Lifeboat Foundation

In the intricate landscape of global cybersecurity, Webwyrm malware has surfaced as a formidable adversary, casting its ominous shadow across 50 nations and leaving in its wake over 100,000 compromised victims. This insidious digital menace successfully emulates in excess of 1,000 reputable companies globally, with the ensuing potential financial fallout estimated to surpass a staggering $100 million. It is imperative for cybersecurity professionals and organizations alike to comprehend the multifaceted nature of this threat to devise and implement robust defensive strategies effectively.

In the dynamic realm of cyber threats, malicious actors incessantly refine their Tactics, Techniques, and Procedures (TTPs), exploiting extant vulnerabilities and augmenting the efficacy of their malicious campaigns. Webwyrm epitomizes this relentless pursuit of evolution, embodying a level of sophistication reminiscent of infamous cyber threats of yore, such as the notorious ‘Blue Whale Challenge.’

WebWyrm malware orchestrates a complex, deceptive narrative aimed at duping unsuspecting job seekers into relinquishing their cryptocurrency. Initiating contact predominantly via WhatsApp, the malefactors likely leverage data procured from employment portals to pinpoint and engage individuals predisposed to their deceptive overtures. Prospective victims are enticed with promises of lucrative weekly remuneration, ranging between $1200 and $1500, contingent upon the completion of daily task “packets” or “resets.”

The strange science experiment that blew a worm’s head off… and blew our minds.

This interview is an episode from @The-Well, our publication about ideas that inspire a life well-lived, created with the @JohnTempletonFoundation.

Continue reading “The beauty of collective intelligence, explained by a developmental biologist” »

Lectiure by Gregory Bateson.

Scientists have for the first time revealed how blue-green algae—visible as the slippery green slime in stagnant water, riverbeds, and seashores—weaves itself into large weblike structures.

A team at Nottingham Trent University and Loughborough University has revealed the physical mechanism behind the geometric patterns formed of cyanobacteria, one of the oldest and most abundant forms of life on Earth, and which has played a pivotal role in the evolution of our planet.

The research, for which Ph.D. students Mixon Faluweki and Jan Cammann are co-lead authors, is published in the journal Physical Review Letters.

Do you think human beings are the last stage in evolution? If not, what comes next?

I do not think human beings are the last stage in the evolutionary process. Whatever comes next will be neither simply organic nor simply machinic but will be the result of the increasingly symbiotic relationship between human beings and technology.

Bound together as parasite/host, neither people nor technologies can exist apart from the other because they are constitutive prostheses of each other. Such an interrelation is not unique to human beings. As the physiologist J. Scott Turner writes in “The Extended Organism”: “Animal-built structures are properly considered organs of physiology, in principle no different from, and just as much a part of the organism as kidneys, heart, lungs or livers.” This is true for termites, for example, who form a single organism in symbiosis with their nests. The extended body of the organism is created by the extended mind of the colony.

Thanks to directed evolution accelerating natural selection processes, scientists are generating mutants with beneficial properties and improving functionality.

Learn more about these reagents in the new Research Products.

Directed evolution approaches are creating new reagents to help a tried-and-true technique reach new heights.

Continue reading “Directing Superior Reagents for Better PCR Results” »

Some of nature’s mysteries have kept scientists busy for decades—for example, the processes that drive evolution. The question of whether certain differences between and within species are caused by natural selection or by chance processes divides evolutionary biologists even today. Now, an international team of researchers has teased apart a scientific debate concerning the evolutionary theories of Darwin and the Japanese geneticist Kimura. Their conclusion: the debate is unnecessarily convoluted by the co-existence of different interpretations.

Due to his contributions to geological and biological sciences, British naturalist Charles Darwin (1809–1882) is considered one of the most important natural scientists. His influential work “On the Origin of Species” (1859), with its strictly scientific explanation of the diversity of life, forms the basis of modern evolutionary biology. Darwin concluded that species evolve through natural selection: well-adapted organisms survive, others don’t.

However, by the end of the 1960s, the Japanese geneticist Motoo Kimura (1924–1994) proposed that at the genetic level, most changes in the course of evolution do not offer direct advantages or disadvantages to the individual but are simply neutral. According to his “Neutral Theory of Molecular Evolution,” first published in 1968, most of the genetic variation within and between species arises from random fluctuations of neutral mutations.

#evolution.

Promptbreeder is a self-improving self-referential system for automated prompt engineering. Give it a task description and a dataset, and it will automatically come up with appropriate prompts for the task. This is achieved by an evolutionary algorithm where not only the prompts, but also the mutation-prompts are improved over time in a population-based, diversity-focused approach.

Continue reading “Promptbreeder: Self-Referential Self-Improvement Via Prompt Evolution (Paper Explained)” »

An international team of researchers has developed a new theoretical framework that bridges physics and biology to provide a unified approach for understanding how complexity and evolution emerge in nature.

This new work on “assembly theory,” published today in Nature, represents a major advance in our fundamental comprehension of biological evolution and how it is governed by the physical laws of the universe. The paper is titled “Assembly Theory Explains and Quantifies Selection and Evolution.”

This research builds on the team’s previous work developing assembly theory as an empirically validated approach to life detection, with implications for the search for alien life and efforts to evolve new life forms in the laboratory.