Tuesday 25 June 2019

A new 'golden' age for electronics?

One way that heat damages electronic equipment is it makes components expand at different rates, resulting in forces that cause micro-cracking and distortion. Plastic components and circuit boards are particularly prone to damage due to changes in volume during heating and cooling cycles. But if a material could be incorporated into the components that compensates for the expansion, the stresses would be reduced and their lifetime increased.

* This article was originally published here

Israel's SpaceIL says it won't try second moonshot

SpaceIL, the Israeli company that attempted but failed to put an unmanned craft on the moon earlier this year, says it will not try a second moonshot.

* This article was originally published here

Report: Hackers using telecoms like 'global spy system'

An ambitious group of suspected state-backed hackers has been burrowing into telecommunications companies in order to spy on high-profile targets across the world, a U.S. cybersecurity firm said in a report published Tuesday .

* This article was originally published here

Fake news 'vaccine' works: 'Pre-bunking' game reduces susceptibility to disinformation

An online game in which people play the role of propaganda producers to help them identify real world disinformation has been shown to increase "psychological resistance" to fake news, according to a study of 15,000 participants.

* This article was originally published here

Using game theory to model poisoning attack scenarios

Poisoning attacks are among the greatest security threats for machine learning (ML) models. In this type of attack, an adversary tries to control a fraction of the data used to train neural networks and injects malicious data points to hinder a model's performance.

* This article was originally published here

Instagram chief insists it doesn't spy on users

Instagram doesn't snoop on private conversations as part of its advertising targeting strategy, the head of the popular social media site said in an interview Tuesday.

* This article was originally published here

Solving a condensation mystery

Condensation might ruin a wood coffee table or fog up glasses when entering a warm building on a winter day, but it's not all inconveniences; the condensation and evaporation cycle has important applications.

* This article was originally published here

GM to upgrade assembly plants ahead of new pickup, SUV lines

General Motors Co. has announced it's investing more than $4.2 billion in assembly plants in Indiana, Michigan and Texas to prepare for the launch of its next generation of pickups and SUVs.

* This article was originally published here

Hacker used Raspberry Pi computer to steal restricted NASA data

A hacker used a tiny Raspberry Pi computer to infiltrate NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory network, stealing sensitive data and forcing the temporary disconnection of space-flight systems, the agency has revealed.

* This article was originally published here

Predictors of cognitive recovery following mild to severe traumatic brain injury

Researchers have shown that higher intelligence and younger age are predictors of greater cognitive recovery 2-5 years post-mild to severe traumatic brain injury (TBI). In contrast, injury severity, as measured by the duration of post-traumatic amnesia, was not associated with greater or worse long-term cognitive recovery, as supported by a study published in Journal of Neurotrauma.

* This article was originally published here

Study identifies pathway linking socioeconomic status to cardiovascular risk

A biological pathway previously found to contribute to the impact of stress on the risk of cardiovascular disease also may underlie the increased incidence of such disease experienced by individuals with lower socioeconomic status. The report from investigators at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH), published online in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology, is a follow-up to a 2017 Lancet paper by some of the same authors that, for the first time in humans, linked activity of the stress-responsive brain structure the amygdala to elevated risk of events such as heart attack and stroke.

* This article was originally published here

Cyprus racers show budget solar cars have a sunny future

Venetia Chrysostomide fastened her helmet and rolled her solar-powered car into the sunny streets of Cypriot capital Nicosia for a race to showcase such vehicles' eco-friendly potential, even on a budget.

* This article was originally published here

Tidal tails detected around dwarf galaxy DDO 44

By conducting deep, wide-area imaging survey of the galaxy NGC 2403 and its environment, including the dwarf satellite galaxy DDO 44, astronomers have detected tidal tails emanating from the dwarf. The finding, presented in a paper published June 19, could shed more light on the interactions between galaxies and their satellites.

* This article was originally published here

Evaluating the effect of spin in health care news

Health care news stories represent an important source of information for patients. However, some evidence suggests that many news stories do not adequately explain research results and could mislead readers with spin, defined as "the presentation of information in a particular way, a slant, especially a favorable one." The danger of spin is that it can, for example, convince patients that treatments are more promising than they actually are or minimize their risks.

* This article was originally published here

Short-term effects of hurricanes Irma and Maria on Puerto Rico's forest birds

In September of 2017, hurricanes Irma and Maria delivered a devastating one-two punch to Puerto Rico, causing significant defoliation of the island's forests. While the detrimental effects of these storms on human populations was well-documented, little was known about how the island's bird populations were affected - until now. A new paper published in PLOS ONE by Vermont Center for Ecostudies (VCE) and colleagues compares occupancy of birds in forested areas across Puerto Rico during a winter before (2015) and shortly after (2018) the passage of these hurricanes. Using dynamic community models analyzed within a Bayesian framework, the authors find significant changes in species detectability, with some species becoming more readily detected after the storms and others becoming more difficult to detect.

* This article was originally published here

Non-invasive, more precise preimplantation genetic test under development for IVF embryos

Selecting the best possible embryo to implant in a woman undergoing in vitro fertilization (IVF) is a complicated task. As success rates for IVF have improved, many clinics now implant a single embryo during an IVF cycle—with the goal of avoiding a multiple pregnancy—and the responsibility of selecting the embryo falls to the embryologist. To determine the quality and viability of an embryo, embryologists typically examine specific features of the embryos using a light microscope. In addition, specialists can use data from preimplantation genetic testing for aneuploidy (PGT-A), a test of whether cells from the embryo at the blastocyst stage have a normal or abnormal number of chromosomes. However, this crucial test carries the risk of false positives (which could lead to discarding a normal embryo) and false negatives (which could lead to transferring an embryo with a chromosomal abnormality).

* This article was originally published here

Mathematics ties media coverage of gun control to upticks in gun purchases

For the first time, researchers have shown a causal link between print news media coverage of U.S. gun control policy in the wake of mass shooting events and increases in firearm acquisition, particularly in states with the least restrictive gun laws.

* This article was originally published here

Dutch telephone outage takes out nation's emergency number

A major telephone outage took down the Dutch emergency number for more than three hours Monday, forcing police and other first responders to scramble to set up alternatives.

* This article was originally published here

Enhancing face recognition tools with generative face completion

Researchers at the USC Information Sciences Institute (ISI) in California have recently carried out a study investigating whether completing obstructed faces using artificial neural networks (ANN) can improve the accuracy of face recognition tools. Their study originated from the IARPA Odin research project, which is aimed at identifying true and false faces in images, ultimately to enhance the performance of biometric authentication tools.

* This article was originally published here