270’2026 (2026-09-27) – Sunday
Today, I learned about:
You may remember that in 2025, I made a post about drones, 304’2026 (2025-10-31). Unfortunately, most of the news involving drones these days are about their use in military conflicts in Europe and Asia. But, of course, there are so many other ways we could really benefit from drones. Here comes an interesting application:
How can a person know what a certain forest contains with regards to the number of trees, their size and quality, etc.? Since the quantity of trees normally is huge, this is a major task! Let us call in a drone! And that is when the Swedish robotics and AI company Deep Forestry comes in. As you can see in reference #1 below, they use drones to facilitate the job.
You probably have heard about quantum computing, that does not use binary bits in their calculations, but quantum states, so-called qubits. More about what quantum computing is can be found in reference # 2 below. But so far, we have not seen much use of quantum computers, and one reason is that they are not very reliable yet. However, now a team of researchers at my alma mater, Chalmers University of Technology in Gothenburg, Sweden, have found a way of speeding up the calculations with a factor of 1.000 (one thousand) times. That way, we should be able to not only obtain faster results, but mainly also more reliable ones. If that sounds interesting to you, read all about it in references # 3 and 4, below.
Finally, this month we have been surprised by the discovery of a new species of cats. DNA analysis has confirmed that this species, with origin 1,4 million years ago, can be found in the jungles of Bolivia. But it is a shy animal, it only hunts during the night! Read all about in reference # 5 below. And here comes a photo of Leopardus tilcayo:
And last, but not least, the header photo this month was taken by my daughter Karina on 259’2026 (2026-09-16), while visiting Penha in the Southern state of Santa Catarina. Complete peace and beauty!
That’s what I learned in school today!
Ref.:
1: Deep Forestry & Ouster – Deep Learning for Forest Biodiversity
3: 1,000 times faster operations bring reliable quantum computing a step closer
4: Single-Period Floquet Control of Bosonic Codes with Quantum Lattice Gates
5: Meet the tiny wild cat that’s new to science
*: What did you learn in school today?
