A team of engineers, physicists and quantum specialists at Google Research has found that reducing noise to a certain level allows the company's sycamore quantum chip to beat classical computers running random circuit sampling (RCS).

When lightning strikes, the electrons come pouring down. In a new study, researchers at the University of Colorado Boulder, led by an undergraduate student, have discovered a novel connection between weather on Earth and space weather. The team utilized satellite data to reveal that lightning storms on our planet can dislodge particularly high-energy, or "extra-hot," electrons from the inner radiation belt—a region of space enveloped by charged particles that surround Earth like an inner tube.

According to highly cited conventional models, cooling and a major drop in sea levels about 34 million years ago should have led to widespread continental erosion and deposited gargantuan amounts of sandy material onto the ocean floor. This was, after all, one of the most drastic climate transitions on Earth since the demise of the dinosaurs.

The word laser usually conjures up an image of a strongly concentrated and continuous light beam. Lasers that produce such light are, in fact, very common and useful. However, science and industry often also require very short and strong pulses of laser light.

Researchers at Freie Universität Berlin, University of Maryland and NIST, Google AI, and Abu Dhabi set out to robustly estimate the free Hamiltonian parameters of bosonic excitations in a superconducting quantum simulator. The protocols they developed, outlined in a paper pre-published on arXiv, could contribute to the realization of highly precise quantum simulations that reach beyond the limits of classical computers.

Based on the data from the Magellan-Clay telescope in Chile, astronomers have performed a chemo-dynamical study of a very metal-poor star known as HE 2315−4240. Results of the study, published on the preprint server arXiv, yield important insights into the nature of this star.

A team of geologists, life scientists and biologists affiliated with several institutions in China has found one of the earliest examples of a winged seed in a mine in Anhui Province. Their paper is published in the journal eLife.

SpaceX successfully "caught" the first-stage booster of its Starship megarocket Sunday as it returned to the launch pad after a test flight, a world first in the company's quest for rapid reusability.

Female crested gibbons display jerky, almost geometric patterns of movement. Researchers from Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf (HHU), Oslo in Norway and Paris have studied these conspicuous movements, which are comparable to human dances.

Researchers have unveiled a novel approach to tackle obesity by targeting fat absorption in the small intestine. The cutting-edge nanoparticle system, engineered to deliver therapeutic molecules directly to the digestive tract, has shown significant potential to prevent diet-induced obesity. The work is published in the journal Advanced Science.