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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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      A quantum computing milestone is immediately challenged by a supercomputer

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      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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      Robots are gaining new capabilities thanks to plants and fungi

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      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

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      Mount Vesuvius turned this ancient brain into glass. Here’s how

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      The eruption of Mount Vesuvius in A.D. 79 is perhaps most famous for entombing the Roman city of Pompeii. But in nearby Herculaneum, also buried in the eruption, the preserved skeleton of a young man lying in bed contained a surprising find: glass remnants of his brain.

      When researchers studied the shiny samples, they saw what appeared to be nerve cells. A new study now uncovers more details into how the glass may have formed, the team reports February 27 in Scientific Reports. More

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      The best way to cook an egg, according to science

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      When egg prices are hard-boiling your temper, it’s important to make sure that each egg you make is the best it can possibly be. But when your egg white is cooked, your egg yolk is often still a runny mess. Once the yolk is cooked, the white is rubbery. The solution is a method of periodic cooking, researchers report February 6 in Communications Engineering. And true eggcellence, they say, requires only boiling water, slightly warm water, an egg — and 32 minutes of patience.

      The challenge of cooking an egg is that the yolk and the albumen — or white — have different compositions, says Emilia Di Lorenzo, a chemical engineer at the University of Naples Federico II in Italy. The result is that the proteins in each part of the egg denature — or fall apart — at different temperatures. Yolk proteins cook at 65° Celsius, while those in the white cook at 85° C. More

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      Quantum mechanics was born 100 years ago. Physicists are celebrating

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      A century ago, science went quantum. To celebrate, physicists are throwing a global, year-long party.

      In 1925, quantum mechanics, the scientific theory that describes the unintuitive rules of physics on very small scales, began to crystallize in the minds of physicists. Beginning in that year, a series of monumental papers laid out the theory’s framework. Quantum physics has since permeated a wide range of scientific disciplines — explaining the periodic table, the lives and deaths of stars and more — and enabled technologies from the laser to the smartphone. More

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      A new microbead proves effective as a plastic-free skin scrubber

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      A new degradable microbead could soon replace plastic exfoliants in skin cleansers.

      The polymer spheres effectively remove permanent marker and eyeliner on animal skin samples and break down into molecules similar to sugars and amino acids, researchers report December 6 in Nature Chemical Engineering. The beads offer a more environmentally friendly alternative to microplastic beads, the scientists say.

      In 2015, the United States banned companies from adding plastic microbeads to personal care products that get rinsed down the drain to prevent them from entering waterways where marine life might ingest them. Several countries have implemented similar bans, but others still allow companies to add plastic microbeads as scrubbers and exfoliants. More

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      Starchy nanofibers shatter the record for world’s thinnest pasta

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      The world record for the thinnest pasta has been shattered, though the new, narrow noodles are better suited to wound dressings than the dinner table.

      From white flour, researchers made starch-rich nanofibers that are about 370 nanometers thick, on average — or about two hundredths the thickness of a human hair. The nano-noodles could be used in biodegradable bandages, chemist Adam Clancy and colleagues reported October 30 in Nanoscale Advances.

      To make the noodle “dough,” the scientists mixed the flour with formic acid, a liquid that helps uncoil the long starch molecules in the flour. “Normally, if you want to cook starch, then you use water and heat to break up the tight packing of starch,” says Clancy, of University College London. “We do that chemically with formic acid. So we effectively pickle it instead of cooking it.” More