Modest Designs.

It's a thing: Sleep Tourism.

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1. Riken Yamamoto has been awarded this year’s Pritzker Prize, architecture’s highest honor.  Yamamoto is recognized for modest designs that inspire social connection and both literal and figurative transparency. “Whether he designs private houses or public infrastructure, schools or fire stations, city halls or museums, the common and convivial dimension is always present,” the jury said in its citation announcing the award on Tuesday. “His constant, careful and substantial attention to community has generated public interworking space systems that incentivize people to convene in different ways.” (Source: nytimes.com)

(Riken Yamamoto: Tianjin Library, 2012, Tianjin, China. The building appears as 10 crisscrossing levels; from any level viewers can see other levels. Photo via archdaily.com)

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2. Google and XPRIZE are launching a $5 million competition to find practical uses for quantum computers that could actually benefit society. We already know that quantum computers can perform specific tasks faster than classical computers, after Google first claimed quantum advantage for its Sycamore processor in 2019. However, these demonstration tasks are simple benchmarks with no real-world applications. “There’s a lot of rather abstract mathematical problems where we can prove quantum computers give very, very large speed-ups,” says Ryan Babbush at Google. “But a lot of the research community has been less focused on trying to match those more abstract quantum speed-ups to specific real-world applications, and to try to figure out how quantum computers could be used.” To that end, Google and the XPRIZE Foundation are urging researchers to come up with new quantum algorithms as part of a three-year competition. (Source: newscientist.com)