The Overnight News Digest is a nightly series chronicling the eschaton and the fall of the Republic.
Oregon Public Broadcasting
Study: Ocean Acidification Is Dissolving Shells Of Young Dungeness Crab
A new study finds ocean acidification is already dissolving the shells and damaging the sensory organs of young Dungeness crab off the West Coast…
The ocean absorbs about a quarter of the carbon dioxide released by burning fossil fuels and that triggers a chemical process that makes ocean water more acidic.
Researchers with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration were surprised to see acidic water having so much impact so soon.
“We found dissolution impacts to the crab larvae that were not expected to occur until much later in this century,” said Richard Feely, senior scientist with NOAA’s Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory and one of the co-authors of the study.
The Guardian
Why were whales increasingly caught in crab lines? Because of the climate crisis
[Humpback whales have] increasingly got caught up in fishermen’s crab ropes. By 2016, there were more than 50 recorded entanglements that left whales injured or killed. Whales got ropes tangled around their mouths, making it difficult for them to eat. Crab lines cut through tissue and caused infections.
Although whales and fishing had coexisted for decades, this was a new problem. So what was driving it?
A new study published in the journal Nature Communications points at climate breakdown as a factor in the mass entanglements.
Telescope captures most detailed pictures yet of the sun
The sun’s turbulent surface has been revealed in unprecedented detail in the first observations by the Inouye solar telescope in Hawaii.
The striking images reveal a surprising level of structure hidden within the churning plasma exterior, bringing a previously hazy impression of the sun’s patchwork surface sharply into focus for the first time.
“These are the highest resolution images of the solar surface ever taken,” said Thomas Rimmele, the director of the Inouye solar telescope project. “What we previously thought looked like a bright point – one structure – is now breaking down into many smaller structures.”
Nature
China coronavirus: labs worldwide scramble to analyse live samples
With no sign that an outbreak of a new coronavirus is abating, virologists worldwide are itching to get their hands on physical samples of the virus. They are drawing up plans to test drugs and vaccines, develop animal models of the infection and investigate questions about the biology of the virus such as how it spreads.
“The moment we heard about this outbreak, we started to put our feelers out to get access to these isolates,” says Vincent Munster, a virologist at the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases in Hamilton, Montana. His lab is expecting to receive a sample in the next week from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, Georgia, which has led the response to US cases of the virus.
The first lab to isolate and study the virus, known provisionally as 2019-nCoV, was at the epicentre of the outbreak: in Wuhan, China. A team at the Wuhan Institute of Virology led by virologist Zheng-Li Shi isolated the virus from a 49-year-old woman, who developed symptoms on 23 December 2019 before becoming critically ill.
The race to decipher how climate change influenced Australia’s record fires
On 1 January, the air in Canberra was the worst of any city in the world. With unprecedented bush fires raging nearby, a thick blanket of smoke smothered Australia’s capital for weeks, sending a surge of residents to the hospital with breathing problems. The toxic haze got so bad that Sophie Lewis, a climate scientist at the University of New South Wales (UNSW) Canberra, took her toddler and boarded a plane to Tasmania.
“I almost wept with relief in Melbourne, on the way to Hobart, simply from seeing the sky,” she says. After weeks in the smoke, her daughter had grown used to all the people walking around with “bird beaks”, Lewis’s name for the masks everyone was wearing.
From Hobart, Lewis fielded e-mails from concerned colleagues overseas. Like the rest of the world, they were stunned by the scale and severity of the fires ravaging Australia (see ‘A country aflame’).
Science
Mite-destroying gut bacterium might help save vulnerable honey bees
The world’s honey bees are facing an unprecedented crisis. Since the 1940s, the number of honey bee hives in the United States has dropped from 6 million to 2.5 million. A combination of colony-killing mites, viral pathogens, and possibly pesticides is largely to blame. Now, researchers are tapping an unusual ally in the fight to bring the bees back: a bacterium that lives solely in their guts. By genetically modifying the bacterium to trick the mite or a virus to destroy some of its own DNA, scientists have improved bee survival in the lab—and killed many of the mites that were parasitizing the insects.
The work, which has yet to be tested in whole hives or outdoors, promises to be effective over the long term, says Robert Paxton, a bee ecologist at Martin Luther University, Halle-Wittenberg, who was not involved with the study. It could help end, he says, “the major plagues of the honey bee.”
Those plagues include the aptly named Varroa destructor mite, which weakens bees by feeding on their fat stores, as well as the deadly “deformed wing” virus the mite transmits when it makes its home on the bees’ bodies. All too quickly, the mites have developed resistance to pesticides that used to kill them, Paxton says
Lost world revealed by human, Neanderthal relics washed up on North Sea beaches
On a clear, windy autumn afternoon last October, Willy van Wingerden spent a few free hours before work walking by the sea not far from the Dutch town of Monster. Here, in 2013, the cheerful nurse found her first woolly mammoth tooth. She has since plucked more than 500 ancient artifacts from the broad, windswept beach known as the Zandmotor, or “sand engine.” She has found Neanderthal tools made of river cobbles, bone fishhooks, and human remains thousands of years old. […]
Van Wingerden’s favorite beachcombing spot is no ordinary stretch of sand. Nearly half a kilometer wide, the beach is made of material dredged from the sea bottom 13 kilometers offshore and dumped on the existing beach in 2012. It’s a €70 million experimental coastal protection measure, its sands designed to spread over time to shield the Dutch coast from sea-level rise. And the endeavor has made 21 million cubic meters of Stone Age soil accessible to archaeologists.
That soil preserves traces of a lost world. During the last ice age, sea levels were 70 meters lower, and what is now the North Sea between Great Britain and the Netherlands was a rich lowland, home to modern humans, Neanderthals, and even earlier hominins. It all disappeared when glaciers melted and sea level rose about 8500 years ago.
Science Daily
MRI-based mapping of the squid brain
We are closer to understanding the incredible ability of squid to instantly camouflage themselves, thanks to research from The University of Queensland.
Dr Wen-Sung Chung and Professor Justin Marshall, from UQ's Queensland Brain Institute, completed the first MRI-based mapping of the squid brain in 50 years to develop an atlas of neural connections.
"This the first time modern technology has been used to explore the brain of this amazing animal, and we proposed 145 new connections and pathways, more than 60 per cent of which are linked to the vision and motor systems," Dr Chung said.
Anti-solar cells: A photovoltaic cell that works at night
What if solar cells worked at night? That's no joke, according to Jeremy Munday, professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at UC Davis. In fact, a specially designed photovoltaic cell could generate up to 50 watts of power per square meter under ideal conditions at night, about a quarter of what a conventional solar panel can generate in daytime, according to a concept paper by Munday and graduate student Tristan Deppe. The article was published in, and featured on the cover of, the January 2020 issue of ACS Photonics.
Munday, who recently joined UC Davis from the University of Maryland, is developing prototypes of these nighttime solar cells that can generate small amounts of power. The researchers hope to improve the power output and efficiency of the devices.
Munday said that the process is similar to the way a normal solar cell works, but in reverse. An object that is hot compared to its surroundings will radiate heat as infrared light. A conventional solar cell is cool compared to the sun, so it absorbs light.
Gizmodo
Cool Discovery Could Finally Explain Gigantic Ice Rings Found on Siberian Lake
The appearance of large ice rings on Lake Baikal in southern Siberia has confounded scientists since they were first discovered in the early 2000s. Recent investigations into the ice rings have resulted in a plausible explanation, but there’s still much to learn about these unusual features.
Russia’s Lake Baikal is the world’s largest and deepest freshwater lake. It’s home to many varieties of fish not seen anywhere else in the world, and even an endemic freshwater seal population. And it also features strange ice rings, which were first spotted in the early 2000s through MODIS satellite imagery.
Research published late last year in Limnology and Oceanography posits a plausible explanation for strange ice rings that frequently appear on Lake Baikal during the winter months: the circular movement of warm water beneath the ice.
Daylight Saving Time Linked to More Deadly Car Crashes
A new study out Thursday highlights a disturbing consequence of the much-hated tradition of Daylight Saving Time. It found evidence that the yearly moving-ahead of clocks in the spring leads to more fatal car crashes throughout the U.S. during the following week.
The new study, published in Current Biology, looked at federal data on fatal traffic crashes between 1996 and 2017 in states where Daylight Saving Time is observed (Hawaii and parts of Arizona excluded). They specifically focused on the week before, during, and after the time change.
A New Type of Aurora Has Been Discovered by Citizen Scientists
A collaboration between physicists and citizen scientists has led to the discovery of a previously unknown form of Northern Lights. Dubbed “the dunes,” the spectacular auroral form is providing new insights into Earth’s upper atmosphere.
New research published today in AGU Advances describes the auroral dunes, which appear as undulating, green-tinged waves in the night sky. The dunes are appearing in the upper atmosphere and likely represent a previously unknown physical process. Physicist Minna Palmroth from the University of Helsinki and her colleagues are the first to document this type of aurora, but the discovery wouldn’t have been possible without the help of citizen scientists.
The Washington Post
Electric cars will challenge state power grids
[…] Washington state is No. 3 in the nation in per capita adoption of plug-in cars, behind California and Hawaii. But as Washington and other states urge their residents to buy electric vehicles — a crucial component of efforts to reduce carbon emissions — they also need to make sure the electric grid can handle it.
The average electric vehicle requires 30 kilowatt hours to travel 100 miles — the same amount of electricity an average American home uses each day to run appliances, computers, lights and heating and air conditioning.
An Energy Department study found that increased electrification across all sectors of the economy could boost national consumption by as much as 38 percent by 2050, in large part because of electric vehicles. The environmental benefit of electric cars depends on the electricity being generated by renewables.
A 3,000-year-old Egyptian mummy speaks again, with some high-tech help
Using a model of a 3,000-year-old mummy’s vocal tract, researchers have approximated the voice of a long-dead Egyptian priest. They were able to create a single burst of sound, a vowel-like bleat between the “e” in “bed” and the “a” in “bad.”
The study published Thursday in the journal Scientific Reports is the sort of science that at first seems to beg for the B-movie treatment (“The Mummy Croaks Again!”). But there is more-serious motivation involved, as well as more respect for the deceased person wrapped in burial cloth.
The study authors said that the priest, named Nesyamun, would be pleased with this postmortem re-creation of his voice. “It is the fulfillment of his belief” to have his voice heard in the afterlife, said study author John Schofield, an archaeologist at the University of York in England.
Phys.org
Global science team on red alert as Arctic lands grow greener
New research techniques are being adopted by scientists tackling the most visible impact of climate change—the so-called greening of Arctic regions.
The latest drone and satellite technology is helping an international team of researchers to better understand how the vast, treeless regions called the tundra is becoming greener.
As Arctic summer temperatures warm, plants are responding. Snow is melting earlier and plants are coming into leaf sooner in spring. Tundra vegetation is spreading into new areas and where plants were already growing, they are now growing taller.
Robotic submarine snaps first-ever images at foundation of notorious Antarctic glacier
During an unprecedented scientific campaign on an Antarctic glacier notorious for contributions to sea-level, researchers took first-ever images at the glacier's foundations on the ocean floor. The area is key to Thwaites Glacier's potential to become more dangerous, and in the coming months, the research team hopes to give the world a clearer picture of its condition.
The images, taken by a robotic underwater vehicle, were part of a broad set of data collected in a variety of experiments by an international team. The International Thwaites Glacier Collaboration (ITGC) announced the completion of this first-ever major research venture on the glacier coincident with the 200-year anniversary of the discovery of Antarctica in 1820.
Already, Thwaites accounts for about four percent of global sea-level rise.
x xYouTube Video
How your clothes become microfibre pollution in the sea
From the polar ice cap to the Mariana Trench 10 kilometres below the waves, synthetic microfibres spat out by household washing machines are polluting oceans everywhere… a major source of marine pollution—microscopic bits of polyester, nylon and acrylic—has up to now gone largely unnoticed, experts say.
Most people don't realise it, but "the majority of our clothes are made from plastic," said Imogen Napper, a researcher at the University of Plymouth. […]
The average family in the United States and Canada unleashes more than 500 million microfibres into the environment each year, according to the Ocean Wise organisation.
Space.com
Space-time is swirling around a dead star, proving Einstein right again
The way the fabric of space and time swirls in a cosmic whirlpool around a dead star has confirmed yet another prediction from Einstein's theory of general relativity, a new study finds.
That prediction is a phenomenon known as frame dragging, or the Lense-Thirring effect. It states that space-time will churn around a massive, rotating body. For example, imagine Earth were submerged in honey. As the planet rotated, the honey around it would swirl — and the same holds true with space-time.
Satellite experiments have detected frame dragging in the gravitational field of rotating Earth, but the effect is extraordinarily small and, therefore, has been challenging to measure. Objects with greater masses and more powerful gravitational fields, such as white dwarfs and neutron stars, offer better chances to see this phenomenon.
NASA unveils 16 payloads that private lunar landers will take to the moon
The commercial spaceflight industry is thriving, and regulators won't get in the way. That's the message that speakers at the 23rd Annual Commercial Space Transportation Conference in Washington this week want to get out.
"The innovation, the technology, the leading edge, in many cases, is coming from the private sector," said Rep. Garret Graves, R-LA, of the U.S. House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee's Aviation Subcommittee. "As we move forward on establishing the right type of government structure, all of us are very aware and cognizant that we've got to be very careful about stymieing innovation."
NASA is certainly leaning into the push for commercial spaceflight. Just last week, the space agency unveiled 16 scientific experiments and technology demonstrations that will hitch a ride to the moon aboard landers built by two private companies: Astrobotic of Pittsburgh and Intuitive Machines LLC of Houston. The two landers are slated to launch in July 2021 on United Launch Alliance's Vulcan Centaur rocket and Space X's Falcon 9, respectively.
AP News
Astronaut craves salsa and surf after record 11 months aloft
After nearly 11 months in orbit, the astronaut holding the record for the longest spaceflight by a woman can’t wait to dig into some salsa and chips, and swim and surf in the Gulf of Mexico.
NASA astronaut Christina Koch told The Associated Press on Tuesday — her 319th consecutive day in space — that taking part in the first all-female spacewalk was the highlight of her mission. She’s been living on the International Space Station since March and returns to Earth on Feb. 6, landing in Kazakhstan with two colleagues aboard a Russian capsule.
Koch said she and fellow NASA astronaut Jessica Meir appreciated that the Oct. 18 spacewalk “could serve as an inspiration for future space explorers.”
Mongabay
Habitat loss, climate change make for an uncertain cricket harvest in Uganda
“The harvest season was good when the forests were not yet cut down, but now they don’t have any food,” says John Mulindwa, 58, sitting behind a timber frame stacked with empty oil drums and metal sheeting. The roadside is crowded with similar structures for catching nsenene — crickets — a delicacy across Uganda, but especially here in the small city of Masaka.
Twice a year, the rains bring swarms of nsenene, primarily Ruspolia differens — a bush cricket or katydid but commonly referred to as a grasshopper — migrating in search of food and a mate; and twice a year, traditionally, people across the country would painstakingly catch nsenene by hand. “During that time we were capturing them in bedsheets and using reeds that we could shake so that the nsenene follow,” Mulindwa says.
Then, in the mid-1990s, some residents of Masaka had the bright idea of using powerful electric lights as a trap, attracting vast swarms of nsenene and a new source of income. But in recent years, with the loss of the crickets’ habitat and a rapidly changing climate, Masaka’s fortunes are also turning.
Melting Arctic sea ice may be altering winds, weather at equator: study
Melting Arctic sea ice has fundamentally and profoundly altered polar ecosystems in recent decades, creating warmer temperatures on land and disrupting the behavior of marine mammals and ice-obligate species. But now new research suggests that melting sea ice is also influencing weather systems as far away as the equatorial Pacific Ocean.
Patterns originating in those tropical waters include El Niño and La Niña, which shape the weather experienced on every continent, meaning, if the new study is correct, that Arctic ice loss could have global ramifications. […]
A study published … in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences finds this accelerating sea ice melt could be linked to the intensification of Central Pacific trade winds, the emergence of El Niño events, and a weakening of the North Pacific Aleutian Low Circulation — a semi-permanent low pressure system that drives post-tropical cyclones and generates strong storms.
The New York Times
Asteroid That Killed the Dinosaurs Was Great for Bacteria
The asteroid moved 24 times faster than a rifle bullet as it struck Earth some 66 million years ago. Its supersonic shock wave flattened trees across North and South America, and its heat wave sparked incomprehensibly large forest fires.
The event lofted so much debris into the atmosphere that photosynthesis shut down. The non-avian dinosaurs disappeared. And nearly 75 percent of all species were extinguished.
At the point of impact, the picture was even more dire. The space rock left a sterile crater nearly 20 miles deep in what is now the Gulf of Mexico. Not a single living thing could have survived.
But even at ground zero, life managed to return, and quickly.
New findings published in the journal Geology last week revealed that cyanobacteria — blue-green algae responsible for harmful toxic blooms — moved into the crater a few years after the impact. That’s the blink of an eye, geologically speaking, and helps illuminate how life bounces back on Earth following cataclysmic events, even in the most devastated environments.
CBC News
Archeologists find trove of medieval artifacts in 'absolutely gargantuan' cesspit
In his line of work, Simon Thurley has seen his fair share of medieval cesspits.
But a cesspit that was recently discovered under a gallery in London, England, is unlike any the architectural historian has seen before.
The pit, found during a refurbishment project at the Courtauld Institute of Art, is nearly 4.6 metres deep and contains a wide array of artifacts dating back to the 14th and 15th centuries — including many items you might not expect to find in the sewer.
Japan panel finds Fukushima nuclear plant water release to sea is best option
A Japanese government panel on Friday roughly accepted a draft proposal for releasing into the sea massive amounts of radioactive water now being stored at the tsunami-wrecked Fukushima nuclear plant.
The economy and industry ministry's draft proposal said releasing the water gradually into the sea was the safer, more feasible method, though evaporation was also a proven method. The proposal in coming weeks will be submitted to the government for further discussion to decide when and how the water should be released.
Nearly nine years after the 2011 meltdowns of three reactor cores at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Plant, it was a small step toward deciding what to do with the water and follows expert recommendations.
CBS News
Scientists alarmed to discover warm water at "vital point" beneath Antarctica's "doomsday glacier"
Scientists have found warm water beneath Antarctica's "doomsday glacier," a nickname used because it is one of Antarctica's fastest melting glaciers. While researchers have observed the recession of the Thwaites Glacier for a decade, this marks the first time they detected the presence of warm water – found at a "vital point" beneath the glacier.
A news release on the findings called it an alarming discovery.
"The fact that such warm water was just now recorded by our team along a section of Thwaites grounding zone where we have known the glacier is melting suggests that it may be undergoing an unstoppable retreat that has huge implications for global sea-level rise," David Holland, director of New York University's Environmental Fluid Dynamics Laboratory and NYU Abu Dhabi's Center for Global Sea Level Change, which conducted the research, said in the news release.
Scientific American
Cracks in the Caribbean: “The Building Was Shaking Like Paper”
Folks in Cuba, Jamaica, and the Cayman Islands were going about life as usual on the afternoon of January 28th, 2020, when everything began rocking. A stressed-out fault had finally lost its entire schist, and the next thing everyone knew, buildings from the Bahamas to Miami were swaying. Even people in northern Florida felt it. Seismometers in Alaska got in on the action.
The Caymans found themselves hosting some really gnarly liquefaction, plus some ground cracks and sinkholes. A few buildings sustained some damage. Worried people hustled out of buildings all over the region. Tsunami alerts went out, and higher-than-usual waves washed in on a few regional coasts.
And... that was about it. You'd be forgiven for thinking this quake was maybe a magnitude 5-ish, but when USGS seismologists finished reviewing the data, the quake measured a whopping M7.7.
Electronics cannot handle the heat. That is why computers rely on fans, and car engines need radiators. But these cooling devices are necessarily rigid, which makes them a bad fit for soft robots made from stretchy, flexible plastics instead of metal. So some Cornell University researchers have taken their inspiration from perspiration and developed a soft robotic gripper that automatically starts sweating when temperatures rise.
Thanks to their squishy construction, soft robots are sometimes more adaptable and durable—and can be less likely to cause injury—than their metallic counterparts. Yet these machines’ flexible materials can also make them vulnerable to high temperatures. The polymers used in many soft robots hold heat longer than metals do, and their stiffness changes when the temperature is altered. These properties can affect the way the robots bend and thus their ability to grasp objects. Giving them the old-fashioned trait of sweating may help.
Universe Today
Voyager 2 Went Into Fault Protection Mode, But Engineers Brought it Back Online
NASA’s Voyager 2 spacecraft went into fault protection mode on Tuesday January 28th. The fault protection routines automatically protect the spacecraft in harmful conditions. Both Voyagers have these routines programmed into their systems.
After it happened, NASA engineers were still in communication with the spacecraft and receiving telemetry.
The fault protection stems from a maneuver attempted on January 25th. On that day, Voyager 2 was supposed to execute a scheduled rotation maneuver. The spacecraft rotates itself 360 degrees to calibrate one of its instruments, MAG, the triaxial fluxgate magnetometer. That instrument is investigating the solar wind boundary with the interstellar magnetic field and beyond.
Yale News
Tiny salamander’s huge genome may harbor the secrets of regeneration
The type of salamander called axolotl, with its frilly gills and widely spaced eyes, looks like an alien and has other-worldly powers of regeneration. Lose a limb, part of the heart or even a large portion of its brain? No problem: They grow back.
“It regenerates almost anything after almost any injury that doesn’t kill it,” said Parker Flowers, postdoctoral associate in the lab of Craig Crews, the John C. Malone Professor of Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology and professor of chemistry and pharmacology.
If scientists can find the genetic basis for the axolotl’s ability to regenerate, they might be able to find ways to restore damaged tissue in humans. But they have been thwarted in the attempt by another peculiarity of the axolotl — it has the largest genome of any animal yet sequenced, 10 times larger than that of humans.
Now Flowers and colleagues have found an ingenious way to circumvent the animal’s complex genome to identify at least two genes involved in regeneration, they report Jan. 28 in the journal eLife.
A Breakthrough in Molding Materials at the Nanoscale
In recent years, researchers have made advances in molding metals and alloys at the nanoscale level. But the ability to mold a coveted class of materials known as ordered phases at that scale has been elusive.
In a potential game-changing shift in how nano- and quantum devices are designed and manufactured, researchers in the lab of Jan Schroers, professor of mechanical engineering & materials science, have discovered that these materials are actually very conducive to nanomolding, thanks to their atoms’ ability to self-organize. The breakthrough could lead to new uses for ordered phases, which make up the large majority of functional materials, including superconductors, topological insulators, and quantum materials. The results are published today in Physical Review Letters.
When the researchers first started nanomolding amorphous metals about 10 years ago, they were encouraged by the possibilities, albeit with some reservations. “It was pretty exciting, and you could make some really nice catalysts,” Schroers said. “But there was a limitation in that you could only do a few alloys out of the billions and billions of alloys.”
St. George News
Bone of rare long-necked dinosaur found in Southern Utah desert
A bone belonging to a rare, yet well-known dinosaur was discovered in Southern Utah and has paleontologists excited by its discovery.
Utah State Parks reported that a 6-foot, 7-inch humerus bone belonging to a rare 30-ton Brachiosaurus was unearthed at a site in the Southern Utah desert last May by paleoartist Brian Engh. The team that removed the bone included paleontologists from the Utah Field House of the Natural History State Park Museum in Vernal, Utah, and the Western University of Health Sciences, in Pomona, California. To protect it, the exact site is not being disclosed.
The recovered bone, the humerus, is the upper arm/leg bone for this towering creature. This is only the third Brachiosaurus humerus ever found – and the first in Utah, according to Utah State Parks.
MIT News
Finding the true potential of algorithms
Each semester, Associate Professor Virginia Vassilevska Williams tries to impart one fundamental lesson to her computer-science undergraduates: Math is the foundation of everything. […]
“When taking an algorithms class, many students expect to program a lot and perhaps use deep learning, but it’s very mathematical and has very little programming,” says Williams, the Steven G. (1968) and Renee Finn Career Development Professor who recently earned tenure in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. “We don’t have much time together in class (only two hours a week), but I hope in that time they get to see a little of the beauty of math — because math allows you to see how and why everything works together. It really is a beautiful thing.” […]
In highly influential work, Williams in 2012 improved an algorithm for “matrix multiplication” — a fundamental operation across computer science — that was thought to be the fastest iteration for 24 years. Years later, she co-founded an emerging field called “fine-grained complexity,” which seeks to explain, in part, how fast certain algorithms can solve various problems.
Ars Technica
Levitating sand escapes classical world, enters quantum ground state
How big can something get and still display quantum behavior? It's a fundamental question in physics, and it gets at the nature of reality itself. All sorts of weird behavior goes on in the quantum world: particles behave like they're in two places at once, there are limits to how certain we can be of where things are, and so on. But once things get bigger than a handful of atoms, we get the nice, orderly behavior of our familiar world, where things exist in definite locations.
The transition between the quantum and the familiar seems to be set by environmental interactions. Once an object gets big enough, it's constantly bumping into atoms and absorbing photons, any of which can push it out of a well-defined quantum state. So the question becomes one of how big we can let things get while still controlling their interactions with the environment.