Shop the Look

Last week, Tesla announced that the Elon Musk-run electric car company will be opening a US factory in Austin, Texas, to build the long-awaited Cybertruck.

Musk isn’t losing any time exploring some ways to make it look, well, just a little less like a giant stainless steel box on wheels.

In a series of tweet replies, very much in character for the CEO, Musk offered a hint of what the fortified, apocalypse-proof truck could end up looking like from the outside: pure white, or even a rainbow treatment, as Electrek reports.

Taste the Rainbow

Design student and Twitter user @flcnhvy suggested that “some types of steel change color when tempered,” and that a Cybertruck “could be torched using a not-a-flamethrower,” referring to The Boring Company’s controversial, propane-burning flamethrower. Being a man of a few words, Musk appeared to support the idea, replying with a cursory “yes.”

Stainless steel does change color depending on what temperature it’s subjected to, ranging from grey, sand, brown, and purple, to blue and light blue. Heated just the right way, an otherwise monotone, stainless steel-clad Cybertruck could be turned into something far more cheerful looking.

Not Impossible

In response to a video of a piece of stainless steel being laser-etched with a fun pattern, Musk replied with “cool.” A render of an off-roader Cybertruck with a “white oxide” coating also got a reply out of Musk — such an option would be “not impossible.”

Whether Tesla will produce these color treatments in-house is debatable. A rainbow treatment will likely be an option relegated to the aftermarket, Electrek suggested.

READ MORE: Tesla Cybertruck’s steel body can be heated to get different colors [Electrek]

More on the Cybertruck: Elon Musk: “We Want to Be a Leader in Apocalypse Technology”

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Cybertruck Metal Can Be Etched, Heated Into a Rainbow

According to a new study published in the prestigious journal Nature, an international team of researchers have identified 21 existing drugs that stop the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2, which causes COVID-19, from replicating. The new research could have bold implications for future of medical care during the pandemic.

The scientists were able to confirm that at certain concentrations, 21 drugs — out of a 100 tested — showed antiviral activity in lab tests. Interestingly, four of them were deemed effective in combination with remdesivir, a drug that the US has been stockpiling thanks to its potential in treating COVID-19.

“As infection rates continue to rise in America and around the world, the urgency remains to find affordable, effective, and readily available drugs that can complement the use of remdesivir, as well as drugs that could be given prophylactically or at the first sign of infection on an outpatient basis,” Sumit Chanda from the Sanford Burnham Prebys Medical Discovery Institute and senior author of the study, said in a statement.

Thirteen of the 21 drugs are already undergoing clinical trials to show their effectiveness in treating COVID-19. Two have already been approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), but for treating allergies and leprosy, not COVID-19.

“This study significantly expands the possible therapeutic options for COVID-19 patients, especially since many of the molecules already have clinical safety data in humans,” Chanda said. “This report provides the scientific community with a larger arsenal of potential weapons that may help bring the ongoing global pandemic to heel.”

Testing is still underway of the drugs in animal models and “organoids,” which are miniaturized human organs made out of human tissue. If shown effective in those trials, the researchers are planning to ask the FDA to authorize clinical trials on human patients, according to the statement.

The 21 drugs were initially identified through a much broader Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation-backed project called ReFRAME, an effort to test 12,000 existing drugs for their potential effectiveness in treating COVID-19.

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Researchers Identify 21 Existing Drugs That Stop the Coronavirus

Kwok Yung Yuen, a professor and microbiologist at the University of Hong Kong, told the BBC on a special titled “Panorama: China’s Coronavirus Cover-Up” that Chinese officials may have purposefully tried to hide the source of the outbreak of the coronavirus back in early January.

“I do suspect that they have been doing some cover-up locally at Wuhan,” he said, as quoted by VICE, referring to the city widely believed to be the epicenter of the pandemic. “The local officials who are supposed to immediately relay the information has not allowed this to be done as readily as it should.”

At the core of Yuen’s complaint is that he says he identified COVID-19 cases in Shenzhen, about 700 miles from Wuhan, in early January, meaning that the virus was spreading between people.

But he says that after he told Chinese authorities about his finding, it took them eight days to warn the public that the coronavirus was spreading in the population.

Yuen invoked the 2003 outbreak of the SARS virus to stress the importance of an early response, which he believes China squandered.

“There is one thing that I learned [during the SARS outbreak] […] if you don’t make use of every hour, you are in big, big trouble,” he told the program, as quoted by The Independent.

“If the same interventions that were put in place on 23 January had been put in place on 2 January, we may have seen a 95 per cent reduction in the number of cases,” Yuen told Panorama.

Yuen also alleges that Chinese officials destroyed early evidence pertaining to the virus.

The news comes after Chinese doctor Lin Wenliang reportedly tried to warn the world about the coronavirus in December. He was subsequently silenced by Chinese authorities and passed away in early February.

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Professor Claims China Tried to Hide Early Info on COVID-19

Homeward Bound

In a matter of days, NASA is set to launch its Perseverance rover to Mars.

One curiosity of the mission is that Perseverance will be bringing a rock back to the Red Planet that scientists believe originated on Mars roughly 600,000 to 700,000 years ago, as the BBC reports — for a fascinating scientific reason.

Meteorite Madness

The rock, first discovered in the deserts of Oman in 1999, is one of nine materials that NASA’s rover will take with it. These materials, housed inside a device on the rover called Sherloc, will serve to calibrate Perseverance’s laser and spectroscopy instruments. In other words, it’ll be a control to make sure that if Perseverance finds evidence of ancient life, it’ll know for sure.

“We’ll look at the calibration target in the first 60-90 days and perhaps not again for six months because we think the instrument is really very stable,” Luther Beegle, principal investigator of Sherloc at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, told the BBC.

Martian Souvenir

“But if we start seeing interesting things on the surface of Mars that we can’t explain in the spectra, then we’ll look back to the calibration target to make sure that the instrument’s working correctly,” he added.

The eventual goal is to collect interesting rocks, seal them in a small tube, and leave them behind on the Martian surface to be returned by later missions.

READ MORE: Nasa Mars rover: Meteorite to head home to Red Planet [BBC]

More on Perseverance: NASA’s Next Rover Will Bring First-Ever Microphone to Mars

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Here’s Why NASA’s Next Rover is Bringing a Mars Rock Back to Mars

A team of National Institutes of Health (NIH) scientists is walking a delicate line: publishing research about how the human brain differs across sex, while trying to guard against their work being misrepresented by misogynists.

Armin Raznahan, chief of developmental neurogenomics at the NIH, published research in the journal PNAS on Monday about how sex chromosomes are tied linked to differences in the size of various brain regions. The research, Wired reports, could give doctors a better understanding of how neurodevelopmental disorders may manifest in different groups.

“If we can understand the biology of sex better,” Raznahan told Wired, “maybe those pathways are going to help us understand what is happening to put a person at risk of manifesting symptoms of autism spectrum disorder, for example.”

But the sensitive nature of Raznahan’s research has him trying to fight misinterpretations of it — something he told Wired he’s run into since early in his career.

“I got my fingers burned when I first started,” Raznahan told Wired.

At the time, he was researching the differences between how men’s and women’s brains change over time. And while his paper only touched on structural changes and not any functional differences, that didn’t stop The Wall Street Journal from citing his work in a 2011 article that suggested schoolchildren might learn better in single-sex classrooms.

Because it’s such a dodgy topic — and the practical conclusions one could draw from such research remain unclear, scientists told Wired that maybe scientists shouldn’t investigate sex differences in the brain so thoroughly at all. But others argue that it’s essential.

“We can’t not make discoveries,” University of Maryland School of Medicine pharmacology professor Margaret McCarthy told Wired, “because they might be misused.”

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Researchers at the University of Veterinary Medicine in Hannover, Germany, have found that dogs are able to sniff out the coronavirus that causes COVID-19 with astonishing accuracy.

During tests, they found that eight dogs from Germany’s military could correctly identify the presence of the coronavirus 94 percent of the time after only being trained a week, as Bloomberg reports.

“We think that this works because the metabolic processes in the body of a diseased patient is completely changed,” Maren von Koeckritz-Blickwede, a professor at the university, said in a video statement posted by the university on YouTube. “We think that the dogs are able to detect a specific smell produced” by the metabolic process.

Despite dogs being used to sniff out a variety of contraband substances and even explosives at airports and other locations, “people have not really realized the potential a dog could have to detect diseased from non-diseased patients,” argues Holger Volk, head of the small animal clinic at the University of Veterinary Medicine Hannover, in the video.

The researchers suggested that the dog sniffing method could be employed in “public areas such as airports, sport events, borders or other mass gatherings,” according to the video’s caption — but only in addition to existing lab testing.

The COVID-19 samples were completely randomized, so neither the dog handlers nor the researchers knew which samples were positive and which ones weren’t. In other words, the researchers guarded against the “Clever Hans” effect, in which animals appear to be solving complex problems, but are actually taking cues from their human handlers.

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Scientists: Trained Dogs Can Smell Coronavirus

According to World Health Organization (WHO) director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the COVID-19 pandemic is “easily the most severe” global health crisis that the organization has ever seen.

Ghebreyesus backed his claim by citing citing the sheer scale of both confirmed coronavirus cases and the global death toll, New Scientist reports. To date, there are over 16.2 million confirmed cases worldwide — and just shy of 649,000 patients have died.

“COVID-19 has changed our world,” Ghebreyesus said during a Monday press briefing. And the pandemic, he added, “has shown what humans are capable of — both positively and negatively.”

During his address, Ghebreyesus said that the guidelines for how to prevent transmission haven’t changed in the six months since the WHO declared the coronavirus a global emergency.

“Keep your distance from others, clean your hands, avoid crowded and enclosed areas, and wear a mask where recommended,” Ghebreyesus said.

He then went on to praise countries that either nipped their outbreaks in the bud — like Vietnam and New Zealand — and those that managed to wrestle large outbreaks back under control: Canada, China, Germany, and Korea.

But clearly not every country got its rear in gear: While he didn’t list any by name, Ghebreyesus didn’t understate the ongoing severity of the pandemic.

“The pandemic continues to accelerate,” he said. “In the past 6 weeks, the total number of cases has roughly doubled.”

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WHO Calls COVID-19 the “Most Severe” Health Crisis in Its History

A boy who was diagnosed with Duchenne muscular dystrophy — a disease that progressively weakens muscles and usually kills patients early in life — when he was four years old has now largely recovered after being injected with an experimental gene therapy.

It’s not yet clear whether the treatment, which delivered billions of gene-carrying viruses to his cells, will be a permanent fix, NPR reports. But two years after his treatment, Conner Curran has made an unprecedented recovery.

“Within three weeks he was running up the stairs,” Conner’s mother Jessica Curran told NPR.

Before the procedure, she said, he couldn’t even drag himself up the steps.

“He would make it past four stairs and he couldn’t do the rest,” she said. “He could not last a full day in school.”

The actual treatment was a two-hour-long injection of billions of harmless viruses that delivered copies of the Dystrophin gene — the one that’s missing or damaged in Duchenne muscular dystrophy — to Conner’s cells.

“The concept is very simple,” Jude Samulski, the University of North Caroline School of Medicine pharmacologist who spent 30 years developing the treatment, told NPR. “You’re missing a gene so you [put it] back.”

In that sense, he added, the virus works like “a molecular FedEx truck. It carries a genetic payload and it’s delivering it to its target.”

For now, many questions remain — like whether the treatment works permanently or if the new genes will eventually wear off.

Only nine boys have received the experimental gene therapy, so now there are plans to launch a large-scale clinical trial to see if the gene therapy could help other Duchenne patients.

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Gene Therapy Lets Boy With Muscular Dystrophy Walk Again

You Get A Car!

The electric automaker Renault just gave every household in the tiny French town of Appy a free three-year lease for one of its electric cars.

Is it a PR stunt? Yes. Could it also do some good along the way? It’s possible! Business Insider reports that the company is trying to demonstrate that electric vehicles can be useful to people living in remote or rural areas, rather than just city-slickers, like many assume. And while the end goal is more car sales for Renault, wider adoption of clean energy wouldn’t be so bad either.

And YOU Get A Car!

The whole campaign involves fewer cars than one might think: As of 2017, only 25 people lived in Appy in total. Grouping residents together into households means that Renault isn’t exactly breaking bank on this stunt.

But all the same, Business Insider reports that each home will get a Renault Zoe electric car and a home charging unit. Renault will also construct one public charging station — the EV equivalent of a gas pump — in the town.

Whole Package

Ironically, it’s that last part that will make widespread EV adoption easier. With government subsidies, electric cars like the Zoe are already extremely cheap in Europe.

But it’s the lack of infrastructure like public chargers, coupled with limited battery range, that actually makes it difficult to switch from gas to electric.

READ MORE: Renault just gave an entire French town free EVs to prove it’s easy to go electric [Business Insider]

More on electric vehicles: Subsidies Mean This Electric Car Is Literally Free in Germany

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Everyone in This French Town Just Got a Free Electric Car

Today, engineers started construction of the world’s largest nuclear fusion project in southern France, The Guardian reports, with operations planned to begin in late 2025.

The project, called ITER, is an international collaborative effort between 35 countries with enormous ambitions: prove the feasibility of fusion energy with a gigantic magnetic device called a “tokamak,” as per the project’s official website.

“Enabling the exclusive use of clean energy will be a miracle for our planet,” ITER director-general Bernard Bigot said during today’s virtual celebration, as quoted by The Guardian.

Fusion power, in theory, works by harnessing the energy released by two lighter atomic nuclei fusing to form a heavier nucleus, and turning it into electricity.

If proven to be economical — that is, if the machine generates more energy than has to be put in to kickstart the process — the technology could lay the groundwork for an entirely new way of generating nearly unlimited clean energy on a commercial scale. Fusion power would be far safer than conventional fission nuclear energy, since there’s no risk of a meltdown or leftover nuclear waste.

But if the last six decades of fusion research are anything to go by, it remains an elusive way of generating net energy. The extremely hot plasma inside the fusion reactors is notoriously difficult to predict and control.

That’ll make ITER an extremely complex build. Its final reactor will weigh 23,000 tons, including 3,000 tons of superconducting magnets connected to each other by 200 kilometers of superconducting cables, all of which have to be kept cryo-cooled down to -269 degrees Celsius, as The Guardian reports.

“Constructing the machine piece-by-piece will be like assembling a three-dimensional puzzle on an intricate timeline [and] with the precision of a Swiss watch,” Bigot added.

The team behind the ITER project is optimistic about the tests they’ll be able to carry out using the massive reactor. By producing self-heating plasma, the team is expecting to generate ten times the heat than the input amount. In other words, the team wants to generate 500 megawatts — just shy of the output of the smallest currently active American nuclear power plant — from an input of just 50 megawatts.

Temperatures would reach ten times the temperature of the center of the Sun, according to ITER.

ITER may be a massive international effort to make fusion energy a reality, but it’s not the only one. A large number of fusion startups in the US and abroad are trying to turn it into a commercially viable source of energy as well.

READ MORE: World’s largest nuclear fusion project begins assembly in France [The Guardian]

More on fusion: Fusion Startup Claims Breakthrough Will Provide “Unlimited” Energy

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Scientists Start Construction of World’s Largest Fusion Reactor

In a sleek announcement video, Virgin Galactic has unveiled the cabin interior of its SpaceShipTwo space plane, a vehicle meant to soon start taking those who can afford it to the lower edges of space.

In today’s announcement, Virgin CEO Richard Branson called the interior cabin the “design centerpiece,” claiming that his company’s space plane was the “first to be built inside out.”

“We started with what we believed would be an optimal customer experience and then we built the spaceship around it,” Branson added.

“It is the rocket ride of your life,” said Bess Moses, chief astronaut instructor, who became the first ever woman to enter space on a U.S. commercial vehicle during a test flight on February 22, 2019. “Space is deep, deep black, and looks endless.”

The cabin is meant to focus on the view without impeding the passengers from moving around to get a better look.

The cabin is dotted with circular windows and two rows of racecar-like seats. Sixteen cameras throughout the cabin capture the experiences of all crew members. Each window has its own camera to capture close-ups of those looking through it in awe.

In another luxurious flex, passengers’ suits will be designed by Under Armour.

Big picture, Virgin Galactic has ambitions to make space tourism a reality. The news comes after the company announced last year that it’s planning to launch a shuttle of passengers into space, on average, every 32 hours by the year 2023. At the time, the company said that a single ticket would go for about $250,000.

In June, Virgin Galactic signed a contract with NASA to start training astronauts for trips to the International Space Station.

Virgin Galactic also revealed a swank spaceport lounge in August 2019 located at its Spaceport America.

The company successfully flew its latest space plane, the VSS Unity, to an altitude of 51.4 miles (82.7 km) during a test flight in December 2018.

Whether that actually counts as “space” is subject to debate. While Moses was awarded commercial astronaut wings by the Federal Aviation Administration after her flight to 55.87 miles, many believe that the edge of space should be defined by the Kármán line at 62 miles (100 kilometers) above the Earth’s surface.

READ MORE: Virgin Galactic unveils the interior cabin of its tourist spaceplane [The Verge]

More on Virgin Galactic: Virgin Galactic to Start Training Astronauts for Trips to Space

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Virgin Galactic Unveils Sleek Spaceship Cabin for Tourist Flights

Motley Crew

NASA has officially assigned crew members for its Crew-2 mission, which aims to be the third time a SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft will visit the International Space Station (ISS) with astronauts on board as part of the agency’s Commercial Crew Program.

On Crew-1, tentatively scheduled for late September, NASA astronauts Shannon Walker, Michael Hopkins, and Victor Glover will be joined by JAXA (Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency) astronaut Soichi Noguchi. The four were picked by NASA for the mission in late March.

For Crew-2, Shane Kimbrough, a NASA astronaut who has visited space twice before, will be joined by Megan McArthur, who has also been to space, but not the space station. The pair will be the commander and pilot, respectively.

The mission will also be JAXA astronaut Akihiko Hoshide’s third trip to space, alongside ESA (European Space Agency) astronaut Thomas Pesquet, the pair will join Kimbrough and McArthur as mission specialists.

Hoshide has been aboard the space shuttle Discovery in 2008 and has been part of two ISS expeditions. Pesquet was part of two later expeditions and has spent 196 days in space total. The four astronauts have spent over a combined 521 days in space.

Demo Tape

The news comes just days before NASA will attempt to return SpaceX’s Crew Dragon capsule from the ISS as part of the Demo-2 mission, with NASA astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley on board, this coming weekend.

SpaceX made history on May 30 when it became the first group in history to launch astronauts into orbit inside a commercial spacecraft.

An official launch date for Crew-2 has not yet been announced, but according to NASA, it will likely be no sooner than spring 2021.

READ MORE: NASA Announces Astronauts to Fly on SpaceX Crew-2 Mission to Space Station [NASA]

More on Demo-2: NASA Just Picked a Date for SpaceX to Bring Back Its Astronauts

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NASA Announces Crew For Upcoming SpaceX Mission

Money Fight!

Bill Gates has had enough of fellow tech billionaire Elon Musk’s habit of spreading coronavirus misinformation.

On Tuesday, Gates spoke at length about online misinformation with CNBC. And when the conversation pivoted to Musk’s online comments, Bill Gates said that the SpaceX and Tesla CEO seemed way out of his element.

“Elon’s positioning is to maintain a high level of outrageous comments,” Gates told CNBC.

Off-Base

Since the pandemic began, Musk has spread disinformation about the COVID-19 death toll, he repeatedly downplayed the danger of the coronavirus, and wrongfully implied that children are “essentially immune” to the disease.

“He’s not much involved in vaccines,” Gates said of Musk. “He makes a great electric car. And his rockets work well. So he’s allowed to say these things. I hope that he doesn’t confuse areas he’s not involved in too much.”

Basically: Stay in your lane, Elon.

Broader Problem

But the problems certainly don’t begin and end with Musk. Gates acknowledged that the very nature of the internet and social media makes it easy to propagate disinformation.

“When you let people communicate, you have to deal with the fact that certain incorrect things that are very titillating can spread very rapidly compared to the truth,” Gates told CNBC. “And we’ve always seen that with vaccines.”

READ MORE: Bill Gates: Lies spread faster than facts on social media, which is hard to police [CNBC]

More on Elon Musk: Elon Musk Is Still Sharing Coronavirus Misinformation

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Bill Gates Slams Elon Musk For Spouting COVID Misinformation

Inside the Space Suit

In a sleek new video, SpaceX gave a rare behind-the-scenes look at the development of its iconic new spacesuit — the one worn by NASA astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley during their historic mission to the International Space Station in May.

Rather than pay external contractors to develop the suit, SpaceX designed it from the ground up in-house, literally in the same building where SpaceX builds its rockets.

Each suit is custom fitted to each astronaut. It’s meant protect crew members in case the spacecraft were to depressurize — not to facilitate a spacewalk.

Plug and Play

In the video, SpaceX space suits and crew equipment manager Chris Trigg says the goal was to make a suit that’s “easy to use and that the crew just literally has to plug in when they sit down.”

An umbilical plugs into a port inside the Crew Dragon spacecraft to provide a communications link, cooling, and breathable air.

“The suit kind of takes care of itself from there,” Trigg said.

A key design feature of the Crew Dragon’s cockpit is a brand new touchscreen interface. That means the suit’s gloves need to work flawlessly with it.

The next live glimpse of the suit in action will be offered to us during SpaceX and NASA’s Crew-1 flight, the first operational flight of the Crew Dragon spacecraft, currently scheduled for late September.

READ MORE: SpaceX offers an inside look at how it created its futuristic Dragon space suits [TechCrunch]

More on the suit: Fashion Magazine Roasts SpaceX’s Dorky Space Suit

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New Video Shows Inside Look at SpaceX Space Suit Lab

Activist Hologram

After Black Lives Matter protesters toppled the Jefferson Davis monument in Richmond, Virginia last month, activists put up a futuristic new symbol in support of the fight against racial injustice last night.

Replacing the likeness of the Confederate leader, who owned more than 100 slaves, was a 3D hologram of George Floyd, whose death at the hands of Minneapolis police in May kicked off mass protests against racism across the globe.

Last night @Change and the @GeorgeFloydFdtn, working with @WeAreKaleida projected a hologram memorial of George Floyd at the former site of the removed Jefferson Davis Memorial. This holographic memorial will tour the southern U.S. replacing former confederate monuments. pic.twitter.com/23fyoVLyHH

— Change.org (@Change) July 28, 2020

The project is a collaboration between the George Floyd Foundation and Change.org, Newsweek reports. The hologram will be a traveling installation, making five stops along the route taken by the Freedom Riders, a civil rights activist group that rode interstate buses into the segregated south in 1961. It shows Floyd, along with a stylized version of his name, reconstituted by glowing fireflies.

Tonight, the hologram will take over the statue of Robert E. Lee, also in Richmond.

Peace Symbol

The hologram was created and designed by Kaleida Hologram Co., which specializes in holographic projection screens and gauzes for clients including Netflix.

It was projected by Quince Imaging of Virginia, a company specializing in video projection mapping, a technology used to overlay video over 3D objects. However, it’s unclear how exactly the effect of the George Floyd hologram was created.

“This project seeks to replace the monuments of racist Confederate memory with symbols of solidarity and justice,” Sylvia Rolle, a senior campaigner at Change.org, said in a statement. “This project aims to reflect the power and beauty of those millions of voices standing up for change.”

Amazing hologram of George Floyd in Richmond. You can hear the Floyd Family speaking in the background. #richmond #GeorgeFloyd pic.twitter.com/0uFK7ePsAc

— pace (@ReggiePace) July 28, 2020

“The hologram will allow my brother’s face to be seen as a symbol for change in places where change is needed most,” George Floyd’s brother Rodney Floyd said, as quoted in a tweet by Change.org.

Accompanying the dazzling visual, onlookers will be able to hear the voices of the Floyd family in the background.

READ MORE: George Floyd Hologram Appears at Sites of Confederate Statues [Newsweek]

More on the protests: Expert: Online Disinfo Now Targeting COVID-19, Black Lives Matter

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Activists Replace Confederate Statue With Amazing Hologram of George Floyd

What was supposed to be a socially-distanced, drive-in Chainsmokers concert quickly degraded into the sort of packed, close-quarters event one might have attended in the Before Times.

Now, New York’s Department of Health says it will investigate the July 25 concert as a health hazard, NBC News reports. The close quarters and spotty mask-wearing make it all but certain that concertgoers walked away from the Southampton venue with more than memories of a mediocre EDM-pop band — it’s reasonable to expect that many will have caught COVID-19 as well.

“Videos from a concert held in Southampton on Saturday show egregious social distancing violations,” New York Governor Andrew Cuomo tweeted. “I am appalled. The Department of Health will conduct an investigation. We have no tolerance for the illegal & reckless endangerment of public health.”

Videos from a concert held in Southampton on Saturday show egregious social distancing violations. I am appalled.

The Department of Health will conduct an investigation.

We have no tolerance for the illegal & reckless endangerment of public health.pic.twitter.com/gf9kggdo8w

— Andrew Cuomo (@NYGovCuomo) July 28, 2020

It’s easy to joke. These are people who went out during a pandemic and risked it all to see The Chainsmokers, after all. And the opener — we are not kidding — was the CEO of Goldman Sachs, who performed a DJ set.

But the concert is also a damning indictment against trying to open too many businesses or lift too many restrictions as the pandemic continues.

“I am greatly disturbed by reports concerning the ‘drive-in’ concert held in your town this past weekend, which apparently involved thousands of people in close proximity, out of their vehicles, a VIP area where there was no pretense of a vehicle, and generally not adhering to social distancing guidance,” New York health commissioner Howard Zucker wrote to Southampton supervisor Jay Scheiderman. “I am at a loss as to how the Town of Southampton could have issued a permit for such an event, how they believed it was legal and not an obvious public health threat.”

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Officials Are Investigating The Chainsmokers for Spreading the Coronavirus

Final Countdown

If humanity continues down its current path, civilization as we know it is heading toward “irreversible collapse” in a matter of decades.

That’s according to research published in the journal Scientific Reports, which models out our future based on current rates of deforestation and other resource use. As Motherboard reports, even the rosiest projections in the research show a 90 percent chance of catastrophe.

Last Gasp

The paper, penned by physicists from the Alan Turing Institute and the University of Tarapacá, predicts that deforestation will claim the last forests on Earth in between 100 and 200 years. Coupled with global population changes and resource consumption, that’s bad new for humanity.

“Clearly it is unrealistic to imagine that the human society would start to be affected by the deforestation only when the last tree would be cut down,” reads the paper.

Coming Soon

In light of that, the duo predicts that society as we know it could end within 20 to 40 years.

In lighter news, Motherboard reports that the global rate of deforestation has actually decreased in recent years. But there’s still a net loss in forest overall — and newly-planted trees can’t protect the environment nearly as well as old-growth forest.

“Calculations show that, maintaining the actual rate of population growth and resource consumption, in particular forest consumption, we have a few decades left before an irreversible collapse of our civilization,” reads the paper.

READ MORE: Theoretical Physicists Say 90% Chance of Societal Collapse Within Several Decades [Motherboard]

More on societal collapse: Doomsday Report Author: Earth’s Leaders Have Failed

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Physicists Say There’s a 90 Percent Chance Civilization Will Soon Collapse

Futurism was launched by the Italian poet Filippo Tommaso Marinetti in 1909. On 20 February he published his Manifesto of Futurism on the front page of the Paris newspaper Le Figaro.

Among modernist movements futurism was exceptionally vehement in its denunciation of the past. This was because in Italy the weight of past culture was felt as particularly oppressive. In the Manifesto, Marinetti asserted that we will free Italy from her innumerable museums which cover her like countless cemeteries. What the futurists proposed instead was an art that celebrated the modern world of industry and technology:

We declarea new beauty, the beauty of speed. A racing motor caris more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace. (A celebrated ancient Greek sculpture in the Louvre museum in Paris.)

Futurist painting used elements of neo-impressionism and cubism to create compositions that expressed the idea of the dynamism, the energy and movement, of modern life.

Chief artists associated with futurism were Giacomo Balla, Umberto Boccioni, Gino Severini.

Vorticism was essentially the British equivalent to futurism, but Wyndham Lewis the founder of the vorticists was deeply hostile to the futurists.

After the brutality of the first world war, many artists rejected the avant-garde notions of futurism and other pre-war movements, by using more traditional and reassuring approaches, a phenomenon described as the return to order.

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Futurism Art Term | Tate

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Over the weekend, NASAs Curiosity rover spent its time blasting a bizarre rock on Mars with a laser.

To clarify, Curiosity wasnt just killing time. This particular rock, Digital Trends reports, was adorned with unusual colors for the area, and vaporizing it with a laser is one of the best tricks Curiosity that has for figuring out what its made of.

The laser is just one of Curiositys tools for analyzing an objects chemical composition. In the past, the rover has used them to make discoveries suggesting that Mars once harbored life. The findings for this particular rock arent available yet, but Digital Trends reports that the colors could suggest the presence of organic compounds.

But it wont be until the next rover, Perseverance, shows up with more sophisticated tools that NASA can kick up the hunt for signs of ancient microbes to the next level.

While NASA prepares for its Perseverance launch, Curiosity is continuing on what NASA is calling a summer road trip to scout ahead and study more regions of the planet that may have once harbored life.

Curiosity was designed to go beyond Opportunitys search for the history of water, NASA researcher Abigail Fraeman said in a press release. Were uncovering an ancient world that offered life a foothold for longer than we realized.

READ MORE: Curiosity is investigating a strangely colored rock it found on Mars [Digital Trends]

More on Curiosity: Next NASA Mars Rover Will Sport a Rock-Vaporizing Laser

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NASA's Mars Rover Spent the Weekend Shooting a Weird-Looking Rock With a Laser - Futurism