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The largest T. rex to ever live may have weighed up to 33,000 pounds.

Our selection of the top 5 videos from this week include 3D printed custom glasses manufacturer, John Deere’s printed parts and more! Enjoy.

DNA — nicknamed “nature’s storage medium” — has accurately stored the instruction sets for all life on Earth for billions of years. But it also may hold the keys to managing explosive data growth and storing archival data for generations to come.

The idea of storing digital data in DNA dates back more than a half century, but making it a reality has accelerated in recent years with advances in biotechnology and declining costs of genome sequencing.

Dave Landsman is the senior director of industry standards and a distinguished engineer at Western Digital. For the past two years, he’s been one of the principals in the company’s exploration of DNA data storage.

Computer security specialists had hoped Go-playing AI agents would be immune to adversarial attacks. Now it’s back to the drawing board.

The idea of human ectogenesis — growing a baby in an artificial environment outside of the human body — has always been considered in the realms of science fiction, however it may not be for much longer.

Scientific developments in this field have been taking big steps forward in recent years, particularly in our ability to care for extremely preterm babies. However, just how close are we to being able to create human life entirely outside of the human body? And in a potential future, where women no longer had to give birth, what societal impacts might that have on gender equality and our conceptions of what it means to be a mother?

Continue reading “What if women never had to give birth again?” »

Error-prone qubits mean quantum systems do not yet surpass classical methods.

In a talk at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1981, Richard Feynman spoke about ‘simulating physics with computers’. This was already being done at the time, but Feynman said he wanted to talk ‘about the possibility that there is to be an exact simulation, that the computer will do exactly the same as nature.’ But as nature is quantum-mechanical, he pointed out, what you need for that is a quantum computer.

The rest is history – but history still in the making. When I recently asked David Deutsch, the visionary physicist who in 1985 laid out what quantum computing might look like, whether he was surprised at how quickly the idea became a practical technology, he replied with characteristic terseness: ‘It hasn’t.’ You can see his point. Sure, in October President Joe Biden visited IBM’s new quantum data centre in Poughkeepsie, New York, to see an entire room filled with the company’s quantum computers. And on 9 November IBM announced its 433-quantum-bit (qubit) Osprey processor, although it seems only yesterday that we were getting excited at Google’s 53-qubit Sycamore chip – with which the Google team claimed in 2016 to demonstrate ‘quantum supremacy’, meaning that it could perform a calculation in a few days that would take the best classical computer many millennia.¹ This claim has since been disputed.

Guarding Against Future Global Biological Risks — Dr. Margaret “Peggy” Hamburg, MD — Chair Nuclear Threat Initiative, bio Advisory Group; Commissioner, Bipartisan Commission on Biodefense; former Commissioner, U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA)

Dr. Margaret “Peggy” Hamburg, MD is an internationally recognized leader in public health and medicine, who currently serves as chair of the Nuclear Threat Initiative’s (NTI) bio Advisory Group (https://www.nti.org/about/people/margaret-hamburg-md/), where she has also served as founding vice president and senior scientist. She also currently holds a role as Commissioner on the Bipartisan Commission on Biodefense (https://biodefensecommission.org/teams/margaret-a-hamburg/).

Continue reading “Dr. Peggy Hamburg, MD — Chair, Nuclear Threat Initiative (NTI), bio Advisory Group” »

The James Webb Space Telescope has spied one of the earliest galaxies formed after the big bang, about 350 million years after the universe began.

The galaxy, called GLASS-z12, and another galaxy formed about 450 million years after the big bang, were found over the summer, shortly after the powerful space observatory began its infrared observations of the cosmos.

Webb’s capability to look deeper into the universe than other telescopes is revealing previously hidden aspects of the universe, including astonishingly distant galaxies such as these two finds.

Quantum superposition is not just a property of subatomic particles but also of the most massive objects in the universe. That is the conclusion of four theoretical physicists in Australia and Canada who calculated the hypothetical response of a particle detector placed some distance from a black hole. The researchers say the detector would see novel signs of superimposed space–times, implying that the black hole may have two different masses simultaneously.

Black holes are formed when extremely massive objects like stars collapse to a singularity – a point of infinite density. The gravitational field of a black hole is so great that nothing can escape its clutches, not even light. This creates a spherical region of space around the singularity entirely cut off from the rest of the universe and bounded by what is known as an event horizon.

An active area of research into the physics of black holes seeks to develop a consistent theory of quantum gravity. This is an important goal of theoretical physics that would reconcile quantum mechanics and Einstein’s general theory of relativity. In particular, by considering black holes in quantum superposition, physicists hope to gain insights into the quantum nature of space–time.