Lifeboat Foundation

Undoing pervasive misconceptions about Bergson’s philosophy (I’m looking at you Bertrand Russell)

France added an additional 3.5 GW of solar during the first three quarters of this year, compared to 2.3 GW during the same period of 2023. The country’s total installed solar capacity now stands at 23.7 GW, including 22.9 GW in mainland France.

The North American Charging System isn’t just giving people Supercharger access. It’s solving a real problem.

“The chain of exploitation underscores the importance of securing every component of a WordPress site, especially third‑party themes and plugins, which can become critical points of entry for attackers.”

The development comes as Wordfence disclosed a high-severity flaw in the WPForms plugin (CVE-2024–11205, CVSS score: 8.5) that makes it possible for authenticated attackers, with Subscriber-level access and above, to refund Stripe payments and cancel subscriptions.

The vulnerability, which affects versions 1.8.4 up to, and including, 1.9.2.1, has been resolved in versions 1.9.2.2 or later. The plugin is installed on over 6 million WordPress sites.

Self replicating alien probes.

Found on Google from phys.org

Continue reading “Self-replicating alien probes could already be here” »

Matuskey, D., Yang, Y., Naganawa, M. et al. ¹¹ C-UCB-J PET imaging is consistent with lower synaptic density in autistic adults. Mol Psychiatry (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41380-024-02776-2

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Generating water from thin air can solve water woes for remote communities and arid regions but the technology is too expensive for them to afford it.

Solar-driven atmospheric water extraction (SAWE) systems have the potential to address the ongoing freshwater scarcity, but they can only produce water intermittently. Here the authors developed a SAWE system with optimised architecture to achieve continuous freshwater production under sunlight.

The arrival of Paxlovid in December 2021 marked another turning point in the COVID-19 pandemic—an effective antiviral that has since successfully treated millions. But like many antivirals before it, scientists know that at some point, Paxlovid is likely to lose some efficacy due to drug resistance. Researchers working to stay ahead of such emerging threats have now identified a wholly new way to treat SARS-CoV-2 infections—work that may have even broader implications.

In fact, a new study by the Tuschl laboratory introduces a proof-of-concept for a novel class of antivirals that would target a type of enzyme essential not just to SARS, but also many RNA viruses, including Ebola and dengue, as well as cytosolic-replicating DNA viruses, including Pox viruses. The findings may pave the way for a faster and more robust response to future pandemics.

“Nobody has found a way to inhibit this enzyme before,” says Thomas Tuschl, the F. M. Al Akl and Margaret Al Akl professor at Rockefeller. “Our work establishes cap methyl transferase enzymes as therapeutic targets and opens the door to many more antiviral developments against pathogens that until now we’ve had only limited tools to fight.”