Tag: Quantum Stuff

November 12, 2024 4 min read Methane Leaks Are Everywhere. The Trump Administration May Repeal Penalty Meant to Reduce Them A fee created to push oil and gas companies to plug methane leaks could be axed by the incoming Trump administration, hampering efforts to curb the potent greenhouse gas By Jean Chemnick & E&E News… Continue reading Methane Leaks Are Everywhere. The Trump Administration May Repeal Penalty Meant to Reduce Them

Fruit-flavored gummies. Tinctures. Creams. Today’s cannabis is not simply dried flowers in plastic baggies or the special ingredient in dorm-room brownies. These days, it comes in candy form, suppositories and even vaporizable dab and wax concentrates. This new cannabis is heavily engineered, cultivated and manufactured to reach THC concentrations of up to 90 percent (delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol),… Continue reading We Need to Ensure Legal Cannabis Is Safe

November 13, 2024 4 min read The U.S. Must Lead the Global Fight against Superbugs Antimicrobial resistance could claim 39 million lives by 2050, yet the pipeline for new antibiotics is drying up. U.S. policymakers can help fix it By Howard Dean edited by Daniel Vergano Colored scanning electron micrograph (SEM) of bacteria cultured from… Continue reading The U.S. Must Lead the Global Fight against Superbugs

[CLIP: Theme music] Rachel Feltman: For Scientific American’s Science Quickly, I’m Rachel Feltman. Plenty of us only think about insects when we’re trying to keep them out of our homes. But the truth is that our fates and fortunes are totally intertwined with all sorts of bugs. Here to tell us more is Barrett Klein,… Continue reading Insects Are More Than Just Pesky Pests

November 13, 2024 5 min read Developing Expertise Improves the Brain’s Ability to Concentrate Expertise bulks up the brain’s ability to think deeply, a skill that may generalize across tasks By Hanna Poikonen edited by Daisy Yuhas Malte Mueller/Getty Images Think of the last time you concentrated deeply to solve a challenging problem. To solve… Continue reading Developing Expertise Improves the Brain’s Ability to Concentrate

As I sit in my backyard in Abuja, Nigeria, looking out at the open landscape around me, I can’t help but feel a deep sense of loss. The rolling hills that were once vibrant with a rich carpet of wild ferns, daisies, lupines and goldenrods are now dotted with invasive species that have choked out… Continue reading How I Overcame Solastalgia

In investigating the limits of extracting work from their real-world information engine, Bechhoefer and Still have found that, in certain regimes, it can significantly outperform conventional engines. They’ve also tracked the inefficiency associated with receiving partial information about the bead’s state, inspired by Still’s theoretical work. The information engine is now shrinking to the quantum… Continue reading What Is Entropy? A Measure of Just How Little We Really Know.

Theorists brainstormed new ways of pairing electrons. The higher-temperature superconductors seemed to have atoms arranged in a way that slows electrons down. And when electrons get the chance to mingle in a leisurely fashion, they collectively generate an ornate electric field that can make them do novel things, like form pairs rather than repel. Physicists… Continue reading Exotic New Superconductors Delight and Confound

“The whole story hinges on that kind of scaling,” said David Hayes, a physicist at the quantum computing company Quantinuum. “It’s really exciting to see that become a reality.” Majority Rules The simplest version of error correction works on ordinary “classical” computers, which represent information as a string of bits, or 0s and 1s. Any… Continue reading Quantum Computers Cross Critical Error Threshold