Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
Toggle light / dark theme

Blog

Category: futurism – Page 18

Oldest known giant rock scallop bead suggests California coastal trade began millennia earlier

Archaeologists have discovered two giant rock scallop beads that push back the clock on the first appearance of these high-status ornaments. The discovery shows that these prized marine beads were traded hundreds of miles from the California coast thousands of years earlier than previously thought.

Radiocarbon dating places one of the beads at roughly 8,500 years old, making it the oldest ever discovered. More unusually, they were found more than 42 miles (68 kilometers) from the nearest coast, extending the known range of these ornaments from the Channel Islands to the California interior.

“It’s cool that this is the oldest of its kind identified so far, but cooler still to view it as part of a broader Early Holocene cultural landscape seemingly well-established in this locale as much as 10,000 years ago,” said Barry A. Price, an archaeologist at Applied EarthWorks Inc. and one of the study’s authors, along with Simone Schinsing and Jasmine Kidwell. The study is published in California Archaeology.

A new drug that can potentially overcome cancer therapy resistance

Researchers at Baylor College of Medicine have developed a drug called CS18 that disrupts cancer cells’ ability to survive therapy. The findings, published in Science Advances, support exploring the possibility of using CS18 to treat human cancer in the future.

“Therapeutic resistance is a main obstacle to achieving effective and durable cancer treatments,” said corresponding author Dr. Weei-Chin Lin, professor of medicine—hematology and oncology—and molecular and cellular biology at Baylor. “While some therapies are effective at the beginning, many patients eventually relapse because cancer cells can activate compensatory and convergent biological pathways that allow them to overcome the toxic effects of therapy, promoting survival.”

In the current study, the researchers’ goal was to develop a drug that would target a “biological switchboard”—topoisomerase IIβ-binding protein 1 (TopBP1)—that controls several cancer-driving pathways at once and to determine whether this strategy could deliver durable responses and overcome resistance.

Quantum-Secure Ballots Demonstrated in the Lab

Quantum bits (qubits) enable these conditions. The quantum voting protocol involves creating a quantum state of many quantum-entangled qubits known as a Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger (GHZ) state, with one qubit for each voter. The state can be prepared so that each qubit measurement randomly produces 0 or 1, but the entanglement guarantees that the total number of 1s is either even or odd. These states can be prepared using, for example, photons as qubits, with 0 and 1 corresponding to distinct polarization states.

Such a protocol was proposed in 2022 by quantum information theorist Federico Centrone of the Barcelona Institute of Science and Technology in Spain and his co-workers [3]. Implementing it requires that the voters be able to verify that they have been given a true GHZ state and not some other state that subverts the protocol. Such verifications can be carried out, but each qubit can only be used once—either for voting or for verification. So extra sets of GHZ states must be produced for multiple rounds of verification.

Two research teams have now demonstrated the fundamental features of the protocol using photons as qubits, although several practical challenges remain before it can be used in a real election. Joey Marcellino, a PhD student at the University of Geneva, and his co-workers randomly assign each round as either a verification or a voting round [1]. Meanwhile, Laurent-Puig and his colleagues (including Centrone) simply chose to postpone the verification aspect of the protocol for future work [2].

Scientists tracked 12 people in Antarctica for 10 months—what happened could shape future Mars missions

A ten-month Antarctic experiment found that astronauts may struggle not only with loneliness but also with spending too much time around the same people. Frequent contact was linked to greater tension and mistrust, while the crew increasingly divided into cultural and language-based groups.

Large File Support

19 years ago I bought version 6 of some software. I just started using it again after not using it for 17 years or so and it is at version 26 and my old registration is still valid so I still have the pro version! They don’t even sell this software anymore, they just rent it but they are honoring my old purchase!

The software is EmEditor. I originally used it for UTF-8 support but this support became more common with editors. I just used it because I was working with a fairly large text file at 12.5 GB. My main editor is 32-bit and couldn’t remotely handle this. I then tried Windows Notepad and Microsoft Word and they also laughed at the idea of editing such a big file.

EmEditor is capable of opening very large files — up to 16 TB or 1,099 billion lines — with only a little memory, leaving you free to work as large or small as you please.

/* */