Internationally, unsuspecting individuals are unwittingly changing into caught up in a brand new and rising sort of organized prison enterprise: automobile transport fraud and theft.
Crooks use e-mail phishing, fraudulent paperwork, and different techniques to impersonate professional transport firms and get employed to ship a luxurious automobile. They divert the cargo away from its meant vacation spot earlier than utilizing a mixture of know-how, pc expertise, and old-school methods to erase traces of the automobile’s authentic possession and registration. In some instances, the automobile has been resold or is overseas by the point the rightful proprietor even realizes it’s lacking.
The nationwide epidemic of car transport fraud and theft has remained underneath the radar, even because it’s rocked the trade over the previous two years. MIT Expertise Overview recognized greater than a dozen instances involving high-end autos, obtained courtroom data, and spoke to legislation enforcement, brokers, drivers, and victims in a number of states to disclose how transport fraud is wreaking havoc throughout the nation. Learn the complete story.
—Craig Silverman
The scientist utilizing AI to hunt for antibiotics nearly all over the place
Antimicrobial resistance is a significant drawback. Infections brought on by micro organism, fungi, and viruses which have developed methods to evade therapies at the moment are related to greater than 4 million deaths per 12 months, and a current evaluation predicts that quantity may surge previous 8 million by 2050.
Bioengineer and computational biologist César de la Fuente has a plan. His workforce on the College of Pennsylvania is coaching AI instruments to go looking genomes far and deep for peptides with antibiotic properties. His imaginative and prescient is to assemble these peptides—molecules manufactured from as much as 50 amino acids linked collectively—into varied configurations, together with some by no means seen in nature. The outcomes, he hopes, may defend the physique towards microbes that face up to conventional therapies—and his quest has unearthed promising candidates in sudden locations. Learn the complete story.
—Stephen Ornes
These tales are each from the following print situation of MIT Expertise Overview journal, which is all about crime. For those who haven’t already, subscribe now to obtain future points as soon as they land.
