Tech Talk

A new version of D-Wave's supposed quantum computers could help NASA hunt for alien worlds or enhance Google's mammoth search engine before the end of the year. The U.S. space agency and Internet search giant have joined a growing list of high-profile customers using the latest D-Wave machine despite lingering skepticism from quantum computing experts.

Photo: D-Wave Systems

It’s launch season in Silicon Valley; birdies leave their nests and nascent companies leave their incubators, accelerators, or classrooms and announce their products to the world. Until recently, software, particularly apps, dominated launch season; credit cards and parental funding can't take a hardware product from idea to manufacturing. But in recent years, with 3-D printers and other rapid prototyping tools readily available, and funding within reach, thanks to Kickstarter, Indiegogo, et al., a lot more would-be entrepreneurs are daring to build things out of plastic and circuits as well as code. And they’re making launch season a lot more interesting.

This week Haxlr8r, one of the first hardware-only accelerator programs, launched its second class. Haxlr8r is especially interesting for its international approach—it requires its teams to spend most of the three months they spend under Haxlr8r’s wings in Shenzhen, China. Explained Zach Hoeken Smith, program director for Haxlr8r: “Shenzhen is the best place in the world to design and build products.” Being there, he says, allows entrepreneurs to quickly change their choices of components, boards, and other parts because they can get their hands on just about anything they might put in a final product within minutes or hours, rather than days or weeks. Entrepreneurs there can also quickly find the right manufacturing partner, and sit down with experts to refine their designs to maximize their manufacturability in the early stages, not after prototypes are complete.

“We believe,” says Smith, “that you don’t wait until you get a million bucks on Kickstarter before you work with manufacturing.”

In a first, an unmanned plane today successfully took off from a U.S. Navy aircraft carrier. In another first, a small, (mostly) unmanned jetliner recently flew through British commercial airspace.

The navy trial involved a Northrop Grumman X-47B plane, one of just two test models built as part of a US $1.8 billion program. As it is the policy to test each element of the plane's autonomous systems independently, today's flight concentrated on the catapult-assisted takeoff. It went without a hitch. This time, however, the flight was controlled remotely by a human, and the plane landed on a conventional runway, that is, on dry land.

Future flights will test the X-47B's ability to fly itself and land on a carrier. Overlapping optical and other sensors, together with GPS connections and internal maps, are designed to allow the plane to navigate and avoid mid-air collisions by itself. Human judgment takes over only when the plane is taxiing--a tricky shell game, played on a deck crowded with moving vehicles.

The plane's sleek, batlike airframe is designed to elude most radars, carry heavy bomb loads, and travel about twice as far as most manned fighters. That's just what the doctor ordered, because it would allow the Navy's floating islands, multi-billion-dollar behemoths all, to lurk at a healthy distance from shore-based missiles and other high-tech weaponry. Next year the Navy plans to test the unmanned plane's ability to refuel in mid-air, which it must do to manage truly long-distance flights.

There are many advantages to going pilotless. For one, it saves humans from getting killed or captured. For another, it allows a plane to make hairpin turns and other maneuvers that generate g-forces high enough to drain the blood from any head, right stuff or not. Finally, it saves on the weight of the many systems that protect the pilot.

Britain's less operatic but perhaps equally consequential feat took place last month, but was announced yesterday. A Jetstream airliner flew 800 kilometers with no intervention from the human pilot except during the takeoff and landing phases--all in commercial airspace. That British air-safety regulators allowed the test suggests that they think unmanned airliners are close enough to justify serious planning.

The flight was organized by a joint project of the U.K. government and local aerospace vendors called the Autonomous Systems Technology Related Airborne Evaluation and Assessment, or Astraea, which happens to be the name of a Greek goddess (the Brits have always had a lot of such coincidences).

Back in December, Lambert Dopping-Hepenstal, the director of Astraea, told Spectrum that the twin-turboprop, 18-seat Jetstream served as a "flying laboratory," with engineers on board to monitor everything. He said that the test vehicle hadn't been specially configured to take off and land autonomously, but that it could do so--as can any modern airliner.

"Here, though, you’ve taken the pilot away, and preprogrammed it to fly a route," he said. "In the event of comm failure, it will look after itself and follow the rules of the air in avoiding conflicting traffic."

Complete autonomy would require quite a lot of advances in the ability of a plane to sense and avoid danger in the air and on the ground,  Dopping-Hepenstal added.  "I’m not quite sure you’re rushing to an economic solution here, but rather doing things that are now difficult or impossible to do with manned aircraft--long endurance, extreme environmental environments. I’m not convinced by the short-term economic argument today."

An airline passenger advocacy group has jumped into the fray over Boeing's 787 -- calling for the FAA to scale back the Dreamliner's airworthiness clearance and for an investigation into Boeing's FAA-approved fix to its battery fire problems.

FlyersRights.org, calling itself "the largest airline passenger organization," on Wednesday submitted a formal petition to FAA chief Michael Huerta and Secretary of Transportation Ray LaHood. The group cited expert testimony that questions Boeing's battery fix, now being implemented around the world to get 787s back in the air within weeks. FlyersRights also questioned FAA's giving Boeing the ability to create some of its own regulatory tests for the Dreamliner's lithium ion batteries.

The FAA, FlyersRights president Paul Hudson says, "gave Boeing essentially all the authority to approve their own batteries. And it's backfired. Now there's an interest by all parties to make the best out of that situation. But the public isn't well served by that."

At NTSB hearings  last month, Boeing Vice President and top engineer of the 787 program Mike Sinnett testified that Dreamliner's FAA certification process "was the most extensive effort in our history." However, he also later noted of some of the 787's battery tests, "In retrospect I believe we don't feel that it was conservative enough."

Included with FlyersRights' petition was an independent assessment of Boeing's battery fix by David Zuckerbrod, head of the Baltimore-based battery consulting firm Electrochemical Solutions.

Zuckerbrod says makers of lithium ion batteries work within some of the most stringent quality control standards in industry today. Even still, he says, "They make cells by the billions, and yet the failures are in the hundreds or thousands every year."

D-Wave's supposed quantum computers have attracted plenty of skepticism alongside some serious interest from huge corporations such as Google and Lockheed Martin. Now recent testing has shown that D-Wave's machine can indeed beat standard computers head-to-head in solving certain problems.

The D-Wave computer performed up to 3600 times faster than a high-performance machine running IBM software while solving an optimization problem, according to the New York Times. D-Wave's machine only proved slightly faster than the standard computing on two other optimization problem tests, but the results still seem encouraging for the company's future prospects.

“Ours is the first paper to my knowledge that compares the quantum approach to conventional methods using the same set of problems,” Catherine McGeoch, the Beitzel professor in technology and society at Amherst College in Massachusetts, says in a press release.

McGeoch, a founder of "experimental algorithmics" in computer science, was enlisted by D-Wave as an outside consultant to devise tests for comparing the company's machines with conventional computers. She plans to present a co-authored paper on the test results at the 2013 Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) International Conference on Computing Frontiers in Ischia, Italy on May 15.

The latest success of D-Wave's computer does not mean that it or quantum computers in general will replace consumer laptops anytime soon. Instead, D-Wave's machine has proven good at tackling specific optimization problems with one best solution—puzzles similar to the "traveling salesperson" problem that asks for the shortest possible route to visit a list of cities exactly once before returning to the original city.

Lots of folks have been trying for years to figure out how to get today’s kids interested in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) careers. A pair of serial entrepreneurs—Brent Bushnell, profiled in Spectrum's 2012 Dream Jobs Special Report, and Eric Gradman, whose latest venture is Two-Bit Circus—think efforts so far have been missing something—art. So they’re mixing in art with engineering to create a new acronym, STEAM, and a new venture, the STEAM Carnival.

Bushnell and Gradman envision STEAM Carnival as taking classic carnival games, which have always appealed to kids, and updating them with technology, particularly the kinds designed to wow youngsters, like lasers, tesla coils, motion capture systems, robots, and shooting flames. An unexpected combination? Not really, Brent Bushnell’s father, Nolan Bushnell, worked as a carnival barker before launching the video game industry by founding Atari. (A story I hold near and dear to my heart, having worked as a barker for a very low-tech carnival game myself before becoming a technology journalist.)

On Saturday, 1 June, and spilling into Sunday, 2 June in some towns, hackers will join together at community centers, vacant parking lots, and closed-off streets, carrying laptops and trailing power cords. They’ll be connecting with educators, students, artists, and city workers in a coordinated effort to build open-source software that will solve local—or even national—problems.

Organized by HackForChange, with help from companies like Intel and Facebook, government agencies including the White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy, and nonprofits like Code for America, the National Day of Civic Hacking has events scheduled in 35 states. My community, Palo Alto, Ca., will be coming together at an event called CityCamp, which has an ambitious agenda: addressing problems of connectedness (traffic, parking, and the Internet, for example); sustainability (climate change, energy, and the environment); resilience (disaser recovery and cyber-security); and health (chronic disease, nutrition, and exercise).  Other cities' aims are a little more focused, and perhaps more realistic—though I appreciate my community’s tendency to dream big.

In Akron, Ohio, hackers will focus on building an app to map the region's parks. In Des Moines, Iowa, a hack-for-school event will focus on developing software to help educators. In Columbia, S.C., hackers will try to figure out what kinds of public information people want access to, and will try to build user interfaces to make it easy to get.  In Washington, D.C., a hackathon at the White House will build apps for a “We the People” website, an online tool meant to make it easier for people to petition the government.

Though is the first time a hacker day will be a national event, it’s not the first time Palo Alto has participated. Last spring, the town hosted a hacking day event called the “Super Happy Block Party.” A number of these block parties had been organized in recent years by a company called Innovation Endeavors, and organizers of the 1 and 2 June civic hacking days are using them as a model.

I’d love to hear about your plans for the National Day of Civic Hacking in the comments below.

Photo credit: Congnghe24g

The world's first gun made mostly from 3-D printed parts won't beat the power of standard firearms or become the latest item in every U.S. household anytime soon. But the gun's first successful firing test raises new uncertainties about everything from existing gun laws to the future of 3D printing.

A remote firing test of the "Liberator" gun took place in central Texas on 1 May, as witnessed by a reporter from Forbes. The gun's design is based on a digital blueprint by Defense Distributed—a group founded by Cody Wilson with the goal of creating fully 3-D printable guns and making their digital blueprints freely available online. Defense Distributed produced the gun parts by using an $8,000, second-hand 3D printer originally made by Stratasys

Wilson followed up the first firing test by personally hand-firing another Liberator gun on 4 May. He told the BBC that his efforts were "about liberty."

I'm seeing a world where technology says you can pretty much be able to have whatever you want. It's not up to the political players any more

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A solitary piling sticking up out of the sea a few dozen meters from the beach is the epitome of loneliness. Incoming waves sweep around it with just a momentary ruffling of their crests, and the diffraction limit makes it invisible from the sand.

The same phenomenon prevents conventional light microscopes from resolving any object smaller than about half the wavelength of whatever light they use. Like the ocean waves, light waves bend around small objects, neither reflecting nor blocking enough energy to reveal their outlines.

The diffraction limit began to drop in the 1990s, when researchers at the Max Planck institute invented "super-resolution" microscopy with stimulated-emission-depletion fluorescence microscopy. This brought the resolution limit down below the half-wavelength mark, but required that fluorescent labels be bound to the target particles or molecules.

Now Pu Wang, Ji-Xin Cheng, and their Purdue University collaborators, have developed the saturated transient absorption microscope (STAM), a tool for seeing objects tinier than a half wavelength without the need for secondary labels.

The method uses a succession of three laser beams to create a sharply defined spot of illumination just 225 nanometers wide. The spot sweeps across a sample on a slide, creating a transmission image that reveals objects in the 100-nm range more clearly and quickly that ever possible in a far-field image. (Far-field techniques, such as conventional microscopes, let researchers record images at a distance from the sample. Techniques like near-field scanning optical microscopy, NFSOM, and scanning tunneling microscopy, STM, have resolutions of about 20 nm and 0.1 nm, respectively; these, however, rely on very short range quantum mechanical phenomena and require that the detector be positioned within about one wavelength of the sample.)