On May 7, 2011, Georgia resident Tonya Brand noticed a pain on the inside of her right thigh. As the pain grew worse in the 4- to 5-inch area of her leg, she headed to a hospital. There, doctors suspected she had a blood clot. But an ultrasound the next day failed to find one. Instead, it revealed a mysterious toothpick-sized object lodged in Brand's leg.

Over the next few weeks, the painful area became a bulge, and on June 17, Brand put pressure on it. Unexpectedly, the protrusion popped, and a 1.5-inch metal wire came poking out of her leg, piercing her skin.

The piece of metal was later determined to be part of a metal filter she had implanted in a vein in her abdomen more than two years earlier, in March 2009, according to a lawsuit Brand filed . The filter was initially placed in her inferior vena cava (IVC), the body's largest vein tasked with bringing deoxygenated blood from the lower body back up to the heart. The filter is intended to catch blood clots, preventing them from getting into the lungs, where they could cause a life-threatening pulmonary embolism. Brand got the IVC filter ahead of a spinal surgery she had in 2009, which could boost her risk of clots.

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On May 7, 2011, Georgia resident Tonya Brand noticed a pain on the inside of her right thigh. As the pain grew worse in the 4- to 5-inch area of her leg, she headed to a hospital. There, doctors suspected she had a blood clot. But an ultrasound the next day failed to find one. Instead, it revealed a mysterious toothpick-sized object lodged in Brand's leg.

Over the next few weeks, the painful area became a bulge, and on June 17, Brand put pressure on it. Unexpectedly, the protrusion popped, and a 1.5-inch metal wire came poking out of her leg, piercing her skin.

The piece of metal was later determined to be part of a metal filter she had implanted in a vein in her abdomen more than two years earlier, in March 2009, according to a lawsuit Brand filed . The filter was initially placed in her inferior vena cava (IVC), the body's largest vein tasked with bringing deoxygenated blood from the lower body back up to the heart. The filter is intended to catch blood clots, preventing them from getting into the lungs, where they could cause a life-threatening pulmonary embolism. Brand got the IVC filter ahead of a spinal surgery she had in 2009, which could boost her risk of clots.

Read full article

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On May 7, 2011, Georgia resident Tonya Brand noticed a pain on the inside of her right thigh. As the pain grew worse in the 4- to 5-inch area of her leg, she headed to a hospital. There, doctors suspected she had a blood clot. But an ultrasound the next day failed to find one. Instead, it revealed a mysterious toothpick-sized object lodged in Brand's leg.

Over the next few weeks, the painful area became a bulge, and on June 17, Brand put pressure on it. Unexpectedly, the protrusion popped, and a 1.5-inch metal wire came poking out of her leg, piercing her skin.

The piece of metal was later determined to be part of a metal filter she had implanted in a vein in her abdomen more than two years earlier, in March 2009, according to a lawsuit Brand filed . The filter was initially placed in her inferior vena cava (IVC), the body's largest vein tasked with bringing deoxygenated blood from the lower body back up to the heart. The filter is intended to catch blood clots, preventing them from getting into the lungs, where they could cause a life-threatening pulmonary embolism. Brand got the IVC filter ahead of a spinal surgery she had in 2009, which could boost her risk of clots.

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When it comes to space policy, a hallmark of the first Trump administration was its embrace of private companies. NASA sought to build fewer expensive things and buy more lower-cost services. In doing so, it aimed to foster a healthy ecosystem of private space companies.

Under the leadership of Jim Bridenstine, NASA, during these years, stood on the shoulders of more than a decade of government investment in commercial space. This culminated in a triumphant Crew Dragon mission in the summer of 2020, the first privately led human orbital spaceflight.

This Demo-2 mission, sending NASA astronauts Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken to the International Space Station on a SpaceX vehicle, validated NASA’s long push into commercial space. Since then, the agency has only doubled down on this approach, generally using fixed-price contracts and buying a service instead of telling companies what and how to build while paying a premium.

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When it comes to space policy, a hallmark of the first Trump administration was its embrace of private companies. NASA sought to build fewer expensive things and buy more lower-cost services. In doing so, it aimed to foster a healthy ecosystem of private space companies.

Under the leadership of Jim Bridenstine, NASA, during these years, stood on the shoulders of more than a decade of government investment in commercial space. This culminated in a triumphant Crew Dragon mission in the summer of 2020, the first privately led human orbital spaceflight.

This Demo-2 mission, sending NASA astronauts Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken to the International Space Station on a SpaceX vehicle, validated NASA’s long push into commercial space. Since then, the agency has only doubled down on this approach, generally using fixed-price contracts and buying a service instead of telling companies what and how to build while paying a premium.

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When it comes to space policy, a hallmark of the first Trump administration was its embrace of private companies. NASA sought to build fewer expensive things and buy more lower-cost services. In doing so, it aimed to foster a healthy ecosystem of private space companies.

Under the leadership of Jim Bridenstine, NASA, during these years, stood on the shoulders of more than a decade of government investment in commercial space. This culminated in a triumphant Crew Dragon mission in the summer of 2020, the first privately led human orbital spaceflight.

This Demo-2 mission, sending NASA astronauts Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken to the International Space Station on a SpaceX vehicle, validated NASA’s long push into commercial space. Since then, the agency has only doubled down on this approach, generally using fixed-price contracts and buying a service instead of telling companies what and how to build while paying a premium.

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We're nearing the end of the year, and there are typically a flood of announcements regarding quantum computers around now, in part because some companies want to live up to promised schedules. Most of these involve evolutionary improvements on previous generations of hardware. But this year, we have something new: the first company to market with a new qubit technology.

The technology is called a dual-rail qubit, and it is intended to make the most common form of error trivially easy to detect in hardware, thus making error correction far more efficient. And, while tech giant Amazon has been experimenting with them , a startup called Quantum Circuits is the first to give the public access to dual-rail qubits via a cloud service.

While the tech is interesting on its own, it also provides us with a window into how the field as a whole is thinking about getting error-corrected quantum computing to work.

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We're nearing the end of the year, and there are typically a flood of announcements regarding quantum computers around now, in part because some companies want to live up to promised schedules. Most of these involve evolutionary improvements on previous generations of hardware. But this year, we have something new: the first company to market with a new qubit technology.

The technology is called a dual-rail qubit, and it is intended to make the most common form of error trivially easy to detect in hardware, thus making error correction far more efficient. And, while tech giant Amazon has been experimenting with them , a startup called Quantum Circuits is the first to give the public access to dual-rail qubits via a cloud service.

While the tech is interesting on its own, it also provides us with a window into how the field as a whole is thinking about getting error-corrected quantum computing to work.

Read full article

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We're nearing the end of the year, and there are typically a flood of announcements regarding quantum computers around now, in part because some companies want to live up to promised schedules. Most of these involve evolutionary improvements on previous generations of hardware. But this year, we have something new: the first company to market with a new qubit technology.

The technology is called a dual-rail qubit, and it is intended to make the most common form of error trivially easy to detect in hardware, thus making error correction far more efficient. And, while tech giant Amazon has been experimenting with them , a startup called Quantum Circuits is the first to give the public access to dual-rail qubits via a cloud service.

While the tech is interesting on its own, it also provides us with a window into how the field as a whole is thinking about getting error-corrected quantum computing to work.

Read full article

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