Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
Toggle light / dark theme

Blog – Page 5006

Moore’s law has driven the semiconductor industry to continue downscaling the critical size of transistors to improve device density. At the beginning of this century, traditional scaling started to encounter bottlenecks. The industry has successively developed strained Si/Ge, high-K/metal gate, and Fin-FETs, enabling Moore’s Law to continue.

Now, the critical size of FETs is down to 7 nm, which means there are almost 7 billion transistors per square centimeter on one chip, which brings huge challenges for fin-type structure and nanomanufacturing methods. Up to now, extreme ultraviolet lithography has been used in some critical steps, and it is facing alignment precision and high costs for high-volume manufacturing.

Meanwhile, the introduction of new materials and 3D complex structures brings serious challenges for top-down methods. Newly developed bottom-up manufacturing serves as a good complementary method and provides technical driving force for nanomanufacturing.

Read more | >

In cancer research, it all comes down to a single cell.

Over the last decade, cancer researchers have homed in on the fact that an individual cell from a tumor can be used to perform molecular analyses that reveal important clues about how the cancer developed, how it spreads and how it may be targeted.

With this in mind, a team of researchers at Brown University has developed an advanced way to isolate single cells from complex tissues. In a study published in Scientific Reports, they show how the approach not only results in high-quality, intact single cells, but is also superior to standard isolation methods in terms of labor, cost and efficiency.

Read more | >

The term ‘type 3 diabetes’ has been used by some to describe Alzheimer’s disease.

While most of us are familiar with type 1 and type 2 diabetes, you may not have come across the term ‘type 3 diabetes’ before. First things first, this is not to be confused with type 3c diabetes, which is something else entirely. It is, however, related to insulin resistance in the brain.

Being diagnosed as insulin resistant generally means that someone is either prebiabetic or has type 2 diabetes. But scientists have proposed that it can also result in the brain’s neurons lacking glucose, which is needed for proper function, and this can lead to symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease.

Read more | >

The CDC has released a map that shows where brain-eating amoebas are infecting people in lakes across the U.S.

A few days ago, a Missouri resident who went swimming in the Lake of Three Fires in Taylor County, Iowa, was hospitalized after a microscopic amoeba entered through their nose and started eating away at their brain.

Better known as Naegleria fowleri, the single-celled organism that thrives in warm freshwater, travels up the nose to the brain where it rapidly multiplies and begins feasting on brain tissue. It can infect people when they are swimming or diving, by entering through their nose.

The state health department reported the case was only the second instance in a Missouri resident and the first in 35 years.

Continue reading “This map shows which US lakes contain brain-eating amoebas” | >

Security researchers have detected a massive campaign that scanned close to 1.6 million WordPress sites for the presence of a vulnerable plugin that allows uploading files without authentication.

The attackers are targeting the Kaswara Modern WPBakery Page Builder, which has been abandoned by its author before receiving a patch for a critical severity flaw tracked as CVE-2021–24284.

The vulnerability would allow an unauthenticated attacker to inject malicious Javascript to sites using any version of the plugin and perform actions like uploading and deleting files, which could lead to complete takeover of the site.

Read more | >

What if you could power the smart thermostats, speakers and lights in your home with a kitchen countertop? Stones, such as marble and granite, are natural, eco-friendly materials that many people building or renovating houses already use. Now, in a step toward integrating energy storage with these materials, researchers have fabricated microsupercapacitors onto the surface of stone tiles. The devices, reported in ACS Nano, are durable and easily scaled up for customizable 3D power supplies.

It would be convenient if the surfaces in rooms could charge smart home devices or other small electronics without being connected to the electrical grid. And although stone is a widely used material for floors, countertops and decorative backsplashes, it hasn’t been integrated with energy storage devices, such as batteries and capacitors. But stones, even those that are polished and seem smooth, have microscopic bumps and divots, making it difficult to adhere electrical components to them. Researchers have recently figured out how to place microsupercapacitors, which have fast charging and discharging rates and excellent power supply storage, onto irregular surfaces with lasers. So, Bongchul Kang and colleagues wanted to adapt this approach to build microsupercapacitors on marble. For further information see the IDTechEx report on Supercapacitor Materials and Formats 2020–2040.

Read more | >