entangled dot cloud
MIT engineers develop a magnetic transistor for more energy-efficient electronics
Transistors, the building blocks of modern electronics, are typically made of silicon. Because it’s a semiconductor, this material can control the flow of electricity in a circuit. But silicon has fundamental physical limits that restrict how compact and energy-efficient a transistor can be.MIT researchers have now replaced silicon with a magnetic semiconductor, creating a magnetic transistor that could enable smaller, faster, and more energy-efficient circuits. The material’s magnetism strongly
Daily briefing: Is a nine-to-five PhD possible?
<p>Nature, Published online: 17 April 2026; <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-01280-7">doi:10.1038/d41586-026-01280-7</a></p>PhD students share how they make their doctorate fit into the hours of a standard working week. Plus, male and female brain cells differ in gene activity and a whole new way to produce DNA.
Smart cable sharing gives quantum computers a big boost
A major obstacle in the development of powerful quantum computers is the growing number of cables required to control a ...
IBM proposes 511,710 square feet of new buildings at Quantum computing facility
Armonk-based IBM wants to expand its Quantum computer facilities on its campus on South Road in the Town of Poughkeepsie by constructing approximately 511,710 square feet of new buildings. The 395-acre campus already has about 45 buildings containing more than 4-million square feet of space. The new construction would take place on the site of an unused parking lot and within the footprint of two existing buildings that would be demolished.
Quantum computers could usher in a crisis worse than Y2K
The day when a quantum computer manages to break common encryption, or Q-Day, is fast approaching, and the world is not close to being ready
France links Lucy photonic quantum system to Joliot-Curie supercomputer
On April 14, 2026, France switched on Lucy, a photonic quantum computer now physically connected to the Joliot-Curie ...
Why your company will never scale (or maybe why it will)
We’re in a copied world. Today, it is so incredibly easy for someone to see what you’re doing and copy your product.
So the question is: How do you actually scale your business to the next level? How do you move past being just a "product" and become a trend, or a brand that you actually dream of?
I believe it comes down to two things: User Laziness and Competitor Laziness1. Making the user too lazy to switch:When you look at Apple, it’s the perfect example. People switch to Apple beca
Observability Stack – AI First?
So... I'm way behind. Just got into Claude this week... it's already doing most of my coding and bug fixes. Crazy stuff.Some background on my company: Mature (14 yrs) Ruby on Rails app, Sidekiq, Redis, PG, AWS lambda/eventbridge, react/preact, swift, and others. Hosted on Heroku. Very database heavy. Solo guy, owner/operator.Current stack:Datadog logging (dabbled in APM, metrics, and others, but the build pack for Heroku is so bloated I had to remove it), so now it'
Show HN: Sostactic – polynomial inequalities using sums-of-squares in Lean
Current support for nonlinear inequalities in Lean is quite limited. This package attempts to solve this. It contains a collection of Lean4 tactics for proving polynomial inequalities via sum-of-squares (SOS) decompositions, powered by a Python backend. You can use it via Python or Lean.These tactics are significantly more powerful than `nlinarith` and `positivity` -- i.e., they can prove inequalities they cannot. In theory, they can be used to prove any of the following types of statements- pro
Ask HN: Has zooming out helped you deal with AI anxiety?
My weird little aha moment came from an HN thread about moon dust smelling like gunpowder.I recently moved to the Bay and have noticed a lot of AI anxiety in everyday conversation.I'm in my early 20s, work in tech but not as an engineer, and a few friends have asked why I don't seem that anxious about it. I didn't have a good answer until yesterday.Oddly, the answer came from an HN thread about moon dust smelling like gunpowder. The thread drifted into oxygen, reactivity, Mars, an
Show HN: Yojam – Route links to the right browser/profile, strip trackers first
Author here. Yojam sits in place of your default browser on macOS and intercepts every http/https click, mailto, .webloc, Handoff page, AirDrop link, Share menu item, and yojam:// URL. They all go through the same pipeline: global URL rewrites, tracker parameter stripping, rule matching (domain / prefix / regex / source app), per-browser rewrites, then either open or show a picker at the cursor.
Things I cared about that other pickers don't quite get right:- Br
Ask HN: What makes a good Product Manager
The tech PM role is… difficult to define, but we’ve all worked with good PMs and bad PMs - it’s usually quite quick to tell where someone falls on the spectrum once you’ve worked with them for a few weeks. But, I find it difficult to describe the difference.
Ask HN: Should I build *another* Markdown task manager?
I was feeling annoyed by Jira again and had to somehow get that out of my system. So I wrote a sketch of a task management system, that I would enjoy using. This is written like a README, as if it it already existed (but nothing is implemented yet).
--> https://github.com/simchri/md.agile/blob/main/README.vision.md
I know that some similar tools exist (Tasks.md, MDTASK), but they don't quite cut it for me.Does it make sense to pursue this project? Is
Ask HN: Is giving AI agents DB access the new BI-tool problem?
A couple of early-to-mid-stage startups I'm consulting with are asking the same question: their AI/ML team wants production Postgres data, and nobody's quite sure how to give it to them.I've handled this before for BI teams — read replica with a generous `max_standby_streaming_delay` and `hot_standby_feedback` on, accepting the occasional bloat on the primary. Worked fine. But the AI/ML ask feels different in ways I can't fully articulate yet, which is part of why I
Water simulation of famous quantum effect reveals unexpected wave patterns
In the quirky quantum world, particles can be affected by forces that they never directly encounter. A classic example is the Aharonov–Bohm (AB) effect, where electrons are affected by a magnetic field, despite not passing through it. Although predicted in 1959, it took more than two decades to confirm this effect experimentally, as the specific changes to the electrons' wave properties could only be inferred indirectly, and with great difficulty. Now, physicists from the Okinawa Institute of Sc
After 200 years scientists finally crack the “dolomite problem”
After two centuries of failed attempts, scientists have finally grown dolomite in the lab, cracking a long-standing geological puzzle. They discovered that the mineral’s growth stalls because of tiny defects—but in nature, those flaws get washed away over time. By mimicking this process with precise simulations and electron beam pulses, the team achieved record-breaking crystal growth. The finding could reshape how high-tech materials are made.
Quantum model explains how single electrons cause damage inside silicon chips
Researchers in the UC Santa Barbara Materials Department have uncovered the elusive quantum mechanism by which energetic electrons break chemical bonds inside microelectronic devices—a detrimental process that slowly degrades performance over time. The discovery, published as an Editors' Suggestion in Physical Review B, explains decades-old experimental puzzles and moves scientists closer to engineering more reliable devices.
Scientists develop dirt-powered fuel cell that could replace batteries
Scientists have developed a fuel cell that uses microbes in soil to produce electricity. The device can power underground sensors for tasks like monitoring moisture or detecting touch, without needing batteries or solar panels. It works in both dry and wet conditions and even lasts longer than similar technologies. This could pave the way for sustainable, low-maintenance sensors in farming and environmental monitoring.
Scientists just found a way to control electrons without magnets
A surprising breakthrough in physics could reshape the future of computing by tapping into a strange, previously untapped property of matter. Scientists have shown that tiny atomic vibrations—called chiral phonons—can directly transfer motion to electrons, allowing them to carry information without magnets, batteries, or even electricity. This opens the door to a new field known as orbitronics, where data is processed using the orbital motion of electrons instead of traditional charge or spin.
Three greats who we’ve lost
Sir Charles Antony Richard Hoare (1934-2026) won the 1980 Turing Award for numerous contributions to computer science, including foundational work on concurrency and formal verification and the invention (with Dijkstra) of the dining philosophers problem. But he’s perhaps best known, to pretty much everyone who’s ever studied CS, as the inventor of the Quicksort algorithm. I’m sorry that I never got to meet him.Michael O. Rabin (1931-2026), of Harvard University, was one of t