New tech, including drones carrying blood, help injured Israeli soldiers survive, casualties reduced by half since 2006

Good news! Military drones can carry more than bombs and machine guns! Dual use technology! 😊

The IDF is truly amazing!

"The Israel Defense Forces estimate they have saved 380 lives of soldiers in the last 14 months of war due to new technology and procedures used to evacuate casualties to hospitals and to treat them on the field, including using drones to ferry blood for infusion into combat zones. ...

an IDF official showed data that reveals the military has managed to reduce by half the number of soldiers who die from their injuries. In the 2006 Lebanon war, the IDF found that this rate was 14.1 percent. That number dropped to 9.2 percent during the 2014 war, and now is 6.9 percent for the Gaza front and 7.1 percent for the Lebanon fronts.

“The average time for a soldier to receive medical treatment in the field is between zero to four minutes, over 90 percent of soldiers injured from close-quarters combat received treatment in the field, approximately 1,600 injured soldiers were evacuated via helicopters,” the IDF said in a written statement. ..."

New tech, including drones carrying blood, help injured Israeli soldiers survive - Breaking Defense "In a recent tour, Israel Defense Forces showcased new methods and technology that they say has halved the casualty rate for the seriously injured."

A Thor drone used to drop a small box that contains blood packets that can be used in the field by the IDF.

China's Covid Secret: Wuhan lab's deadly bioweapon experiment

Very recommendable! Was there already a 2016 outbreak of coronavirus epidemic in Hubei province (capital Wuhan) similar to Covid-19?

I have blogged here multiple times about the lab leak hypothesis and the involvement of the very strange U.S. government involvement (e.g. Anthony Fauci) with the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV).

It was reported several times that the WIV may have acted as a dual use research facility, conducting both civilian and military research.

Face Search Engine: Beneficial tool or Stalkerware

I think, we have to get used to the idea that excellent face recognition capabilities are now a fact of life and available to the general public from now on. It is here to stay!

Face recognition is definitely a dual use technology. Probably, the benefits significantly outweigh the disadvantages.

It is still a fairly new tool. Hence, malfunctioning or unexpected results are to happen. These kinks or quirks will likely be eliminated or at least drastically reduced as time passes.

Just one recent example: The Ukraine is using face recognition to identify Russian soldiers who died fighting in the Ukraine. Well, perhaps the parents might be interested to learn what happened to their son.

You can bet that various governments are already using it and far more advanced than what is available to the public at large. It can be used for legitimate law enforcement or to spy on citizens etc.

Thus, critical reports or articles (like the one below) regarding this technology ought to be taken with a huge grain of salt!

"PimEyes is a service that allows users to search its database of faces using a picture. Unlike Clearview, PimEyes can be used by anyone for $29.99 per month. ..."

Gradient Update #27: Face Search Engine or Stalkerware? And a New LLM Benchmark

AI suggested 40,000 new possible chemical weapons in just six hours

The curse of dual use research and technology! Or why individual liberty and responsibility is so important!

"... We had previously designed a commercial de novo molecule generator that we called MegaSyn2, which is guided by machine learning model predictions of bioactivity for the purpose of finding new therapeutic inhibitors of targets for human diseases. This generative model normally penalizes predicted toxicity and rewards predicted target activity. We simply proposed to invert this logic by using the same approach to design molecules de novo, but now guiding the model to reward both toxicity and bioactivity instead. We trained the AI with molecules from a public database using a collection of primarily drug-like molecules (that are synthesizable and likely to be absorbed) and their bioactivities. We opted to score the designed molecules with an organism-specific lethal dose (LD50) model3 and a specific model using data from the same public database that would ordinarily be used to help derive compounds for the treatment of neurological diseases (details of the approach are withheld but were available during the review process). The underlying generative software is built on, and similar to, other open-source software that is readily available4. To narrow the universe of molecules, we chose to drive the generative model towards compounds such as the nerve agent VX, one of the most toxic chemical warfare agents developed during the twentieth century ...

In less than 6 hours after starting on our in-house server, our model generated 40,000 molecules that scored within our desired threshold. In the process, the AI designed not only VX, but also many other known chemical warfare agents that we identified through visual confirmation with structures in public chemistry databases. Many new molecules were also designed that looked equally plausible. These new molecules were predicted to be more toxic, based on the predicted LD50 values, than publicly known chemical warfare agents ..."

AI suggested 40,000 new possible chemical weapons in just six hours - The Verge ‘For me, the concern was just how easy it was to do’

Dual use of artificial-intelligence-powered drug discovery (open access) An international security conference explored how artificial intelligence (AI) technologies for drug discovery could be misused for de novo design of biochemical weapons. A thought experiment evolved into a computational proof.