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Taking inspiration from the gigantic Black Lives Matter street painting near the White House in Washington D.C., community leaders and volunteers painted a street in the heart of Bed-Stuy with the same message Saturday.

Volunteers spread yellow traffic paint into letters 28 feet tall, spanning a 375-foot-long stretch of Fulton Street in Restoration Plaza.

Volunteers paint a massive Black Lives Matter message on Fulton Street in Bed Stuy. Gothamist

City Councilman Robert Cornegy Jr., who represents Bed-Stuy, said his district was the natural home for the street project.

Similar to what was done in Washington DC, we saw that it helped boost the morale of not only the demonstrators, but of the ancillary community to it, Cornegy said in an interview Saturday. And we thought that since this community has been historically Black, and it's the last bastion of Black homeownership, the last bastion of Black small business, this will be the right place in New York City to begin the Black Lives Matter mural movement.

In addition to the Black Lives Matter message, the names of victims of police brutality are also memorialized in the artwork.

The project is a joint effort between the Billie Holiday Theatre at Restoration Plaza and Cornegy, who originally reached out to artist Dawud West to commission a mural for the plaza.

I suggested that I do something a little bit more statement-making as opposed to just painting something on the wall, West said, adding that the Bed-Stuy project joins the DC artwork and a similar project in Charlotte, North Carolina to show unity across the country.

Dr. Indira Etwaroo, the theaters Executive Artistic Director, added that situating the art project in Restoration Plaza itself was a deliberate message.

This is Restoration Plaza, and this is the first Community Development Corporation in the nation, founded by Robert F. Kennedy and Jacob Javits along with community activists who were rising up during the 1966 race riots (in New York), Etwaroo said. And so here we are full circle again.

Taken outside of its transportation context, the yellow paint represented urgency and action, said Nicholas Love, an artist and volunteer.

Its just so bold and in your face. The black pavement under the traffic-yellow, its like caution: be aware, Love said.

The Saturday kickoff of the project started with Spike Lee, Reverend Al Sharpton, and the state Attorney General Letitia James hoisting paint rollers together. The street art was dedicated with Cornegys Soul Sunday event with local church leaders.

State Attorney General Letitia James, Rev. Al Sharpton, Councilman Robert Cornegy Jr., Billie Holiday Theatre's director Indira Etwaroo, Spike Lee, and artist Dawud West, at the kickoff of the BLM street art project. Courtesy of the Billie Holiday Theatre

I think the mood here is very celebratory, which gives us a break against the stark reality of being black in this country, Cornegy said of the project. So, it hasn't changed the mood overall but for one moment in time, we're able to celebrate the community coming out and painting -- if you notice, most of the painting is being done by community residents, which means that they have a stake in this. This is not something that's happening to them, but being done for them. And that's the difference. A lot of times what we feel is Black Americans, whether it's policy or legislation, you feel that is being done to us as opposed to being done for us. This is one of those days where the community gets to come out and actually participate in the painting.

Another aerial shot of the BLM street art in Bed-Stuy. Filip Wolak

This week, Mayor Bill de Blasio announced that a street in every borough would be named after the Black Lives Matter movement. Though the initiative was supposed to commence near City Hall, West said the Bed-Stuy mural was a bonus.

Bill de Blasio wanted one of these in every borough, West said. So if he wants it in every borough -- heres one right now.

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Photos: Bed-Stuy Gets Its Own Gigantic "Black Lives Matter" Street Painting - Gothamist

The IBM Q quantum computer looks nothing like a classical computer.

IBM now has 18 quantum computers, an increase of three this quarter that underscores the company's effort to benefit from a revolutionary type of computing. Dario Gil, head of IBM Research and a champion of its quantum computing effort, disclosed the number at the Big Blue's Think conference Wednesday.

Eighteen quantum computers might not sound like a lot. But given that each one is an unwieldy device chilled within a fraction of a degree above absolute zero and operated by Ph.D. researchers, it's actually a pretty large fleet. In comparison, Google's quantum computers lab near Santa Barbara, California, has only five machines, and Honeywell only has six quantum computers.

Quantum computing is no longer in its infancy, but it's probably only made it to early toddlerhood. The technology today remains exotic and expensive, with largely unproven benefits. But companies like IBM, Google, Microsoft, Intel and Honeywell along with startups like IonQ, Quantum Circuits and Rigetti Computing are racing to bring quantum computing to maturity. Their hope is to cash in on customers' desire to solve classes of computing problems that are impossible for conventional computers.

IBM's fleet of quantum computers has increased to 18.

You're not likely to ever have your own quantum computer since they're so hard to operate, surrounded by hulking cooling equipment and isolated from outside interference that spoils calculations. Instead, you'll be able to tap into them via cloud computing services. So far, 230,000 people have done so with IBM's Q Experience, Gil said.

IBM is working to make its quantum computers accessible to mere mortals, not just those who understand the weird physics concepts like superposition and entanglement that make quantum computers tick. It's doing so by packaging computational operations into standard recipes it calls circuits that apply a sequence of transformations to qubits, the quantum data storage elements that are far more adaptable than conventional computers' bits.

One sequence of operations forms a circuit to help JP Morgan Chase set prices for financial derivatives and another helps Daimler perform physics simulations to try to improve electric vehicle battery chemistry.

Computing will become a hybrid approach with libraries of quantum computing circuits embedded in classical programs, Gil predicted. And a third flavor, computers inspired by the neurons in human brains, will add another option.

"It is not that one will eat the other," Gil said. "The most profound implication of what is happening today in computing is the convergence of bits, neurons and qubits."

IBM believes those quantum circuits, embedded within ordinary software, will make quantum computing much more broadly accessible. And now it's begun a new business strategy of touting the approach -- "circuits as a service."

"That's where we're going," Gil said in a CNET interview. "If we do that well, that's going to expose quantum computing to a much larger group of humans."

Dario Gil, head of IBM Research, shows off one of IBM's 18 quantum computers during its Think conference.

IBM will still offer low-level access to its systems for those who want to squeeze the most out of the hardware, though.

Tirias Research analyst Kevin Krewell likes the strategy. "Rather than reinventing a programming language, they added libraries for Python," a widely used conventional programming language. "But you can also get 'dirty' with the Qiskit platform," IBM's low-level quantum programming tools, he said.

IBM is on a path to at least double the performance of its quantum computers every year, something it's done for four years running so far. It scores its machines on a measurement it invented called quantum volume, which tracks both the number of qubits in a machine and the reduction in error rates that hobble quantum calculations.

IBM's quantum computing rivals haven't generally signed up to use the same benchmark, but the most notable one that has is Honeywell. It's building a different variety of quantum computer -- an ion trap machine that can run at somewhat less frosty temperatures than IBM's superconducting designs. And Honeywell promises its machines will increase quantum volume by a factor of 10 each year, a much faster pace than IBM.

Gil said he's confident of IBM's approach for years to come, though, which is backed by insights gleaned from IBM Research's investigations. IBM's top-performing quantum computer, codenamed Paris, has 53 qubits. IBM will increase that with a larger system later this year that Gil declined to detail, but he said Big Blue's approach will work beyond a million qubits.

That progress will come in part by miniaturizing hardware and stuffing more of it into the cryostat -- the supercooled chamber that houses the quantum computing processor and a complicated arrangement of wires that carry microwave signals used to operate it, Gil said. Part of that change will come through processor technology better able to run at such cold temperatures.

Is Gil worried Honeywell will leapfrog IBM? Ion trap machines have potential, but "we've done our homework," he said. Honeywell didn't immediately respond to a request for comment.

Operating a cloud computing service is also tough, Gil said. But he welcomes the competition. "It's a great thing that Honeywell is pushing an ambitious road map."

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It's easy to take time's arrow for granted - but the gears of physics actually work just as smoothly in reverse. Maybe that time machine is possible after all?

An experiment from 2019 shows just how much wiggle room we can expect when it comes to distinguishing the past from the future, at least on a quantum scale. It might not allow us to relive the 1960s, but it could help us better understand why not.

Researchers from Russia and the US teamed up to find a way to break, or at least bend, one of physics' most fundamental laws of energy.

The second law of thermodynamics is less a hard rule and more of a guiding principle for the Universe. It says hot things get colder over time as energy transforms and spreads out from areas where it's most intense.

It's a principle that explains why your coffee won't stay hot in a cold room, why it's easier to scramble an egg than unscramble it, and why nobody will ever let you patent a perpetual motion machine.

It's also the closest we can get to a rule that tells us why we can remember what we had for dinner last night, but have no memory of next Christmas.

"That law is closely related to the notion of the arrow of time that posits the one-way direction of time from the past to the future," said quantum physicist Gordey Lesovik from the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology.

Virtually every other rule in physics can be flipped and still make sense. For example, you could zoom in on a game of pool, and a single collision between any two balls won't look weird if you happened to see it in reverse.

On the other hand, if you watched balls roll out of pockets and reform the starting pyramid, it would be a sobering experience. That's the second law at work for you.

On the macro scale of omelettes and games of pool, we shouldn't expect a lot of give in the laws of thermodynamics. But as we focus in on the tiny gears of reality - in this case, solitary electrons - loopholes appear.

Electrons aren't like tiny billiard balls, they're more akin to information that occupies a space. Their details are defined by something called the Schrdinger equation, which represents the possibilities of an electron's characteristics as a wave of chance.

If this is a bit confusing, let's go back to imagining a game of pool, but this time the lights are off. You start with the information a cue ball in your hand, and then send it rolling across the table.

The Schrdinger equation tells you that ball is somewhere on the pool table moving around at a certain speed. In quantum terms, the ball is everywhere at a bunch of speeds some just more likely than others.

You can stick your hand out and grab it to pinpoint its location, but now you're not sure of how fast it was going. You could also gently brush your finger against it and confidently know its velocity, but where it went... who knows?

There's one other trick you could use, though. A split second after you send that ball rolling, you can be fairly sure it's still near your hand moving at a high rate.

In one sense, the Schrdinger equation predicts the same thing for quantum particles. Over time, the possibilities of a particle's positions and velocities expands.

"However, Schrdinger's equation is reversible," said materials scientist Valerii Vinokur from the Argonne National Laboratory in the US.

"Mathematically, it means that under a certain transformation called complex conjugation, the equation will describe a 'smeared' electron localising back into a small region of space over the same time period."

It's as if your cue ball was no longer spreading out in a wave of infinite possible positions across the dark table, but rewinding back into your hand.

In theory, there's nothing stopping it from occurring spontaneously. You'd need to stare at 10 billion electron-sized pool tables every second and the lifetime of our Universe to see it happen once, though.

Rather than patiently wait around and watch funding trickle away, the team used the undetermined states of particles in a quantum computer as their pool ball, and some clever manipulation of the computer as their 'time machine'.

Each of these states, or qubits, was arranged into a simple state which corresponded to a hand holding the ball. Once the quantum computer was set into action, these states rolled out into a range of possibilities.

By tweaking certain conditions in the computer's setup, those possibilities were confined in a way that effectively rewound the Schrdinger equation deliberately.

To test this, the team launched the set-up again, as if kicking a pool table and watching the scattered balls rearrange into the initial pyramid shape. In about 85 percent of trials based on just two qubits, this is exactly what happened.

On a practical level, the algorithms they used to manipulate the Schrdinger equation into rewinding in this way could help improve the accuracy of quantum computers.

It's not the first time this team has given the second law of thermodynamics a good shake. A couple of years ago they entangled some particles and managed to heat and cool them in such a way they effectively behaved like a perpetual motion machine.

Finding ways to push the limits of such physical laws on the quantum scale just might help us better understand why the Universe 'flows' like it does.

This research was published in Scientific Reports.

A version of this article was first published in March 2019.

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Physicists Have Reversed Time on The Smallest Scale Using a Quantum Computer - ScienceAlert

Archer employees working the specialised conduction atomic power microscopy instrumentation required to carry out the measurements.

Archer Supplies has introduced a milestone in its race to construct a room-temperature quantum computing quantum bit (qubit) processor, revealing it has efficiently carried out its first measurement on a single qubit part.

Weve got efficiently carried out our first measurement on a single qubit part, which is crucial part, marking a big interval shifting ahead within the improvement of Archers 12CQ quantum computing chip expertise, CEO Dr Mohammad Choucair stated.

Constructing and working the 12CQ chip requires measurements to be efficiently carried out on the very limits of what may be achieved technologically on this planet at present.

See additionally:Australias bold plan to win the quantum race

Choucair stated immediately proving room-temperature conductivity of the 12CQ chip qubit part advances Archers improvement in direction of a working chip prototype.

Archer stated conductivity measurements on single qubit elements had been carried out utilizing conductive atomic power microscopy that was configured utilizing state-of-the-art instrumentation techniques, housed in a semiconductor prototype foundry cleanroom.

The measurements immediately and unambiguously proved, with nanometre-scale precision, the conductivity of single qubits at room-temperature in ambient environmental circumstances (e.g. within the presence of air, moisture, and at regular atmospheric pressures, Archer stated in a press release.

It stated the measurements progress its technological improvement in direction of controlling quantum info that reside on particular person qubits, which is a key componentry requirement for a working quantum computing qubit processor.

One other key part is readout.

Management have to be carried out previous to readout, as these subsequent steps characterize a logical sequence within the 12CQ quantum computing chip perform, Archer wrote.

See additionally: Whats quantum computing? Understanding the how, why and when of quantum computer systems

In saying final week it was progressing work on its graphene-based biosensor expertise, Archer stated it was specializing in establishing industrial partnerships to convey its work out of the lab and convert it into viable merchandise.

Archer on Monday stated it intends to develop the 12CQ chip to be bought immediatelyand have the mental property rights to the chip expertise licensed.

The technological significance of the work is inherently tied to the industrial viability of the 12CQ expertise. The room-temperature conductivity doubtlessly allows direct entry to the quantum info saved within the qubits by the use of electrical present alerts on-board moveable gadgets, which require conducting supplies to function, for each management and readout, Choucair added.

He stated the intrinsic supplies function of conductivity in Archers qubit materials right down to the one qubit stage represents a important industrial benefit over competing qubit proposals that depend on insulating supplies, equivalent to diamond-based supplies or photonic qubit architectures.

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SALT LAKE CITY Elmer Fudd is still chasing the silly wabbit. Only hes not carrying a gun. Gone is his extended musket, or what was essentially a hunters rifle. This time, he holds a scythe. Occasionally. Not all the time. Sometimes hes chased around. Sometimes hes in hiding.

Why did animators take away the gun? Gun violence. Peter Browngardt, the executive producer of the new Looney Tunes cartoon shorts on the HBO Max streaming service, told The New York Times that Fudd wont have his traditional weapon in the new version.

Were not doing guns, he said. But, we can do cartoony violence TNT, the Acme stuff. All that was kind of grandfathered in.

Instead, Elmer Fudd embraces the scythe, a tool that cuts crops like grass and wheat. It features a large curved blade at the end of a short handle. You could argue thats also a violent weapon, assuming Fudd is supposed to cut away at the rabbit if and when he catches him.

This brief moment sparked conversation on social media and in national headlines. People wondered why the character would be without his iconic weapon, especially since the new cartoon shorts include a number of other mature moments by Looney Tunes standards. For example, the new series shows a moment where Porky sucks snake venom out of Daffys leg. A ghost of Tweety haunts Sylvester. Satan makes a cameo, too.

Browngardt said the show has some edge.

Some of them have maybe gone a little too far, so they might come out in a different format. Maybe theyll come out packaged for an Adult Swim type of thing.

That might seem like an odd comment about a cartoon for children. But Looney Tunes has rarely been a cartoon for children.

For a brief moment, Looney Tunes joined the culture war. Critics wondered if the show was pro- or anti-gun. Did it represent the movement to eliminate guns from our culture? Or was it just about making a safer show for kids?

It might have been a fleeting moment. We may forget the argument in days ahead. But the brief discussion about Elmer Fudd losing his gun speaks to the current state of child animation and where the industry heads next when creating cartoons and productions for children.

The book Reading the Rabbit: Explorations in Warner Bros. Animation, by Kevin S. Sandler, explains that creator Tex Avery said he leaned more toward the adult audience. And animator Chuck Jones said the cartoons were absolutely made for adults.

So those 1940s Looney Tunes shorts that aired? They were absolutely not for children, said Kyra Hunting, an assistant professor of media and arts studies at the University of Kentucky.

The original shorts were shown before movies, giving people a chance to watch something comedic and lighthearted before movies began. Sometimes they were connected to pretty adult movies, Hunting said.

Warner Bros. evolved over time and the characters became more popular. Spinoffs came next, like Tiny Toon Adventures and Baby Looney Tunes that were family-friendly and oriented toward children.

Hunting has watched the entire new series already. She said the show is really an update to the original version rather than a spinoff or reboot.

The Looney Tunes characters bring a sense of nostalgia for people. Theyve existed for more than 60 years, so it makes sense for streaming services like HBO Max to embrace them, according to Kendall Phillips, a pop culture professor at Syracuse University.

The reason you use a character like Bugs Bunny and Elmer Fudd is for that nostalgia value ... you know audiences know what these are, theres a certain kind of cultural cachet and recognizable aspect of these characters, Phillips said.

These characters evolve over time and adapt to our changing times, Phillips said. We reboot famous characters to align with modern American culture.

Sometimes that means characters will be intertwined in the ongoing political culture, too, according to Phillips.

Were constantly recycling culture, he said. Were telling the story of whoever again. We tell these stories over and over again. But every time we tell them, we change them because we dont want to just hear the same story. We want to hear the old story adapted to our new situation or new culture or new ideas.

And now, the gun becomes the thing that really is important, Phillips said. That says something about our culture at this moment.

So what does replacing Elmer Fudds gun with a scythe have to say about our culture at this moment? According to Phillips, Warner Bros. has made the decision that gun violence is not something they want to continue to include in their childrens narrative.

The studio didnt make the decision to remove violence altogether. Theres still dynamite. Theres still slapping and punching.

Taking away the gun is a sign that Looney Tunes has joined the culture war, though, Phillips said.

We are at a point where it would be actually difficult to think of what could be an innocent element of pop culture now, because if Warner Bros. had included guns, they would have been making a choice, Phillips said. If they didnt include the gun of the past, they would have been making a choice. So to me, this says less about Warner Brothers and Elmer Fudd and more about where we are as an American culture, where everything has become part of this very difficult partisan divide.

Warner Brothers doesnt seem to want to remove violence, but I think they want to stop normalizing gun culture in America.

For some families, the issue of guns could be a soft spot. Families across the country grow up surrounded by guns. In fact, Phillips said he grew up around guns. The change, he said, could mean that Warner Bros. might want to encourage people to respect guns.

So, in some ways, if you really respect gun and gun culture, you shouldnt want children to think that guns are playthings because ... they are deadly weapons, he said.

Creating an animated cartoon like Looney Tunes that pays homage to its adult beginnings in its new modern child market is difficult, Hunting said.

HBO Max and Warner Bros. need to be careful with how they portray the show, Hunting said, since theres still a lot of Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck merchandise for sale at stores across America. So you have to be mindful of stakeholders. (HBO Max declined to be interviewed for this story,)

And in that way, the new Looney Tunes has done a good job, Hunting said. The show pays homage to the original, while remaining safe for children.

The show must tread that line between really creating value and respect to the original history without going way over the line where kids cant watch it anymore.

Tim Winter, president of the Parents Television Council, said he applauds any corporate commitment from Hollywood to entertain children without gun violence.

I hope that this is the first of many such commitments by the studio to eliminate graphic gun violence, he said.

Winter also said he hopes the same will be considered for all of its programming, not just cartoons, but in all of its programming. If its going to be responsible with cartoons, why stop there?

Its good both for children and for weasley wabbits everywhere, he said. But I hope this is demonstrative of a bigger commitment by the studio to be mindful of its content.

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How Looney Tunes joined the culture wars - Deseret News