Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Blog – Page 8,174

Masks and testing are necessary to combat asymptomatic spread in aerosols and droplets.

Respiratory infections occur through the transmission of virus-containing droplets (5 to 10 μm) and aerosols (≤5 μm) exhaled from infected individuals during breathing, speaking, coughing, and sneezing. Traditional respiratory disease control measures are designed to reduce transmission by droplets produced in the sneezes and coughs of infected individuals. However, a large proportion of the spread of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) appears to be occurring through airborne transmission of aerosols produced by asymptomatic individuals during breathing and speaking (1–3). Aerosols can accumulate, remain infectious in indoor air for hours, and be easily inhaled deep into the lungs. For society to resume, measures designed to reduce aerosol transmission must be implemented, including universal masking and regular, widespread testing to identify and isolate infected asymptomatic individuals.

Humans produce respiratory droplets ranging from 0.1 to 1000 μm. A competition between droplet size, inertia, gravity, and evaporation determines how far emitted droplets and aerosols will travel in air (4, 5). Respiratory droplets will undergo gravitational settling faster than they evaporate, contaminating surfaces and leading to contact transmission. Smaller aerosols (≤5 μm) will evaporate faster than they can settle, are buoyant, and thus can be affected by air currents, which can transport them over longer distances. Thus, there are two major respiratory virus transmission pathways: contact (direct or indirect between people and with contaminated surfaces) and airborne inhalation.

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There’s currently a race to create the first air taxi service using electric vertical take-off and landing aircraft (eVTOL) and a new serious player has entered the race: Archer.

Following the rise of consumer drones and improved battery capacity, electric vertical take-off and landing aircraft (eVTOL) with the capacity for passengers has become possible.

Many companies are currently developing different versions of the technology to enable electric air taxi services, and automakers have gotten onboard.

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The subject of the 2018 Nobel Prize in physics, chirped pulse amplification is a technique that increases the strength of laser pulses in many of today’s highest-powered research lasers. As next-generation laser facilities look to push beam power up to 10 petawatts, physicists expect a new era for studying plasmas, whose behavior is affected by features typically seen in black holes and the winds from pulsars.

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Modern capabilities for fake video creation are an emerging threat to digital communication, both on private channels and online.

Since 2018, we have been at the forefront of threat research and detection solutions against deepfakes, working with news organizations, brands, and digital platforms.

Learn more.

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Microsoft’s security team has issued an advisory today warning organizations around the globe to deploy protections against a new strain of ransomware that has been in the wild over the past two months.

“PonyFinal is a Java-based ransomware that is deployed in human-operated ransomware attacks,” Microsoft said in a series of tweets published today.

Human-operated ransomware is a subsection of the ransomware category. In human-operated ransomware attacks, hackers breach corporate networks and deploy the ransomware themselves.

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Researchers at the University of Science and Technology of China have recently introduced a new satellite-based quantum-secure time transfer (QSTT) protocol that could enable more secure communications between different satellites or other technology in space. Their protocol, presented in a paper published in Nature Physics, is based on two-way quantum key distribution in free space, a technique to encrypt communications between different devices.

“Our main idea was to realize quantum-secure time transfer in order to resolve the in practical time–frequency transfer,” Feihu Xu, one of the researchers who carried out the study, told Phys.org.

Quantum key distribution (QKD) is a technique to achieve secure communication that utilize based on the laws of quantum mechanics. Quantum protocols can generate secret security keys based on , enabling more secure data transfer between different devices by spotting attackers who are trying to intercept communications.

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