A quantum-encrypted future is a step closer this week after researchers announced a great advancement in speed: from fast enough to encrypt voice transmissions to fast enough to encrypt video.

For decades now scientists have tried to develop reliable quantum cryptography systems that take advantage of the quirks of quantum mechanics. Thanks to the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, for example, we know that you can’t measure a photon of light without altering it. Thus, the thinking goes, if you encode information into photons of light, no hacker could intercept the information without giving themselves away. In 2008, we covered the scientists who orchestrated a secure video conference by using a quantum key, a security key derived from the patterns of arriving photons. Now, the Toshiba Research Lab in Cambridge [England] has reported a secure bit rate of 1 MB/sec, which is over 100 times better than previously achieved, making it suitable for commercial application [Nature]. The team outlines this research in Applied Physics Letters.

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For the better part of a decade, the Global Hawk unmanned aerial vehicle has coasted through the stratosphere, surveilling vast panoramas of land below for the U.S. Air Force and Navy. Now the plane’s broad reach will serve science. NASA announced this week that it had completed the first test flight of a Global Hawk retrofitted with monitoring equipment to help scientists study the the oceans, the atmosphere, and more.

“We can go to regions we couldn’t reach or go to previously explored regions and study them for extended periods that are impossible with conventional planes,” said David Fahey, co-mission scientist and research physicist [CNN]. From the comfort of their offices in Dryden Flight Research Center in the Mojave Desert, pilots flew the plane 14 hours up to the Arctic Ocean on this test run. Though this flight lasted about 14 hours, the Global Hawk can stay aloft for 30, and reach altitudes of 60,000, or twice as high as your last commercial airline flight attained.

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The ghost fleet, mothball fleet, reserve fleet—whatever you want to call the long-obsolete U.S. Navy ships that have been rusting in California’s Suisun Bay for decades, they might finally be gone this decade. The federal government’s Maritime Administration says it will spend $38 million to remove about half of the crumbling convoy from the waters near San Francisco by 2012, and dispose of the rest by 2017.

After World War II, there were thousands of surplus ships, and, in 1946, the Maritime Administration began keeping the best of them in reserve. At one time, more than 350 ships were in the fleet, including cruisers, destroyers, supply ships, transports and tankers [San Fransisco Chronicle]. The Navy dusted off some of them for use in the Korean and Vietnam wars. But the rest became relics, slowing decaying over the next six decades. And while the ghost fleet provides some nostalgia for Navy vets, it provides something less romantic for Suisun Bay: pollution. Twenty tons of lead-based paint had leached into the water.

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We gave the BBC a hard time this morning for going a little overboard in declaring the Large Hadron Collider a broken-down mess. But here’s something cool: In a new documentary, a team simulated the blast that “Underwear Bomber” Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab tried to create on Christmas Day last year. Their finding: Even if he had blown up the bomb successfully, it wouldn’t have been enough to take down flight 253 from Amsterdam to Detroit.

Dr John Wyatt, an international terrorism and explosives adviser to the UN, replicated the conditions on board the Detroit flight on a decommissioned Boeing 747 at an aircraft graveyard in Gloucestershire, England [BBC News]. Wyatt used the same amount of the explosive pentaerythritol that the bomber carried, about 80 grams, which packs about the punch of a hand grenade. They put it on the same seat and lit off a controlled explosion, which sent a shock wave through the aluminum exterior.

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The Iraq war and its aftermath have left physical and psychic wounds on both local residents who lived through the American invasion and many U.S. soldiers. But anecdotal reports suggest that another demographic may have suffered as well: unborn babies. Doctors in Fallujah, Iraq have reported a high number of children born with birth deformities ever since the massive battle between Iraqi insurgents and U.S. forces that raged there in 2004.

While no medical studies have been done or official reports have been issued, many Fallujah locals suspect that U.S. weaponry used in the assault has left a lingering effect.

A debate is expected to come up in the British parliament sometime next week on the subject. The call for debate came up after the latest report by BBC’s John Simpson, in which an Iraqi pediatrician said she was seeing two to three deformed babies each day; most of the children had cardiac complications. The doctor clarified that while she didn’t have any official figures, she had noted an increase in the number of cases since the American invasion. The current level of cardiac birth defects in Fallujah, said the BBC, is 13 times higher than that in Europe.

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Spanish authorities announced this week that they shut down what appears to be the largest botnet ever discovered.

The Mariposa botnet, which first appeared in 2008, was a network of nearly 13 million virus-infected PCs, remotely operated by thieves stealing private information from computers in half the Fortune 1000 companies and 190 countries. Though three men are now in custody, worries over the bot are far from over.

Juan Salon at the Spanish Civil Guard was relieved to catch the three men, aged between 25 and 31, whose names have not yet been released. But the guard was troubled to find that none of the three possessed the technical know-how to design something like the Mariposa. “We have not arrested the creator of the botnet. We have arrested the administrators of the botnet, the ones who spread it and were administering and controlling it,” Salon said [San Jose Mercury News]. They are following a fourth suspect, he says.

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Success! The video below shows a test the military ran off the California coast last week, in which a modified Boeing 747 carrying a laser used it to shoot down a test missile; it was the first time a laser weapon has destroyed a missile in its booster stage. DISCOVER covered the first flight tests of this system back in 2008.

The liquid-fueled rocket – thought to be a Scud-B, similar to those being developed by Iran and North Korea – was fired from a ship off the coast California on 11 February [New Scientist]. The plane locked in its tracking lasers, and then unleashed a chemical laser that burned a hole in the side of the missile to blow it up. The Missile Defense Agency ran three total tests, two of which were successful.

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Picture the classic shoot-out in a Western movie: The good guy and the bad guy face each other, their hands quivering over their gun holsters. The bad guy reaches for his weapon, causing the good guy to react–he whips out his pistol and BAM! The hero triumphs. Physicist Niels Bohr once had a theory on why the good guy always won shoot-outs in Hollywood westerns. It was simple: the bad guy always drew first. That left the good guy to react unthinkingly – and therefore faster. When Bohr tested his hypothesis with toy pistols and colleagues who drew first, he always won [New Scientist].

But new research suggests that Bohr didn’t have it exactly right. In a study published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, scientists suggest that people do move faster when they are reacting to what is happening around them–but not fast enough for a heroic gunslinger to save his own life.

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The next generation of bulletproof vests and military armor could well be inspired by a deep-sea snail, say scientists.

A team led by materials scientist Christine Ortiz of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology investigated the iron-rich shell of the “scaly foot” mollusk, whose triple-layered shell gives it one of the strongest exoskeletons seen in nature. The researchers believe that copying its microstructure could help in the development of armor for soldiers, tanks, and helicopters. Their work was published (pdf) this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Scientists were first drawn to this snail in 2003 when they discovered it living in a relatively harsh environment on the floor of the Indian Ocean. It lives near hydrothermal vents that spew hot water–thereby exposing it to fluctuations in temperature as well as high acidity. It also faces attacks from predators like crabs and other snail species. But unlike other snail species, this snail survives because of its thick shell and the different properties of each of its three layers.

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It’s a classic case of bolting the barn door after the horses are gone. Politicians are angry that the “crotch bomber” (who tried to blow up an airplane of Christmas day) got through airport security with his explosives undetected, and have demanded that full-body scanners be placed in all airports. So far, 19 U.S. airports are using the scanners, and the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) hopes to put hundreds more in airports across the country.

Proponents of this technology argue that it’s worth sacrificing privacy (and modesty) for safety. But in their rush to do something policymakers be ignoring five big problems with rolling out this technology:

1. Manufacturers aren’t willing to fill orders. According to a spokesperson for Smiths Detection, a manufacturer of millimeter-wave body scanners, the scanner technology has not yet been certified as fit for purpose by national governments – and manufacturers will not invest in mass production until it has [New Scientist]. Until the TSA and the European Union certify the technology, don’t expect manufactures to rush into production, seeing as how the scanners cost around $125,000 each.

2. They won’t actually catch that many threats. According to a spokesperson for QinetiQ, another body scanner manufacturer, airport body scanners would be “unlikely” to detect many of the explosive devices used by terrorist groups [BBC News]. QinetiQ said the technology probably wouldn’t have detected the Christmas day underwear bomb. Neither would the scanners have caught the explosives from the 2006 airliner liquid bomb plot, nor the explosives used in the 2005 London Tube train bombing. The body scanners aren’t very useful for detecting liquids and plastics and can only help spotlight irregularities under a person’s clothes, said the spokesperson. Singling out every irregularity for further screening will place a heavy burden on airport security (read: bring a pillow with you to the airport).

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Much to the chagrin of a certain Wyoming Senator, the Central Intelligence Agency is poised to fight terrorism and spy on sea lions (Sen. John Barrasso once quipped the CIA should stick to the former occupation). The nation’s top scientists and spies are collaborating on an effort to use the federal government’s intelligence assets — including spy satellites and other classified sensors — to assess the hidden complexities of environmental change. They seek insights from natural phenomena like clouds and glaciers, deserts and tropical forests [The New York Times].

The program will have little impact on the CIA’s normal intelligence gathering, say those involved, and will only release data already in hand or data gathered during satellite down time. The images will even have their sharpness decreased in order to maintain some secrecy about the satellites’ true capabilities.

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Remember the embarrassment that the Transportation Security Administration suffered last month, when a bout of lax editing allowed the TSA standard operating manual to leak across the Web? Last week, the TSA inflicted another public relations snafu upon itself. Agents subpoenaed two travel bloggers who published the organization’s temporary procedures in the wake of the attempted Christmas Day airline bombing, only to drop the subpoenas shortly thereafter.

The document, which the two bloggers published within minutes of each other Dec. 27, was sent by TSA to airlines and airports around the world and described temporary new requirements for screening passengers through Dec. 30, including conducting “pat-downs” of legs and torsos. The document, which was not classified, was posted by numerous bloggers. Information from it was also published on some airline websites [Wired.com]. Still, the TSA (which is part of the Department of Homeland Security, or DHS) decided to target the two bloggers, Chris Elliott and Steven Frischling, to make them reveal who leaked the information to them. And the strong-arm tactics the agency used quickly made it look draconian and repressive.

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The Christmas Day airplane bombing attempt has renewed the debate over full body scanners at airports. The Transportation Security Administration in recent years has tried out a series of “whole-body imagers” to look for threats that typical metal detectors can’t find. These systems are the only way that smuggled explosives, like the one officials say was brought on the Christmas flight, can be reliably found [Wired.com].

Privacy advocates are calling the full body scanners a “digital strip search” (take a look at this TSA image of a full body scan and you’ll get the idea). But some security advocates say that either patting down every passenger or taking full body scans are the only options to ensure certain dangerous items are kept off airplanes.

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Are your phone conversations about to become less secure? A German encryption expert says he’s cracked the two-decade-old algorithm that protects most of the world’s cellphones: GSM (Global System for Mobile communication).

Karsten Nohl says his intentions were noble; he wanted to show the world that though GSM protects 80 percent of the cellphones in the world, it’s far from invincible.  “This shows that existing G.S.M. security is inadequate,” Mr. Nohl, 28, told about 600 people attending the Chaos Communication Congress, a four-day conference of computer hackers that runs through Wednesday in Berlin. “We are trying to push operators to adopt better security measures for mobile phone calls” [The New York Times].

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For an organization dedicated to not letting anything get by them, the Transportation Security Administration seriously dropped the ball this week when a full copy of its standard operating procedures for airport security leaked on the Web.

TSA officials said that the manual was posted online in a redacted form on a federal procurement Web site, but that the digital redactions were inadequate. They allowed computer users to recover blacked-out passages by copying and pasting them into a new document or an e-mail [Washington Post]. Among the information accidentally made public in the PDF: pictures of the passes that CIA officials and members of Congress use, as well as a list of the 12 countries whose passport holders are flagged for extra security checks. The document also revealed technical settings used by airport X-ray and explosive-detecting machines.

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