Lifeboat Foundation

“We’re sorry this happened,” Facebook said in a statement after disclosing yet another privacy failing.

Facebook said on Friday in a developer-focused blog post that it had discovered a nasty bug in its photo software.

The bug allowed authorized app programmers to access photos that people had uploaded to Facebook but not publicly shared, as well as those posted on Facebook’s Marketplace software or Facebook Stories, the post said.

Continue reading “Facebook’s latest privacy scandal: The private photos of millions of users were accidentally shared with 1,500 apps” »

Transistors, superconductors, and chip design have all seen efficiency breakthroughs this year. So much so, that we may see the cold-running computer before too long.

Unilever, the multinational consumer goods manufacturer, uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to help with recruiting and onboarding of new employees. The algorithms help to sift through CVs and even conduct and analyze video interviews.

A team of researchers have just figured out how to play god, mastering the editing of DNA

Science.

Cytomegalovirus (CMV) is a β-herpesvirus that infects the majority of people in the world. It lies dormant in the body, waiting for an opportunity to strike when the immune system is weakened. This persistent virus infects people for their entire lives, and now researchers have discovered how the virus spreads, opening the door to ways to destroy it.

What is cytomegalovirus?

CMV is part of the β-subfamily of herpesviruses, which are believed to have been co-evolving with their hosts for around 180 million years [1]. CMV infection is asymptomatic; this means it causes no symptoms and is a latent infection; in other words, it lies dormant in the cell, awaiting activation under certain conditions [2].

There’s a positive correlation of assisted reproductive technologies with arterial hypertension. Epigenetics and hormone treatments with IVF are probable causes.

Assisted reproductive technologies (ART) have been shown to induce premature vascular aging in apparently healthy children. In mice, ART-induced premature vascular aging evolves into arterial hypertension. Given the young age of the human ART group, long-term sequelae of ART-induced alterations of the cardiovascular phenotype are unknown.

This study hypothesized that vascular alterations persist in adolescents and young adults conceived by ART and that arterial hypertension possibly represents the first detectable clinically relevant endpoint in this group.

Continue reading “Association of Assisted Reproductive Technologies With Arterial Hypertension During Adolescence” »

About the dinosaur wars…? Somehow I find this whole discussion to be debated in a pretty narrow-minded fashion and it renders it, at least to me, fairly useless.

Environmental influences are important, too, but they are largely unsystematic, unstable and idiosyncratic.

• By Robert Plomin on December 14, 2018

NASA’s newly arrived Mars lander has been spotted by one its orbiting cousins.

The space agency’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter used its supersharp High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment camera (HiRISE) to photograph the InSight lander, as well as the hardware that helped the stationary robot ace its Nov. 26 touchdown on the equatorial plain known as Elysium Planitia.

“It looks like the heat shield (upper right) has its dark outside facing down, since it is so bright (saturated, probably a specular reflection),” HiRISE principal investigator Alfred McEwen, of the University of Arizona, wrote in an image description today (Dec. 13). [Mars InSight in Photos: NASA’s Mission to Probe Core of the Red Planet].

Whether we will ever find a way to overcome the physiological trade offs that hold back immortality, or whether we will really be able to replicate human consciousness in a computer are questions too difficult for us yet to answer. But are those leading the charge against death at least inspiring us to lead healthy lives, or are they simply rallying against an inevitable fate?

Long read: How nature is fighting our attempts to use biohacking to live forever.