Lifeboat Foundation

Google has removed two new malicious dropper apps that have been detected on the Play Store for Android, one of which posed as a lifestyle app and was caught distributing the Xenomorph banking malware.

“Xenomorph is a trojan that steals credentials from banking applications on users’ devices,” Zscaler ThreatLabz researchers Himanshu Sharma and Viral Gandhi said in an analysis published Thursday.

“It is also capable of intercepting users’ SMS messages and notifications, enabling it to steal one-time passwords and multi-factor authentication requests.”

Recent progress in generative models has paved the way to a manifold of tasks that some years ago were only imaginable. With the help of large-scale image-text datasets, generative models can learn powerful representations exploited in fields such as text-to-image or image-to-text translation.

The recent release of Stable Diffusion and the DALL-E API led to great excitement around text-to-image generative models capable of generating complex and stunning novel images from an input descriptive text, similar to performing a search on the internet.

With the rising interest in the reverse task, i.e., image-to-text translation, several studies tried to generate captions from input images. These methods often presume a one-to-one correspondence between pictures and their captions. However, multiple images can be connected to and paired with a long text narrative, such as photos in a news article. Therefore, the need for illustrative correspondences (e.g., “travel” or “vacation”) rather than literal one-to-one captions (e.g., “airplane flying”).

Longevity is not yet considered an official medical term, and aging is not officially considered a disease but a natural occurrence in every living thing.

However, some biologists, researchers and practicing doctors believe this approach should change, and they are striving to discover the mechanisms of aging in humans. In doing so, they are creating age clocks by defining biomarkers for measuring biological age, exploring the best lifestyle habits and natural supplements, and inventing new drugs that could stop us from getting older.

Longevity has been on the radar of crypto leaders for some time already, which is not a surprise given that the industry promises to improve humankind through innovation. Indeed, one prominent event in the longevity industry, the Longevity Investors Conference, is organized by Marc P. Bernegger and Tobias Reichmuth, who were previously involved with the Crypto Finance Group.

Ever wonder why some 90-year olds don’t seem to slow down and seem. to retain the mental and physical capacity of someone half their age?
Do they have good genes? Or is there a way that all of us can get older without getting old?

That’s what Dr. Nir Barzilai, founder of the Institute for Aging Research at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, set out to answer in his book, Age Later.

Continue reading “A discussion with Dr. Nir Barzaili on Age Later” »

Researchers from LP3 Laboratory in France developed a light-based technique for local material processing anywhere in the three-dimensional space of semiconductor chips. The direct laser writing of new functionalities opens the possibility to exploit the sub-surface space for higher integration densities and extra functions.

Semiconductors remain the backbone material of the electronics integrated with modern devices such as cellphones, cars, robots and many other intelligent devices. Driven by the continuous need for miniaturized and powerful chips, the current semiconductor manufacturing technologies are facing increasing pressure.

The dominating manufacturing technology, lithography, has strong limitations when addressing these challenges, given its surface processing nature. For this reason, a solution to fabricating structures under the wafer surfaces would be highly desirable so that the full space inside the materials could be exploited.

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A Paris-based startup has created a genetically engineered houseplant that can literally clean the air within your home. The plant builds off the natural purifying properties that houseplants already offer. So, while it adds some color to whatever room you put it in, it’s also actively keeping the air cleaner than 30 air purifiers.

The company, called Neoplants, modified both a pothos plant as well as its root microbiome to pump the plant’s natural air-cleaning properties up quite a bit. Called Neo P1, the genetically engineered houseplant recently hit the market, and you can purchase it right now.

Continue reading “New genetically engineered houseplant cleans air as efficiently as 30 air purifiers” »

T ransplant medicine could take a giant leap forward if donor organs could soak up oxygen for longer and decay delayed. A technology called OrganEx, described in Nature from a team at Yale, promises to do just that. The researchers stopped the hearts of pigs and an hour later used OrganEx, then cataloged the return of bodily functions. The new approach far exceeded the ability of existing technology to prolong organ viability.

Pigs have long been a popular animal model of human disease because they are about our size and their hearts and blood vessels are quite similar. They have also had fictional roles in medicine.

In the Twilight Zone episode Eye of the Beholder, Janet Tyler has undergone multiple procedures to replace the “pitiful twisted lump of flesh” that is her face with something more acceptable. At the end, as the bandages are slowly unrolled from yet another failed procedure, we see that she naturally looks like us, considered hideous in her world where most people, including the nurse and doctor, have pig faces. Janet and others like her are sent to live among themselves.

Artificial intelligence has helped design an invisibility cloak. The cloak could hide communication devices from detectors that use microwaves or infrared light.

Quantum mechanics, the theory which rules the microworld of atoms and particles, certainly has the X factor.

Unlike many other areas of physics, it is bizarre and counter-intuitive, which makes it dazzling and intriguing.

When the 2022 Nobel prize in physics was awarded to Alain Aspect, John Clauser, and Anton Zeilinger for research shedding light on quantum mechanics, it sparked excitement and discussion.