Month: June 2016

(credit: CDC/ James Gathany)

The US Food and Drug Administration on Monday approved the first human trial of an experimental Zika vaccine, according to a joint announcement by the two companies behind the new therapy.

The companies, Inovio Pharmaceuticals, Inc., based in Pennsylvania, and GeneOne Life Science, Inc., based in South Korea, said that their DNA-based vaccine candidate, dubbed GLS-5700, will be given to 40 people in a phase I trail. The trial will start “in the next weeks,” the companies said, and could yield results later this year.

Inovio and GeneOne noted in their announcement that pre-clinical data from animal studies suggested that the vaccine could induce a strong immune response that might protect against mosquito-transmitted Zika. But, like all phase I trials, their upcoming human study will not test how effective the vaccine is at fighting off Zika virus, but rather its safety and appropriate dosage levels. If the DNA-based vaccine is found to be safe, it will then move on to larger trials on efficacy that will take years to complete.

(credit: Internet Archive)

An angry group of former customers has sued a collapsed Bitcoin mining company, GAW Miners, in a proposed class-action lawsuit. The group alleges that it was duped by the company and its founders.

This is the second civil suit filed against the company within the last six months—it was sued by the Securities and Exchange Commission in December 2015 over similar accusations of fraud. The SEC alleged $19 million worth of fraudulent deals. (That SEC case was put on hold for six months, starting in April 2016, according to court records.)

In early 2014, GAW Miners was first introduced to the Bitcoin public by re-selling mining rigs. Later, the company shifted to cloud-based mining (Hashlets), and in early 2015, it introduced its own altcoin, dubbed "Paycoin." GAW also tried its hand at its own cloud-based wallet service (Paybase) and its own online discussion board (HashTalk).

It's no big secret that Google's Chrome browser is a bit of a battery hog. The native browsers on both Windows and macOS (Edge and Safari) are widely reported to outlast Google's offering. In its latest campaign, Microsoft is quantifying this difference: in a test that cycles through some common sites including Facebook, YouTube, Wikipedia, and Amazon, Microsoft's latest browser lasted 7 hours and 22 minutes on a Surface Book system. Chrome lasted just 4 hours and 19 minutes.

Between these extremes were Firefox, at 5 hours and 9 minutes, and Opera in battery-saving mode, at 6 hours and 18 minutes.

Microsoft has gone a step beyond just measuring how long each system runs by measuring the power draw of the Wi-Fi, CPU, and GPU during its test workload. A task that drew 2.1W in Edge pulled 2.8W in Chrome, 3.1W in Opera, and 3.2W in Firefox. This lower draw translates to the longer battery life.

John Wayne in True Grit. (credit: Paramount PIctures)

The concept of “grit” has risen to prominence recently on a wave of publicity for Angela Duckworth’s book, Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance. The idea of grit is that success is about more than just natural talent—finding something you’re passionate about and persevering in it is more important than how talented you are to start out with. This can help to explain why people who are highly talented aren’t always successful.

That grit is as important as talent is an inspirational message—in part. One common criticism is that this message leads to a painful amount of self blame in, and prejudice against, people who fail at something. But the concept has snowballed into a simplistic, self-help wrecking ball, and even Duckworth is concerned about how far the idea is being taken.

But is the concept valid to start with? There's a study due to be published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, and an early version has been made available by lead author Marcus Credé. The authors take a close look at the results of multiple studies on grit, pointing out some important problems with the idea. Apparently it doesn’t make as big a difference in success as the hype claims, and it doesn’t seem to be all that different from a concept we’ve known about for a long time: conscientiousness.

(credit: KF)

Who wouldn’t want to be smarter? After all, high intelligence can help you get better grades in school, more promotions at work, fatter pay checks through your career, and a cushier life overall. Those are pretty good outcomes by any measure.

For years, scientific studies suggested that smarts were mostly heritable and fixed through young adulthood—nothing one could willfully boost. But some recent studies hint that a segment of smarts, called fluid intelligence—where you use logic and patterns, rather than knowledge, to analyze and solve novel problems—can improve slightly with memory exercises. The alluring finding quickly gave life to a $1 billion brain training industry. This industry, including companies such as Lumosity, Cogmed, and NeuroNation, has since promised everything from higher IQs to the ability to stay sharp through aging. The industry even boasts that it can help users overcome mental impairments from health conditions, such as attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), traumatic brain injury, and the side effects of chemotherapy.

Those claims are clearly overblown and have been roundly criticized by scientists, the media, and federal regulators. Earlier this year, Lumosity agreed to pay $2 million to the Federal Trade Commission over claims of deceptive advertising. The FTC said Lumosity “preyed on consumers’ fears about age-related cognitive decline.” In the settlement, the FTC forbid the company from making any such claims that the training could sharpen consumers’ minds in life-altering ways.

Integrated into the front grille of the Cadillac CT6 is a surveillance camera the driver can secretly activate. There's one on the rear trunk lid, too. If the alarm system is triggered, these two cameras activate, and two others on the door-mounted rearview mirrors do too. Footage is stored on a removable SD card in the trunk. (credit: Cadillac)

When Ars first saw the new Cadillac CT6 at the New York International Auto Show last year, we remarked that it "may well be the company’s most convincing home-grown rival to the mighty German super-sedans like Audi’s A8, BMW’s 7-Series, and Mercedes-Benz’s S-Class." But one feature we missed was that the $53,000-plus machine doubles as surround-view, gas-powered camcorder on wheels.

Sure, vehicles like police cars have dash cams, and there was even a valet cam in the 2015 Corvette. But the Cadillac CT6 has four cameras secretly offering surround-view video-recording outside the vehicle. It's an industry first and a new source for capturing YouTube moments, scenic drives, or even other affairs like police stops.

"Cadillac expects the surround-vision video recording system to be used by CT6 owners to record events such as a memorable drive, for security in the case of a vehicle being tampered with, or to record an incident," General Motors said of the feature.