Michmutters

“This is not a faster car, this is a spacecraft.”

Mind Numbing

Think and you’ll miss it: researchers at MIT claim to have successfully created analog synapses that are one million times faster than those in our human brains.

Just as digital processors need transistors, analog ones need programmable resistors. Once put into the right configuration, these resistors can be used to create a network of analog synapses and neurons, according to a press release.

These analog synapses aren’t just ultra-fast, they’re remarkably efficient, too. And that’s pretty important, because as digital neural networks grow more advanced and powerful, they require more and more energy, increasing their carbon footprint considerably.

As detailed in a new paper, the researchers hope their findings will advance the field of analog deep learning, a burgeoning field of artificial intelligence.

Glassy-Eyed

By ditching the normally used organic mediums and opting for high tech glass, known as inorganic phosphosilicate glass (PSG), instead, the researchers were able to reach nanosecond speeds, which were faster than the synapses in the human brain.

“The action potential in biological cells rises and falls with a timescale of milliseconds, since the voltage difference of about 0.1 volt is constrained by the stability of water,” said senior author and professor of nuclear science Ju Li, in the statement. “Here we apply up to ten volts across a special solid glass film of nanoscale thickness that conducts protons, without permanently damaging it.”

“And the stronger the field, the faster the ionic devices,” I added.

Because PSG can withstand high voltages without breaking, it allows the protons to travel at ludicrous speeds while also being incredibly energy-efficient.

The material is both common and easy to fabricate, making it not only the fastest option, but also a practical one.

“Once you have an analog processor, you will no longer be training networks everyone else is working on,” said lead author Murat Onen in the statement. “You will be training networks with unprecedented complexities that no one else can afford to, and therefore vastly outperform them all.”

“In other words, this is not a faster car, this is a spacecraft,” he added.

More on AI: Authors Are Starting to Use AI to Quickly Churn Out Novels

Once the exclusive review of epileptics (to control seizures) and madmen bodybuilders, the keto diet is now the “it” diet of the masses, having completely trounced Weight Watchers.

It’s easy to see how it happened. The keto diet lets people eat all the fat they want, and they can practically see themselves shrinking day by day. But the keto diet isn’t all sunshine and deep-fried daisies. It has some drawbacks, some of which are serious, and it’s not the best diet for lifters.

Here are some of the problems with the keto diet that make me get a little itchy:

Bad Nutrition

Keto dieters jettison entire food groups, often making them deficient in vitamin D, calcium, magnesium, phosphorus, and essential fatty acids. Keto dieters can take care of a lot of those problems by taking multivitamins, but that’s a poor and uncertain replacement for the nutrients in real food. Beyond that, missing out on dozens or even hundreds of the polyphenols found in grains, fruits, wine, and even beer is like playing Super Mario Bros. and not bothering to pick up all the super mushroom power-ups.

Bad for Strength Athletes

There’s some evidence that keto diets might work well for endurance runners and Alaskan sled dogs, but if you’re a weightlifter who relies on short bursts of power, forget it.

Bad for Bowels

Ditching carbs means ditching fiber. Any long-term reductions in actual body weight may be offset by the weight of the steadily accruing reservoir of impacted feces in your intestines.

Bad Crotch

Despite the alliterative name, keto crotch is not the newest member of the Marvel Universe (Peter Parker, Matt Murdoch, Jessica Jones, etc., etc.). If it were, I doubt her superpower would be of any use in fighting crime, except maybe in some highly unusual and specific circumstances.

Apparently, all the meat-eatin’ changes vaginal pH, and the lower acidity creates a welcoming environment to undesirable bacteria, leading to possible infections, an unpleasant odor, and probably infestation by raccoons.

bad-blood

The dangers of high cholesterol are inconclusive, but that doesn’t mean they don’t matter at all, and high cholesterol is what you get when you eat saturated fat for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

But the worst part of the keto diet, at least for people who want to pack on muscle, is that going into ketosis steals amino acids from muscle to fuel other stuff. Oh, and low carbs lead to high cortisol, which also affects how well you put on muscle.

Microsoft today added two new features to its Microsoft Defender security platform: Microsoft Defender Threat Intelligence and Microsoft Defender External Attack Surface Management. These features are based on the company’s acquisition of RiskIQ and with this launch, Microsoft is now bringing some of RiskIQ’s core features to its own security platform (all while RiskIQ continues to operate its own services, too).

“Our mission is to build a safer world for all — and threat intelligence is [at] the heart of it,” Microsoft’s Vasu Jakkal told me. “If you don’t know what’s happening in the world around you, it’s very hard to understand what to do about it and how to act on it. Microsoft has the largest breadth and depth of threat signals today — we are tracking, as we just announced in our earnings, 43 trillion signals [each day] which we see from identities, from devices, from platforms, from email, collab tools.”

With Defender Threat Intelligence, Microsoft is using RiskIQ’s technology to scan the internet and provide additional data to the existing Defender real-time service to help security teams proactively secure their infrastructure. Microsoft, of course, already had a large signal map to power its Defender platform, but Jakkal noted that RiskIQ’s data not only helps enrich this existing data set but also enables an additional layer on top of Defender that gives security teams a view of the entire attack chain.

“They can see the entire attack chain, they can act on it and then — combined with their own human intelligence —– they can see where the attack is going and how to proactively prevent it,” Jakkal explained.

Image Credits: microsoft

The service also provides users with a library of raw threat intelligence and analysis from Microsoft’s security experts, which in turn should help security teams find, remove and block adversary tools that may be hidden within their organization.

Meanwhile, the new external attack surface management service helps these security teams understand how a potential attacker sees their network. Like similar services, it provides security teams with a way to discover all of their resources and find those that are unknown and/or unmanaged. Most businesses that start using a service like this end up being surprised by how many internet-facing unmanaged assets they find.

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Image Credits: microsoft

“All organizations are asking the question: how secure am I? It’s such a simple question but it’s so hard to answer that question. Because the first point is, well, first we need to understand what’s happening in the world of threats. And we we need to understand what that looks like. The second thing we need to understand is where our resources are,” Jakkal noted. With these new tools, Microsoft is giving security teams more data to work with to protect their networks and other assets.