Sum of the Parts

The movie studio 20th Century Fox developed a machine learning algorithm that it’s using to predict who will like new movies. The system, described in a paper published on the preprint server ArXiv in late October, analyzes and categorizes movie trailers based on the objects and people it detects in them.

Other films with similar trailers, according to the algorithm, will likely appeal to similar audiences.

Mix and Match

For instance, a blog post about the algorithm details how it interpreted the X-Men film “Logan.” After watching the trailer, the top four labels picked up by the algorithm were “tree,” “facial hair,” “car,” and “man,” which led the algorithm to recommend the visually-similar film “The Revenant,” perhaps because of all the beards and forests.

But, The Verge highlighted, the algorithm totally missed out on the opportunity to pair “Logan” with “Ant-Man,” and “Deadpool,” both of which are also subversions of a typical superhero story.

Party Trick

Artificial intelligence and robots are rapidly automating Hollywood, with AI recommending scripts to produce and algorithmically generating special effects. But it’s unclear just who Fox’s new system will actually help, especially considering AI’s current limitations.

Maybe this tool could help marketing teams target specific demographics with ads once the trailer has been produced. But it’s difficult to imagine an area where an image-detection algorithm outperforms humans who are capable of making deeper connections.

But hey, it’s still neat!

READ MORE: 20th Century Fox is using AI to analyze movie trailers and find out what films audiences will like [The Verge]

More on Hollywood: It’s This Woman’s job to Dream up Hollywood’s Sci-Fi Future

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Fox is Using Machine Learning to Predict Which Movies Will be Hits

Where in the World

In a few years, GPS systems may get a boost from a new generation of quantum physics navigation tools.

After a series of high profile GPS hacks and failures, WIRED reported, the U.S. military and several national labs are working on new quantum navigators that could revolutionize global positioning systems by cutting out the need for satellite

Red Light Green Light

The quantum navigator takes the form of a small diamond cube synthesized to have pockets of nitrogen atoms among the usual carbon lattice. As a green laser passes through the cube, these nitrogen pockets emit a red light that varies in intensity depending on the strength and direction of whatever magnetic field is affecting the cube.

When calibrated to the patterns of Earth’s magnetic field, the device can be used as its own global positioning device — one that doesn’t require satellites that can be cracked by hackers. The gyroscope and other quantum tools rely on different physical structures and respond to different stimuli, but their use of quantum mechanics offers similar benefits over today’s technology.

You Won’t Feel a Thing

Government and military researchers hope that their tools will become available within the next decade as quantum tech continues to improve. And contractors including Lockheed Martin are already interested, according to WIRED.

For now, the tools aren’t nearly as precise as GPS tech, so it’s more likely that quantum navigation will serve as an emergency backup or to verify what a GPS is reporting — it most likely won’t replace it, at least for a while.

READ MORE: QUANTUM PHYSICISTS FOUND A NEW, SAFER WAY TO NAVIGATE [WIRED]

More on quantum technology: The World’s First Practical Quantum Computer May Be Just Five Years Away

See the rest here:
Quantum Navigation Could be as Accurate as GPS, Without Satellites

Midair Meeting

The Pentagon just pulled off an extraordinary feat: it shot a dummy nuclear missile out of the sky, using another missile.

On October 26, the U.S.  Missile Defense Agency launched a fake medium-range nuclear missile from the Pacific Missile Range Facility at Kauai, Hawaii. Moments later, the destroyer USS John Finn fired a specialized “interceptor” called the SM-3 Block IIA — a U.S.-Japanese missile designed to intercept enemy missiles.

Threading the Needle

The SM-3 can launch from land or sea, and was designed to intercept short- and medium-range ballistic missiles — very much like the ones in Russia and North Korea‘s stockpiles.

According to manufacturer Raytheon, the SM-3 interceptor is designed to slam into the target at a force of a “10-ton truck traveling 600 mph.” It doesn’t explode upon impact — it simply rams the enemy missile at ultra-high speeds to destroy it.

Don’t Press The Red Button

It’s the second successful demonstration of the SM-3 after two failed attempts in June 2017 and January 2018, according to Defense News. The first was a spectacular mission failure when a sailor accidentally caused the SM-3 missile to self-destruct mid-flight.

A recently released video shows the SM-3 colliding with the dummy missile in mid-air:

Shooting Bullets With Bullets

It’s a spectacular feat that essentially amounts to hitting a high-velocity target with another even faster missile — think of it as shooting a bullet out of the sky with another bullet.

Will it save us from nuclear armageddon? Impossible to tell at this early stage. But the enemy is bound to be paying attention as well, meeting U.S. advancements in missile technology with their own.

READ MORE: After consecutive failures, watch US Navy intercept test missile with SM-3 weapon [Defense News]

More on anti-missile technology: Russia Is Building an AI-Powered Missile That Can Think for Itself

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Watch a Missile Smash a Dummy Nuclear Warhead Out of the Sky

Berning Man

Where others might see 67,000 acres of desolate desert, Jeffrey Berns sees a future utopia powered by blockchain.

Earlier this year, Berns’s company, Blockchains LLC, bought a vast plot of land surrounding Tesla’s Nevada Gigafactory for $170 million. On it, he plans to build an experimental community that operates on a blockchain, the digital ledger technology developed to support bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies.

“This will either be the biggest thing ever, or the most spectacular crash and burn in the history of mankind,” Berns told The New York Times. “I don’t know which one. I believe it’s the former, but either way it’s going to be one hell of a ride.”

Sandbox City

According to The Times, Berns’s plan is to populate the land with houses, a business district, a college, and an e-gaming arena, with blockchain serving as the new community’s lifeblood.

Every resident and employee of this blockchain city will have an address on the Ethereum network that they’ll use to vote, store their personal data, record property ownership, and more.

So far Berns has spent $300 million on his blockchain city, but he didn’t earn the money through his career as a lawyer — he made it by selling high on some ether he bought in 2015. Which seems appropriate.

Get Rich Quicksand

For now, Berns will continuing working on the master plan for his community, with construction expected to begin no earlier than late 2019.

No word yet on when residents will be able to move into this city of the future, so for now, the closest you’ll probably be able to get to living on the blockchain is asking your landlord if you can pay your rent in crypto.

Just don’t be too surprised if they decline, though — after all, not everyone shares Berns’s unshakable faith in the blockchain.

READ MORE: A Cryptocurrency Millionaire Wants to Build a Utopia in Nevada [The New York Times]

More on the blockchain: Here’s Why the Blockchain Might Change the Future (and Why It May Not Live up to the Hype)

See the rest here:
A Millionaire Is Building a Blockchain Utopia in the Nevada Desert

Extra Crispy

The Republic of Palau, an island nation North of Australia, just announced that it will ban all sunscreens that contain any of ten toxic ingredients by 2020.

The new law, which will hit violating retailers with thousand-dollar fines, comes as part of a push to slow, prevent, and reverse coral bleaching in the area, according to BBC News.

Want a Sticker?

Palau joins Hawai’i among governments that have banned the toxic substances, perhaps the most harmful of which is a common sunscreen component called oxybenzone, repeatedly shown to kill off coral in controlled experiments.

Just like plastic straws make up a minuscule fraction of the plastic found in the oceans, evidence suggests that sunscreen is responsible for just a small portion of coral bleaching. The real culprits, as the BBC reported, are climate change and algal blooms caused by agricultural runoff.

Just Say No

But like banning plastic straws, putting the kaibosh on sunscreens with oxybenzone and other harmful chemicals is an obvious choice.

That’s especially the case given that several coral reef-safe types of sunscreen hit the markets in response to Hawai’i’s ban. Though major pharmaceutical corporations like L’Oreal and Johnson & Johnson are fighting the ban according to BBC, switching to a safer alternative should not at all get in the way of tourists traveling to Palau.

READ MORE: Coral: Palau to ban sunscreen products to protect reefs [BBC News]

More on sunscreen: A Bacteria Is Making Sunscreen Safe for You and the Environment

Read more:
A Sunscreen Ban Won’t Save the Coral Reefs, but It’s a Good Start

The Finish Line

One of the largest and most expensive studies ever to explore a potential link between cell phones and cancer has finally concluded.

On Thursday, the National Toxicology Program (NTP) released the results of a study focused on determining if there’s any evidence of a link between cell phone use and cancer. Its conclusion: yes, but only under very specific circumstances.

“Clear Evidence”

For their study, the NTP researchers exposed rats and mice to high levels of radio frequency radiation for nine hours a day for two years.

Following this exposure, 5 to 7 percent of the male rats developed malignant schwannomas, a type of nerve tumor, in their hearts, while 2 to 3 percent of the male rats developed malignant gliomas, a deadly brain cancer. None of the rodents in the control groups developed these conditions.

The above results led the agency to conclude there is “clear evidence” of a link between cell phone use and heart schwannomas and “some evidence” of a link with brain tumors.

iPhones and Oranges

Now for the caveats.

For one thing, the NTP study has been in the works since 1999, and today’s cell phones no longer utilize the same radio frequency. So unless you’re still rocking a 2G flip-phone, the radio waves emitted by your device are probably the kind that have more trouble penetrating the human body.

Secondly, the rodents’ exposure to the radiation wasn’t entirely comparable to that of a human cell phone user.

“In our studies, rats and mice received radio frequency radiation across their whole bodies,” said NTP senior scientist John Bucher in a press release. “By contrast, people are mostly exposed in specific local tissues close to where they hold the phone. In addition, the exposure levels and durations in our studies were greater than what people experience.”

So, $30 million and nearly two decades later, it looks like this NTP study is leaving us right where we were before it started: almost completely unsure whether the phones in our pockets could be harming our health.

READ MORE: Study of Cellphone Risks Finds ‘Some Evidence’ of Link to Cancer, at Least in Male Rats [The New York Times]

More on cancer and cell phones: Here’s Why You Shouldn’t Worry About California’s New Guidelines for Cell Phone Usage

Read more:
Your Cell Phone Could Cause Cancer — Under Very Specific Conditions

Sick AV, Dude

Once your car can drive itself, you’ll be able to use your daily commute to catch up on work or read the latest headlines — at least, unless riding in an autonomous car makes you sick.

Motion sickness occurs due to a disconnect between what we see and what we feel. If your body is moving in a car, but you’re looking at something stationary — a book or your smartphone, for example — your brain sometimes interprets this to mean you’re hallucinating due to some poison, and it’ll force you to vomit to get the toxin out of your system.

Keeping your eyes on the road, which is also moving, can help you avoid losing your lunch. But what’s the point of riding in an AV if you can’t ignore the road (other than, you know, increased safety)?

To get ahead of the motion sickness issue, Jaguar Land Rover, the UK’s largest car manufacturer, is developing a system it claims will identify when a rider in an AV is likely to experience a bout of motion sickness and take action to prevent it.

Vague but Encouraging

First, Jaguar’s algorithm produces a “wellness score” for each passenger in a vehicle based on data from biometric sensors. How these sensors work is something of a mystery, though. Does the car connect to the rider’s FitBit to check their heart rate? Do cameras inside the cabin monitor their features for signs of nausea?

The press release doesn’t say, but it does claim the system can use the wellness score to “automatically personalise a vehicle’s driving and cabin settings to reduce the effects of feeling car sick by up to 60%.”

Although Jaguar Land Rover is pretty light on specifics, it‘s encouraging to see at least one automaker trying to get ahead of AV-caused motion sickness. After all, it’s going to be hard enough to convince people to accept the vehicles without adding literal vomit to the mix.

READ MORE: Future Jaguar and Land Rover Vehicles Will Help Cure Motion Sickness [Jaguar Land Rover]

More on AV adoption: Poll: Cool Teens Think Self-Driving Cars Are Totally Lame

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A Major Automaker Is Trying to Stop AVs From Making People Sick

Minority Report

Imagine this: You file a police report, but back at the station, they feed it into an algorithm — and it accuses you of lying, as though it had somehow looked inside your brain.

That might sound like science fiction, but Spain is currently rolling out a very similar program, called VeriPol, in many of its police stations. VeriPol’s creators say that when it flags a report as false, it turns out to be correct more than four-fifths of the time.

Lie Detector

VeriPol is the work of researchers at Cardiff University and Charles III University of Madrid.

In a paper published earlier this year in the journal Knowledge-Based Systems, they describe how they trained the lie detector with a data set of more than 1,000 robbery reports — including a number that police identified as false — to identify subtle signs that a report wasn’t true.

Thought Crime

In pilot studies in Murcia and Malaga, Quartz reported, further investigation showed that the algorithm was correct about 83 percent of the time that it suspected a report was false.

Still, the project raises uncomfortable questions about allowing algorithms to act as lie detectors. Fast Company reported earlier this year that authorities in the United States, Canada, and the European Union are testing a separate system called AVATAR that they want to use to collect biometric data about subjects at border crossings — and analyze it for signs that they’re not being truthful.

Maybe the real question isn’t whether the tech works, but whether we want to permit authorities to act upon what’s essentially a good — but not perfect — assumption that someone is lying.

READ MORE: Police Are Using Artificial Intelligence to Spot Written Lies [Quartz]

More on lie detectors: Stormy Daniels Took a Polygraph. What Do We Do With the Results?

See the rest here:
This AI Lie Detector Flags Falsified Police Reports

Factory Farm

Plastics have revolutionized manufacturing, but they’re still terrible for the environment.

Manufacturing plastics is an energy-intensive slog that ends in mountains of toxic industrial waste and greenhouse gas emissions. And then the plastic itself that we use ends up sitting in a garbage heap for thousands of years before it biodegrades.

Scientists have spent years investigating ways to manufacture plastics without ruining the planet, and a Toronto biotech startup called Genecis says it’s found a good answer: factories where vats of bacteria digest food waste and use it to form biodegradable plastic in their tiny microbial guts.

One-Two Punch

The plastic-pooping bacteria stand to clean up several kinds of pollution while churning out usable materials, according to Genecis.

That’s because the microbes feed on waste food or other organic materials — waste that CBC reported gives off 20 percent of Canada’s methane emissions as it sits in landfills.

Then What?

The plastic that the little buggers produce isn’t anything new. It’s called PHA and it’s used in anything that needs to biodegrade quickly, like those self-dissolving stitches. What’s new here is that food waste is much cheaper than the raw materials that usually go into plastics, leading Genecis to suspect it can make the same plastics for 40 percent less cost.

There are a lot of buzzworthy new alternative materials out there, but with a clear environmental and financial benefit, it’s possible these little bacteria factories might be here to stay.

READ MORE: Greener coffee pods? Bacteria help turn food waste into compostable plastic [CBC]

More on cleaning up plastics: The EU Just Voted to Completely ban Single-Use Plastics

See more here:
These Bacteria Digest Food Waste Into Biodegradable Plastic

Please, Santa?

It’s never too early to start writing your Christmas wish list, right? Because we know what’s now at the top of ours: a hoverbike.

We’ve had our eyes on Hoversurf’s Scorpion-3 since early last year — but now, the Russian drone start-up is accepting preorders on an updated version of the vehicle.

Flying Bike

The S3 2019 is part motorcycle and part quadcopter. According to the Hoversurf website, the battery-powered vehicle weighs 253 pounds and has a flight time of 10 to 25 minutes depending on operator weight. Its maximum legal speed is 60 mph — though as for how fast the craft can actually move, that’s unknown. Hoversurf also notes that the vehicle’s “safe flight altitude” is 16 feet, but again, we aren’t sure how high it can actually soar.

What we do know: The four blades that provide S3 with its lift spin at shin level, and while this certainly looks like it would be a safety hazard, the U.S. Department of Transportation’s Federal Aviation Administration approved the craft for legal use as an ultralight vehicle in September.

That means you can only operate an S3 for recreational or sports purposes — but you can’t cruise to work on your morning commute.

Plummeting Bank Account

You don’t need a pilot’s license to operate an S3, but you will need a decent amount of disposable income — the Star Wars-esque craft will set you back $150,000.

If that number doesn’t cause your eyes to cross, go ahead and slap down the $10,000 deposit needed to claim a spot in the reservation queue. You’ll then receive an email when it’s time to to place your order. You can expect to receive your S3 2019 two to six months after that, according to the company website.

That means there’s a pretty good chance you won’t be able to hover around your front yard this Christmas morning, but a 2019 jaunt is a genuine possibility.

READ MORE: For $150,000 You Can Now Order Your Own Hoverbike [New Atlas]

More on Hoversurf: Watch the World’s First Rideable Hoverbike in Flight

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You Can Now Preorder a $150,000 Hoverbike

Ups and Downs

Can we please get off Mr. Musk’s Wild Ride now? We don’t know how much more of this Tesla rollercoaster we can take.

In 2018 alone, Elon Musk’s clean energy company has endured a faulty flufferbot, furious investors, and an SEC probe and settlement. But there was good news, too. Model 3 deliveries reportedly increased, and just this week, we found out that Tesla had a historic financial quarter, generating $312 million in profit.

And now we’re plummeting again.

Closing In

On Friday, The Wall Street Journal reported that the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) is deepening a criminal probe into whether Tesla “misstated information about production of its Model 3 sedans and misled investors about the company’s business going back to early 2017.”

We’ve known about the FBI’s Tesla criminal probe since September 18, but this is the first report confirming that Model 3 production is at the center of the investigation.

According to the WSJ’s sources, FBI agents have been reaching out to former Tesla employees in recent weeks to ask if they’d be willing to testify in the criminal case, though no word yet on whether any have agreed.

Casual CEO

We might be having trouble keeping up with these twists and turns, but Musk seems to be taking the FBI’s Tesla criminal probe all in stride — he spent much of Friday afternoon joking around with his Twitter followers about dank memes.

Clearly he has the stomach for this, but it’d be hard to blame any Tesla investors for deciding they’d had enough.

READ MORE: Tesla Faces Deepening Criminal Probe Over Whether It Misstated Production Figures [The Wall Street Journal]

More on Tesla: Elon Musk Says Your Tesla Will Earn You Money While You Sleep

View original post here:
FBI’s Tesla Criminal Probe Reportedly Centers on Model 3 Production

Danger, Will Robinson

As famous Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield demonstrated with his extraterrestrial sob session, fluids behave strangely in space.

And while microgravity makes for a great viral video, it also has terrifying medical implications that we absolutely need to sort out before we send people into space for the months or years necessary for deep space exploration.

Specifically, research published Thursday In the New England Journal of Medicine demonstrated that our brains undergo lasting changes after we spend enough time in space. According to the study, cerebrospinal fluid — which normally cushions our brain and spinal cord — behaves differently in zero gravity, causing it to pool around and squish our brains.

Mysterious Symptoms

The brains of the Russian cosmonauts who were studied in the experiment mostly bounced back upon returning to Earth.

But even seven months later, some abnormalities remained. According to National Geographic, the researchers suspect that high pressure  inside the cosmonauts’ skulls may have squeezed extra water into brain cells which later drained out en masse.

Now What?

So far, scientists don’t know whether or not this brain shrinkage is related to any sort of cognitive or other neurological symptoms — it might just be a weird quirk of microgravity.

But along with other space hazards like deadly radiation and squished eyeballs, it’s clear that we have a plethora of medical questions to answer before we set out to explore the stars.

READ MORE: Cosmonaut brains show space travel causes lasting changes [National Geographic]

More on space medicine: Traveling to Mars Will Blast Astronauts With Deadly Cosmic Radiation, new Data Shows

More here:
Zero Gravity Causes Worrisome Changes In Astronauts’ Brains

Wrong Direction

Breathing polluted air is as likely to kill you as tobacco use — worldwide, each kills about 7 million people annually. But while the world is making progress in the war against tobacco, air pollution is getting worse.

The Director General of the World Health Organization (WHO) hopes to change that.

“The world has turned the corner on tobacco,” wrote Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus in an opinion piece published by The Guardian on Saturday. “Now it must do the same for the ‘new tobacco’ — the toxic air that billions breathe every day.”

Taking Action

According to the WHO, nine out of 10 people in the world breathe polluted air.

This week, the organization is hosting the first Global Conference on Air Pollution and Health, and Ghebreyesus is hopeful world leaders will use the conference as the opportunity to commit to cutting air pollution in their nations.

“Despite the overwhelming evidence, political action is still urgently needed to boost investments and speed up action to reduce air pollution,” he wrote, noting that this action could take the form of more stringent air quality standards, improved access to clean energy, or increased investment in green technologies.

Reduced Risk

The impact sustained action against air pollution could have on public health is hard to overstate.

“No one, rich or poor, can escape air pollution. A clean and healthy environment is the single most important precondition for ensuring good health,” wrote Ghebreyesus in his Guardian piece. “By cleaning up the air we breathe, we can prevent or at least reduce some of the greatest health risks.”

The conference ends on Thursday, so we won’t have to wait long to see which nations do — or don’t — heed the WHO’s call to action.

READ MORE: Air Pollution Is the New Tobacco. Time to Tackle This Epidemic [The Guardian]

More on air pollution: Dumber Humans — That’s Just One Effect of a More Polluted Future

Original post:
WHO Director: Air Pollution Is the “New Tobacco”

Hall of Mirrors

A few years ago, the journal Small published a study showing how photosynthetic bacteria could absorb and release photons as the light bounced across a minuscule gap between two mirrors.

Now, a retroactive look at the study’s data published in The Journal of Physics Communications suggests something more may have been going on. The bacteria may have been the first living organisms to operate in the realm of quantum physics, becoming entangled with the bouncing light at the quantum scale.

Cat’s Cradle

The experiment in question, as described by Scientific American, involved individual photons — the smallest quantifiable unit of light that can behave like a tiny particle but also a wave of energy within quantum physics — bouncing between two mirrors separated by a microscopic distance.

But a look at the energy levels in the experimental setup suggests that the bacteria may have become entangled, as some individual photons seem to have simultaneously interacted with and missed the bacterium at the same time.

Super Position

There’s reason to be skeptical of these results until someone actually recreates the experiment while looking for signs of quantum interactions. As with any look back at an existing study, scientists are restricted to the amount and quality of data that was already published. And, as Scientific American noted, the energy levels of the bacteria and the mirror setup should have been recorded individually — which they were not — in order to verify quantum entanglement.

But if this research holds up, it would be the first time a life form operated on the realm of quantum physics, something usually limited to subatomic particles. And even though the microbes are small, that’s a big deal.

READ MORE: “Schrödinger’s Bacterium” Could Be a Quantum Biology Milestone [Scientific American]

More on quantum physics: The World’s First Practical Quantum Computer May Be Just Five Years Away

The rest is here:
Scientists May Have Put Microbes in a State of Quantum Entanglement

Good Luck

On October 10, a Chinese organization called the Tian Fu New Area Science Society revealed plans to replace the streetlights in the city of Chengdu with a satellite designed to reflect sunlight toward the Earth’s surface at night.

But in a new interview with Astronomy, an associate professor of aerospace engineering at the University of Texas at Austin named Ryan Russel argued that based on what he’s read, the artificial moon plan would be impossible to implement.

Promised the Moon

Wu Chunfeng, the head of the Tian Fu New Area Science Society, told China Daily the artificial moon would orbit about 310 miles above Earth, delivering an expected brightness humans would perceive to be about one-fifth that of a typical streetlight.

The plan is to launch one artificial moon in 2020 and then three more in 2022 if the first works as hoped. Together, these satellites could illuminate an area of up to 4,000 square miles, Chunfeng claims.

But Russell is far from convinced.

“Their claim for 1 [low-earth orbit satellite] at [300 miles] must be a typo or misinformed spokesperson,” he told Astronomy. “The article I read implied you could hover a satellite over a particular city, which of course is not possible.”

Overkill Overhead

To keep the satellite in place over Chengdu, it would need to be about 22,000 miles above the Earth’s surface, said Russel, and its reflective surface would need to be massive to reflect sunlight from that distance. At an altitude of just 300 miles, the satellite would quickly zip around the Earth, constantly illuminating new locations.

Even if the city could put the artificial moon plan into action, though, Russell isn’t convinced it should.

“It’s a very complicated solution that affects everyone to a simple problem that affects a few,” he told Astronomy. “It’s light pollution on steroids.”

Maybe Chengdu shouldn’t give up on its streetlights just yet.

READ MORE: Why China’s Artificial Moon Probably Won’t Work [Astronomy]

More on the artificial moon: A Chinese City Plans to Replace Its Streetlights With an Artificial Moon

Original post:
There’s No Way China’s Artificial Moon Will Work, Says Expert

Gold Nuggets

A company called Ingelia says it’s figured out a way to turn human waste — the solid kind — into a combustible material it’s calling biochar. And if Ingelia’s claims are accurate, biochar can be burned for fuel just like coal, except with near–zero greenhouse gas emissions, according to Business Insider.

That’s because almost all of the pollutants and more harmful chemicals that would normally be given off while burning solid fuels is siphoned away into treatable liquid waste, leaving a dry, combustible rod of poop fuel.

“Clean Coal“

Ingelia, which is currently working to strike a deal with Spanish waste management facilities, hopes to make enough biochar to replace 220 thousand tons of coal per year, corresponding to 500 thousand tons of carbon dioxide emissions.

But that’s by 2022, at which point we’ll have even less time to reach the urgent clean energy goals of that doomsday United Nations report. In an ideal world, we would have moved away from coal years ago. At least this gives us a viable alternative as we transition to other, renewable forms of electricity.

So while we can, in part, poop our way to a better world, biochar — and other new sewage-based energy sources — will only be one of many new world-saving sources of clean energy.

READ MORE: This Spanish company found a way to produce a fuel that emits no CO2 — and it’s made of sewage [Business Insider]

More on poop: Edible Tech is Finally Useful, is Here to Help you Poop

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Clean Coal Startup Turns Human Waste Into Earth-Friendly Fuel

Green-Light District

It doesn’t matter how advanced our self-driving cars get — if they aren’t allowed on roads, they aren’t going to save any lives.

The future of autonomous vehicles (AVs) in the U.S. depends on how lawmakers in Washington D.C. choose to regulate the vehicles. But until now, AV testing has largely taken place far from the nation’s capital, mostly in California and Arizona.

Ford is about to change that. The company just announced plans to be the first automaker to test its self-driving cars in the Distinct of Columbia — and how lawmakers feel about those vehicles could influence future AV legislation.

Career Day

Sherif Marakby, CEO of Ford Autonomous Vehicles, announced the decision to begin testing in D.C. via a blog post last week. According to Marakby, Ford’s politician-friendly focus will be on figuring out how its AVs could promote job creation in the District.

To that end, Ford plans to assess how AVs could increase mobility in D.C., thereby helping residents get to jobs that might otherwise be outside their reach, as well as train residents for future positions as AV technicians or operators.

Up Close and Personal

Marakby notes that D.C. is a particularly suitable location for this testing because the District is usually bustling with activity. The population increases significantly during the day as commuters arrive from the suburbs for work, while millions of people flock to D.C. each year for conferences or tourism.

D.C. is also home to the people responsible for crafting and passing AV legislation. “[I]t’s important that lawmakers see self-driving vehicles with their own eyes as we keep pushing for legislation that governs their safe use across the country,” Marakby wrote.

Ford’s ultimate goal is to launch a commercial AV service in D.C. in 2021. With this testing, the company has the opportunity to directly influence the people who could help it reach that goal — or oppose it.

READ MORE: A Monumental Moment: Our Self-Driving Business Development Expands to Washington, D.C. [Medium]

More on AV legislation: U.S. Senators Reveal the Six Principles They’ll Use to Regulate Self-Driving Vehicles

Continue reading here:
Ford’s Self-Driving Cars Are About to Chauffeur Your Senator

Free Your Mind

It turns out you don’t have to risk a bad trip to enjoy the mind-expanding benefits of psychedelics.

According to researchers from Leiden University, just a tiny dose of magic mushrooms or truffles containing psychedelic substances — an amount unlikely to make you think the floor is alive and wants to eat you — can enhance your cognitive abilities.

With Free Drugs

For their study, which was published Thursday in the journal Psychopharmacology, the researchers first tracked down 36 volunteers at an event organized by the Psychedelic Society of The Netherlands.

Then they asked these volunteers to each complete three tasks, which they designed to assess the person’s ability to identify a solution to a problem (that’s called convergent thinking), reason and find answers to new problems (fluid intelligence), and recognize many possible solutions to a problem (divergent thinking).

Each volunteer completed the tasks twice: once before consuming approximately 0.37 grams of dried truffles — that’s about one-third the weight of a jelly bean — and once after.

The researchers found that the microdoses improved the volunteers’ divergent and convergent thinking — they were better equipped to find a single solution to a problem and conjure up additional out-of-the-box solutions.

Do Trip

Microdosing has gained popularity in recent years among tech workers who think it gives them a creative boost at work, but this was the first study to explore how microdosing psychedelic substances can affect a volunteer’s cognitive abilities in a natural setting. Lead researcher Luisa Prochazkova is hopeful that its results will inspire others to pursue similar research on magic mushrooms.

“Apart from its benefits as a potential cognitive enhancement technique, microdosing could be further investigated for its therapeutic efficacy to help individuals who suffer from rigid thought patterns or behavior such as individuals with depression or obsessive-compulsive disorder,” she said in a press release.

And those benefits would come without the potential side effect of a bad trip.

READ MORE: Can Tiny Doses of Magic Mushrooms Unlock Creativity? [EurekAlert]

More on psychedelics: Did an Acid Trip Change Your Life? Scientists Want to Know About It

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A Microdose Of “Magic Mushrooms” Could Unleash Your Creativity

Scrub Tech

It’s starting to look as though our best bet to stave off a climate change apocalypse is carbon capture: technology that can clean a huge amount of greenhouse gases from the planet’s atmosphere.

The problem: that technology doesn’t exist yet. In a 368-page report published Thursday by the National Academies of Science, leading scientists argued that the government should invest heavily in research that could leave to planet-saving carbon capture.

Outatime

The urgent call for carbon capture research comes on the tail of a damning UN report in which researchers concluded that civilization has much less time than we thought to prevent irreparable environmental devastation.

This is a different sort of investment than expanding our use of solar and wind power — two things we know how to do fairly well at this point. Carbon capture tech still needs more fundamental research.

But Maybe

Different approaches to carbon capture tech have shown promise at the proof of concept level, as The New York Times reported. The real challenge will be scaling those different technologies to the point where they can accomplish what the National Academies of Sciences is hoping.

Unfortunately, this may mean putting all of our chips on entrepreneurs and hoping that some tech company cracks the climate code. Because until someone figures carbon capture out, it would seem things are going to keep getting worse.

READ MORE: Scientists Push for a Crash Program to Scrub Carbon From the Air [The New York Times]

More on carbon capture: Experts Worry a Landmark Report on Climate Change Will Call for Unrealistic Tech

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Scientists: The Government Should Invest in Carbon Capture Now

Bathroom Bricks

The next time you pee, think about this: Your urine could one day create the sustainable building materials of the future.

Dyllon Randall is a research engineer at the University of Cape Town. He’s also the supervisor on a new project in which students harvested urine from urinals so they could transform the waste into building bricks. Not only could these bio-bricks eliminate one form of human waste, they could also help fight climate change.

Liquid Gold

More on upcycling waste: Researchers Devise Method for Recycling Astronaut Urine to Make 3D Printing Plastics in Space

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These Environmentally Friendly Bricks Are Made out of Human Urine