A joint AWS, Nvidia, Berkeley Lab and NASA study built a model (the communication-to-computation ratio) for when a quantum processor must sit next to a supercomputer versus when the cloud will do. Unsexy, and exactly the discipline the field needed.
ESA has installed its first quantum computer, Equal1’s rack-mounted 6-qubit Bell-1, at its Earth-observation centre near Rome, to test hybrid quantum-classical processing of satellite data. Everyone involved is refreshingly honest that the real payoff is years away.
CuspAI raised $450M at a $2.6B valuation, backed by Bezos, Nvidia and AMD, to build a ‘search engine for atoms’ that finds new materials with AI. It is the AI boom funding the search for the materials the AI boom needs.
A Schmidt Ocean Institute team sent a robot into the midwater off Brazil and confirmed more than 30 new species in two weeks, including a gossamer worm and nine new jellyfish, using laser imaging to study fragile deep-sea life without destroying it.
Omega Centauri should hold about 10,000 stellar-mass black holes. For decades nobody could find one. Hubble and Webb just caught the first, oMEGACat BH-2, by watching a star waltz with an invisible 4.46-solar-mass partner for 20 years.
NASA’s James Webb telescope found a hidden giant planet in the Beta Pictoris system, not by seeing it, but by detecting the carbon-monoxide barcode of its atmosphere. It had been sitting in the data since 2014.