Tag: technology

The Semiconductor Industry Is Coming for Your Wallet — As Usual, Congress Is Complicit

Of all the problems in the world right now, the chip shortage probably isn’t the chief concern for most people, but that doesn’t mean it’s not a serious issue. The auto and tech sectors have faced unprecedented delays and rising prices in recent months. Some used cars are even selling for more than their new counterparts because of the delays, a sure sign that production has slowed dramatically.

To address this, Congress is contemplating bipartisan legislation known as the Chips Act, which would provide $52 billion in grants and $24 billion in tax credits to the US semiconductor industry. Thanks to a last-minute bipartisan amendment, the bill will also put tens of billions of dollars toward various federal agencies, bringing the total price tag to $250 billion.

Because why not…

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Why Facebook May Have Your Medical Records

By now, most people are aware that if they “like” a certain page on Facebook, it gives the social media giant information about them.

“Like” a page about a particular disease, for instance, and marketers may begin to target you with related products and services.

Facebook may be collecting sensitive health data in far more insidious ways as well, however, including tracking you when you’re on hospital websites and even when you’re in a personal, password-protected health information portal like MyChart.

It does this via pixels, which may be installed without your knowledge on websites you visit. They can collect information about you as you browse the web, even if you don’t have a Facebook account.

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Engineers Have Created ‘Small-Scale’ Soft Robots That Can Crawl Around a Stomach and Deliver Drug ‘Cargo’

In a new study published in Science Advances a team of engineers at The Chinese University of Hong Kong outlines how it has created small-scale soft robots capable of multimodal locomotion, drug cargo delivery, and the ability to tolerate exposure to acid. A prime use case for the small-scale robots—which are tens of millimeters across depending on their shape—is, according to the engineers, “for biomedical applications that involve operation in the stomach such as gastric ulcer treatment.” As a proof-of-concept for the study, the researchers even had one of the small, soft robots roll around in an ex vivo pig’s stomach and apply a “therapy patch.”

In their study the engineers describe how their small-scale robots utilize a “modular soft magnetic architecture” with individual parts of the robots containing magnetic microparticles that each have their own prescribed magnetization profiles—that is, they each respond to their own type of magnetic field depending on the directionality of the field.

These “modular magnetization units” are embedded into a “network of adhesive sticker layers” in order to form the soft robots, which are capable of taking on either 2D or 3D shapes. “Functional” modules consisting of different materials, and having different shapes—e.g., particles, papers, films, foams, and electronic components—can then be “seamlessly integrated” into the small-scale robots.

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Over 1,600 of the Brightest Scientific Minds in Technology Have Signed a Letter Calling Both Crypto and Blockchain a Sham

The letter is a punch in the gut to the Wall Street underwriters who have brought billions of dollars of crypto related companies to the public markets, most of which have now collapsed in price. It makes the billionaire venture capitalists who have invested billions in crypto startups look like fools. And it renders the big-name celebrities who have promoted this garbage in TV commercials look like the shills that they are.

The letter was sent to key members of Congress and to the Chairs of the Senate Banking and House Financial Services Committees. It is signed by more than 1,600 computer scientists, software engineers and technologists from around the world. There are 45 signatories who currently work at Google; 19 who work at Microsoft; 11 employed at Apple. (Those three companies currently have a collective market capitalization of more than $5.75 trillion; they can afford to hire the best and the brightest.) There are signatories that are Ph.Ds from the most prestigious universities in the world, including the University of Oxford and MIT. And all 1,600 have signed a letter that says this about crypto and blockchain:

“We strongly disagree with the narrative—peddled by those with a financial stake in the crypto-asset industry—that these technologies represent a positive financial innovation and are in any way suited to solving the financial problems facing ordinary Americans…

“As software engineers and technologists with deep expertise in our fields, we dispute the claims made in recent years about the novelty and potential of blockchain technology. Blockchain technology cannot, and will not, have transaction reversal or data privacy mechanisms because they are antithetical to its base design. Financial technologies that serve the public must always have mechanisms for fraud mitigation and allow a human-in-the-loop to reverse transactions; blockchain permits neither.”

The letter links to an article from Bruce Schneier, a Security Technologist who teaches at the Harvard Kennedy School. The article appeared at Wired on February 6, 2019 under the headline: “There’s No Good Reason to Trust Blockchain Technology.” The article makes the following salient points:

“What blockchain does is shift some of the trust in people and institutions to trust in technology. You need to trust the cryptography, the protocols, the software, the computers and the network. And you need to trust them absolutely, because they’re often single points of failure.

“When that trust turns out to be misplaced, there is no recourse. If your bitcoin exchange gets hacked, you lose all of your money. If your bitcoin wallet gets hacked, you lose all of your money. If you forget your login credentials, you lose all of your money. If there’s a bug in the code of your smart contract, you lose all of your money. If someone successfully hacks the blockchain security, you lose all of your money. In many ways, trusting technology is harder than trusting people. Would you rather trust a human legal system or the details of some computer code you don’t have the expertise to audit?”

Losing your money is mostly what has been going on this year in crypto. In addition to crypto itself being a dubious “investment,” the Federal Trade Commission reported in June that “since the start of 2021, more than 46,000 people have reported losing over $1 billion in crypto to scams. That’s about one out of every four dollars reportedly lost to fraud during that period.” (For more on the perils of crypto investing, see our report on how customers on the Coinbase crypto exchange are being victimized.)

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FDA-Approved Brain Computer Interface Company “Synchron” Implants First Brain Device in US Patient

New York-based Synchron, the startup behind an FDA ‘breakthrough neuroprosthesis device,’ successfully implanted its first brain device in a patient in the US earlier this month, Bloomberg first reported.

According to the news outlet, a doctor at Mount Sinai West Medical Center in New York inserted a “1.5-inch-long implant consisting of wires and electrodes into a blood vessel in the brain of an ALS patient” on July 6.

In August 2020, Synchron becomes the first brain-computer interface (BCI) company to receive the FDA’s approval to conduct an investigational device exemption (IDE) clinical trial of a permanently implanted device.

NIH awarded Synchron $10 million to begin a US trial of a brain implant that allows users to manage digital apps using only their thoughts, as reported by Fierce Biotech.

“Our neuroprosthetics are designed to help people get their lives back by restoring lost functions,” Synchron wrote on its website.

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The quantum internet has taken a major step forward

The development of a so-called quantum internet may have just seen a significant breakthrough, experts have declared. 

Research from a team Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, Canada published in the scientific journal Nature(opens in new tab) provides proof of principle that T centers, a specific luminescent defect in silicon, can provide a ‘photonic link’ between qubits (quantum computing’s counterpart to the binary digit or bit of classical computing).

As successfully harnessing quantum technology would benefit from communications technology that enables these qubits to link together at scale, this could be a huge step forward.

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FACIAL RECOGNITION SEARCH ENGINE PULLS UP “POTENTIALLY EXPLICIT” PHOTOS OF KIDS

ABUSIVE PARENTS SEARCHING for kids who have fled to shelters. Governments targeting the sons and daughters of political dissidents. Pedophiles stalking the victims they encounter in illicit child sexual abuse material.

The online facial recognition search engine PimEyes allows anyone to search for images of children scraped from across the internet, raising a host of alarming possible uses, an Intercept investigation has found.

Often called the Google of facial recognition, PimEyes search results include images that the site labels as “potentially explicit,” which could lead to further exploitation of children at a time when the dark web has sparked an explosion of images of abuse.

“There are privacy issues raised by the use of facial recognition technology writ large,” said Jeramie Scott, director of the Surveillance Oversight Project at the Electronic Privacy Information Center. “But it’s particularly dangerous when we’re talking about children, when someone may use that to identify a child and to track them down.”

Over the past few years, several child victim advocacy groups have pushed for police use of surveillance technologies to fight trafficking, arguing that facial recognition can help authorities locate victims. One child abuse prevention nonprofit, Ashton Kutcher and Demi Moore’s Thorn, has even developed its own facial recognition tool. But searches on PimEyes for 30 AI-generated children’s faces yielded dozens of pages of results, showing how easily those same tools can be turned against the people they’re designed to help.

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‘CRISPR 2.0’ Used To Change Patient’s DNA For First Time

Scientists are rewriting the code of life with a new technology that promises to cure inherited diseases by precisely correcting genetic typos. Known as base editing, the technology empowers researchers to pick a single letter amongst the three billion that compose the human genome, erase it, and write a new letter in its place.

Base editing is an updated version of the gene editing tool CRISPR, which has revolutionized life sciences research and is making strides in treating genetic blood and liver diseases. But some scientists think base editing, sometimes billed as CRISPR 2.0, could be safer and more precise than the original. And this summer, the sequel technology is being used in patients for the first time.

On Tuesday, the Boston biotech firm Verve Therapeutics announced that it had edited the DNA of a person with a genetic condition that causes high cholesterol and predisposes them to heart disease. The base editor is designed to tweak a gene in the liver, curtail the accumulation of cholesterol, and hopefully lower the risk of heart attacks.

Verve chief executive and cofounder Sekar Kathiresan likens the approach to “surgery without a scalpel.” Although the trial is focused on people with the genetic condition familial hypercholesterolemia, Kathiresan hopes that the one-and-done therapy may one day be used more broadly, to permanently reduce the risk of heart disease in millions of people with high cholesterol. “We are completely trying to rewrite how this disease is cared for,” he said.

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Japan Wants to Bring Artificial Gravity to the Moon

Interest in the Moon has been reignited recently, and Japan is looking to get in on the fun. Researchers and engineers from Kyoto University and the Kajima Corporation have released their joint proposal for a three-pronged approach to sustainable human life on the Moon and beyond.

The future of space exploration will likely include longer stays in low gravity environments, whether in orbit or on the surface of another planet. Problem is, long stays in space can wreak havoc on our physiology; recent research shows that astronauts can suffer a decade of bone loss during months in space, and that their bones never return to normal. Thankfully, researchers from Kyoto University and the Kajima Corporation are seeking to engineer a potential solution.

The proposal, announced in a press release last week, looks like something ripped straight from the pages of a sci-fi novel. The plan consists of three distinct elements, the first of which, called “The Glass,” aims to bring simulated gravity to the Moon and Mars through centrifugal force.

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