Lifeboat Foundation

To solve a long-standing puzzle about how long a neutron can “live” outside an atomic nucleus, physicists entertained a wild but testable theory positing the existence of a right-handed version of our left-handed universe. They designed a mind-bending experiment at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory to try to detect a particle that has been speculated but not spotted. If found, the theorized “mirror neutron”—a dark-matter twin to the neutron—could explain a discrepancy between answers from two types of neutron lifetime experiments and provide the first observation of dark matter.

“Dark matter remains one of the most important and puzzling questions in science—clear evidence we don’t understand all matter in nature,” said ORNL’s Leah Broussard, who led the study published in Physical Review Letters.

Continue reading “Physicists confront the neutron lifetime puzzle” »

By Chuck Brooks

Our Growing Digital Connected World — Made For Botnets

There are dire implications of having devices and networks so digitally interconnected when it comes to bot nets. Especially when you have unpatched vulnerabilities in networks. The past decade has recorded many botnet cyber-attacks. Many who are involved in cybersecurity will recall the massive and high profile Mirai botnet DDoS attack in 2016. Mirai was an IoT botnet made up of hundreds of thousands of compromised IoT devices, It targeted Dyn—a domain name system (DNS) provider for many well-known internet platforms in a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack. That DDoS attack sent millions of bytes of traffic to a single server to cause the system to shut down. The Dyn attacks leveraged Internet of Things devices and some of the attacks were launched by common devices like digital routers, webcams and video recorders infected with malware.

Continue reading “When Botnets Attack” »

The need to find alternative sources for fertilizer have become urgent as chemical fertilizer shortages from the Ukrainian war threaten countries globally.

A Chinese military analyst suggested countermeasures for the Starlink satellite system developed by Musk’s SpaceX – including ways to hack or destroy the service.

Continue reading “As chemical fertilizer shortages persist, peecycling — the process of recycling human urine — could increase the yield of nutrient-rich crops” »

😳!

A Chinese military analyst suggested that Beijing should develop countermeasures for the Starlink satellite system developed by Elon Musk’s SpaceX — including ways to hack or even destroy the service during a time of conflict.

In a recent paper published in a China-based academic journal called Modern Defense Technology, analyst Ren Yuanzhen argued that China’s military needs to develop the capability of tracking each of the thousands of satellites set to comprise the Starlink constellations in the coming years.

Continue reading “China analyst urges possible attacks on Elon Musk’s Starlink satellites” »

Flashes of what may become a transformative new technology are coursing through a network of optic fibers under Chicago.

Researchers have created one of the world’s largest networks for sharing quantum information —a field of science that depends on paradoxes so strange that Albert Einstein didn’t believe them.

The network, which connects the University of Chicago with Argonne National Laboratory in Lemont, is a rudimentary version of what scientists hope someday to become the internet of the future. For now, it’s opened up to businesses and researchers to test fundamentals of quantum information sharing.

As our tech needs grow and the Internet of Things increasingly connects our devices and sensors together, figuring out how to provide power in remote locations has become an expanding field of research.

Professor Seokheun “Sean” Choi—a faculty member in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Binghamton University’s Thomas J. Watson College of Engineering and Applied Science—has been working for years on biobatteries, which generate electricity through bacterial interaction.

One problem he encountered: The batteries had a lifespan limited to a few hours. That could be useful in some scenarios but not for any kind of long-term monitoring in remote locations.

The US Transportation Command, or USTRANSCOM, are a Pentagon office tasked with transporting cargo to American global military assets, announced that it was partnering with SpaceX to examine the feasibility of quickly blasting supplies into space and back to Earth rather than flying them through the air.

SpaceX is already functionally a defense contractor and has launched American military satellites and recently bolstered Ukrainian communication links with Starlink.

Practical uses

Continue reading “Pentagon considers using SpaceX for fleet of militarized Starships” »

SpaceX’s Starlink satellite internet service has let the company capture high definition video of its rocket landing on a ship.