Lifeboat Foundation

Vintage lovers, unite.

Jason Scott, a tech activist has launched a new website named Discmaster, which enables you to find any file among 91.7 million vintage computer files taken from Archive.org.

“The value proposition is the value proposition of any freely accessible research database,” stated Jason Scott in an interview with Ars Technica.

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Discovery of intriguing material behavior at small scales could reduce energy demands for computing.

As electronic devices become smaller and smaller, the materials that power them need to become thinner and thinner. Because of this, one of the key challenges scientists face in developing next-generation energy-efficient electronics is discovering materials that can maintain special electronic properties at an ultrathin size.

Advanced materials known as ferroelectrics present a promising solution to help lower the power consumed by the ultrasmall electronic devices found in cell phones and computers. Ferroelectrics—the electrical analog to ferromagnets—are a class of materials in which some of the atoms are arranged off-center, leading to a spontaneous internal electric charge or polarization. This internal polarization can reverse its direction when scientists expose the material to an external voltage. This offers great promise for ultralow-power microelectronics.

With Executive Order 14028, a large regulatory push toward mandating the production of a software bill of materials (SBOM) began. As this new buzzword spreads, you’d think it was a miracle cure for securing the software supply chain. Conceptually, it makes sense — knowing what is in a product is a reasonable expectation. However, it is important to understand what exactly an SBOM is and whether or not it can objectively be useful as a security tool.

SBOMs are meant to be something like a nutrition label on the back of a grocery store item listing all of the ingredients that went into making the product. While there currently is no official SBOM standard, a few guideline formats have emerged as top candidates. By far, the most popular is the Software Data Package Exchange (SPDX), sponsored by the Linux Foundation.

SPDX, as with most other formats, attempts to provide a common way to represent basic information about the ingredients that go into the production of software: names, versions, hashes, ecosystems, ancillary data like known flaws and license information, and relevant external assets. However, software is not as simple as a box of cereal, and there is no equivalent to the Food and Drug Administration enforcing compliance to any recommended guidelines.

The tremendous rise in the economic burden of type 2 diabetes (T2D) has prompted a search for alternative and less expensive medicines. Dandelion offers a compelling profile of bioactive components with potential anti-diabetic properties. The Taraxacum genus from the Asteraceae family is found in the temperate zone of the Northern hemisphere. It is available in several areas around the world. In many countries, it is used as food and in some countries as therapeutics for the control and treatment of T2D. The anti-diabetic properties of dandelion are attributed to bioactive chemical components; these include chicoric acid, taraxasterol (TS), chlorogenic acid, and sesquiterpene lactones. Studies have outlined the useful pharmacological profile of dandelion for the treatment of an array of diseases, although little attention has been paid to the effects of its bioactive components on T2D to date. This review recapitulates previous work on dandelion and its potential for the treatment and prevention of T2D, highlighting its anti-diabetic properties, the structures of its chemical components, and their potential mechanisms of action in T2D. Although initial research appears promising, data on the cellular impact of dandelion are limited, necessitating further work on clonal β-cell lines (INS-1E), α-cell lines, and human skeletal cell lines for better identification of the active components that could be of use in the control and treatment of T2D. In fact, extensive in-vitro, in-vivo, and clinical research is required to investigate further the pharmacological, physiological, and biochemical mechanisms underlying the effects of dandelion-derived compounds on T2D.

Keywords: type 2 diabetes, dandelion, chlorogenic acid, chicory acid, taraxasterol, sesquiterpene.

Abbreviations: ADP — adenosine diphosphate; AFLD — alcoholic fatty liver disease; AMPK — adenosine monophosphate-activated protein kinase; ATP — adenosine triphosphate; cAMP — cyclic adenosine monophosphate; CGA — chlorogenic acid; CoA — coenzyme A; CRA — chicory acid; DAG — diacylglycerol; DBD — DNA-binding domain; DNA — deoxyribonucleic acid; DPPH — 2,2-diphenyl-1-picrylhydrazyl; Dw — dry weight; FOS — fructose oligosaccharide; G6P — glucose-6-phosphate; GDP — guanosine 5’-diphosphate; GLP-1 — glucagon-like peptide 1; GLUT2 — glucose transporter 2; GLUT4 — muscle glucose transporter protein 4; GPCR — G protein-coupled receptor; GTP — guanosine triphosphate; HNB — 2-hydroxy-5-nitrobenzenaledehyde; HPLC — high-pressure liquid chromatography; IC₅₀ — half maximal inhibitory concentration; IDF — International Diabetes Federation; IDX-1 — islet duodenum homeobox 1; IL-1α — interleukin 1 alpha; INS-1E — rat insulinoma clonal beta-cell line; IR — insulin receptor; IRS-1 — insulin receptor substrate 1; Km — Michaelis constant; IP3 — inositol triphosphate; IRS-1 — insulin receptor substrate 1; LBD — ligand-binding domain; LC-DAD — liquid chromatography with (photo) diode array detection; LPS — lipopolysaccharide; MAPK — mitogen-activated protein kinase; NADH — nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide; NAFLD — non-alcoholic fatty liver disease; NF-κb — nuclear factor kappa B; NO — nitric oxide; PI3K — phosphatidylinositol 3 kinase; PKA — protein kinase A; PKC — protein kinase C; PPAR-γ — peroxisome proliferator-activated receptor gamma; ROS — reactive oxygen species; RxR — retinoid X receptor; SEL — sesquiterpene lactones; SUR1 — sulphonylurea receptor 1; T2D — type 2 diabetes; TAG — triacylglycerol; TNF-α — tumor necrosis factor; TO — Taraxacum officinale; TS — taraxasterol; UPLC-MS/MS — ultra-performance liquid chromatography — tandem mass spectrometry; UV/VIS — ultraviolet visible; WHO — World Health Organization.

This could enable for microgrids for sewage disposal and more lucrative businesses in waste reclaiming through making essentially computers with waste.

A synthesis procedure developed by NITech scientists can convert fish scales obtained from fish waste into a useful carbon-based nanomaterial. Their approach uses microwaves to break the scales down thermally via pyrolysis in less than 10 seconds, yielding carbon nano-onions with unprecedented quality compared with those obtained from conventional methods. Credit: Takashi Shirai from NITech, Japan.

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Scientists from Trinity College Dublin believe our brains could use quantum computation. Their discovery comes after they adapted an idea developed to prove the existence of quantum gravity to explore the human brain and its workings.

The brain functions measured were also correlated to short-term memory performance and conscious awareness, suggesting quantum processes are also part of cognitive and conscious brain functions.

If the team’s results can be confirmed—likely requiring advanced multidisciplinary approaches—they would enhance our general understanding of how the brain works and potentially how it can be maintained or even healed. They may also help find innovative technologies and build even more advanced quantum computers.

Rolls-Royce quantum computing chief tells Tech Monitor the aerospace giant plans to use quantum and classical machines in tandem.

Reservoir computing (RC) is an approach for building computer systems inspired by current knowledge of the human brain. Neuromorphic computing architectures based on this approach are comprised of dynamic physical nodes, which combined can process spatiotemporal signals.

Researchers at Tsinghua University in China have recently created a new RC system based on memristors, electrical components that regulate the flow of electrical current in a circuit, while also recording the amount of charge that previously flowed through it. This RC system, introduced in a paper published in Nature Electronics, has been found to achieve remarkable results, both in terms of performance and efficiency.

“The basic architecture of our memristor RC system comes from our earlier work published in Nature Communications, where we validated the feasibility of building analog reservoir layer with dynamic memristors,” Jianshi Tang, one of the researchers who carried out the study, told TechXplore. “In this new work, we further build the analog readout layer with non-volatile memristors and integrate it with the dynamic memristor array-based parallel reservoir layer to implement a fully analog RC system.”

Summary: A new theory suggests glial cells, specifically astrocytes, play a key role in cognitive processing.

Source: University Health Network.

A team of scientists from the Krembil Brain Institute, part of the University Health Network in Toronto, and Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, has developed the first computer model predicting the role of cortical glial cells in cognition.