astro picture for the day

Credit: ESO

---------------------------------extra goodie for the day------------------------------------------------------

The electromagnetic nature of light was certainly a great surprise; but, that discovery was just a tip of an iceberg.  The electric nature of atoms was to lead to much; the unification theories of the universe; the nature of the stars; that we are stardust, and eventualy, the atom seems to be like a snowflake; the clues to the origin of our universe is imprinted in atoms.

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"the roads that lead man to knowledge are as wondrous as that knowledge itself." - Johannes Kepler

---------------------------------nanotechnology and quantum computing news for the day-----------

http://www.nature.com/srep/2012/120813/srep00571/full/srep00571.html

D-Wave has been making special purpose quantum computers for a few years now(with some controversy on whether they're machines actually work . . . just like when Galileo was spotting moons going around Jupiter with his little telescope?).  Well they've just succeeded in calculating some protein folding with a quantum simulation machine.  This used 81 qubits; they have a 500 plus quibit machine going into commercialisation right now and plan on building a two thousand plus qubit machine in a few years.  But, with this demonstration, we're already in the quantum computing age!  Maybe we will just compute a primitive protein nanomachine(when the two thousand plus qubit machine gets built).  And, quantum computer breakthroughs occur all the time(today, there was a recent announcement of reading out qubits of a single atom that lasts for seconds(as oppossed to less than a nanosecond).