“Guarding The Digital Frontier. AI As A Cyber Weapon”
Thank you!
Chuck Brooks is an Adjunct Faculty at Georgetown University’s Graduate Cybersecurity Risk Management Program, where he has taught courses on risk management, emerging technologies, and cybersecurity.
In two years, the world’s first flying car will no longer be a science-fiction concept. The Federal Aviation Administration gave the Alef Aeronautics “Model A” car a Special Airworthiness Certification in June, approving the vehicle for road and air tests, the New York Post reported.
Scientists adding a human intelligence gene into monkeys — it’s the kind of thing you’d see in a movie like Rise of the Planet of the Apes. But Chinese researchers have done just that, improving the short-term memories of the monkeys in a study published in March 2019 in the Chinese journal National Science Review. While some experts downplayed the effects as minor, concerns linger over where the research may lead.
The goal of the work, led by geneticist Bing Su of Kunming Institute of Zoology, was to investigate how a gene linked to brain size, MCPH1, might contribute to the evolution of the organ in humans. All primates have some variation of this gene. However, compared with other primates, our brains are larger, more advanced and slower to develop; the researchers wondered whether differences that evolved in the human version of MCPH1 might explain our more complex brains.
Article from 2019
https://academic.oup.com/nsr/article/6/3/480/5420749
Elon Musk’s net worth is staggering. Delve into the vast wealth amassed by the visionary tech CEO, who’s reshaping the tech industry.
From a Google AI that writes news articles to a robotic liver transplant, check out this week’s awesome tech stories from around the web.
The show provides a glimpse into humanity’s astonishing diversity. Social scientists have a similar goal—understanding the behavior of different people, groups, and cultures—but use a variety of methods in controlled situations. For both, the stars of these pursuits are the subjects: humans.
But what if you replaced humans with AI chatbots?
The idea sounds preposterous. Yet thanks to the advent of ChatGPT and other large language models (LLMs), social scientists are flirting with the idea of using these tools to rapidly construct diverse groups of “simulated humans” and run experiments to probe their behavior and values as a proxy to their biological counterparts.
Knowing a little about the local connections on flight maps and other networks can reveal a lot about a system’s global structure.
In some deep subterranean aquifers, cells have a chemical trick for making oxygen that could sustain whole underground ecosystems.
Researchers have created a quantum superposition state in a semiconductor nanostructure that might serve as a basis for quantum computing. The trick: two optical laser pulses that act as a single terahertz laser pulse.
A German-Chinese research team has successfully created a quantum bit in a semiconductor nanostructure. Using a special energy transition, the researchers created a superposition state in a quantum dot—a tiny area of the semiconductor—in which an electron hole simultaneously possessed two different energy levels. Such superposition states are fundamental for quantum computing.
However, excitation of the state would require a large-scale free-electron laser that can emit light in the terahertz range. Additionally, this wavelength is too long to focus the beam on the tiny quantum dot. The German-Chinese team has now achieved the excitation with two finely tuned short-wavelength optical laser pulses.
Cities can be obstacle courses for communications signals. A radio signal must travel from a cell phone to a router to a cell tower, and onward to its recipient—all while bouncing between walls, buildings and other structures. When it hits an obstacle, the radio wave gets scattered, diminishing the signal. This in turn reduces the bandwidth. At the same time, the signal must compete with the bandwidth needs of numerous other devices in the area. All this reduces the amount of information the signal can communicate.
Newly developed small, lightweight reflective surfaces could revolutionize communications in crowded environments by providing unprecedented control over electromagnetic signals, like radio waves.
Historically, engineers have used repeaters—electronic devices that receive a signal and retransmit it—to help these communications signals cover longer distances and get around obstacles, but this technology is reaching its limits. Now, engineers are looking to modify the behavior of the communications signal itself. Enter reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RIS).