Spiders, Quantum Supremacy, Missouri Runoff. Oct 25, 2019, Part 1

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🗓️ 25 October 2019

⏱️ 47 minutes

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Summary

Spiders were one of the first animals to evolve on land. And over the span of 400 million years of speciation and evolution, they’ve learned some amazing tricks. One of their trademarks? The strong, sticky substance that we call silk—every spider produces it, whether for weaving webs, wrapping prey, or even leaving trails on the ground for potential mates. But every silk is unique, each with different chemistry and different physical properties. Even a single spider web may use multiple kinds of silk. So how did spiders develop these wondrous fibers? We hear from Cheryl Hayashi at the American Museum of Natural History, Sarah Han at the University of Akron, and Linda Rayor at Cornell University about their work. Plus, a "dead zone" in the Gulf of Mexico has states along the Mississippi working to reduce nutrient runoff. Science and environment reporter Eli Chen from St. Louis Public Radio tells the us the State of Science. And, Google says its quantum computer has achieved in just 200 seconds what would take a supercomputer thousands of years. But IBM is pushing back. Sophie Bushwick, technology editor at Scientific American, joins Ira to talk about what this means and other stories from this week in science.

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. Oh, in case you missed it, the quantum supremacy has arrived.
0:07.1	Yeah, at least according to Google. What does that mean? Well, Google says its quantum computer
0:11.8	solved a problem in just 200 seconds that would have taken the best supercomputer 10,000 years to
0:20.1	complete. But the pushback has already started. Here to fill us in
0:24.6	is Sophie Bushwick, technology editor at Scientific American. Pushback starting. Oh, oh yeah, absolutely.
0:31.0	I mean, this goes back. This is a big, big breakthrough. This is Google's, Google has compared
0:36.8	this to the first airplane flight in terms of the significance of this finding. Yeah. So this is a big deal, which means there's a really high standard of proof that Google has to meet to say that we have achieved quantum supremacy. So there's already been pushed back against that claim.
0:53.8	Start at the beginning.
0:55.0	What is the quantum supremacy and how does that start?
0:58.0	So the whole appeal of a quantum computer is that it can solve certain types of problems
1:04.0	exponentially faster than classical computers.
1:07.0	And the problem is it's really hard to build a working quantum computer. So a lot of different
1:12.1	tech companies have been struggling with this conundrum. And none of them have managed to get a
1:16.3	quantum computer that could really fulfill the promise of solving these problems super fast. So that's
1:21.9	what Google claims they've done. They say this is a problem. Your regular computer would take
1:25.9	thousands and thousands of years. We've done it in seconds. Almost immediately, IBM started working on, they said, well, could this type of problem that you've solved be actually solved much faster by a regular old computer, not a quantum one? And they have released what they say is an algorithm that could solve it in just two and a half days instead
1:44.5	of 10,000 years. So they're saying, you know, Google's achievement isn't quite as big as they're
1:49.3	making it out to be. And there's no quantum computer around the corner for everybody to buy it.
1:55.5	No. I mean, even Google's quantum computer is right. It's solved this one problem. It's not about to really, it's not about
2:03.5	to break down all of these barriers that quantum computers could eventually maybe do. Because one of the
2:09.3	exciting things, one of the types of problems that quantum computers could be very good at solving
2:13.3	is factoring big numbers, which is a key component of most modern encryption methods.
	...

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