CNET is celebrating its 25th anniversary with articles remembering the 1990s — including that moment “when Hollywood finally noticed the web,” calling it “a flawed but fun snapshot of the moment the internet took over the world…”

“Twenty-five years ago, cinema met cyberspace in a riot of funky fashion, cool music and surveillance paranoia.

It began in May 1995 with the release of Johnny Mnemonic, a delirious sci-fi action dystopia matching Keanu Reeves with seminal cyberpunk author William Gibson. In July, Sandra Bullock had her identity erased in conspiracy thriller The Net. In August, Denzel Washington pursued Russell Crowe’s computer-generated serial killer in Virtuosity, and in September Angelina Jolie found her breakthrough role in anarchic adventure Hackers. In October, Kathryn Bigelow served up dystopian thriller Strange Days. It’s hard to know what’s most dated about these mid-’90s curios: the primitive-looking effects, the funky fashions or the clunky technology depicted on screen. But now, 25 years later, they’ve proved prescient in their concerns about surveillance, corporate power and the corruption of what seemed to be an excitingly democratic new age…
Most tellingly, Johnny Mnemonic and the other tech-focused films of 1995 all express fears around the misuse of surveillance in a connected world. The Net updates the paranoia of ’70s thrillers The Conversation and The Anderson Tapes, and each movie features an unholy alliance of avaricious corporate bad guys and authoritarian law enforcement. Or as Matthew Lillard’s character puts it in Hackers, “Orwell is here and livin’ large!”

But the whistleblowing heroes of Hackers, The Net and Johnny Mnemonic use their skills to subvert and unpick the establishment’s grip on technology. Hackers in particular radiates an infectious idealism as the diverse crew of anarchic youngsters rollerblade rings around the greedy suits and clueless cops, “snooping onto them as they snoop onto us”. The movie highlights technology’s potential to be a tool for wrongdoing and a democratic, open medium where you can be who you want to be…

Sadly, 1995’s wave of technology-themed movies have one other thing in common. They all bombed.

CNET’s reporter gets new quotes from the director of Hackers — as well as one of that film’s then-15-year-old technical advisors, Nicholas Jareck. “For all its exaggerations,” he says, “it does a decent job of showing the hacker spirit — those kids were tinkerers, experimenting, reveling in their ability to figure something out. It’s a celebration of human ingenuity.” Johnny Mnemonic. “Speaking on the phone from New York, Longo’s memories are peppered with entertaining asides about who was ‘evil,’ ‘a dick,’ ‘an idiot’ or ‘a fucking idiot.'”

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Source: Slashdot – CNET Remembers 1995, the Year Hollywood Finally Noticed The Internet

“What if a single injection could lower blood levels of cholesterol and triglycerides — for a lifetime?” asks the New York Times.

“In the first gene-editing experiment of its kind, scientists have disabled two genes in monkeys that raise the risk for heart disease.” (Alternate source here.)
Humans carry the genes as well, and the experiment has raised hopes that a leading killer may one day be tamed. “This could be the cure for heart disease,” said Dr. Michael Davidson, director of the Lipid Clinic at the University of Chicago Pritzker School of Medicine, who was not involved in the research.

But it will be years before human trials can begin, and gene-editing technology so far has a mixed tracked record. It is much too early to know whether the strategy will be safe and effective in humans; even the monkeys must be monitored for side effects or other treatment failures for some time to come. The results were presented on Saturday at the annual meeting of the International Society for Stem Cell Research, this year held virtually with about 3,700 attendees around the world. The scientists are writing up their findings, which have not yet been peer-reviewed or published…

Both genes are active in the liver, which is where cholesterol and triglycerides are produced. People who inherit mutations that destroyed the genes’ function do not get heart disease.

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Source: Slashdot – A ‘Cure for Heart Disease’? A Single Shot Succeeds in Monkeys

“Invisible outbreaks sprang up everywhere. The United States ignored the warning signs,” writes the New York Times, in a detailed interactive data visualization.

“We analyzed travel patterns, hidden infections and genetic data to show how the epidemic spun out of control.”

By mid-February, there were only 15 known coronavirus cases in the United States, all with direct links to China… The patients were isolated. Their contacts were monitored. Travel from China was restricted.

None of that worked. Only a small part of the picture was visible. Some 2,000 hidden infections were already spreading through major cities…

Genetic samples linked to the Seattle outbreak appeared in at least 14 states, said Trevor Bedford, a professor at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center… In New York City, where officials had found only a single case by March 1, roughly 10,000 infections had spread undetected… More than 5,000 contagious travelers left New York City in the first two weeks of March, estimates suggest… People [from New York City] also made more than 25,000 trips to New Orleans, where genetic data suggests that a large early outbreak stemmed from infections from New York…

Travel from the city helped to spread that variant across the country. “New York has acted as a Grand Central Station for this virus,” said David Engelthaler of the Translational Genomics Research Institute. By the time President Trump blocked travel from Europe on March 13, the restrictions were essentially pointless. The outbreak had already been spreading widely in most states for weeks… The New Orleans outbreak helped seed infection across Louisiana and the South…

Even now, America remains in the dark. Most infected people are never tested. There is little capacity to trace and isolate the contacts to those who do test positive.

After the lockdowns expired, new cases spiked once again.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – New York Times Investigates How in America ‘the Virus Won’