Lifeboat Foundation

Cryptocurrency is usually “mined” through the blockchain by asking a computer to perform a complicated mathematical problem in exchange for tokens of cryptocurrency. But in research appearing in the journal Chem a team of chemists has repurposed this process, asking computers to instead generate the largest network ever created of chemical reactions which may have given rise to prebiotic molecules on early Earth.

This work indicates that at least some primitive forms of metabolism might have emerged without the involvement of enzymes, and it shows the potential to use blockchain to solve problems outside the financial sector that would otherwise require the use of expensive, hard to access supercomputers.

“At this point we can say we exhaustively looked for every possible combination of chemical reactivity that scientists believe to had been operative on primitive Earth,” says senior author Bartosz A. Grzybowski of the Korea Institute for Basic Science and the Polish Academy of Sciences.

A new attack targets Docker servers and uses a combo of cryptocurrency mining and website traffic generation for profit. It could leave a backdoor for attackers to exploit later. Patch your systems and monitor for suspicious activity:

Artificial intelligence has progressed from sci-fi fantasy to mainstream reality. AI now powers online tools from search engines to voice assistants and it is used in everything from medical imaging analysis to autonomous vehicles. But the advance of AI will soon collide with another pressing issue: energy consumption.

Much like cryptocurrencies today, AI risks becoming a target for criticism and regulation based on its high electricity appetite. Partisans are forming into camps, with AI optimists extolling continued progress through more compute power, while pessimists are beginning to portray AI power usage as wasteful and even dangerous. Attacks echo those leveled at crypto mining in recent years. Undoubtedly, there will be further efforts to choke off AI innovation by cutting its energy supply.

The pessimists raise some valid points. Developing ever-more capable AI does require vast computing resources. For example, the amount of compute used to train OpenAI’s ChatGPT-3 reportedly equaled 800 petaflops of processing power—on par with the 20 most powerful supercomputers in the world combined. Similarly, ChatGPT receives somewhere on the order of hundreds of millions of queries each day. Estimates suggest that the electricity required to respond to all these queries might be around 1 GWh daily, enough to power the daily energy consumption of about 33,000 U.S. households. Demand is expected to further increase in the future.

Poorly secured Linux SSH servers are being targeted by bad actors to install port scanners and dictionary attack tools with the goal of targeting other vulnerable servers and co-opting them into a network to carry out cryptocurrency mining and distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks.

“Threat actors can also choose to install only scanners and sell the breached IP and account credentials on the dark web,” the AhnLab Security Emergency Response Center (ASEC) said in a report on Tuesday.

In these attacks, adversaries try to guess a server’s SSH credentials by running through a list of commonly used combinations of usernames and passwords, a technique called dictionary attack.

Google and Twitter ads are promoting sites containing a cryptocurrency drainer named ‘MS Drainer’ that has already stolen $59 million from 63,210 victims over the past nine months.

According to blockchain threat analysts at ScamSniffer, they discovered over ten thousand phishing websites using the drainer from March 2023 to today, with spikes in the activity observed in May, June, and November.

A drainer is a malicious smart contract or, in this case, a complete phishing suite designed to drain funds from a user’s cryptocurrency wallet without their consent.

Elon Musk discusses various topics including the declining legacy media market, the success of X platform, the importance of free speech and accurate information propagation, the challenges of public companies, the future of AI, the impact of cryptocurrency, and the potential of autonomous vehicles.

Questions to inspire discussion.

Continue reading “Elon Musk’s Explosive Insights on Media, X Platform, AI, and Cryptocurrency” »

Good telescope that I’ve used to learn the basics: https://amzn.to/35r1jAk.
Get a Wonderful Person shirt: https://teespring.com/stores/whatdamath.
Alternatively, PayPal donations can be sent here: http://paypal.me/whatdamath.

Hello and welcome! My name is Anton I’m away for a few days due to voice issues, so enjoy this older video where we talk about the incredible invention of 3D printed bio ink that could be used to print any biological tissue (in theory). 3D printed heart anyone?

Continue reading “Bio Ink Made out of Bacteria Could Be Used to 3D Print Organs” »

Good telescope that I’ve used to learn the basics: https://amzn.to/35r1jAk.
Get a Wonderful Person shirt: https://teespring.com/stores/whatdamath.
Alternatively, PayPal donations can be sent here: http://paypal.me/whatdamath.

Hello and welcome! My name is Anton and in this video, we will talk about the incredible effects gut microbiome has on our body.
Links:
https://www.clarkson.edu/news/microbes-gut-might-affect-pers…s-research.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/fecal-transplants-…180978416/
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-03532-0
https://www.nature.com/articles/s43587-021-00093-9
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gut%E2%80%93brain_axis.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gut_microbiota.
https://www.mdpi.com/2072-6643/14/3/466
#microbiome #gut #bacteria.

Continue reading “Bacteria Living Inside Our Guts Have Mindblowing Effects On Us” »

Computers used to mine Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies’ require enormous amounts of energy and cooling that’s evaporating water supplies.