Industry health: the government's strategy document will focus on the UK's digital health sector

The department for culture, digital and sport is to unveil plans to boost the UK tech economy following Brexit and the pandemic.

The 50-page digital strategy document, which is expected to draw together a list of existing tech policies into one document, will focus on increasing investment into AI, resources into quantum computing and digital health according to reports.

The strategy is also expected to say the UK needs to strengthen its position globally with next generation semiconductors, after concerns the UK is losing ground to Asia.

Last month, a review was launched into a Chinese-owned companys takeover of Newport Wafer Lab, a Welsh manufacturer of silicon wafers used in the production of semiconductors.

Some of the policies could be announced during London Tech Week, which begins on June 13 and runs at the same time as similar tech events in Paris, Barcelona, Amsterdam, Dublin and Berlin.

The UK tech sector reached a landmark 1 trillion valuation in March, trailing only the ecosystems of the US and China. It is also currently producing the most tech unicorns in Europe.

According to Tech Nation, the UK is fourth in the world for tech investment at 33.3bn ($40.8bn), having achieved a record year in 2021. Tech scale-ups contributed just over half of this investment in 2021, peaking at 16.9bn ($21.2bn).

However, the UKs earliest-stage tech start-ups risk being starved of investment according to a report from Google. Its report found the proportion of funding for earliest-stage tech start-ups fell from 15 per cent of the overall investment in the UK technology sector in 2011 to 4.9 per cent last year.

The news of a new strategy follows calls from CBI last month on the government to unlock investment in digital and build business confidence and willingness to invest by publishing the long-awaited digital strategy.

Venture Capital Trusts driving early stage UK tech funding

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Government to unveil strategy to boost UK tech industry - GrowthBusiness.co.uk

Scientists are working toward building the next evolution of computers: quantum computers. And recently, a team of researchers in the Netherlands made another step toward that future after they successfully sent quantum data to three locations in a network.

That development could lead to the creation of a quantum internet, an essential part of any future attempt to build quantum computing networks.

Cade Metz, a technology correspondent for The New York Times, wrote about this recent development.

Marketplaces Kimberly Adams spoke with Metz about quantum computing, what makes the concept different from todays computers and why this latest development with quantum networks involves teleportation.

The following is an edited transcript of their conversation.

Cade Metz: Todays computers store data in what we call bits. And in each bit, you can store either a one or a zero. With a quantum computer, you have whats called a qubit short for quantum bit is that it can store a combination of one and zero at any given moment. So as you string these qubits together, the possibilities for computation become exponentially more powerful, because each qubit can store both these values at once.

Kimberly Adams: You mentioned in your article that quantum computing also needs a comparable network to support it a quantum network, if you will. What would that look like?

Metz: Well, in some ways, it looks a lot like our networks of today. But with a quantum network, you want to be able to move quantum data. And thats a very difficult thing to do. If you have a qubit that stores both those values at the same time, if you look at it, if you try to read the data, you suddenly break the qubit. It becomes an ordinary bit where its either a one or a zero. So you need a new type of network that allows you to move that quantum data and keep it in that state without breaking it.

Adams: Right, because if you try to move a qubit through a system thats only used to dealing with bits, it breaks that qubit into bits.

Metz: Exactly. I mean, its just fundamental that you cannot copy data and move it in a quantum computer. So you need a new way of taking that data thats stored in this unusual way and moving it to a new machine.

Adams: So lets say we do have a network of quantum computers. The internet that we have now completely changed the way the world operates. What would quantum internet do?

Metz: One thing that we need to underline here is that quantum computing is still a ways off. This isnt going to change our everyday lives immediately. Its going to change the way scientists do their work. As they get more powerful, we might expand beyond that, but initially, this is going to be something that is used by companies and academic labs and government labs. But potentially, these systems can really change some important things. Drug discovery is one, right? [It can] help us understand the way the human body works and the ways we can address illness and disease. The quantum computer could potentially break the encryption methods that we use to protect our data. So in the shorter term, its best to think about it that way. Its going to change the way businesses compute, the way government labs and academic labs compute.

Adams: Thats how the internet that we have today started out, it was something that was only used by governments and labs. And now its being used for everything from, you know, posting pictures of your breakfast to crimes and spreading [disinformation] and misinformation. What happens when you layer quantum technology and quantum computing on top of that?

Metz: You know, a lot of people think that as we move forward, we will continue to use both types of systems in tandem, right? There certain things that a classical system will be good for and there are other things that a quantum system will be good for. Now, you can look beyond that. But Im hesitant to do that, despite decades of research into this, were still waiting for a quantum computer that can do something that is practical and useful that you cannot do yet with a classical machine.

Adams: Lets say we take something like risk modeling for climate change. Can you walk me through how differently the experience would go trying to do that modeling with the traditional computing power that we have now and traditional computer networks we have now, compared with a quantum computer and interconnected quantum computers in a network?

Metz: Well, that type of modeling requires, you know, enormous amounts of processing power today. If you really want to model a complex system, you have to take in so much data, and youre struggling to understand how all that data relates to everything else in that collection. A quantum computer, think about it as as finding shortcuts that allow you to better understand the connections between all that data. Thats the hope is that we can find an easier and more straightforward way to understand the connections between all those disparate pieces of data.

Adams: Talking about this almost feels like were entering the realm of science fiction. You mentioned things like quantum teleportation. What is that?

Metz: What you can do with two quantum systems that are at a distance is you can, as scientists say, entangle them. Even if theyre far apart, they can be entangled so that when the state of one changes, the state of the other will change. That strange phenomenon can be used to move data. A team in the Netherlands recently demonstrated that you can do this, not just across two distance systems, but across three. And that was an important step because it showed that we can potentially do this for many network nodes and move towards that type of quantum internet.

Adams: I think about how theres so much technology that we use every day that we dont understand. How important do you think it is that people understand quantum computing by the time we actually have it showing up in our lives?

Metz: I think were experiencing this now with another technology, driverless cars. I do feel like the general public for years did not understand this technology at all, what it was capable of and what it wasnt capable of. And that can be a dangerous thing. This is something that is approaching our public roads. In a lot of ways, its already there under test. You need to understand what that technology can and cannot do, when thats the case. And its good to lay the groundwork and understand whats coming and understand how that might change our personal lives and the larger way the world operates

Metzs article, as well as this explainer from Wired, provide good background on the concept of quantum computing and quantum mechanics.

If you want to learn more about quantum teleportation, check out this short video from The Verges YouTube channel, Seeker.

Last month, President Joe Biden announced two presidential directives related to all this. One was to enhance the National Quantum Initiative Advisory Committee and put it directly under White House control to feed lawmakers and the public information about the latest developments in the field.

And another was to address the cybersecurity risks. Specifically, the directive calls for the National Institute of Standards and Technology to develop new, quantum-resistant cryptographic standards.

By the way, those directives were released quite appropriately on May the Fourth. You know, Star Wars Day.

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Scientists have made another step toward creating a quantum network - Marketplace

COMPUTING

Manipulating Photons for Microseconds Tops 9,000 Years on a SupercomputerJohn Timmer | Ars TechnicaThanks to some tweaks to the design it described a year ago, [quantum computing startup] Xanadu is now able to sometimes perform operations with more than 200 qubits. And it has shown that simulating the behavior of just one of those operations on a supercomputer would take 9,000 years, while its optical quantum computer can do them in just a few-dozen milliseconds.

Researchers in Japan Just Set a Staggering New Speed Record for Data TransfersAndrew Liszewski | GizmodoResearchers from Japans National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT) successfully sent data down a custom multi-core fiber optic cable at a speed of 1.02 petabits per second over a distance of 51.7 km. Thats the equivalent of sending 127,500 GB of data every second, which, according to the researchers, is also enough capacity for over 10 million channels of 8K broadcasting per second.i

California Allows Driverless Taxi Service to Operate in San FranciscoAssociated Press | The GuardianCruise and another robotic car pioneer, Waymo, have already been charging passengers for rides in parts of San Francisco in autonomous vehicles with a backup human driver present to take control if something goes wrong with the technology. But now Cruise has been cleared to charge for rides in vehicles that will have no other people in them besides the passengersan ambition that a wide variety of technology companies and traditional automakers have been pursuing for more than a decade.

With Glass Buried Under Ice, Microsoft Plans to Preserve Music for 10,000 YearsMark Wilson | Fast CompanyLocated in Norway, its part of a cold-storage facility drilled into the very same mountain as the Svalbard Global Seed Vault. While the seed vault protects the earths cache of seeds, the Global Music Vault aims to preserve the sonic arts for generations to come. Dubbed Project Silica, you could oversimplify [Microsofts] technology as something akin to a glass hard drive thats read like a CD. Its a 3-by-3-inch platter that can hold 100GB of digital data, or roughly 20,000 songs, pretty much forever.

How Do You Decide? Cancer Treatments CAR-T Crisis Has Patients Dying on a WaitlistAngus Chen | StatBy the fall of 2021, Patel saw only one possibility left to save Goltzenes lifea newly approved CAR-T cell therapy for myeloma. Its an approach that is transforming treatment of blood cancers: CAR-T therapy labs convert the immune systems T cells into assassins of cancer cells by inserting a gene for whats known as a chimeric antigen receptor. But the process is slow and laborious, and drugmakers simply cant keep up.

How to Make the Universe Think for UsCharlie Wood | QuantaPhysicists are building neural networks out of vibrations, voltages and lasers, arguing that the future of computing lies in exploiting the universes complex physical behaviors. McMahon views his devices as striking, if modest, proof that you dont need a brain or computer chip to think. Any physical system can be a neural network, he said.

AstroForge Aims to Succeed Where Other Asteroid Mining Companies Have FailedEric Berger | Ars Technicathe company plans to build and launch what Gialich characterized as a small spacecraft to a near-Earth asteroid to extract regolith, refine that material, and send it back toward Earth on a ballistic trajectory. It will then fly into Earths atmosphere with a small heat shield and land beneath a parachute. Acain and Gialich, veterans of SpaceX and Virgin Orbit, respectively, readily acknowledge that what theyre proposing is rather audacious. But they believe it is time for commercial companies to begin looking beyond low Earth orbit.

Eavesdropping on the Brain With 10,000 ElectrodesBarun Dutta | IEEE SpectrumVersion 2.0 of the [Neuropixels] system, demonstrated last year, increases the sensor count by about an order of magnitude over that of the initial version produced just four years earlier. It paves the way for future brain-computer interfaces that may enable paralyzed people to communicate at speeds approaching those of normal conversation. With version 3.0 already in early development, we believe that Neuropixels is just at the beginning of a long road of exponential Moores Lawlike growth in capabilities.

This Is What Flying Car Ports Should Look LikeNicole Kobie | WiredIt might be years before flying cars take to the skies, but designers and engineers are already testing the infrastructure theyll need to operate. to hail an air taxi, passengers will need to make their way to a local vertiport, which could sit atop train stations, office blocks, or even float in water. Figuring out exactly what these buildings will require isnt simple. Urban-Air worked with Coventry University on a virtual reality model to test the space before spending 11 weeks assembling Air One, [Urban-Air Ports 1,700-square-meter modular popup building].

Image Credit:Bryan Colosky / Unsplash

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This Week's Awesome Tech Stories From Around the Web (Through June 4) - Singularity Hub

It can be hard to find among the headlines but some news is good news.

Here is your weekly digest of whats going well in the world.

These are this weeks positive news stories:

1. Scientists have identified the brain mechanism behind memory loss in old age

If youve ever forgotten where you left your keys or accidentally told the same story twice, help may soon be at hand.

Neuroscientists at Johns Hopkins have been working with rats to investigate the parts of the brain that control memory.

They have discovered a mechanism in the CA3 region of the hippocampus that appears to be responsible for a common type of memory loss and might turn out to be our greatest hope for combating Alzheimers and other age-related neurological disorders.

The Johns Hopkins team has found that the mechanism is responsible for two basic, co-dependent, memory functions pattern separation and pattern completion.

Lets say you visit a restaurant with your family and a month later you visit the same restaurant again with your friends. You should be able to recognise that it is the same restaurant, even though some details have changed, like the people who work there, the menu, the people eating there, and so on. Your ability to recognise it as the same restaurant is the responsibility of the pattern completion function of the brain.

Now pattern separation is what allows you to remember, for example, which conversation happened when, so you do not confuse two similar experiences or patterns. Lets say you talked about love with your friends, and money with your family. Pattern separation allows you to remember who you had the conversation with.

What the Johns Hopkins team has discovered is that as the brain ages, our ability to distinguish patterns diminishes, and as a result our memory becomes impaired, causing us to become forgetful or repeat ourselves.

Concretely what happens is that the pattern separation function of the brain fades away, and the other function, the pattern completion one, takes over.

In other words, your brain is focused on the common experience of the restaurant, but leaves out the details of the separate visits, so you might remember you had a conversation about love, but be unsure who you had it with, your family or your friends.

But researchers noticed that some of the older rats they worked with performed their memory tasks perfectly, even though their neurons and pattern-recognising functions were impaired.

It's just like people, says James J. Knierim from the Department of Neuroscience, Johns Hopkins University. There's a lot of variability in humans in terms of their cognitive ageing and how their cognitive abilities can decline over age. So we see the same thing in our rat population.

Professor Knierim says that they want to turn all the rats, and subsequently people, into really high performers.

Something was allowing those rats to compensate for the deficit which we also see in those lucky humans who remain surprisingly sharp into their older years. If we can isolate this factor, the hope is that we can replicate it.

Is it just different strategies they use that they've learnt to compensate for deterioration in some of the brain function? Or is it the fact that their brains are not deteriorating as fast?

Identifying the memory loss mechanism could really help us understand what prevents impairment in some people and open the door to preventing or delaying cognitive decline in the elderly.

We know that this same region that we're studying is one of the first areas that is affected in Alzheimer's, explains Professor Knierim, so if we want to understand Alzheimer's and what it does, we need to understand how the brain ages normally.

2. The French village being lit up by the sea.

Living lamps are lighting up the small French town of Rambouillet, about 50 kilometres southwest of Paris.

Its the same natural phenomenon that allows fireflies to light up, and algae to glow at night when the water around them moves.

The lamps are the work of a French start-up called Glowee, which collects bioluminescent marine bacteria called Aliivibrio fischeri, which is then stored inside tubes filled with saltwater. This turns the tubes into fluorescent aquariums.

The goal is to create a living bioluminescent raw material to create urban furniture and redesign the city of tomorrow, to be more respectful of biodiversity and the environment, says Sandra Rey, founder of Glowee.

Mrs Rey says they are currently developing the first pilot project of bioluminescence urban furniture, which will be installed in the city of Rambouillet in the fall.

We are in the process of producing this urban furniture so that it can be tested in the field. And to then be able to, after this first pilot project, really deploy bioluminescence in the city of Rambouillet, but obviously in many other cities too.

The manufacturing process consumes less water than the production of LED lights and releases less CO2, while the liquid is also biodegradable.

Mrs Rey says Glowee works with almost 50 development projects today in France, with constructors, with developers and with municipalities directly.

3. We take a huge step towards a revolutionary quantum internet

Scientists are working on a groundbreaking new computer that will make the ones we use today seem like antiques.

They are using the mysterious powers of quantum mechanics, in a way Albert Einstein himself once deemed impossible.

Quantum mechanics could be revolutionary for modern life as we know it. Tasks that would take todays supercomputers thousands of years to complete could be performed in minutes.

But the thing is quantum computing needs another technological breakthrough to reach its full potential. It needs the equivalent of quantum internet a network that can send quantum information between distant machines without being connected.

It needs what Einstein called spooky action at a distance.

And a group of scientists at the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands has done just that, spooky computing.

This team of physicists used a technique called quantum teleportation to send data across non-neighbouring locations in a quantum network.

Up until now, researchers have only been able to send data between neighbouring nodes, but the new study represents what they call a prime building block for the future of quantum networks and the advances in technology it will bring with it.

4. A new gel can absorb water from desert air and make it drinkable

Pulling water out of thin air just became a reality and not just for magicians.

Scientists and engineers at the University of Texas in Austin have come up with a gel film that could offer cheap access to clean drinking water for people living in arid regions around the globe.

A third of the world's population lives in drylands, which are areas that experience significant water shortages, so this advancement could have a huge global impact.

The gel can pull water from the air in even the driest climates, and its as cheap as it is efficient.

The material costs around 2 a kilogram, and a single kilogram can produce more than six litres of water per day in areas with less than 15 per cent relative humidity. To give you an idea, Las Vegas, a notably dry US city that sits in the middle of a desert, has an average humidity rate of a little over 30 per cent.

And although six litres doesnt sound like much, the researchers say they could drastically increase the amount of water the invention yields by simply making thicker films or absorbent beds.

Pulling water from desert air is usually energy-intensive and rarely produces much clean water, but this invention is set to change all that. Its also easy to use and simple to replicate.

It's very simple. It doesn't require advanced equipment or something else. You just mix it. Its even easier than making a meal, jokes Nancy Guo, lead researcher of the study.

All the materials are easy to find, she says, adding that they were inspired by stuff in the kitchen, like salt, flour and sugar.

5. An EU plan to make solar panels mandatory on all new buildings

The outlook for Europes energy crisis might soon get a little sunnier.

A new proposal from the European Commission intends to make solar panels mandatory on all new buildings within the European Union.

The goal is to make solar energy the largest electricity source in the bloc, replacing reliance on Russian oil and gas supplies with renewable energy.

Following Russias invasion of Ukraine, the European Commission is speeding up their original green energy transition plans, increasing the renewable energy goals to 45 per cent of electricity consumption by 2030.

In 2020 renewable energy sources already made up 37.5 per cent of the EUs electricity consumption, meaning the continent is already well on track.

"The big lessons that we have to take from this war are that renewable energies are not only fundamental to facing the climate goal, but it's the best ally for the European Union for its independence and strategic autonomy, said Pedro Snchez, the Spanish prime minister, speaking at a World Economic Panel on energy in the Swiss resort town of Davos.

Theres still work to be done, however, and the Commissions REPowerEU plan and the solar rooftop initiative is introducing a phased-in legal obligation to install solar panels on new public and commercial buildings, as well as new residential buildings, by 2029.

If the plan is successful, solar energy will become the largest electricity source in the EU by 2030, with more than half of the share coming from rooftops.

As well as the obvious environmental benefits, the EU hopes the plan will help reduce energy prices over time. In its World Energy Outlook 2020 report, the International Energy Agency (IEA) confirmed that solar power schemes now offer the cheapest electricity in history and predicted that by 2050 solar power production will skyrocket to become the worlds primary source of electricity.

6. The Canadian chef helping immigrants into the workplace

Jessica Rosval has worked alongside triple-Michelin-starred chef Massimo Bottura in his restaurant Osteria Francescana, in Modena, Italy, for over a decade. Shes received many awards along the way, but her most recent recognitions are for her humanitarian work.

This year she opened a brand new culinary venture that helps women who immigrate to Italy to find careers and integrate into life in a new country.

Roots, the social enterprise restaurant she opened in March with her friend Caroline Caporossi, showcases the cultural diversity of Modena's immigrant women.

Rosval says that the menu is inspired by her chefs-in-training and where they come from. You know, the story of the trip from Cameroon to Modena or from Colombia to Italy.

Rosval says the training teaches the women participating the technical skills needed to be able to pursue a professional career in cooking, But also non-technical skills that really help in terms of better understanding Italian bureaucracy, culture, the history of Modena, the food culture that exists in Modena, which are all also very fundamental and important aspects of cooking in this new country.

Dishes inspired by Cameroon, Guinea, Nigeria, Tunisia and Ghana are all on this seasons menu.

For example, Zaira is one of our trainees, she's from Tunisia and in Tunisia they make brik, which is a rolled fried savoury dumpling filled with a lot of different things. It can be interpreted a lot of different ways in Tunisia, but there is always fresh cheese in the original Tunisian recipe. But when Zaira moved into Modena, she started making it with Parmigiano Reggiano. And when she told us that story, we thought it was great.

Rosval says that sometimes the best ways for us to get to understand new places is by picking out these little ingredients, and tasting the food and seeing what the actual land is giving us.

And how are the Italians taking it?

We were unsure of what people's reactions would be. But it has been miraculous. We have had so much support from our community. We have had from the florists to the electricians to the plumbers, everybody donating their time, everybody donating their energy, their services. The restaurant is full every single night that we're open, Rosval told Euronews.

Besides teaching women how to cook and run a kitchen, Roots taps into a wide network of government agencies, small businesses and volunteers who help train the women in everything from how to open a bank account and manage household finances to workers' rights and dealing with Italian bureaucracy.

During this year alone, more than 17,000 migrants have arrived in Italy via boat, according to the UNHCR. Seven per cent of these are women, who can be doubly disadvantaged, both socially and economically.

Roots is part of the Modena-based Association for the Integration of Women, and just one of the incredible examples of local commitment to bringing these women into the workforce.

And if you're still hungry for more positive news, there's more below

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Good News: Big step towards quantum internet and a village lit up by the sea - Euronews