Lifeboat Foundation

If you live in a place where you can buy Arduinos and Raspberry Pis locally, you probably don’t spend much time worrying about your water supply. But in some parts of the world, it is nothing to take for granted, bad water accounts for as many as 500,000 deaths worldwide every year. Scientists have reported a graphene sensor they say costs a buck and can detect dangerous bacteria and heavy metals in drinking water.

The sensor uses a GFET — a graphene-based field effect transistor to detect lead, mercury, and E. coli bacteria. Interestingly, the FETs transfer characteristic changes based on what is is exposed to. We were, frankly, a bit surprised that this is repeatable enough to give you useful data. But apparently, it is especially when you use a neural network to interpret the results.

What’s more, there is the possibility the device could find other contaminants like pesticides. While the materials in the sensor might have cost a dollar, it sounds like you’d need a big equipment budget to reproduce these. There are silicon wafers, spin coating, oxygen plasma, and lithography. Not something you’ll whip up in the garage this weekend.

Cell therapy company BlueRock Therapeutics has revealed promising results from the Phase 1 clinical trial of bemdaneprocel, an investigational stem cell therapy designed to treat Parkinson’s disease. BlueRock, a wholly owned independently operated subsidiary of pharma giant Bayer, is creating a pipeline of cell therapy treatments for neurological, cardiovascular, immunological, and ophthalmic conditions.

Bemdaneprocel is a stem cell therapy developed to replace dopamine-producing neurons that are lost in Parkinson’s disease. Derived from pluripotent stem cells, the therapy involves implanting neuron precursors into the brains of patients to potentially restore neural networks and improve motor and non-motor functions.

“The need for new therapies to help patients struggling with Parkinson’s disease is clear,” said Ahmed Enayetallah, Head of Development at BlueRock Therapeutics. “We are excited to be sharing the results of this Phase 1 and look forward to advancing bemdaneprocel to the next stage of clinical testing.”

This post is also available in: עברית (Hebrew)

Prominent National Science Foundation (NSF) space telescopes worldwide have been shut down due to a major cyberattack, the reason for which is unknown. For over two weeks, ten telescopes have been impacted, while some on-site operatives were able to keep some operational. These shutdowns have caused chaos in the astronomy sphere due to many essential windows of opportunity being missed for space observations.

NOIRLab (the NSF-run coordinating center for ground-based astronomy) said in a press release “Our staff are working with cybersecurity experts to get all the impacted telescopes and our website back online as soon as possible and are encouraged by the progress made thus far.”

Hackers are using sneaky compression methods in Android APK files to evade malware detection.

CVE-2023–36874 is not just any vulnerability; rather, it is a zero-day that is being actively exploited. This indicates that the vulnerability was being exploited in the wild even before any remedy was provided, and in some cases, even before it was publicly acknowledged. Because they provide a window of opportunity before updates are sent out, vulnerabilities of this kind are often among the top targets for cybercriminals.

However, taking advantage of this vulnerability is not as simple as one may first believe it to be. According to the advisory notes published by Microsoft, “An attacker must have local access to the targeted machine and must be able to create folders and performance traces on the machine, with restricted privileges that normal users have by default.”

This significantly reduces the danger vector, but it does not remove it entirely. Because Windows is so prevalent throughout the world, even a very minor security flaw may put millions of machines at danger.

Accounts may be hijacked and data can be uploaded without authentication if a certain version of Jupiter X Core, a premium plugin for setting up WordPress and WooCommerce websites, is used. These vulnerabilities impact various versions of the plugin.

Jupiter X Core is a visual editor that is both simple and powerful, and it is a component of the Jupiter X theme. The Jupiter X theme is used in more than 172,000 websites.

The second flaw, identified as CVE-2023–38389, makes it possible for unauthenticated attackers to gain control of any WordPress user account so long as they are in possession of the user’s email address. The vulnerability has been given a critical severity level of 9.8 and affects all versions of Jupiter X Core beginning with 3.3.8 and below.

Space junk could one day be snatched in orbit with a strong bag, if a new contract to test the technology ends up flying in space.

The U.S. Central Intelligence Agency has released a new entry in its World Factbook that catalogues the programs and milestones of space agencies around the world.

Quantum computing is on the verge of catapulting the digital revolution to new heights.

Turbocharged processing holds the promise of instantaneously diagnosing health ailments and providing rapid development of new medicines; greatly speeding up response time in AI systems for such time-sensitive operations as autonomous driving and space travel; optimizing traffic control in congested cities; helping aircraft better navigate extreme turbulence; speeding up weather forecasting that better prepares localities facing potential disaster, and optimizing supply chain systems for more efficient delivery times and cost savings.

But we’re not there yet. One of the greatest obstacles facing quantum operations is error-correction.