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Pair accused of stealing battery manufacturing secrets from Tesla and starting their own company

Two men are accused of starting a business in China using battery manufacturing technology pilfered from Tesla and trying to sell the proprietary information, federal prosecutors in New York said Tuesday.

Klaus Pflugbeil, 58, a Canadian citizen who lives in Ningbo, China, was arrested Tuesday morning on Long Island, where he thought he was going to meet with businessmen to negotiate a sale price for the information, federal authorities said. Instead, the businessmen were undercover federal agents.

The other man named in the criminal complaint is Yilong Shao, 47, also of Ningbo. He remains at large. They are charged with conspiracy to transmit trade secrets, which carries up to 10 years in prison if convicted.

Introducing Floorlocator, a system that enhances indoor navigation

Indoor positioning is transforming with applications demanding precise location tracking. Traditional methods, including fingerprinting and sensor-based techniques, though widely used, face significant drawbacks, such as the need for extensive training data, poor scalability, and reliance on additional sensor information. Recent advancements have sought to leverage deep learning, yet issues such as low scalability and high computational costs remain unaddressed.

Social bonding gets people on the same wavelength, neural synchronization study suggests

When small hierarchical groups bond, neural activity between leaders and followers aligns, promoting quicker and more frequent communication, according to a study published on March 19 in the open-access journal PLOS Biology by Jun Ni from Beijing Normal University, China, and colleagues.

Social groups are often organized hierarchically, where status differences and bonds between members shape the group’s dynamic. To better understand how bonding influences communication within hierarchical groups and which are involved in these processes, the researchers recorded 176 three-person groups of human participants (who had never met before) while they communicated with each other, sitting face-to-face in a triangle.

Participants wore caps with fNIRS (functional near-infrared spectroscopy) electrodes to non-invasively measure brain activity while they communicated with their .

Quantum Computing Breakthrough: Scientists Develop New Photonic Approach That Works at Room Temperature

Significant advancements have been made in quantum computing, with major international companies like Google and IBM now providing quantum computing services via the cloud. Nevertheless, quantum computers are not yet capable of addressing issues that arise when conventional computers hit their performance ceilings. This limitation is primarily the availability of qubits or quantum bits, i.e., the basic units of quantum information, is still insufficient.

One of the reasons for this is that bare qubits are not of immediate use for running a quantum algorithm. While the binary bits of customary computers store information in the form of fixed values of either 0 or 1, qubits can represent 0 and 1 at one and the same time, bringing probability as to their value into play. This is known as quantum superposition.

This makes them very susceptible to external influences, which means that the information they store can readily be lost. In order to ensure that quantum computers supply reliable results, it is necessary to generate a genuine entanglement to join together several physical qubits to form a logical qubit. Should one of these physical qubits fail, the other qubits will retain the information. However, one of the main difficulties preventing the development of functional quantum computers is the large number of physical qubits required.