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Brain inserts and carbon-absorbing bacteria aren’t just the fantasies of Silicon Valley’s richest executives, they’re also a part of a larger hope to advance artificial intelligence and computing efforts. “Biology will undoubtedly fuel computing” in coming years, former Google CEO and current technical advisor Eric Schmidt said at a conference called SynBioBeta in San Francisco Monday. “Taking biology, which I’d always viewed as squishy and analog, and turning it into something that can be digitally manipulated, is an enormous accelerator.” Schmidt’s comments come as Silicon Valley’s seeming obsession with biology attempts to move beyond fascinating projects and into more serious...

Ask Internet entrepreneur and Silicon Valley venture capitalist Reid Hoffman how he decides which companies to invest in, and he’ll tell you he has a simple litmus test to determine whether to give the idea a closer look. “I want to invest in companies that play to one or more of the seven deadly sins,” Hoffman said. For those a bit rusty, those sins would be: lust, gluttony, greed, sloth, wrath, envy and pride. Hoffman, best known as co-founder of LinkedIn, says the business-professional networking-platform most embodies the deadly sin of greed. “In the end, LinkedIn is helping someone earn...

You don't seriously think the Chinese are so stupid as to think they could get better private equity returns with Hunter Biden and John Kerry's stepson Chris Heinz than they could with, say, Goldman Sachs or Morgan Stanley, do you? So what could they get from the two unaccomplished promoters that they couldn't from Goldman or Morgan? The answer is twofold: the ability to buy American military technology and the ability to gain U.S. State Department approval for doing so. Who was the secretary of state in 2015? None other than Chris Heinz's stepfather, John Kerry. In 2015, the Aviation...

Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA), running for the 2020 Democrat presidential nomination, would secure a major legislative victory should Senate Republicans help pass a green card giveaway plan for the nation’s largest tech corporations. This week, Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) and Harris are looking to pass S. 386, legislation that would allow Indian nationals to effectively monopolize the U.S. green card system for at least ten years, providing a constant stream of foreign workers that American professionals will be forced to compete against for white-collar jobs. Lee and Harris’s legislation will ensure outsourcing firms such as Cognizant and Infosys, as well...

The Department of Homeland Security has again delayed a plan to cancel 100,000 work permits which were printed for the Indian spouses of H-1B visa workers by President Barack Obama. snip At this point, DHS has informed counsel that it believes the earliest possible publication date for that [H4EAD cancellation] rule would be in spring 2020,” said a September 16 letter to a judge who is overseeing a lawsuit against the program. “Although that timeframe is aspirational,” the letter added The rule was drafted at the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services agency to help implement President Donald Trump’s “Hire American”...

Sen. David Perdue (R-GA) now supports Sen. Mike Lee’s (R-UT) green card giveaway bill, which will allow investors to reward many more Indian graduates for taking middle-class jobs from American college graduates. Perdue’s decision to end his opposition to the bill clears the way for Lee to rush his bill through the Senate on Thursday. If no other senators object, Lee’s bill will move through the Senate, putting it much closer to becoming law.

Apprente, based in Silicon Valley, has developed a tech to automate voice orders supporting many languages and accents McDonald’s Corporation has entered an agreement to buy Israeli-founded, Silicon Valley based startup Apprente, “a leader in the field of conversational voice-based technology,” the fast food giant said in a statement Tuesday. The technology will allow for “faster and simpler and more accurate ordering” through speech at McDonald’s drive-thru stations, the statement said. According to the deal, Apprente’s employees will become part of the US firm’s global technology team. The terms of the deal were not disclosed. The Apprente team – made up of workers...

No sane person enjoys standing in an airport security line. In some cases, especially when you’re late for your flight, the wait to get through security can seem like hours or even days. And wait times to make it through airport security have indeed gone up over the last 20 or so years in response to terrorism threats. Fortunately developments in artificial intelligence (AI) are beginning to make it easier to get through airport security. Airports, airlines and government security agencies generally must balance two competing objectives. The first is to ensure that robust and effective aviation security programs are...

"Remarkably, the device is able to generate electricity at night, when solar cells don't work," "Beyond lighting, we believe this could be a broadly enabling approach to power generation suitable for remote locations, and anywhere where power generation at night is needed The device developed by Raman and Stanford University scientists Wei Li and Shanhui Fan sidesteps the limitations of solar power by taking advantage of radiative cooling, in which a sky-facing surface passes its heat to the atmosphere as thermal radiation, losing some heat to space and reaching a cooler temperature than the surrounding air. This phenomenon explains how...

Apprente staff, which includes employees with PhDs in machine learning and computational linguistics, will become part of McDonald's Global Technology team following the acquisition. American fast food giant McDonald’s Corporation has entered into an agreement to acquire Apprente, a Silicon Valley start-up founded by Israelis that specializes in conversational voice-based technology. The acquisition of the company, McDonald’s said, will “allow for faster, simpler and more accurate ordering at the Drive-Thru,” and could be incorporated into mobile ordering and kiosks in the future. No financial details were disclosed regarding the acquisition of the company, which has raised $4.8 million in two...

Scientists have invented a device that can quickly produce large numbers of living entities that resemble very primitive human embryos.Researchers welcomed the development, described Wednesday in the journal Nature, as an important advance for studying the earliest days of human embryonic development. But it also raises questions about where to draw the line in manufacturing "synthetic" human life.Other scientists have previously created synthetic embryos, which are also known as embryoids. These entities are made by coaxing human stem cells to form structures found in very early human embryos. The research has raised questions about how similar to complete embryos they could and should be...

A man accused of murdering his girlfriend in southeast China was caught after facial recognition software suggested he had tried to scan a dead person’s face to apply for a loan. Officers in Fujian province said the 29-year-old named Zhang was caught while trying to burn the body on a remote farm, but they had been tipped off by an online lending company after its software could find no signs of movement in the victim’s eyes, Xiamen Evening News reported on Sunday. Zhang is suspected of strangling his girlfriend with a rope in Xiamen on April 11 after they argued...

Cyber-assistant taught to duck sensitive topics Apple has programmed its Siri voice assistant to avoid politically charged subjects, and deflect or duck questions that require its AI to take a stand on issues, it emerged this week. From a tranche of documents leaked by a former contract worker who evaluated Siri responses to user questions for accuracy, The Guardian obtained a set of guidelines drawn up last year to ensure Siri's responses to "sensitive" topics comes across as neutral. In keeping with these guidelines, Siri's responses were revised to endorse "equality" while avoiding the word "feminism," even if asked directly....

NEW YORK (ChurchMilitant.com) - A new film by former White House Chief Strategist Steve Bannon is sounding the alarm over China's encroachment into the high-tech industry. Slated for release in September, Claws of the Red Dragon spotlights the relationship between telecommunications giant Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd. and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and People's Liberation Army (PLA). Based on Canada's 2018 arrest of Huawei Chief Financial Officer Meng Wanzhou, the film tells the story of Chinese-Canadian journalist Jane Li as she covers the detention of the CFO of a fictional Chinese tech firm Huaxing Hi-Tech and exposes the company's connections...

Electronic warfare, known as the battle in the electromagnetic spectrum, relies on data and signals to survey, fight and defend and the complex mission executed by the Army’s electronic warfare Soldiers – which includes detecting and responding to enemy jamming attempts and other electronic interference – is intensifying. Currently, the Army is developing an Electronic Warfare Planning and Management Tool, or EWPMT, to manage and control electronic warfare assets in support of unified land operations. According to Army News Service, through the EWPMT, the Army can now visually synergize its EW attack, targeting, and surveillance capabilities to enable the maneuverability...

Something very strange and disturbing happened to me recently. If it was just relevant to me, it wouldn’t be that important (except perhaps to me), and I wouldn’t be writing this column. But it’s something that is likely more important and more ominous than we can even imagine.There are already common fraudulent schemes being perpetrated by both telephone and internet. One known as the “Grandparent Scam” is particularly reprehensible, first because it is perpetrated on elderly people who are, in general, more susceptible to tech-savvy criminals and second because it is based on the manipulation of familial love, trust and...

European Union officials have drawn up an aggressive 173-page plan to counter both President Donald Trump’s trade moves and American tech giants including Google, Apple, Amazon, Microsoft and Facebook. According to a document obtained by POLITICO, European Commission officials are pushing their president-elect, Ursula von der Leyen, to set up a European Future Fund that would invest more than $100 billion in equity stakes in high-potential European companies. The goal: get Europe competing head-on with the American and Chinese tech giants it has lagged behind for decades. They’re also advocating for Europe to show more grit in Trump’s trade war,...

The US Navy is to replace touchscreen controls on destroyers with physical systems in 2020 after a report into the fatal 2017 USS John S McCain collision branded the controls ‘unnecessarily complex’. The investigation into the accident that resulted in the deaths of 10 sailors said that the complexity of the control system and a lack of training led to the collision. Bridge design on US naval vessels is largely uncontrolled by the military, with a lack of specific requirements leaving design decisions to shipbuilders. The step-back in technology will give sailors more tactile feedback and remove the ambiguity and...

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...

Could an emerging technology reshape the battle lines in the abortion debate? Since Roe v. Wade was decided in 1973, that fight has been defined by the interlocking, absolute values of choice and life: For some, a woman’s right to choose trumps any claim to a right to life by the fetus; for others, it’s the reverse. But what if we could separate those two — what if a woman’s choice to terminate a pregnancy no longer meant terminating the fetus itself? That is the promise of artificial wombs, a technology that has already shown some success in tests on...