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Fluid Singularities, A Qubit Record, New Fusion, and Graphene’s Law
This week’s science bits from SWTG
Marcus Gee-Lim
October 01, 2025
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Google DeepMind Tackles Fluid Singularities, Gears Up for Fields Medal
Image: Google DeepMind
DeepMind announced they have a method to find singularities in classic fluid equations. This sounds very much like they’re looking to solve one of the Millenium Problems – specifically the one about whether the Navier-Stokes equation can develop singularities. However, in this work they did not use the Navier-Stokes equation, and instead worked with other, similar, fluid equations in 2 dimensions. But come on, we all know what’s going on there: Demis Hassabis gearing up to become the first person to both win a Nobel Prize and a Fields medal. Paper here. Press release here.
This week’s episode of Science News is about graphene. Graphene is a sort of miracle material which is exceptionally strong and conducts electricity and heat better than most other materials. In a recent press release, physicists claim that a super-cleaned version of graphene breaks a fundamental law of nature and could even be used to somehow study black holes. Sounds intriguing, let’s take a look.
New Record: 6,100 Qubits With Neutral Atoms
Figure: Atoms in the 2D array. Credits: Manetsch et al, Nature (2025).
Researchers at CalTech have successfully trapped more than 6,100 atoms with laser “tweezers” in a 2D array, and kept them coherent for more than 12 seconds. These trapped atoms can function as the computational units of quantum computers, the qubits, and in this business, 12 seconds counts as remarkably long. The researchers also managed to move the atoms around without messing up the stored information, which will come in useful for error correction. Neural atoms have been a latecomer in the race for commercially useful quantum computers, but have been catching up dramatically fast in the past years. Still, what is missing is a demonstration that they can create entanglement and perform logical operators on the arrays at scale. Paper here. Press release here.
British Fusion Startup Pursues New Approach
Design Sketch for the Nuclear Fusion Reactor. Credits: First Light Fusion
The UK company First Light Fusion has published a plan for a new nuclear fusion concept called FLARE. It’s a two-step approach to inertial confinement. First, they want to squeeze the fuel slowly with an electrical pulse, then ignite it quickly with a small burst – for example, a short laser pulse. All this happens in a big pool of liquid lithium that soaks up heat, generates power, and also breeds tritium as a new fuel.
They say the gain (meaning energy from fusion divided by energy delivered to the fuel) could reach a stunning 200 to 1,000. About the timeline, they vaguely say they hope to have a “commercial demonstration potentially by the mid-thirties.” First Light Fusion has previously used solid projectiles to shoot at fuel targets and was aiming at commercialisation in the early 2030s. The full concept plan is available here.
