sciencemag.org SCIENCEPHOTO: AMY TOENSING/NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC IMAGE COLLECTION208 18 JANUARY 2019 • VOL 363 ISSUE 6424
India’s quantum computing push
FUNDING | The Indian government quietly
unveiled a $12 million Quantum Enabled
Science & Technology program last week.
The funds, to be spent over 3 years, will
build infrastructure and hire researchers
to help realize the country’s ambitious new
goal: being at the forefront of the quantum
computing revolution within 10 years.
Indian policymakers often lament that the
country missed the computer hardware
revolution of the 1970s, despite having
played a significant role in developing
software. Now, they don’t want to miss the
quantum computing boat.Radio telescopes plan global pact
ASTRONOMY | Radio astronomers intend
to link two of their biggest planned projects,
the Square Kilometre Array (SKA)—a
12-nation effort to build thousands of radio
antennas across swaths of South Africa and
Australia—and the U.S. Next Generation
Very Large Array (ngVLA). Designs for the
ngVLA include 214 18-meter dishes across
New Mexico, Texas, Arizona, and northern
Mexico, as well as 30 more far-flung dishes
in Hawaii, British Columbia in Canada,
the U.S. Virgin Islands, and elsewhere; the
dishes will pool their data to achieve un-
precedented resolution. Tony Beasley, direc-
tor of the U.S. National Radio Astronomy
Observatory in Charlottesville, Virginia, told
the American Astronomical Society meeting
in Seattle, Washington, last week that ngVLA
planners are in discussions with their SKA
counterparts on a reciprocal agreement to
allow researchers access to both observa-
tories. Neither array, however, has yet been
approved for construction.Space ‘Cow’ mystery endures
ASTRONOMY | Astronomers admitted last
week they are flummoxed by an unusually
bright glow in the sky that appeared sud-
denly one day in June 2018. After months of
study, they still aren’t sure what the object—
officially called AT2018cow, but universally
referred to as the “Cow”—is or what caused
it. At the American Astronomical Society
meeting last week in Seattle, Washington,
researchers described using dozens ofM
ore than 1 million fish have died in the Murray-Darling river
system in New South Wales and adjacent states in Australia
in recent weeks—despite a 2012 water-sharing agreement,
touted as historic, that was supposed to avoid such catas-
trophes. The die-off is due to the combined effects of a heat
wave, low water levels, and algae blooms, which starved
the fish of oxygen when they decayed. Farmers blame a monthslong
drought, but environmentalists say too much water has been drawn
for irrigation from the network of rivers, which stretches through
a 1-million-square-kilometer basin in the country’s southeast. The
2012 plan promised to balance the demand for drinking water and
irrigation with environmental needs (Science, 7 December 2012,
p. 1273). But enforcement of water diversion limits has been lax,
says John Quiggin, an environmental economist at the University of
Queensland in Brisbane, Australia, and the federal government has
refused to buy back water rights from farmers, as the plan stipulated.
Climate change could exacerbate stresses on the ecosystem, he says,
and cause “irrecoverable damage.”Dead carp lie on the shores of Lake Hawthorn, part of the Murray-Darling Basin in Australia, in 2007.NEWS
IN BRIEF
“
We need a rigorous, scientific
postmortem on Russian misinformation to harden
our democracy against future attacks.
”
Sinan Aral, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in The Washington Post.Edited by Lila GutermanENVIRONMENTFish kill reignites Australian water fight
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