Science

2024 is officially the hottest year on record. The ocean is heating faster than ever as glaciers lose ice and sea levels rise. And this past year, extreme weather and wildfires devastated communities and economies across the world.  As we start the new year, we can’t allow ourselves to feel discouraged about fighting climate change. While bigger actions by the government are needed to really make a difference, there are many individual actions that can help.  Here is some advice from climate experts on ways to stay involved in the fight against climate change.    Engage in Green Networking  Radhika Iyengar, an associate research scholar at Columbia Climate School’s Center for Sustainable Development, believes we need more grassroots initiatives. “Meet people old school–styl...

Quantum computing chips could use heat to eliminate errorsChalmers University of Technology, Lovisa Håkansson A tiny cooling device can automatically reset malfunctioning components of a quantum computer. Its performance suggests that manipulating heat could also enable other autonomous quantum devices. Quantum computers aren’t yet fully practical because they make too many errors. In fact, if qubits – key components of this type of computer – accidentally heat up and become too energetic, they can end up in an erroneous state before the calculation even begins. One way to “reset” the qubits to their correct states is to cool them down. Simone Gasparinetti at Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden and his colleagues have delegated this task to an autonomous q...

© 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...