Lifeboat Foundation

Launched Aug. 10 1966, Lunar Orbiter 1 was a mission that would set the mold for future planetary science missions thanks to a complicated camera system.

Quartz is a guide to the new global economy for people in business who are excited by change. We cover business, economics, markets, finance, technology, science, design, and fashion.

The mechanism behind leopard spots and zebra stripes also appears to explain the patterned growth of a bismuth crystal, extending Alan Turing’s 1,952 idea to the atomic scale.

The NIH-led Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies® (BRAIN) Initiative continues to teach us about the world’s most sophisticated computer: the human brain. This striking image offers a spectacular case in point, thanks to a new tool called Visual Neuronal Dynamics (VND).

VND is not a camera. It is a powerful software program that can display, animate, and analyze models of neurons and their connections, or networks, using 3D graphics. What you’re seeing in this colorful image is a strip of mouse primary visual cortex, the area in the brain where incoming sensory information gets processed into vision.

This strip contains more than 230,000 neurons of 17 different cell types. Long and spindly excitatory neurons that point upward (purple, blue, red, orange) are intermingled with short and stubby inhibitory neurons (green, cyan, magenta). Slicing through the neuronal landscape is a neuropixels probe (silver): a tiny flexible silicon detector that can record brain activity in awake animals [1].

The goal is to pre-empt the fall of traditional cryptography likely to follow the quantum revolution.

A research team with the Technical University of Munich (TUM) have designed a quantum cryptography chip aimed at the security demands of the quantum computing revolution. The RISC-V chip, which was already sent to manufacturing according to the researchers’ design, aims to be a working proof of concept for protecting systems against quantum computing-based attacks, which are generally considered to be one of the most important security frontiers of the future. Alongside the RISC-V based hardware implementation (which includes ASIC and FPGA structures), the researchers also developed 29 additional instructions for the architecture that enable the required workloads to be correctly processed on-chip.

Traditional cryptography is generally based on both the sender and receiver holding the same “unlock” key for any given encrypted data. These keys (which may include letters, digits, and special characters) have increased in length as time passes, accompanying increases in hardware performance available in the general computing sphere. The idea is to thwart brute-force attacks that would simply try out enough character combinations that would allow them to eventually reach the correct answer that unlocks the encrypted messages’ contents. Given a big enough size of the security key (and also depending on the encryption protocol used), it’s virtually impossible for current hardware — even with the extreme parallelization enabled by the most recent GPUs — to try out enough combinations in a short enough timeframe to make the effort worthwhile.

Continue reading “Researchers Develop RISC-V Chip for Quantum-Resistant Encryption” »

Circa 2014

A computer program called Eugene Goostman, which simulates a 13-year-old Ukrainian boy, is said to have passed the Turing test at an event organised by the University of Reading.

According to theory, if you smash two photons together hard enough, you can generate matter: an electron-positron pair, the conversion of light to mass as per Einstein’s theory of special relativity.

It’s called the Breit-Wheeler process, first laid out by Gregory Breit and John A. Wheeler in 1,934 and we have very good reason to believe it would work.

But direct observation of the pure phenomenon involving just two photons has remained elusive, mainly because the photons need to be extremely energetic (i.e. gamma rays) and we don’t have the technology yet to build a gamma-ray laser.

The reconnection of single-looped field lines in the Sun’s corona can create tension forces strong enough to hurl material into space, according to a new simulation.

Effective COVID-19 vaccines arrived in record time. That success story, years in the making, offers lessons that could help prevent future outbreaks, including pandemic influenza.

This article was produced for Sabin Vaccine Institute by Scientific American Custom Media, a division separate from the magazine’s board of editors.