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The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences: 2 ideas worth knowing

2 ideas from The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, each explained in a minute and credited to the original work. Free on Savvy.

• A hand-sized circuit showed quantum effects usually seen only in single atoms

  In the mid-1980s, John Clarke, Michel Devoret and John Martinis cooled a superconducting circuit cold enough to catch it tunnelling through an energy barrier and sitting in distinc…

  — The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, The Nobel Prize in Physics 2025

• Crystals built mostly of empty space can pull drinking water straight out of desert air

  Susumu Kitagawa, Richard Robson and Omar Yaghi spent the 1990s and 2000s building metal-organic frameworks: crystals where metal ions are linked by carbon-based struts into huge in…

  — The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2025

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