It has the ability to enable multiple applications that keep smart cities safe, but as facial recognition technology has become more sophisticated, so has its potential for abuse. It suffers from problems with accuracy and racial and gender bias, and privacy concerns have led to widespread pushback against the technology.

The clich is that it could be a modern-day version of Jeremy Benthams Panopticon the prison where the warden could see every prisoner and cell, but the inmates couldnt see their jailer. However, it is in the justice context where facial recognition is causing the most concern. Over the last few months, the killing of George Floyd in the United States has brought police powers, and their use of facial recognition, to the fore around the world.

Facial recognition trials in the UK have been met with opposition. Elsewhere in the United States, San Francisco was the first city to implement an outright ban, and lobbying groups in Chicago have called for a halt to police use of facial recognition technologies. In response to the backlash, major players including Amazon, Microsoft and IBM have pulled back on development of facial recognition technology.

Even before the big tech firms pulled back, facial recognition was already facing regulatory challenges. The US lacks adequate regulation to handle the problems with the technology and earlier this year, the EU mooted a five year ban of facial recognition after finding it is prone to inaccuracy, can be used to breach privacy laws, and can facilitate identity fraud.

Between criticism and barriers to entry, will facial recognition fail to take its place among the technologies of a modern smart city? The technologys roll out now depends on developing regulation and standards that will help protect the privacy of citizens. Zak Doffman, CEO at surveillance solutions company Digital Barriers says its critical the industry, as well as lawmakers and society at large agree how to strike a balance between public safety and ensuring the technology is not misused.

The impact of the facial recognition backlash on smart cities is not straightforward. Other perhaps lesser known technology providers offer applications that might be considered more ethical.

As Doffman points out, not all facial recognition systems are the same. Even as we push back on so-called standoff surveillance applications those that have made recent headlines we are seeing more use of facial recognition to make travel more efficient and secure. The biometric ePassport gates at airports, for example.

Covid-19 has also raised the need for additional facial recognition use cases. Doffman cites the example of contact-free identity assurance a key part of smart city deployments that he says, so far, hasnt seen much push back. The idea that a ticket or a pass might shift from a physical ID to a smart device recognising my face clearly negates me signing in or carrying and handing over a physical card or document. We are also seeing facial recognition becoming the norm to unlock smartphones and for some other forms of access control.

At the same time, despite privacy concerns, the technology isnt hated across the board. In fact its often accepted for public safety applications, as long as its accurate. When it comes to public security, citizens recognise the benefits of facial recognition technology, says Pierre-Adrien Hanania, global offer leader, AI in public sector, Capgemini.

Two thirds of people are comfortable with the use of AI-enabled cameras capable of detecting and tracking abnormal or alarming situations in public areas, and over half see the benefit of facial recognition technologies to track offenders, according to a recent Capgemini Research Institute report.

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The future of facial recognition: the impact on smart cities - SmartCitiesWorld

The pandemic has thrown unimaginable challenges to governments. Responses to new developments have had to be put together in a matter of hours. Governments can no longer plan to have solutions ready in the next couple of years.

Digital, the cloud and precise data are depended on like never before. How do you go digital fast? How do you grow to scale with confidence? How do you empower everybody in your organisation to learn how to work with new technology? Presented by Salesforce, heres an inside look at how governments are growing their data based programs to deal with the global pandemic.

Theres a lot to find out, including an exclusive interview with NSWs Minister for Customer Service, Victor Dominello where he tells candidly how they built up their communications capabilities to deal with the border closure with Victoria in only 36 hours an incredible achievement in data and cloud innovation.

This webinar features:

Victor Dominello: Minister for Customer Service, NSW Government

Sarah Franklin: EVP and GM Platform, Trailhead & AppExchange Salesforce

Peter Schwartz: The Senior Vice President, Strategic Planning & Futurist

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Webinar: Building services that are accessible, innovative, and fast - The Mandarin

By Dr. Mike Walden

The calendar says 2020, but some say its really 2030. Huh? Did we suddenly lose a decade? I, for one, certainly hope not, because that would make me 79 instead of 69.

Actually, no one is saying it really is 2030. What they mean is the ongoing trends in the economy have accelerated so rapidly that the world we are looking at now is closer to what it would have been in 2030. In other words, the future is on us sooner than we thought.

What is the cause of this time travel? Its the COVID-19 pandemic. As economists look at how businesses, households and workers have coped with the virus, many of us see outcomes we wouldnt have expected until many years in the future.

Heres a good example. Meat processing plants use large numbers of individuals working in close proximity to convert cattle, hogs and poultry into products supermarkets and restaurants can use. In fact, meat processing is an important economic sector in North Carolina.

When some of these plants had virus outbreaks, several economists including me speculated that down the road we would see the processing plants begin to replace workers with machines and technology. The logic was that machines and technology are immune to virus outbreaks, and thus when a future pandemic occurred, these high-tech food processing plants could continue operating.

I thought such a conversion was years away. Then a couple of weeks ago I read that some meat processing plants have already begun to introduce robots for some of their work. The article said that the robots werent yet ready to do all the processing work, but over time the robots would be refined and their tasks expanded.

Another example is remote working. Prior to the pandemic, remote working was expanding, but it was still relatively small, accounting for under 10 percent of the workforce. Futurists thought it would gradually expand, perhaps doubling between 2020 and 2030.

However, today there are estimates that perhaps 30 percent of employees are remotely working, and in the next decade that number could expand to as high as 40 percent. Once again, the trend was already there; its just the pandemic has pushed the pedal on it.

The commonality of these two examples is technology. For years economists have talked about technological unemployment as a trend shaping the labor force. Indeed, in 2013 two British economists estimated almost half of todays occupations could be susceptible to downsizing due to the substitution of technology for humans in doing work. While not all economists agree with those predictions, it looks as if the COVID-19 pandemic could make them more likely.

Technological unemployment is not new. It goes back at least as far as the 18th century when English textile workers opposed factory owners replacing them with machines. Once perfected, machines can usually produce more output in a given period of time than can humans. Plus, the machines dont need rest or vacations.

Today theres an additional reason for companies to consider replacing workers with technology. Technology and machines dont get sick for long periods of time like people infected with COVID-19. Technology and machines also dont spread sickness from machine to machine, and machines arent subject to stay-at-home orders during a pandemic.

Now, before you think Im unaware of spreadable computer viruses, I am! I know that users of modern technology must use protective computer programs and be cautious of opening unknown attachments. Maybe someday hopefully soon well have similar techniques, like a vaccine, to protect us against viruses. Unfortunately, just like computer viruses, human viruses can be totally different each year, thereby requiring an entirely new vaccine.

Therefore, until we have better protection from infections like COVID-19, I expect people and businesses wont let their guard down. If they can, more workers will consider remotely working. Also, if they can, more businesses will look for ways to use fewer people and more machines and technology as a means to protect against disease and pandemics.

A new study from two MIT economics professors raises an additional and important worry. If the technological unemployment spurred by the COVID-19 occurs, it may dramatically reduce the number of jobs available for those without post-high school training. In one way, this is a plus, because most of those jobs pay low wages. However, such a situation also creates challenges of retraining displaced workers for other preferably higher-paying occupations.

This raises the important question of how this retraining will occur. Will businesses do it on their own with on the job training. If so, what strings might be attached to prevent retrained workers from moving to other companies?

Or, will we need to rely mostly on our public educational system, including community colleges and four-year colleges and universities? If these institutions do carry the bulk of the retraining, then they will need to provide quick, inexpensive and focused education in specific work tasks. Workers losing their jobs to technological unemployment, especially those with families and dependents, wont be able to spend multiple years in new learning.

The COVID-19 pandemic has been more than a health event. It has had a profound impact on our economy by pushing existing economic trends ahead faster than we could have ever imagined. So, if 2020 really is like 2030, do you like what you see? You decide!

Dr. Mike Walden is a William Neal Reynolds Distinguished Professor and Extension Economist in the Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics at North Carolina State University who teaches and writes on personal finance, economic outlook and public policy.

FOR MORE COLUMNS AND LETTERS TO THE EDITOR, CHECK OUT OUR OPINION SECTION HERE.

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You Decide: Is it really 2030? - The Coastland Times - The Coastland Times

Watch the video for Colonizing Space (Dir. by Aaron Frison) fromPlace,Hearnes new collaboration with Saul Williams, below.

On a distant planet

where the reason landed

and the folks transparent

fourth dimensional

libation granted.

-Saul Williams

When I moved to Fort Greene, Brooklyn, Mayor Bloombergs third term was careening forward with hubris and the rents were rising. The bodega on my corner started stocking Greek yogurt and when the hardware store closed an oyster bar sprung up in its place. The Times called my new neighborhood the ZIP code with the greatest disparity of wealth in the city. Stop-and-frisk was operating in full force, and sometimes I saw children subjected to an unconstitutional search outside my front window. The year I moved away, a movie star bought a brownstone on my block.

Spike Lee got a lot of attention for his gentrification rant, saying people didnt move to the neighborhood with respect. It wasnt just that there were demographic changes, but that the newcomers didnt give any space to the culture that existed before them; they only respected money.

I saw this displacement, of course. It was undeniable. And as a white musician who had recently arrived, my role in the process was undeniable as well. But my complicity didnt care if I was trying to deny it or not: the forces of racialized property control and anti-Blackness both national and ancestral worked themselves through me just the same. The more I saw my relationship to these generational patterns, the more difficult it felt to disentangle myself.

The more I saw my relationship to these generational patterns, the more difficult it felt to disentangle myself.

I wanted to confront these generational patterns the way I knew bestthrough music. But a white person who cant decenter whiteness will live in paralysis no matter how mobile or critical they are. I needed to have a conversation.

I reached out to visionary poet Saul Williams, who had lived in Fort Greene in the 90s when its population and economy were different, and together we wrotePlace. This was a piece of music that took gentrification and displacement as a starting point, and through our very different perspectives on the same places became a dialogue working through us in real time.

I began to think of my neighborhood as a huge collection of overlapping maps, each drawn from the experiences and locations important to a person who lived there. The overlay was messy but thick: how could this many-dimensional truth be reflected in music?

Along with director Patricia McGregor, we created a piece for BAM in Fort Greene and the Los Angeles Philharmonic. Although this piece was released as an album a few months ago, our live performance was slated to premiere with the LA Phil in March, but it was cancelled (along with everything else) due to the pandemic. So filmmaker Aaron Frison and I took the opportunity to turnPlaceinto a short film, one that could explore some of the more poetic and surreal aspects of the text that could never be fully realized in a staged performance.

The end ofPlaceis calledColonizing Space. Sauls poetry lifts off the streets of Brooklyn and projects toward the stars. Will we carry our old viruses into a new world? Afro-futurism breathes new possibilities while issuing firm warnings in the context of gentrification.

I asked Aaron how he approached the text and what gave him the idea to create this rich imagery and backstory to accompany the music. He told me:

The epic quality of the music, the voices, Sauls poetry, all combined to give me the idea. I was aware that the initial intention behind the project, or at least pieces of it, would address gentrification, and though affected by it in a literal sense, I didnt want to be a documentarian. I wanted to write a story around what that idea meant, to colonize space. And also to pull the idea of gentrification a bit away from a political climate and make it more of a spiritual battle, because I see this ongoing struggle as being more about energy than anything else.

Aaron was very intentional about surrounding singer Isaiah Robinsons character with the barren desert and all the weathervanesthis mystic character is in the midst of a trial akin to those undergone by Old Testament prophets. Isaiah, singing in the desert, is pleading to his god, or angel, professing his need for guidance.

Says Aaron:The spiritual crisis contains many nuances. He knows he must fulfill his purpose, he knows he must pass on the trinket, as a symbol for the next in line, somewhat completing a certain stage in his own evolution, and initiating anothers. But I wouldnt call it a sacrifice, Id say its a test or trial, maybe leading to his purpose. He knows it will be understood before he goes, but yet still hes still dealing with the nuance of his own special world, a young Black man, pleading for space. In our world, nothing is ever for certain.

It is such a bizarre twist of serendipity that weve had to cancel the live performances. Yet Sauls work is so deeply spiritual, this video gave us the opportunity to dig deeper into the Afro-futurism embedded throughoutPlacea metaphysical lens to see where weve been, where we are, where we might be going.

As a white artist, straight man, father to white children, part of my ongoing spiritual battle is a personal reckoning with my own complicity in these systems of oppression.

The uncertainty that Aaron mentions running throughColonizing Spacereflects not only the literal uncertainty that has accompanied the release of this piece, but the uncertain future of our attempts at justice, including housing equity and environmental racism. But its also bigger than all of those thingsas Aaron says, this is a spiritual battle.

As a white artist, straight man, father to white children, part of my ongoing spiritual battle is a personal reckoning with my own complicity in these systems of oppression. How can I be a good ancestor? My collaboration with Saul is one aspect of that self-interrogation. His text continues to give me gifts, trials, and challenges. And like great spiritual texts, new dimensions of his words reveal themselves to me as I change, as time goes on. His words feel particularly prescient during COVID and this administrations abusive policies toward migrants, but as Saul says, history in cycles. And now through working with Aaron, Sauls fourth-dimensional libation feels like a cup from the gods.

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Composer Ted Hearne Examines White Complicity in the Displacement of Black Americans - The Daily Beast

Only two manmade objects have traveled beyond the far edges of the solar system: NASAs Voyager 1 and Voyager 2.

Beyond the heliosphere, the bubble of space created by the Sun, lies the interstellar void of space between stellar systems in our galaxy.

For years, astronomers have suggested that the heliosphere is shaped like a comet, with a characteristically long tail that helps act like a shield that blocks incoming cosmic rays.

But according to new research, its shape could look far more peculiar than that: like a deflated croissant, according to a NASA statement. Less comet and more like a chewed up piece of gum, or maybe something vaguely biological from the movie Annihilation.

To construct the model, a team of astronomers took a closer look at data collected by NASAs Interstellar Boundary Explorer (IBEX). The mission analyzed energetic neutral atoms as cosmic rays travel from the Sun and outwards towards the heliopause, the theoretical boundary past which solar winds cant penetrate, some ten billion miles from Earth.

The team also considered dataabout charged particles being reflected towards the inner solar system, courtesy of NASAs Cassini mission, as well as measurements from NASAs New Horizons mission. Astronomers found that the further solar wind moved away from the Sun, it interacted with an increasing amount of material from interstellar space.

With all this data in hand, the team then got to work to come up with a 3D model of the heliosphere, as detailed in a paper published in the journal Nature Astronomy in March.

The result looks far more peculiar than the elegant comet-like shape from conventional models. Two jets shoot out of the center of this croissant, caused by the solar magnetic field. The overall shape is far smaller, rounder, and narrower than the conventional model.

Knowing the shape of the heliosphere could prove to be helpful in figuring outwhether other star systems could also be shielded by a similar bubble, and thereby harbor life. The heliosphere stops most galactic cosmic rays from penetrating through the ones that get through can prove dangerous, particularly to astronauts.

Astronomers are hopeful that NASAs upcoming Interstellar Mapping and Acceleration Probe (IMAP) could shed more light on the actual shape of our solar systems heliosphere. The probe, slated for launch in 2024, will attempt to measure how energetic particles behave and interact with solar wind.

READ MORE: Uncovering Our Solar Systems Shape [NASA]

More on the heliosphere: Its Official: NASA Is Considering an Interstellar Mission

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NASA Imaged the Bubble Around the Solar System and... Yikes - Futurism

Saw It Coming

The UK government has been funneling millions of dollars into a prediction tool for violent crime that uses artificial intelligence. Now, officials are finally ready to admit that it has one big flaw: It’s completely unusable. Also: Predictably (ironically), riddled with ethical problems, as Wired reports.

Police have already stopped developing the system called “Most Serious Violence” (MSV), part of the UK’s National Data Analytics Solution (NDAS) project, and luckily was never actually put to use — yet plenty of questions about the system remain.

The tool worked by assigning people scores based on how likely they were to commit a gun or knife crime within the next two years.

Two databases from two different UK police departments were used to train the system, including crime and custody records.

Fatal Flaws

Fortunately, the system never got off the ground. The system was full of flaws according to official documents obtained by Wired. “A coding error was found in the definition of the training data set which has rendered the current problem statement of MSV unviable,” a March briefing read.

“It has proven unfeasible with data currently available to identify a point of intervention before a person commits their first MSV offense with a gun or knife with any degree of precision.”

Instead of predictability scores in the high 70s, as was found in early tests, the system was only able to predict gun or knife violence less than 20 percent of the time.

Biases

Luckily, police forces have decided to discontinue the development of the system. Yet, as experts tell Wired, even with a 100 percent accuracy, plenty of biases would remain in similar systems in the future, especially with regards to age and ethnicity.

READ MORE: A British AI Tool to Predict Violent Crime Is Too Flawed to Use [Wired]

More on AI: Scientists Are Using an “AI Bird Watcher” to Solve a Solar Farm Bird Massacre Mystery

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Minority Report-Style Crime-Predicting AI Predictably Sucks At Its Job

According to several new studies published today in the journal Nature, Ceres, the largest object in the asteroid belt between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter, likely holds massive reservoirs of sea water underneath its surface. Yes: An ocean planet. 

A team of researchers found evidence of an “extensive reservoir” of brine beneath the surface of the 20-million-year-old Occator crater on Ceres using high definition images from NASA’s Dawn spacecraft.

Ceres is the only dwarf planet in the inner solar system. It’s only 590 miles across and takes 1,682 Earth days (4.6 years) to orbit the Sun. It has a very thin atmosphere of water vapor from ice volcanoes.

The recently discovered reservoir is roughly the size of Utah’s Great Salt Lake and is thought to be filled with extremely salty water — which is what stopped it from freezing.

NASA’s Dawn spacecraft, a now-retired space probe that launched in 2007, took the images from just 22 miles from the surface during a second run in 2018.

The team analyzed infrared images and found evidence of hydrohalite, a material commonly found in sea ice on Earth, which has never been observed on another planet.

Scientists suspect this reservoir was formed in the Occator crater after another space rock impacted with the location some 20 million years ago. The scientists believe that after this impact, the surface of the crater froze over, forming a large reservoir of melt water beneath.

“The material found on Ceres is extremely important in terms of astrobiology,” Maria Cristina De Sanctis, a researcher at the Istituto Nazionale di Astrofisica in Rome, Italy, co-author of one of the new papers and Dawn team member, told AFP.

“We know that these minerals are all essential for the emergence of life,” she added.

“It’s really kind of a smoking gun, because you would have expected it had gone away if it had been sitting there even close to the surface for millions of years,” Dawn Principal Investigator Carol Raymond of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab told Astronomy.

“Past research revealed that Ceres had a global ocean, an ocean that would have no reason to exist [still] and should have been frozen by now,” De Sanctis told Astrology. ”These latest discoveries have shown that part of this ocean could have survived and be present below the surface.”

READ MORE: Ceres: An ocean world in the asteroid belt [Astronomy]

More on Ceres: Traces of Organic Molecules Have Been Located on Ceres

The post Study: Dwarf Planet Ceres is an Ocean World appeared first on Futurism.

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Study: Dwarf Planet Ceres is an Ocean World

Absolutely Atlantian

How much effort should we place on preserving heritage as the world around us changes? “How much effort,” asks a press release from North Carolina State University, “should be spent trying to keep Venice looking like Venice?”

Rather than spending increasing resources to keep Venice looking like Venice, a new proposal published in the journal Climate Change suggests World Heritage Sites, like Venice, should be allowed to “transform” as our world changes.

Timeless

Historically, preservation efforts have focused on keeping heritage sites exactly as they were. But, as the world around us continues to change, preservationists and researchers are suggesting there may be a better model than to keep up with the pace of change.

In a paper co-authored by Eugene Jo, World Heritage Leadership Programme Coordinator at the International Centre for the Study of the Preservation and Restoration of Cultural Property, and Erin Seekamp, a professor of parks, recreation and tourism management at North Carolina State University, Seekamp and Jo argue that heritage sites “severely impacted” by climate change could remain damaged to serve as a “memory” of that event and to encourage conversation about the loss.

Keep it Cool

Ultimately, Seekamp and Jo call for a new categorization of heritage sites they call “World Heritage Sites in Climatic Transformation.” The designation would better help identify sites at risk and funnel resources towards them; almost like an endangered species list for parts of the world. Rather than be forced to continue preventing change, the designation would allow heritage sites to progress in a way that benefits them as well as the environment.

“We’re not saying that this should open the door for development or tourism,” Seekamp adds. “We’re saying, ‘Let’s create a new categorization, and enable those places to not just think about persistent adaptation, but about transformative adaptation.’ It allows us to think about alternatives.”

READ MORE: Landmarks Facing Climate Threats Could ‘Transform,’ Expert Says [NCSU]

More on Climate Change: Scientists: Climate Change Is Going to Suck, but It Won’t Be Armageddon

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New Climate Paper: Maybe Let’s Let Venice Sink?

AI Bird Watcher

Solar energy! ‘Might be completely renewable and green and great for the planet, sure. It could also, however, be deadly — if you’re a bird.

But really: A 2016 study found that large solar farms in the US accounted for the death of almost 140,000 birds every year. For a while, we only had our best guess as to why solar farms were killing birds at such a scale — for instance, they may have mistaken the reflective panels as the surface of water.

These theories are far from confirmed. But we may soon know a lot more, courtesy of an artificial intelligence-powered birdwatcher, as Wired reports.

Bird Algorithms

The thinking is that an algorithm can pick out avian behavior and analyze their flying patterns near solar panels. The Department of Energy recently signed a contract with Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois to develop a tailor-made AI solution.

“The machine-learning research we’re doing is a little unique, because we don’t just want to classify an object in a single image,” Adam Szymanski is a software engineer at Argonne, who’s working on the system, told Wired.

“It has to classify a small, fast-moving object over time,” he added. “So if the bird is flying, in some frames you’ll see a dot and in others you’ll see its wings out, and we need to track that object as it moves across the camera.”

Perched on a Solar Panel

Ironically, the bird watcher will likely rely on solar panels on its own. Using and adapting a camera system designed to monitor pedestrians and cars, the team is planning to mount the bird watcher on top of a solar panel.

The goal? To eventually figure out how bird behavior changes around solar panels and ensure that birds are protected in the future.

READ MORE: Why Do Solar Farms Kill Birds? Call in the AI Bird Watcher [Wired]

More on AI: Elon Musk: If You Don’t Think AI Could Outsmart You, You’re an Idiot

The post Scientists Are Using an “AI Bird Watcher” to Solve a Solar Farm Bird Massacre Mystery appeared first on Futurism.

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Scientists Are Using an “AI Bird Watcher” to Solve a Solar Farm Bird Massacre Mystery

Mask On

New York City’s subway-running Metropolitan Transit Agency, fed up with folks taking off their masks to unlock their iPhones, wants Apple to improve their iPhones’ facial recognition features. In a letter to CEO Tim Cook obtained by The Associated Press, Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) Chairman Patrick Foye complained that too many riders were seen removing their masks to unlock phones even though Apple recently simplified the unlock process for people wearing masks.

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Some masks have been shown to thwart facial recognition programs, to the point of being a government concern last month. Before Apple’s software update in May, users wearing masks would have to wait a few seconds while face-recognition features tried and failed to authorize them before asking for a passcode. Now masked iPhone users are able to swipe up and enter a passcode immediately, so in theory, there shouldn’t be any need to remove a face covering while riding an MTA bus or train.

Now Delayed

The MTA Chairman’s letter comes at a unique time. MTA ridership, the fares from which the MTA depends on, plummeted almost 90% during the height of the coronavirus epidemic in New York City. The request to improve facial recognition comes just two months after two US Senators proposed banning police use of the technology and after previous arguments from experts that such technology should be banned from everyday life.

READ MORE: MTA asks Apple’s help to solve iPhone mask issues [AP]

More on Facial Recognition: Government leak: Cops terrified masks will block facial recognition

The post New York City Subway System Asks Apple to Improve Masked Face ID appeared first on Futurism.

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New York City Subway System Asks Apple to Improve Masked Face ID

Powerhouse

Mitochondria are the powerhouses of the cell — but if something dampers their output, it can be difficult to determine why. To better investigate mitochondrial function, a team of researchers from Switzerland’s Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne developed a method to make mice glow in the dark, like fireflies. Their work was published today in the journal Nature Chemical Biology.

Cell Walls

Like cells themselves, mitochondria have a membrane that filters materials entering and exiting their structure. That membrane relies on a difference in polarity known as “membrane potential” and when membrane potential drops, it can be indicative of a problem. Testing that membrane is why scientists had a need to make mice glow.

So! To do that, (EPFL professor and the paper’s lead author) Elena Goun and team used mice genetically modified to express luciferase, the enzyme that produces light when combined with another compound called luciferin — which is exactly how fireflies glow. The team developed two molecules that, when injected into mice, pass into the mitochondria and cause them to produce luciferin, making the mice glow. “In a completely darkened room, you can see the mice glowing, just like fireflies,” says Elena Goun.

Actual Glow Up

Studying mitochondrial function is then as simple as measuring how bright the mice glow. The brighter they are, the more luciferin in the mitochondria, the better the mitochondria are functioning. This animal model method of testing mitochondrial function could be extremely useful in things like cancer drug research, as well as things like diabetes, oncology, aging, nutrition, and neurogenerative diseases.

READ MORE: Fireflies shed light on the function of mitochondria [EPFL]

More on Mouse Studies: Lab Puts Mice in Suspended Animation. Will It Work on Humans?

The post Scientists Made Mice Glow in the Dark to Study Mitochondria appeared first on Futurism.

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Scientists Made Mice Glow in the Dark to Study Mitochondria

After spending over a year of trying to bury itself into the surface of Mars to take the Red Planet’s temperature, the “mole” attached to NASA’s InSight Mars lander is finally officially “in” and buried in sand according to an update by the German Aerospace Center (DLR).

Back in June, the DLR team pulled the mole out of the Martian soil in to check up on it, and decided to get back to drilling down into the surface. After a lengthy “hammering session” of 150 strokes on June 20, as JPL put it in a July update, the mole caused “bits of soil jostling within the scoop — possible evidence that the mole had begun bouncing in place, knocking the bottom of the scoop.”

The team thought that soil fell in from the sides of the hole the mole dug. “Instead, we were pleasantly surprised to see that the Mole was largely covered with sand,” reads today’s DLR update. “Only the back cap and a few centimeters of the hull are sticking out.”

Having the mole completely covered in sand could provide enough friction for the mole to make more headway in its endeavor of reaching a maximum depth of ten feet. The success of burying the mole could also have big impacts on the scientific value of the Mars mole mission.

The mole’s mission objective is to take Mars’ temperature from below the surface — and after having it fully buried, “both the thermal and mechanical contact have improved,” the update reads. “So we’re feeling optimistic!”

The discovery came after a number of risky maneuvers trying to gage the state of the mole. “After intense discussion, the team decided to first do a push on the back cap, similar to the successful back cap pushes conducted in the past months,” today’s update reads. Unfortunately, the “scoop no longer fits in the pit,” making such a maneuver pretty risky.

After a lengthy back and forth, the team decided to scrape along the top of the buried mole to test if it was possible to push it using the scoop. “The scraping was a complete success!,” the team wrote. “The scrape was much more effective than expected and the sand filled the pit almost completely. The Mole is now covered, but there is only a thin layer of sand on the back cap.”

The team’s calculations may have gone array due to the fact that the shovel went in much deeper than initially thought.

READ MORE: Mars InSight mission: The Mole is ‘in’ and the ‘finishing touches’ are ‘in sight’  [DLR]

More on the mole: Crap: NASA’s Mars “Mole” Finally Started Digging, Then Hit Another Obstacle

The post NASA’s Mars Mole is Officially “Dug In” appeared first on Futurism.

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NASA’s Mars Mole is Officially “Dug In”

Only two manmade objects have traveled beyond the far edges of the solar system: NASAs Voyager 1 and Voyager 2.

Beyond the heliosphere, the bubble of space created by the Sun, lies the interstellar void of space between stellar systems in our galaxy.

For years, astronomers have suggested that the heliosphere is shaped like a comet, with a characteristically long tail that helps act like a shield that blocks incoming cosmic rays.

But according to new research, its shape could look far more peculiar than that: like a deflated croissant, according to a NASA statement. Less comet and more like a chewed up piece of gum, or maybe something vaguely biological from the movie Annihilation.

To construct the model, a team of astronomers took a closer look at data collected by NASAs Interstellar Boundary Explorer (IBEX). The mission analyzed energetic neutral atoms as cosmic rays travel from the Sun and outwards towards the heliopause, the theoretical boundary past which solar winds cant penetrate, some ten billion miles from Earth.

The team also considered dataabout charged particles being reflected towards the inner solar system, courtesy of NASAs Cassini mission, as well as measurements from NASAs New Horizons mission. Astronomers found that the further solar wind moved away from the Sun, it interacted with an increasing amount of material from interstellar space.

With all this data in hand, the team then got to work to come up with a 3D model of the heliosphere, as detailed in a paper published in the journal Nature Astronomy in March.

The result looks far more peculiar than the elegant comet-like shape from conventional models. Two jets shoot out of the center of this croissant, caused by the solar magnetic field. The overall shape is far smaller, rounder, and narrower than the conventional model.

Knowing the shape of the heliosphere could prove to be helpful in figuring outwhether other star systems could also be shielded by a similar bubble, and thereby harbor life. The heliosphere stops most galactic cosmic rays from penetrating through the ones that get through can prove dangerous, particularly to astronauts.

Astronomers are hopeful that NASAs upcoming Interstellar Mapping and Acceleration Probe (IMAP) could shed more light on the actual shape of our solar systems heliosphere. The probe, slated for launch in 2024, will attempt to measure how energetic particles behave and interact with solar wind.

READ MORE: Uncovering Our Solar Systems Shape [NASA]

More on the heliosphere: Its Official: NASA Is Considering an Interstellar Mission

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NASA Imaged the Bubble Around the Solar System and Yikes - Futurism

Megaconstellations

Amazon was approved by the Federal Communications Commission to launch 3,326 satellites as part of its planned Kuiper constellation. That’s roughly 600 more satellites than the total number currently in orbit, as The New York Times reports. But who’s counting?

Astronomers are. And they’re worried. The news comes just a week after SpaceX launched its latest batch of 57 Starlink satellites, bringing the total number up to just shy of 600 already in orbit.

The reflective micro satellites have been photobombing astronomical observations of the night sky ever since they started being launched by SpaceX, appearing as bright streaks of light.

No Rules

“We don’t yet have any kind of industrywide guidelines,” Michele Bannister, planetary astronomer at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand, told the Times.

“We don’t have an industry body that’s producing good corporate citizenship on the part of all of these enthusiastic companies that want to launch, and we don’t have any regulatory setup in place that’s providing clear guidelines back to the industry,” Bannister added. “To me, honestly, it feels like putting a bunch of planes up and then not having air traffic control.”

A Growing Problem

Problems are likely to persist as companies like SpaceX and Amazon continue to litter the night sky with thousands, if not tens of thousands, of their satellites.

While SpaceX has tried non-reflective coating and a sunshade to stop reflecting light, a fully effective solution has yet to be demonstrated. An Amazon spokesperson also told the Times that “reflectivity is a key consideration in our design and development process.”

Astronomers, however, are calling for national regulators to step up to the plate and make sure ground-based astronomy can survive this new trend. Whether or not they will — much like a potential clear night sky in the future — remains to be seen.

READ MORE: Amazon Satellites Add to Astronomers’ Worries About the Night Sky [The New York Times]

More on Starlink: SpaceX’s Starlink Satellites Ruined This Photo of the NEOWISE Comet

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Amazon’s Constellation of 3,236 Satellites Has Astronomers Very, Very Freaked Out

Wealthy philanthropist and public health advocate Bill Gates, who’s been critical of the U.S. coronavirus response since the beginning, shared some new thoughts about the diagnostic testing situation in the country.

Specifically, he says it’s utter trash.

“The majority of all U.S. tests are completely garbage, wasted,” Gates told Wired in a lengthy interview today.

His frustration wasn’t necessarily about the quality of the tests or the accuracy of the results they provide, though that’s been called into question in the past, but rather how long it takes to get results in the first place.

The current delays for test results, Gates says, essentially render them useless. Positive or negative, many in the U.S. are going weeks before they hear back about their nasal swabs. That’s a dangerously long time for people to continue going about their lives if they’re unsure whether or not they might spread COVID-19.

Gates called the delays “stupidity” in the Wired interview.

To fix the bottleneck, Gates suggests that the testing companies’ reimbursement should be tied to how long it takes to send back results. With that extra incentive, Gates thinks that results will come back way sooner.

“You have to have the reimbursement system pay a little bit extra for 24 hours, pay the normal fee for 48 hours, and pay nothing [if it isn’t done by then]. And they will fix it overnight,” Gates told Wired.

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A team of astronomers have observed what they believe to be a neutron star being born following a supernova first detected in 1987, in a satellite galaxy of the Milky Way 170,000 light-years from Earth, dubbed SN 1987A.

Until now, astronomers weren’t sure if the neutron star survived the powerful event and didn’t just collapse in on itself to form a black hole — but a new paper published last week in The Astrophysical Journal suggests that it may have survived after all.

That means the neutron star would be a millennial, no older than 33.

If confirmed, it would be the youngest neutron star known to mankind, as Astronomy reports. To date, the youngest supernova remnant is the 330 years old Cassiopeia A, about 11,000 light-years away from Earth inside the Milky Way.

Analyzing high-resolution imagery from the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) in Chile, a team of astronomers was able to get a closer look at what was left behind following SN 1987A.

They found a hot “blob” inside the core of the supernova, likely a gas cloud shrouding the neutron star. The star itself would be far too small to be detected directly, as it’s extremely small and dense — the mass of 1.4 times the Sun inside a sphere that’s only 15 miles across.

“We were very surprised to see this warm blob made by a thick cloud of dust in the supernova remnant,” Mikako Matsuura from Cardiff University who made the discovery with ALMA, said in a statement.

The discovery by the ALMA team supports the new theoretical study published last week.

“There has to be something in the cloud that has heated up the dust and which makes it shine. That’s why we suggested that there is a neutron star hiding inside the dust cloud,” Matsuura added.

“In spite of the supreme complexity of a supernova explosion and the extreme conditions reigning in the interior of a neutron star, the detection of a warm blob of dust is a confirmation of several predictions,” lead author Dany Page, astrophysicist at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, explained in the statement.

According to computer models, the neutron star would have been sent screaming through space at hundreds of kilometers per second. The location where the ALMA team found it is exactly where it would be today, according to the models.

The theoretical star was also found to be extremely bright, in large part thanks to its hypothesized temperature of around five million degrees Celsius.

It will take time until the existence of the star can be confirmed. The dust and gas around the supernova need to subside further for astronomers to say with any certainty that the extremely young star really exists.

READ MORE: Hot ‘blob’ points to a neutron star lurking in Supernova 1987A [Astronomy]

More on neutron stars: Astronomers Watch Neutron Star “Charge Up” Before Huge X-Ray Blast

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Astronomers May Have Found a Star That’s Just 33 Years Old

According to new research, half the calcium in our universe came from “calcium-rich supernova.” That means the stuff our teeth and bones is made from is, essentially, the remains of dead stars that blew up a long, long time ago.

“These events are so few in number that we have never known what produced calcium-rich supernova,” said Wynn Jacobson-Galan, Northwestern graduate student and lead author of the new study published in The Astrophysical Journal this week, in a statement.

“By observing what this star did in its final month before it reached its critical, tumultuous end, we peered into a place previously unexplored, opening new avenues of study within transient science,” Jacobson-Galan added.

An extremely bright event some 55 million light years from Earth grabbed the attention of the international astronomy community in April 2019. “Every single country with a prominent telescope turned to look at this object,” Jacobson-Galan recalled.

Astronomers were so quick that many observed the supernova just ten hours after the explosion. “The explosion is trying to cool down,” Raffaella Margutti from Northwestern University and a senior author of the study, explained in the statement. “It wants to give away its energy, and calcium emission is an efficient way to do that.”

As it turns out the explosion spewed out an immense amount of calcium. “It wasn’t just calcium rich,” Margutti said. “It was the richest of the rich.”

They caught the event just in time to conclude that it was the most calcium to have ever been observed to be emitted from just a single event.

“The luminosity tells us how much material the star shed and how close that material was to the star,” Jacobson-Galan explained. “In this case, the star lost a very small amount of material right before it exploded. That material was still nearby.”

READ MORE: Exploding stars created the calcium in our bones and teeth, study says [CNN]

More on supernovae: This Star Appears to Have Survived a Supernova

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Your Bones Are Made Out of Exploded Stars, Scientists Say

A small UK-based DNA testing company called DnaNudge has come up with a toaster-sized machine that can detect COVID-19 in just 90 minutes, Bloomberg reports, no lab analysis needed.

The UK’s National Health Service has already ordered 5,000 of the machines, as well as cartridges to start testing coronavirus patients, as part of a $211 million contract.

The machine was originally designed to help people tailor their diet based on their heredity, according to Bloomberg. But founder Christofer Toumazou, a professor at Imperial College London, made a U-turn in light of the growing pandemic.

“My dream has been to bring testing like this to the consumer,” Toumazou told Bloomberg. “A test that can demystify and simplify that quickly — rather than leaving people in doubt — is going to be very useful.”

All the machine needs is a nose swab or some saliva to detect traces of the coronavirus. It can even detect other diseases such as the flu and a common virus infection called Respiratory Syncytial Virus (RSV). It will also notify the user if a proper sample has been taken or if a test needs to be retaken.

Bloomberg didn’t address the accuracy of the machine, which DnaNudge says could prove helpful in triaging potential COVID patients.

“If you have someone coming in and you’re not sure if they have COVID, you can make a decision about where they should go,” Graham Cooke, a professor of infectious diseases at Imperial College London, told Bloomberg. “You don’t want to put the wrong person in the wrong place.”

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Machine Detects COVID-19 in 90 Minutes

In a new study published in the journal Science of Learning, researchers showed that small amounts of electrical stimulation through specially designed ear pieces improved the adult participants’ abilities to recognize foreign language tones — an effect that lasted after the stimulation was halted.

“Humans are excellent perceptual learners,” the paper’s introduction reads. “Yet, a notable and well-documented exception is the acquisition of non-native speech categories in adulthood.”

By stimulating the vagus nerve using the ear pieces, the group was better able to better identify and distinguish between four different Mandarin tones, as Inverse reports.

That’s impressive, because differentiating between those four common tones is extremely hard for native English speakers who are not used to tonal languages.

Overall, they saw an improvement of 13 percent in distinguishing an easier-to-tell-apart pair of Mandarin tones when compared to those who didn’t receive brain stimulation — although the effect was almost imperceptible more difficult tones.

“Showing that non-invasive peripheral nerve stimulation can make language learning easier potentially opens the door to improving cognitive performance across a wide range of domains,” Fernando Llanos, a postdoc researcher at the University of Pittsburg’s Sound Brain Lab and lead author on the study, said in a statement.

The same effect could be generalized to learning sound patterns of other languages according to the researchers.

“In general, people tend to get discouraged by how hard language learning can be, but if you could give someone 13 percent to 15 percent better results after their first session, maybe they’d be more likely to want to continue,” said Matthew Leonard, an assistant professor of neurological surgery at the University of California, San Francisco and co-author of the study.

The researchers are now investigating if extending the learning sessions with stimulation could enhance the effect for the more-difficult-to-distinguish tones.

Similar brain stimulation of the same area, the vagus nerve, has been used to treat epilepsy in the past and is now the subject of other studies investigating whether it could help treat depression or even inflammatory diseases.

However, these treatments tend to be far more invasive when compared to the non-invasive ear pieces used during this particular study.

“We’re showing robust learning effects in a completely non-invasive and safe way, which potentially makes the technology scalable to a broader array of consumer and medical applications, such as rehabilitation after stroke,” senior author Bharath Chandrasekaran, professor and vice chair of research at the University of Pittsburgh School of Health and Rehabilitation Sciences, said in the statement.

READ MORE: Scientists Discover Brain Hack That Improves Language Abilities By 13 Percent [Inverse]

More on brain stimulation: Elon Musk: Neuralink Will Do Human Brain Implant in “Less Than a Year”

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Zapping the Brain Improved Language Learning Abilities by 13%

A new NASA simulation shows the ghostly ultraviolet flashes of Mars’ “nightglow” — greenish hues in the Martian night sky.

The stunning video comes courtesy of the Imaging Ultraviolet Spectrograph on board NASA’s MAVEN (Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution) spacecraft, which launched back in 2013.

The observations were detailed in a new paper appearing the journal Space Physics this week.

To the MAVEN  team’s surprise, they found that the Martian atmosphere pulsed exactly three times every night, but only during spring and fall on the Red Planet. The new analysis also showed unexpected waves and spirals over the planet’s poles during winter.

We’ve known about Mars’ “nightglow” phenomenon for a number of years now. Scientists have observed faint glows, likely the result of nitric oxide emissions.

Here’s how it works. On the day side of Mars, UV light from the Sun breaks down carbon dioxide and nitrogen molecules.

The resulting particles are then circulated by high-altitude winds from the day side to the night side, where they fall to lower altitudes. CO2 and nitrogen particles then recombine, creating energy, which is then released in the form of UV light.

“The ultraviolet glow comes mostly from an altitude of about 70 kilometers (approximately 40 miles), with the brightest spot about a thousand kilometers (approximately 600 miles) across, and is as bright in the ultraviolet as Earth’s northern lights,” Zac Milby, student researcher at the University of Colorado’s Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics and co-author of the new study, said in a NASA statement.

“Unfortunately, the composition of Mars’ atmosphere means that these bright spots emit no light at visible wavelengths that would allow them to be seen by future Mars astronauts,” he added.

The team is hoping to examine the phenomenon from an entirely new perspective next by looking at just above the edge of the planet, where they’re hoping to get a more detailed look at vertical wind patterns and seasonal changes.

READ MORE: The eerie green ‘nightglow’ of Mars pulses in ultraviolet light in new NASA views [Space.com]

More on Mars: This Video of Mars’ Leaking Atmosphere Could Make Elon Musk Cry

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