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Submission + - Moon-bound asteroid could cripple Earth's satellites, say astronomers (substack.com) 1

Submitted by KentuckyFC
KentuckyFC writes: In DEcember last year, NASA's Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System (ATLAS) picked up an 60-meter asteroid that appeared to be heading our way. Further observations quickly ruled out the possibility of a collision but in April, the agency announced that 2024 YR4 had a 4 per cent chance of hitting the moon instead. Now astronomers have calculated the likely consequences and say the impact would create a crater 1 km across and send 100 millions tonnes of ejecta hurtling into space and towards us. The risks to astronauts and satellite systems are clearly existential. The team say this kind of risk is not considered in planetary defence plans, which now urgently need to be updated.

Submission + - Why science is about to become AI's killer app (substack.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Laboratory science is largely the methodical, relentless pursuit of evidence in controlled conditions. That is a difficult task, not because of a single, insurmountable obstacle, but due to a thousand tiny, complex ones. Humans are good at this but now a new generation of AI-enabled systems are beginning to automate this process. In one recent advance, researchers at the University of Oxford and elsewhere created a set of knowledge agents that work together to carry out the complex task of preparing, calibrating and measuring superconducting qubits in a quantum computing laboratory based on natural language prompts. As this approach is applied more widely, it raises the prospect of a new kind of discovery, analogous to the emerging technique of “vibe coding” enabled by platforms like Replit and Cursor. "Vibe science” would allow researchers to immediately test ideas and hypotheses developed in brainstorming sessions, by intuition or guess work. The prospects for science look good. For scientists? Not so much.

Comment Re:Yet still pumping oil? (Score 1) 234

by QuantumV (#61869899) Attached to: Norway To Hit 100% Electric Vehicle Sales Early Next Year

Sounds great, yet I haven't heard anything about them shutting down their operations in the North Sea. Why is that?

Probably because you have not followed the Norwegian public discourse during the last year, in particluar ahead of September's election.

One of big discussion points has been about how and how quickly oil production should shut down (it will shut down eventually in any case). The factual question behind this is "If Norway phases out its (relatively CO2e-efficient) oil and gas production more quickly than what is economically optimal, how does that impact global CO2e emmisions?" There have been reports saying global emmisions would go slightly down and others saying it would go slightly up (due to it being compensated by increased production in countries where the production is more CO2e-intensive). I think the key word here is slightly. For every additional barrel of oil the Norwegian production is reduced, the global impact of global burnt oil is far less then a barrel (whether positive or negative). In this setting, is it rational to refrain from the income which comes from participating in the global oil market, canalizing the lost income to the other oil exporting countries instead?

Comment Re:What is the long term plan? (Score 5, Informative) 41

The main purpose is to slow the spread, so that health care infrastructure can keep up with the demand. The quality of care also improves over time, since health practitioners learn more and more about how best to manage the disease. (In the extreme case, if we can slow the spread enough then some people will get the vaccine before getting the real virus.)

This visualizes this in graphical form.

Comment Re:Makes one wonder (Score 1) 41

There's a difference between "works" and "works well". I was recently scheduled to teach a 2-day short course recently; the meeting was cancelled (due to COVID19) so we switched to giving the lectures through video-conferencing and doing Q&A using a chat channel. It worked okay, but was not nearly as engaging as an in-person meeting. When courses are run well, the back-and-forth between instructor and students helps make the content more relevant and memorable. (E.g. the instructor can read body language and know when a concept needs to be re-explained.)

Overall, there are certainly lessons to be learned in terms of leveraging online education models to improve efficiency. And I'm not defending the dated "professor droning in front of bored students" teaching model, which could indeed be improved in numerous ways (including by leveraging online components). However currently there is no online experience that can replicate the advantages of in-person discussion, and thus a purely online course will not be as effective as a properly run in-person lecture+discussion.

Comment Re: Quantization (Score 2) 113

by QuantumV (#57964844) Attached to: The Super-Secure Quantum Cable Hiding In the Holland Tunnel

So for km long links they send what they call "weak" pulses of photons, and still call it QKD.

Yes, but the weak pulses still have an average number of photons well below 2. The loss in a long fiber only means that perhaps only 0.1 % to 1 % of the photons arrive at their destination, but those arriving may still be used to generate a secret key.

Comment Re:QKD solves no problem, but creates one (Score 1) 113

by QuantumV (#57964794) Attached to: The Super-Secure Quantum Cable Hiding In the Holland Tunnel

Nobody can say if a more precise model of reality will open up ways to intercept single photon transmissions without leaving traces.

No, but we also know that in a world where this is possible (sufficiently well), lots of other cool possibilities will open up, such as superluminal communication and time machines. The currently known laws of physics describe pretty much everything possible on earth (and other places in the universe with weak gravity) today. But of course if you could integrate a couple of black holes and maybe a few wormholes into your interception device, we cannot quite rule out that an attack is impossible.

Comment Re:Explained - future privacy (Score 1) 113

by QuantumV (#57964734) Attached to: The Super-Secure Quantum Cable Hiding In the Holland Tunnel
The part about future privacy is spot on. The following to statements in the last paragraph are wrong:
1. It fails if I send lots of photons each time (which I really need to do)
2. [It fails if] our attacker has better equipment than we do

As for 1, the performance certainly degrades quickly if you send more than one photon or each signal, but it is still possible to get a secret key from two- and three-photon pulses provided a protocol ruling out photon-number-splitting attack is used (such as decoy-state or SARG).

As for 2, in QKD setups, it is always assumed that an attacker may do anything to the signals allowed by the laws of physics. For example, a photon-number-splitting attack is unfeasable with current technology, but it is still taken into account.

What is usually challenging in practice is avoiding side-channels. An attacker with better technology may attack side channels that the designers of the QKD equipment did not realize were there (or have the capability to test for). In principle, QKD based on entanglement may rule out many of the possible side channels (but it is still possible to get it wrong).

Comment Re:BOSE = terribly privacy policy (Score 1) 231

by commodoresloat (#54265213) Attached to: Bose Headphones Secretly Collected User Data, Lawsuit Reveals

I don't want to start a holy war here, but what is the deal with you BOSE fanatics? I've been sitting here at my freelance gig with my QuietComfort 35 wireless loaded with Megadeth for about 20 minutes now while I attempt to listen to a 17 Meg mp3 from one directory on the ipod. 20 minutes. At home, with my Pioneer HDJ2000 listening to Radiohead, which by all standards should be a lot slower than Megadeth, the same operation would take about 2 minutes. If that.

In addition, during this jam session, Soundcloud will not work. And everything else has ground to a halt. Even Facebook is straining to keep up as I type this.

I won't bore you with the laundry list of other problems that I've encountered while working on various headphones, but suffice it to say there have been many, not the least of which is I've never seen headphones that run faster than the songs playing on them, despite counting double when you listen to mashups since you are getting two songs at once. My Sony Walkman with a Chromium Dioxide cassette plays Megadeth faster than these headphones. From a productivity standpoint, I don't get how people can claim that the BOSE headphones are superior interfaces.

BOSE addicts, flame me if you'd like, but I'd rather hear some intelligent reasons why anyone would choose to use QuietComfort over other faster, cheaper, more stable systems.

Submission + - Algorithm Clones Facial Expressions...And Pastes Them Onto Other Faces

Submitted by KentuckyFC
KentuckyFC writes: Various researchers have attempted to paste an expression from one face on to another but so far with mixed results. Problems arise because these algorithms measure the way a face distorts when it changes from a neutral expression to the one of interest. They then attempt to reproduce the same distortion on another face. That's fine if the two faces have similar features. But when the faces differ in structure, as most do, this kind of distortion looks unnatural. Now a Chinese team has solved the problem with an algorithm that divides a face into different regions for the mouth, eyes, nose, etc and measures the distortion in each area separately. It then distorts the target face in these specific regions while ensuring the overall proportions remain realistic. At the same time, it decides what muscle groups must have been used to create these distortions and calculates how this would change the topology of the target face with wrinkles, dimples and so on. It then adds the appropriate shadows to make the expression realistic. The result is a way to clone an expression and paste it onto another entirely different face. The algorithm opens the way to a new generation of communication techniques in which avatars can represent the expressions as well as the voices of humans. The film industry could also benefit from an easy way to paste the expressions of actors on to the cartoon characters they voice.

Submission + - Exploiting the DRAM Rowhammer Bug to Gain Kernel Privileges (blogspot.com) 2

Submitted by netelder
netelder writes: “Rowhammer” is a problem with some recent DRAM devices in which repeatedly accessing a row of memory can cause bit flips in adjacent rows. We tested a selection of laptops and found that a subset of them exhibited the problem. We built two working privilege escalation exploits that use this effect. One exploit uses rowhammer-induced bit flips to gain kernel privileges on x86-64 Linux when run as an unprivileged userland process. When run on a machine vulnerable to the rowhammer problem, the process was able to induce bit flips in page table entries (PTEs). It was able to use this to gain write access to its own page table, and hence gain read-write access to all of physical memory.

Submission + - The Origin of Life And The Hidden Role of Quantum Criticality

Submitted by KentuckyFC
KentuckyFC writes: One of the great puzzles of biology is how the molecular machinery of life is so finely coordinated. Even the simplest cells are complex three dimensional biochemical factories in which a dazzling array of machines pump, push, copy, and compute in a dance of extraordinarily detailed complexity. Indeed, it is hard to imagine how the ordinary processes of electron transport allow this complexity to emerge given the losses that arise in much simpler circuits. Now a group of researchers led by Stuart Kauffmann have discovered that the electronic properties of biomolecules are entirely different to those of ordinary conductors. It turns out that most biomolecules exist in an exotic state called quantum criticality that sits on the knife edge between conduction and insulation. In other words, biomolecules belong to an entirely new class of conductor that is not bound by the ordinary rules of electron transport. Of course, organic molecules can be ordinary conductors or insulators and the team have found a few biomolecules that fall into these categories. But evolution seems to have mainly selected biomolecules that are quantum critical, implying that that this property must confer some evolutionary advantage. Exactly what this could be isn't yet clear but it must play an important role in the machinery of life and its origin.

Submission + - Genetic Data Analysis Tools Reveal How US Pop Music Evolved

Submitted by KentuckyFC
KentuckyFC writes: The history of pop music is rich in anecdotes, folklore and controversy. But despite the keen interest, there is little in the form of hard evidence to back up most claims about the evolution of music. Now a group of researchers have used data analysis tools developed for genomic number crunching to study the evolution of US pop music. The team studied 30-second segments of more than 17,000 songs that appeared on the US Billboard Hot 100 between 1960 and 2010. Their tools categorised the songs according to harmonic features such as chord changes as well as the quality of timbre such as whether guitar-based, piano-based orchestra-based and so on. They then used a standard algorithm for discovering clusters within networks of data to group the songs into 13 different types, which turned out to correspond with well known genres such as rap, rock, country and so on. Finally, they plotted the change in popularity of these musical types over time. The results show a clear decline in the popularity of jazz and blues since 1960. During the same period, rock-related music has ebbed and flowed in popularity. By contrast, was rare before 1980 before becoming the dominant musical style for 30 years until declining in the late 2000s. The work answers several important question about the evolution of pop music, such as whether music industry practises have led to a decline in the cultural variety of new music and whether British bands such as The Beatles and The Rolling Stones triggered the 1964 American music revolution [spoiler: no in both cases].

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