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      There’s no cheating this random number generator

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      If your name gets picked for jury duty, it’s because a computer used a random number generator to select it. The same goes for tax audits or when you opt for a quick pick lottery ticket. But how can you trust that the draw was truly fair? A new cheat-proof protocol for generating random numbers could provide that confidence — preventing hidden tampering or rigged outcomes, researchers report June 11 in Nature.

      “Having a public source of randomness that everyone trusts is important because the higher the stakes of an application or the more people involved, the more incentive there is to change or hack a random number generator,” says Gautam Kavuri, a physicist at the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Boulder, Colo. “This protocol verifies that random number generation is not being compromised.” More

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      New audio tech could let you listen privately without headphones

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      Controlling sound has long been a staple of science fiction and fantasy. In Dune, the cone of silence allows characters to converse privately, even in open spaces. The eerie billboards of Blade Runner 2049 whisper advertisements into the ears of those passing by.

      In the real world, quirks of architecture, intentional or not, can direct where sound goes. In the U.S. Capitol’s hall of statues, for example, a whisper can travel silently across the room from one spot to another. The sound waves interact with curved surfaces to focus the audio. Now, scientists are looking to precisely control sound, perhaps one day resulting in a world without earbuds, but directing sound waves is a challenge. More

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      Physicists are mostly unconvinced by Microsoft’s new topological quantum chip

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      ANAHEIM, CALIF. — At the world’s largest gathering of physicists, a talk about Microsoft’s claimed new type of quantum computing chip was perhaps the main attraction. 

      Microsoft’s February announcement of a chip containing the first topological quantum bits, or qubits, has ignited heated blowback in the physics community. The discovery was announced by press release, without publicly shared data backing it up. A concurrent paper in Nature fell short of demonstrating a topological qubit. Microsoft researcher Chetan Nayak, a coauthor on that paper, promised to provide solid evidence during his March 18 talk at the American Physical Society’s Global Physics Summit. More

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      A quantum computing milestone is immediately challenged by a supercomputer

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      The tug-of-war between quantum computers and classical computers is intensifying.

      In just minutes, a special quantum processor, called a quantum annealing processor, solved a complex real-world problem that a classical supercomputer would take millions of years to complete, researchers claim March 12 in Science. And that supercomputer, the team reports, would consume more energy to run the whole computation than the entire globe uses in a year. However, another group of researchers claims to have already found a way for a classical supercomputer to solve a subset of the same problem in just over two hours. More

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      Robots are gaining new capabilities thanks to plants and fungi

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      Aaron Tremper is the editorial assistant for Science News Explores. He has a B.A. in English (with minors in creative writing and film production) from SUNY New Paltz and an M.A. in Journalism from the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism’s Science and Health Reporting program. A former intern at Audubon magazine and Atlanta’s NPR station, WABE 90.1 FM, he has reported a wide range of science stories for radio, print, and digital media. His favorite reporting adventure? Tagging along with researchers studying bottlenose dolphins off of New York City and Long Island, NY. More

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      Mount Vesuvius turned this ancient brain into glass. Here’s how

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      The eruption of Mount Vesuvius in A.D. 79 is perhaps most famous for entombing the Roman city of Pompeii. But in nearby Herculaneum, also buried in the eruption, the preserved skeleton of a young man lying in bed contained a surprising find: glass remnants of his brain.

      When researchers studied the shiny samples, they saw what appeared to be nerve cells. A new study now uncovers more details into how the glass may have formed, the team reports February 27 in Scientific Reports. More