CORPORATE HIJACKING. Security firm Kaspersky Lab just exposed an international cryptocurrency mining ring that is using malware software called PowerGhost to spread across vast corporate networks. The malware is infecting anything from workstations to entire server farms, using corporate hardware to dedicate a portion of the computer’s power to mine a yet-unknown cryptocurrency.

Once a computer is infected, a script downloads the mining tool, which uses the hardware’s processing power to solve complex computational problems. The small amounts of cryptocurrency it mines gets sent back to the attacker’s wallet; the virus, meanwhile, launches a copy of itself to infect other computers connected to the same network.

RANSOM NO MORE. Previous analyses by Kaspersky Lab and security firm Skybox suggested that it is more profitable for cybercriminals — you know, the tinted sunglasses, hoodie-wearing type — to install cryptocurrency mining malware, rather than holding data hostage using ransomware. Browser-based cryptojacking attacks rose 80 percent in 2017, they found.

The difference between these two approaches is fairly simple: mining malware uses processing power of targeted machines — anything from workstations, servers, to even point-of-sales terminals, and people’s smartphones — to mine for obscure cryptocurrencies; ransomware simply locks people out of being able to access their data, threatening to bear their data for all to see. Unless of course, they pay a ransom. That’s how last year’s worldwide ransomware attack WannaCry worked.

WORLD DOMINATION. PowerGhost is even harder to notice than other crypto-mining malware. According to Kaspersky Lab, the malware doesn’t even need to use any files at all, making itself even more invisible to anti-malware and -virus software. Rather than moving files onto the targeted machine to start running mining software, PowerGhost runs a script from memory right away, and bam, it starts mining.

This malware used corporate networks to spread across the entire globe as Kaspersky Lab’s handy map shows:

The intent is simple: the more infected computers, the more processing power available to mine more cryptocurrency. The more crypto, the bigger the reward. And as it turns out, targeting corporate networks is an extremely effective way to do just that.

Unfortunately, it’s not always easy to fend off “cryptojacking” malware. Malware communicates with servers in a way very similar to conventional, unsuspicious network communication. And on a big corporate scale, a lot of data could end up hiding the mining software quite well.

If your computer in infected with PowerGhost, installing software updates and patches to avoid being vulnerable to exploits will fix it. But this is surely not the last cryptomining malware we’ll see.

“The miner we examined indicates that targeting consumers is not enough for cybercriminals anymore – threat actors are now turning their attention to enterprises too. Cryptocurrency mining is set to become a huge threat to the business community,” principal security researcher David Emm tells ZDNet.

Translation: cryptomining malware has the potential to turn into a huge headache for everyone.

More about cryptomining: Crypto Mining for Charity: Your Processing Power Could Save the World

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ALL EYES ON AI. The U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) is going all-in on AI. The department, which oversees everything pertaining to the U.S.’s national security and armed forces, has been tossing around the idea of establishing a center focused on artificial intelligence (AI) since October 2016. On June 27, the idea became a reality when Deputy Defense Secretary Patrick Shanahan issued a memo officially establishing the Joint Artificial Intelligence Center (JAIC).

The JAIC will serve as the military’s AI center, housing the DoD’s 600 or so AI projects. According to a request the DoD submitted to Congress in June, the center will cost an estimated $1.7 billion over the next six years.

“Deputy Secretary of Defense Patrick M. Shanahan directed the DoD Chief Information Officer to standup the Joint Artificial Intelligence Center (JAIC) in order to enable teams across DOD to swiftly deliver new AI-enabled capabilities and effectively experiment with new operating concepts in support of DOD’s military missions and business functions,” Department of Defense spokeswoman Heather Babb told Futurism.

AT THE JAIC. In his memo, Shanahan notes that advances in AI will likely change the nature of warfare and that the military needs a new approach to AI that will allow it to rapidly integrate any advances into its operations and “way of fighting.” He believes the military’s AI center could help in those efforts by focusing on four areas of need:

• Helping the military execute its National Mission Initiatives (NMIs). These are large-scale AI projects designed to address groups of urgent, related challenges.
• Creating a DoD-wide foundation for the execution of AI. This would mean finding a way to make any AI-related tools, data, technologies, experts, and processes available to the entire DoD quickly and efficiently.
• Improving collaboration on AI projects both within the DoD and with outside parties, such as U.S. allies, private companies, and academics.
• Working with the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD) to determine how to govern and standardize AI development and delivery.

CROSSING THE LINE. Last week, many of the biggest names in AI research from the private sector and academia took a stand against autonomous weapons, machines that use AI to decide whether or not to attempt to kill a person. Signatories of the pledge vowed to never work on any such projects; one even called autonomous weapons “as disgusting and destabilizing as bioweapons.”

By establishing an AI center, the U.S. government makes its stance clear: Not only does it see AI as an inevitable part of the future of war, it wants to be the best at implementing it. As Shanahan wrote in an email to DoD employees, “Plenty of people talk about the threat from AI; we want to be the threat.”

READ MORE: Pentagon’s Joint AI Center Is ‘Established,’ but There’s Much More to Figure Out [FedScoop]

More on autonomous weapons: Top AI Experts Vow They Won’t Help Create Lethal Autonomous Weapons

Editor’s note 7/23/18 at 3:15 PM: This piece was updated to include statements from Deputy Defense Secretary Patrick Shanahan and DoD spokesperson Heather Babb.

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Last week, many of the major players in the artificial intelligence world signed a pledge to never build or endorse artificial intelligence systems that could run an autonomous weapon. The signatories included: Google DeepMind’s cofounders, OpenAI founder Elon Musk, and a whole slew of prominent artificial intelligence researchers and industry leaders.

The pledge, put forth by AI researcher Max Tegmark’s Future of Life Institute, argues that any system that can target and kill people without human oversight is inherently immoral, and condemns any future AI arms race that may occur. By signing the pledge, these AI bigwigs join the governments of 26 nations including China, Pakistan, and the State of Palestine, all of which also condemned and banned lethal autonomous weapons.

So if you want to build a fighter drone that doesn’t need any human oversight before killing, you’ll have to do it somewhere other than these nations, and with partners other than those who signed the agreement.

Yes, banning killer robots is likely a good move for our collective future — children in nations ravaged by drone warfare have already started to fear the sky — but there’s a pretty glaring hole in what this pledge actually does.

Namely: there are more subtle and insidious ways to leverage AI against a nation’s enemies than strapping a machine gun to a robot’s arm, Terminator-style.

The pledge totally ignores the fact that cybersecurity means more than protecting yourself from an army of killer robots. As Mariarosaria Taddeo of the Oxford Internet Institute told Business Insider, AI could be used in international conflicts in more subtle but impactful ways. Artificial intelligence algorithms could prove effective at hacking or hijacking networks that are crucial for national security.

Already, as Taddeo mentioned, the UK National Health Service was held hostage by the North Korea-linked WannaCry virus and a Russian cyberattack took control of European and North American power grids. With sophisticated, autonomous algorithms at the helm, these cyberattacks could become more frequent and more devastating. And yet, because these autonomous weapons don’t go “pew pew pew,” the recent AI pledge doesn’t mention (or pertain to) them at all.

Of course, that doesn’t make the pledge meaningless. Not by a long shot. But just as important as the high-profile people and companies that agreed to not make autonomous killing machines are the names missing from the agreement. Perhaps most notably is the U.S. Department of Defense, which recently established its Joint Artificial Intelligence Center (JAIC) for the express purpose of getting ahead for any forthcoming AI arms races.

“Deputy Secretary of Defense Patrick M. Shanahan directed the DOD Chief Information Officer to standup the Joint Artificial Intelligence Center (JAIC) in order to enable teams across DOD to swiftly deliver new AI-enabled capabilities and effectively experiment with new operating concepts in support of DOD’s military missions and business functions,” Heather Babb, Department of Defense spokesperson, told Futurism.

“Plenty of people talk about the treat from AI; we want to be the threat,” Deputy Defense Secretary Patrick Shanahan wrote in a recent email to DoD employees, a DoD spokesperson confirmed to Futurism.

The JAIC sees artificial intelligence as a crucial tool for the future of warfare. Given the U.S.’s hawkish stance on algorithmic warfare, it’s unclear if a well-intentioned, incomplete pledge can possibly hold up.

More on pledges against militarized AI: Google: JK, We’re Going To Keep Working With The Military After All

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AEROSOLS FOR GOOD. You may have sworn off aerosol sprays in the ’90s when everyone was talking about the hole in the ozone layer, but a team of researchers from MIT has found a use for aerosols that could be good for both the environment and our health. This spray contains nanobots, tiny sensors with the potential to do everything, from detecting dangerous leaks in pipelines, to diagnosing health issues. They published their research in Nature Nanotechnology on Monday.

NANO-SCALE SENSORS. Each sensor in the aerosol spray contains two parts. The first is a colloid, an extremely tiny insoluble particle or molecule. Colloids are so small, in fact, they can remain suspended in a liquid or the air indefinitely — the force of particles colliding around them is stronger than the force of gravity attempting to pull them down.

The second part of the sensor is a complex circuit containing a chemical detector built from a two-dimensional material, such as graphene. When this detector encounters a certain chemical in its environment, its ability to conduct electricity improves. The circuit also contains a photodiode, a device that can convert ambient light into electric current. This provides all the electricity needed to power the circuit’s data collection and memory.

The researchers grafted their circuits onto colloids, thereby giving them the colloid’s ability to travel in unique environments. Once combined, the researchers aerosolized the nanobots (converted them into a sprayable form). This delivery method wouldn’t be possible without the addition of the colloid. “[The circuits] can’t exist without a substrate,” said the study’s lead author Michael Strano in a news release. “We need to graft them to the particles to give them mechanical rigidity and to make them large enough to get entrained in the flow.”

TWO TYPES OF PIPELINES. The MIT team sees a number of potential diagnostic uses for their sprayable, microscopic sensors, demonstrating a couple in their study. As one example, they designed their sensors to detect the toxic chemical ammonia, then tested its ability within a sealed section of pipe. They sprayed the sensors into one side of a pipe, then gathered them at the other end using a piece of cheesecloth. When they examined the sensors, they could tell they’d come in contact with ammonia based on the information stored in the sensors’ memory.

In the real-world, this could save inspectors from having to manually look at an entire length of pipe from the outside. Instead, they could simply let the aerosol travel the length of the pipeline, then look for any data in its memory that might signal a problem, such as an encounter with an outside chemical that should not be in the pipeline.

As the MIT team noted in the news release, eventually, this same technology could help diagnose problems in the human body, for example, by traveling along our digestive tract, gathering data, and relaying it to medical experts. “We see this paper as the introduction of a new field [in robotics],” said Strano.

READ MORE: Cell-Sized Robots Can Sense Their Environment [MIT News]

More on nanobots: Kurzweil: By 2030, Nanobots Will Flow Throughout Our Bodies

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Within the next year you could have your own BlackFly, no pilot’s license required.

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RETROACTIVE NEGOTIATION. Tesla seems to have a weird understanding of the old adage “You have to spend money to make money.” In order to look like it’s making money, the company is asking for refunds on the money it’s already spent — even though the people paid delivered on their part of the deal.

On Sunday, The Wall Street Journal reported that it had obtained a memo Tesla sent to one of its suppliers last week. In the memo, Tesla requested a refund on a “meaningful amount” of the money it had paid the supplier since 2016. The author of the memo, one of Tesla’s global supply managers, wrote that the money was “essential” to Tesla’s ability to continue operating and asked that the supplier view the refund as an “investment” that would allow Tesla and the supplier to continue to grow their relationship.

Though the memo claimed that all suppliers were receiving such refund requests, at least some contacted by The WSJ knew nothing about it.

HOW BIZARRE. A Tesla spokesperson doesn’t seem to think Tesla’s refund request is all that noteworthy, telling The WSJ it’s a standard practice. Many of those outside the company, however, think it’s downright bizarre. “I have never heard of that,” finance expert Ron Harbour told Bloomberg. “Suppliers have been asked for reductions, but going back for them in arrears reeks of desperation.”

It’s also a pretty self-centered move, according to manufacturing consultant Dennis Virag. “It’s simply ludicrous, and it just shows that Tesla is desperate right now,” he told The WSJ. “They’re worried about their profitability, but they don’t care about their suppliers’ profitability.”

TESLA’S WOES. Tesla’s current financial woes center on its Model 3, with frequent production issues repeatedly pushing back deliveries of the vehicle. The company currently carries more than $10 billion in debt and has been beset by one controversy after another throughout 2018. Just last month, shareholders even held a vote to decide whether or not to let CEO Elon Musk retain his position as chairman (they ultimately decided to let him stay on in that role).

If the plan behind Tesla’s refund request was to increase faith in the company as it continues to navigate the troubled waters of Model 3 production, it appears to be backfiring; Tesla’s stock dropped by 4 percent Monday morning, even though the first reviews of the Model 3 have started rolling out and have been largely positive (including from the WSJ).

On August 1, Musk will update shareholders on Tesla’s Q2 financial results, so he has just about a week to get the bad taste of Tesla’s refund request out of shareholders’ mouths. If he can’t, it’s not hard to imagine his role as chairman once again in jeopardy.

READ MORE: Tesla Asks Suppliers for Cash Back to Help Turn a Profit [The Wall Street Journal]

More on Model 3 production: In an Effort to Speed up Production, Tesla Is Assembling Model 3s in a Giant Tent

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CHANGE IS COMING. Today, more than 1 billion people use the Facebook-owned messaging app WhatsApp to share messages, photos, and videos. With the tap of a button, they can forward a funny meme or send a party invite to groups of friends and family. They can also easily share “fake news,” rumors and propaganda disguised as legitimate information.

In India — the nation where people forward more WhatsApp content than anywhere else — WhatsApp-spread fake news is inciting mob violence and literally getting people killed. On Thursday, WhatsApp announced in a blog post that it plans to make several changes in an effort to prevent more violence.

Some of the changes will only apply to users in India. They will no longer see the “quick forward” button next to photos and videos that made that content particularly easy to send along quickly, without incorporating information about where it came from. They’ll also no longer be able to forward content to more than five chats at a time. In the rest of the world, the new limit for forwards will be 20 chats. The previous cap was 250.

THE ELEPHANT IN THE ROOM. Over the past two months, violent mobs have attacked two dozen people in India after WhatsApp users spread rumors that those people had abducted children. Some of those people even died from their injuries.

The Indian government has been pressuring WhatsApp to do something to address these recent bouts of violence; earlier on Thursday, India’s Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology threatened the company with legal action if it didn’t figure out some effective way to stop the mob violence.

The WhatsApp team, however, never mentions that violence is the reason for the changes in its blog post, simply asserting that the goal of the control changes is to maintain the app’s “feeling of intimacy” and “keep WhatsApp the way it was designed to be: a private messaging app.”

TRY, TRY AGAIN. This is WhatsApps’ third attempt in the last few weeks to address the spread of fake news in India. First, the company added a new label to the app to indicate that a message is a forward (and not original content from the sender). Then, they published full-page ads in Indian newspapers to educate the public on the best way to spot fake news.

Neither of those efforts has appeared to work, and it’s hard to believe the latest move will have the intended impact either. Each WhatsApp chat can include up to 256 people. That means a message forwarded to five chats (per the new limit) could still reach 1,280 people. And if those 1,280 people then forward the message to five chats, it’s not hard to see how fake news could still spread like wildfire across the nation.

READ MORE: WhatsApp Launches New Controls After Widespread App-Fueled Mob Violence in India [The Washington Post]

More on fake news: Massive Study of Fake News May Reveal Why It Spreads so Easily

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Forty-nine years ago this Friday, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin became the first humans to set foot on the Moon. That day, they also became the first people to harvest samples from another celestial body and bring them back to Earth.

Over the course of the Apollo missions, astronauts collected about 2,200 individual samples weighing a total of 842 pounds (382 kg) for scientific study that continues today, NASA curator Ryan Zeigler told Futurism. Zeigler, who also conducts geochemical research, is responsible for overseeing NASA’s collection of space rocks from the Apollo missions, as well as those from Mars, asteroids, stars, and anywhere else other than Earth.

Scientists have only studied about 16 percent of all the Apollo samples by mass, Zeigler told Futurism. Within that 16 percent, just under one-third has been put on display, which Zeigler noted largely keeps the samples pristine. Another quarter were at least partially destroyed (on purpose) during NASA-approved research, and the rest have been analyzed in less destructive ways.

“Trying not to deplete the samples so that future scientists will still have the opportunity to work with them is definitely something we are considering,” says Zeigler. “Also, while I would consider the Apollo samples primarily a scientific resource (though as a scientist am obviously biased), it is undeniable that these samples also have significant historic and cultural importance as well, and thus need to be preserved on those grounds, too.”

The cultural reasons to preserve moon rocks, Zeigler says, are harder to define. But it’s still important to make sure future scientists have enough space rocks left to work with, especially since we can’t fully predict the sorts of questions they’ll try to answer using the Apollo samples, or the technology that will be at their disposal.

“Every decade since the Apollo samples came back has seen significant advances in instrumentation that have allowed samples to be analyzed at higher levels of precision, or smaller spatial resolution,” Zeigler says. “Our understanding of the Moon, and really the whole solar system, has evolved considerably by continuing studies of the Apollo samples.”

“Our understanding of the Moon, and really the whole solar system, has evolved considerably by continuing studies of the Apollo samples.”

In the last six years, Zeigler says that his curation team saw 351 requests for Apollo samples, which comes out to about 60 each year. Within those requests, the scientists have asked for about 692 individual samples per year, most of which weigh one to two grams each. Even if the researchers don’t get everything that they ask for, Zeigler says, most of the studies are at least partially approved, and he’s been loaning out about 525 samples every year. That comes out to just over 75 percent of what the scientists requested.

“So while it is true that significant scientific justification is required to get Apollo samples, and we (NASA, with the support of the planetary scientific community) are intentionally reserving a portion of the Apollo samples for future generations of scientists and scientific instruments to study, the samples are available to scientists around the world to study, and we are slowly lowering the percentage of material that is left,” Zeigler says.

Thankfully, about 84 percent of the Apollo samples are still untouched. That pretty much guarantees that the next generation of geologists and astronomers who try to decipher the Moon’s remaining secrets will have enough samples to fiddle with.

To read more on future lunar research, click here: Three Reasons Why We Might Return To The Moon

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BLOCKCHAIN ISLAND. The tiny European nation of Malta is truly living up to its nickname of “Blockchain Island.” On Thursday, MSX (the innovation arm of the Malta Stock Exchange) announced a new partnership with blockchain-based equity fundraising platform Neufund and Binance, one of the world’s biggest cryptocurrency exchanges). Their goal: create the first global stock exchange that’s both regulated and decentralized.

THE NEW SCHOOL. There are a lot of complex concepts at play here, so let’s break them down.

First, tokens. In the realm of cryptocurrency, a token is a digital asset on a blockchain, a ledger that records every time two parties trade an asset. A token can represent practically anything, from money to a vote in an election. Today, many blockchain startups raise funds by selling “equity tokens” through initial coin offerings (ICO).

When a person buys one of these equity tokens, they are essentially buying a percentage ownership of the startup. They can later use an online platform known as a cryptocurrency exchange to sell the tokens or buy more from other investors at any time, quickly and fairly cheaply.

Though various governments are starting to look into regulating tokens, the cryptocurrency realm is still largely unregulated, making it an enticing target for scammers.

THE OLD SCHOOL. Equity securities, also known as stocks, are similar to equity tokens. A person who buys stock in a company owns a percentage of that company. However, securities are not traded via 24-hour online exchanges — they’re bought and sold via stock exchanges, which are only open during certain hours. Navigating them often requires the help of middleman, such as a broker or lawyer, which could be costly.

A government agency typically regulates a nation’s securities and stock exchanges — in the United States, that agency is the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). This regulation can protect investors from scams and ensure companies don’t try to swindle them.

TOKENIZED SECURITIES. Tokenized securities are a melding of these two worlds. They’re securities, and when they’re traded, a blockchain records the transaction. This combines the fast, cheap transactions associated with tokens with the protective oversight of securities.

Right now, there’s not a government-regulated, global platform hosting the trading of tokenized securities, and that’s the void the Malta team plans to fill with their decentralized stock exchange.

“We are thrilled to announce the partnerships with Malta Stock Exchange and Binance, that will ensure high liquidity to equity tokens issued on Neufund,” Zoe Adamovicz, CEO and Co-founder at Neufund, said in a press release. “It is the first time in history that security tokens can be offered and traded in a legally binding way.”

Experts estimate that the value of the world’s equity tokens could soar as high as $1 trillion by 2020. Malta’s project is still in the pilot stages, but if all the pieces for its decentralized stock exchange fall into place, the tiny European island could find itself at the center of that incredibly fruitful market.

READ MORE: Malta Paves the Way for a Decentralized Stock Exchange [TechCrunch]

More on tokens: Tokens Will Become the Foundation of a New Digital Economy

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Friday marks the 49^th anniversary of the first time any human set foot on solid, extraterrestrial ground. The details are probably familiar: on July 20, 1969, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin became the first people to walk on the Moon. It’s a rare privilege, even now: only ten other people have landed on the Moon and gone out for a stroll.

Just over three years later, humans walked on the Moon for the last time. Changing political and economic priorities meant NASA would no longer focus on sending people to the Moon. After all, we had already planted a flag, confirmed that the Moon wasn’t made of cheese, and played some golf. What else is left?

Well, it just so turns out that we might be heading back out there — and soon. President Trump has insisted on resuming manned Moon missions, despite the fact that it doesn’t match the public or scientific community’s desires for a space program (no one is quite sure where his determination stems from, but it doesn’t seem to have much more substance than a whim).

But there are some other, real reasons that we might want to send someone to the Moon. There’s science to be done, and money to be made. Let’s dig a little deeper and see what might be bringing us back to our lunar neighbor.

1) Trump really wants it to happen.

Last December, President Trump signed a directive indicating that NASA would prioritize human exploration to the Moon and beyond. Just imagine: a human setting foot on the Moon! Accomplishing such an impossible feat would show the rest of the world that America is capable of great things, which would really assert our dominance on the international stage!

So, assuming that President Trump knows we won the space race 43 years ago (he knows, right? right?) there might be other reasons why Trump wants more people to go visit. Maybe it’s a display of national achievement, maybe it’s to develop economic or military advantages. Either way, the White House is pushing hard for that giant leap.

2) Cash money.

A rare isotope called helium-3 could help us produce clean and safe nuclear energy without giving off any hazardous or radioactive waste. And it just so happens that the Moon has loads of the stuff (so does Jupiter, but that’s a bit harder to reach).

While a helium nuclear fusion reactor does not yet exist, many expect that helium-3 could be the missing piece — and whoever secures the supply would unlock riches to rival Scrooge McDuck.

Two years ago, the federal government gave a private company its blessing to land on the Moon for the first time. Moon Express, which also plans to dump human ashes on the Moon (read: litter) for customers who want an unconventional cremation, has the ultimate goal of establishing a lunar mining colony. According to the company’s website, Expedition “Harvest Moon” plans to have a permanent research station up and running by 2021. At that point, it will begin extracting samples and raw materials to send back to Earth.

This could lead to more and (maybe) better research into the moon’s history and makeup, especially since our supply of samples from the Apollo missions is so limited. But helium-3 is what Moon Express is really after. And they’re not the only ones — the Chinese government also has its eyes set on the Moon’s helium-3 supply.

In addition to opening space up to private mining operations, Trump has reached out to NASA in hopes that the agency’s technology could be used to launch mining rigs to the Moon and to asteroids.

But there’s a lot that needs to happen before the spacefaring equivalents of coal barons start selling space rocks. For instance, we need to figure out how to approach and land on an asteroid, and to set up at least semi-permanent bases and mining operations. But still, some companies some companies are forging ahead.

3) Science! slash, practice for Mars.

The government, along with multiple space-interested billionaires, have some well-publicized plans to colonize Mars. Their reasons range from: furthering scientific research, to exploring the cosmos for funsies, to saving humanity from, uh, something.

The Moon could play a vital role in those plans — as practice off-world destination, and as a celestial truck stop along the way.

In February, Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross said that setting up a colony on the Moon will be essential for future space exploration. Especially, he mentioned, so that it can serve as a refueling station. His logic seems to be based on the fact that the Moon exerts less gravitational force than the Earth, so landing and relaunching a refueled rocket would let that rocket explore farther into space.

Some have also proposed using a Moon base as practice for a Martian settlement, since they would be much closer to Earth — Moon-dwellers would only be three days from Earth, while human Martians would be eight months from home.

NASA’s Gateway mission, as Time reported, could give rise to lunar settlements within the next ten years. Gateway would function as a space station in orbit around the Moon, but would be capable of traveling to and from the surface. The expected Gateway timeline is controversial even within NASA, however, as some feel that its far too optimistic about when we might actually see results.

There are still too many unknowns and hazards for people in space settlements for such a program to succeed today. Even trying to simulate a Mars colony on Earth led to several unforeseen mental strains and complications.

But either way, ongoing exploration and research missions continue to radically change our understanding of the Moon.

“Ten years ago we would have said that the Moon was complete dry,” Ryan Zeigler, NASA’s curator of lunar samples from the Apollo missions, told Futurism. “Over the past ten years, new instruments and new scientists have shown this to not be the case, and that has had profound effects on the models that predict how the Earth-Moon system has formed,” he added.

Of course, there are financial reasons at the forefront the recent push for lunar exploration. But even if its just a pleasant side effect, we may get valuable new science out of these missions, too.

Read more about complications with NASA’s lunar plans: NASA Just Canceled Its Only Moon Rover Project. That’s Bad News for Trump’s Lunar Plans.

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GRIDLOCK. China’s largest cities are choking in traffic. Millions of cars on the road means stifling levels of air pollution and astronomical commute times, especially during rush hours.

The latest move to address this urban traffic nightmare: Chinese state-backed companies are making heavy investments in U.S. hyperloop startups Arrivo and Hyperloop Transportation Technologies, lining up $1 billion and $300 million in credit respectively. It’s substantial financing that could put China ahead in the race to open the first full-scale hyperloop track.

MAG-LEV SLEDS. Both companies are planning something big, although their approaches differ in some key ways. Transport company Arrivo is focusing on relieving highway traffic by creating a separate track that allows cars to zip along at 200 miles per hour (320 km/h) on magnetically levitated sleds inside vacuum-sealed tubes (it’s not yet clear if this will be above ground or underground).

Arrivo’s exact plans to build a Chinese hyperloop system have not yet been announced, but co-founder Andrew Liu told Bloomberg that $1 billion in funding could be enough to build “as many as three legs of a commercial, citywide hyperloop system of 6 miles to 9 miles [9.5 to 14.4 km] per section.” The company hasn’t yet announced in which city it’ll be built.

Meanwhile, Hyperloop Transportation Technologies has already made up its mind as to where it will plop down its first Chinese loop. It’s the old familiar maglev train design inside a vacuum tube, but instead it’s passengers, not their cars, that will ride along at speeds of up to 750 mph (1200 km/h). Most of the $300 million will go towards building a 6.2 mile (10 km) test track in Guizhou province. According to a press release, this marks the third commercial agreement for HyperloopTT after Abu Dhabi and Ukraine from earlier this year.

A PRICEY SOLUTION. Building a hyperloop is expensive. This latest investment hints at just how expensive just a single system could be in the end. But providing high-speed alternatives to car-based transport is only one of many ways to deal with the gridlock and traffic jams that plague urban centers. China, for instance, has attempted to tackle the problem by restricting driving times based on license plates, expanding bike sharing networks, and even mesh ride-sharing data with smart traffic lights.

And according to a recent report by Chinese location-based services provider AutoNavi, those solutions seem to be working: a Quartz analysis of the data found that traffic declined by 12.5 and 9 percent in Hangzhou and Shenzhen respectively, even though the population grew by 3 and 5 percent.

MO’ MONEY, MO’ PROBLEMS. There are more hurdles to overcome before hyperloop can have a significant impact in China. There is the cost of using the hyperloop system — if admission is priced too high (perhaps to cover astronomical infrastructure costs), adoption rates may remain too low to have a significant effect.

The capacity of a maglev train system would also have to accommodate China’s  growing population centers. That’s not an easy feat— HyperloopTT’s capusles have to squeeze through a four meter (13 feet) diameter tube and only hold 28 to 40 people at a time, and there are 3 million cars in Shenzhen alone.

We don’t know yet whether China’s hyperloop investments will pay off and significantly reduce traffic in China’s urban centers. But bringing new innovations to transportation in massive and growing cities — especially when those new innovations are more environmentally friendly — is rarely a bad idea.

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A PROPOSAL. Species on the brink of extinction in the U.S. could soon have their government protections stripped from them.

On Thursday, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) (the government agency that manages the U.S.’s fish, wildlife, and natural habitats) and National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) (a scientific government agency that studies the world’s oceans, major waterways, and atmosphere) proposed revisions to the Endangered Species Act, a law designed to empower the federal government to protect threatened or endangered species.

The agencies propose making changes to three sections of the ESA — Section 4, Section 4D, and Section 7 — and the full explanations of the proposed changes are available to the public via a trio of Federal Register notices. If you don’t have time to sift through all 118 pages of Register notices, though, here’s a breakdown of the changes that could have the biggest impact.

THERE’S ALWAYS MONEY IN THE PROTECTED LAND. One potentially major change centers on removing language designed to ensure regulators make decisions about species/habits solely based on scientific factors, not economic ones.

The agencies propose removing “without reference to possible economic or other impacts of such determination” from the ESA because, they write, “there may be circumstances where referencing economic, or other impacts may be informative to the public.” As pointed out by The New York Times, this could make it easier for companies to obtain approval for potentially damaging construction projects, such as roads or oil pipelines.

Another major change centers on “threatened” species. These are currently defined as “any species which is likely to become endangered within the foreseeable future.”  But the proposal suggests giving the FWS the ability to define “foreseeable future” on a species-by-species basis. Today, threatened and endangered species receive more or less the same protections, but under the proposed changes, species newly classified as threatened wouldn’t automatically receive those protections.

PRAISE AND BACKLASH. The proposed changes quickly elicited an impassioned response from the public.

“For too long, the ESA has been used as a means of controlling lands in the West rather than actually focusing on species recovery,” Kathleen Sgamma, president of Western Energy Alliance, which lobbies on behalf of the oil and gas industry, told The New York Times. She added that she was hopeful the changes would “[help lift restrictions on] responsible economic activities on private and public lands.”

Environmental activists, however, see the changes as undercutting the purpose of the ESA: to protect endangered species.

“These proposals would slam a wrecking ball into the most crucial protections for our most endangered wildlife. If these regulations had been in place in the 1970s, the bald eagle and the gray whale would be extinct today,” Brett Hartl, government affairs director for the Center for Biological Diversity, a nonprofit focused on protecting endangered species, said in a statement.

“Allowing the federal government to turn a blind eye to climate change will be a death sentence for polar bears and hundreds of other animals and plants,” he added. “This proposal turns the extinction-prevention tool of the Endangered Species Act into a rubber stamp for powerful corporate interests

Members of the public have 60 days to share their thoughts on the proposed changes with the government, though it’s hard to say what impact that might have. Ultimately, if environmental advocates are right, the U.S. could soon see a dramatic increase in the number of animals that move from endangered to outright extinct.

READ MORE: Law That Saved the Bald Eagle Could Be Vastly Reworked [The New York Times]

More on the Endangered Species Act: The War for Endangered Species Has Begun

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Mankind is about to get closer to the sun than ever before.

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NAILED IT. Wednesday morning, Blue Origin launched a capsule-carrying New Shepard rocket from its facility in West Texas. The goal: to test the altitude escape motor, the motor that would engage if astronauts needed to make a fast getaway due to some unforeseen circumstances in space. Its effectiveness is essential to ensuring the safety of any people who might ride aboard the capsule in the future.

And the company appeared to nail the test.

After launch, the capsule separated from the rocket just like it should, and then its emergency motor ignited — just as it’s supposed to during an emergency situation. This propelled the capsule to an altitude of roughly 119 kilometers (74 miles), a record height for the company. After that, both the capsule and the rocket safely returned to Earth.

TESTING. TESTING. Blue Origin wasn’t the only company testing the waters with this New Shepard rocket launch; the rocket’s capsule contained a variety of devices and experiments for scientists and educators conducting microgravity research. One company sent up a system designed to provide reliable WiFi connectivity in space, while another added a number of textiles to the capsule so they could test their viability for use in space suits.

SPACE TOURISM. However, the most interesting payload aboard the capsule (for the general public, anyways) was likely Mannequin Skywalker, the test dummy that first rode a New Shepard back in December. The mannequin serves as a reminder of Blue Origin’s ultimate goal — to send people into space — and with today’s successful test, the company moves one step closer to reaching that goal.

READ MORE: Blue Origin Will Push Its Rocket ‘to Its Limits’ With High-Altitude Emergency Abort Test Today [The Verge]

More on the New Shepard’s capsule: Blue Origin Just Released Images of Its Sleek Space Tourism Capsule

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ETHICALLY ACCEPTABLE. We may have just moved one step closer to designer babies. On Tuesday, the Nuffield Council on Bioethics (NCB), an independent U.K.-based organization that analyzes and reports on ethical issues in biology and medicine, released a report focused on the social and ethical issues surrounding human genome editing and reproduction.

According to the report, editing human embryos, sperm, or eggs is “morally permissible” as long as the edit doesn’t jeopardize the welfare of the future person (the one born from the edited embryo) or “increase disadvantage, discrimination, or division in society.”

PROCEED WITH CAUTION. The NCB report doesn’t say we should only make edits to embryos for therapeutic reasons, meaning changes for cosmetic reasons are still on the table, ethically speaking. However, by no means does the report suggest we jump right into editing human embryos.

Before we get to that point, we must conduct further research to establish safety standards, according to the report. We’ll also need to publicly debate the use of the technology and consider its possible implications. Additionally, we’ll need to assess any potential risks to individuals, groups, or society in general, and figure out a system for monitoring and addressing any unforeseen adverse affects as they may crop up.

After all that, gene-editing in humans will still need to be closely regulated by government agencies, and we’ll want to start by using it only in closely monitored clinical studies, says the NCB.

AN INFLUENTIAL VOICE. The NCB can’t actually write laws or establish any standards for the use of gene-editing in humans. However, the Council’s recommendations do carry some weight, with the BBC referring to the organization as “influential.”

So, while it may still be years before anyone gives birth to a “designer baby,” the mere fact that editing human embryos is getting the ethical green light from the NCB is a promising sign for anyone eager for the day gene-editing lets them create the offspring of their dreams.

READ MORE: UK Ethics Council Says It’s ‘Morally Permissible’ to Create Genetically Modified Babies [Gizmodo]

More on human embryo editing: Scientists Just Used Gene Editing to Remove a Fatal Blood Disorder From Human Embryos

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