Lifeboat Foundation

Very interesting discovery about how our brain thinks; our brain isn’t always 100% error proof according to this report from Carnegie Mellon University. Therefore, when researchers are mapping the brain plus mimicking human brain functions; what is the tolerance level for error allowed then?

A study conducted at Carnegie Mellon University investigated the brain’s neural activity during learned behavior and found that the brain makes mistakes because it applies incorrect inner beliefs, or internal models, about how the world works. The research suggests that when the brain makes a mistake, it actually thinks that it is making the correct decision—its neural signals are consistent with its inner beliefs, but not with what is happening in the real world.

“Our brains are constantly trying to predict how the world works. We do this by building internal models through experience and learning when we interact with the world,” said Steven Chase, an assistant professor in the Department of Biomedical Engineering and the Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition. “However, it has not yet been possible to track how these internal models affect instant-by-instant behavioral decisions.”

Continue reading “Mental Miscues” »

New method to make purify water and eliminate clean water shortages in the future by purifying waste water via artificial leafing.

For years, scientists have been pursuing ways to imitate a leaf’s photosynthetic power to make hydrogen fuel from water and sunlight. In a new twist, a team has come up with another kind of device that mimics two of a leaf’s processes — photosynthesis and transpiration — to harness solar energy to purify water. Their development, reported in the journal ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces, could help address issues of water scarcity.

More than 1 billion people around the world live in areas where clean water is hard to come by, and that number will likely rise as the population grows.

Continue reading “Purifying Water with Leaf-mimicking Device” »

Scientists were able to study brain growth using a 3D gel model in order to see how the human brain gets its folds.

New research shows that our brains are likely folded because, as they grow, a large amount of volume has to fit in a small space (AKA, our skulls). This compression is actually beneficial, the folds reduce the length of neuronal wiring, improving cognitive function.

Researchers at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences teamed up with scientists in Finland and France to find out more about the folding process.

Read more

HoloLens is about to change the way we watch sports. http://voc.tv/14JQHoo

Read more

Read more

Building building diamond lattices through DNA.

Using bundled strands of DNA to build Tinkertoy-like tetrahedral cages, scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Brookhaven National Laboratory have devised a way to trap and arrange nanoparticles in a way that mimics the crystalline structure of diamond. The achievement of this complex yet elegant arrangement, as described in a paper published February 5, 2016, in Science, may open a path to new materials that take advantage of the optical and mechanical properties of this crystalline structure for applications such as optical transistors, color-changing materials, and lightweight yet tough materials.

“We solved a 25-year challenge in building diamond lattices in a rational way via self-assembly,” said Oleg Gang, a physicist who led this research at the Center for Functional Nanomaterials (CFN) at Brookhaven Lab in collaboration with scientists from Stony Brook University, Wesleyan University, and Nagoya University in Japan.

Continue reading “DNA used to assemble nanoparticles into a copy of the crystalline structure of diamond” »

Non-hackable RFIDs

You might not realize it, but radio frequency identification (RFID) tech is everywhere these days. From the cards in your wallet, to inventory control in warehouses, it’s the technology that works behind the scenes to power the world around you. RFID has brought efficiency to complicated industries and makes our tiny devices and everyday carry items speak to each other. But RFID technology has also been very vulnerable to security attacks and information hackers – until now. A team of researchers from MIT and Texas Instruments have developed a new kind of RFID chip that they believe is impossible to hack.

The new RFID chip is made of ferroelectric crystals, which are material made up of molecules arranged in a lattice pattern across three dimensions. Thanks to this unique structure, when you apply electricity to the lattice, each cell can be polarized as either positive or negative, representing the values of a bit of information. Because the cells retain their polarization when the electric field is removed, the chips can store data even when they’re powered off. Texas Instruments developed a series of 3.3-volt capacitors for the chip’s energy source, and 1.5-volt cells for data storage.

Continue reading “MIT engineers have developed a new kind of RFID chip that’s nearly impossible to hack” »

AI Chip for the phone — the new MIT chip has 168 processing engines with each engine having it’s own dedicated memory bank.

A chip designed to run powerful neural networks for image analysis uses one-tenth the energy a mobile GPU would.

Read more

US Hacker Tools treated like weapons in US arms deals with other countries — why not; the true war is really in Cyber.

The government is rewriting a proposal under arms control rules from 20 years ago to make it simpler to export tools related to surveillance and hacking software, since they are used for network security.

Read more