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A science is a body of knowledge that is constructed via observation, hypothesis, experimentation, and logic for the purpose of explaining and predicting events or behavior. Observation, experimentation and critical reasoning all play crucial roles in the advancement of scientific knowledge. A discipline is widely regarded as a science if its practitioners apply the 'scientific method'. According to falsificationists, this involves the formation of a testable hypothesis, followed by ongoing attempts to refute this hypothesis via critical reasoning, experimentation and observation. A hypothesis that has been rigorously tested under a wide variety of conditions, and which remains unrefuted, is tentatively accepted as a useful approximation to the truth, and attains the status of theory; future observations may yet refute it.

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A quantum computer is any device for computation that makes direct use of distinctively quantum mechanical phenomena, such as superposition and entanglement, to perform operations on data. In a classical (or conventional) computer, the amount of data is measured by bits; in a quantum computer, it is measured by qubits. The basic principle of quantum computation is that the quantum properties of particles can be used to represent and structure data, and that devised quantum mechanisms can be used to perform operations with this data. For a generally accessible overview of quantum computing, see Quantum Computing with Molecules, an article in Scientific American by Neil Gershenfeld and Isaac L. Chuang.

Experiments have already been carried out in which quantum computational operations were executed on a very small number of qubits. Research in both theoretical and practical areas continues at a frantic pace; see Quantum Information Science and Technology Roadmap for a sense of where the research is heading. Many national government and military funding agencies support quantum computing research, to develop quantum computers for both civilian and national security purposes, such as cryptanalysis.

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Rosalind Elsie Franklin (25 July 1920 - 16 April 1958) was a British physical chemist and crystallographer who made very important contributions to the understanding of the fine structures of coal and graphite, DNA and viruses. Franklin is best known for her contribution to the discovery of the structure of DNA in 1953, while working at King's College London under the direction of physicist John Randall. By the time the 1962 Nobel Prize for Physiology and Medicine was awarded to Crick, Watson, and her colleague Wilkins, she had been dead for 4 years. She subsequently became an icon in feminist literature.

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Paramecium aurelia, the best known of all ciliates. The bubbles throughout the cell are vacuoles. The entire surface is covered in cilia, which are blurred by their rapid movement.

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edit Did you know...

...that Pop Rocks are pressurized with carbon dioxide gas at about 600 PSI?
...that marsupials have pockets to help them carry their young?
...that the water bear, in theory, could survive the vacuum of space?
...that the average adult human radiates the same amount of heat as a 100W lightbulb?
...that in 1933, Ernest Rutherford said “The energy produced by breaking down the atom is a very poor kind of thing. Anyone who expects a source of power from the transformations of these atoms is talking moonshine.”