Lifeboat Foundation

DeepMind’s AlphaCode outperforms many human programmers in tricky software challenges.

Check out all the on-demand sessions from the Intelligent Security Summit here.

It appears that most IT environments have not connected the dots when it comes to ransomware and the importance of a good protection system. It’s easy to infer this when reading a recent IDC survey of more than 500 CIOs from 20-plus industries around the world.

The most headline-grabbing statistic from IDC’s report is that 46% of respondents were successfully attacked by ransomware in the last three years. That means that ransomware has leaped past natural disasters to become the primary reason one must be good at performing large data restores. Many years ago, the main reason for such restores was hardware failure because the failure of a disk system often meant a complete restore from scratch.

It’s easy to think of Earth’s geomagnetic poles as features that are set in stone (or ice), but both poles are not stationary and remain in a permanent state of flux. Since it was first documented by scientists in the 1830s, the North Magnetic Pole has wandered some 2,250 kilometers (1,400 miles) across the upper stretches of the Northern Hemisphere from Canada towards Siberia. Between 1990 and 2005, the rate of this movement accelerated from less than 15 kilometers per year to around 50 to 60 kilometers per year.

A study, published in the journal Nature Geoscience, argues the changes could be explained by the to-ing and fro-ing between two magnetic “blobs” of molten material in the planet’s interior, causing a titanic shift of its magnetic field.

The North Magnetic Pole is the point at which Earth’s magnetic field points vertically downwards, dictated by molten iron that’s sloshing around Earth’s interior through convection currents. The recent shift towards Siberia, it seems, is caused by a blip in the pattern of flow in Earth’s interior that occurred between 1970 and 1999. The change resulted in the Canadian blob becoming elongated and losing its influence on the magnetosphere, causing the pole to zoom toward Siberia.

A new law in NYC will come into effect on April 15, 2023, requiring companies using automated employment decision tools to pass an audit for bias. AI ethicist Merve Hickok explains everything about it here.

Europe has an energy crisis. Factories are halting operations in the face of soaring energy prices; families are paying 50% more for heating (or opting to freeze in their homes), and Europe as a whole continues to destabilize its political position by making itself more dependent on Russia for natural gas.

Almost every patient who gets myeloma and is treated with a standard therapy also experiences relapse. But researchers have developed an antibody therapy that triggers the immune system to destroy these cancer cells. The bispecific antibody can bind to T cells and multiple myeloma cells at once, to kill the cancer. This immunotherapy, called talquetamab, was astonishingly effective, and worked in about 73 percent of patients who were treated with the drug in two clinical trials. The treatment even helped for a patient who had a cancer that resisted all therapies that have been approved for multiple myeloma.

Talquetamab takes advantage of a receptor on myeloma cells called GPRC5D, and CD3, a complex and co-receptor on the surface of T cells. Anti-CD3 antibodies have long been known to cause the activation of T cells. Mouse studies showed that talquetamab can recruit and activate CD3-positive T-cells, which inhibits the formation and growth of tumors.

The explanation of inertia based on “Mach’s principle” is briefly revisited and an experiment whereby the gravitational origin of inertia can be tested is described. The test consists of detecting a small stationary force with a sensitive force sensor. The force is presumably induced when a periodic transient Mach effect mass fluctuation is driven in high voltage, high energy density capacitors that are subjected to 50 kHz, 1.3 kV amplitude voltage signal, and threaded by an alternating magnetic flux of the same frequency. An effect of the sort predicted is shown to be present in the device tested. It has the expected magnitude and depends on the relative phase of the Mach effect mass fluctuation and the alternating magnetic flux as expected. The observed effect also displays scaling behaviors that are unique to Mach effects.

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) considers aging to be a natural process. This makes it difficult to get FDA approval for drugs that seek to slow or reverse the biological process of aging. Instead, drugs intended to target aging must target a disease that often results from the aging process in order to demonstrate efficacy and gain approval.

But there is growing consensus and effort among scientists to convince the FDA that aging itself should be classified as a disease and an appropriate target for drug development.