US tech leads nearly 100 companies in legal brief against Trump travel ban

The companies - including Apple, Google, Microsoft - banded together to file a "friend-of-the-court" brief with the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals arguing that the ban "inflicts significant harm on American business."

Nearly 100 companies, including some of high-tech’s biggest names, joined a legal brief opposing President Donald Trump’s temporary travel ban, arguing that it would give companies incentives to move jobs outside the United States.

The companies – including Apple Inc, Google Inc and Microsoft Corp – banded together late on Sunday to file a “friend-of-the-court” brief with the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco arguing that the ban “inflicts significant harm on American business.”

Trump’s Jan. 27 executive order temporarily barred entry into the United States of people from seven Muslim-majority nations as well as suspending the U.S. refugee program, sparking protests and chaos at U.S. and overseas airports. On Friday, a federal judge in Seattle temporarily blocked the order. The Trump administration had a deadline on Monday to justify its action at the appeals court.

Pending the next ruling in the case, the travel ban remained suspended, and people with valid visas who had been blocked from travel were being allowed to board planes. Refugee resettlement also resumed. The companies, backing a lawsuit brought against the ban by Washington state, argued that Trump’s order created uncertainty for companies depending on talent from overseas and global business travel to innovate and create jobs in the United States.

“Highly skilled immigrants will be more interested in working abroad, in places where they and their colleagues can travel freely and with assurance that their immigration status will not suddenly be revoked,” the brief said. “Multinational companies will have strong incentives … to base operations outside the United States or to move or hire employees and make investments abroad.” “Ultimately, American workers and the economy will suffer as a result,” the companies argued.

A major theme of the new Republican president’s 2016 presidential campaign was bringing back jobs he said had been moved to other countries. Facebook Inc, Twitter Inc, Intel Corp , eBay Inc, Netflix Inc and Uber Technologies Inc joined the brief, as well as non-tech companies such as Levi Strauss & Co and Chobani Llc.

Uber’s chief executive, Travis Kalanick, quit Trump’s business advisory group on Thursday amid mounting pressure from activists and employees who oppose administration immigration policies. No other companies on the council, assembled during the transition leading up to Trump’s Jan. 20 inauguration, signed on to the “friend-of-the-court” brief.

The tech companies, which employ many foreign-born nationals, have been among the most vocal groups speaking out against the travel order, which Trump has defended as necessary to ensure tougher vetting of people coming into the country and better protect the nation from the threat of terror attacks. In its response to the lawsuit, the government argued in legal filings that the president was exercising his constitutional authority to control U.S. borders and that the law allows him to suspend the entry of any class of foreigners who “would be detrimental to the interests of the United States.” The Department of Justice declined to comment beyond the filed court papers.

The government had until 3 p.m. PST (2300 GMT) on Monday to submit additional legal briefs to the appeals court in support of the executive order. Following that, the court was expected to act quickly. A decision either way may ultimately result in the case reaching the U.S. Supreme Court.

The brief filed by the companies hailed the contributions inclusive immigration policies have made to the American economy. It claimed that immigrants or their children have founded more than 200 of the companies on the Fortune 500 list. In addition to some of the companies filing the brief, the attorneys pointed to companies such as Kraft Inc, Ford Motor Co, General Electric Co, AT&T Inc, McDonald’s Corp, Boeing Co, and Walt Disney Co .

“Collectively, these companies generate annual revenue of $4.2 trillion, and employ millions of Americans,” the brief said. Susan Cohen an attorney at Mintz Levin in Boston who represents big companies in immigration matters, including global information company and Reuters parent Thomson Reuters, said lawyers were advising clients to get to the United States as quickly as possible because the current situation allowing travel could change.

She said that businesses were going out of their way to provide the most up-to-date information to their employees as the fast-moving court battle developed. “Many businesses are extremely upset and confused,” Cohen said. “They don’t know if meetings will be able to go forward or they will be able to bring people in for work. They can’t plan.”

 

Will Sci-Fi Bots Write the Next Great Dystopian Novel?

OAKLAND, Calif. — William Faulkner kept the words flowing with a steady drip of whiskey. Laurence Sterne conquered writer's block by shaving his beard. Ernest Hemingway stopped writing just when the story got good, so he'd always know where to pick up the next day.

Watch This Squishy, See-Through Robot Grab a Live Goldfish

Squishy, nearly transparent robots that flap, squeeze and kick when pumped with water could be the next underwater spies, at least when it comes to sneaking up on aquatic life.

In a robotic test, one of these jelly-like machines was quick enough to grab and release a goldfish, a team at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology found. 

The researchers, led by engineer Xuanhe Zhao and graduate student Hyunwoo Yuk, created a series of the transparent robots from a rubbery material called hydrogel, including a fin-like bot that can flap back and forth, a "limb" that can kick, and a hand-shaped structure that can squeeze and let go.

Because the material is composed mostly of water, the resulting robots could also have biomedical applications, the researchers said.

"Hydrogels are soft, wet, biocompatible and can form more friendly interfaces with human organs," Zhao, an associate professor of mechanical engineering and civil and environmental engineering, said in a statement. He added that the group is collaborating with medical scientists to create soft "hands," which could aid in delicately manipulating tissues and organs during surgeries.

Hydrogel recipes

For five years, Zhao's team worked to whip up various hydrogel mixes, made from polymers and water, to find one that was tough and stretchable. They also developed processes to attach, or glue, the hydrogels to an array of surfaces, such as glass, metal and rubber.

Zhao noted that others have tried to craft soft robotics from hydrogels, but their materials were brittle and not very flexible, resulting in cracks after repeated use.

When brainstorming ways to create soft robots from their hydrogels, the researchers looked to nature, particularly at glass eels; these tiny, transparent larvae are soft like hydrogels and manage to migrate unscathed over long distances to their riverine habitats. [Photos: Amazing Tech Inspired by the Octopus]

"It is extremely long travel, and there is no means of protection," Yuk said in the statement. "It seems they tried to evolve into a transparent form as an efficient camouflage tactic. And we wanted to achieve a similar level of transparency, force and speed."

So the team got to work. They used 3D printing and laser-cutting techniques to create hollow components of robots. Then, they attached these units to small, rubbery tubes connected to pumps.

Depending on the overall shape of each robot, when water was pumped in, it would quickly produce forceful motions, such as curling up or stretching out.

In one test, Zhao's team pumped water into and out of the "fingers" of a hand-like robot while submerging it in a goldfish tank. The grasper closed delicately around the fish, the researchers said.

"[The robot] is almost transparent, very hard to see," Zhao said in the statement. "When you release the fish, it's quite happy because [the robot] is soft and doesn't damage the fish. Imagine a hard robotic hand would probably squash the fish."

Physicists 'See' Location of 23,000 Single Atoms for First Time

For the first time, scientists have seen the exact locations of more than 23,000 atoms in a particle that's small enough to fit inside the wall of a single cell.

A team led by Peter Ercius of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and Jianwei Miao of UCLA used a scanning electron microscope to examine a particle that was made of iron (Fe) and platinum (Pt) that was only 8.4 nanometers across, they reported yesterday (Feb. 1) in the journal Nature. (A nanometer is a billionth of a meter, or 3.9 one-hundred-millionths of an inch.)

Why would anyone care about the location of each little atom? "At the nanoscale, every atom counts," Michael Farle, a physicist at the University of Duisburg-Essen in Germany, wrote in an accompanying News and Views article in Nature. "For example, changing the relative positions of a few Fe and Pt atoms in a FePt nanoparticle dramatically alters the particle's properties, such as its response to a magnetic field." 

Electron beams

Using a scanning electron microscope, a beam of electrons is passed over the surface of an object to create an image. That allows researchers to see even small details of tiny bits of material like crystals and protein molecules. "There are very powerful techniques for figuring out the structure of crystals," he said. "But those have to be perfect crystals."

Ordinarily, when this kind of electron microscope is used to look at a crystal or other large molecule, the electrons are beamed at the sample and they scatter as they hit it, rather like a stream of bullets fired from a machine gun would scatter off Superman's chest. After they bounce off the atoms, the electrons hit a detector, and from there, the researcher can look at where the electrons land to get a look at the arrangement of the atoms in the crystal or molecule.

The problem, Ercius said, is that the image is built from an average that's obtained using many atoms or molecules. That is, the researchers will see a pattern, but it can only tell that person what the bulk arrangement of the atoms is, not where each one is actually located. [Image Gallery: Stunning Peek Inside Molecules]

The iron-platinum nanoparticles are a kind of irregular crystal. But the ordinary scanning method wouldn't work as well for them, because the atoms are arranged in unique and slightly irregular ways, the researchers said. So they had to find a new way to use the electron microscope: They decided to look at the sample iron-platinum particle from many different sides.

Locating single atoms

To do that, they altered the way the sample was prepared. Instead of leaving it in place, they put it on a special base that let them rotate and tilt their particle of iron and platinum, changing its orientation slightly after each "snapshot" with the electron beam. Otherwise, the process the researchers used was the same as usual. 

That simple change was powerful: The varying orientations produced different patterns of scattering. The different patterns, which were picked up on a detector that's similar to the ones in digital cameras, could be used to calculate the exact positions of the 6,569 iron and 16,627 platinum atoms in the nanoparticle. It's not unlike making a 3D model of an object by taking pictures from many angles, which animators do routinely. Their results for the atoms' locations reached a resolution of about one-tenth the diameter of a single atom, according to Farle.

In the future, getting such an accurate picture could aid materials scientists in creating nanometer-size structures for applications such as hard drives. Makers of hard drives want to fabricate tiny, near-perfect crystals so that they can be easily magnetized and will hold a magnetic field for a long time, Ercius noted.

"All crystals have defects," Ercius said. "The problem is when they get nanoparticles that have these weird defects in them. This means they can look at those and how they affect how things work."

Knowing each atom's exact location would also allow scientists to predict how a crystal might grow. Ercius noted that right now, when materials scientists run simulations, they have to assume that a crystal grows in a certain way, and those assumptions guide their predictions for the future. If they could see exactly where the atoms are, they could make more accurate predictions of what the crystal will look like when it has grown to full size.

"What's so good about this is it measures disorder," Ercius said. "It lets you see unique objects." 

RoboDragonfly: Tiny Backpack Turns Insect into a Cyborg

Scientists look to flying animals — birds, bats and insects — for inspiration when they design airborne drones. But researchers are also investigating how to use technology to interact with, and even guide, animals as they fly, enhancing the unique adaptations that allow them to take to the air.

To that end, engineers have fitted dragonflies with tiny, backpack-mounted controllers that issue commands directly to the neurons controlling the insects' flight.

This project, known as Dragonfly, uses optogenetics, a technique that employs light to transmit signals to neurons. And researchers have genetically modified dragonfly neurons to make them more light-sensitive, and thereby easier to control through measured light pulses. 

Dragonflies have large heads, long bodies and two pairs of wings that don't always flap in sync, according to a 2007 study published in the journal Physical Review Letters. The study authors found that dragonflies maximize their lift when they flap both sets of wings together, and they hover by flapping their wing pairs out of synch, though at the same rate.

Meanwhile, separate muscles controlling each of their four wings allow dragonflies to dart, hover and turn on a dime with exceptional precision, scientists found in 2014. Researchers used high-speed video footage to track dragonfly flight and build computer models to better understand the insects' complex maneuvers, presenting their findings at the 67th Annual Division of Fluid Dynamics meeting, according to a statement released by the American Physical Society in November 2014.

Dragonfly sees these tiny flight masters as potentially controllable flyers that would be "smaller, lighter and stealthier than anything else that's manmade," Jesse Wheeler, a biomedical engineer at the Charles Stark Draper Laboratory (CSDL) in Massachusetts and principal investigator on the DragonflEye program, said in a statement.

A close-up of the backpack board and components before being folded and fitted to the dragonfly.

Credit: Charles Stark Draper Laboratory

The project is a collaboration between the CSDL, which has been developing the backpack that controls the dragonfly, and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI), where experts are identifying and enhancing "steering" neurons located in the dragonfly's nerve cord, inserting genes that make it more responsive to light.

"This system pushes the boundaries of energy harvesting, motion sensing, algorithms, miniaturization and optogenetics, all in a system small enough for an insect to wear," Wheeler said.

Even smaller than the dragonfly backpack are components created by CSDL called optrodes — optical fibers supple enough to wrap around the dragonfly's nerve cord, so that engineers can target only the neurons related to flight, CSDL representatives explained in a statement.

And in addition to controlling insect flight, the tiny, flexible optrodes could have applications in human medicine, Wheeler added.

"Someday these same tools could advance medical treatments in humans, resulting in more effective therapies with fewer side effects," Wheeler said. "Our flexible optrode technology provides a new solution to enable miniaturized diagnostics, safely access smaller neural targets and deliver higher precision therapies."

New Quantum-Computer Design Could Lead to Practical Hardware

Quantum computers promise the ability to tackle complex problems, such as decoding encrypted communications and developing new pharmaceutical drugs, much faster than conventional machines can. But to date, quantum computers have only been used to tackle specific problems, mostly to demonstrate how they work.

Now, scientists have proposed a new way to build a quantum computer using microwaves to control individual atoms, and they say the new method offers a blueprint for a more useful computing machine. 

"We're using some new concepts that tremendously simplify how to build a quantum computer," said Winfried Hensinger, director of the Ion Quantum Technology Group at the University of Sussex in the United Kingdom. Hensinger led the new study that outlines the design. 

The quantum computer would be made up of junctions that control the movement of charged atoms, called ions. As many as 1,296 junctions could be fit onto a conventional 3.5-inch (9 centimeters) silicon wafer, and the wafers could be linked, allowing for a computer with as many quantum bits as needed. By contrast, current quantum computers have, at most, a dozen bits.

Quantum computers don't work the same way ordinary machines do. In a typical computer, the bits are encoded in millions of tiny circuits and have a value of 1 or 0. In a quantum computer, the bits, called qubits, are encoded by the quantum state of excited atoms, and can be 1, 0 or any value in between.

Qubits can do this because quantum mechanics allows superposition of states; a particle is never really in one state or another until it is observed, meaning that it has to interact in a measurable way with the outside world. Superposition does not mean that the state is simply unseen; it really can exist as both at once. Because the qubits are in more than one state at once, a quantum computer could effectively tackle many calculations simultaneously. 

Superposition, though, is also why quantum computers are hard to build. The ions in their superposed states can't ever touch anything from the outside. Even stray heat can make the ion "collapse" into one state, which takes away the qubits' ability to do all of those calculations, according to the researchers.

New design

In the new architecture, each junction consists of four electrodes that meet like a crossroads. Underneath the electrodes are wires that carry current and create a magnetic field. The magnetic field controls the movement of the "data" ions, which go from the "loading" zone on one electrode to meet another ion in the "entanglement" zone on the opposite electrode, Hensinger said.

Microwaves are beamed at the two ions as they meet, and they are entangled. That means that whatever happens to one ion will be reflected instantly in the second. This is where the 1 or 0 value is encoded, but the value is unknown. Altering the magnetic fields again moves the data ion back to the "crossroads," where it turns to go to a third electrode, called the detection zone. At that point, a laser hits the ion and reveals its state — 1 or 0.

With thousands of these junctions attached to one another, scientists could build a true quantum computer, according to the study. Hensinger and his colleagues envision modules of 2.2 million junctions, about 14 feet (4.3 meters) on a side, attached to one another. A thousand such modules would be the size of a football field and have 2 billion ions, representing about as many qubits, the researchers said.

It's the use of the microwaves and magnetic fields that makes the design easier to scale up, Hensinger told Live Science.

"Traditionally, you use lasers to execute quantum gates," he said. "But to make a computer with lots of qubits, you need a billion laser beams." This was not practical, so his team sought another way.

Other quantum-computer designs trap ions at temperatures close to absolute zero, the coldest temperature theoretically possible (minus 459.67 degrees Fahrenheit or minus 273.15 degrees Celsius). Hensinger said the machine can operate at much higher temperatures, about minus 351 degrees F (minus 213 degrees C), using liquid nitrogen as a coolant. 

This type a quantum computer could factor a 617-digit number in 110 days, according to the study. Such large numbers are used in encryption for a lot of communications on the web. (Contrary to popular myth, the quantum computer would not try every single factor; rather, it would find a shortcut that allows an ordinary computer to more easily calculate the factors you want to produce your large number.)

DigiCert, a U.S.-based company that provides digital certificates for common secure communications, says on its website that even 1,000 desktop computers working together would take longer than the age of the universe to match that feat.

Making progress

Christopher Monroe, a professor of physics at the University of Maryland's Joint Quantum Institute, who has worked on quantum-computing designs, said he likes the ideas laid out for this quantum computer because the modules don't rely on exotic technologies — everything in the paper could be built today. On the other hand, actually building the quantum computer would be a real challenge, he added.

One issue is the sheer size of the machine; the study notes that it would measure more than 300 feet (91 m) on a side if it were to have 2 billion bits.

Even so, Monroe said this study takes a stab at addressing problems that earlier research did not. For example, Hensinger and his team studied the problem of keeping the computer cold enough to operate reliably, because heat can spoil the qubits.

"Lasers and wires carrying current to make magnetic fields are real heat hogs," Monroe said, and incorporating a cooling system was a good idea.

Designs like this one are a move toward real engineering, said Bill Munro, who heads the Theoretical Quantum Physics Research Group at Japanese telecommunications company NTT. Still, some challenges will remain, he said.

"There's a big difference between theory and design and actually building," Munro said. Yet, the simplicity of the design makes it plausible, he added. "The key is not doing a billion [qubits]. You produce one, then 10, or 100. It's kind of something we've been missing."

The new study was published online today (Feb. 1) in the journal Science Advances.

All In: Artificial Intelligence Beats the World's Best Poker Players

The world's best artificial intelligence poker player seems to know exactly when to hold 'em and when to fold 'em.

An artificial-intelligence program known as Libratus has beat the world's absolute best human poker players in a 20-day No-Limit Texas Hold'em tournament, defeating four opponents by about $1.77 million in poker chips, according to Pittsburgh's Rivers Casino, where the "Brains vs. Artificial Intelligence" poker tournament was held.

 At the end of each day, at least one of the human players was beating the AI program. But in the end, it was not enough.

"We appreciate their hard work, but unfortunately, the computer won," said Craig Clark, general manager of Rivers Casino.

Computer scientists can now add Texas Hold'em to a growing list of games — including chess, Go and "Jeopardy!" — in which AI can beat the best human competitor in the world. [Super-Intelligent Machines: 7 Robotic Futures]

Artificial-intelligence strides

Since IBM's Deep Blue bested chess player Garry Kasparov in 1997, the robots have been gaining on humans. Last year, AI shocked the world by trouncing the world's best Go player in a set of matches in the strategy game involving black and white stones. The task was so difficult because Go contains more potential moves than atoms in the universe. To tackle that problem, the computer, known as AlphaGo, used a deep-learning strategy, a spookily powerful method that involves computing calculations at one layer and then feeding those up to another layer in the algorithm.

And yet, in many ways, Texas Hold'em is even harder, said Tuomas Sandholm, a computer scientist at Carnegie Mellon University who helped design Libratus and helped organize the tournament. (In Heads-Up Texas Hold'em, two players each hold two cards and then have to make the best hand from the five cards that are eventually placed face-up on the table over several rounds of play. After each card is turned, players can call, or match, another player's bet; raise the bet; or fold their cards, or give up.)

It turns out, cracking this type of play may be even trickier than mastering Go, where each player knows the other's position perfectly. [5 Intriguing Uses for Artificial Intelligence (That Aren't Killer Robots)]

"In incomplete-information games like poker, it's much harder," Sandholm told Live Science.

For instance, imagine you're playing a hand against an opponent. You need to not only think about the ace-ace in your hand but also consider what's on the table, what the other player could be holding, what his bet tells you about his cards and what he is trying to learn with his bets.

So Sandholm and his colleagues relied on a different concept to program Libratus. Known as Nash equilibrium, it is a mathematical way of determining the best game strategy to maximize your own payoffs while minimizing those of your opponent. In any one hand of poker, random chance dictates that the Nash equilibrium play may lose, but over the course of many hands, Nash equilibrium translates to the "unbeatable play" strategy, Sandholm said.

However, "the game has 10 to the power of 160 different situations," meaning it has many, many more computational possibilities than Go. As a result, the program can't calculate the perfect Nash equilibrium solution, but must instead approximate.

In the past, that's been a stumbling block. Libratus was involved in a poker tournament in 2015 and couldn't beat the humans, with the match ending in a statistical tie. However, the souped-up version of Libratus used in the recent tournament has a better end-game solving strategy, Sandholm said.

The tournament

For the "Brains vs. Artificial Intelligence" tournament, four of the world's best poker players faced off one-on-one against Libratus in 120,000 hands of poker. At stake was a $200,000 pot, which the human players received even if they lost.

"They are professionals, so they were fighting to the bitter end, really hard," Sandholm said. "They were studying really hard every night on their computers, trying to find holes in the AI."

In the end, it was no contest: The AI prevailed.

As part of the program, bluffing naturally emerged as a mathematically sound strategy, Sandholm noted.

Its win also involved some surprising moves. For instance, AI was more likely than humans to make huge overbets — meaning that they would bet three, five or even 20 times the amount of chips in the pot. Interestingly, those overbets sometimes made mathematical sense in two very different situations.

"With a very strong hand and with the weakest hands, you want to make those big overbets," Sandholm said.

Libratus was also more likely than the humans to underbet in certain surprising situations, Sandholm said. And every night, it went home and adapted its strategy based on the hands it had played.

"The adaptation was not to learn to exploit the opponent, but rather to determine what holes the opponent had found in the AI strategy and automatically patch those holes," Sandholm said.

Still, there's some hope for the mere mortals. In Heads-Up Texas Hold'em, two players compete. But Libratus would have no idea how to beat players in a poker game with five or six players. There, Nash equilibrium solutions don't work, Sandholm said.

"I would say the top humans in something like that would probably do better than the best AI," Sandholm said.