Category Archives: science

Ars Scientia Essay Prize (contest): The Art-Science Connection

The contest is for undergraduate students at the University of British Columbia (UBC) and the deadline is Wednesday, April 30, 2025 at 6 pm PT. I’ve got more about the contest from an April 23, 2025 Belkin Gallery (The Belkin) newsletter (received via email and it can be seen here for a limited time)

Ars Scientia Essay Prize: The Art-Science Connection

Deadline: Wednesday, April 30 at 6 pm

$1,000 Prize for the Winning Entry

Ars Scientia, UBC’s interdisciplinary initiative at the intersection of art and science, welcomes all UBC undergraduate students across campus to participate in our 2025 Essay Prize. This is an opportunity to explore the profound and often catalyzing connections between these two fields. If we take the long view, art and science have been considered pursuits comfortably woven together for most of human history. Somehow over the past two centuries we lost sight of that holistic worldview and these disciplines became seemingly incompatible. You are invited to write an essay considering how art and science are inextricably linked in fundamental and generative ways, addressing specific examples you have encountered – in a lab, an experiment; in an exhibition, an artwork; perhaps a thought experiment.

READ MORE…

From the Belkin Gallery’s Ars Scientia Essay Prize 2025 webpage,

….

Details & Submission

Eligibility: UBC undergraduate students

Prize: $1000 for the winning entry

Publication: The best essay will be published on the Ars Scientia website, featured in the Quantum Matter Institute’s newsletter, and shared through other relevant online platforms.

Length: 1000-word limit

Deadline: 6 PM PDT, Wednesday, 30 April, 2025

How to Submit: email your essay as a PDF attachment to: arsscientia@ubc.ca

As part of Ars Scientia’s mission to foster dialogue between artistic and scientific inquiry, this competition is an invitation for you to explore, challenge, and celebrate creative intersections of art and science. We look forward to your insights!

Good luck.

For anyone who’s curious about Ars Scientia, I have a lot more about this partnership between the University of British Columbia’s (UBC; Vancouver, Canada) Stewart Blusson Quantum Matter Institute (Blusson QMI), Morris & Helen Belkin Art Gallery (the Belkin), and its Department of Physics and Astronomy (UBC PHAS). Just search ‘Ars Scientia’ in this blog’s search engine.

Arabic manuscript containing lost works of Apollonius discussed in new book about Middle Eastern science (etc.) scholarship

This February 4, 2025 news item is essentially a book announcement but what makes it exceptionally interesting is how one of history’s great mathematicians had some of his work preserved in an Arabic manuscript, Note: Links have been removed,

Scientists say that the two lost, but extremely important books by Apollonius, the Greek mathematician known to the ancient world as “The Great Geometer,” have survived in an Arabic manuscript kept under lock and key as part of the prized possessions of the Leiden University Libraries in Holland.

The revelation is made in a new volume of 50 chapters titled “Prophets, Poets and Scholars” and published recently by Leiden University Press.

Apollonius (262 BC–190 BC) is believed to be one of Greece’s greatest mathematicians and is renowned for his hugely influential book, “The Conics of Apollonius” in which he introduces the terms hyperbola, ellipse, and parabola.

A February 4, 2025 University of Sharjah press release on EurekAlert delves more deeply into the topic,

According to the volume, “The Conics of Apollonius (c. 2.00 BCE) was one of the most profound works of ancient Greek mathematics. The work deals with the theory of ellipses, parabolas, and hyperbolas – the curves which you can see if you shine a flashlight on a wall.” Apollonius’s work comprises eight books, but only the first four were available to European scholars during the Renaissance.

The lost books – 5 and 7 – were brought to the Leiden University by the famous Dutch orientalist and mathematician Jacob Golius who had bought them for the university as part of a collection of nearly 200 manuscripts during his various voyages to the Middle East.

The 50 chapters in the book touch on the history of the Netherlands’ relationships with the orient, particularly the Middle East and North Africa, emphasizing that the first encounters with Arabic manuscripts occurred in the early 17th century.

The 17th century saw the first Dutchman, Thomas Erpenius, gaining pre-eminence in oriental studies. “He concentrated on Arabic text editions, primers for students and most importantly an Arabic grammar that would remain in use as a standard work for more than two centuries,” the volume’s editors write in their introductory chapter.

But the first Dutch “to have ever set foot in the Middle east or North Africa was … Jacobus Golius (1596-1667).  On his travels he bought more than 200 Middle Eastern manuscripts for Leiden University,” say the editors. However, “Golius’s fame rests mainly on his lexicon Arabian-Latinum, a large folio volume printed by the then firm of Elzevier in 1653.  The work is based on the Arabic lexicographical manuscripts that he had acquired on his travels.”

It is the manuscripts which Golius purchased for the Leiden University Libraries that attract the attention of numerous scholars who have contributed to the volume. For instance, a chapter focuses on an 11th century Arabic manuscript, which is a translation of the lost mathematical works attributed to Apollonius. In the meantime, the essay dwells on four other Arabic manuscripts bought by Golius to present some aspects of the scientific traditions prevalent in the heyday of Arab and Muslims civilization.

The Arabic translation of Apollonius is fascinating, Dutch mathematician and historian of science, Jan Pieter Hogendijk, says in an email interview, adding that besides its exact science, it is adorned with colored images and written in skillful Arabic calligraphy. “The calligraphy in some of these manuscripts is wonderful and also the geometrical figures were written with extreme care.

“They (manuscripts) are a witness of the mental abilities, discipline, power of concentration, will power and so on which the scientists and also the scribes possessed, and which modern people, spoiled by their gadgets, mobile phones, and so on, do not possess anymore.”

The volume, according to the editors, “serves as an introduction to more than fifty contributions of scholars and librarians who are intimately familiar with diverse aspects of the collections (of Leiden University Libraries), both ancient and modern.”

The volume is a nice read as it is written for the public. It is luxuriously illustrated with ancient maps, images, and extracts from Arabic, Turkish and Persian manuscripts. Besides accounts and analyses of scientific traditions prevalent among Arabs and Muslims in the Middle Ages, the volume narrates some fantasy tales from Arabic travel literature, which still captivate the mind.

In their studies and analyses, the scientists find that their authors would often add an entertaining touch mingled with fantasy to their narrative. “They (the texts) were often mixed with legendary accounts, especially in reports about the outer edges of the known world, where the laws of nature were no longer fixed and strange things might occur.

“There women might grow on trees, people might have arms where we have our ears, and might come across islands exclusively inhabited either by women or by men. All this has left its traces in the Middle Eastern written heritage, and also in the accompanying pictorial tradition.”

In the section dedicated to Arabic manuscripts and titled “The Great Arabic Heritage,” there is emphasis on cosmography besides astronomy, mathematics, zoology, botany, planetology, among other sciences.

There is emphasis on a renowned Muslim cosmographer Ibn Muhammad al-Qazwini’s “Ajaib al-Makhluqat wa Khraib al-Mawjudat (Wonders of Creations and Rarities of Extant Beings), an encyclopedic work which, according to the volume tackles “the humble creatures such as fleas, worms and lice to exotic animals surrounded by mystery and legends.”

Some creatures can be merely fantasy beings like the turtle which “sailors moored their ship on it, taking the motionless animal that had become overgrown with vegetation for an island” – reminiscent of the creatures one comes across in the famous Travels of Sindbad the Sailor.

However, as one of the fascinating chapters in the volume underscores, “sometimes one has to rid oneself of preconceived ideas to understand the descriptions. Such a case is a sea creature described by Qazwini, … its face is like that of man, it has a white beard, its body looks like that of a frog, its hair is like a cow’s and its size like that of a calf. It takes us a moment to see that this is a perfectly adequate description of some kind of seal.”

Mostafa Zahri, University of Sharjah Professor of numerical analysis and mathematical modeling, says the prized possessions of “Arabic manuscripts in Western libraries like Leiden University Libraries serve as invaluable records of Islamic civilization’s intellectual achievements, especially in mathematics and geometry.

“Western institutions, besides Leiden University, namely the British Library, and the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, house thousands of Arabic, Persian, and Ottoman manuscripts containing rare geometric treatises. These collections bridge historical and modern scholarships.”

However, and despite the wealth of knowledge they hold, many manuscripts remain understudied and only greater collaboration, digitization, and accessibility between Western and Arab scholars could unlock their full historical and mathematical value, says Prof. Zahri.

In an email interview, Wilfred de Graaf, Education Coordinator at Utrecht University concurs, emphasizing that only a small portion of collections of Arabic and Islamic manuscript texts have been studied. He attributes the scarcity of studies in this sphere to the lack of scholars in the West who are fluent in oriental language like Arabic, Persian and Turkish, in which most Islamic manuscripts are written.

Nonetheless, he adds that more and more ancient texts are unraveled assisting scholars to obtain “a general view of the development of science in the Islamic tradition. “In the West, there is an interest in the Islamic scientific tradition, not only because of it being crucial for the development of science in Europe between the 11th and 14th century, but also because of the intrinsic nature of its contributions.”

Mesut Idriz, Sharjah University’s Professor of Islamic civilization, says bringing Arabic and Islamic manuscripts to life is among the hardest labors social science researchers face. “Islamic manuscript studies require a nuanced understanding of both the textual and scientific traditions they encapsulate.

“The study of Islamic manuscripts demands specialized knowledge, encompassing paleography, historical context, linguistic expertise, and scientific specialization—areas that are often underdeveloped among contemporary researchers and academics.”

Drawing on Leiden University Libraries’ Arabic manuscripts, a team of Western scientists held a workshop at the University of Sharjah in the United Arab Emirates in January 2025 to teach participants the method by which Arab and Muslim scientists wrote numbers in a numeral system called abjad, in reference to the Arabic alphabet, a right-to-left script.

The abjad is a numeral system in which the first of the 28-letter Arabic alphabet ‘alif’ represents 1, and the second letter ‘baa’ is 2 up to 9. The other letters stand for nine intervals of 10s and then those of 100s ending with 1000.

“The scientists in the Islamic tradition used abjad in combination with the sexagesimal system which is still used today for time (hours, minutes and seconds) and angles (degrees, arc minutes and arc seconds),” Wilfred, who organized the workshop, said.

This is the second workshop in nearly two months Western scientists hold [sic] at the University of Sharjah to present Arabic manuscripts to the Arab academic community and demonstrate the uses Arab and Muslim scientific instruments were put to in the Middle Ages. In them, the participants were made to read in detail the abjad numbers on an early astrolabe, an Arabic astronomical instrument.

Besides the Arabic manuscript in which the two lost works of Apollonius were found, there are extracts and studies in the volume tackling a variety of scientific traditions prevalent among the Arabs in the Middle Ages.

One chapter analyzes a figure from an 11th century manuscript attributed to al-Mu’taman ibn Hud, King of Saragossa between 1081 and 1085. The chapter shows how Muslim scientists managed to solve an ancient Greek geometry puzzle nearly half a millennium before a solution to the same problem was found in Europe. Muslim scientists’ solution of the puzzle, according to the chapter, “is part of a huge mathematical encyclopedia called the Book of Perfections of which a small fragment has been preserved.”

Quoting from yet another 14th century Arabic manuscript, the chapter shows how Muslim scientists could determine the geographical coordinates of no less than 160 cities with a high degree of accuracy and minimum error margin.

“The names of the cities appear in black and the numbers in red are the longitudes in degrees and minutes, and the latitude in degrees and minutes,” says Prof. Hogendijk. “The numbers are written in the alphabetical abjad system used by most astronomers, in which a numerical value is attributed to each letter. The first column begins with localities in the two provinces of Western and Eastern Azerbaijan in modern Iran.”

The book, “Prophets, Poets and Scholars; The Collections of the Middle Eastern Library of Leiden University” Editor: Arnoud Vrolijk, Kasper van Ommen, Karin Scheper & Tijmen Baarda, can be found on its Leiden University Press publication order page.

Physics of the Wild Cards fictional universe, a paper by physicist Ian Tregillis and author George RR Martin

I don’t often get a chance to mention superstar authors such as George RR Martin here but it does happen when science fiction authors and physics are concerned.

Caption: A coordinate system for the polar model of the Wild Cards system and an example of the viral vector trajectories. Credit: Ian Tregillis

A January 23, 2025 news item on phys.org announces the research paper,

Many science fiction authors try to incorporate scientific principles into their work, but Ian Tregillis, who is a contributing author of the Wild Cards book series when he’s not working as a physicist at Los Alamos National Laboratory, took it one step further: He derived a formula to describe the dynamics of the fictional universe’s viral system.

In independent research published in the American Journal of Physics, from AIP Publishing, Tregillis and George R.R. Martin derive a formula for viral behavior in the Wild Cards universe.

A January 23, 2025 American Institute of Physics (AIP) news release (also on EurekAlert), which originated the news item, describes both the ‘Wild Cards universe’ and the speculative physics in more detail,

Wild Cards is a science fiction series written by a collection of authors and edited by Martin and Melinda M. Snodgrass. Sitting at over 30 volumes, the books are about an alien virus called the Wild Card that mutates human DNA. Martin is credited as a co-author of the paper, making it his first peer-reviewed physics publication.

The idea to explore the science behind the fictional virus came from a series of blog posts on the Wild Cards website.

“Like any physicist, I started with back-of-the-envelope estimates, but then I went off the deep end. Eventually I suggested, only half-jokingly, that it might be easier to write a genuine physics paper than another blog post,” Tregillis said. “Being a theoretician, I couldn’t help but wonder if a simple underlying model might tidy up the canon.”

The formula he derived is a Lagrangian formulation, which considers the different ways a system can evolve. It’s also a fundamental physics principle, which also makes the fictional example a powerful teaching tool.

Tregillis shared that deriving this physical model was a fun but open-ended puzzle. After some trial and error of models based on fractals or thermodynamic analogies, he and Martin settled on the Lagrangian approach.

“We translated the abstract problem of Wild Card viral outcomes into a simple, concrete dynamical system. The time-averaged behavior of this system generates the statistical distribution of outcomes,” he said.

While the Wild Card virus can be modeled by physics, Tregillis emphasized that it isn’t a hard-and-fast rule in the canon.

“Good storytelling is about characters: their wants, needs, obstacles, challenges, and how they interact with their world,” Tregillis said. “The fictional virus is really just an excuse to justify the world of Wild Cards, the characters who inhabit it, and the plot lines that spin out from their actions.”

Here’s a link to and a citation for the paper,

Ergodic Lagrangian dynamics in a superhero universe by I. L. Tregillis and George R. R. Martin. Am. J. Phys. Volume 93, Issue 2 February 2025 127–136 DOI: https://doi.org/10.1119/5.0228859

This paper is open access.

One other thing, Wild Cards, a current television programme which has nothing to do with George RR Martin or physics, stars Vanessa Morgan and Giacomo Gianniotti in a Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) production about a con artist and a police officer solving crimes toghether can be seen here.

The nuclear fusion energy race

In addition to the competition to develop commercial quantum computing, there’s the competition to develop commercial nuclear fusion energy. I have four stories about nuclear fusion, one from Spain, one from Chine, one from the US, and one from Vancouver. There are also a couple of segues into history and the recently (April 2, 2025) announced US tariffs (chaos has since ensued as these have become ‘on again/off again’ tariffs) but the bulk of this posting is focused on the latest (January – early April 2025) in fusion energy.

Fission nuclear energy, where atoms are split, is better known; fusion nuclear energy is released when a star is formed. For anyone unfamiliar with the word tokamak as applied to nuclear fusion (which is mentioned in all the stories), you can find out more in the Tokamak Wikipedia entry.

Spain

A January 21, 2025 news item on phys.org announces the first plasma generated by a tokamak,

In a pioneering approach to achieve fusion energy, the SMART device has successfully generated its first tokamak plasma. This step brings the international fusion community closer to achieving sustainable, clean, and virtually limitless energy through controlled fusion reactions.

A January 21, 2025 University of Seville press release on EurekAlert, which originated the news item, provides some explanations and more detail about the work, Note: Links have been removed,

The SMART tokamak, a state-of-the-art experimental fusion device designed, constructed and operated by the Plasma Science and Fusion Technology Laboratory of the University of Seville, is a worldwide unique spherical tokamak due to its flexible shaping capabilities. SMART has been designed to demonstrate the unique physics and engineering properties of Negative Triangularity shaped plasmas towards compact fusion power plants based on Spherical Tokamaks.

Prof. Manuel García Muñoz, Principal Investigator of the SMART tokamak, stated: “This is an important achievement for the entire team as we are now entering the operational phase of SMART. The SMART approach is a potential game changer with attractive fusion performance and power handling for future compact fusion reactors. We have exciting times ahead!
Prof. Eleonora Viezzer, co-PI of the SMART project, adds: “We were all very excited to see the first magnetically confined plasma and are looking forward to exploiting the capabilities of the SMART device together with the international scientific community. SMART has awoken great interest worldwide.

When negative becomes positive and compact

The triangularity describes the shape of the plasma. Most tokamaks operate with positive triangularity, meaning that the plasma shape looks like a D. When the D is mirrored (as shown in the figure on the right), the plasma has negative triangularity.

Negative triangularity plasma shapes feature enhanced performance as it suppresses instabilities that expel particles and energy from the plasma, preventing severe damage to the tokamak wall. Besides offering high fusion performance, negative triangularity also feature attractive power handling solutions, given that it covers a larger divertor area for distributing the heat exhaust. This also facilitates the engineering design for future compact fusion power plants.

Fusion2Grid aimed at developing the foundation for the most compact fusion power plant

SMART is the first step in the Fusion2Grid strategy led by the PSFT team and, in collaboration with the international fusion community, is aimed at the most compact and most efficient magnetically confined fusion power plant based on Negative Triangularity shaped Spherical Tokamaks.

SMART will be the first compact spherical tokamak operating at fusion temperatures with negative triangularity shaped plasmas.

The objective of SMART is to provide the physics and engineering basis for the most compact design of a fusion power plant based on high-field Spherical Tokamaks combined with Negative Triangularity. The solenoid-driven plasma represents a major achievement in the timeline of getting SMART online and advancing towards the most compact fusion device.

The Plasma Science and Fusion Technology Lab of the University of Seville hosts the SMall Aspect Ratio Tokamak (SMART) and leads several worldwide efforts on energetic particles and plasma transport and stability towards the development of magnetically confined fusion energy.

Here’s a link to and a citation for the paper,

Performance prediction applying different reduced turbulence models to the SMART tokamak by D.J. Cruz-Zabala, M. Podestàa, F. Polib, S.M. Kaye, M. Garcia-Munoz, E. Viezzer and J.W. Berkery. Nuclear Fusion, Volume 64, Number 12DOI 10.1088/1741-4326/ad8a70 Published 7 November 2024 © 2024 The Author(s). Published by IOP Publishing Ltd on behalf of the IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency)

This paper is open access.

China

Caption: The Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak achieved a remarkable scientific milestone by maintaining steady-state high-confinement plasma operation for an impressive 1,066 seconds. Credit: Image by HFIPS ( Hefei Institutes of Physical Science at the Chinese Academy of Sciences)

China has made a business announcement and there is no academic paper mentioned in their January 21, 2025 press release on EurekAlert (also available on phys.org as a January 21, 2025 news item), Note: A link has been removed,

The Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak (EAST), commonly known as China’s “artificial sun,” has achieved a remarkable scientific milestone by maintaining steady-state high-confinement plasma operation for an impressive 1,066 seconds. This accomplishment, reached on Monday, sets a new world record and marks a significant breakthrough in the pursuit of fusion power generation.

The duration of 1,066 seconds is a critical advancement in fusion research. This milestone, achieved by the Institute of Plasma Physics (ASIPP) at Hefei Institutes of Physical Scienece [sic] (HFIPS) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, far surpasses the previous world record of 403 seconds, also set by EAST in 2023.

The ultimate goal of developing an artificial sun is to replicate the nuclear fusion processes that occurr [sci] in the sun, providing humanity with a limitless and clean energy source, and enabling exploration beyond our solar system.

Scientists worldwide have dedicated over 70 years to this ambitious goal. However, generating electricity from a nuclear fusion device involves overcoming key challenges, including reaching temperatures exceeding 100 million degrees Celsius, maintaining stable long-term operation, and ensuring precise control of the fusion process.

“A fusion device must achieve stable operation at high efficiency for thousands of seconds to enable the self-sustaining circulation of plasma, which is essential for the continuous power generation of future fusion plants,” said SONG Yuntao, ASIPP director and also vice president of HFIPS. He said that the recent record is monumental, marking a critical step toward realizing a functional fusion reactor.

According to GONG Xianzu, head of the EAST Physics and Experimental Operations division, several systems of the EAST device have been upgraded since the last round of experiments. For example, the heating system, which previously operated at the equivalent power of nearly 70,000 household microwave ovens, has now doubled its power output while maintaining stability and continuity.

Since its inception in 2006, EAST has served as an open testing platform for both Chinese and international scientists to conduct fusion-related experiments and research.

China officially joined the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) program in 2006 as its seventh member. Under the agreement, China is responsible for approximately 9 percent of the project’s construction and operation, with ASIPP serving as the primary institution for the Chinese mission.

ITER, currently under construction in southern France, is set to become the world’s largest magnetic confinement plasma physics experiment and the largest experimental tokamak nuclear fusion reactor upon completion.

In recent years, EAST has consistently achieved groundbreaking advancements in high-confinement mode, a fundamental operational mode for experimental fusion reactors like ITER and the future China Fusion Engineering Test Reactor (CFETR). These accomplishments provide invaluable insights and references for the global development of fusion reactors.

“We hope to expand international collaboration via EAST and bring fusion energy into practical use for humanity,” said SONG.

In Hefei, Anhui Province, China, where EAST is loacated [sic], a new generation of experimental fusion research facilities is currently under construction. These facilities aim to further accelerate the development and application of fusion energy.

I always feel a little less confident about the information when there are mistakes. Three typos in the same press release? Maybe someone forgot to give it a final once over?

US

Despite the Cambridge University Press mention, this March 27, 2025 Cambridge University Press press release (also on EurekAlert) is about a US development,

Successfully harnessing the power of fusion energy could lead to cleaner and safer energy for all – and contribute substantially to combatting [UK spelling] the climate crisis. Towards this goal, Type One Energy has published a comprehensive, self-consistent, and robust physics basis for a practical fusion pilot power plant.  

This groundbreaking research is presented in a series of six peer-reviewed scientific papers in a special issue of the prestigious Journal of Plasma Physics (JPP), published by Cambridge University Press. 

The articles serve as the foundation for the company’s first fusion power plant project, which Type One Energy is developing with the Tennessee Valley Authority utility in the United States.  

Alex Schekochihin, Professor of Theoretical Physics at the University of Oxford and Editor of the JPP, spoke with enthusiasm about this development: 

“JPP is very proud to provide a platform for rigorous peer review and publication of the papers presenting the physics basis of the Infinity Two stellarator — an innovative and ground-breaking addition to the expanding family of proposed fusion power plant designs.  

“Fusion science and technology are experiencing a period of very rapid development, driven by both public and private enthusiasm for fusion power. In this environment of creative and entrepreneurial ferment, it is crucial that new ideas and designs are both publicly shared and thoroughly scrutinised by the scientific community — Type One Energy and JPP are setting the gold standard for how this is done (as we did with Commonwealth Fusion Systems 5 years ago for their SPARC physics basis).” 

The new physics design basis for the pilot power plant is a robust effort to consider realistically the complex relationship between challenging, competing requirements that all need to function together for fusion energy to be possible.  

This new physics solution also builds on the operating characteristics of high-performing stellarator fusion technology – a stellarator being a machine that uses complex, helical magnetic fields to confine the plasma, thereby enabling scientists to control it and create suitable conditions for fusion. This technology is already being used with success on the world’s largest research stellarator, the Wendelstein 7-X, located in Germany, but the challenge embraced by Type One Energy’s new design is how to scale it up to a pilot plant. 

Building the future of energy 

Functional fusion technology could offer limitless clean energy. As global energy demands increase and energy security is front of mind, too, this new physics design basis comes at an excellent time.  

Christofer Mowry, CEO of Type One Energy, is cognisant of the landmark nature of his company’s achievement and proud of its strong, real-world foundations. 

“The physics basis for our new fusion power plant is grounded in Type One Energy’s expert knowledge about reliable, economic, electrical generation for the power grid. We have an organisation that understands this isn’t only about designing a science project.” 

This research was developed collaboratively between Type One Energy and a broad coalition of scientists from national laboratories and universities around the world. Collaborating organisations included the US Department of Energy, for using their supercomputers, such as the exascale Frontier machine at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, to perform its physics simulations. 

While commercial fusion energy has yet to move from theory into practice, this new research marks an important and promising milestone. Clean and abundant energy may yet become reality.  

You can read the six papers and the accompanying Editorial (all of which are open access) in this special issue, Physics Basics of the Infinity Two Fusion Power Plant of the Journal of Plasma Physics.

Bull Run, eh?

This is not directly related to fusion energy, so, you might want to skip this section.

Caption: Type One Energy employees at the Bull Run [emphasis mine] Fossil Plant, soon to be home to the prototype Infinity One. Credit: Type One Energy

I wonder if anyone argued for a change of name given how charged the US history associated with ‘Bull Run’ is, from the the First Battle of Bull Run Wikipedia entry, Note: Links have been removed,

The First Battle of Bull Run, called the Battle of First Manassas[1] by Confederate forces, was the first major battle of the American Civil War. The battle was fought on July 21, 1861, in Prince William County, Virginia, just north of what is now the city of Manassas and about thirty miles west-southwest of Washington, D.C. The Union Army was slow in positioning themselves, allowing Confederate reinforcements time to arrive by rail. Each side had about 18,000 poorly trained and poorly led troops. The battle was a Confederate victory and was followed by a disorganized post-battle retreat of the Union forces.

A Confederate victory the first time and the second time (Second Battle of Bull Run Wikipedia entry)? For anyone unfamiliar with the history, the US Civil War was fought from 1861 to 1865 between Union and Confederate forces. The Confederate states had seceded from the union (US) and were fighting to retain their slavery-based economy and they lost the war.

Had anyone consulted me I would have advised changing the name from Bull Run to some thing less charged (pun noted) to host your prototype fusion energy pilot plant.

Back to the usual programme.

Type One Energy

Type One Energy issued a March 27, 2025 news release about the special issue of the Journal of Plasma Physics (JPP), Note 1: Some of this redundant; Note 2: Links have been removed,

Type One Energy announced today publication of the world’s first comprehensive, self-consistent, and robust physics basis, with conservative design margins, for a practical fusion pilot power plant. This physics basis is presented in a series of seven peer-reviewed scientific papers in a special issue of the prestigious Journal of Plasma Physics (JPP). They serve as the foundation for the company’s first Infinity Two stellarator fusion power plant project, which Type One Energy is developing for the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) utility in the U.S.

The Infinity Two fusion pilot power plant physics design basis realistically considers, for the first time, the complex relationship between competing requirements for plasma performance, power plant startup, construction logistics, reliability, and economics utilizing actual power plant operating experience. This Infinity Two baseline physics solution makes use of the inherently favorable operating characteristics of highly optimized stellarator fusion technology using modular superconducting magnets, as was so successfully proven on the W7-X science machine in Germany.

“Why are we the first private fusion company with an agreement to develop a potential fusion power plant project for an energy utility? Because we have a design anchored in reality,” said Christofer Mowry, CEO of Type One Energy. “The physics basis for Infinity Two is grounded in the knowledge of what is required for application to, and performance in, the demanding environment of reliable electrical generation for the power grid. We have an organization that understands this isn’t about designing a science project.”

Led by Chris Hegna, widely recognized as a leading theorist in modern stellarators, Type One Energy performed high-fidelity computational plasma physics analyses to substantially reduce the risk of meeting Infinity Two power plant functional and performance requirements. This unique and transformational achievement is the result of a global development program led by the Type One Energy plasma physics and stellarator engineering organization, with significant contributions from a broad coalition of scientists from national laboratories and universities around the world. The company made use of a spectrum of high-performance computing facilities, including access to the highest-performance U.S. Department of Energy supercomputers such as the exascale Frontier machine at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), to perform its stellarator physics simulations.

“We committed to this ambitious fusion commercialization milestone two years ago and today we delivered,” said John Canik, Chief Science and Engineering Officer for Type One Energy. “The team was able to efficiently develop deep plasma physics insights to inform the design of our Infinity Two stellarator, by taking advantage of our access to high performance computing resources. This enabled the Type One Energy team to demonstrate a realistic, integrated stellarator design that moves far beyond conventional thinking and concepts derived from more limited modeling capabilities.”

The consistent and robust physics solution for Infinity Two results in a deuterium-tritium (D-T) fueled, burning plasma stellarator with 800 MW of fusion power and delivers a nominal 350 MWe to the power grid. It is characterized by fusion plasma with resilient and stable behavior across a broad range of operating conditions, very low heat loss due to turbulent transport, as well as tolerable direct energy losses to the stellarator first wall. The Infinity Two stellarator has sufficient room for both adequately sized island divertors to exhaust helium ash and a blanket which provides appropriate shielding and tritium breeding. Type One Energy has high confidence that this essential physics solution provides a good baseline stellarator configuration for the Infinity Two fusion pilot power plant.

“The articles in this issue [of JPP] represent an important step towards a fusion reactor based on the stellarator concept. Thanks to decades of experiments and theoretical research, much of the latter published in JPP, it has become possible to lay out the physics basis for a stellarator power plant in considerable detail,” said Per Helander, head of Stellarator Theory Division at the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics. “JPP is very happy to publish this series of papers from Type One Energy, where this has been accomplished in a way that sets new standards for the fidelity and confidence level in this context.”

Important to successful fusion power plant commercialization, this stellarator configuration has enabled Type One Energy to architect a maintenance solution which supports good power plant Capacity Factors (CF) and associated Levelized Cost of Electricity (LCOE). It also supports favorable regulatory requirements for component manufacturing and power plant construction methods essential to achieving a reasonable Over-Night Cost (ONC) for Infinity Two.

About Type One Energy

Type One Energy Group is mission-driven to provide sustainable, affordable fusion power to the world. Established in 2019 and venture-backed in 2023, the company is led by a team of globally recognized fusion scientists with a strong track record of building state-of-the-art stellarator fusion machines, together with veteran business leaders experienced in scaling companies and commercializing energy technologies. Type One Energy applies proven advanced manufacturing methods, modern computational physics and high-field superconducting magnets to develop its optimized stellarator fusion energy system. Its FusionDirect development program pursues the lowest-risk, shortest-schedule path to a fusion power plant over the coming decade, using a partner-intensive and capital-efficient strategy. Type One Energy is committed to community engagement in the development and deployment of its clean energy technology. For more information, visit www.typeoneenergy.com or follow us on LinkedIn.

While the company is currently headquartered in Knoxville, Tennessee, it was originally a spinoff company from the University of Wisconsin-Madison according to a March 30, 2023 posting on the university’s College of Engineering website,

Type One Energy, a Middleton, Wisconsin-based fusion energy company with roots in the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s College of Engineering, recently announced its first round of seed funding, raising $29 million from investors. The company has also onboarded a new, highly experienced CEO [Christofer Mowry].

Type One, founded in 2019 by a team of globally recognized fusion scientists and business leaders, is hoping to commercialize stellarator technology over the next decade. Stellarators are a type of fusion reactor that uses powerful magnets to confine ultra-hot streams of plasma in order to create the conditions for fusion reactions. Energy from fusion promises to be clean, safe, renewable power. The company is using advanced manufacturing methods, modern computational physics and high-field superconducting magnets to develop its stellarator through an initiative called FusionDirect.

According to the Type One Energy’s About page, there are four offices with the headquarters in Tennessee,

Knoxville (Headquarters)
2410 Cherahala Blvd.
Knoxville, TN 37931

Madison
316 W Washington Ave. Suite 300
Madison, WI 53703

Boston
299 Washington St. Suites C & E
Woburn, MA 01801

Vancouver
1140 West Pender St.
Vancouver, BC V6E 4G1

The mention of an office in Vancouver, Canada piqued my curiosity but before getting to that, I’m going to include some informative excerpts about nuclear energy (both fission and fusion) from this August 31, 2023 article written by Tina Tosukhowong on behalf of TDK Ventures, which was posted on Medium,

Fusion power is the key to the energy transformation that humanity needs to drive decarbonization, clean, and baseload energy production that is inherently fail-safe, with no risk of long-lived radioactive waste, while also delivering on ever-growing energy-consumption demands at the global scale. Fusion is hard and requires exceptional conditions for sustained reaction (which is part of what makes it so safe), which has long served as a deterrent for technical maturation and industrial viability. …

The current reality of our world is monumental fossil-fuel dependence. This, coupled with unprecedented levels of energy demand has resulted in the over 136,700 TWh (that’s 10¹²) of energy consumed via fossil fuels annually [1]. Chief repercussion among the many consequences of this dependence is the now very looming threat of climate catastrophe, which will soon be irreversible if global temperature rise is not abated and held to within 1.5 °C of pre-industrial levels. To do so, the nearly 40 gigatons of CO2 emissions generated each year must be steadily reduced and eventually mitigated entirely [2]. A fundamental shift in how power is generated globally is the only way forward. Humanity needs an energy transformation — the right energy transformation.

Alternative energy-generation techniques, such as wind, solar, geothermal, and hydroelectric approaches have all made excellent strides, and indeed in just the United States electricity generated by renewable methods doubled from 10 to 20% of total between 2010 and 2020 [3–4]. These numbers are incredibly encouraging and give significant credence in the journey to net-zero emission energy generation. However, while these standard renewable approaches should be championed, wind and solar are intermittent and require a large amount of land to deploy, while geothermal and hydroelectric are not available in every geography.

By far the most viable candidates for continuous clean energy generation to replace coal-fired power plants are nuclear-driven technologies, i.e. nuclear fission or nuclear fusion. Nuclear fission has been a proven effective method ever since it was first demonstrated almost 80 years ago underneath the University of Chicago football Stadium by Nobel Laureate Enrico Fermi [5]. Heavier atomic elements, in most cases Uranium-235, are exposed to and bombarded by neutrons. This causes the Uranium to split resulting in two slightly less-heavy elements (like Barium and Krypton). This in turn causes energy to be released and more neutrons to be ejected and bombard other nearby Uranium-235, at which point the process cascades into a chain reaction. The released energy (heat) is utilized in the same way coal is burned in a traditional power plant, being subsequently used to generate electricity usually via the creation of steam to drive a turbine [6]. While already having reached viable commercial maturity, fission carries inherent and nontrivial safety concerns. An unhampered chain reaction can quickly lead to meltdown with disastrous consequences, and, even when properly managed, the end reaction does generate radioactive waste whose half-life can last hundreds of thousands of years.

Figure 1. Breakdown of a nuclear fission reaction [6]. Incident neutron bombards a fissile heavy element, splitting it and release energy and more nuclei setting off a chain reaction.

Especially given modernization efforts and meteoric gains in safety (thanks to advents in material science like ceramic coatings), fission will continue to be a critical piece to better, greener energy transformation. However, in extending our vision to an even brighter future with no such concerns — carbon emissions or safety — nuclear fusion is humanity’s silver bullet. Instead of breaking down atoms leading to a chain reaction, fusion is the combining of atoms (usually isotopes of Hydrogen) into heavier elements which also results in energy release / heat generation [7]. Like fission, fusion can be designed to be a continuous energy source that can serve as a permanent backbone to the power grid. It is extremely energy dense, with 1 kg of fusion fuel producing the same amount of energy as 1,000,000 kg of coal, and it is inherently fail-safe with no long-term radioactive waste.

As a concept, if fusion is a silver bullet to answer humanity’s energy transformation needs, then why haven’t we done so already? The appeal seems so obvious, what’s the hold up? Simply put, nuclear fusion is hard for the very same reason the process is inherently safe. Atoms in the process must have enough energy to overcome electrostatic repulsive forces between the two positive charges of their nuclei to fuse. The key figure of merit to evaluate fusion is the so-called “Lawson Triple Product.” Essentially, this means in order to generate energy by fusion more than the rate of energy oss to the environment, the nuclei must be very close together (as represented by n — the plasma density), kept at a high enough temperature (as represented by T — temperature), and for long enough time to sustain fusion (as represented by τ — the confinement time). The triple product required to achieve fusion “ignition” (the state where the rate of energy production is higher than the rate of loss) depends on the fuel type and occurs within a plasma state. A deuterium and tritium (D-T) system has the lowest Lawson Triple product requirement, where fusion can achieve a viable threshold for ignition when the density of the fuel atoms, n, multiplied by the fuel temperature, T, multiplied by the confinement time, τ, is greater than 5×10²¹ (nTτ > 5×10²¹ keV-s/m³) [8–9]. For context, the temperature alone in this scenario must be higher than 100-million degrees Celsius.

Figure 2. (Left) Conceptual illustration of a fusion reaction with Deuterium (²H) and Tritium (³H) forming an Alpha particle (⁴He) and free neutron along with energy released as heat (Right). To initiate fusion, repelling electrostatic charge must be overcome via conditions meeting the minimum Lawson Triple Product threshold

Tosukhowong’s August 31, 2023 article provides a good overview keeping in mind that it is slanted to justify TDK’s investment in Type One Energy.

Why a Vancouver, Canada office?

As for Type One Energy’s Vancouver (British Columbia, Canada) connection, I was reminded of General Fusion, a local fusion energy company while speculating about the connection. First speculative question: could Type One Energy’s presence in Canada allow it to access Canadian government funds for its research? Second speculative question: do they want to have access to people who might hesitate to move to the US or might want to move out of the US but would move to Canada?

The US is currently in an unstable state as suggested in this April 3, 2025 opinion piece by Les Leyne for vancouverisawsome.com

Les Leyne: Trump’s incoherence makes responding to tariff wall tricky

Trump’s announcement was so incoherent that much of the rest of the world had to scramble to grasp even the basic details

B.C. officials were guarded Wednesday [April 2, 2025] about the impact on Canada of the tariff wall U.S. President Donald Trump erected around the U.S., but it appears it could have been worse.

Trump’s announcement was so incoherent that much of the rest of the world had to scramble to grasp even the basic details. So cabinet ministers begged for more time to check the impacts.

“It’s still very uncertain,” said Housing Minister Ravi Kahlon, who chairs the “war room” committee responsible for countering tariff threats. “It’s hard to make sense from President Trump’s speech.” [emphasis mine]

Kahlon said the challenge is that tariff policies change hour by hour, “and anything can happen.”

On April 2, 2025 US President Donald Trump announced tariffs (then paused some of the tariffs on April 9, 2025) and some of the targets seemed a bit odd, from an April 2, 2025 article by Alex Galbraith for salon.com, Note: Links have been removed,

“Trade war with penguins”: Trump places 10% tariff on uninhabited Antarctic islands

Planned tariffs shared by the White House included a 10% duty on imports from the barren Heard and McDonald Islands

For once in his life, Donald Trump underpromised and over-delivered. 

The president announced a 10% duty on all imports on Wednesday [April 2, 2025], along with a raft of reciprocal tariffs on U.S. trading partners. An extensive graphic released by the White House showed how far Trump was willing to take his tit-for-tat trade war, including a shocking levy of 10% on all imports from the Heard and McDonald Islands. 

If you haven’t heard of this powerhouse of global trade and territory of Australia, you aren’t alone. Few have outside of Antarctic researchers and seals. These extremely remote islands about 1,000 miles north of Antarctica consist mostly of barren tundra. They’re also entirely uninhabited. 

The news that we were starting a trade war with penguins spread quickly after Trump’s announcement. …

U.S. stock futures crumbled following the news of Trump’s widespread tariffs. Dow futures fell by nearly 1,000 points while NASDAQ and S&P futures fell by 3 to 4%. American companies’ stock values rapidly tumbled after the announcement, with large retail importers seeing significant losses. …

No word from the penguins about the ‘pause’. I’m assuming Donald Trump’s next book will be titled, “The art of negotiating trade deals with penguins.” Can’t wait to read it.

(Perhaps someone should tell him there are no penguins in the Arctic so he can’t bypass Canadians or Greenlanders to make a deal.)

Now for the local story.

General Fusion

There’ve been two recent developments at General Fusion. Most recently, an April 2, 2025 General Fusion news release announces a new hire, Note: Links have been removed,

Bob Smith is joining General Fusion as a strategic advisor. Smith brings more than 35 years of experience developing, scaling, and launching world-changing technologies, including spearheading new products and innovation in the aerospace industry at United Space Alliance, Sandia Labs, and Honeywell before serving as CEO of Blue Origin. He joins General Fusion as the company’s Lawson Machine 26 (LM26) fusion demonstration begins operations and progresses toward transformative technical milestones on the path to commercialization.

“I’ve been watching the fusion energy industry closely for my entire career. Fusion is the last energy source humanity will ever need, and I believe its impact as a zero-carbon energy source will transform the global energy supply at the time needed to fight the worst consequences of climate change,” said Smith. “I am thrilled to work with General Fusion. Their novel approach has inherent and distinctive benefits for the generation of commercially competitive fusion power. It’s exciting to join at a time when the team is about to demonstrate the fundamental physics behind their system and move to scaling up to a pilot plant.”

The LM26 program marks a significant step towards commercialization, as the company’s unique Magnetized Target Fusion (MTF) approach makes the path to powering the grid with fusion energy more straightforward than other technologies—because it practically addresses barriers to fusion commercialization, such as neutron material degradation, sustainable fuel production, and efficient energy extraction. As a strategic advisor, Smith will leverage his experience advancing game-changing technologies to help guide General Fusion’s technology development and strategic growth.

“Bob’s insights and experience will be invaluable as we execute the LM26 program and look beyond it to propel our practical technology to powering the grid by the mid-2030s,” said Greg Twinney, CEO, General Fusion. “We are grateful for his commitment of his in-demand time and expertise to our mission and look forward to working together to make fusion power a reality!”

About Bob Smith:

Bob is an experienced business leader in the aerospace and defense industry with extensive technical and operational expertise across the sector. He worked at and managed federal labs, led developments at a large government contractor, grew businesses at a Fortune 100 multinational, and scaled up a launch and space systems startup. Bob also has extensive international experience and has worked with suppliers and OEMs in all the major aerospace regions, including establishing new sites and factories in Europe, India, China, and Puerto Rico.

Bob’s prior leadership roles include Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Blue Origin, President of Mechanical Systems & Components at Honeywell Aerospace, Chief Technology Officer at Honeywell Aerospace, Chairman of NTESS (Sandia Labs), and Executive Director of Space Shuttle Upgrades at United Space Alliance.

Bob holds a Bachelor of Science degree in aerospace engineering from Texas A&M, a Master of Science degree in engineering/applied mathematics from Brown University, a doctorate from the University of Texas in aerospace engineering, and a business degree from MIT’s Sloan School of Management. Bob is also a Fellow of the Royal Aeronautical Society, a Fellow of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, and an Academician in the International Academy of Astronautics.

Quick Facts:  

  • Fusion energy is the ultimate clean energy solution—it is the energy source that powers the sun and stars. Fusion is the process by which two light nuclei merge to form a heavier one, producing a massive amount of energy.
  • General Fusion’s Magnetized Target Fusion (MTF) technology is designed to scale for cost-efficient power plants. It uses mechanical compression to create fusion conditions in short pulses, eliminating the need for expensive lasers or superconducting magnets. An MTF power plant is designed to produce its own fuel and inherently includes a method to extract the energy and put it to work.
  • Lawson Machine 26 (LM26) is a world-first Magnetized Target Fusion demonstration. Launched, designed, and assembled in just 16 months, the machine is now forming magnetized plasmas regularly at 50 per cent commercial scale. It is advancing towards a series of results that will demonstrate MTF in a commercially relevant way: 10 million degrees Celsius (1 keV), 100 million degrees Celsius (10 keV), and scientific breakeven equivalent (100% Lawson).

About General Fusion
General Fusion is pursuing a fast and practical approach to commercial fusion energy and is headquartered in Richmond, Canada. The company was established in 2002 and is funded by a global syndicate of leading energy venture capital firms, industry leaders, and technology pioneers. Learn more at www.generalfusion.com.

Bob Smith and Blue Origin: things did not go well

Sometimes you end up in a job and things do not work out well and that seems to have been the case at Blue Origin according to a September 25, 2023 article by Eric Berger for Ars Tecnica,

After six years of running Blue Origin, Bob Smith announced in a company-wide email on Monday that he will be “stepping aside” as chief executive of the space company founded by Jeff Bezos.

“It has been my privilege to be part of this great team, and I am confident that Blue Origin’s greatest achievements are still ahead of us,” Smith wrote in an email. “We’ve rapidly scaled this company from its prototyping and research roots to a large, prominent space business.”

Shortly after Smith’s email, a Blue Origin spokesperson said the company’s new chief executive will be Dave Limp, who stepped down as Amazon’s vice president of devices and services last month.

To put things politely, Smith has had a rocky tenure as Blue Origin’s chief executive. After being personally vetted and hired by Bezos, Smith took over from Rob Meyerson in 2017. The Honeywell engineer was given a mandate to transform Blue Origin into a large and profitable space business.

He did succeed in growing Blue Origin. The company had about 1,500 employees when Smith arrived, and the company now employs nearly 11,000 people. But he has been significantly late on a number of key programs, including the BE-4 rocket engine and the New Glenn rocket.

As a space reporter, I have spoken with dozens of current and former Blue Origin employees, and virtually none of them have had anything positive to say about Smith’s tenure as chief executive. I asked one current employee about the hiring of Limp on Monday afternoon, and their response was, “Anything is better than Bob.”

Although it is very far from an exact barometer, Smith has received consistently low ratings on Glassdoor for his performance as chief executive of Blue Origin. And two years ago, a group of current and former Blue Origin employees wrote a blistering letter about the company under Smith. “In our experience, Blue Origin’s culture sits on a foundation that ignores the plight of our planet, turns a blind eye to sexism, is not sufficiently attuned to safety concerns, and silences those who seek to correct wrongs,” the essay authors wrote.

With any corporate culture, there will be growing pains, of course. But Smith brought a traditional aerospace mindset into a company that had hitherto been guided by a new space vision, leading to a high turnover rate. And Blue Origin remains significantly underwater, financially. It is likely that Bezos is still providing about $2 billion a year to support the company’s cash needs.

Crucially, as Blue Origin meandered under Smith’s tenure, SpaceX soared, launching hundreds of rockets and thousands of satellites. Smith, clearly, was not the leader Blue Origin needed to make the company more competitive with SpaceX in launch and other spaceflight activities. It became something of a parlor game in the space industry to guess when Bezos would finally get around to firing Smith.

On the technical front, a March 27, 2025 General Fusion news release announces “Peer-reviewed publication confirms General Fusion achieved plasma energy confinement time required for its LM26 large-scale fusion machine,” Note: Links have been removed,

New results published in Nuclear Fusion confirm General Fusion successfully created magnetized plasmas that achieved energy confinement times exceeding 10 milliseconds. The published energy confinement time results were achieved on General Fusion’s PI3 plasma injector — the world’s largest and most powerful plasma injector of its kind. Commissioned in 2017, PI3 formed approximately 20,000 plasmas in a machine of 50 per cent commercial scale. The plasma injector is now integrated into General Fusion’s Lawson Machine 26 (LM26) — a world-first Magnetized Target Fusion demonstration tracking toward game-changing technical milestones that will advance the company’s ultimate mission: generating zero-carbon fusion energy for the grid in the next decade.

The 10-millisecond energy confinement time is the duration required to compress plasmas in LM26 to achieve key temperature thresholds of 1 keV, 10 keV, and, ultimately, scientific breakeven equivalent (100% Lawson). These results were imperative to de-risking LM26. The demonstration machine is now forming plasmas regularly, and the company is optimizing its plasma performance in preparation for compressing plasmas to create fusion and heating from compression.    

Key Findings: 

  • The plasma injector now integrated into General Fusion’s LM26 achieved energy confinement times exceeding 10 milliseconds, the pre-compression confinement time required for LM26’s targeted technical milestones. These results were achieved without requiring active magnetic stabilization or auxiliary heating. This means the results were achieved without superconducting magnets, demonstrating the company’s cost-effective approach.  
  • The plasma’s energy confinement time improved when the plasma injector vessel was coated with natural lithium. A key differentiator in General Fusion’s commercial approach is its use of a liquid lithium wall to compress plasmas during compression. In addition to the confinement time advantages shown in this paper, the liquid lithium wall will also protect a commercial MTF machine from neutron damage, enable the machine to breed its own fuel, and provide an efficient method for extracting energy from the machine.
  • The maximum energy confinement time achieved by PI3 was approximately 12 milliseconds. The machine’s maximum plasma density was approximately 6×1019 m-3, and maximum plasma temperatures exceeded 400 eV. These strong pre-compression results support LM26’s transformative targets.

Quotes:  

“LM26 is designed to achieve a series of results that will demonstrate MTF in a commercially relevant way. Following LM26’s results, our unique approach makes the path to powering the grid with fusion energy more straightforward than other technologies because we have front-loaded the work to address the barriers to commercialization.”  

Dr. Michel Laberge
Founder and Chief Science Officer

“For over 16 years, I have worked hand in hand with Michel to advance General Fusion’s practical technology. This company is entrepreneurial at its core. We pride ourselves on building real machines that get results that matter, and I’m thrilled to have the achievements recognized in Nuclear Fusion.”

Mike Donaldson
Senior Vice President, Technology Development

Here’s a link to and a citation for the paper,

Thermal energy confinement time of spherical tokamak plasmas in PI3 by A. Tancetti, C. Ribeiro, S.J. Howard, S. Coop, C.P. McNally, M. Reynolds, P. Kholodov, F. Braglia, R. Zindler, C. Macdonald. Nuclear Fusion, Volume 65, Number 3DOI: 10.1088/1741-4326/adb8fb Published 28 February 2025 • © 2025 The Author(s). Published by IOP Publishing Ltd on behalf of the IAEA [International Atomic Energy Agency]

This paper is open access.

For anyone curious about General Fusion, I have a brief overview and history of the company and their particular approach to fusion energy in my February 6, 2024 posting (scroll down to ‘The Canadians’).

Say ain’t so! van Gogh’s ‘The Starry Night’ is not a masterpiece when it comes to flow physics according to researchers

Researchers at Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU; US) have challenged the findings in recent research that was highlighted here in a December 16, 2024 posting “van Gogh’s sky is alive with real-world physics.”

An April 1, 2025 news item (not an April Fool’s joke) on phys.org announces a conclusion that contradicts the original findings,

The Dutch master Vincent van Gogh may have painted one of Western history’s most enduring works, but “The Starry Night” is not a masterpiece of flow physics—despite recent attention to its captivating swirls, according to researchers from Virginia Commonwealth University and the University of Washington [state not district].

Credit: Pixabay/CC0 Public Domain [downloaded from https://phys.org/news/2025-04-vincent-van-gogh-starry-night.html].

An April 1, 2025 Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU) news release (also on EurekAlert) by Leila Ugincius, which originated the news item, goes on to further refute the claim about Starry Night and flow physics, Note: Links have been removed,

The post-Impressionist artist painted the work (often referred to simply as “Starry Night”) in June 1889, and its depiction of a pre-sunrise sky and village was inspired in part by the view from van Gogh’s asylum room in southern France. The painting is part of the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.

Last year, a paper published in the September issue of Physics of Fluids – “Hidden Turbulence in van Gogh’s ‘The Starry Night’” – received considerable notice by positing that the eddies, or swirls, painted by van Gogh adhere to Kolmogorov’s theory of turbulent flow, which explains how air and water swirls move in a somewhat chaotic pattern. “[van Gogh] was able to reproduce not only the size of whirls/eddies, but also their relative distance and intensity in his painting,” the paper read.

However, those conclusions are unfounded, according to Mohamed Gad-el-Hak, Ph.D., the Inez Caudill Eminent Professor in VCU’s Department of Mechanical and Nuclear Engineering, and James J. Riley, Ph.D., the inaugural Paccar Professor of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Washington. Their report –  “Is There Hidden Turbulence in Vincent van Gogh’s ‘The Starry Night’?” – appears in the latest issue of Journal of Turbulence.

Here’s a link to and a citation for the paper,

Is there hidden turbulence in Vincent van Gogh’s The Starry Night? by James J. Riley
& Mohamed Gad-el-Hak. Journal of Turbulence Pages 1–2. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/14685248.2025.2477244 Published online: 18 Mar 2025

This paper is behind a paywall.

Genetic study of native hazelnut reveals how ancient Indigenous peoples used the land

Large, rounded beaked hazelnuts associated with the Shuswap region, growing at the ancestral village of Gitsaex in Laxyuumb Gitselasu, northwestern BC [British Columbia]. Courtesy: Simon Fraser University

A December 6, 2024 news item on ScienceDaily announces some research from Simon Fraser University (SFU; Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada),

By decoding the DNA of the beaked hazelnut (Corylus cornuta), a native plant that thrives in British Columbia, a team of multidisciplinary scientists is providing new insight into how ancestral Indigenous peoples stewarded plants across the province.

Led by Chelsey Geralda Armstrong, an assistant professor in Simon Fraser University’s (SFU) Department of Indigenous Studies, the innovative study was recently published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science(PNAS), a major scientific journal. 

A December 4, 2024 Simon Fraser University (SFU) news release (also on EurekAlert but published December 5, 2024), which originated the news item, expands on this intriguing story,

“The misconception that Indigenous peoples did not use or steward the land is widespread across North America, but is very pointed in British Columbia, where landscapes are often described as ‘wild’ or ‘untouched,’” says Armstrong of the engrained cultural biases she seeks to address through her research.

Far from being only “hunter-gatherers” — an anthropological designation of the early 20th century to describe Indigenous peoples on the northwest coast — the study challenges settler-colonial narratives by establishing people actively cultivated hazelnut on a continental scale, beginning likely 7,000 years ago.

Indigenous knowledge inspires genetic research

As an ethnoecologist and archaeologist, Armstrong specializes in finding hidden signs of how humans in the distant past co-evolved with, and co-constitute, lived environments. To understand the intertwined histories of people and plants, Armstrong often works for and with Indigenous Elders and knowledge-holders.

Through previous projects, Armstrong became aware of oral traditions that told of how ancient humans cultivated beaked hazelnut. In addition to providing a reliable source of nutrition, people uncovered ingenious uses for all parts of the plant: making medicine and cosmetics from its oil; producing a rich blue dye from its roots; as well as building and crafting useful items, such as snowshoes, from its flexible-yet-durable wood and shoots.

Armstrong was inspired to investigate how the genetic profile of the hazelnut aligned with the knowledge passed down for generations, and brought together a team of geneticists and linguists to find multifaceted evidence of how actions by humans led the beaked hazelnut to become naturalized in the forests of British Columbia.

Genes point to trade and plant transplantation over long distances

Alongside oral traditions, Armstrong’s team found similarities in Indigenous languages in the province that indicate the beaked hazelnut was a versatile commodity that was traded and shared among different communities, “British Columbia is very linguistically diverse. We found that the word for hazelnut is similar in many Indigenous languages, where there should be no similarities.” 

To retrace how the native hazelnut spread across Western North America, Armstrong and her team collected specimens found throughout the province, but also focused on sampling near archaeological village sites. A team of interdisciplinary scientists from the Hakai Institute worked closely with Armstrong to analyze the DNA of these specimens and mapped out the geographic distribution of plants sharing these genetic traits.

“We found that people were actively transplanting and cultivating hazelnuts hundreds of kilometers from their place of origin,” Armstrong explains of the expansive trade activity the maps illustrated. “People were moving hazelnut around and selectively managing it to the point that it increased genetic diversity. This type of activity was previously thought to be entirely absent in the Pacific Northwest.”

Significantly, by analyzing specimens from the Skeena Watershed, Armstrong’s team identified unique hazelnut clusters that are only found at the origin place of the Gitxsan, Ts’msyen, and Nisga’a peoples. “Genetic clustering allowed us to map something that appears subtle,” says Armstrong of the finding, which supports Indigenous land claims in the area.

Reconnecting with Indigenous science will support food security

According to Armstrong, settler-colonial efforts to systematically separate Indigenous peoples from their land and suppress traditional knowledge have obscured the role humans played in shaping the landscape. By using genetic evidence to recount the shared history of people and plants, the study brings wider appreciation to the effective methods Indigenous peoples used to manage the land for millennia. 

Jesse Stoeppler (Gwii Lok’im Gibuu), who belongs to Wilp Spookwx of the Lax Gibuu Clan, is a Gitxsan land steward, co-executive director of the Skeena Watershed Coalition and Deputy Chief of the Hagwilget First Nation. Stoeppler believes that mobilizing this traditional knowledge will benefit his community’s economy and the environment. “Throughout thousands of years of human history, someone has faced the same problems our communities are facing now and has found a solution,” says Stoeppler. “Our future is in our past. Our people saw value in the hazelnut and practiced stewardship of the land. The flora and fauna in the area were able to thrive in that environment. Understanding this can support food sovereignty in our communities.”

Similarly, Armstrong says the study indicates that ancestral Indigenous peoples understood the importance of genetic diversity in promoting environmental sustainability, “This research confirms what Indigenous peoples have always known: plants were cultivated and engineered to a level that is now observable in the genetic structure of hazelnut.” 

You can get more information about what the researchers unearthed (couldn’t resist the wordplay) in a December 4, 4024 article by Amanda Follett Hosgood for The Tyee,

… most intriguing was the complexity in northwest B.C., where five distinct genetic hazelnut clusters are scattered around the area surrounding Temlaxam — a region that today includes the community of Hazelton.

Armstrong said the findings were the “opposite of what you’d expect” from plants in an isolated grouping, which would normally lack genetic diversity.

“The pattern here with increased genetic diversity… that’s huge unto itself,” she said. “When you drill down and you start to look at the ethnographic record, the archeological record, things start to come together in this really neat way.”

The same study that unearthed the 3,500-year-old landslide at Seeley Lake, about 10 kilometres west of Hazelton, also found that hazelnut pollen abruptly appeared at the location about 7,000 years ago.

Here’s a link to and a citation for the paper,

Genetic differentiation and precolonial Indigenous cultivation of hazelnut (Corylus cornuta, Betulaceae) in western North America by Chelsey Geralda Armstrong, Rute B. G. Clemente-Carvalho, Nancy J. Turner, Sara Wickham, Andrew Trant, and Matthew A. Lemay. PNAS (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences) November 18, 2024 121 (48) e2402304121 DOI https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2402304121

This paper is behind a paywall.

Is your smart TV or your car spying on you?

Simple answer: Yes.

Smart television sets (TVs)

A December 10, 2024 Universidad Carlos III de Madrid press release (also on EurekAlert) offers details about the data collected by smart TVs,

A scientific team from Universidad Carlos III de Madrid (UC3M), in collaboration with University College London (England) and the University of California, Davis (USA), has found that smart TVs send viewing data to their servers. This allows brands to generate detailed profiles of consumers’ habits and tailor advertisements based on their behaviour.

The research revealed that this technology captures screenshots or audio to identify the content displayed on the screen using Automatic Content Recognition (ACR) technology. This data is then periodically sent to specific servers, even when the TV is used as an external screen or connected to a laptop.

“Automatic Content Recognition works like a kind of visual Shazam, taking screenshots or audio to create a viewer profile based on their content consumption habits. This technology enables manufacturers’ platforms to profile users accurately, much like the internet does,” explains one of the study’s authors, Patricia Callejo, a professor in UC3M’s Department of Telematics Engineering and a fellow at the UC3M-Santander Big Data Institute. “In any case, this tracking—regardless of the usage mode—raises serious privacy concerns, especially when the TV is used solely as a monitor.”

The findings, presented in November [2024] at the Internet Measurement Conference (IMC) 2024, highlight the frequency with which these screenshots are transmitted to the servers of the brands analysed: Samsung and LG. Specifically, the research showed that Samsung TVs sent this information every minute, while LG devices did so every 15 seconds. “This gives us an idea of the intensity of the monitoring and shows that smart TV platforms collect large volumes of data on users, regardless of how they consume content—whether through traditional TV viewing or devices connected via HDMI, like laptops or gaming consoles,” Callejo emphasises.

To test the ability of TVs to block ACR tracking, the research team experimented with various privacy settings on smart TVs. The results demonstrated that, while users can voluntarily block the transmission of this data to servers, the default setting is for TVs to perform ACR. “The problem is that not all users are aware of this,” adds Callejo, who considers this lack of transparency in initial settings concerning. “Moreover, many users don’t know how to change the settings, meaning these devices function by default as tracking mechanisms for their activity.”

This research opens up new avenues for studying the tracking capabilities of cloud-connected devices that communicate with each other (commonly known as the Internet of Things, or IoT). It also suggests that manufacturers and regulators must urgently address the challenges that these new devices will present in the near future.

Here’s a link to and a citation for the paper,

Watching TV with the Second-Party: A First Look at Automatic Content Recognition Tracking in Smart TVs by Gianluca Anselmi, Yash Vekaria, Alexander D’Souza, Patricia Callejo, Anna Maria Mandalari, Zubair Shafiq. IMC ’24: Proceedings of the 2024 ACM on Internet Measurement Conference Pages 622 – 634 DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/3646547.3689013 Published: 04 November 2024

This paper is open access.

Cars

This was on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s (CBC) Day Six radio programme and the segment is embedded in a January 19, 2025 article by Philip Drost, Note: A link has been removed,

When a Tesla Cybertruck exploded outside Trump International Hotel in Las Vegas on New Year’s Day [2025], authorities were quickly able to gather information, crediting Elon Musk and Tesla for sending them info about the car and its driver. 

But for some, it’s alarming to discover that kind of information is so readily available.

“Most carmakers are selling drivers’ personal information. That’s something that we know based on their privacy policies,” Zoë MacDonald, a writer and researcher focussing on online privacy and digital rights, told Day 6 host Brent Bambury.

The Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department said the Tesla CEO was able to provide key details about the truck’s driver, who authorities believe died by self-inflicted gun wound at the scene, and its movement leading up to the destination. 

With that data, they were able to determine that the explosives came from a device in the truck, not the vehicle itself.  

“We have now confirmed that the explosion was caused by very large fireworks and/or a bomb carried in the bed of the rented Cybertruck and is unrelated to the vehicle itself,” Musk wrote on X following the explosion.

To privacy experts, it’s another example of how your personal information can be used in ways you may not be aware of. And while this kind of data can useful in an investigation, it’s by no means the only way companies use the information.  

“This is unfortunately not surprising that they have this data,” said David Choffnes, executive director of the Cybersecurity and Privacy Institute at Northeastern University in Boston.

“When you see it all together and know that a company has that information and continues at any point in time to hand it over to law enforcement, then you start to be a little uncomfortable, even if — in this case — it was a good thing for society.”

CBC News reached out to Tesla for comment but did not hear back before publication. 

I found this to be eye-opening, Note: A link has been removed,

MacDonald says the privacy concerns are a byproduct of all the technology new cars come with these days, including microphones, cameras, and sensors. The app that often accompanies a new car is collecting your information, too, she says.

The former writer for the Mozilla Foundation worked on a report in 2023 that examined vehicle privacy policies. For that study, MacDonald sifted through privacy policies from auto manufacturers. And she says the findings were staggering.

Most shocking of all is the information the car can learn from you, MacDonald says. It’s not just when you gas up or start your engine. Your vehicle can learn your sexual activity, disability status, and even your religious beliefs [emphasis mine].

MacDonald says it’s unclear how they car companies do this, because the information in the policies are so vague.

It can also collect biometric data, such as facial geometric features, iris scans, and fingerprints [emphasis mine].

This extends far past the driver. MacDonald says she read one privacy policy that required drivers to read out a statement every time someone entered the vehicle, to make them aware of the data the car collects, something that seems unlikely to go down before your Uber ride.

If that doesn’t bother you, then this might, Note: A link has been removed,

And car companies aren’t just keeping that information to themselves.

Confronted with these types of privacy concerns, many people simply say they have nothing to hide, Choffnes says. But when money is involved, they change their tune. 

According to an investigation from the New York Times in March of 2024, General Motors shared information on how people drive their cars with data brokers that create risk profiles for the insurance industry, which resulted in people’s insurance premiums going up [emphases mine]. General Motors has since said it has stopped sharing those details [emphasis mine].

“The issue with these kinds of services is that it’s not clear that it is being done in a correct or fair way, and that those costs are actually unfair to consumers,” said Choffnes. 

For example, if you make a hard stop to avoid an accident because of something the car in front of you did, the vehicle could register it as poor driving.

Drost’s January 19, 2025 article notes that the US Federal Trade Commission has proposed a five year moratorium to prevent General Motors from selling geolocation and driver behavior data to consumer report agencies. In the meantime,

“Cars are a privacy nightmare. And that is not a problem that Canadian consumers can solve or should solve or should have the burden to try to solve for themselves,” said MacDonald.

If you have the time, read Drost’s January 19, 2025 article and/or listen to the embedded radio segment.

Microsoft, D-Wave Systems, quantum computing, and quantum supremacy?

Before diving into some of the latest quantum computing doings, here’s why quantum computing is so highly prized and chased after, from the Quantum supremacy Wikipedia entry, Note: Links have been removed,

In quantum computing, quantum supremacy or quantum advantage is the goal of demonstrating that a programmable quantum computer can solve a problem that no classical computer can solve in any feasible amount of time, irrespective of the usefulness of the problem.[1][2][3] The term was coined by John Preskill in 2011,[1][4] but the concept dates to Yuri Manin’s 1980[5] and Richard Feynman’s 1981[6] proposals of quantum computing.

Quantum supremacy and quantum advantage have been mentioned a few times here over the years. You can check my March 6, 2020 posting for when researchers from the University of California at Santa Barbara claimed quantum supremacy and my July 31, 2023 posting for when D-Wave Systems claimed a quantum advantage on optimization problems. I’d understood quantum supremacy and quantum advantage to be synonymous but according the article in Betakit (keep scrolling down to the D-Wave subhead and then, to ‘A controversy of sorts’ subhead in this posting), that’s not so.

The latest news on the quantum front comes from Microsoft (February 2025) and D-Wave systems (March 2025).

Microsoft claims a new state of matter for breakthroughs in quantum computing

Here’s the February 19, 2025 news announcement from Microsoft’s Chetan Nayak, Technical Fellow and Corporate Vice President of Quantum Hardware, Note: Links have been removed,

Quantum computers promise to transform science and society—but only after they achieve the scale that once seemed distant and elusive, and their reliability is ensured by quantum error correction. Today, we’re announcing rapid advancements on the path to useful quantum computing:

  • Majorana 1: the world’s first Quantum Processing Unit (QPU) powered by a Topological Core, designed to scale to a million qubits on a single chip.
  • A hardware-protected topological qubit: research published today in Nature, along with data shared at the Station Q meeting, demonstrate our ability to harness a new type of material and engineer a radically different type of qubit that is small, fast, and digitally controlled.
  • A device roadmap to reliable quantum computation: our path from single-qubit devices to arrays that enable quantum error correction.
  • Building the world’s first fault-tolerant prototype (FTP) based on topological qubits: Microsoft is on track to build an FTP of a scalable quantum computer—in years, not decades—as part of the final phase of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Underexplored Systems for Utility-Scale Quantum Computing (US2QC) program.

Together, these milestones mark a pivotal moment in quantum computing as we advance from scientific exploration to technological innovation.

Harnessing a new type of material

All of today’s announcements build on our team’s recent breakthrough: the world’s first topoconductor. This revolutionary class of materials enables us to create topological superconductivity, a new state of matter that previously existed only in theory. The advance stems from Microsoft’s innovations in the design and fabrication of gate-defined devices that combine indium arsenide (a semiconductor) and aluminum (a superconductor). When cooled to near absolute zero and tuned with magnetic fields, these devices form topological superconducting nanowires with Majorana Zero Modes (MZMs) at the wires’ ends.

Chris Vallance’s February 19, 2025 article for the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) news online website provides a description of Microsoft’s claims and makes note of the competitive quantum research environment,

Microsoft has unveiled a new chip called Majorana 1 that it says will enable the creation of quantum computers able to solve “meaningful, industrial-scale problems in years, not decades”.

It is the latest development in quantum computing – tech which uses principles of particle physics to create a new type of computer able to solve problems ordinary computers cannot.

Creating quantum computers powerful enough to solve important real-world problems is very challenging – and some experts believe them to be decades away.

Microsoft says this timetable can now be sped up because of the “transformative” progress it has made in developing the new chip involving a “topological conductor”, based on a new material it has produced.

The firm believes its topoconductor has the potential to be as revolutionary as the semiconductor was in the history of computing.

But experts have told the BBC more data is needed before the significance of the new research – and its effect on quantum computing – can be fully assessed.

Jensen Huang – boss of the leading chip firm, Nvidia – said in January he believed “very useful” quantum computing would come in 20 years.

Chetan Nayak, a technical fellow of quantum hardware at Microsoft, said he believed the developments would shake up conventional thinking about the future of quantum computers.

“Many people have said that quantum computing, that is to say useful quantum computers, are decades away,” he said. “I think that this brings us into years rather than decades.”

Travis Humble, director of the Quantum Science Center of Oak Ridge National Laboratory in the US, said he agreed Microsoft would now be able to deliver prototypes faster – but warned there remained work to do.

“The long term goals for solving industrial applications on quantum computers will require scaling up these prototypes even further,” he said.

While rivals produced a steady stream of announcements – notably Google’s “Willow” at the end of 2024 – Microsoft seemed to be taking longer.

Pursuing this approach was, in the company’s own words, a “high-risk, high-rewards” strategy, but one it now believes is going to pay off.

If you have the time, do read Vallance’s February 19, 2025 article.

The research paper

Purdue University’s (Indiana, US) February 25, 2025 news release on EurekAlert announces publication of the research, Note: Links have been removed,

Microsoft Quantum published an article in Nature on Feb. 19 [2025] detailing recent advances in the measurement of quantum devices that will be needed to realize a topological quantum computer. Among the authors are Microsoft scientists and engineers who conduct research at Microsoft Quantum Lab West Lafayette, located at Purdue University. In an announcement by Microsoft Quantum, the team describes the operation of a device that is a necessary building block for a topological quantum computer. The published results are an important milestone along the path to construction of quantum computers that are potentially more robust and powerful than existing technologies.

“Our hope for quantum computation is that it will aid chemists, materials scientists and engineers working on the design and manufacturing of new materials that are so important to our daily lives,” said Michael Manfra, scientific director of Microsoft Quantum Lab West Lafayette and the Bill and Dee O’Brien Distinguished Professor of Physics and Astronomy, professor of materials engineering, and professor of electrical and computer engineering at Purdue. “The promise of quantum computation is in accelerating scientific discovery and its translation into useful technology. For example, if quantum computers reduce the time and cost to produce new lifesaving therapeutic drugs, that is real societal impact.” 

The Microsoft Quantum Lab West Lafayette team advanced the complex layered materials that make up the quantum plane of the full device architecture used in the tests. Microsoft scientists working with Manfra are experts in advanced semiconductor growth techniques, including molecular beam epitaxy, that are used to build low-dimensional electron systems that form the basis for quantum bits, or qubits. They built the semiconductor and superconductor layers with atomic layer precision, tailoring the material’s properties to those needed for the device architecture.

Manfra, a member of the Purdue Quantum Science and Engineering Institute, credited the strong relationship between Purdue and Microsoft, built over the course of a decade, with the advances conducted at Microsoft Quantum Lab West Lafayette. In 2017 Purdue deepened its relationship with Microsoft with a multiyear agreement that includes embedding Microsoft employees with Manfra’s research team at Purdue.

“This was a collaborative effort by a very sophisticated team, with a vital contribution from the Microsoft scientists at Purdue,” Manfra said. “It’s a Microsoft team achievement, but it’s also the culmination of a long-standing partnership between Purdue and Microsoft. It wouldn’t have been possible without an environment at Purdue that was conducive to this mode of work — I attempted to blend industrial with academic research to the betterment of both communities. I think that’s a success story.”

Quantum science and engineering at Purdue is a pillar of the Purdue Computes initiative, which is focused on advancing research in computing, physical AI, semiconductors and quantum technologies.

“This research breakthrough in the measurement of the state of quasi particles is a milestone in the development of topological quantum computing, and creates a watershed moment in the semiconductor-superconductor hybrid structure,” Purdue President Mung Chiang said. “Marking also the latest success in the strategic initiative of Purdue Computes, the deep collaboration that Professor Manfra and his team have created with the Microsoft Quantum Lab West Lafayette on the Purdue campus exemplifies the most impactful industry research partnership at any American university today.”

Most approaches to quantum computers rely on local degrees of freedom to encode information. The spin of an electron is a classic example of a qubit. But an individual spin is prone to disturbance — by relatively common things like heat, vibrations or interactions with other quantum particles — which can corrupt quantum information stored in the qubit, necessitating a great deal of effort in detecting and correcting errors. Instead of spin, topological quantum computers store information in a more distributed manner; the qubit state is encoded in the state of many particles acting in concert. Consequently, it is harder to scramble the information as the state of all the particles must be changed to alter the qubit state.

In the Nature paper, the Microsoft team was able to accurately and quickly measure the state of quasi particles that form the basis of the qubit.

“The device is used to measure a basic property of a topological qubit quickly,” Manfra said. “The team is excited to build on these positive results.”

“The team in West Lafayette pushed existing epitaxial technology to a new state-of-the-art for semiconductor-superconductor hybrid structures to ensure a perfect interface between each of the building blocks of the Microsoft hybrid system,” said Sergei Gronin, a Microsoft Quantum Lab scientist.

“The materials quality that is required for quantum computing chips necessitates constant improvements, so that’s one of the biggest challenges,” Gronin said. “First, we had to adjust and improve semiconductor technology to meet a new level that nobody was able to achieve before. But equally important was how to create this hybrid system. To do that, we had to merge a semiconducting part and a superconducting part. And that means you need to perfect the semiconductor and the superconductor and perfect the interface between them.”

While work discussed in the Nature article was performed by Microsoft employees, the exposure to industrial-scale research and development is an outstanding opportunity for Purdue students in Manfra’s academic group as well. John Watson, Geoffrey Gardner and Saeed Fallahi, who are among the coauthors of the paper, earned their doctoral degrees under Manfra and now work for Microsoft Quantum at locations in Redmond, Washington, and Copenhagen, Denmark. Most of Manfra’s former students now work for quantum computing companies, including Microsoft. Tyler Lindemann, who works in the West Lafayette lab and helped to build the hybrid semiconductor-superconductor structures required for the device, is earning a doctoral degree from Purdue under Manfra’s supervision.

“Working in Professor Manfra’s lab in conjunction with my work for Microsoft Quantum has given me a head start in my professional development, and been fruitful for my academic work,” Lindemann said. “At the same time, many of the world-class scientists and engineers at Microsoft Quantum have some background in academia, and being able to draw from their knowledge and experience is an indispensable resource in my graduate studies. From both perspectives, it’s a great opportunity.”

Here’s a link to and a citation for the paper,

Interferometric single-shot parity measurement in InAs–Al hybrid devices by Microsoft Azure Quantum, Morteza Aghaee, Alejandro Alcaraz Ramirez, Zulfi Alam, Rizwan Ali, Mariusz Andrzejczuk, Andrey Antipov, Mikhail Astafev, Amin Barzegar, Bela Bauer, Jonathan Becker, Umesh Kumar Bhaskar, Alex Bocharov, Srini Boddapati, David Bohn, Jouri Bommer, Leo Bourdet, Arnaud Bousquet, Samuel Boutin, Lucas Casparis, Benjamin J. Chapman, Sohail Chatoor, Anna Wulff Christensen, Cassandra Chua, Patrick Codd, William Cole, Paul Cooper, Fabiano Corsetti, Ajuan Cui, Paolo Dalpasso, Juan Pablo Dehollain, Gijs de Lange, Michiel de Moor, Andreas Ekefjärd, Tareq El Dandachi, Juan Carlos Estrada Saldaña, Saeed Fallahi, Luca Galletti, Geoff Gardner, Deshan Govender, Flavio Griggio, Ruben Grigoryan, Sebastian Grijalva, Sergei Gronin, Jan Gukelberger, Marzie Hamdast, Firas Hamze, Esben Bork Hansen, Sebastian Heedt, Zahra Heidarnia, Jesús Herranz Zamorano, Samantha Ho, Laurens Holgaard, John Hornibrook, Jinnapat Indrapiromkul, Henrik Ingerslev, Lovro Ivancevic, Thomas Jensen, Jaspreet Jhoja, Jeffrey Jones, Konstantin V. Kalashnikov, Ray Kallaher, Rachpon Kalra, Farhad Karimi, Torsten Karzig, Evelyn King, Maren Elisabeth Kloster, Christina Knapp, Dariusz Kocon, Jonne V. Koski, Pasi Kostamo, Mahesh Kumar, Tom Laeven, Thorvald Larsen, Jason Lee, Kyunghoon Lee, Grant Leum, Kongyi Li, Tyler Lindemann, Matthew Looij, Julie Love, Marijn Lucas, Roman Lutchyn, Morten Hannibal Madsen, Nash Madulid, Albert Malmros, Michael Manfra, Devashish Mantri, Signe Brynold Markussen, Esteban Martinez, Marco Mattila, Robert McNeil, Antonio B. Mei, Ryan V. Mishmash, Gopakumar Mohandas, Christian Mollgaard, Trevor Morgan, George Moussa, Chetan Nayak, Jens Hedegaard Nielsen, Jens Munk Nielsen, William Hvidtfelt Padkar Nielsen, Bas Nijholt, Mike Nystrom, Eoin O’Farrell, Thomas Ohki, Keita Otani, Brian Paquelet Wütz, Sebastian Pauka, Karl Petersson, Luca Petit, Dima Pikulin, Guen Prawiroatmodjo, Frank Preiss, Eduardo Puchol Morejon, Mohana Rajpalke, Craig Ranta, Katrine Rasmussen, David Razmadze, Outi Reentila, David J. Reilly, Yuan Ren, Ken Reneris, Richard Rouse, Ivan Sadovskyy, Lauri Sainiemi, Irene Sanlorenzo, Emma Schmidgall, Cristina Sfiligoj, Mustafeez Bashir Shah, Kevin Simoes, Shilpi Singh, Sarat Sinha, Thomas Soerensen, Patrick Sohr, Tomas Stankevic, Lieuwe Stek, Eric Stuppard, Henri Suominen, Judith Suter, Sam Teicher, Nivetha Thiyagarajah, Raj Tholapi, Mason Thomas, Emily Toomey, Josh Tracy, Michelle Turley, Shivendra Upadhyay, Ivan Urban, Kevin Van Hoogdalem, David J. Van Woerkom, Dmitrii V. Viazmitinov, Dominik Vogel, John Watson, Alex Webster, Joseph Weston, Georg W. Winkler, Di Xu, Chung Kai Yang, Emrah Yucelen, Roland Zeisel, Guoji Zheng & Justin Zilke. Nature 638, 651–655 (2025). DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-024-08445-2 Published online: 19 February 2025 Issue Date: 20 February 2025

This paper is open access. Note: I usually tag all of the authors but not this time.

Controversy over this and previous Microsoft quantum computing claims

Elizabeth Hlavinka’s March 17, 2025 article for Salon.com provides an overview, Note: Links have been removed,

The matter making up the world around us has long-since been organized into three neat categories: solids, liquids and gases. But last month [February 2025], Microsoft announced that it had allegedly discovered another state of matter originally theorized to exist in 1937. 

This new state of matter called the Majorana zero mode is made up of quasiparticles, which act as their own particle and antiparticle. The idea is that the Majorana zero mode could be used to build a quantum computer, which could help scientists answer complex questions that standard computers are not capable of solving, with implications for medicine, cybersecurity and artificial intelligence.

In late February [2025], Sen. Ted Cruz presented Microsoft’s new computer chip at a congressional hearing, saying, “Technologies like this new chip I hold in the palm of my hand, the Majorana 1 quantum chip, are unlocking a new era of computing that will transform industries from health care to energy, solving problems that today’s computers simply cannot.”

However, Microsoft’s announcement, claiming a “breakthrough in quantum computing,” was met with skepticism from some physicists in the field. Proving that this form of quantum computing can work requires first demonstrating the existence of Majorana quasiparticles, measuring what the Majorana particles are doing, and creating something called a topological qubit used to store quantum information.

But some say that not all of the data necessary to prove this has been included in the research paper published in Nature, on which this announcement is based. And due to a fraught history of similar claims from the company being disputed and ultimately rescinded, some are extra wary of the results. [emphasis mine]

It’s not the first time Microsoft has faced backlash from presenting findings in the field. In 2018, the company reported that they had detected the presence of Majorana zero-modes in a research paper, but it was retracted by Nature, the journal that published it after a report from independent experts put their findings under more intense scrutiny.

In the [2018] report, four physicists not involved in the research concluded that it did not appear that Microsoft had intentionally misrepresented the data, but instead seemed to be “caught up in the excitement of the moment [emphasis mine].”

Establishing the existence of these particles is extremely complex in part because disorder in the device can create signals that mimic these quasiparticles when they are not actually there. 

Modern computers in use today are encoded in bits, which can either be in a zero state (no current flowing through them), or a one state (current flowing.) These bits work together to send information and signals that communicate with the computer, powering everything from cell phones to video games.

Companies like Google, IBM and Amazon have invested in designing another form of quantum computer that uses chips built with “qubits,” or quantum bits. Qubits can exist in both zero and one states at the same time due to a phenomenon called superposition. 

However, qubits are subject to external noise from the environment that can affect their performance, said Dr. Paolo Molignini, a researcher in theoretical quantum physics at Stockholm University.

“Because qubits are in a superposition of zero and one, they are very prone to errors and they are very prone to what is called decoherence, which means there could be noise, thermal fluctuations or many things that can collapse the state of the qubits,” Molignini told Salon in a video call. “Then you basically lose all of the information that you were encoding.”

In December [2024], Google said its quantum computer could perform a calculation that a standard computer could complete in 10 septillion years — a period far longer than the age of the universe — in just under five minutes.

However, a general-purpose computer would require billions of qubits, so these approaches are still a far cry from having practical applications, said Dr. Patrick Lee, a physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology [MIT], who co-authored the report leading to the 2018 Nature paper’s retraction.

Microsoft is taking a different approach to quantum computing by trying to develop  a topological qubit, which has the ability to store information in multiple places at once. Topological qubits exist within the Majorana zero states and are appealing because they can theoretically offer greater protection against environmental noise that destroys information within a quantum system.

Think of it like an arrow, where the arrowhead holds a portion of the information and the arrow tail holds the rest, Lee said. Distributing information across space like this is called topological protection.

“If you are able to put them far apart from each other, then you have a chance of maintaining the identity of the arrow even if it is subject to noise,” Lee told Salon in a phone interview. “The idea is that if the noise affects the head, it doesn’t kill the arrow and if it affects only the tail it doesn’t kill your arrow. It has to affect both sides simultaneously to kill your arrow, and that is very unlikely if you are able to put them apart.”

… Lee believes that even if the data doesn’t entirely prove that topological qubits exist in the Majorana zero-state, it still represents a scientific advancement. But he noted that several important issues need to be solved before it has practical implications. For one, the coherence time of these particles — or how long they can exist without being affected by environmental noise — is still very short, he explained.

“They make a measurement, come back, and the qubit has changed, so you have lost your coherence,” Lee said. “With this very short time, you cannot do anything with it.”

“I just wish they [Microsoft] were a bit more careful with their claims because I fear that if they don’t measure up to what they are saying, there might be a backlash at some point where people say, ‘You promised us all these fancy things and where are they now?’” Molignini said. “That might damage the entire quantum community, not just themselves.”

Iif you have the time, please read Hlavinka’s March 17, 2025 article in its entirety .

D-Wave Quantum Systems claims quantum supremacy over real world problem solution

A March 15, 2025 article by Bob Yirka for phys.org announces the news from D-Wave Quantum Systems. Note: The company, which had its headquarters in Canada (Burnaby, BC) now seems to be a largely US company with its main headquarters in Palo Alto, California and an ancillary or junior (?) headquarters in Canada, Note: A link has been removed,

A team of quantum computer researchers at quantum computer maker D-Wave, working with an international team of physicists and engineers, is claiming that its latest quantum processor has been used to run a quantum simulation faster than could be done with a classical computer.

In their paper published in the journal Science, the group describes how they ran a quantum version of a mathematical approximation regarding how matter behaves when it changes states, such as from a gas to a liquid—in a way that they claim would be nearly impossible to conduct on a traditional computer.

Here’s a March 12, 2025 D-Wave Systems (now D-Wave Quantum Systems) news release touting its real world problem solving quantum supremacy,

New landmark peer-reviewed paper published in Science, “Beyond-Classical Computation in Quantum Simulation,” unequivocally validates D-Wave’s achievement of the world’s first and only demonstration of quantum computational supremacy on a useful, real-world problem

Research shows D-Wave annealing quantum computer performs magnetic materials simulation in minutes that would take nearly one million years and more than the world’s annual electricity consumption to solve using a classical supercomputer built with GPU clusters

D-Wave Advantage2 annealing quantum computer prototype used in supremacy achievement, a testament to the system’s remarkable performance capabilities

PALO ALTO, Calif. – March 12, 2025 – D-Wave Quantum Inc. (NYSE: QBTS) (“D-Wave” or the “Company”), a leader in quantum computing systems, software, and services and the world’s first commercial supplier of quantum computers, today announced a scientific breakthrough published in the esteemed journal Science, confirming that its annealing quantum computer outperformed one of the world’s most powerful classical supercomputers in solving complex magnetic materials simulation problems with relevance to materials discovery. The new landmark peer-reviewed paper, Beyond-Classical Computation in Quantum Simulation,” validates this achievement as the world’s first and only demonstration of quantum computational supremacy on a useful problem.

An international collaboration of scientists led by D-Wave performed simulations of quantum dynamics in programmable spin glasses—computationally hard magnetic materials simulation problems with known applications to business and science—on both D-Wave’s Advantage2TM prototype annealing quantum computer and the Frontier supercomputer at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory. The work simulated the behavior of a suite of lattice structures and sizes across a variety of evolution times and delivered a multiplicity of important material properties. D-Wave’s quantum computer performed the most complex simulation in minutes and with a level of accuracy that would take nearly one million years using the supercomputer. In addition, it would require more than the world’s annual electricity consumption to solve this problem using the supercomputer, which is built with graphics processing unit (GPU) clusters.

“This is a remarkable day for quantum computing. Our demonstration of quantum computational supremacy on a useful problem is an industry first. All other claims of quantum systems outperforming classical computers have been disputed or involved random number generation of no practical value,” said Dr. Alan Baratz, CEO of D-Wave. “Our achievement shows, without question, that D-Wave’s annealing quantum computers are now capable of solving useful problems beyond the reach of the world’s most powerful supercomputers. We are thrilled that D-Wave customers can use this technology today to realize tangible value from annealing quantum computers.”

Realizing an Industry-First Quantum Computing Milestone
The behavior of materials is governed by the laws of quantum physics. Understanding the quantum nature of magnetic materials is crucial to finding new ways to use them for technological advancement, making materials simulation and discovery a vital area of research for D-Wave and the broader scientific community. Magnetic materials simulations, like those conducted in this work, use computer models to study how tiny particles not visible to the human eye react to external factors. Magnetic materials are widely used in medical imaging, electronics, superconductors, electrical networks, sensors, and motors.

“This research proves that D-Wave’s quantum computers can reliably solve quantum dynamics problems that could lead to discovery of new materials,” said Dr. Andrew King, senior distinguished scientist at D-Wave. “Through D-Wave’s technology, we can create and manipulate programmable quantum matter in ways that were impossible even a few years ago.”

Materials discovery is a computationally complex, energy-intensive and expensive task. Today’s supercomputers and high-performance computing (HPC) centers, which are built with tens of thousands of GPUs, do not always have the computational processing power to conduct complex materials simulations in a timely or energy-efficient manner. For decades, scientists have aspired to build a quantum computer capable of solving complex materials simulation problems beyond the reach of classical computers. D-Wave’s advancements in quantum hardware have made it possible for its annealing quantum computers to process these types of problems for the first time.

“This is a significant milestone made possible through over 25 years of research and hardware development at D-Wave, two years of collaboration across 11 institutions worldwide, and more than 100,000 GPU and CPU hours of simulation on one of the world’s fastest supercomputers as well as computing clusters in collaborating institutions,” said Dr. Mohammad Amin, chief scientist at D-Wave. “Besides realizing Richard Feynman’s vision of simulating nature on a quantum computer, this research could open new frontiers for scientific discovery and quantum application development.” 

Advantage2 System Demonstrates Powerful Performance Gains
The results shown in “Beyond-Classical Computation in Quantum Simulation” were enabled by D-Wave’s previous scientific milestones published in Nature Physics (2022) and Nature (2023), which theoretically and experimentally showed that quantum annealing provides a quantum speedup in complex optimization problems. These scientific advancements led to the development of the Advantage2 prototype’s fast anneal feature, which played an essential role in performing the precise quantum calculations needed to demonstrate quantum computational supremacy.

“The broader quantum computing research and development community is collectively building an understanding of the types of computations for which quantum computing can overtake classical computing. This effort requires ongoing and rigorous experimentation,” said Dr. Trevor Lanting, chief development officer at D-Wave. “This work is an important step toward sharpening that understanding, with clear evidence of where our quantum computer was able to outperform classical methods. We believe that the ability to recreate the entire suite of results we produced is not possible classically. We encourage our peers in academia to continue efforts to further define the line between quantum and classical capabilities, and we believe these efforts will help drive the development of ever more powerful quantum computing technology.”

The Advantage2 prototype used to achieve quantum computational supremacy is available for customers to use today via D-Wave’s Leap™ real-time quantum cloud service. The prototype provides substantial performance improvements from previous-generation Advantage systems, including increased qubit coherence, connectivity, and energy scale, which enables higher-quality solutions to larger, more complex problems. Moreover, D-Wave now has an Advantage2 processor that is four times larger than the prototype used in this work and has extended the simulations of this paper from hundreds of qubits to thousands of qubits, which are significantly larger than those described in this paper.

Leading Industry Voices Echo Support
Dr. Hidetoshi Nishimori, Professor, Department of Physics, Tokyo Institute of Technology:
“This paper marks a significant milestone in demonstrating the real-world applicability of large-scale quantum computing. Through rigorous benchmarking of quantum annealers against state-of-the-art classical methods, it convincingly establishes a quantum advantage in tackling practical problems, revealing the transformative potential of quantum computing at an unprecedented scale.”

Dr. Seth Lloyd, Professor of Quantum Mechanical Engineering, MIT:
Although large-scale, fully error-corrected quantum computers are years in the future, quantum annealers can probe the features of quantum systems today. In an elegant paper, the D-Wave group has used a large-scale quantum annealer to uncover patterns of entanglement in a complex quantum system that lie far beyond the reach of the most powerful classical computer. The D-Wave result shows the promise of quantum annealers for exploring exotic quantum effects in a wide variety of systems.”

Dr. Travis Humble, Director of Quantum Science Center, Distinguished Scientist at Oak Ridge National Laboratory:
“ORNL seeks to expand the frontiers of computation through many different avenues, and benchmarking quantum computing for materials science applications provides critical input to our understanding of new computational capabilities.”

Dr. Juan Carrasquilla, Associate Professor at the Department of Physics, ETH Zürich:
“I believe these results mark a critical scientific milestone for D-Wave. They also serve as an invitation to the scientific community, as these results offer a strong benchmark and motivation for developing novel simulation techniques for out-of-equilibrium dynamics in quantum many-body physics. Furthermore, I hope these findings encourage theoretical exploration of the computational challenges involved in performing such simulations, both classically and quantum-mechanically.”

Dr. Victor Martin-Mayor, Professor of Theoretical Physics, Universidad Complutense de Madrid:
“This paper is not only a tour-de-force for experimental physics, it is also remarkable for the clarity of the results. The authors have addressed a problem that is regarded both as important and as very challenging to a classical computer. The team has shown that their quantum annealer performs better at this task than the state-of-the-art methods for classical simulation.”

Dr. Alberto Nocera, Senior Staff Scientist, The University of British Columbia:
“Our work shows the impracticability of state-of-the-art classical simulations to simulate the dynamics of quantum magnets, opening the door for quantum technologies based on analog simulators to solve scientific questions that may otherwise remain unanswered using conventional computers.”

About D-Wave Quantum Inc.
D-Wave is a leader in the development and delivery of quantum computing systems, software, and services. We are the world’s first commercial supplier of quantum computers, and the only company building both annealing and gate-model quantum computers. Our mission is to help customers realize the value of quantum, today. Our 5,000+ qubit Advantage™ quantum computers, the world’s largest, are available on-premises or via the cloud, supported by 99.9% availability and uptime. More than 100 organizations trust D-Wave with their toughest computational challenges. With over 200 million problems submitted to our Advantage systems and Advantage2™ prototypes to date, our customers apply our technology to address use cases spanning optimization, artificial intelligence, research and more. Learn more about realizing the value of quantum computing today and how we’re shaping the quantum-driven industrial and societal advancements of tomorrow: www.dwavequantum.com.

Forward-Looking Statements
Certain statements in this press release are forward-looking, as defined in the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. These statements involve risks, uncertainties, and other factors that may cause actual results to differ materially from the information expressed or implied by these forward-looking statements and may not be indicative of future results. These forward-looking statements are subject to a number of risks and uncertainties, including, among others, various factors beyond management’s control, including the risks set forth under the heading “Risk Factors” discussed under the caption “Item 1A. Risk Factors” in Part I of our most recent Annual Report on Form 10-K or any updates discussed under the caption “Item 1A. Risk Factors” in Part II of our Quarterly Reports on Form 10-Q and in our other filings with the SEC. Undue reliance should not be placed on the forward-looking statements in this press release in making an investment decision, which are based on information available to us on the date hereof. We undertake no duty to update this information unless required by law.

Here’s a link to and a citation for the most recent paper,

Beyond-classical computation in quantum simulation by Andrew D. King , Alberto Nocera, Marek M. Rams, Jacek Dziarmaga, Roeland Wiersema, William Bernoudy, Jack Raymond, Nitin Kaushal, Niclas Heinsdorf, Richard Harris, Kelly Boothby, Fabio Altomare, Mohsen Asad, Andrew J. Berkley, Martin Boschnak, Kevin Chern, Holly Christiani, Samantha Cibere, Jake Connor, Martin H. Dehn, Rahul Deshpande, Sara Ejtemaee, Pau Farre, Kelsey Hamer, Emile Hoskinson, Shuiyuan Huang, Mark W. Johnson, Samuel Kortas, Eric Ladizinsky, Trevor Lanting, Tony Lai, Ryan Li, Allison J. R. MacDonald, Gaelen Marsden, Catherine C. McGeoch, Reza Molavi, Travis Oh, Richard Neufeld, Mana Norouzpour, Joel Pasvolsky, Patrick Poitras, Gabriel Poulin-Lamarre, Thomas Prescott, Mauricio Reis, Chris Rich, Mohammad Samani, Benjamin Sheldan, Anatoly Smirnov, Edward Sterpka, Berta Trullas Clavera, Nicholas Tsai, Mark Volkmann, Alexander M. Whiticar, Jed D. Whittaker, Warren Wilkinson, Jason Yao, T.J. Yi, Anders W. Sandvik, Gonzalo Alvarez, Roger G. Melko, Juan Carrasquilla, Marcel Franz, and Mohammad H. Amin. Science 12 Mar 2025 First Release DOI: 10.1126/science.ado6285

This paper appears to be open access.Note: I usually tag all of the authors but not this time either.

A controversy of sorts

Madison McLauchlan’s March 19, 2025 article for Betakit (website for Canadian Startup News & Tech Innovation), Note: Links have been removed,

Canadian-born company D-Wave Quantum Systems said it achieved “quantum supremacy” last week after publishing what it calls a groundbreaking paper in the prestigious journal Science. Despite the lofty term, Canadian experts say supremacy is not the be-all, end-all of quantum innovation. 

D-Wave, which has labs in Palo Alto, Calif., and Burnaby, BC, claimed in a statement that it has shown “the world’s first and only demonstration of quantum computational supremacy on a useful, real-world problem.”

Coined in the early 2010s by physicist John Preskill, quantum supremacy is the ability of a quantum computing system to solve a problem no classical computer can in a feasible amount of time. The metric makes no mention of whether the problem needs to be useful or relevant to real life. Google researchers published a paper in Nature in 2019 claiming they cleared that bar with the Sycamore quantum processor. Researchers at the University of Science and Technology in China claimed they demonstrated quantum supremacy several times. 

D-Wave’s attempt differs in that its researchers aimed to solve a real-world materials-simulation problem with quantum computing—one the company claims would be nearly impossible for a traditional computer to solve in a reasonable amount of time. D-Wave used an annealing designed to solve optimization problems. The problem is represented like an energy space, where the “lowest energy state” corresponds to the solution. 

While exciting, quantum supremacy is just one metric among several that mark the progress toward widely useful quantum computers, industry experts told BetaKit. 

“It is a very important and mostly academic metric, but certainly not the most important in the grand scheme of things, as it doesn’t take into account the usefulness of the algorithm,” said Martin Laforest, managing partner at Quantacet, a specialized venture capital fund for quantum startups. 

He added that Google and Xanadu’s [Xanadu Quantum Technologies based in Toronto, Canada] past claims to quantum supremacy were “extraordinary pieces of work, but didn’t unlock practicality.” 

Laforest, along with executives at Canadian quantum startups Nord Quantique and Photonic, say that the milestones of ‘quantum utility’ or ‘quantum advantage’ may be more important than supremacy. 

According to Quantum computing company Quera [QuEra?], quantum advantage is the demonstration of a quantum algorithm solving a real-world problem on a quantum computer faster than any classical algorithm running on any classical computer. On the other hand, quantum utility, according to IBM, refers to when a quantum computer is able to perform reliable computations at a scale beyond brute-force classical computing methods that provide exact solutions to computational problems. 

Error correction hasn’t traditionally been considered a requirement for quantum supremacy, but Laforest told BetaKit the term is “an ever-moving target, constantly challenged by advances in classical algorithms.” He added: “In my opinion, some level of supremacy or utility may be possible in niche areas without error correction, but true disruption requires it.”

Paul Terry, CEO of Vancouver-based Photonic, thinks that though D-Wave’s claim to quantum supremacy shows “continued progress to real value,” scalability is the industry’s biggest hurdle to overcome.

But as with many milestone claims in the quantum space, D-Wave’s latest innovation has been met with scrutiny from industry competitors and researchers on the breakthrough’s significance, claiming that classical computers have achieved similar results. Laforest echoed this sentiment.

“Personally, I wouldn’t say it’s an unequivocal demonstration of supremacy, but it is a damn nice experiment that once again shows the murky zone between traditional computing and early quantum advantage,” Laforest said.

Originally founded out of the University of British Columbia, D-Wave went public on the New York Stock Exchange just over two years ago through a merger with a special-purpose acquisition company in 2022. D-Wave became a Delaware-domiciled corporation as part of the deal.

Earlier this year, D-Wave’s stock price dropped after Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang publicly stated that he estimated that useful quantum computers were more than 15 years away. D-Wave’s stock price, which had been struggling, has seen a considerable bump in recent months alongside a broader boost in the quantum market. The price popped after its most recent earnings, shared right after its quantum supremacy announcement. 

The beat goes on

Some of this is standard in science. There’s always a debate over big claims and it’s not unusual for people to get over excited and have to make a retraction. Scientists are people too. That said, there’s a lot of money on the line and that appears to be making situation even more volatile than usual.

That last paragraph was completed on the morning of March 21, 2025 and later that afternoon I came across this March 21, 2025 article by Michael Grothaus for Fast Company, Note: Links have been removed,

Quantum computing stocks got pummeled yesterday, with the four most prominent public quantum computing companies—IonQ, Rigetti Computing, Quantum Computing Inc., and D-Wave Quantum Inc.—falling anywhere from over 9% to over 18%. The reason? A lot of it may have to do with AI chip giant Nvidia. Again.

Stocks crash yesterday on Nvidia quantum news

Yesterday was a bit of a bloodbath on the stock market for the four most prominent publicly traded quantum computing companies. …

All four of these quantum computing stocks [IonQ, Inc.; Rigetti Computing, Inc.; Quantum Computing Inc.; D-Wave Quantum Inc.] tumbled on the day that AI chip giant Nvidia kicked off its two-day Quantum Day event. In a blog post from January 14 announcing Quantum Day, Nvidia said the event “brings together leading experts for a comprehensive and balanced perspective on what businesses should expect from quantum computing in the coming decades — mapping the path toward useful quantum applications.”

Besides bringing quantum experts together, the AI behemoth also announced that it will be launching a new quantum computing research center in Boston.

Called the NVIDIA Accelerated Quantum Research Center (NVAQC), the new research lab “will help solve quantum computing’s most challenging problems, ranging from qubit noise to transforming experimental quantum processors into practical devices,” the company said in a press release.

The NVAQC’s location in Boston means it will be near both Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). 

Before Nvidia’s announcement yesterday, IonQ, Rigetti, D-Wave, and Quantum Computing Inc. were the leaders in the nascent field of quantum computing. And while they still are right now (Nvidia’s quantum research lab hasn’t been built yet), the fear is that Nvidia could use its deep pockets to quickly buy its way into a leadership spot in the field. With its $2.9 trillion market cap, the company can easily afford to throw billions of research dollars into quantum computing.

As noted by the Motley Fool, the location of the NVIDIA Accelerated Quantum Research Center in Boston will also allow Nvidia to more easily tap into top quantum talent from Harvard and MIT—talent that may have otherwise gone to IonQ, Rigetti, D-Wave, and Quantum Computing Inc.

Nvidia’s announcement is a massive about-face from the company in regard to how it views quantum computing. It’s also the second time that Nvidia has caused quantum stocks to crash this year. Back in January, shares in prominent quantum computing companies fell after Huang said that practical use of quantum computing was decades away.

Those comments were something quantum computing company CEOs like D-Wave’s Alan Baratz took issue with. “It’s an egregious error on Mr. Huang’s part,” Bartaz told Fast Company at the time. “We’re not decades away from commercial quantum computers. They exist. There are companies that are using our quantum computer today.”

According to Investor’s Business Daily, Huang reportedly got the idea for Nvidia’s Quantum Day event after the blowback to his comments, inviting quantum computing executives to the event to explain why he was incorrect about quantum computing.

The word is volatile.

Drat! ARPICO (Society of Italian Researchers and Professionals in Western Canada) Celebrates Women in STEM: Voices of Innovation on Wednesday, February 26, 2025

(Missed the boat on this one.) I received (via email) a January 18, 2025 notice about an upcoming Society of Italian Researchers and Professionals in Western Canada (ARPICO) event, Note 1: Tickets are free, Note 2: the Eventbrite registration page for the event includes a map showing where the venue is located,

ARPICO is excited to invite you to our first event of 2025, “ARPICO Celebrates Women in STEM [science, technology, engineering, and mathematics]: Voices of Innovation” which will be held on Wednesday, February 26th, 2025 at 7:00 PM at the Museum of Vancouver, History Room, 1100 Chestnut Street, Vancouver, BC.

February 11th marks the celebration of Women and Girls in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM), established by the United Nations in 2015 to honor the achievements of women and girls in these fields.

Women’s access to STEM education and careers became a reality in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, with milestones like, for example, Marie Curie breaking barriers in science and Ada Lovelace becoming the first computer programmer. While progress has been made, women are still underrepresented in STEM. Currently, In Canada, women represent approximately 23% of STEM professionals (about 28% in the United States).

At ARPICO, we are proud to celebrate the progress of women in STEM, acknowledging both their contributions and the challenges they continue to face by hosting a special event you won’t want to miss!

This event aims to inspire and empower the next generation of women, as well as people from all walks of life, to take their place at the forefront of innovation, ensuring STEM is an inclusive space for all. Through its initiatives, ARPICO aims to foster an environment where everyone can thrive, share their experiences, and inspire others.

ARPICO is therefore excited to host an event featuring five distinguished women in STEM. These panelists will engage in a dynamic discussion, sharing their journeys, successes, challenges, and sources of inspiration. The event will include a lively Q&A session, encouraging audience participation, reflection on the importance of supporting women in STEM and exploring how diverse talent strengthens STEM fields and society as a whole.

Whether you’re already involved in STEM, want to guide family and friends into these fields, or simply wish to be inspired by the panelists’ stories, this event will be informative, uplifting, and empowering. Reserve your spot!

To read more and to register for FREE admission, please visit EventBrite at https://womenstem.eventbrite.ca

Evening Program

  • 6:30 PM – Doors open for registration
  • 7:00 PM – Event begins. Welcome & Introductions by Nicola Fameli
  • 7:05 PM – Message from Italian Consul General Paolo Miraglia Del Giudice
  • 7:10 PM – ARPICO President’s Address & Moderated Panel Discussion
    • Presentation by Valentina Marchetti, President of ARPICO
    • Panel Discussion: “ARPICO Celebrates Women in STEM: Voices of Innovation”
  • 8:00 PM – Q & A Period
  • 8:15 PM – Refreshments, networking and socializing

We look forward to seeing everyone there.

RSVP: Tickets for this event are required, but FREE; all wishing to attend are requested to obtain “free-admission” tickets on EventBrite

Further details are also available at arpico.ca, arpico facebook, and EventBrite.

If participants wish to donate to ARPICO, this can be done within EventBrite or in person at the event; this would be greatly appreciated in order to help us continue our public lecture program and to build upon our scholarship fund.

Main Event Details

ARPICO Celebrates Women in STEM: Voices of Innovation

February 11th marks the celebration of Women and Girls in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM), established by the United Nations in 2015 to honor the achievements of women and girls in these fields.

Women’s access to STEM education and careers became a reality in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, with milestones like, for example, Marie Curie breaking barriers in science and Ada Lovelace becoming the first computer programmer.

At ARPICO, we are proud to celebrate the progress of women in STEM, acknowledging both their contributions and the challenges they continue to face, by hosting this special event featuring five distinguished women in STEM. These panelists will engage in a dynamic discussion, sharing their journeys, successes, challenges, and sources of inspiration.

Their messages hope to inspire and empower the next generation of women to take their place at the forefront of innovation, ensuring STEM is an inclusive space for all.

The event will include a lively Q&A session, encouraging audience participation, reflection on the importance of supporting women in STEM and exploring how diverse talent strengthens STEM fields and society as a whole.

Whether you’re already involved in STEM, want to guide family and friends into these fields, or simply wish to be inspired by the panelists’ stories, this event will be informative, uplifting, and empowering.

ATTRACTING & CELEBRATING THE BEST MINDS

It is essential for nations, universities, and employers to recruit and nurture top talent in STEM fields to ensure continued innovation and progress. However, women remain underrepresented in STEM careers, making up only 23% of STEM professionals in Canada and 28% in the United States.

Promoting gender equity in STEM is about more than fairness—it’s about unlocking a broader talent pool and fostering richer, more innovative solutions. Research shows that when women and men contribute equally, STEM outcomes are more effective and transformative. Empowering women in STEM benefits not only individuals but also entire industries and societies.

THE IMPORTANCE OF STEM FOR THE WORLD, NATIONS & INDIVIDUALS

Science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) drive the innovations that shape every aspect of modern life. Careers in STEM offer opportunities to collaborate internationally, solve global challenges like climate change and health crises, and make groundbreaking contributions to society.

Nations that invest in STEM not only foster critical research and innovation but also position themselves as global leaders, driving sustained economic growth and securing a competitive edge.

For individuals, STEM careers are highly sought after, often well-compensated, and provide unparalleled flexibility. Beyond technical expertise, STEM education cultivates critical thinking, creativity, and problem-solving skills—qualities essential for navigating and excelling in today’s interdisciplinary and ever-evolving job market. With these skills, STEM professionals can pivot and thrive in diverse career paths, creating limitless opportunities for personal and professional growth.

About The Panelists and Moderators

Dr. Lori Brotto is a leading expert in women’s sexual health, serving as a Professor in UBC’s [University of British Columbia] Department of Obstetrics and Gynaecology and holding a Canada Research Chair. Her research focuses on developing accessible treatments for common sexual concerns in women, with a strong emphasis on equity and digital health technologies. As Executive Director of the Women’s Health Research Institute, she leads nearly 600 members in advancing women’s health research across BCDr. Brotto is a frequent media presence, appearing in documentaries like Netflix’s The Principles of Pleasure and CBC Gem’s The Big Sex Talk. She authored Better Sex Through Mindfulness (2018) and The Better Sex Through Mindfulness Workbook (2022), and her work earned her a UBC Public Education Through Media award in 2023. As a Registered Psychologist in BC, Dr. Brotto works directly with individuals to improve sexual well-being and encourages young women to pursue STEM careers. She engages with the public through social media, empowering women and advancing research in sexual health.

Dr. Cristina Conati is a Professor of Computer Science at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada. She received an M.Sc. in Computer Science at the University of Milan, as well as a Ph.D. in Intelligent Systems at the University of Pittsburgh. She has been a Faculty Member at UBC since November 1999. Cristina’s research is at the intersection of Artificial Intelligence, Human-Computer Interaction and Cognitive Science, focusing on Human-Centred AI with contributions in the areas of Intelligent Tutoring Systems, User Modeling, Affective Computing, Information Visualization, and Explainable AI. Cristina’s research has received 10 Best Paper Awards from a variety of venues and in 2022 she received a UBC Killam Research Price. She is a Fellow of AAAI (Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence) and of AAIA (Asia-Pacific Artificial Intelligence Association). She is the co-Editor in Chief of the Journal of AI in Education. She served as President of AAAC (Association for the Advancement of Affective Computing), as well as Program or Conference Chair for several international conferences.

Dr. Jaraquemada, Lupe, is a Radiochemist at Alpha9 Oncology in Vancouver, where she develops new radiopharmaceuticals to enhance cancer diagnosis and treatment. She studied in Canada in 2015 during her PhD and later returned to UBC Chemistry for postdoctoral and research associate work with Dr. Chris Orvig. Before joining Alpha9, Lupe worked as a Staff Scientist at BC Cancer’s Molecular Oncology department under Dr. François Bénard. She holds a PhD in Chemical Sciences and Technologies from the University of Cagliari, Italy, and a BSc in Chemistry from the University of Extremadura, Spain. In her free time, Lupe enjoys skiing with family and friends, watching Whitecaps games, and cheering on her two boys at soccer matches at the Italian Cultural Centre.

Camilla Moioli is a Ph.D. candidate at UBC’s ERDE (Energy Resources, Development, and Environment) and Forest Action Labs, focusing on the intersection of land use policy, energy transitions, and climate justice. With a background in Economics and Social Sciences, she uses both micro and macroeconomic methods to explore sustainable development. Camilla has worked with grassroots organizations in Ecuador on local restoration policies and collaborated with research centers in Europe, including EIEE in Milan, IIASA in Vienna, and SDSN in Paris, to incorporate global perspectives. She also teaches Forest and Conservation Economics at UBC and contributes to courses in carbon and energy economics. Camilla holds a BSc in Business from the University of Milano-Bicocca and an MSc in Economics from the Catholic University of Milan.

Dr. Adele Ruosi‘s journey in physics began in Italy, where she earned her Ph.D. and delved into experimental superconductivity while teaching at the University of Naples. Her curiosity then led her to the US, where she conducted research at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She also taught physics at Temple University and served as the Scientific Administrator of an Energy Frontier Research Center. Since 2019, Adele has been a Science Education Specialist in Physics and Astronomy at the University of British Columbia. When she’s not advancing science education, Adele enjoys exploring the great outdoors of British Columbia

Desiree Fiaccabrino is a BSc Chemistry graduate with First Class Honours from King’s College London, is pursuing a PhD in Chemistry at UBC under Dr. Chris Orvig and Dr. Paul Schaffer at TRIUMF. Her research focuses on developing novel molecules to bind radioactive metals for cancer therapeutics and diagnostics. As President of UBC’s Chemistry Graduate Student Society, Desiree organized professional development initiatives, including career panels with industry and academic leaders. She has mentored undergraduate and MSc students in research and scientific communication. Desiree is passionate about creating tools to bridge scientific discovery with practical applications in nuclear medicine to improve patient care.

Dr. Valentina Marchetti is an expert in endothelial cell dysfunction and progenitor cells in cardiovascular diseases. After completing her PhD at the University of Rome, Italy, she worked as a postdoctoral fellow at The Scripps Research Institute, focusing on stem cells for treating diabetic retinopathies and eye diseases. In 2013, she joined STEMCELL Technologies in Vancouver, where she led the endothelial and eye group and developed products for stem cell research. Currently an Adjunct Professor at Simon Fraser University, Valentina collaborates with the Department of Molecular Biology and Biochemistry. As President of ARPICO, she advances collaboration and public awareness of key research, while promoting Italian-Canadian scientific and cultural exchanges.

FAQ

  • Where can I contact the organizer with any questions?
  • info@arpico.ca
  • Can I update my registration information?
  • Yes. If you have any questions, contact us at info@arpico.ca
  • I am having trouble using EventBrite and cannot reserve my ticket(s). Can someone at ARPICO help me with my ticket reservation?
  • Of course, simply send your ticket request to us at info@arpico.ca so we can help you.

As always, the organizers have been thoughtful about including detailed information.