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Submission + - First petawatt electron beam arrives, ready to rip apart matter and space (science.org) 1

sciencehabit writes: By squeezing a packet of laser light into a tiny sliver of a second, physicists can produce superintense pulses that, if only for an instant, deliver as much power as 1 million nuclear plants. Such petawatt lasers have enabled scientists to manipulate materials in new ways, emulate the conditions inside planets, and even split atoms. Now, accelerator physicists have matched that feat, producing petawatt pulses of electrons that could also have spectacular applications.

Superintense electron bunches might someday even probe the nature of empty space. They produce a hugely intense electric field, so if one of them were to collide with an ultraintense laser pulse, which also contains a huge electric field, it would expose space to an incredibly strong electrical polarization, D’Arcy notes. If that field is strong enough, it should begin to rip particle-antiparticle pairs out of the vacuum, a phenomenon predicted by quantum physics but never observed.

That’s still a distant goal, but researchers might get within shouting distance of it if they could make the electron pulses 10 times shorter. Researchers plan to do just that, making the additional chirp even more dramatic by replacing the laser with a more complex scheme involving a cell of plasma. “We generated 100-kiloamp beams, now the next step is getting to mega-amp beams.”

Submission + - 27-Year-Old EXE becomes Python in minutes AI-Assisted reverse engineering (adafruit.com)

ptorrone writes: Reddit post detailing how someone took a 27-year-old visual basic EXE file, fed it to Claude 3.7, and watched as it reverse-engineered the program and rewrote it in Python. It was an old Visual Basic 4 program they had written in 1997. Running a VB4 exe in 2024 can be a real yak-shaving compatibility nightmare, chasing down outdated DLLs and messy workarounds. So! OP decided to upload the exe to Claude 3.7.

Comment HP is a zombie corporation roaming... (Score 1) 165

...the countryside looking for more corpses to feed on. A pale sad husk of the company it once was. I wish them nothing but the worse after their efforts to get me to have an internet connection so I can print from across the room. I dropped HP printers from my life, for the first time since EVER., just last week. I bought a BROTHER color laser printer and guess what? It prints - without 3 varieties of screwing around - amazing - right?

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