TV News LIES

Google on Monday announced Willow, its latest, greatest quantum computing chip. The speed and reliability performance claims Google's made about this chip were newsworthy in themselves, but what really caught the tech industry's attention was an even wilder claim tucked into the blog post about the chip.

Google Quantum AI founder Hartmut Neven wrote in his blog post that this chip was so mind-boggling fast that it must have borrowed computational power from other universes.

Ergo the chip's performance indicates that parallel universes exist and "we live in a multiverse."

Here's the passage:

Willow’s performance on this benchmark is astonishing: It performed a computation in under five minutes that would take one of today’s fastest supercomputers 1025 or 10 septillion years. If you want to write it out, it’s 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 years. This mind-boggling number exceeds known timescales in physics and vastly exceeds the age of the universe. It lends credence to the notion that quantum computation occurs in many parallel universes, in line with the idea that we live in a multiverse, a prediction first made by David Deutsch.

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An ancient cat was found almost perfectly preserved in Siberia's permafrost.

Researchers found the mummy of a 35,000-year-old saber-toothed cub in what is now Russia's northeastern Sakha Republic, also known as Yakutia, in 2020. A study published this past week in the journal Scientific Reports shows that the cat was just three weeks old when it died, but its cause of death is unknown.

The kitten still had its whiskers and claws attached when it was pulled out of the permafrost, and was covered in a coat of "short, thick, soft, dark brown fur." Its hair was about 20 to 30 millimeters long, according to researchers.

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Scientists in Bolivia are hoping to track glacial changes at lightning speed.

What if the song "Baby Shark" stopped after just two stanzas?

For non-fans of the catchy tune, that might sound like a dream. For a real-life Mommy Shark in Illinois, it's reality: She produced a baby without a Daddy Shark.

The epaulette shark pup hatched this summer at Brookfield Zoo, just west of Chicago. Its mother has been at the zoo since 2019; in that time, she's never shared a tank with a male.

It's a rare case of parthenogenesis, a type of asexual reproduction, according to the zoo.

The latest species of spider found in the U.S. are huge, brightly colored and travel in a method described as "ballooning." And, according to new research, they're spreading out to new states around the country.

Researchers at Clemson University published a study on Joro spiders, coming to the conclusion that the species is spreading rapidly beyond the South Carolina area, and data shows they could inhabit most of the eastern U.S.

Scientists have reconstructed Pink Floyd’s Another Brick in the Wall by eavesdropping on people’s brainwaves – the first time a recognisable song has been decoded from recordings of electrical brain activity.

The hope is that doing so could ultimately help to restore the musicality of natural speech in patients who struggle to communicate because of disabling neurological conditions such as stroke or amyotrophic lateral sclerosis – the neurodegenerative disease that Stephen Hawking was diagnosed with.

Although members of the same laboratory had previously managed to decipher speech – and even silently imagined words – from brain recordings, “in general, all of these reconstruction attempts have had a robotic quality”, said Prof Robert Knight, a neurologist at the University of California in Berkeley, US, who conducted the study with the postdoctoral fellow Ludovic Bellier.

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