Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
Toggle light / dark theme

Blog

Category: internet

Silk made into strong plastic-like materials with 6G potential

Silk threads can be fused into transparent, plastic-like materials that twist terahertz frequencies of light, according to research led by Imperial College London, University of Michigan Engineering and Tufts University. The findings could enable components of 6G networks to be made from upcycled silk.

The new materials are also lightweight, yet stronger than many metal alloys and conventional plastics produced from fossil fuels. Their mechanical properties could make them useful in sports gear, shipping containers and certain kinds of packaging. In ballistics tests, the new materials were about as puncture-resistant as carbon-fiber-reinforced polymers, which are used in the bodies of airplanes and the chassis of automobiles. And, because the materials slowly degraded when implanted into mice, they could prove useful in temporary medical implants.

The researchers are particularly interested in the material’s ability to twist, or polarize, terahertz frequencies of light. The 6G band, which could transmit data up to hundreds of times faster than 5G networks and is particularly appealing for rural high-speed internet, extends into terahertz frequencies.

New quantum protocol breaks distance and speed barriers in fiber networks

Scientists at the University of Science and Technology of China have successfully deployed a multi-mode quantum relay network, achieving matter–matter entanglement over 14.5 kilometers, according to media reports.

The system, known as Xinghan-2, was detailed in the journal Nature Photonics on May 7. It addresses a key bottleneck in quantum communication by achieving both high transmission rates and high fidelity at the same time.

Quantum relays are seen as essential for the future quantum internet, as they help prevent signal loss over long distances by dividing communication channels into shorter segments. Previous approaches often involved a trade-off between the high speeds of single-photon interference and the high precision of two-photon interference.

You can put a data center at your house—but who really pays?

“The idea, put forward by a California smart utility box company called Span, is to put the GPUs where the power has already been allocated—at the home. Span says the average household uses only about 42% of the electricity allotted to it, and rarely reaches peak usage. Span’s smart utility boxes detect that, and steer the extra available power over to the GPUs, which live inside a ”node” that sits beside the house and looks something like an HVAC unit. The boxes contain 16 Nvidia GPUs, 4 AMD CPUs, 4 terabytes of memory, and a cooling system. When a large number of homes have these, the servers could be connected together in a network and work together on distributed computing jobs (workloads), Span says.

In exchange for hosting a node, Span pays a big chunk of the homeowner’s electricity and broadband internet bills.

And there may even be advantages for putting the compute power closer to the end users that are using the chatbots or AI services, Span says.

It’s a cool idea on paper, but it’s almost completely unproven in real-world use. Span has been prototyping the units but has yet to install any of them beside real homes. I asked Span VP Chris Lander if his company has done technical studies showing that its brand of distributed computing will be fast and robust enough to handle real AI workloads. ‘We’ve done a bunch of technical studies internally [and] a bunch of modeling for different kinds of workloads, both from the business point of view [and] the product point of view and from the technical architecture point of view,’ he replies.

The idea of asking homeowners to host boxes full of GPUs is a symptom of the woeful dearth of data center space needed for AI computing.

‘Elegant triangle’ experiment suggests quantum internet may be closer than we think

For more than 60 years, Bell’s theorem has been the gold standard for demonstrating that quantum mechanics defies the rules of classical physics. Now, an international team of researchers, including Constructor University Professor Dr. Nicolas Gisin, has extended this principle to new limits, using an “elegant triangle” to reveal new forms of quantum nonlocality that specifically emerge in multi-node quantum networks.

The study, published in Physical Review Letters, opens a new frontier in our understanding of how quantum correlations behave in realistic network settings, one that could help usher in the age of a quantum internet.

“This is not simply a more elaborate version of Bell’s theorem applied to networks, it’s something genuinely new that only emerges when multiple independent quantum sources interact through entangled measurements,” explained Dr. Gisin, who collaborated on the experiment with researchers from China, France and Austria.

Chip-scale photonic approach achieves ultralow-noise microwave and millimeter-wave signal generation

Researchers led by Dr. Changmin Ahn and Prof. Jungwon Kim at KAIST, in collaboration with Prof. Hansuek Lee, have demonstrated a chip-scale photonic approach for generating ultralow-noise and highly stable microwave and millimeter-wave signals based on optical frequency combs (microcombs), offering a potential pathway toward compact, high-performance frequency sources for next-generation technologies.

High-frequency signals in the tens to hundreds of gigahertz range are essential for emerging applications such as 6G communications, radar, and precision sensing. However, achieving both low noise and high stability at these frequencies remains a fundamental challenge for conventional electronic signal sources.

In the first study, published in Laser & Photonics Reviews, the researchers addressed the long-standing challenge of transferring the stability of an optical reference to a microcomb. Direct stabilization is difficult due to the lack of carrier-envelope offset detection in high-repetition-rate microcombs. To overcome this, they used a mode-locked laser as a transfer oscillator and synchronized it to the microcomb using electro-optic sampling.

How Many Satellites are There in Space?

A satellite is any object that orbits another body in space. Earth’s only natural satellite is the Moon. Every other satellite around Earth, more than 14,000 of them as of early 2026, is artificial. The first one was launched in October 1957 by the Soviet Union; recent ones are reaching orbit at a rate of roughly 60 per week, almost all of them part of SpaceX’s Starlink constellation. The orbital environment around Earth has changed more in the last six years than in the previous sixty, and the trajectory of that change is what makes the satellite question worth revisiting in 2026.

What Higher Dimensional Beings Look Like (And They’re Watching!) Per Donald Hoffman

Let’s unravel the reality beyond our space-time ♾️🔍 Go to https://piavpn.com/beeyondideas to get 83% off from our sponsor Private Internet Access with 4 months free!

Watch Part 2 of this series: • Higher-Dimensional Beings Are Staring at U…

Want to support our production? Feel free to join our membership at https://youtube.com/watch?v=FIBC5w9a5kU&si=Qy-HR0sj8USp6scG

Special thanks to our beloved YouTube members this month: Powlin Manuel, Saïd Kadi, Nate Lachae, Alison Rewell, Thomas Lapins, Ahmad Salahudin, Antonio Ferriol Colombram, Anton Nicolas Burger 🚀🚀🚀

Experts featured in this video include Donald Hoffman, Annaka Harris and Leonard Susskind.

Chapters:

Continue reading “What Higher Dimensional Beings Look Like (And They’re Watching!) Per Donald Hoffman” | >

Focused helium ions create ferroelectric regions in aluminum nitride for lower-power chips

Scientists at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory have shown for the first time that ferroelectricity can be directly written into aluminum nitride using a tightly focused helium ion beam at the Center for Nanophase Materials Sciences (CNMS), a DOE Office of Science user facility at ORNL. Ferroelectric devices don’t need constant power to store data, which allows for devices that are more reliable and less power consuming than what’s currently available.

The study, published in Advanced Materials, represents a new processing approach for wurtzite III-V nitrides, a class of semiconductors already widely used in microelectronics but whose ferroelectric potential has only been recognized since 2019.

“Today, both the material and the processing method are already employed in chip manufacturing: aluminum nitride is widely used in many 5G and Wi-Fi devices, and helium ion beams are common tools to make tiny changes to circuits,” said Bogdan Dryzhakov, an ORNL postdoctoral research associate at CNMS.

White matter injury may lead to neurodegeneration

The brain is equally divided into grey and white matter. Grey matter contains the brain’s processing hubs, linked by an information highway — the white matter. Although white matter damage is a defining feature of multiple sclerosis and is also seen in neurodegeneration including Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease, the consequences of white matter damage are not well understood.

The team created localised damage to myelin – the main component of white matter – in a well-defined brain circuit and followed what happened over time. They found that small, localised myelin damage triggered a striking response in a connected, remote grey matter region. Neuronal activity fell, microglia – the brain’s immune cells – became activated, and connections between neurons were lost.

Crucially, these changes were not permanent. After myelin was regenerated, neuronal activity recovered, connections between neurons returned, and the inflammatory response subsided.

The study also challenges a common assumption about brain inflammation. Grey matter inflammation is traditionally viewed as harmful. But here, the team found that this transient response was part of the repair process itself. When they prevented grey matter inflammation, myelin regeneration was impaired.

Conversely, when the team blocked myelin regeneration, the grey matter response did not resolve and instead became chronic. This suggests that failed myelin regeneration may help drive the persistent low-grade inflammation seen in neurodegenerative disease. ScienceMission sciencenewshighlights.

Damage to white matter in the brain can trigger features associated with neurodegenerative disease, The researchers have discovered in a new study published in the journal Nature.

Continue reading “White matter injury may lead to neurodegeneration” | >

/* */