The sin of “hubris” - Pearls and Irritations
▻https://johnmenadue.com/the-sin-of-hubris
The sin of “#hubris” is to shame and humiliate others for pleasure or gratification. Such narcissistic pleasures were considered offensive to the gods of ancient Greece; a case of breaching the boundaries between the human and divine realms.
In the grand theatre of international politics, hubris and tragedy often share the stage. The saga of Western involvement in Ukraine stands as a testament to the maxim that those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.
]]>Inside the quest to engineer climate-saving “super trees” | MIT Technology Review
▻https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/06/08/1074287/inside-the-quest-to-engineer-climate-saving-super-trees
On ne sait pas comment ça fonctionne... mais on va quand même planter des arbre génétiquement modifiés au bord de forêts !
L’hubris scientifique ou la hype technologique... en tout cas un bon marché à court terme, la société gèrera les problèmes à long terme s’ils adviennent.
Et pendant ce temps là on continue à déboiser, à mal gérer les forêts et à détruire le cycle de l’eau.
At Living Carbon, Mellor is trying to design trees that grow faster and grab more carbon than their natural peers, as well as trees that resist rot, keeping that carbon out of the atmosphere. In February, less than four years after he co-founded it, the company made headlines by planting its first “photosynthesis-enhanced” poplar trees in a strip of bottomland forests in Georgia.
This is a breakthrough, clearly: it’s the first forest in the United States that contains genetically engineered trees. But there’s still much we don’t know. How will these trees affect the rest of the forest? How far will their genes spread? And how good are they, really, at pulling more carbon from the atmosphere?
Living Carbon has already sold carbon credits for its new forest to individual consumers interested in paying to offset some of their own greenhouse gas emissions. They’re working with larger companies, to which they plan to deliver credits in the coming years. But academics who study forest health and tree photosynthesis question whether the trees will be able to absorb as much carbon as advertised.
Even Steve Strauss, a prominent tree geneticist at Oregon State University who briefly served on Living Carbon’s scientific advisory board and is conducting field trials for the company, told me in the days before the first planting that the trees might not grow as well as natural poplars. “I’m kind of a little conflicted,” he said, “that they’re going ahead with this—all the public relations and the financing—on something that we don’t know if it works.”
“One of the things that concerns me is [Living Carbon is] just focusing on carbon acquisition,” says Marjorie Lundgren, a researcher at Lancaster University in the UK who has studied tree species with natural adaptations leading to increased photosynthetic efficiency. She notes that trees need more than just carbon and sunlight to grow; they need water and nitrogen, too. “The reason they have such a high growth rate is because in the lab, you can just super-baby them—you can give them lots of water and fertilizer and everything they need,” she says. “Unless you put resources in, which is time and money, and not great for the environment, either, then you’re not going to have those same outcomes.”
Living Carbon’s paper acknowledges as much, citing nitrogen as a potential challenge and noting that how the trees move carbon may become a limiting factor. The extra sugars produced through what the company calls “enhanced photosynthesis” must be transported to the right places, something trees haven’t typically evolved to do.
Et bien évidemment cela marche sur l’arnaque aux crédits carbone
Living Carbon funds its plantings—and makes its profits—by selling credits for the extra carbon the trees absorb. Currently, the company is offering “pre-purchases,” in which companies make a commitment to buy a future credit, paying a small portion of the fee up front to help Living Carbon survive long enough to deliver results.
New research shows that California’s climate policy created up to 39 million carbon credits that aren’t achieving real carbon savings. But companies can buy these forest offsets to justify polluting more anyway.
The company has found that these buyers are more interested in projects with ecosystem benefits, which is why the first project, in Georgia, has become an outlier. There has been a subsequent planting in Ohio; this and all currently planned plantings are not near sawmills or in active timber harvesting regions. Thus, the company does not expect those trees to be harvested.
Wherever they plant trees—whether atop an old minefield or in a timber-producing forest—Living Carbon will pay the landowner an annual per-acre fee and cover the cost of plant site preparation and planting. At the end of the contract, after 30 or 40 years, the landowner can do whatever they want with the trees. If the trees grow as well as is hoped, Living Carbon assumes that even on timber land, their size would mean they’d be turned into “long-duration wood products,” like lumber for construction, rather than shredded to make pulp or paper.
Until recently, Living Carbon was also selling small-scale credits to individual consumers. When we spoke in February, Mellor pointed me toward Patch, a software company with a carbon-credit sales platform. The Georgia project was marketed there as “biotech-enhanced reforestation.” The credits were offered as a monthly subscription, at a price of $40 per metric ton of carbon removed.
When I pressed Mellor for details about how the company calculated this price, given the lack of any solid data on the trees’ performance, he told me something the company had not acknowledged in any public-facing documentation: 95% of the saplings at the Georgia site were not photosynthesis-enhanced. The GE poplar trees were planted in randomized experimental plots, with controls for comparison, and contribute only a small amount to the site’s projected carbon savings. Despite the advertising, then, customers were really paying for a traditional reforestation project with a small experiment tucked inside.
]]>Réception pour l’avenir de la recherche française – Docs en stock : dans les coulisses de la démocratie universitaire
Blog de Julien Gossa
▻https://blog.educpros.fr/julien-gossa/2023/12/12/reception-pour-lavenir-de-la-recherche-francaise
Le Président Emmanuel Macron a reçu plus de 300 chercheurs, représentants d’établissements supérieurs, instituts de recherche, institutionnels et chefs d’entreprises, pour présenter sa vision pour l’avenir de la recherche française, ce jeudi 7 décembre 2023 au Palais de l’Élysée. Gros verbatim et petit résumé.
[...]
[Résumé du contenu de la réforme en] Trois grands axes
– Faire de nos organismes nationaux de recherche de vraies agences de programme.
– Écrire l’acte II de l’autonomie des universités.
– Installer le Conseil présidentiel de la science.
Pas de nouveauté...
[...]
Mais une opportunité [sic]
Damage Control
[...]
En clair, les deux annonces principales de M. Macron viennent d’être à la fois saluées et torpillée par les managers. La confusion est donc à son comble, comme en atteste la demande de clarification du SNCS-FSU. Cette confusion est tout à fait dommageable à une réforme qui vise à clarifier. L’avenir nous dira si ces managers étaient sincères, ou s’il ne s’agissait que d’une manœuvre pour endormir les personnels et pouvoir travailler en paix à la réforme de leurs statuts.
#université #recherche #statuts #précarisation #concentration #_excellence_ #Macron #ivresse_du_pouvoir #hubris jamais d’#évaluation des politiques publiques menées #déclin de la science française #Pécresse
]]>Usbek & Rica - « Les riches nous imposent une société de #pornopulence »
J’aime bien (non) ce nouveau mot dièse.
▻https://usbeketrica.com/fr/article/les-riches-nous-imposent-une-societe-de-pornopulence
Mégayachts, îles artificielles, bitcoin, fusées, soirées arrosées… Les mille visages de la #richesse s’étalent chaque jour en Une de l’actualité, sur les réseaux sociaux et, surtout, dans notre inconscient collectif. Résultat ? Pour la sociologue et professeure à l’université d’Ottawa, « bernés par les prestidigitations des ultra-riches, nous les regardons, stupéfaits, dilapider les ressources de la planète » tandis que les #inégalités demeurent.
D’où le titre de son nouvel essai en forme de pamphlet sans concession, à paraître ce 22 août aux éditions Lux : La société de provocation – Essai sur l’#obscénité des riches. Une référence explicite au roman Chien blanc de Romain Gary, dans lequel l’ancien résistant fustige « cet ordre social où l’exhibitionnisme de la richesse érige en vertu la démesure et le luxe ostentatoire tout en privant une part de plus en plus large de la population des moyens de satisfaire ses besoins réels ». De passage à Paris, Dahlia Namian a répondu à nos questions.
]]>Meta’s former CTO has a new $50 million project : ocean-based carbon removal | MIT Technology Review
▻https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/06/06/1074124/metas-former-cto-has-a-new-50-million-project-ocean-based-carbon-removal/?truid=a497ecb44646822921c70e7e051f7f1a
Un ancien CTO de Facebook se lance dans le géoengineering... pensez-vous que quelque chose puisse mal tourner ?
On appréciera la phrase : “The way you get started is by doing,” he says. “And by moving, in particular, the science forward and making sure that the people who can answer these fundamental questions have the resources and time to answer them thoroughly.” Le moto traditionnel de la Silicon Valley : on fait et on réfléchit après, en payant des chercheurs pour justifier ce qu’on a fait. Quand c’est problématique, on cache sous le tapis le travail de recherche comme l’a montré la lanceuse d’alerte Frances Hauben.
Et celle-ci également d’un des "scientifique" qui poussent de tels projets : “It’s a huge operation, of course, similar to fossil fuels or coal mining,” he says. “So these are all side effects we have to take into account.”...exactement ce que fait Meta, isn’t it ?
A nonprofit formed by Mike Schroepfer, Meta’s former chief technology officer, has spun out a new organization dedicated to accelerating research into ocean alkalinity enhancement—one potential means of using the seas to suck up and store away even more carbon dioxide.
Additional Ventures, cofounded by Schroepfer, and a group of other foundations have committed $50 million over five years to the nonprofit research program, dubbed the Carbon to Sea Initiative. The goals of the effort include evaluating potential approaches; eventually conducting small-scale field trials in the ocean; advancing policies that could streamline permitting for those experiments and provide more public funding for research; and developing the technology necessary to carry out and assess these interventions if they prove to work well and safely.
The seas already act as a powerful buffer against the worst dangers of climate change, drawing down about a quarter of human-driven carbon dioxide emissions and absorbing the vast majority of global warming. Carbon dioxide dissolves naturally into seawater where the air and ocean meet.
But scientists and startups are exploring whether these global commons can do even more to ease climate change, as a growing body of research finds that nations now need to both slash emissions and pull vast amounts of additional greenhouse gas out of the atmosphere to keep warming in check.
Ocean alkalinity enhancement (OAE) refers to various ways of adding alkaline substances, like olivine, basalt, or lime, into seawater. These basic materials bind with dissolved inorganic carbon dioxide in the water to form bicarbonates and carbonates, ions that can persist for tens of thousands of years in the ocean. As those CO2-depleted waters reach the surface, they can pull down additional carbon dioxide from the air to return to a state of equilibrium.
The ground-up materials could be added directly to ocean waters from vessels, placed along the coastline, or used in onshore devices that help trigger reactions with seawater.
Carbon to Sea is effectively an expansion of the Ocean Alkalinity Enhancement R&D Program, which Additional Ventures launched in late 2021 with the Astera Institute, the Grantham Environmental Trust, and others. Ocean Visions, a nonprofit research group working to advance ocean-based climate solutions, is also a partner, though not a funder. Early last year, the organizations began accepting applications for research grants for “at least $10 million” that could be put to use over the next five years. The program has committed $23 million to the research field so far.
Schroepfer, who will serve as a board chair of Carbon to Sea, said that he decided to support the field of ocean alkalinity enhancement because he consistently heard that it was a promising approach to carbon removal that needed to be closely studied, but “nobody was stepping up to do the actual funding of the work.”
“The way you get started is by doing,” he says. “And by moving, in particular, the science forward and making sure that the people who can answer these fundamental questions have the resources and time to answer them thoroughly.”
Antonius Gagern, previously the program director for ocean carbon dioxide removal at Additional Ventures, is leading the new organization.
“In looking at the different ways that the ocean is already using natural carbon pumps to sequester CO2 permanently, ocean alkalinity enhancement has emerged as, for us, the most promising one for a number of reasons,” Gagern says.
It’s “extremely scalable,” it’s “very permanent,” and it “doesn’t mess with” biological systems in the ways that other ocean-based approaches may, he adds.
’A substantial climatic impact’
Other observers also consider ocean alkalinity enhancement a promising approach, in part because it’s one of the major ways the planet already pulls down carbon dioxide over very long time scales: rainwater dissolves basic rocks, producing calcium and other alkaline compounds that eventually flow into the oceans through rivers and streams.
These processes naturally sequester hundreds of millions of tons of carbon dioxide per year, by some estimates. And the planet has more than enough of the reactive materials required to bond with all the carbon dioxide humans have emitted throughout history.
There are potentially some additional benefits as well. Alkaline substances could reduce ocean acidification locally and might provide beneficial nutrients to certain marine organisms.
Andreas Oschlies, a climate modeler at the Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research in Kiel, Germany, agrees that it’s one of the few carbon removal approaches that could “really deliver at scale and have a substantial climatic impact.”
“The minerals are not limiting and the reservoir, the ocean, is not limiting,” he says.
(Oschlies hasn’t received research grants from the Additional Ventures consortium but is a senior advisor to a project that has.)
He’s quick to stress, however, that there are significant challenges in scaling it up, and that far more research is needed to understand the most effective approaches and secondary impacts of such interventions.
Notably, some approaches would require mining, grinding, and moving around massive amounts of alkaline materials, all of which entails a lot of energy and environmental impacts.
“It’s a huge operation, of course, similar to fossil fuels or coal mining,” he says. “So these are all side effects we have to take into account.”
(Not all these concerns would necessarily be raised by other methods, however, like using electrochemistry to remove acid from seawater or processing existing waste from mines.)
There are additional challenges and uncertainties as well.
Several recent lab experiments found that these approaches didn’t work as well or easily as expected. Indeed, in some instances the addition of such substances reduced alkalinity as well as the uptake of carbon dioxide. This raises the possibility that these methods may only work in limited areas or circumstances, or could be more costly or complex to implement than hoped.
Some of the minerals contain trace heavy metals, which can collect in marine ecosystems. They could also alter the light conditions and biogeochemistry of the waters in ways that might harm or help various organisms.
Finally, the fact that carbon removal happens as a second step in the process makes it challenging to accurately monitor and measure how much CO2 the process really removes, particularly with approaches that occur in the turbulent, variable open oceans. That, in turn, could make it difficult to incentivize and monetize such efforts through carbon markets.
CarbonPlan, a San Francisco nonprofit that evaluates the scientific integrity of carbon removal projects and techniques, ranks ocean alkalinity enhancement on the low end of its “verification confidence levels,” which evaluate the degree to which long-term carbon removal and storage “can be accurately quantified” with existing tools and approaches.
“There is a lot of natural variability associated with these processes, which means it can be hard to discern a signal from the noise,” Freya Chay, program lead for carbon removal at CarbonPlan, said in an email.
“We’re still in exploration mode when it comes to OAE—there is a lot to learn about how to measure, monitor, and effectively deploy these technologies,” she added.
‘Getting the science right’
These challenges are precisely why it’s crucial to fund a coordinated research program into ocean alkalinity research, Gagern says. One of Carbon to Sea’s top priorities will include “getting the science right,” he says, by supporting studies designed to assess what approaches work most effectively and safely, and under what conditions.
He says that improving systems for monitoring, reporting, and verifying the carbon actually removed through these processes will also be a “major, major focus,” with efforts to develop, test, and refine sensors and models. Finally, Carbon to Sea will also prioritize “community building” in the nascent field, striving to draw in more researchers across disciplines and encourage collaborations through conferences, workshops, and fellowships.
One of Carbon to Sea’s initial grantees is the Ocean Alk-Align consortium, an international group of researchers studying the potential and environmental safety of ocean alkalinity enhancement.
“The award from Carbon to Sea enables us to rigorously investigate the promise of OAE for meaningful climate change mitigation and provides us with significant resources to tackle important questions through independent scientific study,” said Katja Fennel, who leads the consortium and is chair of the department of oceanography at Dalhousie University, in a prepared statement.
The program’s additional funding will likely go to a mix of research groups and startups.
]]>J’aurais aimé pouvoir rire de cette mésaventure mais finalement je ressens plutôt une grande #sidération ...
Starship : cet automobiliste n’aurait pas dû se garer à côté du pas de tir
▻https://www.huffingtonpost.fr/international/article/starship-cet-automobiliste-n-aurait-pas-du-se-garer-a-cote-du-pas-de-
« Nous avons réussi à quitter le pas de tir, ce qui honnêtement était tout ce que nous espérions », a déclaré une ingénieure de SpaceX, Kate Tice, lors du direct vidéo de la société.
▻https://video.twimg.com/ext_tw_video/1649052736149762048/pu/vid/1280x720/bL2sSBMzvnmP_s6u.mp4?tag=12
VR Cam caught some spectacular footage as #SuperHeavy rocked #SpaceX #Starbase this morning. I am floored at the amount of debris that was ejected. Waiting on Rover 2 damage assessment. Congratulations @elonmusk
on pulling this historical launch!
]]>Dreaming of Suitcases in Space - The New York Times
▻https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/07/technology/inversion-suitcases-space.html
La folie de détruire l’espace comme commun. Encore un exemple de l’imbécilité qui consiste à mettre les modèles économiques avant les besoins humains et la protection de l’espace et de la planète et ses habitants.
If Inversion is successful, it’s possible to imagine hundreds or thousands of containers floating around space for up to five years — like some (really) distant storage lockers.
The company’s founders imagine the capsules could store artificial organs that are delivered to an operating room within a few hours or serve as mobile field hospitals floating in orbit that would be dispatched to remote areas of the planet. And one day, a shortcut through space could allow for unimaginably fast deliveries — like delivering a New York pizza to San Francisco in 45 minutes.
Inversion’s founders think what seems like a pipe dream may become more realistic as launch costs drop from current prices, which start at $1 million (and increase depending on weight) to share space on a SpaceX rocket. Inversion declined to offer an estimate of how much its capsules will cost.
“The big obstacle that everyone in the sector is trying to overcome is that at current costs, there just isn’t that much demand to do much in space,” said Matthew C. Weinzierl, a professor at Harvard Business School who has published research about the economic potential of space.
For decades, people have imagined living and working in space as an extension of life on Earth. That vision seemed like a Hollywood fantasy until an influx of private rocket companies greatly reduced the costs of getting to space, making commercial activity beyond Earth more feasible.
]]>This company says it’s developing a system that can recognize your face from just your DNA | MIT Technology Review
▻https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/01/31/1044576/corsight-face-recognition-from-dna/?truid=a497ecb44646822921c70e7e051f7f1a
A police officer is at the scene of a murder. No witnesses. No camera footage. No obvious suspects or motives. Just a bit of hair on the sleeve of the victim’s jacket. DNA from the cells of one strand is copied and compared against a database. No match comes back, and the case goes cold.
Corsight AI, a facial recognition subsidiary of the Israeli AI company Cortica, purports to be devising a solution for that sort of situation by using DNA to create a model of a face that can then be run through a facial recognition system. It is a task that experts in the field regard as scientifically untenable.
Corsight unveiled its “DNA to Face” product in a presentation by chief executive officer Robert Watts and executive vice president Ofer Ronen intended to court financiers at the Imperial Capital Investors Conference in New York City on December 15. It was part of the company’s overall product road map, which also included movement and voice recognition. The tool “constructs a physical profile by analyzing genetic material collected in a DNA sample,” according to a company slide deck viewed by surveillance research group IPVM and shared with MIT Technology Review.
A photo of Corsight’s investor presentation showing its product roadmap that features “voice to face”, “DNA to face” and “movement” as an expansion of its face recognition capabilities.
Corsight declined a request to answer questions about the presentation and its product road map. “We are not engaging with the press at the moment as the details of what we are doing are company confidential,” Watts wrote in an email.
But marketing materials show that the company is focused on government and law enforcement applications for its technology. Its advisory board consists only of James Woolsey, a former director of the CIA, and Oliver Revell, a former assistant director of the FBI.
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The science that would be needed to support such a system doesn’t yet exist, however, and experts say the product would exacerbate the ethical, privacy, and bias problems facial recognition technology already causes. More worryingly, it’s a signal of the industry’s ambitions for the future, where face detection becomes one facet of a broader effort to identify people by any available means—even inaccurate ones.
This story was jointly reported with Don Maye of IPVM who said “this presentation was the first time IPVM became aware of a company attempting to commercialize a face recognition product associated with a DNA sample.”
A checkered past
Corsight’s idea is not entirely new. Human Longevity, a “genomics-based, health intelligence” company founded by Silicon Valley celebrities Craig Venter and Peter Diamandis, claimed to have used DNA to predict faces in 2017. MIT Technology Review reported then that experts, however, were doubtful. A former employee of Human Longevity said the company can’t pick a person out of a crowd using a genome, and Yaniv Erlich, chief science officer of the genealogy platform MyHeritage, published a response laying out major flaws in the research.
A small DNA informatics company, Parabon NanoLabs, provides law enforcement agencies with physical depictions of people derived from DNA samples through a product line called Snapshot, which includes genetic genealogy as well as 3D renderings of a face. (Parabon publishes some cases on its website with comparisons between photos of people the authorities are interested in finding and renderings the company has produced.)
Parabon’s computer-generated composites also come with a set of phenotypic characteristics, like eye and skin color, that are given a confidence score. For example, a composite might say that there’s an 80% chance the person being sought has blue eyes. Forensic artists also amend the composites to create finalized face models that incorporate descriptions of nongenetic factors, like weight and age, whenever possible.
Parabon’s website claims its software is helping solve an average of one case per week, and Ellen McRae Greytak, the company’s director of bioinformatics, says it has solved over 600 cases in the past seven years, though most are solved with genetic genealogy rather than composite analysis. Greytak says the company has come under criticism for not publishing its proprietary methods and data; she attributes that to a “business decision.”
Parabon does not package face recognition AI with its phenotyping service, and it stipulates that its law enforcement clients should not use the images it generates from DNA samples as an input into face recognition systems.
Related Story
The pandemic is testing the limits of face recognition
Government use of face ID systems exploded during the pandemic—but tying it to critical services has left some people locked out at the moment they needed help the most.
Parabon’s technology “doesn’t tell you the exact number of millimeters between the eyes or the ratio between the eyes, nose, and mouth,” Greytak says. Without that sort of precision, facial recognition algorithms cannot deliver accurate results—but deriving such precise measurements from DNA would require fundamentally new scientific discoveries, she says, and “the papers that have tried to do prediction at that level have not had a lot of success.” Greytak says Parabon only predicts the general shape of someone’s face (though the scientific feasibility of such prediction has also been questioned).
Police have been known to run forensic sketches based on witness descriptions through facial recognition systems. A 2019 study from Georgetown Law’s Center on Privacy and Technology found that at least half a dozen police agencies in the US “permit, if not encourage” using forensic sketches, either hand drawn or computer generated, as input photos for face recognition systems. AI experts have warned that such a process likely leads to lower levels of accuracy.
Corsight also has been criticized in the past for exaggerating the capabilities and accuracy of its face recognition system, which it calls the “most ethical facial recognition system for highly challenging conditions,” according to a slide deck presentation available online. In a technology demo for IPVM last November, Corsight CEO Watts said that Corsight’s face recognition system can “identify someone with a face mask—not just with a face mask, but with a ski mask.” IPVM reported that using Corsight’s AI on a masked face rendered a 65% confidence score, Corsight’s own measure of how likely it is that the face captured will be matched in its database, and noted that the mask is more accurately described as a balaclava or neck gaiter, as opposed to a ski mask with only mouth and eye cutouts.
Broader issues with face recognition technology’s accuracy have been well-documented (including by MIT Technology Review). They are more pronounced when photographs are poorly lit or taken at extreme angles, and when the subjects have darker skin, are women, or are very old or very young. Privacy advocates and the public have also criticized facial recognition technology, particularly systems like Clearview AI that scrape social media as part of their matching engine.
Law enforcement use of the technology is particularly fraught—Boston, Minneapolis, and San Francisco are among the many cities that have banned it. Amazon and Microsoft have stopped selling facial recognition products to police groups, and IBM has taken its face recognition software off the market.
“Pseudoscience”
“The idea that you’re going to be able to create something with the level of granularity and fidelity that’s necessary to run a face match search—to me, that’s preposterous,” says Albert Fox Cahn, a civil rights lawyer and executive director of the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project, who works extensively on issues related to face recognition systems. “That is pseudoscience.”
Dzemila Sero, a researcher in the Computational Imaging Group of Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica, the national research institute for mathematics and computer science in the Netherlands, says the science to support such a system is not yet sufficiently developed, at least not publicly. Sero says the catalog of genes required to produce accurate depictions of faces from DNA samples is currently incomplete, citing Human Longevity’s 2017 study.
In addition, factors like the environment and aging have substantial effects on faces that can’t be captured through DNA phenotyping, and research has shown that individual genes don’t affect the appearance of someone’s face as much as their gender and ancestry does. “Premature attempts to implement this technique would likely undermine trust and support for genomic research and garner no societal benefit,” she told MIT Technology Review in an email.
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Sero has studied the reverse concept of Corsight’s system—“face to DNA” rather than “DNA to face”—by matching a set of 3D photographs with a DNA sample. In a paper in Nature, Sero and her team reported accuracy rates between 80% to 83%. Sero says her work should not be used by prosecutors as incriminating evidence, however, and that “these methods also raise undeniable risks of further racial disparities in criminal justice that warrant caution against premature application of the techniques until proper safeguards are in place.”
Law enforcement depends on DNA data sets, predominantly the free ancestry website GEDmatch, which was instrumental in the search for the notorious “Golden State Killer.” But even DNA sampling, once considered the only form of scientifically rigorous forensic evidence by the US National Research Council, has recently come under criticism for problems with accuracy.
Fox Cahn, who is currently suing the New York Police Department to obtain records related to bias in its use of facial recognition technology, says the impact of Corsight’s hypothetical system would be disastrous. “Gaming out the impact this is going to have, it augments every failure case for facial recognition,” says Fox Cahn. “It’s easy to imagine how this could be used in truly frightening and Orwellian ways.”
The future of face recognition tech
Despite such concerns, the market for face recognition technology is growing, and companies are jockeying for customers. Corsight is just one of many offering photo-matching services with flashy new features, regardless of whether they’ve been shown to work.
Many of these new products look to integrate face recognition with another form of recognition. The Russia-based facial recognition company NtechLab, for example, offers systems that identify people based on their license plates as well as facial features, and founder Artem Kuharenko told MIT Technology Review last year that its algorithms try to “extract as much information from the video stream as possible.” In these systems, facial recognition becomes just one part of an apparatus that can identify people by a range of techniques, fusing personal information across connected databases into a sort of data panopticon.
Corsight’s DNA to face system appears to be the company’s foray into building a futuristic, comprehensive surveillance package it can offer to potential buyers. But even as the market for such technologies expands, Corsight and others are at increased risk of commercializing surveillance technologies plagued by bias and inaccuracy.
by Tate Ryan-Mosley
#ADN #Police_scientifique #Reconnaissance_faciale #Hubris_technologique #Société_de_contrôle #Surveillance
]]>Bonnes feuilles : « Ils voulaient refroidir la Terre »
▻https://theconversation.com/bonnes-feuilles-ils-voulaient-refroidir-la-terre-160317
Nous publions un extrait du polar que l’économiste Christian de Perthuis vient de faire paraître aux éditions Librinova. « Ils voulaient refroidir la Terre » aborde la thématique de la géo-ingénierie, ce terme qui désigne l’ensemble des technologies, plus ou moins étonnantes, promettant de contrer le dérèglement climatique. Une manière fictionnelle et originale d’évoquer un sujet scientifique très débattu. Dans ce passage, extrait du chapitre 13, le héros évoque son parcours et les recherches du Professeur Dubbo retrouvé mort.
#climat #hubris #géo-ingénierie #auteur·rices #édition #fiction #littérature
]]>Scientists plan to drop limits on how far human embryos are grown in the lab | MIT Technology Review
▻https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/03/16/1020879/scientists-14-day-limit-stem-cell-human-embryo-research/?truid=a497ecb44646822921c70e7e051f7f1a
As technology for manipulating embryonic life accelerates, researchers want to get rid of their biggest stop sign.
Antonio Regalado
March 16, 2021
Pushing the limits: For the last 40 years, scientists have agreed never to allow human embryos to develop beyond two weeks in their labs. Now a key scientific body is ready to do away with the 14-day limit. The International Society for Stem Cell Research has prepared draft recommendations to move such research out of a category of “prohibited” scientific activities and into a class of research that can be permitted after ethics review and depending on national regulations.
Why? Scientists are motivated to grow embryos longer in order to study—and potentially manipulate—the development process. They believe discoveries could come from studying embryos longer, for example improvements to IVF or finding clues to the causes of birth defects. But such techniques raise the possibility of someday gestating animals outside the womb until birth, a concept called ectogenesis. And the long-term growth of embryos could create a platform to explore the genetic engineering of humans.
#Cellules_souches #Biotechnologies #Embryons_humains #Hubris
]]>« La question de l’origine du SARS-CoV-2 se pose sérieusement » | CNRS Le journal
►https://lejournal.cnrs.fr/articles/la-question-de-lorigine-du-sars-cov-2-se-pose-serieusement
Près d’un an après que l’on a identifié le coronavirus SARS-CoV-2, les chercheurs n’ont toujours pas déterminé comment il a pu se transmettre à l’espèce humaine. Le virologue Étienne Decroly fait le point sur les différentes hypothèses, dont celle de l’échappement accidentel d’un laboratoire.
Quelques extraits de ce long entretien avec le virologue Étienne Decroly :
SARS-CoV-2 ne descend pas de souches humaines connues et n’a acquis que récemment la capacité de sortir de son réservoir animal naturel.
.../...
L’étude des mécanismes d’évolution impliqués dans l’émergence de ce virus est essentielle pour élaborer des stratégies thérapeutiques et vaccinales.
.../...
Y a-t-il des indices pointant vers d’autres candidats au rôle d’hôte intermédiaire ?
É. D. : Dans les zoonoses, les hôtes intermédiaires se retrouvent généralement parmi les animaux d’élevage ou sauvages en contact avec les populations. Or, en dépit des recherches de virus dans les espèces animales vendues sur le marché de Wuhan, aucun virus intermédiaire entre RaTG13 et le SARS-CoV-2 n’a pu être identifié à ce jour. Tant que ce virus intermédiaire n’aura pas été identifié et son génome séquencé, la question de l’origine de SARS-CoV-2 restera non résolue. Car en l’absence d’éléments probants concernant le dernier intermédiaire animal avant la contamination humaine, certains auteurs suggèrent que ce virus pourrait avoir franchi la barrière d’espèce à la suite un accident de laboratoire ou être d’origine synthétique.
.../...
Tant qu’on n’aura pas trouvé l’hôte intermédiaire, l’hypothèse d’un échappement accidentel ne pourra être écartée par la communauté scientifique.
Mais au final, c’est la cause accidentelle qui semble privilégiée
Le mot de la fin :
Dans mes cours consacrés à l’ingénierie virale, j’ai l’habitude de présenter à des étudiants de Master cet exercice théorique : je leur demande d’imaginer un procédé procurant au virus VIH la capacité d’infecter n’importe quelle cellule de l’organisme (pas seulement les lymphocytes). Ces étudiants sont brillants, et la plupart sont en mesure de me proposer des méthodes efficaces, conduisant à la construction de virus chimériques potentiellement dangereux. Je donne ce cours depuis une dizaine d’années et les étudiants s’attachent exclusivement à l’efficacité de la méthode sans s’interroger une seconde sur les conséquences potentielles de leurs mises en œuvre.
L’objectif pédagogique que je poursuis est de les sensibiliser à ces problématiques et de leur montrer qu’on peut dans bien des cas construire des systèmes expérimentaux tout aussi efficaces et permettant de mieux contrôler les risques biologiques. il faut intervenir dès la formation, en formant les futurs biologistes à toujours questionner le risque et la pertinence sociétale de leurs travaux, aussi novateurs soient-ils.
#recherche_médicale #virologie #protocole_expérimental #techno-science #technolâtrie #éthique
]]>Le virus à venir et le retour à l’anormal
►http://www.piecesetmaindoeuvre.com/spip.php?page=resume&id_article=1287
Depuis le début officiel de l’épidémie, au lendemain des élections municipales, nous voyons une ruée sur les enquêtes que nous avions publiées au début des années 2000 à propos des laboratoires de la guerre au vivant. Soudain on se souvient. Dix mille personnes meurent chaque année en France de la grippe saisonnière – et 150 000 du cancer. Trente mille meurent entre décembre 1969 – année érotique – et janvier 1970 de la « grippe de Hong Kong ». Seuls les médecins l’ont su. Ce n’est qu’ensuite que les autorités sanitaires ont enjoint aux vieux de se faire vacciner. C’est également 30 000 personnes qui vont mourir du virus cette année. Jusqu’à ce qu’on vende un nouveau vaccin et qu’on oublie. Ce qu’il y a de nouveau cette fois, c’est que les autorités ont décidé d’en faire un événement. L’événement s’oubliera, (...)
#Nécrotechnologies
▻http://www.piecesetmaindoeuvre.com/IMG/pdf/le_virus_a_venir.pdf
Elon Musk et Neuralink présentent leur prototype d’implants cérébraux pour aider à communiquer avec des machines
►https://www.lemonde.fr/pixels/article/2019/07/17/elon-musk-et-neuralink-presentent-leur-prototype-d-implants-cerebraux_549034
Un mélange entre l’hubris de la recherche et le désir de pouvoir absolu des entreprises de la communication numérique. Effrayant.
La société financée par le magnat des transports a présenté, mardi 16 juillet, sa technologie d’interface cerveau-machines.
Publié le 17 juillet 2019 à 11h25 - Mis à jour le 17 juillet 2019 à 14h55
Un implant discret et indolore, permettant au cerveau de communiquer directement avec des machines ou des interfaces numériques : c’est le projet, en partie concrétisé, qu’a présenté mardi 16 juillet Neuralink, la société financée à hauteur de 100 millions de dollars par Elon Musk (Tesla, SpaceX).
L’entreprise a détaillé pour la première fois, lors d’une conférence de presse diffusée en direct sur Youtube, le fonctionnement de son prototype d’interface se branchant directement sur le cerveau. Il devrait prendre, à terme, la forme d’un petit boîtier connecté sans fil directement au cerveau.
Le projet d’implant de Neuralink.
Le projet d’implant de Neuralink. Neuralink
L’une des possibilités offertes par ces technologies et discutées pendant la conférence Neuralink qui s’est déroulée à San Francisco : la possibilité, pour des personnes paralysées, auxquelles on aurait réussi à implanter ce dispositif en creusant des trous dans leur crâne, de pouvoir contrôler par la pensée leur smartphone ou leur ordinateur. A terme, Neuralink espère que des millions de personnes pourront disposer d’un cerveau augmenté, selon un article de Bloomberg, qui reprend l’une des déclarations d’Elon Musk lors de la conférence : « au bout du compte, nous parviendrons à une symbiose entre le cerveau et l’intelligence artificielle. »
Aucune autorisation n’a encore été délivrée
Mais les prototypes présentés le 16 juillet, qui semblent sortis de classiques de la science-fiction (et ont été comparés par certains internautes à un épisode de la série Black Mirror), sont encore loin d’être aboutis. Ils n’ont ainsi pas encore passé le stade des tests humains, mais seulement celui de premiers tests effectués sur des rats. Elon Musk a également laissé entendre, lors de sa conférence, que des tests avaient été effectués sur des singes avec succès.
Le boîtier présenté par Neuralink ne dispose par ailleurs pas encore de toutes les fonctionnalités prévues : il n’est ainsi pas encore capable de transmettre des données sans fil, mais utilise, pour l’instant, d’un classique connecteur USB-C pour connecter le cerveau à une machine. Les images fournies par Neuralink au site spécialisé The Verge montrent ainsi un rat avec un port USB implanté sur le crâne, dans le cadre des premiers tests effectués. Ce port USB était relié à 1 500 électrodes disposées sur le cerveau du rat, précise le New York Times.
Les images fournies par Neuralink des test de leurs implants cérébraux sur des rats de laboratoire.
Les images fournies par Neuralink des test de leurs implants cérébraux sur des rats de laboratoire. Neuralink
Neuralink espère pouvoir débuter des tests sur des humains d’ici à la fin de 2020. Mais Neuralink a reconnu n’avoir pas encore démarré les démarches auprès de la Food and Drugs Administration (FDA), compétente aux Etats-Unis pour la régulation des dispositifs médicaux. Le processus pour obtenir un agrément pour ce type de dispositifs est « long et compliqué », a reconnu la société.
Basé sur une technologique de câbles de polymères souples et très fins, moins invasifs et plus durables que les systèmes actuellement utilisés dans le cadre médical, Neuralink est, en revanche, plus délicat à implanter. L’entreprise dit travailler à un robot chirurgical pour réaliser automatiquement et efficacement la tâche délicate de l’installation.
Des questions se posent également sur la durabilité des câbles utilisés par Neuralink une fois ces derniers implantés dans le cerveau. Neuralink est loin d’être la seule société à travailler sur des interfaces cerveau-machines. D’importants moyens ont été investis par l’armée américaine dans ces technologies, qui ont potentiellement de nombreuses applications, notamment pour les personnes en situation de handicap.
#Implants_neuronaux #Communication_Humain_Machine #Interface #Hubris #Pouvoir
]]>Power Causes Brain Damage - The Atlantic
►https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/07/power-causes-brain-damage/528711
Je reposte à part, cet article de 2017 était perdu en commentaire à la fin d’un fil.
The historian Henry Adams was being metaphorical, not medical, when he described power as “a sort of tumor that ends by killing the victim’s sympathies.” But that’s not far from where Dacher Keltner, a psychology professor at UC Berkeley, ended up after years of lab and field experiments. Subjects under the influence of power, he found in studies spanning two decades, acted as if they had suffered a traumatic brain injury—becoming more impulsive, less risk-aware, and, crucially, less adept at seeing things from other people’s point of view.
That loss in capacity has been demonstrated in various creative ways. A 2006 study asked participants to draw the letter E on their forehead for others to view—a task that requires seeing yourself from an observer’s vantage point. Those feeling powerful were three times more likely to draw the E the right way to themselves—and backwards to everyone else (which calls to mind George W. Bush, who memorably held up the American flag backwards at the 2008 Olympics). Other experiments have shown that powerful people do worse at identifying what someone in a picture is feeling, or guessing how a colleague might interpret a remark.
The fact that people tend to mimic the expressions and body language of their superiors can aggravate this problem: Subordinates provide few reliable cues to the powerful. But more important, Keltner says, is the fact that the powerful stop mimicking others. Laughing when others laugh or tensing when others tense does more than ingratiate. It helps trigger the same feelings those others are experiencing and provides a window into where they are coming from. Powerful people “stop simulating the experience of others,” Keltner says, which leads to what he calls an “empathy deficit.”
As Susan Fiske, a Princeton psychology professor, has persuasively argued, power lessens the need for a nuanced read of people, since it gives us command of resources we once had to cajole from others. But of course, in a modern organization, the maintenance of that command relies on some level of organizational support. And the sheer number of examples of executive hubris that bristle from the headlines suggests that many leaders cross the line into counterproductive folly.
Less able to make out people’s individuating traits, they rely more heavily on stereotype. And the less they’re able to see, other research suggests, the more they rely on a personal “vision” for navigation.
PepsiCo CEO and Chairman Indra Nooyi sometimes tells the story of the day she got the news of her appointment to the company’s board, in 2001. She arrived home percolating in her own sense of importance and vitality, when her mother asked whether, before she delivered her “great news,” she would go out and get some milk. Fuming, Nooyi went out and got it. “Leave that damn crown in the garage” was her mother’s advice when she returned.
For Winston Churchill, the person who filled that role was his wife, Clementine, who had the courage to write, “My Darling Winston. I must confess that I have noticed a deterioration in your manner; & you are not as kind as you used to be.” Written on the day Hitler entered Paris, torn up, then sent anyway, the letter was not a complaint but an alert: Someone had confided to her, she wrote, that Churchill had been acting “so contemptuous” toward subordinates in meetings that “no ideas, good or bad, will be forthcoming”—with the attendant danger that “you won’t get the best results.”
]]>#cojonesvirus : compilation d’articles et de « seen » à propos de tous les biais suscités par cette Pan ! Pan ! Démie, des sottises que l’on pourra lire dans quelques recoins mal famés de la #médiasphère, mais aussi de quelques autres phénomènes tels que l’instauration d’une surveillance de masse généralisée, du lobbying des laboratoires pharmaceutiques, de la mise en évidence des gros bugs à tous les étages de nos sociétés marchandisées, etc.
Il semble se dessiner un début de solution du côté de Vittel ou Contrexéville (ch’ais plus trop ...) :
Les très graves ratés de l’expérience chinoise des « bébés CRISPR »
▻http://theconversation.com/les-tres-graves-rates-de-lexperience-chinoise-des-bebes-crispr-1287
L’annonce de la naissance en Chine de Lulu et Nana, des jumelles dont le génome a été modifié en utilisant la technologie de l’édition du génome CRISPR/Cas9, a choqué le monde entier l’année dernière. Une année après cette annonce, Jiankui He, le scientifique chinois a l’origine de la naissance de ces bébés génétiquement modifies, a été condamné à trois ans de prison ferme et 380 000 euros d’amendes pour la pratique illégale de la médecine.
▻https://seenthis.net/messages/814993
#CRISPR #Hubris_scientifique #Génomique #Modification_génétique
]]>The biggest technology failures of 2019 - MIT Technology Review
▻https://www.technologyreview.com/s/614990/worst-technologies-biggest-technology-failures-2019
Technology Review be without our annual list of the year’s sorriest tech fails?
This year’s list includes the deadly, the dishonest, and the simply daft. Read
Boeing’s out-of-control autopilot
First one brand-new 737 Max Boeing plane, Lion Air Flight 510, crashed shortly after takeoff. Then another did the same. Everyone aboard died. In each case, pilots had struggled against an autopilot system that took over and plunged the planes to their doom.
Fake food computer
The MIT Media Lab has been called the “future factory”—but its “food computer” likely won’t be part of it.
In a 2015 TED Talk that gathered 1.8 million views, architect Caleb Harper introduced hydroponic boxes stuffed with electronics and AI, which he said would measure millions of combinations of light, temperature, and humidity. His Open Agriculture project, he said, was pioneering “cyber agriculture.”
Really? The food computer, it turns out, was nothing more than a glorified grow box that didn’t work very well. But by fertilizing the project with buzzwords—“climate hacking,” “open source,” “microbiome”—the Media Lab kept winning attention and funding for it. Claims for the contraption reached an absurd apex in April, when Harper said “machine learning” had been employed to grow basil that an MIT news release called “likely more delicious” than any ever tasted.
In September, workers stepped forward to blow the whistle, telling the media about fake photo shoots (the plants were purchased), smoke-and-mirror tactics, and environmental violations. By October, MIT officials had “halted most of the work” by the OpenAg group, according to the Boston Globe.
Genetic gaydar
Within weeks of a major study identifying genes associated with homosexual behavior, a programmer had launched an app called “How Gay Are You?”
For $5.50, the app purported to use those research findings to calculate the gayness level of anyone, using results from a DNA test like those sold by 23andMe.
Controversy ensued. Was the app a “dangerous mischaracterization” of science or did it accurately underscore the main point, which is that there’s no one gene for being gay? Alternatively, did it show that the original research project to try to explain homosexual behavior was ill conceived?
The gaydar app is now gone (it didn’t survive the controversy), but the promise—or the problem—of genetic predictions isn’t going away. Gene scientists have new ways to link small genetic differences not only to a person’s risk of disease, but to traits like height, intelligence, or earning potential.
Space stowaways
This year, an Israeli company launched that country’s first lunar lander, which unfortunately crash-landed on the moon in April. Luckily, no one was onboard. Unfortunately, something was.
It turned out that a US nonprofit called Arch Mission Foundation had secretly added to the mission payload a capsule full of tardigrades, or water bears. The microscopic, eight-legged creatures can survive in a dormant state through harsh conditions, and maybe even on the moon.
The concept of planetary protection is the idea that we shouldn’t pollute other worlds with earthly life. There’s the worry over contamination, and what’s more, if you do discover life outside of orbit, you’d like to be sure you didn’t put it there.
Without some water, the tardigrades aren’t likely to revive and spread. Still, the episode shows that today’s honor system might not be enough to ensure planetary protection.
Why did Arch do it? The foundation’s mission is to create a backup of planet Earth, and so it tests out technologies for long-lasting archives, like securing information in DNA strands or encapsulating insects in artificial amber. Its payload on the Israeli mission included nickel sheets nanopatterned with 60,000 pages of Wikipedia and other texts.
In a last-minute switch-up, Arch and its cofounder Nova Spivack decided to add some human hair, blood cells, and thousands of tardigrades. “We didn’t tell them we were putting life in this thing,” Spivack said. “We just decided to take the risk.”
Apple’s biased credit card
Why would a wealthy tech entrepreneur get a credit limit 10 times as high his wife’s on the new Apple Card, even though their assets are held in common? When one complained, a rep told him, “It’s just the algorithm.” A sexist algorithm! Steve Wozniak, Apple’s cofounder, said it happened to his wife, too. But what’s the program, and what does it do? Apple and Goldman Sachs, the bank backing the card, didn’t say. And that’s the problem. Computerized bias exists, but it’s hard to hold anyone, or anything, accountable. Facebook this year reached a settlement to stop letting advertisers intentionally discriminate in housing and job ads, yet research shows that unseen algorithms are still skewing results. Ads for taxi drivers on Facebook were automatically shown more often to minorities, and supermarket jobs to women.
]]>Boeing se résigne à geler la production du 737 MAX
▻https://www.lemonde.fr/international/article/2019/12/16/boeing-va-suspendre-la-production-du-737-max-a-partir-de-janvier_6023110_321
Immobilisé depuis le mois de mars après deux accidents survenus à cinq mois d’intervalle en Indonésie et en Ethiopie, qui ont fait 346 morts, l’avion avait continué jusqu’à présent d’être produit au rythme de quarante-deux unités par mois.
Ayant accumulé plus de 4 500 commandes, le géant aéronautique achetait les pièces nécessaires pour en fabriquer mensuellement dix de plus par mois, ce qui a généré une accumulation de plus de 400 avions, selon le Wall Street Journal.
Des conséquences sur l’économie américaine
Cette pause va peser à la fois sur l’entreprise et sur ses sous-traitants, notamment CFM International pour ce qui concerne les moteurs – une joint-venture entre General Electric et la société française Safran –, ainsi que Spirit AeroSystems, qui travaille sur le fuselage.
L’arrêt de la production du 737 MAX était attendu. Le 12 décembre, Steve Dickson, patron de Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), l’autorité de l’aviation civile américaine accusée d’avoir eu des relations trop étroites avec Boeing, s’était montré particulièrement sévère vis-à-vis de l’avionneur qui a déjà perdu plus de 9 milliards de dollars (environ 8 milliards d’euros) avec l’immobilisation de son appareil.
Dans une lettre adressée aux élus du Congrès, il avait « craint que Boeing ne continue de poursuivre un calendrier de retour en service irréaliste ». Steve Dickson avait jugé « plus inquiétant encore » le fait que « certaines des prises de position publiques [de l’avionneur] pouvaient donner l’impression de vouloir forcer la FAA à agir plus vite » pour autoriser le 737 MAX à reprendre ses vols.
]]>Des mutations inquiétantes sur les bébés chinois génétiquement modifiés par CRISPR - UP’ Magazine
▻https://up-magazine.info/index.php/le-vivant/innovations-vertes/28764-des-mutations-inquietantes-sur-les-bebes-chinois-genetiquement-m
Les jumelles chinoises nées l’an dernier d’embryons génétiquement modifiés par les ciseaux moléculaires « CRISPR » ont probablement des mutations imprévues dans leur génome à la suite de cette manipulation. C’est un journaliste américain qui révèle cette information ce 3 décembre après avoir obtenu une version non publiée de l’étude détaillant l’expérience.
L’annonce avait choqué le monde en novembre 2018 : le scientifique He Jiankui avait révélé à Hong Kong qu’il avait modifié des embryons, dans le cadre d’une fécondation in vitro pour un couple, afin de tenter de créer une mutation de leurs génomes qui leur conférerait une immunité naturelle contre le virus du sida au cours de leur vie. Cette nouvelle avait provoqué un tollé car la procédure employée n’avait aucune justification médicale, présentait de graves dangers pour la santé et contrevenait aux règles éthiques les plus élémentaires.
LIRE DANS UP : Les Chinois auraient mis au monde deux bébés génétiquement modifiés par CRISPR
Des jumelles étaient nées, nommées Lulu et Nana, mais elles et leurs parents sont restés anonymes, et on ignore totalement ce qu’elles sont devenues.
L’expérience d’He Jiankui avait vivement été condamnée par la communauté scientifique internationale et les autorités de son pays, et l’affaire avait relancé les appels à une interdiction des « bébés Crispr ».
Le manuscrit de l’étude révélé
Un journaliste de la MIT Technology Review a reçu le manuscrit de l’étude que He Jiankui a tenté de faire publier par des revues scientifiques prestigieuses, et qui détaille sa méthode et ses résultats. Mais le texte de l’étude confirme ce que beaucoup d’experts suspectaient : selon des généticiens interrogés, il ne montre en réalité pas que la mutation tentée, sur une partie du gène CCR5, a effectivement réussi. L’étude affirme que la mutation accomplie est « similaire » à celle qui confère l’immunité, et non identique.
Des conséquences imprévisibles
En outre, des données incluses en annexe montrent que les jumelles ont subi des mutations ailleurs dans leur génome, et probablement différentes d’une cellule à l’autre, ce qui rend les conséquences imprévisibles.
« CRISPR » est une technique révolutionnaire de modification du génome inventée en 2012, bien plus simple et facile d’utilisation que les technologies existantes. Mais les ciseaux coupent souvent à côté de l’endroit ciblé, et les généticiens répètent que la technologie est encore loin d’être parfaite pour être utilisée à des fins thérapeutiques.
« Il y a énormément de problèmes dans l’affaire des jumelles CRISPR. Tous les principes éthiques établis ont été violés, mais il y a aussi un grand problème scientifique : il n’a pas contrôlé ce que CRISPR faisait, et cela a créé plein de conséquences imprévues », a dit le professeur de génétique Kiran Musunuru, de l’université de Pennsylvanie, dans un entretien récent à l’AFP.
Dans la MIT Technology Review, le généticien Fyodor Urnov déclare : « La recherche était toutefois incomplète et le manuscrit passe sous silence un point clé : les cellules prélevées sur les embryons au stade précoce pour les tester n’ont pas réellement contribué aux corps des jumeaux. Les cellules restantes, celles qui se multiplieraient et se développeraient pour devenir les jumeaux, auraient pu aussi avoir des effets hors cible, mais il n’y aurait eu aucun moyen de le savoir avant le début de la grossesse. » Il ajoute : « Une déformation flagrante des données réelles qui ne peut, encore une fois, être décrite que comme un mensonge flagrant. Il est techniquement impossible de déterminer si un embryon modifié « n’a présenté aucune mutation hors cible » sans détruire cet embryon en inspectant chacune de ses cellules. Il s’agit d’un problème clé pour l’ensemble du domaine de l’édition d’embryons, un problème que les auteurs balaient sous le tapis ici. »
#CRISPR #Hubris_scientifique #Génomique #Modification_génétique
]]>How Earnest Research Into Gay Genetics Went Wrong | WIRED
▻https://www.wired.com/story/how-earnest-research-into-gay-genetics-went-wrong
Un excellent article sur les danger éthiques et sociaux de l’usage sans précaution des données génétiques, notamment les données massives obtenues soit par des actes volontaires (recherche d’ancêtres, et autres) soit au fil d’actes médicaux.
Anonymiser les données ne suffit pas à garantir qu’il n’y aura pas de conséquences fâcheuses pour l’ensemble de la société.
Un très bon papier.
In late spring 2017, Andrea Ganna approached his boss, Ben Neale, with a pitch: He wanted to investigate the genetics of sexuality. Neale hesitated. One of the top geneticists in the country, Neale and his colleagues at the Broad Institute, a pioneering biotech hub in Boston, had a decade earlier developed software that made it much easier for scientists to study the vast amounts of genetic data that were beginning to flood in. It was the kind of tool that helped illuminate a person’s risk of developing, say, heart disease or diabetes. And now, as Ganna was proposing, the approach could be applied to the foundations of behavior, personality, and other social traits that in the past had been difficult to study.
Ganna wanted to pounce on a new opportunity. A giant collection of carefully cataloged genomes, called the UK Biobank, was about to become available to researchers. A scientist could apply and then gain access to data from 500,000 British citizens—the largest public repository of DNA on the planet. To Ganna, the genetic origins of being gay or straight seemed like the kind of blockbuster question that might finally get an answer from a data set of this size.
Neale wasn’t so sure. As a gay man himself, he worried that such research could be misconstrued or wielded to advance hateful agendas. On the other hand, a better understanding of how genetics influences same-sex attraction could also help destigmatize it.
Then Ganna mentioned that another group was already pursuing the question using the UK Biobank: a geneticist named Brendan Zietsch, at the University of Queensland, and his colleagues. In 2008, Zietsch published a study suggesting that the genes straight people shared with their gay twins made them more successful at bedding heterosexual partners. Now he was going to further test this “fecundity hypothesis” with a much more powerful data set. He’d also proposed investigating the genetic associations between sexual orientation and mental health. Thinking his lab could add expertise coupled with caution to such a project, Neale agreed they should try to team up with Zietsch.
“Armed with the knowledge that this research was going to be done, I thought it was important that we try and do it in a way that was responsible and represented a variety of different perspectives,” he says, noting that, because there is so much genetic data to work with these days, collaborations in his field are commonplace “But it was also important to me personally, as a gay man, to get involved.”
From the outset, Neale expected some pushback and misunderstandings. That’s why he involved LGBTQ+ groups along the way, something not technically required for the kind of research he was doing. But he wasn’t prepared for scientists within his home institution to rise up and challenge the value and ethics of his work. And he was even less prepared for a company to exploit the results of the study—just a few weeks after it was published in the journal Science—to sell an app purporting to predict how attracted someone is to the same sex.
#Données_génétiques #Big_data #Ethique #Recherche #Hubris #Génomique #Homosexualité #Fausse_science
]]>La Lune abrite une bibliothèque universelle et... des tardigrades
▻https://www.actualitte.com/article/zone-51/la-lune-abrite-une-bibliotheque-universelle-et-des-tardigrades/96260
Il y a quand même plusieurs éléments choquants dans cette « expérience » :
– envoyer volontairement du matériau vivant sur la Lune n’est-il pas peu éthique et contradictoire avec le maintien de l’espace comme espace commun ?
– Pourquoi une « bibliothèque humaine » est-elle uniquement en anglais ?
On retrouve bien là, non seulement l’hubris scientifique, mais aussi une conception bien datée de « l’humanité », réduite à ses dominants.
En avril dernier, une sonde israélienne a fini sa course sur la Lune. Et à son bord, une espèce microbienne qui aujourd’hui attire l’attention : les tardigrades. Des créatures microscopiques, qui étaient installées dans l’appareil, stockées dans de la colle époxy. Et selon les scientifiques, les bestioles auraient survécu au crash de la sonde, du fait de leur résistance quasi absolue.
Moon
Roberto Pasini, CC BY SA 2.0
Les tardigrades, également surnommés oursons d’eau, focalisent l’attention des scientifiques, car, pour la première fois, une espèce vivante serait retrouvée sur la Lune. Certes, elle ne doit rien aux meilleurs scénarios de romans de science-fiction, puisqu’il s’agit d’une espace terrestre, expédiée sur le satellite. Cependant, après le crash de la sonde Bereshit — premier mot de la Genèse en hébreu — la survie de ces bébêtes intrigue.
Expédier sur la Lune des créature d’un millimètre
Selon Nova Spivack, de la Fondation Arch Mission, à l’origine de ce voyage, la sonde était en effet accompagnée d’une forme d’encyclopédia universalis. Cette dernière contenait une série de disques de la taille d’un DVD, contenant les archives de notre planète, soit 30 millions de pages. Une forme d’Arche de Noé, expédiée sur la Lune pour préserver les informations, ou les fournir à qui passerait par là.
L’ADN, un système anti-vol... pour les manuscrits
Le propre du tardigrade est de pouvoir basculer dans un état de cryptobiose, une forme de mort clinique, où cet arthropode se plonge en attendant de pouvoir bénéficier de conditions de survie meilleures. Pourquoi les faire voyager ? D’abord, parce qu’il y avait de la place. Ensuite, parce qu’il était simple d’intégrer entre les couches de nickel de la bibliothèque ainsi constituée ces petites créatures.
Les contenus expédiés seraient intacts
La bibliothèque lunaire, telle qu’elle a été surnommée, permettait en effet d’ajouter des ADN humains, ainsi que des tardigrades déshydratés. Et comme, selon la NASA, tout porte à croire qu’en dépit de l’alunissage manqué, la bibliothèque a survécu, les tardigrades seraient certes toujours inactifs, mais auraient survécu par également.
La bibliothèque, qui compte l’ensemble, ou presque, de la version anglaise de l’encyclopédie Wikipedia, ainsi que des milliers de livres classiques, des manuels scolaires n’a pas besoin d’eau pour se réhydrater. En revanche, il suffirait aux tardigrades de quelques microns d’eau pour retrouver une activité normale.
A Tardigrade
domaine public - Peter von Bagh
« Nous les avons choisis parce qu’ils sont spéciaux. Ils représentent la forme de vie la plus acharnée que nous connaissons. Ils pourraient survivre pratiquement à tout cataclysme nucléaire. Ils peuvent survivre au vide de l’espace, mais également aux radiations », poursuit Nova Spivack.
Ressusciter l’espèce humaine ?
Et d’ajouter : « Dans le meilleur des cas, la bibliothèque est entièrement préservée, installée sur une belle colline sablonneuse, sur la Lune, pour un milliard d’années. Dans un avenir lointain, il sera possible pour nos descendants de les récupérer, ou pour une nouvelle forme de vie intelligente, longtemps après notre disparition. »
Stocker toute la connaissance dans de l’ADN
Avec l’ADN présent, il sera même possible de reconstituer l’espèce humaine, des plantes ou des animaux. Ou pas.
En attendant ce jour, les tardigrades, s’ils trouvent l’eau nécessaire pour se remettre en piste, disposeront d’une quantité de lecture pour passer le temps.
]]>Geoengineering is very controversial. How can you do experiments? Harvard has some ideas. - MIT Technology Review
▻https://www.technologyreview.com/s/614025/geoengineering-experiment-harvard-creates-governance-committee-cli
A prestigious university forging ahead with an outdoor experiment is a major milestone for the field, known as geoengineering. But it’s fraught with controversy. Critics fear such a step will lend scientific legitimacy to the idea that we could turn the dial on Earth’s climate. And they fret that even doing experiments is starting down a slippery slope toward creating a tool of incredible power.
Despite the critics, Harvard will take a significant step forward on Monday, as the university announces the formation of a committee to ensure that researchers take appropriate steps to limit health and environmental risks, seek and incorporate outside input, and operate in a transparent manner.
It’s a move that could create a template for how geoengineering research is conducted going forward, and perhaps pave the way for more experiments to follow.
Mach said the committee may ultimately recommend that the proposal be altered, delayed, or canceled, and her understanding is that the research team will treat such guidance with the “utmost seriousness” and “respond in a public way.”
But some think that by creating the committee, the university is rushing ahead of the public and political debate on this issue.
“It’s an extremely high-profile institution that’s decided they don’t want to wait for the regulatory regimes to greenlight this,” says Wil Burns, co-director of the Institute for Carbon Removal Law and Policy at American University.
From an engineering standpoint, the team could be ready for an initial test flight within about six months. The current plan is to launch from a site somewhere in New Mexico. The scientists, however, have said they won’t pursue the experiment until the committee completes its review and will heed a determination that they should stop.
The basic idea behind what’s known as solar geoengineering is that we could use planes, balloons, or even very long hoses to disperse certain particles into the atmosphere, where they could reflect enough sunlight back into space to moderately cool the planet.
Most of the research to date has been conducted using software climate simulations or experiments in the lab. While the models show that the technique will lower temperatures, some have found it might unleash unintended environmental impacts, such as altering monsoon patterns and food production, depending on how it’s done.
Only two known experiments that could be seen as related to solar geoengineering have been carried out in the open air to date. Researchers at the University of California, San Diego, sprayed smoke and salt particles off the coast of California in 2011, and scientists in Russia dispersed aerosols from a helicopter and car in 2009.
Plans for a proposed outdoor experiment in the United Kingdom, known as the SPICE project, were dropped in 2012, amid public criticism and conflict-of-interest accusations.
The Harvard experiment, first proposed in a 2014 paper, will launch a scientific balloon equipped with propellers and sensors around 20 kilometers (12 miles) above Earth. The aircraft would release between 100 grams and 2 kilograms of sub-micrometer-size particles of calcium carbonate, a substance naturally found in shells and limestone, in a roughly kilometer-long plume.
The balloon would then fly through the plume, enabling the sensors to measure things such as how broadly the particles disperse, how they interact with other compounds in the atmosphere, and how reflective they are.
The researchers hope these observations could help assess and refine climate simulations and otherwise inform the ongoing debate over the feasibility and risks of various approaches to geoengineering.
“If anything, I’m concerned that the current climate models make solar geoengineering look too good,” Frank Keutsch, a professor of chemistry and the project’s principal investigator, said in a statement. “If we want to be able to predict how large-scale geoengineering would disrupt the ozone layer, or the exchange of air between the troposphere and stratosphere, we need more real-world observations.”
The project is being funded through Harvard grants to the professors involved and the university’s Solar Geoengineering Research Program, a multidisciplinary effort to study feasibility, risks, ethics, and governance issues. The organization has raised more than $16 million from Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates, the Hewlett Foundation, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, and other philanthropic groups and individuals.
But there are concerns with the way the Harvard team is moving ahead.
“It doesn’t pose a physical risk, but it does pose a considerable social and political risk in being the first step towards development of actual technology for deployment,” Raymond Pierrehumbert, a physics professor at the University of Oxford, has said of the experiment. “There would be some limited scientific payback from such a small-scale experiment, but it is mostly a stunt to break the ice and get people used to the idea of field trials.”
Another question is whether the new committee is adequately independent, given Harvard’s involvement in the first step of the selection process. The university’s dean of engineering and vice provost for research created an external search committee, made up of three individuals from outside the university, to select the chair of the advisory panel. Bedsworth, in turn, chose the rest of the members.
The counterargument is that the US political system is effectively broken on the topic of global warming. The inability to raise public funds for research—or pass strict legislation, for that matter—has little to do with the merits of the science, or the importance of the issue, and everything to do with the poisoned politics of climate change, says Jane Long, a former associate director at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, who served on the search committee.
“We’re so dysfunctional from a political perspective,” says Long, who pushed early on for the researchers to create a governance board. “I don’t know how you can draw the conclusion that we’ve gotten a democratic signal that we shouldn’t do this research.”
The committee is made up of a mix of social scientists and legal and technical experts, including Michael Gerrard, a law professor at Columbia; Shuchi Talati, a fellow at the Union of Concerned Scientists; Robert Lempert, a principal researcher at RAND; and Raj Pandya, director of Thriving Earth Exchange.
But it doesn’t include any representatives of the public—say, from New Mexico, where the experiment is likely to occur—or, Burns notes, any outspoken geoengineering critics.
It’s also notable that everyone is based in the US. Flegal has previously criticized proponents of geoengineering research for failing to call on enough voices from developing nations, even as they argue that the tools could be especially important in helping to address the disproportionate impact of climate change on the global poor.
Harvard professor David Keith, one of the main figures behind the experiment, acknowledged that there are reasonable concerns about independence. But he said Harvard made a good-faith effort to create a committee several layers removed from the researchers. He adds that it’s not the only form of oversight, noting that the project will also have to pass muster with Harvard’s safety committee, Federal Aviation Administration regulations, and provisions of the National Environmental Policy Act.
]]>CRISPR might soon create spicy tomatoes by switching on their chili genes - MIT Technology Review
▻https://www.technologyreview.com/the-download/612721/the-next-feat-for-crispr-might-be-spicy-tomatoes-made-with-chili-g
Looking for perfect heat and lots of it? Gene engineers in Brazil think they might be able to create eye-watering tomatoes.
Hot stuff: Even though chili peppers and tomato plants diverged from a common ancestor millions of years ago, tomatoes still possess the genetic pathway needed to make capsaicinoids, the molecules that make chilis hot.
Now, Agustin Zsögön from the Federal University of Viçosa in Brazil writes in the journal Trends in Plant Science that gene-editing tools like CRISPR could turn it back on.
Spicy biofactories: Tomatoes are much easier to grow than peppers, so making them hot could turn them into spice factories. “Capsaicinoids are very valuable compounds; they are used in [the] weapons industry for pepper spray, they are also used for anaesthetics [and] there is some research showing that they promote weight loss,” he told the Guardian.
Strange fruit: Tomatoes are not the first food that scientists have suggested could be given an unusual new twist using CRISPR. Sweeter strawberries, non-browning mushrooms, and tastier ground-cherries have all been either attempted or mooted in the past.
]]>United Nations considers a test ban on evolution-warping gene drives - MIT Technology Review
▻https://www.technologyreview.com/s/612415/united-nations-considers-a-test-ban-on-evolution-warping-gene-driv
he billionaire Bill Gates wants to end malaria, and so he’s particularly “energized” about gene drives, a technology that could wipe out the mosquitoes that spread the disease.
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Gates calls the new approach a “breakthrough,” but some environmental groups say gene drives are too dangerous to ever use.
Now the sides are headed for a showdown.
In a letter circulated today, scientists funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and others are raising the alarm over what they say is an attempt to use a United Nations biodiversity meeting this week in Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt, to introduce a global ban on field tests of the technology.
At issue is a draft resolution by diplomats updating the UN Convention on Biological Diversity, which—if adopted—would call on governments to “refrain from” any release of organisms containing engineered gene drives, even as part of experiments.
The proposal for a global gene-drive moratorium has been pushed by environmental groups that are also opposed to genetically modified soybeans and corn. They have likened the gene-drive technique to the atom bomb.
In response, the Gates Foundation, based in Seattle, has been funding a counter-campaign, hiring public relations agencies to preempt restrictive legislation and to distribute today’s letter. Many of its signatories are directly funded by the foundation.
“This is a lobbying game on both sides, to put it bluntly,” says Todd Kuiken, who studies gene-drive policy at North Carolina State University. (He says he was asked to sign the Gates letter but declined because he is a technical advisor to the UN.)
It’s the ability of a gene drive to spread on its own in the wild that accounts for both the technology’s promise and its peril. Scientists already take elaborate precautions against accidental release of gene-drive mosquitoes from their labs.
Burt says for now the biggest unknown is whether the technology will work at all. “The risk we are trying to deal with is that it doesn’t work, that it falls over when we release it, or resistance develops very quickly,” he says.
That means both opponents and supporters of gene drives may be overestimating how soon one could be ready.
“The member states are hearing and thinking that these are sitting in the lab ready to be released, and that is not the case,” says Kuiken. “Nothing I have seen suggested these things are literally ready to go out the door tomorrow. We could have better decisions if everyone knew they could take a breath.”
]]>Linguistic red flags from Facebook posts can predict future depression diagnoses — ScienceDaily
▻https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/10/181015150643.htm
Research finds that the language people use in their Facebook posts can predict a future diagnosis of depression as accurately as the tools clinicians use in medical settings to screen for the disease.
In any given year, depression affects more than 6 percent of the adult population in the United States — some 16 million people — but fewer than half receive the treatment they need. What if an algorithm could scan social media and point to linguistic red flags of the disease before a formal medical diagnosis had been made?
Ah oui, ce serait fantastique pour les Big Pharma : la dépression est une maladie complexe, dont les symptômes graves sont souvent confondus avec la déprime qui est un état sychologique que nous connaissons tous. Notre Facebook, couplé avec notre assistant vocal Amazon nous gorgerait de Valium, et tout irait pour le mieux dans le Meilleur des mondes.
Considering conditions such as depression, anxiety, and PTSD , for example, you find more signals in the way people express themselves digitally."
For six years, the WWBP, based in Penn’s Positive Psychology Center and Stony Brook’s Human Language Analysis Lab, has been studying how the words people use reflect inner feelings and contentedness. In 2014, Johannes Eichstaedt, WWBP founding research scientist, started to wonder whether it was possible for social media to predict mental health outcomes, particularly for depression.
“Social media data contain markers akin to the genome,” Eichstaedt explains. “With surprisingly similar methods to those used in genomics, we can comb social media data to find these markers. Depression appears to be something quite detectable in this way; it really changes people’s use of social media in a way that something like skin disease or diabetes doesn’t.”
Il y a au moins une bonne nouvelle sur la déontologie scientifique :
Rather than do what previous studies had done — recruit participants who self-reported depression — the researchers identified data from people consenting to share Facebook statuses and electronic medical-record information, and then analyzed the statuses using machine-learning techniques to distinguish those with a formal depression diagnosis.
Les marqueurs considérés sont aussi des marqueurs sociaux et économiques, qu’il faudrait traiter autrement qu’avec des médicaments.
They learned that these markers comprised emotional, cognitive, and interpersonal processes such as hostility and loneliness, sadness and rumination, and that they could predict future depression as early as three months before first documentation of the illness in a medical record.
La conclusion est fantastique : il faut rendre le balayage obligatoire !!!
Eichstaedt sees long-term potential in using these data as a form of unobtrusive screening. “The hope is that one day, these screening systems can be integrated into systems of care,” he says. “This tool raises yellow flags; eventually the hope is that you could directly funnel people it identifies into scalable treatment modalities.”
Despite some limitations to the study, including its strictly urban sample, and limitations in the field itself — not every depression diagnosis in a medical record meets the gold standard that structured clinical interviews provide, for example — the findings offer a potential new way to uncover and get help for those suffering from depression.
#Dépression #Facebook #Foutaises #Hubris_scientifique #Big_pharma #Psychologie
]]>The smartphone app that can tell you’re depressed before you know it yourself - MIT Technology Review
▻https://www.technologyreview.com/s/612266/the-smartphone-app-that-can-tell-youre-depressed-before-you-know-i
A startup founded in Palo Alto, California, by a trio of doctors, including the former director of the US National Institute of Mental Health, is trying to prove that our obsession with the technology in our pockets can help treat some of today’s most intractable medical problems: depression, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder, and substance abuse.
Mindstrong Health is using a smartphone app to collect measures of people’s cognition and emotional health as indicated by how they use their phones. Once a patient installs Mindstrong’s app, it monitors things like the way the person types, taps, and scrolls while using other apps. This data is encrypted and analyzed remotely using machine learning, and the results are shared with the patient and the patient’s medical provider.
The seemingly mundane minutiae of how you interact with your phone offers surprisingly important clues to your mental health, according to Mindstrong’s research—revealing, for example, a relapse of depression.
The seemingly mundane minutiae of how you interact with your phone offers surprisingly important clues to your mental health, according to Mindstrong’s research—revealing, for example, a relapse of depression.❞
For now, Insel says, the company is working mainly with seriously ill people who are at risk of relapse for problems like depression, schizophrenia, and substance abuse. “This is meant for the most severely disabled people, who are really needing some innovation,” he says. “There are people who are high utilizers of health care and they’re not getting the benefits, so we’ve got to figure out some way to get them something that works better.” Actually predicting that a patient is headed toward a downward spiral is a harder task, but Dagum believes that having more people using the app over time will help cement patterns in the data.
There are thorny issues to consider, of course. Privacy, for one: while Mindstrong says it protects users’ data, collecting such data at all could be a scary prospect for many of the people it aims to help. Companies may be interested in, say, including it as part of an employee wellness plan, but most of us wouldn’t want our employers anywhere near our mental health data, no matter how well protected it may be.
#Données_médicales #Maladie_mentale #Surveillance #Algorithmes_prédictifs #Hubris_scientifique
]]>Manifeste contre la géo-ingénierie : bas les pattes ! - Attac France
▻https://france.attac.org/nos-publications/notes-et-rapports/article/manifeste-contre-la-geo-ingenierie-bas-les-pattes
Plus de 110 organisations du monde entier, provenant de 5 continents, dont Attac France, publient à l’occasion de la réunion du GIEC en Corée du Sud un manifeste exigeant l’arrêt immédiat des expériences de géo-ingéniérie actuelles et prévues dans les mois à venir et l’interdiction pure et simple de la géo-ingéniérie. Cet ensemble de solutions techniques à grande échelle visant à bloquer une partie des rayons du soleil, réfléchir la lumière du soleil ou capturer les émissions de gaz à effet de serre, avec des effets dévastateurs sur l’environnement, les écosystèmes et les communautés du monde entier. A l ’occasion de la publication du rapport du GIEC sur le 1.5°C, cette coalition d’organisation appelle à déployer les solutions déjà éprouvées et moins risquées, mais qui restent marginalisées dans les délibérations sur le changement climatique.
]]>The Unlikely Politics of a Digital Contraceptive | The New Yorker
▻https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/the-unlikely-politics-of-a-digital-contraceptive
In August, the F.D.A. announced that it had allowed a new form of contraception on the market: a mobile app called Natural Cycles. The app, which was designed by a Swedish particle physicist, asks its users to record their temperature with a Natural Cycles-branded thermometer each morning, and to log when they have their periods. Using a proprietary algorithm, the app informs its users which days they are infertile (green days—as in, go ahead, have fun) and which they are fertile (red days—proceed with caution), so that they can either abstain or use a backup method of birth control. In clearing the app as a medical device, the F.D.A. inaugurated “software application for contraception” as a new category of birth control under which similar products can now apply to be classified. The F.D.A.’s press release quotes Terri Cornelison, a doctor in its Center for Devices and Radiological Health, who said, “Consumers are increasingly using digital health technologies to inform their everyday health decisions and this new app can provide an effective method of contraception if it’s used carefully and correctly.”
On touche vraiment au grand Ogin’importe quoi.
In January, a single hospital in Stockholm alerted authorities that thirty-seven women who had sought abortions in a four-month period had all become pregnant while using Natural Cycles as their primary form of contraception. The Swedish Medical Products Agency agreed to investigate. Three weeks ago, that agency concluded that the number of unwanted pregnancies was consistent with the “typical use” failure rate of the app, which they found to be 6.9 per cent. During the six-month investigation, six hundred and seventy-six additional Natural Cycle users in Sweden reported unintended pregnancies, a number that only includes the unwanted pregnancies disclosed directly to the company.
Berglund’s story—a perfect combination of technology, ease, and self-discovery, peppered with the frisson of good fortune and reliance on what’s natural—has helped convince more than nine hundred thousand people worldwide to register an account with Natural Cycles. But the idea of determining fertile days by tracking ovulation, known as a fertility-awareness-based method of birth control, is anything but new. Fertility awareness is also sometimes called natural family planning, in reference to the Catholic precept that prohibits direct interventions in procreation. The most familiar form of fertility awareness is known as the rhythm method. First designated in the nineteen-thirties, the rhythm or calendar method was based on research by two physicians, one Austrian and one Japanese. If a woman counted the number of days in her cycle, she could make a statistical estimate of when she was most likely to get pregnant. Those methods evolved over the years: in 1935, a German priest named Wilhelm Hillebrand observed that body temperature goes up during ovulation. He recommended that women take their temperature daily to determine their fertile period.
Plenty of doctors remain unconvinced about Natural Cycles. “It’s as if we’re asking women to go back to the Middle Ages,” Aimee Eyvazzadeh, a fertility specialist in San Francisco, said. Technology, she warned, “is only as reliable as the human being behind it.” Forman, from Columbia, said that “one of the benefits of contraception was being able to dissociate intercourse from procreation.” By taking a pill or inserting a device into an arm or uterus, a woman could enjoy her sexuality without thinking constantly about what day of the month it was. With fertility awareness, Forman said, “it’s in the opposite direction. It’s tying it back together again. You’re having to change your life potentially based on your menstrual cycle. Whereas one of the nice benefits of contraception is that it liberated women from that.”
#Médecine #Hubris_technologique #Contraception #Comportements
]]>Quand Google rêve de contrôler l’humanité - Le Temps
▻https://www.letemps.ch/sciences/google-reve-controler-lhumanite
▻https://assets.letemps.ch/sites/default/files/styles/share/public/media/2018/05/18/file7072dzexf1ion0z0bux.jpg.png?itok=gvoP6FU0
Dans une vidéo interne révélée par le site américain « The Verge », Google développe une théorie prospective pour influencer le comportement humain à travers la compilation des données personnelles. Une « opération qui n’est pas liée à un produit actuel ou futur », se défend la multinationale
Comment les expériences d’un être humain peuvent-elles modifier le code génétique interne et les caractéristiques physiologiques des générations futures ? Google part de cette interrogation pour imaginer un immense registre de données compilées utilisé pour influencer le comportement humain. Son nom : « The selfish Ledger (le registre égoïste), ouvertement inspiré de l’ouvrage de Richard Dawkins The Selfish Gene, publiée en 1976. Dans ce livre, l’auteur émet un postulat iconoclaste : les êtres humains ne sont que des vecteurs, la véritable humanité se situe dans les gènes, éléments fondateurs de sa théorie de l’évolution. Par analogie, on peut penser que Google effectue le même renversement dans sa vidéo en célébrant la suprématie des données personnelles face à des individus réduits au rôle d’enveloppes corporelles.
]]>US nuclear tests killed American civilians on a scale comparable to Hiroshima and Nagasaki — Quartz
►https://qz.com/1163140/us-nuclear-tests-killed-american-civilians-on-a-scale-comparable-to-hiroshima-an
►https://qzprod.files.wordpress.com/2017/12/us-nuclear-test-fallout-radiation-poison-iodine-nevada-test-
When the US entered the nuclear age, it did so recklessly. New research suggests that the hidden cost of developing nuclear weapons were far larger than previous estimates, with radioactive fallout responsible for 340,000 to 690,000 American deaths from 1951 to 1973.
The study, performed by University of Arizona economist Keith Meyers, uses a novel method (pdf) to trace the deadly effects of this radiation, which was often consumed by Americans drinking milk far from the site of atomic tests.
Those measurements, however, did not capture the full range of effects over time and geography. Meyers created a broader picture by way of a macabre insight: When cows consumed radioactive fallout spread by atmospheric winds, their milk became a key channel to transmit radiation sickness to humans. Most milk production during this time was local, with cows eating at pasture and their milk being delivered to nearby communities, giving Meyers a way to trace radioactivity across the country.
The National Cancer Institute has records of the amount of Iodine 131—a dangerous isotope released in the Nevada tests—in milk, as well as broader data about radiation exposure. By comparing this data with county-level mortality records, Meyers came across a significant finding: “Exposure to fallout through milk leads to immediate and sustained increases in the crude death rate.” What’s more, these results were sustained over time. US nuclear testing likely killed seven to 14 times more people than we had thought, mostly in the midwest and northeast.
]]>U.S. Government Lifts Ban on Making Viruses More Deadly and Transmissible | Alternet
▻https://www.alternet.org/personal-health/us-government-lifts-ban-making-viruses-more-deadly-and-transmissible?akid=
Or rather, it did until Tuesday, when the U.S. government announced it was lifting a three-year ban on federal funding for experiments that alter viruses to make them even deadlier.
“Gain-of-function” research, in which scientists make pathogens more powerful or easily transmissible, is aimed at preventing disease outbreaks by better understanding how they might occur. The studies allow scientists, working in a highly controlled environment, to learn how a flu virus might mutate into a superbug capable of killing millions—a sort of game of wits played to gain insight into nature’s unpredictability. The ultimate goal is to proactively create vaccines, medications and other solutions to stop contagion in its tracks.
The new National Institutes of Health policy reverses a 2014 Obama administration funding ban on gain-of-function research projects specifically involving all forms of the influenza virus, Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS), and severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS). The new rules would extend beyond those viruses, “apply[ing] to any pathogen that could potentially cause a pandemic,” according to the New York Times. “For example, they would apply to a request to create an Ebola virus transmissible through the air.”
Possibly aware that this sounds like the prologue to a very hacky horror movie, the NIH accompanied its announcement with a list of criteria that proposals must meet before funding will be granted. According to those terms, a panel will only greenlight projects if the work promises to yield practical solutions, such as an effective antiviral treatment; the research benefits must sufficiently outweigh the risks; and researchers must prove their experiment outcomes cannot be obtained using safer methodologies. Contenders will also have to prove their researchers and facilities “have the capacity to do the work safety and securely and to respond rapidly if there are any accidents, protocol lapses, or security breaches.”
“We have a responsibility to ensure that research with infectious agents is conducted responsibly, and that we consider the potential biosafety and biosecurity risks associated with such research,” NIH director Francis S. Collins said in a statement. “I am confident that the thoughtful review process...will help to facilitate the safe, secure, and responsible conduct of this type of research in a manner that maximizes the benefits to public health.”
Despite those reassurances, critics continue to express concern about potential mishaps. There’s some precedent for this. In 2014, CNN reported that dozens of workers at the CDC had been accidentally exposed to anthrax, while others had mishandled samples of the bacteria. No staff were found to be infected by the disease after prolonged monitoring. A Vice Motherboard report notes that between “2003 and 2009, there were 395 events reported that could have resulted in exposure to toxic agents, although this resulted in just seven infections.”
Harvard epidemiologist Marc Lipsitch offered tepid support, telling the Times the approval panels are "a small step forward,” but cautioning that gain-of-function experiments “have given us some modest scientific knowledge and done almost nothing to improve our preparedness for pandemics, and yet risked creating an accidental pandemic.”
Conversely, Stony Brook University president and biomedical researcher Samuel Stanley worries that the NIH decision, after three years of funding prohibition in this area, may be too little and just a wee bit too late.
“There has been increased scrutiny of laboratories working in this area, which can lead to an even more robust culture of safety,” Stanley told NPR. “But I also fear that the moratorium may have delayed vital research. That could have long lasting effects on the field. I believe nature is the ultimate bioterrorist and we need to do all we can to stay one step ahead.”
Comment çà « trop tard » ? Dans la compétition d’hubris entre chercheur peut-être... pas dans la sécurité de la planète. Quand j’entends « biosécurité », je pense « bioguerre », je ne sais pas pourquoi...
]]>“’Burning Man for the 1%’: the desert party for the tech elite”
▻https://www.theguardian.com/business/2016/may/02/further-future-festival-burning-man-tech-elite-eric-schmidt
“It’s important what we do here,” Scott said. “That’s what we keep saying. We’re shaping the future. These are the people who not only can do it, but these are the only people who can.”
]]>UP Magazine - Ils sont fous ! Des scientifiques ont un plan pour stopper le changement climatique : diminuer le soleil
▻http://up-magazine.info/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=7058:ils-sont-fous-des-sc
Les scientifiques commencent à envisager sérieusement un plan radical de géoingénierie de l’environnement afin de lutter contre le changement climatique et d’atténuer certains des effets néfastes qu’il a déjà sur nous et sur l’environnement. Plusieurs groupes de scientifiques étudient l’idée de projeter un nuage d’aérosols sulfatés dans la haute atmosphère. Cela disperserait une partie des rayons du soleil dans l’espace, réduisant ainsi la vitesse à laquelle la Terre se réchauffe.
Une telle mesure pourrait contribuer à mettre un terme aux effets néfastes du changement climatique, tels que le blanchiment des coraux et l’augmentation de la fréquence et de l’intensité des ouragans. James Crabbe, de l’Université du Bedfordshire au Royaume-Uni, mène une recherche pour déterminer le type d’effets que ce type de géoingénierie peut avoir sur la région des Caraïbes où l’étude est menée. Crabbe affirme au New Scientist : « Nous montrons de façon très convaincante qu’en injectant du dioxyde de soufre dans l’atmosphère, les températures à la surface de la mer diminueraient de façon significative vers 2069 ».
]]>L’eau contaminée de Fukushima devrait être déversée dans le Pacifique - polynésie 1ère
►http://la1ere.francetvinfo.fr/polynesie/eau-contaminee-fukushima-devrait-etre-deversee-pacifique-494789.
Plus de 700.000 m3 d’eau contaminée de la centrale nucléaire de Fukushima, devrait bientôt être déversée dans l’Océan. L’exploitant de la centrale Tepco n’attend plus que le feu vert du gouvernement japonais pour se débarrasser de cette eau à la radioactivité résiduelle.
Mais enfin, seuls les naïfs ou les complices des nucléocrates pouvaient nier que tôt ou tard cette eau contaminée finirait dans la nature, comme la terre contaminée, comme la centrale elle-même. Que ce soit volontairement par largage, ou involontairement lors du prochain tremblement de terre... Une fois créés, les déchets nucléaires restent dans l’environnement plus longtemps que la mémoire des hommes qui les ont créés. Il s’agit de les diluer, pas de les effacer.
]]>Une bombe de la Seconde Guerre mondiale découverte dans l’enceinte de Fukushima
▻http://www.latribune.fr/entreprises-finance/industrie/energie-environnement/une-bombe-de-la-seconde-guerre-mondiale-decouverte-dans-l-enceinte-de-fuku
La découverte par un sous-traitant de l’électricien Tepco s’est produite au cours des importants travaux engagés dans la centrale nucléaire en vue du démantèlement de ses six réacteurs, dont quatre ont été sévèrement endommagés après le séisme et le tsunami du 11 mars 2011.
Une bombe datant probablement de la Seconde Guerre mondiale a été découverte jeudi au Japon dans l’enceinte de la centrale nucléaire accidentée Fukushima Daiichi, a indiqué l’exploitant.
Bien sûr, quand une telle nouvelle tombe sur Twitter, le premier réflexe est de ne pas y croire... comment, ils n’auraient pas complètement préparé le terrain pour construire une centrale nucléaire...Non, j’y crois pas.
Et pourtant !!!
]]>« Le monde #arabe est dans un #chaos mental absolu » - International - El Watan
▻http://www.elwatan.com/international/le-monde-arabe-est-dans-un-chaos-mental-absolu-15-07-2017-349064_112.php
Quand j’évoque le chaos mental, j’entends également qu’il existe du côté arabe et #musulman, puisque nous avons de très nombreux Etats qui se disent musulmans qui sont des alliés inconditionnels de la puissance militaire américaine et soutiennent son déploiement. Dans cet ouvrage, je tente donc de déconstruire les discours canoniques et les images clichés devenues omniprésentes dans les opinions publiques qui sont amenées à approuver ou ne pas s’opposer aux politiques d’interventions militaires musclées, soit au nom des droits de l’homme, soit au nom de la défense préemptive des « #valeurs » occidentales.
J’essaie également de montrer que si l’image de l’islam est autant défigurée aujourd’hui, la responsabilité n’en incombe pas seulement à ce que j’appelle l’#hubris (notion d’origine grecque désignant la démesure, ndlr) des Etats membres de l’#OTAN et le désir de #dominer entièrement le monde qui va de pair avec la globalisation.
Le fait que des régimes politiques arabes ou non arabes musulmans, ainsi que de très nombreux intellectuels arabes et d’autres pays musulmans, se mettent à vanter une altérité islamique inconciliable avec les acquis positifs de la modernité, permet d’accréditer la thèse de Huntington. Nous sommes dans le chaos mental absolu.
L’une des aberrations, c’est qu’il n’existe plus aujourd’hui de connaissance de l’islam. Les nouveaux orientalistes ne connaissent que trois auteurs sur les 13 siècles de civilisation islamique (Sayed Kotob, Mawdudi, Ibn Taymiyya). Leurs œuvres sont diffusées en tous lieux et en plusieurs langues et c’est ce qui tombe entre les mains des jeunes Arabes et musulmans partout dans le monde.
Par ailleurs, le problème tire ses origines de la création de l’Organisation de la conférence islamique (#OCI), où brusquement on assiste à un regroupement d’Etats sur la base de l’identité religieuse — inédit depuis le temps des #croisades — et cette organisation s’est efforcée de créer et de consolider une altérité islamique, en refusant de façon très abrupte des principes de modernité qui sont devenus universels et auxquels il est difficile de se soustraire, même si les gouvernement de l’OTAN en font un très mauvais usage.
]]>Gene editing opens doors to seedless fruit with no need for bees | New Scientist
▻https://www.newscientist.com/article/2127640-gene-editing-opens-doors-to-seedless-fruit-with-no-need-for-be
Don’t like the seeds in tomatoes? You might be pleased to know that seedless ones have been created by gene editing.
The technique will make it possible to make a much wider range of seedless fruits than is currently available – and also means farmers might not have to rely on declining bee populations. Whether we ever see such fruits on supermarket shelves, however, may depend on how regulators decide to treat gene-edited crops.
Une belle entrée en matière... on aurait aussi pu ajouter qu’on aurait plus besoin de paysans.
Mais tout est du même acabit... en théorie tout est devenu possible.
“We haven’t tasted them yet, but in theory they should taste the same,” says Osakabe.
The downside for farmers is that seedless plants have to be grown from cuttings, which may be more labour-intenstive. Tomatoes are usually grown from seed, but they can also be propagated by cuttings.
Some people also like the flavour that tomato seeds add. Seedless versions would, however, be ideal for processing into sauces and pastes.
On retrouve à nouveau cette logique anti-naturelle qui fait remonter du process agro-alimentaire vers la production agricole : ce sera mieux pour les plats préparés et les sauces en boîte.
Mais le plus beau reste la conclusion :
Whether these seedless varieties make it to shop shelves may depend on whether gene-edited plants have to meet the same criteria for approval as genetically modified plants, which would greatly increase costs. Some argue that where gene-editing is used to introduce mutations already found in some of the plant we eat, it should not require such strict regulation.
Si c’est pareil, c’est la même chose, et donc ça reste pareil. Ne venez pas regarder de plus près, ça coûte trop cher.
]]>10 Breakthrough Technologies 2016 : Precise Gene Editing in Plants - MIT Technology Review
▻https://www.technologyreview.com/s/600765/10-breakthrough-technologies-2016-precise-gene-editing-in-plants
▻https://d267cvn3rvuq91.cloudfront.net/i/images/ma16-10plantsx2760.jpg?cx=1&cy=1193&cw=2147&ch=1207&sw=12
CRISPR offers an easy, exact way to alter genes to create traits such as disease resistance and drought tolerance.
Availability: 5-10 years
]]>The CRISPR Tomato That Has No Seeds
Le résumé des trois articles parlant de cette tomate sans graines publié dans la lettre de la MIT Technology Review est proprement sidérant. Des fruits qui murissent avant de faire des graines et qui n’ont pas besoin de pollinisateurs... voilà ce qui va garantir la sécurité alimentaire. Hubris scientifique poussé à son maximum, et en même temps acceptation de la dystopie climatique qui nous menace. Avoir peur de l’avenir, ne pas faire confiance aux paysans (qui ne pourront pas ressemer ces tomates sans graines, bien ouej) et inventer un techno-fix qui va rapporter des millions.
A newly engineered tomato could help increase food security. The CRISPR gene-editing tool shows great promise in helping us engineer better food. And now researchers from Tokushima University in Japan have used it to create seedless tomatoes, by introducing a genetic modification to increase production of a hormone that causes fruits to develop before seeds have formed. As New Scientist notes, the resulting plants don’t require pollination, which means that they could be grown in areas where insect life fails to help nature’s reproduction.
]]>Synthetic Biology : Learn to Program Life
▻https://www.eventbrite.com/e/synthetic-biology-learn-to-program-life-tickets-32540756278
Le titre d’une telle cnférence est un résumé de la « science des promesses », ou alors d’une vision prométhéenne de la science. L’hubris scientifique dans toute sa splendeur.
Synthetic biology endeavors to program life as we would program computers—only with DNA instead of machine code. For the past 20 years, synthetic biologists have reshaped what living things do by rewriting their DNA. They’ve turned living cells into biosensors, fuel and medicine producers, and far more.
In this workshop, you will learn the fundamentals of synthetic biology in a hands-on way. You’ll learn how Biobricks work, how DNA can be made into a programming language, and engineer bacteria to glow.
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