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HRL Laboratories, LLC, has published the first demonstration of universal control of encoded spin qubits. This newly emerging approach to quantum computation uses a novel silicon-based qubit device architecture, fabricated in HRL’s Malibu cleanroom, to trap single electrons in quantum dots. Spins of three such single electrons host energy-degenerate qubit states, which are controlled by nearest-neighbor contact interactions that partially swap spin states with those of their neighbors.

And yet the scientific consensus is that 1.5℃ is the real upper limit we can risk. Beyond that, dangerous tipping points could spell even more frequent disasters.

Luckily, the IMO will revise its strategy this July. I and many others expect far more ambition—because zero shipping emissions by 2050 is a necessity to keep the 1.5℃ limit credible. That gives us less than three decades to clean up an industry whose ships have an average life of 25 years. The 2050 timeline conceals that our carbon budget will likely run out far more quickly—requiring urgent action for all sectors, including shipping.

Research has confirmed the potential of wind propulsion. The maths is simple. Shipping accounts for one billion tons of carbon dioxide a year, almost three percent of global greenhouse gas emissions. If wind propulsion saves fossil fuels today, the dwindling carbon budget stretches a little further. This, in turn, buys more time to develop alternative fuels, which most ships will need to some extent. Once these fuels are widely available, we’ll need less of them because the wind can provide anything from 10 percent to 90 percent of the power a ship needs.

Physicists in West Virginia have announced a potential breakthrough that could help upend a longstanding constraint imposed by the first law of thermodynamics.

The discovery, involving how energy is converted in plasmas in space, was described in new research published in the journal Physical Review Letters, and could potentially require scientists to have to rethink how plasmas are heated both in the lab and in space.

The first law of thermodynamics, an expression of the law of conservation of energy albeit styled with relation to thermodynamic processes, conveys that the total energy within a system will remain constant, but that it can be converted from one form of energy into another. More simply, the idea is commonly expressed as “energy can neither be created or destroyed.”

Chaotic behavior is typically known from large systems: for example, from weather, from asteroids in space that are simultaneously attracted by several large celestial bodies, or from swinging pendulums that are coupled together. On the atomic scale, however, one does normally not encounter chaos—other effects predominate.

Now, for the first time, scientists at TU Wien have been able to detect clear indications of chaos on the nanometer scale—in on tiny rhodium crystals. The results have been published in the journal Nature Communications.

The chemical reaction studied is actually quite simple: with the help of a precious metal catalyst, oxygen reacts with hydrogen to form water, which is also the basic principle of a fuel cell. The reaction rate depends on external conditions (pressure, temperature). Under certain conditions, however, this reaction shows oscillating behavior, even though the external conditions are constant.