Lifeboat Foundation

Mosquitoes that transmit dengue and other viruses have evolved growing resistance to insecticides in parts of Asia, and novel ways to control them are desperately needed, new research warns.

Health authorities commonly fog mosquito-infested areas with clouds of insecticide, and resistance has long been a concern, but the scale of the problem was not well understood.

Japanese scientist Shinji Kasai and his team examined mosquitos from several countries in Asia as well as Ghana and found a series of mutations had made some virtually impervious to popular pyrethroid-based chemicals like permethrin.

I imagine, this could hurt a lot of people. This could easily be resolved with better ventilation and planning; not really outright banning.

A federal agency is considering a ban on gas stoves, a source of indoor pollution linked to childhood asthma.

In an interview with Bloomberg, a US Consumer Product Safety commissioner said gas stove usage is a “hidden hazard.”

Continue reading “A US federal agency is considering a ban on gas stoves” »

The DoNotPay app is the home of the world’s first robot lawyer. Fight corporations, beat bureaucracy and sue anyone at the press of a button.

Continue surfing free trials, beating parking tickets, suing robocallers for cash, and more.

On Thursday, Microsoft researchers announced a new text-to-speech AI model called VALL-E that can closely simulate a person’s voice when given a three-second audio sample. Once it learns a specific voice, VALL-E can synthesize audio of that person saying anything—and do it in a way that attempts to preserve the speaker’s emotional tone.

Microsoft calls VALL-E a “neural codec language model,” and it builds off of a technology called EnCodec, which Meta announced in October 2022. Unlike other text-to-speech methods that typically synthesize speech by manipulating waveforms, VALL-E generates discrete audio codec codes from text and acoustic prompts.

On Friday, Koko co-founder Rob Morris announced on Twitter that his company ran an experiment to provide AI-written mental health counseling for 4,000 people without informing them first, The Verge reports. Critics have called the experiment deeply unethical because Koko did not obtain informed consent from people seeking counseling.

On Discord, users sign into the Koko Cares server and send direct messages to a Koko bot that asks several multiple-choice questions (e.g., “What’s the darkest thought you have about this?”). It then shares a person’s concerns—written as a few sentences of text—anonymously with someone else on the server who can reply anonymously with a short message of their own.

A researcher at Tohoku University has made significant improvements to a high-power electrodeless plasma.

Plasma is one of the four fundamental states of matter, along with solid, liquid, and gas. It is an ionized gas consisting of positive ions and free electrons. It was first described by chemist Irving Langmuir in the 1920s.

A breakthrough in quantum research – the first detection of excitons (electrically neutral quasiparticles) in a topological insulator has been achieved by an international team of scientists collaborating within the Würzburg-Dresden Cluster of Excellence ct.qmat. This discovery paves the way for a new generation of light-driven computer chips and quantum technologies. It was enabled thanks to smart material design in Würzburg, the birthplace of topological insulators. The findings have been published in the journal Nature Communications.

<em>Nature Communications</em> is a peer-reviewed, open-access, multidisciplinary, scientific journal published by Nature Portfolio. It covers the natural sciences, including physics, biology, chemistry, medicine, and earth sciences. It began publishing in 2010 and has editorial offices in London, Berlin, New York City, and Shanghai.

Academics reveal new Text-to-SQL model attacks that could potentially let attackers break into sensitive databases or launch DoS attacks.

StrongPity APT group targeting Android users with a Trojanized Telegram app distributed through a fake Shagle video chat service website.