Category Science

In October 2019, Google claimed quantum supremacy (a point where quantum computers can perform any task that can’t be performed by classical computers) when its quantum computer ‘Sycamore’ performed a complex calculation in 200 seconds. The company claimed that it would take nearly 10,000 years for the world’s fastest supercomputer to perform the same calculation.

Computer scientists have seen quantum supremacy — the moment when a quantum computer could perform an action a conventional computer couldn’t — as an elusive, important milestone for their field. There are many research groups working on quantum computers and applications, but it appears Google has beaten its rivals to this milestone.

According to John Preskill, the Caltech particle physicist who coined the term “quantum supremacy,” Google’s quantum computer “is something new in the exploration of nature. These systems are doing things that are unprecedented.”

It sounds all very gee-whiz. And some scientists think these computers will one day lead to discoveries of new drugs and possibly whole new fields of chemistry. Others fear they’ll be used one day to crack the toughest security protocols.

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In 2018, scientists studying ancient DNA revealed to have found the first hybrid ancient human. The DNA, sourced from a 90,000-years-old bone, belonged to a teenage girl whose father was a Denisovan and mother was a Neanderthal.

This is the first time scientists have identified an ancient individual whose parents belonged to distinct human groups. The findings were published on 22 August in Nature.

“To find a first-generation person of mixed ancestry from these groups is absolutely extraordinary,” says population geneticist Pontus Skoglund at the Francis Crick Institute in London. “It’s really great science coupled with a little bit of luck.”

The team, led by palaeogeneticists Viviane Slon and Svante Pääbo of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, conducted the genome analysis on a single bone fragment recovered from Denisova Cave in the Altai Mountains of Russia. This cave lends its name to the ‘Denisovans’, a group of extinct humans first identified on the basis of DNA sequences from the tip of a finger bone discovered2 there in 2008. The Altai region, and the cave specifically, were also home to Neanderthals.

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In August 2018, Apple became the world’s first- ever trillion dollar company, thereby becoming the richest company to ever exist. However, it quickly lost its top spot after poor iPhone sale and multiple controversies.

PetroChina, a state-owned oil giant, was the first company to hit this mark during its initial public offering in 2007, though its value has declined dramatically since then. Apple on the other hand is the first non-state-owned company to reach this stratospheric valuation on its own merits through a long, sustained upward climb without implicit government guarantees or backing.

It is a market development that has been in the pipeline for well over a year. Recent higher sales of the expensive iPhone X gave investors more confidence in the company and helped it to this watershed moment, leaving second-place Amazon and third-place Google well behind in the mid to high $800 billion value range.

Picture Credit : Google

In July 2017, fossils of five early humans found in North Africa were unveiled by researchers. These fossils show that Homo sapiens emerged on Earth at least 100,000 years earlier than previously recognized. The finds also suggested that humans may have been evolving in the same direction all over the African continent.

Homo sapiens is part of a group called hominids, which were the earliest humanlike creatures. Based on archaeological and anthropological evidence, we think that hominids diverged from other primates somewhere between 2.5 and 4 million years ago in eastern and southern Africa. Though there was a degree of diversity among the hominid family, they all shared the trait of bipedalism, or the ability to walk upright on two legs.

When humans migrated from Africa to colder climates, they made clothing out of animal skins and constructed fires to keep themselves warm; often, they burned fires continuously through the winter. Sophisticated weapons, such as spears and bows and arrows, allowed them to kill large mammals efficiently. Along with changing climates, these hunting methods contributed to the extinction of giant land mammals such as mammoths, giant kangaroos, and mastodons. Fewer giant mammals, in turn, limited hunters’ available prey.

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At a time when it is difficult for humans to get citizenship of a particular country, Sophia, a humanoid robot developed by Hong Kong- based Hanson Robotics was conferred citizenship by the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia in October 2017. Sophia looks and talks like a human. From after, you can probably not even say she’s a robot!

She is fashioned after Audrey Hepburn, can walk, talk and emote too. And now, Sophia, the world’s first robot citizen who came calling here this week, can also draw sketches, contextualise a conversation and attach faces with names, say its makers.

The delicate looking woman robot with doe-brown eyes and long fluttering eyelashes, who mesmerised the world when she was activated in 2016, is getting smarter by the day.

Sophia, dressed in a black skirt and a grey metallic shirt, was part of several industrial and social robots, including ‘Professor Einstein’, exhibited at the 28th IEEE Conference on Robot and Human Interactive Communication (RO-MAN2019) here.

Picture Credit : Google
 

For four days in May, Portugal, the European country known for soccer and Cristiano Ronaldo, was powered by renewable energy. Yes, for four consecutive days the country’s electric usage was provided entirely by wind, solar and hydro-generated energy.

The country’s zero emission milestone was announced just days after Germany, another European superpower, announced that clean energy had powered almost all its electricity needs on May 15.

Overall, renewable energy is gaining ground on the world’s electric grids, accounting for nearly 60 percent of the world’s new electric capacity, according to the renewable energy research network REN21.

Still, wind and solar panels together account for just 4 percent of the total power supply. Though the coal industry has been on the decline in some places, the world is still largely reliant on fossil fuels to generate power. Efforts to cut planet-warming greenhouse gases depend markedly on the power sector, which accounts for about 42 percent of all energy-related carbon emissions. Nuclear plants can contribute to the clean-energy bottom line, but they face opposition over waste and safety issues, as well as political and economic headwinds.

Wind and solar command a lot of attention when it comes to renewable energy, but in many cases, other low-emissions sources are providing big assists. A key player in Portugal’s win is hydroelectric power, which accounts for about 19 percent of the country’s supply. Hydro can provide the steadier output needed to fill in gaps when the wind isn’t blowing or the sun isn’t shining.

Having a strong reserve of geothermal energy can help lay a foundation, too, as is the case in Iceland, Philippines, and others. But developing those resources takes time, money, and political consensus, which can often hold projects back.

Picture Credit : Google