Category: Quantum Stuff

Aliens live on Neptune. Ancient pyramids generated electricity. Humans don’t cause climate change. You might imagine the typical believer of these claims to be a card-carrying conspiracy theorist, but they could just as easily be a curious nine-year-old with an iPad. YouTube reliably feeds AI-generated videos containing questionable claims like these to children, often in… Continue reading Kids See a Lot More Misinformation Than We Think

Researchers don’t know precisely how that load is allocated, but over the past few decades, they have clarified what the brain is doing in the background. “Around the mid-’90s we started to realize as a discipline [that] actually there is a whole heap of stuff happening when someone is lying there at rest and they’re… Continue reading How Much Energy Does It Take To Think?

The brain is like an ecosystem—thousands of different types of cells connect to form one big, interdependent web. And just as biologists document species of plants and animals, neuroscientists have spent decades identifying different “species” of neurons and other brain cells that support them. They’ve found more than 3,000 cell types spread throughout the brain,… Continue reading Engineered Viruses Make Neurons Glow and Treat Brain Disease

The World Isn’t Ready for the Mental Health Toll of Extreme Heat Temperatures are rising, and so are mental health risks By Madhusree Mukerjee edited by Dean Visser A man walks with an umbrella to protect himself from the heat as a yellow alert is issued by the U.K. Health Security Agency (UKHSA) because of… Continue reading The World Isn’t Ready for the Mental Health Toll of Extreme Heat

Famously, at the quantum scale, particles can be in multiple possible locations at once. A particle’s state spreads out like a wave, peaking where the particle is likely to be found. When you measure its position, this spread-out state, known as a wave function, transforms into a single definite location. The full shape of the… Continue reading First Map Made of a Solid’s Secret Quantum Geometry

In the past, researchers have tried to improve on Shor’s algorithm for factoring by simulating a qubit using a continuous system, with its expanded set of possible values. But even if your system computes with continuous qubits, it will still need a lot of them to factor numbers, and it won’t necessarily go any faster.… Continue reading New Quantum Algorithm Factors Numbers With One Qubit

Two blind spots torture physicists: the birth of the universe and the center of a black hole. The former may feel like a moment in time and the latter a point in space, but in both cases the normally interwoven threads of space and time seem to stop short. These mysterious points are known as… Continue reading Singularities in Space-Time Prove Hard to Kill

CLIMATEWIRE | When federal regulators were crafting a first-ever proposal to protect workers from extreme heat, they relied on government health experts who had been working on the deadly effects of high temperatures for years. Now that entire team is gone due to President Donald Trump’s personnel purges. It comes ahead of summertime heat waves… Continue reading Trump Fired the Heat Experts. Now He Might Kill Their Heat Rule

Whether we’re considering global trade, new technologies or scientific research, everything seems to become more complex over time. In the past, polymaths became well versed in various disciplines and made important contributions to each. But today it is far more difficult for a person to excel in multiple domains, in part because of greater specialization.… Continue reading It’s Not Just You. Everything Really Is Getting More Complicated over Time