Month: September 2018

An Amazon worker. (credit: Getty Images)

After 24 years of operation, Amazon passed a market value of $1 trillion yesterday. It is the second company to reach that arbitrary milestone; fellow tech giant Apple became the first only a few weeks ago. The company's value has fallen slightly below that threshold since, but its continued growth is likely, according to most analysts.

Founded in 1994, Amazon initially sought simply to launch an online storefront for books to challenge Barnes & Noble and other big book retailers. The company went on to build one of the world's most advanced logistical operations to fuel a broad-ranging e-commerce business. It has also offered a wide range of digital content, purchased major media properties like Twitch, and released its own tablets and smart home hardware products.

According to the The New York Times, Amazon "captures 49 cents of every e-commerce dollar in the United States." Its market value is greater than those of the 10 biggest brick-and-mortar retailers combined.

Enlarge / This picture taken on March 5, 2018 shows a guard gesturing at a check post exit from the exclusion zone of Futaba town, Fukushima prefecture, as Japan prepares to mark the 7th anniversary of the devastating 2011 earthquake and tsunami that triggered the Fukushima nuclear disaster. (credit: BEHROUZ MEHRI/AFP/Getty Images)

On Wednesday, Japan's Ministry of Health, Labor, and Welfare admitted that a man employed at the Fukushima nuclear power plant died of lung cancer linked to radiation exposure. Three of the power plant's six reactors melted down in March 2011 when a tsunami hit the Fukushima area.

The deceased, who was in his 50s, "was in charge of measuring radiation at the Fukushima No.1 plant shortly after its meltdown," the BBC reported. Japanese government officials reportedly said the employee had worked at the site "at least twice after it was damaged" and had worn the appropriate protective gear. The man's death is the first to be officially linked to radiation exposure during the disaster.

"After hearing opinions from a panel of radiologists and other experts, the ministry ruled that the man's family should be paid compensation," the BBC wrote.

Enlarge (credit: NASA)

Last year saw the first event that astronomers detected using both photons and gravitational waves. The event, a gamma-ray burst, was triggered by the merger of two neutron stars, forming a single mass of neutrons that was large enough to collapse into a black hole shortly afterwards. Before the black hole appeared, however, lots of material was ejected into space, where it formed heavier elements.

Now, researchers are reporting follow-up observations that suggest the black hole has formed jets of material that are moving at a substantial fraction of the speed of light. The jets have moved fast enough that we have been able to watch them drive through the expanding shell of debris and pass beyond it into open space, helping reveal more details about what's been going on post-collision.

Superluminal

The neutron-star collision was picked up nearly simultaneously by the Fermi Space Telescope, which detected gamma rays produced during the collision, and the LIGO/VIRGO gravitational-wave detectors, which named the event GW170817. In response to the initial detection, many telescopes observed the initial debris in a variety of wavelengths. These observations confirmed that these collisions act as factories for heavy, neutron-rich elements that would be difficult to form in supernovae.

Enlarge (credit: Dirk Hoffmann / EyeEm/Getty Images)

Researchers at China's Netlab 360 have discovered that thousands of routers manufactured by the Latvian company MikroTik have been compromised by malware based on a vulnerability made public by WikiLeaks' publication of tools from the CIA's "Vault7" toolkit. While MikroTik posted a software update for the vulnerability in April, researchers found that more than 370,000 MikroTik devices they identified on the Internet were still vulnerable.

According to a report by Netlab 360's Genshen Ye, more than 7,500 of them are actively being spied on by attackers, who are actively forwarding full captures of their network traffic to a number of remote servers. Additionally, 239,000 of the devices have been turned into SOCKS 4 proxies accessible from a single, small Internet address block.

MikroTik provides routing and wireless hardware for Internet service providers and businesses worldwide, including ISP and campus network infrastructure such as outdoor fiber routers and wireless backbones. The vulnerable routers discovered by Netlab 360, still configured with an unpatched interface for the company's Winbox router configuration utility, are widely distributed—but the largest concentrations of affected networks were in Brazil and Russia. There were 14,000 devices identified operating using US-based IP addresses.

Enlarge / The maze: as a photon you must run it. But your path will be changed by your partner photon. (credit: Nature)

There comes a moment in every physicist's life when they think the unthinkable: I wish I were an engineer. I suspect this thought crossed the minds of the 14-odd physicists involved in creating a key demonstration of the scalability of quantum computing using light.

At the moment, if you had to bet on the technology most likely to win the quantum computing race, most people would put their chips on a spread of superconducting rings. But I’d put the house and kids on light. Why? Because lasers make everything better. More seriously, quantum computing architectures based on superconducting devices have made remarkable progress in the last five to ten years. By contrast, progress on the light front has been ominously slow. But it should be easier to work with light-based qubits if we can ever get them off the ground.

Why I love photons

Photons, as far as I’m concerned, still make the best quantum bits (qubits). This is because photons mostly pass through the world unhindered. A photon, in a super-special quantum state, can go from air to an optical fiber to air, through a silicon chip, back into air, and into a fiber again, all without destroying its quantum state. About all you need to ensure is that your photon detector is in the dark so that only the qubit photons hit it.