Running complicated algorithms on quantum computing hardware is going to require the use of logical qubits, where collections of hardware qubits are linked together in ways that allow errors to be detected and corrected. In general, the more hardware qubits you dedicate to each logical qubit, the better the chances are of identifying errors. But, given that the hardware qubits are prone to errors, adding more of them also increases the probability that errors will occur. If the hardware error rate is too high, then growing the logical qubit will only make matters worse.

Fortunately, several companies have demonstrated hardware where the error rate is not too high. Several demonstrations show logical qubits are beyond the breakeven point, where adding more qubits improves performance. The problem is that the improvement isn't very dramatic. To lower error rates to levels we'll need to run complex algorithms, we'd have to add a completely impractical number of qubits to each logical qubit.

On Monday, Quantinuum announced that its current generation of hardware is capable of scaling well beyond the breakeven point. Each step up in the size of logical qubits improved some measures of their performance by a factor of over 10.

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A protein is a chain of amino acids held together by what are called peptide bonds. On their own, those bonds are extremely stable; they're estimated to have a half-life of several hundred years. But in Earth's environment, most proteins don't last nearly that long. That's because organisms have evolved a handful of ways to catalyze the break-up of peptide bonds, which have diversified into countless specialized protein-digesting enzymes. Proteases are everywhere and generally make short work of any proteins that find their way into the environment.

Now, researchers have basically short-circuited the diversification process, using AI-based protein design tools to take the catalytic core of two types of protease and replace the entire rest of the protein. The resulting enzymes could be tuned to cut specific proteins in half, and the researchers demonstrated their effectiveness by using them to cut proteins associated with neurological diseases.

Cutting proteins

The basic peptide bond isn't especially interesting-looking—it's what you get when you link an amino group to an acid, releasing a water molecule in the process. As their name implies, amino acids have both an amino and an acid group, allowing them to form peptide bonds on two sides of the amino acid. This is critical for building up the long chains found in proteins. (The amino acids also have side chains with distinctive chemistry, which gives a backbone specific properties.)

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In most cases, hotspot-driven volcanism is relatively sedate, with lava flowing down mountainsides slowly enough that people can walk out of its way. But in a number of locations—Mount Etna, Hawaii, Iceland—lava gets expelled in dramatic fountains that can reach several hundred meters in height.

Right now, we're not sure what powers them. However, thanks to a recent set of eruptions at the Kilauea volcano, we have some of the best documentation yet of erupting lava fountains. In a recent edition of Science, researchers from the US Geological Survey describe what we've seen and compare it with what we might expect based on our best ideas about what powers these fountains of molten rock.

Years of fountains

With three active volcanic regions that engage in fountaining, there has been a steady flow of dramatic videos of red-hot molten rock spouting from the Earth. But Kilauea has had only three fountaining episodes since 1823, even though it's the youngest and most active volcano in Hawaii. That activity has led to intensive study, and we have a good idea of the volcano's structure. Previous work has identified a couple of lava residues within a few kilometers of the surface, and the volcano had 35 separate data-gathering stations set up on Kilauea, including "seismic, infrasound, geodetic, gas, and visual and thermal cameras."

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