In the quest to make computers accurate and reliable, noise is the enemy. The thermal jiggling of atoms is a constant threat to the precision needed for detailed calculations. Whether we’re dealing with familiar classical devices like the laptops or supercomputers that we use today, or fancy quantum devices that promise us faster computation tomorrow, we don’t want some haphazard heat fluctuation…
In 1993, a team led by the planetary scientist Carl Sagan tentatively concluded that there is life on Earth. Not much of a deduction, you might think — except that the researchers confined their evidence to observations made by the Galileo spacecraft, which had flown past our planet three years earlier on a looping journey to Jupiter. So great is the transformative power of life that its presence…
Since its molecular structure was deduced in the 1950s, DNA has been hailed by many biologists as the secret of life. They’ve read and studied the information stored in the DNA found in the cells of living organisms, known as their genomes, and claimed that this genetic database must be some kind of blueprint, code script, or computer. But if DNA really does harbor some greater secret about how…
Login