Lifeboat Foundation

An analysis reveals striking similarities between the BlackSuit and Royal ransomware strains.

Human intelligence may be just a brief phase before machines take over. That may answer where the aliens are hiding.

The quantum fluctuations that pervade empty space spontaneously give birth to pairs of particles and antiparticles. Ordinarily, these pairs annihilate so promptly that their existence is virtual. But a powerful field can pull a pair’s members apart for long enough that their existence becomes real. In 1951 Julian Schwinger calculated how strong an electric field needs to be to beget electron–positron pairs. Now Michael Wondrak and his colleagues of Radboud University in the Netherlands have proposed that particle pairs can be brought into existence by the immense gravitational tidal forces around a black hole [1].

Wondrak and his colleagues considered all the paths a pair of virtual particles could take during their brief existence. If the vacuum is stable, all pairs that are created are also destroyed. But a strong field destabilizes the vacuum, makes some paths more likely than others, and leads to a deficit of pairs that recombine. The deficit is balanced by a net outflow of real particles, which, in the case of a black hole’s gravitational field, leads to the black hole’s eventual evaporation.

The theorists’ approach is sufficiently general that it could reproduce not only Schwinger’s effect but also Stephen Hawking’s 1974 proposal that if a particle–antiparticle pair springs into virtual existence near a black hole’s event horizon, one member could fall in while the other escapes. What’s more, the researchers found that Hawking’s effect is a special case of a more general phenomenon. Pulling virtual particles into existence depends only on the stretching of spacetime wrought by a curved gravitational field and does not require an event horizon as Hawking originally suggested. One intriguing implication is that a neutron star, whose Schwarzschild radius lies beneath the stellar surface, can also beget particle pairs and decay.

Atom for the first time. Using a pioneering technique known as synchrotron X-ray scanning tunneling microscopy (SX-STM), the team was able to identify and characterize individual atoms, opening new possibilities in environmental, medical, and quantum research.

A team of scientists from Ohio University, Argonne National Laboratory, the University of Illinois-Chicago, and others, led by Ohio University Professor of Physics, and Argonne National Laboratory scientist, Saw Wai Hla, has taken the world’s first X-ray SIGNAL (or SIGNATURE) of just one atom. This groundbreaking achievement was funded by the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Basic Energy Sciences, and could revolutionize the way scientists detect materials.

A breakdown of tech salaries shows the disparity in compensation between CEO and median employee pay.

AI is going to have a huge impact on the workforce. And while there will be winners in the workplace, there will also be losers.

Scientists making the “Air-gen” device have discovered that any material can be used to generate electricity from the air.

Since 2015, reusable rockets have dramatically decreased the cost of transportation from Earth to orbit. Such process is paving the path toward a civilian sp…

Summary: Researchers developed a machine learning algorithm, FoodProX, capable of predicting the degree of processing in food products.

The tool scores foods on a scale from zero (minimally or unprocessed) to 100 (highly ultra-processed). FoodProX bridges gaps in existing nutrient databases, providing higher resolution analysis of processed foods.

This development is a significant advancement for researchers examining the health impacts of processed foods.