Lifeboat Foundation

Neuralink! Also known as, Elon Musk’s other (other) project.

You’ve probably heard of Elon Musk’s plan to insert brain chips into the human brain, finally bridging the gap between human and machine. Academically, this is known as a brain-machine interface and it’s actually not that novel an idea!

Continue reading “Neuralink: Bridging The Gap Between Human & Machine” »

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j4fYXQ7HSMc

Circa 2021

Entrepreneurs are devising innovative ways to reuse spent electric vehicle batteries. One promising idea is storing power from solar and wind farms.

It was always going to come to something like this. But now, everyone at work may be even more concerned about what they write and say.

Quite a bit of my consulting work lately has focused on helping clients counter false information spreading online. This sort of engagement can very quickly lead to rough and murky waters, especially if an organization does not arm itself with proper ongoing situational awareness tools in order to differentiate between the bad actors who are steering the narrative and the people unknowingly posting false information.

Much of the discourse on ‘fake news’ these days conflates three notions: misinformation, disinformation and mal-information. It’s important to distinguish messages that are true from those that are false, and messages that are created, produced or distributed by “agents” who intend to do harm from those that are not. I recommend that you ensure your online comms and digital engagement folks are well versed in key definitions from the Council of Europe’s Information Disorder Report:

A study shows that Canadians have concerns about how extreme temps will affect EVs.

A study shows that Canadians have concerns about how extreme temps will affect EVs.

For those building their own remote controlled devices like RC boats and quadcopter drones, having a good transmitter-receiver setup is a significant factor in the eventual usability of their build. Many transmitters are available in the 2.4 GHz band, but some operate at different frequencies, like the 868/915 MHz band. The TBS Crossfire is one such transmitter, and it’s become a popular model thanks to its long-range performance.

When [g3gg0] bought a Crossfire set for his drone, he discovered that the receiver module consisted of not much more than a PIC32 microcontroller and an SX1272 LoRa modem. This led him to ponder if the RF protocol would be easy to decode. As it turns out, it was not trivial, but not impossible either. First, he built his own SPI sniffer using a CYC1000 FPGA board to reveal the exact register settings that the PIC32 sent to the SX1272. The Crossfire uses channel hopping, and by simply looking at the register settings it was easy to figure out the hopping sequence.

Continue reading “Reverse Engineering A 900 MHz RC Transmitter And Receiver” »

The unsung star of Jurassic Park was a mosquito frozen in amber. While you can’t really extract blood from specimens like that, you could be transported back in time if you looked at a specimen of fossilized tree sap and found a 110 million-year-old lizard staring back at you.

Creatures get trapped in amber all the time, but most prehistoric finds are insects. Amber is a great material for preserving arthropods because of their already tough shells that will hold on even if the insides disintegrate. But what about a lizard? Retinosaurus hkamentiensis is a new extinct species of lizard that was unexpectedly found trapped in Burmese amber. No one expected an entire reptile to be preserved so well, from its scaly skin down to its skeleton.

What are now the empty eyes of Retinosaurus may have once seen dinosaurs or giant ferns or dragonflies the size of your head. It was determined to be a juvenile that ran into a sticky situation when it ran into a glob of tree amber that it couldn’t escape. It was so well preserved that paleontologist Andrej Čerňanský of Comenius University and his team, who recently published a study in Scientific Reports, approached the prehistoric lizard almost as if it were alive.