Chinese President Xi Jinping delivers a speech during a symposium on the Belt and Road Initiati.
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SEOUL: China is investigating executives of a North Korean bank believed to finance the illicit procurement of arms and materials related to the isolated country’s banned nuclear programme, South Korea’s JoongAng Daily reported on Monday.
China and the United States have agreed to step up cooperation in the U.N. Security Council and in law enforcement channels after North Korea’s fifth nuclear test on Sept. 9, the White House said last week.
While China is North Korea’s sole major ally, it disapproves of its nuclear and missile programmes.
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Yesterday, in the New York Review of Books, Freeman Dyson analyzed a trio of recent books on humanity’s future in the larger cosmos. They were How to Make a Spaceship: A Band of Renegades, an Epic Space Race, and the Birth of Private Spaceflight; Beyond Earth: Our Path to a New Home in the Planets; and All These Worlds Are Yours: The Scientific Search for Alien Life.
Dyson is “a brilliant physicist and contrarian,” as the theoretical astrophysicist Lawrence Krauss recently told Nautilus. So I was waiting, as I read his review, to come across his profound and provocative pronouncement about these books, and it came soon enough: “None of them looks at space as a transforming force in the destiny of our species,” he writes. The books are limited in scope by looking at the future of space as a problem of engineering. Dyson has a grander vision. Future humans can seed remote environments with genetic instructions for countless new species. “The purpose is no longer to explore space with unmanned or manned missions, but to expand the domain of life from one small planet to the universe.”
Dyson can be just as final in his opinions on the destiny of scientific investigation. According to Krauss, Dyson once told him, “There’s no way we’re ever going to measure gravitons”—the supposed quantum particles underlying gravitational forces—“because there’s no terrestrial experiment that could ever measure a single graviton.” Dyson told Krauss that, in order to measure one, “you’d have to make the experiment so massive that it would actually collapse to form a black hole before you could make the measurement.” So, Dyson concluded, “There’s no way that we’ll know whether gravity is a quantum theory.”
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Scientists at the University of Calgary successfully teleported a particle nearly four miles away in a breakthrough experiment that could revolutionize the way computers function.
Researchers used the entanglement property of quantum mechanics, known as “spooky action at a distance,” to teleport a particle. It’s a scientific property not even the renowned Albert Einstein could come to terms with it.
“Being entangled means that the two photons that form an entangled pair have properties that are linked regardless of how far the two are separated,” Dr. Wolfgang Tittel, a physics professor at the University of Calgary who was involved in the research, said in a press statement. “When one of the photons was sent over to City Hall, it remained entangled with the photon that stayed at the University of Calgary. What happened is the instantaneous and disembodied transfer of the photon’s quantum state onto the remaining photon of the entangled pair, which is the one that remained six kilometres [slightly less than 4 miles] away at the university.”
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The huge wave of Internet of Things (IoT) enabled devices has the U.S. government worried that the technology harbors lurking security threats.
According to a Defense One article, the U.S. Department of Justice has joined other agencies in evaluating IoT technology for national security risks.
And with up to 50 billion connected devices coming online by 2020, the government is scrambling to assess threats from the fast evolving technology.
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This computational illustration shows a graphene network structure below a layer of water.
New analysis finds way to safely conduct heat from graphene to biological tissues.
In the future, our health may be monitored and maintained by tiny sensors and drug dispensers, deployed within the body and made from graphene — one of the strongest, lightest materials in the world. Graphene is composed of a single sheet of carbon atoms, linked together like razor-thin chicken wire, and its properties may be tuned in countless ways, making it a versatile material for tiny, next-generation implants.
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Ouch!!!
National Security Agency says tools left exposed by mistake — and dumping by presumably Russia-backed hackers Shadow Brokers.
An FBI investigation into the public dumping of hacking tools used by the National Security Agency (NSA) to uncover security flaws in some networking vendor products is looking at how the tools were exposed on a remote computer, a Reuters report says, quoting people close to the investigation.
Sources say NSA believes it was an inadvertent act by an employee or contractor, but the NSA did not inform manufacturers of the leak because sensors employed to detect misuse of the tools came up empty-handed. NSA may have wanted to take advantage of the theft to gather intelligence and improve its defense, adds the exclusive.
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