The world’s largest health-research study is under way in Britain | Who is sabotaging underwater infrastructure in the Baltic Sea? | What Taylor Swift Knows | Thirty Years Later, a Speed Boost for Quantum Factoring | Quanta Magazine

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� � � � � � You Might Like � � � � � � � � � The world's largest health-research study is under way in Britain - The Economist    Volunteer number one rolled up his sleeve on July 12th last year. Volunteer two put out an arm to give blood the same day. Volunteer 100 stepped onto the scales on August 3rd. A tape measure was slipped around the waist of volunteer 1,000 on September 30th. Then things sped up: volunteer 100,000 gave blood this March. The roll is now growing so fast—by thousands every day—that putting a precise number in print is pointless: by the time you read this it will be out of date. By the end of this year this research study—called Our Future Health—will be Britain’s largest of its kind. By the end of next year, the world’s. The NHS has two main problems. The first is that it works badly. The second is that it works well. Its failings—waiting lists, queuing ambulances, costs invariably labelled “spiralling”—are well known. Its successes are harder to see—but are there in those same lists, queues and costs. For all exist, in part, because the NHS is keeping many alive who would, without it, be dead. But not being dead is not the same as being healthily alive: an average Briton may reach only 60 or so in good fettle (see chart). As Raghib Ali, the chief medical officer of Our Future Health (and its volunteer number one), says: “What we have…is not really a National Health Service but a national sickness service.” It was never meant to be like this. When in 1943 Winston Churchill promised Britain a health service “from the cradle to the grave” no one dreamt that Britons would spend so long with one foot in that grave, or cost so much as they stood there. On the contrary: it was thought that the NHS would get cheaper over time as Britons—laid in their cradles by NHS midwives, fortified by NHS vaccinations—would gaze through their newly issued NHS spectacles to a bright, healthy future. The NHS’s very existence, wrote William Beveridge, its architect, would lead to “a reduction in the number of cases requiring it”. It was, one politician later said, “a miscalculation of sublime dimensions”. Continued here Who is sabotaging underwater infrastructure in the Baltic Sea? - The Economist    PITY THE Baltic sea-creatures who just want a quiet life; their patch has never been busier. On October 17th Carl-Oskar Bohlin, Sweden’s minister for civil defence, said that a communications cable between Sweden and Estonia had been partially damaged earlier in the month. It was the latest of several suspicious incidents that have given rise to fears that Russia is making mischief underwater. On October 8th the nearby Balticconnector gas pipeline and a communications cable between Finland and Estonia were damaged due to what Sauli Niinisto, Finland’s president, called “external activity”. The two cables were some distance from one another. Finnish police later said the cause was “an external mechanical force”, with signs of an “extremely heavy object” left on the seabed. These events have come just over a year after the Nord Stream 1 and 2 gas pipelines from Russia to Germany were damaged by a pair of explosions. Swedish prosecutors say that a state was probably responsible. Initial suspicion fell on Russia, which has a large and sophisticated capability for underwater cable-tapping and sabotage, but American and European intelligence agencies have since then uncovered signs that Ukrainians might have been behind the blasts. The situation remains murky. Continued here Don't like ads? Go ad-free with TradeBriefs Premium What Taylor Swift Knows - The Atlantic    One week ago, Taylor Swift’s concert film, The Eras Tour, opened in theaters across the country. Within days, it had become the most successful concert film of all time, grossing more than $90 million in North America on its first weekend. I spoke with my colleague David Sims, who covers culture for The Atlantic, about what the success of the movie says about the future of movie theaters, and what made right now such a good time for Swift to release it. Lora Kelley: There has been a lot of dire news about the future of movie theaters in recent years. Are blockbuster theatrical releases for movies such as Barbie and The Eras Tour a sign that theaters are on the up again? David Sims: These hit movies are a sign of rebound. There has been a general sense of positivity regarding ticket sales lately, especially after sales reached historic lows early in the pandemic. Barbie and Taylor Swift, in particular, appeal to young people, whom Hollywood is obsessed with getting into the theater. Continued here Thirty Years Later, a Speed Boost for Quantum Factoring | Quanta Magazine - Quanta Magazine    Peter Shor didn't set out to break the internet. But an algorithm he developed in the mid-1990s threatened to do just that. In a landmark paper, Shor showed how a hypothetical computer that exploited the quirks of quantum physics could break large numbers into their prime factors far faster than any ordinary classical machine. The result had implications far beyond mathematics. At the time, a vital component of internet security called public-key cryptography relied on the assumption that factoring large numbers is so computationally difficult as to be effectively impossible. That assumption still underpins some critical protocols today. Shor's algorithm showed that it would fail spectacularly in a world with powerful quantum computers. In the past 30 years, computer scientists have streamlined Shor's algorithm in preparation for the day that quantum technology matures enough to run it. But a new variant, from the New York University computer scientist Oded Regev, is faster in a fundamentally new sense. It's the first to improve the relationship between the size of the number being factored and the number of quantum operations required to factor it. Continued here

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