Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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I always caution folks to never say “never” especially around hacking and worst case scenarios relating to security. Granted there is a balance around not going too overboard. However, when it comes to being risk adverse and determining how much risk your company can absorb must be a core piece of your assessment. And, an attack like the one by ISIS in this article can not be allowed.

https://lnkd.in/b-_mdNW

LONDON: ISIS terrorists hacked the website of a UK-based solar firm as revenge for the killing of one of their British Muslim members, a media report said on Sunday.

Self-styled Caliphate Cyber Army (CCA) members recently carried out the hack on the website of Solar UK, an East Sussex company in south-east England with only 11 staff, The Sunday Times reported.

The attack was reportedly to avenge the death of Junaid Hussain, an ISIS figure from Birmingham, and it saw customers being diverted to a web page featuring the terror group’s logo accompanied by a string of threats.

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I see these growing exponentially in the next few years especially when companies introduce autonomous technologies. One must ponder how far will these go when the breach was inside a bank that is leveraging technology and/ or autonomous technologies from vendors. https://lnkd.in/bzXdix3

A number of data breach lawsuits have been filed against major enterprises in recent years, which could lead to mounting data breach costs.

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Annual list highlights the most important technology milestones.

Cambridge, MA – February 23, 2016: Today, MIT Technology Review publishes its annual 10 Breakthrough Technologies list (www.technologyreview.com/lists/technologies). The list identifies innovations from the past year that solve difficult problems or create powerful new ways of using technology. These are the breakthroughs that will matter for years to come.

Jason Pontin, Editor in Chief and Publisher, states, “Each year, our editors search the globe to create this important list. From Beijing, China, where researchers are creating fungus-resistant wheat and boosting rice crop yields, to Seattle, where a spin-off company of the University of Washington is commercializing “passive Wi-Fi,” making data connections using 1/10,000th as much power as existing Wi-Fi, the 10 Breakthrough Technologies represent the advancements we feel have the greatest potential to impact our lives for years to come.”

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NASA’s study of a Venus landsail rover for possible launch as early as 2023 continues via its Innovative Advanced Concepts office. Geoffrey Landis, the rover’s study scientist fills me in on the latest. Ironically, the optimal landing site is near that of the Soviet Venera 10 lander.

NASA continues working towards a Venus landsail surface rover that could see launch as early as 2023 and mark the first time in a generation that any probe has landed on the planet’s hot, rocky surface. After a five month journey from Earth, the lander-rover — about the size of a windsurfing board — would begin a nominal 50-day surface mission.

If funded, NASA would launch this landsail “Zephyr” rover as a $400 million Discovery class mission with a coupled orbiter and lander. Once safely in Venus orbit, the rover-lander would detach for its journey through the planet’s thick atmosphere. Following an upright wheels-down landing, pyrotechnics would then cut the rover loose to explore the surface.

Loaded with some 50 pounds of science equipment, the landsail rover would move about courtesy of a 26-foot airfoil sail.

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Most biology students will be able to tell you that neural signals are sent via mechanisms such as synaptic transmission, gap junctions, and diffusion processes, but a new study suggests there’s another way that our brains transmit information from one place to another.

Researchers in the US have recorded neural spikes travelling too slowly in the brain to be explained by conventional signalling mechanisms. In the absence of other plausible explanations, the scientists believe these brain waves are being transmitted by a weak electrical field, and they’ve been able to detect one of these in mice.

“Researchers have thought that the brain’s endogenous electrical fields are too weak to propagate wave transmission,” said Dominique Durand, a biomedical engineer at Case Western Reserve University. “But it appears the brain may be using the fields to communicate without synaptic transmissions, gap junctions or diffusion.”

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A team of Stanford researchers have developed a novel means of teaching artificial intelligence systems how to predict a human’s response to their actions. They’ve given their knowledge base, dubbed Augur, access to online writing community Wattpad and its archive of more than 600,000 stories. This information will enable support vector machines (basically, learning algorithms) to better predict what people do in the face of various stimuli.

“Over many millions of words, these mundane patterns [of people’s reactions] are far more common than their dramatic counterparts,” the team wrote in their study. “Characters in modern fiction turn on the lights after entering rooms; they react to compliments by blushing; they do not answer their phones when they are in meetings.”

In its initial field tests, using an Augur-powered wearable camera, the system correctly identified objects and people 91 percent of the time. It correctly predicted their next move 71 percent of the time.

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Researchers have taken on the problem of reducing a super computer the size of a basketball field to that of a book. The answer is “biocomputers” – incredibly powerful machines capable of performing multiple calculations with a fraction of energy.

According to study coordinator Heiner Linke, who heads nanoscience at Lund University in Sweden, “a biocomputer requires less than one percent of the energy an electronic transistor needs to carry out one calculation step.”

A biocomputer is useful because ordinary computers are incapable of solving combinational problems, such as those dealing with cryptography or other tasks requiring that a multitude of possible solutions be considered before deciding on the optimal one. These already exist, but the new research from Lund tackles the key problems of scalability and energy efficiency.

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