Month: January 2020

Enlarge / Two of the scientists involved in the new work wearing proper safety equipment while playing with lasers. (credit: Lorenzo Magrini, Yuriy Coroli/University of Vienna)

How big can something get and still display quantum behavior? It's a fundamental question in physics, and it gets at the nature of reality itself. All sorts of weird behavior goes on in the quantum world: particles behave like they're in two places at once, there are limits to how certain we can be of where things are, and so on. But once things get bigger than a handful of atoms, we get the nice, orderly behavior of our familiar world, where things exist in definite locations.

The transition between the quantum and the familiar seems to be set by environmental interactions. Once an object gets big enough, it's constantly bumping into atoms and absorbing photons, any of which can push it out of a well-defined quantum state. So the question becomes one of how big we can let things get while still controlling their interactions with the environment.

For the last decade, the gold standard in this area has been a physical resonator linked to hardware that lets us control it with photons of a specific wavelength. To keep stray bits of energy from messing with the resonator, the whole device is kept very close to absolute zero. But now, researchers have found that they can control the interactions of a tiny bead that's levitated on laser light. While it's smaller than the resonators, the setup works at room temperature and doesn't require that the bead be physically linked to any special hardware.

Enlarge / These are the only two Switch models that Nintendo plans to sell this year.

Nintendo says it won't be releasing another new version of the Switch this year. "Regarding Nintendo Switch, we believe that it is important to continue to communicate the appeal of both Nintendo Switch systems and expand the installed base," CEO Shuntaro Furukawa said in an investor briefing following an earnings report. "Please note that we have no plans to launch a new Nintendo Switch model during 2020."

The announcement counters multiple reports from the past 12 months that suggested Nintendo was looking into a more powerful Switch model with an improved OS, image rendering, and usability functions. A Nikkei report from April suggested that this "enhanced" version of the system was still in the early planning stages, though, and didn't even have anyone assigned to head its development at the time.

Will the Switch fall behind?

The hardware inside the Nvidia Tegra-based Switch is distinctly less powerful than the Xbox One or PS4, despite launching years later than Sony's and Microsoft's larger TV-based consoles. That power gap is even more pronounced for the PS4 Pro and Xbox One X and is set to widen even further later this year with the release of the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X.

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  The Mercedes-Benz GLB is up against rivals like the Volvo XC40 and Audi Q3. [credit: Mercedes-Benz ]

If there were any doubt about the utter dominance of the market by SUVs, consider that prior to 2020, Mercedes—that storied brand built on luxury sedans—offered six different classes of them. Wait—seven, if you count the hatchback GLA they slot in as an SUV (and I do).

Well, brace yourselves. There's now an eighth. The GLB250 parks a squarish, upright, proper-looking SUV into the paper-thin slot under the C-Class-based GLC and over the definition-challenged GLA. But the GLB grabs its design clay far more from the big GLS and positively rectilinear G-Class than any of the softer, more pliably styled Mercedes SUVs. In fact, that boxier form factor makes the new GLB an even more authoritative-looking family box with wheels than many roaming the streets today, somewhat aimless in their design.

And one step further into family firmament, the GLB offers a third-row seat—nearly unheard of in this size class, and something you must venture way up into the mid-sized GLE class among other Mercedes models to find.