Lifeboat Foundation

AI company DeepMind has built a tool that can create working code to solve complex software challenges.

Giant mountain ranges at least as high as the Himalayas and stretching up to 8,000 kilometers across entire supercontinents played a crucial role in the evolution of early life on Earth, according to a new study by researchers at The Australian National University (ANU).

The researchers tracked the formation of these supermountains throughout Earth’s history using traces of zircon with low lutetium content—a combination of mineral and rare earth element only found in the roots of high mountains where they form under intense pressure.

The study found the most giant of these supermountains only formed twice in Earth’s history—the first between 2,000 and 1,800 million years ago and the second between 650 and 500 million years ago. Both mountain ranges rose during periods of supercontinent formation.

Researchers have discovered 23 “high-impact vulnerabilities” affecting any vendors that adopted Independent BIOS Developers (IBV) code into their Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) firmware.

Binarly explained the vulnerabilities in a blog post this week, confirming that “all these vulnerabilities are found in several of the major enterprise vendor ecosystems” including Fujitsu, Siemens, Dell, HP, HPE, Lenovo, Microsoft, Intel and Bull Atos. CERT/CC confirmed that Fujitsu, Insyde and Intel were affected but left the others tagged as “unknown,” urging anyone affected to update to the latest stable version of firmware.

According to the blog, the majority of the vulnerabilities disclosed lead to code execution with SMM privileges and had severity ratings of between 7.5 — 8.2.

A team of researchers from the University of Massachusetts Amherst recently announced in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that they had engineered a new rubber-like solid substance that has surprising qualities. It can absorb and release very large quantities of energy. And it is programmable. Taken together, this new material holds great promise for a very wide array of applications, from enabling robots to have more power without using additional energy, to new helmets and protective materials that can dissipate energy much more quickly.

“Imagine a rubber band,” says Alfred Crosby, professor of polymer science and engineering at UMass Amherst and the paper’s senior author. “You pull it back, and when you let it go, it flies across the room. Now imagine a super rubber band. When you stretch it past a certain point, you activate extra energy stored in the material. When you let this rubber band go, it flies for a mile.”

This hypothetical rubber band is made out of a new metamaterial—a substance engineered to have a property not found in naturally occurring materials—that combines an elastic, rubber-like substance with tiny magnets embedded in it. This new “elasto-magnetic” material takes advantage of a physical property known as a phase shift to greatly amplify the amount of energy the material can release or absorb.

Quantum science holds promise for many technological applications, such as building hackerproof communication networks or quantum computers that could accelerate new drug discovery. These applications require a quantum version of a computer bit, known as a qubit, that stores quantum information.

But researchers are still grappling with how to easily read the information held in these qubits and struggle with the short memory time, or coherence, of qubits, which is usually limited to microseconds or milliseconds.

A team of researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory and the University of Chicago has achieved two major breakthroughs to overcome these common challenges for quantum systems. They were able to read out their qubit on demand and then keep the quantum state intact for over five seconds—a new record for this class of devices. Additionally, the researchers’ qubits are made from an easy-to-use material called silicon carbide, which is widely found in lightbulbs, electric vehicles and high-voltage electronics.

SpaceX has rapidly recovered the first converted Falcon Heavy ‘side core’ after its first Falcon 9 launch and landing, kicking off preparations for its fourth launch less than two days after its third.

After four consecutive days of delays, one of which was caused by an inexplicably wayward cruise ship, former Falcon Heavy side core B1052 finally lifted off on January 31st on its first mission as a Falcon 9 booster. Despite the painful launch campaign, B1052 performed perfectly and helped send the Italian Space Agency’s (ASI) CSG-2 Earth observation satellite to a polar sun-synchronous orbit (SSO) before boosting back to the Florida coast and landing just a few miles south of where it launched.

As a Falcon Heavy side core, B1052 supported both of the only two launches of the Block 5 variant of the rocket – first on April 11th, 2019 and again on June 25th, 2019. Both times, side boosters B1052 and B1053 performed return-to-launch-site (RTLS) maneuvers and landed side by side at SpaceX’s LZ-1 and LZ-2 landing pads. CSG-2 thus marked B1052’s third launch and third RTLS landing.

Astrophotographer Jason Guenzel managed to capture the James Webb Space Telescope on its journey while it was 1 million kilometers away.

One mountain grew 30 feet overnight.

Recently, the Swiss Alps made the news when scientists found they were growing due to tectonic activity deep beneath Earth’s surface. Now, Mount Everest is also on the rise. Why is there so much, uh, “mounting” altitude?

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Koenigsegg has announced new high power, compact motors and powertrains for electric cars.

Christian von Koenigsegg is an inveterate tinkerer who has built a business on his ability to squeeze extraordinary amounts of power out of internal combustion engines. Lately, he has turned his talents to electric motors and drivetrains. On January 31, his company announced two breakthrough products that could transform the world of electric cars.

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