One of the hotter areas of physics research over the last few years has been quantum computing. Newly published research may put a damper on some of the enthusiasm about the ability of adiabatic quantum computers to outperform classic computers in some algorithms.

Early research showed that if information were stored in such a way that the value of one bit was correlated to that of another bit, then several algorithms will run faster than their classical counterparts. Examples of such algorithms include finding prime factors of large numbers, simulating quantum systems, and certain types of database searches.

Intel has announced a new partnership designed to increase the prominence of volunteer grid computing. Its new Progress Through Processors program will see the chipmaker partner with Facebook and GridRepublic to promote several of the projects that are run through BOINC, a distributed computing client that runs during idle time on volunteers' machines. Although there are a whole host of projects that can be run through the BOINC interface, Intel has chosen to focus on three: Rosetta@home, Climateprediction.net, and Africa@home.

The technology behind the endeavor is fairly well established. BOINC, run out of the University of California, Berkeley and supported by the National Science Foundation, was developed in response to the success of several early distributed computing projects, most notably SETI@home. It's designed to provide a single piece of client software that runs while a user's machine is idle. Different projects can provide computational engines that are loaded and run by the BOINC client. The single client infrastructure is intended to make it easier for individual projects to roll out updated software and for users to divide their machine's time among multiple worthy projects.

Does the level of one's personal religious level affect what one studies in college, or even if they go to college? Does a path of study influence a person's religious development? A new study released by the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan examines the correlation between these two aspects of young people's lives.

A lot of people might expect that those who study physical sciences become the least religious during their tenure at school. The research found that this is not the case; a course of study in the sciences, such as physics or biology, leads to little change in what the authors term religiosity. The survey found that the greatest positive change—those who become more religious during their studies—are those preparing for an education degree. Those who become the least religious relative to their starting point are those majoring in the social sciences.

Over the past three decades, scientists have been working on making light and matter interact strongly. This may come as a surprise, since nearly every bit of color we see around us is generally due to the interaction of light and matter. But this interaction is quite weak, and what we see is the result of light interacting billions and billions of times.

If you want to observe light interacting with a single atom or molecule, what must be done? The answer is to confine the light into a very small volume that just happens to contain the atom. But this is easier said than done. To make this job easier, researchers have shown us how to put light in a bottle.

Back in 2001, a prominent politician derided energy efficiency efforts, saying, "Conservation may be a sign of personal virtue, but it is not a sufficient basis for a sound, comprehensive energy policy." This week saw a pair of reports that can be viewed as a giant "au contraire." The National Academies of Science released a report that looked at the energy market as a whole, and concluded that conservation through efficiency would largely be enough to limit the building of new powerplants to what's needed for the replacement of obsolete facilities. Meanwhile, McKinsey & Company put some hard numbers on things: even if we limit ourselves to efficiency efforts that pay back within a decade, it'll provide the equivalent of 9.1 quadrillion BTUs of carbon-free energy by 2020.

The McKinsey report arrived at those figures by performing a fairly simple economic analysis: what measures, if rolled out on a large scale starting in the near future, would have a positive return on investment by 2020. Those are fairly conservative conditions, since many efficiency projects require a substantial up-front investment that's only paid back gradually; time horizons longer than a decade aren't uncommon when it comes to payback. Nevertheless, the numbers were staggering. $520 billion worth of investments would produce a total of $1.2 trillion in savings by 2020. Presumably, the numbers would look even better later into the century.

There is just so much going on in science that no single person can keep up with it all. So when a friend of mine sent me a copy of an article about the beginnings of a remote-controlled moth, I just had to write about it. One problem though—the research paper is from August of last year, so there may be some bemusement on the part of the researchers that the media has cottoned on to their research so late. What can I say? I don't go looking for remote-controlled moths, I wait for them to come to me.

In a recent interview with Yale Environment 360, Jane Lubchenco, the head of NOAA, called oceanic acidification global warming’s “equally evil twin.” Ocean acidification occurs because carbon dioxide, when dissolved in water, forms a weak acid. Put more CO₂ into the atmosphere, and more will inevitably dissolve into the oceans, lowering their pH. A landmark report published in 2005 by the British Royal Society urged the global community to invest more time and effort into studying this critical issue, warning that “Marine ecosystems are likely to become less robust as a result of the changes to the ocean chemistry and these will be more vulnerable to other environmental impacts.”

While research efforts have since taken off, what has been sorely lacking are datasets that could help scientists document the long-term rate of acidification and understand the underlying physical and chemical processes. That is, until now. In the latest issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, John E. Dore of Montana State University and colleagues from the University of Hawaii, Honolulu, present the results of the first set of longitudinal time-series measurements of seawater pH, spanning an almost twenty-year period (from 1988 to 2007). The data were recorded at ALOHA, a research station off Hawaii.

As in just about every other field, computers have become an essential part of biological research. Complicated algorithms and analyses that once took months of work by specialists are now available as Web services, and whole areas of study, such as genomics, can be pursued entirely in silico. But, even though most biologists know how to plug in their data and act on the output of computational tools, precious few understand the math that's going on behind the scenes, as most bioscience degree programs don't require computer science or any math more advanced than calculus.

Two papers in the latest issue of Science argue that that's a bad thing. One focuses on the ability to represent the behavior of biological systems through algebraic notation, an area that's badly neglected in both science and math education. The second focuses generally on the incorporation of biology-specific math and computer science into the education system. Both assume that the lack of a math background is a serious problem.

Marijuana is generally considered not to be an addictive drug in the traditional sense—even heavy marijuana users who stop smoking rarely experience withdrawal symptoms. However, a new study suggests that marijuana smokers can still experience difficulties quitting. Researchers at the University of Mexico and University of Colorado used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to see that even marijuana users who had not smoked for three days still respond with cravings for marijuana when presented with visual or auditory cues.

The study's participants were 38 regular marijuana users who had abstained from lighting up for 72 hours. The researchers used fMRI to observe if and when cravings were stimulated by auditory and visual cues. When the abstaining marijuana smokers had scripts read to them that evoked imagery of marijuana smoking, were presented with smoking paraphernalia, or both, areas of their brains were activated that suggested they were craving a toke. 

Their desire to smoke varied directly with the amount of marijuana-related content—the more the speakers in the script spoke of marijuana, the more the listeners craved it.

How high sea levels may rise has remained a subject of considerable debate among the climate cognoscenti. Even as their models have grown ever more sophisticated, researchers have struggled to make sense of some of the underlying physical mechanisms driving sea level fluctuations—particularly the response of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets to global warming. This, on top of the intricacies inherent to a complex system, has left sea level predictions subject to significant uncertainties.

The most recent report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), published in 2007, estimated that sea levels would rise by 18 to 59 cm by 2100. It couched its forecast in caveats, however, acknowledging that even the most advanced models did not consider the full range of changes in ice sheet flow and uncertainties in climate-carbon cycle feedbacks. Devising a single model that accurately incorporates the full array of parameters and processes that shape the global climate system has been a continual challenge for researchers, leaving most models focused on a particular variable, such as temperature, around which they center their prognostications.

To tackle changes in sea levels, a team of researchers led by Mark Siddall of Columbia University opted for a different approach, looking to the past by drawing on reconstructions of sea-level rise, derived from fossil corals, which span the past 22,000 years—since the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM). They used this to create a simpler, integrated model of sea-level response, which they detailed in the latest issue of Nature Geoscience.

The EPA has published a list of what it considers some of the greenest organizations around. "Green" is an arbitrary metric but, for the purpose of this list and article, the greenest organizations are defined as those that use the most "on-site green power" in kilowatt-hours on an annual contract basis. While one can argue which power sources really are green, the list highlights biomass, biogas, hydroelectric, wind, and solar.

Eight of the top 20 organizations listed are civic municipalities, either US cities or counties. Geographically they range from San Diego, CA to Nassau County, NY. Of these eight municipalities, six are on the west coast (CA and OR), one in the Midwest and one on the East coast. 

The number one in terms of magnitude of on-site green energy production and use is a company, the Kimberly-Clark Corporation, which makes, among other things, Scott toilet tissues, Huggies diapers, and Kleenex tissues. Headquartered in Dallas, TX they use 192.7 million kWh of green energy derived from biomass each year.

The National Science Foundation (NSF) recently awarded UC San Diego and its partners, the MIT Museum, the Franklin Institute (Philadelphia) and UC San Francisco, $3 million to fund science outreach programs. These include establishing a National Science Festival Network, hosting science enrichment activities, and funding the 2010 San Diego Science Festival. 

Back in April, we reported the success of the first ever San Diego Science Festival: Expo Day at the Park, an event that marked a month-long celebration of science in San Diego. It drew over 50,000 visitors and became “the largest single-day celebration of science in the nation.” Now the organizers are hoping to continue the success by helping cities across the nation launch similar festivals and making the original San Diego festival an annual event, as well.

To implement the new NSF grant, the organizers will need to take multiple factors into consideration. What will truly inspire people to be interested in science? How do you make a positive, lasting impression that will affect young people’s career goals? What will help parents encourage their children to study science? How do you spread the message across such a diverse nation? To find out how they plan to address some of these questions, we spoke with Loren Thompson, the Assistant Vice Chancellor of UC San Diego, and one of the principle investigators for the NSF grant.

The recent Pew survey on the status of science in the US public included two findings: the public is interested in the latest news about health issues, but it doesn't necessarily feel the press does a good job. Last Friday produced a clear indication of why. Multiple news sources credulously repeated health "facts" that were essentially made up. The reason? Someone claiming to suffer from a condition that doesn't appear to exist is releasing an album named after the apparently nonexistent condition, and wanted to raise its profile. In short, the news reports provided false health information because the reporters fell for a PR stunt.

Reports appeared in The Sun, The Telegraph, and The Daily Mail, and were picked up by Fox News and spread as far away as India. The articles describe the tormented life of a British DJ who is convinced that WiFi signals set off a variety of health symptoms, including dizziness, headaches, and nausea. With the proliferation of wireless devices, not only has this individual found it difficult to pursue his career, but also simply to find a house, shops, and pub that he feels comfortable occupying. And he is apparently not alone; the reports consistently claim that two percent of the population suffers from the same issues.

The authors of the study, incidentally, disclose a large number of potential conflicts, as they've been heavily involved with drug studies in the pharmaceutical industry. Of course, given that it's pretty impractical to patent a placebo, it seems unlikely that their corporate sponsors would influence this work.

In Nature Photonics on Monday, a paper was published in which the authors claimed to have experimentally demonstrated a cloaking device that was effective at optical frequencies. I was excited; unfortunately, I was also busy, so I only managed to read the whole paper today. So, belatedly, I bring you the latest in cloaking research.

The research, performed at Cornell, makes use of transformation optics, which we have discussed before, but it is not cloaking as your local Star Trek fan club knows it. On the other hand, what the researchers are selling as cloaking could find a whole range of applications that don't involve invisibility at all.