Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Blog – Page 11484

Yikes.

Britain’s railway network is notoriously overpriced, overcrowded, and experiences frequent delays. Now cyberattacks are threatening to turn the morning commute into a deathtrap as well.

The world’s oldest railway system has been the victim of four major cyberattacks in the past year alone, security experts claim.

Hackers, thought to be computer specialists working for foreign governments, are believed to be behind the online aggression, which could allow them to take control the railway’s physical infrastructure.

Continue reading “4 cyberattacks in 1 year make British rail network potential commuter deathtrap” | >

I can assure you for each person leaving Boston; there are at least 1 to 3 people leaving SV for places like NYC, Austin, Memphis, NC, and Boston due to the appeal of SV has worn off.

The “ Scoring Tech Talent” report shows that Boston has the largest brain drain out of 40 cities in the country, with more than 17,200 people with tech-focused degrees having left the city between 2011 and 2015.

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The researchers say that the monochrome painting — a dime’s width across — is a proof-of-concept that the extremely precise technique can be used to build nanoscale chip-based devices like computer circuits, conductive carbon nanotubes, and for extremely efficient targeted drug delivery.

In order to reproduce the painting, the researchers used a technique first described by Rothemund and colleagues at IBM in 2009. The first step of the process involves folding DNA strands to create the desired shape, with short “staple strands” being used to literally staple the molecules. Then this pattern, which, at this stage, is floating in a saline solution, is poured into patches on a chip whose shapes match the DNA origami’s.

The folded DNA now acts as scaffolding onto which researchers then install fluorescent molecules inside microscopic light sources called photonic crystal cavities (PCC) — much like putting light bulbs into lamps.

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Tech making fashion industry cleaner and greener.

Suzanne Mancini, Rhode Island School of Design

Chemical waste, mass production and consumerism are all byproducts of an industrialized global economy.

The fashion industry is no different. Technology has helped the industry meet growing demand by making production more efficient. At the same time, vast overproduction – propelled by fast fashion’s demands for new styles – has led to a host of additional problems: increased chemical waste during production, along with thousands of tons of waste from worn, discarded or donated clothes.

Continue reading “Can technology help fashion clean up its act?” | >

Over the past several years, Northwestern Engineering’s Michael Jewett did the seemingly impossible. He overcame the critical barrier to making mutant ribosomes, the core catalyst in cells that are responsible for life.

Now, with funding from the Department of Defense’s Multidisciplinary University Research Initiatives (MURI) program, Jewett is ready to take this research to the next level. Along with a multi-school team, he plans to use engineer and repurpose the ribosome to make new kinds of polymers for flow batteries.

“We are in a new era of biomaterial design,” Jewett said. “So far, the ribosome has been this untouchable biomolecular machine — one that we couldn’t engineer or modify. Now, armed with recent advances in our ability to construct new versions, new applications may only be limited by our imagination.”

The MURI grant joins researchers from Northwestern, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, University of Texas at Austin, and Georgia Institute of Technology who will work together to develop new types of electrical materials for battery storage. By using biological catalysts, the team aims to produce materials for sustainable, rechargeable batteries that are currently impossible to make chemically.

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Experts at Adelaide’s Flinders University have made an Alzheimer’s breakthrough that may result in world’s first dementia vaccine. Developed by Australian and US scientists, this vaccine may not only prevent but also reverse early stages of Alzheimer’s, the most common form of dementia.

The Alzheimer’s vaccine may be tested on humans within the next two to three years after being bankrolled by the US Government. Scientists from Flinders University and America’s Institute of Molecular Medicine and University of California developed the vaccine by targeting proteins in the brain that block neurons.

The formula targets tau proteins and abnormal beta-amyloid that cause Alzheimer’s. The scientists are confident that the vaccine would eventually be used as preventative vaccine. According to Flinders University medicine professor Nikolai Petrovsky, the proteins must be removed from the brain as Alzheimer’s, and dementia sufferers have lots of these broken down proteins inside.

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