Science, Space, Technology, Health News and Information. Astrophile: Mars coils hold with those who favour fire - space - 26 April 2012. Astrophile is our weekly column on curious cosmic objects, from the solar system to the far reaches of the multiverse Object: Spiral patterns in Martian valleysOrigin: Solidified lava lake Some say Mars's northern valley formed in fire, some say in ice: now curious spirals on the floor of the valley have been glimpsed – and hold with those who favour fire. The Athabasca Valles region, a channelled and scabbed valley just north of the red planet's equator, was clearly carved by floods of fluid coursing through it tens of millions of years ago. But, in a beautiful echo of the apocalyptic poem "Fire and Ice" by American poet Robert Frost, no one had been able to work out whether that fluid was water or molten lava.
Graduate student Andrew Ryan of Arizona State University and colleagues seem to have settled the debate with their discovery of subtle spirals on the valley floor that could only be formed from lava. Ocean of consternation "That caused a lot of consternation," Ryan says. LiftPort Space Elevator - LiftPort v2.0! - StumbleUpon. Researchers claim quantum breakthrough & News in Science (ABC Science) News in Science Thursday, 26 April 2012 Connor Duffy and staffABC Giant leap Researchers say they have designed a tiny crystal that acts like a quantum computer so powerful it would take a computer the size of the known universe to match it.
Details of the crystal, which is made up of just 300 atoms, are published today in the journal Nature. "Quantum computing is a kind of information science that is based on the notion that if one performs computations in a fundamentally different way than the way your classical desktop computer works," says study co-author University of Sydney's Dr Michael Biercuk. "There's a huge potential to solve a variety of problems that are very, very hard or near impossible for standard computer. " The crystal simulator uses a property of quantum mechanics called superposition, where a quantum particle appears to be in two distinct states at the same time.
As the number of qubits increase, the number or states increases exponentially. Outstrips classical computers.