Human populations need at least 2.7 children per woman – a much higher fertility rate than previously believed – to reliably avoid long-term extinction, according to a new study published April 30, 2025 in the open-access journal PLOS One by Takuya Okabe of Shizuoka University, Japan, and colleagues.

Researchers at QuTech in Delft have combined superconductors and quantum dots to observe and manipulate so-called Majorana bound states, which have properties that could enable stable quantum computation. By building a chain of three coupled quantum dots in a two-dimensional electron gas, they were able to demonstrate properties of Majoranas that are essential for the study of Majorana-based quantum bits. The results were published in Nature this week. 

Rice’s César A. Uribe has won a National Science Foundation CAREER Award to advance the mathematical foundations of decentralized learning, a critical area for the future of artificial intelligence, data science and distributed systems.

Madrid will host Eurocrypt 2025 for the first time from May 4 to 8 at the Riu Plaza España Hotel, with pre-conference workshops on May 3 and 4 at the Complutense University. Organized by the International Association for Cryptologic Research (IACR), Eurocrypt is one of the world’s leading scientific conferences in cryptography. This 44th edition will feature 123 selected papers from 624 submissions and is expected to welcome over 650 participants. The IMDEA Software Institute leads the local organization, alongside Universidad Carlos III, Universidad Complutense, and Inversed Tech.