Germany-based Carl Zeiss AG is a fascinating company. Fascinating, even if you do not take into account that they make lenses and optics for some of the coolest systems in the world.
When you are etching patterns as wide as a small virus, you have graduated beyond simple lens. Now we refer to them as “optics systems”. These massive multi-component systems are at the very heart of the multi-million dollar photolithography machines that ASML makes. Without them, ASML has no machine to deliver to TSMC, Samsung or Intel.
In this video, we are going to continue with our deep dive into the semiconductor industry’s critical suppliers with a look at one of ASML’s closest partners. The makers of the optics systems that let high-energy UV light etch wafers. And a company with an utterly fascinating history. Carl Zeiss.
Error: The video shows that Zeiss died in 1866. He died in 1888.
The future will be fully automated. That is, at least in the case of warehouses. Today, warehouses all around the world have a large number of robots working for them, helping them to accomplish tasks more safely and efficiently.
These active robots combine the finest of science, technology, and engineering to become extremely useful machines that manufacture the vast majority of the products you use every day.
They are the future. It is automation at its most effective, and it creates some pretty amazing results in the process.
Do you want to see what these robots are capable of? We bring you live-action footage of some of the best warehouse robots.
There’s Amazon’s robot army, which can number up to 500 robots and is responsible for assembling consumer orders. They use a conveyor belt to move between hundreds of zip codes and load packages into delivery trucks as they pass along the track.
The Shentong Express factory robots are on the job 24 hours a day, seven days a week, sorting through 200,000 parcels every day in the world’s largest completely automated sorting facility. Approximately 300 billion route combinations covering an area of 21,000 square feet are calculated in total by the team (2,000 sq m).
The SqUID robots that make up the BionicHIVE are based on the worker bee. There is no limit to where these robots can go in a warehouse and pick up or place boxes weighing up to 32 pounds (15 kg).
(This is part 1 or at least a 2 part series on quantum computing. Each video will be successively more in-depth.) Classical and quantum computers share many general components – power supply, data storage, RAM memory, motherboard, but they differ in the way the central processing unit (CPU) works. A classical CPU is made from transistors, which is like an on/off switch. If it is on, then it’s like the number 1 or true. If it is off it’s like the number 0 or false. This is what binary means. A transitor represents a binary bit.
Quantum computers do not use binary bits, they use quantum bits or qubits. What is a Qubit? It is a bit in a superposition of 1 and 0. What does superposition mean? Quantum theory shows that quantum objects such as electrons, prior to measurement, are in multiple states at the same time. So something like the spin of an electron, which is a measurement of its intrinsic angular momentum, when measured is either up or down. When not measured, it is in both states of up and down. This is what superposition is.
If you visualize a qubit as a sphere, a classical bit can be 1 or 0 – the north pole or south pole. But a qubit can be in any place on the surface of this sphere depending on the superposition. A single qubit can be any mixture of 1 and 0, so the possible values are infinite! So whereas the classical binary bit can only take one of two values, the superposition allows a qubit to take on a potentially infinite number of values.
A qubit can be created by any quantum object like photons, electrons or even atoms. It doesn’t really matter. It just needs to be a quantum object in superposition. Qubits allow us to ask several questions at once during computation, “what is the result if the qubit is one? What is the result if the qubit is zero? What is the result if it is anything in between?”– thus we can calculate the process where the bit is both zero and one and anything in between.
This downside is that the result of the computation will also be in superposition. This means that the quantum computers needs to maintain superposition throughout the process. The inputs AND outputs are both in superposition. The quantum computer operates WITHOUT any measurement of any kind. Because there are no measurements, the computer state evolves according to quantum mechanics.
The computer follows multiple computational paths at the same time, analogous to the way a photon could follow multiple paths through a double slit experiment. It only has a certain probability of ending up on certain locations.
However, at the end, there has to be a measurement to get a final result. And this final result from the computer is always classical. It is going to be a one or zero. How do we know whether we should get a one or zero? This is controlled by the quantum algorithm, which are clever programs created by programming scientists that use mathematical tricks to make sure that the probability of getting the correct is answer is as high as it can be.
How do quantum Algorithms work? They word by applying destructive interference on the wrong results, and constructive interference to the correct results. It does a kind of interference experiment to find the most likely answer.
So how is this so much more powerful than classical computers for solving problems? The quantum computer doesn’t do the usual stuff in a faster way. It doesn’t calculate all the possible results very quickly. It calculates all functions for all inputs at once. It calculates multiple functions at once for multiple possible inputs.
Why is it hard to build quantum computers?
Qubits have to be isolated from the outside world. They cannot interact with any molecules or photons or other particles. This requires extreme cooling, because heat can modify or destroy the superposition by interacting with Qubits. So, this is why quantum computers are cooled to near absolute zero, that’s -273 degrees Celcius, to effectively eliminate all external thermal energy, so that the superposition is not modified or broken. In addition, Qubits can’t talk to the outside world, but they have to be able to talk to each other very fast. So these connections that the qubits must have with each other is not trivial.
Visa is the latest major company jumping into the NFT craze.
The payments processor said Monday it bought a “CryptoPunk,” one of thousands of NFT-based digital avatars, for nearly $150,000 in ethereum.
An NFT — which stands for non-fungible token — is a unique digital asset designed to represent ownership of a virtual item. Unlike bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, NFTs can’t be exchanged like-for-like with another NFTs.
Proponents say this makes NFTs scarce, driving up their value. NFTs have often been compared to physical collectible items like rare trading cards and works of art.
“We think NFTs will play an important role in the future of retail, social media, entertainment, and commerce,” Cuy Sheffield, head of crypto at Visa, said in a blogpost Monday.
“To help our clients and partners participate, we need a firsthand understanding of the infrastructure requirements for a global brand to purchase, store, and leverage an NFT.”
Sheffield said CryptoPunks have become a “cultural icon for the crypto community.”
“With our CryptoPunk purchase, we’re jumping in feet first,” he said. “This is just the beginning of our work in this space.”
Anchorage, a federally-chartered digital asset bank, facilitated the purchase, Visa said.
Big firms join NFT craze
Several big firms have been experimenting with NFTs lately.
Christie’s has auctioned off several NFTs, some worth millions of dollars. The auction house set records in March when an image created by the digital artist Beeple sold for $69 million.
Meanwhile, a number of media publications, including CNN, The New York Times and Fortune magazine, have sold NFTs of their own.
But some critics are skeptical of NFTs. While such tokens represent a digital certificate of ownership, buyers don’t own the underlying item, and internet users can still view the associated media online. Some people have even stolen other artists’ work and gone on to sell them as NFTs.
“The purchaser of Beeple’s $69 million NFT artwork, ‘Everydays – The First 5000 Days’, owns the unique token,” Adam Rendle, partner at law firm Taylor Wessing, said in a blogpost.
“They do not, however, own copyright or any other intellectual property rights in the digital artwork itself. They cannot distribute or otherwise commercialise the represented asset.”
WIRED has challenged computer scientist and Hidden Door cofounder and CEO Hilary Mason to explain machine learning to 5 different people; a child, teen, a college student, a grad student and an expert.
Decentralized Autonomous Organisation. Quite a mouthful, which is why most people just say ‘DAO’.
But what are they? What do they do? And why should you care?
Very, very good questions.
In a nutshell, DAOs provide the framework for OPEN COLLABORATION. Which, it turns out, can be incredibly productive. How productive you ask? Well, that’s what we’re here for you silly goose!
So what’s the story behind Decentralized Finance? How has all of this started? What happened in DeFi in 2020? And where are we going in the future? You’ll find answers to these questions in this video.
Although there is no one agreed-upon date when decentralized finance was born, there were a few important events that made DeFi possible.
The first of them was the creation of Bitcoin in 2009 by Satoshi Nakamoto.
Despite whether Bitcoin should be classified as DeFi or not, its inception was the key enabler for the whole cryptocurrency industry which decentralized finance is part of.
Although sending Bitcoin around the world is cool – finance doesn’t stop there. Every robust financial system needs a set of other important services such as lending, borrowing, trading, funding or derivatives.
Ethereum, with its Turing-complete programming language Solidity and the ERC20 standard for creating new tokens, quickly became a go-to smart contract platform to build on.
Theoretical physicist Michio Kaku lauded a recent nuclear fusion experiment at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.
“This is a giant step toward the holy grail of energy research,” said Kaku, professor of theoretical physics at the City College and City University of New York. “To hit break-even, to extract more energy than you put in, and this could eventually become a game-changer.”
The Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory announced a key achievement in nuclear fusion that it had, back on Aug. 8, been able to produce 1.3 megajoules of energy at its National Ignition Facility, albeit very briefly. Kaku told CNBC’s “The News with Shepard Smith” that the achievement was a giant step towards clean energy.
“A fusion reactor is carbon neutral, it does not create carbon dioxide, it does not create copious quantities of nuclear waste that you find in fission plants with uranium, it does not meltdown,” said the author of “The God Equation: The Quest for a Theory of Everything.” “The fuel is seawater, hydrogen from seawater could be the basic fuel.”
Fusion, the lesser-known and opposite reaction to nuclear fission is when two atoms slam together to form a heavier atom and release energy. It is the way the sun makes energy.
Kaku explained some of the drawbacks to nuclear fusion and why it’s not currently an easily accessible source of energy.
“It turns out that when you heat hydrogen to tens of millions of degrees Fahrenheit, the temperature of the sun, things become unstable, and that’s why this reaction took place over a hundred trillionth of a second, just a snap of the finger, so in other words, we want to have a continuous stream of energy, not bursts of energy, like we found here,” Kaku said.
