- Walmart worker reveals its clever strategy to stop shoplifting at self-checkout counters and the handheld devi Daily Mail
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- Walmart workers slam antitheft self-checkout measures for making customers hostile and say ‘people throw i… The US Sun
- Walmart’s anti-theft self-checkout technology is effective but involves confronting customers Business Insider
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Tag Archives: clever
Our Muscles Evolved a Clever Way to Keep Us Warm, Even When They’re Doing Nothing : ScienceAlert
When the mercury drops, mammals like us have an advantage over so-called cold-blooded critters; our muscles can act as furnaces, generating the heat needed to keep our body temperature stable by turning fuel into movement.
But even when relaxed, our muscles can continue to produce heat – a trick called muscle-based thermogenesis.
As you sit quietly reading this article, appreciate that the development of muscle-based thermogenesis was a key step in your evolution, making it possible for your ancestors to spread into less tropical environments all over the globe.
Now, Australian researchers have identified a specific way that mammalian muscle tissue evolved from those of cold-blooded or ‘ectothermic’ animals.
“Cold-blooded animals, like frogs and toads, and warm-blooded mammals, such as humans, use the same basic muscle structures to generate force for posture and movement,” said one of the authors, University of Queensland biomedical scientist Bradley Launikonis.
But mammals have achieved their geographical freedom by changing the way the concentration of calcium ions is regulated in their resting muscles, setting them on a different course from our ectothermic relatives. This adaptation allows mammalian muscle cells to tolerate higher calcium concentrations in the surrounding fluid, requiring the muscle to expend energy in order to flush the calcium out.
The calcium ion pumps in skeletal muscles work to keep the level of calcium ions steady. Previous research has shown the pump’s activity also has an effect on how much heat skeletal muscle makes when it is at rest.
Even small amounts of heat generated in each muscle fiber adds up when you have enough skeletal muscle covering the body, allowing the internal temperature to remain constant in cooler environments. Add some insulation, and that heat energy can go a long way.
The researchers looked at the muscle fibers of mammals and those of ectothermic animals and compared how they worked under the same conditions, finding each resisted the effects of increasing concentrations of calcium ions in different ways.
They analyzed dissolved calcium in muscle fibers from cane toads, mice, and people with malignant hyperthermia, a condition which is often caused by a mutation in a ryanodine receptor that makes calcium channels more likely to open when exposed to a stimulant.
Ryanodine receptors (RyR) are intracellular calcium channels in animal tissue like muscles and neurons, through which calcium ions flow. Calcium ion pumps work in the opposite direction, pumping calcium back the other way, to restore the balance inside cells.
A type called RyR1 is expressed in skeletal muscle in mammals, whereas ectothermic animals express two types of the receptor in their skeletal muscle, αRyR and βRyR.
The results of this study showed that in mammals, abrupt increases in calcium in the fluid surrounding resting muscle fibers cause the ions to accumulate in a membrane-wrapped compartment inside cells called the sarcoplasmic reticulum, rather than be rapidly released.
Usually, an influx of calcium ions into muscle cells triggers RyR channels to release more calcium into the cell’s cytoplasm, setting off a cascade that leads to muscle contraction. However, mammals appear to have developed some resistance to rising calcium levels inside their muscle cells.
This is important because it allows for a steady calcium ion leak from the sarcoplasmic reticulum, which forces the calcium ion pump to work harder, producing more heat.
It seems that losing one form of RyR helped mammals’ muscles become less sensitive to calcium ion triggers, which in addition to metabolism supports their endothermy.
The research adds details to our understanding of not just mammalian evolution, but our own health, laying important groundwork in understanding how our muscles burn energy even while we’re simply chilling out, reading another amazing ScienceAlert article.
This research has been published in the journal The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Clever Ways to Manage All Your Cords and Cables
With so many devices (and their various accessories) needing to be charged—not to mention the lights, appliances, and other electronics that need to remain plugged in—your cords and cables situation is probably out of control. Keeping cables neat and well organized is tough, whether it’s for the stuff you use every day, or the battery charger for an emergency flashlight you use twice a year.
There are some tricks you can use to keep things tangle free, however. Here are a few of the best.
Store your cables separately and keep them organized
When it comes to storage for cords you don’t keep plugged in, storing them separately is a must. The more they interact with each other, the more chances they have to get tangled up, even when just sitting in a drawer. You can buy a special case with elastic pockets that keep cords perfectly organized, but you can also use a tackle box, a jewelry organizer, or a hardware box you already have around to get the job done. Anything with compartments sized for small parts will work, so you can get creative with what kind of organizer you use.
Labeling is key
The real game changer when you’re storing cables that aren’t in use: Label everything so that you remember what it’s for. You might think you’ll remember what a certain cable does when you put it away, but speaking from experience, I’ve moved a box of cords with me throughout my entire adult life because I never know which one I’ll need or what each one specifically does. Using a sharpie or a label maker to note the device(s) the cord works with with can really help when you’re struggling to remember which battery pack/tablet/portable speaker some tiny cord belongs to.
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Keep plugged-in cords organized
If you’re struggling with tangled cords that stay with your devices, that can be more trickier, since you often don’t have a lot of control about where they will be plugged in. Cables can fall behind desks or get lost under furniture, making it hard to get things to their proper charger. Using a cable wrap that’s reusable and doesn’t stick to anything is an excellent solution. Anchoring cords to a furniture leg so that they don’t come undone when you’re not using them is also a good way to keep them together. A slotted cable organizer that fits on your desktop is one solution to this problem, keeping the chargers you use regularly at your fingertips. You can also use an under-desk tray to hold cables, whether you have a desk or not—they can also be used on a shelf or wherever you want to set up your charging station.
String lighting and entertainment cords along your baseboards
For lighting and appliance cords that you need to leave plugged in most of the time, using a baseboard cord channel can keep things neat and cords less noticeable. If you have some distance between an outlet and your cables, this will make it much more streamlined and also keep cords from getting tangled. For cords that need to travel across the floor, a rubber cord protector will prevent tripping and keep the cord from getting damaged by regular foot traffic. (These aren’t meant for heavier traffic like furniture dollies or hand trucks, so if you’re moving or doing renovations, it’s best to unplug power cords while you’re working.)Rather than packing a nest of cables into a power strip with a short cable, use a corded outlet cover, so you can run just one cord from the outlet instead of a few.
Kitchen cords
For kitchen appliances, as well as some tools, a cord winder can be very handy to cut down on messy tangles. To keep appliance cords off of the counter top, you can also use cord clips mounted underneath your cabinets. When you’re not using the appliance, leaving an extra clip under the cabinet to store the plug will keep it handy when you need to plug it back in. For items that are stored in a cabinet or cupboard, a velcro cable tie can help keep the mess to a minimum.
North Korea-backed hackers have a clever way to read your Gmail
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Researchers have unearthed never-before-seen malware that hackers from North Korea have been using to surreptitiously read and download email and attachments from infected users’ Gmail and AOL accounts.
The malware, dubbed SHARPEXT by researchers from security firm Volexity, uses clever means to install a browser extension for the Chrome and Edge browsers, Volexity reported in a blog post. The extension can’t be detected by the email services, and since the browser has already been authenticated using any multifactor authentication protections in place, this increasingly popular security measure plays no role in reining in the account compromise.
The malware has been in use for “well over a year,” Volexity said, and is the work of a hacking group the company tracks as SharpTongue. The group is sponsored by North Korea’s government and overlaps with a group tracked as Kimsuky by other researchers. SHARPEXT is targeting organizations in the US, Europe, and South Korea that work on nuclear weapons and other issues North Korea deems important to its national security.
Volexity President Steven Adair said in an email that the extension gets installed “by way of spear phishing and social engineering where the victim is fooled into opening a malicious document. Previously we have seen DPRK threat actors launch spear phishing attacks where the entire objective was to get the victim to install a browser extension vs it being a post exploitation mechanism for persistence and data theft.” In its current incarnation, the malware works only on Windows, but Adair said there’s no reason it couldn’t be broadened to infect browsers running on macOS or Linux, too.
The blog post added: “Volexity’s own visibility shows the extension has been quite successful, as logs obtained by Volexity show the attacker was able to successfully steal thousands of emails from multiple victims through the malware’s deployment.”
Installing a browser extension during a phishing operation without the end-user noticing isn’t easy. SHARPEXT developers have clearly paid attention to research like what’s published here, here, and here, which shows how a security mechanism in the Chromium browser engine prevents malware from making changes to sensitive user settings. Each time a legitimate change is made, the browser takes a cryptographic hash of some of the code. At startup, the browser verifies the hashes, and if any of them don’t match, the browser requests the old settings be restored.
For attackers to work around this protection, they must first extract the following from the computer they’re compromising:
- A copy of the resources.pak file from the browser (which contains the HMAC seed used by Chrome)
- The user’s S-ID value
- The original Preferences and Secure Preferences files from the user’s system
After modifying the preference files, SHARPEXT automatically loads the extension and executes a PowerShell script that enables DevTools, a setting that allows the browser to run customized code and settings.
“The script runs in an infinite loop checking for processes associated with the targeted browsers,” Volexity explained. “If any targeted browsers are found running, the script checks the title of the tab for a specific keyword (for example’ 05101190,’ or ‘Tab+’ depending on the SHARPEXT version). The specific keyword is inserted into the title by the malicious extension when an active tab changes or when a page is loaded.”
Volexity
The post continued:
The keystrokes sent are equivalent to
Control+Shift+J, the shortcut to enable the DevTools panel. Lastly, the PowerShell script hides the newly opened DevTools window by using the ShowWindow() API and theSW_HIDEflag. At the end of this process, DevTools is enabled on the active tab, but the window is hidden.In addition, this script is used to hide any windows that could alert the victim. Microsoft Edge, for example, periodically displays a warning message to the user (Figure 5) if extensions are running in developer mode. The script constantly checks if this window appears and hides it by using the
ShowWindow()and theSW_HIDEflag.
Volexity
Once installed, the extension can perform the following requests:
| HTTP POST Data | Description |
| mode=list | List previously collected email from the victim to ensure duplicates are not uploaded. This list is continuously updated as SHARPEXT executes. |
| mode=domain | List email domains with which the victim has previously communicated. This list is continuously updated as SHARPEXT executes. |
| mode=black | Collect a blacklist of email senders that should be ignored when collecting email from the victim. |
| mode=newD&d=[data] | Add a domain to the list of all domains viewed by the victim. |
| mode=attach&name=[data]&idx=[data]&body=[data] | Upload a new attachment to the remote server. |
| mode=new&mid=[data]&mbody=[data] | Upload Gmail data to the remote server. |
| mode=attlist | Commented by the attacker; receive an attachments list to be exfiltrated. |
| mode=new_aol&mid=[data]&mbody=[data] | Upload AOL data to the remote server. |
SHARPEXT allows the hackers to create lists of email addresses to ignore and to keep track of email or attachments that have already been stolen.
Volexity created the following summary of the orchestration of the various SHARPEXT components it analyzed:
Volexity
The blog post provides images, file names, and other indicators that trained people can use to determine if they have been targeted or infected by this malware. The company warned that the threat it poses has grown over time and isn’t likely to go away anytime soon.
“When Volexity first encountered SHARPEXT, it seemed to be a tool in early development containing numerous bugs, an indication the tool was immature,” the company said. “The latest updates and ongoing maintenance demonstrate the attacker is achieving its goals, finding value in continuing to refine it.”
New MacBook Air design could be a doubly clever move
A rumored new MacBook Air design looks set to see the biggest shakeup to the look of Apple’s cutest laptop since it was launched in 2008.
If the reports are true, it strikes me as a doubly clever move by Apple: a new look that will appeal to many, and encourage them to update, while being actively off-putting to others, effectively pushing them to buy a MacBook Pro even if they don’t need the power …
Apple’s separation of business & consumer laptops
Early Apple laptops were expensive, and mostly pitched to business and professional users. This started in 1989 with the Macintosh Portable (though “luggable” would have been a more accurate term), before we got the PowerBook series. The first of these was the PowerBook 100 in 1991, and the last of them the PowerBook G4 (aluminium), sold between 2001 and 2006.
The first Apple laptop specifically aimed at consumers was the iBook, launched in 1999 as the iBook G3. The design was clearly inspired by the iMac G3, and despite looking rather toy-like now, it successfully turned a laptop into a fashionable item.
Seen here alongside the PowerBook G3 aimed at professional users, it couldn’t be clearer that the two machines were aimed at completely different markets:
Apple did briefly revive the plain MacBook name for a cute (and premium-priced) 12-inch model, but mostly since then it’s been the MacBook Pro and MacBook Air.
Today’s design position
The wedge-shaped design was always the key design differentiator between the Air and the Pro, but with the laptops open, viewed from either front or rear, there isn’t a great deal to distinguish them. In the latest iterations, the Air is labelled beneath the screen, while the Pro isn’t, but both have the same aluminum casing and black bezels.
There isn’t that much visual differentiation between the two machines to the casual observer. That’s great if you want a professional-looking machine without paying for professional-level performance you don’t need, but not necessarily quite so good for Apple’s bottom-line. The MacBook Air has always been the Default Mac, and a rumored 15-inch model could make that the case even for those who like larger screens for everyday tasks.
Additionally, some color option aside, there hasn’t been much to distinguish different generations of MacBook Air. Those who care about looking cool in their local coffee shop can do so with a pretty old model.
Potential impact of a new MacBook Air design
We’re expecting a big design change in the upcoming models: They are said to come in a range of colors, echoing those of the latest iMacs. This is expected to include white bezels in place of black.
This could do a lot to persuade existing MacBook Air owners to upgrade. For the first time since the Air was launched, they can get a completely new look. Not just space gray or gold, but some totally new pastel shades.
Many will upgrade because they love one of the new colors, while the cool kids will do so to be seen to be using the latest model rather than an older one.
Between the fantastic battery life of M1 (and M2) chips, and the new design, the new machines are going to fly off the shelves.
But there’s an additional factor, which I think could also boost Apple’s bottom line: those white bezels.
Many don’t care. White or black, it’s all the same to them. But there’s a significant minority of people who do care, either because they find white bezels distracting, or simply because they don’t like the aesthetics. Some of those people will be willing to pay the premium for a base-model MacBook Pro even if they don’t need the additional power. More money in Apple’s coffers.
There’s a potential additional factor: mainstream business users. The Air may give them all the power they need to run their spreadsheets and show their PowerPoint presentations, but they may be reluctant to show up to a client meeting with a green laptop. They may be willing to spend the extra to have a more subdued-looking MacBook Pro. However, the iMac precedent suggests that they will have the option of buying a standard-looking silver model.
While most reports have suggested we’ll have to wait until next year to find out Apple’s plans, Mark Gurman has suggested that we could see the new MacBook Air launched at WWDC in June.
What’s your view? If you have an existing MacBook Air, are you planning to upgrade when the new design is available? And are you one of those who would buy a Pro over an Air just for the black bezels? Please let us know in the comments.
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You Unfortunately Can’t Fix the Apple Magic Mouse’s Idiotic Charging Port Placement Through Clever Engineering
Although companies like Apple never do anything by accident, users were perplexed when Apple revealed its Magic Mouse 2 back in 2015 with the charging port inconveniently located underneath it. It’s an issue that still plagues the mouse seven years later, and it’s apparently an issue that Apple is determined to preserve for years to come, as Matty Benedetto discovered.
Benedetto is best known online for the YouTube channel, Unnecessary Inventions, where, as the name implies, they feature inventions the world doesn’t really need. That includes everything from an iPhone case that stores and shoots candy into a user’s mouth, to a bizarre approach to a standing workspace with elongated keyboard keys instead of a raised desk.
Like many other loyal Apple users, Benedetto loves most things about the Mighty Mouse 2, except that when its rechargeable battery dies, it has to be flipped over and rendered unusable in order to charge. So through the power of determination, 3D printing, and YouTube clicks, they designed what they assumed would be a clever solution to the problem.
Starting with a Lightning charging cable featuring a right-angle connector on the end, Benedetto designed and 3D printed a lifter for the back of the Magic Mouse 2 that rolls around on a pair of metal ball bearings. The lift allows the mouse to still slide around a desk while it’s connected to a power source and recharging, but it turns out Benedetto’s ingenuity was no match for Apple’s determination.
The problem they immediately discovered was a simple but baffling one: when the Mighty Mouse 2 is connected to a power source, it stops working. It recharges just fine, but the rest of it just shuts down until the Lightning charging cable is disconnected. Why is this the case when Apple’s wireless keyboards keep working while a charging cable is attached? Apple claims that a two-minute charge, or roughly the time it takes to walk to the water cooler and back, gives the Mighty Mouse 2 nine hours of power, so the charging port woes aren’t really that big of an issue. But from our own testing we’ve found that’s simply not the case, and when a Magic Mouse 2 dies, it actually requires several two minute charges throughout the day to keep it working.
To Apple’s credit, in recent years it’s been addressing and fixing several questionable design choices, including its problematic laptop keyboards, getting rid of the Touch Bar, and even packing the new Mac Studio full of useful ports. So there’s still hope that the Magic Mouse 2 will get its act together, or that the Magic Mouse 3 will help us forget these dark times.
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You Can Play GTA V on the Game Boy Using This Clever Cartridge
Although the old top-down version of Grand Theft Auto was at one time ported to the Game Boy Color, the experience was nowhere near as fun as the notorious 3D versions of the game, so Sebastian Staacks decided to fix that and has come up with a way to actually play Grand Theft Auto V on the original Game Boy through the magic of game streaming.
As our various devices gain speed in accessing the internet rapidly increases through technologies like 5G and the recently demonstrated wifi 7, it seems inevitable that downloading giant video game installs or buying physical cartridges and discs will soon be a thing of the past. Streaming will undoubtedly be the real future of gaming, where titles run on powerful cloud servers while video of the gameplay is transmitted to players, exactly how services like Google Stadia and Xbox Cloud Gaming work—and there’s no more convincing demonstration of the true potential of game streaming than what Sebastian Staacks has come up with for their latest demo.
The last time we checked in with Staacks, they were demonstrating an original Game Boy streaming Star Wars. And while the movie has never looked worse than when it was compressed to 160 x 144 pixels running at 20 frames per second in four shades of gray, it was still a neat accomplishment. The secret behind the Game Boy’s newfound streaming capabilities was a custom cartridge Staacks designed and built around a wireless ESP8266 microchip and a custom PCB squeezed inside a Game Boy cartridge shell.
But Staacks is far from done with their custom Game Boy cartridge, and in a follow-up video and a new post on their personal blog, they share not only more details about the challenges of displaying full-screen video on the Game Boy’s screen which is limited to a tile-based rendering system, but also some new tricks added to the cartridge. Not only can it now be used to stream gameplay footage in real-time, but the Game Boy can also be used to actually play titles like GTA V using its own controls.
The experience doesn’t come anywhere close to playing Grand Theft Auto V on a PlayStation console, obviously. Not only will the Game Boy’s screen still burn your retinas, but the handheld lacks all the buttons and analog joysticks that help make 3D games feel so interactive. But the fact that you can is what makes this hack so impressive, and while Staacks has made the entire project open source for those wanting to attempt to build their own wireless cartridge, we’re going to remain hopeful that someone decides to build and sell these en masse for the rest of us.
Peloton and Ryan Reynolds respond to the “Sex and the City” reboot shocker with a clever ad
Last week’s premiere of “And Just Like That” didn’t just devastate “Sex and the City” fans’ hearts — Peloton’s shares were also hit hard after *that* scene. But now, the exercise equipment company has responded in the ultimate way — with an ad featuring Ryan Reynolds and Chris Noth.
(This story contains spoilers about the premiere of “And Just Like That.”)
The scene in question involves Noth’s character John James Preston, also known as Mr. Big, who has been the on-and-off love interest, and later husband, of Carrie Bradshaw since the pilot episode of “Sex and the City” in 1998.
In the show’s reboot, Mr. Big and Carrie make plans to go out to dinner after Carrie is done with her plans with her friends. Mr. Big takes a ride on his Peloton bike at home while she’s out, but when he goes to get ready for dinner after the ride, he suddenly clutches his chest and collapses. Carrie comes home only for him to die in her arms.
The company’s shares fell more than 5% on Friday after the tragic scene aired.
But on Sunday, the company clapped back at the morbid plot twist, tweeting out an ad saying, “And just like that…he’s alive.”
The ad features none other than Noth himself, sitting on a couch with Peloton cycling instructor Jess King, who was the instructor Mr. Big followed in his last fatal ride in “And Just Like That.”
“To new beginnings,” Noth says in front of a crackling fireplace. “I feel great.”
He then asks King if they should “take another ride,” nodding to the two Peloton bikes behind the couch, adding: “Life’s too short not to.”
That’s when the voice of Ryan Reynolds pops in, saying, “And just like that, the world was reminded that regular cycling stimulates and improves your heart, lungs, and circulation.”
He continues to list the benefits of exercise and cycling, before quickly adding “he’s alive,” seemingly referencing Mr. Big.
Along with its not-so-subtle reference to the HBO show, the ad is also a nod to Reynolds’ past involvement with Peloton controversy. Reynolds famously responded to a Peloton ad in 2019 that revolved around a woman’s year-long cycling journey after being gifted a Peloton bike from her spouse. After going viral for being criticized as sexist, Reynolds used the actress in his own ad for his company Aviation American Gin.
Clever Physics Experiment That Produces “Something From Nothing”
New theory ‘detects’ light in the darkness of a vacuum.
Black holes are regions of space-time with huge amounts of gravity. Scientists originally thought that nothing could escape the boundaries of these massive objects, including light.
The precise nature of black holes has been challenged ever since Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity gave rise to the possibility of their existence. Among the most famous findings was English physicist Stephen Hawking’s prediction that some particles are actually emitted at the edge of a 
“In the proposed experiment, illustrated here, a postage stamp-sized synthetic diamond membrane containing nitrogen-based light detectors is suspended in a super-cooled metal box that creates a vacuum. The membrane, which acts like a tethered trampoline, is accelerated at massive rates, producing photons. Credit: Animation by LaDarius Dennison/Dartmouth College
“In an everyday sense, the findings seem to surprisingly suggest the ability to produce light from the empty vacuum,” said Miles Blencowe, the Eleanor and A. Kelvin Smith Distinguished Professor in Physics at Dartmouth and the study’s senior researcher. “We have, in essence produced something from nothing; the thought of that is just very cool.”
In classical physics, the vacuum is thought of as the absence of matter, light, and energy. In quantum physics, the vacuum is not so empty, but filled with photons that fluctuate in and out of existence. However, such light is virtually impossible to measure.
One part of Einstein’s general theory of relativity, the “equivalence principle,” establishes a connection between Hawking’s prediction for radiating black holes and Unruh’s prediction for accelerating photodetectors seeing light. Equivalence says that gravity and acceleration are fundamentally indistinguishable: A person in a windowless, accelerating elevator would not be able to determine if they are being acted on by gravity, an inertial force, or both.
Therefore, if black hole gravity can create photons in a vacuum, so can acceleration.
With science already demonstrating that observation of light in a vacuum is possible, the Dartmouth team set out to find a practicable way to detect the photons.
Dartmouth’s Miles Blencowe, the Eleanor and A. Kelvin Smith Distinguished Professor in Physics, and Hui Wang, a postdoctoral researcher, have described an experiment that could allow researchers to produce and detect light in a vacuum. Credit: Robert Gill/Dartmouth College
The Dartmouth research theory, published in Nature Research’s Communications Physics, predicts that nitrogen-based imperfections in a rapidly accelerating diamond membrane can make the detection.
In the proposed experiment, a postage stamp-sized synthetic diamond containing the nitrogen-based light detectors is suspended in a super-cooled metal box that creates a vacuum. The membrane, which acts like a tethered trampoline, is accelerated at massive rates.
The research paper explains that the resulting photon production from the cavity vacuum is collectively enhanced and measurable, with the vacuum photon production undergoing a phase transition from a normal phase to “an enhanced superradiant-like, inverted lasing phase” when the detector number exceeds a critical value.
“The motion of the diamond produces photons,” said Hui Wang, a postdoctoral researcher who wrote the theoretical paper while a graduate student at Dartmouth. “In essence, all you need to do is shake something violently enough to produce entangled photons.”
The Dartmouth paper investigates using multiple photon detectors—the diamond defects—to amplify the acceleration of the membrane and increase detection sensitivity. Oscillating the diamond also allows the experiment to take place in a controllable space at intense rates of acceleration.
“Our work is the first to explore what happens when there are many accelerating photodetectors instead of one,” said Blencowe. “We discovered a quantum-enhanced amplification effect for light creation from vacuum, where the collective effect of the many accelerating detectors is greater than considering them individually.”
To confirm that the detected photons come from the vacuum rather than from the surrounding environment, the team demonstrates that the theory observes “entangled light,” a distinct feature of quantum mechanics that cannot originate from outside radiation.
“The photons detected by the diamond are produced in pairs,” said Hui. “This production of paired, entangled photons is evidence that the photons are produced in vacuum and not from another source.”
The proposal to observe light in a vacuum does not have immediate applicability, but the research team hopes that it adds to the understanding of physical forces that contributes to society in the way other theoretical research has. In particular, the work may help shed experimental light on Hawking’s prediction for radiating black holes through the lens of Einstein’s equivalence principle.
“Part of the responsibility and joy of being theorists such as ourselves is to put ideas out there,” said Blencowe. “We are trying to show that it is feasible to do this experiment, to test something that has been until now extraordinarily difficult.”
A technical animation produced by the team depicts the creation of photons by the experiment. The detected light exists in microwave frequency, so is not visible to the human eye.
Reference: “Coherently amplifying photon production from vacuum with a dense cloud of accelerating photodetectors” by Hui Wang and Miles Blencowe, 10 June 2021, Communications Physics.
DOI: 10.1038/s42005-021-00622-3
The research was supported by the National Science Foundation.
Cosmic rays threaten Martian agriculture, rattlesnakes play a clever trick on your spatial perception – Physics World
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