Lake Maracaibo, lightning capital of the world

One firebolt after another illuminates a stilt-house settlement where the Catatumbo river flows into Venezuela's Lake Maracaibo, the lightning capital of the world.

Blog comment, collab help man attack old maths problem

Chris Cesare in Nature reported on Friday that Terence Tao successfully attacked the Erdős discrepancy problem by building on an online collaboration. Tao is a professor in the math department at UCLA. He works primarily ...

New process makes 'biodegradable' plastics truly compostable

Biodegradable plastics have been advertised as one solution to the plastic pollution problem bedeviling the world, but today's "compostable" plastic bags, utensils and cup lids don't break down during typical composting and ...

Disposable masks could be used to improve concrete

With the pervasive single-use masks during the pandemic now presenting an environmental problem, researchers have demonstrated the idea of incorporating old masks into a cement mixture to create stronger, more durable concrete. 

Solving 'barren plateaus' is the key to quantum machine learning

Many machine learning algorithms on quantum computers suffer from the dreaded "barren plateau" of unsolvability, where they run into dead ends on optimization problems. This challenge had been relatively unstudied—until ...

Mathematician suggests a scheme for solving telegraph equations

A mathematician from RUDN University suggested a stable difference scheme for solving inverse problems for elliptic-telegraph and differential equations that are used to describe biological, physical, and sociological processes. ...

Using steampunk to explain quantum physics

What do quantum computers have to do with smog-filled London streets, flying submarines, waistcoats, petticoats, Sherlock Holmesian mysteries, and brass goggles?

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