298 articles from WEDNESDAY 12.8.2020

What happens in Vegas… is captured on camera

The use of facial recognition by police has come under a lot of scrutiny. In part three of our four-part series on FaceID, host Jennifer Strong takes you to Sin City, which actually has one of America’s most buttoned-up policies on when cops can capture your likeness. She also finds out why celebrities like Woody Harrelson are playing a starring role in conversations about this...

Land of a billion faces

Clearview AI has built one of the most comprehensive databases of people’s faces in the world. Your picture is probably in there (our host Jennifer Strong’s was). In part two of this four-part series on facial recognition, we meet the CEO of the controversial company who tells us our future is filled with FaceID— regardless of whether it’s regulated or not. We meet: ...

Coastal flooding study finds trust-building, power-sharing key for environmental justice

It took two years and $11 million, but eventually ranchers, politicians and scientists came to a consensus about how to prevent flooding in Tillamook, a coastal Oregon town. A recent study by Portland State University researchers examining the social factors involved in this decision-making process showcases how environmental justice can be served when affected parties have a seat at the table....

Time-shifted inhibition helps electric fish ignore their own signals

Electric fish generate electric pulses to communicate with other fish and sense their surroundings. Some species broadcast shorter electric pulses, while others send out long ones. But all that zip-zapping in the water can get confusing. The fish need to filter out their own pulses so they can identify external messages and only respond to those signals.

Who owns your face?

Police have a history of using FaceID to arrest protestors—something not forgotten by activists since the death of George Floyd. In the last of a four-part series on facial recognition, host Jennifer Strong explores the way forward for the technology and examines what policy might look like.  We meet: Artem Kuharenko, NTechLabDeborah Raji, AI Now InstituteToussaint Morrison,...

What happens when an algorithm gets it wrong

In the first of a four-part series on FaceID, host Jennifer Strong explores the false arrest of Robert Williams by police in Detroit. The odd thing about Willliams’s ordeal wasn’t that police used face recognition to ID him—it’s that the cops told him about it. There’s no law saying they have to. The episode starts to unpack the complexities of this technology and introduces some thorny...

Swallowing this colonoscopy-like bacteria grabber could reveal secrets about your health

Your gut bacteria could say a lot about you, such as why you're diabetic or how you respond to certain drugs. But scientists can see only so much of the gastrointestinal tract to study the role of gut bacteria in your health. Researchers built a way to swallow a tool that acts like a colonoscopy, except that instead of looking at the colon with a camera, the technology takes samples of bacteria.

Programmed bacteria have something extra

Chemists expand the genetic code of Escherichia coli bacteria to produce a synthetic building block, a 'noncanonical amino acid' that makes it a living indicator for oxidative stress. The research is a step toward designed cells that detect disease and produce their own drugs.

'Reelin' in a new treatment for multiple sclerosis

In an animal model of multiple sclerosis (MS), decreasing the amount of a protein made in the liver significantly protected against development of the disease's characteristic symptoms and promoted recovery in symptomatic animals, scientists report.

New generation of drugs show early efficacy against drug-resistant TB

New drug regimen for multidrug-resistant tuberculosis shows early effectiveness in 85 percent of patients in a cohort including many with serious comorbidities. The results suggest a global need for expanded access to two recently developed medicines, bedaquiline and delamanid. Study cohort included many people who would have been excluded from trials because of comorbidities, severity of disease...