Win-Win

The worldwide number of people forcibly displaced from their homes by violence, war, and persecution is now 68.5 million — more than the population of the U.K., for context.

REFUNITE is a nonprofit dedicated to helping many of those refugees reconnect with their missing loved ones. Now, it thinks it’s found a way to help them get back on their feet financially, too — while simultaneously advancing the field of artificial intelligence.

AI Training Day

To train an AI, researchers must often feed the system troves of meticulously labelled data. Those datasets can be expensive to buy and time-consuming to create.

REFUNITE believes it’s found a solution to that problem — last week, the nonprofit announced the creation of LevelApp, an app that makes it easy for anyone with a smartphone to earn money labeling AI-training data.

The company is currently conducting a pilot project of the app with 5,000 refugees in Uganda, 200 of whom are labeling data for DeepBrain Chain, an AI-focused blockchain company.If that trial goes as hoped, it plans to scale up to 25,000 Ugandan refugees within two years.

Leveling Up

According to a World Economic Forum story, REFUNITE’s co-chief executive Chris Mikkelsen told attendees at a recent conference on human rights that a person could make up to $20 a day through LevelApp. And while that might not be enough to cover the cost of living for people in many places, it could be life-changing for a Ugandan refugee.

Currently, a refugee in Uganda is likely to earn just $1.25 a day doing the basic tasks or menial jobs available to them. That means LevelApp could increase their income 16-fold. The refugee could then use that extra money for everything from healthcare to education for their children.

In other words, this single app could help members of a vulnerable population rebuild their lives, all while helping shape the future of AI.

READ MORE: This Mobile App Is Paying Refugees to Train Artificial Intelligence [World Economic Forum]

More on training AI: This AI Dreams up Brain Tumor Scans to Train Other AIs

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Autonomous Commute

Being able to take your eyes off the road to read a newspaper while your car drives itself seemed like a distant future just a couple years ago.

But thanks to U.S. graphics chip maker NVIDIA, that dream could become a reality as soon as the year 2020.

The Chinese electric car companies XPeng Motors, Singulato Motors and SF Motors have signed a deal with the chipmaker to useNVIDIA’s Xavier AI chip to bring Level 3 autonomous driving — meaning that you can take your eyes off the road but still have to be able to react — to upcoming EVs in China, as reported by Reuters.

In October, Swedish multinational car maker Volvo officially signed up to useNVIDIA’s self-driving car platform as well. Volkswagen and Uber have also signed similar deals.

Heavy Lifting

NVIDIA introduced the autonomous driving platform, including a Xavier developer kit, back in September. The NVIDIA DRIVE AGX Xavier car computer that comes with the kit is capable of taking care of a self-driving car’s heavy computational load — obstacle recognition, driver monitoring, and other aspects of autonomous driving.

These tasks are very hardware intensive, and according to NVIDIA’s press release, AI-powered self-driving cars “cars must rely on numerous deep neural networks running simultaneously.”

Hands Off the Wheel

The chip maker also released an autonomous driving safety report back in October, to prove to federal regulators that their platform is safe to use.

The race is on to bring a mainstream NVIDIA DRIVE self-driving car to the market — whether it’ll be in the U.S. or China.

READ MORE: U.S. chipmaker Nvidia to provide AI platform for Chinese EV start-ups [Reuters]

More on NVIDIA’s self-driving car platform: NVIDIA Has Designed a Compact AI Computer to Drive Fully Autonomous Vehicles

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Chip Maker NVIDIA is Bringing Its AI Driving Chip to China

Depending on who you ask, straws are either having the worst year ever, or a revolutionary one.

For whatever reason, be it Hashtag Activism, or their ticket just finally getting punched, in 2018, everyone’s starting to get hip, woke, whatever—they’re fully-realizing the danger of single-use plastics (like plastic straws).

For example, the EU voted to completely ban single-use plastics.

Seattle recently became the first major American city to ban plastic straws.

And, bottom-lining it, whether you like it or not, the simple fact is this: On a long-enough timeline, there’s never a good argument in favor of plastic straws.

Which is why everyone, all the cool kids, are getting themselves their own reusable straws. And not just any straw—a good one. Maybe one that, say, is easy to clean. Or one that you don’t have to schlep around all inconvenient-like. One that comes in a few decent colors would be nice, too? Alas, enter FinalStraw: The collapsable, cleanable, folding straw-on-a-keychain that took Kickstarter by storm, to the tune of a $1.8 million-dollar crowdfunding campaign. Why all the fuss over a folding straw?

Well: It’s simple to clean. It works with all to-go cups. It comes with its own case. It should last you, according to FinalStraw, about 3600 hundred cycles (or five years at twice-a-day use). It’s latex-free and BPA-free. It’s dishwasher safe. And the case comes in five colors.

But if none of those selling points are enough, how about this one: You’ll be saving the world, one sip at a time. Also, it’s a brilliantly easy, cheap stocking stuffer for anyone you know. Especially anyone intent on ruining the world with their plastic trash, or trash habits. Or people who can’t drink out of the lid of a cup correctly. Or anyone who you just want to smash, with a present, into a moral equivalence quagmire, where they will be forced to reckon with their own innate selfishness and the fact that they do not, in fact, want a better world for those who come after them, and that they are—let’s be perfectly clear—destined to repeat the cycles of damage, not just to our Earth, but the people on it. Because they just need to drink out of a plastic straw. That, you will argue with this person, is the reason they want their children to have a dying world.

This is a perfect gift for them.

And it only costs $25! Buy it here at FinalStraw.

Want more gift ideas? Check out the full 2018 Futurism Gift Guide here!

Editor’s note: To create this content, the editorial team sought out products we love without any consideration of payment. That said, if you buy a product through this page Futurism may receive a small commission, which helps us save up for a fleet of jetpacks. 

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The Final Countdown(s)

Not counting the time Elon Musk jettisoned a dummy in a Tesla toward Mars, SpaceX hasn’t flown a crewed mission. Ever. In fact, the United States hasn’t flown a crewed mission since the July 2011 Atlantis flight. Luckily, we’ve had Russia to rely on. 

That could change next year. On January 7, the first flight of a SpaceX Dragon craft designed to carry a crew is set to take off from Kennedy Space Center, according to NASA. Now, to be clear, this Dragon capsule is meant for a crew, but this particular flight will not be a crewed mission – yet.

Think of it as a test for NASA’s future Commercial Crew Program. Called Demo-1, the flight – and others like it over the next few months – will culminate in a crewed launch in June 2019 (Demo-2).

Testing…123

In addition to SpaceX, Boeing – which also has a commercial crew contract with NASA – also has many test flights planned over the next year, and a crewed mission in August 2019 using the CST-100 Starliner capsule. Boeing’s first test flight won’t be as early as SpaceX though – it’s slated for March 2019.

Between these flight tests, both companies will also need to complete “abort tests” – proving that the astronauts can safely escape unscathed in the possibility of an emergency. After each test, NASA will look over all the data, reviewing performance, safety, and looking for opportunities to resolve issues – until all systems are certified.

So the big question: Will both companies stay on schedule? If all goes well. But delays also aren’t entirely avoidable. “Flying safety has always taken precedence over schedule,” says NASA spokeswoman Marie Lewis to Reuters. SpaceX has seen delays before. And it’s not just Elon Musk. Space is full of delays.

But, patience is key. As the old saying goes: Test twice and launch once, right?

READ MORE: SpaceX’s crew rocket set for January test flight [Reuters]

More on SpaceX: SpaceX Just Launched a Rocket With a Critical Reused Part

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Fake Meat

This Thanksgiving, families across the country will oven-roast Tofurkys, Field Roasts, and other fake meats in addition to — or instead of — genuine turkeys.

That’s according to MarketWatch, which reports that there will be more plant-based meat substitutes at holiday feasts this holiday season than any previous year. It cites a Nielsen report that found that meat substitute sales grew 6.1 percent this year, to $555 million — yet another sign that Americans’ diets are shifting toward meat alternatives.

Pro-Earth Protein

A Fortune profile of Tofurky’s growing meatless empire breaks down the factors that are driving buyers towards meatless goods. There are ethical concerns about the treatment of animals, naturally, but the profile also identified concerns about health and the impact of farming on the environment as factors that are pushing American shoppers toward plant-based meat substitutes.

“That’s not a fad,” Walmart’s Chase Worthen, who helps the company decide what vegetarian goods to stock in its stores, told the business magazine. “It’s a trend that’s here to stay.”

Future Outlook

In addition to these clever simulacrums made out of soy and other plant-based proteins, there’s a specter on the horizon that could further upend Americans’ relationship with protein: meat substitutes that are grown from animal cells in a lab.

MarketWatch pointed to a report by food consultancy Baum and Whiteman that predicted lab-grown meats, like those made by Memphis Meats and Future Meat Technologies, will be a key food trend in 2019.

If that report is right, Thanksgiving might never be the same again.

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Seeing Daylight

Thirteen years ago, UC Davis scientists Simon Cherry and Ramsey Badawi had an idea for a machine that could scan the entire human body at once, producing a 3D image that could help medical specialists with everything from diagnosing conditions to developing new drug treatments.

Now, that once-hypothetical scanner is very real. And the first images it produced are even more impressive than its creators expected.

Superior Scan

The EXPLORER scanner uses a combination of two well-known imaging techniques — positron emission tomography (PET) and x-ray computed tomography (CT) — to scan the entire human body at once.

But eliminating the need to take separate scans of separate body parts is just one of EXPLORER’s advantages over existing scanning tech. It’s also fast, producing its whole body scan in just 20 to 30 seconds — roughly 40 times faster than a PET scan. It’s safer, too, requiring a far smaller radiation dose than what’s needed for a PET scan.

EXPLORER can even produce movies, giving researchers the ability to track drugs as they make their way through the human body.

Exceeding Expectations

Ultimately, both Cherry and Badawi were highly impressed by the first scan produced by EXPLORER.

“While I had imagined what the images would look like for years, nothing prepared me for the incredible detail we could see on that first scan,” Cherry said in a press release.

“There is no other device that can obtain data like this in humans, so this is truly novel,” Badawi added.

Cherry said he doesn’t think it’ll be long before multiple EXPLORER systems are in use around the world, so take a look at the above video of the machine’s first scan if you want a glimpse at the future of medical imaging.

READ MORE: Human Images From the World’s First Total-Body Medical Scanner Unveiled [UC Davis]

More on medical scanners: These Mind-Blowing Images of the Human Body Were Made by a New Kind of Scanner

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Many people try to use meditation to do something to their brain. They want to quiet it, focus it, energize it, or zap some ideas into it. What some of those people don’t realize is that, while the end results of meditation can certainly do all those things to their brain, the first step in establishing a beneficial and long-term meditation practice is to start with an understanding of what is going on in that brain in the first place.

In the past, that wasn’t easy to do. To get a glimpse inside the brain, doctors have to use electroencephalography, also known as EEG technology, to get a graph of the different waves traveling through there at any given time. Most people either didn’t have the access, funds, or time to get hooked up to EEG sensors to see what’s happening inside their head. Alternatively, they might lack a medical reason to do so at all. Now, though, with new affordable wearable technology like the Muse headband, people are able to get a glimpse of their brainwaves – and also personalized, data-driven feedback that will guide them in training their brain.

Brain training is a more critical part of meditation than most people realize. As the billions of neurons in the human brain travel throughout the organ’s complex networks, they communicate with each other via small electrical currents that produce a synchronized movement known as a brainwave. Neuroscientists learned that by placing electrodes on a person’s scalp, in the process known as EEG, they can track and visualize those waves.

They’ve detected five main types of brainwaves, all occurring in different moments of consciousness. The slowest brain waves, delta waves, happen while you sleep – and are crucial for the rest and relaxation that your brain needs after working hard all day. At the other end of the spectrum are Gamma brainwaves, the fastest ones recorded by EEG. They are the waves considered the peak of physical or mental performance, the kind that occur when you feel like you’re “in the zone” at work, or have a sudden burst of inspiration.

While similarities exist between all human brains, scientists have recently begun to realize that the brainwaves of highly experienced meditation practitioners, such as Buddhist monks, are different than those of non-meditators. For most non-meditators, Gamma brainwaves happen infrequently, and often don’t last very long. But in experienced meditators, neuroscientists have observed that Gamma brainwaves are stronger and more regularly observed. Plus, they have more control over the ease at which they switch between waves. While non-meditators have to wait around for their “aha” moment to strike, it’s easier for long-term meditators to switch their brain into focus mode.

Many of those experienced and enlightened meditators got there through hours of brain study, practice, and guidance. That’s a great path for some, but one that most people don’t have the funds, time, or access to pursue. For those people, there is Muse. The sleek, portable headband uses seven small sensors to detect the brain’s electrical activity. Some wearable technology stops there – they simply clock how many steps you’ve taken that day, or how many hours of restful sleep you got. But Muse takes it one step further. In addition to clocking your brain’s activity, it uses a highly complex algorithm to deliver you real-time audio feedback during sessions and usable data metrics post-session to help you improve.

That real time feedback is the roadmap to establishing a meditation practice that can help minimize stress, focus the brain, and improve overall well being. The result is data-driven learning and real time feedback that doesn’t just give you the immediate benefits of a meditative session, but also the tools you need to train your brain to be more focused, rejuvenated, and mindful going forward.

Neuroscientists have already taken the highly portable product into to the field. Researchers from MIT and Harvard have used Muse to learn more about how the brain classifies pain, and researchers from British Columbia took Muse to Nepal to better understand the minds of Buddhist monks.

But the beauty of the product is that it’s not just for neuroscientists. As long as you have a smart device, a few moments, and a brain, you can use it anywhere at any time. And now, you can use it more affordably. As part of a Black Friday deal, you can get a Muse for just $159. It’s a deal so great that if it didn’t have everything to do with bettering your brain, it’d be called a no-brainer.

Futurism fans: To create this content, a non-editorial team worked with Muse, who sponsored this post. This post does not reflect the views or the endorsement of the Futurism.com editorial staff.

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3D Printing on the Moon

Replacing parts on a lunar base could pose a major challenge, since resupplying missions will likely be massively expensive and time consuming.

That’s why a group of scientists led by the European Space Agency are exploring ways to 3D print anything from screws to coins using artificial lunar regolith — a simulation, essentially, of moon dust.

Easy Space Oven

The scientists partnered with Austrian company Lithoz to develop a 3D printing technology that first mixes the regolith with a special kind of glue that hardens when exposed to light. Then they 3D print it into a particular shape and bake it inside an oven — similarly to how ceramics are hardened inside a kiln.

“If one needs to print tools or machinery parts to replace broken parts on a lunar base, precision in the dimensions and shape of the printed items will be vital,” says Advenit Makya, an ESA engineer working on the project in an ESA blog post.

Fix-it-Yourself

It’s a work in progress, and the project has yet to find out if the 3D printed parts will actually be able to hold up to the stresses of lunar base life, according to Live Science.

But if we do find a way to 3D print objects using locally sourced materials, the possibilities are endless. The tech could make living on the Moon a whole lot easier — and maybe a tiny bit less reliant on the Earth.

READ MORE: European Researchers Baked Fake Moon Dust into Money and Screws [Live Science]

More on 3D printing on the moon: Here Are The Finalists For NASA’s Mars Habitat Design Competition

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Who’s Hungry?

This Thanksgiving, our robot overlords will only feed us if they feel we truly deserve each morsel of our traditional human meals.

At least, that’s a grim interpretation of Arm-A-Dine, a semi-autonomous robotic third arm that gamifies Thanksgiving Dinner.

Happy Meal

The robotic arm will feed whichever human looks happiest about their upcoming treat, reports IEEE Spectrum. After someone manually guides the chest-mounted robot toward a piece of food, it will grab the morsel and hold it in the air. If the person sitting across from the arm looks happy about the prospect of a snack, Arm-A-Dine will deliver it to their mouth. Yummy!

If that person actively frowns, the food will go to the person wearing the robotic arm. If the person seems fairly neutral, Arm-A-Dine will wave the food back and forth before feeding it to a human mouth of the device’s choosing, according to research published by Australian engineers at Melbourne’s RMIT University that will be presented at the human-robot interaction conference SIGCHI this month.

Benevolent Overlords

Thankfully, IEEE Spectrum mentions, Arm-A-Dine will avoid punching out your teeth by bringing the food about ten centimeters from your face.

Just like in “Hitch,” your feederbot will wait as long as it takes for you to come the last ten percent and claim your reward.

READ MORE: Feed Your Friends With Autonomous Chest-Mounted Robot Arms [IEEE Spectrum]

More on augmentative robotics: New Prosthetic Limbs are More Interchangeable Than Ever

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Teamwork Makes the Dream Work

Mainstream online activism is all about making things easy — a like or retweet doesn’t do much, but it sure feels good. That’s why activists from the group Bail Bloc found a way to raise money that requires almost zero effort.

For the past year, Bail Bloc has been collecting the cryptocurrency Monero by running software in the background on volunteers’ computers to raise money for the Bronx Freedom Fund, a charity that helps pay the bail of people caught up in the NYC legal system. Starting Thursday, the group changed gears to start paying for people’s release from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) custody.

Beginner’s Hacktivism

When people sign up for Bail Bloc, they agree to lend some of their computer’s processing power to mine cryptocurrency, which is automatically collected by the Bail Bloc team to pay someone’s bail or immigration bond, reports IEEE Spectrum.

Each individual’s contribution is small because cryptocurrency mining has long since stopped being accessible or cost-effective for hobbyists. But many computers working together can add up. Bail Bloc calculates on its website that it would take 113 people running the app during a 40-hour work week for 12 months to free one person from ICE detention at an average cost of $2,010.

White Hat

Distributed crypto mining of this sort was once popular among malware developers. Often, people would write a program — or even hide it in the code of an app — that automatically hijacked part of people’s computers to run mining software in the background.

Bail Bloc, and other groups like it, use the exact same technology. But they introduce transparency and user consent into the equation, so people know exactly how their computer is being used and where the money is going.

READ MORE: Charity Lets You Mine Monero to Post Bail [IEEE Spectrum]

More on distributed crypto mining: Crypto Mining for Charity: Your Processing Power Could Save the World

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Gamer Fuel

Just like “Back to the Future Part II” predicted, Gamepads are so old-fashioned.

A new pill acts as the controller for a new video game out of Australia’s Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology. In “The Guts Game,” two players will have anywhere from 24 to 36 hours to kill off a digital parasite by raising and lowering the temperature of their digestive systems as measured by the pill, reports New Scientist.

Eating for Two

Players are encouraged to do whatever they need to raise or lower their body temperature and kill off their virtual bugs: eat spicy food, drink ice water, go for a jog, or anything else.

When The Guts Game was presented at Chi Play 2018, a gaming technology convention held in Melbourne in late October, New Scientist reports, the developers reassured the crowd that any temperature changes in the body were completely safe. After all, people eat spicy food and exercise all the time; there’s nothing about doing so for a new video game that suddenly makes it dangerous.

Presumably, The Guts Game’s version of cheat codes would be popping the pill before sweating your virtual parasite out in a sauna, but since you would have to buy each single-use pill, this sort of defeats the point.

Race Against the Clock

Like all good things in the world, this game too must end. Players in The Guts Game are in an endless race against time, against whom there are no victors.

Win or lose the game ends the moment the controller leaves the body.

READ MORE: A computer game’s edible controller lets you play it with your gut [New Scientist]

More on gastrables: Edible Tech is Finally Useful, is Here to Help You Poop

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Watch Your Tongue

You probably don’t go around biting into plants covered in needles. But if you happened to chomp down on Euphorbia resinifera, a cactus-like plant also known as the resin spurge, you’d seriously regret it — and not for the reason you might think.

The plant’s active ingredient, resiniferatoxin (RTX), is incredibly spicy — a full 10,000 times hotter than the world’s hottest pepper on the scale used to measure hotness. But in an ironic twist, RTX could actually be the future of pain relief.

Nerves Ending

According to a newly published story in WIRED, researchers across the globe have taken a keen interest in RTX as a painkiller.

They’ve discovered that, when injected into the body, the chemical binds to TRPV1, a molecule found in the nerve endings that sense pain. This opens a channel in the nerve ending that calcium can then flow through. This calcium overload deactivates the pain-sensing nerve without affecting other sensory neurons, such as those that allow a person to feel a light touch.

RTX researcher Michael Iadarola has tested RTX on dogs, injecting the chemical into the animals’ knees to alleviate joint pain, with promising results.

“It is profoundly effective there, and lasts much, much longer than I might have expected, maybe a median of 5 months before the owners of the dogs asked for reinjection,” he told WIRED. “The animals went from basically limping to running around.”

Crisis Diverted

Besides simply being effective, RTX has numerous benefits over existing painkillers: It doesn’t require frequent dosing, targets only the area causing pain, and doesn’t produce a potentially addictive high.

If the powerful chemical becomes widely available for human use, it could eventually begin to replace opioids as the go-to medication for addressing major pain issues — helping society address its major opioid addiction issue in the process.

READ MORE: This Chemical Is so Hot It Destroys Nerve Endings-in a Good Way [WIRED]

More on opioids: Four Reasons Why the Opioid Epidemic Is Getting Worse, Not Better

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Let’s Talk

In October, we reported that scientists planned to craft an updated version of the Arecibo Message — a radio message sent into space 44 years ago to draw the attention of aliens — and they wanted the public’s help deciding what the new message should be.

Now that you’ve had a couple of weeks to think about what you’d say to aliens if given the chance, here’s how you can make your voice heard.

A True Challenge

On Friday, the Arecibo Observatory (AO) posted details on the New Arecibo Message global challenge to its website.

According to the site, teams of 10 students in kindergarten through college can participate in the challenge, but doing so won’t be as simple as emailing a proposed message to the AO.

The students will need to break coded messages, solve brain puzzles, and more at various points throughout the year in order to unlock details about the challenge, including instructions for registering their team and specifications for crafting their message.

These mini challenges will require each team to demonstrate knowledge of the AO, the scientific method, the space sciences, and other AO-related topics.

Get Ready

The AO will release the first part of the challenge on December 16, so students have just under a month to form their teams and get ready to put their knowledge of space to the test.

The challenge will continue for approximately nine months, with the AO declaring a winning team during a week-long event in October 2019 celebrating the observatory’s 56th anniversary.

“We have quite a few surprises in store for participants and we will be sharing more details as the competition progresses,” AO Director Francisco Cordova said in a press release. “We can’t wait to see what our young people across the globe come up with.”

READ MORE: New Arecibo Observatory Message Challenge Announced [University of Central Florida]

More on the Arecibo Message: Scientists Want Your Help Crafting a Message to Aliens

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Unwanted Guests

Brain cells are not something you want to find growing where you don’t expect them. But that’s the surprise that awaited a team from Washington University in St. Louis (WUSTL) when it analyzed the mini kidneys researchers have been growing from stem cells in the lab.

Thankfully, the WUSTL team also found a way to prevent most of the brain cells from turning up in lab-grown mini kidneys — and the technique could prevent rogue cells from developing in other mini organs, too.

Tiny Organs, Big Problem

Lab-grown mini organs, or organoids, are clusters of cells that mimic the functionality of full-grown organs, which makes them highly useful for medical research. To grow them, scientists place human stem cells into chemicals that encourage them to develop into various types of adult cells.

For their study, which was published Thursday in the journal Cell Stem Cell, the WUSTL team analyzed 83,130 cells from 65 kidney organoids using a technique called single cell RNA sequencing. This analysis returned some startling news: between 10 and 20 percent of the cells in the organoids were actually brain or muscle cells — not kidney cells, as expected.

These off-target cells could render mini organs fall less useful for research, so the next step for the WUSTL team was finding a way to stop their development.

Back On Track

By analyzing the process through which stem cells become brain and muscle cells, the team identified the point in the kidney organoids’ development when some cells went rogue. From that, they were able to discern that they could decrease the number of brain and muscle cells by 90 percent if they just inhibited certain growth factors during the organoids’ development.

“This should really accelerate our progress in making organoids better models for human kidney disease and drug discovery,” researcher Benjamin D. Humphreys noted in a press release, “and the same technique could be applied to targeting rogue cells in other organoids.”

READ MORE: Brain, Muscle Cells Found Lurking in Kidney Organoids Grown in Lab [Washington University in St. Louis]

More on mini organs: Robots Can Grow Humanoid Mini-Organs From Stem Cells Faster and Better Than People

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Fake News

DARPA, the U.S. military’s research division, is hell-bent on fighting high-tech forgeries. In the past two years, it’s spent $68 million on digital forensics technology to flag them.

For DARPA, spotting and countering “deepfakes” — doctored images and videos that can be used to generate propaganda and deceptive media like fictionalized political speeches or pornography — is a matter of national security, reports the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.

Losing Battle

For all of its hard work to spot edited videos, DARPA may still be fighting a losing battle. That’s according to Hany Farid, a computer scientist and digital forensics expert at Dartmouth College.

“The adversary will always win, you will always be able to create a compelling fake image, or video, but the ability to do that if we are successful on the forensics side is going to take more time, more effort, more skill and more risk,” Farid told the CBC.

The CBC acquired some videos and images of DARPA’s deepfake-spotting artificial intelligence in action and it’s not the most impressive highlight reel.

In one, the algorithm is able to go frame-by-frame to spot discrepancies. This is an impressive feat for an automated system, but the video in question is clearly edited — it’s nowhere near as sophisticated as the most advanced deepfakes out there, which can imitate a real person’s voice and facial expressions.

Putting a Finger on it

Other examples obtained by CBC showed off DARPA’s algorithm spotting inconsistencies in lighting and other subtle cues that give away a doctored video.

People who want to create misleading deepfakes may always be a step ahead of the people trying to stop them, but DARPA’s digital forensics program still has another two years of research ahead of it.

As long as they stay on top of new deepfake techniques and keep their algorithms on the cutting edge, they may be able to spot all but the most advanced, high-budget and high-tech productions.

That way, when a video of Donald Trump announcing a nuclear strike plunges the world into the apocalypse, we’ll at least know it was the real thing.

READ MORE: A new ‘arms race’: How the U.S. military is spending millions to fight fake images [CBC]

More on DARPA’s deepfake research: If DARPA Wants To Stop Deepfakes, They Should Talk To Facebook And Google

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DARPA Spent $68 Million on Technology to Spot Deepfakes

Ain’t Happening

Bill Nye thinks you’d have to be on drugs to believe Mars could ever be habitable for humans.

“This whole idea of terraforming Mars, as respectful as I can be, are you guys high?” the science educator asked in an interview with USA TODAY. “We can’t even take care of this planet where we live, and we’re perfectly suited for it, let alone another planet.”

That’s Just Like, Your Opinion, Man

Nye is a respected science communicator, so his opinion on the viability of Mars terraforming plans carries some weight. He also has some pretty solid arguments.

“It’s not reasonable because it’s so cold,” he told USA TODAY. “And there is hardly any water. There’s absolutely no food, and the big thing, I just remind these guys, there’s nothing to breathe.”

Nye isn’t alone in his thinking, either — noted astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, another well-known science advocate, also believes any plans to make Mars livable for humans are absurd.

Terra Forma

However, the pro-terraforming camp isn’t all slouches — it counts among its membership SpaceX CEO Elon Musk and late physicist Stephen Hawking.

In Musk and Hawking’s opinions, we can and should exhaust all options for transforming Mars into something of an Earth 2.0. And they have some pretty compelling reasons, ranging from climate change to the notion that becoming an interplanetary species is the next step in human exploration.

Switching Space Camps

While Nye really couldn’t have been more clear about his opinion on terraforming Mars in the USA TODAY interview, he did also say he believes we should send astronauts to explore the Red Planet.

And who knows? Maybe they’ll find something there that moves the Science Guy from the camp of the terraforming skeptics to that of the believers.

READ MORE: Bill Nye: We Are Not Going to Live on Mars, Let Alone Turn It Into Earth [USA Today]

More on Mars skeptics: Neil deGrasse Tyson Says Humans Will Never Colonize Mars

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Breakthrough

Elon Musk’s oddball underground tunneling venture, the Boring Company, just completed a major milestone.

Musk posted a video on Twitter showing the gigantic tunneling machine breaking through the final wall connecting it to O’Leary Station, the Boring Company’s first outpost that connects the underground tunnel to the surface near its headquarters in Hawthorne, Los Angeles.

pic.twitter.com/TQhb9hQRxQ

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 17, 2018

The tunnel is a respectable 3.2 km (2 miles) in length, 30 feet (9 m) in diameter, and 15 feet under the surface. It has been in the works for almost two years under the Boring Company’s headquarters.

Skating Home

The tunnel is a proof-of-concept that’s meant to connect the company’s offices to a local suburb to show off a brand new form of transport: once completed, the company is hoping to shoot cars or just passengers along at 250 km/h (155 mph) on “skates.”

Musk announced last month that his company is planning to open the tunnel to the public in December – a tight timeline considering the tunnel was only just completed.

Racing a Snail

The Boring Company is hoping to speed things up next time round, according to its official website. By digging tunnels with smaller diameters of 14 feet or less, company could conceivably dig much faster.

Unsurprisingly, the Musk-owned company is also planning to go electric, according to the site — future version of the Boring Machine will run on motors, not diesel engines and locomotives.

READ MORE: The Boring Company has completed digging its first tunnel [The Verge]

More on Elon’s tunnels: Elon Musk: First Boring Company tunnel will open December 10

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Tree House

The Tree of Life is a metaphor established by Charles Darwin to give some perspective to evolution. Every living organism on Earth has a home somewhere on the Tree, and by looking at it, we can see how species relate to one another.

While we’ve known about a type of microbe called hemimastigotes since the 1800s, it turns out we were totally wrong about where they fit on the Tree of Life — because they didn’t fit on any of the existing branches.

Home of Its Own

In a study published Wednesday in the journal Nature, researchers from Dalhousie University detail their discovery that hemimastigotes are so unlike anything else in the Tree of Life, they require the creation of a brand-new branch.

“It was clear from our analyses that hemimastigotes didn’t belong to any known kingdom-level group, or even to a known ‘super-group’ of several kingdoms together, like the one that includes both animals and fungi,” researcher Alastair Simpson said in a news release.

“This one little collection of organisms is a whole new group at that level, all on its own,” she continued. “It’s a branch of the Tree of Life that has been separate for a very long time, perhaps more than a billion years, and we had no information on it whatsoever.”

Evolution of Tech

The Dalhousie team was only able to reach this conclusion thanks to an advanced genetic analysis technique that wasn’t available when scientists first discovered hemimastigotes.

“That such a distinct form of life could be hiding literally under our feet,” Simpson said in the press release, “is a sharp reminder about how little we still know about the diversity of life on Earth.”

And as our technologies advance even further, there’s no telling what else we might discover — or how many other branches we might add to the Tree of Life.

READ MORE: Hidden in Plain Sight: Dal Evolutionary Biologists Uncover a New Branch on the Tree of Life [Dalhousie University]

More on the Tree of Life: There’s a Revised “Tree of Life,” and It Has 1000+ New Species

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King of Kings

During an all-hands meeting last week in Seattle, AmazonCEO Jeff Bezos reportedly predicted that the company would one day go bankrupt.

“Amazon is not too big to fail,” he said, according to CNBC, which reviewed audio from the meeting. “In fact, I predict one day Amazon will fail. Amazon will go bankrupt. If you look at large companies, their lifespans tend to be 30-plus years, not a hundred-plus years.”

Boundless and Bare

Bezos’s admission is striking because Amazon was on top of the world this week, riding the high after announcing that its much-hyped HQ2 will be split between New York and D.C.

In the light of that success, Bezos turned his attention to the company’s longterm future — and advised the retail giant’s workers not to become complacent, lest it follow in the footsteps of Sears, which filed for bankruptcy last month.

“If we start to focus on ourselves, instead of focusing on our customers, that will be the beginning of the end,” he said. “We have to try and delay that day for as long as possible.”

READ MORE: Jeff Bezos to Employees: ‘One Day, Amazon Will Fail’ but Our Job Is to Delay It as Long as Possible [CNBC]

More on Amazon: Experts Warn of Amazon’s Accent-Detecting Technology

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Priority Numero Uno

Cybersecurity isn’t just a top technology concern of today’s healthcare executives — it’s the top concern.

That’s according to “Top of Mind for Top Health Systems 2019,” a new report co-authored by the Center for Connected Medicine (CCM), a think tank focused on the use of technology in healthcare, and the Health Management Academy, a network of healthcare executives.

Weak Link

To produce this report, the CCM and the Academy surveyed and interviewed 44 executives from 38 health systems representing 459 hospitals across the U.S.

According to those executives, the most common types of cyberattacks their institutions had faced in the previous 12 months were phishing and spear-phishing. Both of those involve gaining access to a network by essentially tricking a person into handing over valuable information, such as passwords and usernames, and they can enable a hacker to access sensitive information about patients.

It’s not entirely surprising, then, that 62 percent of those who contributed their insights to the report believe staff members are the primary point of weakness in their institutions’ cybersecurity. “Employee education” was also cited as the most common cybersecurity challenge, implying it’s a weak spot that hasn’t been easy to address.

Shoring Up

Thankfully, hospitals appear prepared to meet the challenge of cybersecurity head on. Not one of the respondents claimed their health system planned to decrease spending on cybersecurity efforts in 2019. In fact, 87 percent said they planned to spend more than they did in 2018.

“The people that are up to no good have far better tools than we do on our platforms,” one CEO told the report’s creators. “If they really target you, they will likely find a way in…We are not trying to make it impenetrable, but we are trying to make it more difficult to break into our system than others in our market.”

READ MORE: Top of Mind for Top Health Systems 2019 [Center for Connected Medicine]

More on health data: The Government Wants to Share Your Health Data. That’s Not a Terrible Idea.

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