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] Con­tinue reading →

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. Con­tinue reading →

4th August, 2010 View Comments

The Tokyo Insti­tute of Tech­nol­ogy announced the details of the “Tsub­ame 2.0,” the next-generation super­com­puter sys­tem for the uni­ver­sity that will start oper­a­tion in the fall of 2010, at a press meet­ing. The com­pu­ta­tion capac­ity of the sys­tem is 2.39 PFLOPS (petaflops, double-precision value), which ranks sec­ond in the “Top500,” a rank­ing of super­com­put­ers, as of June 2010. “It will be the first petaflops com­puter in Japan,” said Satoshi Mat­suoka, pro­fes­sor at the Global Sci­en­tific Infor­ma­tion and Com­put­ing Cen­ter (GSIC) of the uni­ver­sity. “And it will be the first world-class super­com­puter sys­tem for our university.”

How­ever, the actual con­struc­tion of the sys­tem, which will be con­ducted by NEC Corp and Hewlett-Packard Co, has yet to be done. The sys­tem has the “vector-scalar mix­ture archi­tec­ture,” Mat­suoka said. But the com­pu­ta­tion capac­ity of its graph­ics pro­cess­ing units (GPUs) accounts for 90% of the total com­pu­ta­tion capac­ity, mak­ing the sys­tem more like a vec­tor com­puter. There­fore, the per­for­mance of the sys­tem slightly dif­fers depend­ing on the type of cal­cu­la­tion. Specif­i­cally, the per­for­mance tar­get in terms of the Lin­pack bench­mark is 1.0−1.4 PFLOPS, which ranks third or fourth in the Top500 as of June 2010. On the other hand, for cal­cu­la­tions that are suited for vec­tor com­put­ers such as weather pre­dic­tion, the per­for­mance can be more than 150 TFLOPS (ter­aflops), which is much higher than the world record (50 TFLOPS). Con­tinue reading →

21st June, 2010 Comments Off

This year human­ity cel­e­brates cen­ten­nial of the birth of one of the great explor­ers and inven­tors of the twen­ti­eth cen­tury Jacques-Yves Cousteau. Jacques-Yves Cousteau was a French naval offi­cer. He and Émile Gag­nan designed the Aqua-Lung, the first self-contained under­wa­ter breath­ing appa­ra­tus, or scuba. It made longer trips under­wa­ter pos­si­ble and freed divers from heavy hel­mets to float as if in space. He brought the mys­te­ri­ous under­wa­ter world to mil­lions by film­ing his adven­tures on the Calypso, a ship he turned into a lab and field research ves­sel. From this ship Cousteau shot the film “The Silent World”, which won the Palme d’Or in Cannes in 1956.

Har­ness­ing the power of visual imagery, Cousteau cre­ated more than 120 doc­u­men­taries and 50 books, and brought aware­ness of the marine envi­ron­ment to mil­lions of peo­ple around the planet. The world stands in his debt for inspir­ing entire gen­er­a­tions of marine biol­o­gists, film­mak­ers, pho­tog­ra­phers and con­ser­va­tion­ists. Later in his life, Cousteau saw that the ocean’s resources are not infi­nite, and sought to edu­cate the world about the fragility of the envi­ron­ment. The Cousteau legacy con­tin­ues through his chil­dren and grand­chil­dren, who have fol­lowed in his foot­steps to edu­cate and inspire. Jacques Cousteau said, “peo­ple pro­tect what they love.” As a com­mu­nity, we must also con­tinue his legacy, to share our images and videos with the world, show­ing species and places that most peo­ple will never see, but which are vitally impor­tant to con­serve. Con­tinue reading →

11th June, 2010 Comments Off