Quantum Computing Stocks See Surprise Surge

The stocks of several quantum computing companies – including D-Wave, IonQ, and Rigetti – recently saw a surprise upswing. The cause was likely Amazon’s announcement of the “Quantum Embark” program, which, Amazon says, will help customers to get into the quantum computing business. It’s an interesting development because none of those companies are making a profit. Quantum computers are far from delivering any commercially interesting results – by my own estimate, at least a decade.But the surprise surge even impressed CNBC's Jim Cramer, who seems especially taken by the company “Quantum Computing Inc” that saw their stocks rise by more than 500%. As Cramer correctly notes, though, the company “has hardly any revenue.”

This episode of Science News covers Moore's law. According to Moore’s law, the number of transistors on a microchip should double every year. Two years ago, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said that the law was “dead” because we're hitting physical limits for the miniaturization of transistors. Now, though, he’s reversed that claim, instead predicting that we're about to see a “Hyper” Moore’s law. Let’s take a look.

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We Finally Got Some Cloud Data – And The News Is Bad

Image: Alfred-Wegener-Institut / Yves Nowak

Climate models make different predictions for how much temperature increase we can expect if we continue emitting carbon dioxide. The major reason for the difference between the predictions is how the models’ cloud cover reacts to increased temperatures. If we get more low-hanging clouds, that could reflect more sunlight and help against warming. But if we get more high-hanging clouds, on the contrary, that will trap heat and accelerate warming. Just exactly what happens depends on uncertain microphysical processes for water condensation, and is surprisingly difficult to calculate.A recent analysis of data from NASA and ECMWF now found that the major reason global temperatures sparked so high in 2023 was that Earth reflected less sunlight than expected. The researchers say that this is because of a substantial decline in low-hanging clouds. While there have been some speculations that this is partly due to less air pollution from ship emissions after a change in law, the authors of the new paper say that ship emissions are insufficient to explain what happened. They speculate instead that we are seeing the natural reaction of clouds to increasing temperatures. One year of data isn’t enough to infer a trend, so maybe we are lucky and the changes in the 2023 cloud cover are just a coincidence. But if the trend continues, it is bad news because then temperatures will continue to increase faster than the average model prediction had led us to suspect. It’s about time we work out nuclear fusion! Press release here, paper here.

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Quantum Computing Advantage Shrinks Further

Image: @qzoeholmes.bsky.social‬

In a very interesting recent pre-print, a group of physicists explains that algorithms for a quantum computer can, given suitable circumstances, be piecewise approximated on a conventional computer. They demonstrate this for algorithms run on IBM’s quantum computer with 127 qubits. This procedure will not work for general algorithms, especially not those that rely on large amounts of entanglement which take a long time to simulate on a conventional computer. However, it further reduces the need for quantum computers in many instances. Paper here, comments from the authors here.

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