Over a century ago, quantum physics revealed a surprising fact: truly identical particles do not behave like tiny billiard balls. When two indistinguishable particles meet under the right conditions, they can interfere with each other in ways that have no classical explanation. One of the most famous demonstrations of this phenomenon is the Hong–Ou–Mandel effect […]
Artificial Intelligence • Biology • Computer science • Genetics
Researchers at the University of Oregon have developed an artificial intelligence tool that can read genetic code the way large language models like ChatGPT read text. Scanning the genome for biological mutation patterns, the computer model traces pairs of genes back in time to their last common ancestor. It’s the first language model designed for […]
The material at the heart of the digital revolution, silicon, is now a leading candidate for building large-scale quantum computers. This strategy leverages the most mature and powerful manufacturing technology on Earth to control the fundamental quantum property of an electron: its spin. Recent breakthroughs in silicon-based spin qubits have demonstrated gate fidelities that meet […]
If you’ve ever sat by a quiet pond and tapped the surface of the water with your finger once every second, you’d expect to see a ripple travel outward once every second. In the world of classical physics, the effect follows the cause in a predictable, rhythmic march. But imagine for a moment that you […]
The simulation hypothesis—the idea that our universe might be an artificial construct running on some advanced alien computer—has long captured the public imagination. Yet most arguments about it rest on intuition rather than clear definitions, and few attempts have been made to formally spell out what “simulation” even means. A new mathematical framework emerges A […]
A new study has identified a surprising source of entropy in quantum timekeeping—the act of measurement itself. The researchers demonstrate that the energy cost of “reading” a quantum clock far outweighs the cost of running it, with implications for the design of future quantum technologies. Clocks, whether pendulums or atomic oscillators, rely on irreversible processes […]
OpenAI’s recent rollout of its new video generator Sora 2 marks a watershed moment in AI. Its ability to generate minutes of hyper-realistic footage from a few lines of text is astonishing, and has raised immediate concerns about truth in politics and journalism. But Sora 2 is rolling out slowly because of its enormous computational […]
One often-repeated example illustrates the mind-boggling potential of quantum computing: A machine with 300 qubits (quantum bits) could simultaneously store more information than the number of particles in the known universe. Now process this: Harvard scientists just unveiled a system that was 10 times bigger and the first quantum machine able to operate continuously without […]
A new discovery of how bees use their flight movements to facilitate remarkably accurate learning and recognition of complex visual patterns could mark a major change in how next-generation AI is developed, according to a University of Sheffield study. By building a computational model—or a digital version of a bee’s brain—researchers have discovered how the […]
A team of astronomers led by Michael Janssen (Radboud University, The Netherlands) has trained a neural network with millions of synthetic black hole data sets. Based on the network and data from the Event Horizon Telescope, they now predict, among other things, that the black hole at the centre of our Milky Way is spinning […]