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Why do protected areas have to be interconnected?


With its annual report “Environment Frontiers”, the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) outlines the challenges that will have a decisive influence on the natural foundations of life on our planet in the future. In their report 2018/2019, the authors call “Ecological Networking: Bridges to Greater Biodiversity” one of the great challenges of the future.

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Simulations of stochastic processes play an important role in the quantitative sciences, enabling the characterisation of complex systems. Recent work has established a quantum advantage in stochastic simulation, leading to quantum devices that execute a simulation using less memory than possible by classical means. To realise this advantage it is essential that the memory register remains coherent, and coherently interacts with the processor, allowing the simulator to operate over many time steps. Here we report a multi-time-step experimental simulation of a stochastic process using less memory than the classical limit. A key feature of the photonic quantum information processor is that it creates a quantum superposition of all possible future trajectories that the system can evolve into. This superposition allows us to introduce, and demonstrate, the idea of comparing statistical futures of two classical processes via quantum interference. We demonstrate interference of two 16-dimensional quantum states, representing statistical futures of our process, with a visibility of 0.96 ± 0.02.

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In what is being hailed as a lucky accident, a salvage team looking for containers that had fallen off a transport ship in Dutch waters discovered a 16th-century shipwreck on the North Sea floor.

Copper plates and wooden beams were found on the vessel, which dates back to 1540, making it the oldest find of a seafaring ship in Dutch waters ever, according to the Netherlands Cultural Heritage Agency.

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