No one wants to ring in the New Year with a splitting headache and a sandpapery tongue, and yet "Hangover Cure" tends to be the number one Google search on New Year's Day. If that search term brought you here, sorry: There's no silver bullet cure for the side effects of boozin'. But based on what we know about hangovers, scientifically speaking, there are some things you can do to help.
2016 is just around the corner and there’s a lot to keep an eye on in Asia in the first month of the year. In January 2016, we’ll see elections in Taiwan, the formal operational launch of China’s Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, the possible resumption of peace talks between the Afghan government and the Taliban, the first steps toward renewed comprehensive talks between India and China, and the possible disintegration of a recently concluded controversial deal between the Japanese and South Korean governments on comfort women. Here’s your guide to starting off the new year with an eye to some early developments of geopolitical significance in the Asia-Pacific...
Depending on how you count them, humans have a variety of senses. The big five – sight, smell, hearing, taste, and touch – provide us with the vast majority of the information we require to operate in the world. In some applications, for robots to be most useful for us, they need to possess replicas of these senses. Indeed, several of the senses are already recreated in their machine versions, or work is well underway to make it a reality. Video analytics provides machine visions. Audio analysis – including speech recognition – is a well developed field. There is even work to imbue machines with a “sense of smell.” Soon, robots could be getting the sense of touch, as well.
Russian president Vladimir Putin has signed and enacted a decree that establishes five operational headquarters in maritime areas to organise, plan, and conduct counter-terrorism operations.
Although there are more than a million cybersecurity positions available worldwide, the global shortage of skilled cybersecurity professionals is set to continue to grow at rapid pace in 2016, putting public and private sector organizations at risk, according to a recent survey by Cybrary, the world’s first and only no-cost cybersecurity massive open online course provider.
Intelligence and Transportation Minister Yisrael Katz on Wednesday maintained that Israel does not spy on the US and said it expects Washington to uphold the same standards.
The supremacy of the US dollar is in danger: more and more countries around the world are seeking to replace the American currency, independent researcher and writer Timothy Alexander Guzman notes, pointing to a series of Russo-Iranian agreements aimed at stopping mutual settlements in US dollars with foreign countries.
As American families dined on turkey and stuffing, China’s Central Military Commission (CMC) was hard at work in Beijing hammering out military reforms. These reforms were then announced to the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) by President Xi Jinping, who also serves as the CMC chairman. The proposed organizational changes may make this round of reform the most significant since those of the 1950s, when the PLA transitioned from a revolutionary army to the arm of a party-state. First impressions of the proposals provide mostly descriptive analyses at what Xi Jinping proposed for the PLA, but what the PLA publicized does not tell the whole story. The proposed creation of a separate headquarters for PLA ground forces and reorganization of the military regions will reverberate throughout military intelligence — a subject omitted entirely in Beijing’s propaganda blitz. Once the PLA moves beyond the inevitable organizational growing pains, the Chinese military intelligence system will be better positioned to manage its responsibilities for informing policymakers and supporting military operations.
An independent computer security researcher uncovered a database of information on 191 million voters that is exposed on the open Internet due to an incorrectly configured database, he said on Monday.The database includes names, addresses, birth dates, party affiliations, phone numbers and emails of voters in all 50 U.S. states and Washington, researcher Chris Vickery said in a phone interview.Vickery, a tech support specialist from Austin, Texas, said he found the information while looking for information exposed on the Web in a bid to raise awareness of data leaks.
In a Christmas gift for Chinese fighter pilots, December 25th saw the unveiling of a new J-20 fighter in fresh yellow fuselage primer on the runway of the Chengdu Aviation Corporation (CAC) factory. More notable than its paint color, however, was the numbering of the plane: "2101." As opposed to "2018" or "2019" to follow the eighth flying prototype "2017," "2101" suggests the plane is the first of the low rate initial production (LRIP) airframes, which signify the move away from prototype production to building fighters for actual military use.
Expectation, Meet Reality
As the United States struggles to begin a serious discussion about how best to deal with the threat posed by terrorist groups in general and Islamic State militants in particular, Russ Feingold is offering answers based on decades of experience and a deep understanding of all the issues that must be addressed. And it may be that the most important of these answers is this one: “[If] we are to win this fight, we cannot repeat the mistakes of the past with yet another rush toward a full-scale ground invasion led by tens of thousands of American troops.”
A Washington brawl has broken out over the future of the U.S. military's ability to reach orbit, with the powerhouse combo of Boeing and Lockheed Martin jostling with the scrappy — yet well-funded — upstart of entrepreneur Elon Musk’s SpaceX for multibillion-dollar contracts for launching satellites.
One of the excellent features of new Windows devices is that disk encryption is built-in and turned on by default, protecting your data in case your device is lost or stolen. But what is less well-known is that, if you are like most users and login to Windows 10 using your Microsoft account, your computer automatically uploaded a copy of your recovery key – which can be used to unlock your encrypted disk – to Microsoft’s servers, probably without your knowledge and without an option to opt-out.
The United States has been at war with ISIS for more than a year, and with Islamic extremism for nearly a decade and a half. But beyond defending the homeland against terrorism,U.S. leaders have not offered a compelling answer to this vital question: What is it that America is fighting for?The question has taken on new urgency as electoral politics has driven a surge of illiberal populism, not only in the United States but in many European democracies. America will not defeat the grave challenge it faces by retreating from its core principles. When societies fall out of touch with their most elevating, unifying beliefs, they decline into cynicism and sloth. This is how states and civilizations decay and disappear.
Hirata attributes Japan's pro-whaling anomaly to two factors. The first is cultural. Unlike Americans, Japanese people don't tend to see whales as charismatic mammals that should be protected from human consumption by a universal taboo. Hirata points out that in Japanese, "the symbol for whale (pronounced kujira) includes within it a component that means fish." Since whales are considered just a really big fish, she writes, "most Japanese lack any special love of whales and disagree with Western animal rights activists who insists on whales' rights." Sanctimony about whales translates as cultural prejudice...
The Health Ministry called on everyone over the age of six – especially pregnant women and people of all ages with chronic diseases such as heart problems, diabetes or Down syndrome – to get a flu shot, following the death of a 54-year-old woman from H1N1 (swine) flu at the Rabin Medical Center-Beilinson Campus in Petah Tikva on Thursday.
Matthew Olsen: There is every reason to expect that the threat of terrorism here in the U.S. will increase in 2016. The year 2015 is, by many measures, a record year in terms of the number of terror plots and terror suspects who have been identified. This year around 50 people have been arrested for their connection to ISIS – the most that we’ve had since 9/11. That trend, given ISIS’s continued focus on the West as demonstrated in Paris and in San Bernardino, is likely to continue into the next year. That’s obviously posing a huge challenge to our counterterrorism community going forward.
Investigators of the Paris attacks revealed recently that the terrorists used the encrypted apps WhatsApp and Telegram to communicate and coordinate beforehand. This follows reports from San Bernardino that authorities discovered two smashed cellphones at the scene of the rampage that killed 14 people, and they recovered a third one from the body of the female terrorist.
The public first heard it in September 1999, when Putin was an unknown prime minister. Russia was hit with several deadly terrorist bombings of apartment buildings. Vowing revenge, Putin didn't hold back: "We're going to pursue the terrorists everywhere," he said. "That means, you'll excuse me, we'll catch them in the toilet, we'll wipe them out in the sh*t house, finally."
Power plants are some of the most critical bits on infrastructure. An attack against a power plant could incapacitate an entire region of any country. This is doubly true for nuclear power plants. Moreover, an attack against a nuclear power facility could have disastrous consequences, making an area uninhabitable for millennia. With more and more critical systems moving “online” an attack need not be physical to inflict untold damage.
Researchers are taking crime scene fingerprint identification to a new level. They have discovered a straightforward concept for identifying whether a culprit is male or female based on the content in fingerprints.