Month: June 2017

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | Paul Taylor)

The Federal Communications Commission's plan to gut net neutrality rules and deregulate the Internet service market may hinge on the definition of the word "broadband."

In February 2015, the FCC's then-Democratic leadership led by Chairman Tom Wheeler classified broadband as "telecommunications," superseding the previous treatment of broadband as a less heavily regulated "information service." This was crucial in the rulemaking process because telecommunications providers are regulated as common carriers under Title II of the Communications Act, the authority used by the FCC to impose bans on blocking, throttling, and paid prioritization.

Thus, when the FCC's new Republican majority voted on May 18 to start the process of eliminating the current net neutrality rules, the commission’s Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM) also proposed redefining broadband as an information service once again.

Enlarge (credit: challenge.gov)

The nation's top-level intelligence office, the Director of National Intelligence, wants to find "the most accurate unconstrained face recognition algorithm."

A branch of the office, which oversees the nation's spy agencies, is holding a contest toward that end, with submissions due no later than 2pm ET June 15.

"Have you developed software to identity faces in general web photographs?  Can your software verify that a face in one photograph is the same as in another?" asks a posting on challenge.gov about the Face Recognition Prize Challenge. It continues:

Enlarge (credit: Getty | diane39)

Indian authorities last year pulled the plug on a dubious clinical trial aiming to reverse brain death in 20 people. But, it seems, the resolve of the trial’s leaders is undying. They have revived their plans and will announce a new trial in upcoming months that will take place somewhere in Latin America, Stat reports.

The trial, led by Philadelphia-based biotech firm Bioquark, aims to restore life to those declared clinically brain dead by using a slap-dash potpourri of methods—combining mesenchymal stem cell injections with peptides said to promote brain cell growth, transcranial laser therapy said to jump-start brain cells, and electrical stimulation of the median nerve (a major nerve that runs through the arm) to enliven the senses.

Individually, some of these interventions have hinted at potential benefits for some patient populations in preliminary research. For instance, early studies suggest that stem cell injections into the brain or spinal cord may help some with brain injuries. But there is no indication that the interventions—individually or together—can bring back brain-dead patients. Bioquark and partners have not even tested out their hodgepodge method on animals.

Missile Defense Agency video of the successful May 30 test of an intercontinental ballistic missile interceptor. (video link)

On May 30, the US Missile Defense Agency (MDA) and the United States Air Force successfully tested the Homeland Missile Defense System, shooting down an intercontinental ballistic missile in the first "live fire" test of the system's Ground-based Midcourse Defense (GMD) element. The GMD consists of a land-based, fire-control system and interceptor missiles designed to strike ICBMs in flight outside the atmosphere. The interceptor missile was launched from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, and it destroyed an "ICBM-class target" launched from the Kwajelein Atoll in the Marshall Islands. The ICBM was tracked by multiple radars, including the Sea-Based X-Band Radar, a giant radome mounted aboard a "semi-submersible" platform that resembles a giant self-propelled oil rig.

"The intercept of a complex, threat-representative ICBM target is an incredible accomplishment for the GMD system and a critical milestone for this program," said MDA Director Vice Adm. Jim Syring in an official statement. "This system is vitally important to the defense of our homeland, and this test demonstrates that we have a capable, credible deterrent against a very real threat."

Enlarge (credit: LIGO/Caltech/MIT/Sonoma State (Aurore Simonnet))

Today, the team behind the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) is announcing the detection of a third black hole merger, the first from its second operational run. The merger shares some features with the previous ones: the black holes were bigger than expected, and their merger released a staggering amount of energy. But the LIGO team was also able to extract some information about the details of the collision and propagation of gravitational waves. These details tell us something about the limits of general relativity and the history of the black holes themselves.

Boom

As with the earlier detections, the new event (GW170104) showed up as a series of curves that came to briefly dominate the noise in LIGO's two detectors for a few seconds before fading back into the background. Normally, an event like this would trigger an alert to the astronomy community, which could then attempt observations in the area of the sky where the event took place. But, in this case, a recent period of maintenance had left one of the two detectors set in a calibration mode.

So, instead, the event was picked up by software triggers that scan the incoming data in near-real time. The operators then sent out an alert manually; about 30 groups of astronomers searched the appropriate areas of the sky, but there's no word yet on whether anything came out of those searches.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | Spencer Platt)

Verizon recently tried to buy Charter Communications for "well over $100 billion," but the US' second biggest cable company rejected the offer, according to a New York Post article yesterday. Charter rejected the offer "because it was too low—and because Charter was not ready to sell," the Post wrote, quoting anonymous sources.

Rumors about Verizon trying to buy Charter surfaced in January, a month after Verizon CEO Lowell McAdam said that a Verizon/Charter merger would make "industrial sense." In mid-April, McAdam said that he'd be willing to have merger talks with just about any company, including Comcast, the country's biggest cable operator. But he said that no deals were imminent and argued that no cable company could match Verizon's fiber network.

Those comments may have come after Charter rejected Verizon's offer. The Verizon offer to Charter was made "in recent months," the Post wrote. Chairman John Malone of Liberty Media, Charter's largest shareholder with a 19 percent ownership stake, is wary of the tax implications of a deal with Verizon and wants to give Charter more time to finish integrating its new Time Warner Cable subsidiary, the report said.