Everyone in quantum computing agrees that error correction will be the key to doing a broad range of useful calculations. But early every company in the field seems to have a different vision of how best to get there. Almost all of their plans share a key feature: some variation on logical qubits built by linking together multiple hardware qubits.

A key exception is Nord Quantique, which aims to dramatically cut the amount of hardware needed to support an error-corrected quantum computer. It does this by putting enough quantum states into a single piece of hardware, allowing each of those pieces to hold an error-corrected qubit. Last week, the company shared results showing that it could make hardware that used photons at two different frequencies to successfully identify every case where a logical qubit lost its state.

That still doesn't provide complete error correction, and they didn't use the logical qubit to perform operations. But it's an important validation of the company's approach.

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WASHINGTON, DC—The general outline of the Trump administration's proposed 2026 budget was released a few weeks back, and it included massive cuts for most agencies, including every one that funds scientific research. Late last week, those agencies began releasing details of what the cuts would mean for the actual projects and people they support. And the results are as bad as the initial budget had suggested: one-of-a-kind scientific experiment facilities and hardware retired, massive cuts in supported scientists, and entire areas of research halted.

And this comes in an environment where previously funded grants are being terminated, funding is being held up for ideological screening, and universities have been subjected to arbitrary funding freezes. Collectively, things are heading for damage to US science that will take decades to recover from. It's a radical break from the trajectory science had been on.

That's the environment that the US's National Academies of Science found itself in yesterday while hosting the State of the Science event in Washington, DC. It was an obvious opportunity for the nation's leading scientific organization to warn the nation of the consequences of the path that the current administration has been traveling. Instead, the event largely ignored the present to worry about a future that may never exist.

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On May 23, President Trump issued an executive order entitled "Restoring Gold Standard Science." And, in news that may surprise our readers, it sounds remarkably good, focusing on issues like reproducibility and conflicts of interest. While there were a few things that could be phrased better, when it comes to basic scientific practices, the language was remarkably reasonable.

So, why didn't we report on what appeared to be a rare bit of good news? I'd considered doing so, but the situation is complicated by the fact that the order is structured in a way that makes it very sensitive to who's responsible for implementing it, a situation that's subtle enough that I couldn't figure out how to handle it well. Fortunately, I only had to wait a week for a member of the Trump administration to show just how dangerous it could be and highlight its biggest problem.

On Sunday, Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Marty Makary appeared on one of the weekend news programs, where he was asked about the decision to limit pregnant people's access to the COVID-19 vaccines. The host mentioned that aggregation of studies involving a total of over 1.8 million women had shown the vaccine was safe and effective.

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Currently, there are no nuclear power plants scheduled for construction in the US. Everybody with plans to build one hasn't had a reactor design approved, while nobody is planning to use any of the approved designs. This follows a period in which only three new reactors have entered service since 1990. Despite its extremely low carbon footprint, nuclear power appears to be dead in the water.

On Friday, the Trump administration issued a series of executive orders intended to revive the US nuclear industry. These include plans to streamline the reactor approval process and boost the construction of experimental reactors by the Department of Energy. But they also contain language that's inconsistent with other administration priorities and fundamentally misunderstands the use of nuclear power. Plus, some timelines might be, shall we say, unrealistic: three new experimental reactors reaching criticality in just over a year.

Slow nukes

The heyday of nuclear plant construction in the US was in the 1970s and 80s. But the 1979 partial meltdown at the Three Mile Island plant soured public sentiment toward nuclear power. This also came at a time when nuclear plants typically generated only half of their rated capacity, making them an expensive long-term bet. As a result, plans for many plants, including some that were partially constructed, were canceled.

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While our Sun prefers to go solo, many other stars are parts of binary systems, with a pair of stars gravitationally bound to each other. In some cases, the stars are far enough apart that planets can form around each of them. But there are also plenty of tight binary systems, where the stars orbit each other at a radius that would place them both comfortably inside our Solar System. In these systems, exoplanets tend to be found at greater distances, in orbits that have them circling both stars.

On Wednesday, scientists described a system that seems to be neither of the above. It is a tight binary system, with a heavy central star that's orbited by a white dwarf at a distance two to three times larger than Earth's orbit. The lone planet confirmed to be in the system is squeezed in between the two, orbiting at a distance similar to Earth's distance from the Sun. And, as an added bonus, the planet is orbiting backward relative to the white dwarf.

Orbiting ν Octantis

The exosolar system is termed ν Octantis (or Nu Octantis), and its primary star is just a bit heavier than our Sun (1.6 solar masses). It's orbited by a far dimmer companion that's roughly half of our Sun's mass, but which hasn't been characterized in detail until now. The companion's orbit relative to the central star is a bit lopsided, ranging from about two astronomical units (AU, the typical Earth-Sun distance) at its closest approach to roughly three AU at its farthest. And, until yesterday, the exact nature of the companion star was not clear.

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China has been installing renewable energy at a spectacular rate and now has more renewable capacity than the next 13 countries combined, and four times that of its closest competitor, the US. Yet, so far at least, that hasn't been enough to offset the rise of fossil fuel use in that country. But a new analysis by the NGO Carbon Brief suggests things may be changing, as China's emissions have now dropped over the past year, showing a 1 percent decline compared to the previous March. The decline is largely being led by the power sector, where growth in renewables has surged above rising demand.

This isn't the first time that China's emissions have gone down over the course of a year, but in all previous cases the cause was primarily economic—driven by things like the COVID pandemic or the 2008 housing crisis. The latest shift, however, was driven largely by the country's energy sector, which saw a 2 percent decline in emissions over the past year.

China's emissions have shown a slight decline over the last year, despite economic growth and rising demand for electricity. Credit: Carbon Brief

Carbon Brief put the report together using data from several official government sources, including the National Bureau of Statistics of China, National Energy Administration of China, and the China Electricity Council. Projections for future growth come from the China Wind Energy Association and the China Photovoltaic Industry Association.

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Over the last century or more, humanity has been developing an ever-growing number of new chemicals that have never been seen before by Earth's creatures. Many of these chemicals end up being toxic contaminants that we'd love to get rid of, but we struggle to purify them from the environment or break them down once we do. And microbes haven't had much chance to evolve the ability to break them down for us.

Over the last few years, however, we've found a growing number of cases where bacteria have evolved the ability to break down such chemicals, like industrial contaminants and plastics. Unfortunately, these bacteria are all different species, target different individual contaminants, and thrive in different environments. But now, researchers have developed a new way to take the genes from all these species and place them in a single bacterial strain that can decontaminate complex waste mixtures.

Targeting contaminants

The inspiration for this work was the fact that a lot of this industrial contamination contains a mixture of toxic organic molecules that are commonly found in brackish or salty water. So, the research team, based in Shenzhen, China, started by simply testing a number of lab bacteria strains to develop one that could survive these conditions. The one that seemed to survive the best was Vibrio natriegens. These bacteria were discovered in a salt marsh, and their primary claim to fame is an impressive growth rate, with a population being able to double about every 10 minutes.

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The ongoing war between the Trump administration and Harvard University has taken a new twist, with the government sending Harvard a letter that, amid what appears to be a stream-of-consciousness culture war rant, announces that the university will not be receiving any further research grants. The letter potentially suggests that Harvard could see funding restored by "complying with long-settled Federal Law," but earlier demands from the administration included conditions that went well beyond those required by law.

The letter, sent by Secretary of Education Linda McMahon, makes it somewhat difficult to tell exactly what the government wants, because most of the text is a borderline deranged rant written in florid MAGA-ese. You don't have to go beyond the first paragraph to get a sense that this is less a setting of funding conditions than an airing of grievances:

Instead of using these funds to advance the education of its students, Harvard is engaging in a systemic pattern of violating federal law. Where do many of these "students" come from, who are they, how do they get into Harvard, or even into our country—and why is there so much HATE? These are questions that must be answered, among many more, but the biggest question of all is, why will Harvard not give straightforward answers to the American public?

Does Harvard have to answer these questions to get funding restored? It's unclear.

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We've reviewed some pretty expensive bikes here at Ars, and one of the consistent concerns we see in the comments is the fear of theft. That's a widely shared fear, based on a whole bunch of videos that describe how to hide an AirTag tracker where a potential bike thief won't notice it. There are also a number of products available that will hold a hidden AirTag in a reflector, a bike bell, or the head tube.

But Apple has also made it possible for third parties to plug their devices into its "Find My" system, and a company called Knog has made a Bluetooth bike tracker called the Scout that does just that. The Scout goes well beyond tracking, though, providing a motion-sensitive alarm system that will alert you if anybody tries to move your bike.

Meet the Scout

The Scout can be attached to the frame using the screw holes normally used for a water bottle holder. Security screws make it considerably more difficult to remove. Once there, it uses Apple's Find My network to keep the owner apprised of the bike's location (Android users need not apply at the moment). If you're leaving your bike in a high-risk location, you can also use Knog's phone application to set an alarm that will be triggered if the bike is moved.

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Since the Iberian Peninsula lost power in a massive blackout, grid operators are in the process of trying to restore power to millions of customers and businesses. As you might imagine, the process—termed a "black start"—is quite a bit more challenging than flicking on a switch. However, the challenge is made considerably more difficult because nearly everything about the system—from the management hardware that remotely controls the performance of the grid to the power plants themselves—needs power to operate.

Restarting the grid

You might think that a power plant could easily start generating power, but in reality, only a limited number of facilities have everything they need to handle a black start. That's because it takes power to make power. Facilities that boil water have lots of powered pumps and valves, coal plants need to pulverize the fuel and move it to where it's burned, etc. In most cases, black-start-rated plants have a diesel generator present to supply enough power to get the plant operating. These tend to be smaller plants, since they require proportionally smaller diesel generators.

The initial output of these black start facilities is then used to provide power to all the plants that need an external power source to operate. This has to be managed in a way that ensures that only other power plants get the first electrons to start moving on the grid, otherwise the normal demand would immediately overwhelm the limited number of small plants that are operating. Again, this has to be handled by facilities that need power in order to control the flow of energy across the grid. This is why managing the grid will never be as simple as "put the hardware on the Internet and control it remotely," given that the Internet also needs power to operate.

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What does the "typical" exosolar system look like? We know it's not likely to look like our own Solar System, given that our familiar planets don't include entire classes of planets (Hot Jupiters! Mini-Neptunes!) that we've found elsewhere. And our discovery methods have been heavily biased toward planets that orbit close to their host star, so we don't really have a strong sense of what might be lurking in more distant orbits.

A new study released on Thursday describes a search for what are called "microlensing" events, where a planet acts as a gravitational lens that magnifies the star it's orbiting, causing it to brighten briefly. These events are difficult to capture, but can potentially indicate the presence of planets in more distant orbits. The researchers behind the new work find indications that there's a significant population of rocky super-Earths that are traveling in orbits similar to that of Jupiter and Saturn.

Lenses go micro

The two primary methods we've used to discover exoplanets are called transit and radial velocity. In the transit method, we simply watch the star for dips in the light it sends to Earth, which can be an indication of a planet orbiting in a way that it eclipses a small fraction of the star. For radial velocity, we look for red- or blue-shifts in the light received from the star, caused by a planet tugging the star in different directions as it orbits.

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© Harvard-Smithsonian,Center for Astrophysics/D. A. Aguilar

A few decades ago, it wasn't realistic to attribute individual events—even heat waves—to the general warming trend driven by human-caused climate change. Now, there are peer-reviewed methods of rapidly detecting humanity's fingerprints in the wake of weather disasters like hurricanes or climate-driven wildfires.

In today's issue of Nature, Dartmouth's Christopher Callahan and Justin Mankin argue that we've reached a similar level of sophistication regarding another key question: What are the economic damages caused by individual climate events? They argue that we can now assign monetary values to the damage caused by emissions that can be traced back to individual companies. They found that "The global economy would be $28 trillion richer ... were it not for the extreme heat caused by the emissions from the 111 carbon majors."

They argue that this method might provide legal ammunition for those interested in seeking climate damages in court: "By revealing the human fingerprint on events previously thought to be ‘acts of God,’ attribution science has helped make climate change legally legible."

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Concerns about AI's energy use have a lot of people looking into ways to cut down on its power requirements. Many of these focus on hardware and software approaches that are pretty straightforward extensions of existing technologies. But a few technologies are much farther out there. One that's definitely in the latter category? Quantum computing.

In some ways, quantum hardware is a better match for some of the math that underlies AI than more traditional hardware. While the current quantum hardware is a bit too error-prone for the more elaborate AI models currently in use, researchers are starting to put the pieces in place to run AI models when the hardware is ready. This week, a couple of commercial interests are releasing a draft of a paper describing how to get classical image data into a quantum processor (actually, two different processors) and perform a basic AI image classification.

All of which gives us a great opportunity to discuss why quantum AI may be more than just hype.

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Shortly after its inauguration, the Trump administration has made no secret that it isn't especially interested in funding research. Before January's end, major science agencies had instituted pauses on research funding, and grant funding has not been restored to previous levels since. Many individual grants have been targeted on ideological grounds, and agencies like the National Science Foundation are expected to see significant cuts. Since then, individual universities have been targeted, starting with an ongoing fight with Columbia University over $400 million in research funding.

This week, however, it appears that the targeting of university research has entered overdrive, with multiple announcements of funding freezes targeting several universities. Should these last for any considerable amount of time, they will likely cripple research at the targeted universities.

On Wednesday, Science learned that the National Institutes of Health has frozen all of its research funding to Columbia, despite the university agreeing to steps previously demanded by the administration and the resignation of its acting president. In 2024, Columbia had received nearly $700 million in grants from the NIH, with the money largely going to the university's prestigious medical and public health schools.

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Even the tiniest of living things are capable of some amazing forms of locomotion, and some come with highly sophisticated sensor suites and manage to source their energy from the environment. Attempts to approach this sort of flexibility with robotics have taken two forms. One involves making tiny robots modeled on animal behavior. The other involves converting a living creature into a robot. So far, either approach has involved giving up a lot. You're either only implementing a few of life's features in the robot or shutting off most of life's features when taking over an insect.

But a team of researchers at Harvard has recognized that there are some behaviors that are so instinctual that it's possible to induce animals to act as if they were robotic. Or mostly robotic, at least—the fruit flies the researchers used would occasionally go their own way, despite strong inducements to stay with the program.

Smell the light

The first bit of behavior involved Drosophila's response to moving visual stimuli. If placed in an area where the fly would see a visual pattern that rotates from left to right, the fly will turn to the right in an attempt to keep the pattern stable. This allowed a projector system to "steer" the flies as they walked across an enclosure (despite their names, fruit flies tend to spend a lot of their time walking). By rotating the pattern back and forth, the researchers could steer the flies between two locations in the enclosure with about 94 percent accuracy.

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A study released on Wednesday finds that a live-virus vaccine that limits shingles symptoms was associated with a drop in the risk for dementia when it was introduced. The work took advantage of the fact that the National Health Service Wales made the vaccine available with a very specific age limit, essentially creating two populations, vaccinated and unvaccinated, separated by a single date. And these populations showed a sharp divide in how often they were diagnosed with dementia, despite having little in the way of other differences in health issues or treatments.

What a day

This study didn't come out of nowhere. There have been a number of hints recently that members of the herpesvirus family that can infect nerve cells are associated with dementia. That group includes Varicella zoster, the virus that causes both chicken pox and—potentially many years after— shingles, an extremely painful rash. And over the past couple of years, observational studies have suggested that the vaccine against shingles may have a protective effect.

But it's extremely difficult to do a clinical trial given that the onset of dementia may happen decades after most people first receive the shingles vaccine. That's why the use of NHS Wales data was critical. When the first attenuated virus vaccine for shingles became available, it was offered to a subset of the Welsh population. Those who were born on or after September 2, 1933, were eligible to receive the vaccine. Anyone older than that was permanently ineligible.

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