The world over, unsuspecting persons are unwittingly turning into caught up in a brand new and rising sort of organized legal enterprise: car transport fraud and theft.
Crooks use e-mail phishing, fraudulent paperwork, and different techniques to impersonate legit transport corporations and get employed to ship a luxurious car. They divert the cargo away from its supposed vacation spot earlier than utilizing a mixture of expertise, laptop expertise, and old-school methods to erase traces of the car’s authentic possession and registration. In some instances, the automobile has been resold or is in another country by the point the rightful proprietor even realizes it’s lacking.
The nationwide epidemic of auto transport fraud and theft has remained beneath the radar, even because it’s rocked the trade over the previous two years. MIT Expertise Assessment recognized greater than a dozen instances involving high-end autos, obtained court docket data, and spoke to regulation enforcement, brokers, drivers, and victims in a number of states to disclose how transport fraud is wreaking havoc throughout the nation. Learn the total story.
—Craig Silverman
The scientist utilizing AI to hunt for antibiotics nearly in every single place
Antimicrobial resistance is a serious drawback. Infections attributable to micro organism, fungi, and viruses which have advanced methods to evade remedies at the moment are related to greater than 4 million deaths per 12 months, and a latest evaluation predicts that quantity might surge previous 8 million by 2050.
Bioengineer and computational biologist César de la Fuente has a plan. His crew on the College of Pennsylvania is coaching AI instruments to look genomes far and deep for peptides with antibiotic properties. His imaginative and prescient is to assemble these peptides—molecules fabricated from as much as 50 amino acids linked collectively—into numerous configurations, together with some by no means seen in nature. The outcomes, he hopes, might defend the physique towards microbes that stand up to conventional remedies—and his quest has unearthed promising candidates in sudden locations. Learn the total story.
—Stephen Ornes
These tales are each from the following print problem of MIT Expertise Assessment journal, which is all about crime. For those who haven’t already, subscribe now to obtain future points as soon as they land.
