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Category: computing – Page 424

Does the brain store information in discrete or analog form?

For engineers, the question of whether to store information in analog or discrete form is easy to answer. Discrete data storage has clear advantages, not least of which is that it is much more robust against degradation.

Engineers have exploited this property. Provided noise is below some threshold level, digital music can be copied endlessly. By contrast, music stored in analog form, such as on cassette or vinyl LP, can be copied only a few times before noise degrades the recording beyond recognition.

Art and music therapy seem to help with brain disorders. Scientists want to know why

When Michael Schneider’s anxiety and PTSD flare up, he reaches for the ukulele he keeps next to his computer.

“I can’t actually play a song,” says Schneider, who suffered two serious brain injuries during nearly 22 years in the Marines. “But I can play chords to take my stress level down.”

It’s a technique Schneider learned through Creative Forces, an arts therapy initiative sponsored by the National Endowment for the Arts, in partnership with the departments of Defense and Veterans Affairs.

Arts therapies appear to ease brain disorders from Parkinson’s to PTSD. Now, artists and scientists have launched an effort to understand how these treatments change the brain.

“Something Strange Is Going On” — Physicists Answer a Decades-Old Question

“It’s a really old question inherited from condensed matter physics,” said David Weld, an experimental physicist at UCSB with specialties in ultracold atomic physics and quantum simulation. The question falls into the category of ‘many-body’ physics, which interrogates the physical properties of a quantum system with multiple interacting parts. While many-body problems have been a matter of research and debate for decades, the complexity of these systems, with quantum behaviors such as superposition and entanglement, leads to multitudes of possibilities, making it impossible to solve through calculation alone. “Many aspects of the problem are beyond the reach of modern computers,” Weld added.

Paper reveals a quarter of the world’s internet users rely on infrastructure that is susceptible to attacks

About a quarter of the world’s internet users live in countries that are more susceptible than previously thought to targeted attacks on their internet infrastructure. Many of the at-risk countries are located in the Global South.

That’s the conclusion of a sweeping, large-scale study conducted by computer scientists at the University of California San Diego. The researchers surveyed 75 .

“We wanted to study the topology of the internet to find weak links that, if compromised, would expose an entire nation’s traffic,” said Alexander Gamero-Garrido, the paper’s first author, who earned his Ph.D. in computer science at UC San Diego.

Nobel Prize: Quantum Entanglement Unveiled

The 2022 Nobel Prize in Physics honors research on the foundations of quantum mechanics, which opened up the quantum information frontier.

7 October 2022: We have replaced our initial one-paragraph announcement with a full-length Focus story.

The Nobel Prize in Physics this year recognizes efforts to take quantum weirdness out of philosophy discussions and to place it on experimental display for all to see. The award is shared by Alain Aspect, John Clauser, and Anton Zeilinger, all of whom showed a mastery of entanglement—a quantum relationship between two particles that can exist over long distances. Using entangled photons, Clauser and Aspect performed some of the first “Bell tests,” which confirmed quantum mechanics predictions while putting to bed certain alternative theories based on classical physics. Zeilinger used some of those Bell-test techniques to demonstrate entanglement control methods that can be applied to quantum computing, quantum cryptography, and other quantum information technologies.

Intel hits major milestone as it moves toward mass production of quantum computer chips

Intel Corp.’s two primary research organizations, Intel Labs and Components Research, announced today that they’re making big progress as they work toward large-scale production of quantum computing processors.

At the 2022 Silicon Quantum Electronics Workshop in Orford, Quebec, Intel’s researchers said that they’ve been able to demonstrate the highest reported yield and uniformity rate when manufacturing “silicon spin qubit devices” at the company’s transistor research and development facility. The research is believed to be a key milestone for Intel as it moves toward being able to fabricate quantum computing chips on its existing transistor manufacturing processes.

Intel is a key player in the race to build quantum computers, which are more advanced machines that encode data as “qubits,” as opposed to the conventional bits used in traditional computers. The advantage of qubits is they’re not restricted to states of 1 or 0. They can also exist as both states at the same time, a characteristic that’s known as superposition.

3 critical malicious code execution vulnerabilities in Linux kernel

A security investigator has discovered three new code execution flaws in the Linux kernel that might be exploited by a local or external adversary to take control of the vulnerable computers and run arbitrary code. The roccat_report_event function in drivers/hid/hid-roccat.c has a use-after-free vulnerability identified as CVE-2022–41850 (CVSS score: 8.4). A local attacker might exploit this flaw to run malicious script on the system by submitting a report while copying a report->value. Patch has be released to addresses the Linux Kernel 5.19.12 vulnerability CVE-2022–41850.

The second flaw tracked as CVE-2022–41848 (CVSS score: 6.8), is also a use-after-free flaw due to a race condition between mgslpc_ioctl and mgslpc_detach in drivers/char/pcmcia/synclink_cs.c. By removing a PCMCIA device while calling ioctl, an attacker could exploit this vulnerability to execute arbitrary code on the system. The bug affects Linux Kernel 5.19.12 and was fixed via this patch.

Due to a compatibility issues between mgslpc ioctl and mgslpc detach in drivers/char/pcmcia/synclink cs.c, the second vulnerability, tagged as CVE-2022–41848 (CVSS score: 6.8), is likewise a use-after-free vulnerability. An adversary might use this flaw to run malicious script on the computer by deleting a PCMCIA device while executing ioctl. There is a patch that corrects this flaw that was present in the Linux Kernel 5.19.12.

Achieving greater entanglement: Milestones on the path to useful quantum technologies

Tiny particles are interconnected despite sometimes being thousands of kilometers apart—Albert Einstein called this “spooky action at a distance.” Something that would be inexplicable by the laws of classical physics is a fundamental part of quantum physics. Entanglement like this can occur between multiple quantum particles, meaning that certain properties of the particles are intimately linked with each other.

Entangled systems containing multiple offer significant benefits in implementing quantum algorithms, which have the potential to be used in communications, or quantum computing. Researchers from Paderborn University have been working with colleagues from Ulm University to develop the first programmable optical quantum memory. The study was published as an “Editor’s suggestion” in the Physical Review Letters journal.