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Phoenix666 writes:

A new technique which delivers light deeper into human tissue than previously possible has been developed by researchers at the University of St Andrews and Harvard Medical School.

The new method, published in the journal Nature Communications, could help heal wounds faster and treat tumours more efficiently.

Through a process called photochemical tissue bonding, light is applied to a wound to stimulate healing. Until now this technique has been limited to treating superficial wounds. The researchers set out to develop a technology for tissue repair that would allow this method to be applied deeper in the human body.

The international team found a way to make biodegradable optical fibres which can be inserted into the body to deliver light to heal internal wounds locally, for example after surgery.

Traditionally, fibre-optic devices or catheters have been fabricated from glass or plastic and remain in the body permanently or until removed through further surgical intervention. However, the St Andrews-Harvard research team shows how fibres can be made from materials that will be reabsorbed into the body, eliminating the need for removal and the risk of damaging the newly-repaired tissue. This advancement will give doctors the power to heal from within without scarring.

Bioabsorbable polymer optical waveguides for deep-tissue photomedicine (open, DOI: 10.1038/ncomms10374)

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Anonymous Coward writes:

In a filing submitted to the FCC Google has stated that while concerns for health and environmental risks posed by Project Loon testing were 'genuinely held,' that 'there is no factual basis for them.' Google's filing attempts to address a wide range of complaints, from environmental concerns related to increased exposure to RF and microwave radiation, to concerns for loss of control and crashes of the balloons themselves. First, it states that its proposed testing poses no health or environmental risks, and is all well within the standards of experimentation that the FCC regularly approves. It also pledges to avoid interference with any other users of the proposed bandwidth, by collocating transmitters on shared platforms and sharing information kept current daily by an FCC-approved third party database manager.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Loon

Project Loon is a research and development project being developed by Google X with the mission of providing Internet access to rural and remote areas. The project uses high-altitude balloons placed in the stratosphere at an altitude of about 18 km (11 mi) to create an aerial wireless network with up to 4G-LTE speeds. It was named Project Loon, since Google itself found the very idea of providing internet access to the remaining 5 billion population unprecedented and "crazy."

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takyon writes:

A study of octopuses has found evidence of complex social behavior using color-changing camouflage:

Octopuses may have more complex social interactions than previously believed, a new study has found. Biologists studied a group of Sydney octopuses off Australia's east coast and observed a range of behaviour that may indicate complex social signalling.

Octopuses that stand tall, turn dark and spread their web in a "Nosferatu pose" are likely showing aggression. Conversely, octopuses may display a pale colour after losing a fight or when trying to avoid conflict.

It was previously believed that octopuses were largely solitary creatures. Changes to body colour and other behaviour were interpreted as tactics to avoid predators. But Prof Peter Godfrey-Smith said the unique study, based on 53 hours of footage and published on Friday in the journal Current Biology, provided a novel perspective on octopus behaviour.

[...] The researchers, based in Australia and the US, dubbed the stance the "Nosferatu pose", referring to the classic 1920s horror film, because the spread of the octopus's web was reminiscent of a vampire's cape.

Octopuses frequently turned pale while retreating from aggressors and also produced high-contrast patterns known as deimatic displays.
The contrasting patterns were most frequently observed when octopuses were attempting to return to their den after they had been forced out, or in the presence of an aggressive individual. "Suppose there's a large, aggressive guy there and you want to get back into our den, if you approach with a pale colour it could be interpreted as a non-confrontational behaviour," Prof Godfrey-Smith said.

The study also found that two octopuses displaying dark colours were likely to fight if in close proximity, while a darker-coloured octopus was likely to stand its ground against a lighter-coloured octopus. Another cephalopod, the cuttlefish, shows a similar set of features, with aggressive males darkening their faces and paler males withdrawing from fights.

Signal Use by Octopuses in Agonistic Interactions (open, DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2015.12.033)

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Phoenix666 writes:

James and Janet Baker spent nearly two decades building Dragon, a voice technology company, into a successful, multimillion-dollar enterprise. It was, they say, their "third child." So in late 1999, when offers to buy Dragon began rolling in, the couple made what seemed a smart decision: they turned to Goldman Sachs for advice. And why not? Goldman, after all, was the leading dealmaker on Wall Street. The Bakers wanted the best.

This, of course, was before the scandals of the subprime mortgage era. It was before the bailouts, before Occupy Wall Street, before ordinary Americans began complaining about "banksters" and "muppets" and "the vampire squid." In short, before Goldman Sachs became, for many, synonymous with Wall Street greed.

And yet, even today what happened next to the Bakers seems remarkable. With Goldman Sachs on the job, the corporate takeover of Dragon Systems in an all-stock deal went terribly wrong. Goldman collected millions of dollars in fees — and the Bakers lost everything when Lernout & Hauspie was revealed to be a spectacular fraud. L.& H. had been founded by Jo Lernout and Pol Hauspie, who had once been hailed as stars of the 1990s tech boom. Only later did the Bakers learn that Goldman Sachs itself had at one point considered investing in L.& H. but had walked away after some digging into the company.

Moral of the story: Never do business with a Wall Street bank.

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Quoth The Guardian:

Repeat after me: if you've done nothing wrong, you have nothing to hide...

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NotSanguine writes:

The New York Times is reporting on the impact of serious shortages in a wide variety of pharmaceuticals on the quality of health care in the United States.

In the article [semi-paywalled], Sheri Fink elucidates some of the more alarming details:

In recent years, shortages of all sorts of drugs — anesthetics, painkillers, antibiotics, cancer treatments — have become the new normal in American medicine. The American Society of Health-System Pharmacists currently lists inadequate supplies of more than 150 drugs and therapeutics, for reasons ranging from manufacturing problems to federal safety crackdowns to drugmakers abandoning low-profit products. But while such shortages have periodically drawn attention, the rationing that results from them has been largely hidden from patients and the public.

At medical institutions across the country, choices about who gets drugs have often been made in ad hoc ways that have resulted in contradictory conclusions, murky ethical reasoning and medically questionable practices, according to interviews with dozens of doctors, hospital officials and government regulators.

Some institutions have formal committees that include ethicists and patient representatives; in other places, individual physicians, pharmacists and even drug company executives decide which patients receive a needed drug — and which do not.

[Continues]

Phoenix666 writes:

The last time you went to a restaurant, what did you order? A plate of celery and radishes to start, perhaps? How about a pack of cigarettes or an alligator pear salad?

These things rarely make an appearance on restaurant tables today, but not so long ago, they were all common on American menus, as a massive collection of historical menus at the New York Public Library shows. After more than a century of collecting, the library has amassed more than 40,000 restaurant menus. About 18,000 of those menus, dating from 1851 to 2008, have been digitized and are available on the library's website.

[...] Others offer a snapshot of history. In addition to the menu above, from the Pan-American exhibition where President McKinley was assassinated, the collection includes the menu from McKinley's inauguration. It also includes the menu for a meal McKinley ate in 1899 while riding the Pennsylvania Railroad, a defunct railroad that most people will know from the game Monopoly. That menu includes interesting dishes like green turtle, broiled oysters on toast, and, of course, celery.

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

A Chinese ship equipped with advanced sonar equipment will soon join the search for the Malaysian airliner believed to have crashed in the southern Indian Ocean almost two years ago, an official said on Friday.

The Dong Hai Jiu 101 will leave Singapore on Sunday to join the hunt for Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 over a 120,000-square- kilometer (46,000-square-mile) expanse of deep seabed by late February, Australian Deputy Prime Minister Warren Truss said.

The ship brings the state-of-the-art Synthetic Aperture Sonar (SAS), which some experts say is more accurate than standard 75 kHz side-scan sonar devises that have been used to scan most of the area searched so far.

With standard acoustic sonar, the image becomes less clear the farther a seabed object is from the equipment. But with SAS, the image remains sharp regardless of an object's distance.

Original Submission

sudo rm -rf writes:

On his blog 'Schneier on Security', security expert and privacy advocate Bruce Schneier has some interesting thoughts about the IoT and legislative reaction resulting from it, and worries about what might happen if we rushed headlong into the "World Sized Web", as he calls it:

Original Submission

-- OriginalOwner_ writes:

Glyn Moody reports via TechDirt

Kuwait has the dubious honor of being the first nation to require everyone's DNA--including that of visitors to the country. The Kuwait Times has a frighteningly matter-of-fact article about the plan, which is currently being put into operation. Here's how the DNA will be gathered:

Collecting samples from citizens will be done by various mobile centers that will be moved according to a special plan amongst government establishments and bodies to collect samples from citizens in the offices they work in. In addition, fixed centers will be established at the interior ministry and citizen services centers to allow citizens [to] give samples while doing various transactions.

Those who are not citizens of Kuwait will be sampled when they apply for residence permits:

Collection will done on issuing or renewing residency visas through medical examinations done by the health ministry for new residency visas and through the criminal evidence department on renewing them.

As for common-or-garden[-variety] visitors to the country:

Collection will be done at a special center at Kuwait International Airport, where in collaboration with the Civil Aviation Department, airlines, and embassies, visitors will be advised on their rights and duties towards the DNA law.

[...] The DNA will not be used for medical purposes, such as checking for genetic markers of disease, which will avoid issues of whether people should be told about their predisposition to possibly serious illnesses. Nor will the DNA database be used for "lineage or genealogical reasons". That's an important point: a complete nation's DNA would throw up many unexpected paternity and maternity results, which could have massive negative effects on the families concerned. It's precisely those kinds of practical and ethical issues that advocates of wider DNA sampling and testing need to address, but rarely do.

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Phoenix666 writes:

31 nations this week signed a data-sharing agreement that will see multinational companies' financial reports shared widely, the better to understand their global financial contortions.

The Multilateral Competent Authority Agreement (MCAA) is an instrument of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) under its Base Erosion and Profit Shifting (BEPS) Action Plan. The agreement means that signatory nations will share multinational companies financial data filed in their jurisdiction with the other 30 participants.

That plan is all about trying to get multinationals to pay tax where they earn their revenue, instead of finding legal-but-cynical ways of finding better tax rates in other nations. Apple is obviously in governments' sights, thanks to its use of the infamous "Double Irish Dutch Sandwich" that sees money skip between nations and emerge less taxable. Microsoft Australia manages to book most sales through Singapore, so Australians send money to the city state despite never using Microsoft software in the city state. And Amazon.com struck a deal with Luxembourg to receive kinder tax treatment than was available elsewhere, despite conducting most of its European activities beyond the Grand Duchy.

OECD secretary general Angel Gurría hailed the deal, say that "Armed with this information, tax administrations are better placed to assess transfer pricing and other BEPS risks, and deploy audit resources where they will be most effective."

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hubie writes:

Death Valley is the lowest, driest, and hottest region in North America. In the middle of this valley is a 22 x 3.5 meter fissure in the rock named Devil's Hole that opens into a vast flooded cavern. In this dark, hot, and oxygen depleted water lives Cyprinodon diabolis, aka the pupfish. These particular fish have always been a mystery because they are a distinct species from the other pupfish in the region and it had been assumed they were deposited in Death Valley when the glaciers receded 10,000 years ago, but being so isolated they would not have expected to survive due to inbreeding. In a Proceedings of the Royal Society B paper (DOI: 10.1098/rspb.2015.2334) by Chris Martin of the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, he found that these fish are actually newcomers and this is an excellent demonstration of rapid species adaption.

To understand the fish's history, he and his colleagues sequenced DNA samples taken from C. diabolis that had died from natural causes, and compared the samples with archived DNA samples from other pupfish species that live in Death Valley.

Using mutation rates estimated from pupfish species elsewhere, the team calculated how long the Death Valley pupfish must have been isolated from one another.

The team found that all the pupfish of Death Valley descended from a common ancestor about 10,000 years ago, which fits with the postglacial drying of the valley.

But the Devil's Hole pupfish are much younger, with an estimated origin of just 255 years ago – long after the last time the valley was fully flooded. Yet in that short time, the population has diverged enough to be considered a separate species.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Google will include an additional processing chip in its future mobile devices (such as the Nexus line of smartphones and tablets) to enable "deep learning" applications without (necessarily) communicating to a central server:

Google has signed a deal with Movidius to include its Myriad 2 MA2450 processor in future devices. The search giant first worked with Movidius back in 2014 for its Project Tango devices, and it's now licensing the company's latest tech to "accelerate the adoption of deep learning within mobile devices."

[...] More recently, Google managed to cram a [neural] network into its Translate app, allowing users to convert the text in images on the fly. And SwiftKey also runs a small-scale network for word predictions in its SwiftKey Neural application. But all these applications require a large amount of processing power for what are relatively inane tasks. That's where Movidius' chip comes in.

The Myriad 2 MA2450 is referred to as a "vision processing unit." It's really got a single purpose: image recognition. The architecture has very little in common with a traditional CPU, and it's designed specifically to handle the myriad (get it) simultaneous processes involved in neural networks. As such, its power draw when, for example, recognising a face or an image, is much, much lower than doing the same task with a Snapdragon processor. As for how exactly will Google utilize the chips, that's something we're unlikely to know until it's ready to announce devices.

TechCrunch has some additional details about Movidius MA2150 and MA2450 chips. Or look at this product brief (PDF).

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

The 'Internet of Things' is growing rapidly. Mobile phones, washing machines and the milk bottle in the fridge: the idea is that minicomputers connected to these will be able to process information, receive and send data. This requires electrical power. Transistors that are capable of switching information with a single electron use far less power than field effect transistors that are commonly used in computers. However, these innovative electronic switches do not yet work at room temperature. Scientists working on the new EU research project 'Ions4Set' intend to change this. The program will be launched on February 1. It is coordinated by the Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf (HZDR).

"Billions of tiny computers will in future communicate with each other via the Internet or locally. Yet power consumption currently remains a great obstacle", says project coordinator Dr. Johannes von Borany from the HZDR. "Basically, there are two options: either one improves the batteries or one develops computer chips that require significantly less energy."

For example, it has been known for years that single electron transistors are an energy-saving alternative to the commonly used field effect transistors (FET). As yet, however, they only work at low temperatures and, what is more, they are not compatible with the so-called CMOS technology that forms the technological basis for the integration of a huge number of FET components on a computer chip necessary to perform complex signal processing at laptops or smartphones.

The single electron transistor (SET) switches electricity by means of a single electron. The novel SET is based on a so-called quantum dot (consisting of just several hundred silicon atoms) embedded in an isolating layer that is sandwiched between two conducting layers.

Hard to imagine that practical SETs would not also find their way into every other application beyond the Internet-of-Things (IoT) and accelerate demand-destruction.

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

A little more than two years after the College Board released research rebutting findings concerning the board's testing methods, a professor at Indiana University and his colleagues have raised new questions in a paper about test bias (DOI: 10.1037/edu0000104), based on the testing service's own data.

The paper, to be published in the Journal of Educational Psychology, suggests that hundreds of thousands of college students have been affected by differential and varied predictions of their success based on how they perform on standardized tests such as the SAT and GRE.

"Our main implication is that tests do not work in the same way across colleges and universities, and we have found that hundreds of thousands of people's predicted GPA based on SAT scores were under- or overestimated," says lead author Herman Aguinis, a professor of organizational behavior and human resources at Indiana University's Kelley School of Business.

"If the prediction is not the same, that means that you can benefit or suffer based only on your ethnicity or gender, because your performance is expected to be higher or lower than it will be, which means you're more or less likely to be offered a scholarship or you're more or less likely to be offered admission."

Original Submission