Good News/Bad News

Tesla’s latest quarterly safety data report is a mixed bag of good and bad news.

According to the report, which Tesla released this week, crashes involving the company’s vehicles are on the rise. Not great.

However, when Autopilot is engaged, Teslas are less likely to get into crashes, signaling that human drivers may benefit from an artificial intelligence safety boost. And even with Autopilot switched off, the likelihood of a Tesla getting into a crash is still less than the national average — a sign that Tesla’s efforts to make its cars the safest in the world appear to be paying off.

Crunched Number

In the fourth quarter of 2018, Tesla reported one accident for every 2.91 million miles driven with Autopilot engaged. The first Tesla safety report of 2019 shows that rate increasing slightly, to one accident every 2.87 million miles.

However, both of those figures are better than the statistics for Teslas without Autopilot engaged: one accident for every 1.76 million miles driven in Q4 2018 and one every 1.58 million miles driven in Q1 2019.

Teslas with or without Autopilot engaged also appear substantially safer than the average car, based on the new Tesla data. According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration’s most recent data, there’s an auto crash every 436,000 miles driven in the United States.

READ MORE: Tesla releases new Autopilot safety report: more crashes but still fewer than when humans drive [Electrek]

More on Autopilot: Elon Musk: Teslas Should Have “Full Self-Driving” by End of 2019

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Tesla Says Autopilot Is Statistically Safer Than a Human Driver

Big Brain

For the first time, scientists have used gene-editing techniques to make monkey brains more humanlike.

The monkeys, rhesus macaques, got smarter — they had superior memories to unaltered monkeys, according to recently-published research that’s kicked off a fiery debate among ethicists about how far scientists should be able to take genetic experimentation.

Cognitive Gap

The team of Chinese scientists edited the human version of a gene called MCPH1 into the macaques. The new gene made the monkeys’ brains develop along a more human-like timeline. The gene-hacked monkeys had better reaction times and enhanced short-term memories compared to their unaltered peers, according to China Daily.

But not everyone is on board.

“The use of transgenic monkeys to study human genes linked to brain evolution is a very risky road to take,” University of Colorado geneticist James Sikela told the MIT Technology Review. “It is a classic slippery slope issue and one that we can expect to recur as this type of research is pursued.”

Evolutionary Roadmap

Pinpointing the gene’s role in intelligence could help scientists understand how humans evolved to be so smart, MIT Tech reports.

While altering one gene to enhance memory in some macaques won’t throw Darwinism off-kilter — there’s no risk of a “Planet of the Apes”-style uprising, yet — it could teach us how humanity became so intelligent and gives us hints as to why.

READ MORE: Chinese scientists have put human brain genes in monkeys—and yes, they may be smarter [MIT Technology Review]

More on gene editing: Scientist Who Gene-Hacked Babies “Likely” Boosted Their Brainpower

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Chinese Scientists Gene-Hacked Super Smart Human-Monkey Hybrids

Pale Orange Ring

The image of a black hole shared by scientists on Wednesday represents many things. It’s the first-ever direct observation of a black hole’s event horizon, it’s evidence supporting Einstein’s theory of general relativity — and, if we’re being perfectly honest, it’s just straight-up awesome.

But the picture — a glowing orange ring — is also kind of fuzzy, like an optometrist forgot to calibrate her equipment before photographing someone’s retina. That’s why scientists from the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT), the international network that captured the image, are promising that the next one will be way crisper.

Enhance!

The EHT is a network of radio telescopes around the world. By combining their data, scientists can essentially treat the EHT as though it’s a single planet-sized dish. That lets them spot small, faraway objects like the black hole at the center of the M87 galaxy — but because there’s only a handful of telescopes in the network, the images are inherently fuzzy.

Since the M87 data was collected, a number of telescopes have joined the ranks of the EHT, meaning that any future images will already be sharper, EHT Director Shep Doeleman explained during a livestream on Wednesday. He also mentioned that algorithms could be used to clean up the current image.

The current image was taken with a network of telescopes that could capture a wavelength as small as one millimeter — Doeleman’s goal is to get that down to 0.87 millimeters. That would sharpen future images by 13 percent.

Branching Out

In coming years, the EHT may even grow larger than the Earth.

“World domination isn’t enough — we also want to get into space,” Doeleman said, explaining that he hopes to introduce orbital telescopes into the mix.

Doing so would mean an even higher resolution for future black hole images, and it could help the EHT finally capture Sagittarius A*, the supermassive black hole at the core of the Milky Way.

More on the EHT: Scientists Just Released the First-Ever Image of a Black Hole

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RoboStork

A team of Australian scientists built an underwater robot that can deliver larval coral to the Great Barrier reef, where they hope it will help restore the reef to some of its former glory, before it was ravaged by climate change.

The delivery drone, LarvalBot, is a more hospitable version of the underwater drone that has previously been used to hunt and kill off the coral’s predators — yet another experiment in using robotics to protect and help recover the world’s coral reefs.

Fertilizing The Lawn

The scientists behind the project consider their work similar to fertilizing a lawn, according to Particle. Except instead of grass, it’s working on a beautiful and complex underwater ecosystem.

In order to re-seed the coral reef with larvae, scientists first need to gather that seed in the first place. Back in November, the researchers gathered millions of coral sperm and egg cells for what they called at the time “IVF for coral.”

Planning In Advance

LarvalBot made its first delivery back in December. Now the researchers are planning a second expedition to coincide with the reef’s natural mass spawning period, which will happen in October into November.

When that happens, LarvalBot will dive down, dropping millions of larvae that the researchers hope will be able to take root as brand new coral.

READ MORE: ROBOTS TO THE RESCUE OF THE GREAT BARRIER REEF [Particle]

More on the coral reef: To Protect Endangered Coral Reefs, Researchers Need Legal Recourse

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Clean Many Robots

Walmart is about to bring worker robots to a third of its stores.

Of the corporation’s 4,600 U.S. locations, 1,500 are about to start using floor-cleaning custodial robots and 300 will use the bots to spot empty shelves, according to The Wall Street Journal. It’s a move that could save human employees a lot of time, but also one that signals that Walmart considers sees human employees and their salaries as circumventable expenses.

Time To Pivot

“With automation, we are able to take away some of the tasks that associates don’t enjoy doing,” Mark Propes, a Walmart operations director, told the WSJ. “At the same time, we continue to open up new jobs in other things in the store.”

Those other jobs are likely related to e-commerce, WSJ reports, as Walmart plans to pivot to more online sales in an attempt to challenge Amazon.

READ MORE: Walmart Is Rolling Out the Robots [The Wall Street Journal]

More on Walmart: Walmart Is About to Deploy Hundreds of Robot Janitors

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Memory Games

Stimulating the brains of elderly people with electrical currents allowed them to perform just as well on a memory test as people in their 20s — a sign that researchers may have found a noninvasive way to turn back the hands of time when it comes to human memory.

“It’s opening up a whole new avenue of potential research and treatment options,” researcher Rob Reinhart said in a press release regarding the study, “and we’re super excited about it.”

All Ages

In a study published in the journal Nature Neuroscience on Monday, researchers from Boston University detail how they asked a group of 20-somethings and a group of people in their 60s and 70s to complete a task designed to test their working memory, which is the part of our short-term memory that we use for reasoning and decision-making.

Working memory typically begins declining around the time we hit 30 years old, so as expected, the people in their 20s outperformed the older group on the memory task.

Remembrall

However, after the members of the older group received 25 minutes of mild stimulation via scalp electrodes, they performed just as well as the younger participants — and the memory boost still hadn’t subsided by the time the experiment ended 50 minutes later.

According to the researchers, the benefits of this noninvasive treatment could extend beyond those whose working memory has started to succumb to age, too. They found that stimulating the brains of the younger people who performed poorly on the task boosted their memories as well.

READ MORE: As Memories Fade, Can We Supercharge Them Back to Life? [Boston University]

More on memory: Can a Brain Zap Really Boost Your Memory?

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Lunar Lander

If all goes according to plan, Israel will earn a place in history on Thursday as the fourth nation ever to land a spacecraft on the Moon — and unlike any craft that came before it, this Moon lander was privately funded.

Beresheet is the work of SpaceIL, a nonprofit Israeli space company. On Feb. 21, the company launched its $100 million spacecraft on a journey to the Moon aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, and on April 4, it settled into the Moon’s orbit.

The next step in the mission is for Beresheet to attempt to land on the surface of the Moon sometime between 3 and 4 p.m. ET on Thursday.

Watch Along

Beresheet’s target landing site is in the northeastern part of Mare Serenitatis, also known as the Sea of Serenity.

“On the basis of our experience with Apollo, the Serenitatis sites favor both landing safety and scientific reward,” SpaceIL team member Jim Head said in a press release.

SpaceIL and Israel Aerospace Industries, the company that built Beresheet, will live-stream Thursday’s touch-down attempt, so the world will have a chance to watch along as Israel tries to land itself a spot in the history books.

READ MORE: Israel’s Beresheet space probe prepares for historic moon landing [NBC News]

More on Beresheet: Israel’s Moon Lander Just Got Photobombed by the Earth

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Super-Forecasters

Some people have a knack for accurately predicting the likelihood of future events. You might even be one of these “super-forecasters” and not know it — but now there’s an easy way to find out.

BBC Future has teamed up with UK-based charity Nesta and forecasting services organization Good Judgement on the “You Predict the Future” challenge. The purpose is to study how individuals and teams predict the likelihood of certain events, ranging from the technological to the geopolitical.

All Winners

Anyone interested in testing their own forecasting skills can sign up for the challenge to answer a series of multiple-choice questions and assign a percentage to how likely each answer is to come true.

“When you’re part of the challenge, you’ll get feedback on how accurate your forecasts are,” Kathy Peach, who leads Nesta’s Centre for Collective Intelligence Design, told BBC Future. “You’ll be able to see how well you do compared to other forecasters. And there’s a leader board, which shows who the best performing forecasters are.”

Collective Intelligence

You’ll also be helping advance research on collective intelligence, which focuses on the intellectual abilities of groups of people acting as one.

Additionally, as Peach told BBC Future, “New research shows that forecasting increases open-mindedness, the ability to consider alternative scenarios, and reduces political polarisation,”  — meaning even if you don’t find out you’re a “super-forecaster,” you might just end up a better person after making your predictions.

READ MORE: Could you be a super-forecaster? [BBC Future]

More on forecasting: Forecasting the Future: Can the Hive Mind Let Us Predict the Future?

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Ongoing Battle

The deadline has passed for Amazon and a coalition of eight governments in South America to settle a seven-year dispute over the coveted “.amazon” top-level domain.

Both groups want dibs, and neither Amazon nor the countries through which the iconic river runs have agreed to various compromises, according to BBC News. Above all else, the dispute highlights how Amazon has become powerful that it’s becoming embroiled in geopolitical disputes.

Back And Forth

The eight nations, which together form the Amazon Cooperation Treat Organization (ACTO), blocked Amazon’s attempt to claim the domain outright. In ACTO’s proposed deal, Amazon would be allowed to use relevant sites like “kindle.amazon,” but most addresses would be reserved for member nations.

Amazon essentially proposed the opposite, in which each country would get a modified version of the “.amazon” domain.

Not Budging

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) gave Amazon and ACTO until April 7 to settle the dispute. But Business Insider reports that neither group submitted a deal to ICANN by the deadline, which has now been pushed back to April 21.

In 2018, Amazon tried to garner favor by offering $5 million worth of Kindles and web hosting, which ACTO declined.

“We are not looking for financial compensation,” Ecuadorian ambassador Francisco Carrión wrote to ICANN. “Nor are we after ex-gratia concessions to use one or a few second-level domains.”

READ MORE: The nations of the Amazon want the name back [BBC News]

More on Amazon: Lawmakers Don’t Know How to Regulate Amazon’s Delivery Robots

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Cleaning Cyberspace

On Monday, the South China Morning Post published a story about the content moderation operations at Inke, one of China’s largest live-streaming companies.

The piece offers a rare glimpse at how China’s private sector helps facilitate government censorship. In some cases, that means flagging streams of people smoking or wearing bikinis — content that would likely seem fairly innocuous to an American audience — but in others, it means preventing internet viewers from seeing streams of people committing acts of terrorism or violence.

That’s the same kind of content multinational corporations such as Facebook have had trouble moderating — raising questions about what these Chinese companies have figured out that American ones haven’t.

Evolving Censorship

Inke tasks a team of 1,200 moderators with policing the streams of its 25 million users, according to SCMP.

The moderators watch streams 10- to 15-seconds before they actually go live, and in that time, they’re expected to catch anything “that is against the law and regulations, against mainstream values, and against the company’s values,” Zhi Heng, Inke’s content safety team leader, told the SCMP.

Inke defers to guidelines published by the China Association of Performing Arts to know what content falls under that umbrella, and according to the SCMP story, it ranges from politically sensitive speech and violence to people smoking or wearing bikinis.

The document is updated weekly, however, meaning content that might be acceptable one week could be censored the next, or vice versa.

To make this massive task of censoring content a little more manageable on its human moderators, Inke also employs algorithms and recognition software capable of filtering content into different risk categories.

The company sometimes dedicates just one human reviewer to watching streams considered “low-risk,” such as cooking shows, according to SCMP, while higher-risk streams receive closer scrutiny.

Learning Opportunity

The idea of censoring streams of people smoking cigarettes or wearing bikinis might seem ridiculous to a Western audience.

However, if Inke’s combination of human and AI moderators is effective at flagging the content deemed objectionable in China, it’s worth considering what it’s doing that others, such as Facebook, aren’t. Are Inke’s algorithms better in some discernible way? Has it stumbled upon the optimum human moderator-to-user ratio?

You might not agree with the content China is censoring, but content moderation isn’t by default objectionable — even Facebook’s own execs believe the company should have prevented the horrific livestream of the Christchurch shooting from reaching its audience, for example.

So perhaps there’s something Facebook and others could learn from how Inke is managing the job of filtering out undesirable online content, even if we don’t agree with China’s definition of undesirable.

READ MORE: No smoking, no tattoos, no bikinis: inside China’s war to ‘clean up’ the internet [South China Morning Post]

More on censorship: China Is Censoring “Genetically Edited Babies” on Social Media

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China Is Trying to Scrub Bikinis and Smoking From the Internet

Warm Fusion

Scientists from the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory say that they’ve found a new way to start up nuclear fusion reactions.

The new technique, described in research published last month in the journal Physics of Plasmas, provides an alternate means for reactors to convert gas into the superhot plasma that gets fusion reactions going with less equipment taking up valuable lab space — another step in the long road to practical fusion power.

Out With The Old

Right in the center of a tokamak, a common type of experimental nuclear fusion reactor, there’s a large central magnet that helps generate plasma. The new technique, called “transient coaxial helical injection,” does away with the magnet but still generates a stable reaction, freeing up the space taken up by the magnet for other equipment.

“The good news from this study,” Max Planck Institute researcher Kenneth Hammond said in a press release, “is that the projections for startup in large-scale devices look promising.”

READ MORE: Ready, set, go: Scientists evaluate novel technique for firing up fusion-reaction fuel [Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory newsroom via ScienceDaily]

More on nuclear fusion: Scientists Found a New Way to Make Fusion Reactors More Efficient

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Scientists Find a New Way to Kickstart Stable Fusion Reactions

Pale Black Dot

On Wednesday, a team of scientists from around the world released the first ever directly-observed image of the event horizon of a black hole.

The black hole, M87*, is found within the constellation Virgo — and as the webcomic XKCD illustrated, it’s as big as our entire solar system.

Stellar Giant

The gigantic black hole, not counting the giant rings of trapped light orbiting it, is about 23.6 billion miles (38 billion kilometers) across, according to Science News.

Meanwhile, the Earth is just 7,917 miles in diameter — meaning our planet wouldn’t even be a drop in the bucket of the giant, black void. Based Futurism’s calculations, it would take just over 2.98 million Earths lined up in a row to span the length of M87*. For a sense of scale, that’s about how many adult giraffes it would take to span the diameter of Earth.

Paging Pluto

Our entire solar system is just about 2.27 billion miles wide, meaning we could just barely fit the whole thing into the newly-imaged black hole’s event horizon.

Thankfully, M87* is about 55 million light years away — so while we could readily fit inside its gaping maw, we’re way too far to get sucked in.

READ MORE: Revealed: a black hole the size of the solar system [Cosmos]

More on M87*: Scientists: Next Black Whole Image Will Be Way Clearer

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Here’s How Big the M87 Black Hole Is Compared to the Earth

I Hear You

Amazon pays thousands of workers across the globe to review audio picked up by its Echo speakers — and their behavior raises serious concerns about both privacy and safety.

Bloomberg recently spoke with seven people who participated in Amazon’s audio review process. Each worker was tasked with listening to, transcribing, and annotating voice recordings with the goal of improving the ability of Amazon’s Alexa smart assistant to understand and respond to human speech.

But sometimes, according to Bloomberg, they share private recordings in a disrespectful way.

“I think we’ve been conditioned to the [assumption] that these machines are just doing magic machine learning” University of Michigan professor Florian Schaub told Bloomberg. “But the fact is there is still manual processing involved.”

Listen to This

The job is usually boring, according to Bloomberg’s sources. But if they heard something out of the ordinary, they said, sometimes they’d share the Alexa recordings with other workers via internal chat rooms.

Occasionally, it was just because they found the audio amusing — a person singing off-key, for example — but other times, the sharing was “a way of relieving stress” after hearing something disturbing, such as when two of Bloomberg’s sources heard what sounded like a sexual assault.

When they asked Amazon how to handle cases like the latter, the workers said they were told “it wasn’t Amazon’s job to interfere.” Amazon, meanwhile, said it had procedures in place for when workers hear something “distressing” in Alexa recordings.

READ MORE: Amazon Workers Are Listening to What You Tell Alexa [Bloomberg]

More on Echo: Thanks, Amazon! Echo Recorded and Sent Audio to Random Contacts Without Warning

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Amazon Workers Listen to Your Alexa Conversations, Then Mock Them

Computer Brain

Scientists say they’ve developed a new “quantum material” that could one day transfer information directly from human brains to a computer.

The research is in early stages, but it invokes ideas like uploading brains to the cloud or hooking people up to a computer to track deep health metrics — concepts that until now existed solely in science fiction.

Quantum Interface

The new quantum material, described in research published Wednesday in the journal Nature Communications, is a “nickelate lattice” that the scientists say could directly translate the brain’s electrochemical signals into electrical activity that could be interpreted by a computer.

“We can confidently say that this material is a potential pathway to building a computing device that would store and transfer memories,” Purdue University engineer Shriram Ramanathan told ScienceBlog.

Running Diagnostics

Right now, the new material can only detect the activity of some neurotransmitters — so we can’t yet upload a whole brain or anything like that. But if the tech progresses, the researchers hypothesize that it could be used to detect neurological diseases, or perhaps even store memories.

“Imagine putting an electronic device in the brain, so that when natural brain functions start deteriorating, a person could still retrieve memories from that device,” Ramanathan said.

READ MORE: New Quantum Material Could Warn Of Neurological Disease [ScienceBlog]

More on brain-computer interface: This Neural Implant Accesses Your Brain Through the Jugular Vein

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Scientists Say New Quantum Material Could “‘Download’ Your Brain”

Nurturing the Bizarre

NASA isn’t afraid to take a chance on the weird. In fact, it has a program designed for that specific purpose, called NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) — and on Wednesday, the agency announced 18 bizarre new projects receiving funding through the program.

“Our NIAC program nurtures visionary ideas that could transform future NASA missions by investing in revolutionary technologies,” NASA exec Jim Reuter said in a press release. “We look to America’s innovators to help us push the boundaries of space exploration with new technology.”

Sci-Fi to Sci-Fact

The 18 newly funded projects are divided into two groups: Phase I and Phase II.

The 12 recipients of the Phase I awards will each receive approximately $125,000 to fund nine month’s worth of feasibility studies for their concepts. These include a project to beam power through Venus’ atmosphere to support long-term missions, a spacesuit with self-healing skin, and floating microprobes inspired by spiders.

The six Phase II recipients, meanwhile, will each receive up to $500,000 to support two-year studies dedicated to fine-tuning their concepts and investigating potential ways to implement the technologies, which include a flexible telescope, a neutrino detector, and materials for solar surfing.

“NIAC is about going to the edge of science fiction, but not over,” Jason Derleth, NIAC program executive, said in the press release. “We are supporting high impact technology concepts that could change how we explore within the solar system and beyond.”

READ MORE: NASA Invests in Potentially Revolutionary Tech Concepts [Jet Propulsion Laboratory]

More on bizarre NASA plans: New NASA Plan for Mars Is Moderately-Terrifying-Sounding, Also, Completely-Awesome: Robotic. Bees.

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Here’s A Band-Aid

Tesla’s on-site clinic, Access Omnicare, has allegedly been downplaying workers’ injuries to keep the electric automaker off the hook for workers’ compensation.

Several former Tesla employees, all of whom got hurt on the job, and former employees of Access Omnicare, told Reveal News that the clinic was minimizing worker injuries so that the automaker wouldn’t have to pay workers’ comp — suggesting that the barely-profitable car company is willing to do whatever it takes to stay out of the red and avoid negative press.

Back To Work

Reveal, which is a project by the Center for Investigative Reporting, described cases in which employees suffered electrocution, broken bones, and mold-related rashes while working in a Tesla factory — only for Omnicare to deny that the injuries warranted time off work.

The clinic’s top doctor “wanted to make certain that we were doing what Tesla wanted so badly,” former Omnicare operations manager Yvette Bonnet told Reveal. “He got the priorities messed up. It’s supposed to be patients first.”

Missing Paperwork

Meanwhile, employees who requested the paperwork to file for workers’ comp were repeatedly ignored, according to Reveal.

“I just knew after the third or fourth time that they weren’t going to do anything about it,” a former employee whose back was crushed under a falling Model X hatchback told Reveal. “I was very frustrated. I was upset.”

The automaker is on the hook for up to $750,000 in medical payments per workers’ comp claim, according to Reveal‘s reporting.

Meanwhile, both Tesla CEO Elon Musk and Laurie Shelby, the company’s VP of safety, have publicly praised Access Omnicare, Reveal found. Musk even recently announced plans to extend it to other plants, “so that we have really immediate first-class health care available right on the spot when people need it.”

READ MORE: How Tesla and its doctor made sure injured employees didn’t get workers’ comp [Reveal News]

More on Tesla: Video Shows Tesla Autopilot Steering Toward Highway Barriers

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Report: Tesla Doc Is Playing Down Injuries to Block Workers’ Comp

Happy Birthday

On Tuesday, a couple gave birth to what researchers are calling a “three-parent baby” — giving new hope to infertile couples across the globe.

After four cycles of in vitro fertilization failed to result in a pregnancy, the Greek couple enrolled in a clinical trial for mitochondrial replacement therapy (MRT) — meaning doctors placed the nucleus from the mother’s egg into a donor egg that had its nucleus removed. Then they fertilized the egg with sperm from the father and implanted it into the mother.

Due to this procedure, the six-pound baby boy has DNA from both his mother and father, as well as a tiny bit from the woman who donated the egg.

Greek Life

The Greek baby wasn’t the first “three-parent baby” born after his parents underwent MRT — that honor goes to the offspring of a Jordanian woman who gave birth in 2016.

However, in her case and others that followed it, doctors used the technique to prevent a baby from inheriting a parent’s genetic defect. This marked the first time a couple used MRT as part of a clinical trial to treat infertility.

“Our excellent collaboration and this exceptional result will help countless women to realise their dream of becoming mothers with their own genetic material,” Nuno Costa-Borges, co-founder of Embryotools, one of the companies behind the trial, said in a statement.

READ MORE: Baby with DNA from three people born in Greece [The Guardian]

More on three-parent babies: An Infertile Couple Is Now Pregnant With a “Three-Parent Baby”

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Infertile Couple Gives Birth to “Three-Parent Baby”

Simulation Hypothesis

Futurism readers may recognize Rizwan Virk as the MIT researcher touting a new book arguing that we’re likely living in a game-like computer simulation.

Now, in new interview with Vox, Virk goes even further — by probing whether we’re protagonists in the simulation or so-called “non-player characters” who are presumably included to round out a player character’s experience.

Great Simulation

Virk speculated about whether we’re players or side characters when Vox writer Sean Illing asked a question likely pondered by anyone who’s seen “The Matrix”: If you were living in a simulation, would you actually want to know?

“Probably the most important question related to this is whether we are NPCs (non-player characters) or PCs (player characters) in the video game,” Virk told Vox. “If we are PCs, then that means we are just playing a character inside the video game of life, which I call the Great Simulation.”

More Frightening

It’s a line of inquiry that cuts to the core of the simulation hypothesis: If the universe is essentially a video game, who built it — and why?

“The question is, are all of us NPCs in a simulation, and what is the purpose of that simulation?” Virk asked. “A knowledge of the fact that we’re in a simulation, and the goals of the simulation and the goals of our character, I think, would still be interesting to many people.”

READ MORE: Are we living in a computer simulation? I don’t know. Probably. [Vox]

More on the simulation hypothesis: Famous Hacker Thinks We’re Living in Simulation, Wants to Escape

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MIT Prof: If We Live in a Simulation, Are We Players or NPCs?

Spreading Hate

Australia is considering a bill designed to prevent the “weaponization” of social media — the kind of activity the Christchurch terrorist engaged in before an attack that killed 50 people in the nearby nation of New Zealand in March.

“We will not allow social media platforms to be weaponised by terrorists and violent extremists who seek to harm and kill,” Australia’s Minister for Communications Mitch Fifield said in a press release announcing the bill, “and nor would we allow a situation that a young Australian child could log onto social media and watch a mass murder take place.”

Facebook’s Failure

On March 15, a white nationalist attacked two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, livestreaming the first 17 minutes of the shooting on Facebook Live.

Once police alerted them to it, Facebook removed the video, according to a tweet from Facebook’s newsroom, as well as the shooter’s Facebook and Instagram accounts.

However, the fact that the horrific livestream went on for 17 minutes — and that Facebook had to find out about it from a third party — confirms that its internal team of human moderators and artificial intelligence software is not enough to prevent the weaponization of its platform.

Taking Responsibility

To that end, Australia plans to introduce into Parliament this week the Criminal Code Amendment (Unlawful Showing of Abhorrent Violent Material) Bill 2019, a bill Australia’s Attorney-General Christian Porter said was designed to “put responsibility back on the social media giants to prevent their platforms being co-opted by terrorists, criminals, and violent extremists.”

If passed into law, the bill would make it a criminal offense for social media platforms “not to remove abhorrent violent material expeditiously,” with violators facing up to three years in prison or fines equivalent to up to 10 percent of their company’s annual turnover.

Social media companies would also face fines of up to A$840,000 (US$597,706) for not notifying the Australian Federal Police if they find out their platforms are “streaming abhorrent violent conduct that is happening in Australia.”

“Big social media companies have a responsibility to take every possible action to ensure their technology products are not exploited by murderous terrorists,” Prime Minister Scott Morrison said in the press release. “It should not just be a matter of just doing the right thing. It should be the law.”

READ MORE: Countries Want to Ban ‘Weaponized’ Social Media. What Would That Look Like? [The New York Times]

More on Facebook: Former Content Moderators Are Suing Facebook Over PTSD and Trauma

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Australia Proposes Bill to Stop “Weaponization” of Social Media

Flying Light

A team from NASA and MIT has created a new type of airplane wing — and it could make air travel far more efficient.

In a paper published in the journal Smart Materials and Structures on Monday, the researchers describe how they built an airplane wing from hundreds of identical, lightweight cube-like structures, all bolted together and then covered with a thin polymer material.

The design allows the wing to change shape automatically, adjusting itself to whatever configuration is optimal for the current phase of flight — with one configuration for take-off, for example, and another for landing.

Bigger and Better

The wing the researchers created and tested for the new paper is about the same size as what you’d find on a single-seater plane, according to MIT News, but they’d already demonstrated their design’s feasibility with a smaller wing several years ago.

Not only does this new wing show that the concept scales up to a size that could carry a person, but it also demonstrates a new manufacturing process that cuts the time needed to produce each individual structure down from several minutes to just 17 seconds.

“The research shows promise for reducing cost and increasing the performance for large, light weight, stiff structures,” Aurora Flight Sciences structures researcher Daniel Campbell, who wasn’t involved in the research, told MIT News. “Most promising near-term applications are structural applications for airships and space-based structures, such as antennas.”

READ MORE: MIT and NASA engineers demonstrate a new kind of airplane wing [MIT News]

More on airplane design: See a Mini Prototype of a Weird Plane With Connected Wings in Action

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NASA and MIT Debut Shape-Shifting Airplane Wing