2024-12-14
25 分钟Hello and welcome to the latest dose of science news from New Scientist.
I'm Penny Satay, joined again today by Rowan Hooper.
Hello.
Season's greetings to you and to you.
Now, Rowan, don't you find often at this time of year everyone's written up their list of the biggest science findings of the year.
We're all good to go.
And then a really big one comes along.
And then a really big one comes along.
And so this year we've got Google.
They've just published a big Nature paper about a new quantum chip they're calling Willow, which is nice because they're continuing the tree theme.
Always nice to see it's at the heart of their new quantum computer.
And in the paper, the Google team is claiming to have pulled ahead in the race to build machines that can be even the world's best conventional supercomputers at certain tasks.
Quantum supremacy, as it's known.
This is potentially a big deal.
So we're going to get into what it means.
And we're also in this show, going to be talking about ways to keep your brain young, which we may well need after we've done all that thinking about quantum computers.
We need it now, let alone that.
But yeah, let's start with quantum stuff.
As you say, the prize is quantum, what's called quantum supremacy.
And that's when a quantum computer can beat a classical computer.