Lifeboat Foundation

Researchers have developed soft robotic devices driven by neuromuscular tissue that triggers when stimulated by light—bringing mechanical engineering one step closer to developing autonomous biobots.

In 2014, research teams led by mechanical science and engineering professor Taher Saif and bioengineering professor Rashid Bashir at the University of Illinois worked together to developed the first self-propelled biohybrid swimming and walking biobots powered by beating cardiac muscle cells derived from rats.

“Our first swimmer study successfully demonstrated that the bots, modeled after sperm cells, could in fact swim,” Saif said. “That generation of singled-tailed bots utilized cardiac tissue that beats on its own, but they could not sense the environment or make any decisions.”

Good bacteria are our friends. We need to protect them.

Astronomers have discovered the most massive example yet of the dead stars known as neutron stars, one almost too massive to exist, a new study finds.

On its surface, the plan was simple: gene-hack mosquitoes so their offspring immediately die, mix them with disease-spreading bugs in the wild, and watch the population drop off. Unfortunately, that didn’t quite pan out.

The genetically-altered mosquitoes did mix with the wild population, and for a brief period the number of mosquitoes in Jacobino, Brazil did plummet, according to research published in Nature Scientific Reports last week. But 18 months later the population bounced right back up, New Atlas reports — and even worse, the new genetic hybrids may be even more resilient to future attempts to quell their numbers.

Field notes from space-time | We’re only just grasping how cosmic black holes and Einstein’s theories relate – and that deepens our sense of wonder, says Chanda Prescod-Weinstein.

Transplanted brain stem cells survive without anti-rejection drugs in mice. By exploiting a feature of the immune system, researchers open the door for stem cell transplants to repair the brain.

In experiments in mice, Johns Hopkins Medicine researchers say they have developed a way to successfully transplant certain protective brain cells without the need for lifelong anti-rejection drugs.

A report on the research, published today (September 16, 2019) in the journal Brain, details the new approach, which selectively circumvents the immune response against foreign cells, allowing transplanted cells to survive, thrive and protect brain tissue long after stopping immune-suppressing drugs.

These need to be banned like the European union did.

Memes and social networks have become weaponized, while many governments seem ill-equipped to understand the new reality of information warfare. How will we fight state-sponsored disinformation and propaganda in the future?

A model based on Brownian motion describes the tsunami-like propagation of chaotic behavior in a system of quantum particles.

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In daily life, “chaos” describes anything messy. In physics, the term has a more specific meaning: It refers to systems that, while subject to deterministic laws, are totally unpredictable because of an exponential sensitivity to initial conditions—think of the butterfly flapping its wings and causing a distant tornado. But how does the chaos observed in the classical, macroscopic world emerge from the quantum-mechanical laws that govern the microscopic world? A recently proposed explanation invokes quantum “information scrambling” [1, 3], in which information gets rapidly dispersed into quantum correlations among the particles of a system. This scrambling is a memory-loss mechanism that can cause the unpredictability of chaos. Developing a theory that fully describes information scrambling remains, however, a daunting task.

SHA-256 is a one way hashing algorithm. Cracking it would have tectonic implications for consumers, business and all aspects of government including the military.

It’s not the purpose of this post to explain encryption, AES or SHA-256, but here is a brief description of SHA-256. Normally, I place reference links in-line or at the end of a post. But let’s get this out of the way up front:

• Sept 11: Original disclosure
• Sept 11: Community skepticism
• Sept 12: Claim retracted: [announcement] [press]

One day after Treadwell Stanton DuPont claimed that a secret project cracked SHA-256 more than one year ago, they back-tracked. Rescinding the original claim, they announced that an equipment flaw caused them to incorrectly conclude that they had algorithmically cracked SHA-256.

“All sectors can still sleep quietly tonight,” said CEO Mike Wallace. “Preliminary results in this cryptanalytic research led us to believe we were successful, but this flaw finally proved otherwise.”

Continue reading “Was SHA-256 cracked? Don’t buy into retraction!” »