Pay Up

Facebook just agreed to settle with its content moderators, who filed a class-action lawsuit after being forced to watch extremely graphic media under abject working conditions.

Moderators, who were contractors for the company Cognizant rather than Facebook staffers, were tasked with rapidly flagging and removing the absolute worst content users uploaded. A typical day could mean exposure to child sexual abuse, animal abuse, beheadings, and gun violence. Now, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation reports that Facebook is paying $52 million for psychological damages.

Years Later

The class-action lawsuit was first filed in 2018, and more moderators signed on over time. Facebook leadership has long known how grueling the job was — CEO Mark Zuckerberg once quickly deflected when Congress asked if he would consider moderating the social media site for a day.

But because the moderators were technically hired by Cognizant and didn’t work on Facebook’s property, the company generally avoided claiming any responsibility for their work conditions, which included high quotas and reportedly lacked proper professional or psychological resources.

Pay Day

Now, each of the moderators who were part of the lawsuit gets $1,000, according to ABC News. But whose who were diagnosed with medical conditions due to the stressful, traumatic work can get up to $50,000 in medical treatment and damages.

Facebook’s official statement said that the company is “grateful to the people who do this important work to make Facebook a safe environment for everyone. We’re committed to providing them additional support through this settlement and in the future.”

READ MORE: Facebook to pay moderators $80 million for psychological damages [Australian Broadcasting Corporation]

More on Facebook moderation: Facebook Moderators Are Dying at Their Desks

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Facebook Will Pay Mods $52M For Trauma From Gore, Sexual Abuse

Software developer Epic Games, the company behind “Fortnite,” just released the first look at Unreal Engine 5, the next generation of its popular game engine — and it looks genuinely spectacular.

Epic Games’ flashy new demo, “Lumen in the Land of Nanite,” runs in real-time on a PlayStation 5 and looks extraordinarily impressive. The company claims it could “achieve photorealism on par with movie CG and real life.”

The demo offers a tantalizing glimpse of the fidelity that next-gen consoles — the long-awaited PlayStation 5 and Xbox One Series X — could offer.

Epic highlighted two new technologies in an official blog post.

First off, “Nanite virtualized micropolygon geometry” gives artists the ability to create art “comprising hundreds of millions or billions of polygons” that can be directly imported into Unreal Engine.

Second, “Lumen” offers developers a “fully dynamic global illumination solution that immediately reacts to scene and light changes.” That means individual rays of light can bounce many times from surfaces, creating “indirect specular reflections in huge, detailed environments, at scales ranging from kilometers to millimeters.”

Of course, it’s easy to be taken in by a showy new demo. Back in 2016, we were wowed by a demo of Unreal Engine 4 that now looks — well, not that impressive.

Still, this latest version, at first bluff, is majestic — a step along the way to games that could be almost indistinguishable from reality.

A preview of the new engine will be available in early 2021 and will support both next-gen and current-gen consoles, as well as PC, Mac, iOS, and Android.

READ MORE: A first look at Unreal Engine 5 [Epic Games]

More on Unreal Engine: The Future of Gaming? Check Out the Remarkable Graphics of Unreal Engine 4

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This Hyper-Realistic Game Engine Looks Almost Like Real Life

Microsoft and the biotech company Adaptive are launching a new study on how the immune system fends off the coronavirus — and they’re paying patients for bags of their blood.

The goal is to learn how T cells, which function as the foot soldiers of the immune system, contribute to the body’s overall response to SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19.

While other scientists are already investigating the body’s immune response, Business Insider reports that Microsoft and Adaptive believe a specific emphasis on T cell research is a blindspot in other ongoing coronavirus research.

In order to fill in that gap, Microsoft and Adaptive are reportedly preparing to send phlebotomists to the homes of people who were exposed to the coronavirus, those who are currently sick, and those who recovered from it, to draw blood.

Those who might be interested can fill out an online questionnaire to enroll in the study. Microsoft will compensate participants who are selected with at $50 gift card, and those who are selected for blood drawings will get another $50 for each one of up to four blood drawings they agree to.

Once they’ve bought and paid for those blood bags, the two companies hope to compare the T cells of sick and recovered coronavirus patients. The ultimate goal, Business Insider reports, is to ascertain whether T cells that were already exposed to and fought SARS-CoV-2 can contribute to long-term immunization against future infections.

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Bad news, according to the World Health Organization (WHO): even if scientists invent a vaccine, the coronavirus that causes the sometimes-deadly COVID-19 might be here for good.

“It is important to put this on the table: this virus may become just another endemic virus in our communities, and this virus may never go away,” WHO emergencies expert Mike Ryan said during a Thursday briefing, as reported by Reuters.

He noted that other illnesses, such as measles, already have a vaccine but have yet to be completely defeated.

“HIV has not gone away — but we have come to terms with the virus,” Ryan said.

And timelines, he cautioned, are not much more than educated guesses.

“I think it is important we are realistic and I don’t think anyone can predict when this disease will disappear,” Ryan added. “I think there are no promises in this and there are no dates. This disease may settle into a long problem, or it may not be.”

Ryan also argued that finding a vaccine would be a “massive moonshot,” according to Reuters.

Luckily, it’s not all doom and gloom. On the plus side, according to a WHO survey, scientists are working on more than 100 vaccine candidates worldwide, ranging from more traditional vaccines that use an inactivated version of the virus to more experimental attempts that hijack your DNA to build up a resistance.

Rather than rushing into reopening economies and borders and restarting air travel, the WHO says that a safe return to normalcy will require patience.

“We need to get into the mindset that it is going to take some time to come out of this pandemic,” WHO epidemiologist Maria van Kerkhove said during the briefing.

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WHO: The Coronavirus Might Be Here Forever

In order to find new treatments for COVID-19, scientists are probing how the coronavirus alters human cells when it infects and hijacks them.

Medical virologists at the Frankfurt University hospital have been culturing cells of SARS-CoV-2 since February, learning as much as they could about how it affects them, according to a Goethe University Frankfurt press release. Now, they’ve identified a number of compounds — available in existing drugs including the metabolism-inhibiting cancer medication WP1122 — that seem to stop the coronavirus from reproducing inside a host.

The team’s findings were published Thursday in the journal Nature. With those in hand, pharmaceutical companies are already launching clinical trials in a bid to develop new pharmaceuticals that could block the deadly virus.

Some viruses force cells to dedicate all their resources to churning out copies of the virus, but the virologists found that SARS-CoV-2 takes a less extreme approach. Instead of taking over all protein production within the cell, it increases the amount of proteins the cell synthesizes and helps itself to the surplus.

As a result, the team found that they could stop viral reproduction by taking away the building blocks of proteins, and found a number of compounds that did the trick.

“The successful use of substances that are components of already approved drugs to combat SARS-CoV-2 is a great opportunity in the fight against the virus,” lead author and Frankfurt virologist Jindrich Cinatl said in the release. “These substances are already well characterized, and we know how they are tolerated by patients. This is why there is currently a global search for these types of substances. In the race against time, our work can now make an important contribution as to which directions promise the fastest success.”

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Scientists Have a Promising New Idea to Defeat the Coronavirus

The Pentagon has released new information about a series of fascinating encounters between US Navy pilots and unidentified flying objects.

The “hazard reports” include details about the size and shape of the “unidentified aerial phenomena.”

“The unknown aircraft appeared to be small in size, approximately the size of a suitcase, and silver in color,” reads a report describing a 2014 incident. At the time, the Navy aircraft “passed within 1000 [feet] of the object, but was unable to positively determine the identity of the aircraft.”

A different report, in 2013, describes another object that “had an approximately 5 foot wingspan and was colored white with no other distinguishable features. Due to the small size, the aircraft was determined to be a [unidentified aerial system].”

The report noted that the objects could be drones, although no nearby operators could be identified.

The news comes after a series of UFO videos surfaced thanks to a 2017 investigation by The New York Times. The three videos showed strangely shaped objects zipping across the surface of the ocean, while others appeared to shoot up into the sky without any apparent methods of propulsion.

Last month, the pentagon finally formally released the three unclassified videos, noting that “after a thorough review, the department has determined that the authorized release of these unclassified videos does not reveal any sensitive capabilities or systems.”

“[The Department of Defense] is releasing the videos in order to clear up any misconceptions by the public on whether or not the footage that has been circulating was real, or whether or not there is more to the videos,” Sue Gough, a Defense Department spokeswoman, told CBS News last month. “The aerial phenomena observed in the videos remain characterized as ‘unidentified.'”

Just over a year ago, the US Navy also announced it started working on new guidelines for its personnel to report sightings and other encounters with “unidentified aircraft,” as Politico reported at the time.

READ MORE: Newly released incident reports detail US Navy’s ‘UFO’ encounters [CNN]

More on the mysterious videos: PENTAGON OFFICIALLY RELEASES THREE UFO VIDEOS

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US Military Releases New Info About Navy UFO Videos

Algorithmic Nonsense

Have you ever heard of a lachetous vine? Maybe you just finished up some worryless tasks?

Those words sound vaguely familiar — perhaps you think you’ve heard them before but aren’t sure you could explicitly define them. That’s because they’re gibberish — part of an endless stream of words conjured up by an algorithm programmed to make new words that sound as believable as possible.

Technobabble

The made-up words are generated by the website thisworddoesnotexist.com, which is a creation of former Instagram engineer Thomas Dimson, The Verge reports. Each time the site is refreshed, it comes up with a new word — with varying degrees of success.

Thisworddoesnotexist uses the OpenAI-created algorithm GPT-2, which generates plausible text that’s been used to algorithmically create everything from text-based adventure games to grad school essays.

Crowdsourced

Because GPT-2 wasn’t trained on dictionaries — The Verge­ reports that it instead scraped 8 million websites from popular Reddit links — some of the new definitions are still a little bit off.

But AI-generated dictionary is still a notable accomplishment, given that understanding the meanings of words has long been one of the major limitations of modern-day artificial intelligence.

READ MORE: ThisWordDoesNotExist.com is rewriting the dictionary with the help of AI [The Verge]

More on GPT-2: This Grad Student Used a Neural Network to Write His Papers

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This Delightful AI Generates Words That Sound Real But Aren’t

Million Mile

Tesla will soon announce a “million mile” battery that it says will bring down the cost of electric vehicles to the price point of gas engine cars and greatly improve the longevity of batteries, according to a Reuters exclusive.

The battery will be used in the company’s Model 3 luxury sedan made and sold in China later this year or early next year. According to Reuters, the battery is a collaboration between Tesla and a team of academic battery experts recruited by Tesla CEO Elon Musk.

Low Cobalt

The new batteries will rely on low-cobalt and cobalt-free battery technologies that reduce the stresses on the inside of the batteries, making them last much longer, according to Reuters. Cobalt remains the most expensive metal in the production of electric car batteries.

Thanks to a heavily automated manufacturing process, production cost will reportedly drop as well. Tesla is planning on opening even larger “Terafactories” that will dwarf its existing — and already massive — gigafactories to produce the batteries.

Terafactories

Musk has also been teasing that Tesla will be holding a “Battery Day” later this month, which may be when the company officially announces the new battery.

“We’ve got to scale battery production to crazy levels that people cannot even fathom today,” Musk told investors in January.

READ MORE: Exclusive: Tesla’s secret batteries aim to rework the math for electric cars and the grid [Reuters]

More on Tesla: Defying Shelter-in-Place, Tesla Is Building New Cars Today

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Tesla Leak Describes Upcoming “Million Mile” Battery

Shake It Off

To a hapless Mars rover, getting stuck in a slippery sand trap can be a death sentence. That’s what happened to NASA’s Spirit rover ten years ago: its wheels got trapped and the robot was immobilized until it eventually ran out of power.

To prevent that from happening future exploration robots, The New York Times reports that engineers from the Georgia Institute of Technology are testing rovers that vibrate intensely to avoid becoming ensnared by alien landscapes.

Jitterbug

In order to keep future rovers moving, the engineers are programming prototype robots to shake, gyrate, and army crawl across the top of sandy terrain — which they simulated by filling a glass tank with poppy seeds, according to research published in the Science Robotics on Wednesday.

“This combination of wheels and paddling and lifting, if sequenced properly, is really powerful,” Georgia Tech physicist Daniel Goldman told the NYT. “No longer just wheels at the end of sticks but they are actually active appendages, and I think that’s exciting.”

Want To Break Free

Not only can the bizarre dance prevent a sandy death, but the NYT reports that it could enable next-generation rovers to explore previously-inaccessible regions of Mars, like loose-terrained inclines.

“When you only have wheels,” Goldman told the NYT, “that limits your ability to go anywhere.”

READ MORE: Watch These Rover Models Wiggle Out of Alien Sand Traps [The New York Times]

More on rovers: The White House Is Trying to Shut Down NASA’s Last Mars Rover

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This Wiggly Mars Rover Is the Silliest Thing We’ve Ever Seen

A team of scientists at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston has developed a brain implant that allows both blind and sighted participants “see” the shape of letters.

As detailed in a new paper published in the journal Cell, the device works by skipping the eye and relaying visual information from a camera straight to electrodes implanted in the brain.

It’s a step toward a “visual prosthetic” that would allow the blind to fully regain vision — though such a device is likely still many years out.

But what the researchers created is nonetheless remarkable: participants were able to “see” the outlines of shapes, thanks to complex sequences of electrical pulses sent to their brains.

“When we used electrical stimulation to dynamically trace letters directly on patients’ brains, they were able to ‘see’ the intended letter shapes and could correctly identify different letters,” senior author Daniel Yoshor from the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston said in a statement. “They described seeing glowing spots or lines forming the letters, like skywriting.”

The new device differs from previous visual aids that treated each electrode like a pixel.

“Rather than trying to build shapes from multiple spots of light, we traced outlines,” first author Michael Beauchamp, professor at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, said in the statement.

“Our inspiration for this was the idea of tracing a letter in the palm of someone’s hand,” Beauchamp added.

Such a device could have a major impact on the lives of the blind and visually impaired.

“The ability to detect the form of a family member or to allow more independent navigation would be a wonderful advance for many blind patients,” Yoshor told Live Science.

But the development of the device is still in its early stages, as the brain is an extremely complex organ.

“The primary visual cortex, where the electrodes were implanted, contains half a billion neurons,” Beauchamp said in the statement. “In this study we stimulated only a small fraction of these neurons with a handful of electrodes.”

Therefore “an important next step will be to work with neuroengineers to develop electrode arrays with thousands of electrodes, allowing us to stimulate more precisely,” he added. “Together with new hardware, improved stimulation algorithms will help realize the dream of delivering useful visual information to blind people.”

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Resting Heartrate

For the first time, astronomers were able to cut through all the background noise of the universe and discover that a particular class of star gives off rhythmic pulsing, not unlike a person’s heartbeat.

The internal fluctuations of a type of star known as a “Delta Scuti” eluded astronomers for decades, but new data from NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) revealed distinct patterns coming from inside 60 nearby stars relatively close to our solar system, according to research published Wednesday in the journal Nature.

Fine Tuning

Scientists already knew that Delta Scuti stars pulsated, but they’d never before been able to find any pattern to the beats.

“Previously we were finding too many jumbled up notes to understand these pulsating stars properly,” University of Sydney researcher Tim Bedding said in a press release. “It was a mess, like listening to a cat walking on a piano.”

“The incredibly precise data from NASA’s TESS mission have allowed us to cut through the noise,” Bedding added. “Now we can detect structure, more like listening to nice chords being played on the piano.”

Cosmic Shazam

It turns out that the pulsations are sound waves originating from inside each star. Each internal sound wave causes a region of the star to expand or contract, giving off different frequencies.

This asteroseismological discovery, the researchers said in the release, basically lets them peer inside a star, revealing what it’s made of and what changes are happening inside.

READ MORE: Astronomers find regular rhythms among pulsating stars [University of Sydney]

More on stars: A Star Is Circling a Black Hole and its Orbit is Absolutely Nuts

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Astronomers: Some Stars Have Something Akin to a Heartbeat

A new video shows what it would look like if four rocket types were transparent during liftoff and stage separation — even showing how the fuel drains as the rockets keep firing.

The fascinating animation compares the following four rockets from left to right:

• Saturn V, a US-made super heavy-lift vehicle used by NASA between 1967 and 1973
• The Space Shuttle, NASA’s space plane that retired back in 2011
• SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy, a super heavy-lift vehicle
• NASA’s Space Launch System (SLS), the space agency’s upcoming heavy lift rocket that has been under development since the Space Shuttle retired in 2011

The video color-codes a number of different rocket fuel types being used up by the rockets’ various stages.

• Red is kerosene RP-1, a highly refined form of kerosene similar to jet fuel.
• Orange is liquid hydrogen (LH2), a common rocket fuel used by NASA. Interestingly, it first cools the nozzle of the rocket before being ignited by an oxidizer.
• Blue is liquid oxygen (LOX), the liquid form of diatomic oxygen that often is used as oxidizer for the liquid hydrogen in rockets such as NASA’s workhorse RS-25, an engine that was used for the Space Shuttle.

NASA’s upcoming SLS will mix both LH2 and LOX to produce a massive amount of energy — and water.

Due to the extremely low density of LH2, NASA’s SLS would need a gigantic fuel tank. To mitigate that, designers gave the rocket two boosters on either side, a design derivative of NASA’s retired Space Shuttle.

Both SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy and the Saturn V use a refined version of kerosene as a first stage, a stage that gets jettisoned at a certain altitude.

Burning kerosene comes with a heavy toll on the environment as burning it creates immense amounts of carbon dioxide — a problem that could be compounded if SpaceX’s plan to launch a rocket every two weeks ever comes to fruition.

The animator behind the video even thought to include a tiny little red Tesla Roadster — a car famously launched into space in 2018 by SpaceX CEO Elon Musk.

Editor’s note 5/14/2020: A previous version of this story wrongly stated that SpaceX’s Heavy Falcon will carry NASA astronauts into space later this month. It will in fact be a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket.

READ MORE: If Rockets were Transparent [YouTube]

More on rockets: Dock a SpaceX Spacecraft to the ISS in This Amazing Simulator

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Amazing Vid Shows What You’d See If Rockets Were Transparent

We’re getting close to the halfway point of 2020, and so far this year has been…well, you know. But believe it or not, things could actually be a lot worse. If this were, say, 2005, there would be no Netflix. There would be no Tik Tok. There would be no UberEats. There would be no Amazon Prime. There would be no Animal Crossing. And perhaps worst of all, there would be no CBD gummies to order off the internet and have delivered right to your door.

As you probably know, people take CBD because they believe it provides gentle, side-effect-free relief from a wide variety of conditions, including stress, anxiety, insomnia, pain, and inflammation. According to a Gallup poll conducted last summer, 20 percent of Americans between the ages of 18 and 29 said they used CBD products on a regular basis, while 16 percent of adults between the ages of 30 use it. Chances are, if they conducted another poll right now, the numbers would be much higher.

Shorthand for cannabidiol, CBD is one of 113 cannabinoid compounds found in cannabis and hemp plants. However, unlike THC, which is the active ingredient in marijuana, CBD does not get you high. Instead, it works by modulating your endocannabinoid system, which is a kind of inter-cellular communications system that helps the brain regulate immune function, stress, anxiety, pain, inflammation, and memory.

Of course, these days there are lots of different ways to take CBD. You can get it in pills, ointments, energy shots, tinctures, bath oils—you name it. However, the most delicious way to get your daily dose of calming, stress-reducing CBD is via gummies. And when it comes to CBD gummies, nothing beats Penguin CBD Gummy Worms.

Penguin CBD Gummies

With so many different CBD products on the market, it can be difficult for consumers to figure out which brands they can trust. That’s why Penguin is completely transparent about how they make their products.

The CBD used in Penguin gummies is produced using the most advanced isolation process in the industry. It all starts with 100-percent organic, 100-percent THC-free industrial hemp, which is grown locally in Oregon without the use of toxic chemical fertilizers or pesticides. Penguin then uses advanced machinery and CO2 to extract CBD from the hemp. The CBD extract then undergoes a cutting-edge nanoemulsification process that breaks it down into microscopic particles that are easily absorbed by human cells.

Once the production process is complete, all Penguin CBD products undergo third-party testing by ProVerde Laboratories. This ensures that their gummies are certified to be clear of any unwanted chemicals and totally safe to consume.

Each Penguin CBD Gummy Worm contains 10mg of their potent CBD extract, and each jar contains 30 worms. If you love sour candy loaded with tropical flavors and coated on sweet and sour sugar crystals, you will love these gummies. But if you don’t, Penguin offers a 100-percent satisfaction guarantee. If you’re not satisfied, simply return them within 30 days and they’ll give you a full refund. Penguin will even pay for the return shipping.

So if you’re looking for a high-quality CBD product that tastes as good as it makes you feel, give Penguin CBD Gummy Worms a try. If you love them, you can subscribe to monthly shipments and save 15-percent off the regular price. So really you’ve got nothing to lose.

Futurism fans: To create this content, a non-editorial team worked with Verma Farms, 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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Happy Accident

Astronomers hoped to study a comet named ATLAS when it passed through our solar system, but in April it started to disintegrate.

But Space.com reports that NASA and the European Space Agency may have an extremely fortuitous opportunity to analyze it all the same. That’s because Solar Orbiter, a spacecraft operated by the two agencies that studies our Sun, happens to be on the exact right course to pass through the comet’s tail in the next few weeks.

Ships In The Night

Solar Orbiter could pass through the outer layers of the tail of ATLAS’s rubble either on May 31 or Jun 1, Space.com reports, and it could hit the remnants of its dust trail by June 6.

Once it makes contact, the instruments on Solar Orbiter that were built to study the ionized particles on the Sun’s atmosphere could instead get an up-close look at how comets — or their debris — ionize their surroundings, according to research published earlier this month in the journal Research Notes of the AAS.

Ships In The Night

Aside from the excitement around the potential discoveries associated with the flyby, the researchers seem blown away by the fantastic luck necessary for Solar Orbiter and ATLAS’ trajectories to line up so well.

“If Solar Orbiter instruments detect material from Comet ATLAS, it will be the first predicted serendipitous comet tail crossing by an active spacecraft carrying appropriate instrumentation for the detection of cometary material,” the researchers wrote in their paper.

READ MORE: A sun-watching spacecraft just might fly through tail of Comet ATLAS in rare encounter [Space.com]

More on comets: Watch NASA’s New Footage of a Comet Exploding

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Research Spacecraft May Pass Through Tail of Dead Comet

Type Oil Negative

For the first time in history, the price of crude oil has gone negative as a result of plummeting demand amid the coronavirus outbreak, Bloomberg reports. Oil traders are literally running out of space to store excess oil.

In a single day, the price of oil dropped far below the previous record, set in 1946, when the world was still recovering from World War 2.

So what does this mean?

Theres no storage left for oil, so extra oil becomes worthless, wrote author and climate advocate Eric Holthaus on Twitter.

Oil companies are storing extra oil every way possible: filling oil tankers and parking them offshore, putting oil into pipelines and turning them off. At this rate global oil storage will be full in a few weeks, Holthaus added.

Despite the record drops, investors are still pumping money into oil futures, according to Bloomberg.

Refiners are rejecting barrels at a historic pace and with U.S. storage levels sprinting to the brim, market forces will inflict further pain until either we hit rock bottom, or COVID clears, whichever comes first, but it looks like the former, Michael Tran, managing director of global energy strategy at RBC Capital Markets, told Bloomberg.

READ MORE: Oil Plunges Below Zero for First Time With May Contract Ending [Bloomberg]

More on the pandemic: THIS HEATMAP SHOWS SEVERITY OF COVID OUTBREAK IN EVERY US COUNTY

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For the First Time Ever, the Price of Oil is Now Negative - Futurism

Scientists and healthcare workers arestill trying to make sense of the many symptoms of COVID-19.

From extensive lung and blood vessel damage tothe loss of smell and taste and even strange discoloration of toes, questions linger about the deadly virus currently sweeping the globe.

Now, doctors are noticing mysterious blood clots in COVID-19 patients that may be causing extremely low oxygen levels so low that they should be unconscious or even dead but still acting normally, according to The Washington Post.

The strange clots have even prompted some doctors have suggested giving blood thinners to all COVID patients, including the ones not sick enough to be hospitalized.

Autopsies showed that patients lungs were filled with hundreds of tiny clots or microclots rather than one large hemorrhage that couldve caused a stroke or heart attack.

The problem we are having is that while we understand that there is a clot, we dont yet understand why there is a clot, Lewis Kaplan, a University of Pennsylvania physician, told the Post. We dont know. And therefore, we are scared.

Researchers are now investigating whether these microclots could play a role in deaths across the country.

But first, they are trying to understand what is causing them in the first place.

One of the theories is that once the body is so engaged in a fight against an invader, the body starts consuming the clotting factors, which can result in either blood clots or bleeding, Kaplan told the Post.

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COVID Patients Are Getting Mysterious and Deadly Blood Clots - Futurism

Playing Offense

The U.S. Space Force recently acquired its first offensive weaponry: a device capable of blocking satellite communications, temporarily rendering orbiting satellites useless.

The technology behind these Counter Communications Systems, as they’re called, has already existed for years, Interesting Engineering reports, but the devices were only delivered to the military last month. With them, the U.S. can now disable enemy satellites from the ground.

Arms Race

While these weapons are new for the U.S. military, they had already been deployed elsewhere. For instance, Popular Mechanics reports that Russia’s military has had similar weapons in place since 2019.

And while the technical details of how the jammers work are kept under wraps, PopMech reports that there have been at least 13 similar systems up and running around the world back in 2017.

Logistical Nightmare

While the Counter Communication Systems don’t actually damage the satellites they target, they pose a major threat to military and other communication networks that rely on satellites to relay messages.

That means soldiers could be cut off from communication networks while they’re on a mission. And in a far more drastic scenario, missile alert systems could suddenly be disabled, leaving whatever nation got jammed vulnerable to a devastating attack.

READ MORE: U.S. Space Force’s First Offensive Weapon Is a Satellite Jammer [Interesting Engineering]

More on the Space Force: The US Space Force Is About to Finally Leave the Planet

The post Space Force Unveils Its First Weapon, a Satellite Jammer appeared first on Futurism.

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Space Force Unveils Its First Weapon, a Satellite Jammer

Test Run

SpaceX CEO Elon Musk tweeted Wednesday that the company’s Starlink satellite network will come online for a public beta in about six months.

The network will still be incomplete — Business Insider reports that SpaceX hopes to launch thousands more satellites in the coming years. But the beta will be the first attempt to test out whether Starlink can reliably beam internet service down from space. If it works, it could help improve access to broadband and close the digital divide that’s only become more of a problem since people started isolating at home.

Private beta begins in ~3 months, public beta in ~6 months, starting with high latitudes

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 23, 2020

Crowded Sky

Starlink has remained controversial among scientists who are worried that launching tens of thousands of satellites could prevent astronomers from conducting research — or even become a minefield for spacecraft trying to leave the planet.

But SpaceX has made efforts to assuage those concerns by changing the altitude at which the satellites orbit and apply coatings that make them appear dimmer from the ground.

Digital Divide

SpaceX has currently launched just 420 — get it? — of its Starlink satellites into orbit, but plans to have 12,000 up within the decade, Business Insider reports.

Because of that limited scale, the beta tests will only deliver broadband access to some parts of the world, according to Musk’s tweet. But no matter how well the test goes, it will still be a far cry from how the full network is expected to perform down the road.

READ MORE: Elon Musk announces that early access to the Starlink satellite-internet project will launch this year [Business Insider]

More on Starlink: Ominous Video Shows SpaceX Satellites Cutting Across Sky

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Robot manufacturer Boston Dynamics has found a new job for its robot dog Spot Mini amidst the coronavirus outbreak: Modified Spot robots, outfitted with iPads, are now letting doctors walk into the rooms of coronavirus patients without risking infection.

Hospitals have been asking the company for help with remote health.

“Based on these conversations, as well as the global shortage of critical personal protective equipment (PPE), we have spent the past several weeks trying to better understand hospital requirements to develop a mobile robotics solution with our robot, Spot,” the company wrote in an update. “The result is a legged robot application that can be deployed to support frontline staff responding to the pandemic in ad-hoc environments such as triage tents and parking lots.”

The goal is to limit the number of medical staff being placed in danger of catching the virus.

“With the use of a mobile robot, hospitals are able to reduce the number of necessary medical staff at the scene and conserve their limited PPE supply,” the update reads.

A Spot Mini is already helping out at Boston’s Brigham and Women’s Hospital, where it’s being used as “a mobile telemedicine platform, allowing healthcare providers to remotely triage patients.”

In other words, an iPad mounted to the top of the robot allows it to be turned into an ersatz doctor, as pictures of a modified Spot suggest.

Boston Dynamics is now trying to figure out how to add the ability to remotely measure things like body temperature, pulse, and oxygen saturation.

With the help of a UV-C light, they’re also hoping Spot could be used to kill viruses in a room that’s in need of decontamination.

READ MORE: With the use of a mobile robot, hospitals are able to reduce the number of necessary medical staff at the scene and conserve their limited PPE supply. [TechCrunch]

More on the pandemic: US POLICE TESTING “PANDEMIC DRONES” THAT MONITOR SOCIAL DISTANCING

The post Hospitals Are Using iPads to Turn Robot Dogs Into Doctors appeared first on Futurism.

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Hospitals Are Using iPads to Turn Robot Dogs Into Doctors

In a blog post, billionaire philanthropist Bill Gates likened the ongoing coronavirus pandemic to a world war — with a striking difference.

“This is like a world war, except in this case, we’re all on the same side,” he wrote.

He also urged readers to look on the bright side.

“During World War II, an amazing amount of innovation, including radar, reliable torpedoes, and code-breaking, helped end the war faster,” Gates wrote. “This will be the same with the pandemic.”

But at the same time, he acknowledged the terrible suffering the pandemic has wrought.

“It is impossible to overstate the pain that people are feeling now and will continue to feel for years to come,” the memo reads. “No one who lives through Pandemic I will ever forget it.”

Gates argued in the memo that innovations in “testing, treatments, vaccines, and policies to limit the spread while minimizing the damage to economies and well-being” will eventually come about by everyone working together, noting how impressed he’s been already with “how the world is coming together to fight this fight.”

Gates has already committed $250 million to fighting the coronavirus through The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. He also was one of the first to denounce president Donald Trump’s plans to defund the WHO.

Despite the criticism and opposition to the White House’s handling of the crisis, Gates stops short of making any statements that are explicitly political, as The Seattle Times points out.

In the memo, Gates also underlined the importance and effectiveness of social distancing measures.

“A lot of people will be stunned that in many places we will go from hospitals being overloaded in April to having lots of empty beds in July,” he wrote.

But that doesn’t mean we should reopen America immediately — something that some US states are already planning to do.

“However, as behavior goes back to normal, some locations will stutter along with persistent clusters of infections and some will go back into exponential growth,” he wrote.

Bill gates called the return to normal society a “gradual process,” noting that breaking the rules would put everyone at risk.

He also described the new normal: “Picture restaurants that only seat people at every other table, and airplanes where every middle seat is empty. Schools are open, but you can’t fill a stadium with 70,000 people.”

That return will also rely on innovations in four key areas: treatments, better and faster testing, contact tracing, and vaccines.

“If in the spring of 2021 people are going to big public events — like a game or concert in a stadium — it will be because we have a miraculous treatment that made people feel confident about going out again,” Gates wrote. Such a treatment would have to be “95 percent effective” for that to happen.

Other treatment plans such as manufacturing antibodies or antivirals could also be effective. Gates also pointed out that possible benefits of taking hydroxycholorquine, the controversial malaria drug touted by Trump, to fight the virus would be “modest at best.”

The memo also notes that testing will have to be expanded to include at-home testing kits, tests that “may be available in a few months.”

“Testing becomes extremely important as a country considers opening up,” Gates noted. ” You want to have so much testing going on that you see hot spots and are able to intervene by changing policy before the numbers get large.”

READ MORE: ‘It is impossible to overstate the pain’: Fight against coronavirus will define our era, Bill Gates says [The Seattle Times]

More on Gates: BILL GATES IS PISSED: “WE SHOULD’VE DONE MORE” TO STOP COVID-19

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Bill Gates: COVID Is Like a World War, Except for One Thing