#ศาสตร์เกษตรดินปุ๋ย : ขอบคุณแหล่งข้อมูล : หนังสือพิมพ์ The Nation.

American Andrea Ghez, two others win Nobel Prize in physics for discoveries about black holes

Oct 07. 2020

By The Washington Post · Joel Achenbach · NATIONAL, WORLD, SCIENCE-ENVIRONMENT 
An American astrophysicist, Andrea Ghez, was awarded the Nobel Prize in physics on Tuesday for discovering that stars at the center of our galaxy are hurtling through space around a supermassive black hole.

Ghez, 55, shared half the prize with German astrophysicist Reinhard Genzel, who independently observed the astonishing acceleration of stars in the galactic center. Astrophysicists now believe that supermassive black holes reside at the center of all galaxies and played a role in the formation of galaxies from the primordial soup of matter in the early universe.

The other half of the prize went to Roger Penrose, a British mathematical physicist cited for his discovery that the existence of black holes is one of the bizarre implications of Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity, in which gravity is associated with the curvature of space and time.

Ghez, a professor at the University of California at Los Angeles, became the fourth woman to win a physics Nobel, following Marie Curie in 1903, Maria Goeppert Mayer in 1963 and Donna Strickland in 2018.

Dawn was still many hours away in California when Göran Hansson, secretary general of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, telephoned Ghez to tell her that she been laureated. About an hour later, she spoke by phone to reporters in Stockholm and discussed both the thrills of her research and her hopes that this new recognition will inspire more women to enter the field.

Asked what she thought when she first saw signs that something mysterious was lurking at the center of the galaxy, she said, “I think the first thing is doubt. You have to prove to yourself you’re really seeing what you think you’re seeing. Doubt and excitement.”

She added, “We have no idea what’s inside the black hole, and that’s what makes these things such exotic objects.”

Ghez has previously received many honors, including a MacArthur Foundation “genius” award. She was the first woman to receive the Royal Swedish Academy’s Crafoord Prize. A graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she majored in physics, and Caltech, where she received her doctorate, she has been on the UCLA faculty since 1994.

On Tuesday, she told reporters she feels particularly passionate these days about the teaching side of her profession.

“I take very seriously the responsibility of being the fourth woman to win the Nobel Prize. I hope I can inspire other young women into the field. It’s a field that has so many pleasures, and if you’re passionate about the science, there’s so much to be done,” Ghez said.

This year’s physics Nobel honored both the theoretical side of black holes – Penrose’s work – and the observational side, the investigations of Ghez and Genzel. There is no shortlist for a Nobel, and laureates find out they have won only if and when they get the early morning phone call from Sweden. This year, as has happened in the past, the announcement was delayed briefly while the academy attempted to reach one of the laureates.

The fact that this year’s prize would somehow involve black hole physics was hinted at by Hansson in his opening statement: “This year’s prize is about the darkest secrets of the universe.”

The usually packed room at the academy was mostly empty, because of restrictions in place because of the coronavirus pandemic. Hansson said this year there would be no in-person Nobel celebration in Stockholm in December.

Genzel, 68, is a professor at the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics near Munich, and also has an appointment at the University of California at Berkeley. Penrose, 89, is an emeritus professor at the University of Oxford who a half-century ago collaborated with the late Stephen Hawking to develop theories about the existence and nature of black holes.

Penrose did not invent the term “black hole,” but, the academy said Tuesday in its scientific brief describing the prize, “It was after Penrose’s discoveries that ‘black hole’ finally stuck as the name for this exotic gravitational anomaly.”

The academy’s scientific brief cites four of Hawking’s papers, including one co-authored with Penrose. Hawking, who died in 2018, never won a Nobel Prize. Several scientists opined Tuesday that Hawking probably would have shared a Nobel with Penrose had he lived. The academy does not award prizes posthumously.

“The one piece of sadness is that Steven Hawking is not alive to share the theory half of the prize with Roger Penrose,” David Spergel, director of the Center for Computational Astrophysics in New York, said Tuesday in an email.

In announcing the prize, the academy cited an article Penrose wrote in 1965, a decade after Einstein’s death, in which he said black holes really exist. “His groundbreaking article is still regarded as the most important contribution to the general theory of relativity since Einstein,” the academy wrote.

University of Chicago physicist Michael Turner on Tuesday called Penrose “a brilliant mathematician who turned his amazing skills to understanding Einstein’s theory at a time when there were still doubts about even the mathematical reality” of black holes. 

Turner said Einstein didn’t fully understand the implications of his own theory. “It took another generation of brilliant physicists to figure it all out. Not because of Einstein’s limitations but because of the richness of the theory,” Turner said.

Black holes are among the strangest features of the universe. They are formed from collapsed stars, with their matter so compressed by gravity that, according to the equations of general relativity, space becomes infinitely curved. Light cannot escape the gravity well. In 2019, scientists revealed the first direct image of a black hole – a supermassive black hole at the center of Messier 87, a galaxy in the constellation Virgo. 

Ghez and Genzel, backed by teams of researchers and using some of the world’s largest telescopes, separately published findings in the 1990s and 2000s that provided observational support for the existence of a supermassive black hole – or something acting suspiciously like one – in the center of our own galaxy in a region known as Sagittarius A*.

The tremendous speed at which stars move in that region suggests they are influenced by the gravity of a supermassive object. What that object is, exactly, is unknown, but as the Swedish Academy put it in announcing the prize, “A supermassive black hole is the only currently known explanation.”

They did not observe the black hole directly, but instead scrutinized individual stars whose motion implied the presence of something creating a powerful gravitational field. Our sun makes a full orbit of the galaxy over the course of about 230 million years, but near the center of the galaxy, a few speed-demon stars have orbits of less than 20 years, including one of just 11.5 years described in a 2012 paper in the journal Science co-authored by Ghez.

The mysterious “something” at the galactic center appears to have the mass equal to 4 million suns.

The observations of the stars in the galactic center were technically challenging, even with huge telescopes employed by Ghez and Genzel in Hawaii and Chile, respectively. The core of the galaxy is crowded with stars, and the scientists needed to pick out individual stars amid the swarm. The distances involved are immense – about 26,000 light-years – and the motions of those faraway stars hard to detect. The observations took many years, even decades.

Abundant dust interfered with the view, so the scientists had to observe in the dust-penetrating infrared portion of the spectrum. And they had to find a way, through what is known as adaptive optics, to correct for the distortions created by Earth’s own atmosphere.

Tuesday’s announcement came as something of a surprise to the physics community simply because the academy usually rotates the prize through different areas of the sprawling field, which covers everything from the smallest subatomic particle to the vastness of the universe. But for the second year in a row, the academy honored work involving exotic things in deep space.

#ศาสตร์เกษตรดินปุ๋ย : ขอบคุณแหล่งข้อมูล : หนังสือพิมพ์ The Nation.

House investigation faults Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google for engaging in anti-competitive monopoly tactics

Oct 07. 2020

By The Washington Post · Tony Romm, Cat Zakrzewski, Rachel Lerman · NATIONAL, BUSINESS, TECHNOLOGY, POLITICS, COURTSLAW, CONGRESS 

WASHINGTON – Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google engaged in anticompetitive, monopoly-style tactics to evolve into four of the world’s most powerful corporate behemoths, according to congressional investigators who called in a wide-ranging report released Tuesday for sweeping changes to federal laws so that government regulators can bring Silicon Valley back in check.

The roughly 450-page document, capping a roughly 16-month investigation by the House’s top antitrust committee, found that the four tech giants relied on dubious, harmful means to solidify their dominance in Web search, smartphones, social networking and shopping – and in the process evaded the very federal regulators whose primary task is to ensure that companies do not grow into such unmatched corporate titans.

Congressional investigators faulted Facebook for gobbling up potential competitors with impunity, and they concluded Google improperly scraped rivals’ websites and forced its technology on others to reach its pole position in search and advertising. The lawmakers’ report labeled both of those firms as monopolies while faulting the federal government for failing to crack down on them sooner.

Amazon and Apple, meanwhile, exerted their own form of “monopoly power” to protect and grow their corporate footprints. As operators of two major online marketplaces – a world-leading shopping site for Amazon, and a powerful App Store for Apple – the two tech giants for years set rules that essentially put smaller, competing sellers and software developers at a disadvantage, the report found.

The House investigation stopped short of calling on the Trump administration to break up any of the companies. Instead, it proposed the most sweeping overhaul of U.S. antitrust law in decades, a series of legislative proposals that could empower the government to battle bigness in the tech industry and prevent future problematic mergers. Any such retooling would require approval from Congress, and they would affect not only Silicon Valley but the entire economy – essentially turning the House’s efforts into a broader assault against corporate consolidation.

“You look at farms and agriculture; you look at big banks, of course; you look at the housing market; you look at retail,” said Rep. Pramila Jayapal, D-Wash., one of the committee’s members. “Our focus is on tech, but there’s no question this would help strengthen competition and rein in anti-monopoly behavior across industries, which would benefit consumers.”

In the meantime, the House’s findings threaten to carry considerable legal weight, lending fresh evidence to state and federal officials as they actively investigate Apple, Amazon, Facebook and Google for potential violations of antitrust rules. The Justice Department is expected to file an antitrust lawsuit against Google in a matter of days, as state attorneys general mount their own, nearly finished probe of the search-and-advertising giant.

“To put it simply, companies that once were scrappy, underdog startups that challenged the status quo have become the kinds of monopolies we last saw in the era of oil barons and railroad tycoons,” the House panel concluded in its report. “Although these firms have delivered clear benefits to society, the dominance of Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google has come at a price.”

“These firms typically run the marketplace while also competing in it,” the report continues, enabling tech giants “to write one set of rules for others, while they play by another, or to engage in a form of their own private quasi regulation that is unaccountable to anyone but themselves.”

Apple did not respond to a request for comment, Facebook and Google defended their business practices in statements that touted their popular appeal. Amazon responded with a blistering, unsigned blog post, calling House investigators’ proposed antitrust overhaul “flawed” and “fringe” in nature and scope. The company also defended its business practices, arguing its relationship with third-party sellers is “mutually beneficial.” (Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post.)

“All large organizations attract the attention of regulators, and we welcome that scrutiny. But large companies are not dominant by definition, and the presumption that success can only be the result of anti-competitive behavior is simply wrong,” the blog said.

House lawmakers embarked on their wide-ranging probe of the tech industry last June, responding to a flurry of complaints that Apple, Amazon, Facebook and Google had become too big and powerful. Investigators working on behalf of Rep. David Cicilline, D-R.I., the chairman of the House’s antitrust panel, soon amassed a trove of 1.3 million documents and hundreds of hours candorof testimony in public and private, including a high-profile, public grilling of the four tech giants’ chief executives: Amazon’s Bezos, Apple’s Tim Cook, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and Google’s Sundar Pichai.

Initially, Cicilline predicted that the probe would find that the Internet had become “broken” – overcome with ills, including privacy scandals, resulting from years of neglect in Washington. About 16 months later, he said in a statement Tuesday that the vast body of evidence lawmakers obtained had confirmed his fears, leaving “no doubt that there is a clear and compelling need for Congress and the antitrust enforcement agencies to take action that restores competition, improves innovation, and safeguards our democracy.”

The House report also serves as an indictment of the federal agencies that are supposed to keep watch over the country’s largest companies.

The Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission have the power to probe potential wrongdoing, review and approve large mergers before they occur and tap decades-old laws – put to use more than a century ago against railroad, steel and oil magnates – to ensure companies don’t become too politically and economically dominant. With the tech industry, though, investigators concluded the government had “failed, at key occasions, to stop monopolists from rolling up their competitors and failed to protect the American people from abuses of monopoly power.”

The report recommends a significant overhaul of the federal government’s antitrust powers, including making it illegal for a company like Amazon or Google to give greater weight to their own products in their online marketplaces. Other suggested retooling would empower consumers to bring lawsuits and give new legal tools to the Justice Department or FTC to block future tech mergers.

Some of the most ambitious ideas drew sharp rebukes from congressional Republicans, raising doubts about the extent to which lawmakers may be able to translate the report into a robust federal overhaul. Some House Republicans even issued their own findings Tuesday, focusing not on antitrust but “bias and censorship” targeting conservatives online. Top GOP lawmakers have joined President Donald Trump in airing such claims of censorship, offering specious evidence amid a flurry of denials from major social-media sites.

With Facebook, the House investigation trained its attention on the tech giant’s prior purchases of Instagram, a photo-sharing app, and WhatsApp, a messaging service. Facebook long has maintained that those acquisitions – blessed in the past by federal regulators – helped both of those apps grow from nascent startups into widely popular global services. But more than 41,000 pages of emails, memos and other once-secret company records tell a different story, showing Facebook sought to acquire “its competitive threats to maintain and expand its dominance.”

Earlier this summer, Democratic lawmakers unearthed a slew of private communications, showing Facebook officials discussing a “land grab” to buy up its rivals before they could pose significant threats. On Tuesday, congressional investigators added to that damning trove: A 2018 memo, prepared for Zuckerberg, that appears to show Facebook had grown more concerned with competition from its own subsidiary than other outside services.

A former senior Instagram employee told lawmakers the memo guided Facebook’s strategy, seeking to ensure Instagram could never become bigger and more popular than the tech giant’s original social-networking app, according to the report. To investigators, it also proved the Instagram purchase essentially “tipped the social networking market toward a monopoly, and now considers competition within its own family of products to be more considerable than competition from any other firm.”

“Acquisitions are part of every industry, and just one way we innovate new technologies to deliver more value to people,” Facebook spokesman Chris Sgro said in a statement. “Instagram and WhatsApp have reached new heights of success because Facebook has invested billions in those businesses.”

Taking aim at Google, the House probe determined the tech giant had tapped vast swaths of user data to become “an ecosystem of interlocking monopolies” in search, advertising, mapping, mobile and more. Lawmakers homed in on the ways that Google gives its own products a boost in search results, even when they are inferior to competitors’, marking the latest government entity to take issue with the company’s business practices after Europeans fined it billions for unfairly manipulating search results.

“Americans simply don’t want Congress to break Google’s products or harm the free services they use every day,” Google spokeswoman Julie Tarallo McAlister said in a statement. “The goal of antitrust law is to protect consumers, not help commercial rivals.”

Lawmakers also took aim at Amazon’s relationship with third-party merchants. The e-commerce giant publicly calls these smaller providers its “partners,” but Amazon competes with them as the seller of many products itself. House lawmakers said that the relationship “incentivizes Amazon to exploit its access to competing sellers’ data and information, among other anticompetitive conduct.”

Investigators said they heard from companies that Amazon used “strong-arm” tactics in negotiations. Book publishers, for example, said the company retaliated by removing the “buy” button on their products or showed their books as out of stock. Some of the tales stand in stark contrast to the very remarks Amazon made to the subcommittee at an early hearing in the investigation, when Amazon associate general counsel told Congress it does not use “individual seller data directly to compete.” Months later, media reports contradicted that claim, revealing the company had used rivals’ data to develop competing products.

The committee said in its report that Amazon “displayed a lack of candor” in its responses, and it cited a letter in which members from both parties on the committee accused the company of being “misleading, and possibly criminally false or perjurious.” The subcommittee staff said it views the company’s claims “with a degree of skepticism” in instances where it conflicted with other information they gathered.

With Apple, congressional investigators focused on its App Store, the only official way to get apps on the company’s iPhones and iPads. Apple long has faced criticism for the rules it applies to apps that appear in this portal – and the fees it sometimes extracts from those that offer subscriptions. Epic Games, the maker of the popular video game Fortnite, has sued Apple over such policies.

The House report repeatedly faults Apple for amassing anticompetitive “gatekeeper power” over the software that appears on mobile devices. It pointed to evidence showing the iPhone giant at times had copied features from popular or innovative rival services. In one example, Phillip Shoemaker, a former App Store review director, told House aides about an instance in which Apple rejected an app for wireless charging even though it did not violate company guidelines – then later “appropriated the rejected app’s feature for its own offerings,” the report says.

“Apple has struggled with using the App Store as a weapon against competitors,” Shoemaker has written, according to the report.

Apple previously said has said it does not steal other companies’ app data to create its own products. “We do not retaliate or bully people,” Apple CEO Tim Cook said at a congressional hearing in July. “It is strongly against our company culture.”

#ศาสตร์เกษตรดินปุ๋ย : ขอบคุณแหล่งข้อมูล : หนังสือพิมพ์ The Nation.

This is how the government can ramp up climate tech investment

Oct 06. 2020Wildfires in California/ File photo 

By Syndication Washington Post, Bloomberg · Leslie Kaufman · NATIONAL, BUSINESS, TECHNOLOGY, SCIENCE-ENVIRONMENT, US-GLOBAL-MARKETS 
The last couple of weeks have brought a steady stream of new pledges to achieve net-zero carbon emissions within the next handful of decades. China committed to it; so did Walmart. And yet a report released last month by the International Energy Agency, which advises governments on energy policy, estimated that roughly half of the technologies that will be needed to get us to net zero globally by 2050 aren’t even commercially available yet. Yikes.

The dirty secret of deep decarbonization is that it won’t occur from just plugging into a wind farm or buying carbon offsets in a tropical forest. Without new technologies, it will be impossible to rein in emissions from the most-carbon intensive sectors of the economy such as heavy industry and long-distance transport.

Varun Sivaram, a physicist and clean energy expert, has a plan for how the next president can quickly speed up government energy innovation. Currently a senior research scholar at the Center on Global Energy Policy at Columbia University, he teamed up with colleagues to write, “Energizing America: A Roadmap to Launch a National Energy Innovation Mission.” The book, which came out in September, details down to the budget line item exactly how much money America should spend and how it should spend it.

“Innovation isn’t one of the things we need to do to tackle climate change. It is half the game,” he said in a recent interview. “If we drop the ball on this one, we are lost.”

The first step, as Sivaram and his colleagues see it, is for the next president to establish a National Energy Innovation Mission and create a White House Task Force to coordinate spending across different federal agencies. Sivaram and his team include a draft executive order in the report so the next administration can just plug and play.

Step two is to ramp up spending on energy innovation research and development from the current rate of about $9 billion a year to at least $25 billion by 2022. Sivaram calls that number “very feasible,” explaining that it is “less than a quarter of what the government invests in health innovation and less than a tenth of what it invests in defense innovation.”

But the most interesting part of the report is how it proposes spending the $25 billion. The plan breaks down decarbonization into 10 categories where breakthroughs must occur. These include clean fuels, clean agricultural systems, carbon capture use and sequestration, and carbon removal. Identifying these categories is key because it allows for the next step: matching money to the need.

One of the most persuasive moments in the report comes in a chart showing the disconnect between the sectors in the U.S. responsible for emissions and the corresponding research budget through the Department of Energy. Electricity produces 27% of emissions but gets 47% of the research dollars, while industry produces 22% of the emissions but receives 6% of the innovation funding.

The Columbia team’s budget would remedy that by adding money to underfunded areas, like tripling the money for carbon capture from $115 million a year to $300 million. Sivaram points out that carbon capture-the process of trapping and storing the gas so it doesn’t leak into the atmosphere-offers a perfect example of how these research dollars will not only promote needed technology but will also bolster emerging industries with high-paying jobs. 

“Carbon capture is an area where America is ahead,” he said. “The technology is not set. This is a sweet spot where we can compete internationally on something that is hard to abate and also nurture a domestic industry.”

Sivaram says one of the most exciting thing about releasing the report is the positive reception it has received on Capitol Hill-from Democrats and Republicans alike. He said that, in fact, Democratic staffers (he wouldn’t specify the chamber or committee) have asked to see the Excel sheets behind the budget numbers. But still he’s concerned that it won’t be enough.

“I am worried that energy innovation will get lost in a cacophony of demands,” he said. “Innovation is not just one of a laundry list of items that need to get done. It is foundational.”

#ศาสตร์เกษตรดินปุ๋ย : ขอบคุณแหล่งข้อมูล : หนังสือพิมพ์ The Nation.

‘We were fortunate on timing,’ 28-year-old SPAC billionaire says

Oct 06. 2020Thomas Healy 

By Syndication Washington Post, Bloomberg · Ben Stupples · BUSINESS, TECHNOLOGY, US-GLOBAL-MARKETS 
Thomas Healy was secretly arranging a deal to turn his Texas-based truck electrification startup into a publicly traded company when the coronavirus pandemic struck.

The crisis halted many transactions, but not the one between special-purpose acquisition vehicle Tortoise Acquisition and Hyliion, which Healy founded in 2015.

The company created from the merger — Hyliion Holdings — began trading Friday in New York after shares in Tortoise surged more than 300% ahead of a shareholder vote last month. Healy’s stake is now worth more than $1.4 billion, making him one of the world’s youngest self-made billionaires. Still, the 28-year-old knows luck was involved.

“We were fortunate on timing,” said Healy, the firm’s chief executive officer. “If we were trying to close right when the stock market was on that downswing, we might have been having different discussions.”

Hyliion slumped 12% in its first full day of trading and there is growing skepticism of the SPAC phenomenon as such deals have proliferated in recent weeks.

Bloomberg spoke with Healy ahead of his ringing the opening bell on Monday to start trading on the New York Stock Exchange. Comments have been edited and condensed.

– – –

Q: How did the deal come about?

A: In the first quarter, we kicked off our next financing round. Going public and being able to bring in more capital than we would staying private was attractive. From that, we considered: do we go down the conventional IPO route? Or do we want a SPAC process? We saw a lot of efficiencies with SPACs. You’re really negotiating a deal with an organization as opposed to going on a roadshow for an IPO that may — or may not — be successful. We met with the Tortoise team introduced to us through investment bank Marathon Capital. That was the moment of ‘OK. Let’s do this!’

Q: Thoughts on the SPAC craze?

A: SPACs have definitely gotten a lot of attention. Nikola was really the first to kick it off this year. We were already in the process of our transaction by then. From our end, it was a very natural process with Tortoise. We were just going through a conventional financing fundraising process, and then we saw this as the best path.

Q: How did you start Hyliion?

A: Growing up, I raced cars. I spent a tremendous amount of time at racetracks driving vehicles. Our equipment was shipped in tractor trailers, so I got to know about trucks through that. Then when I was in college, studying mechanical engineering, I had an interest in electric vehicles. Tesla was just starting to become known then, and I thought: Why do we have electric technology in cars and not in trucks yet, since trucks are where you can have the biggest impact? They drive 100,000 miles a year and there’s still a lot of greenhouse gases that come from them. So it was this thinking of, let’s take this mega trend — a shift to electrification — and apply it to this industry.

Q: What keeps you busy outside of work?

A: I’m a gearhead at heart. I love working on cars, souping them up and putting turbo chargers on them. If I can spend a Saturday working on a vehicle, that’s class. My daily driver is a Tesla, which is very fitting for what we’re doing. I’ve also got an Ariel Atom, a two-seater that’s like a big go-cart.

Q: Where do you want to be in 10 years?

A: Our goal is you’ll be driving down the highway and the trucks you see will have Hyliion powertrains. There will be other trucks that are electric as well, taking a different approach. We hope all these technologies are successful as ultimately we’re trying to make this shift to electric. The more people are focused on that, the better off we’ll all be.

Q: How are you celebrating the deal?

A: Normally you’d have hundreds of people come to the stock exchange. It’s obviously a smaller group for us, but we’ll do our best to celebrate. All our team on Monday can livestream the ringing of the bell. We’ll figure out a way to get them some breakfast tacos and give them at least a few hours to sit back and celebrate as this process has been a full company effort.

#ศาสตร์เกษตรดินปุ๋ย : ขอบคุณแหล่งข้อมูล : หนังสือพิมพ์ The Nation.

Covid-sniffing robots offer a testing alternative, startup bets

Oct 05. 2020Koniku’s Konikore scent-detection device. MUST CREDIT: Koniku. 

By Syndication Washington Post, Bloomberg · Kristen V. Brown · BUSINESS, TECHNOLOGY, HEALTH, HEALTH-FEATURES 
A biotechnology startup called Koniku is trying to develop robots that could sniff out covid-19 infections faster than conventional testing.

The technology fuses neurons with a silicon chip to create a “smell cyborg” capable of detecting scents ranging from explosives to pathogens.

Koniku’s first clinical trial began three weeks ago and will examine samples from patients tested for covid-19 to compare how well the smell-bot detects the virus compared with traditional methods. Small internal trials have already demonstrated that it can accurately detect the presence of influenza A.

“Our goal is to have a device that merges synthetic biology with silicon and maps all of the smells of human life on a global scale,” said Oshiorenoya Agabi, the San Rafael, California-based company’s chief executive officer and co-founder. “We should have a device in every home in America to screen for disease.”

Pathogens produce unique volatile organic compounds, scent-fingerprints of a sort, released by ailing cells. These signature smells are the same biological clues that allow dogs to sniff out dozens of diseases. Finland tested the ability of dogs to detect covid-19 in a trial at Helsinki’s airport last month.

Some researchers have suggested that using dogs could be cheaper, faster and even potentially more effective in screening for the disease than methods including temperature checks, nasal swabs and saliva. In July, German researchers showed trained dogs were able to distinguish between saliva sampled from people infected with the virus and those who were not more than 90 percent of the time.

Koniku’s device, the Konikore, is slightly smaller than a frisbee and resembles a flying saucer. When the proteins in its chip bind to a scent it has been programmed to detect, cells amplify and process those signals with help from machine learning, and the device lights up.

In a recent field test in Alabama, it was able to detect explosives better than trained dogs. The test was conducted by law-enforcement officials and aerospace giant Airbus, a Koniku investor and partner that has been working to roll out the technology in airports.

Koniku plans to conduct field trials with Airbus at Changi Airport in Singapore and then San Francisco International Airport later this year.

“If a dog can smell it, we can,” said Agabi, who describes the Konicore as a “smell camera.” He imagines the technology could be useful far beyond bombs and diseases. For example, he said, it could digitize the taste of food, allowing for the synthetic recreation of things like bacon.

Koniku’s merger of biology and computing technology – often termed “wetware” – is a growing field. The company’s investors include Softbank, Platform Capital, Halfcourt Ventures, Changi Airport and Airbus’s venture-capital arm.

Koniku has hired Treximo, a biotech consulting and project management company, to conduct its trials for SARS-CoV-2. Trials for new devices are typically far faster and less intensive than those for new drugs. Treximo said it expects it will be done with the necessary steps to apply for an emergency-use authorization with the Food and Drug Administration in the first quarter of 2021.

“We know this device can smell explosives, but can we have it pick up organic compounds in human breath to say yes or no does this person have SARS-CoV-2?” said Treximo CEO Michael Stomberg. “It’s a game-changing device if it proves to be valid.”

The devices will go on pre-sale for hardware developers this week.

After covid-19, Agabi imagines the company pursuing other diseases insurance companies might be inclined to cover the cost of a test for, such as lung cancer. In the future, if successful, it could be used not just in homes, but for mass detection of diseases and pathogens in public spaces.

“Telehealth is growing,” said Agabi. “Our goal is not another Zoom application, but to actually bring technology closer to people to be able to screen disease in real time.”

#ศาสตร์เกษตรดินปุ๋ย : ขอบคุณแหล่งข้อมูล : หนังสือพิมพ์ The Nation.

Lenovo promises ‘immersive gameplay’ with 15-inch gaming laptop

Sep 30. 2020

By The Nation

Lenovo has launched the “world’s lightest GeForce RTX gaming laptop” — Lenovo Legion Slim 7i — that comes with up to 10th Gen Intel Core i9 HK-series mobile processor, dedicated graphics, and Windows 10.

This 15-inch gaming laptop made from aerospace-grade aluminium for its strength and extreme lightness, finely-calibrated powerhouse gaming machine offers impressive frame rates and reduced load times, Lenovo said.

The built-in Max-Q Dynamic Boost4 technology automatically enables real-time GPU and CPU power balancing, allowing your system to dynamically shift power from the CPU to the GPU during heavy-duty activities like gaming by intelligently assessing your system’s power demand on a frame-by-frame basis, a power shift only happens when it’s needed, resulting in higher frame rates and smoother gaming for up to a 10 per cent performance boost, the company said.

Other NVIDIA supported features on the Lenovo Legion Slim 7i with up to GeForce RTX GPUs include enhanced DLSS 2.0 (Deep Learning Super Sampling) technology, which uses AI to boost frame rates by up to two-times faster than the original while retaining a sharper image with half the pixels when ray tracing is enabled.

Less bulk at 17.9mm slim and weighing just 1.86 kg means more mobility aided by a 71WHr battery for up to 7.75 hours of battery life and Rapid Charge Pro.

The cooling fans won’t get too loud to drown out the sound of Dolby Atmos speaker system with sound radar by Dolby.

Boot up and log in with one click with an intuitive biometric fingerprint reader built into the power button, and for more privacy use the built-in privacy shutter on your new top-placed webcam. “And because every gamer’s needs and wants are different, we offer up to 2TB M.2 NVMe PCIe SSD (RAID 0) of storage, up to 32GB 3200MHz DDR4 of memory, and multiple 15.6-inch screen options, including up to 4K IPS VESA DisplayHDR 400 with 100 per cent Adobe RGB, a refresh rate of 60Hz, and 600 nits of brightness—ideal for streamers,” Lenovo said.

The Lenovo Legion Slim 7i comes with enhanced TrueStrike keyboard beloved by gamers with second transition switches providing a more satisfying, deeper key travel feel, the company said.

While on the go, gamers can enjoy all the advantages of an ultra-portable laptop powered by the latest hardware with fast-connectivity with Intel Wi-Fi 6 (Gig+), two Thunderbolt ports, and Bluetooth 5.

The 15-inch Lenovo Legion Slim 7i will start at Bt69,990 and is expected to be available from November.

The first 30 customers who purchase the Legion Slim 7i at any authorised Lenovo retail and partner shops in Thailand will receive seven items worth Bt17,000 free, the company said.

For more information, go to www.lenovo.com/th/th/legion or www.facebook.com/lenovolegionTH/.

#ศาสตร์เกษตรดินปุ๋ย : ขอบคุณแหล่งข้อมูล : หนังสือพิมพ์ The Nation.

Judge suggests Trump administration has overreached in TikTok case

Sep 29. 2020

By  The Washington Post · Rachel Lerman · NATIONAL, BUSINESS, WORLD, POLITICS, COURTSLAW, ASIA-PACIFIC 
The Trump administration’s proposed ban against video app TikTok may “likely exceed” the bounds of the law, a judge wrote while granting TikTok a reprieve from being removed from U.S. app stores.

Judge Carl Nichols wrote in a decision unsealed Monday morning that the law President Donald Trump cited while issuing an executive order banning TikTok does not allow certain personal communications or the exporting or importing of informational material to be prohibited – and the ban would prevent people from sending messages and information through the app.

“It is undisputed that the Secretary’s prohibitions will have the effect of preventing Americans from sharing personal communications on TikTok,” wrote Nichols, a federal judge in Washington who was appointed by Trump last year.

Nichols granted TikTok a preliminary injunction Sunday night, just hours before the app was set to be taken out of app stores in the country by executive order. Trump signed an executive order in August that would have banned TikTok starting Sept. 20, citing national security concerns.

It was the second blow for Trump in his effort to shut down two Chinese communication apps, TikTok and WeChat. WeChat, an app used to send messages and make payments, was also given a reprieve from the ban by a separate judge last week.

TikTok first received a one-week extension from the government when Trump seemingly gave his blessing to a proposed deal that would partner TikTok with American database company Oracle. Then, TikTok got another break from the judge, and it is still available on app stores in the United States.

Nichols’s ruling does not affect the second order Trump signed that requires ByteDance to divest from TikTok in the United States, said Robert Chesney, an associate dean at the University of Texas School of Law. That order has a Nov. 12 deadline.

TikTok has been working with the government to get a deal approved that would create a new entity, TikTok Global, that includes investment from Oracle and Walmart. The app is hoping that will satisfy regulators’ national security concerns by separating it a bit from its Chinese parent company, ByteDance.

Trump and some lawmakers have said that TikTok is a security threat because it collects information on Americans, which could then be accessible by Beijing. TikTok insists that it keeps U.S. customer information stored outside of China.

Even as TikTok pursues a deal with Oracle, it is continuing with a lawsuit against the Trump administration, asserting that the executive order is unnecessary and unfair.

Nichols said it was clear from the government’s argument that China presents “a significant national security threat,” but he said the evidence that TikTok is a threat, and whether a ban is the only way to deal with that, “remains less substantial.”

The ruling compares TikTok to a news wire service, and said people use TikTok to share not only news but also art and photographs – all items whose sharing is prevented from being prohibited by limitations laid out in the act, which were added by Congress.

Chesney said he thinks Nichols’s ruling glossed over some of the nuances of the law, and he isn’t sure it will hold up. TikTok is not used for messaging primarily, he pointed out, and another court might reasonably disagree that the order conflicts with the International Emergency Economic Powers Act.

“At a minimum, I think it’s way harder than he’s let on,” Chesney said, pointing out that people have others means of communicating with foreign countries outside of TikTok.

The judge didn’t specifically address First Amendment issues in the ruling, said Kurt Opsahl, deputy director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Instead, he focused on the Emergency Economic Powers Act in a “pretty narrow ruling.”

“In plain language, the statute says you can’t directly or indirectly prohibit materials or personal communications,” he said. “The court is saying, at a minimum this is an indirect regulation of personal communications.”

First Amendment issues are implicit in the ruling, according to Hina Shamsi, director of the national security project at the ACLU.

“Congress put in those limitations and intended to protect First Amendment interests, which is what this order does,” she said.

#ศาสตร์เกษตรดินปุ๋ย : ขอบคุณแหล่งข้อมูล : หนังสือพิมพ์ The Nation.

87% of websites are tracking you. This new tool will let you run a creepiness check.

Sep 27. 2020

By The Washington Post · Geoffrey A. Fowler · TECHNOLOGY
How bad has privacy become on the World Wide Web? Really bad, a new audit shows.

At least 87% of the world’s most-popular web domains engage in some form of digital tracking without you ever signing in, according to investigative journalism nonprofit The Markup. Many, it found, even covertly record the way you move your mouse or type. This is the hidden tech that lets companies learn who you are, what you like and even the secrets you look at online so they can tailor what you see, make ads follow you around – or even sell your information to others.

The good news: You can run a privacy check on any site yourself by using the free tool made for the audit, called Blacklight. Think of it, in The Markup’s words, as a “meat thermometer that you can stick into any website and get an instant reading on its level of creepiness.”

Blacklight was created by Surya Mattu, who wanted not just to stop website snooping, but a tool to see exactly what was going on when you visit sites with the default Google Chrome, the popular browser I once dubbed “spy software.”

Earlier this month, engineer and journalist Mattu ran Blacklight on a list of the 100,000 most-popular domains on the Web. Some of those addresses didn’t have a website on them or wouldn’t load. But of the more than 80,000 that he could scan, a grim picture emerged.

– Only 13% of sites didn’t load any ad trackers or third-party cookies, which are snippets of code sites leave in your browser to identify you.

– 15% of websites loaded technology called “session recorders,” the digital equivalent of recording videos as you surf a site, as one tech provider describes it. “For me, this was the biggest shock,” Mattu told me.

– 4% logged keys you typed into forms and boxes even without hitting submit.

– 6% of websites used a newer, harder-to-avoid form of tracking called canvas fingerprinting. (Last year, an investigation I worked on with privacy company Disconnect found fingerprinting on a third of the 500 most-popular websites.)

– 74% of sites loaded Google tracking technology, and 33% loaded Facebook trackers. It’s staggering to see the reach of those two Silicon Valley giants – it’s easy to forget they track you even when you’re not using their websites or apps.

Worse, Mattu’s numbers are likely conservative. On sites that ask you to accept cookies before they’re loaded, particularly common in Europe, Blacklight doesn’t click “accept” – so those sites registered as less creepy.

“I think this is just a reflection of how business operates when it goes unchecked,” said Mattu. “I don’t think there is some super-evil person sitting somewhere trying to collect everyone’s information. There is economic incentive for having this data, and over the last 15 years that incentive has only increased.”

Blacklight isn’t the perfect or only measure of privacy – it’s a cat and mouse game with the companies that develop tracking tech. But I hope The Markup updates its audit every year, so we can track how the web changes as more people become concerned about privacy, and new privacy laws attempt to outlaw some of the snooping.

What’s the point for non-techies? Use Blacklight quickly to see whether you want to trust a site – or evaluate the claims of a CEO who touts “privacy is a human right.” You can download your results, share anything shocking with me or with the smart team at The Markup.

Here’s what’s “normal,” for comparison: The median number of third-party cookies on websites is 3. The median number of ad trackers is 7.

What you find might surprise you. As of Sept. 24, pet food maker Purina notches almost every possible kind of tracking Blacklight detects, which Purina can use to learn about the demographics and interests of people, their brand loyalty and even to understand how they use their website. It has 14 ad trackers, 28 third-party cookies, fingerprinting and monitoring keystrokes and mouse clicks. (Tell Fluffy to be careful out there.)

Sensitive websites track people, too. Planned Parenthood has 42 third-party cookies, according to Blacklight.

Joe Biden’s website uses fewer third-party cookies, 10, than Donald Trump’s website, 18, according to Blacklight.

Microsoft uses 43 third-party cookies. Apple uses zero – in fact, it uses no tracking tech at all, according to Blacklight.

The Washington Post’s site uses six third-party cookies and allows Google Analytics to track you, but doesn’t have Facebook trackers, according to Blacklight. The New York Times has 12 trackers, the Wall Street Journal has 44 and The New Yorker has 152.

Just remember: You don’t have to give up all hope of preserving your privacy. There are steps you can take to protect your privacy on the web.

For most people, I recommend making one simple change: Switch browsers to one that includes automatic protection. I like Mozilla’s Firefox, but Apple’s Safari and the new version of Microsoft Edge also provide some protection, as do the privacy-focused DuckDuckGo and Brave.

But if you just can’t quit Chrome, or you’re forced to use it for work, there are ad-blocking and tracker-blocking plugins that can de-fang Chrome, including Privacy Badger and Ghostery.

And if you live in the state of California, there’s also a law called CCPA that gives you the ability to tell any business to stop selling your data. 

#ศาสตร์เกษตรดินปุ๋ย : ขอบคุณแหล่งข้อมูล : หนังสือพิมพ์ The Nation.

Japanese tech identifies individuals from glimpse of gait

Sep 27. 2020Osaka University Prof. Yasushi Yagi 

By The Japan News

A Japanese team of scientists has developed a technology that uses artificial intelligence to identify individuals by understanding their gait, or walking pattern, based on as little as a brief glimpse, the team led by Osaka University Prof. Yasushi Yagi announced.

The technology is able to identify individuals based on surveillance camera images that captures them walking, even if only for a moment. It is expected to be applied in criminal investigations.

The method is called gait recognition. According to Yagi, who specializes in visual information processing, gait recognition has been used in criminal investigations in Japan since 2009 and has been introduced as evidence at trials. For accurate results, it was necessary to have at least four steps’ worth of walking data, including two steps each on the left and right foot.

The team used data from videos of about 5,000 people walking, which was collected for experimental purposes, and analyzed it with deep learning — machine learning algorithms that detect patterns from large amounts of data. It succeeded in extrapolating four steps of walking data from a single gait image by finding such characteristics as the way a person steps forward and their posture. The team said it could identify individuals with 80% accuracy based on this extrapolation.

NEC Corp. Fellow Hitoshi Imaoka, who specializes in biometrics, said: “The idea of reproducing data of walking is quite interesting. Chances to obtain a sufficient amount of gait images are usually limited. The technology can be said to be effective in identifying individuals based on little information.”

#ศาสตร์เกษตรดินปุ๋ย : ขอบคุณแหล่งข้อมูล : หนังสือพิมพ์ The Nation.

TikTok judge schedules Sunday hearing as Trump’s ban looms

Sep 27. 2020

By Syndication Washington Post,  Bloomberg · David Yaffe-Bellany, Chris Dolmetsch · NATIONAL, BUSINESS, COURTSLAW, NATIONAL-SECURITY, WHITEHOUSE, US-GLOBAL-MARKETS 
A federal judge scheduled a rare Sunday morning hearing to decide whether the U.S. can go through with its ban on the popular video-sharing app TikTok.

ByteDance Ltd., TikTok’s Chinese owner, has asked the court to block the ban, set to begin on Sunday night, even as it pursues approvals from the government for the sale of a stake in its U.S. operations to Oracle Corp. and Walmart Inc. under pressure from President Donald Trump. It argued in court filings Friday that the ban would trample constitutional free-speech protections.

Trump cited national security risks in August, when he announced a ban on the widely-used network from U.S. app stores. The president, who’s also barred WeChat, owned by China’s Tencent Holdings Ltd., has told ByteDance its only alternative is to sell its American TikTok business. The U.S. Justice Department argues the apps potentially give the China’s government access to millions of Americans’ personal data.

The government emphasized those concerns in a filing on Friday, urging U.S. District Judge Carl Nichols not to grant the temporary block. U.S. lawyers cited FBI Director Christopher Wray’s assessment that China poses the “greatest long-term threat to our nation’s information and intellectual property” as a reason for the ban.

“One of the tools that the PRC uses to further its goals is bulk data collection,” the U.S. government said, referring to the People’s Republic of China.

ByteDance, founded in 2012 by Zhang Yiming, has close ties to the Chinese Communist Party and must abide by laws that require it to cooperate with China’s government, the U.S. said.

“In April 2018, the CCP forced ByteDance to shutdown one of its other platforms, and Mr. Yiming issued a public apology in which he pledged to cooperate with and elevate official CCP media,” the U.S. said. “Following this public atonement, ByteDance underwent organizational restructuring with CCP infrastructure now built into it.”

The ban, announced in an Aug. 6 executive order, is part of a wider effort by the administration to take a hard line against Beijing, which Trump bets will help him win re-election. Starting at 11:59 p.m. on Sept. 27, it would remove TikTok from the app stores run by Apple and Google’s Android, the most widely used marketplaces for downloadable apps. People who don’t yet have the app wouldn’t be able to get it, and those who already have it wouldn’t have access to updates needed to ensure its safe and smooth operation. TikTok is used regularly by 19 million Americans.

Ahead of the looming deadline, ByteDance had argued for an expedited schedule in the case. The U.S. pushed back at a hearing on Thursday, saying ByteDance had filed a separate suit more than a month ago and was late in requesting the injunction in this one. In defense of the ban, the government again cited security concerns.

“TikTok is allowed to continue operating with respect to existing users but cannot add users, and the reason for that is that there are significant national security risks,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Daniel Schwei told the judge.

TikTok said that the ban was already undermining its business model by scaring users away, and that it had sought relief as soon as it was allowed to under the law. It said the government would have argued its request was premature if filed earlier.

“The urgency of this is created by the Sunday night ban,” attorney John Hall said. “That part of it makes absolutely no sense to us.”

Hall added the ban would increase risks to existing users by preventing them from getting regular security updates. The deadline also was affecting the company’s reputation with users, who are considering moving to less attractive platforms, the attorney noted.

In the social media industry, Hall said, “users retained is absolutely the lifeblood of their business.”

In Friday’s filing, TikTok’s lawyers argued that Trump is exceeding his authority with the proposed ban and acting in an “unreasonable and capricious manner” by seeking to cut off all transactions on the service.

The law being invoked “states the President’s authority does not extend to the direct or indirect regulation or prohibition of ‘personal communication’ and the international flow of ‘information or informational materials,’ such as film, photographs, and artwork, regardless of the ‘format or medium of transmission,”‘ the Chinese company’s lawyers argued.

Such a ban also would trample free-speech rights of U.S. users of the Chinese company’s platform, TikTok’s lawyers added. Millions of Americans “engage in core protected speech on TikTok in pursuit of a wide variety of political, social, and cultural ends,” according to the brief. “The Prohibitions unlawfully restrict this speech in violation of the First Amendment.”