Artificial leaves can now directly make liquid fuels:

Powered only by sunlight, a new device converts carbon dioxide and water to liquid fuels that could be directly used in car engines.

The device, presented in the journal Nature Energy, is the latest evolution of an artificial leaf. Researchers have been working for years on such systems that mimic photosynthesis to sustainably produce fuels at low cost. Previous artificial leaves produced simple products like carbon monoxide and hydrogen. But the new one takes an important step forward by making energy-dense ethanol and propanol fuels.

They say that currently it is not very efficient. With photovoltaic cell being mature and with excellent efficiency the artificial leaves have a strong competitor. The advantage the leaves have is on the storage side of things.

The fuel releases CO₂ when burned. But because the leaves originally pulled the carbon from the air, the fuel will be carbon neutral. Technically, it will not be a fossil fuel.

This will be interesting to watch.

I love living in the future.

Due to a recently issued patent I now am the sole inventor on three different patents. For various personal reasons I am not very public about the details of two of them. However, the first one, 4,412,299, does not share those concerns.

The title is Phase Jitter Detector. This was an invention to help meet speech immunity requirements for a Touch-Tone receiver. What is “speech immunity?” It turns out that because the old analog phone lines used the same channel for voice and signaling (the Touch-Tone digits) background speech, music, and other sounds would sometimes simulate a Touch-Tone digit with sufficient accuracy to insert a false digit into your dialed number. This false digit would result in a wrong number.

The problem increased in severity as the dynamic range of the receiver increased. With some reasonable precautions the problem was kept under control with normal subscriber to central office communications. But in the late 1970s and 1980s companies were creating things which they wanted to be able to remotely control. Examples from that time are answering machines to private branch exchanges (remember “dial nine for an outside line?”) where you could call the “main number” and then dial “One for Parts, two for Service, three for Sales, etc.. The receivers used for subscriber-to-subscriber communications required nearly twice the dynamic range of subscriber to central office communication. With this requirement the speech immunity problems went way up.

You could design a receiver which would would avoid the speech hits but in doing so you reduced the noise immunity of the receiver. A small amount of noise would prevent the detection of valid Touch-Tone digits. In other words, there is a trade-off between speech immunity and noise immunity. In the subscriber-to-subscriber signaling case you needed far better than normal noise immunity while retaining whatever speech immunity you could.

This speech immunity versus noise problem inspired me to get my master’s degree in electrical engineering. The graph below is from my thesis:

IIRC, the minimum A-level for subscriber to C.O. signaling was about –28 dBm. For subscriber-to-subscriber signaling the minimum A-level was about –40 dBm. Using a standard test tape from AT&T and a receiver without any guarding against speech hits the number of speech hits nearly tripled for this lower signal strength acceptance level.

My invention enabled the accurate distinction between a true Touch-Tone signal and speech/music/etc. which imitated a Touch-Tone digit. The receiver utilizing this invention, TelTone’s M-937 Touch-Tone Receiver, was able to meet any published requirements for subscriber-to-subscriber receivers for both noise and speech immunity. To the best of my knowledge no other production receiver was ever able to make that claim.

I’m deliberately changing the details to protect the guilty, but I’m nearly certain the essence of the situation are legally the same as what I describe below.

Suppose a cyber security professional (CSP) obtained the username and password credentials of a bad guy (BG) who had poor operational security. The BG didn’t intend to reveal the credentials but the CSP has them and knows the BG is in the process of obtaining credentials via deceptive means from the organization the CSP works for.

The CSP, by using the credentials of the BG, can rapidly mitigate damage done by the deceptively obtained corporate credentials.

While everyone on the CSP’s team sees this as morally justified, one team member (WB) throws a wet blanket on the CSP’s plan to use the BG’s credentials to get information the BG’s intended to keep private and use for ill gotten gains. WB claims that, legally, the BG credentials have been “stolen” and should the CSP use them to surreptitiously access the BG’s data the CSP would be committing a crime.

I’m almost certain this is a crime, if not the U.S. then some other countries which may or may not be involved. And, if the CSP were do this, I’m almost certain it would never be prosecuted. But committing felonies you think you are going to get away with doesn’t seem like a particularly good item to put on your resume or even admit to others.

What do you guys think of this?

So when will this be available over the counter?

According to the new research, the scientists conducted a Nobel-prize winning discovery reprogramming cells to a more youthful state. Over the course of three years, following thorough investigations involving mice and monkeys, the researchers pinpointed a specific combination of drugs capable of counteracting cellular aging and rejuvenating cells. The “six chemical cocktails” indicates potential to reverse the aging process in under a week.

I love living in the future.

This is getting creepy:

Scientists Are Frighteningly Close to Achieving Synthetic Biological Intelligence

• A group of researchers have already grown brain cells on silicon chips and then taught them to perform tasks.

• This merging of artificial intelligence and synthetic biology opens a new realm of continual machine learning.

• A $600,000 AUD Australian national intelligence grant continues to the research into the “cyborg computing chips.”

Lab-grown synthetic brain cells can already learn tasks. Now, the same team that brought us 800,000 Pong-playing brain cells living in a dish has received $600,000 AUD from Australia’s National Intelligence and Security Discovery Research Grants Program to further push these lab-grown brain cells embedded onto silicon chips into the world of machine learning.

This entire project “merges the fields of artificial intelligence and synthetic biology to create programmable biological computing platforms,” Adeel Razi, associate professor at Monash University’s Turner Institute for Brain and Mental Health, says in a news release. “This new technology capability in future may eventually surpass the performance of existing, purely silicon-based hardware.”

I feel like there is some sort of moral boundary being breached. But it is hard to articulate exactly what is wrong.

Interesting observation.

Engineers on the brink of extinction threaten entire tech ecosystems

While computer science course take-up had gone up by over 90 percent in the past 50 years, electrical engineering (EE) had declined by the same amount. The electronics graduate has become rarer than an Intel-based smartphone.

That part of the technology industry which makes actual things has always been divided between hardies and softies, soldering iron versus compiler, oscilloscope versus debugger. But the balance is lost. Something is very wrong at the heart of our technology creation supply chain. Where have all the hardies gone?

I have a master’s degree in Electrical Engineering but switched to software after about 10 years because there were more and better paying jobs in software at the time. So… in a sense they are talking about me.

This could be “interesting”:

Cyber Apocalypse 2023: Is The World Heading For A ‘Catastrophic’ Event?

As the 2023 annual meeting of the World Economic Forum wrapped up in Davos, Switzerland, it ended with a disturbing prediction from one of the leading voices. Delivering a presentation on the 2023 Global Cybersecurity Outlook report, forum Managing Director Jeremy Jurgens revealed that 93 percent of those surveyed believe that a “catastrophic” cyber security event is likely in the next two years.

…

According to the WEF report, one of the biggest threats is a “mutating” threat. This could take the form of an AI-enabled virus that transforms as it infects various systems and organizations to evade defense systems or even detection. Prime Minister of Albania, Edi Rama, whose country suffered an attack that brought down critical infrastructure in 2022, spoke about what he had learned since:

“It’s about viruses that can not only block our way of living but can control it and deviate it. So it can use our systems like, God forbid, our air transport systems to hit us back. Imagine if there is a cyberattack on our air transport systems that turn a huge number of airplanes that are flying into bombs.

Skynet smiles.

I need an underground bunker in Idaho.

I love living in the future.

Scientists Are Actively Building a Real-Life Tractor Beam. Seriously.

• Scientists are working on bringing a tractor beam from science fiction to reality.
• The researchers are planning to use beams of electrons to create opposite charges and attract object to the beam for manipulation.
• The goal is to find a safe and effective way to pare down the ever-growing field of space junk orbiting our planet.