The peculiar properties of quantum mechanics allow two remote parties to communicate a private, secret key, which is protected from eavesdropping by the laws of physics. So-called quantum key distribution (QKD) implementations always rely on detectors to measure the relevant quantum property of single photons. Here we demonstrate experimentally that the detectors in two commercially available QKD systems can be fully remote-controlled using specially tailored bright illumination. This makes it possible to tracelessly acquire the full secret key; we propose an eavesdropping apparatus built from off-the-shelf components. The loophole is likely to be present in most QKD systems using avalanche photodiodes to detect single photons. We believe that our findings are crucial for strengthening the security of practical QKD, by identifying and patching technological deficiencies.

Vadim Makarov at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim and his colleagues have now cracked it. “Our hack gave 100% knowledge of the key, with zero disturbance to the system,” he says.  In Makarov and colleagues’ hack, Eve gets round this constraint by ‘blinding’ Bob’s detector — shining a continuous, 1-milliwatt laser at it. While Bob’s detector is thus disabled, Eve can then intercept Alice’s signal.[2]

Vadim Makarov demoing quantum eavesdropping equipment

The cunning part is that while blinded, Bob’s detector cannot function as a ‘quantum detector’ that distinguishes between different quantum states of incoming light. However, it does still work as a ‘classical detector’ — recording a bit value of 1 if it is hit by an additional bright light pulse, regardless of the quantum properties of that pulse. That means that every time Eve intercepts a bit value of 1 from Alice, she can send a bright pulse to Bob, so that he also receives the correct signal, and is entirely unaware that his detector has been sabotaged. There is no mismatch between Eve and Bob’s readings because Eve sends Bob a classical signal, not a quantum one. As quantum cryptographic rules no longer apply, no alarm bells are triggered.

“We have exploited a purely technological loophole that turns a quantum cryptographic system into a classical system, without anyone noticing,” says Makarov. Makarov and his team have demonstrated that the hack works on two commercially available systems: one sold by ID Quantique (IDQ), based in Geneva, Switzerland, and one by MagiQ Technologies, based in Boston, Massachusetts.

This is the latest in a line of quantum hacks. Earlier this year, a group led by Hoi-Kwong Lo at the University of Toronto in Ontario, Canada, also showed that an IDQ commercial system could be fully hacked. However, in that case, the eavesdropper did introduce some noticeable errors in the quantum key.[3]

However, no cause for alarm! Both IDQ and MagiQ welcome the hack for exposing potential vulnerabilities in their systems. Makorov informed both companies of the details of the hack before publishing, so that patches could made, avoiding any possible security risk. The study would suggest that customers using commercial systems ought to beware, although ID Quantique sees no cause for alarm. “It’s important and interesting in the sense that quantum cryptography is just like any other security technology – you must test it to know that it is secure”. This work will ultimately make these systems stronger :)

References:

1. Lydersen, L., Wiechers, C., Wittmann, C., Elser, D., Skaar, J., & Makarov, V. (2010). Hacking commercial quantum cryptography systems by tailored bright illumination Nature Photonics DOI: 10.1038/NPHOTON.2010.214.
2. Nature News. DOI: 10.1038/news.2010.436.
3. Feihu Xu, Bing Qi, & Hoi-Kwong Lo (2010). Experimental demonstration of phase-remapping attack in a practical
   quantum key distribution system Preprint. arXiv: 1005.2376v1.

Three centuries of light consumption in the UK. The left axis has the units Tlm h/yr (teralumen-hours per year). The colored lines represent consumption of light produced by technologies powered by particular fuels; the black line represents total consumption of light produced by all technologies.

The importance of artificial light to society has long been recognized with the utilization of fire thought of as the quintessential human invention. Now scientists have found that emerging, more energy efficient lighting technologies could be the key to a better quality of life.

New research published on August 19 , in a special issue of IOP Publishing’s Journal of Physics D: Applied Physics shows that solid-state lighting (SSL), a new technology based on semiconductor light-emitting diodes (LEDs), has the potential to increase our consumption of light and therefore our quality of life. [1]

Using more efficient lights like LEDs will not necessarily lessen human impact on the environment. Though artificial light sources are increasingly efficient, scientists point out that people may even the keel on energy costs by using light sources more and more. To get the efficiency to translate to energy savings, energy providers may have to raise their prices:

Thus, an increase in the cost of energy associated with lighting, which would normally reduce both human productivity and energy consumption, can be mitigated  by an increase in the efficiency in lighting: energy consumption can be held constant while maintaining some human productivity increase or energy consumption can be reduced without a decrease in human productivity.

The perspective paper focuses on human use of artificial lighting, an energy expenditure that accounts for 0.72 percent of the world’s gross domestic product. Artificial lighting has become more and more efficient, from oily lamps to incandescent bulbs to fluorescent bulbs, and LEDs are poised as the next efficiency jump. In order to get people to save energy, the authors suggest that the best way may be to force the savings at the source by increasing the cost of power. They hope that this would hold energy consumption constant, at least, while preserving some of the productivity that could be gained by using more light.

Reference:
1. Tsao, J., Saunders, H., Creighton, J., Coltrin, M., & Simmons, J. (2010). Solid-state lighting: an energy-economics perspective Journal of Physics D: Applied Physics, 43 (35) DOI: 10.1088/0022–3727/43/35/354001

NIH Director Francis Collins

In an exclusive interview for the July issue of the Forbes/Wolfe Emerging Tech Report, NIH Director Francis Collins outlined what he considers the critical pathways for the future of health sciences. Below are his five areas of exceptional opportunity for the next decade.

1. The application of high-throughput technologies to large biology projects has the potential to comprehensively answer fundamental questions about how life works. That includes genomics, but it also includes nanotechnology, imaging approaches, proteomics, and computational strategies to allow us to be much more systematic in assessing mechanisms than before. In the past, we had to take a hunch, pick a candidate gene, and draw a cartoon. Those days are gone. Now we can be faster and more thorough, and we’re often surprised when the answers aren’t where we expected.

2. Rational drug design based on structural information is the next frontier. The academic investigator field is essential for the critical mission to translate the deluge of information we get from the academic world into real forms of treatment. We must push that therapeutic agenda on the academic field, which often stops at basic science discovery and does not move into translation. We need to provide the tools to make that move from science to treatment possible. This is where chemistry and translational research are crucial — areas that have been largely the province of the private sector in the past. Now, there’s both a diminution of research and development investments in the private sector and a profound surge of new targets emerging from the basic science. I think there is also an increasing interest from academia to play a more significant role in the therapeutic development pathway — we have the chance to make that happen.

3. The development of the science of healthcare reform will be critical to provide the evidence necessary for our healthcare system to focus more effectively on good outcomes and reduced costs. This can mean focusing on everything from comparative effectiveness to personalized medicine and pharmaco-genetics. We have tools that provide us with an increasing understanding of the individual. Now, we must shift our attention to how we can use that information for prevention and for choosing the best therapies for those who need treatment.

4. Global health is a priority that we can help to speed by de-risking projects to make them more attractive to the private sector. We understand the basic nature of certain pathogens that cause illness for hundreds of millions, yet a lack of economic incentives has resulted in few developed therapeutics for these conditions. By de-risking some of those projects and speeding up the process, the private sector can begin to fill this critical gap.

5. Our own biomedical research community must be empowered and invigorated so they can chase after innovative ideas and recruit the next generation of investigators. The USA Science and Engineering Festival also kicks in here. We’re hoping that it will be an opportunity for young people to find out why this is such an exciting time in science, so those with curiosity and some vision can pursue these myriad opportunities. We must foster innovation and interest in the sciences by sustaining funding, encouraging young scientists, and facilitating innovative research.

However, the actual construction of the system, which will be conducted by NEC Corp and Hewlett-Packard Co, has yet to be done. The system has the “vector-scalar mixture architecture,” Matsuoka said. But the computation capacity of its graphics processing units (GPUs) accounts for 90% of the total computation capacity, making the system more like a vector computer. Therefore, the performance of the system slightly differs depending on the type of calculation. Specifically, the performance target in terms of the Linpack benchmark is 1.0–1.4 PFLOPS, which ranks third or fourth in the Top500 as of June 2010. On the other hand, for calculations that are suited for vector computers such as weather prediction, the performance can be more than 150 TFLOPS (teraflops), which is much higher than the world record (50 TFLOPS).

The backbone of the supercomputer system consists of 2,816 of six cores 2.93 GHz Intel Xeon 5600 microprocessor (Westmere-EP), and 4,224 Nvidia Tesla M2050 GPUs. The double precision arithmetic performance of the Tesla M2050 is much higher than that of the existing Tesla GPUs, which are developed mainly for single precision arithmetic. A unit of the Tesla M2050 has a performance of 515 GFLOPS (double-precision). The performance per node is 1.6 TFLOPS or 51.2 TFLOPS per rack.


The university made two major improvements for enhancing the performance of the system. First, it improved the memory bandwidth. Specifically the network bisection bandwidth (the minimum communication capacity of the cross section at a random part of the system) is about 200 Tbps, which is 33 times higher than that of the Tsubame 1.0, a supercomputer system constructed by the university in 2006.

The other improvement was made to the memory and its composition. The university structured a multilevel storage using not only DRAMs such as DDR3 but also SSDs (solid state drives) composed of flash memories. While the total memory capacity of the backbone system’s DRAMs is 80.6 Tbytes for microprocessors and 12.7 Tbytes for GPUs, the total memory capacity of the SSDs is 173.9 Tbytes. SSDs have a high performance in inputting and outputting data.

The new supercomputer system has one more noteworthy feature: low power consumption. While the power consumption of the Tsubame 1.0 including its cooling system is 0.85MW, that of the Tsubame 2.0, which has a 30 time higher computation capacity, is only 1MW. So, the power consumption per computation capacity was reduced to about 1/25. The performance value per watt (in terms of the Linpack benchmark) is expected to exceed 1,000 MFLOPS (megaflops) per watt and will possibly be ranked first in the Green500, a ranking of supercomputer’s energy saving performance, the university said.

The drastic decrease in the power consumption per computation capacity is also an advantage in terms of cost. The cost for the entire system and the basic maintenance cost for four years amount to ¥3.2 billion (US$35 million), which is low. While the normal cost to introduce a supercomputer is about ¥10 million per 1 TFLOPS, the cost to introduce the Tsubame 2.0 is about ¥3 million per 1 TFLOPS. The cost does not include electricity costs, which are about ¥100 million per year. If the electricity costs increased in the same ratio as the computation capacity, they could be up to ¥2.5 billion per year.

Harnessing the power of visual imagery, Cousteau created more than 120 documentaries and 50 books, and brought awareness of the marine environment to millions of people around the planet. The world stands in his debt for inspiring entire generations of marine biologists, filmmakers, photographers and conservationists. Later in his life, Cousteau saw that the ocean’s resources are not infinite, and sought to educate the world about the fragility of the environment. The Cousteau legacy continues through his children and grandchildren, who have followed in his footsteps to educate and inspire. Jacques Cousteau said, “people protect what they love.” As a community, we must also continue his legacy, to share our images and videos with the world, showing species and places that most people will never see, but which are vitally important to conserve.

Today it is hard to overstate Cousteau’s influence. With his iconic red beanie and famed ship Calypso, the French marine explorer, sailed the world for much of the late 20th century, educating millions about the Earth’s oceans and its inhabitants—and inspiring their protection. His pioneering underwater documentaries—including the Oscar-winning films The Golden Fish, and World Without Sun had a bald storyline. It was a deep and complete introduction for the general public to the undersea world. He also helped restrict commercial whaling. The moratorium remains in place today, though some countries still hunt whales in the name of scientific research.

Cousteau also organized a popular campaign against a French-government plan to dump nuclear waste into the Mediterranean Sea in 1960—and took his fight straight to the president of the republic. He acknowledged that it was a clean power source and full of possibilities but felt that—as long as we’re dealing with waste that we don’t know how to handle—we should not pursue it. In the end, the train carrying the waste turned back after women and children staged a sit-in on the tracks.

The widow of Jacques Cousteau said Tuesday she is trying to relaunch his iconic ship the Calypso — sunk, badly damaged and now in rehab — in time to mark the centennial of his birth. Aboard the Calypso, Cousteau unlocked the mysteries of the sea for tens of millions of TV viewers in the 1960s and 1970s with his riveting documentary series, “The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau.” Francine Cousteau and the Cousteau Society announced a year of events what would have been the 100th birthday of the undersea pioneer, who with his red cap for a time became synonymous with the underwater universe. The relaunching of the 43-meter (140-feet) ship would be a centerpiece of the centennial, which begins this week.

Another highlight of the centennial will be under way within days — the filming expedition of three marine reserves in the Mediterranean. Conducted with the National Geographic Society, the project will compare findings with those documented by Cousteau in the 1940s. Son Pierre-Yves, currently in Corsica, is leading that project. “In this year, the 100th anniversary of his birth, we owe it to his memory to ensure that the spirit of Jacques-Yves Cousteau and his work inspires new generations,” the explorer’s son said in a statement from the Cousteau Society.

The Cousteau Society and its French equivalent Equipe Cousteau carry out projects around the world, from the coastal waters of Sudan to a study of the condition of the Danube River delta. They have established 14 university chairs across the globe for the study of the oceans. A special Cousteau Divers program is being developed so that recreational divers can help contribute to awareness of the world’s oceans — which make up 72 percent of the planet’s surface. The launch of the year honoring Cousteau could not have come at better time, as the ongoing oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico has underscored the importance of ocean conservation, the organization said. An early defender of marine life, Cousteau long railed against ocean drilling by the oil industry and instead urged “more direct access to the sun’s power.”

• V. I. Arnold, Mathematical Methods of Classical Mechanics, Springer-Verlag (1989), ISBN 0–387-96890–3.
• V. I. Arnold, Geometrical Methods In The Theory Of Ordinary Differential Equations, Springer-Verlag (1988), ISBN 0–387-96649–8.
• V. I. Arnold, Ordinary Differential Equations, The MIT Press (1978), ISBN 0–262-51018–9.
• V. I. Arnold, A. Avez, Ergodic Problems of Classical Mechanics, Addison-Wesley (1989), ISBN 0–201-09406–1.

Please see full list at Amazon. However, there many more in russian that yet to be translated.

He received acclaim back in 1957, when he was a student at Moscow State University. He managed to prove that any continuous function of several variables can be constructed with a finite number of two-variable functions. His solution helped his teacher Andrey Kolmogorov solve the so-called Hilbert’s Thirteenth Problem. He is also famous for formulating several mathematical problems, for example, the so-called Folding Ruble Problem, or Margulis Napkin problem, as it is known in mathematical literature.[1] It asks for proof that a square cannot be folded in such a way that the resulting figure has a greater perimeter than the original one.

During his last years, Arnold worked at the Steklov Mathematical Institute in Moscow and Université Paris Dauphine in France.

References:
1. Tabachnikov, S. (2007). Arnold’s Problem The Mathematical Intelligencer, 29 (1), 49–52 DOI: 10.1007/BF02984760

The researchers identified a catalog of genetic features unique to modern humans by comparing the Neanderthal, human, and chimpanzee genomes. Genes involved in cognitive development, skull structure, energy metabolism, and skin morphology and physiology are among those highlighted in the study as likely to have undergone important changes in recent human evolution. Neanderthals lived in much of Europe and western Asia before dying out 30,000 years ago. They coexisted with humans in Europe for thousands of years, and fossil evidence led some scientists to speculate that interbreeding may have occurred there. But the Neanderthal DNA signal shows up not only in the genomes of Europeans, but also in people from East Asia and Papua New Guinea, where Neanderthals never lived.

Deriving a genome sequence—representing the genetic code on all of an organism’s chromosomes—from such ancient DNA is a remarkable technological feat. The Neanderthal bones were not well preserved, and more than 95 percent of the DNA extracted from them came from bacteria and other organisms that had colonized the bone. The DNA itself was degraded into small fragments and had been chemically modified in many places. The researchers had to develop special methods to extract the Neanderthal DNA and ensure that it was not contaminated with human DNA. They used new sequencing technology to obtain sequence data directly from the extracted DNA without amplifying it first.[2] Although genome scientists like to sequence a genome at least four or five times to ensure accuracy, most of the Neanderthal genome has been covered only one to two times so far.

The draft Neanderthal sequence is probably riddled with errors, but having the human and chimpanzee genomes for comparison makes it extremely useful despite its limitations. Places where humans differ from chimps, while Neanderthals still have the ancestral chimp sequence, may represent uniquely human genetic traits. Such comparisons enabled the researchers to catalog the genetic changes that have become fixed or have risen to high frequency in modern humans during the past few hundred thousand years.

Other resent genetic analysis of nearly 2,000 people from around the world indicates that such extinct species interbred with the ancestors of modern humans twice, leaving their genes within the DNA of people today.[3] Using projected rates of genetic mutation and data from the fossil record, the researchers suggest that the interbreeding happened about 60,000 years ago in the eastern Mediterranean and, more recently, about 45,000 years ago in eastern Asia. Those two events happened after the first H. sapiens had migrated out of Africa, says Long. Scientists didn’t find evidence of interbreeding in the genomes of the modern African people included in the study. The researchers suggest that the population from the first interbreeding went on to migrate to Europe, Asia and North America. Then the second interbreeding with an archaic population in eastern Asia further altered the genetic makeup of people in Oceania.

Furthermore, Science also recorded excellent podcast, and special online presentation featuring video commentary, text, and a timeline of Neandertal-related discoveries provide additional context for their findings.

References:

1. Green, R., Krause, J., Briggs, A., Maricic, T., Stenzel, U., Kircher, M., Patterson, N., Li, H., Zhai, W., Fritz, M., Hansen, N., Durand, E., Malaspinas, A., Jensen, J., Marques-Bonet, T., Alkan, C., Prufer, K., Meyer, M., Burbano, H., Good, J., Schultz, R., Aximu-Petri, A., Butthof, A., Hober, B., Hoffner, B., Siegemund, M., Weihmann, A., Nusbaum, C., Lander, E., Russ, C., Novod, N., Affourtit, J., Egholm, M., Verna, C., Rudan, P., Brajkovic, D., Kucan, Z., Gusic, I., Doronichev, V., Golovanova, L., Lalueza-Fox, C., de la Rasilla, M., Fortea, J., Rosas, A., Schmitz, R., Johnson, P., Eichler, E., Falush, D., Birney, E., Mullikin, J., Slatkin, M., Nielsen, R., Kelso, J., Lachmann, M., Reich, D., & Paabo, S. (2010). A Draft Sequence of the Neandertal Genome Science, 328 (5979), 710–722 DOI: 10.1126/science.1188021

2. Burbano, H., Hodges, E., Green, R., Briggs, A., Krause, J., Meyer, M., Good, J., Maricic, T., Johnson, P., Xuan, Z., Rooks, M., Bhattacharjee, A., Brizuela, L., Albert, F., de la Rasilla, M., Fortea, J., Rosas, A., Lachmann, M., Hannon, G., & Paabo, S. (2010). Targeted Investigation of the Neandertal Genome by Array-Based Sequence Capture Science, 328 (5979), 723–725 DOI: 10.1126/science.1188046

3. Dalton, R. (2010). Neanderthals may have interbred with humans Nature DOI: 10.1038/news.2010.194

Science is now more multidisciplinary than ever – new fields are emerging from the cross-fertilization of traditionally distinct disciplines at an ever-increasing rate. However, the number of truly multidisciplinary primary research journals can be counted on one hand. Nature Communications is a new, and unique, venue in this arena: an online-only journal publishing high-quality papers from all corners of the physical, chemical and biological sciences, with an open-access option for authors.

Our focus on primary research further distinguishes Nature Communications from other Nature titles. Aside from the occasional review article, we have no plans to publish news or opinion pieces, for which Nature and the Nature research journals are renowned. Our primary goal is to provide highly efficient peer review and rapid publication, which we have achieved by streamlining the editorial process.

The journal will operate according to the hybrid model. It is a mixed revenue model of subscription charges and publication fees. It offers authors of accepted papers the choice to pay a fee in order for their articles to made freely available online immediately upon publication. The open access option will be available to all authors submitting original research. Perhaps the most important feature of Nature Communications is the opportunity for authors to pay an Article Processing Charge to publish their papers without restriction – with open access. If authors choose this option, their papers will be published under one of two Creative Commons licenses and be clearly delineated on the website with an ‘open’ logo.

As a born-digital publication, Nature Communications has, and will continue, to make full use of enhanced web technologies. Our online-only presence affords us flexibility in the number of papers we publish and the schedules in which they are made available. We have also structured our website to provide an intuitive browsing experience: readers will be able to browse by date of publication, subject category and personal preferences.

The first issue contains 11 articles, although only four published under Creative Commons license. It features articles on quantum computing, biofuel cells, molecular networks and more…

Editorial (2010). Open for business Nature Communications, 1 (1), 1–1 DOI: 10.1038/ncomms1011

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A small, but telling example came to light last month when the popular online newspaper gazeta.ru published an interview with Yuri Osipov (in russian), president of the Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow. Pressed by the reporter about the very low citation rate for articles published in Russian-language science journals, Osipov dismissed the relevance of citation indices, questioned the need for Russian scientists to publish in foreign journals and said that any top-level specialist “will also study Russian and read papers in Russian”.

From anyone else, such a response might be dismissed as an off-hand comment, perhaps reflecting a bit of stung national pride. But Osipov is head of the largest and most powerful research organization in Russia, the employer of around 50,000 scientists in more than 400 research institutes, and the publisher of some 150 Russian-language research journals. What he says and thinks has a big effect on Russian science. Moreover, the undercurrent of scientific nationalism in his remarks is widely shared by other senior members of the academic establishment — many of whom are products of Soviet times, when Russian science was pretty much an all-Russian affair (see Nature 449, 524–527, and 528–529; 2007).

According to the US National Science Foundation (NSF) Science and Engineering Indicators 2010 report, even 20 years later there is a still steady decrease in the number of scientists in Russia.
What is also eye-catching, number of domestic researchers draws level with Europe and the United States. Where as China continues to show very strong grow. China has approximately as many researchers as either the United States or the European Union (EU)!

According to the citation-analysis company Thomson Scientific, Russia is eighteenth among countries ranked by citations in the scientific literature over the past 10 years. That is a result not just of low overall funding but because management of basic science still stands on the concepts of a closed society, with a centralized administration inherited from the days of the Soviet Union. This leads to the absence of international peer review and to little motivation for scientists to produce international-level scientific results — they do not really need them to get funding from national sources. In addition, centralized funding of institutions, rather than of individual scientists, leads to resources being wasted.

Between 2004 and 2008, Thomson Reuters indexed 125,778 papers that listed at least one author address in Russia. Of those papers, the highest percentage appeared in journals categorized in the field of physics, followed by space science. As the right-hand column shows, the citations-per-paper (impact) average for physics papers from Russia during 2004-08 was 14% below the world impact figure for the field (3.57 citations per paper for Russia, versus a world figure of 4.16 cites).

Russian science is already lagging behind that of other nations. According to an analysis published in January by Thomson Reuters, Russia produced just 2.6% of the research papers published between 2004 and 2008 and indexed by the firm — fewer than China (8.4%) and India (2.9%) and only slightly more than the Netherlands (2.5%). Moreover, Russia’s publication output has remained almost flat since 1981, even as the output of nations such as India, Brazil and China was exploding. The situation is so bleak that in October last year, 185 Russian expatriate scientists signed an open letter to Medvedev and Prime Minister Vladimir Putin warning of an imminent collapse of Russian science unless something was done to improve the inadequate funding, strategic planning and teaching of science.

Russia’s scientific reputation will continue to dwindle unless it embraces international research

Self-imposed scientific isolationism can only make matters worse — and accelerate the already large emigration of Russian scientists seeking better opportunities in the West. And those who remain in Russia are also starting to recognize the danger. Many young researchers now eagerly collaborate with Western groups. And many older Russian professors continue to produce excellent science under often difficult conditions. They know very well what a grave disservice they would do to their students by asking them to publish in low-profile journals for the supposed sake of national pride. The answer isn’t to close Russia in, but to open it up.

References:

1. Editorial (2010). Scientific glasnost Nature, 464 (7286), 141–142 DOI: 10.1038/464141b
2. News (2007). Russian science: What the scientists say Nature, 449 (7162), 528–530 DOI: 10.1038/449528a
3. Thomson Reuters
4. NSF Sci­ence and Engi­neer­ing Indi­ca­tors 2010 report