Features

What does the future hold for computing? Experts at the Networked Quantum Information Technologies Hub (NQIT), based at Oxford University, believe our next great technological leap lies in the development of quantum computing.

Quantum computers could solve problems it takes a conventional computer longer than the lifetime of the universe to solve. This could bring new possibilities, such as advanced drug development, superior military intelligence, greater opportunities for space exploration and enhanced encryption security.

Quantum computers also present real risks, but scientists are already working on new forms of encryption that even a quantum computer couldn't crack. Experience tells us that we should think about the applications and implications of quantum computing long before they become reality as we strive to ensure a safe future in the exciting new age of quantum computing.

A new animation, produced for NQIT by Scriberia, looks at how quantum computing could change our lives.

A new podcast about women who have played an important but neglected role in Oxford’s history has been launched.

The podcast series, called ‘Women in Oxford’s History’ (WiOH), has been developed by two doctoral students at Oxford University and funded by the University’s AHRC-TORCH Graduate Fund.

Olivia Robinson of the History Faculty and Alison Moulds of the English Faculty have made six podcasts, which can be downloaded here for free.

In a guest post for Arts Blog, the presenters explain the idea behind the podcasts and what they hope it achieves:

"The history of Oxford is often told through the experiences of eminent men drawn from the aristocracy, the Church and academia, while the stories of ordinary women’s contributions to the city and the University remain neglected. The blue plaque scheme exists to recognise the lives of eminent people connected to the city, but less than a quarter of Oxford’s plaques commemorate women. The WiOH podcast project aims to redress this balance by highlighting the role women have played in Oxford’s history. We hope to inspire others to investigate women’s impact on their own communities and cities.

The project consists of six podcasts on women whose contributions to either ‘town or gown’ life have been overlooked. These showcase individuals whose lives are not widely known and whose names may be unfamiliar to many. These are not the Margaret Thatchers and Ada Lovelaces of the world, but are nonetheless women who have made important contributions to the city and university over the centuries, and who we feel deserve wider recognition.

The podcasts have been designed to appeal to a broad audience and people of all ages and backgrounds. We hope that they will attract interest beyond the University, from local schools and community groups and from international visitors.  They might be listened to by a Year 11 student on her way to school, a young professional who listens to podcasts while running, or a retired American tourist planning to explore the city.

Our contributors are postgraduate students at Oxford University in the fields of Anthropology, Creative Writing, Economic, Social and Local History. They have been busy producing narrative accounts of individual women whom they’ve chosen for their connection to, and impact on, Oxford. In several cases, the advanced search facility at the Online Dictionary of National Biography was used to identify suitable women to research in more depth, and the subjects include women with interests in social work, race relations, women’s education and museum collections.

The research produced by our contributors has then been adapted into scripts suitable for audio recordings and the podcasts also feature relaxed interviews with our contributors to find out more about their research. Each podcast lasts less than 15 minutes and is available to download via the University’s podcast series on iTunes. A website accompanies the series on which we’ve shared the podcast scripts along with extra research resources and links."

Five years ago, the Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to three astronomers for their discovery, in the late 1990s, that the universe is expanding at an accelerating pace.

Their conclusions were based on analysis of Type Ia supernovae – the spectacular thermonuclear explosions of dying stars – picked up by the Hubble space telescope and large ground-based telescopes. It led to the widespread acceptance of the idea that the universe is dominated by a mysterious substance named 'dark energy' that drives this accelerating expansion.

Now, a team of scientists led by Professor Subir Sarkar of Oxford University's Department of Physics has cast doubt on this standard cosmological concept. Making use of a vastly increased data set – a catalogue of 740 Type Ia supernovae, more than ten times the original sample size – the researchers have found that the evidence for acceleration may be flimsier than previously thought, with the data being consistent with a constant rate of expansion.

The study is published in the Nature journal Scientific Reports.

Professor Sarkar, who also holds a position at the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen, said: 'The discovery of the accelerating expansion of the universe won the Nobel Prize, the Gruber Cosmology Prize, and the Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics. It led to the widespread acceptance of the idea that the universe is dominated by "dark energy" that behaves like a cosmological constant – this is now the "standard model" of cosmology.

'However, there now exists a much bigger database of supernovae on which to perform rigorous and detailed statistical analyses. We analysed the latest catalogue of 740 Type Ia supernovae – over ten times bigger than the original samples on which the discovery claim was based – and found that the evidence for accelerated expansion is, at most, what physicists call "3 sigma". This is far short of the 5 sigma standard required to claim a discovery of fundamental significance.

'An analogous example in this context would be the recent suggestion for a new particle weighing 750 GeV based on data from the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. It initially had even higher significance – 3.9 and 3.4 sigma in December last year – and stimulated over 500 theoretical papers. However, it was announced in August that new data shows that the significance has dropped to less than 1 sigma. It was just a statistical fluctuation, and there is no such particle.'

There is other data available that appears to support the idea of an accelerating universe, such as information on the cosmic microwave background – the faint afterglow of the Big Bang – from the Planck satellite. However, Professor Sarkar said: 'All of these tests are indirect, carried out in the framework of an assumed model, and the cosmic microwave background is not directly affected by dark energy. Actually, there is indeed a subtle effect, the late-integrated Sachs-Wolfe effect, but this has not been convincingly detected.

'So it is quite possible that we are being misled and that the apparent manifestation of dark energy is a consequence of analysing the data in an oversimplified theoretical model – one that was in fact constructed in the 1930s, long before there was any real data. A more sophisticated theoretical framework accounting for the observation that the universe is not exactly homogeneous and that its matter content may not behave as an ideal gas – two key assumptions of standard cosmology – may well be able to account for all observations without requiring dark energy. Indeed, vacuum energy is something of which we have absolutely no understanding in fundamental theory.'

Professor Sarkar added: 'Naturally, a lot of work will be necessary to convince the physics community of this, but our work serves to demonstrate that a key pillar of the standard cosmological model is rather shaky. Hopefully this will motivate better analyses of cosmological data, as well as inspiring theorists to investigate more nuanced cosmological models. Significant progress will be made when the European Extremely Large Telescope makes observations with an ultrasensitive "laser comb" to directly measure over a ten to 15-year period whether the expansion rate is indeed accelerating.'

Our desire to communicate and interact on social media took off long before we considered how this vast and ever-growing mass of information might shape our world, for better or worse.

Scientists involved in the Digital Wildfire project in Oxford's Department of Computer Science are searching for ways to make sense of the huge volume of publicly accessible data that our social media obsession has created. They're exploring the pros and cons of social media, from its positive use as a communications tool to the harmful spread of misinformation and hate speech.

Learn about their work in the latest animation from Oxford Sparks.

Oxford Sparks is a great place to explore and discover science research from the University of Oxford. Oxford Sparks aims to share the University's amazing science, support teachers to enrich their science lessons, and support researchers to get their stories out there. Follow Oxford Sparks on Twitter @OxfordSparks and on Facebook @OxSparks.

In a guest post for Science Blog, Professor David Pyle of Oxford's Department of Earth Sciences discusses a new paper looking at ancient volcanic activity in the Ethiopian Rift Valley.

The great Rift Valley that runs through Ethiopia has played a pivotal role in human evolution. It is both the location of the earliest fossils of anatomically modern humans and, later, become an important route for human migrations 'out of Africa'.

Today, it is home to more than ten million people, a major hub for tourists, and the location of important transport links. The main Ethiopian Rift Valley is also one of the largest fields of volcanoes on Earth – although this status may not be obvious from the remnants of the sprawling tumbledown hills that break through the dusty flats of the rift valley floor. Here, Africa has been slowly pulling apart for millions of years. As the continent pulls apart, the crust extends and thins, promoting the rise of magma from the depths of the Earth's mantle. None of these volcanoes is thought to have erupted since the early 19th century, and several are now the focus of development of geothermal energy potential.

In a new paper published in the journal Nature Communications, Will Hutchison, an Oxford DPhil student, and a team of collaborators from the UK, Ethiopia and the USA, shed a little more light on the violently explosive past of several of these rift volcanoes. Using a combination of field work (to reconstruct the deep history of the volcanoes) and isotopic age dating techniques, the researchers find that at least four of the volcanoes of the main Ethiopian Rift Valley suffered colossal eruptions between about 320,000 and 170,000 years ago. These were very significant eruptions – perhaps of the scale of the eruption of Krakatoa in Indonesia in 1883. They would have buried the rift floor in volcanic ejecta, disrupting water sources and habitats across wide areas, with the collapsed remnants of the volcanic edifices forming great 'calderas', or craters, in the rift floor.

This pulse in volcanism coincides with the arrival of Homo sapiens in the region around 200,000 years ago and raises the question of to what extent these changes in the landscape and environments occupied by our earliest human ancestors might have influenced human evolution and migration. The recognition that explosive volcanism in the rift occurs in bursts also poses some interesting geological questions, and future inter-disciplinary research is needed to understand the scale of eruptions at other large volcanoes of the rift, their causes, and their wider consequences.