Looks like the Simpsons had it right again, now that an Australian radio station has been caught using an AI-generated DJ for their midday slot. Station CADA, a Sydney-based broadcaster that’s part of the Australian Radio Network, revealed that “Workdays with Thy” isn’t actually hosted by a person; rather, “Thy” is a generative AI text-to-speech […]
Sometimes you need random numbers — and properly random ones, at that. [Sean Boyce] whipped up a rig that serves up just that, tasty random bytes delivered fresh over MQTT. [Sean] tells us he’s been “designing various quantum TRNGs for nearly 15 years as part of an elaborate practical joke” without further explanation. We won’t […]
We’re probably all familiar with the Hall Effect, at least to the extent that it can be used to make solid-state sensors for magnetic fields. It’s a cool bit of applied physics, but there are other ways to sense magnetic fields, including leveraging the weird world of quantum physics with this diamond, laser, and microwave […]
We talk about quantum states — that is, something can be at one of several discrete values but not in between. For example, a binary digit can be a 1 or a 0, but not 0.3 or 0.5. Atoms have quantum states, but how do we know that? That’s what the Franck-Hertz experiment demonstrates, and […]
Wired has a fascinating story this week, about the length Sophos has gone to for the last 5 years, to track down a group of malicious but clever security researchers that were continually discovering vulnerabilities and then using those findings to attack real-world targets. Sophos believes this adversary to be overlapping Chinese groups known as […]
Depending on who you ask, the big news this week is that quantum computing researchers out of China have broken RSA. (Here’s the PDF of their paper.) And that’s true… sort of. There are multiple caveats, like the fact that this proof of concept is only factoring a 22-bit key. The minimum RSA size in […]
Diamonds are nearly perfect crystals, but not totally perfect. The defects in these crystals give the stones their characteristic colors. But one type of defect, the NV — nitrogen-vacancy — center, can hold a particular spin, and you can change that spin with the correct application of energy. [Asianometry] explains why this is important in […]
Radar was a great invention that made air travel much safer and weather prediction more accurate, indeed it is even credited with winning the Battle of Britain. However, it carries a little problem with it during times of war. Painting a target with radar (or even sonar) is equivalent to standing up and wildly waving […]