Lifeboat Foundation

Circa 2012

It’s okay, you’ve not clicked on “Green Plane Reports”, but every so often something from beyond the world of cars catches our attention.

This time, it’s electric flight. The concept is nothing new, and it’s even been alluded to by people like Elon Musk of Tesla, but for the time being it remains a true flight of fancy, rather than a working concept for passenger transportation.

Continue reading “Electric Aircraft Has Unlimited Range… With A Fleet Of Recharging Planes” »

Circa 2016 Awesome

Solar Impulse 2 which landed in Abu Dhabi, is first plane powered by the renewable energy source to tour the globe.

Autonomous machine expected to pick more than 25,000 raspberries a day, outpacing human workers.

Circa 2019

Autonomous machine expected to pick more than 25,000 raspberries a day, outpacing human workers.

Continue reading “Robocrop: world’s first raspberry-picking robot set to work” »

Cloud-based content management provider Box has announced a new “deep scan” functionality that checks files as they are uploaded to identify sophisticated malware and avert attacks.

The new capabilities constitute part of Box Shield, which uses machine learning to prevent data leaks, detect threats, and spot any kind of abnormal behavior. In April of last year, Box added a slew of automated malware detection features to the mix, allowing Box Shield customers to spot malicious content that may already have been uploaded to a Box account. However, so far this has leaned heavily on “known” threats from external intelligence databases. Moving forward, Box said it will mesh deep learning technology with external threat intelligence capabilities to analyze files for malicious scripts, macros, and executables to protect companies from zero-day (unknown) vulnerabilities.

When a user uploads an infected file, Box will quarantine it for inspection but will still allow the user to view a preview of the file and continue working.

These attacks were perpetrated by a newly discovered Iranian state sponsored threat group — dubbed MalKamak — that has been operating under the radar since at least 2018.

This operation has been ongoing for years, continuously evolving its malware year after year, while successfully evading most security tools. The authors of ShellClient invested a lot of effort into making it stealthy to evade detection by antivirus and other security tools by leveraging multiple obfuscation techniques and recently implementing a Dropbox client for command and control (C2), making it very hard to detect. By studying the ShellClient development cycles, Cybereason researchers were able to observe how ShellClient has morphed over time from a rather simple reverse shell to a sophisticated RAT used to facilitate cyber espionage operations.

The most recent ShellClient versions observed in Operation GhostShell follow the trend of abusing cloud-based storage services — in this case, the popular Dropbox service. The ShellClient authors used Dropbox to exfiltrate the stolen data and send commands to the malware. Threat actors have increasingly adopted this tactic due to its simplicity and the ability to effectively blend in with legitimate network traffic. Ultimately, this discovery tells researchers a lot about the tactics that advanced attackers are using to defeat security solutions.

In drought-parched California, some residents are turning to pricey machines that developers say can produce hundreds of gallons of water a day, literally out of thin air.

BENICIA, Calif. (AP) — The machine Ted Bowman helped design can make water out of the air, and in parched California, some homeowners are already buying the pricey devices.

The air-to-water systems work like air conditioners by using coils to chill air, then collect water drops in a basin.

Continue reading “In dry California, some buy units that make water from air” »

The largest projects started in 2,013 when the US government and the European Commission launched ‘moonshot’ efforts to provide services to researchers that will help to crack the mammalian brain’s code. They each poured vast resources into large-scale systematic programmes with different goals. The US effort — which is estimated to cost US$6.6 billion up until 2027 — has focused on developing and applying new mapping technologies in its BRAIN (Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies) Initiative (see ‘Big brain budgets’). The European Commission and its partner organizations have spent €607 million ($703 million) on the Human Brain Project (HBP), which is aimed mainly at creating simulations of the brain’s circuitry and using those models as a platform for experiments.

Scientists around the world are working together to catalogue and map cells in the brain. What have these huge projects revealed about how it works?

Artificial intelligence is often thought of as disembodied: a mind like a program, floating in a digital void. But human minds are deeply intertwined with our bodies — and an experiment with virtual creatures performing tasks in simulated environments suggests that AI may benefit from having a mind-body setup.

Stanford scientists were curious about the physical-mental interplay in our own evolution from blobs to tool-using apes. Could it be that the brain is influenced by the capabilities of the body and vice versa? It has been suggested before — over a century ago, in fact — and certainly it’s obvious that with a grasping hand one learns more quickly to manipulate objects than with a less differentiated appendage.

Continue reading “Simulated AI creatures demonstrate how mind and body evolve and succeed together” »