Month: May 2023
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Supreme Court Limits EPA’s Authority Under the Clean Water Act – yay, trash the USA!
The U.S. Supreme Court Court on Thursday significantly curtailed the power of the Environmental Protection Agency to regulate the nation’s wetlands and waterways. It was the court’s second decision in a year limiting the ability of the agency to enact anti-pollution regulations and combat climate change. The challenge to the regulations was brought by Michael…
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Virgin Galactic flies final test before opening for business
At 0915 Mountain Time (1515 UTC), the VMS Eve mothership took off from New Mexico’s Spaceport America, carrying its spacecraft to an altitude of 44,500 feet (over 13.5km). Pilots on VSS Unity, which rides along with VMS Eve, then fired its rockets to take its six passengers even higher – to 54.2 miles (over 87.2km)…
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New superbug-killing antibiotic discovered using AI
Scientists have used artificial intelligence (AI) to discover a new antibiotic that can kill a deadly species of superbug. The AI helped narrow down thousands of potential chemicals to a handful that could be tested in the laboratory. The result was a potent, experimental antibiotic called abaucin, which will need further tests before being used.…
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Google bans Downloader app after TV firms complain it can load a pirate website – Firefox, Opera, IE, Chrome, Safari: look out!
The Google Play Store suspended an app that combines a web browser with a file manager after a Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) complaint pointed out that the app is capable of loading a piracy website—even though that same pirate website can be loaded on any standard browser, including Google Chrome. The free app, which…
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Brute-force attack bypasses Android biometric fingerprint defense
Chinese researchers say they successfully bypassed fingerprint authentication safeguards on smartphones by staging a brute force attack. Researchers at Zhejiang University and Tencent Labs capitalized on vulnerabilities of modern smartphone fingerprint scanners to stage their break-in operation, which they named BrutePrint. Their findings are published on the arXiv preprint server. A flaw in the Match-After-Lock…
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A Paralyzed Man Can Walk Naturally Again With ML Brain and Spine Implants
Gert-Jan Oskam was living in China in 2011 when he was in a motorcycle accident that left him paralyzed from the hips down. Now, with a combination of devices, scientists have given him control over his lower body again. “For 12 years I’ve been trying to get back my feet,” Mr. Oskam said in a…
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SkyFi lets you order up fresh satellite imagery in real time with a click
Commercial Earth-observation companies collect an unprecedented volume of images and data every single day, but purchasing even a single satellite image can be cumbersome and time-intensive. SkyFi, a two-year-old startup, is looking to change that with an app and API that makes ordering a satellite image as easy as a click of a few buttons…
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Samsung Display demos long rollable and a health-sensing OLED
The Rollable Flex is an interesting new flexible screen from Samsung Display that can be unrolled from just 49mm to 254.4mm, over five times its length. The display is being shown off at the annual Display Week trade show in Los Angeles alongside another Samsung panel that the company says offers fingerprint and blood pressure…
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Samsung’s new Sensor OLED display can read fingerprints anywhere on the screen
Samsung has unveiled a new display technology that could lead to new biometric and health-related capabilities in future phones and tablets. The tech giant has debuted what it calls the Sensor OLED Display that can read your fingerprints regardless of what part of the screen you touch at this year’s SID Display Week in LA.…
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Meta’s open-source speech AI recognizes over 4,000 spoken languages | Engadget
Meta has created an AI language model that (in a refreshing change of pace) isn’t a ChatGPT clone. The company’s Massively Multilingual Speech (MMS) project can recognize over 4,000 spoken languages and produce speech (text-to-speech) in over 1,100. Like most of its other publicly announced AI projects, Meta is open-sourcing MMS today to help preserve…
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Establishing a wildflower meadow bolstered biodiversity and reduced greenhouse gas emissions, study finds
A new study examining the effects of planting a wildflower meadow in the historic grounds of King’s College, Cambridge, has demonstrated its benefits to local biodiversity and climate change mitigation. The study, led by King’s Research Fellow Dr. Cicely Marshall, found that establishing the meadow had made a considerable impact to the wildlife value…
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Brain waves can tell us how much pain someone is in
Brain signals can be used to detect how much pain a person is experiencing, which could overhaul how we treat certain chronic pain conditions, a new study has suggested. The research, published in Nature Neuroscience today, is the first time a human’s chronic-pain-related brain signals have been recorded. It could aid the development of personalized…
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Meta ordered to suspend Facebook EU data flows as it’s hit with record €1.2BN privacy fine under GDPR – 10 years and 3 court cases later
[…] Today the European Data Protection Board (EDPB) announced that Meta has been fined €1.2 billion (close to $1.3 billion) — which the Board confirmed is the largest fine ever issued under the bloc’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). (The prior record goes to Amazon which was stung for $887 million for misusing customers data…
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HP Can’t Fix Bricked Printers After Faulty Firmware Update which bricked non HP-ink cartridges
Last week the Telegraph reported that a recent firmware update to HP printers “prevents customers from using any cartridges other than those fitted with an HP chip, which are often more expensive. If the customer tries to use a non-HP ink cartridge, the printer will refuse to print.” Some HP “Officejet” printers can disable this…
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How a 35-year-old weed smoker behind 10 million scam calls made his fortune
Millions of people get phone calls from scammers and wonder who is at the other end. Now we know: rather than someone in a call centre far away, a “bright young man” living in a lush flat in London has been unmasked as the mastermind behind so many of these calls. Tejay Fletcher’s trial exposed…
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Online age verification is coming, and privacy is on the chopping block
A spate of child safety rules might make going online in a few years very different, and not just for kids. In 2022 and 2023, numerous states and countries are exploring age verification requirements for the internet, either as an implicit demand or a formal rule. The laws are positioned as a way to protect…
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The Supreme Court’s Warhol decision could have huge copyright implications for ‘fair use’, apparently made by blind judges
The Supreme Court has ruled that Andy Warhol has infringed on the copyright of Lynn Goldsmith, the photographer who took the image that he used for his famous silkscreen of the musician Prince. Goldsmith won the justices over 7-2, disagreeing with Warhol’s camp that his work was transformative enough to prevent any copyright claims. In…
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Automakers Are Making Basic Car Functions A Costly Subscription Service… Whether You Like It Or Not
Automakers are increasingly obsessed with turning everything into a subscription service in a bid to boost quarterly returns. We’ve noted how BMW has embraced making heated seats and other features already in your car a subscription service, and Mercedes has been making better gas and EV engine performance something you have to pay extra for…
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Logitech partners with iFixit for self-repairs
Hanging on to your favorite wireless mouse just got a little easier thanks to a new partnership between Logitech and DIY repair specialists iFixit. The two companies are working together to reduce unnecessary e-waste and help customers repair their own out-of-warranty Logitech hardware by supplying spare parts, batteries, and repair guides for “select products.” Everything…
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Human DNA can be pulled from the air: A Boon For Science, While Terrifying Others
Environmental DNA sampling is nothing new. Rather than having to spot or catch an animal, instead the DNA from the traces they leave can be sampled, giving clues about their genetic diversity, their lineage (e.g. via mitochondrial DNA) and the population’s health. What caught University of Florida (UoF) researchers by surprise while they were using…
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The ‘invisible’ cellulose coatings that mitigate surface transmission of pathogens (kills covid on door handles)
Research has shown that a thin cellulose film can inactivate the SARS-CoV-2 virus within minutes, inhibit the growth of bacteria including E. coli, and mitigate contact transfer of pathogens. The coating consists of a thin film of cellulose fiber that is invisible to the naked eye, and is abrasion-resistant under dry conditions, making it suitable…
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LLM emergent behavior written off as rubbish – small models work fine but are measured poorly
[…] As defined in academic studies, “emergent” abilities refers to “abilities that are not present in smaller-scale models, but which are present in large-scale models,” as one such paper puts it. In other words, immaculate injection: increasing the size of a model infuses it with some amazing ability not previously present. […] those emergent abilities…
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Fallout continues from fake net neutrality comments
Three digital marketing firms have agreed to pay $615,000 to resolve allegations that they submitted at least 2.4 million fake public comments to influence American internet policy. New York Attorney General Letitia James announced last week the agreement with LCX, Lead ID, and Ifficient, each of which was found to have fabricated public comments submitted…
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Ex-Ubiquiti engineer behind “breathtaking” data theft, attempts to frame co-workers, calls it a security drill, assaults stock price: 6-year prison term
An ex-Ubiquiti engineer, Nickolas Sharp, was sentenced to six years in prison yesterday after pleading guilty in a New York court to stealing tens of gigabytes of confidential data, demanding a $1.9 million ransom from his former employer, and then publishing the data publicly when his demands were refused. […] In a court document, Sharp…
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Fake scientific papers are alarmingly common and becoming more so
When neuropsychologist Bernhard Sabel put his new fake-paper detector to work, he was “shocked” by what it found. After screening some 5000 papers, he estimates up to 34% of neuroscience papers published in 2020 were likely made up or plagiarized; in medicine, the figure was 24%. Both numbers, which he and colleagues report in a…
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