Science

Your phone charger needs precise quantum measurementsShutterstock/Zoomik If you are anything like me, you are almost always charging your smartphone. What you might not realise is that the ability to do so safely depends on a delicate quantum measurement at the cutting edge of physics. To understand why, we need to look at what happens when you plug your charger into a standard outlet. The electricity that flows from the outlet carries more than hundred volts, but the charger is designed so that by the time electricity reaches your phone, it has been converted to carry around a dozen. Were it not for this reduction in voltage, the phone would catch on fire. In other words, the exact number of volts matters in a very concrete way. But how do we know what a single v...

On July 28, 170 researchers sent a letter to the National Science Foundation (NSF) and Congress after NSF’s 2026 budget request included plans to end its lease of a U.S. research vessel in the Southern Ocean near Antarctica. The Nathaniel B. Palmer has been in operation for over 30 years and is the only U.S. research vessel icebreaker—a uniquely designed ship that navigates through frozen waters and can perform long-term scientific missions. The letter’s signatories, including 10 from Columbia University, are urging a reconsideration of this decision in the name of scientific progress. Nathaniel B. Palmer, the only U.S. Antarctic research vessel icebreaker, is set to have its lease terminated in October. (Credit: Michael Van Woert, NOAA NESDIS, ORA via Commons) “In general, the r...

A false colour image of the quantum router circuitMIT SQUILL foundry Quantum computers may be able to run useful algorithms more quickly, thanks to a new quantum router that helps data get to the right place faster. Traditional computers avoid becoming slow when faced with a complicated program in part by using random access memory (RAM) to temporarily store some information. The component key to building RAM’S quantum counterpart, QRAM, is a router. This isn’t the router that directs your internet queries to the right IP address, but rather an internal router that directs informational traffic inside a computer. Connie Miao at Stanford University in California and her colleagues have now built such a device. “The project was motivated by algorithms that use QRAM....

Black holes produce gravitational waves when they collideVICTOR de SCHWANBERG/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY Efforts to understand the universe could get a boost from an AI developed by Google DeepMind. The algorithm, which can reduce unwanted noise by up to 100 times, could allow the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) to spot a particular type of black hole that has so far eluded us. LIGO is designed to detect the gravitational waves produced when objects such as black holes spiral into each other and collide. These waves cross the universe at the speed of light, but the fluctuations they cause in space-time are extremely small – 10,000 times smaller than the nucleus of an atom. Since its first observations 10 years ago, LIGO has recorded such signals p...

Image: Philip Thurston Adapted from a release written by Michael Keller for ETH Zurich. In brief Extreme sea surface temperatures in 2023 resulted in high CO₂ outgassing, particularly in the North Atlantic, meaning that the global ocean absorbed less CO₂ overall. Thanks to El Niño, much less CO₂ than usual escaped into the atmosphere in the eastern Pacific, but the outgassing in the North Atlantic negated the positive effect. The fact that the ocean did not lose even more CO₂ is due to physical and biological processes that limited outgassing despite the record-high temperatures. Researchers are unsure if these compensating processes will continue to effectively support the marine carbon sink as global warming progresses. The world’s oceans act as an important sink f...