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Category: Technology

First GMO mosquitoes to be released in the Florida Keys

First GMO mosquitoes to be released in the Florida Keys

By Taylor White This spring, the biotechnology company Oxitec plans to release genetically modified (GM) mosquitoes in the Florida Keys. Oxitec says its technology will combat dengue fever, a potentially life-threatening disease, and other mosquito-borne viruses — such as Zika — mainly transmitted by the Aedes aegypti mosquito. While there have been more than 7,300 dengue cases reported in the United States between 2010 and 2020, a majority are contracted in Asia and the Caribbean, according to the U.S. Centers…

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Five ways fungi could change the world, from cleaning water to breaking down plastics

Five ways fungi could change the world, from cleaning water to breaking down plastics

Shutterstock By Mitchell P. Jones, Vienna University of Technology Fungi — a scientific goldmine? Well, that’s what a review published today in the journal Trends in Biotechnology indicates. You may think mushrooms are a long chalk from the caped crusaders of sustainability. But think again. Many of us have heard of fungi’s role in creating more sustainable leather substitutes. Amadou vegan leather crafted from fungal-fruiting bodies has been around for some 5,000 years. More recently, mycelium leather substitutes have taken…

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Who is making sure the AI machines aren’t racist?

Who is making sure the AI machines aren’t racist?

Cade Metz writes: Hundreds of people gathered for the first lecture at what had become the world’s most important conference on artificial intelligence — row after row of faces. Some were East Asian, a few were Indian, and a few were women. But the vast majority were white men. More than 5,500 people attended the meeting, five years ago in Barcelona, Spain. Timnit Gebru, then a graduate student at Stanford University, remembers counting only six Black people other than herself,…

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Your face is not your own

Your face is not your own

Kashmir Hill writes: In May 2019, an agent at the Department of Homeland Security received a trove of unsettling images. Found by Yahoo in a Syrian user’s account, the photos seemed to document the sexual abuse of a young girl. One showed a man with his head reclined on a pillow, gazing directly at the camera. The man appeared to be white, with brown hair and a goatee, but it was hard to really make him out; the photo was…

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Tim Wu’s appointment to the National Economic Council signals a confrontational approach to Big Tech

Tim Wu’s appointment to the National Economic Council signals a confrontational approach to Big Tech

The New York Times reports: President Biden on Friday named Tim Wu, a Columbia University law professor, to the National Economic Council as a special assistant to the president for technology and competition policy, putting one of the most outspoken critics of Big Tech’s power into the administration. The appointment of Mr. Wu, 48, who is widely supported by progressive Democrats and antimonopoly groups, suggests that the administration plans to take on the size and influence of companies like Amazon,…

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AI is killing choice and chance – which means changing what it means to be human

AI is killing choice and chance – which means changing what it means to be human

AI promises to make life easier, but what will humans lose in the bargain? AP Photo/Frank Augstein By Nir Eisikovits, University of Massachusetts Boston and Dan Feldman, University of Massachusetts Boston The history of humans’ use of technology has always been a history of coevolution. Philosophers from Rousseau to Heidegger to Carl Schmitt have argued that technology is never a neutral tool for achieving human ends. Technological innovations – from the most rudimentary to the most sophisticated – reshape people…

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A solar panel in space is collecting energy that could one day be beamed to anywhere on Earth

A solar panel in space is collecting energy that could one day be beamed to anywhere on Earth

CNN reports: Scientists working for the Pentagon have successfully tested a solar panel the size of a pizza box in space, designed as a prototype for a future system to send electricity from space back to any point on Earth. The panel — known as a Photovoltaic Radiofrequency Antenna Module (PRAM) — was first launched in May 2020, attached to the Pentagon’s X-37B unmanned drone, to harness light from the sun to convert to electricity. The drone is looping Earth…

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Electric cars’ looming recycling problem

Electric cars’ looming recycling problem

By Perry Gottesfeld, Undark In September, Tesla announced that it would be phasing out the use of cobalt in its batteries, in an effort to produce a $25,000 electric vehicle within three years. If successful, this bold move will be an industry game changer, making electric vehicles competitive with conventional counterparts. But the announcement also underscores one of the fundamental challenges that will complicate the transition to electric vehicles. Without cobalt, there may be little financial incentive to recycle the…

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The coming war on the hidden algorithms that trap people in poverty

The coming war on the hidden algorithms that trap people in poverty

Karen Hao writes: Miriam was only 21 when she met Nick. She was a photographer, fresh out of college, waiting tables. He was 16 years her senior and a local business owner who had worked in finance. He was charming and charismatic; he took her out on fancy dates and paid for everything. She quickly fell into his orbit. It began with one credit card. At the time, it was the only one she had. Nick would max it out…

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Why computers will never write good novels

Why computers will never write good novels

Angus Fletcher writes: You’ve been hoaxed. The hoax seems harmless enough. A few thousand AI researchers have claimed that computers can read and write literature. They’ve alleged that algorithms can unearth the secret formulas of fiction and film. That Bayesian software can map the plots of memoirs and comic books. That digital brains can pen primitive lyrics and short stories—wooden and weird, to be sure, yet evidence that computers are capable of more. But the hoax is not harmless. If…

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The internet rewired our brains. Michael Goldhaber predicted it would

The internet rewired our brains. Michael Goldhaber predicted it would

Charlie Warzel writes: Michael Goldhaber is the internet prophet you’ve never heard of. Here’s a short list of things he saw coming: the complete dominance of the internet, increased shamelessness in politics, terrorists co-opting social media, the rise of reality television, personal websites, oversharing, personal essay, fandoms and online influencer culture — along with the near destruction of our ability to focus. Most of this came to him in the mid-1980s, when Mr. Goldhaber, a former theoretical physicist, had a…

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The dangers of seeing human minds as predictive machines

The dangers of seeing human minds as predictive machines

Joseph Fridman writes: The machine they built is hungry. As far back as 2016, Facebook’s engineers could brag that their creation ‘ingests trillions of data points every day’ and produces ‘more than 6 million predictions per second’. Undoubtedly Facebook’s prediction engines are even more potent now, making relentless conjectures about your brand loyalties, your cravings, the arc of your desires. The company’s core market is what the social psychologist Shoshana Zuboff describes as ‘prediction products’: guesses about the future, assembled…

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The war between Silicon Valley and Washington takes a new turn

The war between Silicon Valley and Washington takes a new turn

Politico reports: Silicon Valley is punching back. After more than 1,400 days of trying to placate and handle President Donald Trump and his allies, the tech industry is taking on the Trump machine with just days left in the president’s term. In a flurry of quick moves this week, Twitter permanently banned Trump’s account and Facebook kicked him off its platform for at least the remainder of his presidency, while Google and Apple cracked down on a social platform seen…

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Microsoft says Russians hacked its network, viewing source code

Microsoft says Russians hacked its network, viewing source code

The Washington Post reports: Russian government hackers engaged in a sweeping series of breaches of government and private-sector networks have been able to penetrate deeper into Microsoft’s systems than previously known, gaining access to potentially valuable source code, the tech giant said Thursday. The firm previously acknowledged that it had inadvertently downloaded a software patch used by Russian cyberspies as a potential “back door” into victims’ systems. But it was not known that the hackers had viewed the firm’s source…

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Apple’s longtime supplier accused of using forced labor in China

Apple’s longtime supplier accused of using forced labor in China

The Washington Post reports: One of the oldest and most well-known iPhone suppliers has been accused of using forced Muslim labor in its factories, according to documents uncovered by a human rights group, adding new scrutiny to Apple’s human rights record in China. The documents, discovered by the Tech Transparency Project and shared exclusively with The Washington Post, detail how thousands of Uighur workers from the predominantly Muslim region of Xinjiang were sent to work for Lens Technology. Lens also…

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Hacked networks will need to be burned ‘down to the ground’

Hacked networks will need to be burned ‘down to the ground’

The Associated Press reports: It’s going to take months to kick elite hackers widely believed to be Russian out of the U.S. government networks they have been quietly rifling through since as far back as March in Washington’s worst cyberespionage failure on record. Experts say there simply are not enough skilled threat-hunting teams to duly identify all the government and private-sector systems that may have been hacked. FireEye, the cybersecurity company that discovered the intrusion into U.S. agencies and was…

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