Lifeboat Foundation

Run for serverless containers includes new metrics, supports Cloud SQL, and is available from new GCP regions.

What can gamma rays really do?

You won’t be commuting to the office in it, but by this time next year it could be an entertaining extreme sport.

Facebook removed more than 3 billion fake accounts from October to March, twice as many as the previous six months, the company said Thursday.

Nearly all of them were caught before they had a chance to become “active” users of the social network.

In a new report, Facebook said it saw a “steep increase” in the creation of abusive, fake accounts in the past six months. While most of these fake accounts were blocked “within minutes” of their creation, the company said this increase of “automated attacks” by bad actors meant not only that it caught more of the fake accounts, but that more of them slipped through the cracks.

Continue reading “Facebook: Fake account removal doubles in 6 months to 3B” »

How does a coma affect the body?

Science fiction is often seen as an anticipation – a fiction peculiarly expected to graduate into fact. But if technologies once found only in SF do sometimes become real they do not, in so doing, always cease to be science fictional. SF is not, after all, simply a literature about the future; it is a literature about the shock of new capacities and new perspectives, about transcendence, estrangement and resistance in the face of the inhuman. Its ideas shape and constrain the ways in which technological possibilities are seen, understood and experienced long after those possibilities are first tentatively realised. It illuminates the dreams of Musk, Bezos and all the other new moon-rushers.

Fifty years after the first moon landings, a new generation of space travellers, from Xi Jinping’s taikonauts to Jeff Bezos, are racing to colonise our nearest neighbour. Is reality catching up with sci-fi?

In November last year, geologists announced they’d picked up something really weird: a huge seismic event originating in the island of Mayotte in the Indian Ocean, felt all across the globe, source unknown. A few months later, scientists used modelling to produce an answer — hypothesising a giant underwater volcanic eruption.

And now it seems that is pretty likely to be the case. Scientists travelled out to where they think the swarm’s epicentre is located, and they found a large active volcano, rising 800 metres (2,624 feet) from the seafloor, and sprawling up to 5 kilometres (3.1 miles) across.

A large active volcano that wasn’t there six months prior.

Continue reading “Stunning Sonar Image Just Revealed Largest Underwater Volcano Eruption Ever Detected” »

Circa 2017

Scientists in all areas of research must feel able to freely articulate the implications of their work without concern for causing offense.

Continue reading “Creating a Universe in the Lab? The Idea Is No Joke” »