entangled dot cloud

MIT engineers develop a magnetic transistor for more energy-efficient electronics

Transistors, the building blocks of modern electronics, are typically made of silicon. Because it’s a semiconductor, this material can control the flow of electricity in a circuit. But silicon has fundamental physical limits that restrict how compact and energy-efficient a transistor can be.MIT researchers have now replaced silicon with a magnetic semiconductor, creating a magnetic transistor that could enable smaller, faster, and more energy-efficient circuits. The material’s magnetism strongly

Astronomers just found the source of the brightest fast radio burst ever

Astronomers have discovered the brightest fast radio burst ever detected and traced it to a nearby galaxy using a new network of CHIME Outrigger telescopes. The flash, nicknamed RBFLOAT, lasted only a fraction of a second but briefly outshone every other radio source in its galaxy. Follow-up observations with the James Webb Space Telescope spotted a faint infrared signal at the same location. The burst’s unusual behavior—showing no signs of repeating—may challenge current ideas about what causes

Scientists discover hidden water beneath Mars that could have supported life

New research suggests Mars may have remained habitable much longer than scientists once thought. Ancient sand dunes in Gale Crater appear to have been soaked by underground water billions of years ago, leaving behind minerals that can preserve signs of life. Even after surface water disappeared, subsurface flows may have created protected environments for microbes. These hidden habitats could be key targets in the ongoing search for past life on Mars.

Show HN: QKD eavesdropper detector using Krylov complexity-open source Python

I built a framework that detects eavesdroppers on quantum key distribution channels by reading the scrambling "fingerprint" embedded in the QBER error timeline, no new hardware required. The core idea: every QKD channel has a unique Lanczos coefficient sequence derived from its Hamiltonian. An eavesdropper perturbs the Hamiltonian, which shifts the coefficients in a detectable and unforgeable way (Krylov distortion ΔK). Validated on 181,606 experimental QBER measurements from a deploye

Show HN: ngrep – grep plus word embeddings (Rust)

I got curious about a simple question: regular expressions are purely syntactic, but what happens if you add just a little bit of semantics?To answer, I ended up building ngrep: a grep-like tool that extends regular expressions with a new operator ~(token) that matches a word by meaning using word2vec-style embeddings (FastText, GloVe, Wikipedia2Vec).A simple demo: "~(big)+ \b~(animal;0.35)+\b" over Moby-Dick can find many ways used to refer to a large animal, surfacing "great wha

Ask HN: How do you use local LLMs productively?

I've been periodically testing the strongest reported models as they come out, and which can fit on my 32GB M1 Max. I've yet to find one that I feel is genuinely useful.My latest attempts were with 4 bit quants of Qwen 3.5, both 9b and 35B.Both, on my very first query, something along the lines of "sup dog" or "how does beer a compare to beer b" led to an endless loop of thinking that I eventually had to manually stop in each case.And yet I keep seeing passing comme

Show HN: Nia CLI, an OSS CLI for agents to index, search, and research anything

We’re open-sourcing the Nia CLI: a command-line tool for AI agents to index and search technical and general data sources directly from the terminal.GitHub: https://github.com/nozomio-labs/nia-cliWe originally built Nia as an MCP server and API, but a lot of the most capable agents today, like Claude Code, Cursor, and custom shell-based pipelines, live in the terminal. For those agents, a CLI felt like the most natural interface.What it can do:- Index repos, docs, papers, dat

On Montgomery County public magnet schools: a guest post by Daniel Gottesman

Scott’s foreword: I’ve known fellow quantum computing theorist Daniel Gottesman, now at the University of Maryland, for a quarter-century at this point. Daniel has been a friend, colleague, coauthor, and one of the people from whom I’ve learned the most in my career. Today he writes about a topic close to my heart, and one to which I’ve regularly lent this blog over the decades: namely, the struggle to protect enrichment and acceleration in the United States (in this ca

NASA launches twin spacecraft to solve the mystery of Mars’ lost atmosphere

Mars didn’t always look like the barren world we see today. Over billions of years, the Sun’s solar wind stripped away much of its atmosphere, helping transform it from a warmer, wetter planet into a frozen desert. NASA’s twin-spacecraft ESCAPADE mission aims to watch this process in action by measuring how the solar wind interacts with Mars’ fragile magnetic environment. The findings could reveal how Mars lost its habitability—and help prepare humans for future missions there.

NASA’s Curiosity rover investigates strange spiderweb ridges on Mars

NASA’s Curiosity rover is investigating strange spiderweb-like ridges on Mars that may reveal a hidden chapter of the planet’s watery history. These “boxwork” formations likely formed when groundwater flowed through cracks in the rock, leaving minerals that hardened into ridges while surrounding material eroded away. New chemical analyses of drilled rock samples show minerals linked to water activity.

This Week’s Awesome Tech Stories From Around the Web (Through March 14)

RoboticsHow Pokémon Go Is Giving Delivery Robots an Inch-Perfect View of the WorldWill Douglas Heaven | MIT Technology Review ($)“Niantic Spatial is using that vast and unparalleled trove of crowdsourced data—images of urban landmarks tagged with super-accurate location markers taken from the phones of hundreds of millions of Pokémon Go players around the world—to build a kind of world model, a buzzy new technology that grounds the smarts of LLMs in real-world environments.”FutureA R

Wildcat Canyon Regional Park

Photography at Wildcat Canyon Regional Park

Wildcat Canyon Regional Park 徒步

Richmond 带病徒步

Pi Day: From rockets to cancer research, here's how the number pi is embedded in our lives

Math nerds and dessert enthusiasts unite to celebrate Pi Day every March 14, the date that represents the first three digits of the mathematical constant pi.

A lab mistake at Cambridge reveals a powerful new way to modify drug molecules

Cambridge scientists have discovered a light-powered chemical reaction that lets researchers modify complex drug molecules at the final stages of development. Unlike traditional methods that rely on toxic chemicals and harsh conditions, the new approach uses an LED lamp to create essential carbon–carbon bonds under mild conditions. This could make drug discovery faster and more environmentally friendly. The breakthrough was uncovered unexpectedly during a failed laboratory experiment.

These Genetically Engineered Brain Cells Devour Toxic Alzheimer’s Plaques

A single shot protected mice from the protein gunk implicated in Alzheimer’s disease. Alzheimer’s disease and cancer have something in common: They’re hard to treat.Despite decades of research, both still plague humanity, robbing people of longer, healthier lives. In Alzheimer’s, a protein called amyloid forms toxic clumps in the brain. Eventually, neurons supporting memory, decision-making, and movement wither.Whether amyloid clumps cause Alzheimer’s is still hotly debated. Drugs that cle

We Need to Look into Machine Cognition

I’ve been thinking a lot about how we actually form ideas.When we speak, it often feels like the words simply arrive. One word leads to the next, then the next, until eventually we reach the end of a thought. It’s an iterative process — a step-by-step stream of language emerging in real time.But that raises a deeper question.Is speaking itself the process of thinking? Or is it simply the surface output of a deeper process happening outside our awareness?It often feels like the latter.Ideas seem

Fortanix expands Data Security Manager with quantum entropy from Qrypt and Quantum Dice

Data security company Fortanix Inc. today announced a new multi-sourced quantum entropy capability within Fortanix Data Security Manager that allows enterprises to diversify encryption key generation ...

Stacked quantum materials enable precise spin control without external magnetic fields

Spintronics—a technology that harnesses the electron's magnetic quantum states to carry information—could pave the way for a new generation of ultra-energy-efficient electronics. Yet a major challenge ...

Local droplet etching yields more symmetric quantum dots for integrated photonics

Light-based quantum technologies, such as quantum communication and photonic quantum computing, require reliable sources of individual photons and, ideally, pairs of entangled photons. Semiconductor ...