The future is now: 10 ideas from past SF applied in present

SF writers have often succeeded in imagining the technology we use today.

Over the years, SFs, whether we're talking about books, comics, serials or movies here, have managed to show us what the technology we will use in the future might look like. This genre has given birth to many important names in literature, among them, Jules Verne managing to combine an easy-to-read style of writing with a boundless imagination; he managed to foresee even aselenization in his book "From the Earth to the Moon".

The development of radio and television has given many writers and writers the opportunity to share their ideas with the general public and even give us a clear picture of how the technology we use will look. Space has created a list of 10 ideas from SF that, in the meantime, have become reality.


1. Star Trek Mobile Phone: The Original Series

The first mobile phone was invented by Motorola in 1973 and weighed 1.1 kilograms; Over time, scientists have been able to consistently reduce the weight of these devices and, more importantly, increase their number of functions.

H&I | The Star Trek prop that predicted the flip phone is back

If the first mobile phone, Motorola DynaTAC, only gave you 35 minutes for calls, the preset phones can work even for a few days without being charged, and some of them can even download in a few seconds a lot of information that initially mobile telephony would have seemed astronomical.


2. Universal Translator, Star Trek: The Original Series

The characters in Star Trek used a device to communicate with the various alien species. Currently, the idea of a device has been replaced by an algorithm, such as the one offered by Skype that allows the translation of the voice from one language to another. Obviously, the current technology does not meet SF standards, but it alone represents solid steps in the right direction.

Star Trek's Universal Translator Version 1.0 Shelly Palmer

Fans of Star Trek (The Original Series) will fondly remember the “Universal Translator.” While Gene Roddenberry’s epic saga was both inspirational and aspirational for some, it set goals for others. How much wireless bandwidth would you need on the Starship Enterprise? How would a medical tricorder work? What kind of storage would you need on Memory Alpha? How did the noise-cancelling for communicators work? Every engineer I know can tell you a story about how he or she was inspired by this amazing 1960s television show.


3. Teleportation, Star Trek: The Original Series

Quantum teleportation moves into the third dimension – Physics World Physics World

The idea behind the teleportation in this series is that a person could be "decomposed" into energy and "recomposed" once they reach their destination. Unfortunately, our scientists have not been able to teleport people, but they have been able to teleport photons, the smallest forms of matter, on the boundary between energy and matter.

Physicists in China and Austria have shown for the first time they can teleport multi-dimensional states of photons. Carrying out experiments using photons encoded via three spatial states, they say their scheme can be extended to arbitrarily high numbers of dimensions and is a vital step in teleporting the entire quantum state of a particle. The work could also improve technology used in quantum communications and quantum computing.

Quantum mechanics forbids the quantum state of one particle from being copied precisely to another particle. But teleportation – the instantaneous transfer of a state between particles separated by a long distance – offers an alternative. The process involves no physical transfer of matter and erases the state of the particle to be copied.


4. 3D Holograms, Star Wars

In the Star Wars universe, some of the communication is done with the help of three-dimensional holograms, such a transmission being the one that removes Obi-Wan Kenobi from his isolation on the desert planet Tatooine.

In real life, in 2018, researchers at Brigham Young University, United States of America managed to create such a hologram, their technology uses fast particles.


5. Bionic members, Star Wars

Star Wars fans know over the course of the nine films many people lose their limbs; however, the confrontation between Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader of Cloud City gave us the first picture of how an artificial hand could look and function.

Cybernetics Wookieepedia - Fandom

This scenario seems to be closer to reality now than it was in the 1970s when the series was launched; researchers from the Georgia Institute of Technology, USA, have managed to produce an arm that can be controlled with the help of sensors by people whose arms have been amputated.


6. Digital panels, Blade Runner

In this movie, viewers can see a possible version of a Los Angees from the not too distant future; on some of the buildings of this city are a series of giant billboards that would be digital. In 2013, the company Digital Out Of Home (DOOH) was created which develops a similar technology.

7. Artificial intelligence

Currently, artificial intelligence has a variety of applications, starting from art and even to medicine and pharmacology; we can say that researchers in most people do their best to adapt the algorithms to help them in their work, and this is due to their almost unlimited potential.

In the movie Blade Runner, we are presented with the idea of synthetic people who need artificial intelligence to function; the existence of these algorithms tends to play an important role in the unfolding of the film.


8. Space Stations, 2001: A Space Odyssey

In the 1968 film, we are presented with the idea of ​​a space station, located on the Earth's low orbit, where astronauts experience microgravity. Starting with 1998, this idea began to take shape and in reality, with the construction of the International Space Station, a laboratory dedicated to microgravity studies.

Washington, DC, April 2, 1968.  The Uptown Theater.  Opening night.  The world eagerly awaits the premiere of Stanley Kubrick’s latest epic film.  Four years in the making with noted science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke, the film has been delayed and is over budget.  Two days later, 2001: A Space Odyssey opens in New York and Los Angeles, and in other US cities the following week.  Anticipation runs high, given the talent involved and the near total secrecy surrounding the film during production and editing, which Kubrick was still finishing just a few days before opening day.  Even Clarke didn’t see the finished product until the premiere.


9. Tablets, 2001: A Space Odyssey

The tablets we use today appeared in 2010, however in 1964, in 2001: A Space Odyssey, the creators introduced the concept of "newspads". These devices were used by the scientists in the movie and, like Samsung, these were the first true tablets and not the iPads.


10. Cars without driver, Total Recall

This 1984 film presents a concept that scientists from a multitude of research institutions and private companies are actively working on: creating an algorithm that allows cars to travel safely, without the need for a driver at steering wheel. NASA seems to be interested in this property, and that would allow it to build more efficient robots that explore space.

The futuristic cars of Total Recall, behind the scenes hemmings.com

A long time ago (in a galaxy far, far away? No, wrong movie), reader Greg Allen caught our post on the Boonie Bug and sent in some screengrabs from the classic Arnold Schwarzenegger film Total Recall guessing that the Johnnycab was based on a Boonie Bug. It wasn’t, but that post did inspire James Belohovek to get in touch with us. James did some work on the Johnny in the Johnnycab and had a chance to take plenty of pictures on set during the filming of the movie.

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A new material based on plant structure can revolutionize technology. It's 7.5 times lighter than air, but it can support a weight of 6,000 times its mass

American Chemical Society

Whether it's balancing on a blade of grass or taking on the appearance of frozen smoke, aerogels have been blowing us away with their amazing properties in recent years. And just when you thought they couldn't get any freakier, researchers have created a graphene aerogel that can support over 6,000 times its own weight.

Aerogel: Remarkable Insulating Material of the Future

Thalia dealbata Fraser ex Roscoe credit: wikipedia

Along with being super strong, the new aerographene is bendy, conductive, and mimics the structure of a plant stem. The unique properties of the material could make it an ideal component in flexible electronics such as smart windows, curved TV screens, and printable solar panels.

Speaking with ScienceAlert, Hao Bai . a materials engineer from Zhejiang University, says the graphene aerogel is unique from other aerogels available. 

Dr. Hao Bai Tomsia Biomaterials Research Group credit: tomsia

"Learning from nature always offers new insights for developing new materials and technology," says Bai. "Our graphene aerogel is different from current aerogels in both microstructures and properties."

Weighing a minuscule 0.16 milligrams per cubic centimetre, graphene aerogel is 7.5 times lighter than air and about 1000 times less dense than water. This stuff is so light that you can balance it on a fluffy dandelion head or on the stamen of a flower. Out of all the aerogels, graphene aerogel is the least dense and considered one of the lightest solid materials on Earth.

Apart from blowing our minds, aerogels are already proving useful for a wide variety of applications, from cleaning up oil spills to creating high-energy batteries. Researchers have even managed to convert sunlight into water vapour at room temperature using graphene aerogel, which makes it possible to turn wastewater into drinkable water.

Enhanced mechanical, thermal, and electric properties of graphene aerogels via supercritical ethanol drying and high-temperature thermal reduction Scientific Reports

But when it comes to moving machine parts, flexible sensors, and bendable energy storage devices, researchers have struggled to create aerogels that have both the strength and resilience required for these applications.

"Strength and resilience are usually mutually exclusive in regular aerogels," Bai explains. "There is a high demand for strong and resilient aerogels in many important fields, but it is very difficult to achieve both of these properties."

In recent years, we've seen several attempts to achieve these properties in graphene aerogels, including through the use of 3D printing and freeze-drying. The problem with these processes is that they only produce graphene aerogels with a random architectural structure, which doesn't provide robust strength and resilience.

Aerogel High Strength (Page 4) - Line.17QQ.com

Looking at the natural world, the secret to the strength and bendiness of porous materials like plant stems comes down to how the material is arranged at the nanoscale. Even if the material itself is weak and porous, the highly organised arrangement of the material makes it strong and flexible.

"Many natural materials have developed unprecedented properties by building complex multiscale architectures," Bai says. "We wondered whether we could mimic these features to create an aerogel that is both strong and resilient." 

To find out, Bai and his team turned to the powdery alligator-flag (Thalia dealbata), a hardy aquatic plant native to South America and Mexico. Even though the stem of this plant is slender and porous, it can withstand frequent wild winds thanks to its grid-like layered microstructure.

Powdery Thalia (Thalia dealbata) Credit: Garden Supply Co

Taking cues from the plant's complex structure, the team used bidirectional freezing to mimic its architecture in graphene aerogel.

First, graphene oxide particles are dispersed in water, which form sheets as the liquid freezes.

Once completely frozen, the graphene oxide sheets form a three-dimensional network similar to the structure of ice crystals.

Finally, thermal reduction and sublimation produced graphene aerogel that mirrored the bridged layers of the powdery alligator-flag stem.

Architecture of the Thalia dealbata stem and biomimetic graphene  ResearchGate

Next, the team put the aerogel through a series of compression tests to see whether its architecture produced strength and resilience. After 1,000 compressive cycles the researchers discovered that the graphene aerogel was capable of supporting over 6,000 times its own weight and spring back to its original state. The material also retained 85 per cent of its strength before compression was applied.

This is a significant jump from aerogels with a random architecture, which tend to retain just 45 per cent of their original strength after only 10 compressive cycles.

Although the enormous strength and resilience of the aerogel is amazing all on its own, the researchers also wanted to know whether the material was conductive under compression.

Zhejiang University Personal homepage

The team placed the aerogel in a circuit with an LED, and applied different compression strains. Sure enough, they found that the aerogel remained conductive even when compressed, indicating that it could play a role in flexible electronics and sensors.

Now that the researchers have finally created a graphene aerogel that is strong, resilient and conductive, the next step is figuring out whether nature can be used as a reference for developing other kinds of aerogels, such as cellulose-based or polymer-silica composites.

"Learning from natural models will definitely help to develop new materials," Bao told ScienceAlert. "The challenges still remain in how much we can discover and understand nature's secrets, and if we can really mimic nature with synthetic approaches."


We can only dream of what nature will help us design next.

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The above post is reprinted from materials provided by Sciencealert . Note: Materials may be edited for content and length

IBM is Rolling out the World's First Universal 'Quantum Computing' Service

sakkmesterke/Shutterstock.com

We're all excited about the potential of quantum computers - devices that will harness strange quantum phenomena to perform calculations far more powerful than anything conventional computers can do today.

Unfortunately, we still don't have a tangible, large-scale quantum computer to freak out over just yet, but IBM is already preparing for a future when we do, by announcing that they're rolling out a universal 'quantum-computing' service later this year.

The service will be called IBM Q, and it will give people access to their early-stage quantum computer over the internet to use as they wish - for a fee.

The big elephant in the room is that, for now, IBM's quantum computer only runs on five qubits, so it's not much faster (if any faster) than a conventional computer.

But their technology is improving all the time. The company has announced it hopes to get to 50 qubits in the next few years, and in the meantime, it's building the online systems and software so that anyone in the world can access the full power of its quantum computer when it's ready. IBM Q is a crucial part of that.

QuantumComputing. The three types of quantum computing. Credit: ExtremeTech

Unlike conventional computers, which use 'bits' of either 1 or 0 to code information, quantum computers use a strange phenomenon known as superposition, which allows an atom to be in both the 1 and 0 position at the same time. These quantum bits, or qubits, give quantum computers far more processing power than traditional computers.

But right now, qubits are hard to make and manipulate, even for more the most high-tech labs. Which is why IBM only has five qubits working together in a computer, despite decades of research. And those qubits have to be cooled to temperatures just above absolute zero in order to function.

Companies such as Google, and multiple university research labs, have also built primitive quantum computers, and Google has even used theirs to simulate a molecule for the first time, showing the potential of this technology as it scales up.

But instead of just focussing on the hardware itself, IBM is also interested in the software around quantum computers, and how to give the public access to them.

"IBM has invested over decades to growing the field of quantum computing and we are committed to expanding access to quantum systems and their powerful capabilities for the science and business communities," said Arvind Krishna, senior vice president of Hybrid Cloud and director for IBM Research.

IBM Q universal quantum computer Credit: YouTube

The system builds on the company's Quantum Experience, which was rolled out last year for free to approved researchers. IBM Q will use similar cloud software, but will also be open to businesses - and, more importantly, any programmers and developers who want to start experimenting with writing code for quantum systems.

The goal is to have a functional, commercial, cloud-based service ready to go when a fully realised quantum computer does come online.

"Putting the machine on the cloud is an obvious thing to do," physicist Christopher Monroe from the University of Maryland, who isn't involved with IBM, told Davide Castelvecchi over at Scientific American. "But it takes a lot of work in getting a system to that level."

The challenge is that while, on paper, a five-qubit machine is pretty easy to simulate and program for, real qubits don't quite work that way, because you're working with atoms that can change their behaviour based on environmental conditions

"The real challenge is whether you can make your algorithm work on real hardware that has imperfections," Isaac Chuang, a physicist at MIT who doesn't work with IBM, told Scientific American.

In their announcement, IBM said that in the past few months, more than 40,000 users have already used Quantum Experience to build and run 275,000 test applications, and 15 research papers have been published based off of it so far.

And they predict that in future, the quantum service will become even more useful.

"Quantum computers will deliver solutions to important problems where patterns cannot be seen because the data doesn't exist and the possibilities that you need to explore to get to the answer are too enormous to ever be processed by classical computers," said IBM in its announcement.

There's no word as yet on how much IBM Q will cost to use, or how users will be approved. But we have to admit it'd be pretty cool to be among the first to play around with quantum computing.



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• New Particle zoo in a quantum computer First experimental quantum simulation of particle physics phenomena

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The above post is reprinted from materials provided by Sciencealert . Note: Materials may be edited for content and length.

Another step into the future: A new kind of magnet recently discovered, Will revolutionize today's technology

This is a spectrum of the three layer graphene as a function of magnetic field and density of electrons. Credit: Biswajit Datta, Mandar Deshmukh

Scientists have discovered the magnetism of electrons in three layers of graphene. This study reveals a new kind of magnet and provides insight on how electronic devices using graphene could be made for fundamental studies as well as various applications.

Metals have a large density of electrons and to be able to see the wave nature of electrons one has to make metallic wires that are only a few atoms wide. However, in graphene -- one atom thick graphite -- the density of electrons is much smaller and can be changed by making a transistor. As a result of the low density of electrons the wave nature of electrons, as described by quantum mechanics, is easier to observe in graphene.

Graphene is an atomic-scale hexagonal lattice made of carbon atoms. Credit: wikipedia

Often in metals like copper the electron is scattered every 100 nanometers, a distance roughly 1000 times smaller than the diameter of human hair, due to impurities and imperfections. Electrons can travel much longer in graphene, up to distances of 10 micrometer, a distance roughly 10 times smaller than the diameter of human hair. This is realized by sandwiching graphene between layers of boron nitride. The layers of boron nitride have few imperfections to impede the flow of electrons in graphene.

Once electrons travel long distances, implying there are few imperfections, one notices the faint whispers of electrons "talking to each other." Reducing the imperfections is akin to making a room quiet to enable the faint whispers of electronic interactions to develop between many electrons.

Graphene becomes superconductive Credit: Science Daily

In a study, led by PhD student Biswajit Datta, Professor Mandar Deshmukh's group at TIFR realized just this kind of silence allowing electronic interactions to be observed in three layers of graphene. The study reveals a new kind of magnet and provides insight on how electronic devices using graphene could be made for fundamental studies as well as applications. This work discovers the magnetism of electrons in three layers of graphene at a low temperature of -272 Celsius. The magnetism of electrons arises from the coordinated "whispers" between many electrons.

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Amazing Spider Silk properties will lead to the creation of artificial muscles

Our muscles are amazing structures. With the trigger of a thought, muscle filaments slide past each other and bundles of contracting fibers pull on the bones moving our bodies. The triggered stretching behavior of muscle is inherently based in geometry, characterized by a decrease in length and increase in volume (or vice versa) in response to a change in the local environment, such as humidity or heat.

Variations of this dynamic geometry appear elsewhere in nature, exhibiting a variety of mechanisms and structures and inspiring development in artificial muscle technology. 

Spider silk, specifically Ornithoctonus Huwena spider silk, now offers the newest such inspiration thanks to research from a collaboration of scientists in China and the U.S., the results of which are published today in Applied Physics Letters, from AIP Publishing.

Credit: British Tarantula Society

"Spider silk is a natural biological material with high sensitivity to water, which inspires us to study about the interaction between spider silk and water," said Hongwei Zhu, a professor in Tsinghua University's School of Material Science and Engineering in Beijing and part of the collaboration. "Ornithoctonus Huwena spider is a unique species as it can be bred artificially and it spins silk of nanoscale diameter."

Besides the shrink-stretch ability of muscles, the way in which the motion is triggered -- how the muscle is actuated -- is a key part of its functionality. These spider silk fibers, actuated by water droplets, showed impressive behavior in all the ways that matter to muscle performance (or to super heroes that may need them to swing from buildings).

"In this work, we reveal the 'shrink-stretch' behavior of the Ornithoctonus Huwena spider silk fibers actuated by water, and successfully apply it on weight lifting," said Zhu. "The whole process can cover a long distance with a fast speed and high efficiency, and further be rationalized through an analysis of the system's mechanical energy."

The research team looked at the actuation process in a few different scenarios, capturing the macro dynamics of the flexing fibers with high speed imaging. They actuated bare fibers on a flat surface (a microscope slide) and while dangling from a fixed point (held with tweezers) before adding a weight to the dangling configuration to test its lifting abilities.

Zhu and his group also investigated the micro structure of the proteins that make up the fibers, revealing the protein infrastructure that leads to its hydro-reflexive action.

Electron microscopy gave a clear picture of the smooth inner threads that make up the fibrous structure, and a laser-driven technique, called Raman spectroscopy, revealed the precise conformation of the protein folding structures making up each layer. Fundamentally, the specific molecular configurations, in this case having proteins that have a strong affinity for water and that rearrange in the presence of water, give rise to the spider silk's actuation.

"Alpha-helices and beta-sheets are two types of secondary protein folding structures in spider silk proteins," said Zhu. "Beta-sheets act as crosslinks between protein molecules, which are thought relevant to the tensile strength of spider silk. A-helices are polypeptide chains folded into a coiled structure, which are thought relevant to the extensibility and elasticity in spider silk protein."

Returning the fiber back to its relaxed state (as one-use muscles are far less useful) requires only removing the water, which offers conservation along with its simplicity. With some fine tuning, there is also potential for designing the precise behavior of the shrink-stretch cycle.

"In addition, as the falling water droplet can be collected and recycled, the lifting process is energy-saving and environmentally friendly," said Zhu. "This has provided the possibility that the spider silk can act as biomimetic muscle to fetch something with low energy cost. It can be further improved to complete staged shrink-stretch behavior by designing the silk fiber's thickness and controlling droplet's volume."

Understanding this remarkable material offers new insight for developing any of a number of drivable, flexible devices in the future.

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The above post is reprinted from materials provided by Sciencedaily . Note: Materials may be edited for content and length.

New Revolutionary mind-reading technology allows immobilized patients to communicate again

Credit: Wyss Centre

The technology to control a computer using only your thoughts has existed for decades. Yet we’ve made limited progress in using it for its original purpose: helping people with severe disabilities to communicate. Until now, that is.

The final stages of the degenerative condition known as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) or motor neuron disease, leaves sufferers in a complete locked-in state. In the end they cannot move any part of their bodies, not even their eyes, although their brains remain unaffected.

But scientists have struggled to use brain-computer interface technology that measures electrical activity in the brain to help them communicate.

One reason for this is that it is still unclear how much these conventional brain-computer interface systems rely on electrical signals that are generated by the movement of eye muscles.

One ALS sufferer who had been using a brain-computer interface when she could still move her eyes lost her ability to communicate through the technology after becoming completely locked-in.

This suggested that most of the electrical activity recorded by the computer was related to involuntary eye movements that occurred when she thought about something rather than the thoughts themselves.


To overcome this problem, an international group of researchers used a different way of detecting neural activity that measures changes in the amount of oxygen in the brain rather than electrical signals.

A new study has shown that an alternative brain-computer interface technology can help people with 'locked-in syndrome' speak to the outside world. It has even allowed sufferers to report that they are happy, despite the condition.

The research, published in PLOS Biology, involved a technique known as functional near-infrared spectroscopy, which uses light to measure changes in blood oxygen levels.

Because the areas of the brain that are most active at any given time consume more oxygen, this means you can detect patterns of brain activity from oxygen fluctuations.

This technique is not as sensitive to muscular movements as the electroencephalography (EEG) systems used to measure electrical activity.

An EEG recording setup Credit: wikipedia

This means the new method could be used to help ALS sufferers communicate both before and after they lose their entire ability to move because it is more likely to only record brain activity related to thoughts.

The study involved four ALS sufferers, three of which had not been able to reliably communicate with their carers since 2014 (the last one since early 2015).

By using the new brain-computer interface technology, they were able to reliably communicate with their carers and families over a period of several months. This is the first time this has been possible for locked-in patients.

The volunteers were asked personal and general knowledge questions with known "yes" or "no" answers.

The brain-computer interface captured their responses correctly 70 percent of the time, which the researchers argued was enough to show they didn’t just record the right answer by chance. Similar experiments using EEG didn’t beat this chance-level threshold.

The patients were also able to communicate their feelings about their condition, and all four of them repeatedly answered "yes" when they were asked if they were happy over the course of several weeks.

One patient was even asked whether he would agree for his daughter to marry her boyfriend. Unfortunately for the couple, he said no. The volunteers have continued using the system at home after the end of the study.

As I know from my own research, working with completely locked-in patients requires a lot of hard work. In particular, you can’t know for sure if the user has understood how we want them to give an answer that we can try to detect.

If a system that has previously been used to record the brain activity of able-bodied users doesn’t work with locked-in patients, it is common to assume that the person, and not the machine, is at fault, which may not be the case.

What’s more, there is added pressure on researchers – from the patient’s family and from themselves – to fulfil the dream of finding a way to communicate with the volunteers.

These challenges highlight what a significant achievement the new study is. It is a groundbreaking piece of research that could provide a new path for developing better brain-computer interface technology.

Even though the system so far only allows locked-in patients to give yes or no answers, it already represents a big improvement in quality of life.

The first ever brain-computer interface system was designed to enable disabled (although not locked-in) users to spell words and so communicate any message they wanted, admittedly through a slow and lengthy process.

So it is safe to assume that the new technology is just the first step towards more sophisticated systems that would allow free two-way communication not based on simple questions.

Perhaps more importantly, the technology has already restored the communication capabilities of four people who had been mute for years. Imagine how these patients and their families must have felt when they were finally able to 'speak' again.


Despite the challenges in brain-computer interface research, results like this are what make us keep going.


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The above post is reprinted from materials provided by Sciencealert . Note: Materials may be edited for content and length.

China currently uses the technology of weather modification

Increased levels of drought and extreme natural phenomena have forced the Chinese to invest 30 million dollars for this technology to control the weather.

China has allocated 199 million yuan (29.76 million dollars) to create technology that wants to control the weather, new technology is part of of drought and natural disaster reduction.

Finance Minister provided details about the project earlier this month, after local media announced that this year's floods have caused 237 deaths. It said the new funds were allocated to help regions in China to better survive extreme natural phenomena such as heavy flooding in central and southern regions and drought in the northwest.

China currently uses the technology of weather modification, including cloud seeding to induce rain during droughts or reduce hail, but also to create a favorable weather during special events such as the Olympic Games in Beijing 2008.

China should use this technology to create over 60 billion cubic meters of water by 2020. A similar technology was developed by a team of researchers from Nevada, they want to control the weather using a drone. Engineers and meteorologists said they had created the first standalone platform that seeded the clouds, it can increase rainfall by 15%.

The machine can create clouds by spraying fine particles of silver iodide into clouds to increase existing levels of precipitation.

Drone engineers and researchers from Desert Research Institute, and the American Drone AviSight allied to create drone incorporating a system of seeding clouds.

Richards, President Drone America, said the project will provide ,, a solution sprayed into the air that can bring people relief from dry areas ''. Although this is the first drone seeded clouds is not the first time such technology is used. Last year in Arizona, plans were unveiled creating artificial rain by spraying the plane silver iodate. The inventors believe that the new technology will help to prevent the worst climate change.

The process of seeding clouds was first proposed in 1940 in the laboratories of General Electric in Schenectady, New York. Twenty years later, Central Arizona Project and Salt River Project have started investigations to bring the project to reality.

Since 2007, the Central Arizona Project has invested one million dollars in research to other countries to increase the water supply from the Colorado River System operates on the premise that rains occur when water droplets grow to become ice crystals.

They become too heavy to remain suspended in the air and often fall melting until they touch the ground.

The water in dry areas can be air, turned into ice crystals in the atmosphere by spraying some chemicals, such as dry ice or silver iodate.

Some researchers worry that silver from the air may lodge in the Basin. Also, they are concerned about how they will decide who can benefit from this project. Compared to other alternatives, such as desalination of sea water, creating clouds is a much cheaper alternative, although it will not only be able to combat drought.

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Quantum computer simulates hydrogen molecule

A prototype quantum computer has been used to calculate the electronic structure of a hydrogen molecule for the first time, demonstrating the possibility of performing complex quantum-mechanical simulations of molecular processes on such devices.


Updated 02/05/2020

The quantum computer was constructed by researchers at Google’s research laboratories in California, US. Together with colleagues elsewhere in the US and in the UK, a team led by John Martinis used the device to perform electronic structure calculations that they say can be readily scaled up to more complex cases.1

IBM BrandVoice: The Quantum Computing Era Is Here. Why It Matters Forbes

The possibility of simulating quantum systems without the approximations necessary with classical computers was what prompted Richard Feynman to propose quantum computing back in 1982. As quantum computers have come closer to reality, much of the attention has been focused on the greater speed they should achieve relative to classical devices. But some feel that quantum simulation will end up being the ‘killer application’ that makes the effort worthwhile.

Roche - Quantum computers - Calculating the unimaginable

This is not the first time that a quantum-chemistry algorithm has been implemented on a proto-quantum computer. But previous efforts have not been able to exploit the full advantages of a quantum-based approach, because they have required costly ‘pre-computation’ steps on a classical computer, which limits the degree of complexity that can be handled this way. ’What is new here is that this work uses a scalable quantum computing architecture,’ says Matthias Troyer of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, who was not involved in the research.


A combined approach

Google’s digital quantum computer uses superconducting devices for its quantum bits (qubits), in which information can be encoded in the quantum states of the supercurrent.2 To carry out the electronic structure calculation for a hydrogen molecule, the researchers used two different methods, called the variational quantum eigensolver (VQE) and phase-estimation algorithm (PEA).

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‘We might soon see quantum computers that outperform classical ones for certain problems’‘Both are efficient quantum algorithms for finding ground-state energies,’ says team member Peter O’Malley, ‘but they take different approaches and have different advantages and disadvantages.’ The PEA method can in principle get the answer with arbitrary precision, but only if there are no errors in the process.

In practice errors are always present, in which case the VQE method works better. This involves using a series of successive algorithms that gradually improve on an initial guess at the molecule’s wavefunction. By adjusting the parameters in the wavefunction, it is possible to compensate for errors incurred in the computational steps and still get an answer – for the dissociation energy, say – essentially the same as that obtained from a detailed classical simulation of the molecule.

The researchers say that it is already possible to simulate more complicated molecules than hydrogen with their device. ‘The benefit of quantum simulation is that you only need a quantum simulator roughly the size of the molecule you want to simulate,’ says O’Malley. The calculation used only a third of the available qubits, and the team is now building quantum chips that should be able to model small transition-metal complexes.


‘All of these problems are still trivial and the effort of just controlling the quantum computer is still much more than that of solving the problem classically,’ says Troyer. He adds that we may soon see quantum computers that outperform classical ones for certain problems, but that doing quantum-chemistry calculations beyond the power of classical computers will take a few years longer.

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source: rsc