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ASML—Europe’s most valuable tech company and manufacturer of the world’s most advanced chip-making machines—found itself in the middle of a purported U.S.-led effort to restrict China’s access to advanced semiconductors as the firm’s shares were hit Friday by a new Dutch law restricting the export of advanced chip manufacturing tools on national security grounds.
According to Reuters, the Dutch government’s move follows pressure from the U.S. as ASML’s equipment contains some U.S.-made components
The new rules, which will go into effect on September 1, will require Dutch companies—primarily ASML—to seek government authorization for exporting “certain types of advanced semiconductor manufacturing equipment.”
A trade war between China and the United States over the future of semiconductors is escalating.
Beijing hit back Monday by playing a trump card: It imposed export controls on two strategic raw materials, gallium and germanium, that are critical to the global chipmaking industry.
“We see this as China’s second, and much bigger, counter measure to the tech war, and likely a response to the potential US tightening of [its] AI chip ban,” said Jefferies analysts. Sanctioning one of America’s biggest memory chipmakers, Micron Technology (MU), in May was the first, they said.
Here’s what you need to know about gallium and germanium, how they could play into the chip war and whether more countermeasures could be coming.
Last October, the Biden administration unveiled a set of export controls banning Chinese companies from buying advanced chips and chip-making equipment without a license.
Chips are vital for everything from smartphones and self-driving cars to advanced computing and weapons manufacturing. US officials have talked about the move as a measure to protect national security interests.
But it didn’t stop there. For the curbs to be effective, Washington needed other key suppliers, located in the Netherlands and Japan, to join. They did.
China eventually retaliated. In April, it launched a cybersecurity probe into Micron before banning the company from selling to Chinese companies working on key infrastructure projects. On Monday, Beijing announced the restrictions on gallium and germanium.
The Biden administration is preparing to restrict Chinese companies’ access to U.S. cloud-computing services, according to people familiar with the situation, in a move that could further strain relations between the world’s economic superpowers.
The new rule, if adopted, would likely require U.S. cloud-service providers such as Amazon (AMZN.O) and Microsoft (MSFT.O) to seek U.S. government permission before they provide cloud-computing services that use advanced artificial-intelligence chips to Chinese customers, the newspaper said.
The U.S. Department of Commerce is expected to implement the restriction in coming weeks as part of an expansion of its semiconductor export control policy introduced in October, the it said.
Have you ever been compelled to enter sensitive payment data on the website of an unknown merchant? Would you be willing to consign your credit card data or passwords to untrustworthy hands? Scientists from the University of Vienna have now designed an unconditionally secure system for shopping in such settings, combining modern cryptographic techniques with the fundamental properties of quantum light. The demonstration of such "quantum-digital payments" in a realistic environment has been published in Nature Communications.
A research team led by Prof. Philip Walther from the University of Vienna has shown how the quantum properties of light particles or photons can ensure unconditional security for digital payments.
In an experiment the researchers have demonstrated that each transaction cannot be duplicated or diverted by malicious parties, and that the user's sensitive data stays private. "I am really impressed how the quantum properties of light can be used for protecting new applications such as digital payments that are relevant in our every day's life," says Tobias Guggemos.
For enabling absolute secure digital payments, the scientists replaced classical cryptographic techniques with a quantum protocol exploiting single photons. During the course of a classical digital payment transaction the client shares a classical code—called cryptogram—with his payment provider (e.g. a bank or credit card company).
"At present, our protocol takes a few minutes of quantum communication to complete a transaction. This is to guarantee security in the presence of noise and losses," says Peter Schiansky, first author of the paper. "However, these time limitations are only of technological nature," adds Matthieu Bozzio, who is convinced that "we will witness that quantum-digital payments reach practical performance in the very near future."
Women seeking jobs at billionaire Microsoft founder and philanthropist Bill Gates' private office, Gates Ventures, were asked incredibly inappropriate and invasive questions about sensitive topics including sexual behavior and drug histories, The Wall Street Journal reports.
Per the report, some women who interviewed for the roles at Gates Ventures were grilled about pornography preferences, whether they'd ever had extramarital affairs, or if they had "nude photographs of themselves on their phones." One woman reportedly told the WSJ that she'd been asked if she'd ever "danced for money," while another woman said she was asked if she'd ever had an STI.
Meanwhile, according to the WSJ, none of the men who interviewed for similar Gates Ventures positions recounted being asked such invasive questions.
According to the report, it's believed that the security firm tasked with interviewing candidates, called Concentric, was attempting to seek information about candidates' backgrounds that might make them vulnerable to external blackmail while working for one of the world's richest and most powerful men. But it's also the latest in what's now a years-long string of concerning reports about the treatment of women within Gates-led companies and even by Gates himself — and as a result, yet another blow to Gates' formerly squeaky-clean reputation.
UPSIDE Foods, a California-based lab-grown meat company, recently announced that it received approval from the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) to start commercial production and sales of its cultivated chicken.
originally posted by: socialmediaclown
Transgenic soybeans could replace pork, by producing pig proteins
Great strides are being made in the field of lab-grown meat, but its price remains a barrier to wide commercial use. British startup Moolec has created what it claims is a less costly alternative, in the form of soya plants that produce pig-protein-rich beans.
Although the details of Moolec's molecular farming technology are a trade secret, the company states that it has added pig genes to the genome of regular soya plants. As a result, a quarter of the proteins in those plants' "Piggy Sooy" beans are pig proteins – 26.6%, to be precise. The flesh of the soybeans even has a pink, pork-like color.
newatlas.com...
“We took the human genome, cut it into 173 puzzle pieces and rearranged it to make a pig,” explains animal geneticist Lawrence Schook. “Everything matches up perfectly. The pig is genetically very close to humans.”
On July 3, 2023, WiMi Hologram Cloud is revolutionizing the field of human-robot collaboration with their groundbreaking digital twin-based system. By seamlessly integrating the physical and digital realms, this innovative technology enables the supervision and prediction of both human and robot digital models.
WiMi Hologram Cloud’s dedication to pushing the boundaries of virtual interaction is evident in their development of an intelligent system powered by digital twin technology. This cutting-edge system opens up new possibilities for efficient and meaningful collaboration between humans and robots.
In a significant milestone, WiMi Hologram Cloud announced in May 2023 the successful creation of a human-robot interaction system that harnesses the power of machine learning algorithms. This breakthrough further solidifies their position as pioneers in the field, propelling the future of human-robot collaboration to new heights.
San Francisco–based A.I. startup, Inflection AI, just raised $1.3 billion in a new round of funding from the likes of Microsoft, Nvidia, and former Google CEO Eric Schmidt—not to mention a certain Bill Gates. The funding will support further development of Inflection AI’s first product, a personal assistant and companion named Pi (Personal A.I.), which was launched in May.
The funding brings the total Inflection has raised to $1.5 billion. The company had previously raised $225 million in early 2022 from some of the same investors, as well as former Meta chief technology officer Mike “Schrep” Schroepfer plus Google DeepMind cofounder and CEO Demis Hassabis, and pop artist Will.i.am.
Inflection’s goal is to build a kind of universal A.I.-powered digital assistant. Many technologists, including Gates, see this kind of assistant as the future for all human-computer interaction.
“Every person will have an A.I. assistant/coach/mentor/trainer/advisor/therapist that is infinitely patient, infinitely compassionate, infinitely knowledgeable, and infinitely helpful,” Andreessen wrote in June. “The A.I. assistant will be present through all of life’s opportunities and challenges, maximizing every person’s outcom
“I think everybody is going to have a chief of staff in their pocket that is knowledgeable, kind, supportive, and also very practical,” Suleyman said during a Collision livestream on Thursday. “There aren’t any humans that can do all of those skills at once in a single experience and a single person…It’ll be consigliere, it’ll be confidante, it’ll be chief of staff, it’ll be coach, it’ll be educator and teacher, all in one.”
A woman whose epilepsy was greatly improved by an experimental brain implant was devastated when, just two years after getting it, she was forced to have it removed due to the company that made it going bankrupt.
As the MIT Technology Review reports, an Australian woman named Rita Leggett who received an experimental seizure-tracking brain-computer interface (BCI) implant from the now-defunct company Neuravista in 2010 has become a stark example not only of the ways neurotech can help people, but also of the trauma of losing access to them when experiments end or companies go under.
Leggett, who declined to be interviewed by the Tech Review after a recent stroke, also developed a symbiotic relationship with the implant, and told the researchers behind the Brain Stimulation paper that she and the BCI "became one."
"I wish I could’ve kept it," Leggett told Gilbert, who regularly interviews her. "I would have done anything to keep it."
"I have never again felt as safe and secure... nor am I the happy, outgoing, confident woman I was,” she continued. "I still get emotional thinking and talking about my device... I’m missing and it’s missing."
Her experience, the researcher said, was a form of "trauma," and she isn't alone — with more and more experiments like Neuravista's cropping up, so too does the sense of loss experienced at the trials' ends by participants who have particularly good outcomes.
In fact, it calls to mind a similar incident last year in which the manufacturer of a bionic eye decided the units were obsolete, leading patients who'd had them implanted to lose their vision again.
It sounds like dystopian fiction that biotech companies could play takesie-backsies with patients' implants, in other words, but the reality is we've already crossed into that world. And if devices such as Leggett's BCI can, as she suggested to researchers over the years, become part of a person, then their removal "represents a form of modification of the self," Ienca said, and he and his coauthors are arguing that there need to be updated patients' rights when it comes to these sorts of outcomes.
originally posted by: CrazyFox
originally posted by: socialmediaclown
Transgenic soybeans could replace pork, by producing pig proteins
Great strides are being made in the field of lab-grown meat, but its price remains a barrier to wide commercial use. British startup Moolec has created what it claims is a less costly alternative, in the form of soya plants that produce pig-protein-rich beans.
Although the details of Moolec's molecular farming technology are a trade secret, the company states that it has added pig genes to the genome of regular soya plants. As a result, a quarter of the proteins in those plants' "Piggy Sooy" beans are pig proteins – 26.6%, to be precise. The flesh of the soybeans even has a pink, pork-like color.
newatlas.com...
human pig
“We took the human genome, cut it into 173 puzzle pieces and rearranged it to make a pig,” explains animal geneticist Lawrence Schook. “Everything matches up perfectly. The pig is genetically very close to humans.”
Pretty easy to hide something in plain sight.
edit on 2023/7/4 by CrazyFox because:
Water cremation is set to be made available for the first time in the UK.
The process, known as resomation, uses a mix of potassium hydroxide and water to break down human remains in what is billed as a more sustainable option.
It takes four hours - the bones remain, and are powdered then returned to loved ones in a similar way to ashes, in an urn.
Resomation is used in Canada, South Africa and many US states.According to the founder of the company, Sandy Sullivan, the liquid used in resomation is "safely returned to the water cycle free from any traces of DNA".
originally posted by: nugget1
Water cremation is set to be made available for the first time in the UK.
The process, known as resomation, uses a mix of potassium hydroxide and water to break down human remains in what is billed as a more sustainable option.
It takes four hours - the bones remain, and are powdered then returned to loved ones in a similar way to ashes, in an urn.
Resomation is used in Canada, South Africa and many US states.According to the founder of the company, Sandy Sullivan, the liquid used in resomation is "safely returned to the water cycle free from any traces of DNA".
[Water cremation: Co-op Funeralcare to be first UK company to offer resomation]
Soylent Green indeed.
www.lifesitenews.com...
Wisconsin Senate approves bill to dissolve dead bodies, dump them in sewer
For now
According to the Cremation Association of North America (CANA), the practice involves a pressurized vat that typically can hold around 100 gallons of liquid. Deceased people placed in the chamber can be heated at up to 302 degrees and bathed in lye, an industrial chemical agent used as a drain cleaner, to induce rapid decomposition.
Drought-stricken US warned of looming 'dead pool'
water level is now so low that bodies of murder victims from decades back, once hidden by its depths, have surfaced
Fact check: No, aquamation remnants are not used to 'feed the dead to the living
www.usatoday.com...
told me it is safe and effective
Fact
"Check out this death chamber, this washing machine," it says. "They call it 'aquamation,' where they liquify the dead and then dump the remains down the drain to be recycled into the municipal water supply. ... And they’re grinding up the bones into powder. They call this calcium phosphate, which is going to be used for food processing undoubtedly.
Our rating: False
Alkaline hydrolysis, or "aquamation," is the process of decomposing a human body with hot water and a strong base solution. There is no human DNA, flesh or pathogens left at the end of the procedure, experts told USA TODAY. The bones are given to the family, not put into the food supply.
New body 'liquefaction' unit unveiled in Florida funeral home
Body tissue is dissolved and the liquid poured into the municipal water system. Mr Sullivan, a biochemist by training, says tests have proven the effluent is sterile and contains no DNA, and poses no environmental risk.
Significant flooding along Chicago River prompts unusual decision to reverse water flow
originally posted by: socialmediaclown
The funding brings the total Inflection has raised to $1.5 billion. The company had previously raised $225 million in early 2022 from some of the same investors, as well as former Meta chief technology officer Mike “Schrep” Schroepfer plus Google DeepMind cofounder and CEO Demis Hassabis, and pop artist Will.i.am.