‘Endangered’ elements used to make mobile phones are running out quickly, scientists warn. Vital chemical elements have been included on an “endangered list” because they are being thrown away in mobile phones at such a high rate.
Scientists have warned some of the substances used to make phones are becoming increasingly scarce due to limited supplies, their location in conflict zones and the lack of recycling. To tackle this problem, they say people should avoid changing their phones every few years. Researchers have developed a periodic table highlighting the scarcity of Earth’s 90 naturally occurring elements, many of which are used in the production of devices like phones and TVs. Untitled. Quantum computers theoretically can prove more powerful than any supercomputer, and now scientists calculate just what quantum computers need to attain such “quantum supremacy,” and whether or not Google achieved it with its claims last year.
Whereas classical computers switch transistors either on or off to symbolize data as ones or zeroes, quantum computers use quantum bits—qubits—that, because of the bizarre nature of quantum physics, can be in a state of superposition where they are both 1 and 0 simultaneously. Superposition lets one qubit perform two calculations at once, and if two qubits are linked through a quantum effect known as entanglement, they can help perform 22 or four calculations simultaneously; three qubits, 23 or eight calculations; and so on. In principle, a quantum computer with 300 qubits could perform more calculations in an instant than there are atoms in the visible universe. Bg175. A Groundbreaking Mathematician on the Gender Politics of Her Field. A Child’s Puzzle Helped Uncover How Magnets Really Work. The elegant physics experiment to decode the nature of reality. Imagine throwing a baseball and not being able to tell exactly where it’ll go, despite your ability to throw accurately.
The Key to Everything. Scale: The Universal Laws of Growth, Innovation, Sustainability, and the Pace of Life in Organisms, Cities, Economies, and Companies by Geoffrey West Penguin, 479 pp., $30.00 Geoffrey West spent most of his life as a research scientist and administrator at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, running programs concerned not with nuclear weapons but with peaceful physics.
After retiring from Los Alamos, he became director of the nearby Santa Fe Institute, where he switched from physics to a broader interdisciplinary program known as complexity science. The Santa Fe Institute is leading the world in complexity science, with a mixed group of physicists, biologists, economists, political scientists, computer experts, and mathematicians working together. Scale is a progress report, summarizing the insights that West and his colleagues at Santa Fe have achieved. The title, Scale, needs some clarification. Martin Gardner: The Magic and Mystery of Numbers. Introduction Martin Gardner on Numbers by Kristin Ozelli Section 1: Numbers Real, Imaginary and In-between 1.1 Seeing the Integers through the Trees 1.2 Negative Numbers and Peg Boards 1.3 The Imaginableness of Imaginary Numbers 1.4 The Remarkable Lore of Prime Numbers 1.5 A Surplus of Surreal Number Games Section 2: Number Sequences, Series and Patterns.
The Higgs Boson: Searching for the God Particle. Introduction A Good Beginning by Jesse Emspak Section 1: The Standard Model 1.1 Elementary Particles and Forces by Chris Quigg.
Atomic John. The single, blinding release of pure energy over Hiroshima, Japan, on August 6, 1945, marked a startling and permanent break with our prior understandings of the visible world.
Yet for more than sixty years the technology behind the explosion has remained a state secret. The United States government has never divulged the engineering specifications of the first atomic bombs, not even after other countries have produced generations of ever more powerful nuclear weapons. In the decades since the Second World War, dozens of historians have attempted to divine the precise mechanics of the Hiroshima bomb, nicknamed Little Boy, and of the bomb that fell three days later on Nagasaki, known as Fat Man. Embrace Hearing: Premium Hearing Aids Online. Digital Hearing Aids Online. Cookies are Not Accepted - New York Times. Ideal Numbers Seek Their Lost Primes. Krylov. Log In. Photo If you’ve been watching the HBO series “Westworld,” you might suspect 3-D printers are starting to do some amazing things.
Recently, I journeyed to Brooklyn to watch a whole universe come out of a printer — our own universe, actually, when it was a baby at just 380,000 years old. My guide was Janna Levin, a professor at Barnard College at Columbia and an award-winning author of books including, most recently, “Black Hole Blues,” about the discovery of gravitational waves. Dr. Levin is also the director of scientific programs at Pioneer Works a cultural and art center with laboratories as well as studios in Red Hook, Brooklyn, home to the universe-maker. To cook up her universe, Dr. The model is based on a map of the universe made recently by the Planck satellite, which shows the residual heat left over from the Big Bang itself in the form of microwave radio waves. Finding North America’s lost medieval city. A thousand years ago, huge pyramids and earthen mounds stood where East St.
Louis sprawls today in Southern Illinois. This majestic urban architecture towered over the swampy Mississippi River floodplains, blotting out the region's tiny villages. Beginning in the late 900s, word about the city spread throughout the southeast. Thousands of people visited for feasts and rituals, lured by the promise of a new kind of civilization. Many decided to stay. This rocket engine breaks a law of physics. But a NASA test says it works anyway.
Parrots Are a Lot More Than ‘Pretty Bird’ “Monk parakeets from South America are doing nicely in New York City,” said Leo Joseph, a parrot expert and director of the Australian National Wildlife Collection in Canberra.
“Peach-faced lovebirds from Africa are well-established in Arizona.” What We’ve Learned About Pluto. The four small moons of Pluto turned out to be brighter and smaller than expected and spin quickly. Is the NSA’s SKYNET program killing innocent people? A new examination shows thousands of innocent people may have been labeled as terrorists. The National Security Agency uses metadata to recognize and classify terrorists to kill them. But recently, a new investigation of the former published Snowden documents suggests that several of those people may have been innocent. Last May, detailed documents revealing the NSA’s SKYNET program were published, showing its engagement in mass surveillance of Pakistan’s mobile phone network.
SKYNET uses a machine learning algorithm on the mobile network metadata of 55 million people to analyze and rate the individual’s likeliness of being a terrorist. Will the NSA Finally Build Its Superconducting Spy Computer? Today, silicon microchips underlie every aspect of digital computing. But their dominance was never a foregone conclusion. Throughout the 1950s, electrical engineers and other researchers explored many alternatives to making digital computers. One of them seized the imagination of the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA): a superconducting supercomputer. Such a machine would take advantage of superconducting materials that, when chilled to nearly the temperature of deep space—just a few degrees above absolute zero—exhibit no electrical resistance whatsoever. The kernel of the argument over Linux’s vulnerabilities. ‘Dodo birds had it coming’ John Conway's Life in Game. MIT-CSAIL-TR-2015-026.pdf. Topics in String Theory.
Number Theorist Manjul Bhargava Is Awarded Fields Medal. Artur Avila Is First Brazilian Mathematician to Win Fields Medal. Triangulation Conjecture Disproved. Dwarf Galaxies Dim Hopes of Dark Matter.