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Feb 15, 2023

Elizabeth Holmes Booked A One-Way Flight To Mexico After Fraud Conviction, Prosecutors Say

Posted by in category: law enforcement

Holmes has requested to stay out of prison while she appeals her conviction for wire fraud and conspiracy to commit wire fraud, for which she was sentenced to more than 11 years in prison.

Feb 15, 2023

Hackers start using Havoc post-exploitation framework in attacks

Posted by in category: security

Security researchers are seeing threat actors switching to a new and open-source command and control (C2) framework known as Havoc as an alternative to paid options such as Cobalt Strike and Brute Ratel.

Among its most interesting capabilities, Havoc is cross-platform and it bypasses Microsoft Defender on up-to-date Windows 11 devices using sleep obfuscation, return address stack spoofing, and indirect syscalls.

Like other exploitation kits, Havoc includes a wide variety of modules allowing pen testers (and hackers) to perform various tasks on exploited devices, including executing commands, managing processes, downloading additional payloads, manipulating Windows tokens, and executing shellcode.

Feb 15, 2023

Military AI Applications Will Be As Game-Changing As Nukes: Former Google CEO

Posted by in categories: military, robotics/AI

But will the bureaucracy get out of its own way?

Feb 15, 2023

Altered Carbon (Takeshi Kovacs #1)

Posted by in category: neuroscience

It’s the twenty-fifth century, and advances in technology have redefined life itself. A person’s consciousness can now be stored in the brain and downloaded into a new body (or “sleeve”), making death nothing more than a minor blip on a screen. Onetime U.N. Envoy Takeshi Kovacs has been killed before, but his last death was particularly painful. Resleeved into a body in Bay City (formerly San Francisco), Kovacs is thrown into the dark heart of a shady, far-reaching conspiracy that is vicious even by the standards of a society that treats existence as something that can be bought and sold. For Kovacs, the shell that blew a hole in his chest was only the beginning.

Feb 15, 2023

Michael Levin & Josh Bongard On Xenobots

Posted by in category: robotics/AI

‘Is AI Extending the Mind?’ is the second annual workshop by Cross Labs, this year held virtually from April 11 – 15, 2022.This workshop expands on our previ…

Feb 15, 2023

Study Finds a New Kind of Star System That Could Help Reveal How They Form

Posted by in categories: cosmology, physics, robotics/AI

Over 50 percent of high-mass stars reside in multiple star systems. But due to their complex orbital interactions, physicists have a difficult time understanding just how stable and long-lived these systems are. Recently a team of astronomers applied machine learning techniques to simulations of multiple star systems and found a new way that stars in such systems can arrange themselves.

Classical mechanics has a notorious problem known as the three-body problem. While Newton’s laws of gravity can easily handle calculations of the forces between two objects and their subsequent evolution, there is no known analytic solution when you include a third massive object. In response to that problem, physicists over the centuries have developed various approximation schemes to study these kinds of systems, concluding that the vast majority of possible three-object arrangements are unstable.

But it turns out that there are a lot of multiple-star systems out there in the galaxy. Indeed, over half of all massive stars belong to at least a binary pair, and many of them belong to triple or quadruple star systems. Obviously, the systems last a long time. Otherwise, they would have flung themselves apart a long time ago before we had a chance to observe them. But because of the limitations of our tools, we have difficulty assessing how these systems organize themselves and what stable orbit options exist.

Feb 15, 2023

‘It became me’: Studies show that revolutionary new brain chips may bend your mind in strange and troubling ways

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, computing, cyborgs, neuroscience

Musk’s company is far from the only group working on brain-computer interfaces, or systems to facilitate direct communication between human brains and external computers. Other researchers have been looking into using BCIs to restore lost senses and control prosthetic limbs, among other applications. While these technologies are still in their infancy, they’ve been around long enough for researchers to increasingly get a sense of how neural implants interact with our minds. As Anna Wexler, an assistant professor of philosophy in the Department of Medical Ethics and Health Policy at the University of Pennsylvania, put it: “Of course it causes changes. The question is what kinds of changes does it cause, and how much do those changes matter?”

Feb 15, 2023

‘Lego-like’ universal connector makes assembling stretchable devices a snap

Posted by in categories: health, robotics/AI, wearables

An international team led by researchers from Nanyang Technological University, Singapore (NTU Singapore) has developed a universal connector to assemble stretchable devices simply and quickly, in a “Lego-like” manner.

Stretchable devices including soft robots and wearable health care devices are assembled using several different modules with different material characteristics—some soft, some rigid, and some encapsulated.

However, the commercial pastes (glue), currently used to connect the modules often either fail to transmit mechanical and reliably when deformed or break easily.

Feb 15, 2023

The New Best Place To Look For Alien Life: The Photosynthetic Habitable Zone

Posted by in category: alien life

In the search for life on other Earths, astrobiologists should look for signs of photosynthesis, say scientists.

Feb 15, 2023

AI Has Been Mastering Games; Now It Can Also Create Them

Posted by in categories: entertainment, robotics/AI

After beating humans in video games, AI is now taking on game design.