Lifeboat Foundation

There is a joke about the daughter who asks her dad why he speaks so quietly around the house. “Because there is artificial intelligence everywhere that is listening to what we say,” the dad replies. The daughter laughs, the father laughs. And Alexa laughs.

Artificial intelligence does seem to be injecting itself into more and more aspects of our lives. And as AI brains earn the equivalent of a million doctoral degrees while absorbing trillions of bits of data and in turn generate responses with an engaging tone and demeanor that sound as simple and humanlike as your favorite old college professor, some feel compelled to ask: Are computers becoming sentient?

A cynic would respond, “Of course not. Computers may solve problems in seconds that would take humankind generations to solve, but they can’t feel love and pain, can’t see and appreciate the moon and the stars, can’t smell the coffee we spill on the keyboard.”

Researchers from Queen Mary University of London have made a discovery that could change our understanding of the universe. In their study published on August 23 in the journal Science Advances.

<em>Science Advances</em> is a peer-reviewed, open-access scientific journal that is published by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). It was launched in 2015 and covers a wide range of topics in the natural sciences, including biology, chemistry, earth and environmental sciences, materials science, and physics.

Construction is set to break ground by the end of this year, and the company expects to move into the new space by the end of 2024. The production facility for semiconductor quartz will include a clean room, high-purity cleaning system and allow them to expand an automation component of their business that they’ve been capitalizing on for years.

“We knew that our customers all over the world were expanding at a rate we couldn’t keep up with,” said Scott Lingren, SXT’s managing director and U.S. chairman. “As you see all these expansions from Samsung in Taylor to Texas Instruments Inc. in the Dallas area to all over the world … we just have to keep up.”

SXT – which is headquartered in the Netherlands and owned by the privately-held Schunk Group in Germany – supplies semiconductor manufacturers around the world, like Samsung, which has had a presence in Central Texas for decades and is potentially adding to its existing Austin campus and its new site in Taylor. Other major players in the industry include Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., which is expanding in Arizona, and Intel Corp., which is expanding to Ohio.

When the meteor that Avi Loeb, director of the Institute for Theory and Computation at Harvard University calls IM1 streaked across the sky on 8 January 2014, it was nothing special.

Yes, at half a meter in diameter, it was big enough to put on a nice show for people on the ground, ending in a rapid series of explosions high in the atmosphere.

“There were some reports of flashes in the sky, and there was probably a boom, although I’ve never heard anyone say that,” says Loeb’s colleague, Rob McCallum of Cambridge, Massachusetts.

In a major milestone, Chandrayaan-3’s Pragyan rover has confirmed the presence of sulphur & other elements on the moon’s south pole. Molly Gambhir brings you a report.

#chandrayaan3 #sulphur #gravitas.

Continue reading “Gravitas: Chandrayaan-3’s big milestone: Sulphur on moon’s south pole confirmed” »

This post is also available in: עברית (Hebrew)

Prominent National Science Foundation (NSF) space telescopes worldwide have been shut down due to a major cyberattack, the reason for which is unknown. For over two weeks, ten telescopes have been impacted, while some on-site operatives were able to keep some operational. These shutdowns have caused chaos in the astronomy sphere due to many essential windows of opportunity being missed for space observations.

NOIRLab (the NSF-run coordinating center for ground-based astronomy) said in a press release “Our staff are working with cybersecurity experts to get all the impacted telescopes and our website back online as soon as possible and are encouraged by the progress made thus far.”

Accounts may be hijacked and data can be uploaded without authentication if a certain version of Jupiter X Core, a premium plugin for setting up WordPress and WooCommerce websites, is used. These vulnerabilities impact various versions of the plugin.

Jupiter X Core is a visual editor that is both simple and powerful, and it is a component of the Jupiter X theme. The Jupiter X theme is used in more than 172,000 websites.

The second flaw, identified as CVE-2023–38389, makes it possible for unauthenticated attackers to gain control of any WordPress user account so long as they are in possession of the user’s email address. The vulnerability has been given a critical severity level of 9.8 and affects all versions of Jupiter X Core beginning with 3.3.8 and below.

Space junk could one day be snatched in orbit with a strong bag, if a new contract to test the technology ends up flying in space.

The U.S. Central Intelligence Agency has released a new entry in its World Factbook that catalogues the programs and milestones of space agencies around the world.