Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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If you’ve been hacked in recent years, odds are you fell for that perfectly crafted phishing message in your email. Even the most mindful individuals can slip up, but Google’s employees have reportedly had a flawless security record for more than a year thanks to a recent policy requiring them to use physical security keys.

Krebs on Security reports that in early 2017, Google started requiring its 85,000 employees to use a security key device to handle two-factor authentication when logging into their various accounts. Rather than just having a single password, or receiving a secondary access code via text message (or an app such as Google Authenticator), the employees had to use a traditional password as well as plug in a device that only they possessed. The results were stellar. From the report:

A Google spokesperson said Security Keys now form the basis of all account access at Google.

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Using advanced fabrication techniques, engineers at the University of California San Diego have built a nanosized device out of silver crystals that can generate light by efficiently “tunneling” electrons through a tiny barrier. The work brings plasmonics research a step closer to realizing ultra-compact light sources for high-speed, optical data processing and other on-chip applications.

The work is published July 23 in Nature Photonics.

The device emits light by a quantum mechanical phenomenon known as inelastic electron tunneling. In this process, electrons move through a solid barrier that they cannot classically cross. And while crossing, the electrons lose some of their energy, creating either photons or phonons in the process.

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On Friday 27 July there will be a total lunar eclipse, also known as a blood moon. The blood moon occurs when the sun, Earth and moon align perfectly, putting the moon in the Earth’s shadow. The red colouring is a result of sunlight refracting through the Earth’s atmosphere.

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Silicon computer chips have been on a roll for half a century, getting ever more powerful. But the pace of innovation is slowing. Today the U.S. military’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) announced dozens of new grants totaling $75 million in a program that aims to reinvigorate the chip industry with basic research into new designs and materials, such as carbon nanotubes. Over the next few years, the DARPA program, which supports both academic and industry scientists, will grow to $300 million per year up to a total of $1.5 billion over 5 years.

“It’s a critical time to do this,” says Erica Fuchs, a computer science policy expert at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

In 1965, Intel co-founder Gordon Moore made the observation that would become his eponymous “law”: The number of transistors on chips was doubling every 2 years, a time frame later cut to every 18 months. But the gains from miniaturizing the chips are dwindling. Today, chip speeds are stuck in place, and each new generation of chips brings only a 30% improvement in energy efficiency, says Max Shulaker, an electrical engineer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge. Fabricators are approaching physical limits of silicon, says Gregory Wright, a wireless communications expert at Nokia Bell Labs in Holmdel, New Jersey. Electrons are confined to patches of silicon just 100 atoms wide, he says, forcing complex designs that prevent electrons from leaking out and causing errors. “We’re running out of room,” he says.

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A new study shows that mice reprogram their gut tissues to repair injury rolling them from an aged state back to a more fetal-like one.

Getting old is one thing; getting old in a healthy way is another. Many elderly people suffer from all kinds of diseases and disorders, ranging from cardiovascular problems and diabetes to Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease. Wouldn’t it be nice if we could keep the body young as we grow older to prevent disease associated with old age? For instance, would it be possible to slow down or reverse the aging processes in the cells of our body?

This question has gained a lot of interest from scientists, and their research has led to the discovery of the important role that the shortening of telomeres, the protective caps on our DNA, plays in aging. While this has been described in recent posts on the LEAF blog, I would like to address another mechanism that has seen an interesting leap forward, more or less by accident: rejuvenation of tissue.

Rejuvenation is a term that has recently been used in the context of senolytics. These are newly discovered compounds that decrease the number of senescent cells in the body. For the purpose of this article, I define rejuvenation as the resetting of a genetic program within a cell or tissue, from adult back to fetal. Typically, cells develop from stem cells, which are cells that can differentiate into many different cell types. During cell differentiation, certain genetic programs in the stem cell are turned off, while others are turned on to make the formation of a specific cell type possible. During rejuvenation, this process is reversed: differentiated cells are reset to an embryonic state.

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