Lifeboat Foundation

I call them “BATS”.

Can bacteria generate radio waves?

On the face of it, this seems an unlikely proposition. Natural sources of radio waves include lightning, stars and pulsars while artificial sources include radar, mobile phones and computers. This is a diverse list. So it’s hard to see what these things might have in common with bacteria that could be responsible for making radio waves.

Continue reading “How Bacteria Could Generate Radio waves” »

BEIJING — China has turned its western region of Xinjiang into a police state with few modern parallels, employing a combination of high-tech surveillance and enormous manpower to monitor and subdue the area’s predominantly Muslim ethnic minorities.

Now, the digital dragnet is expanding beyond Xinjiang’s residents, ensnaring tourists, traders and other visitors — and digging deep into their smartphones.

A team of journalists from The New York Times and other publications examined a policing app used in the region, getting a rare look inside the intrusive technologies that China is deploying in the name of quelling Islamic radicalism and strengthening Communist Party rule in its Far West. The use of the app has not been previously reported.

Its creator thinks mind-control systems could be as pervasive as smartphones in the future.

Betty Lim

Is a massive, planetary-wide, space surveillance system currently being constructed that aims to monitor you all the way down to your DNA. Officially, the Space Fence is, according to Wikipedia, a 2nd generation space surveillance system being built (started in 2014) by the US Air Force and Lockheed Martin to track artificial satellites and space debris. Its budget is US$1.594 billion, it’s expected to be operational in 2019 and the Space Fence facility will be located in the Marshall Islands along with an option for another radar site in Western Australia. The Space Fence is a resurrection of a program started by Reagan in the 1980s called SDI (Strategic Defense Initiative), commonly known by its nickname “Star Wars.” However, like many exotic weapons of the New World Order, it has a cover purpose and a real purpose. This article exposes the grander implications of the Space Fence – and how it connects to other technology that could be used to enslave you.

What is the Space Fence?

Continue reading “Space Fence: Connecting the Surveillance and Transhumanist Agendas” »

Circa 2016

Diamond computer chips running at 100-GHz have been demonstrated by Akhan Semiconductor. They are currently using design rules in the 100s of nanometers.

Developers are focusing on power applications on 12-inch wafers. They hope to drive down the costs of production with higher volumes. Power devices are moving into pilot production at a fab. They are using the fab-lite model—that is produce small- to medium-sized runs themselves. They will then transfer their process to foundries when they ramp up into volume production.

Continue reading “Diamond on silicon chips are running at 100 Gigahertz and can also make power chips for directing 10,000 volts” »

The introduction of the $69.95 monitor is a prime example of how Apple is increasingly breaking into the health space by making the iPhone and Apple Watch a key hub for people’s personal health.

The high resolution and wealth of data provided by an experiment at Diamond can lead to unexpected discoveries. The piezoelectric properties of the ceramic perovskite PMN-PT (0.68Pb(Mg₁/3Nb₂/3)O₃–0.32PbTiO₃) are widely used in commercial actuators, where the strain that is generated varies continuously with applied voltage. However, if the applied voltage is cycled appropriately then there are discontinuous changes of strain. These discontinuous changes can be used to drive magnetic switching in a thin overlying ferromagnet, permitting magnetic information to be written electrically. An international team of researchers used beamline I06 to investigate a ferromagnetic film of nickel when it served as a sensitive strain gauge for single-crystal PMN-PTheir initial interpretation of the results suggested that ferroelectric domain switching rotated the magnetic domains in the film by the expected angle of 90°, but a closer examination revealed the true picture to be more complex.

Their work, recently published in Nature Materials, shows that the ferroelectric domain switching rotated the magnetic domains in the film by considerably less than 90° due to an accompanying shear strain. The findings offer both a challenge and an opportunity for the design of next-generation data storage devices, and will surely be relevant if the work is extended to explore the electrically driven manipulation of more complex magnetic textures.

Some solid materials develop electrical charge in response to an applied mechanical stress. This piezoelectric effect means that certain crystals can be used to convert mechanical energy into electricity or vice-versa, and piezoelectric materials are used in a variety of technologies, including the automatic focusing of cameras in mobile phones. For these applications, the strain varies continuously with applied voltage, but cycling the applied voltage can lead to discontinuous changes of strain due to ferroelectric domain switching. These discontinuous changes in strain can be used to drive magnetic switching in a thin ferromagment film, such that data can be written electrically, and stored magnetically.

On October 3, 2018, cell phones across the United States received a text message labeled “Presidential Alert.” The message read: “THIS IS A TEST of the National Wireless Emergency Alert System. No action is needed.”

It was the first trial run for a new national alert system, developed by several U.S. government agencies as a way to warn as many people across the United States as possible if a disaster was imminent.

Continue reading “National emergency alerts potentially vulnerable to attack” »

Researchers at the University of Washington have used machine learning to teach an AI system to identify when someone is having a cardiac arrest. The system learned to identify agonal breathing, which occurs when someone gasps for breath during cardiac arrest, with a high degree of accuracy. The technology can be embedded into a variety of listening devices, such as smart speakers or smartphones, to alert authorities and loved ones to someone having a heart attack while they sleep.

Approximately half a million Americans die from cardiac arrest annually. Cardiac arrests often happen while someone is at home in bed. This is particularly dangerous, as there is likely to be no-one around, or no-one awake, to help.

Now, researchers have developed an AI system that can work through smart speakers or a smartphone to monitor for signs of a cardiac arrest while someone sleeps. The system listens for something called agonal breathing, which occurs in about 50% of people who experience a cardiac arrest, and patients who demonstrate this characteristic gasping often have a better chance of surviving.