Aurelia Butler

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Physicists are mostly unconvinced by Microsoft’s new topological quantum chip

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ANAHEIM, CALIF. — At the world’s largest gathering of physicists, a talk about Microsoft’s claimed new type of quantum computing chip was perhaps the main attraction. 

Microsoft’s February announcement of a chip containing the first topological quantum bits, or qubits, has ignited heated blowback in the physics community. The discovery was announced by press release, without publicly shared data backing it up. A concurrent paper in Nature fell short of demonstrating a topological qubit. Microsoft researcher Chetan Nayak, a coauthor on that paper, promised to provide solid evidence during his March 18 talk at the American Physical Society’s Global Physics Summit. More

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  • 125 Shares15 Views

    in Physics

    Physicists are mostly unconvinced by Microsoft’s new topological quantum chip

    ANAHEIM, CALIF. — At the world’s largest gathering of physicists, a talk about Microsoft’s claimed new type of quantum computing chip was perhaps the main attraction. 

    Microsoft’s February announcement of a chip containing the first topological quantum bits, or qubits, has ignited heated blowback in the physics community. The discovery was announced by press release, without publicly shared data backing it up. A concurrent paper in Nature fell short of demonstrating a topological qubit. Microsoft researcher Chetan Nayak, a coauthor on that paper, promised to provide solid evidence during his March 18 talk at the American Physical Society’s Global Physics Summit. More

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    JWST spots the earliest sign yet of a distant galaxy reshaping its cosmic environs

    The James Webb Space Telescope has caught a distant galaxy blowing an unexpected bubble in the gas around it, just 330 million years after the Big Bang.

    The galaxy, dubbed JADES-GS-z13-1, marks the earliest sign yet spotted of the era of cosmic reionization, a transformative period in the universe’s history when the first stars and galaxies began to reshape their environment, astronomers report in the March 27 Nature.

    “It definitely puts a pin in the map of the first point where [reionization] very likely has already started,” says astrophysicist Joris Witstok at the University of Copenhagen. “No one had predicted that it would be this early” in the universe’s history. More

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    in Space & Astronomy

    A map of 14 million galaxies and quasars deepens a dark energy mystery

    ANAHEIM, Calif. — Change is in the air. New data strengthen a hint that dark energy, long thought to be constant force in the universe, might change over time.Dark energy explains the observation that the universe’s expansion rate is accelerating. But its origins are unknown. It’s typically expected to have constant density across the billions of years of the universe’s history. So when researchers from the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument, or DESI, reported in 2024 that dark energy might vary over time based on their first year of data, it shook cosmology to its core.

    Many scientists expected that the standard picture would prevail with additional data from DESI. But that hasn’t happened. Instead, with three years of DESI data, the preference for a changing, or dynamical dark energy has grown. More

  • 125 Shares153 Views

    in Physics

    A quantum computing milestone is immediately challenged by a supercomputer

    The tug-of-war between quantum computers and classical computers is intensifying.

    In just minutes, a special quantum processor, called a quantum annealing processor, solved a complex real-world problem that a classical supercomputer would take millions of years to complete, researchers claim March 12 in Science. And that supercomputer, the team reports, would consume more energy to run the whole computation than the entire globe uses in a year. However, another group of researchers claims to have already found a way for a classical supercomputer to solve a subset of the same problem in just over two hours. More

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    in Heart

    Some trees are coping with extreme heat surprisingly well

    Ecologist Akhil Javad felt the thrill of fieldwork quickly fade when he was faced with the prospect of scaling trees over five times his height. But for some of the trees he was studying in India’s Western Ghat mountains, that was the only way to take their temperature.

    So, Javad got climbing. Sensors that he placed on leaves in the upper canopy are providing unprecedented insights into how tropical forests are weathering global warming. The findings suggest that the trees may be in better shape than scientists thought, he and colleagues report in the February Global Change Biology.

    Ecologist Akhil Javad (shown) and colleagues found that tropical trees’ ability to photosynthesize may be more resilient to rising global temperatures than previously thought.Akhil Javad

    In the summer, which lasts from March through June in the region, daily high temperatures in the mountains can cross 37° Celsius and are projected to rise by about 4 degrees Celsius in the next 60 years. That could be a problem for trees, since leaves can get much hotter than the surrounding air.

    As the temperature of a leaf rises, its ability to harness sunlight to make sugar and oxygen becomes less efficient. On average, when leaves surpass 46.7° C, their photosynthetic machinery shuts down, lab studies have shown. When that happens, trees don’t get the energy they need. Many trees in the tropics are already experiencing temperatures beyond that average limit. More

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    in Heart

    Some sea turtles are laying eggs earlier in response to climate change

    Green sea turtles are adjusting their nesting habits in response to rising global temperatures. Individual females are laying their eggs earlier in the season to cope with warmer conditions, researchers report in the February Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

    Scientists have long known that the sex of most turtle species is determined by incubation temperature — higher temperatures give life to females, and lower ones produce males. As climate change drives up temperatures, more females and fewer males are being born, potentially weakening populations. Extreme heat can also be lethal for the eggs.

    Marine biologist Mollie Rickwood kneels next to a loggerhead turtle protected nest. The females dig themselves down in the sand using their flippers, then they dig a flask-shaped chamber where they lay eggs.Mollie Rickwood

    To understand how turtles are adapting, conservation ecologist Annette Broderick and colleagues analyzed three decades of nesting data from around 600 tagged green turtles (Chelonia mydas) on the beaches of Northern Cyprus. The data included the number of successful hatchlings in each nest and temperatures during incubation. The team found that individual females nested earlier as temperatures rose, laying eggs just over six days earlier, on average, for each 1-degree-Celsius increase.

    This is “the first time anyone looked at individual turtles and looked at how they’re changing,” rather than studying nesting behavior at a population level, says Broderick, of the University of Exeter in England. More

  • 88 Shares147 Views

    in Heart

    Warming is chasing cloud forests steadily uphill

    Cloud forests are strange and ghostly places — akin to coral reefs hidden high on tropical mountains. Stunted trees loom in the mist, gnarled trunks and branches crusted in moss, lichens, orchids, ferns, bromeliads and even climbing cactus vines. Arboreal frogs and salamanders spawn in fog-fed bromeliad pools, and spider monkeys pause to sip drinks.

    But these enigmatic forests are being squeezed by warming and deforestation.

    Hundreds of tree and plant species that make up Mesoamerican cloud forests are being chased uphill by rising temperatures, at an average rate of 1.8 to 2.7 meters per year, researchers report in the March 7 Science. From 1979 to 2010, these forests retreated 84 meters uphill. At the same time, cattle grazing and deforestation higher on the mountains is pushing the forests downward 6.3 meters per year — squishing these ecosystems into ever narrower bands of territory. More

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    Robots are gaining new capabilities thanks to plants and fungi

    Aaron Tremper is the editorial assistant for Science News Explores. He has a B.A. in English (with minors in creative writing and film production) from SUNY New Paltz and an M.A. in Journalism from the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism’s Science and Health Reporting program. A former intern at Audubon magazine and Atlanta’s NPR station, WABE 90.1 FM, he has reported a wide range of science stories for radio, print, and digital media. His favorite reporting adventure? Tagging along with researchers studying bottlenose dolphins off of New York City and Long Island, NY. More