Lifeboat Foundation

Cybersecurity researchers have found “backdoor-like behavior” within Gigabyte systems, which they say enables the UEFI firmware of the devices to drop a Windows executable and retrieve updates in an unsecure format.

Firmware security firm Eclypsium said it first detected the anomaly in April 2023. Gigabyte has since acknowledged and addressed the issue.

“Most Gigabyte firmware includes a Windows Native Binary executable embedded inside of the UEFI firmware,” John Loucaides, senior vice president of strategy at Eclypsium, told The Hacker News.

“” This achievement connects synchrotron X-rays with quantum tunneling process to detect X-ray signature of an individual atom and opens many exciting research directions including the research on quantum and spin (magnetic) properties of just one atom using synchrotron X-rays,” Hla said.”

A team of scientists from Ohio University, Argonne National Laboratory, the University of Illinois-Chicago, and others, led by Ohio University Professor of Physics, and Argonne National Laboratory scientist, Saw Wai Hla, have taken the world’s first X-ray SIGNAL (or SIGNATURE) of just one atom. This groundbreaking achievement could revolutionize the way scientists detect the materials.

A recent discovery made by astronomers operating the Hubble Space Telescope has revealed the presence of a black hole at the center of a dwarf galaxy that actually creates stars instead of consuming them. This revelation has challenged the common perception that black holes only destroy matter.

The method by which stars are formed in this particular dwarf galaxy, named Henize 2–10, is fundamentally different from how stars are formed in larger galaxies. Astronomers have observed that gas moves around the black hole before merging with a core of dense gas present in the galaxy.

The Hubble spectroscopy revealed that the outflow of this gas was traveling at a rate of a million miles per hour, which eventually collided with the dense gas present in the galaxy. The outflow created clusters of newly born stars on its path.

In 2021, lanthanide-doped nanoparticles made waves—or rather, an avalanche—when Changwan Lee, then a Ph.D. student in Jim Schuck’s lab at Columbia Engineering, set off an extreme light-producing chain reaction from ultrasmall crystals developed at the Molecular Foundry at Berkeley Lab. Those same crystals are back again with a blink that can now be deliberately and indefinitely controlled.

“We’ve found the first fully photostable, fully photoswitchable nanoparticle—a holy grail of nanoprobe design,” said Schuck, associate professor of mechanical engineering.

This unique material was synthesized in the laboratories of Emory Chan and Bruce Cohen at the Molecular Foundry, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory as well as in a national lab in South Korea. The research team also included Yung Doug Suh’s lab at Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology (UNIST).

Geneticists have unearthed a major event in the ancient history of sturgeons and paddlefish that has significant implications for the way we understand evolution. They have pinpointed a previously hidden “whole genome duplication” (WGD) in the common ancestor of these species, which seemingly opened the door to genetic variations that may have conferred an advantage around the time of a major mass extinction some 200 million years ago.

The big-picture finding suggests that there may be many more overlooked, shared WGDs in other species before periods of extreme environmental upheaval throughout Earth’s tumultuous history.

The research, led by Professor Aoife McLysaght and Dr. Anthony Redmond from Trinity College Dublin’s School of Genetics and Microbiology, has just been published in Nature Communications.

There is a lot of speculation about the end of the universe. Humans love a good ending after all. We know that the universe started with the Big Bang and it has been going for almost 14 billion years. But how the curtain call of the cosmos occurs is not certain yet. There are, of course, hypothetical scenarios: the universe might continue to expand and cool down until it reaches absolute zero, or it might collapse back onto itself in the so-called Big Crunch. Among the alternatives to these two leading theories is “vacuum decay”, and it is spectacular – in an end-of-everything kind of way.

While the heat death hypothesis has the end slowly coming and the Big Crunch sees a reversal of the universe’s expansion at some point in the future, the vacuum decay requires that one spot of the universe suddenly transforms into something else. And that would be very bad news.

There is a field that spreads across the universe called the Higgs field. Interaction between this field and particles is what gives the particles mass. A quantum field is said to be in its vacuum state if it can’t lose any energy but we do not know if that’s true for the Higgs field, so it’s possible that the field is in a false vacuum at some point in the future. Picture the energy like a mountain. The lowest possible energy is a valley but as the field rolled down the slopes it might have encountered a small valley on the side of that mountain and got stuck there.

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Any traditional computer such as a Turing machine or a Post machine or any other reasonable computer can become a self-referential Gödel machine by just loading it with a particular form of machine-dependent software, software that is self-referential and has the potential to modify itself.

But Gödel machines cannot in any way overcome the fundamental limitations of computability and of theorem proving which were first identified in 1931 by Kurt Gödel himself.

“The idea that this stuff could actually get smarter than people… I thought it was way off… Obviously, I no longer think that,” Geoffrey Hinton, one of Google’s top artificial intelligence scientists, also known as “the godfather of AI,” said after he quit his job in April so that he can warn about the dangers of this technology.