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Opinion The scientific community celebrated April 14 as World Quantum Day to raise awareness of quantum science’s impact across diverse fields The world of science is on the cusp of a transformative era driven by the burgeoning field of quantum technology. Quantum science is founded on several key principles that underpin the behaviour of particles and systems at the quantum scale. The term “quantum scale” refers to the realm of physics that deals with phenomena occurring at very small scales, typically at the level of atoms, subatomic particles and fundamental particles. It encompasses the principles of quantum mechanics, which govern...

**SNIP** “It’s getting to the point where [the car] is almost like a consumable, like a TV,” Benoit said. Benoit’s experience heralds a problem that early adopters of EVs, as well as electric micromobility devices like e-bikes and e-scooters, are beginning to face: These vehicles contain big, expensive batteries that will inevitably degrade or stop working over time. Repairing these batteries can have sustainability benefits, saving energy and resources that would otherwise be used to manufacture a new one. That’s particularly important for EVs, which contain very large batteries that must be used for years to offset the carbon emissions...

So you got yourself a brand new, $70,000 subsidized electric vehicle (EV), and everyone on your block is envious. Quiet, non-polluting, cheaper to operate than a gas-powered vehicle, right? That’s not entirely accurate. The grim fact is, you better pray your EV never breaks down. The electric vehicle manufacturers sort of forgot to train the necessary number of mechanics to service your beautiful new car, leaving you with repair costs that will be through the roof. It seems like too obvious a detail to overlook. And it’s going to blow up the EV industry once a couple of millions of...

Electric car owners face soaring insurance and repair costs over fears the vehicles could explode after being in even minor collisions. Damaged EVs must be 'quarantined' 15 metres apart from other cars in repair shops due to the risk of battery fires under government guidelines – driving up the price for mechanics and insurers. A lack of suitable repair shops and EV trained mechanics risks increasing costs to the insurance industry by more than £600million, which could be passed on to drivers. As more battery-powered vehicles take to the road insurers will need to spend an additional £900million per year,...

Businesses in a number of service industries are calling for urgent measures to deal with a shortage of qualified staff. They say recruitment issues are preventing further expansion and causing knock-on consequences for customers. Difficulties are being experienced by many companies and small enterprises. A lack of available mechanics is leading to delays for those seeking service or repair work at many garages. Owners say the process to secure permits for non-EU residents is drawn out and cumbersome. They have called for a widening of the Critical Skills list, which allows those with necessary competences to live and work here....

Grinning away: The quantum Cheshire cat effect takes its name from a character in Lewis Carroll's novel Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. (Courtesy: Larissa Kulik/Shutterstock) Since its inception, quantum theory has presented us with many strange and seemingly paradoxical phenomena. One of the oddest examples is the quantum Cheshire cat effect, in which properties of quantum objects become disembodied from the objects themselves. Now, two of the researchers who predicted the effect have shown that it is even weirder than they first thought: not only can quantum properties become detached from their parent objects, these properties can also move of...

Originally built to speed up calculations, a machine-learning system is now making shocking progress at the frontiers of experimental quantum physicsQuantum physicist Mario Krenn remembers sitting in a café in Vienna in early 2016, poring over computer printouts, trying to make sense of what MELVIN had found. MELVIN was a machine-learning algorithm Krenn had built, a kind of artificial intelligence. Its job was to mix and match the building blocks of standard quantum experiments and find solutions to new problems. And it did find many interesting ones. But there was one that made no sense. “The first thing I thought...

Popular Mechanics magazine published an instruction piece on Tuesday that tells readers how to take down statues "without anyone getting hurt." The guide from the magazine comes as statues are being taken down in several cities across the country amid protests following the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis last month. Statues that have been taken down include several Confederate figures, former President Thomas Jefferson and Christopher Columbus.

Full title: Hummingbird Robots 1, Drones 0 Engineers just built a bird bot that can fly better than unmanned aerial vehicles. Engineers at Purdue have built a flying robot to mimic one of the most expert flyers in the natural world: the hummingbird.... ... After going through the training, the robot has an understanding, so to speak, of when to pause and when to take flight. Even more impressive? The robot can't actually see. It senses by touching surfaces, with each touch altering an electrical current.

Southwest filed suit in U.S. District Court in Dallas against its mechanics union, claiming the American Mechanics Fraternal Association (AMFA) and its leaders have not done enough to stop what Southwest alleges is an illegal job action aimed at disrupting the airline's operations. Southwest Airlines and the AMFA — which represents about 2,400 Southwest mechanics — have been locked in tense contract negotiations for six years. Central to the contract negotiations is Southwest's use of outside maintenance contractors, which factored into the mechanics rejecting a contract offer in the fall. According to documents obtained by CBS News, the suit alleges...

The Difficult Birth of the "Many Worlds" Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics Hugh Everett, creator of this radical idea during a drunken debate more than 60 years ago, died before he could see his theory gain widespread popularity   By Adam Becker on March 21, 2018 Share on Facebook Share on Twitter Share on Reddit Email Print Share via Google+Stumble Upon Credit: Garik Barseghyan Pixabay Over several rounds of sherry late one night in the fall of 1955, the Danish physicist Aage Petersen debated the mysteries at the heart of quantum physics with two graduate students, Charles Misner and Hugh Everett, at Princeton University. Petersen was defending the...

Schrödinger's cat now has a second box to play in, thanks to an international team of physicists that has created a two-mode "Schrödinger's cat state" for the first time. The experiment brings together two purely quantum properties, in that the "cat" (i.e. the photons) is simultaneously "alive and dead" (in a superposition of states) while also in two locations at once (the two boxes are entangled with one another).

The discovery is a long sought-after link between the theories of quantum mechanics and general relativityThe two towering achievements of 20th century physics are Einstein’s theory of general relativity and quantum mechanics. Both have fundamentally changed the way we view the universe and our place within it. And yet they are utterly incompatible: quantum mechanics operates on the tiniest scales while relativity operates on the grandest of scales. Never the twain shall meet; although not for lack of trying on the part of several generations of theorists including Einstein himself. Now one theorist has shown that an exotic quantum effect...

In 1909, Ernest Rutherford, Hans Geiger and Ernest Marsden took a piece of radium and used it to fire charged particles at a sheet of gold foil. They wanted to test the then-dominant theory that atoms were simply clusters of electrons floating in little seas of positive electrical charge (the so-called ‘plum pudding’ model). What came next, said Rutherford, was ‘the most incredible event that has ever happened to me in my life’. Despite the airy thinness of the foil, a small fraction of the particles bounced straight back at the source – a result, Rutherford noted, ‘as incredible as...

A new approach to the unification of general theory of relativity and quantum theory Present-day physics cannot describe what happened in the Big Bang. Quantum theory and the theory of relativity fail in this almost infinitely dense and hot primal state of the universe. Only an all-encompassing theory of quantum gravity which unifies these two fundamental pillars of physics could provide an insight into how the universe began. Scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics (Albert Einstein Institute) in Golm/Potsdam and the Perimeter Institute in Canada have made an important discovery along this route. According to their theory,...

n March 2012, Joseph Polchinski began to contemplate suicide — at least in mathematical form. A string theorist at the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics in Santa Barbara, California, Polchinski was pondering what would happen to an astronaut who dived into a black hole. Obviously, he would die. But how? According to the then-accepted account, he wouldn’t feel anything special at first, even when his fall took him through the black hole’s event horizon: the invisible boundary beyond which nothing can escape. But eventually — after hours, days or even weeks if the black hole was big enough — he...

G.E. Hardiman I – Ralph Mosher (American) Hardiman is a name derived somehow, from "Human Augmentation Research and Development Investigation." and Man from MANipulator. Sometimes written as HardiMan, Hardi-Man, Hardi Man, Hardiman I. Said to also be officially called the "Powered Exo-skeleton." Note: some reports suggest that only one arm of Hardiman's was built. The above photo usually accompanies that comment, but it is incorrect. A complete Hardiman was built with both arms, but the comment refers to the earlier tests of just the single, upper manipulator. Later, even when the full machine was built, one side was made static,...

One of the most deeply rooted concepts in science and in our everyday life is causality; the idea that events in the present are caused by events in the past and, in turn, act as causes for what happens in the future. If an event A is a cause of an effect B, then B cannot be a cause of A. Now theoretical physicists from the University of Vienna and the Université Libre de Bruxelles have shown that in quantum mechanics it is possible to conceive situations in which a single event can be both, a cause and an effect...

I TYPED these words on a computer designed by Apple, co-founded by the college dropout Steve Jobs. The program I used to write it was created by Microsoft, started by the college dropouts Bill Gates and Paul Allen. And as soon as it is published, I will share it with my friends via Twitter, co-founded by the college dropouts Jack Dorsey and Evan Williams and Biz Stone, and Facebook — invented, among others, by the college dropouts Mark Zuckerberg and Dustin Moskovitz, and nurtured by the degreeless Sean Parker. American academia is good at producing writers, literary critics and historians....

Physicists struggling to reconcile gravity with quantum mechanics have hailed a theory – inspired by pencil lead – that could make it all very simpleIT WAS a speech that changed the way we think of space and time. The year was 1908, and the German mathematician Hermann Minkowski had been trying to make sense of Albert Einstein's hot new idea - what we now know as special relativity - describing how things shrink as they move faster and time becomes distorted. "Henceforth space by itself and time by itself are doomed to fade into the mere shadows," Minkowski proclaimed, "and...