Lifeboat Foundation

And he’s been searching for it for a decade.

It’s a nightmare scenario that might become increasingly common in a world of digital currency. A man threw away an old PC hard drive while doing a quick spring clean of his home in Newport Wales, U.K., in 2013. Fast-forward almost a decade and he’s still desperately petitioning to be allowed to go through his local landfill.

The reason the man, 35-year-old IT engineer James Howells, wants to trawl through his local trash site is that the hard drive he threw out included a wallet with 7,500 Bitcoin.

Continue reading “A Man Accidentally Threw Out a Hard Drive Worth $357 Million in Bitcoin” »

One promising solution to plastic pollution is mycelium or mushroom packaging. It is made of 2 ingredients: mushrooms and hemp. Mycelium is the underground network of very durable, thread-like filaments called hyphae. It is mixed with agricultural waste like wood chips, oat hulls, cotton burrs or hemp hurds.

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Continue reading “Can Mushrooms replace EVERYTHING? | Concrete, Plastic, Meat, Leather” »

Officials from IBM and Samsung announced at this year’s IEDM conference in San Francisco a collaboration on a new chip design that adds transistors vertically on a chip. As part of their announcement, they suggested that their vertical transport field effect transistors (VTFET) could double the speed of processor chips, or alternatively, reduce the power they use by up to 85 percent.

Since the beginning of digital technology, processing chips have been made by placing tiny transistors on a chip and connecting them. Over time, engineers have placed increasingly more transistors on chips that have remained roughly the same size—adhering, generally, to Moore’s Law, which states that the number of transistors on a chip should double every year. Engineers have known for a long time that there are limits to Moore’s Law—eventually, it would become impossible to add even one more transistor, much less double the number that are there.

So researchers are looking for other ways to make chips. But in the meantime, engineers continue to look for ways to add more transistors to conventional chips. In their announcement, IBM and Samsung have explained that they are taking steps to begin designing chips that can expand vertically. In a practical sense, the move was inevitable. As an analogy, when towns grew too big to be efficient, engineers began making buildings taller, essentially turning 2D towns into 3D cities. Officials and engineers at IBM and Samsung (and doubtless other corporations, such as Intel) suggest that now is the time to begin doing the same with microprocessors.

The months-long project demonstrates the physics behind the CPUs we take for granted.

Computer chips have become so tiny and complex that it’s sometimes hard to remember that there are real physical principles behind them. They aren’t just a bunch of ever-increasing numbers. For a practical (well, virtual) example, check out the latest version of a computer processor built exclusively inside the Minecraft game engine.

Continue reading “This 8-bit processor built in Minecraft can run its own games” »

https://youtube.com/watch?v=OF3Zwfu6Ngc

Stacking transistors could be the next big thing in chips.

IBM and Samsung have announced their latest advance in semiconductor design: a new way to stack transistors vertically on a chip (instead of lying flat on the surface of the semiconductor).

Continue reading “IBM and Samsung say their new chip design could lead to week-long battery life on phones” »

Abstract. The cnidarian model organism Hydra has long been studied for its remarkable ability to regenerate its head, which is controlled by a head organizer located near the hypostome. The canonical Wnt pathway plays a central role in head organizer function during regeneration and during bud formation, which is the asexual mode of reproduction in Hydra. However, it is unclear how shared the developmental programs of head organizer genesis are in budding and regeneration. Time-series analysis of gene expression changes during head regeneration and budding revealed a set of 298 differentially expressed genes during the 48-h head regeneration and 72-h budding time courses. In order to understand the regulatory elements controlling Hydra head regeneration, we first identified 27,137 open-chromatin elements that are open in one or more sections of the organism body or regenerating tissue. We used histone modification ChIP-seq to identify 9,998 candidate proximal promoter and 3,018 candidate enhancer-like regions respectively. We show that a subset of these regulatory elements is dynamically remodeled during head regeneration and identify a set of transcription factor motifs that are enriched in the enhancer regions activated during head regeneration. Our results show that Hydra displays complex gene regulatory structures of developmentally dynamic enhancers, which suggests that the evolution of complex developmental enhancers predates the split of cnidarians and bilaterians.

No, really. Walk into any school now, and you’ll see millions of Linux machines. They’re called Chromebooks. For a free project launched 30 years ago today by one man in his spare time, it’s an amazing feat.

Physicist Max Tegmark on predictions that cannot be observed, explanation of Universe’ fine tuning, and quantum computer.

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Continue reading “Evidence for Parallel Universes — Max Tegmark / Serious Science” »

The 41-year-old computing method can decode encrypted messages and help detect hidden military vehicles such as stealth aircraft.