Science News Proudly Canadian: THE WORLD’S BIGGEST T. REX The skeleton of a 13-metre-long Tyrannosaurus rex from Saskatchewan is the largest dinosaur skeleton found in Canada and the largest T. rex skeleton found anywhere. The skeleton was discovered in 1991, when paleontologists including Philip Currie (biological sciences) were called in on the project.
Lindsay LeBlanc, Canada Research Chair in ultracold gases for quantum simulation.
“Scotty,” nicknamed after a celebratory bottle of scotch the night it was discovered, has leg bones suggesting a living weight of more than 8,800 kilograms, making it larger than all other carnivorous dinosaurs. The scientific work on Scotty has been a correspondingly massive project. And it’s not just Scotty’s size and weight that set it apart. The Canadian mega-rex also lays claim to seniority. It was 30 years old when it died. “Scotty is the longest-lived T. rex known,” explains Scott Persons (’11 MSc, ’16 PhD), postdoctoral fellow and lead author. “By tyrannosaurus standards, it had an unusually long life. And it was a violent one. Riddled across the skeleton are pathologies—spots where scarred bone records large injuries.” Among Scotty’s injuries are broken ribs, an infected jaw, and what may be a bite from another T. rex on its tail—battle scars from a long life. A new exhibit featuring the skeleton of Scotty opened at the Royal Saskatchewan Museum in May 2019.
UAlberta physicists have developed a new way to build quantum memories, a method for storing delicate quantum information encoded into pulses of light. “We’ve developed a new way to store pulses of light—down to the single-photon level—in ultracold atoms, and to later retrieve them, on demand, by shining a ‘control’ pulse of light,” said Lindsay LeBlanc (physics), Canada Research Chair in ultracold gases for quantum simulation. Quantum memories are an important component of quantum
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networks, serving much the same role as hard drives in computers. And the interest in storing quantum data efficiently and effectively is only growing, with practical applications including developing a quantum fibre-optic internet and other methods of secure communication. This new method is best suited for key applications requiring highspeed operation and also requires less power and fewer technique requirements. This discovery will allow for the crucial scaling up of quantum technologies, which has proven the biggest challenge to date in the emerging field.
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A HARD DRIVE FOR LIGHT