This Device Allows You to Control a Computer With Your Tongue

Graduate designer Dorothee Clasen has come up with an unusual new way to interface with a computer: a tongue-operated controller.

Tong

Dorothee Clasen, a master’s student of design at the Köln International School of Design, has come up with an unusual new way to interface with a computer: a tongue-operated controller.

At its core, the prototype device is a dental retainer with a ball and magnet attached to it that slide along a set of rails, as Dezeen reports.

Move the Ball Back and Forth

The idea is simple: the wearer can move the ball back and forward with their tongue. A wire coming out of the wearer’s mouth hooks up to a WiFi transmitter to send the information to a nearby computer.

According to Clasen, it’s meant for with disabilities, or for those whose two hands are already occupied.

Human Reins

In a demonstration, Clasen was able to play a game of Tong, a tongue-based take on the Atari classic Pong, as shown in the video above.

Oddly, she says she got the idea from riding a horse.

“As I do horse riding as a hobby, I was especially fascinated by the haptic communication between the rider’s hand and the horse’s mouth,” Clasen told Dezeen. “Through the reins, the human influences the horse’s posture, and at the same time has to rely on his sense of touch to check on the horse’s posture.”

READ MORE: Tong allows users to control a computer with their tongue [Dezeen]

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Psychophysicists: Your Brain Might Not Be as Conscious as You Think

A team of psychophysicists believe they've figured out how consciousness works in our mind. If so, they would also have settled a 1,500-year-old debate.

NPCs

A team of scientists thinks they’ve finally arrived at a model of how consciousness works in the human mind — and in doing so, may have settled a 1,500-year-old debate.

The big issue is whether consciousness is continuous or discrete: Basically, scientists and philosophers have long argued over whether we’re conscious all the time or only during concise moments. In an opinion piece published Thursday in the journal Trends in Cognitive Sciences, the scientists say it’s a little bit of both — and their verdict could free scientists of various disciplines up to do their work without butting heads.

And/Or

The scientists, all psychophysicists at Switzerland’s Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), said that there’s a two-step process going on. While our brains are continuously processing information behind the scenes in more of an “unconscious” manner, we’re only actively conscious of that information during discrete moments.

“Conscious processing is overestimated,” lead author Michael Herzog said in a press release. “You should give more weight to the dark, unconscious processing period. You just believe that you are conscious at each moment of time.”

Autopilot

When we ride a bike, Herzog mused, our bodies automatically make minute adjustments to keep from falling over without consciously thinking about it. But even with his team’s two-step model, some of the secondary questions surrounding the ancient debate remain. Questions about how long these discrete moments of consciousness last, or how they differ among people, don’t have answers.

“The question for what consciousness is needed and what can be done without conscious? We have no idea,” Herzog said.

READ MORE: Is consciousness continuous or discrete? Maybe it’s both, argue researchers [Cell Press]

More on consciousness: Artificial Consciousness: How To Give A Robot A Soul

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Watch Ford’s Insanely Powerful Electric Mustang Pop a Wheelie on the Drag Strip

The Ford Mustang Cobra Jet 1400 prototype is absolutely insane. It can barely keep itself on the road during a drag race.

Action Hero

Ford is gunning to become the name brand of choice when it comes to the new generation of American all-electric muscle cars — and with its one-off Mustang Cobra Jet 1400 prototype, dubbed the “all-electric action hero,” it might just have a shot to take first place.

The vigorous electric powertrain on wheels delivers a rubber-melting 1,400 horsepower and over 1,100 pound feet of torque, served up immediately with a single press of a pedal.

During a private test, Ford engineers were able to squeeze just over 1,500 horsepower out of the 800 volt powertrain, the company claims.

Up to 11

The Cobra Jet features four motors that spin at up to 10,000 revolutions per minute. Its battery pack can put out 350 kW — per motor.

It’s so much unbridled performance, the car can barely keep itself grounded. In a new video uploaded by Ford’s Performance division, the vehicle pops a wheelie as it screams down the drag strip.

“Since revealing the car, we’ve continued to fine-tune it and now know we’re just scratching the surface of what we may be able to achieve with this much electric horsepower in a drag racing setting,” Mark Rushbrook, global director at Ford Performance Motorsports, said in a statement.

There’s only a slim chance you’ll be able to buy one any time soon, though. Ford has, however, announced the Mustang Lithium, a 900 horsepower all-electric muscle car. There’s also the Mustang Mach-E.

READ MORE: Watch Ford Mustang electric prototype pull a wheelie on the drag strip [Electrek]

More on Ford: Ford Software Update Lets Cop Cars Bake Away Coronavirus

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NASA’s Moon-Bound Orion Spacecraft is Officially Fit for Flight

NASA's Orion spacecraft just completed its System Acceptance Review and Design Certification Review. In other words, it's fit for flight.

Fit for Flight

NASA’s Orion, the spacecraft designed to carry American astronauts to the Moon as part of the agency’s Artemis program, just completed its System Acceptance Review and Design Certification Review. In other words, Orion is officially fit to embark on its maiden voyage as soon as next year.

The Orion spacecraft is a partially reusable capsule meant to ferry a crew of between two and six into space and as far as the lunar orbit. It also features an emergency abort system and the ability to provide safe re-entry from deep space.

SLS

Orion is designed to be carried into space using NASA’s next-generation, heavy lift Space Launch System (SLS) rockets.

The thorough review included system tests, inspection reports, and detailed analyses of every part of the spacecraft. It also signifies “the final formal milestone to pass before integration with the Space Launch System rocket,” according to a NASA statement.

The news comes a day after Northrop Grumman successfully fired a massive 154-foot SLS booster during a test in the Utah desert.

Artemis I

Artemis I, formerly known as Exploration Mission-1, will put Orion and SLS to the ultimate test — the mission will be a three week, uncrewed test flight around the Moon, getting to within just 60 miles of the lunar surface.

The mission is slated for November 2021. The first crewed mission, Artemis II, is expected to launch in August 2023.

READ MORE: Orion Program Completes Key Review for Artemis I [NASA]

More on Artemis: NASA Tests Rocket So Huge It Lights Entire Hillside on Fire

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Amazon Promises Its Alexa For Landlords System Doesn’t Spy on Tenants

Amazon is launching a Alexa for Residential service that makes it easier for landlords to convert units into smart apartments.

Don’t Mind Me!

Amazon is launching a new program that would make it easier for landlords to install Alexa-enabled smart speakers and devices in their tenants’ homes.

Alexa for Residential, The Verge reports, would get Alexa integration set up in the now-smart apartment, and tenants would be able to link their Amazon accounts to the devices or just use them as standalone gadgets. Most importantly, Amazon says that the wealth of user data that these devices would gather on each tenant will stay out of their landlord’s hands.

Tall Order

Of course, Amazon telling us we can trust them to keep data private is a bit rich, given the myriad privacy scandals involving Amazon’s tech in recent years — not to mention its well-funded efforts to spy on its own employees.

That said, The Verge reports that tenants will be able to separate their Amazon account from the smart devices, and Amazon says that any voice recordings gathered by the devices will be deleted after a day.

Potential Upsell

In the coming months, companies that have already signed up for Alexa for Residential plan to install the units in rental properties in Colorado, Florida, and Maryland.

At that point, it’ll be interesting to see if the units get rented for more than they did previously – or, on the other hand, if people avoid the high-tech homes altogether.

READ MORE: Amazon Alexa for Residential will let the voice assistant power apartment complexes [The Verge]

More on Alexa: Thanks, Amazon! Echo Recorded And Sent Audio To Random Contacts Without Warning

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A Three-Star System Ripped Apart Its Own Protoplanetary Disc

Scientists identified a solar system with three stars that tore apart its own protoplanetary disc with the stars' bizarre orbits.

Topsy-Turvy

For the first time, astronomers have found a star system that ripped apart its own protoplanetary disc, the ring of materials that gradually clump together to form planets.

The star system in question, GW Orionis, is particularly volatile. With three stars at its center, what once was a regular, uniform protoplanetary disk is now warped out of alignment, according to research published Thursday in the journal Science. It’s an unusual find, and it could help the hunt for more exoplanets elsewhere now that scientists know planets could form in bizarre, unique orbits.

Black Sheep

Thankfully, the damage to the protoplanetary disc isn’t so bad that exoplanets can’t form around the three stars. Even a separate misaligned ring still has enough material to potentially create a new world.

“Any planets formed within the misaligned ring will orbit the star on highly oblique orbits and we predict that many planets on oblique, wide-separation orbits will be discovered in future planet imaging campaigns,” study co-author Alexander Kreplin of the University of Exeter said in a press release.

Missing Piece

The scientists found that the three stars, all of which are in misaligned orbits, could have gradually ripped the disc apart. But a separate team from the University of Victoria thinks that there’s still a missing piece: one exoplanet formed in the middle of the mess that served as a trigger for the ensuing chaos.

“We think that the presence of a planet between these rings is needed to explain why the disc tore apart,” Victoria researcher Jiaqing Bi said in the release.

READ MORE: New observations show planet-forming disc torn apart by its three central stars [ESO]

More on planet formation: A Baby Exoplanet Is Creating Strange Dust Rings Around Its Star

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Close-Up Images of Sunspots Look Like Horrible Gaping Mouths

Using the recently upgraded GREGOR telescope on Tenerife, Spain, researchers zoomed in on the surface of the Sun to study its magnetism.

Enhance

Using Europe’s largest solar telescope GREGOR, researchers zoomed in on the surface of the Sun to study its magnetism and how it influences the Earth — and what they saw is absolutely terrifying.

They were able to get close enough to identify features as small as 50 kilometers across, the equivalent of spotting a needle on a soccer field from an entire kilometer away, according to a statement.

Telescope Upgrades

Telescope optics suffer from many of the same problems as glasses wearers who have the wrong prescription, resulting in blurry vision. These issues tend to be caused by fabrication issues involved in constructing the telescope’s numerous elements.

The team was able to correct for some of these issues on GREGOR by realigning its elements and making several mechanical upgrades, as outlined in a new paper published in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.

One of these issues was an astigmatism, another issue plaguing both human and telescopic vision. They eliminated it by polishing six nanometers off the ‘scope’s massive parabolic mirrors, or about 10,000th the diameter of a human hair.

Gaping Maw

Thanks to the upgrades, the team was able to get a detailed look at the Sun’s mysterious sunspots, strange and relatively cool spots that dot the surface of our star. Magnetic fields are very strong in these areas, trapping the heat within.

And as it turns out, they look absolutely terrifying when viewed from Earth — like a horrible gaping mouth.

READ MORE: New High-Res Images of The Sun Show How Creepy Sunspots Look in Closeup [Science Alert]

More on the Sun: Scientists Found Something Surprising in Closest-Ever Photos of the Sun

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China Just Launched a Mysterious “Reusable Test Spacecraft”

China quietly launched a mysterious reusable spacecraft into orbit this morning on top a massive Long March 2F rocket. Could it be the country's spaceplane?

Mysterious Spacecraft

China quietly launched a mysterious reusable spacecraft into orbit this morning, atop a massive Long March 2F rocket at the country’s Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center.

China’s state news website Xinhua called the launch a success. “The test spacecraft will return to its intended domestic landing site after a period of orbit, during which reusable technical validation will be carried out as planned,” reads the report, as translated by Google Translate.

Top Secret

It’s still unclear what the spacecraft, likely a project by the country’s main space contractor China Aerospace Science and Technology Corp. (CASC), is designed to do — or what it even looks like, for that matter.

Some experts suggest it could be a spaceplane, reminiscent of the US’s top secret X-37B project, which recently carried out its sixth mission in orbit.

“China has been looking into a few different concepts for spaceplanes for quite a few years,” Andrew Jones, a freelance reporter specializing in China’s space program, told The Verge.

Wider Payloads

In 2017, China announced plans to test a reusable spaceplane in 2020, as SpaceNews reports. Adding to the rumors was apparent modification work on the launch tower, reportedly allowing wider payloads to be launched using the Long March 2F rocket.

The 2017 reports also claimed that such a reusable spacecraft would be designed to carry both crew and payloads, according to SpaceNews.

READ MORE: China just launched a ‘reusable test spacecraft’ — possibly a spaceplane [The Verge]

More on X-37B: The Space Force Is About to Launch a Mysterious Spacecraft

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Neuroscientist: There Was a Huge Problem With Neuralink’s Demo

But not everybody was impressed with Neuralink's recent demo. To many experts, the demo seems to have raised far more questions than it was able to answer.

Not Impressed

On August 28, Elon Musk showed off an early version of his secretive startup Neuralink’s brain computer interface. He demonstrated a coin-sized prototype, implanted in a pig’s skull, that’s meant to read and write information from the brain.

Musk called it “kind of like a Fitbit in your skull, with tiny wires” during the event, and said it could solve a number of disorders, from depression to brain damage.

But not everybody was impressed. To many experts, the demo seems to have raised far more questions than it was able to answer.

“Let me give a more specific concern: The device we saw was placed over a single sensorimotor area,” John Krakauer, chief medical and scientific officer at MindMaze and professor of neurology at Johns Hopkins University, told Inverse.

Studded Belt

Krakauer’s logistical concern: could one Neuralink device really give access to the entire brain?

“If we want to read thoughts rather than movements (assuming we knew their neural basis) where do we put it?” he added. “How many will we need? How does one avoid having one’s scalp studded with them? No mention of any of this of course.”

Big Huh

Krakauer wasn’t the only unimpressed neuroscientist.

“In terms of their technology, 1,024 channels is not that impressive these days, but the electronics to relay them wirelessly is state-of-the-art, and the robotic implantation is nice,” Andrew Jackson, professor of neural interfaces at Newcastle University said in a Science Media Center statement.

“The biggest challenge is what you do with all this brain data,” Jackson added. “The demonstrations were actually quite underwhelming in this regard, and didn’t show anything that hasn’t been done before.”

READ MORE: Neuralink: 3 neuroscientists react to Elon Musk’s brain chip reveal [Inverse]

More on Neuralink: PETA Is Really Upset With Elon Musk For Testing Neuralink on Pigs

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Battery-Free Game Boy Powered by Force of Mashing Buttons

A team of scientists build a recreation of the Nintendo Game Boy that works without any batteries to demonstrate new ways to build clean gadgets.

Button Masher

A team of computer scientists have spent their year working on the world’s first battery-free Game Boy.

The device, CNET reports, is a faithful recreation of the 1989 Nintendo Game Boy, with one key difference: Instead of AA batteries, the handheld gaming system is powered entirely by tiny solar panels and the force of a heated gamer mashing the buttons. Just like the Game Boy was a breakthrough in mobile gaming, the scientists hope that they too can spark a revolution in battery-free technology.

Gamer Fuel

Playing the device — called the Engage — isn’t quite up to the standard of an authentic Game Boy, even though it can play the classic console’s entire library of games. That’s because its very limited power necessitates a tiny screen, no speakers, and just a few seconds of life without constant button-mashing.

“We’re really making a huge leap towards useful and usable systems that are built upon this foundation of intermittent computing,” Delft University of Technology computer scientist Przemyslaw Pawelczak told CNET.

Save States Enabled

Those limitations are by design, CNET reports, and the team found a way to make the console autosave your progress at the exact moment before it dies. Press a few buttons and the game springs back to life at the exact moment you left it. That’s great for games like Tetris, but more of a disruption for games like the Pokémon series that don’t require button mashing.

What remains to be seen, however, is how the notoriously-litigious Nintendo will react after the team presents the Engage at a research conference next week.

READ MORE: The first battery-free Game Boy wants to power a gaming revolution [CNET]

More on gaming: Putting Pokémon On The Blockchain Takes Microtransactions To Their Inevitable, Insufferable End

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Russian Scientist Still Plotting to Create More CRISPR Babies

A Russian biologist plans to gene-hack more CRISPR babies in an attempt to prevent deafness despite other scientists' warnings.

Remember all the commotion and immediate backlash against the idea of CRISPR babies — human embryos that have their genes altered with CRISPR — after a Chinese researcher created a pair of twins with altered genetic code in 2018 and 2019?

Well, the concept hasn’t gone away, much to bioethicists’ chagrin. Now, Russian biologist Denis Rebrikov of Moscow’s Pirogov Medical University is telling New Scientist that he still plans to gene-hack human embryos, in an attempt to prevent congenital deafness.

“We are still planning to correct the inherited hearing loss mutation in [the gene] GJB2, so that a hearing baby is born to a deaf couple,” Rebrikov told the magazine.

But other scientists, of course, remain convinced that’s a bad idea. After the Chinese researcher He Jiankui created the world’s first CRISPR babies a few years back, an international team of doctors created the International Commission on the Clinical Use of Human Germline Genome Editing.

The commission, New Scientist reports, published a report on Thursday concluding that human gene editing is still unsafe, especially when the goal is to bring an embryo to term. And if a doctor absolutely must do so, they suggest that it ought to be only for life-saving purposes.

Even having read the report, Rebrikov told New Scientist that he’s still moving ahead with his plan.

It’s not clear that he’s got the necessary approval from Russian regulatory bodies. But, as is the case in many countries around the world, Russia doesn’t outright ban the practice so he may be able to sneak his experiments through.

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Engineers Test Jetliner Where You Ride in the Wings

Engineers ran a flight test of a model Flying-V, the experimental plane that has seats inside its wings, for the first time.

We Have Liftoff

For the first time, a scale model of the Flying-V, an experimental jetliner that seats passengers inside its wings, took flight during an uncrewed test.

The results of a Flying-V test have been long awaited. The plane’s unusual design makes it 20 percent more fuel efficient than the most advanced planes on the market, according to New Atlas, which has covered the project previously. But, as with any unusual experimental design, it remains unclear how well it would actually work in practice.

Flight Simulator

Even if it wasn’t a real Flying-V, the successful flight test of the scaled down model is a pretty big deal. Even the engineers helping design it weren’t sure how well the new plane would fare during takeoff and landing.

“One of our worries was that the aircraft might have some difficulty lifting-off, since previous calculations had shown that ‘rotation’ could be an issue,” Roelof Vos, a propulsion researcher at Delft University of Technology, told Flightglobal.com. “The team optimized the scaled flight model to prevent the issue. But you need to fly to know for sure.”

Light Turbulence

The largest issue that the team ran into was during what Vos called “somewhat of a rough landing,” Vos told FlightGlobal.

When your flight lands, you might notice that the plane tends to tilt back and forth a bit as it lands up with the runway. The same thing happened with the Flying-V, Vos told the site, and we can’t imagine how nauseous passengers would have been.

READ MORE: Flying V long-distance plane makes its first flight as a scale model [New Atlas]

More on aviation: New “Flying-V” Plane Puts Passenger Seats in the Wings

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Finally, There’s Evidence That the Russian COVID Vaccine Might Work

There's finally published research suggesting that the Russian COVID-19 vaccine boosts the immune system, but it's not clear if it will actually help.

Finally, after the Russian government approved it for use, there’s actual evidence that the country’s experimental coronavirus vaccine induces an actual immune response.

Results from a preliminary test were published in the academic journal The Lancet on Friday, New Scientist reports, ending weeks of mystery during which Russian officials bragged about the vaccine despite there being no publicly-available evidence that it worked.

Even the newly-published experiment is minuscule in scale compared to what’s necessary to prove that a vaccine works and is safe. The paper shows that the vaccine prepared the immune systems of all 76 healthy volunteers to fight the coronavirus without side effects. But, as New Scientist points out, there’s still no evidence that the vaccine actually prevents or even mitigates COVID-19 infections.

Without proper data, scientists remain skeptical of the vaccine — and, needless to say, the deployment of it  — until there’s actual evidence that it will help.

“We are not expecting to see widespread vaccination until the middle of next year,” World Health Organization spokesperson Margaret Harris said at a Friday press briefing.

“This phase 3 must take longer because we need to see how truly protective the vaccine is and we also need to see how safe it is,” Harris added, speaking of experimental vaccines in general.

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Plants Do Something Weird When They Grow Near Human Corpses, Scientists Say

According to a new paper, changes in the composition of tree and shrub canopies could guide search and rescue teams to find human remains.

It’s like an episode of “True Detective.”

How do you find human remains in a massive natural ecosystem like the Amazon rainforest? According to a new paper published in the journal Trends in Plant Science, tree and shrub canopies could guide search and rescue teams to find human remains, as CNN reports.

As they decompose, human remains create “cadaver decomposition islands,” the researchers write, altering the surrounding soil, roots and leaves. These changes could even be “detected remotely.”

“In smaller, open landscapes foot patrols could be effective to find someone missing, but in more forested or treacherous parts of the world like the Amazon, that’s not going to be possible at all,” explained senior author Neal Stewart Junior, a professor of plant sciences at the University of Tennessee, in a statement. “This led us to look into plants as indicators of human decomposition, which could lead to faster, and possibly safer body recovery.”

The researchers are planning to test their new cadaver discovering technique at the University of Tennessee’s “body farm,” more formally known as the Anthropology Research Facility, where they will assess changes in these cadaver decomposition islands including minute changes in the coloration and fluorescent signatures of individual leaves.

“The most obvious result of the islands would be a large release of nitrogen into the soil, especially in the summertime when decomposition is happening so fast,” Stewart said. “Depending on how quickly the plants respond to the influx of nitrogen, it may cause changes in leaf color and reflectance.”

There’s one key problem: humans aren’t the only mammals dying in the woods. That means the team will have to find a human specific way to spot these metabolic processes that differ, say, from a dead deer.

“One thought is if we had a specific person who went missing who was, let’s say, a heavy smoker, they could have a chemical profile that could trigger some sort of unique plant response making them easier to locate,” Stewart suggested. “Though at this stage this idea is still farfetched.”

Stewart and his team are hoping their research could make recovering human bodies — and possibly nearby survivors — in large forested ideas far more efficient.

“When you start to think about deploying drones to look for specific emissions, now we can think of the signals more like a check engine light,” he explained. “If we can quickly fly where someone may have gone missing and collect data over tens or even hundreds of square kilometers, then we’d know the best spots to send in a search team.”

READ MORE: Plants could help authorities detect dead human bodies in woodland [CNN]

More on forensics: Horrifying Study: Corpses Thrash Around For a Year After Death

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Fauci Warns That Earth Has Entered a “Pandemic Era”

Dr. Fauci warns that we've all entered a

Dr. Anthony Fauci, the White House’s top coronavirus advisor, warns that humanity is now living in a “pandemic era.”

At this point, nearly half a year after the COVID-19 pandemic brought the U.S. to its knees, that may sound obvious. But as The Washington Post reports, Fauci is talking about something greater than just the current pandemic. Rather, he believes that human activity has become a major contributor to the emergence of new deadly diseases.

“COVID-19, recognized in late 2019, is but the latest example of an unexpected, novel, and devastating pandemic disease,” Fauci, along with his colleague Dr. David Morens, wrote in research published last month in the prestigious journal CELL. “One can conclude from this recent experience that we have entered a pandemic era. The causes of this new and dangerous situation are multifaceted, complex, and deserving of serious examination.”

Throughout the paper, Fauci and Morens point out numerous dangerous disease outbreaks that began as a downstream effect of industrialization or other ways that human civilization impacted nature. For instance, there’s the Nipah virus outbreak from around the turn of the 21st century that began because humanity burned down forests to make room for agriculture, which displaced infected bats closer to populated areas.

“There are many examples where disease emergences reflect our increasing inability to live in harmony with nature,” Fauci and Morens write.

In order to reverse course, the duo warns that we need to rethink many aspects of our society, from deforestation to living in crowded cities to unsanitary animal farming.

“Living in greater harmony with nature will require changes in human behavior as well as other radical changes that may take decades to achieve: rebuilding the infrastructures of human existence, from cities to homes to workplaces, to water and sewer systems, to recreational and gatherings venues,” Fauci and Morens write.

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Fauci: We Could Cut Trials Short and Give Out COVID Vaccine "Right Now" – Futurism

According to Anthony Fauci, the United States top infectious disease expert, there could be a safe way to start giving out a COVID vaccine earlier than expected.

Fauci said during aTuesday interview with Kaiser Health News that the Data and Safety Monitoring Board, a committee made up of independent experts who evaluate the safety of vaccine development, could decide that the data is so good right now that you can say its safe and effective.'

In other words, researchers could end the trials early and start giving out the vaccine.

Three COVID vaccines have reached late stage large-scale trials in the US, according to CNN, including one by pharmaceutical company Moderna.

Its a touchy subject and complicating matters is the politicization of the vaccine by U.S. president Donald Trump. Experts have claimed that Trump is pressuring regulators to release a vaccine early to help with his reelection later this year.

Fauci remained steadfast during Tuesdays interview. If you are making a decision about the vaccine, youd better be sure you have very good evidence that it is both safe and effective, Fauci said. Im not concerned about political pressure.

Health experts are reluctant to make any claims as to when a coronavirus vaccine will be made available. Some claim that ending trials early would likely come with inherent safety risks, as CNN reports.

Fauci is optimistic. He believes that we could make rapid progress before the end of 2020.

I believe that by the time we get to the end of this calendar year that we will feel comfortable that we do have a safe and effective vaccine, Fauci told NBC today.

Faucis main concern right now, actually, is the upcoming flu season, something the nation needs to get ahead of.

What Id really like to see is a full court press to get us way down as a baseline, so that when you get these cases in the fall, they wont surge up, Fauci added.

READ MORE: Theres a legitimate way to end coronavirus vaccine trials early, Fauci says [CNN]

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SETI Team Increases Number of Stars That Might Host Life by 200x – Futurism

Branching Out

The search for extraterrestrial life just got a whole lot more expansive a team of scientists keeping an ear out for alien transmissions just ballooned their operation to examine 200 times the number of star systems it had previously.

The Breakthrough Listen Initiative, an effort to intercept radio transmissions sent out by extraterrestrial civilizations, is now listening to 288,315 star systems instead of its previous 1,327, according to preprint research shared online last week. In all, the change represents a major upgrade to one of the more prominent attempts to find intelligent life in the Milky Way.

The University of Manchester scientists behind the project made the improvements after combing through existing European Space Agency data about the locations and distance from Earth of celestial bodies within 33,000 lightyears, which is the range of their radio telescope.

Knowing the locations and distances to these additional sources, Manchester researcher and team leader Michael Garrett said in a press release, greatly improves our ability to constrain the prevalence of extraterrestrial intelligence in our own galaxy and beyond. We expect future SETI surveys to also make good use of this approach.

The idea is to identify extraterrestrial civilizations by picking up radio broadcasts, so figuring out how feasible it is for each star system to get a message to Earth helped them narrow down their search while adding the new candidates.

Our results help to put meaningful limits on the prevalence of transmitters comparable to what we ourselves can build using twenty-first-century technology, study coauthor Bart Wlodarczyk-Sroka said in the release.

READ MORE: Breakthrough narrows intelligent life search in Milky Way [University of Manchester]

More on SETI: Scientists Say Life Could Survive Inside Stars

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SETI Team Increases Number of Stars That Might Host Life by 200x - Futurism

Scientists Are Running Out of Primates to Test Vaccines On – Futurism

Right now, anyone in the U.S. trying to develop a vaccine for COVID-19 will likely run into a crucial roadblock: There simply arent enough primate research subjects to go around.

American labs have run into a critical shortage of monkeys, The Atlantic reports. And without them, scientists have no hope of completing the animal testing phases of clinical tests before they can move on to trials with human volunteers. The bottleneck is a bad sign for future attempts to develop a treatment, as scientists who might develop a working vaccine have no way to actually test it out.

Koen Van Rompay is an infectious disease expert at the California National Primate Research Center. He told The Atlantic that due to the shortage, he gets significantly more requests from companies that want to run studies at the facility than he can handle.

I have to tell them, Im sorry, we are not allowed to start your research,' Van Rompay told The Atlantic.

There are numerous problems at play, The Atlantic reports. Theres more demand for monkeys to use in clinical research due to the coronavirus pandemic, but there are fewer monkeys available than ever. China had been supplying 60 percent of monkeys used in American research, but closed down exports due to the pandemic. On top of that, monkeys were already a hot commodity in short supply.

And because hindsight can be cruel, the National Institutes of Health actually discussed creating a strategic monkey reserve back in 2018, but never acted on it. If they had, scientists might still be able to do their important work.

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Scientists Are Running Out of Primates to Test Vaccines On - Futurism

Chadwick Bosemans Wakanda: Afro-Futurism Is in the Present – Common Dreams

Chadwick Bosemans tragic death at the all too young age of 43 from colorectal cancer has been weighing on me the past couple of days. I am a fan. But I also am battling cancer, and I think I understand his incredible productivity in his last years, as he knew he was fighting for his life. He was also fighting for a legacy, something to bequeath those he would leave behind. Having played Thurgood Marshall, Jackie Robinson, James Brown and King TChalla among others, he produced a string of pearls, of multi-dimensional performances. At a time when young Black men need hope and role models, he stepped up.

I thought I would say something about the Afro-Futurism that was much discussed with regard to the Wakanda whose ruler he played in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. At the end of The Black Panther, TChalla announces that Wakanda would begin sharing its technology with the world. Someone in the audience asks what a largely agricultural country had to offer, and Boseman just smiles.

Of all the world regions, Africa and the Middle East most suffer from stereotypes in the US media. Elliot Ross at Africaasacountry wrote in 2014 about historian Steven Simons observation that publishers seemed to like putting acacia trees on the covers of novels set in Africa, and, indeed, on books about Africa in general.

I lived about a tenth of my life on the African continent, and can attest that acacias or plane trees just arent common everywhere there.

What has been obscured by Americans stereotypes of Africa as one big wild animal reservation is its own spheres of hyper-modernity.

The complaints of white American conservatives that Wakanda is not a country are peculiarly tone deaf and betray an inability to understand genres of literature. It has been observed that George Orwells 1984 was not about the future. Eric Blair writing as Orwell was describing in the present the worst excesses of fascist and Stalinist societies (and as an anarcho-syndicalist was not above indicting British capitalism either).

Science Fiction and comic books often appeal to hyperbole and exaggeration as their central figure of speech, just as literary fiction likes irony. Wakanda is not the opposite of reality, but an exaggeration of an existing reality, a piling up of realities in one place that are instead scattered.

We dont often see Africa skylines like that of Nairobi in our media:

As for science, there is a lot of it being done on the continent, especially in South Africa, as Cheryl Kahla wrote at The South African.

She points out that Sandile Ngcobo and some physicist colleagues at the University of KwaZuluNatal developed the first digital laser, which can be controlled by computer and does not have to be reset each time it is used.

Some of the inventions come out of Africas special challenges. These obstacles can spur innovation.

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For instance, Africa mostly did not have a network of physical telephone wires, so when cell phone technology came along, Africans adopted it even more widely than other global populations. By 2013 there were 650 million cell phones in Africa, more than in the United States or Europe. We all remember how North African youth wielded this technology to unseat a string of dictators.

Thus, in a BBC report on technological innovations in Africa for 2017 we find that Ugandan engineer Brian Turyabagye has designed a biomedical smart jacket to quickly and accurately diagnose pneumonia in children. In that population it is hard to distinguish it from malaria, but Turyabagye linked a stethoscope in a vest to a mobile phone app that records the audio of the patients chest. Analysis of that audio can detect lung crackles and can lead to preliminary diagnoses.

As for Wakandas new-found vocation of philanthropy, Kenya, Nigeria, South Africa and Uganda are highly rated for charitable giving. Even Liberia, despite its legacy of civil war, is more generous in world rankings than Belgium.

The Black Panthers own Orientalism can get in the way of its futurism. It makes Wakanda a monarchy when Africa is almost entirely made up of republics. Ghana and Senegal have made strides in democracy (and Killmonger could not so easily have taken over a democracy). It garbles Pharaonic religion with Hinduism and displaces both to the south of the subcontinent, whereas the vast majority of Africans are Muslims and Christians, and they have innovated in those traditions. Sufi Murids in Senegal contributed to a powerful strain of Muslim pacifism. If anything the film does not make Africa futuristic enough.

Of course, Africa can sometimes offer a low-tech critique of an overly industrialized, scientistic way of life.

Ironically, if Boseman had actually been, say, a South African, he would have been much less likely to die of that form of cancer. A 2018 paper in the American Journal of Pathology says that:

Incidence rates of CRC are vastly different for African Americans (60 per 100,000 per year) and South African blacks (5 per 100,000 per year). Of the many differences that characterize the environment for these different individuals, diet can play an outsize role in the incidence rates for CRC. The diet for rural South African blacks is highly enriched in fiber and low in meat and fat, whereas the Western diet is low in fiber and high in meat and fat.

Americans would do well to adopt this low tech but life-saving way of life from Africans, cutting down on red meat and fat in favor of nutritious fruits and vegetables. Since red meat is also a high carbon food, reducing its consumption would also help the environment. Africas carbon dioxide and methane emissions are tiny compared to those of supposedly technologically more sophisticated countries.

In one of his many achievements, Boseman (along with the MCU creative team) deployed the tropes of science fiction to create new images of Africa, but African scientific and technological advance is in the present. If it does not get the big international awards, I suspect, it is because it is oriented to practical problem-solving for populations that were set back by a history of European colonialism and exploitation.

These thoughts came to me as I rewatched The Black Panther for the nth time.

I am just one of millions of grieving fans trying to find a way to say goodbye to someone whose spirit I had expected to inspire and guide me for many years to come, and who was cut down in his prime. I am grateful for his life even as I mourn his death.

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Chadwick Bosemans Wakanda: Afro-Futurism Is in the Present - Common Dreams

Japanese Company Tests a Flying Car With a Human On Board – Futurism

Flying Machine

A Japanese company called SkyDrive just conducted a successful flight test of its flying car vehicle with a human pilot on board.

The vehicle, which looks sort of like a cross between a snowmobile and a quadrotor drone, hovered several feet off the ground for four minutes, AP News reports. While it sounds like a small feat, very few eVTOL (electric vertical takeoff and landing) projects have ever actually made it off the ground and fewer yet have done so with a human in the pilots seat.

Tomohiro Fukuzawa, who runs SkyDrive, told AP News that hes optimistic about the future of eVTOL vehicles and believes that they could drive down the cost of exports or revolutionize personal transport.

Of the worlds more than 100 flying car projects, only a handful has succeeded with a person on board, Fukuzawa told AP News. I hope many people will want to ride it and feel safe.

But theres a lot of engineering that needs to happen between now and then. Flying cars cant yet stay aloft for nearly long enough to be useful, and the battery packs necessary to do so are heavy and expensive.

If [eVTOL vehicles] cost $10 million, no one is going to buy them, Sanjiv Singh, a Carnegie Mellon University roboticist whos working on his own eVTOL project, told AP News. If they fly for 5 minutes, no one is going to buy them. If they fall out of the sky every so often, no one is going to buy them.

READ MORE: Japans flying car gets off ground, with a person aboard [AP News]

More on flying cars: Boeings Flying Car Just Completed Its First Test Flight

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Japanese Company Tests a Flying Car With a Human On Board - Futurism