January 24, 2024 3 min read Groundwater Is Declining Globally, but There Are Hopeful Exceptions The most detailed global look at groundwater yet shows a lot of loss but also stories of success in restoring some aquifers By Stephanie Pappas Groundwater-fed irrigation of maize in Kabwe, Zambia. In 1997 Union County in southern Arkansas faced… Continue reading Groundwater Is Declining Globally, but There Are Hopeful Exceptions
Category: Quantum Stuff
New Breakthrough Brings Matrix Multiplication Closer to Ideal
That’s where Strassen’s laser method finally comes into play. “The laser method typically works very well and generally finds a good way to kill a subset of blocks to remove the overlap,” Le Gall said. After the laser has eliminated, or “burned away,” all the overlaps, you can construct the final product matrix, C. Putting… Continue reading New Breakthrough Brings Matrix Multiplication Closer to Ideal
Tiny Tweaks to Neurons Can Rewire Animal Motion
It was as if this ion channel were a dial that could twist one neuron type into the other. But what was actually different about this protein in the snake’s body and rattle? At first, the researchers thought that rattle motor neurons must have extra KV72/3 potassium channels. If the rattle neurons had more channels,… Continue reading Tiny Tweaks to Neurons Can Rewire Animal Motion
A Multitalented Scientist Seeks the Origins of Multicellularity
You did your postdoc with the zoologist Michael Akam at Cambridge. In an era when biochemistry predominates, the study of whole animals can sometimes seem like a throwback to another century. Why did you choose it? Because I wanted to take the findings in my dissertation to the next step. The dissertation examined how germ… Continue reading A Multitalented Scientist Seeks the Origins of Multicellularity
A New Agenda for Low-Dimensional Topology
Kirby has historically been a skeptic of the existence of structural biases in mathematics, including regarding the field’s gender imbalance. In the 1970s, about 10% of mathematicians were women; today almost 30% are, according to a 2020 report by the International Science Council. In an article that he wrote in the 1990s, and which was… Continue reading A New Agenda for Low-Dimensional Topology
The Opioid Crisis Is Now Being Tracked with Wastewater
Wastewater-based epidemiology, the process of monitoring health indicators through sewage, has become a common way to track the spread of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID. But before 2020 scientists were using the technology to follow a different public health threat: the opioid crisis. Just as sewage data can fill gaps in SARS-CoV-2 tracking, this… Continue reading The Opioid Crisis Is Now Being Tracked with Wastewater
Climate Concern Grows Nationwide, Even in Some Republican States
CLIMATEWIRE | American voters are increasingly concerned about global warming, a new national public opinion analysis found, but that hasn’t changed the deeply partisan lens through which voters still view climate policy. The 2023 Yale Climate Opinion Maps report released Tuesday found that two-thirds of Americans agree that “developing clean energy should be a priority for the president… Continue reading Climate Concern Grows Nationwide, Even in Some Republican States
Toilet Taboos Can Make Scientific Fieldwork Dangerous
Gawain Antell knew something was seriously wrong when students started vomiting. In spring 2019, the paleobiologist — then earning a Ph.D. at the University of Oxford — was working as a teaching assistant on a geological mapping field trip in Scotland when, after returning to the hotel, a handful of undergraduate women grew grievously ill.… Continue reading Toilet Taboos Can Make Scientific Fieldwork Dangerous
China’s New Dark Matter Lab Is Biggest and Deepest Yet
Some 2,400 metres below the Jinping Mountains in southwest China, the world’s deepest and largest underground laboratory has just opened. The enormous space is home to scientists who are hunting down dark matter — the hypothetical substance that is thought to make up more than 80% of the mass in the Universe. The China Jinping… Continue reading China’s New Dark Matter Lab Is Biggest and Deepest Yet
Never-Repeating Tiles Can Safeguard Quantum Information
This extreme fragility might make quantum computing sound hopeless. But in 1995, the applied mathematician Peter Shor discovered a clever way to store quantum information. His encoding had two key properties. First, it could tolerate errors that only affected individual qubits. Second, it came with a procedure for correcting errors as they occurred, preventing them… Continue reading Never-Repeating Tiles Can Safeguard Quantum Information