Claims of leaps in quantum computing are made almost daily, but progress is hard to judge when each research group uses its own mixture of hardware, algorithms and evaluation metrics, making it near impossible to compare systems. Now, researchers are trying to make it easier to chart the performance of quantum machines. As part of an ongoing effort, a consortium of UK researchers has created a suite of metrics that they say is a holistic way to measure the performance of quantum computers. They have published the work alongside a library of open-source software called QCMet1. Separately, a group including tech giant IBM and Helsinki-based quantum-software company Algorithmiq launched the Quantum Advantage Tracker last month as a way to compare experiments that purport to show 'quantum advantage' ' that is, an efficiency or accuracy better than that of a classical machine. 'People ask, 'When is quantum computing going to be useful'' I think it's a little bit of a farcical question to answer without some data. And I think having data-driven answers is exactly what initiatives like this are pushing for,' says James Whitfield, a quantum physicist at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire....

The President of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, said she has been studying Australia's restrictions and how they address what she described as 'algorithms that prey on children's vulnerabilities', leaving parents feeling powerless against 'the tsunami of big tech flooding their homes'. In October, New Zealand announced it would introduce similar legislation to Australia's, following the work of a parliamentary committee to examine how best to address harm on social media platforms. The committee's report will be released in early 2026. Pakistan and India are aiming to reduce children's exposure to harmful content by introducing rules requiring parental consent and age verification for platform access, alongside content moderation expectations for tech companies. Malaysia has announced it will ban children under 16 from social media starting in 2026. This follows the country requiring social media and messaging platforms with eight million or more users to obtain licenses to operate, and use age verification and content-safety measures from January 2025....

In January this year, an announcement from China rocked the world of artificial intelligence. The firm DeepSeek released its powerful but cheap R1 model out of the blue ' instantly demonstrating that the United States was not as far ahead in AI as many experts had thought. Behind the bombshell announcement is Liang Wenfeng, a 40-year-old former financial analyst who is thought to have made millions of dollars applying AI algorithms to the stock market before using the cash in 2023 to establish DeepSeek, based in Hangzhou. Liang avoids the limelight and has given only a handful of interviews to the Chinese press (he declined a request to speak to Nature). Liang's models are as open as he is secretive. R1 is a 'reasoning' large language model (LLM) that excels at solving complex tasks ' such as in mathematics and coding ' by breaking them down into steps. It was the first of its kind to be released as open weight, meaning that the model can be downloaded and built on for free, so has been a boon for researchers who want to adapt algorithms to their own field. DeepSeek's success seems to have prompted other companies in China and the United States to follow suit by releasing their own open models....

There are some jobs human bodies just weren't meant to do. Unloading trucks and shipping containers is a repetitive, grueling task ' and a big reason warehouse injury rates are more than twice the national average. The Pickle Robot Company wants its machines to do the heavy lifting. The company's one-armed robots autonomously unload trailers, picking up boxes weighing up to 50 pounds and placing them onto onboard conveyor belts for warehouses of all types. The company name, an homage to The Apple Computer Company, hints at the ambitions of founders AJ Meyer '09, Ariana Eisenstein '15, SM '16, and Dan Paluska '97, SM '00. The founders want to make the company the technology leader for supply chain automation. The company's unloading robots combine generative AI and machine-learning algorithms with sensors, cameras, and machine-vision software to navigate new environments on day one and improve performance over time. Much of the company's hardware is adapted from industrial partners. You may recognize the arm, for instance, from car manufacturing lines ' though you may not have seen it in bright pickle-green....