New Stent-like Electrode Allows Humans to Operate Computers With Their Thoughts – IEEE Spectrum

“The quality of the signals is sacrificed a little by the electrodes being in a blood vessel, rather than directly on brain tissue. But it’s good enough to allow the two participants in the study to accurately type up to 20 characters per minute with predictive text disabled, and do online shopping and banking, all without lifting a finger or using voice commands. “

Source: New Stent-like Electrode Allows Humans to Operate Computers With Their Thoughts – IEEE Spectrum

Exclusive: Humans placed in suspended animation for the first time | New Scientist

EPR involves rapidly cooling a person to around 10 to 15°C by replacing all of their blood with ice-cold saline. The patient’s brain activity almost completely stops. They are then disconnected from the cooling system and their body – which would otherwise be classified as dead – is moved to the operating theatre. A surgical team then has 2 hours to fix the person’s injuries before they are warmed up and their heart restarted.

Source: Exclusive: Humans placed in suspended animation for the first time | New Scientist

New Artificial Intelligence System Automatically Evolves to Evade Internet Censorship | College of Computer, Mathematical, and Natural Sciences

The researchers developed a tool called Geneva (short for Genetic Evasion), which automatically learns how to circumvent censorship. Tested in China, India and Kazakhstan, Geneva found dozens of ways to circumvent censorship by exploiting gaps in censors’ logic and finding bugs that the researchers say would have been virtually impossible for humans to find manually.

Source: New Artificial Intelligence System Automatically Evolves to Evade Internet Censorship | College of Computer, Mathematical, and Natural Sciences

The world’s first Gattaca baby tests are finally here – MIT Technology Review

Handed report cards on a batch of frozen embryos, parents can use the test results to try to choose the healthiest ones. The grades include risk estimates for diabetes, heart attacks, and five types of cancer.

According to flyers distributed by the company, it will also warn clients about any embryo predicted to become a person who is among the shortest 2% of the population, or who is in the lowest 2% in intelligence.”

Source: The world’s first Gattaca baby tests are finally here – MIT Technology Review

Check Your Halloween Candy For Malicious Payloads | Hackaday

We are living in the future.

“[MG] has produced a large quantity of these small devices, packaging them in anti-static wrappers. The wrappers contain a note instructing children to insert them into their parent’s work computers to access “game codes”, and to share them with their friends while hiding them from adults.”

Source: Check Your Halloween Candy For Malicious Payloads | Hackaday

My 20-Year Experience of Software Development Methodologies – zwischenzugs

‘Coming up with useful software methodologies is not easy. The difficulty lies not in defining them, but in convincing others to follow it. Much of the history of software development revolves around this question: how does one convince engineers to believe particular stories about the effectiveness of requirements gathering, story points, burndown charts or backlog grooming? Yet when adopted, it gives organisations immense power, because it enables distributed teams to cooperate and work towards delivery.

Source: My 20-Year Experience of Software Development Methodologies – zwischenzugs

I wrote the SQL query in 5 mins. Why does my engineer say it will take a month? – WTF Is My Engineer Talking About

[…] as the saying goes, a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. Much as I’m not a marketing professional just because that witty tweet I wrote that one time got 75 RT’s, you’re not an engineer because you sent an HTML email that looks great in all email clients except Outlook.

Let’s say you wrote an email template that you already sent out to some users, and you want to add a page with the same information to your website. Or you wrote a SQL query that you use for some analytics purposes and now you want your engineer to add something similar to the product – maybe as part of a dashboard, or maybe as a core feature. Easy, right? You already did the hard part!

Not necessarily. That query might be fine for one-off use, but may not be suitable for a production environment. Here are just a few reasons it might not be that simple.

Source: I wrote the SQL query in 5 mins. Why does my engineer say it will take a month? – WTF Is My Engineer Talking About