An innocent Canadian wrongly served 18 months in prison after Wisconsin police misspelled his Skyrim-inspired internet username.
Brandon Klayme from Halifax, Nova Scotia, was arrested in 2020 on charges of child luring and possession of child sex abuse imagery, after his username on chat app Kik was tracked down by U.S. cops.
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But police made an error when identifying that Elder Scrolls IV: Skyrim username, Klayme's lawyers have now proven, finally securing their client's innocence six years later — and long after he served 18 months behind bars for crimes that someone else committed.
The case's 12-year-old victim identified the man talking to them on Kik as operating under the username "fus__ro_dah," a reference to Skyrim's infamous dragon language shout. Klayme, meanwhile, used the username "fus_ro_dah," a difference of one underscore.
In an affidavit submitted for his appeal seen by CBC News, Klayme said this difference had been "a subtle mistake that changed the course of my life."
"We noticed the problem when we were working on the appeal arguments this spring," Klayme's defence lawyer Zeb Brown told CBC News. "We were trying to figure out why the digital forensic evidence pointed at him given his denial of any involvement."
"If the correct username had been used at the start of the investigation, the subsequent steps in the investigation would not have led to Mr. Klayme," a subsequent appeal board declared. "In these circumstances, Mr. Klayme is factually innocent of the offences. He should never have been charged, let alone convicted."
As yet, there's no word on whether Klayme will pursue any further claim for damages after it's now been shown that he was falsely imprisoned. For now, however, his name has been cleared.
Earlier this month, Skyrim publisher Bethesda announced that its beloved RPG had now officially crossed the 65 million units sold milestone, joining fellow fantasy role-playing game The Witcher 3 as one of the top 10 best-selling games of all time. Confirmation came from Bethesda boss Todd Howard, who outlined the company’s lineup of games following Xbox’s latest round of layoffs, with The Elder Scrolls 6 now a priority.
A conceptual illustration showing the direct correspondence between the elusive non-trivial zeros of the Riemann zeta function and dynamical quantum phase transitions (DQPT) engineered within a quantum many-body system. Credit: Shijie Wei/BAQIS.
A new study in Nature Communications has established a link between the Riemann Hypothesis and dynamical phase transitions in engineered quantum systems, demonstrating the effect on a quantum processor.
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First posed in 1859, the Riemann Hypothesis is one of the longest-standing unsolved problems in mathematics. It underpins parts of cryptography, as well as more than a thousand theorems proved on the assumption that it is true.
Physicists have previously proposed physical counterparts to this mathematical statement. The aim was to map the Riemann Hypothesis to something concrete, such as the energy levels of a quantum system. The new study ties the hypothesis to how a quantum system evolves over time.
Phys.org spoke to co-authors Dr. Shijie Wei from the Beijing Academy of Quantum Information Sciences (BAQIS), Professor Tao Xin from the Shenzhen International Quantum Academy, and Professor Gui-Lu Long from BAQIS and Tsinghua University about their work.
"Many [academics] have suggested that the final solution to the Riemann Hypothesis may not come from the field of algebra, and that the answer is instead embedded in the fundamental laws of physics," they said. "Motivated by this long-held intuition ... our core goal has been to turn this poetic theoretical insight into concrete quantum-physical interpretations and to explore whether quantum computing technology can open up a new path for addressing this 160-year-old problem in number theory."
From energy levels to time
The Riemann zeta function is a mathematical sum of infinitely many terms, closely tied to the distribution of prime numbers. Its nontrivial zeros all sit within a narrow band of the complex plane called the critical strip. Riemann conjectured that every one of them has a real part of exactly 1/2, placing them all on a single line down the middle of that strip, the critical line, and no one has proven that this holds for all of them.
Physicists have suspected a connection between the zeta zeros and quantum mechanics for the better part of a century. The most influential version of this idea is the Hilbert–Pólya conjecture, which proposes that the zeros might be the energy levels of an undiscovered quantum system.
Correspondence between the Riemann zeta function and physical many-body systems. Credit: Shijie Wei et al
That search has proven difficult. "Identifying and scaling such a stationary Hamiltonian is notoriously challenging, particularly on near-term quantum hardware," said the researchers. Their study takes a different route.
"We posed a distinct question: What if we use time instead of energy as our core variable?" they explained, pointing to dynamical quantum phase transitions (DQPT), moments when a quantum system's properties change abruptly as it evolves. "Since time is the most natural and precisely controllable variable in quantum computing, we recognized that DQPT provides an ideal temporal framework to 'scan' for and reveal these mathematical zeros."
Two quantum systems
The team began by building two complementary quantum systems, each consisting of a many-body system coupled to a single probe qubit. Both systems are prepared in thermal equilibrium and then driven out of equilibrium over time. In this setup, the two components of the zeta function's complex argument become physical variables: The real part corresponds to the system's temperature, and the imaginary part corresponds to evolution time.
Within this framework, a phase transition can occur only if the system is prepared at a precise temperature along the critical line. Observing such a transition at any other temperature would signal a breakdown of the Riemann Hypothesis within this physical mapping.
To test this, the team built the first of their two systems on a five-qubit nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) processor, using the nuclear spins of a molecule containing three fluorine atoms and two hydrogen atoms, with one spin serving as the probe. The team ran the processor at three settings: on the critical line, off the critical line and at the imaginary part corresponding to the first nontrivial zero.
"Only when the parameters simultaneously satisfied both conditions—lying on the critical line and equaling a Riemann zero—did the observed signal completely vanish, indicating that a dynamical quantum phase transition had occurred," the researchers said.
Their second system was built around a related quantity called the Loschmidt amplitude. Rather than being run on hardware, it was tested through numerical simulation, extending the correspondence to the trillionth zero. The researchers also proposed a gate-based quantum algorithm capable of implementing either system using only polynomial resources.
Finding zeros
The NMR experiment produced a clean result. When the system was tuned to the critical line, probe-qubit coherence collapsed at points matching the first five nontrivial zeros of the zeta function. Off the critical line, no such collapses appeared. This collapse is the dynamical phase transition itself. The moment the probe qubit's quantum signal drops to zero marks where a zero of the zeta function has been detected.
The numerical simulation of the second system showed the same zero-to-collapse relationship out to the trillionth zero, with the simulated zero locations matching the true, known values more precisely at larger zeros.
The researchers clarified that their work is not a rigorous mathematical proof of the Riemann Hypothesis, since experiments and simulations can only ever check a finite number of zeros.
"Its true significance lies in providing a radically new, scalable tool with a clear quantum advantage," the researchers said. "Classically, simulating dense, massive number-theoretic functions or verifying zeros extremely far out on the critical line becomes exponentially expensive. Our proposed digital quantum framework requires only polynomial resources."
What's next?
The researchers outlined three directions for future work. The first is scaling up their hardware, moving from the five-qubit demonstration to larger digital quantum platforms capable of resolving much higher-order zeros. The second is expanding into physics applications beyond number theory, including using the same framework to calculate the Witten index in string theory or to probe the thermodynamic properties of black holes. The third is broadening the approach to other unsolved problems in mathematics.
"Since the Riemann zeta function can be mapped to quantum dynamics, it inspires us to wonder if other mysteries in number theory—such as generalized L-functions or structural properties related to other arithmetic conjectures—possess their own physical 'twins' waiting to be discovered in quantum many-body systems," the researchers said.
Written for you by our author Tejasri Gururaj, edited by Gaby Clark, and fact-checked and reviewed by Robert Egan—this article is the result of careful human work. We rely on readers like you to keep independent science journalism alive.
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I've learned a lot about being an American parent in Italy while living in our small town in the Calabria region.
Elya Martseva/Getty Images
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When my family moved from the United States to a small town in Southern Italy 12 years ago, I expected our children to grow up speaking another language and experiencing a different way of life.
I didn't fully anticipate how much the move would challenge my ideas about parenting (in a good way).
I was born and raised in Cleveland and attended Ohio State University, so my instincts were influenced by life in and around large American cities. I was accustomed to parents closely supervising where their children went, organizing their schedules, and treating late evenings as adult territory.
In our part of Southern Italy, Mormanno, a mountain town in the Calabria region with a population of less than 3,000 people, many of those assumptions do not apply.
Over the years, I have had to decide which local customs to embrace, which American values to preserve, and how to raise children who understand both cultures without feeling that they must choose between them.
Children here are typically given more freedom in public
I've found it's not uncommon to see kids playing without their parents super close by in our town.
Daniel Llao Calvet/Getty Images
One of the first differences I noticed was how independently children move around town.
In the small community where we live, it's not unusual to see kids walking through the town center, visiting friends, or spending time outside without a parent or adult directly beside them.
Older children and teenagers tend to remain outside much later than I would have considered normal growing up in Cleveland, too.
At first, this felt shocking and made me uncomfortable. My American instincts told me that children needed much closer supervision, particularly after dark.
But the environment is different from the one that birthed my expectations. Crime here in our town is extremely rare, and local families often know one another across generations.
A child may be outside without a parent, but that does not necessarily mean no adult is paying attention. Neighbors, relatives, shopkeepers, and family friends are often nearby.
The freedom children receive reflects both the community's safety and the trust created by living in a place where people recognize one another.
It took me time to understand that independence here can exist within a strong communal safety net.
Kids seem to be included in adult social life more often
When the adults go out for a late dinner, it's not uncommon for the kids to come along.
I was also surprised by how naturally children are woven into social life here.
In the US, many parents arrange babysitters for late dinners or adult gatherings. We also tend to distinguish between spaces that are meant for children and those intended primarily for adults. Even at family events, kids may be given a separate table or activity area.
Where we live in Italy, children are usually part of the gathering. It's not unusual for families to bring young children to restaurants, cafés, celebrations, and evening events, sometimes quite late at night.
What Americans might call a bar is often also a neighborhood café where people drink coffee, eat pastries, and socialize with their families.
The expectation is not necessarily that every environment must be specially designed for children. Instead, kids gradually learn how to exist within the broader social world of the family and other adults.
That approach can make evenings feel less structured than what many American parents are accustomed to. Strict bedtimes and carefully planned routines may give way to long dinners, spontaneous visits, and children falling asleep nearby while the adults continue talking.
I still value routine, particularly because every child responds differently to changes in sleep and structure. But I have come to appreciate a culture in which parenthood does not seem to automatically exclude families from so much of community life.
Independence means something different in each culture
Italy has challenged my views of independence.
ASphotowed/Getty Images
Perhaps the most interesting contrast is that Italian children can appear more independent when they are young but remain more closely connected to their families as they grow older.
American culture often defines independence as separation. Young people are encouraged to earn their own money, move out, and build lives apart from their parents. Living at home well into adulthood can sometimes be interpreted as a failure to progress.
In Southern Italy, independence seems less connected to leaving the family unit. Adult children may live with their parents longer, remain heavily involved in family decisions, or depend on relatives for practical support. In return, they are also expected to remain available to help parents, grandparents, and siblings.
Some of this is cultural, and some is connected to economic realities and limited job opportunities. To me, it also reflects a more interdependent idea of family life. Adulthood does not necessarily mean needing one another less.
That has challenged some of my American assumptions. I still want my children to become capable, responsible adults, but I no longer believe autonomy has to mean distance.
Ultimately, we are doing our best to raise our children between cultures
Assimilation can make daily life easier, but complete assimilation would require our kids (not pictured) to give up parts of themselves that matter.
VICTORIA Strelets/Getty Images
I do recognize that much of what I've experienced here is probably very similar to how life is in small rural cities in the US. For me, however, it was like a whole new world.
Our greatest challenge has been helping our children participate fully in Italian life without losing their American identity or their identity as African Americans.
We want them to speak the language, understand local customs, and appreciate the community in which they are growing up. We also want them to know the history, traditions, and experiences that connect them to their family and culture in the US.
After 12 years, I no longer see Italian and American parenting as a contest in which one approach must be better than the other. Each reflects different ideas about safety, family, community, and what children need in order to thrive.
Raising our kids here has required constant negotiation. We have adopted some Italian habits, held firmly to some American ones, and created others that belong specifically to our family.
Our children are not growing up exactly as I did, but they are learning how to belong to more than one place. That may be the most unexpected part of raising them abroad, and perhaps the most valuable.
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Creshonda Smith is a creative writer with 10 years of experience covering lifestyle topics like parenting, relationships, traveling, and food. She also likes to write about things she is unfamiliar with because it forces her to learn something new about the world around her.Hailing from Cleveland, Creshonda is an Ohio State University graduate with a master's degree in clinical social work. She specializes in listicles, features, trending topics, news, and op-eds. Her work has been published on MSN, Yahoo, Apple News, and a myriad of specialty blog sites.
When your internet starts buffering in the middle of a video call or slows down right as you’re placing a mobile takeout order, the last thing on your mind is whether your network is cable, 5G or fiber.
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Instead, you’re focused on whether you’ll be able to complete your work or handle transactions without interruption. Even so, consumers often choose internet providers based on infrastructure labels rather than the outcomes they experience day-to-day—factors like speed, reliability and overall network performance.
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Fiber (an internet technology that uses fiber-optic cables to deliver service) has long been considered the gold standard for home internet.
What’s The Difference Between Fiber And Cable?
Fiber and cable networks both deliver internet to your home, but in different ways. Fiber transmits data using pulses of light through thin strands of glass, allowing it to move large amounts of information swiftly. Cable networks use a different type of wiring, called coaxial cables, for the final connection into a home, though many providers also rely on fiber throughout their broader network infrastructure.
Xfinity, for example, uses a network built on fiber that delivers internet to homes via coaxial cable, illustrating how a provider’s broader network architecture can shape the overall internet experience, even when the final connection into the home isn’t fiber.
Xfinity’s network is being upgraded to deliver symmetrical upload and download speeds over hybrid fiber-coax infrastructure — meaning more of its customers can access faster, more balanced connections without requiring a full fiber rebuild to every home. According to Comcast, Xfinity was also the first provider in the world to deploy a technology specifically designed to reduce lag for gaming and video calls — two activities that have become essential for many households1.
These technical differences can influence speed and capacity, which is why fiber developed its reputation over time. But the type of connection coming into your home is only one part of the picture. The actual quality of your everyday internet experience also depends on how well a provider’s network supports the activities your household relies on.
How Your Household Experiences Home Internet
The average U.S. household now has 21 connected devices, from smartphones, tablets and gaming consoles to video doorbells, smart speakers and robot vacuums.
As more devices compete for bandwidth throughout the day, an internet provider needs to keep them all running without a hitch. A strong network should support all the activities your household relies on by delivering:
Reliability: Your connection stays stable, whether you’re streaming a live event or downloading a homework assignment.
Responsiveness: Websites load quickly, apps respond without delay and video calls start without noticeable lag.
Whole-home coverage: Your connection remains strong throughout your home (not just in the room where the router sits).
Multi-device performance: Everyone can stream, work, play games or browse at the same time without competing for bandwidth.
Consistency: Your internet has steady speed and performance throughout the day, even during busy periods.
These are the qualities that shape your everyday internet experience; they’re also the kinds of outcomes independent performance studies increasingly measure when comparing providers.
A Smarter Way To Assess Your Internet Service
So how can you gauge whether a provider will deliver the internet experience described above?
One place to start is performance data from real users. Independent research firms can evaluate how providers perform in everyday use, measuring factors like reliability, consistency, video quality and download speeds. Some research also examines how people experience connectivity across both home internet and mobile networks, recognizing that consumers increasingly expect a seamless experience whether they’re at home or on the go.
In one recent national study of broadband providers, Xfinity ranked first in three of five total award categories: consistent quality, download speed experience and video experience. Together, the findings underscore the network’s strong performance across online activities like video calls, streaming, web browsing and connected-home use, reinforcing Xfinity’s ability to deliver the kind of everyday internet experience modern households value.
The company's home internet service also includes technologies designed to support those everyday experiences, such as the Xfinity Gateway (free with all plan tiers), which helps optimize in-home WiFi performance and support the growing number of connected devices found in today's households.
Independent performance research is only one piece of the decision-making process, but it can provide a valuable point of comparison alongside a household’s specific demands, internet habits and the area’s service availability.
Key Questions To Ask When Finalizing Your Home Internet Choice
If you’re comparing providers, it helps to have a framework for your decision. Rather than asking only “Is it fiber?” consider these questions:
Is it reliable? Ask about the provider's uptime and how often the network drops during everyday use. For example, Xfinity says its network delivers 99.9% reliability, giving consumers one benchmark to consider when comparing providers.
How does it perform during peak hours? Get information on the provider’s coverage in your area and find reports about recent service outages. This will tell you whether the network can manage usage surges.
How does it handle multiple devices at once? Think about the number of devices your household uses today and whether the provider can support them without compromising performance.
What does the data show? Independent research can provide another point of comparison, helping you understand how providers perform across measures like consistent quality and download speed experience. Xfinity, for example, ranked first across those three categories.
Does it fit my household’s needs? Consider the internet activity for various members of your household. Frequent video calls, online gaming, streaming and smart-home devices all place different demands on your connection.
By considering both the technology behind your internet service and how it performs in everyday life, you’ll be better equipped to choose the provider that's right for your household. Xfinity's recent independent performance rankings illustrate how those factors can come together to support the internet experience households expect.
1. Xfinity says its network is being upgraded to DOCSIS 4.0 Full Duplex (FDX) technology and that it was the first provider in the world to deploy Low Latency DOCSIS.%!s()
Two Polish citizens who have lived in the UK for nearly 80 years after their parents fled the second world war have spoken of their terrifying experience after being told they did not have post-Brexit rights to return to the UK.
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In May, while visiting Poland, they learned that although they had been welcomed as refugees after the war, they now needed special post-Brexit paperwork to return to their home in Bury, Greater Manchester.
Maria Krupa, 85, and her husband, Czeslaw, 92, who met in the UK and went on to marry and settle in Bury, were issued with “aliens’ registration cards” and have travelled extensively as adults without anyone asking them for their immigration status.
Maria and Czeslaw Krupa in Kraków airport. Photograph: Image courtesy of Stephanie Postle Krupa/the Krupa family
Czeslaw, who came from Lviv which was then part of Poland, and Maria, who left her home town in what is now Belarus as an infant, had travelled to Poland in May to meet surviving family members.
But Ryanair refused to allow them to board the flight for their return journey on the grounds that they had neither proof of the right to live in the UK nor the new electronic travel authorisation (ETA) now required for foreign tourists entering the UK.
“It was a big shock,” said Maria. “We were very, very disappointed and a bit upset because my husband takes a lot of medicine because of a stroke to his spinal cord.”
They had arrived in Southampton in 1947 and 1948 as the young dependants of displaced Polish service members who had been evacuated from their homes in 1940 and later became part of Gen Władysław Anders’s Polish army that served in Persia, India, the Middle East and Africa.
Anders’s army played a key role in the defeat of the Third Reich and had integrated into the British military command structure after friction with the Soviets in 1942.
“We tried to explain to Ryanair that our fathers fought for Poland and England in the war, but they refused to let us on the plane because they said they would have to pay a big fine,” said Maria.
“My husband was really upset,” she said, explaining that Czeslaw used a mobility scooter and was on a lot of medication after the stroke. He has difficulty getting in and out of cars and “just wanted to get home”, she said.
Czeslaw Krupa, left, with his brother and cousin in Africa in 1944. Photograph: Image courtesy of Stephanie Postle Krupa/the Krupa family
They are speaking out to help others who might be in the same position. “It was a big, big shock because we never heard of this and we never thought for one minute that after nearly 80 years someone would tell us we couldn’t go home,” said Maria.
Kate Smart, the chief executive of Settled, who helped the Krupas, said the charity was seeing “thousands of cases” like the Krupas’. “It is a really common occurrence, almost on a daily basis,” she said.
The EU settlement scheme was launched in 2019 to give EU citizens living in the UK the documentary evidence needed to travel as they had done under the pre-Brexit, free-movement rules.
Many of the people seen by Settled are elderly people who have British children and grandchildren. “They have nobody in their family circle who thinks like immigrants so they don’t talk about things like ‘settled status’,” said Smart.
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Maria Krupa as a child in Karachi, then part of India, where her father was stationed in 1943. Displaced Polish people were housed in refugee camps. Photograph: Image courtesy of Stephanie Postle Krupa/the Krupa family
Maria said she had never thought to get a British passport as she had never needed it in the previous 80 years and it had never crossed her mind. “It was really important. I didn’t think of it as sort of weakening my identity. I love England. I mean, I always say, I’m very grateful to England, you know, to have taken so many people, you know thousands after the war. But I just thought it was important that we stay Polish,” she said.
After being forced to leave the airport late on a Sunday night in May, they returned the next day with an ETA but the couple had to pose as tourists, claiming they lived in Poland as the online form would not accept their British address.
Maria and Czeslaw Krupa celebrate Czeslaw’s 90th birthday in Bury. Photograph: Image courtesy of the Krupa family/the Krupa family
Maria said: “When we arrived in England we were terrified. We had to be careful about what we said. We were terrified because they started asking questions and we thought we are not going to lie again and have to tell the truth.”
After going to Citizens Advice in Bury, they were connected with Settled. Smart commended the Home Office resolution centre for its swift action after the charity submitted a no-time-limit application that resulted in settled status for the Krupas last week.
She appealed to the government to take note of the issues with the EU settlement scheme, arguing “a process should have kicked in at the airport” when an issue such as this one arose.
A spokesperson said the Home Office would encourage people to check their immigration status before they travel, but anyone in a similar situation to the Krupas should make a no-time-limit application to get the paperwork they needed to travel in and out of the country.
“Anyone settled in the UK without up-to-date evidence of their status is encouraged to make a no-time-limit application. This will give them access to an eVisa and facilitate seamless future travel,” they said. %!s()
