THE DESTRUCTIVE BLOB. In 2013, an unstoppable entity began terrorizing the Pacific. At times it spanned the entire stretch of ocean from Alaska to South America. No, it wasn’t some hyper-aggressive shark or killer whale — it was “the blob,” a mass of water several degrees warmer than the ocean’s average temperature. It’s the kind of thing you might (foolishly) welcome in a chilly swimming pool, but can cause absolute havoc in the ocean.
DEVASTATING FOR MAN AND FISH. Early in 2017, temperatures in parts of the ocean, including the Gulf of Alaska, returned to normal, but the blob’s effects continue to linger in the region.
Thanks mainly to the blob, the Gulf’s cod population is now at the lowest level ever recorded, an expert at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), a U.S. agency focused on the world’s bodies of water and atmosphere, told NPR. In March, Alaskan governor Bill Walker even reached out to the federal government to ask it to declare the state’s cod fishery a disaster so former workers, and the governments that collected their taxes, would qualify for relief funds.
“Throughout the Gulf of Alaska, direct impacts will be felt by vessel owners and operators, crew, and fish processors, as well (as) support industries that sell fuel, supplies, and groceries,” he wrote in his letter. “Local governments will feel the impact to their economic base and the State of Alaska will see a decline in fishery-related tax revenue.”
CODLESS FOREVER? While some researchers think the cod population could eventually recover, fisheries biologist Mike Litzow from the University of Alaska doesn’t think it will. “When you push a population down really hard, the resources that population used to rely on can be exploited by other populations,” he told NPR.
Ultimately, this could be another example of the widespread devastation caused by climate change, this time in the form of a murky ocean dweller known as the blob.
BEYOND HUMAN. Prosthetic limbs have come a long way in recent years. From primitive designs that were little more than useless placeholders for the real thing, we now have high-tech devices that wearers can control with their thoughts. These prostheses can help people with missing limbs feel “whole” again. But in a new study, researchers set out to see if such devices could make humans more than whole.
Specifically, a pair of researchers from the Advanced Telecommunications Research Institute in Japan wanted to know if giving someone a supernumerary robotic limb (SRL), a mind-controlled robotic limb that worked alongside the person’s two biological ones, could give that person multitasking abilities beyond those of the average human.
They published their research in the journal Science Robotics on July 25.
TWO TASKS, THREE HANDS. For their study, the researchers asked 15 volunteers to sit in a chair with an SRL positioned as if it were a third arm coming from their own body. On the head of each volunteer, the researchers placed special cap that tracked the brain’s electrical activity. The cap transmitted that data to a computer that then translated it into movement in the SRL.
The result: all a volunteer had to do to control the SRL was think about an action.
Next, they asked the volunteers to complete two tasks. To accomplish one — balancing a ball on a board — they used their natural limbs. For the other (grasping and releasing a bottle), they used the SRL system. The researchers asked the volunteers to complete the tasks sometimes separately, sometimes simultaneously.
In 20 trials, the volunteers successfully completed both tasks using the three limbs about 75 percent of the time. In other words, they were able to complete two tasks simultaneously that would have been essentially impossible with just two limbs.
TRAINING THE BRAIN. When you think you’re “multitasking,” you aren’t actually paying attention to two things at once — your brain just switches rapidly between the two tasks. Past SRL systems required the user to concentrate on just the task at fake hand — this system is the first that could “read” a multitasking mind, sifting out the user’s intentions for the SRL. It can do this simply because it’s more advanced than previous versions.
The researchers even believe their system could essentially help humans become better at multitasking even when they don’t have a third limb helping out. “By operating this brain-machine interface, we have an idea that we may be able to train the brain itself,” researcher Shuichi Nishio told The Verge.
Future research will endeavor to figure out whether that’s true or not. If it is, we might be able to enhance our minds by temporarily enhancing our bodies.
Hackers, scammers, gamers, DIY-ers — the internet has been a boon for a lot of people. But for media, it’s largely been a disaster. Newspapers and magazines are trying to balance keeping their content affordable, accessible, and accurate, while still making enough dough to keep operations afloat. Information not trapped behind paywalls or subscription models runs the risk of being sponsored content, or just plain wrong. Social media has inflamed the issue, allowing users to share untrustworthy and unsavory news while dispensing with the traditional markers that would signal readers to be skeptical.
The result: our current age of mistrust and misdirection, rife with well-financed “fake news.” And no one knows how to fix it. Facebook is expanding its army of fact checkers and moderators to stem the tide of misleading information on its platform. Congress is caught up in futile hearings about political bias in content filtering practices by social media giants, evading discussions of much more pressing matters (hint: they involve Russia).
A new startup thinks it might have cracked it. Civil wants to be a platform where independent newsrooms can foster direct relationships with their readers, who can have a real stake — in the form of cryptocurrency — in supporting publications they trust.
It’s an ambitious project with a lot of moving parts, but the experiment is already underway. Back in October 2017, the Brooklyn-based company received $5 million in funding from blockchain platform ConsenSys, and expanded its operations to 24 full-time staff members. Now, with its token launch (what others in the same position might call an ICO or Initial Coin Offering) slated for August 13, more people are going to have to ask themselves: will it work?
Here’s how it’s supposed to work (it’s a little complicated, so stick with me). Every community member (readers and journalists) gets to invest some of their real-life money to buy a certain number of Civil tokens. If readers think a particular newsroom is unethical in some way, they can “challenge” it (details of the exact process are still unclear). Anyone with Civil tokens gets to vote on what they think is the right or “ethical” side by gambling their Civil tokens towards it. Betters in the majority get rewarded with more tokens; those in the minority won’t, unless they themselves challenged a newsroom.
The same tokens could also be used to pay journalists (or at least tip them), using the smart contracts inherent to blockchain to set up a transparent kickback system for writers, editors, and illustrators that readers want to support.
But Civil plans to leave the business decisions entirely to the newsrooms themselves. “We think it’s important for newsrooms to maintain full independence from The Civil Media Company, as we never wish to exert undue editorial influence on them — even if it means an ‘anti-Civil newsroom’ launches on Civil — as long as they play by the rules, it’s fair game,” Civil Media Company co-founder Matt Coolidge tells Futurism.
“We think it’s important for newsrooms to maintain full independence from The Civil Media Company, as we never wish to exert undue editorial influence on them.”
Yes, despite its laissez-faire attitude towards the business practices of individual newsrooms, Civil has done a lot to try to make sure only the most deserving news sources end up on its platform. The company is still in the process of crafting a full-blown Constitution that lays out Civil’s journalistic standards in detail. One of the elements the Constitution demands: a Civil Council, made up of journalism heavyweights. Civil Foundation CEO Vivian Schiller will appoint the Council (readers will appoint the next round) that will act as a court of appeals for any newsroom challenges that are particularly controversial and involve one or multiple infractions of the Constitution.
“[The Constitution] is the foundational document for all activity that occurs on the Civil platform. And more broadly, what will ensure that Civil is above all always rooted in its commitment to be a marketplace for sustainable journalism, where journalists are beholden to their readers above all else,” Coolidge says.
Rogue actors that want to sway challenges in their favor by buying up a bunch of tokens — like, say, a group of alt-right readers who invest a bunch of money to discount credible news sources they disagree with — would be easy to spot. Huge sums of tokens changing hand could trigger an alert. And thanks to Civil’s extremely rigorous and lengthy registration process— multiple journalists have already failed their entry quiz already — Civil would already have each community member’s anonymized information (unique cryptowallet addresses), making the rogue actors identifiable. Any anomalous behavior could then be challenged with a vote.
Credit: Civil
If this works the way Civil thinks it might, everyone wins: journalists and newsrooms would be able to support themselves and move away from a business model that relies on capricious ad revenue; readers can have confidence in what they read because they’ve voted with their wallets to support only the good stuff.
Civil is also planning to give newsrooms the ability to send every piece of content to its Ethereum-based blockchain, making any existing news content near impossible to tamper with, effectively ending any form of censorship. And we already have proof that blockchain can actually stop censorship: Chinese internet users managed to circumvent their government’s strong-handed censorship practices by adding an investigative piece about a vaccine maker inside the metadata of a blockchain transaction.
But whether the Civil platform will actually catch on is practically impossible to tell at this point.
On August 13, Civil will launch 100 million CVL tokens as part of its token launch. It will reserve 33 percent of those tokens for itself; another third it will give out as grants to “mission-aligned third parties” (more details will emerge as we near the token launch, Civil has assured me). The remaining 34 percent it intends to sell. If it does, their total value won’t exceed $32 million (this is called a hard cap — the fixed number of coins that will be issued also determines the value of each token).
Some who already established businesses on the platform are frustrated with this. Too high of a hard cap, and a token’s value would be diluted; too low and the token launch may have trouble getting off the ground. And Civil decided to set that bar relatively low. Realistically, even if the tokens reach their absolute highest value,they wouldn’t be able to support entire newsroom operations immediately; depending on how the ICO goes, a single token will only be worth 24 to 94 cents.
Newsrooms and journalists will feel the heat. Even thousands of tokens wouldn’t be enough to pay a single journalist’s salary. So for now, they will have to finance their operations the old fashioned way, instead of relying entirely on Civil’s cryptoeconomy.
As part of their podcast ZigZag, veteran journalist Manoush Zomrodi and radio producer Jen Poyant started creating a media business on Civil’s platform. And the duo is not all that excited about the ICO.
“Not that we’re going to get Lambos, you and I. But the money we could have gotten out of this sale [Civil’s token launch]would fund our business the way a venture capitalist may have done,” says Jen Poyant in Chapter 7: A New Frontier for Journalism?. “But that’s definitely not going to happen.” Instead, they will still have to rely on conventional venture capital to support their business, not just CVL tokens.
By launching its token at such a bargain basement rate, Civil seems to be insulating its token from speculation, to ensure its value doesn’t oscillate as bitcoin’s has in the past. “CVL is meant to play a critical utility in the ongoing self-governance of the platform, not to be a speculative vehicle of any kind,” Coolidge says. In other words, Civil’s token is there to act as a vote, or a way for you to keep unethical news off the platform — specifically not a get-rich-quick scheme.
“CVL is… not [meant] to be a speculative vehicle of any kind.”
Since no one one is going to make beaucoup bucks from the token launch, fiat currencies are still essential for everything to work, at least for the time being. “The forthcoming CVL token will unlock a lot of additional community features, but many Civil-newsroom contributing writers, editors, and illustrators are currently being compensated for their work in fiat currency,” David Moore, the founder of Sludge, one of the first newsrooms to be built on Civil’s platform, tells Futurism. But he is hopeful about creating incentives for freelancers by paying them in Civil tokens.
There are, of course, a lot of questions about how Civil will work that are still impossible to answer. What will a Civil-powered comments section actually look like? Will journalists ever be remunerated entirely in tokens, or will they have to rely on income through conventional means? Will readers’ ability to exert such a direct influence on the kind of news they read create healthy conversation with lots of opposing viewpoints, or create an echo-chamber just for one?
Civil’s mission is an optimistic one, perhaps fatally so. Is its convoluted tactic the only way to solve journalism for good? No, and Civil Foundation CEO Vivian Schiller agrees. She tells Zomrodi and Poyant on Chapter 7 of ZigZag: “Is Civil going to be the answer to all the problems of journalism? Of course not. It doesn’t have to be the answer to all the problems. It has to be a part of the answer, part of the solution.”
Editor’s Note (7/26/18 at 11:10 AM ET): This article previously mischaracterized several aspects of Civil’s platform works. Users can lose tokens during a challenge only if they bring up the challenge, not if they vote for the losing side. Also, Civil does not store community member data — it only stores anonymized cryptowallet addresses. The article has been updated to reflect the correct information. We regret the error.
SORRY, DON. President Donald Trump has made it clear: he wants his legacy to include establishing the world’s first space force, a military branch dedicated to off-world conflicts. Congress, however, doesn’t appear so keen on the idea — at least not right now.
On Monday, Congressional lawmakers agreed on a defense spending bill for the fiscal year 2019. The bill directs the office of the secretary of defense to “develop a space warfighting policy.” What it doesn’t do is make any mention of a “space force.”
The House and Senate will vote on the bill this summer, and if it passes, it’ll move to President Trump’s desk to sign into law.
KICKING THE CAN. A U.S. space force will remain a pipe dream unless it garners support of those in Congress; they’re the only ones with the authority to establish and fund a new branch of the nation’s armed forces.
Still, the omission from the 2019 bill could have more to do with timing than Congress’ actual opinion on the matter. Trump only gave the order to establish the branch in June, weeks after the administration submitted most of its other proposals for the bill, a White House official told The Atlantic.
CYBER WARFARE. While the bill didn’t include any mention of a space force, it did include something else groundbreaking: the establishment of the U.S.’s first policy on cyber warfare. There have been a growing number of these kinds of attacks in recent years (compared to the number of space attacks, which have so far been zero). So it’s not entirely surprising that Congress is choosing to first focus on that very immediate threat before committing resources to defending our interests in space.
SHARING INFORMATION. China is in the midst of vaccine scandal. This weekend, news broke that drug manufacturer Changchun Changsheng Biotechnology was selling unsafe vaccines, causing an uproar amongst Chinese citizens, as we reported Tuesday. A blogger writing under the nom de plume “Beast” (?? shouye) was one of the first to break the story; an investigative article they published on the topic went viral on the WeChat social network.
Chinese internet monitors deleted the story within hours and quickly removed any reposts. However, internet users figured out a way to share the story that will keep it permanently out of reach of these monitors: by adding it to a blockchain.
ON THE CHAIN. Adding the article to a blockchain was actually pretty easy. A user simply sent themselves about $0.47 worth of the digital asset ether and posted the full article in the transaction’s metadata, a section reserved for notes or other information. Because the Ethereum blockchain is a public ledger, anyone can view this transaction (and read the included article). The ledger is also decentralized, so there’s no single authority Chinese officials could pressure to remove the article.
Technode, a site focused on China’s tech industry, was the first to catch this clever use of the blockchain, but it isn’t the first time Chinese citizens have turned to blockchain to share content that Chinese internet monitors had removed. In April, a student published an open letter detailing the threats she received for attempting to obtain information from her university about a sexual assault case. After internet monitors removed the letter, students added it to the Ethereum blockchain, where it remains.
TWO INTERNETS. The internet in China looks far different from that in the U.S. and many other nations. According to several human rights organizations, the nation employs more than 40,000 internet monitors whose sole job is to ensure information the government doesn’t want the public seeing stays off the internet. Chinese citizens can’t use Google, Facebook, and a number of other sites many of us take for granted. They also can’t access overseas Chinese news sites or use words the government doesn’t approve of (for example, they can’t post the word “disagree” on Weibo, a popular Chinese site that’s essentially a Twitter-Facebook hybrid).
By using the blockchain in this new way, Chinese citizens may have finally found a way to express themselves that’s beyond the government’s reach.
FIRST IMPRESSIONS. When we see someone for the first time, we make internal snap judgements about them. We can’t help it, we’re just judgmental like that. After looking at the person for just a few seconds, we might note their gender, race, and age or decide whether or not we think they’re attractive, trustworthy, or kind.
After actually getting to know the person, we might find out that our initial perception of them was wrong. No big deal, right?
Well, it’s a very big deal when you consider how our assumptions could shape how the artificial intelligence (AI) of the future make increasingly important decisions.
In an effort to illustrate this issue to the public, researchers from the University of Melbourne created Biometric Mirror.
PUBLIC PERCEPTION. Biometric Mirror is an AI that analyzes a person’s face and then displays 14 characteristics about them, including their age, race, and perceived level of attractiveness.
To teach the system to do this, the Melbourne researchers started by asking human volunteers to judge thousands of photos for the same characteristics. This became the dataset Biometric Mirror referenced when analyzing new faces. Because the information these volunteers provided was subjective, so was Biometric Mirror’s output. If most of the human respondents thought people with beards seemed less trustworthy, that would influence how the Biometric Mirror judged people with beards.
THE ETHICS OF AI. To use Biometric Mirror, a person just has to stand in front of the system for a few seconds. It quickly scans their face and then lists their perceived characteristics on a screen. The AI then asks the person to think about how they’d feel if it shared that information with others. How would they feel if they didn’t get a job because the AI ranked them as having a low level of trustworthiness? Or if law enforcement officials decided to target them because they ranked highly for aggression?
“Our study aims to provoke challenging questions about the boundaries of AI. It shows users how easy it is to implement AI that discriminates in unethical or problematic ways which could have societal consequences,” lead researcher Niels Wouters said in a press release. “By encouraging debate on privacy and mass-surveillance, we hope to contribute to a better understanding of the ethics behind AI.”
ELIMINATING BIAS. A system as biased as Biometric Mirror could have major consequences as AI becomes more widely used and makes increasingly important decisions. And this isn’t just some future possibility, either; we’re already seeing examples show up in today’s systems. While researchers work on figuring out ways to ensure future systems don’t contain those same flaws, it’s important that the public consider the potential impact of biased AI on society. Biometric Mirror could help them do just that.
SAY “AHHHH.” Do you dread going to the dentist just as much you disdain attending children’s birthday parties and doing your taxes?
Researchers at Columbia University’s Center for Precision Dental Medicine want to change that. (At least the bit about dentists. You’re on your own for the other stuff.)
They’ve transformed a 15,000-square-foot space into their high-tech vision of the dental clinic of the future, one designed to decrease patient wait times, lower stress levels, and maximize comfort, according to an article published by The Outline.
RFIDS EVERYWHERE. At this clinic, a patient starts by signing in at an online portal. They receive a wristband equipped with radio-frequency identification (RFID) to wear throughout the rest of their visit. This allows the clinic’s staff to always know where the patient is, what procedure they’re receiving, and any additional information about the patient. No more “lost charts” to slow things down.
The clinic also includes RFID trackers on its chairs that note when patients and doctors “sign in” for a procedure. This could let staff know how long patients typically wait and address issues if they arise. The RFID tracker in the chair can also link up with the one on the patient’s wristband, noting the position the patient preferred during their last visit and automatically adjusting itself to match it.
RFID tags on six dental instruments track everything about their use, from when someone uses them and for how long to the last time someone cleaned or sharpened them.
A BETTER EXPERIENCE. A pair of cameras installed in each dental chair record each procedure, giving the dentist the opportunity to analyze their own work or that of other dentists. Meanwhile, a 3D milling machine dramatically decreases the amount of time needed to produce a crown, from the standard two weeks (the time it takes to send a patient’s info to the manufacturer, who makes it bespoke to the patient) to just 15 minutes.
Perhaps the most exciting development for those who dread the dentist is the tech to track patient stress levels. Within the next six months, the clinic plans to equip each of its 48 digital chairs with biofeedback systems. These systems will measure patients’ heart rates and oxygen levels during procedures.
Eventually, the clinic might add facial recognition capabilities to the chairs’ cameras to further improve the dentist’s ability to know when the patient is experiencing stress or pain. This could let dentists know when patients need a break or if what the dentist is doing is painful, even if the patient doesn’t speak up.
BETTER CARE. The clinic’s high-tech take on dentistry has the potential to improve more than a patient’s experience. By leveraging all the data it collects about patients both during and after their procedures, it could also improve their dental care. For example, if the clinic notes that a certain type of person is more likely than others to experience complications during a procedure or need extra pain meds afterwards, it might chose to take a different approach for their treatment.
For now, the clinic is still a singular example of what the dental care of the future could look like, but as Steven Erde, Columbia’s College of Dental Medicine’s chief information officer, told The Outline, it’s already generating “significant interest” from clinics across the nation. That means you might not have to wait too long before you find yourself actually able to relax once settled into a dental chair.
A coach is indispensable to the serious athlete — everyone from Olympians to up-and-coming youth athletes needs experts who can spot the strengths and weaknesses of an athlete’s style and cater to their personal needs. But now AI systems are almost sophisticated enough to do the job just as well as — better in some ways — than the old human experts.
HomeCourt, an iPhone app that basketball players can use to track their shots, might be the first of its kind. If the phone’s camera is propped up and aimed at them while they practice, the app will track the position and success rate of each throw. As The Wall Street Journal reported, the free app offers users real-time feedback, complete with an automatically-spliced video recording of every single shot the athlete takes so they can check their form. At least, it does for 300 shots per month — more than that, and a user is prompted to pay $8 for a subscription.
There are other apps that coaches and athletes use, of course. Coach’s Eye, for instance, lets athletes review and annotate their footage. But while many of them help athletes film themselves, none use AI to help improve performance. Without an expert there to review the footage, these athletes may not even know what they’re looking for.
Credit: Emily Cho
HomeCourt isn’t yet as sophisticated as a real-life human coach — right now, the app’s AI gets confused if there’s more than one person on the court. But David Lee, the Co-Founder and CEO of NEX Team, the company behind HomeCourt, is optimistic for how AI will be able to serve athletes in the future.
“In the future, we believe we can provide a platform where coaches and trainers can be actively training and coaching their players through the app from anywhere, anytime,” Lee told Futurism. He added that some athletes are already using HomeCourt to work remotely with their coaches when one of them is on the road. That way, athletes can get feedback from coaches based on what the AI saw during a solo practice session.
HomeCourt’s AI, rudimentary as it might be, represents an important first step. Artificial intelligence and apps — cheap compared to the elite coaches that kids are expected to hire if they want to break into travel leagues or thrive in a highly-competitive sport — could democratize the way that people can train and improve.
HomeCourt’s AI, rudimentary as it might be, represents an important first step. Artificial intelligence and apps could democratize the way that people can train and improve.
In the future, Lee plans to make the app capable of new measurements so it can glean even more about a player, some of which a human coach can’t readily discern. For basketball players, HomeCourt would look for things like jump height, speed, and release time, and analyze how each factor plays a role in an athlete’s accuracy.
“From the data, we can extract what shooting form has the highest consistency and success specifically for you,” says Lee. “The idea here is not to identify the perfect shot, but your perfect shot.”
He also hopes to bring the HomeCourt’s level of analysis to other sports. Tennis might be a natural next step, since the court is similarly marked with clear lines that help the AI gauge where people are standing. But other sports and activities may see AI coaches in the near future as well. Even some unconventional ones like yoga.
“We can track a person’s poses for something like downward dog and provide instant feedback about adjustments to help a yogi improve their poses,” says Lee. “Simply seeing ourselves doing yoga along with actionable insights could revolutionize yoga since most people don’t currently get any feedback about their poses and how they can improve.”
While having your smartphone film you while you stretch and balance may ruin yoga’s relaxing elements for some, AI could be a great learning tool for the many yoga practitioners who only do yoga at home, instructed by a video. Once people get the fundamentals down, they would presumably be able to unplug and enjoy yoga’s meditative side.
Whether or not HomeCourt (or a similar AI system) reaches a given sport, it’s clear that sports technology is becoming more sophisticated than ever before. Athletes and coaches have access to an incredible amount of analytics and data, which helps them find more specific ways to improve their games in ways that wouldn’t have been imaginable in the past. The key to improving sports through AI, of course,is to make sure that these technologies are available to everyone. Otherwise, tools like HomeCourt will only help the privileged few who already had access to the best tools.
While the premium membership to HomeCourt isn’t unaffordable for most, it’s yet another subscription to keep track of. Meanwhile, the price tags for other advanced sports technology can easily climb into the triple digits, or even higher.
It’s easy to wonder whether these high-tech systems can really deliver on the promise to bring competitive sports to people who have been historically priced out. Until more competitors arrive to the artificial intelligence coaching space, we may have to wait and see.
While one can’t expect one company like HomeCourt to solve the problems of wealth inequality in sports, what we can all hope is increased outreach to make sure that those who would actually benefit from smarter sports tech actually get to use it.
BIG MONEY, BIG PHARMA. Want to unlock the secrets hidden in your DNA? Go for it, as long as you’re prepared to have those secrets shared with Big Pharma.
On Wednesday, 23andMe announced a four-year collaboration with multi-billion dollar British pharmaceutical company GlaxoSmithKline (GSK). For the duration of the deal, 23andMe will only collaborate with GSK on any drug development projects. It will provide GSK with access to its database of genetic information, as well as its analysis tools; GSK will contribute its expertise in discovering, developing, and commercializing drugs.
As part of the deal, GSK bought $300 million in equity in 23andMe. The companies will co-fund any projects together, splitting any proceeds from newly discovered drugs or treatments.
NO SURPRISE. Ultimately, the deal with GSK really shouldn’t come as a shocker to anybody. 23andMe was already providing researchers with access to its data in exchange for money. “We have a lot of research partnerships,” Kate Black, the company’s head of privacy, told Gizmodo in April 2017. “Some of these include financial remuneration.”
But many of those previous partners were academics or worked at nonprofits, such as the Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson’s Research. Now, for the next four years at least, only one for-profit company will have permission to access 23andMe’s database — it’ll essentially have a monopoly on the wealth of information 23andMe has collected since its inception.
As 23andMe CEO Anne Wojcicki wrote in a blog post published Thursday, customers have the option to opt-in or opt-out of sharing their data at any time, so someone who opted-in a year ago could choose to opt-out in light of this new deal with GSK (though the idea of ever really stopping the spread of your genomic data once you’ve shared it might be a pipe dream).
THE BOTTOM LINE. Whether customers choose to opt-in or not, the idea of two for-profit companies teaming up to trade personal information about one company’s customers in this way doesn’t sit right with at least one expert.
“It’s one thing for NIH (the National institutes of Health) to ask people to donate their genome sequences for the higher good,” Peter Pitts, president of the Center for Medicine in the Public Interest, a healthcare research and education nonprofit, said to NBC News. “But when two for-profit companies enter into an agreement where the jewel in the crown is your gene sequence and you are actually paying for the privilege of participating, I think that’s upside-down.”
The key word in all of that is “for-profit.” 23andMe never marketed itself as anything other than a for-profit company, so if you’re surprised it’s now selling access to your DNA profile to the highest bidder, maybe you just haven’t been paying attention.
EARLY MORNING SURPRISE. At around 6 AM PT Thursday morning, Virgin Galactic, the aerospace company founded by Richard Branson, took to Twitter to casually announce plans to test one of its SpaceShipTwo (SS2) spaceplanes.
Roughly three-and-a-half hours later, the spaceplane, named the VSS Unity, took off from the Mojave Air and Space Port in Mojave, CA. About 20 minutes after that, it touched down. No livestream, no press release — just a dozen or so Twitter posts, and it was over.
SUPERSONIC SPACEPLANE. Launching a SS2 is pretty different from a typical rocket launch. Instead of launching vertically, a jet-powered craft called a White Knight Two (WK2) takes off horizontally like a plane, carrying a SS2 up to its launch altitude of 15 kilometers (9.4 miles). The SS2 then separates from the carrier vehicle and flies into the upper atmosphere. Both craft later landing on a runway just like planes.
For Thursday’s launch, the WK2 was named VMS Eve. This was VMS Eve’s 252nd flight and VSS Unity’s 14th, but it was only the third rocket-powered test flight for VSS Unity (in some test flights, it never separated from its carrier; in others, it separated but didn’t ignite its engines, simply gliding without power). According to Virgin Galactic’s Twitter posts, the goal of today’s test was to “gather more data on supersonic flight, aerodynamics, as well as thermal dynamics,” as well as analyze the conditions within Unity’s cabin.
ONE LAUNCH CLOSER. On Wednesday, Bloomberg published a video interview with Virgin Galactic CEO Richard Branson in which he asserted the company is closing in on its goal of sending people to space. “Before the end of the year, I hope to be sitting in a Virgin Galactic spaceship, going to space,” he told interviewer David Rubenstein. If and when that happens, expect to hear a lot about it.
YOU ARE NOT A MATCH. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) just spent $12.33 to test a system that could quite literally cost people their lives. On Thursday, the nonprofit organization, which focuses on preserving the rights of U.S. citizens, published a blog post detailing its test of Rekognition, a facial identification tool developed and sold by Amazon.
Using Rekognition’s default setting of 80 percent confidence (meaning the system was 80 percent certain it was correct when it signaled a match), the ACLU scanned a database of 25,000 publicly available mugshots looking to match them to photos of every sitting representative in Congress, in both the Senate and the House of Representatives.
Rekognition matched 28 Congresspeople to mugshots. It was wrong, but it found matches anyway.
THE POLICE AND P.O.C. Not only did Rekognition mistakenly believe that those 28 Congresspeople were the same people in the mugshots, the people it wrongfully matched were disproportionately people of color; while people of color make up just 20 percent of Congress, according to the ACLU, they accounted for 39 percent of the false matches.
“People of color are already disproportionately harmed by police practices, and it’s easy to see how Rekognition could exacerbate that,” wrote the ACLU in its post. “An identification — whether accurate or not — could cost people their freedom or even their lives.”
AMAZON’S RESPONSE. An Amazon spokesperson told The Verge that poor calibration was likely the reason Rekognition falsely matched so many members of Congress. “While 80 percent confidence is an acceptable threshold for photos of hot dogs, chairs, animals, or other social media use cases, it wouldn’t be appropriate for identifying individuals with a reasonable level of certainty,” said the spokesperson. They said Amazon recommends at least a 95 percent confidence threshold for any situation where a match might have significant consequences, such as when used by law enforcement agencies.
HALT! While anyone can use the system relatively cheaply (Rekognition, according to its web site, “charges you only for the images processed, minutes of video processed, and faces stored”), like the ACLU did, Amazon is actively marketing Rekognition to government and law enforcement agencies. Several are already using the service.
The ACLU isn’t the only organization actively petitioning against this use; Amazon shareholders and employees have urged the company to stop providing Rekognition to government agencies. So have dozens of civil rights groups and tens of thousands members of the public.
So far, Amazon has not indicated that it plans to comply with these requests. But perhaps, if members of Congress see just how flawed the system really is, they’ll be compelled to take action, placing a halt on any law enforcement use of facial recognition software, as the ACLU requests in its blog post.
We’ve only been to the Moon a handful of times. But we’ve already set our sights on a far more ambitious mission: colonize Mars.
If you believe the hype, it may happen in just a few decades. Elon Musk anticipates that SpaceX’s BFR (big f–king rocket) will take its first handful of passengers to the Red Planet by 2024 — if everything goes according to plan, that is. Mars One’s crew, which will take up permanent residence on Mars, is slated to launch by 2031. NASA is aiming for a similar mission by 2033.
Getting humans there is hard enough. But surviving there, especially over a prolonged period? That’s a whole other question. A structure on Mars would have to withstand intense solar radiation and massive daily temperature changes, and provide a pressurized environment inside for humans to inhabit over a prolonged period of time. Weight and space limits aboard the rockets that will get us there will make the design task even harder.
3D printing the habitat seems like humanity’s best bet. The Martian surface comes with its own challenges, but back on Earth, 3D printing technology in home construction is proving to be very promising. A 3D printer with local resources from the surface as the “ink” would mean that astronauts wouldn’t have to fill up precious cargo space with building materials. Plus, the reduced weight would make Mars colonization substantially less expensive.
So NASA held a contest for the best 3D-printed habitat that might actually work on Mars. That was in 2014. The first two phases of the project required teams to submit renderings, and come up with material technologies. Now, four years after launching the contest, NASA has narrowed the finalists to just five brilliant designs. The fives teams, which hail from a handful of American universities and companies that specialize in architecture or construction, have now come up with an entire structure that takes advantage of autonomous 3D printing on the surface of another planet; they will also share a $100,000 prize. For the next phase, each team will have to create a third-scale model of their designs.
Here are what the five finalists propose:
First Place: Team Zopherus
Team Zopherus from Rogers, Arkansas came up with the idea of mixing “Martian concrete” using locally available materials — ice, calcium oxide, and Martian rocks.
A huge metal dome houses the concrete mixer and 3D printer. The dome protects the structure the printer is constructing from the harsh environment. Once the printer is done with a section, it lifts itself up, and repeats the process elsewhere. The resulting habitats are hexagonal, made of finished concrete that the team claims would be able to withstand the harsh local climate and absorb enough radiation to protect humans living within. The metal dome that houses the printer, plus any air locks and windows for the final construction will have to be shipped separately from Earth.
Second Place: Team AI SpaceFactory
The team from New York tried to inject an “element of humanity” into its habitat design to create a “credible and evocative habitat with an alien yet familiar beauty” according to the team’s website. The habitat, dubbed Marsha, is cylindrical to maximize usable floor area and pressurization efficiency. Multiple floors also means inhabitants won’t end up murdering each other (that’s a real concern), offering each activity or group of people their own closed off space.
Sliding bearings on the floor allow the walls of the habitat to “breathe” as it expands and contracts as the outside temperature changes.
There are two layers: an outer shell to keep the harsh environment out, and an inner shell that houses people. The outer shell is made out of a reusable thermoplastic that is mixed with local rock fibers to reinforce it. This type of plastic, called PLA, is great for this application because it doesn’t expand or contract as much as other plastics when temperatures drop or spike.
Team Kahn-Yates
The team from Jackson, Mississippi designed a habitat that has a prefabricated core, which the lander plops down on the Martian surface. Once it lands, the core extends a giant print arm that 3D prints the oval habitat’s foundation, then its walls.
The habitat’s exterior shell has carefully-designed openings that allow sunlight to reach the inside. A gap between the outer shell and the interior core provide space for lush garden that can help filter the air inside.
Team SEArch+Apis Cor
The team from New York balanced on the habitat’s ability to shield inhabitants from radiation while still allowing sunlight to filter into the design’s interior. The team partnered up with Apis Cor, an (Earth-bound) construction company that has already 3D-printed entire buildings using a special type of concrete.
In this model, the inhabitants live inside a pair of “inflatable volumes” that can be deployed to the Martian surface before the crew arrives. A 3D printed shell, made of rough loose rocks, would shield the inflatable habitats from radiation.
Team Northwestern University
Like previous team, Northwestern’s team designed an inflatable pressurized vessel that houses the 3D printer. The outer shell would be printed out of resources available on the crust nearby.
The layout focuses all “wet rooms” (kitchen, bathroom, and lab) along one side of the habitat to concentrate plumbing and other mechanical features to one area. NASA’s HI-SEAS experiment, which simulated space exploration, informed the proportions of the different rooms.
TUBULAR TESLA. If you’re looking at which forms of transportation are the cleanest, the surfboard is hard to beat. It produces no emissions — the only fuel needed to get from Point A to Point Break is a gnarly wave. Sure, it might not be ideal for your morning commute if it happens to involve inland roads or electronics. But that isn’t stopping Tesla from adding surfboards to its clean transportation offerings.
On July 28, Tesla added the Limited Edition Tesla Surfboard to its online shop. According to the product page, the Tesla surfboard features the same paint finishes as Tesla’s vehicles and will fit in the company’s Model S, Model X, and Model 3 vehicles.
VERY LIMITED EDITION. Tesla produced just 200 of the $1,500 boards, and they sold out almost immediately. eBay is now your only hope for snagging a Tesla surfboard — that is, if you’re willing to shell out upwards of $5,000 for a single board.
What sets the board apart from those you’d find in a beachside surf shop, you may ask? It’s hard to say. The board is the result of a collaboration with two expert board creators, Lost Surfboards and Matt “Mayhem” Biolos, so it’s likely pretty high quality, but according to TechCrunch, most of Lost’s boards cost between $700 and $800. That Tesla logo comes with quite the markup.
DIVING INTO A NEW MARKET. No one knows for sure why Tesla decided to add a surfboard to its list of online wares. Tesla declined to go on record about whether or not the motivations had anything to do with the company’s recent financial struggles (it recently reached out to suppliers to ask for refunds on past contracts).
Tesla plans to start shipping the boards in two to 10 weeks (assuming no production delays), so surf enthusiasts should be able to hit the waves with their exclusive Tesla surfboards before the end of the season — assuming they decide to keep the boards and not attempt to make a tidy profit off them in the resale market.
LIZARD BRAINS. We knew that they can regenerate their tails (and spinal cords). But it turns out that geckos can regenerate parts of their brain, too, according to researchers from the University of Guelph. That’s cool for geckos, but it could be cool for us, too; it could signal a new area of research for the treatment of human brain injuries and degeneration. The researchers published their study last month in the journal Scientific Reports.
Because geckos can regenerate various parts of their bodies, the researchers suspected there might be something interesting going on in gecko brains, too. So they injected leopard geckos with a chemical label they could then detect within the DNA of any newly formed cells.This allowed them to see new cells as they turned up in the geckos’ brains.
They found many more of them than they anticipated. The researchers were also able to identify a type of stem cell that regularly turned into brain cells in the animals’ medial cortex, a part of the brain that serves the same function as the hippocampus in humans. This is the first time scientists knew that stem cells were involved in the formation of new neurons in the leopard gecko’s brain.
LIZARDS = PEOPLE? Lizards are more closely related to humans than amphibians or fish, which are the subjects of most regeneration research, lead researcher Rebecca McDonald said in a news release. So the discovery that geckos can regenerate parts of their brain could change the way we study the human brain, perhaps more profoundly than previous regeneration studies.
“The findings indicate that gecko brains are constantly renewing brain cells, something that humans are notoriously bad at doing,” said Matthew Vickaryous, McDonald’s co-author on the study, in the news release. “The next step in this area of research is to determine why some species, like geckos, can replace brain cells while other species, like humans, cannot.”
LIZARDS ? PEOPLE. Even if we figure out why humans can’t regenerate brain cells the way geckos do, though, it doesn’t mean we’ll know how to change our biology to more closely mimic theirs. Still, given the remarkable complexity of the human brain, any new understanding of its inner workings is a step toward better treatments for injuries, diseases, and degeneration.
QUIET SKIES. Hop aboard a domestic flight in the last few months? You might be one of the thousands of American citizens monitored by armed, undercover air marshals through the U.S. Transportation Security Administration’s (TSA) Quiet Skies program.
The TSA launched Quiet Skies in March, but the public is just hearing about it now thanks to a July 29 report by The Boston Globe, which obtained TSA bulletins on the program and talked to air marshals involved in it.
CHOOSING A TARGET. According to The Globe’s report, the TSA screens every American traveling within the nation for potential inclusion in Quiet Skies, but even air marshals interviewed anonymously by The Globe aren’t sure why it decides to include some people and not others.
The one concrete criterion seems to be that they “are not under investigation by any agency and are not in the Terrorist Screening Data Base,” according to a TSA bulletin from March. Additionally, targets may have the same travel patterns as known terrorist suspects or be “possibly affiliated” with someone on a watch list, according to a May bulletin.
UNDER HIS EYE. Once the TSA identifies a Quiet Skies target, a team of air marshals has the task of monitoring that person’s every move.
This group follows the target through the airport and then travels on their flight with them, noting everything from how many times they used the restroom to whether or not they had “a cold, penetrating stare.”
Air marshals told The Globe it’s a costly and time-consuming process that prevents them from doing “more vital law enforcement work.”
IF IT LOOKS LIKE SURVEILLANCE… The TSA neither confirmed nor denied the existence of Quiet Skies to The Globe, but later provided statements on it to other publications. TSA spokesperson James O. Gregory told The Washington Post a bit more about why Quiet Skies was created in the first place: as “an additional line of defense to aviation security.” He also denied that the program qualified as “surveillance” since the TSA wasn’t listening to targets’ calls or trailing them outside of the airports.
Based on the legal definition of “surveillance,” Quiet Skies sure does seem to qualify. But however the TSA wants to classify the program, it raises new concerns about the U.S. government’s monitoring of the average citizen. If teams of armed air marshals could be jotting down whether or not we declined a bag of peanuts on our last flight, what else might classified government records be noting down about us?
The internet is filled with your embarrassing pictures from high school or that one office party. Here’s how you can hide posts you don’t want haunting you.
“IT’S BAAACK.” Jennifer Bennett, a technical director for Google Cloud, announced that Google Glass would be returning. But instead of being a goofy headset that your everyday person can use to covertly record everyday life, it’s geared towards industrial applications. The factory floor is really where people could use some hands-free assistance, and might not mind being goofy while doing it, according to WIRED.
OKAY, GOOGLE. If you’re among those who breathed a sigh of relief when Google decided to stop selling its glasses a few years back, I have good and bad news. Google Glass resurfaced last summer as the newly-retooled “Enterprise Edition.” If you’re wondering why you don’t have one yet, it’s probably because Google has been marketing these gadgets to businesses, not individual people. And, also, unless you work in a factory, you’re probably no longer its ideal clientele.
The new Google Glass Enterprise Edition includes an app by Israeli software company Plataine that basically embeds a smart assistant into each headset. That means the AI system can understand and respond to voice commands either by displaying information on the glasses or responding out loud.
Google suspects this can help workers manage their workload, scan barcodes and prepare for projects, and look up recommendations without needing to drag a laptop around with them.
THE HAWTHORNE EFFECT. You may recall that gross feeling when you walked by a person wearing Google Glass, that feeling of wondering whether they had just filmed you or subjected you to some sort of facial recognition tech. Well, that element is still there in the Enterprise edition: the WIRED article mentioned that bosses might monitor their employees through their hip new spectacles. While this may boost productivity, it will almost certainly lower morale as employees wonder whether or not their boss is spying on them at any given moment. It’s almost like Google couldn’t resist adding a teensy pinch of technological dystopia to its product.
