Month: December 2015

(credit: University of Maryland)

Quantum systems are inherently fragile as any interactions with the outside world can change their state. That makes creating things like quantum memories rather challenging, since it can be hard to know if it actually preserves the information you put into it. To get around this, researchers have been looking into ways of creating error-correcting quantum memory.

Now, researchers have come up with a rather simple scheme for providing quantum error controls: entangle atoms from two different elements so that manipulating won't affect the second. Not only is this highly effective, the researchers show that they can construct quantum logic gates with the setup. And while they were at it, they demonstrate the quantum nature of entanglement with a precision that's 40 standard deviations away from classic physical behavior.

People have managed to entangle different types of particles previously. For example, you can entangle an atom and a photon, which allows the photon to transfer information elsewhere—something that's undoubtedly necessary for a quantum computer.

(credit: Adam Jones, Ph.D.)

A Massachusetts man who bought methylone (also known as "molly") online from China was sentenced Monday to eight years and four months in prison.

Harold Bates pleaded guilty in September 2015 to importing methylone and one count of possession by an inmate in prison of a prohibited object. Curiously, the man was busted by the digital trail he left on the USPS tracking website, according to the United States Postal Inspection Service.

The judge’s memorandum and order from April 2015 explains that in October 2013, postal investigators found 500 grams of a substance that turned out to be methylone in a package to be delivered in Hollywood, Florida. That statement may suggest investigators found the suspicious package first and then manually checked IP logs to see if anyone had been searching for tracking information. Once they located Bates’ IP address, they could then check to see if it had been used to search for other packages.

Tim Westergren, founder of Pandora Media, speaks during an interview in October 2015. Photographer: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg (credit: Bloomberg / Getty Images)

Internet radio services like Pandora will have to pay more to artists and their representative groups, according to a decision released today by the Copyright Royalty (CRB). The basic per-song rates paid by Pandora will go from $.0014 per song, or 14 cents per 100 songs played, to $.0017. That's a nearly 20 percent increase.

The $.0017 rate will remain in effect for all of 2016 and then may increase according to the Consumer Price Index, a common measure of inflation, through 2020. At that point, the CRB will make another rate decision.

Today's decision resolves a long legal fight in which Pandora was asking to pay a lower rate of $.0011. SoundExchange, which distributes money to record labels and artists, wanted the rate to nearly double to $.0025 per stream.

Plumes of water vapor on Europa? We may find out in about a decade. (credit: NASA/ESA/K. Retherford/SWRI)

In November Ars revealed exclusive details about a daring mission to land on Jupiter’s moon Europa, and now it has become the law of the land. The Congressional budget deal to fund NASA for the fiscal year 2016 includes $1.63 billion for planetary science, of which $175 million is designated for the “Jupiter Europa clipper mission.” It has a target launch date of 2022.

But the new budget legislation does not stop there. It further stipulates, “This mission shall include an orbiter with a lander that will include competitively selected instruments and that funds shall be used to finalize the mission design concept.” In other words, it's against the law to fly the mission to Europa without a lander.

The overall budget for NASA provides $19.2 billion for NASA in fiscal year 2016, about $700 million more than President Obama requested. “This number, this year, is the largest vote of confidence that Congress has ever given NASA,” Texas Congressman John Culberson, who chairs the House Appropriations subcommittee with jurisdiction over the space agency, told Ars. “There’s enough money to do everything on their plate.”

High fantasy is having something of a moment on television. Game of Thrones is the biggest and most obvious example, but shows like Vampire Diaries, its Originals spin-off, Once Upon a Time, Grimm, and the somehow-still-running Supernatural have made the genre increasingly visible. SyFy’s current bid for a conversation-worthy bite of this apple is its adaptation of The Magicians, Lev Grossman’s New York Times bestselling novel about a young man who attends a magical school and struggles to defeat a world-threatening Big Bad.

If this premise sounds familiar, you wouldn’t be the first person to feel a sense of wizardly déjà vu. The books, especially the first in the trilogy, have been frequently described as “adult Harry Potter,” an assessment that is both understandable and catchy. While that meme-ified judgment of Grossman’s books is seriously reductionist, it’s also a useful way of thinking about just how tricky it’s going to be to get this adaptation right. So before the pilot’s launch on Wednesday night—and ahead of the series’ official January 2016 premiere—we got to the bottom of our “the book is always better” bias one kind of question in mind. What kind of magic are we in for?

The un-Harry Potter

SyFy

Quentin Coldwater, played by actor Jason Ralph.

4 more images in gallery

The Magicians is less “adult Harry Potter” than it is an “un-Harry.” In his protagonist Quentin Coldwater, in the magical education Quentin receives, and in the foundational structure of the series, Grossman carefully and meticulously smashes the lovely, sparkly romanticism of the Harry Potter story to pieces. Brakebills, the Magicians universe’s Hogwarts equivalent, is a frustrating and demanding place. Quentin is stuck for endless, mind-numbling hours working on rote memorization in order to master the fickle language of magic in his universe. The book is full of passages like this: “The room was the same, and the days were always, always, always the same: empty, relentless, interminable wastelands of repetition.”