Lifeboat Foundation

Europe will soon produce a strategically vital component in the modern global economy as US semiconductor giant Intel chooses the site for a new cutting-edge chip factory.

Recent problems in global supply chains have highlighted the fundamental importance of semiconductors, which are used in a growing number of products including cars, TVs and smartphones.

Keen demand and the closure of semiconductor plants, particularly in Asia, due to pandemic disruptions led to a global chip shortage and forced car manufacturers such as Ford, Nissan and Volkswagen to scale back production.

Dystopian nightmare or a simple convenience? A Swedish company implanting microchips under the skin has is promoting its devices for use as a COVID-19 health pass in a country with thousands of early adopters.

Amanda Back uses her smartphone to scan a microchip implanted in her hand to reveal her health pass.

The new fiber battery is manufactured using novel battery gels and a standard fiber-drawing system. In a press release issued by MIT, MIT postdoc Tural Khudiyev noted that previous attempts to make batteries in fiber form were structured with key materials on the outside of the fiber. In the latest development, his system embeds the lithium and other materials inside the fiber, with a protective outside coating, creating a stable and waterproof version. He said it demonstrates that it’s possible to make a fiber battery that can be up to a kilometer long and highly durable, having many practical applications. As Khudiyev puts it, “there’s no obvious upper limit to the length. We could definitely do a kilometer-scale length.”

The 140-meter fiber produced can charge smartwatches or phones, with an energy storage capacity of 123 milliamp-hours.

“The beauty of our approach is that we can embed multiple devices in an individual fiber,” said former MIT postdoc Jung Tae Lee. The team had exhibited the integration of LED and Li-ion batteries in a single fiber, and Lee believes that more than three or four devices can be combined in such a small space in the future. “When we integrate these fibers containing multi-devices, the aggregate will advance the reaggregate of a compact fabric computer,” he added.

[Cross posted on Chi-Ning’s blog, the course is open also to non-Harvard people. Chi-Ning is my amazing grad student, who has worked on several aspects related to the course, including quantum computation and neurally-plausible computation. He assembled a great collection of guest speakers and so this course looks like it will be very exciting. Boaz]

In the following January, Harvard GSAS kindly supports me to offer a mini-course on “What is Computation? From Turing Machines to Blackholes and Neurons”. In this blog post, I’m going to share the motivation for teaching this mini-course and give an overview on what you will learn if you are interested in participating!

Computation is not an exotic word for people living in the 21st century. In high school, kids have to learn and do all sorts of computations in arithmetics (and some even start to write computer programs!). For scientists, computational methods become more and more common and sometimes even completely change the paradigm of a field. There are computers of different forms hiding in our daily life ranging from your smartphones to the toy of your pets. Also, from time to time we see excitement on the news about the development of quantum computing and artificial intelligence. Computation has become central in human civilization, however, do we really understand what computation is?

People in movies are often quick to resort to sawing off someone’s hand to get past a fingerprint scanner. A report from the Kraken Security Labs Team shows that it would be much easier—and less gruesome—to recreate someone’s fingerprint using a little bit of off-the-shelf wood glue.

Kraken notes that biometric security has become increasingly common as smartphone, tablet, and laptop manufacturers have incorporated fingerprint scanners into their products. These scanners offer a convenient way to access those devices without entering a password.

The report says a fingerprint scanner can be “hacked” by using a picture of the target’s fingerprint, creating a negative in Photoshop, printing the resulting image, and then putting some wood glue on top of the imitated fingerprint so it can be used to trick many commercial scanners.

That could change though, because Samsung and IBM have announced a partnership in which both companies are working together to develop new battery tech that could allow our smartphones to run for an entire week on a single charge.

This comes in the form of a new chip architecture that could potentially reduce the amount of energy consumed by as much as 85% called Vertical-Transport Nanosheet Field Effect Transistor (VTFET). As the name suggests, this new design will allow signals to travel across the chip vertically by stacking transistors on top of each other.

As a result, this could allow phones to perform just as well as they do right now, but with massive gains in energy efficiency. Alternatively, this design would also allow phones to improve on its performance by as much as 100% compared to modern FET alternatives.

The company’s current Glass hardware is built on Android.

Google is hiring an “Augmented Reality OS” team focused on building software for an “innovative AR device,” according to job listings spotted by 9to5Google. The team is led by Mark Lucovsky, who announced he’d joined the company this week. Lucovsky previously worked at Meta developing an in-house alternative to Android to power the company’s hardware, and also co-authored the Windows NT operating system.

According to Google’s job listings, the Augmented Reality OS team is building “the software components that control and manage the hardware on [its] Augmented Reality (AR) products.” This is far from Google’s first stab at developing AR software, and follows the company’s work on ARCore for Android and Tango. The company’s Google Glass, which is aimed at the business and enterprise market, is currently built on Android.

Continue reading “Google staffs up to build OS for unknown ‘innovative AR device’” »

It’s often said Earth’s resources are finite. This is true enough. But shift your gaze skyward for a moment. Up there, amid the stars, lurks an invisible bonanza of epic proportions.

Many of the materials upon which modern civilization is built exist in far greater amounts throughout the rest of the solar system. Earth, after all, was formed from the same cosmic cloud as all the other planets, comets, and asteroids—and it hardly cornered the market when it comes to the valuable materials we use to make smartphone batteries or raise skyscrapers.

A recent study puts it in perspective.

Continue reading “This Asteroid May Be the Shard of a Dead Protoplanet—and Have More Metal Than All the Reserves on Earth” »

“We will constantly be ‘within’ the internet, rather than have access to it, and within the billions of interconnected computers around us,” Ball wrote in his Metaverse Primer. Mark Zuckerberg described the metaverse similarly, calling it “an even more immersive and embodied internet.” Picture this: you strap on a headset or pair of goggles, flick a switch, and boom—you’re still standing in your living room, but you’re also walking through a 3D world as an avatar of yourself, and you can interact with other people who are doing the same thing from their living rooms.

Being constantly within the internet doesn’t sound all that appealing to me personally—in fact, it sounds pretty terrible—but the good news for those with a similar sentiment is that the “full vision” of the metaverse, according to Ball, is still decades away, primarily because of the advances in computing power, networking, and hardware necessary to enable and support it.

Continue reading “The Metaverse Will Need 1,000x More Computing Power, Says Intel” »