Lifeboat Foundation

Imagine a manufacturing plant in which all the production equipment is continually changing in response to market needs. Robots churning out widgets, for instance, would reconfigure themselves based on data coming in from all points of the widget supply chain, as well as sensors monitoring the factory itself. The result is a smart factory that’s more agile and autonomous than previous generations of automation.

Also known as Industry 4.0, the smart factory runs on data and artificial intelligence, but connectivity forms the backbone of operations. The new fifth generation of mobile networks (5G) is a catalyst for this new industrial revolution because it offers much greater speed and bandwidth than previous networks, as well as low latency, or time required for data to travel between two points. 5G will work with and in some cases replace existing fixed, wired connections, making manufacturing more flexible and ready to implement innovations.

Continue reading “5G is accelerating factory automation that could add trillions to the global economy” »

Electronic systems – from the processors powering smartphones to the embedded devices keeping the Internet of Things humming – have become a critical part of daily life. The security of these systems is of paramount importance to the Department of Defense (DoD), commercial industry, and beyond. To help protect these systems from common means of exploitation, DARPA launched the System Security Integration Through Hardware and Firmware (SSITH) program in 2017. Instead of relying on patches to ensure the safety of our software applications, SSITH seeks to address the underlying hardware vulnerabilities at the source. Research teams are developing hardware security architectures and tools that protect electronic systems against common classes of hardware vulnerabilities exploited through software.

To help harden the SSITH hardware security protections in development, DARPA today announced its first ever bug bounty program called, the Finding Exploits to Thwart Tampering (FETT) Bug Bounty. FETT aims to utilize hundreds of ethical researchers, analysts, and reverse engineers to deep dive into the hardware architectures in development and uncover potential vulnerabilities or flaws that could weaken their defenses. DARPA is partnering with the DoD’s Defense Digital Service (DDS) and Synack, a trusted crowdsourced security company on this effort. In particular, FETT will utilize Synack’s existing community of vetted, ethical researchers as well as artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) enabled technology along with their established vulnerability disclosure process to execute the crowdsourced security engagement.

Bug bounty programs are commonly used to assess and verify the security of a given technology, leveraging monetary rewards to encourage hackers to report potential weaknesses, flaws, or bugs in the technology. This form of public Red Teaming allows organizations or individual developers to address the disclosed issues, potentially before they become significant security challenges.

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Quantum computers (QC) are poised to drive important advances in several domains, including medicine, material science and internet security. While current QC systems are small, several industry and academic efforts are underway to build large systems with many hundred qubits.

Towards this, computer scientists at Princeton University and physicists from Duke University collaborated to develop methods to design the next generation of quantum computers. Their study focused on QC systems built using trapped ion (TI) technology, which is one of the current front-running QC hardware technologies. By bringing together computer architecture techniques and device simulations, the team showed that co-designing near-term hardware with applications can potentially improve the reliability of TI systems by up to four orders of magnitude.

Continue reading “Examining trapped ion technology for next generation quantum computers” »

Live coverage of the countdown and launch of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from pad 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The mission will launch SpaceX’s tenth batch of Starlink broadband satellites. Text updates will appear automatically below. Follow us on Twitter.

SpaceX will launch its tenth set of Starlink internet satellites into orbit today (July 8) and you can watch it live online.

You might think you’ve seen it all via live stream. Whether it’s historic astronaut launches, the strawberry moon, or new videogame console reveals, it’s easy to take our ability to see things unfold in real-time over the internet for granted.

And yet, there’s one frontier we’ve yet to fully breached — the deep sea. Communication through water isn’t quite as simple as through air and space.

Now, a new study shows that a type of aquatic internet can send data through light beams to allow divers to instantly stream footage from under the sea to the surface.

Continue reading “World’s First Underwater WiFi is Set Up” »

The weather forecast looks mostly favorable for the Space Coast’s next launch, a mission slated to see a 230-foot SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket take flight from Kennedy Space Center on Wednesday.

Conditions are shaping up to be 70% “go” for the 11:59 a.m. liftoff from pad 39A, the Space Force said Sunday, thanks to the movement of drier air. Teams will have until 12:05 p.m. to launch.

“On Wednesday, some drier mid-level air will likely move into the area, helping to limit shower and storm coverage compared to earlier in the week,” the 45th Weather Squadron said. “The primary concern for the launch window is the cumulus cloud rule.”

Researchers from ETH Zurich have achieved what scientists have been attempting to do for some 20 years: in their laboratory work as part of European Horizon 2020 research projects, they have manufactured a chip on which fast electronic signals can be converted directly into ultrafast light signals—with practically no loss of signal quality. This represents a significant breakthrough in terms of the efficiency of optical communication infrastructures that use light to transmit data, such as fiber optic networks.

In cities like Zurich, these fiber optic networks are already being used to deliver high-speed internet, digital telephony, TV, and network-based video or audio services (“streaming”). However, by the end of this decade, even these optical communication networks may reach their limits when it comes to rapid data transmission.

This is due to the growing demand for online services for streaming, storage and computation, as well as the advent of artificial intelligence and 5G networks. Today’s optical networks achieve data transmission rates in the region of gigabits (10⁹ bits) per second. The limit is around 100 gigabits per lane und wavelength. In the future, however, transmission rates will need to reach the terabit region (10¹² bits per second).

Thousands of words, big and small, are crammed inside our memory banks just waiting to be swiftly withdrawn and strung into sentences. In a recent study of epilepsy patients and healthy volunteers, National Institutes of Health researchers found that our brains may withdraw some common words, like “pig,” “tank,” and “door,” much more often than others, including “cat,” “street,” and “stair.” By combining memory tests, brain wave recordings, and surveys of billions of words published in books, news articles and internet encyclopedia pages, the researchers not only showed how our brains may recall words but also memories of our past experiences.

“We found that some words are much more memorable than others. Our results support the idea that our memories are wired into neural networks and that our brains search for these memories, just the way search engines track down information on the internet,” said Weizhen (Zane) Xie, Ph.D., a cognitive psychologist and post-doctoral fellow at the NIH’s National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS), who led the study published in Nature Human Behaviour. “We hope that these results can be used as a roadmap to evaluate the health of a person’s memory and brain.”

Dr. Xie and his colleagues first spotted these words when they re-analyzed the results of memory tests taken by 30 epilepsy patients who were part of a clinical trial led by Kareem Zaghloul, M.D., Ph.D., a neurosurgeon and senior investigator at NINDS. Dr. Zaghloul’s team tries to help patients whose seizures cannot be controlled by drugs, otherwise known as intractable epilepsy. During the observation period, patients spend several days at the NIH’s Clinical Center with surgically implanted electrodes designed to detect changes in brain activity.