Company noted for building quantum annealers now also making gate-based hardware. D-Wave is a bit of an oddity in the quantum computing space, having been founded back in the last century. And its initial offering wasn’t a quantum computer like those being developed by IBM or Google. Instead, the…
Also: Cyborg diving suits for cockroaches, why sleepy sperm whales blow bubbles, Betelgeuse’s companion star. It’s a regrettable reality that there is never enough time to cover all the interesting scientific stories we come across. So every month, we highlight a handful of the best stories that nearly slipped…
“We believe that a capture of Swift, an attempted capture of Swift, is very much in the cards.” One week ago, more than 200 miles above the Earth, a refrigerator-size satellite making its way toward an attempted rescue of NASA’s $500 million Swift gamma-ray observatory suddenly spun out of…
Tracking smells in turbulent air takes a keen sense of direction and sharp memory. A fruit fly hunting a piece of rotting fruit or a mate navigates by smell, following plumes of odor. Out in the wild, turbulent air swirls these plumes into a chaotic, broken landscape—dense chemical filaments…
Some group with no modern descendants contributed a lot to our genomes. When the history of our ancestry is written, the fact that we’ve interbred with some of our closest relatives, the Neanderthals and Denisovans, will have a central role. And it will be tempting to write it as…
Wavelength and intensity in the infrared are translated into colors in the visible. Human eyes don’t register the infrared portion of the light spectrum because infrared photons don’t carry enough energy to trigger the signaling pathway inside our light-sensing cells. But we’ve been able to make devices that give…
Look at chemistry of batteries and motors shows big opportunity for recycling. While recycling is a mathematically obvious response to the finite, non-renewable nature of many resources, the economic math is often challenging. For many materials, it can be hard to compete with virgin materials on a cost basis.…
“Dogfighting in space doesn’t quite have the drama of an aerial dogfight.” An ongoing military exercise happening hundreds of miles above Earth has—for the first time in an unclassified setting—demonstrated how future satellites might evade and pursue one another in a future conflict. That was the announcement Wednesday from…
Three approaches to the issue of quantum results that can’t be verified classically. There are many algorithms for which it has been mathematically proven that a quantum computer can generate results that would take a classical computer an unreasonable amount of time to generate. Unfortunately, today’s quantum computers either…
Companies are making sure we have a surplus of options for building qubits. If you follow quantum computing news for long enough, it can start to seem like any quantum system that can alternate between two well-separated energy states can be used as a qubit. Atoms, ions, photons, electrons,…
