Lifeboat Foundation

Renting space and IP addresses on a public server has become standard business practice, but according to a team of Penn State computer scientists, current industry practices can lead to “cloud squatting,” which can create a security risk, endangering sensitive customer and organization data intended to remain private.

Cloud squatting occurs when a company, such as your bank, leases space and IP addresses—unique addresses that identify individual computers or computer networks—on a public server, uses them, and then releases the space and addresses back to the public server company, a standard pattern seen every day. The public server company, such as Amazon, Google, or Microsoft, then assigns the same addresses to a second company. If this second company is a bad actor, it can receive information coming into the address intended for the original company—for example, when you as a customer unknowingly use an outdated link when interacting with your bank—and use it to its advantage—cloud squatting.

“There are two advantages to leasing server space,” said Eric Pauley, doctoral candidate in computer science and engineering. “One is a cost advantage, saving on equipment and management. The other is scalability. Leasing server space offers an unlimited pool of computing resources so, as workload changes, companies can quickly adapt.” As a result, the use of clouds has grown exponentially, meaning almost every website a user visits takes advantage of cloud computing.

The British James Dyson Foundation presented the first Sustainability Award to Carvey Ehren Maigue, an electrical engineering student in the Philippines. He was awarded for creating new material from recycled crop waste that has the ability to transform ultraviolet (UV) rays from the sun into electrical energy. The technology could soon be turning the windows and walls of buildings into a rich new source of electricity.

The invention of the Filipino university student is called AuREUS (Aurora Renewable Energy and UV Sequestration). Both AuREUS devices (Borealis Solar Window and Astralis Solar Wall) use the same technology used in the beautiful Northern and Southern lights. High energy particles are absorbed by luminescent particles that re-emit them as visible light. A similar type of luminescent particles (derivable from certain fruits and vegetables) were suspended in a resin substrate and is used as the core technology on both devices.

Continue reading “Solar panels created from crop waste produce energy even if the sun isn’t shining” »

These chips might be the future of neuromorphic computing.

Honey could be the next material used to create brain-like computer chips. Its proven practicality marks another step toward creating efficient, renewable processors for neuromorphic computing systems, using biodegradable products.

Research engineers from WSU’s School of Engineering and Computer Science, Feng Zhao and Brandon Sueoka, first processed honey into a solid. Then they jammed it between two electrodes, using a structure design similar to that of a human synapse. They’re known as ‘memristors,’ and are proficient at learning and retaining information just like human neurons.

Continue reading “Honey might be the key to cooler, more efficient, biodegradable chips” »

The U.S. still imports lithium from other countries like Argentina, Chile, Russia, and China. Geothermal energy has long been the forgotten member of the clean energy family, overshadowed by relatively cheaper solar and wind power, despite its proven potential. But this may soon change – for an unexpected reason.

DWR’s Salton Sea Unit supports the California Natural Resources Agency’s Salton Sea Management Program (SSMP), created by then-Gov. Jerry Brown’s Salton Sea Task Force to address the urgent public and ecological health issues resulting from the drying and shrinking of the Salton Sea. The issues include air quality impacts from dust emissions and loss of important wildlife habitat.

While the SSMP is a long-range program, its immediate focus is on the development and implementation of the Phase I: 10-Year Plan. We support the SSMP and the Phase I Plan by providing planning, engineering, and environmental expertise for design and implementation of dust-suppression and habitat projects. The Phase I Plan includes projects that will be completed as early as the end of 2022. Proposition 1 provided $80 million in funding for SSMP implementation.

The U.S. Air Force and General Electric (GE) have begun the Phase 2 testing of GE’s second XA100 adaptive cycle engine at the Air Force’s Arnold Engineering Development Complex (AEDC) in Tennessee.

The Phase 1 testing of this XA100 engine was completed in November 2021 in Evendale, Ohio. Developed by GE Edison Works advanced program unit, the XA100 is a three-stream adaptive cycle engine demonstrator that can direct air to the bypass third stream for increased fuel efficiency and cooling or to the core and fan streams for additional thrust and performance.

GE’s XA100 engine is uniquely designed to fit both the F-35A and F-35C without any structural modifications to either airframe, enabling better aircraft range, acceleration, and cooling power to accommodate next-generation mission systems, while also ensuring durability and enhanced readiness.

“An engineering team from MIT collaborated with students from Rhode Island School of Design to create a textile that can hear and (eventually) interpret what’s happening on and inside our bodies.”

A new fiber made from a piezoelectric material and a conductor can register sound as mechanical waves and convert it into electrical waves, helping monitor bodies.

The prospects for directly testing a theory of quantum gravity are poor, to put it mildly. To probe the ultra-tiny Planck scale, where quantum gravitational effects appear, you would need a particle accelerator as big as the Milky Way galaxy. Likewise, black holes hold singularities that are governed by quantum gravity, but no black holes are particularly close by — and even if they were, we could never hope to see what’s inside. Quantum gravity was also at work in the first moments of the Big Bang, but direct signals from that era are long gone, leaving us to decipher subtle clues that first appeared hundreds of thousands of years later.

But in a small lab just outside Palo Alto, the Stanford University professor Monika Schleier-Smith and her team are trying a different way to test quantum gravity, without black holes or galaxy-size particle accelerators. Physicists have been suggesting for over a decade that gravity — and even space-time itself — may emerge from a strange quantum connection called entanglement. Schleier-Smith and her collaborators are reverse-engineering the process. By engineering highly entangled quantum systems in a tabletop experiment, Schleier-Smith hopes to produce something that looks and acts like the warped space-time predicted by Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity.

The path back to the moon is long and fraught with danger, both in the real, physical sense and also in the contractual, legal sense. NASA, the agency sponsoring the largest government-backed lunar program, Artemis, has already been feeling the pain on the contractual end. Legal battles have delayed the development of a critical component of the Artemis program – the Human Landing System (HLS). But now, the ball has started rolling again, and a NASA manager recently reported the progress and future vision of this vital part of the mission to the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers at a conference.

Kent Chojnacki is the manager of NASA’s Systems Engineering & Integration Office. He recently gave a presentation entitled Human Landing System. While it only ran to six content slides, he provided some more details into how the agency is arranging its work with future contractors developing the part of the Artemis program that will take astronauts down to the lunar surface.

Continue reading “NASA Releases Details on how Starship Will be Part of its Return to the Moon” »

The teeth of a mollusk can not only capture and chew food to nurture its body, but the marine choppers also hold insights into creating advanced, lower-cost and environmentally friendly materials.

David Kisailus, UC Irvine professor, and graduate student Taifeng Wang, both in materials science and engineering, took a close look at the ultrahard teeth of the Northern Pacific Cryptochiton stelleri or gumboot chiton. Their findings are published in the Small Structures April 2022 issue.

“The findings in our work are critical, as it not only provides an understanding of the precision of natural systems in mineralization to form high-performance architected materials, but also provides insights into bioinspired synthetic pathways to a new generation of advanced materials in a broad range of applications from wear-resistant materials to energy storage systems,” said Kisailus.