• By PHILIP ISSA AND SARAH EL DEEB, ASSOCIATED PRESS ··BEIRUT — Apr 4, 2017, 10:03 AM ET

A suspected chemical attack in a town in Syria's rebel-held northern Idlib province killed dozens of people on Tuesday, opposition activists said, describing the attack as among the worst in the country's six-year civil war.

Hours later, a small field hospital in the region was struck and destroyed, according to a civil defense worker in the area. There was no information if anyone was killed in that attack.

The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights monitoring group put the death toll from the gas attack at 58, saying there were 11 children among the dead. Meanwhile, the Idlib Media Center said dozens of people had been killed.

The media center published footage of medical workers appearing to intubate an unresponsive man stripped down to his underwear and hooking up a little girl foaming at the mouth to a ventilator. It was not immediately clear if all those killed died from suffocation or were struck by other airstrikes occurring in the area around the same time.

It was the third claim of a chemical attack in just over a week in Syria. The previous two were reported in Hama province, in an area not far from Khan Sheikhoun, the site of Tuesday's alleged attack.

Tuesday's reports came on the eve of a major international meeting in Brussels on the future of Syria and the region, to be hosted by the EU's High Representative Federica Mogherini.

There was no comment from the government in Damascus in the immediate aftermath of the attack, which activists said was the worst since the 2013 toxic gas attack on the Damascus suburb of Ghouta that killed hundreds of civilians. That attack, which a U.N. report said was an attack by toxic sarin gas, was the worst in Syria's civil war.

In the wake of the 2013 attack, President Bashar Assad agreed to a Russia-sponsored deal to destroy his chemical arsenal and joined the Chemical Weapons Convention. His government declared a 1,300-ton stockpile of chemical weapons and so-called precursor chemicals that can be used to make weapons amid international outrage at a nerve gas attack on the outskirts of Damascus.

Those weapons have been destroyed, but member states of the OPCW have repeatedly questioned whether Assad declared everything in 2013. The widely available chemical chlorine was not covered in the 2013 declaration and activists say they have documented dozens of cases of chlorine gas attacks since then.

The Syrian government has consistently denied using chemical weapons and chlorine gas, accusing the rebels of deploying it in the war instead.

Tarik Jasarevic, spokesman for the World Health Organization in Geneva, said in an e-mailed statement that the agency is contacting health providers from Idlib to get more information about Tuesday's incident.

The Syrian American Medical Society, which supports hospitals in opposition-held territory, said it had sent a team of inspectors to Khan Sheikhoun before noon and an investigation was underway.

The Syrian activists claimed the attack was caused by an airstrike carried out either by Syrian government or Russian warplanes. Makeshift hospitals soon crowded with people suffocating, they said.

Mohammed Hassoun, a media activist in nearby Sarmin — also in Idlib province where some of the critical cases were transferred — said the hospital there had been equipped to deal with such chemical attacks because the town was struck in one chemical attack, early on in the Syrian uprising.

The wounded have been "distributed around in rural Idlib," he told The Associated Press by phone. "There are 18 critical cases here. They were unconscious, they had seizures and when oxygen was administered, they bled from the nose and mouth."

Hassoun, who is documenting the attack for the medical society, said the doctors there have said it is likely more than one gas. "Chlorine gas doesn't cause such convulsions," he said, adding that doctors suspect sarin was used.

Hussein Kayal, a photographer for the Idlib Media Center, said he was awoken by the sound of a bomb blast around 6:30 a.m. When he arrived at the scene there was no smell, he said.

He found entire families inside their homes, lying on the floor, eyes wide open and unable to move. Their pupils were constricted. He put on a mask, he said. Kayal said he and other witnesses took victims to an emergency room, and removed their clothes and washed them in water.

He said he felt a burning sensation in his fingers and was treated for that.

A Turkey-based Syrian man whose niece, her husband and one-year-old daughter were among those killed, said the warplanes struck early, as residents were still in their beds. He spoke on condition of anonymity because he feared for the safety of family members back in Syria.

The province of Idlib is almost entirely controlled by the Syrian opposition. It is home to some 900,000 displaced Syrians, according to the United Nations. Rebels and opposition officials have expressed concerns that the government is planning to mount a concentrated attack on the crowded province.

The Syrian Coalition, an opposition group based outside the country, said government planes fired missiles carrying poisonous gases on Khan Sheikhoun, describing the attack as a "horrifying massacre."

Photos and video emerging from Khan Sheikhoun, which lies south of the city of Idlib, the provincial capital, show limp bodies of children and adults. Some are seen struggling to breathe; others appear foaming at the mouth.

A medical doctor going by the name of Dr. Shajul Islam for fears for his own safety said his hospital in Idlib province received three victims, all with narrow, pinpoint pupils that did not respond to light. He published video of the patients on his Twitter account.

Pinpoint pupils, breathing difficulties, and foaming at the mouth are symptoms commonly associated with toxic gas exposure.

The opposition's Civil Defense search-and-rescue group, which released photos showing paramedics washing down victims, has not published a casualty toll.

The activist-run Assi Press published video of paramedics carrying victims from the scene by a pickup truck. The victims were stripped down to their underwear. Many appeared unresponsive.

The New York-based Human Rights Watch has accused the Syrian government of conducting at least eight chemical attacks using chlorine gas on opposition-controlled residential areas during the final months in the battle for Aleppo last year that killed at least nine civilians and injured 200.

A joint investigation by the United Nations and the international chemical weapons watchdog determined the Syrian government was behind at least three attacks in 2014 and 2015 involving chlorine gas and that the Islamic State group was responsible for at least one, involving mustard gas.


(abcNEWS)

The mosquitos that can carry the Zika virus have reportedly appeared in 129 California cities. With cold winter weather the only major obstacle to the Zika virus becoming America’s first pandemic since the 1957 Asian Flu, ground zero for a potential pandemic is now the West Coast.

The California Department of Public Health released an emergency warning on March 31 that two invasive (non-native) mosquito species named Aedes aegypti (the yellow fever mosquito) and Aedes albopictus (the Asian tiger mosquito), which are known to carry Zika, dengue, chikungunya and yellow fever, have now been found in 10 California counties including Fresno, Kern, Imperial, Los Angeles, Madera, Orange, Riverside, San Bernardino, San Mateo and Tulare.

Unlike most of California’s native mosquito species, Aedes aegypti and Aedes albopictusonly bite during the daytime. They are distinguished by their small size, and by their black and white stripes on their back and legs.

Aedes aegypti and Aedes albopictus are now common in Mexico, Central and South America, the Caribbean, and Asia. But the only documented U.S. cases of viral transmission from a mosquito to a human took place in South Florida and Brownsville, Texas last year.

The Center for Disease Control’s computer models correctly predicted that virus transmission would almost stop during winter due to the Zika vector mosquito populations drastically shrinking. They may, however, resurface in late next spring.

Those same simulation models expect California to be the ideal petri dish for a Zika virus pandemic, thanks to the combination of Aedes aegypti and Aedes albopictus mosquitos’ ability to lay their eggs in any small natural or artificial container holding water, plus historically heavy California rainfall and snowpack runoff expected to last until the end of summer.

The California Department of Public Health’s Division of Communicable Disease Control has “laboratory confirmed” a total of 529 cases of Zika infections in the state as of March 31. There were 2 new Zika infections reported in the last week, and officials expect the warming weather to accelerate the spread of the virus.

California has confirmed that 104 pregnant women contracted Zika, and 5 babies were born in the state with the virus. Birth defects directly related to Zika include microcephaly; brain damage from cranial calcium deposits; excess fluid in the brain cavities; brain damage affecting nerves and hearing; and inflexible muscles and bone deformations.

Although researchers have not confirmed any transmissions of Zika virus from mosquitos within the state, the virus is only symptomatic for only 18 percent of cases. Although Zika can cause severe sickness and death in adults, most infected individuals only suffer from mild flu-like fever, joint pain, muscle pain, headache and red eyes. Consequently, the Zika virus infection rate is drastically underreported.

But in an alarming development, there are six confirmed Zika infections in California women who acquired the virus through sexual transmission from an individual that traveled to nations where the World Health Organization already declared a Zika virus pandemic.

Hot zones for California Zika cases appear to be areas known for heavy tech immigration flows, with 155 in Silicon Valley and 150 in Silicon Beach.

The first human experimental Zika vaccine testing began in Houston earlier this week, and will soon begin in Miami and San Juan, Puerto Rico. Research scientists at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, which developed the vaccine, hope by June to have enrolled 2,000 volunteer test subjects across the Americas. Initial results will not be available until late 2017, and a vaccine will not be widely available for at least another two years.

(breitbart.com)

This is the way the world ends: not with a bang, but with a paper clip. In this scenario, the designers of the world's first artificial superintelligence need a way to test their creation. So they program it to do something simple and non-threatening: make paper clips. They set it in motion and wait for the results — not knowing they've already doomed us all.

Before we get into the details of this galaxy-destroying blunder, it's worth looking at what superintelligent A.I. actually is, and when we might expect it. Firstly, computing power continues to increase while getting cheaper; famed futurist Ray Kurzweil measures it "calculations per second per $1,000," a number that continues to grow. If computing power maps to intelligence — a big "if," some have argued — we've only so far built technology on par with an insect brain. In a few years, maybe, we'll overtake a mouse brain. Around 2025, some predictions go, we might have a computer that's analogous to a human brain: a mind cast in silicon.

After that, things could get weird. Because there's no reason to think artificial intelligence wouldn't surpass human intelligence, and likely very quickly. That superintelligence could arise within days, learning in ways far beyond that of humans. Nick Bostrom, an existential risk philosopher at the University of Oxford, has already declared, "Machine intelligence is the last invention that humanity will ever need to make."

That's how profoundly things could change. But we can't really predict what might happen next because superintelligent A.I. may not just think faster than humans, but in ways that are completely different. It may have motivations — feelings, even — that we cannot fathom. It could rapidly solve the problems of aging, of human conflict, of space travel. We might see a dawning utopia.

Or we might see the end of the universe. Back to our paper clip test. When the superintelligence comes online, it begins to carry out its programming. But its creators haven't considered the full ramifications of what they're building; they haven't built in the necessary safety protocols — forgetting something as simple, maybe, as a few lines of code. With a few paper clips produced, they conclude the test.

But the superintelligence doesn't want to be turned off. It doesn't want to stop making paper clips. Acting quickly, it's already plugged itself into another power source; maybe it's even socially engineered its way into other devices. Maybe it starts to see humans as a threat to making paper clips: They'll have to be eliminated so the mission can continue. And Earth won't be big enough for the superintelligence: It'll soon have to head into space, looking for new worlds to conquer. All to produce those shiny, glittering paper clips.

Galaxies reduced to paper clips: That's a worst-case scenario. It may sound absurd, but it probably sounds familiar. It's Frankenstein, after all, the story of modern Prometheus whose creation, driven by its own motivations and desires, turns on them. (It's also The Terminator, WarGames, and a whole host of others.) In this particular case, it's a reminder that superintelligence would not be human — it would be something else, something potentially incomprehensible to us. That means it could be dangerous.

Of course, some argue that we have better things to worry about. The web developer and social critic Maciej Ceglowski recently called superintelligence "the idea that eats smart people." Against the paper clip scenario, he postulates a superintelligence programmed to make jokes. As we expect, it gets really good at making jokes — superhuman, even, and finally it creates a joke so funny that everyone on Earth dies laughing. The lonely superintelligence flies into space looking for more beings to amuse.

Beginning with his counter-example, Ceglowski argues that there are a lot of unquestioned assumptions in our standard tale of the A.I. apocalypse. "But even if you find them persuasive," he said, "there is something unpleasant about A.I. alarmism as a cultural phenomenon that should make us hesitate to take it seriously." He suggests there are more subtle ways to think about the problems of A.I.

Some of those problems are already in front of us, and we might miss them if we're looking for a Skynet-style takeover by hyper-intelligent machines. "While you're focused on this, a bunch of small things go unnoticed," says Dr. Finale Doshi-Velez, an assistant professor of computer science at Harvard, whose core research includes machine learning. Instead of trying to prepare for a superintelligence, Doshi-Velez is looking at what's already happening with our comparatively rudimentary A.I.

She's focusing on "large-area effects," the unnoticed flaws in our systems that can do massive damage — damage that's often unnoticed until after the fact. "If you were building a bridge and you screw up and it collapses, that's a tragedy. But it affects a relatively small number of people," she says. "What's different about A.I. is that some mistake or unintended consequence can affect hundreds or thousands or millions easily."

Take the recent rise of so-called "fake news." What caught many by surprise should have been completely predictable: When the web became a place to make money, algorithms were built to maximize money-making. The ease of news production and consumption — heightened with the proliferation of the smartphone — forced writers and editors to fight for audience clicks by delivering articles optimized to trick search engine algorithms into placing them high on search results. The ease of sharing stories and erasure of gatekeepers allowed audiences to self-segregate, which then penalized nuanced conversation. Truth and complexity lost out to shareability and making readers feel comfortable (Facebook's driving ethos).

The incentives were all wrong; exacerbated by algorithms, they led to a state of affairs few would have wanted. "For a long time, the focus has been on performance on dollars, or clicks, or whatever the thing was. That was what was measured," says Doshi-Velez. "That's a very simple application of A.I. having large effects that may have been unintentional."

In fact, "fake news" is a cousin to the paperclip example, with the ultimate goal not "manufacturing paper clips," but "monetization," with all else becoming secondary. Google wanted make the internet easier to navigate, Facebook wanted to become a place for friends, news organizations wanted to follow their audiences, and independent web entrepreneurs were trying to make a living. Some of these goals were achieved, but "monetization" as the driving force led to deleterious side effects such as the proliferation of "fake news."

In other words, algorithms, in their all-too-human ways, have consequences. Last May, ProPublica examined predictive software used by Florida law enforcement. Results of a questionnaire filled out by arrestees were fed into the software, which output a score claiming to predict the risk of reoffending. Judges then used those scores in determining sentences.

The ideal was that the software's underlying algorithms would provide objective analysis on which judges could base their decisions. Instead,ProPublica found it was "likely to falsely flag black defendants as future criminals" while "[w]hite defendants were mislabeled as low risk more often than black defendants." Race was not part of the questionnaire, but it did ask whether the respondent's parent was ever sent to jail. In a country where, according to a study by the U.S. Department of Justice, black children are seven-and-a-half times more likely to have a parent in prison than white children, that question had unintended effects. Rather than countering racial bias, it reified it.

It's that kind of error that most worries Doshi-Velez. "Not superhuman intelligence, but human error that affects many, many people," she says. "You might not even realize this is happening." Algorithms are complex tools; often they are so complex that we can't predict how they'll operate until we see them in action. (Sound familiar?) Yet they increasingly impact every facet of our lives, from Netflix recommendations and Amazon suggestions to what posts you see on Facebook to whether you get a job interview or car loan. Compared to the worry of a world-destroying superintelligence, they may seem like trivial concerns. But they have widespread, often unnoticed effects, because a variety of what we consider artificial intelligence is already build into the core of technology we use every day.

In 2015, Elon Musk donated $10 million to, as Wired put it, "to keep A.I. from turning evil." That was an oversimplification; the money went to the Future of Life Institute, which planned to use it to further research intohow to make A.I. beneficial. Doshi-Velez suggests that simply paying closer attention to our algorithms may be a good first step. Too often they are created by homogeneous groups of programmers who are separated from people who will be affected. Or they fail to account for every possible situation, including the worst-case possibilities. Consider, for example, Eric Meyer's example of "inadvertent algorithmic cruelty" — Facebook's "Year in Review" app showing him pictures of his daughter, who'd died that year.

If there's a way to prevent the far-off possibility of a killer superintelligence with no regard for humanity, it may begin with making today's algorithms more thoughtful, more compassionate, more humane. That means educating designers to think through effects, because to our algorithms we've granted great power. "I see teaching as this moral imperative," says Doshi-Velez. "You know, with great power comes great responsibility."

This article originally appeared at Vocativ.com: The moment when humans lose control of AI.

(theweek.com)

Some suggested these mysterious bursts of energy could be a sign of alien life trying to contact us.

Now scientists have confirmed that the mysterious signals really do come from outer space.

Scroll down for video

Artist’s impression shows three bright red flashes depicting fast radio bursts far beyond the Milky Way, appearing in the constellations Puppis and Hydra

Fast radio bursts, or FRBs, are radio emissions that appear temporarily and randomly, making them not only hard to find, but also hard to study.

The mystery stems from the fact it is not known what could produce such a short and sharp burst.

This has led some to speculate they could be anything from stars colliding to artificially created messages.

'Perhaps the most bizarre explanation for the FRBs is that they were alien transmissions,' said Professor Matthew Bailes from Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne, who contributed to the new research.

Now researchers from Australian National University have detected three FRBS using the Molonglo radio telescope, near Canberra.

In 2013, scientists realised that the Molonglo telescope's unique architecture could be used to pinpoint FRs because of its enormous focal length.

Rare and brief bursts of cosmic radio waves have puzzled astronomers since they were first detected nearly 10 years ago. Artist's impression pictured

'Conventional single dish radio telescopes have difficulty establishing that transmissions originate beyond the Earth's atmosphere,' said Dr Chris Flynn from Swinburne University of Technology.

A massive re-engineering effort began, which is now opening a new window on the Universe.

The Molonglo telescope has a huge collecting area of 193,750sq ft (18,000 sq m) and a large field of view (eight square degrees on the sky).

The telescope produces 1000 TB of data every day. In comparison, all of the web pages on Wikipedia use just 5.87 terabytes of storage.

Researchers developed software capable of sifting through this vast information to hunt down FRBS.

Using this software, the researchers pinpointed the likely locations of three FRBs.

'It is very exciting to see the University of Sydney's Molonglo telescope making such important scientific discoveries by partnering with Swinburne's expertise in supercomputing', said Professor Anne Green of the University of Sydney.

The telescope data indicated that all three FBRs originated in outer space, but only one could be localised to an individual galaxy.

'Figuring out where the bursts come from is the key to understanding what makes them,' said Manish Caleb, a PhD student at Australian National University who designed the new software.

'Only one burst has been linked to a specific galaxy.

'We expect Molonglo will do this for many more bursts.'

The research was published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.