Lifeboat Foundation

With plans for a nationwide rollout in the United States.

While the coronavirus pandemic undoubtedly brought grave hardships to most of us, it has also provided some opportunity for innovation. At this year’s CES 2022, the world’s largest technology show that takes place in Las Vegas, Nevada, the tech startup Ottonomy IO presented tremendous progress in building fleets of autonomous delivery robots. Its machines have already been employed at retail locations around the U.S., with a very real possibility they are coming to a store or drive-through near you soon.

Continue reading “Fully Autonomous Delivery Robots Might Just Become An Everyday Reality” »

A large, rocky asteroid is going to fly by Earth next week.

At 1 kilometer (3,280 feet) long, it’s roughly two and a half times the height of the Empire State Building, and it’s been classed a “Potentially Hazardous Asteroid” due to its size and its regular close visits to our planet.

But don’t worry, this month’s visit is going to have a very safe clearance, with the asteroid zipping by at a distance of 1.93 million kilometers (~1.2 million miles) away from Earth – that’s roughly 5.15 times more distant than the Moon.

Hackers used a cloud video hosting service to perform a supply chain attack on over one hundred real estate sites that injected malicious scripts to steal information inputted in website forms.

These scripts are known as skimmers or formjackers and are commonly injected into hacked websites to steal sensitive information entered into forms. Skimmers are commonly used on checkout pages for online stores to steal payment information.

In a new supply chain attack discovered by Palo Alto Networks Unit42, threat actors abused a cloud video hosting feature to inject skimmer code into a video player. When a website embeds that player, it embeds the malicious script, causing the site to become infected.

New Zealand’s fossil record of land dinosaurs is poor, with just a few bones, but the collection of ancient extinct marine reptiles is remarkable, including shark-like mosasaurs and long-necked plesiosaurs.

Plesiosaurs first appeared in the fossil record around 200 million years ago and died off, alongside dinosaurs, 66 million years ago.

They are best known for the fanciful but appealing idea, suggested by British scientist Sir Peter Scott, that the fabled Loch Ness monster was in fact a plesiosaur that somehow outlasted all other giant reptiles and remained undetected throughout human history.

North Korea has hacked USD 1.7B of crypto and views the loot as a ‘long-term investment’. Experts say that Pyongyang is going long on its take of tokens, rather than quickly trading them for cash.

North Korea’s crypto exchange attacks

According to Newsis and Chosun, the US federal government prosecutor issued statements saying that North Korean hackers have been “conspiring with other money-laundering criminals” to “steal crypto-assets” from at least “three digital asset exchanges” before “laundering the proceeds.”

Discover Zefhir’s exclusive parachute rescue system and the unique turbine helicopter destined to become the go-to brand for air mobility. Zefhir is the first helicopter in the world to be fitted with an innovative ballistic parachute rescue system.

The field of experimental quantum communication promises ways of efficient and unconditional secure information exchange in quantum states. The possibility of transferring quantum information forms a cornerstone of the emerging field of quantum communication and quantum computation. Recent breakthroughs in quantum computation with superconducting circuits trigger a demand for quantum communication channels between superconducting processors separated in space at microwave length frequencies. To pursue this goal, Kirill G. Fedorov, and a team of scientists in Germany, Finland and Japan demonstrated unconditional quantum teleportation to propagate coherent microwave states by exploring two-mode squeezing and analog feedforward across a distance of 0.42 m. The researchers achieved a teleportation fidelity of F= 0.689±0.004, which exceeded the asymptotic no-cloning threshold, preventing the use of classical error correction methods on quantum states. The quantum state of the teleported state was preserved to open the avenue towards unconditional security in microwave quantum communication.

Quantum teleportation (QT).

The promise of quantum communication is based on the delivery of efficient and unconditionally secure ways to exchange information by exploring the quantum laws of physics. Quantum teleportation (QT) is an exemplary protocol that stands out to allow the disembodied and safe transfer of unknown quantum states using quantum entanglement and classical communication as resources. Recent progress in quantum computation with superconducting circuits has led to quantum communication between spatially separated superconducting processes functioning at microwave length frequencies. Methods to achieve this communication task includes the propagation of two-mode squeezed (TMS) microwaves to entangle remote qubits and teleport microwave states to interface between remote superconducting systems. Fedorov et al. demonstrated the deterministic QT of coherent microwave states by exploring two-mode squeezing and analog feedforward across a distance of 0.

The rhythms of activity in all biological organisms, both plants and animals, are closely linked to the gravitational tides created by the orbital mechanics of the sun-Earth-moon system. This truth has been somewhat neglected by scientific research but is foregrounded in a study by Cristiano de Mello Gallep at the University of Campinas (UNICAMP) in the state of São Paulo, Brazil, and Daniel Robert at the University of Bristol in the United Kingdom. An article on the study is published in the Journal of Experimental Botany.

“All matter on Earth, both live and inert, experiences the effects of the gravitational forces of the sun and moon expressed in the form of tides. The periodic oscillations exhibit two daily cycles and are modulated monthly and annually by the motions of these two celestial bodies. All organisms on the planet have evolved in this context. What we sought to show in the article is that gravitational tides are a perceptible and potent force that has always shaped the rhythmic activities of these organisms,” Gallep told.

The study is both an extensive review of the literature and a meta-analysis of the data from three previously published cases in which gravitational causality was not fully explored: The swimming activity of isopods, small shell-less crustaceans whose appearance on Earth dates from at least 300 million years ago; reproductive effort in coral; and growth modulation in sunflower seedlings inferred from autoluminescence. In the latter case, the researchers analyzed results of their own investigations as well as data from the literature.

Computer maintenance workers at Kyoto University have announced that due to an apparent bug in software used to back up research data, researchers using the University’s Hewlett-Packard Cray computing system, called Lustre, have lost approximately 77 terabytes of data. The team at the University’s Institute for Information Management and Communication posted a Failure Information page detailing what is known so far about the data loss.

The team, with the University’s Information Department Information Infrastructure Division, Supercomputing, reported that files in the /LARGEO (on the DataDirect ExaScaler storage system) were lost during a system backup procedure. Some in the press have suggested that the problem arose from a faulty script that was supposed to delete only old, unneeded log files. The team noted that it was originally thought that approximately 100TB of files had been lost, but that number has since been pared down to 77TB. They note also that the failure occurred on December 16 between the hours of 5:50 and 7pm. Affected users were immediately notified via emails. The team further notes that approximately 34 million files were lost and that the files lost belonged to 14 known research groups. The team did not release information related to the names of the research groups or what sort of research they were conducting. They did note data from another four groups appears to be restorable.