It is sup­posed to be absolutely secure – a means to trans­mit secret infor­ma­tion between two par­ties with no pos­si­bil­ity of some­one eaves­drop­ping. It is based on the prin­ci­ple that you can­not make mea­sure­ments of a quan­tum sys­tem with­out dis­turb­ing it. Quan­tum cryp­tog­ra­phy works because a system’s quan­tum state can­not be observed with­out chang­ing it. In the stan­dard pro­to­col, two users, typ­i­cally known as Alice and Bob, openly share encoded infor­ma­tion. They can only decode the infor­ma­tion once they also share the secret quan­tum “key”. But they will always know if another party, typ­i­cally known as Eve, tries to eaves­drop on the key, because by observ­ing it she will always change its state. Yet it, accord­ing to Nature Pho­ton­ics arti­cle pub­lished yes­ter­day, is not with­out its faults.[1]
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30th August, 2010 View Comments

Three cen­turies of light con­sump­tion in the UK. The left axis has the units Tlm h/yr (teralumen-hours per year). The col­ored lines rep­re­sent con­sump­tion of light pro­duced by tech­nolo­gies pow­ered by par­tic­u­lar fuels; the black line rep­re­sents total con­sump­tion of light pro­duced by all technologies.

The impor­tance of arti­fi­cial light to soci­ety has long been rec­og­nized with the uti­liza­tion of fire thought of as the quin­tes­sen­tial human inven­tion. Now sci­en­tists have found that emerg­ing, more energy effi­cient light­ing tech­nolo­gies could be the key to a bet­ter qual­ity of life.

New research pub­lished on August 19 , in a spe­cial issue of IOP Publishing’s Jour­nal of Physics D: Applied Physics shows that solid-state light­ing (SSL), a new tech­nol­ogy based on semi­con­duc­tor light-emitting diodes (LEDs), has the poten­tial to increase our con­sump­tion of light and there­fore our qual­ity of life. [1] →

25th August, 2010 View Comments

NIH Direc­tor Fran­cis Collins

In an exclu­sive inter­view for the July issue of the Forbes/Wolfe Emerg­ing Tech Report, NIH Direc­tor Fran­cis Collins out­lined what he con­sid­ers the crit­i­cal path­ways for the future of health sci­ences. Below are his five areas of excep­tional oppor­tu­nity for the next decade.

1. The appli­ca­tion of high-throughput tech­nolo­gies to large biol­ogy projects has the poten­tial to com­pre­hen­sively answer fun­da­men­tal ques­tions about how life works. That includes genomics, but it also includes nan­otech­nol­ogy, imag­ing approaches, pro­teomics, and com­pu­ta­tional strate­gies to allow us to be much more sys­tem­atic in assess­ing mech­a­nisms than before. In the past, we had to take a hunch, pick a can­di­date gene, and draw a car­toon. Those days are gone. Now we can be faster and more thor­ough, and we’re often sur­prised when the answers aren’t where we expected. →

4th August, 2010 View Comments