Something lovely for your timeline!

Beautiful blue glass beads from the late Bronze Age.

Ploughed up by a farmer in Denmark in 1885, analysis shows the beads were made in Mesopotamia, pointing to long-distance trade in luxury goods some 3,000 years ago.

📷 National Museum of Denmark

#Archaeology #globalmuseum #museums

@AlisonFisk

New paper from a team at Shanghai University outlines how a team there factored a 22-bit RSA integer on a #quantum computer (D-Wave's Advantage).

They reframed integer factoring as combinatorial optimization (which matches well with quantum annealing hardware) instead of Shor's period-finding approach. The previous best effort was 19 bits and was less efficient (more qubits per variable required).

The researchers also attacked some AES underlying algorithms including Present, Rectangle, and the Gift-64 block cipher.

(Notable context: Back in 2022 a different team in China claimed to have factored a 48-bit semiprime with a 10 qubit quantum computer, but that was later retracted.)

n.b., headline is clickbait but article is actually pretty good.

#PQC

https://www.earth.com/news/china-breaks-rsa-encryption-with-a-quantum-computer-threatening-global-data-security/

http://cjc.ict.ac.cn/online/onlinepaper/wc-202458160402.pdf