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The dust has settled — to some extent — on a major furore that swept the internet over recent months: the whole question of adding an easy mode to Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice. Some argued every game should be accessible to every player, while others pointed out titles like Sekiro are intended to be highly challenging, and it’s okay for some games to target specific audiences without the need to appeal to everyone at once....

Toxoplasma is closely related to Plasmodium, the parasite that causes malaria. But while Plasmodium is quite fussy about where it lives, only able to survive in liver cells and then in red blood cells, Toxoplasma doesn’t much care. It muscles its way into just about any type of cell. But it’s also very hard to isolate Toxoplasma from the cells that it infects. So I’m trying to find a method to increase the amount of Toxoplasma parasite in samples....

Imagine seeing the light from a torch reflected inside of a diamond. Now, imagine you’ve moved the diamond to another room, leaving the torch behind, yet it continues to reflect the light – that’s basically what the researchers did, just on a much smaller scale. How did they do this? The usual: they played something nice on the radio for the diamond, wooed it with some microwave cooking, and created a magnetic atmosphere for magic to happen....

The 5G Open Innovation Lab, for example, is a new technology hub built in partnership with T-Mobile, the University of Washington and the City of Bellevue, Wash, will connect 5G startups with investors and technology labs to test their products. Backed by big names like Intel and NASA, it will fund startups in health care, retail, transportation, and energy that 65harness 5G networks. Jim Brisimitzis, general partner of the lab, says that these new networks will effectively be able to support types of businesses that do not yet exist, and ultimately have an impact similar to that of the dot-com boom....

Nithyananda, a fugitive on the run over allegations of rape and abduction, yesterday announced he’d founded the Republic of Kailaasa — a supposedly sovereign state that would serve as the world’s “greatest and purest Hindu nation,” The Guardian reports. The republic is described as a “nation without borders created by dispossessed Hindus from around the world who lost the right to practice Hinduism authentically in their own countries.” Three prominent personalities from Ahmedabad, the location of Nithyananda’s main ashram, have reportedly already planned to leave their corporate and social lives for the island....

The Elasticsearch cluster contained user IDs, phone numbers, and names of mostly US-based users. According to Diachenko, who examined the evidence, the data likely came from “an illegal scraping operation or Facebook API abuse by criminals in Vietnam.” It was left exposed for nearly two weeks starting December 4, and is now unavailable – but not before it was allegedly shared as a download on a hacker forum. While this isn’t a lot of data per person, it could still be used to target users with phishing attacks....

The common thread across most articles has been to find a suitable workspace — a desk in your home office or a kitchen table — and adapt it according to your needs. Well, that’s all great but what if I told you that you could — and should — treat yourself and work from bed every once in a while? I’ve not gone mad, just hear me out, please. [Read: The weirdo’s guide to WFH productivity: Sanity shower, squats, and snacks]...

Still, cybersecurity is a difficult line of work. It’s dynamic, and IT pros often feel harrowed by the amount of ground they’re expected to cover. Instead of seeing what new cybersecurity trends will develop in 2020, we thought we’d ask the experts. We polled a massive number of CTOs, VPs, experts, and at least one “InfoSec Personality” on what they thought 2020 would have in store for us. If there’s one core takeaway, it’s the headline for this article could have swapped ‘132’ for ‘5’ and we’d still not have covered all the feedback....

So, how will technology transform financial services in the next few years? We asked experts to share their perspectives, and here are five trends we think are worth watching. Natural language processing The past decade has seen tremendous advances in natural language processing, the field of artificial intelligence that extracts meaning and context from spoken and written language. Natural Language Processing (NLP) provides an unprecedented opportunity to obtain value from Word and PDF documents, emails, chat logs, social media posts, and the vast amounts of unstructured data that constitute much of the web....

Machine learning systems called DALL-E, GPT and PaLM are making a splash with their incredible ability to generate creative work. These systems are known as “foundation models” and are not all hype and party tricks. So how does this new approach to AI work? And will it be the end of human creativity and the start of a deep-fake nightmare? 1. What are foundation models? Foundation models work by training a single huge system on large amounts of general data, then adapting the system to new problems....

Consider, for instance, the recent deepfake using Vladimir Putin’s face over MIT Technology Review’s editor-in-chief Gideon Lichfield’s body. Though it’s fairly obvious that Putin himself isn’t being interviewed (the shock of blonde hair is a helpful tell), it’s not that unconvincing. It’s also not a far leap to see how the technology can be used to impersonate a world leader to sway the masses or forge a video to frame someone for a crime....

Melody Cooper, discussing her decision to post her brother’s footage online, told hosts of American talk show The View that she “wanted to shine a light on” Amy Cooper’s weaponization of racism “so that no other black person would have to go through it from her”. Over half a century ago, African Americans viewed the potential of the newest development in communications technology, television, in strikingly similar terms. Under the TV spotlight In 1957, Howard D Gould told readers of his column in the Chicago Defender, an African-American newspaper, that: “Under the spotlight of TV, discriminatory practices will have to stop”....

In fact, pretty much all of its current on-chain activity comes from weathersv.com, an automated weather service that simply copies data from another (centralized) weather site and writes it to the BSV blockchain. — Painted Frog (@painted_frog) June 24, 2019 As spotted by Twitter user @painted_frog, weather.sv accounted for more than 1.23 million of BSV’s “actions” over the past month. It was launched back in April, pitched as a way of recording local weather and climate data with the BSV blockchain....

When it comes to fictional portrayals of artificial intelligence technology, the Star Trek universe stands head and shoulders above all others. Series creator Gene Rodenberry’s vision for the far future seems just as prescient today, in the era of advanced deep learning, as it did in the 1960s when he unveiled it. Unfortunately, this article is about the AI in Star Wars. Read: Star Wars: Battlefront multiplayer returns for May the 4th You know, Star Wars, the media franchise where an evil military empire hellbent on taking over the galaxy deploys – aboard its Death Stars, no less — tiny utility robots that squeal in fear when they see a big furry monster: Before I go off the rails, I should point out that I’m a light saber-wielding Star Wars fanatic....

According to a report by The Telegraph, AI-based video interviewing software — such as that developed by HireVue — are being leveraged by UK companies for the first time to shortlist the best job applicants. “Unilever, the consumer goods giant, is among companies using AI technology to analyse the language, tone and facial expressions of candidates when they are asked a set of identical job questions which they film on their mobile phone or laptop,” the report said....

Scientists have built an AI tool that forecasts Arctic sea ice conditions, which could help protect local wildlife and people from changes caused by global warming. The deep learning system, named IceNet, was developed by a research team led by British Antarctic Survey (BAS) and The Alan Turing Institute. The model was trained on climate simulations and observational data to forecast the next six months of sea ice concentration maps....

Per a report from Nikkei’s Asian Review (h/t TechSpot), Alibaba claims its new system can detect coronavirus in CT scans of patients’ chests with 96% accuracy against viral pneumonia cases. And it only takes 20 seconds for the AI to make a determination – according to the report, humans generally take about 15 minutes to diagnose the illness as there can be upwards of 300 images to evaluate. Read: AI sent first coronavirus alert, but underestimated the danger The system was trained on images and data from 5,000 confirmed coronavirus cases and has already been tested in hospitals throughout China....

As we snuggle up on our trusty ol’ couch and fire up Netflix to drown out the voices of our beloved family, we’re yet again faced with a question that’s plagued us since the dawn of human existence: what the hell should I watch? Searching for the right content, the perfect piece of wondrous cinema for this exact occasion is a tricky endeavor, no matter how good Netflix’s recommendations have become....

But not those at Google, Uber, Dropbox, Soundcloud, Slack, and Medium. The programmers at top corporations have long fallen for the language with the cute mascot. That’s not to say that Python is no good. It’s great! But whether it’s for APIs, web services, or data processing — while most developers are still using Python, top-performers are adopting Golang, or Go, more and more. Because it rocks. Go was invented by an all-star trio at Google: Robert Griesemer was one of the heads behind Google’s V8 JavaScript machine and a main developer for Sawzall, another language invented by Google....

[Read: NASCAR swaps race tracks for pixels in pivot to esports amid coronavirus race cancellations] Rivian, known for its high-range and practical all-electric SUVs, is shutting down all its facilities, TechCrunch reports. But it’s great to hear that the company will continue to pay its salaried and hourly workers during what will be, hopefully, a temporary shutdown. According to TechCrunch, Rivian had already begun scaling back its workforce. Last week, the company said its offices and production facilities were operating at around 2 to 5% occupancy....