Daily Archives: September 19, 2023

A delicate coral, the color of a cherry blossom or a peony, moves gently with the water, each of its intricate arms outfitted with curled, spindle-like fingers. Unlike some of its relatives, this coral is skeleton-free almost gelatinous in appearance, and see-through around the edges.

The camera, outfitted to the side of a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) remote-operated vehicle (ROV), zooms back out, turning its eye forward as the vessel continues its trek along the seafloor. There's life everywhere, but roughly two miles under the surface, it's not like we're used to. Some creatures, like the pink coral, look like they climbed off the pages of Dr. Seuss; others, like craggly, long-armed spider stars and misshapen squat lobsters, evoke something more like Tim Burton.

The rover keeps going. To the right sits another soft-bodied coral, this one bright white and fan-shaped. The NOAA researchers operating the ROV, who can be heard chattering over the dive's live feed, describe the creature off-hand as a "sea orchid," as "sea lily" has already been taken. A lone shrimp, meanwhile, can be seen sitting at the bottom-left corner of the screen, its black eyes staring, unblinking, into the murky deep.

That's but a minutes-long glimpse into NOAA's ongoing Alaska Seascape 5 mission, the latest installment of the agency's efforts to fully map the Gulf of Alaska's seafloor a lofty goal, considering both the size of the Alaskan Gulf and the fact that it's never before been done. And at its incredible depth, the freezing cold and high pressure environment is profoundly unforgiving. The massive undersea landscape is new to human eyes as is the sunlight-free ecosystem that flourishes within it.

"We picked it because we thought it was going to be a weird place," NOAA physical scientist Sam Candio, the expedition's coordinator, told us over a video call. "And then we see weird stuff down there."

It's all fascinating, not to mention undeniably beautiful, in a bizarreand otherwordly way. But of course, strange and lovely as they are, Truffula tree corals and lumpy lobsters aren't the reason why this particular Alaska Seascape mission has captured the public's attention. Back on August 30, toward the beginning of the mission, the researchers happened upon an especially strange sight: a mysterious golden "orb" of sorts, resting on the side of an unexplored underwater volcano, a hole ripped in the specimen's fleshy side.

The object it was widely described as an orb in the media, but might more accurately be termed a fleshy lump was puzzling then, and remains so now.

"Even from far away, [we were] like, 'what do we have here?'" Candio recalled. We caught the scientist shortly after NOAA had submerged its ROV for the day's exploration, and he was monitoring the live feed as we spoke. "I immediately thought sponge, because you see a lot of those at these depths. But getting closer, it looked less and less spongy."

NOAA used its ROV's robotic arms to collect the specimen and soon shipped it to the lab, but even after a preliminary lab study, its origin remains unclear. That it's likely an egg casing of some kind seems to be a leading theory among researchers, but no one can be certain until its DNA has been sequenced.Even then, given the uncharted nature of the habitat, it's possible we still won't know.

As it turns out, finding new and strange things isn't uncommon for expeditions of this kind. In fact, according to Candio, until the media picked up the story, most of the researchers "kind of forgot" about the finding. To them, it's all in a day's work.

"We see weird stuff every dive that wasn't even the most interesting thing that jumped out at us at that time," said Candio, adding that a "lot of what we see, we just don't know what it is." (Asked what wasthe most interesting thing on the dive, the scientist excitedly explained that they'd seen two mother octopi breeding their young, and when the ROV moved in closely, researchers were able to catch a miraculous glimpse of tiny octopi still trapped inside of their clear eggs, tentacles and all.)

"Everybody's saying, 'how unusual is this?'" the researcher continued, stopping briefly mid-sentence to witness the discovery of yet another octopus, in real-time, this one also caring for her eggs. "My question is, how do you or I know what is usual or unusual down there when we really just don't have any information? It's like being dropped in the city and walking down one block, and then saying you know everything about the world from what you saw on that one block and one city."

Other deep-sea researchers echoed a similar refrain.

"Because so little of the deep ocean is explored, each time we go to new areas of the deep sea we find new creatures," Dr. Amy Baco-Taylor, an Associate Professor in the Department of Earth, Ocean and Atmospheric Sciences at Florida State University, who is not involved with NOAA's Alaskan expedition, told us over email. "Sometimes they are beautiful and highly photogenic like deep-sea corals or hydrothermal vents. Other times they are creepy and weird like this object."

Asked to speculate on the origin of the object, Baco-Taylor agreed that "from its color and appearance, I would agree with the other scientists' initial guesses that it was a dead sponge." But the texture, she added, "doesn't seem right," and "an egg case of some sort is the next most likely option." An expert in seamounts and deep-sea corals, Baco-Taylor also noted that the maybe-egg happens to be surrounded by a field of sponges a common nursery ground for deep-sea critters.

"The egg-like object helps to highlight the role that corals and sponges play in the deep sea by providing habitat for a wide diversity of invertebrates and fishes," she said. "If it is an egg, it will be exciting to find out what laid it, perhaps a species that is new to science!"

It's still unclear why, exactly, the public has been so enraptured by the discovery. Of course, "mysterious golden egg found at undersea volcano" is just intrinsically fascinating, and the researchers' colorful livestream commentary as was first reported by The Miami Herald, one NOAA scientist remarked when the orb was spotted that finding it was "like the start of a horror movie," while another quipped that it looked "like something had tried to get in... or get out" probably worked to bolster the eeriness of the finding.

"Maybe we shouldn't have been talking about aliens on [the livestream]," Candio confessed with a smile. "But it's fun to play along, you know?"

But like outer space, our unexplored oceans hold a particular lure, especially at these lightless depths. Without the Sun to provide energy, life there is as close to alien as anyon Earth can get; it's a planet within a planet, and the scientific community has hardly scratched the surface.

"I think a lot of people have this misconception that scientists aren't people and that they know everything," said Candio. "And that's why people get frustrated when science changes or when people learn new things."

But now, scientists worldwide are preparing to get to work. As Candio explained it during our call, the orb will soon be shipped to the National Museum to be archived. Once there, interested researchers from around the world will have access to it, and will be able to contribute, piece by piece, to understanding the discovery. It's incredibly collaborative basically, a global science project.

Fingers crossed that this global project soon delivers some answers,because like everyone else, we're dying to know from whence this orb came. In the meantime, NOAA's Alaskan mission will continue, as will other exploratory expeditions, and the more we explore the deep sea, the more we'll surely find and hopefully,the more collective wonder we'll experience in turn.

"Ocean exploration and exploration in general touches on a human desire to learn," said Candio. "People get so locked into the day-to-day and forget how much wonder and fantasy there is out there." And as for the orb itself, according to the scientist, its discovery "brings more attention to the vastness of the oceans how little we know," he added, "and how much there is left to learn."

More on the unidentified golden orb: Scientists Recovered That Golden "Orb" From the Bottom of the Ocean and It Looks Different Now

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We Checked in With the Scientists Who Discovered That Mysterious ... - Futurism

Talk about a bad physical. Bad Physical

Our planet just got a health check-up and unfortunately, according to scientists, the results are pretty grim.

In a new study published in the journal Science Advances, an international team of researchers warns that several of Earth's vital life-supporting systems or "planetary boundaries" have been breached, meaning that our Pale Blue Dot is "well outside the safe operating space for humanity."

Defined by the Stockholm University Resilience Centre as the margins "within which humanity can continue to develop and thrive," these nine boundaries are designed to offer researchers a way to test our planet's overall health and resilience and include categories like biosphere integrity, climate change, ocean acidification, and land-system change, among others.

Troublingly, after performing the "first scientific health check for the entire planet," the team determined that six of these nine systemic categories have been broken by manmade pollution and demolition, leaving Earth and the life that exists on it in a precarious position.

"We know for certain that humanity can thrive under the conditions that have been here for 10,000 years," Katherine Richardson, a professor at the University of Copenhagen and the leader of the assessment, told The Guardian. "We don't know that we can thrive under major, dramatic alterations [and] humans impacts on the Earth system as a whole are increasing as we speak."

According to the analysis, which took over 2,000 previous studies into account, some of Earth's boundaries were breached quite a while ago.

The boundary of biosphere integrity, for example, which is considered a "core boundary" along with climate change, was broken back in the 1800s, while the healthy boundary for Earth's freshwater systems was breached shortly thereafter in the early 1900s. The threshold for climate change, meanwhile, was crossed in the 1980s.

The most concerning finding? According to the assessment, all four categories dealing with the biological world were either at or close to the highest risk level.

But, if there's any silver lining, our atmospheric ozone appears to still be hovering within healthy confines a particularly hopeful finding, considering that our ozone was once at great riskof collapse and human efforts to reverse that damage have proven effective.

While it all sounds pretty doom and gloom,Richardson was careful to note to The Guardian that the study results don't necessarily mean we're going under.

It doesn't "indicate a certain heart attack," she said, comparing our home planet to a human with high blood pressure, "but it does greatly raise the risk."

And lowering that risk, of course, will require human action.

More on Earth: The Death Toll From Climate Change Will Be Catastrophic, Scientists Say

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Scientists Perform Health Check on Planet Earth, Alarmed by What ... - Futurism

Shooting for the stars... and missing. Missing the Mark

With its impressive constellation of satellites, Starlink has become somewhat of a household name in spite of its relatively niche market. That hasn't saved it, however, from its numbers coming up drastically short of internal projections, the Wall Street Journal reports.

Starlink, a division of Elon Musk's SpaceX, reported a revenue of $1.4 billion for 2022. That's respectable on its own, but a far cry from what the company expected to be raking in by now.

According to a 2015 presentation obtained by the WSJ, SpaceX projected that Starlink would generate nearly $12 billion in revenue and $7 billion in profit in 2022. By 2025, it hoped to clear $30 billion which now seems laughable.

Similarly, the actual size of its user base pales in comparison to its early projections. The plan in 2015 was that Starlink would have 20 million subscribers to its satellite based internet service by the end of last year, but in reality it only hit one million.

Whether those massive discrepancies are simply a symptom of Musk's signature overly ambitious timelines rather than the performance actually being that bad is up for debate, but clearly the company isn't anywhere near where it'd hoped to be by now.

Currently, the division's exact profitability remains unclear, and was not disclosed in the obtained documents. On the upside, Starlink reported marginal profits for the first three months of 2022, the WSJ reported. A small victory, nonetheless, amidst an overall loss for the year.

A big reason for why profits remain elusive is that SpaceX is blowing hefty chunks of change in upkeep, spending $3.2 billion in capital expenditures that year, according to the documents.

That spending, paired with day-to-day operating costs, is sure to be a huge dent in anyone's wallet, let alone for a company that is over 18 million short in expected customers.

Recent bad press is certainly no boon going forward, either, with Musk admitting last week that he manipulated Starlink to sabotage a Ukraine military attack on Russia's naval fleet in Crimea.

At the very least, Starlink's revenue still enjoyed a healthy climb last year, up $222 million from the year before, and recently announced that it's no longer losing money on producing its satellite antennas.

Furthermore, the Musk-led venture can safely say that it's head and shoulders above its competitors like Amazon, who are still scrambling to deploy its own low Earth orbit satellites.

This is where SpaceX enjoys a considerable advantage: as the world's foremost launch provider, it has plenty of rockets available to send up its own satellites as often as it wants, without having to depend on third parties.

Even that advantage has a caveat, though: in a leaked email two years ago, Musk warned that if SpaceX can't get Starship off the ground as a next-gen launch vehicle for future Starlink satellites, it could put the entirety of SpaceX in danger of bankruptcy.

More on SpaceX: Elon Musk Secretly Manipulated Starlink to Hamstring Ukrainian Attack Against Russia

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Starlink Is Falling Way Short of Projections on Revenue and Users - Futurism

It was inspired by children's toys. Moon Ball Drop

Japan is hoping to follow up India's successful landing on the surface of the Moon early next year and helping it along will be a tennis ball-shaped rover that's giving us just a little bit of the same energy as BB-8 from the Star Wars movies.

The Japanese space agency JAXA's Smart Lander for Investigating Moon (SLIM) probe launched into space last week, carrying the odd robot dubbed Lunar Excursion Vehicle 2 (LEV-2) in tow.

Once roughly six feet above the dusty lunar surface that is, if the lander makes it that far in one piece it'll release the 8.8-ounce spacecraft, which will then move both of its halves separately to crawl through the regolith, a fantastical concept that directly draws from the design of children's toys.

Think of it more as a tech demo. LEV-2's batteries only allow it to explore the area for two hours. However, the benefits of its unusual shape are substantial and could inspire future rovers.

"We adopted the robust and safe design technology for children's toys, which reduced the number of components used in the vehicle as much as possible and increased its reliability," said Hirano Daichi, senior researcher and developer of the vehicle at JAXA, in a statement.

The space agency teamed up with toy maker TOMY and Doshisha University to come up with the design. Japanese tech giant Sony came up with the control board and stabilized camera, nestled between its two half-sphere legs.

But before LEV-2 can start rolling off into the distance, JAXA has the difficult task of navigating its SLIM probe to lunar orbit and making its descent, a harrowing journey that a growing number of countries have failed to survive in recent years.

Nonetheless, Daichi and his colleagues are hopeful.

"I hope children will get interested in science generally, not limited to space science, by seeing the baseball-sized vehicle running while swinging left and right on the Moon," he said in the statement.

If you want your own LEV-2, TOMY's Sora-Q is a 1:1 model of the LEV-2 and can be bought for roughly $150.

More on JAXA: Japan Launches Mission to the Moon

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Japanese Moon Mission Carrying Weird Rolling Robot - Futurism

Honestly: go off, IRS. Tax Code

Thought AI was only being used to eliminate the jobs of the working class? Sounds like maybe it's going to be used against the wealthy for a change.

In a Monday press release, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) announced that as part of a renewed effort to ensure fairness and crack down on lawbreakers, it'll start using "cutting-edge machine learning technology" to stop the US' wealthiest individuals and corporations from cheating on their taxes. According to the IRS, it'll use AI to find inconsistencies across a number of tax sectors including "partnership tax, general income tax and accounting, and international tax" in what it says is a "taxpayer segment that historically has been subject to limited examination coverage."

The AI integration is part of an effort to "ensure the IRS holds our wealthiest filers accountable to pay the full amount of what they owe," IRS Commissioner Danny Werfel said in the release. The IRS is "deploying new resources towards cutting-edge technology," he added, "to improve our visibility on where the wealthy shield their income and focus staff attention on the areas of greatest abuse."

Lest you're worried about the tech being aimed at the poors, the release says the "groundbreaking collaboration among experts in data science and tax enforcement" will focus primarily on taxpayers with an annual income of over $1 million and more than $250,000 in tax debt, in addition to large corporate bodies.

And according to the IRS, the crackdown is already on the verge of getting started. By the end of September, the release says, the IRS will "open examinations" of "75 of the largest partnerships in the US." These partnerships will include "hedge funds, real estate investment partnerships, publicly traded partnerships," and "large law firms," among other ventures in various industries. On average, according to the IRS, these partnerships retain more than $10 billion in assets an eye-watering sum that apparently makes the partnerships ripe for the AI sleuth's digging.

It's a fascinating application for AI, as long as it actually gets results. The IRS is keeping specifics about the system pretty close to the vest, but it's pretty widely agreed that one of AI's strongest use cases tends to be pattern recognition. Massively deep pockets can make it easy, or at least easier, to obscure and subvert tax law; if the IRS' new system is indeed able to sift through those layers of obscurity, it could well be an effective means of both catching current offenders and dissuading future transgressions. As the saying goes: the bill always comes due.

More on AI-assisted money collection: Cursed New AI Calls Debtors to Hassle Them for Money

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The IRS Says It's Using AI to Bust Millionaire Tax Cheats - Futurism

It keeps getting worse. Give It Up

Last fall, Meta-formerly-Facebook unveiled its Meta Quest Pro, a long-rumored, higher-end follow-up to the company's best-selling Quest 2 VR headset.

The sleek device, which initially went on sale for an eye-watering $1,500, has really struggled to catch on since then, just as we predicted at the time.

And now, as Mixed Reality News reports, Meta is literally resorting to giving them away for free: Attendees of this year's developer conference for the global gaming platform Roblox each got a free Meta Quest Pro. While it's unclear how many people attended the event, it's aclear indication that the device isn't exactly flying off the shelves.

Meta told suppliers earlier this year that it wouldn't order new components for the device, indicating that production would end as the company ran out of parts.

To remedy the situation, Meta even tried to massively cut the price of the device to $999 back in March.

Then there's the upcoming Quest 3, set to be announced next month, which could also be dampening interest in the premium device.

Meta's Reality Labs is still spending billions of dollars developing the tech each quarter, and revenues are only a tiny fraction of that. Yet over the last three years, quarterly performance has only gotten worse.

Long story short, the company is clearly struggling to get traction for its metaverse ambitions, even by the damp standards of the VR industry. Only earlier this month did the device appear in SteamVR's hardware stats, a roundup of the kind of devices people use on Valve's popular VR content platform. According to Mixed, the Quest Pro's usage was a measly 0.39 percent.

For now, all eyes are on Apple. The tech giant has historically bided its time before entering a new market, and the same goes for its recent unveiling of an even more expensivepremium headset called the Vision Pro.

But whether the tech giant's $3,499 VR goggles will fare any better than the Quest Pro remains to be seen.

More on VR: Zuckerberg Has Been Working on Metaverse Legs This Whole Time

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Facebook's VR Headset Not Selling, Literally Giving It Away - Futurism

Let's go! Fire & Ice

NASA and SpaceX notched an important milestone for theirupcoming crewed lunar mission: test-firing a SpaceX engine from a cold start in order to simulate conditions in the extremely ice-cold vacuum of space, according to a statement from the space agency.

SpaceX released video footage of the test on X-formerly-Twitter, showing the cold engine start of its Raptor engine last month. While lying face down, the engine successfully blasted a controlled jet of fire.

NASA is planning to use a lunar variant ofSpaceX's Starship spacecraft for the agency's crewed Artemis missions to the lunar surface, slated for 2025. The lunar lander needs to operate from a cold start because NASA envisions that the spacecraft may have to sit in the frigid temperatures of outer space for a relatively long time compared to a mission orbiting the Earth, according to NASA.

In 2o21, NASA awarded a $2.89 billion contract to SpaceX for its lunar lander. Last year, NASA awarded a contract option to SpaceX to further develop its Starship spacecraft.

The test sets the stage for SpaceX's long-awaited, second orbital launch attempt. With a green light from the Federal Aviation Administration, the test flight could occur as soon as next month.

The SpaceX test is notable not only for passing a crucial technological checkbox and cementing further the alliance between the company and NASA it's also a reminder of the burgeoning space race among world powers.

For example, last month, India landed its Vikram spacecraft on the lunar surface, near the south pole of the Moon.

A few weeks ago, Japan sent into orbit a satellite and a robotic moon landerthat will attempt to touch down on the surface after a long, meandering journey of several months.

Earlier this year, China publicized its ambitious plans to land astronauts on the Moon by 2030, ratcheting up its rivalry with the US.

But the race to the Moon and beyond is not without its perils. Case in point: Russia, which has been trying to follow up on the successes of the Soviet Union's space program, crash-landed during its recent attempt to explore the Moon's surface last month.

Despite these risky gambles, establishing a presence on the Moon is not just for international bragging rights. It serves as a launching pad to Mars and beyond and could reward countries with an abundance of space-based resources as well.

More on SpaceX: Spacexs Botched Starship Launch Left Wildlife Officials Stunned

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SpaceX Just Simulated a Lunar Landing With Its Rocket Engine - Futurism

On Wednesday, US senators played host to nearly two dozen tech industry titans in a closed-door session in Washington, DC, discussing the future of AI. But despite the power vested in all those members of Congress, the senators were the ones who had to dutifully defer to their guests.

Wired reports that the over 60 senators "sat like school children," forbidden from speaking or raising their hands. And to be fair, the intent of the forum was to be educational but you'd be right to question the authority of a teacher who doesn't let their pupils ask questions.

Given the guests in attendance, their compliance may as well have been peremptory. Notables included Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, Microsoft founder Bill Gates, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Google CEO Sundar Pichai, and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang.

You don't need to do the exact math to know that their combined net worths rival that of a small, disproportionately wealthy nation.

Not all were on board with being on the receiving end of a schooling. Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) complained that the private nature of the meeting and the lack of input from senators was counterproductive to actual lawmaking, and stifled the chance for cooperation.

"There's no feeling in the room," Warren told Wired. "Closed-door [sessions] for tech giants to come in and talk to senators and answer no tough questions is a terrible precedent for trying to develop any kind of legislation."

Still, the forum is undeniably a historic occasion. It's not every day you get all these guys in the same room to mouth off to Congress. And, further still, it's even rarer for them to all agree on something, or at least ostensibly: that the federal government must step in to regulate AI.

"It's important for us to have a referee," Musk, who recently launched his own AI firm, told reporters after the briefing, as quoted by Wired. "[It] may go down in history as very important to the future of civilization."

When Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY), who organized the meeting, asked if the government needs to regulate AI, the response was unanimous.

"Every single person raised their hand, even though they had diverse views," Schumer said, per Wired.

Having a consensus is a strong starting point, but ironing out what that regulation should look like or how it will be enforced will undoubtedly be divisive.

It's worth considering whether these corporate leaders should be the ones having the ears of the country's senators rather than, say, a panel of scientists and AI experts. Is this a show of good faith on Silicon Valley's part, paternalistic concern, dressed-up lobbying, or some plain-and-simple swindling?

Frustratingly, the closed-door nature of the meeting precludes us from getting any more insight. So for now, we'll have to take their word for it.

More on AI: The IRS Says It's Using AI to Bust Zillionaire Tax Cheats

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Tech Bros Lectured Congress About AI "Like Schoolchildren" Who ... - Futurism

That must be really difficult for him. No Signal

Jailhouse internet is so bad, apparently, that disgraced crypto billionaire Sam Bankman-Fried's lawyers say it should be grounds for his release.

In a court filing, Bankman-Fried's lawyer Mark Cohen claimed that the Wi-Fi in the Brooklyn jail where the FTX founder is being held without bail is so slow, he can't get any work done on his defense.

Cohen listed a number of issues pertaining to his client's internet access, including transportation delays and the aforementioned slow Wi-Fi. It has been nearly impossible, the attorney claimed, for SBF to prepare for his swiftly approaching trial "with these kinds of limitations."

Though the Department of Justice claims that the 31-year-old crypto pariah should have access to multiple hard drives and databases as well as a laptop with sufficient battery his lawyer contends that the government's solution is nowhere near up to snuff.

"We believe that the current solution is untenable and we no longer have the time to see if the Government will be able to devise a plan that works," the attorney wrote. "Almost an entire month has passed since Mr. Bankman-Fried was remanded and we have lost that time to effectively prepare for trial."

Bankman-Fried has been locked up at a notorious jail in Brooklyn to await his upcoming fraud trial for almost a month after a judge ruled he tampered with witnesses while on $250 million bail at his parents' mansion in Palo Alto, California.

And conditions in this particular jail, given previous complaints filed by the likes of convicted sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell, paint a troubling picture, from . In other words, bad Wi-Fi is only the tip of the iceberg.

Though the argument is slightly different, this latest filing by Bankman-Fried's lawyers was the second time in a single week that the defense has made such a request.

To be fair, there is a ton of data for SBF to sift through before the scheduled start of his first trial on October 2. As his attorneys noted in yet another filing asking for him to be released from jail ahead of trial, "Bankman-Fried was spending 80-100 hours a week reviewing the voluminous discovery" provided by the government, which included "millions of pages of documents and terabytes of data."

All that said, it seems awfully clear that SBF's hired hands are intent on getting him the kind of preferential treatment that other folks detained in jailhouses will never see.

Then again, it also doesn't seem like senior US district judge Lewis Kaplan will budge, either, given that he was the one who remanded him to jail over allegedly tampering with witnesses in the first place.

More on FTX: It Sounds Like Caroline Ellison Has Some Major Dirt on Sam Bankman-Fried

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Sam Bankman-Fried Complains That the Wi-Fi Is Bad in Jail - Futurism

With government interest in unidentified aerial phenomena (UAPs) skyrocketing, NASA has announced its first-ever "UFO czar" after initially declining to do so out of concerns for his safety.

In a press release last week, NASA named its new director of UAP research, longtime civil servant Mark McInerney, in response to calls for the agency to "play a more prominent role in understanding" the phenomena and, it seems, because people started threatening the agency and people associated with it.

Last week, the agency held a press conference pegged to the release of an independent report about UAPs and announced that it was appointing a head of UAP research. However, NASA refused to name that person at the time because members of the study panel had been subjected to jeers and threats, as Politico and other outlets reported.

"Thats in part why we are not splashing the name of our new director out there, because science needs to be free," Dan Evans, NASA's assistant deputy associate administrator, told reporters at the time. "Some of [the incidents] rose to actual threats."

The incident highlights how much of a hot-button topic UAPs have become as of late. With government organizations like NASA taking recent reports of UFO sightings more seriously, we've seen a resurgence of conspiracy theories surrounding the existence of government cover-ups, and other far-fetched theories pertaining to the existence of extraterrestrial life.

Despite NASA's efforts to protect McInerney's identity, the agency eventually gave in to the pressure.

Nicola Fox, an associate NASA administrator, put it even more bluntly when asked directly by reporters about the new director's identity, saying "we will not give his name out."

Later that same day, however, NASA sent out an update that named McInerny as its new director with no apparent explanation as to the about-face.

It's still unclear why the agency released McInerny's name after initially declining to do so, and Futurism has reached out to NASA for clarity about that decision.

The institutional need for a "UFO czar"came as a recommendation from the study, which was led by David Spergel of the Simons Foundation. Among other things, the study panel called on NASA to work in tandem with other government agencies including the Pentagon, for which McInerney used to be a liaison at NASA to study UAPs, as Time reports.

As Spergel told the magazine, folks "harassed some of our panel members," which he rightfully characterized as "very inappropriate behavior."

On the whole, it's a win for the pursuit of science in the face of the persistent stigma surroundingUFO research but NASA's lack of disclosure about why McInerny was initially not named only serves to muddle the issue.

Given the jeers and abuse, it's clear that NASA still has a long way to go before its investigations into UAPs are fully taken seriously by the public, something that will only serve to impede the scientific process.

More on UFOs: Pentagon Launches Website to Watch Declassified UFO Videos

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NASA Releases Name of Its First-Ever "UFO Czar" After Threats - Futurism