Lifeboat Foundation

Threat intelligence analysts have unmasked a dark web operation farming facial photos and ID data to enable sophisticated fraud—here’s what you need to know.

A data breach earlier this year at SRP Federal Credit Union has left nearly a quarter-million people exposed to possible identity theft and account fraud.

The ransomware group Nitrogen has claimed responsibility for extracting 650 gigabytes of sensitive customer data, according to reports filed recently with the state attorney general’s offices in Texas and Maine. The breach has been publicly reported throughout December by cybersecurity analysts, financial technology companies and national news media.

Screen captures of what seemed to be raw customer data from SRP were posted on social media through bogus accounts as early as Dec. 5.

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The Paper:
Indium Selenide breakthrough ➜ https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-08156-8

Continue reading “The Discovery of a New Semiconductor Could Revolutionize Computing” »

“Facial recognition is essential to human interaction, and we were curious about how the brain processes ambiguous or incomplete facial images—especially when they’re hidden from conscious awareness. We believe understanding these mechanisms can shed light on subconscious visual processing,” said study author Makoto Michael Martinsen, a PhD student conducting research under the Visual Perception and Cognition Laboratory and the Cognitive Neurotechnology Laboratory at the Toyohashi University of Technology.

To investigate how the brain processes face-like stimuli unconsciously, the researchers used a method called Continuous Flash Suppression (CFS). In this technique, participants were presented with a dynamic series of high-contrast masking images in one eye while a target image—such as a face-like stimulus—was shown to the other eye. The rapid flashing of the mask suppressed the perception of the target image, rendering it temporarily invisible to the participant. By measuring the time it took for the target image to “break through” the suppression and reach conscious awareness, the researchers could infer how efficiently the brain processed the image.

The study included 24 participants, all university students aged 20 to 24, with normal or corrected-to-normal vision. They were exposed to two types of visual stimuli: grayscale images of faces and binary images resembling faces. These binary images were created using black-and-white contrasts to simulate minimal facial features, such as contours and the general arrangement of facial elements. Each image was presented in both upright and inverted orientations to assess the impact of orientation on recognition.

Asteroids and comets reveal complex organic molecules which form in space and might have contributed to Earth’s early biology.

The research, led by Professor Zhang Huaqiao of the Nanjing Institute of Geology and Paleontology at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, highlights the impact of these ancient organisms on our understanding of biological development.

Significance of the research: Fossilized invertebrate embryos are extraordinarily rare, and their preservation offers invaluable insights into the evolutionary developmental biology of ancient organisms.

Historically, fossil embryos from the early Cambrian to Early Ordovician periods have predominantly included cnidarians and the scalidophoran taxon Markuelia.

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Thank you to John Norton, Brett Park, Samuel Fletcher and Guido Bacciagaluppi for your guidance and consultation with this video.

Continue reading “The Dome Paradox: A Loophole in Newton’s Laws” »

The neurobiology of learning and intelligence and synthetic neurobiology.

For The Transmitter’s first annual book, five contributing editors reflect on what subfields demand greater focus in the near future—from dynamical systems and computation to technologies for studying the human brain.

A groundbreaking FDA approval has introduced a new treatment option specifically designed for colorectal cancer patients with the BRAF V600E mutation.