Lifeboat Foundation

NASA lit a fire in a used Cygnus cargo spacecraft to better prepare for accidents in space.

A survey of millions of people in more than 200 countries shows ethical decisions are never simple.

AMERICAN telecom customers experienced widespread cellphone outages during what was believed to be the largest cyberattack in US history.

Thousands of T-Mobile, Metro by T-Mobile, AT&T, Verizon, and Sprint customers all reported outages in areas including Florida, Georgia, New York, and California on Monday afternoon.

The disruptions were part of a large-scale distributed denial-of-service, or DDoS, attack meant to overwhelm an online service with multiple traffic sources to render it unusable, according to Pop Culture.

Researchers from Germany and the US have discovered an exoplanet less than twice the size of Earth orbiting at about the same distance from its star, making it the closest analog to the Earth-sun system known so far.

Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken are the only two people who know what it’s like to fly on a SpaceX rocket. On Friday, the pair revealed some more details about how it feels, and why the Falcon 9’s design changes things.

London (AP) — The pilot of a fighter jet that crashed into the North Sea, off the coast of northern England, has been found dead, the U.S. Air Force said Monday.

In a statement hours after the crash, it said “the pilot of the downed F-15C Eagle from the 48th Fighter Wing has been located, and confirmed deceased.”

It said this is a “tragic loss” for the 48th Fighter wing community and sent condolences to the pilot’s family.

An exotic physical phenomenon known as a Kohn anomaly has been found for the first time in an unexpected type of material by researchers at MIT and elsewhere. They say the finding could provide new insights into certain fundamental processes that help determine why metals and other materials display the complex electronic properties that underlie much of today’s technology.

The way electrons interact with phonons—which are essentially vibrations passing through a crystalline material —determines the physical processes that take place inside many electronic devices. These interactions affect the way metals resist electric current, the temperature at which some materials suddenly become superconductors, and the very low temperature requirements for quantum computers, among many other processes.

But electron-phonon interactions have been difficult to study in detail because they are generally very weak. The new study has found a new, stronger kind of unusual electron-phonon interaction: The researchers induced a Kohn anomaly, which was previously thought to exist only in metals, in an exotic material called a topological Weyl semimetal. The finding could help shed light on important aspects of the complex interplay between electrons and phonons, they say.

A US military jet has crashed into the North Sea off the coast of Yorkshire.

A major operation is underway after the F-15 fighter jet came down near Flamborough Head in East Yorkshire, south of Scarborough. The pilot is yet to be found.

Continue reading “BREAKING: US F-15 fighter jet crashes into North Sea off Yorkshire Coast” »

Quantum key distribution (QKD)^1,2,3 is a theoretically secure way of sharing secret keys between remote users. It has been demonstrated in a laboratory over a coiled optical fibre up to 404 kilometres long^4,5,6,7. In the field, point-to-point QKD has been achieved from a satellite to a ground station up to 1,200 kilometres away^8,9,10. However, real-world QKD-based cryptography targets physically separated users on the Earth, for which the maximum distance has been about 100 kilometres^11,12. The use of trusted relays can extend these distances from across a typical metropolitan area^13,14,15,16 to intercity¹⁷ and even intercontinental distances¹⁸. However, relays pose security risks, which can be avoided by using entanglement-based QKD, which has inherent source-independent security^19,20. Long-distance entanglement distribution can be realized using quantum repeaters²¹, but the related technology is still immature for practical implementations²². The obvious alternative for extending the range of quantum communication without compromising its security is satellite-based QKD, but so far satellite-based entanglement distribution has not been efficient²³ enough to support QKD. Here we demonstrate entanglement-based QKD between two ground stations separated by 1,120 kilometres at a finite secret-key rate of 0.12 bits per second, without the need for trusted relays. Entangled photon pairs were distributed via two bidirectional downlinks from the Micius satellite to two ground observatories in Delingha and Nanshan in China. The development of a high-efficiency telescope and follow-up optics crucially improved the link efficiency. The generated keys are secure for realistic devices, because our ground receivers were carefully designed to guarantee fair sampling and immunity to all known side channels^24,25. Our method not only increases the secure distance on the ground tenfold but also increases the practical security of QKD to an unprecedented level.