CEO Matt Garman announced Amazon will stop using secret agreements with county officials and acknowledges community backlash could lead to data center "moratoriums" across the country. www.wired.com/story/amazon...

Amazon Says It Is Going to Stop Using NDAs for Data Centers

CEO Matt Garman announced Amazon will stop using secret agreements with county officials and acknowledges community backlash could lead to data center "moratoriums" across the country.

wired.com

Mathematicians birthed LLMs. You've forgotten your mommy, OpenAI. My new piece in Wired: www.wired.com/story/solvin...

Solving Math’s Greatest Problems Was an Art Form. Then Came AI

Mathematics has been one of humanity’s most creative endeavors, akin to painting and poetry. Now, mathematicians are trying to save it from the brute force of AI.

wired.com

Quantum computing has a reputation as a dish to serve cold, but it's getting spicy these days too! (Isabella Ward reporting for Wired) www.wired.com/story/micros...

Microsoft’s Quantum Chief Doesn’t Care That Scientists Don’t Believe His Results

Zulfi Alam thinks his team doesn’t need to “prove” they engineered a new state of matter in their bid to reinvent computing. Science would disagree.

wired.com

two radically different approaches to covering surveillance technology.

Last Friday, DHS capped internat. students' stay at 4 years. But a physics PhD takes 6+ years. "It's going to make people around the world start questioning whether...to get a higher-level education in the U.S.," one student told me. My May story on their perspective: www.aps.org/apsnews/2026...

Amid visa uncertainty, international students look for support

Proposed changes to the duration of status policy would affect many students and scholars. To raise awareness, five shared their stories.

aps.org

My first time on the Vergecast! Have a listen if you've ever wondered what's the deal with quantum computing, or if you've never wondered at all (which is most of my friends and family).

Marina Galperina@mfortki.bsky.social · 3mo ago

Talking quantum computer hype and Majorana drama with @sophurky.bsky.social and @jake--k.bsky.social, and fulfilling my lifelong dream of being head on thumbnail www.youtube.com/watch?v=SnIE...

Following Trump's executive orders, Microsoft news, and announcements of $billions in investment, I wrote about the current state of quantum computing and what we can expect. bit.ly/4v3kedO

What is a quantum computer good for? Absolutely nothing — yet

The Trump administration wants a useful quantum computer in two years. Microsoft wants one in three. Independent researchers cry hype.

bit.ly

IBM figured out how to build two tiers of transistors on a chip. Experts I spoke to agreed this was "transformational." This paves a way to cramming more transistors on chips without needing to shrink them further. www.technologyreview.com/2026/06/25/1...

IBM has unveiled chip technology that could help extend Moore’s Law another decade

The company, along with others, is pursuing a new paradigm for cramming more transistors on chips—building up.

technologyreview.com

Quantum computing drama. Henry Legg's critique of Microsoft's quantum computing claims was published in Nature today. Legg doubts they made a working qubit last year, and he thinks this year's chip suffers the same problems. bit.ly/4eY1ffP

A new paper argues Microsoft exaggerated its quantum claims a year ago

A peer-reviewed critique of Majorana 1 claims Microsoft did not conclusively demonstrate a working topological qubit. Microsoft disagrees.

bit.ly

Climate science can be a heavy topic. But who's to say it's not beautiful, too? Physicists have found the patterns in Earth's oceans and atmospheres recur in other unexpected parts of our universe, including strange states of matter. There is poetry to our planet. physics.aps.org/articles/v19...

A Climate for Physicists

As concerns about climate change grow, researchers from fields ranging from gravitational-wave astronomy to condensed-matter physics are finding unexpected opportunities to contribute to climate resea...

physics.aps.org

Someone finally got through to the physicists that the way to trick children into learning quantum mechanics is to give them a video game with cats www.aps.org/apsnews/2026...

Bypassing dense math, kids play their way to quantum science

At the APS Global Physics Summit, physics researchers showcased innovative card, board, and video games for school-aged children (and playful adults).

aps.org

NSF uses staffing cuts to strip Inspector General's office of its ability to investigate research misconduct www.science.org/content/arti...

Exclusive: NSF watchdog unit is no longer investigating research misconduct

New policy hands universities the reins in probing allegations against faculty

science.org

"I think many people have forgotten about it," an international student told me. A physics PhD takes ~6 years; Trump is about to cap internat. students' time at 4 years. This will fundamentally change STEM education and research in the US. Academia, gird your loins. www.aps.org/apsnews/2026...

Amid visa uncertainty, international students look for support

Proposed changes to the duration of status policy would affect many students and scholars. To raise awareness, five shared their stories.

aps.org

Astronomy, meet quantum computing. A recent demonstration at Harvard shows how entangled particles could help multiple optical telescopes, spaced far apart, combine their light to create better images. physics.aps.org/articles/v19...

Expanding Interferometry’s Potential with Quantum Memory

Researchers exploit quantum entanglement to measure the interference of light signals from two distant detectors, opening a path toward quantum-enhanced astronomy.

physics.aps.org

Bluesky hive mind: I'm writing a story for the American Physical Society about proposed changes in US student visas. I'm looking for international physics students willing to share how it's affected their decisionmaking. They can be anonymous.

😶

Zlatko Minev@zlatko-minev.bsky.social · 7mo ago

Big news of the day, at Google we are building both superconducting and neutral atom quantum computers. blog.google/innovation-... #quantum #atom #google

Wrote a review for a movie from 6 decades ago. Rewatching 2001 in 2026 made me consider the purpose of accurate science in movies. They're never completely accurate, and sometimes bad science makes better movies. But in 2001, the accuracy creates room for wonder. www.aps.org/apsnews/2026...

April 1968: The film 2001: A Space Odyssey gets (some of) the science right

Director Stanley Kubrick packed the iconic movie with accurate depictions of space and physics, and inspired a generation of sci-fi films.

aps.org

I call this Schrödinger's chicken, where the chicken can come both before and after the egg. (Check out my story on indefinite causal order.) physics.aps.org/articles/v19...

Can Before and After Be Superposed?

Through a quantum-switch experiment, researchers attempt to reveal “indefinite causal order”—a quantum phenomenon involving events in a before-and-after superposition.

physics.aps.org

Columbus, Ohio, where I live, is one of the fastest growing data center markets in the country. Capacity grew 18x, 2020-2025. Meta is building a gigawatt-scale facility in the area. It's confusing and chaotic, so the community met about it yesterday. I bore witness: matternews.org/community/de...

Columbus City Council meeting debates the local impact of data centers – Matter News

‘This is the beginning of a conversation,’ councilmember Christopher Wyche said of the four-hour meeting, during which reps from the data center industry, labor unions, and environmental groups joined...

matternews.org

Here's yet another weird analogue between nature and technology. New theory finds that bursts of gamma rays can form in an insulator like they do during a lightning storm in the atmosphere (which is itself, a type of insulator too).

Physics Magazine@physicsmagazine.aps.org · 7mo ago

Thunderstorms can cause 100-meter-scale regions in the atmosphere to generate bursts of gamma rays via cascades of relativistic electrons. Now theorists have predicted that a similar mechanism could work in centimeter-scale regions in dielectric solids.

Let's talk about neutrinos and the sun. Cheers to @thephysicsgirl.bsky.social and team, great to be working together again. www.youtube.com/watch?v=B3m3...

My first science video in 3 years!

YouTube video by Physics Girl

youtube.com

Quantum computers are insanely hard to build, with commercial application timelines of a decade+. The space is overrun with hype. Academic physicists in Canada are making an open-source quantum computer in a bid for more transparency. physics.aps.org/articles/v19...

How To Build Your Own Quantum Computer

A group of physicists are developing a quantum computer that’s entirely open source, from hardware to software

physics.aps.org

1/4 RIP Micius 🛰️ The world's first quantum satellite crashed into the Pacific last week (to the west of Ecuador) after an almost 10-year mission Also known as Mozi (& QUESS) it was famously the first to teleport a photon to space (or at least its quantum state) 🧪⚛️ www.nature.com/articles/nat...

Quantum teleportation is even weirder than you think - Nature

Don't let the catchy name distract you, says Philip Ball: the questions inspired by this arguably misnamed phenomenon go to the heart of quantum theory.

nature.com

Companies' push to use generative AI means more chips, more servers, and data centers — and in a few years, a lot of garbage. Here's my story about how countries plan to deal with the rising e-waste, and the challenges ahead. www.nature.com/articles/s43... (1/n)

The afterlife of 20 million AI chips - Nature Computational Science

Data-center operators try to recycle retired hardware, but a broken global recycling infrastructure stands in the way.

nature.com

Quantinuum's new trapped-ion quantum computer, Helios, has performed some intriguing simulations of high-temperature superconductors. But it's still much too small to perform the industry’s dream algorithms. www.technologyreview.com/2025/11/05/1...

A new ion-based quantum computer makes error correction simpler

Quantinuum has unveiled a third-generation quantum computer that could be easier to scale up than rival approaches.

technologyreview.com

(1/2) Today's Chemistry Nobel went to metal-organic frameworks. These are a class of customizable molecules that I think of as cages, where you can trap chemicals of your choice and then efficiently perform controlled chemistry reactions within them.

(1/n) Today's physics Nobel Prize went to John Clarke, Michel Devoret, and John Martinis for their work on quantum tunneling in superconducting circuits. This research laid the groundwork for the quantum computers in development today.

In my latest for Gizmodo, I write about two cases of generative AI being used in legal settings. They're foils to each other: one that I believe presents a way to use the software responsibly, and one that doesn't. I leave it as an exercise to the reader to decide which is which. (1/n)

Not a lot of people get to invent a programming language. I got to talk to somebody who did. Check out my latest profile in APS News. www.aps.org/apsnews/2025...

Quantum careers: The coder who used 90 programming languages — then invented one for quantum computers

As a kid in Ukraine, Mariia Mykhailova wrote code on paper. Now she writes books on quantum computing.

aps.org

Quantum computing gets all the attention -- but have you heard about their cousin, quantum radar? I write about a new type of quantum radar that uses Rydberg atoms, used as qubits in computers, not for encoding info but for imaging objects underground. www.technologyreview.com/2025/08/11/1...

This quantum radar could image buried objects

Physicists are exploring a quantum-mechanical approach to making smaller radio wave detectors.

technologyreview.com