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Knowing Knowledge...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on November 13, 2015 at 8:59pm
Image Source: Scientific American, Antiscience Beliefs Jeopardize U.S. Democracy, Shaun Lawrence Otto, October 16, 2012, see "trinity of three greatest men" link below.


Topics: Commentary, Science, SETI, STEM, Research


Science: 1 a : an area of knowledge that is an object of study b : something (as a sport or technique) that may be studied or learned like a science  c : any of the natural sciences (as biology, physics, or chemistry) Middle English science "the state of knowing, knowledge," from early French science (same meaning), from Latin scientia (same meaning)

Recently, there's been buzz on the Internet about a so-called mega structure (i.e. a Dyson Sphere) seen 1,500 light years away around its star. Related somewhat, astrophysicist Sara Seager thinks she can detect life on exoplanets by examining the spectrum of sodium (see BBC link below).

The quintessential question is - for any science discipline, from astronomy, biology, climate science and physics: how do scientists "know"?

They know first by sheer practice and enthusiasm. Everyone in STEM can recount the very instance that made such an impression on them that they decided to pursue a path to search the unknown - that labeled them "nerd"; weird and steeled their resolves against the tide of conformity. They studied all subjects with equal vigor, but particularly the science subjects. It formed a culture and a value system. Nerd went from epithet to web sites, social media forums; blerds, blogs and t-shirts.

They know by observation, forming hypothesis, doing experiments; rigorously defending and refuting positions...it sounds a lot like democracy, or at least how Thomas Jefferson envisioned it on the foundation of his "trinity of three greatest men." If knowing knowledge is thesis, then it's antithesis is prideful, unknowing ignorance.

Scientists and engineers will know knowledge, test it, debate it; refute it. They will confirm an ancient civilization that existed in our past...or, not. They have consensus on climate change, not conspiracy. I'm sure they would rather be wrong. They have a vested interest beyond an elaborate Ponzi scheme: their families. Some legacies have far more value than money.

Pseudoscience differs from erroneous science. Science thrives on errors, cutting away one by one. False conclusions are drawn all the time, but they are drawn tentatively. Hypotheses are framed so they are capable of being disproved. A succession of alternative hypotheses is confronted by experiment and observation. Science gropes and staggers toward improved understanding. Proprietary feelings are of course offended when a scientific hypothesis is disproved, but such disproofs are recognized as central to the scientific enterprise.

Pseudoscience is just the opposite. Hypotheses are often framed precisely so they are invulnerable to any experiment that offers a prospect of disproof, so even in principle they cannot be invalidated. Practitioners are defensive and wary. Skeptical scrutiny is opposed. When the pseudoscientific hypothesis fails to catch fire with scientists, conspiracies to suppress it are deduced.

“I would rather have questions I can’t answer, than answers I can’t question.” Richard Feynman

BBC Future: If alien life exists on exoplanets, how would we know?
Mouser Electronics: The Truth Is Still Out There. And We’re Still Looking, Barry Manz

Read more…

Hacking Photosynthesis...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on November 12, 2015 at 7:05am
Image Source: Teacher's Guide to Photosynthesis


Topics: Alternative Energy, Biology, Green Energy, Photosynthesis


See previous post this year Mimicking Nature. I derived the title of the post from a supporting link to the article below suggesting that scientist had "hacked photosynthesis" and I thought it catchy. The fact that Argonne National Laboratory, Australian researchers (see link in the article) and now Florida State University have achieved this is exciting. What will be interesting are the moneyed interests that will ally against this advancement and sadly, throw lobbyists and dollars towards our elected officials to delay or squash it totally. Our economy is tied to commerce, but in essence this would be like [paraphrased] "living in the canopy, and burning down the forest." *

* Source: "Predator Nation," Charles H. Ferguson, chapter 1: "Where We Are Now."
Image Source: Biology Notes for IGCSE

It’s one of the holy grails of scientific research: discovering a way of replicating the natural process of photosynthesis, such that light could be easily converted into energy for other purposes, just like a plant does. And now researchers in the US have discovered an artificial material that lets them mimic this system to create a clean, sustainable source of power.

Researchers at Florida State University have discovered a method of using manganese oxide – also known as birnessite – to capture sunlight and then use that solar energy to create an oxidation reaction, breaking down water (H2O) into hydrogen (H) and oxygen (O2). Oxidation occurs during photosynthesis, and by replicating this part of the natural process, we might be able to produce energy in new ways via a simple, practical mechanism.

Science Alert:
New artificial material mimics photosynthesis to create clean, self-sustaining energy source
Peter Dockrill

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Wright Mons...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on November 11, 2015 at 5:48pm
An overhead view of Wright Mons, one of two potential cryovolcanoes on Pluto.

NASA/JHUAPL/SWRI


Topics: NASA, Planets, Planetary Science, Space, Space Exploration


Two icy volcanoes may lurk near Pluto’s south pole, images from NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft suggest.

The images show two mountains roughly circular in shape and with deep depressions in their centers. One, Wright Mons, is 3 to 5 kilometres high, while the other, Piccard Mons, is up to 6 kilometres high.

They resemble icy volcanoes, known as cryovolcanoes, on Neptune’s moon Triton and other frozen worlds. Flowing ice, rather than hot lava, fuels cryovolcanoes.

“We’re not yet ready to announce we have found volcanic constructs at Pluto, but these sure look suspicious and we’re looking at them very closely,” says Jeff Moore, a planetary scientist at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California, who heads the New Horizons geology team. Moore spoke on November 9 at the American Astronomical Society’s Division for Planetary Sciences meeting in National Harbor, Maryland.

Scientific American:
Ice Volcanoes Could Be on Pluto, Alexandra Witze and Nature magazine

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Tomato, to-MA-to...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on November 10, 2015 at 8:05pm
©iStock.com


Topics: High Energy Physics, Particle Physics, Theoretical Physics


What’s the difference between matter and antimatter? Sometimes nothing, a new study finds.

Scientists at Brookhaven National Laboratory’s Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) discovered that antimatter protons, called antiprotons, act just like their ordinary-matter cousins when they are close enough to interact via the so-called strong nuclear force, which binds protons and neutrons together into atomic nuclei.

Antimatter is essentially the opposite of matter, in which the subatomic particles (protons and electrons) of antimatter have charges opposite to those of ordinary matter. In an ordinary block of stuff, for instance, the protons are positively charged, and the electrons carry negative charges. In antimatter, the antiprotons are negatively charged, while the antielectrons (called positrons) are positively charged. When antimatter and matter touch, they annihilate each other and produce energy in the form of gamma radiation.

Scientific American:
Antimatter Protons Stick Together Just Like Normal Particles
Jesse Emspak and LiveScience

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Beauty...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on November 9, 2015 at 7:29pm
Image Source: NIST

Topics: Condensed Matter Physics, Lasers, Materials Science, Metamaterials, Quantum Mechanics

Physicists at JILA have made their "quantum crystal" of ultracold molecules more valuable than ever by packing about five times more molecules into it. The denser crystal will help scientists unlock the secrets of magnets and other, more exotic materials.

The crystal is actually a gas of particles trapped in 3-D formation by laser beams. The trap, called an optical lattice, has wells—local regions of low energy—like an egg carton made of light. The researchers maneuvered a single molecule into each well, successfully filling about 25 percent of the crystal. The structure has an advantage over a real crystal, as it is made of scientifically interesting molecules that normally would not crystallize.

Described in the Nov. 6, 2015, issue of Science,* the JILA crystal is useful for studying correlations among the molecules' "spins," or rotations, a quantum behavior related to magnetism. The denser crystal will enable scientists to study and model complex effects such as how spin correlations or entanglement—a quantum link between the properties of separated particles—spread through a large system. Scientists might use these effects, for example, to make novel materials for electronics or other applications.

NIST:
It’s a Beauty: JILA’s Quantum Crystal is Now More Valuable, Laura Ost

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Sacred Cows...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on November 6, 2015 at 7:32am
From "The Demon Haunted World"; more at Good Reads


Topics: #Commentary, Carl Sagan, Philosophy, Research


This is a very good article about the duality humans express, such as: we really LIKE our tech; we just hate what the science behind the tech points to...or, points away from.

Galileo was branded a heretic by the church for daring to say the Earth revolved around the sun, versus the now understood accepted observation. There's still a Flat Earth Society, and people who long for "the good old days," that coincide with their youth and for many, an understood; un-breached and unquestioned social status and strata. It explains - at least to me - why we can be vulnerable to pseudoscience and the flimflam artist: s/he tells us what we wish to hear about a world we wish to bend to our wills.

There would have to be some wholesale, necessary-for-survival shift as a species from intuition to a rational, logic-based viewpoint. As sophisticated as we like to think of ourselves, we're really primitives by nature; tribal at heart, bending the world to our own view of right and wrong to bow at the altars of our sacred cows...

For over three decades, researchers in the fields of cognitive psychology, developmental psychology, and science education have been studying the dynamics of conceptual change. They have been characterizing what we intuitively know about different domains, how that knowledge differs from scientific knowledge, and how that knowledge changes with instruction, either formal instruction in the classroom or informal instruction at home or elsewhere (e.g., museums, libraries, parks). While different researchers have analyzed conceptual change in different ways, most would agree that conceptual change requires a basic restructuring of one’s intuitive knowledge. That restructuring could involve collapsing distinctions that are no longer meaningful on a scientific conception of the domain (e.g., collapsing the distinction between objects in motion and objects at rest), introducing new distinctions that are scientifically meaningful (e.g., making a distinction between weight and mass), or moving an entity from one mental category to another (e.g., shifting the entity air from the category empty space to the category matter). Accumulating new facts and new experiences is not sufficient to bring about conceptual change; one must instead reorganize the very nature of one’s understanding.

Because conceptual change requires knowledge restructuring, it has long been assumed that, once the restructuring was complete, one’s initial conceptions of the domain would no longer be accessible. Restructuring one’s knowledge was assumed to erase previously held intuitions in the same way that remodeling one’s house erases previously navigated floor plans. A growing body of research, however, suggests that conceptual change does not produce this result. Rather, conceptual change appears to produce dual modes of understanding: a new scientific understanding of the domain and an older, more intuitive understanding of the domain that coexists with, but is not replaced by, the scientific understanding. Put differently, adults with extensive science education appear to harbor intuitions that they had explicitly rejected many years prior—intuitions like “whales are fish,” “coats produce heat,” “the wind is alive,” “air has no weight,” “heavier objects fall faster than lighter objects,” and “the sun revolves around the earth.” In some cases, these intuitions had previously been documented only among preschool-aged children, but, with the application of new methodologies, they are now being documented among scientifically literate adults as well.

Skeptic.com:
SCIENCE V. INTUITION: Why is it Difficult for Scientific Knowledge to Take Root?
Andrew Shtulman

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The Q Continuum...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on November 5, 2015 at 7:19am
Image Source: Argonne National Laboratory


Topics: Dark Energy, Dark Matter, Physics Humor, Star Trek, Theoretical Physics, Quantum Cosmology

This is the title of the original post, I kid you not! There are apparently a few Trekkies at Argonne National Lab...\\//_


Researchers are sifting through an avalanche of data produced by one of the largest cosmological simulations ever performed, led by scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE's) Argonne National Laboratory.

The simulation, run on the Titan supercomputer at DOE's Oak Ridge National Laboratory, modeled the evolution of the universe from just 50 million years after the Big Bang to the present day — from its earliest infancy to its current adulthood. Over the course of 13.8 billion years, the matter in the universe clumped together to form galaxies, stars, and planets; but we’re not sure precisely how.

These kinds of simulations help scientists understand dark energy, a form of energy that affects the expansion rate of the universe, including the distribution of galaxies, composed of ordinary matter, as well as dark matter, a mysterious kind of matter that no instrument has directly measured so far.

Argonne National Laboratory:
Researchers model birth of universe in one of largest cosmological simulations ever run
Louise Lerner

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Squeezed Light and Qumodes...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on November 4, 2015 at 7:00am
Image Source: Technology Review


Topics: Computer Science, Modern Physics, Quantum Computer, Quantum Mechanics


TECHNOLOGY REVIEW: The world’s fastest computer is the Tianhe-2 supercomputer at National Super Computer Center in Guangzhou, China. It consists of 16,000 computer nodes, each with two Intel Ivy Bridge Xeon processors and three Xeon Phi coprocessor. Together these make it capable of 33.86 quadrillion floating point calculations per second, more than any other computing machine on the planet.

Clearly, the resources available to carry out a calculation are the crucial factor in its performance, and the number of calculations per second is a good guide to a computer’s power.

But quantifying the power of a quantum computer is much harder. These computing devices can perform calculations that are beyond the ken of ordinary processing machines. And yet the resources they require to do this trick are poorly understood.

Abstract


Although quantum computers are capable of solving problems like factoring exponentially faster than the best-known classical algorithms, determining the resources responsible for their computational power remains unclear. An important class of problems where quantum computers possess an advantage is phase estimation, which includes applications like factoring. We introduce a new computational model based on a single squeezed state resource that can perform phase estimation, which we call the power of one qumode. This model is inspired by an interesting computational model known as deterministic quantum computing with one quantum bit (DQC1). Using the power of one qumode, we identify that the amount of squeezing is sufficient to quantify the resource requirements of different computational problems based on phase estimation. In particular, it establishes a quantitative relationship between the resources required for factoring and DQC1. For example, we find the squeezing required to factor has an exponential scaling whereas no squeezing (i.e., a coherent state) is already sufficient to solve the hardest problem in DQC1.

Physics arXiv: The power of one qumode
Nana Liu, Jayne Thompson, Christian Weedbrook, Seth Lloyd, Vlatko Vedral, Mile Gu, Kavan Modi

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sneakers on the cross

Posted by stacey Williams on November 3, 2015 at 12:02pm

hello everyone i am a writer from newark nj i have written a book of poetry called sneakers on the cross which is a conversation between the street and God my science fiction stories are coming this is just a beginning would love to hear from everyone thats interested 

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Quantum Tunneling Between Nanowires...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on November 3, 2015 at 8:03am
Figure 1, see link below

Topics: Condensed Matter Physics, Nanotechnology, Semiconductor Technology, Solid State Physics, Quantum Mechanics

Abstract


We theoretically investigate the electronic transport properties of two closely spaced L-shaped semiconductor quantum wires, for different configurations of the output channel widths as well as the distance between the wires. Within the effective-mass approximation, we solve the time-dependent Schrödinger equation using the split-operator technique that allows us to calculate the transmission probability, the total probability current, the conductance, and the wave function scattering between the energy subbands. We determine the maximum distance between the quantum wires below which a relevant non-zero transmission is still found. The transmission probability and the conductance show a strong dependence on the width of the output channel for small distances between the wires.

Journal of Applied Physics: Quantum tunneling between bent semiconductor nanowires
A. A. Sousa, Andrey Chaves, T. A. S. Pereira, G. A. Farias and F. M. Peeters

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Aleatory Architecture...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on November 2, 2015 at 8:18am
Image Source: Technology Review

Topics: Architectural Engineering, Architecture, Civil Engineering, Condensed Matter Physics, Humor, Science Fiction

TECHNOLOGY REVIEW: Architecture is a conservative discipline, not least because of the exacting standards of stability and safety that all human-made structures must adhere to. The forces acting on and within any structure must be carefully calculated and the design modified accordingly. Little can be left to chance.

At least, that’s the traditional view. But some designers are toying with another idea—that there’s a different way to build that exploits randomness rather than avoids it. This kind of building will rely on new kinds of granular materials that when tipped into place, bind together in ways that provide structural stability. In this way, walls, columns and even domes could be poured into place, forming complex but stable structures.

That may sound like science fiction but today Sean Keller at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago and Heinrich Jaeger at the University of Chicago explain how this kind of “aleatory architecture” is finally becoming possible. These guys say that the first aleatory structures are already being built and that the approach is introducing new ways to think about architecture and design in general.

Not quite here yet...

Physics arXiv: Aleatory Architectures - Sean Keller, Heinrich Jaeger

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Colors in Darkness

Posted by Rasheedah Prioleau on November 1, 2015 at 12:08pm

Hey BSFS!

Today marks the last day of my Everlasting: Da Eb'Bulastin blog tour and I invite you all to drop by Facebook today at 4 for my segment with Colors in Darkness.  I will be there live to share my writing experience and answer questions.  Just click or copy.and paste the link at 4pm then follow the Rasheedah Prioleau thread:

 https://m.facebook.com/events/451684671686492?ref=m_notif&notif_t=admin_plan_mall_activity&actorid=100002736741366

See you there!

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Past Prologue...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on October 30, 2015 at 6:00am


Topics: Economy, Education, Jobs, Politics, STEM, Research


"What's past is prologue." William Shakespeare, The Tempest, Act II, scene i, Antonio

The last excerpt observation in the second article: it is now possible for the true believer to sail on an ocean of political, historical, and scientific disinformation without ever sighting the dry land of empirical fact. Does that presume once introducing them to facts it would sway them at all? A good (and sad read) is "When Prophesy Fails," by Leon Festinger. In sum, an earlier version of the "Heaven's Gate Cult" waited for the end of the world in the 1950s. When it did not happen, you had a group of them disappointed that defected; another that made up the excuse that their "vibrations" or faithfulness saved the world from extinction. It is the origin of the phrase cognitive dissonance, and my concern The Common Good shall become chaff in the wind to the authoritarian "do as I SAY!" That is the plot of a Dystopian science fiction novel; not a democratic republic. Desperate people do desperate things when their delusions are not fulfilled. Giving them power is pouring gasoline on a bonfire.

The past...

The Know-Nothing Party, also known as the American Party, was a prominent United States political party during the late 1840s and the early 1850s.

The American Party originated in 1849. Its members strongly opposed immigrants and followers of the Catholic Church. The majority of white Americans followed Protestant faiths. Many of these people feared Catholics because members of this faith followed the teachings of the Pope. The Know-Nothings feared that the Catholics were more loyal to the Pope than to the United States. More radical members of the Know-Nothing Party believed that the Catholics intended to take over the United States of America. The Catholics would then place the nation under the Pope's rule. The Know-Nothing Party intended to prevent Catholics and immigrants from being elected to political offices. Its members also hoped to deny these people jobs in the private sector, arguing that the nation's business owners needed to employ true Americans.

The majority of Know-Nothings came from middle and working-class backgrounds. These people feared competition for jobs from immigrants coming to the United States. Critics of this party named it the Know-Nothing Party because it was a secret organization. Its members would not reveal the party's doctrines to non-members. Know-Nothings were to respond to questions about their beliefs with, "I know nothing." [1]

The current prologue...

Tomasky expresses astonishment that Carson’s jaw-dropping comments make him more popular among Republican voters, but he concludes without fully answering the question he posed. It is an important question: what has happened to the American people, or at least a significant portion of them?

Anti-knowledge is a subset of anti-intellectualism, and as Richard Hofstadter has pointed out, anti-intellectualism has been a recurrent feature in American life, generally rising and receding in synchronism with fundamentalist revivalism.

Whether retail customers actually buy all these screeds, or whether foundations and rich conservative donors buy them in bulk and give them out as door prizes at right-wing clambakes, anti-knowledge infects the political bloodstream in the United States.

Thanks to these overlapping and mutually reinforcing segments of the right-wing media-entertainment-“educational” complex, it is now possible for the true believer to sail on an ocean of political, historical, and scientific disinformation without ever sighting the dry land of empirical fact. [2]

1. Ohio Central History: The Know-Nothing Party
2. BillMoyers.com: The GOP and the Rise of Anti-Knowledge, Mike Lofgren

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Superconducting Uproar...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on October 29, 2015 at 6:15am
Image Source: Technology Review


Topics: Condensed Matter Physics, Materials Science, Solid State Physics, Superconductivity


TECHNOLOGY REVIEW: The world of superconductivity is in uproar. Last year, Mikhail Eremets and a couple of pals from the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry in Mainz, Germany, made the extraordinary claimthat they had seen hydrogen sulphide superconducting at -70 °C. That’s some 20 degrees hotter than any other material—a huge increase over the current record.

Followers of this blog will have read about this work last December, when it was first posted to the arXiv. At the time, physicists were cautious about the work. The history of superconductivity is littered with dubious claims of high-temperature activity that later turn out to be impossible to reproduce.

But in the months since then, Eremets and co have worked hard to conjure up the final pieces of conclusive evidence. A few weeks ago, their paper was finally published in the peer reviewed journal Nature, giving it the rubber stamp of respectability that mainstream physics requires. Suddenly, superconductivity is back in the headlines.

Physics arXiv:
Superconductivity above the lowest Earth temperature in pressurized sulfur hydride
Antonio Bianconi, Thomas Jarlborg

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WT1190F...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on October 28, 2015 at 8:12am
The object is only 1 to 2 meters in size, and its trajectory shows that it has a low density, and is perhaps hollow. That suggests an artificial object.

Credit: Johannes Gerhardus Swanepoel ©iStock.com


Topics: Economy, Jobs, Space Exploration, Space Junk


As I said in the post "Space Faring Species":

"Space Junk: Not a sexy topic, but we've been chucking things to the Clarke Orbit since Sputnik. There's a lot of debris floating above us, and with the right training, the opportunity to employ people and possibly recycle the metals and materials used to build probes that outlive their usefulness and technology." Now's a good time to start thinking about the subject.

Researchers call it sheer coincidence that a newly discovered piece of space junk is officially designated WT1190F. But the letters in the name, which form the acronym for an unprintable expression of bafflement, are an appropriate fit for an object that is as mysterious as it is unprecedented.

Scientists have worked out that WT1190F will plunge to Earth from above the Indian Ocean on November 13, making it one of the very few space objects whose impact can be accurately predicted. More unusual still, WT1190F was a 'lost' piece of space debris orbiting far beyond the Moon, ignored and unidentified, before being glimpsed by a telescope in early October.

Scientific American:
Mysterious Space Junk Will Plunge to Earth in November
Traci Watson and Nature Magazine

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Sfbios.com has launched

Posted by Anne Gray on October 27, 2015 at 2:05pm

I just started a project called SFbios.com, which will be collecting bios by and about fans and pros which a lot of cons publish in our program books or souvenir books.  Only collecting attributed bios and posting them with permission of the authors.  If you work on or attend a con that publishes that sort of thing and would like to help, please let me know.

Read more…

Knowing...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on October 27, 2015 at 6:46am
The company’s knowledge of climate change dates back to July 1977, when its senior scientist James Black delivered a sobering message on the topic.

Credit: Getty Images/MARS


Topics: Climate Change, Global Warming, Politics, Research


The sobering realization is I was in high school when this was known. The meek due to "inherit the Earth" - children K-12 - are in school now. What world will we give them? 1

Exxon was aware of climate change, as early as 1977, 11 years before it became a public issue, according to a recent investigation from InsideClimate News. This knowledge did not prevent the company (now ExxonMobil and the world’s largest oil and gas company) from spending decades refusing to publicly acknowledge climate change and even promoting climate misinformation—an approach many have likened to the lies spread by the tobacco industry regarding the health risks of smoking. Both industries were conscious that their products wouldn’t stay profitable once the world understood the risks, so much so that they used the same consultants to develop strategies on how to communicate with the public.

Experts, however, aren’t terribly surprised. “It’s never been remotely plausible that they did not understand the science,” says Naomi Oreskes, a history of science professor at Harvard University. But as it turns out, Exxon didn’t just understand the science, the company actively engaged with it. In the 1970s and 1980s it employed top scientists to look into the issue and launched its own ambitious research program that empirically sampled carbon dioxide and built rigorous climate models. Exxon even spent more than $1 million on a tanker project that would tackle how much CO2 is absorbed by the oceans. It was one of the biggest scientific questions of the time, meaning that Exxon was truly conducting unprecedented research. [2]

1. Nature - Climate Change:
Future temperature in southwest Asia projected to exceed a threshold for human adaptability
Jeremy S. Pal & Elfatih A. B. Eltahir
2. Scientific American: Exxon Knew about Climate Change Almost 40 Years Ago
Shannon Hall

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Nano Autumn Round-Up...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on October 26, 2015 at 8:51pm
Image Source: Daily Tech


Topics: Biology, Economy, Education, Jobs, Medicine, Nanotechnology, Semiconductor Technology, STEM


This is an excellent synopsis of the great research and experimentation going on in nanotechnology. I hope it gives you a sense of how these applications impact you directly. As a nation (US), we should be encouraging our young people into STEM fields primarily by not confusing them with pseudoscience that produces nothing but reelected officials. We celebrate the athlete, the reality television star, but not the "nerdy" kid that may invent something that makes her/him wealthy or at least able to afford and raise a family - that person was and still is bullied into terrified silence or capitulation to "fit in" with the so-called cool kids, themselves intimidated by all things science. For every conspiracy provocateur that rants and raves about hidden cabals, I've never heard a proposal that is practical and so in plain sight. It is a matter of values and priorities.

Nanotechweb: Autumn Round-up

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Hackers, Lasers and Quantum Security...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on October 23, 2015 at 6:27am
Light damage: the new hacks involve laser-heating components to thwart security measures. (Courtesy: iStock/Arttanja)

Topics: Computer Science, Cryptography, Internet, Lasers, Quantum Computer, Quantum Hacking, Quantum Mechanics

Somewhat like Richard Feynman that never meet a safe he didn't want to crack, there will be some of us that will take on the task of solving any puzzle before us, even those meant to safeguard and make us feel at least some sense of security. I guess it's good to know now before we all get our hopes too high. My father used to say: "locks are made for honest people." I think he may have been right.

A new way to hack quantum-cryptography systems has been unveiled by physicists in Canada. The method involves using a powerful laser to physically damage the optical equipment used to send and receive secret keys in "quantum key distribution" (QKD) systems. QKD systems are already in commercial use, and this latest disruption comes as quantum-cryptography experts have already modified their systems to make them immune to other eavesdropping techniques.

QKD uses the laws of quantum mechanics to guarantee complete security when two people exchange a cryptographic key. This secret key then allows them to exchange information using conventional communications. The sender and receiver – usually called Alice and Bob, respectively – share a secret key made up of a series of quantum states that an eavesdropper, Eve, is in principle unable to intercept without altering those states and thereby revealing her presence. [1]

Abstract

Quantum communication protocols such as quantum cloud computing, digital signatures, coin-tossing, secret-sharing, and key distribution, using similar optical technologies, claim to provide unconditional security guaranteed by quantum mechanics. Among these protocols, the security of quantum key distribution (QKD) is most scrutinized and believed to be guaranteed as long as implemented devices are properly characterized and existing implementation loopholes are identified and patched. Here we show that this assumption is not true. We experimentally demonstrate a class of attacks based on laser damage, capable of creating new security loopholes on-demand. We perform it on two different implementations of QKD and coin-tossing protocols, and create new information leakage side-channels. Our results show that quantum communication protocols cannot guarantee security alone, but will always have to be supported by additional technical countermeasures against laser damage. [2]

1. Physics World: Lasers burn holes in quantum security systems
Edwin Cartlidge, science writer based in Rome
2. Physics arXiv: Laser damage creates backdoors in quantum communications
Vadim Makarov, Jean-Philippe Bourgoin, Poompong Chaiwongkhot, Mathieu Gagne, Thomas Jennewein, Sarah Kaiser, Raman Kashyap, Matthieu Legre, Carter Minshull, Shihan Sajeed

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