To tackle widespread scientific misconduct, the Chinese government has expanded its controversial social credit system to include infractions made by research scientists. The plan could scare some scientists straight—but the potential for abuse is very real.
“Researchers in China who commit scientific misconduct could soon be prevented from getting a bank loan, running a company or applying for a public-service job,” reports science writer David Cyranoski at Nature News.
In November, Dr. Aubrey de Grey, a graduate of the University of Cambridge, was in Spain to attend the Longevity World Forum in the city of Valencia, and he gave a press conference organized by his friend, MIT engineer José Luis Cordeiro.
Dr. Aubrey de Grey is the scientific director (CSO) and founder of the SENS Research Foundation. In Madrid and Valencia, Dr. de Grey reaffirmed for Tendencias21 one of his most striking statements of 2018: “In the future, there will be many different medicines to reverse aging. In five years, we will have many of them working in early clinical trials.”
The Longevity World Forum is a congress on longevity and genomics in Europe. It is heir to the first congress in Spain, the International Longevity and Cryopreservation Summit, which was held at the CSIC headquarters in Madrid in May 2017, and Dr. de Grey also participated in that event. In Valencia, his presentation was recieved with interest, and Dr. de Grey explained to this select audience that aging will be treated as a medical problem in the near future. Rather than treating its symptoms using the infectious disease model, the root causes of aging will themselves be treated.
Posted in government, robotics/AI | Leave a Comment on Microsoft president calls for government regulation of facial-recognition technology to ‘ensure that the year 2024 doesn’t look like a page from the novel 1984’
Microsoft said Thursday it was adopting a set of ethical principles for the use of its facial recognition technology, and urged the government to follow its lead with regulations barring unlawful discrimination and focusing on transparency.
In a blog post, Microsoft president Brad Smith pushed for the government, as well as tech companies, to regulate facial-recognition technology and ensure it “creates broad societal benefits while curbing the risk of abuse.”
“The facial recognition genie, so to speak, is just emerging from the bottle,” Smith said in the post. “Unless we act, we risk waking up five years from now to find that facial recognition services have spread in ways that exacerbate societal issues.”
Not cool, China.
(Reuters) — Hackers behind a massive breach at hotel group Marriott International left clues suggesting they were working for a Chinese government intelligence gathering operation, according to sources familiar with the matter.
Marriott said last week that a hack that began four years ago had exposed the records of up to 500 million customers in its Starwood hotels reservation system.
Private investigators looking into the breach have found hacking tools, techniques and procedures previously used in attacks attributed to Chinese hackers, said three sources who were not authorized to discuss the company’s private probe into the attack.
The longer-term answer is to develop and scale up the quantum communication network and, subsequently, the quantum internet. This will take major investments from governments. However, countries will benefit from the greater security offered13. For example, Canada keeps its census data secret for 92 years, a term that only quantum cryptography can assure. Government agencies could use quantum-secured blockchain platforms to protect citizens’ personal financial and health data. Countries leading major research efforts in quantum technologies, such as China, the United States and members of the European Union, will be among the early adopters. They should invest immediately in research. Blockchains should be a case study for Europe’s Quantum Key Distribution Testbed programme, for example.
Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies will founder unless they integrate quantum technologies, warn Aleksey K. Fedorov, Evgeniy O. Kiktenko and Alexander I. Lvovsky. Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies will founder unless they integrate quantum technologies, warn Aleksey K. Fedorov, Evgeniy O. Kiktenko and Alexander I. Lvovsky.
By 2020, China plans to assign each of its 1.4 billion citizens a “social credit score” that will determine what people are allowed to do, and where they rank in society.
It’s part of a broad effort in China to build a so-called reputation system that will measure, in theory, the credibility of government officials and businesses, in addition to citizens. The Chinese government says the system will boost “trust” nationwide and build a culture of “sincerity.”
Hundreds of children with cancer are resorting to inferior treatment because of a failure to open two flagship specialist centres, experts have warned.
NHS officials have admitted that no patient has yet received state-of-the-art proton beam therapy (PBT) at either its new London or Manchester sites, despite a Government pledge to be treating 1,500 a year by 2018.
Leading oncologists have called for transparency after two promised opening dates at The Christie NHS Foundation Trust were missed this year and the deadline quietly pushed back.
Posted in asteroid/comet impacts, existential risks, government, military | Leave a Comment on Astronaut says a neglected telescope is NASA’s best chance of defending Earth from ‘city killer’ asteroids — ‘for God’s sake, fund it’
Killer asteroids might be a bigger threat than you think.
A former NASA astronaut says the agency he used to work for has a duty to protect civilians from killer asteroids, but that it isn’t meeting that obligation.
The threat of asteroid strikes might seem as abstract as outer space itself. But the risk, while infrequent, is real — and potentially more deadly than the threat posed by some of the most powerful nuclear weapons ever detonated.
QUT chemistry researchers have discovered cheaper and more efficient materials for producing hydrogen for the storage of renewable energy that could replace current water-splitting catalysts.
Professor Anthony O’Mullane said the potential for the chemical storage of renewable energy in the form of hydrogen was being investigated around the world.
“The Australian Government is interested in developing a hydrogen export industry to export our abundant renewable energy,” said Professor O’Mullane from QUT’s Science and Engineering Faculty.
