Facial recognition technology is likely not as safe as you may have thought. This was illustrated by a recent test where 3D printed busts of peoples’ heads were used to unlock smartphones.
Out of five tested phones, only one refused to open when presented with the fake head.
Other biometric security measures are also showing less resilience to hacking than you might expect. A group of Japanese researchers recently showed it was possible to copy a person’s fingerprints from pictures like the ones many of us post on social media.
Front Microbiol. 2018 Sep 27;9:2338. doi: 10.3389/fmicb.2018.02338. eCollection 2018.
Influenza A virus causes periodic outbreaks and seriously threatens human health. The drug-resistant mutants have shown an epidemic trend because of the abuse of chemical drugs. Aloe polysaccharides (APS) extracted from Aloe vera leaves have evident effects on the therapy of virus infection. However, the activity of APS in anti-influenza virus has yet to be investigated. Here, we refined polysaccharides from A. vera leaf. In vitro test revealed that APS could inhibit the replication of a H1N1 subtype influenza virus, and the most obvious inhibitory effect was observed in the viral adsorption period. Transmission electron microscopy indicated that APS directly interacted with influenza virus particles. Experiments on PR8 (H1N1) virus infection in mice demonstrated that APS considerably ameliorated the clinical symptoms and the lung damage of the infected mice, and significantly reduced the virus loads and mortality.
Successfully coronavirus treatment on a critically ill 71-year woman.
Thai doctors have declared the use of anti-flu and AIDS drugs a success in reducing symptoms of coronavirus patients after using them on a Chinese woman.
Two doctors from Rajavithi Hospital in Bangkok — Dr Kriangsak Atipornwanich, an expert physician, and Assoc Prof Dr Subsai Kongsangdao, a specialist — said at a briefing in Bangkok that improvements were seen in the 71-year-old woman 48 hours after administering the two groups of medications.
The woman was admitted first to Hua Hin Hospital and then transferred to Rajavithi Hospital on Jan 29.
“The previous laser prototype was tested in the Persian Gulf three years ago aboard an amphibious the USS Ponce,” said Col Mikhail Khodarenok, former editor of the Military-Industrial Courier.
Artificial intelligence and robotics architectures are often inspired by patterns occurring in nature, both in humans and animals. Patterns of movement observed in animals have been replicated in robots via a number of shape-changing mechanisms such as chemical swelling, skin stretching or origami morphing.
Researchers at Seoul National University’s Soft Robotics Research Center in South Korea and the Rebikoff-Niggeler Foundation (FRN) in Portugal have recently developed a robotic architecture structurally inspired by the pelican eel, a species of fish that lives in the deep sea. Their architecture, presented in a paper published in Science Robotics, is among the latest of a series of designs inspired by animals or naturally occurring phenomena.
“Over the past few years, we have been working on several bio-inspired robots, including the water strider-inspired water-jumping robot published in Science, as well as origami-inspired transformable robots and soft robots,” Prof. Kyujin Cho, corresponding author and lead researcher for the study, told TechXplore. “Our research on stretchable origami can be considered as an integration of our previous works.”
On Friday we wrote about Samsung’s mysterious “artificial human” project Neon, speculating that the company was building realistic human avatars that could be used for entertainment and business purposes, acting as guides, receptionists, and more.
Now, a tweet from the project’s lead and some leaked videos pretty much confirm this — although they don’t give us nearly enough information to judge how impressive Neon is.
The lead of Neon, computer-human interaction researcher Pranav Mistry, tweeted the image below, apparently showing one of the project’s avatars. Mistry says the company’s “Core R3” technology can now “autonomously create new expressions, new movements, new dialog (even in Hindi), completely different from the original captured data.”
Using data from NASA’s Parker Solar Probe (PSP), a team led by Southwest Research Institute identified low-energy particles lurking near the Sun that likely originated from solar wind interactions well beyond Earth orbit. PSP is venturing closer to the Sun than any previous probe, carrying hardware SwRI helped develop. Scientists are probing the enigmatic features of the Sun to answer many questions, including how to protect space travelers and technology from the radiation associated with solar events.
“Our main goal is to determine the acceleration mechanisms that create and transport dangerous high-energy particles from the solar atmosphere into the solar system, including the near-Earth environment,” said Dr. Mihir Desai, a mission co-investigator on the Integrated Science Investigation of the Sun (IS?IS) instrument suite, a multi-institutional project led by Principal Investigator Prof. Dave McComas of Princeton University… IS?IS consists of two instruments, Energetic Particle Instrument-High (EPI-Hi) and Energetic Particle Instrument-Low (EPI-Lo). “With EPI-Lo, we were able to measure extremely low-energy particles unexpectedly close to the solar environment. We considered many explanations for their presence, but ultimately determined they are the smoking gun pointing to interactions between slow- and fast-moving regions of the solar wind that accelerate high-energy particles from beyond the orbit of Earth.
Researchers at Tel Aviv University have for the first time demonstrated the backflow of optical light propagating forward. The phenomenon, theorized more than 50 years ago by quantum physicists, has never before been demonstrated successfully in any experiment—until now.
“This ‘backflow’ phenomenon is quite delicate and requires exquisite control over the state of a particle, so its demonstration was hindered for half a century,” explains Dr. Alon Bahabad of the Department of Physical Electronics at TAU’s School of Electrical Engineering, who led the research for the study.
“This phenomenon reveals an unintuitive behavior of a system comprised of waves, whether it’s a particle in quantum mechanics or a beam of light. Our demonstration could help scientists probe the atmosphere by emitting a laser beam and inducing a signal propagating backward toward the laser source from a given point in front of the laser source. It’s also relevant for cases in which fine control of light fields is required in small volumes, such as optical microscopy, sensing and optical tweezers for moving small particles,” Dr. Bahabad says.
