Lifeboat Foundation

Local and federal authorities spent months investigating a warehouse in Fresno County, California, that they suspect was home to an illegal, unlicensed laboratory full of lab mice, medical waste and hazardous materials.

The Fresno County Public Health Department has been “evaluating and assessing the activities of an unlicensed laboratory” in Reedley, the health department’s assistant director, Joe Prado, said in a statement Thursday. All of the biological agents were destroyed by July 7 following a legal abatement process by the agency.

“The evaluation required coordination and collaboration with multiple federal and state agencies to determine and classify biological and chemical contents onsite, in addition to assessing jurisdictional authority under this unique situation,” Prado said.

When Samuel Peralta contacts artists about putting their work on the moon, they don’t always believe him.

“I say, ‘I’d like to put your art on the moon,’ and they think this is some sort of a scam,” the semiretired physicist and author tells the New York Times’ J. D. Biersdorfer.

But it’s true. Peralta is the mastermind behind the Lunar Codex, a series of time capsules containing the work of 30,000 artists from 157 countries that will journey to the lunar surface. Peralta wants the project to honor artists after the difficulties they faced during the pandemic, he tells the Toronto Star’s Kevin Jiang.

NASA’s Juno spacecraft captured this close view of Io on its 53rd orbit around Jupiter. Credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech / SwRI / MSSS / Thomas Thomopoulos (CC BY 3.0)

Want more science and tech news delivered straight to your inbox? Sign up for Mashable’s Light Speed newsletter today.

Juno’s orbit around Jupiter will bring it even closer to Io. By year’s end, in late December, the spacecraft will make its closest pass by Io (with another in early 2024).

The Cygnus NG-19 cargo freighter arrived at the International Space Station on Friday, Aug. 4, after a two-day space ride with 8,200 pounds (3,700 kilograms) of supply, experiments and new technology aboard.

The craft, built by U.S. aerospace giant Northrop Grumman and named after astronaut Laurel Clark who perished during the Columbia space shuttle disaster in 2003, was the last to launch on a version of the company’s Antares rocket using a first stage built in Ukraine.

In April, Alibaba launched its large language model (LLM) called Tongyi Qianwen. A LLM is an artificial intelligence model trained on huge amounts of data. It is also the basis for generative AI applications, such as ChatGPT — which generate human-like responses to user prompts.

Tongyi Qianwen allows AI content generation in English and Chinese and has different model sizes, including seven billion parameters and above. A model’s parameters refer to its power.

Alibaba will be open-sourcing the seven-billion-parameter model called Qwen-7B, along with a version designed for conversational apps, called Qwen-7B-Chat. This means that researchers, academics and companies globally can use the model to create their own generative AI apps without needing to train their own systems, saving time and expense. Companies with more than 100 million monthly active users will require a royalty-free license from Alibaba to do so.

Is the Ira Rubinoff Director of the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (STRI https://www.si.edu/about/bios/joshua-tewksbury), part of the Smithsonian Institution, the world’s largest museum, education, and research complex. He oversees more than 400 employees, with an annual budget of $35 million. Headquartered in Panama City, Panama, with field sites around the world, STRI furthers the understanding and public awareness of tropical biodiversity and its importance to human welfare. In addition to its resident scientists and support staff, STRI’s facilities are used annually by some 1,400 visiting scientists, pre-and postdoctoral fellows and interns from around the world.

Dr. Tewksbury is an ecologist with more than two decades of research in conservation and biodiversity, as well as nearly a decade of executive leadership experience at international research institutes.

Continue reading “Dr. Joshua Tewksbury, Ph.D. — Director, Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (STRI)” »

Kenya claims it’s shutting down Sam Altman’s eyeball-scanning Worldcoin cryptocurrency within its borders — but Worldcoin says it’s suspending its own services in the country, thank you very much.

In a joint statement, a group of agencies in the East African nation said that Worldcoin “must cease its data collection activities in Kenya until further notice” as it investigates regulatory concerns about the way the project collects biometric data.

Worldcoin, meanwhile, seems to have a different version of events.

This post is also available in: עברית (Hebrew)

A hacktivist group called “Mysterious Team Bangladesh” attacked over 750 times this year using the DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) method and defaced over 70 websites. According to research performed by cyber security firm Group-IB, they seem to be driven by political and religious reasons.

“Mysterious Team Bangladesh” was founded in 2020 by a threat actor nicknamed “D4RK TSN” and is it unclear whether it originates from Bangladesh. Their activity peaked in May of 2023 after announcing a large-scale campaign against India.

“A place for everything and everything in its place”—making sense of order, or disorder, helps us understand nature. Animals tend to fit nicely into categories: Mammals, birds, reptiles, whatever an axolotl is, and more. Sorting also applies to materials: Insulator, semiconductor, conductor, and even superconductor. Where exactly a material lands in the hierarchy depends on a seemingly invisible interplay of electrons, atoms, and their surroundings.

Unlike animals, the boundaries are less sharp, and tweaking a material’s environment can force it to bounce between categories. For example, dialing down the temperature will turn some materials into superconductors. Snapping on a magnetic field might reverse this effect. Within a single category, different types of order, or phases, can emerge from the sea of particles.

Unfortunately, we can’t see this nanoscopic universe with our eyes, but scientists can use advanced imaging tools to visualize what’s going on. Every once in a while, they uncover unexpected and surprising behaviors.