Qubits, the quantum equivalent of digital bits, are fragile and prone to errors. That makes building reliable quantum computers extremely difficult. One fix has been to use traditional magic state distillation, which filters out flaws, but it is extremely resource-intensive.

Another potential solution is magic state cultivation, which cleans up a noisy magic state (a specially prepared quantum state that is needed for advanced calculations) directly inside a protected qubit. But this approach has never been tested successfully on real hardware.

However, in a first for quantum computing, Google Quantum AI researchers have demonstrated magic state cultivation on Willow, a superconducting proces...

A Ph.D. student at the University of Sydney has produced the first comprehensive classification system and map of Martian soils, creating a new framework that could help scientists compare landscapes across the Red Planet and identify promising locations for future exploration, habitation and food production.

The research, led by Daniel Irving from the Sydney Institute of Agriculture and the Faculty of Science, proposes a new term for Martian soil classes: “areths,” derived from Ares, the Greek name for Mars.

Published in the journal CATENA, the research uses orbital observations and models to classify almost 800 million locations across Mars into a hierarchy of 2,000 soil classes and presents ...

A common gut bacterium produces a molecule that slows cholesterol production in the liver. When researchers gave the molecule to mice prone to artery disease, the animals developed roughly half as much fatty plaque as untreated controls.

The molecule acts on the same enzyme targeted by statins, the widely used cholesterol-lowering drugs. That connection offers a concrete explanation for something harder to untangle: how bacteria living in the intestine might influence the health of arteries elsewhere in the body.

Researchers at institutions including Sun Yat-sen University and Shenzhen ...

Silicon spin qubits are a promising platform for building scalable quantum computers as they are compatible with the semiconductor manufacturing technologies used to produce today’s computer chips. However, they have an important weakness: silicon spin qubits typically lose accuracy when several qubits are under parallel control. To be useful, quantum computers will need to operate many qubits simultaneously without compromising the accuracy of their operations.

Now, in a study published in Nature Physics, researchers from the RIKEN Center for Emergent Matter Science and collaborators have addressed this challenge by achieving high-fidelity control of multiple sili...