Lifeboat Foundation

Samsung has earned a strong reputation among PC enthusiasts when it comes to solid-state storage. Its Pro series of SSDs are often among reviewers’ top recommendations for users seeking high-speed storage for large work files, apps, and boot drives. Over the past year, though, reliability concerns around Samsung’s 980 Pro and most recent 990 Pro have marred this reputation. It has become so notable that custom PC-maker Puget Systems, a top proponent of Samsung SSDs since the SATA days, has pulled 1TB and 2TB Samsung drives from its lineup.

For Puget, problems with Samsung SSDs, which the 22-year-old boutique PC shop sells in its custom-built systems, started with the 980 Pro that came out in September 2020. On January 31, Puget wrote a blog noting it received a surprising number of reports of failing Samsung drives, specifically with the 2TB version of the 980 Pro.

The most common failure mode that we have found is that the drives are suddenly locked into read-only mode, rendering the drive unusable. If the failed drive is the primary drive, then the system becomes unbootable until the drive is replaced and the OS is reinstalled, Chris Newhart, a Tier 2 repair technician at Puget, wrote.

Advanced new Faraday cages—the metal mesh enclosures that can block wireless signals—can also be switched on and off for reversible protection against noise, a new study finds.

In addition, these new shields can be easily fabricated through a technique akin to spray-painting, which could help them find use in electronics, researchers say.

Built out of a novel material called MXene, these cages could block and allow signals as desired.

Of the camera’s 580 photos, 400 were bear selfies.

The City of Boulder Open Space and Mountain Parks (OSMP) team in Colorado reported this week in a Tweet that an adorable bear was eager to strike a pose for wildlife motion capture cameras.

Making headlines around the world.

Continue reading “Curious bear takes 400 selfies with wildlife motion capture camera” »

Hackers have leveraged a critical remote code execution vulnerability in Realtek Jungle SDK 134 million attacks trying to infect smart devices in the second half of 2022.

Exploited by multiple threat actors, the vulnerability is tracked as CVE-2021–35394 and comes with a severity score of 9.8 out of 10.

Between August and October last year, sensors from Palo Alto Networks observed significant exploitation activity for this security issue, accounting for more than 40% of the total number of incidents.

Scientists have developed a way to detect 3D shapes and the movements of human bodies in a room using a Wi-Fi router.

The researchers at Carnegie Mellon University in the U.S. hope that the technology may eventually replace normal cameras.

According to a recent paper published on arXiv, the team of scientists managed to make out images of people in a room through the Wi-Fi signals emitted from a normal router.

Researchers have developed an extremely thin chip with an integrated photonic circuit that could be used to exploit the so-called terahertz gap – lying between 0.3-30THz in the electromagnetic spectrum – for spectroscopy and imaging.

This gap is currently something of a technological dead zone, describing frequencies that are too fast for today’s electronics and telecommunications devices, but too slow for optics and imaging applications.

However, the scientists’ new chip now enables them to produce terahertz waves with tailored frequency, wavelength, amplitude and phase. Such precise control could enable terahertz radiation to be harnessed for next-generation applications in both the electronic and optical realms.

If you walk along the Oudezijds Achterburgwal canal in Amsterdam, you will notice an elegant and aesthetically pleasing steel bridge for pedestrians. If not for the media attention it got, you would even consider it a regular feature of the city’s architecture. But this bridge loaded with sensors, is actually the world’s first 3D-printed steel bridge, according to an Imperial College London press release.

“A 3D-printed metal structure large and strong enough to handle pedestrian traffic has never been constructed before,” said Imperial co-contributor Prof. Leroy Gardner of the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, in a press release. “We have tested and simulated the structure and its components throughout the printing process and upon its completion, and it’s fantastic to see it finally open to the public.”

Researchers have developed an optical coating system that combines antifogging and antireflective properties. The new technology could help boost the performance of lidar systems and cameras.

“Walking into a warm room from the cold outside can cause glasses to fog up, blinding the user,” said research team leader Anne Gärtner from Fraunhofer Institute for Applied Optics and Precision Engineering and Friedrich Schiller University Jena, both in Jena, Germany. “The same can happen to sensors such as the lidar systems used in autonomous cars. It is important that surfaces remain highly transparent, even if fogging occurs, so that functionality is maintained.”

In Applied Optics, Gärtner and colleagues describe how they combined a polymer coating that prevents fogging with porous silicon dioxide nanostructures that reduce reflections. Although the coatings described in the paper were designed specifically for lidar systems, the technology can be tailored for many different applications.

Hammacher Schlemmer, a U.S. catalog company, has recently listed a flying hovercraft for purchase. The company claims that the craft can not only hover over land and water but that it can fly through the air at impressive speeds. A flying hovercraft may sound like something out of a comic book, but it’s a real product with some unique and noteworthy features.

About Hammacher Schlemmer

People may be surprised to hear that Hammacher Schlemmer, a company that sells decorations, sporting goods, furniture, and uncommon electronics, is offering a flying hovercraft. However, it’s important to note that the company doesn’t create or design its products. Instead, it offers a catalog of products that 3^rd party manufacturers designed.