Lifeboat Foundation

Natural language processing continues to find its way into unexpected corners. This time, it’s phishing emails. In a small study, researchers found that they could use the deep learning language model GPT-3, along with other AI-as-a-service platforms, to significantly lower the barrier to entry for crafting spearphishing campaigns at a massive scale.

Researchers have long debated whether it would be worth the effort for scammers to train machine learning algorithms that could then generate compelling phishing messages. Mass phishing messages are simple and formulaic, after all, and are already highly effective. Highly targeted and tailored “spearphishing” messages are more labor intensive to compose, though. That’s where NLP may come in surprisingly handy.

At the Black Hat and Defcon security conferences in Las Vegas this week, a team from Singapore’s Government Technology Agency presented a recent experiment in which they sent targeted phishing emails they crafted themselves and others generated by an AI-as-a-service platform to 200 of their colleagues. Both messages contained links that were not actually malicious but simply reported back clickthrough rates to the researchers. They were surprised to find that more people clicked the links in the AI-generated messages than the human-written ones—by a significant margin.

Want to find your inner Matt Damon and spend a year pretending you are isolated on Mars? NASA has a job for you.

To prepare for eventually sending astronauts to Mars, NASA began taking applications Friday for four people to live for a year in Mars Dune Alpha. That’s a 1,700-square-foot Martian habitat, created by a 3D-printer, and inside a building at Johnson Space Center in Houston.

Continue reading “Want to pretend to live on Mars? For a whole year? Apply now” »

A new tool helps researchers explore the types of cells that make up brain organoids — clusters of cells that can mimic the basic structure, function and development of different parts of the brain.

The software, detailed in Cell Stem Cell, maps information about when and where genes are expressed in brain organoids onto a reference atlas of the developing mouse brain. Scientists can use the resulting overlay to develop organoids that better recapitulate the developing brain, the team says, or to uncover the effects of gene mutations and other experimental perturbations.

Brain organoids derived from the cells of people with conditions such as autism have proved useful in capturing neuronal abnormalities. But the findings are muddied by methodological differences in how researchers develop these lab-grown blobs. Advanced techniques to profile gene expression in single cells have made it easier to identify the cell types in any given organoid. But it’s remained difficult to map those cell types onto different brain regions.

In previous research, the researchers behind the present study analyzed nerve fiber damage in people’s corneas and linked this to neuropathy and fibromyalgia.

A recent study concludes that the loss of nerve fibers and an increase of immune cells in the cornea may have associations with long COVID.

CHINA’S NEW 600 KM PER HOUR LEVITATED TRAIN is the next step in its system of 38,000 km of high speed rail lines covering the nation. China’s land area is almost exactly the same as the USA’s, but, by contrast, the USA has ZERO km of high speed rail. China is financing this and other massive infrastructural networks in the same way that the US formerly financed all its major infrastructure— with governmental financing. Every highway, every railway system, every waterway, etc., etc., in the USA was built in the same way, but we stopped building such systems.

It’s fast, very fast.

In fact, it is the fastest train the world.

Continue reading “China unveils 600 km/h Transrapid train” »

Check Point, an Israeli cybersecurity provider, found that by clicking an e-book infected by malware, users could lose control of both their Kindle tablet and their Amazon accounts.

AI is already pretty powerful when humans show it what to do. As it gets better at drawing smart conclusions on its own, the technology will enter a new “age of self.”

Elon Musk’s SpaceX stacked a Starship prototype rocket on top of a Super Heavy rocket booster for the first time Friday morning, giving a look at the scale of the combined nearly 400-foot-tall vehicle.

Musk, asked by CNBC what he thought of witnessing the milestone at the company’s facility in Boca Chica, Texas, responded simply.

“Dream come true,” Musk replied in a tweet.

Summary: Artificial neural networks help researchers uncover new clues as to why people on the autism spectrum have trouble interpreting facial expressions.

Source: Tohoku University.

People with autism spectrum disorder have difficulty interpreting facial expressions.