Porn Ban

Over the past week, Bangladesh has blocked tens of thousands of sites and apps and is policing the social media accounts of celebrities in an effort to scrub the nation’s internet of pornography.

The porn purge comes as part of the government’s push to crack down on adult-oriented content like porn and gambling, which originated with a November decision in Bangladesh’s High Court, according to Al Jazeera.

Declaring War

“I want to create a safe and secure internet for all Bangladeshis, including children,” said Mustafa Jabbar, Bangladeshi posts and telecommunications minister. “And this is my war against pornography. And this will be a continuous war.”

That war on porn also seems to involve micromanaging the lives of celebrities. The Bangladeshi government recently ordered a local actress to delete what it determined were provocative pictures from her various social media accounts, Al Jazeera reports.

“We are monitoring the local Facebook profiles, YouTube channels and websites, also,” Jabbar said. “A few of them were taken down for having obscene content. We advised a few others not to post anything that goes against our social norms.”

Behind Seven Proxies

So far, internet service providers have complied with the government’s demands. But the nation’s porn hungry internet users can still access porn with a little technological wizardry.

A Bangladeshi official confirmed that the country’s new regulations can be skirted using a virtual private network or mirror websites, according to Al Jazeera.

READ MORE: Bangladesh blocks 20,000 websites in anti-porn ‘war’ [Al Jazeera]

More on censorship: Google Is Censoring Search Results to Hide Russian Corruption

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Bangladesh Declares “War on Pornography,” Blocks TikTok

The Geocorona

A light layer of hydrogen atoms called the geocorona separates Earth’s atmosphere from outer space. And it extends far beyond Earth — much farther than previously believed.

Data collected by NASA and the European space agency’s Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO), a spacecraft that launched in 1995 to study the Sun, suggests that this gaseous layer extends up to 391,000 miles (630,000 km) from Earth — which, strikingly, is 50 times Earth’s diameter and almost twice the distance to the Moon.

Water Vapor

And that’s a big deal, because planets with traces of hydrogen in their atmospheres have a much higher chance of containing water on the surface.

“This is especially interesting when looking for planets with potential reservoirs of water beyond our Solar System,” explained Jean-Loup Bertaux, co-author of the paper on the new research and former principal investigator at ESA, in an official press release.

Empty Space

Unfortunately, those extra hydrogen atoms won’t be particularly useful for future missions to the Moon.

“On Earth we would call it vacuum, so this extra source of hydrogen is not significant enough to facilitate space exploration,” said Igor Baliukin of Russia’s Space Research Institute and lead author of the paper.

But they could make future astronomical observations more accurate by allowing astronomers to take the hydrogen atoms and their associated ultraviolet wavelengths into account.

The revelation symbolizes a big win for the SOHO team. “This discovery highlights the value of data collected over 20 years ago and the exceptional performance of SOHO,” said Bernhard Fleck, SOHO project scientist at ESA.

READ MORE: Earth’s atmosphere stretches out to the Moon — and beyond [ESA]

More on Earth’s atmosphere: The European Space Agency’s New Ion Thruster “Breathes” Air

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New Research: Earth’s Atmosphere Extends Well Beyond the Moon

Toxic Changes

In April, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) proposed new standards for how it studies the health impacts of low doses of chemicals, trading in a previously cautious approach for one that’s far more flexible.

On Tuesday, the Los Angeles Times published a deep dive into the work that went on behind the scenes to get this proposed rule change added to the Federal Register — and the damage it could do to public health if adopted.

Current Standard

For decades, according to the LA Times’ excellent explainer, U.S. federal agencies have adhered to what’s known as the linear no-threshold model when regulating and studying toxic chemicals and radiation. This model assumes that if a substance is harmful at any level, it’s harmful at all levels, with the level of harm increasing or decreasing depending on the level of exposure.

This model ensured that the public wouldn’t be exposed to potentially harmful substances even if research didn’t conclusively prove that a low level of exposure would, in fact, be harmful.

That was important because, in some cases, various studies of the same chemical at the same low dose have reached different conclusions. One might assert that the low dose is harmful, another that it has no effect, and still another that the dose is actually beneficial to the human body, a phenomenon known as hormesis.

Hormesis D’oeuvre

It’s true that some dangerous substances really are beneficial at low doses. Small doses of tamoxifen, for example, can help treat breast cancer, but at higher doses, the chemical can actually cause uterine cancer.

However, while hormesis might be useful in a clinical setting, it’s not an effective way to regulate chemicals that could reach the public at large, according to David Jacobs, a public health professor at the University of Minnesota.

“There is no way to control the dose a person gets from an industrial or agricultural chemical,” Jacobs told the LA Times. “It’s not being doled out in pills and monitored by a physician who can lower it if the patient isn’t responding well.”

The Holy Grail

On April 30, the EPA posted a proposed rule titled “Strengthening Transparency in Regulatory Science” for comment in the Federal Register. It removes linear no-threshold as the default model for estimating low-dose impacts, instead giving the EPA the authority to test other models, including hormesis.

Ten months later, the EPA has yet to announce a final date for deciding on the proposed rule. But if it’s adopted, public health experts told the LA Times they expect it to “tie the EPA up in knots” and possibly even result in new standards for everything from our air to our drinking water.

“Industry has been pushing for this for a long time,” David Michaels, a professor of environmental and occupational health at George Washington University, told the newspaper. “Not just the chemical industry, but the radiation and tobacco industries, too.”

“This is industry’s holy grail,” he concluded.

READ MORE: Scientist Says Some Pollution Is Good for You — a Disputed Claim Trump’s EPA Has Embraced [Los Angeles Times]

More on the EPA: The EPA Just Removed Climate Change From Their Climate Change Website

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EPA: Low Doses of Toxins, Radiation Could Actually Be Healthy

Full Autonomy

According to Elon Musk, Tesla’s cars are nearly ready for fully autonomous driving.

“I think we will be feature complete — full self-driving — this year,” Musk told Cathie Wood and Tasha Keeney of ARK Invest in a podcast on Tuesday. “Meaning the car will be able to find you in a parking lot, pick you up and take you all the way to your destination without an intervention, this year.”

Car Naps

By next year, you’ll be able to take a nap behind the wheel, Musk claimed in the same interview.

“My guess as to when we would think it is safe for somebody to essentially fall asleep and wake up at their destination? Probably towards the end of next year,” he said.

And he’s willing to stand by his words: “I would say I am of certain of that,” he said. “That is not a question mark.”

Big Promises

Musk is no stranger to making big promises. As it stands right now, Tesla’s Autopilot can make lane changes, and navigate highway ramps — but it still can’t handle most other roads.

In October, Tesla dropped the “full self-driving” mode from the Model 3, with Musk claiming it was “causing too much confusion” in a tweet.

The race to have cars take over all driving functions is on. Alphabet’s Waymo launched a robo-taxi service in Arizona in December.

But even Waymo’s cars require human safety drivers to take control on multiple occasions throughout a single ride.

READ MORE: Elon Musk Promises a Really Truly Self-Driving Tesla in 2020 [Wired]

More on Tesla: Teslas Are Getting a “Party and Camping Mode”

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More Q’s Than A’s

We still have a lot of questions to answer before autonomous vehicles can go mainstream: Who’s at fault if an AV has an accident? Should people need licenses to ride in a self-driving car? How should an AV decide between running over a dog or a cat?

On Wednesday, Bloomberg published a story focused on yet another question — how should AVs interact with law enforcement? — and the solution might involving ceding control of your car to cops.

Police Power

The Bloomberg story notes the Dec. 2018 incident in which an intoxicated driver fell asleep behind the wheel of a Tesla with Autopilot engaged. The vehicle led police on a seven-minute chase down a freeway before officers were able to compel the Tesla to stop by essentially boxing it in.

This is the kind of problem AV manufactures and law enforcement want to avoid, and that could mean programming AVs to pull over as soon as they detect flashing police lights behind them, a protocol already adopted by Waymo.

Bloomberg even suggests that officers forced to exit their vehicles might be able to instruct other AVs to reroute away from an area “with a couple of taps on a handheld device.”

Driver Rights

Letting law enforcement control a car presumably owned by a citizen seems like murky legal territory.

Even if legal, it would be easy to see how some people might be opposed to police being able to give instructions to their car — especially if the car is programmed to follow police orders over that of the driver and the driver isn’t doing anything illegal.

Some critics have also noted how hackers might be able to exploit any ability for police to control AVs.

It’s still too early to say whether any of the measures proposed in the Bloomberg piece will become the standard for navigating interactions between AVs and law enforcement. But given that we could have fully autonomous vehicles as soon as next year, we have no time to waste figuring out an answer to this lingering question.

READ MORE: Someday Your Self-Driving Car Will Pull Over for Police [Bloomberg]

More on driverless cars: It Took Seven Minutes to Pull Over a Drunk and “Unresponsive” Tesla Driver

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Automakers Could Give Police Control Over Your Self-Driving Car

Galaxy Fold

Korean tech giant Samsung officially announced its take on the growing foldable smartphone trend at its Galaxy Unpacked event today in San Francisco: the Samsung Galaxy Fold. The device will go on sale for $1,980 on April 26.

We first got a glimpse of the device in November, but the brand has likely been working on the concept for almost half a decade.

Serious About Multitasking

The Galaxy Fold will unsurprisingly pack some serious power, with a high resolution 7.3-inch Infinity Flex Display. When it’s folded in half — Samsung referred to that as “phone mode” — the display size is reduced to only 4.6 inches.

It’ll also pack an impressive 12 GB of RAM and 512 GB of on-board flash storage.

Foldable Future

Competitors include Royole and Chinese phone maker Xiaomi. The latter is developing a smartphone that folds on both sides, like a birthday card.

The device seems to be a little awkward to use in phone mode, but when unfolded, the Galaxy Fold could be a worthy replacement for a seven-inch tablet.

READ MORE: Samsung’s foldable phone is the Galaxy Fold, available April 26th starting at $1,980 [The Verge]

More on foldable smartphones: Xiaomi Teases Flexible Smartphone That Folds Like a Card

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Samsung Just Revealed a $1,980 Folding Smartphone

Three Deaf Mice

About half of the time someone is born totally deaf, it’s because of their genetic makeup. Those people are typically treated with cochlear implants, but now researchers from Europe and the U.S. are looking at gene-based treatments as well.

Deaf mice treated with a new kind of gene therapy developed the ability to hear almost as well as healthy mice, according to research published Tuesday in the journal PNAS — findings that suggest gene therapies may someday help with previously-untreatable conditions.

Ear Genes

The mice had what’s called DFNB9 deafness, the type that accounts for between two and eight percent of gene-related cases of human deafness. In DFNB9 deafness, a protein called otoferlin can’t perform its usual role of transmitting sound information gathered by the fine hairs in the inner ear.

But after altering the deaf mice’s genomes with specially-crafted viruses, the mice were able to hear almost as well as mice that were born with functioning otoferlin.

Step One

Even after altering the same specific gene in mice as what causes DFNB9 deafness in humans, it’s too soon to say that these gene-editing viruses can be used to treat people. There’s a long road between animal experiments and human clinics.

There’s more reason to be wary of this treatment. According to a conflict of interest statement in the PNAS article, one researcher from the University of Florida stands to profit if this virus-based technology takes off — so it’s worth waiting to see if the work holds up in further studies.

READ MORE: Gene therapy durably reverses congenital deafness in mice [Pasteur Institute Newsroom via MedicalXPress]

More on gene therapy: New CRISPR Gene Editing Experiment Slows Down Hearing Loss

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Scientists Used Gene Therapy to Cure Deafness in Mice

Interplanetary Heritage

Right now, there’s no legal framework preventing people from destroying or selling culturally-important landmarks in space.

For instance, as space travel becomes more common, an opportunistic someone could find a way to steal and auction off the first bootprints left on the moon by Neil Armstrong, warns University of Mississippi Air and Space Law professor Michelle Hanlon in an essay published Friday in The Conversation.

Earthly Precedent

Hanlon cites damage to landmarks like the Pyramids of Gaza or Terracotta Army by tourists who break off pieces to take home as evidence that people can’t be trusted to preserve landmarks of their own volition.

“There is no law against running over the first bootprints imprinted on the moon,” Hanlon wrote. “Or erasing them. Or carving them out of the moon’s regolith and selling them to the highest bidder.”

Rising Chorus

Places like Stonehenge and ancient cave paintings are protected as part of the U.N.’s World Heritage List. If landmarks in space are to survive as more nations and companies develop the capacity to leave the planet, Hanlon believes that leaders need to be proactive and protect those landmarks before anything goes wrong.

Hanlon is just one of many to recently call for more comprehensive or updated space laws. Right now, the various laws and treaties that pertain to outer space are a bit of a mess. Hopefully, before trips to the moon become commonplace, someone can sort them out.

READ MORE: Protecting human heritage on the moon: Don’t let ‘one small step’ become one giant mistake [The Conversation]

More on space law: Four Legal Challenges to Resolve Before Settling on Mars

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Lawyer: People Could Try to Sell the Apollo Moon Footprints

Cleaning House

Not all damaged cells die. Some stick around as senescent cells, unable to divide but still able to produce chemical signals — and they could play a major role in the battle against aging.

“It is thought that these cells and the substances they produce are involved in the process of aging,” longevity researcher Nicolas Musi from the University of Texas at Austin told MIT Technology Review. “The idea is that removing these cells may be beneficial to promote healthy aging and also to prevent diseases of aging.”

Based on the results of a very early trial, there may be something to that theory.

Doubled Up

In January, Musi and his colleagues published the results of a trial in which they treated 14 patients suffering from the fatal lung condition idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis (IPF) with a drug combination they believed would clear out senescent cells.

Over the course of three weeks, the patients took nine doses of a leukemia drug called dasatinib and quercetin, a supplement. By the end of the trial, the patients were reportedly able to walk farther than they could previously in the same amount of time and other signs of improved well being — all without any serious side effects.

“Though small, this pilot study marks a major breakthrough in how we treat age-related diseases such as IPF,” researcher Jamie Justice said in a press release. “Here, we’ve therapeutically targeted a fundamental biological hallmark of aging that is implicated in IPF, and we show early but promising results for the first time in human patients.”

Next Steps

Right now, it’s hard to say whether the drug combo would actually prove effective as an anti-aging therapy, but the researchers are committed to finding out. They’re already testing the treatment on a group of 15 more lung patients, as well as 20 people suffering from chronic kidney disease.

“If we see effectiveness signals and don’t encounter really bad side effects, we’ll try to get to people with less and less life-threatening conditions,” researcher James Kirkland told MIT Technology Review. “If everything goes right.”

READ MORE: A Cell-Killing Strategy to Slow Aging Passed Its First Test This Year [MIT Technology Review]

More on anti-aging: The Quest for Immortality Could Create Two “Classes of Humans”

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Anti-Aging Drug That Kills Old Cells Passes First Human Trial

Front Row Seats

China’s Academy of Space Technology is working on an orbital power plant that would capture solar energy in space and beam it back to Earth. The plant would be able to harness solar power even when it’s cloudy back on Earth, since its photovoltaic array would be floating high above any terrestrial weather.

With plans to launch a test facility before 2025, pursuing space-based clean energy shows that China is committed to its ongoing push towards using more renewable energy and asserting its place among global leaders in space.

Beam Me Down

Needless to say, the biggest problem for a floating power plant is figuring out how to get the energy back down to Earth.

The scientists behind the project are still sorting that part out. But right now, the plan is to have solar arrays in space capture light from the sun and then beam electricity down to a facility on Earth in the form of a microwave or a laser, according to The Sydney Morning Herald.

From there, the electricity could be used just as if it had been generated by conventional, terrestrial means.

Big Plans

If the launch goes well and the energy-transmitting beam works like it’s supposed to, the Chinese scientists have plans to test and launch bigger and more powerful facilities through 2050, according to The Sydney Morning Herald.

And aside from sending clean energy to Earth, the power plant could also feasibly power missions deeper and farther into space, as long as the beam is precise enough to target any ships that are rocketing away to explore the cosmos.

READ MORE: Plans for first Chinese solar power station in space revealed [The Sydney Morning Herald]

More on power plants in space: NASA Wants to Collect Solar Power Directly From Space

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China Is Building a Solar Power Station in Space

Rotating Space Station

Welcome on board the Von Braun Rotating Space Station.

At least, that’s what the Gateway Foundation is envisioning. Dreamed up by former pilot John Blincow and retired Jet Propulsion Laboratory mission architect Tom Spilker, the station would allow for both low-gravity scientific experiments conducted by national space agencies and space tourism.

In a slick new video posted to YouTube, the Foundation shows off its ambitious plans — including a render of a Hilton space hotel module.

Big Dreams

The Spaceport is a futuristic vision of what it would be like to visit a massive off world spaceport — even if you’re just headed up for a brief holiday to space.

“It will allow us to take our first steps toward colonizing the Moon, Mars, and ultimately, will usher in a new age of exploration as we travel throughout our solar system and discover what lies beyond,” reads the Foundation’s official website.

Since it rotates, the Gateway can simulate varying degrees of gravity. For instance, a Hub that houses administration, storage, and other important elements of the spaceport could simulate lunar gravity for both tourists and scientific purposes. Five gates form a transport hub allowing shuttles from Earth or the Moon to dock to the Gateway.

Questions

But will it ever be built? The Foundation is offering a Gateway “membership” as part of a lottery system.

In return for a yearly contribution — there is a free basic tier — the Foundation is offering up “informative emails,” “event discounts,” and a chance to win a free trip to the Gateway. At least, that’s if it ever gets built.

It’s an extremely ambitious project that is going to require astronomical amounts of funding to ever stand a chance of being built. But it also shows how passionate people are to finally get a chance to travel to space during their lifetime.

READ MORE: SpaceX Starship and The Von Braun Rotating Space Station [YouTube]

More on space gateways: NASA Wants Its Deep Space Gateway Habitat To Orbit The Moon By 2024

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Watch This Epic “Trailer” for the Commercial Lunar Space Station

ICEd Out

In early January, news broke that certain drivers of internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicles were blocking electric vehicle (EV) charging stations, an act known as ICEing, seemingly as some sort of protest against the vehicles.

Within weeks, Tesla proposed a solution, and now — as is the Tesla way — the company is already rolling out an update to it.

Automatic Unlocks

In mid-January, Tesla drivers in China began spotting strange-looking devices at Supercharger stations. They appeared to be small hurdles of sorts that, when in an upright position, would prevent a car from parking in front of a Supercharger. Each sported a QR code that a Tesla driver could scan to lower the hurdle, thereby unlocking the space.

On Thursday, Electrek reported that the Tesla Owners club in Taiwan posted information on an updated version of the devices to Twitter. Now, instead of a driver using the QR code to lower the hurdle, they simply back their car toward it. A camera on the device reads the car’s license plate, and the space unlocks automatically.

No word on when, or even if, the devices will make their way to the U.S. But if American drivers continue to report issues with others ICEing them out of Supercharger spots, it certainly wouldn’t be outside the realm of possibility — maybe Tesla will even find another way to update the devices by then.

View from inside car pic.twitter.com/fpTqbIPcfS

— Tesla Owners Taiwan (@TeslaOwnersTwn) February 14, 2019

READ MORE: Tesla Tests New Innovative Way to Avoid Gas Cars ‘ICEing’ Superchargers [Electrek]

More on ICEing: Tesla Found a Clever Way to Prevent Supercharger ICEing

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Tesla’s Anti-ICEing System Just Got an Upgrade

Converging Theories

Black holes remain mysterious. It was huge news, back in October, when astronomers did as little as actually confirming that there’s a supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy.

But it turns out that scientists very rarely agree about black holes on a philosophical level — they often can’t even agree what they are.

Words Matter

That’s the conclusion of an investigation by Erik Curiel, a philosopher and physicist from Harvard and the Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy at Germany’s Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, according to new research he published last month in the journal Nature Astronomy.

“The properties of black holes are the subject of investigations in a range of subdisciplines of physics — in optical physics, in quantum physics and of course in astrophysics,” Curiel said in a university-published press release. “But each of these specialties approaches the problem with its own specific set of theoretical concepts.”

Conflict Resolution

Many of the black hole definitions Curiel gathered from various physicists conflicted with one another. An astrophysicist told him that “a black hole is the ultimate prison: once you check in, you can never get out.” On the other hand, a theoretical physicist said that it’s “conceptually problematical to think of black holes as objects in space, things that can move and be pushed around.”

Curiel embarked on this journey to point out the problem of having multiple, incongruous definitions for a single concept, but eventually came around to the discrepancy, arguing that scientists defining black holes according to their specific fields allowed them to do better work.

“I conclude that, within reasonable bounds, the profusion of different definitions is in fact a virtue, making the investigation of black holes possible and fruitful in all the many different kinds of problems about them that physicists consider,” Curiel wrote in his research paper, “although one must take care in trying to translate results between fields.”

READ MORE: Philosophy: What exactly is a black hole? [Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München newsroom via ScienceDaily]

More on scientific definitions: Artificial Consciousness: How To Give A Robot A Soul

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Flu Vaccine

Vaccines for bacterial and viral infections are extremely difficult to develop. But thanks to gene-editing, we could soon be able to make people immune to the flu or even HIV.

Researchers at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, Washington developed a new technique to artificially create improved and longer-lasting antibodies by editing the DNA of so-called B cells — the immune system’s white blood cells responsible for creating antibodies.

Donor B Cells

The technique could eventually allow healthcare professionals to pass a major hurdle: many conventional antibody treatments are only effective for a short period of time — antibodies tend to break down quickly, requiring additional injections later down the line. In contrast, scientists believe that these new antibodies could one day only need to be injected once.

According to a preprint of the research published in the journal bioRxiv earlier this month, an initial trial involving 15 mice delivered promising results: 82 days of protection against the respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) — a respiratory tract infection that can prove dangerous to both children and adults.

A Growing Trend

Editing the DNA of B cells is a rapidly growing trend, New Scientist points out. Multiple research teams are in a race to become the first to test the technique in human trials.

Scientists will have to prove the technique is safe first — and that will likely take a number of years. But if it ever does become a treatment for humans, “thousands of hospital visits, disabilities, and deaths could be prevented each year,” reads the preprint.

READ MORE: CRISPR could help us protect ourselves from viruses like flu and HIV [New Scientist]

More on CRISPR: Tiny New CRISPR Protein Could Make Human Gene-Hacking Less Risky

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CRISPR Could Make You Immune to the Flu

Brief Delays

A drone sighting has once again shut down a major airport while officials scrambled to figure out what was going on.

This time, the airport in question was Dubai International Airport, one of the largest international airports in the world. After a drone was spotted nearby, the airport suspended all flight activity between 10:13 and 10:45 a.m. local time, according to The Wall Street Journal.

Dubai Airports confirms that operations at Dubai International are back to normal after less than 30 minutes of delay due to unauthorized drone activity.

— Dubai Media Office (@DXBMediaOffice) February 15, 2019

Some Guy

A Dubai official told The WSJ that the drone was operated by “a guy in the desert” but didn’t share many more details.

The half hour delay is the shortest of three major drone-related airport shutdowns in recent months, but still signals that airports haven’t figured out how to deal with the proliferation of inexpensive drones.

Back in December, London’s Gatwick airport canceled about 1,000 flights over a three-day period, and New Jersey’s Newark Liberty International Airport was briefly shut down in January when a drone was spotted over the nearby airport in Teterboro.

Sound the Alarm

Operating a drone without a license in Dubai is illegal, and similar laws have been enacted by the U.S. government.

But apparently all it takes is one guy in the desert to interrupt the world’s largest international airport. So in the meantime, Fortune reports, airports like Gatwick are running drills to minimize delays and interruptions next time a drone sails by.

READ MORE: Drone Scare Grounds Flights at Dubai Airport [The Wall Street Journal]

More on drones: New FAA Rules Could Make Drones Vastly More Annoying

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Drones Just Shut Down Another Huge Airport

Primate Problem

In January, we reported on a controversial video featuring five newborn monkeys, all of which are clones of a single monkey genetically engineered with CRISPR to cause problems with its circadian rhythms. The monkey clones are clearly not well, exhibiting signs of anxiety, depression, and schizophrenia-like behaviors.

Some in the scientific community questioned whether the research was ethical, and now the lead scientist behind the study is defending his work — which he suggests will cost fewer monkeys their lives than standard research methods.

Cloning and CRISPR

In a new interview with New Scientist, Hung-Chun Chang of the Institute of Neuroscience in Shanghai notes that cynomolgus monkeys, the kind used for his team’s study, are the most commonly used primate model for research. It’s legal everywhere in the world, he said, to edit the species’ genes.

Given those two points, researchers might actually be able to subject far fewer monkeys to testing if they can reliably gene edit and then clone them.

“Every year, thousands of monkeys are subject to drug testing,” Chang told New Scientist. “And because of the genetic variations among individuals, we need to repeat the testing in many monkeys for meaningful results. That’s why we chose to do cloning: with completely identical monkeys, we can use fewer of them.”

Making Mistakes

If the scientific community is going to agree that testing on these monkeys is ethical, there is some logic behind the idea of gene-editing and cloning the animals to be identical models for specific tests.

However, a key part of that will be ensuring we can effectively edit and clone the animals, and we might not be there yet. Dozens of surrogate mothers underwent embryo implantations as part of Chang’s team’s research, but of the 16 that became pregnant, only five monkeys were born.

We’re going to need to answer many tough questions along the path to a future in which CRISPR helps humanity eradicate disease, end hunger, or even colonize the universe — and whether or not the failures preceding the creation of these five monkeys crossed the ethical line is one of them.

READ MORE: Meet the Man Who Made CRISPR Monkey Clones to Study Depression [New Scientist]

More on the monkeys: Chinese Scientists Cloned Gene-Edited Monkeys With Horrifying Results

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Scientist Defends Controversial Cloning of Gene-Edited Monkeys

Spotted

When scientists calculate how much matter ought to exist in the universe, their estimates always vastly exceeded the amount of matter that they’ve actually accounted for.

The consensus, in fact, is that we’re missing about a third of the matter that should be out there.

But thanks to a new technique for scanning the cosmos, scientists think they may have finally spotted all that missing starstuff.

Peekaboo

For clarity, this research has nothing to do with dark matter, the invisible substance that makes up about 85 percent of the matter in the universe. Rather, the team of astronomers from Harvard and Hungary’s Eötvös University found the missing luminous matter, which makes up all of the stars, planets, and other celestial objects in the universe.

According to newly-publicized research, a draft of which was first published to the preprint server ArXiv in December, the scientists used NASA’s orbital Chandra X-Ray Observatory to scan for clouds of space gas surrounding a distant black hole. In those clouds, they found previously-unaccounted-for masses of oxygen. Extrapolating to the amount of similar gas clusters that are out there, the astronomers think that they can account for the entire difference between calculations and observations of the universe.

“We were thrilled that we were able to track down some of this missing matter” said Randall Smith, an astronomer from the Harvard & Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) who worked on the study, in a new press release. “In the future we can apply this same method to other quasar data to confirm that this long-standing mystery has at last been cracked.”

Secret Stash

More study is needed to confirm that these new findings can actually justify the lofty extrapolation that the scientists make in their paper. But if this work holds up, it means that scientists have finally sorted out one of the most confusing mysteries of the universe.

“If we find this missing mass, we can solve one of the biggest conundrums in astrophysics,” said CfA astrophysicist Orsolya Kovacs in the same press release. “Where did the universe stash so much of its matter that makes up stuff like stars and planets and us?”

READ MORE: Where is the universe hiding its missing mass? [NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory newsroom via Phys.org]

More on the Chandra Observatory: Here’s Why MIT Scientists Are Watching a Black Hole Devour a Star

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Scientists May Have Finally Found the Universe’s Missing Matter

Harpooning Space Debris

Junk floating around in Earth’s orbit is becoming a big problem. Bits of man-made debris can pose a big threat to satellites circling our planet. But a team of British engineers might have a clever solution.

The team of researchers from the University of Surrey used the RemoveDEBRIS satellite — a satellite specifically designed to eliminate space junk that launched on board a SpaceX Falcon rocket in April 2018 — to launch a harpoon at a (previously set up) piece of test debris at 20 meters a second (44 mph).

“Successful in space demonstration of the harpoon technology is a significant step towards solving the growing issue of space debris,” said Chris Burgess, Harpoon Lead Engineer at Airbus Defence and Space said in a press release.

Caught in a Web

The test is actually the RemoveDEBRIS satellite’s second trick: in September, it successfully deployed a spider-like web  that was meant to grab space junk out of the sky.

The team at the University of Surrey is now preparing for its third and final test: RemoveDEBRIS will inflate a sail that will slowly drag it into Earth’s atmosphere where it will burn up and be destroyed.

READ MORE: Space junk harpooned like whale in orbit-cleanup test [Associated Press]

More on RemoveDEBRIS: UK Researchers Just Deployed a Massive Net to Catch Space Debris

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Predicting Outcomes

Figuring out the survival rate of cancer patients relies on a number of tests and it can be difficult for clinicians to determine the prognosis. But a newly developed AI could give them a big leg up.

Scientists at Imperial College London and the University of Melbourne developed a piece of machine learning software that can predict the prognosis of ovarian cancer patients — and at a higher accuracy than conventional methods.

Their research and the results of an initial trial were published in the journal Nature Communications yesterday.

The researchers found that the survival rate of epithelial ovarian cancer was approximately 35-40 percent despite the existence of a number of treatment options. Some 6,000 new cases appear in the UK every year.

But developing a treatment that is personalized to the patient is critical — and the earlier the better.

“Radiomic Prognostic Vector”

The researchers developed a “radiomic prognostic vector” (RPV) — a piece of software that looks at four biological characteristics of tumors including structure, shape, size, and genetic makeup in CT scans — that turned out to be four times as accurate at predicting outcomes when compared to conventional methods in an initial trial that examined samples from 364 women.

The RPV also “reliably identifies” the five percent of patients that normally only have two years to live. By identifying them early on, they could improve prognosis and optimize treatment plans for those patients.

Transforming Healthcare

“Artificial intelligence has the potential to transform the way healthcare is delivered and improve patient outcomes,”  co-author of the study and radiologist at the Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust Andrea Rockall said in a press release. “Our software is an example of this and we hope that it can be used as a tool to help clinicians with how to best manage and treat patients with ovarian cancer.”

READ MORE: Artificial intelligence can predict survival of ovarian cancer patients [EurekaAlert]

More on machine learning and cancer: Microsoft Wants to Use AI and Machine Learning to Discover a Cure for Cancer

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Luxury Living

In 2017 we wrote about Arkup, a company designing “hurricane-proof” livable yachts powered by solar energy and capable of operating completely off the grid.

Now, the company has finally debuted a real-life version of one of its designs, and it could let you ride out the worst that climate change might throw at the Earth in the near future — assuming you have $5.5 million to spend on it.

Cost of Climate Change

Visitors to the Miami Yacht Show, which runs through Feb. 18, can catch a glimpse of the Arkup #1, a 75-foot livable yacht its creators claim is entirely self-sustaining.

The yacht has a rainwater-harvesting system, a 2,300-square-foot roof covered in solar panels, and would be as “stable as a home on land” if pummeled with Category 4 winds, according to an Arkup press release.

Based on the tweeted photos of the yacht, it’s incredibly luxurious. But given that most of us don’t have $5.5 million to spend on a floating home, we might want to consider cheaper ways to prepare for climate change, like urging our legislators to back climate-friendly legislation.

75' Livable yacht by Arkup pic.twitter.com/xbLxbm8P4i

— Arkup LLC (@Arkup_LLC) February 14, 2019

READ MORE: This $5.9 Million Floating Home Lets You Ride out Sea-Level Rise in Style [Sun Sentinel]

More on Arkup: An Architect Made Floating Homes, and They Are Hurricane-Proof

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