To detect the quantum friction of empty space, scientists are going for a spin.
A twirling nanoparticle, suspended in a laser beam inside of a vacuum, can measure tiny twisting forces, making it the most sensitive detector of torque yet created. Researchers say the device could one day detect an elusive quantum effect called vacuum friction.
The suspended nanoparticle can spin more than 300 billion times a minute. “This is the fastest human-made rotor in the world,” says physicist Tongcang Li of Purdue University in West Lafayette, Ind.
Researchers from the University Hospital and ETH Zurich have developed a machine that repairs injured human livers and keep them alive outside the body for one week. This breakthrough may increase the number of available organs for transplantation saving many lives of patients with severe liver diseases or cancer.
How can we tackle gender imbalance in the personalities of AI learning tools?
The Gendering of AI
The expected growth in use of artificial intelligence (AI) in learning applications is raising concerns about both the potential gendering of these tools and the risk that they will display the inherent biases of their developers. Why the concern? Well, to make it easier for us to integrate AI tools and chatbots into our lives, designers often give them human attributes. For example, applications and robots are often given a personality and gender. Unfortunately, in many cases, gender stereotypes are being perpetuated. The type of roles robots are designed to perform usually reflect gendered over generalizations of feminine or masculine attributes.
Feminine personalities in AI tools such as chatbots and consumer devices like Amazon’s Alexa are often designed to have sympathetic features and perform tasks related to care giving, assistantship, or service. Many of these applications have been created to work as personal assistants, in customer service or teaching. Examples include Emma the floor cleaning robot and Apple’s Siri your personal iPhone assistant. Conversely, male robots are usually designed as strong, intelligent and able to perform “dirty jobs”. They typically work in analytical roles, logistics, and security. Examples include Ross the legal researcher, Stan the robotic parking valet and Leo the airport luggage porter.
The United States Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has issued an alert that strongly urges users and administrators alike to update a VPN with long-since disclosed critical vulnerabilities. “Affected organizations that have not applied the software patch to fix a remote code execution (RCE) vulnerability,” the CISA alert warns, “can become compromised in an attack.” What has dictated the need for this level of Government agency interest and the urgency of the language used? The simple answer is the ongoing Travelex foreign currency exchange cyber-attack, thought to have been facilitated by no less than seven VPN servers that were late in being patched against this critical vulnerability. The vulnerability in question is CVE-2019–11510, first disclosed way back in April 2019 when Pulse Secure VPN also released a patch to fix it.
Critical VPN security vulnerability timeline
The CISA alert provides a telling timeline that outlines how the Pulse Secure VPN critical vulnerability, CVE-2019–11510, became such a hot security potato. Pulse Secure first released an advisory regarding the vulnerabilities in the VPN on April 24, 2019. “Multiple vulnerabilities were discovered and have been resolved in Pulse Connect Secure (PCS) and Pulse Policy Secure (PPS),” that advisory warned, “this includes an authentication by-pass vulnerability that can allow an unauthenticated user to perform a remote arbitrary file access on the Pulse Connect Secure gateway.” An upgrade patch to fix the problem, which had been rated as critical, was made available at the same time. Warning users that the vulnerabilities posed a “significant risk to your deployment,” Pulse Secure recommended patching as soon as possible.
Magnets may play a central role in the future of surgery. This summer, US surgeon Dr. Jeffrey Cadeddu performed the first of several magnet-assisted prostate cancer surgeries he has now done.
The unique relationship between the coordinates in the bore of a Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) scanner and the magnetic field gradients used for MRI allows building a localization system based on the measurement of these gradients. We have previously presented a miniature 3D Hall probe integrated in a low cost, low voltage 0.35μm CMOS chip from which we were able to measure the magnetic gradient 3D maps of 1.5T and 3T MRI scanners. In this paper, this 3D Hall probe has been integrated in a magnetic tracking device prototype and an algorithm was built to determine the position of the probe. First experimental results show that the probe gives its position with accuracy close to a few millimeters, and that sub-millimeter localization in a one-shot-3ms-measurement should be readily possible. Such a prototype opens the way for the development of MRI compatible real time magnetic tracking systems which could be integrable in surgical tools for MR-guided minimally-invasive surgery.
