According to the latest figures from CNN, the coronavirus pandemic has now killed more than 3,000 people in the United States.

That’s a grim milestone, because it means the virus’s death toll has now exceeded that of the September 11, 2001 terror attacks, which took the lives of 2,977.

Although the significance of the two are incomparable, and stretches far beyond their death tolls, the impact the coronavirus pandemic will have on society will be immense. Estimates show the coronavirus could still be taking lives for months — or even years — and so the full extent of its tragedy is still unknown.

In the long view, the virus seems likely to take many more American lives than Al Qaeda and ISIS combined — not to mention the virus’s global reach, which has killed more than 38,000 people around the world.

At the same time, September 11 casts such a long shadow on the national psyche that it’s been invoked repeatedly during the coronavirus pandemic. And, to be fair, there are strong resonances between the two tragedies.

Both resulted in an approval ratings bump for national leaders, for one, but over time, the historical record demonstrated profound failures of intelligence and leadership at the White House.

In the case of September 11, it gradually emerged that the Bush administration had dismissed CIA warnings that Osama Bin Laden had been intent on carrying out an attack on US soil.

And now, with the US healthcare system struggling under the weight of more confirmed coronavirus cases than any other nation on Earth, damning evidence is emerging that the Trump administration squandered the crucial six-week period after experts became convinced that the virus was going to wreak havoc in America — a window it could have used to corral medical resources and crack down on the first domestic cases to prevent them from spreading.

But perhaps the most significant parallel — and one that, in the case of the coronavirus, remains unwritten — is the story of how the nation will respond to the tragedy.

September 11 led to a pair of brutal wars in Afghanistan and Iraq that have dragged on to this day, alongside related regional conflicts, and have claimed the lives of what some experts estimate to be nearly half a million people. The effort has been extraordinarily expensive for US taxpayers, according to an estimate last year, costing something on the order of $6.4 trillion. And after all that, it’s hazy whether the War on Terror has even accomplished very much for national security.

The US might have stumbled in its initial response to the coronavirus, but the opportunity is still there to change course and do better. At the end of a gloomy investigation into how the pandemic is likely to play out, for instance, Atlantic staff writer Ed Yong abruptly changes tone, imagining a future in which public health investments and international cooperation craft a world that’s prepared for the next outbreak.

“In 2030, SARS-CoV-3 emerges from nowhere,” Yong wrote, in an unforgettable final line, “and is brought to heel within a month.”

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A team of researchers at Carnegie Mellon University and other institutions have released an early version of an app that they claim can determine whether you might have COVID-19, just by analyzing your voice.

“I’ve seen a lot of competition for the cheapest, fastest diagnosis you can have,” said Benjamin Striner, a Carnegie Mellon graduate student who worked on the project, in an interview with Futurism. “And there are some pretty good ones that are actually really cheap and pretty accurate, but nothing’s ever going to be as cheap and as easy as speaking into a phone.”

That’s a provocative claim in the face of the global coronavirus outbreak, and particularly the widespread shortages of testing kits. But Striner believes that the team’s algorithm, even though it’s still highly experimental, could be a valuable tool in tracking the spread of the virus, especially as the team continues to refine its accuracy by collecting more data.

You can use the COVID Voice Detector now to analyze your own voice for signs of infection, though it comes with a hefty disclaimer that it’s “not a diagnostic system,” not approved by the FDA or CDC, and shouldn’t be used as a substitute for a medical test or examination.

The researchers behind the project emphasize that the app is a work in progress.

“What we are attempting to do is to develop a voice-based solution, which, based on preliminary experiments and prior expertise, we believe is possible. The app’s results are preliminary and untested,” said Bhiksha Raj, a professor at Carnegie Mellon who also worked on the project. “The score the app currently shows is an indicator of how much the signatures in your voice match those of other COVID patients whose voices we have tested. This is not medical advice. The primary objective of our effort/website at this point of time is to collect large numbers of voice recordings that we could use to refine the algorithm into something we — and the medical community — are confident about.”

“If the app is to be put out as a public service, it, and our results, will have to be verified by medical professionals, and attested by an agency such as the CDC,” Raj added. “Until that happens, its still very much an experimental and untrustworthy system. I urge people not to make healthcare decisions based on the scores we give you. You could be endangering yourself and those around you.”

And at the end of the day, it’s unlikely the app will ever be as accurate as a laboratory test.

“In terms of diagnostics, of course, it’s never going to be as as accurate as taking a swab and putting it on some agar and waiting for it to grow,” said Striner, who has been working around the clock to prepare the app for release. “But in terms of very easily monitoring a ton of people daily, weekly, whatever, monitoring on a very large scale, it gives you a way to handle and track health outbreaks.”

If you have a smartphone or a computer with a microphone, using the app is simple. Users are prompted to cough several times and record a number of vowel sounds, as well as reciting the alphabet. Then it provides a score, expressed as a download-style progress bar, representing how likely the algorithm believes it is that the user has COVID-19.

Also working on the project is Rita Singh, a professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon who for years has been creating algorithms that identify micro-signatures in the human voice that she believes reveal psychological, physiological, and even medical data about an individual subject.

“The cough of a COVID patient is very distinctive,” Singh said. “It affects the lungs so badly that breathing patterns and several other vital parameters are affected, and those are likely to have very strong signatures in voice.”

A challenge for Singh and Striner’s team of ten Carnegie Mellon researchers — who have all been working on the app from home, the campus is shut down due to the pandemic — has been gathering enough audio from confirmed COVID-19 patients, in order to train the algorithm.

To gather that data, the team reached out to colleagues around the world. Those colleagues didn’t just help them gather audio from COVID-19 patients, but also patients with other viruses, so that they could teach the algorithm to spot the differences. They even pored over news videos to find interviews with patients, and add those to the dataset as well.

“You have samples of people that are healthy, you have samples of people that might just have the flu,” Striner said. “And you have all those different recordings of all the different types of coughs, like what are all the coughs that are out there? And then that allows you to kind of spot the differences.”

It’s difficult to quantify the current version of the app’s accuracy, and both Striner and Singh reiterated that its output shouldn’t be treated as medical advice.

“Its accuracy cannot be tested currently because we don’t have the verified test instances we need,” Singh said, adding that the more people who use the app — healthy or otherwise — the more data they will have to better train the algorithm. “If it comes from a healthy person, we then have examples of what ‘healthy’ sounds like. If it comes from a person who has some known respiratory condition, we then know what that condition sounds like. The system will use all that data as counterexamples, and for disambiguating COVID signatures from those of other confusing conditions.”

Ashwin Vasan, a professor at Columbia University Medical Center who was not involved in the Carnegie Mellon research, expressed reservations about releasing the app during a moment of global health crisis.

“Despite what could be a well-intentioned attempt by a bunch of engineers to help during this crisis, this is not exactly the messaging we want to be out there,” he cautioned. “That somehow there is a nifty new tool we can use to diagnose coronavirus, in absence of the things we really need much more of, actual test kits, serologic testing, PPE for frontline healthcare workers, and ventilators for critically ill patients.”

“Let’s keep the focus on that, especially when our leaders in Washington seem unable to meet those most basic needs,” he added. “Anything else is just a distraction.”

For their part, the Carnegie Mellon team says they’re grappling with the public health implications of the app. Striner said that they’ve consulted with colleagues in the medical research community, and that they carefully considered how to fine-tune the app’s sensitivity.

“We would probably side more towards having some false positives then false negatives, if that make sense,” Striner said. “If you give someone a false negative on COVID, then they walk around and get a bunch of people sick, versus a couple extra false positives, maybe some people get tests they don’t need.”

Editor’s note March 31: This story has been updated with additional remarks from Dr. Bhiksha Raj.

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New App Attempts to Detect Signs of COVID-19 Using Voice Analysis

Mass Protest

On Monday, General Electric workers staged a mass protest and walked off the job.

Their demands for the company: stop going about business as usual and start mass-producing ventilators for coronavirus patients, according to The Independent. Ventilators are in extremely short supply, especially in cities hit hardest by the pandemic, so the GE workers reasonably posit that the country needs them more than their usual output of jet engines right now.

War Effort

President Trump has invoked but not actually used the Defense Production Act, which grants him the authority to compel manufactures like General Motors and General Electric to manufacture whatever is needed in a crisis. In this case, that would be medical ventilators and other supplies for overburdened hospitals.

Meanwhile, GE, which The Independent reports stands to benefit from the government’s $2 trillion bailout, recently announced that it was laying off 2,600 factory workers and half of its maintenance staff in a bid to save money — an unfortunate display of priorities in the face of a global crisis.

All Hands

“If GE trusts us to build, maintain and test engines which go on a variety of aircraft where millions of lives are at stake, why wouldn’t they trust us to build ventilators?” union leader Jake Aguanaga said during a press conference, per The Independent.

It’s reassuring to know that the nation’s factory workers are ready and willing to get to work manufacturing the supplies hospitals need, but equally unfortunate that the company’s leadership still hasn’t gotten on board.

READ MORE: Coronavirus: GE workers walk off the job and demand they build ventilators [The Independent]

More on ventilators: Experts Say Putting Multiple Patients on one Ventilator Is Unsafe

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GE Workers Protest: We Want To Build Ventilators, Let Us Build Ventilators

You may not realize it, but electric bikes are having a bit of a moment. Ebike sales skyrocketed by 91% from 2017 to 2018, and some experts expect 130 million electric bikes to be motoring around the U.S. by 2023—far outpacing the number of electric cars and trucks projected to be on the roads by then. If you’re not already part of the crew who’s figured out how electric bikes can transform your life, we’ve rounded up the reasons why you can’t afford not to ride (pun intended) the wave. 

You’ll save money.

Swapping out drives for ebike rides is one of the quickest and healthiest ways to make giant dents in your budget. One estimate from Rad Power Bikes shows how switching your commute from car to ebike can save as much as $7,409 in a single year. 

You know your budget best. Think about your transportation costs, from Uber rides to gas money to subway fares to car maintenance, and do the quick math to see how much you can save by working an ebike into your lifestyle. 

It will revolutionize your commute. 

There’s the fantasy of a conventional bike ride into work (showing up fresh as a daisy, right on time) and the reality of a standard bike commute (harried sprints upon realizing you’re not the Tour de France biker you thought you were, trying to hide your sweaty pits from your boss). 

But a commute on an electric bike turns that fantasy into a reality. Along with shaving time off your ride—just how much will depend on your distance and terrain, but an ebike optimized for commutes can slash a 27-minute standard ride down to 15 minutes—that speed and the ease of the ride allow you to show up without looking like you need a shower and a Gatorade.

Plus, with accessories like baskets and child seats, you can ditch the car and make errands like daycare drop off and Target runs all part of your electric ride to work. 

It will help you bring a whole new meaning to weekend warrior.

But ebikes aren’t all work, no play. They’re great tools for making the most of the free time you have to explore the great outdoors, since they allow you to travel farther, faster. Easy to rack to the back of a car or to fold into the trunk or an RV, they’re mobile enough to trot out for a quick Saturday spin but long-lasting enough to get you through an entire weekend of camping trip rides.

Ebikes with fat tires can help you tackle terrain that a conventional bike can’t, while an ultra-quiet but mighty hunting bike can be an affordable way to trek through mud, sand, or snow to stake out a spot that other hunters won’t find. 

It’s not the ‘lazy’ option you might think it is.

Ebikes get dismissed as the lazy version of biking. And while it’s true that rides can sometimes seem effortless, your body is still getting the benefits of exercise. One study tracked previously sedentary adults who took up ebiking. After a month, they had greater aerobic fitness, better blood sugar control, a trend towards lowering their body fat, and, importantly, the desire to keep on riding despite other forms of exercise never enticing them before. 

Plus, there are people for whom less physically taxing rides can be a game changer. The balance and motor functions required to ride a bike can help to alleviate the symptoms of diseases like Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s in aging populations. And doing it on an ebike can help seniors get all those benefits without physically exhausting themselves, making rides a great way to stay active and healthy with older relatives and friends.

You’ll be doing your part to help the planet.

Scaling back your driving miles by 5,000 per year can slash your carbon footprint by 15%, and contribute to your physical and mental wellbeing in the process. There’s never been a more critical time to start making the sacrifices that will help keep Earth healthy. So why not make a switch to electric that feels like anything but a sacrifice?

Interested in uncovering even more reasons you can benefit from an ebike? Rad Power Bikes is offering Futurism readers a free add-on accessory of up to a $100 value when you buy an ebike. Just add the promo code “FUTURISM” at checkout and get ready for the ride that will change your life. Offer expires 4/10/20 at 11:30 PDT and cannot be combined with other discounts or promotions. U.S. only.

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Futurism fans: To create this content, a non-editorial team worked with RadPower Bikes, who sponsored this post. They help us keep the lights on. This post does not reflect the views or the endorsement of the Futurism.com editorial staff.

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In cooperation with the European Space Agency (ESA), a team of European researchers have conducted a… strange experiment. They mixed urea — the main compound found in mammalian urine — with materials, including Moon rocks, to test if we could one day use astronaut pee to build a lunar base.

The urea itself acted as a “plasticizer” — stuff that allows us to shape other harder materials into different forms. In their unusual experiment, the team used an analog of lunar regolith, or loose Moon rock, and mixed it with the urea.

The big advantage: using local materials is a lot easier — and dramatically cheaper — than lugging heavy construction supplies from Earth.

“To make geopolymer concrete that will be used on the moon, the idea is to use what is already there: regolith and the water from the ice present in some areas,” Ramón Pamies, a professor at the Polytechnic University of Cartagena, Spain, and co-author of the study published in the Journal of Cleaner Production last month, said in a statement.

“But moreover, with this study, we have seen that a waste product, such as the urine of the personnel who occupy the moon bases, could also be used,” Pamies explained. “The two main components of urine are water and urea, a molecule that allows the hydrogen bonds to be broken and, therefore, reduces the viscosities of many aqueous mixtures.”

Using a 3D printer, the team squeezed out Playdough-like shapes out of the urine concrete. 3D printing has become one of the most promising ways to build structures on distant planets including the Moon and Mars.

After heating them up to a temperature of 80 degrees C (176 Fahrenheit), they found that the resulting structures could support heavy weights — even after eight freeze-thaw cycles that simulated several day and night cycles on the lunar surface.

But there’s still one minor hurdle to overcome before we decide to build Urinetown on the face of the Moon. “We have not yet investigated how the urea would be extracted from the urine, as we are assessing whether this would really be necessary, because perhaps its other components could also be used to form the geopolymer concrete,” co-author Anna-Lena Kjøniksen, professor at Østfold University College, said in the statement.

READ MORE: Astronauts could use their own urine to build moon bases one day [Space.com]

More on 3D printing on the Moon: Russia is Planning to 3D Print a Moon Base

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Scientists: Astronauts Could Build Moon Base Using Human Urine

Starship Guide

Elon Musk-led space company SpaceX has released an early version of a user manual for its Starship, a massive stainless steel rocket that’s meant to one day ferry up to 100 passengers to the Moon and even Mars.

The five-page PDF details some of the ambitious plans the company has for its rocket, including a roomy interior for passengers to enjoy the ride.

“The crew configuration of Starship includes private cabins, large common areas, centralized storage, solar storm shelters and a viewing gallery,” it reads.

Cargo Carrier

The user manual also advertises the rocket’s utility for “rapid point-to-point Earth transport.” Intercontinental space-based long distance travel aboard a Starship was a key proponent of the company’s plans from the very start.

A massive capacity of 100 tons also means that a single Starship could launch three “geosynchronous telecom satellites” in one go — or a full constellation of smaller satellites. It could even repair satellites in space by capturing them, similarly to NASA’s retired Space Shuttle.

The manual also mentions the possibility of carrying an “in-space demonstration spacecraft” that would stay attached to the Starship to run experiments before heading back to Earth.

READ MORE: SpaceX’s Starship user guide details how it could replace the Space Shuttle and offer comfy passenger flights [TechCrunch]

More on Starship: Elon Musk Was Pretty Pissed When His Starship Prototype Exploded

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SpaceX Starship “User Guide” Details Private Cabins, Common Areas

Brain Reader

Researchers say they’ve built a system that can translate brain signals directly into text — a promising step toward a “speech prosthesis” that could effectively allow you to think text directly into a computer.

“We are not there yet,” University of California researcher Joseph Makin told The Guardian, “but we think this could be the basis of a speech prosthesis.”

AI Power

Makin and his collaborators described the new system in a paper published in the journal Nature Neuroscience.

Basically, they recruited four epilepsy patients who had already had electrode arrays implanted into their brains for monitoring purposes. They asked the participants to repeatedly read sentences aloud, while collecting neural information — a dataset they then used to train an algorithm to interpret the signals even when the subjects weren’t reading out loud.

Locked In

The system still has weaknesses — most notably that it works best on sentences it’s already been trained on. But its accuracy is impressive, The Guardian reports, with an error rate of only about three percent, which is slightly lower than that of human transcribers.

According to the newspaper, the researchers behind the system hope it could be used as the basis for a communication device for people who are unable to type or speak due to locked in syndrome or similar conditions.

READ MORE: Scientists develop AI that can turn brain activity into text [The Guardian]

More on brain-computer interfaces: Facebook Just Bought a Brain-Computer Interface Startup

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Scientists Debut System to Translate Thoughts Directly Into Text

Big Kaboom

Stars with a certain deadly elemental cocktail in their cores could be doomed to suffer an early demise.

If a star forms enough neon, a rare and poorly-understood chemical reaction can trigger a star-killing thermonuclear blast, Gizmodo reports. The unusual phenomenon can explain why some stars detonate and collapse into white dwarves — instead of continuing to live.

Nuclear Exchange

If a star has a core rich with neon, magnesium, and oxygen, the neon atoms can sometimes gobble up extra elections, according to research published in the journal Physical Review Letters. This triggers a nuclear reaction that detonates all of the core’s oxygen, turning the entire star into a gigantic nuclear bomb.

“What’s remarkable is that it’s a singular nuclear transition, and a very rare transition that you normally neglect,” lead researcher, Oliver Kirsebom of Dalhousie University, told Gizmodo. “Under the specific conditions in these stars, it could have a profound effect on the evolution.”

Critical Timing

What Kirsebom means by that is that these explosions can happen before a star grows and develops the intense, crushing density normally associated with the end of its stellar life cycle.

That may explain why younger, smaller stars sometimes detonate and turn into white dwarves before their time — and instead of becoming the neutron stars that usually originate from a supernova.

READ MORE: How Neon Can Make a Star Destroy Itself [Gizmodo]

More on stars: Scientists Just Found a Dead Star Lodged Inside Another Star

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Poison in the Hearts of Stars Can Make Them Explode

Free of Charge

Tesla CEO and billionaire Elon Musk has announced renewed efforts to supply hospitals around the country — and internationally — with life-saving equipment amid the coronavirus outbreak.

“We have extra FDA-approved ventilators,” he tweeted. “Will ship to hospitals worldwide within Tesla delivery regions. Device and shipping cost are free.”

He did, however, have one caveat: the ventilators need to be put to use immediately: “Only requirement is that the vents are needed immediately for patients, not stored in a warehouse.”

“Heroic Effort”

The news comes after Musk sourced some 1,255 ventilators from Chinese manufacturers and donated them to hospitals in the Los Angeles area last week. “If you want a free ventilator installed, please let us know!” he tweeted at the time.

California governor Gavin Newsom praised the move at the time, calling it a “heroic effort,” according to Bloomberg.

Vent Rush

Hospitals across the country are quickly running out of ventilators, machines that play a crucial role in providing care for a growing number of COVID-19 patients. Healthcare practitioners now have an awful decision to make: which patients get access to a limited number of ventilators?

Last week, U.S. President Donald Trump used the Defense Production Act to encourage companies including General Motors to produce ventilators. Despite severe shortages in the US, Trump announced plans yesterday to send excess ventilators to Europe.

READ MORE: Tesla offers ventilators free of cost to hospitals, Musk says [The Hill]

More on Musk: “Heroic Effort”: Elon Musk Donates 1,250 Ventilators to Hospitals

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Elon Musk is Shipping Free Ventilators to Hospitals Worldwide

Australian startup Cortical Labs is building computer chips that use biological neurons extracted from mice and humans, Fortune reports.

The goal is to dramatically lower the amount of power current artificial intelligence systems need to operate by mimicking the way the human brain.

According to Cortical Labs’ announcement, the company is planning to “build technology that harnesses the power of synthetic biology and the full potential of the human brain” in order to create a “new class” of AI that could solve “society’s greatest challenges.”

The mouse neurons are extracted from embryos, according to Fortune, but the human ones are created by turning skin cells back into stem cells and then into neurons.

The idea of using biological neurons to power computers isn’t new. Cortical Labs’ announcement comes one week after a group of European researchers managed to turn on a working neural network that allows biological and silicon-based brain cells to communicate with each other over the internet.

Researchers at MIT have also attempted to use bacteria, not neurons, to  build a computing system in 2016.

As of right now, Cortical’s mini-brains have less processing power than a dragonfly brain. The company is looking to get its mouse-neuron-powered chips to be capable of playing a game of “Pong,” as CEO Hon Weng Chong told Fortune, following the footsteps of AI company DeepMind, which used the game to test the power of its AI algorithms back in 2013.

“What we are trying to do is show we can shape the behavior of these neurons,” Chong told Fortune.

READ MORE: A startup is building computer chips using human neurons [Fortune]

More on neurons: Artificial and Biological Neurons Just Talked Over the Internet

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This Startup’s Computer Chips Are Powered by Human Neurons

By now, “stay six feet away from others” is practically a mantra for people trying to stay healthy during the coronavirus pandemic. It’s been widely accepted as a healthy, science-backed way to slow the spread of the coronavirus as much as possible.

“If it were possible to wave a magic wand and make all Americans freeze in place for 14 days while sitting six feet apart, epidemiologists say,” The New York Times wrote last month, “the whole epidemic would sputter to a halt.”

But while physically distancing ourselves from others is a crucial part of slowing the virus, six feet may not be far enough, MIT disease transmission researcher Lydia Bourouiba argued in the journal JAMA last week. In fact, the science that the six-foot rule is based on came out nearly 90 years ago.

It goes without saying that our understanding of disease transmission has progressed a great deal since then — but public health guidelines have lagged behind to a terrifying extent.

“Although such social distancing strategies are critical in the current time of pandemic,” Bourouiba wrote, “it may seem surprising that the current understanding of the routes of host-to-host transmission in respiratory infectious diseases are predicated on a model of disease transmission developed in the 1930s that, by modern standards, seems overly simplified.”

There are two main problems that Bourouiba’s research — which investigates the fluid dynamics of people coughing and sneezing — has uncovered with the existing guidelines. The first problem, The Boston Globe reports, is that people can expel viruses through regular exhalations. They don’t need to have sneezed to be spreading the pandemic.

The second is that the virus can be spread through gas clouds people expel when they cough or sneeze, not just the visible droplets that the six-foot rule seeks to avoid. And those gas clouds can send a virus as far as 27 feet under optimal conditions.

“When possible, if it’s a confined space, then maintaining larger distances would be wise,” Bourouiba told the Globe.

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MIT Professor: Guidelines to Stay Six Feet Apart Aren’t Enough

The U.S. intelligence community seems to be increasingly convinced that China downplayed the severity of its coronavirus outbreak — and that it continues to do so.

A classified report that intelligence agencies sent to the White House allegedly concludes that China’s official tally of coronavirus cases and deaths doesn’t tell the whole story, three anonymous officials told Bloomberg. If they’re right, it’s bad news for other countries that have depended on China’s data and insight to craft their own responses to COVID-19.

“The medical community made — interpreted the Chinese data as: This was serious, but smaller than anyone expected,” Deborah Birx, the State Department immunologist, said at a Tuesday news conference, according to Bloomberg. “Because I think probably we were missing a significant amount of the data, now that what we see happened to Italy and see what happened to Spain.”

Of course, there’s reason to be skeptical of this particular narrative — the Trump administration has increasingly blamed China for the global pandemic, arguably to draw attention away from its own failures, and dubiously-sourced reports that China deliberately hid how bad things were would be politically convenient.

But ever since the outbreak began last year, dissidents in China have accused the government of censorship, downplaying the risks and severity of the coronavirus, and punishing those who spoke up.

Last week, China made headlines when the epicenter city of Wuhan reported no new cases for several days in a row. Its rapidly-built emergency hospitals have even started to close down as they become unnecessary.

Now the intelligence community is calling that success story into question — and along with it much of what we’ve learned about the viral outbreak.

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Secret U.S. Intelligence Report: China Hid The Size of the Pandemic

In a Tuesday Washington Post opinion piece, philanthropist and Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates argued that the US “missed the opportunity to get ahead of the coronavirus.”

But that doesn’t mean the ship has sailed and the country is doomed to lose between 100,000 and 240,000 people, as the White House projected in a Tuesday briefing.

For Gates, the approach is simple: first, “we need a consistent nationwide approach to shutting down,” he wrote in the opinion piece.

People still traveling and going to restaurants across the country “is a recipe for disaster.” What we need is a clear message from leaders: “Shutdown anywhere means shutdown everywhere.”

Secondly, testing should also be far more effective and widespread than it has been so far. Despite the recent progress, the more tests healthcare workers conduct, the better we understand the spread; where there’s smoke, there’s fire. Healthcare workers need to get tested first, then those who experience symptoms.

Third, Gates also argued that running “rapid trials involving various candidates” for possible vaccines is the best way to find an effective treatment — and avoid a situation in which people hoard lifesaving drugs and keep them away from those who need it most.

And we shouldn’t wait for a vaccine — a process that could take up to 18 long months. We should build facilities now that could “manufacture buildings of doses,” according to Gates.

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Bill Gates: US “Missed the Opportunity” to Prevent Catastrophe

Sharp Shooter

A sharpshooter on Reddit posted a pretty incredible snapshot to the Space subreddit over the weekend: The International Space Station, as seen from his backyard on Saturday night.

The user, who goes by 120decibel, explained that he nabbed the shot using what sounds like a relatively expensive telescoping rig (upwards of $7,000, according to another users estimate), and manually tracked the ISS in the night sky with a viewfinder (as it moves a a pretty fast clip at about 17,500 MPH).

You might not have a $7,000 telescoping rig and enough experience to nail thing thing in a viewfinder tonight, but according to another user on the same post, its not impossible to see it with the naked eye, explaining that it looks like a bright star about 30 degrees above the horizon that crosses about a quarter of the sky and lasts for two minutes.

They go on: It can very easily be missed or mistaken for a plane. Good passes can be brighter than any other planet or star in the night sky and just barely below the limit to see during the day.

If you want to give it a shot yourself, they pointed us to Heavens Above, where you can find a list of visible ISS passes for the next few weeks, here.

Continued here:

This Guy Took a Photo of the ISS from His Backyard - Futurism

Big Kaboom

Stars with a certain deadly elemental cocktail in their cores could be doomed to suffer an early demise.

If a star forms enough neon, a rare and poorly-understood chemical reaction can trigger a star-killing thermonuclear blast, Gizmodo reports. The unusual phenomenon can explain why some stars detonate and collapse into white dwarves instead of continuing to live.

If a star has a core rich with neon, magnesium, and oxygen, the neon atoms can sometimes gobble up extra elections, according to research published in the journal Physical Review Letters. This triggers a nuclear reaction that detonates all of the cores oxygen, turning the entire star into a gigantic nuclear bomb.

Whats remarkable is that its a singular nuclear transition, and a very rare transition that you normally neglect, lead researcher, Oliver Kirsebom of Dalhousie University, told Gizmodo. Under the specific conditions in these stars, it could have a profound effect on the evolution.

What Kirsebom means by that is that these explosions can happen before a star grows and develops the intense, crushing density normally associated with the end of its stellar life cycle.

That may explain why younger, smaller stars sometimes detonate and turn into white dwarves before their time and instead of becoming the neutron stars that usually originate from a supernova.

READ MORE: How Neon Can Make a Star Destroy Itself [Gizmodo]

More on stars: Scientists Just Found a Dead Star Lodged Inside Another Star

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Poison in the Hearts of Stars Can Make Them Explode - Futurism

A team of researchers at Carnegie Mellon University and other institutions have released an early version of an app that they claim can determine whether you might have COVID-19, just by analyzing your voice.

Ive seen a lot of competition for the cheapest, fastest diagnosis you can have, said Benjamin Striner, a Carnegie Mellon graduate student who worked on the project, in an interview with Futurism. And there are some pretty good ones that are actually really cheap and pretty accurate, but nothings ever going to be as cheap and as easy as speaking into a phone.

Thats a provocative claim in the face of the global coronavirus outbreak, and particularly the widespread shortages of testing kits. But Striner believes that the teams algorithm, even though its still highly experimental, could be a valuable tool in tracking the spread of the virus, especially as the team continues to refine its accuracy by collecting more data.

You can use the COVID Voice Detector now to analyze your own voice for signs of infection, though it comes with a hefty disclaimer that its not a diagnostic system, not approved by the FDA or CDC, and shouldnt be used as a substitute for a medical test or examination.

The researchers behind the project emphasize that the app is a work in progress.

What we are attempting to do is to develop a voice-based solution, which, based on preliminary experiments and prior expertise, we believe is possible. The apps results are preliminary and untested, said Bhiksha Raj, a professor at Carnegie Mellon who also worked on the project. The score the app currently shows is an indicator of how much the signatures in your voice match those of other COVID patients whose voices we have tested. This is not medical advice. The primary objective of our effort/website at this point of time is to collect large numbers of voice recordings that we could use to refine the algorithm into something we and the medical community are confident about.

If the app is to be put out as a public service, it, and our results, will have to be verified by medical professionals, and attested by an agency such as the CDC, Raj added. Until that happens, its still very much an experimental and untrustworthy system. I urge people not to make healthcare decisions based on the scores we give you. You could be endangering yourself and those around you.

And at the end of the day, its unlikely the app will ever be as accurate as a laboratory test.

In terms of diagnostics, of course, its never going to be as as accurate as taking a swab and putting it on some agar and waiting for it to grow, said Striner, who has been working around the clock to prepare the app for release. But in terms of very easily monitoring a ton of people daily, weekly, whatever, monitoring on a very large scale, it gives you a way to handle and track health outbreaks.

If you have a smartphone or a computer with a microphone, using the app is simple. Users are prompted to cough several times and record a number of vowel sounds, as well as reciting the alphabet. Then it provides a score, expressed as a download-style progress bar, representing how likely the algorithm believes it is that the user has COVID-19.

Also working on the project is Rita Singh, a professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon who for years has been creating algorithms that identify micro-signatures in the human voice that she believes reveal psychological, physiological, and even medical data about an individual subject.

The cough of a COVID patient is very distinctive, Singh said. It affects the lungs so badly that breathing patterns and several other vital parameters are affected, and those are likely to have very strong signatures in voice.

A challenge for Singh and Striners team of ten Carnegie Mellon researchers who have all been working on the app from home, the campus is shut down due to the pandemic has been gathering enough audio from confirmed COVID-19 patients, in order to train the algorithm.

To gather that data, the team reached out to colleagues around the world. Those colleagues didnt just help them gather audio from COVID-19 patients, but also patients with other viruses, so that they could teach the algorithm to spot the differences. They even pored over news videos to find interviews with patients, and add those to the dataset as well.

You have samples of people that are healthy, you have samples of people that might just have the flu, Striner said. And you have all those different recordings of all the different types of coughs, like what are all the coughs that are out there? And then that allows you to kind of spot the differences.

Its difficult to quantify the current version of the apps accuracy, and both Striner and Singh reiterated that its output shouldnt be treated as medical advice.

Its accuracy cannot be tested currently because we dont have the verified test instances we need, Singh said, adding that the more people who use the app healthy or otherwise the more data they will have to better train the algorithm. If it comes from a healthy person, we then have examples of what healthy sounds like. If it comes from a person who has some known respiratory condition, we then know what that condition sounds like. The system will use all that data as counterexamples, and for disambiguating COVID signatures from those of other confusing conditions.

Ashwin Vasan, a professor at Columbia University Medical Center who was not involved in the Carnegie Mellon research, expressed reservations about releasing the app during a moment of global health crisis.

Despite what could be a well-intentioned attempt by a bunch of engineers to help during this crisis, this is not exactly the messaging we want to be out there, he cautioned. That somehow there is a nifty new tool we can use to diagnose coronavirus, in absence of the things we really need much more of, actual test kits, serologic testing, PPE for frontline healthcare workers, and ventilators for critically ill patients.

Lets keep the focus on that, especially when our leaders in Washington seem unable to meet those most basic needs, he added. Anything else is just a distraction.

For their part, the Carnegie Mellon team says theyre grappling with the public health implications of the app. Striner said that theyve consulted with colleagues in the medical research community, and that they carefully considered how to fine-tune the apps sensitivity.

We would probably side more towards having some false positives then false negatives, if that make sense, Striner said. If you give someone a false negative on COVID, then they walk around and get a bunch of people sick, versus a couple extra false positives, maybe some people get tests they dont need.

Editors note March 31: This story has been updated with additional remarks from Dr. Bhiksha Raj.

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New App Attempts to Detect Signs of COVID-19 Using Voice Analysis - Futurism

Back in 2018, I had a phone conversation with a so-called futurist called Richard Watson.

He made a number of predictions for the future of travel. He told me that overcrowding will continue to be a huge issue. He predicted that iris ID scans would come in one day, and that social media will soon seem quite quaint.

Amongst his predictions was also the following prophecy: The travel industry will shut down but it will bounce back.

At the time, I remember thinking the idea of global travel shutting down for any length of time was rather fanciful. The idea of things closing for a few days, or perhaps a week, was fathomable. Anything beyond that? Surely not.

We could have some kind of nasty event which shuts everything down, like a pandemic, he expanded. I remember when everyone in airports were wearing masks when SARS happened.

Whats interesting though is that weve had all of those things in the past and the travel industry always bounces back remarkably quickly. So I dont think itll be a long term shift, it might impact travel for six months or a year.

That was then. So what does Watson think about the current situation, and what could come next?

The travel industry is in deep trouble, but its not the first time and it wont be the last, Watson said.

Despite SARS, 9/11, oil price spikes, climate change and the eruption of the Eyjafjallajkull volcano, the leisure travel industry has remained resilient throughout its long history, bouncing back relatively unscathed after numerous short-term shocks.

This time its different, were told, but the industry will still bounce back, because people have a need to get away, to unwind and escape. Indeed, this need could be stronger than ever once this particular storm has passed.

Did anyone see this pandemic coming? Of course. It has always been a case of when not if, and Ive been in numerous workshops where its been discussed, although ironically, it was among terrorism and climate change as an off-limits topic when I was asked to look at the future of travel a decade ago (I declined).

However, its been on my risk radar as a highly probable, highly impactful event. So, what else might be hidden in plain sight that could ground air travel in particular? Here are some thoughts:

Forget Eyjafjallajkull. What would happen if a mega-volcano the size of Yellowstone erupted? The result could be akin to the Year Without Summer back in 1815.

At the moment, the oil price is low, with people even talking about it going negative. But what if the opposite occurred? What if it hit $200+ a barrel before we had time to develop hybrid electric aircraft or create workable bio-fuels in sufficient quantities?

What if terrorists developed novel ways to attack trains, planes and ships? I can think ways, which Im not going to mention, but sustained and effective attacks would shift how and where people travel.

At the moment, a relatively small proportion of Chinese citizens (or Indians, Russians, Brazilians, Indonesians, Nigerians or Mexicans for that matter) holiday abroad. What if this changed? Certain places already restrict tourist numbers, so what if, in the future, you had to book years in advance to go anywhere worth going? This would fundamentally re-draw the tourist map.

Boeing and other plane makers are seriously considering the idea of pilotless planes. Im sure the idea has crossed the mind of Michael OLeary too. Maybe these will be OK. Passenger drones should be safer than small helicopters, but Im not rushing to buy a ticket anytime soon. If this happens I think Ill stay at home or re-discover the joys of passenger ships and long-distance rail travel.

What? We havent got over this one yet, I hear you say. Well Im afraid the growth of the global population, rising urbanisation, intensive agriculture and continued globalisation takes us straight back to when, not if, this happens once again.

Richard Watson is the founder of nowandnext.com.

Continued here:

A futurist told us a pandemic would cancel all travel heres what he says will happen next - Telegraph.co.uk

FUTURISTS have revealed what the world might look like once the coronavirus crisis finally comes to an end.

The Sun spoke to two professional futurologists who think we could see the end of the "9 to 5", mass "prepping" and even more people driving cars.

Future-gazing Brit Tom Cheesewright reckons we'll soon see an end to normal working hours.

"Smart companies will realise that human beings aren't robots and let us work in more productive ways," Tom told The Sun.

"That means mapping the working day to your body clock so you get enough sleep. Working in bursts not long stretches.

"And breaking it up with some exercise," he added.

The number of people working from home has risen sharply and it's hard to imagine all office workers reverting to their old life.

So says Ian Pearson, a renowned futurist who thinks we'll see more people spending ditching the commute altogether in a post-coronavirus world.

"Closer to home, with everyone familiar with home working, many will stay at home more often," said Ian, speaking to The Sun.

"So there will be a bit less commuting, with less congestion, less pollution, and lower CO2."

Before 2020, people largely saw "preppers" doomsday-obsessed people who stockpile supplies and build bunkers as a bit nutty.

But Tom reckons the practice of prepping will be significantly more popular in years to come.

"The ultra-rich in the US have been prepping for years," Tom explained.

"It's a point of pride for Silicon Valley magnates that they all have a holiday home/bunker filled with enough tinned food and weapons to survive the zombie apocalypse.

"More people in the UK might now start to follow their example, turning spare rooms over to storage for every eventuality."

Health technology, expertise and techniques have been improved steadily but all health systems struggle under the weight of a pandemic.

Now national health infrastructure is more vital than ever, so Ian thinks much money will be poured into healthcare from now on.

"There is a little re-levelling of attitudes in our class system," said Ian.

"We're being forced to realise which people are really essential in running our society and also that some really are just decoration."Some benefits are political. Everyone right now appreciates the massive efforts of every health care worker looking after victims.

"But once it's over, it is important that the NHS as a whole is reformed to make sure it is much better able to cope the next time, and sadly there will be a next time.

"There will be much greater willingness to reform the NHS and make sure it is fit for purpose, not badly managed, inefficient and poorly focused as it has been."

And one big change could be bad for the environment: a boom in driving.

Tom thinks that more people will be pushed into using their own personal transport, which could make the rise of "green" electric vehicles more important than ever.

"Public transport is a scary place in a pandemic," said Tom.

"People have been turning away from cars for a while, learning to drive later in life. But that trend might slow post-coronavirus with a bump in car buying for those whose finances allow."

You can find Tom Cheesewright at his website, or the Talk About Tomorrow podcast.

And you can find Ian Pearson at his website, or his blog.

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In other news, we debunk some of the zaniest coronavirus conspiracy theories out there.

Check out our guide to the best apps for working from home.

And criminals are taking advantage of the COVID-19 outbreak bysending scam emailsclaiming to be from the WHO.

Do you agree with these predictions? Let us know in the comments!

We pay for your stories! Do you have a story for The Sun Online Tech & Science team? Email us at tech@the-sun.co.uk

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Mass home-working and doomsday prepping futurists reveal what life after the coronavirus crisis could look - The Sun

Go Time

The recently-formed U.S. Space Force will actually venture out into orbit for the first time on Thursday.

The mission, which will send a military communication satellite into orbit from Floridas Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, is still on track for its 3 p.m. EST launch, according to Ars Technica. Thats because, unlike other groups like SpaceX and NASA, military spaceports in the U.S. have thus far escaped unscathed by the coronavirus pandemic.

However, the mission has been altered somewhat by the pandemic, even if the launch itself is proceeding as scheduled. Ars Technica reports that the usual fanfare surrounding a rocket launch, like a social media event and other forms of outreach, have been cancelled.

That said, people can still watch the launch if they so desire on this livestream.

If the Space Force mission succeeds, the U.S. military will be able to bring online a new constellation of communication satellites. With the satellite thats being launched today in place, the military will finally be able to replace the outdated network that its been relying on.

Five of the six satellitesin the new network are already in place, Ars Technica reports. Some have been waiting in geostationary orbit for ten full years, as the military has been slowly sending them up since 2010.

READ MORE: For the first time, the US Space Force will actually go to space today [Ars Technica]

More on space: Space Force Working Pretty Closely With Elon Musk and SpaceX

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The US Space Force Is About to Finally Leave the Planet - Futurism

There are those who have been around the block, and then, theres this guy: A 101-year-old Italian man has survived the 1918 flu, a World War, and now, the coronavirus. Whatd you do today?

A patient known as Mr. P was admitted last week to Infirmi Hospital in Remini, Italy after testing positive for COVID-19. Mr. P was born in 1919, as the 1918 flu pandemic which would go on to kill an estimated 600,000 Italians was in full-swing. And on Wednesday night, 101 someodd years later, Mr. P was discharged from the hospital, and taken home by his family.

The Vice Mayor of Rimini, Gloria Lisi, provided a statement to local newspaper ReminiToday about the man. The (incredibly poetic) statement, roughly translated, reads:

Given the progress of the virus, it could not even be called a story like many if it were not for a detail that makes the life of the person returned to their loved ones truly extraordinary.

Mr. P., from Rimini, was born in 1919, in the midst of another tragic world pandemic. He saw everything, hunger, pain, progress, crisis and resurrections. Once over the 100-year-old barrier, fate has put this new challenge before him, invisible and terrible at the same time. Last week, Mr. P. was hospitalized at in Rimini after testing positive for COVID-19. In a few days, it became history for doctors, nurses, and the rest of the healthcare personnel who treated him.

A hope for the future finds itself in the body of a person over a century old, as the sad chronicles of these weeks mechanically tell every day of a virus that is raging especially on the elderly.

Yet, Mr. P. made it. The family brought him home yesterday evening, to teach us that even at 101-years-old, the future has yet to be written.

Per the Hopkins Map, as of this writing, Italy leads the world in COVID-19 infections resulting in death, and is likely to overtake China within the day for total confirmed infections. But their rate of infections continues to slow, and the countrys lockdown appears to be working. The reality of the math is brutal, but Mayor Lisi isnt wrong: The future, as doubly evidenced, isnt entirely bleak, and has very, very much yet to be written.

Originally posted here:

101-Year-Old Man Who Survived 1918 Flu Beats Coronavirus, Too - Futurism