So… what animal is the most dangerous to humans? That is, what animal kills more humans than any other each year?

Almost for certain you have had direct contact with one, or one of their “cousins”, multiple times in your life. Think about it for a bit. As this is a gun blog, what caliber of gun do you think would be most effective in defending yourself from this beast?

If I were the betting type I would bet you chose wrong. Almost for certain this animal would sneak in past your defenses and bite you on the neck without you being able to get off a single shot in its direction. Guns are essentially worthless against it.

What is this deadly beast? Alien? Predator? An escapee from Jurassic Park?

Nope.

Omar Akbari, a molecular biologist and assistant professor of entomology at the University of California, Riverside says:

Aedes aegypti is literally probably the most dangerous animal in the world.

And from the same article:

The same type of mosquito caused dengue to proliferate from Southeast Asia through tropical regions world-wide during the last quarter of the 20th century. The dengue virus infects an estimated 390 million people a year, killing thousands of them.

Aedes aegypti also is a carrier of chikungunya, a crippling disease that causes lasting joint pain, and yellow fever. In southern Africa, officials are struggling to contain a large outbreak of yellow fever, which can lead to fatal liver disease.

And another type of mosquito transmits malaria which kills nearly a half million people each year.

But scientist are working on genetic tools that could possibly direct selected species to extinction:

Imperial College London researchers are refining a system under development for the past several years to drive a self-destructive genetic trait into the Anopheles gambiae mosquito, the major carrier of malaria in sub-Saharan Africa. The trait could eventually shrink the malaria carrier’s population. Malaria kills an estimated 438,000 people a year.

…

With Crispr/Cas9, scientists can use an enzyme to snip DNA and insert changes, then build something called a “gene drive” that makes those changes more likely to be inherited by future generations, altering them. Normally, genes have only a 50% chance of being inherited.

Prof. Adelman and Virginia Tech biochemistry professor Zhijian Tu see a way to do this with genes involved in mosquito reproduction. In a paper published in Science last year, the researchers identified a gene that makes Aedes aegypti mosquitoes male.

“This was the master switch that controls sex,” says Prof. Tu. He and Prof. Adelman were co-authors of the research.

The researchers now are working on a system to program mosquitoes to develop as males. Since only females bite, that change could reduce the ability to spread viruses. The researchers aim to then use Crispr/Cas9 to build a gene drive that would spread the change through successive generations.

“If you’re successful, then you end up with all males, and the local population crashes,” says Prof. Tu. Prof. Adelman cautions that a system to target Aedes aegypti would have to be designed to leave the African forest-dwelling mosquito Aedes aegypti formosus intact. That type of mosquito doesn’t threaten human, he says.

Prof. Akbari at UC Riverside is using Crispr/Cas9 to design a gene-drive system that would inactivate a fertility gene in female Aedes aegypti mosquitoes and then pass on the inactivated gene. That would sterilize future generations of females.

The tradeoff is millions of human lives saved versus the preservation of the most deadly animals on the planet. Which will we chose?

Via Bruce Schneier we have this:

American and Chinese academics built a keystroke recognition system called WiKey consisting, at its simplest, of a standard router (sender) and laptop (receiver). WiKey can recognize typed keys in the middle of the system based on how the Wi-Fi signal lands on the receiver.

“In real-world experiments, WiKey can recognize keystrokes in a continuously typed sentence with an accuracy of 93.5 percent,” the researchers wrote.

However, they go on to say:

This is not something you should expect to see deployed in the real world tomorrow by spy agencies or hackers. Other distortions throw the entire thing off. If someone else is walking through—or simply in—the room, the current set up falters.

That’s somewhat reassuring but what they don’t say is that it tells us that our keystrokes, some our smallest movements, can be determined via radio waves. It doesn’t have to be Wi-Fi signals from access points already in the environment. It could be any type of custom built radio transmitters and receivers specifically brought to your location. By illuminating your environment with numerous transmitters/receivers one can imagine doing the equivalent of a CAT scan of your home/office, in real time, with centimeter resolution.

If that’s not enough to concern you Bruce shares another way WiFi can be used to spy on on people:

In this paper, we propose a novel approach for human identification, which leverages WIFI signals to enable non-intrusive human identification in domestic environments. It is based on the observation that each person has specific influence patterns to the surrounding WIFI signal while moving indoors, regarding their body shape characteristics and motion patterns. The influence can be captured by the Channel State Information (CSI) time series of WIFI. Specifically, a combination of Principal Component Analysis (PCA), Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT) and Dynamic Time Warping (DTW) techniques is used for CSI waveform-based human identification. We implemented the system in a 6m*5m smart home environment and recruited 9 users for data collection and evaluation. Experimental results indicate that the identification accuracy is about 88.9% to 94.5% when the candidate user set changes from 6 to 2, showing that the proposed human identification method is effective in domestic environments.

I think my utopian, underground, home is going to also be a Faraday Cage with some sort of HARM missile capability.

When I worked at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory I talked to a researcher who told me he did a study on satellite phones and cancer in rats. They wanted to make sure the specific signals used by these phones were safe because their have been concerns that the relatively high powered transmitters next to a persons head might cause cancer. We didn’t really have a plausible hypothesis for this since it was non-ionizing electromagnetic radiation, but doing the tests on rats was due diligence in making sure the concerns were unwarranted.

He told me that the rats exposed to cell phone signals had fewer cancers than the control group! People didn’t really believe the results and even he was skeptical. He redid the study. Same result. I just sort of filed it away in my mind and would occasionally tell the story to people when something related came up in a conversation. I wasn’t really sure I believe the result either. I just know the researcher was convinced he did the testing correctly had much greater than chance data to support the conclusion.

I don’t remember his name and the only thing that might be associated with that study I could find in a quick search on the Internet was this. But today I ran across this:

Another result of the study is even more head-scratching: the groups of rats exposed to cell signals lived longer than those not exposed. That doesn’t mean that cell phone radiation will extend your lifespan. But, Carroll writes, it could mean the exposed group simply developed cancer as an inevitable part of aging, while the non-exposed group died before tumors could develop.

Wow! This is a much more recent and independent study. Yet it hints at the same result as the PNNL researcher found over a decade ago.

If true, what could the mechanism possibly be?

As if there was any doubt this should settle the issue:

Microsoft is bowing out of building its own phones for consumers. After dramatically scaling back its Lumia devices last year, Microsoft hammered the final nail in the coffin today with an additional $950 million write off and 1,850 more job losses. Microsoft’s Lumia devices still account for more than 95 percent of all Windows phones sold, but a lack of new devices means sales and Windows Phone market share have declined sharply over the past year. Windows Phone is dead, and phone makers aren’t interested in reviving it.

I need to start porting my apps (Field Ballistics and As the Crow Flies) to the iPhone or Android so when my current phone dies I’ll still be able to use them with my new phone.

Just setting the clock on your Apple device to January 1, 1970 will permanently brick it. And it overheats as it dies…

By setting up your own time server and Wi-Fi hotspot it can be done remotely to most Apple devices that come within range.

Update your Apple device software. Or, considering using it to fry an egg on as it’s last functional activity.