Month: October 2019

Enlarge / Hartmut Neven, the head of Google's Quantum AI lab, walked Ars and others through an overview of the company's quantum computing efforts this week. (credit: John Timmer)

SANTA BARBARA, California—Early this autumn, a paper leaked on a NASA site indicating Google engineers had built and tested hardware that achieved what's termed "quantum supremacy," completing calculations that would be impossible on a traditional computer. The paper was quickly pulled offline, and Google remained silent, leaving the rest of us to speculate about their plans for this device and any follow-ons the company might be preparing.

That speculation ended today, as Google released the final version of the paper that had leaked. But perhaps more significantly, the company invited the press to its quantum computing lab, talked about its plans, and gave us time to chat with the researchers behind the work.

The supremacy result

"I'm not going to bother explaining the quantum supremacy paper—if you were invited to come here, you probably all read the leaked paper," quipped Hartmut Neven, the head of Google's Quantum AI lab. But he found it hard to resist the topic entirely, and the other people who talked with reporters were more than happy to expand on Neven's discussion.

Enlarge / Forams collected from the time of the Chicxulub asteroid impact that (at least in part) drove a mass extinction. (credit: Michael J. Henehan)

As nasty as the asteroid impact at the end of the Cretaceous sounds, you wouldn't think scientists would be spending much time asking, "Yeah, but how did things actually die?"

It's not just a macabre fascination. With so many awful things going on at once—including a remarkable stretch of volcanic eruptions in what is now India—there are a handful of kill mechanisms to choose from. And when you closely examine the patterns of which species in which environments went extinct, the picture gets complicated.

One major question has been the extinctions in the oceans. On land, there were several years of freezing temperatures and sunless skies, not to mention the tsunamis and worldwide wildfires. The oceans have a tremendous thermal mass, however, that would have moderated the global chill. In the deep ocean, the loss of sunlight wouldn't be felt as immediately.

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  Oh wondrous day! Pry loose one of the new 15" Surface Laptop's feet with a pick or spudger and you see an actual screw. It's Torx, mind you. But still, it's a screw! [credit: iFixit ]

iFixit completed its teardown of Microsoft's new Ryzen-powered 15" Surface Laptop 3, and—to absolutely everyone's surprise, very much including iFixit's—the teardown didn't permanently break anything.

When the folks at iFixit tore down the first Microsoft Surface Laptop, they didn't get much further than removing the rubber feet before the device was irreparably damaged. The entire thing turned out to be one giant wad of glue, fabric, spot-welds and hate that earned the original Surface a "perfect" 0/10 repairability score, right up there next to Apple's AirPods (which it would never even occur to most people to attempt to disassemble).

In case you weren't sure, this was the teardown that shared a 0/10 score with the original Surface laptop. (credit: iFixit)

This year's 15" Surface Laptop 3 is an entirely different story. Well, not entirely different—but it's definitely a big change of heart. There are still some nasty bits to the Surface Laptop 3's construction—in particular, the battery is glued down and a bear to remove safely—but the iFixit crew managed to get the entire thing disassembled into its component parts with a minimum of blood and cursing. Better yet, iFixit left it in proper condition to be reassembled again.

Enlarge / Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg did not have a super great time at a hearing before the House Financial Services Committee on Oct. 23., 2019. (credit: Al Drago | Bloomberg | Getty Images)

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg was on Capitol Hill Wednesday to testify before the the House Financial Services Committee about Libra, Facebook's controversial cryptocurrency plan. At least, Libra was theoretically his reason for being in Washington, DC. Once he was in the hot seat, however, lawmakers pinned him down with questions about basically everything, making clear just how much ire the ostensible social network now draws at the highest level.

The hearing, titled "An Examination of Facebook and its Impact on the Financial Services and Housing Sectors," ran for more than five hours as representatives pressed Zuckerberg on a variety of topics. Many of the questions seemed to leave the CEO flustered as members of the committee dug in.

Among the highlights:

Enlarge / A Pakistani health worker administers polio vaccine drops to a child during a vaccination campaign in Karachi on December 10, 2018. Pakistan is one of only two countries in the world where polio remains endemic. (credit: Getty | RIZWAN TABASSUM )

A crippling strain of polio virus is no more. Officials confirmed Thursday that global health efforts have wiped it out, moving humanity one step closer to completely eradicating the highly infectious virus from the planet.

The obliterated strain—wild poliovirus type 3 (WPV3)—is one of only three wild strains of polio. It is the second to be globally eradicated. Health officials declared WPV2 eradicated in 2015. That leaves only one wild strain remaining: WPV1.

This “historic” announcement falls on World Polio Day and is based on the recent conclusion of the independent Global Commission for the Certification of Poliomyelitis Eradication, set up in part by the World Health Organization. The announcement comes after years of careful and painstaking global surveillance to certify that WPV3 no longer exists anywhere in the world, apart from specimens preserved in secure containment. The last known case of WPV3 occurred in northern Nigeria in 2012.

Last year, a huge group of researchers collaborated to try to replicate the results of some very famous social science research. They determined that only 62% of the studies found similar results when they were repeated. But the researchers found something else intriguing: other scientists were astonishingly good at guessing which of the results would replicate.

Does that mean we can just ask scientists for their hunch on what research is robust? It's a lot more complicated than that, but predictions could have a useful role to play in science, and new projects are springing up to make use of them.

Obvious or not?

The success of scientists' predictions doesn't mean that every individual scientist (or non-scientist) can just rely on their gut to guess which scientific results are true. We have a term for that: "confirmation bias." But that doesn't mean that scientists can't have informed, well-founded suspicions about some research. Predictions taken from across a whole group of scientists could average out the bias and highlight the well-informed doubts and thus be a very useful contribution to scientific research.