Lifeboat Foundation

We might be amidst a chip shortage, but if you enjoy reverse-engineering, there’s never a shortage of intriguing old chips to dig into – and the 2513N 5×7 character ROM is one such chip. Amidst a long thread probing a few of these (Twitter, ThreadReader link), [TubeTime] has realized that two address lines were shorted inside of the package. A Twitter dopamine-fueled quest for truth has led them to try their hand at making the chip work anyway. Trying to clear the short with an external PSU led to a bond wire popping instead, as evidenced by the ESD diode connection disappearing.

A dozen minutes of sandpaper work resulted in the bare die exposed, making quick work of the bond wires as a side effect. Apparently, having the bond pads a bit too close has resulted in a factory defect where two of the pads merged together. No wonder the PSU wouldn’t take that on! Some X-acto work later, the short was cleared. But without the bond wires, how would [TubeTime] connect to it? This is where the work pictured comes in. Soldering to the remains of the bond wires has proven to be fruitful, reviving the chip enough to continue investigating, even if, it appears, it was never functional to begin with. The thread continued on with comparing ROMs from a few different chips [TubeTime] had on hand and inferences on what could’ve happened that led to this IC going out in the wild.

Such soldering experiments are always fun to try and pull off! We rarely see soldering on such a small scale, as thankfully, it’s not always needed, but it’s a joy to witness when someone does IC or PCB microsurgery to fix factory defects that render our devices inoperable before they were even shipped. Each time that a fellow hacker dares to grind the IC epoxy layers down and save a game console or an unidentified complex board, the world gets a little brighter. And if you aren’t forced to do it for repair reasons, you can always try it in an attempt to build the smallest NES in existence!

A team of scientists at Tufts University and Harvard University “have brought us a step closer to the goal of regenerative medicine” by using a drug cocktail to regrow a frog’s amputated legs.

Peer-reviewed study: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.abj2164

Scientists say they have been able to help frogs regrow their legs for the first time. The next step? Try the procedure on mammals.

Continue reading “Scientists were able to regrow frog legs. Will it pave the way for human regeneration?” »

He’s backing a new biotech company working on “cellular rejuvenation programming.”

It sure looks like Jeff Bezos has plans to cheat death.

The founder and former CEO of Amazon has reportedly made an investment in the freshly launched Altos Labs, a biotech startup focused on “cellular rejuvenation programming to restore cell health and resilience, with the goal of reversing disease to transform medicine,” according to a January 19 press release. With $3 billion in backing on day one, Altos Labs has hit the ground running with what may be the single largest funding round for a biotech company, according to the Financial Times of London.

Continue reading “Jeff Bezos Is Paying for a Way to Make Humans Immortal” »

Xenotransplantation To Save And Extend Lives — Dr. David K.C. Cooper, MD, PhD, Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical School

Dr. David K. C. Cooper, MA, PhD, MD, MS, DSc (Med), FRCS, FACS, FACC, FAST, (https://researchers.mgh.harvard.edu/profile/27073950/David-Cooper) is a pioneering heart transplant surgeon and researcher in the field of xenotransplantation, which is defined as any procedure that involves the transplantation, implantation or infusion into a human recipient of live cells, tissues, or organs from a nonhuman animal source.

Continue reading “Dr. David K. C. Cooper, MD, PhD. — MGH/Harvard — Xenotransplantation To Save And Extend Lives” »

From an autonomous robotic surgeon to the world’s most powerful cyberweapon, check out this week’s awesome tech stories from around the web.

The COVID-19 pandemic brought about a seismic shift in the way organizations and offices operate. Working from home has become a preferred option for countless businesses and millions of employees around the globe. The work from home trend might continue in the future too, as it has proven not to affect business productivity adversely. Additionally, as per a McKinsey study, up to 278 business executives plan to reduce their office space by 30% even beyond the pandemic. Work from home is a seemingly viable option for employees for a variety of reasons, one of them being the possible arrival of the metaverse, a concept that will make traveling to a specific location for work redundant. This will affect one particular part of employees’ personal lives—domestic chores. There are more than a few reasons why IoT for smart cities and homes will play a significant role in optimizing household chores.

Domestic chores are an unavoidable yet necessary part of individuals’ personal lives. For instance, tasks such as cooking meals, managing laundry work and making timely lighting and plumbing repairs are hard to overlook, even if an important virtual business meeting is going on. In simple words, tasks such as cooking, cleaning, maintenance and task management act as distractions that stand in the way of remote organizational work. Resultantly, the productivity of remote employees is seriously affected by domestic chores. To state the obvious, remote working blurs the boundaries between the workspace and personal life. Work hours increasingly blend into the time that would normally be associated with completing household tasks. These are remote working problems that you probably know. The biggest problem of remote working is how it has regressed gender equality and the involvement of women in prominent positions at the workplace.

Ground squirrels spend the end of summer gorging on food, preparing for hibernation. They need to store a lot of energy as fat, which becomes their primary fuel source underground in their hibernation burrows all winter long.

While hibernating, ground squirrels enter a state called torpor. Their metabolism drops to as low as just 1 percent of summer levels and their body temperature can plummet to close to freezing. Torpor greatly reduces how much energy the animal needs to stay alive until springtime.

That long fast comes with a downside: no new input of protein, which is crucial to maintain the body’s tissues and organs. This is a particular problem for muscles.

When the results of his study came in, Kondwani Jambo was stunned.

He’s an immunologist in Malawi. And last year he had set out to determine just how many people in his country had been infected with the coronavirus since the pandemic began.

Jambo, who works for the Malawi-Liverpool-Wellcome Trust Clinical Research Programme, knew the total number of cases was going to be higher than the official numbers. But his study revealed that the scale of spread was beyond anything he had anticipated — with a huge majority of Malawians infected long before the omicron variant emerged. “I was very shocked,” he says.

Continue reading “Africa may have reached the pandemic’s holy grail” »

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Levine’s Biological age calculator is embedded as an Excel file in this link from my website:
https://michaellustgarten.com/2019/09/09/quantifying-biological-age/