
To test the promising simulation results in practice, the researchers have also used their passive radar system to detect small and controlled landslides in a former basalt mine on the Rhine near the German town of Remagen. These landslides occur when an excavator pours its load into the still-gaping hole.
“Both the simulations and the practical test have shown that passive radar with signals from satellite mega-constellations is suitable for detecting and confirming avalanches,” summarizes Dr. Cristallini.
‘Tis the season of avalanches so it is good to see some advances on safety tech. BTW dig those domes straight out of 1950’s sci fi.
I can’t believe the progress of tech in some areas.
In December, Google announced that its new quantum computer, based on a chip called Willow, solved a math problem in five minutes that would take one of the fastest supercomputers roughly “10 septillion years” to crack. For context, 10 septillion years is the entire history of the universe—about 14 billion years—repeated several trillion times over. The achievement was so audacious that some people speculated that Google’s computer worked by borrowing computing power from parallel universes.
You shouldn’t think of quantum computers as being bigger, faster, or smarter than the computers that run our day-to-day life. You should think of them as being fundamentally different.
But the possibilities aren’t all pretty. The U.S., China, and other countries are locked in a multibillion-dollar race toward quantum supremacy, in part because it’s broadly understood that a fully functioning quantum computer could also solve the sort of complex mathematical problems that form the basis of public-key cryptography. In other words, a working quantum computer could render null and void most internet encryption. Here again, the technological power to do more good tends to rise commensurately with the power to cause more chaos.
Now, engineers have utilized quantum sensors to realize a groundbreaking variation of nuclear quadrupolar resonance (NQR) spectroscopy, a technique traditionally used to detect drugs and explosives or analyze pharmaceuticals.
Described in Nano Letters, the new method is so precise that it can detect the NQR signals from individual atoms—a feat once thought unattainable. This unprecedented sensitivity opens the door to breakthroughs in fields like drug development, where understanding molecular interactions at the atomic level is critical.
New quantum sensing technology reveals sub-atomic signals
Yikes, wow again. This makes sci fi sound tame.
The researchers developed nanosensors that have attained both the most sensitive force response and the largest dynamic range ever realized in similar nanoprobes.
They have 100 times better force sensitivity than the existing nanoparticles that utilize rare-earth ions for their optical response, and an operational range that spans more than four orders of magnitude in force, a much larger range—10–100 times larger—than any previous optical nanosensor.
“We expect our discovery will revolutionize the sensitivities and dynamic range achievable with optical force sensors, and will immediately disrupt technologies in areas from robotics to cellular biophysics and medicine to space travel,” Schuck says.
For this paper, the team used thulium.
nanoscale sensors of force access previously unreachable environments
Thulium? When was the last time you heard of that? Time to stockpile it?