The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is looking to take its own swing at an encrypted messaging app.
April 22, 2016.
The Defense Information Systems Agency, like many other federal agencies and the Defense Department as a whole, is bullish on embracing the small, innovative startups popping up in private sector, particularly Silicon Valley. But finding a way to integrate those fast-moving startups into DISA’s rules-encumbered procurement process remains a major hurdle.
The creative acronym – SILMARILS – comes from “Lord of the Ring’s” magical lore. IARPA’s goals for the project are anything but fictional.
Current technologies for detecting narcotics, explosives and other dangerous chemicals requires physical contact between humans and X-ray-based machinery like those stationed within major airports that scan suitcases and luggage.
In other cases, a human must swab samples of a substance and run them through a similar machine, which is time and labor consuming and risky.
Pretty cool!
As Brain-Computer Interface is rapidly developed worldwide, mind-controlled drones turn into sports and weapons of today.
Florida University hosted a sporting event that might give a start to a new generation of high-technology sport involving latest trademark inventions of 21st century — drones and consumer-grade brain-computer interface (BCI).
Drones have become a trademark of 21st century, since development of low-weight, high-capacity batteries and small sophisticated electronic controllers allowed to construct fairly cheap yet very easy to control flying device.
Bringing awareness on a syndrome that makes it hard for families and patients trying to have genetic testing on cancers in their families. I first came across this syndrome with a researcher at Swedish Medical Center’s Cancer Research Group. Some families can have so many various cancers that genetic testing is extremely costly to patients and may not be able to pinpoint the mutation due to this syndrome.
Yet misdiagnosis remains an ongoing challenge, and a recent international study involving more than 100 countries and nearly 2000 patients revealed the average case takes between 5 and 9 years to properly diagnose after the first symptoms appear, and the average patient may see five or six doctors, noted Richard R.P. Warner, MD, in an interview with Oncology Nursing News.
“You can’t detect it, if you don’t suspect it,” said Warner, who directs the Center for Carcinoid and Neuroendocrine Tumors at Mount Sinai Hospital. Most doctors will only see one or two cases in their lifetime, and symptoms of NETs, like diarrhea and recurrent episodes of flushing, are associated with other, more commonly seen conditions.
He added that to complicate matters even further, “no two samples of tumors are exactly identical.” The treatment has to be customized for each case and depends on where the tumor is located and how much it has spread.
Neutron scattering and computational modeling have revealed unique and unexpected behavior of water molecules under extreme confinement that is unmatched by any known gas, liquid or solid states.
In a paper published in Physical Review Letters, researchers at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory describe a new tunneling state of water molecules confined in hexagonal ultra-small channels — 5 angstrom across — of the mineral beryl. An angstrom is 1/10-billionth of a meter, and individual atoms are typically about 1 angstrom in diameter.
The discovery, made possible with experiments at ORNL’s Spallation Neutron Source and the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in the United Kingdom, demonstrates features of water under ultra confinement in rocks, soil and cell walls, which scientists predict will be of interest across many disciplines.
Interesting — data compression algorithm can be applied to detect Quantum Entanglement.
The next time you archive some files and compress them, you might think about the process a little differently. Researchers at the National University of Singapore have discovered a common compression algorithm can be used to detect quantum entanglement. What makes this discovery so interesting is that it does not rely on heavily on an assumption that the measured particles are independent and identically distributed.
If you measure the property of a particle and then measure the same property of another particle, in classical mechanics there is no reason for them to match but pure chance. In quantum mechanics though, the two particles can be entangled, such that the results will match each other. This follows from Bell’s theorem, which is applied to test if particles are in fact entangled. The catch is that the theorem is derived for testing pairs of particles, but many pairs have to be measured and the probabilities they are entangled calculated. This is where the researchers’ discovery comes into play because instead of calculating probabilities, the measurements can be fed into the open-source Lempel-Ziv-Markov chain algorithm (LZMA) to get their normalized compression difference. Compression algorithms work by finding patterns in data and encoding them more efficiently, and in this case they also find correlations from quantum entanglement.
