Lifeboat Foundation

Chinese researchers are reporting that applying an electric field to pea plants increased yields. This process — known as electroculture — has been tested multiple times, but in each case there are irregularities in the scientific process, so there is still an opportunity for controlled research to produce meaningful data.

This recent research used two plots of peas planted from the same pods. The plants were tended identically except one plot was stimulated by an electric field. The yield on the stimulated plot was about 20% more than the control plot.

The actual paper is paywalled in the journal Nature Food, but the idea seems simple enough. If you search for the topic, you’ll find there have been other studies with similar findings. There are also anecdotal reports of electrical plant stimulation going back to 1746.

The Grand Cherokee 4xe plug-in hybrid goes on sale soon, with 4-wheel drive standard.

It’s good news, bad news time at the Jeep division of Stellantis, formerly FCA, formerly Daimler Chrysler, formerly Chrysler Corporation. The 4xe plug-in hybrid version of the popular Grand Cherokee will go on sale this spring. According to Autoblog, buyers will have 5 trim levels to choose from — base, Trailhawk, Overland, Summit, and Summit Reserve.

The Grand Cherokee 4xe Good News

Continue reading “Jeep Grand Cherokee 4xe Plug-In Hybrid Arrives This Spring” »

Ground squirrels spend the end of summer gorging on food, preparing for hibernation. They need to store a lot of energy as fat, which becomes their primary fuel source underground in their hibernation burrows all winter long.

While hibernating, ground squirrels enter a state called torpor. Their metabolism drops to as low as just 1 percent of summer levels and their body temperature can plummet to close to freezing. Torpor greatly reduces how much energy the animal needs to stay alive until springtime.

That long fast comes with a downside: no new input of protein, which is crucial to maintain the body’s tissues and organs. This is a particular problem for muscles.

An OpenAI research team fine-tunes the GPT-3 pretrained language model to enable it to answer long-form questions by searching and navigating a text-based web browsing environment, achieving retrieval and synthesis improvements and reaching human-level long-form question-answering performance.

When the results of his study came in, Kondwani Jambo was stunned.

He’s an immunologist in Malawi. And last year he had set out to determine just how many people in his country had been infected with the coronavirus since the pandemic began.

Jambo, who works for the Malawi-Liverpool-Wellcome Trust Clinical Research Programme, knew the total number of cases was going to be higher than the official numbers. But his study revealed that the scale of spread was beyond anything he had anticipated — with a huge majority of Malawians infected long before the omicron variant emerged. “I was very shocked,” he says.

Continue reading “Africa may have reached the pandemic’s holy grail” »

At one university in Israel, scientists are creating portals between the senses and even reprogramming our senses.

“That’s Bouba,” I declare, pointing to the rounded shape.

Continue reading “The ingenious lab where you can hear sights and feel sounds” »

Looking to get into fault injection for your reverse engineering projects, but don’t have the cash to lay out for the necessary hardware? Fear not, for the tools to glitch a chip may be as close as the nearest barbecue grill.

If you don’t know what chip glitching is, perhaps a primer is in order. Glitching, more formally known as electromagnetic fault injection (EMFI), or simply fault injection, is a technique that uses a pulse of electromagnetic energy to induce a fault in a running microcontroller or microprocessor. If the pulse occurs at just the right time, it may force the processor to skip an instruction, leaving the system in a potentially exploitable state.

EMFI tools are commercially available — we even recently featured a kit to build your own — but [rqu]’s homebrew version is decidedly simpler and cheaper than just about anything else. It consists of a piezoelectric gas grill igniter, a little bit of enameled magnet wire, and half of a small toroidal ferrite core. The core fragment gets a few turns of wire, which then gets soldered to the terminals on the igniter. Pressing the button generates a high-voltage pulse, which gets turned into an electromagnetic pulse by the coil. There’s a video of the tool in use in the Twitter thread, showing it easily glitching a PIC running a simple loop program.

A joint probe mission of ESA and Roscosmos captured a giant tree stump from the Martian surface. One of the probes on Mars recently captured a strange image on the planet’s surface.

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Levine’s Biological age calculator is embedded as an Excel file in this link from my website:
https://michaellustgarten.com/2019/09/09/quantifying-biological-age/