It’s Valentine’s week and what better way to showcase our love of both quantum physics and cybersecurity. In this edition of More than Quantum, we have some great videos on quantum mechanics and quantum computing, along with a few other sweet stories for you to enjoy!

Seeing Quantum with the Naked Eye

Explaining quantum mechanics in action can be difficult, but this great video by PBS’s NOVA that explains how light illustrates the complexities of quantum mechanics through the wave–particle duality. This is the concept that every particle or quantic entity may be partly described not only in terms of particles, but also of waves. By the way, the laser example in the video gives you a good idea of how we built our first quantum random number generator.

Colder than Outer Space

We love TED talks and here is an interesting one by Jerry Chow of IBM’s Watson Research Center who creates qubits, the building blocks of quantum computing. Chow taps into the strange world of the smallest particles, where the rules of ordinary reality don’t apply and shares how to harness their mind-boggling potential.

MIT Engineers Have Breakthrough for IoT Encryption

It’s no secret the Internet of Things provides serious challenges for security, particularly encryption. Researchers from MIT have developed an ultra-energy efficient chip to enable IoT device encryption. Using elliptical-curve encryption, this chip only uses 1/400 as much power, 1/10 as much memory and executes processes 500 times as fast as a software solution would.

We Told You Bitcoin Had a Consumption Problem – Iceland to see energy use double

In our 2018 predictions, we mentioned the issue with the massive amount of energy needed to mine cryptocurrency, now Iceland’s National Energy Authority notes bitcoin mining is expected to double Iceland’s energy consumption to around 100 megawatts this year. To put this in perspective, this is double what the island nation typically uses.

Pedaling a Cybersecurity Threat

Bike sharing is a fantastic idea. No need to worry about bike thieves stealing your bike or wondering where to park it when you’re done. But as this article points out, there is a copious amount of personal data being from just using a bike share program and you just might be surprised how much it is and where it is going. “From unlocking to relocking, your name, payment information, geographic location and route are getting beamed, via smartphone and a chip on the bike, to company servers. Where? It depends on which company you’re riding with.” The concern? If it’s with Chinese companies like Ofo or Mobike, two of the largest dockless players, it could end up in China where the line between the state and private sector is a but blurry. This has some cybersecurity and data privacy experts think that could be a compromising position.