We all know how the story goes for quantum computing: A qubit (short for a quantum bit), unlike classical bits, can be at the state of 0 and 1 simultaneously. The superposition of states offers quantum computers the superior computational power over traditional supercomputers. Its unprecedented efficiency for tasks like factoring, database-searching, simulation, or code-breaking…
by Ben Bradley, Year 12, Reigate College, Surrey. “The good thing about science is that it’s true, whether or not you believe in it”- Neil deGrasse Tyson, Astrophysicist and science communicator. But in the age of fake news, since when has the truth been important? Despite consensus throughout the scientific community on the threat of…
by Isabella Kwiecinski, Year 12, Lady Margaret School, London. Growing up when I thought of the future I thought of holograms and flying cars. To me that was how science was going to progress in the future and in my eyes I was soon going to be taken to school in some form of spacecraft….
by Juliet Anderson, Year 12 Reigate Grammar School, Surrey. In 2016, according to FAO statistics, a staggering 815 million people (10.7% of the world’s population) suffered from chronic undernourishment; the two main forms being protein-energy malnutrition (lacking proteins and calories necessary for growth) and micronutrient deficiency (lacking vitamins/minerals). There is enough food on the planet…
by Patrick Brown, Year 12, Merchant Taylors’ School Northwood, Middlesex. Seventeen million people were diagnosed with cancer in 2018. It is a major killer, caused by the accumulation of mutations in DNA. Billions of pounds have been invested into cancer research and cancer treatments, but the complexity of cancer and its variations has meant that…
by Larissa Chan, Year 10, Cheltenham Ladies College, Gloucestershire. How can you rock climb again, after losing a leg? Jim Ewing fell fifteen metres during a climbing accident in the Cayman Islands, and he asked himself the same question. The answer to this is the agonist-antagonist myoneural interface (AMI), a method invented by researchers in…
by Aaliah Dhorat, Year 10, Batley Grammar School, West Yorkshire. “Making one person smile changes the world… maybe not the entire world, but their world.” Smiling is infectious, you can catch it like the flu; someone smiled at me today, and I started smiling too. Smiling is like a virus; it’s contagious like other viruses,…
Complexity science explains why efforts to reject the mainstream merely result in a new conformity. Despise anything that is “too mainstream”? Want to make a countercultural statement with an alternative style? Your one-of-a-kind look often ironically ends up pretty much the same as your counterculture peers. Intrigued by this counterintuitive phenomena, mathematician Jonathan Touboul at…
Water filtration for human consumption and industrial wastewater purification accounts for huge electricity consumption and CO2 emissions. Passing water through a porous membrane to filter out particles larger than water molecules is a common water processing method. A problem with this filtration method is that membranes are susceptible to fouling (clogging by the filtrates). To…
In the ideal world, recycling plastics should break the polymers back to monomers, its original building blocks. Monomers could then be made into new plastics over and over. The team from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California brought us one step closer to the dream of closed-loop, zero-waste plastics. Researchers utilised a family of…
