On January 1, 2008, at 1:59 am in Calipatria, California, an earthquake happened. You haven’t heard of this earthquake; even if you had been living in Calipatria, you wouldn’t have felt anything. It was magnitude -0.53, about the same amount of shaking as a truck passing by. Still, this earthquake is notable, not because it ..
Tag : Science
By now, a handful of technologies are leading contenders for producing a useful quantum computer. Companies have used them to build machines with dozens to hundreds of qubits, the error rates are coming down, and they’ve largely shifted from worrying about basic scientific problems to dealing with engineering challenges. Yet even at this apparently late ..
(l-r): John Clarke, Michel H. Devoret, and John M. Martinis. Credit: Niklas Elmehed/Nobel Prize Outreach From subatomic to the macroscale Clarke, Devoret, and Martinis were the first to demonstrate that quantum effects, such as quantum tunneling and energy quantization, can operate on macroscopic scales, not just one particle at a time. After earning his PhD ..
“The effects of climate change are destroying the military’s infrastructure—Secretary Hegseth should take that threat seriously,” Warren told ICN in an email. “This data shows just how costly this threat already is for the National Guard to respond to natural disasters. Failing to act will only make these costs skyrocket.” Neither the Department of Defense ..
In 1915, intrepid British explorer Sir Ernest Shackleton and his crew were stranded for months in the Antarctic after their ship, Endurance, was trapped by pack ice, eventually sinking into the freezing depths of the Weddell Sea. Miraculously, the entire crew survived. The prevailing popular narrative surrounding the famous voyage features two key assumptions: that ..
So, the evidence is mixed. Now, Prates and his colleagues are arguing we’re not off the hook. Humans and extinct megafauna only shared South America for less than 3,000 years, and it was over 10,000 years ago, so the odds of evidence being preserved are fairly low. At many of those sites, Pleistocene layers—which would ..
Many of the most interesting bodies in our Solar System aren’t planets, but the moons that orbit them. They have active volcanoes, hydrocarbon oceans, geysers, and moon-wide oceans buried under icy crusts. And, as far as we can tell, the physics of the processes that produce large planets should make moon formation inevitable. Given how ..
The MIT team proposed that a BEC of radioactive atoms—say, rubidium-83—could radioactively decay in sync to produce a laser beam. Neutrinos are released naturally during radioactive decay, and in the quantum BEC state, that decay should accelerate, an effect that should produce an amplified beam of neutrinos akin to how stimulated emission amplifies photons to ..
Smyth thinks that so few adults show up on the fossil record in this region not only because they were more likely to survive, but also because those that couldn’t were not buried as quickly. Carcasses would float on the water anywhere from days to weeks. As they decomposed, parts would fall to the lagoon ..
Mann and Hotez have more in common than being pilloried all over the internet. Although they trained in disparate disciplines, their fields are now converging (as if they weren’t each threatening enough on their own). Climate change is altering the habitats, migrations, and reproductive patterns of pathogen-bearing wildlife like bats, mosquitoes, and other insects. It ..
