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The technology received a vote of confidence from investors today, as 2 -year-old stealth startup Quantum Brilliance raised a nearly $10m seed funding round from a consortium of investors led by Main Sequence Ventures and the founders of QxBranch, the Australian quantum services company acquired by Rigetti. The funding will speed the commercialisation of the technology, which Andrew Horsley, CEO of the Australian-German startup, says could dramatically change the way quantum computing can be used. “It is simplifying the quantum computer and turning it into something that can sit in an ordinary server rack next to classical computers. Most quantum computers are giant mainframes; these will eventually be small enough to be embedded in mobile devices,” Horsley told Sifted. “The miniaturisation potential is huge.” So is the volume of quantum computers that could be created using this technique. “We are thinking about volumes in millions.” “We are thinking about volumes in millions, not the...

Measuring a black hole’s mass isn’t easy. A new technique could change that Flickering in the gas and dust of the accretion disk of a black hole provides hints of its mass Astronomers have figured out how to use the disk of hot gas and dust around some black holes (like the one shown in this artist’s illustration) to measure the black hole’s mass. MARK A. GARLICK, SIMONS FOUNDATION Share this: Email Facebook Twitter Pocket Reddit Print By  Lisa Grossman AUGUST 12, 2021 AT 2:00 PM An actively feeding black hole surrounds itself with a disk of hot gas and dust that flickers like a campfire. Astronomers have now found that monitoring changes in those flickers can reveal something that is notoriously hard to measure: the behemoth’s heft. “It’s a new way to weigh black holes,” says astronomer Colin Burke of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. What’s more, the method could be used on  any astrophysical object with an accretion disk , and may even help find el...

How Bell’s Theorem Proved ‘Spooky Action at a Distance’ Is Real By BEN BRUBAKER July 20, 2021 The root of today’s quantum revolution was John Stewart Bell’s 1964 theorem showing that quantum mechanics really permits instantaneous connections between far-apart locations 103 READ LATER Samuel Velasco/Quanta Magazine We take for granted that an event in one part of the world cannot instantly affect what happens far away. This principle, which physicists call locality, was long regarded as a bedrock assumption about the laws of physics. So when Albert Einstein and two colleagues showed in 1935 that quantum mechanics permits “spooky action at a distance,” as Einstein put it, this feature of the theory seemed highly suspect. Physicists wondered whether quantum mechanics was missing something. Then in 1964, with the stroke of a pen, the Northern Irish physicist John Stewart Bell demoted locality from a cherished principle to a testable hypothesis. Bell  proved  that quant...

Vaccines Are Pushing Pathogens to Evolve IMMUNOLOGY Vaccines Are Pushing Pathogens to Evolve By MELINDA WENNER MOYER May 10, 2018 Just as antibiotics breed resistance in bacteria, vaccines can incite changes that enable diseases to escape their control. Researchers are working to head off the evolution of new threats. 10 READ LATER Matthew J. Jones, a research assistant at Pennsylvania State University, takes a sample of dust collected from a chicken farm to test it for signs of the virus that causes Marek’s disease, an infection common among poultry. Some evidence suggests that the virus that causes the disease is becoming immune to yet another version of the vaccine that controls it. Sasha Maslov  for Quanta Magazine Andrew Read  became a scientist so he could spend more time in nature, but he never imagined that would mean a commercial chicken farm. Read, a disease ecologist who directs the Pennsylvania State University Center for Infectious Disea...

Mathematicians Solve Decades-Old Classification Problem By STEVE NADIS August 5, 2021 A pair of researchers has shown that trying to classify groups of numbers called “torsion-free abelian groups” is as hard as it can possibly be. READ LATER Eric Nyquist  for Quanta Magazine If you’re conducting a census of all the plants growing in a specific region, rather than tally every single plant, you might decide to organize them by species. Doing this along certain stretches of the Tuscany coast would not be too difficult, said the University of Turin mathematician  Gianluca Paolini , because you’ll mainly find a single plant — maritime pine ( pinus pinaster ). If you were in the Amazon rainforest, by contrast, you’d face a much bigger challenge trying to work out the names and numbers of all the species that have taken root there. Doing so fully would, in all likelihood, be impossible. Mathematicians, in their attempt to make sense of the sprawling landscape of mathemati...