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What if time is not as set in stone it seems? Imagine that time could move forward or backward due to quantum-level processes rather than in a single direction. According to a recent study published in Scientific Reports, researchers at the University of Surrey have uncovered the intriguing discovery that some quantum systems have the potential to produce competing arrows of time.

Image Credit: amgun/Shutterstock.com

The arrow of time—the notion that time moves irrevocably from the past to the future—has baffled scholars for ages. The fundamental principles of physics do not favor one path over another, even though this appears to be evident in the reality humans experience. The equations are the same whether time goes forward or backward.

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Researchers at UC Santa Barbara and TU Dresden are pioneering a new approach to robotics by creating a collective of small robots that function like a smart material.

According to Matthew Devlin, a former doctoral researcher in the lab of UCSB mechanical engineering professor Elliot Hawkes and lead author of a paper published in Science, researchers have developed a method for robots to behave more like a material.

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Searching for life in alien oceans may be more difficult than scientists previously thought, even when we can sample these extraterrestrial waters directly.

A new study focusing on Enceladus, a moon of Saturn that sprays its ocean water into space through cracks in its icy surface, shows that the physics of alien oceans could prevent evidence of deep-sea life from reaching places where we can detect it.

Published today (Thursday, 6 February 2025) in Communications Earth and Environment, the study shows how Enceladus’s ocean forms distinct layers that dramatically slow the movement of material from the ocean floor to the surface.

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Since their invention, traditional computers have almost always relied on semiconductor chips that use binary “bits” of information represented as strings of 1’s and 0’s. While these chips have become increasingly powerful and simultaneously smaller, there is a physical limit to the amount of information that can be stored on this hardware. Quantum computers, by comparison, utilize “qubits” (quantum bits) to exploit the strange properties exhibited by subatomic particles, often at extremely cold temperatures.

Two qubits can hold four values at any given time, with more qubits translating to an exponential increase in calculating capabilities. This allows a quantum computer to process information at speeds and scales that make today’s supercomputers seem almost antiquated. Last December, for example, Google unveiled an experimental quantum computer system that researchers say takes just five minutes to finish a calculation that would take most supercomputers over 10 septillion years to complete—longer than the age of the universe as we understand it.

But Google’s Quantum Processing Unit (QPU) is based on different technology than Microsoft’s Majorana 1 design, detailed in a paper published on February 19 in the journal Nature. The result of over 17 years of design and research, Majorana 1 relies on what the company calls “topological qubits” through the creation of topological superconductivity, a state of matter previously conceptualized but never documented.

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Neural technologies are adopting bio-inspired designs to enhance biointegration and functionality. This review maps the growing field of bio-inspired electronics and discusses recent developments in tissue-like bioelectronics, from soft interfaces to ‘biohybrid’ and ‘all-living’ platforms.

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