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Software engineers from leading technology companies, including Google, SpaceX, and Amazon, are volunteering to help students learn to code while schools are closed

Since the outbreak of COVID-19, over 1,000 engineers have signed up to teach, and students across 45 U.S. states and 30 countries have received coding lessons. Started byThe Coding School, a 501(c)(3) tech education nonprofit, the organization is providing free online,one-on-one coding lessonsto students who have been significantly affected by COVID-19. Students grades 412 with a parent who is an essential worker or has lost a job due to COVID-19 is eligible to receive personalized coding lessons from a live instructor.

Since 2017, The Coding School has taught online, face-to-face coding lessons for K-12 students in partnership withUSCandUCLAsSchools of Engineering. The organization is also offering otherfree programming to inspire students during this time, including a web development coding course and Q&As with engineers specializing in aerospace, healthcare and tech, product design, and quantum computing.

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Were on a mission to ensure coding education is accessible and empowering for all students, explainsKiera Peltz, founder of The Coding School. Over the past three years, weve seen the power personalized coding education has in transforming students lives, and thats why we want to make sure especially now students experiencing difficult times, have access to specialized coding instruction and mentorship.

Instructors are professional software engineers from over 60 companies and university students from undergraduates to Ph.D. candidates at more than 100 universities, includingStanford,MIT, andDuke. Students are matched with instructors with similar backgrounds, thus serving as not only instructors but also mentors.

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Over 95% of students who participate in the program are more likely to pursue a career using programming skills, and 98% of students found The Coding Schools program to be the most effective form of coding education. Students learning at their own pace, focusing on tech fields of interest, and having relatable mentors as instructors has been the winning formula for students engagement and success.

Feeling lost in his schools coding class, my son was ready to give up, saidVladimir Manuel, ahealthcare worker inLos Angeles. The Coding School matched Manuels son with a software engineer from Google for one-on-one lessons. The one-on-one lessons really helped my son understand the material. Now he leaves every lesson with a smile on his face and is excited to continue learning to code.

While students benefit greatly from personalized instruction, instructors have found giving back has its own rewards. Jiahan Yan, an instructor and also software engineer at Google, wrote, This has been one of the most rewarding experiences of my life.

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Software Engineers at Google, Microsoft, and Amazon Give Free Coding - AiThority

Written by AZoQuantumApr 22 2020

Magnon particles that cool quickly offer an unexpectedly effective way to produce Bose-Einstein condensate, which happens to be an enigmatic quantum state of matter.

This finding can help to advance the studies relating to quantum physics and bring researchers closer to the long-term objective of room-temperature quantum computing.

Now, an international group of researchers has discovered an easy method to activate a unique state of matter known as a Bose-Einstein condensate. The latest technique, recently explained in the Nature Nanotechnology journal, is anticipated to help improve the research and development of room-temperature quantum computing.

The researchers, headed by physicists from the University of Vienna in Austria and the Technische Universitt Kaiserslautern (TUK) in Germany, created the Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) via a rapid temperature change: initially, the quasi-particles are heated up gradually and then cooled down quickly to the original room temperature.

To demonstrate this technique, the researchers used quasi-particles known as magnons that denote the quanta of a solid bodys magnetic excitations.

Many researchers study different types of Bose-Einstein condensates, stated Professor Burkard Hillebrands from TUK and one of the top scientists in the BEC field. The new approach we developed should work for all systems.

Bose-Einstein condensates, which were named after Albert Einstein and Satyendra Nath Bose, who initially suggested their existence, are an unusual type of matter. All these particles behave spontaneously in the same manner on the quantum level, fundamentally assuming a single entity.

Bose-Einstein condensates were initially utilized to explain the perfect gas particles and have been established with atoms and also with quasi-particles like magnons, phonons, and bosons.

It is quite difficult to produce Bose-Einstein condensates because, by definition, they need to take place suddenly. To create the right conditions to generate the Bose-Einstein condensates, no attempts should be made to introduce any kind of coherence or order to support the particles to act in the same manner; this means, the particles have to do that on their own.

At present, Bose-Einstein condensates are produced by administering a vast number of particles at room temperature into a limited space, or by reducing the temperature to an almost absolute zero. But the room temperature approach, initially reported by Hillebrands and colleagues in 2005, is technically complicated and only a minimal number of research groups across the world have gained the required expertise and equipment.

On the contrary, the latest technique is relatively simpler. It needs a minute magnetic nanostructure, which measures 100 times smaller than the width of a human hair, and a heating source.

Our recent progress in the miniaturization of magnonic structures to nanoscopic scale allowed us to address BEC from completely different perspective.

Andrii Chumak, Professor, University of Vienna

The nanostructure is gradually heated up to a temperature of 200 C to produce phonons, which, consequently, produce magnons that have the same temperature. When the heating source is switched off, the nanostructure cools down quickly to room temperature, in nearly 1 ns. During this process, the phonons travel to the substrate, but the magnons react very slowly and continue to remain within the magnetic nanostructure.

Michael Schneider, the studys lead paper author and a PhD student in Magnetism Research Group at TUK, elucidated why this occurs: When the phonons escape, the magnons want to reduce energy to stay in equilibrium. Since they cannot decrease the number of particles, they have to decrease energy in some other way. So, they all jump down to the same low energy level.

The magnons create a Bose-Einstein condensate by unexpectedly occupying the same level of energy.

We never introduced coherence in the system, so this is a very pure and clear way to create Bose-Einstein condensates.

Andrii Chumak, Professor, University of Vienna

As is usually the norm in the science field, the researchers made this finding quite by chance. They had actually embarked to examine a different aspect of nanocircuits, when unusual things started to occur.

At first we thought something was really wrong with our experiment or data analysis, added Schneider.

After conferring the work with colleagues at TUK and in the United States, the researchers tuned a few experimental parameters to observe if the unusual thing was indeed a Bose-Einstein condensate. They validated its presence using spectroscopy methods.

The discovery will predominantly interest other physicists investigating this state of matter.

But revealing information about magnons and their behavior in a form of macroscopic quantum state at room temperature could have bearing on the quest to develop computers using magnons as data carriers.

Burkard Hillebrands, Professor, Technische Universitt Kaiserslautern

Chumak emphasized the significance of the association within TUKs OPTIMAS Research Group towards finding a solution to this mystery. For Chumak, it was important to integrate his teams know-how in magnonic nanostructures with Hillebrands knowledge in magnon Bose-Einstein condensates. Two European Research Council (ERC) financial grants provided significant support to the researchers project.

Source: https://www.univie.ac.at/en/

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Fast Cooling Magnon Particles to Create Quantum State of Matter - AZoQuantum

Researchers in Australia have brought quantum computing up to a bewildering 1.5 Kelvin, which may not sound like much until you consider existing technologies require supercooling to almost absolute zero. These scientists say they can quantum compute in an environment 10 times warmer that costs millions less in expensive supercooling equipment.

In the most common form of quantum computing research, scientists use qubitsquantum bits, which are often a single atom of an element with a carefully controlled electronthat must be cooled, ideally, to absolute zero to achieve superconductivity. Absolute zero is impossible, but scientists can get very, very close, and theyre getting slightly even closer all the time.

Each new step costs more money, and often more lead time, for the supercooled tech to get down to temperature. At Sydneys University of New South Wales (UNSW), researchers have reframed the qubit question in order to make a different paradigm. On a relatively traditional silicon chip, pairs of quantum dots, which are artificial atoms that take the form of microscopic crystals, are arranged and combined with nano-scale magnets to help electrons zoom back and forth.

A second group developed a very similar idea at the same time, in a kind of convergent evolution of quantum computing research. The first and second papers, published simultaneously in Nature, both represent results on an underlying silicon technology UNSW says it developed in 2014.

Using an almost consumer-ready silicon chip means the qubits can be manufactured through established factory channels. While the temperature is the big breakthrough here, the production-friendly tech is also a huge advantage.

Cooling a traditional quantum computer to near absolute zero is already costly, but thats just the beginning. Every qubit pair added to the system increases the total heat generated, and added heat leads to errors, lead researcher Andrew Dzurak said in a statement. Thats primarily why current designs need to be kept so close to absolute zero.

Its also why quantum computers are still so tiny. The cheapest desktop PC we could find on a leading consumer electronics site has an Intel Celeron processor (yes, really!), and this 22-year-old CPU technology could hold several entire quantum computers in just a single container of bits passing through in a fraction of a second. For quantum computers to really both surpass traditional CPUs and reach their promised potential, they need to get huge compared to what researchers are putting together today.

From UNSW's statement:

Turning a handful of bits into millions is dauntingbut its much less so at 1.5 Kelvin than it is at absolute zero. And during the next 10 years, many more barriers are likely to come down.

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Hot Qubits Could Deliver a Quantum Computing Breakthrough - Popular Mechanics

Garland views Amaya as a typical Silicon Valley success story. In the world of Devs, it's the first company that manages to mass produce quantum computers, allowing them to corner that market. (Think of what happened to search engines after Google debuted.) Quantum computing has been positioned as a potentially revolutionary technology for things like healthcare and encryption, since it can tackle complex scenarios and data sets more effectively than traditional binary computers. Instead of just processing inputs one at a time, a quantum machine would theoretically be able to tackle an input in multiple states, or superpositions, at once.

By mastering this technology, Amaya unlocks a completely new view of reality: The world is a system that can be decoded and predicted. It proves to them that the world is deterministic. Our choices don't matter; we're all just moving along predetermined paths until the end of time. Garland is quick to point out that you don't need anything high-tech to start asking questions about determinism. Indeed, it's something that's been explored since Plato's allegory of the cave.

"What I did think, though, was that if a quantum computer was as good at modeling quantum reality as it might be, then it would be able to prove in a definitive way whether we lived in a deterministic state," Garland said. "[Proving that] would completely change the way we look at ourselves, the way we look at society, the way society functions, the way relationships unfold and develop. And it would change the world in some ways, but then it would restructure itself quickly."

The sheer difficulty of coming up with something -- anything -- that's truly spontaneous and isn't causally related to something else in the universe is the strongest argument in favor of determinism. And it's something Garland aligns with personally -- though that doesn't change how he perceives the world.

"Whether or not you or I have free will, both of us could identify lots of things that we care about," he said. "There are lots of things that we enjoy or don't enjoy. Or things that we're scared of, or we anticipate. And all of that remains. It's not remotely affected by whether we've got free will or not. What might be affected is, I think, our capacity to be forgiving in some respects. And so, certain kinds of anti-social or criminal behavior, you would start to think about in terms of rehabilitation, rather than punishment. Because then, in a way, there's no point punishing someone for something they didn't decide to do."

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Alex Garland on 'Devs,' free will and quantum computing - Engadget

In the most recent episode of his YouTube series Science vs. Cinema, UC Santa Barbara physicist Andy Howell takes on Star Trek: Picard, exploring how the CBS offerings presentation of supernovae and quantum computing stack up against real world science.

For Howell, the series that reviews the scientific accuracy and portrayal of scientists in Hollywoods top sci-fi films is as much an excuse to dive into exciting scientific concepts and cutting edge research.

Science fiction writers are fond of grappling with deep philosophical questions, he said. I was really excited to see that UCSB researchers were thinking about some of the same things in a more grounded way.

For the Star Trek episode, Howell spoke with series creators Alex Kurtzman and Michael Chabon, as well as a number of cast members, including Patrick Stewart. Joining him to discuss quantum science and consciousness were John Martinis a quantum expert at UC Santa Barbara and chief scientist of the Google quantum computing hardware group and fellow UCSB Physics professor Matthew Fisher. Fishers group is studying whether quantum mechanics plays a role in the brain, a topic taken up in the new Star Trek series.

Howell also talked supernovae and viticulture with friend and colleague Brian Schmidt, vice- chancellor of the Australian National University. Schmidt won the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics for helping to discover that the expansion of the universe is accelerating.

"We started Science vs. Cinema to use movies as a jumping-off point to talk science Howell said. Star Trek Picard seemed like the perfect fit. Star Trek has a huge cultural impact and was even one of the things that made me want to study astronomy.

Previous episodes of Science vs. Cinema have separated fact from fiction in films such as Star Wars, The Current War, Ad Astra, Arrival and The Martian. The success of prior episodes enabled Howell to get early access to the show and interview the cast and crew.

"What most people think about scientific subjects probably isn't what they learned in a university class, but what they saw in a movie, Howell remarked. That makes movies an ideal springboard for introducing scientific concepts. And while I can only reach dozens of students at a time in a classroom, I can reach millions on TV or the internet.

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Science of Star Trek - The UCSB Current