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Nov 27, 2022

Frontier Airlines drops its customer service line

Posted by in category: futurism

The budget airline says customers will no longer be able to call a live agent by phone. Frontier is encouraging customers to instead reach out by text, social media and WhatsApp.

Nov 27, 2022

Hackers attacking energy sector using decades-old software, says Microsoft

Posted by in categories: cybercrime/malcode, energy, internet

Boa, an open-source web server suitable for embedded applications that was discontinued since 2005 is now becoming a security threat because of the complex nature of how it was built into the internet of things (IoT) device supply chain. A recent report by tech major Microsoft said that hackers are exploiting vulnerabilities in the software to target organizations in the energy sector.

Microsoft researchers revealed in an analysis that a vulnerable open-source component in the Boa web server, is used widely in a range of routers and security cameras as well as popular software development kits (SDKs), a set of tools that allow developers to write or use an existing framework to develop applications for a given platform.

Despite the software being discontinued a nearly two decades ago, Microsoft reports that attackers are continuing their attempts to exploit the flaws of the Boa web servers which include a high-severity information disclosure bug (CVE-2021–33558) and another arbitrary file access flaw (CVE-2017–9833). An unauthenticated attacker could exploit these vulnerabilities to obtain user credentials and leverage them for remote code execution.

Nov 27, 2022

Evidence of Higgs boson contributions to the production of Z boson pairs at high energies

Posted by in categories: particle physics, quantum physics

The Higgs boson, the fundamental subatomic particle associated with the Higgs field, was first discovered in 2012 as part of the ATLAS and CMS experiments, both of which analyze data collected at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the most powerful particle accelerator in existence. Since the discovery of the Higgs boson, research teams worldwide have been trying to better understand this unique particle’s properties and characteristics.

The CMS Collaboration, the large group of researchers involved in the CMS experiment, has recently obtained an updated measurement of the width of the Higgs boson, while also gathering the first evidence of its off-shell contributions to the production of Z boson pairs. Their findings, published in Nature Physics, are consistent with predictions.

“The quantum theoretical description of fundamental particles is probabilistic in nature, and if you consider all the different states of a collection of particles, their probabilities must always add up to 1 regardless of whether you look at this collection now or sometime later,” Ulascan Sarica, researcher for the CMS Collaboration, told Phys.org. “When analyzed mathematically, this simple statement imposes restrictions, the so-called unitarity bounds, on the probabilities of particle interactions at high energies.”

Nov 27, 2022

Lasers recreate ‘molecule that made the universe’

Posted by in category: space

Year 2017 face_with_colon_three


(Credit: Coconino National Forest/Flickr)

While H3+ is astronomically abundant, no scientist understood the mechanisms that form it from organic molecules. Until now.

Nov 27, 2022

Google AI Introduces ‘SegCLR,’ a Self-Supervised Machine Learning Technique that Produces Highly Informative Representations of Cells Directly from 3D Electron Microscope Imagery and Segmentations

Posted by in categories: mapping, robotics/AI

If we can analyze the organization of neural circuits, it will play a crucial role in better understanding the process of thinking. It is where the maps come into play. Maps of the nervous system contain information about the identity of individual cells, like their type, subcellular component, and connectivity of the neurons.

But how do we obtain these maps?

Volumetric nanometer-resolution imaging of brain tissue is a technique that provides the raw data needed to build these maps. But inferring all the relevant information is a laborious and challenging task because of the multiple scales of brain structures (e.g., nm for a synapse vs. mm for an axon). It requires hours of manual ground truth labeling by expert annotators.

Nov 27, 2022

Groundbreaking New Technology Allows People To Listen to Music Through Touch

Posted by in categories: information science, media & arts, neuroscience

A ground-breaking prototype developed by experts from the Department of Electronics at the University of Malaga and members of the R&D group “Electronics for Instrumentation and Systems,” will allow those with hearing loss to listen to music through the sense of touch.

It consists of an audio-tactile algorithm that transforms monophonic music into tangible stimuli based on vibration utilizing “tactile illusions.” According to the researchers, “It’s like ‘hacking’ the nervous system to receive a different response to the real stimulus sent.”

Continue reading “Groundbreaking New Technology Allows People To Listen to Music Through Touch” »

Nov 26, 2022

Helical Engine

Posted by in category: space travel

Infinite speed helical engine for space travel 😗😁


Copyright © 2019 by David M. Burns. Published by the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Inc., with permission.

Nov 26, 2022

Revival of light signalling in the postmortem mouse and human retina

Posted by in category: futurism

Revitalizing the human eye for eye donors will be possible now due to new treatment even 5 hours after death.


Experiments measuring light-evoked responses in postmortem mouse and human retinas are used to quantify decay of photoreceptors following death and optimise conditions for reviving trans-synaptic transmission.

Nov 26, 2022

Bulk localized transport states in infinite and finite quasicrystals via magnetic aperiodicity

Posted by in categories: computing, particle physics

Infinite hard drive for computers essentially :3.


Topological edge states can form when a charged particle confined to a crystalline lattice interacts with a magnetic field. These edge states are localized to the boundary and can support transport along the edge even with an insulating bulk. Here, the authors show that a different state that supports transport in the bulk can emerge when the charged particle is on a quasicrystalline lattice. Utilizing a recently developed spectral computation technique, they show that these new bulk localized transport (BLT) states survive in the infinite-size limit.

Nov 26, 2022

Scientists develop RNA-targeting strategy to repair genetic cause of ALS and dementia

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, genetics, health, neuroscience

Scientists at University of Florida (UF) Scripps Biomedical Research have developed a potential medicine for a leading cause of ALS and dementia that works by eliminating disease-causing segments of RNA. The compound restored the health of neurons in the lab and rescued mice with the disease.

The potential medication is described this week in the scientific journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. It is designed to be taken as a pill or an injection, said the lead inventor, professor Matthew Disney, Ph.D., chair of the UF Scripps chemistry department. Importantly, experiments showed that the compound is small enough to cross the blood-brain barrier, a hurdle other approaches have failed to clear, he said.

Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS, progressively destroys neurons that control muscles, leading to worsening muscle loss and eventually death. The mutation, a leading cause of inherited ALS, is referred to as “C9 open reading frame 72,” or C9orf72. This mutation also leads to one form of frontotemporal dementia, a brain disease that causes the brain’s frontal and to shrink, resulting in changes in personality, behavior and speech, ultimately resulting in death.