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Israel and Palestine - after his visit to
Jerusalem, the Pope called leaders of
Israel and Palestine for a joint prayer
session in the Vatican to pray for peace
in the Middle East
Europe - the local elections in Britain had very
unexpected results. The Liberal Democrats
and Concervatives both suffered losses but
the Labour Party an UKIP made large gains.
UKIP also made large gains in the European
Qatar - despite having been
chose to host the 2022 world
cup, Qatar is now under
investigation as Sepp Blatter
raised issues of racism and
discrimination
Brazil - as the world cup
approaches, people take
to the streets in protest.
61% of people think
hosting the world cup is
a bad idea as it diverts
spending from important
public services
Ukraine - Petro Poroshenko was
made president of Ukraine. he
met with Vladimir Putin presi-
dent of Russia to try to make a
peace agreement beteen their two
countries.
It is common knowledge that there are a
fair amount of misconceptions through-
out science. It seems tome, however, that
chief among thesemisconceptions is not
one of misunderstood equations or me-
dia fuelled panic pandemics, but rather
one regarding science itself as a whole;
there is an all too common belief that
“real” science is in the past.
Theproblemis rooted in the fact that only
long established scientific phenomena
are given a spot on the current school
syllabus; the cutting edge of science,
whilst often not more difficult to un-
derstand than any other concept, gets
not even amere footnote. The result? A
populationof potentialNobel laureates,
99%ofwhicharekept inthedarkabout
anything that the media doesn’t think
will sell.
In an attempt to inspire the allevia-
tion of this issue, here are a couple
of nuggets from the shores of the
current scientific frontier that I be-
lieve everyone should be excited
about…
3D Bioprinting
When someone says 3D printing to me,
I picture the 3D printer in our technol-
ogy department. Surprisingly, when it
comes to printing human cells, it turns
out that the process is not that differ-
ent. Biologists are bringing science
fiction to life, using a “bio-ink” of living
cells tocreatecomputerdesigned living
structures layer by layer. The latest ob-
stacle to be overcome in this field is the
creating of blood vessels; an essential
aspect regarding the preservation of
cells in artificial structures.
Although there is still work to be done in
the field, the progress is looking prom-
ising.
Quantumcomputing
Classical computers – those which sit un-
der your desk or buried in your mobile
– use something called a “bit” to trans-
port information and perform calcula-
tions and commands. A “bit” can have
two states: 0 or 1. These two states are
represented physically by, for example,
voltage: whether a bulb is on or off.
Quantum computers use quantum bits,
or “qubits”, which can also be repre-
sented physically by, for example, the
“spin” of an electron. In this context, it
is not
important to understand what the “spin”
of an electron is, only that it can be ei-
ther spin up (1) or spin down (0). How-
ever, there is something special about
the way things work in the world of
subatomic particles.An electron can
be thought of as both spin up AND spin
down, withbothstatesbeing reprosent-
ed by the fundamental probabilities
of their transpiring when measured.
This is called a quantum superposi-
tion. The upshot of this (and one that
unfortunately cannot be explained
in in a column of text) is that n qubits
can theoretically contain 2^n pieces of
information. So 30 qubits can contain
1,073,741,824 pieces of information
whereas itwouldbeonly30pieces for a
classical bit. The power of exponentials
means we would only need 300 qubits
to have as many pieces of information
as there are atoms in the known uni-
verse. This has huge implications for
the
potential speedof extremelycomplexcal-
culations in the future.
C
utting
edge
