Lakshmi Chandrasekaran

Quantum computers are poised to become computational superpowers, but researchers have long sought a viable problem that confers a quantum advantage — something only a quantum computer can solve. Only then, they argue, will the technology finally be seen as essential.

Even after decades, they’re still looking. “Part of the reason it’s challenging is because classical computers are pretty good at a lot of the things they do,” said John Preskill, a theoretical physicist at the California Instit...

Have you noticed how oranges are stacked at the store? Grocers know that the most attractive and stable arrangement is a pyramid. Johannes Kepler suspected this pyramid-stacking was superior, way back in the 17th century. But the German scientist also noted that he couldn’t prove it. Sadly, like Kepler, many mathematicians may never live to see the confirmation of their discoveries. Or the full impact of their insights.
In Kepler’s case, it took nearly 400 years for mathematicians to confirm ...

Introduction

The traveling salesperson problem is one of the oldest known computational questions. It asks for the ideal route through a certain list of cities, minimizing mileage. Despite seeming simple, the problem is notoriously difficult. While you can use brute force to check all the possible routes until you find the shortest path, such a strategy becomes untenable after just a handful of cities. Instead, you can apply a rigorous mathematical model called linear programming, which rough...

Understanding the quantum universe is not an easy thing. Intuitive notions of space and time break down in the tiny realm of subatomic physics, allowing for behavior that seems, to our macro sensibilities, downright weird.

Quantum computers should allow us to harness this strangeness. Such machines could theoretically explore molecular interactions to create new drugs and materials. But perhaps most important, the world itself is built upon this quantum universe — if we want to understand how...

Print
As the world began to cautiously emerge from the ravages of COVID-19 in early 2022, a new global outbreak arose: monkeypox/mpox, a viral infectious zoonotic disease. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), the virus has spread to 110 countries thus far. WHO also reported that smallpox vaccines are roughly 85 percent effective in preventing mpox. Nevertheless, public health experts still debate a central question: Should public policy mandate vaccinations to prevent the spread ...

Imagine you’re a general in ancient times and you want to keep your troop counts secret from your enemies. But you also need to know this information yourself. So you turn to a math trick that allows you to achieve both aims.
In a morning drill you ask your soldiers to line up in rows of five. You note that you end up with three soldiers in the last row. Then you have them re-form in rows of eight, which leaves seven in the last row, and then rows of nine, which leaves two. At no point have y...

When the first transistor was created, in 1947, few could have imagined the eventual impact of this device—the switch that lies at the heart of logic chips.
We have silicon to thank for computing’s great takeover. Add a minute pinch of impurities to the element, and silicon forms a material almost ideal for transistors in computer chips.
For more than five decades, engineers have shrunk silicon-based transistors over and over again, creating progressively smaller, faster, and more energy-effi...

A NASA mission is sponsoring undergraduate research to test space-based manufacturing.

If we’re going to go to Mars — maybe not so far off with SpaceX founder Elon Musk already planning human flights there — we’d better be ready to produce necessities when we get there.

Given that it takes nearly 300 days to reach Mars from Earth, imagine the time, the number of trips, the weight of materials to be carried and the cost to sustain even a small community. Could a better alternative be to figure...

Physicist Elisabetta Matsumoto is an avid knitter and has been since taking up the hobby as a child. During graduate school at the University of Pennsylvania in 2009, Matsumoto came across an unusually knotty stitch while knitting a pattern for a Japanese red dragon. “I have books with thousands of different stitch patterns, but the one in the red dragon wall hanging was one I had never seen,” she says. That got her thinking about the geometry of stitches and, eventually, led her to study the...

By Lakshmi Chandrasekaran
The house came down piece by numbered piece. In mid-September, the House by Northwestern (HBN) team dismantled the entire home they built over the summer, and FedEx-ed it off to Denver.
The solar-powered sustainable house, Enable is an official entry in the eighth Solar Decathlon competition, sponsored by the United States Department of Energy. Northwestern University will be participating for the first time.
The Solar Decathlon features a total of 11 collegiate team...

By Lakshmi Chandrasekaran
A Chinese solar energy company captured the imagination of the world and a younger generation of consumers by building a solar farm in the shape of a giant panda. That adds a bit of whimsy to China’s growing reputation as a world leader in solar energy production. But the hottest competition is in the race for new solar technology
In the quest to limit carbon emissions, more countries are harvesting energy from the sun, with the focus on research to create better sol...

By Lakshmi Chandrasekaran
Glaciers and forests show jagged retreats in Jill Pelto’s paintings while the sky above heats up. Pelto, a graduate student studying climate science at the University of Maine, uses her art to convey the impacts of climate change on world environments.
She overlays climate change research data with striking colors and vivid imagery to depict our living world amid rising temperatures. Her watercolor paintings convey multiple layers of information, all the while visual...

Cities generally exhibit higher air and surface temperatures than surrounding rural areas due to differences in their surface energy balance [5]. This phenomenon, which is known as the urban heat island (UHI) effect, poses a major threat to human health. Studies show that more than half of the world’s population now resides in cities, where warming can increase morbidity and mortality — especially during heat waves [5, 10]. For example, many parts of Western Europe suffered from swelter...

Print

Have you ever wondered how an organism tries to solve a physiological problem on scales much larger than itself? For instance, humans construct architectures that are tens to hundreds of times bigger than themselves via a combination of systematic design, global planning, and effective communication between individuals.

How does this work for insects such as bees, wasps, termites, or ants, which tend to cohabitate in large colonies? To survive as a colony, social insects must solve some...

Nathan La Porte dreams of a field full of solar panels leading to a pump in the corner fueling station. The sun shines down on the panels collecting enough energy to power a process that produces a liquid fuel to fill up the gas tank of a car.
If you think this falls in the realms of science fiction, think again. La Porte, a post-doctoral scientist with Michael Wasielewski’s chemistry lab at Northwestern University, is working to convert the concept into reality. And the inspiration for this ...