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upstart writes in with an IRC submission for c0lo:

WWII codebreaker Turing honored on UK's new 50-pound note:

LONDON (AP) — The rainbow flag flew proudly Thursday above the Bank of England in the heart of London's financial district to commemorate World War II codebreaker Alan Turing, the new face of Britain's 50-pound note.

The design of the bank note was unveiled before it is being formally issued to the public on June 23, Turing's birthday. The 50-pound note is the most valuable denomination in circulation but is little used during everyday transactions, especially during the coronavirus pandemic as digital payments increasingly replaced the use of cash.

The new note, which is laden with high-level security features and is made of longer-lasting polymer, completes the bank's rejig of its paper currencies over the past few years. Turing's image joins that of Winston Churchill on the five-pound note, novelist Jane Austen on the 10-pound note and artist J. M. W. Turner on the 20-pound note.

Turing was selected as the new face of the 50-pound note in 2019 following a public nomination process that garnered around 250,000 votes, partly [in] recognition of the discrimination that he faced as a gay man after the war.

Among his many accomplishments, Turing is most famous for the pivotal role he played in breaking Nazi Germany's Enigma code during World War II. The code had been believed to be unbreakable as the cipher changed continuously. Historians say the cracking of the code may have helped shorten the war by at least two years, potentially saving millions of lives.

"There's something of the character of a nation in its money, and we are right to consider and celebrate the people on our bank notes," Bank of England Gov. Andrew Bailey said.

[...] As part of the new note's design — which includes a metallic hologram that changes between the words "Fifty' and "Pounds" when the note is tilted and an image of a microchip — the bank collaborated with U.K. intelligence and security agency GCHQ to create The Turing Challenge, a set of 12 puzzles

GCHQ said the full challenge could take an experienced puzzler seven hours to complete and may have even left Turing "scratching his head, although we very much doubt it."

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takyon writes:

Baltimore will no longer prosecute drug possession, prostitution, low-level crimes

A year ago, as the coronavirus began to spread across Maryland, Baltimore State's Attorney Marilyn Mosby stopped prosecuting drug possession, prostitution, minor traffic violations and other low-level offenses, a move aimed at curbing Covid-19's spread behind bars.

That shift — repeated by prosecutors in many other cities — didn't just reduce jail populations. In Baltimore, nearly all categories of crime have since declined, confirming to Mosby what she and criminal justice experts have argued for years: Crackdowns on quality-of-life crimes are not necessary for stopping more serious crime.

On Friday, Mosby announced that she was making her pandemic experiment permanent, saying Baltimore — for decades notorious for runaway violence and rough policing — had become a case study in criminal justice reform.

Also at WBAL-TV.

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

"Expert" hackers used 11 0-days to infect Windows, iOS, and Android users:

A team of advanced hackers exploited no fewer than 11 zero-day vulnerabilities in a nine-month campaign that used compromised websites to infect fully patched devices running Windows, iOS, and Android, a Google researcher said.

Using novel exploitation and obfuscation techniques, a mastery of a wide range of vulnerability types, and a complex delivery infrastructure, the group exploited four zero-days in February 2020. The hackers' ability to chain together multiple exploits that compromised fully patched Windows and Android devices led members of Google's Project Zero and Threat Analysis Group to call the group "highly sophisticated."

On Thursday, Project Zero researcher Maddie Stone said that, in the eight months that followed the February attacks, the same group exploited seven more previously unknown vulnerabilities, which this time also resided in iOS. As was the case in February, the hackers delivered the exploits through watering-hole attacks, which compromise websites frequented by targets of interest and add code that installs malware on visitors' devices.

[...] The seven zero-days were:

• CVE-2020-15999 - Chrome Freetype heap buffer overflow
• CVE-2020-17087 - Windows heap buffer overflow in cng.sys
• CVE-2020-16009 - Chrome type confusion in TurboFan map deprecation
• CVE-2020-16010 - Chrome for Android heap buffer overflow
• CVE-2020-27930 - Safari arbitrary stack read/write via Type 1 fonts
• CVE-2020-27950 - iOS XNU kernel memory disclosure in mach message trailers
• CVE-2020-27932 - iOS kernel type confusion with turnstiles

Wikipedia has a good description of a Zero-day(0-day) vulnerability.

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

Event Horizon Telescope captures new view of black hole in polarized light:

Two years ago, the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) made headlines with its announcement of the first direct image of a black hole. Science magazine named the image its Breakthrough of the Year. Now the EHT collaboration is back with another groundbreaking result: a new image of the same black hole, this time showing how it looks in polarized light. The ability to measure that polarization for the first time—a signature of magnetic fields at the black hole's edge—is expected to yield fresh insight into how black holes gobble up matter and emit powerful jets from their cores. The new findings were described in three papers published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

"This work is a major milestone: the polarization of light carries information that allows us to better understand the physics behind the image we saw in April 2019, which was not possible before," said co-author Iván Martí-Vidal, coordinator of the EHT Polarimetry Working Group and a researcher at the University of Valencia, Spain. "Unveiling this new polarized-light image required years of work due to the complex techniques involved in obtaining and analyzing the data."

[...] In much the same way that polarized sunglasses reduce glare from bright surfaces, the polarized light around a black hole provides a sharper view of the region around it. In this case, the polarization of light isn't due to special filters (like the lenses in sunglasses) but the presence of magnetic fields in the hot region of space surrounding the black hole. That polarization enables astronomers to map the magnetic field lines at the inner edge and to study the interaction between matter flowing in and being blown outward.

"The observations suggest that the magnetic fields at the black hole's edge are strong enough to push back on the hot gas and help it resist gravity's pull. Only the gas that slips through the field can spiral inwards to the event horizon," said co-author Jason Dexter of the University of Colorado Boulder, who is also coordinator of the EHT Theory Working Group. That means that only theoretical models that incorporate the feature of a strongly magnetized gas accurately describe what the EHT collaboration has observed.

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for c0lo:

'Double mutant': What are the risks of India's new Covid-19 variant:

Indian genome scientists have detected a so-called "double variant" of the novel coronavirus.

The government said that an analysis of the samples collected from the western state of Maharashtra showed "an increase in the fraction of samples with the E484Q and L452R mutations" compared with December last year.

"Such [double] mutations confer immune escape and increased infectivity," the health ministry said in a statement.

Dr Jeremy Kamil, a virologist at Louisiana State University Health Sciences Center Shreveport, says the E484Q is similar to E484K - a mutation seen in the B.1.351 (South Africa) and P.1 (Brazil) variants, which have emerged independently several times.

If enough mutations happen in a viral family tree or a lineage, the virus can begin to function differently and the lineage can become a so-called 'variant of concern'.

As far as the L452R mutation - also found in the "double mutation" in India - it first got attention as part of B.1.427/B.1.429 lineage in the US, which is sometimes called the "California variant", Dr Kamil told me.

Also at IndiaToday.

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission for c0lo:

Amazon Workers Describe Struggle for Historic Union Vote in Alabama:

Six thousand warehouse workers in Alabama could soon decide the future of a $1.5 trillion tech giant and its 560,000 employees worldwide.

One of those employees, Darryl Richardson, 51, said he was thrilled to work for Amazon when it opened a warehouse in Bessemer, Alabama, in March 2020. But within weeks his excitement waned. He said he watched workers get fired after violating social-distancing rules and be slapped with write-ups for taking time from work to use the restroom or get a drink of water, a complaint other Amazon workers have made.

One day last summer he picked up the phone and called the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union, or the RWDSU.

"I was just at home one day, and I just felt like I need to make a phone call to see if I can make some changes," Richardson said. The call helped set into motion a historic battle to unionize the 5,800 workers at the warehouse.

A vote to form a union is now well underway among these workers, and it's scheduled to finish on March 29. Chelsea Connor, a spokesperson for the RWDSU, which is backing the union effort, told Insider she expected a result by Easter.

If the workers vote yes, they would form the first Amazon union in the US, something the tech behemoth has been fighting against for years.

upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

AstraZeneca lowers efficacy claim for COVID-19 vaccine, a bit, after board's rebuke:

Seeking to quell a controversy of its own making, AstraZeneca yesterday issued new data from the latest clinical trial of its COVID-19 vaccine, slightly downgrading its previous estimate of how well the shots protect people from symptomatic disease. The update came after an extraordinary rebuke issued late Monday night by the study's independent monitoring board, which complained that the company had used potentially misleading and "outdated" data in its initial analysis.

The two-dose vaccine, made by AstraZeneca with technology developed by the University of Oxford, had 76% efficacy against symptomatic COVID-19 among the 32,000 trial participants in the United States and South America, the company stated in a press release distributed late last night. That's 3% lower than AstraZeneca reported in a press release on 22 March. The new analysis is based on 190 COVID-19 cases that occurred in people who had received the vaccine or a placebo; the previous one evaluated 141 cases, which AstraZeneca says was a pre-specified cutoff point for an interim analysis.

aristarchus writes:

The Fight Against Fake-Paper Factories That Churn Out Sham Science:

When Laura Fisher noticed striking similarities between research papers submitted to RSC Advances, she grew suspicious. None of the papers had authors or institutions in common, but their charts and titles looked alarmingly similar, says Fisher, the executive editor at the journal. "I was determined to try to get to the bottom of what was going on."

A year later, in January 2021, Fisher retracted 68 papers from the journal, and editors at two other Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC) titles retracted one each over similar suspicions; 15 are still under investigation. Fisher had found what seemed to be the products of paper mills: companies that churn out fake scientific manuscripts to order. All the papers came from authors at Chinese hospitals. The journals' publisher, the RSC in London, announced in a statement that it had been the victim of what it believed to be "the systemic production of falsified research".

What was surprising about this was not the paper-mill activity itself: research-integrity sleuths have repeatedly warned that some scientists buy papers from third-party firms to help their careers. Rather, it was extraordinary that a publisher had publicly announced something that journals generally keep quiet about. "We believe that it is a paper mill, so we want to be open and transparent," Fisher says.

Got to say, disruptive tech all around. Gutenberg? Made mass production of forgeries possible. Morse Code? No way to verify authorship[*]. Ma Bell? 2600 is your Daddy.

fleg writes:

Reproduction without pregnancy: would it really emancipate women?:

A team of Israeli scientists announced the mother of all inventions last week. Researchers from the Weizmann Institute of Science revealed in the journal Nature that they had successfully gestated hundreds of mice inside an artificial womb. They placed newly fertilised eggs inside glass vials rotating in a ventilated incubator, and grew the embryos for 11 days – the mid-point of a mouse pregnancy – outside their mothers' bodies. The embryos developed normally; their hearts, visible through the glass vials, pounded steadily at 170 beats per minute.

The mice were no bigger than sunflower seeds, but what they represent is enormous: the breakthrough brings us one step closer to reproduction without pregnancy. The division of labour in gestation is the most intractable imbalance between the sexes. Men only have to contribute a single cell to make a baby, whereas women carry their children for nine months and give birth, sometimes risking their bodies and often risking their careers, in a world of work built largely by men. An artificial womb would mean complete reproductive parity between the sexes: all anyone needs to do is throw in their gametes and the rest is taken care of. But this equality could come at great cost to women. This is radically disruptive technology, and with every new development we are sleepwalking into a world of tough ethical choices.

Article raises some interesting points, amongst them what will the effect be on abortions when you can be pro-choice and pro-life, ie choose to not be pregnant but the prospective child still gets a chance at life?

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission for c0lo:

Optical fiber could boost power of superconducting quantum computers:

The secret to building superconducting quantum computers with massive processing power may be an ordinary telecommunications technology—optical fiber.

Physicists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have measured and controlled a superconducting quantum bit (qubit) using light-conducting fiber instead of metal electrical wires, paving the way to packing a million qubits into a quantum computer rather than just a few thousand. The demonstration is described in the March 25 issue of Nature.

Superconducting circuits are a leading technology for making quantum computers because they are reliable and easily mass produced. But these circuits must operate at cryogenic temperatures, and schemes for wiring them to room-temperature electronics are complex and prone to overheating the qubits. A universal quantum computer, capable of solving any type of problem, is expected to need about 1 million qubits. Conventional cryostats—supercold dilution refrigerators—with metal wiring can only support thousands at the most.

Optical fiber, the backbone of telecommunications networks, has a glass or plastic core that can carry a high volume of light signals without conducting heat. But superconducting quantum computers use microwave pulses to store and process information. So the light needs to be converted precisely to microwaves.

To solve this problem, NIST researchers combined the fiber with a few other standard components that convert, convey and measure light at the level of single particles, or photons, which could then be easily converted into microwaves. The system worked as well as metal wiring and maintained the qubit's fragile quantum states.

Journal Reference:
F. Lecocq, F. Quinlan, K. Cicak, et al. Control and readout of a superconducting qubit using a photonic link, Nature (DOI: 10.1038/s41586-021-03268-x)

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Previously thought to be science fiction, a planet in a triple-star system has been discovered:

KOI-5Ab is a newly discovered planet in a triple-star system. It is a great example of the kind of astonishing discoveries that result from co-operation between large teams of astronomers using different types of telescopes and observation techniques.

[...] Two sun-sized stars, designated A and B, orbit each other every 29 years in the middle of the system, while a third, smaller star orbits the two central stars every 400 years. The discovered planet is called KOI-5Ab, because it orbits star A, on an orbit that is tilted wildly away from the plane of the stars' orbits.

Data from Kepler and TESS, which required the effort of dozens of astronomers working together, has revealed the size of KOI-5Ab: seven times the radius of the Earth. Another team of astronomers used radial velocity data to measure the mass of KOI-5Ab: 57 times the mass of the Earth. Combining these numbers gives the density, and tells us this planet is a gas giant planet, a bit smaller and denser than Saturn.

upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

Cern experiment hints at new force of nature:

Scientists at the Large Hadron Collider near Geneva have spotted an unusual signal in their data that may be the first hint of a new kind of physics.

The LHCb collaboration, one of four main teams at the LHC, analysed 10 years of data on how unstable particles called B mesons, created momentarily in the vast machine, decayed into more familiar matter such as electrons.

The mathematical framework that underpins scientists' understanding of the subatomic world, known as the standard model of particle physics, firmly maintains that the particles should break down into products that include electrons at exactly the same rate as they do into products that include a heavier cousin of the electron, a particle called a muon.

But results released by Cern on Tuesday suggest that something unusual is happening. The B mesons are not decaying in the way the model says they should: instead of producing electrons and muons at the same rate, nature appears to favour the route that ends with electrons.

"We would expect this particle to decay into the final state containing electrons and the final state containing muons at the same rate as each other," said Prof Chris Parkes, an experimental particle physicist at the University of Manchester and spokesperson for the LHCb collaboration. "What we have is an intriguing hint that maybe these two processes don't happen at the same rate, but it's not conclusive."

upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

Firefox 87 Adds Stronger User Privacy Protections:

Mozilla today announced the release of Firefox 87 in the stable channel fitted with a new intelligent tracker blocking mechanism.

Called SmartBlock, the feature works in Firefox Private Browsing and Strict Mode and is meant to improve users' browsing experience through fixing pages that Mozilla's tracking protections break.

[...] "To reduce this breakage, Firefox 87 is now introducing a new privacy feature we are calling SmartBlock. SmartBlock intelligently fixes up web pages that are broken by our tracking protections, without compromising user privacy," Mozilla announced.

To improve user experience, SmartBlock provides local stand-ins for the third-party tracking scripts that are blocked. Designed to "behave just enough like the original ones," these scripts ensure that websites load and that their functionality is intact.

With the SmartBlock stand-ins bundled with Firefox, no third-party tracking content is loaded, thus fully preventing potential tracking attempts. SmartBlock automatically replaces specific common scripts that are classified as trackers on the Disconnect Tracking Protection List.

The new browser release also brings along a stricter, more privacy-focused Referrer Policy, where the browser, by default, "will trim path and query string information from referrer headers to prevent sites from accidentally leaking sensitive user data."

[...] Firefox 87 sets the default Referrer Policy to 'strict-origin-when-cross-origin', meaning that user sensitive information that is accessible in the URL will always be trimmed, for all "navigational requests, redirected requests, and subresource (image, style, script) requests." The new policy will be enforced automatically upon updating to Firefox 87.

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission for c0lo:

Radio Shack Once Again Crawls Out of the Grave:

Radio Shack, the once-popular U.S. electronics chain, went bankrupt in 2015 and again in 2017. The physical stores, once a nerd's paradise full of electronic components and computer gear, closed one by one, and a company called Retail Ecommerce Ventures (REV) bought the brand and most of the company's assets.

Fast forward a few years and, once again, Radio Shack seems to be rising from the grave. REV is planning to turn the electronics store into an e-commerce site to rival Best Buy.

"The ultimate objective here is really not reviving [the RadioShack] brand — it is to create a massive online shopping mall," REV CEO Alex Mehr said to Adweek. "Imagine the shopping malls that you and I grew up with. They had a lot of familiar brands, and the collective gravitational pulls brought people in. That's what we're creating."

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

Semiconductor qubits scale in two dimensions:

The heart of any computer, its central processing unit, is built using semiconductor technology, which is capable of putting billions of transistors onto a single chip. Now, researchers from the group of Menno Veldhorst at QuTech, a collaboration between TU Delft and TNO, have shown that this technology can be used to build a two-dimensional array of qubits to function as a quantum processor. Their work, a crucial milestone for scalable quantum technology, was published today in Nature.

[...] Electrons trapped in quantum dots, semiconductor structures of only a few tens of nanometres in size, have been studied for more than two decades as a platform for quantum information. Despite all promises, scaling beyond two-qubit logic has remained elusive. To break this barrier, the groups of Menno Veldhorst and Giordano Scappucci decided to take an entirely different approach and started to work with holes (i.e. missing electrons) in germanium. Using this approach, the same electrodes needed to define the qubits could also be used to control and entangle them. 'No large additional structures have to be added next to each qubit such that our qubits are almost identical to the transistors in a computer chip,' says Nico Hendrickx, graduate student in the group of Menno Veldhorst and first author of the article. 'Furthermore, we have obtained excellent control and can couple qubits at will, allowing us to program one, two, three, and four-qubit gates, promising highly compact quantum circuits.'

After successfully creating the first germanium quantum dot qubit in 2019, the number of qubits on their chips has doubled every year. 'Four qubits by no means makes a universal quantum computer, of course,' Veldhorst says. 'But by putting the qubits in a two-by-two grid we now know how to control and couple qubits along different directions.' Any realistic architecture for integrating large numbers of qubits requires them to be interconnected along two dimensions.

Journal Reference:
Nico W. Hendrickx, William I. L. Lawrie, Maximilian Russ, et al. A four-qubit germanium quantum processor, Nature (DOI: 10.1038/s41586-021-03332-6)

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