A photon is immortal if it does not meet some matter on its way.

 

Light (photons) is made of energy that propagates as spherical waves. Energy keeps on changing from one form into the other as energy follows entropy -from order to disorder. All objects in the universe are just doing this constantly. Light or photons last for a long time. But they must have a life span. They do not exist eternally. Once emitted from a source, light (photons) immediately become orphan. The source of light keeps on moving away from the location it emitted light(photons). This is true for all lights (photons). Light follows the same laws followed by sound waves which are also made of energy. Values of wave length, frequency and intensity are fixed by the source emitting light. They are property of the source only. After traveling a long distance away from the source, values of these parameters change. Wave length gets larger, frequency and intensity get less. If an observer moves towards the source from this location, he will experience blue shift. If he moves away from the source, he will experience red shift. The speed of light is independent of the speed of the source emitting light. But it is not independent of the speed of the observer. The speed of light is not constant through out the universe. Light (photons) get tired after a long time and get absorbed by objects in the universe. Light (photons) begin their journey from atoms, and end their existence into atoms. Nothing in the universe can restore values of wave length, frequency and intensity which has been changed from values set by the source.

The notion of the speed of light as the cosmic speed limit is based on the assumption that particles of light, called photons, have no mass. But astrophysical observations cannot rule out the slim chance that photons do have a tiny bit of mass—a prospect with wide ramifications in physics. For instance, if photons weigh nothing at all, they would be completely stable and could theoretically last forever. But if they do have a little mass, they could eventually decay into lighter particles. Now, by studying ancient light radiated shortly after the big bang, a physicist has calculated the minimum lifetime of photons, showing that they must live for at least one billion billion years, if not forever.

That lifetime may sound like an eternity, but to a photon traveling at light speed, it passes in a relative blink. Because of the time-dilation effect predicted by Einstein's special theory of relativity, a billion billion years on Earth feels like only three years to a photon, because it's traveling so fast.

If physicists ever do discover that photons have nonzero mass, and therefore limited lifetimes, then “the notion of light-speed obviously wouldn't make much sense anymore" there would still be an absolute limit on velocities, but the photons would have to obey that law, too, and travel below the speed of light." Photons’ speed would then depend on their wavelengths, and blue light would travel faster than red light. Photons released simultaneously from distant stars would arrive at Earth at different times, depending on their wavelengths.

A photon with mass would also necessitate modifications to the Standard Model of particle physics (which posits a massless photon), the Maxwell equations that describe electromagnetic waves and fields (photons are the carrier particles for electromagnetic force) and the laws describing interactions between charged particles. Because of this latter effect, observations of the sun’s magnetic field have already proved that the photon, if it weighs anything at all, must be extremely light. The current experimental limit on the possible mass of the photon is 10-54 kilogram.

To find the limit on the photonic lifetime, Heeck analyzed observations of the cosmic microwave background radiation—light pervading the universe that dates from a few hundred thousand years after the big bang—gleaned from the now defunct NASA's Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE) satellite, launched in 1989. This light fits a very specific pattern called ''blackbody radiation'', that tells scientists how intense the light should be, based on its wavelength. If any photons were decaying as they traveled across the universe, however, COBE would see less low-energy light than predicted by the blackbody radiation law, because red light would be expected to decay sooner than blue light. If the photons come from very far away, say from the beginning of the universe, then they might have had enough time to decay on their way here.

But according to COBE's measurements, the cosmic microwave background appears to behave like a perfect blackbody. No low-energy light seems to be missing, indicating that very few photons, if any, have decayed since the big bang some 13.7 billion years ago. This analysis enabled Heeck to calculate that the minimum lifetime of a photon is 1018, or one billion billion, years.

IBM announces launch 127-Qubit ''Eagle'' quantum processor.

 

Over the past decade, several big-name technology companies have been working hard to develop a truly functional and useful quantum computer. Such efforts have fallen into two main camps—those attempting to create a quantum computer using entangled photons and those using superconducting materials.

IBM has announced the development of a 127-qubit quantum processor. The current processor has been named Eagle. As part of its announcement, IBM also announced that computers running the new processor will be made available to IBM Quantum Network members and that the company has plans for launching two other, presumably more powerful processors it has named Osprey and Condor over the next two years.

Over the past decade, several big-name technology companies have been working hard to develop a truly functional and useful quantum computer. Such efforts have fallen into two main camps—those attempting to create a quantum computer using entangled photons and those using superconducting materials. The processors announced by IBM are all based on superconducting materials.

The announcement by IBM marks a record for superconducting quantum computers—the prior record for number of qubits was 64. The new mark of 127 suggests a massive increase in computing power, though IBM has yet to make public any data regarding the performance of its new machines. But that has not stopped the company from claiming that it has created the world's largest superconductor-based quantum computer. Representatives for the company have also claimed that the Eagle is the first processor that cannot be simulated on a traditional supercomputer. They herald its development as a major step toward the development and use of quantum computers that will be able to not only outperform classical computers but tackle some problems that would take traditional computers thousands of years to process.

The Eagle processor was built using a new technique—one that has qubit control components placed in a multiple physical layer architecture, with the qubits held in a separate layer. IBM says such an arrangement helps with stability. The company also says the same design will be used for both Osprey and Condor—the former will have 433 qubits and the latter 1121. The company is also suggesting that with the delivery of Condor, in 2023, the company will be delivering a machine with quantum advantage.

We can do this today.

 

Quantum cryptography is one of the best solutions  in theory, the laws of physics make a network linked by quantum connections unhackable. In practice, there is a big problem: quantum key distribution only works over relatively short distances. Photons, which are used for these transmissions, get scattered or absorbed along the route. Record distances for quantum key distribution so far have been 421km (in 2018), and a Chinese research group last year took this to 509km.

Terra Quantum, the Swiss quantum technology company, is today announcing a breakthrough in quantum cryptography with a technology that allows quantum cryptography keys to be transmitted over a distance of more than 40,000km — the circumference of the Earth.

It blows all previous quantum cryptography distance records out of the water with an almost 100x improvement and potentially solves the biggest problem preventing quantum cryptography from becoming practically usable.

The world faces a huge threat in the next few years when quantum computers become powerful enough to break the cryptography of conventional computers. Everything from government communications to the contents of Bitcoin wallets would become vulnerable to hackers.

Hackers and hostile governments are likely to be among the first to harness quantum computers for code-breaking and the computer industry is becoming acutely aware that it needs to find ways to protect itself.

In order to send a secure quantum key between, say, London and New York (5,567km) to secure a stock market trade, you’d need to put multiple repeaters into the line to boost the signal. Each one of these repeaters becomes a potential point of vulnerability, where the signal can be intercepted. So quantum cryptography developers have been trying to find ways to do without these.

One big advantage of Terra Quantum’s solution is that it can run inside a standard optical fibre line, already in use today in telecoms networks.The technique is based around the second law of thermodynamics — the one that states that entropy always increases.

We can know exactly how much of the signal is being intercepted and can tweak it to make sure that the eavesdropper only gets a few photons.

The technology is based on measuring the loss of photons over a particular line and carefully controlling the transmitted signal so that the amount of signal that an eavesdropper on the line is never enough to be able to extract meaningful information.

This is not something for the future, we can do this today.

This Giant Vibrator Could Be the Future of cheap electricity.

 

The Spanish company ''Vortex Bladeless'' has developed a model for bladeless wind turbines. The company says these giant rods can generate clean power and without the harmful environmental effects of traditional windmill-style turbines that can kill birds.They call it a vortex-induced, vibration-resonant wind generator.

The bladeless turbine design includes a lightweight cylinder that is fixed vertically with an elastic rod. But according to the company, they’re actually oscillating back and forth and generating electricity from the vibration.

Vortex Bladeless says their new technology would allow us to capture wind power even without strong winds present since the generators create their own movement.The organization also says their turbines are super quiet, creating noise at such a low level that it’s virtually undetectable to the human ear. They’re also slightly more inconspicuous than traditional turbines.

The company says its turbines could fill the holes in existing wind power plans. The model is suitable for urban and residential locations where people might want to generate clean power locally, but where large-scale wind farms would take up too much space and be too disruptive. It’s a small-scale wind option. A personal one. One you may even keep in your bedside table drawer.

Vortex Bladeless hopes to scale up its plans, creating versions that are 450 feet (140 meters) tall with a power capacity to generate 1 megawatt of electricity each. That’s enough to power 400 to 900 homes.

Right now, the company has only done field tests of the smaller models. It is currently looking for an industrial partner to make its wild fantasy into a reality.

The company have a whole scientific paper on the study behind this, and it shows some promise. Norway’s state oil company ''Equinor'' dubbed it one of the 10 most exciting energy startups earlier this year.

Black holes may be 3D ‘holograms.

 

Black holes could be like a hologram, where all the information is amassed in a two-dimensional surface able to reproduce a three-dimensional image. In this way, these cosmic bodies, as affirmed by quantum theories, could be incredibly complex and concentrate an enormous amount of information inside themselves, as the largest hard disk that exists in nature, in two dimensions.

For scientists, black holes are a big question mark for many reasons.  According to the first theory, they would be simple bodies without information. According to the other they would be "the most complex existing systems" because they would be characterised by an enormous "entropy", which measures the complexity of a system, and consequently would have a lot of information inside them.

To study black holes, the two authors of the research, Francesco Benini (SISSA Professor, ICTP scientific consultant and INFN researcher) and Paolo Milan (SISSA and INFN researcher), used an idea almost 30 years old, but still surprising, called the "holographic principle". The researchers say: "This revolutionary and somewhat counterintuitive principle proposes that the behavior of gravity in a given region of space can alternatively be described in terms of a different system, which lives only along the edge of that region and therefore in a one less dimension. And, more importantly, in this alternative description (called holographic) gravity does not appear explicitly. In other words, the holographic principle allows us to describe gravity using a language that does not contain gravity, thus avoiding friction with quantum mechanics".

What Benini and Milan have done "is apply the theory of the holographic principle to black holes. In this way, their mysterious thermodynamic properties have become more understandable: focusing on predicting that these bodies have a great entropy and observing them in terms of quantum mechanics, you can describe them just like a hologram: they have two dimensions, in which gravity disappears, but they reproduce an object in three dimensions".

"This study," explain the two scientists, "is only the first step towards a deeper understanding of these cosmic bodies and of the properties that characterise them when quantum mechanics crosses with general relativity. Everything is more important now at a time when observations in astrophysics are experiencing an incredible development. Just think of the observation of gravitational waves from the fusion of black holes result of the collaboration between LIGO and Virgo or, indeed, that of the black hole made by the Event Horizon Telescope that produced this extraordinary image. In the near future, we may be able to test our theoretical predictions regarding quantum gravity, such as those made in this study, by observation. And this, from a scientific point of view, would be something absolutely exceptional".

In one strict sense, it mean little. The same laws of physics you've been living with for your entire life would seem to remain exactly the same. Your house, dog, car, and body would keep appearing as three-dimensional objects, just like they always have.

But in a deeper sense, this discovery would revolutionize our existence on a profound level.

It doesn't matter much for your day-to-day life that the universe was formed 13.8 billion years in a sudden, violent expansion from a single point of matter. But the discovery of the Big Bang is instrumental for our current understanding of the history of the universe and our place within the cosmos.

Likewise, the bizarre principles of quantum mechanics — like entanglement, in which two distant particles somehow affect each other — don't really change your daily life either. You can't see atoms and don't notice them doing this. But these principles are another basic truth that tells us something utterly unexpected about the fundamental nature of the universe.

Proving the holographic principle would be much the same. Living our normal lives, we probably won't think much about the peculiar, counterintuitive fact that we live in a hologram. But the discovery would serve as an important step toward fully understanding the laws of physics — which dictate every action you've ever taken.

Biological computing and DNA-RNA.

Researchers have been trying to develop molecular machines for the past decade.

What if in the many DNA repeat elements lay the foundation for building a novel type of biocomputer? This approach would enable calculations performed with self-renewing wetware rather than stone-cold hardware, opening the door to logic circuits based on DNA that flips from one state to another, analogous to the way silicon switches "on" and "off".

RNA is the cell’s de facto translator: like a game of telephone, RNA takes DNA’s genetic code to a cellular factory called ribosomes. There, the cell makes proteins based on RNA’s message.

But RNA isn’t just a middleman. It controls what proteins are formed. Because proteins wiz around the cell completing all sorts of important processes, you can say that RNA is the gatekeeper: no RNA message, no proteins, no life.

The DNA sequence repeats itself over and over again a number of times. The repeats actually are great for building DNA structures with useful properties. Instead of the everyday B-DNA repeats of certain DNA sequences can morph into some rather exotic higher-energy 3D structures. They can form left-handed duplexes, three-stranded triplexes, and four-stranded quadruplexes. The different DNA structures change how information is read out from DNA to make RNA.

Those repeat sequences that are able to switch from one DNA structure to another are called flipons. Fliponware sets the stage for a cell to make the right wetware tools and run the right genetic program to get the job at hand done. It allows assembly of gene pieces into different RNA-based programs for a cell to overcome challenges from its environment.

Flipons can be used to create genetic programs, describing ways they can be wired into the logic gates that computers need to function. The flipon logic gates can perform 'AND' or 'NOT' operations. Many can be combined to perform the Boolean operations essential to a universal computer as first described by Turing. Their use in the genome for logical operations resembles how Turing machines work, but instead of a Turing tape, the cell uses RNA to record the results. The series of processing steps decides whether the RNA message is stable or not and the genetic program to execute.

Many of the novel RNA assemblies are trashed without ever being used--they may not be needed or their assembly is defective (equivalent to a FALSE result from a Turing machine). Those messages that persist become the codonware of the cell (logically the same as a TRUE result from a Turing machine). The codonware that results then defines the cell's biology by the wetware they direct the production of..

This form of computation differs from previously described DNA computers built without flipons. These other devices depend on whether or not pairs of DNA sequences match each other. If they do, the matches enable the next calculation step. Flipon computers differ in many ways from those using DNA matching. First, some flipons switch very fast (in milliseconds) because all they need to do is change from one 3D structure to another without the need to search for a matching DNA to pair with. Turning a flipon ON or OFF is possible in many different ways. For example, just stretching the DNA can cause flipons to morph, or they can flip due to a change in temperature or variations in salt concentration.

The combination of fliponware, wetware and codonware is analogous to program code, machine language and hardware in a silicon computer. Each of these bioware sets has memory to enable learning. They use error correction to prevent bad outcomes. While flipons are made with simple sequences, codonware is made from complex sequence mixes. The information provides the cell very detailed information on the wetware to make. In simple terms, fliponware instructs which tools to use for a particular job, codonware tells how to make the tools, and wetware does the job.

It’s now possible to massively scale up the process of programming new circuits into living cells. We’ve expanded the library of available biocomponents that can be used to reprogram life’s basic code.

Pittsburgh researcher studying Covid 19 killed in Ross Township.

On May 2 PITTSBURGH – University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine scientists today announced a potential vaccine against SARS-CoV-2, the new coronavirus causing the COVID-19 pandemic. When tested in mice, the vaccine, delivered through a fingertip-sized patch, produces antibodies specific to SARS-CoV-2 at quantities thought to be sufficient for neutralizing the virus. 

On May 2 PITTSBURGH – police said 37-year-old Bing Liu was found dead in his home on Elm Court from apparent gunshot wounds to his head, neck and torso. Investigators say they now believe his death is a homicide.

Liu was a research assistant professor at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, his department said on Monday.
“Bing was on the verge of making very significant findings toward understanding the cellular mechanisms that underlie SARS-CoV-2 infection and the cellular basis of the following complications. 

Received Bachelor and PhD in Computer Science under the supervision of Profs P.S. Thiagarajan and David Hsu from National University of Singapore. Previously, have been working with Prof Edmund M. Clarke (Turing Award 2007) as a Postdoctoral Fellow in Department of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University, and with Prof Ivet Bahar as a Research Associate in the Department of Computational & Systems Biology, School of Medicine,  Research Assistant Professor in the Department of Computational & Systems Biology, School of Medicine, University of Pittsburgh.

Ultimate Gaming Bed.🛏

Japanese retailer Bauhutte sells a great deal of furniture aimed at “gamers,” but few can top its one-stop shop for sleep and gaming. 

No, this isn't the Ultimate Bed, it's the ultimate gaming bed! There's a big difference between being very functional and luxurious, to just fully removing you from society. Though I guess that could be said about both beds. Created and sold by a Japanese furniture manufacturer called Bauhutte, the company has come up with a bed that a gamer really never really has to leave (barring the toilet), and includes mounted screens, shelving that surrounds you for food, drinks, and everything else you'll need while gaming, and even a screen mount to hover over you while you sleep so you'll never be without a screen in your face.

The full setup, which turns eight different products into a cocoon, costs roughly ¥113,250, or about $1,048. “I wake up and move from my bed to my desk,” its description reads. Why is that so complicated? Gaming beds solve this problem.

Gold Nugget Made of Plastic.⚗

Here's how the Swiss researchers create the new lightweight gold: first, they add the ingredients to water and create a dispersion. After adding salt to turn the dispersion into a gel, next they replace the water in it with alcohol.

Then they place the alcohol gel into a pressure chamber, where high pressures and a supercritical CO2 atmosphere enables miscibility of the alcohol and the CO2 gas; when the pressure is released, everything turns it into a homogeneous gossamer-like aerogel. Heat can be further applied afterwards to anneal the plastic polymers, thus transforming the material and compacting into the final desired shape, yet preserving the 18 carat composition.

 If a piece of it falls onto a hard surface, it sounds like plastic. But it glimmers like metallic gold, and can be polished and worked into the desired form.

The researchers can even adjust the hardness of the material by changing the composition of the gold. They can also replace the latex in the matrix with other plastics, such as polypropylene. Since polypropylene liquifies at some specific temperature, "plastic gold" made with it can mimic the gold melting process, yet at much lower temperatures. Furthermore, the shape of the gold nanoparticle can change the material's colour: "nanoplatelets" produce gold's typical shimmer, while spherical nanoparticles of gold lend the material a violet hue.

As a general rule, our approach lets us create almost any kind of gold we choose, while the plastic gold will be in particular demand in the manufacture of watches and jewellery, it is also suitable for chemical catalysis, electronics applications or radiation shielding. The researchers have applied for patents for both the process and the material.

The researchers have applied for patents for both the process and the material.

Google's speed badging.😴

Everyone hates slow-loading websites. Google is now looking to make it easier to identify such websites and, in the process, push website owners to improve page load times. Google Chrome is testing a way to identify and label slow-loading websites. Such websites will be appropriately labelled in the future.

Google said it started the project to "to help users understand when a site may load slowly, while rewarding sites delivering fast experiences".

It said it was working on metrics that could spot when sites are "authored" in a way that makes them slow generally. The quirks of many web technologies make it easy for developers to code pages so they take a long time to appear.

In addition, pages are often slow to load because they are waiting for responses from off-site resources such as ad networks, social media widgets or code that analyses user behaviour.

Indicators could include text that says a page "usually loads slow" or might change the colour of a progress bar to hint that the page is a laggard.

In the blog, Chrome engineers said its plan to identify sites would be refined over time and was designed to improve the way websites were created.

"We are being very mindful with our approach to setting the bar for what is considered a good user experience and hope to land on something that is practically achievable by all developers.

Badging will identify whether a website has been authored in a way that makes it slow to load,, with the help of historical load latencies. It will later be expanded to include identifying when a page is likely to load slowly because of your internet connection or device.

Apart from this, Google has also revealed what's in store for Chrome soon along with a number of developer-focussed updates. The company also unveiled a preview of an API, called Web Bundles, that allows developers to distribute content across multiple formats.

quantum supremacy in 2019.☯

The Financial Times reports that they saw a Google publication claiming that the company’s quantum processor can perform a calculation “in three minutes and 20 seconds that would take today’s most advanced classical computer, known as Summit, approximately 10,000 years”—a demonstration of quantum supremacy.

Google researchers are throwing around the term “quantum supremacy” as a result, the FT said, because their computer can solve tasks that can’t otherwise be solved. “To our knowledge, this experiment marks the first computation that can only be performed on a quantum processor,” the research paper reportedly said.
Google not only took down the paper but now is refusing to comment. What does it all mean?

The Financial Times reports that the supremacy experiment was instead performed with a 53-qubit processor codenamed Sycamore. This would be a major early milestone when it comes to comparing these quantum devices against classical computers. But we’re a long way off from quantum computers actually demonstrating quantum usefulness.

Superconducting quantum chips and ion trapped quantum computers are in the 16 qubit to 100 qubit range. Rigetti Computing is seeking an application that will give it a practical advantage over conventional computers. Other companies are pushing other metrics to gauge progress.

Google has said they are at 72 qubits but there are reports that that announcement in March 2018 was premature. There is only 20 qubit quantum computers that can be accessed via cloud computer interfaces.

Google has stated that they went from laptops, to desktops and then to a large cloud network to match the power of their quantum chips.

Neven has said that Google’s quantum systems could become faster than any classical computers by the end of 2019. This suggests that quantum supremacy should occur with noisy superconducting qubits with 70-200 qubits.

Noisy qubits should not need error correction up to 500 to 10000 qubits. The higher qubit ranges can be reached with lower error rates going from one in a hundred to one in ten thousand.

Moore’s Law is a doubling function, we can represent Moore’s Law like this, where n represents a two year interval:

n Classical computing power (2n)
* 1 2
* 2 4
* 3 8
* 4 16
* 5 32
* 6 64
* 7 128
* 8 256
* 9 512
* 10 1024

Google’s Neven’s Law says there is a double exponential improvement in quantum systems. n equals each new improvement to Google’s quantum processor. Google is exponentially increasing the power of its processors on a monthly to semi-monthly basis. However, there has been no announcement or confirmation that the 72 qubit chip or follow on chip works since march 2018.

        n      2n       2(2n)         Quantum Computing Power Relative to Classical Computing Power

     * 1       2         22            4
     * 2       4         24            16
     * 3       8         28            256
     * 4      16       216           65,536
     * 5      32       232           4,294,967,296
     * 6      64       264           18,446,744,073,709,551,616
     * 7      128      2128          3.4028236692093846346337460743177e+38
     * 8      256      2256          1.1579208923731619542357098500869e+77
     * 9      512      2512          1.3407807929942597099574024998206e+154
     * 10     1024     21024         1.797693134862315907729305190789e+308
5 steps of improvement is a billion times more powerful
6 steps is a billion times a billion times
Between steps 7 and 8 is a universe of atoms of classical computing.

IBM has talked about quantum volume which also considers how many steps of quantum computation a system can perform.

Making tweeks to the current quantum systems can make giant improvements to their utility.

Google does not have its full 72 qubit system working.

Any of the competing quantum systems that fully uses 100-200 qubits will have quantum supremacy for some applications.

Getting to a fully useful 200-400 qubits should have overall quantum supremacy.

Getting to fully useful 400-800 qubits should make quantum systems vastly better than current systems for any application where they can be used.

It’s possible scientists may not even accept Google’s announcement as valid. Most importantly, if it takes 10,000 years for a supercomputer to check the answer a quantum computer produced, how do you know that the quantum computer got the answer right in the first place?

Quantum Cryptography🔐

A society connected by a variety of devices: laptops, mobile phones, wearables, self-driving or self-flying things. We have standards for a common language that allows these devices to communicate with each other. This is critical for wide-scale deployment – especially in cryptography where the smallest detail has great importance.

Traditional computers work with binary digits, or bits as they are called for short, that are either zero or one.

Typically, zero and one are represented by some traditional physical property – a hole punched in a tape, or no hole; a metal disc magnetised one way or the other by an electric current; an electronic capacitor that holds a charge or not; and so on.

Quantum computers aren’t like that – they work with qubits, which can essentially represent zero or one at the same time.

In theory, that makes it possible to perform calculations in parallel that would normally require a loop to do them one at a time.

The qubits represent what quantum physicists would call a superposition of all possible answers, tangled together through the mystery of quantum mechanics.

The idea, loosely speaking, is that for some types of algorithm, a quantum computer can calculate in N units of time what would otherwise take 2N units of time to work out.

In other words, some problems that are conventionally considered to be exponential time algorithms would turn into polynomial time algorithms.

Exponents involve “raising something to the power of X”, and exponential functions grow enormously quickly.

Polynomials involve “multiplying X by something”, and even though polynomial functions can grow very fast, they’re much more manageable than exponentials.

Here’s a thought experiment: lay 40 sheets of office paper on top of each other to create a pile 40 times thicker than one sheet – about 4mm in total.

Now imagine taking the top sheet and folding it in half 40 times.

That many folds are impossible in practice, of course, but if you could do it, you’d end up with a piece of paper more than 100,000 kilometres thick.

Two more folds and you’d be further out than the moon.

As a result, many people are worried that quantum computers, if they really work as claimed and can be scaled up to have a lot more processing power and qubit memory than they do today, could successfully take on problems that we currently regard as “computationally unfeasible” to solve.

The most obvious example is cracking encryption.

If your security depends on the fact that a crook would need months or years to figure out your decryption keys, by which time he’d be too late, then you’re in trouble if someone finds a way to do it in seconds or minutes.

Here’s the difference between exponential time and polynomial time in measuring the cost of cracking codes.

Imagine that you have a cryptographic problem that takes 1,000,000 loops to solve today if you have a 20-bit key, but by doubling the key to 40 bits you square the effort needed, so that it now takes 1,000,000,000,000 loops. (Actually, 240, which is approximately a million million, or one trillion.)

Imagine that you can do 1000 loops a second: multiplying the key size by 2 just boosted the cracking time of your cryptosystem one million-fold, from 1000 seconds (under 20 minutes) to a billion seconds (more than 30 years).

Now imagine that a quantum computer’s cracking time doubled along with the keylength, instead of squaring – your added safety margin of 30 years just dropped back to an extra 20 minutes, so a key that you thought would keep your secrets for decades wouldn’t even last an hour.

In other words, if reliable quantum computers with a reasonable amount of memory ever become a reality – we don’t know whether that’s actually likely, or even possible, but some experts think it is – then anything encrypted with today’s strongest algorithms might suddenly become easy to crack.

Is this the end of the world as we know it, at least for cryptography?

Fortunately, the answer is, “No,” because there’s a catch.

If you loop through 256 possible solutions to a problem using a conventional algorithm and 16 of them are correct, you end up with a list of all 16 possibilities, thus reliably ruling out 240 of them.

From there, you can go on to dig further into the problem, knowing that you will eventually solve it because you’ll end up trying every valid path to the answer.

But with quantum computers, even though you can do a whole load of calculations in parallel because the qubits are in multiple quantum states at the same time, So if your quantum computer can do, say, 256 computations in parallel, you have to make sure that that there’s only one correct answer that can emerge before you go on to the next stage of the algorithm, or you might have discarded the path that leads to the right answer later on.

In other words, you might be able to “solve” each stage of a problem much faster than before, yet hardly ever get the correct answer, meaning that you’re stuck with repeating your “fast” calculations over and over again until you get lucky all the way through and end up at the genuine solution.

As a result of this stumbling block, not all encryption algorithms will be vulnerable to quantum cracking, even if a viable quantum computer is ever built.

Unfortunately, quantum computer calculations based on a process known as Shor’s algorithm just happen to provide super-quick solutions to various mathematical problems that we currently rely on heavily in modern cryptography.

Algorithms such as SHA-256 (used in hashing, for example to store passwords securely) and AES (used to encrypt files and hard disks securely) can’t be cracked with Shor’s algorithm.

But the algorithms that are widely used today for public key cryptography – the way we set up secure, authenticated web connections, for example – can be attacked quickly with a quantum computer.

When we encrypt data over a secure web connection, we usually use a non-quantum-crackable algorithm such as AES to keep the data secret, after agreeing on a random AES key first.

So far, so good, except that we use public key algorithms, such as RSA and elliptic curve cryptography (ECC), to do our initial AES key agreement, and those public-key algorithms can be attacked using Shor’s algorithm.

In other words, quantum computing can’t crack the AES encryption, but it doesn’t have to because it can crack the AES key instead, and then decrypt the AES data directly.

Some experts doubt that quantum computers can ever be made powerful enough to run Shor’s algorithm on real-world cryptographic keys.

They suggest that there’s an operational limit on quantum computers, baked into physics, that will eternally cap the maximum number of answers they can reliably calculate at the same time – and this upper bound on their parallel-processing capacity means they’ll only ever be any use for solving toy problems.

Others say, “It’s only a matter of time and money.”

Rather than simply bet that the first group are right, US standards body NIST is currently running a competition to design, analyse and choose a set of new algorithms for public key cryptography that are considered uncrackable even if a quantum supercomputer does get built.

The project is very much like previous crypto competitions that NIST has run, with a similar motivation.

In the 1990s, NIST ran a contest to select AES, needed to replace the no-longer-quite-safe-enough DES algorithm.

In the 2000s, the competitive target was SHA-3, a cryptographic hashing algorithm that was standardised just in case someone finds a way to crack SHA-256, and we need a trustworthy replacement in a hurry.

Quantum computers that can break meaningful cryptographic parameter settings do not exist, yet. They won't be built for at least the next few years.

Xenon1T Event Ever Recorded.⚛

As groundbreaking as the new discovery is, that wasn't the primary goal of the XENON1T experiment. It's designed to hunt for evidence of dark matter, these experiments can help capture the rare times dark matter interacts with normal matter.

The XENON1T experiment has now revealed the longest half-life ever seen in an element, which is far, far longer than the age of the universe.

Xenon 124 was already thought to have a long half-life – about 160 trillion years,  but the new observation makes that look like the blink of an eye.

According to this study, the half-life of xenon 124 is a barely-comprehensible 18 sextillion years, or an 18 followed by 21 zeroes. For comparison's sake, that's more than a trillion times longer than the age of the universe itself, which is a mere 14 billion years young. That also means xenon 124 has the longest half-life ever measured in a material, stealing the crown from bismuth 209 and its half-life of "only" 19 quintillion years.

Nuclear Physics  scientists are currently searching for dark matter particles is located about 1,400 meters beneath the Gran Sasso massif, well protected from cosmic rays which can produce false signals. Theoretical considerations predict that dark matter should very rarely “collide” with the atoms of the detector.

This assumption is fundamental to the working principle of the XENON1T detector: its central part consists of a cylindrical tank of about one meter in length filled with 3,200 kilograms of liquid xenon at a temperature of –95° C.

When a dark matter particle interacts with a xenon atom, it transfers energy to the atomic nucleus which subsequently excites other xenon atoms. This leads to the emission of faint signals of ultraviolet light which are detected by means of sensitive light sensors located in the upper and lower parts of the cylinder. The same sensors also detect a minute amount of electrical charge which is released by the collision process.

The new study shows that the XENON1T detector is also able to measure other rare physical phenomena, such as double electron capture. To understand this process, one should know that an atomic nucleus normally consists of positively charged protons and neutral neutrons, which are surrounded by several atomic shells occupied by negatively charged electrons. Xenon-124, for example, has 54 protons and 70 neutrons.

In double electron capture, two protons in the nucleus simultaneously “catch” two electrons from the innermost atomic shell, transform into two neutrons, and emit two neutrinos.

The other atomic electrons reorganize themselves to fill in the two holes in the innermost shell. The energy released in this process is carried away by X-rays and so-called Auger electrons. However, these signals are very hard to detect, as double electron capture is a very rare process which is hidden by signals from the omnipresent natural radioactivity.

After sorting through a year's worth of data, researchers have now reported observing dozens of these kinds of decays. The event itself is known as electron capture, where an electron enters the nucleus of an atom and turns a proton into a neutron, which causes its decay. In this case, the researchers saw double electron captures for the first time.

New type of matter. ⚗

Until now, the atoms in physical material were understood to exist typically in one of three states – solid, liquid or gas.

Using what’s known as a neural network—an artificial intelligence machine that learns how to predict behavior based on prior examples. After being trained on small groups of potassium atoms, the neural network learned quantum mechanics well enough to simulate collections containing tens of thousands of atoms.

The computer models confirmed that between about 20,000 and 40,000 times atmospheric pressure and 400 to 800 Kelvin (260 to 980 degrees Fahrenheit), the potassium entered what’s called a chain-melted state, in which the chains dissolved into liquid while the remaining potassium crystals stayed solid.

This is the first time scientists have shown that such a state is thermodynamically stable for any element.

The machine learning technique that the team developed could be useful in modeling the behavior of other substances.

SOLID, LIQUID, GAS … and something else? While most of us learn about just three states of matter in elementary school, physicists have discovered several exotic varieties that can exist under extreme temperature and pressure conditions.

Now, a team has used a type of artificial intelligence to confirm the existence of a bizarre new state of matter, one in which potassium atoms exhibit properties of both a solid and a liquid at the same time. If you were somehow able to pull out a chunk of such material, it would probably look like a solid block leaking molten potassium that eventually all dissolved away.

“It would be like holding a sponge filled with water that starts dripping out, except the sponge is also made of water,”

The unusual state of potassium could exist under conditions found in Earth’s mantle, but the element is generally not found in a pure form and is usually bound up with other material. Similar simulations could help study the behaviors of other minerals in such extreme environments.

Metals like potassium are fairly straightforward on a microscopic level. When shaped into a solid bar, the element’s atoms link up into orderly rows that conduct heat and electricity well. For a long time, researchers believed that they could easily predict what might occur to such crystalline structures under pressure.

But around 15 years ago, scientists discovered that sodium—a metal with similar properties to potassium—did something strange when compressed. At 20,000 times the pressure present at the Earth’s surface, sodium transformed from a silvery block into a transparent material, one that did not conduct electricity but rather prevented its flow. By probing the sodium with x-rays, scientists could see that its atoms had adopted a complex crystal formation instead of a simple one.

Our nights are getting brighter, and Earth is paying the price
Potassium, too, has been subjected to much experimental scrutiny. When compressed to similar extremes, its atoms arrange themselves into an elaborate formation—five cylindrical tubes organized into an X shape, with four long chains sitting in the crooks of this assembly, almost like two separate and non-intertwining materials.

“Somehow, these potassium atoms decide to divide up into two loosely linked sub-lattices,”  But as scientists turned up the heat, x-ray images showed the four chains disappearing, and researchers argued about what exactly was happening.

“Most of the matter in the universe is at high pressure and temperature, for instance inside planets and stars.