Science

Indistinguishability Obfuscation

Indistinguishability Obfuscation (iO) is a crytographic protocol which was thought to be impossible until Aayush Jain and his advisor Amit Sahai from UCLA, together with Huijia Lin from the University of Washington, published a paper acheived IO using standard security assumptions. The purpose of iO, as I understand it, is to allow two pieces of the same data to be encrypted with all but one element being different, e.g. a key, and it would be impossible to determine the difference by comparing the two encrypted results.

Iron As Renewable Fuel

Working with researchers from TU Eindhoven, the Swinkels Family Brewers in The Netherlands are the first to employ at scale the burning of Iron as a renewable fuel. Finely ground iron powder burns cleanly at high temperatures and produces iron oxide (rust) as its only emission. Best of all, this rust can be reenrgised back in to iron powder using electricity, for use as a combustable source of energy again!

Improvements To The Travelling Salesman Problem

The travelling salesman problem is a famous network optimisation problem that hasn't been improved upon in forty-four years, until now! Researchers Nathan Klein, Anna Karlin and Shayan Ovies Gharan at the University of Washington have created a new algorithm that improves on the general traveling salesman problem, by 0.2 billionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a percent!

COVID-19 Vaccine Predictions

The Center For Global Development have published research on predicting the rollout timelines of a COVID-19 vaccine. The predictions show a 50% chance of a vaccine by April 2021, rising to 100% by September 2023. The paper also estimates that a total of just under 24 billion doses will be needed globally, distributed between health workers (115m), 65+ people(1.6bn), at risk people (4.2bn), and the rest of the population (18bn).

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