Quanta Magazine

Deep within the nucleus of each of our cells, cascades of molecular signals accumulate into metabolites, building blocks that affix themselves to the spools that bind our genetic code. Later on, these markers help decide whether a gene is greenlighted to express itself.  https://lnkd.in/e2Gds93S

What started as a cautious question — is dark energy losing steam? — has turned into a real possibility suggested by a new map of the cosmos that spans nearly 15 million galaxies. https://lnkd.in/eVDp_CVD

Researchers Stephen Jordan and Noah Shutty from Google Quantum AI have devised a new quantum approach to solving problems by treating them like error-free messages. So far, the algorithm has bested all known classical techniques. https://lnkd.in/gxzwwQCE

Evolutionary biologist Will Ratcliff lives on a hobby farm in Atlanta, where he raises goats, chickens, and peacocks. Oh, and 9,000+ generations of snowflake yeast to find out what created a major turning point in the evolution of life on Earth. “The Joy of Why” is back. Tune in to the first episode of the season: https://lnkd.in/etCGxSTB

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How did single cells find a way to connect and become more complex? The question has taken one biologist on the journey of a lifetime — or rather, thousands of lifetimes. Learn more about the multi-generational experiment cracking open the secrets of multicellularity on “The Joy of Why” with co-hosts Steven Strogatz and Janna Levin. https://lnkd.in/etCGxSTB

In 1917, mathematician Sōichi Kakeya posed a deceptively simple question. Over a century later, the answer has come to light. https://lnkd.in/eQq-uUmb

Last spring, a team of nearly 1,000 cosmologists announced that dark energy — the enigmatic agent propelling the universe to swell in size at an ever-increasing rate — might be slackening. The bombshell result, based on the team’s observations of the motions of millions of galaxies combined with other data, was tentative and preliminary. Today, the scientists report that they have analyzed more than twice as much data as before and that it points more strongly to the same conclusion: Dark energy is losing steam.    “We are much more certain than last year that this is definitely a thing,” said Seshadri Nadathur, a member of the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) collaboration, the group behind the new result.    Their finding, presented today at the Global Physics Summit in Anaheim, California, aligns with that of a second group of cosmologists, the 400-strong Dark Energy Survey (DES). Having also observed a huge swath of the cosmos, DES reported evidence of varying dark energy in a paper earlier this month and in a talk today at the Anaheim meeting.     “It’s interesting that things are pushing in this direction and that multiple experiments are seeing some tension” with the idea that dark energy is constant, said Michael Troxel, a member of the DES team based at Duke University.    If the evidence of evolving dark energy holds up as more data accrues — and this is not guaranteed — it would upend cosmologists’ understanding of our ultimate destiny. Dark energy that has a constant density and pressure would doom our cosmos to expand for all time until unbridgeable gulfs separate every particle from all the others, snuffing out all activity. But dark energy that evolves makes alternative futures possible. “It challenges the fate of the universe,” said Mustapha Ishak-Boushaki, a cosmologist at the University of Texas at Dallas and DESI team member. “It’s game-changing.”   🌌 Keep reading: https://lnkd.in/eVDp_CVD

The story usually goes a little something like this: Quantum researchers create an algorithm that they believe solves a problem better than anything else. Shortly thereafter, classical researchers come up with one that equals it. But recently, a speedy new quantum algorithm cropped up — and classical computers are still catching up. https://lnkd.in/gxzwwQCE

For computer scientists, solving problems is a bit like mountaineering. First they must choose a problem to solve — akin to identifying a peak to climb — and then they must develop a strategy to solve it. Classical and quantum researchers compete using different strategies, with a healthy rivalry between the two. Quantum researchers report a fast way to solve a problem — often by scaling a peak that no one thought worth climbing — then classical teams race to see if they can find a better way.    This contest almost always ends as a virtual tie: When researchers think they’ve devised a quantum algorithm that works faster or better than anything else, classical researchers usually come up with one that equals it. Just last week, a purported quantum speedup, published in the journal Science, was met with immediate skepticism from two separate groups who showed how to perform similar calculations on classical machines.   But in a paper posted on the scientific preprint site arxiv.org last year, researchers described what looks like a quantum speedup that is both convincing and useful. The researchers described a new quantum algorithm that works faster than all known classical ones at finding good solutions to a wide class of optimization problems (which look for the best possible solution among an enormous number of choices).    So far, no classical algorithm has dethroned the new algorithm, known as decoded quantum interferometry (DQI). It’s “a breakthrough in quantum algorithms,” said Gil Kalai, a mathematician at Reichman University and a prominent skeptic of quantum computing. Reports of quantum algorithms get researchers excited, partly because they often illuminate new ideas about difficult problems, and partly because, for all the buzz around quantum machines, it’s not clear which problems will actually benefit from them. A quantum algorithm that outperforms all known classical ones on optimization tasks would represent a major step forward in harnessing the potential of quantum computers. 🔗 Keep reading: https://lnkd.in/gxzwwQCE 🎨 Daniel Garcia for Quanta Magazine