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Five years ago, Yandex was just a search engine trying hard to fend off Google in its local market. Since then it has bought Uber Technologies Inc.’s Russia business, built its voice assistant into cars and home appliances, and more than doubled its revenue. Yandex now claims to have 108 million monthly users, which is about 75% of Russia’s population.

I’m woken up by an alarm on a home speaker designed by Yandex NV. I go to work in Yandex taxi listening to the company’s music-streaming service. My lunch is delivered by Yandex. Eats. I buy sneakers on the company’s Beru marketplace, and catch up on a series on its Kinopoisk smart-TV app in the evening.

You get the picture. Not so long ago, most decisions in Russia were decided by the state. Now, Russia’s largest tech company can cater to your every need.

Continue reading “How Russia’s Citizens Can’t Escape Their Largest Tech Company” »

Mechanical systems facilitate the development of a hybrid quantum technology comprising electrical, optical, atomic and acoustic degrees of freedom, and entanglement is essential to realize quantum-enabled devices. Continuous-variable entangled fields—known as Einstein–Podolsky–Rosen (EPR) states—are spatially separated two-mode squeezed states that can be used for quantum teleportation and quantum communication. In the optical domain, EPR states are typically generated using nondegenerate optical amplifiers, and at microwave frequencies Josephson circuits can serve as a nonlinear medium^4,5,6. An outstanding goal is to deterministically generate and distribute entangled states with a mechanical oscillator, which requires a carefully arranged balance between excitation, cooling and dissipation in an ultralow noise environment. Here we observe stationary emission of path-entangled microwave radiation from a parametrically driven 30-micrometre-long silicon nanostring oscillator, squeezing the joint field operators of two thermal modes by 3.40 decibels below the vacuum level. The motion of this micromechanical system correlates up to 50 photons per second per hertz, giving rise to a quantum discord that is robust with respect to microwave noise. Such generalized quantum correlations of separable states are important for quantum-enhanced detection and provide direct evidence of the non-classical nature of the mechanical oscillator without directly measuring its state. This noninvasive measurement scheme allows to infer information about otherwise inaccessible objects, with potential implications for sensing, open-system dynamics and fundamental tests of quantum gravity. In the future, similar on-chip devices could be used to entangle subsystems on very different energy scales, such as microwave and optical photons.

Sydney — Post-mortem examinations have found a degenerative brain disease linked to repeated blows to the head in two elite Australian rugby league players, the first cases found in the sport, researchers said on Thursday.

The researchers said the players both had chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), which has been widely diagnosed among former US National Football League (NFL) players but is little studied elsewhere.

The Sydney-based study said the condition, once known as ‘punch drunk syndrome’ occurred when repeated brain trauma led to a long-term decline in cognitive function.

The story of the RD-180, the big rocket engine that could.

Epicentre of quake at shallow depth of 14km.

Long-dormant bacteria and viruses, trapped in ice and permafrost for centuries, are reviving as Earth’s climate warms.

During the series of tests at the High Energy Laser System Test Facility at White Sands Missile Range, the Demonstrator Laser Weapon System (DLWS), acting as a ground-based test surrogate for the SHiELD system, was able to engage and shoot down several air launched missiles in flight. The demonstration is an important step of the SHiELD system development, by validating laser effectiveness against the target missiles. The final SHiELD system, however, will be much smaller and lighter, as well as ruggedized for an airborne environment.

https://www.wpafb.af.mil/News/Art/igphoto/2002127367/

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SpaceX launched its Falcon Heavy rocket in the early hours of Tuesday morning, delivering 24 satellites into orbit and making many of its clients very happy in the process. The company nailed the landing of both side boosters, but the center core booster narrowly missed its landing and splashed down in the ocean instead.

In the hours following the launch, SpaceX boss Elon Musk weighed in on the unfortunate fate of the core booster, offering a bit of an explanation as to why it missed its mark.