So Ron and his sister arrived two days ago. Lucky for me she is a doer who jumps in to do stuff and doesn’t wait for others to do for her. She has really helped Ron get a lot of stuff done. She helps when my back goes out. She is doing supper right now so I can catch up on the last few days of news. I really hope she finds a place to her tastes here as she is a good influence for Ron. Hugs, loves to all, and best wishes to all who wish them. Scottie
Thanks to Ron’s sister jumping in and doing all the extra stuff I have been trying to do I can rest my back while doing my posting. I could get used to this. Hugs
tRump’s illegal war for profit to please the corporations he told to give him a billion dollars for his campaign and he would do what ever they asked. Wow US military young adults sold for tRump’s profit. Hugs
The $1,776 per person bonuses, unveiled by Trump in his nationwide address Wednesday night, will be covered with funding approved in the Big Beautiful Bill that passed in July, according to the congressional officials and later confirmed by the Pentagon. The payouts — which will cost roughly $2.6 billion — will be a “one-time basic allowance for housing supplement to all eligible service members,” said the official.
The Trump administration announced several moves Thursday that will have the effect of essentially banning gender-affirming care for transgender young people, even in states where it is still legal.
The second would block all Medicaid and Medicare funding for any services at hospitals that provide pediatric gender-affirming care.
Really stupid things say and blame democrats for just because they think it sounds good not realizing how dumb it seems.
As Democracy Docket previously reported, in his previous role as a prosecutor in the Los Angeles district attorney’s office, Neff was put on leave after bringing charges against an election software executive based on information from conspiracy-driven election denier group True the Vote. The saga ultimately cost taxpayers $5 million to settle a lawsuit over the flawed prosecution.
Neff is also affiliated with True The Vote, the far-right QAnon group featured in Dinesh D’Souza’s debunked “2000 Mules” film.
Slumped over in his chair at the Resolute desk, Trump’s face slackened—eyes drooping, the corners of his mouth sagging—as he fought off sleep. The elderly president has now been caught appearing to doze off at four official events in six weeks.
Explanation: In a Finnish myth, when an arctic fox runs so fast that its bushy tail brushes the mountains, flaming sparks are cast into the heavens creating the northern lights. In fact the Finnish word “revontulet”, a name for the aurora borealis or northern lights, can be translated as fire fox. So that evocative myth took on a special significance for the photographer of this northern night skyscape from Finnish Lapland near Kilpisjarvi Lake. The snowy scene is illuminated by moonlight. Saana, an iconic fell or mountain of Lapland, rises at the right in the background. But as the beautiful nothern lights danced overhead, the wild fire fox in the foreground enthusiastically ran around the photographer and his equipment, making it difficult to capture in this lucky single shot.
It is indeed good to see the NASA Earth Observatory newsletter in my Inbox again, since the shutdown ended. This is one of the things we the people own and pay taxes to maintain, and it’s a wonderful thing, good for all to learn about our world. Even if a person never gets farther than their own downtown, they can still learn about the world with the information we receive from the Observatory. We need to keep the stuff we’ve paid for!
Snippet: We are back! After the lapse in appropriations at the beginning of October, and therefore a lapse in our ability to pay for our newsletter platform, the Earth Observatory team is back to publishing our Image of the Day and we are happy to be back in your inbox. We have a slate of new stories to share with you (I will include them all below so you can catch up) and more planned. But in other news…
Satellites Detect Seasonal Pulses in Earth’s Glaciers
Physicists from research groups at the University of Stuttgart, Saarbrücken, and Dresden conducting an experiment on quantum teleportation (left to right: Tobias Bauer, Marlon Schäfer, Caspar Hopfmann, Stefan Kazmaier, Tim Strobel, Simone Luca Portalupi). Credit: Julian Maisch
Everyday life on the internet is insecure. Hackers can break into bank accounts or steal digital identities. Driven by AI, attacks are becoming increasingly sophisticated. Quantum cryptography promises more effective protection. It makes communication secure against eavesdropping by relying on the laws of quantum physics. However, the path toward a quantum internet is still fraught with technical hurdles.
Researchers at the Institute of Semiconductor Optics and Functional Interfaces (IHFG) at the University of Stuttgart have now made a decisive breakthrough in one of the most technically challenging components, the quantum repeater. They report their results in Nature Communications.
Nanometer-sized semiconductor islands for information transfer
“For the first time worldwide, we have succeeded in transferring quantum information among photons originating from two different quantum dots,” says Prof. Peter Michler, head of the IHFG and deputy spokesperson for the Quantenrepeater.Net (QR.N) research project.
What is the background? Whether WhatsApp or video stream, every digital message consists of zeros and ones. Similarly, this also applies to quantum communication, in which individual light particles serve as carriers of information.
Zero or one is then encoded in two different directions of polarization of the photons (i.e., their orientation in the horizontal and vertical directions or in a superposition of both states). Because photons follow the laws of quantum mechanics, their polarization cannot always be completely read out without leaving traces. Any attempt to intercept the transmission would inevitably be detected.
Making the quantum internet ready for the fiber-optic infrastructure
Another challenge: An affordable quantum internet would use optical fibers—just like today’s internet. However, light has only a limited range. Conventional light signals, therefore, need to be renewed approximately every 50 kilometers using an optical amplifier.
Because quantum information cannot simply be amplified or copied and forwarded, this does not work in the quantum internet. However, quantum physics allows information to be transferred from one photon to another as long as the information stays unknown. This process is referred to as quantum teleportation.
Quantum repeaters as nodes for information transmission
Building on this, physicists are developing quantum repeaters that renew quantum information before it is absorbed in the optical fiber. They are to serve as nodes for the quantum internet. However, there are considerable technical hurdles. To transmit quantum information via teleportation, the photons must be indistinguishable (i.e., they must have approximately the same temporal profile and color). This proves extremely difficult because they are generated at different locations from different sources.
“Light quanta from different quantum dots have never been teleported before because it is so challenging,” says Tim Strobel, scientist at the IHFG and first author of the study. As part of QR.N, his team has developed semiconductor light sources that generate almost identical photons.
“In these semiconductor islands, certain fixed energy levels are present, just like in an atom,” says Strobel. This allows individual photons with defined properties to be generated at the push of a button.
“Our partners at the Leibniz Institute for Solid State and Materials Research in Dresden have developed quantum dots that differ only minimally,” says Strobel. This means that almost identical photons can be generated at two locations.
Information is ‘beamed’ from one photon to another
At the University of Stuttgart, the team succeeded in teleporting the polarization state of a photon originating from one quantum dot to another photon from a second quantum dot. One quantum dot generates a single photon, the other an entangled photon pair.
Entangled means that the two particles constitute a single quantum entity, even when they are physically separated. One of the two particles travels to the second quantum dot and interferes with its light particle. The two overlap. Because of this superposition, the information of the single photon is transferred to the distant partner of the pair.
Instrumental for the success of the experiment were quantum frequency converters, which compensate for residual frequency differences between the photons. These converters were developed by a team led by Prof. Christoph Becher, an expert in quantum optics at Saarland University.
Improvements for reaching considerably greater distances
“Transferring quantum information between photons from different quantum dots is a crucial step toward bridging greater distances,” says Michler.
In the Stuttgart experiment, the quantum dots were separated only by an optical fiber of about 10 m length. “But we are working on achieving considerably greater distances,” says Strobel.
In earlier work, the team had shown that the entanglement of the quantum dot photons remains intact even after a 36-kilometer transmission through the city center of Stuttgart. Another aim is to increase the current success rate of teleportation, which currently stands at just over 70%. Fluctuations in the quantum dot still lead to slight differences in the photons.
“We want to reduce this by advancing semiconductor fabrication techniques,” says Strobel.
“Achieving this experiment has been a long-standing ambition — these results reflect years of scientific dedication and progress,” says Dr. Simone Luca Portalupi, group leader at the IHFG and one of the study coordinators. “It’s exciting to see how experiments focused on fundamental research are taking their first steps toward practical applications.”
Good Morning All. One of the difficulties and blessings we enjoy is the very thing we are doing right now: social media. People are able to express their information, their interests, their opinions to a world. We once trusted the network news and then a clown descended an escalator. Below is a 15-minute video from Neal DeGrasse Tyson that I found really helpful in navigating the bull. Hugs. Randy
The Northern Bobwhite, also known as Virginia Quail or Virginia Partridge, is in the same family as the Montezuma and Scaled Quails, but the bobwhite is the only native quail species in the eastern United States. This delightfully round little quail is capable of strong, short bursts of flight — particularly when fleeing predators — though they prefer to walk or run, scuttling about under the dense, low cover of vegetation in grasslands, agricultural fields, and open forests.
The Northern Bobwhite is more often heard than seen, its namesake whistled bob-white! call sounding from the brushy undergrowth, where their dappled brown-and-white plumage provides excellent camouflage. But sometimes, especially when calling in spring, males will occupy highly visible locations, perching atop fenceposts and tree limbs.
A popular game bird, the Northern Bobwhite has a whopping 22 subspecies across its range, one of which — the Masked Bobwhite — is federally listed as Endangered. Its status as a game bird has made it one of the most well-studied birds in the world, and scientists have observed sharp declines, likely owing to multiple causes that include habitat loss and the increased use of pesticides.
Threats
Populations of Northern Bobwhite plunged between 1966 and 2019, resulting in an overall decline of 81 percent, according to the North American Breeding Bird Survey. Partners in Flight considers the Northern Bobwhite as a “Common Bird in Steep Decline.” For years, an explanation for such drastic declines has been elusive. However, most biologists agree that multiple causes are to blame. (snip-MORE on the page)
Scottie's Playtime 
