As concerns over cyber security grow with each newly publicized attack, computer scientists have been pursuing quantum technology as a silver bullet against would-be hackers.

According to a groundbreaking announcement, scientists at Los Alamos National Labs in New Mexico have been utilizing a small-scale "quantum internet" for the past two years.

Quantum cryptography is possible because of the phenomenon known as quantum entanglement. When two photons become 'entangled,' changing the spin of one of the photons will alter the spin of the other photon almost instantaneously.

These entangled photons can be used to create an encryption key that cannot be secretly deciphered, as the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle dictates that simply trying to measure the characteristics of a photon will alter it.

For all its promise, computer scientists have only been able to use secure quantum communications with point-to-point communications. This means that messages can only be sent between two parties that each have one of the two entangled photons. Even this type of communication has only been demonstrated over relatively short distances of less than 70 miles.

All lightning on Earth may have its roots in space, new research suggests.

Lightning flashes on Earth about 100 times per second, but what triggers lightning in thunderstorms remains mostly unknown. Especially odd is the fact that decades of analysis suggest electrical fields within thunderclouds have only a tenth or so of the strength needed to spark a lightning bolt.

More than 20 years ago, physicist Alex Gurevich at the Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow suggested lightning might be initiated by cosmic rays from outer space. These particles strike Earth with gargantuan amounts of energy surpassing anything the most powerful atom smashers on the planet are capable of.

When cosmic rays slam into air molecules, they can make them spit out huge numbers of electrons. This shower of electrons would collide into still more air molecules, generating more electrons. All in all, cosmic rays could each set off an avalanche of electrons, a chain reaction Gurevich calls a runaway breakdown.

Are you prepared to meet your robot overlords?

The idea of superintelligent machines may sound like the plot of The Terminator or The Matrix, but many experts say the idea isn't far-fetched. Some even think the singularity - the point at which artificial intelligence can match, and then overtake, human smarts - might happen in just 16 years.

But nearly every computer scientist will have a different prediction for when and how the singularity will happen.

Some believe in a utopian future, in which humans can transcend their physical limitations with the aid of machines. But others think humans will eventually relinquish most of their abilities and gradually become absorbed into artificial intelligence (AI)-based organisms, much like the energy making machinery in our own cells.

Rio de Janeiro - Brazilian geologists on Monday announced the discovery of what could be part of the continent submerged when the Atlantic Ocean was formed as Africa and South America drifted apart 100 million years ago.

Roberto Ventura Santos, a top official at Brazil's Geology Service (CPRM), said granite samples were found two years ago during dredging operations in an area known as "Rio Grande Elevation", a mountain range in Brazilian and international waters.

Granite is seen as a continental rock.

"This could be the Brazilian Atlantis. We are almost certain but we must bolster our hypothesis," said Ventura.

"We will have final (scientific) recognition this year when we conduct drilling in the area to retrieve more samples of these rocks."

Initially, the scientists thought they were mistaken, Ventura noted.

But last month, their case was bolstered when team of Brazilian and Japanese scientists aboard Japan's manned research submersible, Shinkai 6500, observed the underwater geological formation located opposite the Brazilian coast.

"From an analysis we began to see that the area could be a piece of the continent that disappeared into the sea millions of years ago," Ventura said.

Source: AFP

Those in the Australian outback and parts of the Pacific Ocean will be able to view an annular eclipse of the sun - in which a ring of the sun's surface appears around the body of the moon's silhouette - on the morning of May 10, 2013 at shortly after 8 a.m. local time. About 95% of the solar disk will be covered, and yet this is considered a partial eclipse. At no time will the sky darken, or stars pop into view. The remaining 5% of sun is so bright that those in the right place on Earth to see the eclipse will need to look at it through specially filtered glasses for the entire event. View the illustrations below to learn more about the May 10, 2013 annular solar eclipse.
The May 10 annular eclipse as seen in Australia. The annular phase will start in extreme northwest Australia in the state of Western Australia, where some veteran eclipse chasers will try to see it at sunrise. The 300-km-wide path will include Tennant Creek, about 500 km north of Alice Springs in the Northern Territory. The path of annularity will leave the Australian continent well north of Cairns, where tens of thousands of people saw a total solar eclipse in November, and even north of Cooktown; Cliff Island and Flinders Group National Parks will be in the zone. Annularity will last about 3 minutes at Tennant Creek and about 4-1/2 minutes at the centerline, about 50 km north of Tennant Creek. The path of annularity will leave Queensland with about 4-3/4 minutes of annularity.

Radical new research is attempting to characterize the properties of a fifth force that disrupts the predictions general relativity makes outside our own galaxy, on cosmic-length scales. University of Pennsylvania astrophysicist Bhuvnesh Jain, says the nature of gravity is the question of a lifetime. As scientists have been able to see farther and deeper into the universe, the laws of gravity have been revealed to be under the influence of an unexplained force. Two branches of theories have sprung up, each trying to fill its gaps in a different way.

One branch - dark energy - suggests that the vacuum of space has an energy associated with it and that energy causes the observed acceleration. The other falls under the umbrella of "scalar-tensor" gravity theories, which effectively posits a fifth force (beyond gravity, electromagnetism and the strong and weak nuclear forces) that alters gravity on cosmologically large scales.

"These two possibilities are both radical in their own way," Jain said. "One is saying that general relativity is correct, but we have this strange new form of energy. The other is saying we don't have a new form of energy, but gravity is not described by general relativity everywhere."

Jain's research is focused on the latter possibility; he is attempting to characterize the properties of this fifth force that disrupts the predictions general relativity makes outside our own galaxy, on cosmic length scales.

By innovatively analyzing a well-studied class of stars in nearby galaxies, Jain and his colleagues - Vinu Vikram, Anna Cabre and Joseph Clampitt at Penn and Jeremy Sakstein at the University of Cambridge - have produced new findings that narrow down the possibilities of what this force could be. Their findings, published on the Arxiv, are a vindication of Einstein's theory of gravity.

Scientists believe they have made the first ever recording of a tree gasping for water.

Just as humans make a noise as they desperately try to gulp air, living trees make ultrasonic popping noises as they draw in as much moisture as possible to survive during a drought.

The sounds are a hundred times faster than can be heard by the human ear, but a team led by French physicist Philippe Marmottant at Grenoble University believe they have been able to slow the process down sufficiently to be heard during a recent lab experiment.

Using slivers of dead pine tree wood bathed in hydrogel, they recreated the conditions of a living tree.

Scientists believe they may have hit upon a cure for baldness - but it is not for the faint-hearted.

Researchers found they were able to regrow hair on the bald patches on people's heads by injecting them with a solution derived from their own blood.

The so-called "vampire" treatment involved taking blood from the patient and processing it in a machine that extracts "platelet-rich plasma" (PRP), which is then injected back into the head.

Scientists believe the solution then stimulates new stem cells below the skin which can aid the regrowth of hair.

Such "vampire" treatments are already used in some cosmetic procedures, where injections of PRP are used in an effort to reduce the effects of ageing on the face and hands.

The new treatment could have helped Sir Elton John, inset, who invested in a hair transplant.

The research, published in the latest edition of the British Journal of Dermatology, was conducted among a group of people suffering from alopecia areata, which affects about 2 per cent of the population.

These delicate wisps of gas make up an object known as SNR B0519-69.0, or SNR 0519 for short. The thin, blood-red shells are actually the remnants from when an unstable progenitor star exploded violently as a supernova around 600 years ago. There are several types of supernovae, but for SNR 0519 the star that exploded is known to have been a white dwarf star - a Sun-like star in the final stages of its life.

SNR 0519 is located over 150 000 light-years from Earth in the southern constellation of Dorado (The Dolphinfish), a constellation that also contains most of our neighboring galaxy the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC). Because of this, this region of the sky is full of intriguing and beautiful deep sky objects.

The LMC orbits the Milky Way galaxy as a satellite and is the fourth largest in our group of galaxies, the Local Group. SNR 0519 is not alone in the LMC; the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope also came across a similar bauble a few years ago in SNR B0509-67.5, a supernova of the same type as SNR 0519 with a strikingly similar appearance.

NASA said late in the day yesterday (May 3, 2013) that a record-setting blast of gamma rays from a dying star in a distant galaxy has wowed astronomers around the world. The eruption is a gamma-ray burst (GRB), one of the universe's most luminous explosions, thought to take place when supernovae erupt in distant galaxies. This particular GRB is designated GRB 130427A. On April 27, NASA said, it produced the highest-energy light ever detected from a gamma ray burst.

The animation here shows how the sky looks at gamma-ray energies above 100 million electron volts (MeV) with a view centered on the north galactic pole. The first frame shows the sky during a three-hour interval prior to GRB 130427A. The second frame shows a three-hour interval starting 2.5 hours before the burst, and ending 30 minutes into the event. In other words, the animation demonstrates how bright the burst was relative to the rest of the gamma-ray sky. Julie McEnery, project scientist for the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope, which observed the event, said:

We have waited a long time for a gamma-ray burst this shockingly, eye-wateringly bright. The GRB lasted so long that a record number of telescopes on the ground were able to catch it while space-based observations were still ongoing.