplanted into baboons, allowing them to survive for more than six months.

Yet the billion-dollar question remained: will it work for humans? Because non-human primates have different immune systems than ours, theyre less-than-ideal models. In 2021, we got a first answer. A kidney grown in a heavily genetically edited pig was transplanted into two people who were legally dead without brain function. The kidneys functioned normally for more than 50 days while the recipients were on life support. A similar recent case resulted in promisingthough mixedresults.

A leader in xenotransplants, Dr. Muhammad Mohiuddin has worked towards a successful pig-to-human transplant for years. The head surgeon at the University of Maryland Medical Center who pulled off Davids surgery, he had previously asked the FDA for approval for a clinical trial.

He was rejected. The agency was worried about the origin of the genetically edited pigs, requiring that they come from a clinic-grade facility.

Then Mohiuddin met Bennett. At 57 years old, Bennett had been on heart support for almost 2 months. With untreated high blood pressure and other health problems, he was ineligible for a human heart transplant. With his health rapidly declining, Bennett gave the go-ahead for the surgeons team to seek compassionate use authorization from the FDA for a pig heart transplant.

It was either die or do this transplant. I want to live. I know its a shot in the dark, but its my last choice, said Bennett.

The heart was provided by Revivicor, a company based in Virginia that has been engineering pig organs for roughly two decades. In several experiments for pig-to-baboon transplants, the organs survived up to nine months, until the animals passed away due to a lung infection unrelated to the transplant.

Overall, the heart had 10 hefty genetic edits. Three of them wiped out sugar molecules on the outside of cells that provoke an immune response. Six bolstered the chance of the human host accepting the heartamping up an anti-inflammatory response, preventing blood vessel damage, and dampening any antibodies against the organ. Finally, the last edit limited the pig hearts size. Although it generally matched the size of a human heart, the team wanted to prevent the pig organ from overgrowth inside Bennetts chest once it was transplantedsomething they previously noticed happened in baboons.

The next challenge was how to keep the heart healthy once it was removed from the pig. Heart failure occurs rapidly once deprived of blood and oxygen, and keeping the organs healthy and functional has been a major heartache (pun intended). Here, Mohiuddin tapped into a method developed in Sweden by Dr. Stig Steen at Lund University. Once removed, the heart is bathed in a bubbling, circulating bath chock-full of hormones, nutrients, and cocaine (yup, you read that right).

Then came the third part of the trifecta: immunosuppressants. Even with genetic edits, Bennett was kept on a hefty dose of a new antibody drug, dubbed anti-CD40, to dampen his immune system. Compared to previous generations the drug is like a master switch that shuts down antibody production, while also killing communication between different immune cells. This nixes the bodys ability to mount a coordinated attack against the new organ.

The 10 [altered] genes help, but the anti-CD40 antibody, which had been my main focus throughout my career, I think is the game changer, said Mohiuddin.

Bennett is doing well. Scientists dont yet know how long the heart will survive, but theyre carefully monitoring the organs function and Bennetts immune response. Theyre also obsessively keeping him away from any source of infection.

But as the living pioneer of xenotransplants, Bennett has lots to offer. Experts agree that its a remarkable chance to tailor an organ for humans, rather than for baboons as in previous lab experiments. Because we have far more antibodies that may attack the pig organ than baboons do, its critical to nail those responses down.

Another unsolved question is how the pig heart will behave in a human. According to one estimate, a pigs resting heart rate is roughly 90 beats per minute, which is on the high range of a healthy human heart.

The prospect of a future surge in xenotransplants is reigniting a bioethics firestorm. Is it ethical to grow pigs for whats essentially replacement organ parts for humans (cue humans as batteries for robots, la The Matrix)? Although theyre a popular food source, pigs are surprisingly intelligent creatures that, unlike human organ donors, have no say in the process. What if there are alternatives, like 3D printed organs?

For now, the technology remains highly experimental and risky. Failure, as seen in a previously tragic case, could lead to a tortuous death. And Bennett will be the first to experience the risk of porcine viruses, which the team is monitoring closely.

Another burning question is who should be allowed access, or placed at the top of a xenotransplant list? For example, people who need a kidney transplant can generally be put on dialysis as they wait for a human donor organ. Its a grueling process. But does that justify the dangers of an animal transplant?

As Dr. Jeremy Chapman, a retired transplant surgeon at the University of Sydney, told Nature, a long wait by itself isnt sufficient to justify approval. Bennett was granted the procedure and fully informed of the risks because it was his only chance for survivalshould the same guideline apply to others down the road?

We wont wait long for an answer. Revivicor still dominates the game. The company is readily working on a new clinic-grade facility according to FDA standards to increase pig production, with the aim of launching in 2023. Others are on its heels. eGenesis, for example, is tackling the PERV problem, genetically editing pigs that cant pass on those viruses to their human recipients. Nzeno, based in New Zealand, is breeding pigs for kidney transplants.

While many questions remain, the surgery is a landmark. This is truly a historic, monumental step forward, said Dr. Bert W. OMalley, president and CEO of the University of Maryland Medical Center.

Image Credit: Alexandru Acea on Unsplash

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ROBOTICS

Now You Can Rent a Robotic Workerfor Less Than Paying a HumanWill Knight | WiredLast year, to meet rising demand amid a shortage of workers, Polar hired its firstrobot employee. The robot arm performs a simple, repetitive job: lifting a piece of metal into a press, which then bends the metal into a new shape. And like a person, the robot worker gets paid for the hours it works. Jose Figueroa, who manages Polars production line, says the robot, which is leased from a company calledFormic, costs the equivalent of $8 per hour, compared with a minimum wage of $15 per hour for a human employee.

Going Bald? Lab-Grown Hair Cells Could Be On the WayAntonio Regalado | MIT Technology ReviewWere born with all the hair follicles well ever havebut aging, cancer, testosterone, bad genetic luck, even covid-19 can kill the stem cells inside them that make hair. Once these stem cells are gone, so is your hair. [Ernesto] Lujan says his company can convert any cell directly into a hair stem cell by changing the patterns of genes active in it.

Autonomous Battery-Powered Rail Cars Could Steal Shipments From TruckersTim de Chant | Ars TechnicaParallel Systems isnt just taking an existing freight train andswapping its diesel-electric locomotive for a battery version. Instead, its taking the traction motors and distributing them to every car on the train. Its how many electric passenger trains operate, but its a system that has been slow to migrate to the freight world. Parallel Systems is going a step further, though. Each of its rail vehicles consists of a battery pack, electric motors, four wheels, and a package of sensors that allow it to operate autonomously.

A $3 Billion Bet on Finding the Fountain of YouthStaff | The EconomistThough preparations for the launch of what must surely be a candidate for the title of Best financed startup in history have been rumoured for months, the firm formally announced itself, and its modus operandi, on January 19th. And, even at $3bn, its proposed product might be thought cheap at the price. For the alchemy its founders, Rick Klausner, Hans Bishop and Yuri Milner, hope one day to offer the world is an elixir of life.

Intel Selects Ohio for Largest Silicon Manufacturing Location on the PlanetJon Porter | The VergeAfter helping to establish Silicon Valley, Gelsinger said the new site could become the Silicon Heartland. Intel plans to invest up to $100 billion in the site over the next decade, as well as around $100 million in partnership with Ohio universities, colleges, and the US National Science Foundation to foster new talent.

Machine to Melt Moon Rocks and Derive Metals May Launch in 2024Eric Berger | Ars Technicaa Houston-based company says there is value in the gray, dusty regolith spread across the entire lunar surface. The firm, Lunar Resources, is developing technology to extract iron, aluminum, magnesium, and silicon from the Moons regolith. These materials, in turn, would be used to manufacture goods on the Moon.

Its All Just Wild: Tech Startups Reach a New Peak FrothErin Griffith | The New York TimesHow crazy is the money sloshing around in start-up land right now? Its so crazy thatmore than 900 tech start-upsare each worth more than $1 billion. In 2015, 80seemed like a lot. Investors and founders have adopted a seize-the-day mentality, believing the pandemic created a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to shake things up. The basic fabric of the world is up for grabs, [entrepreneur Phil Libin] said, calling this time the changiest the world has ever been.i

What Happens If a Space Elevator BreaksRhett Alain | WiredIn the first episode ofFoundation, some people decide to set off explosives that separate the space elevators top station from the rest of the cable. The cable falls to the surface of the planet and does some real damage down there. What would a falling space elevator cable look like in real life? Its not that simple to model, but we can make a rough guess.

Image Credit:Pawel Czerwinski / Unsplash

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WASHINGTON Post-1945 attempts to transform Europe from a geographical to a political designation have resulted in a baroque accretion of bureaucracies, but no answer to Henry Kissingers reported question: Who do I call if I want to speak to Europe?

The European Union is the worlds second-largest economic entity, with member nations combined gross domestic products ($15.3 trillion) larger than that of China ($14.7 trillion), and dwarfing Russias ($1.5 trillion), which is less than Italys ($1.9 trillion). Geopolitically, however, it is much less than the sum of its 27 parts, as the Ukraine crisis is demonstrating.

French President Emmanuel Macron would like to be designated to take Kissingers telephone call. This month, when he began a six-month term in the rotating office of EU president, he displeased the febrile portion of the French right by flying the European Union flag alone under the Arc de Triomphe. He then delivered to the European Parliament in Strasbourg, France, a speech that demonstrated why no Kissinger would bother placing that call.

Macrons speech began with some continental chauvinism about Europes supposed democratic singularity, such as the idea of universal human rights which need to be protected from the fervors of history. This idea animated the American Revolution before and better than the French Revolution, but Macron was not under oath. He rhapsodized about Europeans sharing a civility, a way of living in the world, from our cafes to our museums, which is incomparable, and about making Europe a democratic, cultural and educational power. Military power went unmentioned.

Of NATOs 30 members, just 10 are fulfilling the commitment, first announced 16 years ago, to spend at least 2% of GDP on defense. Macron waxed optimistically about better batteries and more women on corporate boards before getting around to mentioning something unpleasant: Ukraine.

He called for the EU to have our own security doctrine, in complementarity with NATO and with a genuine technological independence, industrial and defense strategy. It is, he said, Europes vocation to be a balancing power, particularly in its dialogue with Russia.

This will not happen. Leave aside the priority EU members give to social spending especially pensions and medical care for their aging populations over military spending. Macrons blurry notion of complementarity with NATO would inevitably mean discord with NATO. Eastern Europeans, who live in a dangerous neighborhood and with memories of Russia rampant, know better than to trust their security to Europe balancing its cafes and museums against Russian President Vladimir Putins tanks and missiles. The farther Europeans are from the Atlantic Ocean, the more trans-Atlanticist they are.

It is fanciful to talk, as Macron is merely the latest European leader to do, about Europe speaking with a single, powerful voice on behalf of principles and rules established not against or without Russia, but with Russia. These principles, he said, include rejection of the use of force, of threats and of coercion; the free choice for states to take part in the organizations, alliances and security arrangements they wish; the inviolability of borders, the territorial integrity of states and the rejection of spheres of influence.

Macron noted that European nations and Russia signed such principles 30 years ago. As he spoke, Russia was violating all of them.

An irony of 2022 is that Ukraine yearns to affirm and buttress its nationality primarily by associating not with NATO but with the EU, which many nationalists throughout Europe disparage as inimical to national sovereignty and a solvent of national cultures. Ukraine is wiser than the EUs despisers for reasons that illuminate Americans stake in todays clash of civilizations: Universal human rights protected by sovereign nations commitments to the rule of law is a trans-Atlantic ideal.

In The Abandonment of the West: The History of an Idea in America Foreign Policy, Michael Kimmage, who served on the State Departments policy planning staff from 2014 to 2016, reminds us that for our Founders, the United States was more vividly European before it was ever palpably American. There has been a Euro-American path to liberty.

The United States, Kimmage insists, is a country carved from the stone of Enlightenment thought, which migrated west from England, Scotland, France and Germany, from Konigsberg Immanuel Kants home in Europes East to Philadelphia in the American colonies. Ukraine is looking to the West, away from Putins ethnoreligious, blood-and-soil notion of nationhood, toward the community of nations of shared Enlightenment values. For the West to look away from Ukraine would be an apostasy foreshadowing a dark future.

George F. Will writes on politics and domestic and foreign affairs. He began his column with The Post in 1974, and he received the Pulitzer Prize for commentary in 1977. 2022, The Washington Post Writers Group

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The Beatles sought to be innovators in any area they could. Whether it was through samples, eight track recording, the integration of classical Indian music, or the extension of songs beyond three minutes in length, the Fab Four simply did things that no other major artist did.

But one of the more strange preoccupations that the members of the band obsessed over was more minimalist: they wanted to create a song with just one chord. John and I would like to do songs with just one note like Long Tall Sally. We get near it in The Word. Indeed, The Word represents The Beatles employing a fair amount of restraint, but there were other songs that took the bands desire for harmonic singularity to a greater height.

When it comes to Beatles songs largely revolving around a single chord, the band loved to gravitate towards the key of C. George Harrison especially, with his deep love of Indian classical music, used the sitars common tuning of C as a basis for a large number of songs with more experimental tendencies. Blue Jay Way, for example, has a C drone as the chords alternate between different suspensions and diminished variations on the central C Major chord.

Love You To does the same, although it prominently features a Bb Major chord in the songs chorus. Harrisons most explicit Indian-infused song, Within You Without You, goes to Ravi Shankars preferred tuning of C# and stays there with a few chord variations that follow the central melody. But when it comes to truly only using a single, unchanging chord, no song in the bands catalogue can top Tomorrow Never Knows.

Devised by John Lennon and specifically inspired by the psychedelic experience, Tomorrow Never Knows isnt written like any conventional pop song that came before. Its a song based on tape loops, including a drum loop from Ringo Starr, different lines from Harrison playing sitar and tambura, and Lennon mixing in recorded Mellotron parts. Paul McCartneys bass line is the only standard part of the arrangement.

For almost the entirety of the track, the song stays on the C Major chord. No variations, so suspensions, no additional notes. But the complication comes when Lennon sings it is not dying. Thats because one of the loops, that of a Hammond organ, is playing a Bb Major chord. The rest of the song continues to play C Major, but Lennons vocal lines highlights the Bb Major to the extent that chord has to be considered a Bb Major/C chord, thereby ruining the pipe dream of recording a song with only one chord.

Its likely for the best that The Beatles never achieved their one-chord goal. Tomorrow Never Knows is the ultimate example of making a harmonically static song vibrant and audibly entertaining. If someone were to simply strum a C chord on a guitar and sing the songs melody, it would be a fairly limp performance. Songs need different chords to keep the listeners attention, and unless youre Muddy Waters barking out Mannish Boy or Howlin Wolf singing Smokestack Lighting, chances are youre not going to have a very good song on your hands.

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S. Mitra Kalita and Sara Lomax-Reese had this moment when they knew they had to build something with existing newsrooms, not remake them or start new.

There was yet another piece about a mainstream news outlet and racism it was contending with in its top ranks, Kalitatold Poynters Mel Grau last October. I called Sara. We had seen enough of that at that point. I remember one of us said, We have to do something. And the moment is now.

That was July 2020. By January 2021, the former senior vice president for news, opinion and programming for CNN Digital (Kalita), and the CEO/president of WURD Radio in Philadelphia (Lomax-Reese) launchedURL Media. URL stands for uplift, respect and love, and URLs homepage describes their work as a decentralized, multi-platform network of high-performing Black and Brown media organizations. Well share content, distribution, and other resources to enhance reach, expand revenue and build long-term sustainability.

URL Media launched one year ago today. Via email, I asked the founders about the last year, starting with whats changed since they first gathered eight network member newsrooms.

In the world: we are seeing deeper, more sophisticated ways of dividing the country along racial lines, Lomax-Reese said. The Virginia governors race was a blueprint for how to mobilize white voters around the issue of critical race theory. Dog whistles are real. We are seeing increased restrictions on voting rights as we head into the 2022 midterm elections. And COVID fatigue seems to be numbing out the country just when we need to be energized to fight for reproductive rights, voting, health care, education and everything. This is why URL and the work of all of our BIPOC media partners is absolutely critical right now. We need diverse, trusted voices to chronicle the truth of our present reality.

In URL Medias first year, it:

Held a monthly roundtable, Meet the BIPOC Press, on The Laura Flanders Show, which airs on 280 public television stations

Grew to help its members with coaching and talent development

Added two more newsrooms,Sahan JournalandNative News Online

Got the networks newsrooms on Apple News, which is something mainstream newsrooms have taken for granted for years to reach masses, Kalita said. Our BIPOC newsrooms dont always have the developers or audience managers to enable this so this felt like a real feat.

Among URLs 10 newsrooms, theres also a common thread of generosity and openness, Lomax-Reese said. Kalita, who is the founder and publisher ofEpicenter NYC, agreed.

I often joke that our members are the same because we all grew up with extra relatives living in our basement and strangers showing up at the dinner table, Kalita said. I say this because a spirit of generosity runs through every single one of our newsrooms. When I think about what we represent to our communities in this deadly pandemic that has disproportionately sickened us, killed us even, I get choked up. Theres a sameness there but also a singularity and customization by community and platform.

In its second year, URL Media ishiring, working to grow advertising and sponsorship revenue and to add members. I asked the two founders what we should all learn from the newsrooms URL Media works with.

I think all of our partners center and prioritize service to their audiences, Lomax-Reese said. This is a relatively new trend in mainstream journalism right now, but this is fundamental and foundational for our BIPOC media organizations. And this has been at the center of Black media throughout history, starting as early as 1827 when the first Black newspaper, Freedoms Journal, was launched to advocate for the humanity of enslaved Africans. Our business models are intimately connected to service, filling gaps that exist not just in the media but in society.

This piece originally appeared in Local Edition, our newsletter devoted to the telling stories of local journalists

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URL Media is turning one. Here's what it accomplished in supporting Black and Brown newsrooms Poynter - Poynter