How do you program a computer that doesn’t exist yet? In a new project, researchers at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) are looking into this question and developing software for quantum computers – even though no such computers are working yet and may not be for decades to come. But once the hardware is available, it needs to be usable without further delay; even the most powerful quantum computer will certainly be useless without suitable programs.

Dr. Tanja Stratmann has been awarded the prestigious Starting Grant by the European Research Council (ERC). Starting in 2026, Dr. Stratmann will spend five years researching the nitrogen cycle of living and fossil sponges at MARUM – Center for Marine Environmental Sciences at the University of Bremen.

Artificial intelligence is now part of our daily lives, with the subsequent pressing need for larger, more complex models. However, the demand for ever-increasing power and computing capacity is rising faster than the performance traditional computers can provide.

To overcome these limitations, research is moving towards innovative technologies such as physical neural networks, analogue circuits that directly exploit the laws of physics (properties of light beams, quantum phenomena) to process information. Their potential is at the heart of the study published by the prestigious journal Nature. It is the outcome of collaboration between several international institutes, including the Politecnico di Milano, the École Polytechnique Fédérale in Lausanne, Stanford University, the University of Cambridge, and the Max Planck Institute.

A pioneering study led by the University of Oxford in collaboration with international partners has applied AI for the first time to count the Great Wildebeest Migration from satellite images. Unexpectedly, the results showed fewer than 600,000 individual wildebeest – less than half the previous estimate of 1.3 million animals. The results have been published today (9 Sept) in PNAS Nexus.

Discover how machine learning is helping researchers identify different groups of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) patients in China and understand how their health conditions impact daily life. This new study offers insights into targeted treatments and better quality of life for those living with COPD.