Lifeboat Foundation

Quanta Magazine.

In The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, the philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn observed that scientists spend long periods taking small steps. They pose and solve puzzles while collectively interpreting all data within a fixed worldview or theoretical framework, which Kuhn called a paradigm. Sooner or later, though, facts crop up that clash with the reigning paradigm. Crisis ensues. The scientists wring their hands, reexamine their assumptions and eventually make a revolutionary shift to a new paradigm, a radically different and truer understanding of nature. Then incremental progress resumes.

For several years, the particle physicists who study nature’s fundamental building blocks have been in a textbook Kuhnian crisis.

Continue reading “Crisis in Particle Physics Forces a Rethink of What Is ‘Natural’” »

Sanctions mean joint Russian-European ExoMars mission is likely to be postponed for a third time.

A new, third, data wiper malware — dubbed “IsaacWiper” — is now targeting Ukrainian governmental systems.

Teabot android banking malware spreads again through google play store apps.

An Android banking trojan designed to steal credentials and SMS messages has been observed once again sneaking past Google Play Store protections to target users of more than 400 banking and financial apps, including those from Russia, China, and the U.S.

As many as five security vulnerabilities have been disclosed in the PJSIP open-source multimedia communication library that could be abused by an attacker to trigger arbitrary code execution and denial-of-service (DoS) in applications that use the protocol stack.

Autonomous drone mapping startup Emesent has announced its latest survey-grade LiDAR payload: Hovermap ST. The lightweight, IP65-rated solution is being launched with Emesent’s new Automated Ground Control feature that, the company stresses, enables autonomous data capture in harsher environments than ever and for a wider range of use cases.

Emesent’s LiDAR payloads leverage a process called simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM), in which a drone builds a map and, at the same time, localizes the drone in that map.

The H+ Academy Roundtable presents “AGI: How it got started and key issues ahead” with Peter Voss and Ben Goertzel.

Thousands of cars—including Porsches, Volkswagens, and Lamborghinis—have gone down with the giant cargo ship Felicity Ace, which had been on fire in the Atlantic Ocean for nearly two weeks. A salvage operation was underway to take the roll-on-roll-off car carrier to a safe area off the Azores when it sank on Tuesday morning. The fire was out by the time the ship went under the waves.

The weather had been rough at the time, a spokesperson for Felicity Ace’s Japanese operator, Mitsui O.S.K. Lines transportation company, told Bloomberg. The ship sank after listing to starboard around 220 nautical miles off the Portuguese Azores archipelago at around 9 a.m. local time on March 1. Salvage craft remain posted at the site of the sinking to monitor the situation, according to a press release from the Felicity Ace Incident Information Centre.

Return of the optical drive.

Despite the year 2022, Pioneer has released a new SATA optical drive that will let you record data or video on high-precision BD-R media at up to 16x, as well as write and play back a very wide gamut of optical discs and media formats. Designed for built-in 5.25 inch drive bays, this drive is priced around $150.

Continue reading “Optical Discs Aren’t Dead, as Pioneer’s New Drive Doubles BD Write Speeds” »