#A Simple Plan to Impede the NSA Is Taking hold A year after revelations first emerged from former National security agency contractor Edward Snowden about mass Internet surveillance,
more e-mail providers are adopting encryption, a simple change that could make it harder for spy agencies to vacuum up huge numbers of communications in transit.
In an analysis released this week, Google said 65 percent of the messages sent by Gmail users are encrypted
when delivered, meaning the recipient provider also supports the encryption needed to establish a secure connection for transmission of the message.
Google says, but that up from 27 percent on December 11, 2013. And the numbers could get even better as more providers offer encryption by default to their customers.
less than 1 percent of traffic to and from Gmail from Comcast and Verizon is encrypted currently,
if it gains access to an e-mail provider servers. Even here, though, the tide may be turning:
on Tuesday Google released draft source code of a tool, called End-to-end, that would secure a message from the moment it leaves one browser to the moment it arrives at anothereaning even e-mail providers couldn read them as they travel between two people,
Stephen Farrell, a computer scientist at Trinity college in Dublin and a member of the Internet Engineering Task force, the group of engineers who maintain
and upgrade the Internet protocols, says the Google data shows progress. ore e-mail is being encrypted between mail servers,
he says. ne would hope that a general, and good, trend. Embarrassed by Snowden revelations,
Last month, Facebook reported that about 58 percent of the notification e-mails it sent out were encrypted from its systems to recipientse-mail providers i
#How Google Could Disrupt Global Internet Delivery by Satellite Google has shaken up the market for fast Internet service in parts of the United states by offering
or planning fiber-to-the-home in Kansas city and 11 other cities. Its reported entry into the satellite Internet business could do the same globally by providing increased competition and better service than existing satellite technologies.
This week the Wall street journal reported that Google will spend more than $1 billion to launch a fleet of 180 satellites.
The project the paper reports is being led by two executives with satellite startup O3b Networks which Google helped fund in 2010.
Neither company would comment on the plan Tuesday. While satellite launches can be expensive the strategy could give Google a foothold in a growing business.
The effect of competition could be powerful. Google s entry into municipal fiber markets has tended to drive down prices
and improve service offerings from existing ISPS according to some analyses (see Google Fiber s Ripple Effect
and When Will the Rest of Us Get Google Fiber?).Similarly if Google could beam Internet connectivity to countries that have only a single ISP often one controlled by a government
and very high prices for Internet connectivity that could be a game changer for a huge swath of the globe says Rob Faris research director at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard.
O3b s name refers to the other three billion a reference to people worldwide who lack Internet access.
The company has four satellites in orbit and plans to launch another four next month.
Its existing business is providing Internet connectivity to mobile carriers base stations. It isn t clear
what model Google and O3b might pursue. But O3b s satellites already offer a superior and cheaper way to deliver high-speed Internet than conventional satellite services.
Satellite Internet is provided traditionally by geostationary satellites that stay over a given point On earth. These satellites orbit at 35000 kilometers often adding a 600 millisecond delay to the radio signals going back and forth.
Such a delay is considered generally excessive for business use. O3b satellites orbit at a relatively low altitude of about 8000 kilometers and the company says this means a more-tolerable 150-millisecond delay coverage to latitudes up to 45 degrees north
or south of the equator a swath of territory inhabited by 70 percent of the world s population.
They can work even though they re in motion relative to the Earth s surface because they use technology called beam-forming to direct their signals.
Google declined an interview request about its satellite project. But like its other infrastructure efforts the satellite plan could boost its earnings simply by bringing its services to new users.
That incentive also helps explain Google's Project Loon a far-out effort aimed at dispatching high-altitude balloons to provide broadband service from the stratosphere.
Both Google and Facebook have been acquiring companies and experts to explore using drones for that purpose e
#Microsoft s 3-D Audio Gives Virtual Objects a Voice Just as a new generation of virtual reality goggles for video games are about to hit the market,
researchers at Microsoft have come up with what could be the perfect accompaniment way for ordinary headphones to create a realistic illusion of sound coming from specific locations in space.
In combination with a virtual reality device like the Oculus Rift, the new system could be used to make objects
or characters in a virtual world sound as well as look like they are at a specific point in space,
even if that is outside a person field of view. Microsoft researchers refer to the technology as 3-D audio.
In a demonstration of the technology at Microsoft Silicon valley lab, I put on a pair of wireless headphones that made nearby objects suddenly burst into life.
A voice appeared to emanate from a cardboard model of a portable radio. Higher quality music seemed to come from a fake hi-fi speaker.
And a stuffed bird high off the ground produced realistic chirps. As I walked around,
the sounds changed so that the illusion never slipped as their position relative to my ears changed.
I had sat down in front of a Kinect 3-D sensor and been turned briefly to the left and right.
Software built a 3-D model of my head and shoulders and then used that model to calculate a personalized filter that made it possible to fool my auditory senses.
or software, says Ivan Tashev, the researcher at Microsoft Redmond labs working on the project with colleague David Johnston. ou can use this for virtual reality and augmented reality,
he says. To work properly, Tashev system also needs data on the position of the headphones as a person moves his head
provided by motion sensors and a watching camera. However, the kind of motion sensors used by virtual reality headset like the Oculus Rift could provide enough information.
Tashev system is a new twist on an old idea. It has long been known that the unique shape
and position of a person ears and the anatomy of their head alters how sound reaches the ear canals,
The most accurate way is to use earplugs fitted with an array of microphones to record exactly what reaches a person ears
but that isn practical outside a lab. Video game developers create spatial audio effects using average HRTFS,
his software generates an approximation of that subject HRTF that seems good enough to produce unusually accurate spatial audio. ssentially we can predict how you will hear from the way you look,
The software that does that was created by capturing accurate HRTFS for 250 people and then comparing them with 3-D scans of their heads.
Mark Billinghurst, a professor and leader of the Human Interface Lab at the University of Canterbury, New zealand, says that the approach developed by Microsoft could have a broad impact
and sounds in games on smartphone headsets or devices like Google glass could make them easier to interact with,
Billinghurst says. hat could help with how immersed you feel in a game or virtual environment or even with wearable devices
#A Cleaner, Cheaper Way to Make Metals In lab space across from a yoga studio in an office park in Natick, Massachusetts,
Adam Powell holds up a brilliant white ceramic tube that he says is the key to making the production of many widely used metals significantly cheaper
a startup spun out of Boston University that been operating quietly since 2008 and is now ready to go to market with its first productshe are earthmetals neodymium and dysprosium.
and are important for the generators found in wind turbines and many electric car motors. While Infinium approach can be used to produce other metals,
including magnesium and aluminum, the company is starting with rare earths because they fetch much higher prices.
Its first customer is the U s. government, which needs rare earth metals for its stockpile of strategically valuable materials.
Rare earth ore is mined in just a few places in the world, and high costs and environmental challenges have prevented companies from processing rare earth ore to make metals domestically.
Infinium process addresses a specific part of metal production: transforming partially processed oresetal oxidesnto metals. This can be done by immersing the oxides in a bath of molten salt and running electricity through the mixture.
Aside from the emissions associated with generating that power, this process itself releases greenhouse gases. One of the electrodes is made usually of carbon,
which reacts with oxygen, forming carbon dioxide. The ceramic material Powell showed mehich is made of zirconium oxideeplaces the carbon electrode
and eliminates those emissions. Researchers have been trying to replace carbon for many years, but the molten salts have corroded the alternatives.
The key advance for Infinium was developing alternative molten salts that don react with the zirconium oxide
so that it can last long enough to be practical. This month Infinium is starting up production using a machine that will produce half a ton of rare earth metals annually.
In September, Infinium will start using another machine that can produce 10 metric tons a yearnough for the company to be profitable,
Powell says. Infinium has demonstrated also that the process works for aluminum, magnesium, titanium, and silicon,
and it plans to scale up production of the first two of those by 2016. The process isn a cure-all for the environmental problems associated with metal production.
It doesn address pollution from mining and separating rare earth oxides from other materials in the ore (other new processes are being developed to address those issuesee he Rare-Earth Crisis. But for metals such as aluminum and magnesium,
Infinium says, it can reduce processing costs by 30 to 50 percent. Making these metals much cheaper could,
for one thing, transform car-making. Parts made of these metals weigh far less than the steel parts ordinarily used in cars,
while being just as strong. The weight savings could reduce fuel consumption by 10 percent, according to an auto industry consortium.
As the company scales up production, one key question will be whether its ceramic electrodes hold up for
as long as the company smaller-scale testing suggests they will. If the ceramic doesn last the company may not have a cost advantage.
Finding an alternative to carbon has long been the reamof the metals industry, says Donald Sadoway,
a professor of materials science at MIT who is not involved with the company. believe Infinium technology is sound.
It real, he says. Whether the company succeeds s all about the economics, he says. o one cares about the flow chart for the process.
You care about the prices. If it produces a good metal at a lower cost,
people will be interested. l
#Military Funds Brain-Computer Interfaces to Control Feelings Researcher Jose Carmena has worked for years training macaque monkeys to move computer cursors and robotic limbs with their minds.
He does so by implanting electrodes into their brains to monitor neural activity. Now, as part of a sweeping $70 million program funded by the U s. military,
Carmena has a new goal: to use brain implants to read, and then control, the emotions of mentally ill people.
This week the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, awarded two large contracts to Massachusetts General Hospital and the University of California, San francisco,
to create electrical brain implants capable of treating seven psychiatric conditions, including addiction, depression, and borderline personality disorder.
The project builds on expanding knowledge about how the brain works; the development of microlectronic systems that can fit in the body;
and substantial evidence that thoughts and actions can be altered with well-placed electrical impulses to the brain. magine if
I have an addiction to alcohol and I have a craving, says Carmena, who is a professor at the University of California, Berkeley,
and involved in the UCSF-led project. e could detect that feeling and then stimulate inside the brain to stop it from happening.
The U s. faces an epidemic of mental illness among veterans, including suicide rates three or four times that of the general public.
But drugs and talk therapy are limited of use which is why the military is turning to neurological devices,
says Justin Sanchez, manager of the DARPA program, known as Subnets, for Systems-Based Neurotechnology for Emerging Therapies. e want to understand the brain networks in neuropsychiatric illness,
develop technology to measure them, and then do precision signaling to the brain, says Sanchez. t something completely different and new.
These devices don yet exist. Under the contracts, which are the largest awards so far supporting President Obama BRAIN INITIATIVE,
the brain-mapping program launched by the White house last year, UCSF will receive as much as $26 million and Mass General up to $30 million.
Companies including the medical device giant Medtronic and startup Cortera Neurotechnologies a spin out from UC Berkeley wireless laboratory,
The research builds on a small but quickly growing market for devices that work by stimulating nerves, both inside the brain and outside it.
More recently, doctors have used such stimulators to treat severe cases of obsessive-compulsive disorder (see rain Implants Can Reset Misfiring Circuits.
the U s. Food & Drug Administration approved Neuropace, the first implant that both records from the brain and stimulates it (see apping Seizures Away.
It is used to watch for epileptic seizures and then stop them with electrical pulses. Altogether, U s. doctors bill for about $2. 6 billion worth of neural stimulation devices a year, according to industry estimates.
Researchers say they are making rapid improvements in electronics, including small, implantable computers. Under its program, Mass General will work with Draper Laboratories in Cambridge, Massachusetts,
to develop new types of stimulators. The UCSF team is being supported by microelectronics and wireless researchers at UC Berkeley
who have created several prototypes of miniaturized brain implants. Michel Maharbiz, a professor in Berkeley electrical engineering department, says the Obama brain initiative,
and now the DARPA money, has created a eeding frenzyaround new technology. t a great time to do tech for the brain,
he says. The new line of research has been dubbed ffective brain-computer interfacesby some, meaning electronic devices that alter feelings,
perhaps under direct control of a patient thoughts and wishes. asically, wee trying to build the next generation of psychiatric brain stimulators,
says Alik Widge, a researcher on the Mass General team. Darin Dougherty a psychiatrist who directs Mass General division of neurotherapeutics,
says one aim could be to extinguish fear in veterans with posttraumatic stress disorder, or PTSD. Fear is generated in the amygdala part of the brain involved in emotional memories.
But it can be repressed by signals in another region, the ventromedial prefrontal cortex. he idea would be to decode a signal in the amygdala showing overactivity,
then stimulate elsewhere to suppress that fear, says Dougherty. Such research isn without ominous overtones.
In the 1970s, Yale university neuroscientist Jose Delgado showed he could cause people to feel emotions
like relaxation or anxiety, using implants he called timoceivers. But Delgado, also funded by the military,
left the U s. after Congressional hearings in which he was accused of developing otalitarianmind-control devices.
According to scientists funded by DARPA, the agency has been anxious about how the Subnets program could be perceived,
Psychiatric implants would in fact control how mentally ill people act, although in many cases indirectly, by changing how they Feel for instance,
Dougherty says a brain implant would only be considered for patients truly debilitated by mental illness, and who can be helped with drugs
let do surgery, says Dougherty. t going to be for people who don respond to the other treatments. o
#10-4, Good Computer: Automated System Lets Trucks Convoy as One A recent demonstration involving two trucks tethered by computer control shows how automation
and vehicle-to-vehicle communication are creeping onto the roads. A pair of trucks convoying 10 meters apart on Interstate 80 just outside Reno,
Nevada, might seem like an unusual sightot to mention unsafe. But the two trucks doing this a couple of weeks ago were actually demonstrating a system that could make trucking safer and much more efficient.
While the driver in front drove his truck normally, the truck behind him was operated partly by a computernd it stuck to its leader like glue.
When instructed to do so the computer controlled the gas and brakes to pull to within 10 meters (roughly three car lengths) of the truck ahead.
The computer then kept the two trucks paired at this precise distance, as if linked by some invisible cable,
until the system was disengaged. If the truck in front stopped suddenly, the one behind could have reacted instantaneously to avoid a collision.
Most automobile companies are working on full vehicle automation, but they need to overcome significant challenges before they can deploy those technologies (see riverless Cars Are Further Away Than You Think.
The technology demonstrated in Nevada in contrast, could be deployed today, since the system is automated only partially (the driver behind still steers, with the aid of a camera that shows the view ahead of the truck in front).
So it is covered by the same guidelines and regulations as adaptive cruise control, a feature in some cars that automatically keeps vehicles on the highway a safe distance from the ones around them.
This kind of latooning? as it is knowneduces the wind drag on both trucks, and could therefore save trucking companies millions of dollars in fuel every year.
The trucks were fitted with technology developed by a startup called Peloton Tech (elotonis The french word for platoon.
Peloton system consists of radar sensors, a wireless communications system, and computers connected to each truck central computer.
Video screens in both cabs show the drivers views of blind spots around the two vehicles.
Joshua Switkes, CEO of Peloton Tech, says the fuel savings are 4. 5 percent for the front truck and 10 percent for the rear truck.
This could amount to $100, 000 each year. or truck companies, these savings are enormous, Switkes says.
He adds that the technology could even allow competing companies to platoon together to get these savings.
Switkes says the technology should also improve safety since drivers have greater visibility and the radar systems can brake automatically if needed.
In theory, more trucks could be tethered virtually together this way, although the initial plan is to connect only two.
The prospect of two trucks driving so close together under computer control may raise concerns among other drivers,
but the technology involved, including the vehicle-to-vehicle communications system used to share information between the two trucks,
is set to become far more common in the next few years. The U s. Department of transportation has indicated that it plans to mandate such communications systems in new vehicles in the hopes of improving road safety (see he Internet of Cars Is Approaching a Crossroads.
Vehicle platooning has been a subject of research in industry and academia for decades, but efforts have intensified in recent years as the underlying technology has advanced.
A European project, called SARTRE (Safe Road trains for the Environment), has been exploring ways for vehicles to travel in platoons since 2009.
This effort is funded by the European commission and involves various companies, including the carmaker Volvo. Another effort, called Energy ITS,
which is backed by the Japanese government and involves several Japanese universities, has been testing platoons made of three semi-automated or fully automated trucks since 2007.
A U s. project, called PATH (Partners for Advanced Transportation technology operated out of the University of California,
Berkeley, is testing vehicle platooning along with other technologies designed to improve transportation. Steven Shladover, a research engineer at UC Berkeley involved with PATH, says that his own experiments indicate that platooning vehicles even closer togetherust a few meters apartcould lead to fuel savings of 20 percent.
But it would also introduce new risks. Once trains of trucks get too long, it much harder for drivers of other cars to change lanes. would not advocate running very long sequences of these trucks close together,
Shladover says k
#Genome Editing to Reverse Bubble Boy Syndrome Researchers used an emerging technique to correct the gene behind a fatal immune system disorder in an infant.
A new kind of gene therapy which involves editing, rather than replacing, faulty genes in sick people, is being used experimentally in patients.
The latest report shows how scientists can correct a broken gene as it sits in the patient genome.
How the health of the patient, a 4-month old infant, will change is yet to be reported.
Genome editing technology is considered a promising new tool for curing disease. For decades gene therapy has meant that a virus delivers a functional copy of a gene that is dysfunctional in a patient.
The dysfunctional copy remains and the therapeutic version typically remains separate from the rest of the genome.
The technology has drawbacks. First, by sitting outside of the genome, the activity of therapeutic gene isn regulated properly.
In some cases, the therapeutic copy is delivered by a retrovirus the plunks the new gene down near randomly in the patients genome,
which risks disrupting another gene, potentially causing cells to turn cancerous. Second, some diseases, such as Huntington
can be treated this way because the broken copy of the gene causes harm. To treat these kinds of conditions,
the original copy of the gene must be corrected. Using genome editing to repair genes could circumvent these issues (see enome Surgery.
In the new study, published today in the journal Nature, researchers in Milan treated a condition known as Severe Combined Immunodeficiency Syndrome,
or SCID (this condition is referred sometimes to as ubble boy diseasebecause children afflicted may live in protected environments
because the risk of death from infectious disease is extremely likely). Children with this genetic condition have been treated with the additive gene therapy method in the past,
and some suffered leukemia-like diseases as a side effect (see he Glimmering Promise of Gene therapy.
In the new report, researchers describe treating a single infant with zinc-finger nucleases designed to repair a defective copy of an important immune system gene.
The report does not look at the long term health effects for the infant. But the team shows that the genome editing did reconstitute a functional copy of the immune system gene in a small fraction of bone marrow cells
(which give rise to immune cells). his work is undoubtedly a step towards using gene repair for gene therapy,
writes immunologist Alain Fischer in an accompany article also published in Nature. Fischer led the first successful gene therapy trials for SCID patients.
In March, researchers reported an even more dramatic example of gene repair. Scientists used zinc fingers to engineer the immune cells of patients with HIV to resist the virus (see an Gene therapy Cure HIV?.
In a few patients, the amount of virus in the blood decreased and in one patient,
the virus could no longer be found
#DNA-Based Research May have unveiled Long-Sought Diabetes Treatment A synthetic drug that controls blood sugar in obese mice demonstrates the potential of a DNA-dependent method for developing new chemical compounds.
By Susan Young Rojahn on May 23, 2014 WHY IT MATTERS The World health organization predicts that diabetes will be the seventh-leading cause of death by 2030.
After decades of searching, researchers may have identified finally a chemical compound that could be used to study and treat diabetes.
Researchers have known long that the body carries an enzyme that breaks down insulin inside cells
and helps regulate the body response to sugars process that goes awry in type 2 diabetes.
Genetic studies have shown that people with type 2 diabetes are more likely to have mutations in the gene that encodes a protein called insulin-degrading enzyme, or IDE.
But exactly which processes the enzyme controls is not yet clear. David Liu and his team at Harvard have identified a chemical compound that can inhibit IDE,
and they have shown that the compound increases the amount of insulin in the bloodstreams of both normal mice
and ones made obese by an unhealthy diet. Liu and his team developed the new compound using a novel method called DNA-templated synthesis. This involves linking thousands of different chemical structures to thousands of unique DNA strands
and then taking advantage of the interactions between two strands of DNA to bring the chemical building blocks together to create new ones.
Patients with type 2 diabetes either have an insufficient amount of insulin in their blood
or do not properly respond to the hormone in order to move the body main energy sourcelucosento cells.
Researchers have speculated for decades that a drug that could inhibit IDE might help some type 2 diabetes patients.
Small-molecule drugs, which make up the majority of medicines, are compounds far smaller than less common biological medicines like antibodies.
They are developed using libraries of thousands or millions of known chemical substances. Each compound is screened to see
if it has desired a effect on a biological target such as an enzyme or other protein known to be involved in a disease.
Pharmaceutical companies may use robotics to test many chemical reactions in parallel. DNA-templated synthesis allows researchers without a lot of expensive equipment to more quickly evaluate all the potential small molecule interactions that could occur from a library of building blocks. single student with only minimal equipment
and infrastructure can evaluate millions of potential small molecule-protein interactions in one to two weeks,
says Liu. Furthermore, DNA-templated synthesis can produce structures that are often not found in chemical libraries used by many pharmaceutical companies
which may be why the Harvard team was able to identify an IDE-controlling drug when so many had failed in the past.
The newly identified IDE inhibitor could be the starting point for developing a powerful new drug for type 2 diabetes.
Another compound was known previously to inhibit IDE, but it had unwanted side effects, and it survived for only a few minutes in the body.
The new inhibitor lasts for hours, says Liu s
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