This year, you won’t be able to escape the data mesh, one of the most disruptive trends currently operating in the data and analytics world.
Humans experience the world in three dimensions, but a collaboration in Japan has developed a way to create synthetic dimensions to better understand the fundamental laws of the Universe and possibly apply them to advanced technologies.
They published their results today (January 28, 2022) in Science Advances.
“The concept of dimensionality has become a central fixture in diverse fields of contemporary physics and technology in past years,” said paper author Toshihiko Baba, professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Yokohama National University. “While inquiries into lower-dimensional materials and structures have been fruitful, rapid advances in topology have uncovered a further abundance of potentially useful phenomena depending on the dimensionality of the system, even going beyond the three spatial dimensions available in the world around us.”
North Korean-backed hacking group Lazarus has added the Windows Update client to its list of living-off-the-land binaries (LoLBins) and is now actively using it to execute malicious code on Windows systems.
The new malware deployment method was discovered by the Malwarebytes Threat Intelligence team while analyzing a January spearphishing campaign impersonating the American security and aerospace company Lockheed Martin.
After the victims open the malicious attachments and enable macro execution, an embedded macro drops a WindowsUpdateConf.lnk file in the startup folder and a DLL file (wuaueng.dll) in a hidden Windows/System32 folder.
In 2017, ‘Oumuamua became the 1st-known interstellar visitor. Since then, we’ve seen one other. Can astronomers now chase it down?
In order to satiate youth-hungry bald people, scientists are growing human hair cells on mice.
Ernesto Lujan, a biologist and founder of medical startup dNovo, told MIT Technology Review that his company has successfully transplanted human hair stem cells onto a mouse.
The result is a horrifying abomination of all that is good, and proof that science has gone too far.
A newly created nano-architected material exhibits a property that previously was just theoretically possible: it can refract light backward, regardless of the angle at which the light strikes the material.
Students from eight Jewish and Arab schools spent three years building satellites and watched a live NASA feed as they took off for outer space.
In the future, a trip from Beijing to New York could take you via suborbital space.
That’s because Chinese aerospace firm Space Transportation is developing a “rocket with wings” designed for space tourism as well as incredibly fast passenger transport similar to that of a famous concept shown off by SpaceX in 2017.
According to a report from Space.com, the fully reusable space plane would provide rapid point-to-point travel between any two locations on Earth via suborbital flight, and a crewed test flight could take place as early as 2025.
Researchers from KTH Royal Institute of Technology and Stanford University have fabricated a material for computer components that enables the commercial viability of computers that mimic the human brain.
Electrochemical random access (ECRAM) memory components made with 2D titanium carbide showed outstanding potential for complementing classical transistor technology, and contributing toward commercialization of powerful computers that are modeled after the brain’s neural network. Such neuromorphic computers can be thousands times more energy efficient than today’s computers.
These advances in computing are possible because of some fundamental differences from the classic computing architecture in use today, and the ECRAM, a component that acts as a sort of synaptic cell in an artificial neural network, says KTH Associate Professor Max Hamedi.
Artificial intelligence will soon become one of the most important, and likely most dangerous, aspects of the metaverse. I’m talking about agenda-driven artificial agents that look and act like any other users but are virtual simulations that will engage us in “conversational manipulation,” targeting us on behalf of paying advertisers.
This is especially dangerous when the AI algorithms have access to data about our personal interests, beliefs, habits and temperament, while also reading our facial expressions and vocal inflections. Such agents will be able to pitch us more skillfully than any salesman. And it won’t just be to sell us products and services – they could easily push political propaganda and targeted misinformation on behalf of the highest bidder.
And because these AI agents will look and sound like anyone else in the metaverse, our natural skepticism to advertising will not protect us. For these reasons, we need to regulate some aspects of the coming metaverse, especially AI-driven agents. If we don’t, promotional AI-avatars will fill our lives, sensing our emotions in real time and quickly adjusting their tactics for a level of micro-targeting never before experienced.