Category Archives: Futurism

This seems, uh, pretty bad. Exhausting

It looks like the exhaust fumes from SpaceXs Falcon 9 rockets (and others like it, including Blue Origin) are actually toxic to humans and to the planet we call home.

A new paper in the journal Physics of Fluids details how researchers digitally modeled the type of fumes that come from rockets like those made by SpaceX, Blue Origin, and other private rocket manufacturers and their conclusions are pretty grim.

We believe that the problem of atmospheric pollution caused by rocket launches is vital, the Cyprus University of Nicosia research team wrote, and needs to be addressed appropriately as commercial space flights, in particular, are expected to increase in the future.

Each launch using RP-1 rocket fuel, like SpaceXs Falcon 9, produces large amounts of carbon gases and nitrogen oxides. Per the modeling done by the Cyprus team, the noxious fumes released by ascending rocket launches would be considered hazardous to human health per guidelines set by the World Health Organization.

In an email statement toBusiness Insider pegged to the study, a Blue Origin spokesperson said its New Shepard rocket is fueled by highly efficient and clean liquid oxygen and hydrogen and only has water vapor with no carbon emissions as a byproduct. Futurism has reached out to SpaceX for comment but has not yet heard back.

The looming issue, of course, is that commercial space companies and particularly SpaceX are working to scale rocket launches up to an astonishing degree. If thats going to pose a major environmental and health issue, better to learn that now.

READ MORE:Atmospheric pollution from rockets [Physics of Fluids]

More on rockets:Journalists Slam NASA for Lack of Transparency Behind Moon Rocket Prelaunch

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SpaceX Rocket Fumes "Hazardous to Humans" and the Climate, Scientists Warn - Futurism

The community is invited to takea walk throughSoul Desse's magical Afrolandscape, Hermafrodek: A Suspension of Identity,"an interactive environment in which mobile sculptures hanging from reclaimed Afro hair morph seamlessly into gender-fluid shapes.

Desse, an artist whose work has been exhibited around the globe,describes the installation as a "sculptural exploration of surrealist gender-bending Afro-futurism." She developed Hermafrodekduring a recent ATLAS B2 Creative Residency; the B2 Center for Arts Media and Performance/CMAPis an interdisciplinary and wildly experimental community located in the Roser ATLAS Center at CU Boulder.

If you go

Who: Everyone and anyone

What: "Hermafrodek: A Suspension of Identity," a magical Afrolandscape

When: Open viewing hoursMay 23-26, 2-4 p.m.; May 27, 11-1 p.m.

Where: Roser ATLAS Center, ATLAS Black Box Experimental Studio (ATLS B2 level), 1125 18th St. Boulder

Cost: Free

Registration

Learnmore about the technologies in the Black Box Experimental Theater, including Augmester course offerings with hands-on learning opportunities.

This interactive exhibit, located in the ATLAS Black Box Experimental Studio,utilizes the highly specialized equipment available in B2, incorporatingmotion capture, projection mappingand Ambisonic sound technology to create an endlessly shifting soundspace which engages and captivates visitors.

For this project, Desse's collaborators include ATLAS AffiliateBrad Gallagheras technical art director,Andy DiLalloas sound designer and technical supportand staff memberGary McCrumbas lighting designer and audio engineer.

Desses work has been exhibited in the Middle East, Asia, Europe, Africa, and the Americas, at institutions including the Katonah Museum of Art;Indianapolis Museum of Contemporary Art;Printed Matter, Inc., New York, NY;the Black Mountain College Museum & Arts Center in Asheville;Mahmoud Darwish Museum; Center for Global Justice; San Miguel De Allende, Mexico; Bogot Arte Contemporaneo Gallery, Bogota, Colombia; Galerie Nord Berlin, Germany; Greatmore Studios, Capetown, South Africa; Total Arts Gallery, Dubaiand the Cultural Foundation, Abu Dhabi.

More here:
B2 Creative Residency: Walk in a magical Afrolandscape - CU Boulder Today

Another one.Fatal Collision

Earlier this month, a 2022 Tesla Model S rammed a curb and plowed into construction equipment, killing its three occupants.

Now, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) has revealed that its investigating the fatal crash, suggesting the vehicle may have had semiautonomous driving features turned on, The Wall Street Journal reports, in yet another grisly and high profile crash linked to Teslas controversial self-driving features.

To date, the regulator has already opened investigations into 35 Tesla crashes that may have involved Autopilot, the electric car companys advanced driving assistance system. The first fatal accident involving the system dates back to 2016, according to Bloomberg.

There are seven additional investigations into crashes that involved ADAS, but not Tesla vehicles.

Teslas Autopilot system has repeatedly come under fire, with critics arguing that its dangerous and not ready for public use yet, as detailed in an upcoming New York Times documentary, scheduled to premiere tomorrow.

US regulators still arent tightly overseeing advanced self driving technologies, allowing companies like Tesla to beta test controversial software, including its Full Self-Driving (FSD) system an optional $12,000 add-onwhich, misleadingly, does not allow a Tesla vehicle to fully drive itself on public roads.

Videos circulating online have shown vehicles with the FSD beta activated getting confused by pedestrians, streetcar tracks, and traffic cones.

Its still unclear if the most recent fatal crash involved either Autopilot or FSD, but given the NHTSAs statement, it likely involved at least one of the two.

Tesla, a company that dissolved its media relations department two years ago, has yet to respond to request for comments by both the LA Times and the WSJ.

READ MORE: Tesla Autopilots Role in Deadly Vehicle Crash Is Probed by Safety Regulators [The Wall Street Journal]

More on Autopilot: Tesla Engineers Say Elon Musk Misled the Public About Autopilots Safety

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Tesla Autopilot May Have Been Involved in Fatal Crash That Killed Three - Futurism

Immunity-boosting drugs may have huge implications in the pharmaceutical fight against COVID-19.

As MIT Technology Review reports, a number of immunity-boosting drugs are currently being studied to see whether they can help course-correct damage the coronavirus does to the immune system.

One of the most promising avenues of research comes from a class of pharmaceuticals known as statins, which are most commonly used to combat high cholesterol but have in recent years been studied for their off-label immunity-boosting properties and,as it turns out,this fascinating benefit may help with COVID-19 treatment.

As University of Birmingham aging and immunity researcher Janet Lord tells MIT Tech, she and many in her cohort believe this class of drugs is actually better at improving immune systems than lowering cholesterol.

In 2018, Lord and her colleagues ran a small statin trial for older people, aged 68 to 90, who were hospitalized with pneumonia. They found that the patients who took a statin simvastatin were much less likely to die than the ones who took a placebo.

Researchers more recent hope, as the report notes, is that statin regimens may similarly help older patients more likely to succumb to COVID combat acute infections and Lord and her team arent alone in investigating whether statins can help with COVID.

MIT Tech points to Wuhan University researcher Xiao-Jing Zhang, whose team compared the outcomes of patients who happened to be on cholesterol-lowering drugs when they were hospitalized with COVID to those who werent. They found that those who were taking statins were much less likely to die from COVID than their counterparts who werent on cholesterol meds.

Alongside studies around already-extant drugs are upstart labs looking into newer medications that might help older people cope with COVID infections, to varied results.

Perhaps the most promising of these pharma startups is Tornado Therapeutics, according to MIT Tech, which is working on treatments target the mTOR enzyme that regulates metabolism. Though their first study in 2014 looking into a drug to help older people have less severe responses to flu vaccines was promising, a follow-up trial, the report notes, yielded poor results.

During the COVID pandemic, according to the outlets reporting, Tornado Therapeutics has been giving drugs similar to rapamycin, an immunosuppressive drug most often given to people to help them recover from kidney transplants, to nursing home patients during coronavirus outbreaks. Intriguingly, the patients taking the rapamycin clone developed no symptoms, while half of those taking the placebo died and an additional 25 percent of placebo subjects developed severe COVID.

Theres obviously much more study needed to figure out whether so-called anti-aging drugs actually do help our immune systems but when it comes to COVID, anything that sticks when thrown at the wall is a good thing.

READ MORE:Anti-aging drugs are being tested as a way to treat covid [MIT Technology Review]

And on completely non-effective COVID treatments:Inmates Treated With Ivermectin Without Their Knowledge

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Doctors Impressed by Drugs That Rejuvenate Immune System - Futurism

Great, now we're thirsty. Drink Up

Throughout the ups and downs of the American economy, one thing has been astonishingly constant: the price of AriZona Iced Tea drinks, which always has been, and hopefully always will be, 99 cents.

In other words, can you imagine any better asset to back a new stable cryptocurrency?

The website for USDTea, a new AriZona Iced Tea-backed crypto, calls the iconic beverage Americas most stable asset and its hard to argue, given that a big can of the good stuff has been 99 cents since the company began distributing in 1992.

News of the almost certainly tongue-in-cheek USDTea comes in the wake of the ongoing stablecoin nightmare, in which the price of the Terra stablecoin drop more than 99 percentand amid a larger crypto crash thats brought even Bitcoin to its knees.

Created by the mossy tech/art collective the same group behind the unofficial Non-Fungible Olive Gardens project USDTea is on the Ethereum blockchain and can, as its website claims, be redeemed for actual AriZona teas (for a $20 flat fee, of course).

Along with these two seemingly satirical crypto projects, mossy also has a third maybe-joke non-fungible token (NFT) project: Blockedchain, which allows people to mint NFTs when, and only when, someone famous blocks them on Twitter.

Of these three absurdist ventures, USDTea seems to have the most potential to go anywhere though in the world of crypto, which saw the jokingly-named Dogecoin spike in value after Elon Musk tweeted the word doge, whos really to say?

More on crypto schemes:Suicidal Posts Spike After Crypto Project Crashes

More:
New Crypto Backed by "America's Most Stable Asset": Cans of AriZona Iced Tea - Futurism

For those of us worried the world somehow got trapped in the wrong timeline, relax scientists are now saying there might actually be two realities.

Two researchers from the University of Maryland released their findings in a study earlier this month in the journal Physical Review Research. According to a university press release, though, a second reality isnt exactly what they set out to find. While studying layers of graphene, made with hexagons of carbon, the found repeating patterns that changed the way electricity moves.

Based on their research, the pair think they accidentally found a clue that could explain some of our current realitys mysteries. According to the universitys media arm, they realized that experiments on the electrical properties of stacked sheets of graphene produced results that looked like little universes and that the underlying causes could apply to other areas of physics. In stacks of graphene, electricity changes behavior when two sheets interact, so the two hypothesize that unique physics could similarly emerge from interacting layers elsewhereperhaps across the entire universe.

In a sense, its almost suspicious that it works so well by naturally predicting fundamental features of our universe such as inflation, study co-author Victor Galitski said in a statement.

Its not uncommon for physicists to question the way our universe works. Even the best-established theory can be called into question and should be if we hope to better understand the world we live in as well as potential ones we havent been to yet.

We havent explored all the effects thats a hard thing to do, co-author Alireza Parhizkar said in the university release.

Parhizkar also said that the findings could solve many outstanding questions scientists have about conflicting or confusing laws of physics.

No word yet on how we get to the proverbial other side, though.

More on reality: Scientists Say Space is Filled With Invisible Walls

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Physicists Say There May Be Another Reality Right Beyond This One - Futurism

Theres reportedly a minor civil war brewing amongst government officials over just how much of their UFO intelligence they should turn over to Congress and the public and at the heart of it, an alleged cabal of powerful secret-keepers.

In interviews withPolitico, government officials who, unsurprisingly, spoke on condition of anonymity said that there are those within the Pentagon who are protecting very interesting information from being released to the public, even as others within and outside the Defense Department are trying to bring daylight to this subject of increasing interest.

They fetishize their secret society, one intelligence official told Politico in interviews ahead of tomorrows House Intelligence Committee hearings on unidentified aerial phenomenon (UAPs, which is the militarys rebranding of what were previously known as UFOs), the first of its kind since 1966. Its kind of a Skull and Bones-type vibe. They take it seriously but they have no accountability. Zero. There is a whole group of us that know in great detail this subject, a lot of which has not been reported to Congress because of security issues.

Its going to take some sort of forcing mechanism, another Defense Department official said, to get these gatekeepers to reveal even part of their closely-guarded secrets to Congress and, in turn, the public.

While it all sounds very X-Files-ish, theres another, much more mundane concern among some officials who spoke toPolitico.Theyre more worried about the actually-unexplained sightings being grouped together with the thousands of alleged UAP sightings that turn out to be bupkis.

According to one intelligence official, legit UAPs are so rare that they accounted for maybe five things out of 5,000. This same official said their superiors seem to think UAPs are all air trash and, as such, arent taking it seriously enough.

This attitude, it seems, has led to increasing calls during the Trump and Biden administrations to reveal more about UAPs, which started with the strategic leaking of information about these strange occurrences in late 2017 and coalesced into the Defense Department establishing a public-facing office to study UFOs in November 2021.

Whether or not well start to get a fuller picture of what the Pentagon (and this supposed cult of gatekeepers) knows remains to be seen but youd best believe well be reading the liveblogs eagerly.

READ MORE:A Skull and Bones-type vibe: Spy agencies grapple with how much to share at UFO hearing [Politico]

More on UAPs/UFOs: Former Pentagon Officials Say Family of UFO Investigator Reported Creature Peering into Their House

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There's a "Secret Society" in the Pentagon Hiding UFO Secrets, Officials Say - Futurism

Scientists current best theories about the arrangement of the cosmos suggest that small galaxies should be distributed around their host galaxies in seemingly random orbits.

But observations have found that these smaller galaxies arrange themselves in thin disks around their hosts, Vice reports, not unlike Saturns rings. Needless to say, that represents a puzzling gap between knowledge and theory.

Researchers are now trying to reconcile this gap by suggesting smaller galaxies may be conforming to invisible walls created by a new class of particles called symmetrons a fascinating proposal that could rewrite the laws of astrophysics.

The standard theory, known as the Lambda cold dark matter (Lambda-CDM) model suggests that the universe is made up of three key elements: the cosmological constant, which is a coefficient added by Einstein to explain his equations of general relativity, cold dark matter which are slow moving theoretical particles that dont emit radiation, and the conventional matter we interact with every day.

That theory suggests that smaller galaxies should be captured by the gravitational pull of larger host galaxies and forced into chaotic orbits, something that has not been reflected in real world observations.

Now, two researchers from the University of Nottingham may have come up with an explanation, as detailed in a new, yet-to-be-peer-reviewed study.

They suggest a fifth force could be arranging the galaxies into disk shapes, while still considering the existence of dark matter, the mysterious substance that appears to make up the vast majority of the universes mass.

According to their theory, speculative particles known as symmetrons, which researchers have used to explain gaps in our knowledge of the cosmos, could generate this force to form domain walls, or boundaries in space.

We know that we need new particles because we have dark matter and dark energy and so we suspect that were going to need to add new particles to our standard model to account for those things, Aneesh Naik, a research fellow at the University of Nottingham, and lead author of the preprint, told Vice.

Thats the context in which people study theories like symmetron theory its a new particle candidate for dark energy and/or dark matter, he added.

These particles could exist in groups of different polar states, forming invisible walls between them. These walls, in turn, could trigger smaller galaxies to form disks around much bigger host galaxies.

But many questions remain, and Naik and his colleague University of Nottingham physicist Clare Burrage have plenty of work ahead of them to solidify the theory.

READ MORE: Space Has Invisible Walls Created by Mysterious Symmetrons, Scientists Propose [Vice]

More on dark matter: Scientist Says Dark Matter Could Likely Be Incredible Fuel for Spacecraft

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Scientists Say Space Is Filled With Invisible Walls - Futurism

They also found an impaled turtle and fish full of debris.Die Hard

Scientists say theyve figured out what happened the day an apocalyptic asteroid crashed into Earth and annihilated the dinosaurs.

Naturalist Sir David Attenborough and paleontologist Robert DePalma filmed a documentary about the 66-million-year old rock fragment they found in North Dakota.The film, Dinosaur Apocalypse, debuts on PBSthis week, but yesterdays CNN report on the pair explains where the fragment was located and how its related to the dino wipeout.

According to CNN, tiny pieces of amber that contain vaporized asteroid dust are from the Hell Creek Formation in the Western United States, which they believe preserved part of the deadly day due its proximity to the impact site. Fossils from the area include fish with gills full of toxic debris, a turtle impaled on a stick, and a dino leg that was possibly blown off its owner.

It gives a moment by moment story of what happens right after impact and you end up getting such a rich resource for scientific investigation, DePalma told the news outlet. In that amber weve located a number of spherules that were basically frozen in time. Theyre perfectly preserved.

The site is 2,000 miles away from the purported asteroid crater located off the coast of Mexico, which means its just far enough that the Hell Creek animals may have died on the day the asteroid struck.

Although the findings have yet to be published in a peer-reviewed journal, CNN reported that Michael Benton, a professor of vertebrate paleontology at the University of Bristol, worked as scientific adviser on the film and thinks the conclusions are accurate.

Its grim thought to imagine the last day for the dinos. But as the work holds up to scrutiny, it would help to understand what happened to untold species, forever changing the course of natural history.

More on sudden changes: Watch an Entire House Suddenly Fall Into the Ocean

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Team Claims to Have Found Chunk of Asteroid That Killed the Dinosaurs - Futurism

They say the eyes are the windows to the soul.

And now, scientists say, it turns out they might also be windows toone of the worlds preeminent parasites.

In an essay for The Conversation, researchers described how they were able to detect infection from the Toxoplasma gondii parasite by studying thousands of retinal photographs, searching for signs of the sometimes eye-attacking disease.

Toxoplasmosis has, in recent years, gained a somewhat memetic reputation because its main carriers are cats and its primary transmission vector is, well, cat poop. Studies conducted over the last few decades have associated toxoplasmosis with everything from changes in sexual proclivities to higher rates of car accidents, and Futurism recently spoke to one of the authors of a study that found a correlation between childhood cat ownership and psychosis in adulthood.

As it turns out, toxoplasmosis is extremely common. The latest research suggests that anywhere between 30 and 50 percent of the global population is infected, and as Justine Smith and Joo Furtado recount in their essay for The Conversation, that percentage may be as high as 66 percent per a recent community-based study.

The parasite which, it should be noted, can also can be spread via undercooked meat often attacks the retina, and ocular toxoplasmosis is one of the most common afflictions associated with Toxoplasma gondii. It can cause floaters that obscure ones vision and result in vision loss, and as Smith and Furtado wrote, it can scar the back of the eyeball, too.

In an analysis of Western Australias Busselton Healthy Ageing Study, which took retinal photographs of more than 5,000 baby boomers born between 1946 and 1964, they found that an alarming one in 150 of the eyeball photos showed signs of scarring from ocular toxoplasmosis.

As they noted, there is currently no drug or vaccine to stop or prevent toxoplasmosis infection, and with its estimated rates of prevalence in the global population, it makesToxoplasma the leader of the parasitic pack.

Toxoplasma gondii is probably the most successful parasite in the world today, the researchers wrote and its hard to argue with that conclusion given the numbers.

Heres hoping the experimental toxoplasmosis vaccines that have been cropping up over recent years gets to pharmacies and veterinarians sooner rather than later, because the last thing we need is a parasite in our eyeballs.

READ MORE: One in three people are infected withToxoplasma parasite and the clue could be in our eyes [The Conversation]

More on toxoplasmosis:Elon Musk Suggests That a Brain Parasite is Forcing Humans to Create Superhuman AI

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It's Surprisingly Likely That You Have a Nasty Parasite in Your Eyeball - Futurism