How an informant and a messaging app led to huge global crime sting
It took $100,000 plus expenses, and the opportunity for a reduced prison sentence, for the smartphone developer to collaborate with the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) in 2018 and kick-start Operation Trojan Shield, according to a court document.
Source: reuters.com
'Big risk': California farmers hit by drought change planting plans
Joe Del Bosque is leaving a third of his 2,000-acre farm near Firebaugh, California, unseeded this year due to extreme drought. Yet, he hopes to access enough water to produce a marketable melon crop.
Source: reuters.com
Tracking SARS-CoV-2 variants
All viruses, including SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, change over time. Most changes have little to no impact on the virus’ properties. However, some changes may affect the virus’s properties, such as how easily it spreads, the associated disease severity, or the performance...
Source: who.int
Then and now: Pandemic clears the air
Air pollution is highly damaging to the environment, but Covid lockdowns show we can clear the air.
Source: bbc.com
Greta Thunberg aims to change how food is produced
Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg has set her sights on changing how the world produces and consumes food in order to counteract a trio of threats: carbon emissions, disease outbreaks and animal suffering.
Source: reuters.com
China lands its Zhurong rover on Mars
The six-wheeled robot has made the hazardous descent to the surface of the Red Planet, China announces.
Source: bbc.com
No Evidence That Associations Between Adolescents' Digital Technology Engagement and Mental Health Problems Have Increased
Digital technology is ubiquitous in modern adolescence, and researchers are concerned that it has negative impacts on mental health that, furthermore, increase over time. To investigate whether technology is becoming more harmful, we examined changes in associations between technology engagement and...
Source: sagepub.com
Human remains from Mary Rose show diversity of Tudor crew
A team of researchers with Cardiff University, the Mary Rose Trust, HM Naval Base and the British Geological Survey's National Environmental Isotope Facility has found evidence of racial diversity among the crew of the Mary Rose—a warship from the time of King Henry the VIII. In their paper published...
Source: phys.org
UK should set tougher air pollution limits, says Kissi-Debrah coroner
The UK government should impose tougher limits on air pollution, in line with World Health Organization recommendations, to prevent more deaths like those of 9-year old Ella Kissi-Debrah, a coroner has urged.
Source: newscientist.com
Why a U.S. hospital and oil company turned to facial recognition
Deployments of facial recognition from Israeli startup AnyVision show how the surveillance software has gained adoption across the United States even as regulatory and ethical debates about it rage.
Source: reuters.com
IEA issues 'dire warning' on CO2 emissions as it predicts 5% rise
Global CO2 emissions from energy are seen rising nearly 5% this year, suggesting the economic rebound from COVID-19 could be "anything but sustainable" for the climate, the International Energy Agency said on Tuesday.
Source: reuters.com
Google’s FLoC Is a Terrible Idea
Update, April 9, 2021 : We've launched Am I FLoCed, a new site that will tell you whether your Chrome browser has been turned into a guinea pig for Federated Learning of Cohorts or FLoC, Google’s latest targeted advertising experiment. The third-party cookie is dying, and Google is trying to create...
Source: eff.org
NASA has flown its Ingenuity drone helicopter on Mars for the first time
The historic moment was livestreamed on YouTube and Ingenuity captured the photo above with one of its two cameras.
Source: technologyreview.com
Constructing Transformers For Longer Sequences with Sparse Attention Methods
"We show that carefully designed sparse attention can be as expressive and flexible as the original full attention model. Along with theoretical guarantees, we provide a very efficient implementation which allows us to scale to much longer inputs. As a consequence, we achieve state-of-the-art results...
Source: googleblog.com
World's wealthiest (and 'business as usual') 'at heart of climate problem'
"These [polluter elite] are people who fly most, drive the biggest cars most and live in the biggest homes which they can easily afford to heat, so they tend not to worry if they’re well insulated or not. … They’re also the sort of people who could really afford good insulation and solar panels...
Source: bbc.com
Use of 360° virtual reality video in medical obstetrical education: a quasi-experimental design Vera Arents. Pieter C.
Background Video-based teaching has been part of medical education for some time but 360° videos using a virtual reality (VR) device are a new medium that offer extended possibilities. We investigated whether adding a 360° VR video to the internship curriculum leads to an improvement of long-term recall...
Source: biomedcentral.com
Databunker secure storage
Really like this approach putting privacy tools all in one place. Warrants some experimentation. "Databunker gives strong, serious, real personal-data protection for customer records without expensive custom coding and with full customer visibility."
Source: databunker.org
Left-wing party wins Greenland election, opposes big mining project
Greenland's left-wing Inuit Ataqatigiit party pledged its opposition to a large rare earth mining project on Wednesday after winning a parliamentary election with more than a third of the votes.
Source: reuters.com
To them that hath: economic complexity and local industrial strategy in the UK Penny Mealy. Diane Coyle. International Tax
Divergent economic performance in many countries has led to renewed interest in place-based policies, such as the UK’s local industrial strategies at the level of Combined Authorities or Local Economic Partnerships. However, an analysis of employment data using methods from the economic complexity...
Source: springer.com
Innovators in Japan are Developing New Technologies to Counter Coronavirus
As the global coronavirus pandemic continues, the world is searching for new measures that will minimize the risk of infection while allowing essential institutions such as hospitals, government, and schools to continue to function.
Source: reuters.com
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