Sewage Power

The human body doesn’t extract all the energy out of food, so our waste is a great untapped energy source. Now, thanks to purple photosynthetic bacteria, we can convert our poop into hydrogen and carbon energy sources.

In research published Tuesday in the journal Frontiers in Energy Research, a team of Spanish chemists figured out a way to hijack a bacterium’s ability to turn light into energy — and use it to break down waste into useful fuels.

Modern Alchemy

When the scientists stimulated the bacteria with a weak electric current, it sucked up the hydrogen from some fecal matter. It also extracted the carbon, preventing any greenhouse gas emissions and raising the possibility that the carbon could be used in various materials or other energy sources.

Though this particular study was merely designed to show that the process works, the researchers hope that this bioelectric process could be used to extract clean, usable fuel out of the wastewater treatment process instead of just wiping it all away. Currently, waste water treatment plants typically dry out and dump human waste while freely burning off any gases they emit.

Regular Movements

Other scientists and startups have experimented with poop-to-power technologies.

But this is the first time that these purple bacteria have been set loose to do their dirty business, specifically tweaked to grab up as much carbon as they can. It brings new meaning to the concept of “clean energy.”

READ MORE: Purple bacteria ‘batteries’ turn sewage into clean energy [ScienceDaily]

More on waste management: Bill Gates Wants to Save Lives and Money With High-Tech Toilets

Excerpt from:
A Purple, Photosynthetic Bacteria Can Turn Your Poop Into Power

Game Changer

We may not have to wait much longer to jump in a taxi without a human driver.

According to Bloomberg, Waymo is about to unveil the world’s first driverless ride-hailing service as soon as next month. Waymo has yet to officially announce a new name for the project.

Phoenix Rising

According to Bloomberg‘s source, the service will be limited to a handful of authorized cars in a 100 square mile area across a number of Phoenix suburbs.

The Alphabet-owned company has been test driving its modified driverless Chrysler Pacifica minivans on the streets of Silicon Valley and Arizona for some time now. Since March of this year, Waymo’s Early Rider Program has allowed test groups — including families — to go for driverless rides around Phoenix. Those Early Riders will be the first to access the new program, according to Bloomberg.

Waymo’ Driverless Miles

It’s very likely Waymo will want to expand the commercial service to different parts of the country, but that might take some time. While its driverless technology is already ahead of the curve, Waymo’s approach is to slowly expand to other areas without incurring major setbacks such as a crash.

Waymo is already planning on adding 62,000 hybrid minivans, and 20,000 electric Jaguar I-Pace SUVs to its driverless fleet by 2020.

Driverless Nation

Time will tell whether we’ll see Waymo’s driverless minivans give people rides. But opening a fully fledged driverless service to the masses would be bound to give Waymo unprecedented visibility.

The takeaway: It’s starting to look as though it’s no longer a matter of “if,” but “when” Uber and Lyft drivers will be replaced with sophisticated technology.

READ MORE: Waymo to Start First Driverless Car Service Next Month [Bloomberg]

More on autonomous cars: Waymo Plans to Deploy The Largest Fleet of Autonomous Vehicles by 2020

Read more:
Yep, It’s Real: Your Next Rideshare Could Be Driverless in as Soon as a Month

Speak Up

If you’ve ever been on a conference call, you know how important it can be to identify a person just from their voice. After all, how will you know who to deliver that report to if you can’t tell who asked for it?

This skill is even more difficult for an artificial intelligence (AI) to master, but Google thinks it now has a system adept enough at it for real-world applications — and it can operate in real-time.

You Heard

Identifying the voice of a speaker it’s already heard isn’t so hard for an AI — after all, we’re able to train AIs such as Alexa and Siri to recognize our voices. It’s getting an AI to recognize a voice we haven’t trained it to recognize as soon as the voice starts speaking that’s proven difficult.

On Monday, Google AI Research Scientist Chong Wang published a blog post detailing how his team was able to create an AI better at speaker diarization — that’s the process of splitting an audio clip featuring more than one speaker into segments based on the person talking at any given moment — than previous attempts.

Active Listener

Wang’s explanation is highly technical, but the crux of it is this: While most speaker diarization systems rely on clustering — a machine learning technique focused on the grouping of data points — the Google team’s system makes use of recurrent neural networks, which are a type of machine learning model that processes sequences of data points.

Using this method, the Google team was able to create an AI capable of speaker diarization with an error rate of just 7.6 percent. The team is now focused on improving the system themselves, and it’s also posted its algorithms on GitHub, meaning anyone can download the files for their own research.

Eventually, we could end up with an AI capable of near-flawless real-time speaker diarization, which could improve how we caption live events, transcribe doctor-patient conversations, and more.

READ MORE: Accurate Online Speaker Diarization with Supervised Learning [Google AI Blog]

More on AI: You Have No Idea What Artificial Intelligence Really Does

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Google’s New AI Can Recognize Voices It’s Never Heard Before

Underarmer

Unilever — that’s the owner of prominent deodorant makers Axe and Dove — has teamed up with an all-star squad of academics and electronics manufacturers to create a machine learning-powered gadget that’ll tell you if you have body odor.

That’s according to a detailed story in the magazine IEEE Spectrum about Unilever’s work with chipmaker Arm, electronics firm PragmatIC, and researchers at the University of Manchester. They aim to use some of the most advanced artificial intelligence (AI) and sensor technology in the world — to tell you whether you smell bad.

Smell-O-Vision

The gadget will take the form of a thin plastic strip, according to IEEE, with a tiny processor and an array of organic semiconductors that detect “gaseous analytes” — chemical signs, apparently, that you’re giving off a nasty pong.

And because those gaseous analytes are complex, the system will employ machine learning to analyze the data and decide whether it’s time for a fresh misting of the “hot chocolate” and “red peppercorn notes” from Axe’s Dark Temptation XL Body Spray.

Food Waste

The technology wouldn’t just provide relief for your family and coworkers. It could also potentially evaluate food freshness, according to IEEE — possibly cutting into the 1.3 billion tons of food that went to waste in 2016.

And, to be fair, it also represents a step forward for AI and sensor technology, which have become adept at recognizing sights and sounds but struggled to categorize smells.

READ MORE: Arm Leads Project to Develop an Armpit-Sniffing Plastic AI Chip [IEEE Spectrum]

More on smell technology: FeelReal Brings Sense of Smell To Virtual Reality

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A Deodorant Maker is Using Machine Learning to Detect Your B.O.

Picking Teams

The British military is going public with its love for drones and other military robots. On Monday, it began its four-week “Autonomous Warrior” experiment, the largest military exercise to focus on robots in British history.

Primarily, MIT Technology Review reports, the Ministry of Defense hopes to use drones and other autonomous robots to improve reconnaissance work in and around a battlefield and to keep logistical supply chains open, getting resources to soldiers who need them. But, ­because of course it is, the U.K. is also interested in combat-ready drones as well.

Drone Wars

The U.K. called for a set of artificial intelligence ethics guidelines as recently as April, so it’s ironic that the country is now fully embracing weaponized AI.

That’s not lost on activists in the U.K., who recently published a harrowing report of all the dangerous ways that military AI could be misused or glitch with deadly consequences.

Drone on

Still, it’s unlikely that any new protest will make the British government abandon their work towards autonomous drones on the battlefield, whether or not AI is employed in any weapons systems or if the robots just handle recon and deliveries.

As MIT Tech reported, Autonomous Warrior is the next step in a major push in defense research that began back in 2016. So for all the UK’s posturing, it sounds like this has been in the works for a while.

READ MORE: The British Army is carrying out a massive test of military robots and drones [MIT Technology Review]

More on military drones: Five Experts Share What Scares Them the Most About AI

Excerpt from:
The UK is Testing Robots to Deliver Food and Ammo to Soldiers

Closed Circuit

In the Japanese prefecture of Tagawa, automation could one day enable dry-cleaning businesses to operate without any employees at all.

At least that’s Daisuke Tahara’s goal, according to WIRED. Already the owner of eight dry cleaners, Tahara taught himself the basics of machine learning and used them to build a system that lets customers create a service ticket by laying all their dirty clothes on a table to be scanned by a computer vision system.

Trickle Down

Tahara’s story is one of four short profiles published by WIRED on Tuesday. The common thread is that each subject decided to tinker around with artificial intelligence, usually teaching themselves to harness an algorithm’s ability to solve an everyday problem or, in Tahara’s case, streamline his family’s business.

AI giants have strong incentives to keep all of their developments to themselves. But they often choose to share some of their research to help foster a stronger research community and, presumably, to boast.

If you Build it

These glimpses into top AI labs can help the tech-savvy get started with their own AI pet projects.

The most impressive AI developments are still likely to come from those tech giants that have an absurd amount of money to throw at engineers and their labs. But in this era in which most AI research is on new uses for algorithms rather than major breakthroughs, more diversity among those who can build AI will only help the technology move forward.

READ MORE: THE DIY TINKERERS HARNESSING THE POWER OF ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE [WIRED]

More on the AI community: An AI Conference Refusing a Name Change Highlights a Tech Industry Problem

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How a Neural Network Runs a Family-Owned Japanese Dry Cleaner

It’s a Hot One

Things are heating up in China.

On Tuesday, a team from China’s Hefei Institutes of Physical Science announced that its Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak (EAST) reactor — an “artificial sun” designed to replicate the process our natural Sun uses to generate energy — just hit a new temperature milestone: 100 million degrees Celsius (180 million degrees Fahrenheit).

For comparison, the core of our real Sun only reaches about 27 million degrees Fahrenheit — meaning the EAST reactor was, briefly, more than six times hotter than the closest star.

Nuclei Smash

When two hydrogen nuclei combine, they produce an enormous amount of energy. That process, known as nuclear fusion, is how our Sun generates light and heat, and it’s the great white whale of the energy world — if we could find a way to harness it, we’d have a near-limitless source of clean energy.

Tokamaks like EAST could help us do just that. They’re devices that use magnetic fields to control plasma in a way that could support stable nuclear fusion, and it’s this plasma that EAST heated to such an incredible temperature.

Going Nuclear

Not only is EAST’s new plasma temperature milestone remarkable because, wow, it’s really hot, it’s also the minimum temperature scientists believe is needed to produce a self-sustaining nuclear fusion reaction on Earth.

Now that China’s “artificial sun” is capable of heating plasma to the necessary temperature, researchers can focus on the next steps along the path to stable nuclear fusion.

READ MORE: How Hot Is the Chinese Artificial Sun? [Chinese Academy of Sciences]

More on nuclear energy: Tech Billionaires Are Pouring Money Into Fusion Research

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China’s “Artificial Sun” Is Now Hot Enough for Nuclear Fusion

Up in Smoke

Facing criticism about underage users, e-cigarette maker JUUL has decided to pull all flavored JUUL pods from retail stores, and is adding additional age-verification systems to its web store.

In an update on its website, the company also said that it will stop retail orders to over 90,000 retail stores in the U.S.

Anybody who wants to buy flavors other than tobacco, mint and menthol will have to prove their age by giving up information like “name, date of birth, permanent address, and the last four digits of their social security number” to verify they are older than 21.

The news comes after the FDA raided the company’s headquarters in San Francisco in October, seizing thousands of documents about the company’s marketing strategies.

Social Media Crackdown

JUUL has also announced it will shut down its U.S.-based social media accounts on Facebook and Instagram. It will also start asking other accounts to remove “unauthorized, youth-oriented content” from their feeds.

“By deterring social media promotion of the JUUL system by exiting our accounts, we can better prevent teens and non-smokers from ever becoming interested in the device,” read the statement.

Age-Gating

In the future, JUUL says it hopes its next generation Bluetooth-enabled product will “break new ground on access restrictions at the user level” once it’s released in the U.S.

Pulling JUUL flavors off retail shelves is bound to make it harder for underage users to get their vape on, but will it be enough? Unlikely, considering the company’s brand is only one of hundreds.

READ MORE: Juul Will Stop Selling Most E-Cigarette Flavors in Stores and Halt Social Media Promotions [The New York Times]

More on JUUL: The FDA Just Raided the Headquarters of E-Cigarette Maker JUUL

More:
JUUL Will Stop Selling Flavored Vape Juice in All Retail Stores

Can’t Hardly Wait

You don’t have to wait until next month to get a sneak peak inside the Boring Company’s first tunnel.

On October 21, Elon Musk tweeted that construction on his company’s two-mile-long test tunnel in Hawthorne, CA, was nearing completion. He claimed the Boring Company would host an opening party for the tunnel on December 10, at which time the public would get a chance to take free rides through it.

This weekend, Musk confirmed via Twitter that the December 10 date was still a go — and shared a remarkable time-lapse video of a tunnel walkthrough.

Sneak Peak

Be forewarned that the below clip is pretty hypnotic. We’re not doctors, but if you’re prone to seizures, you might want to skip watching this one.

Tunnel Trance

In his tweet Musk called the tunnel “disturbingly long,” but the two miles it covers might eventually seem like a short jaunt. After all, the ultimate plan is a network comprising hundreds of layers of tunnels dug out below the greater Los Angeles area.

This test tunnel is just the start of that vision, and if watching the walkthrough makes you want to experience the tunnel firsthand, just make sure you’re in the Hawthorne area on December 10.

READ MORE: Elon Musk Shares First-Look Into the Boring Company’s ‘Disturbingly Long’ Tunnel [Business Insider]

More on the Boring Company: Elon Musk: First Boring Company Tunnel Will Open December 10

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Take a Virtual Ride Through the Boring Company’s First Tunnel

Mobile Bots

Famed futurist Ray Kurzweil thinks tiny robots will flow through our bodies by 2030 to help us stay healthy. We now have one more reason to believe he’s right.

Compelling nanobots to move through liquids such as blood has proven tricky but doable. It’s been much harder to get tiny bots to navigate dense tissues, such as those found in the eyeball, without damaging them.

Thanks to a bit of design ingenuity, though, an international team of researchers has managed to create a nanobot that can do just that.

Teflon-Inspired

The team describes how a few key design features gave their propeller-shaped nanobot that unique ability in a paper published Friday in the journal Science Advances.

First, the bot is incredibly tiny, approximately 200 times smaller in diameter than a human hair. Second, a non-stick coating helps it slip through dense tissue. And finally, the inclusion of a bit of magnetic material in the nanobots makes them easy to steer with an external magnetic field.

To test the nanobots, the researchers injected tens of thousands of them into a dissected pig’s eye. Using a magnetic field, they were able to direct the swarm to the retina at the back of the pig’s eye — just as they’d hoped.

Drugs On Demand

Eventually, the researchers believe this technique will allow them to deliver drugs directly to hard to reach parts of the human body — not just the back of the eyeball.

“That is our vision,” researcher Tian Qiu said in a press release. “We want to be able to use our nanopropellers as tools in the minimally-invasive treatment of all kinds of diseases, where the problematic area is hard to reach and surrounded by dense tissue. Not too far in the future, we will be able to load them with drugs.”

READ MORE: Nanorobots Propel Through the Eye [Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems]

More on nanobots: Kurzweil: By 2030, Nanobots Will Flow Throughout Our Bodies

See the original post:
A New Nanobot Drills Through Your Eyeball to Deliver Drugs

It’s Alive

Tim Berners-Lee, who’s often credited with inventing the World Wide Web in 1989, sees a modern Frankenstein’s Monster in how his creation is being used today.

That’s the gist of Berners-Lee’s comments at Monday’s Web Summit tech conference, where CNBC reported that he laid out ground rules for a new “Contract for the Web“and called for a return to net neutrality.

Crowd Surfing

The new contract, published by Berners-Lee’s World Wide Web Foundation, calls for safeguards that protect users’ data from being sold, stolen, or misused. Looking back at the history of the web, Berners-Lee argued that without explicit protections against them, hate speech, misinformation, and abuse have been allowed to proliferate online.

“If you’d asked me 10 years ago, I would have said humanity is going to do a good job with this,” Berners-Lee told CNBC. “If we connect all these people together, they are such wonderful people they will get along. I was wrong.”

Bad Feeling

Apparently Facebook and Google, two of the largest perpetrators of privacy violations and unscrupulous online activity, have already signed onto the contract. It raises the question of how useful such an agreement could possibly be, given the fact that these tech giants are unlikely to sign anything that would hurt their bottom line.

All the same, anything that helps restore net neutrality is a good thing, especially if Berners-Lee is willing to throw his weight around.

READ MORE: The inventor of the web says the internet is now at a ‘tipping point’ — and reveals a plan to fix it [CNBC]

More on net neutrality: Net Neutrality Is Officially Gone. Here’s How This Will Affect You.

Read more from the original source:
The Inventor of the Web Says It’s Broken and Net Neutrality Can Fix It

What’s In a Name?

Want to flex your creative muscles for a chance to win $10,000?

On Friday, General Motors (GM) unveiled two new electric bike designs it plans to begin selling in 2019, one compact and the other foldable. Each boasts a pair of wheels, a battery-powered motor, and a slew of safety features. What they don’t have, though, is a name — and that’s where you come in.

Ten (eBike) Racks

In the press release announcing the new eBikes, GM also launched a contest to name its eBike brand. The person who submits the winning name will receive a prize of $10,000, while nine runners-up will each receive $1,000.

If you’d like to get in on this naming contest, you have until November 26 at 10 a.m. EST to submit your suggestion via the contest website, which includes further details.

Electric Love

GM is far from the first major auto manufacturer to design an eBike. However, it is rare to see the vehicles actually make it to market — after all, each eBike sold could translate to one fewer car sale.

Still, GM has claimed repeatedly that it is committed to electric vehicles, and the eBike could be one more example of that commitment in action.

Other than the 2019 release date, the press release is pretty short on details. How far can these eBikes travel on a single charge? Will they be part of a bike-sharing network? Who knows?

But with $10,000 up for grabs, the question most people are probably pondering is, “What the heck should we call these things?”

READ MORE: General Motors Is Building an eBike and Wants You to Name It [General Motors]

More on electric bikes: Tow an SUV With This Incredible Electric Bike

See more here:
General Motors Will Give You $10,000 to Name Its New eBike

Rise and Shine

Most animators would agree: making a cataclysmic explosion destroy a planet is easy, but human figures and delicate interactions are hard.

That’s why engineers from The Georgia Institute of Technology and Google Brain teamed up to build a cute little AI agent — an AI algorithm embodied in a simulated world — that learned to dress itself using realistic fabric textures and physics.

Blessed

The AI agent takes the form of a wobbling, cartoonish little friend with an expressionless demeanor.

During its morning routine, our little buddy punches new armholes through its shirts, gets bopped around by perturbations, dislocates its shoulder, and has an automatic gown-enrober smoosh up against its face. What a day!

Great Job!

Beyond a fun video, this simulation shows that AI systems can learn to interact with the physical world, or at least a realistic simulation of it, all on their own.

This is thanks to reinforcement learning, a type of AI algorithm where the agent learns to accomplish tasks by seeking out programmed rewards.

In this case, our little friend was programmed to seek out the warm satisfaction of a job well done, and we’re very proud.

READ MORE: Using machine learning to teach robots to get dressed [BoingBoing]

More on cutesy tech: You Can’t Make This Stuff Up: Amazon Warehouse Robots Slipped On Popcorn Butter

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Having a Bad Day? An Adorable Video Shows AI Learning to Get Dressed

Alexa, Buy Me a Gift

The holiday season is upon us, and Amazon is getting ready for the seasonal onslaught with 100,000 additional warehouse hires.

That’s about 20,000 fewer than last year. According to analysts, the drop is because the company’s automation efforts are succeeding.

Automating Santa

In 2012, Amazon bought Kiva Systems — the maker of little orange robots that are quickly becoming the gold standard in warehouse distribution center automation.

They are proving particularly useful in Amazon’s fulfillment centers, where they move orders around massive warehouses quietly and efficiently — and without complaining about horrendous working conditions. The result: fewer human workers.

Prime Real Estate

Automation has also brought much higher productivity to Amazon’s many smaller distribution centers.

And it’s packing as many robots into each of them as it can. The company is planning on using cubic instead of square feet to measure the size of its warehouses thanks to multi-story warehouse systems, CNBC reports.

And if you’re one of the unlucky few warehouse workers working grueling overtime during the holiday season: happy holidays.

READ MORE: Reduced holiday temp hiring is a sign Amazon is turning to more automation and robots: Citi [CNBC]

More on Amazon robots: Amazon Is Ramping up Its (Still Rather) Secretive Home Robot Project

Continued here:
More Robots Means Fewer Seasonal Workers for Amazon This Holiday

Marijuana Medication

Just a few decades ago, the idea of a medical use for cannabis was little more than a pipe dream. Now, there’s a cannabis-derived drug on the market that doctors can prescribe as readily as any other medication.

As of Thursday, doctors in the nation are free to prescribe patients Epidiolex, making it the first drug on the market specifically designed to treat a rare form of childhood epilepsy. It’s also the first prescribable cannabis-derived drug.

First Step

In June, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved the sale of Epidiolex to treat treat two rare forms of epilepsy that manifest during childhood: Lennox-Gastaut syndrome and Dravet syndrome.

While a few treatments for the former were already available, none existed for the latter. Epidiolex showed remarkable promise during trials, though, reducing seizures by up to 40 percent.

Final Step

Even though the FDA approved Epidiolex in June, prescribing it was still illegal because the Drug Enforcement Agency classifies all forms of cannabis as a Schedule I drug — the same category that heroin and LSD fall under.

That changed on September 27 when the DEA classified Epidiolex as a Schedule V drug. That classification means that doctors in all 50 states are now as free to prescribe Epidiolex as they are cough suppressants containing small amount of codeine.

The cannabis-derived drug has already improve the lives of many of the young patients who participated in its trials, and now that it’s widely available, it has the opportunity to improve many more.

READ MORE: The First FDA-Approved Cannabis-Based Drug Is Now Available [Fast Company]

More on Epidiolex: The Digest: A Marijuana-Derived Medication Is Now Approved for Sale in the US

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Doctors Can Now Prescribe FDA-Approved Drug Derived From Cannabis

Phone Home

Scientists have a new idea to contact alien civilizations: build a huge laser and start blasting exoplanets with messages.

We could build such a laser, according to research by MIT scientists published Monday in The Astrophysical Journal, with technology that either exists today or requires just minor developments.

Death Star

The laser is more of a homing beacon than a death ray. A one or two-megawatt laser, beamed out through a 30 to 45-meter telescope, would be powerful enough to reach planets as far as 20,000 light years away. For reference, the star nearest our sun is Proxima Centauri, which is just over four light years from us.

If any planet hit with our laser that happens, by some infinitesimally small chance, to host extraterrestrial life that had developed advanced technology, its occupants would be able to look back at Earth and see signs of life.

Waiting Game

The scientists behind this research are counting on SETI, the government agency responsible for scanning the night sky for alien life, to complete more full-sky scans and invest in the infrared technology that could help identify which distant planets likely have habitable atmospheres.

With those advances and if there are aliens out where with a laser of their own — that’s a big “if” — the researchers argue that we could have a back-and-forth conversation over decades or centuries, with each message taking many years to reach its target.

READ MORE: E.T., we’re home [MIT News]

More on the search for alien life: Scientists want Your Help Crafting a Message to Aliens

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A Giant Space Laser on Earth Could Blast Messages at Alien Planets

Good News, Everyone

It seems like every recent study on the environment has had the same takeaway: We’re heading toward a climate catastrophe.

A newly released report backed by the United Nations bucks that trend with some very positive news. It seems our global efforts to repair the ozone layer are actually paying off — and even better, future efforts already in the works have the potential to help us address global warming.

How’s that for a breath of fresh, non-toxic air?

In the Zone

Every four years, an international team of researchers releases a report focused on the state of Earth’s stratospheric ozone, a naturally occurring gas that shields the planet from ultraviolet (UV) radiation.

Unfortunately, our actions on Earth have had a detrimental effect on the ozone layer. For decades, we pumped chemicals called chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) into the air, and these depleted the ozone layer, leaving us vulnerable to that harmful UV radiation.

In 1987, the world decided to take action against this damage to the ozone layer through the Montreal Protocol, an international treaty focused primarily on the phasing out of CFCs. As of 2010, the harmful chemicals were completely banned.

Based on this newly released report, those efforts have paid off.

Ozone in certain parts of the stratosphere has increased by 1 to 3 percent every decade since 2000. Based on current projections, the ozone layer above the Northern Hemisphere will be completely healed by the 2030s, with the Southern Hemisphere following in the 2050s and the polar regions by 2060.

Building Momentum

Though the findings of this new report are promising, we are far from any sort of “mission accomplished” moment when it comes to the ozone.

We already know that not everyone is abiding by the CFC ban — looking at you, China — so we’ll need to figure out a way to address that issue.

We’re also just months away from the implementation of the Kigali Amendment, an update to the Montreal Protocol that will guide the phasing out of another type of harmful chemical, hydroflourocarbons (HFCs). This amendment has the potential to not only build on the ozone-repair efforts already in place, but also help us avoid up to 0.4 percent of global warming this century, so we’ll need to ensure the world is as committed to phasing out HFCs as it has been CFCs.

If we can do that, who knows? Maybe environmental reports containing positive news could become the norm.

READ MORE: Healing of Ozone Layer Gives Hope for Climate Action: UN Report [UN News]

More on CFCs: Report Identifies China as the Source of Ozone-Destroying Emissions

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Our Efforts to Heal the Ozone Layer Are Finally Paying Off

Phub off

When it comes to smartphone etiquette, we tend to be pretty rude. Most of us — 62 percent according to a new Australian poll— have checked our phone in the middle of an in-person conversation.

The people we snub the most are romantic partners and close friends, according to The Conversation, perhaps because those relationships can survive the occasional rudeness in the form of phubbing — phone snubbing.

All Night Long

Aside from commuting and lunch breaks — honestly, we get it — the most common place people phubbed was in bed, scrolling Reddit or Twitter for hours before falling asleep next to their partner, according to the research, which will be published next month in the Proceedings of the International Conference on Information Systems.

And aside from frying your eyes by staring at a bright blue screen in a dark room, phubbing could be a serious detriment to your relationships. Research published in the journalPsychology of Popular Media Culture in 2016 suggests that cell phone use — texting your bud during dinner or tweeting during movie night — can harm personal relationships and personal well-being.

Screen Time

Of course, these findings alone aren’t enough to extrapolate the future of relationships. But all signs are pointing to the increasing presence of personal technology in our lives, especially our bedrooms, are getting in the way of human intimacy.

Next time, instead of scrolling Reddit for relationship horror stories, see if you can try and prevent your own.

READ MORE: Phubbing (phone snubbing) happens more in the bedroom than when socialising with friends [The Conversation]

More on smartphones: Musk: You’ll be Able to Remote Control Your Tesla Within 6 Weeks

Read more:
Go Phub Yourself: How Phones Pull You Away From Your Loved Ones

Everyone Else Is Doing It

Barring a few special circumstances, every U.S. citizen has the right to vote — or not vote — in government elections. But don’t expect to stay home on election day guilt-free.

In the U.S., your voting record is public information — depending on the state, your record could include anything from the political party you’re affiliated with to whether or not you voted in past elections.

Now, at least two tech startups have created apps that use this information to give people an easy way to peer pressure their friends into voting.

Text the Vote

On Sunday, The New York Times published a compelling story on two political apps, VoteWithMe and Outvote. The apps pull the voting data of everyone in your contact list and group those contacts based on how engaged they are in the voting process.

You can then use the apps to encourage your contacts to vote in the coming election in several ways. For example, you could send reminders of the election date to the less-than-committed voters in your contact list or ask your more committed friends to be sure to encourage their friends to vote.

Shifting Focus

Unfortunately, these political apps might work better in theory than in practice.

First, there’s the fact that they don’t really provide a full picture of your voting history — they only show the data for the state you’re currently registered in. Then there’s the possibility that the apps might affect how people vote — not just how often.

Right now, you might not think twice about registering as a Democrat even though you work for a decidedly Republican-leaning company, but you might if you knew your boss was likely to download an app that reveals that information.

It’s a tricky situation. Democracies work best when everyone participates, but is app-delivered peer pressure really the best way to encourage a higher voter turnout in the future? Just a thought, but maybe we should all focus on securing our elections and restoring Americans’ faith in the democratic process instead.

READ MORE: Did You Vote? Now Your Friends May Know (and Nag You) [The New York Times]

More on democracy: Pre-Teen Hackers Prove It: The U.S. Election System Simply Isn’t Secure Enough

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Exercise Your Civic Duty by Shaming Your Friends Into Voting

Old Kid on the Block

In the outer layers of the Milky Way is an old star, newly discovered by Johns Hopkins University astronomers, that might be one of the oldest in the universe.

New research which will soon be published in The Astrophysical Journal describes a star with the mouthful of a name, 2MASS J18082002-5104378 B. It’s about one-sixth the size of our sun and dates back 13.5 billion years — just 300 million years younger than the entire universe.

Old-School Metal

We know this star is so old because of its metal composition. As stars die and their leftover materials form new stars, the nuclear fusion reactions that power their cores give off heavy metals like gold and platinum. The more heavy metals, the more generations a given star must have been through.

But this star, still dimly twinkling, has such a small heavy metal content that astronomers think it comes from just the second generation of all the stuff in the universe — its celestial predecessor would have been formed in the Big Bang itself. For reference, our sun first emerged many generations after that, a 4.6 billion-year-old youngster compared to 2MASS.

I Wish I Might

This star is far older than anything else found in our galaxy so far, and its discovery opens the doors to finding even older stars.

That means we may soon learn more about how the Big Bang gave rise to the universe — and a better understanding of our own origins.

READ MORE: Johns Hopkins Scientist Finds Elusive Star with Origins Close to Big Bang [Johns Hopkins University]

More on old stars: Scientists Now Know When the First Stars Formed in the Universe

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An Ancient Star Reveals Our Galaxy Is Older Than We Thought