Lifeboat Foundation

Why an upcoming mission to Phobos may reveal something spectacular.

Both NASA and the European Space Agency are operating or planning major missions to — and back from — the Red Planet in a hunt for signs the once wet planet also hosted microbial life forms.

But it’s possible the best place to look for life on Mars isn’t on Mars at all.

Continue reading “Phobos: Why the largest Martian moon may reveal alien life” »

A guide to the next computer age.

New algorithm could enable fast, nimble drones for time-critical operations such as search and rescue.

If you follow autonomous drone racing, you likely remember the crashes as much as the wins. In drone racing, teams compete to see which vehicle is better trained to fly fastest through an obstacle course. But the faster drones fly, the more unstable they become, and at high speeds their aerodynamics can be too complicated to predict. Crashes, therefore, are a common and often spectacular occurrence.

Continue reading “New Algorithm Trains Drones To Fly Around Obstacles at High Speeds” »

Uptycs Threat Research Team has discovered malware that not only hijacks vulnerable *nix-based servers and uses them to mine cryptocurrency but actually modifies their CPU configurations in a bid to increase mining performance at the cost of performance in other applications.

Perpetrators use a Golang-based worm to exploit known vulnerabilities like CVE-2020–14882 (Oracle WebLogic) and CVE-2017–11610 (Supervisord) to gain access to Linux systems, reports The Record. Once they hijack a machine, they use model-specific registers (MSR) to disable the hardware prefetcher, a unit that fetches data and instructions from the memory into the L2 cache before they are needed.

AI ethics is about more than just bias. That’s why Red Hat’s Noelle Silver is dedicated to spreading AI literacy.

Real-time capabilities will allow a customer to plug an existing TensorFlow or Pytorch neural network into streaming data and have it continuously re-trained, for uses such as recommender systems.

In another instance of a misconfigured data server, the personal details of over 3 million senior citizens have been exposed.

“Our research may help us understand how abnormalities in anxiety-like behavior occur and design circuit-based therapeutic approaches for correcting them,” remarks Professor Ji Won Um from the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at DGIST, who led the study.

Summary: Study identifies the role a specific protein plays in regulating the development of inhibitory synapses in the hippocampus in the context of anxiety-related behaviors.

Source: DGIST

Continue reading “How a Specific Synapse Type Regulates Anxiety-Like Behavior” »

As a wind catcher requires no electricity to power it, it is both a cost-efficient and green form of cooling. With conventional mechanical air conditioning already accounting for a fifth of total electricity consumption globally, ancient alternatives like the wind catcher are becoming an increasingly appealing option.

From ancient Egypt to the Persian Empire, an ingenious method of catching the breeze kept people cool for millennia. Now, it could come to our aid once again.