James' World 2

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Microsoft has announced that it has created the first ‘topological qubits’ — a way of storing quantum information that the firm hopes will underpin a new generation of quantum computers. Machines based on topology are expected to be easier to build at scale than competing technologies, because they should better protect the information from noise. But some researchers are sceptical of the company’s claims.

The announcement came in a 19 February press release containing few technical details — but Microsoft says it has disclosed some of its data to selected specialists in a meeting at its research centre in Santa Barbara, California. “Would I bet my life that they’re seeing what they think they’re seeing? No, but it looks pretty good,” says Steven Simon, a theoretical physicist at the University of Oxford, UK, who was briefed on the results.

At the same time, the company published intermediate results — but not the proof of the existence of topological qubits — on 19 February in Nature.

Superconducting wire

Topological states are collective states of the electrons in a material that are resistant to noise, much like how two links in a chain can be shifted or rotated around each other while remaining connected.

The Nature paper describes experiments on a superconducting ‘nanowire’ device made of indium arsenide. The ultimate goal is to host two topological states called Majorana quasiparticles, one at each end of the device. Because electrons in a superconductor are paired, an extra, unpaired electron will be introduced, forming an excited state. This electron exists in a ‘delocalized’ state, which is shared between the two Majorana quasiparticles.

The paper reports measurements suggesting that the nanowire does indeed harbour an extra electron. These tests “do not, by themselves” guarantee that the nanowire hosts two Majorana quasiparticles, the authors warn.

According to the press release, the team has carried out follow-up experiments in which they paired two nanowires and put them in a superposition of two states — one with the extra electron in the first nanowire, and the other with the electron in the second nanowire. “We’ve built a qubit and shown that you can not only measure parity in two parallel wires, but a measurement that bridges the two wires,” says Microsoft researcher Chetan Nayak.

“There’s no slam dunk to know immediately from the experiment” that the qubits are made of topological states, says Simon. (A claim of having created Majorana states, made by a Microsoft-funded team based in Delft, the Netherlands, was retracted in 2021.) The ultimate proof will come if the devices perform as expected once they are scaled up, he adds.

Early announcement

Some researchers are critical of the company’s choice to publicly announce the creation of a qubit without releasing detailed evidence. “If you have some new results not connected to this paper, why don’t you wait until you have enough material for a separate publication?” says Daniel Loss, a physicist at the University of Basel, Switzerland. “Without seeing the extra data from the qubit operation, there is not much one can comment,” says Georgios Katsaros, a physicist at the Institute of Science and Technology Austria in Klosterneuburg.

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Roy Ayers, a legendary jazz vibraphonist, keyboardist, composer and vocalist known for his spacy, funky 1976 hit “Everybody Loves the Sunshine” that has been sampled by such R&B and rap heavyweights as Mary J. Blige, N.W.A., Dr. Dre, 2Pac, Mos Def and Ice Cube, has died. He was 84.

The Ayers family said in a Facebook post that he died Tuesday in New York City after suffering from a long illness. “He lived a beautiful 84 years and will be sorely missed,” it said.

Ayers had 12 albums land in the Billboard 200 album charts, the highest being “You Send Me” in 1978 at No. 48. His “The Best of Roy Ayers” spend 50 weeks on the Contemporary Jazz Album chart.

His music never went out of style, appearing in the 2019 “Queen & Slim: The Soundtrack.” His song “Running Away” propelled A Tribe Called Quest’s 1989 opus “Description of a Fool,” and the song was sampled by Big Daddy Kane and Common. Ayers was heard on Tyler, the Creator’s album “Cherry Bomb” and Erykah Badu’s “Mama’s Gun.”

“Well, I have more sampled hits than anybody,” he said in a 2004 interview with Wax Poetics magazine. “I might not have more samples than James Brown, but I’ve had more sampled hits. Oh, man, and there’s a few I don’t know about.”

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Roy Ayers

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The James Webb Space Telescope is an incredible piece of engineering and has brought some incredible images of our universe. But the intention of James Webb was to peer into the furthest reaches of the known universe, how is that going? Watch to find out.

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The Edge of the Universe

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Kylie Perkins faces the camera in a pink quarter-zip, hands clasped to reveal a blue manicure. “Are you doing your best, or are you lying because it’s easier?” she asks. “If you tell the truth, you are gonna be forced to make changes.”

The 27-year-old TikTok influencer has amassed most of her 2 million followers in a matter of weeks — half of them in just the past few days — by posting motivational videos from her home in North Carolina aimed at young mothers like her who may feel behind on housework, urging them to essentially get their shit together. In some, she demonstrates her morning routine of drawing the curtains, opening the windows, and making the bed. In others, she wipes down her kitchen, folds laundry, or simply addresses the camera. In many of them, she’s yelling.

“You’re capable of so much more than just scrolling on your phone and not getting anything done,” she says. Her aim, she explains, is to help women experience clearer minds through uncluttered spaces.

Women seem to be responding to the tough love. “Kylie Perkins has yelled at me enough that I finally got up and started to do something about my depression,” a 30-year-old Kansas City woman named Heather Richard said in a voice-over for a recent video. In her post, Richard described the challenge, and ultimate relief, of deep-cleaning her home while newly sober.

“pov you introduce your teenage daughter to Kylie Perkins and this is what her room looks like this morning,” reads the text over a video from another woman, who filmed herself entering a tidy bedroom with a neatly made bed and raised blinds.

The conversation around Perkins has quickly become about more than cleaning. When, in recent days, an influencer made a video alluding to Perkins and suggesting she supported Donald Trump, conservatives quickly rallied around Perkins, following her in droves and flooding her comment sections with support. “Following you because of the way the left is trying to cancel you,” one woman wrote.

Perkins’s rapid ascendence seems to mark, if not the start of a new era, a return to an old one: “bootstraps”-style self-help is back. That means no wallowing allowed. In her videos, there’s a relentless focus on the individual as the agent of change, regardless of context. If you feel shame or guilt about your mess, you probably should, she says — that’s a message from your brain to get going and fix it. (Perkins didn’t respond to requests to speak for this story.)

Part of the reason Perkins isn’t compelled by conditions that may make it hard to be productive, like depression or ADHD, she’s suggested, is that she has overcome some difficult personal circumstances of her own. In her videos, she has mentioned parents who suffered from drug addiction, a period as a teen when she experienced homelessness, and later, as a mother, a challenging time when one of her children was having seizures and Perkins struggled with suicidal ideation.

As such, she seems to have little patience for people who point to some sort of circumstantial disadvantage as an explanation for flagging motivation or functioning. If she has come through all that, she suggests in her videos, you can get off the couch and do the dishes. “I have had to be tough my whole entire life,” Perkins says. “That’s why I come on here and I’m tough with you guys.”

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Photo-Illustration: by The Cut; Photos: @sociallykylie/TikTok, @heatheratl/TikTok, @thesoberglowwithheather/TikTok

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In the corridors of NASA buildings across the United States, Pride flags and pictures celebrating women in science are being taken down. Scientists are adding space-mission stickers to their laptops to cover ones that displayed rainbows and other symbols of LGBT+ support. Employees are stripping pronouns from their e-mail signatures and holding darkly humorous conversations in which they try to avoid saying any pronouns at all.

These and other changes are rippling through NASA, which is purging programmes involving diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) throughout the agency. The directive to do so came from US President Donald Trump, who on 20 January issued an order to eliminate DEI initiatives across the federal government.

“I get a sinking feeling in my stomach when I have to check my [work] e-mail,” says an early-career NASA scientist, who asked to remain anonymous because of concerns about their career prospects. “Every time I reload it, it’s like, ‘oh god, will there be some new heinous missive in there?’”

Nature spoke to scientists inside and outside NASA about the impacts of its DEI changes — and heard anger, fear and confusion. Although the orders affect all federal agencies, they are keenly felt at NASA, which has a long history of working towards inclusivity. In 2020, Trump appointee Jim Bridenstine, then head of NASA, added inclusion to the agency’s list of core values, joining safety, integrity, teamwork and excellence. That fifth value has now been removed from many NASA websites.

“How do you go from something being so important that it’s a pillar [of the agency], to being so reviled that it’s off of everything?” asks Julie Rathbun, a planetary scientist at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York.

“It feels like a betrayal by NASA,” says Kas Knicely, a planetary geophysicist at the University of Alaska in Fairbanks. “It’s inefficient, it’s wasteful, and it’s also just messed up.”

In a statement, NASA said the agency “is committed to engaging the best talent to drive innovation and achieve our mission for the benefit of all. As new guidance comes in, we’re working to adhere to new requirements in a timely manner.”

A changed agency

NASA’s push towards inclusivity is one of the most visible in the US government. In the 1950s and 1960s, all of the agency’s astronauts were white men. By 1978, it had bowed to internal and external pressure and had chosen several women and people of colour to fly to space. Today, NASA’s astronauts, as well as its world-renowned scientific and engineering teams, are measurably diverse.

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Children with a rare form of eye disorder who were born blind can now see thanks to a “remarkable” gene therapy breakthrough.

Researchers from London’s Moorfields Eye Hospital, biotech firm MeiraGTx and University College London have demonstrated that their therapy is both safe and effective in improving the vision of and slowing retinal deterioration in young patients born with “LCA-AIPL1.”

This previously untreatable genetic disorder, which affects some 2–3 of every 10 million newborns, leads to profound visual impairments and legal blindness.

In turn, this causes affected children to typically experience delayed and disrupted development in areas such as behavior, communication, and mobility.

After trials of the new procedure, however, children that before could only play with toys by feeling are now able to safely run about, identify pictures and even drive go-karts.

“It’s an absolutely transformational improvement,” paper author and Moorfields ophthalmologist Michel Michaelides told Newsweek.

LCA (Leber congenital amaurosis) is the name given to a family of inherited eye disorders that affect the retina—the layer at the back of the eyeball containing light-sensitive “photoreceptor” cells.

These disorders are seen in roughly 2–3 out of every 100,000 births. There are many types of LCA and these vary depending on which of the genes involved in the development and function of the retina are affected.

At present, the only treatable form of LCA is that which involves a mutation in the gene coding for RPE65, a protein involved in the “visual cycle” that translates photons of light into electrical signals that the brain can then interpret.

Specifically, the protein helps refresh special pigments in photoreceptor cells so that they can be used over again. Without it, vision cannot be sustained.

Children with LCA-RPE65 tend to have poor night vision from birth and reduced day vision.

“They will recognize spaces and colors, and they’ll be on the vision chart,” Michaelides explains.

In 2017, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved Luxturna, a gene therapy, for the treatment of RPE65-associated LCA. Gene therapies work by using a virus to install a new, healthy copy of a faulty gene into a patient’s cells to help address the underlying problem.

RPE65 mutations, however, only underlie about eight percent of LCA cases—and such are on the relatively milder end of the spectrum, in terms of not only severity but also the rate of onset and progression. Because of the latter, patients with RPE65-associated LCA can be treated from diagnosis up until their thirties or even forties.

In the new study, the researchers have focused on one of the rarest—and previously untreatable—flavors of LCA which affects the gene for AIPL1, which is essential for both the development and function of photoreceptor cells. This type of LCA is far more severe in effect, Michaelides says.

“They can’t get around in the dark. They’ve got no peripheral vision. Their central vision is virtually zero,” he explained.

“They can tell whether a light is on or off—if you shine a bright light at them, they might look towards it, for example.

“And then a smaller number of children with AIPL1 may be able to discern a large object really close up, or if it’s moving.”

Signs of AIPL1 issues in newborn children can include roving, almost shaking, eye movements; an inability to fix their eyes on anything, including their parents; and sleeping problems due to an inability to tune into the day/night cycles that normally set our bodies’ circadian rhythms.

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Children with a rare form of eye disorder who were born blind can now see

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“There is always a well-known solution to every human problem—neat, plausible, and wrong,” according to H. L. Mencken. Today we might ponder his words to diagnose the revival of another neat, plausible and boneheaded idea: ringing the planet with orbiting missiles to somehow make the U.S. safer.

In January, President Donald Trump called for a “next-generation missile defense shield” for the U.S. in an executive order. Named an “Iron Dome for America” after Israel’s short-range missile defense system—which it has nothing to do with—the plan would pour hundreds of billions of additional dollars into the long-underperforming rathole of U.S. missile defense efforts while weaponizing space. In the order, Trump referenced then president Ronald Reagan’s 1983 initiative, known as “Star Wars,” to build a missile defense shield with ground- and space-based weapons, saying it was “canceled before its goal could be realized.”

A similar fate awaits Trump’s plan—for the same reasons that Reagan’s missile-defense fantasia, including a late-1980s orbital version known as “Brilliant Pebbles,” never panned out: it will cost too much, won’t work and will endanger us all.

Right now the U.S. has 44 ground-based interceptor missiles stationed on the U.S. West Coast and aimed against ballistic missile attacks from the unstable nation of North Korea. They have worked 12 times out of 21 tests, a paltry success rate achieved only after $250 billion spent since their 1985 beginning. This illustrates the intrinsic, expensive difficulty of intercepting even dummy intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs). It’s just hard to hit them.

What’s driving Trump’s Iron Dome? Fear of nuclear-tipped hypersonic missiles developed by Russia and China, which reach speeds of Mach 5, about one mile per second. Unlike ballistic missiles, which arc into space before returning to Earth, hypersonic ones maneuver and fly on a flat trajectory, which would be challenging for U.S. ground interceptors. “Most terrestrial-based radars cannot detect hypersonic weapons until late in the weapon’s flight due to line-of-sight limitations of radar detection,” the Congressional Research Service noted in a recent report.

In pursuit of “peace through strength,” the executive order argued, “the United States will guarantee its secure second-strike capability.” That means the ability to launch nuclear missiles as payback after a hypersonic nuclear attack on the U.S.—one that would mean World War III had started—supposedly to be assured via hypersonic-missile-detecting satellites, plus satellites to link these sensors to interceptors and the “deployment of proliferated space-based interceptors.”The idea is that space-based interceptors would presumably get a jump on blocking missiles over the current ground-based ones. (Natch, there are also space lasers planned. Although, with apologies to Dr. Evil, we’ve yet to hear if equally impractical “sharks with frickin’ laser beams attached to their heads” will also make a debut.)

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Think a hankering for pickle juice is just a weird pregnancy quirk? How about a whiff of dish liquid paired with a glass of ice?

That’s what’s on the menu for one pregnant mom who’s taken to TikTok to share her unusual craving. Lathering up a soapy sponge over a kitchen sink, @Yannigiles promises a tantalizing treat for the senses, combining the smell of soap with a mouthful of ice–and her followers are eating it up (if you’ll pardon the pun).

The TikTok, currently sitting at over 950K views, has gained a lot of attention from the curious as well as the concerned, wondering what’s the deal with pregnancy cravings.

It’s Not ‘Crazy’, It’s a Craving

“It smells so good, it’s like you can taste it almost,” Yanni explains in the TikTok as she inhales the scent of the sponge.

While a number of the 400+ commenters on Yanni’s video are a little taken aback by her newfound passion, many are backing her recommendation, sharing similar experiences of pregnancy cravings for cleaning products. And they’re not alone.

While an estimated 50%-90% of American women experience cravings for specific foods during pregnancy, non-food items are occasionally coveted too.

Pickles and ice cream! Food cravings in pregnancy: hypotheses, preliminary evidence, and directions for future research. Frontiers in psychology. 2014. 

The tendency to compulsively desire things that aren’t edible or typically considered foods that have any significant nutritional value is known as pica.

The combination of scents and textures is just one example of non-food related cravings that some can have during pregnancy. Some specific cravings can include clay or dirt (also known as geophagia), ice and frozen substances (pagophagia), hair, chalk, and cornstarch. Some even fancy the smell of burnt matches, mothballs, or cigarette ashes.3

Craving the combination of dish soap and crushed ice commonly falls into this pica category, says Hayley Estrem, PhD, RN, a nurse scientist from the University of North Carolina Wilmington specializing in nutrition, family health and feeding disorders. She’s also the Research Consortium Project Lead for Feeding Matters. 

She says pregnant people, like Yanni, are more likely to experience pica than non-pregnant people.

“Some people experience pica before and after pregnancy, but pregnancy is a marked time of increase and vulnerability,” explains Dr. Estrem. “It is believed that this could be because of the natural increase in inflammatory response that occurs with pregnancy.”

Dr. Estrem adds other lines of thought suggest pica could be activated by an increase in emotional stressors or vitamin or mineral deficiencies. 

Though Pica May Be Harmless, It Could Be a Sign of Other Issues

So is there any harm in getting intimate with a little soap and ice? Well, potentially. Dr. Estrem reminds us that everything we ingest matters–including ice, which may seem harmless and most “food-like.” 

“Craving ice may indicate that there is a deficiency, most often an iron deficiency, but there could be other underlying issues,” she says. 

Doreen Marshall, PhD, psychologist and Chief Executive Officer of the National Eating Disorders Association (NEDA), says there’s limited understanding of what contributes to pica. However, she agrees iron-deficiency anemia and malnutrition are thought to be related.

“In pregnant individuals in particular, pica can be a sign that the body is trying to correct a significant nutrient deficiency,” says Dr. Marshall. “Treating this deficiency with medication or vitamins can address the problem, though it is important that a medical professional is involved in assessment and treatment.”

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CLIMATEWIRE | Back-to-back disasters rocked Houston last year, when a powerful derecho struck the city in May, followed by Hurricane Beryl in July. Both events brought gale-force winds to the densely built downtown, with gusts exceeding 90 miles per hour.

But after the storms, researchers noticed something strange. The derecho caused more damage than the hurricane to Houston’s tallest buildings.

Now, scientists say there’s a need for more research on the impacts of powerful downbursts in urban centers. That’s especially true for places like Houston, the Gulf Coast’s largest city, where thunderstorms and hurricanes can both wreak havoc.

In a new study, published Friday in the scientific journal Frontiers in Built Environment, researchers from Florida International University demonstrated that different kinds of storms — which produce distinct wind patterns — can pose different threats to tall buildings.

Both hurricanes and derechos can produce high-speed winds. But derechos — long-lasting wind storms often associated with bands of thunderstorms — have unique traits. They’re often characterized by sudden bursts of winds that move in straight lines, often causing damage that radiates outward in a single direction.

The researchers compared the damage caused by last year’s storms on several of Houston’s tall buildings, each at least 600 feet tall. These include the Chevron Building Auditorium, Wells Fargo Plaza, Enterprise Plaza, Wedge International Tower and the Total Energies Tower.

Each of these buildings is designed to withstand gusts up to 150 mph — yet many still sustained significant damage, particularly during the derecho. The researchers noted that an assessment of 18 buildings revealed more than 3,000 broken windows during the storm. Hurricane Beryl, on the other hand, caused significantly less glass damage than the derecho.

The researchers wanted to know why there was such a difference between the two storms. So they conducted a series of experiments in a special wind chamber housed at FIU, altering the airflow to simulate the patterns of derechos versus hurricanes. Model buildings inside the chamber helped them evaluate the impacts of the strong winds on the built environment.

They found that derecho winds can produce unique forces compared with hurricanes, including stronger suction on the walls of city buildings, allowing them to dislodge glass panels and shatter windows. The findings suggest that even buildings designed for strong winds aren’t necessarily resilient for all kinds of storms.

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