Parasitic worms have armies, and produce more soldiers when needed

-
In estuaries around the world, tiny trematode worms take over the bodies of aquatic snails. These parasitic flatworms invade the snail's body and use its systems to support their colony, sometimes for over a decade, "driving them around like cars," according to senior author Ryan Hechinger, professor of marine sciences at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California San Diego.

from Phys.org - latest science and technology news stories https://ift.tt/37WANxh

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

5 investors discuss what’s in store for venture debt following SVB’s collapse

-
There are many questions around the implications of Silicon Valley Bank’s (SVB) collapse that won’t be answered for a long time. But there’s one question that many startups and investors are hoping will get answered sooner rather than later: What happens to venture debt? SVB was one of the larger, if not the largest, providers of venture debt to U.S.-based startups. And now that First Republic Bank has also gone under, that question has spiraled, growing ever more complex. Many startups rely on venture debt: it’s both a cheaper alternative to raising equity and can serve as a capital tool that helps companies build in ways that equity isn’t great for. For some companies in capital-intensive areas like climate, fintech and defense, access to debt is often the only avenue to growth or scale. Thankfully, venture capitalists aren’t too worried about the SVB collapse’s impact on venture debt as a whole. We’re widening our lens, looking for more investors to participate in TechCrunch su...
Read more

Index and Credo lead a $2.75M seed in anti-fraud tech, Resistant AI

-
Prague based Resistant AI has nabbed a $2.75M seed round. The security startup’s machine learning technology is designed to be deployed on top of AI systems used for financial decision making to protect customers in markets such as financial services and ecommerce from attacks such as targeted manipulation, adversarial machine learning and advanced fraud. The seed round was co-led by Index Ventures (Jan Hammer) and Credo Ventures (Ondrej Bartos and Vladislav Jez). Seedcamp also participating, along with Daniel Dines, CEO of UiPath; Michal Pechoucek, CTO of Avast and other unnamed angel investors. Bartos joins the board of directors on behalf of the investors. The startup sells an additional layer of protection that’s specifically designed for tightening security around automated functions such as credit risk scoring and anti-money laundering by using tech to detect fake documents that feed such systems. Its tech is also aimed at uncovering suspicious patterns of transactions whic...
Read more

TikTok claims it’s not collecting U.S. users’ biometric data, despite what privacy policy says

-
Last year, TikTok quietly updated its privacy policy to allow the app to collect biometric data on U.S. users, including “faceprints and voiceprints” — a concerning change that the company declined to detail at the time, or during a subsequent Senate hearing held last October. Today, the tech company was again asked about its intentions regarding this data collection practice during a Senate hearing focused on social media’s impact on homeland security.  TikTok’s earlier privacy policy change had introduced a new section called “Image and Audio Information” under the section “Information we collect automatically.” Here, it detailed the types of images and audio that could be collected, including: “biometric identifiers and biometric information as defined under U.S. laws, such as faceprints and voiceprints.” The policy language was vague as it didn’t clarify whether it was referring to federal law, state laws, or both, nor did it explain why, exactly, this information was being...
Read more