Spaceplane Buddy

After launching into orbit roughly three months ago, China's top-secret spaceplane has released a mysterious object, which is now circling the Earth behind it, SpaceNews reports.

There's very little we know about China's "reusable experimental spacecraft," except that it launched atop a Long March 2F rocket back in August. We don't know its purpose, what it looks like, or what cargo it was carrying during launch — but it's an intriguing development, nonetheless, for China's reusable launch platform.

Mysterious Object

The object was released between October 24 and October 31, according to tracking data being analyzed by the US Space Force's 18th pace Defense Squadron.

We can only hazard a guess as to what the mysterious object's purpose is. According to Harvard astronomer and space tracker Jonathan McDowell, it "may be a service module, possibly indicating an upcoming deorbit burn."

Based on the size and weight of payloads Long March rockets usually carry, China's mysterious spaceplane is likely similar to the Air Force's X-37B spaceplane, which is similarly shrouded in mystery and currently on its sixth mission.

We also don't know when the Chinese model will make its return back to Earth, but given recent activity at the Lop Nur base in Xinjiang suggests, it may land there in the near future, according to the report.

It's a puzzling new development for China's secretive spacecraft — but it does raise the possibility of a renewed interest in spaceplanes, a potentially affordable and reusable way to launch payloads into orbit.

More on the spaceplane: China Launches Mysterious "Reusable Test" Spacecraft

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Chinese Spaceplane Releases Mystery Object Into Orbit

Spying @ Home

Ever since the COVID-19 pandemic drove a wave of working from home, companies have been relentless in their efforts to digitally police and spy on remote employees by using what's known as "bossware." That's the pejorative name for software that tracks the websites an employee visits, screenshots their computer screens, and even records their faces and voices.

And now, the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), an agency of the federal government, is looking to intervene.

"Close, constant surveillance and management through electronic means threaten employees' basic ability to exercise their rights," said NLRB general counsel Jennifer Abruzzo, in a Monday memo. "I plan to urge the Board to apply the Act to protect employees, to the greatest extent possible, from intrusive or abusive electronic monitoring and automated management practices."

Undoing Unions

In particular, Abruzzo is worried about how bossware could infringe on workers' rights to unionize. It's not hard to imagine how such invasive surveillance could be used to bust unionization. Even if the technology isn't explicitly deployed to impede organization efforts, the ominous presence of the surveillance on its own can be a looming deterrent, which Abruzzo argues is illegal.

And now is the perfect moment for the NLRB to step in. The use and abuse of worker surveillance tech in general — not just bossware — has been "growing by the minute," Mark Gaston Pearce, executive director of the Workers' Rights Institute at Georgetown Law School, told CBS.

"Employers are embracing technology because technology helps them run a more efficient business," Gaston explained. "… What comes with that is monitoring a lot of things that employers have no business doing."

Overbearing Overlord

In some ways, surveillance tech like bossware can be worse than having a nosy, actual human boss. Generally speaking, in a physical workplace employees have an understanding of how much privacy they have (unless they work at a place like Amazon or Walmart, that is).

But when bossware spies on you, who knows how much information an employer could be gathering — or even when they're looking in. And if it surveils an employee's personal computer, which more often than not contains plenty of personal information that a boss has no business seeing, that's especially invasive.

Which is why Abruzzo is pushing to require employers to disclose exactly how much they're tracking.

It's a stern message from the NLRB, but at the end of the day, it's just a memo. We'll have to wait and see how enforcing it pans out.

More on surveillance: Casinos to Use Facial Recognition to Keep "Problem Gamblers" Away

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Droning On

Someone thinks it's a great idea to fly 500 drones over New York City to create a huge ad in the sky on Thursday evening. Because New Yorkers certainly don't have any historical reason to mistrust unknown aircraft over their skyline, right?

As Gothamist reports, the drone swarm is part of a "surreal takeover of New York City’s skyline" on behalf of — we shit you not — the mobile game Candy Crush.

Fernanda Romano, Candy Crush's chief marketing officer, told Gothamist that the stunt will "turn the sky into the largest screen on the planet" using the small, light-up drones.

Though this is not the first time the Manhattan skyline has been used as ad space — that distinction goes to the National Basketball Association and State Farm, which did a similar stunt this summer during the NBA draft — local lawmakers are ticked off about it nonetheless.

"I think it’s outrageous to be spoiling our city’s skyline for private profit," Brad Hoylman, a state senator that represents Manhattan's West Side in the NY Legislature, told the local news site. "It’s offensive to New Yorkers, to our local laws, to public safety, and to wildlife."

Freak Out

Indeed, as the NYC Audubon Society noted in a tweet, the Candy Crush crapshoot "could disrupt the flight patterns of thousands of birds flying through NYC, leading to collisions with buildings" as they migrate.

Beyond the harm this will do to birds and the annoyance it will undoubtedly cause the famously-grumpy people of New York, this stunt is also going down with very little warning, considering that Gothamist is one of the only news outlets even reporting on it ahead of time.

While most viewers will hopefully be able to figure out what's going on pretty quickly, the concept of seeing unknown aircraft above the skyline is a little too reminiscent of 9/11 for comfort — and if Candy Crush took that into consideration, they haven't let on.

So here's hoping this event shocks and awes Thursday night city-goers in a good way, and not in the way that makes them panic.

More drone warfare: Russia Accused of Pelting Ukraine Capital With "Kamikaze" Drones

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Huge Drone Swarm to Form Giant Advertisement Over NYC Skyline

Chinese scientists are reportedly planning to send monkeys to its new Tiangong space station for experiments that will involve the animals mating and potentially reproducing, the South China Morning Post reports.

It's a fascinating and potentially controversial experiment that could have major implications for our efforts to colonize space: can mammals, let alone humans, successfully reproduce beyond the Earth?

According to the report, the experiment would take place in the station's largest capsule, called Wentian, inside two biological test cabinets that can be expanded.

After examining the behavior of smaller creatures, "some studies involving mice and macaques will be carried out to see how they grow or even reproduce in space," Zhang Lu, a researcher at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing, said during a speech posted to social media earlier this week, as quoted by the SCMP.

"These experiments will help improve our understanding of an organism’s adaptation to microgravity and other space environments," he added.

Some simpler organisms, including nematodes and Japanese rice fish, have been observed reproducing in space.

But more complex life forms have struggled. In 2014, a Russian experiment to see whether geckos could produce offspring in space failed when all the critters died.

And the failure rate for mammals, so far, has been total. Soviet Union scientists got mice to mate during a space flight in 1979, but none of them gave birth after being returned to Earth.

In other words, getting monkeys to reproduce on board a space station will be anything but easy. For one, just dealing with living creatures in space can pose immense challenges. The astronauts will "need to feed them and deal with the waste," Kehkooi Kee, a professor with the school of medicine at Tsinghua University, told the SCMP.

Then there's the fact that astronauts will have to keep the macaques happy and comfortable, something that experts say will be challenging since long term confinement in the spartan environments of space habitats could cause immense stress for the simians.

And even if astronauts successfully set the mood for the monkeys, the physics of sex in space are predicted to be challenging.

"Firstly, just staying in close contact with each other under zero gravity is hard," Adam Watkins, an associate professor of reproductive physiology at University of Nottingham, wrote in a 2020 open letter highlighted by the SCMP. "Secondly, as astronauts experience lower blood pressure while in space, maintaining erections and arousal are more problematic than here on Earth."

With its new space station in nearly full operation, China isn't shying away from asking some big questions — but whether these experiments will play out as expected is anything but certain.

READ MORE: Chinese scientists plan monkey reproduction experiment in space station [South China Morning Post]

More on sex in space: Scientists Say We Really Have to Talk About Boning in Space

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China Plans to Send Monkeys to Space Station to Have Sex With Each Other

Latest Feud

Another day, another Elon Musk feud on Twitter — except now, he's the owner of the social network, and he's beefing with a sitting member of Congress.

The whole thing started innocently enough earlier this week, when firebrand Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY, and better known by her initials, "AOC") subtweeted the website's new owner.

"Lmao at a billionaire earnestly trying to sell people on the idea that 'free speech' is actually a $8/mo subscription plan," the New York Democratic Socialist tweeted in a post that, upon Futurism's perusal, appeared to load only half the time.

Sweat Equity

Not one to be shown up, Musk later posted a screenshot of an AOC-branded sweatshirt from the congressperson's website, with its $58 price tag circled and an emoji belying the billionaire's alleged affront at the price.

In response, Ocasio-Cortez said she was proud her sweatshirts were made by union labor, and that the proceeds from their sales were going to fund educational support for needy kids. She later dug in further, noting that her account was "conveniently" not working and joking that Musk couldn't buy his way "out of insecurity."

Yo @elonmusk while I have your attention, why should people pay $8 just for their app to get bricked when they say something you don’t like?

This is what my app has looked like ever since my tweet upset you yesterday. What’s good? Doesn’t seem very free speechy to me pic.twitter.com/e3hcZ7T9up

— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) November 3, 2022

Bricked

To be clear, any suggestion that Musk personally had anything to do with any Twitter glitches on AOC's part would seem ludicrously petty. But then again, this is a guy who once hired a private detective to investigate a random critic.

Occam's razor, though, suggests that it was probably AOC's mega-viral tweet that broke the site's notoriously dodgy infrastructure. Of course, that's not a ringing endorsement of the site that Musk just acquired for the colossal sum of $44 billion.

More on Twitter: Twitter Working on Plan to Charge Users to Watch Videos

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AOC Says Her Twitter Account Broke After She Made Fun of Elon Musk

Observatory Offline

The Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA) Observatory in Chile has been hit with a cyberattack that has taken its website offline and forced it to suspend all observations, authorities there said.

Even email services were limited in the aftermath, illustrating the broad impact of the hack.

Nested high up on a plateau in the Chilean Andes at over 16,000 feet above sea level, ALMA is one of the most powerful and advanced radio telescopes in the world. Notably, ALMA helped take the first image of a black hole in 2019, in a collaborative effort that linked radio observatories worldwide into forming the Event Horizon Telescope.

Thankfully, ALMA's impressive arsenal of 66 high-precision antennas, each nearly 40 feet in diameter, was not compromised, the observatory said, nor was any of the scientific data those instruments collected.

In High Places

What makes ALMA so invaluable is its specialty in observing the light of the cooler substances of the cosmos, namely gas and dust. That makes ALMA a prime candidate for documenting the fascinating formations of planets and stars when they first emerge amidst clouds of gas.

Since going fully operational in 2013, it's become the largest ground-based astronomical project in the world, according to the European Southern Observatory, ALMA's primary operators.

So ALMA going offline is a distressing development, especially to the thousands of astronomers worldwide that rely on its observations and the some 300 experts working onsite. Getting it up and running is obviously a top priority, but the observatory said in a followup tweet that "it is not yet possible to estimate a date for a return to regular activities."

As of now, there's no information available on who the hackers were, or exactly how they conducted the attack. Their motivations, too, remain a mystery.

More on ALMA: Astronomers Think They Found the Youngest Planet in the Galaxy

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Hackers Just Took Down One of the World's Most Advanced Telescopes

You know that "research" going around saying humans are going to evolve to have hunchbacks and claws because of the way we use our smartphones? Though our posture could certainly use some work, you'll be glad to know that it's just lazy spam intended to juice search engine results.

Let's back up. Today the Daily Mail published a viral story about "how humans may look in the year 3000." Among its predictions: hunched backs, clawed hands, a second eyelid, a thicker skull and a smaller brain.

Sure, that's fascinating! The only problem? The Mail's only source is a post published a year ago by the renowned scientists at... uh... TollFreeForwarding.com, a site that sells, as its name suggests, virtual phone numbers.

If the idea that phone salespeople are purporting to be making predictions about human evolution didn't tip you off, this "research" doesn't seem very scientific at all. Instead, it more closely resembles what it actually is — a blog post written by some poor grunt, intended to get backlinks from sites like the Mail that'll juice TollFreeForwarding's position in search engine results.

To get those delicious backlinks, the top minds at TollFreeForwarding leveraged renders of a "future human" by a 3D model artist. The result of these efforts is "Mindy," a creepy-looking hunchback in black skinny jeans (which is how you can tell she's from a different era).

Grotesque model reveals what humans could look like in the year 3000 due to our reliance on technology

Full story: https://t.co/vQzyMZPNBv pic.twitter.com/vqBuYOBrcg

— Daily Mail Online (@MailOnline) November 3, 2022

"To fully realize the impact everyday tech has on us, we sourced scientific research and expert opinion on the subject," the TollFreeForwarding post reads, "before working with a 3D designer to create a future human whose body has physically changed due to consistent use of smartphones, laptops, and other tech."

Its sources, though, are dubious. Its authority on spinal development, for instance, is a "health and wellness expert" at a site that sells massage lotion. His highest academic achievement? A business degree.

We could go on and on about TollFreeForwarding's dismal sourcing — some of which looks suspiciously like even more SEO spam for entirely different clients — but you get the idea.

It's probably not surprising that the this gambit for clicks took off among dingbats on Twitter. What is somewhat disappointing is that it ended up on StudyFinds, a generally reliable blog about academic research. This time, though, for inscrutable reasons it treated this egregious SEO spam as a legitimate scientific study.

The site's readers, though, were quick to call it out, leading to a comically enormous editor's note appended to the story.

"Our content is intended to stir debate and conversation, and we always encourage our readers to discuss why or why not they agree with the findings," it reads in part. "If you heavily disagree with a report — please debunk to your delight in the comments below."

You heard them! Get debunking, people.

More conspiracy theories: If You Think Joe Rogan Is Credible, This Bizarre Clip of Him Yelling at a Scientist Will Probably Change Your Mind

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That "Research" About How Smartphones Are Causing Deformed Human Bodies Is SEO Spam, You Idiots

Jeff Bezos' former housekeeper is suing the Amazon founder for workplace discrimination that she says forced her to literally climb out out the window of his house to use the bathroom.

In the suit, filed this week in a Washington state court, the former housekeeper claimed that she and Bezos' other household staff were not provided with legally-mandated eating or restroom breaks, and that because there was no "readily accessible bathroom" for them to use, they had to clamber out a laundry room window to get to one.

In the complaint, lawyers for the ex-housekeeper, who is described as having worked for wealthy families for nearly 20 years, wrote that household staff were initially allowed to use a small bathroom in the security room of Bezos' main house, but "this soon stopped... because it was decided that housekeepers using the bathroom was a breach of security protocol."

The suit also alleges that housekeepers in the billionaire's employ "frequently developed Urinary Tract Infections" that they believed was related to not being able to use the bathroom when they needed to at work.

"There was no breakroom for the housekeepers," the complaint adds. "Even though Plaintiff worked 10, 12, and sometimes 14 hours a day, there was no designated area for her to sit down and rest."

The housekeeper — who, like almost all of her coworkers, is Latino — was allegedly not aware that she was entitled to breaks for lunch or rest, and was only able to have a lunch break when Bezos or his family were not on the premises, the lawsuit alleges.

The Washington Post owner has denied his former housekeeper's claims of discrimination through an attorney.

"We have investigated the claims, and they lack merit," Harry Korrell, a Bezos attorney, told Insider of the suit. "[The former employee] made over six figures annually and was the lead housekeeper."

He added that the former housekeeper "was responsible for her own break and meal times, and there were several bathrooms and breakrooms available to her and other staff."

"The evidence will show that [the former housekeeper] was terminated for performance reasons," he continued. "She initially demanded over $9M, and when the company refused, she decided to file this suit."

As the suit was just filed and may well end in a settlement, it'll likely be a long time, if ever, before we find out what really happened at Bezos' house — but if we do, it'll be a fascinating peek behind the curtain at the home life of one of the world's most powerful and wealthy men.

More on billionaires: Tesla Morale Low As Workers Still Don't Have Desks, Face Increased Attendance Surveillance

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Jeff Bezos' Housekeeper Says She Had to Climb Out the Window to Use the Bathroom

Last year, as his net worth soared past $300 billion dollars, Elon Musk was crowned the world's richest person in history.

Fast forward about 11 months — involving a "bad feeling" about the economy, a sudden, complicated, and likely soiled bid to buy Twitter, and a self-imposed foray into social media foreign policy — and according to Forbes, over $100 billion of that historic net worth has effectively vanished. As of Thursday, Musk's net worth is down to around $209.4 billion, in a 35 percent year-over decrease.

Don't get us wrong. Musk's wealth is still so unfathomably vast that even after losing that $100 billion, he's still the world's richest person. Still, that's a lot of money to lose, especially as far as it can be attributed to the founder's chaotic personal antics: secret babies with employees, escalating US-Russia tensions over the war in Ukraine with a Twitter poll.

That being said, though, one could argue that Musk would never have become who he is — and with that, how wealthy he is — today if not for his deeply chaotic online presence. His use of Twitter to rile and agitate has no doubt contributed to his cultural relevance, and alongside that relevance, investors and fans alike have followed.

Or it did, at least. These new numbers tell a different story, and they likely have a lot to do with Musk's maybe-failed deal to buy Twitter. He can't put up the money alone, and at least one of his outside investors has very publicly stated that they and others want out. (As a partial result of that bungled deal, the founder may soon be up for a national security review. So there's that, too.)

"The problem for Tesla investors is that more stock sales are likely by Musk to fund [the Twitter] deal," Wedbush analyst Dan Ives told Forbes, "which we believe will go down as one of the worst, most overpaid M&A deals in the history of the market."

But drama aside, his actual companies have faced more, uh, normal difficulties. The economy is hurting everyone, for starters. And earlier in the year, the CEO quipped that due to supply chain woes, his Tesla gigafactories should have sounded "like a giant roaring sound which [was] the sound of money on fire." Of course, government recall investigations might have had something to do with those money troubles, too.

At the end of the day, Musk is still richer than one Jeff Bezos, so we're sure he's pleased about that. In any case, it's unlikely that the world's still-richest man will change his controversial ways anytime soon — after all, he's clearly not that worried about what those ways might do to his own savings. The jury's still out on whether his investors will continue to trust him with theirs, though.

READ MORE: Elon Musk's Fortune Has Fallen By More Than $100 Billion In Less Than A Year [Forbes]

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Product Pains

Meta-formerly-Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is doubling down on his vision of the metaverse, a VR-based playground that hasn't made much headway in justifying its own existence so far.

Among its many critics, one stands out particularly: Palmer Luckey, the founder of Oculus, which was bought by Facebook for $2 billion back in 2014, and who seems to hate what Zuckerberg has done with it since.

"I don't think it's a good product," he told the audience during The Wall Street Journal's Tech Live conference on Monday, as quoted by Insider.

"It's not good, it's not fun," Luckey said, referring to Meta's Horizon Worlds, a crude and reportedly deserted virtual world meant to facilitate social gatherings and business meetings. "Most people on the team would agree it's not a good product."

It's a noteworthy perspective, considering Luckey and Oculus laid the early groundwork for Meta's Quest lineup of VR devices, a key component of the company's pivot to the metaverse. And, it's worth pointing out, he left room open for the vision to ultimately succeed.

"It is terrible today, but it could be amazing in the future," he said. "I think Mark will put in the money to do that."

Meta Mind

It's also yet another outspoken Facebook veteran speaking their mind on Zuckerberg's audacious pivot, a $15 billion gamble that has clearly spooked investors. Earlier this month, top Facebook consultant John Carmack voiced his discontent, revealing that "there's a bunch that I'm grumpy about," and criticizing the company's strategy in selling a VR-based virtual world to the masses.

The company has been put through the wringer as a result of Zuckerberg's new passion project. The company's metaverse division has reportedly been bleeding billions of dollars this year.

According to internal documents obtained by the Wall Street Journal this month, most Horizon Worlds users failed to return to the company's flagship metaverse space after just one month of use.

The company's goal was to obtain half a million active users by the end of 2022, but according to the documents, it has yet to crack 200,000.

Project Car

In short, it's no wonder Facebook veterans are coming out to criticize Zuckerberg's metaverse obsession.

During this week's conference, Luckey stopped short from predicting a total Meta implosion. Instead, he compared the metaverse to a "project car."

"You hack at it and maybe no one else sees the value," Luckey said. "Will they stumble? Yeah sure."

"Will they waste money? Will they add things to their project car that they later hack off?" he added. "Yes."

Updated with an additional quote by Luckey.

READ MORE: Oculus founder Palmer Luckey compares Facebook's metaverse to a 'project car,' with Mark Zuckerberg pursuing an expensive passion project that no one thinks is valuable [Insider]

More on the metaverse: Top Facebook Consultant Admits That the Metaverse Is Absolutely Terrible

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Founder of VR Company That Facebook Bought Roasts Zuckerberg's Metaverse

Astronomers have discovered a mysterious neutron star that's far lighter than previously thought possible, undermining our understanding of the physics and evolution of stars. And fascinatingly, it may be composed largely of quarks.

As detailed in a new paper published in the journal Nature Astronomy this week, the neutron star has a radius of just 6.2 miles and only the mass of 77 percent of the Sun.

That makes it much lighter than other previously studied neutron stars, which usually have a mass of 1.4 times the mass of the Sun at the same radius.

The team of astronomers, led by Victor Doroshenko of Eberhard Karls University of Tübingen in Germany, therefore suggest it could be an entirely new type of star.

"Our mass estimate makes the central compact object in HESS J1731-347 the lightest neutron star known to date, and potentially a more exotic object — that is, a 'strange star' candidate," the paper reads.

Neutron stars, which are some of the densest objects in the known universe, are typically formed after supergiant stars go supernova.

The star's core can then implode, compressing all of that mass into an extremely dense object. According to scientists' calculations, a single teaspoon of neutron star would have a mass of 2.2 trillion pounds.

But this newly discovered object defies our known definitions and boundaries.

Doroshenko and his team found that the star is actually much closer to us than we thought using data obtained by the European Space Agency's Gaia spacecraft, which allowed them to recalculate the mysterious star's mass.

The resulting mass and radius, though, simply don't fit into our current definition of a neutron star, which makes this new discovery a possible "strange star" candidate, according to the team.

Strange stars are hypothetical celestial objects thought to be made up of largely "strange quark" matter, allowing them to have lower temperatures and masses of other neutron stars.

Astronomers have also suggested that strange stars could be behind fast radio bursts, mysterious and powerful bursts of radio pulses that have yet to be explained.

In short, it's a highly unusual object that could rewrite our understanding of the universe.

"Such a light neutron star, regardless of the assumed internal composition, appears to be a very intriguing object from an astrophysical perspective," Doroshenko and his team wrote in a statement.

READ MORE: Mysterious Object May Be a 'Strange Star' Made Out of Quarks, Scientists Say [Science Alert]

More on neutron stars: Scientists Spotted Something That Appeared to Be Moving 7 Times the Speed of Light

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Astronomers Puzzled by Extremely Peculiar Object in Deep Space

Knotty Knotty

Robotic hand and claw-like grippers haven't been able to achieve anything close to a human-like dexterity, making them a clumsy choice to pick up delicate or oddly shaped objects.

Now, researchers at Harvard's engineering school are working on an ingenious alternative: why not throw a bunch of grippy tentacles at an object and see what sticks?

Inspired by how jellyfish ensnare their prey, the tentacle gripper looks more like an unnatural creature out of a Cronenberg movie than something pulled from nature, incidentally right on time for Halloween. And hell, the tentacles are effective, according to the researchers' findings recently published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 

"This new approach to robotic grasping complements existing solutions by replacing simple, traditional grippers that require complex control strategies with extremely compliant, and morphologically complex filaments that can operate with very simple control," said Robert Wood, professor of engineering and applied sciences at SEAS, in a press release about the work.

Chaos Science

The tentacles, or filaments, are made of rubber and aren't very strong individually. But working together, the slithy appendages can start to grapple some pretty heavy objects. Since each individual tentacle doesn't grip strongly, even delicate cargo like plants can be ensnared without risking damage.

And there's not a lot of fancy science involved, either. No special sensors or feedback and whatnot, just some limp, gangly tentacles that are thicker on one side so when you pump them full of air, they start to curl up. When it's time to set an object down, all it takes is releasing the pressure of that inflation. Of course, the curling is pretty random and isn't always going to entangle, but with enough tentacles and enough tries, it should stick.

While there's still some more fine tuning to be done, the tentacle gripper is already a promising prototype. And the researchers envision plenty of useful applications for the technology, like retrieving fragile artifacts on the ocean floor to moving fruits and vegetables in agricultural distribution.

More on weird grippers: Scientists Turn Dead Spiders Into "Necrobotic" Arachnoborgs

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Buy It Back

An upstate New York lawman is expressing concern that people around the US are 3D printing firearms to turn into gun buyback programs for cold, hard cash.

"I know in Utica, New York, Houston, Texas, and Spartanburg, South Carolina that 3D printed guns were submitted to the gun buyback program," Robert Swenszkowski, the assistant sheriff of New York's Oneida County and, strangely, a professor at Utica University, told Spectrum News 1.

He appeared to be referring to several stories that emerged this summer, in which people in Texas, South Carolina and New York did indeed sell back guns they 3D printed at home to local authorities as part of state gun buyback programs. One man, who identified himself only as "Kem," admitted that he 3D printed more than 100 guns to turn into New York State's gun buyback program. He was awarded $21,000 for his efforts, which was paid out to him in $500 gift cards.

Regulatory Nightmare

The NY state attorney general's office confirmed that the man known as Kem had indeed exploited the program — and as Swenszkowski noted, it's unclear what to do about the loophole, given that others are doing the same in other parts of the country.

"From a public safety perspective," the Utica assistant sheriff said, "getting any gun off the street if it has the potential to harm someone may be just as effective [as buying back traditionally-manufactured guns] so there’s certainly considerations that need to be given."

"You can’t guarantee that those guns will never be used to harm someone or never be used unlawfully," Swenszkowski added in his interview with the Utica-based Spectrum News 1.

To the assistant sheriff's mind, people like Kem should be held accountable for fraud — but he admits that changing the language of these buyback programs, which currently operate on a no-questions-asked basis, may hurt their efficacy.

"It’s a catch-22," Swenszkowski said — and it's hard to argue, given the gravity of gun violence in the US today.

Updated to correct Swenszkowski's title and more accurately reflect his outlook.

More next-gen weaponry: Drama Engulfs Plan to Zap School Shooters With Taser-Toting Drones

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Assistant Sheriff Expresses Concern About People 3D Printing Guns for Firearm Buyback Programs

Mythical Beast

Most people know better than to try to take an Uber between cities that are 100 miles apart — and as one tech guy learned in a now-viral post, people have very little sympathy for how much he got charged.

"I just took an Uber from Manhattan to Philadelphia," self-proclaimed "five-time unicorn founder" Martin Varsavsky tweeted. "In one hour and 45 minutes, different governments charged me $140 in various tolls and taxes."

The tweet was immediately met with ridicule, with Twitter users arguing those who chose to drive should foot the bill for maintaining the roads they use every day.

I just took an Uber from Manhattan to Philadelphia. In one hour and 45 minutes different governments charged me $140 in various tolls and taxes. pic.twitter.com/4ObTXtV9TK

— Martin Varsavsky (@martinvars) October 24, 2022

Zoomin'

A screenshot of his partial bill shows that Varsavsky did indeed get repeatedly charged by the governments of New York, Delaware, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania, for everything from various bridge charges to highway tolls. Uber also charged him $35 for an "Out of Town Surcharge."

The tech entrepreneur argued that he didn't take the train, which he claims is his usual move when traveling between the neighboring metropolises, because he "had to be on zooms [sic] along the way" — but that excuse didn't seem to cut it for those who responded to his tweet.

"That's their way of telling you that you shouldn't be using Uber to go from Manhattan to Philadelphia," Lee Carter, a former Virginia state delegate, said. "That's what trains are for."

Climate reporter Kendra Pierre-Louis had an even more choice take. "You guys love to tout personal responsibility but roadways [don't] pay for themselves," she tweeted. "So which is it? You wanna cover the cost of bridge and tunnels or nah?"

Triggered

Varsavsky defended himself after the post went viral.

"How can people be so triggered by something like this?" he tweeted — a response which itself garnered even more responses.

"It’s because in the US we overinvest in car infrastructure and under invest in public transportation," Michael Schneider, the founder of transit advocacy group Streets for All, responded. "For example, we subsidize the cost of driving at the expense of good trains. So when you were complaining about tolls it felt tone deaf to those that are trying to change things."

We couldn't have put it better ourselves.

More infrastructure week: Europe Plots High Speed Rail So Fast It Could Replace Airlines

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Tech Guy Shocked That Uber From NYC to Philly Is Expensive

Do Not Avert

Now that's an unnerving gaze.

Astronauts gearing up for SpaceX's private Polaris Dawn mission have recently puzzled netizens with their strange, almost creepy eyes that look straight out of "Minority Report."

"What's with the weird Photoshop in each Polaris Dawn crew member's eye?" asked one confused Redditor.

And no, these astronauts don't owe their uncanny looks to a bad Photoshop job, but something way cooler: high tech contact lenses.

Eye Spy

Anna Menon, one of the mission's astronauts and lead space operations engineer at SpaceX, took to Twitter to provide a clear close up of the cyberpunk-looking contacts. In the video, you can see a halo-like ring of light that outlines the inside of her pupils, with a noticeable but small white rectangle reflecting brightly within it, in what's likely responsible for the white speck in the eye in pictures from afar.

"Eye will be back… for research," Menon tweeted, with the "Terminator 2: Judgment Day" theme blaring in the video to boot.

Eye will be back…for research. Polaris Dawn will carry with us on our mission 38 experiments from 23 partner institutions, including this device that measures intraocular pressure through a contact lens. See https://t.co/VHKqpel7BB for more! pic.twitter.com/QBGqziW4Ij

— Anna Menon (@annawmenon) October 24, 2022

Sans Solution

According to Menon, the specialized contact lenses will be worn by all the astronauts to measure intraocular pressure. It's part of a University of Colorado Boulder study into the recently discovered affliction called spaceflight associated neuro-ocular syndrome.

SANS, as it's more readily known, causes swelling of the optic nerve, changes in the eye's shape and structure, and as a result of all that, can blur astronauts' vision. Its long term effects aren't well known, nor are its causes, but by having the astronauts wear the micro-sensor equipped "smart" contact lenses, scientists hope to measure how the eye adapts once it enters microgravity.

The current theory maintains that fluid shifts in the eye and brain are responsible for SANS symptoms, which the scientists believe could be confirmed from the contact lenses' data.

And if the data doesn't pan out, the contact lenses at least make a unique piece of astronaut fashion.

More on SpaceX: Billionaire Buys SpaceX Moon Trip For Him and His Wife

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Scammer's Paradise

The Fyre Fest island — yup, the Bahamas locale where convicted felon Billy McFarland "hosted" the wretched music festival that never was in 2017 — has reached its natural next form: a luxury real estate colony for the crypto elite, where "60 ultra-luxe pavilions and villas" will be bought and sold exclusively by way of NFTs.

That's right. A developing group called AGIA International claims to have snagged a 60-acre slice of cursed paradise and plans to sell multimillion dollar homes via crypto wallet. Intrigued? If you want to get on the ground floor, the developers will let you on an "allowlist" for a cool $10,000. Sounds... safe.

"This is the first time an entire real estate development has been exclusively for sale on the blockchain," Matthew Salnick, AGIA's blockchain developer, said in a statement. "There's never been a 100 percent tokenized resort-style community."

Extremely Opaque

Shockingly, there's a not a lot of transparency regarding how the process actually works.

While buying an NFT might sound simple enough, buying and owning deeded, real-world properties is a lot more complicated than scooping up an expensive JPEG. And though the developers do make the vague claim that their system offers "easily traceable ownership" and "faster buying-selling across borders," NFT trading is notoriously rife with scams and hacks — what happens if someone hacks into your wallet and, uh, steals your luxe villa?

That being said, shadiness — and, to that point, offshore banking — seems to be part of the whole pitch, with developing partner and Unchained Partners CEO Hunter Williams claiming that "among other benefits," perspective buyers will have access to "Bahamian residency and access to its sophisticated offshore banking system."

On that note, it's not terribly surprising to see the first so-called community of this kind being built in the Bahamas. Earlier this year, the country's PM, Philip E. Davis, gave any and all crypto operations the green light to set up shop.

"If the world of cryptocurrency is where you see your possibilities," Davis said back in April," then the Bahamas has a place for you."

Are there a lot of details missing here? Sure. Could this be Fyre Fest times actual millions? Definitely. But hey, according to AGIA, they just saw an opportunity. After all, one man's trash is another's offshore treasure.

"We bought this property because we saw its future," Erik Sanderson, an AGIA International co-founder, said in a statement, "not its past."

READ MORE: Fyre Festival's Island Is Being Turned Into an Enclave for Crypto Millionaires

More on NFT houses: This $7.7 Million Miami Mansion Comes With a Metaverse "Twin"

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Developers are Transforming the Fyre Fest Island Into an Exclusive Colony for Crypto Millionaires, Because of Course They Are

Meow Mix

Every cat person has suspected that their cats are ignoring them — and now, new research seems to support that hunch.

As a new study published in the journal Animal Cognition details, feline researchers have demonstrated that cats do appear to know when their owners are talking to them, but that sometimes, they choose to ignore it.

The researchers sat with 16 cat-people pairs who lived in studio apartments, and playing them recordings of the pair interacting, followed by recordings of the humans saying the same words they use when baby-talking their cats, but in a voice register similar to that which they'd use to speak to other humans. The researchers also played them recordings of other humans speaking to them as well, which the cats didn't respond much to at all.

To the shock of no one who's ever tried repeatedly to get their cat's attention, the felines seemed to be able to differentiate between the tone of voice used when their humans were speaking to them versus that which humans use to speak to each other. In other words, cats seem to know who's talking to them and if they're being spoken to — even if they act like they don't.

I Cat Even

The most interesting — and funniest — finding in the study, which was conducted by researchers at the Paris Nanterre University, was that some of the cats only indicated that they'd heard their person speaking to them in the baby-talk register by twitching their ears and otherwise seeming completely disinterested in the recordings.

In other instances, some of the cats would look towards the sound of their owner's kitten-babble and meow, pause its activities, or otherwise respond.

"Our results highlight the importance of one-to-one relationships for indoor companion cats," the researchers wrote in the paper, "who do not seem to generalize the communication developed with one human to all human interlocutors."

Translation: cats seem to know when their own people are talking to them — but that doesn't mean they care.

More on cats: Can Cats Infect You With a Psychosis-Inducing Brain Parasite? The Answer Is Complicated

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Scientists Discover That Cats Simply Do Not Give a Crap

Researchers at the University of Texas claim to have built a "decoder" algorithm that can reconstruct what somebody is thinking just by monitoring their brain activity using an ordinary fMRI scanner, The Scientist reports.

The yet-to-be-peer-reviewed research could lay the groundwork for much more capable brain-computer interfaces designed to better help those can't speak or type.

In an experiment, the researchers used MRI machines to measure the changes in blood flow — not the firing of individual neurons, which is infamously "noisy" and difficult to decrypt — to decode the broader sentiment or semantics of what three study subjects were thinking while listening to 16 hours of podcasts and radio stories.

They used this data to train an algorithm that they say can associate these blood flow changes with what the subjects were currently listening to.

The results were promising, with the decoder being able to deduce meaning "pretty well," as University of Texas neuroscientist and coauthor Alexander Huth told The Scientist.

However, the system had some shortcomings. For instance, the decoder often mixed up who said what in the radio and podcast recordings. In other words, the algorithm "knows what’s happening pretty accurately, but not who is doing the things, " Huth explained.

The algorithm was also not able to use what it had learned from one participant's brain scans semantics and apply that to another's scans, intriguingly.

Despite these shortcomings, the decoder was even able to deduce a story when participants watched a silent film, meaning that it's not limited to spoken language, either. That suggests these findings could also help us understand the functions of different regions of the brain and how they overlap in making sense of the world.

Other neuroscientists, who were not directly involved, were impressed. Sam Nastase, a researcher and lecturer at the Princeton Neuroscience Institute, called the research "mind blowing," telling The Scientist that "if you have a smart enough modeling framework, you can actually pull out a surprising amount of information" from these kinds of recordings.

Yukiyasu Kamitani, a computational neuroscientist at Kyoto University, agreed, telling The Scientist that the study "sets a solid ground for [brain-computer interface] applications."

READ MORE: Researchers Report Decoding Thoughts from fMRI Data [The Scientist]

More on reading brains: Neuralink Cofounder Leaves as Brain Company Descends Into Chaos

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Scientists Say They've Figured Out a Way to Read Thoughts Using an MRI Machine

Deepening Issue

As if there weren't enough of them going around already, deepfakes are coming to advertising too, flaunting ghastly imitations of your favorite celebrities — with or without their permission.

Earlier this fall, Bruce Willis's representatives shut down reports that the actor signed a deal to get deepfaked into future productions. A year before, a Russian telecom company deepfaked the action star into a TV commercial (with permission), and the Pandora's box has been open ever since.

Now, the Wall Street Journal reports that agencies are injecting simulacra of A-listers including Tom Cruise, Leonardo DiCaprio, and Elon Musk into ads. The most worrying part, according to the WSJ? None of the last three celebrities ever agreed to appear.

Lagging Lawmaking

Sure, in most cases the uses of the deepfakes are clearly meant to be just fake enough to be funny, but the implications of the technology's use to impersonate celebs, authorized or not, is no laughing matter.

"We're having a hard enough time with fake information," Ari Lightman, a professor of digital media and marketing at Carnegie Mellon University, told the WSJ. "Now we have deepfakes, which look ever more convincing."

And US law hasn't really caught up either, especially in regards to using deepfakes in commercials. While some of the companies reportedly consulted with lawyers and/or included disclaimers, it doesn't change the fact that they're taking advantage of an extremely gray legal area. Generally speaking, the benefits of the attention gained from using the deepfakes — be it negative or positive — outweigh the risk of getting sued by such massive celebrities.

"A lot of these companies purposefully get as close to the line as possible in order to almost troll the celebrities they're targeting," explained Aaron Moss, chair of the litigation department at the law firm Greenberg Glusker, to the WSJ.

Even if a celebrity wanted to go after these companies, the ubiquity and ease of using deepfakes could make it impossible to target them all.

Unrivaled Production

What's worse is that experts believe that old contracts written before deepfake technology took off could allow advertisers to use their existing footage of a celebrity to create deepfakes of them.

And the temptation to do that is extremely strong.

"In six months, we made 10 completely different creatives and concepts with digital Bruce Willis working with different directors," said a spokesperson for Deepcake, the firm responsible for deepfaking Willis into the telecom ad, to WSJ.

"It is difficult to imagine such a production with a real actor."

More on deepfakes: This Keanu Reeves Deepfake Is Giving Us Shivers

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Blazing Speeds

The world wide web is not enough, because scientists have managed to transmit data at a staggering 1.84 petabits per second — nearly twice the amount of global internet traffic in the same interval.

That blows the previous record for data transmission using a single light source and optical chip of one petabit per second out the water. And to put that ridiculous amount into perspective, a petabit is equal to one million gigabits. A single gigabit, or 1,000 megabits, is about the fastest download speed money can buy for most households.

To achieve the astonishing feat, researchers from the Technical University of Denmark (DTU) and Chalmers University of Technology used a custom optical chip that can make use of a single infrared light by splitting it into hundreds of different frequencies that are evenly spaced apart. Collectively, they're known as a frequency comb. Each frequency on the comb can discretely hold data by modulating the wave properties of light, allowing scientists to transmit far more bits than conventional methods.

Chip on the Shoulder

In a study about the work published in the journal Nature Photonics, the scientists describe how they transmitted the 1.84 petabits per second worth of "dummy" data over 4.9 miles of optical fiber while using 223 wavelength channels in the frequency comb. According to the scientists, to transmit data at those kinds of speeds using commercial equipment would require over one thousand lasers. This experiment, using a cutting edge chip, only needed one.

"What is special about this chip is that it produces a frequency comb with ideal characteristics for fiber-optical communications," said Victor Torres Company, head of the research group and a professor at Chalmers, in a press release. "It has high optical power and covers a broad bandwidth within the spectral region that is interesting for advanced optical communications.

Scaling Up

As dizzyingly fast as the new record breaking speed is, the researchers say they're just getting started and believe speeds of up to 100 petabits per second are possible.

"The reason for this is that our solution is scalable," explained study lead author and DTU professor Leif Katsuo Oxenløwe. "Both in terms of creating many frequencies and in terms of splitting the frequency comb into many spatial copies and then optically amplifying them, and using them as parallel sources with which we can transmit data."

While the researchers' efforts have shown it's possible, it still needs to be proven to be practical. But Oxenløwe believes that his team's solution can make data transmission much more efficient, thereby leaving "a smaller climate footprint."

More on data transmission: SpaceX Has a Major Problem With Its Starlink Internet Connections

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