It’s an ugly reality we see in every corner of the web: racism, bigotry, misogyny, political extremism. Hate speech seems to thrive on the internet like a cancer.

It persists and flourishes on social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit — they certainly don’t claim to welcome it, but they’re having a hell of a time keeping it in check. No AI is yet sophisticated enough to flag all hate speech perfectly, so human moderators have to join the robots in the trenches. It’s an imperfect, time-consuming process.

As social media sites come under increasing scrutiny to root out their hate speech problem, they also come up against limits for how much they can (or will) do. So whose responsibility is it, anyway, to mediate hate speech? Is it up to online platforms themselves, or should the government intervene?

The British government seems to think the answer is both. The Home Office and the Department of Digital, Culture, Media, and Sports (DCMS) — a department responsible for regulating broadcasting and the internet — is drafting plans for regulation that would make platforms like Facebook and Twitter legally responsible for all the content they host, according to Buzzfeed News.

In a statement to Futurism, the DCMS says that it has “primarily encouraged internet companies to take action on a voluntary basis.” But progress has been too slow — and that’s why it plans to intervene with “statutory intervention.”

But is this kind of government intervention really the right way forward when it comes to hate speech online? Experts aren’t convinced it is. In fact, some think it may even do more harm than good.

Details on about DCMS’ plan are scant — it’s still early in development. What we do know so far is that the legislation, Buzzfeed reports, would have two parts. One: it would introduce “take down times” — timeframes within which online platforms have to take down hate speech, or face fines. Two: it would standardize age verification for Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram users. A white paper detailing these plans will allegedly be published later this year.

Why should the government intervene at all? Internet platforms are already trying to limit hate speech on their own. Facebook removed more than 2.5 million pieces of hate speech and “violent content” in the first quarter of 2018 alone, according to a Facebook blog post published back in May.

Indeed, these platforms have been dealing with hate speech for as long as they’ve existed. “There’s nothing new about hate speech on online platforms,” says Brett Frischmann, a professor in Law, Business and Economics at Villanova University. The British government might be trying to put in a law to stop hate speech too quickly to come up with anything that will work the way it’s supposed to.

Unfortunately, hate speech is a whack-a-mole that moves far faster than publishers seem to be able to. As a result, a lot of it goes unmediated. For instance, hate speech from far right extremist groups in the U.K. often still falls through the cracks, fueling xenophobic beliefs. In extreme cases, that kind of hate speech can lead to physical violence and the radicalization of impressionable minds on the internet.

Jim Killock, executive director for the Open Rights Group in the U.K. — a non-profit committed to preserving and promoting citizens’ rights on the internet — thinks the legislation, were it to pass tomorrow, wouldn’t be just ineffective. It might even prove to be counterproductive.

The rampant hate speech online, Killock believes, is symptomatic of a much larger problem. “In some ways, Facebook is a mirror of our society,” he says. “This tidal wave of unpleasantness, like racism and many other things, has come on the back of [feeling] disquiet about powerlessness in society, people wanting someone to blame.”

Unfortunately, that kind of disillusionment with society won’t change overnight. But when a policy only addresses the symptoms of systemic injustice instead of the actual issues, the government is making a mistake. By censoring those who feel like they are being censored, the government is reinforcing their beliefs. And that’s not a good sign, especially when those who are being censored are actively spreading hate speech online themselves.

Plus, a law like the one DCMS has proposed would effectively make certain kinds of speech illegal, even if that’s not what the law says. Killock argues that while a lot of online material may be “unpleasant,” it often doesn’t violate any laws. And it shouldn’t be to companies to decide where the line between the two lies, he adds. “If people are breaking the law, it frankly is the job of courts to set those boundaries.”

But there’s good reason to avoid redrawing those legal boundaries for what kind of behavior online should be enforced (even if it is technically not illegal). The government might have to adjust much wider sweeping common law that concerns the freedom of speech. That is probably not going to happen.

The UK government’s plans are still in the development stage, but there are already plenty of reasons to be skeptical that the law would do what the government intends. Muddying the boundaries between illegal and non-illegal behavior online sets a dangerous precedent, and that could have some undesirable consequences — like wrongfully flagging satirical content as hate speech for instance.

The DCMS is setting itself up for failure: censoring content online will only embolden its critics, while failing to address the root issues. It has to find that middle ground if it wants a real shot: too much censorship, and the mistrust of those who feel marginalized will keep building. Too little regulation, and internet platforms will continue to make many users feel unwelcome or lead to violence.

The U.K. government has a few tactics it could try before it decides to regulate speech online. The government could incentivize companies to strengthen the appeal process for taking down harmful content. “If you make it really hard for people to use appeals, they may not use them at all,” Killock argues. For instance, the government could introduce legislation that would ensure each user has a standardized way of reporting problematic content online.

But it will take a much bigger shift before we are able to get rid of hate speech in a meaningful way. “Blaming Facebook or the horrendous people and opinions that exist in society is perhaps a little unfair,” Killock says. “If people really want to do and say these [hurtful] things, they will do it. And if you want them to stop, you have to persuade them that it’s a bad idea.”

What do those policies look like? Killock doesn’t have the answer yet. “The question we have really is, how do we make society feel better about itself?” says Killock. “And I’m not pretending that that’s a small thing at all.”

More on regulating speech online: Social Media Giants Need Regulation From a Government That’s Unsure How To Help

Continue reading here:
The UK Government Is Planning to Regulate Hate Speech Online

MOON UNIT

Imagine, for a second, that human life has been snuffed out like the flame of a candle. Wouldn’t it be nice if we’d archived the sum of our knowledge for whoever might come along next?

That’s the idea behind the Arch Mission Foundation, a nonprofit exploring ways to store vast amounts of information. in formats that will last for “thousands to millions” of years. And after all, spreading caches of information around the solar system is the ultimate backup.

Its latest project: encoding important books and crowdsourced images into synthetic DNA molecules, and storing them on the Moon.

DNA INFO

To tackle the DNA project, Arch Mission is collaborating with Microsoft, the University of Washington, and the Twist Bioscience Corporation. The collaborators chose DNA, they wrote in a press release, because it can store information in an ultra-compact form.

“Using DNA as a building block you can write and store information in an extremely small volume,” said Arch Mission co-founder Nova Spivack in an interview with Scientific American. “A tiny liquid droplet could contain Amazon’s entire data center. You can then replicate it inexpensively to create literally billions of copies.”

LONG TERM

Once they’ve stored the data in the DNA — which will include 20 books selected by Project Gutenberg and 10,000 crowdsourced images of everyday life — the plan is to send it to the Moon on an Atlas V rocket in 2020, according to Scientific American. 

The Moon project is just an early step in Arch Mission’s very ambitious plans, which include building a vast repository of human knowledge and placing copies on planets, asteroids, comets, and moons around the solar system.

It’s not clear, Spivack acknowledged in the Scientific American interview, how likely it is that future life forms would ever actually stumble across one of those archives. But the project, he argued, is also a “grand gesture that brings together our hopes and dreams about becoming a spacefaring civilization.”

READ MORE: Lunar library to include photos, books stored in DNA [University of Washington]

More on the Moon: Why Are We Going to the Moon, Again? Oh Right, to Make It a “Gas Station for Outer Space”

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A Nonprofit Plans to Store Human Knowledge in DNA and Store It on the Moon

At 2:18 PM Eastern Time on Wednesday, every cell phone in America will buzz, beep, or maybe play a jaunty tune. Everyone will receive a special, handy-dandy emergency broadcast sent by the White House.

The test of the National Wireless Emergency Alert System, which was supposed to happen in September but was pushed back, will join the ranks of Amber Alerts for missing children and those flash flood warnings that you only seem to get on sunny days — yet another thing that makes your pocket buzz but typically doesn’t affect your day-to-day life all that much.

Granted, these alerts are actually from FEMA and are intended to warn us about natural disasters, cyberattacks, and acts of war (they are at the directive of the president but they don’t actually contain a message from President Trump). But the audacity of the federal government to contact us in a way that is so personal and immediate — let alone all of us at once — has left many wondering how to opt out.

The consensus among media reports, such as in WIRED’s oral history of the alert, is that we’re SOL.

But we’re not giving up. Here are the top three strategies we’ve come up with to stop your phone from buzzing on cue for today’s emergency alert.

ASK YOUR PHONE NICELY

If you go to your phone’s settings menu, you’ll have a number of ways to limit the notifications that your phone sends your way. On a Droid, you’ll find an Emergency Alerts app that you can’t disable or uninstall, but you can hit the “force stop” button. Note that the app will start back up after a few minutes, so your best bet will be to strategically time the force stop before 2:18.

On an iPhone, you can turn off “government alerts” in your notifications settings, but that may be just as useless as hitting the “close doors” button on an elevator.

More extreme measures might be in order.

TURN YOUR PHONE OFF FOREVER

You can’t get the message if you’ve got nothing to receive it on, right? We’re betting that turning your phone back on at 2:19 will just delay rather than cancel the alert, so you really need to commit to this one. And if you want to avoid accidentally turning your phone back on in your pocket, we have one more idea.

HAMMER

Use a hammer.

More here:
Don’t Want to Receive That Presidential Text Alert Today? Here’s How to Avoid It

STAR POWER

The star system SS 433 is something of a celebrity in the world of astronomy.

It’s the first known example of a microquasar — a black hole that feeds off a nearby companion star and emits two powerful jets of material. Plus, at just 15,000 light-years away, it’s relatively close to us.

And now, an international team of researchers has discovered something new about SS 433: it emits a type of electromagnetic radiation known as high-energy gamma rays. This new insight could help astronomers understand what’s going on at the centers of galaxies, where huge quasars sometimes feed on many stars at once.

DARK WATER

The team discovered the rays using the High-Altitude Water Cherenkov Gamma-Ray Observatory (HAWC) in Mexico.

HAWC features more than 300 water tanks, each about 24 feet across. When gamma rays reach Earth’s atmosphere from elsewhere in the universe, they cause showers of particles that hit the water in these tanks, causing shockwaves of light. Special cameras detect these, and from their recordings, researchers can pinpoint the source of the gamma rays.

For their study, published Wednesday in Nature, the team examined 1,017 days’ worth of HAWC data and determined that SS 433 was a source of gamma rays. Perhaps even more remarkably, they figured out that the rays were coming from the ends of the microquasars’ jets — a source of gamma rays they’d never seen before.

CLOSER LOOK

“This new observation of high-energy gamma rays builds on almost 40 years of measurements of one of the weirdest objects in the Milky Way,” said study co-author Segev BenZvi in an emailed press release. “Every measurement gives us a different piece of the puzzle, and we hope to use our knowledge to learn about the quasar family as a whole.”

Of the roughly one dozen microquasars in the Milky Way, only two appear to emit high-energy gamma rays. The fact that the closest microquasar to Earth also emits these rays — and in a previously unknown way — could afford researchers a better way to study them, all while helping us get to know our favorite microquasar a little bit better.

READ MORE: Very-High-Energy Particle Acceleration Powered by the Jets of the Microquasar SS 433 [Nature]

More on HAWC: Earth Is Getting Hit by Too Much Antimatter, and Nobody Knows Why

Original post:
We Just Learned Something New About “One of the Weirdest Objects in the Milky Way”

SURPRISING SURPLUS

At one point, it seemed like Tesla Model 3s were more in demand than tickets to a hypothetical Coachella co-headlined by the newly reunited Jay-Z and Kanye.

An estimated 500,000 people pre-ordered one of the $35,000 vehicles. In an effort to make all those cars, Tesla had to resort to moving assembly into a tent. A used Model 3 was even (briefly) listed for sale online, marked up to $150,000.

So the Model 3 is in demand — right? So why are hundreds of Teslas now sitting dormant in parking lots across the nation?

EYES IN THE SKIES

The New York Times reports that a group calling itself the Shorty Air Force — that’s “shorty” as in “short selling” — has shared photos of large numbers of seemingly unsold Model 3s and other Teslas, parked together in lots and garages across the U.S. According to the Times, at least some of the members of the group think the stashed cars are evidence that Tesla is hiding poor sales.

Some of the photos, which the anonymous members of the Shorty Air Force take using drones and airplanes, feature hundreds of the vehicles, while others feature just a few dozen.

SUPPLY AND DEMAND

That’s not the only explanation for why these cars are simply chilling in lots while drivers who pre-ordered Model 3s beg Elon Musk on Twitter to deliver their vehicles.

The company could be running low on delivery trailers, as Musk told one Twitter user. Maybe the photographed cars are in need of repairs before Tesla can deliver them to drivers — at least one photo showed a Tesla with a needed repair spelled out on its windshield. Or, you know, maybe the demand for Teslas simply isn’t as high as it seemed.

We may want to know the answer to the mystery of the extra Teslas even more than we want to know what changed Musk’s mind about settling that SEC lawsuit. And that’s something we really want to know.

READ MORE: Unraveling a Tesla Mystery: Lots (and Lots) of Parked Cars [The New York Times]

More on Tesla: A Used Tesla Model 3 Was Briefly Listed for $150,000

See the rest here:
Tesla Seems to Be Producing Plenty of Cars. They Just Aren’t Ending up on the Road.

VAPORIZED

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) just raided the headquarters of popular e-cigarette maker JUUL Labs in San-Francisco.

It seized thousands of pages of documents about the vape maker’s sales and marketing strategies, according to the Wall Street Journal. The raid comes on the tail of a huge effort by the agency to stop e-cigarette makers from marketing to minors.

PRECIOUS JUULS

The FDA has been on Juul’s case since April 2018, telling it off for targeting users under the age of 21. Earlier this month, the agency gave Juul 60 days to get its act together.

Juul holds considerable power in the e-cigarette market. According to a recent Wells Fargo analysis as reported by CNBC, Juul’s sales skyrocketed 783 percent in just one year; experts estimate the company controls 68 percent of the e-cigarette market, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

The FDA got interested because adolescents are such huge fans. The National Institute on Drug Abuse found that 7 in 10 teens are exposed to e-cig ads. Even the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal have reported that vaping’s popularity has taken off among teens.

COUGHING FIT

The jury is still out whether using e-cigarettes is bad for your health, especially for teens who weren’t smokers before. Vaping was found to leave toxic chemicals in the lungs. But there’s a lot we don’t know yet.

The unfortunate reality: teens do what they want, but they often don’t know what’s good or bad for them, either. It’s time for us to do a better job at parenting them, parents and governing bodies alike.

READ MORE: FDA Raids Vape Maker Juul, Seizes ‘Thousands’ of Documents [Gizmodo]

More on e-cigarettes: The FDA Just Threatened to Crack Down on E-Cig Companies Like Juul

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The FDA Just Raided the Headquarters of E-Cigarette Maker JUUL

Cheat Sheet

When you were in grade school, you likely encountered Punnett squares, which are simple charts that let you figure out the likelihood a child will inherit certain traits from their parents. Maybe you even entered your own parents’ eye colors into one, noting that you were likely to inherit your father’s brown peepers over your mother’s blue ones because his gene variants were dominant over hers.

Now a fertility clinic in California is letting would-be parents use the same technique — plus some modern genetic screening tech — to choose the color of their future baby’s eyes.

Behind Blue Eyes

According to a Wall Street Journal report, the Fertility Institutes clinic employs the same technology used to test embryos for genetic diseases to screen them for eye color. Parents can then choose to move forward with implantation of only the embryos most likely to produce an offspring with the eye color of their choice.

Of course, if the parents come from a long line of brown-eyed folks, this test won’t magically allow the duo to produce an embryo with blue eyes. But if the couple has, say, a one-in-six shot at the rare eye color, they could test several embryos until they found one that fit the bill.

Babies By Design

Choosing an unborn child’s eye color is a moral gray area that could lead to other eugenics-adjacent practices. Today a clinic might offer parents a choice of eye colors, but tomorrow, they could have the ability to screen embryos for hair color, height, intelligence, and a host of other traits.

And deciding as a society whether creating these “designer babies” is ethical will take much more effort than you’ll likely expend in a grade school science class.

READ MORE: Is It Ethical to Choose Your Baby’s Eye Color? [The Wall Street Journal]

More on designer babies: Creating Genetically Modified Babies Is “Morally Permissible,” Says Ethics Committee

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You Can Now Pick Your Baby’s Eye Color Before You’re Even Pregnant

Amazon is the second largest employer in the United States. Its CEO just overtook Bill Gates as the richest man on the planet.

It’s hard to square that reality with the working conditions of the 575,000 Americans Amazon employs. Reports claim employees have to pee in bottles to keep up with the relentless pace at Amazon’s factories. The Economist found that Amazon warehouses openings actually caused the wages to drop at other warehouses in the same regions.

But the days of sub-par working conditions are behind us, right? On Monday, the online retailer announced it would raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour for some 250,000 workers. It’s not a fluke: some of those employees will see significant boosts in income. Amazon is even announcing it will advocate for a higher minimum wage on a federal level in Congress.

But what drove the company to announce this now? 

Compensating Amazon workers fairly is an inherently good thing, but the timing of such an announcement is a little suspect.

Amazon might have agreed to the age hike:

1. Because Bezos Actually Cares

You can bet that Amazon didn’t get to its #324 rank on Forbes’ America’s Best Employers list by offering outstanding benefits that cost the company. But maybe Bezos has a heart, after all. What brand would want to be associated with atrocious working conditions?

2. To Prevent Competitors from Poaching Workers

Here’s one for the skeptics out there: maybe raising the minimum wage of Amazon workers was a play to keep employees from working for smaller competitors, or even steal workers from smaller competitors, as an opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal suggests.

To take the argument further, lobbying Congress to raise the national minimum wage will also raise costs for Amazon’s competitors. And not every small business will be able to afford to compete with Amazon’s wages.

3. To Do What Bernie Says

Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) has been on Amazon’s case for a while now. Back in August, Sanders openly called out Bezos for mistreating workers, and Sanders was hardly the first to do so.

Bezos might be aligning his company with the left in the U.S. to get ahead the “blue wave” — a wave of Democratic wins for House and Senate seats in the last couple of months leading up to the midterm elections.

Sanders seemed to be satisfied by the $15 minimum wage announcement and urged other companies to follow Bezos’ lead. “You cannot continue to pay your workers starvation wages,” Sanders told CNN‘s Wolf Blizter in an interview. “Learn from what Bezos has done. He has done the right thing. You have got to do it as well.” The rest of the appalling work conditions? Well hopefully Amazon will just figure it out.

4. To Appease Restless Employees

Amazon has been suppressing all of its employees’ efforts to unionize ever since the company was founded in 1994, The Guardian reports.

A higher minimum wage often reduces employees’ desire to unionize to fight for better working conditions (at least a little bit). “And now, amid growing labour unrest and intense anti-union activity on Amazon’s part, a conveniently-timed wage hike,” as Motherboard notes.

Amazon has made the right decision to hold itself accountable for paying (at least more of) its half a million employees a fair, livable wage, and fighting for more companies to do the same.

Bezos is not a hero, and it would be a mistake to call him that. Money talks — and that goes not only for all the minimum wage earners out there, but especially for the richest man on the planet.

More on Amazon’s working conditions: An Amazon Patent Would Use Cages to Keep Employees “Safe”

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4 Reasons Why Amazon Workers Might Have Gotten a Raise

HeliJet

The craft takes off vertically from any flat surface, like a helicopter, then cruises to your destination like a jet at 724 kilometers per hour (450 miles per hour), far above the traffic below.

That’s the idea behind a prototype aircraft created by Boston startup Transcend Air. The company says the craft could transport a half-dozen passengers at a time between Boston and New York in fewer than 40 minutes.

“We like to boast that we’re not inventing anything new here,” said CEO Greg Bruell in an interview with Travel + Leisure. “We’re taking a concept first demonstrated in the ’60s and finding a market for it, while updating it with the latest technology so that it doesn’t cost military-scale budgets to build them.”

Elite Travel

As Quartz pointed out, a Boston-New York flight from a conventional airport could easily take three hours between clearing security, boarding, and driving to the airport.

But passengers will have to pay for Transcend Air’s elite service. A one-way trip from New York to Boston will run $283 — easily double the cost of a conventional flight.

Hold It

There are a few more caveats. The service won’t launch until 2024 at the earliest. And to save on space, the next-gen aircraft won’t have bathrooms, so no grande mochas before take-off.

Ultimately, Transcend Air’s prototype is a glimpse of a stylish future for air transportation — even if, like private jets, it’ll inevitably cater to the wealthy.

READ MORE: Flying Taxi Company Wants to Get You From New York City to Boston in 36 Minutes [Travel + Leisure]

More on flying taxis: The World’s First Flying Taxis Will Take to the Skies in Five Months

The rest is here:
This Futuristic Aircraft Could Take You From New York to Boston in 36 Minutes

Pod People

We’ve seen more sketches and animated demo videos of hyperloops than we can count. But now, one of leaders of the industry has finally shown us something we can touch.

During a ceremony in Spain on Tuesday, Hyperloop Transportation Technologies (HyperloopTT) unveiled the Quintero One, a pod designed to whisk passengers across vast distances, through depressurized tubes, as part of the high-tech transportation system of the future.

The company also released a video detailing the manufacturing of the capsule on the same day.

The Deets

Quintero One is 32 meters (105 feet) long, weighs 5,000 kilograms (5.5 tons), and took 5,000 hours to assemble. HyperloopTT constructed it almost entirely out of a custom-built, super-strong, super-light smart material containing a combination of carbon fiber and embedded sensors. These sensors can wirelessly transmit information on everything from temperature to stability in real-time while the capsule is in operation.

On the Move

Next stop for the capsule is HyperloopTT’s research and development center in Toulouse, France, so the company can integrate it into a hyperloop system. According to Bibop Gresta, HyperloopTT’s chairman and co-founder, it will be ready for passengers by 2019.

That’s assuming the company has a hyperloop in place to support it, of course.

The idea of a hyperloop has been floating around since Elon Musk first posed the concept back in 2013, and HyperloopTT is just one of several companies developing the technology.

Despite all the hype, though, we still don’t have a hyperloop. But hey, at least this pod’s a step in the right direction.

READ MORE: First Hyperloop Passenger Capsule Unveiled [Bloomberg]

More on HyperloopTT: CEO of a Hyperloop Company Has Some Surprising Thoughts on the Future of Transportation

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The First Full-Scale Hyperloop Passenger Capsule Has Arrived

Many Moons

Moons are everywhere in our solar system — we have one, Mars has two, Jupiter and Saturn have dozens each — but we’ve never known whether moons are as common, or even exist at all, outside our Sun’s orbit.

That may have just changed.

On Wednesday, Columbia University researchers announced that they’d found the first evidence of an “exomoon” — a moon orbiting a planet beyond Earth’s solar system.

Survey Says

The discovery of the exomoon began with a survey of 284 transiting planets — meaning they pass between a star and an instrument we use to observe space (in this case NASA’s Kepler space telescope).

A planet passing in front of a star causes a noticeable dip in the star’s brightness, which astronomers can analyze to deduce information about a planet, such as its size and composition. In the case of Kepler-1625b, a Jupiter-sized planet about 4,000 lightyears from Earth, the Kepler survey data was a little different than the typical exoplanet, suggesting that it may have a moon.

The Columbia team then used the more-powerful Hubble telescope to study Kepler-1625b, looking for any additional dimming that would confirm the exomoon, or any sign that it was affecting the planet’s gravity. They found both.

Looking Up

Despite that evidence, the researchers caution that their work is preliminary, and it will need confirmed by future studies.

“We are trying to be cautious with our claims at this point… we want to see a little more before we come out and say, ‘Yes, this thing is definitely there,'” researcher Alex Teachey told reporters during a press briefing. “In that sense, we are not cracking open champagne bottles just yet on this one.”

And as of this week, though, it’s safe to say that many fresh pairs of eyes will set their sights on Kepler-1625b.

READ MORE: Thanks to Help From Hubble, the First Confirmed Exomoon? [EurekAlert]

More on exomoons: Do Exomoons Exist?

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Researchers Think They’ve Discovered the First Moon Outside Our Solar System

JOB THIEF

First came the factories. Between 1993 and 2007, as U.S. factories became highly automated, every new robot eliminated 5.6 human jobs, an economic think tank estimated in a study.

Now automation is starting to eat into a new industry: food and hospitality. Workers are concerned — according to the New York Times, the labor union that represents Marriott International hotel workers is demanding measures that will protect staff from being replaced by robots.

ROBO-STOP

The Times’ take is that food and hospitality jobs have been spared by automation because service workers make so little. But cheap, effective artificial intelligence means those jobs are no longer secure. Especially worrying to Marriott workers: Their employer is now deploying Amazon Echo speakers in rooms, which they worry will cut into the duties of human hotel workers.

And it’s not just Marriott. Fast food giant McDonald’s is rolling out cashier-replacing kiosks at 1,000 stores per quarter, which one former executive blamed on workers’ demands for higher wages. This spring, Las Vegas food workers voted to strike to protest technology they said was encroaching on human jobs in kitchens.

BURGER FLIPPERS

Robots haven’t pushed out the human bellhops or front desk workers quite yet. But experts predict that’s going to change radically. And we’ve already got examples of what the service sector will look like as robots shoulder more tasks, from the Boston-based automated kitchen Spyce to the Japanese “robot hotel” Henna na.

So buckle up. Automation is going to bring precipitous change to the job market — and if history is any guide, workers are unlikely to give up their jobs without a fight.

READ MORE: Hotel Workers Fret Over a New Rival: Alexa at the Front Desk [New York Times]

More on automation and labor: Las Vegas Food Service Workers Are Going on Strike So They Don’t Lose Their Jobs to Robots

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Robots Are Coming for Service Jobs

PAY BACK

We tap away on our mobile devices all day long. Isn’t it about time they tapped us back?

Human-computer interaction researcher Marc Teyssier clearly thinks so. He’s the brains behind MobiLimb, a horrifying finger-like robotic attachment for smartphones and tablets that somehow simultaneously evokes “The Addams Family” and “Black Mirror.”

Today, he published a video demonstrating all the ways the robotic finger can creep you out — including by softly stroking the back of your hand while you mess around on your phone.

SINGLE DIGIT

According to a paper Teyssier will present at the Berlin User Interface Software and Technology conference in October, the MobiLimb uses five precisely-controllable motors to make a great range of finger-like motions.

Sometimes Teyssier isn’t feeling the standard black plastic look, so he covers the robotic finger with one of two custom skins — a fur-covered one and a fleshy model that (kinda, sorta) makes it look like a human finger.

POINTLESS POINTER

In the video, Teyssier demonstrates how MobiBot can drag a smartphone across a surface, wag back and forth like a tail, and tap the table to signal a notification. Its one truly useful skill might be serving as a smartphone stand, but, um, those already exist. And they don’t look eerily like a dismembered digit.

For now, MobiLimb will likely remain relegated to the category of tech we probably don’t need, but that we’re glad someone created, if for no reason other than that it’s weird and we like weird.

READ MORE: Smartphone With a Finger? Augmenting Mobile Devices With a Robotic Limb [Marc Teyssier]

More on smartphone attachments: A Clever Smartphone Attachment Will Show if Water Is Contaminated

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Look at This Creepy Finger You Can Plug Into Your Smartphone

HACK ATTACK

Hackers accessed data from nearly 50 million Facebook accounts, the company said today. The company discovered the breach on Tuesday, according to the post, and does not know who was behind the attack. The social giant didn’t immediately say what data the hackers might have stolen.

Facebook’s vice president of product management Guy Rosen wrote in a post announcing the breach:

Our investigation is still in its early stages. But it’s clear that attackers exploited a vulnerability in Facebook’s code that impacted ‘View As’, a feature that lets people see what their own profile looks like to someone else. This allowed them to steal Facebook access tokens which they could then use to take over people’s accounts. Access tokens are the equivalent of digital keys that keep people logged in to Facebook so they don’t need to re-enter their password every time they use the app.

ZUCKED

This new data breach is significant not just because it showed another way that hackers can infiltrate Facebook’s defenses. It also shows that users themselves aren’t as prepared as they should be. As Michael Roston, a science editor for the New York Times noted on Twitter, it reveals that a large proportion of Facebook users aren’t protecting themselves from hacks like this as best they could.

Is the buried lede in Facebook's announcement that only about 90 million of their 2 billion-plus users are using two-factor authentication? https://t.co/xb1UUAZysD

— Michael Roston (@michaelroston) September 28, 2018

But it likely won’t have the impact of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, which granted improper access to information about 87 million Facebook users in 2013.

Facebook’s reputation took a beating during that episode, and this is more bad news. We’ll update this post as more information becomes available.

READ MORE: Security Update [Facebook]

More on Facebook hacks: Mark Zuckerberg Kicks Off Facebook’s Cambridge Analytica Spin Cycle With a Washed Response

Read more here:
Breaking: Hackers Accessed 50 Million Facebook Accounts

PHONE HOME

Are we alone in the universe? Hunting for biological signatures of life on moons and exoplanets is just one way we might find an answer.

Another is to look for “technosignatures” of alien technology — radio signals or microwaves coming from deep in space. The idea has been around for decades, but now Congress is pushing NASA to ramp up the approach. This week, the agency held a three-day workshop in Houston to explore the state of the field and what might come next.

ALIEN TECH

The organizing committee included representatives from NASA, the Planetary Science Institute, the SETI Institute and several large research universities. During a Reddit question-and-answer session on Thursday between workshop participants and the public, Penn State professor of astronomy and astrophysics Jason Wright said that though the search for alien technosignatures goes back decades, its pace slowed in the United States after the 1990s.

But more recently, Wright wrote, there’s been a “resurgence of activity” in the field. So it’s time for those actively looking for technosignatures to be sure they’re looking for the right things.

At the workshop, where the agenda featured events about detecting megastructures and how signs of alien technology might be found in big data, NASA outlined four broad goals for its participants:

• Define the current state of the technosignature field, identifying past projects and current limitations
• Identify near-term advances in the field, noting current projects and tools that could have a future impact
• Look at the longer-term potential of the technosignature field, identifying needed tools and experiments
• Find ways NASA can work with the private sector and philanthropic organizations to advance technosignature research

LIFE SIGNS

On Reddit, workshop speaker Andrew Siemion, Director of Berkeley SETI Research Center, said that if NASA does identify alien life, it will exercise caution.

“There are no plans to attempt communication — our technosignature searches are looking and listening,” he said.

Whether the efforts lead to the discovery of intelligent life or not, we’ll at least know that we left no stone unturned in the hunt.

READ MORE: NASA Is Taking a New Look at Searching for Life Beyond Earth [NASA]

More on technosignatures: Astronomer: Instead of Alien Life, Should We Be Searching for Signs of Alien Tech?

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NASA Is Looking For New Ways to Detect Alien Technology

Would you be OK with a caterpillar robot crawling all over your insides, even if it meant it would deliver helpful medications in the process? That might be a choice you have to make in the future. To glimpse what else we’ve seen in our crystal ball, read on.

Scientists Want to Put a Horrifying Caterpillar Robot Inside Your Body. Researchers in Hong Kong have invented a robot that looks like a caterpillar. It’s designed to travel through your body and release drugs.

Should Coma Patients Live or Die? Machine Learning Will Help Decide. An algorithm is helping Chinese researchers determine if a coma patient will wake up again.

This “Flying Sports Car” Is Like a Giant Drone You Can Ride In. This week, Philippine inventor Kyxz Mendiola took his Koncepto Milenya, a flying sports car prototype, out for its first public test flight.

These Robots Weave Super Durable Fiberglass Structures So Humans Don’t Have To. MIT researchers have created Fiberbots, autonomous robots that can weave fiberglass into tall tubes that we could one day use for construction projects.

Spotify Will Make a Playlist Based on Your DNA. Provide the results of your AncestryDNA test, and Spotify will provide a “mix of music, inspired by your origins.” It’s a cute idea, but nah.

Robots Are Coming for Service Jobs. Automation is eating into food and hospitality jobs. Unions are demanding measures that will protect staff from being replaced by robots.

More on tech: This Week in Tech: Sept 15-21

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This Week in Tech: Sept 22-28

This week, the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency’s (JAXA) landed a pair of tiny hopping robots to the asteroid called Ryugu, and they’ve got the mind-blowing photos to prove it. Meanwhile, SpaceX is officially gearing up to send a Japanese rover to the surface of the Moon around 2020. Domo Arigato, Mr. Roboto.

Here Are the First Photos Japan’s Robot Landers Sent Back From an Asteroid. Japan’s asteroid-exploring robots have officially landed on Ryugu and are now transmitting data and photos of the rocky small planet.

Scientists Just Took A “Spectacular Step” Towards Lab-Grown Human Egg Cells. Researchers have come closer than ever before to producing lab-grown human egg cells using just the blood of a person.

Electrical Stimulation Helped A Man With Paralyzed Legs Walk Again. With the help of electrical stimulation and physical therapy, a 29-year-old man diagnosed with total lower body paralysis can now take steps on his own.

SpaceX Will Send Another Company’s Robots to the Moon in 2021. Japanese space exploration company ispace is teaming up with SpaceX on two lunar missions, one in mid-2020 and the other in mid-2021.

Pet Store Puppies Are Spreading Antibiotic-Resistant Bacteria. CDC officials have traced an outbreak of the antibiotic-resistant bacteria Campylobacter jejuni to pet-store puppies unnecessarily prescribed antibiotics.

Nuclear Power Used to Seem Like the Future. Now Its Fate in the US Is in Question. If we still need nuclear plants as a stopgap to moving away from fossil fuels, fine. But overall, atomic power no longer feels like the future.

More on science: This Week in Science: Sept 15-21

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This Week in Science: Sept 22-28

NO DEAL

Before the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filed a lawsuit against Elon Musk for alleged fraud yesterday, the Tesla CEO reportedly turned down a settlement offer.

That’s according to the Wall Street Journal, which spoke to sources who said the settlement for an undisclosed amount was approved by the SEC’s commissioners. But after Musk’s lawyers turned it down Thursday, the sources said, the agency “rushed to pull together” the complaint they filed that afternoon.

TWEET TROUBLES

Musk’s troubles with the SEC stem from an August 7 tweet in which he said he was considering taking Tesla private for $420 per share — a corporate buyout the SEC says he had no way of financing.

Sources who talked to CNBC offered more details about the no-deal settlement, reporting that the enigmatic CEO “refused to sign the deal because he felt that by settling he would not be truthful to himself.” In other words, Musk wouldn’t take the settlement because that would imply that he did something wrong, and he doesn’t think he did.

Musk had a way to avoid going to court, and he didn’t take it. That means he’s prepared to fight.

READ MORE: SEC Sues Elon Musk for Fraud, Seeks Removal From Tesla [Wall Street Journal]

More on the SEC investigation: Ludicrous Mode: SEC Sues Elon Musk, Causing a Quick Drop in Tesla Stock

Continue reading here:
Reports: Elon Musk Turned Down an SEC Settlement

THE BIRDS AND THE B52S

Each year thousands of birds collide with airplanes, dying in the process. Unfortunately, we haven’t been able to figure out an effective way to help the animals survive alongside humans in the not-so-friendly skies.

That may be changing, though. A team from Purdue University has uncovered a simple solution to the problem of bird collisions, at least for one species: adding red or blue LEDs to planes.

BIRD’S EYE

The Purdue team described their experiment in a study published this week in the journal PeerJ. They cut two holes in a large board, one on the left side and one on the right, and positioned a large LED light next to each. Each LED could shine in five different wavelengths of light: ultraviolet, blue, green, red, and white.

Then they let a brown-headed cowbird go and observed which hole it chose to fly through, given various choices of LED lights. They chose the species because it is commonly involved in plane collisions and has a visual system well-suited to this kind of experimentation.

They found that the birds consistently avoided a hole if it was lit by an LED that appears blue or red to the human eye — a clue that those colors could be used to deter birds from flying toward airplanes.

FLOCK TOGETHER

Planes aren’t the only man-made objects birds collide with while flying — they also slam into buildings, wind turbines, power lines, cars, and more.

As our urban areas sprawl to encroach on areas inhabited by wildlife, placing more of these animals in harm’s way. If we want to ensure our structures don’t diminish bird populations, we’ll need a better way to deter the animals from approaching them, and LEDs look like they could be a viable option.

READ MORE: Millions of Birds Die in Collisions Each Year, but Lights Could Change That [Purdue University]

More on bird collisions: These Robots Chase Birds Away From Airports

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Planes Kill Huge Numbers of Birds. LEDs Could Save Their Lives.

IMPOSSIBLE STANDARDS

Flat stomachs and thigh gaps are simply everywhere on social media. That can make many women feel inadequate — or even push them into disordered eating. And because it’s the internet, some (lots of) photos might not (definitely don’t) reflect reality. Many users, after all, edit their selfies into unattainable ideals of beauty.

Researchers at Ohio State University may have found a way to reduce the negative impact of retouched Instagram selfies: simply label them as edited.

SELFIE STICKLERS

For the study, published last week in the journal Body Image, the researchers asked 360 female college students to each look at 45 Instagram selfies of thin women wearing revealing clothing. Half the participants saw mostly images that had been marked with an icon indicating that they had been edited or filtered and half saw mostly images with no icon.

Participants who saw the photos that had been marked as edited, they found, were less likely to agree with the statement “Thin women are more attractive than other women.” That’s a sign, the researchers suspect, that marking edited photos could encourage social media users not to internalize harmful ideas about beauty.

“The photos are less influential if women see them as being edited, so cues that images have been altered could potentially reduce the negative effects of thin ideal images,” lead researcher Megan Vendemia said in a press release. “Just being aware of the amount of photo editing that goes on diminishes women’s endorsement of the thin ideal when they view pictures of slender people.”

BACK TO REALITY

Of course, it’s hard to say how we’d go about applying this information in the real world. Instagram could conceivably auto-label images with filters added. But forcing people to label images that someone edited prior to uploading? That might be as impossible as achieving one of those perfect bodies we see online.

READ MORE: Is That Selfie Edited? Why It May Matter for Women Viewers [The Ohio State University]

More on Instagram: Instagram Is Trying to Make Users Feel Better Without Scaring Them Off

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Labelling Edited Selfies on Social Media Might Make Us Less Miserable