Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Category: biotech/medical – Page 519

Recent studies have found that Gires-Tournois (GT) biosensors, a type of nanophotonic resonator, can detect minuscule virus particles and produce colorful micrographs (images taken through a microscope) of viral loads. But they suffer from visual artifacts and non-reproducibility, limiting their utilization.

In a recent breakthrough, an international team of researchers, led by Professor Young Min Song from the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Gwangju Institute of Science and Technology in Korea, has leveraged artificial intelligence (AI) to overcome this problem. Their work was published in Nano Today.

Rapid and on-site diagnostic technologies for identifying and quantifying viruses are essential for planning treatment strategies for infected patients and preventing further spread of the infection. The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the need for accurate yet decentralized that do not involve complex and time-consuming processes needed for conventional laboratory-based tests.

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Two types of technologies could change the privacy afforded in encrypted messages, and changes to this space could impact all of us.

On October 9, I moderated a panel on encryption, privacy policy, and human rights at the United Nations’s annual Internet Governance Forum. I shared the stage with some fabulous panelists including Roger Dingledine, the director of the Tor Project; Sharon Polsky, the president of the Privacy and Access Council of Canada; and Rand Hammoud, a campaigner at Access Now, a human rights advocacy organization. All strongly believe in and champion the protection of encryption.

I want to tell you about one thing that came up in our conversation: efforts to, in some way, monitor encrypted messages.

Policy proposals have been popping up around the world (like in Australia, India, and, most recently, the UK) that call for tech companies to build in ways to gain information about encrypted messages, including through back-door access. There have also been efforts to increase moderation and safety on encrypted messaging apps, like Signal and Telegram, to try to prevent the spread of abusive content, like child sexual abuse material, criminal networking, and drug trafficking.

Not surprisingly, advocates for encryption are generally opposed to these sorts of proposals as they weaken the level of user privacy that’s currently guaranteed by end-to-end encryption.

In my prep work before the panel, and then in our conversation, I learned about some new cryptographic technologies that might allow for some content moderation, as well as increased enforcement of platform policies and laws, all *without* breaking encryption. These are sort-of fringe technologies right now, mainly still in the research phase. Though they are being developed in several different flavors, most of these technologies ostensibly enable algorithms to evaluate messages or patterns in their metadata to flag problematic material without having to break encryption or reveal the content of the messages.

Continue reading “IGF 2023 WS #356 Encryption’s Critical Role in Safeguarding Human Rights” | >

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.”

Xpanceo was founded in 2021 and is based out Dubai, and before now it has been bootstrapped. Its team of more 50 scientists and engineers has mainly, up to now, been working on different prototypes of lenses and all of the hard work that goes into that. The move away from silicon and to optoelectronics, for example, has driven a new need for materials that can emit and read light that are ever-smaller, Volkov said. The company has likened developments of 2D materials like graphene to what it is pursuing with new materials for contact lenses.

“We have kind of developed our own niche [in 2D materials] and now we use this knowledge as a backbone for our contact lens prototypes,” Volkov said in an interview.

Continue reading “Canalys Newsroom — North American smartphone shipments to fall 12% in 2023 despite premium segment strength” | >

A recent publication in Cell demonstrates that arginine, an amino acid that facilitates various cellular processes, including cellular growth, also promotes tumor growth. The study shows that arginine reprograms the metabolism of the tumor, a mechanism that many cancer cells use to replicate continuously.

The liver’s primary functions include metabolizing nutrients obtained from food and storing energy for later use by the body. Thus, the liver is highly involved in the body’s metabolic balance.

Over the past two decades, a growing body of evidence suggests cancer is a metabolic disease. Almost all cancers, regardless of the tissue in which they develop, have an impairment in energy metabolism.

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