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Submission + - The electron is really, really spherical (nature.com) 2

Submitted by OneHundredAndTen
OneHundredAndTen writes: A new article in Nature reports a new, extremely precise measurement of the electric dipole moment of the electron. The conclusion is that, within the margin of error of the measurement, the electron remains a perfect sphere. Which implies that supersymmetric theories keep running out of corners to hide, that another nail is driven into their coffin, and that string theory looks less and less compelling.

Submission + - Grindr struggling to cope with privacy invading Fuckr app (torrentfreak.com)

Submitted by AmiMoJo
AmiMoJo writes: Released back in 2015, the Fuckr app provides enhanced access to the popular Grindr dating service. However, the extra features offered by the software are controversial. Fuckr gives users the ability to precisely locate hundreds of Grindr users to an accuracy of just a few feet. In addition, Fuckr offers access to a trove of information about Grindr users not freely available, including photos, HIV status, and even their preferred sexual position.

Early September, following an exposé by Queer Europe, Grindr decided to end Fuckr’s party. The company filed a DMCA notice with Github, where the application’s code was hosted. This resulted in Fuckr being taken down, but over 90 forks and clones have appeared since. Grindr now appears to be playing whack-a-mole with them, rather than stopping making the data available via its public API. The original author of Fuckr has submitted a DMCA counter-notice.

Submission + - Earth burping particles which don't fit the Standard Model (livescience.com) 1

Submitted by Tablizer
Tablizer writes: There's something mysterious coming up from the frozen ground in Antarctica, and it could break physics as we know it.

Physicists don't know what it is exactly. But they do know it's some sort of cosmic ray — a high-energy particle that's blasted its way through space, into the Earth, and back out again. But the particles physicists know about — the collection of particles that make up what scientists call the Standard Model (SM) of particle physics — shouldn't be able to do that. Sure, there are low-energy neutrinos that can pierce through miles upon miles of rock unaffected. But high-energy neutrinos, as well as other high-energy particles, have "large cross-sections." That means that they'll almost always crash into something soon after zipping into the Earth and never make it out the other side...

Penn State researchers calculated that, whatever particle is bursting up from the Earth, it has much less than a 1-in-3.5 million chance of being part of the Standard Model. (In technical, statistical terms, their results had confidences of 5.8 and 7.0 sigma, depending on which of their calculations you're looking at.)

Submission + - Experiment confirms that causality is fuzzy (physicsworld.com) 2

Submitted by UpnAtom
UpnAtom writes: The Institute of Physics' online magazine writes:

"In classical physics – and everyday life – there is a strict causal relationship between consecutive events. If a second event (B) happens after a first event (A), for example, then B cannot affect the outcome of A. This relationship, however, breaks down in quantum mechanics because the temporal spread of a particles’s wave function can be greater than the separation in time between A and B."

They report on an published study by the University of Queensland which "confirmed that quantum mechanics allows events to occur with no definite causal order."

What are the implications?

Submission + - SPAM: Neural network will enable successive Alexa queries without repeating "Alexa"

Submitted by georgecarlyle76
georgecarlyle76 writes: At this year's Interspeech, Amazon researchers will present a paper describing a neural network that distinguishes "device-directed speech" from background speech, to enable Alexa to temporarily dispense with wake-word repetition. (Components of the model are already used in Alexa's Follow-Up Mode.)
Link to Original Source

Submission + - VORACLE Attack Can Recover HTTP Data From VPN Connections (bleepingcomputer.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: A new attack named VORACLE can recover HTTP traffic sent via encrypted VPN connections under certain conditions. The attack was discovered by security researcher Ahamed Nafeez, who presented his findings at the Black Hat and DEF CON security conferences held last week in Las Vegas.

The conditions are that the VPN service/client uses the OpenVPN protocol and that the VPN app compresses the HTTP traffic before it encrypts it using TLS. To make matters worse, the OpenVPN protocols compresses all data by default before sending it via the VPN tunnel. At least one VPN provider, TunnelBear, has updated its client to turn off the compression. HTTPS traffic is safe, and only HTTP data sent via the VPN under these conditions can be sent. Users can also stay safe by switching to another VPN protocol if their VPN client suppports multiple tunneling technologies.

Submission + - WWV time broadcasts slashed in 2019? (qrz.com)

Submitted by SteveSgt
SteveSgt writes: A forum thread on QRZ.com indicates that the shortwave time broadcasts by the National Institutes of Standards and Technology (NIST) from stations WWV (Colorado) and WWVH (Hawaii) may be slashed in budget year 2019:

Illustrative program reductions in FY 2019
— $6.3 million supporting fundamental measurement dissemination, including the shutdown of NIST radio stations in Colorado and Hawaii

While the WWV broadcasts may seem like an anachronism to some Slashdotters, they remain a crucial component in many unexpected services, from over-the-air broadcasters and traffic signals, to medical devices, wall clocks, and wrist watches. The signals serve as standard beacons for radio propagation, and as a frequency reference for alignment of a broad range of communications equipment.

It's easy to imagine that not even the NIST knows every service and device that could be impacted by this decision.

Submission + - A Material Found To Carry Current In a way Never Before Observed (phys.org)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Scientists at the Florida State University-headquartered National High Magnetic Field Laboratory have discovered a behavior in materials called cuprates that suggests they carry current in a way entirely different from conventional metals such as copper. The research, published today in the journal Science, adds new meaning to the materials' moniker, "strange metals." Cuprates are high-temperature superconductors (HTS), meaning they can carry current without any loss of energy at somewhat warmer temperatures than conventional, low-temperature superconductors (LTS). Although scientists understand the physics of LTS, they haven't yet cracked the nut of HTS materials. Exactly how the electrons travel through these materials remains the biggest mystery in the field.

For their research on one specific cuprate, lanthanum strontium copper oxide (LSCO), a team led by MagLab physicist Arkady Shekhter focused on its normal, metallic state—the state from which superconductivity eventually emerges when the temperature dips low enough. This normal state of cuprates is known as a "strange" or "bad" metal, in part because the electrons don't conduct electricity particularly well. Scientists have studied conventional metals for more than a century and generally agree on how electricity travels through them. They call the units that carry charge through those metals "quasiparticles," which are essentially electrons after factoring in their environment. These quasiparticles act nearly independently of each other as they carry electric charge through a conductor. But does quasiparticle flow also explain how electric current travels in the cuprates? At the National MagLab's Pulsed Field Facility in Los Alamos, New Mexico, Shekhter and his team investigated the question. They put LSCO in a very high magnetic field, applied a current to it, then measured the resistance. The resulting data revealed that the current cannot, in fact, travel via conventional quasiparticles, as it does in copper or doped silicon. The normal metallic state of the cuprate, it appeared, was anything but normal.

Submission + - China's Space Control Listening Base In Argentina Now Alarming US Officials (nytimes.com)

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: The giant antenna rises from the desert floor like an apparition, a gleaming metal tower jutting 16 stories above an endless wind-whipped stretch of Patagonia. The 450-ton device, with its hulking dish embracing the open skies, is the centerpiece of a $50 million satellite and space mission control station built by the Chinese military. The station began operating in March, playing a pivotal role in China’s audacious expedition to the far side of the moon — an endeavor that Argentine officials say they are elated to support.

Perhaps more significantly, China has issued tens of billions of dollars in commodities-backed loans across the Americas, giving it claim over a large share of the region’s oil — including nearly 90 percent of Ecuador’s reserves — for years.

China has also made itself indispensable by rescuing embattled governments and vital state-controlled companies in countries like Venezuela and Brazil, willing to make big bets to secure its place in the region.

Here in Argentina, a nation that had been shut out of international credit markets for defaulting on about $100 billion in bonds, China became a godsend for then-President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner.

Submission + - Secret Link Uncovered Between Pure Math and Physics (quantamagazine.org)

Submitted by ClickOnThis
ClickOnThis writes: Mathematics has been called both the queen and the handmaiden of the sciences. While arguably it is not a science (it does not draw conclusions from experiments) there is no question that science finds it useful. But occasionally, that utility runs in the other direction. Minhyong Kim at the University of Oxford has been working on one possible example of this. His work on finding rational-number solutions to Diophantine equations has led him to explore the application of principles from theoretical physics, such as the Principle of Least Action with the goal of discovering and exploiting new symmetries. From the article:

Over the past decade Kim has described a very new way of looking for patterns in the seemingly patternless world of rational numbers. He’s described this method in papers and conference talks and passed it along to students who now carry on the work themselves. Yet he has always held something back. He has a vision that animates his ideas, one based not in the pure world of numbers, but in concepts borrowed from physics. To Kim, rational solutions [to Diophantine equations] are somehow like the trajectory of light.

If the connection sounds fantastical it’s because it is, even to mathematicians. And for that reason, Kim long kept it to himself. “I was hiding it because for many years I was somewhat embarrassed by the physics connection,” he said. “Number theorists are a pretty tough-minded group of people, and influences from physics sometimes make them more skeptical of the mathematics.”

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