technology – Page 14

‘Our notion of privacy will be useless’: what happens if technology learns to read our minds? | Technology

November 7, 2021 Audrey

“The skull functions as a bastion of privacy the brain is the very last private section of ourselves,” Australian neurosurgeon Tom Oxley says from New York.

Oxley is the CEO of Synchron, a neurotechnology firm born in Melbourne that has effectively trialled hi-tech brain implants that let people today to deliver email messages and texts purely by assumed.

In July this 12 months, it became the 1st company in the globe, forward of rivals like Elon Musk’s Neuralink, to obtain acceptance from the US Meals and Drug Administration (Fda) to carry out scientific trials of brain computer interfaces (BCIs) in people in the US.

Synchron has by now effectively fed electrodes into paralysed patients’ brains by using their blood vessels. The electrodes record mind action and feed the knowledge wirelessly to a laptop or computer, where it is interpreted and applied as a set of instructions, making it possible for the people to deliver emails and texts.

BCIs, which make it possible for a individual to regulate a unit via a relationship concerning their brain and a pc, are observed as a gamechanger for persons with specific disabilities.

“No just one can see inside of your mind,” Oxley suggests. “It’s only our mouths and bodies moving that tells persons what is within our mind … For men and women who can’t do that, it’s a horrific scenario. What we’re doing is seeking to support them get what’s inside of their cranium out. We are absolutely concentrated on solving clinical troubles.”

BCIs are a single of a array of building systems centred on the brain. Mind stimulation is an additional, which delivers specific electrical pulses to the mind and is made use of to address cognitive conditions. Other folks, like imaging tactics fMRI and EEG, can monitor the brain in actual time.

“The probable of neuroscience to improve our life is virtually unrestricted,” states David Grant, a senior exploration fellow at the College of Melbourne. “However, the amount of intrusion that would be desired to realise these gains … is profound”.

Grant’s problems about neurotech are not with the perform of firms like Synchron. Controlled professional medical corrections for people with cognitive and sensory handicaps are uncontroversial, in his eyes.

But what, he asks, would happen if these kinds of capabilities shift from medicine into an unregulated business environment? It is a dystopian state of affairs that Grant predicts would lead to “a progressive and relentless deterioration of our potential to management our very own brains”.

And when it’s a development that remains hypothetical, it is not unthinkable. In some countries, governments are by now shifting to defend individuals from the risk.

A new style of legal rights

In 2017 a youthful European bioethicist, Marcello Ienca, was anticipating these likely hazards. He proposed a new class of authorized legal rights: neuro legal rights, the freedom to make a decision who is permitted to watch, read through or change your brain.

Nowadays Ienca is a Professor of Bioethics at ETH Zurich in

New Sterilization Technology Offers an Alternative to EtO

November 5, 2021 Audrey

According to FDA, more than 20 billion devices sold in the United States every year are sterilized with EtO, accounting for approximately 50 percent of devices that require sterilization. But recently, the EPA has taken a closer look at EtO, based on results from the National Air Toxics Assessment, which identified the chemical as a potential concern in several areas of the country. As a result, there have been several closures of EtO sterilization facilities in the United States and Europe. EPA is planning to finalize new regulations for commercial EtO sterilizers in 2022.

FDA said in 2019 that without adequate availability of EtO sterilization, it anticipates a national shortage of surgical kits and other critical devices including feeding tube devices used in neonatal intensive care units, drug-eluting cardiac stents, catheters, shunts, and other implantable devices.

Phiex Technologies, however, hopes that its technology could offer companies an alternative to EtO sterilization. The company’s technology uses existing common packaging materials, such as plastic film or nonwovens, to sterilize devices.

“The difference is that we compound or embed a special proprietary powder additive into the package, in the material itself,” said Phiex co-founder and CEO, CL Tian, in an interview with MD+DI. “And so what an OEM has to do is essentially switch out their existing material one-for-one,” she explained. “And then when they seal the device in the package, they can activate the sterilization with a certain period of light exposure.” The contents will then be sterilized, as the packaging releases the sterilant, she said.

One of the ways that costs can be reduced by using Phiex’s technology is that the device never needs to be shipped out to a third-party vendor to be sterilized, Tian said. “That in and of itself is associated with a five to 10 percent cost [savings] by cutting freight and logistics, and time savings as it can take weeks to months to sterilize off-site, depending on how large of a medical device company you are.”

The technology is also environmentally compatible, Tian said. “The sterilant that we use actually has been in use for a very long time in the United States for its safety, from an environmental and also a human perspective,” she said.

Using Phiex’s packaging material will allow the manufacturer to bring sterilization in-house without needing any additional equipment investment, Tian said. “Typically, when you sterilize, you have to increase the heat and the humidity, and the pressure inside the gas chamber. Our technology does not require that,” she said.

Tian said she anticipates that companies will be using Phiex’s packaging materials for their devices in the next 12 to 24 months. Some OEMs are already looking into using the technology and would resubmit it in their FDA filings within 12-24 months.

“I think it’s the right time to be rethinking ways to sterilize with the regulation happening, and we know a number of companies are in fact, looking at novel technologies and new approaches that are going to set

Elon Musk proposes Texas Institute of Technology & Science

November 4, 2021 Audrey

Tesla CEO Elon Musk tweeted Friday that he’s considering launching a new university: the “Texas Institute of Technology & Science.”

It’s not clear how serious the mega-billionaire is, particularly considering the proposed school’s obscene acronym and Musk’s reputation for joking on Twitter — even to the point of violating securities laws.

That didn’t stop netizens from seizing on the tweet, propelling the proposed school’s acronym to Twitter’s top 25 trending list in the US on Friday.

Beyond jokes, Musk has a history of making raunchy acronyms in his business operations, including by planning the rollout of Tesla’s Models S, 3, X and Y vehicles to spell out S.3.X.Y. on the company’s website.

When one Twitter user asked whether he had secured funding for the university, Musk responded, “obv.”

That could have just been a nod to Musk’s 2018 tweet in which he said he had “funding secured” to take Tesla private at $420 a share, which sent the stock price soaring and eventually led to a settlement between Musk and the Securities and Exchange Commission that was supposed to keep the mega-billionaire largely off Twitter.

In another follow-up tweet Friday morning, Musk said the proposed university would “have epic merch.”

Am thinking of starting new university:
Texas Institute of Technology & Science

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 29, 2021

Musk’s own feelings about university, though, have been lukewarm. He’s repeatedly derided the experience, saying last year that colleges are “for fun and to prove that you can do your chores, but they’re not for learning.”

He’s also said Tesla won’t have university requirements for jobs, “because that’s absurd.”

Musk — worth an estimated $302 billion — has been ramping up his presence and that of his companies in Texas.

Last year, he announced that he was personally moving to the Lone Star State — where there’s no personal income tax — and earlier this month he announced that his electric car company would move its headquarters to the Austin area as well.

Tesla will continue to expand its massive plant in Fremont, California, but Musk has said the company plans to begin production at its new factory in Austin next year.

A space craft is prepared for launch. — Musk has sought to create a city near Starbase, SpaceX’s launch site in Texas.

Musk’s two other companies, SpaceX and The Boring Company, are both still based in Hawthorne, California.

But SpaceX’s launch site, dubbed Starbase, sits in southeast Texas, near Boca Chica, an unincorporated seaside village in Cameron County. Musk has sought to expand the Starbase and actually create an incorporated US city in the area.

And The Boring Company has previously hinted of a similar expansion to Texas by teasing job postings in the state.

And the San Antonio Express-News reported earlier this year that the company is in talks with San Antonio and Austin officials to create an underground transportation loop in Central Texas, like the one that opened this summer in Las Vegas.

Musk isn’t the only tech billionaire to expand his operations in

5D data storage technology offers 10,000 times the density of Blu-ray

November 3, 2021 Audrey

By deploying cutting-edge lasers and a little problem-solving, scientists at the University of Southampton have achieved a data storage breakthrough that offers both incredible density and long-term archiving capabilities. The technology is said to be capable of storing 500 terabytes on a single CD-sized disc, with the creators imagining it finding use in preserving everything from information for museums and libraries to data on a person’s DNA.

The technology is what is known as five-dimensional (5)D optical storage and it is one the University of Southampton team has been pursuing for a while. It was first demonstrated back in 2013, with the scientists successfully using the format to record and retrieve a 300-kb text file, though they harbored much loftier ambitions than that.

The data is written using a femtosecond laser, which emits incredibly short but powerful pulses of light, forging tiny structures in glass that are measured on the nanoscale. These structures contain information on the intensity and polarization of the laser beam, in addition to their three spatial dimensions, which is why the scientists refer to it as 5D data storage.

In 2015, the team demonstrated their progress by using the technology to save digital copies of major documents such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the King James Bible and the Magna Carta. As opposed to typical hard-drive memory that is vulnerable to high temperatures, moisture, magnetic fields and mechanical failure, this “eternal” 5D data storage promised incredible thermal stability and a virtually unlimited lifetime at room temperature.

One thing the scientists have been working to address, however, is the ability to write data at fast enough speeds and at high enough densities for real-world applications. They now claim to have achieved this by using an optical phenomenon called near-field enhancement, which enables them to create the nanostructures with a few weak light pulses rather than writing with the femtosecond laser directly. This allows data to be written at 1,000,000 voxels per second, which equates to 230 kb of data, or more than 100 pages of text, per second.

“This new approach improves the data writing speed to a practical level, so we can write tens of gigabytes of data in a reasonable time,” says Yuhao Lei from the University of Southampton in the UK. “The highly localized, precision nanostructures enable a higher data capacity because more voxels can be written in a unit volume. In addition, using pulsed light reduces the energy needed for writing.”

University of Southampton scientists have used their cutting-edge 5D data storage tech to save around 5 GB of information onto a one-inch silica glass sample

The team demonstrated this technique by writing 5 GB of text data onto a silica glass disc around the size of a CD with almost 100 percent readout accuracy, though the researchers say such a disc would be capable of holding 500 TB of data, making it 10,000 times denser than a Blu-ray disc. The researchers

Bill Gates: Funding clean technology is the way to avoid climate disaster | Free to read

November 2, 2021 Audrey

The writer is co-founder of Microsoft, founder of Breakthrough Energy and co-chair of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation

Before the last major COP meeting, in Paris in 2015, innovation was barely on the climate agenda. This year in Glasgow it will take centre stage. Shifting the world’s focus to inventing clean technologies was among the greatest successes of the Paris COP. Continuing that trajectory is, perhaps, its biggest opportunity this year, because innovation is the only way the world can cut net greenhouse gas emissions from roughly 51bn tonnes per year to zero by 2050.

There is now significantly more money for basic research and development and more venture capital for clean start-ups in hard-to-decarbonise sectors than ever before. As a result, some important clean technologies — like sustainable aeroplane fuel, green steel and extra-powerful batteries — now exist and are ready to scale up.

If the world is really committed to climate innovation, however, then these breakthroughs must be only the beginning of the story, not the end. At COP26 we need to think about how to turn lab-proven concepts into ubiquitous products that people want and can afford to buy. This will require a massive effort to fund hundreds of commercial demonstration projects of early-stage climate technologies.

It is incredibly challenging for any start-up to commercialise its product, but it is uniquely so for energy companies. When I was starting Microsoft, we didn’t need much infrastructure to write code and, once we’d written it, we could make nearly infinite copies with perfect fidelity for very little money.

Climate-smart technologies are much more difficult to navigate. Once you can make green hydrogen in a lab, you have to prove that it works — safely and reliably — at scale. That means building an enormous physical plant, ironing out engineering, supply chain and distribution issues, repeating them over and over again and steadily cutting costs. Demonstration projects like this are hugely complicated, extremely risky, and extraordinarily expensive — and it’s very hard to finance them.

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In clean technology, there is yet another complication. When all that complicated, risky, expensive work is finished, you end up with a product that does more or less the same thing as the one it’s intended to replace — green steel has pretty much the same functionality as today’s steel — but costs more, at least for a while.

Naturally, it’s hard to find buyers, which means banks charge more for loans. The high cost of capital, in turn, increases the price of the products. Because financing is so hard to come by, commercial demonstration can be an excruciatingly slow process. Right now, the key to the climate innovation agenda is making it go faster.

I believe we can do this. Hundreds of governments and companies have made net zero commitments, and

Texas A&M considers massive technology consolidation

October 30, 2021 Audrey

Consultants on Monday recommended that Texas A&M centralize its information technology department and establish a central help desk to give leaders more information about services.

A restructuring of one of the country’s largest universities, outlined in a report published by two companies hired by the Texas A&M system in June — MGT Consulting and Martin+Crumpton — would have the institution halve the number of units in its IT department’s organizational chart. The guidance is in line with the report’s broader takeaways, including that the university needs to better organize its departments for efficiency and oversight.

“As a result [of decentralization], talent and financial resources are not used in a practical or transparent method, and students, faculty, and staff do not have complete clarity when seeking help from operational units,” the report reads. “A misalignment of oversight responsibilities has resulted in a duplication of efforts, ineffective initiatives, and unnecessary administrative burdens on faculty and staff.”

The news aligns with a broader trend at universities and colleges now reviewing their operations or undergoing strategic planning efforts. Virginia Tech recently employed Deloitte to review its IT and cybersecurity operations, which will include how the university balances departmental and central IT operations. University regents set a goal in University of Arizona President Robert Bobbins’s contract for finding “appropriate centralization” opportunities for departments including IT.

Texas A&M enrolls more than 70,000 students and operates at two branch campuses. According to its report, the firms surveyed more than 16,000 former Texas A&M students, current students, faculty, staff and deans, and they reviewed operations at peer universities and conducted interviews.

Consultants also recommended centralizing other departments — including human resources, finance and marketing — but IT was highlighted as one of the larger groups, employing 300 part-time liaisons. How the university chooses to adopt these recommendations affects workers, with consultants noting in the report that restructuring IT would highlight where there are inefficiencies and duplication. Leaders can reduce staffing over time, reinvesting the money into updating technology or infrastructure or redistributing workers to fill gaps, according to the report.

Centralization would involve pulling IT workers assigned to other areas, like research or student affairs, to work under a central IT department, and moving communications and finance for IT operations out to related departments. The proposed organizational chart streamlines units based on the centralization, grouping units under leaders, like an associate vice president for student and faculty systems or on-campus college support.

“Not only will this increase the effectiveness of Information Technology and create myriad efficiencies, but consolidation will also lead to improvements in the ability to manage campus-wide cybersecurity,” the report reads. “The effort to consolidate and centralize services and personnel will naturally lead to a more efficient organization. Cost savings should be reinvested into continuing to advance technology services and other critical issues, such as cybersecurity.”

The central help desk is proposed as part of the firms’ recommendation that Texas A&M collect more data on its everyday services, and the report notes “little data” was available