Free Republic

Roberts...Wenchan Zhao, Francisco Garcia-Oscos and Daniel Dinh, used "optogenetic manipulation"—where light is used to monitor and control brain activity—to guide the learning of songs. They controlled the interactions between two regions of the brain in order to create memories of syllables of a song—the length of a note corresponded to the length of light exposure. As a result, they guided the learning of the zebra finch with these implanted memories. Roberts said they did not implant the song—just the length of the syllables. This is just one pathway involved in vocalizations. If they can uncover the other circuits that control...

U.S. Customs and Border Patrol’s facial recognition technology program has now arrived at Detroit’s international airport. Known as ‘Simplified Arrival,’ CBP’s biometric-based system matches the faces of arriving international travelers at Detroit Metropolitan Airport against the images contained in their travel documents, enabling the agency to quickly verify their identities. Detroit also joins a growing list of top US airports using the Simplified Arrivals system, where at least 20 of them will offer the facial recognition technology to speed through the Customs process by the end of 2020. Systems like Simplified Arrivals and its brother facial recognition program, Biometric Exit...

Still in the prototype stages, this medical device is set to 'observe bodily movements and functions', and is capable of monitoring the progression of certain diseases. 'Disguised as a flower pot, the omnipresent detection system can observe bodily movements and functions, such as heart rate, gait, and ultimately the progression of certain diseases, to help prevent negative outcomes that may be costly or worst, fatal,' Barclays analysts wrote in a note following the event. It seems at-home health monitoring devices are the wave of the future, as earlier this year, scientists unveiled high tech 'smart' pajamas that monitor heartbeat, breathing...

"View" co-host Joy Behar invoked George Orwell's iconic novel "1984" while discussing the Trump presidency with author Stephen King. While promoting his new novel, "The Institute," on Wednesday, King began by explaining the plot, which involves "defenseless children" with supernatural abilities who are "locked up" by a mysterious organization. He talked about how his story connects to current events. "When I started writing this book, I just wanted to write a story about defenseless children who were locked up and had to kind of band together in order to fight these cruel adults that are performing tests on them," King...

A group known as The Climate Mobilization, which has called for a World War II-style mobilization to combat “climate change” and is aligned with Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) and Sen. Bernie Sanders, is criticizing American media outlets for allowing “climate deniers” to express their views. As such, the group wants media to ban them in an effort to silence all opposition to “climate change” rhetoric. “Some media outlets are sacrificing the future of our planet for the sake of appearing objective,” Margaret Klein Salamon, founder and executive director of The Climate Mobilization, said in a news release Saturday. “This idea...

In George Orwell’s “1984,” the classics of literature are rewritten into Newspeak, a revision and reduction of the language meant to make bad thoughts literally unthinkable. “It’s a beautiful thing, the destruction of words,” one true believer exults. Now some of the writer’s own words are getting reworked in Amazon’s vast virtual bookstore, a place where copyright laws hold remarkably little sway. Orwell’s reputation may be secure, but his sentences are not. Over the last few weeks I got a close-up view of this process when I bought a dozen fake and illegitimate Orwell books from Amazon. Some of them...

Ring, Amazon’s home surveillance company, is teaching police how to convince residents to share camera footage with them. When police partner with Ring, Amazon’s home surveillance camera company, they get access to the “Law Enforcement Neighborhood Portal,� an interactive map that allows officers to request footage directly from camera owners. Police don’t need a warrant to request this footage, but they do need permission from camera owners.Emails and documents obtained by Motherboard reveal that people aren’t always willing to provide police with their Ring camera footage. However, Ring works with law enforcement and gives them advice on how to persuade people to...

The Federal Bureau of Investigations aims to acquire access to a “social media early alerting tool” that will help insiders proactively and reactively monitor how terrorist groups, foreign intelligence services, criminal organizations and other domestic threats use networking platforms to further their illegal efforts, according to a request for proposal amended this week. “With increased use of social media platforms by subjects of current FBI investigations and individuals that pose a threat to the United States, it is critical to obtain a service which will allow the FBI to identify relevant information from Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and other Social media...

...South Dakota...Minnesota, Iowa, Wisconsin and Missouri, before concluding in central Illinois...the balloons are intended to “provide a persistent surveillance system to locate and deter narcotic trafficking and homeland security threats”,...The balloons are carrying hi-tech radars designed to simultaneously track many individual vehicles day or night, through any kind of weather...Sometimes it’s referred to as ‘combat TiVo’ because when an event happens somewhere in the surveilled area, you can potentially rewind the tape to see exactly what occurred, and rewind even further to see who was involved and where they came from.”

Britain’s trade minister Liz Truss has said the National Health Service (NHS) would not be put up for sale, as she prepares to discuss a free-trade deal with the U.S. in the next few weeks. “My main priority now will be agreeing a free-trade deal with the U.S., building on the successful phone call between the Prime Minister and President Trump,” she wrote in a Telegraph column late on Sunday. …

Ofcom, Britain's communications watchdog, highlighted seven instances of problematic reporting by the channel. Its handling of the poisoning of former Russian spy Sergei Skripal in Salisbury played a large part. British communications watchdog Ofcom announced the measure on Friday, after an investigation into RT's coverage of the poisoning of former Russian spy Sergei Skripal and the conflicts in Syria and Ukraine. The fine of £200,000 ($250,000, €220,000) comes eight months after Ofcom launched its investigation into RT. Lack of impartiality Ofcom said RT, formerly known as Russia Today, "failed to preserve due impartiality in seven news and current affairs programs...

Americans must accept more of the world’s refugees into their job markets and neighborhoods, says a Washington Post op-ed by Walter Mondale, the Democrat presidential candidate who lost 49 of 50 states to President Ronald Reagan in November 1984. “There is hope,” Mondale says in his op-ed, continuing: While most Americans do not have the privileges my office afforded me in 1979, nor the platforms upon which to speak out, there are steps everyone can take to make a real, tangible impact. Contact your representatives in Washington. Make the case for an increase in refugee admissions. Speak up against this...

The Tesla and SpaceX founder announced a goal of implanting chips into human brains as early as next year to create direct human connections to computers.Elon Musk, the futurist billionaire behind SpaceX and Tesla, outlined his plans to connect humans' brains directly to computers on Tuesday night, describing a campaign to create "symbiosis with artificial intelligence." He said the first prototype could be implanted in a person by the end of next year.Arriving at that goal "will take a long time," Musk said in a presentation at the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco, noting that securing federal approval...

This summer, George Orwell's novel Nineteen Eighty-Four turns 70 years old, and that anniversary has prompted a surfeit of articles analyzing the book and its continuing relevance to our age. There is no doubt that the book is one of the most consequential political novels ever written and ought to be on the reading list of every conservative -- not because Orwell was himself a conservative (he remained a man of the Left until his death), nor because the dystopian world that Orwell described turned out to be prophetic. “The image of a boot stamping across the human face," in...

George Orwell was a brilliant individual. A man of incredible insight – and foresight. In his unfathomably predictive novel 1984, Orwell warns of Big Brother: “(O)stensibly the leader of Oceania, a totalitarian state wherein the ruling party Ingsoc wields total power ‘for its own sake’ over the inhabitants. “In the society that Orwell describes, every citizen is under constant surveillance by the authorities, mainly by telescreens.…The people are constantly reminded of this by the slogan ‘Big Brother is watching you’: a maxim that is ubiquitously on display. “In modern culture, the term ‘Big Brother’ has entered the lexicon as a...

A man dubbed the 'Lion of London Bridge' after confronting a terrorist has been put on an anti-terror watchlist. Roy Larner, from Greatstone in Romney Marsh, was one of 48 people injured in the terror attacks in the capital in June 2017. The Millwall fan was stabbed several times as he bravely confronted the killers and was hailed worldwide for his heroics, with a petition set up online to award him the George Cross.

Full title: "'Lion of London Bridge' who was stabbed eight times as he confronted terrorist attackers 'is put on anti-terror watch list after far-right extremists contacted him'" The 'Lion of London Bridge' who was hailed a hero for fighting off knife-wielding jihadis during the terror attack said he is on an anti-terror watch list after being contacted by far-right anti-Islam supporters. Roy Larner, 49, screamed, 'f*** you, I'm Millwall,' as he took on the knife murderers when they struck in June 2017 while he was enjoying a pint in the Black & Blue restaurant in Borough Market, in Southwark, south-east London. But...

A jury convicted a Washington state man Friday in the killings of a young Canadian couple more than three decades ago — a case that was finally solved when investigators turned to powerful genealogy software to build a family tree of the then-unknown suspect. Tanya Van Cuylenborg, 18, and her 20-year-old boyfriend, Jay Cook, disappeared in November 1987 after leaving their home near Victoria, British Columbia, for what was supposed to be an overnight trip to Seattle. Their bodies were found in separate locations in northwestern Washington state about a week later. Investigators preserved DNA evidence that was recovered from...

Researchers are showing off a creepy new software that uses machine learning to allow people to add, delete or change the words coming out of someone's mouth. The work is the latest evidence that our ability to edit what gets said in videos and create so-called deepfakes is becoming easier, posing a potential problem for election integrity and the overall battle against online disinformation. ..." In order to produce video fakes, scientists combined several techniques. First, they scan a target video to isolate phonemes spoken by the person — those are the sounds that make up words, such as "oo" and...

In 2019, you don’t have to be just afraid of hackers who may leak your closely guarded private photos. A newly developed artificial neural network only needs to be fed a normal picture to replace your clothes with what's under them. An anonymous ‘technology enthusiast’ has created an app which is able to undress a fully clothed person within a couple of clicks, triggering concerns over the ethics of such technology and non-consensual photo sharing. The app in question is called DeepNude – a play on the new term deepfake – an AI-assisted technology that superimposes faces onto other bodies...