The deal struck by 23-year-old Karim Baratov, who immigrated to Canada from Kazakhstan, also resulted in a fine that “encompasses all his remaining assets,” the US Justice Department said in a statement.

Baratov has been in American custody since being extradited from Canada last year on a US warrant for hacking, commercial espionage and related crimes.

US authorities allege Russian intelligence agents hired Baratov and another hacker to carry out attacks on Yahoo from 2014 to 2016.

The data breach compromised 500 million Yahoo accounts and is one of the largest cyberattacks in history.

“The sentence imposed reflects the seriousness of hacking for hire,” said prosecutor Alex Tse.

“Hackers such as Baratov ply their trade without regard for the criminal objectives of the people who hire and pay them.”

Targets included Russian and US government officials, cyber security, diplomatic and military personnel, journalists, companies and financial firms.

“It’s difficult to overstate the unprecedented nature of this conspiracy, in which members of a foreign intelligence service directed and empowered criminal hackers to conduct a massive cyber-attack against 500 million victim user accounts,” said John Bennett, FBI special agent in charge for the San Francisco field office.

A team from Germany, the United States and France taught an artificial intelligence system to distinguish dangerous skin lesions from benign ones, showing it more than 100,000 images.

The machine — a deep learning convolutional neural network or CNN — was then tested against 58 dermatologists from 17 countries, shown photos of malignant melanomas and benign moles.

Just over half the dermatologists were at “expert” level with more than five years of experience, 19 percent had between two and five years’ experience, and 29 percent were beginners with less than two years under their belt.

“Most dermatologists were outperformed by the CNN,” the research team wrote in a paper published in the journal Annals of Oncology.

On average, flesh and blood dermatologists accurately detected 86.6 percent of skin cancers from the images, compared to 95 percent for the CNN.

“The CNN missed fewer melanomas, meaning it had a higher sensitivity than the dermatologists,” the study’s first author Holger Haenssle of the University of Heidelberg said in a statement.

It also “misdiagnosed fewer benign moles as malignant melanoma… this would result in less unneccessary surgery.”

The dermatologists’ performance improved when they were given more information of the patients and their skin lesions.

The team said AI may be a useful tool for faster, easier diagnosis of skin cancer, allowing surgical removal before it spreads.

There are about 232,000 new cases of melanoma, and 55,500 deaths, in the world each year, they added.

But it is unlikely that a machine will take over from human doctors entirely, rather functioning as an aid.

Melanoma in some parts of the body, such as the fingers, toes and scalp, are difficult to image, and AI may have difficulty recognising “atypical” lesions or ones that patients themselves are unaware of.

“Currently, there is no substitute for a thorough clinical examination,” experts Victoria Mar from Monash University in Melbourne and Peter Soyer of the University of Queensland wrote in an editorial published with the study.

And who would have thought to trawl through five million of these gene snapshots — called “DNA barcodes” — collected from 100,000 animal species by hundreds of researchers around the world and deposited in the US government-run GenBank database?

That would be Mark Stoeckle from The Rockefeller University in New York and David Thaler at the University of Basel in Switzerland, who together published findings last week sure to jostle, if not overturn, more than one settled idea about how evolution unfolds.

It is textbook biology, for example, that species with large, far-flung populations — think ants, rats, humans — will become more genetically diverse over time.

But is that true?

“The answer is no,” said Stoeckle, lead author of the study, published in the journal Human Evolution.

For the planet’s 7.6 billion people, 500 million house sparrows, or 100,000 sandpipers, genetic diversity “is about the same,” he told AFP.

The study’s most startling result, perhaps, is that nine out of 10 species on Earth today, including humans, came into being 100,000 to 200,000 years ago.

“This conclusion is very surprising, and I fought against it as hard as I could,” Thaler told AFP.

That reaction is understandable: How does one explain the fact that 90 percent of animal life, genetically speaking, is roughly the same age?

Was there some catastrophic event 200,000 years ago that nearly wiped the slate clean?

Simpler, cheaper 

To understand the answer, one has to understand DNA barcoding. Animals have two kinds of DNA.

The one we are most familiar with, nuclear DNA, is passed down in most animals by male and female parents and contains the genetic blueprint for each individual.

The genome — made up of DNA — is constructed with four types of molecules arranged in pairs. In humans, there are three billion of these pairs, grouped into about 20,000 genes.

But all animals also have DNA in their mitochondria, which are the tiny structures inside each cell that convert energy from food into a form that cells can use.

Mitochondria contain 37 genes, and one of them, known as COI, is used to do DNA barcoding.

Unlike the genes in nuclear DNA, which can differ greatly from species to species, all animals have the same set of mitochondrial DNA, providing a common basis for comparison.

Mitochondrial DNA is also a lot simpler, and cheaper, to isolate.

Around 2002, Canadian molecular biologist Paul Hebert — who coined the term “DNA barcode” — figured out a way to identify species by analysing the COI gene.

“The mitochondrial sequence has proved perfect for this all-animal approach because it has just the right balance of two conflicting properties,” said Thaler.

‘Neutral’ mutations

On the one hand, the COI gene sequence is similar across all animals, making it easy to pick out and compare.

On the other hand, these mitochondrial snippets are different enough to be able to distinguish between each species.

“It coincides almost perfectly with species designations made by specialist experts in each animal domain,” Thaler said.

In analysing the barcodes across 100,000 species, the researchers found a telltale sign showing that almost all the animals emerged about the same time as humans.

What they saw was a lack of variation in so-called “neutral” mutations, which are the slight changes in DNA across generations that neither help nor hurt an individual’s chances of survival.

In other words, they were irrelevant in terms of the natural and sexual drivers of evolution.

How similar or not these “neutral” mutations are to each other is like tree rings — they reveal the approximate age of a species.

Which brings us back to our question: why did the overwhelming majority of species in existence today emerge at about the same time?

Darwin perplexed 

Environmental trauma is one possibility, explained Jesse Ausubel, director of the Program for the Human Environment at The Rockefeller University.

“Viruses, ice ages, successful new competitors, loss of prey — all these may cause periods when the population of an animal drops sharply,” he told AFP, commenting on the study.

“In these periods, it is easier for a genetic innovation to sweep the population and contribute to the emergence of a new species.”

But the last true mass extinction event was 65.5 million years ago when a likely asteroid strike wiped out land-bound dinosaurs and half of all species on Earth. This means a population “bottleneck” is only a partial explanation at best.

“The simplest interpretation is that life is always evolving,” said Stoeckle.

“It is more likely that — at all times in evolution — the animals alive at that point arose relatively recently.”

In this view, a species only lasts a certain amount of time before it either evolves into something new or goes extinct.

And yet — another unexpected finding from the study — species have very clear genetic boundaries, and there’s nothing much in between.

“If individuals are stars, then species are galaxies,” said Thaler. “They are compact clusters in the vastness of empty sequence space.”

The absence of “in-between” species is something that also perplexed Darwin, he said.

The library is not just a place for reading books. It also for learning and experiencing different types of learning – and that’s why Singapore’s Tampines Regional Library reopened in August 2017 with a new concept and redesigned to facilitate and encourage users to interact with the library itself.

Recently, Asean journalists visited the Tampines Regional Library to see how to implement a new-era library and to apply Singapore’s national approach of helping lead an inclusive and informed digital Asean.

The library has five floors, very long floors the length of a football field, and is part of Tampines Hub, the first of its kind in Singapore. It is the integrated services hub for the island nation’s citizen, providing different facilities for residents, as well as providing a hub for government agency offices. In addition to the library, there are also a swimming pool, local football club, community centre, food centre and supermarket.

Tampines Regional Library serves about 3,500 people on weekdays, and double that on weekends. It is one of 26 national libraries in Singapore, serving as a regional library for the largest region, the east. There are three regional library in Singapore, each boasting 10,900 square metres.

Lynn Koh, the manager of Tampines Regional Library, said the facility works under the concept of “Don’t read the same things! Please try different books”. Tampines offers 400,000 books, 347 magazine titles, and 16,800 audio-visual items to induce people to spend time discovering something new. A lifelong library membership is free for Singapore citizens, while foreigner pay an annual membership fee of 42.80 Singapore dollars.

Self-services

As the entry floor has heavy foot traffic, Level 2 hosts a more general collection, along with transaction kiosks, and book check-out stations. Many transaction kiosks in the library are self-service, with the library encouraging users to find things themselves as well as check them out. In fact, users can largely bypass traditional library desks by using a mobile app to make payments, register for membership, borrow items, and search for and register in programmes.

A digital directory is located on every floor. It gives users a map of the whole library, making it easy to find what they’re seeking. They can search different levels and also search for the best route to the book or programme they seek. The kiosk also allows users to download a map to their mobile phone. Because the library is so big, it hopes to facilitate self-navigation.

It offers some 24-hour services in a round-the-clock lobby and an outside book-drop that takes books borrowed from any of the system’s libraries. And “reservation lockers” to put a hold on items has enabled users to pick up the item at any time – even when the library is closed.

Mobile Bookdrop

Tampines Regional Library is the first of its kind to implement a “bookdrop robot”, a bookdrop machine embedded with electromagnetic radio frequency identification (RFID).

Users can return books through the machine. Once it is full, the robot will automatically “walk”, following a magnetic strip on the floor embedded with QR Code, as it travels to return books to the main sorting area. When it arrives in the sorting area, it will send a signal to the sorting room to alert staff to replace the bin.

Librarians can also detect where the robot is along its route. At the book-sorting area, library staff will put the books into an “auto-sorter” machine that arranges the books for return to their proper shelves. The auto-sorter is a computerised system that mechanically sorts returned items into specific categories for easy shelving by staff and service partners. The machine uses data analytics to identify popular titles for staff to place on the “Just Returned’” shelves.

This is the first and only Singapore library to boast a “bookdrop” robot, which was just added in December 2017. It plans to roll out more in the other libraries.

Dedicated design for all

Koh noted that the Tampines Regional Library is designed to serve all people with an inclusive community space. The library is laid out so that Level 2 is has the more general collections including magazines and cookbooks, Level 3 serves young children, Level 4 is for older children and teenagers, Level 5 is for adult collections including non-fiction books, while Level 6 features quiet reading areas.

Shelves on Level 3, display books with their cover facing out to better attract children and make it easier for them to flip through and pick up the books they like. It also includes books for parents to read to babies aged zero to three years old.

It also offers four Tumble Book e-book reading stations, where a machine reads the book to children.

“One of objective of the library is to make it an attractive place for Singaporeans and library users to come to visit,” said Koh.

Anybody, including tourists, are welcome to visit and use the library, including finding a book and reading it there without charge – until, they want to borrow the book, at which point people apply for a library membership and pay the annual fee.

“It also offers an outdoor reading garden for teenagers who want to hang out and make a bit more noise rather than keeping quiet all the time,” said Koh.

The library also engages its users with social media, using hashtag #librarysgteens to showcase recommended books for teens. Teens can post their own content on Instagram or Twitter with hashtag #librarysgteens to engage with the library and their friends. They can post their activities in the library, respond to questions posed by the library, post what they are reading and so on.

Perhaps unexpectedly, Tampines also boasts a Culinary Studio, a cooking studio in the library managed by the People’s Association (PA). It is the first time that the library system has integrated its cookery collection with PA’s Culinary Studio. In addition to holding cooking classes, NLB supplements the space with a digital display of recommended reads and videos to facilitate learning.

Creative Space: Pixel Labs

Tampines Regional Library also offers users the Pixel Labs “Making Space”, a collaboration between National Library Board (NLB) and Infocomm Media Development Authority (IMDA).

It provides users with the equipment to create prototypes of new things. Pixel Labs aims to inspire people to “do” rather than just to “see”, participating in the act of creation and moving beyond the traditional library approach of consuming information. It is a chance to apply information to a problem, to test out a prototype or work on a hobby or area of interest..

Users will find a dedicated space with tools and supplies that enable individuals to learn, create, invent, network and share skills and knowledge. Tools and equipment such as 3D printers and microcontrollers enable onsite tinkering in the library.

Programmes are jointly arranged by NLB and IMDA for general library users, covering both tech and non-tech areas, including hands-on workshop for students and families; programmes for young children, adults and seniors, and also tech-related talks for the public and crafting sessions for makers.

The Enabling Village is an inclusive community space that brings under one roof a range of facilities and services for persons with disabilities.

Within the 30,000 square-metre village, visitors will find three key services – a community facility that promotes integration of persons with disabilities, a focal point for training and employment, and a showcase of accessibility and universal design, assistive technology for disabilities.

The Enabling Village is both a community and a space. The goal is to create a place where people with different abilities can move independently, where they can feel accepted for who they are and be valued for their contributions.

It is a community space combining retail, lifestyle and training in an all-accessible public space.

Tech Able

The Enabling Village is home to Tech Able, an integrated assistive technology space.

An initiative by SG Enable and SPD, Tech Able provides assistive device assessment services while doubling as a technology showcase.

It also offers a workspace to collaborate with other innovators, makers and marketers. They can test their ideas and products with both able-bodied and disabled users. Tech Able’s experiential space allows for testing products for the visually- and hearing-impaired in a fully-equipped soundproof and lightproof room. It also has a communications lab and an assistive technologies showroom.

It provides an independent living showcase where visitors can see universal design and assistive technologies in the context of a simulated living and working space. This helps users with disabilities make informed decisions about assistive technologies for their offices and home.

Thais are turning to technology, including through Facebook, to create social good and to help each other online – with real-world impacts.

Currently, nearly 1 million active Facebook Groups have been created by Thai people. For example, Help Us Read is a community of more than 11,000 volunteers and visually impaired Thais. Using text-to-audio features on their mobile devices, visually impaired members are able to “read” content that helps them in their daily lives.

Natwut Amornvivat, co-founder and administrator of Help Us Read, said the group was established with a sense of community and support for blind people in Thailand, who often struggle to find the basic help they need each day.

“Today, our community of more than 11,000 people connects visually impaired members with volunteers who are willing to be their ‘eyes’,” said Natwut. “We rely on the tools available on Facebook to help visually impaired members ‘read’ content, such as food labels, books and even describe pictures or cards from their children. This helps bring real value and impact to their lives. We’re now excited to extend our community into other countries.”

Since Facebook is accessible by the visually impaired, Natwut changed his mind from his original idea of developing an app to serve that community, and instead turned to Facebook and started Help Us Read. Immediately, within the first week of launch, there were 700 to 800 volunteers participating on the page. That has now reached 10,000 volunteers, with someone available 24 hours daily, seven days a week to help by reading drug labels or other information.

“It is kindness blended with technology,” said Natwut. “Facebook is the bridge that links these two different groups together, the blind and people with ‘normal’ vision.”

Cholatip Yimyong, co-founder and administrator of Help Us Read, said she found Help Us Read on Facebook four years ago.

Another socially useful Facebook group is Run2gether, a community of more than 28,000 people. It organises mini-marathons to promote the inclusion and equality of non-disabled and disabled people. Facebook serves as the platform for participants to connect and share their experiences.

Chatchai Aphibanpoonpon, the Group and Page Administrator of Run2gether, said the group serves a community of runners with disabilities. Set up for four years ago, the objective of Run2gether is to invite visually impaired and disabled people to get exercise by running.

Chatchai has always worked closely with blind people and found that many of them are overweight. This led to the idea of inviting them to run. But those with strong visual challenges need partners to run with them and cannot run alone. And that’s where the Run2gether initiative fitted in.

“At the first event of Run2gether, mini-marathons, we had 12 blind people and 12 volunteers running together. They had a ‘shared experience’ and became friends. Able-bodied people now have disabled friends, and they will always be thinking of their disabled friends,” said

Chatchai. He used Facebook as a platform to connects able-bodied community members to those with disabilities, as well as a place to share the experience and to connect.

And the idea may be catching on – a Run2gether event and community page has opened for Bulgaria.

Arnun Chantan, or Lek, a member of Run2gether, said that he became disabled because of disease. When he came across Run2gether three years ago he was not able to even walk, but has now turned his life around and is running. In fact, he is now a full-marathon runner, able to cover 42 kilometres.

Then there is the HandUp Network, a community of more than 5,000 connecting skilled professionals with non-government organisations (NGOs) to help the groups learn the skills needed to scale their operations and create greater impact.

Thunhavich Thitiratsakul, project manager of HandUp Network, said it has provided a place for everyone who can contribute their skills to help others. The HandUp Network in 2015 debuted on Facebook, and has helped 27 society organisations in Thailand.

Facebook for society 

John Wagner, managing director of Facebook Thailand said that one of the social site’s missions is to support communities, to help them achieve growth and fully realise their digital aspirations.

“Facebook is a platform connecting people and creating shared value,” he said, pointing to the more than 1 million Facebook Groups created by Thais. “We are inspired by the amazing communities developing within Thailand’s digital society.” Many of the million groups aim to create a positive social impact.

Facebook is committed to amplifying the social value created by Thai communities with local programmes, he said. For example, Facebook has teamed up with C-Asean to conduct a series of training sessions and workshops aimed at helping social enterprises in Thailand gain critical skills to grow their operations.