Davide Castelvecchi

1 week ago | nature.com | Davide Castelvecchi

How early in Earth’s history would scientists have been able to detect human-caused climate change if they’d had the proper technology? That’s the subject of a thought experiment published by researchers today in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences1. Earth shattered heat records in 2023 and 2024: is global warming speeding up? The answer: “As early as 1885,” says study co-author Benjamin Santer, an independent climate scientist based in Los Angeles, California.

2 weeks ago | nature.com | Davide Castelvecchi

The strength of Earth’s magnetic field seems to rise and fall hand-in-hand with the abundance of oxygen in its atmosphere, a study of geological records spanning the last half billion years has found. Explaining the link could help to reveal fundamental trends in the evolution of life on Earth — and could show astronomers the most promising places to look for signs of complex life on other planets.

2 weeks ago | aol.com | Davide Castelvecchi

Subatomic particles such as quarks can pair up when linked by ‘strings’ of force fields — and release energy when the strings are pulled to the point of breaking. Two teams of physicists have now used quantum computers to mimic this phenomenon and watch it unfold in real time. The results, described in two Nature papers on June 4, are the latest in a series of breakthroughs towards using quantum computers for simulations that are beyond the ability of any ordinary computers.

2 weeks ago | nature.com | Davide Castelvecchi

The outcome of quantum experiments is intrinsically unpredictable. Now physicists have combined that feature with blockchain techniques to generate random numbers in a fully transparent process for the first time1. Public sources of random numbers are used for various applications, such as lotteries, jury-duty selection or the assignment of placebos in clinical trials.

2 weeks ago | nature.com | Davide Castelvecchi

“There are so many stars!”This might sound like an obvious thing for a professional stargazer to say. But astrophysicist Federica Bianco was reacting to something extraordinary — the first full-colour picture from a telescope that promises to image vastly more stars than any that came before it. Bianco and her collaborators got a sneak peek at the sky as seen through the Vera C.