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Instagram and Facebook Add New Screen-Time Management Tools

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Mark Zuckerberg is a man of year-long resolutions. In 2009, he wore a tie every day. In 2010, he learned Mandarin. In 2015, he read two books a month. But this year, Zuckerberg’s resolution looked a little different: He vowed to spend the year making less bad stuff happen on Facebook, and working to ensure that “the time we all spend on Facebook is time well spent.”

It’s useful to remember this after the year Facebook’s had, which includes: the Cambridge Analytica scandal, a two-day Congressional hearing, news of a compromised election, admitted influence from Russian trolls, repeated problems with fake news and fake accounts, a 20 percent plummet in stock, and, you know, accusations of inciting genocide.

But the year isn’t over yet! And Zuckerberg is still serious about promoting quality time on his platforms—which is why today, Facebook and Instagram are each rolling out a set of tools designed to give users more control of how they spend their time on the apps.

Users can now set reminders to get off the app after a certain amount of time, and can temporarily disable notifications for anywhere between 15 minutes and eight hours.

“When people use Facebook and Instagram, we want to make sure that they feel good about the time they’ve spent on the platform,” said Ameet Ranadive, Instagram’s Product Director of Well-Being, at a press briefing on Tuesday. “A big part of that is making sure that people are in control of their experiences and they can be mindful and intentional about how they’re spending their time, how much time they’re spending, when they engage, how they engage.”

Facebook/Instagram

The new features roll out jointly to Instagram and Facebook users starting today. There’s a new activity dashboard that shows users the average time they spend on the platform each day, as well as a day-by-day breakdown of time spent during the past week. Users can set reminders to get off the app after a certain amount of time, and can temporarily disable push notifications for anywhere between 15 minutes and eight hours. Ranadive described them as tools for more “intentional” and “mindful” use of the platforms.

It’s hard not to see this as bandwagon-jumping on the part of Facebook. Earlier this summer, Google and Apple each introduced a similar suite of tools, which give users more granular control of notifications and screen time. Those initiatives seemed to remind people that it’s not your phone that’s the problem—it’s all the junk on it that continually distracts you and wastes your time. Google’s Digital Wellness initiative and Apple’s Screen Time tools both aim to neuter apps like Facebook and Instagram, which stand in the center of the dopamine vortex on our phones. Now, Facebook and Instagram want to position themselves as allies—not enemies—in that pursuit.

“We have a whole team of experts who are working on wellbeing and thinking about how do we learn more, how do we understand more about the relationship between social media and wellbeing,” said David Ginsberg, Facebook’s Director of Research, at Tuesday’s press briefing.

How can you find JOMO on the app that practically invented FOMO?

In January, Facebook rejiggered its News Feed algorithm to prioritize posts from friends and family over viral videos, news, and other content. That move, Ginsberg said, was a first step in promoting time well spent on Facebook. “Giving people a sense of their time so that they’re more mindful is a second part of that.”

But there are still hard questions: You can use the activity tracker to show how much time you’re spending on Facebook or Instagram, but how does a user measure the quality of time on those apps? What does “time well spent” even look like on a platform so often riddled with toxicity? How can you find JOMO on the app that practically invented FOMO?

“It’s really hard to cut down, even after having somebody tell you, ‘You’re on for four hours a day,’” says Larry Rosen, a research psychologist at California State University, Dominguez Hills, who studies the psychological impact of obsessive tech use. Rosen uses an app called Moment in his research, which tracks phone activity much like Facebook and Instagram’s new activity dashboard. He’s found that people don’t use their phones significantly less after tracking the (often shocking) number of hours they spend scrolling.

Rosen calls the new Facebook and Instagram tools a “good first step” in helping people understand how much time they’re spending on Facebook or Instagram. But those features alone don’t go far enough to unglue users from the apps or change unhealthy behavior. “Facebook and Instagram are going to give us the ‘what,’” says Rosen. “Now we have to figure out the ‘why,’ and the ‘how.’ How do you deal with it?”

More than that, these new tools send a message about who’s liable for the time they’re spending on these platforms. By “empowering” users to “control” their time spent on screen, tech companies distance themselves from the responsibility of addiction, social anxiety, distractibility, and wasted time. A suite of time management tools puts the onus on users to make the experience what they want. Hey, it’s not our problem that you can’t control yourself, the tech companies seem to say. We gave you the tools to control how you’re spending your time.

At Tuesday’s briefing, Ranadive emphasized that these tools are just a starting point. Instagram and Facebook will continue expanding and evolving these features over time, including “more insights, more context, and more controls.” For some users, it might be enough to make social media feel nice again. But for most of us, it won’t do much to slow the scroll.

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Naked Labs’ $1,395 3-D Body Scanner Shows You the Naked Truth

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I ate a big breakfast. So if my scans are off, don’t sweat it, I tell myself. And this was immediately following a long, unhealthy weekend (a friend’s wedding). All of the excuses of the first world were available to me as I walked up the stairs in The Assembly, a women’s club in San Francisco, one that looks like it was once a place of worship but now hosts accomplished-looking laptop-clackers and has bottles of sweet-smelling face mist in the bathroom. This is where I would get my body shape and fat percentage measured by a company that has named itself Naked.

Naked Labs makes a full-length mirror lined with 3-D cameras that capture a 360-degree image of your body. There’s also a weight scale involved, something that the company’s cofounder and CEO, Farhad Farahbakhshian, calls the turntable (more on that later). Farahbakhshian, a former electrical engineer and certified Spin instructor, first introduced the Naked 3-D Fitness Tracker to the world two years ago and crowdfunded it through the company’s website. The initial launch was set for March 2017. Naked Labs missed that deadline by a great many months.

Now, several product iterations and more than $14 million in funding later, the Naked 3-D Fitness Tracker is shipping. The company’s funding round was led by Founders Fund, Peter Thiel’s firm, and included NEA and Lumia Capital. (Cyan Banister, another partner at Founders Fund, personally invested in Naked Labs.) “The product took much more capital, manpower, and time than we expected,” Farahbakhshian told me over the phone the day before I got my scans done. During that time, Intel’s RealSense cameras—which is what the Naked scanner relies on—were upgraded, which put the company in a holding pattern until it could build the product with the latest tech, he said.

The scanner now costs $1,395, a significant hike from the $499 the company listed it for at launch. But Naked Labs is wagering that (a) fitness freaks, (b) people looking for motivation to lose weight, and (c) customers who aren’t unnerved by daily 3-D scans of themselves will all pay to own the product. Its target customer has changed, Farahbakhshian said, from “people with a six-pack who want to get an eight-pack to people in the earlier stages of their fitness journey … Sure, there are power athletes who want to get that extra 1 percent, but we also see people who have felt powerless about their bodies for most of their lives.”

Farahbakhshian and Sam Winter, Naked Labs’ head research scientist, were waiting for me when I entered the room at the Assembly. Winter is a cognitive neuroscientist and sometimes triathlete who took the lead during the demo. She and Farahbakhshian suggested, both over the phone and in person, that the scan would work better if I stripped down to my underwear. I wore stretch pants and a long-sleeved shirt.

The mirror is nicely constructed—something I never thought I’d say about a mirror but feel obligated to note since it costs $1,395. It weighs 30 pounds, and with its frame measures 62.5 inches high and 12 inches wide. The back panel is plastic; its sides are powder-coated extruded aluminum. Three Intel RealSense 410 series cameras line the left side of the frame, along with a laser pointer (A laser pointer! In a mirror!) and a round indicator light.

Without warning, it began to spin me around, like a cat on a Roomba.

Winter fired up the 3-D Fitness Scanner, and the laser pointer shined a light onto the hardwood floor. She pulled the scale out from under the mirror and lined up the center of the scale with the laser’s red dot. The scale, which charges via USB-C, is a disc of injection-molded plastic with a glass top. It wobbled slightly on the smooth hardwood when I stepped on it and widened my stance. The company says it also works well on carpet.

I tried to stand exactly as Naked Labs’ mobile app instructed me to: straight back, arms extended slightly from my sides, hands curled into fists. My hair was pulled up; Farahbakhshian and Winter said it’s a good idea to capture the neck and trapezius muscles as part of your body scan. And then I discovered why Farahbakhshian had been calling the scale the “turntable”: Without warning, it began to spin me around, like a cat on a Roomba. I laughed, which blurred my face on the first scan. By the third try, I had stopped moving and laughing. Maybe.

Being scanned and looking at the results are entirely different experiences. The scan itself takes only 15 seconds. Crunching the 2 gigabytes of visual data into a 2-megabyte file takes a few minutes. The processed image files are then shared from the mirror to the cloud, and then to the Naked Labs mobile app.

Animation by Naked Labs

All of the scans appear in grayscale in the app, making your body look as though it is made of liquid metal. Naked Labs also uses a “smoothing” technique on each body scan, which sounds like a culturally correct way of saying the images are Photoshopped. “Our goal in using grayscale was to take away any form of emotional attachment to the body model and make it as objective as possible,” Farahbakhshian told me. As T-1000 as the image may be, it was still undoubtedly me.

The extra data that appears onscreen beside your portrait, though, is what jumps out. Your weight is shown, but Farahbakhshian and Winter say they’re really trying to de-emphasize weight. At the top of the Key Stats pile is your body fat percentage, followed by your weight, your lean mass, and your fat mass. You can swipe through different parts of your body and get measurements for your waist, chest, each thigh, each calf. Do this day after day and you can look at comparative charts illustrating the changes to your body over time.

What’s interesting is that Naked Labs isn’t calculating body fat percentage using bioelectric impedance analysis, which many scales or other body composition devices do. And it’s obviously not doing hydrostatic testing, which would require you to be in water. It’s doing all of this algorithmically by comparing your images against a database of body shapes and DEXA scan data (DEXA stands for dual energy x-ray absorptiometry, and it measures bone density as well as body fat estimates). The Naked Labs approach is supposed to get better over time, which is the promise of a lot of quantified-self products: Feed us more data and we will, in turn, feed you the information you need to be a better you.

For Naked Labs, this ideally means getting you into better shape. The scanner is a consumer product, after all, which means the company isn’t attaching any medical claims to the device. It also hasn’t published any white papers or had its work peer-reviewed. But there are broader applications for 3-D body scans, ranging from less essential—retailers using the tech to sell you clothing suited to your shape—to the more critical, like tracking disease.

“If you look at all of the quantified-self technologies, a lot of it provides information that you have no idea what to do with. ‘Walk 10,000 steps …’ Well, what happens if it’s 9,000 or 11,000? There’s not a lot of information available around that,” says John Shepherd, an epidemiologist at the University of Hawaii who has spent 30 years researching quantitative imaging. “Body shape is so different in that if you can quantify it yourself at home with home-based systems, you can learn about risk factors for disease.”

Shepherd and his research team have been leading an NIH-funded study called Shape Up since 2015. The study is based on two premises: that that body shape is an important biomarker for overall health and that closely monitoring body shape could be more useful to people than just looking at numbers on a scale. They’ve used Naked Labs’ technology in their research, as well as 3-D scanners from Fit3D, Styku, TC Squared, and SciStream.

The Shape Up cohort currently includes 1,500 people, ranging from age 5 to 85, both male and female. Perhaps most interestingly, it also includes participants from five different ethnic backgrounds. Both Shepherd and the team at Naked Labs point out that most of the prediction algorithms for body fat and body muscle currently derive from data from white males.

But there could also be serious psychological pitfalls along the path to self-betterment and optimal health. Earlier this year, a researcher at Florida State University reported that participants in a 3-D body scanner study reported feeling dejected and dissatisfied with their body image after seeing their scans. The researcher, Jessica Ridgway, suggested that this might be explained by “self-discrepancy theory”—when there’s a dissonance between our actual selves and our ideal selves. 3-D scanners, essentially, magnify this.

Winter, Naked Labs’ neuroscientist, said she could think of one person in the company’s 25-person beta test group who she believed had a negative emotional reaction to her body scans. This person had “fallen off the wagon, hadn’t had a scan in a long time, and when she did look at it again, she said ‘Yeah, this does show what has happened the past couple months.’ It made her feel like she had been hiding what had happened in her body,” Winter said. But the overwhelming majority of the group found the scans to be productive, she insisted.

Shepherd said his team at the University of Hawaii has not yet partnered with any other researchers to examine the psychology aspect of body scans. “The primary reason is that we’re studying the utility right now, and we want to know if the utility is there before we recommend people using it in general,” he said.

Back at WIRED’s offices, I showed three colleagues the body scans that the Naked Labs team had emailed me. Two of my coworkers were horrified—not by my results (I don’t think) but by the whole concept of daily body scans. One was intrigued: “As someone who spends an inordinate amount of time comparing his body to sizing charts, this is kinda cool,” he wrote via Slack. Anecdata, no doubt. For some reason, I can’t seem to get my grayscale image out of my head.

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Edge of Belgravia Shiroi Hana Knife Set: Price, Specs, Release Date

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Glimpse your reflection on the mirror-like surface of a Shiroi Hana knife, and you’ll see your most glamorous culinary aspirations glittering back at you. The newest collection from Edge of Belgravia is a $299 set of six steel slicers inspired by Japanese swords. Never mind that your countertops are encrusted under spills, or that you only pretend to know what “chiffonade” is. The sight of these knives—sophisticated, luminous—are meant to evoke the possibility of all that your kitchen could be.

Included in the set—which goes on sale today through Kickstarter—are a full-size 7.5-inch chef’s knife, a shorter 6-inch chef’s knife, a smaller utility knife, a paring knife, a 7.5-inch serrated bread knife, and a 7.5-inch slicer with a rectangular blade. All of the knives have Edge of Belgravia’s signature, soft-angled handle. I was sent a set to test out, and even the large chef knife feels startlingly light and balanced.

The core of each knife in the Shiroi Hana collection is made of AUS-10 steel, produced exclusively in Japan, and is fortified by outer layers of steel that help maintain its sharp edges over repeated wear. The specialized blades glide into ingredients with precision—so you can feel just as elegant carving leftover deli ham as you would preparing sustainably farmed Kanpachi sashimi.

The hallmark of the Shiroi Hana collection is the striking Damascene pattern that whirls across the surface in metallic rivulets. The intricate floral design complements Edge of Belgravia’s Black Diamond knife block, which safely encloses your knives in a free-floating display.

After all, the Shiroi Hana collection is meant to be seen. The knives will almost certainly attract the admiring gazes of dinner guests. But extrinsic validation is far less important than the private, extravagant culinary ambitions that beautiful kitchen tools such as these excite in you. No matter your level of expertise, cooking in real life is frequently messy and mundane. But when you spy graceful knives, glinting in the corner like a promise, they are an assurance that those fantasies of Michelin stardom may be a little closer within reach than you think.

One last note: The knives are for sale through a crowdfunding platform, but London-based Edge of Belgravia is an established brand with a track record of well-funded releases. Last year, the company held a Kickstarter sale for a similar knife set called Kuroi Hana.

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Airstream’s Nest Is a Compact Escape Pod That Doesn’t Skimp on Luxury

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Airstream founder Wally Byam began experimenting with fiberglass back in the 1950s. A half-century (and then some) later, his company has finally built the Nest, a plastic trailer that’s as stylish and rugged as the iconic, road-tested aluminum capsules. While Airstream’s retro-chic metal models can carry sticker-shocking six-figure price tags, its new fiberglass tow-along is half that—cheap enough to attract a new generation of customers. The 16-foot Nest is compact but luxurious, with room for two to sleep, cook, and wash up (it has a bathroom with a shower). The overhead skylight and gogglelike front window brighten every corner of the interior. And at 3,400 pounds, you don’t need a monster truck to pull it. Forget #vanlife—#nestlife is about to have its moment.

$45,900 and up.

This article appears in the July issue. Subscribe now.

Styling by Pakayla Rae Biehn and Linda Mai Green; Airstream Nest courtesy of Airstream; Postproduction by Wet Noodles

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From Surface Go to the Instant Pot Max, All the Things We Loved This Month

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Panasonic Wireless Headphones (RP-HD605N) Review: Bose Beaters?

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People complain about red eye flights a lot, but my least favorite time to board is at the crack of dawn. As a night owl, there’s nothing worse than finally falling asleep at midnight only to wake up at 3 a.m. to head to the airport. My alarm may as well be an air raid siren at that hour. I wake up in a cold sweat, with no idea of who or where I am, and no amount of caffeine can revive me. I zombie-shuffle my way through security and arrive at my destination utterly destroyed.

Despite knowing better, last week I took an early flight to save some cash. On this particular plane, a baby in the airplane felt as grumpy as I did. The poor critter may have screamed the entire way. I have no idea. After a few moments of it, I turned on Panasonic’s latest noise cancelling headphones, and threw a hoodie over my head. The baby faded to a faint whisper and I slept peacefully for two whole hours, which saved my day.

For a brand that’s struggled to regain the recognition it once had, Panasonic continues to make some stellar products. I still own one of the last-ever Panasonic plasma TVs, and its $9 earbuds are pretty darn nice for the dough. I’d put its new hi-res noise cancelling over-ear headphones right next to them in terms of value and surprising performance.

I wish Panasonic’s product naming czars had come up with a more inspiring moniker than “RP-HD605N-K.” Thankfully, they sound fantastic, with good bass and treble response, and a balanced sound signature thanks to the 40mm drivers that are certified for hi-res audio (LDAC and AptX HD supported for Bluetooth). I found them especially crisp and clear when used with the included 3.5mm audio cable, though a touch bright on some tracks.

Panasonic

The design is all-plastic with a faux leather headband and earcups. They look like a pair of your typical Bose headphones, though a hair more modern—the kind of headphones that no one will notice, or remember. They elicit neutral feelings from most people I’ve shown them to, which might be a positive or negative, depending on your fashion sense. For me, it was fine. I’m perfectly content with wearing drab headphones if they sound great.

The cushioning is comfortable and each cup slides out to fit different head sizes. I found them very soft, and particularly liked the 3D ball joint that lets the cups adjust for a tighter seal, though if you prefer deep padding, these might not satisfy you. They have about a centimeter and a half of give, which was enough for me.

That said, the leatherette earcups get too warm and sweaty during workouts, and tend to hug your neck when you take them off. Luckily, they can collapse, so you can stow them in a large pocket, or bag. If you don’t, the included semi-hard shell case is easily stuffed into a carry-on.

The real benefits are the 20-hour battery life, which should last a couple weeks between charges, and the adjustable active noise cancelling. Tap the NC button on the edge of the right earcup (you’ll figure out where it is—it’s smooshed up against the power control) and you can cycle through three levels of noise cancelling. I preferred the strongest, even though I could hear a faint hiss when music wasn’t playing.

Panasonic baked in a really helpful little trick, too. If you want to hear the world around you, put your right hand over the right earcup. The headphones will instantly enter Ambient Sound mode, which drastically lowers the volume of your audio and pipes in outside noise, so you can hear what someone’s telling you for a moment. Lift your palm and you’re back in listening land. It’s fun to do, and works really well in a crunch.

Panasonic

Above the NC button is a volume switch that also acts as a button to accept calls or speak with your phone’s voice assistant. Call quality was acceptably clear, though callers did tell me they could hear some background noise. Sadly, few headphones, even at this price, nail phone calls.

At $300, Panasonic has priced its cans a bit cheaper than the Bose QuietComfort 35 by $50. If you pressed me, I’d still push you to buy a pair of QC35s if you’re buying solely for noise cancelling, and the Plantronics BackBeat Pro 2 if you’re searching for a bargain. But the longer I wear these Panasonic headphones, the more my loyalties sway. Panasonic’s name might not have the cachet it used to, but it has a killer set of cans in the RP-HD605N-K.

Seriously, We Need to Talk About Hannah Gadsby’s ‘Nanette’

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Nanette, the Netflix special from Australian comedian Hannah Gadsby, landed on the streaming service well over a month ago. For that reason, it should be the last thing WIRED is doing a piece on. However, in the six weeks since the special first dropped, the conversation around it has only increased—and by now, the special has established itself as a sleeper phenomenon. Dealing openly with the sexism, homophobia, and assaults Gadsby has dealt with in her own life, Nanette quickly became the title most frequently preceded by “Have you seen…” during the typically quiet months of June and July. And in the process, it completely upended what a comedy special could be in the process.

Which means we needed to talk about it, too. Below we gathered writers and editors Angela Watercutter, Jason Kehe, Alexis Sobel Fitts, and Peter Rubin for a roundtable discussion about Nanette and what, exactly, made it such an unexpected success.

Angela Watercutter, Senior Associate Editor: Strictly speaking, I may very well be Hannah Gadsby’s target demo: I’m a woman with a fondness for blazers and short hair and I like comedy. But that’s not why I watched Nanette the weekend it came out. At least not initially. I put it on because a friend of mine had sent me a clip of the part of the special where Gadsby relates a run-in with a mansplainer telling her she shouldn’t take antidepressants because she’s an artist and “if Vincent Van Gogh had taken medication, we wouldn’t have The Sunflowers.” (Yes, the part where she says “I tore that man a college-debt-sized new asshole.”) The thinkpieces hadn’t started rolling in yet, so I wasn’t expecting the twist. (If you don’t know what I mean by “the twist” stop reading now, go watch Nanette, and come back.) By the time I’d finished, my heart was on the floor. Everything she was saying—about art, about the tools of comedy, about the strength of broken people who rebuild themselves—hit like a locomotive.

Like many of you, I’m sure, that viewing led to lots of conversations about Gadsby’s special (as well multiple repeat viewings). I heard lots of feedback, lots of opinions; most of those came down to how mind-blowing and revolutionary Nanette was. The reasons people offered for why it is so vital are almost as varied as the people I talked to about it. But I think what struck me most was that I’d never heard anyone address the psychological layers of self-deprecating humor in a comedy show. Watching it, I realized I’d often relied on the same tricks of tension-breaking Gadsby does/did—though, admittedly, not as well—and hadn’t really thought about the implications. That bit has lingered in my brain for a while, and I don’t think it’ll ever leave.

Jason Kehe, Senior Associate Editor: Angela, you happened to be at our San Francisco office the day after I watched Nanette, and thank god, because I had to talk to you about it. Pretty sure I said something to the effect of: “NA. freaking. NETTE.” Like you, I was stunned, overwhelmed, floored. But I gotta ask: Does this count as comedy? Or stand-up? At least two friends of mine kept calling it a “speech,” which feels belittling. Others seem to prefer “one-woman show.” That’s closer, maybe (though—do we ever say “one-man show”?), but I still maintain it’s a stand-up comedy special. In a sense it had to be called that, because the whole point is that, midway through, she completely subverts what that means. The show worked for me in many ways, but the main one might be as a kind of meta self-interrogatory anti-comedy. Anyway, why this strenuous effort to categorize, name, label? My mental image is of the tongue-tied masses being like: GERP WHAT IS THIS?!

Alexis Sobel Fitts, Senior Editor: Oh, how little I want to slot in as resident buzzkill, and the genre-and-culture-bending comedy set of a masculine-of-center lesbian is not the mountain I intended to die on. And yet, here we are.

Look, from a structural perspective, I won’t deny that Hannah Gadsby’s performance is brilliant: The way she quietly built and broke different interlocking threads could (and should) be studied by grad students, dissected and mapped and explained as a masterclass on narrative. What I question is the hype. I’m not clear what makes her set so genre-breaking. Comedy is built to question its own existence, to be weird, to vary from form, to offer something closer to social commentary than … well, humor. Think back to a period when Louis C.K. was still comedian god, and remember that his entire live show revolved around unmooring the closing scene of the Grapes of Wrath. It’s not just white guys in the #MeToo set who get to do this: Tig Notaro, Wanda Sykes, Joan Rivers have offered up intimate performances that grapple with the darkest parts of society, that engage and enrage and place blame on the audience, that do much more than setting up jokes.

What made Gadsby’s special special, in my opinion, is the diversity of its audience. Louis C.K. might get to spew his weirdness into packed auditoriums, but when queer, female comedians tackle identity in a set, they’re usually speaking to a limited, like-minded room. Because Netflix had Nanette up on its homepage and the press covered it in a unified push, the resulting network effect transformed it from a television program into a can’t-miss cultural event. For example, I watched the show with my husband—a lovely, well read, open-minded, feminist-advocate … who is also still, a straight, white man. He was overwhelmed by Nanette, he wanted to send it to all of his friends, and talk about it ad nauseam. He also wasn’t used to bearing such close witness to the struggles of a queer woman within the patriarchy. “I know stuff like this happens,” he told me at one point, “but I’m not used to hearing it like this.”

Peter Rubin, Senior Editor: Alexis, I certainly agree that comedy can violate any definition one can dream up for it, and its slipperiest self might be the one that offers itself up as a sacrifice. We expect things from comedy—as Gadsby says: tension, resolution—but the truly indelible performances break that expectation. Artists have spent their lives onstage, developing a comfort that in the best cases has given rise to clarity; some of the most searing routines of recent years have dispensed with the distance of jokes, instead laying bare the artist behind the art. It’s no surprise that all the routines you mention are women; given the way the comedy world has worked for decades, they’ve got more than a little material to work with.

I also agree that what we call this thing doesn’t really get at the real question here, which is what exactly is so transformative about Nanette. Since I saw it, I’ve had conversations about it, and I’ve definitely thought about it, but I’ve also spent a lot of time considering my role as a viewer—and in comedy, that’s rare territory to find yourself in. There’s no one way to be a fantastic standup comic, but whether someone is a storyteller or a satirist, a common thread is universalizing your experience. Nanette points itself the other way, and tromps on the gas pedal. At every turn of the screw, her experience becomes more and more personal, more and more individual; connecting with the story isn’t a ohhh, hey, yeah! but a hoooooly shit.

And that’s the special thing here, to me. Nanette isn’t just brilliantly written, or emotionally honest, or performed by a comic with gift for disarming asides. It’s challenging. Gadsby forces you to feel another person’s pain and strength, but does so in a way that also causes you to interrogate your own position. I’ve been wondering what I would compare it to, and the answer isn’t another standup special but a first-season episode of Atlanta, in which Earn (Donald Glover) gives Darius (Lakeith Stanfield) the last of his money in hopes of a quick come-up. When the come-up does arrive, it slams home the economic catch-22 of check-to-check living, and does so in a way that no observation- or polemic-based comedy routine could. It’s an apples-to-Cane Corso puppies comparison, I know, but we’re also talking about two one-of-a-kind projects.Each had predecessors that plumbed similar ground, but I’d argue that none did so as deftly as these.

So here’s another question: what happens now? Does Netflix start ponying up for more bracing, conscious comedy specials? Does Hannah Gadsby’s comedy retirement hold? If so, what’s next for her; if not, how long until her Kingdom Come?

Watercutter: Peter, I think you’re 100 percent right about Nanette causing audiences to look at their own role in the proceedings. It breaks down the fourth wall in a genre—stand-up comedy—that we typically don’t think of as having one because the orator is always addressing the audience. It’s an odd thing to ask a crowd, “What are you buying when you pay to laugh at someone?” With a lot of stand-up, that doesn’t seem like such an unfair bargain because the presenter is offering up scenes of humiliation—relationship dust-ups, the woes of travel, whatever—that seem, at least, relatively benign. What Gadsby does is point out the fact that the way she gets laughs is by joking about the very traumatic events in her life—and then makes the crowd confront what they were asking for when they showed up and said, “Here we are now, entertain us.”

With other forms of entertainment like movies or plays or even concerts, the audience also pays someone else to make them feel something, but the transaction is different. You’re made to empathize with a character in a 1-1 relationship: They’re representing a thing people can relate to; catharsis ensues. Both parties are, roughly, going through the same emotions. Gadsby’s special is her talking about painful experiences, getting both empathy and laughs, and then asking the audience to think about why they’re laughing—a particularly potent question, I think, for the segments of the audience who haven’t had similar life experiences. All art requires the consumer, on some level, to relate to the artist, but not while the artist is actively telling them that the thing they’re getting joy from was traumatizing for them.

I think that’s why folks are reticent to call Nanette “comedy.” When audiences see stand-up, it’s given under the illusion that the comic enjoys making people laugh, that everyone is in on the joke; Gadsby doesn’t do that, she’s not laughing along with her audience. (I’m weirdly reminded of Ellen DeGeneres’ bit about using the phrase “just kidding” to try to get away with saying something insulting: “Well, then you don’t know how to kid properly, ’cause we should both be laughing.”)

But Peter, you asked a question. What I think/hope the future holds for Gadsby is writing. I think what she did with Nanette, whether intentionally or not, was set up one really great mic-drop. She kinda can’t go back. (Also, if it is causing the kind of harm Gadsby says it is in the special, I kinda don’t want her to go back, at least not to the kind of routines she’d been doing heretofore.) She was writing for the show Please Like Me while she was on it, and it would be awesome if she could continue using her talents in that way … perhaps on a Netflix show! After that, if she wants to come back like Jordan wearing the 45 and give an encore, she can.

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Climate Change Is Coming for Underwater Archaeological Sites

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For years, archaeologists have mainly been concerned with what climate change might do to places where the land meets the water. They’ve examined ways to stave off rising tides by buffering sites that will be swamped, hauling things to higher ground, or documenting whatever they can in the water’s path. For these sites that are not yet damp, water is a threat—sometimes a distant one, sometimes one that’s gaining ground—but for the wrecks, it’s a foregone conclusion. That ship has sailed—and sunk.

With climate change, “sea-level rise is the most obvious thing people are used to hearing about, and the most easily dismissed with submerged sites,” says Jeneva Wright, an underwater archaeologist and research fellow at East Carolina University. Sea-level rise is far from the only climate-related threat facing submerged sites, though: Wright outlined a handful of others in a 2016 paper in the Journal of Maritime Archaeology, written when she was working as an archaeologist in the National Parks Services’ Submerged Resources Center.

Across the field, there’s admittedly little data about some of these risks, and Wright says that archaeologists would do well to collaborate with biologists, ecologists, oceanographers, and other scientists who have amassed much more information about what a changing climate will do to parts of these ecosystems. For now, Wright describes her reading of these risks as “theoretical, hypothetical, and logical,” meaning that though there’s fairly limited research within archaeology, these forecasts square with projections that researchers in other fields have arrived at, after starting to scrutinize the future effects of climate change on, for instance, ocean chemistry, reefs, and other marine life.

Storm surges and violent weather pose an immediate threat: Hurricanes tracking right over shipwrecks can splinter them into oblivion, or at least strip protective coverings and expose timbers, coral-covered cannonballs, and other features to battering currents and wind. This already happens. As a graduate student in 2014, Wright conducted research in Biscayne National Park, at the HMS Fowey. To cushion the wreck against a storm surge or hurricane event, the Parks Service had partially reburied it with sandbags and sediment. Then a storm swept through the following year. When it hit, “all of that sediment was dispersed and taken away,” Wright says. “It was sort of a failure of the reburial effort, but was sort of a success, because if that sand hadn’t been there, it would have been just this 18th-century British warship that had dispersed all over the place.”

Many wrecks are coated in concretions, which look like cement and can help hold everything together.
Tane Casserley/NOAA/MONITOR NMS/CC BY 2.0

Other changes will be less physically brutal, and maybe less obvious to landlubbers, compared with pelting rain and wild winds. Wrecks are already deluged, of course, but rising sea levels could affect them, too, because depth changes—even relatively small ones—can trigger changes that cascade through the environment. Underwater, a change in depth can correlate to a change in temperature, and that in turn may change the species that can survive there. Take seagrass. In many wrecks around Florida, for instance, seagrass functions as an anchor, holding sediment in place and blanketing fragile timbers. Some of these species vanish below about 30 feet; anything deeper is too cold, too dark, and too devoid of oxygen. A sea-level rise of just a few meters could theoretically swamp these wrecks with enough water to threaten the survival of the species that lock them in place, Wright says. (In Florida, the National Parks Service manages parks around the estimate that waters will rise three feet by 2100.)

As the ocean absorbs more carbon dioxide, it is also becoming hotter and more acidic. The Smithsonian has referred to ocean acidification as “climate change’s equally evil twin,” and it could pose big problems for wrecks. Associated chemical changes will likely erode the cement-like coating that covers many historic wrecks. This protective layer, called concretion, appears most often on iron wrecks; it’s a byproduct of rust interacting with seawater and attracting organisms. “You’ve got this crusty stuff that’s covering everything, and it can protect it for centuries,” Wright says. But “because it’s a calcium carbonate—just like Tums that you would eat if you had an upset stomach—it’s really, really sensitive to acid.” When the acid content increases,”all of that protective coating that’s over these cultural materials can vanish—like, literally vanish,” Wright says. Research in this vein tends to focus on the similar threats faced by calcifying marine life such as corals, clams, oysters, and sea urchins. When researchers extrapolate that to shipwrecks, Wright says, “You go, ‘Ooh, that’s bad.’”

Chemical changes can also be quite dangerous in light of what might still be stashed inside a ship’s hull. Sunken World War II naval vessels might still hold a smattering of “big, bad things,” Wright adds, from armaments to biohazards such as vast quantities of oil. Most of these ships are made of rusting metals. “The more temperature you add, and the more acidic that environment is, the faster those shipwrecks can deteriorate,” Wright says. “And suddenly you’re looking at the loss of cultural heritage, but you’re also looking at the release of whatever those wrecks are holding.” In many cases, it’s not realistic to extract the potential pollutants from these sites, or to raise them from the sea. They may be war graves, holding soldiers’ remains, or else submerged in very deep water.’

Divers study the SS City Washington in the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary.
Tane Casserley/NOAA

Blueair Sense+ Review: Breathe Easy With This WiFi-Enabled Air Purifier

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Your home might be your sanctuary, but the air inside it is probably not that great for you. Especially during the summer, open windows let in exhaust from passing vehicles, on top of dust, and pollen. My dogs shed constantly, putting dander and hair in the air, too. I can usually find my spouse happily drilling into walls or cutting holes in the floor, and my kids leave sopping wet towels to incubate mold in bizarre, hidden places. Although I vacuum every day, it’s not nearly enough.

Seasonal wildfires and summer heat in the western United States also contribute to poor air quality. While many people are fine with washing their sheets, vacuuming, and changing filters in their HVAC system, those might not be adequate measures if you’ve ever stepped outside to find your entire neighborhood veiled in a fine, ashy haze.

Many parents of small children buy and run an air purifier during the summer. As an allergy and asthma sufferer with two small kids, I do, too.

Just Breathe

Founded two decades ago by an Electrolux alum in Stockholm, Sweden, Blueair makes some of the best air purifiers available. I elected to test the Sense+, their Wi-Fi-enabled model. While it isn’t quite as visually striking as the Dyson Pure Cool, the sleek cuboid does come in a range of vivid colors. My tester model was in a brilliant leaf green.

At 19 inches tall and 18.5 inches wide, the Sense+ is a floor unit. It doesn’t have an exterior fan, so you have to be a little thoughtful about placement in order for the maximum amount of air to get contact with the filter. Blueair recommends that you place it about 10 centimeters, or almost four inches, away from other objects. In my bedroom, the only place that both fit the unit and had an electrical outlet was in the path around the foot of our bed.

Setup is simple. Just plug it in, download the Blueair Friend app to your phone, and swipe your hand over the top of the unit, which will start to glow like something out of Minority Report. Then, you follow the in-app instructions to connect the Sense+.

Blueair

The LED screen on top of the Sense+ looks pretty cool, and it’s fun to adjust the fan speed or turn it off by merely waving your hand. But for more fine-tuned control, you have to use the app (the Sense+ is also Alexa-compatible). On your phone, you can adjust the fan speed or the LED brightness. You can also set night mode, which will dial down the fan speed and LED intensity during a set of pre-programmed time constraints. Finally, there’s a child lock feature, if you also have a toddler who is thrilled to discover that he can turn the purifier on and off by waving a tiny fist.

And unlike the Pure Cool, the Sense+ does not come with a built-in air quality monitor. For that, you need to purchase the optional Blueair Aware, which is a small device that both does not look like it costs $200, and also seems to be comparably priced to other consumer-grade air quality sensors. AQ monitors evaluate your indoor air quality based on a number of different factors, like temperature, humidity, or particulate matter.

The manual recommends setting the Aware at “nose level”, but since the purifier is in our bedroom, a bedside table seemed to be the best place for it. The Aware requires a week’s worth of test readings before it’s calibrated.

The Aware monitors particulate matter that are up to 2.5 micrometers in size, which could range from everything from fine dust to odors; volatile organic compounds (VOCs) such as acetaldehyde from cooking or tobacco smoke; and carbon dioxide, in addition to temperature and humidity. The Aware sends you alerts on your phone when the air quality in your room is poor. You can also link it to the Sense+ to increase the purifier’s interior fan speed automatically when the room is more polluted; examine charts for each pollutant over time; and compare your indoor air quality to outdoor air quality.

The app uses the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s standard for calculating the air quality index (AQI), and the Blueair Friend’s outdoor AQI readings tallied with the live local readings from my state’s Department of Environmental Quality.

As might be expected, when I first set up the purifier and turned on the app, it registered that our bedroom was highly polluted with both total VOCs and carbon dioxide (it should be noted that high levels of carbon dioxide are a ventilation issue, and cannot be fixed with an air purifier). It took about an hour during the day for the Sense+ and Aware to reduce the readings from polluted to excellent.

Looking back at the timeline of the Aware’s readings was like looking back at a timeline of my day. Yup, those particulate matter spikes are at the exact same time when my spouse and I fall into our dusty sheets at the end of the day. The carbon dioxide spikes are timed exactly when we get up in the morning, and when our dogs walk (or run) past the air purifier at night to chase skunks or possums. Everything flatlines during the day, while we’re at work. And as with the Dyson Pure Cool, I have stopped waking up to note our neighbor skunks’ nighttime journeys past our bedroom window. Maybe they’ve started taking another route?

In the Air Tonight

At $400, the Sense+ is very expensive. A $200 air quality monitor on top of that is pricier still. And after running the Sense+ for about a month, my Blueair Friend informs me that I have a mere 122 days left on the filter, a replacement for which appears to cost around $80. This is not a cheap investment, although the Blueair does offer more affordable options. For example, the Blueair Pure 211 is almost half the price and purifies the same square footage.

As someone who has chronic asthma-induced bronchitis, it’s nice to know when your indoor air quality worsens—even if it’s just because your toddler has started breathing directly into the top of the AQ monitor. Improving your indoor air quality can improve your quality of life, even if you’re not an asthmatic or a data hound who likes poring over charts. Vulnerable demographics, like young children or the elderly, can especially benefit.

After all, if I’m going to endure the constant aromas of fish sticks, scented markers, and Play-Doh while hiding from the sun this summer, I’ll gladly take all the help I can get.

Are Diplomas in Your DNA?

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Last week, scientists published the biggest-ever study of the genetic influence on educational attainment. By analyzing the DNA of 1.1 million people, the international team discovered more than a thousand genetic variants that accounted—in small part—for how far a person gets through school. It made a lot of people nervous, as they imagined how this new research could be applied in Gattaca-esque testing tools.

But those concerns aren’t new—and neither is the kind of research published last Monday. This sort of correlational work for educational attainment has been in progress since at least 2011. And there is already a consumer product on the market that draws from that early research.

Log onto the Helix DNA marketplace—it’s like the app store for consumer genetic products—and the candy-colored website invites you to “Get started with DNA.” Clicking through takes you to one of Helix’s featured products: the DNAPassport. It was developed by Denver-based HumanCode, which Helix acquired in June, and lets users explore where their ancestors come from, whether they might be sensitive to gluten or lactose, and more than 40 other genetically-influenced traits. One of them is something called “academic achievement.”

It’s based on a single genetic variant called rs11584700, near a gene called LRRN2 that codes for a protein involved in neuron signaling. And it was discovered by the same consortium that published the massive genetic analysis on Monday.

Social scientists’ first attempts at unearthing links between genes and people’s behaviors, in the mid-2000s, were plagued by small samples, weak methods, and unreproducible results. So to save the field from itself, a behavioral economist named Daniel Benjamin, at the University of Southern California, borrowed an idea from medical geneticists. He convinced research organizations from around the world to pool their data, giving them enough power to run something called a Genome-Wide Association Study, or GWAS. The first thing they looked at was how long people stay in school.

In 2011, Benjamin founded the Social Science Genetic Association Consortium, along with David Cesarini and Philipp Koellinger. Their goal was to find a reliable measure of heritable influence on education attainment so that other researchers could control for genetics in their experiments, the same way they’d control for socioeconomic status or zip code. Since then, the SSGAC has uncovered more than 1,000 genetic variations associated with years of schooling. Benjamin’s team has gone out of its way to make it clear that each one exerts only a teeny tiny bit of influence—three additional weeks of education, max—and that even collectively, the variants are not powerful enough to predict an individual’s academic achievement.

But that’s not stopping companies from using their research to sell people insights into their degree-seeking behavior. Based on one of the consortium’s earlier papers, and a second one using data from the UK’s National Child Development Study, HumanCode added the academic achievement feature to its DNAPassport app last December. Users who’ve got a pair of G’s or an A and a G at that location will learn that those genotypes are “associated with slightly higher educational attainment in Europeans.” If your spit turns up an AA, well, no higher ed association for you.

“I’m not afraid to share that my own academic achievement SNP is not the desirable one,” says Chris Glodé, formerly the CEO of HumanCode, now a chief product officer at Helix, as he sends over a screenshot of his “Normal,” aka AA genotype. He says HumanCode made the decision to add the feature after seeing educational attainment show up on a number of third-party sites like GenePlaza, Genome Link, and Promethease. These are websites where people can go to upload the genetic data files they get from spit testing kits like 23andMe, Ancestry, and Helix, to further explore their DNA. “A lot of people are using these third-party services, so the idea that we’re going to prevent people from finding out this information for themselves seems not only unlikely, but also misaligned with our mission,” says Glodé. “The question then became, can we present this information responsibly?”

HumanCode sold DNAPassport on Helix’s marketplace even before the company was acquired. So its product has been subject to Helix’s scientific evaluation process since late 2017: The company requires that any variants used in a product are based on studies with more than 2,000 people whose results have been replicated. In the case of academic achievement, Helix also required that HumanCode list it with a disclaimer of sorts, called a LAB designation. “The research supporting the genetics underlying this trait require more work,” reads the site’s language. “Traits with the LAB designation may have limited scientific support from studies that are small/preliminary or lacking independent replication. Additionally, some traits with LAB designations have valid and replicated associations, but we want to learn more about how genetics influences the trait.”

About a quarter of DNAPassport’s traits fall under LAB designation. They’re all grouped together in the “Just for Fun” category of traits, “to reinforce that this information shouldn’t be used for making lifestyle decisions,” says Glodé. Sometimes, when new and better research comes out, traits get upgraded. If he were still the CEO of HumanCode and it was still an independent company, his team would probably update the academic achievement trait with the latest variants. But he says Helix has no plans to do that. Instead, it’s focused on encouraging developers to bring new products to its platform, including tests that might include educational attainment.

“Provided the context was appropriate, that a product was intended to be informational and educational, I think Helix would be open to it,” says Glodé. “But they would likely still require the results to presented the way we did in DNAPassport, providing additional qualifications that the research isn’t as well established as for traits like height and eye color.” And that the results don’t apply beyond people of European descent. Like the vast majority of genetic population studies, the SSGAC’s research cohort is overwhelmingly European, and the variants identified have little predictive power for non-European populations.

Benjamin—the SSGAC co-founder—says relying on his study’s genetic score to predict educational attainment for an individual would be inaccurate. Using just a single variant, even more so. “If companies want to do this I would be concerned that they’re accurately communicating the information,” says Benjamin. “It’s not just a matter of disclosing the limitations of the predictive power.” Along with other members of the consortium and its advisory board, Benjamin spent hundreds of hours writing a 27-page FAQ to accompany their paper, explicitly because of the potential for misinterpretation. He credits companies like 23andMe that use a rating system to communicate how confident users can be in the results.

While 23andMe has played a significant role in supporting research into the genetics of educational attainment—the company contributed deidentified data on 365,536 of its research-consented customers to the SSGAC’s latest study—it does not at this time offer a report for academic achievement. Nor does it have any educational attainment reports in the product pipeline, according to a company spokesperson.

Remember, no one knows exactly how these genes create a tendency toward degree-seeking behavior. They could influence how fast neurons fire, or they could make sitting at a hard wooden desk for eight hours not feel like torture. Maybe they remove the stigma of asking for extra time on tests or assignment extensions. Researchers will need to do a lot more work to figure out the why. But when they do, you can be sure someone will try to sell it to you.

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Despite Pledging Openness, Companies Rush to Patent AI Tech

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At Google’s cloud computing conference in San Francisco last week, CEO Sundar Pichai mused on his company’s commitment to openness, and artificial intelligence.

“We create open platforms and share our technology because it helps new ideas get out faster,” Pichai said. Then he namechecked TensorFlow, the machine learning software Google developed and uses internally. The company open sourced the code in 2015, and it has since been downloaded more than 15 million times. “We created TensorFlow to make it possible for anyone to use AI,” Pichai said.

Such homilies to openness have become standard from the large tech companies competing intensely to develop AI technology. Facebook, Amazon, and Microsoft have all, like Google, released as open source software that their own engineers use for machine learning. All, including to some extent famously secretive Apple, encourage their AI researchers to openly publish their latest ideas—helping the companies recruit the brightest faculty and grad students from universities.

At the same time, these proponents of AI openness are also working to claim ownership of AI techniques and applications. Patent claims related to AI, and in particular machine learning, have accelerated sharply in recent years. So far, tech companies haven’t converted those patents into lawsuits and legal threats to thwart rivals. But should AI patents become corporate weapons, the current openness around AI research and ideas could end, likely hampering research.

A National Bureau of Economic Research study released this month shows US filings related to machine learning, the technology driving the current AI boom, increasing rapidly. “We’ve seen a huge explosion of patenting activity in AI and machine learning, and I see this exponential growth continuing,” says Michael Webb, a Stanford researcher and co-author of the study.

In 2010, there were 145 US patent filings that mentioned machine learning, the study says. In 2016, there were 594—a figure that’s incomplete, since the US Patent and Trademark Office only makes filings public 18 months after they have been registered. (Webb and his colleagues gathered their data in February.) Patent filings mentioning neural networks, a machine learning technique, climbed to 485 in 2016, from 94 in 2010.

Hotlittlepotato

Google itself exemplifies the trend. In 2010, only one Google filing mentioned machine learning or neural networks in its abstract or title, according to a search of the USPTO database. In 2016, there were 99 such filings from Google and other Alphabet companies. Facebook filed for 55 patents related to machine learning or neural networks in 2016, up from zero in 2010. IBM, which has been granted more US patents than any other company for the past 25 years running, boasts that in 2017 it won 1,400 AI-related patents, more than ever before.

It’s not surprising that patent filings related to AI are increasing. In 2012, neural networks suddenly became a hot topic of interest from tech companies, after they enabled big improvements in speech and image recognition. But the moves to lock up technology contrast with the emphasis on openness in companies’ public discussion of their AI strategies.

The patent filing surge recalls the fierce battles over intellectual property in the last big tech revolution, around smartphones. Apple and Samsung have fought at least 50 lawsuits over technology and designs for smartphones, according to the NBER paper; Apple and Google tussled in about 20.

More patents filed in a particular area make lawsuits more likely, says Richard Abramson, a Stanford lecturer who previously was general counsel at independent research institute SRI. “If you give everybody a gun you can pretty much bet the incidence of shooting is going to rise,” he says.

Litigation over AI could harm the open progress tech giants say they want. Twenty-five years ago, patent suits were mostly disputes between companies fighting to use specific technology in their products, Abramson says. Today many are brought by companies, often dubbed “trolls,” holding patents they don’t plan to use for anything but extracting compensation. “Now companies are freaked out by patent troll activity, and a lot of them stockpile patents in order to have something to shoot back,” he says.

There’s no indication yet that any of the leading AI companies are working to leverage their AI patents. Spokespeople for Google and DeepMind both said that their companies hold patents defensively, not with the intent to start fights with others. Google’s spokesperson also noted that the company accounts for a small minority of recent AI-related filings. A Facebook spokesperson said its filings shouldn’t be read to indicate current or future plans. IBM’s chief patent counsel, Manny Schecter, said the company’s patent horde reflects its investment in fundamental research.

Those statements leave room for future changes in policy. Given the recent history of fights over tech patents, some researchers still worry the AI patents piling up could be used in ways that could stifle progress. Assessing the value and scope of patents is complex, and even expert interpretations can vary. But some of the applications filed by Google and others appear to describe fundamental techniques with broad applications in research, says Miles Brundage, who researches trends in AI development at the University of Oxford. “It’s not had an impact yet, but this might be a ticking time bomb,” he says.

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The WIRED Guide to Artificial Intelligence

DeepMind, the Alphabet unit behind the AlphaGo software that defeated a world champion at Go, has filed applications including on DQN, an extension to a learning algorithm originating in the 1980s that helped DeepMind software master Atari games. Since DeepMind published academic work on DQN, researchers elsewhere have explored and extended its insights.

Google has a patent pending on dropout, a now-standard technique used to help neural networks generalize to new data they were not trained on. One Facebook application covers an approach to designing neural networks dubbed memory networks, which enhance a conventional machine learning system for processing text with a kind of short-term memory.

Mark Riedl, a professor at Georgia Institute of Technology currently on leave to work at Salesforce’s AI research group in Palo Alto, says patents on algorithms and other fundamental machine learning techniques make him uneasy. The patents filed so far haven’t yet caused problems for researchers, but assigning legal ownership of relatively abstract ideas doesn’t fit with the open progress that has lately made machine learning so exciting, he says.

Not all the patents recently filed on AI ideas and techniques will be awarded. Patents on software have become harder to get since a 2014 Supreme Court ruling that merely implementing an idea on a computer isn’t enough to make it patentable. And last year, USPTO significantly expanded the number of examiners dedicated to scrutinizing AI patents, something expected to screen out more applications.

Big changes in what kinds of AI ideas can be patented seem unlikely, though. “The companies filing a lot of applications in this space are a big portion of the economy,” says Joe Holovachuk, a patent attorney with the firm Pepper Hamilton. That means they can pay for lobbyists and lawyers to push lawmakers or courts to support their favored approach—which seems to be making all kinds of AI techniques broadly patentable.

In what could be music to the ears of tech companies, the director of the Patent and Trademark Office, Andrei Iancu, has signaled that he’s been thinking about AI patents. In April he told the Senate Judiciary Committee that he believes recent court decisions have muddied the question of whether algorithms can be patented. Iancu thinks algorithms, including in AI, generally always can be. “We have to make sure our policies, including IP, are highly focused on incentivizing that type of innovation,” he said.

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The Danger of Invisible Government Deeds

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Every few years, someone suggests privatizing the Tennessee Valley Authority. A crucial government corporation, the TVA, among its many other jobs, sells wholesale electricity to local power companies serving 9 million people in parts of seven southeastern states. President Obama floated this idea twice; President Trump proposed the same step in his Very Big Infrastructure Plan earlier this year.

The thinking is that it’s a waste for the government to be in the business of selling wholesale power because private industry could be making more money instead. As long as US senator Lamar Alexander (R-Tennessee) draws breath, though, the TVA won’t be sold; he has said the idea is “looney” and has “zero chance of becoming law.”

But Alexander won’t always be around, and few Americans outside TVA’s seven-state footprint likely know or care that it exists. Both the institution and the essential functions that it performs have become invisible. And so, someday, someone will succeed in selling off the TVA.

Susan Crawford (@scrawford) is an Ideas contributor for WIRED, a professor at Harvard Law School, and author of Captive Audience: The Telecom Industry and Monopoly Power in the New Gilded Age.

Much of what government does shares this same curse of invisibility. The unseen, well-functioning systems that allow us to trust our food and water, be confident our bank accounts won’t vanish, and move us seamlessly from place to place are some of the best things that government is capable of. Even as worried Americans on both coasts wring their hands over the daily drumbeat of front page, Trump-led government fiascos, we are at risk of forgetting what government is for—at all levels. The consequences of this collective forgetfulness could be cataclysmic.

Consider the TVA, launched in 1933 as a federal project aimed at harnessing the Tennessee River and developing its valley for the good of the people of a huge region. Nine million Americans live there now (a dramatic increase from the fewer than 5 million who lived there in the 1930s), in portions of Virginia, Kentucky, Alabama, Georgia, North Carolina, and Mississippi, as well as most of Tennessee. In 1947, historian John Gunther called the TVA “the greatest single American invention” of the 20th century and “the biggest contribution the United States has yet made to society in the modern world.”

The unseen, well-functioning systems that allow us to trust our foodand water, be confident our bank accounts won’t vanish, and move usseamlessly from place to place are some of the best things thatgovernment is capable of.

He was right. The TVA transformed one of the poorest areas in the country by making millions of acres of depleted and eroded soil useful for farming, creating a river capable of carrying huge amounts of freight, generating electric power for sale at low prices to retail power companies, stimulating demand for electricity, and developing the local economy in a host of ways—including handing out thousands of books and effectively creating new prosperous towns where thinly-populated, hard-scrabble communities had been barely surviving on land that couldn’t be farmed. Floods in 1937 had made millions of people homeless in the Ohio and Mississippi valleys; by 1942, the TVA’s 29 enormous dams made such catastrophes just about impossible in the Tennessee Valley.

Today, TVA makes enough from selling wholesale electricity that it needs no taxpayer funding. And Tennessee Valley residents pay electric rates that are below what more than two-thirds of the country pays. Almost 5 million people get their drinking water from the TVA.

And yet, of course, it probably sounds hopelessly old-fashioned; it was born of the brisk and lively months right after FDR was first elected in 1932, after years when the Great Depression had otherwise flattened American hopes. It was, and is, a regional planning agency.

People in TVA’s region don’t think of TVA when they flick on a light switch. “There are lots of things that the TVA is doing, but it’s not as visible in how it does it,” Chattanooga mayor Andy Berke told me recently. “Even when I was growing up, it seemed like there was much more pride in what it had accomplished. It was ours.” Over the course of time, for many reasons, TVA has become obscure. And so the necessary public role it continues to play may not be supported the next time someone is looking for a quick reduction in America’s deficit. Privatization, Berke says, “is a perennial idea that just keeps coming back, which to me means that there might be a long-term issue for TVA.”

This same disease of obscurity is afflicting the role of government as a whole. A month ago, a graduate student in public administration looked me right in the eye and said, “Why do we need government, anyway? Couldn’t the private sector do everything it does, just better?” I wasn’t surprised. This kind of technocratic, start-uppy thinking is everywhere.

“Couldn’t the private sector do everything it does, just better?” Thiskind of technocratic, start-uppy thinking is everywhere.

There is a difference between public sector and private sector values. The whole idea of the public sector is to protect and serve everyone. Only government, for example—and, likely, only local and regional government entities—can carry out long-term, equitable administrative planning for the sea-level rise that is about to swamp coastal US cities. Only government has an interest in protecting everyone, not just the wealthy, from the fires, floods, and tornadoes of changing weather throughout the country. Only government can hope to protect individuals against discrimination by private businesses. And only government is obliged to ensure that the water we drink and the air we breathe are clean.

These functions are just as invisible as electricity. But they, and the role of the government that provides them, need to be protected.

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BurnBox Makes Hidden Files Look Like You’ve Deleted Them

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Imagine you’re a human rights activist, pulling up to a border crossing. The on-duty customs agent requests that you hand over your phone and unlock it, without a warrant—an increasingly common practice for US Customs and Border Protection.

Your phone holds sensitive photographs documenting abuses abroad, but the agent can’t find them. At most, he might notice that you’ve deleted some files recently. Once you’re back on your way, you immediately call a colleague, who provides you with a special passcode. You then open your phone, enter the code into an app, and the photos you “deleted” have returned to the same cloud-storage folder where you last saw them.

That’s the scenario enabled by BurnBox, a new prototype designed by researchers from Cornell University, Cornell Tech, and the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, which will be presented at the USENIX Security conference next month. Designed to work on top of existing cloud storage services like Dropbox, BurnBox is a form of what the researchers call “self-revocable encryption,” which allows users to temporarily revoke access to some content on their device. While BurnBox is not a commercially available product and far from foolproof, it’s a glimpse at how journalists, dissidents, and others who carry sensitive data might deal with situations like border crossings in the future.

“The basic idea of BurnBox is dealing with what happens when we are forced to give up access to our personal data,” says Ian Miers, one of the coauthors of the paper and a postdoc at Cornell Tech. “You’re dealing with a setting where not only does someone have access to your files and the key. In this setting, they have your actual computer and they have everything you’ve done with it.”

Just One Piece

BurnBox works essentially by making encrypted files whose keys have been revoked look indistinguishable from deleted ones, at least to a border crossing agent or similar adversary. In a fully working version, users would need to restart or turn off their device right before they cross, in order to wipe any relevant metadata from its memory. The key used to regain access to the files needs to be stored somewhere else entirely, like at home or with a trusted friend. The technology behind BurnBox theoretically can work on both mobiles phones and other devices like laptops.

“BurnBox is just one piece of this puzzle of a whole ecosystem of apps.”

Nirvan Tyagi, Cornell University

You could also use BurnBox simply to delete files more securely. As the researchers point out, some cloud storage services have experienced problems in the past that prevented them from fully deleting items, and they also may be subject to government surveillance. Last year, for example, Dropbox acknowledged it suffered from a now-fixed bug that prevented some files and folders from being fully deleted from its services for years.

The technology behind BurnBox has a number of limitations, many of which have to do with how operating systems and the applications they run work. Revoking access to a file or deleting it does not, in many circumstances, also remove the associated metadata, like file size, when it was last accessed, and its name. That kind of information can be telling, especially in a high-stakes situation like crossing a border. An incriminating file name or an indication that something was recently deleted could raise the suspicions of a customs agent.

Miers likens the problem to a craft project. “You can clean up the things you actually made, but the glitter gets everywhere, it gets all over the place, and operating systems are not good at cleaning it up,” he says.

For BurnBox to work fully as intended, operating systems and applications would likely need to be reimagined with stronger privacy protections. “BurnBox is just one piece of this puzzle of a whole ecosystem of apps,” says Nirvan Tyagi, a PhD candidate at Cornell University and the lead author on the paper. “Here is this problem and we have a solution to one part of it.”

Absent that broader buy-in, BurnBox would help most against someone going through your phone by hand, rather than a full forensic analysis. Although the mere presence of BurnBox on a device might raise the suspicions of a border control agent or similar adversary. In the current version, nothing conceals its existence, though a fully developed version could hide inside, say, inside a calculator app.

For now, the researchers have only developed a way for BurnBox to work for a single client. You couldn’t use it on a Dropbox folder synced between multiple devices. “We have to have this model where you have two different devices and they keep in-sync about what’s deleted and what’s not,” says Miers, but that poses technical hurdles that the team has not yet overcome.

Safe Travels

At least one company has already launched a BurnBox-type product: password manager 1Password. Last year, the company released Travel Mode, a feature which allows users to temporarily remove sensitive passwords from their device and then reinstate them later when they’ve crossed the border. The feature is technologically different and less sophisticated, but it addresses similar kinds of threats.

“A lot of the ideas behind it are certainly usable,” Jeffrey Goldberg, a security architect at 1Password, says of BurnBox. “I’m not going to rule out that we would try to build on it. On the other hand, we’re fairly happy with Travel Mode and its current threat model.”

One difference between Travel Mode and BurnBox is where the keys to regain the data are located. A savvy border agent could simply compel you to open a browser, log into your 1Password account and turn Travel Mode off. BurnBox requires that you store the key to regain access to your revoked files somewhere not on your person as an added layer of security.

“A lot of the ideas behind it are certainly usable.”

Jeffrey Goldberg, 1Password

A serious issue with BurnBox, Travel Mode, and other tools like them is that deceiving border officials can have serious consequences. If a sophisticated law enforcement official detects that you’re lying in some way, it’s possible you might get charged with obstructing justice or another crime. In the United Kingdom last year, the director of an activist organization was convicted of willfully obstructing justice after he refused to decrypt his phone and laptop, for example.

The researchers behind BurnBox, however, have considered some of these issues. They designed their system so that users wouldn’t have to lie directly; they can honestly say that there’s no way to regain access to a revoked file while in custody, since the key is meant to be stored in a safe place. Still, if the application were to be fully developed, it could raise a number of legal issues for those who use it. For now, BurnBox remains a cryptographic feat, but not yet a full security solution.

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UK Group Threatens to Sue Facebook Over Cambridge Analytica

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Lawyers for a group of UK residents whose Facebook data was harvested by Cambridge Analytica are now threatening to sue for damages. In a 27-page letter served to the company Tuesday, they accuse Facebook of violating British data privacy regulations. The letter before claim, as it’s called, is the first step in the UK’s legal process for filing a class action suit. It warns Facebook that if it does not adequately respond to a list of questions regarding user privacy within 14 days, the claimants may take legal action against the company in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Ireland. Nearly 1.1 million British citizens could be eligible to join such a suit if it goes forward.

The warning comes from the UK-based law firm Irvine Thanvi Natas Solicitors, which is representing dozens of people who argue that Facebook misused their personal data in violation of UK law. It follows an announcement Monday by separate group, called the Fair Vote Project, that is also launching a class action suit against Facebook in the UK.

The UK Information Commissioner’s Office already said earlier this month that it intends to fine Facebook more than $600,000 under the country’s Data Protection Act for allowing Cambridge Analytica, the now-defunct political consulting firm, to collect information on tens of millions of users without their knowledge. But Ravi Naik, a lawyer with Irvine Thanvi Natas Solicitors, says the individuals affected also have a right to answers, and may have a right to damages if those answers aren’t satisfactory.

“People should realize that data rights are real rights, and we have a mechanism to enforce them,” Naik says.

WIRED reviewed a copy of the letter Naik submitted to Facebook Tuesday. It reads like a checklist of Facebook’s failures, dating back to its decision in 2009 to no longer allow users to keep their friend lists private. The letter also notes Facebook’s decision to let app developers scoop up data not just on their apps’ own users but on those users’ friends. Facebook didn’t put a stop to this practice until 2015. By then, Cambridge Analytica had already gained access to as many as 87 million Facebook users’ data through a personality quiz app designed by a University of Cambridge researcher named Aleksandr Kogan.

These original sins, the letter argues, opened Facebook up to legal liability from several angles. For starters, the UK’s Data Protection Act requires companies to get user consent to process their data. Naik says that Facebook essentially misled users about what they were consenting to. In Facebook’s privacy settings at the time, users could determine whether to share their posts with “only friends” or “friends of friends,” but this only applied to what other Facebook users could see. App developers had their own permissions, which, in some cases, gave them the ability to tap into their users’ friends’ data.

This broad allowance for app developers also triggered regulators in the United States to investigate Facebook for deceptive practices in 2011. At the time, the US Federal Trade Commission wrote that while Facebook had given users the impression they could share information only with their friends, those privacy restrictions “would be ineffective as to certain third parties.” The FTC argued Facebook failed to make that clear to users. It also considered Facebook’s 2009 decision to stop letting users make their friend lists private to be an “unfair and deceptive” practice. Facebook settled the matter by signing a consent decree with the FTC in 2011, and vowed not to mislead users about their privacy. After reports about Cambridge Analytica surfaced this spring, the FTC announced it was investigating whether Facebook broke that promise, a violation that could come with hefty fines.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, for his part, has told Congress he doesn’t believe the actions of a rogue app developer working for Cambridge Analytica constitute a breach of the consent decree. Still, in the letter, Naik uses the FTC’s own arguments to paint a picture of a company that failed to protect its users years after it was first informed of the risks. “We’re not talking about something passive here,” Naik says. “This was spelled out by the FTC.”

The claimants are seeking detailed answers to questions about how their data was shared, who exactly had access to it, and how Facebook has tried to protect them. They argue that the language Facebook used to alert people their data had been given to Cambridge Analytica was “vague and caveated.” It explained at a high level the kind of information that might have been shared, but the notification wasn’t tailored to each individual. That means, for instance, users had no way of knowing whether they were among the 1,500 people who had agreed to share their private messages with the Cambridge Analytica-linked app.

Naik’s clients want to know what other third parties may have had similar access. Facebook has shared some of that information with users already. Anyone can see the advertisers they’ve interacted with on Facebook and the apps they’ve logged into through Facebook under their account settings, but the company offers users limited details about the specific data those third parties can see.

In addition to answers, Naik’s clients are seeking unspecified damages, alleging Facebook misused private information, committed a breach of confidence, and violated the Data Protection Act, which would entitle the claimants to compensation under British law. Naik acknowledges this is a relatively untested argument as it pertains to social media companies, even in a country with relatively strict data privacy laws. “We’re watching data rights evolve in practice. This is going to be a really important test,” he says.

Naik is also representing David Carroll, an American professor at The New School, in a separate claim against Cambridge Analytica. Carroll is seeking additional information about the sources of data the company used to develop predictions about his political leanings. That case is still ongoing. But while the two issues overlap, Carroll is not a party in the potential claim against Facebook.

Facebook faced several lawsuits in the United States after the Cambridge Analytica scandal broke this spring. In its earnings report last week, Facebook mentioned multiple lawsuits that have been filed since March, but the company wrote that it believes they are “without merit” and is “vigorously defending them.”

But Naik says his clients’ claim is fortified not only by the strength of UK data protection law but by timing. Key players including Zuckerberg, Kogan, and former Cambridge Analytica CEO Alexander Nix have repeatedly testified before international regulators. The Information Commissioner’s Office announced its intention to fine Facebook the maximum penalty allowed under British law earlier this month. And over the weekend, following an 18-month investigation, a Parliamentary committee in the UK issued a scathing report condemning Facebook’s actions and suggesting the government go even further in establishing “clear legal liability for the tech companies to act against harmful and illegal content on their platforms.”

Naik isn’t the only person looking to capitalize on this heightened scrutiny. The Fair Vote Project, which is also preparing a suit against Facebook, is an activist group working to uncover alleged misdeeds in the Brexit Leave campaign. In a statement on the group’s website Monday, director Kyle Taylor wrote, “It is now abundantly clear the status quo with regard to how we hold internet giants to account does not work. The solution is urgent reform to properly regulate and oversee companies like Facebook.”

The timing couldn’t be worse for Facebook. Last week, following a quarterly earnings report that predicted slowed revenue growth ahead, the company lost more than $123 billion in value overnight. Facebook will undoubtedly have to answer to investors in the months ahead. The company is already facing one shareholder lawsuit over the stock market dive.

But Naik says the company has to answer to the individuals whose data was misused, too. “There’s one economic consequence of what they’ve done,” he says, “but there’s a human consequence as well.”

This is a developing story, and WIRED may update with more information as it becomes available.

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Dog Dumped Outside Shelter In Trash Bag Waited All Night For Someone To Find Her

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It was the start of an already busy day for the staff at Unleashed Pet Rescue and Adoption in Mission, Kansas, last Thursday morning — and then they saw her.

Outside the shelter was an emaciated boxer, lying motionless inside a bag full of garbage.

“Tears came right away,” Rebecca Taylor, PR manager for the rescue, told The Dodo. “We were not sure if [she] … was alive. She could not lift her head.”

Stray Dog Got Jug Stuck On Head And Couldn’t Eat For 11 Days

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“She was very instrumental in organizing a search party,” Kordusky said. “They went out on Thursday night and were able to discover that he was in a garage.”

It was a local man’s garage. At first, the rescuers thought they could just close the garage door to trap the dog, but the automatic garage door was very slow and loud when it went down, and whenever they tried to lower it, the dog dashed back onto the street before the door closed.

“We almost had him twice, but he didn’t want to be caught, and it was just amazing that even after having his head stuck in that thing for 9 or 10 days, that he had that much strength to just plow through,” Kordusky said.

Orca Mom Refuses To Let Go Of Her Baby’s Body

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By evening, several female orcas from the pod had gathered together at sunset. “A group of five to six females gathered at the mouth of the cove in a close, tight-knit circle, staying at the surface in a harmonious circular motion for nearly two hours,” a resident of San Juan Island told CWR. “As the light dimmed, I was able to watch them continue what seemed to be a ritual or ceremony. They stayed directly centered in the moonbeam, even as it moved.”

By Saturday, J35 was still carrying her baby, for the fifth straight day, even after her pod had moved on.

The tragic loss of this baby is just part of a larger story of devastation impacting these animals.

The southern resident killer whales (SRKW) group is made up of three pods, J Pod, K Pod and L Pod, who live in waters off the Pacific Northwest during the spring, summer and autumn. In recent years, environmental destruction and plummeting populations of Chinook salmon, the food source for these orcas, have made many of them go hungry. Damming rivers has contributed to this loss of the food source. (In the 1970s, the southern resident pods were also depleted by SeaWorld, which, along with other marine parks, took a generation of baby orcas captive.)

Wild Polar Bear Shot Dead After Charging At Cruise Ship Employee

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A wild polar bear was just shot dead after a run-in with an employee of a cruise ship line. The employee was part of an expedition to the archipelago in northern Norway where the polar bear lived.

The cruise ship landed on Spitsbergen, in the Svalbard islands, on Saturday and a four-person team of polar bear guards — employees whose job it is to survey landing sites to ensure the safety of tourists as they explore on foot — disembarked.

Then, a polar bear appeared suddenly and attacked one of the guards, according to a statement from Hapag-Lloyd Cruises. After first trying to scare the bear away, another guard then shot and killed the polar bear.

This Robot Hand Taught Itself How to Grab Stuff Like a Human

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Elon Musk is kinda worried about AI. (“AI is a fundamental existential risk for human civilization and I don’t think people fully appreciate that,” as he put it in 2017.) So he helped found a research nonprofit, OpenAI, to help cut a path to “safe” artificial general intelligence, as opposed to machines that pop our civilization like a pimple. Yes, Musk’s very public fears may distract from other more real problems in AI. But OpenAI just took a big step toward robots that better integrate into our world by not, well, breaking everything they pick up.

OpenAI researchers have built a system in which a simulated robotic hand learns to manipulate a block through trial and error, then seamlessly transfers that knowledge to a robotic hand in the real world. Incredibly, the system ends up “inventing” characteristic grasps that humans already commonly use to handle objects. Not in a quest to pop us like pimples—to be clear.

Video by OpenAI

The researchers’ trick is a technique called reinforcement learning. In a simulation, a hand, powered by a neural network, is free to experiment with different ways to grasp and fiddle with a block. “It’s just doing random things and failing miserably all the time,” says OpenAI engineer Matthias Plappert. “Then what we do is we give it a reward whenever it does something that slightly moves it toward the goal it actually wants to achieve, which is rotating the block.” The idea is to spin the block to show certain sides, each marked with an uppercase letter, without dropping it.

If the system does something random that brings the block slightly closer to the right position, a reward tells the hand to keep doing that sort of thing. Conversely, if it does something dumb, it’s punished, and learns to not do that sort of thing. (Think of it like a score: -20 for something very bad like dropping the object.) “Over time with a lot of experience it gradually becomes more and more versatile at rotating the block in hand,” says Plappert.

The trick with this new system is that the researchers have essentially built many different worlds within the digital world. “So for each simulation we randomize certain aspects,” says Plappert. Maybe the mass of the block is a bit different, for example, or gravity is slightly different. “Maybe it can’t move its fingers as quickly as it normally could.” As if it’s living in a simulated multiverse, the robot finds itself practicing in lots of different “realities” that are slightly different from one another.

This prepares it for the leap into the real world. “Because it sees so many of these simulated worlds during its training, what we were able to show here is that the actual physical world is just yet one more randomization from the perspective of the learning system,” says Plappert. If it only trains in a single simulated world, once it transfers to the real world, random variables will confuse the hell out of it.

For instance: Typically in the lab these researchers would position the robot hand palm-up, completely flat. Sitting in the hand, a block wouldn’t slide off. (Cameras positioned around the hand track LEDs at the tip of each finger, and also the position of the block itself.) But if the researchers tilted the hand slightly, gravity could potentially pull the block off the hand.

The system could compensate for this, though, because of “gravity randomization,” which comes in the form of not just tweaking the strength of gravity in simulation, but the direction it’s pulling. “Our model that is trained with lots of randomizations, including the gravity randomization, adapted to this environment pretty well,” says OpenAI engineer Lilian Weng. “Another one without this gravity randomization just dropped the cube all the time because the angle was different.” The tilted palm was confused because in the real world, the gravitational force wasn’t perpendicular to the plane of the palm. But the hand that trained with gravity randomization could learn how to correct for this anomaly.

To keep its grip on the block, the robot has five fingers and 24 degrees of freedom, making it very dexterous. (Hence its name, the Shadow Dexterous Hand. It’s actually made by a company in the UK.) Keep in mind that it’s learning to use those fingers from scratch, through trial and error in simulation. And it actually learns to grip the block like we would with our own fingers, essentially inventing human grasps.

Interestingly, the robot goes about something called a finger pivot a bit differently. Humans would typically pinch the block with the thumb and either the middle or ring finger, and pivot the block with flicks of the index finger. The robot hand, though, learns to grip with the thumb and little finger instead. “We believe the reason for this is simply in the Shadow Hand, the little finger is actually more dextrous because it has an extra degree of freedom” in the palm, says Plappert. “In effect this means that the little finger has a much bigger area it can easily reach.” For a robot learning to manipulate objects, this is simply the more efficient way to go about things.

It’s an aritificial intelligence figuring out how to do a complex task that would take ungodly amounts of time for a human to precisely program piece by piece. “In some sense, that’s what reinforcement learning is about, AI on its own discovering things that normally would take an enormous amount of human expertise to design controllers for,” says Pieter Abbeel, a roboticist at UC Berkeley. “This is a wonderful example of that happening.”

Now, this isn’t the first time researchers have trained a robot in simulation so a physical robot could adopt that knowledge. The challenge is, there’s a massive disconnect between simulation and the real world. There are just too many variables to account for in this great big complicated physical universe. “In the past, when people built simulators, they tried to build very accurate simulators and rely on the accuracy to make it work,” says Abbeel. “And if they can’t make it accurate enough, then the system wouldn’t work. This idea gets around that.”

Sure, you could try to apply this kind of reinforcement learning on a robot in the real world and skip the simulation. But because this robot first trains in a purely digital world, it can pack in a lot of practice—the equivalent of 100 years of experience when you consider all the parallel “realities” the researchers factored in, all running quickly on very powerful computers. That kind of learning will grow all the more important as robots assume more responsibilities.

Responsibilities that don’t including exterminating the human race. OpenAI will make sure of that.

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Sorry, Nerds: Terraforming Might Not Work on Mars

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ai

Listen, I get it. You want to go to Mars. I want to go to Mars. (Sort of.) And the plan—it’s good. A rocket with people. A base on the moon. Then more rockets and more people. Start making fuel on the surface, maybe depot it along the way. An outpost becomes a base becomes a domed city. And then: terraforming.

Bring dead Mars back to life, build it a new atmosphere with whatever’s left in its soil—frozen carbon dioxide, most likely—to up the air pressure, rely on greenhouse warming (you know, like climate change?) to make the place warm enough so frozen water, locked away underground, melts and comes roaring back. Oceans! Air! Maybe breathable, but at least enough so you don’t have to walk around in a spacesuit. Boom (where the value of “boom” = 10,000 years, plus or minus). Up the gravity well we go, and we can get moving on the Earther-Martian Colony Revolution all the hard sci-fi keeps promising.

It ain’t crazypants. The astronomer Carl Sagan, an upright symbol of scientific rectitude, pitched “planetary engineering” in 1971, melting water vapor from Mars’ polar ice to create “much more clement conditions.” Twenty years later, the astrobiologist Christopher McKay rounded the idea out, suggesting that terraforming of Mars was possible as long as the planet still had enough carbon dioxide, water, and nitrogen squirreled away to volatilize and pump into the atmosphere.

But a couple of scientists who study Mars are trying to burst that hermetically-sealed, oxygen-recirculating, radiation-shielded bubble. If a new analysis is correct, conditions on Mars make it impossible for existing technology to turn it into a garden of Earth-like delights.

“We were able to put together for the first time a reasonably clean inventory of the CO2 on Mars,” says Bruce Jakosky, a planetary scientist at the University of Colorado and co-author, with Northern Arizona University’s Christopher Edwards, of the new paper. “The bulk has been lost to space, a small amount to polar ice and shallow carbon-bearing minerals, and an unknown amount to deep carbonates.” Even adding in bits of CO2 stuck onto rocks—“adsorbed” onto their surfaces—and a little more locked into water-molecule cages called clathrates doesn’t help. “Even if you put it all back into the atmosphere, it doesn’t add up to enough to warm the planet,” Jakosky says.

Atmospheric pressure on the surface of Earth is about 1 bar; you need about that much CO2 on Mars to bring the surface temperature up to freezing; even just 250 millibars would change the climate there significantly. And some time in the past, Mars had that and more—geology and surface morphology strongly hint at the existence of liquid water on the planet’s surface in its distant past, which means it had to be warm enough and pressurized enough to retain that liquid water. If the planet had CO2 in the same proportions of Earth and Venus, Jakosky says, you’d expect the equivalent of 20 bars of the stuff somewhere—mineralized as carbonate, frozen in polar ice, something. “For the past 40 years, the mantra of Mars science has been looking for carbonate deposits that had to exist, because the CO2 had to have gone somewhere,” he says. “Down into the crust, it would be accessible, perhaps. If it went up to the top and got lost out of the atmosphere, it’s gone.”

New radar data has yielded new numbers for CO2 near the polar caps. The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has collected numbers for carbonate distribution. And the Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution (Maven) probe, in orbit since 2014, has been quantifying the gas lost to space. (Jakosky is the principal investigator for that mission.) And the results are ugly, if you’re a would-be terraformer.

Polar caps give you about 15 mbar. Strip-mining the carbonates give you less than 15 mbar; maybe up to 150 mbar if you really squeeze. Adsorbed gas in the regolith? Just 40 mbar even if you process all the dirt on Mars to a depth of 100 meters. “It would be almost impossible to get up above 40 or 50 millibars, and that’s not enough pressure, and not enough of an effect on temperature,” Jakosky says. “You could probably push it up by a factor of two or three, but even that doesn’t get you anywhere near the amount required to produce significant warming.”

Sigh.

Or … well, maybe he’s wrong. Terraforming pioneer Christopher McKay still has hope. “The key question for terraforming is the amount of CO2, N2, and H2O on Mars. Unfortunately there is nothing new here to resolve this question,” McKay emails. Jakosky’s Maven results only show some of Mars’ ex-carbon dioxide leaving, not all of it. So maybe it’s still there, McKay says. “We are still highly uncertain as to the amount of CO2 below the surface. We don’t have good data and we need to drill deeply to get it.”

It’s true that Mars remains full of surprises—as last week’s announcement of a possible sea of briny liquid water under the pole shows. So these newly crunched numbers don’t dampen the spirits of the real Mars jockeys. Robert Zubrin, president of the Mars Society and author of The Case for Mars, says Jakosky’s numbers are “systematically pessimistic.” Zubrin doesn’t need a full bar. Just give him 300 mbar. That’s, like, Mount Everest pressure. “Two hundred millibars means no spacesuits. It means you can create domed enclosures where the pressure on the inside equals the pressure on the outside,” Zubrin says.

Zubrin and McKay also point out that stretching the bounds of the hypothesis just a little paints a much rosier picture for the red planet. Artificial greenhouse gases—maybe chlorofluorocarbons made from the abundant chlorine in the Martian regolith, or something even more exotic and faster-working, a “super greenhouse gas,” could get the job done. If anyone knew how to make them. And release them. And make sure they didn’t destroy what little ozone is there, so that ultraviolet radiation doesn’t join the the killer cosmic radiation bombarding the magnetosphere-less Mars.

(Related: If you believe it’s possible to terraform Mars, you also must believe in human-caused climate change, because it’s the same process. Even if it’s impossible to terraform Mars, it’s clearly possible to areoform the mid-latitudes of Earth. Because people are doing it.)

(Doubly related: Water on Mars makes it slightly more likely that something is alive there already. “Terraforming” a world with indigenous life is the difference between the Genesis effect and the Genesis torpedo. That’s an ethical conversation that’ll have to happen along with the scientific and policy ones.)

Which raises a triply related question: Why? “We’re getting away from the science here, but I would question the rationale for terraforming to begin with,” Jakosky says. “Having a back-up planet in case we screw this one up, or it gets screwed up from external drivers, I think is a poor argument. It’s a lot easier to keep this one pleasant and with a clement climate than it is to change the Mars environment.”

Explore? Sure. Permanent scientific base? Absolutely. But cities? Oceans? Canals? Take a deep breath—because as far as anyone knows, you literally cannot do that anywhere else in the universe.

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