Widely Popular Nanoparticles Could Be Giving You Cancer, Nutritional Deficiencies

There is a bit of controversy revolving around nanoparticles, which involve the manipulation of elements as well as other matter on an atomic and molecular scale. Found in consumer products, many foods, and in pharmaceutical drugs, nanoparticles are increasingly being found in more products every year. Many people assume nanoparticles are safe, but they have actually been shown to pose a threat to your health.

Nanoparticles Shown to be Dangerous, Block Nutrient Absorption

According to the Project on Emerging Nanotechnologies (PEN), over 1,300 manufacturer nanotechnology-enabled products are in the global commercial marketplace. Nanoparticles can be found in car batteries, appliances, aluminum foil, non-stick cookware, and is especially present in health and fitness items. PEN Director David Rejeski states:

“The use of nanotechnology in consumer products continues to grow on a rapid and consistent basis…when we launched the inventory in March 2006 it contained 212 products. If the current trend continues, the number of products could reach 3,400 by 2020.”

Nanotechnology is much like organism-based biotechnology, where even supporters of the technologies know there needs to be more long term testing to determine safety. Genetically modified foods have already been shown to cause numerous health and environmental complications, but they continue to be pushed. Similarly, nanotechnology is believed by some to be the ‘next industrial revolution’, but like genetically modified foods, it has never been proven totally safe for use or consumption.

A recent study published in the journal Nature titled “Oral exposure to polystyrene nanoparticles affects iron absorption” examined chickens fed a diet which included polystyrene nanoparticles. Researchers found that intestinal changes affecting iron absorption occurred due to the polystyrene nanoparticles. They also expect to see an alteration in absorption of calcium, copper, zinc, and vitamins A, D, E, and K.

Another study conducted in 2004 found that nanoparticles cause brain damage in fish and other aquatic species.

In addition, Oxford University and Montreal University in 1997 linked titanium dioxide and zinc oxide nanoparticles in sunscreen to free radical and DNA damage. But still, even in 2011, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration declined to put any warning labels on sunscreens that contain nanomaterials.

Scientists worry about the place nanoparticles have in our society. These particles have fundamentally different physical, biological, and chemical properties than their larger counterparts, and continue to be shown as a danger to human health.

Source: Natural Society

Facebook Building Major Artificial Intelligence System To Understand Who We Are

Meaningful artificial intelligence has been the aim of computer science since Alan Turing first imagined, in the 1950s, a computer that “passed” as human. Hollywood movies began shortly thereafter to depict computers with human-like intelligence. But, like so many things, artificial intelligence has been much harder to achieve in reality than in the movies.

But following research breakthroughs about five years ago, leading tech companies, including Microsoft, IBM and Google, have begun investing big money in artificial intelligence applications.

Facebook, not wanting to be left behind, is flexing its muscles, too. In addition to expanding its use of facial recognition, the company is developing deep learning software to understand what its users say and do online, a spokesman confirmed for Singularity Hub. (The project was first reported in MIT’s Technology Review.)

Much of Wall Street’s interest in Facebook, albeit fickle, has stemmed from the potential commercial value of what the social network knows about its users. Unless Facebook is considering major changes to its business plan, the company will use artificial intelligence to learn more about its users than what they share.

And Facebook has a lot of data from which an artificial learning setup could draw inferences.

“Places like Google and Facebook now have so much data that the kinds of networks you can train and the kinds of things you can learn from that have basically been unimaginable,” Bhiksha Raj, a machine learning expert at Carnegie Mellon University, told Singularity Hub.

“If you feed all this information, the computer is basically going to develop the ability to make sense of the inputs. Then you’ve trained a network that can scan your page and those of your friends and tell you all kinds of things about you that you hadn’t put out there, and that really is the holy grail for all of these companies,” Raj said.

It’s possible, too, that the agreements that govern what Facebook does with users’ data won’t apply to the data the company generates about its users with its neural networks.

“It’s kind of no man’s land at this point. We haven’t gotten to the point where people have begun worrying about that kind of thing, but we’re going to get there pretty fast,” Raj said.

Notable deep learning projects have already allowed computers to recognize in photos and videos the faces of humans and cats and to identify the emotions behind written content even when they’re not stated explicitly. And before Facebook acquired the company in 2012, Face.com claimed its software could identify which photographed smiles were genuine and which were fake.

Facebook has more experience with facial recognition applications of artificial intelligence, but it moved in to natural language processing with the search feature it launched this summer.

Facebook’s current staffing for the AI project suggests the company will use deep learning to dive deeper into both computer vision and natural language processing. Face.com co-founder Yaniv Taigman and Lubomir Bourdev will contribute expertise on computer vision. But natural language expert Srini Narayanan is building the project’s staff, and Graph Search veteran Keith Adams will also move to the AI project.

Facebook has poached Marc’Aurelio Ranzato from Google’s deep learning project, likely to deliver expertise in how to start the computers learning. Ranzato studied under Geoffrey Hinton, the University of Toronto computer scientist whose research into how best to train deep neural networks has spurred much of the current activity in the field.

Deep learning builds on the longtime use of “neural networks,” or computing systems that simulate the teamwork among neurons in the human brain. Instead of having each neuron, or detector, look for a particular input, which requires too many detectors to be plausible, scientists assign each layer a different task that builds on the first.

“You’re attempting to [have the computer] learn a succession of levels of representation of increasing complexity and abstraction,” Christopher Manning explained in an influential video tutorial on deep learning.

Once the layers have been set up, they can be fine-tuned to handle different sorts of inputs. In other words, such a system will be a big investment for Facebook but one that promises big payoffs.

Source: Singularity Hub

Now MasterCard Wants Your Fingerprints…

Earlier this week, USA Today reported that massive payment processor MasterCard had joined the FIDO alliance. FIDO is an acronym for Fast IDentity Online, and the group describes itself as:

Image: Mastercard.

The FIDO (Fast IDentity Online) Alliance is a 501(c)6 non-profit organization nominally formed in July 2012 to address the lack of interoperability among strong authentication devices as well as the problems users face with creating and remembering multiple usernames and passwords. The FIDO Alliance plans to change the nature of authentication by developing specifications that define an open, scalable, interoperable set of mechanisms that supplant reliance on passwords to securely authenticate users of online services. This new standard for security devices and browser plugins will allow any website or cloud application to interface with a broad variety of existing and future FIDO-enabled devices that the user has for online security.

USA Today reports that:

SAN FRANCISCO — MasterCard is joining the FIDO Alliance, signaling that the payment network is getting interested in using fingerprints and other biometric data to identify people for online payments.

MasterCard will be the first major payment network to join FIDO. The Alliance is developing an open industry standard for biometric data such as fingerprints to be used for identification online. The goal is to replace clunky passwords and take friction out of logging on and purchasing using mobile devices.

It’s for your own good, and it’ll probably fight terrorism too!

Apple’s new iPhone 5s smartphone has a fingerprint sensor, but the tech giant is not part of FIDO. However, Google is part of the Alliance, and devices running Google’s Android operating system will have fingerprint sensors by next year.

I’m sure the folks at the Department of Homeland Security will be more than happy that the financial giant will make mass collection under its Biometric Optical Surveillance System (BOSS) that much easier. Serfs up suckers!

Full article here.