Lifeboat Foundation

The concept of the Metaverse first blew up in October of 2021 when the company formerly known as Facebook announced its rebranding to Meta with an intent to build the metaverse, a virtual world where users could interact with each other and even play games. Meta, at the time, was said to be hiring 10,000 engineers to build the tools of the Metaverse.

The news made headlines around the world and had people asking: what exactly is a Metaverse? In short, it is an extension of our world, complete with concert venues, museums, and even robot training grounds. In fact, what you can build is only limited by your imagination. do the Metaverse and Omniverse work together? Can one exist without the other? We have the answers to all your questions and more.

Are we to see an evolution of drone designs now?

Researchers at the University of Bristol in the U.K. have designed a flying robot that flaps its wings and can generate more power than a similar-sized insect, which it was inspired from. The robot could pave way for smaller, lighter, and more effective drones, the researchers claimed in an institutional press release.

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“The methods used to approach it cover, I would say, the whole of mathematics,” said Andrei Yafaev of University College London.

The new paper begins with one of the most basic but provocative questions in mathematics: When do polynomial equations like x³ + y³ = z³ have integer solutions (solutions in the positive and negative counting numbers)? In 1994, Andrew Wiles solved a version of this question, known as Fermat’s Last Theorem, in one of the great mathematical triumphs of the 20th century.

In the quest to solve Fermat’s Last Theorem and problems like it, mathematicians have developed increasingly abstract theories that spark new questions and conjectures. Two such problems, stated in 1989 and 1995 by Yves André and Frans Oort, respectively, led to what’s now known as the André-Oort conjecture. Instead of asking about integer solutions to polynomial equations, the André-Oort conjecture is about solutions involving far more complicated geometric objects called Shimura varieties.

AI company DeepMind has built a tool that can create working code to solve complex software challenges.

Giant mountain ranges at least as high as the Himalayas and stretching up to 8,000 kilometers across entire supercontinents played a crucial role in the evolution of early life on Earth, according to a new study by researchers at The Australian National University (ANU).

The researchers tracked the formation of these supermountains throughout Earth’s history using traces of zircon with low lutetium content—a combination of mineral and rare earth element only found in the roots of high mountains where they form under intense pressure.

The study found the most giant of these supermountains only formed twice in Earth’s history—the first between 2,000 and 1,800 million years ago and the second between 650 and 500 million years ago. Both mountain ranges rose during periods of supercontinent formation.

Researchers have discovered 23 “high-impact vulnerabilities” affecting any vendors that adopted Independent BIOS Developers (IBV) code into their Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) firmware.

Binarly explained the vulnerabilities in a blog post this week, confirming that “all these vulnerabilities are found in several of the major enterprise vendor ecosystems” including Fujitsu, Siemens, Dell, HP, HPE, Lenovo, Microsoft, Intel and Bull Atos. CERT/CC confirmed that Fujitsu, Insyde and Intel were affected but left the others tagged as “unknown,” urging anyone affected to update to the latest stable version of firmware.

According to the blog, the majority of the vulnerabilities disclosed lead to code execution with SMM privileges and had severity ratings of between 7.5 — 8.2.

A team of researchers from the University of Massachusetts Amherst recently announced in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that they had engineered a new rubber-like solid substance that has surprising qualities. It can absorb and release very large quantities of energy. And it is programmable. Taken together, this new material holds great promise for a very wide array of applications, from enabling robots to have more power without using additional energy, to new helmets and protective materials that can dissipate energy much more quickly.

“Imagine a rubber band,” says Alfred Crosby, professor of polymer science and engineering at UMass Amherst and the paper’s senior author. “You pull it back, and when you let it go, it flies across the room. Now imagine a super rubber band. When you stretch it past a certain point, you activate extra energy stored in the material. When you let this rubber band go, it flies for a mile.”

This hypothetical rubber band is made out of a new metamaterial—a substance engineered to have a property not found in naturally occurring materials—that combines an elastic, rubber-like substance with tiny magnets embedded in it. This new “elasto-magnetic” material takes advantage of a physical property known as a phase shift to greatly amplify the amount of energy the material can release or absorb.

Quantum science holds promise for many technological applications, such as building hackerproof communication networks or quantum computers that could accelerate new drug discovery. These applications require a quantum version of a computer bit, known as a qubit, that stores quantum information.

But researchers are still grappling with how to easily read the information held in these qubits and struggle with the short memory time, or coherence, of qubits, which is usually limited to microseconds or milliseconds.

A team of researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory and the University of Chicago has achieved two major breakthroughs to overcome these common challenges for quantum systems. They were able to read out their qubit on demand and then keep the quantum state intact for over five seconds—a new record for this class of devices. Additionally, the researchers’ qubits are made from an easy-to-use material called silicon carbide, which is widely found in lightbulbs, electric vehicles and high-voltage electronics.