New Camera Is the Size of a Grain of Salt

 New Camera Is the Size of a Grain of Salt: Smart Dust Is Coming 

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Miniaturization is one of the most world-shaking trends of the last several decades. Computer chips now have features measured in billionths of a meter. Sensors that once weighed kilograms fit inside your smartphone. But it doesn't end there.

Researchers are aiming to take sensors smaller—much smaller.

In a new University of Stuttgart paper published in Nature Photonics, scientists describe tiny 3D printed lenses and show how they can take super sharp images. Each lens is 120 millionths of a meter in diameter—roughly the size of a grain of table salt—and because they're 3D printed in one piece, complexity is no barrier. Any lens configuration that can be designed on a computer can be printed and used.

This allows for a variety of designs to be tested to achieve the finest quality images.

According to the paper, the new method not only demonstrates high-quality micro-lenses can be 3D printed, but it also solves roadblocks to current manufacturing methods. These include limitations on how small you can go, failure to combine multiple elements, surface design restrictions, and alignment difficulties.

Artificial intelligence

Artificial intelligence

There is a common saying in the artificial-intelligence community: “AI is whatever hasn’t been done yet.” They call this the “AI effect.” Skeptics discount the behavior of an artificial-intelligence program by arguing that, rather than being real intelligence, it is just brute force computing and algorithms.

There is merit to the criticism. Even though computers have beaten chess masters and Jeopardy players and learned to talk to us and drive cars, Siri and Cortana are still imperfect and infuriating.

But that is about to change — so that even the skeptics will say that AI has arrived. There have been major advances in “deep learning” neural networks, which learn by ingesting large amounts of data: IBM has taught its AI system, Watson, everything from cooking, to finance, to medicine and Facebook. Google, and Microsoft have made great strides in face recognition and human-like speech systems. AI-based face recognition, for example, has almost reached human capability. And IBM Watson can diagnose certain cancers better than any human doctor can.

Fortunately, we don’t need to worry about superhuman AI yet; that is still a decade or two away.

How Drone helps find a man suffering from heart attack

 A new colleague was Iowa's first responders sight when searching for missing boaters Wednesday night.

On the East Fork of the Des Moines River, a 20-person team was searching for a grandfather and granddaughter who were stranded in a logjam . David Penton, emergency management coordinator for Kossuth County, could faintly hear the cries of the missing persons, but the setting sun was making it more difficult to see them amid the thickly wooded riverbank.

So Penton called a colleague and had him rush to the scene with a drone.

Within three minutes of takeoff, they'd found the duo by watching the live stream from the DJI Phantom's camera. The drone then hovered overhead so that the first responders could use its location to guide them to the grandfather and granddaughter.

According to Penton, he said he expected the victims would have been found without the drone, but using it allowed them to find them faster. Once discovered, the man fell to his knees as he was suffering from a heart attack.

"Without the help of that drone, time could've been an issue for him," Penton said.

Android Hacking group making $500,000 per day

Own an Android smartphone?

Hackers can secretly install malicious apps, games, and pop-up adverts on your smartphone remotely in order to make large sums of money.
Cheetah Mobile have uncovered one of the world's largest and most prolific Trojan families, infecting millions of Android devices.
Dubbed Hummer, this notorious mobile trojan stealthily installs malicious apps, games, or even porn apps onto victim's phones and yields its creators more than $500,000 (£375,252) on a daily basis.
"This Trojan continually pops up ads on victims' phones, which is extremely annoying," researchers wrote in a blog post. "It also pushes mobile phone games and silently installs porn applications in the background. Unwanted apps appear on these devices, and they are re-installed shortly after users uninstall them."
Even after the number of phones infected has declined, Hummer is still infecting nearly 1 Million new devices per day, making it the most widespread trojan family in the world.
Every time Hummer installs a new app on the infected devices, it's developers make 50 cents. Therefore, the group behind this Trojan is believed to be making more than half a million dollars (over $500,000) daily.
...and over $15 Million per month.
Here's How Hummer Work:
Once a device is infected with Hummer, the Trojan proceeds to root the phone to gain administrator privileges, which allowed it to discreetly install unwanted apps, games, porn apps as well as malware in the background.

These apps and malware end up consuming large amounts of network traffic, potentially affecting the victims with large bills from their Internet providers.
"In several hours, the trojan accessed the network over 10,000 times and downloaded over 200 APKs, consuming 2 GB of network traffic," the researchers noted.
Hummer is almost Impossible to Uninstall
The bad news for affected Android users is that Hummer is extremely difficult if not impossible to get rid of, because the Trojan takes control of the phone at admin level, making it impossible for traditional antivirus tools to uninstall Hummer.
The dangerous part: It is impossible to delete the Trojan through a factory reset due to the fact Hummer comes equipped with up to 18 different separate rooting exploits that allow it to root itself on a phone, the researchers said.
Recently, Trend Micro researchers also detected a similar threat known as Godless that came with Android rooting exploits, affecting 90 percent of all Android devices available in the market today.
Hummer spreads itself using a different number of domain names and third-party app stores, tricking users into downloading malicious apps or fake versions of popular apps like Facebook or Twitter.
The researchers claim to have traced the source of the Trojan family to an "underground internet industry chain" in China, based on an email address linked to the domain names used by the malware.