The Shocking Secrets of Madison Square Garden’s Surveillance Machine Famously vengeful Knicks owner Jim Dolan has long spied on people at his iconic arenas. WIRED goes deep inside the operation that allegedly tracked a trans woman, lawyers, protesters, and more.

Madison Square Garden was a frontrunner in using facial recognition technology to keep legal opponents from going to concerts and sporting events. Interesting piece from Wired about the security apparatus there more generally.
www.wired.com/story/madiso...

Deception, exploited workers, and cash handouts: How World recruited its first half a million test users The startup promises a fairly-distributed, cryptocurrency-based universal basic income. So far all it's done is build a biometric database from the bodies of the poor.

Watching Sam Altman's World ID announcement on its new ID verification partnerships w/ Tinder, Zoom, AWS, etc & want to point out that @technologyreview.com predicted all of this 4 years ago—while pointing out the privacy violations they built on. www.technologyreview.com/2022/04/06/1...

Surely that must be wrong because Vaclav Smil says fast transitions are against the laws of physics

China's electrification bet is paying off. Electricity now accounts for 30% of its energy consumption - 50% higher than the US or Europe.

With 1/3 of global renewable energy capacity already installed, China is structurally more insulated from rising oil prices than most Western economies.

Ohhh and is it solar powered? I want one too!

‘Without them there is no life on Earth’: why interest in fungi conservation is mushrooming Amid growing evidence of fungi’s key role in ecosystems and storing carbon, mycologists seek greater recognition of the need to preserve ‘funga’ as much as flora and fauna

‘Without them there is no life on Earth’: why interest in #fungi conservation is mushrooming

www.theguardian.com/environment/...

I would also like to see (honest) error bars around each of those data points

So what's better, human or robotic space exploration? Happy to make the case for robotic on Sky News today (with a little shout out to Europa Clipper, arriving at Jupiter in 2030 🥳)

Artemis II relied on European science: what that means for the region's space ambitions The Artemis II mission is a success for the European Space Agency, as well as for NASA. Will Europe crew its own lunar missions?

My latest: the Artemis program was born with an emphasis on international collaboration, and ESA plays a small but important role in it. Will this continue to be the case in this age of "America first"?
www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Oh wow, I never realized (or perhaps I had forgotten) that it was that large! It's surprising that it wasn't discovered long before Galileo, since a keen observer should be able to detect it with the naked eye

Sure, and the tidal locking is not perfect, correct? But how many degrees of oscillation are we talking?

Oh and yes, this just happened

Your periodic reminder that if you are _on_ the Moon, there is no such thing as an earthrise. If you were standing on the surface, you'd see the Earth just floating at a fixed point in the sky. It's only when astronauts were flying by or orbiting the Moon that they could see Earth rising or setting

Massive budget cuts for US science proposed again by Trump administration Budget proposal would also curb federal payments for scientific publishing.

NASA has just shared the first high-resolution images of the Earth taken by the Artemis II crew, meanwhile, massive budget cuts are once again proposed for US science, including for NASA

🧪
www.nature.com/articles/d41...

I don't think it's true at all that transmon chips are where they were in 2019. Anyway these papers are not roadmaps or blueprints, they are resource estimates based on what sounds like reasonable assumptions — and most importantly, Oratomic's focuses on neutral atoms, not transmons

Also, these high-rate quantum LDPC codes are just more efficient at encoding several logical qubits into a small set of physical qubits. That's progress that is kind of orthogonal to the experimental advances

Although if it's used to sabotage infrastructure we could all find out the hard way, I fear

My understanding is that whatever error correction scheme or platform you use, if you improve physical fidelities you should automatically lower the qubit overheads.

But these analyses don't make crazy assumptions about how good your EC needs to be. Moreover, two-gate fidelities have been improving dramatically on many platforms. Oxford ionics points out that their uncorrected two-gate fidelities are better than what others have gotten with distance-7 codes...

Who do you think will be the first targets of 'bad actors' who get access to these capabilities?

Quantum computers will finally be useful: what’s behind the revolution A string of surprising advances suggests usable quantum computers could be here in a decade.

Oh and sorry, here is the link I had promised to my February article
www.nature.com/articles/d41...

... Moreover, while for public key distribution the transition to post-quantum codes is already under way, for authentication it has barely started, as Bas Westerbaan, my source at Cloudflare, points out. [end]

... No, the thing we really should worry about is not encryption, but authentication. It is crucial for keeping the Internet secure. Plus, it is embedded in virtually all gadgets including credit cards and credit card readers but also mobile apps. And it all uses P-256. ...

... But to be honest, RSA is really old news: people started phasing it out already years ago in favor of a different scheme called elliptic curve cryptography, and in particular an implementation called P-256. And more recently, Internet encryption has been migrating to 'quantum-safe' codes. ...

... The paper by Oratomic, a start-up launched just earlier this week by some stars of quantum computing, has now calculated that, and the answer shocked even its own authors. Depending on how fast you want to do it, breaking RSA could require 100,000 or even just 10,000 qubits. ...

... But Gidney's study had made conservative assumptions. His estimate was based on the most vanilla-type quantum error correction, the surface code, and on relatively-poor-quality qubits. I was waiting for the other shoe to drop — for someone to tell us, what's a less conservative estimate? ...

One of the things I mentioned in my February article (linked below) was an analysis by Google's Craig Gidney suggesting that breaking RSA (the encryption system based on prime numbers) would require 1 million qubits — orders of magnitude lower than what was expected just a decade ago [...]

‘It’s a real shock’: quantum-computing breakthroughs pose imminent risks to cybersecurity Two analyses suggest that quantum computers could crack ubiquitous security keys and cryptocurrencies before the decade is over.

Only a couple of months ago, I reported about a "vibe shift" in physics, towards feeling that powerful quantum computers were 1) definitely going to happen and 2) going to happen within 10 years, not a generic "decades". Now that timeline might have to be revised.
www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Are boys really in crisis? What the science says in the age of the manosphere Some data suggest that boys and young men are struggling with school, health and masculinity. But does talk of a male crisis further sideline women and girls?

Are boys in ‘crisis’ — and is the manosphere playing a part?

My new @nature.com feature digs into data on boys & young men incl. education, health & attitudes — and asks whether talk of a ‘crisis’ risks sidelining women & girls. 1/7

www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Some of the scientists we canvassed for this story sounded definitely excited