Lifeboat Foundation

I’m excited to share my new opinion piece on AI facial recognition and privacy for IEEE Spectrum:

The views expressed here are solely those of the author and do not represent positions of IEEE Spectrum or the IEEE.

Many people seem to regard facial-recognition software in much the same way they would a nest of spiders: They recognize, in some abstract way, that it probably has some benefits. But it still gives them the creeps.

Continue reading “Facing Up to Facial Recognition” »

An FBI agent says China’s deal with Charles Lieber, the chair of Harvard University’s chemistry department, paid him up to $50,000 monthly, along with another $150,000 per year.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and health officials continue to grapple with the coronavirus outbreak that has killed at least 81 people in China and sickened 2,800 worldwide. And back in 2018, Billionaire Bill Gates gave a warning that the world wasn’t prepared for pandemics, which should “concern us all.”

Speaking at an event hosted by Massachusetts Medical Society and the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) on April 27, 2018, Gates said he believed “the world needs to prepare for pandemics in the same serious way it prepares for war.”

“This preparation includes staging simulations, war games and preparedness exercises so that we can better understand how diseases will spread and how to deal with responses such as quarantine and communications to minimize panic,” Gates said.

A magnitude 7.7 earthquake struck Tuesday about 80 miles from Jamaica, shaking people in the Caribbean and as far away as Miami.

A tsunami of 0.4 feet was recorded in the Cayman Islands at George Town, but no tsunami was observed at Port Royal, Jamaica, or Puerto Plata, Dominican Republic.

A tsunami threat alert was lifted Tuesday afternoon, a few hours after the quake.

LAWRENCE, KS (KCTV) — Lawrence Memorial Hospital has a patient currently being held in isolation who may have coronavirus.

The hospital says the patient recently entered the United States from Wuhan, China, and showed symptoms of a respiratory illness.

Procedures are underway to treat the patient while minimizing exposure. These procedures, the hospital says, include placing the patient in isolation in a room specially designed for infection prevention.

Essentially the higgs boson could create a replicator and even a teleportation device.

Can you think of any? Here’s what I mean. When we set about justifying basic research in fundamental science, we tend to offer multiple rationales. One (the easy and most obviously legitimate one) is that we’re simply curious about how the world works, and discovery is its own reward. But often we trot out another one: the claim that applied research and real technological advances very often spring from basic research with no specific technological goal. Faraday wasn’t thinking of electronic gizmos when he helped pioneer modern electromagnetism, and the inventors of quantum mechanics weren’t thinking of semiconductors and lasers. They just wanted to figure out how nature works, and the applications came later.

Continue reading “Technological Applications of the Higgs Boson” »

Michigan State University and Stanford University scientists have invented a nanoparticle that eats away—from the inside out—portions of plaques that cause heart attacks.

Bryan Smith, associate professor of biomedical engineering at MSU, and a team of scientists created a “Trojan Horse” nanoparticle that can be directed to eat debris, reducing and stabilizing plaque. The discovery could be a potential treatment for atherosclerosis, a leading cause of death in the United States.

The results, published in the current issue of Nature Nanotechnology, showcases the nanoparticle that homes in on atherosclerotic plaque due to its high selectivity to a particular immune cell type—monocytes and macrophages. Once inside the macrophages in those plaques, it delivers a drug agent that stimulates the cell to engulf and eat cellular debris. Basically, it removes the diseased/dead cells in the plaque core. By reinvigorating the macrophages, plaque size is reduced and stabilized.

Recently, a team of researchers, including Professor Judy Campisi, has published an atlas charting the inflammatory senescence-associated secretory phenotype (SASP) [1].

The nature of the SASP

As we grow older, increasing numbers of our cells enter a state known as senescence. Senescent cells no longer divide to support and help maintain the tissues that they are a part of and instead secrete a range of harmful inflammatory signals: the SASP.

If your PC is running on any modern #Intel CPU built before Oct 2018, it’s likely vulnerable to a new hardware issue, dubbed CacheOut (CVE-2020–0549), that could let attackers leak sensitive data from OS kernel, VMs and even from SGX enclave. :-o.

Researchers demonstrated a new speculative execution vulnerability, dubbed ‘CacheOut’ assigned CVE-2020–0549, in Intel processors that could allow attackers to leak targeted sensitive data from OS kernel, co-resident virtual machines, and even stored within Intel’s secured SGX enclave.