The wackiest headlines from the week as they would appear in a Classifieds section.

Careers

AMATEUR FACT-CHECKER: You can apply to contribute Community Notes on Facebook, Instagram, and Threads now. For anyone commenting “PHOTOSHOPPED” on hot people’s thirst traps, it’s time to go professional.

FRANKENSTEIN’S ASSISTANT: A startup wants to create genetically modified rabbits that glow in the dark. If that doesn’t sound cool to you, they can probably do a snake or something.

Personal

SPONSORED ROADTRIP: Jeep owners were bombarded with intrusive pop-up ads telling them to buy a FlexCare Extended Care Premium Plan due to a software glitch, according to parent company Stellantis. Your 2003 Honda Civic wouldn’t dream of doing you dirty like that.

ISO FUR: Younger consumers are on the hunt for used, vintage fur, but not just to upsell on Depop—they actually want to wear it.

For Sale

ENGLISH SINGLE MALT: Scotland is livid after the UK government said it would look into classifying whisky distilled in England as “single malt,” which is usually reserved for the drink in Scotland. This is like if they let Barefoot start calling its prosecco “Champagne,” or if your cousin was allowed to call whatever the heck he brought to Thanksgiving a Bloomin’ Onion.

NOT ART: A German federal court ruled that Birkenstocks are just shoes, not art. The jury is still out on Jibbitz.

TRACK SUIT: Paris Hilton is selling some of her iconic Y2K pieces to benefit the LA wildfire relief fund. Juicy for a cause, if you will.—MM

Team Canada defeated Team USA 3–2 in overtime in the final of the 4 Nations Face-Off in Boston on Thursday night. The international hockey tournament involving Canada, the US, Finland, and Sweden replaced the NHL’s traditional All-Star Game and proved to be a massive success—viewership was through the roof, and the cheapest tickets available on gameday were more than $700.

The geopolitical tensions between Canada and the US brought on by President Trump’s desire to annex a traditional ally added fuel to the fire. During round robin games in Canada, the US anthem was loudly booed; American fans returned the favor when the Canadian anthem was performed on Thursday. But Canada got the last laugh.—DL

Here are some illuminating scientific discoveries from the week to help you live better and maybe even build the beginnings of a fish friendship.

London doctors cure rare childhood blindness. For the first time ever, kids born with a genetic condition called leber congenital amaurosis have been effectively treated with a new gene-therapy surgery that only takes an hour. The four children, aged between one and two, were followed for up to five years after their interventions and have shown “hugely impressive” results, according to one of the consulting ophthalmologists. After being born legally blind, the kids can now see shapes, recognize faces, and, in some cases, read and write. “Now we get calls and notes home from school that he’s stealing phones out of teachers’ back pockets, which is hysterical to us,” one parent said.

Fish can tell people apart by their outfits. Wild fish can recognize people by the color of their clothing, researchers discovered, after teaching two species of seabream to identify their human trainer over 12 days. Out in the Mediterranean Sea, a researcher trained fish to follow her by rewarding them with food. Then, when a second researcher who also had food was present, the fish still followed their original trainer more often than the second one when the researchers wore different diving gear. The fish tended to lose track of who was who when the divers wore the same outfit. Some seabream even got better at following the correct leader as the study progressed, which suggests that the fish were actively learning.

Minnesota got so frigid, satellites thought the state was a cloud. Taking the Weather Channel at face value, Minnesotans literally had their heads in the clouds this week: A dangerous wind chill caused temperatures to plummet to as low as 40 below zero on Tuesday, tricking weather satellites into thinking that the entire state of Minnesota—as well as North Dakota, South Dakota, and western Wisconsin—was one enormous cloud. On the satellite imagery, the Twin Cities area was one of a few white dots amid a stagnant sea of blue, demonstrating how areas dense with man-made objects hold more warmth, Fox 9 meteorologist Cody Matz pointed out.—ML

The company that gave the world Bing Maps says it has created a fourth state of matter to achieve a quantum computing breakthrough.

This week, Microsoft unveiled the Majorana 1 quantum chip, a microprocessor that harnesses the properties of an elusive material called a topological superconductor yielding particles that are neither a liquid or solid, nor a gas. Building on exotic physics research that the tech giant began 17 years ago, Microsoft outlined this new state of matter in a peer-reviewed paper published in the journal Nature.

Microsoft says its chip could be used to solve industrial-scale problems—like designing self-repairing construction materials and accelerating drug discovery—“in years, not decades.” That timeline stands at odds with chip overlord Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, who tanked quantum computing stocks last month when he mused that useful quantum computers are at least 15 to 20 years away.

• Microsoft’s announcement comes after Google recently unveiled its own quantum chip, Willow. Google says its chip has the ability to make a calculation in five minutes that would take a conventional computer 10 septillion years, albeit for arcane problems with limited practical use cases.
• Intel and IBM are also racing to develop their own quantum computers, and the Chinese government has committed $15.3 billion in an effort to gallop ahead in the field.

Microsoft’s quantum drop is thrilling theoreticians for whom the words “topological entanglement entropy” aren’t gibberish, but let’s look into what it means for the rest of us, and explore whether Majorana 1 is truly a harbinger of a computing revolution.

Computing on steroids

Microsoft’s research was supported by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the government agency tasked with funding cutting-edge research with national security applications. While currently in experimental mode, quantum computing holds the promise of ultra-powerful cryptography and the ability to simulate complex natural systems.

Infusing computers with quantum mechanics know-how enables them to store information via quantum bits that can take the value of a 1 and 0 simultaneously (they’re called qubits).

• Microsoft claims that Majorana 1—which currently holds eight qubits—is designed to house up to 1 million of them.
• The company says that would make its machine mightier than all the world’s current computers combined.

Maverick Microsoft

Typically, qubits are produced by using low temperatures to create superconductors or trapping particles in electric currents. The systems are extremely difficult to scale because qubits are fragile, tending to lose their 1-and-0 quantum state when the computer runs, leading to errors.

While Google says it lowered the error rate by grouping the qubits in a special grid formation, Microsoft claims to have created a different workaround.

Using sophisticated materials engineering, Microsoft’s researchers combined the semiconductor indium arsenide with aluminium, which is a superconductor. They fashioned the unique material into a pair of nanoscopic wires and brought them to an extremely low temperature, spawning particles that constitute an exotic state of matter, known as Majorana particles, with unique properties that make for less error-prone qubits.

Notably, the chip engages with the qubits digitally, making it easier to correct errors while operating at scale.

Don’t get too excited (yet)

More research is needed to see whether this is the breakthrough that gets quantum computing out of the lab and into commercial use. While some researchers unaffiliated with Microsoft are optimistic, they warn that it's a bit of a Schrodinger’s qubit situation. Microsoft’s paper only presents intermediary results, which the company itself disclaims don’t actually prove that the qubits it created truly run on a topological superconductor.

• Independent researchers say that it won’t be apparent whether that can happen until the device gets scaled up—which Microsoft says it plans to do.
• A previous Microsoft-funded paper lauding a topological semiconductor-powered quantum computer had to be retracted in 2021 after the company’s researchers were found to have cherry-picked data.
• There are some hardline detractors. German physicist Vincent Mourik, who pushed for the retraction last time, told Nature he believes Microsoft's method of creating a topological semiconductor is misguided.

Skepticism from some scientists notwithstanding, investors are enthused, buoying the entire quantum computing industry. The quantum computing ETF QTUM opened 1% in the green the day after the chip was announced on Wednesday.

Looking ahead…Microsoft said that it would have to pack its quantum chip with 100 qubits before it is commercially viable and projected that it could become available to cloud customers of Microsoft Azure for experimental tinkering by 2030.—SK