Science

© William Horton, William Horton Photography Every now and then, it is worth pausing for a second and giving thanks to the many, ever so slightly different versions of you that exist in parallel realities. It is these alternative selves that help to keep these universes in balance. At least, that is what’s going on if you happen to subscribe to the many-worlds interpretation of quantum theory. First proposed more than 65 years ago, the idea is that reality is constantly splitting off into parallel paths, due to subtle interactions at the level of quantum particles. Though it may boggle the mind, it also smooths over some devilishly tricky problems in physics and, for that reason, plenty of clear-eyed physicists believe it to be true. But now this strange idea migh...

The suggestion that consciousness has its origins in quantum weirdness has long been viewed as a bit, well, weird. Critics argue that ideas of quantum consciousness, the most famous of which posits that moments of experience arise as quantum superpositions in the brain collapse, do little more than merge one mystery with another. Besides, where is the evidence? And yet there is a vocal minority who insist we should take the idea seriously. Hartmut Neven, who leads Google’s Quantum Artificial Intelligence Lab, is among them. He originally trained as a physicist and computational neuroscientist before pioneering computer vision – a type of AI that replicates the human ability to understand visual data. Later, Neven founded Google Quantum AI, which in 2019 became the fir...

2024 was another record-breaking year—global temperatures continued to rise; an especially active hurricane season left a trail of destruction in the U.S; catastrophic floods rattled Spain and Central Europe; and wildfires decimated parts of North and South America—to name just a few of the headlines. But it was also a year filled with exciting opportunities for collaboration, bringing together people from diverse fields within academia, policy and research, alongside community members, to discuss new ways to combat, mitigate and prevent the effects of climate change during Climate Week NYC, COP29 and the World Water Film Festival, among other initiatives. For the first time in almost nine years, the seismic vessel R/V Marcus G. Langseth also made a stop in New York City for some mu...

Imagine taking a hammer to your laptop. You smash it apart and shards of plastic, batteries and circuit board go flying. It would be an act of vandalism, a shocking waste of money and resources, so much so that it sounds absurd. But the truth is that, every time we use a computer, we are dealing with a machine that is, at the fundamental level, even more wasteful than this. It all goes back to a decision made decades ago about the deep workings of computer logic and how these machines delete data, a process that inevitably produces a large amount of waste heat. For a long time, we have muddled through with wasteful computers. But with the rise of artificial intelligence, which has pushed the power demands of computing to new heights, this seemingly inconsequential dec...

The author, left, and filmmaker Sumit Rezwan Shahriar, at COP29 My journey from New York City to Baku, Azerbaijan, host of this year’s UN climate change conference (COP29), took me over seven thousand miles of earth and sea. I arrived in Baku at night, where colorful, flame-shaped towers define the landscape of this city. Once a Soviet Republic and now an oil rich petrostate, Azerbaijan shares borders with Iran, Armenia and Russia. Over the next two weeks, more than 60,000 world leaders, experts and members of civil society exchanged ideas and information, while high-level negotiations with delegates from nearly 200 countries took place in secured rooms. I serve on the steering committee for UNFCCC Entertainment & Culture for Climate Action Film & TV (ECCA). As an educator...