Month: November 2016

(credit: Gage Skidmore)

China has threatened to stifle American trade if US president-elect Donald Trump makes good on his campaign promise to impose massive tariffs on the country's imports.

One of the most regular pledges that Trump made during the run-up to the election was to impose what he called "defensive" tariffs of 45 percent on Chinese imports, and to have Beijing officially declare a currency manipulator, "the greatest in the world." At a rally in Florida in August, the Republican suggested these tariffs would force China to "stop the cheating."

In an excoriating op-ed, China's state-run newspaper Global Times warned that the People's Republic would adopt "a tit-for-tat approach," and would simply stop buying American goods, including the Apple products that are so popular there. It said:

(credit: UC Berkeley)

A paralysed woman, who is "almost completely locked in," has become the first person to use a fully implanted brain-computer interface at home in day-to-day life without constant doctor supervision.

The work was presented at the annual Society for Neuroscience meeting by Nick Ramsey, a specialist in brain-computer interfaces (BCI) at the the Brain Center Rudolf Magnus at UMC Utrecht in the Netherlands. The research paper is published this month in the New England Journal of Medicine.

The patient, who is 58 years old and wishes to remain anonymous, was diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) in 2008. ALS, also known as Lou Gehrig's disease or motor neurone disease, destroys the neurons that are required for voluntary muscle control. There's no known cure. Within a couple of years, ALS usually causes complete paralysis. In this case the patient still has control of her eyes, but that's about it.

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AdultFriendFinder has been hacked, revealing the account details of more than 400 million people who would undoubtedly prefer to keep their identities private on the "world's largest sex and swinger community" site.

The hacked database—which appears to be one of the largest ever single data breaches in history—apparently contains account details for numerous adult properties belonging to the California-based Friend Finder Network, and includes customers' e-mail addresses, IP addresses last used to log-in to the site, and passwords.

According to data breach notification site LeakedSource.com, the passwords were either kept in plain text format, or used the largely discredited SHA1 hashing algorithm. It claimed to have cracked 99 percent "of all available passwords" which "are now visible in plaintext."

(credit: Spencer E Holtaway)

Facebook chief Mark Zuckerberg has claimed that only one percent of posts on the free content ad network carry fake news reports.

Critics have said that Facebook influenced the outcome of the US election—in which voters propelled Donald Trump to the White House—by allowing bogus news stories to be shared on the site.

Late on Saturday, Zuckerberg continued his efforts to dampen Facebook's influence on the hugely divisive election campaigns. He said:

NASA

Relatively speaking, it is not so hard to become an astronaut in the United States. During the last dozen years, NASA has selected a total of three classes, and conferred the coveted status of astronaut-candidate on 28 Americans. Meanwhile, since the turn of this century, the European Space Agency has chosen just a single class of astronauts—six men and women announced in 2009.

One of them was a Frenchman, Thomas Pesquet, from the small, coastal town of Dieppe in Normandy. And now, seven years later, he's on the cusp of flying into space. On Thursday at 3:20pm ET, he, along with NASA astronaut Peggy Whitson and Oleg Novitskiy of the Russian space agency Roscosmos, are scheduled to launch to the International Space Station for a six-month stay. The rookie will be among veterans, including Whitson, who will become the first woman to command the station twice.

The new design of the MacBook Pros is nice and Apple’s decision to put in nothing but Thunderbolt 3 ports has prompted a fresh wave of dongle talk, but the signature feature of the new MacBook Pros was always going to be the Touch Bar.