Google Challenges Trump With a Google Doodle

Google honored Fred Korematsu on Monday in its daily Doodle in celebration of what would have been his 98th birthday. It isn't a milestone year, but the homage may just be a reference to Donald Trump's "Muslim ban," which put a 120-day halt on the entry to the U.S. of any refugees, a 90-day halt for all citizens of seven Muslim-majority countries, and an indefinite halt on all refugees from Syria. Perhaps Google has thrown shade before, but it's abundantly clear that one of the world's largest tech companies — that is headquartered in America and co-founded by an immigrant — is not holding back against Trump's executive order. Google cofounder Sergey Brin was spotted protesting at San Francisco International Airport Saturday.


Back in 1942, Korematsu, along with thousands of other Japanese-Americans, was forced to leave his home under an executive order by President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Following Japan's bombing of Pearl Harbor, the president demanded law enforcement to identify and move Japanese-Americans into designated military zones. Korematsu refused to go into the government's internment camps and was arrested and convicted of breaking military law. With the help of the ACLU, Korematsu appealed in the landmark Supreme Court case of Korematsu v. United States, but in 1944 the court ruled against him. He and his family were then sent to the Central Utah War Relocation Center until the end of the war in 1945. Korematsu remained an activist throughout his life, becoming a member of the National Coalition for Redress and Reparations, where he lobbied for a bill that would grant an official apology from the government and compensation of $20,000 for the Japanese Americans who were held in internment camps. In 1988, President Ronald Reagan signed the reparations legislation and redress into law.



Credits:
http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/01/30/512488821/its-fred-korematsu-day-celebrating-a-foe-of-u-s-internment-camps

"Rogue" accounts that have the look of those by real federal agencies are spreading like wildfire on Twitter. The AltUSNatParkService Twitter account has gained more than 1 million followers and inspired the creation of many more "unofficial resistance" accounts for specific national parks and other entities, including accounts like Rogue NASA and AltUSForestService.

Some of these accounts — this list has compiled more than 80 of them — initially claimed to be run by members of these organizations, but many have since altered their descriptions, or in the case of the alternative National Park Service have said the account was handed off to environmentalists and activists. But that's just it. These are all claims. None of the account owners have come forward and identified themselves. Instead, they are choosing to remain anonymous and continue tweeting out facts about climate change and directly opposing the Trump administration.

Click here for the video.

Robotic Salad Tosser

The Useless Duck Company's YouTube description is short and sweet: "Useless inventions and overall madness." The channel's latest entry? The Useless Salad Machine, a robot that wants to be helpful but can't quite pull it off without making a mess. The Useless Salad Machine, which includes quite a few 3D-printed components, takes on the chore of tossing a salad. The gadget holds a set of salad serving spoons. You place the contraption over a bowl and let it go to work. This sounds innocent, but it's really a chaotic demon in disguise.

The machine features several modes. The simple-toss mode launches the entire bowl onto the floor. The second mode causes the bot to jump up and down while flipping its spoons around, sending lettuce pieces flying onto the counter. The final option is turbo mode, which is a more enthusiastic version of the second mode and ends up catching the salad on fire for dramatic effect. The one-off kitchen gadget isn't available to buy, which is fine since you won't want one anyway. At least we know the Useless Salad Machine isn't entirely useless after all. It's definitely good for a laugh.



Credits:
www.cnet.com/news/robot-useless-salad-machines/

A "Soft robot" Helps Hearts Beat

Harvard University and Boston Children’s Hospital researchers have developed a customizable soft robot that fits around the heart and helps it beat, potentially opening new treatment options for people suffering from heart failure. The soft robotic sleeve twists and compresses in synch with a beating heart, augmenting cardiovascular functions weakened by heart failure. Unlike currently available devices that assist heart function, Harvard’s soft robotic sleeve does not directly contact blood.

Heart failure affects 41 million people worldwide. Today, some of the treatment options are mechanical pumps called ventricular assist devices (VADs), which pump blood from the ventricles into the aorta, and heart transplants. While VADs are continuously improving, patients are still at high risk for blood clots and stroke. To create an entirely new device that doesn’t come into contact with blood, Harvard researchers took inspiration from the heart itself. The thin silicone sleeve uses soft pneumatic actuators placed around the heart to mimic the outer muscle layers of the mammalian heart. The actuators twist and compress the sleeve in a motion similar to the beating heart.

Click here for the video.

Credits:
http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2017/01/soft-robot-helps-the-heart-beat/

Obama Commutes Chelsea Manning's Sentence

President Barack Obama has shortened the prison sentence of Chelsea Manning, the former US military intelligence analyst who was responsible for a 2010 leak of classified materials to anti-secrecy group WikiLeaks, the biggest such breach in US history. A White House official said there was no connection between Manning's commutation and renewed US government concern about WikiLeaks' actions during last year's presidential election, or a promise by founder Julian Assange to accept extradition if Manning was freed.

Manning has been a focus of a worldwide debate on government secrecy since she provided more than 700,000 documents, videos, diplomatic cables and battlefield accounts to WikiLeaks - a leak for which she was sentenced to serve 35 years in prison. Obama, in one of his final acts before leaving office, reduced her sentence to seven years, angering some Republicans. "This is just outrageous," House of Representatives Speaker Paul Ryan said in a statement. Ryan, a Republican, said the decision was a "dangerous precedent" for those who leak materials about national security. "Chelsea Manning's treachery put American lives at risk and exposed some of our nation's most sensitive secrets," Ryan said.


Credits:
http://www.aljazeera.com/news/2017/01/obama-cuts-short-chelsea-manning-prison-sentence-170117215031015.html

A Digital Assistant for the Elderly

Startup Intuition Robotics emerged from stealth today, announcing a social robot aimed at keeping older adults active and engaged. The design and actions of the artificial intelligence-based device, ElliQ, make it look and feel less like a traditional robot and more as a friendly and approachable digital companion.

The world’s advanced economies are facing today the challenge of responding to the needs of a rapidly aging population (about 15% of people in the United States and 26% in Japan are older than 65). Loneliness and social isolation are serious issues that sometimes accelerate specific health conditions and worsen the physical disabilities of older adults. “We felt that in our next venture we wanted to do something that will have actual meaning and impact in people’s lives,” says CEO and co-founder Dor Skuler, a serial entrepreneur with background in cyber security and cloud computing, explaining the motivation for founding Intuition Robotics.


Something or nothing: http://tinyurl.com/heskxdr

Credits:
http://www.androidheadlines.com/2017/01/older-adults-now-digital-assistant-system-elli-q.html

Googles Lunar xPrize -- One year to go

The $30M Google Lunar XPRIZE is an unprecedented competition to challenge and inspire engineers, entrepreneurs and innovators from around the world to develop low-cost methods of robotic space exploration. The first team that successfully completes this mission will be awarded the $20 million Grand Prize. The second team to successfully complete the mission will be awarded $5 million. To win either of these prizes, teams must prove that 90% of their mission costs were funded by private sources. Teams have until the end of 2016 to announce a verified launch contract to remain in the competition and complete their mission by the end of 2017.

The Google Lunar XPRIZE (GLXP), sometimes referred to as Moon 2.0, is an inducement prize space competition organized by XPRIZE, and sponsored by Google. The challenge calls for privately funded spaceflight teams to be the first to land a privately funded robotic spacecraft on the Moon, travel 500 meters, and transmit back high-definition video and images. In 2015, XPRIZE announced that the competition deadline would be extended to December 2017 if at least one team could secure a verified launch contract. Two teams secured such a launch contract, and the deadline was extended. As of 2016, 14 teams remain in the competition, with five teams, SpaceIL, Moon Express, Synergy Moon ,Team Indus and Team Hakuto, having secured verified launch contracts for 2017 (with SpaceX, Rocket Lab, Interorbital Systems, ISRO and ISRO respectively). All other teams had until the end of 2016 to secure a verified launch contract, and remain in the competition.



Credits:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-4125474/Moon-Express-gets-closer-mining-lunar-surface.html

AmpMe Allows Music to Sync Over Various Phones

A small company called AmpMe rolled out an app with a clever premise — it let you sync audio playback across any number of phones, offering users a (hopefully) better option for filling a room with music than just placing a phone in a bowl. Today the company is taking the idea a step further with an update to the app that extends AmpMe to Bluetooth speakers.

The basic workings remain the same. Everyone still needs to use the AmpMe app — which is free and available on iOS or Android. One person acts as the “host,” and they can play music from SoundCloud, YouTube, or their own local library. AmpMe uses high-frequency sounds to sync all the devices together, and rom there, there’s no upper limit on the amount of speakers or phones you can loop together. The only limit is that you can only connect one speaker to each phone.



Credits:

http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-38526187

Happy Anniversary Mars Rover Spirit (RIP)

NASA's epic and ongoing Mars Exploration Rover (MER) mission began its Red Planet operations 13 years ago today (Jan. 3), with the touchdown of a six-wheeled robot named Spirit. Spirit landed on the night of Jan. 3, 2004, and its twin, Opportunity, followed three weeks later. The two MER rovers were tasked with hunting for signs of past water activity near their touchdown sites, which were in very different parts of the Red Planet.

That search was initially supposed to last just three months, but both Spirit and Opportunity kept chugging along for years. Spirit finally got bogged down in soft Martian sand in April 2009; as a result, the rover wasn't able to re-orient its solar panels to track the sun through the harsh Red Planet winter, and Spirit essentially froze to death. Spirit made many important discoveries during its six years of work on Mars. Perhaps the most exciting came when the rover's crippled right-front wheel dug a trench in the dirt of Gusev Crater, revealing bright-white silica. On Earth, such deposits are created by hot water reacting with rock, so Spirit likely uncovered an ancient Martian hydrothermal system, NASA officials have said. The find strongly suggested that, long ago, at least some parts of Mars harbored liquid water and an energy source — two key ingredients necessary for life as we know it.

Spirit found other evidence that liquid water flowed across Mars in the past (as did Opportunity). The rover also photographed dust devils and Martian clouds, and it captured the first image of Earth ever taken from the surface of another planet. Spirit's death didn't mark the end of the $800 million MER mission. Opportunity remains active to this day, and, an arthritic robotic arm and some issues with its flash memory notwithstanding, it's quite healthy, MER team members have said. In fact, Opportunity had logged over 27 miles on Mars, a rover record that continues to be expanded.



Credits:
http://www.space.com/35168-spirit-mars-rover-13th-anniversary.html

How Did Russia Hack the US Election

The FBI squarely blamed Russian intelligence services on Thursday for meddling in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, releasing the most definitive report yet on the issue, including samples of malicious computer code said to have been used in a broad hacking campaign. Starting in mid-2015, Russia’s foreign intelligence agency, the FSB, emailed a malicious link to more than 1,000 recipients, including U.S. government targets, the Federal Bureau of Investigation said in a 13-page report co-authored with the Department of Homeland Security.

According to the report, "[The Russian Intelligence Services (RIS) was] part of an ongoing campaign of cyber-enabled operations directed at the U.S. government and its citizens. These cyber operations have included spearphishing campaigns targeting government organizations, critical infrastructure entities, think tanks, universities, political organizations, and corporations leading to the theft of information. In foreign countries, RIS actors conducted damaging and/or disruptive cyber-attacks, including attacks on critical infrastructure networks. In some cases, RIS actors masqueraded as third parties, hiding behind false online personas designed to cause the victim to misattribute the source of the attack. This JAR provides technical indicators related to many of these operations, recommended mitigations, suggested actions to take in response to the indicators provided, and information on how to report such incidents to the U.S. Government. 

Click here for the video.



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