This page has been archived and is no longer updated. Published online 28 June Nature doi Return to Science on the solstice special feature. The hundreds of small mirrors, beam splitters and lenses in Akira Furusawa's quantum-computing lab at the University of Tokyo look like a mess; in fact, they are meticulously organized.
One of his students is trying to beat the world record for enhancing the quantum correlation between photons as a way to increase the efficiency with which they can be used in computation. They are trying to figure out how to disentangle the contributions of isotopes from photosynthesis, carbon storage, respiration and wood formation when interpreting the isotope patterns found in tree rings.
In a dark, cramped lab at Columbia University Medical Center a microscope automatically snaps images of live yeast cells as they divide. Joanne Bruno is trying to find out which fluorescently tagged proteins behave asymmetrically during cell division, segregating unevenly between daughter cells. The experiments form part of the Rothstein lab's efforts to model asymmetry in yeast. At the Deep Space Network station outside Canberra, a metre radio dish starts to receive data from Mars Odyssey, Data will pass between the ground station and the satellite for the next four hours and thirty five minutes.
Moments before local midnight, the beams of protons and antiprotons racing around Fermilab's Tevatron, the world's most powerful particle accelerator, unexpectedly collapse.
Such failures are becoming more common because of new components and a faster pace of operations. Marty Murphy, the accelerator operator leading the 'owl shift', calls in experts to check the system. By dawn, they get the beam back. At the wine laboratory of the Bavarian Health and Food Safety Authority, Norbert Christoph is switching on the sample changer of the MHz NMR spectrometer that he is going to use to determine the deuterium:hydrogen isotope ratio of ethanol and sugar in two Macedonian wines and three apple juices as a check of authenticity and geographical origin.
