Lifeboat Foundation

By one major metric, artificial general intelligence is much closer than you think.

The public perceives OpenAI’s ChatGPT as revolutionary, but the same techniques are being used and the same kind of work is going on at many research labs, says the deep learning pioneer.

Recent experiments conducted in Boston labs have shown reverse aging results among mice and could show similar results in people.

The combined experiments — which were conducted during a span of 13 years — published Thursday (January 12) in the scientific journal Cell reported that old, blind mice regained eyesight, developed smarter brains and built healthier muscle and kidney tissue, challenging the theory that DNA was the only cause of aging, as it proved that chemical and structural changes to chromatin played a factor without altering genetic code.

The research showed that a breakdown in epigenetic information caused the mice to age and the restoration of the epigenome reversed aging effects.

We might all have been in a situation where we had to put our trust in our work to hold up and do what it needed to do, but Margaret Hamilton’s work was particularly important — it was responsible for putting Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin on the moon in July 1969.

When warning lights started going off in the middle of the Eagle module’s descent toward the lunar surface, NASA faced a tough decision: continue with the landing or abort.

Continue reading “Margaret Hamilton: Pioneering Software Engineer Who Saved the Moon Landing” »

An unsecured server discovered by a security researcher last week contained the identities of hundreds of thousands of individuals from the U.S. government’s Terrorist Screening Database and “No Fly List.”

Located by the Swiss hacker known as maia arson crimew, the server, run by the U.S. national airline CommuteAir, was left exposed on the public internet. It revealed a vast amount of company data, including private information on almost 1,000 CommuteAir employees.

CommuteAir also confirmed the legitimacy of the data, stating that it was a version of the “federal no-fly list” from roughly four years prior.

Continue reading “EXCLUSIVE: U.S. airline accidentally exposes ‘No Fly List’ on unsecured server” »

Virus-enveloping macromolecular shells or tilings can prevent viruses from entering cells. Here, we describe the design and assembly of a cone-shaped DNA origami higher-order assembly that can engulf and tile the surface of pleomorphic virus samples larger than 100 nm. We determine the structures of subunits and of complete cone assemblies using cryoelectron microscopy (cryo-EM) and establish stabilization treatments to enable usage in in vivo conditions. We use the cones exemplarily to engulf influenza A virus particles and severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), chikungunya, and Zika virus-like particles. Depending on the relative dimensions of cone to virus particles, multiple virus particles may be trapped per single cone, and multiple cones can also tile and adapt to the surface of aspherical virus particles. The cone assemblies form with high yields, require little purification, and are amenable for mass production, which is a key requirement for future real-world uses including as a potential antiviral agent.

Far below our feet, a giant may have started moving against us.

Earth’s inner core, a hot iron ball the size of Pluto, has stopped spinning in the same direction as the rest of the planet and might even be rotating the other way, research suggested on Monday.

Roughly 5,000 kilometers (3,100 miles) below the surface we live on, this “planet within the planet” can spin independently because it floats in the liquid metal outer core.

A threat actor tracked as DEV-0569 uses Google Ads in widespread, ongoing advertising campaigns to distribute malware, steal victims’ passwords, and ultimately breach networks for ransomware attacks.

Over the past couple of weeks, cybersecurity researchers MalwareHunterTeam, Germán Fernández, and Will Dormann have illustrated how Google search results have become a hotbed of malicious advertisements pushing malware.

These ads pretend to be websites for popular software programs, like LightShot, Rufus, 7-Zip, FileZilla, LibreOffice, AnyDesk, Awesome Miner, TradingView, WinRAR, and VLC.

The WordPress online course plugin ‘LearnPress’ was vulnerable to multiple critical-severity flaws, including pre-auth SQL injection and local file inclusion.

LearnPress is a learning management system (LMS) plugin that allows WordPress websites to easily create and sell online courses, lessons, and quizzes, providing visitors with a friendly interface while requiring no coding knowledge from the website developer.

The vulnerabilities in the plugin, used in over 100,000 active sites, were discovered by PatchStack between November 30 and December 2, 2022, and reported to the software vendor.