Magic Mushrooms

This week, Denver, CO became the first city in the United States to decriminalize psilocybin, a compound with hallucinogenic properties that occurs in some mushrooms — a move that could signal new frontiers both in the country’s evolving relationship with mind-altering substances and in the medical community’s accelerating exploration of psychedelics.

“Because psilocybin has such tremendous medical potential, there’s no reason individuals should be criminalized for using something that grows naturally,” said Kevin Matthews, the director of the campaign to legalize psilocybin in Denver, in an interview with the New York Times.

Magic Mushroom

The new law passed by a narrow margin, according to the Times, of less than 2,000 votes. It doesn’t entirely legalize psilocybin-containing mushrooms, but it makes the prosecution of possession and cultivation of them an extremely low-priority offense.

But not everybody in Denver is pleased.

“We’re still in the very early stages of marijuana legalization, and we are still learning the impact of that substance on our city,” Carolyn Tyler, a spokeswoman for the district attorney, told the Times. The district attorney, she said, “is not in favor of Denver being the only city that doesn’t enforce the law.”

READ MORE: Denver Voters Support ‘Magic’ Mushrooms [The New York Times]

More on psilocybin: Scientist Tells World Leaders MDMA and Magic Mushrooms Should Be Legal

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Denver Becomes First U.S. City to Decriminalize “Magic Mushrooms”

Drift Compatible

A new brain-computer interface can connect three people’s brains, allowing them to play a “Tetris”-like video game together using something resembling telepathy.

Companies like Elon Musk’s Neuralink and Facebook are working on mind-reading devices designed to connect people’s brains to machines. While details on those projects have been sparse, this new gamified version of a brain-computer interface out of the University of Washington shows that the technology could be ready in the near future.

Multiplayer

In the game, three people collaborate to solve rudimentary “Tetris”-like puzzles in which they rearrange blocks to fill a complete row in a virtual grid. In a video featuring NPR’s Elise Hu, two players are each presented with the puzzle and asked whether or not they should rotate a block before it drops to the bottom of the screen.

The device monitors the players’ brain activity to determine whether they want to rotate the block or not. The two players’ decisions are then transmitted into the brain of a third player, who hasn’t seen the puzzle, and must then decide whether or not to rotate the block. In the video, Hu and her teammate successfully recommended against rotating the block.

For now, the system isn’t sophisticated enough to handle a full version of “Tetris” — rather, it broke the puzzles down into yes or no questions which each took several seconds, meaning that until the technology improves, we’re stuck controlling games with our hands like animals.

READ MORE: How Computer-Assisted Telepathy Helps Humans Communicate [NPR]

More on brain-computer interface: This Neural Implant Accesses Your Brain Through the Jugular Vein

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This Machine Lets You Play “Tetris” With Your Brain

Parachute Test

NASA administrator Bill Gerstenmaier admitted during a contentious hearing before the House of Representatives Wednesday that SpaceX’s Crew Dragon shuttle smashed into the ground last month after a failed parachute test — alarming news that comes in the wake of a separate SpaceX failure last month when a Crew Dragon apparently exploded during a different test.

“The test was not satisfactory,” Gerstenmaier said. “We did not get the results we wanted. The parachutes did not work as designed.”

Brush It Off

During a parachute test over a dried-out lake bed in Nevada, an empty Crew Dragon shuttle was damaged when it crashed into the ground, Gerstenmaier said.

The Crew Dragon is equipped with four parachutes, and this particular test was designed to determine how safely the spacecraft could land with one parachute intentionally disabled. But the other three chutes didn’t work right, leading to the incident Gerstenmaier described.

Fully Engaged

All the same, Gerstenmaier expressed confidence that the parachute problem will be solved in time for NASA and the federal government’s ambitious space travel plans.

“NASA is fully engaged on this,” he said.

READ MORE: SpaceX had a problem during a parachute test in April [Ars Technica]

More on NASA: NASA Head: “This Time, When We Go to the Moon, We Will Stay”

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NASA Admits SpaceX Ship Crashed During Failed Test Last Month

Hello, This is Robot

Almost exactly a year ago, everyone was flipping out over Google’s newly announced Duplex feature, which basically pretends to be a human assistant in order to make reservations at restaurants or schedule trips to the hairdresser.

But the AI-powered assistant has struggled to win over the hearts of service workers. The Verge reports that restaurants are hanging up on Google’s auto-calling voice assistant — sometimes because they’re creeped out by how lifelike it sounds.

“I was spooked at how natural and human the machine sounds,” server Shawn Watford of Birmingham, Alabama told The Verge. “It was so weird [that] when it called, I immediately hung up.”

Friend or Foe

Other restaurant employees ignore the calls because they think they’re spam — understandable, considering that robocallers have quickly become a particularly nagging reality of life.

Setting up online booking services like OpenTable can be expensive for smaller businesses, as The Verge points out, forcing them to rely on call-based reservations, foot traffic, and walk-ins.

But there’s one thing Google’s AI call feature has going for it: Google’s robot slaves aren’t pushy and speak very clearly — not something you can expect from every human caller trying to make a reservation.

READ MORE: One Year Later, Restaurants Are Still Confused by Google Duplex [The Verge]

More on Duplex: Yes, Google’s Phone-Calling AI Is Cool. But Why Does It Exist?

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Restaurants Are Ignoring Calls From Google’s Smart Assistant

Droning On

Officials in South Florida are excited to announce they’ll be engaging in drone warfare.

The Florida Keys Mosquito Control District is going to spend the summer using drones to spread larvicide over the salt marshes that annoying and potentially infectious mosquitoes use as breeding grounds, according to WJCT — a high-tech attempt to keep the pests’ population in check, and one that stands to save the state a great deal of money, officials say.

Buzz Off

The mosquito control organization already uses drones to search for remote pools of standing water, WJCT reports. Now the drones will be able to carry seven or eight pounds of larvicide — enough to spray up to two acres — so that they can treat these remote pools themselves, a task usually assigned to expensive helicopters.

“It’s only treating very small areas,” Florida Keys Mosquito Control District executive director Andrea Leal told WJCT. “We want to make sure that we’re precise with this. It’s really starting out, seeing exactly what this can do for us.”

READ MORE: The Drones Are Coming! Keys Add A New Weapon In War Against Mosquitoes [WJCT]

More on mosquitoes: To Stop Mosquitoes From Biting, Scientists Put Them on Diet Pills

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Florida Officials Are Using Drones to Kill Mosquitoes

Creepin’ on Your Kids

On Thursday, 19 consumer advocacy and privacy groups announced plans to file a complaint against Amazon with the Federal Trade Commission (FTC).

The complaint alleges that the version of Amazon’s Echo smart speaker designed specifically for use by kids is illegally collecting data on minors. It’s the latest in a long list of allegations over Amazon’s devices violating users’ privacy.

Some Pissed-Off Parents

The 96-page complaint is chock full of examples demonstrating how the Amazon Echo Dot Kids violates the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA), the law limiting data companies can collect on children without their parents’ permission.

The complaint notes that Amazon stores voice recordings from the device in the cloud indefinitely (just as it does for adults’ Alexa devices), forcing parents to deal with a burdensome review process to delete the data. It also asserts that Amazon does an insufficient job of making clear which third-parties can access collected data.

Pattern Emerging

Amazon spokeswoman Kinley Pearsall said the Echo Dot Kids Edition is “compliant with the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act” in a statement to The Washington Post, but failed to address any specific allegations from the complaint.

Of course, this is far from the first example of Amazon playing fast and loose with user data, but the first to focus specifically on kids. Maybe this complaint will move the needle because it involves kids; or maybe Amazon will dig their heels in, deeper. After all, children are the future (Amazon customers).

READ MORE: Amazon’s Echo Dot Kids Edition is illegally recording your children, 19 privacy advocates warn [Business Insider]

More on Alexa: Thanks, Amazon! Echo Recorded and Sent Audio to Random Contacts Without Warning

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Amazon Alexa: Illegally Recording Kids, Privacy Advocates Allege

Drying Up

A team of scientists say they’ve discovered the unusual way in which water cycles on Mars.

The findings could illuminate how hydrogen from water vapor could be making its way into space on the Red Planet — a potential explanation as to why Mars has turned from a water-rich planet into a dry and desolate one over the course of billions of years.

Water World

According to the researchers’ results, water can only rise from the lower into the upper atmosphere during a tiny time window: approximately every two Earth years, when it’s summer on the southern hemisphere and Mars is at its closest to the Sun.

The team of researchers, who hail from the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology and the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research (MPS) in Germany, used a computer simulation and data gathered by space telescopes and space probes to probe the Red Planet’s weather dynamics.

“When it is summer in the southern hemisphere, at certain times of day water vapor can rise locally with warmer air masses and reach the upper atmosphere,” Paul Hartogh from MPS said in a statement.

Ocean Avenue

The water vapor then gets carried to the North Pole where it condenses into liquid and falls out of the sky. During that process, some of the water particles disintegrate and leak hydrogen atoms into the emptiness of space.

Many astronomers believe that Mars was once covered in a massive ocean and countless rivers — meaning this new discovery could help figure out why Mars has lost all that water.

READ MORE: New water cycle on Mars discovered [Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research]

More on water: New Research: Mars Used To Be Covered In Huge Rivers

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Surprising Discovery: Mars Is Leaking Hydrogen from Water Vapor

Inclusive Designs

Google is releasing 53 new gender-fluid emoji, according to a Fast Company exclusive — the latest example of efforts to make the tiny symbols more inclusive.

“We’re not calling this the non-binary character, the third gender, or an asexual emoji — and not gender neutral. Gender neutral is what you call pants,” Android emoji director Jennifer Daniel, who sits on the Unicode consortium, told Fast Company. “But you can create something that feels more inclusive.”

Representing All

The work-in-progress designs shared with Fast Company exhibit many of the same features of the more gendered emoji, but with tiny tweaks that make the characters appear neither male nor female — or perhaps both.

The newly designed merperson emoji, for example, boasts chin-length curls, an orange tail, and crossed arms over its chest. Meanwhile, the new vampire wears a chain across its lapels, an accessory that’s a bit more gender-neutral than the necklace or bowtie sported by the seemingly female- and male-presenting vampires, respectively.

First Launch

The new gender-fluid emoji will launch as part of a Pixel smartphone beta release this week, with a roll out to all Android Q phones planned for later in 2019, at which point they’ll join the recently released emoji designed to better represent people with disabilities.

As Fast Company points out, Google collaborates with Apple and other tech companies when developing emojis, so we could see others release their own versions of the new gender-fluid emoji in the near future.

READ MORE: Exclusive: Google releases 53 gender fluid emoji [Fast Company]

More on emoji: Inclusive New Emoji Include Prosthetic Arms and Legs

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Google Is Adding 53 Gender-Fluid Emoji to Its Smartphones

Gotta Go Fast

Back in August, the Trump Administration instructed NASA to put an astronaut on the Moon by 2024 — four years sooner than originally planned.

That accelerated timeline put NASA in an unexpected tizzy, since it meant the space agency had to quickly find a way to trim four years’ worth of fat from its plans. That work hasn’t been going well, according to the Houston Chronicle — suggesting that the accelerated timeline may have been too ambitious.

NASA still hasn’t delivered the budget proposal that Congress instructed it to deliver by March, and now federal representatives want answers.

Friendly Check-In

NASA administrator Bill Gerstenmaier said that the missing budget wasn’t yet ready during a hearing with the House of Representatives Committee on Science, Space, and Technology on Wednesday. He added that he expected it to be several more weeks before NASA sorted out the budget.

“We’re flying blind,” Oklahoma representative Kendra Horn said during the hearing, going on to say that the four-year acceleration left NASA “scrambling to develop a plan and hastening to pull together a budget amendment that still hasn’t been delivered.”

“The lack of planning evident so far is no way to run a human exploration program,” she said.

READ MORE: Congress members slam NASA for lack of moon plans, say the agency is ‘scrambling’ [Houston Chronicle]

More on NASA timelines: Former NASA Chief Scientist: Humans Could be on Mars in Five Years

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Congress Is Furious That NASA Doesn’t Have a Moon Plan Yet

Alexa, Take Me to the Moon

Jeff Bezos’ private space company Blue Origin revealed its long-awaited plans to go to the Moon at a mysterious press event today.

Bezos showed off a brand new design of its “Blue Moon” lander, which is designed to carry 6.5 tons to the surface of the Moon. According to Bezos, the Blue Origin team has been working on the design for three years.

“A very fundamental long-range problem is that we will run out of energy on Earth,” Bezos said at the event. “This is just arithmetic. It will happen.”

Prime Delivery

The solution, according to Bezos: look elsewhere for energy sources in the solar system.

The lunar lander will fit into the fairing of Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket and will feature a brand new BE-7 engine with 10,000 pounds of thrust. The new rocket will fire test for the first time as soon as this summer.

Bezos also confirmed that a modified version of the Blue Moon lander could be powerful enough to carry a pressurized ascent vehicle for astronauts to the lunar surface.

A new space on Blue Origin’s website describes the lander as being capable of “precise and soft landings” to enable “a sustained human presence on the Moon.”

Space Vision

Bezos also talked about his futuristic visions of humanity living in giant space colonies modeled after physicist Gerard O’Neill’s designs for massive cylinders that could house human settlers by spinning to provide gravity.

But launching into space is not only super expensive but very difficult. The news comes just a day after Congress grilled NASA officials over how it failed to come up with plans to get to the Moon by 2024.

Blue Origin is officially offering its new lander as an ascent vehicle for NASA’s 2024 human landing missions.

Bezos confirms Blue Origin will fly people in space this year on New Shepard (but no new announcements so far about those plans.)

— Jeff Foust (@jeff_foust) May 9, 2019

Endurance

Up until the announcement, the only clue as to what the event was about was a cryptic tweet with a picture of British explorer Ernest Shackleton’s ship called the Endurance that he explored the Antarctic with.

A site near the south pole of the Moon was named after Shackleton — a crater with rims that are exposed to almost continual sunlight.

The world's richest person wants to go to the Moon, and that's pretty cool.

— Eric Berger (@SciGuySpace) May 9, 2019

Editors note: this story has been updated with additional details.

READ MORE: Blue Moon [Blue Origin]

More on Blue Origin: Jeff Bezos: In the Future, We’ll Live In “Giant Space Colonies”

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Jeff Bezos Just Unveiled Blue Origin’s Moon Lander

Traffic Stop Robocop

American nonprofit research institute SRI International has developed a prototype of what it’s calling a “police robot,” as IEEE Spectrum reports. The robot is meant to prevent accidents that occur when the police pull over drivers.

The brain behind the bot is Rueben Brewer, a senior robotics research engineer at SRI. Brewer started building the prototype in his garage.

“With such dangerous interactions between people, maybe it’s time to send a robot in between them, one that can’t hurt or be hurt,” reads the caption of the video. “Our robot goes between people to keep everyone safe.”

License and Registration

The cop bot is attached to a telescopic robotic arm that can extend from the side of the cop car to reach the window of the pulled over vehicle in front of it. The office is then able to communicate with the driver via a webcam.

From there, Brewer’s robocop can do it all: it can scan the driver’s license, spit out a ticket, and even deploy spikes to stop a perp from getting away.

READ MORE: Video Friday: Watch This ‘RoboCop’ Make a Traffic Stop [IEEE Spectrum]

More on robocops: India Just Swore in Its First Robot Police Officer

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Watch This “Police Robot” Pull a Car Over

Jacking In

Personal gadgets known as “hearables,” which communicate with the neural signals passing through our ears in order to monitor and interact with our brains, are on their way.

Hearables could help us focus on specific conversations, like smart hearing aids, or monitor our brain activity to treat tinnitus. That’s according to Poppy Crum, the Stanford University neuroscientist and chief scientist at Dolby Laboratories who coined the term, who recently wrote about the concept in IEEE Spectrum.

The emerging tech stands to blur the lines between artificial and biological intelligence, Crum argues — augmenting our thought processes and collaborating with our brains.

Plug And Play

Other wearables, like Google Glass, were ridiculed for being dorky and potentially creepy. But a hearable could help people isolate specific conversations or monitor neural health without constantly being the topic of conversation by curious passers-by.

And the ear is the logical choice for such a connection to the brain, argues Crum.

“The ear is like a biological equivalent of a USB port,” writes Crum. “It is unparalleled not only as a point for ‘writing’ to the brain, as happens when our earbuds transmit the sounds of our favorite music, but also for ‘reading’ from the brain.”

Surround Sound

Based on the progress of various teams around the world, Crum argues that the technology for these wearable brain-computer interfaces could be developed within five years.

“When we do, hearables will constantly and silently assess and anticipate our needs and state of mind while helping us cope with the world around us,” Crum writes. “They will be our true life partners.”

READ MORE: Hearables Will Monitor Your Brain and Body to Augment Your Life [IEEE Spectrum]

More on wearables: Coming Soon: An In-Ear EEG for Unobtrusive Brain Hacking

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Stanford Scientist Says In-Ear Gadgets Will Monitor Our Brains

Say Cheese

A resplendent new composite image shows off 265,000 galaxies — which were slowly but surely captured over 16 years of observations by the Hubble Space Telescope.

The image, called the Hubble Legacy Field, is made up of 7,500 separate images of distant galaxies. Some are so far away that our images of them represent how they looked as far back as just 500 million years after the Big Bang, according to a press release.

Enhance! Enhance!

If you don’t want to download a massive image file, Business Insider’s Dave Mosher uploaded a version that people can scroll around and explore.

You can zoom in and watch tiny specks of lights reveal themselves to be entire galaxies — some of which Hubble scientists say are 10 billion times too faint to see with the naked eye.

“Now that we have gone wider than in previous surveys, we are harvesting many more distant galaxies in the largest such dataset ever produced,” Garth Illingworth, the University of California, Santa Cruz scientist who led the project to assemble the image. “No image will surpass this one until future space telescopes like James Webb are launched.”

READ MORE: ‘No image will surpass this’: Hubble telescope astronomers created a stunning picture of the deep universe with 16 years’ worth of photos [Business Insider]

More on space telescopes: Hubble data: The Universe Is Expanding Faster and Faster

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Tiny Specks Zoom Into Beautiful Galaxies In Amazing Hubble Image

Weather Sensors

Many companies rely on radar signals and satellites to predict the weather.

Boston-based startup ClimaCell, however, pulls its data from a range of sources including cell phones, street cameras, connected vehicles, and drones. This allows it to forecast weather conditions on a hyper-local level — and with what it claims is 60 percent better accuracy.

“A lot of the things around us actually sense the weather, just not by design,” ClimaCell co-founder Rei Goffer recently told Borgen Magazine. “They’re affected by the weather, and by looking at how they’re affected you can actually reverse engineer things and see through that.”

Saving Lives

Several major airlines and transportation companies have already invested in ClimaCell in the hopes of improving their ability to forecast weather conditions.

However, the startup might make its biggest impact in places without any current forecasting systems in place.

“Developing countries like India don’t have sufficient weather infrastructure, like radar and weather stations, to ensure public safety and serve the private sector,” co-founder Shimon Elkabetz told Forbes in 2017. “Our technology helps countries leapfrog from no weather data to granular data using software. We can issue alerts about flooding, including warnings to citizens and information for rescue teams.”

READ MORE: A weather tech startup wants to do forecasts based on cell phone signals [MIT Technology Review]

More on weather: NOAA’s Satellite Could Track Extreme Weather Resulting From Climate Change

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This Startup Uses Cell Phone Signals to Forecast Weather

Open Air Surgery

After a man was stabbed in Durham, England, medical personnel arriving at the scene worried he might not survive the trip to the hospital. Instead of taking that risk, according to The Independent, the two doctors began to perform emergency heart surgery right there in the street.

It was a risky procedure, but one that ultimately paid off — the surgery was a success and the man, who had gone into cardiac arrest before the doctors arrived, survived.

Mobile Unit

The doctors attribute the successful procedure to the fact that they were able to reach the stabbing victim within 15 minutes, per The Independent.

“I think it’s proof that if everything works in terms of the patient getting good care on scene straight away, if we can [utilize] the aircraft or the car and get the team to the scene as quickly as possible, then we can make a difference to that patient,” Chris Smith, the doctor who performed the procedure to remove a blood clot and restart the man’s heart, told The Independent.

In short, that doesn’t mean that more doctors should replace operating rooms with street scenes — but it does mean a robust healthcare infrastructure can make all the difference during an emergency.

READ MORE: Doctors perform open heart surgery in middle of street to stop stab victim bleeding to death [The Independent]

More on surgery: Experts: Stem Cells and Robots Will Replace Many Invasive Surgeries

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Medical First: Doctor Performs Open Heart Surgery in the Street

Plank Walk

On Friday, IHMC Robotics unveiled a new video in which a humanoid robot named Atlas gingerly — and autonomously — walks across various objects, including suspended wooden planks and wobbly cinder blocks.

It basically looks like someone challenged the robot to play “the floor is lava” with the leftover supplies from a construction site, and the bot is surprisingly good at the game — putting it a step closer to one day filling in for humans on dangerous missions.

Step Ahead

Boston Dynamics built Atlas, but IHMC Robotics wrote the algorithms giving the bot the dexterity demonstrated in the video.

In the description posted along with the clip, the company says the humanoid relies on LIDAR to build a map of the area it’s supposed to traverse, and then uses an algorithm to determine each step it should take to reach the other side.

Currently Atlas is successful with about half of its attempts, according to IHMC, but the company is already working to increase that rate by improving the robot’s balance and the range of motion in its joints.

If IHMC can pull it off, Atlas might one day do far more than dominate at sleepover games — the goal is for the robot to serve as an avatar for humans in dangerous emergency scenarios or even as they explore Mars.

READ MORE: IHMC Atlas Autonomous Path Planning Across Narrow Terrain [YouTube]

More on Atlas: The Boston Dynamics Robot Atlas Is Now a Parkour Master

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Watch This Hulking Robot Play “The Floor Is Lava”

Hello There

A European satellite called Gaia just made a new surprise discovery.

Originally charged with mapping out the positions and movements of the stars, according to Space.com, the space probe also happened to spot three previously-undiscovered asteroids that orbit the Sun at an unusual angle compared to the rest of the solar system.

Spotted

The asteroids, which are the first new asteroids to be discovered by Gaia, can be found more than 15 degrees off-axis compared to the rest of the planets, asteroids, and other space stuff that orbits our Sun.

“The population of such high-inclination asteroids is not as well studied as those with less tilted orbits, since most surveys tend to focus on the plane where the majority of asteroids reside,” reads a European Space Agency (ESA) press release about the discovery.

New Target

ESA officials expect more similar discoveries out of Gaia, as its position in orbit gives it a better vantage than that of observatories on Earth when it comes to spotting asteroids out of the solar system’s typical orbit.

As it spots more of these unusual asteroids, which are remnants from the early days of our solar system, Gaia could reveal more secrets of how the asteroids, planets, and moons all came to be.

READ MORE: The Gaia Spacecraft Was Studying Stars, But It Found Something Else — 3 Asteroids [Space.com]

More on Gaia: Scientists Discover a “Ghost of a Galaxy” Orbiting the Milky Way

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ESA Satellite Accidentally Discovered Three New Asteroids

Pun Generator

Imagine you tell your dad something about a negotiator, or a car. Just enough material for him to land an appalling pun:

That’s because [the] negotiator got my car back to me in one peace.

But this is the work of no dad. Instead, it was created by a pun-generating artificial intelligence, created by Stanford researchers to prove that a neural network can have a sense of humor, too. The results were hilarious, but not always in the way you’d expect. Some of these knee-slappers were barely coherent — but they might provide a preview of what happens when AI starts to become funny.

HumorBot

A preprint of the research, published in the journal arXiv last month, describes how the researchers fed pairs of homophones — like “two” and “too” — to a neural network.

The results often had an almost-there quality that’ll be familiar to close watchers of AI-generated text. Here’s an example: Even from the outside, I could tell that he’d already lost some wait.

Not Funny

There are plenty of challenges that remain.

Neural networks “are rule-abiding to a fault, and that makes them terrible jokers,” writes Wired.

In an organized pun-off against competing human jokesters, the machine was rated to be funnier than a human just ten percent of the time.

“While we improve beyond current techniques, we are still far from human-generated puns,” concludes the prewrite. Neural networks tend to conflate creativity with nonsense — which remains a “big challenge in humor.”

READ MORE: The Comedian Is in the Machine. AI Is Now Learning Puns [Wired]

More on machine learning: Machine Learning Is Giving Retro Games Cutting-Edge Graphics

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This AI Is Spitting Out Coherent, Almost-Funny Dad Puns

Striking a Chord

Web developer Victor Pontis has had enough of cars in San Francisco — parking spaces, he says, just take up too much space.

His idea: turn the prime real estate of parking spots into coworking spaces, complete with desks and chairs, that he called WePark — and charge only the price of a parking meter, which is a fraction of the price of other local coworking spaces.

I have set up at 16th and Market and paid the meter a reasonable $2.75 for one hour.

Stop by and say hi! pic.twitter.com/qJCJudEWsh

— Victor Pontis (@VictorPontis) April 25, 2019

The experiment struck a nerve — especially considering the skyrocketing rent in the Californian metropolis — and picked up widespread press coverage.

“Car parking squanders space that can be used for the public good — bike lanes, larger sidewalks, retail, cafes, more housing,” Pontis told Vice. “Let’s use city streets for people, not cars.”

Great first official day of WePark!

We had 3 events across the world today:

– @valdecarpentrie in France
– @graybright in Santa Monica
– @VictorPontis + 30 others in San Francisco. (Recap coming soon.)

And we hear more are coming soon to a city near you! pic.twitter.com/cGnea3G9VQ

— wepark (@weparkweparty) April 30, 2019

Pontis got the idea from a tweet by developer Devon Zuegel, who posted a picture of a specialized bike carrier vehicle that can fit eight bikes in a single parking spot.

This mobile parklet fits 8 bikes. With a license plate, it can be legally parked anywhere for the price of parking 1 car. Genius. https://t.co/cFshYA4C1N pic.twitter.com/p6xTfLd5CA

— Devon (@devonzuegel) March 29, 2019

Everybody Park Now

WePark has quickly garnered the attention from freelancers across the globe. Its operations have expanded to Santa Monica — and a related event even took place in France.

The question remains: is WePark more than a publicity stunt that takes a clear stance against San Francisco’s — perhaps even an American — obsession with cars? That’s hard to tell. But momentum is growing behind the idea regardless.

READ MORE: A Rogue Coder Turned a Parking Spot into a Coworking Space and People Loved It [Vice]

More on the sharing economy: People Love Living in Pods So Much They’re Getting Neck Tattoos About It

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SF Is so Expensive That People Are Using Parking Spots as Offices

First Breaths

Scientists just took a major step forward towards 3D printed organs — with a new lung-like system full of air sacs can expand and contract, filling the same biological role as our lungs do by pumping oxygen into blood.

Bioprinted organs could someday help people who are waiting and sometimes dying on the organ transplant waitlist. In research published in the journal Science last week, the team behind the new printing technique made a similar device and successfully grafted it into mice with injured livers.

In And Out

The 3D printed lung can be seen expanding and contracting, oxygenating blood as it flows past its bulbous transparent air sacs in a video published by Seeker on Friday.

Biological Infrastructure

3D printing blood vessels and other vasculature has remained an elusive challenge for scientists — some teams have even outsourced the endeavor to the International Space Station, where the zero-gravity environment means that small tubes are less likely to collapse under their own weight as they’re being printed.

Per the research, this new lung was printed down here on Earth, suggesting that the new bioprinting technique and materials could help us get to a point where people in need of new organs only need to wait as long as it takes to print one out.

More on 3D bioprinting: These Scientists Are 3D-Printing New Body Parts for Athletes

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New Video Shows 3D Printed Lung “Breathing”