This Could Be Our Coolest Summer

Surprise! This summer is extremely hot.

How hot? July 4 was the hottest day on Earth since record-keeping began more than 40 years ago, according to scientists at the University of Maine’s Climate Reanalyzer project. As Americans grilled burgers and set off fireworks, the global average temperature reached 62.9 degrees Fahrenheit (17.2 degrees Celsius). The month of June, meanwhile, was the warmest on record, the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts reported Thursday.

The heat index neared 100 degrees this week in New York City. That’s nothing compared to the 120-degree temperatures that baked parts of Texas in late June, smashing dozens of records, straining the power grid, and sending thousands of Texans to the emergency room with heat-related ailments. More than a dozen people in the state have died.

On just one day at the end of June, more than 120 million Americans were under some form of heat advisory, according to the National Weather Service. That’s more than one in every three people.

Regions outside the US have also been blasted by spring and summer heat. In April, temperatures in Spain were already breaking 100 degrees; they’ve since exceeded 110 in some places. The heat in Beijing and other regions of China broke records in June, and warm weather is fueling unprecedented wildfires in Canada.

All this, and we’re only a few weeks into summer.  READ MORE...

A Declining US Population Impacts Higher Education

The population of college-age Americans 

is about to crash and itt will change 

higher education forever.

In 2021, Shippensburg University won the NCAA Division II Field Hockey championship, completing an undefeated season with a 3-0 victory over archrival West Chester. The “Ship” Raiders also won it all in 2018, 2017, 2016, and 2013, which I know because I saw it written in big letters on a banner festooning the fieldhouse on Ship’s campus in south-central Pennsylvania when I visited last month.

Ship was in fine form. Young men and women wearing logoed Champion sweatshirts bustled between buildings. There was a line at the coffee shop in the student union. It was the kind of bright-blue autumn day that you would see on a brochure.

There was no way to tell, from the outside, that Ship was a shrinking institution. Or that the problem is about to get a lot worse — not just here, but at colleges and universities nationwide.


In four years, the number of students graduating from high schools across the country will begin a sudden and precipitous decline, due to a rolling demographic aftershock of the Great Recession. Traumatized by uncertainty and unemployment, people decided to stop having kids during that period. 

But even as we climbed out of the recession, the birth rate kept dropping, and we are now starting to see the consequences on campuses everywhere. Classes will shrink, year after year, for most of the next two decades. People in the higher education industry call it “the enrollment cliff.”

Among the small number of elite colleges and research universities — think the Princetons and the Penn States — the cliff will be no big deal. These institutions have their pick of applicants and can easily keep classes full.

For everyone else, the consequences could be dire. In some places, the crisis has already begun. College enrollment began slowly receding after the millennial enrollment wave peaked in 2010, particularly in regions that were already experiencing below-average birth rates while simultaneously losing population to out-migration. 

Starved of students and the tuition revenue they bring, small private colleges in New England have begun to blink off the map. Regional public universities like Ship are enduring painful layoffs and consolidation.

The timing is terrible. Trade policy, de-unionization, corporate consolidation, and substance abuse have already ravaged countless communities, particularly in the post-industrial Northeast and Midwest. 

In many cases, colleges have been one of the only places that provide good jobs in their communities, offer educational opportunities for locals, and have strong enough roots to stay planted. The enrollment cliff means they might soon dry up and blow away.

This trend will accelerate the winner-take-all dynamic of geographic consolidation that is already upending American politics. College-educated Democrats will increasingly congregate in cities and coastal areas, leaving people without degrees in rural areas and towns. 

For students who attend less-selective colleges and universities near where they grew up — that is, most college students — the enrollment cliff means fewer options for going to college in person, or none at all.  READ MORE...

The Revolutionary World of Quantum Computers

The inside of an IBM System One quantum computer.  Bryan Walsh/Vox

A few weeks ago, I woke up unusually early in the morning in Brooklyn, got in my car, and headed up the Hudson River to the small Westchester County community of Yorktown Heights. There, amid the rolling hills and old farmhouses, sits the Thomas J. Watson Research Center, the Eero Saarinen-designed, 1960s Jet Age-era headquarters for IBM Research.

Deep inside that building, through endless corridors and security gates guarded by iris scanners, is where the company’s scientists are hard at work developing what IBM director of research Dario Gil told me is “the next branch of computing”: quantum computers.

I was at the Watson Center to preview IBM’s updated technical roadmap for achieving large-scale, practical quantum computing. This involved a great deal of talk about “qubit count,” “quantum coherence,” “error mitigation,” “software orchestration” and other topics you’d need to be an electrical engineer with a background in computer science and a familiarity with quantum mechanics to fully follow.

I am not any of those things, but I have watched the quantum computing space long enough to know that the work being done here by IBM researchers — along with their competitors at companies like Google and Microsoft, along with countless startups around the world — stands to drive the next great leap in computing. Which, given that computing is a “horizontal technology that touches everything,” as Gil told me, will have major implications for progress in everything from cybersecurity to artificial intelligence to designing better batteries.

Provided, of course, they can actually make these things work.

Entering the quantum realm
The best way to understand a quantum computer — short of setting aside several years for grad school at MIT or Caltech — is to compare it to the kind of machine I’m typing this piece on: a classical computer.

My MacBook Air runs on an M1 chip, which is packed with 16 billion transistors. Each of those transistors can represent either the “1” or “0” of binary information at a single time — a bit. The sheer number of transistors is what gives the machine its computing power.

Sixteen billion transistors packed onto a 120.5 sq. mm chip is a lot — TRADIC, the first transistorized computer, had fewer than 800. The semiconductor industry’s ability to engineer ever more transistors onto a chip, a trend forecast by Intel co-founder Gordon Moore in the law that bears his name, is what has made possible the exponential growth of computing power, which in turn has made possible pretty much everything else.  READ MORE...

Everywhere... Everything is Explained...

This is Michelle Yeoh in the very fantastic Everything Everywhere All at Once. In it she plays a mom,

and her story made me want to call my mom.   Courtesy of A24

This past weekend, a couple of my friends and I went to see Everything Everywhere All at Once. I went in knowing two things about it: The first was that the very talented and fantastic Michelle Yeoh was in it; and the second was that it involved the “multiverse.”

As the credits rolled, with tears trickling into my mask, I had a hard time discerning what was making me emotional. I say emotional because it wasn’t just one feeling, but a strange mix of several: joy, wistfulness, catharsis, yearning, hope.

Without giving too much away, the very simple gist of this maximalist, fantastic tornado of a movie is about the choice to exist, to fully live within the present moment. It’s about finding the beauty in our small, odd lives, even as we constantly compare what we have to our unfulfilled fantasies. The movie also examines how we take solace in the personal disasters we’ve narrowly avoided. But what makes Everything Everywhere All at Once so powerful is the multiverse, a dazzling antidote to the fact that real life these days feels like it’s been designed to blur and pummel our emotions into dullness.

What is the multiverse? A world full of endless potential; multiple parallel universes spinning in synchronicity; and the possibility of alternate, powerful, seemingly better versions of ourselves. At a time when a pandemic, wars, and political cruelty have become constant, inevitable presences in our daily lives, it’s the ultimate fantasy for this moment. And that’s not just because Marvel, the most powerful entertainment company in the world, has gone all-in and made the multiverse a cornerstone of its current storytelling.  READ MORE...

What's the Worst That Couild Happen?

How bad could climate change get?

Humans have already warmed the planet by at least 1 degree Celsius by burning fossil fuels that spew heat-trapping gases into the sky. The oceans are rising, and deadly disasters like wildfires, heat waves, and flooding are becoming more destructive. Almost every part of the world is experiencing the effects of climate change.

That much is “unequivocal,” according to the latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), an international team of scientists convened by the United Nations.

What’s far less certain is just how bleak the future of our planet will be.

This critical question reaches beyond physical sciences into economics, sociology, and even psychology. Humans still have the power to slow the climate crisis — though with each day that goes by without sweeping societal changes to slash emissions, the outlook grows more grim.

The first installment of the IPCC’s sixth assessment report, which focuses on the physical science behind climate change, considers five scenarios that game out how humanity will respond, or not, to the specter of warming. They reveal that some of the more extreme projections of the past are less likely to come to fruition. But every scenario in the report also overshoots one of the targets of the 2015 Paris climate agreement. A best-case scenario now requires drastically more climate action than the world has achieved to date, and the window for action is closing.

However, “Scenarios are not predictions,” the report says. “Instead, they provide a ‘what-if’ investigation of the implications of various developments and actions.”

In short, these scenarios show how scientists are grappling with the capriciousness of human behavior. What happens if more countries are taken over by nationalists? Or if clean technology makes a radical leap forward? Or if countries and corporations actually start to buckle down and throttle emissions?

Our planet has many possible futures that depend on human decisions. These visions of tomorrow emphasize that we have profoundly and irreversibly changed the world, but also that much of the potential warming is still in our hands.  READ MORE