AI and the human mind: only one is a black box

Permanently wiping out a disease is tricky business. Polio, measles, mumps—all have effective vaccines, yet they persist in certain pockets around the world. To date, the World Health Organization considers just two viruses as successfully eradicated: smallpox and rinderpest.

Oyster reef living shorelines have been found to provide a resilient and adaptive alternative to conventional hard coastal protection, reducing wave energy while supporting oyster colonization.

Humans are masters of seeing faces in any old thing—a handbag, TV static, toasted white bread. Scientists want to know why. A few years ago, as the category 5 Hurricane Milton bore down on the Florida coast, the internet noticed something strange. Doesn't the satellite image of the storm look a bit like an angry bald guy? Or a skull?

Mid-circuit measurements are one of the biggest practical hurdles in quantum error correction on encoded qubits. Researchers in Innsbruck and Aachen have now proposed and experimentally demonstrated that a universal fault-tolerant quantum algorithm can be executed without such measurements. Using a trapped-ion quantum processor, the team successfully ran Grover's quantum search algorithm on three logical qubits.