Lifeboat Foundation

SAN FRANCISCO — Two weeks after closing a $44 billion deal to buy Twitter, Elon Musk painted a bleak financial picture for the social media company and outlined a series of changes for employees in his first companywide emails to staff.

In two emails sent to workers late on Wednesday, Mr. Musk said the economy was challenging. He added that he planned to end Twitter’s remote work policy and wanted employees to renew their focus on generating revenue and fighting spam.

“Sorry that this is my first email to the company, but there is no way to sugarcoat the message,” Mr. Musk, 51, wrote in one email. “The economic picture ahead is dire.” Twitter was too heavily dependent on advertising and vulnerable to pullbacks in brand spending, he added, and would need to bolster the revenue it gets from subscriptions.

Five malicious dropper Android apps with over 130,000 cumulative installations have been discovered on the Google Play Store distributing banking trojans like SharkBot and Vultur, which are capable of stealing financial data and performing on-device fraud.

“These droppers continue the unstopping evolution of malicious apps sneaking to the official store,” Dutch mobile security firm ThreatFabric told The Hacker News in a statement.

“This evolution includes following newly introduced policies and masquerading as file managers and overcoming limitations by side-loading the malicious payload through the web browser.”

There is a mix of excitement and fear and lots of memes.

After much back and forth and a lawsuit, four days ago, Elon Musk completed his $44 billion takeover of the social media platform Twitter. Musk had put the deal on hold after his initial offer earlier this year. Later he backed out, citing a high number of fake or spam accounts on the platform, a point that then-CEO Aggarwal had publicly denied.

Musk was then taken to court by Twitter’s lawyers. The court had given the two parties time till the month’s end to work out a deal.

Continue reading “Here are some of the best internet reactions to Elon Musk buying Twitter” »

Researchers find that a phenomenon called multifractality manifests in the conductance fluctuations of a 2D electron gas as the gas undergoes a topological phase transition.

Fractals are geometric patterns that repeat themselves across different length scales. Such patterns are ubiquitous, appearing in the outlines of snowflakes, in swirls of turbulent fluids, and in graphs tracing the highs and lows of financial markets. Now Aveek Bid and his colleagues at the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore show that fractals can also emerge in the electrical-conductance fluctuations of a 2D electron gas in graphene as the electron gas transitions between two topological phases [1]. The results confirm predictions made earlier this year [2].

Subject a 2D electron gas to a strong perpendicular magnetic field, and its Hall conductance—the conductance perpendicular to an induced current—takes on certain discrete values. But during a transition from one discrete value to another, this conductance can exhibit fluctuations. Bid and his colleagues measured these fluctuations in the 2D electron gases of two graphene-based devices. Using detailed data analysis, they determined that the conductance fluctuations contained patterns that could be accurately described by a multifractal—a fractal that scales spatially in several different ways.

With his Twitter takeover set to be completed this week, Elon Musk has outlined some of his vision for the social media giant. Speaking on Twitter (where else?) Musk claimed that he didn’t buy Twitter for financial gain, but he do so to “try to help humanity.”

Addressing his message to advertisers on the platform, the multi-billionaire said he believes “the relentless pursuit of clicks” has ultimately resulted in the extreme political polarization we see around the world today. While this is good for profits, Musk argues, it results in meaningful dialogue being lost.

Protecting People, Society & Environment — Lydie Evrard, Deputy Director General; Head, Department of Nuclear Safety & Security, International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA)

Lydie Evrard (https://www.iaea.org/about/organizational-structure/departme…d-security) is Deputy Director General and Head of the Department of Nuclear Safety and Security at the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).

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Edward Boyden is a Hertz Foundation Fellow and recipient of the prestigious Hertz Foundation Grant for graduate study in the applications of the physical, biological and engineering sciences. A professor of Biological Engineering and Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT, Edward Boyden explains how humanity is only at its infancy in merging with machines. His work is leading him towards the development of a “brain co-processor”, a device that interacts intimately with the brain to upload and download information to and from it, augmenting human capabilities in memory storage, decision making, and cognition. The first step, however, is understanding the brain on a much deeper level. With the support of the Fannie and John Hertz Foundation, Ed Boyden pursued a PhD in neurosciences from Stanford University.

The Hertz Foundation mission is to provide unique financial and fellowship support to the nation’s most remarkable PhD students in the hard sciences. Hertz Fellowships are among the most prestigious in the world, and the foundation has invested over $200 million in Hertz Fellows since 1963 (present value) and supported over 1,100 brilliant and creative young scientists, who have gone on to become Nobel laureates, high-ranking military personnel, astronauts, inventors, Silicon Valley leaders, and tenured university professors. For more information, visit hertzfoundation.org.

Continue reading “Hybrid Intelligence: Coupling AI and the Human Brain | Edward Boyden bigthink” »

The Inaugural Rejuvenation Startup Summit 2022, brought to you by the Forever Healthy Foundation, took place with over 400 participants from over 30 countries in October. It is a vibrant networking event that aims to accelerate the development of the rejuvenation biotech industry. The Summit brings together startups, members of the longevity venture capital / investor ecosystem, and researchers interested in founding or joining a startup – all aiming to create therapies to vastly extend the healthy human lifespan. We started to publish videos with a first set of selected speakers on the 2022 summit:

Elon Musk made a bold prediction during Tesla’s Q3 2022 earnings call stating that Tesla would grow to become an enormous company by the end of this decade.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk dazzled and entertained listeners during the call, which was full of jokes and ambitious goals. That’s when he made the bold statement that Tesla could surpass both Apple and Saudi Aramco’s market cap in the future.

Continue reading “Elon Musk Believes Tesla Stock Will Be Worth More Than Apple and Saudi Aramco Combined” »