Good morning and welcome to Kid News. I'm Kim. Today is Wednesday, December 11th, 2024.

And we begin with Mother Nature thumbing its nose at the calendar. Even though California's

wildfire season ended last month, a raging inferno erupted late Monday night in Malibu. Flames fueled by

the notorious Santa Ana Wins moved in on homes, the famous Malibu

Pier, and Pepperdine University, where school officials canceled finals yesterday and for a time

told students to shelter in place. Elsewhere, police used loudspeakers to get residents to evacuate.

According to CNN, at one point, the fire tripled in size in just one hour.

Five miles of Pacific Coast Highway are closed and power has been cut to tens of thousands of homes.

As of this recording, more than 2,700 acres have burned and a red flag warning for high wind and low humidity is in effect

through 8 tonight.

Mind-boggling speed.

That's the description of a new quantum computing chip announced by Google.

Known as Willow, the chip is the size of a postage stamp, and in just five minutes,

can reportedly solve a problem that would take conventional computers 10 septillion years,

which is more time than the universe is old.

Google says it's a whole lot less error-prone than previous versions.

The new tech is expected to be especially useful in medicine,

where it can supercharge drug

development by speeding up the experimental phase. An Oxford researcher told the Guardian that

quantum computing could start to have a meaningful impact on our lives in just five years.

It's a crazy hard test.

Some call it the hardest in history, just to become a tour guide at Gettysburg National Park.

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