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Marissa Giustina, a researcher with Google's quantum computer lab, draws a diagram showing "quantum supremacy" as only an early step on a path of quantum computer progress.

After years of development, quantum computers reached a level of sophistication in 2021 that emboldened commercial customers to begin dabbling with the radical new machines. Next year, the business world may be ready to embrace them more enthusiastically.

BMW is among the manufacturing giants that sees the promise of the machines, which capitalize on the physics of the ultrasmall to soar over some limits of conventional computers. Earlier this month, the German auto giant chose four winners in a contest it hosted with Amazon to spotlight ways the new technology could help the automaker.

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The carmaker found quantum computers have potential to optimize the placement of sensors on cars, predict metal deformation patterns and employ AI in quality checks.

"We at the BMW Group are convinced that future technologies such as quantum computing have the potential to make our products more desirable and sustainable," Peter Lehnert, who leads BMW's research group, said in a statement.

BMW isn't alone in its determination to evaluate the practical application of quantum computers. Aerospace giant Airbus, financial services company PayPal and consumer electronics maker LG Electronics are among the commercial businesses looking to use the machines to refine materials science, streamline logistics and monitor payments.

For years, researchers worked on quantum computers as more or less conceptual projects that take advantage of qubits, data processing elements that can hold more than the two states that are handled by transistors found in conventional computers. Even as they improved, quantum computers were best suited for research projects, some as basic as figuring out how to program the exotic machines. But at the current rate of progress, they'll soon become powerful enough to tackle computing jobs out of reach of conventional computers.

Like cloud computing before it, quantum computing will be a service that most corporations rent from other companies. The rigs require constant attention and are notoriously fiddly. Though more work is required to tap their full potential, quantum computers are becoming more and more stable, a development that's helping corporations overcome initial hesitance.

Georges-Olivier Reymond, chief executive of startup Pasqal, says the progress is turning around skeptics who previously viewed quantum computing as a fantasy. A few years ago, employees at large corporations would roll their eyes when he brought up the subject, but that's changed, Reymond says.

"Now each time I talk to them I have a positive answer," Reymond said. "They are ready to engage."

One new customer is European defense contractor Thales, which is interested in quantum computing applications in sensors and communications. "Pasqal's quantum processors can efficiently address large size problems that are completely out of reach of classical computing systems," Thales Chief Technology Officer Bernhard Quendtsaid in a statement.

Of course, quantum computing is still a tiny fraction of the traditional computing market, but it's growing fast. About $490 million was spent on quantum computers, software and services in 2021, Hyperion Research analyst Bob Sorensen said at the Q2B conference held by quantum computing software company QC Ware in December. He expects spending to grow by 22% to $597 million in 2022 and at an average of 26% a year through 2024. By comparison, spending on conventional computing is expected to rise 4% in 2021 to $3.8 trillion, Gartner analysts predict.

The growing commercial activity is notable given that using a quantum computer costs $3,000 to $5,000 per hour, according to Jean-Francois Bobier, an analyst at Boston Consulting Group. A conventional, high-performance computer hosted on a cloud service costs a half penny for the same amount of time.

Analysts say the real spending on quantum computing will start when the industry tackles error correction, a solution to the vexing problem of easily perturbed qubits that derail calculations. The fidelity of a single computing step on the most advanced machines is around 99.9%, leaving a degree of flakiness that makes a raw quantum computing calculation unreliable. As a result, quantum computers have to run the same calculation many times to provide confidence that the answer is correct.

Once error correction is mature, the revenue generated through quantum computing will explode, according to Boston Consulting Group. With today's machines, that value will likely total between $5 billion and $10 billion by 2025, according to the consultancy's estimates. Once error corrected machines arrive, the total could leap forward to hit $450 billion to $850 billion by 2040.

Software and services that hide the complexity of quantum computers also will boost usage. IonQ CEO Peter Chapman predicts that in 2022, developers will be able to easily train their AI models with quantum computers. "You don't need to know anything about quantum," Chapman said. "You just give it the data set and it spits back a model."

Among the signs of commercial interest:

Quantum computers today are more of a luxury than a necessity. But with their potential to transform materials science, shipping, financial services and product design, it's not a surprise companies like BMW are investing. The automaker stands to benefit from knowing better how materials will deform in a crash or training its vehicles' vision AI faster. Though quantum computers might not produce a payoff this year or next, there's a cost to missing out on the technology once it matures.

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Quantum computers are on the path to solving bigger problems for BMW, LG and others - CNET

A team of researchers with Japan's NTT Corporation, the Tokyo University, and the RIKEN research center have announced the development of a full photonics-based approach to quantum computing. Taking advantage of the quantum properties of squeezed light sources, the researchers expect their work to pave the road towards faster and easier deployments of quantum computing systems, avoiding many practical and scaling pitfalls of other approaches. Furthermore, the team is confident their research can lead towards the development of rack-sized, large-scale quantum computing systems that are mostly maintenance-free.

The light-based approach in itself brings many advantages compared to traditional quantum computing architectures, which can be based on a number of approaches (trapped ions, silicon quantum dots, and topological superconductors, just to name a few). However, all of these approaches are somewhat limited from a physics perspective: they all need to employ electronic circuits, which leads to Ohmic heating (the waste heat that results from electrical signals' trips through resistive semiconductor wiring). At the same time, photonics enable tremendous improvements in latency due to data traveling at the speed of light.

Photonics-based quantum computing takes advantage of emerging quantum properties in light. The technical term here is squeezing the more squeezed a light source is, the more quantum behavior it demonstrates. While a minimum squeezing level of over 65% was previously thought required to unlock the necessary quantum properties, the researchers achieved a higher, 75% factor in their experiments. In practical terms, their quantum system unlocks a higher than 6 THz frequency band, thus taking advantage of the benefits of photonics for quantum computing without decreasing the available broadband to unusable levels.

The researchers thus expect their photonics-based quantum design to enable easier deployments there's no need for exotic temperature controls (essentially sub-zero freezers) that are usually required to maintain quantum coherence on other systems. Scaling is also made easier and simplified: there's no need to increase the number of qubits by interlinking several smaller, coherent quantum computing units. Instead, the number of qubits (and thus the performance of the system) can be increased by continuously dividing light into "time segments" and encoding different information in each of these segments. According to the team, this method allows them to "easily increase the number of qubits on the time axis without increasing the size of the equipment."

All of these elements combined allow for a reduction in required raw materials while doing away with the complexity of maintaining communication and quantum coherence between multiple, small quantum computing units. The researchers will now focus on actually building the photonics-based quantum computer. Considering how they estimate their design can scale up towards "millions of qubits," their contributions could enable a revolutionary jump in quantum computation that skips the expected "long road ahead" for useful qubit counts to be achieved.

Read more:
Research Opens the Door to Fully Light-Based Quantum Computing - Tom's Hardware

From quantum discoveries to the first AI-discovered drug candidates going into clinical trials, 2021 was a landmark year for deeptech in Europe.

Swedish battery maker Northvolt now has huge investment from companies like Volvo and VW to build gigafactories, and even ideas like Energy Vault (storing grid energy as huge stacked-up concrete blocks) which may have seemed out there a few years ago, are getting real investment.

Quantum computing took a big leap forward, with many top academics and even former White House officials, joining startups and a huge funding boost from the French and German governments. Even places like Finland built their first quantum computer.

So, what more will 2022 bring?

Investors believe that 2022 will be the year of deeptech with many more VCs and corporations jumping in to fund startups, especially as other sectors become overheated and overcrowded.

Ewan Kirk, tech entrepreneur and founder of Cantab Capital Partners, says that consumer tech like fintech, social media and ride-sharing has ridden a wave of interest, but that these businesses are hard to defend and new competition is entering the market all the time. Which starts to make deeptech look a lot more attractive.

Deeptech businesses are fundamentally different at their base, they are about leveraging a technological or scientific breakthrough, which is defensible through IP. Many VCs are starting to see that this makes them a very strong investment proposition.

Benjamin Joffe, partner at SOSV, says more funding will help startups overcome the multiple transitions they need to make from lab to market.

But what specific developments can we look forward to? Quantum computing, fusion energy and healthtech feature heavily in our experts predictions:

In 2022 we will see the first quantum computing companies demonstrating that they have solutions that are competitive with classical only computing clusters, for applications useful to society as whole even if its with a relatively narrow focus to start with. The metric is a mix of time to solution, accuracy and energy consumption. At a minimum we will have a clear vision of the requirements and scaling laws to make it happen within the next two years.

Christophe Jurczak, founder and partner at Quontonation

2022 will be a breakthrough year for quantum computing and we will finally develop material and technology enabling robust qubits. Quantum computing is a hot topic, but in reality we are very early in developing basic hardware required for the quantum computing dream to materialise.

Quantum computing depends on availability of very specific hardware and material that is able to maintain spin states of qubits for extended period of time. Due to lack of such material the qubits that we have at this point are unstable and highly prone to error, not capable of making more complex calculations with certainty. To unleash the massive potential of quantum computing we need systems with millions of stable qubits rather than the 10s of not-so-robust ones we have at this point.

Marcin Hejka, cofounder and general partner at OTB Ventures

As it stands, the most common approach to improving battery chemistry is through trial and error. Even AI and simulation technologies increasingly used to accelerate the process of identifying and cycling through potentially winning combinations are limited in their impact by the capabilities of computers.

In 2022, there will be huge steps forward as quantum computing begins solving key problems in battery materials modelling that are simply beyond the reach of standard computers, unlocking higher-performance and lower-cost batteries.

2022 will be the year in which government-backed funding will really take off

With significant capital now being invested in quantum computing, we will see more first case uses as innovation in hardware and software accelerates in 2022. As governments in the West begin to take notice of the huge potential applications of quantum computing, 2022 will be the year in which government-backed funding will really take off.

Moray Wright, CEO at Parkwalk Ventures

Nuclear fusion has always been a distant dream, always 30 years away from being ready to commercialise. But investors are starting to pay attention to nuclear fusion startups now, with US-based Commonwealth Fusion Systems raising more than $1.8bn in Series B funding led by Tiger Global. In Europe, nuclear fusion research has long revolved around the long-running ITER mega-project in the south of France, but now younger startups like Renaissance Fusion in Grenoble and Marvel Fusion in Munich are leapfrogging this with new approaches.

Ilkka Kivimaki, partner at Maki.vc

I think we are seeing the tail end of the AI and machine learning wave

I think we are seeing the tail end of the AI and machine learning wave. While it is incredibly important, it is now very much a part of modern technology development, rather than a special formula for the next big company. The focus will instead be on how we can neutralise the dual threats of climate change and future pandemics.

Ewan Kirk, founder of Cantab Capital Partners and tech entrepreneur

Chip shortages revealed the weakness of supply chains and tech sovereignty. It will become more crucial to have key suppliers located within your own country or region.

Benjamin Joffe, partner at SOSV

The light that Covid has shone on the health sector wont go away, and big investment will continue to be made here particularly in increasing the throughput of labs, from simple upgrades to the way in which data is collated, recorded and shared through to transforming the benchtop equipment itself with more flexible hardware.

Well also see more investment in further understanding complex and heterogeneous diseases; now we have the ability to retrieve and combine information from multiple genomics sources, we expect that machine learning algorithms will naturally have a bigger role to play in interpreting all the distinct layers of information and correlating findings with relevant medical knowledge (which will be particularly challenging when dealing with new variants or new genes not previously associated with a specific disease).

Zoe Chambers, partner at Frontline Ventures

The science equity industry is an emerging one but it is picking up pace. In 2022 it will continue growing since it is a main transformational engine for the European economy, and around 100 new industrial science-based companies will be set up in Europe.

Almudena Trigo Lorenzo, founding partner and chair at BeAble Capital

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2022 will be the year of deeptech say investors - Sifted

2021 was quite a year, and during the first few days of 2022, I suddenly realized something.

Even in the face of this centurys worst health epidemic, technological progress has hardly missed a beat.

The entire planet has been under threat of intermittent shutdowns for multiple years now. The economy has suffered incalculable losses, and the labor market has been thrown into complete upheaval.

But despite all this, the worlds spirit of innovation and discovery is flourishing.

The real agents of change out there haven't missed a beat. If anything, this new threat has reinvigorated some of the planets top minds.

For one particular field of science, this past year has been a blockbuster.

For the past decade or more, the tech itself has been locked away in the relative safety of university labs around the world. You might have heard of it before in passing, but very few people expected it to actually materialize.

Last year, that outdated perception was shattered.

At this point, its impossible for you to NOT have heard of quantum computing. The news has been full of real-world proof that this stuff works.

In just a few decades, quantum computers have evolved from the musings of a few ambitious physicists into the genuine article.

The 2000s and 2010s saw a lot of funding shuffled around, but very little real success came out of it. The long and tedious development phase tested the resolve of even the most committed researchers.

Without a tangible success story to rile people up, the public started to gradually lose interest in the technology altogether.

Then in 2019, when Google announced it had achieved quantum supremacy, the world quickly snapped back to attention. Several competitors have since dismissed Google's claim as bogus, but the idea of quantum computers becoming the new standard was firmly established.

After that, the race was officially on. The computing industry hasn't seen so much attention from the general public since Y2K.

Everyone was asking the same question: Do they work?

Luckily, Im here to inform you that the answer is still no.

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Sure, these machines function. But they operate similarly to our current best attempts at nuclear fusion: They cost far more input than they provide in output.

By my estimate, we are somewhere between a few months and a few decades away from building a quantum machine that can rival todays top supercomputers.

I know thats a vague timeline, and I wish I could be more specific. But in the world of quantum physics, there are very few definite answers.

There is one definite figure I can offer, however: $1.02 billion.

That's the total amount of private funding that went to the young quantum computing industry in 2021 alone. And it doesn't even take into account the amount spent by deep-pocketed tech giants like IBM or Microsoft.

Some market analysts are even taking it a step further. Recent projections from reputable firms are confident that the industry will hit $1 trillion by 2030. For perspective, thats around five times more than last years global computer sales.

The takeaway here is that even without a practical prototype, the quantum computing market isn't short on cash or confidence. Hedge funds and venture capitalists are finally feeling bold enough to take the plunge.

And why shouldn't they? Even with a few daunting engineering challenges facing them, the top researchers in the field unanimously agree that it will change the world.

It wont just become a new standard it will render any old-school machines completely obsolete.

There are currently hundreds of companies that claim to be in the quantum computing business. Very few of them pass a cursory financial analysis.

Fewer still seem to have any hope of bringing a real product to market in this century.

It took some serious legwork to narrow down the best stock plays in this sector. As expected, everyone claims to have found the Holy Grail without offering anything to back it up.

After weeding out the imposters, tech editor Keith Kohl and I only feel confident recommending one top pick for this industry.

Check out the free presentation here before the rest of the rabble climbs aboard and it becomes old news.

To your wealth,

Luke SweeneyContributor, Energy and Capital

Lukes technical know-how combined with an insatiable scientific curiosity has helped uncover some of our most promising leads in the tech sector. He has a knack for breaking down complicated scientific concepts into an easy-to-digest format, while still keeping a sharp focus on the core information. His role at Angel is simple: transform piles of obscure data into profitable investment leads. When following our recommendations, rest assured that a truly exhaustive amount of research goes on behind the scenes..

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The Next Great Upgrade: 2022 and Beyond - Energy & Capital

Every year, scientists undertake some truly baffling experiments, and 2021 was no exception. From growing mini-brains with their own eyes in petri dishes to reanimating 24,000-year-old self-replicating zombies from the Siberian permafrost, here are the absolute weirdest scientific experiments of the year.

In August, a group of scientists made news that was equal parts fascinating and horrifying when they announced they had successfully lab-grown a tiny human brain with its own pair of eyes. They made the Cronenberg-esque mini brain, called an organoid, by transforming stem cells into neural tissue, then stimulating the cells with chemical signals to form tiny rudimentary "optic cups" filled with light-sensitive cells.

Thankfully for our collective sanity and for the mini-brains themselves, the tiny organoids don't have nearly enough neural density to be conscious so they won't be asking themselves anytime soon how they awakened as a lost pair of eyes sliding around a petri dish. They are, however, incredibly useful constructs for studying brain development and potentially creating cures for retinal disorders that cause blindness something that the researchers want to study.

Read more: Lab-made mini brains grow their own sets of 'eyes'

If the Cronenburg body-horror of the last entry didn't move you, this year also saw scientists reveal an experiment more in line with Hitchcock's classic horror film "The Birds" proving that crows were smart enough to understand the concept of zero. The concept of zero, ostensibly developed by human societies somewhere in the fifth century A.D., requires abstract thinking. So it came as quite a surprise when a June paper in The Journal of Neuroscience revealed that crows not only picked zero as distinct from other numbers, but also associated it more readily with the number one than with higher numbers.

Scans of the birds' brain activity during the experiments showed that crows have specially tuned neurons for understanding the null number, but what they use those brain cells for (besides potentially plotting to take over the world, of course) is a mystery. The scientists were amazed that both human and crow brains can compute zero even though we shared our last common ancestor with birds well before the extinction of the dinosaurs; this shows that evolution takes multiple routes to create brains with the same higher-level functions.

Read more: Crows understand the 'concept of zero' (despite their bird brains)

April saw researchers finally finding the answer to one of humanity's most pressing questions: Why do Brazil nuts rise to the top of the bag? The nutty mystery was resolved by shaking a mixture of peanuts and Brazil nuts, with the Brazil nuts placed at the bottom, and taking a 3D X-ray scan of the bag after each shake. It turned out that successive shakes eventually moved the larger nuts into a vertical orientation, after which every shake forced them upwards. The scientists believe their research could help engineers design better ways to prevent size segregation from occurring in other mixtures something that, while vitally important for bags of nuts, could have essential applications in medicine and construction.

Read more: 'Brazil nut puzzle' cracked by researchers

By switching off certain genes in the daddy longlegs, scientists created a stunted "daddy shortlegs" version but why? By shortening the famous arachnid's legs, the researchers hoped to reveal the secrets behind its body plan as well as its unique method of locomotion: walking with three pairs of legs and waving the longest pair about to feel its way around.

After the gene tweak, the legs of the stunted daddy shortlegs had not only changed in size, but also in shape; they morphed into short food-manipulating appendages called pedipalps. This offered the scientists a glimpse back in time at the kinds of creatures that daddy longlegs could have evolved from 400 million years ago. And this isn't the last mutant arachnid the scientists want to create; they also plan to mutate spider fangs to glean similar insights into their evolution.

Read more: Mutant 'daddy shortlegs' created in a lab

From early antiquity all the way to the 17th century, alchemists were obsessed with the philosopher's stone: a mythical substance with the power to transmute lead into gold. In July, scientists reported an experiment that looked a little like the fabled process: for just a few fleeting seconds, they were able to transform water into a shiny, golden metal. The researchers achieved this by mixing the water with sodium and potassium metals which donate their extra electrons to the water, and therefore make the water's electrons wander freely, rendering it metallic. The briefly metallic water they created could provide scientists with some key insights into the highly-pressurized hearts of planets, where water could be squished so intensely that this process occurs naturally.

Read more: Scientists transform water into shiny, golden metal

In July, researchers working with Google revealed that they had created a time crystal inside the heart of the tech giant's quantum computer, Sycamore. The crystal was a completely new phase of matter that the researchers claimed was able to evade the second law of thermodynamics, which dictates that entropy, or the disorder of a system, must always increase. Unlike other systems, which see their entropy increase over time, the time crystal's entropy did not increase no matter how many times it was pulsed with a laser. The truly remarkable thing about the weird quantum crystals is that they are the first objects to break a fundamental symmetry of the universe, called discrete time-translation symmetry. Scientists are hoping to use the otherworldly crystals to test the boundaries of quantum mechanics the strange rules that govern the world of the very small.

Read more: Otherworldly 'time crystal' made inside Google quantum computer could change physics forever

If you were to find a group of zombies from the Pleistocene epoch frozen inside Siberian permafrost, reviving and cloning them is probably not high on your agenda. However, that's exactly what scientists described in a June paper published in the journal Current Biology. Thankfully, these zombies aren't the shambling, fictitious brain-eaters popularized by George Romero, but are instead tiny multicellular organisms called bdelloid rotifers. Once thawed, the tiny creatures began reproducing asexually through a process called parthenogenesis, creating perfect clones of themselves. Remarkably, analysis of the soil around the creatures showed that they had been frozen for 24,000 years, and they had survived by putting themselves inside a protective stasis called cryptobiosis. Scientists are hoping to study this clever trick to better understand cryopreservation and how it could be adapted for humans.

Read more: 24,000-year-old 'zombies' revived and cloned from Arctic permafrost

In May, scientists working off the coast of Japan used a long, thin drill called a giant piston corer to drill a 5 mile (8,000 meter) hole to the bottom of the Japan Trench. The scientists then extracted a 120-foot-long (37 m) sediment core from the bottom of the sea, hauling it all the way back up to their ship. The researchers wanted to examine the sediment core because they were searching for clues into the region's earthquake history the drill site is located very close to the epicenter of the magnitude-9.1 Tohoku-oki earthquake. The 2011 quake caused an enormous tsunami that smashed into the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant and caused a devastating meltdown.

Read more: Scientists just dug the deepest ocean hole in history

A July study published in the journal Molecular Biology revealed that an already weird past study had produced even weirder unintended consequences. Decades ago, the Finnish scientist Ilkka Hanski introduced the Glanville fritillary butterfly onto the remote island of Sottunga, planning to study how a population of one species placed inside a harsh habitat could survive. Little did he know, the butterflies harbored a species of stomach-bursting parasitic wasp, and those wasps also carried their own, smaller, stomach-bursting hyperparasite itself a parasitic wasp. Once the butterflies were released on Sottunga, the wasps erupted, spreading across the island with their hosts. This experiment provided later scientists with not only a fascinating ecological study, but also a clear warning that we must understand the ecological webs that form around endangered species before introducing them into new environments.

Read more: 'Russian doll' set of stomach-bursting parasites released inside butterfly on remote Finnish island

Okay, so this one wasn't done by a scientist, but it's by far one of the weirdest amatuer experiments we've heard this year. A January study in the Journal of the Academy of Consultation-Liaison Psychiatry revealed that a man who had brewed a "magic mushroom" tea and injected it into his body ended up in the emergency room with the fungus growing in his blood. After injecting the psilocybin tea, the man, who had hoped to relieve symptoms of bipolar disorder and opioid dependence, quickly became lethargic, his skin turned yellow and he started vomiting blood. The man survived, but needed to take antibiotics and antifungal drugs to remove the psychoactive fungus from his bloodstream. He also had to be put onto a respirator. A growing body of research indicates that psilocybin, the psychoactive compound found in magic mushrooms, could be a promising treatment for depression, anxiety and substance abuse but only if taken safely.

Read more: 'Magic mushrooms' grow in man's blood after injection with shroom tea

Originally published on Live Science.

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10 of the weirdest experiments of 2021 - Livescience.com