Science

Software produced by the National Health Service is usually open to the publicMareks Perkons/Alamy NHS England is hurriedly withdrawing all the software it has written from public view because of the perceived risk of hacking from cutting-edge artificial intelligence. Security experts say the move is unnecessary and counterproductive. Software produced by the National Health Service has previously been made open-source and listed on GitHub because it is created with public money. This allows other organisations to build upon it and make better services more cheaply without duplicating effort. But NHS England has issued new guidance to staff, which has been shared with New Scientist, that demands existing and future software be pulled from public view and kept behi...

It took Singapore less than 60 years to transform from a colonial port into one of the world’s fastest growing and most technologically advanced city-states, a feat with few parallels in modern history. But sitting at the southern tip of the Malay Peninsula, Singapore also finds itself in the middle of rising seas, intensifying heat and erratic rainfall. As a regional hub for finance, technology and policy, the country has drawn a new generation of climate thinkers, engineers and entrepreneurs. Two recent additions to the city are M.A. in Climate and Society alumni Amanda Chen (CS’24) and Anuka Upadhye (CS’25), who moved to the country precisely because it is serious about change and the opportunities therein.  Anuka Upadhye. Credit: Laila Shaaban Upadhye is a policy fellow in en...

Qunnect’s Carina rack for quantum entanglementQunnect Medhi Namazi wants to sell you quantum entanglement. He and his colleagues at Qunnect have spent nearly a decade building devices that make sharing quantum-entangled particles of light, or photons, practical enough to be used for unhackable communication. At Qunnect’s headquarters in Brooklyn, New York, large tables are filled with lasers, lenses, special crystals and other tiny components that researchers use to manipulate light. They are all destined to be neatly packaged into bright magenta boxes and then shipped to other builders of the communication technologies of the future. Against the backdrop of the stunning New York skyline, Namazi opens a box for me, revealing electronics that, at first glance, don’...

Backing up information on quantum computers is trickyRUSLANAS BARANAUSKAS/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY/Alamy In quantum mechanics, the idea that quantum information can’t be duplicated is ironclad – or at least, it was. A surprising approach to backing up qubits, the basic units of quantum computers, appears to allow a sidestepping of this fundamental law of physics. The no-cloning theorem was first discovered by researchers in the 1980s. It says that quantum states that describe all the information about a system can’t be copied. Attempting to measure the information to copy it would simply destroy the delicate quantum properties that you want to measure. This fact has proved important for quantum technologies like encryption, leading to simple protocols that prevent informa...

Much has been written about how government agencies struggle with community engagement in climate resilience planning. For example, a 2024 study by the Resilient Coastal Communities Project (RCCP) described the enormous frustration felt by communities involved in planning exercises that fail to meaningfully address, let alone prioritize, local needs and experience.  RCCP, a partnership between the Center for Sustainable Urban Development at the Columbia Climate School and the New York City Environmental Justice Alliance, published these findings in a 2024 Geoforum article, to give voice to community perspectives on why planners get community engagement wrong. The article also shared 10 community-based ideas for more effective, collaborative planning practice. More recently, RCCP deci...