When it comes to babies, a considerable amount of plastic appears to be both going in one end and out the other, according to new research that involved spatulas, diapers, and poop. In particular, the average concentration of one pervasive type of microplastic in baby stool was a whopping ten times higher than that in adult stool in a small pilot study published this week. The plastic, called PET, or polyethylene terephthalate, is widely used in bottles and polyester textiles. The results suggest that infants could be exposed to even higher levels of microplastics than adults, the study authors say.…
Author: Mike Harrison
Most algorithms designed to help people identify skin problems don’t let experts see the datasets they were developed with and don’t share information on the skin tone or ethnicity of the patients in those datasets, according to a new review. That could make it hard for people to evaluate the programs before using them and to understand if they might not work as well for certain groups of people, the authors argue. These types of tools use pictures of skin conditions to teach a system to recognize those same conditions in new images. Someone could upload a picture of a…
REvil ransomware gang cheats its own affiliates to steal the latter’s cut of the ransom, keeping the entire payment from the victim. (Photo : by Sean Gallup/Getty Images)BERLIN, GERMANY – JANUARY 25: In this photo illustration a young man types on an illuminated computer keyboard typically favored by computer coders on January 25, 2021 in Berlin, Germany. 2020 saw a sharp rise in global cybercrime that was in part driven by the jump in online retailing that ensued during national lockdowns as governments sought to rein in the coronavirus pandemic. REvil Ransomware Gang Cheats Affiliates It turns out that the…
Theranos’s board member James “Mad Dog” Mattis, a four-star general and the former secretary of defense, served among the company’s impeccably credentialed supporters — but testifying in Elizabeth Holmes’s trial on Wednesday, he resembled nothing so much as a nattily-dressed grandfather. At one point, he seemed befuddled when the defense asked him if he remembered discussion of high-throughput devices. When Mattis first met Theranos’ Holmes in 2011, he told the court, she pricked his finger to give him an idea of the blood draw process. And like a damsel in a fairy tale, he fell under her spell. At the…
The Food and Drug Administration cleared a third dose of the Pfizer / BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine for people some vulnerable groups — the first booster in the United States’ vaccination efforts. The agency signed off on boosters for people 65 years of age and older, those who are at high risk of severe disease, health care workers, and other people at high risk of exposure to COVID-19 at work. The decision comes a month after the Biden administration announced that booster shots would be available to people in the US starting in September. At the time, scientists and public health…
Health apps have to tell their users about any data breaches or risk a hefty fine, the Federal Trade Commission clarified in a policy statement last week. The rule that requires that transparency is a decade old, but it hasn’t been enforced before. The new guidance serves as a warning to the many companies elbowing into the health app space: the FTC is taking issues around health data privacy seriously — even if it won’t be able to tackle all the privacy gaps on its own. The FTC’s Health Breach Notification Rule covers all organizations that aren’t subject to the…
Brittany Gould, wearing a black mask with a clear window through which you could see her mouth, got choked up as she told the court about her experience with Theranos in 2014. She’d used the company’s tests because they were cheap — her language was “cost-effective” — and the results told her, wrongly, that she was miscarrying. It would have been her fourth miscarriage in a row. The defense in US v. Elizabeth Holmes blocked testimony from Gould about the emotional impact of the bad test, so jurors didn’t hear how it affected her. But “the loss of all these…
It’s been around 10 years since security researcher Jay Radcliffe got up onstage at a conference and demonstrated that he was able to hack into his own insulin pump. If he’d wanted, he could have used the pump to deliver a lethal dose of the drug into his system. Instead, he demanded that medical companies take the security threat seriously. That presentation and others like it were wake-up calls about the potential danger of connecting vulnerable medical devices to the internet, says Mike Johnson, a securities technologies expert at the University of Minnesota’s Technological Leadership Institute. In the decade since,…
Elizabeth Holmes, the founder and CEO of disgraced blood testing company Theranos, is being tried for 12 charges of wire fraud and conspiracy to commit wire fraud. The trial is expected to last through December. Theranos was valued as high as $9 billion, and Holmes was a darling of Silicon Valley, sporting black turtlenecks that prompted comparisons to Steve Jobs. That is, until John Carreyrou’s exposé was published in The Wall Street Journal. In that article, Carreyrou wrote that Theranos was using its own device for only a handful of tests and that other employees were concerned that the device…
(Photo : Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay ) The term ‘metaverse’ was coined by science fiction writer Neal Stephenson in his 1992 science fiction novel ‘Snow Crash’, where humans, as avatars, interact with each other and software agents, in a three-dimensional virtual space that uses the metaphor of the real world. Stephenson used the term to describe a virtual reality-based successor to the Internet. Since then, ‘metaverses’ have become hugely popular, especially in the last few years, and many companies, including giants like Microsoft and Facebook, are developing them. Metaverses are popular in the blockchain industry as well. Blockchain…