Lifeboat Foundation

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Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has made its hardware vulnerability disclosure platform for white-hat hackers open source.

The platform, known as Finding Exploits to Thwart Tampering (FETT), was first launched last year, and the agency hopes that moving to an open-source structure will help ethical hackers to spot flaws with chip design and aid the creation of new processor prototypes.

Continue reading “DARPA makes hardware bug bounty platform open source” »

Such changes, multiplied across thousands of businesses in dozens of industries, could significantly change workers’ prospects. Professor Warman, the Canadian economist, said technologies developed for one purpose tend to spread to similar tasks, which could make it hard for workers harmed by automation to shift to another occupation or industry.

The need for social distancing led restaurants and grocery stores to seek technological help. That may improve productivity, but could also cost jobs.

As the Shenzhou-12 crew of three taikonauts has lived for nearly three weeks in China’s Tianhe space station core module, the urine treatment system in the module has recycled 66 liters of urine and treated it into distilled water to support the crew, the Global Times learned from the system designers on Tuesday.

This urine treatment system — a sub-system of the life support system — was devised by Chinese scientists with the 206 Research Institute of the Second Academy of the China Aerospace Science and Industry Corp (CASIC). The developers told the Global Times that this is the nation’s first engineering application of the system, and its good performance shows how China’s space station construction work has advanced.

All indicators of the distilled water have reached the standards for usage, and the mission planners have unanimously recognized this outstanding performance, the institute said in a statement it sent to the Global Times.

Methane is an organic molecule that hangs around in Earth’s atmosphere and is mostly produced by living organisms, most notoriously by burping cows. Its detection on Mars, on the other hand, has been a weird mystery for planetary scientists.

In recent years, NASA’s Curiosity rover has picked up tiny traces of methane numerous times on the red planet. While these emissions might be coming from some geological process, it was possible they could indicate the presence of some sort of life form on Mars (unlikely to be cows, of course).

As you’d expect, scientists are really excited by that prospect, but the data are confusing. Higher in the atmosphere, orbiting technology from the European Space Agency (ESA) has detected no methane in any concentration.

Apollo’s last three missions were arguably the most scientifically significant, largely due to roving vehicles which the astronauts used to jaunt from point to point over the Moon’s extremely difficult terrain.

😀 This could to more complex organisms being resurrected.

Deep in the tissues of sea anemones, corals, and jellyfish are strange yellow cells which are genetically distinct from the marine animals.

More than a century after these cells were first assigned a now forgotten genus, a new paper has resurrected the name and described six new species from around the world.

Continue reading “After 140 Years, Biologists Have ‘Resurrected’ The Genus of These Weird Yellow Cells” »

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U.S. Special Operations Command (SOCOM), the organization that administers America’s Spec Ops forces, says it will soon start clinical trials of an “anti-aging pill” that could halt some naturally degenerative effects of aging.

“We have completed pre-clinical safety and dosing studies in anticipation of follow-on performance testing in fiscal year 2022,” Navy Commander Tim Hawkins, a SOCOM spokesperson, told Breaking Defense.

Continue reading “The U.S. Military Is Testing a Pill That Could Delay Aging” »

An elegant new algorithm developed by Danish researchers can significantly reduce the resource consumption of the world’s computer servers. Computer servers are as taxing on the climate as global air traffic combined, thereby making the green transition in IT an urgent matter. The researchers, from the University of Copenhagen, expect major IT companies to deploy the algorithm immediately.

One of the flipsides of our runaway internet usage is its impact on climate due to the massive amount of electricity consumed by computer servers. Current CO₂ emissions from data centers are as high as from global air traffic combined—with emissions expected to double within just a few years.

Only a handful of years have passed since Professor Mikkel Thorup was among a group of researchers behind an algorithm that addressed part of this problem by producing a groundbreaking recipe to streamline computer server workflows. Their work saved energy and resources. Tech giants including Vimeo and Google enthusiastically implemented the algorithm in their systems, with online video platform Vimeo reporting that the algorithm had reduced their bandwidth usage by a factor of eight.

But hey, at least all that money is going to charity.

You know that $5.43M NFT that contained files pertaining to the source code for the world wide web? The one created by Sir WWW Tim Berners-Lee himself? Turns out there’s a scripting error in the video representation of the source code. It has been highlighted by Mikko Hypponen, a researcher at F Secure, on Twitter who pointed out that “the angle brackets are wrong!” If you watch the start of the video visualisation of the code on the Sotheby’s auction page you can see that where there should be ‘’ characters they have been replaced by something else entirely.