Lifeboat Foundation

A Middle Eastern advanced persistent threat (APT) group has resurfaced after a two-month hiatus to target government institutions in the Middle East and global government entities associated with geopolitics in the region in a rash of new campaigns observed earlier this month.

Sunnyvale-based enterprise security firm Proofpoint attributed the activity to a politically motivated threat actor it tracks as TA402, and known by other monikers such as Molerats and GazaHackerTeam.

The threat actor is believed to be active for a decade, with a history of striking organizations primarily located in Israel and Palestine, and spanning multiple verticals such as technology, telecommunications, finance, academia, military, media, and governments.

Circa 2019

As quantum computing enters the industrial sphere, questions about how to manufacture qubits at scale are becoming more pressing. Here, Fernando Gonzalez-Zalba, Tsung-Yeh Yang and Alessandro Rossi explain why decades of engineering may give silicon the edge.

In the past two decades, quantum computing has evolved from a speculative playground into an experimental race. The drive to build real machines that exploit the laws of quantum mechanics, and to use such machines to solve certain problems much faster than is possible with traditional computers, will have a major impact in several fields. These include speeding up drug discovery by efficiently simulating chemical reactions; better uses of “big data” thanks to faster searches in unstructured databases; and improved weather and financial-market forecasts via smart optimization protocols.

Continue reading “Manufacturing silicon qubits at scale” »

Tanzania considers crypto—and boosts bitcoin—as nations line up behind el salvador to embrace decentralized finance.

El Salvador voted to adopt bitcoin as legal tender last week.

U.S. chip goliath Qualcomm has said it is open to the idea of investing in U.K. chip designer Arm if the company’s $40 billion sale to Nvidia is blocked by regulators, according to The Telegraph newspaper.

Qualcomm’s incoming CEO, Cristiano Amon, said Qualcomm would be willing to buy a stake in Arm alongside other industry investors if SoftBank, Arm’s current owner, listed the company on the stock market instead of selling it to Nvidia, the newspaper reported Sunday.

“If Arm has an independent future, I think you will find there is a lot of interest from a lot of the companies within the ecosystem, including Qualcomm, to invest in Arm,” Amon said. “If it moves out of SoftBank and it goes into a process of becoming a publicly-traded company, [with] a consortium of companies that invest, including many of its customers, I think those are great possibilities.”

The aircraft could be used to transfer passengers between home and airports, Virgin believes. It would be able, for example, to make the 56-mile journey from Cambridge to Heathrow in 22 minutes, compared with a 90-minute drive.

The announcement represents another step in the race to making mass electric flight and air taxis a reality. Some analysts have predicted the sector could be worth £150bn by 2040 but significant hurdles remain, including regulation and safety certification. The VA-X4 has yet to take its first test flight. Dómhnal Slattery, the chief executive of Avolon, said its order would “accelerate the inevitable commercial rollout of zero-emissions aircraft. Before the end of this decade, we expect zero-emission urban air mobility, enabled by eVTOLs, to play an increasingly important role in the global commercial aviation market.”

An emerging ransomware strain in the threat landscape claims to have breached 30 organizations in just four months since it went operational, riding on the coattails of a notorious ransomware syndicate.

First observed in February 2021, “Prometheus” is an offshoot of another well-known ransomware variant called Thanos, which was previously deployed against state-run organizations in the Middle East and North Africa last year.

The affected entities are believed to be government, financial services, manufacturing, logistics, consulting, agriculture, healthcare services, insurance agencies, energy and law firms in the U.S., U.K., and a dozen more countries in Asia, Europe, the Middle East, and South America, according to new research published by Palo Alto Networks’ Unit 42 threat intelligence team.

Circa 2015 brain immortality through aldehyde stabilized cryopreservation.

We describe here a new cryobiological and neurobiological technique, aldehyde-stabilized cryopreservation (ASC), which demonstrates the relevance and utility of advanced cryopreservation science for the neurobiological research community. ASC is a new brain-banking technique designed to facilitate neuroanatomic research such as connectomics research, and has the unique ability to combine stable long term ice-free sample storage with excellent anatomical resolution. To demonstrate the feasibility of ASC, we perfuse-fixed rabbit and pig brains with a glutaraldehyde-based fixative, then slowly perfused increasing concentrations of ethylene glycol over several hours in a manner similar to techniques used for whole organ cryopreservation. Once 65% w/v ethylene glycol was reached, we vitrified brains at −135 °C for indefinite long-term storage. Vitrified brains were rewarmed and the cryoprotectant removed either by perfusion or gradual diffusion from brain slices. We evaluated ASC-processed brains by electron microscopy of multiple regions across the whole brain and by Focused Ion Beam Milling and Scanning Electron Microscopy (FIB-SEM) imaging of selected brain volumes. Preservation was uniformly excellent: processes were easily traceable and synapses were crisp in both species. Aldehyde-stabilized cryopreservation has many advantages over other brain-banking techniques: chemicals are delivered via perfusion, which enables easy scaling to brains of any size; vitrification ensures that the ultrastructure of the brain will not degrade even over very long storage times; and the cryoprotectant can be removed, yielding a perfusable aldehyde-preserved brain which is suitable for a wide variety of brain assays.

Health, Equity, And Economic Growth — Dr. Helene Gayle, MD, MPH, President and CEO, The Chicago Community Trust.

Dr. Helene D. Gayle, MD, MPH, is President and CEO of The Chicago Community Trust (CCT), one of the nation’s oldest and largest community foundations, and under her leadership, CCT has adopted a new strategic focus on closing the racial and ethnic wealth gap in the Chicago region.

Continue reading “Dr. Helene Gayle — President / CEO, Chicago Community Trust — Health, Equity and Economic Growth” »

The Perseverance rover began a two-year mission to collect Martian soil samples this year. It’s the first of three missions, jointly sponsored by NASA and ESA, aiming to bring Martian soil back to Earth in hopes of finding evidence of past life. The total costs of the missions will likely exceed more than $9 billion.

MORE SO EXPENSIVE VIDEOS:
Why Japanese Eel Is So Expensive.

Why Black Opal Is So Expensive.

Why Ceylon Cinnamon Is So Expensive.

Continue reading “Why Two Pounds Of Dirt From Mars Costs $9 Billion | So Expensive” »