The European Commission is on the brink of adopting its long-awaited legislation that will require all mobile phones and other electronic devices sold in Europe to have a common charging standard. According to Reuters, the Commission will be ready to present the legislation as soon as next month, which has been hotly debated within its ranks for the past few years. Sources say that the EU executive is now in the process of drafting the new rules, and although the details aren’t clear, they’re widely expected to give the nod to USB-C as the new common standard. Currently, mobile phones sold throughout the 27 countries in the European Union use a hodgepodge of different charging connectors, with Reuters noting that half of the chargers sold in 2018 had a micro USB connector, while 29 percent used USB-C, and 21 percent used Apple’s Lightning connector. The problem with this, as far as EU regulators are concerned, is that it increases the amount of electronic waste as consumers are forced to buy new chargers and discard old ones when upgrading to newer smartphones. According to a resolution passed in late 2019, around 50 million metric tons of e-waste are generated globally per year, with about a quarter of that coming from Europe. The European Parliament describes this as “an unnecessary environmental footprint that can be reduced,” and points to charging accessories as a linchpin of the problem. The resolution, which passed in a 582-40 vote in the EU’s parliament, originally ordered the Commission to adopt new rules by last July, but this deadline was extended as the world wrestled with the global COVID-19 pandemic. Now, however, it looks like they’re finally ready to proceed. Will Apple Actually Ditch Lightning? Firstly, if you’re hoping that this will prompt a wholesale switch to USB-C on Apple’s next-generation iPhone models, we’d suggest not holding your breath. Like most of these kinds of regulatory laws, these get implemented at the speed of government, which means that it could be years before Apple is actually forced to make a change — by which time Apple will likely have released its much-rumored portless iPhone, and wired charging ports will be a thing of the past. To be fair, the European Parliament also recommended that the Commission regulate wireless chargers to ensure that they’re completely interoperable, but this is far less of an issue, as it’s already covered by the Qi standard, and even Apple’s MagSafe charging technology remains fully Qi compliant — just at lower charging speeds. It’s unlikely that the EU will go so far as to mandate minimum power levels for Qi charger compatibility. To give you an idea of how slow the EU moves in this area, however, it’s worth considering that the European Union has been pushing for a common charging standard for well over a decade already, although back then it expected companies to voluntarily comply with its standards, which were published back in 2010 and mandated micro USB as the common charging standard. Apple actually signed on to this “voluntary memorandum of understanding” back in 2009, but it also arguably cheated a bit. Instead of putting micro USB directly into the iPhone, it forged ahead with its proprietary Lightning connector and offered a $19 Lightning to Micro USB Adapter to satisfy the European Union’s requirements. It remains to be seen whether Apple would get with pulling a similar trick this time around, but several Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) saw through Apple’s game last time, and have begun calling for ”binding measures” that would force all devices sold in the EU to directly support the same chargers. For its part, Apple has naturally been vocal in opposing the legislation, suggesting that it would “freeze innovation” and be “unnecessarily disruptive” for consumers. Apple does have a point, to be fair, since it’s sold over a billion Apple devices with Lightning connectors over the past nine years, and there’s still a sizeable market of third-party accessory makers that build their devices for the Lightning port. Want more, visit OUR FORUM.

Time crystals sound like majestic objects from science fiction movies that unlock passageways to alternative universes. In the Marvel universe, the “time stone” gives wielders control over the past, present, and future. While that remains a fantasy, scientists have successfully created micro-scale time crystals for years — not for powering intergalactic spaceships but for energizing ultrapowerful computers. “Time crystals are like a rest stop on the road to building a quantum computer,” said Norman Yao, a molecular physicist at the University of California at Berkeley. It’s an area of interest for Google, which, along with physicists at Stanford and Princeton universities, claim to have developed a “scalable approach” to time crystal creation using the company’s Sycamore quantum computer. In a paper published last month on the research-sharing platform Arxiv.org, a team of over 100 scientists describes how they set up an array of 20 quantum particles, or qubits, to serve as a time crystal. During experiments, they applied algorithms that spun the qubits upward and downward, generating a controllable reaction that could be sustained “for infinitely long times,” according to the paper. Time crystals are scientific oddities made of atoms arranged in a repeating pattern in space. This design enables them to shift shape over time without losing energy or overheating. Since time crystals continuously evolve and don’t seem to require much energy input, they may be useful for quantum computers, which rely on extremely fragile qubits that are prone to decay. Quantum computing is weighed down by hard-to-control qubits, which are error-prone and often die. Time crystals might introduce a better method for sustaining quantum computing, according to Yao, who published a blueprint for making time crystals in 2017. “Time crystals are a weighted benchmark, showing that your system has the requisite level of control,” Yao said. The scientists involved in Google’s research say they can’t discuss their findings as they undergo peer review. However, the work tackles an area where physicists have long hoped for a breakthrough. “The consequence is amazing: You evade the second law of thermodynamics,” Roderich Moessner, a co-author of the Google paper, told Quanta Magazine. The time crystal concept was first proposed in 2012 by Nobel Prize-winning physicist Frank Wilczek, who wondered whether atoms could be arranged in time similar to their arrangement in ordinary crystals. Essentially, he wondered whether a closed system could spin, oscillate or move in a repetitious manner. What followed was a healthy dose of scrutiny from the broader physics community, years of university experiments with and without Wilczek, and testing to see whether his vision was possible. The definition expanded to include objects that would be activated by an external influence such as a shake, stir, or laser strike. “The definition is somewhat fluid. But if you want to call it a new state of matter, you want it to be autonomous and not have stirred,” Wilczek said. Early experiments pumped ions with lasers so they would artificially pulsate. It was useful but difficult to scale, Wilczek added. By 2017, scientists from Harvard University and the University of Maryland revealed they created micro-scale time crystals at frigid temperatures in a lab. Both passed peer review. More recently, a team from the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands published findings in July on its approach to building a time crystal inside a diamond. (Those findings haven’t undergone peer review.) Time crystals are a tough concept to grasp, but scientists say you can think of them as a perpetual motion machine, adding a caveat to the second law of thermodynamics, which states that any isolated system will degenerate into a more disordered state or entropy. Their existence also undermines Newton’s first law of motion, detailing how an object must react to motion. To learn more visit OUR FORUM.