At the heart of the research is a critique of the dominant message that underpins most pornography education in schools: that porn is dangerous and must be avoided at all costs. This simple warning model, the study finds, bears little resemblance to the evidence emerging from youth sexuality research. Studies of how young people actually interact with sexual media suggest that many of them interpret such content critically, question its realism, and compare what they see online with their own experiences of relationships and intimacy. Far from absorbing sexual media unthinkingly, teenagers frequently approach it with scepticism, curiosity and a desire to talk about what it means. The problem, the researchers argue, is that the education system is not built to harness that critical instinct.

The mismatch between what policy prescribes and what young people experience creates a serious challenge for teachers on the front line. Current classroom approaches tend to rely on warnings, scripted lessons and moral messaging designed to prevent harm before it occurs. These methods are well-intentioned, and safeguarding remains an essential priority, but the study suggests they often have the unintended effect of closing down discussion rather than opening it up. When lessons present pornography solely as a threat to be avoided, students who have already encountered sexual content, which is nearly all of them, learn quickly that honest questions are unwelcome. The result is that young people are left to make sense of complex issues about sex, consent and relationships on their own, without adult guidance or structured support.

To reach these conclusions, the research team analysed current policy frameworks, with particular attention to the UK government’s Independent Pornography Review, and compared them against interdisciplinary research into young people’s experiences of sexual media. The methodology combined a critical policy analysis with a synthesis of existing studies covering youth engagement with pornography, media literacy and sex education. By mapping how educational responses are shaped at the policy level and then testing those responses against the accumulated evidence of what young people actually report, the team was able to identify precisely where the current system falls short and why repeated calls for caution-based teaching have not resolved the underlying tensions.

Dr Emily Setty, lead author of the study and Associate Professor of Criminology at the University of Surrey, explained the central problem with prevailing assumptions. The way pornography is currently taught in many schools assumes that young people simply absorb what they see and are harmed by it, she noted, but in reality their experiences are far more varied. Many young people question what they see, recognise unrealistic portrayals and want space to talk about relationships, consent and ethics. When education shuts down those conversations, she warned, it risks leaving them to make sense of these issues alone, at precisely the moment in their lives when structured guidance could make the greatest difference.

As an alternative, the research proposes a new educational framework the authors call safe uncertainty. Rather than pretending that educators can eliminate risk or that simple prohibition will work, the approach encourages open, structured discussions about pornography that acknowledge its complexity while still maintaining clear safeguarding and ethical boundaries. The framing is deliberate: safe signals that protective boundaries remain firmly in place, while uncertainty admits that sexual media is a complicated phenomenon that cannot be reduced to a single warning. Under this model, teachers act as facilitators of critical inquiry rather than enforcers of moral messaging, guiding students through difficult questions in a managed and supportive environment.

In practical terms, the safe uncertainty model would transform what happens in the classroom. Instead of lessons built around warnings, teachers would guide students to critically explore how sexual media represents consent, power, gender and relationships. Lessons might include analysing media portrayals to identify unrealistic or harmful depictions, discussing ethical dilemmas raised by the production and distribution of sexual content, or comparing online representations with the realities of intimacy and communication in actual relationships. This kind of active, analytical engagement, the researchers argue, develops what is termed porn literacy, a specialised form of media literacy that allows young people to question the production, realism and ethics of sexual content rather than simply being told to avoid it.

Dr Setty emphasised that pornography should not be viewed in isolation, since it is only one part of a much broader landscape of sexual messaging that includes social media, television, advertising and peer culture. Focusing narrowly on porn, she cautioned, risks exaggerating its influence while ignoring the other powerful cultural forces that shape how young people understand relationships and sex. A young person navigating the digital world today encounters sexualised and gendered messaging across nearly every platform they use, and an education system that addresses only one slice of that landscape leaves students poorly equipped for the whole. The broader goal, she argued, should be to equip young people with critical thinking skills and ethical awareness so they can navigate a complex digital environment in which sexual content is increasingly visible and increasingly difficult to avoid.

Importantly, the researchers are not arguing that concerns about potential harm should be dismissed. Addressing potential harm remains essential, and the safe uncertainty framework is explicitly designed to operate within safeguarding structures, not against them. The distinction the study draws is between harm prevention as the sole purpose of education and harm awareness as one component of a richer critical curriculum. Rather than relying solely on warnings or prohibition, the authors contend, education should also develop young people’s ability to interpret media, reflect on their own relationships and engage in honest conversations about sex and consent. In a media environment where young people will almost certainly encounter sexual content regardless of what schools say, the question is not whether they will be exposed but whether they will be prepared.

The findings arrive at a moment of intense debate about relationships, sex and health education in England, with policymakers under pressure to respond to rapid changes in digital culture. By grounding its critique in both policy analysis and the lived experiences of young people, the study offers a concrete alternative for educators and officials willing to move beyond fear. The research suggests that the most effective protection schools can offer is not silence or alarm, but the confidence and critical capacity that come from honest, well-structured dialogue. If the goal of education is to prepare young people for the world as it actually exists, the authors conclude, then teaching them to think critically about sexual media, in all its complexity, is not a risk to be avoided but a responsibility to be embraced.

Subject of Research: Pornography education and youth media literacy in England

Article Title: Fear-based education around porn is failing young people, say researchers

Article References: Fear-based education around porn is failing young people, say researchers. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: pornography education, young people, media literacy, porn literacy, sex education, safe uncertainty, University of Surrey, safeguarding, consent, digital culture, Porn Studies journal, critical policy analysis

The dominant technology in the current generation of quantum computers relies on superconducting circuits, tiny electrical oscillators that, when cooled sufficiently, carry current without resistance. These devices have enabled impressive demonstrations of quantum computation, but they come with a fundamental weakness. Superconducting qubits are exquisitely sensitive to electromagnetic noise and to stray electrical charges, the kind of static electricity that makes hair cling to a balloon on a dry day. Even minuscule perturbations of this sort can scramble the delicate quantum states that encode information, introducing errors that must be corrected through elaborate overhead. As engineers attempt to pack more and more qubits onto a chip, keeping these error rates under control becomes one of the central bottlenecks to scaling the machines up.

The Surrey team, drawn from the university’s Quantum Sciences Group, has proposed a radically different approach to quantum hardware. Their proposed device, named the Superfluid Helium Oscillator Quantum, or SHOQ, would store and manipulate quantum information in quantized oscillations within superfluid helium-3. Because the medium is electrically charge-neutral, the qubit is naturally immune to many of the electromagnetic disturbances and stray charges that torment conventional superconducting devices. According to the team’s theoretical analysis, this intrinsic protection could translate into error rates roughly 100 times lower than those of standard superconducting qubits, a margin that would substantially ease the burden of quantum error correction in a large-scale machine.

The concept is, the researchers note, the first reported design for a qubit based on superfluid helium. While the individual physical ingredients have long been studied in isolation, the Surrey group is the first to assemble them into a coherent microfluidic device architecture and to work out the specific parameters and specifications needed for the device to function as a qubit. Dr Priya Sharma, Daphne Jackson Fellow in Hybrid Quantum Systems at the University of Surrey’s School of Mathematics and Physics and lead author of the study, emphasized that the work is an educated design grounded in established physics rather than a speculative sketch. The mathematics, she explained, indicates that the device should work as intended, and the crucial next step is to fabricate a prototype and test the predictions experimentally.

The underlying physics is as fascinating as the engineering ambition. Helium-3, the lighter isotope of helium, becomes a superfluid at temperatures only a few thousandths of a degree above absolute zero. In this state, the liquid flows with zero viscosity and exhibits quantum behavior on a macroscopic scale, with collective oscillations whose energy levels are quantized just like those of atoms. The SHOQ proposal taps into these quantized mechanical vibrations as the carrier of quantum information. Because these oscillations involve neutral atoms rather than moving charges, they do not couple strongly to the electric fields and charge fluctuations that are ubiquitous in solid-state environments, offering what physicists call a quieter platform for preserving delicate quantum states.

An especially significant feature of the proposal is that the SHOQ device is not intended to replace existing quantum technology outright. The paper outlines how the superfluid-based qubit could be coupled with current superconducting quantum hardware, raising the possibility that the two technologies might operate side by side within a single larger quantum system. Dr Eran Ginossar, Associate Professor at the University of Surrey’s Department of Physics and Advanced Technology Institute and co-author of the study, argued that no single qubit technology needs to do everything. Combining different quantum platforms, he suggested, could allow engineers to exploit the particular strengths of each, and superfluid helium offers a fundamentally new type of quantum hardware to explore. If the predicted performance can be demonstrated in the laboratory, such devices could eventually work alongside superconducting systems as components of hybrid architectures.

One potential application highlighted by the team is quantum memory. In a future hybrid computer, a version of the SHOQ device could serve as a long-lived repository for quantum information, storing fragile states while a separate processor built from different hardware performs calculations. This division of labor mirrors the separation between memory and processing units in classical computers and could prove decisive in the quest for machines that are both powerful and reliable. The low sensitivity of charge-neutral superfluid helium to environmental noise makes it a natural candidate for the memory role, where preservation of quantum coherence over time is the paramount requirement.

The Surrey effort is not proceeding in isolation. The work was carried out in collaboration with Professor Jens Koch of Northwestern University in the United States, a physicist who was among the researchers behind the development of the transmon, the superconducting qubit design that has become the workhorse of much of today’s quantum computing industry. That pedigree gives the new proposal considerable weight, since the transmon itself succeeded by engineering away sensitivity to charge noise, and the SHOQ concept extends the same philosophy into an entirely different physical medium. The involvement of researchers with hands-on experience in bringing a qubit design from theory to widespread laboratory use may help the new idea avoid some of the pitfalls that accompany novel hardware concepts.

The team is now turning its attention to building a prototype to determine whether the theoretical predictions survive contact with reality, an effort supported by an IAA Commercialisation Fellowship awarded to Dr Sharma. The cryogenic challenge is formidable but not unprecedented: although the SHOQ device would need to operate at extremely low temperatures, conditions of exactly this kind have already been achieved experimentally in superfluid helium-3 research laboratories around the world. That existing experimental infrastructure means the path from concept to prototype does not require inventing entirely new cryogenic techniques, only adapting well-established ones to a new microfluidic device. If the prototype confirms the predicted hundredfold reduction in error rates, superfluid helium could move from the margins of low-temperature physics to the center of the conversation about how to scale quantum computers, adding a genuinely new and remarkably quiet material platform to the engineer’s toolkit.

The choice of helium-3 rather than the more common helium-4 is central to the proposal. Helium-4 atoms are bosons and form a superfluid at around two kelvin, but helium-3 atoms are fermions, which means they cannot condense directly. Instead, at temperatures a few thousandths of a degree above absolute zero, pairs of helium-3 atoms bind together in a manner analogous to the Cooper pairs of electrons in a superconductor, and it is these paired atoms that flow without viscosity. This pairing mechanism gives superfluid helium-3 a rich internal structure, including multiple distinct superfluid phases, and endows the liquid with collective modes whose quantum properties are exceptionally well characterized by decades of low-temperature research.

The quantized vibrations that the SHOQ design would exploit belong to a broader family of mechanical quantum systems that physicists have been developing for years. Researchers have previously succeeded in cooling micromechanical drums and membranes to their quantum ground states and entangling them with light, establishing that mechanical oscillators can genuinely store and process quantum information. What has been missing is a mechanical oscillator whose intrinsic noise performance rivals that of the best electronic qubits, and the Surrey team argues that a charge-neutral superfluid medium could supply exactly that, since acoustic modes in helium couple only weakly to the solid-state defects and two-level fluctuators that degrade fabricated resonators on chips.

The significance of a hundredfold reduction in error rates becomes clearer when viewed through the lens of quantum error correction. Theoretical studies of fault-tolerant computation indicate that below a critical error threshold, adding more physical qubits suppresses logical errors exponentially, but the overhead involved is enormous when physical error rates sit near the threshold. Lowering the physical error rate by two orders of magnitude would reduce the number of physical qubits needed per logical qubit by a comparable factor, potentially shrinking the machine required for useful fault-tolerant computation from millions of qubits to a far more manageable scale.

The hybrid vision also echoes patterns from other parts of the quantum technology landscape. Trapped-ion systems already combine different species of ions, using one type for memory and another for logic, while superconducting processors have been coupled to spin defects in diamond and to atomic ensembles acting as quantum memories. The SHOQ concept would extend this modular philosophy to a liquid platform, connecting a microfluidic cell through microwave circuitry to conventional superconducting control electronics. The paper’s authors suggest that such interfaces, rather than any single monolithic technology, may ultimately define how large quantum computers are assembled.

Considerable uncertainty remains, as is inevitable for a purely theoretical design. Real devices must contend with damping of acoustic modes at their boundaries, thermal excitations that must be filtered out, and the practical difficulty of coupling a liquid oscillator strongly enough to microwave circuits to allow fast quantum gates. The prototype planned under the fellowship is intended to probe precisely these questions, and the coming experimental results will determine whether the elegant mathematics translates into working hardware.

Subject of Research: A conceptual superfluid helium-3 based qubit design for fault-tolerant quantum computing

Article Title: Superfluid-based qubit design could be key to scaling up quantum computers

Article References: Superfluid-based qubit design could be key to scaling up quantum computers. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: superfluid helium, qubit, quantum computing, error rates, superconducting qubits, SHOQ device, quantum memory, hybrid quantum systems, npj Quantum Information, University of Surrey, helium-3, microfluidics