Lifeboat Foundation

2021 will be remembered as a significant year for the cyber security industry. With the pandemic accelerating digital transformation, the threat landscape was in constant flux. Major ransomware attacks demonstrated not just their impact on businesses, but wider society too. As we look ahead to 2022, the only constant in our industry is uncertainty in the cyber realm, but here are a few of our predictions for next year, based on trends we’re already seeing emerge.

Ransomware.

Omicron, Moon missions and particle physics are among the themes set to shape research in the coming year.

We will keep you posted.

The mathematician Ben Green of the University of Oxford has made a major stride toward understanding a nearly 100-year-old combinatorics problem, showing that a well-known recent conjecture is “not only wrong but spectacularly wrong,” as Andrew Granville of the University of Montreal put it. The new paper shows how to create much longer disordered strings of colored beads than mathematicians had thought possible, extending a line of work from the 1940s that has found applications in many areas of computer science.

The conjecture, formulated about 17 years ago by Ron Graham, one of the leading discrete mathematicians of the past half-century, concerns how many red and blue beads you can string together without creating any long sequences of evenly spaced beads of a single color. (You get to decide what “long” means for each color.)

This problem is one of the oldest in Ramsey theory, which asks how large various mathematical objects can grow before pockets of order must emerge. The bead-stringing question is easy to state but deceptively difficult: For long strings there are just too many bead arrangements to try one by one.

“Specialists of the Central Military District’s search/rescue and parachute service have been relocated in full to the Republic of Kazakhstan to provide for the safe landing of the Soyuz MS-20 descent capsule with space tourists from Japan on its board,” the press office said in a statement.

The Central Military District has redeployed additional personnel from the Chelyabinsk Region in the Urals to bolster the basic group that provided for the safe launch of the Soyuz spacecraft. In particular, about 50 more rescuers have been redeployed to Kazakhstan together with eight Mi-8 helicopters and two PEM-1 and PEM-2 ‘Blue Bird’ search and evacuation vehicles, the statement says.

Overall, the search and rescue operation to provide for the safe landing of the Soyuz MS-20 descent module involves about 200 rescuers, 12 Mi-8 helicopters, two An-12 planes and an An-26 aircraft and over 20 motor vehicles, including six pieces of ‘Blue Bird’ rescue and evacuation equipment.

The prospect of Starship making its mark on the Space Coast entered another level this week when NASA revealed it would conduct environmental assessments on LC-49 to support Starship launch and landing operations.

With SpaceX already confirming they will restart work on a Starship pad inside 39A, the potential of a second site at LC-49 could provide a considerable increase in Starship launch cadence from the Kennedy Space Center (KSC).

Infarm, an Amsterdam-headquartered start-up that grows food indoors in racks, has been valued at over $1 billion in a new $200 million funding round.

It is the first vertical farming start-up in Europe to pass the $1 billion “unicorn” milestone.

Erez Galonska, co-founder and CEO of Infarm, said in a statement that the current food system is broken.

We’ve all seen children draw quirky, awesome characters, and even heard them talk about their illustrations as if they were real! How cool would it be to actually bring the characters to life?

Researchers at Meta AI have developed a way to do just that. We’re announcing a first-of-its-kind AI-powered animation tool that can automatically animate children’s drawings of human figures within minutes.

Yusaku Maezawa, founder of Japan’s online fashion retailer Zozotown, tweeted yesterday on turning the first photo he took into a non-fungible token (NFT).