Lifeboat Foundation

Researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology have found a detection method that could revolutionize cancer treatment by showing how cancers metastasize and what stage they are.

Cancer spreads via circulating tumor cells (CTCs) that travel through the blood to other organs, and they are nearly impossible to track. Now, researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology have found a detection method that could revolutionize cancer treatment by showing how cancers metastasize and what stage they are. This could lead to earlier and more targeted treatment, beginning with a simple blood test.

When a tumor starts metastasizing, it sheds its cell into the blood. An individual cell often doesn’t survive the bloodstream on its own, but clusters of cells are much more robust and can travel to other organs, effectively pushing the cancer to a metastatic state.

Imagine driving home after a long day at work. Suddenly, a car careens out of an obscured side street and turns right in front of you. Luckily, your autonomous car saw this vehicle long before it came within your line of sight and slowed to avoid a crash. This might seem like magic, but a novel technique developed at Caltech could bring it closer to a reality.

With the advent of autonomous vehicles, advanced spacecraft, and other technologies that rely on sensors for navigation, there is an ever-increasing need for advanced technologies that can scan for obstacles, pedestrians, or other objects. But what if something is hidden behind another object?

In a paper recently published in the journal Nature Photonics, Caltech researchers and their colleagues describe a new method that essentially transforms nearby surfaces into lenses that can be used to indirectly image previously obscured objects.

A component of computer processors that connects different parts of the chip can be exploited by malicious agents who seek to steal secret information from programs running on the computer, MIT researchers have found.

Modern computer processors contain many computing units, called cores, which share the same hardware resources. The on-chip interconnect is the component that enables these cores to communicate with each other. But when programs on multiple cores run simultaneously, there is a chance they can delay one another when they use the interconnect to send data across the chip at the same time.

By monitoring and measuring these delays, a malicious agent could conduct what is known as a “side-channel attack” and reconstruct secret information that is stored in a program, such as a cryptographic key or password.

The “moderate” storm is the result of sunspots.

NOAA reported that a “moderate” solar storm struck Earth over the weekend, and another once could hit today.

Worry not though, as the Mars-bound spacecraft could finally make its orbital test flight on September 1. That’s because SpaceX set out a six-month window that opens on the first day of September. The license was granted by the FCC on Wednesday, August 10, according to Space.com.

A team of researchers from Nanjing University of Posts and Telecommunications and the Chinese Academy of Sciences in China and Nanyang Technological University and the Agency for Science Technology and Research in Singapore developed an artificial neuron that is able to communicate using the neurotransmitter dopamine. They published their creation and expected uses for it in the journal Nature Electronics.

As the researchers note, most machine-brain interfaces rely on electrical signals as a communications medium, and those signals are generally one-way. Electrical signals generated by the brain are read and interpreted; signals are not sent to the brain. In this new effort, the researchers have taken a step toward making a brain-machine interface that can communicate in both directions, and it is not based on electrical signals. Instead, it is chemically mediated.

Continue reading “An artificial neuron that can receive and release dopamine” »

Simulations of a quantum computer made of six rubidium atoms suggest it could run a simple brain-inspired algorithm that can learn to remember and make simple decisions.

Across the United States, local wind and solar jobs can fully replace the coal-plant jobs that will be lost as the nation’s power-generation system moves away from fossil fuels in the coming decades, according to a new University of Michigan study.

As of 2019, coal-fired electricity generation directly employed nearly 80,000 workers at more than 250 plants in 43 U.S. states. The new U-M study quantifies—for the first time—the technical feasibility and costs of replacing those coal jobs with local wind and solar employment across the country.

The study, published online Aug. 10 in iScience, concludes that local wind and solar jobs can fill the electricity generation and employment gap, even if it’s required that all the new jobs are located within 50 miles of each retiring coal plant.

At least three groups split from the Conti ransomware operation have adopted BazarCall phishing tactics as the primary method to gain initial access to a victim’s network.

This allows the threat actors to deploy highly-targeted attacks that are more difficult to detect and stop because of the social engineering component.