One Million Times Faster Than Current Technology: New Optical Computing Approach Offers Ultrafast Processing Ultrafast computer processing speeds are possible with optical chirality logic gates that operate about a million times faster than existing technologies. Processing devices based on polarized light run one million times faster than current technology. Logic gates are the basic building blocks of computer processors. The optical chirality logic gate is made of a material that emits lights with different circular polarization depending on the chirality of the input beams. This new approach, which is described in a paper published in the journal Science Advances, uses circularly polarized light as the input signal. Additionally, the team demonstrated that a single device could contain all of their chirality logic gates operating simultaneously in parallel.
Why are so many women living in separate homes from their partners and kids? Because it’s a win-win situation | Emma Brockes The model coupling – the dream, if you will – was always Helena Bonham Carter and Tim Burton, or Annie Leibovitz and Susan Sontag: maintaining a marriage, de facto or real, across two separate households, so that you got all the benefits with none of the gross bits. You could keep the magic alive, extend the honeymoon period indefinitely and, by protecting your space and rationing your time together, create a scenario in which you were actually happy to see each other. Trends originating with celebrities tend to be fake, meaningless or massaged, but the appeal of this model has lingered on. Overlooking the small matter of money, what, exactly, is there not to like? Or rather, what is there not to like for the women in any given couple? It’s well known that among straight couples, women initiate most divorces – by some reckonings 70% – and pushing for separate households is, I would imagine, a staging post towards this end for many of the numbers in this new trend.
Louisiana Communities Show the Many Contours of Climate Migration Organizers are tackling climate displacement from all angles—advocating for climate-displaced people, providing them with resources, and making their communities more climate-resilient. Since he purchased his 311-acre property in Cameron Parish, Louisiana, in 1998, John Allaire has watched 60 acres of it disappear. He has witnessed a series of climate disasters rapidly wash away Louisiana’s coastline, devastating already-overlooked communities like his. In 2005, he lost his home to Hurricane Rita. Climate events like these are becoming more frequent and higher in magnitude across the U.S. “We have to acknowledge that disaster outcomes exacerbate sociopolitical inequalities,” says Sara McTarnaghan, senior research associate at Metropolitan Housing and Communities Policy Center at the Urban Institute. In the aftermath of the 2020 Hurricanes Laura and Delta, for example, Allaire says the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) came and did an assessment but offered no direct relief.
We can reduce homelessness if we follow the science on what works By Maia Szalavitz In the past few months, government officials across the US have announced initiatives to reduce homelessness, a problem that has become more widespread, visible and contentious since the start of the pandemic. Yet many of the proposals now being pushed ahead seem to ignore the evidence about what actually reduces homelessness, and instead perpetuate costly and ineffective strategies that are unlikely to make a difference in the long term. Half of US adults say the problem of homelessness is a major worry. In cities including New York, San Francisco, Portland, Oregon, and elsewhere, concerns about the number and size of outdoor encampments has been growing. This increased visibility does reflect a real rise in numbers in many places. A rise in homelessness isn’t just happening in the US, either. Many of these new initiatives rely heavily on an old idea known as “treatment first”. Yet we have known since at least the early 2000s that there is a better way.
Investigation of Tech Firm Accused of Colluding With Landlords to Hike Apartment Rents ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published. The senator tasked with overseeing federal antitrust enforcement is urging the U.S. Department of Justice to investigate whether a Texas-based company’s price-setting software is undermining competition and pushing up rents. Amy Klobuchar, the Minnesota Democrat who chairs the Senate Subcommittee on Competition Policy, Antitrust and Consumer Rights, sent a letter to the DOJ’s Antitrust Division this month. “We are concerned that the use of this rate setting software essentially amounts to a cartel to artificially inflate rental rates in multifamily residential buildings,” the letter said. In mid-October, a ProPublica investigation documented how real estate tech company RealPage’s price-setting software uses nearby competitors’ nonpublic rent data to feed an algorithm that suggests what landlords should charge for available apartments each day.
We need new stories on Climate Crisis - Win the popular imagination - Change the game Every crisis is in part a storytelling crisis. This is as true of climate chaos as anything else. We are hemmed in by stories that prevent us from seeing, or believing in, or acting on the possibilities for change. Some are habits of mind, some are industry propaganda. Sometimes, the situation has changed but the stories haven’t, and people follow the old versions, like outdated maps, into dead ends. We need to leave the age of fossil fuel behind, swiftly and decisively. In order to do what the climate crisis demands of us, we have to find stories of a livable future, stories of popular power, stories that motivate people to do what it takes to make the world we need. To change our relationship to the physical world – to end an era of profligate consumption by the few that has consequences for the many – means changing how we think about pretty much everything: wealth, power, joy, time, space, nature, value, what constitutes a good life, what matters, how change itself happens.
Homelessness has risen 70% in California’s capital. Inside the staggering emergency | California Sitting on the edge of a collection of about 60 tents pitched alongside the American River, Twana James is doing her best to comfort a friend at the end of her wits. All day, the woman says, she had been waiting for a caseworker from a Sacramento non-profit to come pick her up and put her on a list for housing. “You wait all day for somebody to come and get you and they don’t come,” she cries in despair. James offers her a ride to a shelter that provides food, showers and counseling. She makes a cheeky comment about her friend’s hair, eliciting a laugh. It’s the sort of thing James, 53, does often. Dubbed the Island, the tents stretch out on a picturesque plot of land along the American River. During the pandemic, the unhoused population has soared all over California, but the increase in Sacramento has been particularly stunning. The region has seen an almost 70% rise in homelessness since 2019, now counting more unhoused people than San Francisco. ‘Encampments everywhere’
What do rich homeowners actually want? My forthcoming book of short stories A Creature Wanting Form is available for pre-order now. Aware that he only had a few months left to live the great Mike Davis gave one of his final interviews back in August to the Guardian. "You’ve been organizing for social change your whole life. How do you deal with a future that feels so bleak?" Lois Beckett asked. "For someone my age who was in the civil rights movement, and in other struggles of the 1960s, I’ve seen miracles happen," the revolutionary and historian responded. I’ve seen ordinary people do the most heroic things. I’ve always been influenced by the poems Brecht wrote in the late 30s, during the second world war, after everything had been incinerated, all the dreams and values of an entire generation destroyed, and Brecht said, well, it’s a new dark ages … how do people resist in the dark ages? I believe that as well. Davis' quote there calls to mind this stanza from Auden's September 1, 1939: Davis died this week at 76.
Molecular Beehive: Physicists Probe “Astonishing” Morphing Properties of Honeycomb-Like Quantum Material By exposing a honeycomb-like material with a specific kind of magnetic field, yellow arrow, researchers can create order among the loop currents, light blue, within that material. Electrons, in green, can then pass through the material much more easily. Credit: Oak Ridge National Laboratory A recently discovered, never-before-seen phenomenon in a type of quantum material could be explained by a series of buzzing, bee-like “loop-currents.” The specific quantum material in question is known by the chemical formula Mn3Si2Te6. “We’ve discovered a new quantum state of matter. When physicist Gang Cao and his colleagues at CU Boulder synthesized this molecular beehive in their lab in 2020, they were in for a shock: Under most circumstances, the material behaved a lot like an insulator. “It was both astonishing and puzzling,” said Cao, corresponding author of the new study and professor in the Department of Physics. He and his colleagues now believe they can explain that astonishing behavior.
The 40-Year Robbing of Rural America - In These Times Marc Edelman is a writer and Professor of Anthropology at Hunter College. In his work, academic and otherwise, Edelman investigates what he terms the underdevelopment of rural America. In a 2021 paper entitled “Hollowed out Heartland, USA” he writes “Rural decline is not simply the result of deindustrialization spurred by free trade, the farm crisis, or automation and robotization. Since the 1980s, financial capital has developed imaginative new ways to strip and seize the assets present in rural zones, whether these be mutually-owned banks, industries, cooperatively-owned grain elevators, local newspapers, hospitals, people’s homes, or stores located in towns and malls.” We discuss the destabilizing effects of such uneven development, the parallels between rural and urban landscapes of decline, and the political choices that sacrificed rural prosperity to urban agglomeration, below. Olivia Weeks, The Daily Yonder: What are “sacrifice zones” and what are the institutions they lack?
San Francisco Braces for Epic Commercial Real Estate Crash Skip to main content PoliticsEducationCriminal JusticeBusinessHousingTransportationPublic HealthCommunityArts & CulturePerspectivesSports The super-rich ‘preppers’ planning to save themselves from the apocalypse | The super-rich As a humanist who writes about the impact of digital technology on our lives, I am often mistaken for a futurist. The people most interested in hiring me for my opinions about technology are usually less concerned with building tools that help people live better lives in the present than they are in identifying the Next Big Thing through which to dominate them in the future. I don’t usually respond to their inquiries. Why help these guys ruin what’s left of the internet, much less civilisation? Still, sometimes a combination of morbid curiosity and cold hard cash is enough to get me on a stage in front of the tech elite, where I try to talk some sense into them about how their businesses are affecting our lives out here in the real world. That’s how I found myself accepting an invitation to address a group mysteriously described as “ultra-wealthy stakeholders”, out in the middle of the desert. A limo was waiting for me at the airport. They started out innocuously and predictably enough.