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Circa 2020

IBM knows how to adapt to an ever-changing enterprise tech landscape. The venerable company more almost 20 years ago shed its PC business – selling it to Lenovo – understanding that that systems were quickly becoming commodity devices and the market was going to stumble. A decade later IBM sold its X86-based server business to Lenovo for $2.3 billion and in the intervening years has put a keen focus on hybrid clouds and artificial intelligence, buying Red Hat for $34 billion and continuing to invest its Watson portfolio.

However, that hasn’t meant throwing out product lines simply because they’ve been around for a while. IBM has continued to upgrade its mainframe systems to keep up with modern workloads and the bet has paid off. In the last quarter 2,019 the company saw mainframe revenue – driven by its System z15 mainframe in September 2019 – jump 63 percent, a number followed the next quarter by a 59 percent increase.

Tape storage is a similar story. The company rolled out its first tape storage device in 1,952 the 726 Tape Unit, which had a capacity of 2MB. Five decades later, the company is still innovating its tape storage technology and this week said that, as part of a 15-year partnership with Fujifilm, has set a record with a prototype system of 317 gigabits-per-square-inch (GB/in2) in areal density, 27 times more than the areal density of current top-performance tape drives. The record, reached with the help of a new tape material called Strontium Ferrite (SrFe), is an indication that magnetic tape fits nicely in a data storage world of flash, SSDs and NVMe and a rising demand for cloud-based storage.

Continue reading “Big Blue Shines A Light On The Future Of Tape Storage” | >

Using a groundbreaking new technique at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), an international collaboration led by NIST researchers has revealed previously unrecognized properties of technologically crucial silicon crystals and uncovered new information about an important subatomic particle and a long-theorized fifth force of nature.

By aiming known as neutrons at and monitoring the outcome with exquisite sensitivity, the NIST scientists were able to obtain three extraordinary results: the first measurement of a key property in 20 years using a unique method; the highest-precision measurements of the effects of heat-related vibrations in a silicon crystal; and limits on the strength of a possible “fifth force” beyond standard physics theories.

The researchers report their findings in the journal Science.

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A threat actor has leaked a list of almost 500,000 Fortinet VPN login names and passwords that were allegedly scraped from exploitable devices last summer.

While the threat actor states that the exploited Fortinet vulnerability has since been patched, they claim that many VPN credentials are still valid.

This leak is a serious incident as the VPN credentials could allow threat actors to access a network to perform data exfiltration, install malware, and perform ransomware attacks.

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Mastercard has agreed to acquire blockchain analytics start-up CipherTrace, in the latest sign of how major companies are warming to cryptocurrencies.

The payments giant said Thursday it entered into an agreement to buy CipherTrace for an undisclosed amount. Based in Menlo Park, California, CipherTrace develops tools that help businesses and law enforcement root out illicit digital currency transactions. The company’s competitors include New York-based Chainalysis and London start-up Elliptic.

“Digital assets have the potential to reimagine commerce, from everyday acts like paying and getting paid to transforming economies, making them more inclusive and efficient,” Ajay Bhalla, president of cyber and intelligence at Mastercard, said in a statement. “With the rapid growth of the digital asset ecosystem comes the need to ensure it is trusted and safe.”

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Half-billion-year-old critter belonged to an extinct group of animals.

Palaeontologists have dug up a brand new animal species from the Cambrian era, more than 500 million years ago. Remarkably, Titanokorys gainesi was about half a metre long – which is giant compared to most of the other, pinky-finger-sized species alive at the time.

“The sheer size of this animal is absolutely mind-boggling,” says Jean-Bernard Caron, from the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) in Canada. “This is one of the biggest animals from the Cambrian period ever found.”

The Cambrian period spanned from around 541 to 485 million years ago. It was a critical time in the evolution of life on Earth because it marked a massive explosion in diversity, with most of the major groups of animals we know today emerging, from arthropods and molluscs to echinoderms and chordates (us).

Continue reading “Huge new fossil species uncovered in Canada” | >

Recently, the PLA has put into service a new low-altitude air defense system (SHORAD), which looks similar to the recently deployed US SHORAD Stryker defence system.

According to a video released by China State Television (CCTV), China’s new SHORAD system, consisting of a 35mm anti-aircraft ԍuɴ along with two surface-to-air missiles, is mounted on an armored vehicle chassis. steel 8×8 wheels.

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Exploring The Gut Microbiota-Brain Axis In Health, Disease, and Aging — Dr. Marina Ezcurra, Ph.D. University of Kent.

Dr. Marina Ezcurra (https://marinaezcurralab.com/) is a Lecturer in the Biology of Aging, and NeuroBiology, at the School of BioSciences, at the University of Kent, UK (https://www.kent.ac.uk/biosciences/people/2081/ezcurra-marina).

Dr. Ezcurra received her PhD from the Karolinska Institute in 2011. Her PhD research was a collaborative project between Karolinska and the Medical Research Council Laboratory of Molecular Biology at Cambridge, where she studied neural circuits and behavior using C. elegans in the lab of Dr. Bill Schafer.

Continue reading “Dr. Marina Ezcurra, Ph.D. — Exploring The Gut Microbiota-Brain Axis In Health, Disease, and Aging” | >