The Moon: oh wow you guys decided to come back Artemis II crew: earth’s haunted

"We [...] introduce a new measure, felinity." arxiv.org/abs/2604.02793

The quantum adiabatic theorem says that a slowly perturbed system stays in its instantaneous ground state. Now researchers have shown that this principle holds for the opposite limit: The ground state remains the most likely state even for a system subjected to an instantaneous perturbation.

Artemis II lifts off

The forward-looking Oratomic time-efficient architecture claims to "potentially enable runtimes of 10 days for ECC–256 with ≈26,000 qubits, and 97 days for RSA–2048 with ≈102,000." This is based on stitching together several gadgets and plausibly assuming they can work together on an atom platform.

We're making such good progress at reducing the number of qubits needed for factoring that we might accidentally overshoot and bring it down to zero, at which point we would have a classical factoring algorithm. arxiv.org/abs/2603.28627

Looks like Oratomic is coming in with a splash!

"our most time-efficient architectures can potentially enable runtimes of 10 days for ECC–256 with ≈ 26,000 qubits, and 97 days for RSA–2048 with ≈ 102,000 qubits" arxiv.org/pdf/2603.28627

More than 1,500 mathematicians are demanding that their field’s most prestigious meeting be moved from the U.S.

hello 👋 i have developed a new tool called blüuümpíi. blüuümpíi will convert every file on your hard drive to a .wav file without asking you, maximize your system volume, and play them on every bluetooth speaker you have ever connected to. if you offer feedback on blüuümpíi i will take legal action

I know I've said this a trillion times but I have to say it periodically to keep from going insane: The right ran a huge, well-funded, & ultimately successful campaign to completely take over political media & the infosphere more generally. This is by far the most important political development...

Charles Bennett and Gilles Brassard have been named the winners of the A.M. Turing Award, one of the highest honors in computing, for their work establishing the foundations of quantum information theory. The award comes with a $1 million prize. www.quantamagazine.org/quantum-cryp...

The APS Meeting in Denver starts in earnest tomorrow and as sort of an experiment to see if this still works, I've resolved to actually cover the conference on social media (like we did in days of yore), so bear with me for what will be a couple days of posting about physics.

Garnet Chan reflects on recent progress using classical heuristics in computational quantum chemistry—and what it means for quantum computing. The lessons he draws can help to steer both classical and quantum approaches in scientifically productive directions. quantumfrontiers.com/2026/03/12/t...

The arXiv is becoming a nonprofit separate from Cornell, and they're looking for a CEO. Please repost to let good candidates know! @dabacon.tachyon.institute, @harrowing.bsky.social, @michaelnielsen.bsky.social jobs.chronicle.com/job/37961678...

New fantastic work from my lovely colleagues at Phasecraft! "Onset of Ergodicity Across Scales on a Digital Quantum Processor" by F Alam, M Crichigno, E Crosson, @sflammia.bsky.social F M Gambetta, M Hunter Gordon, M Kreshchuk, @quantumashley.bsky.social , A Nocera & R A Santos

The distinction I would make is that writing is "thinking" in two simultaneous dimensions. One is the attempt to capture an idea in one's head. The other is that during the act of writing the thinking changes the original idea. When we remove the opportunity for that thinking the output is affected.

Student: Can you explain again what a free module is? Me: Well, it's a S: And don't say "it's a module that doesn't cost anything" Me: Look I know my jokes are bad but I wouldn't go for one that obvious S: OK. So what is it? Me: It's a module that has time to help you right now

“For a long time, the tech industry liked to think of itself as a meritocracy: it rewarded qualities like intelligence, competence, and expertise. But all that barely matters anymore.” Sam Kriss reports on the next generation of AI technologists.

Researchers have shown how the frequencies and bandwidths of individual photons can be tuned over a wide range inside a short length of standard optical fiber. They anticipate that their technique will be useful in future quantum computing and communications networks.

John Baez wants to wrangle one of the most abstract branches of math to better model the natural world. It sounds like a pipe dream. But is it? Read the latest Qualia column:

Masteful sequence of quotes in Mike and Ike which I never noticed before

No greater praise for a textbook has ever been put down in words

Mathematician Georg Cantor was born #OTD in 1845. He is the founder of set theory and developed the concepts of cardinal and transfinite numbers. These shocking results led his former professor Kronecker to call him a "corrupter of youth." Image: Oberwolfach Photo Collection

Absolutely love this! www.youtube.com/watch?v=T4Up... Kudos to the Norwegian Consumer Council for their efforts to fight enshittification! www.forbrukerradet.no/news-in-engl... Read their report here: storage02.forbrukerradet.no/media/2026/0...

A great overview of the evolution of #container technology via #Docker. It also provides a quick peek into the various technology bits that enable containers work. If you want to learn more about how containers work, then consider starting with wizardzines.com/zines/contai... by @b0rk.jvns.ca.

Interesting format for a review article. 24 brief chapters, each offering perspective from a small subset of the 69 authors on a particular topic. quantumfrontiers.com/2026/02/11/q...

My PhD student Wen Fan (fanweneddie.github.io) is looking for summer internships! ✨His research interests are at the intersection of AI and formal methods, and his work with me is exploring how LLMs can be used to build more usable and scalable verification tools.

New blog post! Autodiff through function types: Categorical semantics the ultimate backpropagator https://julesh.com/posts/2026-02-20-categorical-semantics-ultimate-backpropagator.html

Quantum computing is usually framed in complex linear algebra. This paper asks: what is the least you need to add to reversible classical computing to recover quantum computation? www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/... @manchegobaby.bsky.social

We are at an airport restaurant. A robot just drove up to us with our food, said, "Hi! Here I am!" and then drove away with our food.

What I’m seeing in some of the Epstein revelations about well known scientists who maintained contact after his conviction, is folks who always thought they were the smartest person in any room, sure they could shrewdly navigate a route that gets them what they want without getting dirty themselves.

I've been asked several times to comment on arxiv.org/abs/2602.11457, which claims to reduce the qubit cost of factoring by 10x. My take is that they demand a *lot* more qubit connectivity for that number. Your mileage depends entirely on how plausible you find those demands.

New many-body postdoc offering at @UMDscience; come join us! umd.wd1.myworkdayjobs.com/UMCP/job/Uni...

The paper is up! A project impressively led by Kenny Chen, co-advised with Julian Mestre, on Forrelation, a slightly-artificial up task introduced by Aaronson to show an exponential separation between classical and quantum computers.* Small 🧵 below! 📝 arxiv.org/abs/2602.07503 *(in the query model)

Good thread. This is why, when convenient, I like to switch to the completely equivalent but imo much more intuitive picture "the size of the universe is fixed but the speed of light gradually decreases" Nice bonus is imo "light moved infinitely fast" is easier to picture than Big Bang singularity

Teaser: coming soon to an #arXiv near you! (my coauthors did not change the title in time)

Did you know you can simulate quantum states with Pauli and Majorana propagation? In short: High-temperature states are provably and practically sparse, and we can use imaginary time evolution to get there starting from the infinite-temperature state. scirate.com/arxiv/2602.0...

I'm quite proud of how far I've been able to get with TensorType: https://github.com/bgavran/TensorType What started out as a casual "I wonder if I can implement type-safe tensors" question has now evolved into a fully-fledged library

A DISCWORLD PRIMER* *or, why should I read this thing that everyone keeps going on about? Come on in, sit down, pull up a chair. If you have followup questions, feel free to ask me or @ankhmorporkcity.watch, we're always happy to help. (1/a lot, idk, we'll figure this out as we go)

Today we get the computer scientists' view on the transition into fault-tolerance. There will indeed be a whole lot of classical computing involved in getting early fault-tolerance running, and the better it is, the more quantum we can use. arxiv.org/abs/2601.20247

Come and visit me at the poster session at #QIP26 today! :)))

Love the rock concert vibes of #QIP2026!

If you're interested in some of the design choices behind TensorType, have a look at the great blog post that @Andrev just posted: types.pl/@Andrev/1159... TLDR; Tensors in NumPy are secretly built out of the composition product of containers

Russia is scaling up its educational programs for journalists in Southeast Asia, Africa, China, and India, pushing a pro-Kremlin agenda and propaganda under the guise of an "alternative narrative" and a "fight against fakes."

Reading that while from Kyiv with no light, no heat, no warm water and working with a hot bottle on my lap from under my duvet so yes, I will indeed point out that Ukrainians are going through hell than marvelling at their resilience. ❄️ Temperature outside is -15°C...

⚡️ Russia welcomes Trump's tariffs on NATO allies over Greenland as 'collapse' of alliance. "The transatlantic alliance is over," Kremlin economic negotiator Kirill Dmitriev said.

❗️Poland says Russia carried out a cyberattack on its energy sector. In late December, the country nearly lost power, but the attack was successfully repelled. Poland’s minister described the attack as “digital tanks” that are already here.

This year's Quantum Computing Theory in Practice Conference (QCTiP) is scheduled for 04/20/2026-04/25/2026 in Oxford, UK 🇬🇧: qctipconf.github.io Talk submission deadline is just round the corner: 01/11/2026. Looking forward to many exciting contributions and a great time in Hogwarts🪄, aehm Oxford🎓.

Postdoctoral Researcher in Quantum Randomness Certification to develop a certifiable security hierarchy for Quantum Random Number Generators (QRNGs), in Malta. www.quantiki.org/position/pos...