Two from Nature

Was reading Nature this morning and found these two articles: First - an interesting find:

Reservoir deep under Ontario holds billion-year-old water
Scientists working 2.4 kilometres below Earth's surface in a Canadian mine have tapped a source of water that has remained isolated for at least a billion years. The researchers say they do not yet know whether anything has been living in it all this time, but the water contains high levels of methane and hydrogen � the right stuff to support life.

Micrometre-scale pockets in minerals billions of years old can hold water that was trapped during the minerals� formation. But no source of free-flowing water passing through interconnected cracks or pores in Earth�s crust has previously been shown to have stayed isolated for more than tens of millions of years.

�We were expecting these fluids to be possibly tens, perhaps even hundreds of millions of years of age,� says Chris Ballentine, a geochemist at the University of Manchester, UK. He and his team carefully captured water flowing through fractures in the 2.7-billion-year-old sulphide deposits in a copper and zinc mine near Timmins, Ontario, ensuring that the water did not come into contact with mine air.

Second - quantum computing:

Google and NASA snap up quantum computer
D-Wave, the small company that sells the world�s only commercial quantum computer, has just bagged an impressive new customer: a collaboration between Google, NASA and the non-profit Universities Space Research Association.

The three organizations have joined forces to install a D-Wave Two, the computer company's latest model, in a facility launched by the collaboration � the Quantum Artificial Intelligence Lab at NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California. The lab will explore areas such as machine learning � making computers sort and analyse data on the basis of previous experience. This is useful for functions such as language translation, image searches and voice-command recognition. �We actually think quantum machine learning may provide the most creative problem-solving process under the known laws of physics,� says a blog post from Google describing the deal.

The D-Wave website is here. Their Wikipedia entry is here. Their software developers page is here -- there is a simulator written in Python for you to play with. As a hardware geek -- I wonder who fabs their CPUs? They are just a few miles to my North in Burnaby, BC -- might see if I can visit sometime...