Lifeboat Foundation

Telecommunications have reshaped many aspects of our lives over the past few decades by providing incredibly convenient ways to share and access information. One of the most important enablers for this transformation has been the adoption and improvement of broadband technologies, which cram enormous amounts of data over wide frequency bands to achieve unprecedented transfer speeds. Today, most large cities have fiber optics-based networks that distribute high-speed internet directly to every home.

Unfortunately, it is not always feasible to deploy fiber optic links to remote locations and rural areas, due to the associated costs and civil engineering work required. Such places could benefit from a different approach to optical broadband communications: free-space optics. The main idea in free-space optical (FSO) communications is to set up aligned transmitter–receiver pairs where needed and use air as the medium to carry the signals.

While there are still many challenges to address in FSO systems (such as low energy efficiency, impact of weather, and high background noise), scientists worldwide are continuously trying out new ways of solving these issues and achieving higher data rates.

A team of engineers at UC Santa Cruz has developed a new method for remote automation of the growth of cerebral organoids—miniature, three-dimensional models of brain tissue grown from stem cells. Cerebral organoids allow researchers to study and engineer key functions of the human brain with a level of accuracy not possible with other models. This has implications for understanding brain development and the effects of pharmaceutical drugs for treating cancer or other diseases.

In a new study published in the journal Scientific Reports, researchers from the UCSC Braingeneers group detail their automated, internet-connected microfluidics system, called “Autoculture.” The system precisely delivers feeding liquid to individual cerebral organoids in order to optimize their growth without the need for human interference with the tissue culture.

Cerebral organoids require a high level of expertise and consistency to maintain the precise conditions for cell growth over weeks or months. Using an automated system, as demonstrated in this study, can eliminate disturbance to cell culture growth caused by human interference or error, provide more robust results, and allow more scientists access to opportunities to conduct research with human brain models.

The combined force of these disruptive technologies (AI and 5G) enables fast, secure, and ubiquitous connectivity of cost-efficient smart networks and IoT (Internet-of-Things) devices. This convergence point is essential to concepts like intelligent wireless edge.

5G and AI, the connected digital edge

Artificial intelligence and 5G are the two most critical elements that would empower futuristic innovations. These cutting-edge technologies are inherently synergistic. The rapid advancements of AI significantly improve the entire 5G ecosystem, its performance, and efficiency. Besides, 5G-connected devices’ proliferation helps drive unparalleled intelligence and new improvements in AI-based learning and inference. Moreover, the transformation of the connected, intelligent edge has commenced as on-device intelligence has garnered phenomenal traction. This transformation is critical to leveraging the full potential of 5G’s future. With these prospects, these technologies hold enough potential to transform every industry. Here’s how the combination of AI and 5G has been reshaping industries.

Boa, an open-source web server suitable for embedded applications that was discontinued since 2005 is now becoming a security threat because of the complex nature of how it was built into the internet of things (IoT) device supply chain. A recent report by tech major Microsoft said that hackers are exploiting vulnerabilities in the software to target organizations in the energy sector.

Microsoft researchers revealed in an analysis that a vulnerable open-source component in the Boa web server, is used widely in a range of routers and security cameras as well as popular software development kits (SDKs), a set of tools that allow developers to write or use an existing framework to develop applications for a given platform.

Despite the software being discontinued a nearly two decades ago, Microsoft reports that attackers are continuing their attempts to exploit the flaws of the Boa web servers which include a high-severity information disclosure bug (CVE-2021–33558) and another arbitrary file access flaw (CVE-2017–9833). An unauthenticated attacker could exploit these vulnerabilities to obtain user credentials and leverage them for remote code execution.

Earlier this year, we announced our vision to empower any developer to become a space developer through Azure. With over 90 million developers on GitHub, we have created a powerful ecosystem and we are focused on empowering the next generation of developers for space. Today, we are announcing a crucial step towards democratizing access to space development, with the preview release of Azure Orbital Space SDK (software development kit)—a secure hosting platform and application toolkit designed to enable developers to create, deploy, and operate applications on-orbit.

By bringing modern cloud-based applications to spacecrafts we not only increase the efficiency, value, and speed of insights from space data but also increase the value of that data through the optimization of ground communication.

Many of the fundamental technological improvements that have accelerated the growth of Internet of Things (IoT) in the past decade remain untapped by space development missions today. With the Azure Orbital Space SDK, we will help bring those improvements to space through modern agile software deployment, container-based development, use of higher-level languages, and cloud-managed networking. Extending the power of the Azure cloud into space means that spacecraft development will take less time, cost less, and bring more people into the space development ecosystem.

By Chuck Brooks

There are many other interesting trends to look out for in 2023. These trends will include the expansion of use of a Software Bill of Materials (SBOM), the integration of more 5G networks to bring down latency of data delivery, more Deep Fakes being used for fraud, low code for citizen coding, more computing at the edge, and the development of initial stages of the implementation of quantum technologies and algorithms.

When all is said and done, 2023 will face a boiling concoction of new and old cyber-threats. It will be an especially challenging year for all those involved trying to protect their data and for geopolitical stability.

Continue reading “A Boiling Cauldron: Cybersecurity Trends, Threats, And Predictions For 2023” »

To be a sheep is to blindly follow the crowd. But is a sheep’s sheepiness really enough to make an entire flock walk around in a circle non-stop for days on end?

That’s a mystery the internet has pondered for about a week now and solving it has proved more difficult than you’d expect.

Continue reading “Eerie Video of Bizarre Sheep Phenomenon Has The World Running in Circles” »

https://youtube.com/watch?v=WL3DQfQqCQg

Do you think the image of Elon Musk as a good human being should come to be questioned when he’s a major contractor of the war machine? What are your thoughts?

By Alan MacLeod / MintPress News

Continue reading “Elon Musk Is Not a Renegade Outsider—He’s a Massive Pentagon Contractor” »

Large-capacity wireless data transmission systems are demanded along with the development of multimedia services, video-based interactions, and cloud computing in the era of big data. Compared with radio-frequency communication systems, free-space optical (FSO) signal transmission technology has the merits of high data rate, great flexibility, less power consumption, high security, and large license-free bandwidths [1– 3], which has been widely applied in terrestrial transmission [4], last mile solutions [5], ground-to-satellite optical communication [6], disaster recovery [7], and so on. To date, up to 10 Gbit/s FSO communication system has been realized for transmission distance over 1,000 km of star-ground or inter-star communications [8], and 208 Gbit/s terrestrial communication is also reported at 55 m transmission distance [9]. Wavelength-division multiplexing (WDM) technology is commonly employed to improve data transmission capacity in fiber communication systems, which would be more effective in FSO communication systems benefitting from very weak non-linear cross talk between different frequency channels in free space. Based on a simulation platform, a WDM FSO communication system could boost the signal transmission capacity to 1.28 Tbit/s by modulating 32 optical channels with dual-polarization 16 quadrature amplitude modulation signals [10]. To date, beyond 10 Tbit/s FSO communication systems have been experimentally demonstrated recently using WDM technology [11,12]. However, a WDM communication system becomes power-hungry and bulky with the increase of transmission channels while traditional distributed feedback lasers are used as optical carriers. In addition, more rigorous requirement is imposed on the frequency tolerance of carrier lasers to avoid channel overlap with the decrease of channel frequency interval.

The invention of microresonator-based optical frequency combs provides novel integrated optical laser sources with the natural characteristic of equi-spaced frequency intervals which can overcome the challenge of massive parallel carrier generation [13 – 19]. In particular, the spontaneously organized solitons in continuous-wave (CW)-driven microresonators provide a route to low-noise ultra-short pulses with a repetition rate from 10 GHz to beyond terahertz. Soliton microcombs (SMCs) are typical stable laser sources where the double balances of non-linearity and dispersion as well as dissipation and gain are reached in microcavities. Meanwhile, the linewidth of the comb lines is similar with the pump laser, which enables low power consumption and costs multiwavelength narrow-linewidth carriers for a wide range of applications. Through designing the scale of microresonators, the repetition rate of SMCs could be compatible with dense wavelength-division multiplexing (DWDM) communication standard. To date, several experiments have demonstrated the potential capacity for ultra-high-speed fiber communication systems using SMCs as multiwavelength laser sources [20 – 30]. For instance, a coherent fiber communication system has improved the transmission capacity up to 55 Tbit/s using single bright SMCs as optical carriers and a local oscillator [20]. And dark solitons and soliton crystals are also employed as multiwavelength laser sources for WDM communication systems [27 – 30]. However, few studies have carried out massive parallel FSO communication systems using the integrated SMCs as laser sources.

In this paper, we experimentally demonstrate a massive parallel FSO communication system using an SMC as a multiple optical carrier generator. 102 comb lines are modulated by 10 Gbit/s differential phase shift keying (DPSK) signals to boost the FSO transmission rate up to beyond 1 Tbit/s. The transmitter and receiver terminals are installed in two buildings at a distance of ∼1 km, respectively. Using a CW laser as reference, the influence of optical signal-to-noise ratios (OSNRs) on the bit error rate (BER) performance is experimentally analyzed. Our results show an effective solution for large-capacity spatial signal transmission using an integrated SMC source which has potential applications in future satellite-to-ground communication systems.