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Planetary scientists estimate that each year, about 500 meteorites survive the fiery trip through Earth’s atmosphere and fall to our planet’s surface. Most are quite small, and less than 2% of them are ever recovered. While the majority of rocks from space may not be recoverable due to ending up in oceans or remote, inaccessible areas, other meteorite falls are just not witnessed or known about.

But new technology has upped the number known falls in recent years. Doppler radar has detected meteorite falls, as well as all-sky camera networks specifically on the lookout for meteors. Additionally, increased use of dashcams and security cameras have allowed for more serendipitous sightings and data on fireballs and potential meteorite falls.

A team of researchers is now taking advantage of additional technology advances by testing out drones and machine learning for automated searches for small meteorites. The drones are programmed to fly a grid search pattern in a projected “strewn field” for a recent meteorite fall, taking systematic pictures of the ground over a large survey area. Artificial intelligence is then used to search through the pictures to identify potential meteorites.

Security researchers accidentally revealed a huge flaw.


Microsoft is warning Windows users about an unpatched critical flaw in the Windows Print Spooler service. The vulnerability, dubbed PrintNightmare, was uncovered earlier this week after security researchers accidentally published a proof-of-concept (PoC) exploit. While Microsoft hasn’t rated the vulnerability, it allows attackers to remotely execute code with system-level privileges, which is as critical and problematic as you can get in Windows.

Researchers at Sangfor published the PoC, in what appears to have been a mistake, or a miscommunication between the researchers and Microsoft. The test code was quickly deleted, but not before it had already been forked on GitHub.

Sangfor researchers had been planning to detail multiple 0-day vulnerabilities in the Windows Print Spooler service at the annual Black Hat security conference later this month. It appears the researchers thought Microsoft had patched this particular vulnerability, after the company published patches for a separate Windows Print Spooler flaw.

“It would be difficult to introduce a single thing and it causes crime to go down,” one expert said.


“Are we seeing dramatic changes since we deployed the robot in January?” Lerner, the Westland spokesperson said. “No. But I do believe it is a great tool to keep a community as large as this, to keep it safer, to keep it controlled.”

For its part, Knightscope maintains on its website that the robots “predict and prevent crime,” without much evidence that they do so. Experts say this is a bold claim.

“It would be difficult to introduce a single thing and it causes crime to go down,” said Ryan Calo, a law professor at the University of Washington, comparing the Knightscope robots to a “roving scarecrow.”

In an email, the company said that targeted devices included security appliances that have remote management or SSL VPN enabled, namely in the USG/ZyWALL, USG FLEX, ATP, and VPN series running on-premise ZLD firmware. The language in the email is terse, but it appears to say that the attacks target devices that are exposed to the Internet. When the attackers succeed in accessing the device, the email further appears to say, they are then able to connect to previously unknown accounts hardwired into the devices.

Batten down the hatches

“We’re aware of the situation and have been working our best to investigate and resolve it,” the email, which was posted to Twitter, said. “The threat actor attempts to access a device through WAN; if successful, they then bypass authentication and establish SSL VPN tunnels with unknown user accounts, such as ‘zyxel_silvpn,’ ‘zyxel_ts,’ or ‘zyxel_vpn_test,’ to manipulate the device’s configuration.”

Circa 2015 In theory this big bang laser could eventually create complex matter but would need to be pocket-size as I want it on a smartphone to make a replicator so I can make fruit or food in space 😀


The Institute of Laser Engineering (ILE), Osaka University, has succeeded to reinforce the Petawatt laser “LFEX” to deliver up to 2000 trillion watts in the duration of one trillionth of one second (this corresponds to 1000 times the integrated electric power consumed in the world). By using this high-power laser, it is now possible to generate all of the high-energy quantum beams (electrons, ions, gamma ray, neutron, positron). Owing to such quantum beams with large current, we can make a big step forward not only for creating new fundamental technologies such as medical applications and non-destructive inspection of social infrastructures to contribute to our future life of longevity, safety, and security, but also for realization of laser fusion energy triggered by fast ignition.

Background and output of research

Petawatt lasers are used for study of basic science, generating such high-energy quantum beams as neutrons and ions, but only a few facilities in the world have Petawatt laser. So far, Petawatt lasers in the world have had relatively a small output (to a few tens of joules). ILE has achieved the world’s largest laser output of dozens of times those at other world-class lasers facilities (1000 joules or more).

Free-space optical communication, the communication between two devices at a distance using light to carry information, is a highly promising system for achieving high-speed communication. This system of communication is known to be immune to electromagnetic interference (EMI), a disturbance generated by external sources that affects electrical circuits and can disrupt radio signals.

While some studies have highlighted the possible advantages of free-space optical communication, this system of communication has so far come with certain limitations. Most notably, it is known to offer limited security against eavesdroppers. Researchers at Télécom Paris (member of Institut Polytechnique de Paris), mirSense, Technische Universität Darmstadt and University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) have recently introduced a unique system for more secure free-space optical communication based on a technology known as , a specific type of semiconductor that typically emits mid–.

“The core idea behind our research is that private free-space communication with quantum key distribution (i.e., based on quantum physics properties) is promising, but it is probably years away, or even further,” Olivier Spitz, one of the researchers who carried out the study, told TechXplore. “Currently, the main limitations of this technology are the requirements for cryogenic systems, very slow data rates and costly equipment.”

- Progress, Potential, And Possibilities has had another busy month, with another awesome set of guests from academia, industry, and government, all focused on building a better tomorrow — Please come subscribe and enjoy all our current and future guests — Much more to come! # Health # Longevity # Biotech # SpaceExploration # ArtificialIntelligence # NeuroTechnology # RegenerativeMedicine # Sports # Environment # Sustainability # Food # NationalSecurity # Innovation # Future # Futurism # AnimalWelfare # Equity # IraPastor.

Live Eye Surveillance, a Seattle-based company, takes it to the next level and provides security systems to convenience stores like 7-Eleven; it employs “remote supervisors” who are real people sitting miles away behind the surveillance cameras, monitoring all activity captured by the tools.


Employers are using various surveillance technologies to track employee movement and interactions, and now 7-Eleven stores are involved in the game.

Circa 2017


The future Internet is very likely the mixture of all-optical Internet with low power consumption and quantum Internet with absolute security. The optical regular Internet would be used by default, but switched over to quantum Internet when sensitive data need to be transmitted. PT and and its counterpart in the quantum limit SPT would be the core components for both OIP and QIP in future Internet. Compared with electronic transistors, PTs/SPTs potentially have higher speed, lower power consumption and compatibility with fibre-optic communication systems.

Several schemes for PT6,7,8,9,10 and SPT11,12,13,14,15,16,17 have been proposed or even proof-of-principle demonstrated. All these prototypes exploit optical nonlinearities, i.e., photon-photon interactions18. However, photons do not interact with each other intrinsically, so indirect photon-photon interactions via electromagnetically induced transparency (EIT)19, photon blockade20 and Rydberg blockade21 were intensively investigated in this context over last two decades in either natural atoms22,23 or artificial atoms including superconducting boxes24,25 and semiconductor quantum dots (QDs)12,13. PT can seldom work in the quantum limit as SPT with the gain greater than 1 because of two big challenges, i.e., the difficulty to achieve the optical nonlinearities at single-photon levels and the distortion of single-photon pulse shape and inevitable noise produced by these nonlinearities26. The QD-cavity QED system is a promising solid-state platform for information and communication technology (ICT) due to their inherent scalability and matured semiconductor technology. But the photon blockade resulting from the anharmonicity of Jaynes-Cummings energy ladder27 is hard to achieve due to the small ratio of the QD-cavity coupling strength to the system dissipation rates12,13,28,29,30,31,32 and the strong QD saturation33. Moreover, the gain of this type of SPT based on the photon blockade is quite limited and only 2.2 is expected for In(Ga)As QDs12,13.

In this work, a different PT and SPT scheme exploiting photon-spin interactions rather than photon-photon interactions is proposed based on a linear quantum-optical effect — giant optical Faraday rotation (GFR) induced by a single QD-confined spin in a single-sided optical microcavity34. This spin-cavity transistor is genuinely a quantum transistor in three aspects: it is based on a quantum effect, i.e., the linear GFR; it has the duality as a quantum gate for QIP and a classical transistor for OIP; it can work in the quantum limit as a SPT to amplify a single-photon state to Schrödinger cat state. Therefore this new-concept transistor can be more powerful than the traditional electronic transistors. Theoretically the maximum gain can reach ~105 in the state-of-the-art pillar microcavity, several orders of magnitude greater than previous PT/SPT schemes6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14,15,16,17. The large gain is attributed to the linear GFR that is robust against classical and quantum fluctuations and the long spin coherence time compared with the cavity lifetime. The maximal speed which is determined by the cavity lifetime has the potential to break the terahertz (THz) barrier for electronic transistors35,36. Based on this versatile spin-cavity transistor, optical Internet1, quantum computers (QCs)37,38 (either spin-cavity hybrid QCs or all-optical QCs), and quantum Internet4 could become reality even with current semiconductor technology.