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Jul 17, 2022

Tetraquarks and pentaquarks: “Unnatural” forms of exotic matter have been found

Posted by in category: particle physics

Scientists have found three new examples of a very exotic form of matter made of quarks. They can yield insights into the early Universe.


View insights.

Jul 17, 2022

Amazon Science at ICML 2022

Posted by in categories: biological, robotics/AI, science

We’re proud to be a platinum sponsor of ICML, the annual conference on machine learning. Learn about Amazon’s presence at the conference, accepted publications,… See more.


The International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML) is the premier gathering of professionals dedicated to the advancement of the branch of artificial intelligence known as machine learning. The conference is globally renowned for presenting and publishing cutting-edge research on all aspects of machine learning used in closely related areas like artificial intelligence, statistics and data science, as well as important application areas such as machine vision, computational biology, speech recognition, and robotics.

Jul 17, 2022

These are the 20 most common passwords leaked on the dark web — make sure none of them are yours

Posted by in category: security

Mobile security firm Lookout has a new list of the 20 passwords most commonly found in leaked account information on the dark web. Some are surprisingly easy to guess.

Jul 17, 2022

New research suggests adverse childhood experiences accelerate the biological processes of aging

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, life extension

“Harms in early life can take many forms, and can lead to health consequences many years down the road. What our study shows is that these consequences manifest as perturbations to multiple biological systems, which can be measured from biomarkers in blood.”…


Individuals exposed to adverse childhood experiences tend to be biologically older than their counterparts, according to new research published in the scientific journal Psychoneuroendocrinology.

Adverse childhood experiences refer to a set of potentially traumatic events that occur before adulthood. These experiences include various forms of abuse and neglect, witnessing intimate partner violence, parental death or serious illness, parental divorce or separation, and psychiatric illness of a family member. Biological aging, on the other hand, refers to the accumulation of damage and loss of function to cells, tissues and organs.

Continue reading “New research suggests adverse childhood experiences accelerate the biological processes of aging” »

Jul 17, 2022

A Window On The Progress, Promise And Realities Of Indoor Agriculture

Posted by in categories: food, solar power, sustainability

Last week New York City was host to the Indoor AgTech Innovation Summit, an event which drew 600 attendees, featured 90 speakers and included representatives from 42 countries. For a sector with some history of hyperbole about its role in feeding the world, the presentations and discussions during this event featured an overall balance of optimism and pragmatism. Many different kinds of “indoor” facilities were being considered at this meeting ranging from basic greenhouses all the way to multi-level “vertical farms” of the type pictured above. Industry players prefer to call their sector “controlled environment agriculture” or CEA. That is in contrast to mainstream agriculture which has the advantage of free solar energy and rainfall, but which must also deal with all the variables associated with weather and the limitations determined by geography.

The origins of CEA stretch at least as far the 17th and 18th century when “orangeries” in France were used in the winter to protect citrus trees grown in pots. For the last eight decades the Dutch have been technology leaders in the increasingly sophisticated and international greenhouse industry. In recent years CEA has been expanding world wide and trending towards a higher degree of control of the growing conditions including light, temperature, humidity, water, and carbon dioxide concentration. Fertilization in these systems is increasingly micromanaged in a soil-free setting such as “hydroponics” or “aeroponics.” Many tasks and process controls are automated.

This is an expanding industry with 7–8% annual growth projected for greenhouses and 15% per year for vertical farming. Greenhouses are commonly used to produce leafy greens, tomatoes, peppers, and cucumbers. The highest tech, vertical farming systems are currently focused on leafy greens and herbs. Even so, the packaged salad and leafy greens market is said to be in the range of $8.7 billion and projected to grow to between $13 billion and $25 billion within the next 5 years and CEA is likely to account for an increasing share.

Jul 17, 2022

The most dangerous keylogger malware of 2022: Snake Keylogger

Posted by in categories: cybercrime/malcode, encryption, finance

Check Point Research, the Threat Intelligence division of the company, a leading global cybersecurity specialist provider, has released its Global Threat Index for the month of June 2022. Researchers have found that Emotet continues to be the number one malware and has also increased its global incidence by around 6%. Continuing with its climb of the last month, Snake Keylogger sneaks into the top three positions, taking the Formbook position, both still far from Emotet.

Emotet, has affected 14% of organizations around the world in June, an increase that is almost double compared to the previous month. This malware is highly profitable thanks to its ability to go unnoticed. Its persistence also makes it difficult to remove once a device is infected, making it the perfect tool in a cybercriminal’s arsenal. Conceived as a banking Trojan, it is often distributed via phishing emails and has the ability to embed other malware, increasing its ability to cause widespread damage.

Continue reading “The most dangerous keylogger malware of 2022: Snake Keylogger” »

Jul 17, 2022

The sustainable cities made from mud

Posted by in categories: materials, sustainability

Earthen architecture can withstand extreme events such as earthquakes and heavy winds “because of the ability of its structure to distribute the load that it faces on its surface, unlike concrete or cement,” says Damluji.

But mud building’s resilience to earthquakes depends on the intensity of the seismic waves and the soil in which they are built, says Jerome.

Mud buildings are “also protected from seasonal rains and flash floods due to the damp-proof and protective external rendering used in several layers of refined mud, ash and lime coating and plaster”, says Damluji.

Jul 17, 2022

This ‘UFO’ rover could hover on the moon and asteroids one day

Posted by in category: space

The levitating rover concept is a wild new idea to explore airless worlds.


Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) want to engineer a new kind of hovering spacecraft that can operate without air.

Jul 17, 2022

Deep learning accelerates the detection of live bacteria using thin-film transistor arrays

Posted by in categories: chemistry, economics, food, health, mobile phones, robotics/AI

Early detection and identification of pathogenic bacteria in food and water samples are essential to public health. Bacterial infections cause millions of deaths worldwide and bring a heavy economic burden, costing more than 4 billion dollars annually in the United States alone. Among pathogenic bacteria, Escherichia coli (E. coli) and other coliform bacteria are among the most common ones, and they indicate fecal contamination in food and water samples. The most conventional and frequently used method for detecting these bacteria involves culturing of the samples, which usually takes 24 hours for the final read-out and needs expert visual examination. Although some methods based on, for example, the amplification of nucleic acids, can reduce the detection time to a few hours, they cannot differentiate live and dead bacteria and present low sensitivity at low concentrations of bacteria. That is why the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) approves no nucleic acid-based bacteria sensing method for screening water samples.

In an article recently published in ACS Photonics, a journal of the American Chemical Society (ACS), a team of scientists, led by Professor Aydogan Ozcan from the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), and co-workers have developed an AI-powered smart bacterial colony detection system using a thin-film transistor (TFT) array, which is a widely used technology in mobile phones and other displays.

The ultra-large imaging area of the TFT array (27 mm × 26 mm) manufactured by researchers at Japan Display Inc. enabled the system to rapidly capture the growth patterns of bacterial colonies without the need for scanning, which significantly simplified both the hardware and software design. This system achieved ~12-hour time savings compared to gold-standard culture-based methods approved by EPA. By analyzing the microscopic images captured by the TFT array as a function of time, the AI-based system could rapidly and automatically detect colony growth with a deep neural network. Following the detection of each colony, a second neural network is used to classify the species.

Jul 17, 2022

Researchers uncover life’s power generators in the Earth’s oldest groundwaters

Posted by in category: alien life

An international team of researchers has discovered 1.2-billion-year-old groundwater deep in a gold-and uranium-producing mine in Moab Khotsong, South Africa, shedding more light on how life is sustained below the Earth’s surface and how it may thrive on other planets.

The findings were published earlier this week in the journal Nature Communications.

“For the first time, we have insight into how energy stored deep in the Earth’s subsurface can be released and distributed more broadly through its crust over time,” says Oliver Warr, research associate in the Department of Earth Sciences at the University of Toronto and lead author of the study. “Think of it as a Pandora’s Box of -and-hydrogen-producing power, one that we can learn how to harness for the benefit of the deep biosphere on a global scale.”