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Imagine a real spider 3,300 feet across.


The European Space Agency’s Mars Express orbiter has spotted “spiders” on the Red Planet’s southern polar region.

But they’re not the arachnids we fear or adore back on Earth — they’re the result of a complex geological process that causes carbon dioxide to sublimate, digging up darker material from below the surface during the planet’s spring.

And they’re a whole lot larger than the spiders you’re used to, measuring up to 3,300 feet across.

Entanglement is a form of correlation between quantum objects, such as particles at the atomic scale. The laws of classical physics cannot explain this uniquely quantum phenomenon, yet it is one of the properties that explain the macroscopic behavior of quantum systems.

Because entanglement is central to the way quantum systems work, understanding it better could give scientists a deeper sense of how information is stored and processed efficiently in such systems.

Qubits, or quantum bits, are the building blocks of a quantum computer. However, it is extremely difficult to make specific entangled states in many-qubit systems, let alone investigate them. There are also a variety of entangled states, and telling them apart can be challenging.

Theoretical physicists at Utrecht University, together with experimental physicists at Sogang University in South Korea, have succeeded in building an artificial synapse. This synapse works with water and salt and provides the first evidence that a system using the same medium as our brains can process complex information.

The results appear in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

In the pursuit of enhancing the energy efficiency of conventional computers, scientists have long turned to the human brain for inspiration. They aim to emulate its extraordinary capacity in various ways.

Federal, transportation and union leaders gathered in Las Vegas Monday to drive spikes into a symbolic rail, marking the beginning of construction for a $12 billion high-speed rail line that will link Las Vegas and the Los Angeles area.

“People have been dreaming of high-speed rail in America for decades,” Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg said Monday ahead of the groundbreaking ceremony. “It’s really happening this time.”

Sir Roger Penrose proposes that the universe undergoes repeated cycles of expansion, decay, and rebirth, challenging the traditional notion of a singular Big Bang origin.


Renowned physicist Sir Roger Penrose, hailing from the University of Oxford and a co-recipient of the 2020 Nobel Prize in Physics, posits a fascinating theory regarding the universe’s cyclical nature. Contrary to prevailing notions, Penrose suggests that our universe has undergone numerous Big Bang events, with another impending in the future.

Penrose’s Nobel-winning contributions revolve around advancing mathematical frameworks that not only validate but also extend Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity. Moreover, his investigations into black holes elucidated the phenomenon of gravitational collapse, wherein excessively dense entities converge into singularities, infinitely massive points.

Scientists have successfully engineered functional artificial cells in the lab that behave like living cells.


Advances in the development of cytoskeletal-like materials with modular structures and mechanics are pivotal for the engineering of synthetic cells. Now actin-mimetic supramolecular peptide networks have been designed using programmable peptide–DNA crosslinkers, giving rise to tunable tactoid-shaped bundles and mechanical properties that control spatial localization, the diffusion of payloads and shape changes within artificial cells.

Read how Congress is pressing the DEA to reclassify marijuana from a Schedule I drug to Schedule III.


Marijuana is currently classified as a Schedule I drug, meaning these are “drugs with no currently accepted medical use and a high potential for abuse.” However, a team of 21 bipartisan congressional leaders from both the Senate and House of Representatives hopes to change that as they recently sent a letter to the United States Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) pushing them to “promptly remove marijuana from Schedule I of the Controlled Substances Act (CSA)”, noting that almost eight months had passed “since the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) recommended rescheduling marijuana to Schedule III — and 18 months since President Biden directed HHS and the Department of Justice (DOJ) to begin the process of reviewing marijuana’s scheduling.”

Examples of other Schedule I drugs include heroin, lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD), marijuana (cannabis), 3,4-methylenedioxymethamphetamine (ecstasy), methaqualone, and peyote, while Schedule III drugs include Tylenol, ketamine, anabolic steroids, and testosterone. Additionally, the penalties between Schedule I and Schedule III drugs also demonstrate stark contrasts, as well.

The 21 congressional leaders take it even farther than requesting marijuana be reclassified as a Schedule III drug, as they state, “As explained in our prior letters, while a move to Schedule III would be a meaningful improvement, the only way to remedy the most concerning consequences of marijuana prohibition is to deschedule marijuana altogether.”