Senate Republicans cannot be led by someone who is openly hostile to the agenda of their party's president and the base who elected him.

People keep predicting that each wave of new technology will mean humans can put their feet up. It hasn't happened yet. Some economists and anthropologists who study the subject say even with the arrival of artificial intelligence, humans will remain integral to making the world go round.

House Republicans on Tuesday demanded that each member of President Biden's cabinet preserve all relevant documents and communications, a move that signals future investigations into the Biden administration.

Senate Republicans on Wednesday will elect a new party leader for the first time in nearly two decades.

Republican Rep. David Valadao has won reelection in California's 22nd Congressional District, defeating Democrat Rudy Salas for the second time.

The Massimo Modular E9 is a sleek, smart and comfy tiny home in 409 square feet. Tech expert Kurt “CyberGuy" Knutsson takes a closer look at what the future of housing might look like.

An updated Android trojan called FakeCall hijacks bank calls. Tech expert Kurt “CyberGuy" Knutsson says Android phone manufacturers and Google need to step up their game on security.

Tech expert Kurt “CyberGuy" Knutsson helps you honor our heroes with these powerful podcasts, audiobooks and documentaries this Veterans Day.

Emma Raducanu has been crowned BBC Sports Personality of the Year on another history-defining night for Britain’s teenage phenomenon.

The company behind Pornhub and other popular pornographic sites broke Canadian privacy law by allowing intimate images to be shared on its websites without the direct knowledge or consent of everyone depicted, the federal privacy commissioner has ruled. The Office of the Privacy Commissioner’s (OPC) investigation into Aylo (formerly MindGeek), one of the world’s largest […]

How private is your internet address? Very, says the Supreme Court of Canada. Police can’t just walk into a company and demand a suspect’s IP address by saying a Canadian resident doesn’t have an expectation of privacy of that information, the court ruled today. An IP address is vital enough that every resident expects it […]

In Canada, your IP address has the right to remain silent. Elon Musk is suing OpenAI for not being Open. Apple faces a class action not allowing competitive access to backup services and the World Server Throwing Competition in March 2024 is accused of being too violent towards servers.   All this and more on the […]

Canada’s national anti-money laundering agency has been hit by a cyber attack. The Financial Transactions and Reports Analysis Centre of Canada (FINTRAC) said Tuesday that over the last 24 hours it has been managing a cyber incident. “The incident does not involve the centre’s intelligence or classified systems,” it said in a statement. “As a […]

The government of Canada has announced significant investments to improve connectivity in British Columbia and Alberta over the past two days. That includes combined federal and provincial funding of C$112 million to bring high speed internet access to more than 22,500 households in Alta. and another $37 million for 7,500 households in B.C.. The households, […]

Artificial intelligence can be the key to unlocking better relationships with work, HP revealed in its new Work Relationship Index (WRI) report. “AI represents a significant opportunity to transform our work dynamics and unlock a more positive and productive environment for all,” stated Dave Shull, president of HP Workforce Solutions at HP Inc.. “To foster […]

Facing an unprecedented crisis, IT World Canada, a beacon of technology journalism, is on the brink of closure. This poses a critical question: Without IT World Canada, who will narrate Canada’s tech story? After decades of serving the Canadian tech industry, IT World Canada needs help to survive. As of midnight tonight, the company is […]

A new species of Jurassic dinosaur related to Tyrannosaurus rex has been discovered by paleontologists in Kyrgyzstan in Central Asia.

A spike in earthquakes at Mount Adams, a volcano in Washington state, prompted scientists to install additional monitoring instruments to assess the seismic activity.

The sun blasted a coronal mass at Earth earlier this week, and after back-to-back major hurricanes, some are concerned it could impact the power grid.

And the Epic Games Achievements system will start to roll out next week.

Surrounding ourselves with greenery can do wonders for our physical and mental wellbeing. Kathy Willis reveals just what kinds of plants are best for our brains and bodies, and why

Stem cells made in the lab may one day aid cancer treatment by reducing our reliance on donors

People with cancer may have understandable reasons to follow Australian supermodel Elle Macpherson in declining chemotherapy, but the odds aren’t in their favour, warns Elle Hunt

Modern life disrupts the circadian rhythms controlling our biology – increasing our risk of developing conditions ranging from diabetes to dementia. Lynne Peeples's new book The Inner Clock explores and offers solutions

Interacting with animals seems to provide emotional support to young people with a serious illness, even when the contact is via letters and not face to face

Male pattern baldness could soon be a thing of the past, with new hair loss treatments beginning to show tantalising results

Snoring is often viewed as harmless, at least to the snorer, but we are now uncovering its potentially serious effects on cardiovascular health. And finding ways to stop is surprisingly challenging

Systems that can harvest water from moisture in the atmosphere could offer a valuable water source in the wake of disasters

Cases of prostate cancer are surging alarmingly around the world. Thankfully, we are developing more accurate tests that can catch the condition early

Antibiotics can reduce diversity in the gut microbiome, raising the risk of infections that cause diarrhoea - and the effects may last years

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A massive undertaking to map cancer tumours is providing new insights into how the disease forms, evolves and develops resistance to treatments

The Renaissance artist Michelangelo had carried out human dissections, which may have led him to include women with breast cancer in some of his pieces

Experts predict that the number of cancer cases around the world will skyrocket, resulting in millions more fatalities by 2050

Wonder Brands Inc. is recalling various brands of bread and buns because of pieces of metal in the products. According to the Canadian Food Inspection Agency (CFIA), the recalled products were distributed in Newfoundland and Labrador, Ontario and Quebec, Canada. The brands listed in the recall include Country Harvest, D’Italiano,... Continue Reading

Human bird flu has hospitalized a Canadian teenager at British Columbia Children’s Hospital. He is the first person in Canada to test positive for the bird flu virus. The B.C. teen likely acquired the virus from exposure to a bird or animal. B.C. Health said the infection is a rare... Continue Reading

Listings outpace demand in Toronto and Vancouver

Atlantic Canadians say the region has room to grow, but is facing a shrinking labour pool

Stock and bond markets are already reacting in anticipation of the changes

Canada Post workers might soon be putting down their mailbags and grabbing picket signs

The Associated Press has declared a winner in Colorado's 8th Congressional District which has been one of the most closely watched races in the country.

Senate Republicans met on Tuesday night to hear from the three candidates to succeed Mitch McConnell, and Rick Scott left with two new endorsements.

Incumbent Republican David Valadao is projected to emerge victorious in California's 22nd Congressional District. The highly contested race was considered to be a tossup.

The Canadian women's soccer team was implicated in a drone scandal this past summer. But, an investigation determined drone use against opponents, predated the Paris Olympics.

Quantum computing is a devilishly complex technology, with many technical hurdles impacting its development. Of these challenges two critical issues stand out: miniaturization and qubit quality.

IBM has adopted the superconducting qubit road map of reaching a 1,121-qubit processor by 2023, leading to the expectation that 1,000 qubits with today’s qubit form factor is feasible. However, current approaches will require very large chips (50 millimeters on a side, or larger) at the scale of small wafers, or the use of chiplets on multichip modules. While this approach will work, the aim is to attain a better path toward scalability.

Now researchers at MIT have been able to both reduce the size of the qubits and done so in a way that reduces the interference that occurs between neighboring qubits. The MIT researchers have increased the number of superconducting qubits that can be added onto a device by a factor of 100.

“We are addressing both qubit miniaturization and quality,” said William Oliver, the director for the Center for Quantum Engineering at MIT. “Unlike conventional transistor scaling, where only the number really matters, for qubits, large numbers are not sufficient, they must also be high-performance. Sacrificing performance for qubit number is not a useful trade in quantum computing. They must go hand in hand.”

The key to this big increase in qubit density and reduction of interference comes down to the use of two-dimensional materials, in particular the 2D insulator hexagonal boron nitride (hBN). The MIT researchers demonstrated that a few atomic monolayers of hBN can be stacked to form the insulator in the capacitors of a superconducting qubit.

Just like other capacitors, the capacitors in these superconducting circuits take the form of a sandwich in which an insulator material is sandwiched between two metal plates. The big difference for these capacitors is that the superconducting circuits can operate only at extremely low temperatures—less than 0.02 degrees above absolute zero (-273.15 °C).

Superconducting qubits are measured at temperatures as low as 20 millikelvin in a dilution refrigerator.Nathan Fiske/MIT

In that environment, insulating materials that are available for the job, such as PE-CVD silicon oxide or silicon nitride, have quite a few defects that are too lossy for quantum computing applications. To get around these material shortcomings, most superconducting circuits use what are called coplanar capacitors. In these capacitors, the plates are positioned laterally to one another, rather than on top of one another.

As a result, the intrinsic silicon substrate below the plates and to a smaller degree the vacuum above the plates serve as the capacitor dielectric. Intrinsic silicon is chemically pure and therefore has few defects, and the large size dilutes the electric field at the plate interfaces, all of which leads to a low-loss capacitor. The lateral size of each plate in this open-face design ends up being quite large (typically 100 by 100 micrometers) in order to achieve the required capacitance.

In an effort to move away from the large lateral configuration, the MIT researchers embarked on a search for an insulator that has very few defects and is compatible with superconducting capacitor plates.

“We chose to study hBN because it is the most widely used insulator in 2D material research due to its cleanliness and chemical inertness,” said colead author Joel Wang, a research scientist in the Engineering Quantum Systems group of the MIT Research Laboratory for Electronics.

On either side of the hBN, the MIT researchers used the 2D superconducting material, niobium diselenide. One of the trickiest aspects of fabricating the capacitors was working with the niobium diselenide, which oxidizes in seconds when exposed to air, according to Wang. This necessitates that the assembly of the capacitor occur in a glove box filled with argon gas.

While this would seemingly complicate the scaling up of the production of these capacitors, Wang doesn’t regard this as a limiting factor.

“What determines the quality factor of the capacitor are the two interfaces between the two materials,” said Wang. “Once the sandwich is made, the two interfaces are “sealed” and we don’t see any noticeable degradation over time when exposed to the atmosphere.”

This lack of degradation is because around 90 percent of the electric field is contained within the sandwich structure, so the oxidation of the outer surface of the niobium diselenide does not play a significant role anymore. This ultimately makes the capacitor footprint much smaller, and it accounts for the reduction in cross talk between the neighboring qubits.

“The main challenge for scaling up the fabrication will be the wafer-scale growth of hBN and 2D superconductors like [niobium diselenide], and how one can do wafer-scale stacking of these films,” added Wang.

Wang believes that this research has shown 2D hBN to be a good insulator candidate for superconducting qubits. He says that the groundwork the MIT team has done will serve as a road map for using other hybrid 2D materials to build superconducting circuits.

Waiting for each part of a 3D-printed project to finish, taking it out of the printer, and then installing it on location can be tedious for multi-part projects. What if there was a way for your printer to print its creation exactly where you needed it? That’s the promise of MobiPrint, a new 3D printing robot that can move around a room, printing designs directly onto the floor.

MobiPrint, designed by Daniel Campos Zamora at the University of Washington, consists of a modified off-the-shelf 3D printer atop a home vacuum robot. First it autonomously maps its space—be it a room, a hallway, or an entire floor of a house. Users can then choose from a prebuilt library or upload their own design to be printed anywhere in the mapped area. The robot then traverses the room and prints the design.

It’s “a new system that combines robotics and 3D printing that could actually go and print in the real world,” Campos Zamora says. He presented MobiPrint on 15 October at the ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology.

Campos Zamora and his team started with a Roborock S5 vacuum robot and installed firmware that allowed it to communicate with the open source program Valetudo. Valetudo disconnects personal robots from their manufacturer’s cloud, connecting them to a local server instead. Data collected by the robot, such as environmental mapping, movement tracking, and path planning, can all be observed locally, enabling users to see the robot’s LIDAR-created map.

Campos Zamora built a layer of software that connects the robot’s perception of its environment to the 3D printer’s print commands. The printer, a modified Prusa Mini+, can print on carpet, hardwood, and vinyl, with maximum printing dimensions of 180 by 180 by 65 millimeters. The robot has printed pet food bowls, signage, and accessibility markers as sample objects.

MakeabilityLab/YouTube

Currently, MobiPrint can only “park and print.” The robot base cannot move during printing to make large objects, like a mobility ramp. Printing designs larger than the robot is one of Campos Zamora’s goals in the future. To learn more about the team’s vision for MobiPrint, Campos Zamora answered a few questions from IEEE Spectrum.

What was the inspiration for creating your mobile 3D printer?

Daniel Campos Zamora: My lab is focused on building systems with an eye towards accessibility. One of the things that really inspired this project was looking at the tactile surface indicators that help blind and low vision users find their way around a space. And so we were like, what if we made something that could automatically go and deploy these things? Especially in indoor environments, which are generally a little trickier and change more frequently over time.

We had to step back and build this entirely different thing, using the environment as a design element. We asked: how do you integrate the real world environment into the design process, and then what kind of things can you print out in the world? That’s how this printer was born.

What were some surprising moments in your design process?

Campos Zamora: When I was testing the robot on different surfaces, I was not expecting the 3D printed designs to stick extremely well to the carpet. It stuck way too well. Like, you know, just completely bonded down there.

I think there’s also just a lot of joy in seeing this printer move. When I was doing a demonstration of it at this conference last week, it almost seemed like the robot had a personality. A vacuum robot can seem to have a personality, but this printer can actually make objects in my environment, so I feel a different relationship to the machine.

Where do you hope to take MobiPrint in the future?

Campos Zamora: There’s several directions I think we could go. Instead of controlling the robot remotely, we could have it follow someone around and print accessibility markers along a path they walk. Or we could integrate an AI system that recommends objects be printed in different locations. I also want to explore having the robot remove and recycle the objects it prints.