Drones are getting more and more important in everyday’s life. Here’s everything you need to know about them, their benefits and how they will influence your future.
Source: 20 Ways Drones will Shape your Future
They also cover military UAVs
A new app from Fraunhofer development engineers looks directly inside objects and displays specific constituents. It has numerous uses: For instance, apples can be scanned for pesticide residues. Applications will be added successively following the Wikipedia principle.
[…]
Such scans usually require a special hyperspectral camera: It adjusts to different colored light each time and ascertains how much of a color’s light is reflected by an object, thus generating a complete spectral fingerprint of the object. The development engineers use a mathematical model to extract just about any information on an object, e.g. its constituents, from its spectral fingerprint. “Since hyperspectral cameras aren’t integrated in smartphones, we simply reversed this principle,” explains Seiffert. “The camera gives us a broadband three-channel sensor, that is, one that scans every wavelength and illuminates an object with different colored light.” This means that, instead of the camera measuring luminous intensity in different colors, the display successively illuminates the object with a series of different colors for fractions of a second. Thus, if the display casts only red light on the object, the object can only reflect red light – and the camera can only measure red light. Intelligent analysis algorithms enable the app to compensate a smartphone’s limited computing performance as well as the limited performance of the camera and display.
Source: New smartphone app looks inside objects
The availability of a universal quantum computer may have a fundamental impact on a vast number of research fields and on society as a whole. An increasingly large scientific and industrial community is working toward the realization of such a device. An arbitrarily large quantum computer may best be constructed using a modular approach. We present a blueprint for a trapped ion–based scalable quantum computer module, making it possible to create a scalable quantum computer architecture based on long-wavelength radiation quantum gates. The modules control all operations as stand-alone units, are constructed using silicon microfabrication techniques, and are within reach of current technology. To perform the required quantum computations, the modules make use of long-wavelength radiation–based quantum gate technology. To scale this microwave quantum computer architecture to a large size, we present a fully scalable design that makes use of ion transport between different modules, thereby allowing arbitrarily many modules to be connected to construct a large-scale device. A high error–threshold surface error correction code can be implemented in the proposed architecture to execute fault-tolerant operations. With appropriate adjustments, the proposed modules are also suitable for alternative trapped ion quantum computer architectures, such as schemes using photonic interconnects.
Source: Blueprint for a microwave trapped ion quantum computer
“An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by sending API commands via HTTP to a particular URL without prior authentication,” Cisco said today. “An exploit could allow the attacker to perform any actions in Cisco Prime Home with administrator privileges.”
Note that “administrator” was italicized by the networking giant. Super serious.
Cisco pitches Prime Home as a “solution” for ISPs and connected device vendors, allowing companies to control devices such as ISP-issued cable modems, routers, and set top boxes in subscribers’ homes from afar. It uses “Broadband Forum’s TR-069 suite of protocols to provision and manage in-home devices.”
That means that a successful attack on an ISP’s installation of Prime Home would allow a criminal to take administrator-level control of the Prime Home GUI and meddle with all the devices connected to that particular service. As there are no workarounds or mitigations for the bug, Cisco is recommending that administrators install the update as soon as possible.
The presence of a large underdensity, the dipole repeller, is predicted based on a study of the velocity field of our Local Group of galaxies. The combined effects of this super-void and the Shapley concentration control the local cosmic flow.
[…]
Our Local Group of galaxies is moving with respect to the cosmic microwave background (CMB) with a velocity 1 of V CMB = 631 ± 20 km s−1 and participates in a bulk flow that extends out to distances of ~20,000 km s−1 or more
Source: The dipole repeller
Figure 1: A face-on view of a slice 6,000 km s−1 thick, normal to the direction of the pointing vector rˆ=(0.604,0.720,−0.342).
Three different elements of the flow are presented: mapping of the velocity field is shown by means of streamlines (seeded randomly in the slice); red and grey surfaces present the knots and filaments of the V-web, respectively; and equi-gravitational potential (ϕ) surfaces are shown in green and yellow. The potential surfaces enclose the dipole repeller (in yellow) and the Shapley attractor (in green) that dominate the flow. The yellow arrow originates at our position and indicates the direction of the CMB dipole (galactic longitude l = 276°, galactic latitude b = 30°). The distance scale is given in units of km s−1.
Figure 2: A 3D view of the velocity field.
It is shown here by means of the flow streamlines (in black–blue, left panel) and of the anti-flow (in yellow–red, right panel). Anti-flow is defined here by the negative (namely, the reverse) of the velocity field. The same streamlines are seeded on a regular grid and are coloured according to the magnitude of the velocity. The flow streamlines diverge from the repeller and converge on the attractor. For the anti-flow, the divergence and convergence switch roles: they diverge from the attractor and converge on the repeller. The knots and filaments of the V-web are shown for reference. Cartesian supergalactic coordinates (SGX, SGY, SGZ) are assumed here. (For a 3D view, look at the accompanying Supplementary Video, at time 00:56–01:28.)