American scientists Award

  A groundbreaking quantum-safe video encryption framework has emerged as a significant technological milestone in the fight against cyber threats such as deepfakes, data manipulation, and cyber-attacks. The innovation, created by a team of researchers from India and the USA, has been featured in the prestigious IEEE Transactions on Consumer Electronics. The collaborative effort brought together experts Dr S.S. Iyengar and Dr. Yashas Hariprasad from Florida International University, USA, and Dr. Naveen Kumar Chaudhary from the National Forensic Sciences University, India. Their novel hybrid encryption system leverages quantum computing to secure video communication against evolving cyber threats. The rise of deepfake technology—AI-generated media capable of creating highly convincing but fabricated visuals—has become a growing global concern. These manipulations can spread disinformation, impersonate influential figures, and destabilise political or social systems. This new encrypt...

Some places in the U.S. are seeing an uptick in cases of the stomach bug known as  norovirus . The  U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention  says there were  91 outbreaks reported  during the week of Dec. 5, up from 69 cases the last week of November, per The Associated Press. There have been a maximum of 65 outbreaks reported during the first week of December in recent years. The highly contagious infection is the leading cause of foodborne illness and causes sudden vomiting and diarrhea. Other symptoms include nausea, stomach pain, body ache, headache and fever. There is no medication to treat it. According to the CDC, there are between 19 million to 21 million cases of norovirus a year, and an estimated 900 people die from it while 109,000 are hospitalized. It's  estimated  that one in every 15 people per year are infected. Norovirus is often seen on  cruise ships , nursing homes, jails, schools and crowded living conditions. Cases...

  SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Tech behemoth OpenAI has touted its artificial intelligence-powered transcription tool Whisper as having near “human level robustness and accuracy.” But Whisper has a major flaw: It is prone to making up chunks of text or even entire sentences, according to interviews with more than a dozen software engineers, developers and academic researchers. Those experts said some of the invented text — known in the industry as hallucinations — can include racial commentary, violent rhetoric and even imagined medical treatments. Experts said that such fabrications are problematic because Whisper is being used in a slew of industries worldwide to translate and transcribe interviews, generate text in popular consumer technologies and create subtitles for videos. More concerning, they said, is  a rush by medical centers  to utilize Whisper-based tools to transcribe patients’ consultations with doctors, despite  OpenAI’  s warnings that the tool should n...

Billionaire Elon Musk has hailed Twitter as a bastion for freedom of expression ever since he acquired the social media site two years ago. But over the course of 2024, X, as it is now called, has evolved from what felt like a communal town square into a polarised hub where views and posts seem even more controversial. ​​Certain profiles that have shared misleading takes on politics and the news, some of which have been accused of triggering hate, have recently shot to prominence. All of this matters because X might not have as many users as some other major social media sites, but it does seem to have a significant impact on political discussions. Not only is it a place where certain high-profile politicians, governments and police forces share statements and views - but now its owner Mr Musk has directly aligned himself with Donald Trump, a relationship that could redefine how the bosses of other social media giants deal with the next US President. So, what's behind this new wave...

  Recent reports of the  first “severe” human case of bird flu   in the U.S. are raising concerns among   public health   experts as to the potential long-term health threat the virus could pose for the public the longer it continues to circulate throughout the country. The  Centers for Disease Control and Prevention  recently confirmed a Louisiana patient was hospitalized with a severe case of the  H5N1 strain of influenza  after being around sick and dead birds in backyard flocks, marking the first such case involving exposure to a backyard flock in the U.S. The case is the latest in an upsurge in virus activity this year. Earlier this month, the  U.S. Department of Agriculture  announced it would order the  testing of all raw, unpasteurized milk  under federal order for  bird flu  in response to a large outbreak among dairy cows that was first detected in March and has since been found in nearly  900 herd...

  Researchers are hopeful that a newly developed smartphone app can help fight the deadly opioid epidemic that's ravaging communities across America. A team at the University of Washington announced that technology in what's believed to be the first overdose-detecting cellphone app, called Second Chance. The research published Wednesday in Science Translational Medicine, an interdisciplinary medical journal, details how the app sends sound waves from a cellphone to a person's chest and then tracks how the waves return to the phone to identify specific changes in breathing patterns.