Tag: Quantum Stuff

In November, Russia ignited an international uproar with a weapon test that launched an interceptor against a defunct military satellite. When it hit, that deliberate collision shattered the satellite into more than 1,500 trackable pieces of debris. This space debris is dangerous; it could hit and severely damage an orbiting space station, akin to the… Continue reading It’s Time for a Global Ban on Destructive Antisatellite Testing

2022 is shaping up to be a solar boom. That is, if supply chain constraints don’t undercut the industry. The U.S. Energy Information Administration projects U.S. solar companies will install 21.5 gigawatts of utility-scale capacity this year, shattering the annual record of 15.5 GW set last year. But EIA’s projection comes amid a period of considerable uncertainty… Continue reading Solar Power Could Boom in 2022, Depending on Supply Chains

Suppose aliens existed, and imagine that some of them had been watching our planet for its entire four and a half billion years. What would they have seen? Over most of that vast timespan, Earth’s appearance altered slowly and gradually. Continents drifted; ice cover waxed and waned; successive species emerged, evolved, with many of them… Continue reading If Aliens Exist, Here’s How We’ll Find Them – Issue 111: Spotlight

Do you ever feel like someone is watching you? They could be. And I’m not talking about the odd neighbors at the end of your street. This summer, at the Carl Sagan Institute at Cornell University and the American Museum of Natural History in NYC, my colleague Jacky Faherty and I identified 1,715 stars in… Continue reading Where Aliens Could Be Watching Us – Issue 111: Spotlight

Many view the scientific process as a tool to preclude human emotions from influencing the search for truth. But those emotions are essential when it comes time to help people connect to the science, or so suggests award-winning illustrator and visual artist Fatinha Ramos. The Portuguese artist has won awards from the Society of Illustrators… Continue reading How an Award-Winning Illustrator Weaves Emotion into Science

To escape predators beneath the waves, a flying fish can shoot out of the water and glide long distances because its paired pectoral and pelvic fins, longer and more rigid than those of other fish, act as airfoils. In a quirky triumph of evolution, creatures that were once strictly aquatic transformed into temporarily airborne ones… Continue reading Flying Fish and Aquarium Pets Yield Secrets of Evolution

Negotiators at the global climate talks in Scotland tentatively agreed to accelerate the timeline by which countries need to strengthen their promises for carbon reductions, according to a draft of the working text released this morning. The text reflects growing alarm among nations that global goals to slow the pace of climate change are falling… Continue reading Draft Text at Climate Talks Pushes Nations to Act Faster

Over the centuries, we have learned to put information into increasingly durable and useful form, from stone tablets to paper to digital media. Beginning in the 1980s, researchers began theorizing about how to store the information inside a quantum computer, where it is subject to all sorts of atomic-scale errors. By the 1990s they had… Continue reading Qubits Can Be as Safe as Bits, Researchers Show

Remember IBM’s Watson, the AI Jeopardy! champion? A 2010 promotion proclaimed, “Watson understands natural language with all its ambiguity and complexity.” However, as we saw when Watson subsequently failed spectacularly in its quest to “revolutionize medicine with artificial intelligence,” a veneer of linguistic facility is not the same as actually comprehending human language. Natural language… Continue reading What Does It Mean for AI to Understand?

I grew up in a small village in a very rural part of England. It was a landscape capped with the huge skies of a low-lying coastal zone. Gently rolling fields, long hedgerows, and a lot of farms. Some of the people running those farms came from so many generations that they could point to… Continue reading A Wrinkle in Nature Could Lead to Alien Life – Issue 111: Spotlight