Lifeboat Foundation

On Tuesday, January 4, Panasonic announced that Redwood Materials would start supplying copper foil to its battery production facility in Giga Nevada. The Japanese tech giant announced the news during the 2022 CES tech trade show.

“Our work together to establish a domestic circular supply chain for batteries is an important step in realizing the full opportunity that EVs have to shape a much more sustainable world,” said Allan Swan, the President of Panasonic Energy of North America, at the latest CES tech trade show.

Redwood Materials, which former Tesla CTO JB Straubel founded, will be supplying Panasonic with copper foil made from recycled materials. The company recycles scripts from discarded electronics like cell phone batteries, laptops, power tools, and even scooters and electric bicycles. Redwood extracts materials like cobalt, nickel, and lithium, which are usually mined, from discarded electronics.

Athletes headed to the Beijing Olympic Winter Games are making final travel preparations, including keeping in line with China’s health measures on the “My 2022″ smartphone app. However, inadequate encryption measures within the app can leave Olympians, journalists and sports officials vulnerable to hackers, privacy breaches, and surveillance, according to a cybersecurity report by the Citizen Lab obtained exclusively by DW. Additionally, the IT forensic specialists found that the app includes a censorship keyword list. The findings come as international concern over digital safety at the Games mounts. Germany, Australia, UK and US have urged their athletes and National Olympic Committees to leave their personal phones and laptops behind and to travel with special devices over fears of digital espionage. The Dutch Olympic Committee outright banned its athletes from bringing personal phones and laptops due to surveillance concerns.

In the Olympic Playbook for athletes and team officials, the International Olympic Committee states that the “My 2022″ app is “in accordance with international standards and Chinese law.” But based on its findings, Citizen Lab concludes that the insecure transmission of personal information “may constitute a direct violation of China’s privacy laws.” This is because China’s data protection laws require that a person’s health and medical records held digitally be transmitted and stored in an encrypted manner. Citizen Lab’s findings also raise questions concerning two Western tech giants that carry the “My 2022″ app: Apple and Google. “Both Apple’s and Google’s policies forbid apps to transmit sensitive data without proper encryption, so Apple and Google will need to determine whether the app’s unresolved vulnerabilities warrant delisting,” Citizen Lab’s Knockel told DW. The Beijing Organizing Committee has stood by its app, however, saying it “passed the examination” of international mobile application markets such as Google, Apple and Samsung.“We have taken measures such as personal information encryption in the app to ensure privacy security,” the committee said Monday to Xinhua News Agency.

Continue reading “Hacking backdoor? Security flaws in China’s mandatory Olympics app | DW News” »

Apple’s digital car key feature might soon be useful for unlocking more than a handful of BMW models. In his latest newsletter, Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman claimed Hyundai and its upscale Genesis badge will support Apple CarKey “by the summer.” It’s not certain which models would provide the option, but it’s notable that some trim levels of the Ioniq 5 and other Hyundai cars include NFC for a (currently proprietary) digital key.

While remote lock controls have been available through smartphones for a while, CarKey (and its Android equivalent) treats the phone more like a physical key. You just have to bring your phone or Apple Watch to the door handle to unlock it, and you can even place your phone in a given area to start the car. People with ultra-wideband iPhones (such as the iPhone 11 and newer) can even leave their phone in their pocket when opening and starting the vehicle.

If the leak is accurate, Apple’s move could significantly expand the audience for digital car keys — you wouldn’t need to shop from one high-end marque to even consider it. A deal would also suggest the tussle over a possible EV collaboration wasn’t enough to deter Apple and Hyundai from exploring a CarKey team-up.

Researchers at University College London (UCL), Universidade de Santiago de Compostela (USC) and biopharma firm FabRx, have managed to convert an everyday smartphone into an on-demand personalized drug 3D printer.

Using the visible light created by a mobile phone screen, the modified M3DIMAKER LUX system has already proven capable of 3D printing blood-thinning tablets in specific shapes, sizes and dosages. Operable via a user-friendly app, it’s hoped that with further R&D, the team’s machine could be deployed in future by those living in isolated areas, under the remote supervision of GPs to ensure patient safety.

“This novel system would help people who need precise dosages that differ from how a medication is typically sold, as well as people whose required dosage may change regularly,” said the study’s lead author Xiaoyan Xu. “The tablet’s shape and size are also customizable, which enables flexibility in the rate at which the medication gets released into the bloodstream.”

Catherine Labadia, an archaeologist at the State Historic Preservation Office, was on vacation when the first text came in from fellow archaeologist David Leslie. The picture on her phone was of a channel flake, a stone remnant associated with the creation of spear points used by Paleoindians, the first humans known to enter the region more than 10,000 years ago. “I responded, ‘Is this what I think it is?’” “It most definitely is,” texted back Leslie, who was on site at the Avon excavation with Storrs-based Archaeological and Historical Services (AHS). “It was all mind-blowing emojis after that,” Labadia says.

But that first picture was just the beginning. By the time the excavation on Old Farms Road was completed after a whirlwind three months in the winter of 2019, the AHS team had uncovered 15,000 Paleoindian artifacts and 27 cultural features. Prior to this dig, according to Leslie, only 10–15 cultural features — non-movable items such as hearths and posts that can provide behavioral and environmental insights — had been found in all of New England.

The site is significant for more than the quantity and types of artifacts and features found. Early analyses are already changing the way archaeologists think of the Paleoindian period, an epoch spanning from about 13,000 to 10,000 years ago of which little is known due to relatively scant archaeological evidence. The forests of that time, for instance, were likely made up of more diverse species of trees than previously thought. And that opens up new interpretations for what Paleoindians ate. Remains found at the excavation also suggest — for the first time — that Paleoindians and mastodons might have overlapped in the region.

A farmer can put the tractor to work with a swipe of a smartphone app and then walk away to attend to other business.

A team of researchers at the Institute of Computer Science and Random Systems has built a non-software-based virus detection system using a Raspberry Pi, an H-field probe and an oscilloscope to detect electromagnetic wave signatures of multiple types of viruses. The team presented its system and test results at last month’s ACM Machinery’s Annual Computer Security Applications Conference and published a paper describing their system on ACM’s Research Article page.

The idea behind the new system is that running software generates electromagnetic waves. And each piece of software generates its own unique wave patterns due to the way the software executes its code. The researchers took advantage of this knowledge and began using an H-field probe to capture wave patterns of known computer viruses running on various devices and viewed the results on an oscilloscope. They saw oscilloscope patterns that were unique to individual viruses as they were running. The researchers used that information to program a Raspberry Pi to identify data from the other two devices to recognize known virus wave patterns, using the system as a virus detector. To determine if a virus is running on a computer, IoT device or smartphone, a user places the H-field probe close enough to the device to read the electromagnetic waves that are generated. The Raspberry Pi then reports on whether it found any viruses, and if so, which ones.

Fittingbox’s Frame Removal uses diminished reality to help people pick out new eyeglasses — but the tech’s potential extends far beyond the bridge of your nose.

French company Fittingbox has just unveiled an app that uses a technology called “diminished reality” — the opposite of augmented reality (AR).

Continue reading “Diminished reality flips the script on AR” »

In a groundbreaking new study, researchers at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities used a customized printer to fully 3D print a flexible organic light-emitting diode (OLED) display. The discovery could result in low-cost OLED displays in the future that could be widely produced using 3D printers by anyone at home, instead of by technicians in expensive microfabrication facilities.

The research is published in Science Advances.

Continue reading “Researchers develop first fully 3D-printed, flexible OLED display” »