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Jupiter has captured an icy comet from the outer solar system in a bizarre orbit that will bring it back to within 3 million kilometers of the giant planet in 2063. The only Sun-orbiting objects known to come closer were the fragments of Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9, which plunged into the Jovian cloud deck in July 1994.

A year ago, NASA’s asteroid-hunting ATLAS project in Hawai’i discovered 2019 LD2, and further observations showed it was a comet. New observations this spring confirmed it as a periodic comet and placed its orbit near Jupiter, leading Larry Denneau (University of Hawaii) to announce May 20th that P/2019 LD2 was the first comet among the Trojans. This family of several thousand asteroids shares Jupiter’s orbit but stays steady at about 60° ahead or behind of the planet. The discovery of a comet among Trojan asteroids was surprising because most of them are thought to have been captured in the solar system’s early years — any ices ought to have evaporated long ago.

However, when amateur astronomer Sam Deen used software on the Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s solar-system dynamics website to calculate the object’s orbit, he found P/2019 LD2 recently had a close encounter with Jupiter that left its orbit unstable. The model showed that the comet had likely been a Centaur, part of a family of outer solar system asteroids, with an orbit reaching out to Saturn. Then, on February 17, 2017, it passed about 14 million kilometers from Jupiter, an encounter that sent the comet on a wild ride and inserted it into an odd Jupiter-like orbit.

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As far back as 2015, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) began asking encryption experts to submit their candidate algorithms for testing against quantum computing’s expected capabilities — so this is an issue that has already been front of mind for security professionals and organizations. But even with an organization like NIST leading the way, working through all those algorithms to judge their suitability to the task will take time. Thankfully, others within the scientific community have also risen to the challenge and joined in the research.

It will take years for a consensus to coalesce around the most suitable algorithms. That’s similar to the amount of time it took ECC encryption to gain mainstream acceptance, which seems like a fair comparison. The good news is that such a timeframe still should leave the opportunity to arrive at — and widely deploy — quantum-resistant cryptography before quantum computers capable of sustaining the number of qubits necessary to seriously threaten RSA and ECC encryption become available to potential attackers.

The ongoing development of quantum-resistant encryption will be fascinating to watch, and security professionals will be sure to keep a close eye on which algorithms and encryption strategies ultimately prove most effective. The world of encryption is changing more quickly than ever, and it has never been more important for the organizations dependent on that encryption to ensure that their partners are staying ahead of the curve.

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I’ve just been reading about reaction time and intelligence. That got me wondering if IQ could be calculated by comparing reaction time age to chronological age at https://www.justpark.com/creative/reaction-time-test/. The average reaction time age I got, with 10 attempts, was 38(rounded to nearest whole number). My actual age is 63.

Take this simple test, and we’ll gauge your age based on your reaction time.

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Most of us are familiar with the four classical states of matter – solid, liquid, gas and plasma – but there’s a whole world of exotic states out there. Now, physicists at Radboud and Uppsala Universities have identified a new one named “self-induced spin glass,” which could be used to build new artificial intelligence platforms.

Magnetism usually arises when the electrons in the atoms of a material all spin in the same direction. But in a spin glass, the atomic magnets have no order, all spinning in random directions. The “glass” part of the name comes from the similarities to how atoms are arranged amorphously in a piece of regular old glass.

So far spin glasses have only been found in certain alloys, but now, researchers have discovered that the state occurs naturally in the pure element neodymium. To differentiate it from the alloy version, they’ve called the new state self-induced spin glass.

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The strongest permanent magnets today contain a mix of the elements neodymium and iron. However, neodymium on its own does not behave like any known magnet, confounding researchers for more than half a century. Physicists at Radboud University and Uppsala University have shown that neodymium behaves like a so-called ‘self-induced spin glass,’ meaning that it is composed of a rippled sea of many tiny whirling magnets circulating at different speeds and constantly evolving over time. Understanding this new type of magnetic behavior refines our understanding of elements on the periodic table and eventually could pave the way for new materials for artificial intelligence. The results will be published in Science on May 29, 2020.

“In a jar of honey, you may think that the once clear areas that turned milky yellow have gone bad. But rather, the jar of honey starts to crystallize. That’s how you could perceive the ‘aging’ process in neodymium.” Alexander Khajetoorians, professor in Scanning probe microscopy, together with professor Mikhail Katsnelson and assistant professor Daniel Wegner, found that the material neodymium behaves in a complex magnetic way that no one ever saw before in an element on the periodic table.

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Anyons – the particle-like collective excitations that can exist in some 2D materials – tend to bunch together in a two-dimensional conductor. This behaviour, which has now been observed by physicists at the Laboratory of Physics of the ENS (LPENS) and the Center for Nanoscience and Nanotechnologies (C2N) in Paris, France, is completely different to that of electrons, and experimental evidence for it is important both for fundamental physics and for the potential future development of devices based on these exotic quasiparticles.

The everyday three-dimensional world contains two types of elementary particles: fermions and bosons. Fermions, such as electrons, obey the Pauli exclusion principle, meaning that no two fermions can ever occupy the same quantum state. This tendency to flee from each other is at the heart of a wide range of phenomena, including the electronic structure of atoms, the stability of neutron stars and the difference between metals (which conduct electric current) and insulators (which don’t). Bosons such as photons, on the other hand, tend to bunch together – a gregarious behaviour that gives rise to superfluid and superconducting behaviours when many bosons exist in the same quantum state.

Within the framework of quantum mechanics, fermions also differ from bosons in that they have antisymmetric wavefunctions – meaning that a minus sign (that is, a phase φ equal to π) is introduced whenever two fermions are exchanged. Bosons, in contrast, have symmetric wavefunctions that remain the same when two bosons are exchanged (φ=0).

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