Lifeboat Foundation

More than 70 years after it was torpedoed and sunk during the World War II Battle of Guadalcanal, the aircraft carrier USS Wasp has been discovered in the Coral Sea.

Wasp was spotted on the seabed, in 14,000 feet of water, by the research vessel (RV) Petrel, part of a research organization established by Microsoft Corp. co-founder Paul Allen, in January.

Continue reading “Deep-Sea Explorers Discover Wreck of WWII Aircraft Carrier USS Wasp” »

Scientists have known for a century that viruses attack and sometimes kill bacteria, much the way humans come down with the flu. But only recently have they begun to understand the biochemistry that happens as bacteria and virus strive for competitive advantage, with far-reaching implications for medicine and more.

Researchers explain how viruses make a molecular decoy that is used to subvert the CRISPR-Cas bacterial immune system.

What’s most worrisome, one source told MIT Tech, was that the malware crosses a new ethical line.

“Targeting safety systems just seemed to be off limits morally and really hard to do technically,” Joe Slowik, a former information warfare officer in the US Navy who now works at Dragos, an industrial cybersecurity firm that’s been tracking the spread of Triton, told the magazine.

In the realm of memetic warfare:

How a simple “news” tag can change everything.

According to the Bulletin, we’ve done nothing in the past year to make the situation any less precarious — humanity still faces not one, but two “existential threats” in the form of nuclear weapons and climate change.

While the clock remains set at 11:58, the potential of either threat to destroy humanity has increased over the past 12 months, according to the Bulletin’s 2019 statement. We must do something to alter our path.

“Though unchanged from 2018, this setting should be taken not as a sign of stability but as a stark warning to leaders and citizens around the world,” the scientists wrote. “The current international security situation — what we call the ‘new abnormal’ — has extended over two years now… Th e longer world leaders and citizens carelessly inhabit this new and abnormal reality, the more likely the world is to experience catastrophe of historic proportions.”

Nuclear fission — the physical process by which very large atoms like uranium split into pairs of smaller atoms — is what makes nuclear bombs and nuclear power plants possible. But for many years, physicists believed it energetically impossible for atoms as large as uranium (atomic mass = 235 or 238) to be split into two.

That all changed on Feb. 11, 1939, with a letter to the editor of Nature — a premier international scientific journal — that described exactly how such a thing could occur and even named it fission. In that letter, physicist Lise Meitner, with the assistance of her young nephew Otto Frisch, provided a physical explanation of how nuclear fission could happen.

It was a massive leap forward in nuclear physics, but today Lise Meitner remains obscure and largely forgotten. She was excluded from the victory celebration because she was a Jewish woman. Her story is a sad one.

Continue reading “Lise Meitner Is the Forgotten Female Physicist Who Deserved a Nobel Prize” »

Alcatraz holds many forgotten secrets, but one has been discovered: High-tech radar and laser scans have uncovered a hidden military traverse underneath the infamous penitentiary, according to new research.

A team of researchers from Binghamton University, State University of New York used terrestrial laser scans, ground-penetrating radar data, and georectifications (the process of taking old digitized maps and linking them to a coordinate system so that they can be accurately geolocated in 3D space) to locate and assess the historical remains beneath the former recreation yard of the Alcatraz penitentiary, according to a press release.

Continue reading “Laser Scans Uncover Hidden Military Traverse Underneath Alcatraz” »

The attack threatens users with location-tracking, DoS, fake notifications and more.

Privacy-breaking flaws in the 4G and 5G mobile protocols could allow attackers to intercept calls, send fake amber alerts or other notifications, track location and more, according to a research team from Purdue University and the University of Iowa.

In a paper presented at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona this week, the researchers explained that the issues arise from weaknesses in the cellular paging (broadcast) protocol. They started with the fact that when a mobile device is in its idle, low-power state, it will conserve battery life partly by polling for pending services only periodically.

Mice with vision enhanced by nanotechnology were able to see infrared light as well as visible light, reports a study published February 28 in the journal Cell. A single injection of nanoparticles in the mice’s eyes bestowed infrared vision for up to 10 weeks with minimal side effects, allowing them to see infrared light even during the day and with enough specificity to distinguish between different shapes. These findings could lead to advancements in human infrared vision technologies, including potential applications in civilian encryption, security, and military operations.

Injectable photoreceptor-binding nanoparticles with the ability to convert photons from low-energy to high-energy forms allow mice to develop infrared vision without compromising their normal vision and associated behavioral responses.