A new colorectal cancer drug has shocked researchers with how effective it is against the highly dangerous disease, as it virtually cured it in every member of a clinical trial.
Dostarlimab, a monoclonal antibody drug, smashed expectations in a recent trial sponsored by pharma giant GlaxoSmithKline (GSK).
A year after the trial’s completion, each of the 18 participants had their disease go into complete remission, with doctors unable to find signs of the cancer in their body.
While the trial was small, it is game-changing, and sets up the drug as a potential cure for one of the most dangerous common cancers known.
Monday’s news come largely thanks to $65 billion set aside for high speed internet in the Bipartisan Infrastructure law. That money has helped fund the ACP and is also being directed towards parallel efforts to increase coverage areas and speeds.
[…]
Families are eligible for the ACP mostly based on income level. Any household making less than 200% of the Federal Poverty Level — $55,500 for a family of four in the continental U.S. — is eligible. Households can also qualify if they participate in certain government programs like Medicaid or Supplemental Security Income.
In the fine print, participants are agreeing to allow the federal government’s Ministry of Truth to filter their internet to eliminate disinformation. Just kidding… they already do that.
The scientists at the Fermilab Collider Detector (CDF) in Illinois have found only a tiny difference in the mass of the W Boson compared with what the theory says it should be – just 0.1%. But if confirmed by other experiments, the implications are enormous. The so-called Standard Model of particle physics has predicted the behaviour and properties of sub-atomic particles with no discrepancies whatsoever for fifty years. Until now.
CDF’s other co-spokesperson, Prof Giorgio Chiarelli, from INFN Sezione di Pisa, told BBC News that the research team could scarcely believe their eyes when they saw the results.
“No-one was expecting this. We thought maybe we got something wrong.” But the researchers have painstakingly gone through their results and tried to look for errors. They found none.
The result, published in the journal Science, could be related to hints from other experiments at Fermilab and the Large Hadron Collider at the Swiss-French border. These, as yet unconfirmed results, also suggest deviations from the Standard Model, possibly as a result of an as yet undiscovered fifth force of nature at play.
Physicists have known for some time that the theory needs to be updated. It can’t explain the presence of invisible material in space, called Dark Matter, nor the continued accelerating expansion of the Universe by a force called Dark Energy. Nor can it explain gravity.
Dr Mitesh Patel of Imperial College, who works at the LHC, believes that if the Fermilab result is confirmed, it could be the first of many new results that could herald the biggest shift in our understanding of the Universe since Einstein’s theories of relativity more than a hundred years ago.
If you think that the big tech companies in the U.S. aren’t doing the same work for the American government, you aren’t paying attention.
Nokia said this month that it would stop its sales in Russia and denounced the invasion of Ukraine. But the Finnish company didn’t mention what it was leaving behind: equipment and software connecting the government’s most powerful tool for digital surveillance to the nation’s largest telecommunications network.
The tool was used to track supporters of the Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny. Investigators said it had intercepted the phone calls of a Kremlin foe who was later assassinated. Called the System for Operative Investigative Activities, or SORM, it is also most likely being employed at this moment as President Vladimir Putin culls and silences anti-war voices inside Russia.
For more than five years, Nokia provided equipment and services to link SORM to Russia’s largest telecom service provider, MTS, according to company documents obtained by The New York Times. While Nokia does not make the tech that intercepts communications, the documents lay out how it worked with state-linked Russian companies to plan, streamline and troubleshoot the SORM system’s connection to the MTS network. Russia’s main intelligence service, the FSB, uses SORM to listen in on phone conversations, intercept emails and text messages, and track other internet communications.
“The days of having to pull your child up outside of McDonald’s to do their homework because there’s no internet in your home and no internet in your region end when we provide affordable, high-speed internet to every American; urban, rural, suburban, tribal,” Biden said.
Some apps in the virtual-reality metaverse are “dangerous by design”, the NSPCC has warned in response to a BBC News investigation.
A researcher posing as a 13-year-old girl witnessed grooming, sexual material, racist insults and a rape threat in the virtual-reality world.
The children’s charity said it was “shocked and angry” at the findings.
Head of online child safety policy Andy Burrows added the investigation had found “a toxic combination of risks”.
The BBC News researcher – using an app with a minimum age rating of 13 – visited virtual-reality rooms where avatars were simulating sex. She was shown sex toys and condoms, and approached by numerous adult men.
The metaverse is the name given to games and experiences accessed by people wearing virtual reality headsets. The technology, previously confined to gaming, could be adapted for use in many other areas – from work to play, concerts to cinema trips.
Mark Zuckerberg thinks it could be the future of the internet – so much so, he recently rebranded Facebook as Meta, with the company investing billions developing its Oculus Quest headset.
NASA’s auditing body, the Office of Audits, has produced a report detailing the agency’s commitment to replacing the International Space Station (ISS) with one or more commercial space stations once the orbiting lab is retired. Despite still being scheduled for 2024, all indications are that the ISS’s operational life will be extended to 2030, which is when the agency is assuming it’ll be able to hand off human occupation of an on-orbit science facility to a private company.
This audit basically details the current costs of maintenance and operation of the ISS, and also explains why it thinks that there will still be an essential need for a research facility that can provide a test bed for prolonged human exposure to space, as well as for development and demonstration of tech key to helping people explore deep space, including the establishment of a more permanent presence on the moon and exploration of Mars.
The conclusion is that NASA hopes to see a commercial station operation by 2028 in order to give a period of two years of overlap before the anticipated retirement and de-orbiting of the ISS. That timeline presents clear risks, however, in part because of “limited market demand, inadequate funding, unreliable costs estimates and still-evolving requirements.”
Scientists who created xenobots, the world’s first living robots, say the life forms are “the first-ever, self-replicating living robots.”
The tiny organisms were originally unveiled in 2020. The robots were assembled from heart and skin stem cells belonging to the African clawed frog. They can move independently for about a week before running out of energy, are self-healing and break down naturally.
The scientists from the University of Vermont, Tufts University and Harvard University’s Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering published research on Monday saying they discovered a new type of biological reproduction different from any other known plant or animal species, according to a press release published by the Wyss Institute.
“People have thought for quite a long time that we’ve worked out all the ways that life can reproduce or replicate. But this is something that’s never been observed before,” said Douglas Blackiston, Ph.D., a senior scientist at Tufts University and the Wyss Institute who worked on the study.
An Associated Press investigation in 2015 found that the FBI had built a fleet of at least 50 surveillance planes that flew more than 100 flights over 11 states during a one-month span in the spring of that year under the Obama administration. The AP traced the planes to at least 13 fake companies designed to obscure the identity of the aircraft and the pilots.
The AP review also found that the Drug Enforcement Administration had at least 92 surveillance aircraft as of 2011 under Obama. The U.S. Marshals Service also has operated its own aerial surveillance program.
[…]
Pilots can shoot video of the scenes below them using standard cameras, infrared sensors that pick up body heat and light sensors with enough resolution to show building features, basic vehicle features and movements such as people walking or riding bicycles. The planes also can carry technology that mimics cellphone towers, enabling agencies to track people’s cellphones even if they’re not making a call or in public. Much of the technology was developed for use by the U.S. military in Iraq as part of a project dubbed Gorgon Stare after the mythical Greek monster that could turn men to stone with a glance.
Even if the video images are blurry, agencies can still use them in combination with other data to discover people’s identities.
At the same time, the ability of the Taliban and its supporters to operate substantially within the rules of companies such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube has left Silicon Valley vulnerable to intensifying political crosscurrents: U.S. conservatives have been demanding to know why former president Donald Trump has been banned from Twitter while various Taliban figures have not.
The answer, analysts said, may simply be that Trump’s posts for years challenged platform rules against hate speech and inciting violence. Today’s Taliban, by and large, does not.
“The Taliban is clearly threading the needle regarding social media content policies and is not yet crossing the very distinct policy-violating lines that Trump crossed,” Katz said.
A major internet outage has affected the websites of major retail, financial, logistics and travel websites, and appears to be affecting 911 services in several areas.
Down Detector, a service that detects whether websites are working properly or not, began reporting a series of outages shortly before 12 pm EST on Thursday.
Among the affected websites were US Bank, UPS, Fox News, American Airlines, AT&T, and Expedia.
Republican committee members approved $125 million in borrowing for broadband expansion, along with $4 million over the biennium for broadband expansion grants.
Based on a standard 2.5% interest rate for a 20-year bond, the Republican proposal, the nonpartisan Legislative Fiscal Bureau estimates the bonding will cost an additional $35 million in interest.
Evers proposed spending about $200 million over the biennium on broadband expansion efforts.
The state Public Service Commission first began awarding broadband expansion grants about eight years ago and has awarded a total of $78 million so far to 279 projects.
Three reasons it’s dumb:
Why borrow the money and pay interest when there is available cash?
Programs like this are built for corruption and graft. Let’s see… government handing out massive grants to select companies to build a commercially unviable infrastructure? Who is deciding the winners and losers in that discussion?
While an argument can be made that it is in the public interest for the government to fund broadband expansion, technology is once again outpacing public policy. Ubiquitous broadband options like Starlink are getting close to viable and will likely be widely available before this infrastructure is built. Instead of giving a big corporation a grant for tens of millions of dollars to run fiber to a farmer in Shanagolden that will be available in four years, we could spend nothing and that same farmer might have gig service in a year anyway. I expect that we are about to lay a lot of fiber that will remain underutilized forever.
The commercial air travel market has been squeezed to the bottom for some time. While everybody says they want more space, more luxuries, faster transits, and more direct flights, there just haven’t been enough people willing to pay for it for airlines to sustain a high-end model. United’s move seems to indicate that they think that the high-end air travel market may be sustainable enough in the future to make supersonic flights commercially viable again.
US airline United has announced plans to buy 15 new supersonic airliners and “return supersonic speeds to aviation” in the year 2029.
Supersonic passenger flights ended in 2003 when Air France and British Airways retired Concorde.
The new Overture aircraft will be produced by a Denver-based company called Boom, which has yet to flight-test a supersonic jet.
United’s deal is conditional on the new aircraft meeting safety standards.
Nigeria’s government has announced an indefinite suspension of Twitter in the country, two days after the social media company removed a post from president Muhammadu Buhari that threatened to punish regional secessionists.
The information minister, Lai Mohammed, said the government had acted because of “the persistent use of the platform for activities that are capable of undermining Nigeria’s corporate existence”.
Mohammed did not spell out what form the suspension would take or give more details on the undermining activities. His ministry also announced Twitter’s suspension on Twitter.
When asked about the details of the suspension, a ministerial aide told Reuters: “Wait and see how things will turn out.”
For years Uber resisted calls to recognise unions, which had criticised the firm for not granting drivers basic rights such as sick pay or a minimum wage.
Uber had argued its drivers were freelancers and not entitled to these benefits. But in March it changed its stance after the Supreme Court ruled that its drivers should be classified as workers – a category entitling them to better pay and conditions.
Now it provides them with a National Living Wage guarantee, holiday pay and a pension.
And by recognising GMB, the ride-hailing giant has gone a step further, giving a union the right to negotiate on behalf of drivers for the first time.
A camera system that uses AI and facial recognition intended to reveal emotional states has been tested on Uyghurs in Xinjiang, the BBC has been told.
A software engineer claimed to have installed such systems in police stations in the province.
A human rights advocate who was shown the evidence described it as shocking.
The Chinese embassy in London has not responded directly to the claims but says political and social rights in all ethnic groups are guaranteed.
Xinjiang is home to 12 million ethnic minority Uyghurs, most of whom are Muslim.
Citizens in the province are under daily surveillance. The area is also home to highly controversial “re-education centres”, called high security detention camps by human rights groups, where it is estimated that more than a million people have been held.
[…]
“The Chinese government use Uyghurs as test subjects for various experiments just like rats are used in laboratories,” he said.
And he outlined his role in installing the cameras in police stations in the province: “We placed the emotion detection camera 3m from the subject. It is similar to a lie detector but far more advanced technology.”
He said officers used “restraint chairs” which are widely installed in police stations across China.
“Your wrists are locked in place by metal restraints, and [the] same applies to your ankles.”
He provided evidence of how the AI system is trained to detect and analyse even minute changes in facial expressions and skin pores.
Between March 2018 and March 2020, 57,506 people from all 50 states requested self-managed medication abortion through Aid Access.
Among the requests, 73.5% said they were specifically seeking self-managed abortion because they were unable to afford in-clinic care. An abortion can cost as much as $1,500, according to Planned Parenthood, and that number varies widely based on what form of abortion and if a patient has insurance that covers the procedure. Under the Hyde Amendment, federal Medicaid does not cover abortion, although some states have different rules.
In-person abortion care can also incur other costs due to the heavy restrictions around the health care procedure, such as transportation, child care and lodging, especially if a state requires a patient do two office visits over multiple days.
The next most common reasons individuals sought self-managed medication abortion were privacy, for 49.3% of respondents, and distance from a clinic, for 40.4% of respondents.
Ring video doorbells, Amazon’s signature home security product, pose a serious threat to a free and democratic society. Not only is Ring’s surveillance network spreading rapidly, it is extending the reach of law enforcement into private property and expanding the surveillance of everyday life. What’s more, once Ring users agree to release video content to law enforcement, there is no way to revoke access and few limitations on how that content can be used, stored, and with whom it can be shared.
Ring is effectively building the largest corporate-owned, civilian-installed surveillance network that the US has ever seen. An estimated 400,000 Ring devices were sold in December 2019 alone, and that was before the across-the-board boom in online retail sales during the pandemic. Amazon is cagey about how many Ring cameras are active at any one point in time, but estimates drawn from Amazon’s sales data place yearly sales in the hundreds of millions. The always-on video surveillance network extends even further when you consider the millions of users on Ring’s affiliated crime reporting app, Neighbors, which allows people to upload content from Ring and non-Ring devices.
Then there’s this: since Amazon bought Ring in 2018, it has brokered more than 1,800 partnerships with local law enforcement agencies, who can request recorded video content from Ring users without a warrant. That is, in as little as three years, Ring connected around one in 10 police departments across the US with the ability to access recorded content from millions of privately owned home security cameras. These partnerships are growing at an alarming rate.
Asked directly if the SVR was responsible for the SolarWinds attack, Naryshkin quipped with a smile that he would be ‘flattered’ if the SVR had been responsible for such a sophisticated attack but that he could not ‘claim the creative achievements of others as his own.’
Naryshkin said he did not want to accuse the US of being behind the attack but quoted from documents leaked by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden to suggest that the tactics of the attack were similar to those used by US and British intelligence agencies.
What is most interesting is that he said anything at all. He is clearly sending a message that Russia is both capable and willing to carry out such cyberwarfare attacks.
The circumstance exposes “how incredibly vulnerable our fuel grid is, our electrical grid is,” Johnson told host John Catsimatidis, but there are “no easy solutions” to the newfangled modern warfare.
Johnson believes things might even get more difficult as the Biden administration seeks to pick up the agenda of the progressives’ Green New Deal to remake American energy, particularly as it relates to giving the government more control over energy.
“With everybody hooking up their solar panels and hooking into the grid so they can get a few shekels for the electricity they’re selling into the grid, we become more and more vulnerable,” Johnson said, adding it creates “more points of contact that cyber-attackers can exploit.’
“We really need to change the direction we’re headed in here. No administration has paid sufficient attention to the vulnerabilities of our electrical grid.”
To take it a step further, we have also not adapted our accepted responses to attacks like this. There is a fine line between a simple criminal act and an act of war. And an act of war does not necessarily have to be perpetrated by another nation.
In this case, the shutdown of the pipeline wreaked untold economic damage on the nation. It also caused a national security issue by starving our armed forces – including the coast guard – of fuel throughout a third of the country. While all of our forces have reserves, how long would they last? What if the pipeline stayed shut down for another week? A month? A year? And what is a terrorist group or cartel or another nation took advantage of our moment of weakness?
This kind of asymmetrical warfare demands a more aggressive response. Put a Tomahawk through the kitchen window of these hackers. It changes the risk profile for these kinds of attacks. They attack us from Eastern Europe because they know that our law enforcement can’t reach them there. As a nation, we have other tools in our arsenal. This kinds of attack is not a matter for law enforcement. It is a national security issue and must be treated as such.
