Tag: technology

University COVID App Mandates Are The Wrong Call

As students, parents, and schools prepare the new school year, universities are considering ways to make returning to campus safer. Some are considering and even mandating that students install COVID-related technology on their personal devices, but this is the wrong call. Exposure notification apps, quarantine enforcement programs, and similar new technologies are untested and unproven, and mandating them risks exacerbating existing inequalities in access to technology and education. Schools must remove any such mandates from student agreements or commitments, and further should pledge not to mandate installation of any technology.

Even worse, many schools—including Indiana University, UMass Amherst, and University of New Hampshire—are requiring students to make a general blanket commitment to installing an  unspecified tracking app of the university’s choosing in the future. This gives students no opportunity to assess or engage with the privacy practices or other characteristics of this technology. This is important because not all COVID exposure notification and contact tracing apps, for example, are the same. For instance, Utah’s Healthy Together app until recently collected not only Bluetooth proximity data but also GPS location data, an unnecessary privacy intrusion that was later rolled back. Google and Apple’s framework for exposure notification based on Bluetooth is more privacy-protective than a GPS-based solution, but the decision to install it or any other app must still be in the hands of the individuals affected.

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Will travel be safer by 2022?

It’s 2022 and you’ve just arrived at the travel destination of your dreams. As you get off the plane, a robot greets you with a red laser beam that remotely takes your temperature. You’re still half asleep after a long transoceanic flight, so your brain barely registers the robot’s complacent beep. You had just passed similar checks when boarding the plane hours ago so you have nothing to worry about and can just stroll to the next health checkpoint.

As you join the respiratory inspection queue, a worker hands you a small breathalyser capsule with a tiny chip inside. Conceptually, the test is similar to those measuring drivers’ alcohol levels, but this one detects the coronavirus particles in people’s breath, spotting the asymptomatic carriers who aren’t sick but can infect others. By now you know the drill, so you diligently cough into the capsule and drop it into the machine resembling a massive microwave. You wait for about 30 seconds and the machine lights up green, chiming softly. You may now proceed to immigration, so you fumble for your passport and walk on.

These technologies may sound like science fiction, yet they are anything but. If you had travelled earlier this year when countries began locking down, you may have already spotted the remote infrared thermometers used in airports. However, while thermometers are helpful, they aren’t ideal. People can have fevers for others reasons or may harbour coronavirus without symptoms. To spot early infections or asymptomatic carriers, one has to check for the coronavirus particles in their breath.

That’s where the breathalyser comes in. You haven’t yet seen it at transit hubs, but it already exists at the photonics lab of Gabby Sarusi, professor at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Israel. When Covid-19 struck and hospitals worldwide struggled to build fast and accurate biological diagnostic tests, Sarusi looked at the problem differently. As a physicist, he viewed the coronavirus’ spiky sphere not as a biological agent but as a nano-sized particle that can be sensed by specialised electrical equipment. When tossed into the midst of an electromagnetic field, the particles cause certain “interference” to the flow of electromagnetic waves, which can be detected. That’s what happens when the capsule is dropped into the microwave-resembling machine.

“We are taking the chip inside the capsule and we’re measuring it with a spectrometer that’s radiated with the magnetic waves,” Sarusi explained. If coronavirus particles are present, he said, “we can sense the shift.”

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The Tool That Took Over Twitter

If you were staring at your Twitter feed last week, you probably saw a bunch of famous people and brands post a Bitcoin wallet address, asking people to send in money. 

Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Apple, Jeff Bezos, Kanye West, Uber, Wiz Khalifa, Floyd Mayweather, were all among 130 accounts that hackers took control of in a brazen hack. 

Joseph Cox was the first to report that the hackers had pulled off the hack leveraging an internal Twitter tool used by company employees. The New York Times later confirmed the story, talking directly to some of the hackers involved. 

On this week’s CYBER, we spoke to Joseph, who broke down how the hack actually happened, and what we can all learn from it.

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Meet the man trying to send a warning about history’s worst tragedies back to 1935

For about a decade, Joe Davis has been trying to send a message into space. This message is not intended for potential intelligent alien listeners, though. He’s already sent two signals into the void for them. He hopes that this communiqué will reach humans. On Earth. Ideally around 1935.

The dispatch, which Davis calls Swansong, is at its simplest a one-hour Morse code transmission listing numerous pandemics, natural disasters, genocides, and other tragedies that humans failed to mitigate or prevent between 1935 and 2011. The idea is to send it towards Cygnus X-1, a black hole over 6,000 lightyears from Earth, in order to slingshot the signal off of its time-distorting edge, into the past, and back towards us. If the gambit works, the Swansong project could, as Davis put it in his notes for a 2017 presentation on the idea, “be used to break the wheel of time.”

It’s easy to brush Swansong off as an outlandish idea, especially when you know that Davis is not a trained scientist. He earned a BA in creative arts in 1973 from the now-defunct Mount Angel College in Oregon, then moved back to Mississippi, where he’d grown up, and started working blue collar jobs, usually with machines. (He reportedly used his art and machine skills to design his own prosthetic after losing a leg.) In recent decades, he’s struggled to make ends meet as an artist, taking dishwashing gigs to help cover basic expenses — and occasionally failing to do so, facing eviction, and sleeping on friends’ couches or in his truck for days or weeks on end.

But Davis’s lack of credentials and material success do not reflect his intellectual capabilities. As an undergrad in the early 70’s, he reportedly got permission from notorious innovation hub Bell Laboratories to use their laser rigs to carve acrylic, glass, and plastic, publishing his techniques in an academic journal. Then, while working as a laborer, he drew up designs for an electron gun that NASA agreed to launch on its space shuttle to conduct an experiment that could have theoretically produced artificial northern lights. (Despite the agreement, theproject, dubbed Ruby Falls, never got off the ground due to a NASA budget shortfall.) And in 1982, he talked his way into a meeting with the head of MIT’s Center for Advanced Visual Studies, outlined his Ruby Falls plan and several other ideas, and walked out a research fellow. He’s been affiliated with MIT ever since.

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MACHINES CAN LEARN UNSUPERVISED ‘AT SPEED OF LIGHT’ AFTER AI BREAKTHROUGH, SCIENTISTS SAY

Researchers have achieved a breakthrough in the development of artificial intelligence by using light instead of electricity to perform computations.

The new approach significantly improves both the speed and efficiency of machine learning neural networks – a form of AI that aims to replicate the functions performed by a human brain in order to teach itself a task without supervision.

Current processors used for machine learning are limited in performing complex operations by the power required to process the data. The more intelligent the task, the more complex the data, and therefore the greater the power demands.

Such networks are also limited by the slow transmission of electronic data between the processor and the memory.

Researchers from George Washington University in the US discovered that using photons within neural network (tensor) processing units (TPUs) could overcome these limitations and create more powerful and power-efficient AI.

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THE SAME COMPANY 3D PRINTING KFC’S MEAT NUGGETS IS PRINTING HUMAN TISSUE IN SPACE AS WELL

It’s been a wild weekend for Russian startup 3D Bioprinting Solutions.

First, the company announced a partnership with fast food chain KFC as part of an effort to create the “world’s first laboratory-produced chicken nuggets.”

Now, the same company is ready to announce that it’s been hard at work bringing similar tech into orbit as well.

In an experiment on board the International Space Station that took place in 2018 but has only now been published, Russian cosmonaut Oleg Kononoenko was tasked to 3D print human cartilage cells in near-zero gravity using a machine called “Bioprinter Organ.Aut,” as Space.com reports — a machine assembled by, you guessed it, 3D Bioprinting Solutions.

The goal was to investigate ways to reverse some of the negative effects of spending prolonged periods of time in space, in particular evidence that parts of the human body can atrophy over time — something we’ve known about for quite some time.

The eventual hope is to give astronauts the ability to print entire body parts in space, according to the researchers — just in case something goes catastrophically wrong during a mission.

A paper about the research was published in the journal Science Advances last week.

This New, Non-Cuttable Material Is Virtually Indestructible

A new material called Proteus is billed as just 15 percent the density of steel, but completely resistant to being cut through. That means cyclists around the world may be blessed with truly inviolable locks for the first time ever.

People who want to steal the outdoor furniture from restaurant patios will have to cut the furniture now instead of the cable lock. Most importantly, TV writers will have to work even harder to make it seem easy to get into a locked electrical storage or nuclear facility.

Researchers in Germany and the U.K. have teamed up to make a material they say uses harmony and vibration to thwart any attempts to cut it. “Our architecture derives its extreme hardness from the local resonance between the embedded ceramics in a flexible cellular matrix and the attacking tool, which produces high-frequency vibrations at the interface,” they explain in their paper.

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