Hydraulic Machine Found Inside A Pyramid

It appears that hydraulic mechanics were used extensively and may have indeed been the driving force behind the construction of ancient Egyptian pyramids.

In a preprint paper, scientists concluded that the Step Pyramid of Djoser in Saqqara, Egypt—believed to be the oldest of the seven monumental pyramids and potentially constructed about 4,500 years ago — offers a remarkable blueprint for hydraulic engineering.

The hydraulic-powered mechanism could have maneuvered the oversized stone blocks forming the pyramid, starting from the ground up. The research team says the Step Pyramid’s internal architecture is consistent with a hydraulic elevation mechanism, something that’s never been reported before at that place or in that time.

By lifting the stones from the interior of the pyramid in what the authors call a "volcano fashion," the water pressure from the hydraulic system could have pushed the blocks into place. If proved out, this research shows the Egyptians had a powerful understanding of advanced hydraulic systems well before modern scholars believed they did. That begs the question: Was this the first major use of the system, or had it been in play previously?

No matter the answer, pulling it off at the Step Pyramid would have been no easy feat.

The team believes that based on the mapping of nearby watersheds, one of the massive—and yet unexplained—Saqqara structures, known as the Gisr el-Mudir enclosure, has the features of a check dam with the intent to trap sediment and water. The scientists say the topography beyond the dam suggests a possible temporary lake west of the Djoser complex, with water flow surrounding it in a moat-like design.

As a Nile tributary fed the area, a dam could have created a temporary lake, potentially linking the river to a "Dry Moat" around the Djoser site, helping move materials and serving the hydraulic needs.

"The ancient architects likely raised the stones from the pyramid center in a volcano fashion using the sediment-free water from the Dry Moat’s south section," the authors write.

In one section of the moat, the team found that a monumental linear rock-cut structure consisting of successive, deep-trench compartments combines the technical requirement of a water treatment facility—and a design still often seen in modern-day water treatment plants — by including a settling basin, retention basin, and purification system.

"Together, the Gisr el-Mudir and the Dry Moat's inner south section work as a unified hydraulics system that improves water quality and regulates flow for practical purposes and human needs," the authors write. The team believes the water available in the area was sufficient to meet the needs of the project.

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Budget Issues Hound ISS

The dilapidated state of the International Space Station (ISS) serves as a sad reminder of shifting priorities amid reports that President Donald Trump's administration is planning to slash NASA funding by 20 percent.

For years, NASA has emphasized budgetary and aging hardware concerns regarding the ISS. Now, during a public meeting of the Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel (ASAP) last 17 April, NASA officials said they were "deeply concerned" about the diminishing safety of the orbital station.

The panel cited long-standing issues – cracks and air leaks – as well as funding shortfalls. They called for more funding to facilitate the end of the ISS's operations and avert a potentially catastrophic unplanned deorbit.

During the ASAP meeting, members of the NASA safety panel emphasized the growing risks facing ISS operations.

Cracks aboard the space station have been a long-running concern. Over the years, air leaks have also hindered operations – the source of one of those leaks was pinpointed thanks to floating tea leaves.

At the time of writing, NASA aims to deorbit the ISS by 2030. The space agency has contracted SpaceX to develop US Deorbit Vehicle (USDV) to safely remove the ISS from orbit within that timeframe.

However, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk may throw a spanner in the works. He recently recommended NASA deorbit the station sooner. Following a public spat with a former ISS commander, he claimed the station had "served its purpose".

Conversely, when it comes to Trump's NASA budget cuts, Musk recently stated he can't get involved because of a conflict of interest.

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The Fall Of Nuremberg In 1945

About eight decades ago, U.S. Army soldiers raised the American flag in the center of Nuremberg. They stood atop a bunker adorned with Nazi symbols, now in the hands of Allied forces after five days of fierce urban combat.

By April 1945, the invasion of Germany was well underway. After crossing the Rhine River, American soldiers were pushing forward. Soviet troops were already well into Germany, and both forces were moving towards Berlin. To do so though, they had to eliminate the remaining bastions of Nazi military power. The city of Nuremberg, in the southern part of the country, was one such place. It ended up being some of the most intense urban combat that U.S. forces in Europe experienced.

At this point in the war, advancing Allied forces had a doctrine to avoid being bogged down in urban warfare, preferring to encircle and besiege Nazi-held cities and advance forward, rather than suffer heavy casualties that they knew would come from building-to-building combat. But the push into Germany proper meant that Nazi strongholds had to be taken.

Nuremberg in particular was a target due to its importance in Nazi propaganda, having been the site of major rallies by the party prior to the war. Berlin was the capital of Germany but Nuremberg was seen as the Nazi’s political center.

As such, the Nazis had significant defenses set up. Nuremberg had been heavily bombed by American forces, reducing large portions of the city to rubble, which the German forces used to place anti-tank guns and machine gun nests throughout the streets. Despite being outnumbered, the conditions of urban combat meant they could put the U.S. Army’s 3rd Infantry Division and 45th Infantry Division through hellish conditions.

In the first two days the two Army divisions swept across the city’s outskirts, capturing suburban towns and passes. On April 18 they entered Nuremberg proper, and that was when the main phase of the battle began.

"The 3rd Division entered the city with the [7th Infantry Regiment] on the right, the 15th [Infantry Regiment] in the center, and the 30th [Infantry Regiment] on the left. The advance was slow and methodical," a Combat Studies Institute paper on the battle recounted.

"There was heavy German resistance from the basements of buildings, foxholes in the city parks, and prepared 88mm gun emplacements. The 7th Regiment encountered heavy small arms, automatic weapons, and bazooka fires. The Germans fought fanatically and had to be rooted out of every house and building."

The 45th Infantry Division, moving in from the east, reported similar resistance, with house-to-house fighting becoming the norm. By 19 April, American troops were at Nuremberg’s old city, where the Nazis were headquartered out of. Still, the Germans were able to continue to fight back, prompting additional American bombardment of the already wrecked city.

On 20 April, soldiers from the 30th Infantry Regiment reached Adolf Hitler Platz in the center of the city, where they raised the American flag. At 11:00 A.M. the Germans officially surrendered. Nuremberg had fallen. According to the Army, there were more than 800 casualties in the fighting. German losses were unknown.

Rather, victory was "a direct result of battle-hardened U.S. veterans refusing to be denied," the same Combat Studies Institute report concluded. "The fighting involved building-to-building, room-to-room, and at times hand-to-hand-combat."

Nuremberg was more than just a symbolic win. Allied intelligence at the time suggested that the Nazis were looking to pull their remaining forces south into Austria to regroup as an insurgency, with Nuremberg as one of the last bastions on the way out of southern Germany.

The capture of Nuremberg also paved the way for the U.S. military’s post-war trials. Seven months after the city fell to the U.S. Army, the Allies began trying high-ranking Nazi officials and officers for their roles in war crimes. The Allies chose to hold the tribunals in Nuremberg, again citing its symbolic importance to the now-defeated Nazi Germany. They weren’t the first war trials — that actually took place in May 1945, prior to the establishment of the International Military Tribunal — but were the largest and highest level of such prosecutions.

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Only Five People Have Seen This Very Rare Color

There are only so many colors that the typical human eye can see; estimates put the number just below 10 million. But now, for the first time, scientists say they’ve broken out of that familiar spectrum and into a new world of color.

In a paper published in Science Advances, researchers detail how they used a precise laser setup to stimulate the retinas of five participants, making them the first humans to see a color beyond our visual range: an impossibly saturated bluish green.

Human retinas contain three types of cone cells, photoreceptors that detect the wavelengths of light. S cones pick up relatively short wavelengths, which we see as blue. M cones react to medium wavelengths, which we see as green. And L cones are triggered by long wavelengths, which we see as red. These red, green and blue signals travel to the brain, where they’re combined into the full-color vision we experience.

But these three cone types handle overlapping ranges of light: the light that activates M cones will also activate either S cones or L cones. "There’s no light in the world that can activate only the M cone cells because, if they are being activated, for sure one or both other types get activated as well," says Ren Ng, a professor of electrical engineering and computer science at the University of California, Berkeley.

Ng and his research team wanted to try getting around that fundamental limitation, so they developed a technicolor technique they call "Oz."

"The name comes from the Wizard of Oz, where there’s a journey to the Emerald City, where things look the most dazzling green you’ve ever seen," Ng explains. On their own expedition, the researchers used lasers to precisely deliver tiny doses of light to select cone cells in the human eye. First, they mapped a portion of the retina to identify each cone cell as either an S, M or L cone. Then, using the laser, they delivered light only to M cone cells.

It wasn’t exactly a comfortable setup. "This is not a consumer-oriented device, right? This was a basic visual science and neuroscience project," Ng says. In fact, the researchers experimented on themselves: three of the five participants were co-authors of the study. The two others were colleagues from the University of Washington, who were unaware of the purpose of the research.

Ng himself was one of the participants. He entered a darkened lab and sat at a table. "There were lasers, mirrors, deformable mirrors, modulators, light detectors," Ng says. There, he had to bite down hard on a bar to keep his head and eyes still. As the laser shone into his retina, he perceived a tiny square of light, roughly the size of a thumbnail viewed at arm’s distance. In that square, he glimpsed the Emerald City: a color the researchers have named "olo."

What, exactly, did olo look like? Ng describes it as "blue-green with unprecedented saturation" — a perception the human brain conjured up in response to a signal it had never before received from the eye. The closest thing to olo that can be displayed on a computer screen is teal, or the color represented by the hexadecimal code #00ffcc, Ng says.

If you want to try envisioning olo, take that teal as the starting point: Imagine that you are adjusting the latter on a computer. You keep the hue itself steady but gradually increase the saturation. At some point, you reach a limit of what your screen can show you.

You keep increasing the saturation past what you can find in the natural world until you reach the limit of saturation perceptible by humans—resulting in what you’d see from a laser pointer that emitted almost entirely teal light. Olo lies even further than that.

Ng’s team dreams of one day building screens that can scan your retina to display perfect images and videos by delivering light to individual cones—enabling crisp, nonpixelated visuals in impossible colors. "That’s going to be extremely hard to do, but I don’t think it’s out of the realm of possibility," Ng says.

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Lucy Spacecraft Beamed Back Photos Of "Bowling Pin-Shaped" Asteroids

NASA’s Lucy spacecraft has beamed back pictures from its latest asteroid flyby, revealing a long, lumpy, odd-shaped space rock.

The space agency released the images last 21 April, a day after the close approach. It was considered a dress rehearsal for the more critical asteroid encounters ahead closer to Jupiter.

This asteroid is bigger than scientists anticipated, about 5 miles (8 kilometers) long and 2 miles (3.5 kilometers) wide at its widest point — resembling an irregular bowling pin. It's so long that the spacecraft couldn't capture it in its entirety in the initial downloaded images.

Data returned over the next week should help clarify the asteroid's shape, according to NASA.

Lucy passed within 600 miles (960 kilometers) of the harmless asteroid known as Donaldjohanson in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. It's named for the paleontologist who discovered the fossil Lucy 50 years ago in Ethiopia.

The spacecraft was launched in 2021 to study the unexplored so-called Trojan asteroids out near Jupiter. Eight Trojan flybys are planned through 2033.

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Is Pope Francis' Death Tied To A 900-Year Old Prophecy?

The death of Pope Francis has led to renewed interest in a 900-year-old book known as "The Prophecy of the Popes" ("Prophetia Sancti Malachiae Archiepiscopi, de Summis Pontificibus" - or "Prophecy of Saint-Archbishop Malachy, concerning the Supreme Pontiffs"), which claims to predict the year of Judgement Day.

For those of you who need brushing up on your scripture, Judgement Day – also known as "The Final Judgement" or "the second coming of Jesus Christ" - is the day that Jesus returns to Earth to judge humanity and destroy Earth and Heaven.

Essentially, the day we find out who will be saved and who will be damned.

According to the 12th-century book credited to Irish bishop Saint Malachy, it’s going to take place in 2027.

Located in the Vatican’s Secret Archives and discovered in 1590 by Benedictine monk Arnold Wion, "The Prophecy of the Popes" is making headlines due to a prophecy that ties with Pope Francis’ death.

The book contains a series of Latin phrases in 112 mysterious sections which purport to predict the Catholic popes, beginning with Celestine II up to the Church's current leader.

One passage, attributed to Pope Sixtus V, reads: "Axle in the midst of a sign".

Pope Sixtus' tenure began 442 years after the first Pope’s rule, and the passage suggests he is in the 'middle' of the papal lineage - thus indicating the end of the world would come 442 years later, in 2027.

The last passage of the book reads: "In the final persecution of the Holy Roman Church there will reign Peter the Roman, who will feed his flock amid many tribulations, after which the seven-hilled city will be destroyed, and the dreadful Judge will judge the people. The End."

The "seven-hilled city" refers to Rome and some interpret the last passage as Peter taking over as the Pope from Francis due to the latter's chronic lung disease, making Francis the last Pope.

It all sounds very Dan Brown, and "The Prophecy of the Popes" has appeared in popular fiction, including Steve Berry’s 2005 novel "The Third Secret" and in James Rollins' 2009 novel "The Doomsday Key".

It’s worth noting that modern scholars have disputed the origins of the text, saying that the book is simply cryptic forgery created for partisan political reasons.

Others also refer back to the Bible, which specifically warns against predicting the date of the second coming.

Matthew 24:36 reads: "But of that day and hour no one knows, not even the angels of heaven, nor the Son, but the Father alone."

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China Started Its Thorium-Fueled Nuclear Power Plant

Several months after satellites picked up a massive nuclear fusion facility in China's Sichuan province, the country's nuclear industry has blown the lid off fission tech.

During a private meeting earlier this month, researchers at the Chinese Academy of Sciences revealed the successful operation of a thorium-powered nuclear reactor located in the Gobi Desert. The team had achieved "full-power operation" last June 2024, according to South China Morning Post, and recently succeeded in reloading the reactor while it was powered up — a world first.

It's a major milestone for nuclear power. Thorium offers a more accessible but less weaponizable alternative to uranium, according to the World Nuclear Association, which notes that "thorium-based power reactor fuels would be a poor source for fissile material usable in the illicit manufacture of an explosive device."

The Gobi Desert reactor is a two megawatt research unit engineered to use molten salt as fuel carrier and coolant. A molten salt reactor (MSR) theoretically carries far less risk in the event of a meltdown compared to water-based systems, as salts can carry greater loads of thermal energy at much lower pressure.

In fact, a "meltdown" is basically a non-factor for these systems — the fuel is already molten.

A report sponsored by the US government on MSRs notes that a "possible advantage of the MSR is that the fuel is subject to freezing," so "upon breach of a vessel or pipe... the fuel will disperse, and thus increase its cooling geometry, until it reaches a freezing configuration and thus will be confined to that location and configuration." Basically, imagine lava rolling slowly down a mountain as the air cools it back into rock, compared to a spectacular steam explosion like the incident at Chernobyl.

Curiously, MSRs are nothing new. They had their day in the US back in the late 1940s and early 50s, when American cold warriors dumped nearly $1 billion into developing a nuclear-powered stealth bomber. Congress halted research on thorium-fueled airplanes back in 1961, and uranium more or less became the gold standard, due in no small part to its military potential.

Assumed obsolete, the US' MSR research has since been made public, forming the foundation of the Gobi Desert team's work.

"The US left its research publicly available, waiting for the right successor," said the project's chief scientist Xu Hongjie. "Rabbits sometimes make mistakes or grow lazy. That’s when the tortoise seizes its chance."

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Salt-Powered Ref Invented By Three Teens

There are three teenagers who just designed a mini refrigerator that cools itself with salt and doesn't require an outlet. They're bringing it to hospitals to help transport medical supplies to rural areas without electricity.

Dhruv Chaudhary, Mithran Ladhania, and Mridul Jain live in Indore, India and all have parents working in medical fields. The boys decided to find a salty refrigeration technique after hearing how challenging it was to bring COVID-19 vaccines to rural areas without electricity.

Their invention, which they call Thermavault, won them the 2025 Earth Prize on Saturday. The award comes with $12,500, which they plan to use to build 200 of their refrigerators and send them to 120 hospitals for testing.

They hope their refrigerator can help transport vaccines, other medicines and supplies, and even transplant organs.

"We have been able to keep the vaccines inside the Thermavault for almost 10 to 12 hours," Dr. Pritesh Vyas, an orthopedic surgeon who tested the device at V One hospital in Indore, says in a video on the Thermavault website.

With some improvements like a built-in temperature monitor, he added, "it will be definitely helpful, definitely useful in the remote places, the villages."

Some salts can have a cooling effect when they're dissolved in water.

That's because when those salts dissolve, the charged atoms, or ions, that make them up break apart. That separation requires energy, which the ions pull from the environment, thus cooling the water around them.

Chaudhary, Ladhania, and Jain searched the internet, first compiling a list of about 150 salts that might work, then narrowing it down to about 20 that seemed most efficient.

They then borrowed a lab at the Indian Institutes of Technology to test those 20, or so. To their disappointment, none of the salts cooled the water enough.

They were back to square one. Turns out, they didn't need the internet after all — their school teacher recommended trying two different salts: barium hydroxide octahydrate and ammonium chloride.

"While we did scour through the entire internet to find the best salt possible, we kind of just ended up back to our ninth-grade science textbook," Chaudhary said.

The trio says they found that ammonium chloride maintained temperatures of around 2 to 6 degrees Celsius (about 35 to 43 degrees Fahrenheit), which is ideal for many vaccines. Adding barium hydroxide octahydrate to the mix produced sub-zero Celsius temperatures, which is ideal for some other vaccines and sometimes for transplant organs.

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Gateway's HALO Module Arrived In The U.S.

Earlier this month, NASA released to the public a set of photos highlighting a newly arrived module for Gateway, a small space station that the agency aims to launch to lunar orbit in 2027.

That module is HALO (Habitation and Logistics Outpost), which will serve as a living and working space for astronauts aboard Gateway.

A cargo plane flew the HALO module to the U.S. from Turin, Italy, where it was constructed by the company Thales Alenia Space. The cargo plane landed at Phoenix-Mesa Gateway Airport in Mesa, Arizona on 1 April.

The newly released photos give you a good feel for the size of the lunar module, which takes up most of the space in the plane’s large cargo hold.

The next stop for the HALO module was Northrop Grumman’s integration and test facility in Gilbert, Arizona, where it's undergoing final outfitting. Northrop Grumman is one of the contractors working on NASA’s Artemis program of moon exploration, which sees Gateway as a vital piece of infrastructure.

The agency says that the lunar station will help "chart a path of scientific discovery toward the first crewed missions to Mars," which will follow after NASA establishes a sustainable human presence on the moon — a key Artemis goal.

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Strange Creatures Discovered In Ocean Floor of Antartica

Our world is mysterious and bizarre. New discovery each year prove this and now more strange creatures straight out of a science-fiction movie have been captured by scientists off the coast of Antarctica.

Pink and bulbous "sea pigs", hand-sized sea spiders and delicate sea butterflies are among the bizarre animals hauled up from the ocean floor by a team of Australian researchers aboard the icebreaker ship RSV Nuyina, which is on a 60-day voyage across the Southern Ocean to the Denman Glacier.

Some of the weird wildlife may even be previously undiscovered.

"[We've collected] a really large diversity of a broad suite of marine life, and likely some new species to science," Jan Strugnell, a professor of marine biology at James Cook University in Queensland, Australia, told ABC News.

The RSV Nuyina was launched for the Denman Marine Voyage to investigate the effects of warming sea temperatures on the Denman Glacier, which is located about 3,100 miles (5,000 kilometres) south of Australia and has already retreated 3.1 miles (5 km) between 1996 and 2017/2018. It is considered the fastest-melting glacier in East Antarctica.

Along the way, the ship's researchers have been trawling the sea floor to bring up a huge variety of unusual organisms from the deep.

One of the strangest creatures was a sea pig. These bizarre animals are a type of sea cucumber and measure around 1.5 to 6 inches (4 to 15 centimeters) long. They get their name from their squishy, bloated bodies and stubby little legs, which make them vaguely resemble pigs. Sea pigs live on the sea floor, between 3,300 to 19,500 feet (1 to 6 km) below the ocean's surface, and feed on the organic material that falls from the upper ocean layers, sometimes called "marine snow."

The scientists also fished out sea spiders "as big as your hand" and sea stars "that grow to the size of a dinner plate," according to Strugnell.

Along with collecting creatures from the deep, the researchers have also been taking samples of seawater near the edge of the glacier to analyze temperature, salinity, oxygen and the level of metals present at different depths.

"For us to really understand how much heat enters the ice shelf, we need to be as close as possible to understand these processes and properties of the ocean," Herraiz Borreguero said.

"The system is changing. And it is really important that we observe the change so that we keep on challenging those climate models we rely on for our mitigation and adaptation strategies."

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NASA's Perseverance Rover Mining Rocks In Mars

The NASA's Perseverance rover is reveling in a scientific bonanza on Mars after finding a diverse array of rocks that are providing eager scientists a glimpse into the planet's ancient history.

The Perseverance rover is currently exploring Mars hills, boulders and rocky outcrops along the rim of Jezero Crater, a dry, bowl-shaped depression north of the Martian equator that likely held a lake billions of years ago. Since reaching the crater's western rim in December of last year, the rover has focused its attention on the layered terrain of a tall slope called Witch Hazel Hill, which could hold clues to a period when Mars had a vastly different climate.

In the past few months alone, the car-sized Perseverance has collected samples of five rocks, performed detailed analysis on seven others, and zapped an additional 83 with its laser for remote study — the robotic explorer's fastest pace of scientific data collection since it landed on the Red Planet four years ago, NASA says.

"During previous science campaigns in Jezero, it could take several months to find a rock that was significantly different from the last rock we sampled and scientifically unique enough for sampling," Katie Morgan, who is the Perseverance's project scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, said in a statement. "But up here on the crater rim, there are new and intriguing rocks everywhere the rover turns. It has been all we had hoped for and more."

The crater's western rim is proving to be a scientific goldmine because it contains lots of fragmented, once-molten rocks that had been blasted from deep beneath the surface billions of years ago by meteor impacts, possibly including the impact that created Jezero Crater itself, according to the statement.

Of key interest to astronomers is Perseverance's first crater rim sample, named Silver Mountain, which is a "one-of-a-kind treasure" likely dating back at least 3.9 billion years to the Noachian age — an early Martian period of heavy bombardment that shaped the planet's cratered landscape we see today, NASA recently said.

"My 26th sample, known as 'Silver Mountain,' has textures unlike anything we've seen before," the rover's official X account posted in February.

Not far away, the rover also found a rock rich in serpentine minerals, which typically form when water interacts with certain volcanic rocks. Scientists say this process can sometimes create hydrogen, a potential energy source for life as we know it here on Earth.

"The last four months have been a whirlwind for the science team, and we still feel that Witch Hazel Hill has more to tell us," said Morgan. "We'll use all the rover data gathered recently to decide if and where to collect the next sample from the crater rim."

"Crater rims — you gotta love 'em," she added.

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This Is A Truly Random Number Generator

If you try to think of a number between 1 and 10 ... was it 7? If it was, don't feel too bad, as human brains are notoriously bad at both true randomness and understanding probability. Even if you're the galaxy-brained to fall for my tricks and slyly thought of something clever like '3 and three-quarters,' you may still be interested to know that scientists have potentially cracked a truly random number generator.

A peer-reviewed research paper published in the scientific journal Nature claims that certifiable randomness can be achieved using "a 56-qubit Quantinuum H2-1 trapped-ion quantum computer" (via Popular Mechanics).

Traditionally, computers are incapable of true randomness, though they can still produce an approximation that passes the vibe check for humans—you know, those guys who witness true randomness out in the world and insist it's not random at all. Quantum computers, on the other hand, are a whole other ball game, which may have positive ramifications for data security in the future.

Even the veneer of randomness is pretty key to data encryption. For example, traditional computers may create encryption based on the result of multiplying two large prime numbers together, generating a seemingly random number. As this string of numbers only has those two large prime numbers in common, someone who wants to 'unlock' the encryption would only need one of them as a 'key'. However, maths nerds everywhere will tell you that's more likely than you think.

As prime numbers are ultimately predictable, encryption protocols are always changing without actually being dynamic to outpace obsolescence. So, the over 30 authors of the paper in Nature (four of whom now hold patents related to this quantum computing work) came together to essentially throw away the 'key.'

With their quantum computer, the researchers were able to create randomised strings containing 70,000 bits of data that the team writes "is uncorrelated with any side information." Besides that, 70,000 bits is definitely too long for your favourite maths nerd to memorise—though not for lack of trying.

The team's quantum computing method is able to not only generate these incredibly long, highly random numbers, but can also generate them in a reasonable amount of time. Though we're all still a ways off from parking any number of qubits on our desks, the team insist that their findings could still be applicable in the here and now; they wrote, "[W]e demonstrate a useful beyond-classical application of gate-based digital quantum computers."

As a proposed use case for quantum computers, it's perhaps more promising than trying (and failing) to properly run Doom. Still, with data breaches only getting bigger and uglier, I don't think anyone can afford to ignore what is potentially a quantum leap in the right direction for data security.

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