Lifeboat Foundation

Computer scientist Brent Seales and a team of researchers at the University of Kentucky are working to “digitally unwrap” ancient papyri from the Herculaneum library that were carbonized by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 CE.

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Since 2019, NEH has supported work by computer scientist Brent Seales and a team of researchers at the University of Kentucky in efforts to “digitally unwrap” ancient papyri from the Herculaneum library that were carbonized by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 A.D.

Continue reading “Reading the Invisible Library: the Herculaneum Papyrus Scrolls” »

Smartphone sales have had their worst quarterly performance in over a decade, a fact that raises two big questions. Have the latest models finally bored the market with mere incremental improvements? And if they have, what will the next form factor (and function) be? Today a deep tech startup called Xpanceo is announcing $40 million in funding from a single investor, Opportunity Ventures in Hong Kong, to pursue its take on one of the possible answers to that question: computing devices in the form of smart contact lenses.

The company wants to make tech more simple, and it believes the way to do that is to make it seamless and more connected to how we operate every day. “All current computers will be obsolete [because] they’re not interchangeable,” said Roman Axelrod, who co-founded the startup with material scientist and physicist Valentyn S. Volkov. “We are enslaved by gadgets.”

With a focus on new materials and moving away from silicon-based processing and towards new approaches to using optoelectronics, Xpanceo’s modest ambition, Axelrod said in an interview, is to “merge all the gadgets into one, to provide humanity with a gadget with an infinite screen. What we aim for is to create the next generation of computing.”

🚨 A new vulnerability called GPU_zip has been discovered in almost all modern graphics processing units (GPUs), potentially allowing for information leaks.

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Learn how your GPU could be at risk.

Continue reading “Researchers Uncover New GPU Side-Channel Vulnerability Leaking Sensitive Data” »

This week, researchers proved empirically that life isn’t fair. Also, you’ll notice that, in a superhuman display of restraint, I managed to write a paragraph about the simulated universe hypothesis without once referencing “The Matrix.” (Except for this reference.)

Oh, so a European research team has proven that flipped coins aren’t actually fair? Buddy, life isn’t fair! Do you think the world owes you two equally probable outcomes as established by an axiomatic mathematical formalization? When I was a kid, we didn’t even have coins! We had to roll dice! It took 10 minutes to start a football game! Oh, so a coin is very slightly more likely to land on the same face as its initial position? Quit crying! It’s only a meaningful bias if you flip a coin multiple times!

Applying a recently discovered physical law, a physicist at the University of Portsmouth has contributed to the discussion about whether or not the universe is a simulation. The simulated universe hypothesis proposes that the universe is actually a simulation running on a vastly complex computing substrate and we’re therefore all just NPCs, walking through our animation loops and saying, “Hail, summoner! Conjure me up a warm bed!” and “Do you get to the Cloud District often?”

Computer vision algorithms have become increasingly advanced over the past decades, enabling the development of sophisticated technologies to monitor specific environments, detect objects of interest in video footage and uncover suspicious activities in CCTV recordings. Some of these algorithms are specifically designed to detect and isolate moving objects or people of interest in a video, a task known as moving target segmentation.

While some conventional algorithms for moving target segmentation attained promising results, most of them perform poorly in real-time (i.e., when analyzing videos that are not pre-recorded but are being captured in the present moment). Some research teams have thus been trying to tackle this problem using alternative types of algorithms, such as so-called quantum algorithms.

Researchers at Nanjing University of Information Science and Technology and Southeast University in China recently developed a new quantum algorithm for the segmentation of moving targets in grayscale videos. This algorithm, published in Advanced Quantum Technologies, was found to outperform classical approaches in tasks that involve the analysis of video footage in real-time.

Year 2022 face_with_colon_three

When the team fired their ultra-fast laser at a graphene wire strung between two gold electrodes, it produced two different kinds of currents. Some of the electrons excited by the light continued moving in a particular direction once the light was switched off, while others were transient and were only in motion while the light was on. The researchers found that they could control the type of current created by altering the shape of their laser pulses, which was then used as the basis of their logic gate.

Logic gates work by taking two inputs—either 1 or 0—processing them, and providing a single output. The exact processing rules depend on the kind of logic gate implementing them, but for example, an AND gate only outputs a 1 if both its inputs are 1, otherwise it outputs a 0.

Continue reading “New Logic Gates Are a Million Times Faster Than Those in Today’s Chips” »

Date October 11, 2023

Speeding up communication between humans is surprisingly tricky.

Last week, a post by Elon Musk on X (formerly known as Twitter) caught my eye. The entrepreneur claimed that sticking electrodes in people’s heads is going to lead to a huge increase in the rate of data transfer out of, and into, human brains.

The occasion of Musk’s post was the announcement by Neuralink, his brain-computer interface (BCI) company, that it was officially seeking the first volunteer to receive the “N1,” an implant comprising 1,024 electrodes able to listen in on brain neurons.

Bahadır Eroğlu/iStock.

Wouldn’t it be great if researchers could use a special quantum eraser to remove their mistakes?