Lifeboat Foundation

Earth’s magnetic field flipped 42000 years ago, study shows.

A small, flying reptile glides beneath the canopy of an ancient forest, scouring the trees for tasty bugs. She spots a cicada buzzing in the boughs of a ginkgo tree, then swoops down to snatch it up in her beak. The bug flees; the reptile follows, grasping swiftly along the branches with her sharp claws until – snatch! – she grabs the bug with her opposable thumbs.

It’s not your typical picture of a pterosaur – those iconic, winged reptiles that lived through most of the Mesozoic era (from about 252 million to 66 million years ago).

But according to a new study published April 12 in the journal Current Biology, a newly-described Jurassic pterosaur appears to have lived its life among the trees, hunting, and climbing with the help of its two opposable thumbs – one on each of its three-fingered hands.

100 million more iot devices are exposed—and they won’t be the last.

The Name: Wreck flaws in TCP/IP are the latest in a series of vulnerabilities with global implications.

Measurements of the muon magnetic moment strengthen a previously reported tension with theoretical predictions, ushering in a new era of precision tests of the standard model.

Hackers can now use a JavaScript exploit to trigger Rowhammer attacks remotely on modern DDR4 RAM cards.

In an attempt to better track users and predict their search habits, Google Chrome has developed FLoC (Federated Learning of Cohorts). FLoC provides visibility into user data to any website that desires this information.

In fact, FLoC places each user in an ID group to help websites recognize and target individuals. In response, the alternative search engine DuckDuckGo has come out with an extension for Chrome that can block FLoC tracking. Furthermore, users now have the option of using either the DuckDuckGo application or extension to entirely opt out of FLoC monitoring.

Google first implemented FLoC in order to offer all users advertisements based on their demographic and search trends, but without including third-party cookies. However, the company waited only a short time before deciding the tracking method would apply to all Google Chrome users regardless of whether the user chose to opt in or not. Understandably concerned about privacy, many users have expressed wanting to learn more about alternative search engine options.

Inside the symmetries of a crystal shape, a postdoctoral researcher has unearthed a counterexample to a basic conjecture about multiplicative inverses.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=3Z_jkWzgfSk

Future Breakthroughs in Technology and in the Search for Life: Take Aways from the last two days at the Breakthrough Discuss Meeting.

Takeaways from this week’s Breakthrough Discuss meeting.