Sometime in the last week or so, I came across something which amazed me: a functional gene which was "hidden" inside another gene, and could be transcribed (or translated?) via a frame shift of a single nucleotide. The thing is, I don't know where I read or heard it, and I can't find it again! Does anyone know what I'm talking about?
If "life" is "a chemical system capable of evolution through natural selection", then is it possible that some "chemical systems" are better at evolving than others? (Forgive me, this is a half-formed thought!)
I remember as a teen realising who the USS Grissom was named after and being touched. But where did the Mutara Nebula get its name?
Got an unusual use case here...
I've been given the job of refitting my company's encrypted shared folders on their private cloud -- which were created using a custom encfs/OpenSSL-based piece of software developed many years back -- to use quantum-safe keys.
The encfs system used an AES256 symmetric key for all the files in the folder, which was encrypted using the RSA cert of each user which had access to the folder, and all the resulting encrypted key blocks were stored in a config file so each user could decrypt their own copy of the key -- effectively treating the AES256 key as a shared secret. So far, so old-school. The question becomes how to replace the RSA encryption certs with quantum-safe ones.
And the big complicating factor is interoperability... since not every user's certs are going to roll over at the same time time, we need to preserve the existing RSA users' access while allowing new/replacement ML-KEM users to be introduced.
So we're looking at needing a hybrid scheme, capable of supporting an arbitrary number of users, and which needs to maintain the existing underlying AES key.
Now, if I understand correctly, it's considered a bad idea to use ML-KEM to encapsulate an existing shared secret -- to the extent where OpenSSL (which the existing app was built around) provides no direct means of doing so. So if I can't feed the existing AES-256 key into a fresh encapsulation... do I need to generate a *second* shared secret for the ML-KEM user, store its encapsulation, and then the user's code must use the second shared secret to encrypt/decrypt the stored first AES-256 key?
Or do I need to create a new shared secret for each user, use a KDF to derive a common key... and presumably replace that key every time we add or remove a user from the shared folder?
Also, is there any sensible way to move from such an arrangement to a purely ML-KEM based system down the line, once the RSA keys have all been replaced? It will still need to support an arbitrary, varying number of users with access to the shared folder.
Migrating entirely away from their existing software base is not their preferred option at the moment, but if there's an open-source product which provides a simpler quantum-safe end-to-end encryption solution I'm entirely open to hearing about it!
Obviously, there is an extremely good reason it wouldn't work - but I have no idea what it is!
Sometimes when I'm nodding off, I feel a series of tiny explosions happening, in my face, or even inside my face. It's a bit hard to describe. I associate it with falling asleep by accident, or trying (and failing) to stay awake.
It's not a hypnic jerk (for me that's more like a martial arts kick!), and I don't hear anything, so it's not Exploding Head Syndrome.
Any thoughts?
Sometimes when I'm nodding off, I feel a series of tiny explosions happening, in my face, or even inside my face. It's a bit hard to describe. I associate it with falling asleep by accident, or trying (and failing) to stay awake.
It's not a hypnic jerk (for me that's more like a martial arts kick!), and I don't hear anything, so it's not Exploding Head Syndrome.
Any thoughts?
I'm thinking about how the cargo's genetic material would degrade over time. Am I more likely to arrive with viable, healthy organisms if I freeze them at the start, or if I give them an appropriate environment and let them live and reproduce during the trip?
In WWII, mass bombing of civilians became a routine part of war, culminating in the use of the atomic bomb. Was there a particular moment in history when it came into use, or was it gradual?
Edit: Thank you so much to the commenters who address my question! I've learned a lot.
Quick wave to the stragglers posting answers other people have already posted 😆
I caught bits of this black and white movie on TV and I've been hunting it ever since. It isn't Millions Like Us, The Gentle Sex, or Mrs Miniver. What the heck is it?
Why are some songs in my library so quiet? Is it something to do with songs I've bought from iTunes vs songs I've ripped from CDs? It's a PITA the way the volume changes from track to track. (iTunes version 12.13.10.3, Windows 11)
I caught bits of this black and white movie on TV and I've been hunting it ever since. It isn't Millions Like Us, The Gentle Sex, or Mrs Miniver. What the heck is it?
Short of their radioing a "Hello!" or building something very large, the only thing I could think of was our spotting the light of their ship drives. Surely this has been done in loads of SF!
It makes their email thing completely useless. I think I'll shut it off and just run my saved searches once a day.
I read about small asteroids which rotate very fast (like a nine-second day). That spin has built up over millions of years from the pressure of sunlight. Amazing stuff. Is there some way to convert that angular momentum into energy? (In principle -- assuming you can catch up to the asteroid, etc.)
Hope my posting isn't so red-shifted that you can't even see it!
The 2007 edition of "A First Course in String Theory" says that the inverse square law of gravity has been tested down to 50 microns, so if the extra dimensions are there, they must be smaller than that. But that was nearly 20 years ago. Does string theory predict a size? Or is there an infinite landscape of possible sizes, and we can only find out by experiment?
Not "ordinary matter", or a lay term like that; but a special expression used by scientists.