Scientists from Jülich together with colleagues from Aachen and Turin have produced a memristive element made from nanowires that functions in much the same way as a biological nerve cell. The component is able to save and process information, as well as receive numerous signals in parallel. The resistive switching cell made from oxide crystal nanowires is thus an ideal candidate for use in building bioinspired “neuromorphic” processors, able to take over the diverse functions of biological synapses and neurons.

Researchers at RMIT University have engineered a new type of transistor, the building block for all electronics. Instead of sending electrical currents through silicon, these transistors send electrons through narrow air gaps, where they can travel unimpeded as if in space.

“It could happen in a matter of months,” says Martin Mlynczak of NASA’s Langley Research Center. ________________

“The sun is entering one of the deepest Solar Minima of the Space Age,” wrote Dr Tony Phillips just six weeks ago, on 27 Sep 2018.

Sunspots have been absent for most of 2018 and Earth’s upper atmosphere is responding, says Phillips, editor of spaceweather.com.

This is one of the many statistics that illustrate the rise in hacking and phishing. The subject of phishing, in particular, has played big roles and some of the largest data breaches recently.

An example of this would be the 2014 Sony Pictures breach perpetrated is to be believed by North Korea per the US Department of Justice. in this instance, it only took one email being opened by an employee to provide malicious actors a way to take control of Sony’s network.

A common thing we see among phishing attacks is impersonating an actual employee inside of the business.  Some Phishing messages have even been reported as coming from the CEO of the company and play off of existing relationships to convince the victim to part with confidential information.

Phishing attacks don’t just happen on traditional computers but also mobile devices as well.

Even more modern security measures such as two-factor authentication can also be targeted by phishing. The hackers of today are able to create fake login pages to get the information of a target and then use that information to access the actual website.

So why isn’t 2-step verification good? Why doesn’t it work? When the victim is prompted for 2-step Verification they also enter the verification number on the fake login page, thus giving the attacker complete access.

A Rise In Hacking & Phishing Attempts

A series of industry reports demonstrates the growing trend of hacking and phishing attempts in recent years.

According to PhishMe’s Enterprise Phishing Resiliency and Defense Report, phishing attempts have increased 65% from the previous year.

Additionally, a statement from Wombat Security State of the Phish report that 76% of businesses reported being a victim of a phishing attack in the last year.

Per the Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report, 30% of phishing communications are opened by their target and 12% of those victims visit or open a malicious attachment or link.

A report from The SANS Institute revealed that 95% of all hacks on enterprise networks are the result of phishing.

According to cybersecurity leader Symantec, phishing and thus hacking has increased across most business types all with varying sizes — no business or industry is immune it seems.

Per the Webroot Threat Report, nearly 1.5 million new phishing sites are built monthly.

Common Phishing Techniques

The most common phishing attack you will come across is one where you will be directed to a fake login page. This usually happens because of a “Forgot Password” or “Reset Password” email has been received by the victim and they act on it.

Another common way that a phishing attack will present itself is through malicious browser extensions and ads.

er a recent report, Google removed over 3 billion ads from its platform last year a 100% increase in malicious ad removal over the previous year. The same report also revealed that cybercriminals compromise over 100,000 devices with browser extensions. The browser extensions in question did everything from steal login credentials to mine cryptocurrencies.

Another method that is less common than two listed above is a tech support scam. This is where a fake tech support agent will call someone directly to “assist” them with an issue that their computer is having (caused by the caller in the first place). This is most often because of a”virus” the user got on their device.

How To Avoid Phishing Attempts

The biggest thing you could possibly do as a business to prevent phishing is to use a password management tool. This means the employees would never login directly to a website or service but would rather click a saved hyperlink in the password manager. This means the change that you or your employees will visit a fake login page would be almost zero.

Another huge measured that will help you prevent phishing attacks as educating yourself or your employees. This one clued both education on what phishing attacks are and also how to spot when they’re happening.

The most common way to spot a phishing email is to verify the email address it was sent from. While hackers can spoof email addresses this is a very quick way to recognize at least 50% of phishing emails.

Another great method is that before you or any of your employees click on any link in an email, first the user should right click on the link and copy the URL into a notepad to verify that it is a trusted website that they are about to visit.

Yet another great rule of thumb is to not open any email attachments you are unsure about especially zip files.

How can you spot a phishing attack?  Always be on the lookout for:

• Grammar or spelling mistakes.
• An undue appeal for urgency.
• A request for information the requestor should already have that could be personal.
• An unfamiliar e-mail address.
• A link in an email to a website you don’t recognize.

Conclusion

Because of the rise of phishing and hacking both regular employees business owners and IT Security Professionals need to put extra effort into avoiding these threats. The landscape is changing almost monthly and new types of attacks are created weekly.

On top of email, there are many other possible ways that a hacker may target someone with a phishing attack. This extends beyond email to other communication methods such as LinkedIn messenger, WhatsApp or text messaging.

This also applies to any other third-party internal messaging system that you may be using such as Skype or Slack. If you were serious about preventing a costly data breach you need to put time, energy, and attention into making sure you are diligent in avoiding phishing and hacking attacks.

Learn how to incorporate AI into real world projects using the latest tools and applications, and how AI can to add value to your business.

On right now…

It’s finally the last month of the year and you know what that means: the holiday flood known as Christmas. Celebrated by many, it’s a time of the year where presents are exchanged and songs are sung. Only, this year, one of those songs won’t be sung (let alone written) by a human being. Nope, this time an artificial intelligence is giving it a go!

In the spirit of Christmas, listen to the carolling tune of an artificial intelligence as it attempts to capture the very essence of what makes this holiday so beloved.

A look into the universe’s past may tell us where we’re going.

Deep learning has been making it possible for powerful machines to approximate and imitate abilities and techniques once thought to be uniquely human. Mathematicians have struggled to explain how they work so well and may now get some answers by looking outside mathematics and into the nature of the universe.

The process will help develop new treatments.

Theoretical physicist was among the first to predict that the phenomenon of topology could lead to exotic states of matter.

RealClearScience.

D esigner therapies are treatments tailored to a specific disease, and nowhere is the need greater for new therapies than in a group of nervous system disorders, known as “neurodegenerative diseases.”

Many of these diseases are common and well-known, such as Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s disease. However, some are very rare, genetic disorders that are the consequence of a defective gene. In all these diseases, a mutant protein that misfolds causes the degeneration and death of neurons. One effective therapeutic strategy is to prevent the rogue protein from ever being made.

Spinocerebellar ataxia type 7 (SCA7) is one such disease in which nerves in different parts of the brain, including the eye, degenerate, which leads to blindness and difficulty walking, speaking, and balancing. SCA7 is dominantly inherited — which means that you just need one bad copy of the mutation to cause disease. The disease occurs when a short section of DNA that encodes ataxin-7 gene is erroneously repeated — like a word in a book printed two or three times. In this case, three chemical units of the DNA sequence — C-A-G — are repeated over and over.

Before we get started, it’s essential to understand that astrophotography takes time and practice in order to achieve good results, so don’t get frustrated if you don’t nail it on the first go.

When it comes to photographing the night sky there isn’t an exact setting which is going to achieve the same results across the board. This is due to the amount atmospheric light which is available in your area. So in order to help get you started, I’ve decided to write a guide on “how to photograph the stars.”

The aim is to shed some light on the type of equipment you will need and give you a general starting point for where your settings ‘should’ be so that you can head out into the night and have some fun with it.

China’s expansion of its digital communications infrastructure will have global implications in the years to come.

New research suggests that exposure to childhood adversity is associated with reduced cognitive control and alterations in key brain networks. The findings, which appear in the journal Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, could help explain the link between childhood adversity and depression.

“My work focuses on how we can use objective biomarkers to aid in clinical decision making,” said study author Scott A. Langenecker of the University of Utah.

“One challenging clinical decision point is what to do when individuals have recovered from a depressive episode. Do we continue treatment? Do we exercise regular check-ins? Or do we just wait and see?”

One Grade 11 student’s summer research at the University of Alberta has the possibility to change how industry leaders extract diamonds from rocks.

As part of a six-week internship called the Wisest Summer Research Program, students get the chance to spend their summer doing research at the university.

Hamdi Ali spent this summer at the university’s Earth and Atmospheric Sciences department as part of the internship program. She had the chance to work with various researchers in the geology department for six weeks.

This is the farthest away that black hole wind has ever been known to extend.

Astronomers studying the universe’s first light — the light from the first stars, which ignited nearly 14 billion years ago, according to the European Southern Observatory (ESO) — have made an unexpected discovery.

While scouring the distant cosmos with the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) in northern Chile, the scientists came across a streak of thermal wind spewed from a far-flung black hole, which had traveled a staggering distance from the galaxy where it originated.

China launched its Chang’e 4 mission to the far side of the moon on Dec. 8, 2018 Beijing Time (Dec. 7 EST/GMT). China is the first country ever to send a rover to soft-land on the lunar farside. See the mission photos here! This Image: The Long March 3B rocket carrying Chang’e 4 lifts off from China’s Xichang Satellite Launch Center.

Credit: Jiang Hongjing/Xinhua/Zuma

China’s Chang’e 4 lunar probe lifts off the pad at Xichang Satellite Launch Center on Dec. 7, 2018 (Dec. 8 local Chinese time).

Drawn in by Teslarati photographer Pauline Acalin’s most recent photos of Port of LA Falcon 9 recovery operations SpaceX is in the midst of, CEO Elon Musk took to Twitter on December 8th to discuss titanium grid fins and – more importantly – answer a miscellaneous handful of questions about the status of BFR’s development.

Marked lately by rapid-fire, wide-reaching changes to BFR’s general structural composite, Musk at long last confirmed what some suspected – now known as Starship/Super Heavy, the BFR program has officially moved away from carbon fiber composites as the primary material of choice for the rocket’s structure and propellant tanks, instead pivoting to what Musk described as a “fairly heavy metal”.

But cool pics of the demo Starship that will fly suborbital hops coming in ~4 weeks.

If you have clear skies and are willing to brave the chilly temperatures, you might want to head to a dark site and look for a passing visitor.

Comet 46P/Wirtanen, first discovered in 1948, will have its closest encounter with Earth on Dec.16. But it’s already visible in the sky.

While this is the brightest comet of the year and the 10th closest comet in modern times, don’t expect one with a well-defined tail, a hallmark of comets.

Kids with peanut allergies haven’t had many options, but that first-of-their-kind treatments could change that as soon as 2019.

Mayo Clinic has been using 3D printed models for over a decade to help guide surgery and treatment, education, and patient-specific simulation.

I’m speaking next Friday evening, Dec 14, at 6PM then doing a panel at the NodeSF in San Francisco. Hosted by the Institute for Competitive Governance and Startup Societies Foundation, the event will discuss innovative approaches for new cities and societies. Join us in building the future! https://www.eventbrite.com/e/future-cities-distributed-socie…gFeha96wn2 #transhumanism

How are the future cities going to look like? Are they going to be sovereign states? Will people have decentralized governments? What is the future of law like?

The hepatitis B virus (HBV), which spreads through blood and bodily fluids and invades liver cells, is thought to kill just under 1 million people every year around the world, mostly from cancer or scarring (cirrhosis) of the liver. HBV is less likely to be fatal than HIV, and many people who carry the virus don’t have symptoms. But because more than 250 million people live with chronic HBV infections, more than 7 times the number with HIV, its global death toll now rivals that of the more-feared virus.

Viral hepatitis is on the rise. Tackling hepatitis B in Africa is key to fighting back. Viral hepatitis is on the rise. Tackling hepatitis B in Africa is key to fighting back.

Is this just fantasy?

While things have seemed quiet after Diwata-2’s launch into space last October 29, the team has been busy working on the initial tests and calibration of Diwata-2’s payloads. Stay tuned for more images and updates in the coming weeks! Read more about the first few images here: https://bit.ly/2E9oi6m&h=AT3JRdu_Q1bmVIKgKhh6i5isF4r0_KorJah…-f_F-Lf8F8 #Diwata2 #D2nMe

Optical fibers are then inserted through an area called the perineum, found between the testes and the anus, and directly into the prostate gland. Afterwards, the scientists turn on a red laser that is induced through the optical fibers. This process utilizes the photosensitivity of the WST11 drug and activates it. Upon activation, free radicals are released within the area, attacking and destroying the tumors. Unlike conventional treatments which might affect a general area of body cells, this treatment is localized. The nearby cells are left more or less unharmed.

Beating The Big ‘C’

The trial for this prostate cancer treatment has shown promising results. Endgadget reports that, from the 415 participating men, nearly half were rid of the malignant disease by the end of treatment. This is a huge improvement compared to conventional procedures, which only have an average success rate of about 14 percent. Of those that had cancer in remission, only six percent needed to have their affected prostate removed, which is again a stark contrast to the conventional procedures’ 30 percent.

By Luke Miller

A fungus that can “eat” plastic has been discovered in Pakistan. This discovery could tackle the growing plastic problem the planet is currently facing, by cutting the lifespan of plastic from up to 1000 years, to just weeks.

One of the largest environmental problems we are currently facing is plastic. Taken from sas.org pollution facts and figures:

Today, NASA released the first ever audio recording from Mars!

NASA’s InSight lander touched down successfully on Mars on November 26th. The primary mission of the lander (which is not a rover) is to study the interior of Mars by drilling below the surface. The goal is to analyze seismic activity and monitor for Marsquakes, which are Earthquakes, except on Mars.

“Capturing this audio was an unplanned treat,” Bruce Banerdt, of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said in a press release. “But one of the things [the InSight mission] is dedicated to is measuring motion on Mars, and naturally that includes motion caused by sound waves.”

STOREY COUNTY — The need for more infrastructure and housing is constraining Tesla Motors’ desire to grow its footprint in Northern Nevada, Tesla CEO Elon Musk said Tuesday.

Musk’s comment came during a technology and innovation summit hosted by Gov. Brian Sandoval at Tesla’s Gigafactory 1 located just outside of Sparks.

Musk said he envisions growing the number of employees at the Nevada factory from roughly 7,000 currently to upward of 20,000 in the future, and more than doubling the physical footprint of the 5.8 million-square-foot lithium-ion battery factory.

The discovery of three other black hole collisions were announced at the same time.

The best is yet to come.

We launched two sounding rockets that will help scientists understand atmospheric escape on our home planet that has applications all over the universe — from predicting which far off planets might be habitable, to piecing together how Mars became the desolate, exposed landscape it is today.

SpaceX’s #Dragon cargo spacecraft was successfully installed on the Earth-facing side of the International Space Station’s Harmony module at 10:36 a.m. EST. While there are now six spaceships attached at the station, the Dragon will spend about five weeks there and return to Earth in January 2019 with more than 4,000 pounds of research, hardware and crew supplies.

Starlight continues to travel across the cosmos long after its sources have burned out — which means that we can see stars that no longer exist. It also means that our astronomers can study stellar formation without looking at the stars at all, but by observing the gamma rays that shoot out from distant galaxies interacting with the starlight. Take a closer look: https://go.nasa.gov/2G33gsA&h=AT2mbPrj5N1YVp76caneadyE80cXxz…q-2PIES2mQ

Project for Awesome (P4A) 2018 is finally here, and you can help us to win much-needed funds at no cost to you by voting for the videos supporting our charity.

Every year, a number of charities are chosen through voting, and they each receive a sum of money based on what the fundraiser at P4A has raised. In the past, charities have received around $25,000 each, which is a considerable sum, especially for a small non-profit org such as LEAF.

With these funds, we can purchase new equipment to support reporting at conferences and events and to bring our audience the best media experience possible. We are also planning to host a second conference in New York City in 2019, and this will be far more ambitious in scale and will be a two-day event rather than the single-day conference we held this year; with your support, we can make this one of the top conferences supporting the field of rejuvenation biotechnology and make high-quality footage available to the public. Finally, we can use the funds to hire new writers in order to bring you even more high-quality news articles and educational pieces about aging and research.

‘Chemo brain’ affects many people who have undergone cancer treatment. What happens in the brain, and how can we reverse this effect?

Intel and AMD could be looking at some stiff competition in the processor game. Fresh off announcing its new Snapdragon 855 mobile chip, the company has announced the Snapdragon 8cx. It’s for laptops instead of smartphones and is by far the most powerful processor the company has ever made. How can you tell? The “X” in the name stands for “extreme.”

While the Snapdragon 8cx is not the company’s first PC chip (that honor goes to the quickly forgotten Snapdragon 850), it’s the first one that could make Intel take note. Like the 855, the Snapdragon 8cx uses a 7nm manufacturing process. It has the same octa-core design with four high-performance cores based on the Cortex A76 and four low-power cores based on the A55. That’s really the end of the similarities, though.

Qualcomm has cranked the clock speed of all of its “Kryo 495” cores way up in the Snapdragon 8cx, but it won’t say exactly how high. The chip has 10MB of cache between L2 and L3 — the 855 only has 3MB. That makes the Snapdragon 8cx better at running heavy apps, and there’s support for up to 16GB of system memory. You can also check the boxes for NVMe and UFS3.0 storage.

Microsoft said Thursday it was adopting a set of ethical principles for the use of its facial recognition technology, and urged the government to follow its lead with regulations barring unlawful discrimination and focusing on transparency.

In a blog post, Microsoft president Brad Smith pushed for the government, as well as tech companies, to regulate facial-recognition technology and ensure it “creates broad societal benefits while curbing the risk of abuse.”

“The facial recognition genie, so to speak, is just emerging from the bottle,” Smith said in the post. “Unless we act, we risk waking up five years from now to find that facial recognition services have spread in ways that exacerbate societal issues.”

Newborns with vitamin D deficiency have an increased risk of schizophrenia later in life, a team of Australian and Danish researchers has reported.

The discovery could help prevent some cases of the disease by treating vitamin D deficiency during the earliest stages of life.

The study, led by Professor John McGrath from The University of Queensland (UQ) in Australia and Aarhus University in Denmark, found newborns with vitamin D deficiency had a 44 per cent increased risk of being diagnosed with schizophrenia as adults compared to those with normal vitamin D levels.

Another sign that zero-carbon energy is going viral.

This robotic strawberry harvester saves farmers hours of time and effort.

And, so far, they’re just fine. America needs a sober debate about the pros and cons of Crispr instead of a paranoid ban on the technology.

The question and answer interview of He Jianku conference presentation has the most interesting parts of this debate about human gene editing of embryos. The interview starts at about 1 hour and 28 minutes of the record. The formal presentation showed that the scientist He has taken appropriate scientific care to perform the work. He took care to make sure it was on target and was successful. He took care to make sure there were no unintended off-target side-effects.

* the parents (father HIV positive) made a choice to use the edited embryos versus unedited * the CRISPR vector used to make the change. Appears to be the kind that can be ordered for about $100. There have been adult people who have self-experimented with mail order gene editing kits * the conference interviewer asked about whether He Jianku was aware of a few other research papers. Some paper suggests that the gene CCR5 could cause increased susceptibility to flu and another suggests a tiny increase in cognitive effect.

Intelligence is controlled by many thousands of genes.

The first-ever 8K broadcast has officially occurred, but don’t expect immediate uptake.

This simple statistic captures the power of the exponential growth in science that has been taking place over the past century. It is attributable to Derek de Solla Price, the father of scientometrics (i.e., the science of studying science), in his 1961 book Science Since Babylon. If science is growing exponentially, then the major technological advancements and upheavals of the past 200 years are only the tip of the iceberg.

Imagine one drug that can target and kill malignant cells for some patients with many types of cancer. A new drug called Vitrakvi (larotrectinib), now approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, shows promise of doing just that for both adults and children with a variety of sometimes rare cancers that share one specific genetic mutation.

The mutation, called a TRK fusion, occurs when one of three NTRK genes becomes mistakenly connected to an unrelated gene and ignites uncontrolled growth. By solely targeting this mutation, the drug is designed to turn off growth signaling with a minimum of other toxicities.

According to the drug manufacturer, Loxo Oncology, this specific mutation can occur in a small subset of various adult and pediatric solid tumors ranging from cancers of the appendix, bile ducts, breast, lung, pancreas and thyroid to melanoma, GIST and various sarcomas.

A number of different things have to happen for a child to develop leukemia.

A massive, previously unexplored cave discovered by accident in Canada has been named “Sarlacc’s Pit,” after the multi-tentacled alien beast that first made an appearance in Star Wars: Return of the Jedi.

Officials from Canada’s Ministry of Environment and Climate Change first came across the huge cavern in Wells Gray Provincial Park in British Columbia while conducting a caribou count by helicopter in March.

The sinkhole was later discovered to be the entrance to a cave, and is 328 feet long, 196 feet broad and 600 feet deep. Officials believe it may be Canada’s largest cave.