Advanced Concepts Team

The ice-cube observatory in Antarctica reveals the source of high energy cosmic neutrinos. Spoiler: its Blazars!

Hate spoliers!

A rectenna at infrared wavelength. They authors mention a potential application in RTGs

Paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/1806.02404

Claims to be "the most powerful rocket propellant".

Computer scientists have been searching for years for a type of problem that a quantum computer can solve but that any possible future classical computer cannot. Now they've found one.

Oh this is a big one! Unfortunately, the problem is only relativized (i.e. you need an oracle for it) but nevertheless an impressive result.

Einstein's theory of gravity, General Relativity (GR), has been tested precisely within the Solar System. However, it has been difficult to test GR on the scale of an individual galaxy. Collett et al. exploited a nearby gravitational lens system, in which light from a distant galaxy (the source) is bent by a foreground galaxy (the lens). Mass distribution in the lens was compared with the curvature of space-time around the lens, independently determined from the distorted image of the source. The result supports GR and eliminates some alternative theories of gravity.

Google is taking position here, but can they live up to their own standards?

" Avoid creating or reinforcing unfair bias." Thats the very definition of the AI used today. If you learn from a dataset, you are biased to that data set. No escape from it.

Found them!

microsoft just bought github ...

An experiment at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory near Chicago has detected far more electron neutrinos than predicted - a possible harbinger of a revolutionary new elementary particle called the sterile neutrino, though many physicists remain skeptical.

NASA marketing interstellar travel to foreign bodies even without knowing how they actually look like.

"...measured the way people make certain types of decisions and say that their statistical analysis of the results strongly suggests that the brain must store information in discrete form. Their conclusion has significant implications for neuroscientists and other researchers building devices to connect to the brain."

it works! No, of course it doesn't. I've wasted your time just posting this.

Scientists are preparing to create "miniature brains" that have been genetically engineered to contain Neanderthal DNA, in an unprecedented attempt to understand how humans differ from our closest relatives.

Apparently Atlas became a ninja and I missed it: https://youtu.be/fRj34o4hN4I

he looks way more elegant than most humans when running :D

I'll try not to take that personally...

20 billion sun masses black hole!!

no cutting-edge space-related science, but important anyways

The EFF communicate is actually quite inaccurate. This is disappointing from the EFF, though for some part, it is due to the communication from the researchers who "discovered" the attack. PGP itself is not broken, but rather some implementations on some email clients (notably Enigmail, though it was patched several months ago). See https://protonmail.com/blog/pgp-vulnerability-efail/ On the other hand, if you are very keen on security, there is an XSS attack reported on Signal, so… https://thehackernews.com/2018/05/signal-messenger-code-injection.html The *good* recommendation here is actually rather to keep your software stack up to date (surprising, no?) and keep encrypting your emails.

Old data reveal new evidence of europa spouting plumes into space.