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In what’s being hailed as one of the biggest astronomical discoveries of the century, scientists with the European Southern Observatory (ESO) today confirmed the discovery of an Earth-like exoplanet in the habitable zone of Proxima Centauri-our nearest neighboring star. Details of the team’s discovery were just published in Nature.

Rumors of a possible Earth-like exoplanet first surfaced on August 12 in the German weekly Der Spiegel. Citing an anonymous source with the La Silla Observatory research team, the magazine claimed the rumored planet “is believed to be Earth-like and orbits at a distance to Proxima Centauri that could allow it to have liquid water on its surface-an important requirement for the emergence of life.”

Now we know those rumors were true: There is clear evidence for a planet orbiting Proxima Centauri, a small red dwarf star located just 4.25 light years away, slightly closer to Earth than the famous binary pair of Alpha Centauri A and B. It’s been dubbed Proxima b, and the ESO team pegs its mass as being roughly 1.3 times that of Earth.

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Hope they’re working with QC researchers in Los Alamos and DARPA; it is the US Government which is known for its silos and multi-layer bureaucracies.

Quantum computing is a novel way to build computers — one that takes advantage of the quantum properties of particles to perform operations on data in a very different way than traditional computers. In some cases, the algorithm speedups are extraordinary.

Specifically, a quantum computer using something called Shor’s algorithm can efficiently factor numbers, breaking RSA. A variant can break Diffie-Hellman and other discrete log-based cryptosystems, including those that use elliptic curves. This could potentially render all modern public-key algorithms insecure. Before you panic, note that the largest number to date that has been factored by a quantum computer is 143. So while a practical quantum computer is still science fiction, it’s not stupid science fiction.

(Note that this is completely different from quantum cryptography, which is a way of passing bits between two parties that relies on physical quantum properties for security. The only thing quantum computation and quantum cryptography have to do with each other is their first words. It is also completely different from the NSA’s QUANTUM program, which is its code name for a packet-injection system that works directly in the Internet backbone.)

Continue reading “The NSA Plans for a Post-Quantum World” | >

Ever wanted to down a neighborhood nuisance drone and couldn’t? Or maybe you have some frustration that has built over time and want to release it. Well, here is your chance. DARPA wants you to down a rogue drone.

The Pentagon’s futuristic think tank is thinking about how to stop errant drones and it wants the public’s help. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s Tactical Technology Office this week announced a request for information to help create “novel, flexible, mobile layered” anti-drone soluti…

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Nice.

Algae (a term used to group many photosynthetic organisms into a rather heterologous mash-up) do not have a kind place in the public imagination. Take for example the following passage from Stephen King’s Pet Semetary:

“Dead fields under a November sky, scattered rose petals brown and turning up at the edges, empty pools scummed with algae, rot, decomposition, dust…”

Leaving aside their use in a horror novel as a way to set an image of decay, algae attract significant scientific attention, and are even considered cool (well, at least by some). But when I tell people I work on algal Synbio, one question that eventually comes up (or is silently implied) is why do I bother, when there are more prominent and better-developed systems? In this blog I will try to partly address this point of view, as well as provide a small perspective on the subject.

Continue reading “Algae as vessels for synthetic biology” | >