Lifeboat Foundation

Apple’s biggest iPhone redesign in years has suddenly taken shape…

A team of scientists from the universities of Alberta and Toronto have laid out the blueprints for a “quantum battery” that never loses its charge.

To be clear, this battery doesn’t exist yet — but if they figure out how to build it, it could be a revolutionary breakthrough in energy storage.

“The batteries that we are more familiar with — like the lithium-ion battery that powers your smartphone — rely on classical electrochemical principles, whereas quantum batteries rely solely on quantum mechanics,” University of Alberta chemist Gabriel Hanna said in a statement.

When the first smartphones arrived, few people understood how they would change our reality. Today, our internet-connected mobile device maps our travel, manages our finances, delivers our dinner, and connects us to every corner of human knowledge. In less than a generation, it has become almost an extension of our central nervous system — so indispensable that we can’t imagine leaving home without it to guide us.

We are about to embark on another journey even more important to every individual and to human society. We are entering the age of genomics, an amazing future that will dramatically improve the health outcomes of people across the planet. Soon, we won’t be able to imagine a time when we left home without knowledge of our genome to guide us.

Continue reading “How we Benefit from Getting our Genomes Sequenced” »

Researchers at the University of Sussex have developed a glue which can unstick when placed in a magnetic field, meaning products otherwise destined for landfill, could now be dismantled and recycled at the end of their life.

Currently, items like mobile phones, microwaves and car dashboards are assembled using adhesives. It is a quick and relatively cheap way to make products but, due to problems dismantling the various materials for different recycling methods, most of these products will be destined for landfill.

However, Dr. Barnaby Greenland, Lecturer in Medicinal Chemistry, working in conjunction with Stanelco RF Technologies Ltd and Prof Wayne Hayes at the University of Reading, may have found a solution.

Think of the human brain as an immensely powerful supercomputer. But as one of the most complex systems in Nature, there’s still much to learn about how it works. That’s why researchers from the Human Brain Project are attempting to unravel even more of its mysteries. However, most neuroscientists still believe that consciousness is generated in our brains, trying to justify their chosen profession as the only key to our experience of the world. It is not. We humans don’t live in a vacuum, we are not “brains in a vat,” so to speak. Just like your smartphone, your brain is a ‘bio’-logical computing device of your mind, an interface into physical reality. Our minds are connected to the broader mind-network, as computers in the Cloud. Consciousness is “non-local” Cloud, our brain-mind systems are receivers, processors and transmitters of information within that Cloud. So, a truly multidisciplinary and computationalist approach is required to crack the neural code and reverse-engineer consciousness in AI and cybernetic systems. We shouldn’t be surprised if all that hype about testing for the “seat of consciousness” could only end up refining our understanding of neural correlates — not how consciousness originates in the brain because it’s not its origin there. The Internet or a cellular network is not generated by your smartphone — only processed by it. Species-wide mind-networks are ubiquitous in Nature. What’s different with humans is that the forthcoming cybernetic mediation could become synthetic telepathy and beyond that — the emergence of one global mind, the Syntellect Emergence (cf. The Syntellect Hypothesis) #consciousness #HumanBrainProject

In episode four of Bloomberg’s Moonshot, see how 500 scientists in 100 universities are spending $1.1 billion on the Human Brain Project.

Although mobile devices were not designed to run compute-heavy AI models, in recent years AI-powered features like face detection, eye tracking, and voice recognition have all been added to smartphones. Much of the compute for such services is done on the cloud, but ideally these applications would be light enough to run directly on devices without an Internet connection.

In this spirit of “smaller is better,” Shanghai-based developer “Linzai” (GitHub user name @Linzaer) recently shared a new lightweight model that enables real-time face detection for smartphones. The “Ultra-Light-Fast-Generic-Face-Detector-1MB” is designed for general-purpose face detection applications in low-power computing devices and is applicable to both Android and iOS phones as well as PCs (CPU and GPU). The project has garnered a whopping 3.3k Stars and over 600 forks on GitHub.

Facial recognition technology is widely applied in security monitoring, surveillance, human-computer interaction, entertainment, etc. Detecting human faces in digital images is the first step in facial recognition, and an ideal face detection model can be evaluated by how quickly and accurately it performs.

A rogue Android app previously available on Google Play has been making millions of fraudulent purchases and sending your data back to ad networks. Here’s what you need to know.

Researchers at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore (NTU Singapore) have developed a quantum communication chip that is 1,000 times smaller than current quantum setups, but offers the same superior security quantum technology is known for.

Most leading security standards used in secure communication methods—from withdrawing cash from the ATM to purchasing goods online on the smartphone—does not leverage quantum technology. The electronic transmission of the personal identification number (PIN) or password can be intercepted, posing a security risk.

Roughly three millimeters in size, the tiny chip uses quantum communication algorithms to provide enhanced security compared to existing standards. It does this by integrating passwords within the information that is being delivered, forming a secure quantum key. After the information is received, it is destroyed along with the key, making it an extremely secure form of communication.

Planting trees to save the planet just got a whole lot easier – no gardening gloves required.

Researchers say planting trees helps capture and store carbon – and a new app makes it easy for anyone to get involved.