Lifeboat Foundation

Different kinds of materials can play different roles when it comes to controlling heat. If we want to keep our home warm in the depths of winter, insulating layers in our walls can help to lock it in. If we want to keep things cool, thermally conductive materials like those used in computer processors can help carry it away. But could one material have it both ways? A new breakthrough suggests that it could, made by a team of scientists who believe heat needn’t just be a one way street.

The research was carried out by scientists at the University of Bayreuth and the Max Planck Institute for Polymer Research, who sought to combine the thermally insulating properties of materials like polystyrene, with the thermally conductive properties of heavy metals often used to dissipate heat.

Their breakthrough boils down to a way of manipulating the way heat travels, which is through the oscillation of individual molecules that pass on their movement to neighboring molecules.

Ancient burials in a Cameroon rock shelter are shedding light on the humans who lived in western Central Africa thousands of years ago.

The municipality of Saudi Arabia’s capital city Riyadh has partnered IBM to facilitate government services and transactions on a blockchain.

Under terms of the partnership, early blockchain-tech mover IBM will work with Elm Company, the municipality’s technology partner, to develop an implementation strategy to plug government transactions and commercial services to citizens and residents on a blockchain, ITP.net reports.

The city administration, IBM and Elm will further sync with key government departments and private and semi-government sectors over a number of workshops to determine the services that can be transformed by blockchain.

Closed-door reviews of risks and benefits of studies should be made public, some scientists say.

Oxygen is surprisingly the third most abundant element in the cosmos and likely just as important to life elsewhere as here on Earth. New observations of an oxygen-rich ancient star provide clues to its distribution in the early universe.

Circa 2019 Event 201, hosted by the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, envisions a fast-spreading coronavirus with a devastating impact.

Back in 2001, it was a smallpox outbreak, set off by terrorists in U.S. shopping malls. This fall, it was a SARS-like virus, germinating quietly among pig farms in Brazil before spreading to every country in the world. With each fictional pandemic Johns Hopkins experts have designed, the takeaway lesson is the same: We are nowhere near prepared.

Continue reading “Pandemic simulation exercise spotlights massive preparedness gap” »

By Rohit Talwar, Steve Wells, Alexandra Whittington, and Maria Romero

As artificial intelligence (AI) revolutionises work as we know it, how will the software testing and security industry be impacted?

The robots are coming: “Lock up your knowledge and protect your job at all costs!” The apocalyptic warnings are starting to flow of how artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics combined with other disruptive technologies could eliminate the need for humans in the workplace. Equally sceptical voices are rubbishing the idea that anything drastic will happen, citing previous industrial revolutions as proof that new jobs will emerge to fill any gaps created by the automation of existing ones. In practice, no one really knows how quickly AI might eliminate jobs or what the employment needs will be of the future businesses and industries that have not yet been born.

But the future is not black and white. Aside from the potential to take (and make) jobs, AI might also transform jobs. Below, we share a list of some critical job roles that could be transformed or eliminated completely by the use of AI and robotics over the period from 2020 to 2030. The automation of the following six jobs would bring new opportunities to the software testing world, but could also change it in other possibly in unexpected ways.

Continue reading “Here come the robots: intelligent machines could take, make, or reboot software testing and security jobs” »

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Come see Liz Parrish, CEO & Founder of BioViva, a bio-tech company that is developing treatments to slow the aging process in humans. The event starts Thursd…

A new study has demonstrated that increasing the expression of a single gene was enough to reverse age-related visual decline in the eyes of old mice.

Introducing ELOVL2

Elongation of Very Long Chain Fatty Acids Protein 2 (ELOVL2) is both a bit of a tongue twister and a known aging biomarker. The results of a new study from researchers at the University of California San Diego School of Medicine suggest that the ELOVL2 gene plays a pivotal role in both the functional and anatomical aging of the retinas of mice and may also have relevance to human age-related eye conditions.