The disease is relatively rare, but affects an estimated 100,000 persons in the United States, and results in 20,000 deaths annually. There is no cure.

In a study published May 4, 2022 in Science Translational Medicine, researchers at the University of California San Diego School of Medicine describe the underlying signaling pathway that results in PAH — and a novel monoclonal antibody therapy that blocks the abnormal blood vessel formation characterizing the disease.

At the cellular level, PAH progresses with proliferation of vascular smooth muscle cells (vSMC) that cause small arteries in the lungs to become narrowed, leading to progressively less oxygen in the blood. A research team, led by senior author Patricia A. Thistlethwaite, MD, PhD, professor of surgery in at UC San Diego School of Medicine and a cardiothoracic surgeon at UC San Diego Health, focused on overexpression of the NOTCH ligand JAGGED-1, a binding protein involved in cell signaling and, in this case, the development of small pulmonary vSMCs.

They found that overexpression of the NOTCH3 ligand, JAGGED-1, spurs vSMC proliferation, but the NOTCH3 ligand DELTA-LIKE 4 inhibits it. The researchers then developed a therapeutic monoclonal antibody that selectively blocks JAGGED-1-induced NOTCH3 signaling, effectively reversing pulmonary hypertension in two rodent models of the disease, without toxic side effects.

“These findings reveal two opposing roles of NOTCH ligands,” said Thistlethwaite. “Importantly, it opens the door to a potentially new, safe treatment for PAH, using a monoclonal antibody that selectively inhibits NOTCH3 activation in the lung vasculature.”

Co-authors include: Yu Zhang, Moises Hernandez, Jonathan Gower, Nolan Winicki, Xena Morataya, Sebastian Alvarez, Jason X.-J. Yuan and John Shyy, all at UC San Diego.

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Materials provided by University of California – San Diego. Original written by Scott La Fee. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

Notably, the researchers also found that a majority of people rely on credible sources of information, with two-thirds completely avoiding unreliable news sites.

The study, which appears in the journal Science Advances, centered on credibility ratings determined by NewsGuard, a browser extension that rates news and other information sites in order to guide users in assessing the trustworthiness of the content they come across online.

“While it’s encouraging that most of us rely on credible sources of information, there are many who turn to sites of questionable trustworthiness, which raises concerns about misperceptions people may hold,” says Kevin Aslett, a postdoctoral researcher at the Center for Social Media and Politics (CSMaP) and the lead author of the paper. “However, while our study shows that, overall, credibility ratings have no discernible effect on misperceptions or online news consumption behavior of the average user, our findings suggest that the heaviest consumers of misinformation — those who rely on low-credibility sites — may move toward higher-quality sources when presented with news reliability ratings.”

In the study, conducted in May and June 2020, the researchers encouraged a random sample of more than 3,000 online participants to install the NewsGuard browser extension, which embeds source-level indicators of news reliability into users’ search engine results pages, social feeds, and visited URLs. Different “shield” symbols are placed in-feed to provide visual summaries of sources’ quality:

• Green shield = reliable source
• Red shield = unreliable source
• Gray shield = source with user-generated content
• Gold shield = satire

To measure the effect of these source labels, survey data were collected over two time periods (May 28-June 9 and June-19-June 30).

In addition to this panel survey, the researchers also collected anonymized digital trace data to characterize the quality of news consumption of a subset of approximately 1,000 participants. These quality measures made use of the same NewsGuard ratings shown to study participants as they encountered news links in their browsers.

Previous studies have shown that exposure to misinformation and online fake news can increase belief in misperceptions, heighten cynicism toward politics, lower trust in the news media, and increase affective polarization (i.e., disdain for supporters of the other political party). Moreover, prior research also suggests that expert source ratings, when shown alongside a mock news article, can influence the perceived truthfulness of the article’s claim.

With these earlier findings in mind, the researchers tested whether in-feed source reliability labels can counteract these effects by shifting news consumption from unreliable to more reliable sources, increasing trust in mainstream media and reliable sources, and/or mitigating political polarization and cynicism.

In order to measure whether source reliability information affects belief in misinformation as well as in accurate claims, the respondents were asked to judge the veracity of five widely circulated statements about the Black Lives Matter movement and five similarly well-circulated statements about COVID-19 — some true and some false.

Combining panel survey data and individual-level web-visit data, the results showed the following:

• A majority of people have reliable media diets: Most people (65 percent) did not visit any unreliable news sites before the study began, a finding consistent with the authors’ previous research. In fact, only 1.5 percent of respondents relied extensively on unreliable sources for news.
• Source credibility labels had no impact, on average: In-browser credibility labels did not measurably shift online consumption from unreliable to more reliable sources, failed to significantly alter misperceptions of widely circulated inaccurate claims about COVID-19 and the Black Lives Matter movement, and did not alter trust in the media generally.
• However, source labels made a difference for those who consume the most low-quality news: There was a noticeable improvement in the overall credibility of news sources visited by those who began the study with the lowest news diet quality, according to NewsGuard scores.

“In our partisan age, when attitudes about news sources are strongly correlated with partisanship, relatively subtle cues like source credibility labels may not be powerful enough to shift news habits and counteract misperceptions among the general public,” observes Andrew M. Guess, a faculty research affiliate at CSMaP and an assistant professor at Princeton University. “However, a key metric of success for this intervention is how it changes the behavior of those who consume the most low-quality news. The fact that it doesn’t work for the overall population doesn’t mean the tool is ineffective. It means it must be part of a far larger toolkit to combat the spread of online misinformation.”

The paper’s other authors were Joshua A. Tucker and Jonathan Nagler, professors in NYU’s Department of Politics, and Richard Bonneau, a professor in NYU’s Department of Biology and Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences. Tucker, Nagler, and Bonneau are co-directors of CSMaP.

NewsGuard was not involved in the design or funding of this research.

Compared with the fast weather fluctuations of the atmosphere, the slowly varying ocean exhibits strong persistence, or “memory,” meaning the ocean temperature tomorrow is likely to look a lot like it does today, with only slight changes. As a result, ocean memory is often used for predicting ocean conditions.

Ocean memory decline is found as a collective response across the climate models to human-induced warming. As greenhouse-gas concentrations continue to rise, such memory decline will become increasingly evident.

“We discovered this phenomenon by examining the similarity in ocean surface temperature from one year to the next as a simple metric for ocean memory,” said Hui Shi, lead author and researcher at the Farallon Institute in Petaluma, California. “It’s almost as if the ocean is developing amnesia.”

Ocean memory is found to be related to the thickness of the uppermost layer of the ocean, known as the mixed layer. Deeper mixed layers have greater heat content, which confers more thermal inertia that translates into memory. However, the mixed layer over most oceans will become shallower in response to continued anthropogenic warming, resulting in a decline in ocean memory.

“Other processes, such as changes in ocean currents and changes in the energy exchange between the atmosphere and ocean, also contribute to changes in ocean memory, but the shoaling of the mixed layer depth and resulting memory decline happens in all regions of the globe, and this makes it an important factor to consider for future climate predictions,” said Robert Jnglin Wills, a research scientist at University of Washington in Seattle, Washington, and co-author of the research.

Along with ocean memory decline, the thinning mixed layer is also found to increase the random fluctuations of the sea surface temperature. As a result, although the ocean will not become much more variable from one year to the next in the future, the fraction of helpful signals for prediction largely reduces.

“Reduced ocean memory together with increased random fluctuations suggest intrinsic changes in the system and new challenges in prediction under warming,” said Fei-Fei Jin, an atmospheric sciences professor at the University of Hawai’i at Manoa School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology, and co-author of the research.

Ocean memory loss doesn’t just impact the prediction of physical variables, but could also influence the way we manage sensitive marine ecosystems.

“Reduced memory means less time in advance for a forecast to be made. This could hinder our ability to predict and prepare for ocean change including marine heatwaves, which are known to have caused sudden and pronounced changes in ocean ecosystems around the world,” said Michael Jacox, a research scientist at NOAA Fisheries’ Southwest Fisheries Science Center in Monterey, California, and co-author of the research.

In fisheries management, the biological parameters used for stock assessment are estimated assuming a stable environment represented by the recent past. Reduced ocean memory might render such estimation inaccurate and calls for new approaches in ecosystem-based fisheries management to include real-time ocean monitoring and other efforts alike. Ocean memory decline also likely exerts impacts on populations of biological resources. Depending on whether the species are adapted to constant or more variable environmental conditions, future changes in their population can be better estimated and predicted by taking ocean memory loss into consideration.

Besides ocean prediction, forecasting land-based impacts on temperature, precipitation as well as extreme events might also be affected by ocean memory decline due to their dependence on the persistence of sea surface temperature as a predictability source. As ocean memory continues to decline, researchers will likely be challenged to search for alternative predictors for skillful predictions.

Several studies have identified a significant decline in insect populations in recent decades — also in Germany. The focus so far has been on the loss of suitable habitats for insects; for example, the conversion of natural areas into agricultural or urban areas. But what are the consequences of land use in combination with warmer and dryer climates for pollinating insects? And what could be done to mitigate possible negative consequences? This was investigated in a new study by the Julius-Maximilians-University (JMU) Würzburg.

The key findings of the study

The JMU research team and collaborators reveal for the first time how climate and land use together shape the diversity of pollinating insects at local and landscape scales across Bavaria. Based on more than 3200 identified pollinator species from 179 locations in forest, grassland, arable and urban habitats, they find homogenization of pollinator communities in warmer climates. This suggests an overall loss of pollinator diversity under future climates.

Individual taxa such as bees, flies, beetles, butterflies, and moths showed different responses to warmer and dryer climates, but the general pattern indicates that landscapes with higher proportions of forest maintain more diverse pollinator communities. “One key finding therefore is that forest in the landscape can cushion the effects of climate warming to a certain extent.” explains Cristina Ganuza, PhD student in the group of Professor Ingolf Steffan-Dewenter at JMU’s Department of Animal Ecology and Tropical Biology, and lead author of the study.

“The study underpins that in addition to the importance of floral resources and the negative effects of land use intensification, climatic conditions play an increasingly important role for the maintenance of pollinator diversity. For example, the combination of high temperatures and low precipitation negatively affected total pollinator diversity, while bee richness in urban areas was negatively affected by higher mean temperatures,” explains Steffan-Dewenter.

The relevance for nature and humans

High pollinator diversity is needed for high pollinator performance. Ganuza: “However, the combination of ongoing climate change and current land use will only allow certain pollinator species to survive in different habitat types.”

“We conclude that a large proportion of forested land in the landscape could serve as refuge for insects from climate warming,” Ganuza said. “This is likely because forests and forest edges provide largely natural conditions which buffer extreme heat and drought compared to more human-influenced habitats.”

Another suggestion from the researchers would be to lower the air temperature in cities, for example through greening. “This could lead to more bee species being able to live in urban areas,” the biologist explains. In short, insects like it diverse. And flowering plants that are as diverse as possible are essential for the small animals in all areas.

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Materials provided by University of Würzburg. Original written by Kristian Lozina. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

Victor Agbafe was watching the address on TV. The University of Michigan Medical School student, who is also studying law at Yale, immediately texted a few mentors, including Michigan Medicine integrated plastic surgery resident Nicholas Berlin, M.D., M.P.H., M.S.

The question that emerged from their messages was a crucial one: What role can the medical community, which accounts for about 8.5% of America’s greenhouse gas emissions, play in these climate change reduction efforts?

A year later, research that Agbafe and Berlin led outlines some answers. Their paper describes how surgery, particularly cancer surgery, contributes to climate change and suggests some solutions to combat the problem, from reducing waste to rethinking how surgical care is delivered.

“In general, these ideas are good for our planet,” Agbafe said. “But also, surgery unfortunately plays a disproportionate role in the carbon output and the waste we produce in medicine.”

Operating rooms are a massive source of greenhouse gas production for hospitals, representing 70% of their waste and generating three to six times as much carbon as the rest of health systems.

Cancer care is an obvious target for greener efforts within surgery, Berlin notes, because it often involves intense levels of care over a short period of time.

Plus, minimally invasive surgeries that require a lot of energy, including robotic-assisted operations, have become common treatments for cancers ranging from colorectal and uterine cancer to head and neck cancer. A robotic-assisted hysterectomy, for example, produces as much carbon as driving more than 2,200 miles in a car — the equivalent of a road trip from Ann Arbor, Mich., to Los Angeles.

“If we can lower our greenhouse gas output, we have a chance to extend the lifespan of our patients and expand access to timely care,” Agbafe said. “And we think it’s really important that the surgical community is proactive at being at that table.”

What to do differently

One of the most feasible changes to make in this space would be around waste reduction, Agbafe said.

This might be as simple as making sure that anything thrown away before or during surgery is properly categorized and labeled since it’s estimated that over 90% of OR waste does not meet the necessary standards for the type of trash it ends up in. (The red waste bags in ORs are intended only for items that have been exposed to bodily fluids and are much more expensive to dispose of than clear disposal bags.)

Hospitals could also consider switching to some reusable or reprocessed devices and surgical gowns since there is no link between reused tools and hospital-acquired infections.

Some of the pair’s other suggestions involve optimizing ORs’ energy use. Agbafe and Berlin point to the American Society of Healthcare Engineering’s recommendations to install energy-efficient lighting, schedule preventive maintenance and minimize air flow into rooms that aren’t being used as easy ways to green the systems.

The surgical supply chain could be more efficient, too, they write. Estimates suggest that 87% of the surgical instruments laid out for an operation are rarely used, so coming up with standardized lists of the necessary tools for surgeries that occur regularly could cut down on cost, waste and the energy needed to sterilize and repackage those instruments.

Moving more manufacturing of surgical supplies closer to hospitals — or choosing to source from suppliers that are locally based — could also reduce the OR’s carbon footprint.

“Given some of the geopolitical events that have been going on right now in Ukraine and with China and the competition there along with the effects of pandemic is creating an increasing emphasis on resiliency within supply chains,” Agbafe said. “So this idea of localizing our operating room supply chains is something that there’s a lot of political energy and momentum within the public to move towards.”

Reimagining care delivery

But perhaps the broadest way the oncology space could cut down on its greenhouse gas emissions is to change how surgical care is delivered, starting with permanently offering telemedicine.

“We think telemedicine is a great opportunity for us to lower the climate impact and improve the quality of care by doing so,” Agbafe said. “During the pandemic, we’ve been using virtual care and if we could make that a routine aspect of cancer care for pre-op and post-op, that’s a way we can reduce the climate impact of delivering care and make it more convenient for patients.”

Reducing low-value care is another way to eliminate carbon-producing activities associated with unnecessary scans, testing and procedures.

This has been a priority for U-M, thanks to the Michigan Program on Value Enhancement — a collaboration of Michigan Medicine and the University of Michigan Institute for Healthcare Policy that aims to improve the quality of care at the institution — and a partnership with the similarly oriented Michigan Value Collaborative, also referred to as MVC, a collaborative quality initiative that serves the entire state.

Last year, the two organizations collaborated on a study that highlighted how much routine testing was still done before surgeries despite its low value. Berlin was the first author.

“U-M is considered one of the leading institutions studying low-value care and efforts to limit that type of care,” Berlin said. “But like a lot of other centers, we are really just at the precipice of these initiatives. I would anticipate big changes in the next 10 years.”

From gas to (more sustainable) gas

Some sustainability shifts may come even sooner at Michigan Medicine.

For instance, the Department of Anesthesiology recently launched the Green Anesthesia Initiative, or GAIA for short. Its mission: become more environmentally conscious about the types and rates of anesthesia its providers use, another area Agbafe and Berlin say is ripe for improvement.

“This is a topic of fairly intense discussion right now in the field, and I’ve been thinking about it for a while,” said George Mashour, M.D., Ph.D., the chair of the Department of Anesthesiology and the Robert B. Sweet Professor of Anesthesiology at the University of Michigan Medical School. “Unlike other industries, I don’t think that we require massive disruption in order to make progress because, fortunately, we have options.”

Several inhaled gases regularly used for anesthesia are A-list offenders when it comes to greenhouse gas production. Nitrous oxide, commonly known as laughing gas, is a greenhouse gas, a direct ozone depleter and does not dissipate from the atmosphere for more than a century after it’s produced.

However, the inhaled anesthetic sevoflurane has much less of an environmental impact than nitrous oxide and other common inhaled agents, so Mashour says it would be a good alternative.

“The overall goal is to shift away from some of these egregious culprits and start making better choices about which drug we use and then also how we use it,” Mashour said.

“The contributions in terms of greenhouse gas effect or ozone-depleting action partly relate to how much is getting pumped out into the atmosphere and that relates directly to how high we have our fresh gas flow,” he added. “If we have, for example, 10 liters going, we’re blowing a lot of anesthetic into the scavenging and waste and atmospheric systems that doesn’t need to be there.”

To that end, Mashour’s colleagues in the Department of Anesthesiology are already leading a national initiative to try to reduce anesthetic gas flow rates through the Multicenter Perioperative Outcomes Group, another quality initiative that includes health centers from across the country.

Mashour plans to roll out other elements of GAIA over a three- to- five-year period.

“We could be doing better,” he said. “Right now, we’re starting the conversations, getting people on board and making structural choices in the department to help make it easy for people to do the right thing.”

Led by Michael Naguib, an assistant professor in the Department of Physics and Engineering Physics, the study has been published in the journal Advanced Materials.

“Two-dimensional materials are nanomaterials with thickness in the nanometer size (nanometer is one millionth of a millimeter) and lateral dimensions thousands of times the thickness,” Naguib said. “Their flatness offers unique set of properties compared to bulk materials.”

The name of the new family of 2D materials is transition metal carbo-chalcogenides, or TMCC. It combines the characteristics of two families of 2D materials — transition metal carbides and transition metal dichalcogenides.

Naguib, the Ken & Ruth Arnold Early Career Professor in Science and Engineering, said the latter is a large family of materials that has been explored extensively and found to be very promising, especially for electrochemical energy storage and conversion. But he said one of the challenges in utilizing them is their low electrical conductivity and stability.

On the other hand, he said, transition metal carbides are excellent electrical conductors with much more powerful conductivity. Merging the two families into one is anticipated to have great potential for many applications such as batteries and supercapacitors, catalysis, sensors and electronics.

“Instead of stacking the two different materials like Lego building blocks with many problematic interfaces, here we develop a new 2D material that has the combination of both compositions without any interface,” he said.

“We used an electrochemical-assisted exfoliation process by inserting lithium ions in-between the layers of bulk transition metals carbo-chalcogenides followed by agitation in water,” said Ahmad Majed, the first author of the article and a doctoral candidate in Materials Physics and Engineering at Tulane working in Naguib’s group.

Unlike other exotic nanomaterials, Majed said, the process of making these 2D TMCC nanomaterials is simple and scalable.

In addition to Naguib and Majed, the team includes Jiang Wei, an associate professor in physics and engineering physics; Jianwei Sun, an assistant professor in physics and engineering physics; PhD candidates Kaitlyn Prenger, Manish Kothakonda and Fei Wang at Tulane; and Dr Eric N. Tseng and professor Per O.A. Persson of Linkoping University in Sweden.

This study was supported by Naguib’s National Science Foundation Career Award that he received less than a year ago.

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“It’s hard to fathom that a landform the size of the Netherlands and with a comparable population might disappear by the end of the century,” said study co-lead author Matt Kondolf, a Professor of Landscape Architecture & Environmental Planning at the University of California, Berkeley.

“The Mekong Delta is truly outstanding in terms of agro-economic value and regional importance for food security and livelihoods,” said study co-lead author Rafael Schmitt, a senior scientist at the Stanford Natural Capital Project. “Without rapid action, the delta and its livelihoods could become victims of global and regional environmental change.”

On its journey from skyscraping Tibetan peaks to the sea, the Mekong River picks up sediment from eroding uplands in China, Myanmar, Laos Cambodia, Thailand and Vietnam. The nutrient-rich sediment has accumulated in the Mekong Delta and enabled the lower Mekong region to produce up to 10% of all rice traded internationally. It has also fed fisheries that feed tens of millions of people. Like any river delta, the Mekong Delta can only exist if it receives a constant sediment supply from its upstream basin, and if water flows can spread that sediment across the low-lying delta surface to build land at a rate that is equal to or greater than global sea level rise.

Hungry for renewable energy, countries in the basin have built numerous hydropower dams that block fish migrations, trap sediment and reduce downstream flows. If all planned dams are built, they will trap 96% of the sediment formerly reaching the delta. Additionally, sediment supply from tropical cyclones, which deliver about 32% of the suspended sediment load reaching the delta, is decreasing as cyclone tracks shift north.

Sediment that manages to reach the lower Mekong is mined for sand used in construction and land reclamation. Over pumping of groundwater and high dikes built to control floods and enable high intensity agriculture exacerbate the problem.

To slow and reverse damages, the researchers recommend that policymakers:

• Design dams to enable better sediment sediment passage, place them strategically to reduce their downstream impacts, or replace them with wind and solar farms, where possible.
• Strictly regulate sediment mining and reduce use of Mekong sand through sustainable building materials and recycling.
• Allow floodwaters to spread out over the Delta and deposit their sediments
• Limit groundwater pumping in the Mekong Delta
• Reevaluate intensive agriculture in the Mekong Delta for sustainability.
• Implement natural solutions for coastal protections on a large scale along the delta’s coast

Most efforts to rehabilitate the delta have involved individual countries approaching isolated engineering challenges, and proposing solutions on local scales, according to the researchers. Making meaningful progress will require coordination among countries, development banks development agencies and other private and civil society stakeholders, the researchers write.

“We are seeing signs that governments and nongovernmental actors are beginning to work together on these issues,” said Schmitt. “We hope our commentary will elevate the topic on the regional policy agenda, empower conservation in the basin, and act as a wake-up call to address key drivers for land loss on a system scale.”

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Materials provided by Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment. Original written by Rob Jordan. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

In the race for what may become a key future technology, tech giants like IBM and Google are investing enormous resources into the development of quantum computing hardware. However, current platforms are not yet ready for practical applications. There remain multiple challenges, among them the control of device imperfections (‘disorder’).

It’s an old stability precaution: When large groups of people cross bridges, they need to avoid marching in step to prevent the formation of resonances destabilizing the construction. Perhaps counterintuitively, the superconducting transmon qubit processor — a technologically advanced platform for quantum computing favoured by IBM, Google, and other consortia — relies on the same principle: intentionally introduced disorder blocks the formation of resonant chaotic fluctuations, thus becoming an essential part of the production of multi-qubit processors.

To understand this seemingly paradoxical point, one should think of a transmon qubit as a kind of pendulum. Qubits interlinked to form a computing structure define a system of coupled pendulums — a system that, like classical pendulums, can easily be excited to uncontrollably large oscillations with disastrous consequences. In the quantum world, such uncontrollable oscillations lead to the destruction of quantum information; the computer becomes unusable. Intentionally introduced local ‘detunings’ of single pendulums keep such phenomena at bay.

‘The transmon chip not only tolerates but actually requires effectively random qubit-to-qubit device imperfections,’ explained Christoph Berke, final-year doctoral student in the group of Simon Trebst at the University of Cologne and first author of the paper. ‘In our study, we ask just how reliable the “stability by randomness” principle is in practice. By applying state-of-the-art diagnostics of the theory of disordered systems, we were able to find that at least some of the industrially pursued system architectures are dangerously close to instability.’

From the point of view of fundamental quantum physics, a transmon processor is a many-body quantum system with quantized energy levels. State-of-the-art numerical tools allow one to compute these discrete levels as a function of relevant system parameters, to obtain patterns superficially resembling a tangle of cooked spaghetti. A careful analysis of such structures for realistically modelled Google and IBM chips was one out of several diagnostic tools applied in the paper to map out a stability diagram for transmon quantum computing.

‘When we compared the Google to the IBM chips, we found that in the latter case qubit states may be coupled to a degree that controlled gate operations may be compromised,’ said Simon Trebst, head of the Computational Condensed Matter Physics group at the University of Cologne. In order to secure controlled gate operations, one thus needs to strike the subtle balance between stabilizing qubit integrity and enabling inter-qubit coupling. In the parlance of pasta preparation, one needs to prepare the quantum computer processor into perfection, keeping the energy states ‘al dente’ and avoiding their tangling by overcooking.

The study of disorder in transmon hardware was performed as part of the Cluster of Excellence ML4Q in a collaborative work among the research groups of Simon Trebst and Alexander Altland at the University of Cologne and the group of David DiVincenzo at RWTH Aachen University and Forschungszentrum Jülich. “This collaborative project is quite unique,” says Alexander Altland from the Institute for Theoretical Physics in Cologne. “Our complementary knowledge of transmon hardware, numerical simulation of complex many-body systems, and quantum chaos was the perfect prerequisite to understand how quantum information with disorder can be protected. It also indicates how insights obtained for small reference systems can be transferred to application-relevant design scales.”

David DiVincenzo, founding director of the JARA-Institute for Quantum Information at RWTH Aachen University, draws the following conclusion: ‘Our study demonstrates how important it is for hardware developers to combine device modelling with state-of-the-art quantum randomness methodology and to integrate “chaos diagnostics” as a routine part of qubit processor design in the superconducting platform.’

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Materials provided by University of Cologne. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.