This year, millions of people around the world mobilised in protest to highlight the dire emergency facing our planet. Could 2019 prove to be the year when talk turned to action on the climate crisis?

We looked back at some of the biggest stories of the year in science and the environment.

In 2019, the reaction to the ongoing climate crisis switched up another gear. Inspired by Swedish activist Greta Thunberg, the climate strike movement exploded this year. Millions took part in mass protests during the course of the year in countries as diverse as Australia, Uganda, Colombia, Japan, Germany and the UK.

Greta chose to make a statement when she sailed - rather than flew - to a UN climate meeting in New York. Summing up the trajectory for many who have joined popular climate movements, she told chief environment correspondent Justin Rowlatt: "I felt like I was the only one who cared about the climate and ecological crisis... it makes me feel good that I'm not alone in this fight."

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The UK's Extinction Rebellion (XR) was making its point through non-violent direct action in 2019. The group, which aims to compel government action on climate change, occupied five prominent sites across central London in April 2019. Notably, they parked a pink boat in the middle of busy Oxford Circus bearing the phrase "Tell the Truth".

This year also saw the UK's Parliament - along with individual councils around the country - declare a climate emergency, granting what had been one of XR's key demands.

But there were also setbacks to political efforts aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions. The US - one of the world's top emitters - began the process of pulling out of the Paris Agreement. This deal was conceived in 2015 with the intention of keeping the global average temperature to below 2C. President Donald Trump said the pact was bad for the US economy and jobs.

This year's UN climate meeting - COP25 - ended in a deal many described as disappointing. The result means that the onus now falls on the UK to resolve many of the most challenging questions at COP26 in Glasgow in 2020.

In April, astronomers released the much anticipated first image of a black hole. This is a region of space from which nothing, not even light, can escape. The picture was taken by a network of eight telescopes across the world and shows what was described as "the heavyweight champion of black holes".

The 40 billion km-wide, spacetime-warping monster features an intense halo, or "ring of fire", around the black hole caused by superheated gas falling in.

The image caused a sensation and raised the profile of one computer scientist working on the project. 29-year-old Dr Katie Bouman helped develop an algorithm that allowed the image to be created. A picture of her with hands clasped over her mouth, barely containing her excitement at the astronomical picture on her laptop, quickly went viral.

But her fame led to trolling, with some accusing her of hogging credit for a male colleague's work. That team member, Dr Andrew Chael, quickly came to her defence. In an interview for the BBC 100 Women series, Dr Bouman said: "At first I was really taken aback by it. But... I do think it is important that we highlight the women in these roles."

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Two major reports from the UN's climate science body revealed in sharp relief the extent to which humanity is ravaging Earth's land surface and her oceans. The first of these documents from the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) warned that we must stop abusing the land if catastrophic climate change is to be avoided.

The report outlined how our actions were degrading soils, expanding deserts, flattening forests and driving other species to the brink of extinction. Scientists involved in the UN process also explained that switching to a plant-based diet could help combat climate change.

The second report, dealing with the world's oceans and frozen regions, detailed how waters are rising, ice is melting and species are being forced to move. As co-ordinating lead author Dr Jean-Pierre Gattuso said, "The blue planet is in serious danger right now, suffering many insults from many different directions and it's our fault." The authors believe that the changes we've set in motion are coming back to haunt us. Sea level rise will have profound consequences for low-lying coastal areas where almost 700 million people live.

On 1 January, Nasa's New Horizons spacecraft made the most distant ever exploration of a Solar System object. Launched all the way back in 2006, it performed its primary task - a flyby study of the Pluto system - in 2015. But with plenty of gas still in the tank, mission scientists directed the spacecraft towards a new target, an object called 2014 MU 69.

MU 69, later dubbed Ultima Thule, and more recently Arrokoth, may be fairly typical of the primitive, icy objects occupying a distant zone of our Solar System known as the Kuiper Belt.

There are hundreds of thousands of objects out there like it, and their frigid state holds clues to how all planetary bodies came into being some 4.6 billion years ago.

Earlier this year, scientists presented details of what they had found at a major conference in Houston. They had determined that Arrokoth's two lobes formed when distinct objects collided at just 2-3m/s, about the speed you would run into a wall, according to team member Kirby Runyon.

In September, former UK chief scientist Sir David King said he was scared by the faster-than-expected pace of climate-related changes. One of the most shocking examples this year of the extreme events Sir David spoke of was surely the record ice melt in Greenland.

In June, temperatures soared well above normal levels in the Danish territory, causing about half its ice sheet surface to experience some melting. As David Shukman reported on his trip to the region, during 2019 alone, it lost enough ice to raise the average global sea level by more than a millimetre.

Underlining the rapid nature of the change, he returned to a glacier he had filmed in 2004 to find that it had thinned by as much as 100m over the period.

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Greenland's ice sheet stores so much frozen water that if the whole of it melted, it would raise sea levels worldwide by up to 7m. Although that would take hundreds or thousands of years, polar scientists told the American Geophysical Union meeting in December that Greenland was losing its ice seven times faster than in the 1990s.

Prof Andy Shepherd, of Leeds University, said: "The simple formula is that around the planet, six million people are brought into a flooding situation for every centimetre of sea-level rise."

While civilisation-threatening asteroids are a staple of the movies, the probability of a sizeable space rock hitting our planet is very low. But as the dinosaurs found out, the risk does increase with time. Some 19,000 near-Earth asteroids (NEAs) are being monitored, but many lurk undetected by telescopes, so there is always potential for a bolt-from-the-blue.

In March, Nasa scientists told the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference (LPSC) that a big fireball had exploded in Earth's atmosphere at the end of 2018. The space rock barrelled in without warning and detonated with 10 times the energy released by the Hiroshima atomic bomb.

Luckily, the rock blew up over the sea off Russia's remote Kamchatka Peninsula. But an outburst that size could have had serious consequences had it occurred nearer the ground, over a densely populated area.

Then in July, an asteroid the size of a football field buzzed Earth, coming within 65,000km of our planet's surface - about a fifth the distance to the Moon. The 100m-wide rock was detected just days before it passed Earth.

Meanwhile, two robotic spacecraft have been examining different NEAs close-up. Scientists working on Japan's Hayabusa mission reported that their asteroid, Ryugu, was made of rubble blasted off a bigger object. And the US Osiris-Rex spacecraft detected plumes of particles erupting from the surface of its target, Bennu.

The gas sulphur hexafluoride (SF6) isn't a household name. But as the most powerful greenhouse gas known to science, it could play an increasingly important role in discussions about climate change.

As environment correspondent Matt McGrath reported in September, levels are on the rise as an unintended consequence of the boom in green energy. The cheap, non-flammable gas is used to prevent short circuits and fires in electrical switches and circuit breakers known collectively as "switchgear".

As more wind turbines are built around the world, more of these electrical safety devices are being installed. The vast majority use SF6.

Although overall atmospheric concentrations are small for now, the global installed base of SF6 is expected to grow by 75% by 2030. Worryingly, there's no natural mechanism that destroys or absorbs the gas once it's been released.

Quantum computers hold huge promise. The "classical" machines we use today compute in much the same way as we do by hand. Quantum computers promise faster speeds and the ability to solve problems that are beyond even the most powerful conventional types. But scientists have struggled to build devices with enough units of information (quantum bits) to make them competitive with classical computers.

A quantum machine had not surpassed a conventional one until this year. In October, Google announced that its advanced quantum processor, Sycamore, had achieved "quantum supremacy" for the first time. Researchers said it had performed a specific task in 200 seconds that would take the world's best supercomputer 10,000 years to complete.

IBM, which has been working on quantum computers of its own, questioned some of Google's figures. But the achievement represents an important step towards fulfilling some of the predictions made for

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The big science and environment stories of 2019 - BBC News

More than half (54%) of cybersecurity professionals have expressed concerns that quantum computing will outpace the development of other security tech, according to a research from Neustar.

Keeping a watchful eye on developments, 74% of organizations admitted to paying close attention to the technologys evolution, with 21% already experimenting with their own quantum computing strategies.

A further 35% of experts claimed to be in the process of developing a quantum strategy, while just 16% said they were not yet thinking about it. This shift in focus comes as the vast majority (73%) of cyber security professionals expect advances in quantum computing to overcome legacy technologies, such as encryption, within the next five years.

Almost all respondents (93%) believe the next-generation computers will overwhelm existing security technology, with just 7% under the impression that true quantum supremacy will never happen.

Despite expressing concerns that other technologies will be overshadowed, 87% of CISOs, CSOs, CTOs and security directors are excited about the potential positive impact of quantum computing. The remaining 13% were more cautious and under the impression that the technology would create more harm than good.

At the moment, we rely on encryption, which is possible to crack in theory, but impossible to crack in practice, precisely because it would take so long to do so, over timescales of trillions or even quadrillions of years, said Rodney Joffe, Chairman of NISC and Security CTO at Neustar.

Without the protective shield of encryption, a quantum computer in the hands of a malicious actor could launch a cyberattack unlike anything weve ever seen.

For both todays major attacks, and also the small-scale, targeted threats that we are seeing more frequently, it is vital that IT professionals begin responding to quantum immediately.

The security community has already launched a research effort into quantum-proof cryptography, but information professionals at every organization holding sensitive data should have quantum on their radar.

Quantum computings ability to solve our great scientific and technological challenges will also be its ability to disrupt everything we know about computer security. Ultimately, IT experts of every stripe will need to work to rebuild the algorithms, strategies, and systems that form our approach to cybersecurity, added Joffe.

The report also highlighted a steep two-year increase on the International Cyber Benchmarks Index. Calculated based on changes in the cybersecurity landscape including the impact of cyberattacks and changing level of threat November 2019 saw the highest score yet at 28.2. In November 2017, the benchmark sat at just 10.1, demonstrating an 18-point increase over the last couple of years.

During September October 2019, security professionals ranked system compromise as the greatest threat to their organizations (22%), with DDoS attacks and ransomware following very closely behind (21%).

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Will quantum computing overwhelm existing security tech in the near future? - Help Net Security

What if we could do chemistry inside a computer instead of in a test tube or beaker in the laboratory? What if running a new experiment was as simple as running an app and having it completed in a few seconds?

For this to really work, we would want it to happen with complete fidelity. The atoms and molecules as modeled in the computer should behave exactly like they do in the test tube. The chemical reactions that happen in the physical world would have precise computational analogs. We would need a completely accurate simulation.

If we could do this at scale, we might be able to compute the molecules we want and need.

These might be for new materials for shampoos or even alloys for cars and airplanes. Perhaps we could more efficiently discover medicines that are customized to your exact physiology. Maybe we could get a better insight into how proteins fold, thereby understanding their function, and possibly creating custom enzymes to positively change our body chemistry.

Is this plausible? We have massive supercomputers that can run all kinds of simulations. Can we model molecules in the above ways today?

This article is an excerpt from the book Dancing with Qubits written by Robert Sutor. Robert helps you understand how quantum computing works and delves into the math behind it with this quantum computing textbook.

Lets start with C8H10N4O2 1,3,7-Trimethylxanthine.

This is a very fancy name for a molecule that millions of people around the world enjoy every day: caffeine. An 8-ounce cup of coffee contains approximately 95 mg of caffeine, and this translates to roughly 2.95 10^20 molecules. Written out, this is

295, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000 molecules.

A 12 ounce can of a popular cola drink has 32 mg of caffeine, the diet version has 42 mg, and energy drinks often have about 77 mg.

These numbers are large because we are counting physical objects in our universe, which we know is very big. Scientists estimate, for example, that there are between 10^49 and 10^50 atoms in our planet alone.

To put these values in context, one thousand = 10^3, one million = 10^6, one billion = 10^9, and so on. A gigabyte of storage is one billion bytes, and a terabyte is 10^12 bytes.

Getting back to the question I posed at the beginning of this section, can we model caffeine exactly on a computer? We dont have to model the huge number of caffeine molecules in a cup of coffee, but can we fully represent a single molecule at a single instant?

Caffeine is a small molecule and contains protons, neutrons, and electrons. In particular, if we just look at the energy configuration that determines the structure of the molecule and the bonds that hold it all together, the amount of information to describe this is staggering. In particular, the number of bits, the 0s and 1s, needed is approximately 10^48:

10, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000.

And this is just one molecule! Yet somehow nature manages to deal quite effectively with all this information. It handles the single caffeine molecule, to all those in your coffee, tea, or soft drink, to every other molecule that makes up you and the world around you.

How does it do this? We dont know! Of course, there are theories and these live at the intersection of physics and philosophy. However, we do not need to understand it fully to try to harness its capabilities.

We have no hope of providing enough traditional storage to hold this much information. Our dream of exact representation appears to be dashed. This is what Richard Feynman meant in his quote: Nature isnt classical.

However, 160 qubits (quantum bits) could hold 2^160 1.46 10^48 bits while the qubits were involved in a computation. To be clear, Im not saying how we would get all the data into those qubits and Im also not saying how many more we would need to do something interesting with the information. It does give us hope, however.

In the classical case, we will never fully represent the caffeine molecule. In the future, with enough very high-quality qubits in a powerful quantum computing system, we may be able to perform chemistry on a computer.

I can write a little app on a classical computer that can simulate a coin flip. This might be for my phone or laptop.

Instead of heads or tails, lets use 1 and 0. The routine, which I call R, starts with one of those values and randomly returns one or the other. That is, 50% of the time it returns 1 and 50% of the time it returns 0. We have no knowledge whatsoever of how R does what it does.

When you see R, think random. This is called a fair flip. It is not weighted to slightly prefer one result over the other. Whether we can produce a truly random result on a classical computer is another question. Lets assume our app is fair.

If I apply R to 1, half the time I expect 1 and another half 0. The same is true if I apply R to 0. Ill call these applications R(1) and R(0), respectively.

If I look at the result of R(1) or R(0), there is no way to tell if I started with 1 or 0. This is just like a secret coin flip where I cant tell whether I began with heads or tails just by looking at how the coin has landed. By secret coin flip, I mean that someone else has flipped it and I can see the result, but I have no knowledge of the mechanics of the flip itself or the starting state of the coin.

If R(1) and R(0) are randomly 1 and 0, what happens when I apply R twice?

I write this as R(R(1)) and R(R(0)). Its the same answer: random result with an equal split. The same thing happens no matter how many times we apply R. The result is random, and we cant reverse things to learn the initial value.

There is a catch, though. You are not allowed to look at the result of what H does if you want to reverse its effect. If you apply H to 0 or 1, peek at the result, and apply H again to that, it is the same as if you had used R. If you observe what is going on in the quantum case at the wrong time, you are right back at strictly classical behavior.

To summarize using the coin language: if you flip a quantum coin and then dont look at it, flipping it again will yield heads or tails with which you started. If you do look, you get classical randomness.

A second area where quantum is different is in how we can work with simultaneous values. Your phone or laptop uses bytes as individual units of memory or storage. Thats where we get phrases like megabyte, which means one million bytes of information.

A byte is further broken down into eight bits, which weve seen before. Each bit can be a 0 or 1. Doing the math, each byte can represent 2^8 = 256 different numbers composed of eight 0s or 1s, but it can only hold one value at a time. Eight qubits can represent all 256 values at the same time

This is through superposition, but also through entanglement, the way we can tightly tie together the behavior of two or more qubits. This is what gives us the (literally) exponential growth in the amount of working memory.

Artificial intelligence and one of its subsets, machine learning, are extremely broad collections of data-driven techniques and models. They are used to help find patterns in information, learn from the information, and automatically perform more intelligently. They also give humans help and insight that might have been difficult to get otherwise.

Here is a way to start thinking about how quantum computing might be applicable to large, complicated, computation-intensive systems of processes such as those found in AI and elsewhere. These three cases are in some sense the small, medium, and large ways quantum computing might complement classical techniques:

As I write this, quantum computers are not big data machines. This means you cannot take millions of records of information and provide them as input to a quantum calculation. Instead, quantum may be able to help where the number of inputs is modest but the computations blow up as you start examining relationships or dependencies in the data.

In the future, however, quantum computers may be able to input, output, and process much more data. Even if it is just theoretical now, it makes sense to ask if there are quantum algorithms that can be useful in AI someday.

To summarize, we explored how quantum computing works and different applications of artificial intelligence in quantum computing.

Get this quantum computing book Dancing with Qubits by Robert Sutor today where he has explored the inner workings of quantum computing. The book entails some sophisticated mathematical exposition and is therefore best suited for those with a healthy interest in mathematics, physics, engineering, and computer science.

Intel introduces cryogenic control chip, Horse Ridge for commercially viable quantum computing

Microsoft announces Azure Quantum, an open cloud ecosystem to learn and build scalable quantum solutions

Amazon re:Invent 2019 Day One: AWS launches Braket, its new quantum service and releases

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Quantum expert Robert Sutor explains the basics of Quantum Computing - Packt Hub

Quantum computers will make easy work of our current encryption systems, putting some of the worlds most sensitive data at risk. And John Prisco, CEO of the security company Quantum Xchange, tells Inverse that the time for new encryption is already here.

Traditional cryptography relies on a system of public and private encrypted keys that protect data by creating a decryption process that relies on solving incredibly complex math. Namely, the factoring of prime numbers. For todays computers, trying to solve the answer through brute force (e.g. guessing as many different answers as possible) would be nearly impossible. But for quantum computers, such computational hurdles would be trivial.

Before computers were as powerful as they are today, that [kind of cryptography] was going to be good for a million years, says Prisco. [But] a million years got truncated into just a handful of years.

But such computational might, for the time being, is still fairly theoretical. Google was only able to achieve quantum supremacy (a benchmark that compares its computational abilities to a classical computer) this year and quantum systems are far from office staples. Yet, Prisco tells Inverse that waiting until these machines become more widespread to begin improving our encryption methods would be too late.

People are stealing data today and then harvesting [and] storing it, says Prisco. And when they crack the key, then theyve got the information. So if you have data that has a long shelf life, like personal information, personnel records, you really cant afford to not future proof that.

And government agencies says Prisco, are worried about this too. In 2017 NIST (National Institute of Science and Technology) put out a call for new, quantum-resistant algorithms. Out of the 82 submissions it received, only 26 are still being considered for implementation. But Prisco tells Inverse that simply creating algorithms to combat these advanced computers wont be enough. Instead, we need to fight quantum with quantum.

Thats where Priscos company, Quantum Xchange, comes in. Instead of focusing on quantum-resistant algorithms, Quantum Xchange creates new encryption keys that themselves rely on the physics of quantum mechanics.

Just as todays keys are made up of numbers, says Prisco, their quantum key (called QKD) would be made up of photons.

[The QKDs] photons are encoded with ones and zeros, but rather than relying on solving a difficult math problem, it relies on a property of physics, says Prisco. And that property is associated with not being able to observe a photon in any way, shape, or form without changing its quantum state.

This quantum property that Prisco refers to is a law of physics called the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. According to this principle, the quantum state of the QKD is only stable as long as its not observed. So, even if a nefarious actor were to steal the QKD, Prisco tells Inverse, the very act of stealing it would count as observation and would thus change the QKD altogether and render it moot.

You could steal the quantum key, says Prisco, but it would no longer be the key that was used to encrypt and therefore it would no longer be able to decrypt.

Prisco tells Inverse that he believes this new generation of quantum keys would remain resilient as long as the laws of quantum physics did. So in theory, a very, very long time.

While other experts have estimated that it will be ten years until such quantum attacks really start taking place, Prisco tells Inverse he believes it will be less than five. And waiting to develop these technologies will not only put our data at risk, but could put us behind the curve when it comes to competing with other countries in this arena as well. Particularly China, who Prisco says is outspending the U.S. 10-to-1 in quantum technology.

Going forward, Prisco says that the U.S.s best bet will be to incorporate both the quantum-resistant algorithms being developed by NIST and other government agencies as well as a quantum key like their QKD.

Im a proponent for combining what NSA and NIST are doing with quantum-resistant algorithms with quantum keys, says Prisco. You know, it may seem like a revolutionary concept in the United States but I can tell you that Chinas doing this, all of Europes doing this Russias doing this. Everybody kind of realizes that the quantum computer is an offensive weapon when it comes to cryptography. And that the first defensive weapon one can deploy are the quantum keys, and then quantum-resistant algorithms when theyre available.

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Traditional cryptography doesn't stand a chance against the quantum age - Inverse