Month: February 2016

Today a panel of scientists released a report recommending that the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approve testing for a medical procedure known as mitochondrial replacement, which could prevent dangerous genetic diseases in newborns. The procedure, already approved in Great Britain, still has a long way to go before final approval in the US.

A microscopic organ transplant

Though critics say it will send us down a slippery slope of "gene editing," there is in fact no gene editing involved in mitochondrial replacement. Instead, it's more like a microscopic version of an organ transplant.

Mitochondria are called "organelles" because they play an organ-like role in the cell. A bit like a miniature stomach, mitochondria break down molecules to provide energy for the entire body. Mitochondria are also the only part of the cell that contains DNA, other than the nucleus. Some biologists believe this is because mitochondria were once separate cells, absorbed in a process called endosymbiosis during a very early phase in cellular evolution, which nevertheless retained a shred of DNA over the billions of years since that merging.

The rights holders of tattoos on NBA superstars Kobe Bryant, LeBron James, and other professional basketball players are suing Take-Two Interactive, alleging that the maker of the NBA 2K video game series and other titles is infringing their artwork. The federal copyright infringement lawsuit accuses the video game maker of copyright violations because it has not licensed the tattoos from Solid Oak Sketches.

The suit is a maximalist approach to intellectual property. But it's not the first to assert copyright infringement of tattoos in a video game or on the silver screen. That said, all the cases concerning tattoo copyright infringement have settled out of court, and none have come to an ultimate in-court resolution. That's a legal fact that even Solid Oak Sketches notes in its lawsuit.

"The issue of tattoo copyrightability has yet to be decided upon in court due to numerous settlements preventing a final judicial opinion," the rights holder noted in its filing.

Google Fiber today said it will provide free Internet access at gigabit speeds to residents in affordable housing.

Google Fiber was already providing free Internet in public housing, but speeds were limited to 5Mbps downloads and 1Mbps uploads.

Today's announcement said that's being pushed up to 1Gbps downloads and uploads, a speed that normally costs $70 a month. The free gigabit Internet is being rolled out first to West Bluff, a property in Kansas City, Missouri. Google partnered with the Housing Authority of Kansas City on the project.

A former Department of Energy employee has pleaded guilty to federal charges that he attempted to infect 80 current DOE employees with malware so foreign hackers could take control of computer systems that held sensitive information related to nuclear weapons, officials said Wednesday.

Charles Harvey Eccleston, 62, pleaded guilty to one count of attempted unauthorized access and intentional damage to a protected computer, according to a statement issued by officials with the US Department of Justice. The statement said the man, who previously worked for both the DOE and the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission, plotted to compromise federal computer networks by sending current employees highly targeted e-mails that he believed contained links to malware that would give hackers remote access. Such campaigns are often referred to as spear phishing because they target a specific individual, often referring to them by name and referencing specific interests of job duties.

Prosecutors said the plot came to their attention in 2013 after Eccleston entered an unnamed foreign embassy in Manila, Philippines and offered to sell a list of more than 5,000 e-mail addresses of officials, engineers, and employees of a US government agency. Undercover FBI agents posing as embassy employees then worked to build a criminal case against the former employee, who prosecutors said was terminated from his employment at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in 2010. To make the e-mail more convincing, it posed as an advertisement for a conferences related to nuclear energy. According to the press release:

Things are looking pretty good at General Motors these days. The US' largest car maker just reported its Q4 2015 results: $6.3 billion in net income, a big jump over the $1.1 billion it earned during the same period in 2014. Net income for 2015 was $9.7 billion.

That's good news for shareholders—GM earned $5.91 per common share—and also for GM's hourly workers. The 49,600 GM employees who are members of the United Auto Workers union are in line for up to $11,000 in bonus payments as a result of the company's success.

"It was a strong year on many fronts, capped with record sales and earnings, and a substantial return of capital to our shareholders," said chairman and CEO Mary Barra. "We continue to strengthen our core business, which is laying the foundation for the company to lead in the transformation of personal mobility. We believe the opportunities this will create in connectivity, autonomous, car-sharing and electrification will set the stage for driving value for our owners for years to come."

On Sunday, a West Virginia carpenter who goes by the name "Derwood" released a new video (above) of his "Shuty-MP1" firearm, a small semi-automatic 9mm weapon that is almost entirely 3D-printed with inexpensive PLA plastic. The only parts of the gun that are metal are the steel barrel and springs.

Derwood's gun illustrates the evolution of 3D-printed firearms, which have rapidly evolved in nearly three years since the debut of the simple Liberator and the printed AR-15 lower receiver.

"This gun has been a work in process for about a year now," Derwood told Ars. He posted a video of its assembly last week.

Amit Singhal, Google’s SVP for search, is leaving the company after fifteen years. Singhal has long been in charge of Google's flagship product, and he famously rewrote Google's page ranking algorithm in 2001. He was also a big driver of Google's Star Trek ambitions.

With Singhal leaving, John Giannandrea, Google's head of artificial intelligence, is taking over the search division. Re/code is reporting that with the change, Google will merge the search and artificial intelligence divisions. Giannandrea previously led the effort to introduce the Knowledge Graph—a machine learning that gives you a direct answer rather than a list of links—to search. Today the Knowledge Graph powers answers to the "OK Google" voice queries that appear on just about every consumer-facing Google OS.

Moving the artificial intelligence unit in with search is certainly an eyebrow-raising move. Machine Learning seems to be taking over all of Google lately. Google Deepmind is building a general artificial intelligence that is smart enough to learn and beat various games. It recently open sourced TensorFlow, a software library for machine intelligence, and machine learning technology in Google Inbox can even write short replies to e-mails for you.