See Me Rollin’

We’ve seen robots that hop on one leg, saunter like bipedal humans, and mimic our quadrupedal furry friends

But a bot with 32 legs? That’s something we hadn’t seen before. Now here’s Mochibot, on the scene to do exactly that.

Botty Long Legs

The team of Tokyo-based researchers behind this spherical bot presented their creation at the 2018 International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems on October 3.

Each of Mochibot’s 32 legs can extend to a length of about 39 inches or retract until it’s just about 10 inches long. To move in one direction, the bot simply retracts the legs currently touching the ground on that side of itself while extending the legs “behind” it.

Gravity takes over, and the bot rolls in the desired direction. When it wants to stop, it flattens itself out by adjusting its “bottom” feet. Basically, you have to see it to believe it:

Function Over Form

This design might look odd, but it’s actually really clever. If one of Mochibot’s many legs breaks, NBD — it has 31 others. The bot’s center could also house any number of cameras or sensors to expand its capabilities, according to IEEE Spectrum.

Finally, because the length of each of Mochibot’s legs is adjustable, it can maintain its footing on uneven surfaces such as rubble from a collapsed building or the rocky landscape of a planet or moon.

So, while Mochibot might not look as cute as one of those canine-inspired bots we’ve seen making the rounds, it could actually prove far more useful.

READ MORE: 32-Legged Spherical Robot Moves Like an Amoeba [IEEE Spectrum]

More on robots: Glimpse: Man’s Best Friend, Forever? We May Love Robot Dogs as Much as the Real Thing

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This Weird Robot Has 32 Legs and Is Shaped Like a Lumpy Sphere

Salad Days

Earlier this week, a United Nations report predicted that climate change will likely lead to international starvation, drought, and extreme weather events by the 2040s.

On Wednesday, a team of European researchers pushed the conversation forward with a landmark report about the changes we’d need to make to the global food system to mitigate fallout from climate change and a growing population.

Their conclusion is that sidestepping the worst possible harm from climate change is possible, but it’ll require sweeping dietary changes across the globe. The biggest shift: Everybody will have to lay off meat and adopt a “flexitarian” diet made up mostly of plants.

Sweeping Change

Individuals can make dietary decisions that will offset their carbon footprints, the researchers said, but to avoid looming catastrophe, governments across the world will need to make sweeping policy changes to encourage flexitarian diets.

“I think we can do it, but we really need much more proactive governments to provide the right framework,” said lead researcher Marco Springmann, from the University of Oxford, in an interview with the Guardian. “People can make a personal difference by changing their diet, but also by knocking on the doors of their politicians and saying we need better environmental regulations.”

READ MORE: Options for Keeping the Food System Within Environmental Limits [Nature]

More on climate change: Report: Unless We Make Dramatic Changes, We’re Headed for Climate Catastrophe

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To Feed a Hungry Planet, We’re All Going to Need to Eat Less Meat

DNA Panoptican

Earlier this year, police cracked a decades-old murder case by plugging the Golden State Killer’s DNA into a genealogy site that included his relatives’ genetic samples.

It turns out that wasn’t some statistical fluke.

It’s not clear what percentage of people have already uploaded their genetic data to genealogy sites, but right now, you could use these sites to identify a third cousin or closer relative of about 60 percent of people of European descent.

That’s according to a paper published Thursday in the journal Nature. In fact, the paper continued, if just 2 percent of people upload their data to these sites — a milestone we could hit within three years — you’ll be able to use them to find a third cousin or closer relative of virtually anyone.

GATTACA

Researcher Yaniv Erlich told Gizmodo that the Golden State Killer case motivated him to conduct this study. The ingenuity of the detective work impressed him, but he also found himself worrying about the way people could misuse the idea.

“Of course, there’s some good news,” he told Gizmodo. “If someone did something wrong out there, then [law enforcement] is going to be able to catch them. But down the road, as things continue to evolve, there could be people who use this for illegitimate reasons.”

So while genealogy sites might be a boon for police forces, the rest of us might just have to accept the fact that any creep with access to our DNA could track down our family members with relative ease.

READ MORE: Ancestry Sites Could Soon Expose Nearly Anyone’s Identity, Researchers Say [Gizmodo]

More on genealogy websites: A Genealogy Website Led to a Suspected Killer’s Arrest. Here’s What We Know.

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Creeps Will Soon Be Able to Find Almost Anyone on Genealogy Sites

Will we ever save the bees? Do they even have a chance once dramatic changes to the global climate or disastrous health epidemics accelerate us towards catastrophe?

It’s easy to feel downhearted about some of the news this week, we’ll admit. But on the plus side, we could finally eliminate cervical cancer in the U.S. So we’ve got that going for us, which is nice. Read on to find out what fascinated us this week:

Australia’s Success Shows That the US Could Eliminate Cervical Cancer If It Really Wanted To. Australia is on track to all but eliminate cervical cancer within its borders by 2066, and the U.S. could follow in its footsteps.

Pour One out for MASCOT, the Asteroid-Exploring Lander. The MASCOT lander has powered down after spending 17 hours exploring Ryugu, an asteroid 180 million miles away from Earth.

We Need a Backup Supply of the World’s Helpful Germs, Say Researchers. Researchers call for the creation of a vault containing all the beneficial germs in the human microbiota to safeguard the future of human health.

A “Vaccine” Created from Mushrooms Could Help Save the Bees. A humble mushroom extract might help with many of bees’ woes, according to new research — and even, maybe, help rebuild their world population.

Report: Unless We Make Dramatic Changes, We’re Headed for Climate Catastrophe. According to a new IPCC report, we need to limit global temperature increases to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, not 2 degrees Celsius.

Oil Will Be Used Less for Fuel, More for Plastics and Fertilizers. Way more of the planet’s oil production will go toward plastics and fertilizers instead of fuel, especially as renewables keep biting into the energy market.

Read More: This Week in Science: Sept 29 – Oct 5

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This Week in Science: Oct 6 – Oct 12

While scientists are still working on NASA’s newest space capsule, others are more concerned with the small stuff: coffee mugs with heart rates and crypto scams on Twitter. What do they have in common? You guessed it — they’re about tech. Here’s what else caught our interest:

The US Government Wants to Allow Fully Autonomous Vehicles on US Roads. The Department of Transportation just released an 80-page document outlining its plans for regulating fully autonomous vehicles.

Fake Elon Musks Clutter Twitter with Crypto Scams. Twitter scams are running amok, and the platform can’t shut them down. That’s not great news for users, for Elon Musk, or for the midterms.

This Brain-Analyzing AI Could Kill Your Dream of Being a Professional Athlete. Researchers created a machine learning system that looks at brain activity to determine a person’s skill level at a certain task.

Lockheed Engineers Are Using HoloLens to Build NASA’s New Space Capsule. Lockheed Martin engineers are using Microsoft’s HoloLens to speed up construction of NASA’s next space capsule by showing technicians the next step.

Fitness Trackers Say This Coffee Cup Has a Pulse. Wait, What? Chinese website Abacus found that a toilet paper roll had a pulse using Xiaomi’s latest fitness tracker. The reason why is not as surprising as you think.

Ford Patent Would Let You Steer Your Car by Tilting Your Phone. A new Ford patent describes a control system that would let a driver steer a car by tilting or swiping their smartphone.

Read more: This Week in Tech: Sept 29 – Oct 5

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This Week in Tech: Oct 6 – Oct 12

Running With Style

They grow up so fast.

Seems like just yesterday we were marveling at the ability of Boston Dynamics’s Atlas robot to walk on rough terrain. Then our jaws dropped as we watched the humanoid bot execute flawless backflips.

And now Boston Dynamics has upped the ante again, by showing off Atlas’s ability to parkour its way across a makeshift obstacle course.

Jump, Jump

In a short video released on Thursday, Atlas leaps over a log before scaling a tri-level platform. Not exactly enough to qualify for the World Parkour Championships, but definitely more than most bots (and more than a few humans) could accomplish on two legs.

See Atlas parkour across the course in the clip below, and start taking bets now on the next skill Boston Dynamics’s bot will show off. Our money’s on slacklining, because why the heck not?

READ MORE: Boston Dynamics Will Definitely Win the First Robot Ninja Warrior [The Verge]

More on Atlas: Boston Dynamics’ Bipedal Robot Can Now Do a Backflip

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The Boston Dynamics Robot Atlas Is Now a Parkour Master

Expert Witness

On October 16, the U.K. Parliament will hear testimony from a peculiar witness.

Name: Pepper

Occupation: Robot

Please Rise

The appointment, first spotted by the U.K. publication TES, will occur during an inquiry on the “fourth industrial revolution,” a loose term technologists use to refer to technology that blends physical, biological, and digital components. Pepper is the last witness after a selection of academics, roboticists, and computer scientists.

According to the BBC, this will be the first time a robot has appeared before British lawmakers. But Robert Halfon, the chair of the committee that will hear from Pepper, struggled to explain the point of the robot testimony.

“This is not about someone bringing an electronic toy robot and doing a demonstration, it’s about showing the potential of robotics and artificial intelligence and the impact it has on skills,” he told TES. 

Pepper Spray

We’ve written previously about Pepper, a line of robots created by Japan’s SoftBank Robotics. The robot has limited conversational ability and can interpret and respond to emotions.

Brands that have dabbled with using Pepper to interact with customers include Pizza Hut and a Scottish grocery store, which eventually fired the robot.

We’ll be watching to see if the bot can do any better in Parliament.

READ MORE: MPs to Quiz Robot About Education [TES]

More on Pepper: Meet Pepper, the Cute Little Robot Knows That How You’re Feelin

Read more:
A Robot Is Scheduled to Testify in Front of the UK Parliament

Of Rice and Men

Roughly half the people in the world eat rice every day. Soon, we’ll be able to put aside any worries about running out of samples of this dietary staple — samples researchers can use to help us deal with the consequences of climate change and a growing population.

The International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) maintains the world’s largest collection of samples of various types of rice at a gene bank in Los Banos, Philippines. On Friday, it secured $1.4 million per year in funding — enough to maintain the facility forever.

Mr. Rice Guy

Like the “doomsday” seed vault in Norway, the purpose of the IRRI gene bank is to ensure we never find ourselves in a position where our food supply isn’t secure and diverse. To that end, the IRRI gene bank houses samples of more than 135,000 varieties of rice that researchers can access for their studies.

On Friday, the Crop Trust, an organization dedicated to supporting global food security and crop diversity, agreed to permanently fund the gene bank. The organizations will sign an agreement guaranteeing this funding on the very appropriate date of October 16 — World Food Day — at the Fifth International Rice Congress in Singapore.

Arms Rice

Of course, “permanent” is pretty impossible to guarantee, and the agreement will actually start with a five-year-long phase ending in 2023. After that, the organizations will need to renew it every five years.

Still, the Crop Trust seems dedicated to providing the IRRA gene bank with the funding it’ll need to keep researchers rolling in rice for the foreseeable future.

“Providing permanent funding to the world’s most important crop collections is at the core of the Crop Trust mission,” said Marie Haga, Executive Director of the Crop Trust, in a news release. “Today’s announcement validates 20 years of work and 50 years of thinking on how the international community can safeguard crops used for food and agriculture.”

READ MORE: The World’s Rice Bowl: Protected in Perpetuity [Crop Trust]

More on food security: Norway’s “Doomsday” Seed Vault Is Getting a $13 Million Upgrade

See the rest here:
The World’s Largest Collection of Rice Is Now Permanently Funded

High Beam

When you push the button on a laser pointer, its entire beam seems to appear instantaneously. In reality,though, the photons shoot out like water from a hose, just at a speed too fast to see.

Too fast for the human eye to see, anyways.

Researchers at Caltech and the University of Quebec have invented what is now the world’s fastest camera, and it takes a mind-boggling 10 trillion shots per second —enough to record footage of a pulse of light as it travels through space.

Spell “T-CUP”

The extraordinary camera, which the researchers describe in a paper published Monday in the journal Light: Science & Applications, builds on a technology called compressed ultrafast photography (CUP).

CUP can lock down an impressive 100 billion frames per second, but by simultaneously recording a static image and performing some tricky math, the researchers were able to reconstruct 10 trillion frames.

They call the new technique T-CUP, and while they don’t say what the “T” stands for, our money is on “trillion.”

Ludicrous Speed

The camera more than doubles the speed record set in 2015 by a camera that took 4.4 trillion shots per second. Its inventors hope it’ll be useful in biomedical and materials research.

But they’ve already turned their attention to smashing their newly set record.

“It’s an achievement in itself,” said lead author Jinyang Liang in a press release, “but we already see possibilities for increasing the speed to up to one quadrillion frames per second!”

READ MORE: World’s Fastest Camera Freezes Time at 10 Trillion Frames per Second [INRS]

More on high-speed cameras: See the World’s Fastest Cameras in Action: 4.4 Trillion Shots Each Second

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The World’s Fastest Camera Can “Freeze Time,” Show Beams of Light in Slo-Mo

Drink and Drive

Tesla is getting into the alcohol business.

On Monday, Elon Musk’s electric car company filed a trademark application for an agave liquor it’s calling “Teslaquila.”

Musk seemed to confirm that a liquor was in the works on Friday with a tweet claiming itwas “coming soon.” He followed up with a photo of a Teslaquila bottle, which he called a “visual approximation.”

Passed Out

Friday’s tweets weren’t Musk’s first references to Teslaquila. The first time he mentioned the product, though, it seemed like a well-timed joke:

On April Fool’s Day, Musk tweeted that he had been “found passed out” near bottles of the liquor, “the tracks of dried tears still visible on his cheeks.”

Feature Creep

Of course, a trademark application is no guarantee that a product will actually hit store shelves.

The liquor could be a clever marketing stunt or a source of short-term revenue for the troubled energy company — or, more likely, some combination of the two.

READ MORE: Elon Musk’s Tesla seeks to trademark ‘Teslaquila’ [CNBC]

More on Tesla: The Five Funniest Things about the SEC’s Lawsuit against Elon Musk

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Tesla Filed a Trademark Application for “Teslaquila,” Because of Course It Did

Immortal Overlords

Last year, former Facebook president Sean Parker raised some eyebrows at a cancer innovation event when he suggested that the super-rich could defeat death within his lifetime.

“Because I’m a billionaire, I’m going to have access to better health care,” he said. “I’m going to be like 160 and I’m going to be part of this, like, class of immortal overlords.”

Life Eternal

The reality, according to a compelling new feature by Futurism social editor Jake Banas, is that cutting-edge medical science has yet to dream up a treatment that’s more effective than exercise and a healthy diet. Life expectancy will likely continue to creep up, but there’s no guarantee we’ll ever discover a trick to unlock true immortality.

That hasn’t stopped dreamers, including Parker and other Silicon Valley luminaries, from pouring money into research intended to radically extend the human lifespan. Still, even many experts who study aging and mortality aren’t convinced that it’s possible to cheat death forever.

Treat the Rich

As Parker hinted last year, though, such treatments would be unlikely to reach the general population — if everyone had access, after all, it’d quickly create an overpopulation crisis as new babies were born while the old refused to die.

Ultimately, we’ve seen this 21st century quest to cheat death pop up before, and from Gilgamesh to Dorian Grey, it’s seldom turned out well.

READ MORE: Disrupting the Reaper: Tech Titans’ Quest for Immortality Rages Forward [Futurism]

More on eternal life: New Tech Is Giving Humanity Many Potential Paths to Immortality

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The Quest for Immortality Could Create Two “Classes of Humans”

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Planet Hack

On Tuesday, the Government Accountability Office announced that the Pentagon had been caught off guard. It turns out that an entire generation’s worth of weapons systems, including those that are still being developed, are really easy to hack.

There’s pretty much no excuse for the military to be so lax in its digital security, since its weaponry — plus the nature of warfare itself — is increasingly digital.

White Hat

If the military did have an excuse, though, it would be that several of the tests over the years were incomplete, which led officials to disregard the vulnerabilities that popped up.

The report, which left out many crucial details about which systems were most vulnerable, said that small teams of white-hat hackers were able to jack into various weapons systems within an hour.

Hackers, the report said, were able to take control of “major weapon systems” and “operate largely undetected, due in part to basic issues such as poor password management and unencrypted communications.”

In fact, the military’s weak-ass cybersecurity has been routinely failing these tests since 2012, according to the report.

Password123

Let’s not forget how outrageously stupid this is. The U.S. military has the highest budget of any military in the world — it’s set to receive $674 billion of tax dollars next year — but didn’t think it was worth figuring out a way to keep its assets safe.

Hackers seem to have an awful lot to work with these days. Social media and tech companies are leaking, selling, and being robbed of private information left and right. A mountain of evidence suggests that America’s presidential elections and infrastructure were compromised by digital subterfuge in 2016.

In the face of all that, it looks as though the military left its most advanced weaponry and digital systems right out in the open.

Yeesh.

READ MORE: WEAPON SYSTEMS CYBERSECURITY: DOD Just Beginning to Grapple with Scale of Vulnerabilities [U.S. Government Accountability Office]

More on cybersecurity: Leaders Who Pledged Not To Build Autonomous Killing Machines Are Ignoring The Real Problem

See more here:
Report: It’s Easy to Hack an Entire Generation of Military Weapons

Good Guy Google?

Google is taking the high ground — or is it?

On Monday, the company told Bloomberg it wouldn’t submit a bid on a Pentagon contract it had been considering. The tech giant cited concerns that the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) cloud-computing project would have conflicted with principles it put in place following employee protests over military contracts earlier this year.

But while Google framed those employee concerns as reason numero uno for dropping out of the competition, there’s another, less ethically-driven explanation: Google knew it couldn’t win the contract.

Don’t Be Evil

The JEDI project will involve transitioning boatloads of Defense Department data to a cloud system. The contract to operate that cloud system will reportedly last for 10 years and pay an estimated $10 billion.

A Google spokesperson told Bloomberg in a statement that the company would have had no problem meeting some parts of the contract. However, it simply didn’t have the right certifications to complete the contract in its entirety:

While we are working to support the US government with our cloud in many areas, we are not bidding on the JEDI contract because first, we couldn’t be assured that it would align with our AI Principles and second, we determined that there were portions of the contract that were out of scope with our current government certifications. Had the JEDI contract been open to multiple vendors, we would have submitted a compelling solution for portions of it.

It’s unclear how a data transitioning project might be conflict with Google’s principles — it’s not nearly as controversial as drone strikes or government censorship, which Google employees have raised concerns about in the past.

Real Talk

The second part of that paragraph, you’ll note, pretty much says Google couldn’t complete the JEDI contract. And that makes the first part — where it claims it wouldn’t submit a bid based on its “principles” — feels an awful lot like the kid who didn’t get invited to prom saying they didn’t want to go anyways.

We didn’t fall for that one in high school, Google, and we aren’t falling for it now.

READ MORE: Google Drops Out of Pentagon’s $10 Billion Cloud Competition [Bloomberg]

More on Google: Google Employees Have Become the Company’s Moral Compass

Read more here:
Google Won’t Bid on Pentagon Contract, but Not Just Because Employees Wanted It To

Team Titan

Saturn’s largest moon, Titan, is weird. Really weird. Its atmosphere is unlike that of any other moon in our entire solar system — in fact, it’s a lot like what scientists believe Earth’s was like during its first billion years.

Titan’s atmosphere also includes organic compounds called polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), precursors to the molecules that gave rise to life on Earth. Previously, we thought they could only form under high-temperature conditions. But the average surface temperature on Titan is a frigid -179 degrees Celsius (-290 degrees Fahrenheit).

Now, researchers think they’ve found the “missing link” that explains how Titan’s atmosphere could include these compounds. The knowledge could better our understanding of our own planet’s infancy and provide new clues in the search for extraterrestrial life.

Early Earth

In a study published Monday in the journal Nature Astronomy, U.S. and Russian researchers show how gases already known to exist on Titan could have combined to produce PAHs. They did this using a combination of computer simulations and practical experiments.

The finding isn’t remarkable simply because it teaches us something new about Titan — it could also help us better understand Earth’s history.

“The gas make up of Titan is similar to prebiotic Earth — hydrocarbons and nitrogen and the absence of oxygen — hence, scientists are keen to see how chemistry is evolving or has evolved on Titan to provide clues to Earth’s atmospheric content,” Berkeley researcher and study author Musahid Ahmed told Futurism.

The better we can understand the conditions that led to the formation of the Earth as we know it, the better equipped we’ll be to figure out exactly what conditions are necessary for the formation of life — and where we might want to look for it elsewhere in the universe.

READ MORE: Scientists Present New Clues to Cut Through the Mystery of Titan’s Atmospheric Haze [Berkeley Lab]

More on Titan: Titan Has Even More in Common With Earth Than We Thought

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Researchers Identify the “Missing Link” in the Chemistry of Saturn’s Largest Moon

Machine Thumb

Farming is one of humanity’s oldest professions, right after hunting and gathering. But now, a startup called Iron Ox is in the process of opening a farm in California that will replace human farmers with robots.

At the heart of Iron Ox’s operations is Angus, a robot that uses its dexterous arm to tend to mattress-sized hydroponic beds of edible plants. The bot’s machine learning software allows it to identify and remove plants exhibiting signs of pests or disease before they can infect the whole patch.

Robofarmer

Iron Ox’s goal seems to be disrupting the current model of industrial agriculture. The company’s founder, Brandon Alexander, appears particularly well-suited to take on the task: He previously worked as both a farmer and a Google engineer.

“Right now fresh produce really isn’t all that fresh,” Alexander told CNBC. “It’s traveling on average 2,000 miles from farm to grocery store, which means a lot of people are eating week-old lettuce or strawberries.”

Old BotDonald

If all goes well, Iron Ox plans to uproot farming norms with a series of robotic farms that sell locally-grown greens, from lettuce to basil, to restaurants and grocery stores across the country. Though it hasn’t inked any deals yet, the startup says it’s already in talks with Bay Area restaurants, and Alexander told a local news station in San Francisco that the company hopes to be selling robot-grown produce in grocery stores by 2019.

Eventually, he told Fast Company, the goal is to grow produce at a lower price than conventional farms. If the company can pull that off — which, granted, is a huge “if” — it’ll radically reorient the relationship between farmers, food retailers, and, ultimately, your dinner plate.

READ MORE: Meet the farmers of the future: Robots [Associated Press]

More on robot farmers: This Terrifying Robot Wolf Is Protecting the Crops of Japanese Farmers

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A Startup’s Bold Plan to Open Robot Farms Near U.S. Cities

Nervous Wreck

Nerve damage is no joke. Even something as simple as typing too much can lead to bolts of pain shooting up your arm. The damage from an accident or injury can be even more traumatic.

Doctors have known for a while that electrical stimulation can help nerves heal after injuries. Now that observation has led to a futuristic new treatment for nerve damage: implantable gadgets that wrap around damaged nerves, delivering pulses of healing electricity for a set period of time before harmlessly degrading into the body.

Material Existence

According to a study published Monday in the journal Nature Medicine, the dime-sized devices comprise biodegradable polymers and magnesium, and they’re controlled and powered by an external transmitter, similarly to an inductive charging mat for a cell phone.

The researchers, who hail from Northwestern University and Washington University School of Medicine, say they can adjust the devices’ lifespans from less than a minute to several months by changing the composition of the biodegradable materials.

“We engineer the devices to disappear,” said researcher John Rogers, who helped create the device, in a press release. “This notion of transient electronic devices has been a topic of deep interest in my group for nearly 10 years — a grand quest in materials science, in a sense.”

Rats, Foiled Again

To test whether the gadgets help nerves heal, the research team implanted them around the injured sciatic nerves of 25 adult rats. The more electrical stimulation they gave each rat during the following 10 weeks, the faster the animal recovered its nerve function. It’s not clear from this initial research whether there’s an ideal amount of electrical stimulation for nerve therapy, however.

The researchers didn’t share a timeline for human trials, but they said they’re hopeful that their technique could one day “complement or replace” existing treatments for nerve injuries in people, which frequently rely on prescription painkillers.

READ MORE: Implantable, biodegradable devices speed nerve regeneration in rats [EurekAlert]

More on nerve damage: Process Discovered That Saves Injured Nerve Cells And Helps Prevent Brain Damage

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This Wireless Implant Heals Damaged Nerves and Then Self-Destructs

Moon Tourist

The Securities and Exchange Commission might not be convinced that Elon Musk always tells the truth, but that isn’t stopping Yusaku Maezawa from taking the controversial entrepreneur at his word.

Maezawa is the Japanese billionaire paying Musk’s SpaceX an undisclosed — but likely exorbitant — amount of money in exchange for a trip around the Moon. During a news conference at the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Japan in Tokyo on Tuesday, he told reporters he wasn’t sweating the training he’d have to undergo for the first-of-its-kind mission.

Training Yay

Granted, he doesn’t know what exactly that training will be yet.

But he’s still calm about it. Why? The assurance of Elon Musk.

“It hasn’t been decided yet what training I will need to undergo, but Elon Musk has said it shouldn’t be too hard,” Maezawa said.

No Rush

Maezawa doesn’t think he’ll have trouble fitting training into his schedule, either. He only visits the offices of his fashion company Zozo three or four times a week for about six hours per day, he said.

Add to that the fact that the Big Falcon Rocket that will carry Maezawa to the Moon isn’t expected to lift off until 2023, and he should have plenty of time to get in tip-top space tourist shape — whatever that means.

READ MORE: Japan Space Tourist Says Moon Training ‘Shouldn’t Be Too Hard’ [Phys.org]

More on Maezawa: Live Update: Space Unveils Future Moon Passenger

Original post:
SpaceX’s First Tourist Isn’t Worried About Training for His Trip to the Moon

Remember Google+?

Me neither. But while we were blissfully ignorant of its continuing existence something predictable (and quite commonplace in 2018) happened: private user data leaked.

Here’s what happened. There was a bug that allowed hundreds of third party applications to access user’s personal data, according to a Google blog post. We’re talking user names, employers, job titles, gender, birth place and relationship status of at least half a million Google+ users, according to the Wall Street Journal.

As the Wall Street Journal points out, the bug has been around since 2015. Google says it only discovered and “immediately patched” it in March of this year — the same month Facebook’s Cambridge Analytica scandal started to blow up. In the same blog post, Google announced it will shut down Google+ entirely.

So why are we only hearing about this now, seven months later? Don’t Google users have a right to know if their personal data was vulnerable to hackers over the last three years? Internal memos obtained the Wall Street Journal suggest Google was trying to avoid triggering “immediate regulatory interest.” In other words: avoid fines and penalties.

And there was no real reason for Google to do so. Sure, it might have had a better shot at containing the breach. But no government rules compelled the company to tell consumers right when it happened. And to do so of its own volition right when Facebook was coming under such pressure? Didn’t seem like a great PR move.

In a statement to Futurism, Google points out it’s already doing more than required. “Every year, we send millions of notifications to users about privacy and security bugs and issues. Whenever user data may have been affected, we go beyond our legal requirements and apply several criteria focused on our users in determining whether to provide notice.”

The statement continues: “Our Privacy & Data Protection Office reviewed this issue, looking at the type of data involved, whether we could accurately identify the users to inform, whether there was any evidence of misuse, and whether there were any actions a developer or user could take in response. None of these thresholds were met in this instance.”

Google claims that it found “no evidence that any developer was aware of this bug, or abusing the API,” after a thorough, “root-and-branch review of third-party developer access” investigation. No one got hurt, so we’re all cool, right? Right?

Is it just me, or does it feel like our personal data is being leaked on almost a weekly basis? Just two weeks ago, hackers got into 50 million Facebook accounts. One notable difference: the security issue was discovered just three days earlier by Facebook’s engineering team, according to an official blog post. Guess Facebook learned something from Cambridge Analytica, after all.

Now what? Well, now the lawsuits. Ars Technica reports that California residents and Google+ users have filed the first class-action lawsuit in a federal court in San Francisco. The argument: Google knowingly made “a calculated decision not to inform users that their Personal Information was compromised,” according to the complaint, as Ars Technica reported.

And Google may have to contend with the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).  It requires companies to notify affected users of a personal data breach “without undue delay and, where, feasible, not later than 72 hours after having become aware of it,” according to Article 33 — a far shot from the seven months it took Google.

Not complying with that rule could actually hurt Google: fines of up to two percent of annual global revenue. It’s been hit with these kinds of fines before, specifically one of $5 billion in May in response to reportedly violating antitrust laws on Android phones (the company has challenged the decision).

But as TechCrunch points out, Google might not have violated GDPR after all: the bug was found in March, but GDPR went into effect two months later. Since the law is still new and EU member countries are still figuring out how to enforce it, Google may find itself in a regulatory gray area.

Like all companies faced with a breach like this, Google is doing a little introspection. Google claims it’s clamping down on third-party access to consumer Gmail data, and allowing users to give and revoke permissions to those third-parties — a positive step for sure.

But if you still feel wary, well, we don’t blame you. Google knew about the leak for so darn long before it decided to reveal its existence. The fact that it couldn’t find any evidence of misuse is little consolation.

As data breaches like these become more frequent and reveal more information, lawmakers are starting to pay attention, giving data privacy laws a much-needed second look. Consumers have a right to know if their data is ending up in hands they might not have authorized. If companies like Google are not being held accountable, they may never even learn about it.

More on data leaks: Breaking: Hackers Accessed 50 Million Facebook Accounts

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Google Didn’t Report Its Data Leak Till Months Later. Now It’ll Face the Consequences.

What Nerve

Disability rights advocate Nicole Kelly was born without her lower right arm, but using a cutting-edge prosthesis she got last year, she can now grind pepper, play cards, and open beers — just by thinking about the action.

Kelly’s is just one tale from a riveting new Wired story about the steady improvements in prostheses that take orders directly from users’ nerves. The big step forward: software that can make sense of the complex signals from a specific patient’s nervous system. We’ve written about similar systems before, but this report is a striking example of how the tech is already changing users’ lives.

Bear Arms

Wired talked to people using and testing prostheses containing control systems developed by Coapt and Infinite Biomedical Technologies (IBT). These systems pick up nerve signals via electrodes positioned on a user’s upper arm. The user then trains an algorithm to translate their body’s signals into natural motions.

Kelly’s prosthesis, which uses hardware and software made by Coapt, even has a “reset” button that lets her reboot the algorithm if it’s acting up and retrain it, a process that she says takes her just two minutes after about a year of practice.

C.R.E.A.M.

One problem is that the tech is still very expensive. Coapt’s system costs between $10,000 and $15,000, its CEO told Wired. Infinite’s site doesn’t include a price for its setup, which it says will go on sale later this month.

But then again, it’s hard to put a price tag on the satisfaction of cracking open your own beer.

READ MORE: BIONIC LIMBS ‘LEARN’ TO OPEN A BEER [Wired]

More on bionic limbs: A Neural Network, Connected to a Human Brain, Could Mean More Advanced Prosthetics

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The Latest Prostheses Take Orders Directly From Your Nerves