In this week’s science news, we take a trip back in time, as far as the history of our earliest human ancestors. First stop, ancient Egypt, where archaeologists working at a temple at Taposiris Magna have discovered what they believe is a statue of Queen Cleopatra VII, famous for her romances with Roman leaders Julius Caesar and Mark Antony. Although not everyone agrees, coins depicting the late queen’s head were also found at the site, supporting the connection to the ancient ruler.
This isn’t the only intriguing treasure discovered this week. And going back, imagine how a 9-year-old boy must have felt when he discovered a mysterious, triangle-shaped rock on a beach in Sussex, England, three years ago that turned out to be a 50,000-year-old Neanderthal hand axe.
“It’s an incredible discovery,” James Sainsbury, curator of archaeology and social history at Worthing Theatres and Museums, told Live Science. Google scientists have unveiled a new quantum processor that solved a puzzle in five minutes that would have taken the world’s best supercomputer a quarter of the age of the universe to solve.
The chip, called “Willow,” overcomes a major problem in quantum computing that has plagued the field for the past 30 years. Quantum computers are inherently “noisy” because their units of computation, called qubits, tend to exchange information with their environment.
For most systems, the more qubits used, the more errors there are. But with Willow, the more qubits added, the fewer errors there are, paving the way for large-scale quantum computers.
Human bones found in a house burned down 5,700 years ago provide “CSI”-style clues about the deaths of seven people in prehistoric Ukraine.
The battered bones were found in a burned-out settlement about 115 miles (185 km) south of Kiev. But this was no ordinary house fire — archaeologists found that two people had suffered serious head injuries just before they died, while a detached fragment of the third man’s skull was found placed on top of his bones nearly a century later.
“We can only speculate that there was a connection between the fire and lethal violence, i.e., killing people in the house, leaving their corpses, and setting the house on fire,” the researchers wrote in the study.
