On May 28, MIT President Sally Kornbluth and Massachusetts Governor Maura Healey announced plans for a new laboratory to accelerate the development of next-generation quantum technologies that will enable Massachusetts to remain a national hub for quantum innovation. Speaking at the Samberg Conference Center on campus, the leaders introduced the Quantum Systems Laboratory (QSL) at MIT, a shared-use facility that will catalyze quantum development in the region and help keep America at the forefront of a technology seen as critical for a range of industries. 'Quantum technologies have the potential to drive transformative change in fields from computing, security, and navigation to health sciences, defense technologies, and space exploration,' Kornbluth said. 'Greater Boston has the greatest concentration of quantum talent of anywhere in the world, so it has been clear to us for some time that if we could magnify all of that talent with the right facilities ' a shared quantum toolbox ' we could establish Massachusetts as a national hub for quantum innovation and help catalyze the next generation of quantum technologies.'...

The Robotics Innovation Center at the Institute of Science Tokyo opened its automated laboratory in April. Later this year, the lab will be made available for use by other researchers at the institute, says Genki Kanda, an automation researcher who works at the robotics centre. He says that the lab's ultimate goal is to create a 'factory-scale' facility with thousands of robots that could be used by local and international scientists by 2040 or 2050. A laboratory with that many robots would be exciting, says Yan Zeng, a materials scientist at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee. 'I will be curious to see how soon they are really going to achieve that goal,' notes Zeng, who hopes that the lab could be used by scientists globally, like other leading scientific facilities such as Europe's particle-physics lab CERN. Researchers in the life sciences have been automating lab work for at least a decade. Some facilities have one-armed robots that can handle samples in experiments, for instance. But two-armed robots can do more complicated and sophisticated tasks, says Zeng....

In 1969, Apollo 11 astronaut Neil Armstrong stepped onto the moon's surface ' a momentous engineering and science feat marked by his iconic words: "That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind." Now, NASA is making history again. With the successful launch of NASA's Artemis II mission yesterday, four astronauts are set to become the first humans to travel to the moon in more than 50 years. In 2022, the uncrewed Artemis I mission demonstrated that NASA's new Orion spacecraft could travel farther into space than ever before and return safely to Earth. Building on that success, the 10-day Artemis II mission will pave the way for future Artemis missions, which aim to land astronauts on the moon to prepare for a lasting lunar presence, and eventually human missions to Mars. As it orbits the moon, the Orion spacecraft will carry an optical (laser) communications system developed at MIT Lincoln Laboratory in collaboration with NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. Called the Orion Artemis II Optical Communications System (O2O), the system is capable of higher-bandwidth data transmissions from space compared to traditional radio-frequency (RF) systems. During the Artemis II mission, O2O will use laser beams to send high-resolution video and images of the lunar surface down to Earth....

Good day & happy Thursday! Today, all eyes are on Mastercard, which clearly wants to be the toll road for AI shopping (what their recent partnerships and announcments actually mean & why this could be huge + bonus deep dive into Google's UCP, OpenAI's Super App ambitions, and the analysis of Mastercard's latest financials inside), and Bermuda that's now a laboratory for onchain finance (what Coinbase & Circle are trying to do and why it's one of the most interesting experiments in FinTech + bonus deep dives into Coinbase & Circle inside). So let's jump straight into the interesting stuff '' That's exactly why payments giant Mastercard MA 0.00%' just announced it's joining Google's Universal Commerce Protocol while simultaneously integrating its Agent Pay product into Microsoft's Copilot Checkout and OpenAI's Instant Checkout in ChatGPT. The company is also refocusing Start Path, its decade-old startup accelerator, on AI commerce ventures. On the surface, this looks like a payments giant doing routine partnership deals. Look closer, and you'll see a company making an aggressive bet on who captures value when machines start spending money....