D-Wave is a bit of an oddity in the quantum computing space, having been founded back in the last century. And its initial offering wasn't a quantum computer like those being developed by IBM or Google. Instead, the company built what's now called a quantum annealer, a machine that isn't general-purpose but can solve a large class of optimization problems. While the hardware shares some similarities with the qubits used in gate-based quantum computers, it operates in a fundamentally different way.

But a few years back, D-Wave started working on gate-based hardware, apparently choosing a somewhat unusual qubit technology called fluxonium. And this year, the company acquired a startup called Quantum Circuits that spun out of Yale University and has been developing what's called a dual-rail qubit (the same technology used by Amazon), which promises to make most errors very easy to detect, simplifying error correction.

On Wednesday, the company is publishing a paper in Nature that describes a key step in validating this dual-rail technology, showing that two of the qubits can be entangled without altering their best feature: Most are a single type that is easy to detect.

Read full article

Comments

The Infinite Machine Olto is a great electric scooter, one with an overall layout that echoes the classic Vespa. It's comfortable, and it accelerates well, handles nicely, and has a capacious battery. It has a rugged design that seems capable of handling a lot of abuse, but it also comes with thoughtful touches and security features that mean you can park it anywhere with confidence. And it provides all that at less than half the cost of its full-featured stablemate, the P1 scooter.

The reason is that the Olto is also a bicycle. Sort of.

This may technically be a bicycle, but it's not one you'd ever want to pedal. While you can set it to operate as either a Class 2 or Class 3 e-bike, it works best when the pedals are both locked in a forward position, acting as footrests. The Olto was designed to provide riders with the experience of a scooter while still allowing them to take advantage of the growing bike lane networks in many urban areas across the country.

Read full article

Comments

When the history of our ancestry is written, the fact that we've interbred with some of our closest relatives, the Neanderthals and Denisovans, will have a central role. And it will be tempting to write it as a very tidy story: Once we got genomes from these other groups, it was possible to identify the sequences in our genomes that we shared with them.

But in reality, as scientists started poking large enough collections of data, there were regular hints of some strange ancestry in our genomes. It was hard to pin down, though, at least in part because the 2 percent on average of Neanderthal DNA found in many populations does not guarantee that any two individuals will have the same 2 percent. So having the genomes of those two groups made sense of some things researchers had already been seeing.

But knowing what we do about Neanderthal and Denisovan DNA is now allowing researchers to answer a somewhat different question: Is there anything else? Using recently developed analytical techniques, they find evidence of a third lineage that we apparently interbred with before any modern humans left Africa. Again, there were hints of this earlier, but so far, there has been no genome from a modern human relative to help us understand the details—the source of this DNA remains a "ghost lineage."

Read full article

Comments