The international team behind the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) project is gearing up for a huge announcement next week — and according to ScienceAlert‘s analysis, it’s likely to be the first-ever photo of a black hole’s event horizon.
If that prediction is correct, the April 10 event will be a monumental moment for science — providing a glimpse of one of the most epic objects in the known universe.
Media Blitz
The EHT is a network of telescopes around the globe. For several years, astronomers have been using it to peer into Sagittarius A*, the monster black hole at the center of our galaxy with the goal of looking past the space debris to see its event horizon, the point at which matter and light can no longer escape.
An advance briefing on the April 10 announcement does little to temper expectations that the team has succeeded in that effort, promising a “groundbreaking result” from the EHT.
It also notes that six major press conferences will be held around the world and encourages the creation of satellite events “due to the importance” of the finding, which has the potential to upend astrophysics forever.
Astronomers finally figured out where the methane on Mars is coming from. The finding resolves a mystery that’s been ongoing since the organic gas was first detected on Mars in 2003 — but which subsequently eluded scientists trying to measure and trace it.
It turns out that an ice sheet on Mars’ surface near Gale Crater, which may have once have been a lake, is likely giving off the planet’s methane, according to research published Monday in the journal Nature Geoscience — and which could represent yet another puzzle piece in the mystery of whether the Red Planet ever harbored life.
Twin Studies
The research describes two studies that both isolated the same ice sheet as the source of atmospheric methane, using data from two spacecraft and simulations of the Martian atmosphere.
It’s worth noting that the data for these studies was collected in 2013, while the surveys that failed to detect any methane were conducted in 2018. However, the more recent study focused on the upper atmosphere — the scientists behind it conceded that there may be ground-based sources of methane that they simply missed. And since one of the new studies used data from the Curiosity rover’s trek across the Martian landscape, it’s likely that the methane was simply too sparse to measure from an orbital instrument.
Follow That Smell
The presence of methane is often touted as a sign of life, but confirming that Mars has methane isn’t quite the same as confirming that life exists there.
Rather, the combination of atmospheric methane found near body of water opens up the possibility that life may have once existed there — the researchers behind this new study settled the matter of “where” in regards to Martian methane, but their study doesn’t scratch the surface of the “why” or “how.”
Now, the company’s founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg is asking governments and regulators to step up and share some of that responsibility for keeping their citizens safe online.
“I believe we need a more active role for governments and regulators,” Zuckerberg wrote in a Saturday op-ed in The Washington Post. “By updating the rules for the Internet, we can preserve what’s best about it — the freedom for people to express themselves and for entrepreneurs to build new things — while also protecting society from broader harms.”
Law Abiding Netizen
In WaPo, Zuckerberg detailed the four areas of the internet he believes are most in need of new regulations: harmful content, election integrity, privacy, and data portability.
He notes Facebook’s own efforts to address those areas while also citing the need for new standards and regulations related to them — ideally ones that transcend national borders.
“The rules governing the Internet allowed a generation of entrepreneurs to build services that changed the world and created a lot of value in people’s lives,” Zuckerberg wrote. “It’s time to update these rules to define clear responsibilities for people, companies and governments going forward.”
If old-fashioned books are too boring for you, ebook distributor OverDrive wants to gamify them with interactive elements and video game-inspired achievements and badges for kids who finish their reading homework.
“I actually had a team studying how Fortnite became so addictive,” co-founder and CEO Steve Potash told Futurism. “This is why with [OverDrive’s student-focused reading app] Sora we have badges and achievements, and we’re actually in the school market, creating social. We’re not actually saying ‘pick a reading squad and go kill some books,’ but we’re trying to learn from the addictive nature of interactive gaming.”
Publishers are already using OverDrive’s open-source platform to add voiceovers, music, and even Netflix-like “choose your own adventure” elements to their ebooks. Virtual and augmented reality content are on the way too, thanks to the marriage of artificial intelligence tech, big data, and good ol’ fashioned books.
In other words, according to Potash, reading will never be the same.
Book Smarts
OverDrive’s team of engineers has also been leveraging its vast pile of library data, Potash said — the company’s platform streamlines ebook lending for libraries around the world, so the engineers get real-time information on which books people are reading where, and for how long — to develop new AI tools.
While some of these AI developments are being used to improve OverDrive’s smart assistant-style library borrowing app called Libby, others are designed to improve reading habits in tech-savvy schools. That means building algorithms that can predict which books a student will enjoy and want to finish, as well as building new learning tools to enhance the reading experience.
“Sometimes people just want a book with an orange cover,” Potash told Futurism. “If kids will read more because their favorite animal’s on the cover, we want to know that. AI is helping these institutions become more relevant in serving their functions.”
Teachers can even insert quizzes right into the pages of a book — either to streamline homework or to make sure students are reading books at an appropriate age level.
Library Science
The big idea, Potash says, is to make the experience of reading more like a video game or Netflix.
“Everything you can do streaming, you’ll be able to do on the page,” Potash said. “If a user has a broadband connection, that can happen today because any kind of embedded link on the page can be resolved.”
Potash envisions a slew of ways to improve books with AI, like smart assistants that take on the persona of an author, AR content that drops readers inside the historical scene they’re reading about, or games built into books that help students learn new words and concepts.
In the meantime, OverDrive is trudging ahead with backend AI systems, that either help libraries buy books that are more likely to circulate or help teachers find books that actually teach the lessons that they want to work into their curricula.
“This is coming, the biggest excitement we have is not the sexy front-end things I can show [on a demo],” Potash said, “but looking at the 250,000 books we have in the classroom, extracting the themes and concepts and aligning those to the curriculum.”
On March 27, India tested a satellite-destroying missile by blowing up one of its own satellites, which was orbiting about 186 miles above the Earth.
“The test was done in the lower atmosphere to ensure that there is no space debris,” the Ministry of External Affairs wrote on its website. “Whatever debris that is generated will decay and fall back onto the earth within weeks.”
But NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine is publicly disagreeing, telling the agency’s employees during a Monday town hall that 24 pieces of debris are now at an altitude above the International Space Station’s 250 miles, posing an “unacceptable” threat to the astronauts on board.
Dangerous Debris
According to Bridenstine, NASA is now tracking about 60 pieces of debris from India’s satellite, each about six inches or bigger, but other pieces not large enough to track could pose a threat to the ISS as well.
In total, he says India’s satellite test has increased the likelihood of the ISS colliding with debris by 44 percent over a 10-day period.
“That is a terrible, terrible thing to create an event that sends debris at an apogee that goes above the International Space Station,” Bridenstine said. “That kind of activity is not compatible with the future of human spaceflight.”
Tesla’s Autopilot mode might have something of a deathwish.
By attaching just three small stickers to the road that are nearly invisible to a human driver, researchers from Chinese tech corporation Tencent managed to trick the AI of a Tesla Model S 75 into steering towards oncoming traffic, according to the researchers’ report — a worrisome glimpse of how hackers could endanger riders in self-driving cars.
Manual Override
Tesla’s Autopilot mode is the semi-autonomous feature that allows the car to follow road markings and handle some aspects of driving without human intervention — and it already has a history of risky driving maneuvers.
But in this case, Autopilot registered the three small stickers as a lane marking — because the stickers moved off to the left, the car’s AI concluded that the road was shifting to the left when it actually continued straight on.
Achilles’ Heel
This particular exploit is possible because Tesla’s AI engineers designed the system to register lane markings that are crumbled or faded. They trained the Autopilot AI to recognize broken or fading white lines as valid lane markers.
The problem came from the fact that the three white stickers placed in a row registered in the system as enough of a line to make the car change course, according to Tencent’s report — an ironic case of a safety feature gone awry.
NASA’s InSight lander touched down on the surface of Mars in November. Its mission: to unravel secrets about the creation of the planets in our solar system. Crucial to that mission: a broom-length robotic arm that it slowly extended after landing to place a number of sensitive scientific instruments on the Martian surface — and even drill into the planet itself.
To find out more about what it takes to manipulate a robotic arm on the surface of a distant planet, Futurism talked to Al Tadros, VP of Space Infrastructure and Civil Space at SSL — where he manages the company’s relationship with NASA and helps invent the most sophisticated robot arms ever to leave Earth.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Futurism: There are only five robotic arms on Mars, all five of them built by SSL. How did you become NASA’s go-to contractor for robotic arms?
Al Tadros: There have been five robotic arms operated on Mars and we’ve been fortunate to build all five of those, the most recent of which was the InSight Lander arm. We started out as a spin off from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory about 20 years ago from a core team that was passionate about science and wanted to initiate robotic capabilities that can help JPL.
F: Mars is tens of millions of miles from the nearest repair shop. How do you approach the design of something that absolutely needs to work, even with nobody around to fix it?
AT: Part of the core of the space industry is that it’s necessary to build hardware that functions for years without maintenance. So yes, the robotics are under extreme environmental conditions, but we have a lot of satellites that we build that have to be qualified and operated in extreme conditions as well. So we have processes, suppliers, tests and programs that test the reliability of all of what we build.
The robotics on Mars have some unique environments that they have to withstand. Whereas many of our satellites were built in a cleanroom and launched and operated in the vacuum of space, the Mars landers actually go through a thin atmosphere and land on a dusty surface. When they reach a destination they have to work in a day and night environment meaning that temperature extremes with a slight atmosphere and with dust being blown around. And that does pose unique challenges for robotic or mechanical systems like the Mars landers.
Image Credit: NASA
F: How do you simulate the Martian surface? Do you test somewhere on Earth that’s Mars-like?
AT: Good question. First of all, for hardware or spacecraft that we build, we have to put it in a container and take it to a launch site and put it on the rocket. And for the first few minutes when the rocket is going up, it’s being vibrated hard and it has a lot of acoustic vibrations on it — like being at a rock concert — being shaken on a stage. So we literally put it on a vibration stand and shake it in a similar fashion so that we can verify that the design meets and survives the launch.
It’s being vibrated hard and it has a lot of acoustic vibrations on it — like being at a rock concert — being shaken on a stage.
When you don’t have air and you don’t have thermal properties of air, you have different kinds of thermal behavior from your spacecraft. We simulate that in a vacuum chamber called a thermal vacuum chamber for that reason.
F: Let’s talk about the multitasking abilities of InSight. It has a handful of major scientific instruments onboard and the robotic arm plays a pretty crucial role in their deployment. How do you approach an engineering task like this?
AT: These missions are science driven so the lead for these missions will be a scientist who has a primary set of assigned objectives they’re trying to achieve. For the Mars InSight Lander that means placing the critical payloads on the surface of Mars.
For Mars 2020, which is the next mission we are working on now, we’re actually building the Mars sample handling arm which is collecting samples from the surface. And there you want to maintain a pristine sample that might be returned back to Earth, meaning there are unique requirements for that.
Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Lockheed Martin
F: What’s the next phase of the InSight mission specifically that you’re personally most excited to see?
AT: It goes back to the very impetus of the mission — the science. What InSight is doing is studying the inner planets in our solar system. So what we study on Mars has applications here on Earth and the evolution of our own planet. And it helps us understand the solar system in a broader sense.
The unique thing about studying Mars is that humans have populated a lot of the land mass here on Earth and there’s a lot of human induced activities, vibration, and noise pollution that we generate. On Mars you don’t have that. So we can actually study a pristine rocky planet.
F: Do you envision SSL having a role in the human exploration of Mars? There’s a lot of talk about taking humans to the surface of Mars.
AT: It could be decades but people are working on it already — in a number of ways. Even NASA right now is focused on going forward to the Moon but in a sustainable way. But many of the capabilities they’re deploying around the Moon and on the surface of the Moon are to demonstrate and evolve and advance our ability to go to Mars and further.
F: Speaking of sending human astronauts to Mars, do you worry that crewed missions could be leapfrogged by robotic technology?
AT: There are two aspects to that. One is, can we put humans on Mars or on the surface of the Moon? And the other is: what is it that we want us humans to do? There is an exploration gene in humanity — whether it’s getting to the top of Mount Everest or probing the reason for existence or exploring our solar system. Humans are very much an exploratory species, so I think that there will always be that human element. And robotics will be used to push the envelope.
There is an exploration gene in humanity — whether it’s getting to the top of Mount Everest or probing the reason for existence or exploring our solar system.
As you probably noticed last week, we had the first commercial crew capsule that launched and returned to Earth, which was a phenomenal milestone. It harkens back to the start of the aviation industry, when airplanes were very experimental, but became very common place within decades.
Image Credit: NASA
F: Do you apply AI technology at all in your robotic arms, especially regarding InSight?
AT: We’re not building the software that operates it. That’s JPL’s job. The rovers and the robotics on Mars are basically given a command to move to a point and wait for the next command. Or a sequence of commands are given and it follows that sequence as long as all the telemetry is green. If it runs into a problem it stops and waits for the operator back on Earth. So it’s a rudimentary type of control, but it’s very conservative and safe because we don’t need to operate quickly.
Once you get humans or other time critical elements involved, there is interest in how you automate it or how you improve the time efficiency — because the astronaut’s time is precious.
We haven’t implemented AI on the Mars arms before, but with software and processing and algorithms now advancing so rapidly I believe that not only Gateway, but all future robotic systems will have some levels of autonomy and artificial intelligence embedded in them.
F: Anything else you wanted to talk about?
AT: One of the most exciting aspects of space robotics right now is the potential to assemble spacecraft, space telescopes, and other platforms in space.
A spacecraft the size of the Space Station could never be built and launched on one launch vehicle. If you open up your thinking to building communication satellites, space telescopes, habitats in space — that’s what I believe that we’re now approaching, which harkens back to the von Braun space station from the 1940s and sci-fi. What we’re going to get to is an era in space where we are not limited by the size of a launch vehicle.
Nuclear power can provide inexpensive electricity with little in the way of emissions, but there’s a catch: it produces horrifying radioactive waste that can remain deadly for thousands of years.
Enter Gerard Mourou, the Nobel Prize-winning subject of a fascinating new Bloomberg profile. He says that high-intensity lasers could one day render nuclear waste harmless in just a few minutes — a concept which, if realized, could make nuclear power a vastly more appealing energy option.
Laser Future
Mourou is the first to admit that his work, which would use powerful lasers to break down radioactive waste into less harmful material at the atomic level, could be decades off.
“Nuclear energy is maybe the best candidate for the future, but we are still left with a lot of dangerous junk,” he said during his Nobel Lecture in December. “The idea is to transmute this nuclear waste into new forms of atoms which don’t have the problem of radioactivity.”
The U.S. Navy is hiring a new team of hackers, engineers, and scientists to find ways to stop swarms of commercial drones.
Drones are causing problems for militaries around the world, and the Navy wants to make sure it can prevent more issues as the technology gets more sophisticated, according to Defense One — a chilling glimpse of the future of counter-insurgent warfare.
Arms Race
Off-the-shelf drones can already disrupt airports and be used as makeshift bombs, and the military has taken note of the threat, developing lasers and digital tools to counter the emerging threat.
The Navy is now joining forces with the Army on an anti-drone project called JYN (named after, yes, a “Star Wars” character). According to a memo reviewed by Defense One, Navy leadership sees anti-drone efforts as a crucial step to stay on top of new technological weaponry.
Keeping Pace
The Navy is treating this new recruitment drive as a way to make sure that the military stays up to speed on new technology, refreshing not only its own research but also the minds developing it.
“This is necessary to enable the [Navy] to gain a competitive advantage over the commercial advancement of unmanned systems technology and potential for nefarious use against [Navy] facilities and assets,” James Geurts, a Navy assistant secretary, wrote in the memo.
The Australian Space Agency wants to leverage the country’s expertise at mining in remote, inhospitable areas — like, you know, Australia — into a new program that would mine for water and other resources from the Moon.
It’s a bold plan for the fledgling space agency, but one could supercharge Australia’s newfound role in the global space race.
Waypoint
If water, which thinly blankets the moon’s surface, could be harvested in space instead of having to be shuttled up from Earth, the moon could essentially become a jumping-off point — a sort of cosmic fueling station — for missions to Mars and beyond.
“Getting things from the surface of the Earth into orbit or into deep space costs a lot of money,” Australian space engineer Andrew Dempster told Bloomberg. “If you can produce water in space for less than it costs to get there, then you’re ahead.”
Move Fast
The Australian Space Agency is less than a year old, but Dempster believes that its nimble, startup-like attitude that will let it quickly develop new technology and get to the moon as quickly as possible.
“We’re not being weighed down by big lumbering agencies and huge multinationals,” Dempster told Bloomberg. “There’s a lot of agile people with lots of interesting ideas working in this area. Success can occur quite quickly.”
To test cutting-edge artificial intelligences, a team of researchers wants to see how well they handle tasks designed to measure the intelligence of animals. They’re calling their experiment the Animal-AI Olympics, and they’ve giving out more than $10,000 in prizes to high-achieving AIs.
This month, the group plans to release a virtual “playground” they’re developing for the competition and a list of the cognitive abilities they plan to test. At that point, researchers can begin training their AIs to navigate the playground.
In June, the event organizers will begin subjecting each competitor AI to 100 playground tasks they’ve never seen before, each with the same goal usually given to animals in similar intelligence-testing scenarios: retrieve food.
Tough Tests
While the goal may be the same, the various obstacles the AIs will need to overcome to achieve success will vary — they might need to move an object, for example, or demonstrate an understanding of object permanence.
“We expect this to be a hard challenge,” Matthew Crosby, one of the researchers behind the Animal-AI Olympics, told New Scientist. “A perfect score will require a breakthrough in AI, well beyond current capabilities.”
“However,” he continued, “even small successes will show that it is possible, not just to find useful patterns in data, but to extrapolate from these to an understanding of how the world works.”
If any of the inmates at Yancheng prison are considering an escape attempt, they’d better do it soon.
The Chinese prison is currently wrapping up months of construction on a new “smart” surveillance system designed to monitor prisoners at every moment, including while they are in their cells.
According to officials, this digital panopticon will make prison breaks virtually impossible — but it might also wreak havoc on prisoners’ psyches.
Under Constant Watch
On Monday, the South China Morning Post published a story detailing a new surveillance system at China’s Yancheng prison, which houses some of the nation’s most high-profile inmates.
According to the outlet’s sources, the Yanjiao-based facility is almost finished upgrading its surveillance system to include a network of cameras and sensors capable of constantly tracking inmates.
These cameras and sensors will feed into an AI system that uses facial identification and movement analysis technologies to monitor each individual inmate at the Chinese prison, producing a daily report about each one and flagging any unusual behavior.
“For instance,” project representative Meng Qingbiao told SCMP, “if an inmate has been spotted pacing up and down in a room for some time, the machine may regard the phenomenon as suspicious and suggest close-up checks with a human guard.”
Mental Turmoil
This isn’t the first example we’ve seen of prison officials attempting to make facilities “smart” — in February, Hong Kong’s Correctional Services Department announced the implementation of several technologies designed to help prisoners stay safe during their incarceration.
There’s a chance the Yancheng facility’s system could serve the same purpose — if the prisoner in Meng’s scenario was pacing due to thoughts of hurting themselves, for example, the flagging of their behavior and subsequent check by a human guard could prevent that.
However, Zhang Xuemin, a physiology professor at Beijing Normal University, told SCMP the new system will “definitely affect” the prisoners’ mental state.
And while he didn’t elaborate on what that effect might be, past research has shown that constant surveillance can increase a person’s stress and anxiety levels, while decreasing their trust in others — meaning the trade off for an escape-proof “smart” prison might be the mental health of its inmates.
Earlier this year, Russian weapons manufacturer Almaz-Antey filed a patent for a new drone that was little more than a shotgun with wings.
When Futurism first reported on the drone, details were scarce. But now, video footage of flight tests has surfaced showing the drone — which looks like a murderous model plane — in action.
Balancing Act
The drone carries a 12-caliber Vepr-12 semi-automatic shotgun, Tom’s Guide reports. One might justifiably expect the recoil of a shotgun blast to send a drone veering off course, but that doesn’t seem to be the case.
Scientists from the Moscow Aviation Institute who worked on the drone published a press release saying that the drone can continue on its path after firing, and that its electric battery allows for 40 minutes of uninterrupted flight.
Human Touch
Video footage shows the drone taking off and landing with its nose — and barrel — pointed straight into the air.
But when all else fails, a video shows that a human can remove the drone’s wings and shoot it just like any other shotgun.
A fascinating new Bloomberg story looks at the growing market for mice scientists have gene-edited to mimic human diseases ranging from prostate cancer to diabetes.
Researchers are shelling out big money for the CRISPR-modified rodents, according to Bloomberg, sometimes paying as much as $17,000 for a pair — a medicine-disrupting development that’s projected to be a $1.59 billion industry by 2022.
Mouse Model
Bloomberg talked to Charles Lee, a former Harvard Medical School professor who’s using the gene-edited mice to develop new personalized cancer treatments in China.
“When you do these experiments, you want to be as close as possible to the way these tumors are growing in our bodies,” Lee told the magazine. “That’s not in a test tube or a petri dish. That’s in a living organism.”
Ørsted, an energy company in Denmark, announced in March its new plans to convert electricity from its wind turbines into hydrogen fuel, joining the ranks of several other prominent European power companies.
While it’s expensive, stockpiling renewable electricity as hydrogen makes sense as Europe tries to reach its ambitious climate goals, according to Scientific American — it could be used for power on windless days instead of fossil fuels.
Wind Power
Ørsted’s plan is to use electricity generated from wind turbines to power electrolysis plants that split water into oxygen and useable hydrogen.
This means that the renewable electricity could also be used, albeit indirectly, to fuel cars that would otherwise have relied on fossil fuels.
One Of Many
SciAm reports that there are currently 45 European projects working to improve the renewable-to-hydrogen pipeline. The most complex and expensive hurdle is splitting the water.
But the cost of the equipment necessary to do so has dropped by about 40 percent over the last ten years, suggesting that renewable hydrogen fuel may come around sooner than expected.
You’ll need more than a reservation to dine at Sushi Singularity — you’ll also need to be willing to share samples of your bodily fluids.
The futuristic restaurant, which is set to open in Tokyo in 2020, collects samples of reservation-holders’ saliva, feces, and urine two weeks prior to their visits. Then it analyzes the samples to determine each diner’s unique nutritional requirements, tailoring their meal to meet those needs.
“Hyper-personalisation will become common for future foods,” Open Meals, the design studio behind the restaurant, told Dezeen. “Based on DNA, urine, and intestinal tests, people will each have individual health IDs.”
Stunning Sushi
Not only will each meal be hyper-personalized, it will also be constructed using non-traditional tools, including a CNC machine and 3D printer.
“There will be 14 cylinders with different nutrients attached to the food-fabrication machine,” Open Meals said, “and when it 3D prints a dish of sushi, for example, some nutrients that are necessary for the customer will be added automatically.”
If the food Sushi Singularity serves is half as stunning as that featured in the restaurant’s promo video, it’ll be a futuristic feast for the eyes and tastebuds.
Scientists have figured out how to genetically alter bacteria to churn out super-strong spider silk.
Pound for pound, spider silk is much stronger than steel, but farming spiders is incredibly inefficient, according to a press release — so finding a way to mass produce the material could lead to super-strong fabrics and perhaps even next-generation space suits.
Genetic Trickery
Put enough spiders as you’d need to farm silk together, and they tend to eat each other. Edit the gene for spider silk production into bacteria as is — now a common manufacturing process — and it gets rejected.
“In nature, there are a lot of protein-based materials that have amazing mechanical properties, but the supply of these materials is very often limited,” lead researcher Fuzhong Zhang from Washington University in St. Louis said in the press release. “My lab is interested in engineering microbes so that we can not only produce these materials, but make them even better.”
To get around those limitations, the scientists chopped up the spider silk genes into smaller pieces that re-assembled once they had been integrated into the bacterial genome, in research set to be presented Tuesday at the American Chemical Society national Spring 2019 meeting.
Space Spiders
With their new methodology, the scientists managed to manufacture two grams of spider silk — just as strong as silk that actually came from a spider — for each liter of gene-spliced bacteria. That’s not all that much silk for an unsettling amount of bacteria, but the press release reports that it’s a vast improvement over other attempts to mass produce silk.
If this research scales up, though, NASA may want to bring the bacteria along on future missions to space, giving crew members a new supply of materials for repairs.
On Saturday, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg penned an op-ed in The Washington Post asking governments to create new rules and regulations for the internet.
Two days later, Singapore submitted legislation in parliament designed to govern how sites such as Zuckerberg’s handle “fake news” on their platforms.
If it passes, the bill would require sites to place warnings or “corrections” alongside any posts containing false statements, and force them to remove comments that any of the nation’s ministers believe are “against the public interest.”
Failure to comply with the fake news bill could result in fines or prison time — a startling escalation, albeit by a small country, of public concerns about online misinformation.
Censoring Speech
Singapore’s Law Minister K. Shanmugam claims any assertions that the fake news bill would hinder free speech are misguided.
“This legislation deals with false statements of facts,” he told reporters on Monday, according to Reuters. “It doesn’t deal with opinions, it doesn’t deal with viewpoints.”
Phil Robertson, deputy director of Human Rights Watch’s Asian division, disagrees with that assessment.
“This draft law will be a disaster for human rights, particularly freedom of expression and media freedom,” Robertson told Reuters. “The definitions in the law are broad and poorly defined, leaving maximum regulatory discretion to the government officers skewed to view as ‘misleading’ or ‘false’ the sorts of news that challenge Singapore’s preferred political narratives.”
The European parliament voted Wednesday to support plans for the elimination of most uses of single-use plastic, ranging from cutlery and straws to coffee stirrers and plastic plates.
It’s a significant step that could encourage other governments around the globe to also commit to reducing the amount of plastics that end up in landfills, waterways, and oceans — but it’s not going to be instituted overnight.
Plastic-less
In October 2018, the EU voted on the proposal that was overwhelmingly backed by the European Parliament. This week’s vote could lead to EU member states implementing a ban by 2021.
Also included are plans to improve the quality of tap water and reduce the use of plastic bottles. The proposal also would “tighten the maximum limits for certain pollutants such as lead (to be reduced by half), harmful bacteria, and introduce new caps for most polluting substances found in tap water,” according to a statement.
The new plans would also require plastic bottles to be made up of 25 percent recycled material by 2025.
If all goes as planned, when NASA’s Mars 2020 rover reaches the Red Planet in February 2021, it’ll bring a tiny buddyalong with it.
In May 2018, NASA announced plans to create the Mars Helicopter, a four-pound autonomous rotorcraft designed to accompany the Mars 2020 rover on its upcoming mission.
After nearly two months of testing, the agency announced on Thursday that the helicopter is now Mars-ready, meaning it’ll likely be the first heavier-than-air craft to take flight on another planet — opening new options for the future of off-world exploration.
First Flight
According to a press release from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the first step to testing the mini helicopter destined for Mars was creating a mini model of Mars on Earth.
To do that, the Mars Helicopter team removed all the nitrogen, oxygen, and other gases from the air within JPL’s 25-foot-wide Space Simulator vacuum chamber, replacing it with carbon dioxide to mimic the composition of Mars’ atmosphere.
To replicate Mars’ lower gravity, the team attached a motorized lanyard to the helicopter. By tugging upward on the helicopter, this lanyard served as an effective “gravity offload system.”
“The gravity offload system performed perfectly, just like our helicopter,” test conductor Teddy Tzanetos said in the press release, later adding that it was “a heck of a first flight.”
Next Stop: Mars
The team tested the helicopter again the next day, and though the helicopter flew for less than one minute in total, the researchers claim it was long enough to ensure the craft’s more than 1,500 parts function as designed.
The team is now confident the mini helicopter is ready to begin its journey to Mars in July 2020, nestled under the Mars 2020 rover’s belly — conjuring images of a joey and its mother kangaroo.
A few months after the pair lands on Mars, the helicopter will set off on a series of test flights each up to 90 seconds long — and according to Thomas Zurbuchen, Associate Administrator for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate at NASA’s Washington headquarters, the implications of these flights could be profound.
“The ability to see clearly what lies beyond the next hill is crucial for future explorers,” Zurbuchen said in the press release first announcing the helicopter. “We already have great views of Mars from the surface as well as from orbit. With the added dimension of a bird’s-eye view from a ‘marscopter,’ we can only imagine what future missions will achieve.”
