Tag: Quantum Stuff

Orion, a SolarWinds product, was designed to monitor the users’ networks to make sure they were functioning properly and, ironically, kept safe.Photograph by Camilo Concha / Shutterstock Last year, hackers made headlines after they breached SolarWinds, a software company that specializes in network monitoring software. About 33,000 organizations, including the Pentagon, the U.S. State Department,… Continue reading We Already Know How to Stop SolarWinds-Like Hacks – Facts So Romantic

If you could soar high in the sky, as red kites often do in search of prey, and look down at the domain of all things known and yet to be known, you would see something very curious: a vast class of things that science has so far almost entirely neglected. These things are central… Continue reading Our Little Life Is Rounded with Possibility – Issue 102: Hidden Truths

(The title is a riff on my 2016 post announcing the efforts of Finnish open science activists to obtain pricing information through the courts.) Edit 1: I gave a comment for a Times Higher Education article on Elsevier’s negotiations. Edit 2: on Feb 2, 2018, FinELib released more details, including the level of total price… Continue reading Finland takes steps in the openness of academic journal pricing — Mostly Physics

Edited by Dava Sobel Nothing’s wholly certain. A half apple lay beside the bed, bites taken out of it, when his corpse was found—though no one really tried to ascertain if it contained cyanide. After he had seen Snow White, off and on he would chant the haggish queen’s vile couplet. Did he dip the… Continue reading Poem: ‘Turing and the Apple’

Quantum computers, you might have heard, are magical uber-machines that will soon cure cancer and global warming by trying all possible answers in different parallel universes. For 15 years, on my blog and elsewhere, I’ve railed against this cartoonish vision, trying to explain what I see as the subtler but ironically even more fascinating truth.… Continue reading What Makes Quantum Computing So Hard to Explain?

People often ask me whether human-level artificial intelligence will eventually become conscious. My response is: Do you want it to be conscious? I think it is largely up to us whether our machines will wake up. That may sound presumptuous. The mechanisms of consciousness—the reasons we have a vivid and direct experience of the world… Continue reading Do You Want AI to Be Conscious? – Issue 102: Hidden Truths

To survive in the frigid ocean waters around the Arctic and Antarctica, marine life evolved many defenses against the lethal cold. One common adaptation is the ability to make antifreezing proteins (AFPs) that prevent ice crystals from growing in blood, tissues and cells. It’s a solution that has evolved repeatedly and independently, not just in… Continue reading DNA Jumps Between Animal Species. No One Knows How Often.

When animals go extinct, their functions in an ecosystem can be lost, oftentimes leading to the extinction of other species that depend on those functions. Can nonnative species, which are often regarded as invasive pests by conservationists, fill the roles left vacant by extinctions? This question is easy to ponder in the Hawaiian Islands, which… Continue reading Invasive Species Can Sometimes Help an Ecosystem

Most of the data for the initial version of the manuscript was collected already in July, 2017, but sat for a while on my hard drive before writing them up. The first version of the results was posted on the physics preprint archive arXiv right before Christmas on December 23, 2017 (https://arxiv.org/abs/1712.08755v1). In that initial manuscript, most… Continue reading Manipulating single atoms with an electron beam — Mostly Physics