Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
Toggle light / dark theme

Blog – Page 6866

Wines and table grapes exist thanks to a genetic exchange so rare that it’s only happened twice in nature in the last 6 million years. And since the domestication of the grapevine 8000 years ago, breeding has continued to be a gamble.

When today’s growers cultivate new varieties – trying to produce better-tasting and more disease-resistant grapes – it takes two to four years for breeders to learn whether they have the genetic ingredients for the perfect flower.

Females set fruit, but produce sterile pollen. Males have stamens for pollen, but lack fruit. The perfect flower, however, carries both sex genes and can self-pollinate. These hermaphroditic varieties generally yield bigger and better-tasting berry clusters, and they’re the ones researchers use for additional cross-breeding.

Read more | >

Scientists at UC Santa Cruz led a team of researchers from 30 institutions across North America in analyzing data from 3212 camera traps to show how human disturbance could be shifting the makeup of mammal communities.

The new study, published in the journal Global Change Biology, builds upon the team’s prior work observing how wildlife in the Santa Cruz Mountains respond to human disturbance. Local observations, for example, have shown that species like pumas and bobcats are less likely to be active in areas where humans are present, while deer and wood rats become bolder and more active. But it’s difficult to generalize findings like these across larger because human-wildlife interactions are often regionally unique.

So, to get a continent-wide sense for which species of mammals might be best equipped to live alongside humans, the team combined their local camera trap data with that of researchers throughout the U.S., Canada, and Mexico. This allowed them to track 24 species across 61 regionally diverse camera trap projects to see which larger trends emerged.

Read more | >

Zinc-air batteries (ZABs) are among the most promising next-generation battery technologies due to their many advantageous characteristics. Most notably, these batteries have unique half-open structures, a significant theoretical energy density (1086 and 1370 Wh kg−1 when including and excluding oxygen, respectively), flexible electrodes and an inherently aqueous electrolyte. Moreover, in contrast with other materials used in batteries, Zinc (Zn) is less harmful for the environment and more abundant.

Researchers at Hanyang University in South Korea recently designed a new type of zinc-air pouch cell that can outperform other commercially available battery technologies. These pouch cells, presented in a paper published in Nature Energy, use (101)-facet copper phosphosulfide [CPS(101)] as a cathode, anti-freezing chitosan-biocellulosics as super-ionic conductor electrolytes, and patterned Zn as the anode.

“Previous ZABs employing liquid (6 M KOH) electrolytes failed because of the sluggish kinetics for the oxygen reduction and evolution reactions (ORR/OER) and irreversibility of Zn accompanying the parasitic reactions over wide temperatures,” Jung-Ho Lee, one of the researchers who carried out the study, told Tech Xplore. “This feature inspired us to develop solid-state electrolytes, such as functionalized biocellulose, capable of transferring OH- ions effectively without parasitic reactions.”

Read more | >

Despite the obvious benefits of contemporary cloud-based, mobile application development solutions—such as cloud storage, notification management, real-time databases, and analytics—many developers of these solutions fail to properly take into account the potential security risks involved when these apps are misconfigured.

Most recently, Check Point Research has discovered misconfigurations and implementation issues that have exposed the data of 100 million mobile application users. This kind of exposure places both the users as well as the at risk of reputation threats and security damage. In this instance, the developers left open notification managers, storage locations and real-time databases to access by attackers, thus leaving 100 million users vulnerable.

In terms of real-time databases, can help mobile app users sync their data to the cloud in real time. However, when developers do not correctly implement this service with authentication, any user can theoretically access that database, including all mobile customer data. In fact, researchers expressed surprise at facing no obstacles to accessing these open databases for certain apps on Google Play. Some of the aspects obtainable in this case were device locations, email addresses, passwords, private chats and user identifiers, among other attack vectors. Such vulnerabilities leave all of these users at risk for fraud and identity theft.

Read more | >

To meet soaring demand for lightning-quick mobile technology, each year tech giants create faster, more powerful devices with longer-lasting battery power than previous models.

A major reason companies like Apple and Samsung can miraculously pull this off year after year is because engineers and researchers around the world are designing increasingly power-efficient microchips that still deliver .

To that end, researchers led by a team at Brigham Young University have just built the world’s most power-efficient high-speed analog-to– (ADC) microchip. An ADC is a tiny piece of technology present in almost every electronic piece of equipment that converts analog signals (like a radio wave) to a digital signal.

Read more | >

When one of the largest modern earthquakes struck Japan on March 11, 2011, the nuclear reactors at Fukushima-Daiichi automatically shut down, as designed. The emergency systems, which would have helped maintain the necessary cooling of the core, were destroyed by the subsequent tsunami. Because the reactor could no longer cool itself, the core overheated, resulting in a severe nuclear meltdown, the likes of which haven’t been seen since the Chernobyl disaster in 1986.

Since then, reactors have improved exponentially in terms of safety, sustainability and efficiency. Unlike the light-water reactors at Fukushima, which had liquid coolant and , the current generation of reactors has a variety of coolant options, including molten-salt mixtures, supercritical water and even gases like helium.

Dr. Jean Ragusa and Dr. Mauricio Eduardo Tano Retamales from the Department of Nuclear Engineering at Texas A&M University have been studying a new fourth-generation , -bed reactors. Pebble-bed reactors use spherical fuel elements (known as pebbles) and a fluid coolant (usually a gas).

Read more | >