Science and technology micro-summaries for June 19, 2019

The future of medicine is viral; Facebook launches Libra, Calibra, and the Libra Association for its globalcoin ecosystem; Samsung suggests regular virus scans for its smart TVs; A neural network that recognizes psychosis from conversation; and a chip that helps robots to avoid collisions by "imagining" their actions before moving.

Straight from my RSS feed:

Links and micro-summaries from my 1000+ daily headlines. I filter them so you don't have to.

1. STEEM Bacteriophages: The Future Of Medicine | Answers With Joe - This post includes a write-up and an embedded youtube video where @answerswithjoe discusses research into phage therapy, viruses that target bacteria. Much of the research came out of Georgia in the former USSR, where it was kept secret until recently, and the technique has been used successfully for treating infections since the 1920s. The video and write-up both note that phage therapy shows promise in many treatment areas, including treatment for antibiotic resistant bacteria, personalized, medicine, and even treatment for HIV and cancer, and examples are given of two modern American patients who were successfully treated with the phage technologies. (5% of rewards from this post will go to @answerswithjoe)


2. Facebook announces Libra cryptocurrency: All you need to know - Facebook released a whitepaper and technical paper to introduce their Libra technology, and Calibra, a subsidiary company that will support it. The consensus protocol is resistant to loss of up to 1/3 of the nodes in the network, and they are hoping to have 100 founding partners in the Libra Association, the blockchain's newly formed non-profit steering body. These partners will get votes in the chain's governance, and will optionally run validation nodes. As currently designed, open source Libra is a permissioned chain, but the goal is to switch to a permissionless protocool that is based on proof-of-stake. It will be capable of processing 1,000 transactions per second and implementing smart contracts through the newly created MOVE programming language.


3. Samsung TVs should be regularly virus-checked, the company says - Good news: Samsung's Smart TVs come with antivirus software installed. Bad news: the company seriously suggested - in a now deleted post - that consumers should run through about a dozen clicks on the remote control to scan for viruses every few weeks, which is not likely to happen. h/t OS news


4. Boffins' neural network can work out from your speech whether you'll develop psychosis - A paper in Nature reports that a neural network can predict psychosis with 90% accuracy by analyzing online conversations. This was accomplished by training the neural net with data from reddit and interviews with 40 participants in the North American Prodrome Longitudinal Study (NAPLS) who were identified as at risk for psychosis. The neural net trained on the interviews from 30 participants, and made predictions on the remaining 10 with 90% accuracy. The article points out, however, that the NAPLS interviews were typed in from video recordings of conversations, whereas the reddit conversations were created natively as written text. While this technology may prove useful in preventing or treating behavioral problems, it also seems to raise a slew of privacy concerns, especially since the article notes that signs of psychosis can begin to emerge in minors, before the age of 18.


5. A new chip lets robots “imagine” their actions before they make a move - The article describes a chip that lets robots use 3D sensors and a low-level awareness of their surroundings to plan their movements in ways that avoid collisions with other objects. This provides safety for humans and other fragile objects that might be located in close proximity to the robots. An accompanying video shows a robotic arm using the capabilities to avoid a human's arm.

For example, feel free to comment on any or all of these discussion topics:

• How do you think Facebook's libra will effect bitcoin adoption? How about Steem's adoption?
  
  
• Facebook argues for separating Calibra as a separate company, saying that people don't want their financial data comingled with their social data. Do you agree? How does this influence Steem's adoption?
  
  
• Would you be willing to run an antivirus sweep every few weeks on your own Smart TV? Why or why not?
  
  
• Do you think that the health benefit of early recognition of psychosis outweighs the privacy concerns that may accompany use of the technology?
  
  

About this series

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