Day: November 27, 2018

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A New Freeze-dried Polio Vaccine Could Help Finally Eradicate the Disease

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/d-brief/?p=29477

Polio once paralyzed more than 350,000 people each year worldwide. Today, vaccines have dropped the number of reported cases to just 407 in 2013, according to the CDC.
But the disease still lurks in developing countries because vaccine storage and transport requires refrigeration. Now, scientists find freeze-drying a polio vaccine keeps it stable for as long as four weeks even in hot temperatures. The stability could enable vaccine distribution that could lead to the end of the disease.

via Discover Main Feed https://ift.tt/1dqgCKa

November 27, 2018 at 04:44PM

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Be Warned: Customer Service Agents Can See What You’re Typing in Real Time

https://gizmodo.com/be-warned-customer-service-agents-can-see-what-youre-t-1830688119

Next time you’re chatting with a customer service agent online, be warned that the person on the other side of your conversation might see what you’re typing in real time. A reader sent us the following transcript from a conversation he had with a mattress company after the agent responded to a message he hadn’t sent…

Read more…

via Gizmodo https://gizmodo.com

November 27, 2018 at 03:33PM

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The most exciting aerospace innovations of 2018

https://www.popsci.com/best-aerospace-innovations-2018?dom=rss-default&src=syn


Floating AI Astronaut Assistant
On Earth, CIMON weighs 11 pounds and is a bit bigger than a basketball. In low-Earth orbit, the robot, powered by IBM’s Watson natural-language artificial intelligence, is designed to act like a space-bound personal assistant. It’s similar to Siri or Alexa, but equipped with knowledge that can help astronauts make repairs to the ISS, run the many experiments sent into space, or even talk the crew through basic medical procedures. It headed to the ISS this summer as a free-floating assistant, able to fly around the station on command with the help of 14 specialized fans. In mid-November, German astronaut Alexander Gerst successfully walked the floating assistant through its first camera-toting, voice-activated, rubix-cube-solving paces.

via Popular Science – New Technology, Science News, The Future Now https://ift.tt/2k2uJQn

November 27, 2018 at 08:02AM

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Venmo lost a lot of cash due to payment fraud

https://www.engadget.com/2018/11/26/venmo-losses-blamed-on-payment-fraud/



Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg via Getty Images

Venmo apparently had a good reason for disabling web payments and temporarily shutting off instant money transfers — it was losing money hand over fist. The Wall Street Journal has obtained documents indicating that the PayPal-owned service took a 40 percent larger than expected operating loss ($40 million) in the first quarter of 2018, and payment fraud played a major factor in that financial blow. Where Venmo had expected dodgy transactions to represent 0.24 percent of its activity, the numbers shot up to 0.4 percent in March.

Executives were reportedly worried that the hit would be large enough to dent PayPal’s overall bottom line and lead it to miss analyst estimates. They also knew customers would be annoyed by the measures used to get fraud under control. Product exec Ben Mills said he was “pissed” Venmo had to “hurt our customers” to get fraud under control, according to one email.

PayPal is suggesting a slightly different story in public. A spokeswoman told the WSJ that the increase in losses stemmed from introducing new features to Venmo that quarter, and that the payment firm’s loss levels were under 0.35 percent for the quarter. They’ve dropped since and are “lower than the overall average” for PayPal, the spokeswoman added.

If the scoop is accurate, though, it illustrates the challenges Venmo is facing. While the company might be synonymous with mobile payments for some, it’s also expensive for PayPal. Venmo doesn’t charge for most transactions and only recently started charging for instant transfers. If it’s going to have a healthy long-term future, it might need to keep a very close eye on fraud and find more ways to generate cash.

via Engadget http://www.engadget.com

November 26, 2018 at 08:45PM