Lifeboat Foundation

Shrinking transistors have powered 50 years of advances in computing—but now other ways must be found to make computers more capable.

In 2017, an online disinformation campaign spread against the “White Helmets,” claiming that the group of aid volunteers was serving as an arm of Western governments to sow unrest in Syria.

New method to steer electric discharges around an obstacle uses laser beams.

Survey finds that ‘normal’ human tissues are riddled with mutations.

Scientists predicted that our universe’s structure resembles a huge web. We’ve finally seen one of the strands.

A new photonic chip could run optical neural networks 10 million times more efficiently than conventional chips.

The classical physical limit for computing energy is the Landauer limit that sets a lower bound to the minimum heat dissipated per bit erasing operation. Performance below the thermodynamic (Landauer) limit for digital irreversible computation is theoretically possible in this device. The proposed accelerator can implement both fully connected and convolutional networks.

Previous photonic chips had bulky optical components that limited their use to relatively small neural networks. MIT researchers have a new photonic accelerator that uses more compact optical components and optical signal-processing techniques, to drastically reduce both power consumption and chip area. That allows the chip to scale to neural networks several orders of magnitude larger than its counterparts.

Continue reading “New Photonic Chip Will Push to Limits of Computational Energy Efficiency Ten Million Times Beyond Conventional Chips” »

A volcano in the far eastern end of Russia that was previously considered to be extinct has awakened, and scientists are now warning of a possible catastrophic eruption.

The Bolshaya Udina volcano — part of the Kamchatka Peninsula’s Udina volcanic complex — was believed to be extinct until 2017, when scientists detected increasing seismic activity beneath it, CNN reported.

Ivan Koulakov, a geophysicist from Russia’s A.A. Trofimuk Institute of Petroleum Geology and Geophysics who led a study into the volcano, told CNN he believes Bolshaya Udina should now be reclassified as active.

Continue reading “Extinct Russian Volcano Has Woken Up and Could Erupt at Any Moment, Scientists Say” »

A groundbreaking new cell reprogramming device can turn existing cells into any other type of cell, repairing tissue and organs in mice.

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Rare, “rainbow” blanket octopuses were caught on camera off the coast of Romblon, Philippines.