Lifeboat Foundation

The richest man in the world has an affinity for the letter X — though not all Twitter users were happy with the rebrand.

Microscopic materials made of clay, designed by researchers at the University of Missouri, could be key to the future of synthetic materials chemistry. By enabling scientists to produce chemical layers tailor-made to deliver specific tasks based on the goals of the individual researcher, these materials, called nanoclays, can be used in a wide variety of applications, including the medical field or environmental science.

A paper describing this research is published in the journal ACS Applied Engineering Materials.

A fundamental part of the material is its electrically charged surface, said Gary Baker, co-principal investigator on the project and an associate professor in the Department of Chemistry.

China’s rising threat has splintered Europe while creating a need for global leadership.

An artificial intelligence trained on TikTok videos could help you take part in dance trends without moving a muscle.

By Matthew Sparkes

A scalable system for controlling quantum bits demonstrates a very low error rate, which is essential for making practical devices.

A major obstacle to the development of practical quantum computers is the difficulty of scaling up—making a device with large numbers of quantum bits (qubits) that also gives accurate results in the presence of environmental noise. Now researchers report a significant improvement in the accuracy of a technology that is already known to be much easier to scale up than conventional techniques [1]. This alternative technology uses units of magnetic flux called flux quanta to control conventional superconducting qubits. The reduction in the error rate came from physically separating the control circuits from the qubits. With further refinement, the flux-quanta technology could provide a superior pathway to practical quantum computation.

Many current efforts to carry out quantum logic operations—the basic units of computation—use short microwave pulses to control the qubits. Currently, however, this technology is difficult to scale up beyond 1,000 qubits. But the presence of environmental noise requires error-correction methods that rely on large numbers of qubits, perhaps a million or more, for an effective error-correcting system that performs useful computations, according to some estimates.

Measurements conducted over an unprecedented span of conditions uncover universal behavior, but not the kind that theorists expected.

Turbulence is a mesmerizing, chaotic state of fluid motion. It occurs in natural and artificial settings whenever the Reynolds number (quantifying the relative size of inertial to viscous forces in the flow) is large. Through nonlinear coupling, kinetic energy cascades from large scales to ever smaller scales (Fig. 1) until it is dissipated by viscous effects. The fluctuations excited during this process play a crucial role in a diverse range of problems, including planetesimal formation [1], rain initiation in clouds [2], and heat transport within oceans [3]. Remarkably, a new experimental study by Christian Küchler of the Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organization in Germany and co-workers provides compelling evidence that current theoretical models for how the fluctuations are distributed across the scales are missing some important ingredients [4].

Turbulent flows are complex. Quantitative predictions of their properties that are derived directly from the Navier-Stokes equation, without ad hoc assumptions, are accordingly scarce. Most theoretical approaches have perforce been phenomenological, the most famous being Andrey Kolmogorov’s groundbreaking 1941 theory, nicknamed K41 [5]. This mean-field theory assumes that the multiscale properties of the turbulent fluctuations are governed by the average cascade of kinetic energy passing through the scales and by the fluid viscosity. In K41 Kolmogorov went on to propose the existence of an inertial range, which corresponds to an intermediate range of scales over which viscous forces could be ignored relative to inertial forces and where the details of the large-scale forcing are unimportant.

As fish wriggle, they create a complex push–pull pattern in the water that propels them forward. Many studies have shown how the motion of a fish’s tail forms a vortex around its leading edge that provides thrust; however, it has been difficult to capture how the water flow around other parts of the fish interacts with this vortex to impact the overall propulsion. Jiacheng Guo at the University of Virginia and colleagues recently demonstrated how different fins create currents that can constructively interact to improve swimming efficiency [1].

Guo and colleagues studied how the flow around the lower back—or anal—fin interacts with the flow around the tail—or caudal—fin. First, they took a high-resolution video of a swimming rainbow trout and created a computational fluid dynamics model to accurately reproduce the fish’s motion and the water currents that it induced. Then they modified the anal fin in the model to see how this would change the pattern of water flow around the trout and affect the forward thrust.

The researchers found that the anal fin increases propulsion in two ways. It creates a vortex that stabilizes and strengthens the caudal-fin vortex, and it helps maintain a pressure difference across the fish’s body that reduces drag. Changes to the size or position of the anal fin decreased the swimming efficiency, demonstrating that the natural fish physiology is optimal.

Cybersecurity researchers said they have discovered what they say is the first open-source software supply chain attacks specifically targeting the banking sector.

“These attacks showcased advanced techniques, including targeting specific components in web assets of the victim bank by attaching malicious functionalities to it,” Checkmarx said in a report published last week.

“The attackers employed deceptive tactics such as creating a fake LinkedIn profile to appear credible and customized command-and-control (C2) centers for each target, exploiting legitimate services for illicit activities.”

Apple has rolled out security updates to iOS, iPadOS, macOS, tvOS, watchOS, and Safari to address several security vulnerabilities, including one actively exploited zero-day bug in the wild.

Tracked as CVE-2023–38606, the shortcoming resides in the kernel and permits a malicious app to modify sensitive kernel state potentially. The company said it was addressed with improved state management.

“Apple is aware of a report that this issue may have been actively exploited against versions of iOS released before iOS 15.7.1,” the tech giant noted in its advisory.