Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
Toggle light / dark theme

Blog – Page 3,996

Elon Musk has been pretty open about the idea of using social media platforms like Twitter to communicate directly with customers. Tesla highlighted this in its 2022 Impact Report, with the company noting that its social media accounts have helped it reach 1 billion views on Twitter last year.

With Twitter now being owned by Elon Musk, it is no surprise that his companies like Tesla are now more active on the platform. And in a recent post, the official Tesla account asked Twitter users what it could improve. The EV community, from fans to longtime owners, responded, to a great degree. As of writing, Tesla’s post has attracted over 22k comments.

A look at the comments on Tesla’s post would show that there are numerous calls for better service. Service has been Tesla’s Achilles heel for some time now, and with the company adopting a “best service is no service” stance, some owners have reported experiencing difficulties contacting Tesla for issues with their vehicles. Comments on Tesla’s post suggest that customer service is still a key point of improvement for the company.

Read more | >

Engineers at the University of Pittsburgh are bringing concrete into the 21st century by reimagining its design. Concrete, which has its roots dating back to the Roman Empire, remains the most widely utilized material in the construction industry.

A new study presents a concept for the development of smart civil infrastructure systems with the introduction of metamaterial concrete. The research presents a concept for lightweight and mechanically-tunable concrete systems with integrated energy harvesting and sensing capabilities.

“Modern society has been using concrete in construction for hundreds of years, following its original creation by the ancient Romans,” said Amir Alavi, assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering at Pitt, who is the corresponding author on the study. “Massive use of concrete in our infrastructure projects implies the need for developing a new generation of concrete materials that are more economical and environmentally sustainable, yet offer advanced functionalities. We believe that we can achieve all of these goals by introducing a metamaterial paradigm into the development of construction materials.”

Read more | >

The 2022 physics Nobel prize was awarded for experimental work demonstrating fundamental breaks in our understanding of the quantum world, leading to discussions around “local realism” and how it could be refuted. Many theorists believe these experiments challenge either “locality” (the notion that distant objects require a physical mediator to interact) or “realism” (the idea that there’s an objective state of reality). However, a growing number of experts suggest an alternative approach, “retrocausality,” which posits that present actions can affect past events, thus preserving both locality and realism.

The 2022 Nobel Prize in physics highlighted the challenges quantum experiments pose to “local realism.” However, a growing body of experts propose “retrocausality” as a solution, suggesting that present actions can influence past events, thus preserving both locality and realism. This concept offers a novel approach to understanding causation and correlations in quantum mechanics, and despite some critics and confusion with “superdeterminism,” it is increasingly seen as a viable explanation for recent groundbreaking experiments, potentially safeguarding the core principles of special relativity.

In 2022, the physics Nobel prize was awarded for experimental work showing that the quantum world must break some of our fundamental intuitions about how the universe works.

Read more | >

Over the past year, SideWinder has been linked to a cyber attack aimed at Pakistan Navy War College (PNWC) as well as an Android malware campaign that leveraged rogue phone cleaner and VPN apps uploaded to the Google Play Store to harvest sensitive information.

The latest infection chain documented by BlackBerry mirrors findings from Chinese cybersecurity firm QiAnXin in December 2022 detailing the use of PNWC lure documents to drop a lightweight. NET-based backdoor (App.dll) that’s capable of retrieving and executing next-stage malware from a remote server.

What makes the campaign also stand out is the threat actor’s use of server-based polymorphism as a way to potentially sidestep traditional signature-based antivirus (AV) detection and distribute additional payloads by responding with two different versions of an intermediate RTF file.

Read more | >

Iranian nation-state groups have now joined financially motivated actors in actively exploiting a critical flaw in PaperCut print management software, Microsoft said.

The tech giant’s threat intelligence team said it observed both Mango Sandstorm (Mercury) and Mint Sandstorm (Phosphorus) weaponizing CVE-2023–27350 in their operations to achieve initial access.

“This activity shows Mint Sandstorm’s continued ability to rapidly incorporate [proof-of-concept] exploits into their operations,” Microsoft said in a series of tweets.

Read more | >

Physicists at Delft University of Technology have developed a new technology on a microchip by combining two Nobel Prize-winning methods for the first time. The microchip is capable of accurately measuring distances in materials, which could have applications in areas such as underwater measurement and medical imaging.

The new technology, which utilizes sound vibrations instead of light, could be useful for obtaining high-precision position measurements in materials that are opaque. This breakthrough could result in the development of new methods for monitoring the Earth’s climate and human health. The findings have been published in the journal Nature Communications.

<em>Nature Communications</em> is a peer-reviewed, open-access, multidisciplinary, scientific journal published by Nature Portfolio. It covers the natural sciences, including physics, biology, chemistry, medicine, and earth sciences. It began publishing in 2010 and has editorial offices in London, Berlin, New York City, and Shanghai.

Read more | >

Scientific work often involves sifting through enormous amounts of data, a task that’s overwhelmingly mundane for humans but a piece of cake for artificial intelligence. A new platform dubbed BacterAI can conduct as many as 10,000 experiments per day to teach itself – and us – more about bacteria.

The human body is home to trillions of microbes, covering almost every surface inside and out. Many of them are vital to specific bodily functions, while many others make you sick. Research continues to uncover how inextricably linked our overall health is to our microbiomes, but managing and exploring the data involved remains a daunting task.

“We know almost nothing about most of the bacteria that influence our health,” said Paul Jensen, corresponding author of the new study. “Understanding how bacteria grow is the first step toward reengineering our microbiome.”

Read more | >