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Archive for the ‘business’ category: Page 118

Jun 10, 2021

Emerging Ransomware Targets Dozens of Businesses Worldwide

Posted by in categories: business, cybercrime/malcode, energy, finance, food, government, law

An emerging ransomware strain in the threat landscape claims to have breached 30 organizations in just four months since it went operational, riding on the coattails of a notorious ransomware syndicate.

First observed in February 2021, “Prometheus” is an offshoot of another well-known ransomware variant called Thanos, which was previously deployed against state-run organizations in the Middle East and North Africa last year.

The affected entities are believed to be government, financial services, manufacturing, logistics, consulting, agriculture, healthcare services, insurance agencies, energy and law firms in the U.S., U.K., and a dozen more countries in Asia, Europe, the Middle East, and South America, according to new research published by Palo Alto Networks’ Unit 42 threat intelligence team.

Jun 8, 2021

First on CNN Business: Asia’s fake pork titan sets its sights on the next ‘big’ thing

Posted by in categories: business, food, space

OmniFoods is far from the only player breaking into the space. Last year, Nestlé announced its entrance into the category, rolling out a vegan tuna product in Switzerland. Impossible has also previously announced it was working on an alternative fish product.


OmniFoods, the Hong Kong startup best known for its fake pork product “OmniPork,” is jumping on what it sees as the next phenomenon: plant-based seafood.

In an announcement first shared with CNN Business, the company said Tuesday it is launching a new line of products that include alternatives to fish fillets, fish burgers and cuts of tuna.

Continue reading “First on CNN Business: Asia’s fake pork titan sets its sights on the next ‘big’ thing” »

Jun 7, 2021

How I Built a $1 Billion Start-Up Called Misfits Market

Posted by in categories: business, food

Misfits Market is an online grocery delivery service that sells “ugly” organic produce for cheap. In the first four months of 2021 alone, Misfits Market rescued the same amount of food it saved in 2020 as a whole. In 2020, Misfits Market shipped 77 million pounds of food to more than 400000 households across the U.S. Since launching in 2018, Misfits Market has expanded to both coasts, has over 1000 employees and has received over $300 million in funding. Bloomberg reports its valuation tops $1 billion, putting it into unicorn territory. But Misfits Market wasn’t an obvious success. In fact, it was just one of many businesses started by its 29-year-old founder Abhi Ramesh.

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Jun 5, 2021

A Great Deal of Work Lies Ahead in the Development of In Vivo Reprogramming as a Therapy

Posted by in categories: bioengineering, biotech/medical, business, genetics, life extension, nuclear energy

The latest from Calico. A bit technical.


Reprogramming of ordinary somatic cells into induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) was initially thought to be a way to obtain all of the patient matched cells needed for tissue engineering or cell therapies. A great deal of work has gone towards realizing that goal over the past fifteen years or so; the research community isn’t there yet, but meaningful progress has taken place. Of late, another line of work has emerged, in that it might be possible to use partial reprogramming as a basis for therapy, delivering reprogramming factors into animals and humans in order to improve tissue function, without turning large numbers of somatic cells into iPSCs and thus risking cancer or loss of tissue structure and function.

Reprogramming triggers some of the same mechanisms of rejuvenation that operate in the developing embryo, removing epigenetic marks characteristic of aged tissues, and restoring youthful mitochondrial function. It cannot do much for forms of damage such as mutations to nuclear DNA or buildup of resilient metabolic waste, but the present feeling is there is nonetheless enough of a potential benefit to make it worth developing this approach to treatments for aging. Some groups have shown that partial reprogramming — via transient expression of reprogramming factors — can reverse functional losses in cells from aged tissues without making those cells lose their differentiated type. But this is a complicated business. Tissues are made up of many cell types, all of which can need subtly different approaches to safe reprogramming.

Today’s open access preprint is illustrative of the amount of work that lies ahead when it comes to the exploration of in vivo reprogramming. Different cell types behave quite differently, will require different recipes and approaches to reprogramming, different times of exposure, and so forth. It makes it very hard to envisage a near term therapy that operates much like present day gene therapies, meaning one vector and one cargo, as most tissues are comprised of many different cell types all mixed in together. On the other hand, the evidence to date, including that in the paper here, suggests that there are ways to create the desired rejuvenation of epigenetic patterns and mitochondrial function without the risk of somatic cells dedifferentiating into stem cells.

Continue reading “A Great Deal of Work Lies Ahead in the Development of In Vivo Reprogramming as a Therapy” »

Jun 4, 2021

Why Two Pounds Of Dirt From Mars Costs $9 Billion | So Expensive

Posted by in categories: business, finance, space

The Perseverance rover began a two-year mission to collect Martian soil samples this year. It’s the first of three missions, jointly sponsored by NASA and ESA, aiming to bring Martian soil back to Earth in hopes of finding evidence of past life. The total costs of the missions will likely exceed more than $9 billion.

MORE SO EXPENSIVE VIDEOS:
Why Japanese Eel Is So Expensive.

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Jun 3, 2021

How Aerofarms’ vertical farms grow produce

Posted by in categories: business, sustainability

In our series, Real Food, we take a look at the growing trend of vertical farming. Companies like Aerofarms are rethinking how we grow vegetables by going up to provided fresh and affordable produce. Michelle Miller reports.

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Jun 1, 2021

Siva Balu — VP / Chief Information Officer — YMCA of the U.S.A. — People, Potential, & Purpose

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, business, food, information science, life extension, robotics/AI, security

With 2700 locations across 10000 U.S. communities, YMCA is becoming a major hub for healthy living — From vaccinations and diabetes prevention programs, to healthy aging and wellness — Siva Balu, VP/Chief Information Officer — The Y of the U.S.A.


Mr. Siva Balu is Vice President and Chief Information Officer of YMCA of the U.S. (Y-USA), where he is working to rethink and reorganize the work of the organization’s information technology strategy to meet the changing needs of Y-USA and Ys throughout the country.

Continue reading “Siva Balu — VP / Chief Information Officer — YMCA of the U.S.A. — People, Potential, & Purpose” »

May 29, 2021

The future of shopping: what’s in store? | The Economist

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, business, economics

The pandemic has upended the way people buy—online retail has soared as high-street shops and malls close. Brands are now racing to exploit one of the most important weapons in the battle for buyers: their customers’ data.

Read our special report on the future of shopping here: https://econ.st/2Q8XQC2

Continue reading “The future of shopping: what’s in store? | The Economist” »

May 29, 2021

The dream of supersonic passenger flight hits turbulence

Posted by in categories: business, energy, transportation

While the remaining supersonic contenders duke it out to bring faster jets to market, private jet operators are doing their best to address the business traveler’s appetite for speed with aircraft that are as close to the sound barrier as they can be without actually breaking it, which poses all kinds of environmental issues.


With the news that supersonic planemaker Aerion has unexpectedly folded, is the dream of a successor to Concorde running out of fuel?

May 28, 2021

DARPA helped make a sarcasm detector, because of course it did

Posted by in categories: business, humor, robotics/AI

Between the rolled eyes, shrugged shoulders, jazzed hands and warbling vocal inflection, it’s not hard to tell when someone’s being sarcastic as they’re giving you the business face to face. Online, however, you’re going to need that SpongeBob meme and a liberal application of the shift key to get your contradictory point across. Lucky for us netizens, DARPA’s Information Innovation Office (I2O) has collaborated with researchers from the University of Central Florida to develop a deep learning AI capable of understanding written sarcasm with a startling degree of accuracy.

“With the high velocity and volume of social media data, companies rely on tools to analyze data and to provide customer service. These tools perform tasks such as content management, sentiment analysis, and extraction of relevant messages for the company’s customer service representatives to respond to,” UCF Adjunct Professor of Industrial Engineering and Management Systems, Ivan Garibay, told Engadget via email. “However, these tools lack the sophistication to decipher more nuanced forms of language such as sarcasm or humor, in which the meaning of a message is not always obvious and explicit. This imposes an extra burden on the social media team, which is already inundated with customer messages to identify these messages and respond appropriately.”

As they explain in a study published in the journal, Entropy, Garibay and UCF PhD student Ramya Akula have built “an interpretable deep learning model using multi-head self-attention and gated recurrent units. The multi-head self-attention module aids in identifying crucial sarcastic cue-words from the input, and the recurrent units learn long-range dependencies between these cue-words to better classify the input text.”