It’s an intruiging technology. All it takes to set up is burying a sensor in the plant’s dirt, and it works for living and non-living things alike. Given that the experience is going to be wildly different depending on the plant, it’s not like this would be useful for doing anything with accuracy. But for doing weird, unique things (while fondling plants) it’s perfect.

In this era of Kinect, Wii, and Leap, everyone wants to capitalize on motion control. Disney still likes physical peripherals, like houseplants for example.

A short drive south of Alice Springs, the second largest population center in Australia’s Northern Territory, there is a high-security compound, code-named “RAINFALL.” The remote base, in the heart of the country’s barren outback, is one of the most important covert surveillance sites in the eastern hemisphere.

1950, the crew of a U.S. Navy minesweeper ship spent six days spraying Serratia marcescens and Bacillus globigii into the air about two miles off the northern California coast. The project was called €œOperation Sea Spray, € and its aim was to determine the susceptibility of a big city like San Francisco to a bioweapon attack by terrorists.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/1950-us-released-b…d-45rvMGkQ

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Given that going viral on the Internet is often cyclical, it should come as no surprise that an app that made its debut in 2017 has once again surged in popularity. FaceApp applies various transformations to the image of any face, but the option that ages facial features has been especially popular. However, the fun has been accompanied by controversy; since biometric systems are replacing access passwords, is it wise to freely offer up our image and our personal data? The truth is that today the face is ceasing to be as non-transferable as it used to be, and in just a few years it could be more hackable than the password of a lifetime.

Our countenance is the most recognisable key to social relationships. We might have doubts when hearing a voice on the phone, but never when looking at the face of a familiar person. In the 1960s, a handful of pioneering researchers began training computers to recognise human faces, although it was not until the 1990s that this technology really began to take off. Facial recognition algorithms have improved to such an extent that since 1993 their error rate has been halved every two years. When it comes to recognising unfamiliar faces in laboratory experiments, today’s systems outperform human capabilities.

Nowadays these systems are among the most widespread applications of Artificial Intelligence (AI). Every day, our laptops, smartphones and tablets greet us by name as they recognise our facial features, but at the same time, the uses of this technology have set off alarm bells over invasion of privacy concerns. In China, the world leader in facial recognition systems, the introduction of this technology associated with surveillance cameras to identify even pedestrians has been viewed by the West as another step towards the Big Brother dystopia, the eye of the all-watching state, as George Orwell portrayed in 1984.

ISN research is organized into three Strategic Research Areas (SRAs), representing the most fundamental subject areas for scientific inquiry at the Institute. SRAs are designed to address broad strategic challenges facing the Soldier, and are subdivided into specific Projects.

Get your Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind references ready, because scientists have just figured out a way to erase bad memories using—you guessed it—electroshock therapy. Get ready for on-demand forgetting. It’s a real thing now.

A team of Dutch neuroscientists recently devised an electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) to “target and disrupt patients’ memory of a disturbing episode.” Nature explains how patients were showed two traumatic narratives in a slideshow and then subjected to the new technique:

The team later prompted patients to recall only one of the stories by replaying part of that slide show. Immediately afterwards, when the reactivated memory is thought to be vulnerable, the patients received electroconvulsive therapy.

One day later, when given a multiple-choice memory test, patients were significantly worse at remembering details from the reactivated story, performing near chance. Patients’ memory of the other story, however, remained largely unscathed.

The government would never target innocent citizens much less whistleblowers, journalists or activists who are “inconvenient”, right? No history of heinous wrong-doing — right?

FINALLY!!!

Half rabbit half chicken chimera 32%: when rabbit howls truddi chase jove publications %: the piano teacher sophie elliot chimera %: the half life of stars louise wener hodder.

As well as Gait Recognition. (Go ahead and wear a disguise.)

The mass surveillance of innocent Americans continues as George Orwell’s 1984 becomes more of a reality with each passing day. “All told, we are barreling toward a future where every ritual of public life carries implicit consent to be surveilled,” writes Sidney Fussell for The Atlantic.

A new report from Georgetown Law‘s Center on Privacy & Technology (CPT) suggests that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) may be using the rampant problem of illegal immigration as a type of cover to track and spy on Americans in violation of their Fourth Amendment rights. Three years ago, the center revealed that nearly half of all U.S. adults are already in the FBI’s facial recognition database, which is largely sourced from DMV photos.

ICE has apparently requested special access to Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) databases in at least three states – Utah, Washington State, and Vermont – which the federal agency plans to use in conjunction with facial recognition technology to scan people’s drivers’ license photos and match them against criminal and residency databases, all without their knowledge or consent.

Arch Intern Med. 1997 Feb 10;157:281–5.

Growing numbers of patients suffering from many symptoms believe that they have a condition called multiple chemical sensitivity syndrome (MCSS). It has been suggested that this syndrome can be triggered by exposure to any of a large and usually incompletely defined number of natural and synthetic chemical substances. Major medical organizations, including the National Research Council and the American Medical Association, have not recognized MCSS as a clinical syndrome because of a lack of valid, well-controlled studies defining it and establishing pathogenesis or origin. Lately, some have proposed that many patients with MCSS suffer from hereditary coproporphyria. However, this purported association is based chiefly on results from a single reference laboratory of a fundamentally flawed assay for erythrocyte coproporphyrinogen oxidase.