Lifeboat Foundation

NSO Group, an Israeli tech firm, developed malware to hack iPhones by creating a “computer within a computer” capable of stealing sensitive data and sitting undetected for months or even years, researchers at Google have revealed.

The malware is part of NSO Group’s Pegasus software tool, which it is thought to have sold to countries including Azerbaijan, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, India and the United Arab Emirates. US law-makers have called for sanctions against the firm.

An incredibly sophisticated piece of malware developed by the Israeli tech firm NSO Group works by creating an entirely separate computer inside the memory of an iPhone, allowing attackers to snoop and steal data.

Continue reading “NSO iPhone malware builds a computer inside your phone to steal data” »

Lightelligence, a Boston-based photonics company, revealed the world’s first small form-factor, photonics-based computing device, meaning it uses light to perform compute operations. The company claims the unit is “hundreds of times faster than a typical computing unit, such as NVIDIA RTX 3080.” 350 times faster, to be exact, but that only applies to certain types of applications.

However, the PACE achieves that coveted specialization through an added field of computing — which not only makes the system faster, it makes it incredibly more efficient. While traditional semiconductor systems have the issue of excess heat that results from running current through nanometre-level features at sometimes ludicrous frequencies, the photonic system processes its workloads with zero Ohmic heating — there’s no heat produced from current resistance. Instead, it’s all about light.

Continue reading “Optical Chip Promises 350x Speedup Over RTX 3080 in Some Algorithms” »

Real holograms?

Science fiction has repeatedly promised a future filled with holographic 3D displays, but that fantasy has always eluded reality — until now. A startup says it has created a new “solid light” display that renders photos and videos in three dimensions.

Continue reading “New ‘Solid Light’ 3D Holographic Display Can Give Photos Depth” »

From Earth’s vantage point in one of the Milky Way’s spiral arms, the structure of our galaxy is pretty difficult to reconstruct.

That’s because gauging the distance to something in space when you don’t know its intrinsic brightness is really, really hard. And there are a lot of objects in the Milky Way whose brightness is unknown to us. This means that sometimes, we can totally miss huge structures that you’d think should be right under our noses.

A new set of such enormous structures has now been unveiled at the outer regions of the Milky Way disk: massive, spinning filaments with unclear provenance. Astronomers will be conducting follow-up surveys to try and solve the mystery.

Nio’s soon-to-arrive ET7 is practically tailor-made to challenge Tesla’s Model S, and now the company appears to have a (partial) answer to the Model 3. Electrek says Nio has introduced the ET5, a more affordable “mid-size” electric sedan. It starts at RMB 328,000 (about $51,450), or well under the roughly $70,000 of the ET7, but offers similarly grandiose range figures. Nio claims the base 75kWh battery offers over 341 miles of range using China’s test cycle, while the highest-end 150kWh “Ultralong Range” pack is supposedly good for more than 620 miles. You’ll likely pay significantly more for the privilege and may not see that range in real life, but the numbers could still tempt you away from higher-end Model 3s if long-distance driving is crucial.

You can expect the usual heapings of technology. The ET5 will have built-in support for autonomous driving features as they’re approved, and drivers get a “digital cockpit” thanks to Nreal-developed augmented reality glasses that can project a virtual screen equivalent to 201 inches at a 20-foot viewing distance. Nio has teamed with Nolo to make VR glasses, too, although it’s safe to say you won’t wear those while you’re driving.

Deliveries are expected to start September 2022. That’s a long way off, but Nio appears to be on track with its EV plans as it expects to deliver the ET7 on time (if only just) starting March 28th.

Plutonium cores, or pits, act as the triggers for thermonuclear weapons. The goal is to make 30 new cores by 2026.

The new prototype is part of a program designed to replace the aging Defense Meteorological Satellite Program satellites on orbit.

“Looking at the starry sky, with those thousand-year-old walls embracing the ancient constellations and the passing, modern ISS, was undoubtedly a once-in-a-lifetime experience,” Masi said in a statement on Thursday.

Masi also released an annotated version of the image showing constellations marked and labeled, from Pegasus to Ursa Minor.

The Colosseum is nearly 2,000 years old. The ISS has been in space for over 20 years. They are very different kinds of monuments, but they meld together beautifully in an image that speaks to the past and the present and how far humans have traveled.

A zoom into M87’s monster black hole, thanks to Hubble.

The supermassive black hole located at the heart of the M87 galaxy is home to one of the most impressive natural patterns in nature.