Tag: technology

CRISPR Fried Chicken: Genetically Engineered Hens Made to Kill Their Male Chicks

One of the atrocities of industrialized agriculture is the egg industry’s killing of male chicks. Each year, more than 6 billion male chicks are killed worldwide, up to 300 million of them in the U.S.1 The reasoning behind this abhorrent practice is at the root of what is wrong with corporate agriculture — egg-laying hens are bred to lay eggs, and nothing more.

Because males cannot produce eggs, and don’t grow enough meat to make them useful for human consumption (as opposed to broiler chickens, bred to grow unnaturally large), they would cost more to raise than they would be “worth.” With complete disregard for life, egg producers therefore “cull” the males, or kill them off, shortly after birth, sending them to be used as pet feed, livestock feed or simply filler for landfills.

A team of Israeli scientists has now filed a concept patent that involves genetically engineering hens to pass on a lethality, or killer, gene to male embryos, which would eliminate them before they hatch.2 While it’s clear that the practice of killing male chicks must end, this biotech “solution” could end up creating far more problems than it solves.

GE Hens Pass on Lethal Gene to Male Embryos

The patent, which was filed with the State of Israel Ministry of Agriculture & Rural Development listed as the applicant, and Yuval Cinnamon and Enbal Ben-Tal Cohen as the inventors,3 uses the gene-editing tool CRISPR, or Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeat, to insert a foreign gene — the lethality gene — into the male sex Z chromosome.4

The genetically engineered (GE) hen would pass the lethality gene — which is supposed to only be activated by blue light — onto all male embryos. Once the eggs are laid, blue light would then be used to activate the lethality gene and kill all of the male embryos in-ovo, or in the egg.

This will likely be presented as a more “humane” approach, but it comes with significant risks, including to the hen, because the lethality gene is likely to produce highly toxic protein. According to GM Watch:5

“In order to ensure reliable killing of the male chick embryos at an early stage of their development, the lethality gene that the developers insert will have to be highly toxic.

The various lethality-inducing proteins mentioned in the patent that are supposed to work by inhibiting growth/development (paragraphs 0156, 0157) or essential signalling pathways, such as “bone morphogenetic protein antagonist” or “RNA-guided DNA endonuclease enzyme” (paragraphs 0159, 0160), may be too uncertain in their effects.

Therefore the developer will almost certainly choose to use a known highly toxic element — such as genes encoding for diphtheria toxin or ricin toxin, both of which are specifically mentioned in paragraph 0158 as possible candidates for the lethal gene.

The fact that the authors illustrate their concept using a diphtheria toxin lethality gene, albeit within the context of in vitro tissue culture cell experiments (Figure 24A), supports this line of thinking.”

Further, the patent does not restrict the lethal gene to the types named, which means the scientists could use virtually anything, such as a gene encoding cholera toxin.

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Google plots to curb the effectiveness of ad-blockers

It’s common for corporations to take actions that ultimately are to the detriment of most consumers and Google is one of the world’s biggest. The tech giant is making changes to its Chrome Web Store, specifically an end to supporting Manifest v2 (Mv2) extensions, which will make it more difficult for adblockers to operate.

Currently, Mv2 supports all extensions on the Chrome Web Store, including ad-blocker extensions such as uBlock Origin, Privacy Badger, etc. Ad-blockers are extremely popular features of the Chrome Web Store with millions of currently active users due to their functionality in blocking ads and maintaining privacy. However, starting in January 2023, Google will shift from Mv2 to Mv3, making most of these popular features obsolete.

The shift wouldn’t make it entirely impossible to adapt existing extensions; however, Mv3 would certainly reduce the functionality of ad-blockers and limit innovation in the ad blocking space.

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A Google employee warns that the company’s AI has become sentient

A senior artificial intelligence (AI) software engineer at Google has claimed that the company’s AI robotics system has become sentient and has thoughts and feelings.

Google’s AI system, known as the Language Model for Dialogue Applications (LaMDA), allegedly took part in a series of complex conversations with Blake Lemoine, the 41-year-old software specialist, the Daily Mail reported.

Lemoine claimed that he and LaMDA had discussions that covered religious themes and whether the AI system could be goaded into using discriminatory language or other forms of distasteful rhetoric.

The software engineer came away with the belief that LaMDA was indeed sentient and was filled with sensations and original thoughts of its own design.

In a recent interview, Lemoine said, “If I didn’t know exactly what it was, which is this computer program we built recently, I’d think it was a 7-year-old, 8-year-old kid that happens to know physics.”

In order to present the evidence he had collected that detailed LaMDA’s sentience, Lemoine worked with a collaborator and presented the findings to the company. Reportedly, Google’s vice president Blaise Aguera y Arcas and the company’s head of Responsible Innovation, Jen Gennai, dismissed the claims and concerns.

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Wickr, Amazon’s encrypted chat app, has a child sex abuse problem — and little is being done to stop it

Wickr Me, an encrypted messaging app owned by Amazon Web Services, has become a go-to destination for people to exchange images of child sexual abuse, according to court documents, online communities, law enforcement and anti-exploitation activists.

It’s not the only tech platform that needs to crack down on such illegal content, according to data gathered by the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children, or NCMEC. But Amazon is doing comparatively little to proactively address the problem, experts and law enforcement officials say, attracting people who want to trade such material because there is less risk of detection than in the brighter corners of the internet.

NBC News reviewed court documents from 72 state and federal child sexual abuse or child pornography prosecutions where the defendant allegedly used Wickr (as it’s commonly known) from the last five years in the United States, United Kingdom and Australia, using a combination of private and public legal and news databases and search engines. Nearly every prosecution reviewed has resulted in a conviction aside from those still being adjudicated. Almost none of the criminal complaints reviewed note cooperation from Wickr itself at the time of filing, aside from limited instances where Wickr was legally compelled to provide information via a search warrant. Over 25 percent of the prosecutions stemmed from undercover operations conducted by law enforcement on Wickr and other tech platforms. 

These court cases only represent a small fraction of the problem, according to two law enforcement officers involved in investigating child exploitation cases, two experts studying child exploitation and two people who have seen firsthand how individuals frequently use Wickr and other platforms for criminal transactions on the dark web. They point to direct knowledge of child exploitation investigations and sting operations, interviews with victims and perpetrators of abuse, and interactions with individuals soliciting child sexual abuse material as evidence that Wickr is being used by many people who exploit children.  

Posts linking Wickr and child sexual abuse material are also littered across the internet. On social media platforms such as Reddit, Tumblr and Twitter, NBC News found dozens of forums, accounts and blogs where hundreds of posts have been made soliciting minors, those who have access to them, or those interested in trading child sexual abuse material alongside Wickr screen names. No child sexual abuse imagery was viewed in the course of reporting this article.

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Scientists have crafted living skin for robots, further blurring the line between human and machine

Technologies are blurring the line between human and machine. Now, scientists are taking the next step: developing human-like skin for robots.

Though it sounds like the stuff of science fiction, in a study published Thursday in the journal Matter, researchers described how they developed skin tissue for robots that looks and moves just like ours. “We have shown that living skin tissue can be used as a coating material for robots,” Shoji Takeuchi, an engineer at the University of Tokyo and lead author of the study, told Insider. “This result has the potential to make robots look more human-like.” 

To craft the skin, the team first submerged a robotic finger in a cylinder filled with a solution of collagen and fibroblasts — two main components that make up skin, the human body’s largest organ. Using living cells also endows robots with the biological functions of skin, such as its ability to self-repair and repel water.

The research team sees a variety of potential uses for this technology, like helping engineers create more nimble and human-like prosthetics and aiding in the development of cosmetics and pharmaceuticals for skin.  

According to Takeuchi, the “skin” is 1.5 mm in thickness (or 0.06 inches) and made only of epidermis and dermis — the top two layers of skin in the human body. “It does not look perfectly like skin,” Takeuchi said, adding that it lacks some advanced skin features like sensory neurons, hair follicles, nails, and sweat glands. “However, as the robot moves, the skin stretches and contracts, revealing wrinkles; my personal impression is that it is much more realistic than silicone,” Takeuchi said. According to him, silicone is currently the preferred material used to craft artificial robotic skin.

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THE BROOKLYN HOLOGRAM STUDIO RECEIVING MILLIONS FROM THE CIA

LAST SUMMER, Looking Glass Factory, a company based in the Greenpoint neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York, revealed its latest consumer device: a slim, holographic picture frame that turns photos taken on iPhones into 3D displays. Linus Sebastian, an affable YouTube personality behind the immensely popular technology channel Linus Tech Tips, gave his viewers a preview of the technology.

Sebastian praised the Looking Glass Portrait as “freaking awesome,” especially considering the progress the company had made since Sebastian had toured their office two years earlier, after $2.5 million in money from a Kickstarter campaign. “For the price, for the amount of development work, and how niche this thing is, it honestly looks like a pretty compelling value for the right customer,” marveled Sebastian. “Which raises the questions, who is that exactly?”

Sebastian suggested the product would be a perfect fit for those who wanted to “flex” with a novelty piece of artwork or a designer seeking to preview their own work.

But Looking Glass Factory’s other customers went unmentioned in any of the splashy coverage of the new device: the Central Intelligence Agency and the Department of Defense. The military was interested in holographic technology, but the price was a potential obstacle. “The high cost of assembling holographic display devices are restraining market growth,” noted International Defense Security & Technology, a trade publication, last year. One of the growing players in the market, IDST added, is Looking Glass Factory.

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Robotic Crab Tinier than a Flea Becomes the Smallest-ever Remote-controlled Robot

The remarkable record-breaking micro machine was developed by engineers at Northwestern University and comes in the form of a tiny peekytoe crab. The same team also developed millimeter-sized robots resembling inchworms, crickets, and beetles.

Although the research is exploratory at the moment, they believe the technology might bring the field of robotics closer to realizing micro-sized robots that can perform practical tasks inside tightly confined spaces. The researchers also produced a winged microchip last year that was the smallest-ever human-made flying structure.

“Robotics is an exciting field of research, and the development of microscale robots is a fun topic for academic exploration,” says bioelectronics pioneer Professor John Rogers, who led the experimental work, in a university release.

“You might imagine micro-robots as agents to repair or assemble small structures or machines in industry or as surgical assistants to clear clogged arteries, to stop internal bleeding or to eliminate cancerous tumors — all in minimally invasive procedures.”

“Our technology enables a variety of controlled motion modalities and can walk with an average speed of half its body length per second,” adds Yonggang Huang, who led the theoretical work. “This is very challenging to achieve at such small scales for terrestrial robots.”

Smaller than a flea, the crab is not powered by complex hardware, hydraulics, or electricity. Instead, Prof. Rogers explains that its power lies within the elastic resilience of its body.

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First Patient Dosed With Experimental Cancer-Killing Virus in New Trial

Scientists dosed the first patient this week in a small clinical trial of an experimental cancer treatment—one that relies on a novel kind of ally. The treatment uses a virus engineered to selectively kill cancer cells, while also amplifying the body’s immune response to the cancer. The hope is that this therapy can help those with advanced solid tumor cancers, in combination with other existing drugs.

The CF33-hNIS virus, also called Vaxinia, was originally created by researchers at the City of Hope National Medical Center in California. It’s now being jointly developed with the company Imugene Limited.

Vaxinia is billed as an oncolytic virus, meaning it prefers to target and infect tumor cells. Scientists have been hopeful about using these kinds of viruses to directly kill off cancer cells for more than a century, but with limited success so far. In recent years, some teams have decided to explore a slightly different plan of attack. This genetically modified virus not only infects and harms cancer cells, but also forces these cells to become more recognizable to the immune system.

This strategy, the researchers hope, will then allow other treatments that also boost our immune response to cancer cells to be more effective, particularly against hard-to-target solid tumors. These treatments are collectively known as immunotherapy. In early animal and lab experiments, the virus has been shown to reduce the size of colon, lung, breast, ovarian, and pancreatic cancer tumors.

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Scientists ‘really surprised’ after gene-editing experiment unexpectedly turn hamsters into hyper-aggressive bullies

A team of neuroscience researchers was left “really surprised” after a gene-editing experiment unexpectedly created hyper-aggressive hamsters, according to a statement by Georgia State University (GSU).

The GSU research, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), set out to find more about the biology behind the social behavior of mammals.

The scientists used Syrian hamsters and CRISPR-Cas9 — a revolutionary technology that makes it possible to turn on or off genes in cells. The technology knocked out a receptor of vasopressin — a hormone associated with enhanced aggression.

The scientists anticipated that doing so would “dramatically” alter the social behavior of the Syrian hamsters, making them more peaceful. It did change their behavior, but not how they had expected.

“We were really surprised at the results,” said the study’s lead author, GSU professor H. Elliott Albers, in the university’s statement.

“We anticipated that if we eliminated vasopressin activity, we would reduce both aggression and social communication,” Albers continued. “But the opposite happened.”

The hamsters without the receptor displayed “high levels of aggression” towards hamsters of the same sex compared to their counterparts with the receptors intact, the study said.

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Your iPhone Is Vulnerable to Hacking Even When Turned Off

A new report has revealed that iPhones are vulnerable to malware attacks even when they’re turned off.

Wired reports that according to a recent study from researchers at Germany’s Technical University of Darmstadt, iPhone devices are still vulnerable to malware attacks even when powered off. When turning an iPhone off, chips inside the device still run in a low-power state making it possible to locate the lost or stolen device using the Find My app.

Now, researchers have developed a method to run malware on iPhones even when the devices appear to be powered off. The Bluetooth chip in all iPhones has no way to digitally sign or encrypt the firmware it runs, researchers have now developed a method to exploit the lack of security on the chip and run malicious firmware allowing the researchers to track the iPhone’s location or run new features.

In a recently published paper, the researchers studied the risk posed by chips running in a low-power mode that allows chips responsible for NFC, ultra-wideband, and Bluetooth to run in a more that can remain active for 24 hours after a device is turned off.

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