Robinhood Adds Bitcoin Cash & Litecoin Trading, Will …

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Rapidly-expanding fintech unicorn Robinhood has added bitcoin cash and litecoin to the growing stable of cryptocurrencies that users can trade on the popular stock trading app.

The commission-free stock trading app on Thursday announced that it had onboarded its five millionth user, marking yet another milestone for the firm which achieved a $5.6 billion valuation in May at the conclusion of its $363 million Series D funding round.

In tandem with this milestone, Robinhood added full support for bitcoin cash and litecoin to its nascent cryptocurrency trading service, which is currently available in 17 U.S. states and heretofore facilitated bitcoin and ethereum trading.

Perhaps even more significantly, the firm also announced that it plans to add support for coin transfers, likely confirming reports that the company is building an in-app cryptocurrency wallet. At present, users can buy and sell cryptocurrencies on the brokerage platform but cannot deposit, withdraw, or transfer them.

Users both inside and outside of markets where Robinhood Crypto is currently available can continue to add 16 cryptocurrencies to their portfolio watchlist, and the firm has said that it plans to continue to expand the list of cryptoassets available for trading.

Armed with its hundreds of millions of dollars in funding as well as its successful equities trading platform the company has said that it doesnt intend to turn a profit on cryptocurrency trading anytime soon. Rather, it will continue to operate the service as a break-even venture designed to build its market share and help it become the worlds largest crypto platform.

As CCN reported, Robinhood is also said to have approached federal regulators about acquiring the licenses necessary to operate as a chartered national bank, which would allow it to offer traditional banking services to its customers and also exempt it from the patchwork of state-level regulations governing money transmitter businesses. Its not clear how far these discussions have progressed, but other fintech startups including Square have thus far been unsuccessful in their attempts to secure national banking charters.

Header Image from Robinhood

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Space News From SpaceDaily.Com

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Yusaku Maezawa: Japanese spaceman with a taste for artTokyo (AFP) Sept 18, 2018 Billionaire Yusaku Maezawa, confirmed as SpaceX's first Moon tourist, is a former wannabe rock star now worth $3 billion with a penchant for pricey modern art as well as space travel. The 42-year-old tycoon, chief executive of Japan's largest online fashion mall, is the country's 18th richest person, according to business magazine Forbes. His Instagram feed is peppered with shots of his luxury living - including private jets, yachts and designer watches, but also his beloved art. Maezawa hi ... read moreJapanese billionaire businessman revealed as SpaceX's first Moon traveler Hawthorne, United States (AFP) Sept 18, 2018 A Japanese billionaire and online fashion tycoon, Yusaku Maezawa, will be the first man to fly on a monster SpaceX rocket around the Moon as early as 2023, and he plans to bring six to eight artists along. ... moreJuno image showcases Jupiter's brown barge Washington (UPI) Sep 17, 2018 Jupiter's "brown barge" feature is the subject of a new photograph snapped by Juno's camera. ... moreBaikonur Facilities to Undergo Overhaul Before OneWeb Satellites Launch - Source Baikonur, Kazakhstan (Sputnik) Sep 17, 2018The assembly and testing facility of the Baikonur cosmodrome which will be used for the launch of OneWeb satellites atop Russian rockets will go through a reconstruction ahead of the beginning of th ... moreFly me to the Moon? A look at the space-tourism race Washington (AFP) Sept 14, 2018 SpaceX is among a handful of companies racing to propel tourists into space. Here are the top projects in the works, and what they involve. ... more

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Beaches | Chicago Park District

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How often does CPD sample the water? The Chicago Park District samples the beaches seven days a week starting the Friday of Memorial Day weekend until Labor Day. Chicago Park District Lab Sample Collectors sample between sunrise and 8:30 am.

What method does CPD use? The Chicago Park District and the University of Illinois at Chicago School of Public Health have partnered to expand the water quality testing program to utilize a new Rapid Testing method developed by the US Environmental Protection Agency (USEPA). The Rapid Testing method measures levels of bacterial DNA in beach water. The traditional Culture Based method provides results after 18-24 hours, but the Rapid Test provides results within 3-4 hours. The Chicago Park District can use results of the Rapid Test to notify the public when the risk is elevated for developing gastrointestinal symptoms.

What does CPD sample for?The Chicago Park District tests the water for Enterococci bacteria. Enterococci is not harmful itself and is naturally occurring in the environment. However, this bacteria is an indicator of the presence of other pathogens that could make you sick. US Environmental Protection Agency (USEPA) beach policy recommends notifying the public when Enterococci bacteria levels are above the federal water quality Beach Action Value (BAV), which is 1000 CCE. This standard is used at beaches throughout the Great Lakes region.

Why does CPD issue water quality advisories?If a water sample exceeds 1000 CCE of Enterococci bacteria, the Chicago Park District will issue a swim advisory which will be indicated with a yellow flag.

How does CPD inform the public?Beach water quality information is posted by 1:30 pm on http://www.chicagoparkdistrict.com/beaches and the Beach Hotline 312-74-BEACH.

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What is Litecoin? A Basic Beginners Guide – Blockgeeks

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What is Litecoin? A Basic Beginners Guide. Litecoin has taken the world by storm.

As more and more people are embracing the world of cryptocurrency, people are looking for investment opportunities outside of Bitcoin and Ethereum. Litecoin clearly looks like a popular choice.

Consider this: The price of litecoin has increased by 7,291% from the beginning of 2017! In comparison, bitcoin only increased by 1731%.

Image Credit: Coin Market Cap

That graph is scary!

Anyway, in this guide, we are going to do a deep dive on litecoin. Lets take a peek underneath the hood and see how it functions.

While the identity of the Bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto is shrouded in mystery, Litecoins creator Charlie Lee is very active on social media and his blog. Charlie Lee is an ex-Google employee who had the vision to create a lighter version of Bitcoin.

While Bitcoin was seen as gold and a store of value for long-term purposes, Litecoin was seen as the silver and a means of a transaction for cheaper and everyday purposes. So, on October 7 2011, litecoin was released via an open-source client on GitHub. The Litecoin Network went live on October 13 2011. It is basically a fork of the Bitcoin Core client.

Image Credit: Coindesk

If we are to truly understand Litecoin, comparisons with Bitcoin is a must. Litecoin, by their own admission, is a clone of Bitcoin.

So, what are some of the fundamental differences that set it apart from bitcoin? Lets explore them one by one.

One of the most fundamental and technical differences between the two is their mining procedure. Both use Proof-of-work consensus mechanism. Proof-of-work is pretty straightforward to understand.

The miners use their computational power to solve extremely hard cryptographic puzzles. The puzzle solving needs to be extremely hard, if it is simple then miners will keep mining blocks and drain out the entire bitcoin supply.

However, while the puzzle solving part is difficult, checking to see if the solution of the puzzle is correct or not should be simple.

And that, in a nutshell, is proof of work.

Now, both bitcoin and litecoin go about this a little differently.

Bitcoin uses the SHA-256 hashing algorithm for its mining purposes. Before long, miners discovered that they could exponentially increase their mining power by joining together and forming mining pools via parallel processing.

In parallel processing, program instructions are divided among multiple processors. By doing this, the running time of that program decreases greatly and that is basically what the mining pools are doing.

The SHA 256 puzzles require a lot of processing power, and that gave rise to specialized application-specific integrated circuits aka ASICs. The only purpose that these ASICs served was bitcoin mining.

These mining pools would basically have an entire powerplant of ASICs designed specifically for bitcoin mining.

So, to combat these issues, Litecoin uses the Scrypt algorithm.

Scrypt was originally named s-crypt however it is pronounced as script. While this algorithm does, in fact, utilize the SHA 256 algorithm, its calculations are way more serialized than the SHA-256 in bitcoin. As such, parallelizing the calculations is not possible.

What does this mean?

Suppose we have two processes A and B.

In bitcoin, it will be possible for the ASICs to do A and B together at the same time by parallelizing them.

However, in Litecoin, you will need to do A and then B serially. If you try to parallelize them, the memory required becomes way too much too handle.

Scrypt is called a memory hard problem since the main limiting factor isnt the raw processing power but the memory. This is specifically the reason why parallelization becomes an issue. Running 5 memory hard processes in parallel requires 5 times as much memory. Now, of course there can be devices manufactured with tons of memory in it, but two factors mitigate this effect:

Scrypt has been deliberately designed to make sure that mining is accessible and democratized as possible. However, recently companies like Zeus and Flower Technology have managed to create Scrypt ASICs. This would, unfortunately, mean the demise of their dream of democratized mining.

Average block mining speed in Litecoin is 2.5 mins when compared to bitcoins 10. This graph shows the block creation time for litecoin:

Image Credit: Bitinfocharts

Because of network congestion and slow block mining times, the median time waiting time for transactions can fluctuate up to 29 mins!

Image Credit: Blockchain.info

This feature is extremely useful for merchants who need to do a lot of mini-transactions per day. Using litecoin, they can get two confirmations within 5 mins while just one confirmation in Bitcoin will take at least 10 mins.

Another major advantage of the faster block creation time is the variance in miner rewards. Since the time between blocks is so small, more and more miners get the opportunity to mine blocks and earn the mining rewards. What this means is that the mining rewards should theoretically be more well-distributed in Litecoin and, by extension, it should be more decentralized.

However, there are some disadvantages that come along with the faster transaction speed.

Firstly, since the block creation time is so low, it leads to the formation of more orphaned blocks.

What exactly are orphaned blocks?

Mining, in every sense, is a competition between miners. You have a bunch of miners and pools desperately trying to mine the next block that will be added to the chain. There have been instances when more than one miner was able to come up with a blockchain which could be added the chain.

In situations like these, the network decides which block is to be added next. The other block then proceeds to become an orphan i.e. a perfectly legitimate block which wont have any transactions in it

In litecoin, since the downtime between the blocks is so low, the chance of miners mining orphaned blocks increases exponentially. Orphaned blocks are just a drain on the system.

Secondly, there is an immense strain on the blockchain. Look at the number of transactions happening in the litecoin chain.

Image Credit: BitInfoCharts

Now, while it is true that litecoin was made specifically for transaction volume, it still puts immense strain and clogs up the blockchain.

Litecoin solved this problem to the great extent by introducing Segwit. We have covered Segwit in great detail before. In here we are just going to give you a brief overview of what it is. Before we continue, a huge shoutout to Professor Donald J Patterson and his Youtube channel djp3 for the explanation.

We are going to be using bitcoins example and script.

Following is what the transaction looks like in script form.

Suppose Alice wants to send 0.0015 BTC to Bob and in order to do so, she sends inputs which are worth 0.0015770 BTC. This is what the transaction detail looks like:

Image courtesy: djp3 youtube channel.

The first thing that you see:

Is the name of the Transaction aka the hash of the input and output value.

Vin_sz is the number of input data since Alice is sending the data using only one of her previous transactions, it is 1.

Vout_sz is 2 because the only outputs are Bob and the change.

This is the Input data:

See the input data? Alice is only using one input transaction.

Below the input data is her signature data.

Now, this signature data can cause 2 major problems:

So, thats where Segwit came up with a simple solution.

Sidechain as a concept has been in the bitcoin circles for quite some time now. The idea is very straightforward; you have a parallel chain which runs along with the main chain. The side chain will be attached to the main chain via a two-way peg.

This is what Blockstreams initial idea of the Bitcoin blockchain and a sidechain looked like:

What Dr. Wiulle thought of was simple why not add a feature to this sidechain? This feature would include the signature data of all transactions, separating it from the main chain in the process. This feature would be called Segregated Witness aka Segwit.

This is what a block would look like once it implements segwit:

So by removing the signature data from the transactions, it was killing two birds with one stone, the block space got emptier and the transactions became malleable free.

Since litecoin implemented Segwit, the load on their chain has considerably decreased.

Image Credit: Charlie Lee twitter

On July 2015, the bitcoin network was subjected to a flood attack.

A flood attack is an attack where the network is flooded with spam transactions, which basically fills up the blocks and clogs up the blockchain.

In this particular attack the network was congested with thousands of transactions and at one point there were around 80,000 transactions in the mempool!

So how does Litecoin save itself from flood attacks? According to Charlie Lee, they do it by making the attack as economically infeasible as possible. This is what he said in his interview with cointelegraph.

The reason why it is immune to this attack is because it was attacked in a similar fashion (though to a much smaller degree) years ago. I noticed this flaw in Bitcoin and patched it in Litecoin.

The fix implemented in Litecoin is just to charge the sender a fee for each tiny output he creates. For example, in this specific attack, the sender is charged one fee for sending to 34 tiny outputs of 0.00001 BTC. With the fix, that fee would be 34 times as much. So it would cost the attacker a lot more to perform the spam attack. The concept is fairly simple: the sender should pay for each tiny output he/she creates.

One of the most exciting features that litecoin is introducing is the Atomic Swap.

Atomic swap enables a cross-chain exchange of coins without the need of a third party. Eg. If Alice had 1 bitcoin and she wanted 100 litecoins in return, she would normally have to go to an exchange and pay certain fees to get it done.

With the implementation of Atomic Swaps, suppose Alice has 1 BTC and Bob has 100 LTC, they could simply swap their coins with each other, without going to through an exchange and paying any unnecessary transaction fees.

Atomic swaps work by utilizing Hashed timelock contracts.

Hashed timelock contracts or HTLCs are one of the most convenient applications of the payment channels. In fact, the Lightning Protocol is an implementation of the HTLC.

So, what is an HTLC? Till now we have seen channels which use timelocks. An HTLC extends that by introducing Hashlocks along with the timelocks.

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What are Nootropics? – Smart Drug Smarts | Fuel Your …

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Nootropics is an umbrella term for a class of chemicals some naturally-occurring, some manmade that give cognitive benefits to the human brain.

To get really technical, in order to be a nootropic, a substance must meet five criteria set by Dr. Corneliu E. Giurgea, the man who coined the term nootropic. The substance must

This is a pretty hefty list of requirements for any chemical. In fact, anything that meets this full definition, could equally well be called a miracle drug, not just a nootropic.

However, normally when you hear the term nootropickicked around, people really mean a cognitive enhancer something thatdoesbenefit thinking in some way (improved memory, faster speed-of-processing, increased concentration, or a combination of these, etc.), but might not meet the more rigorous definition above. Smart drugs is another largely-interchangeable term.

With this looser definition, discussions about nootropics can range from innocuous everyday substances like caffeine and Omega-3 fatty acids to regulated (and deservedly so) substances like Adderall.

For a more visual definition of nootropics, check out our infographic What Are Nootropics?

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This Tiny Robot Uses Flapping Wings to Imitate Animals’ Flight

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BUG BOT

Ever seen a bat gobble up a bug, or a fly evade a swatting hand? Even the most agile fighter pilot can’t match those aerial acrobatics.

Now a team of Dutch researchers has built a flying robot that uses flapping wings to bank and hover like a winged animal. It’s called the DelFly Nimble, and its creators say they can program it to imitate how specific flying creatures navigate their surroundings — allowing researchers to learn about animals’ flight by trying to copy it.

FLAPPY HOUR

The DelFly, which is about the size of a ping-pong ball and weighs slightly more than a double-A battery. It uses four flapping wings to hover for five minutes or more than a kilometer on a single charge.

Its inventors at the Delft University of Technology designed it to mimic the flapping patterns of various winged creatures, from flies and beetles to bats and hummingbirds. For its first test, they programmed the DelFly to emulate the common fruit fly, which can execute rapid banked turns to avoid predators.

FREE BIRD

Previous robots that imitate the flight of small flying animals include the DARPA-funded Nano Hummingbird and Harvard’s Robobee. But in a paper about their work, the Dutch scientists note that the DelFly outperforms both: unlike the Nano Hummingbird, their robot can fly autonomously, and unlike the Robobee it doesn’t require a tethered power supply.

Already, they wrote, the DelFly has yielded new insights into fruit flies’ rapid evasion maneuvers. In the future, they hope it will help scientists better understand how a range of animals fly, and perhaps one day let us design better human-sized aircraft.

READ MORE: Flappy Robot Mimics the Aerial Acrobatics of Agile Flying Insects [EurekAlert]

More on insect-inspired robots: Want to Build a Better Climbing Robot? Copy a Cockroach.

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This Tiny Robot Uses Flapping Wings to Imitate Animals’ Flight

Never Heard of Edge Computing? It’s About to Make Augmented Reality Way Better.

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AR DISAPPOINTMENT

So far, augmented reality (AR) has not lived up to its promise (see: Magic Leap’s disappointing headset). But just two innovations — 5G networks and edge computing — could change all that. That was the gospel AT&T preached during its Spark technology conference on Monday, at least.

You’ve probably already heard about 5G. It’s the next generation of high-speed cellular networks, and everyone and their mother (plus, you know, Futurism) has been anticipating its arrival for years.

You may not be familiar with edge computing, though. It’s time for that to change.

LIVING ON THE EDGE

Many of the devices we use today do their processing in “the cloud.” That really just means the processing happens at a massive data center owned by Amazon, Microsoft, or some other cloud provider, and not right on your device.

Reaching these data centers takes time, though, and we experience that delay as latency. This can be a major issue for AR devices, which need to be able to process data in near-real time in order to deliver worthwhile experiences.

To get around this issue, AT&T and other companies are turning to edge computing. Essentially, networks of smaller data centers (“cloudlets”) process some information physically closer to the source and send the rest on to the bigger data center if necessary. The result: less latency, and a better AR experience.

NEW TESTS

“Now you can think about placing low-latency, complex application and computation power closer to the users,” Igal Elbaz, AT&T’s Senior VP of Wireless Technology, said during Spark, as reported by Fierce Telecom. “By improving the functionality and the user experience, we can actually unleash some of the new business models that we all talk and hear about like AR, VR, self-driving cars, drones, mobile gaming, and others.”

So far, AT&T has just one edge computing test zone (in Palo Alto, CA), but it plans to expand that to the entire San Francisco Bay area. Eventually, “cloudlets” could blanket the entire nation, ensuring that the AR experience of tomorrow is nothing like the disappointing one of today.

READ MORE: AT&T: 5G and Edge Compute Are a Match Made for AR, VR Gaming [Fierce Telecom]

More on 5G: We’re One Step Closer to Super-Fast 5G Networks

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Plastics Made Without BPA Might Also Be Bad For You

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BPA PANIC

Is the plastic component bisphenol A (BPA) bad for you? It depends who you ask.

Either way, though, consumers have gotten worried that the chemical could cause health problems such as metabolic disease to cancer. So over the past decade, many manufacturers started making plastic with alternatives.

Unfortunately, though, that may not be much better: a new study in the journal Current Biology found that some of those BPA-free replacements cause similar health problems in mice — including effects that are passed down between generations.

MOUSE MODEL

Washington State University geneticist Patricia Hunt was conducting research on a totally different topic in 2003 when she first noticed the effects of BPA. The chemical was leaching out of cages in her lab and causing chromosomal abnormalities in mice.

Recently — and years after obtaining new mouse cages made from a BPA replacement — genetic abnormalities in the sex cells of lab mice.

It was “a strange déjà vu experience,” Hunt told Science. “Our control studies started going wacko.”

FAKE PLASTIC TREES

Intrigued by the ill effects of the supposedly safe replacement cages, Hunt and her colleagues started a new experiment. They fed pregnant mice a range of BPA and alternatives. The results were bleak: the mice given two common BPA alternatives soon started to show genetic damage, including defects that showed up in their offspring — the same kind of damage as the mice who had been exposed to BPA.

Hunt’s work will need to be replicated and expanded to other BPA alternatives before we can draw conclusions. Plus, there’s still debate over whether the chemical is harmful in the doses humans are exposed to.

But if Hunt’s results stand up to further testing, it could be a moment of reckoning for the plastic industry — or at least for its public relations departments.

READ MORE: BPA substitutes may be just as bad as the popular consumer plastic [Science]

More on BPA: A Possible Culprit in the Infertility Crisis: Plastic

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Plastics Made Without BPA Might Also Be Bad For You

You Can Now Genetically Engineer Your Own Mutant Frogs For $499

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KERMIT? IS THAT YOU?

Calling all mad scientists: you can now buy everything you need to genetically engineer mutant frogs in the comfort of your own home for the cut-rate price of $499.

This (admittedly weird) opportunity comes courtesy of biohacker Josiah Zayner, a former NASA biochemist who earned attention for selling DIY kits for people to fiddle with CRISPR at home, and for injecting himself with CRISPR to make himself more buff via livestream. And now, in what can only be considered the logical progression of those two projects, Zayner is selling kits to hack frogs through his web shop, The Odin.

SWOLE FROGS

Each kit comes with six green tree frogs native to Georgia and Louisiana, along with cages, food, syringes, and a genetic cocktail. The goal of the treatment is to bulk up the frogs — when injected with that serum, the frogs’ livers are supposed to produce IGF-1, a protein associated with growth in muscle, cartilage, and other cells, according to the product page.

In Zayner’s own experiments, the genetic engineering seems to have worked: the weight of the mutant frogs increased by an average of 23 percent, compared to just two percent in a control group.

CROAKED

On the product page, The Odin notes the goal of the kits is to educate people about genetic engineering and to encourage the public to take cutting-edge tech into their own hands.

It’s not clear whether the injections are healthy for frogs. Bloomberg reports that Zayner believes the kits are legal — the FDA said it doesn’t regulate the kits, and the Animal Welfare Act doesn’t protect cold-blood critters like frogs.

So, as long as your conscience doesn’t get in the way, you can now to create all the mutant frogs your home and wallet can handle. The kits are on sale now, and The Odin expects to begin shipping them on October 1.

READ MORE: The Biohacker Who Experimented on Himself Is Making DIY Mutant Frogs [Bloomberg]

More on biohacking: Surprise! It’s a Bad Idea to Hack Your Body, Says Prominent Biohacker

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The New Apple Watch Transforms What a “Medical Device” Can Look Like

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We all heard the highlights: iPhones are about to be a little better, iPads will come with more efficient batteries and computers’ more spacious hard drives won’t fill up so quickly. In fact, Wednesday’s #AppleEvent was a three-hour walkthrough of pretty incremental advances in already-ubiquitous devices. It was kind of ho-hum — except for one standout announcement.

The Apple Watch Series 4 comes with an app and a built-in heart rate monitor, making it the first ever over-the-counter electrocardiogram (EKG), according to STAT. This gives the gadget, which will cost $399, the potential to radically redefine how we all think about consumer medical devices.

The Apple Watch Series 4 is the first ever over-the-counter EKG, which gives the device the potential to radically redefine how we all think about consumer medical devices.

The device can’t replace to a trip to the doctor, but it might help more people realize they need to see a doctor in the first place — perhaps before they encounter heart trouble. Between three and six million people in the U.S. have atrial fibrillation, the most common type of irregular heartbeat, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) — a number that’s expected to rise in the coming decades. And as Slate reported, people with atrial fibrillation have a much higher chance of having a stroke.

Apple has reported that the app will only provide accurate readings for people older than 22 who haven’t already been diagnosed with an irregular heartbeat. That’s one of several limitations to what the new Apple Watch EKG tech will be able to do, as The Verge pointed out — it may also cost too much for those who face the highest risk of heart disease and requires that people actually wear the watch at all times.

But if you’re in the Apple Watch’s primary demographic (read: young, trendy, healthy, rich), the device could be of use if you suspect something’s off with your heart. The new device could help those people visit to their doctors equipped with relevant data about their hearts that they captured in real time. If they weren’t wearing the device, then the doctor might just be guessing at whether or not there’s cause for concern.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has cleared — not approved — the Apple Watch’s EKG capabilities. That may sound like a troublesome distinction, but it just means that the FDA deemed the device similar enough to existing EKGs to not warrant additional testing. This is the same approach taken by standalone EKG apps and sensors that were available on previous iterations of the Apple Watch — because there’s no radically-new technology in the heart rate monitor, there’s no legal requirement to subject it to more rigorous testing.

And because the Apple Watch has now made consumer medical devices as discrete as, well, a watch, people can keep an eye on their vitals without facing any of the stigma or discomfort that may come from carrying around a more obvious gadget.

It’s too soon to say whether or not the Apple Watch’s built-in EKG capabilities will deliver on these lofty promises — the heart rate monitor app announced Wednesday won’t be available until well after the Apple Watch Series 4 launches. But if it does, it could be the first step towards an era of accessible, wearable medical devices keeping an eye on us.

More on medical uses for the Apple Watch: The Next Version of the Apple Watch Will Be Able to Track Your Blood Sugar

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Elon Musk Is Digging a Tunnel in a Residential Garage and Nobody Knows Exactly Why

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GOING DOWN

If all goes according to plan, workers will soon start to dig an elevator shaft into the garage floor of a Los Angeles County home on behalf of Elon Musk. When completed, the hole will carry automobiles under a nearby street and into a tunnel that connects to the Boring Company headquarters.

The local city council this week approved the project, which will be carried out by Elon Musk’s Boring Company. The only wrinkle: nobody seems to know exactly why.

A SERIES OF TUBES

This morning, the SpaceX founder tweeted a link to coverage of the project, writing that the Boring Company “will transport your car all the way into your garage.”

That’s a promise that raises more questions than answers, though: does the company plan to dig tunnels to the homes of all its future customers? What would the elevators need to cost to finance all that digging, from the main tunnel to the person’s home? And once the cars are in customers’ garages, how are they supposed to get back out again?

A Boring Company spokesperson was equally enigmatic, telling local Southern California newspaper the Beach Reporter only that the dig was “an important part of the longer-term vision the company is trying to build.”

One thing the garage will definitely not do: allow Boring Company employees to pull in off the street and cruise to work underground. As part of the approval, the company agreed not to allow cars to enter from the road. Though that seems like something the system would have to do eventually if the Boring Company wanted to make it really usable for customers.

EXECUTIVE DYSFUNCTION

Since Musk first tweeted about the Boring Company in 2016, the company’s focus has zigged and zagged all over the place. Potential plans that have included supporting the Hyperloop, transporting individual cars, serving as a new form of public transportation and even digging tunnels on Mars (yes, really).

Will these garage elevators end up being a major part of the Boring Company’s future operations (and how that would work logistically? Anybody’s guess. For now, the company seems content to throw ideas against the wall and see what sticks. Given the way Musk uses his Twitter feed, that makes a lot of sense.

READ MORE: Elon Musk’s Boring Company earns approval for futuristic garage that would connect to underground commuter tunnel [The Beach Reporter]

More on the Boring Company: Elon Musk Says Hyperloop Will Put Pedestrians, Mass Transit First

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It’s This Woman’s Job To Dream Up Hollywood’s Sci-Fi Future

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FUTURE VISION

The post-apocalyptic Australian wasteland of “Mad Max.” The wholesome space utopia of “Star Trek.” The eugenicist, gene-hacking society of “Gattaca.”

When film and television creators envision future worlds, it’s not just an exercise in special effects. It’s also an opportunity to reflect on the futures to which our present moment could lead. That was one challenge that the creators of Hulu’s upcoming sci-fi series “The First,” which dramatizes a human mission to Mars in the 2030s, had to deal with — they didn’t just want to depict an accurate Red Planet. They also wanted to show the life on that future Earth that the protagonists were leaving behind.

For that task, they consulted with New York University business professor and noted futurist Amy Webb. In a new interview with Marketplace, Webb described how she anticipated what life in the show’s future might look like: she took a hard look at the present.

DUMB PHONE

Webb’s primary directive, she said, is to dream up technology that allows us to understand how characters in the future live their lives, but that doesn’t take center stage. In “The First,” that meant that smart phones have become passé, replaced by ubiquitous smart glasses and earpieces that facilitate communication.

“[I]f anything the technology shouldn’t be something that people are focusing on as they’re watching the show,” Webb told interviewer Molly Wood. “It should be more like, ‘Oh, ok. That makes sense.’ And then they go back to the stories of the characters.”

TOMORROW, TODAY

Webb doesn’t believe it’s possible to predict exactly what the future will hold. Instead, she envisions ways that the present could lead to different futures. That’s a compelling way to look not just at TV, but also many of our policy and business decisions that will inform the role today’s technologies, from social media to killer robots, will play in our own future.

“The goal is to make connections,” she said. “So given what we know to be true in the year 2018, what does the year 2031 look like?”

READ MORE: When Hollywood producers need to get the future right, they call a futurist [WIRED]

More on Mars: It’s Official. Humans Are Going to Mars. NASA Has Unveiled Their Mission.

 

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Rappers Are Making Tesla Sexy, Which Might Be Good For the Planet

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FUTURE YE

“I really love my Tesla. I’m in the future. Thank you Elon.”

In one tweet, Kanye pretty much summed up the A-list hip-hop community’s growing affinity for Teslas. As Pitchfork meticulously documented, artists from Big Sean to Juicy J have mentioned it in their rhymes; Jaden Smith moonwalks in front of one in the video for “ICON.”

Why has the hip-hop world, long impressed by Benzes and ‘Raris, now embraced a car that’s intended to be affordable and attainable for the masses? There are tax cuts for these things — plus you have to plug them in. How unsexy is that?

The reason, according to Pitchfork, has something to do with Musk himself:

Rapper interest in Tesla is twofold: They love any implication of innovation or any association with the cutting edge, and they are amused by the supercar’s toys and gadgets. Elon Musk is viewed by rappers as a futurist, a mega-genius of limitless potential and possibility, and so the Tesla is perceived as the vehicle of tomorrow.

EVS WITH CACHE

Among the haute, pricey brands often name-checked in rap songs, Tesla stands alone in its potential to actually have an effect on global warming.

The average consumer vehicle produces 4.6 metric tons of carbon dioxide per year. At the rate we’re dumping greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, we’re not likely to limit our warming to the semi-non-disastrous 2 degrees Celsius. For now, experts are predicting the effects of warming — more intense storms, rising seas, expanding deserts — could get much worse.

Widespread adoption of electric vehicles (EVs) could put a pretty serious dent in our emissions.

GAS IN THE VIP

We’re not there yet — gas guzzlers are still the norm. So anyone who can get more people to buy EVs is helping the planet, whether they’re standing in front of the United Nations or the DJ while drinking Hennessey.

It’s not clear whether rapper mentions have led to increased Tesla sales. But there’s no doubt it’s good PR. And since Musk can arguably be a liability to his companies (Tesla in particular), a little extra positive marketing certainly wouldn’t hurt.

READ MORE: Objectified: Why Tesla Is Hip-Hop’s New Car of Choice [Pitchfork]

More on Tesla: Tesla’s Staying Public. Now The Stakes Are Even Higher.

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Researchers Just Got Funding to Grow a Neural Network in a Petri Dish

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BRAIN IN A DISH

Will the computers of the future be built in factories as they are today, or will they be grown in labs like cell cultures?

That’s the question posed by an interdisciplinary team of biologists and computer engineers who won a $500,000 grant this week from the National Science Foundation. The researchers’ plan: to develop a computer made out of living cells and program it to perform computational tasks.

NEURAL NETWORK

Details about the upcoming project are scant. The grant winners say they will use living cells (they haven’t said what type) to construct a neural network. They say they’ll use optogenetics, a biological technique that uses light to control cells, to train the system to recognize handwritten digits. They say the hybrid project could lead to better understandings of both computers and organic brains. How all these pieces will fit together is really anyone’s guess at this point.

“We hope that neuron scientists will be able to use this technology as a testbed for studying the human brain,” said Yevgeny Berdichevsky, a professor of bioengineering at Lehigh University who’s working on the project, in a press release.

I HAVE NO MOUTH, AND I MUST SCREAM

When scientists at the University of Pennsylvania unveiled lab-grown globules of human brain tissue, it prompted an outcry from ethicists who worried that the “minibrains” could experience consciousness as they became more complex. It’s not yet clear whether this project will raise similar concerns.

But the work does suggest a radically different vision of future computing technology in which everything from buildings to computers could be grown from seeds, like flowers.

READ MORE: Growing computers in petri dishes [Lehigh University]

More on lab-grown brains: A Brain in a Dish: 3D Mini-Brains Prove to Be Remarkably Accurate

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Researchers Just Got Funding to Grow a Neural Network in a Petri Dish

Flying Cars May Work Best When Tethered to Power Lines

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LET’S GO FLY A KITE

Flying cars always work perfectly in the movies. But now that we’re close to actually building some, we’re finding they come with all sorts of problems. Perhaps the most prominent technological hurdle: striking the delicate balance between equipping the vehicles with a battery powerful enough to actually do anything useful, and not having a battery so heavy that it weighs down the entire vehicle.

One California start-up came up with a new solution that involves keeping so-called flying cars on a pretty short leash. Karman Electric proposes tethering flying cars to a crisscrossed network of power lines. As WIRED reported, they already began testing the concept with quadcopter drones.

TRAFFIC JAM

Tethering a flying car to the ground may avoid the big battery problem, but it introduces a whole slew of other logistical problems.

In order to prevent bird strikes and collisions with primitive, terrestrial commuters, Karman envisions flying cars that use this upside-down trolley system in less populated areas (another problem: who’s gonna pay for that?). As they approach cities and towns, pilots would be able to detach from their earthly bonds and use stored-up battery power to elevate above those land-bound suckers.

HEY HERE’S A THOUGHT

If the most energy-efficient way to use a flying car is to tether it to the ground on a specific, pre-defined pathway, why not just take a train? We already have those, and they work pretty well.

READ MORE: To Solve Flying Cars’ Biggest Problem, Tie Them to Power Lines [WIRED]

More on the challenges of flying cars: Uber Plans To Launch Flying Taxis With Technology That Doesn’t Exist

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A New Contest Is Looking For AI That Can Fix How We Get Our News

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FIXING THE NEWS CYCLE

Digital media has seen better days. Russian bots run free while overtly-biased and misleading news drowns out real journalism on social media. Some believe artificial intelligence might be able fix it.

The problem? They’re not quite sure how. A new contest is looking for submissions from engineers, scientists, journalists, and the like to submit their ideas.

CATEGORICALLY SPEAKING

The AI Ethics Initiative, a research organization dedicated to developing AI that helps people, launched an open challenge for new ways that AI might be able to improve media.

The contest will select four winners (one per category) who will receive a cut of the $750,000 of prize money (about $75,000 to $200,000 each).

One category: new ways to govern the platforms on which we all get our news. Social media giants have struggled to protect their audiences from misinformation without censoring them. Maybe an algorithm could do a better job.

The other categories involve developing AI systems that could stop propagandists and other bad actors, help journalists better communicate complex technological concepts, and redesign digital platforms so they better serve the public.

THIS SOUNDS SO EASY!

 

The problems in the way we generate, share, and consume our news are probably too complex for single AI tools (or even four of them) to fully address. So the contest winners are unlikely to provide the panacea the AI Ethics Initiative might be going for. But the conversation the contest generates is still valuable: it’ll bring more diverse and groundbreaking ideas to the table. Crowdsourcing ways to fix these issues might actually help us do it.

The contest is open for submissions until October 12. Semifinalists will be announced in mid-November, and finalists in March 2019.

READ MORE: AI and the News: An Open Challenge [AI Ethics Initiative]

More on improving digital platforms: Explaining Its Decisions Isn’t Going To Make Twitter Better

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Behold: A Robot That Can Do Improv Comedy Just as Badly as a Human

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AUDIENCE EXPECTATIONS

If you think human improv comedy is insufferable, wait until you see a show that can’t pass the Turing Test.

Kory Mathewson, an artificial intelligence researcher at the University of Alberta, Edmonton, created an algorithm designed to riff with him onstage. He trained it to create lines of dialogue to be used in an improv performance by feeding it subtitles from hundreds of thousands of movies.

Then, according to a new paper uploaded to the preprint server arXiv, Mathewson used the AI to perform a mind-bending experiment to test if a live audience could differentiate it from a human performer.

TALKING HEAD

In the experiment, three human performers took the stage. One improvised dialogue in response to audience cues. Another repeated dialogue fed by an offstage human through an earpiece. And a third said lines provided by the AI, read to them by an offstage human via earpiece.

After the performance, audience members guessed which performer had been reciting the AI’s lines. Most of them correctly identified the AI — but a handful of viewers were fooled.

CONVERSATION STARTER

It’s an intriguing experiment, but watching the AI spit out stilted dialogue with Mathewson, it’s hard to imagine the routine becoming a comedy classic.

“Blueberry, I created you,” Mathewson tells a robot programmed with the improv AI during a performance earlier this year, in a video by Bloomberg Businessweek. “I downloaded a voice into your brain so that you could perform in front of these people.”

“So they do not know what I am going to say?” the robot asks.

“I don’t know what you’re going to say either,” Mathewson says, laughing. Good stuff.

READ MORE: AI tries bad improv comedy to trick people into thinking it is human [New Scientist]

More on AI performers: A Robot Will Become A Real-Life Movie Star

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The New Render of Elon Musk’s BFR Means It Might Have Some Dope Features

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Last night, SpaceX tweeted something we already knew: the company has signed the first private passenger to fly around the Moon. More new information is on the horizon — we’ll get to find out who that passenger is on Monday — but until then, the tweet included something pretty exciting for the more detail-oriented among us: a brand new rendering of the Big Big Falcon Rocket (BFR).

SpaceX has signed the world’s first private passenger to fly around the Moon aboard our BFR launch vehicle—an important step toward enabling access for everyday people who dream of traveling to space. Find out who’s flying and why on Monday, September 17. pic.twitter.com/64z4rygYhk

— SpaceX (@SpaceX) September 14, 2018

Musk did indeed confirm that the rendering is new. It’s the first update on the design since the BFR was announced in 2017. And the tweet also notes that the BFR is going to be the craft to fly that passenger to infinity and beyond, instead of the Falcon Heavy as was originally planned. The mission itself, so far, is the same: take a loop around the Moon before returning to Earth.

The BFR consists of a rocket and spaceship (the Big Falcon Spaceship). But the rendering shows a number of features that we didn’t know anything about. Reddit sleuths spent the night enhancing, cropping, and investigating. Here’s some of what they came up with.

Editor’s Note: Reddit comments have been edited for clarity and brevity. 

The Wings

Reddit user rustybeancake:

If you zoom in on the two delta wings / fins at the rear, it appears they can rotate up and down. There’s sort of a hinge against the body. Wonder if they will be flat against the body at launch, Dream Chaser style? Or just for use as control surfaces? Maybe they will just rotate up slightly for reentry. Edit: another option could be that they move during final landing approach (in atmosphere) for precision landing control – sort of like the lower fins on the New Glenn booster.

Reddit user CX-OO1:

Its not a control surface style hinge. Looks more like in vertical mode the three fins are symmetrical, 120 degrees. In landing mode I guess, two fins on the bottom flatten out or go dihedral for a classic plane config.

Reddit user han_ay:

I did a quick edit and increased the exposure and it definitely looks like the closest wing is hinged while the top wing is fixed. Here’s a crop of just the wings.

Elon Must BFR Zoomed In
han_ay | https://imgur.com/g4JSNx0

Reddit user antimatter_beam_core:

The new radial fin design is surprising, because most reentry vehicles have flat or convex bottoms, whereas those fines are going to make the heat shield concave. I’m no expert, but that seems like it might cause some problems.

The Engines

Reddit user antimatter_beam_core:

The engine configuration is also radically different. They’ve gone from four vacuum engines and two (later changed to three iIRC) surface level engines, two seven engines which look pretty much identical, which suggests they must all be optimized for the same pressure (closer to surface level it would seem from a quick comparison to the old design). That seems really odd given the second stage mostly does its burns in near vacuum.

Reddit user LivingOnCentauri:

Maybe they implemented the concept of retractable nozzles? They could use this only for departing to Mars and the other BFS ships won’t have it.

Reddit user zekromNLR: 

I saw someone on /r/SpaceXMasterrace speculate that the sort of tiled skirt thing around the engines might be some form of extendible “secondary nozzle,” which could allow the Rvacs to be used even down to sea level with more or less the same Isp as the sea-level raptor.

Reddit user zolartan:

Yes, and additionally, the engine nozzles seem to have been moved deeper into the spaceship. In the first version they were protruding, now, they are inside some kind of dish lined probably with heat shields. My guess would be that this is perhaps to better protect the engines during landings from flying debris? Or does it perhaps act as a better heat shield when entering the atmosphere?

So when will a passenger actually board this spectacular craft for a Moon loop? In short, it’ll be a while. The BFR still hasn’t undergone all of the necessary testing, so The Wall Street Journal reports the spacecraft might still be at least a year or two from an initial test flight. Ars Technica speculates we’re look at a date closer to late 2023 at the very earliest.

But there’s a good chance we’ll find out sooner if these redditors are right. Perhaps even on Monday when SpaceX will make its announcement noted in the tweet (check its livestream here).

More on the BFR: Elon Musk Has a Plan to Get You Anywhere on Earth in An Hour

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