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As in recent years, panelists included Ron Rivest and Adi Shamir - the R and S in the RSA cryptosystem. They were joined by Carmela Troncoso, an assistant professor at Switzerland s École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, whose work focuses on analyzing, building and deploying secure and privacy-preserving systems.
Also on the panel: Ross Anderson, a professor of security engineering at both the University of Cambridge and the University of Edinburgh, founder of the discipline of security economics and author of the textbook Security Engineering - A Guide to Building Dependable Distributed Systems.
Moderating was Zulfikar Ramzan, chief digital officer at RSA - the security firm that runs the eponymous conference - who dived headfirst into one aspect of the crypto debate.
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IMAGE: A diamond encapsulating tiny bits of fluid from the deep earth, held here by fine tweezers, was part of a study delving into the age and origins of South African. view more
Credit: Yaakov Weiss
Diamonds are sometimes described as messengers from the deep earth; scientists study them closely for insights into the otherwise inaccessible depths from which they come. But the messages are often hard to read. Now, a team has come up with a way to solve two longstanding puzzles: the ages of individual fluid-bearing diamonds, and the chemistry of their parent material. The research has allowed them to sketch out geologic events going back more than a billion years a potential breakthrough not only in the study of diamonds, but of planetary evolution.
(Yaakov Weiss)
Most diamonds are thought to form some 150 to 200 kilometers under the surface, in relatively cool masses of rock beneath the continents. The process may go back as far as 3.5 billion years, and probably continues today. Occasionally, they are carried upward by powerful, deep-seated volcanic eruptions called kimberlites. (Don’t expect to see one erupt today; the youngest known kimberlite deposits are tens of millions of years old.)
Much of what we know about diamonds comes from lab experiments, and studies of other minerals and rocks that come up with the diamonds, or are sometimes even encased within them. The 10 diamonds the team studied came from mines founded by the De Beers company in and around Kimberley, South Africa. “We like the ones that no one else really wants,” said Weiss fibrous, dirty-looking specimens containing solid or liquid impurities that disqualify them as jewelry, but carry potentially valuable chemical information. Up to now, most resear