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US Navy fighting the real war that is ramping up by unpluging from certain networks. Well, that is an option; but also very limiting to “sneaker net” information file transfers. Definitely not uncommon across other areas of government.

SAN DIEGO — For the Navy, the best defense against a high-tech enemy may be a low-tech strategy.

After decades of building equipment, aircraft and ships designed to communicate with each other and back to shore, the Navy is now looking to “selectively disconnect” its systems to minimize vulnerability to cyberattacks, said Rear Adm. Lorin Selby, commander of the Naval Surface Warfare Center.

“We’re going back now and trying to selectively disconnect things and slow down some of these connections and only do it where we think it makes sense, where it’s safe to do it,” Selby told an audience at the AFCEA West conference in San Diego. “We’ve got to be more judicious with the things we connect to the internet or to shore, those kinds of vulnerabilities.”

Continue reading “Navy Wants to Unplug From Some Networks to Stay Ahead of Cyberattacks” | >

One of the largest drawbacks in robotics is the rigid parts and movements of the robots. Well, soon that maybe changing due to non-Newtonian fluids.

(Inside Science) — By using fluids similar to Silly Putty that can behave as both liquids and solids, researchers say they have created fluid robots that might one day perform tasks that conventional machines cannot.

Conventional robots are made of rigid parts that are vulnerable to bumps, scrapes, twists and falls. In contrast, researchers worldwide are increasingly developing robots made from soft, elastic plastic and rubber that are inspired by worms, starfish and octopuses. These soft robots can resist many of the kinds of damage, and can squirm past many of the obstacles, that can impede hard robots.

However, even soft robots and the living organisms they are inspired by are limited by their solidity — for example, they remain vulnerable to cutting. Instead, researcher Ido Bachelet of Bar-Ilan University in Israel and his colleagues have now created what they call fluid robots that they say could operate better than solid robots in chaotic, hostile environments. They detailed their findings online Jan. 22 in the journal Artificial Life.

Continue reading “Silly Putty-like substance is helping researchers make shape-shifting robots” | >

This maybe true in the UK. However, I am in the US. In the US, if I have a robot representing me and I lose my case; can I claim improper representation? I believe that I can. Also, which states and counties/ cities recognize a robot as an attorney? What federal/ state/ county/ and city ordinances and laws will need to be changed for robots to be recognized as attorney in the US? Just having a robot that interprets laws is not enough in the US.

http://mic.com/articles/135693/this-robot-lawyer-can-get-you…t-for-free

It has already saved people millions of dollars.

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Seeking to “push the limits of what humans can do,” researchers at Georgia Tech have developed a wearable robotic limb that transforms drummers into three-armed cyborgs.

The remarkable thing about this wearable arm, developed at GT’s Center for Music Technology, is that it’s doing a lot more than just mirroring the movements of the drummer. It’s a “smart arm” that’s actually responding to the music, and performing in a way that compliments what the human player is doing.

The two-foot long arm monitors the music in the room, so it can improvise based on the beat and rhythm. If the drummer is playing slowly, for example, the arm will mirror the tempo.

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Proving Quantum

New research demonstrates that particles at the quantum level can in fact be seen as behaving something like billiard balls rolling along a table, and not merely as the probabilistic smears that the standard interpretation of quantum mechanics suggests. But there’s a catch — the tracks the particles follow do not always behave as one would expect from “realistic” trajectories, but often in a fashion that has been termed “surrealistic.”

In a new version of an old experiment, CIFAR Senior Fellow Aephraim Steinberg (University of Toronto) and colleagues tracked the of photons as the particles traced a path through one of two slits and onto a screen. But the researchers went further, and observed the “nonlocal” influence of another photon that the first photon had been entangled with.

The results counter a long-standing criticism of an interpretation of quantum mechanics called the De Broglie-Bohm theory. Detractors of this interpretation had faulted it for failing to explain the behaviour of realistically. For Steinberg, the results are important because they give us a way of visualizing quantum mechanics that’s just as valid as the standard interpretation, and perhaps more intuitive.

Continue reading “Researchers demonstrate ‘quantum surrealism’” | >

More news on Qubits that are surprisingly intrinsically resilient to noise.

While a classical bit found in conventional electronics exists only in binary 1 or 0 states, the more resourceful quantum bit, or ‘qubit’ is represented by a vector, pointing to a simultaneous combination of the 1 and 0 states. To fully implement a qubit, it is necessary to control the direction of this qubit’s vector, which is generally done using fine-tuned and noise-isolated procedures.

Researchers at the University of Chicago’s Institute for Molecular Engineering and the University of Konstanz have demonstrated the ability to generate a quantum logic operation, or rotation of the qubit, that — surprisingly — is intrinsically resilient to noise as well as to variations in the strength or duration of the control. Their achievement is based on a geometric concept known as the Berry phase and is implemented through entirely optical means within a single electronic spin in diamond.

Their findings were published online Feb. 15, 2016, in Nature Photonics and will appear in the March print issue. “We tend to view quantum operations as very fragile and susceptible to noise, especially when compared to conventional electronics,” remarked David Awschalom, the Liew Family Professor of Molecular Engineering and senior scientist at Argonne National Laboratory, who led the research. “In contrast, our approach shows incredible resilience to external influences and fulfills a key requirement for any practical quantum technology.”

Continue reading “Moving electrons around loops with light: A quantum device based on geometry” | >

Measuring entanglement — the amount of entanglement between states corresponds to the distance between two points on a Bloch sphere.

To do this, the scientists turned the difficult analytical problem into an easy geometrical one. They showed that, in many cases, the amount of entanglement between states corresponds to the distance between two points on a Bloch sphere, which is basically a normal 3D sphere that physicists use to model quantum states.

As the scientists explain, the traditionally difficult part of the math problem is that it requires finding the optimal decomposition of mixed states into pure states. The geometrical approach completely eliminates this requirement by reducing the many possible ways that states could decompose down to a single point on the sphere at which there is zero entanglement. The approach requires that there be only one such point, or “root,” of zero entanglement, prompting the physicists to describe the method as “one root to rule them all.”

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(Phys.org)—Researchers have designed and implemented an algorithm that solves computing problems using a strategy inspired by the way that an amoeba branches out to obtain resources. The new algorithm, called AmoebaSAT, can solve the satisfiability (SAT) problem—a difficult optimization problem with many practical applications—using orders of magnitude fewer steps than the number of steps required by one of the fastest conventional algorithms.

The researchers predict that the amoeba-inspired may offer several benefits, such as high efficiency, miniaturization, and low , that could lead to a new computing paradigm for nanoscale high-speed .

Led by Masashi Aono, Associate Principal Investigator at the Earth-Life Science Institute, Tokyo Institute of Technology, and at PRESTO, Japan Science and Technology Agency, the researchers have published a paper on the amoeba-inspired system in a recent issue of Nanotechnology.

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Overview.

What is the MMTP? The MMTP is an ambitious project, designed to radically speed up the rate of progress in the field of regenerative medicine and aging research.

The project is the brainchild of our parent organisation, The International Longevity Alliance, a nonprofit foundation for science advocacy and research. The testing and discovery of compounds and treatments to delay or stop the processes of aging is a slow affair, with very few high quality, high impact studies conducted each year.

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HYDERABAD: Telangana police and Assam police nabbed an online fraudster in Guwahati on Thursday, even as the culprit tried to open fire at the police party.

A team of Cyberabad Cyber wing police had been camping in Guwahati for the last two days to nab one Vipul, wanted in a Rs 76-lakh online fraud case. He would send emails promising to get contracts in corporate companies, but after collecting money he would cheat the aspirants. The Cyberabad police party called Vipul on the pretext of some business deal to trap him. Crime wing officials and Assam police were waiting in a car for Vipul, who arrived in a Scorpio car.

However, Vipul got alert after seeing the police party and sped away from the location. On seeing the culprit slipping from the location, police chased his car.

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