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The mind-bending reality of quantum mechanics — with Jim Al Khalili

Jim Al-Khalili explores emerging technologies powering the future of quantum, and looks at how we got here.

This Discourse was recorded at the Ri on 7 November 2025, in partnership with the Institute of Physics.

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Physicist and renowned broadcaster Jim Al-Khalili takes a look back at a century of quantum mechanics, the strangest yet most successful theory in all of science, and how it has shaped our world. He also looks forward to the exciting new world of Quantum 2.0 and how a deeper understanding of such counterintuitive concepts as quantum superposition and quantum entanglement is leading to the development of entirely new technologies, from quantum computers and quantum sensors to quantum cryptography and the quantum internet.

The United Nations has proclaimed 2025 as the International Year of Quantum Science and Technology, to celebrate the centenary of quantum mechanics and the revolutionary work of the likes of Werner Heisenberg and Erwin Schrödinger. Together with the Institute of Physics, join us to celebrate the culmination of the International Year of Quantum at the penultimate Discourse of our Discover200 year.

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2.8 days to disaster: Why we are running out of time in low earth orbit

A “House of Cards” is a wonderful English phrase that it seems is now primarily associated with a Netflix political drama. However, its original meaning is of a system that is fundamentally unstable. It’s also the term Sarah Thiele, originally a Ph.D. student at the University of British Columbia, and now at Princeton, and her co-authors used to describe our current satellite mega-constellation system in a new paper available in pre-print on arXiv.

They have plenty of justification for using that term. Calculations show that, across all low-Earth orbit mega-constellations, a “close approach,” defined as two satellites passing by each at less than 1km separation, occurs every 22 seconds. For Starlink alone, that number is once every 11 minutes. Another known metric of Starlink is that, on average, each of the thousands of satellites have to perform 41 maneuvers per year to avoid running into other objects in their orbit.

That might sound like an efficiently engineered system operating the way it should, but as any engineer will tell you, “edge cases”—the things that don’t happen in a typical environment, are the cause of most system failures. According to the paper, solar storms are one potential edge case for satellite mega-constellations. Typically, solar storms affect satellite operation in two ways.

Scale of living things

Neal Agarwal published another gift to the internet with Size of Life. It shows the scale of living things, starting with DNA, to hemoglobin, and keeps going up.

The scientific illustrations are hand-drawn (without AI) by Julius Csotonyi. Sound & FX by Aleix Ramon and cello music by Iratxe Ibaibarriaga calm the mind and encourage a slow observation of things, but also grow in complexity and weight with the scale. It kind of feels like a meditation exercise.

See also: shrinking to an atom, the speed of light, and of course the classic Powers of Ten.

Active Attacks Exploit Gladinet’s Hard-Coded Keys for Unauthorized Access and Code Execution

Huntress is warning of a new actively exploited vulnerability in Gladinet’s CentreStack and Triofox products stemming from the use of hard-coded cryptographic keys that have affected nine organizations so far.

“Threat actors can potentially abuse this as a way to access the web.config file, opening the door for deserialization and remote code execution,” security researcher Bryan Masters said.

The use of hard-coded cryptographic keys could allow threat actors to decrypt or forge access tickets, enabling them to access sensitive files like web.config that can be exploited to achieve ViewState deserialization and remote code execution, the cybersecurity company added.

Google Chrome adds new security layer for Gemini AI agentic browsing

Google is introducing in the Chrome browser a new defense layer called ‘User Alignment Critic’ to protect upcoming agentic AI browsing features powered by Gemini.

Agentic browsing is an emerging mode in which an AI agent is configured to autonomously perform for the user multi-step tasks on the web, including navigating sites, reading their content, clicking buttons, filling forms, and carrying out a sequence of actions.

User Alignment Critic is a separate LLM model isolated from untrusted content that acts as a “high-trust system component.”

Rydberg-atom detector conquers a new spectral frontier

A team from the Faculty of Physics and the Center for Quantum Optica l Technologies at the Center of New Technologies, University of Warsaw has developed a new method for measuring elusive terahertz signals using a “quantum antenna.”

The authors of the work utilized a novel setup for radio wave detection with Rydberg atoms to not only detect but also precisely calibrate a so-called frequency comb in the terahertz band. This band was until recently a white spot in the electromagnetic spectrum, and the solution described in the journal Optica paves the way for ultrasensitive spectroscopy and a new generation of quantum sensors operating at room temperature.

Terahertz (THz) radiation, being part of the electromagnetic spectrum, lies at the boundary of electronics and optics, positioned between microwaves (used, for example, in Wi-Fi) and infrared.

A direct leap into terahertz: Dirac materials enable efficient signal conversion at room temperature

Highspeed Internet, autonomous driving, the Internet of Things: data streams are proliferating at enormous speed. But classic radio technology is reaching its limits: the higher the data rate, the faster the signals need to be transmitted.

Researchers at the Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf (HZDR) have now demonstrated that weak radio signals can be efficiently converted into significantly higher frequencies using this material that is just several tens of nanometers thick. And at room temperature, at that. The results open up prospects for future generations of mobile communications and high-resolution sensor technology. The paper is published in the journal Communications Physics.

The more data to be transmitted simultaneously, the higher the carrier frequency must be. As a result, research is now delving into the terahertz range. This frequency spectrum lies outside the microwave range currently used and, so far, has been difficult to access technologically.

Scientists Teleport Entanglement Across Two Linked Quantum Networks in Historic First

Researchers at Heriot-Watt University have introduced a prototype quantum network that merges two smaller networks into a single, reconfigurable eight-user system capable of routing — and even teleporting — entanglement on demand. For many years, physicists have imagined a quantum internet: a glo

Single-photon teleportation achieved between distant quantum dots for the first time

An international research team involving Paderborn University has achieved a crucial breakthrough on the road to a quantum internet. For the first time ever, the polarization state of a single photon emitted from a quantum dot was successfully teleported to another physically separated quantum dot.

This means that the properties of one photon can be transmitted to another via teleportation. This is a particularly vital step for future quantum communication networks. For example, the scientists used a 270m free-space optical link for their experiments. The results have now been published in the journal Nature Communications.

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