A team of international scientists has discovered new fossils at a field site in Africa that indicate Australopithecus, and the oldest specimens of Homo, coexisted at the same place in Africa at the same time—between 2.6 and 2.8 million years ago. The paleoanthropologists discovered a new species of Australopithecus that has never been found anywhere.| phys.org
A research team led by Professor Takayuki Hoshino of Nagoya University's Graduate School of Engineering in Japan has demonstrated the world's smallest shooting game by manipulating nanoparticles in real time, resulting in a game that is played with particles approximately 1 billionth of a meter in size.| phys.org
Randomness is incredibly useful. People often draw straws, throw dice or flip coins to make fair choices. Random numbers can enable auditors to make completely unbiased selections. Randomness is also key in security; if a password or code is an unguessable string of numbers, it's harder to crack. Many of our cryptographic systems today use random number generators to produce secure keys.| phys.org
Chinese scientists have established the world's first integrated quantum communication network, combining over 700 optical fibers on the ground with two ground-to-satellite links to achieve quantum key distribution over a total distance of 4,600 kilometers for users across the country. The team, led by Jianwei Pan, Yuao Chen, Chengzhi Peng from the University of Science and Technology of China in Hefei, reported in Nature their latest advances towards the global, practical application of such...| phys.org
National Cancer Institute researchers have developed a method called HORNET for characterizing 3D topological structures of large and flexible RNA molecules. Scientists used atomic force microscopy (AFM) with deep neural networks and unsupervised machine learning to capture individual conformers under physiological conditions.| phys.org