“The big-screen cinema company said Thursday that it and several partner companies created a $50 million investment fund focused on virtual reality media projects like films and video games.”
“The fairy tale will be made available for free on Daydream, Google’s mobile virtual reality product.”
Worried about security for your bitcoin in the face of quantum computing? According to computer researchers, there’s no reason to be.
Source: https://hacked.com/breathe-easy-bitcoiners-quantum-computing…encryption
Some people assume that once quantum computing comes along modern encryption technologies will be outpowered. But experts are starting to posit that hash functions and asymmetric encryption could defend not only against modern computers, but also against quantum attackers from the future.
Matthew Amy from Canada’s University of Waterloo proposes just this in a paper by the International Association of Cryptologic Research.
Amy, and researchers from Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics and the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research, examined attacks against SHA-2 and SHA-3 with Grover’s algorithm.
Grover’s algorithm is a quantum algorithm that finds with high probability the input to black box functions that produce particular, and predictable, output values.
Grover’s algorithm could brute-force a 128-bit symmetric cryptographic key in roughly 264iterations,” Wikipedia states, “or a 256-bit key in roughly 2128 iterations. As a result, it is sometimes suggested that symmetric key lengths be doubled to protect against future quantum attacks.”
Researchers surmise SHA-256 and SHA3-256 need 2166 “logical qubit cycles” to break, and the paper suggests quantum papers pose little threat, though classical processors will need to manage them.
The paper notes: “The main difficulty is that the coherence time of physical qubits is finite. Noise in the physical system will eventually corrupt the state of any long computation,” the paper states. “Preserving the state of a logical qubit is an active process that requires periodic evaluation of an error detection and correction routine.”
With ASICs running at a few million hashes per second, it would take Grover’s algorithm 1032 years to crack SHA-256 or SHA3-256. That is longer than the universe has existed.
As The Register adds: “Even if you didn’t care about the circuit footprint and used a billion-hash-per-second Bitcoin-mining ASIC, the calculation still seems to be in the order of 1029 years.”
SHA-2 is the set of cryptographic hash functions designed by the National Security Agency (NSA), an intelligence branch of the US government under scrutiny for ubiquitous surveillance due to revelations released by Edward Snowden. SHA stands for “Secure Hash Algorithm.”
These hash functions represent mathematical operations run by digital means Cryptographic hash functions boast collision resistance, which means attackers cannot find two different input values that result in the same hash output. The SHA-2 family is comprised of altogether six hash functions with hash values that are 224, 256, 384 or 512 bits: SHA-224, SHA-256, SHA-384, SHA-512, SHA-512/224, SHA-512/256.
SHA-256 and SHA-512 are novel hash functions computed with 32-bit and 64-bit words, respectively.
This could cause earthquakes because of the moons mass pulls of the mass of our planet.
There’s a rare supermoon coming this weekend, and no matter how devastated or thrilled you are by the latest election results, you don’t want to miss it.
In the wee hours of Sunday night and Monday morning, the moon will come closer to the Earth than it has in nearly 70 years.
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Bacteria are among the oldest life forms on Earth and exist nearly everywhere; in the soil, water, deep in the earth’s crust and in our own bodies. Actually, there are at least as many bacterial cells in the human body as human cells.
Bacteria tend to get a bad rap, but now, armed with new research on the bacterial world (or microbiome) in our bodies, we are starting to understand how important a role microorganisms play in our health (good as well as bad).
And beyond merely understanding the relationship between our bodies and the microorganisms inhabiting it, we’re on the cusp of significantly altering that relationship.
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Tokamak Energy.
The world needs abundant, clean energy. Nuclear fusion — with no CO2 emissions, no risk of meltdown and no long-lived radioactive waste — is the obvious solution, but it is very hard to achieve.
The challenge is that fusion only happens in stars, where the huge gravitational force creates pressures and temperatures so intense that usually repulsive particles will collide and fuse; hence “fusion”. On Earth we need to create similar conditions, holding a hot, electrically-charged plasma at high enough pressure for long enough for fusion reactions to occur. The scientific and engineering challenges behind putting a star in a box are large, to say the least. Without proper confinement of the plasma, the reaction would stop. The plasma must be isolated from the walls of the reactor — a feat that can be performed most effectively by magnets. The most advanced machine for this purpose is the ‘tokamak’.
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Telegram has announced the first winners of its bot competition. The BotPrize was announced in April and will see $1 million awarded to developers of the best Telegram bots submitted. The first winners come from the worlds of photo-editing, productivity, games, dating and finance.
Telegram is a messaging service with a focus on speed and security. Launched in 2013, it is cloud-based, meaning that user content syncs instantly across the platforms on which the service can be used, including PC, Mac, Linux, Android, iOS and Windows Phone.
The firm’s BotPrize will help to increase the number of bots available on the service and accelerate the speed with which the number is increased. For the uninitiated, bots are effectively apps in themselves with which users can interact via messaging. They typically run inside messaging apps such as Facebook Messenger or, in this instance, Telegram.
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For most people, icy conditions mean a slippery pavement or trying to chip the car out of a freezing glaze, but icing can also bring down aircraft, snap power lines, and cause a surprising amount of structural damage. Now scientists at the University of Houston (UH) have come up with a surprising solution – and it involves magnets.
The problem with icing is that when droplets of freezing or supercooled water strike a surface, they wet or adhere to it, so more and more droplets can join the party. To de-ice a surface, you need to either melt the ice, break it off, dissolve it, or alter the surface so the ice can’t stick to it in the first place.
According to Hadi Ghasemi from the UH Department of Mechanical Engineering, “icephobic” surfaces that are non-wetting or liquid infused have shown promise in the past, but suffer from high freezing temperatures, high ice adhesion strength, and high cost.
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Fight Aging! Fund Research
Posted in life extension
More reasons for supporting scientific research and how your money fuels real and tangible progress.
Become a SENS patron, and we’ll match a year of your donations
The 2016 year end SENS rejuvenation research fundraiser started on November 1st. This year we’re trying something a little different, with a longer term view. This is the time for it! Newly formed companies are now working on the first SENS therapies, and longer-term non-profit research projects are also underway. These initiatives will come to fruition some years from now: the SENS Research Foundation recently launched Project|21 with a five year timeline, for example. So this year we’re looking for more members of our community to become SENS Patrons for the long term, by signing up for a recurring monthly donation to the SENS Research Foundation, and then keeping that going until the job is done and the first rejuvenation therapies are deployed. As an encouragement, we will match the next year of donations for anyone who signs up before the end of 2016, from a fund of $24,000 provided by Josh Triplett and Fight Aging!
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In Brief:
- Using a system of electrodes, transmitters, receivers, scientists were able to restore leg function in a primate, completely bypassing damaged nerves.
- While this remarkable feat may be decades away from human use, it is a promising development for the hundreds of thousands of people in the U.S. with spinal cord injuries
.
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