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Night is falling on Cerro Pachón. Stray clouds reflect the last few rays of golden light as the sun dips below the horizon. I focus my camera across the summit to the westernmost peak of the mountain. Silhouetted within a dying blaze of red and orange light looms the sphinxlike shape of the Vera C. Rubin Observatory. “Not bad,” says William O’Mullane, the observatory’s deputy project manager, amateur photographer, and master of understatement. We watch as the sky fades through reds and purples to a deep, velvety black. It’s my first night in Chile. For O’Mullane, and hundreds of other astronomers and engineers, it’s the culmination of years of work, as the Rubin Observatory is finally ready to go “on sky.” Rubin is unlike any telescope ever built. Its exceptionally wide field of view, extreme speed, and massive digital camera will soon begin the 10-year Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) across the entire southern sky. The result will be a high-resolution movie of how our solar...
a week ago

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Why JPEGs Still Rule the Web

A version of this post originally appeared on Tedium, Ernie Smith’s newsletter, which hunts for the end of the long tail. For roughly three decades, the JPEG has been the World Wide Web’s primary image format. But it wasn’t the one the Web started with. In fact, the first mainstream graphical browser, NCSA Mosaic, didn’t initially support inline JPEG files—just inline GIFs, along with a couple of other formats forgotten to history. However, the JPEG had many advantages over the format it quickly usurped. aspect_ratio Despite not appearing together right away—it first appeared in Netscape in 1995, three years after the image standard was officially published—the JPEG and web browser fit together naturally. JPEG files degraded more gracefully than GIFs, retaining more of the picture’s initial form—and that allowed the format to scale to greater levels of success. While it wasn’t capable of animation, it progressively expanded from something a modem could pokily render to a format that was good enough for high-end professional photography. For the internet’s purposes, the degradation was the important part. But it wasn’t the only thing that made the JPEG immensely valuable to the digital world. An essential part was that it was a documented standard built by numerous stakeholders. The GIF was a de facto standard. The JPEG was an actual one How important is it that JPEG was a standard? Let me tell you a story. During a 2013 New York Times interview conducted just before he received an award honoring his creation, GIF creator Steve Wilhite stepped into a debate he unwittingly created. Simply put, nobody knew how to pronounce the acronym for the image format he had fostered, the Graphics Interchange Format. He used the moment to attempt to set the record straight—it was pronounced like the peanut butter brand: “It is a soft ‘G,’ pronounced ‘jif.’ End of story,” he said. I posted a quote from Wilhite on my popular Tumblr around that time, a period when the social media site was the center of the GIF universe. And soon afterward, my post got thousands of reblogs—nearly all of them disagreeing with Wilhite. Soon, Wilhite’s quote became a meme. The situation paints how Wilhite, who died in 2022, did not develop his format by committee. He could say it sounded like “JIF” because he built it himself. He was handed the project as a CompuServe employee in 1987; he produced the object, and that was that. The initial document describing how it works? Dead simple. 38 years later, we’re still using the GIF—but it never rose to the same prevalence of JPEG. The JPEG, which formally emerged about five years later, was very much not that situation. Far from it, in fact—it’s the difference between a de facto standard and an actual one. And that proved essential to its eventual ubiquity. We’re going to degrade the quality of this image throughout this article. At its full image size, it’s 13.7 megabytes.Irina Iriser How the JPEG format came to life Built with input from dozens of stakeholders, the Joint Photographic Experts Group ultimately aimed to create a format that fit everyone’s needs. (Reflecting its committee-led roots, there would be no confusion about the format’s name—an acronym of the organization that designed it.) And when the format was finally unleashed on the world, it was the subject of a more than 600-page book. JPEG: Still Image Data Compression Standard, written by IBM employees and JPEG organization stakeholders William B. Pennebaker and Joan L. Mitchell, describes a landscape of multimedia imagery, held back without a way to balance the need for photorealistic images and immediacy. Standardization, they believed, could fix this. “The problem was not so much the lack of algorithms for image compression (as there is a long history of technical work in this area),” the authors wrote, “but, rather, the lack of a standard algorithm—one which would allow an interchange of images between diverse applications.” And they were absolutely right. For more than 30 years, JPEG has made high-quality, high-resolution photography accessible in operating systems far and wide. Although we no longer need to compress JPEGs to within an inch of their life, having that capability helped enable the modern internet. As the book notes, Mitchell and Pennebaker were given IBM’s support to follow through this research and work with the JPEG committee, and that support led them to develop many of the JPEG format’s foundational patents. Described in patents filed by Mitchell and Pennebaker in 1988, IBM and other members of the JPEG standards committee, such as AT&T and Canon, were developing ways to use compression to make high-quality images easier to deliver in confined settings. Each member brought their own needs to the process. Canon, obviously, was more focused on printers and photography, while AT&T’s interests were tied to data transmission. Together, the companies left behind a standard that has stood the test of time. All this means, funnily enough, that the first place that a program capable of using JPEG compression appeared was not MacOS or Windows, but OS/2—a fascinating-but-failed graphical operating system created by Pennebaker and Mitchell’s employer, IBM. As early as 1990, OS/2 supported the format through the OS/2 Image Support application. At 50 percent of its initial quality, the image is down to about 2.6 MB. By dropping half of the image’s quality, we brought it down to one-fifth of the original file size. Original image: Irina Iriser What a JPEG does when you heavily compress it The thing that differentiates a JPEG file from a PNG or a GIF is how the data degrades as you compress it. The goal for a JPEG image is to still look like a photo when all is said and done, even if some compression is necessary to make it all work at a reasonable size. That way, you can display something that looks close to the original image in fewer bytes. Or, as Pennebaker and Mitchell put it, “the most effective compression is achieved by approximating the original image (rather than reproducing it exactly).” Central to this is a compression process called discrete cosine transform (DCT), a lossy form of compression encoding heavily used in all sorts of compressed formats, most notably in digital audio and signal processing. Essentially, it delivers a lower-quality product by removing details, while still keeping the heart of the original product through approximation. The stronger the cosine transformation, the more compressed the final result. The algorithm, developed by researchers in the 1970s, essentially takes a grid of data and treats it as if you’re controlling its frequency with a knob. The data rate is controlled like water from a faucet: The more data you want, the higher the setting. DCT allows a trickle of data to still come out in highly compressed situations, even if it means a slightly compromised result. In other words, you may not keep all the data when you compress it, but DCT allows you to keep the heart of it. (See this video for a more technical but still somewhat easy-to-follow description of DCT.) DCT is everywhere. If you have ever seen a streaming video or an online radio stream that degraded in quality because your bandwidth suddenly declined, you’ve witnessed DCT being utilized in real time. A JPEG file doesn’t have to leverage the DCT with just one method, as JPEG: Still Image Data Compression Standard explains: The JPEG standard describes a family of large image compression techniques, rather than a single compression technique. It provides a “tool kit” of compression techniques from which applications can select elements that satisfy their particular requirements. The toolkit has four modes: Sequential DCT, which displays the compressed image in order, like a window shade slowly being rolled down Progressive DCT, which displays the full image in the lowest-resolution format, then adds detail as more information rolls in Sequential lossless, which uses the window shade format but doesn’t compress the image Hierarchical mode, which combines the prior three modes—so maybe it starts with a progressive mode, then loads DCT compression slowly, but then reaches a lossless final result At the time the JPEG was being created, modems were extremely common. That meant images loaded slowly, making Progressive DCT the most fitting format for the early internet. Over time, the progressive DCT mode has become less common, as many computers can simply load the sequential DCT in one fell swoop. That same forest, saved at 5 percent quality. Down to about 419 kilobytes.Original image: Irina Iriser When an image is compressed with DCT, the change tends to be less noticeable in busier, more textured areas of the picture, like hair or foliage. Those areas are harder to compress, which means they keep their integrity longer. It tends to be more noticeable, however, with solid colors or in areas where the image sharply changes from one color to another—like text on a page. Ever screenshot a social media post, only for it to look noisy? Congratulations, you just made a JPEG file. Other formats, like PNG, do better with text, because their compression format is intended to be non-lossy. (Side note: PNG’s compression format, DEFLATE, was designed by Phil Katz, who also created the ZIP format. The PNG format uses it in part because it was a license-free compression format. So it turns out the brilliant coder with the sad life story improved the internet in multiple ways before his untimely passing.) In many ways, the JPEG is one tool in our image-making toolkit. Despite its age and maturity, it remains one of our best options for sharing photos on the internet. But it is not a tool for every setting—despite the fact that, like a wrench sometimes used as a hammer, we often leverage it that way. Forgent Networks claimed to own the JPEG’s defining algorithm The JPEG format gained popularity in the ’90s for reasons beyond the quality of the format. Patents also played a role: Starting in 1994, the tech company Unisys attempted to bill individual users who relied on GIF files, which used a patent the company owned. This made the free-to-use JPEG more popular. (This situation also led to the creation of the patent-free PNG format.) While the JPEG was standards-based, it could still have faced the same fate as the GIF, thanks to the quirks of the patent system. A few years before the file format came to life, a pair of Compression Labs employees filed a patent application that dealt with the compression of motion graphics. By the time anyone noticed its similarity to JPEG compression, the format was ubiquitous. Our forest, saved at 1 percent quality. This image is only about 239 KB in size, yet it’s still easily recognizable as the same photo. That’s the power of the JPEG.Original image: Irina Iriser Then in 1997, a company named Forgent Networks acquired Compression Labs. The company eventually spotted the patent and began filing lawsuits over it, a series of events it saw as a stroke of good luck. “The patent, in some respects, is a lottery ticket,” Forgent Chief Financial Officer Jay Peterson told CNET in 2005. “If you told me five years ago that ‘You have the patent for JPEG,’ I wouldn’t have believed it.” While Forgent’s claim of ownership of the JPEG compression algorithm was tenuous, it ultimately saw more success with its legal battles than Unisys did. The company earned more than $100 million from digital camera makers before the patent finally ran out of steam around 2007. The company also attempted to extract licensing fees from the PC industry. Eventually, Forgent agreed to a modest $8 million settlement. As the company took an increasingly aggressive approach to its acquired patent, it began to lose battles both in the court of public opinion and in actual courtrooms. Critics pounced on examples of prior art, while courts limited the patent’s use to motion-based uses like video. By 2007, Forgent’s compression patent expired—and its litigation-heavy approach to business went away. That year, the company became Asure Software, which now specializes in payroll and HR solutions. Talk about a reboot. Why the JPEG won’t die The JPEG file format has served us well. It’s been difficult to remove the format from its perch. The JPEG 2000 format, for example, was intended to supplant it by offering more lossless options and better performance. The format is widely used by the Library of Congress and specialized sites like the Internet Archive, however, it is less popular as an end-user format. See the forest JPEG degrade from its full resolution to 1 percent quality in this GIF. Original image: Irina Iriser Other image technologies have had somewhat more luck getting past the JPEG format. The Google-supported WebP is popular with website developers (and controversial with end users). Meanwhile, the formats AVIF and HEIC, each developed by standards bodies, have largely outpaced both JPEG and JPEG 2000. Still, the JPEG will be difficult to kill at this juncture. These days, the format is similar to MP3 or ZIP files—two legacy formats too popular and widely used to kill. Other formats that compress the files better and do the same things more efficiently are out there, but it’s difficult to topple a format with a 30-year head start. Shaking off the JPEG is easier said than done. I think most people will be fine to keep it around. Ernie Smith is the editor of Tedium, a long-running newsletter that hunts for the end of the long tail.

a week ago 10 votes
The Birth of the University as Innovation Incubator

This article is excerpted from Every American an Innovator: How Innovation Became a Way of Life, by Matthew Wisnioski (The MIT Press, 2025). Imagine a point-to-point transportation service in which two parties communicate at a distance. A passenger in need of a ride contacts the service via phone. A complex algorithm based on time, distance, and volume informs both passenger and driver of the journey’s cost before it begins. This novel business plan promises efficient service and lower costs. It has the potential to disrupt an overregulated taxi monopoly in cities across the country. Its enhanced transparency may even reduce racial discrimination by preestablishing pickups regardless of race. aspect_ratio Every American an Innovator: How Innovation Became a Way of Life, by Matthew Wisnioski (The MIT Press, 2025).The MIT Press Carnegie Mellon University. The dial-a-ride service was designed to resurrect a defunct cab company that had once served Pittsburgh’s African American neighborhoods. National Science Foundation, the CED was envisioned as an innovation “hatchery,” intended to challenge the norms of research science and higher education, foster risk-taking, birth campus startups focused on market-based technological solutions to social problems, and remake American science to serve national needs. Are innovators born or made? During the Cold War, the model for training scientists and engineers in the United States was one of manpower in service to a linear model of innovation: Scientists pursued “basic” discovery in universities and federal laboratories; engineer–scientists conducted “applied” research elsewhere on campus; engineers developed those ideas in giant teams for companies such as Lockheed and Boeing; and research managers oversaw the whole process. This model dictated national science policy, elevated the scientist as a national hero in pursuit of truth beyond politics, and pumped hundreds of millions of dollars into higher education. In practice, the lines between basic and applied research were blurred, but the perceived hierarchy was integral to the NSF and the university research culture that it helped to foster. RELATED: Innovation Magazine and the Birth of a Buzzword The question was, how? And would the universities be willing to remake themselves to support innovation? The NSF experiments with innovation At the Utah Innovation Center, engineering students John DeJong and Douglas Kihm worked on a programmable electronics breadboard.Special Collections, J. Willard Marriott Library, The University of Utah In 1972, NSF director H. Guyford Stever established the Office of Experimental R&D Incentives to “incentivize” innovation for national needs by supporting research on “how the government [could] most effectively accelerate the transfer of new technology into productive enterprise.” Stever stressed the experimental nature of the program because many in the NSF and the scientific community resisted the idea of goal-directed research. Innovation, with its connotations of profit and social change, was even more suspect. To lead the initiative, Stever appointed C.B. Smith, a research manager at United Aircraft Corp., who in turn brought in engineers with industrial experience, including Robert Colton, an automotive engineer. Colton led the university Innovation Center experiment that gave rise to Carnegie Mellon’s CED. The NSF chose four universities that captured a range of approaches to innovation incubation. MIT targeted undergrads through formal coursework and an innovation “co-op” that assisted in turning ideas into products. The University of Oregon evaluated the ideas of garage inventors from across the country. The University of Utah emphasized an ecosystem of biotech and computer graphics startups coming out of its research labs. And Carnegie Mellon established a nonprofit corporation to support graduate student ventures, including the dial-a-ride service. Grad student Fritz Faulhaber holds one of the radio-coupled taxi meters that Carnegie Mellon students installed in Pittsburgh cabs in the 1970s.Ralph Guggenheim;Jerome McCavitt/Carnegie-Mellon Alumni News Carnegie Mellon got one of the first university incubators Carnegie Mellon had all the components that experts believed were necessary for innovation: strong engineering, a world-class business school, novel approaches to urban planning with a focus on community needs, and a tradition of industrial design and the practical arts. CMU leaders claimed that the school was smaller, younger, more interdisciplinary, and more agile than MIT. Dwight Baumann. Baumann exemplified a new kind of educator-entrepreneur. The son of North Dakota farmers, he had graduated from North Dakota State University, then headed to MIT for a Ph.D. in mechanical engineering, where he discovered a love of teaching. He also garnered a reputation as an unusually creative engineer with an interest in solving problems that addressed human needs. In the 1950s and 1960s, first as a student and then as an MIT professor, Baumann helped develop one of the first computer-aided-design programs, as well as computer interfaces for the blind and the nation’s first dial-a-ride paratransit system. Dwight Baumann, director of Carnegie Mellon’s Center for Entrepreneurial Development, believed that a modern university should provide entrepreneurial education. Carnegie Mellon University Archives The CED’s mission was to support entrepreneurs in the earliest stages of the innovation process when they needed space and seed funding. It created an environment for students to make a “sequence of nonfatal mistakes,” so they could fail and develop self-confidence for navigating the risks and uncertainties of entrepreneurial life. It targeted graduate students who already had advanced scientific and engineering training and a viable idea for a business. Carnegie Mellon’s dial-a-ride service replicated the Peoples Cab Co., which had provided taxi service to Black communities in Pittsburgh. Charles “Teenie” Harris/Carnegie Museum of Art/Getty Images A few CED students did create successful startups. The breakout hit was Compuguard, founded by electrical engineering Ph.D. students Romesh Wadhwani and Krishnahadi Pribad, who hailed from India and Indonesia, respectively. The pair spent 18 months developing a security bracelet that used wireless signals to protect vulnerable people in dangerous work environments. But after failing to convert their prototype into a working design, they pivoted to a security- and energy-monitoring system for schools, prisons, and warehouses. Wadhwani Foundation supports innovation and entrepreneurship education worldwide, particularly in emerging economies. Wharton School and elsewhere. In 1983, Baumann’s onetime partner Jack Thorne took the lead of the new Enterprise Corp., which aimed to help Pittsburgh’s entrepreneurs raise venture capital. Baumann was kicked out of his garage to make room for the initiative. Was the NSF’s experiment in innovation a success? As the university Innovation Center experiment wrapped up in the late 1970s, the NSF patted itself on the back in a series of reports, conferences, and articles. “The ultimate effect of the Innovation Centers,” it stated, would be “the regrowth of invention, innovation, and entrepreneurship in the American economic system.” The NSF claimed that the experiment produced dozens of new ventures with US $20 million in gross revenue, employed nearly 800 people, and yielded $4 million in tax revenue. Yet, by 1979, license returns from intellectual property had generated only $100,000. “Today, the legacies of the NSF experiment are visible on nearly every college campus.” Critics included Senator William Proxmire of Wisconsin, who pointed to the banana peelers, video games, and sports equipment pursued in the centers to lambast them as “wasteful federal spending” of “questionable benefit to the American taxpayer.” And so the impacts of the NSF’s Innovation Center experiment weren’t immediately obvious. Many faculty and administrators of that era were still apt to view such programs as frivolous, nonacademic, or not worth the investment.

3 weeks ago 13 votes
The Data Reveals Top Patent Portfolios

Eight years is a long time in the world of patents. When we last published what we then called the Patent Power Scorecard, in 2017, it was a different technological and social landscape—Google had just filed a patent application on the transformer architecture, a momentous advance that spawned the generative AI revolution. China was just beginning to produce quality, affordable electric vehicles at scale. And the COVID pandemic wasn’t on anyone’s dance card. Eight years is also a long time in the world of magazines, where we regularly play around with formats for articles and infographics. We now have more readers online than we do in print, so our art team is leveraging advances in interactive design software to make complex datasets grokkable at a glance, whether you’re on your phone or flipping through the pages of the magazine. The scorecard’s return in this issue follows the return last month of The Data, which ran as our back page for several years; it’s curated by a different editor every month and edited by Editorial Director for Content Development Glenn Zorpette. As we set out to recast the scorecard for this decade, we sought to strike the right balance between comprehensiveness and clarity, especially on a mobile-phone screen. As our Digital Product Designer Erik Vrielink, Assistant Editor Gwendolyn Rak, and Community Manager Kohava Mendelsohn explained to me, they wanted something that would be eye-catching while avoiding information overload. The solution they arrived at—a dynamic sunburst visualization—lets readers grasp the essential takeaways at glance in print, while the digital version, allows readers to dive as deep as they want into the data. Working with sci-tech-focused data-mining company 1790 Analytics, which we partnered with on the original Patent Power Scorecard, the team prioritized three key metrics or characteristics: patent Pipeline Power (which goes beyond mere quantity to assess quality and impact), number of patents, and the country where companies are based. This last characteristic has become increasingly significant as geopolitical tensions reshape the global technology landscape. As 1790 Analytics cofounders Anthony Breitzman and Patrick Thomas note, the next few years could be particularly interesting as organizations adjust their patenting strategies in response to changing market access. Some trends leap out immediately. In consumer electronics, Apple dominates Pipeline Power despite having a patent portfolio one-third the size of Samsung’s—a testament to the Cupertino company’s focus on high-impact innovations. The aerospace sector has seen dramatic consolidation, with RTX (formerly Raytheon Technologies) now encompassing multiple subsidiaries that appear separately on our scorecard. And in the university rankings, Harvard has seized the top spot from traditional tech powerhouses like MIT and Stanford, driven by patents that are more often cited as prior art in other recent patents. And then there are the subtle shifts that become apparent only when you dig deeper into the data. The rise of SEL (Semiconductor Energy Laboratory) over TSMC (Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co.) in semiconductor design, despite having far fewer patents, suggests again that true innovation isn’t just about filing patents—it’s about creating technologies that others build upon. Looking ahead, the real test will be how these patent portfolios translate into actual products and services. Patents are promises of innovation; the scorecard helps us see what companies are making those promises and the R&D investments to realize them. As we enter an era when technological leadership increasingly determines economic and strategic power, understanding these patterns is more crucial than ever.

4 weeks ago 6 votes
The Data Reveals Top Patent Portfolios

Eight years is a long time in the world of patents. When we last published what we then called the Patent Power Scorecard, in 2017, it was a different technological and social landscape—Google had just filed a patent application on the transformer architecture, a momentous advance that spawned the generative AI revolution. China was just beginning to produce quality, affordable electric vehicles at scale. And the COVID pandemic wasn’t on anyone’s dance card. Eight years is also a long time in the world of magazines, where we regularly play around with formats for articles and infographics. We now have more readers online than we do in print, so our art team is leveraging advances in interactive design software to make complex datasets grokkable at a glance, whether you’re on your phone or flipping through the pages of the magazine. The scorecard’s return in this issue follows the return last month of The Data, which ran as our back page for several years; it’s curated by a different editor every month and edited by Editorial Director for Content Development Glenn Zorpette. As we set out to recast the scorecard for this decade, we sought to strike the right balance between comprehensiveness and clarity, especially on a mobile-phone screen. As our Digital Product Designer Erik Vrielink, Assistant Editor Gwendolyn Rak, and Community Manager Kohava Mendelsohn explained to me, they wanted something that would be eye-catching while avoiding information overload. The solution they arrived at—a dynamic sunburst visualization—lets readers grasp the essential takeaways at glance in print, while the digital version, allows readers to dive as deep as they want into the data. Working with sci-tech-focused data-mining company 1790 Analytics, which we partnered with on the original Patent Power Scorecard, the team prioritized three key metrics or characteristics: patent Pipeline Power (which goes beyond mere quantity to assess quality and impact), number of patents, and the country where companies are based. This last characteristic has become increasingly significant as geopolitical tensions reshape the global technology landscape. As 1790 Analytics cofounders Anthony Breitzman and Patrick Thomas note, the next few years could be particularly interesting as organizations adjust their patenting strategies in response to changing market access. Some trends leap out immediately. In consumer electronics, Apple dominates Pipeline Power despite having a patent portfolio one-third the size of Samsung’s—a testament to the Cupertino company’s focus on high-impact innovations. The aerospace sector has seen dramatic consolidation, with RTX (formerly Raytheon Technologies) now encompassing multiple subsidiaries that appear separately on our scorecard. And in the university rankings, Harvard has seized the top spot from traditional tech powerhouses like MIT and Stanford, driven by patents that are more often cited as prior art in other recent patents. And then there are the subtle shifts that become apparent only when you dig deeper into the data. The rise of SEL (Semiconductor Energy Laboratory) over TSMC (Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co.) in semiconductor design, despite having far fewer patents, suggests again that true innovation isn’t just about filing patents—it’s about creating technologies that others build upon. Looking ahead, the real test will be how these patent portfolios translate into actual products and services. Patents are promises of innovation; the scorecard helps us see what companies are making those promises and the R&D investments to realize them. As we enter an era when technological leadership increasingly determines economic and strategic power, understanding these patterns is more crucial than ever.

4 weeks ago 7 votes

More in science

Researchers Uncover Hidden Ingredients Behind AI Creativity

Image generators are designed to mimic their training data, so where does their apparent creativity come from? A recent study suggests that it’s an inevitable by-product of their architecture. The post Researchers Uncover Hidden Ingredients Behind AI Creativity first appeared on Quanta Magazine

22 hours ago 2 votes
Science slow down - not a simple question

I participated in a program about 15 years ago that looked at science and technology challenges faced by a subset of the US government. I came away thinking that such problems fall into three broad categories. Actual science and engineering challenges, which require foundational research and creativity to solve. Technology that may be fervently desired but is incompatible with the laws of nature, economic reality, or both.  Alleged science and engineering problems that are really human/sociology issues. Part of science and engineering education and training is giving people the skills to recognize which problems belong to which categories.  Confusing these can strongly shape the perception of whether science and engineering research is making progress.  There has been a lot of discussion in the last few years about whether scientific progress (however that is measured) has slowed down or stagnated.  For example, see here: https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/11/diminishing-returns-science/575665/  https://news.uchicago.edu/scientific-progress-slowing-james-evans https://www.forbes.com/sites/roberthart/2023/01/04/where-are-all-the-scientific-breakthroughs-forget-ai-nuclear-fusion-and-mrna-vaccines-advances-in-science-and-tech-have-slowed-major-study-says/ https://theweek.com/science/world-losing-scientific-innovation-research A lot of the recent talk is prompted by this 2023 study, which argues that despite the world having many more researchers than ever before (behold population growth) and more global investment in research, somehow "disruptive" innovations are coming less often, or are fewer and farther between these days.  (Whether this is an accurate assessment is not a simple matter to resolve; more on this below.) There is a whole tech bro culture that buys into this, however.  For example, see this interview from last week in the New York Times with Peter Thiel, which points out that Thiel has been complaining about this for a decade and a half.   On some level, I get it emotionally.  The unbounded future spun in a lot of science fiction seems very far away.  Where is my flying car?  Where is my jet pack?  Where is my moon base?  Where are my fusion power plants, my antigravity machine, my tractor beams, my faster-than-light drive?  Why does the world today somehow not seem that different than the world of 1985, while the world of 1985 seems very different than that of 1945? Some of the folks that buy into this think that science is deeply broken somehow - that we've screwed something up, because we are not getting the future they think we were "promised".  Some of these people have this as an internal justification underpinning the dismantling of the NSF, the NIH, basically a huge swath of the research ecosystem in the US.  These same people would likely say that I am part of the problem, and that I can't be objective about this because the whole research ecosystem as it currently exists is a groupthink self-reinforcing spiral of mediocrity.   Science and engineering are inherently human ventures, and I think a lot of these concerns have an emotional component.  My take at the moment is this: Genuinely transformational breakthroughs are rare.  They often require a combination of novel insights, previously unavailable technological capabilities, and luck.  They don't come on a schedule.   There is no hard and fast rule that guarantees continuous exponential technological progress.  Indeed, in real life, exponential growth regimes never last. The 19th and 20th centuries were special.   If we think of research as a quest for understanding, it's inherently hierarchal.  Civilizational collapses aside, you can only discover how electricity works once.   You can only discover the germ theory of disease, the nature of the immune system, and vaccination once (though in the US we appear to be trying really hard to test that by forgetting everything).  You can only discover quantum mechanics once, and doing so doesn't imply that there will be an ongoing (infinite?) chain of discoveries of similar magnitude. People are bad at accurately perceiving rare events and their consequences, just like people have a serious problem evaluating risk or telling the difference between correlation and causation.  We can't always recognize breakthroughs when they happen.  Sure, I don't have a flying car.  I do have a device in my pocket that weighs only a few ounces, gives me near-instantaneous access to the sum total of human knowledge, let's me video call people around the world, can monitor aspects of my fitness, and makes it possible for me to watch sweet videos about dogs.  The argument that we don't have transformative, enormously disruptive breakthroughs as often as we used to or as often as we "should" is in my view based quite a bit on perception. Personally, I think we still have a lot more to learn about the natural world.  AI tools will undoubtedly be helpful in making progress in many areas, but I think it is definitely premature to argue that the vast majority of future advances will come from artificial superintelligences and thus we can go ahead and abandon the strategies that got us the remarkable achievements of the last few decades. I think some of the loudest complainers (Thiel, for example) about perceived slowing advancement are software people.  People who come from the software development world don't always appreciate that physical infrastructure and understanding are hard, and that there are not always clever or even brute-force ways to get to an end goal.  Solving foundational problems in molecular biology or quantum information hardware or  photonics or materials is not the same as software development.  (The tech folks generally know this on an intellectual level, but I don't think all of them really understand it in their guts.  That's why so many of them seem to ignore real world physical constraints when talking about AI.).  Trying to apply software development inspired approaches to science and engineering research isn't bad as a component of a many-pronged strategy, but alone it may not give the desired results - as warned in part by this piece in Science this week.   More frequent breakthroughs in our understanding and capabilities would be wonderful.  I don't think dynamiting the US research ecosystem is the way to get us there, and hoping that we can dismantle everything because AI will somehow herald a new golden age seems premature at best.

21 hours ago 2 votes
Animals Adapting to Cities

Humans are dramatically changing the environment of the Earth in many ways. Only about 23% of the land surface (excluding Antarctica) is considered to be “wilderness”, and this is rapidly decreasing. What wilderness is left is also mostly managed conservation areas. Meanwhile, about 3% of the surface is considered urban. I could not find a […] The post Animals Adapting to Cities first appeared on NeuroLogica Blog.

yesterday 2 votes
Cryogenic CMOS - a key need for solid state quantum information processing

The basis for much of modern electronics is a set of silicon technologies called CMOS, which stands for complementary metal oxide semiconductor devices and processes.  "Complementary" means using semiconductors (typically silicon) that is locally chemically doped so that you can have both n-type (carriers are negatively charged electrons in the conduction band) and p-type (carriers are positively charged holes in the valence band) material on the same substrate.  With field-effect transistors (using oxide gate dielectrics), you can make very compact, comparatively low power devices like inverters and logic gates.   There are multiple different approaches to try to implement quantum information processing in solid state platforms, with the idea that the scaling lessons of microelectronics (in terms of device density and reliability) can be applied.  I think that essentially all of these avenues require cryogenic operating conditions; all superconducting qubits need ultracold conditions for both superconductivity and to minimize extraneous quasiparticles and other decoherence sources.  Semiconductor-based quantum dots (Intel's favorite) similarly need thermal perturbations and decoherence to be minimized.  The wealth of solid state quantum computing research is the driver for the historically enormous (to me, anyway) growth of dilution refrigerator manufacturing (see my last point here). So you eventually want to have thousands of error-corrected logical qubits at sub-Kelvin temperatures, which may involve millions of physical qubits at sub-Kelvin temperatures, all of which need to be controlled.  Despite the absolute experimental fearlessness of people like John Martinis, you are not going to get this to work by running a million wires from room temperature into your dil fridge.   Fig. 1 from here. The alternative people in this area have converged upon is to create serious CMOS control circuitry that can work at 4 K or below, so that a lot of the wiring does not need to go from the qubits all the way to room temperature.  The materials and device engineering challenges in doing this are substantial!  Power dissipation really needs to be minimized, and material properties to work at cryogenic conditions are not the same as those optimized for room temperature.  There have been major advances in this - examples include Google in 2019, Intel in 2021, IBM in 2024, and this week, folks at the University of New South Wales supported by Microsoft.   In this most recent work, the aspect that I find most impressive is that the CMOS electronics are essentially a serious logic-based control board operating at milliKelvin temperatures right next to the chip with the qubits (in this case, spins-in-quantum-dots).  I'm rather blown away that this works and with sufficiently low power dissipation that the fridge is happy.  This is very impressive, and there is likely a very serious future in store for cryogenic CMOS.

3 days ago 5 votes
Why U.S. Geothermal May Advance, Despite Political Headwinds

The Trump administration is outwardly hostile to clean energy sourced from solar and wind. But thanks to close ties to the fossil fuel industry and new technological breakthroughs, U.S. geothermal power may survive the GOP assaults on support for renewables and even thrive. Read more on E360 →

4 days ago 2 votes