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Accenture confirms breach after hacker offers stolen data for sale

IT services giant Accenture has confirmed it suffered a security breach after a threat actor claimed to have stolen 35 GB of source code and other data from the company.

“We are aware of this isolated matter, and we have remediated its source. There is no impact to Accenture operations and service delivery,” Accenture told BleepingComputer.

Accenture is a global professional services company that provides consulting, technology, cloud, engineering, and managed services to businesses and governments worldwide.

Steering light in a flash: New chip redirects light beams in less than a trillionth of a second

Light can carry enormous amounts of information at extreme speeds, making photonic technologies promising for the development of faster communications, more powerful computing systems and more sensitive sensors. But for light to be useful for these purposes, engineers need to be able to control where it goes and redirect it quickly. A new device built by Caltech researchers uses a beam of light to steer another to a different angle in just 74 femtoseconds (74 quadrillionths of a second). That’s about the time it takes light to travel the width of a human hair.

Steering light with light is very challenging because light typically interacts very weakly with matter. Using optical metasurfaces (ultrathin carefully nanoengineered sheets), we can up the interaction strength to make this possible with much higher efficiency,” says Harry Atwater, the Howard Hughes Professor of Applied Physics and Materials Science and the Otis Booth Leadership Chair of the Division of Engineering and Applied Science at Caltech.

The team describes the work in a paper published in the journal Nature Nanotechnology. The paper’s lead author, Claudio Hail, completed the work as a postdoctoral scholar in Atwater’s lab at Caltech and is now an assistant professor of mechanical engineering at UC Berkeley.

AI just supercharged the race to find room temperature superconductors

Scientists have combined machine learning with quantum physics to discover two new superconductors and create a much faster way to search for many more. The technique could bring researchers significantly closer to the long-sought goal of a room-temperature superconductor.

Scientists just measured the smallest possible contacts for future computer chips

The rise of AI has created an almost insatiable appetite for computing power. Training and running AI systems requires vast numbers of transistors, and engineers are now racing to pack more of them onto every chip. With their existing designs, however, silicon transistors are rapidly running up against physical limits on how small they can get.

Through new research published in Nature, a team led by Ya-Ping Chiu at National Taiwan University has uncovered new details about next-generation transistors that could help push past these limits.

Scientists discover new method of defense against solar storms to help protect Earth

A recent study is shedding light on how we handle geomagnetic storms, offering a way to reduce their severity.

Experts at Advancing Earth and Space Sciences (AGU) have dug into the essentials of solar storms and how they can affect our planet.

Solar storms occur when the sun creates an entangled mess of magnetic fields, similar to a messy head of hair after a long night of sleep.

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