Lifeboat Foundation

Using retrospective radiocarbon birth dating, an international team of scientists shows that the human liver stays young throughout life and is on average less than three years old.

As one of the major organs of the body, the liver performs many essential biological functions. Almost all the blood in a person’s body passes through the liver, where waste products, worn-out cells, and toxins are filtered. It also produces bile, a solution that helps digest fats and eliminate waste products. Those are just a couple of the major duties it performs — more ore than 500 vital functions have been identified with the liver.

The liver is an essential organ that takes care of detoxifying our bodies. It is prone to injury because it is constantly exposed to toxic substances. To overcome this, the liver has a unique capacity among organs to regenerate itself after damage. Because a lot of the body’s ability to heal and regenerate itself decreases as we age, scientists were wondering if the liver’s capacity to renew also diminishes with age.

University of Missouri scientists are partnering with Harvard and Georgia Tech to create a new diabetes treatment that involves transplanting insulin-producing pancreatic cells. Type 1 diabetes is estimated to affect around 1.8 million Americans. Although type 1 diabetes often develops in childhood or adolescence, it can occur in adulthood…

The object could be the first isolated stellar-mass black hole identified in the Milky Way — or it might be an unusually heavy neutron star.

Study shows how a newly identified molecule stimulates the formation of new insulin-producing cells in zebrafish and mammalian tissue, through a novel mechanism for regulating protein synthesis.

Circa 2020

You’ve no doubt heard of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the massive particle accelerator straddling the border between France and Switzerland. The large size of this instrument allows scientists to do cutting-edge research, but particle accelerators could be useful in many fields if they weren’t so huge. The age of room-sized (and larger) colliders may be coming to an end now that researchers from Stanford have developed a nano-scale particle accelerator that fits on a single silicon chip.

Full-sized accelerators like the LHC push beams of particles to extremely high speeds, allowing scientists to study the minutiae of the universe when two particles collide. The longer the beamline, the higher the maximum speed. Keeping these beams confined requires extremely powerful magnets, as well. It all adds up to a bulky piece of equipment that isn’t practical for most applications. For example, cancer radiation treatments with a particle accelerator could be much safer and more effective than traditional methods.

Continue reading “Researchers Create Particle Accelerator on a Chip” »

A new side-channel attack known as Hertzbleed allows remote attackers to steal full cryptographic keys by observing variations in CPU frequency enabled by dynamic voltage and frequency scaling (DVFS).

This is possible because, on modern Intel (CVE-2022–24436) and AMD (CVE-2022–23823) x86 processors, the dynamic frequency scaling depends on the power consumption and the data being processed.

DVFS is a power management throttling feature used by modern CPUs to ensure that the system doesn’t go over thermal and power limits during high loads, as well as to reduce overall power consumption during low CPU loads.

Cybersecurity researchers have discovered adware and information-stealing malware on the Google Play Store last month, with at least five still available and having amassed over two million downloads.

Adware infections displaying unwanted advertisements that can be particularly intrusive, degrade the user experience, deplete the battery, generate heat, and even cause unauthorized charges.

This software generally tries to hide by masquerading as something else on the host device and makes money for remote operators by forcing the victim to perform views or clicks on affiliated advertisements.

Microsoft has released security updates with the June 2022 cumulative Windows Updates to address a critical Windows zero-day vulnerability known as Follina and actively exploited in ongoing attacks.

“Microsoft strongly recommends that customers install the updates to be fully protected from the vulnerability. Customers whose systems are configured to receive automatic updates do not need to take any further action,” Microsoft said in an update to the original advisory.

“Microsoft recommends installing the updates as soon as possible,” the company further urged customers in a post on the Microsoft Security Response Center.

Internet infrastructure firm Cloudflare said today that it mitigated a 26 million request per second distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack, the largest HTTPS DDoS attack detected to date.

The record-breaking attack occurred last week and targeted one of Cloudflare’s customers using the Free plan.

The threat actor behind it likely used hijacked servers and virtual machines seeing that the attack originated from Cloud Service Providers instead of weaker Internet of Things (IoT) devices from compromised Residential Internet Service Providers.