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Why it matters: Quantum computers promise to tackle problems that stump even the most advanced supercomputers. Getting there is a different story, though. One of the biggest hurdles is efficiently connecting multiple quantum processors so they can share information without errors. A new interconnect device by MIT researchers could solve this problem. Current quantum-computing systems rely on clunky "point-to-point" connections, where data is transferred in a chain and has to jump between nodes. Unfortunately, each hop also increases the likelihood of errors.To address this issue, MIT researchers developed a quantum interconnect component that lets superconducting processors talk directly to each other without a "middleman." The device uses microwave photons to shuttle data, and it could finally pave the way for a scalable, error-resistant quantum supercomputer.At the heart of this breakthrough is a superconducting wire (a waveguide), which acts as a quantum highway that lets the photons zip between processors. The team connected two quantum modules to this waveguide, allowing them to send and receive photons on demand. Each module contains four qubits that act as an interface and convert photons into usable quantum data.Developing accurate, scalable quantum computers involves the creation of remote entanglement. This bizarre phenomenon links two quantum particles that instantly match each other's state regardless of distance. Entangled qubits act as a single system, enabling mind-bending algorithms that traditional computers could never perform.Unfortunately, simply firing full photons back and forth doesn't enable entanglement. Therefore, the researchers devised an odd process that stops the emission process halfway. Doing this leaves the system in a weird quantum limbo where the photon is paradoxically emitted and retained simultaneously. When the receiving module absorbs this "half-photon," the two processors become entangled even though they're not physically linked.The researchers also have to deal with photon distortion as they travel, which makes them more challenging to capture. To address this problem, the team trained an algorithm to tweak the photon's shape for maximum absorption. The result was a 60-percent success rate high enough to confirm genuine entanglement. These results are similar to Oxford's method, which uses an ion trap to create successful entanglement 70 percent of the time. // Related StoriesThe implications are enormous. Unlike today's patchwork quantum setups, this architecture supports "all-to-all" connectivity, meaning any number of processors can communicate directly. Future improvements like 3D integration or faster protocols could also increase absorption rates."In principle, our remote entanglement generation protocol can also be expanded to other kinds of quantum computers and bigger quantum internet systems," Aziza Almanakly, an electrical engineering and computer science graduate student, concluded.The team recently published its research in Nature Physics. It's also worth noting that the US Army Research Office, AWS Center for Quantum Computing, and the US Air Force Office of Scientific Research funded MIT's efforts.Image credit: Ella Maru Studio

Youll need to spend a significant amount of cash if you want a desktop PC that can handle heavy workloads, but fortunately, there are desktop computer deals that will let you pocket some savings along the way. You should consider going for the Dell Precision 3680 Tower Workstation, which is on sale for $1,519 instead of $1,649. The $130 discount may not look like much, but you can consider it as a bonus for this powerful PC. Hurry with your purchase to make sure you dont miss out!The Dell Precision 3660 Tower Workstation is our top choice among the best desktop PCs for 3D rendering, but its successor, the Dell Precision 3680 Tower Workstation, is ready to take that throne with upgraded specifications. The desktop computer is powered by the 14th-generation Intel Core i7 processor, the AMD Radeon Pro W6400 graphics card, and 16GB of RAM, which will allow it to keep up with demanding activities even when youre multitasking between them.With Windows 11 Pro pre-installed, youll have access to the operating systems advanced features on the Dell Precision 3680 Tower Workstation. It also features a 512GB SSD, which will give you ample storage space for the apps that you regularly use and the files that you need within reach. Every purchase of the desktop PC even comes with a wired keyboard and optical mouse, so youve got everything you need for your computer setup if you already have a monitor.RelatedThe Dell Precision 3680 Tower Workstation already offers amazing value at its original price of $1,649, so any discount is a welcome sight, even if its just $130. The desktop PC is down to $1,519 from Dell, but if you want to buy it at this price, we highly recommend hurrying in completing your transaction because the bargain may end at any moment. If you want a good look at the projects that youre working on with the Dell Precision 3680 Tower Workstation, you should also think about upgrading with these monitor deals.Editors Recommendations

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent appeared on NBC's "Meet the Press" with Kristen Welker on Sunday. AP Photo/Evan Vucci 2025-04-06T16:54:56Z SaveSaved Read in app This story is available exclusively to Business Insider subscribers. Become an Insider and start reading now.Have an account? Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent appeared on NBC News' "Meet the Press" on Sunday.Bessent discussed President Donald Trump's tariffs and this week's stock market sell-off.He rejected warnings of a recession and said more than 50 nations were trying to negotiate tariffs.Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent appeared on NBC News' "Meet the Press" on Sunday, facing some pointed questions about the two-day stock market crash that followed President Donald Trump's "Liberation Day" tariff announcement this week.During the interview, Bessent told host Kristen Welker that Trump's sweeping levies were necessary and pushed back at warnings of a recession."I see no reason that we have to price in a recession," he said."What we're looking at is building the long-term economic fundamentals for prosperity," he added.Pressed whether Trump's latest barrage of tariffs would be permanent or whether they were simply a negotiating tactic, Bessent said Trump had "created maximum leverage for himself" and that over 50 countries were trying to negotiate the duties."More than 50 countries have approached the administration about lowering their non-tariff trade barriers, lowering their tariffs, stopping currency manipulation," he said, adding that any talks would take time.Elsewhere in the interview, Bessent attempted to reassure Americans concerned about the potential impact to their retirement plans.The Treasury Secretary said it was a "false narrative" that people looking to retire in the near future may be apprehensive about doing so after their retirement savings may have taken a hit in the stock market this week."Americans who want to retire right now, the Americans who put away for years in their savings accounts, I think they don't look at the day-to-day fluctuations," Bessent said."In fact, most Americans don't have everything in the market," he continued. "The reason the stock market is considered a good investment is because it's a long-term investment. If you look day to day, week to week, it's very risky." US President Donald Trump announced new import tariffs. Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images Trump announced his "Liberation Day" tariffs on Wednesday, and a baseline 10% rate on trading partners came into effect on Saturday. Some nations, such as Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam, are set to face far higher rates that are set to begin on April 9.Vietnam said on Sunday that it was prepared to negotiate to remove all tariffs on US goods as it seeks to delay the 46% levy on Vietnamese imports set out by the Trump administration.A special envoy from Vietnam will head to the US to continue talks on the matter, a senior Vietnamese official said, according to a government press release.Recommended video

By Matthew Gault Published April 6, 2025 | Comments (8) | An advanced medium range ballistic missile target is launched from the Pacific Missile Range Facility, Kauai, Hawaii, as part of the U.S. Missile Defense Agencys Flight Test Aegis Weapon System-32 (FTM-32), held on March 28, 2024 in cooperation with the U.S. Navy. Pentagon photo. The Pentagon is expected to deliver plans for a Golden Dome to Trump this week. In the crudest sense, the Golden Dome is a missile defense system that would shoot nukes, missiles, and drones that threaten the U.S. out of the sky. A scientific study published earlier this month detailed the scientific impossibility of the scheme. America has tried to build a missile defense system since before Ronald Reagan was president. Reagan wanted to put satellites into space that would use lasers to blast Soviet nukes out of the sky. What we built was somewhat more pedestrian. It also probably wont work. But defense contractors made a lot of money. When engineers have been under intense political pressure to deploy a system, the United States has repeatedly initiated costly programs that proved unable to deal with key technical challenges and were eventually abandoned as their inadequacies became apparent, explained a new study from the American Physical Society Panel on Public Affairs. Under Trump, were going to do it again. Trump signed an executive order on January 27 that called on the Pentagon to come up with a plan for an Iron Dome for America, which the President and others have taken to calling a Golden Dome. According to the EO, Trump wants a plan thatll keep the homeland safe from ballistic, hypersonic, advanced cruise missiles, and other next-generation aerial attacks from peer, near-peer, and rogue adversaries. The dream of the Golden Dome is simple: shoot missiles out of the sky before they can do any damage. Its important to not simply think of Golden Dome as the next iteration of the ground-based missile defense system or solely a missile defense system because its a broader mission than that, Jonathan Moneymaker, the CEO of BlueHalo, a defense company working on Golden Dome adjacent tech, told Gizmodo.Moneymaker was clear-eyed about the challenges of building Golden Dome. Everyone looks at it as a replication of Israels Iron Dome, but we have to appreciate that Israels the size of New Jersey, he said. Israels Iron Dome has done a great job shooting down Hamas rockets and Iranian missiles. Its also covering a small territory and shooting down projectiles that arent moving as fast as a nuclear weapon or a Russian Kh-47M2 Kinzhal ballistic missile might. The pitch of the Golden Dome is that it would keep the whole of the continental U.S. safe. Thats a massive amount of territory to cover and the system would need to identify, track, and destroy nuclear weapons, drones, and other objects moving at high speed.Thats like trying to shoot a bullet out of the sky with a bullet. The missile defense study, published on March 3, detailed a few of the challenges facing a potential Golden Dome-style system. Trumps executive order is vague and covers a lot of potential threats. We focus on the fundamental question of whether current and proposed systems intended to defend the United States against nuclear-armed [intercontinental ballistic missile] now effective, or could in the near future be made effective in preventing the death and destruction that a successful attack by North Korea on the United States using such ICBMs would produce. Stopping a nuke is the primary promise of a missile system. And if one of these systems cant stop a nuke then of what use is it?The study isnt positive. This is the most comprehensive, independent scientific study in decades on the feasibility of national ballistic missile defense. Its findings may shock Americans who have not paid much attention to these programs, Joseph Cirincione told Gimzodo. Cirincione is the retired president of the Ploughshares Fund and a former Congressional staffer. He investigated missile defense systems and nukes for the House Armed Services Committee. We have no chance of stopping a determined ballistic missile attack on the United States despite four decades of trying and over $400 billion spent. This is the mother of all scandals, he said.The study looked at a few different methods for knocking a North Korean nuke out of the sky. An ICBM launch has three phases: the boost phase which lasts only a few minutes, the midcourse phase which lasts around 20 minutes, and the terminal phase which is less than a minute. During the boost-phase, the nuke is building up speed and getting into the air. Boost-phase intercept of ICBMs launched from even a small country like North Korea is challenging, the study said. You have to get weapons close to the missile and, in the case of North Korea, that would require building them close to China and then firing them over Chinese territory. Any defense system would only have a few moments to respond to the nuke because the boost phase only lasts a few minutes.For a countermeasure to hit that ICBM under those time constraints means it would need to be built close, probably somewhere in the Pacific. And we would need a lot of them. China would not be happy about a ring of missile defense systems close to its borders, no matter how America tried to sell it to them. But what about space-based systems? Its a territory rivals have less power over. The scientific review panel found that it would take over a thousand orbiting weapons to counter a single North Korean ballistic missile. Even then, the system would be costly and vulnerable to anti-satellite attacks, Cirincione told Gizmodo. Around 3,600 interceptors, to be precise. So were talking about ringing the planet in thousands of munitions-armed satellites. And remember that this is just to handle one nuke launched by North Korea. Imagine scaling up a similar defense shield to guard against all the nukes in Russia and youll begin to see the size of the problem. Well, what about lasers? Reagans original plan was lasers. Surely technology has advanced since the 1980s. There is widespread agreement that laser weapons that could disable ICBMs during their boost-phase, whether based on aircraft, drones, or space platforms, will not be technically feasible within the 15-year time horizon of this study, the study said.This hints at another one of the problems of missile defense: it takes a long time to build and your enemies arent stagnant while its happening. While America works on the Golden Dome, Russia, North Korea, and China will be building their own new and different kinds of weapons meant to circumvent it. We may be able to build lasers capable of shooting nukes out of the sky in two decades but by then Americas enemies may have things to deal with the lasers. OK, so building the systems to shoot down a nuke in its boost phase is a logistical and geopolitical nightmare. What about during its mid-course arc? Theres more time to do something then, between 20 and 30 minutes. Most of Americas currently deployed missile defense systems are designed to strike an object midcourse.The absence of air drag during this phase means that launch debris, such as spent upper stages, deployment and altitude control modules, separation debris and debris from unburned fuel, insulation, and other parts of the booster, as well as missile fragments deliberately created by the offense and light-weight decoys and other penetration aids, all follow the same trajectory as a warhead, the study said. This makes it difficult for the defense to discriminate the warhead from other objects in this threat cloud, so it can target the warhead. In tests, Americas midcourse interceptors only work about half the time. And those tests are done under perfect conditions against known threats. After reviewing carefully the technology and test record of the [ground-based midcourse] system, the report concludes that its unreliability and vulnerability to countermeasures seriously limits its effectiveness, the study said.Theres still the terminal phase, that less than a second before a nuke hits its target. And the U.S. also has systems, like the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THADD), designed to knock a missile out of the air during this crucial moment. The truth is that if a nuke is that close, youve probably already lost. Even effective terminal-phase defenses can defend only limited areas, the study said. Moreover, terminal-phase sensors are vulnerable to the blinding effects of nuclear explosions in the atmosphere. These are just a few of the problems that the researchers discussed in the 60-page report. There are many more. And remember this is just talking about shooting down a North Korean salvo. Things get more complicated when you add Russia, China, or any of Americas other enemies. For Cirincione, the report confirmed his long-held belief that any kind of intricate missile defense system isnt worth the cost of building it. In short, we cannot defend the country against a determined ballistic missile attack now or anytime in the foreseeable future, he said. While we can intercept short-range missiles such as those used in the Middle East or Ukraine, there is zero chance we can intercept long-range missiles that span the oceans. We have spent over $400 billion since 1983 on nothing. Future expenditures will just be throwing money down a rat hole.Moneymaker was bullish. When a nation can get aligned around an objective, whether thats Star Wars or Golden Dome or sending someone to the moon, when you have a unity of mission, a lot of things can happen, he said. He also noted that the Golden Dome was a massive opportunity for disruptive defense companies like Anduril and, yes, BlueHalo. He said that Golden Dome was a project at a scale thats never been seen before. Building any proposed system will require cooperation between state and local officials, police, the Coast Guard, the FBI, and the DHS. Theres a lot of constituents at play that have a next-level order of integration that needs to happen. In Moneymakers imagining, the Golden Dome wouldnt be just one system but a vast patchwork of weapons that cover the United States. Is this one dome? Or is it a series of federated domes that interplay with each other? I just, just given the size and scale of the endeavor, were going to see phases to this development, he said. Moneymaker explained that high-value targets like military bases or large metro areas might get protection first and then be woven together into a tapestry or fabric of protection. He said the project is so big that progress will be incremental. The good news is that I think we can go fast as a nation when we need to or want to.In Washington this week, theres talk of creating a whole new department just to handle the development of the Golden Dome. Booz Allen Hamilton has teased a swarm of refrigerator-sized drones flying in 20 orbital planes around 200 miles in the air. The plan is for these AI-connected drone swarms to identify missiles as they come in and slam into them. Thats just one of the many pitches the Trump administration has received. According to Defense One, the Pentagon has gotten more than 360 plans related to the Golden Dome. I fully expect the Trump administration to ignore this serious scientific advice, just as they reject scientific truth on the climate crisis, vaccines, and the environment, Cirincione said. When there is money to be made, science is shunted aside.Daily NewsletterYou May Also Like By Matt Novak Published April 5, 2025 By Lucas Ropek Published April 4, 2025 By Matt Novak Published April 4, 2025 By Matt Novak Published April 4, 2025 By AJ Dellinger Published April 4, 2025 By Matt Novak Published April 3, 2025

A dramatic video shows Isar Aerospace's first orbital launch attempt, which ended with a fiery crash into the frigid sea about 30 seconds after liftoff.

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Maxon One Spring 2025 release is here, featuring hard-surface modeling in ZBrush for iPad, expanded support for DaVinci Resolve in Red Giant, spline modifiers and real-world simulations in Cinema 4D, and more.Details: https://80.lv/articles/maxon-one-spring-2025-release-is-here/

RTHumanoid HistoryExquisite BLADE RUNNER concept art by Syd Mead. To think Ridley Scott basically hired him to design some futuristic cars and Mead built a whole world around them.