The Merge and Other News

Estimated Reading Time: 2 minutes

TL;DR

This week we have a short post covering Ethereum’s Merge, a new experiment with high temperature superconductors and more.

Interesting Links from Around the Web

• https://www.quantamagazine.org/high-temperature-superconductivity-understood-at-last-20220921/: A new experiment provides new evidence into the origins of high temperature superconductivity by providing evidence for the theory of superexchange.

• https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-new-math-of-wrinkling-patterns-20220922/: A fascinating write-up on the theory of wrinkles

• https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-02999-9: AlphaFold’s developers win a $3 million breakthrough prize. A very well deserved award.

• https://ethereum.org/en/upgrades/merge/: Ethereum successfully pulled off the Merge, and swapped its energy intensive proof-of-work protocol for a more efficient proof-of-stake protocol. Tackling the Merge required taming considerable technical complexity and is a major feat of open source engineering. Ethereum still has a long way to go before it becomes a stable platform for scalable apps, but the technical foundation laid by the Merge takes a big step forward. The next major step will be the introduction of sharding to allow for parallel processing of Ethereum transactions.

  

• https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abk3333: Machine learning algorithms trained on quantum data may be able to outperform any classical algorithm on certain quantum property prediction tasks. This result provides theoretical grounding to the recent surge of work at the intersection of machine learning and quantum physics.

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About

Deep Into the Forest is a newsletter by Deep Forest Sciences, Inc. We’re a deep tech R&D company building Chiron, an AI-powered scientific discovery engine. Deep Forest Sciences leads the development of the open source DeepChem ecosystem. Partner with us to apply our foundational AI technologies to hard real-world problems. Get in touch with us at partnerships@deepforestsci.com! 

Credits

Author: Bharath Ramsundar, Ph.D.

Editor: Sandya Subramanian, Ph.D.