Computer chips (the tech kind, not the potato kind) normally work by moving electrons, tiny particles that carry electricity. Wave Photonics, a company based in Cambridge, England, is designing chips that use photons instead. Photons are particles of light.
Chips that use light can carry more information while using less energy. That makes them especially useful for AI data centers, the huge buildings full of computers that power tools like chatbots, and for quantum computers. They're part of a wider push to make quantum technology smaller and practical enough to build in large numbers. The industry is growing so quickly that Wave Photonics plans to double its staff.
Quantum computers are hard to build, but they could be worth the effort. They use the strange rules of quantum mechanics, the science of how the tiniest particles behave. That lets them tackle certain problems in a completely different way from ordinary computers. For some tasks, they could one day be far faster than even today's most powerful machines.
In the early days of the industry, governments were cautious and mostly bought from companies with a proven track record. Now they're more willing to take chances on newer companies.
If quantum computing keeps growing, it could eventually change fields like medicine, by helping scientists design new drugs, and finance. It could also become a bigger part of the economy.
In A New Discovery About Black Holes, narrator Kate Yule details how radio telescopes picked up signals from neutron stars in the 1960s. Learn how their discovery suggested that black holes existed. Scientists believed that once something had fallen into a black hole, it appeared to be lost from the Universe forever, until Stephen Hawking suggested that black holes can also emit particles and eventually disappear. This video is excerpted from BBC’s Einstein & Hawking: Masters of Our Universe, a mind-bending documentary that tells the story of how the two most famous scientists of the 20th Century transformed our understanding of the Universe and changed the world.
The article "How Technology Can Secure Future Elections From Hacking" from BBC's Science Focus explores the risks of election hacking and the technologies that could safeguard voting integrity.
Computer chips (the tech kind, not the potato kind) normally work by moving electrons, tiny particles that carry electricity. Wave Photonics, a company based in Cambridge, England, is designing chips that use photons instead. Photons are particles of light.
Chips that use light can carry more information while using less energy. That makes them especially useful for AI data centers, the huge buildings full of computers that power tools like chatbots, and for quantum computers. They're part of a wider push to make quantum technology smaller and practical enough to build in large numbers. The industry is growing so quickly that Wave Photonics plans to double its staff.
Quantum computers are hard to build, but they could be worth the effort. They use the strange rules of quantum mechanics, the science of how the tiniest particles behave. That lets them tackle certain problems in a completely different way from ordinary computers. For some tasks, they could one day be far faster than even today's most powerful machines.
In the early days of the industry, governments were cautious and mostly bought from companies with a proven track record. Now they're more willing to take chances on newer companies.
If quantum computing keeps growing, it could eventually change fields like medicine, by helping scientists design new drugs, and finance. It could also become a bigger part of the economy.
In A New Discovery About Black Holes, narrator Kate Yule details how radio telescopes picked up signals from neutron stars in the 1960s. Learn how their discovery suggested that black holes existed. Scientists believed that once something had fallen into a black hole, it appeared to be lost from the Universe forever, until Stephen Hawking suggested that black holes can also emit particles and eventually disappear. This video is excerpted from BBC’s Einstein & Hawking: Masters of Our Universe, a mind-bending documentary that tells the story of how the two most famous scientists of the 20th Century transformed our understanding of the Universe and changed the world.
The article "How Technology Can Secure Future Elections From Hacking" from BBC's Science Focus explores the risks of election hacking and the technologies that could safeguard voting integrity.