Quantum memory may topple Heisenberg's uncertainty principle
A quantum memory may be all scientists need to beat the limit of Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, according to a paper published in Nature Physics. According to a group of researchers, maximally entangling a particle with a quantum memory and measuring one of the particle's variables, like its position, should snap the quantum memory in a corresponding state, which could then be measured. This would allow them to do something long thought verboten by the laws of physics: figure out the state of certain pairs of variables at the exact same time with an unprecedented amount of certainty.
Our ability to observe particles at the quantum level is currently limited by Heisenberg's uncertainty principle. Heisenberg noticed that when someone measured one variable of a particle, such as its position, there were some other variables, like momentum, that could not be simultaneously measured with as much precision—there was a small amount of uncertainty applied to one or both of the measurements.
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Games of summer: why Microsoft's Summer of Arcade succeeds
We're in the midst of Microsoft's yearly Summer of Arcade promotion, where big-name Xbox Live Arcade games are released week after week. Helped by heaps of promotion, a money-back offer if you buy three or more games, and some clever manipulation of the press, these games are bound to do well with consumers. Why not? There isn't much competition for the gaming dollar in retail stores this time of the year, making these games even more attractive.Simply put, why doesn't Nintendo and Sony rip this idea off in a blatant (but most likely profitable) bid to steal some of Microsoft's thunder? Ars explores the secrets of the Summer of Arcade.
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Feature: A decade to separate us: Ars reviews StarCraft 2
Gamers have expectations for StarCraft 2 that will be impossible to meet. Players have waited a decade for a sequel to what is widely considered to be one of the best real-time strategy games of all time, and one of the world's most-played PC games, period. Blizzard certainly isn't afraid to make bold choices: LAN gaming is out, the title is being split into three releases, and the game is launching alongside a reboot of the popular Battle.net service that stretches across all of Blizzard's properties.We've been playing StarCraft 2 since Monday, and the game is good. It's very good. It's also classical in how it treats its units and the gameplay; those who were never impressed with the original game aren't going to be convinced by this sequel. But if you wanted more StarCraft, with different units, adjusted strategy, and a fully fleshed-out single-player game, then this is going to hit your life like a bomb. Say goodbye to your other hobbies, buy your wife some flowers, and get your kids some new toys. It may be time to take a few days off work. StarCraft 2 is finally here, and it threatens to swallow us whole.
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Verizon: top DC lobbyist for Internet laws
The big telco and cable ISPs are always busy beavers over at Capitol Hill, lobbying Congress on a wide variety of issues. But our perusal of the relevant public disclosure databases suggests that Verizon wins the prize for money spent on convincing Senators and Representatives to see broadband- and mobile-related matters the wireless giants' way. According to the latest data provided to the U.S. House of Representatives' Office of the Clerk, during the second quarter of this year, Verizon forked over $4,440,000 to its team of crack buttonholers, who talked up every issue from net neutrality to the proposed Distracted Driving Prevention Act.
To offer some perspective, however, at the same time last year, the company spent $1,120,000.00. That's still a lot of money, but less than a third of the latest sum.
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Searching through the LHC data flood for dark matter
As we mentioned in recent coverage, a hypothesis called supersymmetry is one of the leading candidates to fix the problems that have appeared in the Standard Model, which explains the behavior of the fundamental components of matter. Supersymmetry also makes a nice candidate to transition out of coverage of the Lindau Meeting, which took place in Europe, and the next stop on our scientific tour: CERN's Large Hadron Collider, where many scientists expect that the first direct evidence for supersymmetry will appear.Previous generations of particle accelerators, like CERN's LEP and Fermi's Tevatron, have filled out a full complement of particles that act as the fundamental building blocks of the Universe. These include components of matter, like quarks and leptons (which include the electron and neutrinos), and the force carriers, from the familiar photon to the heavy and hard-to-produce W boson. As David Gross described it in his Lindau talk (linked above), these components of the Standard Model make extremely precise predictions that have been tested on scales from the Planck length to the Universe.
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After spyware fails, UAE gives up and bans BlackBerrys
The United Arab Emirates tends to be one of the more moderate nations in the Persian Gulf region, which may have contributed to its rise as a major financial center. The bankers apparently brought their BlackBerrys with them, creating a small but dedicated group of users on the UAE's local carriers, like Etisalat. But one of the selling points of the BlackBerry—strong encryption between the hardware and RIM's e-mail servers in Canada—hasn't sat well with the UAE's security services. After previous attempts to subvert the encryption, the UAE has now decided to simply ban sales of the devices. Meanwhile Saudi Arabia is considering blocking the use of RIM's instant messaging service.The problem, from the security service's perspective, is that the e-mails never spend any time where the UAE's security services can examine their contents. In what appeared to be an earlier attempt to get around this issue, Etisalat attempted to get RIM users on its network to install some software that simply took any e-mail that had been decrypted and forwarded it on to a server within the UAE. This effort was quickly discovered, however, and RIM washed its hands of the whole thing publicly.
Now, the UAE has apparently decided that if you can't subvert them, you might as well kill them. As of October, RIM devices will be cut off from Internet access when using carriers based in the UAE. The security services would apparently accept the company setting up a local proxy server for monitoring, but the user population is small enough that RIM may be comfortable walking away from that market instead.
But there are some signs that the UAE isn't alone in this. A BBC report on the same topic mentioned that some BlackBerry services would be banned by Saudi Arabia; both mentioned India being concerned with its inability to monitor traffic from the devices. If other security-conscious nations follow suit, RIM could find that, collectively, the moves would threaten a considerable fraction of its customer base.
Why the apparent ire is focused on the devices themselves rather than the general approach isn't clear. An SSL connection to an offshore e-mail server would seem to create just as much trouble as RIM's approach, but there don't seem to be any efforts afoot to clamp down on other smartphone platforms.
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Weird Science spies on cheating warblers
Idle hands are a source of dread: Apparently, if there's nothing that they can justify doing, most people default to doing nothing. And they hate it. People who are busier rated themselves as more happy, and researchers found that even a specious justification for doing something was enough to get most people engaged. In fact, even when individuals are forced to perform a task, they end up happier than those left to sit idle. Infidelity as a means of genetic diversification: The Seychelles warbler apparently settles down with a single mate for life. But that apparently doesn't mean all a female's offspring come from that mate. Researchers have found that females paired with males that lack diverse genes for a key immune protein are more likely to stray, and produce offspring with males that have a greater diversity of these genes. Apparently, infidelity is adaptive.
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