As the bombs continue to fall in Gaza and violence tears through the West Bank, the areas of historic Palestine that are occupied by Israel, it is easy to get lost in the complicated geopolitical histories, statistics, and competing media narratives. That is part of why journalist Nathan Thrall, whose earlier work with the International Crisis Group led him to write deeply researched articles on Israel-Palestine, zoomed in not just on a few characters, but one particular man: Abed Salama. In Thrall’s new book, A Day in the Life of Abed Salama, he paints a picture of the modern West…
Author: Admin
As the bombs continue to fall in Gaza and violence tears through the West Bank, the areas of historic Palestine that are occupied by Israel, it is easy to get lost in the complicated geopolitical histories, statistics, and competing media narratives. That is part of why journalist Nathan Thrall, whose earlier work with the International Crisis Group led him to write deeply researched articles on Israel-Palestine, zoomed in not just on a few characters, but one particular man: Abed Salama. In Thrall’s new book, A Day in the Life of Abed Salama, he paints a picture of the modern West…
What’s the buzz: a brood cicada photographed in the US. (Courtesy: Pmjacoby/CC BY-SA 4.0) Welcome to this year’s first instalment of the Red Folder, which has two tales from the wonderful world of insects. Fire raft ants have a remarkable ability to survive floods – something that could come in handy in the UK, which is currently suffering severe flooding in many low-lying areas. When it rains, the ants can be seen to avoid drowning by clumping together to form floating rafts of 10 or more ants. One possible explanation for this survival strategy is the “Cheerios effectâ€, which causes…
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Maybe a novelist’s real medium isn’t so much words, but the idea of memory itself. Every choice we make—voice, POV, backstory, moments buried as nothing or shouted as epiphany—is a matter of genre and taste. But it all comes from how we, or our characters, experience or recollect existence. Given how primal and important the idea of memory is to the novel’s architecture, it’s not surprising that authors often confront its opposite—memory loss. My last novel Little Threats, leaned on memory as a thematic device and I didn’t quite grasp the importance of that to me at the time. Fiction…
Since having my daughter at the height of COVID fear in May 2020, I have learned the best way to scream in your car. Windows up, no matter how hot it is. Maybe you think about what it would be like if you accidentally left your baby in the car this hot. Maybe it’s good you feel too hot. Maybe you deserve it. No music. Shut off NPR, silence reports of death tolls or an active shooter or the election or a new hot restaurant or air pollution. If you can, wait until no one is walking past, though you…
Random numbers are used in several important technologies including cryptography and numerical simulation. However, large sequences of truly random numbers are notoriously difficult to generate – and correlations lurking within sequences can have dire consequences. Quantum systems are inherently random, so they offer a way to generate random numbers. In this episode of the Physics World Weekly podcast, our guest is Ramy Shelbaya who is who is chief executive officer of Quantum Dice – a UK-based start-up that uses quantum optics to generate random numbers. He explains how the company’s technology creates sequences of random numbers at high speed, and…
Celina Baljeet Basra’s debut novel, Happy, at once fulfills and tragically subverts the promise of its title. Happy Singh Soni, the titular protagonist, struggles to hold on to his optimism and imagination while laboring under appalling conditions as an undocumented migrant worker in Europe. Young, upbeat Happy—an ebullient admirer of new wave French cinema from rural Punjab—goes to Europe in pursuit of riches that are artistic as well as material: he hopes to become an actor in European cinema (he is compared in looks to Sami Frey, the actor in Bande à part, Jean Luc-Godard’s 1964 film, who makes constant…
I’m in Love with My Ex’s Absence The Space I loved you, and when you left, you left a Space. And I fell in love with that Space. Not right away, I mean, but over time. At first I hated the Space. It was just always there! But then I somehow got used to the Space. Then I started to appreciate it, and then I missed it when it was gone. Before I knew it, the Space and I had become friends. I started really enjoying hanging out with the Space; I liked talking to it, and listening to it…
Cooling apparatus: The laser setup the Princeton team used to cool, control, and entangle individual molecules. (Courtesy: Richard Soden, Department of Physics, Princeton University) Ultracold molecules are a step closer to being a viable platform for quantum technology thanks to two independent teams of researchers who showed they could entangle pairs of molecules and encode them as quantum bits (qubits). Because molecules offer new ways to encode quantum information and can interact with each other over long distances, the two works offer new possibilities in quantum computing and quantum simulations beyond those provided by other types of qubits. Quantum computation…
Set in World War II, Vanessa Chan’s utterly gripping debut novel The Storm We Made is the story of an unlikely spy and the consequences of her actions. When Cecily, a bored Malayan housewife in British-colonized Malaya, encounters the charismatic General Fujiwara, she is seduced not only by the force of his personality, but also his dreams of an “Asia for Asians.” Stifled by the narrow confines of her existence as the wife of a low-level bureaucrat, Cecily agrees to act as a spy for the general, unwittingly ushering in the most brutal occupation her people have ever known. Ten…
I am not immune to the appeal of true crime. I’ve read In Cold Blood, Helter Skelter, and I’ll Be Gone in the Dark. I’ve listened to The Staircase, Serial, and Dr. Death. I have watched The Jinx, Making a Murder, and Unsolved Mysteries. In fact, because I am a novelist, I have thought a lot about the way these narratives work. The ones I’ve listed all share a few elements: colorful characters, evocative settings, heroes and villains. But most importantly, they are molded. What do I mean by this? Like memoir, they are of life but they do not…
Quantum designers: Florian Marquardt (left) and Leopoldo Sarra have shown how deep Bayesian experimental design can be applied to quantum many-body systems. (Courtesy: Leopoldo Sarra) As quantum technology improves, researchers are able to connect increasing numbers of components to create nascent quantum computers. An important challenge is knowing what components and configurations have the most potential for creating useful systems. Now, Leopoldo Sarra and Florian Marquardt have shown how machine learning can be used to implement the deep Bayesian experimental design of large-scale quantum networks. Marquardt is based at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Light in Germany,…
Donate to Keep Electric Literature Free! Electric Literature published over 500 writers and nearly 600 articles in 2023—all of which are free for you to read. EL’s archives of thousands of essays, stories, poems, and reading lists are also free. We need you to contribute to keep it that way. Please make a donation to our year end campaign today. Electric Literature is pleased to reveal the cover for the novel If Only by Vigdis Hjorth, which will be published by Verso Books on September 3, 2024. Preorder the book here. “A relatively young woman, aged thirty. She married in her early twenties,…
I’m a Barbie role model: UK space scientist and science educator Maggie Aderin-Pocock with here one-of-a-kind Barbie doll (Courtesy: Mattel) From the fastest woman to run across the US to the mechanics of dancing peanuts, physics has had its fair share of quirky stories this year. Here is our pick of the best 10, not in any particular order. I’m a Barbie…role model This year Barbie created “one-of-a-kind role model dolls†to honour seven female leaders in science, technology, engineering and medicine. They included Susan Wojcicki, chief executive of YouTube, German microbiologist Antje Boetius from the Max Planck Institute for Marine Microbiology,…
(Courtey: iStock/wildpixel) This year, the Physics World team selected a medical innovation as the Breakthrough of the Year: the development of a digital bridge that restores communication between the brain and spinal cord, enabling a man with paralysis to stand and walk naturally. We also reported on several other neural engineering advances, including a neuroprosthesis that restores communication to those who cannot speak and an award-winning implant that could help regulate blood pressure in people with spinal-cord injuries. And that’s just one example of the impact of physics-related research on the healthcare sector. In 2023, we wrote about a host…
(Courtesy: Shutterstock/Roman-Sigaev) It’s been another banner year for quantum science and technology, with academic research groups and tech firms celebrating significant achievements in quantum computing, quantum communications and quantum metrology as well as fundamental quantum science. Three of these advances – a quantum repeater that transmits quantum information over a distance of 50 km; a double-slit experiment in time; and a simulation of an expanding universe in a Bose-Einstein condensate – appeared in our list of the year’s top 10 breakthroughs, but with so many exciting things going on, we can’t resist celebrating a few others. Here, in no particular…
Modified wood Researchers at Linköping University, together with colleagues from the KTH Royal Institute of Technology, have developed the world’s first electrical transistor made of wood. (Courtesy: Thor Balkhed) There are many physicists working on materials and every year we look forward to writing about some of the most exciting research in this field. This year was no exception and here are some of our favourite materials stories from 2023. In an era when new materials are devised using artificial intelligence, I find it comforting that we are also in the midst of a resurgence of interest in wood. It…