You’re late for an important appointment. Just as you are leaving your house, you realize your phone is flat. Imagine you could charge it almost instantly by exploiting the strange rules of quantum physics. That’s the promise of quantum batteries.
My colleagues and I at CSIRO have developed the world’s first quantum battery prototypes —and the direction the technology has taken is surprising.
An international collaboration, including Northwestern University, has reached a critical milestone in the search for dark matter, the mysterious substance that makes up about 85% of all matter in the universe. Located two kilometers below ground in Canada, the Super Cryogenic Dark Matter Search (SuperCDMS) at SNOLAB has cooled to its operating temperature, the collaboration announced on March 17.
Just thousandths of a degree above absolute zero, the cryogenic experiment is about 100 times colder than the temperature of deep space. This extreme cold enables scientists to eliminate thermal noise from vibrating atoms, potentially isolating dark matter’s incredibly tiny signals.
With this milestone, the project transitions from building the experiment to preparing for the search. Researchers can now turn on the dark matter detectors, whose superconducting sensors only function when cooled to extremely low temperatures. If the equipment operates correctly, it should achieve the highest level of sensitivity yet for detecting low-mass particles, which have about half the mass of a single proton.
Quantum computers could solve certain problems that would take traditional classical computers an impractically long time to solve. At the Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (JAIST), researchers are now working to make these systems reliable and trustworthy.
Unlike classical computers that process information in binary digits (bits) as either 0 or 1, quantum computers use quantum bits or “qubits” that can represent both 0 and 1 simultaneously, enabling dramatic speedups in computations for specific problems.
The potential applications of quantum computing are wide-ranging. These include factoring large numbers that could break today’s encryption, optimizing complex industrial processes, accelerating drug discovery, and supporting advances in artificial intelligence (AI).
Nitrogen is essential for life on Earth, yet most organisms cannot use it directly from the atmosphere. Scientists now believe this element may also provide important clues about how life first developed on our planet and how it might arise elsewhere in the universe.
“All living organisms need nitrogen to survive and, though it’s all around us, we can’t access it directly,” says Utah State University biochemist Lance Seefeldt. “Enzymes called nitrogenases enable nitrogen fixation, which converts nitrogen to a form plants, animals, humans, and other life forms can access. And we’re just beginning to understand the extent to which, over the Earth’s four-billion-year history, these nitrogenases have evolved.”
Identity protection company Aura has confirmed that an unauthorized party gained access to nearly 900,000 customer records containing names and email addresses.
The company states that the incident was caused by a voice phishing attack targeting an employee, which exposed the sensitive data of 20,000 current and 15,000 former customers.
In a communication this week, Aura states that the data originated from a marketing tool used by a company acquired by Aura in 2021, which exposed limited information.