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Malware researchers discovered a new malicious campaign for Android devices that replaces legitimate apps with tainted copies built to push advertisements or hijack valid ad events.

Around 25 million devices have already been infected with what researchers have dubbed “Agent Smith,” after users installed an app from an unofficial Android store.

https://paper.li/e-1437691924#/


Forms of Transhumanism

Transhumanism takes a variety of overlapping forms united around a common commitment to use science and technology to improve human intellect and/or physiology. Many, though not all, are committed to Posthumanism; others focus on artificial intelligence and its implications for human life. All of them raise important worldview questions, though not always the same ones.

One early form of Transhumanism was Extropianism. The name comes from the neologism extropy, a word intended to convey the reversal of entropy. Its focus is on using science, technology, and reason to take control of human evolution through life extension technologies, uploading our minds into computers, etc. An optimistic philosophy, Extropianism expected to extend human lifespans indefinitely and to recover and heal people frozen cryogenically.

Carbon dioxide is kind of painted as the villain of the 21st century, and it’s not enough to just reduce our emissions now – we need to remove some of what’s already in the atmosphere. Now, researchers at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) have developed a simple way to turn the troublesome gas into a useful resource by converting it into the “wonder” material graphene.

Virgin Galactic is preparing to become the first publicly traded spaceflight company, and the venture is setting a course to be profitable by August 2021, which would put it lightyears ahead of the profitability projections of another transportation-based company that simply moves people around on Earth: Uber.

The Wall Street Journal reports that Virgin Galactic is merging with Social Capital Hedosophia Holdings (SCH), which will take a 49 percent stake and invest about $800 million into the space tourism endeavor.

A new robot arm can help people who use wheelchairs better handle the day-to-day tasks that might otherwise be too challenging or awkward.

The Jaco, a robotic arm made by the tech company Kinova Robotics, can attach to a wheelchair and operate as a sort of third arm, according to Digital Trends — helping people with limited mobility go about their lives with a greater degree of independence.

The technical challenges are not as daunting as the social and diplomatic ones, says bioengineer Kevin Esvelt at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Media Lab in Cambridge, who was among the first to build a CRISPR-based gene drive. “Technologies like this have real-world consequences for people’s lives that can be nearly immediate.”


Altering the genomes of entire animal populations could help to defeat disease and control pests, but researchers worry about the consequences of unleashing this new technology.

Astrophysicists at Western University have found evidence for the direct formation of black holes that do not need to emerge from a star remnant. The production of black holes in the early universe, formed in this manner, may provide scientists with an explanation for the presence of extremely massive black holes at a very early stage in the history of our universe.

Shantanu Basu and Arpan Das from Western’s Department of Physics & Astronomy have developed an explanation for the observed distribution of supermassive black hole masses and luminosities, for which there was previously no scientific explanation. The findings were published today by Astrophysical Journal Letters.

The model is based on a very simple assumption: supermassive black holes form very, very quickly over very, very short periods of time and then suddenly, they stop. This explanation contrasts with the current understanding of how stellar-mass black holes are formed, which is they emerge when the centre of a very massive star collapses in upon itself.

Some of you are going to want to use this tech.


In a new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers from University of Toronto have demonstrated a novel and non-invasive way to manipulate cells through microrobotics.

Cell manipulation—moving small particles from one place to another—is an integral part of many scientific endeavours. One method of manipulating is through optoelectronic tweezers (OET), which use various light patterns to directly interact with the object of interest.

Because of this direct interaction, there are limitations to the force that can be applied and speed in which the cellular material can be manipulated. This is where the use of microrobotics becomes useful.