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The Stand Up for Science demonstration at Washington Square Park in New York City on Friday 7 March 2025 had the most qualified speakers, angriest participants and wickedest signs of any protest I can remember.
Raucous, diverse and loud, it was held in the shadow of looming massive cuts to key US scientific agencies including the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the National Science Foundation (NSF), and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)
Other anti-science actions have included the appointment of a vaccine opponent as head of the US Health and Human Services and the cancellation of $400m in grants and contracts to Columbia University.
I arrived at the venue half an hour beforehand. Despite the chillingly cold and breezy weather, the park’s usual characters were there, including chess players, tap dancers, people advertising “Revolution Books” and evangelists who handed me a “spiritual credit card”.
But I had come for a more real-world cause that is affecting many of my research colleagues right here, right now. Among the Stand Up For Science demonstrators was Srishti Bose, a fourth-year graduate student in neuroscience at Queens College, who met me underneath the arch at the north of the park, the traditional site of demonstrations.
She had organized the rally together with two other women – a graduate student at Stony Brook University and a postdoc at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine. They had heard that there would be a Stand Up for Science rally on the same day in Washington, DC, and thought that New York City should have one too. In fact, there were 32 across the US in total.
The trio didn’t have much time, and none of them had ever planned a political protest before. “We spent 10 days frantically e-mailing everyone we could think of,” Srishti said, of having to arrange the permits, equipment, insurance, medical and security personnel – and speakers.
Speaking out Two of the protestors in Washington Square in Greenwich Village, New York. (Courtesy: Robert P Crease)
I was astounded at what they accomplished. The first speaker was Harald Varmus, who won the 1989 Nobel Prize for Physiology and Medicine and spent seven years as director of the NIH under President Barack Obama. “People think medicine falls from the sky,” he told protestors, “rather than from academics supported by science funding.”
Another Nobel-prize-winner who spoke was Martin Chalfie from Columbia University, who won the 2008 Nobel Prize for Chemistry.
Speaker after speaker – faculty, foundation directors, lab heads, faculty, postdocs, graduate students, New York State politicians – ticked off what was being lost by the budget cuts targeting science.
It included money for motor neurone disease, Alzheimer’s, cancer, polio, measles, heart disease research, climate science, and funding that supports stipends and salaries for postdocs, grad students, university labs and departments.
Lisa Randall, a theoretical physicist at Harvard University, began with a joke: “How many government officials does it take to screw in a light bulb? None: Trump says the job’s done and they stay in the dark.”
Randall continued by enumerating programme and funding cuts that will turn the lights out on important research. “Let’s keep the values that Make America Great – Again,” she concluded.
The crowd of 2000 or so demonstrators were diverse and multi-generational, as is typical for such events in my New York City. I heard at least five different languages being spoken. Everyone was fired up and roared “Boo!” whenever the names of certain politicians were mentioned.
I told Bose about the criticism I had heard that Stand Up for Science was making science look like a special-interest group rather than being carried out in the public interest.
She would have none of it. “They made us an interest group,” Bose insisted. “We grew up thinking that everyone accepted and supported science. This is the first time we’ve had a direct attack on what we do. I can’t think of a single lab that doesn’t have an NSF or NIH grant.”
Seriously funny Many of the demonstrators held messages aloft. (Courtesy: Robert P Crease)
Lots of signs were on display, many fabulously aggressive and angry, ranging from hand-drawn lettering on cardboard to carefully produced placards – some of which I won’t reproduce in a family magazine.
“I shouldn’t have to make a sign saying that ‘Defunding science is wrong’…but here we are” said one. “Go fact yourself!” and “Science keeps you assholes alive”, said others.
Two female breast-cancer researchers had made a sign that, they told me, put their message in a way that they thought the current US leaders would get: “Science saves boobs.”
I saw others that bitterly mocked the current US president’s apparent ignorance of the distinction between “transgenic” and “transgender”.
“Girls just wanna have funding” said another witty sign. “Executive orders are not peer reviewed”; “Science: because I’d rather not make shit up”; “Science is significant *p<0.05” said others.
The rally ended with 20 minutes of call-and-response chants. Everyone knew the words, thanks to a QR code.
“We will fight?”
“Every day!”
“When science is under attack?”
“Stand up, fight back!”
“What do we want?”
“Answers”
“When do we want it?”
“After peer review!”
After the spirited chanting, the rally was officially over, but many people stayed, sharing stories, collecting information and seeking ideas for the next moves.
“Obviously,” Bose said, “it’s not going to end here.”
A few months ago, I attended a presentation and reception at the Houses of Parliament in London for companies that had won Business Awards from the Institute of Physics in 2024. What excited me most at the event was hearing about the smaller start-up companies and their innovations. They are developing everything from metamaterials for sound proofing to instruments that can non-invasively measure pressure in the human brain.
The event also reminded me of my own experience working in the small-business sector. After completing my PhD in high-speed aerodynamics at the University of Southampton, I spent a short spell working for what was then the Defence and Evaluation Research Agency (DERA) in Farnborough. But wanting to stay in Southampton, I decided working permanently at DERA wasn’t right for me so started looking for a suitable role closer to home.
I soon found myself working as a development engineer at a small engineering company called Stewart Hughes Limited. It was founded in 1980 by Ron Stewart and Tony Hughes, who had been researchers at the Institute of Sound and Vibration Research (ISVR) at Southampton University. Through numerous research contracts, the pair had spent almost a decade developing techniques for monitoring the condition of mechanical machinery from their vibrations.
By attaching accelerometers or vibration sensors to the machines, they discovered that the resulting signals can be processed to determine the physical condition of the devices. Their particular innovation was to find a way to both capture and process the accelerometer signals in near real time to produce indicators relating to the health of the equipment being monitored. It required a combination of hardware and software that was cutting edge at the time.
Exciting times
Although I did not join the firm until early 1994, it still had all the feel of a start-up. We were located in a single office building (in reality it was a repurposed warehouse) with 50 or so staff, about 40 of whom were electronics, software and mechanical engineers. There was a strong emphasis on “systems engineering” – in other words, integrating different disciplines to design and build an overarching solution to a problem.
In its early years, Stewart Hughes had developed a variety of applications for their vibration health monitoring technique. It was used in all sorts of areas, ranging from conveyor belts carrying coal and Royal Navy ships travelling at sea to supersized trucks working on mines. But when I joined, the company was focused on helicopter drivetrains.
In particular, the company had developed a product called Health and Usage Monitoring System (HUMS). The UK’s Civil Aviation Authority required this kind of device to be fitted on all helicopters transporting passengers to and from oil platforms in the North Sea to improve operational safety. Our equipment (and that of rival suppliers – we did not have a monopoly) was used to monitor mechanical parts such as gears, bearings, shafts and rotors.
For someone straight out of university, it was an exciting time. There were lots of technical challenges to be solved, including designing effective ways to process signals in noisy environments and extracting information about critical drivetrain components. We then had to convert the data into indicators that could be monitored to detect and diagnose mechanical issues.
As a physicist, I found myself working closely with the engineers but tended to approach things from a more fundamental angle, helping to explain why certain approaches worked and others didn’t. Don’t forget that the technology developed by Stewart Hughes wasn’t used in the comfort of a physics lab but on a real-life working helicopter. That meant capturing and processing data on the airborne helicopter itself using bespoke electronics to manage high onboard data rates.
After the data were downloaded, they had to be sent on floppy disks or other portable storage devices to ground stations. There the results would be presented in a form to allow customers and our own staff to interpret and diagnose any mechanical problems. We also had to develop ways to monitor an entire fleet of helicopters, continuously learning and developing from experience.
If it all sounds as if working in a small business is plain sailing, well it rarely is. A few years before I joined, Stewart Huges had ridden out at least one major storm when it was forced to significantly reduce the workforce because anticipated contracts did not materialize. “Black Friday”, as it became known, made the board of directors nervous about taking on additional employees, often relying on existing staff to work overtime instead.
This arrangement actually suited many of the early-career employees, who were keen to quickly expand their work experience and their pay packet. But when I arrived, we were once again up against cash-flow challenges, which is the bane of any small business. Back then there were no digital electronic documents and web portals, which led to some hairy situations.
I can recall several occasions when the company had to book a despatch rider for 2 p.m. on a Friday afternoon to dash a report up the motorway to the Ministry of Defence in London. If we hadn’t got an approval signature and contractual payment before the close of business on the same day, the company literally wouldn’t have been able to open its doors on Monday morning.
Being part of a small company was undoubtedly a formative part of my early career experience
At some stage, however, the company’s bank lost patience with this hand-to-mouth existence and the board of directors was told to put the firm on a more solid financial footing. This edict led to the company structure becoming more formal and the directors being less accessible, with a seasoned professional brought in to help run the business. The resulting change in strategic trajectory eventually led to its sale.
Being part of a small company was undoubtedly a formative part of my early career experience. It was an exciting time and the fact all employees were – literally – under one roof meant that we knew and worked with the decision makers. We always had the opportunity to speak up and influence the future. We got to work on unexpected new projects because there was external funding available. We could be flexible when it came to trying out new software or hardware as part of our product development.
The flip side was that we sometimes had to flex too much, which at times made it hard to stick to a cohesive strategy. We struggled to find cash to try out blue sky or speculative approaches – although there were plenty of good ideas. These advantages come with being part of a larger corporation with bigger budgets and greater overall stability.
That said, I appreciate the diverse and dynamic learning curve I experienced at Stewart Hughes. The founders were innovators, whose vision and products have stood the test of time, still being widely used today . The company benefited many people not just the staff who led successful careers but also the pilots and passengers on helicopters whose lives may potentially have been saved.
Working in a large corporation is undoubtedly a smoother ride than in a small business. But it’s rarely seat-of-the-pants stuff and I learned so much from my own days at Stewart Hughes. Attending the IOP’s business awards reminded me of the buzz of being in a small firm. It might not be to everyone’s taste, but if you get the chance to work in that environment, do give it serious thought.
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Researchers from the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Center for Quantum Computing have announced what they describe as a “breakthrough” in quantum error correction. Their method uses so-called cat qubits to reduce the total number of qubits required to build a large-scale, fault-tolerant quantum computer, and they claim it could shorten the time required to develop such machines by up to five years.
Quantum computers are promising candidates for solving complex problems that today’s classical computers cannot handle. Their main drawback is the tendency for errors to crop up in the quantum bits, or qubits, they use to perform computations. Just like classical bits, the states of qubits can erroneously flip from 0 to 1, which is known as a bit-flip error. In addition, qubits can suffer from inadvertent changes to their phase, which is a parameter that characterizes their quantum superposition (phase-flip errors). A further complication is that whereas classical bits can be copied in order to detect and correct errors, the quantum nature of qubits makes copying impossible. Hence, errors need to be dealt with in other ways.
One error-correction scheme involves building physical or “measurement” qubits around each logical or “data” qubit. The job of the measurement qubits is to detect phase-flip or bit-flip errors in the data qubits without destroying their quantum nature. In 2024, a team at Google Quantum AI showed that this approach is scalable in a system of a few dozen qubits. However, a truly powerful quantum computer would require around a million data qubits and an even larger number of measurement qubits.
Cat qubits to the rescue
The AWS researchers showed that it is possible reduce this total number of qubits. They did this by using a special type of qubit called a cat qubit. Named after the Schrödinger’s cat thought that illustrates the concept of quantum superposition, cat qubits use the superposition of coherent states to encode information in a way that resists bit flips. Doing so may increase the number of phase-flip errors, but special error-correction algorithms can deal with these efficiently.
The AWS team got this result by building a microchip containing an array of five cat qubits. These are connected to four transmon qubits, which are a type of superconducting qubit with a reduced sensitivity to charge noise (a major source of errors in quantum computations). Here, the cat qubits serve as data qubits, while the transmon qubits measure and correct phase-flip errors. The cat qubits were further stabilized by connecting each of them to a buffer mode that uses a non-linear process called two-photon dissipation to ensure that their noise bias is maintained over time.
According to Harry Putterman, a senior research scientist at AWS, the team’s foremost challenge (and innovation) was to ensure that the system did not introduce too many bit-flip errors. This was important because the system uses a classical repetition code as its “outer layer” of error correction, which left it with no redundancy against residual bit flips. With this aspect under control, the researchers demonstrated that their superconducting quantum circuit suppressed errors from 1.75% per cycle for a three-cat qubit array to 1.65% per cycle for a five-cat qubit array. Achieving this degree of error suppression with larger error-correcting codes previously required tens of additional qubits.
On a scalable path
AWS’s director of quantum hardware, Oskar Painter, says the result will reduce the development time for a full-scale quantum computer by 3-5 years. This is, he says, a direct outcome of the system’s simple architecture as well as its 90% reduction in the “overhead” required for quantum error correction. The team does, however, need to reduce the error rates of the error-corrected logical qubits. “The two most important next steps towards building a fault-tolerant quantum computer at scale is that we need to scale up to several logical qubits and begin to perform and study logical operations at the logical qubit level,” Painter tells Physics World.
According to David Schlegel, a research scientist at the French quantum computing firm Alice & Bob, which specializes in cat qubits, this work marks the beginning of a shift from noisy, classically simulable quantum devices to fully error-corrected quantum chips. He says the AWS team’s most notable achievement is its clever hybrid arrangement of cat qubits for quantum information storage and traditional transmon qubits for error readout.
However, while Schlegel calls the research “innovative”, he says it is not without limitations. Because the AWS chip incorporates transmons, it still needs to address both bit-flip and phase-flip errors. “Other cat qubit approaches focus on completely eliminating bit flips, further reducing the qubit count by more than a factor of 10,” Schlegel says. “But it remains to be seen which approach will prove more effective and hardware-efficient for large-scale error-corrected quantum devices in the long run.”
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Physicists in Serbia have begun strike action today in response to what they say is government corruption and social injustice. The one-day strike, called by the country’s official union for researchers, is expected to result in thousands of scientists joining students who have already been demonstrating for months over conditions in the country.
The student protests, which began in November, were triggered by a railway station canopy collapse that killed 15 people. Since then, it has grown into an ongoing mass protest seen by many as indirectly seeking to change the government, currently led by president Aleksandar Vučić.
The Serbian government, however, claims it has met all student demands such as transparent publication of all documents related to the accident and the prosecution of individuals who have disrupted the protests. The government has also accepted the resignation of prime minister Miloš Vučević as well as transport minister Goran Vesić and trade minister Tomislav Momirović, who previously held the transport role during the station’s reconstruction.
“The students are championing noble causes that resonate with all citizens,” says Igor Stanković, a statistical physicist at the Institute of Physics (IPB) in Belgrade, who is joining today’s walkout. In January, around 100 employees from the IPB in Belgrade signed a letter in support of the students, one of many from various research institutions since December.
Stanković believes that the corruption and lack of accountability that students are protesting against “stem from systemic societal and political problems, including entrenched patronage networks and a lack of transparency”.
“I believe there is no turning back now,” adds Stanković. “The students have gained support from people across the academic spectrum – including those I personally agree with and others I believe bear responsibility for the current state of affairs. That, in my view, is their strength: standing firmly behind principles, not political affiliations.”
Meanwhile, Miloš Stojaković, a mathematician at the University of Novi Sad, says that the faculty at the university have backed the students from the start especially given that they are making “a concerted effort to minimize disruptions to our scientific work”.
Many university faculties in Serbia have been blockaded by protesting students, who have been using them as a base for their demonstrations. “The situation will have a temporary negative impact on research activities,” admits Dejan Vukobratović, an electrical engineer from the University of Novi Sad. However, most researchers are “finding their way through this situation”, he adds, with “most teams keeping their project partners and funders informed about the situation, anticipating possible risks”.
Missed exams
Amidst the continuing disruptions, the Serbian national science foundation has twice delayed a deadline for the award of €24m of research grants, citing “circumstances that adversely affect the collection of project documentation”. The foundation adds that 96% of its survey participants requested an extension. The researchers’ union has also called on the government to freeze the work status of PhD students employed as research assistants or interns to accommodate the months’ long pause to their work. The government has promised to look into it.
Meanwhile, universities are setting up expert groups to figure out how to deal with the delays to studies and missed exams. Physics World approached Serbia’s government for comment, but did not receive a reply.
Researchers in Australia have developed a nanosensor that can detect the onset of gestational diabetes with 95% accuracy. Demonstrated by a team led by Carlos Salomon at the University of Queensland, the superparamagnetic “nanoflower” sensor could enable doctors to detect a variety of complications in the early stages of pregnancy.
Many complications in pregnancy can have profound and lasting effects on both the mother and the developing foetus. Today, these conditions are detected using methods such as blood tests, ultrasound screening and blood pressure monitoring. In many cases, however, their sensitivity is severely limited in the earliest stages of pregnancy.
“Currently, most pregnancy complications cannot be identified until the second or third trimester, which means it can sometimes be too late for effective intervention,” Salomon explains.
To tackle this challenge, Salomon and his colleagues are investigating the use of specially engineered nanoparticles to isolate and detect biomarkers in the blood associated with complications in early pregnancy. Specifically, they aim to detect the protein molecules carried by extracellular vesicles (EVs) – tiny, membrane-bound particles released by the placenta, which play a crucial role in cell signalling.
In their previous research, the team pioneered the development of superparamagnetic nanostructures that selectively bind to specific EV biomarkers. Superparamagnetism occurs specifically in small, ferromagnetic nanoparticles, causing their magnetization to randomly flip direction under the influence of temperature. When proteins are bound to the surfaces of these nanostructures, their magnetic responses are altered detectably, providing the team with a reliable EV sensor.
“This technology has been developed using nanomaterials to detect biomarkers at low concentrations,” explains co-author Mostafa Masud. “This is what makes our technology more sensitive than current testing methods, and why it can pick up potential pregnancy complications much earlier.”
Previous versions of the sensor used porous nanocubes that efficiently captured EVs carrying a key placental protein named PLAP. By detecting unusual levels of PLAP in the blood of pregnant women, this approach enabled the researchers to detect complications far more easily than with existing techniques. However, the method generally required detection times lasting several hours, making it unsuitable for on-site screening.
In their latest study, reported in Science Advances, Salomon’s team started with a deeper analysis of the EV proteins carried by these blood samples. Through advanced computer modelling, they discovered that complications can be linked to changes in the relative abundance of PLAP and another placental protein, CD9.
Based on these findings, they developed a new superparamagnetic nanosensor capable of detecting both biomarkers simultaneously. Their design features flower-shaped nanostructures made of nickel ferrite, which were embedded into specialized testing strips to boost their sensitivity even further.
Using this sensor, the researchers collected blood samples from 201 pregnant women at 11 to 13 weeks’ gestation. “We detected possible complications, such as preterm birth, gestational diabetes and preeclampsia, which is high blood pressure during pregnancy,” Salomon describes. For gestational diabetes, the sensor demonstrated 95% sensitivity in identifying at-risk cases, and 100% specificity in ruling out healthy cases.
Based on these results, the researchers are hopeful that further refinements to their nanoflower sensor could lead to a new generation of EV protein detectors, enabling the early diagnosis of a wide range of pregnancy complications.
“With this technology, pregnant women will be able to seek medical intervention much earlier,” Salomon says. “This has the potential to revolutionize risk assessment and improve clinical decision-making in obstetric care.”
Chronic loneliness can increase cortisol and inflammation and weaken your immune system, says social scientist Kasley Killiam. She argues it’s time to accept that good quality social connections are a fundamental human need.
Connexion
