FREQUENCY DEVIATIONS IN CONTINENTAL EUROPE ARE CAUSING ELECTRIC CLOCKS TO RUN BEHIND BY 5 MINUTES
 Continental European Power System has been experiencing, since mid-January, continuous significant power deviations due to shortage in supply from one transmission system operator of the interconnected system. All actions are taken by the TSOs of Continental Europe and by ENTSO-E to resolve the situation. Source: entsoe.eu
GOOGLE UNVEILS 72-QUBIT QUANTUM COMPUTER WITH LOW ERROR RATES
If a quantum processor can be operated with low enough error, it would be able to outperform a classical supercomputer on a well-defined computer science problem, an achievement known as quantum supremacy. These random circuits must be large in both number of qubits as well as computational length (depth). Although no one has achieved this goal yet, we calculate quantum supremacy can be comfortably demonstrated with 49 qubits, a circuit depth exceeding 40, and a two-qubit error below 0.5%.
Read moreUBISOFT IS USING AI TO CATCH BUGS IN GAMES BEFORE DEVS MAKE THEM
At the recent Ubisoft Developer Conference in Montreal, the French gaming company unveiled a new AI assistant for its developers. Dubbed Commit Assistant, the goal of the AI system is to catch bugs before they’re ever committed into code, saving developers time and reducing the number of flaws that make it into a game before release. ‘I think like many good ideas, it’s like ‘how come we didn’t think about that before?’,’ says Yves Jacquier, who heads up La Forge, Ubisoft’s R&D division in Montreal.
Read moreMICROSOFT TO OFFER GOVERNMENTS LOCAL VERSION OF AZURE CLOUD SERVICE
The new offering, which will be made available in mid-2018, is designed to appeal to governments and agencies with needs for on-premise servers, such as in a military operation or in an embassy abroad, said Tom Keane, Microsoft Azure’s head of global infrastructure. Source: reuters.com
AI RESEARCHERS AIM TO CRACK CODE ON ‘SUN ENERGY’
Since the ’50s, scientists have chased the promise of clean energy from sun-like reactions between deuterium and tritium, the plentiful isotopes of hydrogen. This carbon-free energy, achieved at temperatures of 360 million degrees Fahrenheit, would offer a great way to heat water and, in turn, spin turbines to create countless kilowatts of electricity. Source: nvidia.com
A FRAMEWORK FOR BUILDING ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE CAPABILITIES
AI will likely become the most important technology of our era as it’s improved upon over time, but we’re still in the early stages of deployment, CIO Journal Columnist Irving Wladawsky-Berger writes. History shows that even after technologies start crossing over into mainstream markets, it takes considerable time for the new tech to be widely embraced across the economy. Source: wsj.com
A PREVIEW OF BRISTLECONE, GOOGLE’S NEW QUANTUM PROCESSOR
The goal of the Google Quantum AI lab is to build a quantum computer that can be used to solve real-world problems. Our strategy is to explore near-term applications using systems that are forward compatible to a large-scale universal error-corrected quantum computer. In order for a quantum processor to be able to run algorithms beyond the scope of classical simulations, it requires not only a large number of qubits.
Read moreJEFF BEZOS HAS SPENT $42M BUILDING A CLOCK TO RUN 10,000 YEARS
The heart of the clock is a titanium torsion pendulum that beats once every 10 seconds. The falling weight that powers the clock can be wound by hand, but it is kept wound by solar power: sunlight shines into an aperture in the 500-ft.-deep chamber in which the clock sits, striking an air-filled cylinder. The expansion of the cylinder provides enough energy to lift the falling weight slightly, and also provides a solar noon time reference for correcting the clock.
Read moreFIRST FIRING OF AIR-BREATHING ELECTRIC TRUSTER
In a world-first, an ESA-led team has built and fired an electric thruster to ingest scarce air molecules from the top of the atmosphere for propellant, opening the way to satellites flying in very low orbits for years on end. Source: esa.int
A NEW STORAGE ENGINE FOR POSTGRESQL TO PROVIDE BETTER CONTROL OVER BLOAT
In-place updates will be supported except when (a) the new tuple is larger than the old tuple and the increase in size makes it impossible to fit the larger tuple onto the same page or (b) some column is modified which is covered by an index that has not been modified to support “delete-marking”. Note that the work to support delete-marking in indexes is yet to start and we intend to support it at least for btree indexes.
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