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A U.S. Army research result brings the quantum internet a step closer. Such an internet could offer the military security, sensing and timekeeping capabilities not possible with traditional networking approaches.

The U.S. Army’s Combat Capability Development’s Army Research Laboratory’s Center for Distributed Quantum Information, funded and managed by the lab’s Army Research Office, saw researchers at the University of Innsbruck achieve a record for the transfer of quantum entanglement between matter and light—a distance of 50 kilometers using fiber optic cables.

Entanglement is a correlation that can be created between quantum entities such as qubits. When two qubits are entangled and a measurement is made on one, it will affect the outcome of a measurement made on the other, even if that second qubit is physically far away.

Last year, Princeton researchers identified a disturbing security flaw in which hackers could someday exploit internet-connected appliances to wreak havoc on the electrical grid. Now, the same research team has released algorithms to make the grid more resilient to such attacks.

In a paper published online in the journal IEEE Transactions on Network Science and Engineering, a team from Princeton’s Department of Electrical Engineering presented algorithms to protect against potential attacks that would spike demand from high-wattage devices such as air conditioners—all part of the “internet of things”—in an effort to overload the power grid.

“The cyberphysical nature of the grid makes this threat very important to counter, because a large-scale blackout can have very critical consequences,” said study author Prateek Mittal, an associate professor of electrical engineering.

What could we do to stop our Sun from eventually expanding and burning out? In this Cosmic Query, astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson explains how we can prolong the life of a star. Co-host Chuck Nice offers his sci-fi option for Earth’s future.

This “Behind the Scenes” video was shot during the recording of our episode, “Cosmic Queries: The Sun and other Stars.” If you’d like to listen to the full podcast, click here: http://www.startalkradio.net/show/cosmic-queries-the-sun-and-other-stars/.

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This is the final part in a series of in-depth articles examining China’s efforts to build a stronger domestic semiconductor industry amid rising trade tensions.


Some in China see custom AI chips, which can offer superior performance to conventional integrated circuits even when manufactured using older processes, as helping the country loosen its dependence on the US in core technology.

Wi-Fi 6 certification is here. On Monday, an announcement from the Wi-Fi Alliance datelined Austin, Texas said the Wi-Fi CERTIFIED 6 certification program from Wi-Fi Alliance was now available.

Edgar Figueroa, president and CEO, Wi-Fi Alliance, said, “Wi-Fi CERTIFIED 6 will deliver improvements in connectivity, including in high density locations and IoT environments.”

(Standards for Wi-Fi are established by the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers, and devices are certified for these new standards by the Wi-Fi Alliance, said Lauren Goode in Wired.)

SHA-256 is a one way hashing algorithm. Cracking it would have tectonic implications for consumers, business and all aspects of government including the military.

It’s not the purpose of this post to explain encryption, AES or SHA-256, but here is a brief description of SHA-256. Normally, I place reference links in-line or at the end of a post. But let’s get this out of the way up front:

One day after Treadwell Stanton DuPont claimed that a secret project cracked SHA-256 more than one year ago, they back-tracked. Rescinding the original claim, they announced that an equipment flaw caused them to incorrectly conclude that they had algorithmically cracked SHA-256.

The competition between the United States and China on artificial intelligence is heating up recently. In the coming AI Race, can India with an abundance of engineering talent really catch up with the US and China?

Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Robotics, and The Internet of Things (IoT) are one of the rapidly advancing technological developments. The rate of progress in the field of these is amazingly rapid. From SIRI to self-driving cars, artificial intelligence is changing our daily life in many ways.

India is on course to become the third-largest economy in the world (by GDP) within the next few years according to MIT Technology Review. Indian government released a report on artificial intelligence in 2018 that calls for the country to boost investment and focus on deploying the technology in manufacturing, health care, agriculture, education, and public utilities. Currently, around 400 new companies in India have put resources into work including artificial intelligence and machine learning.

The second half of humanity is joining the internet. People in countries like India will change the internet, and it will change them. Read more from The Economist here: https://econ.st/2zVWeQQ

Click here to subscribe to The Economist on YouTube: https://econ.st/2xvTKdy

L.O. Two simple letters that marked one of the biggest changes in human history. In 1969 programmers were trying to type “login”.

50 years later and half the world is now online. But that half is primarily from the rich world. How will the second half of humanity coming online change the internet and how will the internet change them?

India’s internet penetration was pretty low until very recently with the launch of a new mobile network called Reliance Jio, with incredibly cheap phones and incredibly cheap data prices. Reliance Jio launched aggressively in 2016 offering subsidised handsets and free data to hook people in. India went from being a relatively expensive place to consume data to being the cheapest in the world. Prices crashed by 94%

Newer users in the developing world are browsing the internet in much the same way as people in the developed world.

This assumes information transfer between humans is frictionless, which it is not. At least not currently. We could easily address this, but no one is listening:-) QED.


Italians are some of the fastest speakers on the planet, chattering at up to nine syllables per second. Many Germans, on the other hand, are slow enunciators, delivering five to six syllables in the same amount of time. Yet in any given minute, Italians and Germans convey roughly the same amount of information, according to a new study. Indeed, no matter how fast or slowly languages are spoken, they tend to transmit information at about the same rate: 39 bits per second, about twice the speed of Morse code.

“This is pretty solid stuff,” says Bart de Boer, an evolutionary linguist who studies speech production at the Free University of Brussels, but was not involved in the work. Language lovers have long suspected that information-heavy languages—those that pack more information about tense, gender, and speaker into smaller units, for example—move slowly to make up for their density of information, he says, whereas information-light languages such as Italian can gallop along at a much faster pace. But until now, no one had the data to prove it.

Scientists started with written texts from 17 languages, including English, Italian, Japanese, and Vietnamese. They calculated the information density of each language in bits—the same unit that describes how quickly your cellphone, laptop, or computer modem transmits information. They found that Japanese, which has only 643 syllables, had an information density of about 5 bits per syllable, whereas English, with its 6949 syllables, had a density of just over 7 bits per syllable. Vietnamese, with its complex system of six tones (each of which can further differentiate a syllable), topped the charts at 8 bits per syllable.