Tag: technology

Mastercard just outlined its digital ID push

At the Authenticate 2022 event, Mastercard SVP of Digital Identity Sarah Clark detailed the company’s digital ID plans. Clark detailed Mastercard’s plans for a digital ID network at a presentation on “Use of FIDO in a Reusable Digital Identity Network.”

The network is aimed at individuals who already have a government-issued ID. Mastercard plans to create a network through which digital IDs can be reused online, for in-person interactions, through calls and other channels.

The company claims that the network is fully operational in two markets and active in seven markets across the globe. The company has launched a digital identity in Brazil and helped the Australian government develop the TDIF, a framework for the development of digital identity services.

According to Clark, there are opportunities for digital ID systems because of the poor user experiences most people have with traditional ID systems. She also claimed that digital ID could help combat cyber fraud.

The system, called “ID,” does not require a password; it uses biometrics. The user owns their own digital ID, making it decentralized, store it on their smartphone, and only show it to a party that has requested it.

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United States Government Has Plans of Creating an AI that Can Expose Anonymous Writers

According to a recent announcement by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), the Intelligence Advanced Projects Activity (IARPA) is developing a program to unmask anonymous writers. IARPA will use AI to analyze anonymous writers’ style. According to Cindy Harper of Reclaim the Net, a writer’s style “is seen as potentially being as unique as a fingerprint.” 

“Humans and machines produce vast amounts of text content every day. Text contains linguistic features that can reveal author identity,” IARPA stated.

If IARPA succeeds with its venture, it believes that the Human Interpretable Attribution of Text Using Underlying Structure (HIATUS) program could identify a writer’s style from multiple samples and change those patterns to increase the anonymization of the writing. 

“We have a strong chance of meeting our goals, delivering much-needed capabilities to the Intelligence Community, and substantially expanding our understanding of variation in human language using the latest advances in computational linguistics and deep learning,” declared HIATUS program manager Dr. Timothy McKinnon.

On top of that, IARPA said it will create explainability standards for the program’s AIs.

ODNI revealed that HIATUS could have several applications, which includes fighting foreign influence activities, defending writers whose work may potentially endanger them, and identifying counterintelligence risks. Per McKinnon, the program can identify if a machine generated or a human being wrote the text.

However, Harper noted that “it is not IARPA’s work to turn HIATUS into something usable. The agency’s work is only to develop the technology.” Regardless, it’s becoming clear that the ruling class has it in for anonymous writers and those who use pen names. 

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Sign of the End? Lab-Grown Human Brain Cells ‘Exhibit Sentience’ When Scientists Teach Them to Play Pong

According to the 1991 blockbuster “Terminator 2: Judgment Day,” Skynet was supposed to have become self-aware 25 years ago, on August 29, 1997.

I know this because I took my wife to see “Terminator 2: Judgement Day” on our honeymoon … which shows you just how self-aware I was in 1991. It’s amazing she’s stuck with me for so long. But I digress.

Skynet, of course, was the huge national-defense artificial intelligence network that kept sending terminator androids back in time so that they could fail to kill Sarah Connor and her son, John. I thought of the film immediately when I saw that Australian scientists recently taught lab-grown brain cells to play Pong.

Now that I write that down, I can see how some might consider it a stretch. Stay with me, here.

According to this report, which does not appear to have been peer-reviewed prior to its publication yesterday, a culture of 800,000 stem-cell-derived human brain cells and embryo-derived mouse brain cells displayed limited “sentience,” in the sense that they were “responsive to sensory impressions.”

The researchers called their human-mouse-brain-hybrid “DishBrain” — and there’s a sentence I never thought I’d write.

“DishBrain offers a simpler approach to test how the brain works, and gain insights into debilitating conditions such as epilepsy and dementia,” Cortical Labs CEO Dr. Hon Weng Chong explained. KOAM described Cortical Labs as a biotech start-up.

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Ratman: Human Brain Cells Grown In Rats

Scientists have transplanted human brain cells into the brains of baby rats, where the cells grew and formed connections.

It’s part of an effort to better study human brain development and diseases affecting this most complex of organs, which makes us who we are but has long been shrouded in mystery.

“Many disorders such as autism and schizophrenia are likely uniquely human” but “the human brain certainly has not been very accessible,” said said Dr. Sergiu Pasca, senior author of a study describing the work, published Wednesday in the journal Nature.

Approaches that don’t involve taking tissue out of the human brain are “promising avenues in trying to tackle these conditions.”

The research builds upon the team’s previous work creating brain “organoids,” tiny structures resembling human organs that have also been made to represent others such as livers, kidneys, prostates, or key parts of them.

To make the brain organoids, Stanford University scientists transformed human skin cells into stem cells and then coaxed them to become several types of brain cells. Those cells then multiplied to form organoids resembling the cerebral cortex, the human brain’s outermost layer, which plays a key role in things like memory, thinking, learning, reasoning and emotions.

Scientists transplanted those organoids into rat pups 2 to 3 days old, a stage when brain connections are still forming. The organoids grew so that they eventually occupied a third of the hemisphere of the rat’s brain where they were implanted. Neurons from the organoids formed working connections with circuits in the brain.

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DARPA and NIH-Funded MIT Researchers Create ‘Stickers that Can See Inside the Body’

A team of researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has created a proof-of-concept for a new “ultrasound sticker,” which is the size of a stamp and is able to provide continuous ultrasound imagining of a person’s internal organs for up to 48 hours. The stickers, which utilize hydrogel in order to function, currently require a wired connection to instruments, but future iterations will function wirelessly.

“Currently, ultrasound imaging requires bulky and specialized equipment available only in hospitals and doctor’s offices,” MIT notes in a press release describing the ultrasound sticker. “But a new design by MIT engineers might make the technology as wearable and accessible as buying Band-Aids at the pharmacy.”

To create their ultrasound sticker the researchers, who outlined their design and prototype in a closed-access paper in Science, paired a “stretchy adhesive layer” with “a rigid array of transducers.” Transducers are electronic devices that convert energy from one form to another—in this instance, by sending sound waves into a human body, which, in turn, echo off internal organs and return back where the echoed signals are translated into visual images.

In order for the ultrasound echoes to work, however, they must travel through a liquid gel, which acts as a conductive medium that creates a bond between the skin and the ultrasound transducer. In this instance, the researchers chose hydrogel as the conductive medium. Hydrogel, for those unfamiliar, is a crosslinked three-dimensional polymeric network structure, which can absorb and retain considerable amounts of water. It’s used to make, for example, the kinds of lipid nanoparticles (LNPs) used to deliver the COVID-19 mRNA “vaccines.”

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CIA Funding Wooly Mammoth De-Extinction Company

While the CIA is not generally known for dealing with ancient animals, the agency is one of the multiple entities financially backing Dallas-based biotechnology company Colossal Biosciences, which is trying to bring the wooly mammoth back from extinction.

Other individuals and groups with investments in the company include Peter Thiel, Tony Robbins, Paris Hilton and Winklevoss Capital.

“Biotechnology and the broader bioeconomy are critical for humanity to further develop. It is important for all facets of our government to develop them and have an understanding of what is possible,” Colossal co-founder Ben Lamm told The Intercept.

In-Q-Tel, Colossal’s new investor, is registered as a nonprofit venture capital firm funded by the CIA, according to The Intercept, which said that recently the firm had shown an interest in biotechnology and DNA sequencing.

In-Q-Tel published a blog post on September 22, which said: “Why the interest in a company like Colossal, which was founded with a mission to “de-extinct” the wooly mammoth and other species? Strategically, it’s less about the mammoths and more about the capability.”

It said that “leadership in biotechnology will allow the U.S. to help set the ethical, as well as the technological, standards for the use of this technology.”

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Biologists Create a New Type of Human Cells

Professor Vincent Pasque and his colleagues at KU Leuven have used stem cells to create a new kind of human cell in the lab. The new cells closely mirror their natural counterparts in early human embryos. As a result, scientists are better able to understand what occurs just after an embryo implants in the womb. The was recently published in the journal Cell Stem Cell.

A human embryo implants in the womb around seven days after fertilization if everything goes correctly. Due to technological and ethical constraints, the embryo becomes unavailable for study at that point. That is why scientists have already created stem cell models for various kinds of embryonic and extraembryonic cells in order to investigate human development in a dish.

Vincent Pasque’s team at KU Leuven has developed the first model for a specific type of human embryo cells, extraembryonic mesoderm cells. Professor Pasque: “These cells generate the first blood in an embryo, help to attach the embryo to the future placenta, and play a role in forming the primitive umbilical cord. In humans, this type of cell appears at an earlier developmental stage than in mouse embryos, and there might be other important differences between species. That makes our model especially important: research in mice may not give us answers that also apply to humans.”

The model cells were created by the researchers using human stem cells, which can still grow into all cell types in an embryo. The new cells closely resemble their natural counterparts in human embryos and hence serve as an excellent model for that cell type.

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US government plans to develop AI that can unmask anonymous writers

The Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) said that the Intelligence Advanced Projects Activity (IARPA) is working on a program to unmask anonymous writers by using AI to analyze their writing style which is seen as potentially being as unique as a fingerprint.

“Humans and machines produce vast amounts of text content every day. Text contains linguistic features that can reveal author identity,” IARPA said.

If successful, IARPA believes the Human Interpretable Attribution of Text Using Underlying Structure (HIATUS) program could identify a writer’s style from different samples and modify those patterns to further anonymize the writing.

“We have a strong chance of meeting our goals, delivering much-needed capabilities to the Intelligence Community, and substantially expanding our understanding of variation in human language using the latest advances in computational linguistics and deep learning,” said HIATUS program manager Dr. Timothy McKinnon.

IARPA said that it will also develop explainability standards for the program’s AIs.

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Genetically Modified Mosquitoes Vaccinate a Human

A box full of genetically modified mosquitoes successfully vaccinated a human against malaria in a trial funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

The study involved about 200 hungry mosquitos biting a human subject’s arm. Human participants placed their arms directly over a small box full of the bloodsuckers.

“We use the mosquitoes like they’re 1,000 small flying syringes,” said researcher Dr. Sean Murphy, as reported by NPR.

Three to five “vaccinations” took place over 30-day intervals.

The mosquitoes gave minor versions of malaria that didn’t make people sick, but gave them antibodies. Efficacy from the antibodies lasted a few months.

“Half of the individuals in each vaccine group did not develop detectable P. falciparum infection, and a subset of these individuals was subjected to a second CHMI 6 months later and remained partially protected. These results support further development of genetically attenuated sporozoites as potential malaria vaccines,” researchers concluded.

Carolina Reid was one of twenty-six participants in the study.

“My whole forearm swelled and blistered. My family was laughing, asking like, ‘why are you subjecting yourself to this?’”

Reid enjoyed her experience so much that she says she wants to participate in as many vaccine trials as she can. For this research, each participant received $4,100 as an incentive.

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Israel explains remote-controlled checkpoint gun

The Israeli army has installed a remote-controlled gun turret in the Palestinian city of Hebron in the West Bank, saying it’s to be used for crowd dispersal.

The sci-fi-looking style is positioned at a checkpoint on Shuhada Street, a protest hotspot in the city, Haaretz reported at the weekend.

The system, which is currently being tested, can fire stun grenades, tear gas and sponge-tipped bullets, while being controlled by a remote operator.

“As part of the army’s improved preparations for confronting people disrupting order in the area, it is examining the possibility of using remotely controlled systems for the employment of approved measures of crowd dispersal,” a military spokesman told the Israeli paper.

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