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Skyrocketing demand for boxes and packing materials during the pandemic has slashed paper production across North America, and it couldn’t have come at a worse time for retail companies.

“We’re starting to hear, ‘We’re out of paper,’” said Polly Wong, president of San Francisco-based direct-marketing firm Belardi Wong, noting that some of her clients already missed their fall advertising campaigns due to issues at the printers. Wong estimates that 100 million catalogs will not be printed or reach U.S. homes in time for the year’s biggest spending season as a result. “It kind of put our industry up in a panic.”

With some mills converting to cardboard to meet the spike in e-commerce deliveries and others shutting down altogether, more than 2.5 million metric tons of North American printing and writing paper capacity — or nearly one-fifth of 2019 levels — has come offline since the start of last year. That’s according to Kevin Mason, managing director for ERA Forest Products Research, a financial research company that specializes in paper and forest products.

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A small team of researchers from Benemérita Universidad and Universidad de las Américas Puebla, in Mexico and Université de Poitiers, in France, has found a “triple Leidenfrost effect” in dissimilar drops in a hot pan. In their paper published in the journal Physical Review Letters, the group describes a type of “bouncing” they observed with different types of drops hovering over a hot surface.

Prior research has shown that the reason drops of water zip around in a hot pan, is because water at the bottom of the drops is vaporized—thus, the drops hover like air-hockey pucks. This phenomenon has come to be known as the Leidenfrost effect. In this new effort, the researchers have found another behavior associated with the Leidenfrost effect.

The work involved dropping two types of liquid onto a hot surface and then tilting the surface to force the drops to run into each other. They wanted to know if the two drops would merge. Instead they found that sometimes one of the drops would start bouncing off of the other.

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The properties of a complex and exotic state of a quantum material can be predicted using a machine learning method created by a RIKEN researcher and a collaborator. This advance could aid the development of future quantum computers.

We have all faced the agonizing challenge of choosing between two equally good (or bad) options. This frustration is also felt by when they feel two competing forces in a special type of quantum system.

In some magnets, particle spins—visualized as the axis about which a particle rotates—are all forced to align, whereas in others they must alternate in direction. But in a small number of materials, these tendencies to align or counter-align compete, leading to so-called frustrated magnetism. This frustration means that the spin fluctuates between directions, even at absolute zero temperature where one would expect stability. This creates an exotic state of matter known as a .

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NASA scientists have issued a warning about a “Potentially Hazardous Asteroid” (PHA) that will fly close to earth in mid-December. The asteroid is larger than 90 percent of asteroids, according to Daily Record, but still smaller than some of the larger reported asteroids. Thankfully, the asteroid won’t come close enough to our planet to do any damage. Near passes like these happen somewhat frequently. But the term “near” is relative when you’re talking about the infinite vastness of outer space.

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NASA predicts that the massive asteroid will pass by Earth on December 11, just a month and a few days from now. The asteroid has been classified as 4,660 Nereus, and NASA does consider it very hazardous. The organization says that the asteroid is almost three times the size of a football pitch — roughly the size of the Eiffel tower.

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Einstein’s special theory of relativity combines space and time into one dynamic, unified entity — spacetime. But if time is connected to space, could the universe be anything but deterministic? And does that mean that the future is predestined?

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Continue reading “Is The Future Predetermined” | >

Cher sang about manipulating it while Doctor Who dramatized it. This hacker went one better and did it. Here’s how time got hacked.

During a 1961 address to the National Association of Manufacturers in New York City, John F. Kennedy said that “we must use time as a tool, not as a couch.” Fast forward fifty years, and one hacker has demonstrated exactly how to do that: by hacking time.

What is time anyway? What is time? That’s not an easy question to answer definitively.

Just go and search for a definition, and you’ll see what I mean. However, from the broader technological perspective, time depends on how we measure it: it is what those measurements tell us. So, what if those measurements, even ones from the most accurate atomic clock sources around the planet, could be manipulated?

Welcome to the world of hacking time. Welcome to the world of Adam Laurie, the lead hardware hacker with the veteran hacking team that is IBM X-Force Red. It’s worth remembering at this point that hacking is not a crime, and this story serves well to illustrate the fact.

Continue reading “Can Time Be Hacked? Here’s How One Hacker Demonstrated It Can” | >

With the potential to image fast-moving objects.

When asked what superpowers they would like to have, many say the ability to see through things. Now, there may be a camera that could give people that gift.

Developed by Northwestern Engineering researchers, the new high-resolution camera can see around corners and through human skin and even bones. It also has the potential to image fast-moving objects such as speeding cars or even the beating heart.

The relatively new research field is called non-line-of-sight (NLoS) imaging and comes with a level of resolution so high that it could even capture the tiniest capillaries at work.

“Our technology will usher in a new wave of imaging capabilities,” said in a statement the McCormick School of Engineering’s Florian Willomitzer, first author of the study.

Continue reading “A New Camera Can See Through Almost Anything, Including Human Tissue and Bones” | >