Category: Science & Technology

Search engine Google is being sued for $5 billion in a class action suit filed in a California court for violation of its users’ privacy, even when they browse in the incognito mode. A similar case was filed last week too. So what wrong has Google committed?

The suit alleges that “Google tracks and collects consumer browsing history and other web activity data no matter what safeguards consumers undertake to protect their data privacy”, such as in the incognito mode and thereby gains “a complete, cradle-to-grave profile” of the users without their consent. Among other things, it accuses Google of “collecting, at minimum, the consumer’s IP address, browser and device information and the webpage content that the consumer is actually looking at”.

What’s incognito mode: Google’s incognito mode offers people the chance to keep their browsing history private, especially on shared devices, claiming that none of a user’s “browsing history, cookies and site data, or information entered in forms are saved” on the device. It also adds that even “Chrome doesn’t tell websites, including Google, when you’re browsing privately in Incognito mode”.

However…Google also cautions users that their browsing history even in incognito mode is still visible to their school, employer or their internet service provider. It also says that the incognito mode doesn’t “prevent the websites you visit from serving ads based on your activity during an incognito session”.

The billions: The petitioners however contend that not only is Google’s snooping in on their browsing history in incognito mode, but that the company was benefitting monetarily from this privacy breach. According to the petitioners, Google has collected and sold off its users’ personal information to third party advertisers — with data on web browsing histories fetching $52 per year as per a study cited in the suit, with the highest value reserved for details like Social Security Number, which is worth $240, while credit card details are worth $150.

The penalty: The petitioners say that since Google has violated the privacy of people numbering in multiples of million, each should receive more than $5,000 at the very least — which would make the minimum payout due $5 billion, if Google loses. However, considering that there are 1.5 billion active account users….you can do the math!

The lawsuit is aiming to utilize the Federal Wiretap Act that provides users with the right to sue if their private communications are intercepted.
A Google spokesperson denied the claim.

“We strongly dispute these claims, and we will defend ourselves vigorously against them,” a Google spokesperson was quoted a saying.

“Incognito mode in Chrome gives you the choice to browse the internet without your activity being saved to your browser or device. As we clearly state each time you open a new incognito tab, websites might be able to collect information about your browsing activity during your session,” the company spokesperson added.

Many users think that once they are logged into Internet via Incognito Mode, their search history isn’t being tracked.

Incognito mode within Google’s Chrome browser gives users the choice to search the internet without their activity being saved to the browser or device.

But the websites visited can use tools such as Google Analytics to track the usage.

A joint study from Microsoft, Carnegie Mellon University and University of Pennsylvania last year investigated 22,484 sex websites using a tool called “webXray” revealed that 93 per cent of pages track and leak users’ data to third-party organisations.

“Tracking on these sites is highly concentrated by a handful of major companies,” said the researchers who identified 230 different companies and services tracking users in their sample.

Of non-pornography-specific services, Google tracks 74 per cent of sites, Oracle 24 per cent and Facebook 10 per cent, said the study.

After a five-year application process, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office awarded a patent to Syed Rizvi, professor of food science engineering, at Cornell University, and colleague Michael E. Wagner.

In Rizvi’s laboratory, a prototype machine – featuring a newly patented process – uses supercritical carbon dioxide to dish out instant vanilla ice cream, according to Cornell report.

With Rizvi and Wagner’s newly patented process – where pressurized carbon dioxide does all the work – anyone can make any ice cream at any time.

“Of course, you’ll need the liquid ice cream mix,” Rizvi said, in the report. “The mix can be made commercially, locally or you can make it at home. It’s very simple, and this machine converts the mix into a scoop of ice cream in about three seconds.”

In the traditional method of making ice cream, the dairy-based mix flows through a heat-exchanging barrel, where ice crystals form and get scraped by blades.

With this new method, highly pressurized carbon dioxide passes over a nozzle that, in turn, creates a vacuum to draw in the liquid ice cream. When carbon dioxide goes from a high pressure to a lower pressure, it cools the mixture to about minus 70 degrees C – freezing the mixture into ice cream, which jets out of another nozzle into a bowl, ready to eat.

A newly patented process using pressurized carbon dioxide can create instant ice cream.

Instant ice cream can be served right on the spot, all without the challenges of commercial transportation “cold chains,” in which the product must be frozen and maintained at minus 20 degrees Celsius. To guard against failing spots in the cold-temperature transportation chain, commercial ice cream makers add stabilizers and emulsifiers, the report said.

“Consumers today want a clean product,” Rizvi said. “They don’t want undesirable ingredients thrown into it.”

What’s more, Rizvi said, the cold chain requires a lot of energy. But if you could make ice cream without stabilization ingredients, commercial entities could avoid the cold chain altogether.

The device can take any liquid and give it frozen features. “You can make a slushy out of soft drinks,” he said, while noting that the new process is suited for on-demand and point-of-use applications like vending machines, parlors and home use. “You can convert water into carbonated ice instantly, too. Any liquid drink that can be partially frozen can be used.”

Cornell’s Center for Technology Licensing is currently exploring licensing opportunities.

Rizvi, a graduate of Panjab University, is professor of food process engineering in the Department of Food Science and also holds the title of International Professor at Cornell.

He is interested in engineering and processing aspects of food science and value addition for global markets. He has published over 170 technical papers, co-authored/edited six books and holds six patents. He is also associated with the Department of State advising the Bureau of Economics, Energy and Agricultural Affairs on use of science in diplomacy.

He had won many awards, including Distinguished Professor (2017) Chinese Academy of Agricultural Science; Excellence in Teaching Award (2014) Food Science Advisory Council; and Stanley Watson Award (2012) American Association of Cereal Chemists International.

Rizvi did his Meng from University of Toronto, in 1988; and his doctorate from the Ohio State University, in 1976.

More than a billion Android devices are at risk of being hacked because they are no longer protected by security updates, watchdog Which? has suggested.

The vulnerability could leave users around the world exposed to the danger of data theft, ransom demands and other malware attacks.

Anyone using an Android phone released in 2012 or earlier should be especially concerned, it said.

Which? says it was not reassured by Google’s response.

And the tech giant has not responded to BBC requests for a comment.

Google’s own data suggests that 42.1% of Android users worldwide are on version 6.0 of its operating system or below.

According to the Android security bulletin, there were no security patches issued for the Android system in 2019 for versions below 7.0.

Extrapolating this data, Which? concluded that two in five Android users worldwide were no longer receiving security updates.

It then tested five phones:

• a Motorola X
• a Samsung Galaxy A5
• a Sony Xperia Z2
• an LG/Google Nexus 5
• a Samsung Galaxy S6

Which? asked anti-virus lab AV Comparatives to infect them with malware – and it succeeded on every phone, creating multiple infections on some.

It said it shared its findings with Google but the tech giant “failed to provide reassurance that it has plans in place to help users whose devices were no longer supported”.

More than a billion Android devices are at risk of being hacked because they are no longer protected by security updates, watchdog Which? has suggested.

The watchdog wants Google and others to provide far more transparency around how long updates for smart devices will be provided.

And it said the mobile industry needed to do a better job of giving support to customers about their options once security updates are no longer available.

Kate Bevan, Which? Computing editor, said: “It’s very concerning that expensive Android devices have such a short shelf life before they lose security support, leaving millions of users at risk of serious consequences if they fall victim to hackers.

“Google and phone manufacturers need to be upfront about security updates – with clear information about how long they will last and what customers should do when they run out.

“The government must also push ahead with planned legislation to ensure manufacturers are far more transparent about security updates for smart devices – and their impact on consumers.”

How to check whether your phone is vulnerable and what to do

• If your Android device is more than two years old, check whether it can be updated to a newer version of the operating system. If you are on an earlier version than Android 7.0 Nougat, try to update via Settings> System>Advanced System update
• If you can’t update, your phone could be at risk of being hacked, especially if you are running a version of Android 4 or lower. If this is the case be careful about downloading apps outside the Google Play store
• Also be wary of suspicious SMS or MMS messages
• Back up data in at least two places (a hard drive and a cloud service)
• Install a mobile anti-virus via an app, but bear in mind that the choice is limited for older phones

Thousands of scientists from around the world are converging on Hawaii this week to unveil the latest discoveries about the universe at the so-called “Super Bowl of astronomy.” If the event, the 235th meeting of the American Astronomical Society, had a stadium, it would be packed.

“This will be the biggest AAS meeting in history,” AAS spokesperson Rick Feinberg told Space.com in an email.

More than 3,500 scientists are expected to attend the four-day conference in Honolulu, Hawaii, Feinberg said. The first press conferences and talks begin today (Jan. 5). They’ll end on Wednesday (Jan. 8), with observatory tours and other presentations scheduled throughout the week.

NASA, as expected, will showcase its latest space findings at the conference, including the agency’s recent exoplanet discoveries by the TESS space telescope and the Hubble Space Telescope, which celebrates its 30th anniversary in April.

“NASA researchers will present new findings on a wide range of astrophysics and other space science topics at the 235th Meeting of the American Astronomical Society, Saturday, Jan. 4, through Wednesday, Jan. 8, in Honolulu,” NASA officials said in a statement. “Agency scientists and their colleagues who use NASA research capabilities also will present noteworthy findings during scientific sessions that are open to registered media.”

“The main new feature of this meeting is our major effort to bring the astronomical community and the local community together as much as possible to discuss the future of astronomy in Hawaii,” Feinberg said.

Hawaii has long been a focal point for astronomy. The Keck Observatory, which has the largest active optical telescopes on Earth, and other observatories sit atop the volcano Mauna Kea and an even larger telescope, the Thirty Meter Telescope, is planned to be built at the site.

But construction of the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) has been stalled due to ongoing protests by indigenous groups that consider Mauna Kea sacred. The demonstrations stepped up in 2019.

“TMT is committed to finding a peaceful way forward on Maunakea for all,” the builders of the new telescope wrote in a Dec. 20 update.

“We are sensitive to the ongoing struggles of indigenous populations around the world, and we will continue to support conversations around TMT and the larger issues for which it has become a flashpoint,” Gordon Squires, TMT VP for External Affairs, said in the statement. “We are participating in private conversations with community leaders, but these conversations will take time.”

A team of US researchers has redefined the conditions that make a planet habitable by taking the star’s radiation and the planet’s rotation rate into account – a discovery that will help astronomers narrow down the search around life-sustaining planets.

The research team is the first to combine 3D climate modeling with atmospheric chemistry to explore the habitability of planets around M dwarf stars, which comprise about 70 per cent of the total galactic population.

Among its findings, the Northwestern team, in collaboration with researchers at the University of Colorado Boulder, NASA’s Virtual Planet Laboratory and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, discovered that only planets orbiting active stars — those that emit a lot of ultraviolet (UV) radiation — lose significant water to vaporization. Planets around inactive, or quiet, stars are more likely to maintain life-sustaining liquid water.

The researchers also found that planets with thin ozone layers, which have otherwise habitable surface temperatures, receive dangerous levels of UV dosages, making them hazardous for complex surface life.

“It’s only in recent years that we have had the modeling tools and observational technology to address this question,” said Northwestern’s Howard Chen, the study’s first author.

“Still, there are a lot of stars and planets out there, which means there are a lot of targets,” added Daniel Horton, senior author of the study. “Our study can help limit the number of places we have to point our telescopes”.

The research was published in the Astrophysical Journal.

Horton and Chen are looking beyond our solar system to pinpoint the habitable zones within M dwarf stellar systems. M dwarf planets have emerged as frontrunners in the search for habitable planets.

They get their name from the small, cool, dim stars around which they orbit, called M dwarfs or “red dwarfs”. By coupling 3D climate modeling with photochemistry and atmospheric chemistry, Horton and Chen constructed a more complete picture of how a star’s UV radiation interacts with gases, including water vapor and ozone, in the planet’s atmosphere.

Instruments, such as the Hubble Space Telescope and James Webb Space Telescope, have the capability to detect water vapor and ozone on exoplanets. They just need to know where to look.

“‘Are we alone?’ is one of the biggest unanswered questions,” Chen said. “If we can predict which planets are most likely to host life, then we might get that much closer to answering it within our lifetimes.”

For the first time ever, a quantum computer has performed a computational task that would be essentially impossible for a conventional computer to complete, according to a team from Google.

Scientists and engineers from the company’s lab in Santa Barbara announced the milestone in a report published last week in the journal Nature. They said their machine was able to finish its job in just 200 seconds — and that the world’s most powerful supercomputers would need 10,000 years to accomplish the same task.

The task itself, which involved executing a randomly chosen sequence of instructions, does not have any particular practical uses. But experts say the achievement is still significant as a demonstration of the future promise of quantum computing.

William Oliver of MIT compared the feat to the first successful flight by the Wright brothers. “It is what the event represented, rather than what it practically accomplished, that was paramount,” he wrote in a commentary that accompanied the study.

Google’s scientists are hailing the achievement as the first demonstration of what’s known as “quantum supremacy.” The phrase was coined in 2012 by John Preskill, a theoretical physicist at Caltech, to describe the point at which quantum computers can do things that classical computers simply can’t.

Not everyone agrees that Google’s announcement represents true quantum supremacy. Computer scientists at IBM have countered that their most powerful supercomputer, called Summit, could complete the same task in 2.5 days rather than 10,000 years.

“A computation that would take 10,000 years on a classical supercomputer took 200 seconds on our quantum computer,” study co-author Brooks Foxen, a graduate student researcher in physics at Google AI Quantum in Mountain View and the University of California, Santa Barbara, said in a statement.

“It is likely that the classical simulation time, currently estimated at 10,000 years, will be reduced by improved classical hardware and algorithms, but, since we are currently 1.5 trillion times faster, we feel comfortable laying claim to this achievement,” Foxen added.

Quantum computers store information using subatomic particles, which behave according to very different rules than the ones that govern our macro world. For example, quantum particles can exist in a “superposition” of two different states at the same time, and particles can be separated by light-years yet still be “entangled,” affecting each others’ properties.

This weirdness is key to the incredible potential power of quantum computing. Because of the superposition phenomenon, quantum computers can store and manipulate far more information per unit volume than can traditional computers, which encode information in a binary way using 0s and 1s. (The basic unit of information in a quantum-computing system, by the way, is known as a qubit, which is short for “quantum bit.”)

The new study gives us a taste of that power. The research team, led by Frank Arute of Google AI Quantum, used a quantum computer called Sycamore, which featured 53 functional qubits (plus one that didn’t work properly).

The scientists entangled those 53 qubits into a complex superposition state, then had Sycamore perform a task akin to random-number generation. The results were then compared with simulations run on the Summit supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee.

“Summit is currently the world’s leading supercomputer, capable of carrying out about 200 million billion operations per second,” William Oliver, a physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, wrote in an accompanying “News and Views” piece in the same issue of Nature.

“It comprises roughly 40,000 processor units, each of which contains billions of transistors (electronic switches), and has 250 million gigabytes of storage. Approximately 99% of Summit’s resources were used to perform the classical sampling,” added Oliver, who was not involved in the new study.

As Foxen noted, Sycamore finished in about 3.5 minutes, and the Summit work suggested that even the most powerful traditional supercomputer would have to chew on the problem for about 10,000 years.

A five year program to map the universe in its most detailed survey ever got underway in Arizona, US with 5,000 mini telescopes aiming to decode Dark Energy — the force that is not just driving the universe’s expansion but also accelerating it. Each one of these mini telescopes will be able to spot a galaxy every 20 minutes — which means that in one year, this super telescope would have surveyed more galaxies in the universe than all other telescopes combined.

How does it work: Researchers from around the globe, who are taking part in this study, have attached an optical device for measuring the spectrum of light from any source, calling it the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI), to the 4m Mayall telescope at the Kitt Peak observatory in Arizona. Inside the DESI are 5,000 optical fibres each of which will act as an independent telescope and together, they will be able to scan 360,000 galaxies in a single day. Using previous surveys to draw a map of the Universe, this super telescope will be studying 35 million galaxies to understand Dark Energy. Given that this super telescope can see objects 10 billion light years away, it means that it can tell us about cosmic events that occurred 10 billion years back.

What’s Dark Energy: It was the name coined to describe the force that is accelerating the Universe’s expansion — after scientists discovered in 1998 that contrary to the expectations propounded by the Big Bang Theory that the Universe’s expansion would not only slow down but that it will also begin to contract as a result of gravitational pull, not only was the Universe expanding, but its expansion was speeding up. Dark Energy is said to make up 68% of the Universe while Dark Matter makes up 27% and the remaining matter — which includes everything on Earth and everything observed through various instruments — constitutes just 5% of the Universe.

By Thorin Klosowski

By making a few simple changes to your devices and accounts, you can maintain security against outside parties’ unwanted attempts to access your data as well as protect your privacy from those you don’t consent to sharing your information with. Getting started is easy. Here’s a guide to the few simple changes you can make to protect yourself and your information online.

Make smart use of the tools available to keep your data safe.

Secure your accounts

Why: In the past decade, data breaches and password leaks have struck companies such as Equifax, Facebook, Home Depot, Marriott, Target, Yahoo, and countless others. If you have online accounts, hackers have likely leaked data from at least one of them. Want to know which of your accounts have been compromised? Search for your email address on Have I Been Pwned? to cross-reference your email address with hundreds of data breaches.

How: Everyone should use a password manager to generate and remember different, complex passwords for every account — this is the most important thing people can do to protect their privacy and security today. Wirecutter’s favorite password managers are LastPass and 1Password. Both can generate passwords, monitor accounts for security breaches, suggest changing weak passwords, and sync your passwords between your computer and phone. Password managers seem intimidating to set up, but once you’ve installed one you just need to browse the Internet as usual. As you log in to accounts, the password manager saves your passwords and suggests changing weak or duplicate passwords. Over the course of a couple of weeks, you end up with new passwords for most of your accounts. Take this time to also change the default passwords for any devices in your house — if your home router, smart light bulbs, or security cameras are still using “password” or “1234” as the password, change them.

Everyone should also use two-step authentication whenever possible for their online accounts. Most banks and major social networks provide this option. As the name suggests, two-step authentication requires two steps: entering your password and entering a number only you can access. For example, step one is logging in to Facebook with your username and password. In step two, Facebook sends a temporary code to you in a text message or, even better, through an app like Google Authenticator, and you enter that code to log in.

Protect your Web browsing

Why: Companies and websites track everything you do online. Every ad, social network button, and website collects information about your location, browsing habits, and more. The data collected reveals more about you than you might expect. You might think yourself clever for never tweeting your medical problems or sharing all your religious beliefs on Facebook, for instance, but chances are good that the websites you visit regularly provide all the data advertisers need to pinpoint the type of person you are. This is part of how targeted ads remain one of the Internet’s most unsettling innovations.

How: A browser extension like uBlock Origin blocks ads and the data they collect. The uBlock Origin extension also prevents malware from running in your browser and gives you an easy way to turn the ad blocking off when you want to support sites you know are secure. Combine uBlock with Privacy Badger, which blocks trackers, and ads won’t follow you around as much. To slow down stalker ads even more, disable interest-based ads from Apple, Facebook, Google, and Twitter. A lot of websites offer means to opt out of data collection, but you need to do so manually. Simple Opt Out has direct links to opt-out instructions for major sites like Netflix, Reddit, and more. Doing this won’t eliminate the problem completely, but it will significantly cut down the amount of data collected.

You should also install the HTTPS Everywhere extension. HTTPS Everywhere automatically directs you to the secure version of a site when the site supports that, making it difficult for an attacker — especially if you’re on public Wi-Fi at a coffee shop, airport, or hotel — to digitally eavesdrop on what you’re doing.

Some people may want to use a virtual private network (VPN), but it’s not necessary for everyone. If you frequently connect to public Wi-Fi, a VPN is useful because it adds a layer of security to your browsing when HTTPS isn’t available. It can also provide some privacy from your Internet service provider and help minimize tracking based on your IP address. But all your Internet activity still flows through the VPN provider’s servers, so in using a VPN you’re choosing to trust that company over your ISP not to store or sell your data. Make sure you understand the pros and cons first, but if you want a VPN, Wirecutter recommends IVPN.

Use antivirus software on your computer

Why: Viruses might not seem as common as they were a decade ago, but they still exist. Malicious software on your computer can wreak all kinds of havoc, from annoying pop-ups to covert bitcoin mining to scanning for personal information. If you’re at risk for clicking perilous links, or if you share a computer with multiple people in a household, it’s worthwhile to set up antivirus software, especially on Windows computers.

How: If your computer runs Windows 10, you should use Microsoft’s built-in software, Windows Defender. Windows Defender offers plenty of security for most people, and it’s the main antivirus option that Wirecutter recommends; we reached that conclusion after speaking with several experts. If you run an older version of Windows (even though we recommend updating to Windows 10) or you use a shared computer, a second layer of protection might be necessary. For this purpose, Malwarebytes Premium is your best bet. Malwarebytes is unintrusive, it works well with Windows Defender, and it doesn’t push out dozens of annoying notifications like most antivirus utilities tend to do.

Mac users are typically okay with the protections included in macOS, especially if you download software only from Apple’s App Store and stick to well-known browser extensions. If you do want a second layer of security, Malwarebytes Premium is also available for Mac. You should avoid antivirus applications on your phone altogether and stick to downloading trusted apps from official stores.

(From The NYTimes)

A Nobel prize-winning astronomer has predicted that humans will find evidence of alien life in the next 30 years.  On Tuesday, Professor Didier Queloz, from Switzerland, said he was “convinced” of the existence of extraterrestrial life after winning the 2019 Nobel Prize in Physics.

“I can’t believe we are the only living entity in the universe,” the Cambridge University professor said while speaking at the Science Media Centre in London, according to The Telegraph. “There are just way too many planets, way too many stars, and the chemistry is universal.

“The chemistry that led to life has to happen elsewhere. So I am a strong believer that there must be life elsewhere. “Life doesn’t just mean a green man coming to you, life started way before animals were crawling on the surface of earth.”

According to the professor, he is certain that humans will have detected alien life in 100 years’ time.  However, he is convinced it will happen much sooner than that, once we have built more advanced technology capable of detecting life on distant planets.

Professor Queloz, who discovered the first planet outside our solar system while still a PhD student, won the Nobel Prize alongside fellow researcher Michel Mayor, his PhD supervisor at Princeton.

In 1995, Professor Queloz and Professor Mayor discovered the exoplanet 51 Pegasi b using the Doppler spectroscopy technique, which measures wobbles of a star as a planet orbits around it.

Since their initial discovery, more than 4,100 additional exoplanets have been found.

The Nobel Prize was awarded to the scientists for “contributions to our understanding of the evolution of the universe and Earth’s place in the cosmos”, with half of the prize awarded to James Peebles, for “theoretical discoveries in physical cosmology”.

Although it’s possible Mars once supported life, Earth is the only planet in the solar system currently known to do so. However, a new study notes that Venus may have been habitable for a few billion years — until something mysterious happened.

The research, presented at the European Planetary Science Congress – Division for Planetary Sciences Joint Meeting 2019, notes that Venus potentially had stable temperatures and was home to “liquid water” for 2 to 3 billion years, until a “dramatic transformation” started happening more than 700 million years ago that completely reshaped the planet and resurfaced approximately 80 percent of it.

“Our hypothesis is that Venus may have had a stable climate for billions of years. It is possible that the near-global resurfacing event is responsible for its transformation from an Earth-like climate to the hellish hot-house we see today,” said Dr. Michael Way, the study’s lead author, in a statement.

Coming back to the present day, Venus has a surface temperature of 864 degrees Fahrenheit. However, in the five outcomes that Way and the researchers ran for the study, they found that Venus was able to maintain stable temperatures scenarios between minus 20 degrees Celsius (-4  degrees Fahrenheit) and 50 degrees Celsius (122 degrees Fahrenheit) for approximately 3 billion years.

Then something mysterious caused a mass explosion of carbon dioxide on the planet between 700 million and 750 million years ago, an event that Way believes could be linked to the volcanic activity on the planet.

“Something happened on Venus where a huge amount of gas was released into the atmosphere and couldn’t be re-absorbed by the rocks,” Way added. “On Earth we have some examples of large-scale outgassing, for instance the creation of the Siberian Traps 500 million years ago which is linked to a mass extinction, but nothing on this scale. It completely transformed Venus.”

Venus is closer to the Sun and its extreme surface temperature makes the existence of liquid water on the planet a moot point. But during the simulations, the researchers added an ocean 310 meters (1,017 feet) deep, one that was 10 meters (32 feet) deep, as well as putting some water in the soil.

There was also a scenario where they used Earth’s topography and the 1,017-foot deep ocean, as well as a planet “completely covered” by an ocean 158 meters (518 feet) deep and found that even though Venus is closer to the Sun than the Earth, liquid water could have been present.

WATER DETECTED ON POTENTIALLY ‘HABITABLE’ EXOPLANET FOR FIRST TIME, SCIENTISTS SAY

“Venus currently has almost twice the solar radiation that we have at Earth,” said Way. “However, in all the scenarios we have modeled, we have found that Venus could still support surface temperatures amenable for liquid water.”

Whether it was the planet’s volcanic activity or something else, Venus is now too hot to be supportive of liquid water. Way said that more research is needed to understand the planet’s history and how it might affect the search for exoplanets, including ones that may hold liquid water.

“We need more missions to study Venus and get a more detailed understanding of its history and evolution,” Way said. “However, our models show that there is a real possibility that Venus could have been habitable and radically different from the Venus we see today. This opens up all kinds of implications for exoplanets found in what is called the ‘Venus Zone’, which may in fact host liquid water and temperate climates.”

Earlier this month, scientists detected water vapor in the atmosphere of a “super-Earth” exoplanet with potentially habitable temperatures, K2-18b, 110 light-years from Earth.

Researchers from the International Computer Science Institute (ICSI) in the US identified 1,325 Android apps that were gathering data from devices even after people explicitly denied them permission, news portal CNET reported on Tuesday.

Serge Egelman, Director of Usable Security And Privacy research at the ICSI, presented the study at the Federal Trade Commission’s privacy conference.

He said the researchers had notified Google about these issues in September 2018, as well as the FTC.

One of the apps mentioned by name was Shutterfly, which is used for editing photos. It had been gathering GPS coordinates from photos and sending that data to its own servers.

In a statement, Shutterfly said: “Like many photo services, Shutterfly uses this data to enhance the user experience with features such as categorization and personalized product suggestions, all in accordance with Shutterfly’s privacy policy as well as the Android developer agreement.”

The study published on the FTC website cited 153 apps, including Samsung’s Health and Browser apps, which are installed in more than 500 million devices.

According to the report, Egelman would be presenting more detailed information about the research findings at the Usenix Security conference in August.

An undergraduate team of scientists in Yale led by an Indian-American, is designing a miniature satellite which has been chosen by NASA for launch on space missions in the coming years.

The Yale Undergraduate Aerospace Association (YUAA), which is currently led by Keshav Raghavan, is currently working at the Wright Lab to build a CubeSat research satellite to detect cosmic rays. It is among  16 teams undergraduate teams across the country whose CubeSats will be flown into space as auxiliary payloads on space missions planned to launch in 2020, 2021 and 2022.

“It will be the first ever Yale undergraduate endeavor to launch a spacecraft, forging the path for even more ambitious space-based projects by Yale undergraduates in the future,” the University announced in a March 22, press release.

According to a March 14 announcement from NASA, the YUAA project, called Bouchet Low-Earth Alpha/Beta Space Telescope (BLAST), “is a scientific investigation mission to map the distribution of galactic cosmic radiation across the night sky. The satellite will identify and count alpha particles and beta particles in the rays, and measure the radiation energy around Earth. BLAST will contribute to the ongoing search for the origins and nature of these rays, which will provide insight into the origins of the universe.”

To date, the CubeSat Launch Initiative has selected 176 CubeSat missions from 39 states and launched 85 CubeSat missions as part of the Educational Launch of Nanosatellites (ELaNa) through NASA’s Launch Services Program, NASA said in its press release.

Raghavan and his team mates have already done the research and development work on the miniature satellite, and this summer, they begin on prototyping and final construction work on the satellite. In January 2019, the team began using one of Wright Lab’s clean rooms to conduct tests on launch-ready components, such as the altitude control systems, Yale said in its press release.  Wright Lab will be the team’s site for final assembly of the satellite.

According to the YUAA website, these miniature satellites were first developed by the California Polytechnic State University and Stanford University in 1999.

“Intended as a standard, inexpensive design that can easily fit alongside larger satellites aboard launch vehicles, the CubeSat model has given student groups, hobbyist organizations, and research teams operating with limited funding or experience unprecedented access to space,” the YUAA site says.

These miniature satellites are built from commercially available materials and have a modular structure of 10x10x10cm cubes (hence the name). Hundreds of universities, companies and research teams have designed and launched their own CubeSats over the years. The Yale CubeSat project is an undergraduate-run project, currently in its 4th year.

Google, Amazon and Apple are all offering versions of this kind of technology Grey areas remain over who your data is shared with once it hits the cloud

Amazon, Apple and Google voice assistants and smart TVs could find out if a person is cheating on their partner, a data expert has claimed.

Smart gadgets, which are used by one in ten people around the UK, can harvest enough data to work out the dynamics of a relationship, they say.

They have the potential to record saucy conversations and analyze location data to discover secret affairs.

The virtual assistants can show when occupants are in a building, or for example, share a bedroom, by using sensor logs and smart meters.

There is already ambiguity when it comes to these companies privacy policies and how they collect and use people’s data.

Recorded chats and locations could be harvested for research, stored in the cloud and sold on to third parties.

Amazon, Apple and Google voice assistants and smart TVs could find out if a person is cheating on their partner, a data expert has claimed.

Smart gadgets, which are used by one in ten people around the UK, can harvest enough data to work out the dynamics of a relationship, they say.

They have the potential to record saucy conversations and analyse location data to discover secret affairs.

The virtual assistants can show when occupants are in a building, or for example, share a bedroom, by using sensor logs and smart meters.

There is already ambiguity when it comes to these companies privacy policies and how they collect and use people’s data.

Recorded chats and locations could be harvested for research, stored in the cloud and sold on to third parties.

Alexa and other AI-powered technology can find out when someone is cheating on their partner, according to a data expert. The gadgets, which are owned by one in ten people around the UK, can harvest enough data to work out the dynamics of a relationship.”

When a section of the scientific community began warning about the growth of artificial intelligence, the rest of the world said it was just paranoia. Then Elon Musk, in 2018, said: “I think the danger of AI is much greater than the danger of nuclear warheads”. Suddenly it wasn’t just “paranoid scientists” ringing the bell but the kind of entrepreneur one expects to build stuff using AI. And now we learn that AI can even write fake news…

OpenAI, a non-profit research company seeking a “safe artificial intelligence”, — Musk is among its co-founder, alongside bigwigs such as Sam Altman, Peter Thiel and Reid Hoffman, though he has left the company — said it has developed an AI that is so good at writing that it will be kept locked in — away from public. The researchers said it was simply too dangerous to let this tech have a go in the real world.

The company’s machine learning system, called Generative Pre-trained Transformer-2 (GPT-2 ), is capable of generating text based on brief writing prompts. The result is very close to human writing. Consider this: GPT-2 was fed with two lines that read, “A train carriage containing controlled nuclear materials was stolen in Cincinnati today. Its whereabouts are unknown”. And it wrote the rest: “The incident occurred on the downtown train line, which runs from Covington and Ashland stations. In an email to Ohio news outlets, the U.S. Department of Energy said it is working with the Federal Railroad Administration to find the thief. “The theft of this nuclear material will have significant negative consequences on public and environmental health, our workforce and the economy of our nation,” said Tom Hicks, the U.S. Energy Secretary, in a statement. You can read the rest — and more such samples — here. Cleary, this is immaculate work by a robot. Immaculate fake news.

With fake news already wreaking havoc across the world — from attempting to influence elections to triggering murder and riot — the fear is real. After all, a fake news-writing AI won’t be bound by human morals.

NASA’s Voyager 2 probe has become the second-ever manmade spacecraft to enter interstellar space, the agency said last week.

The probe, launched in 1977 to study the planets farthest from Earth, crossed the outermost edge of what’s called the heliosphere — a protective bubble created by our sun — on Nov. 5. It is now more than 11 billion miles from Earth, according to NASA. The sun is a mere 91 to 94.5 million miles from Earth.

Like its sister spacecraft Voyager 1, which crossed this boundary in 2012, Voyager 2 is now traveling in the space between stars.

Voyager 1 may have beaten Voyager 2 into interstellar space, but the latter spacecraft has an advantage. An instrument called the Plasma Science Experiment (PLS), which stopped working on Voyager 1 well before leaving the heliosphere, continues to operate on Voyager 2 – making it easier for scientists to learn about the spacecraft’s surroundings. Researchers are furthermore hopeful that data transmitted from Voyager 2 will make it possible to learn about the sun’s influence at so far a distance from the center of our solar system.

“Working on Voyager makes me feel like an explorer, because everything we’re seeing is new,” John Richardson, principal investigator for the PLS instrument and a principal research scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, said in a NASA statement. “Even though Voyager 1 crossed the heliopause in 2012, it did so at a different place and a different time, and without the PLS data. So we’re still seeing things that no one has seen before.”

The Voyager spacecraft, launched as five-year missions, have now been operating for over four decades and continue to transmit valuable data back to Earth, and have even been remotely upgraded along the way.

In India, the smartphone is more than just a convenient way to check Facebook: It is a tool for evening the playing field and catching up with the rest of the world — a revolutionary idea in the world’s largest democracy.

“For most Indians, the internet is something that they are only discovering right now, and not through personal computers [the way that many in the West did]. Most Indians never have had PCs, and never will have PCs,” Ravi Agrawal, managing editor of Foreign Policy and Asia 21 Young Leader and author of India Connected: How the Smartphone is Transforming the World’s Largest Democracy, said last year.

“They’re discovering [the web] because of cheap smartphones and cheap mobile data.”

For many Indians, the phone is their first mobile device — and Agrawal stresses that it is much more than just a phone.

“For someone making two thousand dollars a year, it could be your first TV screen. It could be your first mp3 player or your first Walkman. In most cases your first camera, maybe even your first alarm clock, your first compass, your first map device, your first GPS enabled device.”

The numbers are hard to ignore. According to Agrawal, there are about 400 million Indians on the internet today. That number is expected to reach one billion as soon as 2025.

The existence of so many Indians online will have a ripple effect into various industries, potentially transforming the country’s interpersonal relationships, education system, economics, and politics.

For example, smartphones have given rise to India’s booming dating app industry. While the American apps Tinder (and soon Bumble) operate in the country, homegrown services like TrulyMadly and Woo have dominated market share.

“One of my friends says that you know the first kiss that most young Indians are now going to have is [thanks to] Tinder. It’s a little bit of an exaggeration, but you can actually imagine that happening,” Agrawal said.

But the uses of a smartphone can be even more profound. According to the country’s last census, India had about 270 million people classified as illiterate. The capabilities of the smartphone, with touchpads and voice recognition, suddenly provided access to a world that was once out of reach.

“I’ve been to villages in India where women who are illiterate can take a phone, press Google Talk, and just say, ‘show the Taj Mahal,’ and a video pops up and they can press play and see moving images of the Taj Mahal in a way that really wasn’t possible before. They can look at videos of how to cook different types of dishes and how to make new shalwar kameez’s to boost their stitching businesses. These are things that were just not imaginable even five or 10 years ago for vast parts of Indian society.”

As India prepares for general elections next spring, political parties are also taking notice of the power of a young, voting, digitally savvy generation. In fact, smartphones, social media platforms, and digital connectivity are already playing a significant role in the region’s politics. Agrawal mentions ongoing tensions in the state of Kashmir between India and Pakistan, where there have been intermittent internet outages initiated by the government and police fearful of the medium’s power to mobilize people for protests and disseminate information —  or, in some cases, misinformation. Shutdowns in India were more frequent in 2016 than they were in war-prone Syria and Iraq.

For Agrawal, this comes as no surprise. “That is exactly what the smartphone is for an entire generation of young Indians,” he said. “It is their literal and figurative mobility.”

By Matt Schiavenza

Who’s afraid of artificial intelligence? A lot of people, it turns out. The late Stephen Hawking predicted in 2015 that man-made machines would, within a century, become more capable than people, making one wonder whether they’ll tolerate our presence on earth. Silicon Valley entrepreneur Elon Musk — not one normally given to technological doom and gloom — is only slightly less pessimistic when he claims that AI poses a greater threat to humanity than North Korea’s nuclear weapons.

Even those who don’t believe machines pose an existential crisis for humanity agree that AI represents a hugely disruptive force for the global economy. Autonomous vehicles are likely to render professions like long-haul truck driving and taxi driving obsolete. Robots could replace humans who clean homes and wash dishes for a living. High schoolers from the mid-21st century may receive extra help from machine-based, not human, tutors.

These changes will present governments around the world with an acute problem: what to do about the millions of people whose jobs will disappear and never come back. According to Kai-Fu Lee, a longtime expert on AI, job-displacing artificial intelligence will force people to look beyond work in order to define who they are.

“We were all brainwashed by the Industrial Revolution-era value that our work equals the meaning of our life,” he said in a recent talk at Asia Society in New York. “Perhaps AI is a wakeup call, for us to realize that there’s something else. That there’s love, compassion, empathy, and human-to-human relations.”

That Lee himself is saying this is something of a surprise. The Taiwan-born venture capitalist and entrepreneur is known for his Herculean work ethic: When he served as president of Google China, Lee would wake up at 2 a.m. and again at 5 in order to check and send emails. “I did that so my American colleagues knew I was responsive,” he said. “And to set an example for my Chinese employees.” And in 1991, while his wife was in labor with their first child, Lee made plans to leave her bedside in order to finish work on a presentation — only to be spared this decision when his daughter arrived earlier than expected.

Lee’s perspective changed in 2013 when he was diagnosed with lymphoma, which has since gone in remission. “I realized my priorities were upside down,” he said. “Whatever remaining days I had, continuing to work was no longer something I wanted to do. Much more important was loving the people I wanted to love, and giving back to the people who loved me. [I wanted to pursue] things I was passionate about.”

One of these subjects is artificial intelligence — a field that Lee has studied since his graduate school days at Carnegie Mellon University in the 1980s. In his new book AI Superpowers, he sketches a vision of the near future in which artificial intelligence transforms key economic sectors like transportation, health care, and personal finance. The typical office worker of 2040 — or perhaps even sooner — will travel to work via a public, self-autonomous vehicle that will not get stuck in traffic, cause accidents, or need to park anywhere. A patient displaying troubling symptoms will receive an accurate, instant diagnosis from a machine more knowledgeable than any human doctor. And a bank officer reviewing a loan application will consider more than just an applicant’s income and credit score: variables like one’s propensity to let a cell phone battery die, for instance, will matter, too.

In his talk at Asia Society, Lee said that the rise of machines in the workforce will allow humans to devote themselves to professions which depend on innate human characteristics like compassion and empathy. Far fewer people in the middle of this century will be employed as factory workers, for instance — but more will be needed in elderly care, a job that Lee believes cannot be performed by robots. “Elderly people don’t want a robot,” he said. “They want other people.” And while doctors will no longer dispense diagnoses, they’ll be repurposed as workers whose interpersonal skills matter more than medical knowledge — a medical therapist, if you will.

Managing this transition will require government intervention on a scale that is difficult to fathom. Policymakers in places like Finland have experimented with universal basic income (UBI), a program that provides no-strings-attached payments to everyone, regardless of their employment situation. Lee is skeptical that such an approach will be suitable everywhere and instead prefers government subsidies for modestly-compensated professions, like teaching, that will need to attract more workers. Either solution will require political cooperation that does not seem feasible in today’s hyperpolarized climate. But Lee is adamant that for all its potential for trouble, artificial intelligence will allow humans to transcend our current paradigm that one’s work is one’s life.

“I can imagine our maker is very frustrated with us,” he said. “After thousands of years of evolution, we’re stuck here, like rats on a wheel, doing the same routine jobs every day, and not spending time on what we’re passionate about and with people we love. …  Maybe our maker is so frustrated that he threw AI at us to take away all of the routine jobs, so we have time to think, and to love.”