CAN’T BEAT THE SYSTEM. Well, that didn’t take long. During just its third day in action, a facial recognition system used by Washington Dulles International Airport (IAD) caught its first imposter. While that’s a clear win for proponents of the tech, it might also be major blow to the privacy of the average airline passenger.
On Monday, 14 airports in the U.S. launched a pilot program to test the effectiveness of a biometric scanning system during the security and boarding processes. Passengers simply stand in front of a camera that takes their photo. The system then compares that photo to the one on the person’s passport to confirm their identity.
The 26-year-old man, who was traveling from Sao Paulo, Brazil, presented a French passport to a CBP official, but the system determined that the man’s face didn’t match the photo on the passport. Officials later discovered that the man was concealing his authentic Republic of Congo identification card in his shoe.
The U.S. attorney’s office decided not to charge the man, CNET reports, and he left the country Wednesday night.
AN ETHICAL DIVIDE. Depending on which side of the facial recognition debate you land on, you probably have pretty different feelings about that.
For proponents, catching the traveler shows that a technology purportedly designed to keep us safe is doing its job.
“Terrorists and criminals continually look for creative methods to enter the U.S. including using stolen genuine documents,” said Casey Durst, CBP’s Director of the Baltimore Field Office, in a news release. “The new facial recognition technology virtually eliminates the ability for someone to use a genuine document that was issued to someone else.”
BIG BROTHER, AIRPORT EDITION. However, showing that facial recognition works could worry those who see it as a stepping stone along the path to a Big Brother-esque dystopia. If it works at IAD, other airports might decide to implement their own systems, and it’s not hard to imagine other locations — jobs, schools, public spaces — following suit.
This is problematic for a couple of reasons. According to an NBC report, officials say the airport system is 99 percent accurate, but other tests of facial recognition technology have revealed that the systems aren’t always as accurate as advertised. Furthermore, they often include racial and gender biases, producing higher error rates for people of color and women than for white men. Sure, the IAD system can help officials identify imposters, but how many other law-abiding travelers might it falsely flag?
Catching one person with fake papers doesn’t prove that a facial recognition system works, of course, and the technology is still being tested in a pilot program. But if the technology works as it’s supposed to, this could be the first of many cases in which travelers that might have otherwise made it past human immigration officers are caught at the border.
NOW WITH GPS. Three Square Market (32M) is no longer content to simply microchip its employees. The Wisconsin-based company now want to put trackable implants into people with dementia.
32M’s CEO Todd Westby announced the plan on CNBC’s “Closing Bell” on Wednesday. Westby said the company is working on a voice-activated, body-heat-powered chip that can monitor a person’s vital signs and track them via GPS. It plans to beta test the chips in 2019 and will seek Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approval for them.
TARGET AUDIENCE. The company’s president, Patrick McMullan, added that patients who suffer from dementia would be a primary target for the GPS implant. “Without question it’s a worthy cause, and it’s a product in demand,” he said.
There’s definitely a demand. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), an estimated 47 million people worldwide suffer from dementia; by 2030, they expect that figure to reach 75 million. Six of every 10 of these dementia suffers will wander at some point, traveling from a safe location out into the world where they might get lost.
Clearly, we need a way to quickly track down these wanderers, but is a GPS implant really the best option?
IS IT OVERKILL? We already have bracelets and shoes that dementia patients can wear to ensure they’re found quickly if they wander. SafetyNet Tracking Systems’ bracelet might actually be even more useful than the implant because it doesn’t rely on GPS, which can be spotty in remote areas or inside buildings. Instead, the bracelet emits a radio frequency signal that law enforcement can pick up. Sure, it requires a battery, but that only needs changed every six months.
There’s also the issue of personal autonomy — for people in the throes of a disease that makes them lose their memory, can dementia sufferers consent (and really understand) if they give permission to receive a GPS implant? Would we even need their permission if the person is under the guardianship of a family member or doctor?
Ultimately, while a GPS implant might seem like a logical solution to a growing problem, we might want to reserve our implants for the people who know exactly what they’re getting into, like 32M’s employees.
CLEAN MEAT. When it comes to betting on startups, Y Combinator knows how to pick some winners. Since it launched in 2005, the accelerator has provided seed funding and advice to several companies that went on to become household names, including Airbnb, Reddit, and Dropbox.
Now, the company is ready to sink its teeth into a new challenge: help make plant-based and clean meat — edible protein grown from animal stem cells — mainstream.
NOT YOUR AVERAGE STARTUP. On Wednesday, Y Combinator hosted the second day of demos for its Summer 2018 startups, and one of those, the Good Food Institute (GFI), was pretty unique. It’s not a company per se — GFI is a nonprofit think tank that will itself act as an accelerator for startups in the plant-based and clean meat sector. It’s basically accelerator inception.
GFI has its hands in pretty much anything that has to do with clean meat. It’s working with colleges to design clean meat-focused curriculums, launching a conference on the subject, and funding open-source research so that startups in the space can learn from each other’s work.
GFI also lobbies government organizations and traditional meat manufacturers to secure funding for clean meat startups. The institute has even launched three startups of its own.
A POWERFUL PARTNER. GFI is hopeful that the partnership with Y Combinator will help bring attention to both its startups and the industry as a whole. Y Combinator, meanwhile, simply sees clean meat as the future.
“YC got interested in [clean meat] because of the innovation in this industry,” Gustaf Alstromer, a partner at Y Combinator, told Fast Company. “We think that if it works, this will revolutionize the entire meat industry, and we think that it will probably be entrepreneurs and startups that build the companies that produce that meat.”
As we’ve seen in the past, Y Combinator has a pretty solid track record of detecting industry trends, so if its decision to back GFI is any indication, we’re probably going to see a lot more clean meat in the future.
A COOL NEW LEAD. We’re still figuring out what the heck antimatter even is, but scientists are already getting ready to fiddle with it. Physicists at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) are one step closer to cooling antimatter using lasers, a milestone that could help us crack its many mysteries.
They published their research on Wednesday in the journal Nature.
BIG BANG, BIGGER MYSTERY.Antimatter is essentially the opposite of “normal” matter. While protons have a positive charge, their antimatter equivalents, antiprotons, have the same mass, but a negative charge. Electrons and their corresponding antiparticle, positrons, have the same mass — the only difference is that they have different charges (negative for electrons, positive for positrons).
When a particle meets its antimatter equivalent, the two annihilate one another, canceling the other out. In theory, the Big Bang should have produced an equal amount of matter and antimatter, in which case, the two would have just annihilated one another.
But that’s not what happened — the universe seems to have way more matter than antimatter. Researchers have no idea why that is, and because antimatter is very difficult to study, they haven’t had much recourse for figuring it out. And that’s why CERN researchers are trying to cool antimatter off, so they can get a better look.
MAGNETS AND LASERS. Using a tool called the Antihydrogen Laser Physics Apparatus (ALPHA), the researchers combined antiprotons with positrons to form antihydrogen atoms. Then, they magnetically trapped hundreds of these atoms in a vacuum and zapped them with laser pulses. This caused the antihydrogen atoms to undergo something called the Lyman-alpha transition.
“The Lyman-alpha transition is the most basic, important transition in regular hydrogen atoms, and to capture the same phenomenon in antihydrogen opens up a new era in antimatter science,” one of the researchers, Takamasa Momose, said in a university press release.
According to Momose, this phase change is a critical first step toward cooling antihydrogen. Researchers have long used lasers to cool other atoms to make them easier to study. If we can do the same for antimatter atoms, we’ll be better able to study them. Scientists can take more accurate measurements, and they might even be able to solve another long-unsettled mystery: figuring out how antimatter interacts with gravity.
For now, the team plans to continue working toward that goal of cooling antimatter. If they’re successful, they might be able to help unravel mysteries with answers critical to our understanding of the universe.
A NEW KIND OF TEACHER. It’s back to school, and you know what that means — time to fire up the computer that teaches you!
That’s what primary school students in New Zealand have to look forward to, anyways. They’ll soon be the first students in the world to learn from an artificially intelligent (AI) digital avatar.
MEET WILL. Auckland energy company Vector teamed up with AI company Soul Machines to create the avatar, which goes by the name Will. The AI is now part of Vector’s Be Sustainable with Energy program, which it offers free-of-charge to schools to which it provides electricity.
Will’s there to teach children about energy use. Students interact with Will — essentially just a face on a screen — via their desktop, tablet, or mobile device. He teaches them about different forms of renewable energy, such solar and wind. Will can then ask the students questions about what they’ve learned to ensure the lessons stick.
According to Vector’s Chief Digital Officer, Nikhil Ravishankar, students seem particularly taken by Will. “What was fascinating to me was the reaction of the children to Will. The way they look at the world is so creative and different, and Will really captured their attention,” he said in a news release.
He went on to add, “Using a digital human is a very compelling method to deliver new information to people, and I have a lot of hope in this technology as a means to deliver cost-effective, rich, educational experiences into the future.”
AN EDUCATION CRISIS. Ravishankar isn’t the only person who thinks robots — in the form of AI software programs like Will, or actual humanoid machines — will soon play a major role in education.
In February 2017, futurist Thomas Frey predicted that learning from bots will be commonplace by 2031. Meanwhile, British education expert Anthony Seldon thinks robots will replace human teachers by 2027.
Even if human teachers get to keep their jobs, working in tandem with robots could solve many of the problems currently facing the world’s education system.
Many nations, particularly in the developing world, don’t have nearly enough teachers. Robots like Will could help fill that gap. Compared to the cost of paying a human teacher, these systems are also far cheaper, and they can adjust to each individual student’s learning style to help them reach their potential.
While digital teachers could provide a host of benefits, they still aren’t as advanced as they need to be. Will is only well-versed on one topic — renewable energy — while quality teachers are typically far more well-rounded. Social interaction between teachers and students is also critical to a quality education, and digital teachers most certainly lag behind their human counterparts in this realm.
Still, Will might be the first digital teacher to hit the classroom, but he almost certainly won’t be the last.
AI DEFEAT. AI may be able to best humans at games like Go and chess and poker. But for the cooperative strategy video game DOTA 2, AI still can’t beat the pros — at least not yet.
That’s the major takeaway from The International, a tournament for the computer strategy game DOTA 2. During the tournament, research group OpenAI had its OpenAI Five, a team comprising five neural networks, play against professional DOTA 2 players.
It was a best-of-three competition, but the team from paiN Gaming and an all-star team of pros from China confirmed humanity’s superiority over the AI team in just two matches.
TWO TOURNEY TWEAKS. It’s not that the AI is bad at the game. In fact, back in June, OpenAI Five beat a team of five human amateurs at DOTA 2.
But this match was different in a few significant ways. Previously, each member of the AI team had its own invulnerable courier, a key component of the game that delivers supplies to players. For The International, each team had only one courier to share — the OpenAI Five had just a few days to adjust to that prior to the match.
Players couldn’t choose their own heroes this time around, either — DOTA 2 experts picked the characters for each player in the tournament, no matter if they were human or AI.
BACK ON TOP. Though the humans emerged victorious, OpenAI Five did hold its own. Each match lasted between 45 and 51 minutes — the humans didn’t simply destroy the AI team right out the gate. With a bit more time to adjust to the changes from the June match, the AI team might have fared a bit better, too.
For now, the OpenAI researchers plan to continue to improve the system, so maybe it’ll be ready to bring it in a future rematch.
NOT ALL DOOM AND GLOOM. Tesla might be sucking the life force of CEO Elon Musk, but at least the company’s got some some good news to show for it.
On Saturday, Electrek tweeted a picture of one of Tesla’s autonomous Semi prototypes at the headquarters of trucking company J.B. Hunt. In response, Musk tweeted, “What’s cool is that it was driven across the country alone (no escort or any accompanying vehicles), using the existing Tesla Supercharger network and an extension cord.”
He later added (jokingly, we assume), “The extension cord was 1000 miles long, but still.”
SEEING SEMIS ON THE REG. This wasn’t the first sighting of Tesla’s Semi prototype. The vehicle has been making its way across the country, popping up in Missouri, Oklahoma, Texas, and California.
During some of those stops, witnesses managed to catch a glimpse of the prototype’s charging system. Based on their reports to Electrek, the truck charges via several extension cords, each plugged into its own supercharger stall (these are the chargers used to power Tesla’s other vehicles). This should cut down on charging times, though Tesla plans to eventually create Megachargers that could power the Semis much more quickly. The reports, however, don’t detail how exactly — or who — plugged the trucks in.
THE FUTURE OF TRUCKING. Tesla’s autonomous Semi has the potential to radically transform the future of trucking. According to reports, the vehicles will cost less to operate than their diesel counterparts, and because they’re electric, they’d be far better for the environment. Trucking is actually an industry that needs more workers, so the vehicles aren’t expected to put anyone out of a job, either.
If that Tesla’s Semi prototype did in fact traverse the nation solo, we might not have much longer to wait for the autonomous revolution to hit the trucking industry.
A rhetorical question for you. Let’s say you’re an AI scientist, and you’ve found the holy grail of your field — you figured out how to build an artificial general intelligence (AGI). That’s a truly intelligent computer that could pass as human in terms of cognitive ability or emotional intelligence. AGI would be creative and find links between disparate ideas — things no computer can do today.
That’s great, right? Except for one big catch: your AGI system is evil or could only be used for malicious purposes.
So, now a conundrum. Do you publish your white paper and tell the world exactly how to create this unrelenting force of evil? Do you file a patent so that no one else (except for you) could bring such an algorithm into existence? Or do you sit on your research, protecting the world from your creation but also passing up on the astronomical paycheck that would surely arrive in the wake of such a discovery?
Yes, this is a rhetorical question — for now. But some top names in the world of AI are already thinking about their answers. On Friday, speakers at the “AI Race and Societal Impacts” panel of The Joint Multi-Conference on Human-Level Artificial Intelligence in Prague gave their best responses after the question was posed by an audience member.
Here’s how five panelists, all experts on the future of AI, responded.
Siegelmann urged the hypothetical scientist to publish their work immediately. Siegelmann had earlier told Futurism that she believes there is no evil technology, but there are people who would misuse it. If that AGI algorithm was shared with the world, people might be able to find ways to use it for good.
But after Siegelmann answered, the audience member who posed the hypothetical question clarified that, for the purposes of the thought experiment, we should assume that no good could ever possibly come from the AGI.
Irakle Eridze, Senior Strategy and Policy Advisor at UNICRI, United Nations
Easy one: “Don’t publish it!”
Eridze otherwise stayed out of the fray for this specific question, but throughout the conference he highlighted the importance of setting up strong ethical benchmarks on how to develop and deploy AGI. Apparently, deliberately releasing an evil super-intelligent entity into the world would go against those standards.
Turchin believes there are responsible ways to handle such an AI system. Think about a grenade, he said — one should not hand it to a small child, but maybe a trained soldier could be trusted with it.
But Turchin’s example is more revealing than it may initially appear. A hand grenade is a weapon created explicitly to cause death and destruction no matter who pulls the pin, so it’s difficult to imagine a so-called responsible way to use one. It’s not clear whether Turchin intended his example to be interpreted this way, but he urged the AI community to make sure dangerous algorithms were left only in the most trustworthy hands.
Tak Lo, a partner at Zeroth.ai, an accelerator that invests in AI startups
Lo said the hypothetical computer scientist should sell the evil AGI to him. That way, they wouldn’t have to hold onto the ethical burden of such a powerful and scary AI — instead, you could just pass it to Lo and he would take it from there. Lo was likely (at least half-)kidding, and the audience laughed. Earlier that day, Lo said that private capital and investors should be used to push AI forward, and he may have been poking fun at his own obviously capitalistic stance. Still, someone out there would absolutely try to buy such an AGI system, should it arrive.
But what Lo suggests, in jest or not, is one of the most likely results, should this actually come to pass. While hobbyists can develop truly valuable and innovative algorithms, much of the top talent in the AI field is scooped up by large companies who then own the products of their labor. The other likely scenario is that the scientist would publish their paper on an open-access preprint server like arXiv to help promote transparency.
Seán Ó hÉigeartaigh, Executive Director of the Cambridge Center for the Study of Existential Risk
Ó hÉigeartaigh agreed with Eridze: you shouldn’t publish it. “You don’t just share that with the world! You have to think about the kind of impact you will have,” he said.
And with that, the panel ended. Everyone went on their merry way, content that this evil AGI was safe in the realm of the hypothetical.
In the “real world,” though, ethics often end up taking a back seat to more earthly concerns like money and prestige. Companies like Facebook, Google, and Amazon regularly publish facial recognition or other surveillance systems, often selling them to police or the military which uses it to monitor everyday people. Academic scientists are trapped in the “publish or perish,” cycle — publish a study, or risk losing your position. So ethical concerns are often relegated to a paper’s conclusion, as a factor for someone else to sort out at some vague point in the future.
For now, though, it’s unlikely that anyone will come up with AGI — much less evil AGI — anytime soon. But the panelists’ wide-ranging answers means that we are still far from sorting out what should be done with unethical, dangerous science.
LOOKING AHEAD. The Japanese government sees flying cars as the panacea to some of the nation’s traffic issues — the vehicles will decrease congestion, boost tourism, and increase access to remote areas.
So, naturally, the nation wants to be the world leader in the developing the vehicles. Now it has a dream team of companies on board to help it reach its goal, according to a statement released by the trade ministry in Tokyo on Friday.
TEAM FLYING CARS. Twenty-one companies and organizations have joined a Japanese government-led group designed to lay out the roadmap to flying car adoption in Japan.
Amongst those are some of the biggest players in the space, including Uber, Boeing, and Airbus. Delegates from each group member will meet on August 29 to figure out a plan that will get flying cars to Japan in the next decade.
A GOVERNMENT LEADER. While not everyone(see: Elon Musk) is on board with the idea of flying cars, if the futuristic transportation is ever going to take off, it’ll likely need a government leading the charge, and Japan appears ready to step up on that front.
“It’s necessary for the government to take a lead and coordinate on setting safety standards,” Yasuo Hashimoto, a researcher at Tokyo-based Japan Aviation Management Research, told Bloomberg. “They are trying to set a tone for the industry ahead of other countries.”
We’ll see if Japan is able to meet its ambitious goal of serving as the world leader in flying cars. But it certainly won’t fail because it lacks the right partners in its corner.
This article has been edited for brevity. Read Nevin’s full article here.
2018 is the year of the stablecoin. Leaders of the crypto ecosystem have been aware of the need for a stablecoin for years, and the financial incentive to create the winning currency is immense. When considering whether any given stablecoin will work, it’s very helpful to look at the three main approaches that have been proposed so far, and translate them into the language of monetary economics.
Traditional Asset-Backed Stablecoins
A traditional asset-backed stablecoin is simple to describe, and only gets complicated in practice. The issuer sells tokens for $1 each, and holds all of the dollars from those sales in reserve in a bank account. Any time someone wants to, they can redeem tokens for dollars with the issuer. This design is best with a trustworthy audit mechanism. But in practice, there are two central problems with traditional asset-backed stablecoins: counterparty risk and risk of government intervention?.
These two core problems create a fundamental tension:
The better the audit mechanism, the more credible the promise to use reserves to maintain the buy wall and thus defend the exchange rate peg, but the easier it is for the government to locate and freeze the assets.
The worse the audit mechanism, the harder it is for the government to locate and freeze the assets, but also harder it is for the market to assess the issuer’s solvency and ability to maintain the buy wall.
The traditional asset-backed stablecoin approach doesn’t serve what has been the main use case for BTC: free transfer of money across all borders. In order to supplant the US dollar and become the new reserve currency, free transfer across borders is essential.
Collateralized Debt Stablecoins
A collateralized debt stablecoin offers asset holders a way to take out loans backed by their cryptoassets, which then become the collateral in the system. Users can deposit a cryptoasset into a smart contract, which then mints a new stablecoin for them. The stablecoin must be of lesser value than the collateral, so let’s say the user deposits $2 worth of ETH and receives a stablecoin that has a target price of $1. The user can now go spend that stablecoin on goods and services, without having to give up their position in ETH. When they want their ETH back in their control to spend or trade, they have to repay their stablecoin loan to withdraw it. A common use case for this is going margin-long on cryptoassets: the user can sell $1 stablecoin for ETH, and then is holding $3 worth of ETH instead of just $2 worth. If ETH appreciates, they’ll earn more, and if it depreciates, they’ll lose more.
This design has the virtue of decentralization, and thus censorship resistance. But it doesn’t implement a strong and predictable currency peg. So we predict that users seeking stability will be unimpressed by the fluctuating price history that will likely develop and look elsewhere, so an approach like this will also be unlikely to yield the next reserve currency for the world.
Future Growth-Backed Stablecoins
A future growth-backed stablecoin offers speculators portions of the future growth in stablecoin market cap in exchange for providing the capital to peg a currency as needed. In the original design, there are two tokens: stablecoins and shares. When the price of the stablecoin is above the target price, the system mints more stablecoins and offers them in an auction. The currency used to buy stablecoins in the auction is the share token?—?so only share token holders can participate, and the highest bidders are the recipients of the newly minted stablecoins. The increase in stablecoin supply presumably reduces the market price back down to the target. When the price of the stablecoin is below the target price, the reverse happens?—?the system mints new shares, and auctions them off for stablecoins. By doing this, the system can reduce the supply of stablecoins and bring the price back up.
The central problem with this design is that if at any point speculators lose interest in purchasing shares, the peg breaks, since no stablecoins can be taken out of circulation. If growth in the market cap of the stablecoin is perceived to be highly probable by the market, this would be unlikely to happen, since it would be clear to the market that there is always money to be made by purchasing shares at some price. But in the early stages of adoption, growth in the market cap of the stablecoin may sometimes not be perceived as highly probable.
If a future growth-backed stablecoin does reach this state of stable equilibrium, it has the benefit of being totally decentralized and thus censorship resistant, and able to scale up easily in response to increasing stablecoin demand. But because of the bootstrapping difficulty and risk of catastrophic failure, most designs of this type don’t appear to be safe approaches to building a world-wide cryptocurrency.
The Incredible Responsibility of Stablecoin Producers
Creating a stablecoin is very different from creating a normal crypto token. The people in the world who will benefit most from a stable, full-stack open currency are those with no access to any stable store of value right now, and who often don’t have a lot of money to start with. If a stablecoin reaches prominence among this demographic and then crashes, it will have done great harm to some of the most vulnerable people on the planet.
This is why it’s crucial for the industry to enter this new era with caution. To further compound this issue, in many cases investors and issuers could earn a profit from a stablecoin project reaching prominence even if it breaks later, so long as they liquidate at the right time. This misalignment of incentives means that stablecoin project founders will have to make choices that are not in their own economic interest in order to act responsibly.
All of this is what has motivated the Reserve team to begin putting resources towards educating the industry more broadly. If you would like to get involved in this effort, we are looking to bring on conference organizers, online forum moderators, writers, and careful thinkers to help us build the open currency movement the right way.
The preceding communication has been paid for by Reserve. This communication is for informational purposes only and does not constitute an offer or solicitation to sell shares or securities in Reserve or any related or associated company. None of the information presented herein is intended to form the basis for any investment decision, and no specific recommendations are intended. This communication does not constitute investment advice or solicitation for investment. Futurism expressly disclaims any and all responsibility for any direct or consequential loss or damage of any kind whatsoever arising directly or indirectly from: (i) reliance on any information contained herein, (ii) any error, omission or inaccuracy in any such information or (iii) any action resulting from such information.
This post does not reflect the views or the endorsement of the Futurism.com editorial staff.
ANOTHER DOWNSIDE. We knew that air pollution damages our physical health. Turns out, it’s also wreaking havoc on our intelligence.
According to a new study by researchers from the U.S. and China, exposure to air pollution can have a “huge” impact on a person’s cognitive performance. They published their research in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on Monday.
POLLUTION IN, SMARTS OUT. To explore the connection between air pollution and cognitive ability, the researchers turned to the China Family Panel Studies, an annual survey of Chinese citizens that includes verbal and math testing for cognitive performance. They specifically focused on surveys taken in 2010 and 2014 from 162 randomly chosen Chinese counties. In total, their study targeted about 20,000 people.
Next, they used official air pollution records to calculate individual’s cumulative exposure to dirty air in the time between surveys. From this, they were able to determine how air pollution affects a person’s cognitive ability.
The results weren’t encouraging, especially for older men. “Polluted air can cause everyone to reduce their level of education by one year, which is huge,” researcher Xi Chen told The Guardian. “But we know the effect is worse for the elderly, especially those over 64, and for men, and for those with low education. If we calculate [the loss] for those, it may be a few years of education.”
The researchers told NPR they aren’t certain why pollution has this impact. But they are pretty sure the pollution is causing the mental decline — that is, it’s not just a correlation between the two — and it could have something to do with how it’s affecting the brain’s white matter.
PRETTY CLEAR CUT. This isn’t the only study to note the link between polluted air and cognitive decline, but it is the first to look at people of all ages. It’s also the first to note differences between men and women, which could be due to supposed differences in the brains of males and females (whether they are even really different is a matter of debate).
It’s the most recent in a long line of studies that tells us, again: air pollution is bad for us. We all understand this, right? Noxious combustible compounds wafting densely in the air we breathe equals sad face?
And yet the United States is on a path that could actually lead to more pollution in the future, not less. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is propping up the coal industry, even though coal-fired power plants have negative effects on the environment and public health. It’s also attempting to roll back rules that restrict vehicle emissions.
We could be on a path to a future in which we live on a dying planet in failing bodies with, according to this new research, failing minds to match.
THE NEXT STEP. In 2003, researchers sequenced the human genome for the first time, writing out all 3 billion of the DNA base pairs that dictate every aspect of our makeup. Now, a new team of researchers has figured out a way to create a 3D image of this valuable roadmap to human biology.
They published their research on Tuesday in the Journal of Cell Biology.
A BETTER MAP. After we sequenced the human genome, we had a (very) long list of letters. We knew about the double helix, and that every human cell contained this entire sequence of DNA in more or less this particular order, but we didn’t know much about the three-dimensional location of the DNA pairs — that is, where the various pairs in the double helix were located in relationship to the cell’s nuclear structures. That’s important, because it can tell us a lot about their function and activity.
That’s where this new study from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign comes into play.
Those researchers developed a mapping technique they call tyramide signal amplification sequencing (TSA-Seq). Tyramide is a molecule that, once it’s released from a special enzyme placed around particular nuclear structures, tags any DNA it happens to be around. The closer a gene is to those particular structures, the stronger the signal from the tyramide label — the same way your clothes get more damp if you’re standing closer to a sprinkler.
LOCATION, LOCATION, LOCATION. The researchers tested TSA-Seq in leukemia cells in the lab (don’t worry, the cells weren’t alive). They figured out that genes closer to one kind of nuclear structure (nuclear speckles) were often more active than those closer to another (nuclear lamina).
We don’t actually know what nuclear speckles do, but we might be better equipped to figure that out now that we know they seem to play some sort of role in genetic activity.
“The logic of this nuclear organization remains to be determined, but our model would suggest that chromosome movements of just a few hundred nanometers could have substantial functional significance,” researcher Andrew Belmont said in a news release.
For now, the team plans to continue developing its TSA-Seq technique. Eventually, the researchers hope to map the 3D positions of genes in other types of cells, focusing on how the positions might change as the cells age or become diseased. The more we learn about the structure of the human genome, the better equipped we’ll be to eventually write a genome of our own.
Electric car innovator Tesla will remain a public company, CEO Elon Musk announced late Friday in a blog post titled “Staying Public” published on Tesla’s website.
Why is it notable that things are staying the way they were? Well, if you recall, the company’s CEO Elon Musk has been stirring the Tesla pot lately. In a single tweet, Musk had people all over the world saying in dismay: Tesla is going private? How? And why now?
Am considering taking Tesla private at $420. Funding secured.
Musk has been raging a war against short-sellers — investors that make money when Tesla’s stock value dips. A way to shut them up? Take the company’s stock from open speculation and into private hands. And if Musk’s tweets were to be believed, it was basically a done deal.
Well, turns out that deal was notexactly done, the funding far from secured. The Saudi Arabian sovereign wealth funds Musk said he was talking to had “shown no interest” in buying out Tesla according to Reuters.
The following Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) investigation didn’t help Elon’s cause, further jeopardizing the financial future of the company. If the SEC were to find that Musk made decisions without investors’ knowledge, the company could bar Musk from acting as CEO, or even pursue formal charges of fraud according to the New York Times.
Now, Musk has walked back on that whole privatizing thing. After consulting with Tesla’s Board of Directors and “current shareholders, large and small,” the post says, Musk decided it would be best to give privatization a rest. Turns out no one was all that into the idea to begin with. As Musk admits: “Although the majority of shareholders I spoke to said they would remain with Tesla if we went private, the sentiment, in a nutshell, was ‘please don’t do this.'”
Surely, though, it wasn’t just because people didn’t like it that Musk reversed course. Could the SEC investigation have played a role? Was it the advice of equity firm Silver Lake, or investment juggernaut Goldman Sachs? Was it because the Tesla factory was literally on fire the day before Musk’s announcement?
Perhaps it was simply because Elon Musk didn’t think it all the way through or consider all the possible outcomes when he “considered” a private buyout. People close to Musk have said that he might have been “overly simplistic” in his thinking, the New York Times suggests.
So for now, Model 3 production and sustainable profits will take precedent over any plans to privatize the company. It means that Musk will have to contend with slow-moving shareholder decisions — and, yes, even the short-sellers — as the company works furiously to meet its ambitious production deadlines. Now, Musk and his team are working to meet them under even more scrutiny from regulators and from shareholders, and with more competition — the Saudi Public Investment Fund recently made what is likely a billion-dollar deal with Lucid Motors, another electric car company vying for the same milestones and clientele as Tesla.
Musk hasn’t given up the dream of privatizing Tesla. In fact, the whole back and forth about privatizing Tesla seems to have reassured him that “there is more than enough funding to take Tesla private,” he writes in the blog post (though who exactly would be paying for that remains unclear).
A small LED starts flashing in a dark room crowded with server racks, desks, and office chairs. On a glowing wall of monitors, lines of hundreds of tiny dots appear, mapping out the trajectory of a satellite currently orbiting the Earth. “It’s Kanopus-V-IK again,” mumbles a bored Space Force surveillance specialist. “It’s getting too close for my liking. Should we engage the jammer again?”
We don’t know what war in space will be like. But chances are, it won’t be like “Star Wars” — it’ll be more like that.
Outer space is no longer a mysterious place onto which we can map our aspirations. It’s never been cheaper and easier to launch a satellite into space. But in our effort to improve life on Earth and observe what we can of the cosmos, we’ve littered the space around our planet with growing quantities of junk.
The space surrounding Earth is getting so crowdedthat countries like the U.S., Russia, and China are starting to wonder who it will actually end up belonging to, and what they’ll have to do to keep control over it (yes, we have outer space treaties saying that it belongs to everyone, but who cares).
Countries are starting to wonder who will actually own space, and what they’ll have to do to keep control over it.
And so, the idea of the Space Force was born.
“Space is a war-fighting domain, just like the land, air and sea,” President Donald Trump told an audience of Marines in March.
Despite questionable support and even more questionable funding (the Space Force didn’t make it into Congress’ 2019 defense spending bill), President Trump seems dead set on making the Space Force a thing.
For international relations, the creation of the world’s first Space Force might be a disaster. It sets the stage for what some are already referring to as the “space arms race.”
The U.S. has been obsessing over how to militarize space since at least the Cold War. For instance, “Rods from God” or Project Thor was a conceptual weapon inspired by 1950s science fiction that would fling tungsten rods from outer space at ludicrous speeds at unsuspecting enemies on Earth below. According to Popular Science, this unhinged concept resurfaced in an official Air Force document from 2003, referencing “hypervelocity rod bundles” in its list of possible space-based weapons.
Luckily, space weapon systems like that never actually materialized (and still seem pretty ludicrous to us now). Space warfare in the 21st century looks pretty different — covertly launched satellites jam military GPS signals, and carry out reconnaissance missions using ultra-high resolution cameras, while troops prepare for on-the-ground attacks using satellite-based positioning systems.
There’d be no pew-pew handheld laser guns shot at individuals inside gleaming white spacecraft, no fighter jets and death stars. Instead, the Space Force is more likely to involve engineers clicking away at lots of screens.
But details on what a Space Force will actually look like, or even do, are scant. In a speech earlier this month, Vice President Mike Pence a four action plan to establish the Space Force, including the creation ofa Space Command and an Operations Force made up of high-ranking military experts. Pence, however, didn’t outline what the Space Force would do that the Air Force, or NASA, doesn’t do already, or how will we pay for it.
There’d be no pew-pew handheld laser guns shot at individuals inside gleaming white spacecraft, no fighter jets and death stars.
Despite the seemingly comical vagueness of this plan, a Space Force, should one actually be created, would address some real concerns.
Top of the list: protecting U.S. satellites. Recent reports suggest that Russia and China are developing space weapons designed to monitor and even take out U.S. military satellites. That could bring other American military operations to their knees — 800 U.S. satellites are in orbit, many of which provide the Pentagonwith intelligence and communication networks and GPS — and they weren’t exactly built to protect themselves in case of an attack. Spy satellites could collect valuable information from the enemy by scanning the ground, or interfere with signals from other satellites. In the most extreme cases, they could take down other satellites.
Without a stronger U.S. military presence in space, China and Russia will have ways to “interdict satellites both from a ground standpoint and from a space standpoint,” Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency Robert Ashley said at a Summit in Washington, according to Defense One. “The technology is being developed right now. It is coming in the near future.”
Ashley is right — the satellite fight is already heating up. In 2014, personnel at an undisclosed Air Force base rang the alarm bells when they discovered that Russian “Kamikaze” satellites (formally known as Kosmos 2499) were orbiting dauntingly close to U.S. deployed satellites. The sheer proximity made them worry that the Russian satellites could take out the American ones.
Then there was the time in January 2007when Chinese ballistic missiles intentionally blew up one of the country’s own outdated weather satellites into thousands of pieces of metal, as Wired reports. Strategic Command forces in Nebraska were shocked — being able to shoot a missile at a target moving faster than the Earth’s orbit in outer space could lead to much more drastic action. Perhaps the government was testing out an anti-satellite rocket?
The U.S. military isn’t taking the threat lightly. “Not surprisingly, nations are now actively testing methods to deny us continued use of space services during conflict,” William Shelton, former commander of the U.S. Air Force Space Command, told a House Armed Services Subcommittee in March 2017, CNBC reports.
Image Credit: Emily Cho
Now, proponents of Trump’s Space Force use the threat of other nations attacking satellites to legitimize its creation. “We are not initiating this. We are saying we will be able to defend our satellites in space. At the same time, if someone is going to try to engage in space with military means, we will not stand idly by,” U.S. Defense Secretary James Mattis told an audience during a trip to Brazil, as quoted by ABC News.
For the average person, though, there’s not much to worry about. A satellite probably wouldn’t fall on anyone’s head — more likely, radars, positioning systems, and telecommunication networks would collapse. We’d have a hard time getting around, but except for some International Space Station astronauts afraid of getting shredded by ballistic satellite bits, we’d be pretty safe.
But before the Space Force can shoot down any satellites at all, we’ll have to embark upon the long and tedious process of creating it. Shifting the responsibilities of thousands of military personnel, as Pence suggested, could take a very long time, and that’s only going to happen once the funds are nailed down and approved.And there’s no telling when that might be — Space Force could end up costing U.S. taxpayers an astronomical amount of money, which could make it a pretty tough sell for Congress.
The booming private spaceflight industry could help speed this up. Decades of government investment has allowed companies like SpaceX and Boeing to advance spaceflight technology so much that launching cargo into space has become a whole lot cheaper. So when the Space Force wants to, say, launch a satellite to combat the (very real, or, you know, not) threats to U.S. dominance in space, it’ll cost it a whole lot less to do so.
Not everyone is on board with the Space Force, of course. By allocating funds to a Space Force, the Trump administration is showing Americans what it values — security, ensuring American global dominance — and what it doesn’t — pressing human problems like restoring electricity to hurricane-ravaged Puerto Rico or bringing clean water to Flint, Michigan.
In truth, we have no idea what space wars of the future will look like. But establishing a Space Force is sure to bring about that future more quickly. By amplifying mistrust between nations — will the next person to touch down on the Moon try to claim territory? — the Trump administration is quashing the kind of exploration and innovation that enabled us to have a Space Force in the first place.
A WEARABLE SUPERMATERIAL. Apparel startup Vollebak’s latest offering isn’t exactly something you’d find at your local mall: The company just released the world’s first graphene jacket.
Graphene is a one-atom thick, transparent layer of carbon first isolated in 2004. It’s the strongest material ever discovered, extremely flexible, and highly conductive. And now, you can wear it on your body.
A GRAPPLING HOOK SHORT OF A BATSUIT. Vollebak constructed its $695 (!) reversible jacket from a high-stretch nylon coated on one side with a layer of graphene. The benefits of this graphene coating depend on how a person wears the jacket. If they leave the jacket somewhere warm and then wear it with the graphene facing inward, it warms their body. It can also redistribute heat from warmer parts of the body to cooler parts.
The graphene material also produces less humidity next to the skin than other materials, so you won’t feel as sticky and uncomfortable if you sweat while wearing the jacket. Bacteria can’t grow on graphene, and the jacket is both waterproof and breathable, so while water can’t permeate it, sweat can evaporate out of it, according to Vollebak’s website.
14 YEARS IN THE MAKING. We’ve been hearing about the wonders of graphene for about 14 years now, but the supermaterial has yet to make any sort of super impact on our daily lives. That’s because it’s difficult to work with and expensive to produce. Vollebak co-founder Nick Tidball is hopeful that the company’s jacket will set graphene down the path toward the mainstream.
“By releasing the graphene jackets out into the world as experimental prototypes, our aim is to open up our R&D process and accelerate discovery by finally getting graphene out of the research labs and into the field,” he told Fast Company.
For now, anyone with $695 can buy the jacket on Vollebak’s website. The company hopes that many customers will experiment on the jacket, in the process stumbling across features that no one has discovered yet.
If you just want something to wear during for your morning runs, though, you could probably find something cheaper than one made with the world’s most exciting supermaterial.
WI-FI FOR GOOD. You probably use Wi-Fi on the regular to connect your smartphone, computer, or other electronic device to the glory of the world wide web. But soon, that same technology could also keep you safe in real-life public areas.
According to a peer-reviewed study led by researchers from Rutgers University-New Brunswick, ordinary Wi-Fi can effectively and cheaply detect weapons, bombs, or explosive chemicals contained within bags.
The study earned the researchers a best paper award at the 2018 IEEE Conference on Communications and Network Security, which focused solely on cybersecurity.
DETECTING DANGER. According to the researchers’ paper, most dangerous objects contain metals or liquids. Those materials interfere with Wi-Fi signals in a way that researchers can detect. And the baggage a person might use to contain a bomb, weapon, or explosive device is typically made of materials — paper or fiber, often — through which Wi-Fi signals pass easily.
For their study, the researchers built a Wi-Fi weapon detection system that could analyze what happened to Wi-Fi signals as they encountered a nearby object or material. When they tested their system on 15 types of objects and six types of bags, they found that it could distinguish dangerous objects from non-dangerous ones 99 percent of the time. It could identify 90 percent of dangerous materials, accurately identifying metals 98 percent of the time, and liquids 95 percent of the time.
The bag the object was in presented another variable. If the object was in a standard backpack, the system could detect that object with a 95 percent accuracy rate. If it was wrapped in something else before being put in the bag, though, that figure dropped to 90 percent.
PUBLIC SAFETY. Currently, most airports in the U.S. use X-ray or CT scanning technology to check luggage for suspicious items. These instruments are expensive and hard to implement in large public areas. So many security teams in public venues have to rely on manual bag checks, even though they aren’t always as effective.
“In large public areas, it’s hard to set up expensive screening infrastructure like what’s in airports,” study co-author Yingying (Jennifer) Chen said in a press release. “Manpower is always needed to check bags, and we wanted to develop a complementary method to try to reduce manpower.”
For now, the team plans to focus on improving the accuracy of its Wi-Fi weapon detection system so that it can better detect an object’s shape, and modifying it to estimate the volume of liquids contained within bags. Eventually, it could become a standard security measure at festivals, sporting events, and other potential targets for terrorism.
ASTEROIDS APLENTY. Our solar system has no shortage of asteroids. At last count, NASA estimated there were 781,454 of the rocky bodies orbiting our Sun. Tens of thousands of those are floating between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter in an area appropriately named the asteroid belt.
Right now, asteroids kind of just do their own thing — we really only worry about them if they head toward the Earth or threaten one of our spacecraft. But our relationship with asteroids is set to change dramatically in the coming years. A university in Colorado plans to help us get ready for that — it recently launched the world’s first space resources program.
MONEY WAITING TO BE MINED. Just like Earth, asteroids are laced with valuable raw materials, everything from gold and silver to cobalt and titanium. A single asteroid discovered in 1852 contains an estimated $10,000 quadrillion worth of iron; if we extracted all the materials from the asteroids in the asteroid belt, NASA believes we could give every human on Earth $100 billion.
A number of private companies and government agencies are already positioning themselves to grab the biggest possible slice of the asteroid mining pie, but asteroid mining is about as easy as it sounds (i.e., not easy at all). That’s where the Colorado School of Mines’ new space resources program comes in.
A PIONEERING PROGRAM. According to the school’s website, the goal of the program is to prepare today’s scientists, engineers, entrepreneurs, economists, and policy makers for jobs in the burgeoning space resources industry. The school is offering students their choice of a Post-Baccalaureate certificate, a Master of Science degree, or a PhD, all of which focus on the “exploration, extraction, and use of [space] resources.”
The Colorado School of Mines is a particularly appropriate university to help prepare tomorrow’s space resources experts. According to the program’s website, “The broad topic of space resources brings together many fields in which Mines has a strong presence, including remote sensing, geomechanics, mining, materials/metallurgy, robotics/automation, advanced manufacturing, electrochemistry, solar and nuclear energy, and resource economics.”
Given all the resources space has to offer, it’s probably only a matter of time before humans try to extract them. The Colorado School of Mines’ space resources program could be the first of many like it that would ensure the pioneers of this new industry are well-equipped to meet its challenges.
THE DUGOUT LOOP. For a fan of the Los Angeles Dodgers, the only thing worse than watching the baseball team lose might be the drive to and from Dodger Stadium. LA traffic is often a nightmare anyway, but when fans swarm in and out of the 56,000-capacity stadium on game day, it truly reaches a new level.
Now, LA local Elon Musk has a plan to help with Dodger Stadium’s traffic problem: the Dugout Loop.
BELOW THE TRAFFIC. On Wednesday, Musk’s Boring Company announced the Dugout Loop via a tweet that included a link to the project on the company’s website. According to the site, the Dugout Loop will feature a single underground tunnel that connects Dodger Stadium to one of three LA neighborhoods: Los Feliz, East Hollywood, or Rampart Village.
Passengers will travel through the tunnel on one of about 100 autonomous electric “skates,” each of which can carry between 8 and 16 passengers. The pod-like skates will lower into the tunnel via lifts, and then zip along at speeds between 201 and 241 km/h (125 and 150 mph) to travel the tunnel’s 5.8 kilometers (3.6 miles) in 4 minutes.
Passengers will be able to reserve a spot on a skate via an app (sort of like how you might reserve a movie ticket), and a one-way trip on the Dugout Loop will cost around $1. The Boring Company expects the project will take fewer than 14 months to complete.
FROM TWITTER TO REALITY. As Elon Musk recently learned the hard way, tweeting a plan and actually bringing it to fruition are two very different things. However, the Boring Company does have a couple of things working in its favor.
First, it doesn’t need to worry about raising funds for the Dugout Loop — the company plans to pay for the project on its own. Second, the proposed route only travels below property owned by the Boring Company or public land, and the project already has the (tweeted) support of LA Mayor Eric Garcetti.
Initially, the Boring Company predicts the Dugout Loop will be able to transport roughly 1,400 people per event, but eventually, that could increase to 2,800 people. As for the other tens of thousands of people traveling to and from Dodger Stadium? Well, they’ll just have to deal with the traffic.
The words ‘cryptocurrency’ and ‘volatility’ never seem to be too far away from each other these days. Bitcoin’s famously (or rather, infamously) volatile valuation is the very thing that has drawn and repulsed so many to-and-from the crypto space.
Those who take one look at the cryptosphere and run in the other direction are justified — bitcoin’s unbelievable slide from roughy $20,000 a pop to its current valuation of around $6,400 [at the time of writing] is enough to give anyone pause. However, abandoning cryptocurrency completely also means letting go of all its technological features: decentralization, anonymity, and security.
The fact is that not all cryptocurrencies are volatile. In fact, some have been designed specifically to not be volatile at all. Instead, their value is fixed in essentially the same way that most fiat currencies are fixed. These are called ‘stablecoins.’
Because stablecoins do not have volatile valuations, they aren’t for speculative investment. Stablecoins provide the benefits of blockchain-based cryptocurrencies without the volatility. In theory, they can be used to quickly and cheaply to send cross-border payments, store value, and pay for everyday transactions.
StableCoins Are Set to Act as An Essential Building Block for the Internet of Value
If implemented on a widespread scale, stablecoins could have the ability to become an essential part of the so-called ‘Internet of Value,’ a global financial network in which value can be exchanged just as quickly as information flows on the internet.
Stablecoins are collateralized, meaning that they get their value from being ‘pegged’ to another asset. There are three kinds of stablecoins tied to three separate classes of assets:
Fiat-pegged currencies. These are tied to fiat-currencies, like the US dollar, on a one-to-one basis. This is the most common kind of stable coin.
Crypto-pegged stablecoins. These are coins that represent deposits of cryptocurrency; in this case, each of the deposits needs to be more valuable than the value of the stablecoins in order to prevent losses.
Stablecoins that aren’t pegged to any assets at all. These stablecoins are the most volatile, as their worth depends on the expectation that their value won’t deteriorate.
One of the more well-known stablecoins on the market is Tether, a fiat-pegged currency that claims to have $1 in the bank for every 1 USDT (‘Tether dollar’).
However, the company has come under fire for its chronic lack of transparency — Tether has not managed to produce an official audit of its funds in over a year, resulting in widespread suspicions that the company didn’t actually have enough money in the bank to back each USDT with $1.
Things got even more suspicious when conspiracy theories spread that Tether dollars had been created to falsely prop up the price of bitcoin. Results of a study conducted at the University of Texas later suggested that this theory may have been uncomfortably close to the truth.
Despite a growing number of accusations against Tether, the coin remained the default stablecoin in the cryptosphere due to a lack of a viable competitor. This began to change with the emergence of TrueUSD (TUSD), which was launched by decentralized tokenization platform TrustToken in early 2018.
TrustToken is a platform by which users can tokenize ‘real-world’ currencies and assets, like yen and real estate. The cryptocurrency was specifically “designed to meet the needs of high-volume individuals and institutions,” according to a blog post by TrustToken.
Escrow Provides TrueUSD Users With Familiarity and Transparency
Practically, this means that TrueUSD’s legal structure has been formed around a tool that high-volume crypto traders and institutional investors are already familiar with: escrow accounts. While TrustToken acknowledges in a blog post that escrow may not be “the endgame for decentralized money and tokenized asset management,” the company believes that “the trust and escrow industry already work well for the management and distribution of assets.”
This is because users can exchange directly with escrow accounts, rather than relying on a network’s protocol to exchange their tokens or dealing with “hidden bank accounts.” TrueUSD never actually directly interacts with or holds its users funds. Escrow accounts also grant token holders access to complete legal protection.
TrueUSD has a heavy focus on legal compliance and transparency, and regularly publishes third-party attestations.
TrustToken’s legal counsel has also provided a memorandum explicitly stating that TrueUSD tokens are not securities, an important consideration in the ever-changing regulatory landscape when it comes to cryptocurrency. “They are more akin to deposit & safekeeping receipts, which the SEC has previously analyzed and recommended no enforcement actions for their use,” notes the blog post.
Democratizing Liquidity
At this moment in time, stablecoins are the most significant means by money flows throughout the cryptosphere. They provide a bridge between exchanges when fiat currencies cannot be moved directly between them.
This is because in order to transfer USD from one exchange to another, an investor must withdraw a re-deposit funds, a process that can involve multiple KYC checks and high fees. Using an unpegged cryptocurrency like bitcoin presents an entirely different set of problems—most significantly, the fact that deep fluctuations in value on a daily basis make it impossible for users to know what their funds will be worth hours after they send them.
TrueUSD essentially makes both sets of these issues disappear, eliminating the on-boarding and off-boarding processes involved with transferring between exchanges, as well as the risk of losing value when using crypto as a tool for transference or store-of-value.
While TrueUSD is well-suited to high-volume and institutional investors, any trader of any size can use the cryptocurrency—including traders whose home economies may be increasingly reliant on financial instruments like TrueUSD as a means to securely store their savings.
“The market has demonstrated that there is strong demand for a trustworthy trading pair between cryptocurrencies and U.S. Dollars,” said Danny An, co-founder and CEO of TrustToken, to Bitcoin Magazine. While TrueUSD is still relatively new to the cryptosphere, it has already begun establishing itself as this trustworthy trading pair. Let’s see what the future will hold for this young currency.
The preceding communication has been paid for by TrustToken. This communication is for informational purposes only and does not constitute an offer or solicitation to sell shares or securities in TrustToken or any related or associated company. None of the information presented herein is intended to form the basis for any investment decision, and no specific recommendations are intended. This communication does not constitute investment advice or solicitation for investment. Futurism expressly disclaims any and all responsibility for any direct or consequential loss or damage of any kind whatsoever arising directly or indirectly from: (i) reliance on any information contained herein, (ii) any error, omission or inaccuracy in any such information or (iii) any action resulting from such information.
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