One of the biggest home DNA-testing companies seems to have bowed to a backlash over its decision to allow the FBI access to its database, by announcing a new way for customers to stop law-enforcement agencies accessing their data. Law-enforcement agencies will now have to register under a special process to access the company’s matching combination of genetic data from home DNA-testing kits and family tree databases has allowed individuals to find relatives by matching DNA, but has also opened a new way for police to solve crimes. The changes to the company’s terms of service will see EU citizens automatically opted out of matching with law-enforcement agencies’ DNA samples, but US citizens will need to actively opt out.

The Time Bomb of DNA Testing and Race
Do-it-yourself genetic DNA testing kits could be exploiting our curiosity to build the world’s largest surveillance system
Photo: Eric Baradat/AFP/GettyWhen Alex* decided to use a DNA testing service in 2018, her motivation was clear: Like many African-Americans, she was hoping to discover something about her family lineage that predated the trauma of slavery. If we don’t have ownership of our DNA data once we’ve surrendered it, what are companies doing with it?Conversely, these direct-to-consumer tests have also found popularity among white nationalists obsessed with racial purity — even though the results are often not what they’d like. The company also emphasized that users could opt out of sharing their anonymized genetic information, though it’s still not clear how the company anonymized DNA data, which is inherently unique to each customer.

Like many AI researchers, Nord is also concerned about the impenetrability of results produced by neural networks; often, a system delivers an answer without offering a clear picture of how that result was obtained. Quantum physicists like Roger Melko of the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics and the University of Waterloo in Ontario have used neural networks to solve some of the toughest and most important problems in that field, such as how to represent the mathematical “wave function” describing a many-particle system. Whether Schawinski is right in claiming that he’s found a “third way” of doing science, or whether, as Hogg says, it’s merely traditional observation and data analysis “on steroids,” it’s clear AI is changing the flavor of scientific discovery, and it’s certainly accelerating it.

Former co-workers of Holmes told The Dropout, a new podcast about Theranos’s downfall, that Holmes occasionally “fell out of character” and exposed her real, higher voice — particularly after drinking. Holmes is obviously guilty of many more serious crimes, but faking one’s voice is just weird, and embarrassing, in much the same way that bad toupees are: they place one’s bodily insecurities center stage. O’Connor says the research backs the effort behind Holmes’s baritone, too: “Some of the research we’ve worked on shows that when men and women deliberately lower their voices, it’s actually successful,” she says.

Rovelli turned next to the idea that time flows in only one direction, from past to future. In other words the distinction between past and future, the growth of entropy over time, depends on a macroscopic effect—“the way we have described the system, which in turn depends on how we interact with the system,” he said. Which means that, third, in quantum gravity, you can have “a local notion of a sequence of events, which is a minimal notion of time, and that’s the only thing that remains,” Rovelli said.

Close to three decades later, Vance’s paper is seen as a landmark — one that has come to transform scientists’ understanding of how cells maintain order and function in their crowded interiors, which buzz with various types of organelles, including mitochondria, nuclei and the ER. In 2009, for example, a team led by Benoît Kornmann, an organelle biologist now at the University of Oxford, UK, identified a group of four proteins that collectively formed a tether between the ER and mitochondria in yeast cells. Mitochondrial biologist Jodi Nunnari at the University of California, Davis, and her then colleague, cell biologist Laura Lackner, classified7 a super-contact zone containing at least two tethers and three organelles — the ER, mitochondria and the plasma membrane.

Propofol, for instance — a milky-white fluid used in general anesthetics and some types of sedation — seems to amplify the effects of GABA, an inhibitor that damps down activity in certain areas of the brain, as well as communication between them. These drugs temporarily paralyze the body, preventing spasms and reflexes that could interfere with the surgery, without raising the dose of the anesthetic drugs to dangerously high levels. This doesn’t just reduce patients’ immediate suffering; many of the most invasive lifesaving procedures would simply not be possible without good general anesthesia.

In June 2015, Fort Wayne police learned that Parabon NanoLabs, a biotech company headquartered in Reston, Virginia, was offering a service called Snapshot, in which a working sketch of a criminal suspect could be generated directly from minuscule amounts of DNA. Now, the same DNA sample used to produce the composite sketch of April’s killer could be uploaded to an open-source genealogy database called GEDmatch—founded in 2010 as a free service to help people look for and identify prospective relatives. Within months of the sample upload, Parabon’s lead genealogist, CeCe Moore, had narrowed down the DNA as belonging to two brothers: one only ever identified in court records as JPM, and his elder brother, John D. Miller, a 59-year-old third-shift Walmart worker living alone in a trailer in Grabill, Indiana, about 15 miles north of Fort Wayne.

There are stories of pearls falling out of women’s mouths when they utter sweet words, and pearls appearing from the spray of sea foam as a goddess is born. To create an iridescent pearl, the organism must be able to secrete nacre, a calcium carbonate substance that hardens over time. Pearls were all the rage in ancient Egypt and Rome, and many of the wealthiest women in society wore them to demonstrate their wealth and status.

Albayrak, an active duty officer who has served with Marine recon and intel units, believes intelligence analysts could benefit from entering a mental “flow” state to help them think more creatively—and that LSD might help troops get there faster. Citing Apple founder Steve Jobs and several Nobel prize-winning scientists as cases where LSD aided innovation, Albayrak proposes that the Marine Corps select volunteers and put them through a series of tests. And Albayrak’s proposal notes that off-label use of drugs like Adderall and Ritalin aren’t uncommon in the U.S. military.