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The scientists published their findings in the journal Physics Review X. Finally quantum cryptography may enter mainstream technology. Quantum systems cannot be measured without being noticeably disrupted. People can encode encryption keys into a series of photons and share it, knowing that any eavesdropper will trip the system’s alarms. However, such systems haven’t been able to transmit keys along telecommunication lines, because other data traffic swamps the encoded signal. As a result, quantum cryptography has had only some niche applications, like connecting offices to nearby backup sites using expensive dark fibers that carry no other signals....

Five years later, biofuels have been criticized and critics charge that devoting millions of hectares of agricultural land to fuel crops is driving up food prices and the climate benefits of biofuels are modest. The policies of the Brazilian government have compounded the effects of the global economic downturn. The domestic consumption of liquid ethanol in 2012 has been 26% lower than for the same period in 2008 and forty-one of Brazil’s roughly 400 sugar cane ethanol plants have closed during that span....

COVID-19 has been spreading rapidly over the past several months, and the U.S. death toll has now reached 400,000. As evident from the age distribution of those fatalities, COVID-19 is dangerous not only for the elderly but for middle-aged adults, according to a Dartmouth-led study published in the European Journal of Epidemiology. “For a person who is middle-aged, the risk of dying from COVID-19 is about 100 times greater than dying from an automobile accident,” explains lead author Andrew Levin, a professor of economics at Dartmouth College....

NASA Goddard scientist Roopesh Ojha explains how Fermi and TANAMI uncovered the first plausible link between a blazar eruption and a neutrino from deep space. “Neutrinos are the fastest, lightest, most unsociable and least understood fundamental particles, and we are just now capable of detecting high-energy ones arriving from beyond our galaxy,” said Roopesh Ojha, a Fermi team member at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, and a coauthor of the study....

Wildland fires raged across central and southern Chile in early February 2023. The blazes killed dozens, injured thousands, and left many people homeless. The smoke that previously poured over the Pacific Ocean has since lessened, but the scars on the landscape remain. The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Terra satellite acquired these images before and after the outbreak of fires. The images are false-color, composed from a combination of shortwave infrared and visible light (MODIS bands 7-2-1), which makes it easier to distinguish the burn scar on the landscape....

That’s the scenario scientists have hypothesized. Now, a new study led by The University of Texas at Austin has confirmed it by finding hard evidence in the hundreds of feet of rocks that filled the impact crater within the first 24 hours after impact. The evidence includes bits of charcoal, jumbles of rock brought in by the tsunami’s backflow, and conspicuously absent sulfur. They are all part of a rock record that offers the most detailed look yet into the aftermath of the catastrophe that ended the Age of Dinosaurs, said Sean Gulick, a research professor at the University of Texas Institute for Geophysics (UTIG) at the Jackson School of Geosciences....

For the first time, scientists have managed to sequence multiple individuals from a remote Neanderthal community in Siberia. Among these thirteen individuals, the investigators identified multiple related individuals, including a father and his teenage daughter. The thirteen genomes also allowed the researchers to provide a glimpse into the social organization of a Neanderthal community. They appear to have been a small group of close relatives, consisting of ten to twenty members, and communities were primarily connected through female migration....

An international group of scientists working at the Department of Energy’s (DOE) SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory has mapped a weak spot in the parasite that causes African sleeping sickness, pinpointing a promising new target for treating a disease that kills tens of thousands of people each year. The results, reported in Science Express, are already being enlisted in the effort to combat the disease, which is transmitted by tsetse flies infected with the single-celled parasite....

The galactic detective work found that Andromeda has eaten several smaller galaxies, likely within the last few billion years, with leftovers found in large streams of stars. ANU researcher Dr. Dougal Mackey, who co-led the study with Professor Geraint Lewis from the University of Sydney, said the international research team also found very faint traces of more small galaxies that Andromeda gobbled up even earlier, perhaps as far back as 10 billion years when it was first forming....

All but two of the 26 Galileo satellites already in orbit underwent pre-flight testing at this 3000 sq. m environmentally-controlled complex, hosting test equipment to simulate all aspects of spaceflight. The Test Centre is operated and managed by European Test Services for ESA. All 12 Batch 3 satellites – functionally similar to the Full Operational Capability satellites already in orbit – are scheduled to come here from OHB in Germany to assess their readiness for space, before heading on to French Guiana....

Clear evidence for all these processes has been detected in their optical emission lines of ionized atoms, whose velocities can be measured. However it has been much hard to obtain spatial information about the geometry of the excited gas. CfA astronomer Martin Elvis and nine colleagues used the Gemini eight-meter telescope and a powerful new instrument that records both high-resolution spatial (as small as a few hundred light-years in size) and velocity information....

The research team used cutting-edge techniques, including growing human brain cells from stem cells and transplanting them into mouse brains, to make these discoveries. The work illustrates the potential of a new approach to studying brain disorders, scientists said. Describing the study in the journal, Molecular Psychiatry, researchers reported a mutation – R451C in the gene Neurologin-3, known to cause autism in humans – was found to provoke a higher level of communication among a network of transplanted human brain cells in mouse brains....

Global warming also affects lakes. Based on the example of Lake Zurich, researchers from the University of Zurich demonstrate that there is insufficient water turnover in the lake during the winter and harmful Burgundy blood algae are increasingly thriving. The warmer temperatures are thus compromising the successful lake clean-ups of recent decades. Many large lakes in Central Europe became heavily over-fertilized in the twentieth century through sewage. As a result, algal blooms developed and cyanobacteria (photosynthetic bacteria) especially began to appear en masse....

A geologic formation near Aix-en-Provence, France, is renowned as one of the world’s most important treasure troves of Cenozoic Era fossil species. Scientists have been uncovering exceptionally well-preserved fossilized plants and animals there since the late 1700s. The Aix-en-Provence formation is particularly famous for its fossilized terrestrial arthropods from the Oligocene Period (between roughly 23-34 million years ago). Because arthropods — animals with exoskeletons like spiders — are rarely fossilized, their abundance at Aix-en-Provence is astounding....

Improved Forecasting to Coincide with Peak in Solar Activity After years of relative somnolence, the sun is beginning to stir. By the time it’s fully awake in about 20 months, the team at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., charged with researching and tracking solar activity, will have at their dispoal a greatly enhanced forecasting capability. Goddard’s Space Weather Laboratory recently received support under NASA’s Space Technology Program Game Changing Program to implement “ensemble forecasting,” a computer technique already used by meteorologists to track potential paths and impacts of hurricanes and other severe weather events....

Specifically, the study found that individuals who have been vaccinated are at a reduced risk of developing breathing difficulties, the most prevalent effect to occur following a mild case of COVID-19, compared to those who have not been vaccinated. These findings suggest that, although the long covid phenomenon has been feared and discussed since the beginning of the pandemic, the vast majority of mild disease cases do not suffer serious or chronic long-term illness, say the researchers....

Artificial photosynthesis, or a photocatalytic reaction to produce chemical energy from carbon oxide (CO2) and light, is, as with a solar battery, a promising next-generation clean energy. In particular, the photocatalytic reaction using rhenium (Re) complexes is highly efficient. In order to create efficient photocatalytic molecules, it is necessary to examine how the photocatalytic reaction occurs on a picosecond timescale. However, it was impossible to directly observe various phenomena in the photocatalytic reaction....

University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) researchers have developed a new transparent solar cell that is an advance toward giving windows in homes and other buildings the ability to generate electricity while still allowing people to see outside. Their study appears in the journal ACS Nano. The UCLA team describes a new kind of polymer solar cell (PSC) that produces energy by absorbing mainly infrared light, not visible light, making the cells nearly 70% transparent to the human eye....

The pandemic has impacted farmers, children, plant workers, and even office workers in unique ways that go beyond physical illness. Several studies that explore these individualized effects will be presented during the Individual Impacts of Global Pandemic Risks session and the COVID-19: Risk Communication and Social Dynamics of Transmission and Vulnerability symposia, both from 2:30-4:00 p.m. ET on December 15, at the 2020 Society for Risk Analysis virtual Annual Meeting, December 13-17, 2020....

Researchers provide the first physiological evidence that a foundational center of the brain influences how sound is processed, identify a previously unknown neural circuit. For the first time, researchers have provided physiological evidence that a pervasive neuromodulation system―a group of neurons that regulate the functioning of more specialized neurons―strongly influences sound processing in an important auditory region of the brain. The neuromodulator, acetylcholine, may even help the main auditory brain circuitry distinguish speech from noise....