Tag Archives: intelligence

World

Slovenia arrests 2 suspected Russian spies – POLITICO

Leave a comment

Authorities in Slovenia arrested two foreign nationals accused of spying for Russia, local media reported late Sunday.

The two suspects were citizens of an unnamed South American country and had assumed false identities in real estate and antiques trading, according to local newspaper Delo. They were arrested on December 5, 2022, in a rented office in Ljubljana’s Bežigrad district, according to the report.

“The District State Prosecutor’s Office in Ljubljana received a notification from the Slovenian Intelligence and Security Agency, on the basis of which pre-trial proceedings have been initiated,” Ljubljana prosecutor’s office told Slovenia news portal Siol. The prosecutor’s office said the legal proceedings were ongoing, and would not officially confirm the allegations.

The operation to nab the suspected spies, reportedly carried out by the Slovenian Intelligence and Security Agency, was undertaken in cooperation with other countries’ security services, as the spy cell was reportedly also carrying out operations outside of Slovenia.

Security services around Europe have cracked down on alleged Russian spies operating on the Continent in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Germany has made two arrests connected to espionage within their own foreign intelligence agency.

if ( document.referrer.indexOf( document.domain ) < 0 ) { pl_facebook_pixel_args.referrer = document.referrer; } !function(f,b,e,v,n,t,s) {if(f.fbq)return;n=f.fbq=function(){n.callMethod? n.callMethod.apply(n,arguments):n.queue.push(arguments)}; if(!f._fbq)f._fbq=n;n.push=n;n.loaded=!0;n.version='2.0'; n.queue=[];t=b.createElement(e);t.async=!0; t.src=v;s=b.getElementsByTagName(e)[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(t,s)}(window, document,'script', 'https://connect.facebook.net/en_US/fbevents.js'); fbq( 'consent', 'revoke' ); fbq( 'init', "394368290733607" ); fbq( 'track', 'PageView', pl_facebook_pixel_args ); if ( typeof window.__tcfapi !== 'undefined' ) { window.__tcfapi( 'addEventListener', 2, function( tcData, listenerSuccess ) { if ( listenerSuccess ) { if ( tcData.eventStatus === 'useractioncomplete' || tcData.eventStatus === 'tcloaded' ) { __tcfapi( 'getCustomVendorConsents', 2, function( vendorConsents, success ) { if ( ! vendorConsents.hasOwnProperty( 'consentedPurposes' ) ) { return; } const consents = vendorConsents.consentedPurposes.filter( function( vendorConsents ) { return 'Create a personalised ads profile' === vendorConsents.name; } ); if ( consents.length === 1 ) { fbq( 'consent', 'grant' ); } } ); } } }); }

Read original article here

US

McCarthy blocks Democrats Schiff, Swalwell from intelligence committee

Leave a comment

Comment

House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) said Tuesday he will block Reps. Adam B. Schiff and Eric Swalwell from serving on the House Intelligence Committee, days after House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) formally recommended the California Democrats be reappointed to the panel.

McCarthy has argued that both Schiff and Swalwell are unfit to serve on the committee, using Schiff’s work conducting the first impeachment investigation of President Donald Trump and Swalwell’s alleged ties to a Chinese intelligence operative. There has been no evidence of wrongdoing in relation to the allegation against Swalwell.

“This is not anything political. This is not similar to what the Democrats did,” McCarthy told reporters Tuesday evening. “Those members will have other committees, but the Intel committee, the Intel committee’s responsibility is a national security. … I respect Hakeem Jeffries’s support of his conference and his people. But integrity matters.”

Unlike most committees, where party leaders control their appointees, the speaker has final say over who sits on the Intelligence panel.

McCarthy declined to answer multiple questions on whether he will try to keep Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) from serving on the Foreign Affairs committee — a move that would require a majority vote in the full House.

Schiff told reporters that McCarthy was “carrying the dirty water” for Trump by leaving him out of the committee as retribution for his work during Trump’s first impeachment trial.

Republicans have been keen to deny Democrats positions on key panels after the Democratic-led House in the last Congress voted to remove Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) and Paul A. Gosar (R-Ariz.) from their committee assignments. Greene had previously voiced approval of violence against prominent Democrats, and Gosar had posted an animated video on social media that depicted the killing of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.). In the votes to remove them from their committee slots, some Republicans joined Democrats in voting yes.

Greene and Gosar were removed “after a bipartisan vote of the House found them unfit to serve on standing committees for directly inciting violence against their colleagues,” Jeffries wrote in his letter. “It does not serve as precedent or justification for the removal of Representatives Schiff and Swalwell, given that they have never exhibited violent thoughts or behavior.”

McCarthy, in his formal response to Jeffries on Tuesday, said he cannot “put partisan loyalty ahead of national security” and accused Democrats of misusing the panel during the past two congressional terms. McCarthy claimed that, under Democratic control the panel “undermined its primary national security and oversight missions ultimately leaving our nation less safe.”

In a joint statement released Tuesday after McCarthy’s announcement, Schiff, Omar and Swalwell said they find it “disappointing but not surprising” that McCarthy would attempt to keep them from committee assignments. They accused him of “undermining the integrity of the Congress, and harming our national security in the process.”

“He struck a corrupt bargain in his desperate, and nearly failed, attempt to win the Speakership, a bargain that required political vengeance against the three of us,” he said, referring to the negotiations McCarthy engaged in with the far-right flank of his party during his lengthy fight for the speakership.



Read original article here

US

Swalwell, Schiff won’t serve on House Intelligence panel

Leave a comment

WASHINGTON – GOP Speaker Kevin McCarthy said Tuesday he would not seat fellow California Reps. Eric Swalwell and Adam Schiff to the House Intelligence Committee, keeping a promise he made to conservatives on the campaign trail.

“I will put national security ahead of partisan politics,” he said during a news conference. 

McCarthy has said Swalwell likely would be denied a security clearance in the private sector and accused Schiff of lying to the public, claiming they are not fit to serve on the committee that handles classified information. 

Democrats say it’s political revenge. Both California Democrats served on the panel in the last Congress and Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., has asked that they be reappointed, Unlike most standing committees, the speaker chooses who serves on the Select Intelligence Committee.

McCarthy said it’s not political and that Schiff and Swalwell could be seated on other committees, but not Intelligence. 

Why isn’t McCarthy seating Schiff and Swalwell?

Before he was elected speaker, McCarthy said he would not seat Schiff on the Intelligence committee, claiming he lied to Americans as chairman of the panel that led the first impeachment of former President Donald Trump in 2019.

McCarthy said he would not seat Swalwell because of the congressman’s previous ties to a suspected Chinese spy. 

In 2021, McCarthy first called for Swalwell’s removal from the committee but the Democrat-led House rejected the move largely along party lines. 

Why Democrats say the McCarthy move with Schiff and Swalwell is revenge

In a letter Saturday, Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries told McCarthy any denial of seats “runs counter to the serious and sober mission of the Intelligence Committee. 

He also contrasted the removal of Schiff and Swalwell to the removal of GOP Reps. Paul Gosar of Arizona and Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia in the last Congress. 

The Democratic-led House, with the help of some Republicans, voted to remove Gosar and Greene from committees in the last session.

Reinstated Republicans: Greene, Gosar reinstated to committees by GOP-led House after Democrats had removed them

The comparison to Marjorie Taylor Greene and Paul Gosar

Gosar was censured and removed from committees in November 2021 after posting an animated video that depicted violence against Biden and the killing of progressive Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. He was stripped of his seats on the Natural Resources and Oversight & Reform committees. 

Greene was removed in February 2021 for a number of inflammatory posts on social media. She had embraced QAnon conspiracy theories and made past comments that the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks didn’t happen. She was ousted from seats on the Budget Committee as well as the Education and Labor panel.

Both Greene and Gosar have been restored to committees in the new Republican-led House. 

Jeffries argued in his letter to McCarthy that “a bipartisan vote of the House found them unfit to serve on standing committees for directly inciting violence against their colleagues.” 

Schiff and Swalwell, on the other hand, “have never exhibited violent thoughts or behavior.”

What McCarthy said to Jeffries in a letter

McCarthy formally responded to Jeffries in a letter Tuesday night, telling him “integrity matters more” than length of service on the committee and that he is rejecting Schiff and Swalwell. 

“It is my assessment that the misuse of this panel during the 116th and 117th Congresses severely undermined its primary national security and oversight mission–ultimately leaving our nation less safe,” McCarthy said in the letter. 

He said he’s committed to returning the committee “to one of genuine honesty and credibility that regains the trust of the American people.”

In a response issued late Tuesday, Schiff said McCarthy kicked off the committee because “I fought him and Donald Trump when they tried to tear down our democracy. If he thinks this will stop me, he will soon find out differently.”

‘Industrial-scale ticket scalping’: Senators grill Ticketmaster over Taylor Swift concert fiasco

Candy Woodall is a Congress reporter for USA TODAY. She can be reached at cwoodall@usatoday.com or on Twitter at @candynotcandace.



Read original article here

US

Three Marines with intelligence jobs charged in Jan. 6 Capitol breach

Leave a comment

Comment

Three active duty members of the Marine Corps assigned to intelligence-related jobs, including one at the National Security Agency headquarters in Maryland, have been charged with participating in the Jan. 6, 2021, breach of the U.S. Capitol, according to court filings unsealed Thursday and military service records.

Cpl. Micah Coomer, Sgt. Joshua Abate and Sgt. Dodge Dale Hellonen were arrested Tuesday and Wednesday near Camp Pendleton, Calif., Fort Meade, Md., and Camp Lejeune, N.C., respectively, and appeared in local federal courts.

The FBI said Abate admitted to entering the Capitol “with two ‘buddies’” during a June 2022 interview that was part of his security clearance process while assigned to the Marine Corps’s Cryptologic Support Battalion, which is partnered and headquartered with the NSA at Fort Meade. According to charging papers, Abate said they “walked around and tried not to get hit with tear gas,” and “admitted he heard how the event was being portrayed negatively and decided that he should not tell anybody about going into the U.S. Capitol Building.”

Each faces counts including trespassing, disorderly conduct and illegal parading or picketing in a restricted Capitol building or grounds, in connection with the riots that injured scores of police officers, left offices ransacked and forced lawmakers to evacuate the premises amid Congress’s meeting to confirm the results of the 2020 presidential election.

The sergeants’ occupations as special communications signals analysts and the corporal’s job as an intelligence surveillance reconnaissance system engineer were first reported by Military.com and were confirmed in their service records.

A Marine Corps spokesperson said, “We are aware of an investigation and the allegations. The Marine Corps is fully cooperating with appropriate authorities in support of the investigation.”

Abate’s attorney David Dischley declined to comment. Federal defenders for the other two men did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

The men are the first active-duty military members to be charged in the Capitol attack since Maj. Christopher Warnagiris of the Marine Corps was arrested in May 2021. He is awaiting trial on felony counts including assaulting or impeding police and obstructing an official proceeding. About 120 of the roughly 940 people arrested in the Capitol breach served in the military, reserves or National Guard.

According to charging papers filed Tuesday and unsealed Thursday, Coomer posted photographs on Instagram taken from inside the Capitol during the breach captioned, “Glad to be apart of history.” Data provided by Facebook in connection with an August 2021 federal search warrant showed that in Jan. 31 direct message on Instagram, Coomer allegedly “stated his belief ‘that everything in this country is corrupt. We honestly need a fresh restart. I’m waiting for the boogaloo.’”

Coomer described the term as “Civil war 2,” according to an FBI arrest affidavit. U.S. prosecutors have described “boogaloo” as a term taken up by fringe groups referring to a racially or ethnically motivated civil war.

Capitol surveillance video recorded the three Marines entering the Capitol through the Senate Wing Door less than 10 minutes after it was first breached, according to the FBI. The trio was moving together and spent 52 minutes in the building, with Hellonen carrying a yellow Gadsden flag with a “Don’t Tread on Me” logo, according to the FBI. That included time in the Rotunda, where “they placed a red MAGA hat on one of the statues to take photos with it,” an FBI arrest affidavit said.

All three men had previously been awarded a Good Conduct Medal, which is given for every three years of discipline-free service, according to service records.

Separately, another Washington-area military reservist assigned to the U.S. intelligence community and facing a charge in the Jan. 6 Capitol riot was convicted Wednesday on unrelated felony weapons offenses.

Hatchet M. Speed, a Navy Reserve petty officer first class assigned to the Naval Warfare Space Field Activity at the National Reconnaissance Office in Chantilly, Va., was found guilty of possessing three unregistered firearms silencers by a jury in Alexandria federal court.

Speed has pleaded not guilty to federal misdemeanor charges in Washington after being described by U.S. prosecutors as a heavily armed Nazi sympathizer with top-level U.S. government security clearance who breached the Capitol with members of the Proud Boys extremist group. A new indictment this month added a felony count of obstructing an official proceeding of Congress against Speed, who until recently worked with a U.S. defense and intelligence cyberoperations contractor based in nearby Vienna, Va.

Speed is not accused of violence, has no criminal history and retained a Top Secret/Sensitive Compartmented Information clearance at time of his arrest. But prosecutors cited Speed’s alleged statements to an undercover FBI employee about using violence to further “anti-government and anti-Semitic ideologies,” including many “enemies” who live near Washington as the seat of the government, and his $50,000-worth of “panic” buying of firearms after the Capitol attack that included a dozen pistols, revolvers, shotguns and rifles.

Read original article here

World

Former Swedish intelligence officer jailed for life for spying for Russia | Sweden

Leave a comment

A court in Stockholm has sentenced a former Swedish intelligence officer to life imprisonment and his younger brother to 10 years after finding both guilty of spying for Russia’s military intelligence service for more than a decade.

Peyman Kia, 42, served in the Swedish security and counter-intelligence service, Säpo, and in armed forces intelligence agencies, including the foreign intelligence agency (Must) and KSI, a top-secret unit dealing with Swedish spies abroad.

He was found guilty of aggravated espionage and unauthorised handling of classified documents. The judge, Måns Wigén, said Kia had abused the trust placed in him in order to aid Russia, the country posing “the biggest threat to Sweden”.

His brother Payam, 35, was convicted of aggravated espionage for planning the crime and managing contacts with Russia’s GRU military intelligence agency, passing on 45 of the 90 documents Peyman was found to have gathered.

The court said they had “jointly and in concertation, without authorisation and to assist Russia and the GRU, acquired, forwarded and shared information whose disclosure to a foreign power could be detrimental to Sweden’s security”.

The Iranian-born brothers, both of whom hold Swedish citizenship, have denied the charges and are expected to appeal against them. They were arrested in 2021 when Säpo suspected it had a mole and accused them of having spied for Moscow since 2011.

Much of the evidence, court hearing, and full decision was not made public for national security reasons, and the court conceded that despite evidence including USB sticks, laptops and mobile phones, “some pieces of the puzzle are missing”.

It found that in 2016-17, Peyman Kia handled cash worth about 550,000 kronor (£43,000), most of it in US dollars, which it said most likely represented payment from Russia.

The verdict followed the spectacular pre-dawn arrest late last year in a wealthy Stockholm suburb of a Russian couple suspected of carrying out “illegal intelligence activities” against Sweden and the US – also for more than 10 years.

The “wholly unremarkable” pair, who have not been formally named by Swedish authorities, reportedly arrived in Sweden in 1997, acquired Swedish nationality and ran an IT and communications equipment import-export firm.

A Stockholm court ordered the man to be held on suspicion of “aggravated illegal intelligence activities against Sweden and a foreign power”, but released his partner – suspected of being his accomplice – pending inquiries. Both deny all the allegations.

Swedish media has speculated that the couple’s alleged connections to Moscow’s intelligence community mean they were almost certainly sleeper agents, and the public prosecutor, Henrik Olin, has said the husband was “linked to the GRU”.

Read original article here

Science

How Artificial Intelligence Found the Words To Kill Cancer Cells

Leave a comment

Cancer is a disease characterized by the abnormal growth and division of cells in the body. Tumors can affect any part of the body and can be benign (non-cancerous) or malignant (cancerous), spreading to other parts of the body through the bloodstream or lymph system.

A predictive model has been developed that enables researchers to encode instructions for cells to execute.

Scientists at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) and IBM Research have created a virtual library of thousands of “command sentences” for cells using machine learning. These “sentences” are based on combinations of “words” that direct engineered immune cells to find and continuously eliminate cancer cells.

This research, which was recently published in the journal Science, is the first time that advanced computational techniques have been applied to a field that has traditionally progressed through trial-and-error experimentation and the use of pre-existing molecules rather than synthetic ones to engineer cells.

The advance allows scientists to predict which elements – natural or synthesized – they should include in a cell to give it the precise behaviors required to respond effectively to complex diseases.

“This is a vital shift for the field,” said Wendell Lim, Ph.D., the Byers Distinguished Professor of Cellular and Molecular Pharmacology, who directs the UCSF Cell Design Institute and led the study. “Only by having that power of prediction can we get to a place where we can rapidly design new cellular therapies that carry out the desired activities.”

Meet the Molecular Words That Make Cellular Command Sentences

Much of therapeutic cell engineering involves choosing or creating receptors that, when added to the cell, will enable it to carry out a new function. Receptors are molecules that bridge the cell membrane to sense the outside environment and provide the cell with instructions on how to respond to environmental conditions.

Putting the right receptor into a type of immune cell called a T cell can reprogram it to recognize and kill cancer cells. These so-called chimeric antigen receptors (CARs) have been effective against some cancers but not others.

Lim and lead author Kyle Daniels, Ph.D., a researcher in Lim’s lab, focused on the part of a receptor located inside the cell, containing strings of

What the Grammar of Cellular Commands Can Reveal About Treating Disease

Next, Daniels partnered with computational biologist Simone Bianco, Ph.D., a research manager at IBM Almaden Research Center at the time of the study and now Director of Computational Biology at Altos Labs. Bianco and his team, researchers Sara Capponi, Ph.D., also at IBM Almeden, and Shangying Wang, Ph.D., who was then a postdoc at IBM and is now at Altos Labs, applied novel machine learning methods to the data to generate entirely new receptor sentences that they predicted would be more effective.

“We changed some of the words of the sentence and gave it a new meaning,” said Daniels. “We predictively designed T cells that killed cancer without taking a break because the new sentence told them, ‘Knock those rogue tumor cells out, and keep at it.’”

Pairing machine learning with cellular engineering creates a synergistic new research paradigm.

“The whole is definitely greater than the sum of its parts,” Bianco said. “It allows us to get a clearer picture of not only how to design cell therapies, but to better understand the rules underlying life itself and how living things do what they do.”

Given the success of the work, added Capponi, “We will extend this approach to a diverse set of experimental data and hopefully redefine T-cell design.”

The researchers believe this approach will yield cell therapies for autoimmunity, regenerative medicine, and other applications. Daniels is interested in designing self-renewing stem cells to eliminate the need for donated blood.

He said the real power of the computational approach extends beyond making command sentences, to understanding the grammar of the molecular instructions.

“That is the key to making cell therapies that do exactly what we want them to do,” Daniels said. “This approach facilitates the leap from understanding the science to engineering its real-life application.”

Reference: “Decoding CAR T cell phenotype using combinatorial signaling motif libraries and machine learning” by Kyle G. Daniels, Shangying Wang, Milos S. Simic, Hersh K. Bhargava, Sara Capponi, Yurie Tonai, Wei Yu, Simone Bianco and Wendell A. Lim, 8 December 2022, Science.
DOI: 10.1126/science.abq0225

The study was funded by the National Institutes of Health. 



Read original article here

Technology

Apple introduces the new HomePod with breakthrough sound and intelligence

Leave a comment

Read original article here

Science

Artificial intelligence discovers new nanostructures

Leave a comment

Scanning-electron microscopy images depict novel nanostructures discovered by artificial intelligence. Researchers describe the patterns as skew (left), alternating lines (center), and ladder (right). Scale bars are 200 nanometers. Credit: Brookhaven National Laboratory

Scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory have successfully demonstrated that autonomous methods can discover new materials. The artificial intelligence (AI)-driven technique led to the discovery of three new nanostructures, including a first-of-its-kind nanoscale “ladder.” The research was published today in Science Advances..

The newly discovered structures were formed by a process called self-assembly, in which a material’s molecules organize themselves into unique patterns. Scientists at Brookhaven’s Center for Functional Nanomaterials (CFN) are experts at directing the self-assembly process, creating templates for materials to form desirable arrangements for applications in microelectronics, catalysis, and more. Their discovery of the nanoscale ladder and other new structures further widens the scope of self-assembly’s applications.

“Self-assembly can be used as a technique for nanopatterning, which is a driver for advances in microelectronics and computer hardware,” said CFN scientist and co-author Gregory Doerk. “These technologies are always pushing for higher resolution using smaller nanopatterns. You can get really small and tightly controlled features from self-assembling materials, but they do not necessarily obey the kind of rules that we lay out for circuits, for example. By directing self-assembly using a template, we can form patterns that are more useful.”

Staff scientists at CFN, which is a DOE Office of Science User Facility, aim to build a library of self-assembled nanopattern types to broaden their applications. In previous studies, they demonstrated that new types of patterns are made possible by blending two self-assembling materials together.

“The fact that we can now create a ladder structure, which no one has ever dreamed of before, is amazing,” said CFN group leader and co-author Kevin Yager. “Traditional self-assembly can only form relatively simple structures like cylinders, sheets, and spheres. But by blending two materials together and using just the right chemical grating, we’ve found that entirely new structures are possible.”

Blending self-assembling materials together has enabled CFN scientists to uncover unique structures, but it has also created new challenges. With many more parameters to control in the self-assembly process, finding the right combination of parameters to create new and useful structures is a battle against time. To accelerate their research, CFN scientists leveraged a new AI capability: autonomous experimentation.

In collaboration with the Center for Advanced Mathematics for Energy Research Applications (CAMERA) at DOE’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Brookhaven scientists at CFN and the National Synchrotron Light Source II (NSLS-II), another DOE Office of Science User Facility at Brookhaven Lab, have been developing an AI framework that can autonomously define and perform all the steps of an experiment. CAMERA’s gpCAM algorithm drives the framework’s autonomous decision-making. The latest research is the team’s first successful demonstration of the algorithm’s ability to discover new materials.

X-ray scattering data (left) are shown alongside corresponding scanning-electron microscopy images (right) of key areas in the sample identified by the AI algorithm. The images revealed three novel nanopatterns: alternating lines (top), skew (center), and ladder (bottom). Scale bar is 500 nanometers. Credit: Brookhaven National Laboratory

“gpCAM is a flexible algorithm and software for autonomous experimentation,” said Berkeley Lab scientist and co-author Marcus Noack. “It was used particularly ingeniously in this study to autonomously explore different features of the model.”

“With help from our colleagues at Berkeley Lab, we had this software and methodology ready to go, and now we’ve successfully used it to discover new materials,” Yager said. “We’ve now learned enough about autonomous science that we can take a materials problem and convert it into an autonomous problem pretty easily.”

To accelerate materials discovery using their new algorithm, the team first developed a complex sample with a spectrum of properties for analysis. Researchers fabricated the sample using the CFN nanofabrication facility and carried out the self-assembly in the CFN material synthesis facility.

“An old school way of doing material science is to synthesize a sample, measure it, learn from it, and then go back and make a different sample and keep iterating that process,” Yager said. “Instead, we made a sample that has a gradient of every parameter we’re interested in. That single sample is thus a vast collection of many distinct material structures.”

Then, the team brought the sample to NSLS-II, which generates ultrabright X-rays for studying the structure of materials. CFN operates three experimental stations in partnership with NSLS-II, one of which was used in this study, the Soft Matter Interfaces (SMI) beamline.

“One of the SMI beamline’s strengths is its ability to focus the X-ray beam on the sample down to microns,” said NSLS-II scientist and co-author Masa Fukuto. “By analyzing how these microbeam X-rays get scattered by the material, we learn about the material’s local structure at the illuminated spot. Measurements at many different spots can then reveal how the local structure varies across the gradient sample. In this work, we let the AI algorithm pick, on the fly, which spot to measure next to maximize the value of each measurement.”

As the sample was measured at the SMI beamline, the algorithm, without human intervention, created of model of the material’s numerous and diverse set of structures. The model updated itself with each subsequent X-ray measurement, making every measurement more insightful and accurate.

The Soft Matter Interfaces (SMI) beamline at the National Synchrotron Light Source II. Credit: Brookhaven National Laboratory

In a matter of hours, the algorithm had identified three key areas in the complex sample for the CFN researchers to study more closely. They used the CFN electron microscopy facility to image those key areas in exquisite detail, uncovering the rails and rungs of a nanoscale ladder, among other novel features.

From start to finish, the experiment ran about six hours. The researchers estimate they would have needed about a month to make this discovery using traditional methods.

“Autonomous methods can tremendously accelerate discovery,” Yager said. “It’s essentially ‘tightening’ the usual discovery loop of science, so that we cycle between hypotheses and measurements more quickly. Beyond just speed, however, autonomous methods increase the scope of what we can study, meaning we can tackle more challenging science problems.”

“Moving forward, we want to investigate the complex interplay among multiple parameters. We conducted simulations using the CFN computer cluster that verified our experimental results, but they also suggested how other parameters, such as film thickness, can also play an important role,” Doerk said.

The team is actively applying their autonomous research method to even more challenging material discovery problems in self-assembly, as well as other classes of materials. Autonomous discovery methods are adaptable and can be applied to nearly any research problem.

“We are now deploying these methods to the broad community of users who come to CFN and NSLS-II to conduct experiments,” Yager said. “Anyone can work with us to accelerate the exploration of their materials research. We foresee this empowering a host of new discoveries in the coming years, including in national priority areas like clean energy and microelectronics.”

More information:
Gregory S. Doerk et al, Autonomous discovery of emergent morphologies in directed self-assembly of block copolymer blends, Science Advances (2023). DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.add3687. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.add3687

Provided by
Brookhaven National Laboratory

Citation:
Artificial intelligence discovers new nanostructures (2023, January 13)
retrieved 14 January 2023
from https://phys.org/news/2023-01-ai-nanostructures.html

This document is subject to copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study or research, no
part may be reproduced without the written permission. The content is provided for information purposes only.



Read original article here

World

The war is at a stalemate, Ukraine’s intelligence chief says

Leave a comment

Another wave of Russian missile strikes left several Ukrainian regions without power on Thursday, with crews across the country racing to restore power as the New Year holidays approach.

Ukraine’s Energy Minister Herman Halushchenko said that infrastructure in Kyiv, in north central Ukraine, and Odesa, in the south, had been damaged in the barrage and were experiencing emergency power outages — when the electricity is protectively turned off to diminish damage from the grid shorting out.

“Today the enemy carried out another massive attack on the energy infrastructure of Ukraine,” Halushchenko said in a post on Facebook. “Unfortunately, there is some damage to generation facilities and power grids. As of 11:00, the situation is difficult in the west of the country, Odesa and Kyiv regions.”

Forty percent of Kyiv residents were without power, mayor Vitali Klitschko said Thursday, adding that this was due to security measures taken by power engineers during the air raid alarm and that they were now working to restore services. “The city is supplying heat and water in normal mode,” Klitschko said on the messaging platform Telegram.

Authorities in Odesa, in southern Ukraine, said that emergency power outages had been rolled out amid the missile attacks. “They are introduced due to the threat of missile attacks to avoid significant damage if the enemy manages to hit energy facilities,” DTEK, a utility company, said in a statement.

In western Ukraine, Lviv Mayor Andrii Sadovyi said that 90% of the city was without power, cautioning that the city’s waterworks could also to stop working.

Read original article here

US

Trump downplayed drumbeat of intelligence warnings on Covid, report finds

Leave a comment

Comment

Beginning in late January 2020, U.S. intelligence agencies reported to senior Trump administration officials that the coronavirus spreading in China threatened to become a pandemic and spark a global health crisis.

But then-President Trump’s public statements over the next two months “did not reflect the increasingly stark warnings coursing through intelligence channels,” including the president’s daily brief, available to Trump and senior members of his administration, according to a report issued Thursday by the House Intelligence Committee.

By February, the intelligence community “had amply warned the White House in time for it to act to protect the country,” committee investigators concluded. Trump claimed in a May 2020 tweet that the intelligence community “only spoke of the Virus in a very non-threatening, or matter of fact, manner,” a statement that “simply does not match the record of intelligence analysis published in late January and February,” the committee found.

U.S. intelligence reports from January and February warned about a likely pandemic

Committee staff spent two years examining the intelligence community’s response to the covid-19 pandemic. Their report, which was staffed by bipartisan aides but written by the Democrats, who hold the majority on the committee, broadly praises the work of intelligence analysts for providing early warning about the virus for policymakers.

But the report also faulted the intelligence community for not being better prepared to provide comprehensive early warning based on exclusive intelligence. Agencies didn’t move in the outbreak’s early days to use their clandestine sources for collecting unique, potentially useful intelligence about the unfolding situation in China, the committee found. Doing so might have provided administration leaders with more insight than was available in public health channels and nonclassified sources of information.

Among the new steps the committee recommends the intelligence agencies take to prepare for the next pandemic is designating a new center with responsibility for global health security; enhancing intelligence agencies’ ability to quickly collect information when a new disease emerges; and providing more resources to the National Center for Medical Intelligence (NCMI), a component of the Defense Intelligence Agency that investigators found performed particularly well, but whose early warnings could have been more widely shared with decision-makers.

A spokesperson for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence declined to comment on the report.

Trump administration’s hunt for pandemic ‘lab leak’ went down many paths and came up with no smoking gun

Indications that a novel coronavirus might be spreading in China caught the attention of U.S. intelligence as early as Dec. 31, 2019, the committee found, when an analyst at the NCMI reviewed a notice shared on ProMED about a mysterious respiratory illness spreading in China, and that had been discussed on social media. The analyst uploaded the notice from ProMED, a publicly accessible system for monitoring disease outbreaks, into an intelligence database called Horizon, which disseminates reports to military intelligence directorates.

Labeled as a “possible pandemic warning update,” it was the first indication within the intelligence community of covid-19, which had not yet been named.

In the first week of January 2020, “alarming information was circulating throughout the U.S. government,” but most of it came from public health sources, the committee found.

On Jan. 7, the U.S. Embassy in Beijing took note in a cable of the growing outbreak. Some officials at the National Security Council wanted more information but were frustrated that the intelligence community couldn’t provide unique insights from its own clandestine sources.

Soon thereafter, intelligence analysts began focusing more on the disease and started to coordinate analysis for policymakers, the committee found. On Jan. 16, the embassy sent a cable saying that Chinese government officials were engaged in only “limited sharing” of epidemiological data, which was hindering assessments of the risk the virus posed.

The Washington Post previously reported that in January and February, as intelligence agencies ramped up their reporting on the outbreak, they warned that Chinese officials appeared to be minimizing its severity.

In the U.S., too, the president kept downplaying the coming storm.

On Jan. 22, Trump said in an interview with CNBC that the United States had the virus “totally under control,” a statement that didn’t reflect the “growing level of concern” in the intelligence community’s reports, the committee found. The next day, Trump was reportedly told about the virus in his daily intelligence briefing, and officials told the committee that an article was drafted for inclusion in the president’s daily brief, or PDB, a classified document shared with Trump and his senior advisers.

That day, the State Department ordered staff at the consulate in Wuhan and their families to evacuate China. One day later, the NCMI published an assessment that the virus had a “roughly even chance of becoming a global pandemic during the next four months.”

Intelligence agencies elaborate on theories of covid-19 origins

In a briefing with reporters on Thursday, a committee investigator noted that the World Health Organization didn’t declare a pandemic until nearly the middle of March. He said that the intelligence community’s earlier warning was a “classic example” of the way intelligence analysts can provide insights to decision-makers, which may be necessary for future pandemic response.

“Public health officials will wait until all the data is there before making a call,” said the investigator, speaking on the condition of anonymity under ground rules set by the committee. While the early warning the community provided wasn’t comprehensive, it was a notable example of “where the professional culture of intelligence analysts really shines through,” the investigator added.

The intensity and frequency of the alerts would soon grow. On Jan. 30, the CIA began preparing short intelligence reports called “executive updates” on the spread of the virus. A PDB from early February 2020 warned that covid “could not be contained.” Another report around the same time predicted that the virus would become a global crisis before May.

But the House committee could not determine precisely which reports Trump read or the totality of information that was presented to him. Historically, the executive branch resists sharing full copies of the PDB with investigators, as was the case here, the committee said.

“We don’t know exactly what went up to President Trump,” the investigator said, “but it’s not the intelligence community’s practice to tell the president one thing and the rest of the national security community another.”

The report did not investigate the origins of covid-19, which continue to be a subject of debate. Trump administration officials, led by former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, advocated for the hypothesis that the virus originated in a lab in Wuhan and escaped possibly through an accidental transmission to lab workers. To bolster that claim, officials cited reporting that researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology became ill in the fall of 2019 with symptoms similar to covid-19.

But the House committee staff called those arguments “deeply misleading,” because the U.S. doesn’t know what made the workers sick and whether they had covid-19.

Read original article here

The Ultimate News Site