Lifeboat Foundation

Much of the ‘memory’ of the world and all our digital activities are based on media, hard disks, where the information is encoded thanks to magnetism, by orienting the spin of electrons in one direction or the opposite.

An international team of scientists led by the Italian physicist Stefano Bonetti, professor at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice and the Stockholm University, has managed for the first time to observe the ‘nutation’ of these spins in magnetic materials, i.e. the oscillations of their axis during precession. The measured nutation period was of the order of one picosecond: one thousandth of a billionth of a second. The discovery was recently published by Nature Physics.

The axis of a spin performs nutation and precession, as with any object that revolves, from spinning tops to planets. In this research, physicists observed experimentally that the nutation of the magnetic spin axis is 1000 times faster than precession, a curiously similar ratio to that of Earth.

A Tesla battery researcher showed updated test results pointing to batteries lasting over 15,000 cycles or the equivalent of over 2 million miles (3.5 million km) in an electric car.

Last year, we reported on Jeff Dahn and his lab, who are under contract to do battery research for Tesla, releasing an interesting paper that shows how the latest Li-ion battery technology can produce batteries that would last 1 million miles in electric vehicles.

In a new presentation, Dahn discussed updated test results from this new battery, which he hopes becomes the new standard Li-ion battery that new battery technologies benchmark themselves against.

“People are doing heroic work, but they are really getting to the point where it’s going to be literally unsustainable,” an infectious diseases doctor says.

Texas, Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands stand alone in having recorded decreases in numbers of Covid-19 cases over the last two weeks as the country braces for a possible “third peak” of the disease.

Although Texas reported a “slight decrease” in cases over the 14-day period that ended Saturday, its news was better than elsewhere: 38 states, Washington, D.C., and Guam all recorded increases in cases over the last 14 days, and nine states have plateaued, according to NBC News tallies. Rhode Island, which, like Texas, has also had a net decrease, does not report data over the weekend, and Missouri is not reporting data because of a technology issue.

Continue reading “Covid-19 cases climbing in almost every state as U.S. braces for possible ‘third peak’” »

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Food and Drug Administration (FDA) agrees to a trial using the LungFit™™ system to treat COVID-19 patients

Applications pending with Health Canada and the Israel Ministry of Health to allow studies to be conducted using high concentration nitric oxide to treat COVID-19 patients

GARDEN CITY, N.Y., April 16, 2020 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — Beyond Air, Inc. (NASDAQ: XAIR), a clinical-stage medical device and biopharmaceutical company focused on developing inhaled Nitric Oxide (NO) for the treatment of patients with respiratory conditions, including serious lung infections and pulmonary hypertension, and gaseous NO for the treatment of solid tumors, today announced that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) agreed with the initiation of a clinical study in the U.S. using its LungFit™^TM system to treat COVID-19 patients. Applications for funding are pending with the Biomedical Advance Research and Development Authority (BARDA), a division of Health and Human Services (HHS).

Protein sequencing by Edman Degradation.

This video explains protein sequencing — edman degradation.

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Piling Up

SpaceX has launched about 775 Starlink satellites so far but plans to have 42,000 by the time the constellation is complete. At a three percent failure rate — assuming it stays consistent — that amounts to 1,260 immobilized satellites waiting to smash into other stuff in space.

“I would say their failure rate is not egregious,” McDowell told Business Insider. “It’s not worse than anybody else’s failure rates. The concern is that even a normal failure rate in such a huge constellation is going to end up with a lot of bad space junk.”

Interesting…

The new Nvidia GeForce RTX 3090 is a gaming powerhouse, but that’s not all it can do. According to the makers of a popular password recovery application, the RTX 3090 is also good at brute-forcing passwords. That’s great if you forget an important password, but that’s probably not why people are using such tools. The latest Nvidia cards could make cracking someone else’s files almost trivially easy.

The RTX 3090 is Nvidia’s latest top-of-the-line GPU with a GA102 graphics processor sporting 10,496 cores and 24GB of GDDR6X memory. It is monstrously, obscenely powerful by today’s gaming standards, and comes with a correspondingly high price of $1,500, give or take a few hundred depending on supply. With a focus on high core counts, GPUs are also great for parallel computing. That’s why you couldn’t even buy a GPU for several months when Bitcoin was at its peak. In the same vein, GPUs are very good at cracking passwords.

Continue reading “The Nvidia RTX 3090 GPU Can Probably Crack Your Passwords” »

The video could be the first visual evidence that China is actively testing an air-launched hypersonic weapon.