Lifeboat Foundation

Alarmed by the surge in mpox cases, the Africa Centres for Disease Control has taken the unprecedented step of declaring the outbreak sweeping through African countries a continental public health emergency.

The World Health Organization (WHO) is also meeting to decide whether to trigger its highest global alert level over the epidemic.

These moves come after a virulent strain of the disease spread rapidly to 16 countries and six new countries were affected in 10 days.

Microsoft removed today an arbitrary 32GB size limit for FAT32 partitions in the latest Windows 11 Canary build, now allowing for a maximum size of 2TB.

“When formatting disks from the command line using the format command, we’ve increased the FAT32 size limit from 32GB to 2TB,” the Windows Insider team said today.

Previously, despite this artificial 32GB limit, Windows systems could still read larger FAT32 file systems if they were created on other operating systems or through alternative methods (e.g., from a Windows PowerShell prompt with administrative privileges or using third-party apps that ignored this artificial size limit).

RansomHub ransomware operators are now deploying new malware to disable Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) security software in Bring Your Own Vulnerable Driver (BYOVD) attacks.

Named EDRKillShifter by Sophos security researchers who discovered it during a May 2024 ransomware investigation, the malware deploys a legitimate, vulnerable driver on targeted devices to escalate privileges, disable security solutions, and take control of the system.

This technique is very popular among various threat actors, ranging from financially motivated ransomware gangs to state-backed hacking groups.

A previously unreported project is intended to improve how facial recognition algorithms track children over time.

Security researchers disclosed PoC exploit codes for three vulnerabilities (CVE-2023–4206, CVE-2023–4207, and CVE-2023–4208) in the Linux kernel, impacting versions v3.18-rc1 to v6.5-rc4. These “use-after-free” vulnerabilities within the net/sched component could allow local privilege escalation, enabling attackers to gain unauthorized control over affected systems. The vulnerabilities have been given a CVSS score of 7.8, indicating their high severity.

While everyone knows that a good night’s sleep restores energy, a new Cornell University study finds it resets another vital function: memory.

Learning or experiencing new things activates neurons in the hippocampus, a region of the brain vital for memory. Later, while we sleep, those same neurons repeat the same pattern of activity, which is how the brain consolidates those memories that are then stored in a large area called the cortex. But how is it that we can keep learning new things for a lifetime without using up all of our neurons?

A study, “A Hippocampal Circuit Mechanism to Balance Memory Reactivation During Sleep,” published in Science, finds at certain times during deep sleep, certain parts of the hippocampus go silent, allowing those neurons to reset.

A new study now published in Science reveals that the memory for a specific experience is stored in multiple parallel “copies.” These are preserved for varying durations, modified to certain degrees, and sometimes deleted over time, report researchers at the University of Basel.

The ability to turn experiences into memories allows us to learn from the past and use what we learned as a model to respond appropriately to new situations. For this reason, as the world around us changes, this memory model cannot simply be a fixed archive of the good old days.

Rather, it must be dynamic, changing over time and adapting to new circumstances to better help us predict the future and select the best course of action. How the brain could regulate a memory’s dynamics was a mystery—until multiple memory copies were discovered.

Right off the bat, one of the biggest improvements is the weight of the 4,680 shell itself – down to 49g from the 70g weight of a gen 1 cell. Tesla has essentially optimized the shell, making it thinner, and reducing its internal complexity. They do this by welding the tabless electrode to the cell cap.

That weight reduction is significant – at the battery pack level, the Cybertruck has 1,344 cells – which means that it reduces 28.2kg or 62.1lb of the overall pack weight. But rather than leaving that space empty, Tesla has instead filled that weight with more battery material. Calculated, that’s about a 10% increase in overall pack energy density.

Continue reading “A Look at Tesla’s 4680 Gen 2 Battery Cell” »

Scientists have successfully recovered the first long section of rocks originating from the Earth’s mantle, the layer beneath the crust and the planet’s largest component. These rocks are expected to shed light on the mantle’s role in the origins of life on Earth, the volcanic activity that occurs when it melts, and its influence on the global cycles of crucial elements like carbon and hydrogen, according to the research team.

The nearly continuous 1,268 meters (4160 feet) of mantle rock was recovered from a “tectonic window,” a section of the seabed where rocks from the mantle were exposed along the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, during Expedition 399 “Building Blocks of Life, Atlantis Massif” of the ocean drilling vessel JOIDES Resolution in Spring 2023.

With attempts dating back to the early 1960s, the recovery was a record-breaking achievement led by the International Ocean Discovery Program, an international marine research consortium of more than 20 countries that retrieves cores—cylindrical samples of sediment and rock—from the ocean floor to study Earth’s history.