Author: John Timmer

Quantum computers get a lot of people excited because they solve problems in a manner that's fundamentally different from existing hardware. A certain class of mathematical problems, called NP-complete, can seemingly only be solved by exploring every possible solution, which conventional computers have to do one at a time. Quantum computers, by contrast, explore all possible solutions simultaneously, and so these can provide answers relatively rapidly.

This isn't just an intellectual curiosity; encryption schemes rely on it being too computationally challenging to decrypt a message.

But as you may have noticed, we don't yet have quantum computers, and the technical hurdles between us and them remain substantial. An international team recently decided to try a different approach, using biology to explore a large solution space in parallel. While their computational machine is limited, the basic approach works, and it's 10,000 times more energy-efficient than traditional computers.

At the meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Rice University's Andrea Isella began his talk with words that can start a brawl among astronomy fans: "Everybody knows we have these eight beautiful planets in our Solar System." But he continued with words we can all agree on: we'd like to know how they got here and whether they represent a typical assortment we'd expect to see around other stars.

To answer both of these questions, we need to understand planet formation. And the best way to do that is to image as many systems as we can find that are in the process of forming planets. That process poses a number of challenges, however. In astronomical terms, planet formation is fast, taking place in 10 million years or so, and the process takes place in a diffuse, dusty disk that makes it difficult to do observations at visible wavelengths.

But we now have staggeringly precise images of these disks, thanks to the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array, or ALMA. ALMA is capable of identifying the chemical composition of the disks, along with irregularities in their distribution and the motion of different parts of the disk. Isella and other researchers were on hand to tell what we've learned from this sort of information.

At the end of the last ice age the oceans rose rapidly, as much of the water trapped in the large ice sheets was returned to the sea. Over the course of the last century, ocean levels rose again as rising temperatures caused glaciers to melt and the water itself to expand.

In between the two, however, we haven't had a very clear picture of what has been happening. Various records exist from around the world, indicating where the ocean level was in the past. But these numbers are influenced by local changes and don't give a clear picture of any global changes, which can be key to understanding the oceans' response to climate change and predicting where the sea levels are likely to go in the future.

Now, an international team of researchers has taken these local records and built a global database that allows them to track ocean levels for the past 1,500 years or so. And the picture that results looks a lot like that of the temperature reconstructions: centuries of small variations, followed by a sudden rise over the last century. The authors estimate that the oceans haven't seen changes like this in more than 2,800 years.

The Universe's first light—the earliest we can peer back in time—is the Cosmic Microwave Background, produced some 350,000 years after the Big Bang. It's the product of electrons pairing up with protons to form hydrogen atoms, releasing light in the process. From there, however, the Universe went dark until the formation of the first stars and galaxies, hundreds of thousands of years later.

Understanding the end of the cosmic dark ages can help us figure out the processes that built the Universe we currently occupy. For now, however, the wavelengths that would allow us to do so have remained out of reach. But researchers are building a new generation of telescopes that will help us reach back to this remote time, and they described their progress at the meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

The formation of hydrogen left the Universe electrically neutral. From there on out, most of the Universe's light was produced by hydrogen atoms—and typically absorbed by other atoms nearby. It wasn't until a sufficient population of stars formed that the light they produced put hydrogen back into an ionized state, allowing light to pass great distances unhindered. Thus, this "epoch of reionization" made the Universe transparent and accessible to our astronomical eyes. And, by studying it, we can examine the first large-scale structures that formed in the Universe.

Carbon nanotubes are small and can be semiconducting, which makes lots of people excited about using them as a replacement for features etched in silicon. But there are two big problems: the reactions that produce them create a random mix of metallic and semiconducting nanotubes, and it's really difficult to get them to go precisely where you need them to in order to properly wire up a processor.

Now, a joint IBM-academic team has used those difficulties to their advantage. They've developed a process in which nanotubes are used to randomly wire up part of a chip that's then used to generate cryptographic information, providing an inherently secure on-chip facility for hardware-based encryption.

Most digital cryptography depends on the ability to generate a unique series of bits that acts as a key. Hardware-based cryptography generally relies on a key that's permanently wired into the chip itself. While effective, different techniques for storing the keys have various vulnerabilities, from being subject to external snooping to producing different results when the environmental conditions are changed.

Politicians are often criticized for living up to their promises. For the Idaho Republican Party, however, doing so may end up leaving schools open to constitutional battles.

Last year, the state Republican party's central committee officially endorsed using the Bible in the state's public schools. Although the Bible has valid educational uses in a number of classes, the resolution included a huge laundry list of possible topics where it could apply, and those included a number of sciences, specifically astronomy, biology, and geology.

At the time, it wasn't at all clear how an ancient religious text would inform modern scientific understanding. But that hasn't stopped the Idaho Senate's Education Committee, which has proposed a bill with language that precisely mimics the central committee's document. The only significant additional text in the bill involves repealing existing Idaho education law in order to make room for the Bible.

The recent detection of gravitational waves did more than just confirm Einstein's theory of relativity; it provided our first direct observational evidence of the existence of black holes. That finding highlights LIGO's new job as an astronomical observatory, able to track some of the most energetic events in the Universe—and possibly discover entirely new classes of events.

But with only two detectors, it's hard to pinpoint where an event is happening. That also makes it hard to direct other instruments to the site, meaning we can't observe the event in visible light or other wavelengths. Which would be rather disappointing if the event's gravitational signal suggests it's something new. Things will get somewhat better when the European VIRGO instrument and Japan's KAGRA detector are integrated with LIGO.

But things are likely to get even better with LIGO-India, which would place a LIGO-style interferometer at a site to be determined in India. While approval only came this week, the project has been under consideration for a while. The site-selection process has already started, and a facility is being built that would receive and validate the LIGO hardware before its installation.

Late last week, the Daya Bay experiment in China released a new set of measurements of the neutrinos produced by the nuclear reactors on the site. The new data provides further examples of these strange particles refusing to act like we'd expect them to. This evidence further supports strange behavior that some have interpreted as evidence of the existence of particles beyond the Standard Model, but the new data doesn't bring evidence up to the level of significance required to announce discovery.

For good measure, there's also evidence of an entirely different anomaly—one that could be anything from an indication of new physics to a sign that our experiments were fundamentally misguided.

Any flavor you like

Last year's Physics Nobel Prize went to the people who discovered that neutrinos are less a single particle and more of an identity-shifting family of particles. Neutrinos come in three types, or flavors: electron, muon, and tau. But the identity of any given neutrino isn't fixed; instead, it can shift among these identities over time. Thus, even if you started with a population of pure electron neutrinos, you'd find a few muon neutrinos in the mix as well, given sufficient time.

LIVINGSTON, Louisiana—In a large, joint press event today, the scientists behind the LIGO experiment announced the first direct detection of gravitational waves, ripples in the fabric of space generated by strong gravitational interactions. The news, following weeks of rumors, confirms a major prediction of general relativity, comes a century after Einstein first formulated the theory.

The waves, produced in the final moments of a black hole merger, arrived precisely at 5:51 in the morning (US Eastern), and were picked up by both LIGO detectors—one in Louisiana, one in Washington. Since the Louisiana detector picked up the signal a few milliseconds sooner, the event that produced the gravitational waves occurred in the Southern Hemisphere.

"The description of this observation is beautifully described in the Einstein theory of general relativity formulated 100 years ago," said MIT professor Rainer Weiss, part of the team that first proposed LIGO. He said it "comprises the first test of the theory in strong gravitation."

Mississippi is the latest state to see a bill introduced that would protect teachers who injected bogus information into science classes. In that regard, there's nothing new; South Dakota beat it to the punch this year. The text of the bill is also unremarkable, fitting right in to the family tree of similar legislation that's been introduced over the years (see sidebar).

What is unusual in this case is that the lawmaker behind the bill is being very upfront about his purposes. “I just don’t want my teachers punished in any form or fashion for bringing creationism into the debate," Representative Mark Formby told The Clarion-Ledger. "Lots of us believe in creationism.” The bill he introduced would protect teachers from any disciplinary actions triggered by their discussion of it into the classroom.

In most cases, the people behind these bills avoid publicly admitting their intentions. In that way, they can pretend that the language of the bill (which ostensibly protects scientific information) has a purely secular purpose. By giving the game away—the language is a sham, and the bill is meant to allow proselytizing in the science classroom—Formby has created a record that will undoubtedly resurface should his bill pass and trigger a lawsuit.