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Jan 30, 2022

Will Elon Musk Launch His Own Social Media?

Posted by in category: Elon Musk

Will it actually happen? No way to know for sure. But if the already overwhelming demand continues to grow at this pace, then it may be only a matter of time before he pulls the trigger on it. With his resources and influence, such a platform could quickly become one of the most used in the world.


By Matt Wallace

Currently, the social media space is dominated by a select few platforms who wield a massive amount of control. Any platform that tries to compete faces an uphill battle against App Store bans, restrictions, blacklists, higher standers, and more! If you don’t like the options out there or have issues with the way they are running their platforms, then your other significant choices are extremely limited.

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Jan 30, 2022

Western Australia is a vast state

Posted by in categories: government, solar power, sustainability

Power companies are having to come to terms with the high cost difference between maintaining poles and wires and installing hybrid power systems at the ends of the long power lines. And when the bushfires burn all the poles, then it makes the decision much easier.

Horizon Power is rolling out standalone off-grid solar and battery powered systems for 19 customers east of the town of Esperance. “Horizon Power first began offering certain remote regional customers the option to be powered by a custom built stand-alone solar and battery power system, or SPS, after bushfires destroyed more than 320 power poles and hundreds of kilometres of power lines in the region in November of 2015.”

At that time, only four landowners took up the offer. Now they expect to deliver more than 1,000 systems to farmers and remote indigenous communities. As part of the Western Australian government’s Recovery Plan, Horizon Power has received $46 million to provide 150 systems across regional Western Australia. Each system consists of solar panels, battery storage, and a backup diesel generator. Connection to HP’s service hub means that any faults can be diagnosed remotely. Service teams can be dispatched if needed.

Jan 30, 2022

Better Farming Through Electricity

Posted by in category: food

Chinese researchers are reporting that applying an electric field to pea plants increased yields. This process — known as electroculture — has been tested multiple times, but in each case there are irregularities in the scientific process, so there is still an opportunity for controlled research to produce meaningful data.

This recent research used two plots of peas planted from the same pods. The plants were tended identically except one plot was stimulated by an electric field. The yield on the stimulated plot was about 20% more than the control plot.

The actual paper is paywalled in the journal Nature Food, but the idea seems simple enough. If you search for the topic, you’ll find there have been other studies with similar findings. There are also anecdotal reports of electrical plant stimulation going back to 1746.

Jan 30, 2022

Jeep Grand Cherokee 4xe Plug-In Hybrid Arrives This Spring

Posted by in category: sustainability

The Grand Cherokee 4xe plug-in hybrid goes on sale soon, with 4-wheel drive standard.


It’s good news, bad news time at the Jeep division of Stellantis, formerly FCA, formerly Daimler Chrysler, formerly Chrysler Corporation. The 4xe plug-in hybrid version of the popular Grand Cherokee will go on sale this spring. According to Autoblog, buyers will have 5 trim levels to choose from — base, Trailhawk, Overland, Summit, and Summit Reserve.

The Grand Cherokee 4xe Good News

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Jan 30, 2022

How Gut Microbe Symbiosis Helps Squirrels Keep Their Muscles During Hibernation

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, food

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.

Jan 30, 2022

OpenAI’s WebGPT Crawls a Text-Based Web Environment to Achieve Human-Level Performance on Long-Form QA

Posted by in category: robotics/AI

An OpenAI research team fine-tunes the GPT-3 pretrained language model to enable it to answer long-form questions by searching and navigating a text-based web browsing environment, achieving retrieval and synthesis improvements and reaching human-level long-form question-answering performance.

Jan 30, 2022

Africa may have reached the pandemic’s holy grail

Posted by in category: biotech/medical

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” »

Jan 30, 2022

The ingenious lab where you can hear sights and feel sounds

Posted by in category: futurism

At one university in Israel, scientists are creating portals between the senses and even reprogramming our senses.


“That’s Bouba,” I declare, pointing to the rounded shape.

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Jan 30, 2022

Blast Chips With This BBQ Lighter Fault Injection Tool

Posted by in categories: computing, engineering

Looking to get into fault injection for your reverse engineering projects, but don’t have the cash to lay out for the necessary hardware? Fear not, for the tools to glitch a chip may be as close as the nearest barbecue grill.

If you don’t know what chip glitching is, perhaps a primer is in order. Glitching, more formally known as electromagnetic fault injection (EMFI), or simply fault injection, is a technique that uses a pulse of electromagnetic energy to induce a fault in a running microcontroller or microprocessor. If the pulse occurs at just the right time, it may force the processor to skip an instruction, leaving the system in a potentially exploitable state.

EMFI tools are commercially available — we even recently featured a kit to build your own — but [rqu]’s homebrew version is decidedly simpler and cheaper than just about anything else. It consists of a piezoelectric gas grill igniter, a little bit of enameled magnet wire, and half of a small toroidal ferrite core. The core fragment gets a few turns of wire, which then gets soldered to the terminals on the igniter. Pressing the button generates a high-voltage pulse, which gets turned into an electromagnetic pulse by the coil. There’s a video of the tool in use in the Twitter thread, showing it easily glitching a PIC running a simple loop program.

Jan 30, 2022

ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter Spotted a Giant ‘Tree-Stump’ On The Red Planet’s Surface

Posted by in category: space

A joint probe mission of ESA and Roscosmos captured a giant tree stump from the Martian surface. One of the probes on Mars recently captured a strange image on the planet’s surface.