Thanks to Einstein’s relativity, time flows differently on Mars than on Earth. NIST scientists have now nailed down the difference, showing that Mars clocks tick slightly faster—and fluctuate over the Martian year. These microsecond shifts could play a big role in future Mars navigation, communications, and even a solar-system-wide internet. It’s a small time gap with big consequences for space exploration.
(Cell Reports 42, 112925; August 29, 2023)
The authors were made aware of an image duplication in their published paper. The representative photo in Figure 5B is the same as the image in Fig. 4g of Aubry et al., 2020, Oncogene 39, p. 5338–5357. The assays involved treating xenografts of the RB1021-luc retinoblastoma line, using either MLN4924 (MLN) and topotecan (TPT; Cell Reports) or the RAD51 inhibitor B02 and TPT (Oncogene). These assays were run and analyzed concurrently in 2018. For the Xenogen measurements of tumor growth, we first quantified the signal and recorded the values in tables. After all the mice were assessed, appropriate mice were placed together for representative images. Thus, the quantification, which was performed correctly, and acquisition/storage of the representative image, which was not, were performed separately. Our review of image files revealed that the representative image of the B02 + TPT series of mice was accidentally duplicated using the file name for the MLN + TPT series of mice.
You deserve an explanation, so please don’t skip this 1-minute read. It’s Sunday, December 28. Our fundraiser will soon be over, but fewer people are seeing our message this December and we’re short of our goal. If you’ve lost count of how many times you’ve visited Wikipedia this year, we hope that means it’s given you at least $2.75 of knowledge. If everyone who finds Wikipedia useful gave $2.75, we’d hit our goal in a few hours.
It’s been 25 years and Wikipedia is still free. It’s still created by people, not machines, and we don’t run ads or put up paywalls because we’re not here to make a profit off your attention. In other words, it’s still the internet we were promised.
Less than 2% of our readers donate, so if you’ve never given and Wikipedia has provided you with at least $2.75 worth of knowledge, donate today. If you are undecided, remember any contribution helps.
For years, the dream of a fully secure quantum Internet has been held back by a single, stubborn obstacle: repeaters. Whenever quantum networks needed them, scientists had to fall back on traditional models — a compromise that opened the door to potential security flaws. But now, researchers have finally filled in the missing piece of the puzzle, bringing the first true quantum relays within reach.
Unlike traditional data systems, quantum communication relies entirely on light. Instead of sending electrical signals, it uses pairs of entangled photons to create an unbreakable secret key between sender and receiver. Theoretically, this makes eavesdropping impossible — any attempt to intercept the signal would immediately destroy it.
Even with its promise of speed and security, quantum communication hasn’t yet reached everyday use. The main challenge lies in preserving quantum information. Only a handful of photons can travel together, and their light signal fades quickly over long distances.
Questions to inspire discussion.
Launch Economics & Viability.
🚀 Q: What launch cost makes space data centers economically competitive? A: Space data centers become cost-competitive with ground systems when launch costs drop to approximately $200/kg, according to Google’s Suncatcher paper, making the economics viable for moving compute infrastructure off-Earth.
💰 Q: Why might SpaceX pursue a $1.5 trillion IPO valuation? A: The projected $1.5 trillion SpaceX IPO valuation is speculated to fund the capital-intensive race to establish space-based data centers and secure the best orbital positions before competitors.
🏢 Q: Which companies can realistically build space data centers first? A: Vertically integrated organizations like SpaceX, Relativity Space, and Blue Origin lead because they control launch infrastructure, can self-fund deployment, and serve as their own customers for space compute capacity.
🛰️ Q: How would space data centers physically connect GPUs across satellites? A: Multiple free-flying satellites in formation (like 20+ Starlink satellites) use inter-satellite optical connections to enable communication between GPUs, creating high-density computing clusters in orbit.
Two Chrome extensions in the Web Store named ‘Phantom Shuttle’ are posing as plugins for a proxy service to hijack user traffic and steal sensitive data.
Both extensions are still present in Chrome’s official marketplace at the time of writing and have been active since at least 2017, according to a report from researchers at the Socket supply-chain security platform.
Phantom Shuttle’s target audience is users in China, including foreign trade workers who need to test connectivity from various locations in the country.
Any time you use a device to communicate information—an email, a text message, any data transfer—the information in that transmission crosses the open internet, where it could be intercepted. Such communications are also reliant on internet connectivity, often including wireless signal on either or both ends of a transmission.
But what if two—or 10, or 100, or 1,000—entities could be connected in such a way that they could communicate information without any of those security or connectivity concerns?
That’s the challenge that Alexander DeRieux, a Virginia Tech Ph.D. student and Bradley Fellow in the Bradley Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, under the advisement of Professor Walid Saad, set out to tackle using quantum entanglement. In short, they used the unique properties of quantum bits, or qubits, as a method of transmitting information.
We introduce NitroGen, a vision-action foundation model for generalist gaming agents that is trained on 40,000 hours of gameplay videos across more than 1,000 games. We incorporate three key ingredients: 1) an internet-scale video-action dataset constructed by automatically extracting player actions from publicly available gameplay videos, 2) a multi-game benchmark environment that can measure cross-game generalization, and 3) a unified vision-action policy trained with large-scale behavior cloning. NitroGen exhibits strong competence across diverse domains, including combat encounters in 3D action games, high-precision control in 2D platformers, and exploration in procedurally generated worlds. It transfers effectively to unseen games, achieving up to 52% relative improvement in task success rates over models trained from scratch.
Elon Musk is considering Tesla taking a pre-IPO stake in SpaceX to integrate their businesses, accelerate ambitious projects, and increase the value of both companies ## ## Questions to inspire discussion.
Strategic Governance Alignment.
🔄 Q: Why should Tesla acquire a pre-IPO stake in SpaceX rather than waiting until after the IPO? A: A pre-IPO stake resolves governance and conflict risks before SpaceX’s planned $30B IPO in mid-2026, ensuring all transactions are recorded as part of the IPO and avoiding complications that could impact IPO pricing or create persistent post-IPO conflicts between the two companies.
🎯 Q: What is the core governance problem Tesla shareholders currently face with SpaceX? A: Tesla shareholders are exposed to SpaceX outcomes through dependencies on Starlink connectivity, orbital compute, and launch cadence without any ownership rights, governance rights, or downside protection as the companies converge operationally but not financially.
⚖️ Q: How would a pre-IPO stake transaction affect Tesla’s ownership structure and Musk’s control? A: The transaction would dilute Tesla by 20% but could raise market cap to $1.62-2T, increasing Musk’s stake to 22.1–24% and his net worth approaching $1T, enabling him to achieve 25% control significantly earlier than under the compensation plan.
Capital Requirements and Infrastructure.
Authorities in Nigeria have announced the arrest of three “high-profile internet fraud suspects” who are alleged to have been involved in phishing attacks targeting major corporations, including the main developer behind the RaccoonO365 phishing-as-a-service (PhaaS) scheme.
The Nigeria Police Force National Cybercrime Centre (NPF–NCCC) said investigations conducted in collaboration with Microsoft and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) led to the identification of Okitipi Samuel, also known as Moses Felix, as the principal suspect and developer of the phishing infrastructure.
“Investigations reveal that he operated a Telegram channel through which phishing links were sold in exchange for cryptocurrency and hosted fraudulent login portals on Cloudflare using stolen or fraudulently obtained email credentials,” the NPF said in a post shared on social media.