Month: November 2016

Enlarge (credit: Kelly Michals)

David Charles Hahn, who gained some notoriety in 1994 for attempting to build a homemade breeder nuclear reactor for a Boy Scout project in his mom's Michigan backyard shed, has died at the age of 39. He passed away on September 27, but his death did not draw much media attention until Monday.

Breeder reactors are a type of nuclear reactor that generate more fissile material than they consume. They have been researched extensively for decades, and a number have been built, but the approach has largely been abandoned.

Hahn’s travails were most notably chronicled in a 1998 article in Harper’s, which described his story in detail. (That article was later expanded into a book, The Radioactive Boy Scout.)

Enlarge / Harman and Microsoft have been working on productivity applications for the connected car, so there's going to be no escaping those conference calls in the future. (credit: Harman)

On Monday, we received more proof (as if it were needed) that the connected car is not going away any time soon. Samsung and Harman announced that the South Korean electronics giant would purchase the latter for $8 billion, or $112 per share. Although Harman is most widely known for its range of in-car audio products, the company is heavily focused on connected car technology, including a platform for rolling out over-the-air software updates to connected vehicles.

"As a Tier 1 automotive supplier with deep customer relationships, strong brands, leading technology and a recognized portfolio of best-in-class products, HARMAN immediately establishes a strong foundation for Samsung to grow our automotive platform," said Oh-Hyun Kwon, vice chairman and chief executive officer of Samsung Electronics.

"Partnerships and scale are essential to winning over the long term in automotive as demand for robust connected car and autonomous driving solutions increases at a rapid pace," said Dinesh Paliwal, HARMAN chairman, president, and CEO.

Enlarge (credit: Ubisoft Montreal)

What's the point of being an all-seeing, all-powerful hacker if you don't aim your powers at the biggest targets possible?

This question went unanswered in 2014's Watch Dogs, an open-world adventure game that gave its gun-wielding, car-stealing, parkour-hopping hero a super-charged smartphone but failed to make us care about using those hacking powers. Ubisoft's first shot at the Watch Dogs franchise offered players a chance to fight crime (and have a decent time doing so), but its confusing plot and ho-hum use of tech buzz words didn't keep players rooted in the experience.

The series returns in this week's Watch Dogs 2, a game that now lets players fight more than crime. This go-'round, they fight the entire system, man. What's more, they do so with more powers, more choices, and a much better mix of plot, dialogue, and likable characters.

Enlarge / Screengrab from Johnny Mullins' latest "weather update." (credit: Facebook)

Johnny Mullins' Facebook page contains a mix of "Crooked Hillary" memes and "weather outlook" video updates. For all of his talents, Mullins, alas, has attracted only 82 followers on the social network, and the wannabe Internet weatherman clearly felt like he deserved a wider audience. So Mullins, who lives in Jenkins, Kentucky, took matters into his own hands earlier this month.

According to Jenkins Police Chief James Stephens, the 21-year-old Mullins now faces a charge of second-degree arson for setting a fire in Letcher County. The chief told the Associated Press on Friday that Mullins said he started the fire he was charged with "because he enjoyed the attention he got from the Facebook stuff."

During the last video Mullins posted on Facebook, on November 6, the suspected arsonist says, "Some areas are dealing with forest fires here in Eastern Kentucky also, but not here in the area where I am. Of course we hope not, but as you go through the day today you just want to be extremely careful if you're out there." Mullins offers, helpfully, that people should avoid smoke if possible.

Enlarge / A Comcast service vehicle. (credit: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)

Comcast has decided to stop enforcing data caps and overage fees in Maine and signaled that states in the company's northeast region will remain cap-free, at least for now.

But for Comcast customers in other states, don't get your hopes up that data caps will disappear. Comcast dramatically expanded the caps on November 1 and will continue to apply the data limits and overage fees in 27 states out of the 39 states Comcast operates in.

Comcast says that eliminating data caps in Maine is only about bringing the state in line with company policy elsewhere in the Northeast. A Comcast FAQ says that the data cap in Maine is being suspended effective December 1. According to DSLRreports, this notice is being sent to customers in Maine:

Enlarge (credit: jabapyth)

Electrical charge is the key to modern computing. We can generate, detect, and control current with accuracy and precision. As we contemplate a world of quantum computing, it's important to note researchers have not really coalesced around an equivalent basic architecture. Each architecture we've looked at has a set of disadvantages that are sufficient to keep all the other architectures alive despite their problems.

This is true for optical quantum computers. They require single photons, and sources that generate single photons kind of... well, suck. Ideally, what we want is a device that generates single photons on demand. To put not too fine a point on it, at the press of a button, we want an electrical current to reliably generate a single photon. And, while we haven't had it, it's exactly what a group of researchers from Germany is now claiming to have accomplished.

Single photons: Accidentally on purpose

There are two basic ways to make single photon sources: accidentally and on purpose. The accidental method is to use a parametric amplifier, which takes a light source of one color and uses it to generate light of another color. If the amplifier is set up correctly, then each incoming light pulse has sufficient power to generate just a single pair of photons, which can then be separated by polarization. The single photon production is accidental in the sense that the process is subject to a lot of random noise. Mostly you get one photon, often you get no photons, and sometimes you get two or more photons. The saving grace of the whole thing is that you can use one of the photon pair to announce that the other one is a single photon with which you can perform a calculation.