Tech experts have long championed quantum computers as the next generation of machine, promising to solve big problems in lightning-fast time, but the delicate chips exist in only a handful of labs. In the race to build the largest one yet, Google shot ahead in March when it unveiled Bristlecone, a 72-qubit device with low […]
Quantum computing gets its “Hello World” moment. Read More »
How much beauty does it take to launch a ship? Howmuch does a male physicist’s beard grow in a second?And what is the optimal length of a lecture? Thesemay not seem like typical phenomena you need tomeasure, but they’ve nonetheless inspired creativesouls to forge new units of measurement.They are just some of the weird scales
Some of the smallest, most useful machines known to science are the biological molecules that keep living things living. The protein myosin drives the contraction and relaxation of muscle. Kinesin drags cellular cargo around the cell. Motor enzymes unwind, rewind, and maintain DNA, and bacteria use a molecular motor to rotate their whip-like flagella up
What’s the best way to build a molecular machine? Read More »
NASA is studying what personality an astronaut candidate needs to make the journey to Mars. Can we go to Mars without going crazy? In May 2001, Discover’s cover story asked exactly that, exploring unanswered questions about the psychological perils of humans crammed together and flung through space. At the time, scientists didn’t have much data to
Want to be a Mars Astronaut? You’ll Need the Proper Mindset Read More »
In late 2013, something big and strange showed up in the Gulf of Alaska. Scientists called it “the Blob.” It wasn’t a monster. Instead, it was a monstrous amount of heat in the surface water of the northern Pacific. And it didn’t begin to dissipate until 2016. Scientists soon observed the same heat-up farther south.
The Blob: Fingerprint of climate change shows up in some extreme weather Read More »
Inspiration often comes from unusual sources. Nelson Sepúlveda knows this firsthand. He got his big idea for a new source of power simply by looking out the window at the right time. Sepúlveda is an engineer at Michigan State University in East Lansing. He studies materials that can be used to build tiny electronic devices.
What powers these electronics? We do! Read More »
The tallest known tree in the world is in Redwood National Park, a few hundred kilometres north of San Francisco, just inland from the Pacific coast. You won’t find its location marked on official hiking maps, however. That’s because the two amateur naturalists who discovered the tree in 2006 – Michael Taylor and Chris Atkins – have tried to keep
Top Tips fom Tree Tops Read More »
On a clear, sunny Tuesday afternoon, last August, Andreas Fath climbed out of a river in Paducah, Ky. A small crowd was on hand to witness his setting a new world record. This man had just finished swimming the entire length of the Tennessee River — 1,049 kilometers (652 miles). And he did it in
On January 9, 2018, a trio of federal judges made history when they ruled that the boundaries of North Carolina’s congressional voting districts gave an unfair advantage to Republican candidates. It was the first case in the nation in which a federal court had declared congressional maps unconstitutional because of intentional bias in favor of
Math tools send legislators back to the drawing board Read More »
FOR MORE THAN a century, pathologists have identified cancer by looking at slides containing tissue stained with dyes to make the malignant cells more visible. Spotting aberrant cells among healthy ones is similar in spirit to recognizing familiar faces or objects in pictures. “Our brains are very good at recognizing patterns in images,” says physician and
Recognizing AI’s potential Read More »
