From 2001 to 2009, young people (16- to 34-year-olds) who lived in households with annual incomes of over $70,000 increased their use of public transit by 100 percent, biking by 122 percent, and walking by 37 percent
This week, U.S. Marines landed in northern Australia. Just 200 Marines, but they’re the first wave of a deployment that will eventually increase to 2,500. The Chinese military has expressed disapproval. Host Scott Simon is joined by the U.S. ambassador to Australia, Jeffrey Bleich.
Ready to suspend your brain cells in a superposition of disbelief? Good, because the latest news published in Nature is that diamonds are a quantum computer‘s best friend — particularly if they’re flawed. An international team of scientists sought out sub-atomic impurities in a 1mm-thick fragment of over-priced carbon and used these as qubits to perform successful calculations. A “rogue” nitrogen nucleus provided one qubit, while a free electron became a second. Unlike previous attempts at solid-state quantum computing, this new effort used an extra technique to protect the system from decoherence errors: microwave pulses were fired at the electron qubit to “time-reverse” inconsistencies in its spinning motion. Don’t fully get it? Us neither. In any case, it probably won’t stop jewellers tut-tutting to themselves.