Lifeboat Foundation

This week, see how new telescopes may reshape how astronomers view the cosmos, discover forgotten medieval cities, learn about fireflies’ early evolution, and more.

PRESS RELEASE — After over a year of evaluation, NIST has selected 14 candidates for the second round of the Additional Digital Signatures for the NIST PQC Standardization Process. The advancing digital signature algorithms are:

NIST Internal Report (IR) 8528 describes the evaluation criteria and selection process. Questions may be directed to [email protected]. NIST thanks all of the candidate submission teams for their efforts in this standardization process as well as the cryptographic community at large, which helped analyze the signature schemes.

Moving forward, the second-round candidates have the option of submitting updated specifications and implementations (i.e., “tweaks”). NIST will provide more details to the submission teams in a separate message. This second phase of evaluation and review is estimated to last 12–18 months.

One of the UK’s largest solar farms, a 55 MW project, is now officially online, providing enough power for over 20,000 homes.

The solar farm, developed by Atrato Onsite Energy, is also the fourth largest in the entire country, marking a major milestone for renewable energy in the UK.

The solar farm, which cost £39.4 million to build, is located in Richmond, North Yorkshire, and it covers an impressive 166 acres – that’s about 93 football fields. With over 93,000 bifacial solar panels, this site is expected to reduce CO₂ emissions by 11,000 tonnes annually.

Well, not “locally real,” at least.

Our first fully-integrated vehicle.

This non-flying prototype acted as a ‘dynamic iron bird’ to validate all major aircraft subsystems in a real-world environment.

The development and testing of Mk 0 epitomize our core tenets of hardware richness and rapid real-world testing.

Automatically interpreting millions of features in large language models.

Gonçalo Paulo, Alex Mallen, Caden Juang, Nora Belrose Eleuther AI 2024 https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.13928 https://github.com/EleutherAI/sae-auto-interp

We’re on a journey to advance and democratize artificial intelligence through open source and open science.

By Chuck Brooks, Skytop Contributor / October 25, 2024

Chuck Brooks serves as President and Consultant of Brooks Consulting International. Chuck also serves as an Adjunct Professor at Georgetown University in the Cyber Risk Management Program, where he teaches graduate courses on risk management, homeland security, and cybersecurity.

Chuck has received numerous global accolades for his work and promotion of cybersecurity. Recently, he was named the top cybersecurity expert to follow on social media, and also as one top cybersecurity leaders for 2024. He has also been named “Cybersecurity Person of the Year” by Cyber Express, Cybersecurity Marketer of the Year, and a “Top 5 Tech Person to Follow” by LinkedIn” where he has 120,000 followers on his profile.

As a thought leader, blogger, and event speaker, he has briefed the G20 on energy cybersecurity, The US Embassy to the Holy See, and the Vatican on global cybersecurity cooperation. He has served on two National Academy of Science Advisory groups, including one on digitalizing the USAF, and another on securing BioTech. He has also addressed USTRANSCOM on cybersecurity and serves on an industry/government Working group for DHS CISA focused on security space systems.

In the movie “Jurassic Park,” scientists extracted DNA that had been preserved in amber for millions of years, and used it to create a population of long-extinct dinosaurs.

Researchers at The Jackson Laboratory (JAX), the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, and Yale University, have used artificial intelligence to design thousands of new DNA switches that can precisely control the expression of a gene in different cell types. Their new approach opens the possibility of controlling when and where genes are expressed in the body, for the benefit of human health and medical research, in ways never before possible.

“What is special about these synthetically designed elements is that they show remarkable specificity to the target cell type they were designed for,” said Ryan Tewhey, PhD, an associate professor at The Jackson Laboratory and co-senior author of the work. “This creates the opportunity for us to turn the expression of a gene up or down in just one tissue without affecting the rest of the body.”

In recent years, genetic editing technologies and other gene therapy approaches have given scientists the ability to alter the genes inside living cells. However, affecting genes only in selected cell types or tissues, rather than across an entire organism, has been difficult. That is in part because of the ongoing challenge of understanding the DNA switches, called cis-regulatory elements (CREs), that control the expression and repression of genes.