News of the week selected by Impactscool – November 12th, 2018

Facial recognition has a new ally

It will no longer be enough covering the face to escape the powerful facial recognition systems of the Chinese government. In fact, in Beijing, they are working to develop a new system that can identify citizens based on their body and their gait. Law enforcement agencies in Beijing and Shang have already used this technology that is being tested, but China wants to use it on a large scale. The CEO of Watrix, the company that is developing the technology, has said that the system can identify people with their faces covered up or from behind to 50 meters from the cameras. The recognition of body and gait, which also seems to be particularly reliable and difficult to deceive, would delete the limits of facial recognition and bring us closer to a dystopian and Orwellian society, where we are all controlled by a great mechanical eye.

Is there really an alien object in our skies?

It was unearthed in the solar system last year but it has recently returned to talk about himself “Oumuamua”, the mysterious cigar-shaped interstellar object. A study signed by a team of Harvard researchers and published in the journal Astrophysical Journal, in fact, claims that the object could have an artificial origin. This, according to the report, could assume that it is a probe sent near the Earth by an alien civilization, which travels in interstellar space like a detritus thanks to advanced technological equipment, perhaps driven by solar radiation. First classified as an asteroid, Oumuamua, which in Hawaiian means “messenger”, has immediately aroused the curiosity of researchers and experts for its provenance, its shape, speed and trajectory. The study by Harvard researchers offers a new answer on its origin and further fuels the debate around this interstellar object. The reactions of the scientific community are not slow to arrive and many experts have been sceptical about this publication. Only time and new researches will tell us so it is really Oumuamua.

Longevity: genetics have little to do with it

A study published in the journal Genetics claims that the impact of genes on an longevity is less than 10%: if the life of a person is more or less long, then, it does not depend on what is contained in DNA but on environmental factors and lifestyle. The research, signed by a US team, analysed the data of 400 million people who lived between the 1800s and the early 1900s. The genealogical trees studied, provided by the Ancestry database, showed how the partners, for example, have a lifespan similar to their siblings (particularly if they are of the opposite sex). This could depend on the so-called “assorted coupling”, that is, the fact that we tend to couple with people we consider similar, not only for physical aspects (height and body structure) but also from the social and cultural point of view. In addition, the environment and lifestyle would play a fundamental role in longevity.