Sarah Burris is a long-time veteran of political campaigns, having worked as a fundraiser and media director across the United States. She transitioned into reporting while working for Rock the Vote, Future Majority and Wiretap Magazine, covering the Millennial Generation's perspective during the presidential elections. As a political writer, Burris has had bylines at CNN, Salon.com, BNR, and AlterNet and serves as a senior digital editor for RawStory.com.
Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke has been using taxpayer money to fund his own private jets and use of military plans to fly to his home in Whitefish, Montana as well as two two Caribbean islands.
A report from Politico revealed Zinke spent $12,375 on one trip to Whitefish from Las Vegas using a Beechcraft King Air 200.
During that trip to Las Vegas, Zinke spoke at an event for the city's new professional hockey team. Earlier in the day he flew to Pahrump, Nevada for an announcement about public lands.
He's now the fourth senior official in President Donald Trump's cabinet who has been caught using private jets instead of commercial travel for government trips. Others include EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt, who has taken multiple trips back to Oklahoma, where some say he might run for Governor in 2018. Most notably, however, is Secretary of Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price, who was caught spending $1 million so far on private jets and the use of military planes.
Interior Department spokeswoman Heather Swift explained that the planes were used only when staff was unable to find a commercial flight that would work with the secretary's schedule. However, Las Vegas is "one of the main connecting airports for commercial flights to Glacier International," Politico reported.
The trip to Montana was to speak before the Western Governors' Association's meeting. He spoke to the governors for 20 minutes and refused to take questions. He then did a photoshoot with GQ Magazine. He also went fishing at Lake McDonald while also doing an interview with Outside Magazine records show. The following day, Zinke and his staff flew back to Washington, D.C. on commercial flights.
The two flights to the Caribbean were to attend the centennial of the Danish government. He flew from St. Croix to St. Thomas in the U.S. Virgin Islands on March 31. There were then two flights chartered returning to St. Croix that night. Commercial flights between the islands generally cost only a few hundred dollars.
Zinke and his wife also used military flights to Norway and from there to Alaska. He also used a military helicopter to fly from Fort Bliss to see the Organ Mountains monument in New Mexico in June. He then used a Bureau of Land Management helicopter to survey the Basin and Range National Monument at the end of July.
We collected audio recordings in 103 languages, and we decided how to convert these into waveforms that show these sounds visually. Colleagues from NASA etched these waveforms into the metal plate that shields the spacecraft’s sensitive electronics from Jupiter’s harsh radiation.
I also designed another part of the message that visually depicts the wavelengths of water’s constituents, because water is so important to the search for intelligent life in the universe.
NASA’s design for the Clipper message heading to Jupiter’s moon Europa.
Etching messages into spacecraft isn’t a new practice, and Clipper’s message fits into a decades-old tradition started by astronomer Carl Sagan.
In 1972 and 1973, two Pioneer spacecraft headed to Jupiter and Saturn carrying metal plaques engraved with scientific and pictorial messages. In 1977, two Voyager spacecraft headed to Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Nepture bearing gold-plated copper phonograph records. These records contained tutorials in mathematics and chemistry, as well as music, photos and sounds of Earth and greetings in 55 languages.
Water words
As water is essential for life on Earth, searching for its presence elsewhere has been key to many NASA missions. Astronomers suspect that Europa, where Clipper is headed, has an ocean underneath its icy surface, making it a prime candidate for the search for life in the outer solar system.
Part of the Clipper message features the word for water in 103 languages. We started with audio files collected online, but we then needed to analyze those and find an output that could be engraved on a metal plate. I ended up going back to some of the techniques I used in some of my early psycholinguistic research, where I explored how emotions are encoded in speech.
The 103 spoken words we recorded represent a global snapshot of the diversity of Earth’s languages. The outward-facing side of the Clipper plate shows the words as waveforms that track the varying intensity of sound as each word is spoken.
Each person whom we recorded saying the word “water” for the waveform had a connection to water. For example, the lawyer who contributed the word for water in Uzbek – “suv” – organizes an annual music festival in Uzbekistan to raise awareness of the desertification of the Aral Sea.
The native speaker of the Catalan water word – “aigua” – hunts for exoplanets, discovering potentially habitable planets that orbit other stars.
The Drake Equation
Clipper’s message also pays homage to astronomer Frank Drake, the father of SETI – the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence – by bearing the Drake Equation, his namesake formula. By drawing on scientific data, as well as some best guess hunches, the Drake Equation estimates the number of extraterrestrial civilizations in the galaxy currently sending messages into the cosmos.
By one widely quoted estimate, there are a tenth as many of these extraterrestrial civilizations as one’s average lifetime in years. If civilizations survive for a million years, for example, there should be about 100,000 in the galaxy. If they last only a century on average, scientists would estimate that about 10 exist.
Radio astronomers study the universe by examining the radiation that chemical elements in space give off. They spend much of their time mapping the distribution of the most abundant chemical in the universe – hydrogen.
Hydrogen emits radiation at a certain frequency called the hydrogen line, which radio telescopes can detect. During Project Ozma, the first modern-day SETI experiment, Drake looked for artificial signals at the same frequency, because he figured scientists on other worlds might recognize hydrogen as universally significant and broadcast signals at that frequency.
The water hole
As our team developed our water words message, I realized that the message would only make sense if it were discovered by someone already familiar with the contents inscribed on the plate. The Drake Equation would only make sense if someone already knew what each of the terms in the equation stood for.
The Europa Clipper will crash into Jupiter or one of its other moons, with Ganymede or Callisto the leading candidates. But if for some reason the mission changes and it survives that fate, then humans far in the future with a radically different cultural background and different language conventions may retrieve it millennia from now as an ancient artifact.
To ensure we had at least one part of the message that a distant future scientist might be able to understand, I also designed a pictorial representation of the same frequency that Drake used for Project Ozma: the hydrogen line. We engraved this on the Clipper plate, along with a frequency called the hydroxyl line.
When hydrogen (H+) and hydroxyl (OH-) combine, they form water. Scientists call the range of frequencies between these lines the “water hole.” The water hole represents the part of the radio spectrum where astronomers conducted the first SETI experiments.
We displayed the hydrogen and hydroxyl lines using their wavelengths in the Clipper message. The metal plate also has diagrams showing what hydrogen and hydroxyl look like at the atomic level.
We’re hoping that future chemists would recognize these chemical components as the ingredients of water. If they do, we will have succeeded in communicating at least a few core scientific concepts across time, space and language.
Waveforms let our team tie the messages on the two sides of the Clipper plate together. On the water words side, over a hundred words are depicted by their waveforms. On the other side, the wavelengths of hydrogen and hydroxyl – the constituents of water – are etched into the plate.
METI International funded the collection and curation of the water words, as well as my design of the hydrogen and hydroxyl lines, providing these to NASA at no cost.
While designing the message for the Europa Clipper, we got to reflect on the importance of water on Earth, and think about why astronomers feel so compelled to search for it beneath the icy crust of Jupiter’s moon Europa. The spacecraft is scheduled to enter Jupiter’s orbit in April 2030.
For decades, the pursuit of quantum computing has struggled with the need for extremely low temperatures, mere fractions of a degree above absolute zero (0 Kelvin or –273.15°C). That’s because the quantum phenomena that grant quantum computers their unique computational abilities can only be harnessed by isolating them from the warmth of the familiar classical world we inhabit.
A single quantum bit or “qubit”, the equivalent of the binary “zero or one” bit at the heart of classical computing, requires a large refrigeration apparatus to function. However, in many areas where we expect quantum computers to deliver breakthroughs – such as in designing new materials or medicines – we will need large numbers of qubits or even whole quantum computers working in parallel.
Quantum computers that can manage errors and self-correct, essential for reliable computations, are anticipated to be gargantuan in scale. Companies like Google, IBM and PsiQuantum are preparing for a future of entire warehouses filled with cooling systems and consuming vast amounts of power to run a single quantum computer.
But if quantum computers could function at even slightly higher temperatures, they could be much easier to operate – and much more widely available. In new research published in Nature, our team has shown a certain kind of qubit – the spins of individual electrons – can operate at temperatures around 1K, far hotter than earlier examples.
The cold, hard facts
Cooling systems become less efficient at lower temperatures. To make it worse, the systems we use today to control the qubits are intertwining messes of wires reminiscent of ENIAC and other huge computers of the 1940s. These systems increase heating and create physical bottlenecks to making qubits work together.
The more qubits we try to cram in, the more difficult the problem becomes. At a certain point the wiring problem becomes insurmountable.
After that, the control systems need to be built into the same chips as the qubits. However, these integrated electronics use even more power – and dissipate more heat – than the big mess of wires.
A warm turn
Our new research may offer a way forward. We have demonstrated that a particular kind of qubit – one made with a quantum dot printed with metal electrodes on silicon, using technology much like that used in existing microchip production – can operate at temperatures around 1K.
This is only one degree above absolute zero, so it’s still extremely cold. However, it’s significantly warmer than previously thought possible. This breakthrough could condense the sprawling refrigeration infrastructure into a more manageable, single system. It would drastically reduce operational costs and power consumption.
The necessity for such technological advancements isn’t merely academic. The stakes are high in fields like drug design, where quantum computing promises to revolutionize how we understand and interact with molecular structures.
The research and development expenses in these industries, running into billions of dollars, underscore the potential cost savings and efficiency gains from more accessible quantum computing technologies.
A slow burn
“Hotter” qubits offer new possibilities, but they will also introduce new challenges in error correction and control. Higher temperatures may well mean an increase in the rate of measurement errors, which will create further difficulties in keeping the computer functional.
It is still early days in the development of quantum computers. Quantum computers may one day be as ubiquitous as today’s silicon chips, but the path to that future will be filled with technical hurdles.
Our recent progress in operating qubits at higher temperatures is as a key step towards making the requirements of the system simpler.
It offers hope that quantum computing may break free from the confines of specialized labs into the broader scientific community, industry and commercial data centres.
Disgraced former cryptocurrency mogul Sam Bankman-Fried is going to be spending the next quarter of a century behind bars.
Matthew Russell Lee of Inner City Press reports that Judge Lewis Kaplan on Thursday hit Bankman-Fried with a 300-month prison sentence for allegedly defrauding investors in his FTX cryptocurrency exchange, which collapsed in 2022.
Bankman-Fried was indicted shortly after FTX unexpectedly went bankrupt and led to reported billions of dollars in losses for investors.
In his initial indictment, Bankman-Fried was slapped with charges related to multiple financial crimes, including conspiracy, wire fraud, money laundering and election finance violations.
In the weeks after the first indictment, prosecutors would go on to add charges, including allegations that they made more than 300 illegal political donations totaling tens of millions of dollars.