Sergey Brin’s secretive airship company LTA Research and Exploration is planning to power a huge disaster relief airship with an equally record-breaking hydrogen fuel cell. From a report: A job listing from the company, which is based in Mountain View, California and Akron, Ohio, reveals that LTA wants to configure a 1.5-megawatt hydrogen propulsion system for an airship to deliver humanitarian…
Tag: Switzerland
Magnetic effect without a magnet
Electric current is deflected by a magnetic field—in conducting materials, this leads to the so-called Hall effect. This effect is often used to measure magnetic fields. A surprising discovery has now been made at TU Wien, in collaboration with scientists from the Paul Scherrer Institute (Switzerland), McMater University (Canada), and Rice University (U.S.): an exotic metal made of cerium, bismuth and…
WHO Investigators Now Believe Cornavirus was ‘Circulating Widely’ in Wuhan in December
“Investigators from the World Health Organization (WHO) looking into the origins of coronavirus in China have discovered signs the outbreak was much wider in Wuhan in December 2019 than previously thought,” reports CNN, “and are urgently seeking access to hundreds of thousands of blood samples from the city that China has not so far let them examine.” The lead investigator for…
WHO Investigators Now Believe Coronavirus was ‘Circulating Widely’ in Wuhan in December
“Investigators from the World Health Organization (WHO) looking into the origins of coronavirus in China have discovered signs the outbreak was much wider in Wuhan in December 2019 than previously thought,” reports CNN, “and are urgently seeking access to hundreds of thousands of blood samples from the city that China has not so far let them examine.” The lead investigator for…
Swiss Company Claims Weakness Found in Post-Quantum Encryption, Touts Its New Encryption Protocol
“A Swiss technology company says it has made a breakthrough by using quantum computers to uncover vulnerabilities in commonly used encryption,” reports Bloomberg: Terra Quantum AG said its discovery “upends the current understanding of what constitutes unbreakable” encryption… Terra Quantum AG has a team of about 80 quantum physicists, cryptographers and mathematicians, who are based in Switzerland, Russia, Finland and the…
Research investigates variability of the blazar Mrk 421
Astronomers from Switzerland and Germany have performed multiwavelength observations of a high-synchrotron-peaked blazar known as Mrk 421. Results of this observational campaign provide more insights into the variability of gamma-ray emission from this source. The study was published January 26 on arXiv.org. Source: https://phys.org/news/2021-02-variability-blazar-mrk.html…
Google Workers To Form Global Union Alliance
Google employees from across the globe are forming a union alliance, weeks after more than 200 workers at the search engine giant and other units of parent company Alphabet formed a labor union for U.S. and Canadian offices. From a report: Alpha Global was formed in coordination with UNI Global Union, a union federation that represents about 20 million workers globally,…
Law Enforcement Take Down Three Bulletproof VPN Providers
Law enforcement agencies from the US, Germany, France, Switzerland, and the Netherlands have seized this week the web domains and server infrastructure of three VPN services that provided a safe haven for cybercriminals to attack their victims. From a report: The three services were active at insorg.org, safe-inet.com, and safe-inet.net before the domains were seized and replaced with law enforcement banners…
Report Claims America’s CIA Also Controlled a Second Swiss Encryption Firm
Long-time Slashdot reader SonicSpike brings this report from AFP:
Swiss politicians have voiced outrage and demanded an investigation after revelations that a second Swiss encryption company was allegedly used by the CIA and its German counterpart to spy on governments worldwide. “How can such a thing happen in a country that claims to be neutral like Switzerland?” co-head of Switzerland’s Socialist Party,…
Researchers minimize quantum backaction in thermodynamic systems via entangled measurement
Led by academician Prof. Guo Guangcan from the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), Prof. Li Chuanfeng’s group and Prof. Xiang Guoyong’s group from University of Science and Technology of China (USTC), CAS, in cooperation with theoretical physicists from Germany, Italy and Switzerland, conducted the first experiment using entangled collective measurement for minimizing quantum measurement backaction based on photonic system. …