Researchers from The Australian National University (ANU) have developed a method of freezing and storing light, an important step on the road to developing quantum computers. Most switches used in quantum computing experiments are made up of trapped ions or semiconductor particles, suspended in a state of quantum superposition. Photons, however, could interface much more efficiently with fiber optic networks, without the need for a way to translate the information between the qubit — the quantum-computing equivalent of a classical computer bit — and the computer’s network or interface.
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For decades, misbehaving students in our culture could expect to be sent to detention, a form of punishment that is meant to discipline the unruly child: a practice that sometimes works, and sometimes does not. But one elementary school in Maryland saw that a form of negative punishment might not necessarily be the best approach to correcting negative behavior in young children, and instead sends its pint-sized perpetrators to a special meditation class instead.
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Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump has appointed long-time climate change denier Myron Ebell as his new head of Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) transition, provided Trump is elected this fall. Ebell is well known as a global warming denier, with the Financial Times calling him “one of America’s most prominent climate change skeptics”, and would be expected to carry many of out Trump’s plans to undo years of ecological protection policy, including the elimination of the EPA’s Clean Power Plan.
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NASA has announced that it has found evidence of water plumes erupting from the surface of Jupiter’s moon Europa, using images taken by the Hubble Space Telescope, hinting that the Jovian moon’s subsurface oceans — oceans that scientists consider to be a good candidate as a host for extraterrestrial life — may be more accessible than what was once thought.
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