Lifeboat Foundation

Crypto exchange Coinbase disclosed that a threat actor stole cryptocurrency from 6,000 customers after using a vulnerability to bypass the company’s SMS multi-factor authentication security feature.

Coinbase is the world’s second-largest cryptocurrency exchange, with approximately 68 million users from over 100 countries.

In a notification sent to affected customers this week, Coinbase explains that between March and May 20th, 2,021 a threat actor conducted a hacking campaign to breach Coinbase customer accounts and steal cryptocurrency.

CARACAS, Venezuela (AP) — A new currency with six fewer zeros debuted Friday in Venezuela, whose currency has been made nearly worthless by years of the world’s worst inflation.

But the new bills were difficult to find in the capital, where consumers’ fears that prices will continue to spiral upward proved to be right.

“Today, I went to the supermarket and everything was marked in dollars,” Lourdes Pórtelo, an office worker, said in a shopping center in the east side of Caracas. “In the end, I couldn’t buy anything, I didn’t have enough money.”

Residents of Abusir el-Meleq, an ancient Egyptian city south of Cairo, the men died between 1,380 B.C.E. and 450 C.E. A team from Parabon NanoLabs presented the trio’s facial reconstructions at the International Symposium on Human Identification in September.

“[T]his is the first time comprehensive DNA phenotyping has been performed on human DNA of this age,” says Parabon, a Virginia-based company that typically uses genetic analysis to help solve cold cases, in a statement.

To approximate the men’s faces, researchers used DNA phenotyping, which predicts individuals’ physical appearance based on genetic markers. (Phenotyping can suggest subjects’ skin, hair and eye color, but as Caitlin Curtis and James Hereward wrote for the Conversation in 2,018 the process has its limitations.) The team determined the mummies’ other characteristics through examination of their physical remains, reports Hannah Sparks for the New York Post.

Today, the conjunction of climate change, the advent of artificial intelligence and the capacity to import human purposiveness into evolution through the reading and rewriting of our own genome are, like the first leaps in technology and their consequences, stirring a search for the sacred that frames both the limits and potentialities of what it means to be human. As the Polish thinker Leszek Kołakowski sagely put it, without a sense of the sacred, culture loses all sense.

For this reason, he posited in a conversation some years ago at All Souls College in Oxford, that “mankind can never get rid of the need for religious self-identification. … Who am I, where did I come from, where do I fit in, why am I responsible, what does my life mean, how will I face death? Religion is a paramount aspect of human culture. Religious need cannot be excommunicated from culture by rationalist incantation.”

In this, Rees agrees. Far from consigning faith to the past, science fiction plumbs its future. Where technology and its consequences go, the religious imagination will follow.

Moving beyond the digital revolution, librarians are now confronting the Fourth Industrial Revolution, thinks Bohyun Kim. She sees the lines between the physical, the digital, and the biological spheres becoming blurred. Implications regarding virtual, augmented, and mixed reality will affect the future of libraries.

UNLV researchers and colleagues may have identified the first known planet to orbit three stars.

Unlike our solar system, which consists of a solitary star, it is believed that half of all star systems, like GW Ori where astronomers observed the novel phenomenon, consist of two or more stars that are gravitationally bound to each other.

But no planet orbiting three stars—a circumptriple orbit—has ever been discovered. Perhaps until now.

Researchers have discovered a complex landscape of electronic states that can co-exist on a kagome lattice, resembling those in high-temperature superconductors, a team of Boston College physicists reports in an advance electronic publication of the journal Nature.

The focus of the study was a bulk single crystal of a topological kagome metal, known as CsV₃Sb₅—a metal that becomes superconducting below 2.5 degrees Kelvin, or minus 455 degrees Fahrenheit. The exotic material is built from atomic planes composed of Vanadium atoms arranged on a so-called kagome lattice—described as a pattern of interlaced triangles and hexagons—stacked on top of one another, with Cesium and Antimony spacer layers between the kagome planes.

The material offers a window into how the physical properties of quantum solids—such as light transmission, electrical conduction, or response to a magnetic field —relate to the underlying geometry of the atomic lattice structure. Because its geometry causes destructive interference and “frustrates” the kinetic motion of traversing electrons, kagome lattice materials are prized for offering the unique and fertile ground for the study of quantum electronic states described as frustrated, correlated and topological.

“We are going to get so wrecked,” he added.

The kind of value systems that humans have used to structure societies over history — regardless of their success in bringing about meaningful change — may soon no longer be relevant.

“Idk, I think the broader point is just that machines might end up having a lot more flexibility on how they organize themselves than we do,” Hodak pondered in a follow-up tweet. “It takes generations to upgrade cognitive technology in human societies.”

When Dr. Robert Murphy first started researching biochemistry and drug development in the late 1970s, creating a pharmaceutical compound that was effective and safe to market followed a strict experimental pipeline that was beginning to be enhanced by large-scale data collection and analysis on a computer.

Now head of the Murphy Lab for computational biology at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), Murphy has watched over the years as data collection and artificial intelligence have revolutionized this process, making the drug creation pipeline faster, more efficient, and more effective.

Recently, that’s been thanks to the application of machine learning—computer systems that learn and adapt by using algorithms and statistical models to analyze patterns in datasets—to the drug development process. This has been notably key to reducing the presence of side effects, Murphy says.