The Klagenfurt linderwurm skull belonged to a wooly rhino, not a mammoth. 

We should inform Discover that not all that glitters is gold, and not all that is wooly is a mammoth!

Someone with better knowledge of general zoology - or more time and patience to consult prof. google, can provide a more grounded answer, but off the top of my head I'm pretty sure most mammals and reptiles at least can swim, some better than others. However, I know for a fact that elephants are definitely good swimmers - so in your hypothetical scenario of one jumping or falling off of a ship, yes, it would have no problem swimming. As for primates, I think humans are the only larger ones that actually like to swim; I recall reading somewhere that, say, gorillas or chimps have buoyancy problems due to the way their bodies are proportioned. So they generally avoid deep water, although I think they do occasionally lay down or splash around in shallow water to cool off.

I saw this online:






Well, that really clears it up for me.

(I’m no wiser after reading that, LOL)

Look at this:

I think Roquefort Raider 's quote from Feynman was very apropos, but I'll be the fool who tries to explain it anyway!

This is a subject that has been followed closely in the software engineering world where I spent time earlier in my career, and we had keen interest in both the theory as well as attempted engineering developments to make commercially viable.

This is I believe a very simplistic "layperson" version of it, but when we say a bit can only be a 0 or 1, we're simply saying a computer can only process one of two potential values at any time (a transistor's electrical state of "on" or "off). When we say a qubit also has a "superposition" where a value can be a 0 or 1 at the same time, it's like it can do 2 calculations at the same time (like you had two computers instead of one).

Now take 2 bits...each one can either be a 0 or 1 still. So you can make 4 possible "pairs":

(0,0), (0,1), (1,0), (1,1)

But your traditional computer can only calculate one of the pairs at a time (there's only one "value" it can process at any given point).

With 2 qubits, it can process all 4 of those pairs at the same time, like if you now had 4 traditional computers at the same time versus 1. The processing power grows exponentially larger with every qubit added, and as it scales bigger and bigger, the massive amount of computing power this can generate is mind-bogglingly huge. In a quick search for an example of how much faster, I saw an example of being able to do in 4 minutes with a quantum computer what traditional computing would take 10,000 years to perform.

The actual science behind the qubit again echoes the Feynman quote. But if you've ever heard the "Schrödinger's cat" thought experiment, where a cat is in a closed box and you don't know if he is alive or dead (2 possible states, like our "bit" that can be a 0 or 1), and that he can be considered in a state that is "both", this is the similar idea with the qubit that you have 0, 1, and a "superposition" value that is both.

All that said, there are still significant challenges to building quantum computers (they do exist on a very limited basis already though). I'm not sure if any of that helped at all (and hopefully I didn't mess up the details too badly, kind of going off the top of my head here!), but it's a fascinating topic for sure!

It's surprising to see the Nature paper first describing the helix... It's a very short thing (two pages and change). That's a lot of bang for the buck!