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Pretty soon, people won’t have to provide a fingerprint or a driver license to prove their identity — if VU has its way.

The Argentina-based fraud and identity protection company announced $12 million in Series B funding Monday from backers including software developer Globant, as well as Agrega Partners, NXTP Ventures, Bridge One, the IDB Lab and Telefónica. The new funding gives the company total venture-backed investments of $20 million, CEO Sebastián Stranieri told TechCrunch.

Stranieri, who has worked in the cybersecurity industry for the past 20 years, got the idea for VU in 2007 after spending hours helping his grandmother verify her identity with the Argentinian government in what turned out to be a two-minute process.

Performance recovered!


Making good on its promise, Western Digital has deployed a new firmware for the company’s WD Black SN850 SSD, which is currently one of the best SSDs on the market. The latest firmware will restore the SN850’s write performance when the drive is installed on a M.2 slot that’s connected to AMD’s X570 chipset.

The SN850 is one of the fastest SSDs around right now. However, users were reporting a performance loss of over 40% if the SSD resided on a M.2 slot that doesn’t directly communicate with the Ryzen processor. We don’t see the issue affecting users that have the SN850 as their primary drive. But for users that have multiple SSDs and have the SN850 on an M.2 slot linked to the AMD X570 chipset, it could be a huge problem.

If you want to learn, then you have to break some things.


Summary: Brain cells snap DNA in more places and in more cell types than previously realized in order to express genes for learning and memory.

Source: Picower Institute for Learning and Memory

The urgency to remember a dangerous experience requires the brain to make a series of potentially dangerous moves: Neurons and other brain cells snap open their DNA in numerous locations—more than previously realized, according to a new study—to provide quick access to genetic instructions for the mechanisms of memory storage.

To date, there have been no metrics for accurately assessing individuals’ inflammatory status in a way that could predict these clinical problems and point to ways of addressing them or staving them off, Furman said. But now, he said, the study has produced a single-number quantitative measure that appears to do just that.


You’re as old as your immune system.

Investigators at the Stanford University School of Medicine and the Buck Institute for Research on Aging have built an inflammatory-aging clock that’s more accurate than the number of candles on your birthday cake in predicting how strong your immune system is, how soon you’ll become frail or whether you have unseen cardiovascular problems that could become clinical headaches a few years down the road.

In the process, the scientists fingered a bloodborne substance whose abundance may accelerate cardiovascular aging.