Category Archives: Futurism

It really is that simple. Rock Marks

Despite major advances in the field of renewable energy generation, we still have yet to find a particularly scalable way to store all that power especially from solar and wind which vary greatly depending on the time of day and weather.

Relying on massive battery packs isn't just extremely expensive, it also comes with some inherent safety risks and relies on the mining of non-renewable minerals like lithium, an environmentally damaging process.

But there may be a much simpler alternative that could allow us to store this energy. As CNN reports, a new startup called Antora Energy is investigating ways to store energy inside boxes of extremely hot rocks.

"People sometimes feel like theyre insulting us by saying, 'Hey, that sounds really simple,'" founder Andrew Ponec told CNN. "And we say, No, thats exactly the point.'"

By collecting the heating rays of the Sun through photovoltaic solar panels, the startup is heating up rocks to almost 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit.

Antora has chosen big blocks of solid carbon as its storage medium to soak up excess solar energy.

There's also precedent. Hot rocks inside equipment at smelting plants already store roughly ten times as much energy as all of the world's lithium-ion battery storage, according to CNN, which collect otherwise wasted heat from furnaces.

"The key thing that those furnaces didnt have is a way to get the heat back out," Ponec told CNN. "Weve added some cavities, some gaps in the carbon that allow light from deep within the system to shine out and some insulated doors that can open and close that allow that light to shine out when you want it."

The idea is to then turn this light into steam and electricity. Some of the energy could also be used to heat other equipment in the production of cement and steel.

Antora is only one of several startups looking to store energy in dense rocks.

In short, it could be s a fascinating simple solution that relies on an abundant raw material. But whether the idea will be able to scale along with our massively growing energy demands to make a difference remains to be seen.

Updated to better describe Antora's energy storage technology.

More on storing energy: MIT Scientists May Have Found a Cheap Way of Storing Huge Amounts of Energy in Cement

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Scientists Intrigued By Battery That Stores Energy in Hot Rocks - Futurism

Heads up. New Blue

Mercedes-Benz is trying out a new type of exterior car light in the United States. CNN reports that the German automaker has received approval to use turquoise-colored indicators in its head and tail lights to show when one of its vehicles is in self-driving mode an intriguing new experiment in trying to figure out a place for self-driving vehicles on the roads.

Mercedes's self-driving mode is called "Drive Pilot," and is the first of any self-driving systems to be certified as SAE Level 3, meaning that when it's enabled, drivers don't have to continuously keep their eyes on the road. They can even go fully hands off and take their feet off the pedals, but must take over when prompted. For now, Drive Pilot only enables this level of autonomy when cruising under 40 miles per hour.

Despite those limitations, Mercedes is still speeding past its competitors like Tesla, whose Autopilot and Full Self-Driving systems, both SAE Level 2, require drivers to stay alert and keep their hands on the steering wheel at all times (a safety guardrail that the automaker's enthusiasts proudly devise ways of getting around).

Now with a first-of-its-kind car light to herald its self-driving innovations, Mercedes is seemingly having it easier with US regulators while Tesla and General Motor's robotaxi division Cruise have incurred only further scrutiny over the safety of their systems.

So far, the turquoise self-driving lights have been approved in California and Nevada, which are also the only states to have certified Drive Pilot.

According to Car and Driver, California is letting Mercedes trial the lights in test vehicles for two years, starting in early 2024. Turquoise indicators will be embedded in these vehicles' headlights, tail lights, and side mirrors.

Meanwhile, Nevada has already approved the lights for use in two of Mercedes' production model vehicles: its 2026 EQS and S-class sedans.

The distinctive color, a lighter hue of blue, was chosen because it won't be mistaken for police lights or regular lights on a car. Mercedes said its use is meant to help ease drivers into sharing the road with self-driving vehicles.

It will also help anyone passing these cars, cops included, not be alarmed when they see the person behind the steering wheel with their hands off and their eyes off the road.

Who's to say that these turquoise lights won't be the cool new way of brandishing that you're driving a very advanced car? Of course, if you're skeptical of the technology, you can very helpfully use the flashy indicators to stay clear of these vehicles so perhaps it's a win for everyone involved.

More on self-driving cars: Tesla Driver Forced to Pay After Killing Two People on Autopilot

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Mercedes-Benz Installing New Tail Lights to Show When Car Is Self-Driving - Futurism

What's the spacecraft up to? Orbital Swarm

After embarking on its third mission, China's top-secret spaceplane, dubbed Shenlong, has released six mysterious objects into Earth's orbit and we have no idea what they are.

On December 14, the country launched its reusable spaceplane from the Gobi Desert, as the state-run news agency Xinhua reported at the time. According to the brief update, its third flight will be used to verify reusable spaceplane technologies and carry out science experiments.

But according to amateur astronomer and satellite tracker Scott Tilley, who's been closely tracking the spacecraft since its launch, it released six objects upon reaching orbit and they appear to be emitting a variety of signals.

All six are being tracked by the US Space Force and were designated the names OBJECT A through F by the US Department of Defense.

At least one of the objects appears to be closely following the spaceplane.

"OBJECT A's or nearby emission is reminiscent of earlier Chinese space plane 'wingman' emissions in the sense the signal is modulated with a limited amount of data," Tilley told Space.com.

According to the amateur astronomer's analysis, OBJECT B appears to be the spaceplane itself, with OBJECT A and B traveling "in a similar orbit and relatively close to each other," he tweeted.

OBJECT D and E are emitting idle "placeholder" signals without any accompanying data, Tilley told Space.com.

"It should be noted that unlike emissions early in the Chinese space plane missions 1 and 2, these emissions are very intermittent and do not stay on long," he explained.

According to Tilley, there's a chance A, D, and E could make several close approaches with each other given their orbits.

It's not the first time China's secretive spaceplane has placed a mysterious object into orbit. Last year, SpaceNews reported that the US Space Force was tracking an object released by the experimental spacecraft during its second mission.

And during its first mission in 2020, the spaceplane also released an object two orbits into its two-day journey. The object continued broadcasting S-band transmissions for weeks, per SpaceNews.

At this point, all we can do is guess as to what these objects are. Are they satellites? Service modules? Given the secrecy shrouding China's space program, there's a good chance we'll never find out.

More on the spaceplane: Chinese Spaceplane Releases Mystery Object Into Orbit

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Chinese Spaceplane Releases Six Mysterious Objects That Are Emitting Signals - Futurism

"Where to start with this one." Icy Dip

What if the Titanic never sank and Rose and Jack decided to go for a frosty dip in the Atlantic to take a selfie?

A new AI-generated image that's making its rounds on social media has us completely mystified. The almost-photorealistic image shows the pair as they were portrayed by Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet in James Cameron's 1997 epic "Titanic," having an intimate photo opp.

The image has plenty of the hallmarks of an AI-generated image, from the filtered-looking smooth skin to the excessive number of smoke stacks adorning the Titanic (the real ship only had four, not six). Needless to say, smartphones weren't a thing 111 years ago, either.

But perhaps most glaring of all is that the Titanic hasn't actually sunk in the image, suggesting that Jack and Rose intentionally chose to plunge into the icy waters for a selfie opportunity.

"Why are they in the water if the boat still floats?" one user on the Titanic subreddit suggested.

"Where to start with this one," another user wrote.

The image was also being used by Facebook accounts to take potshots at a younger generation (although it's not entirely clear which).

"If the Titanic happened today," was the most prevalent caption accompanying the many repostings of the odd image. That's characteristic of the annoyingly persistent boomer memes complaining about how younger folks have become obsessed with their phones. What year is it, people?

"They had to use AI to joke about technology being bad," one user on the boomershumor subreddit pointed out.

While this particular meme was unlikely to fool anybody into thinking it's real, the advent of AI image generators has flooded social media with almost photorealistic posts that are far more likely to convince out-of-the-loop users.

As 404 Media reported earlier this week, people are using "image-to-image" AI generators to riff on real photographs, resulting in an endless stream of posts being used to pad out feeds and generate comments.

It's a dangerous trend, especially as these tools are able to produce more and more convincing imagery, further eroding the trust we have in the content we encounter online.

Some of these AI-generated memes may be real stinkers, like this rendition of Jack and Rose going for an icy dip but the same tech could be used for far more nefarious purposes as well, like spreading misinformation or scamming people.

More on AI image generators: Image Database Powering Google's AI Contains Explicit Images of Children

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We Are Completely Mystified by This AI-Generated Image of Jack and Rose Taking a Selfie in "Titanic" - Futurism

Then it becomes a submarine permanently. Watery Grave

Remember when Tesla CEO Elon Musk promised to strap SpaceX rockets onto the back of a Tesla Roadster?

Not only has the feature failed to materialize well over three years later, but even the next-gen Roadster seems to be more of a distant dream than an actual product.

Now, the mercurial CEO is offering uphis next fantastical add-on: a "mod package" that would allow the Cybertruck to "traverse at least 100m [330 feet] of water as a boat."

"Mostly just need to upgrade cabin door seals," he claimed.

To be clear, there are plenty of reasons we shouldn't take Musk at his word. Besides, the last time we've checked, an actual boat can float indefinitely. What good is a vessel that can only cover 330 feet? What happens after it covers that distance?

Presumably, the answer is "it becomes a submarine permanently."

Musk was replying to a post showing a "Jay Leno's Garage" clip in which Tesla's vice president of vehicle engineering Lars Moravy told Leno that "the vehicle almost floats."

"Maybe you have to add a little bit of extra buoyancy just to keep it up," he added.

Considering that even the company's own head of engineering seemingly still has a lot to figure out, it sounds like Musk didn't even bother to consult anybody at his EV firm before promising a "mod package."

"If you're creative, and you want, you could figure out how to put an outboard motor, plugged into your outlet there, turn it on from your screen, and go boating," Moravy added.

It's not the first time Musk has promised that the Cybertruck will be able to double as a boat. Last year, Musk said that the truck "will be waterproof enough to serve briefly as a boat, so it can cross rivers, lakes and even seas that arent too choppy."

In other words, even if the entrepreneur makes good on his promise, the Cybertruck won't actually be much of a seaworthy vessel and it's an extremely charitable use of the word "boat," which generally means a watercraft designed to be propelled on water.

And chances are, given the behavior we've seen from other Tesla enthusiasts, it's only a matter of time until someone actually tries it and a Cybertruck sinks to the bottom.

More on the truck: National Forest Service Trolls Tesla After Cybertruck Gets Stuck in Forest

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Elon Musk Says the Cybertruck Will Be Able to Travel as a Boat, Until It Sinks - Futurism

When the iconic entertainment site The A.V. Club started publishing AI-generated articles earlier this summer at the directive of its owner, G/O Media, the backlash was intense.

"The A.V. Club used to be a benchmark for pop culture writing on the net and now it's a private equity ghost town pumping out AI generated listicles," wrote film journalist Luke Dunne. "MST3K" writer Tammy Golden called the move "sickening."

Amid the fallout, G/O editorial director Merrill Brown sent out an internal memo instructing staff to ignore the criticism.

"Several of us are very familiar with this kind of chatter as it's part of an inevitable media industry feedback loop that comes with the advance of new technologies like the Internet in the nineties and more recently the widespread use of streaming media technology," he wrote. "The best way to deal with industry chatter of this kind is to process it, dismiss the trivial and learn from what surfaces that's thoughtful and of real value."

So let's take Brown's advice and "dismiss the trivial" by going straight to the heart of all the hubbub: the AI's output.

To calibrate your expectations, here's the disclaimer that accompanies articles by the A.V. Club Bot: "This article is based on data from IMDb," it reads. "Text was compiled by an AI engine that was then reviewed and edited by the editorial staff." Its author page adds that "these stories were produced with the help of an AI engine."

You'd think that "based on" and "produced with" would imply something transformative happening a change of phrasing, a reworking in the outlet's tone, an addition of a spicy detail.

But it seems that "compiled" is doing a lot of work here. On our review, the bulk of the A.V. Club's AI-generated articles appear to be copied directly from IMDb. Not "based on," but copied verbatim.

Don't believe it? Take a look at the A.V. Club Bot's synopsis of 2003's "Young Adam," in its list of movies with NC-17 ratings.

A young drifter working on a river barge disrupts his employers' lives while hiding the fact that he knows more about a dead woman found in the river than he admits.

And then compare that to IMDb's description:

A young drifter working on a river barge disrupts his employers' lives while hiding the fact that he knows more about a dead woman found in the river than he admits.

Yep, that's right: every single word is exactly the same.

Let's really hammer it home. Here's the A.V. Club Bot's rundown of "Meg 2: The Trench," in its list of movies coming out in August:

A research team encounters multiple threats while exploring the depths of the ocean, including a malevolent mining operation.

You'd think they'd mention the titular shark, right? But nope. And here's IMDb's version:

A research team encounters multiple threats while exploring the depths of the ocean, including a malevolent mining operation.

Occasionally, the AI's output does slightly differ from what appears on IMDb. Here it is on "Jessica Frost," also from the list of August movies:

A young woman tries to discover why a time-traveling psychopath is after her, leading to a journey through the desert, time, space and her family's past.

And here's IMDb's, which is several words longer, yet substantively identical:

A young woman searching for the truth about why a time-traveling psychopath is after her, is thrown into a turbulent journey through the desert, time, space and her family's past.

What really foregrounds the insipidness of it all is that, in both the list of August movies and the list of NC-17 movies, there's no text beyond the lifted movie descriptions. There's no introduction to ease you in, no nod to the NC-17 rating's fascinating history or some tantalizing context about the summer's slate of releases none of the excellent writing, in other words, that's distinguished the A.V. Club's decades of exceptional work in entertainment journalism.

Still, let's give G/O credit where credit is due: mentioning the place you're copying content from is probably better than not mentioning it at all. But if G/O wants to lift content from IMDb word for word, it should say so without dressing it up in nebulous AI mystique.

In fact, it turns out that there's a deeper relationship between G/O and IMDb than is mentioned anywhere in the disclaimer. Reached with questions, both groups confirmed that G/O is licensing access to IMDb's cache of information about the movie industry.

"A/V Club [sic] licenses content from IMBD [sic]," a G/O spokesperson said in response to our questions, misspelling the names of both The A.V. Club and IMDb. "AI was used to search the massive IMBD [sic] library to cull the list that was used in the story."

That's a very vague answer, and one that unintentionally highlights the ridiculousness of the AI gold rush in media. If G/O's system is just querying IMDb's database and gluing the resulting data into a Frankenstein article, what exactly is the so-called "AI Engine" doing? What specific AI tech, if any, is the company using? From what we can tell, whatever the "AI" is doing in the A.V. Club's case could be achieved with a simple script cobbled together long before the advent of software like ChatGPT.

In response to further questions, the G/O spokesperson replied only that "our AI system leverages licensed data to recommend copy that is reviewed by editorial."

Who exactly is being served by these pasted-together collages of another site's content? It's not readers. IMDb, after all, already has its own lists of upcoming releases and NC-17 rated films made by users.

The reality, of course, is that G/O is almost certainly testing whether it can use this type of automated content to eliminate the jobs of its remaining human staffers.

It has a long history in that domain. And though G/O only began its AI experiment in July, the slow exsanguination of its excellent publications, including The Onion and Deadspin, had already begun years before. In 2019, newly appointed CEO Jim Spanfeller promised there would be no layoffs after private equity firm Great Hill Partners took over the company. Less than a week later, Spanfeller fired 25 employees.

This past June, in fact, Spanfeller gutted another 13 staffers just weeks before G/O would publish its first AI article at Gizmodo, an error-riddled listicle about Star Wars. And just last month, G/O sacked the staff of Gizmodo's Spanish-language site, replacing them with an AI system that automatically translates its English articles. (The translated articles quickly turned out to be filled with sloppy mistakes.)

As upsetting as it is, none of this should be surprising. Generative AI's inroads into the journalism industry has already frequently preceded human casualties.

The tech outlet CNET, which was one of the first prominent news sites to start publishing AI-generated content late last year, laid off half its news and video teams after its disastrous foray into the tech. A few months later, Insider followed suit with its own one-two punch of pivoting to AI and culling humans. And so did BuzzFeed, which shuttered its entire news operation in favor of AI-generated quizzes and articles.(All three publishers claimed the experiments with AI were unrelated to the layoffs.)

The results for readers have been poor. AI-generated articles from CNET and other Red Venture owned outlets were found to be filled with factual errors. Men's Journal butchered health claims in its first AI-generated piece. And an AI used by USA Today's owners couldn't even report fill-in-the-blank sports results properly.

Yet media bosses like Spanfeller and Brown remain unfazed, either genuinely believing AI's hype or perfidiously trying to conciliate their backers with shiny, sci-fi sounding tech that they don't understand. Or maybe they're just content with AI being a sort of muddyification filter of what boils down to copy-paste jobs even when it doesn't say anything original, and merely gives the impression that it does, hence the load-bearing "based on" in the A.V. Club Bot's disclaimer.

One thing is clear, and should've been clear from the beginning: these AIs, at least for now, simply can't do a writer's job.

Maybe the leadership at G/O is starting to notice. Almost two weeks into September, the A.V. Club Bot still hasn't followed up its list of August film releases with one for the new month.

More on AI: When AI Is Trained on AI-Generated Data, Strange Things Start to Happen

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The A.V. Club's AI-Generated Articles Are Copying Directly From IMDb - Futurism

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.

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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.

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