Month: June 2022

Enlarge / Given an actual beam of light, a beamsplitter divides it in two. Given individual photons, the behavior becomes more complicated. (credit: Wikipedia)

Ars Technica's Chris Lee has spent a good portion of his adult life playing with lasers, so he's a big fan of photon-based quantum computing. Even as various forms of physical hardware like superconducting wires and trapped ions made progress, it was possible to find him gushing about an optical quantum computer put together by a Canadian startup called Xanadu. But, in the year since Xanadu described its hardware, companies using that other technology continued to make progress by cutting down error rates, exploring new technologies, and upping the qubit count.

But the advantage of optical quantum computing didn't go away, and now Xanadu is back with a reminder that it hasn't gone away either. Thanks to some tweaks to the design it described a year ago, Xanadu is now able to sometimes perform operations with more than 200 qubits. And it's shown that simulating the behavior of just one of those operations on a supercomputer would take 9,000 years, while its optical quantum computer can do them in just a few dozen milliseconds.

This is an entirely contrived benchmark: just as Google's quantum computer did, the quantum computer is just being itself while the supercomputer is trying to simulate it. The news here is more about the potential of Xanadu's hardware to scale.

Enlarge / An artist’s illustration of two suited crew members working on the lunar surface. (credit: NASA)

On Wednesday, NASA took another step toward landing humans on the Moon when the agency announced a plan to purchase new and more versatile spacesuits for its astronauts.

After more than a decade of work to develop a new spacesuit in-house, NASA said it would instead buy spacesuit services from two private companies, Axiom Space and Collins Aerospace.

Each of these companies will be able to use technology NASA has worked on but are responsible for the overall development of the spacesuits used on the International Space Station and activities on the lunar surface. Axiom and Collins said they intended to demonstrate their spacesuits for NASA—likely in the form of a spacewalk outside the space station—by 2025.

Preparing for the next pandemic at Ars Frontiers. Click here for transcript. (video link)

Though the COVID-19 pandemic is not yet over, fatigue from the global public health emergency has surged to levels only an omicron subvariant could rival. We're all eager to move on. But for scientists and public health experts, that means preparing for the next inevitable pandemic and dealing with the aftermath of this one.

Ahead of Ars Frontiers, I connected with virologist Angela Rasmussen to talk about pandemic preparedness: what went well in this pandemic, what didn't, what we learned—and what lessons we already seem to be ignoring.