Curating the Internet: Science and technology digest for December 5, 2019

A new silicon chip designed to mimic the brain's neurons; New revelations about the science behind the CRISPR twins, Lulu and Nana; A TED talk describing a framework for tech policy activism; IEEE retracts 49 papers at once for peer review violations and irregularities; and a Steem essay speculating that 5G adoption will spur advances in augmented and virtual reality technologies

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1. A silicon chip that mimics the brain’s neurons could help fight paralysis - A December 3 paper in Nature describes a new chip with artificial neurons that mimic biological neurons. The chip's power requirement is on the order of one billionth of a standard microprocessor, which suggests that it can eventually be used efficiently in medical implants to treat chronic conditions like Alzheimer's disease or heart failure. The chip was created from a simulation of the firing of two types of neurons in rats, respiratory neurons, and neurons in the hippocampus. This model was then used to reproduce the behavior in silicon. Some of the research team is now using these artificial neurons to create a smart pacemaker that functions better than a standard pacemaker in rats. It is still a long way from readiness for humans, however. The lead author is Kamal Abu Hassan, and he was joined by a team of seven co-authors.


2. Why the paper on the CRISPR babies stayed secret for so long - Yesterday, in Curating the Internet: Science and technology digest for December 4, 2019, we covered a call for more information about the CRISPR twins, pseudonymously known as Lulu and Nana. Today, we learn that MIT Technology Review received copies from "sources", and published parts of the original manuscript describing the work. These two articles really should be read as a pair. The latter article notes that the 4,699 word manuscript, titled "Birth of Twins After Genome Editing for HIV Resistance", was submitted to Nature and the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) for consideration, but neither has published it. Four researchers reviewed the work for MIT, and offered the following commentary: "key claims that He and his team made are not supported by the data; the babies’ parents may have been under pressure to agree to join the experiment; the supposed medical benefits are dubious at best; and the researchers moved forward with creating living human beings before they fully understood the effects of the edits they had made." As to the secrecy, when the author, He, submitted the work it went to review by Nature and JAMA, and China initially celebrated the results. As the ethical problems with the work became clear, however, the journals terminated their reviews, He disappeared (yesterday's article said He is under house arrest), and China began censoring mentions of the work from social media. Generalized questions remain, however, about the appropriate mechanism for dealing with research that may have been scientifically valid but ethically impaired. Because of this aspect, the work is compared to that of Josef Mengele.


3. How Americans Can Become Tech Policy Activists - Continuing his ongoing theme of "technology in the public interest", Bruce Schneier links to a talk at TEDxBoulder where Caroline McCarthy discusses the importance of tech policy and offers some tips on how to become an effective tech policy activist. She opens by arguing that tech policy isn't just relevant to geeks, but it is something that effects everyone in modern society. Next she moves on to offering a framework for approaching tech policy. This framework includes: (i) It is relevant to everyone, but it is often a double-edged sword. The technological conveniences are also surveillance tools. So, when you're learning about technology, learn about the full context; (ii) Recognize that neither party has a cohesive technology strategy, so she says we need to think outside the left/right or (R)/(D) partisan divide; and (iii) Push officials to legislate for the future, not the past. This, she says, may also involve learning about organizations like the Electronic Freedom Foundation or the Center for Democracy and Technology
   
   Here is the video:
   

h/t Bruce Schneier

Publisher retracts nearly 50 papers at once - In a December 3 statement, IEEE said that it has retracted 49 papers because of issues with the peer review process. The publisher said that "through no fault of the authors", the papers were being retracted for violations or irregularities in the peer review process. IEEE did not identify the papers, but Retraction Watch matched the count by carefully searching the publisher's portal, IEEE Explore. Retraction Watch identified 30 retracted papers in IEEE Transactions on Electromagnetic Compatibility and another 19 in CoCoNet. Of the 20,000 papers in the Retraction Watch database, IEEE is the publisher on about 7,500 of them. For follow-up, IEEE identified three continuing focus areas:Peer-review monitoring; IEEE Publications Policy updates; Deterrents and sanctions.

STEEM Virtual and Augmented Reality — They’re asleep and 5G should be the alarm. - In this post, @virteip begins by walking through the history of virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR), beginning with the Sword of Damocles in 1968, then being picked up by NASA, and on into the present-day gaming industry. After setting the stage, the post goes on to speculate that 5G wireless will provide a boost to speed the development of VR and AR applications because it provides higher speed and capacity for video bandwidth, and because it reduces latency. One of the key problems, it says, is that current users experience dizziness as a result of high latency, but the lower latency of 5G wireless will reduce or eliminate that problem. (A 10% beneficiary setting has been applied to this post for @virteip)

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