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A team of physicists from Sweden, Germany and Spain managed to document the moments of transition of an electron by taking a series of images of strontium ion held in an electric field. Scientists research has attracted a lot of attention with the comments that the universe we experience in our daily lives is not like what we see when we try to look closely.

Objects are an extraordinary result of physics, and these objects can only be identified using a number of sets of probabilities. They all look like duplicates until they try to explore with light to determine their specific size and nature.

In the 1940s, the American-Hungarian mathematician John von Neumann thought that part of the quantum system, for example, the position of the orbital electron, would create enough quantum for all to give up the probable nature of its measurement.

Years later, a German theoretical physicist named Gerhart Lders disagreed with Neumanns assumptions, pointing out that some unstable qualities of a particles possibilities can circulate even while others are being clarified. Although physicists have agreed with Lders in theory, it is not easy to demonstrate experimentally based on measuring some naturally occurring actions in such a way that they do not interfere with each other.

The same quantum computer systemThe researchers placed the electron in a missing strontium atom, trapped the ion in a way to clarify which of the remaining electrons was inside, causing both to meet.

It is actually the same setup that is used in many quantum computers. Quantum computers calculate based on the probability of an objects state before measuring, which means they have an exponentially higher data processing potential than conventional computers.

Research sheds light on the inner workings of natureEvery time we measure the orbit of the electron, the answer will be whether the electron is in a lower or higher orbit, nothing will be between them, said physicist Fabian Pokorny from the University of Stockholm. These findings shed new light on the inner workings of nature and are consistent with the predictions of modern quantum physics, said colleague Markus Hennrich, a physicist researcher at the University of Stockholm.

The research is not the first experiment to show that the quantum leap in the probability of an electron is an expansion process, such as eruption of a volcano rather than a key. However, it is possible to say that the way the change took place adds some interesting details that allow such ideal measurements. Scientists experiments on the subject continue at full speed.

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Physicists Captured The Moment That An Atom Enters Quantum Measurement - Somag News

The world is surrounded by technology technology that makes our jobs easy, the technology that makes our commute easy, the technology that makes out communication easy and so on. Hence, such advancements have turned into a boon to our lives while easing out numerous works that would conventionally take a long time to complete. Now that we look back we see so many new technologies have taken over the world that its nearly impossible to enlist them at once. And how further advancements will impact our lives in new ways we cannot even imagine.

MIT has drafted a list of top 10 strategic technology breakthroughs that will revolutionize our lives in the coming years.

An internet based on quantum physics will soon enable inherently secure communication. A team led by Stephanie Wehner, at Delft University of Technology, is building a network connecting four cities in the Netherlands entirely by means of quantum technology. Messages sent over this network will be unhackable.

The Delft network will be the first to transmit information between cities using quantum techniques from end to end.The technology relies on a quantum behavior of atomic particles called entanglement. Entangled photons cant be covertly read without disrupting their content.

Heres a definition of a hopeless case: a child with a fatal disease so exceedingly rare that not only is there no treatment, theres not even anyone in a lab coat studying it. Too rare to care, goes the saying.

Thats about to change, thanks to new classes of drugs that can be tailored to a persons genes. If an extremely rare disease is caused by a specific DNA mistakeas several thousand aretheres now at least a fighting chance for a genetic fix through hyper-personalized medicine. One such case is that of Mila Makovec, a little girl suffering from a devastating illness caused by a unique genetic mutation, who got a drug manufactured just for her. Her case made the New England Journal of Medicine in October after doctors moved from a readout of her genetic error to treatment in just a year. They called the drug milasen, after her. The treatment hasnt cured Mila. But it seems to have stabilized her condition: it has reduced her seizures, and she has begun to stand and walk with assistance.

Milas treatment was possible because creating a gene medicine has never been faster or had a better chance of working. The new medicines might take the form of gene replacement, gene editing, or antisense (the type Mila received), a sort of molecular eraser, which erases or fixes erroneous genetic messages. What the treatments have in common is that they can be programmed, in digital fashion and with digital speed, to correct or compensate for inherited diseases, letter for DNA letter.

Last June Facebook unveiled a global digital currency called Libra. The idea triggered a backlash and Libra may never launch, at least not in the way it was originally envisioned. But its still made a difference: just days after Facebooks announcement, an official from the Peoples Bank of China implied that it would speed the development of its own digital currency in response. Now China is poised to become the first major economy to issue a digital version of its money, which it intends as a replacement for physical cash.

The first wave of a new class of anti-aging drugs has begun human testing. These drugs wont let you live longer (yet) but aim to treat specific ailments by slowing or reversing a fundamental process of aging.

The drugs are called senolyticsthey work by removing certain cells that accumulate as we age. Known as senescent cells, they can create low-level inflammation that suppresses normal mechanisms of cellular repair and creates a toxic environment for neighboring cells.

The universe of molecules that could be turned into potentially life-saving drugs is mind-boggling in size: researchers estimate the number at around 1060. Thats more than all the atoms in the solar system, offering virtually unlimited chemical possibilitiesif only chemists could find the worthwhile ones.

Now machine-learning tools can explore large databases of existing molecules and their properties, using the information to generate new possibilities. This AI enabled technology could make it faster and cheaper to discover new drug candidates.

Satellites that can beam a broadband connection to internet terminals. As long as these terminals have a clear view of the sky, they can deliver the internet to any nearby devices. SpaceX alone wants to send more than 4.5 times more satellites into orbit this decade than humans have ever launched since Sputnik.

These mega-constellations are feasible because we have learned how to build smaller satellites and launch them more cheaply. During the space shuttle era, launching a satellite into space cost roughly US$24,800 per pound. A small communications satellite that weighed four tons cost nearly $200 million to fly up.

Quantum computers store and process data in a way completely different from the ones were all used to. In theory, they could tackle certain classes of problems that even the most powerful classical supercomputer imaginable would take millennia to solve, like breaking todays cryptographic codes or simulating the precise behavior of molecules to help discover new drugs and materials.

There have been working quantum computers for several years, but its only under certain conditions that they outperform classical ones, and in October Google claimed the first such demonstration of quantum supremacy. A computer with 53 qubitsthe basic unit of quantum computationdid a calculation in a little over three minutes that, by Googles reckoning, would have taken the worlds biggest supercomputer 10,000 years, or 1.5 billion times as long. IBM challenged Googles claim, saying the speedup would be a thousandfold at best; even so, it was a milestone, and each additional qubit will make the computer twice as fast.

AI has a problem: in the quest to build more powerful algorithms, researchers are using ever greater amounts of data and computing power and relying on centralized cloud services. This not only generates alarming amounts of carbon emissions but also limits the speed and privacy of AI applications.

But a countertrend of tiny AI is changing that. Tech giants and academic researchers are working on new algorithms to shrink existing deep-learning models without losing their capabilities. Meanwhile, an emerging generation of specialized AI chips promises to pack more computational power into tighter physical spaces, and train and run AI on far less energy.

In 2020, the US government has a big task: collect data on the countrys 330 million residents while keeping their identities private. The data is released in statistical tables that policymakers and academics analyze when writing legislation or conducting research. By law, the Census Bureau must make sure that it cant lead back to any individuals.

But there are tricks to de-anonymize individuals, especially if the census data is combined with other public statistics.

So the Census Bureau injects inaccuracies, or noise, into the data. It might make some people younger and others older, or label some white people as black and vice versa while keeping the totals of each age or ethnic group the same. The more noise you inject, the harder the de-anonymization becomes.

Differential privacy is a mathematical technique that makes this process rigorous by measuring how much privacy increases when noise is added. The method is already used by Apple and Facebook to collect aggregate data without identifying particular users.

Ten days after Tropical Storm Imelda began flooding neighborhoods across the Houston area last September, a rapid-response research team announced that climate change almost certainly played a role.

The group, World Weather Attribution, had compared high-resolution computer simulations of worlds where climate change did and didnt occur. In the former, the world we live in, the severe storm was as much as 2.6 times more likelyand up to 28% more intense.

Earlier this decade, scientists were reluctant to link any specific event to climate change. But many more extreme-weather attribution studies have been done in the last few years, and rapidly improving tools and techniques have made them more reliable and convincing.

This has been made possible by a combination of advances. For one, the lengthening record of detailed satellite data is helping us understand natural systems. Also, increased computing power means scientists can create higher-resolution simulations and conduct many more virtual experiments.

These and other improvements have allowed scientists to state with increasing statistical certainty that yes, global warming is often fueling more dangerous weather events.

By disentangling the role of climate change from other factors, the studies are telling us what kinds of risks we need to prepare for, including how much flooding to expect and how severe heatwaves will get as global warming becomes worse. If we choose to listen, they can help us understand how to rebuild our cities and infrastructure for a climate-changed world.

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Top 10 Strategic Technology Breakthroughs That Will Transform Our Lives - Analytics Insight

Concerns that quantum computing could place current encryption techniques at risk have been around for some time.

But now cybersecurity startup Active Cypher has built a password-hacking quantum computer to demonstrate that the dangers are very real.

Using easily available parts costing just $600, Active Cyphers founder and CTO, Dan Gleason, created a portable quantum computer dubbed QUBY (named after qubits, the basic unit of quantum information). QUBY runs recently open-sourced quantum algorithms capable of executing within a quantum emulator that can perform cryptographic cracking algorithms. Calculations that would have otherwise taken years on conventional computers are now performed in seconds on QUBY.

Gleason explains, "After years of foreseeing this danger and trying to warn the cybersecurity community that current cybersecurity protocols were not up to par, I decided to take a week and move my theory to prototype. I hope that QUBY can increase awareness of how the cyberthreats of quantum computing are not reserved to billion-dollar state-sponsored projects, but can be seen on much a smaller, localized scale."

The concern is that quantum computing will lead to the sunset of AES-256 (the current encryption standard), meaning all encrypted files could one day be decrypted. "The disruption that will come about from that will be on an unprecedented, global scale. It's going to be massive," says Gleason. Modelled after the SADM, a man-portable nuclear weapon deployed in the 1960s, QUBY was downsized so that it fits in a backpack and is therefore untraceable. Low-level 'neighborhood hackers' have already been using portable devices that can surreptitiously swipe credit card information from an unsuspecting passerby. Quantum compute emulating devices will open the door for significantly more cyberthreats.

In response to the threat, Active Cypher has developed advanced dynamic cyphering encryption that is built to be quantum resilient. Gleason explains that, "Our encryption is not based on solving a mathematical problem. It's based on a very large, random key which is used in creating the obfuscated cyphertext, without any key information within the cyphertext, and is thus impossible to be derived through prime factorization -- traditional brute force attempts which use the cyphertext to extract key information from patterns derived from the key material."

Active Cypher's completely random cyphertext cannot be deciphered using even large quantum computers since the only solution to cracking the key is to try every possible combination of the key, which will produce every known possible output of the text, without knowledge of which version might be the correct one. "In other words, you'll find a greater chance of finding a specific grain of sand in a desert than cracking this open," says Gleason.

Active Cypher showcased QUBY in early February at Ready -- an internal Microsoft conference held in Seattle. The prototype will also be presented at RSA in San Francisco later this month.

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The $600 quantum computer that could spell the end for conventional encryption - BetaNews

Google reported a remarkable breakthrough towards the end of 2019. The company claimed to have achieved something called quantum supremacy, using a new type of quantum computer to perform a benchmark test in 200 seconds. This was in stark contrast to the 10,000 years that would supposedly have been needed by a state-of-the-art conventional supercomputer to complete the same test.

Despite IBMs claim that its supercomputer, with a little optimisation, could solve the task in a matter of days, Googles announcement made it clear that we are entering a new era of incredible computational power.

Yet with much less fanfare, there has also been rapid progress in the development of quantum communication networks, and a master network to unite them all called the quantum internet. Just as the internet as we know it followed the development of computers, we can expect the quantum computer to be accompanied by the safer, better synchronised quantum internet.

Like quantum computing, quantum communication records information in what are known as qubits, similar to the way digital systems use bits and bytes. Whereas a bit can only take the value of zero or one, a qubit can also use the principles of quantum physics to take the value of zero and one at the same time. This is what allows quantum computers to perform certain computations very quickly. Instead of solving several variants of a problem one by one, the quantum computer can handle them all at the same time.

These qubits are central to the quantum internet because of a property called entanglement. If two entangled qubits are geographically separated (for instance, one qubit in Dublin and the other in New York), measurements of both would yield the same result. This would enable the ultimate in secret communications, a shared knowledge between two parties that cannot be discovered by a third. The resulting ability to code and decode messages would be one of the most powerful features of the quantum internet.

Commercial applications

There will be no shortage of commercial applications for these advanced cryptographic mechanisms. The world of finance, in particular, looks set to benefit as the quantum internet will lead to enhanced privacy for online transactions and stronger proof of the funds used in the transaction.

Recently, at the CONNECT Centre in Trinity College Dublin, we successfully implemented an algorithm that could achieve this level of security. That this took place during a hackathon a sort of competition for computer programmers shows that even enthusiasts without detailed knowledge of quantum physics can create some of the building blocks that will be needed for the quantum internet. This technology wont be confined to specialist university departments, just as the original internet soon outgrew its origins as a way to connect academics around the world.

But how could this quantum internet be built anytime soon when we currently can only build very limited quantum computers? Well, the devices in the quantum internet dont have to be completely quantum in nature, and the network wont require massive quantum machines to handle the communication protocols.

One qubit here and there is all a quantum communication network needs to function. Instead of replacing the current infrastructure of optical fibres, data centres and base stations, the quantum internet will build on top of and make maximum use of the existing, classical internet.

With such rapid progress being made, quantum internet technology is set to shape the business plans of telecom companies in the near future. Financial institutions are already using quantum communication networks to make inter-bank transactions safer. And quantum communication satellites are up and running as the first step to extending these networks to a global scale.

The pipes of the quantum internet are effectively being laid as you read this. When a big quantum computer is finally built, it can be plugged into this network and accessed on the cloud, with all the privacy guarantees of quantum cryptography.

What will the ordinary user notice when the enhanced cryptography of the quantum internet becomes available? Very little, in all likelihood. Cryptography is like waste management: if everything works well, the customer doesnt even notice.

In the constant race of the codemakers and codebreakers, the quantum internet wont just prevent the codebreakers taking the lead. It will move the race track into another world altogether, with a significant head start for the codemakers. With data becoming the currency of our times, the quantum internet will provide stronger security for a new valuable commodity.

Harun iljak, Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Complex Systems Science for Telecommunications, Trinity College Dublin

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Image: Reuters

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Quantum Internet: The Technology That Could Change Everything? - The National Interest Online

By the end of 1943, the US Navy had installed 120 electromechanical Bombe machines like the one above, which were used to decipher secret messages encrypted by German Enigma machines, including messages from German U-boats. Built for the Navy by the Dayton company National Cash Register, the US Bombe was an improved version of the British Bombe, which was itself based on a Polish design. Credit: National Security Agency

Quantum computing is a technology that promises to revolutionize computing by speeding up key computing tasks in areas such as machine learning and solving otherwise intractable problems. Some influential American policy makers, scholars, and analysts are extremely concerned about the effects quantum computing will have on national security. Similar to the way space technology was viewed in the context of the US-Soviet rivalry during the Cold War, scientific advancement in quantum computing is seen as a race with significant national security consequences, particularly in the emerging US-China rivalry. Analysts such as Elsa Kania have written that the winner of this race will be able to overcome all cryptographic efforts and gain access to the state secrets of the losing government. Additionally, the winner will be able to protect its own secrets with a higher level of security than contemporary cryptography guarantees.

These claims are considerably overstated. Instead of worrying about winning the quantum supremacy race against China, policy makers and scholars should shift their focus to a more urgent national security problem: How to maintain the long-term security of secret information secured by existing cryptographic protections, which will fail against an attack by a future quantum computer.

The race for quantum supremacy. Quantum supremacy is an artificial scientific goalone that Google claims to have recently achievedthat marks the moment a quantum computer computes an answer to a well-defined problem more efficiently than a classical computer. Quantum supremacy is possible because quantum computers replace classical bitsrepresenting either a 0 or a 1with qubits that use the quantum principles of superposition and entanglement to do some types of computations an order of magnitude more efficiently than a classical computer. While quantum supremacy is largely meant as a scientific benchmark, some analysts have co-opted the term and set it as a national-security goal for the United States.

These analysts draw a parallel between achieving quantum supremacy and the historical competition for supremacy in space and missile technology between the United States and the Soviet Union. As with the widely shared assessment in the 1950s and 1960s that the United States was playing catchup, Foreign Policy has reported on a quantum gap between the United States and China that gives China a first mover advantage. US policy experts such as Kania, John Costello, and Congressman Will Hurd (R-TX) fear that if China achieves quantum supremacy first, that will have a direct negative impact on US national security.

Some analysts who have reviewed technical literature have found that quantum computers will be able to run algorithms that allow for the decryption of encrypted messages without access to a decryption key. If encryption schemes can be broken, message senders will be exposed to significant strategic and security risks, and adversaries may be able to read US military communications, diplomatic cables, and other sensitive information. Some of the policy discussion around this issue is influenced by suggestions that the United States could itself become the victim of a fait accompli in code-breaking after quantum supremacy is achieved by an adversary such as China. Such an advantage would be similar to the Allies advantage in World War II when they were able to decrypt German radio traffic in near-real time using US and British Bombe machines (see photo above).

The analysts who have reviewed the technical literature have also found that quantum technologies will enable the use of cryptographic schemes that do not rely on mathematical assumptions, specifically a scheme called quantum key distribution. This has led to the notion in the policy community that quantum communications will be significantly more secure than classical cryptography. Computer scientist James Kurose of the National Science Foundation has presented this view before the US Congress, for example.

Inconsistencies between policy concerns and technical realities. It is true that quantum computing threatens the viability of current encryption systems, but that does not mean quantum computing will make the concept of encryption obsolete. There are solutions to this impending problem. In fact, there is an entire movement in the field to investigate post-quantum cryptography. The aims of this movement are to find efficient encryption schemes to replace current methods with new, quantum-secure encryption.

The National Institute of Standards and Technology is currently in the process of standardizing a quantum-safe public key encryption system that is expected to be completed by 2024 at the latest. The National Security Agency has followed suit by announcing its Commercial National Security Algorithm Encryption Suite. These new algorithms can run on a classical computera computer found in any home or office today. In the future, there will be encryption schemes that provide the same level of security against both quantum and classical computers as the level provided by current encryption schemes against classical computers only.

Because quantum key distribution enables senders and receivers to detect eavesdroppers, analysts have claimed that the ability of the recipient and sender [to] determine if the message has been intercepted is a major advantage over classical cryptography. While eavesdropper detection is an advancement in technology, it does not actually provide any significant advantage over classical cryptography, because eavesdropper detection is not a problem in secure communications in the first place.

When communicating parties use quantum key distribution, an eavesdropper cannot get ciphertext (encrypted text) and therefore cannot get any corresponding plaintext (unencrypted text). When the communicating parties use classical cryptography, the eavesdropper can get ciphertext but cannot decrypt it, so the level of security provided to the communicating parties is indistinguishable from quantum key distribution.

The more pressing national security problem. While the technical realities of quantum computing demonstrate that there are no permanent security implications of quantum computing, there is a notable longer-term national security problem: Classified information with long-term intelligence value that is secured by contemporary encryption schemes can be compromised in the future by a quantum computer.

The most important aspect of the executive order that gives the US government the power to classify information, as it relates to the discussion of quantum computing and cryptography, is that this order allows for the classification of all types of information for as long as 25 years. Similarly, the National Security Agency provides guidelines to its contractors that classified information has a potential intelligence life of up to 30 years. This means that classified information currently being secured by contemporary encryption schemes could be relevant to national security through at least 2049and will not be secure in the future against cryptanalysis enabled by a quantum computer.

In the past, the United States has intercepted and stored encrypted information for later cryptanalysis. Toward the end of World War II, for example, the United States became suspicious of Soviet intentions and began to intercept encrypted Soviet messages. Because of operator error, some of the messages were partially decryptable. When the United States realized this, the government began a program called the Venona Project to decrypt these messages.

It is likely that both the United States and its adversaries will have Venona-style projects in the future. A few scholars and individuals in the policy community have recognized this problem. Security experts Richard Clarke and Robert Knake have stated that governments have been rumored for years to be collecting and storing other nations encrypted messages that they now cannot crack, with the hope of cracking them in the future with a quantum computer.

As long as the United States continues to use encryption algorithms that are not quantum-resistant, sensitive information will be exposed to this long-term risk. The National Institute of Standards and Technologys quantum-resistant algorithm might not be completedand reflected in the National Security Agencys own standarduntil 2024. The National Security Agency has stated that algorithms often require 20 years to be fully deployed on NSS [National Security Systems]. Because of this, some parts of the US national security apparatus may be using encryption algorithms that are not quantum-resistant as late as 2044. Any information secured by these algorithms is at risk of long-term decryption by US adversaries.

Recommendations for securing information. While the United States cannot take back any encrypted data already in the possession of adversaries, short-term reforms can reduce the security impacts of this reality. Taking 20 years to fully deploy any cryptographic algorithm should be considered unacceptable in light of the threat to long-lived classified information. The amount of time to fully deploy a cryptographic algorithm should be lowered to the smallest time frame feasible. Even if this time period cannot be significantly reduced, the National Security Agency should take steps to triage modernization efforts and ensure that the most sensitive systems and information are updated first.

Luckily for the defenders of classified information, existing encryption isnt completely defenseless against quantum computing. While attackers with quantum computers could break a significant number of classical encryption schemes, it still may take an extremely large amount of time and resources to carry out such attacks. While the encryption schemes being used today can eventually be broken, risk mitigation efforts can increase the time it takes to decrypt information.

This can be done by setting up honeypotssystems disguised as vulnerable classified networks that contain useless encrypted dataand allowing them to be attacked by US adversaries. This would force adversaries to waste substantial amounts of time and valuable computer resources decrypting useless information. Such an operation is known as as defense by deception, a well-proven strategy to stymie hackers looking to steal sensitive information. This strategy is simply an application of an old risk mitigation strategy to deal with a new problem.

Quantum computing will have an impact on national security, just not in the way that some of the policy community claims that it will. Quantum computing will not significantly reduce or enhance the inherent utility of cryptography, and the outcome of the race for quantum supremacy will not fundamentally change the distribution of military and intelligence advantages between the great powers.

Still, the United States needs to be wary of long-term threats to the secrecy of sensitive information. These threats can be mitigated by reducing the deployment timeline for new encryption schemes to something significantly less than 20 years, triaging cryptographic updates to systems that communicate and store sensitive and classified information, and taking countermeasures that significantly increase the amount of time and resources it takes for adversaries to exploit stolen encrypted information. The threats of quantum computing are manageable, as long as the US government implements these common-sense reforms.

Editors Note: The author wrote a longer version of this essay under a Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory contract with the US Energy Department. Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory is operated by Lawrence Livermore National Security, LLC, for the US Department of Energy, National Nuclear Security Administration under Contract DE-AC52-07NA27344. The views and opinions of author expressed herein do not necessarily state or reflect those of the United States government or Lawrence Livermore National Security, LLC. LLNL-JRNL-799938.

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Keeping classified information secret in a world of quantum computing - Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists