Just one week after Google’s DeepMind AI group finally described its biology efforts in detail, the company is releasing a paper that explains how it analyzed nearly every protein encoded in the human genome and predicted its likely three-dimensional structure—a structure that can be critical for understanding disease and designing treatments. In the very near future, all of these structures will be released under a Creative Commons license via the European Bioinformatics Institute, which already hosts a major database of protein structures.
In a press conference associated with the paper’s release, DeepMind’s Demis Hassabis made clear that the company isn’t stopping there. In addition to the work described in the paper, the company will release structural predictions for the genomes of 20 major research organisms, from yeast to fruit flies to mice. In total, the database launch will include roughly 350,000 protein structures.
What’s in a structure?
We just described DeepMind’s software last week, so we won’t go into much detail here. The effort is an AI-based system trained on the structure of existing proteins that had been determined (often laboriously) through laboratory experiments. The system uses that training, plus information it obtains from families of proteins related by evolution, to predict how a protein’s chain of amino acids folds up in three-dimensional space.
The design of most leading edge processors and ASICs rely on steps of optimization, with the three key optimization points being Performance, Power, and Area (and sometimes Cost). Once the architecture of a chip is planned, it comes down to designing the silicon of that chip for a given process node technology, however there are many different ways to lay the design out. Normally this can take a team of engineers several months, even with algorithmic tools and simulation to get a good result, however that role is gradually being taken over with Machine Learning methods. Cadence today is announcing its new Cerebrus integrated ML design tool to assist with PPA optimization – production level silicon is already being made with key partners as the tool directly integrates into Cadence workflows.
With the launch of Intel’s Ice Lake Xeon Scalable platform comes a new socket and a range of features that vendors like Supermicro have to design for. The server and enterprise market is so vast that every design can come in a range of configurations and settings, however one of the key elements is managing compute density with memory and accelerator support. The SYS-120U-TNR we are testing today is a dense system with lots of trimmings all within a 1U, to which Supermicro is aiming at virtualization workloads, HPC, Cloud, Software Defined Storage, and 5G. This system can be equipped with upwards of 80 cores, 12 TB of DRAM, and four PCIe 4.0 accelerators, defining a high-end solution from Supermicro.
Known for its core design IP that ends up in everything from IoT to smartphones to servers, Arm is now presenting that it has enabled one of its key microcontrollers in a new form factor: rather than using silicon as a base, the company has enabled a processor core in plastic. The technology has been in the works for almost a decade, but Arm has been waiting on the fabrication methods to create a fully working core. Now the company has something working in a tangible medium and the research has been published in Nature.
The Cybathlon is a multi-sport international competition in which people with physical disabilities compete against each other to complete everyday tasks using state-of-the-art technical assistance. It’s basically an excuse to create enhancements in assistive technology and a nice showcase for the current state of the industry. Also, cyborgs competing against cyborgs. Plus the competitions are quite riveting and there’s nothing quite like hearing an announcer get super stoked about somebody stacking cups or putting on a jacket.
Keep going from some videos from the 2020 event, including an event called the Brain-Computer Interface (BCI) Race where pilots with quadriplegia steer a car in a computer game using nothing but brain signals.
At the hotel Auberge aux 4 Vents in Fribourg, Switzerland, a gold painted bathtub on rails is available for guests to use that automatically rolls out to the balcony.
The luxurious bath was shared by Felix Unholz, as he sat in the tub whilst it rolled out of a window onto a small balcony specially designed for the bath.
As the windows opened he rolled out with a full bath of bubbly water to relax in, whilst he admired the stunning Swiss countryside from his room on the second floor.
Felix said: “We saw the hotel room on the internet, we instantly knew that we had to stay there for a night.
I keep picturing somebody using this not realizing it rolls onto the balcony. Like they’re in the middle of a bath and suddenly it just starts rolling out like some Japanese prank show and next thing they know they’re naked in front of a bunch of strangers eating brunch.
Keep going for the full video as well as some Japanese prank show videos of what I mean. Emphasis on mean.
With computers and digital technologies increasingly shaping all of our lives, it’s more important than ever that every young person, whatever their background or circumstances, has meaningful opportunities to learn about how computers work and how to create with them. That’s our mission at the Raspberry Pi Foundation.
The Raspberry Pi Computing Education Research Centre will work with educators to translate its research into practice and effect positive change in learners’ lives.
Why research matters
Compared to subjects like mathematics, computing is a relatively new field and, while there are enduring principles and concepts, it’s a subject that’s changing all the time as the pace of innovation accelerates. If we’re honest, we just don’t know enough about what works in computing education, and there isn’t nearly enough investment in high-quality research.
We need research to find the best ways of teaching young people how computers work and how to create with them.
Through our research activities we hope to make a contribution to the field of computing education and, as an operating foundation working with tens of thousands of educators and millions of learners every year, we’re uniquely well-placed to translate that research into practice. You can read more about our research work here.
The Raspberry Pi Computing Education Research Centre
The new Research Centre is a joint initiative between the University of Cambridge and the Raspberry Pi Foundation, and builds on our longstanding partnership with the Department of Computer Science and Technology. That partnership goes all the way back to 2008, to the creation of the Raspberry Pi Foundation and the invention of the Raspberry Pi computer. More recently, we have collaborated on Isaac Computer Science, an online platform that is already being used by 2000 teachers and 18,000 students of A level Computer Science in England, and that we will shortly expand to cover GCSE content.
Computers and digital technologies shape our lives and society — how do we make sure young people have the skills to use them to solve problems?
Through the Raspberry Pi Computing Education Research Centre, we want to increase understanding of what works in teaching and learning computing, with a particular focus on young people who come from backgrounds that are traditionally underrepresented in the field of computing or who experience educational disadvantage.
The Research Centre will combine expertise from both institutions, undertaking rigorous original research and working directly with teachers and other educators to translate that research into practice and effect positive change in young peoples’ lives.
The scope will be computing education — the teaching and learning of computing, computer science, digital making, and wider digital skills — for school-aged young people in primary and secondary education, colleges, and non-formal settings.
We’re starting with three broad themes:
Computing curricula, pedagogy, and assessment, including teacher professional development and the learning and teaching process
The role of non-formal learning in computing and digital making learning, including self-directed learning and extra-curricular programmes
Understanding and removing the barriers to computing education, including the factors that stand in the way of young people’s engagement and progression in computing education
While we’re based in the UK and expect to run a number of research projects here, we are eager to establish collaborations with universities and researchers in other countries, including the USA and India.
Get involved
We’re really excited about this next chapter in our research work, and doubly excited to be working with the brilliant team at the Department of Computer Science and Technology.
Enlarge/ Sign on facade of Activision’s Los Angeles offices. (credit: Getty Images)
On Wednesday, a California State agency filed a lawsuit against the game publisher Activision Blizzard over allegations of rampant sexual discrimination and sexual harassment. The nature of this harassment is so widespread, the lawsuit claims, that women who have worked for the game maker “almost universally confirmed that working for Defendants was akin to working in a frat house”—which, according to this lawsuit, means a workplace full of inebriated men who sexually harassed their female colleagues sans punishment.
The 29-page lawsuit claims that across the entire corporation, pay disparity led to women receiving “less total compensation than their male counterparts while performing substantially similar work.” It includes multiple alleged examples of Activision Blizzard slowing promotions for women in favor of male counterparts, even when those women had longer tenures and a superior review record at the company, and added that women of color were “particularly targets of Defendants’ discriminatory practices.” And it described an office environment where inebriated men sexually harassed their female colleagues without being punished.
A direct report to Blizzard’s president
The full lawsuit includes a lengthy list of violations of both sexual discrimination and sexual harassment, including many that single out unnamed Activision Blizzard staffers, and they range from explicit to repugnant. The lawsuit describes one particularly extreme example of alleged harassment—and says the sufferer eventually took her own life.
The Wakayama Prefectural Government has accepted a consortium led by Toronto-based investment firm Clairvest Group to develop a luxury Integrated Resort (casino resort) at the Marina City district within the jurisdiction of the Wakayama municipal government.
Through the partnership between Wakayama and the Clairvest-led consortium, a licensing application will be made to the central government between October 2021 and April 2022. Currently, there are four local governments—Yokohama, Osaka, and Nagasaki aside from Wakayama—which are planning licensing applications, but under the law only a maximum of three can be permitted at this time.
The Clairvest consortium, operated through its local subsidiary Clairvest Neem Ventures, also includes the French casino operator Groupe Partouche and AMSE Resorts Japan.
Earlier, a number of alternative consortiums had planned to compete with Clairvest for the Wakayama partnership. Two firms, Bloomberry Resorts of the Philippines and Groupe Barriere of France, were forced to withdraw by circumstances related to the Covid pandemic, and a third company, Suncity Group of Macau, was reportedly informed that the Japanese central government would not approve its candidacy due to its suspected links to organized crime in China.
The Clairvest consortium’s proposal is to construct a US$4.3 billion luxury casino resort at Marina City, featuring hotels, exhibition areas, a casino, and all of the other attributes required under the terms of the 2018 IR Implementation Act and subsequent Cabinet decisions.
If it is licensed, the plans call for the Wakayama resort to be built on a 560,000 square meter plot of land, intended to host about 13 million visitors a year. It would potentially become the first casino resort to open its doors in Japan around autumn 2027.
Enlarge/ Picture of the US embassy in Havana, taken on October 3, 2017.
(credit: Getty | YAMIL LAGE)
An undercover Central Intelligence Agency officer who helped hunt down Osama bin Laden will now lead the agency task force charged with investigating the mysterious health incidents that continue to plague US personnel, according to a report Wednesday from The Wall Street Journal.
The incidents, first reported in 2016 among US diplomats stationed in Havana, Cuba, tend to involve bizarre episodes of sonic and sensory experiences that are often described as directional. Afflicted diplomats develop symptoms including headaches, ringing in the ears (tinnitus), nosebleeds, difficulty concentrating and recalling words, permanent hearing loss, and speech problems. Medical experts examining some of the cases have found evidence of “injury to widespread brain networks without an associated history of head trauma.” That is, sufferers appear to a have a concussion without a blow to the head.
Despite years of alarming reports and investigations into the cases, the cause of the incidents and who may be behind them remain a mystery—and cases continue to mount. News of the new task-force chief comes on the heels of a report from NBC News that the latest case count may be as high as 200. And though the incidents tend to be linked to Cuba—the condition is often referred to as “Havana Syndrome”—they have now been reported from every continent except Antarctica.
China state hackers are compromising large numbers of home and office routers for use in a vast and ongoing attack against organizations in France, authorities from that county said.
The hacking group—known in security circles as APT31, Zirconium, Panda, and other names—has historically conducted espionage campaigns targeting government, financial, aerospace and defense organizations as well as businesses in the technology, construction, engineering, telecommunications, media, and insurance industries, security firm FireEye has said. APT31 is also one of three hacker groups sponsored by the Chinese government that participated in a recent hacking spree of Microsoft Exchange servers, the UK’s National Cyber Security Center said on Monday.
Stealth recon and intrusion
On Wednesday, France’s National Agency for Information Systems Security—abbreviated as ANSSI—warned national businesses and organizations that the group was behind a massive attack campaign that was using hacked routers prior to carrying out reconnaissance and attacks as a means to cover up the intrusions.
The Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) collaboration made headlines in 2019 by capturing the very first direct image of a black hole at the center of galaxy. Now, the EHT is back with another exciting breakthrough: images of the “dark heart” of a radio galaxy known as Centaurus A that enable the EHT to pinpoint the location of the supermassive black hole at the galaxy’s center, according to a new paper published in the journal Nature Astronomy. The image also captures the birth of a powerful jet emitting from the black hole. The jet’s unusual characteristics could help astronomers answer a few nagging questions about how such jets are produced in the first place.
“This allows us for the first time to see and study an extragalactic radio jet on scales smaller than the distance light travels in one day,” said co-author Michael Janssen, an astronomer at Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy in Bonn and Radboud University Nijmegen. “We see up close and personally how a monstrously gigantic jet launched by a supermassive black hole is being born.”
Centaurus A (aka NGC 5128) is one of the largest and brightest objects in the night sky, making it especially popular with amateur stargazers, although it is only visible from the Southern Hemisphere and low northern latitudes. Located in the constellation Centaurus, the galaxy was discovered in 1826 by James Dunlop. John Herschel noted its peculiar shape—it looks elliptical when viewed from Earth, with a lane of dust superimposed across it—in 1847.
Enlarge/ A bloody pig mask mailed to cyberstalking victims by then-eBay employees. (credit: FBI)
A former eBay security official who pleaded guilty for his role in a cyberstalking conspiracy has asked for leniency in sentencing while blaming his actions in part on a “drinking culture” at eBay that contributed to his alcoholism.
“eBay had a bar on campus that opened at 3:00 p.m., and drinking was part of the culture, with alcohol present throughout the office space where it was typical to take morning shots of alcohol with co-workers,” a sentencing memorandum for 56-year-old defendant Philip Cooke said yesterday. It was filed in US District Court for the District of Massachusetts.
Cooke was senior manager of security operations for eBay’s Global Security Team, making an annual salary of $185,000, when he played a role in the harassment of a couple that operated a news website. The harassment—in response to news coverage that eBay executives did not like—involved sending threatening messages and deliveries of live cockroaches, a funeral wreath, and a bloody pig mask to the couple’s home in Natick, Massachusetts. Cooke was promoted by eBay to Director of Security Operations and given a raise to $205,000 in June 2020, about 10 months after the cyberstalking campaign began and just before it became public.
Enlarge/ Blue Origin’s New Shepard crew, Oliver Daemen, Mark Bezos, Jeff Bezos, and Wally Funk hold a press conference after flying into space in the Blue Origin New Shepard on July 20, 2021 in Van Horn, Texas. (credit: Joe Raedle/Getty Images)
LAUNCH SITE ONE, Texas—Jeff Bezos burst from his spacecraft with a smile on his face as wide as the brim of the cowboy hat atop his head.
The founder of Amazon fulfilled a lifelong dream of flying into space Tuesday morning aboard a rocket and capsule he personally funded. During a few minutes of weightlessness, Bezos and his brother Mark had floated around the New Shepard capsule alongside aviation pioneer Wally Funk and an 18-year-old customer, Oliver Daemen. They tossed Skittles candy into one another’s mouths and enjoyed the view.
“Best day ever,” said Bezos, 57, after landing safely beneath three parachutes. “My expectations were high, and they were dramatically exceeded.”
Enlarge/ Crowded trains and buses have never been exactly popular—they’re even less so, midpandemic. Google Maps’ new upgrades may help its users dodge the crowds more effectively. (credit: Bloomberg / Getty Images)
Today, Google announced a major expansion of its ability to warn users of crowded mass transit ahead of time. The feature originally launched in June 2019 and covered roughly 200 cities globally, using user-reported data similar to Waze to discover and predict overcrowded trains and buses. Google is expanding that 200-city initial rollout to (eventually) over 10,000 transit agencies in 100 countries, according to today’s announcement.
Unsurprisingly, Google Maps’ mass transit predictions don’t just rely on direct user-reported data. They utilize AI models trained on that data.
“We apply world-class anonymization technology and differential privacy techniques to Location History Data to make sure your data remains private and secure,” the announcement declares—although we must point out that attempts to anonymize location data frequently fail.
Wearable electronics, like watches and fitness trackers, represent the next logical step in computing. They’ve sparked an interest in the development of flexible electronics, which could enable wearables to include things like clothing and backpacks.
Flexible electronics, however, run into a problem: our processing hardware is anything but flexible. Most efforts at dealing with that limitation have involved splitting up processors into a collection of smaller units, linking them with flexible wiring, and then embedding all the components in a flexible polymer. To an extent, it’s a throwback to the early days of computing, when a floating point unit might reside on a separate chip.
But a group within the semiconductor company ARM has now managed to implement one of the company’s smaller embedded designs using flexible silicon. The design works and executes all the instructions you’d expect from it, but it also illustrates the compromises we have to make for truly flexible electronics.
Multiple recent reports from Apple’s supply chain have indicated that a new, greatly upgraded iPhone SE is on the way.
According to Nikkei, the new iPhone SE is expected to launch in early 2022. The device will feature the same iPhone 8-style design as the existing iPhone—home button included.
But the new SE will have what will be the most recent iPhone system-on-a-chip, the A15, which is expected to debut with Apple’s new flagship phones this fall.
In what appears to be a first, a public figure has been ousted after de-anonymized mobile phone location data was publicly reported, revealing sensitive and previously private details about his life.
Monsignor Jeffrey Burrill was general secretary of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops (UCCB), effectively the highest-ranking priest in the US who is not a bishop, before records of Grindr usage obtained from data brokers was correlated with his apartment, place of work, vacation home, family members addresses, and more. Grindr is a gay hookup app, and while apparently none of Burrill’s actions were illegal, any sort of sexual relationship is forbidden for clergy in the Catholic Church.
Burrill’s case is “hugely significant,” Alan Butler, Executive Director of the Electronic Information Privacy Center, told Ars. “It’s a clear and prominent example of the exact problem that folks in my world, privacy advocates and experts, have been screaming from the rooftops for years, which is that uniquely identifiable data is not anonymous.”
Samsung’s invite. That’s a black Galaxy Fold 3 and a purple/gray Galaxy Flip. [credit:
Samsung ]
Samsung has sent out invitations for an August 11 product launch event. The invite might not look like much, but it strongly hints at what products we’ll see: the Galaxy Z Fold 3 (the dark gray shape) and the Galaxy Z Flip 3 (the purple and light gray shape). It’s clearly a foldables event, but we also might see the Galaxy Watch 4, the launch device for Google and Samsung’s revamp of Wear OS.
Normally, Samsung’s August launch event would point to the announcement of the S-Pen-equipped Galaxy Note, but all indications show that the Galaxy Note is dead this year. Samsung shipped an external S-Pen for the Galaxy S21 Ultra, and along with optional support for the Z Fold 3, that will have to be enough for fans of handwriting.
The Fold 3
The Fold 3, with a decidedly non-crazy camera block. [credit: 91mobiles
]
As usual, most of these devices have leaked already. 91 Mobiles has official press renders of the Galaxy Z Fold 3, which looks a lot like the Z Fold 2 from last year. Samsung’s second swing at a tablet-like foldable was a nice refinement of the original Galaxy Fold, with a bigger front display and foldable glass on the inside.
Netflix lost 430,000 subscribers in the US and Canada in the second quarter and issued weaker than expected forecasts for later in the year, rekindling investor doubts over how the streaming group will fare after the economic reopening.
The California-based company predicted it would add 3.5 million subscribers in the third quarter, disappointing investors who were looking for a stronger rebound in the second half of the year. Analysts had forecast that Netflix would add 5.9 million subscribers during the third quarter.
In the past year and a half, Disney, Apple, WarnerMedia, Comcast and others have launched streaming platforms, and there are more than 100 streaming services for consumers to choose from, according to data company Ampere.
