Technology

Defense Distributed it’s 3 D gun printing plans are still available on the web if you know where to look. This archive is not secret. I will not say the name of because everyone should know its name. Everyone should know that everything they put on the web has been archived going back to The beginning of most website by this organization. Furthermore, files put on the Internet In the form of torrents are distributed across many peers in a cloud of computers all around the internet in tiny pieces. The torrent file just puts those pieces together. So the files are out there. You don’t…

The Attorneys General of Democratic states Washington, Massachusetts, Connecticut, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Oregon, Maryland, New York (plus the District of Columbia) are filing a lawsuit against the Trump administration to block the open source distribution of materials that enable the printing of guns using 3-D printers. The organization in question is Defense Distributed, which distributes open-source, downloadable 3D-printed gun instructions. After the U.S. State Department forced the removal of the instruction manuals from the Internet, the organization sued. The federal government…

I had what seemed like rather a good idea a few weeks back. Building on some prominent findings in social psychology, I hypothesized that politicians on the right would wipe their bum with their left hand; and that politicians on the left would wipe with their right hand. Ludicrous? Yes – absolutely. But for once my goal wasn’t to run a bona fide scientific study. Instead, I wanted to see if any “journal” would publish my ass-wiping “findings”. For those who haven’t yet come across the term, “predatory journals” are becoming a bit of a nuisance in science. They actively masquerade as…

Sub-Saharan Africa has around 80 million people infected with hepatitis B, a liver infection caused by the hepatitis B virus, but it infects around 250 million people worldwide. It can be a mild illness lasting a few weeks or a serious, lifelong condition. It is transmitted through blood and bodily fluids.   An accurate diagnostic score that consists of inexpensive blood tests costing around $20 could help diagnose thousands of patients with hepatitis B in need of treatment in some of Africa's poorest regions, far more affordable than the $100-500 for current tests. Called TREAT-B, the…

A.I. - artificial intelligence - has seen a resurgence of buzzword activity. It's the Internet of Things for 2018. But if the limitation is the algorithm underneath, it's not really AI. However, smarter algorithms can help in medical diagnostics, because they really don't perform any better than humans now. The big help will be in identifying rare pathologies in medical images, because of the scarcity of images that can be used to train machine learning (sorry, AI) systems in a supervised learning setting. So a team is using machine learning to create computer generated X-rays to augment AI…

Epilepsy is no laughing matter - except for one rare form, caused by hypothalamic hamartomas, benign masses in the brain that can cause epilepsy symptoms, unintentional giggling seizures and even early puberty. This actual science appeared in the medical melodrama "Grey's Anatomy." The episode “Hold Back the River” featured the show’s doctors using focused sound waves to treat a hypothalamic hamartoma in a young boy, and it is being tested in a clinical trial at UVA. It's not a tumor They are not technically considered brain tumors. “They typically don’t grow,” says neurologist Nathan…

It probably happens every minute of the day: A little girl demands to see the photo her parent has just taken of her. Today, thanks to smartphones and other digital cameras, we can see snapshots immediately, whether we want to or not. But in 1944 when 3-year-old Jennifer Land asked to see the family vacation photo that her dad had just taken, the technology didn’t exist. So her dad, Edwin Land, invented it.  Three years later, after plenty of scientific development, Land and his Polaroid Corporation realized the miracle of nearly instant imaging. The film exposure and processing…

If you want to spread fake news, and rarely have it corrected, Twitter is the best way to go, according to a new analysis. Experience does not help. Instead, the social media platform’s most active users are complicit in detecting and spreading falsehoods, even during public emergencies.  An analysis in Natural Hazards, looked at four false rumors — two each from the Boston Marathon and Hurricane Sandy, including an infamous falsehood about the New York Stock Exchange flooding. The authors looked at whether Twitter users spread the false news, sought to confirm it, or cast doubt…

CERN has equipped itself with an inter-experimental working group on Machine Learning since a couple of years. Besides organizing monthly meetings and other activities fostering the dissemination of knowledge and active research on the topic, the group holds a yearly meeting at CERN where along with interesting presentations on advances and summaries, there are tutorials to teach participants the use of the fast-growing arsenal of tools that any machine-learning enthusiast these days should master.The 2018 event is taking place from April 9 to 12 at CERN, and I have already collected enough…

Do you buy bagged bread in the grocery store?  There are usually several options including bread made with whole grains or containing several different kinds of grain.  You have probably noticed that such breads stay nice and soft for quite a while.  Some people are even suspicious about that imagining that the bread might be “loaded with preservatives.”  If you buy the freshly “baked in thes tore” options like baguettes, or get those at a bakery, they are really tasty,but they rather quickly become stale. They become candidates for making French Toast or maybe…