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Real-Time Searches Lead to Real-Time Malware

July 30, 2010

the physics arXiv blog, July 29, 2010 — Searching for a hot news topic or buzzword can lead an unsuspecting person to harmful malware, said Dan Hubbard, CTO of Websense, at the Cloud Security Alliance Summit, which took place at the Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas.

Estimates have suggested that about 14 percent of traditional searches for trending news go to sites hosting malware.

Much of the problem stems from the nature of information provided in real time, Hubbard says. It’s noisy, spammy, and not authoritative. So search engines have a difficult task ahead determining what links can be trusted.

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Topics: Internet/Telecom | Survival/Defense

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Satellite quantum communication circles closer

July 30, 2010

New Scientist Tech, July 29, 2010 — A new quantum protocol is the first that promises to work independently of the orientation of spin on pairs of entangled photons shared between a sender and receiver, which will prove vital if quantum communications are ever to be sent via satellites (a spinning satellite’s sense of up and down changes over time, making it harder to interpret a photon’s spin and establish a key).

A team at the University of Bristol in the UK has invented a protocol independent of orientation that exploits the fact that photons can have an entangled circular polarization as well as entangled spin. Circularly polarized light can be imagined to corkscrew either clockwise or anticlockwise along its axis of travel.… more

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Topics: Electronics | Quantum

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Reliable Dictation, Down to a ‘T’

July 30, 2010

New York Times, July 28, 2010 — The accuracy of the new Dragon NaturallySpeaking for Windows speech-recognition program is so good that you no longer have to begin by reading a four-minute training text, writer David Pogue has found.

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Topics: AI/Robotics

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Helping Joints Regrow Themselves

July 30, 2010 by Editor

Biomedical engineers at Columbia University Medical Center have implanted a joint-shaped scaffold infused with a growth factor protein that allowed rabbits to begin using their injured forelimbs again in one month.

At two months, the animals moved almost as well as similarly aged healthy rabbits. The study is the first to show that an entire joint can be repaired while being used.

In the study, the researchers first imaged the damaged forelimb joint and then created a three-dimensional picture of it. They used a bioprinter to “print out” a precisely accurate, three-dimensional copy of the joint, but criss-crossed it with tiny interconnecting microchannels to serve as a scaffold for new bone and cartilage growth.

The approach has several advantages. It’s impossible to re-create in a… more

Topics: Biomed/Longevity

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The Science Of ‘Inception’

July 30, 2010

Forbes, July 29, 2010 — Real-life technologies can perform some of the mind-reading tricks shown in the new film Inception, in which people are able to observe and participate in someone’s dreams.

Jack Gallant, a neuroscientist at the University of California, Berkeley shows people images and movies while taking a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scan of their brains. He uses brain-pattern analysis and computer algorithms to analyze the fMRI scans and build a model of the subject’s visual system. Using the model, Gallant can then have his subject watch a completely new movie and then he can reproduce the images the subject has seen in that new movie with very good accuracy. Gallant says he can use the same technology to reproduce images of the dreams… more

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Topics: Cognitive Science/Neuroscience

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Google, CIA Invest in ‘Future’ of Web Monitoring

July 29, 2010

Wired Danger Room, July 28, 2010 — The investment arms of the CIA and Google are both backing a company that monitors the web in real time — and says it uses that information to predict the future.

The company is called Recorded Future, and it scours tens of thousands of websites, blogs and Twitter accounts to find the relationships between people, organizations, actions and incidents — both present and still-to-come. In a white paper, the company says its temporal analytics engine “goes beyond search” by “looking at the ‘invisible links’ between documents that talk about the same, or related, entities and events.”

The idea is to figure out for each incident who was involved, where it happened and when it might go down. Recorded… more

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Topics: Human Enhancement | Internet/Telecom | Singularity/Futures | Social Networking/Web 2.0 | Survival/Defense

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Using exploding nanoparticles to insert DNA and proteins into cells

July 29, 2010 by Editor

Zapped human prostate cancer cells after exposure to laser-activated carbon nanoparticles. (Prerona Chakravarty)

Chemical “nanoblasts” activated by bursts of laser light can punch tiny holes in the protective membranes of cells just long enough to admit therapeutic small molecules, proteins and DNA directly into living cells, Georgia Institute of Technology.researchers have discovered.

“One of the most significant uses for this technology could be for gene-based therapies, which offer great promise in medicine, but whose progress has been limited by the difficulty of getting DNA and RNA into cells,” said Mark Prausnitz, a professor in the School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology.

Researchers have been trying for decades to drive DNA and RNA more efficiently into cells with a variety of methods, including using viruses to ferry genetic materials into cells, coating DNA and RNA… more

Topics: Biomed/Longevity | Nanotech

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Aging and longevity tied to specific brain region in mice

July 29, 2010 by Editor

Researchers watched two groups of mice, both nearing the end of a two-day fast. One group was quietly huddled together, but the other group was active and alert. The difference? The second set of mice had been engineered so their brains produced more SIRT1, a protein known to play a role in aging and longevity.

“This result surprised us,” says the study’s senior author Shin-ichiro Imai, MD, PhD, an expert in aging research at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. “It demonstrates that SIRT1 in the brain is tied into a mechanism that allows animals to survive when food is scarce. And this might be involved with the lifespan-increasing effect of low-calorie diets.”

Imai explains that the mice with increased brain SIRT1 have internal… more

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Big Bang Abandoned in New Model of the Universe

July 29, 2010

the physics arXiv blog, July 27, 2010 — A new cosmology successfully explains the accelerating expansion of the universe without dark energy; but only if the universe has no beginning and no end.

Wun-Yi Shu at the National Tsing Hua University in Taiwan has developed an innovative new description of the Universe in which time and space are not independent entities but can be converted back and forth between each other.

In his formulation of the geometry of spacetime, the speed of light is simply the conversion factor between the two. Similarly, mass and length are interchangeable in a relationship in which the conversion factor depends on both the gravitational constant G and the speed of light, neither of which need be constant. So as the… more

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Topics: Physics/Cosmology

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X PRIZE Foundation to Announce Multi-Million Dollar Incentive Competition to Clean Up Oil

July 28, 2010 by Editor

On July 29, 2010, the X PRIZE Foundation will launch its sixth major competition, a multi-million dollar privately funded Oil Cleanup X CHALLENGE, designed to inspire entrepreneurs, engineers, and scientists worldwide to develop innovative, rapidly deployable, and highly efficient methods of capturing crude oil from the ocean surface.

The announcement will be made at the National Press Club. Attendees will include:

· Peter Diamandis, Founder & Chairman, X PRIZE Foundation

· Wendy Schmidt, President, The Schmidt Family Foundation and Founder of the Foundation’s 11th Hour Project and Climate Central. Co-Founder of the Schmidt Marine Science Research Institute

· U.S. Representative Anh ‘Joseph’ Cao, representing Louisiana’s 2nd Congressional District (New Orleans and the Gulf region of Louisiana)

· Philippe Cousteau, the son of Jan and… more

Topics: Environment/Climate

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Multifunctional nanoparticle enables new type of biological imaging

July 28, 2010 by Editor

30-nanometer particle combines a magnetic core with a thin gold shell (Xiaohu Gao, University of Washington)

University of Washington researchers have developed a multifunctional nanoparticle that enables a more precise form of medical imaging.

Nanoparticles are promising contrast agents for ultrasensitive medical imaging. But in all techniques that do not use radioactive tracers, the surrounding tissues tend to overwhelm weak signals, preventing researchers from detecting just one or a few cells.

The new nanoparticle solves this problem by for the first time by combining magnetic properties and photoacoustic imaging to remove background noise. Researchers used a pulsing magnetic field to shake the nanoparticles by their magnetic cores. Then they took a photoacoustic image and used image processing techniques to remove everything except the vibrating pixels.

“We use an external magnetic field to shake the particles,” he explained. “Then… more

Topics: Biomed/Longevity | Nanotech | Physics/Cosmology

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A Smoother Street View

July 28, 2010

Technology Review, July 28, 2010 —

New street-level imaging software developed by Microsoft could help people find locations more quickly on the Web.

Microsoft researchers have come up with a refinement to Bing Streetside called Street Slide. It combines slices from multiple panoramas captured along a stretch of road into one continuous view. This can be viewed from a distance, or “smooth scrolled” sideways.

Someone using Street Slide’s panoramic view can slide along the facades looking for places of interest, and zoom back in to a classic bubble view at any time. A user can also flip the viewpoint to see the other side of the street, or turn corners onto new streets.

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Topics: Virtual/Augmented Reality

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