Category: Quantum Stuff

Hard problems are usually not a welcome sight. But cryptographers love them. That’s because certain hard math problems underpin the security of modern encryption. Any clever trick for solving them will doom most forms of cryptography. Several years ago, researchers found a radically new approach to encryption that lacks this potential weak spot. The approach… Continue reading Quantum Scientists Have Built a New Math of Cryptography

Between climate change, economic anxiety and political turmoil, the world can feel like a scary place, especially for kids. Today’s young people have already been through a deadly global pandemic, they regularly drill to prepare for school shootings, and they must learn to navigate an age of misinformation and danger online. These stressors seem to… Continue reading How to Help Kids Navigate Our Dangerous World—With Science

The Applause for Jaws despite Flaws Fifty years ago the movie Jaws scared beachgoers and demonized sharks. Now, however, the public is evolving a better understanding By Chris Pepin-Neff The titular giant great white shark opens its mouth in a still from the film Jaws (1975), directed by Steven Spielberg. Universal Pictures/Courtesy of Getty Images… Continue reading The Applause for Jaws despite Flaws

Kristin Kramer woke up early on a Tuesday morning 10 years ago because one of her dogs needed to go out. Then, a couple of odd things happened. When she tried to call her other dog, “I couldn’t speak,” she said. As she walked downstairs to let them into the yard, “I noticed that my… Continue reading Ministrokes Can Be Just as Dangerous for the Brain as Regular Strokes

In 1971, Fan Chung, then in her second year of graduate school at the University of Pennsylvania, received an assignment. Her thesis adviser, Herbert Wilf, asked her to read the proof of a problem in Ramsey theory, an area of mathematics that explores the inevitable emergence of patterns in networks of vertices and edges called… Continue reading Why the Key to a Mathematical Life is Collaboration

Then, in a process Kukushkin described as a tedious choreography of clockwork pipetting, they exposed the cells to precisely timed bursts of chemicals that imitated bursts of neurotransmitters in the brain. Kukushkin’s team found that the both the nerve and kidney cells could finely differentiate these patterns. A steady three-minute burst activated CRE, making the… Continue reading What Can a Cell Remember?

Cairo followed this advice. In the fall of 2023, her family moved to Davis, 60 miles northeast of Berkeley. There, her older brother enrolled as a freshman at UC Davis, and her parents allowed her to commute to Berkeley on Tuesdays and Thursdays. By the spring, she was going five days a week and taking… Continue reading At 17, Hannah Cairo Solved a Major Math Mystery

CLIMATEWIRE | The clean energy transition may soon be on its own. The “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” passed last week by the House would effectively end most clean energy tax credits, reversing a large chunk of former President Joe Biden’s climate agenda. Wind and solar projects would need to begin construction within 60 days… Continue reading The One Big Beautiful Bill Act Is a ‘Nightmare Scenario’ for Clean Energy, Analysts Say

The year was 2013, and the release of a hotly anticipated zombie-apocalypse video game was on the horizon. The game, called The Last of Us, invited players to explore what then seemed a fanciful scenario: a world devastated by a pandemic in which a pathogen kills millions of people. Unlike in many apocalypse fictions, the… Continue reading The Science Adviser for The Last of Us Says COVID Changed How We View Zombie Stories

Kunzinger and Sämann wanted to use their new way of estimating curvature to determine whether these singularity theorems would still be valid if they no longer assumed space-time is smooth. Would singularities persist even in rougher, more realistic-looking spaces? It’s important to find out if the smoothness condition can be waived, Sämann said, because doing… Continue reading A New Geometry for Einstein’s Theory of Relativity