Trump's second term is the beginning of the end of the American empire, including the Western geopolitical order fashioned by US power after the Second World War. But in the ashes of this decline, a liminal space is emerging for a new system. In 2016, a futurist and doyen of peace studies who had predicted the collapse of the Soviet Union told me he had used the same framework to pinpoint the coming collapse of the United States. The late Johan Galtung, a renowned Nobel Prize-nominated sociologist, had made his original prediction of US collapse in the year 2000. The process would start, he warned, in 2025. It's now 2025, and the fulcrum of American collapse can be found at the seat of the US federal government under a second Trump administration. Nearly a decade ago, Galtung had said that he saw Trump as an accelerant of American collapse at the beginning of his first term. Now under his second term, Galtung's extraordinary prescience is on display again as we see a second Trump administration tear apart the fabric of the US government, democratic checks and balances, and the rule of law. Galtung had warned that as American power retracts globally, this could end up reflecting internally ' even resulting in the potential breakup of the US....

Microsoft today introduced Majorana 1, the world's first quantum chip powered by a new Topological Core architecture that it expects will realize quantum computers capable of solving meaningful, industrial-scale problems in years, not decades. It leverages the world's first topoconductor, a breakthrough type of material which can observe and control Majorana particles to produce more reliable and scalable qubits, which are the building blocks for quantum computers. In the same way that the invention of semiconductors made today's smartphones, computers and electronics possible, topoconductors and the new type of chip they enable offer a path to developing quantum systems that can scale to a million qubits and are capable of tackling the most complex industrial and societal problems, Microsoft said. 'We took a step back and said 'OK, let's invent the transistor for the quantum age. What properties does it need to have''' said Chetan Nayak, Microsoft technical fellow. 'And that's really how we got here ' it's the particular combination, the quality and the important details in our new materials stack that have enabled a new kind of qubit and ultimately our entire architecture.'...