Every minute you’re outside, you’re likely inhaling hundreds of “bioaerosols” — pollens, spores, microbes, and other tiny objects that can cause allergic reactions.
Today’s best method for measuring that allergen load is decidedly low-tech — researchers catch bioaerosols in filters or spore traps and study them under a microscope to identify each one. But a new gadget, hacked together by UCLA researchers, uses machine learning to dramatically speed up that process. Eventually, it might even give you a better sense of the air you’re breathing.
Pollen Kingdom
The UCLA researchers describe their device, which they built for less than $200 in parts, in a new paper published in the journal ACS Photonics.
Basically, the apparatus catches bioaerosols on a sticky surface and scans them with a laser and a small sensor. Then it feeds the resulting image into a neural network trained to recognize common allergens such as oak, ragweed pollen, and certain mold spores. Finally, it tells you exactly what’s making you sneeze.
Air Apparent
Though promising, the UCLA prototype isn’t quite ready for action. Its algorithm can only recognize five allergens, and its accuracy is a good-not-great 94 percent.
But incremental improvements could result in a compelling gadget that would let you analyze the air around you — and maybe decide whether it’s time to pop an antihistamine.
It seems like everyrecentstudy 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.
China’s latest weapon in its war against citizen privacy: gait recognition software.
According to a new story by the Associated Press, police in Beijing and Shanghai are using a gait recognition system developed by artificial intelligence company Watrix to identify Chinese citizens — even when their faces aren’t visible.
Walk This Way
Watrix claims its system can identify a person from up to 165 feet away even if their back is to a camera or their face turned away. It doesn’t require any special cameras, either — it can analyze existing surveillance footage to ID an individual with 94 percent accuracy.
“You don’t need people’s cooperation for us to be able to recognize their identity,” Watrix CEO Huang Yongzhen told the AP. “Gait analysis can’t be fooled by simply limping, walking with splayed feet, or hunching over, because we’re analyzing all the features of an entire body.”
However, the software doesn’t yet work in real time. It needs roughly 10 minutes to analyze about an hour’s worth of video, during which time it extracts a person’s silhouette and then creates a model of their individual gait.
Eyes Everywhere
It’s easy to see how this technology could be useful on a smaller scale. A company could produce a database of all its employees’ gaits and then use that database to ensure unauthorized individuals aren’t in restricted areas.
It’s harder to imagine how China could make use of the technology on a nationwide scale, though.
Facial recognition tech is easy to implement because the faces of most citizens are already in government databases. Would the nation need to produce a similar database of citizen gaits? Or would the tech work retroactively — arrest someone for a crime, have them walk for you, and then compare their gait to that of the criminal caught on camera?
Whatever the case may be, police in Beijing and Shanghai are making use of this tech somehow, which means it might just be a matter of time before anyone on the move in China will find themselves under the watchful eye of the nation’s government.
Plant-based meats are finally taking off: animal-free beef is popping up everywhere from high-end burger joints to, uh, biochemical research facilities.
Fine, plant-based and 3D-printed burgers, steaks, and chicken cutlets haven’t quite yet liberated the world’s livestock. But the technology behind these scientific snacks is progressing — with enough support, food researcher Jacy Reese predicts in a new book that we could replace a good chunk of traditional meats in a matter of decades.
Let Them Eat Steak
If we want to prevent catastrophic levels of global climate change, we need to farm and eat less meat. The various startups working on fake meat, perhaps the most famous of which is Impossible Foods, are pursuing an ambitious workaround: bringing cheap, sustainable food to the world without completely making people give up meat.
“In addition to contributing towards decreasing the effect of livestock on climate change, desertification and avoid animals slaughter, the development of these kinds of technological advances should help the populations living in the rural areas of our planet to have better access to healthy food and a varied diet,” Giuseppe Scionti, a biomedical researcher who found a way to 3D print realistic chicken cutlets and steaks, told Futurism.
Hamburger Helper
But major governments need to step in if these plant-based meats are ever going to get out of bougie restaurants and into the hungry mouths of the world.
Without massive structural investments, Fast Company’s reporting corroborated, plant-based meats will be stuck as a fad diet and may never become widespread and inexpensive enough to help the world.
We’re running out of time to avoid a planetary climate change catastrophe. And while the global poor already face problems caused by rising temperatures and severe weather, political leaders often seem frozen.
A new experiment, published last week in the journal PLOS ONE, suggests that those with the resources to change the world are hesitant to do their part. That’s a bummer: If the world is going to make it, we’ll all need to do what we can to slow climate change.
Going Dutch
In the study, researchers gave groups of people different amounts of money that they could choose to keep or donate towards a common goal that would specifically help fight climate change. Those who were given a larger share of the pot were less likely to contribute, while those who were given less money offered most of their donations.
Of course, the study had limitations. Researchers only gave the participants between 20 and 60 euros each, which is chump change compared to the sums involved in the global climate. Still, the finding was a gloomy reflection of the fact that the wealthy cause far more harm to the environment than the poor and do less to clean it up.
Storm the Castle
Perhaps it’s not time to grab a pitchfork and form an angry mob quite yet, but it’s easy to see this new study as a reflection of the many ways that climate change is already hurting the most vulnerable among us — and how the richest seem content to let it happen.
Of course, this is one limited experiment, and the number of participants involved is way too small to extrapolate these results to global politics. All the same, it revealed an unfortunate glimpse into what happens when some get far more money than they need.
The first components of the International Space Station (ISS) launched into space more than 20 years ago, and it’s been continuously occupied for 18. Right now, it’s the only operational space station in orbit — but that’s about to change.
China just unveiled a life-size replica of the country’s new space station at Airshow China, the largest aerospace exhibition in the country. The new station is called Tiangong, which means “Heavenly Palace” in Chinese.
American Football
The new ISS competitor’s central module is 55 feet (17 meters) long, weighs 60 tons, and can fit three astronauts. That’s actually quite a bit smaller than the ISS, which is about as large as an American football field if you count its large solar panels.
WANG ZHAO/AFP/Getty Images
The new space station will allow astronauts to conduct cutting-edge scientific research in the fields of biology and microgravity, according to the Associated Press.
The new station will technically belong to China, but will open its doors to all UN countries. Construction is expected to be completed around 2022.
Here’s to hoping that China’s new space station will fare better than the Tiangong-1 space lab, which crashed into the Pacific earlier this year after authorities lost control of it in orbit.
When it comes to space travel, we can’t overprepare — countless things could go wrong at any step in the process, and even a brief delay in response could be the difference between life and death.
To that end, Elon Musk’s SpaceX recently demonstrated it was ready to handle one of our worst-case space flight scenarios: an injured or sick astronaut.
Testing the Waters
SpaceX will eventually transport astronauts to and from the International Space Station aboard its Crew Dragon spacecraft as part of NASA’s Commercial Crew program.
Some of those return flights will end with the Crew Dragon splashing down in the ocean near Florida’s eastern coast. A crane aboard SpaceX’s recovery ship, GO Searcher, will then lift the craft from the water and place it onto the ship’s main deck. Doctors can then evaluate the returning crew to ensure they’re in good shape before GO Searcher heads to Cape Canaveral.
At least, that’s if everything goes according to plan. If the astronauts aboard the Crew Dragon are sick or injured, SpaceX will need to get them medical attention as quickly as possible.
To prepare for that possibility, SpaceX rehearsed a scenario in which a helicopter landed on GO Searcher. The crew then loaded a stretcher onto the aircraft for transportation to a nearby hospital. The helicopter is also equipped to transport doctors and other medical personnel to GO Searcher so they can care for patients at the ship’s medical treatment facility.
Prior Preparation
SpaceX is ahead of the game with this dress rehearsal — there isn’t even a date set yet for the first water landing of an astronaut-carrying Crew Dragon.
Still, it’s encouraging to know Elon Musk’s space company is taking every precaution to ensure it’s prepared to provide NASA astronauts with the best possible medical care long before they might ever need it.
Depression can manifest with many different symptoms, from a “loss of energy” to “indecisiveness” — broad criteria that make the condition difficult to diagnose with a high degree of certainty.
Now, researchers at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory are working on an algorithm that could eliminate some of that guesswork. They used text and audio data from 142 interviews with patients — 30 of whom had been diagnosed with depression — to teach a machine learning algorithm to listen for signs of depression in speech.
Tone of Voice
What makes this effort stand out is that the researchers examined the patients’ tone of voice, not just the specific words they used. That technique made the model surprisingly accurate: It was able to identify subjects who had been diagnosed with depression with a 77 percent success rate.
But before we go on and implement AI as a tool to diagnose mental disorders in the real world, we’ll have to take these results with a substantial grain of salt.
AI Therapy
While chatbots like Woebot have recently surfaced help people to deal with depression, they won’t be able to replace a human therapist, at least for the time being.
There are far too many variables, and while 77 percent sounds promising, a false positive could raise serious ethical concerns. For instance, AI diagnostic tools could fall into the wrong hands — like your employer or insurance company.
But the researchers are realistic about their machine learning model’s ability to detect depression. Rather than replacing human therapists, they see it as another tool in [a clinician’s] toolbox,” MIT researcher James Glass, who worked on the model, toldSmithsonian.
This past year brought an onslaught of horrifying weather, from droughts and fires in California to devastating storms around the world. If we keep powering our world with fossil fuels, scientists believe, these extreme weather events are going to get worse.
New research published Wednesday in Science Advances suggests there may be a way to slow down our climate change apocalypse, giving us a little bit more time to transition to clean, renewable energy.
Brain Melting
The research project, conducted in part by prominent Penn State earth scientist Michael Mann, explored models that predicted anywhere from a slight decline to a tripling in what are called quasi-resonant amplification (QRA) events.
These QRA events happen when jet streams — global wind patterns, basically — are disrupted and pockets of hot and cold air get stuck in place. They’re directly linked to extreme weather events like droughts and storms.
With business-as-usual dependence on coal and oil,the research suggestswe’re likely going to see a 50 percent increase in QRA events — therefore also dangerous weather — during the 21st century.
Clean Coal
These jet stream disruptions are caused by aerosols, which are released into the atmosphere by burning coal. If coal-burning plants adopt technology to help filter out the aerosols as they burn coal, the worst of climate change-driven weather could be delayed until the middle of the century.
It’s far from a solution, but the finding could give us a slightly longer window to adopt clean energy around the world. If we don’t, the worst of those climate models will almost certainly become reality.
We live in an age in which fact can seem stranger than fiction. From the climate to finance to our political systems, it feels like we’re at an inflection point in history where truly anything could happen. Nothing seems harder to predict than the future.
Maybe that’s why dystopian narratives have become so popular. We’re hooked on shows like West World, The Handmaid’s Tale, and Black Mirror. Several studies have found that millennials — a demographic that will make up nearly half the workforce by 2020, and the primary audience for shows like Black Mirror — are one of the most cynical generations in modern history.
It makes sense. Dystopian shows can help us work through possible (or even plausible) realities. “Writing dystopias and utopias is a way of asking readers: where do you want to live?” Margaret Atwood said at the 2018 Women in the World Summit.
But cynicism and distrust can be damaging, too. Feeling like the nail is already in our proverbial collective coffin can discourage people who might be able to fix society’s ills.
This is all addressed in the final episode of Glimpse,a new original sci-fi series from Futurism Studios (a division of Futurism LLC) and DUST. Watch the episode below.
Indeed, these dystopian tales are only half the story. The technologies that will power the future — artificial intelligence, genome editing, advanced robotics, blockchain — are not innately good or evil. We need people who will use them for good. Our fate, as a civilization, as a species, hasn’t been decided yet. If we’re smart, and if we’re diligent, and if we’re motivated, we can create a happy ending for ourselves.
Image Credit: Getty Images
Utopian fiction plays a role in getting us there. The way dystopian narratives can caution, optimistic ones can inspire. They could bring new uses for technology we already have, and maybe even tools no one has come up with yet.
In fact, optimistic stories played a key role in one of the United States’ biggest achievements. In October 1951, at the dawn of the space race, the United States held the First Symposium on Space Flight. The event, held at American Museum of Natural History’s Hayden Planetarium in New York City, was “one of the keys in introducing the U.S. public to the idea that human space flight was a serious possibility,” according to NASA. There were speakers and journalists in attendance, and major media outlets like Collier’s Magazine and Disney created educational materials (as well as science fiction stories) that walked through hypotheticals about how humans would survive and thrive outside Earth’s atmosphere. When President John F. Kennedy Jr made has famous Moonshot speech a decade later, the public was already comfortable with the idea of putting a man on the Moon, setting the stage for the once-incomprehensible Apollo 11 mission in 1969.
The way dystopian narratives can caution, optimistic ones can inspire.
Utopian fiction could do the same for today’s moonshots. We want to believe that we can break down barriers, cure persistent diseases, stop the planet from warming, visit new worlds. We just need to be convinced it’s possible.
These episodes may be fiction, but they’re a small insight into the kind of world researchers and innovators are making just a little more possible every day. None of them depict a perfect world, but none are totally far-fetched, either. Utopian fiction isn’t marked by the absence of conflict, but the resolution of it.
So fiction — of the dystopian and optimistic varieties — both have their value. Dystopian stories can be a powerful motivator for societies headed down the wrong path to right themselves. In the same way, utopian fiction illuminates a possible right way forward — the ones that lead to the kind of society we all wanted in the first place.
Get ready to trade in your car’s sunroof for a solar roof.
On Wednesday, automakers Hyundai Motor and Kia Motors jointly announced plans to install electricity-generating solar panels on select vehicles beginning in 2019. According to a press release, the companies will install the panels on the roofs or hoods of their vehicles. They won’t replace the cars’ existing power system, just supplement them.
The companies say they plan to roll out three generations of the solar roof charging systems. They designed the first system for use with hybrid vehicles, the second system for fossil fuel-powered cars, and the third system for fully battery-powered vehicles.
On the Path
The solar roofs are just the beginning of the automakers’ plans to make their vehicles more green.
“In the future, we expect to see many different types of electricity-generating technologies integrated into our vehicles,” said Hyundai Motor Group executive Jeong-Gil Park. “The solar roof is the first of these technologies, and will mean that automobiles no longer passively consume energy, but will begin to produce it actively.”
So, while we might not yet be able to buy the fully solar-powered car of our dreams, we can at least get one step closer in 2019.
Malta, a tiny European island nation, is preparing for a future in which robots and humans coexist side by side as fellow citizens.
In a partnership with SingularityNET, the decentralized AI research hub that designed Sophia the robot’s software, the Malta Digital Innovation Authority just drafted a citizenship test for robots — should they ever become advanced enough for that to be relevant.
New Kid on the Block
Malta recently made headlines for embracing financial blockchain technology, and the new preparations for robot citizenship are part of the government’s push to further cement its place as a technological world leader.
The push includes drafting a national strategy and task force for developing artificial intelligence that’s safe, ethical, and beneficial to the people of Malta. Few nations have taken the time to develop thoughtful guidelines around AI — the U.S., for instance, tends to dive into new tech headfirst without pondering ethical qualms or potential harms it could do.
Act of ’53
Saudi Arabia granted citizenship to Sophia the robot last year, in a move that experts critiqued as a stunt. Nowhere in the world — not in Malta, not anywhere else — is there a robot or an AI system advanced enough to act like a person. That level of technology is far in the future and we have no idea how to get there.
That being said, someone has to find answers to the many moral, ethical, and philosophical questions that advanced AI will bring — and Malta’s task force is putting the small island in position to take charge.
Some researchers are starting to believe MDMA, the party drug commonly known as “ecstasy” or “molly,” could become a recognized treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in the coming years.
Case in point: A small clinical trial published last week in the Journal of Psychopharmacology found that therapeutic doses of MDMA, in concert with psychotherapy, reduced the severity of most participants’ PTSD symptoms. And a year after the trial ended, 76 percent of participants no longer met the clinical criteria for a PTSD diagnosis.
Expect Delays
The results, as exciting as they seem on paper, are only from a phase II trial — the second of three stages of safety and efficacy testing required before the U.S. Food and Drug Administration will consider approving a new pharmaceutical.
Many phase II trials, this one included, gather very impressive-sounding results, but the road to FDA approval is littered with the corpses of early-stage research that never made it to the end. That said, phase III trials for treating PTSD with MDMA are underway.
Solid Science
Aside from its small sample size of only 28 participants, the National Institutes of Health (NIH)’s website for monitoring clinical research shows no methodological red flags.
Even so, MDMA is still listed as a schedule one drug, which means the government prevents it from being legally prescribed, believes it has a high risk of abuse, and won’t recognize clinical uses. Though FDA approval would help change that, it means MDMA cannot legally be prescribed off-label in the meantime.
But if all goes well in follow-up research, it’s conceivable that MDMA treatments could hit the market after phase III trials are completed, which is expected to happen within three years.
Where there’s water, there’s usually life — at least on Earth — and we just got confirmation that there used to be far more water on the surface of Mars than scientists previously believed.
The news comes courtesy of a team of researchers from the SETI Institute and NASA’s Ames Research Center. They’ve identified dozens of potential “paleolakes” — lakes that existed when the climate of a region was different than it is today — in the southern hemisphere of Mars. And the finding could forever change the hunt for extraterrestrial life.
On the Map
We already knew of one potential paleolake located in the northeastern part of Hellas, a massive basin in the southern hemisphere of Mars. In a study published in the journal Astrobiology on Tuesday, the researchers detail their discovery of 33 more.
The team conducted a detailed hydrogeographic analysis of the region, mapping its channels and depressions to suss out where additional Martian lakes may have once existed. This turned up the 33 new paleolakes.
By looking at each paleolake’s distinct characteristics, the team was even able to identify its most probable source of water: precipitation, groundwater, or rivers and streams.
Life on Mars
The discovery of these paleolakes is about more than just mapping the geology of Mars. It could also inform our search for life on the Red Planet.
As the researchers note in the paper, the former Martian lakes could contain the biological record of what, if any, life once existed on the planet, so as we plan future missions to Mars, we might want to consider devoting significant time to exploring this once-wet region of its surface.
While sports car enthusiasts are salivating over the Tesla Roadster’s record-shattering performance — 0 to 60 in under two seconds is no joke — Tesla CEO Elon Musk is more excited about a very different Tesla.
“Actually, I’m personally most excited about the pickup truck,” Musk admitted to Recode in an interview this week. “Well I can’t talk about the details, but it’s gonna be like a really futuristic-like cyberpunk, ‘Blade Runner’ pickup truck.”
Before the pickup truck, Tesla is expected to release the Model Y — a hopefully as-futuristic SUV.
Country, Buds, and Superchargers
The prospect of a utility truck that doesn’t rely on chugging gasoline or diesel is exciting, and we can’t wait to see what Tesla’s “futuristic” design will end up looking like.
And he doesn’t even care if it doesn’t sell at all.
“You know, I actually don’t know if a lot of people will buy this pickup truck or not,” he told Recode, “but I don’t care.”
One of the big challenges for artificial intelligence developers is building a system that can interpret and understand the world around it — just look at how long it’s taking to build capable self-driving cars.
To probe that challenge, MIT physicists Max Tegmark and Tailin Wu generated a series of simulated worlds in which a ball bounced through areas affected by gravitational and electric fields, according to MIT Technology Review. They fed that data into a custom-built AI system and tasked it with figuring out the physics of these virtual worlds.
In the end, according to research published to the preprint server ArXiv last week, they got an algorithm that can learn about its environment using tricks similar to the scientific method.
AI-saac Newton
Most machine learning algorithms tend to make sense of the data on which they’re trained via broad, overarching rules and assumptions.
This new “AI Physicist,” as Tegmark and Wu have called it, can compartmentalize what its training data has told it. This preference for simplicity gives the AI Physicist the ability to create distinct theories about the physical environment, loosely based on different branches of physics. That means it could learn how both mechanics and electromagnetism work at the same time, for example.
Richard F-AI-nman
It’s possible, as MIT Technology Review suggested, that tools like the AI Physicist could help take over some aspects of scientific research. Machine learning systems excel at finding patterns and making predictions, and is most useful when poring over more data and finding more obscure correlations than a human would ever be able to.
With an algorithm that can simplify and streamline its findings, not unlike a digital Occam’s Razor, research labs across all kinds of science may soon spot new discoveries that humans could have been overlooking for years.
You Can Now Preorder a $150,000 Hoverbike. Hoversurf’s $150,000 Hover One hoverbike is now available for preorder with deliveries expected to occur in the third quarter of 2019.
Robots have never been more advanced than they are today, but they aren’t terribly adaptable — most are capable of completing just one or two specific tasks.
In an effort to create a more capable robot, researchers from Cornell University designed one that’s essentially many smaller robots stuck together. This modular formation means the robot can transform into whatever shape best suits the task at hand.
Metabot
What makes this shape-shifting robot remarkable is that it doesn’t need anyone telling it when to change shape — it figures that out on its own using a system of cameras, sensors, and AI software.
The Cornell team describes the shape-shifting robot in a paper published Wednesday in the journal Science Robotics, but to get a real feel for its capabilities, we suggest checking out the video above.
Like a Boss
Watch it and you’ll see the robot navigate a makeshift office environment that looks like a box fort you might have built as a child. The robot navigates around what seems like whatever crap the Cornell researchers had lying around the lab — a water filter, a stool — to retrieve objects and place them in a designated drop-off zone.
If the bot decides its current shape isn’t ideal for completing a task, it switches it up — various parts detach and reattach themselves to the robot’s main body. This allows it to navigate narrow spaces or even inchworm itself up a set of stairs.
Let’s just hope the researchers building the next generations of these transforming robots model them after the Autobots and not the Decepticons.
Forget scarves and mittens. Soon, we might be able to knit entire buildings.
A team from the Swiss university ETH Zurich has developed a technique that allows them to knit textiles that can then form the scaffolds for large concrete structures. As a proof of concept, they created a 13-foot-tall architectural structure that’s now on display in Mexico City.
Knit Picking
To create this curvaceous knitted concrete structure, the team started by using an industrial knitting machine to produce the textile that serves as its basis. This process produced just four long strips of fabric and took about 36 hours.
After transporting the textile to Mexico City, they fitted it over a steel cable-net and a temporary frame, inserting balloons into pockets in the fabric to give it its desired shape. Then they sprayed the structure with a specially formulated concrete mixture. After that hardened, they applied fiber-reinforced concrete.
While the textile and net weighed a total of just 121 pounds, they were able to support 5.5 tons of concrete.
Fabric’s Future
The Mexico City structure marks the first use of this knitting technique to create a structure on an architectural scale, but it might not be the last.
“Knitting offers a key advantage that we no longer need to create 3D shapes by assembling various parts,” said developer Mariana Popescu in a press release. “With the right knitting pattern, we can produce a flexible formwork for any and all kinds of shell structures, pockets, and channels just by pressing a button.”
