The next radically different means of information processing will be quantum computing, which researchers say will use the principles of quantum mechanics to perform complex calculations in a fraction of the time needed by the world’s fastest supercomputers.

A paper published recently in Physical Review Letters (Nov. 4 issue) has proposed an experimentally realizable circuit and an efficient scheme to implement scalable quantum computing. The ability to scale up the technology from the one

Sometimes getting too much of a good thing may create more problems than not getting enough – especially when it comes to the weather. Just ask Texas A&M University atmospheric scientist Fuqing Zhang, whose ensemble weather forecasting research is burdened with trillions of bytes of real-time data.

Zhang’s quest, funded by a National Science Foundation grant of $295,500, is to find the best way to assimilate the most recent weather observation data for input into the latest computer fo

Women with a combined HIV/malaria infection more frequently experience complications during pregnancy than healthy women. This is revealed in research from Kenya. However, to their surprise the researchers established that HIV-infected mothers with a mild malaria infection less frequently transmit the HIV infection to their children than HIV-infected mothers without malaria.

In Kenya, the epidemiologists Annemieke van Eijk and John Ayisi investigated the interaction between HIV and malaria a

The ozone layer is thinning and we do not yet know to what extent future ozone losses will be affected by climate change, or what impact this will have on human health.

For this reason, the European Research Commissioner Philippe Busquin today welcomed the start of the first phase of the VINTERSOL (Validation of International Satellites and Study of Ozone Loss) campaign, composed of national and EU projects. VINTERSOL will be closely co-ordinated with the SAGE III Ozone Loss and Valid

In experiments with butterflies, evolutionary biologists from Leiden University have demonstrated that natural selection is not always the only factor which determines the appearance of an organism. Constraints also appear to play a role at times in determining the progress and outcome of the evolutionary process.

This research from Leiden provides evidence for the hypothesis of Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin. In 1979, these two scientists stated that Darwin`s theory of natural selec

PhD student Rüdiger Lang has developed a method to obtain information about water vapour from satellite data not specifically measuring this. The research is part of a project from the FOM Institute for Atomic and Molecular Physics (AMOLF), the Space Research Organisation Netherlands (SRON) and the Free University of Amsterdam.

Water vapour has a greenhouse effect three times stronger than that of carbon dioxide. Therefore a good picture as to the presence, distribution and influence of wate