Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Blog – Page 8423

Scientists have created the world’s first living, self-healing robots using stem cells from frogs.

Named xenobots after the African clawed frog (Xenopus laevis) from which they take their stem cells, the machines are less than a millimeter (0.04 inches) wide — small enough to travel inside human bodies. They can walk and swim, survive for weeks without food and work together in groups.

These are “entirely new life-forms,” said the University of Vermont, which conducted the research with Tufts University.

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A Chinese facial-recognition database with information on thousands of children was stored without protection on the internet, a researcher discovered, raising questions about school surveillance and cybersecurity in China.

The cache was connected to a surveillance system labeled “Safe School Shield” and contained facial-identification and location data, according to Victor Gevers, a researcher at the Dutch nonprofit GDI Foundation, which scans the internet for vulnerabilities and flags them to owners for fixing.

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Fungus Among Us

The idea is to ship dormant fungus to a Moon base and, once it arrives, give it water and the right conditions to trigger growth, according to a NASA press release. That would also require a supply of photosynthetic bacteria to provide the fungus with nutrients. Once the fungus grows into the shape of a structure, it would be heat-treated, effectively killing it and turning it into a compact brick.

“Right now, traditional habitat designs for Mars are like a turtle — carrying our homes with us on our backs — a reliable plan, but with huge energy costs,” lead researcher Lynn Rothschild said in the release. “Instead, we can harness mycelia to grow these habitats ourselves when we get there.”

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Google’s parent company Alphabet ($GOOG) is now the fourth US company to hit a market cap of $1 trillion. It hit the number just before markets closed on Thursday, ending the day’s trading at $1,451.70 per share, up 0.87 percent.

Google CEO Sundar Pichai took over as CEO of Alphabet in December, after Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin relinquished control of Alphabet. It’s been a bumpy couple of years at the company that included allegations of sexual misconduct by executives and a 20,000-person Google Walkout employee protest.

Alphabet is slated to report fourth-quarter earnings on February 3rd, and Wall Street analysts are expecting it to report revenue of $46.9 billion, a year-over-year uptick of almost 20 percent.

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