Tag: technology

Scientists want to use human engineering to solve climate change

A few days ago, the Wall Street Journal held an event called the “Tech Health Conference.” During the event, one reporter had a question for the head of Google’s “Health Division,” a man called David Feinberg.  

Why, the reporter asked, was Google censoring searches for information about the possibility that COVID had escaped from a laboratory in China? Feinberg began by admitting the premise of the question. Yes, Google was in fact hiding information from its users, he effectively conceded. But it was for their own good. According to Feinberg, Google didn’t want to, “lead people down pathways that we would find to be not authoritative information.”  Authoritative information. You’ve heard that phrase a lot in the last year, and phrases like it. “Authoritative information” is the opposite of “misinformation” — or worse, a “conspiracy theory.”  

It’s really important. All you’re allowed to see is authoritative information. So it’s worth knowing in this and many other cases, what is it? And where exactly did Google get its so-called “authoritative information.” In this case, it came from a group led by a noted man of science called Peter Daszak. If the name sounds familiar, Peter Daszak is the person who almost single-handedly stopped virtually all public speculation about the lab leak early in the pandemic. Daszak did this in one swoop by organizing a letter to The Lancet — one of the top scientific publications — stating as fact that there was no possibility the coronavirus could have come from the lab in Wuhan. No chance. Many people believed him and they stopped looking. It was in The Lancet, after all. Almost no one asked why Peter Daszak might be saying this.  

We now know the answer: Peter Daszak himself was funding research on bat coronaviruses in Wuhan, using U.S. taxpayer dollars, supplied by Tony Fauci. According to one grant Fauci approved, Daszak was authorized to conduct quote, “virus infection experiments across a range of cell cultures from different species and humanized mice.”  

Why humanized mice? Well, because they mimic humans. Daszak and his collaborators wanted to make viruses more infectious to people. He didn’t hide this. In December 2019, Daszak appeared on a podcast on YouTube — which is owned by Google — to brag about how easy it is to manipulate bat coronaviruses. 

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ENGINEERED ICE AGE: Congress funds NOAA scientist for geoengineering project to cool the Earth by artificially dimming the sun

During the last ice age, huge masses of ice covered the northern U.S., Canada, northern Europe and northern Asia. All that ended around 12,000 years ago, but we could be closer to another one than you think now that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has received funds from congress for a controversial geoengineering project that aims to cool our planet.

David Fahey, the director of NOAA’s Earth System Research Laboratory Chemical Sciences Division, reportedly told staff that the federal government wished to examine the science behind geoengineering, something he described as a “Plan B” for climate change. Along with $4 million in funding, he was given the go-ahead to study two methods of geoengineering.

The first approach entails injecting sulfur dioxide or another aerosol into the stratosphere to shade the planet from more intense sunlight. This concept is modeled after what occurs naturally when volcanic eruptions emit huge clouds of sulfur dioxide that have the effect of cooling the earth. In the second approach, an aerosol of sea salt particles would be used to enhance the power of low-lying clouds over the ocean to serve as shade.

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See the light: Philips Hue smart bulbs can be hacked and used to install malware

We’ve all heard the horror stories of hackers remotely steering smart cars off the road, but even the smallest of smart devices can lead to big problems if they’re not monitored carefully.

This was on full display when a flaw was discovered that exposed the home networks of people using the very popular Philips Hue smart bulbs. Researchers from cyber security firm Check Point revealed how a bug enabled them to infiltrate the bulbs with a drone that hovers outside a building. They were able to gain access to the bulbs as well as the control bridge that leads to the users’ network, which means it is possible to compromise a person’s home network or even that of a business or smart city using the bulbs.

To infiltrate the users’ network, the researchers exploited a previously discovered bug that Philips hadn’t fixed that allowed them to control aspects of the bulb like brightness and color. After lowering and raising the brightness or changing the color to trick the user into believing the bulb had a glitch, the user would then reset the product by deleting it from their app and then attempting to rediscover it. However, once they rediscovered the compromised bulb, it was able to offload malware onto the control bridge. The users’ home network is linked to this central hub, which means the malware or spyware could infect the entire network.

Check Point Research Head of Cyber Research Yaniv Balmas said: “Many of us are aware that IoT devices can pose a security risk, but this research shows how even the most mundane, seemingly ‘dumb’ devices such as light bulbs can be exploited by hackers and used to take over networks or plant malware.”

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Texas Residents Had the Temperature Raised on Their Smart Thermostats Without Their Knowledge During a Heat Wave

Texas residents had the temperature in their homes raised on their web-connected smart thermostats without their permission during a heat wave.

Prior to their home temperatures being raised to 78 degrees, the state’s electricity operators had warned of another round of power shortages due to people running their air conditioners too much.

“The Big Brother temperature manipulation comes after the Texas energy grid failed this past winter when rolling blackouts left millions without power and 700 dead during February’s devastating winter storms,” the Daily Mail noted.

The report continues on to explain that “it turns out, people had handed over control of their thermostats – at least some people not realizing it – when they signed up for a sweepstakes called ‘Smart Savers Texas’ operated by a company called Energy Hub. The sweepstakes entered them into a contest to win free electricity for a year.”

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Chinese scientists get male rats to give BIRTH by conjoining them with females and transplanting a uterus in ‘vile Frankenscience’ study

A male rat in China has given birth by Caesarean section after a ‘vile’ experiment that involved joining it to a female rat and transplanting a uterus.

Scientists from the Naval Medical University in Shanghai said the experiment may have ‘a profound impact on reproductive biology.’ 

They did not spell out the implications for humans but it comes after studies exploring the possibility of transplanting a uterus into transgender women. 

The team joined a male and female rat together by attaching their skin and sharing their blood, then transplanting a uterus into the male and implanting embryos into both male and female rats.

The embryos were allowed to develop to term, that is 21.5 days, with ten successful pups out of 27 ‘normal’ embryos in the male delivered by Caesarean section.

Those went on to live into adulthood and were able to reproduce, suffering no wider ill effects to heart, lung or liver, the team explained. 

The scientists said: ‘A mammalian animal model of male pregnancy was constructed by us.’ However, PETA’s Senior Science Policy Advisor, Emily McIvor, called the study ‘frankenscience’ and ‘vile’. 

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The demonstration of hydrodynamic cloaking and shielding at the microscale

Researchers at Technion—Israel Institute of Technology, Technische Universität Darmstadt, and IBM Research Europe have recently proposed a new strategy to simultaneously achieve microscale hydrodynamic cloaking and shielding. While the idea of cloaking or shielding objects has been around for some time now, in contrast with other previously developed methods the technique they proposed allows physicists to dynamically switch between these two states.

“When we started with our research, we were aware of work in this direction that is based on porous metamaterials,” Steffen Hardt, who led the research team at TU Darmstadt, told Phys.org. “Our idea was that you do not need such metamaterials if you can inject momentum in a region around the object to be cloaked/shielded. Effectively, this means that you superpose the external flow field by some tailor-made local flow field. As a result, the total flow field (external and local one) comes out such that cloaking or shielding is achieved.”

As part of their previous studies, the researchers developed methods to locally inject momentum using what is known as electroosmotic flow (i.e., motion of liquids typically induced by an applied voltage across a porous material or other fluid conduits). The key objective of their new study was to demonstrate a new method to cloak/shield objects in a fluid flow and make this functionality real-time adaptive, as previously proposed approaches based on metamaterials are not.

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Canon Installs Smile Recognition Technology In Chinese Offices; Employees Can Only Enter Rooms If They Smile

Canon has reportedly installed “smile recognition” technology in the offices of its Chinese subsidiary, with employees only permitted to enter rooms or book meetings if they are smiling.

The AI-backed technology was first reported by The Financial Times, on the subject of how Chinese corporations are tracking employees with the help of cutting-edge technology.

As The Verge noted, “Firms are monitoring which programs employees use on their computers to gauge their productivity; using CCTV cameras to measure how long they take on their lunch break; and even tracking their movements outside the office using mobile apps.”

“Workers are not being replaced by algorithms and artificial intelligence. Instead, the management is being sort of augmented by these technologies,” King’s College London academic Nick Srnicek told The Financial Times. “Technologies are increasing the pace for people who work with machines instead of the other way around, just like what happened during the industrial revolution in the 18th century.”

Canon first announced its “Smiley Face” intelligent ecosystem in October 2020.

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Space Force launches a top secret ‘space domain awareness’ satellite into orbit from the bottom of a jet in first project by mystery ‘Space Safari’ unit

The U.S. Space Force successfully launched into orbit a ‘space domain awareness’ military satellite that it designed and built in less than a year, under a significantly tighter timeframe than what’s usual for space launches. 

The satellite, dubbed Odyssey, is the first launch of the Space Force’s secret, special projects unit. Odyssey hitched a ride inside a Northrop Grumman Pegasus rocket fixed to the bottom of a modified ‘Stargazer’ L-1011 carrier jet and launched from California‘s Vandenberg Space Force Base early Sunday morning. 

The hush-hush mission is the Space Force’s first trial with condensing the timeline it typically takes to launch vehicles into space. 

According to a press release from aerospace and defense company Northrop Grumman, it ‘seeks to introduce speed, agility, and flexibility into the launch enterprise in order to respond to dynamic changes in the space domain.’ 

As its guinea pig, the Space Force used Odyssey, which is a surveillance satellite used to detect foreign objects floating in space.

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Major Scientific Leap: Quantum Microscope Created That Can See the Impossible

In a major scientific leap, University of Queensland researchers have created a quantum microscope that can reveal biological structures that would otherwise be impossible to see.

This paves the way for applications in biotechnology, and could extend far beyond this into areas ranging from navigation to medical imaging.

The microscope is powered by the science of quantum entanglement, an effect Einstein described as “spooky interactions at a distance.”

UQ’s quantum microscope, ready to zero in on previously impossible-to-see biology. Credit: The University of Queensland

Professor Warwick Bowen, from UQ’s Quantum Optics Lab and the ARC Centre of Excellence for Engineered Quantum Systems (EQUS), said it was the first entanglement-based sensor with performance beyond the best possible existing technology.

“This breakthrough will spark all sorts of new technologies — from better navigation systems to better MRI machines, you name it,” Professor Bowen said.

“Entanglement is thought to lie at the heart of a quantum revolution. We’ve finally demonstrated that sensors that use it can supersede existing, non-quantum technology.

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