I have today trademarked the tagline "Most Feared Law Firm in the World." Will keep y'all posted. /s

It's 100x easier to find press releases about this paper than download the PDF itself. What I found was a scraped result, whose title translates to "Quantum annealing public key cryptographic attack.." published in January by "Wang Chao, Ph.D., professor, member of China Computer Federation (CCF), main research fields are artificial intelligence, cyberspace security, quantum computing cryptography." AES is a symmetric cipher, not a public key algorithm. It does use an SPN structure, but attacking toy 64-bit SPN-based algorithms like Present, Gift-64 and Rectangle does not mean the attack scales to other algorithms, especially not to AES-256 which is a standard (CNSA 2.0, FIPS 197) requirement for many DoD systems. One can pick a shitty lock. This does not mean a new threat to Fort Knox has emerged.

I didn't even known trypophobia was a thing until my daughter was symptomatic. We got some new wooden coasters for a living-room table, and they were patterned with these clever honeycomb-like holes. And my young daughter couldn't even look at them; she found them really, really upsetting. When should could finally speak about it, she just described that it's the kind of holes were bugs and snakes might be hiding.

My wife and I thought she was totally making it up until I Google'd it. Kooky.

Am not disagreeing that an ice-age ensued for long after the K/T event. But I heard a recent RadioLab podcast with an interesting (new?) perspective.

The heart of the podcast is a study which focused on impact-melt spherules that were found in the gills of some Tanis-site riverfish washed ashore by a tidal surge. More correctly: "Acipenseriform fish, densely packed in the deposit, contain ejecta spherules in their gills and were buried by an inland-directed surge that inundated a deeply incised river channel before accretion of the fine-grained impactite."

The Tanis site is in North Dakota, about 3000km from Chicxulub. Citing new ballistic calculations about the impact, "spherules would have begun arriving at Tanis 15 min postimpact. The vast majority would have fallen at Tanis within 1 to 2 h of impact."

Here's the best part: given the "billions of tons of ... pulverized ocean rock" that was ejected, and given the density of what was record at Tanis within 1 to 2 hours after impact, it is of course possible to simulate the elevation in atmospheric temperature due to friction from ejecta re-entry. Jay Melosh's team at Purdue (he's quoted in the original article) estimates 10kW of energy per square meter. Which is pizza-oven hot, possibly as high as 1200F. For two hours.

In other words, anything not in the oceans or living under the Earth's surface didn't die off during an ice-age, they were gone in an afternoon barbecue. At the very least ... food for thought.