#age of control

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Clues to Your Health Are Hidden at 6.6 Million Spots in Your DNA

With a sophisticated new algorithm, scientists have found a way to forecast an individual’s risks for five deadly diseases.

Scientists have created a powerful new tool to calculate a person’s inherited risks for heart disease, breast cancer and three other serious conditions.

By surveying changes in DNA at 6.6 million places in the human genome, investigators at the Broad Institute and Harvard University were able to identify many more people at risk than do the usual genetic tests, which take into account very few genes.

Of 100 heart attack patients, for example, the standard methods will identify two who have a single genetic mutation that place them at increased risk. But the new tool will find 20 of them, the scientists reported on Monday in the journal Nature Genetics.

The researchers are now building a website that will allow anyone to upload genetic data from a company like 23andMe or Ancestry.com. Users will receive risk scores for heart disease, breast cancer, Type 2 diabetes, chronic inflammatory bowel disease and atrial fibrillation.

People will not be charged for their scores.

The study began because there was general agreement among researchers that many common diseases are linked not to one mutation, but rather to thousands or millions of mutations, said the first author of the new paper, Dr. Amit V. Khera, a cardiologist at Massachusetts General Hospital and a researcher at the Broad Institute.

In recent years, scientists have cataloged more than 6 million tiny changes in DNA that slightly affect the chances that people will get various diseases.

Each of those genetic alterations has such a small effect — a 1 percent or so increase or decrease in a person’s odds of getting a disease — that it would not be helpful to test for each one in isolation.

But it should be possible, scientists felt, to combine data on all the small DNA changes to construct an individual risk score. To do that, the researchers needed a new algorithm that would weigh the significance of the variations in the genes.

Then they had to test the risk scores they obtained. Dr. Khera and his colleagues turned to the U.K. Biobank, which holds genetic and disease information on half a million people.

The investigators found that their algorithm did predict the odds of being diagnosed with one of the five diseases. But the U.K. Biobank consists mostly of white Europeans.

So the investigators also tested and validated their method in populations of East Asians, South Asians, African Americans and Hispanics.

The researchers also tried their algorithm on 20,000 patients who were seen at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Massachusetts General Hospital.

They found that those who had a high risk score for a heart attack were indeed four times more likely to have had a heart attack than other patients.

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Need a Quick Inspection of a 58-Story Tower? Send a Drone

With their low cost and ease of handling, drones are saving money and time on big construction projects. They could also save lives.

Small, swift and agile, drones have all but replaced the more costly and less nimble helicopter for tasks that involve inspections, measurements and marketing images.

Interest in drones is rising for both consumer and commercial use. Sales of drones increased 33 percent in 2017 over the prior year, according to the market research firm NPD Group.

In 2016, the Federal Aviation Administration allowed commercial drone use for a broad range of businesses, but with restrictions: Pilots must be at least 16 years old and pass a written test.

On building sites, drones are saving money and time by providing digital images, maps and other files that can be shared in a matter of minutes, said Mike Winn, the chief executive of DroneDeploy, a company founded five years ago in San Francisco that creates software for, among other uses, operating drones with mobile apps.

Drones are reducing the travel time for busy executives, Mr. Winn said. “The head office can see what’s going on, and the safety team, the costing team, the designers — all of them can contribute to the project, share data and comment on it, without actually going to the job.”

They could also improve safety, too. In the days before drones, Mr. Winn said, measuring the roof of a house for solar panels would require “a guy with a tape measure to climb up there,” which often produced inaccurate results and, like anything involving heights, was dangerous.

Such peril is magnified in the construction of skyscrapers, said John Murphy Jr., a contractor on the Paramount Miami Worldcenter, a 58-story condominium tower being built in downtown Miami. Before drones, Mr. Murphy said, workers seeking access to the exterior of a high-rise were “dropped over the side” in so-called swing stages, small platforms that hang from cables. Often used by window cleaners, swing stages are precarious in high winds.

“No one wants to go out there,” he said. “It’s scary.”

Falls accounted for 384 of the 991 deaths in the construction industry in 2016, according to the latest figures from the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. That number could be reduced over time by increasing the use of drones for quality-control inspections and similar missions.

“We’re definitely limiting the exposure to workers,” said Mr. Murphy, who on a recent afternoon was at the Paramount site to supervise a drone inspection of window glazing on the tower. The drone’s camera was looking for possible leaks, water intrusion and “other things that you can’t see from the interior of the building.”

Earlier, the drone was used to check the quality of steel connections in a bridge, 72 feet above the ground, that links the main tower to a parking structure.

The utility of drones often begins long before the foundation is poured. They help planners decide where to place new buildings. And at the 87-room Foundry Hotel in downtown Asheville, N.C., the developer sent a drone to the precise height and location of a proposed fourth-floor balcony to help him decide how best to take advantage of the view.

“A drone really helps us to conceptualize what a development is going to be, because sometimes it’s hard to do that just from a set of plans,” said Alexandros D. Papapieris, the development manager at McCall Capital, which is converting a 1925 office building in Bristol, Va., into the 65-room Bristol Hotel, set to open this fall. “Everyone loves a good aerial. Drones allowed us to paint a picture for the investors about why this was a good idea.”

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Los Angeles to Screen Transit Passengers With Body Scanners

The Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority said it would become the first transit agency in the nation to deploy the security measure.

Los Angeles’s transit agency said Tuesday that it would become the first in the nation to screen its passengers with body scanners as they enter the public transit system — a bold effort to keep riders safer from terrorism and other evolving threats.

But officials said that riders need not worry that their morning commute would turn into the sort of security nightmare often found at airports or even sporting events. In a statement released Tuesday, transit officials said the portable screening devices they plan to deploy later this year will “quickly and unobtrusively” screen riders without forcing them to line up or stop walking.

“We’re looking specifically for weapons that have the ability to cause a mass casualty event,” Alex Wiggins, the chief security and law enforcement officer for the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority, said Tuesday, according to The Associated Press. “We’re looking for explosive vests, we’re looking for assault rifles. We’re not necessarily looking for smaller weapons that don’t have the ability to inflict mass casualties.”

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China’s great firewall is rising

How high will it go?

Motivated Chinese have long found it fairly easy to acquire such software, which provides access to what is known as a virtual private network (VPN). Through this kind of connection, a user in China can reach the thousands of websites that are blacklisted by the government—including almost all Google services, many news sites and most foreign social networks. Many people use VPNs several times each day to jump the country’s “great firewall”, as its system of online censorship is often called in English (Chinese netizens have adopted the acronym GFW). Foreigners in China depend on VPNs to reach sites they routinely need: everything from Gmail and Dropbox to Facebook and Instagram.

Many observers believe that the great firewall’s porousness is a feature, not a bug—that its architects see benefit in a barrier that does not completely alienate entrepreneurs, academics and foreign residents, but which most Chinese web-users will not have the energy, or the finances (VPNs usually require subscriptions), to surmount. But doubts are growing about this interpretation. For the past year the government has been trying to make it harder to find, and use, VPNs—the most common form of firewall-leaping tool. Mr Wu’s punishment was clearly intended as a harsh warning to others in China not to try selling such services to ordinary consumers. Speculation is growing that even tougher curbs will be imposed in 2018.

Subscribers to the best-known foreign VPN services are still able to use their accounts in China. But they were rattled in July when Bloomberg, citing anonymous sources, reported that telecoms companies had been told to block access to unauthorised “personal” VPNs, presumably including foreign ones, by February 1st 2018. China’s internet providers may well have the ability to do so: during sensitive political events foreign VPNs often become cumbersome or even impossible to use, apparently because of government-ordered efforts to throttle them. The ministry in charge of cyber affairs issued a confusing rebuttal of Bloomberg’s story. Foreign diplomats in Beijing say they are finding it difficult to get straight answers from the government about how far it intends to go.

This is worrying not just for people who want to surf the web without annoying obstructions. Many firms use their own in-house VPN systems or similar technologies to enable staff to gain secure access to corporate networks remotely. Officials say that tighter controls over VPNs will not impede such usage. But businesses worry that they may be forced instead to use government-authorised methods, including officially approved VPNs and leased lines, that are less reliable and easier to spy on than their own systems.

Those fears will only grow if a new law on encryption, presently being drafted, limits the extent to which companies are permitted to scramble sensitive communications—as some observers fear it might. Businesses have good reason to feel nervous. A cyber-security law that took effect in June allows authorities to review data, such as customer records, that firms wish to send to headquarters abroad.

As China’s increasingly autocratic leader, Xi Jinping, tightens his grip on power, it is becoming harder to remain optimistic that he will continue to tolerate circumvention of the firewall. He shows little sympathy with the complaints of foreign businesses about the difficulties they face in China. And he is clearly determined that the internet in China be made dissent-free, even if his sweeping efforts to achieve this irk members of the middle class on which the Communist Party depends for support. Last year regulators shut down many celebrity-gossip blogs and some sites that stream live events such as concerts, apparently because they could be used as platforms for embarrassing the party.

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Big data meets Big Brother as China moves to rate its citizens

The Chinese government plans to launch its Social Credit System in 2020. The aim? To judge the trustworthiness – or otherwise – of its 1.3 billion residents

So just how are people rated? Individuals on Sesame Credit are measured by a score ranging between 350 and 950 points. Alibaba does not divulge the "complex algorithm" it uses to calculate the number but they do reveal the five factors taken into account. The first is credit history. For example, does the citizen pay their electricity or phone bill on time? Next is fulfilment capacity, which it defines in its guidelines as "a user's ability to fulfil his/her contract obligations". The third factor is personal characteristics, verifying personal information such as someone's mobile phone number and address. But the fourth category, behaviour and preference, is where it gets interesting.

Under this system, something as innocuous as a person's shopping habits become a measure of character. Alibaba admits it judges people by the types of products they buy. "Someone who plays video games for ten hours a day, for example, would be considered an idle person," says Li Yingyun, Sesame's Technology Director. "Someone who frequently buys diapers would be considered as probably a parent, who on balance is more likely to have a sense of responsibility." So the system not only investigates behaviour - it shapes it. It "nudges" citizens away from purchases and behaviours the government does not like.

Friends matter, too. The fifth category is interpersonal relationships. What does their choice of online friends and their interactions say about the person being assessed? Sharing what Sesame Credit refers to as "positive energy" online, nice messages about the government or how well the country's economy is doing, will make your score go up.

Higher scores have already become a status symbol, with almost 100,000 people bragging about their scores on Weibo (the Chinese equivalent of Twitter) within months of launch. A citizen's score can even affect their odds of getting a date, or a marriage partner, because the higher their Sesame rating, the more prominent their dating profile is on Baihe.

Sesame Credit already offers tips to help individuals improve their ranking, including warning about the downsides of friending someone who has a low score. This might lead to the rise of score advisers, who will share tips on how to gain points, or reputation consultants willing to offer expert advice on how to strategically improve a ranking or get off the trust-breaking blacklist.

Indeed, Sesame Credit is basically a big data gamified version of the Communist Party's surveillance methods; the disquieting dang'an. The regime kept a dossier on every individual that tracked political and personal transgressions. A citizen's dang'an followed them for life, from schools to jobs. People started reporting on friends and even family members, raising suspicion and lowering social trust in China. The same thing will happen with digital dossiers. People will have an incentive to say to their friends and family, "Don't post that. I don't want you to hurt your score but I also don't want you to hurt mine."

Currently, Sesame Credit does not directly penalise people for being "untrustworthy" - it's more effective to lock people in with treats for good behaviour. But Hu Tao, Sesame Credit's chief manager, warns people that the system is designed so that "untrustworthy people can't rent a car, can't borrow money or even can't find a job". She has even disclosed that Sesame Credit has approached China's Education Bureau about sharing a list of its students who cheated on national examinations, in order to make them pay into the future for their dishonesty.

Penalties are set to change dramatically when the government system becomes mandatory in 2020. Indeed, on September 25, 2016, the State Council General Office updated its policy entitled "Warning and Punishment Mechanisms for Persons Subject to Enforcement for Trust-Breaking". The overriding principle is simple: "If trust is broken in one place, restrictions are imposed everywhere," the policy document states.

For instance, people with low ratings will have slower internet speeds; restricted access to restaurants, nightclubs or golf courses; and the removal of the right to travel freely abroad with, I quote, "restrictive control on consumption within holiday areas or travel businesses". Scores will influence a person's rental applications, their ability to get insurance or a loan and even social-security benefits. Citizens with low scores will not be hired by certain employers and will be forbidden from obtaining some jobs, including in the civil service, journalism and legal fields, where of course you must be deemed trustworthy. Low-rating citizens will also be restricted when it comes to enrolling themselves or their children in high-paying private schools. I am not fabricating this list of punishments. It's the reality Chinese citizens will face. As the government document states, the social credit system will "allow the trustworthy to roam everywhere under heaven while making it hard for the discredited to take a single step".

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Living in an Extreme Meritocracy Is Exhausting

A society that glorifies metrics leaves little room for human imperfections.

But as serious as their shortcomings are, the widespread use of decision-making algorithms points to an even bigger problem: Even if models could be perfected, what does it mean to live in a culture that defers to data, that sorts and judges with unrelenting, unforgiving precision? This is a mentality that stems from Americans’ unabiding faith in meritocracy, that the most-talented and hardest-working should—and will—rise to the top. But such a mindset comes with a number of tradeoffs, some of which undermine American culture’s most cherished egalitarian ideals.

First, it is important to recognize that the word “meritocracy,” coined by the British sociologist Michael Young in his 1958 book The Rise of the Meritocracy, originally described not some idealized state of perfect fairness, but a cruel dystopia. The idea was that a society evaluated perfectly and continuously by talent and effort would see democracy and equality unravel, and a new aristocracy emerge, as the talented hoarded resources and the untalented came to see themselves as solely to blame for their low status. Eventually, the masses would cede their political power and rights to the talented tenth—a new boss just as unforgiving as the old one, Young suggested.

The new technology of meritocracy goes hand in hand with the escalating standards for what merit is. To hold down a decent job in today’s economy, it is no longer enough to work hard. Workers need brains, creativity, and initiative. They need salesmanship and the ability to self-promote, and, of course, a college degree. And they need to prove themselves on an ever-expanding list of employer-administered metrics.

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France launches massive meteor-spotting network

Tracking space rocks that reach Earth will give insight into the early Solar System.

Scientists in France have launched an unprecedented campaign to catch shooting stars, an effort that will rely on thousands of volunteers to comb the ground for bits of space rock. The programme already includes 68 cameras that scan the skies for meteors, which are seen when bits of asteroid, comet or other planetary material streak through Earth’s atmosphere. By the end of this year, some 100 cameras will blanket France, organizers say. That would make it one of the biggest and densest meteor-spotting networks in the world. FRIPON’s organizers dream of collecting one tracked meteorite per year from the French landscape. By comparison, researchers with the Spanish Meteor Network — another large and dense network — have scored 2 meteorites in the past 12 years.

The French network’s cameras are very densely and evenly spaced, sitting roughly 70–80 kilometres apart at laboratories, science museums and other buildings. That is close enough together to yield good information about where meteorites land. “That increases your chance of finding something,” says Jenniskens.

FRIPON is also the first fully connected and automated network, says principal investigator François Colas, of the Paris Observatory. When a camera detects a meteor, it sends a message to a central computer in Paris. If two or more cameras spot the fireball, FRIPON scientists receive an e-mail describing where it was seen. Eventually, the e-mail will include automatically generated information about the object’s probable landing zone, pinpointing it to an area roughly 1 kilometres by 10 kilometres.

The researchers will then face the arduous job of searching this area to find the object. At first, scientists will conduct the ground searches. But in the next few years, FRIPON organizers plan to train an army of citizen scientists to walk the French landscape looking for bits of meteorite — and to hand over any finds.

Perhaps one in 1,000 volunteers will actually turn up for a search, estimates Brigitte Zanda, a meteorite specialist at the National Museum of Natural History in Paris, who heads the volunteer effort. Organizers hope to field a search team of 30 people in every part of France, so they will have to recruit hundreds of thousands of people, she says. “It’s ambitious.” But hundreds of people have already signed up, even though the official recruitment drive is just getting underway.

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Gut microbes: the latest experiment in enhancing athletic performance

Add "microorganism optimization" below "carbo-loading" on the pre-game checklist.

A team at Okayama University is collecting stool samples from various athletes before and after competitions. “If we can determine what the ideal composition of microorganisms within the intestinal tract is for [the] Japanese based on their diet, it could help improve the performance of athletes,” lead researcher Hidetoshi Morita told the Asahi Shimbun.