Commentary
The crime scene was straight out of an Alfred Hitchcock movie. One hundred and fifty dead birds lay sprawled on the ground, fallen out of trees in a park in The Hague, The Netherlands.
The second such occurrence last autumn made Dutch citizens look up and wonder. With robust starlings turned upside-down at their feet, the usual suspects of disease, pollution, and foul play were dismissed.
An artist’s rendering of Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket during its ascent into orbit. Image Credit: Blue Origin.
CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket has been selected by Canadian-based Telesat to send a fleet of satellites into orbit. The payload for these flights could help improve web services around the globe.
The satellites, designed to provide internet services across the globe, will be sent to low-Earth orbit by Texas-based Blue Origin’s New Glenn over the course of multiple launches.
Spectrally pure lasers lie at the heart of precision high-end scientific and commercial applications, thanks to their ability to produce near-perfect single-color light. A laser’s capacity to do so is measured in terms of its linewidth, or coherence, which is the ability to emit a constant frequency over a certain period of time before that frequency changes.
In practice, researchers go to great lengths to build highly coherent, near-single-frequency lasers for high-end systems such as atomic clocks. Today, however, because these lasers are large and occupy racks full of equipment, they are relegated to applications based on bench tops in the laboratory.
There is a push to move the performance of high-end lasers onto photonic micro-chips, dramatically reducing cost and size while making the technology available to a wide range of applications including spectroscopy, navigation, quantum computation and optical communications. Achieving such performance at the chip scale would also go a long way to address the challenge posed by the internet’s exploding data-capacity requirements and the resulting increase in worldwide energy consumption of data centers and their fiber-optic interconnects.
OTTAWA — A Chinese telecommunication company secretly diverted Canadian internet traffic to China, particularly from Rogers subscribers in the Ottawa area, says an Israeli cybersecurity specialist.
The 2016 incident involved the surreptitious rerouting of the internet data of Rogers customers in and around Canada’s capital by China Telecom, a state-owned internet service provider that has two legally operating “points of presence” on Canadian soil, said Yuval Shavitt, an electrical-engineering expert at Tel Aviv University.
Shavitt told The Canadian Press that the China Telecom example should serve as a caution to the Canadian government not to do business with another Chinese telecommunications giant: Huawei Technologies, which is vying to build Canada’s next-generation 5G wireless communications networks.
Researchers are always looking for new materials that can help power electronics and medical devices in the future. MIT has made a breakthrough with a new material that makes that goal closer to reality. The breakthrough is thanks to a fully flexible device that can convert WiFi signals into electricity that could power devices.
Engineering researchers have demonstrated proof-of-principle for a device that could serve as the backbone of a future quantum Internet. University of Toronto Engineering professor Hoi-Kwong Lo and his collaborators have developed a prototype for a key element for all-photonic quantum repeaters, a critical step in long-distance quantum communication.
