Quantum computers could one day perform calculations beyond the reach of even the most powerful classical supercomputer, but for now building and maintaining these machines remains immensely expensive and difficult.

So over the past few years, the nascent industry has begun to make some of the relatively few quantum machines in existence available to researchers and businesses via the computing cloud.

A startup called Rigetti Computing has just taken the wraps off a new Quantum Computing Service (QCS) that builds on its existing offering, which includes Forest, a software toolkit for quantum programming in the cloud. There’s a $1 million prize for the first person or team using QCS to demonstrate that a quantum machine is capable of showing what the company calls “quantum advantage”.

Rigetti defines this as showing that a quantum machine can come up with higher quality, faster, or cheaper solution to an important and valuable  problem than a classical one. (Rigetti says details of the competition will be unveiled on October 30.)

The company also recently unveiled the world’s most powerful quantum processor, a 128-qubit model that tops the previous record holder, Google’s 72-qubit Bristlecone chip (see the MIT Technology Review qubit counter). QCS users will initially be limited to a 16-qubit chip, however. The service will also be limited to certain customers and partners of Rigetti at first, before becoming more widely available later this year.

The reason there’s so much excitement around quantum computing is that unlike traditional machines, which use standard digital bits that can represent either1or 0, qubits can be both at the same time. Adding just a few extra qubits to a machine—and linking them via a phenomenon known as “entanglement”—creates exponential leaps in computing power (see “Serious quantum computers are finally here. What are we going to do with them?”).

As the technology develops, quantum computing could lead to significant advances in numerous fields, from chemistry and materials science to nuclear physics and machine learning.

Speed trap

Thomas Papenbrock, a nuclear physicist at the University of Tennessee, has used both IBM’s and Rigetti’s cloud services to compute the binding energy of the deuteron, a particle consisting of a proton and neutron that forms the center of the deuterium (or heavy hydrogen) atom. Although it’s possible to do this with classical computers, Papenbrock says he’s keen to use quantum machines through the cloud in order to learn more about their potential.

To run such experiments, researchers often program their own classical computers with hybrid quantum algorithms that then use application programming interfaces, or APIs, to call on quantum machines in the cloud for specific bits of a calculation. The results are then shipped back to the classical machines.

Rigetti says its own team, and users of its existing cloud service, found that this approach created latency issues, slowing down algorithms’ performance.

QCS tackles the problem with a data center containing both quantum computers and classical ones in a system optimized to run entire hybrid algorithms. The firm says that over the next few months, quantum algorithms will run 20 to 50 times faster on its QCS than on its current cloud setup, and significantly faster beyond that.

The service also comes pre-configured with Forest and other tools to make it easy for researchers to get experiments up and running. “We’re really shortening the learning loop so people can just start testing and programming today,” says Chad Rigetti, the company’s CEO and founder.

Though QCS will initially give researchers access only to the company’s 16-qubit chip, eventually its latest one will be accessible via the cloud too, the company says. The prospect of more powerful quantum processors excites researchers like Papenbrock. “With access to a 128-qubit chip, we could solve some fantastic problems,” he says.

Cloud moves

The new service will give even more researchers access to relatively advanced quantum computing and keep Rigetti in the front row of a rapidly expanding quantum cloud movement.

IBM already lets members of its business-focused QNetwork community access 20-qubit machines via the cloud, and provides free access to 5- and 16-qubit machines through an initiative called the IBM Quantum Experience. Dario Gil, the chief operating officer of IBM Research, says that some 97,000 users have run a total of 5.8 million experiments on the latter service since it launched in 2016.

At a recent conference, Diane Greene, the head of Google’s cloud business, said the company is letting a few customers have access to a cloud-based quantum service, and Asian tech firms like Japan’s Fujitsu and China’s Alibaba have also joined the quantum cloud club.

NASA’s Juno spacecraft has mapped the strong magnetic field at Jupiter, revealing a surprising asymmetry between the northern and southern hemispheres that could lend insight into what’s going on within the gas giant.

Jupiter hosts the most powerful magnetic field of all the planets in our solar system, cranking out a field close to 20,000 times stronger than Earth’s. Juno has braved that magnetic field during the probe’s close approaches to the planet since arriving in July 2016; it skims about 2,500 miles (4,000 kilometers) above the planet every 53 days over the course of elongated orbits.

A new paper, published Wednesday (Sept. 5) in the journal Nature, pulls together Juno’s measurements to create the most detailed map yet of the Jovian magnetic field at different depths, painting a complex picture. [‘Totally Wrong’ on Jupiter: What Scientists Gleaned from NASA’s Juno Mission]

“We find that Jupiter’s magnetic field is different from all other known planetary magnetic fields,” the authors, led by Kimberly Moore of Harvard University, wrote in the paper. Like Earth, Jupiter’s magnetic field has a primary north and south pole, close to the planet’s actual poles as it rotates. But while the gas giant’s south pole is relatively orderly, the planet’s north pole has one narrow magnetic hotspot amid more chaotic patches of magnetic field, where positive and negative sections don’t have concrete counterparts. And the planet has another big magnetic “south pole” close to the equator the researchers refer to this equatorial patch as a “great blue spot” in their paper, in contrast to the planet’s swirling Great Red Spot storm. (Blue is often used in diagrams to indicate the negative part of a magnetic field.)

According to a News and Views column accompanying the article, Jupiter’s magnetic field is likely generated by a swirling mass of hydrogen deep within the planet. Crushed to incredible pressure, this material becomes a metallic liquid that can conduct electricity and generate a magnetic field when stirred. The heat within the planet, left over from Jupiter’s formation early in the solar system’s history, creates convection currents that get the liquid moving — not to mention the gases on top, leading to the planet’s roiling clouds and storms.

Convection within Earth’s iron core also generates our planet’s magnetic field, but Earth’s field is much more straightforward: mostly positive at one pole, mostly negative at the other, with no particular pattern to the parts that diverge from that.

This strange magnetic field on Jupiter is a hint to what’s going on inside the planet. The researchers suggest the Jovian core could be larger and more dilute than previously thought, or the stable layers of fluid within Jupiter could partition off parts of the planet’s interior, altering the flow, according to the News and Views story. The state of the planet’s field could even — although the paper’s researchers suggest this is unlikely — mark the middle of a magnetic field reversal process.

By modeling the different possible scenarios within Jupiter and the magnetic fields they’d generate, the researchers said, investigators can search for a match with the planet’s actual magnetic field to work out what’s going on.

Email Sarah Lewin at slewin@space.com or follow her @SarahExplains. Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook and Google+. Original article on Space.com. 

Truly god view, Jilin-1 video satellite shot @OneSpace01 OS-X1 suborbital rocket’s launch at JSLC this noon. pic.twitter.com/KposRHZc4D

— dafeng cao (@dafengcao) September 7, 2018

You’ve likely never seen a rocket launch quite like this. When the Chinese commercial spaceflight startup OneSpace launched a rocket test flight Friday (Sept. 7), a satellite was watching. The result: One amazing video. 

The video shows OneSpace’s OS-X1 rocket blast off from China’s Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in the Gobi Desert during a suborbital test of the solid-fueled booster. It was captured by China’s Jilin-1 satellite in orbit 332 miles (535 kilometers) above Earth and shared on the country’s social media site Weibo, according to China’s GB Times. Twitter user Dafeng Cao then shared the video on Twitter, where it has been viewed more than 23,000 times. 

“At 12:10:03 on September 7, 2018, One Space commercial sub-orbital rocket OS-X1 was successfully launched at Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center. The rocket can provide a flight speed of Mach 4.5 for the load,” OneSpace representatives wrote on Twitter. “This is the second successful launch of this series of rockets.”

Friday’s test flight reached an altitude of 21.7 miles (35 kilometers) and lasted 200 seconds, according to the GB Times. As OneSpace’s Twitter update noted, it was the second launch of an OS-X rocket. The first lifted off on May 22.

OneSpace’s OS-X rocket is a 30-foot-tall (9 meters) rocket designed to allow customers to test technologies and fly research experiments into suborbital space. It is the first of a planned family of OneSpace rockets that will eventually launch payloads into orbit.

The Beijing-based OneSpace is aiming to launch its first orbital flight of its larger OS-M booster later this year, the company has said. 

The Jilin-1 satellite that recorded Friday’s OneSpace test flight launched in October 2015. Jilin-1 is an Earth observation satellite, and became China’s first commercial high-resolution optical imaging satellite when it launched into orbit.

Email Tariq Malik at tmalik@space.com or follow him @tariqjmalik. Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook and Google+. Original article on Space.com.

eBlocker 2 helps secure your online privacy

Digital identity theft is no laughing matter: in fact, cybersecurity has taken on a whole new degree of importance. Even if you are the most casual web surfer, you would have noticed how apps and programs on your computer have an uncanny ability to show you the kind of ads that suit your lifestyle, the places where you tend to frequent, and the kind of products that you purchase. Why not make sure that you remain as anonymous as possible while online with the new eBlocker 2?

The eBlocker 2 is the latest next generation device that will anonymize a user’s online identity, as it goes about blocking data collectors and tracking ads while preventing children from accessing inappropriate content. Using the eBlocker 2 is extremely simple: all that you need to do is to hook it up to your home router, and you are good to go. After all, it is augmented by the latest version of the eBlocker Operating System that will boast of enhanced child protection features, an updated user interface and mobile support. One will be able to select from eBlocker Base, Pro and Family models in order to accommodate one’s specific privacy needs.

Once the eBlocker 2 is docked to the router through a LAN cable (yes, it is not fully wireless just yet, but then again there really isn’t any need to do so apart from aesthetic purposes), you simply need to power it up. The moment it is turned on, it will reliably protect all devices in the home network from any snooping attempts and services, including data trackers, harmful malware and phishing scams. In fact, eBlocker 2 is now able to recognize and block data collecting trackers faster and more efficiently than before courtesy of the upgraded eBlockerOS 2 software.

The eBlocker 2 Base, Pro and Family models will retail for $99, $149 and $169, respectively.

Press Release