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Jan 28, 2023

Researchers Discover New PlugX Malware Variant Spreading via Removable USB Devices

Posted by in category: cybercrime/malcode

Cybersecurity researchers have uncovered a PlugX sample that employs sneaky methods to infect attached removable USB media devices in order to propagate the malware to additional systems.

“This PlugX variant is wormable and infects USB devices in such a way that it conceals itself from the Windows operating file system,” Palo Alto Networks Unit 42 researchers Mike Harbison and Jen Miller-Osborn said. “A user would not know their USB device is infected or possibly used to exfiltrate data out of their networks.”

The cybersecurity company said it uncovered the artifact during an incident response effort following a Black Basta ransomware attack against an unnamed victim. Among other tools discovered in the compromised environment include the Gootkit malware loader and the Brute Ratel C4 red team framework.

Jan 28, 2023

Sam Altman

Posted by in category: robotics/AI

Is an American entrepreneur, angel investor, co-founder of Hydrazine Capital, former president of Y Combinator, founder and former CEO of Loopt, and co-founder and CEO of OpenAI.

Jan 28, 2023

Could lab-grown salmon be the future of fish?

Posted by in category: futurism

Salmon is one of the most popular fish in the US. Now, one California startup is growing salmon fillets from cells.

Jan 28, 2023

Starling Medical’s new urine-testing device turns your toilet into a health tracker

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, health

If you enjoy some good toilet technology, then I think “urine” for a treat. Starling Medical is poised to launch its at-home urine diagnostic patient-monitoring platform, dubbed “StarStream,” that doesn’t rely on the traditional catching containers or dipsticks.

Now, if you’re thinking this technology sounds familiar, you would be correct: My colleague Haje Jan Kamps wrote about Withings’ U-Scan, a urinalysis device, earlier this month when the health-focused consumer tech company debuted it at CES. U-Scan also sits in the toilet for at-home monitoring.

However, Alex Arevalos, Starling’s co-founder and CEO, told TechCrunch that this is an underserved market — the global urinalysis market is forecasted to be valued at $4.9 billion by 2026, meaning there is plenty of room for Withings and a scrappy startup.

Jan 28, 2023

These record-breaking twins were born from 30-year-old frozen embryos. Their mom is only 3 years older than that

Posted by in category: biotech/medical

Three of them were transferred, and two developed. Rachel, who said she had a relatively straightforward pregnancy, gave birth on October 31 at 37 weeks and two days.

Timothy weighed 6 pounds and 7 ounces. Lydia weighed 5 pounds and 11 ounces.

The twins’ record-breaking delivery was verified by the University of Tennessee’s Preston Medical Library. The previous record holder was a child named Molly Gibson, who was born in 2017. The frozen embryo that later became Molly had been stored for 24 years.

Jan 28, 2023

Special Vascular Cells Adjust Blood Flow in Brain Capillaries Based on Local Energy Needs

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, neuroscience

Its impressive how adaptive the brain is to each situation. It can sense which portions of the brain need more blood flow depending on energy usage and makes the needed tiny adjustments.


Summary: Researchers identified a specific type of cell that sits on top of the brain’s smallest blood vessels that sense when their region of the brain is in need of energy.

Source: University of Maryland

Continue reading “Special Vascular Cells Adjust Blood Flow in Brain Capillaries Based on Local Energy Needs” »

Jan 28, 2023

My Mind was Blown. AI Music is INSANE! — Google’s NEW MusicLM AI

Posted by in categories: media & arts, robotics/AI

I wonder if musicians should be worried.


Google Research introduces MusicLM, a model that can generate high-fidelity music from text descriptions. See how MusicLM casts the process of conditional music generation as a hierarchical sequence-to-sequence modeling task, and how it outperforms previous systems in audio quality and text description adherence. Learn more about MusicCaps, a dataset composed of 5.5k music-text pairs, and see how MusicLM can be conditioned on both text and a melody. Check out this video to see the power of MusicLM: Generating Music From Text! #GoogleResearch #MusicLM #MusicGeneration.

Continue reading “My Mind was Blown. AI Music is INSANE! — Google’s NEW MusicLM AI” »

Jan 28, 2023

The Unimportance of Accurate Financial Knowledge

Posted by in category: finance

Simulations of the behavior of individual financial traders show that imperfect market knowledge increases risk but not overall losses.

Jan 28, 2023

Memories Become Chaotic before They Are Forgotten

Posted by in categories: biological, mathematics, robotics/AI

A model for information storage in the brain reveals how memories decay with age.

Theoretical constructs called attractor networks provide a model for memory in the brain. A new study of such networks traces the route by which memories are stored and ultimately forgotten [1]. The mathematical model and simulations show that, as they age, memories recorded in patterns of neural activity become chaotic—impossible to predict—before disintegrating into random noise. Whether this behavior occurs in real brains remains to be seen, but the researchers propose looking for it by monitoring how neural activity changes over time in memory-retrieval tasks.

Memories in both artificial and biological neural networks are stored and retrieved as patterns in the way signals are passed among many nodes (neurons) in a network. In an artificial neural network, each node’s output value at any time is determined by the inputs it receives from the other nodes to which it’s connected. Analogously, the likelihood of a biological neuron “firing” (sending out an electrical pulse), as well as the frequency of firing, depends on its inputs. In another analogy with neurons, the links between nodes, which represent synapses, have “weights” that can amplify or reduce the signals they transmit. The weight of a given link is determined by the degree of synchronization of the two nodes that it connects and may be altered as new memories are stored.

Jan 28, 2023

Quantum Circuit Tackles “Diabolical” Photochemical Process

Posted by in categories: chemistry, quantum physics

A quantum device shows promise for simulating molecular dynamics in a difficult-to-model photochemical process that is relevant to vision.