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Researchers have demonstrated a network connection between quantum processors over metropolitan distances. Their result marks a key advance from early research networks in the lab towards a future quantum internet. The team developed fully independently operating nodes and integrated these with deployed optical internet fiber, enabling a 25-km quantum link.

Researchers have demonstrated a network connection between quantum processors over metropolitan distances. Their result marks a key advance from early research networks in the lab towards a future quantum internet. The team developed fully independently operating nodes and integrated these with deployed optical internet fiber, enabling a 25-km quantum link.

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Several newspapers have refused to endorse any candidate for the upcoming Presidential election. These (infamously) include the Wall Street Journal  (which hasn’t endorsed a candidate since Herbert Hoover), and the Washington Post, but there are many other papers who refused to endorse as well, including the Minnesota Star-Tribune and the Tampa Bay Times, as well as several large newspaper chains.  In the case of the Post, owner Jeff Bezos said that the paper will no longer make any Presidential endorsements (that of course could change should the ownership change.) From the link above:

Big headlines popped up in media circles last week when the billionaire owners of The Washington Post and Los Angeles Times blocked editorials that would have endorsed Kamala Harris. News staff turmoil followed with resignations at the Times and op-eds and a petition from opinion writers at the Post.

USA Today, which endorsed a presidential candidate for the first time in its 38 years in 2020, has reverted to neutrality. The Wall Street Journal hasn’t backed a presidential candidate since Herbert Hoover. If it were to shift course in the next few days, that would be a true October surprise.

That leaves The New York Times by its lonesome among national newspapers in still endorsing (Harris, of course, several times over).

I had already been looking at regional papers, where the steady move away from taking sides in presidential elections has become an epidemic. The largest chains — Gannett and Alden Global’s MediaNews Group and Tribune Publishing — have all stopped. (Hearst and Advance Local still leave their papers the option.)

Independent, locally owned organizations dominate the shrinking list of holdouts. Here, too, disengagement is becoming a trend. The highly regarded (and recently renamed) Minnesota Star Tribune alerted readers on Sept. 23 that no endorsement would be forthcoming.

When the Washington Post refused to endorse, the theory immediately spread that Jeff Bezos, who apparently overrode the editors’ decision to endorse Harris, had become “politically neutral” as a nefarious ploy as insurance against a Trump victory. (Apparently Amazon, also owned by Bezos, might stand to lose substantial government business, as Trump is known to be a retributive person.)

Now I am not sure what motivaated Bezos to do this.  But, as I said, I was willing to be charitable and assumed that Bezos, like the other owners, were being institutionally neutral as a way to maintain their papers’ reputation for objectivity in the news. Other people were not so charitable, and, in the end, we cannot know what was in Bezos’s mind.

But he did explain his decision in a new Washington Post editorial, and it comes down to the institutional neutrality explanation. (He does admit that the timing was bad.) You can read it yourself by clicking on the headline below or find the article archived here. Whether you believe Bezos or not is up to you, but I think that at least as a long-term strategy to prevent people from distrusting the media, journalistic neutrality in both news and lack of official endorsements is the way to go.

I’ll quote Bezos (indented):

In the annual public surveys about trust and reputation, journalists and the media have regularly fallen near the very bottom, often just above Congress. But in this year’s Gallup poll, we have managed to fall below Congress. Our profession is now the least trusted of all. Something we are doing is clearly not working.

Let me give an analogy. Voting machines must meet two requirements. They must count the vote accurately, and people must believe they count the vote accurately. The second requirement is distinct from and just as important as the first.

Likewise with newspapers. We must be accurate, and we must be believed to be accurate. It’s a bitter pill to swallow, but we are failing on the second requirement. Most people believe the media is biased. Anyone who doesn’t see this is paying scant attention to reality, and those who fight reality lose. Reality is an undefeated champion. It would be easy to blame others for our long and continuing fall in credibility (and, therefore, decline in impact), but a victim mentality will not help. Complaining is not a strategy. We must work harder to control what we can control to increase our credibility.

. . . Presidential endorsements do nothing to tip the scales of an election. No undecided voters in Pennsylvania are going to say, “I’m going with Newspaper A’s endorsement.” None. What presidential endorsements actually do is create a perception of bias. A perception of non-independence. Ending them is a principled decision, and it’s the right one. Eugene Meyer, publisher of The Washington Post from 1933 to 1946, thought the same, and he was right. By itself, declining to endorse presidential candidates is not enough to move us very far up the trust scale, but it’s a meaningful step in the right direction. I wish we had made the change earlier than we did, in a moment further from the election and the emotions around it. That was inadequate planning, and not some intentional strategy.

I would also like to be clear that no quid pro quo of any kind is at work here. Neither campaign nor candidate was consulted or informed at any level or in any way about this decision. It was made entirely internally.

. . . You can see my wealth and business interests as a bulwark against intimidation, or you can see them as a web of conflicting interests. Only my own principles can tip the balance from one to the other. I assure you that my views here are, in fact, principled, and I believe my track record as owner of The Post since 2013 backs this up. You are of course free to make your own determination, but I challenge you to find one instance in those 11 years where I have prevailed upon anyone at The Post in favor of my own interests. It hasn’t happened.

. . . While I do not and will not push my personal interest, I will also not allow this paper to stay on autopilot and fade into irrelevance — overtaken by unresearched podcasts and social media barbs — not without a fight. It’s too important. The stakes are too high. Now more than ever the world needs a credible, trusted, independent voice, and where better for that voice to originate than the capital city of the most important country in the world? To win this fight, we will have to exercise new muscles. Some changes will be a return to the past, and some will be new inventions. Criticism will be part and parcel of anything new, of course. This is the way of the world. None of this will be easy, but it will be worth it.

As I said, lots of people won’t believe him, nor do they think the L.A. Times‘s failure to endorse a candidate was principled, as the owner has $6 billion. But what about all those other newspapers and chains? All hedging their bets against a Trump victory?

Perhaps, but I am still in favor of ideological neutrality. And what paper would adopt such neutrality, say, two years after an election? The timing was uncomfortably close to the election, which is bad, but I still think Bezos’s decision is a harbinger of good things that promote freedom of speech and thought. And I now that many readers will disagree with me.

The paper even has an article about Bezos’s refusal to endorse, which you can read by clicking on the headline below, or reading the archived version here.

And some straight reporting on the fallout:

The op-ed, which appears in Tuesday’s print edition, comes as nearly one-third of The Post’s 10-member editorial board stepped down Monday in the wake of Bezos’s decision.

The board members — all of whom have said they intend to remain at the newspaper in other roles — include David E. Hoffman, a 42-year Washington Post veteran who was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for columns on autocracy and resigned Thursday, the day before publisher William Lewis shocked the board by announcing the decision to cease a long-standing practice of issuing endorsements in presidential races. Board member Molly Roberts confirmed that she is stepping down. The third board member is Mili Mitra, who also serves as director of audience for The Post’s opinions section. Bezos made no mention of the resignations in his opinion piece.

. . . The Post’s editorial board is part of the newspaper’s opinions section, which operates independently from the staff that provides news coverage. The remaining members of the board following Monday’s board resignations are Shipley, Charles Lane, Stephen Stromberg, Mary Duenwald, James Hohmann, Eduardo Porter and Keith B. Richburg.

“It’s extremely difficult for us because we built this institution,” Hoffman said in an interview before the public announcement of his decision to step down. “But we can’t give up on our American democracy or The Post.”

Finally, as Bezos surely would have known, his decision to avoid endorsement cost the paper, and cost it seriously. The headline below tells the tale. Click on it or find it.  archived here:

An excerpt:

At least 250,000 Washington Post readers have canceled their subscriptions since the news organization announced Friday that the editorial page would end its decades-long practice of endorsing presidential candidates. The figures represent about 10 percent of The Post’s digital subscribers.

The Post began experiencing a huge spike in the number of subscribers looking to cancel online starting Friday in the wake of the announcement by CEO and publisher William Lewis,according to documents and two people familiar with the figures who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they are not authorized to comment publicly. By Tuesday, the number reached 250,000, the documents indicate.

The number does not take into account how many new subscribers have signed up for The Post during the same period, or how many who canceled may have changed their minds later and re-subscribed.It’s also unclear how many of those who canceled subscriptions also receive print editions of The Post.

A Post spokeswoman declined to comment on subscription numbers. The Post is a privately held company that does not typically share such data with the public.

. . .But despite the assurances from Bezos and Lewis, the blowback has been intense. More than 20 Post opinion columnists dissented in a piece The Post published, and three members of the editorial board stepped down from that role, while remaining on the staff.

Tens of thousands of readers left comments on The Post stories about the fallout, including from those who said they were canceling subscriptions after being loyal readers for decades, alarmed by what they viewed as a capitulation to Donald Trump.

, , ,The Post saw its digital subscribers peak at 3 million in January 2021. It has dropped off since then to about 2.5 million now.

The company was projected to lose $100 million last year, but ended up losing $77 million after an employee buyout program reduced company staffing by about 10 percent. Bezos brought in Lewis this year to help recover lost subscriptions and grow other parts of the business.

Earlier this month, employees were told at a companywide meeting, which was also reported by the New York Times, that The Post was starting to see modest, positive subscriber growth after two years of declining numbers.

As I said, Bezos surely would have foreseen this. So if you take the less charitable view of his actions, he courted Trump knowing that it would cost the paper dearly, and even, perhaps, bring about its death. Perhaps he didn’t predict so many lost subscribers, and made a calculation that Trump’s favor (if he won) would be worth the subscription loss.

Readers have to decide for themselves here. I cannot psychologize Bezos, but in the end I think the trend towards increasing journalistic neutrality is a salubrious occurrence.

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The latest Jesus and Mo strip, called “uncool,” came with this sentence:

I don’t think anybody’s going to like this one.

I like it, because it reminds me of the old Jewish joke, one I’m sure I told before:

Jewish pessimist: “Oy! Things can’t get any worse!”
Jewish optimist:   “Sure they can!”

Jesus and Mo wind up being Jewish optimists.

Neutron stars are as dense as the nucleus of an atom. They contain a star’s worth of matter in a sphere only a dozen kilometers wide. And they are light-years away. So how can we possibly understand their interior structure? One way would be to simply spin it. Just spin it faster and faster until it reaches a maximum limit. That limit can tell us about how neutron stars hold together and even how they might form. Obviously, we can’t actually spin up a neutron star, but it can happen naturally, which is one of the reasons astronomers are interested in these maximally spinning stars. And recently a team has discovered a new one.

All neutron stars rotate on their axes. They form from the collapse of a massive star’s core, and just as an ice skater spins faster as they pull in their arms, a neutron star spins up as it forms. Young neutron stars can rotate hundreds of times a second, though they generally slow down as they age. Interactions between their magnetic fields and interstellar space cause their rate of rotation to decay. This is why, for example, we can observe pulsars gradually slow down over time.

But many neutron stars have a binary companion. If their companion happens to be a closely orbiting regular star, the neutron star can pull off some of the companion’s outer layer and capture it. The slow exchange of matter can cause the neutron star to speed up as it essentially steals some of the orbital angular momentum of the companion. They are known as millisecond pulsars because they emit a radio pulse every few milliseconds. They are the fastest-rotating stars in the cosmos.

So, just how fast can these neutron stars spin? The record for the fastest spinning pulsar is held by PSR J1748–2446ad. Observations in 2004 and 2005 confirmed it rotates 716 times per second. That’s a bit faster than number two, which rotates at 707 times a second. This new study has found another neutron star rotating at 716 times a second, and it’s interesting because it isn’t a pulsar.

X-ray burst showing the 716 Hz oscillation. Credit: Jaisawal, et al

Known as 4U 1820-30, it is part of a binary X-ray system. As the neutron star captures material from its companion, part of its surface will heat up to such a degree that it emits X-rays. As the neutron star rotates, the hot-spot swings in and out of view, and we observe a periodic pulsation of X-rays. Using NASA’s NICER X-ray telescope, the team observed the binary from 2017 to 2021 and captured data on 15 powerful X-ray bursts. One of these bursts had a clear periodicity of 716 Hz. This strongly suggests the neutron star rotates at that rate.

While it could just be a statistical fluke, the fact that we now have two 716 Hz neutron stars found in two different ways suggests they may be near the maximal rotation limit for a neutron star.

Reference: Jaisawal, Gaurava K., et al. “A Comprehensive Study of Thermonuclear X-Ray Bursts from 4U 1820–30 with NICER: Accretion Disk Interactions and a Candidate Burst Oscillation.” The Astrophysical Journal 975.1 (2024): 67.

The post Astronomers Have Found the Fastest Spinning Neutron Star appeared first on Universe Today.