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-- OriginalOwner_ writes:

El Reg reports

Today's generation of fighter pilots could be the last of their breed, thanks to an [Artificial Intelligence] system dubbed ALPHA that's proving unkillable in air combat.

The US Air Force has just completed dogfighting trials in a simulator, pitching the software against retired Air Force Colonel Gene Lee. The AI--which ran on a $35 Raspberry Pi computer--was deliberately handicapped but still managed to shoot down its fleshy opponent every time and evade his attempts to kill it.

[...] To make the defeat even more humiliating, the ALPHA AI's fighters were deliberately handicapped with shorter-range missiles and fewer of them, and its opponents got additional intelligence from a simulated AWACS radar aircraft.

[...] The key to the software is the use of a "Genetic Fuzzy Tree" algorithm[PDF], which breaks down complex decisions into simpler if/then scenarios and narrows down the possible choices very quickly. The code then works through its plans 250 times faster than a human can blink.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Amazon is reportedly trying to attract more consumers to its Dash push-button ordering devices by beefing up the brands offering goods for sale through the gadgets.

The internet retail giant is expected to announce this week the addition of dozens of new brands for Dash buttons, according to a Wall Street Journal report Sunday that cites documents and people familiar with the matter. It wasn't immediately clear which brands might be added to the lineup of Dash buttons, which are small, Internet-connected buttons that people can click to purchase household goods like paper towels or detergent through Amazon.

The new batch of brands comes roughly two months after Amazon unleashed dozens more of them to mark the first anniversary of the tiny widgets in April, tripling the current lineup to surpass 100 different buttons. Because the Dash button was introduced just before April 1, 2015, some reporters wondered if the concept was a joke.

Despite the reinforcements, consumer response to the tiny devices has been tepid, according to one market researcher. In a study released in march, Slice Intelligence found that less than 50 percent of people who bought the buttons actually placed an order with them.

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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Juno is on the seven-day countdown to entering Jovian orbit, and it's going to be a wild ride.

On May 31, the probe crossed the boundary between solar gravity and Jupiter's.

That also marked the start of manoeuvering towards an orbit that's going to take it within 5,000 km of the planet's cloud tops for 37 flybys.

As space probes go, Juno is a hefty beast indeed. Much of its roughly 3,640 kg (8,000 pound) weight is shielding to protect the probe from the radiation of the planet's much-more-intense version of Earth's Van Allen belts.

It's one of the toughest radiation environments in the solar system (Vulture South supposes things are more unpleasant at a similar distance from the Sun).

The shielding around the probe's flight computer alone weighs in at more than 170 kg.

NASA says the excitement will start with a 35-minute burn of its main engine for orbital insertion. That burn will lop 542 metres per second off the probe's velocity.

Orbit insertion and NASA TV commentary begin at 10:30 PM EDT on July 4th.

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fork(2) writes:

Science Daily carries an article about a new approach to cancer treatment (more specifically, cancer treatment resistance):

Every year thousands of patients die from recurrent cancers that have become resistant to therapy, resulting in one of the greatest unsolved challenges in cancer treatment. By tracking the fate of individual cancer cells under pressure of chemotherapy, biologists and bioengineers at Harvard Medical School studied a network of signals and molecular pathways that allow the cells to generate resistance over the course of treatment.

Using this information, a team of applied mathematicians led by Professor Mohammad Kohandel at the University of Waterloo, developed a mathematical model that incorporated algorithms that define the phenotypic cell state transitions of cancer cells in real-time while under attack by an anticancer agent. The mathematical simulations enabled them to define the exact molecular behavior and pathway of signals, which allow cancer cells to survive treatment over time.

[...] The approach the bioengineers took was to build a single nanoparticle, inspired by computer models, that exploit a technique known as supramolecular chemistry. This nanotechnology enables scientists to build cholesterol-tethered drugs together from "tetris-like" building blocks that self-assemble, incorporating multiple drugs into stable, individual nano-vehicles that target tumors through the leaky vasculature. This 2-in-1 strategy ensures that resistance to therapy never has a chance to develop, bringing together the right recipe to destroy surviving cancer cells.

The paper, "Rationally Designed 2-in-1 Nanoparticles Can Overcome Adaptive Resistance in Cancer," (DOI: 10.1021/acsnano.6b00320) was published online on June 3, 2016 in the leading nanotechnology journal ACS Nano.

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takyon writes:

Don't count on memristor technology ever making it out of HPE Labs. It has been displaced by 3D XPoint and other competing memory/storage technologies:

Memristor was first reported by HPE Labs eight years ago, as a form of persistent memory. At the time HP Labs Fellow R. Stanley Williams compared it to flash: "It holds its memory longer. It's simpler. It's easier to make - which means it's cheaper - and it can be switched a lot faster, with less energy."

Unfortunately it isn't simpler to make and still isn't here. NVMe SSDs have boosted flash's data access speed, reducing the memory-storage gap, and Intel/Micron's 3D XPoint SSDs will arrive later this year as the first viable productised technology to fill that gap.

WDC's SanDisk unit is working on ReRAM technology for its entry into storage-class memory hardware, and HPE has a partnership with SanDisk over its use. SanDisk foundry partner Toshiba has a ReRAM interest. WDC's HGST unit has been involved with Phase Change Memory. IBM has demonstrated a 3bits/cell Phase Change Memory (PCM) technology. Samsung has no public storage-class memory initiative, although it has been involved in STT-RAM.

The problem for HPE with Memristor is that it would need volume manufacturing to get the cost down. Unless it can sell the potential chips to other server OEMs, it would be the only consumer of Memristor chips and have its servers compete with the XPoint-using OEMs that Intel and Micron are lining up.

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takyon writes:

Joshua Browder has set up a service that has led users to challenge and overturn over $2.5 million in parking tickets:

An "automated lawyer" chatbot service has successfully challenged and overturned more than $2.5m in parking tickets in New York and London, according to its inventor.

The Do Not Pay service automatically generates an appeal if people fit the criteria to challenge a parking ticket – all publicly available information – and it has been successful an extraordinary 64 per cent of the time, says London-born Stanford student Joshua Browder. Asked about the success rate, he told The Register: "It's not that high. Parking tickets are a multimillion dollar industry. I am just appealing a small fraction of it."

The service is free and leads people through a series of quick questions before firing off a missive to fine-collecting bureaucrats. Not surprisingly, having an artificial intelligence (AI) bot do the legwork for you has been inviting, and over 250,000 appeals have been lodged through it. Demand is such that Browder noted with some irony that his focus on it caused him to get his own parking ticket.

Original Submission

fork(2) writes:

phys.org carries this story:

Convinced that better use of data will improve research, innovation and literacy across other disciplines, six leading statisticians recently published "Ten Simple Rules for Effective Statistical Practice" in the journal PLOS Computational Biology. Part of the popular open access "Ten Simple Rules (TSR)" series, this piece surpassed 51,000 views in only two weeks.

Authors Nancy Reid, of the University of Toronto, Rob Kass of Carnegie Mellon University, Brian Caffo of Johns Hopkins University, Marie Davidian of North Carolina State University, Xiao-Li Meng of Harvard University, and Bin Yu of the University of California, Berkeley, advise practitioners to first "treat statistics as a science, not a recipe."

In furthering this point, the authors stressed the need for researchers across various fields of science to avoid misperceptions and inaccurate claims resulting from faulty statistical reasoning. Grappling with such subtle phenomena requires principled statistical analysis, affirm the authors, who encourage researchers to consider statistics "a language constructed to assist this process, with probability as its grammar."

[...] Meng notes "sound statistical practices require a bit of science, engineering, and arts, and hence some general guidelines for helping practitioners to develop statistical insights and acumen are in order. No rules, simple or not, can be 100% applicable or foolproof, but that's the very essence that I find this is a useful exercise. It reminds practitioners that good statistical practices require far more than running software or an algorithm."

Here is a link to the "Ten Simple Rules" collection at PLOS.

Original Submission

Runaway1956 writes:

Scientists at Emory Vaccine Center, in collaboration with investigators from Thailand, have found that people infected with dengue virus develop antibodies that cross-react with Zika virus.

Some of these antibodies have the potential to neutralize Zika virus -- possibly providing immune protection. At the same time, in laboratory experiments, antibodies against dengue could enhance Zika virus infection of human cells.

The results are scheduled for publication on Monday, June 27 in PNAS.

Zika virus is similar genetically to dengue virus and part of the same flavivirus family. They are both transmitted by Aedes mosquitos. Dengue is endemic in several countries currently experiencing Zika outbreak, leading to proposals that pre-existing dengue immunity is influencing the severity of the Zika epidemic.

"There are really two sides of the coin here: both cross-neutralization and antibody-dependent enhancement," says Jens Wrammert, PhD, assistant professor of pediatrics (infectious diseases) at Emory University School of Medicine and Emory Vaccine Center. "We find antibody-mediated enhancement of infection with cells in the laboratory, but we have yet to clarify what effects these antibodies have on the outcome of infection in humans."

"Zika immune responses and disease severity may be different in dengue-endemic areas, or among dengue-experienced vs dengue-naïve groups. These factors must be taken into account when doing Zika vaccine or other clinical studies."

There are four strains of dengue virus, and infection with one strain does not lead to long-lasting immunity against the other three. In fact, secondary infection with a different strain can increase the risk of developing a more severe illness, called dengue hemorrhagic fever.

This is thought to happen through "antibody-dependent enhancement": pre-existing antibodies to the first strain, unable to stop the secondary infection, instead bind to immune cells and help the new strain infect them.

Emory scientists found that a similar phenomenon occurs with Zika. Antibodies obtained from nine dengue-infected patients at Siriraj Hospital in Bangkok -- both during acute infection and after recovery -- could help Zika virus (a strain isolated in 2015 from Puerto Rico) infect immune cells in cell culture.

From Science daily ; see also the original Emery University publication.

Original Submission

fork(2) writes:

An interesting blog post on sucuri.net describes a DDoS using CCTV devices:

Our security operations team investigate and mitigate multiple denial of service (DDoS) attacks every single day. One recent case caught our attention because of the intensity and duration of the attack, and -- as we discovered through some research -- how it was being done. In this article, we'll share the specifics in an effort to track down the vulnerable devices...

The post continues:

It is not new that attackers have been using IoT devices to start their DDoS campaigns, however, we have not analyzed one that leveraged only CCTV devices and was still able to generate this quantity of requests for so long.

As we extracted the geo-location from the IP addresses generating the DDoS, we noticed that they were coming from all over the world, different countries and networks. A total of 25,513 unique IP addresses came within a couple of hours.

[...] As we dug deeper into each of these IP addresses, we learned that all of them were running the "Cross Web Server" and had a similar default HTTP page with the "DVR Components" title.

This is what raised our suspicious of a IoT botnet that was leveraging some CCTVs as part of the attack. As we kept looking, we found the company logos from the resellers and manufactures on all IP addresses.

The common thread turned out to be that all of the devices were running BusyBox, software that provides several stripped-down Unix tools in a single executable file. [Wikipedia] Sucuri conjectures: "It seems like they might have been hacked via a recently disclosed RCE vulnerability in CCTV-DVR (this is unconfirmed)."

Also covered at Ars Technica and SiliconANGLE.

Original Submission

HughPickens.com writes:

What should a driverless car with one rider do if it is faced with the choice of swerving off the road into a tree or hitting a crowd of 10 pedestrians? The answer depends on whether you are the rider in the car or someone else is writes Peter Dizikes at MIT News. According to recent research most people prefer autonomous vehicles to minimize casualties in situations of extreme danger — except for the vehicles they would be riding in.

"Most people want to live in in a world where cars will minimize casualties," says Iyad Rahwan. "But everybody wants their own car to protect them at all costs." The result is what the researchers call a "social dilemma," in which people could end up making conditions less safe for everyone by acting in their own self-interest. "If everybody does that, then we would end up in a tragedy ... whereby the cars will not minimize casualties," says Rahwan.

Researchers conducted six surveys, using the online Mechanical Turk public-opinion tool, between June 2015 and November 2015. The results consistently showed that people will take a utilitarian approach to the ethics of autonomous vehicles, one emphasizing the sheer number of lives that could be saved. For instance, 76 percent of respondents believe it is more moral for an autonomous vehicle, should such a circumstance arise, to sacrifice one passenger rather than 10 pedestrians. But the surveys also revealed a lack of enthusiasm for buying or using a driverless car programmed to avoid pedestrians at the expense of its own passengers.

"This is a challenge that should be on the mind of carmakers and regulators alike," the researchers write. "For the time being, there seems to be no easy way to design algorithms that would reconcile moral values and personal self-interest."

Original Submission

fork(2) writes:

Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin space company has broken ground for a new 750,000 square foot orbital vehicle factory in Florida. The Orlando Sentinal reports:

In a notice sent out by Bezos this morning, he said the company hopes to open the facility at the end of next year.

The space will be where the company builds, tests and integrates its rockets.

In the notice, Bezos said everything on the orbital vehicle will be built at the site, except the engine.

Initially, the BE-4 engine will be built at its Kent, Wash., facility.

But he did say the company would select a site for its engine production later this year.

"We're clearing the way for the production of a reusable fleet of orbital vehicles that we will launch and land, again and again," Bezos told Quartz in an email.

Quartz continues,

The new Blue Origin factory will share many of the technical features pioneered at SpaceX's California rocket factory, including large-scale friction stir welding to join together the body of the rocket, and "automated composite processing equipment," or the 3D-printed carbon fiber to make things like the faring or nose cone of the rocket that protects a satellite during launch.

Slated to open its doors in December 2017, the factory would mark Blue Origin's ability to compete directly with ULA and SpaceX in the rocket business, instead of simply being a partner or a critic of the larger enterprises.

Original Submission

rts008 writes:

Too little, too late, IMO, but MS has backed down on a lot of the shady upgrade ambush tactics designed to shove Windows 10 down users' throats. I found this while skimming the tech section at Google news this morning, leading to PC World's article, excerpted here:

The company plans to update the Windows 10 upgrade notification window that Windows 7 and Windows 8.1 users see on their PCs, as first reported by ZDNet's Mary Jo Foley late Monday.

The new interface will feature three buttons with clear options, including Upgrade now, Choose time (in other words, schedule the upgrade time), or Decline free offer. Microsoft also plans to restore proper behavior to the "x" in the upper right hand corner. Instead of being treated as consent for an upgrade, clicking the "x" will simply dismiss the window, as it should be.

On top of that, Microsoft says it will provide free tech support for anyone who needs help upgrading, or rolling back from Windows 10 to their previous operating system.

I guess the loss of the lawsuit (Upset with Automated Windows 10 Upgrade, Californian Takes Microsoft to Court... and Wins) tipped the scales, when user backlash was not enough, maybe?

Maybe just a salve, now that most of the damage is done, and why not? The 'free upgrade' was set to expire on 29 July, 2016 anyhow.

Original Submission

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for Runaway1956

In what's believe to be a first of its kind ruling, a federal court in Oregon has dismissed a direct infringement complaint against an alleged movie pirate from the onset. According to the Judge, linking an IP-address to a pirated download is not enough to prove direct copyright infringement.

[...] To prove direct infringement copyright holders merely have to make it "plausible" that a defendant, Thomas Gonzales in this case, is indeed the copyright infringer.

For example, by pointing out that the IP-address is directly linked to the defendant's Internet connection. However, according to Judge Beckerman this is not enough.

"The only facts Plaintiff pleads in support of its allegation that Gonzales is the infringer, is that he is the subscriber of the IP address used to download or distribute the movie, and that he was sent notices of infringing activity to which he did not respond. That is not enough," she writes in her recommendation.

Source: TorrentFreak

Original Submission

butthurt writes:

CBC News reports that a deposit of helium-rich gases has been discovered beneath Tanzania. Estimated at "about 54 billion cubic feet (1.5 billion cubic metres) of helium," the deposit was found by looking for rocks that might contain helium, along with formations that could retain gases underground, and volcanic activity. It is believed that volcanic heat caused separation of helium from the parent rocks; the helium was then trapped in an underground cavern. Helium has traditionally been produced in conjunction with methane (natural gas). The discoverers are optimistic that similar formations may exist elsewhere in the world.

Gas seeping out of the new Tanzanian reserve contains up to 10.6 per cent helium, and the reserve is estimated to hold about 54 billion cubic feet (1.5 billion cubic metres) of helium gas in total.

"This is enough to fill over 1.2 million medical MRI scanners," said Chris Ballentine, a University of Oxford researcher who co-authored the study, in a news release.

For comparison, entire global reserves are thought to be about 35.2 billion cubic metres, and the world uses about 227 million cubic metres per year.

Additional coverage:

• Gizmodo
• New Scientist (semi-paywalled)

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Researchers have created an artificial synapse that requires just 1.23 × 10^-15 Joules per "synaptic event":

An artificial synapse that emulates a biological synapse while requiring less energy has been developed by Pohang University Of Science & Technology (POSTECH) researchers in Korea. A human synapse consumes an extremely small amount of energy (~10 fJ or femtojoules per synaptic event), and an entire human brain consumes only as much energy as a domestic light bulb, but can outperform a supercomputer in many aspects, according to the researchers.

The researchers have fabricated an organic nanofiber (ONF), or organic nanowire (ONW), electronic device that emulates the important working principles and energy consumption of biological synapses while requiring only ~1 fJ per synaptic event. The ONW also emulates the morphology (form) of a synapse. [...] The researchers say they have emulated important working principles of a biological synapse, such as paired-pulse facilitation (PPF), short-term plasticity (STP), long-term plasticity (LTP), spike-timing dependent plasticity (STDP), and spike-rate dependent plasticity (SRDP).

Organic core-sheath nanowire artificial synapses with femtojoule energy consumption (open, DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.1501326)

Original Submission