Lifeboat Foundation

Echolocation for humans. Original post https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article…

With enough training, most humans can learn how to echolocate, using their tongue to make clicking sounds, and interpreting the sounds of the echoes that come back, reflected from the surrounding environment.

In as few as 10 weeks, researchers were able to teach participants how to navigate obstacles and recognize the size and orientation of objects using the rebounding calls of their clicks. The experiment involved 12 participants who’d been diagnosed as legally blind during their childhood, and 14 sighted people.

Continue reading “Humans Can Learn How to ‘Echolocate’ in Just 10 Weeks, Experiment Shows” »

Relativity Space, a California-based aerospace manufacturer, has revealed a new rocket that is both 3D printed and fully reusable. The Terran R could serve as a competitor to SpaceX’s Falcon 9 and is planned for launch in 2024.

Virgin Galactic founder Richard Branson could fly to space just a bit earlier than Blue Origin and SpaceX’s founders.

B.1.1.28.2 variant.

India News: The National Institute of Virology, Pune, has detected a new Covid-19 variant — B.1.1.28.2 — through genome sequencing of samples from international t.

The world is entering a new era of warfare, with artificial intelligence taking center stage. AI is making militaries faster, smarter and more efficient. But if left unchecked, it threatens to destabilize the world.

“Siloscape”, the first malware to target Windows containers, breaks out of Kubernetes clusters to plant backdoors and raid nodes for credentials.

Windows containers have been victimized for over a year by the first known malware to target Windows containers. The ongoing campaign pierces Kubernetes clusters so as to plant backdoors, allowing attackers to steal data and user credentials, or even hijack an entire databases hosted in a cluster.

The malware was discovered by Unit 42 security researcher Daniel Prizmant. He dubbed it Siloscape, which he pronounces “Silo escape.” The malware pries open known vulnerabilities in web servers and databases so as to compromise Kubernetes nodes and to backdoor clusters.

The rodents, which live at elevations of more than 15000 feet, have fluffy tails that act as rudders while they sail between rocky cliffs.

New research suggests age-related changes in blood cell chromosomes are a marker of impaired immunity.

A person’s risk of severe infections increases dramatically as they grow older, but scientists do not yet understand how age might be linked to weakened immunity. Now, research shows that certain age-related changes in blood cells are associated with a higher risk of a range of severe infections including severe COVID-19, other pneumonias, and sepsis.

Researchers analyzed genetic and clinical data from nearly 800000 patients from around the world. They discovered that people with a specific type of acquired rearrangement in the chromosomes of their blood cells, called mosaic chromosomal alterations (mCAs), were nearly three times more likely to develop sepsis and two times more likely to get pneumonia than those without mCAs. These genetic changes accumulate in blood cells with age and often indicate a common condition in the elderly called clonal hematopoiesis.

The explosion contained elements of three different types of solar eruptions: Bubble-like coronal mass ejections, beam-like jets, and partial eruptions that collapse onto themselves. Those eruptions all happen independently of one another, making this hybrid the first of its kind to ever be spotted, according to CNET. NASA is referring to the explosion as a sort of “solar Rosetta Stone,” comparing it to the ancient slab that helped researchers decode Egyptian hieroglyphs, because picking apart the three different eruptions could help researchers finally understand the root causes for each and how they differ.

The 2016 explosion was too big to be a jet but too narrow to be a coronal mass ejection, according to a NASA press release. And when it finished, a partial eruption emerged from the same place just to bubble up and fall back onto itself. Seeing all three forms of eruption emerge in the same place and within the same hour suggested to NASA that all three are caused by the same mechanisms, according to the research, which was presented at Monday’s American Astronomical Society meeting and has been accepted for publication in Astrophysical Journal Letters.

“This event is a missing link where we can see all of these aspects of different types of eruptions in one neat little package,” NASA solar scientist and lead study author Emily Mason said in the release. “It drives home the point that these eruptions are caused by the same mechanism, just at different scales.”