When Kai Kloepfer points his.40 caliber handgun, it fires like any other weapon. But when someone else gives it a try, it doesn’t work. It’s the first firearm with same built-in security as many smartphones.
Smart-gun technology is not new, yet these guns are not mass-produced or sold in the U. S., partly due to fears they are a backdoor to greater gun…
If the gun is picked up by an authorized user, a sensor recognizes the fingerprint and it will fire.
Guns that only work for their owners used to be the stuff of movies, like James Bond’s gun in “Skyfall,” but Kloepfer thinks he has the technology to make them a reality, reports CBS News correspondent Tony Dokoupil.
He realized he couldn’t stop mass shootings, but he thought he could still save lives.
After all, in one year alone, nearly 600 people died in firearm accidents. There were thousands more suicides, many committed with guns that do not belong to the victim.
“Why did it take four and a half years to put a fingerprint reader on the side of a gun?” Dokoupil asked him.
“Well, it’s not as simple of a process as you might imagine,” Kloepfer said. “It’s also not something anybody has ever done before.”
Kloepfer’s weapon doesn’t only lock like a smart phone – it charges like one.
The invention has won him some deep-pocketed allies.
“Kai is the Mark Zuckerberg of guns,” Ron Conway said.
Conway was an early investor in Google and Facebook, and now he’s a putting his money behind Kloepfer’s smart gun.
“What Kai has done is used all of the latest technology available us to innovate a truly authenticated gun. You couldn’t do this five years ago,” Conway said.
But a push for similar guns misfired memorably in the late 1990s. A Colt prototype failed in a major demonstration, and Smith & Wesson dropped its smart gun program after resulting boycotts nearly bankrupted the company.
“What has changed from then until now to make it possible to make a smart gun like the one you’re working on?” Dokoupil asked.
Kloepfer said his gun is “relatively reliable.”
“I know, like, when I’m using it, when I’m testing it, it functions almost every single time,” Kloepfer said.
But not every time, as we saw firsthand when Kloepfer’s prototype — a modified Glock .22 – failed.
Still, he thinks an ultra-fast and reliable final weapon isn’t far off.
“I’m now to the point where… I’m able to start raising money, building a team, sort of really transitioning it to a real company, a real startup – instead of just a kid in his garage working on a science project,” Kloepfer said.
One of the big questions is whether traditional gun owners would ever buy a smart gun. The big gun lobbies say most would not.
But in a poll published last year in the American Journal of Public Health, nearly 60 percent of Americans said that if they were to purchase a new handgun, they would at least consider a smart gun.

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© Source: http://www.cbsnews.com/news/smart-gun-fingerprint-reader-biofire-kai-kloepfer-pushback-firearm-community/
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A Japanese and two American scientists have been awarded the 2017 Crafoord Prize for fundamental discoveries in immune regulation.
The prize committee says Shimon Sakaguchi of Osaka University, Fred Ramsdell from the Parker Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy in San Francisco, and Alexander Rudensky of the New-York-based Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center share the 6 million Swedish krona ($660,000 award.
They were cited „for their discoveries relating to regulatory T cells, which counteract harmful immune reactions in arthritis and other autoimmune diseases. “
The prize is awarded in one discipline each year — this time in Polyarthritis. The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences gives it annually to honor achievements not always covered by its more famous Nobel Prizes. It was named after Holger Crafoord, the Swede who designed the first artificial kidney.

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Since Daniel Hannan, a formerly obscure MEP, has emerged as the anointed intellectual of the Brexit elite, The Staggers is charting his ascendancy…
Daniel Hannan, as I’ve noted in the past, has an awkward habit of deleting his tweets. Often, by a strange coincidence, it’s the more embarrassing proclamations that vanish into the ether – no explanation, no, “Apologies, friends, I buggered that up didn’t I?” The tweet simply vanishes as if it had never been tweeted.
I’ve taken, then, to screenshot-ing some of the best morsels, just in case they’re not there the next time I look. Here’s one now:
Funny thing about that tweet is that Danny Boy has not, at time of writing, deleted it. Despite the fact he was tricked into embarrassing himself by a mean-spirited Remoaner, it’s still sitting there on the internet looking for all the world like its author is not crippled with embarrassment at the fact he could have been such a dunderhead as to write it. Two things are wrong with it, one relatively small, the other so huge as to be all encompassing.
The small one lies in the choice of monarchs. Not all of them are unreasonable: Henry VIII famously broke with the Catholic Church in his search for a divorce, an heir, and a quick bonk with Anne Boleyn. Since that meant an end to the period in which the English crown was answerable to a higher authority in the form of the Pope, we’ve already been treated to umpteen “Britain’s first Brexit” articles, and they’re not soon likely to stop – all this, despite the fact the big man liked to go around telling people he was also the King of France.
Similarly England spent much of the reign of his daughter trying to avoid being swallowed by the Spanish Empire, so it’s probably fair to suggest that Elizabeth I wasn’t a big fan of European integration either. George V, though, was closely related to – indeed, shared a face with – half the other head of states in Europe during his time on the planet, so what he’s doing there is anybody’s guess.
The truly vexing inclusion, though, is Edward V. Is Daniel Hannan really saying that a boy king who reigned for 79 days and was murdered by a wicked uncle at the age of 12 had serious concerns about the European project? Was it the damage that the Combined Agricultural Policy wrought on developing world farmers that Edward was brooding about in his tower? The money wasted on repeatedly moving the European Parliament between Brussels and Strasbourg? What?
@JonnElledge To be fair, if you’d ask the Princes in the Tower if they wanted to leave or remain, I’d bet they’d vote leave.
— Chris Cook (@xtophercook) December 29, 2016
Okay let’s be charitable and assume it’s a typo, presumably for another of Henry’s kids Edward VI. (It certainly wasn’t Edward III who spent much of his reign trying to get into Europe, by kicking off an endless war with France.) But the bigger problem here lies not in the specifics of Daniel’s answer, but in the fact he bothered to answer at all. The entire exercise is entirely ludicrous. It’s like asking for Theresa May’s position on the dissolution of the monasteries, or Jeremy Hunt’s proposals for tackling the Black Death.
The question is an ahistorical nonsense – not just because the European Union was invented in the late 20th century to deal with problems specific to a particular time, but because it misunderstands how England’s role in Europe has evolved over the centuries.
For the first five hundred years or so after the Conquest, the nations of the British Isles were a key part of a western European political system that included France and the Low countries. Until it lost Calais in 1558, indeed, the English Crown generally held territory in France.
The idea that the United Kingdom, as the state became, was with Europe but not of it – that its destiny lay on the high seas, not the continent – is a notion that’s core to Eurosceptic mythology, but one which didn’t emerge until the imperial era. Exactly when I’m not sure (unlike certain Conservative MEPs I’m not afraid to admit my ignorance, which is what makes us better than the animals and egg avatars). However you count it, though, the period between then and 1973 must make up a minority of England’s history as a nation. For most of its history, the idea that the England was somehow not properly “European” would have seemed crazy.
Actually, there was one major European project which a king of both England and Scotland kept us out of, a policy decision confirmed by his successors. That project was a key plank of French foreign policy, grew to encompass more far flung countries like Sweden, and was launched largely to prevent the Germans from getting above themselves. It was the Thirty Years War.
But is James I & VI on Hannan’s list? Is he b*llocks.
Labour has faced no greater electoral test since May 2015 than the Copeland by-election. The party held the constituency by just 2,564 votes at the general election and risks losing votes to the Conservatives, Ukip and the Lib Dems. Were the Tories to win (having finished second last time), they would be the first government to gain a seat since the Mitcham & Morden by-election in 1982.
With no electoral spending limit imposed until Labour’s Jamie Reed formally resigns, the Conservatives have already begun distributing leaflets highlighting Jeremy Corbyn’s opposition to nuclear power („I say no nuclear power, decommission the stations we’ve got“). The seat is home to the Sellafield plant (where Reed will become head of development and community relations) and a new power station could be opened in 2024.
The Tories, who are the bookmakers‘ favourite to win, have signalled their intent. As the Times reports , 100 activists and 10 MPs recently campaigned in the seat and another canvassing session is planned this weekend.
With the odds against them, Labour MPs regard the choice of candidate as crucial. Among those who have made the longlist , which the party’s NEC will whittle down to four, are Rachel Holliday, a local Unite activist and Cumbria’s Woman of the Year in 2015, former Scottish Labour MP Thomas Docherty, Gillian Troughton, a trained orthopaedic surgeon and local councillor, and two more councillors: Tim Knowles and David Southward.
Corbyn’s favoured candidate is Holliday and MPs fear that the NEC panel (which includes leadership allies Jon Trickett, Jenny Formby and Christine Shawcroft) will sideline strong contenders to give her the best hope of winning. For Corbyn, the selection presents a dilemma. A pro-leadership candidate would strengthen his authority (Corbynite candidates have been notably unsuccessful in previous contests). But it would also make it harder for him to avoid the blame if the seat is lost.
His opponents face a comparable dilemma. Though they believe that a non-Corbynite would give Labour the best chance of winning (citing the example of Oldham’s Jim McMahon), it will be harder for them to blame Corbyn if his candidate of choice is rejected. Whichever side triumphs will own victory or defeat.
Were the Tories to triumph, Theresa May would face greater pressure than ever to seek an early general election. But though the Prime Minister may yet need one, she emphatically does not want one.

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© Source: http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/staggers/2017/01/adventure-daniel-hannan-and-princes-tower
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