Category: Quantum Stuff

Unless you’ve been completely off the grid lately, you’ve heard about or met ChatGPT, the popular chatbot that first went online in November 2022 and was updated in March. Type in a question, comment, or command, as I’ve done, and it quickly produces a human-seeming response in good English for any topic. The system comes… Continue reading What Does ChatGPT Know About Science?

Explore When, at the dawn of the 19th century, Meriwether Lewis and William Clark traversed western North America, they encountered a wondrous bestiary: the “fleet and delicately formed” coyote, the “bear of enormous size” which we call the grizzly. Yet few creatures impressed them more than the “Buzzard or Vulture” their party captured near the… Continue reading Humans Are Overzealous Whale Morticians

And if there is life on other planets, it may have new things to teach us about jumping. At lower gravities, jumping could become easier and faster than flying, so organisms might evolve “Mario-like jumping characters,” Sutton said. Alien life might also have muscles that work differently, perhaps with their own ratchet-like solutions to energy… Continue reading Record-Breaking Robot Highlights How Animals Excel at Jumping

A multibillion-dollar slate of moderate climate-mitigation measures in the Biden administration’s Inflation Reduction Act has been met so far with general public approval. But a broader reaction to the historic federal action underlies the discourse: What took you so long? A survey-based study published on Tuesday suggests that a shared delusion among nearly all Americans… Continue reading Climate Change Actions Are Far More Popular Than People in U.S. Realize

Predicting complex systems like the weather is famously difficult. But at least the weather’s governing equations don’t change from one day to the next. In contrast, certain complex systems can undergo “tipping point” transitions, suddenly changing their behavior dramatically and perhaps irreversibly, with little warning and potentially catastrophic consequences. On long enough timescales, most real-world… Continue reading Chaos Researchers Can Now Predict Perilous Points of No Return

Better satellite coverage of wildfires and improved climate models are giving scientists a more accurate view of smoke plumes as they drift across the country. These kinds of advances, they say, can help provide earlier warnings to residents endangered by wildfire smoke. A breakthrough in the field occurred during the deadly 2018 Camp Fire in… Continue reading New Tool Helps Predict Where Wildfire Smoke Will Blow

Explore Manish Vira, a urologist at Northwell Health in New York performs prostate biopsy procedures three to five times a week. He inserts 12 needles into specific locations on the prostate gland, identified by MRI images that reveal malignant or suspicious lesions. The samples then go to a pathologist who determines whether cancer is present… Continue reading Cancer’s Got a Lot of Nerve

To avoid errors, you once again add extra information. Here, you send the y-value that corresponds to another predetermined x-coordinate. If the three points do not fall on the same line, there’s an error. And to figure out where the error is, you just send one more value — meaning you’ve sent four numbers total,… Continue reading How Mathematical Curves Power Cryptography

We now know where on the moon NASA astronauts will set foot after more than 50 years’ absence. The agency announced 13 potential landing regions for its Artemis 3 mission during a news conference held on Friday (Aug. 19). All the candidates are clustered near the south pole of the moon, an area of key scientific and exploration… Continue reading NASA Unveils Candidate Landing Sites for Artemis Astronauts

After interminable delays and tens of billions of dollars in spending, NASA’s Statue of Liberty–size Space Launch System (SLS) megarocket is at last nearing its inaugural launch. Taking place as early as August 29, the launch will use the SLS’s 8.8 million pounds of thrust (39.1 million newtons) to send an uncrewed Orion spacecraft and… Continue reading NASA’s Moon-Bound Megarocket Will Send a Spacecraft to an Asteroid, Too