Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search (GIMPS) on phys.org:

The Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search (GIMPS) has discovered the largest known prime number, 2^77,232,917-1, having 23,249,425 digits.

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The new prime number, also known as M77232917, is calculated by multiplying together 77,232,917 twos, and then subtracting one. It is nearly one million digits larger than the previous record prime number, in a special class of extremely rare prime numbers known as Mersenne primes. It is only the 50th known Mersenne prime ever discovered, each increasingly difficult to find. Mersenne primes were named for the French monk Marin Mersenne, who studied these numbers more than 350 years ago. GIMPS, founded in 1996, has discovered the last 16 Mersenne primes. Volunteers download a free program to search for these primes, with a cash award offered to anyone lucky enough to find a new prime. Prof. Chris Caldwell maintains an authoritative web site on the largest known primes, and has an excellent history of Mersenne primes.

The primality proof took six days of non-stop computing on a PC with an Intel i5-6600 CPU. To prove there were no errors in the prime discovery process, the new prime was independently verified using four different programs on four different hardware configurations.

• Aaron Blosser verified it using Prime95 on an Intel Xeon server in 37 hours.

• David Stanfill verified it using gpuOwL on an AMD RX Vega 64 GPU in 34 hours.
• Andreas Höglund verified the prime using CUDALucas running on NVidia Titan Black GPU in 73 hours.
• Ernst Mayer also verified it using his own program Mlucas on 32-core Xeon server in 82 hours. Andreas Höglund also confirmed using Mlucas running on an Amazon AWS instance in 65 hours.

Opening the Web

Brent Simmons on using Micro.blog:

We could continue to flock to Twitter and Facebook — we could keep paying those who have and will rip off democracy for a stock price — or we could turn our backs and help the open web instead.

We could say goodbye to the creepy targeted ads and the algorithms, to the Nazis and bots and propagandists, to the harassers and the people selling hate. We could stop being spied-on for profit.

This blog entry sums up why we need to make the open web great again. It’s really up to us on how this trend will continue. Let’s make a choice.

Charlotte Hsu, University at Buffalo News:

Helmets that do a better job of preventing concussions and other brain injuries. Earphones that protect people from damaging noises. Devices that convert “junk” energy from airport runway vibrations into usable power.

New research on the events that occur when tiny specks of matter called nanoparticles smash into each other could one day inform the development of such technologies.

Surajit Sen, study co-author:

It gives engineers fundamental information about nanoparticles that they didn’t have before. If you’re designing a new type of nanoparticle, you can now think about doing it in a way that takes into account what happens when you have very small nanoparticles interacting with each other.

This will give engineers new type of material to played around with.

Joe Veix, The Outline:

In 2014, Mark Zuckerberg bought a new home in San Francisco’s Mission District, about a mile from where I lived at the time. Shortly after the purchase, the man who once printed business cards boasting, “I’m CEO, Bitch” began refurbishing the $10 million “fixer upper.”

I immediately biked over to the area to scope the place out. I figured that having the address of one of the richest and most powerful people in the world could be vaguely useful. Maybe if a Class War ever started, I could point an angry mob in his general direction. Or maybe I could steal his valuable trash.

After four years of stalling, I finally decided to go ahead with the latter idea. My quarter-baked plan was this: I’d drive to his Mission District pied-à-terre on trash collection day, snatch a few bags of whatever, and dig through it. I could learn more about Mark Zuckerberg’s habits and interests, creating my own ad profile of him. Then I could sell this information to brands looking to target that coveted “male, 18-34, billionaire” demographic. Think of it as a physical version of Facebook’s business model.

This is very fun to read.

From spacetelescope.org:

An international team of researchers using the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope and several other observatories have, for the first time, uncovered a galaxy in our cosmic neighbourhood that is missing most — if not all — of its dark matter. This discovery of the galaxy NGC 1052-DF2 challenges currently-accepted theories of and galaxy formation and provides new insights into the nature of dark matter. The results are published in Nature.

Dark matter is believed to be the one that holds galaxies together. This discovery requires us new knowledge on how galaxies work. It is exciting to know what’s the explanation behind this.

The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) has approved TLS 1.3 as internet standard in making the web more secure.

Catalin Cimpanu:

The protocol has several advantages over its previous version —TLS 1.2. The biggest feature is that TLS 1.3 ditches older encryption and hashing algorithms (such as MD5 and SHA-224) for newer and harder to crack alternatives (such as ChaCha20, Poly1305, Ed25519, x25519, and x448).

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All in all, TLS 1.3 is a serious boost to Internet security, being considered nigh impossible to crack, at least with today’s resources.