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coolgopher writes:

Science Daily published a report on the newest neutrino detector now operating in China:

"Deep beneath southern China, JUNO has launched one of the most ambitious neutrino experiments in history. With its massive 20,000-ton liquid scintillator detector now operational, it's poised to answer one of particle physics' greatest mysteries: the true ordering of neutrino masses. Built over more than a decade and involving hundreds of scientists worldwide, JUNO not only promises to resolve questions about the building blocks of matter but also to open entirely new frontiers—from exploring signals of supernovae to hunting for evidence of exotic physics."

The Jiangmen Underground Neutrino Observatory (JUNO) has successfully completed filling its 20,000-tons liquid scintillator detector and begun data taking on Aug. 26.

After more than a decade of preparation and construction, JUNO is the first of a new generation of very large neutrino experiments to reach this stage. Initial trial operation and data taking show that key performance indicators met or exceeded design expectations, enabling JUNO to tackle one of this decade's major open questions in particle physics: the ordering of neutrino masses -- whether the third mass state (ν₃) is heavier than the second (ν2).

Located 700 meters underground near Jiangmen city in the Guangdong Province, JUNO detects antineutrinos produced 53 kilometers away by the Taishan and Yangjiang nuclear power plants and measures their energy spectrum with record precision. Unlike other approaches, JUNO's determination of the mass ordering is independent of matter effects in the Earth and largely free of parameter degeneracies. JUNO will also deliver order-of-magnitude improvements in the precision of several neutrino-oscillation parameters and enable cutting-edge studies of neutrinos from the Sun, supernovae, the atmosphere, and the Earth. It will also open new windows to explore unknown physics, including searches for sterile neutrinos and proton decay.

JUNO is designed for a scientific lifetime of up to 30 years, with a credible upgrade path toward a world-leading search for neutrinoless double-beta decay. Such an upgrade would probe the absolute neutrino mass scale and test whether neutrinos are Majorana particles, addressing fundamental questions spanning particle physics, astrophysics, and cosmology, and profoundly shaping our understanding of the universe.

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Original Submission

upstart writes:

New Paper Finds Cases of "AI Psychosis" Manifesting Differently From Schizophrenia:

Researchers at King's College London have examined over a dozen cases of people spiraling into paranoid and delusional behavior after obsessively using a chatbot.

Their findings, as detailed in a new study awaiting peer review, reveal striking patterns between these instances of so-called "AI psychosis" that parallel other forms of mental health crises — but also identified at least one key difference that sets them apart from the accepted understanding of psychosis.

As lead author Hamilton Morrin explained to Scientific American, the analysis found that the users showed obvious signs of delusional beliefs, but none of the symptoms "that would be in keeping with a more chronic psychotic disorder such as schizophrenia," like hallucinations and disordered thoughts.

It's a finding that could complicate our understanding of AI psychosis as a novel phenomenon within a clinical context. But that shouldn't undermine the seriousness of the trend, reports of which appear to be growing.

Indeed, it feels impossible to deny that AI chatbots have a uniquely persuasive power, more so than any other widely available technology. They can act like a "sort of echo chamber for one," Morrin, a doctoral fellow at King's College, told the magazine. Not only are they able to generate a human-like response to virtually any question, but they're typically designed to be sycophantic and agreeable. Meanwhile, the very label of "AI" insinuates to users that they're talking to an intelligent being, an illusion that tech companies are gladly willing to maintain.

hubie writes:

Museum boffins find code that crashes in 2037:

A stark warning about the upcoming Epochalypse, also known as the "Year 2038 problem," has come from the past, as National Museum Of Computing system restorers have discovered an unsetting issue while working on ancient systems.

Robin Downs, a volunteer who was recently involved in an exhibition of Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) gear at the museum, was on hand to demonstrate the problem to The Register in the museum's Large Systems Gallery, which now houses a running PDP-11/73.

The machine's software had already been patched for the Y2K problem, where using two digits to store the year caused headaches when the century rolled around. "Y2K", Downs explained, "was mainly an application programming issue ... mostly it was application programmers not taking into account two digits."

The Year 2038 problem is a different beast. Indicating the PDP-11/73, Downs said, "This machine isn't running Unix, but we have a C compiler on it, and the C compiler is from 1982, so it has ... various issues."

According to Downs, the operating system was patched for Y2K in the late 1990s, but doesn't use the same time structure for its internal date and time.

"So, the C compiler on this, already now, when you ask it what the time and date are, it gets it wrong. It returns the correct time, but the wrong date."

Annoying, but solvable. The team worked around the issue. However, when Downs was testing it by moving the system clock forward, something unexpected happened. He moved the clock forward to 2036, and everything seemed fine.

Then, in 2037 – a year before the Epochalypse is due – the program crashed. "It turns out," said Downs, "the time function has another bug. Undocumented, unknown, where at the start of 2037, any program that calls the time function just crashes."

"So we found bugs that exist, pre-2038, in writing this that we didn't know about."

The Year 2038 problem occurs in systems that store Unix time – the number of seconds since the Unix epoch (00:00:00 UTC on January 1, 1970) in a signed 32-bit integer (64-bit is one modern approach, but legacy systems have a habit of lingering).

At 03:14:07 UTC on January 19, 2038, the second counter will overflow. In theory, this will result in a time and date being returned before the epoch – 20:45:52 UTC on December 13, 1901, but that didn't happen for Downs.

He said, "What we expected was that the local time function should return 1901. That's what we thought would happen."

Instead, it went back to 1970.

[...] Former Microsoft engineer Dave Plummer is optimistic that the problem will be solved in time. He told The Register, "Since the counter starts from current time, anything that is running when it rolls over in 2038 will be suspect. ie: it doesn't have to have been running for long.

"While it's conceivable there are important things that still rely on GetTickCount() or similar, I'd wager the intervening 13 years will be enough to find them!"

Original Submission

canopic jug writes:

Truthout has an editorial entitled, Regulating AI Isn't Enough. Let's Dismantle the Logic That Put It in Schools. Pushing for AI in schools is part of a larger extractive and dehumanizing trend, as opposed to liberating minds.

Funny — until it wasn't. Because behind the gaffe was something far more disturbing: The person leading federal education policy wants to replace the emotional and intellectual process of teaching and learning with a mechanical process of content delivery, data extraction, and surveillance masquerading as education.

[...] Philosopher Raphaël Millière explains that what these systems are doing is not thinking or understanding, but using what he calls "algorithmic mimicry": sophisticated pattern-matching that mimics human outputs without possessing human cognition. He writes that large pre-trained models like ChatGPT or DALL-E 2 are more like "stochastic chameleons" — not merely parroting back memorized phrases, but blending into the style, tone, and logic of a given prompt with uncanny fluidity. That adaptability is impressive — and can be dangerous — precisely because it can so easily be mistaken for understanding.

So-called AI can be useful in certain contexts. But what we're calling AI in schools today doesn't think, doesn't reason, doesn't understand. It guesses. It copies. It manipulates syntax and patterns based on probability, not meaning. It doesn't teach — it prompts. It doesn't mentor — it manages.

In short, it mimics intelligence. But mimicry is not wisdom. It is not care. It is not pedagogy.

Previously:
(2025) 1960s Schools Experiment That Created a New Alphabet and Left Thousands of Children Unable to Spell
(2024) Schools Under Siege: From Nation-States To Ransomware Gangs
(2024) Some Teachers Are Now Using ChatGPT to Grade Papers
(2023) Dishonor Code: What Happens When Cheating Becomes the Norm?
(2023) Amid ChatGPT Outcry, Some Teachers are Inviting AI to Class
(2023) Seattle Public Schools Bans ChatGPT; District 'Requires Original Thought and Work From Students'

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Mysterious "Gator Rande" and "Medusa BB" CPUs mentioned in roadmap:

Something to look forward to: A leaked roadmap from Spanish laptop maker Seleno offers a glimpse into how Intel and AMD aim to shape the mobile CPU market through 2027. While details this far out are subject to change, the documents hint at major shifts in performance tiers, manufacturing nodes, and architecture rollouts that could influence everything from everyday laptops to next-gen gaming consoles.

Prominent leakers @x86deadandback and @momomo_us recently shared internal roadmaps from laptop manufacturer Seleno that chart mobile CPUs from Intel and AMD through 2027.

The forecast provides rough release windows for upcoming architectures, such as Panther Lake, Wildcat Lake, Medusa Point, and the successor to Fire Range. However, even if the roadmap proves accurate, details about processors scheduled to launch two years from now are likely subject to change.

The laptop maker expects to release laptops featuring 12-core Gorgon Point CPUs throughout 2026. This 4nm, Zen 5-based lineup will succeed Strix Point and Kraken Point in the 15 – 54W upper-midrange performance tier. Seleno's chart, however, does not include performance details aside from AI TOPS.

Meanwhile, high-end devices exceeding 45W will continue using 16-core Fire Range processors through the end of 2026, while Strix Halo APUs will remain in use through 2027. Seleno plans to shift its Hawk Point laptops, which feature eight Zen 4 cores, down one performance tier next year. At the entry level, 6 – 15W products will stick with the mature Zen 2-based Mendocino processors for the foreseeable future.

Zen 6 is set to debut in 2027, with Gator Rande succeeding Fire Range and Medusa Point replacing Gorgon Point. Little is known about Gator Rande, but the roadmap supports prior leaks suggesting that Medusa Point will utilize 3nm semiconductors and the FP10 socket. Seleno also intends to replace Hawk Point with a mysterious "Medusa BB" architecture sometime in mid-2027.

upstart writes:

But the cure may ruin the web....:

Opinion: With AI's rise, AI web crawlers are strip-mining the web in their perpetual hunt for ever more content to feed into their Large Language Model (LLM) mills. How much traffic do they account for? According to Cloudflare, a major content delivery network (CDN) force, 30% of global web traffic now comes from bots. Leading the way and growing fast? AI bots.

Cloud services company Fastly agrees. It reports that 80% of all AI bot traffic comes from AI data fetcher bots.  So, you ask, "What's the problem? Haven't web crawlers been around since 1993 with the arrival of the World Wide Web Wanderer in 1993?"  Well, yes, they have. Anyone who runs a website, though, knows there's a huge, honking difference between the old-style crawlers and today's AI crawlers. The new ones are site killers.

Fastly warns that they're causing "performance degradation, service disruption, and increased operational costs." Why? Because they're hammering websites with traffic spikes that can reach up to ten or even twenty times normal levels within minutes.

Moreover, AI crawlers are much more aggressive than standard crawlers. As the InMotionhosting web hosting company notes, they also tend to disregard crawl delays or bandwidth-saving guidelines and extract full page text, and sometimes attempt to follow dynamic links or scripts.

The result? If you're using a shared server for your website, as many small businesses do, even if your site isn't being shaken down for content, other sites on the same hardware with the same Internet pipe may be getting hit. This means your site's performance drops through the floor even if an AI crawler isn't raiding your website.

[...] Yes, of course, we can try to fend them off with logins, paywalls, CAPTCHA challenges, and sophisticated anti-bot technologies. You know one thing AI is good at? It's getting around those walls.

upstart writes:

The data was key evidence in the death of a pedestrian in 2019:

At the beginning of the month, Tesla was found partly liable in a wrongful death lawsuit involving the death of a pedestrian in Florida in 2019. The automaker—which could have settled the case for far less—claimed that it did not have the fatal crash's data. That's until a hacker was able to recover it from the crashed car, according to a report in The Washington Post.

In the past, Tesla has been famously quick to offer up customer data stored on its servers to rebut claims made against the company. But in this case, the company said it had nothing. Specifically, the lawyers for the family wanted what's known as the "collision snapshot," data captured by the car's cameras and other sensors in the seconds leading up to and after the crash.

According to the trial, moments after the collision snapshot was uploaded to Tesla's servers, the local copy on the car was marked for deletion. Then, "someone at Tesla probably took 'affirmative action to delete' the copy of the data on the company's central database," according to the Post.

Tesla only acknowledged that it had received the data once the police took the Tesla's damaged infotainment system and autopilot control unit to a Tesla technician to diagnose, but at that time the local collision snapshot was considered unrecoverable.

That's where the hacker, only identified as @greentheonly, his username on X, came in. Greentheonly told The Washington Post that, "for any reasonable person, it was obvious the data was there."

During the trial, Tesla told the court that it hadn't hidden the data, but lost it. The company's lawyer told the Post that Tesla's data handling practices were "clumsy" and that another search turned up the data, after acknowledging that @greentheonly had retrieved the snapshot locally from the car.

"We didn't think we had it, and we found out we did... And, thankfully, we did because this is an amazingly helpful piece of information," said Tesla's lawyer, Joel Smith.

Original Submission

fliptop writes:

Google warned its 2.5 billion Gmail users worldwide to be on the lookout for a rise in phishing scams:

As a result, the company is advising users to update passwords and use enhanced protections.

"We believe threat actors using the 'ShinyHunters' brand may be preparing to escalate their extortion tactics by launching a data leak site (DLS)," Google said in a June blog post.

[...] The company admitted that a group of hackers breached a massive database and stored contact information for small and medium-sized businesses.

From Newsweek:

The breach involved business contact information such as company and customer names, which hackers have used to craft highly convincing phishing emails and voice-based social engineering scams.

[...] Google has not announced any timeline for further disclosures or technical updates stemming from the breach, but cybersecurity analysts expect continued attacks fueled by the leaked business data. Users are encouraged to switch from passwords to passkeys—biometric-based authentication such as fingerprints or facial recognition—which Google now recommends as the most secure option.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

More than half of patients stopped medical cannabis within a year, especially older adults. Discontinuation was unrelated to pain type or overall health:

New research shows that more than half of patients prescribed medical cannabis for chronic musculoskeletal pain stop treatment within a year. The findings raise concerns about the drug's durability as a long-term pain management option, particularly for older adults.

The study, recently published in PLOS One by researchers at the Rothman Institute Foundation for Opioid Research & Education, reported that 57.9 percent of 78 Pennsylvania patients certified for medical cannabis discontinued use within twelve months. Nearly half of these patients—44.7 percent—stopped during the first three months.

Researchers conducted a retrospective review, following patients newly certified through Pennsylvania's medical marijuana program to determine whether they renewed their certifications or pursued other treatments over a two-year period. Age emerged as the only statistically significant predictor of discontinuation: patients who stopped were, on average, about seven years older than those who continued (71.5 years compared with 64.5 years). Measures of baseline physical and mental health, assessed through PROMIS Global Physical Health and Global Mental Health scores, were similar between the two groups, suggesting that the decision to stop was not linked to overall health status at the outset.

Contrary to what some pain specialists might assume, the location of a patient's pain—whether in the lower back, neck, joints, or elsewhere—was not a significant factor in whether they discontinued cannabis treatment. While a slightly larger proportion of those who stopped reported low back pain, the difference was too small to be statistically meaningful. The results instead suggest that a variety of influences, including dissatisfaction with treatment, unwanted side effects, or choosing more definitive procedures such as injections or surgery, may be more important in determining whether patients continue using cannabis.

[...] The authors caution that their study, while among the first to carefully monitor one-year certification status for medical cannabis in orthopedic pain patients, leaves key questions unanswered. Specific details about cannabis formulation, dosage, and method of delivery were not consistently documented, nor were side effects, functional improvements, or patients' perceptions of relief. This makes it unclear whether discontinuation was due to a lack of effectiveness, adverse effects, financial burden, or even symptom improvement to the point where cannabis was no longer needed. They also point out that their sample was taken from a single institution's patient population and may not represent broader trends.

Journal Reference:
Mohammad Khak, Sina Ramtin, Juliet Chung, et al. Discontinuation rates and predictors of Medical Cannabis cessation for chronic musculoskeletal pain, PLOS ONE (DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0329897)

Original Submission

upstart writes:

A popular shortwave Russian radio station dubbed UVB-76 has been an enigma for decades. But its recent messages have turned it into a tool for Kremlin saber-rattling:

Shortly after US president Donald Trump hung up a call with Russia's Vladimir Putin this spring, an obscure shortwave radio channel, broadcasting from a military base somewhere in Russia, sprang to life.

Through a fog of static, at 4625 kHz on the shortwave dial, a man's voice spoke in monotone: "Nikolai, Zhenya, Tatiana, Ivan." He repeats the message—spelled out in the Russian phonetic alphabet—followed by a series of numbers and letters. The whole message reads: "NZhTI 01263 BOLTANKA 4430 9529." What it means is anyone's guess, but lots of people were guessing.

This radio station, dubbed UVB-76, has spent much of 2025 broadcasting cryptic messages, strange music, and pirate interruptions. The channel has elicited fascination for decades. This time, however, something is different. Now, Moscow's network of propagandists and warmongers are suddenly fascinated by this obscure channel.

UVB-76's real purpose is almost certainly innocuous and mundane. But in recent weeks, Moscow has capitalized on the eerie fixation with the channel to stoke fears of nuclear armageddon.

[...] "What have you stumbled on to?" reads a message posted to curious visitors to Spynumbers.com. "Instructions to spies? Messages exchanged between drug dealers? Deliberate attempts at deception and mis-information? Chances are, all of the above!" The website's users kept a meticulous database of the shortwave stations that, they believed, were used by spooks. Operators around the world logged the station at 4625 Khz as "The Buzzer."

The station, which was categorized only as "Slavic," is thought to have come online in the 1970s. The fact that it could be heard straight across the globe—from London to Sydney—suggested that it had some pretty powerful transmitters behind it. A perpetual tone, an incessant buzzing, was thought to be a way for the operator to reserve the frequency, even when it wasn't actively being used. The buzzing would infrequently stop, perhaps once a week, replaced with other tones or a man reading a message using the Russian phonetic alphabet. Try as they might, listeners never decoded those messages.

[...] As a 2011 feature in WIRED explained, theories about UVB-76's true purpose went from the decidedly unsexy, such as the idea that the station was testing atmospheric changes in the ionosphere (as reported in a 2008 academic paper); to the truly cinematic—that it was either a way to contact aliens or a "doomsday device, which had been programmed to launch a wave of nuclear missiles at the US in the event the Kremlin was flattened by a sneak attack."

[...] In the years since, an online community has sprung up across YouTube, Reddit, X, VKontakte, and across multiple dedicated podcasts and online forums. Its fanbase stretches across history buffs, ham radio operators, and those obsessed with creepypasta. A dedicated site, Priyom.org, sprang up to meticulously catalog UVB-76's many mysterious messages.

[...] "It's natural to be fascinated with things you don't have a clear answer to," says Māris Goldmanis, a historian who runs a website devoted to tracking these shortwave stations, including UVB-76.

upstart writes:

Elon Musk says xAI has open sourced Grok 2.5:

Elon Musk's xAI has made an older version of its AI model Grok — specifically, the model weights used to shape Grok 2.5 — available on the open source platform Hugging Face.

"The @xAI Grok 2.5 model, which was our best model last year, is now open source," Musk wrote on X. He added that Grok 3 "will be made open source in about 6 months."

AI engineer Tim Kellogg described the Grok license as "custom with some anti-competitive terms."

Grok, which is prominently featured on X (which in turn recently merged with xAI), has created considerable controversy this year, particularly after the chatbot seemed to become obsessed with "white genocide" conspiracy theories, expressed skepticism about the Holocaust's death toll, and described itself as "MechaHitler," leading xAI to publish its system prompts on GitHub.

And while Musk described the latest version, Grok 4, as a "maximally truth-seeking AI," the model appears to consult Musk's social media account before answering controversial questions.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

The X-37B spaceplane is flying missions few would have foreseen when the program began:

The US military's reusable winged spaceship rocketed back into orbit Thursday night [August 21, 2025] atop a SpaceX rocket, kicking off a mission that will, among other things, demonstrate how future spacecraft can navigate without relying on GPS signals.

The core of the navigation experiment is what the Space Force calls the "world's highest performing quantum inertial sensor ever used in space."

This is one of many payloads mounted on the military's X-37B spaceplane when it lifted off aboard a Falcon 9 rocket from Kennedy Space Center in Florida at 11:50 pm EDT Thursday (03:50 UTC Friday).

[...] Military leaders tout the X-37B's purpose as a technological testbed that can ferry experiments from Earth to space and back. Many of the spaceplane's payloads have been classified, but officials typically identify a handful of unclassified experiments flying on each X-37B mission. Past X-37B missions have also deployed small satellites into orbit before returning to Earth for a runway landing at Kennedy Space Center, Florida, or Vandenberg Space Force Base, California.

On this mission, the Space Force says the X-37B carries instrumentation to demonstrate quantum navigation, and a laser inter-satellite relay terminal to allow the spaceplane to connect with other spacecraft in orbit.

The quantum sensor package will "inform accurate unaided navigation in space by detecting rotation and acceleration of atoms without reliance on satellite networks like traditional GPS," the Space Force said in a statement before the launch.

[...] Recognizing the importance of GPS signals, the Space Force said the quantum sensor experiment on the X-37B spaceplane will test technology useful for navigation in "GPS-denied environments." Quantum navigation could also help spacecraft navigate in deep space, around the Moon or other planets, where missions can't count on receiving GPS signals.

upstart writes:

A new security flaw in TheTruthSpy phone spyware is putting victims at risk:

A stalkerware maker with a history of multiple data leaks and breaches now has a critical security vulnerability that allows anyone to take over any user account and steal their victim's sensitive personal data, TechCrunch has confirmed.

Independent security researcher Swarang Wade found the vulnerability, which allows anyone to reset the password of any user of the stalkerware app TheTruthSpy and its many companion Android spyware apps, leading to the hijacking of any account on the platform. Given the nature of TheTruthSpy, it's likely that many of its customers are operating it without the consent of their targets, who are unaware that their phone data is being siphoned off to somebody else.

This basic flaw shows, once again, that makers of consumer spyware such as TheTruthSpy — and its many competitors — cannot be trusted with anyone's data. These surveillance apps not only facilitate illegal spying, often by abusive romantic partners, but they also have shoddy security practices that expose the personal data of both victims and perpetrators.

To date, TechCrunch has counted at least 26 spyware operations that've leaked, exposed, or otherwise spilled data in recent years. By our count, this is at least the fourth security lapse involving TheTruthSpy.

TechCrunch verified the vulnerability by providing the researcher with the username of several test accounts. The researcher quickly changed the passwords on the accounts. Wade attempted to contact the owner of TheTruthSpy to alert him of the flaw, but he did not receive any response.

When contacted by TechCrunch, the spyware operation's director Van (Vardy) Thieu said the source code was "lost" and he cannot fix the bug.

As of publication, the vulnerability still exists and presents a significant risk to the thousands of people whose phones are believed to be unknowingly compromised by TheTruthSpy's spyware.

upstart writes:

Transport for London (TfL) asks mobile users to wear headphones:

Transport for London (TfL) is targeting the "disruptive behaviour" of passengers who play music and make calls using mobile phone loudspeakers.

TfL said most bus and Tube travellers considered such behaviour "a nuisance" and that some even found the additional noise very stressful.

The new campaign follows TfL research that found 70% of 1,000 passengers surveyed said they found films, music and calls being played on loudspeakers to be a nuisance.

Posters urging passengers to use headphones or hands-free kits with their device will appear on the Elizabeth line from Tuesday and across other services from the autumn.

During the Monday rush hour BBC Radio London spoke to commuters, who backed the move.

One said: "It should be banned, definitely. It is not polite to anyone else when you are sat on the Tube in the morning and someone is playing music. That's horrendous. It is not comfortable."

Another said: "Maybe someone might be working or they might be tired so yes I think it should be banned. I personally don't mind but I know that other people are a bit more mindful about that. I guess you have to respect what other people think."

A third commuter said: "Recently on a train there was a woman she was playing quite loud [music] and I was smiling to her trying to give the idea that not everyone could like that music. She didn't care."

Loudspeaker noise can be especially acute for those with heightened sensitivity, such as people with autism.

Emma Strain, TfL's customer director, told BBC Radio London that TfL by-laws prohibit playing music and streaming content out loud without permission.

She added: "When our enforcement officers encounter someone doing this they usually ask the person to stop.

"Most people comply at that stage, but if someone refuses then further enforcement action can be taken, which might include them being asked to leave the service or the station, or being reported for possible prosecution."

The new posters will be accompanied by Instagram posts.

Passengers will also be asked to look up from their screens in case someone else needs their seat more, said TfL.

In February, a man was fined €200 (£172) for making a call on loudspeaker in a designated quiet area of a French train station.

The man, named only as David, told French broadcaster BFM TV he was on a call with his sister at Nantes station when an employee from SNCF, the French railway company, approached him. He planned to appeal against the fine.

The French Transport Code says those who use "sound devices or instruments" or "disturb the peace of others by noise" in areas used for public transport could face a fine.

It is believed the use of mobiles and other devices has increased on the Tube, as large sections of the network across central London now have 4G or 5G coverage.

Work is under way to expand coverage to major interchange stations such as Green Park and King's Cross St Pancras, and further sections of the Northern, Piccadilly, Jubilee and Victoria lines by the end of the year, TfL said.

I think that minimum decency demands that people use headphones but not everyone gets the message, what is the situation where you live? Can such people be asked to leave, be fined or detained?

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Phys.org published an article about a new experiment:

In the everyday world that humans experience, objects behave in a predictable way, explained by classical physics. One of the important aspects of classical physics is that nothing, not even information, can travel faster than the speed of light. However, in the 1930s, scientists discovered that very small particles abide by some very different rules. One of the most mind-boggling behaviors exhibited by these particles is quantum entanglement—which Albert Einstein famously called "spooky action at a distance."

In quantum entanglement, two particles can become linked so that their properties are correlated, even when separated by large distances. If you measure a property of one particle—such as its orientation—you instantly know the corresponding property of the other, no matter how far apart they are. Although this correlation appears to happen instantaneously, it cannot be used to send information faster than light. Instead, it reveals a deep and puzzling connection that defies classical explanation, while still respecting the fundamental speed limit set by relativity. This phenomenon is known as "nonlocality"—the appearance of effects at a distance that would be impossible under classical physics.

Up until recently, it was thought that only entangled particles could exhibit this nonlocality. But a new study, published in Science Advances, has used Bell's inequality to test whether nonlocal quantum correlations can arise from other non-entanglement quantum features.

The experiment used photons generated by laser light hitting a particular type of crystal in such a way that it is impossible to determine their source. The setup ensures that the photons cannot become entangled before their detection at two separate detectors. The researchers used Bell's inequality to determine if the experiment resulted in violations of local realism.

According to their calculations, the experiment resulted in a violation of the Bell inequality, exceeding the threshold by more than four standard deviations. This kind of violation using unentangled photons had not been seen before. The researchers say these violations of Bell's inequality arise from a property called quantum indistinguishability by path identity, instead of entanglement.

"Our work establishes a connection between quantum correlation and quantum indistinguishability, providing insights into the fundamental origin of the counterintuitive characteristics observed in quantum physics," the study authors write.

While this work might be groundbreaking, there are still some possible issues that need to be ironed out in future studies. For example, the experiment relies on post selection—where only certain photons are detected, possibly giving misleading results.

Another possible issue comes from a locality loophole due to the phase settings of the detectors not being separated properly. However, the study authors are aware of this study's limitations and are eager to find fixes to these issues and try again.

They end by saying, "We not only expect that tailored loopholes and local hidden variable to the work reported here can be identified, but also expect that they will be consistently excluded by hardware improvements of high-quality quantum photonic devices and experiments, as we witnessed in the 90-year endeavor in the violations of local realism with entangled particles.

"Moreover, our work could very well lead to other interesting experiments, such as in the development of the Bell experiment. In analogy to the Bell experiment with two particles, we expect that quantum mechanics will lastly prevail."

• Violation of Bell inequality with unentangled photons

Original Submission