alternative_right shares a report from ScienceAlert: The colossal black hole lurking at the center of the Milky Way galaxy is spinning almost as fast as its maximum rotation rate. That's just one thing astrophysicists have discovered after developing and applying a new method to tease apart the secrets still hidden in supermassive black hole observations collected by the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT). The unprecedented global collaboration spent years working to give us the first direct images of the shadows of black holes, first with M87* in a galaxy 55 million light-years away, then with Sgr A*, the supermassive black hole at the heart of our own galaxy. [...]

Their results show, among other things, that Sgr A* is not only spinning at close to its maximum speed, but that its rotational axis is pointed in Earth's direction, and that the glow around it is generated by hot electrons. Perhaps the most interesting thing is that the magnetic field in the material around Sgr A* doesn't appear to be behaving in a way that's predicted by theory. M87*, they discovered, is also rotating rapidly, although not as fast as Sgr A*. However, it is rotating in the opposite direction to the material swirling in a disk around it -- possibly because of a past merger with another supermassive black hole. The findings have been detailed in three papers published in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics. They can be found here, here, and here.

SpaceX's Starship exploded on its test stand in South Texas ahead of an engine test, marking the fourth loss of a Starship this year. "In three previous test flights, the vehicle came apart or detonated during its flight," notes the Washington Post. No injuries were reported but the incident highlights ongoing technical challenges as SpaceX races to prove Starship's readiness for deep-space travel. From the report: In a post on the social media site X, SpaceX said that the explosion on the test stand, which could be seen for miles, happened at about 11 p.m. Central time. For safety reasons, the company had cleared personnel from around the site, and "all personnel are safe and accounted for," it said. The company is "actively working to safe the test site and the immediate surrounding area in conjunction with local officials," the post continued. "There are no hazards to residents in surrounding communities, and we ask that individuals do not attempt to approach the area while safing operations continue."

Starship comprises two stages -- the Super Heavy booster, which has 33 engines, and the Starship spacecraft itself, which has six. Before Wednesday's explosion, the spacecraft was standing alone on the test stand, and not mounted on top of the booster, when it blew up. The engines are test-fired on the Starship before it's mounted on the booster. SpaceX had been hoping to launch within the coming weeks had the engine test been successful. [...] In a post on X, Musk said that preliminary data pointed to a pressure vessel that failed at the top of the rocket. You can watch a recording of the explosion on YouTube.

SpaceX called the incident a "rapid unscheduled disassembly," which caught the attention of Slashdot reader hambone142. In a story submitted to the Firehose, they commented: "I worked for a major computer company whose power supplies caught on fire. We were instructed to cease saying that and instead say the power supply underwent a 'thermal event.' Gotta love it."

Honda has successfully conducted a surprise launch and landing test of its prototype reusable rocket as part of its plan to achieve suborbital spaceflight by 2029. Reuters reports: Honda R&D, the research arm of Japan's second-biggest carmaker, successfully landed its 6.3-meter (20.6-foot) experimental reusable launch vehicle after reaching an altitude of 271 meters (889 feet) at its test facility in northern Japan's space town Taiki, according to the company. While "no decisions have been made regarding commercialization of these rocket technologies, Honda will continue making progress in the fundamental research with a technology development goal of realizing technological capability to enable a suborbital launch by 2029," it said in a statement.

Honda in 2021 said it was studying space technologies such as reusable rockets, but it has not previously announced the details of the launch test. A suborbital launch may touch the verge of outer space but does not enter orbit. Studying launch vehicles "has the potential to contribute more to people's daily lives by launching satellites with its own rockets, that could lead to various services that are also compatible with other Honda business," the company added.

Space may be the perfect place to study cancer — and someday even treat it," writes Space.com: On Earth, gravity slows the development of cancer because cells normally need to be attached to a surface in order to function and grow. But in space, cancer cell clusters can expand in all directions as bubbles, like budding yeast or grapes, said Shay Soker, chief science program officer at Wake Forest's Institute for Regenerative Medicine. Since bubbles grow larger and more quickly in space, researchers can more easily test substances clinging to the edge of the larger bubbles, too. Scientists at the University of Notre Dame are taking advantage of this quirk to develop an in-space cancer test that needs just a single drop of blood. The work builds on a series of bubble-formation experiments that have already been conducted on the ISS. "If cancer screening using our bubble technology in space is democratized and made inexpensive, many more cancers can be screened, and everyone can benefit," said Tengfei Luo, a Notre Dame researcher who pioneered the technology, speaking to the ISS' magazine, Upward. "It's something we may be able to integrate into annual exams. It sounds far-fetched, but it's achievable...."

Chemotherapy patients could save precious time, too. In normal gravity, they typically have to spend a half-hour hooked up to a needle before the medicine begins to take effect, because most drugs don't dissolve easily in water. But scientists at Merck have discovered that, in space, their widely used cancer drug pembrolizumab, or Keytruda, can be administered through a simple injection, because large crystalline molecules that would normally clump together are suspended in microgravity... Someday, microgravity could even help patients recovering from surgery heal faster than they would on Earth, Soker added. "Wound healing in high pressure is faster. That's the hyperbaric treatment for wounds...."

For the Wake Forest experiment, which is scheduled to launch next spring, scientists will cut out two sections of a cancer tumor from around 20 patients. One sample will stay on Earth while the other heads to the ISS, with scientists observing the difference. The testing will be completed within a week, to avoid any interference from cosmic radiation. If successful, Soker said, it could set the stage for diagnostic cancer tests in space available to the general population — perhaps on a biomedical space station that could launch after the planned demise of the ISS. "Can we actually design a special cancer space station that will be dedicated to cancer and maybe other diseases?" Shoker asked, answering his question in the affirmative. "Pharmaceutical companies that have deep pockets would certainly support that program."

NASA and Axiom Space have indefinitely delayed the Axiom-4 launch to the International Space Station due to concerns about a persistent air leak in the Russian PrK vestibule of the aging Zvezda module. "The PrK serves as a passageway between the station's Zvezda module and spacecraft docked at its aft port," notes CBS News. From the report: In a blog post, NASA said cosmonauts aboard the station "recently performed inspections of the pressurized module's interior surfaces, sealed some additional areas of interest, and measured the current leak rate. Following this effort, the segment now is holding pressure." The post went on to say the Axiom-4 delay will provide "additional time for NASA and (the Russian space agency) Roscosmos to evaluate the situation and determine whether any additional troubleshooting is necessary."

Launched in July 2000 atop a Russian Proton rocket, Zvezda was the third module to join the growing space station, providing a command center for Russian cosmonauts, crew quarters, the aft docking port and two additional ports now occupied by airlock and research modules. The leakage was first noticed in 2019, and has been openly discussed ever since by NASA during periodic reviews and space station news briefings. The leak rate has varied, but has stayed in the neighborhood of around 1-to-2 pounds per day. "The station is not young," astronaut Mike Barratt said last November during a post flight news conference. "It's been up there for quite a while, and you expect some wear and tear, and we're seeing that in the form of some cracks that have formed." The Russians have made a variety of attempts to patch a suspect crack and other possible sources of leakage, but air has continued to escape into space.

In November, Bob Cabana, a former astronaut and NASA manager who chaired the agency's ISS Advisory Committee, said U.S. and Russian engineers "don't have a common understanding of what the likely root cause is, or the severity of the consequences of these leaks." "The Russian position is that the most probable cause of the PrK cracks is high cyclic fatigue caused by micro vibrations," Cabana said. "NASA believes the PrK cracks are likely multi-causal including pressure and mechanical stress, residual stress, material properties and environmental exposures. "The Russians believe that continued operations are safe, but they can't prove to our satisfaction that they are, and the US believes that it's not safe, but we can't prove that to the Russian satisfaction that that's the case."

As an interim step, the hatch leading to the PrK and the station's aft docking compartment is closed during daily operations and only opened when the Russians need to unload a visiting Progress cargo ship. And as an added precaution on NASA's part, whenever the hatch to the PrK and docking compartment is open, a hatch between the Russian and U.S. segments of the station is closed. "We've taken a very conservative approach to close a hatch between the US side and the Russian side during those time periods," Barratt said. "It's not a comfortable thing, but it is the best agreement between all the smart people on both sides. And it's something that we crew live with and enact." Cabana said last year that the Russians do not believe "catastrophic disintegration of the PrK is realistic (but) NASA has expressed concerns about the structural integrity of the PrK and the possibility of a catastrophic failure."

The World Bank is lifting its decades-long ban on financing nuclear energy, in a policy shift aimed at accelerating development of the low-emissions technology to meet surging electricity demand in the developing world. From a report: In an email to staff on Wednesday, Ajay Banga, the World Bank president, said it would "begin to re-enter the nuclear energy space" [non-paywalled source] in partnership with the International Atomic Energy Agency, the UN nuclear watchdog which works to prevent proliferation of nuclear weapons.

"We will support efforts to extend the life ofÂexisting reactors in countries that already have them, and help support grid upgrades andÂrelated infrastructure," the email said. The shift follows advocacy from the pro-nuclear Trump administration and a change of government in Germany, which previously opposed financing atomic energy due to domestic political opposition to the technology. It is part of a wider strategy aimed at tackling an expected doubling of electricity demand in the developing world by 2035. Meeting this demand would require annual investment in generation, grids and storage to rise from $280 billion today to $630 billion, Banga said in the memo seen by the Financial Times.

The European Space Agency's Solar Orbiter has captured the first-ever images of the sun's poles by tilting its orbit out of the ecliptic plane. Space.com reports: The captured images of the solar south pole were taken between March 16 and 17, 2025, with the Solar Orbiter's Polarimetric and Helioseismic Imager (PHI), Extreme Ultraviolet Imager (EUI), and Spectral Imaging of the Coronal Environment (SPICE) instruments. They constitute humanity's first ever look at the sun's poles. This was the Solar Orbiter mission's first high-angle observation campaign of the sun, conducted at an angle of 15 degrees below the solar equator. Just a few days after snapping these images, the ESA spacecraft reached a maximum viewing angle of 17 degrees, which it sits in currently as it performs its first "pole-to-pole" orbit of our star. [...]

One of the first discoveries made by the Solar Orbiter is the fact that the magnetic fields around the sun's southern poles appear to be, for lack of a better phrase, a complete mess. While standard magnetic fields have well-defined north and south poles, these new observations reveal that north and south polarities are both found at the sun's southern pole. This seems to happen at solar maximum when the poles of the sun are about to flip. Following this exchange of poles, the fields at the north and south poles will maintain an orderly single polarity during solar minimum until solar maximum during the next 11-year cycle.

The Solar Orbiter observations also revealed that while the equator of the sun, where the most sunspots appear, possesses the strongest magnetic fields, those at the poles of our star have a complex and ever-changing structure. The Solar Orbiter's SPICE instrument provided another first for the ESA spacecraft, allowing scientists to track elements via their unique emissions as they move through the sun. Tracing the specific spectral lines of elements like hydrogen, carbon, oxygen, neon, and magnesium, a process called "Doppler measurement," revealed how materials flow through different layers of the sun. The Solar Orbiter also allowed scientists to measure the speed of carbon atoms as they are ejected from the sun in plumes and jets. "This is just the first step of Solar Orbiter's 'stairway to heaven.' In the coming years, the spacecraft will climb further out of the ecliptic plane for ever better views of the sun's polar regions," ESA's Solar Orbiter project scientist Daniel Muller said. "These data will transform our understanding of the sun's magnetic field, the solar wind, and solar activity."

Shubhanshu Shukla will become the first Indian astronaut to visit the International Space Station as part of a four-person mission by Axiom Space launching from the U.S.. The mission will include 14 days aboard the ISS and over 60 scientific studies. The Guardian reports: He will be the third astronaut of Indian origin to reach orbit, following Rakesh Sharma, who was part of a 1984 flight onboard a Soviet Soyuz spacecraft, and Kalpana Chawla, who was born in India but became a US citizen and flew on two space shuttle missions, including the 2003 Columbia flight that ended in disaster when the spacecraft disintegrated, killing all seven astronauts onboard. "I truly believe that even though, as an individual, I am traveling to space, this is the journey of 1.4 billion people," Shukla was quoted as saying by the Hindu newspaper this year. Shukla said he hoped to "ignite the curiosity of an entire generation in my country."

India's department of space has called the trip a "defining chapter" in its ambitious space exploration program. The International Space Station mission (ISS) "stands as a symbol of a confident, forward-looking nation ready to reclaim its place in the global space race," the agency said before the launch. "His journey is more than just a flight -- it's a signal that India is stepping boldly into a new era of space exploration." New Delhi has paid more than $60m for the mission, according to Indian media reports. [...]

Shukla trained at the Yuri Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center in Russia in 2020, before undertaking further training at the ISRO's centre in Bengaluru. He has said the journey aboard the Axiom Mission 4, and the expected 14 days on the ISS, will provide "invaluable" lessons to bring back home. Shukla will be led by the mission commander, Peggy Whitson, a former Nasa astronaut and an Axiom employee, and joined by the European Space Agency astronaut Slawosz Uznanski-Wisniewski, of Poland, and Tibor Kapu, of Hungary. They will conduct 60 scientific studies, including microgravity research, earth observation, and life, biological and material sciences experiments.

The Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile will begin full operations in the coming months with the world's largest digital camera, capturing 3,200-megapixel images that would require several hundred HD television screens to display at full resolution. The $810 million facility will map the entire southern sky every three to four nights, observing each location approximately 800 times over its planned decade of operations.

The telescope's unusual design allows it to photograph an area equivalent to 45 full moons in each shot and swing between different sky locations every 40 seconds. Its digital camera, roughly the size of a small car, will generate eight million alerts per night when it detects astronomical objects that move or change brightness, according to Tony Tyson, the University of California, Davis astronomer who conceived the project in the 1990s. Astrophysicist Federica Bianco, who received a preview of the telescope's first full-color image, described her reaction simply: "There are so many stars!" The team plans to unveil that inaugural image on June 23.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Axios: President Trump quietly took a red pen to much of the Biden administration's cyber legacy in a little-noticed move late Friday. Under an executive order signed just before the weekend, Trump is tossing out some of the major touchstones of Biden's cyber policy legacy -- while keeping a few others. The order preserves efforts around post-quantum cryptography, advanced encryption standards, and border gateway protocol security, along with the Cyber Trust Mark program -- an Energy Star-type labeling initiative for consumer smart devices. But hallmark programs tied to software bills of materials, zero-trust implementation, and space contractor cybersecurity requirements have been either rescinded or left in limbo. The new executive order amends both the Biden cyber executive order signed in January and an Obama administration order.

Each of the following Biden-era programs is now out the door or significantly rolled back:
- A broad requirement for federal software vendors to provide a software bill of materials - essentially an ingredient list of code components - is gone.
- Biden-era efforts to encourage federal agencies to accept digital identity documents and help states develop mobile driver's licenses were revoked.
- Several AI cybersecurity research mandates, including those focused on AI-generated code security and AI-driven patch management pilots, have been scrapped or deprioritized.
- The requirement that software contractors formally attest they followed secure development practices - and submit those attestations to a federal repository - has been cut. Instead, the National Institute of Standards and Technology will now coordinate a new industry consortium to review software security guidelines.

A NASA-backed project using observations from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has released more than 1.5 TB of data for open science, offering the largest view deep into the universe available to date. From a report: The Cosmic Evolution Survey (COSMOS), a joint project from the University of California, Santa Barbara and Rochester Institute of Technology, has launched a searchable dataset for budding astrophysics enthusiasts worldwide.

As well as a catalog of galaxies, the dataset includes an interactive viewer that users can search for images of specific objects or click them to view their properties, covering approximately 0.54 square degrees of sky with the Near Infrared Camera (NIRCam) and a 0.2 square degree area with the Mid Infrared Instrument (MIRI). Although the raw data was already publicly available to the science community, the aim of the COSMOS-Web project was to make it more usable for other scientists.

Blue Origin is falling far short of its goal to launch the New Glenn rocket eight times in 2025, with its second flight now delayed until at least mid-August. Key leadership changes were also announced, including the departure of the New Glenn program head, as the company faces pressure to increase launch cadence and compete with SpaceX for federal contracts and Amazon's Project Kuiper deployments. Ars Technica reports: The mission, with an undesignated payload, will be named "Never Tell Me the Odds," due to the attempt to land the booster. "One of our key mission objectives will be to land and recover the booster," [chief executive of Blue Origin, Dave Limp] wrote. "This will take a little bit of luck and a lot of excellent execution. We're on track to produce eight GS2s this year, and the one we'll fly on this second mission was hot-fired in April."

In this comment, GS2 stands for "Glenn stage 2," or the second stage of the large rocket. It is telling that Limp commented on the company tracking toward producing eight second stages, which would match the original launch cadence planned for this year. This likely is a fig leaf offered to Bezos, who, two sources said, was rather upset that Blue Origin would not meet (or even approach) its original target of eight launches this year. One person familiar with the progress on the vehicle told Ars that even a launch date in August is unrealistic -- this too may have been set aggressively to appease Bezos -- and that September is probably the earliest the rocket is likely to be ready for launch. Blue Origin has not publicly stated what the payload will be, but this second flight is expected to carry the ESCAPADE mission for NASA.

On May 28, a couple of days after Limp's all-hands meeting, the chief executive emailed his entire team to announce an "organizational update." As part of this, the company's senior vice president of engines, Linda Cova, was retiring. Multiple sources confirmed this retiring was expected and that the company's program to produce BE-4 rocket engines is going well. However, the other name in the email raised some eyebrows, coming so soon after the announcement that New Glenn's cadence would be significantly slower than expected. Jarrett Jones, the senior vice president running the New Glenn program, was said to be "stepping away from his role and taking a well deserved year off" starting on August 15. It is unclear whether this departure was linked to Bezos' displeasure with the rocket program. One company official said Jones' sabbatical had been planned, but the timing is curious. A search for internal and external candidates to fill his role is ongoing.

South Asia has warmed far more slowly than the rest of the world over the past four decades with temperatures rising just 0.09C per decade compared to 0.30C elsewhere on land, according to new climate research. Scientists believe this "warming hole" results from two factors that have masked the true impact of global warming: heavy aerosol pollution that reflects sunlight back to space and expanded irrigation that cools air through evaporation.

The protective effect is temporary and comes at a deadly cost. Air pollution currently kills between 2 million and 3 million people annually in South Asia, while extreme heat causes 100,000 to 600,000 deaths. As governments reduce pollution and groundwater depletion limits irrigation expansion, atmospheric scientists predict India will warm at twice the rate of the past 20 years. By 2047, the average Indian could experience a four-fold increase in dangerous heat stress days, threatening a region where only 10% of households have air conditioning.

Nintendo's new Switch 2 console sold a record 3 million units after its launch Thursday. But then today Microsoft announced their own upcoming handheld gaming device that's Xbox-branded (and Windows-powered).

Working with ASUS' ROG division, they build a device that weighs more than the Nintendo Switch 2, and "is marginally heavier than the Steam Deck," reports Engadget. But "at least those grips look more ergonomic than those on the Nintendo Switch 2 (which is already cramping my hands) or even the Steam Deck." There are two variants of the handheld: the ROG Xbox Ally and ROG Xbox Ally X. Microsoft didn't reveal pricing, but the handhelds are coming this holiday... Critically, Microsoft and ROG aren't locking the devices to only playing Xbox games (though you can do that natively, via the cloud or by accessing an Xbox console remotely). You'll be able to play games from Battle.net and "other leading PC storefronts" too. Obviously, there's Game Pass integration here, as well as support for the Xbox Play Anywhere initiative, which enables you to play games with synced progress across a swathe of devices after buying them once...

There's a dedicated physical Xbox button that can bring up a Game Bar overlay, which seemingly makes it easy to switch between apps and games, tweak settings, start chatting with friends and more... You'll be able to mod games on either system as well.

The Xbox Ally is powered by the AMD Ryzen Z2 A Processor, and has 16GB of RAM and 512GB of SSD storage. The Xbox Ally X is the more powerful model. It has a AMD Ryzen AI Z2 Extreme processor, 24GB of RAM and 1TB of storage. They each have a microSD card reader, so you won't need to worry about shelling out for proprietary storage options to have extra space for your games... Both systems boast "HD haptics..." Both systems should be capable of outputting video to a TV or monitor, as they have two USB-C ports with support for DisplayPort 2.1 and Power Delivery 3.0.
"Microsoft has needed to respond to SteamOS ever since the Steam Deck launched three years ago," argues The Verge, "and it has steadily been tweaking its Xbox app and the Xbox Game Bar on Windows to make both more handheld-friendly..." But there was always a bigger overhaul of Windows required, and we're starting to see parts of that today. "The reality is that we've made tremendous progress on this over the last couple of years, and this is really the device that galvanized those teams and got everybody marching and working towards a moment that we're just really excited to put into the hands of players," says Roanne Sones, corporate vice president of gaming Devices and ecosystem at Xbox, in a briefing with The Verge...

I'll need to try this new interface fully to really get a feel for the Windows changes here, but Microsoft is promising that this isn't just lipstick on top of Windows. "This isn't surface-level changes, we've made significant improvements," says Potvin. "Some of our early testing with the components we've turned off in Windows, we get about 2GB of memory going back to the games while running in the full-screen experience."

Mike Judge always seemed to have secret geek sympathies. He co-created the HBO series Silicon Valley, as well as the movie Office Space (reviewed in 1999 by Slashdot contributor Jon Katz).

Now comes the word that besides rebooting Buffy the Vampire Slayer — and an animated scifi/action/horror film called Predator: Killer of Killers — Hulu is also relaunching Judge's animated series King of the Hill on August 4th. And Cinemablend notes they took great pains to ensure the inclusion of internet-loving neighbor Dale Gribble despite the death of voice actor Johnny Hardwick: Co-creators Mike Judge and Greg Daniels joined the cast of returning voice actors for a revealing Q&A at ATX Fest while also revealing longtime cast member Toby Huss took over the role of Dale Gribble... Hardwick passed away in August 2023 at 64, with fans and co-stars paying tribute soon after. It was revealed at the time that he'd recorded some audio for the new season, but it was clear that another actor would be needed to fill those intimidating and conspiracy-obsessed shoes. Among other characters, Huss provided the voice of Cotton Hill and Kahn Sr. in the O.G. run, and feels to me like a natural fit to take over as Dale. And he sounds humbled to have been given the task, telling the ATX Fest crowd:

"Johnny was one-of-a-kind and a wonderful fellow. I'm not trying to copy Johnny...I guess I'm trying to be Johnny. He laid down a really wonderful goofball character...he had a lot of weird heart to him and that's a credit to Johnny. So all I'm trying to do is hold on to his Dale-ness. We love our guy Johnny and it's so sad that he's not here...."

I can already hear Dale himself questioning why he sounds different, and whether or not the government has replaced him with a lizard creature or some other sentient organism... In the immediate aftermath of Johnny Hardwick's death, the word was that the actor had filmed a couple of episodes' worth of material for the Hulu revival, but Mike Judge went on the record at ATX Fest to reveal that initial assessment undershot things entirely. From the voice of Hank Hill himself: "Johnny Hardwick is in six episodes. He's still going to be in the show."
Hulu uploaded the new opening credits to YouTube eight days ago — and it's already been viewed 2.1 million times, attracting 55,000 upvotes and 7,952 comments...

Long-time Slashdot reader theodp shared the official blurb describing the new show: After years working a propane job in Saudi Arabia to earn their retirement nest egg, Hank and Peggy Hill return to a changed Arlen, Texas to reconnect with old friends Dale, Boomhauer and Bill. Meanwhile, Bobby is living his dream as a chef in Dallas and enjoying his 20s with his former classmates Connie, Joseph and Chane.

MIT comp-sci professor Ryan Williams suspected that a small amount of memory "would be as helpful as a lot of time in all conceivable computations..." writes Quanta magazine.

"In February, he finally posted his proof online, to widespread acclaim..." Every algorithm takes some time to run, and requires some space to store data while it's running. Until now, the only known algorithms for accomplishing certain tasks required an amount of space roughly proportional to their runtime, and researchers had long assumed there's no way to do better. Williams' proof established a mathematical procedure for transforming any algorithm — no matter what it does — into a form that uses much less space.

What's more, this result — a statement about what you can compute given a certain amount of space — also implies a second result, about what you cannot compute in a certain amount of time. This second result isn't surprising in itself: Researchers expected it to be true, but they had no idea how to prove it. Williams' solution, based on his sweeping first result, feels almost cartoonishly excessive, akin to proving a suspected murderer guilty by establishing an ironclad alibi for everyone else on the planet. It could also offer a new way to attack one of the oldest open problems in computer science.

"It's a pretty stunning result, and a massive advance," said Paul Beame, a computer scientist at the University of Washington.
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader mspohr for sharing the article.

Startup Nord Quantique has demonstrated that a single piece of hardware can host an error-detecting logical qubit by using two quantum frequencies within one resonator. The breakthrough has the potential to slash the hardware demands for quantum error correction and deliver more compact and efficient quantum computing architectures. Ars Technica reports: The company did two experiments with this new hardware. First, it ran multiple rounds of error detection on data stored in the logical qubit, essentially testing its ability to act like a quantum memory and retain the information stored there. Without correcting errors, the system rapidly decayed, with an error probability in each round of measurement of about 12 percent. By the time the system reached the 25th measurement, almost every instance had already encountered an error. The second time through, the company repeated the process, discarding any instances in which an error occurred. In almost every instance, that meant the results were discarded long before they got through two dozen rounds of measurement. But at these later stages, none of the remaining instances were in an erroneous state. That indicates that a successful correction of the errors -- something the team didn't try -- would be able to fix all the detected problems.

Several other companies have already performed experiments in which errors were detected -- and corrected. In a few instances, companies have even performed operations with logical qubits, although these were not sophisticated calculations. Nord Quantique, in contrast, is only showing the operation of a single logical qubit, so it's not even possible to test a two-qubit gate operation using the hardware it has described so far. So simply being able to identify the occurrence of errors is not on the cutting edge. Why is this notable?

All the other companies require multiple hardware qubits to host a single logical qubit. Since building many hardware qubits has been an ongoing challenge, most researchers have plans to minimize the number of hardware qubits needed to support a logical qubit -- some combination of high-quality hardware, a clever error correction scheme, and/or a hardware-specific feature that catches the most common errors. You can view Nord Quantique's approach as being at the extreme end of the spectrum of solutions, where the number of hardware qubits required is simply one. From Nord Quantique's perspective, that's significant because it means that its hardware will ultimately occupy less space and have lower power and cooling requirements than some of its competitors. (Other hardware, like neutral atoms, requires lots of lasers and a high vacuum, so the needs are difficult to compare.) But it also means that, should it become technically difficult to get large numbers of qubits to operate as a coherent whole, Nord Quantique's approach may ultimately help us overcome some of these limits.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from KrebsOnSecurity: Ukraine has seen nearly one-fifth of its Internet space come under Russian control or sold to Internet address brokers since February 2022, a new study finds. The analysis indicates large chunks of Ukrainian Internet address space are now in the hands of shadowy proxy and anonymity services that are nested at some of America's largest Internet service providers (ISPs). The findings come in a report that examines how the Russian invasion has affected Ukraine's domestic supply of Internet Protocol Version 4 (IPv4) addresses. Researchers at Kentik, a company that measures the performance of Internet networks, found that while a majority of ISPs in Ukraine haven't changed their infrastructure much since the war began in 2022, others have resorted to selling swathes of their valuable IPv4 address space just to keep the lights on.

For example, Ukraine's incumbent ISP Ukrtelecom is now routing just 29 percent of the IPv4 address ranges that the company controlled at the start of the war, Kentik found. Although much of that former IP space remains dormant, Ukrtelecom told Kentik's Doug Madory they were forced to sell many of their address blocks "to secure financial stability and continue delivering essential services." "Leasing out a portion of our IPv4 resources allowed us to mitigate some of the extraordinary challenges we have been facing since the full-scale invasion began," Ukrtelecom told Madory.

Madory found much of the IPv4 space previously allocated to Ukrtelecom is now scattered to more than 100 providers globally, particularly at three large American ISPs -- Amazon (AS16509), AT&T (AS7018), and Cogent (AS174). Another Ukrainian Internet provider -- LVS (AS43310) -- in 2022 was routing approximately 6,000 IPv4 addresses across the nation. Kentik learned that by November 2022, much of that address space had been parceled out to over a dozen different locations, with the bulk of it being announced at AT&T. Ditto for the Ukrainian ISP TVCOM, which currently routes nearly 15,000 fewer IPv4 addresses than it did at the start of the war. Madory said most of those addresses have been scattered to 37 other networks outside of Eastern Europe, including Amazon, AT&T, and Microsoft.

alternative_right shares a report from Phys.Org: Using conventional propulsion and low-energy trajectories, it takes six to nine months for crewed spacecraft to reach Mars. These durations complicate mission design and technology requirements and raise health and safety concerns since crews will be exposed to extended periods in microgravity and heightened exposure to cosmic radiation. Traditionally, mission designers have recommended nuclear-electric or nuclear-thermal propulsion (NEP/NTP), which could shorten trips to just 3 months. In a recent study, a UCSB physics researcher identified two trajectories that could reduce transits to Mars using the Starship to between 90 and 104 days.

The study was authored by Jack Kingdon, a graduate student researcher in the Physics Department at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB). He is also a member of the UCSB Weld Lab, an experimental ultracold atomic physics group that uses quantum degenerate gases to explore quantum mechanical phenomena. [...] As outlined on its website, conference presentations, and user manual, the SpaceX mission architecture consists of six Starships traveling to Mars. Four of these spacecraft will haul 400 metric tons (440 U.S. tons) of cargo while two will transport 200 passengers. Based on the Block 2 design, which has a 1,500 metric ton (1,650 U.S. ton) propellant capacity, the crewed Starships will require 15 tankers to fully refuel in low Earth orbit (LEO). The cargo ships would require only four, since they would be sent on longer low-energy trajectories. Once the flotilla arrives at Mars, the Starships will refuel using propellant created in situ using local carbon dioxide and water ice. When the return window approaches, one of the crew ships and 3-4 cargo ships will refuel and then launch into a low Mars orbit (LMO). The cargo ships will then transfer the majority of their propellant to the crew ship and return to the surface of Mars. The crew ship would then depart for Earth, and the process could be repeated for the other crew ship.

Kingdon calculated multiple trajectories using a Lambert Solver, which produces the shortest elliptical arc in two-body problem equations (aka Lambert's problem). The first would depart Earth on April 30th, 2033, taking advantage of the 26-month periodic alignment between Earth and Mars. The transit would last 90 days, with the crew returning to Earth after another 90-day transit by July 2nd, 2035. The second would depart Earth on July 15th, 2035, and return to Earth after a 104-day transit on December 5th, 2037. As Kingdon explained, the former trajectory is the most likely to succeed: "The optimal trajectory is the 2033 trajectory -- it has the lowest fuel requirements for the fastest transit time. A note that may not be obvious to the layreader is that Starship can very easily reach Mars in ~3 months -- in fact, it can in any launch window, over a fairly wide range of trajectories. However, Starship may impact the Martian atmosphere too fast (although we do not know, and likely SpaceX don't either actually how fast Starship can hit the Martian atmosphere and survive). The trajectories discussed are ones that I am confident Starship will survive." The paper describing the work has been published in the journal Scientific Reports.

The James Webb Space Telescope has discovered the most distant galaxy ever observed, named MoM z14. NASA estimates it existed just 280 million years after the Big Bang. Space.com reports: Prior to the discovery of MoM z14, the galaxy holding the title of earliest and distant was JADES-GS-z14-0, which existed just 300 million years after the Big Bang, or around 13.5 billion years ago. This previous record galaxy has a redshift of z =14.32, while MoM z14 has a redshift of z = 14.44. There is a wider context to the observation of MoM z14 than the fact that it has broken the record for earliest known galaxy by 20 million years, though, as [explained team member and Yale University professor of Astronomy and Physics Pieter van Dokkum].

The researchers were able to determine that MoM z14 is around 50 times smaller than the Milky Way. The team also measured emission lines from the galaxy, indicating the presence of elements like nitrogen and carbon. "The emission lines are unusual; it indicates that the galaxy is very young, with a rapidly increasing rate of forming new stars," van Dokkum said. "There are also indications that there is not much neutral hydrogen gas surrounding the galaxy, which would be surprising: the very early universe is expected to be filled with neutral hydrogen. "That needs even better spectra and more galaxies, to investigate more fully."

The presence of carbon and nitrogen in MoM z14 indicates that there are earlier galaxies to be discovered than this 13.52 billion-year-old example. That is because the very earliest galaxies in the universe and their stars were filled with the simplest elements in the cosmos, hydrogen and helium. Later galaxies would be populated by these heavier elements, which astronomers somewhat confusingly call "metal," as their stars forged them and then dispersed them in supernova explosions. The research has been published on arXiv.