Lifeboat Foundation

The world’s two biggest plane makers say the technology could have a negative impact on the aviation industry.

Aging is a highly complex process with thousands of genes influencing our health, which poses a challenge for researchers looking to explain and target the underlying processes that lead to declining health. Researchers from the Babraham Institute’s Epigenetics research program have published a map of genetic interactions in C. elegans in iScience which can be used to identify new genes that influence lifespan and that have equivalent genes in humans.

Researchers use simple model organisms like the nematode worm C. elegans to gather information that can inform studies on human aging because many genes are shared or have counterparts in other species. However, there are some conceptual and technical challenges that apply to the study of aging in model organisms. Dr. Casanueva, Group leader in the Epigenetics research program explains: “The way researchers usually study gene function is by disrupting its function and observing what happens. The disruption of some genes causes worms to live a very long-life. In this way, researchers have found the so-called ‘longevity-pathways.” However, the complexity underlying aging means that it is not enough to focus on individual genes. We need to study the overall organization of longevity by generating a systems-wide view.”

In collaboration with the physicist Marta Sales Pardo at University of Rovira i Virgili, Dr. Casanueva and her lab set out to cast a wider net when it comes to studying longevity genes. Together they created the largest network of gene regulatory interactions that are found in a long-lived type of C. elegans. In this network, the relationships between genes are represented by lines, and represented in different layers based on the flow of information between genes. The middle of the web represents the genes with the most influence, in this case, they receive complex input signals and de-code them, and connect to an output layer of genes. The researchers found that most key genes for longevity belong to transcription factors and metabolic genes.

Focus on strategic sectors like lithium and 5G puts U.S. and Europe on defensive.

HONG KONG — In late 2003, when much of the world was getting connected to Wi-Fi, China decided to do it differently.

An international team of experts has collected data on metal halide perovskite solar cells from more than 15,000 publications and developed a database with visualization options and analysis tools. The database is open source and provides an overview of the rapidly growing knowledge as well as the open questions in this exciting class of materials. The study was initiated by HZB scientist Dr. Eva Unger and implemented and coordinated by her postdoc Jesper Jacobsson.

Halide perovskites have huge potential for solar cells and other optoelectronic applications. Solar cells based on metal-organic perovskites achieve efficiencies of more than 25 percent, they can be produced cheaply and with minimal energy consumption, but still require improvements in terms of stability and reliability. In recent years, research on this class of materials has boomed, producing a flood of results that is almost impossible to keep track of by traditional means. Under the keyword “perovskite solar,” more than 19,000 publications had already been entered in the Web of Science (spring 2021).

Now, 95 experts from more than 30 international research institutions have designed a database to systematically record findings on perovskite semiconductors. The data are prepared according to the FAIR principles, i.e. they are findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable. By reading the existing literature, the experts have collected more than 42,000 individual data sets, in which the data can be filtered and displayed according to various criteria such as material compositions or component type. Researchers from several teams at HZB were involved in this Herculean task.

2021 saw massive growth in the demand for edge computing — driven by the pandemic, the need for more efficient business processes, as well as key advances in the Internet of Things, 5G and AI.

In a study published by IBM in May, for example, 94 percent of surveyed executives said their organizations will implement edge computing in the next five years.

Continue reading “Top 5 Edge AI Trends to Watch in 2022” »

Cybersecurity researchers have demonstrated a new attack technique that makes it possible to leverage a device’s Bluetooth component to directly extract network passwords and manipulate traffic on a Wi-Fi chip, putting billions of electronic devices at risk of stealthy attacks.

The novel attacks work against the so-called “combo chips,” which are specialized chips that are equipped to handle different types of radio wave-based wireless communications, such as Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and LTE.

“We provide empirical evidence that coexistence, i.e., the coordination of cross-technology wireless transmissions, is an unexplored attack surface,” a group of researchers from the Technical University of Darmstadt’s Secure Mobile Networking Lab and the University of Brescia said in a new paper.

In recent years, engineers have been trying to develop more effective sensors and tools to monitor indoor environments. Serving as the foundation of these tools, indoor positioning systems automatically determine the position of objects with high accuracy and low latency, enabling emerging Internet-of-Things (IoT) applications, such as robots, autonomous driving, VR/AR, etc.

A team of researchers recently created CurveLight, an accurate and efficient light positioning system. Their technology, described in a paper presented at ACM’s SenSys 2021 Conference on Embedded Networked Sensor Systems, could be used to enhance the performance of autonomous vehicles, robots and other advanced technologies.

“In CurveLight, the signal transmitter includes an infrared LED, covered by a hemispherical and rotatable shade,” Zhimeng Yin, one of the researchers who developed the system at City University of Hong Kong, told TechXplore. “The receiver detects the light signals with a photosensitive diode. When the shade is rotating, the transmitter generates a unique sequence of light signals for each point in the covered space.”

A flaw in a commonly used piece of software has left millions of web servers vulnerable to exploitation by hackers.

Controversial facial recognition company, Clearview AI, which has amassed a database of some 10 billion images by scraping selfies off the Internet so it can sell an identity-matching service to law enforcement, has been hit with another order to delete people’s data.

France’s privacy watchdog said today that Clearview has breached Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

In an announcement of the breach finding, the CNIL also gives Clearview formal notice to stop its “unlawful processing” and says it must delete user data within two months.