A BREAKTHROUGH DECISION. For the first time, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has approved a medication derived from marijuana. It's called Epidiolex. GW Pharmaceuticals developed the drug to treat two rare forms of epilepsy that manifest during childhood, Dravet syndrome and Lennox-Gastaut syndrome. In clinical trials, the medication reduced patient seizures by up to 40 percent.
BETTER FOR PATIENTS. As for patients, keyhole surgeries boast a number of benefits over open surgeries. They reduce a patient's chances of developing a hernia by 50 percent, require fewer post-surgery painkillers, and decrease infection rates. However, because keyhole procedures require a high level of technical expertise, they are often eschewed in favor of open surgeries.
Versius can change that by training surgeons in just a fraction of the time. For example, a surgeon typically needs 60 to 80 hours of practice to learn how to manually tie a surgical knot inside a patient through a keyhole incision. With Versius, a surgeon can learn the procedure in just 30 minutes. This could increase the number of doctors equipped to perform keyhole surgeries, making the procedures themselves more common.
WAITING ON THE RED TAPE. Versius isn't the first or only surgical robot. However, these bots are becoming easier to use and more mobile. Someday, hospital staff could simply wheel Versius in and out of operating rooms as needed — if regulatory bodies decide to approve the surgical bot for clinical use, that is.
TREATING THE UNTREATABLE. Children with Dravet and Lennox-Gastaut syndrome typically experience multiple types of seizures, as well as learning problems and intellectual disabilities that often prevent them from ever living "normal" lives.
There are already six drugs on the market that treat Lennox-Gastaut. But there aren't any approved medications for Dravet syndrome. That means Epidiolox could be patients' only hope at treating their debilitating illness. Even more, doctors could choose to prescribe the medication "off-label" (for conditions not officially approved), expanding the number of patients it could help.
RELIEF, NOT RECREATION. Epidiolex contains cannabidiol (CBD), one of the two main compounds in cannabis. Unlike the other compound, delta-9 tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), CBD doesn't produce a "high," so users of Epidiolex won't get the same buzz from using the medication that a recreational user expects to get from smoking THC-containing marijuana.
Still, before GW Pharmaceuticals can sell Epidiolex, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) needs to recategorize CBD, which means rethinking marijuana, too. Marijuana is currently a Schedule I drug, meaning it doesn't have any medical value; the FDA approval shows the government thinks CBD does have medical value.
According to a STAT report, the FDA expects that DEA will reclassify marijuana within the next 90 days. So we could be just a few months away from seeing a marijuana-derived medication hit the American healthcare market.
AT&T helped the NSA conduct surveillance on both Americans and foreign citizens.
NSA + AT&T = BFF. On Monday, The Intercept published a report detailing AT&T's collaborative relationship with the National Security Agency (NSA) via a program codenamed FAIRVIEW. According to the report, AT&T facilities in eight U.S. cities play a central role in helping the NSA conduct surveillance on both Americans and foreign citizens — even those who are not AT&T customers. The report provides details on each facility, as well as supporting evidence drawn from public records, interviews, and classified NSA documents.
SPYING ON AMERICAN SOIL. According to The Intercept's report, there's a reason these eight particular facilities, located in Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas, Los Angeles, New York City, San Francisco, Seattle, and Washington, D.C., are of interest to the NSA — each is a "backbone" facility in the AT&T network, processing huge quantities of AT&T customer data.
Beyond that, these facilities also process the data of other communication providers through something called "peering." Essentially, when a company such as Sprint finds its own network overloaded, it can pay AT&T for some of its available bandwidth. At one point or another, AT&T routes the Sprint customers' data through one of these eight facilities.
POWERFUL ALLIES. According to the report, AT&T didn't just give the NSA access to the emails, online chats, phone calls, and other data from customers using its network — it actively helped the agency process the data, prioritizing communications from certain nations and ranking data based on its potential intelligence value.
Officials from all the parties involved are remaining pretty tightlipped about the whole thing. The NSA neither confirms nor denies anything involving the AT&T facilities, while AT&T maintains it's just doing whatever the law requires. Still, it makes total sense that the NSA would want to partner with AT&T — after all, who better to facilitate government surveillance efforts than the world's largest telecommunications company?
As a team, it collected 180 years worth of experience during each day of training.
HEADING FOR THE BIG LEAGUES. On Monday, non-profit AI research company OpenAI published a blog post about OpenAI Five, a group of five neural networks designed to work as a team while playing the real-time computer strategy game called Dota 2. According to the post, OpenAI Five can now beat a team of five human amateur players at the game, albeit with specific restrictions placed on gameplay. In August, it will attempt to beat a team of professional Dota 2 players at The International (TI), an annual Dota 2 tournament hosted by the game's developer, Valve Corporation.
TEAM ALGORITHM. In Dota 2, two teams of five players battle to destroy the other team's "Ancient," a structure at the center of their base. Each player controls a different character, known as a "hero." These heroes have their own abilities, strengths, and weaknesses, and a team's ability to cooperate is key to its success. The developers assigned each OpenAI Five algorithm a specific hero, placing restrictions on the characters to account for areas of the game they hadn't integrated.
PRACTICE MAKES PERFECT. OpenAI Five trained first as individual algorithms in one-vs-one matches and then as a team by playing against itself and past versions of itself. As a team, it collected 180 years worth of experience during each day of training, eventually picking up on strategies typically used by professional Dota 2 players. None of the algorithms could communicate with one another — cooperation was simply one of each algorithm's incentives. This cooperation continued when a human player replaced one of the algorithms.
THE HEROES WE NEED. With OpenAI Five, we could be seeing a preview of the future of AI. In Dota 2, each algorithm has to choose between roughly 1,000 potential moves every one-eighth of a second — far more complex than a game like Go, in which an AI has to choose between 250 moves at a time. Algorithms usually don't operate as teams, either, but this Dota 2 project shows they're more than capable of cooperating with each other — and humans, too.
PACK YOUR BAGS. An executive for Blue Origin says the aerospace company will begin selling tickets for suborbital space flights in 2019, according to a report by Space News. Senior Vice President Rob Meyerson delivered the news during a keynote speech at Amazon Web Services Public Sector Summit in Washington, D.C. on Tuesday. The flights will be aboard New Shepard, a rocket Blue Origin first started testing in 2015. Those tests will soon include passengers, according to Meyerson.
START SAVING... PROBABLY? So, that's what we know. What we don't know? Pretty much anything else. Meyerson didn't drop any hints as to what New Shepard tickets will get passengers (An hour in space? A day?). He also didn't say what they'd pay for the privilege, but that might be because he simply doesn't know — back in May, Blue Origin (and Amazon) CEO Jeff Bezos told GeekWire the company was still trying to figure out what to charge for New Shepard tickets.
AHEAD OF THE CROWD. Blue Origin isn't alone in attempting to break into the space tourism market — SpaceX, Orion Span, and Axiom Space are just a few of the other companies vying for a piece of the space tourism pie. It also isn't the first company to announce the sale of tickets — Virgin Galactic began selling tickets back in 2013 at $200,000 a pop (later raised to $250,000); as of May 2017, 650 people had put down deposits. Five years later, though, and those flights haven't yet happened.
As we've seen from Virgin Galactic, selling tickets isn't necessarily an indication that a company is just about ready for take off. Still, if Blue Origin is ready to test New Shepard with passengers aboard, it must be feeling pretty confident about the craft — which means the company might just be the first to launch us into the era of commercial space travel.
It's powerful, agile, and could eventually save lives.
ONE CLUNKY ACRONYM. Roboticists from the University of Tokyo's JSK Lab have created a flying robot they call DRAGON, an acronym for Dual-rotor embedded multilink Robot with the Ability of multi-deGree-of-freedom aerial transformatiON. A recent report by IEEE Spectrum includes a video highlighting the bot's ability to change its shape mid-flight in order to navigate through tight spaces.
DRAGON comprises four modules, each boasting a pair of maneuverable fan thrusters. Battery-powered hinged joints link these modules. An Intel Euclid serves as both the eyes and the brain of DRAGON, letting the flying robot "see" the world around it and autonomously decide what shape it needs to assume to fit through a given area.
ONE IMPRESSIVE ROBOT. Indoor drone navigation comes with a variety of unique challenges, not least of which is the issue of having to fit through tight spaces. As noted in the IEEE Spectrum report, this has left developers with two options: make their drones smaller (in which case, they aren't powerful enough to really do much of anything) or put them in protective cages (which also limits their abilities).
While DRAGON can only remain airborne for about three minutes at present, it's both agile and fairly powerful. The JSK developers have big plans for its next stage of development, too. They want to increase the number of modules to 12 and add grippers on each end of the system, giving it the ability to pick up and move objects.
MAN'S NEW BEST FRIEND. It's not hard to imagine using an advanced version of DRAGON to navigate dangerous indoor environments during rescue missions. It could search for survivors in collapsed buildings, removing rubble if necessary to free them. Ultimately, unlike its fictional counterparts, this DRAGON could save human lives.
"[Enceladus] is the only body besides Earth known to simultaneously satisfy all of the basic requirements for life as we know it.”
THE EXCEPTIONAL ENCELADUS. On Wednesday, scientists from the Southwest Research Institute (SWRI) published a paper in Nature outlining their discovery of complex organic molecules on Enceladus, one of Saturn's 53 moons.
These large, carbon-rich molecules emanate from the ocean beneath the moon's icy surface, escaping as plumes through warm cracks. This emergence of complex organic molecules from a liquid ocean makes Enceladus the only body besides Earth to boast all the basic requirements for life as we know it, said co-author Christopher Glein in a news release.
HELP FROM THE DEPARTED. For their paper, the scientists relied on data from NASA's Cassini spacecraft, which plunged into Saturn's surface in September 2017. During a flyby in 2015, the craft detected hydrogen within the materials emanating from the cracks in Encledaus's surface. Hydrogen sometimes serves as an energy source for microbes living near hydrothermal vents in the Earth's oceans, so the researchers suspect that Encledaus's hydrogen formed due to the moon's own hydrothermal activity.
ANOTHER STEP FORWARD. This isn't the first discovery of organic molecules on Encledaus. However, previous discoveries were of simple molecules with masses below 50 atomic mass units — these newly discovered molecules have masses greater than 200 atomic mass units. Still, a single atom of carbon-12 is 12 atomic mass units, so these "complex" molecules are very tiny.
While this might not be the discovery of extraterrestrial life many are waiting for, these molecules do bring us one step closer to finding it. As Glein noted in the news release, future space missions could provide more in-depth analysis of Encledaus's plumes, perhaps helping scientists figure out exactly how the moon's complex molecules came to be and what sort of biological processes are happening beneath its icy surface.
You could travel from NYC to Tokyo in just two hours.
THERE'S FAST, AND THERE'S HYPERSONIC. On Tuesday, Boeing unveiled its first concept design for a hypersonic passenger jet during the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA) conference in Atlanta. The vehicle could theoretically travel at Mach Five, or five times the speed of sound (6,174 kmh/3,836 mph). At that speed, a flight between New York and Tokyo that currently takes 14 hours would drop to just a couple of hours, according to a Popular Mechanics report.
IT'S (NOT) ALL IN THE DESIGN. So how is Boeing’s design going to be able to reach these speeds? As Boeing’s Senior Technical Fellow of Hypersonics Kevin Bowcutt told Popular Mechanics, the craft uses a specific type of engine known as a ramjet, a staple of many hypersonic vehicle designs. He also explained how the hypersonic jet's sharp front-end design would produce minimal drag while its split tail would help to stabilize and steer the vehicle.
We’ve already built and flown craft that exceed hypersonic speed, like the Boeing X-51 Waverider, so we know that building something like this one is at least possible. The biggest obstacle to hypersonic flight isn’t creating the perfect design, though — it’s making the flights affordable. So far, scaling it up (bigger crafts that can go for longer periods of time) has just been too expensive. As John Plueger, president and CEO of AirLease Corp., told CNBC, “It’s hard for me to see, at least in the next 15-20 years, that it’s going to be so cost competitive that it’s going to compel the airlines to take a stab at it."
LOTS OF PLANS. NO PLANES. Boeing is far from the only company considering a future in which we travel at Mach Five. In June 2017, Lockheed Martin announced plans to begin development on the SR-72, a hypersonic military aircraft, though it doesn't expect the craft to be airborne until 2030. In February, researchers in China successfully tested a scaled-down version of their hypersonic I Plane in an air tunnel, reaching a speed of Mach Seven. That craft could also facilitate military operations, a source told the South China Morning Post — if it ever goes into development.
Boeing's newly unveiled passenger plane could transport soldiers or civilians, according to Popular Mechanics, but both groups have quite the wait ahead of them — the craft likely won't be ready for takeoff for another two or three decades.
ON SECOND THOUGHT... In January, Facebook announced a new policy banning companies from advertising initial coin offerings (ICOs), binary options (investments where the return is either a fixed amount or nothing at all), and cryptocurrencies on the platform. On Tuesday, Facebook reversed that policy; it will now allow "pre-approved advertisers" to promote cryptocurrency products and services on the platform. Companies must fill out an application and provide requested background information to earn Facebook's approval to buy cryptocurrency ads. Ads promoting ICOs and binary options are still banned.
STOPPING SCAMS. Facebook's initial decision to stop selling cryptocurrency ads was an attempt to rein in the many companies it claimed were misleading or deceiving users. And, truly, the crypto world has no shortage of scammers — according to CoinDesk, an official from the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) told audience members during a crypto workshop on Monday that consumers lost an estimated $532 million to crypto scams between January and February of 2018 (the FTC defines scams as "deceptive investment and business opportunities, bait-and-switch schemes, and deceptively marketed mining machines"). By the end of the year, the FTC estimates that figure will soar to $3 billion.
WHAT WE KNOW & WHAT WE DON'T. We don't know if Facebook's revised policy will prevent scammers from taking advantage of the platform's users. Also unclear: how thoroughly Facebook plans to screen advertising applicants.
What is clear is who will immediately benefit from the policy change: Facebook, which is once again free to generate ad revenue from crypto companies. Hard to say what Facebook was earning from those companies prior to January's ban, but Google — the internet's other advertising giant —generated an estimated $25 million in ad revenue from ICOs alone in 2017. Facebook might invest some of its own money into the crypto realm, as well, with rumors swirling that it could decide to buy digital currency exchange CoinBase.
Facebook also has less competition for crypto ad dollars now. In March, Twitter announced its own ban on certain cryptocurrency ads. That same month, Google announced it was updating its own policy to ban ads promoting cryptocurrencies, ICOs, and binary options. Google's update just went into effect this month, so... is that a coincidence? Or smart timing by Facebook?
AI TO THE RESCUE. When a storm is approaching, responders need as much detail as possible. Predictions of the timing, intensity, and range of the storm could make the differences between citizen lives saved and lives lost.
Luckily, AI is here to make those predictions much more accurate.
On Tuesday, The Wall Street Journal published an article highlighting the various ways cities across North America use artificial intelligence (AI) to predict and respond to natural disasters. According to the article, these systems make it easier for emergency response personnel to help the people most in need post-disaster.
POWER TO THE PEOPLE. The WSJ article highlights several systems that can do this. There's IBM's AI-powered Outage Prediction tool, which analyzes a combination of historical weather data and real-time weather measurements to predict power outages. That tool is 70 percent accurate at predicting outages up to 72 hours in advance, and its accuracy increases as the storm approaches
There's also One Concern, which uses AI to let emergency responders know where they are most needed after earthquakes, fires, and other disasters. Scottish researchers developed another system that relies on a combination of AI and crowdsourced data to detect instances of flooding within high-risk urban areas. And there are more AI-powered systems that The WSJ didn't get into.
A WORTHY INVESTMENT. These systems are already helping local and city governments better allocate their resources during disasters, no one is using these tools on a large scale, so people aren't quite sure how well it will work, as noted in a report by researchers from Eastern Kentucky University. Investors, then, might be slow to put money into a large-scale project.
But given the success happening at smaller scales, it could simply be a matter of time before more bigger governments decide AI disaster prediction is worth the upfront cost.
For $10,000, you can start your own company that delivers packages exclusively for Amazon.
WORK FOR YOURSELF (BUT REALLY FOR AMAZON). Amazon is looking for a partner. Well, more accurately, lots of little partners.
On Thursday, Amazon launched its Delivery Service Partner (DSP) program, which will encourage entrepreneurs to start small Amazon delivery companies. Each entrepreneur will oversee 40 to 100 employees who will use 20 to 40 Amazon-branded vans to deliver packages year-round, using Amazon's own logistics systems to facilitate the process. Start-up costs for a DSP business are as low as $10,000, and military veterans can apply to have their start-up costs reimbursed. Amazon claims DSP companies can produce annual profits as high as $300,000.
MO' PACKAGES. MO' PROBLEMS. Right now, UPS, FedEx, and the U.S. Postal Service deliver most of Amazon's packages. But Amazon will need a lot more delivered, and soon. People familiar with the matter told The Wall Street Journal that established delivery companies simply can't keep up with Amazon's projected growth.
This has led the e-retailer to start looking inward for a solution to its delivery problem, first through Amazon Flex, which allows drivers to use their own vehicles to deliver packages — think Uber or Lyft, but with packages instead of people — and now with the DSP program.
WIN/WIN/WIN? On paper, the DPS program seems like it could benefit Amazon, Amazon's customers, and American workers. According to Amazon, the program won't take work away from existing delivery companies ("There’s so much growth here in parcel delivery that there’s more than enough for everybody,” Amazon’s senior vice president of world-wide operations Dave Clark told The WSJ).
It could also improve Amazon's relationship with customers. In 2013, customers who expected to receive Amazon packages in time for Christmas found themselves disappointed when both UPS and FedEx missed delivery deadlines. Amazon ended up offering refunds to customers — a situation it would no doubt like to avoid in the future. The DPS program also has the potential to create "tens of thousands" of jobs. Let's just hope Amazon delivery drivers are treated better than Amazon warehouse workers.
Downtown traffic is here to stay, at least for a little longer.
ZIPADEEDOO-NAH. Like sitting in traffic? Well, when autonomous vehicles become widespread, you might be doing it a lot more.
A new report by the World Economic Forum (WEF) found that the use of autonomous vehicles could decrease average travel time by four percent in a city like Boston. That's for people who live in the areas surrounding the downtown core — AVs would actually worsen travel times by five percent inside the city itself.
WEF's impact study used a complex agent-based simulation of traffic and "vehicle-to-vehicle interaction" in downtown Boston to arrive at these numbers, including data from roughly two million daily passenger vehicle trips.
AUTONOMOUS TRAFFIC JAMS. But despite the optimism about alleviating Boston's overall traffic woes, the traffic simulation assumed a 20 percent drop in "personal-car trips, which become mobility-on-demand trips" — think Uber, and Waymo taxi rides. And that may sound pretty optimistic, but with decreasing car sales and a booming ride-hailing industry, it's not much of a stretch. Yet 40 percent of trips would still rely on personal vehicles, clogging up low-capacity arteries, and the downtown core. As for mass-transit, the simulation assumed the behavior of commuters wouldn't change.
TEAMWORK MAKES THE DREAM WORK. Unclogging city centers is a complex issue with a ton of moving parts. Replacing all personal vehicles with AVs — including pay-to-go robot-taxi rides — wouldn't have a huge impact on the number of passenger vehicles on the road. As the WEF report points out, policy makers would have to step in and make changes to local infrastructure to truly have an effect on traffic. For instance, policy makers could introduce per-mile tolls for single-occupancy vehicles, use on-street parking to free up some much needed space for bike lanes or loading zones, or dedicate entire lanes just for AVs. And they ran the numbers again, and the results are promising: a per-mile toll could improve travel time by as much as 15.5 percent.
JOINING THE AV CLUB. Autonomous vehicles can offer us more than just (small) improvements to our traffic nightmare woes. They can improve fuel efficiency, and overall reductions in emissions. And then there is the simple fact that you won't have to stare at the bumper of the poor guy in front of you when you're stuck in traffic. You can lean back, relax, and have the car do the driving. Who cares if you have to spend five percent more time on the road?
THE FUTURE IS NOW. Lyft, Uber, and Waymo's AVs are already hitting the streets — private and public — as we speak. The robo-taxi revolution is right around the corner, and there's not much anybody can do about it. General Motors has already released a steering-wheel-less car concept, giving us a pretty good look at what the future of the private passenger vehicle could look like.
But autonomous vehicles alone won't make the gridlock go up in a puff of smoke. Careful considerations of road infrastructure, and investments in mass transit are just as much part of that effort. Only then will we be able to look back and think of how many hours we've wasted every week sitting in bumper-to-bumper traffic.
It allows consumers to opt-out if companies sell their data.
PROTECTING CALIFORNIANS. Soon, Californians will have a lot more control over their online data. On Thursday, California Governor Jerry Brown signed into law the California Consumer Privacy Act of 2018, an online privacy law that restricts large tech companies' use of California consumers' data. When the law goes into effect in 2020, it will require tech companies with annual gross revenues more than $25 million to disclose which categories of data they collect on California consumers. They'll also have to disclose any third-parties they let access that information.
Californians will be able to opt-out of having their data sold, and companies will not be able to penalize them— by limiting their use of the service, for example — for choosing to do so. Users under 16 will need to opt-in to having their data sold. The law also grants California’s attorney general the power to fine companies that don't do enough to protect consumers' personal information from cyber attacks.
SETTING A PRECEDENT. In the wake of Facebook's Cambridge Analytica scandal, consumer privacy is getting a lot more attention, even though U.S. legislators have not yet done much to regulate the industry. California's Consumer Privacy Act is largely considered one of the nation's toughest laws on data privacy, if not the toughest law, and it could inspire other states or Congress to take similar action. “I think it’s going to set the standard across the country that legislatures... will look to adopt in their own states,” state Sen. Bob Hertzberg (D) told The Washington Post.
The tech industry is, perhaps unsurprisingly, not all that happy that the law has passed. Robert Callahan, vice president of state government affairs for the Internet Association, a group that represents the interests of Facebook, Google, and other tech companies, claimed in a statement that the law will have "inevitable, negative policy and compliance ramifications" for both California consumers and business.
TOO MUCH COMPROMISE? Still, the tech industry must certainly prefer this law to the far tougher ballot measure that was set to go before voters in November. That measure, drafted by San Francisco real estate developer Alastair Mactaggart, would have given consumers the ability to sue companies for up to $3,000 for each data breach. The law that passed this week limits that figure to $750.
As Mactaggart agreed in advance, he withdrew his measure now that this law his passed. He also said in a statement he was "thrilled" about its passage, calling it "a monumental achievement for consumers."
Still, a law is far easier to amend than a passed ballot measure. That means the version of the California Consumer Privacy Act of 2018 that goes into effect in 2020 might not be the same one signed into law on Thursday. Only time will tell whether the final version benefits consumers or the tech industry.
Amazon snaps up PillPack for a reported $1 billion.
AMAZON HAS ENTERED THE ARENA. On Thursday, Amazon announced it had bought PillPack, an online pharmacy for about $1 billion, a source briefed on the deal told The New York Times. The news caused waves in the $560 billion prescription drug industry; shares of publicly-owned drug companies like Walgreens, Rite-Aid, and CVS dropped by 9.4 percent, 13 percent, and 9.2 percent, respectively.
SMARTER PRESCRIPTIONS. PillPack is pretty unique in the pharmacy industry. First, unlike its competitors, it has no brick-and-mortar stores — the company only delivers medications in the mail. Instead of packaging user medications by the prescription (with a month's worth of one drug in one bottle and another drug in another bottle, for example), PillPack packages medications by the dose.
Say a person has to take three different pills each morning and two each night. A monthly PillPack delivery would include 60 or so tiny packets. Half would contain all three morning medications, and the other half would have the two evening ones. Each packet would include a descriptive label with information on the contained medications.
This service could be tremendously useful for people who take multiple medications. Amazon's takeover could help PillPack scale up (it currently boasts just 1,000 employees). PillPack, meanwhile, is already licensed to deliver medications to all 50 U.S. states, helping Amazon clear the regulatory hurdles that might have complicated its foray into the prescription drug industry.
ALEXA, REFILL MY MEDS. This is the latest of several recent moves that show Amazon is dedicated to making inroads in healthcare. In October 2016, CEO Jeff Bezos said he thought Amazon's virtual assistant Alexa could potentially help healthcare providers. Then, in July 2017, Amazon launched 1492, a secret lab dedicated to healthcare technology.
Just last week, Amazon, Berkshire Hathaway, and JPMorgan Chase announced they'd chosen a CEO for their new healthcare venture. The acquisition of PillPack likely puts us one step closer to the day when we can simply ask Alexa to refill our medications.
The company just landed an order for 10 of its buses.
FROM CHINA, WITH LOVE. On Wednesday, Internet giant Baidu (the Google of China) announced a new partnership. Baidu has agreed to produce 10 of its self-driving Apolong buses for SB Drive, a subsidiary of Japanese conglomerate SoftBank, according to a Bloomberg report. Chinese bus manufacturer King Long will handle the production of the autonomous buses, which could arrive in Japan as soon as early-2019. Company executives made the announcement at Baidu Create 2018, the company's annual AI developer conference in Beijing.
MEET THE APALONG. Each 14-passenger Apolong bus is capable of Level 4 autonomy — that means they're "fully autonomous" but aren't designed to handle every possible driving scenario. The buses operate using Baidu's Apollo autonomous driving system, the basis for Baidu's partnerships with Ford, Honda, and other companies.
As of Wednesday, Baidu has produced 100 of the vehicles. While most of those are slated to carry passengers in China, the partnership with SB Drive confirms that Baidu has ambitions for the Apalong beyond its home nation.
SAFER, CLEANER TRANSPORTATION. This isn't the first time Japan has expressed interest in autonomous public transportation, nor is Baidu the only company creating such vehicles. There are several good reasons for that.
First, public transportation is better for the environment, and it can help cities cope with the issue of transporting ever-growing populations. Second, experts predict autonomous vehicles will be far safer than their human-driven counterparts.
Autonomous buses, then, could be the safest, most environmentally friendly way to move from point A to point B, and Baidu appears ready to help usher in this new era of transportation.
“It is time for America to return to the Moon — this time to stay."
LUNAR UPDATE. A.C. Charania, business development director for Blue Origin, says the private aerospace company plans to complete a lunar landing mission before 2023, which would eventually “enable human lunar return.” That is: send humans back to the Moon.
That's an earlier, and more specific, timeframe than anyone at the company had specified up to this point — last year, the Washington Post reported that its Blue Moon project — which includes plans to colonize the Moon, as well as an Amazon-like Moon delivery service — was slated for the mid-2020s.
This news about Blue Origin's came during the Space Frontier Foundation’s NewSpace conference in Renton, Washington, in late June, according to a GeekWire report.
A LITTLE HELP FROM NASA. Blue Origin first revealed its ambitions for a Moon colony in March 2017. “It is time for America to return to the Moon — this time to stay,” Bezos told The Washington Post. “A permanently inhabited lunar settlement is a difficult and worthy objective. I sense a lot of people are excited about this.”
At the time, Blue Origin was looking to NASA and the U.S. government for assistance in the endeavor. Since then, it's become one of 10 companies chosen to share $10 million in NASA funding for lunar research. That has apparently helped the company to move up the timeframe for when Blue Moon might be accomplished.
“Blue Moon is on our roadmap, and because of our scale, because of what we see from the government, we brought it a little bit forward in time,” Charania said during the NewSpace conference. “I think we are very excited to now implement this long-term commercial solution with NASA partnership.”
A CROWDED SPACE. Blue Origin isn't the only aerospace company eying a return to the Moon. SpaceX has floated plans for future Moon colonization, while NASA, China Manned Space Agency, and Russia's space agency Roscosmos all have manned lunar missions in the works.
With so many organizations in on the effort, it seems like it's only a matter of time before humans take that one small step once again.
The bot can decrease patients' risk of infection and need for painkillers.
MEET VERSIUS. By the end of 2018, surgeons in the United Kingdom could have a new assistant in the operating room: Versius, the world's smallest surgical robot.
Created by CMR Surgical, the bot is essentially three robotic arms attached to a mobile unit about the size of a barstool, according to a recent report by The Guardian. A surgeon controls the bot from a control panel, guiding the arms as they carry out keyhole procedures (surgeries performed through tiny incisions in the body — much less invasive than open surgeries, which require much larger incisions).
BETTER FOR SURGEONS. CMR Surgical is in the process of getting Versius approved by UK regulators so that it can move out of the training room and into the operating room. The company hopes to pass this regulatory hurdle before the end of this year. If approved, the bot could benefit both the surgeons that wield it, and the patients under its tiny knife.
Doctors often find themselves in uncomfortable positions when they perform keyhole surgeries. To get their instruments right where they need to be, they may need to bend their bodies at strange angles, and hold them for extended periods of time. Versius lets them avoid these potentially painful positions by doing the maneuvering for them, while the surgeons can do their work by simply sitting or standing at the bot's console.
Knowing what kind of volcano they're dealing with can help emergency responders deploy resources wisely.
ASH-ANALYZING AI. The shape of a particle of volcanic ash can help volcanologists determine the type of eruption that produced it, which can help response teams know how to react in the aftermath of an eruption. For example, it might let them know how large of an area to evacuate. But in the past, categorizing ash was time-consuming, subjective, and reliant on the availability of highly trained experts.
ASH-ANALYZING AI. The shape of a particle of volcanic ash can help volcanologists determine the type of eruption that produced it, which can help response teams know how to react in the aftermath of an eruption. For example, it might let them know how large of an area to evacuate. But in the past, categorizing ash was time-consuming, subjective, and reliant on the availability of highly trained experts.
Now, scientists from the Earth-Life Science Institute at the Tokyo Institute of Technology have developed an artificial intelligence (AI) program that analyzes volcanic ash particles to determine their shape. The scientists detail their research in a paper published in May in the journal Scientific Reports.
TRAINING THE CNN. The Tokyo team's AI is what's known as a convolutional neural network (CNN), a kind of AI frequently used to analyze images. To train it, the researchers used an automated particle analyzer to generate thousands of two-dimensional images of ash particles.
Then, they manually classified the particles into four base shapes: blocky, vesicular, elongated, or rounded. Some particles were a combination of shapes. Next, they fed their CNN 200 images of particles that fit neatly into each category, using those images to teach it to categorize the particles based on certain parameters (for example, rounded particles should have a high degree of circularity).
PASSING THE TEST. After training, the team tested their CNN using about 40 other images of each type of particle. They found that the system was 92 percent successful in accurately categorizing an image. For images it couldn't categorize, it provided probability ratios (for example, a 90 percent probability that a particle is vesicular and a 10 percent probability that it's blocky).
As is, the system could already prove useful in eruption response efforts, but the researchers hope to upgrade their CNN to analyze additional aspects of volcanic ash, including its color and texture, providing even more valuable insights into the type of eruption behind the ash.
The aircraft would turn a disruptive sonic boom into a subtle sonic thump.
WHAT GOES UP REALLY FAST... On Friday, NASA released a video of an Armstrong Flight Research Center test pilot flying an F/A-18 high into the sky and straight back toward the Earth again at more than the speed of sound (767 miles per hour).
The goal wasn't to test the pilot's stomach, though — the maneuver simulates the sonic "thumps" NASA's supersonic jet, the X-59, would generate when in use and flying parallel to the ground. These tests allow NASA to gather data on the ground about the sound the aircraft makes so that, someday, the X-59 (or something like it) could be allowed to fly.
SUPER FAST. SUPER NOISY. In 1973, the U.S. banned supersonic travel over land. The reason? It was just too loud.
Anytime an aircraft exceeds the speed of sound, it creates what's known as a sonic boom. Like a boat pushing aside water as it travels, a supersonic aircraft quickly pushes aside air molecules. This builds up pressure in the molecules and causes shock waves. These shock waves extend behind the craft in two ever-widening cone shapes, one from its front and one from its rear.
The pressure of the molecules releases at the end of each cone, causing a "boom" sound the entire time. When those ends reach the ground, we hear the trademark "boom-boom" of a supersonic jet.
FROM BOOM-BOOM TO THUMP-THUMP. If commercial airplanes were allowed to fly at supersonic speeds, it could dramatically reduce the time it takes to fly from one place to another. Unwilling to give up this possible future, engineers are taking on the task to make a quieter supersonic jet.
In 2016, NASA awarded Lockheed Martin $20 million to work on a quieter supersonic jet. The aircraft they created, now called the X-59, is able to be super quiet and also supersonic thanks to its design — the shape of the X-59's body affects the shape of the shockwaves. This transforms what would normally sound like two sonic booms into a pair of "thumps" — at least, that's how it would work in theory. In April, NASA gave Lockheed Martin $247.5 million to actually build the X-59, but it isn't expected to deliver the craft until the end of 2021.
For now, NASA will continue testing the quiet sonic booms generated by the F/A-18's daredevil maneuver through a series of flights scheduled for November over Galveston, Texas. During those tests, the agency is planning to have volunteers on the ground let them know what they hear.
The data NASA collects might help to convince the U.S. government to lift its ban on supersonic air travel over land. If the government does lift the ban on supersonic travel over land as a result of NASA’s “quiet” technology, we could see commercial supersonic jets take flight, cutting travel times between destinations without disrupting the people still Earth-bound.
The Digest: A Marijuana-Derived Medication Is Now Approved For Sale in the U.S.
It could be young patients' only shot at relief.
A BREAKTHROUGH DECISION. For the first time, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has approved a medication derived from marijuana. It's called Epidiolex. GW Pharmaceuticals developed the drug to treat two rare forms of epilepsy that manifest during childhood, Dravet syndrome and Lennox-Gastaut syndrome. In clinical trials, the medication reduced patient seizures by up to 40 percent.
#cannabis #legal
BETTER FOR PATIENTS. As for patients, keyhole surgeries boast a number of benefits over open surgeries. They reduce a patient's chances of developing a hernia by 50 percent, require fewer post-surgery painkillers, and decrease infection rates. However, because keyhole procedures require a high level of technical expertise, they are often eschewed in favor of open surgeries.
Versius can change that by training surgeons in just a fraction of the time. For example, a surgeon typically needs 60 to 80 hours of practice to learn how to manually tie a surgical knot inside a patient through a keyhole incision. With Versius, a surgeon can learn the procedure in just 30 minutes. This could increase the number of doctors equipped to perform keyhole surgeries, making the procedures themselves more common.
WAITING ON THE RED TAPE. Versius isn't the first or only surgical robot. However, these bots are becoming easier to use and more mobile. Someday, hospital staff could simply wheel Versius in and out of operating rooms as needed — if regulatory bodies decide to approve the surgical bot for clinical use, that is.
TREATING THE UNTREATABLE. Children with Dravet and Lennox-Gastaut syndrome typically experience multiple types of seizures, as well as learning problems and intellectual disabilities that often prevent them from ever living "normal" lives.
There are already six drugs on the market that treat Lennox-Gastaut. But there aren't any approved medications for Dravet syndrome. That means Epidiolox could be patients' only hope at treating their debilitating illness. Even more, doctors could choose to prescribe the medication "off-label" (for conditions not officially approved), expanding the number of patients it could help.
RELIEF, NOT RECREATION. Epidiolex contains cannabidiol (CBD), one of the two main compounds in cannabis. Unlike the other compound, delta-9 tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), CBD doesn't produce a "high," so users of Epidiolex won't get the same buzz from using the medication that a recreational user expects to get from smoking THC-containing marijuana.
Still, before GW Pharmaceuticals can sell Epidiolex, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) needs to recategorize CBD, which means rethinking marijuana, too. Marijuana is currently a Schedule I drug, meaning it doesn't have any medical value; the FDA approval shows the government thinks CBD does have medical value.
According to a STAT report, the FDA expects that DEA will reclassify marijuana within the next 90 days. So we could be just a few months away from seeing a marijuana-derived medication hit the American healthcare market.
The Digest: New Report Details AT&T’s Role in NSA Spying Initiatives
AT&T helped the NSA conduct surveillance on both Americans and foreign citizens.
NSA + AT&T = BFF. On Monday, The Intercept published a report detailing AT&T's collaborative relationship with the National Security Agency (NSA) via a program codenamed FAIRVIEW. According to the report, AT&T facilities in eight U.S. cities play a central role in helping the NSA conduct surveillance on both Americans and foreign citizens — even those who are not AT&T customers. The report provides details on each facility, as well as supporting evidence drawn from public records, interviews, and classified NSA documents.
#nsa #surveillance #att #technology
SPYING ON AMERICAN SOIL. According to The Intercept's report, there's a reason these eight particular facilities, located in Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas, Los Angeles, New York City, San Francisco, Seattle, and Washington, D.C., are of interest to the NSA — each is a "backbone" facility in the AT&T network, processing huge quantities of AT&T customer data.
Beyond that, these facilities also process the data of other communication providers through something called "peering." Essentially, when a company such as Sprint finds its own network overloaded, it can pay AT&T for some of its available bandwidth. At one point or another, AT&T routes the Sprint customers' data through one of these eight facilities.
POWERFUL ALLIES. According to the report, AT&T didn't just give the NSA access to the emails, online chats, phone calls, and other data from customers using its network — it actively helped the agency process the data, prioritizing communications from certain nations and ranking data based on its potential intelligence value.
Officials from all the parties involved are remaining pretty tightlipped about the whole thing. The NSA neither confirms nor denies anything involving the AT&T facilities, while AT&T maintains it's just doing whatever the law requires. Still, it makes total sense that the NSA would want to partner with AT&T — after all, who better to facilitate government surveillance efforts than the world's largest telecommunications company?
The Digest: Five AI Algorithms Worked Together to Beat Humans at a Strategy Game
As a team, it collected 180 years worth of experience during each day of training.
HEADING FOR THE BIG LEAGUES. On Monday, non-profit AI research company OpenAI published a blog post about OpenAI Five, a group of five neural networks designed to work as a team while playing the real-time computer strategy game called Dota 2. According to the post, OpenAI Five can now beat a team of five human amateur players at the game, albeit with specific restrictions placed on gameplay. In August, it will attempt to beat a team of professional Dota 2 players at The International (TI), an annual Dota 2 tournament hosted by the game's developer, Valve Corporation.
#ai #technology #algorithm #aopenai
TEAM ALGORITHM. In Dota 2, two teams of five players battle to destroy the other team's "Ancient," a structure at the center of their base. Each player controls a different character, known as a "hero." These heroes have their own abilities, strengths, and weaknesses, and a team's ability to cooperate is key to its success. The developers assigned each OpenAI Five algorithm a specific hero, placing restrictions on the characters to account for areas of the game they hadn't integrated.
PRACTICE MAKES PERFECT. OpenAI Five trained first as individual algorithms in one-vs-one matches and then as a team by playing against itself and past versions of itself. As a team, it collected 180 years worth of experience during each day of training, eventually picking up on strategies typically used by professional Dota 2 players. None of the algorithms could communicate with one another — cooperation was simply one of each algorithm's incentives. This cooperation continued when a human player replaced one of the algorithms.
THE HEROES WE NEED. With OpenAI Five, we could be seeing a preview of the future of AI. In Dota 2, each algorithm has to choose between roughly 1,000 potential moves every one-eighth of a second — far more complex than a game like Go, in which an AI has to choose between 250 moves at a time. Algorithms usually don't operate as teams, either, but this Dota 2 project shows they're more than capable of cooperating with each other — and humans, too.
The Digest: Blue Origin’s Spaceflight Tickets Will Go on Sale in 2019
But who knows what they’ll cost.
PACK YOUR BAGS. An executive for Blue Origin says the aerospace company will begin selling tickets for suborbital space flights in 2019, according to a report by Space News. Senior Vice President Rob Meyerson delivered the news during a keynote speech at Amazon Web Services Public Sector Summit in Washington, D.C. on Tuesday. The flights will be aboard New Shepard, a rocket Blue Origin first started testing in 2015. Those tests will soon include passengers, according to Meyerson.
#blueorigin #spaceflight #space
START SAVING... PROBABLY? So, that's what we know. What we don't know? Pretty much anything else. Meyerson didn't drop any hints as to what New Shepard tickets will get passengers (An hour in space? A day?). He also didn't say what they'd pay for the privilege, but that might be because he simply doesn't know — back in May, Blue Origin (and Amazon) CEO Jeff Bezos told GeekWire the company was still trying to figure out what to charge for New Shepard tickets.
AHEAD OF THE CROWD. Blue Origin isn't alone in attempting to break into the space tourism market — SpaceX, Orion Span, and Axiom Space are just a few of the other companies vying for a piece of the space tourism pie. It also isn't the first company to announce the sale of tickets — Virgin Galactic began selling tickets back in 2013 at $200,000 a pop (later raised to $250,000); as of May 2017, 650 people had put down deposits. Five years later, though, and those flights haven't yet happened.
As we've seen from Virgin Galactic, selling tickets isn't necessarily an indication that a company is just about ready for take off. Still, if Blue Origin is ready to test New Shepard with passengers aboard, it must be feeling pretty confident about the craft — which means the company might just be the first to launch us into the era of commercial space travel.
The Digest: This Floating Robot DRAGON Can Change Shape Mid-Flight
It's powerful, agile, and could eventually save lives.
ONE CLUNKY ACRONYM. Roboticists from the University of Tokyo's JSK Lab have created a flying robot they call DRAGON, an acronym for Dual-rotor embedded multilink Robot with the Ability of multi-deGree-of-freedom aerial transformatiON. A recent report by IEEE Spectrum includes a video highlighting the bot's ability to change its shape mid-flight in order to navigate through tight spaces.
#technology #robot
DRAGON comprises four modules, each boasting a pair of maneuverable fan thrusters. Battery-powered hinged joints link these modules. An Intel Euclid serves as both the eyes and the brain of DRAGON, letting the flying robot "see" the world around it and autonomously decide what shape it needs to assume to fit through a given area.
ONE IMPRESSIVE ROBOT. Indoor drone navigation comes with a variety of unique challenges, not least of which is the issue of having to fit through tight spaces. As noted in the IEEE Spectrum report, this has left developers with two options: make their drones smaller (in which case, they aren't powerful enough to really do much of anything) or put them in protective cages (which also limits their abilities).
While DRAGON can only remain airborne for about three minutes at present, it's both agile and fairly powerful. The JSK developers have big plans for its next stage of development, too. They want to increase the number of modules to 12 and add grippers on each end of the system, giving it the ability to pick up and move objects.
MAN'S NEW BEST FRIEND. It's not hard to imagine using an advanced version of DRAGON to navigate dangerous indoor environments during rescue missions. It could search for survivors in collapsed buildings, removing rubble if necessary to free them. Ultimately, unlike its fictional counterparts, this DRAGON could save human lives.
One of Saturn’s Moons Has Everything Needed to Host Life
"[Enceladus] is the only body besides Earth known to simultaneously satisfy all of the basic requirements for life as we know it.”
THE EXCEPTIONAL ENCELADUS. On Wednesday, scientists from the Southwest Research Institute (SWRI) published a paper in Nature outlining their discovery of complex organic molecules on Enceladus, one of Saturn's 53 moons.
These large, carbon-rich molecules emanate from the ocean beneath the moon's icy surface, escaping as plumes through warm cracks. This emergence of complex organic molecules from a liquid ocean makes Enceladus the only body besides Earth to boast all the basic requirements for life as we know it, said co-author Christopher Glein in a news release.
HELP FROM THE DEPARTED. For their paper, the scientists relied on data from NASA's Cassini spacecraft, which plunged into Saturn's surface in September 2017. During a flyby in 2015, the craft detected hydrogen within the materials emanating from the cracks in Encledaus's surface. Hydrogen sometimes serves as an energy source for microbes living near hydrothermal vents in the Earth's oceans, so the researchers suspect that Encledaus's hydrogen formed due to the moon's own hydrothermal activity.
ANOTHER STEP FORWARD. This isn't the first discovery of organic molecules on Encledaus. However, previous discoveries were of simple molecules with masses below 50 atomic mass units — these newly discovered molecules have masses greater than 200 atomic mass units. Still, a single atom of carbon-12 is 12 atomic mass units, so these "complex" molecules are very tiny.
While this might not be the discovery of extraterrestrial life many are waiting for, these molecules do bring us one step closer to finding it. As Glein noted in the news release, future space missions could provide more in-depth analysis of Encledaus's plumes, perhaps helping scientists figure out exactly how the moon's complex molecules came to be and what sort of biological processes are happening beneath its icy surface.
Boeing’s Hypersonic Concept Jet Could Cut Flight Times by 85 Percent
You could travel from NYC to Tokyo in just two hours.
THERE'S FAST, AND THERE'S HYPERSONIC. On Tuesday, Boeing unveiled its first concept design for a hypersonic passenger jet during the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA) conference in Atlanta. The vehicle could theoretically travel at Mach Five, or five times the speed of sound (6,174 kmh/3,836 mph). At that speed, a flight between New York and Tokyo that currently takes 14 hours would drop to just a couple of hours, according to a Popular Mechanics report.
IT'S (NOT) ALL IN THE DESIGN. So how is Boeing’s design going to be able to reach these speeds? As Boeing’s Senior Technical Fellow of Hypersonics Kevin Bowcutt told Popular Mechanics, the craft uses a specific type of engine known as a ramjet, a staple of many hypersonic vehicle designs. He also explained how the hypersonic jet's sharp front-end design would produce minimal drag while its split tail would help to stabilize and steer the vehicle.
We’ve already built and flown craft that exceed hypersonic speed, like the Boeing X-51 Waverider, so we know that building something like this one is at least possible. The biggest obstacle to hypersonic flight isn’t creating the perfect design, though — it’s making the flights affordable. So far, scaling it up (bigger crafts that can go for longer periods of time) has just been too expensive. As John Plueger, president and CEO of AirLease Corp., told CNBC, “It’s hard for me to see, at least in the next 15-20 years, that it’s going to be so cost competitive that it’s going to compel the airlines to take a stab at it."
LOTS OF PLANS. NO PLANES. Boeing is far from the only company considering a future in which we travel at Mach Five. In June 2017, Lockheed Martin announced plans to begin development on the SR-72, a hypersonic military aircraft, though it doesn't expect the craft to be airborne until 2030. In February, researchers in China successfully tested a scaled-down version of their hypersonic I Plane in an air tunnel, reaching a speed of Mach Seven. That craft could also facilitate military operations, a source told the South China Morning Post — if it ever goes into development.
Boeing's newly unveiled passenger plane could transport soldiers or civilians, according to Popular Mechanics, but both groups have quite the wait ahead of them — the craft likely won't be ready for takeoff for another two or three decades.
Facebook Will Once Again Allow Ads Promoting Cryptocurrencies
Facebook changed its mind.
ON SECOND THOUGHT... In January, Facebook announced a new policy banning companies from advertising initial coin offerings (ICOs), binary options (investments where the return is either a fixed amount or nothing at all), and cryptocurrencies on the platform. On Tuesday, Facebook reversed that policy; it will now allow "pre-approved advertisers" to promote cryptocurrency products and services on the platform. Companies must fill out an application and provide requested background information to earn Facebook's approval to buy cryptocurrency ads. Ads promoting ICOs and binary options are still banned.
STOPPING SCAMS. Facebook's initial decision to stop selling cryptocurrency ads was an attempt to rein in the many companies it claimed were misleading or deceiving users. And, truly, the crypto world has no shortage of scammers — according to CoinDesk, an official from the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) told audience members during a crypto workshop on Monday that consumers lost an estimated $532 million to crypto scams between January and February of 2018 (the FTC defines scams as "deceptive investment and business opportunities, bait-and-switch schemes, and deceptively marketed mining machines"). By the end of the year, the FTC estimates that figure will soar to $3 billion.
WHAT WE KNOW & WHAT WE DON'T. We don't know if Facebook's revised policy will prevent scammers from taking advantage of the platform's users. Also unclear: how thoroughly Facebook plans to screen advertising applicants.
What is clear is who will immediately benefit from the policy change: Facebook, which is once again free to generate ad revenue from crypto companies. Hard to say what Facebook was earning from those companies prior to January's ban, but Google — the internet's other advertising giant —generated an estimated $25 million in ad revenue from ICOs alone in 2017. Facebook might invest some of its own money into the crypto realm, as well, with rumors swirling that it could decide to buy digital currency exchange CoinBase.
Facebook also has less competition for crypto ad dollars now. In March, Twitter announced its own ban on certain cryptocurrency ads. That same month, Google announced it was updating its own policy to ban ads promoting cryptocurrencies, ICOs, and binary options. Google's update just went into effect this month, so... is that a coincidence? Or smart timing by Facebook?
With AI, Forecasters Can More Accurately Predict Storms And Save Lives
AI can predict what humans can't see.
AI TO THE RESCUE. When a storm is approaching, responders need as much detail as possible. Predictions of the timing, intensity, and range of the storm could make the differences between citizen lives saved and lives lost.
Luckily, AI is here to make those predictions much more accurate.
#ai #newsonleo #weather #stormpredicting
On Tuesday, The Wall Street Journal published an article highlighting the various ways cities across North America use artificial intelligence (AI) to predict and respond to natural disasters. According to the article, these systems make it easier for emergency response personnel to help the people most in need post-disaster.
POWER TO THE PEOPLE. The WSJ article highlights several systems that can do this. There's IBM's AI-powered Outage Prediction tool, which analyzes a combination of historical weather data and real-time weather measurements to predict power outages. That tool is 70 percent accurate at predicting outages up to 72 hours in advance, and its accuracy increases as the storm approaches
There's also One Concern, which uses AI to let emergency responders know where they are most needed after earthquakes, fires, and other disasters. Scottish researchers developed another system that relies on a combination of AI and crowdsourced data to detect instances of flooding within high-risk urban areas. And there are more AI-powered systems that The WSJ didn't get into.
A WORTHY INVESTMENT. These systems are already helping local and city governments better allocate their resources during disasters, no one is using these tools on a large scale, so people aren't quite sure how well it will work, as noted in a report by researchers from Eastern Kentucky University. Investors, then, might be slow to put money into a large-scale project.
But given the success happening at smaller scales, it could simply be a matter of time before more bigger governments decide AI disaster prediction is worth the upfront cost.
Amazon Needs More Delivery Companies and Wants You to Start Them
For $10,000, you can start your own company that delivers packages exclusively for Amazon.
WORK FOR YOURSELF (BUT REALLY FOR AMAZON). Amazon is looking for a partner. Well, more accurately, lots of little partners.
On Thursday, Amazon launched its Delivery Service Partner (DSP) program, which will encourage entrepreneurs to start small Amazon delivery companies. Each entrepreneur will oversee 40 to 100 employees who will use 20 to 40 Amazon-branded vans to deliver packages year-round, using Amazon's own logistics systems to facilitate the process. Start-up costs for a DSP business are as low as $10,000, and military veterans can apply to have their start-up costs reimbursed. Amazon claims DSP companies can produce annual profits as high as $300,000.
MO' PACKAGES. MO' PROBLEMS. Right now, UPS, FedEx, and the U.S. Postal Service deliver most of Amazon's packages. But Amazon will need a lot more delivered, and soon. People familiar with the matter told The Wall Street Journal that established delivery companies simply can't keep up with Amazon's projected growth.
This has led the e-retailer to start looking inward for a solution to its delivery problem, first through Amazon Flex, which allows drivers to use their own vehicles to deliver packages — think Uber or Lyft, but with packages instead of people — and now with the DSP program.
WIN/WIN/WIN? On paper, the DPS program seems like it could benefit Amazon, Amazon's customers, and American workers. According to Amazon, the program won't take work away from existing delivery companies ("There’s so much growth here in parcel delivery that there’s more than enough for everybody,” Amazon’s senior vice president of world-wide operations Dave Clark told The WSJ).
It could also improve Amazon's relationship with customers. In 2013, customers who expected to receive Amazon packages in time for Christmas found themselves disappointed when both UPS and FedEx missed delivery deadlines. Amazon ended up offering refunds to customers — a situation it would no doubt like to avoid in the future. The DPS program also has the potential to create "tens of thousands" of jobs. Let's just hope Amazon delivery drivers are treated better than Amazon warehouse workers.
It Will Take A Lot More Than Autonomous Vehicles To Unclog City Centers
Downtown traffic is here to stay, at least for a little longer.
ZIPADEEDOO-NAH. Like sitting in traffic? Well, when autonomous vehicles become widespread, you might be doing it a lot more.
A new report by the World Economic Forum (WEF) found that the use of autonomous vehicles could decrease average travel time by four percent in a city like Boston. That's for people who live in the areas surrounding the downtown core — AVs would actually worsen travel times by five percent inside the city itself.
WEF's impact study used a complex agent-based simulation of traffic and "vehicle-to-vehicle interaction" in downtown Boston to arrive at these numbers, including data from roughly two million daily passenger vehicle trips.
AUTONOMOUS TRAFFIC JAMS. But despite the optimism about alleviating Boston's overall traffic woes, the traffic simulation assumed a 20 percent drop in "personal-car trips, which become mobility-on-demand trips" — think Uber, and Waymo taxi rides. And that may sound pretty optimistic, but with decreasing car sales and a booming ride-hailing industry, it's not much of a stretch. Yet 40 percent of trips would still rely on personal vehicles, clogging up low-capacity arteries, and the downtown core. As for mass-transit, the simulation assumed the behavior of commuters wouldn't change.
TEAMWORK MAKES THE DREAM WORK. Unclogging city centers is a complex issue with a ton of moving parts. Replacing all personal vehicles with AVs — including pay-to-go robot-taxi rides — wouldn't have a huge impact on the number of passenger vehicles on the road. As the WEF report points out, policy makers would have to step in and make changes to local infrastructure to truly have an effect on traffic. For instance, policy makers could introduce per-mile tolls for single-occupancy vehicles, use on-street parking to free up some much needed space for bike lanes or loading zones, or dedicate entire lanes just for AVs. And they ran the numbers again, and the results are promising: a per-mile toll could improve travel time by as much as 15.5 percent.
JOINING THE AV CLUB. Autonomous vehicles can offer us more than just (small) improvements to our traffic nightmare woes. They can improve fuel efficiency, and overall reductions in emissions. And then there is the simple fact that you won't have to stare at the bumper of the poor guy in front of you when you're stuck in traffic. You can lean back, relax, and have the car do the driving. Who cares if you have to spend five percent more time on the road?
THE FUTURE IS NOW. Lyft, Uber, and Waymo's AVs are already hitting the streets — private and public — as we speak. The robo-taxi revolution is right around the corner, and there's not much anybody can do about it. General Motors has already released a steering-wheel-less car concept, giving us a pretty good look at what the future of the private passenger vehicle could look like.
But autonomous vehicles alone won't make the gridlock go up in a puff of smoke. Careful considerations of road infrastructure, and investments in mass transit are just as much part of that effort. Only then will we be able to look back and think of how many hours we've wasted every week sitting in bumper-to-bumper traffic.
California Cracks Down on the Companies Harvesting Your Data
It allows consumers to opt-out if companies sell their data.
PROTECTING CALIFORNIANS. Soon, Californians will have a lot more control over their online data. On Thursday, California Governor Jerry Brown signed into law the California Consumer Privacy Act of 2018, an online privacy law that restricts large tech companies' use of California consumers' data. When the law goes into effect in 2020, it will require tech companies with annual gross revenues more than $25 million to disclose which categories of data they collect on California consumers. They'll also have to disclose any third-parties they let access that information.
Californians will be able to opt-out of having their data sold, and companies will not be able to penalize them— by limiting their use of the service, for example — for choosing to do so. Users under 16 will need to opt-in to having their data sold. The law also grants California’s attorney general the power to fine companies that don't do enough to protect consumers' personal information from cyber attacks.
SETTING A PRECEDENT. In the wake of Facebook's Cambridge Analytica scandal, consumer privacy is getting a lot more attention, even though U.S. legislators have not yet done much to regulate the industry. California's Consumer Privacy Act is largely considered one of the nation's toughest laws on data privacy, if not the toughest law, and it could inspire other states or Congress to take similar action. “I think it’s going to set the standard across the country that legislatures... will look to adopt in their own states,” state Sen. Bob Hertzberg (D) told The Washington Post.
The tech industry is, perhaps unsurprisingly, not all that happy that the law has passed. Robert Callahan, vice president of state government affairs for the Internet Association, a group that represents the interests of Facebook, Google, and other tech companies, claimed in a statement that the law will have "inevitable, negative policy and compliance ramifications" for both California consumers and business.
TOO MUCH COMPROMISE? Still, the tech industry must certainly prefer this law to the far tougher ballot measure that was set to go before voters in November. That measure, drafted by San Francisco real estate developer Alastair Mactaggart, would have given consumers the ability to sue companies for up to $3,000 for each data breach. The law that passed this week limits that figure to $750.
As Mactaggart agreed in advance, he withdrew his measure now that this law his passed. He also said in a statement he was "thrilled" about its passage, calling it "a monumental achievement for consumers."
Still, a law is far easier to amend than a passed ballot measure. That means the version of the California Consumer Privacy Act of 2018 that goes into effect in 2020 might not be the same one signed into law on Thursday. Only time will tell whether the final version benefits consumers or the tech industry.
The Digest: Amazon Buys Online Pharmacy, Dives Deeper Into Healthcare Industry
Amazon snaps up PillPack for a reported $1 billion.
AMAZON HAS ENTERED THE ARENA. On Thursday, Amazon announced it had bought PillPack, an online pharmacy for about $1 billion, a source briefed on the deal told The New York Times. The news caused waves in the $560 billion prescription drug industry; shares of publicly-owned drug companies like Walgreens, Rite-Aid, and CVS dropped by 9.4 percent, 13 percent, and 9.2 percent, respectively.
SMARTER PRESCRIPTIONS. PillPack is pretty unique in the pharmacy industry. First, unlike its competitors, it has no brick-and-mortar stores — the company only delivers medications in the mail. Instead of packaging user medications by the prescription (with a month's worth of one drug in one bottle and another drug in another bottle, for example), PillPack packages medications by the dose.
Say a person has to take three different pills each morning and two each night. A monthly PillPack delivery would include 60 or so tiny packets. Half would contain all three morning medications, and the other half would have the two evening ones. Each packet would include a descriptive label with information on the contained medications.
This service could be tremendously useful for people who take multiple medications. Amazon's takeover could help PillPack scale up (it currently boasts just 1,000 employees). PillPack, meanwhile, is already licensed to deliver medications to all 50 U.S. states, helping Amazon clear the regulatory hurdles that might have complicated its foray into the prescription drug industry.
ALEXA, REFILL MY MEDS. This is the latest of several recent moves that show Amazon is dedicated to making inroads in healthcare. In October 2016, CEO Jeff Bezos said he thought Amazon's virtual assistant Alexa could potentially help healthcare providers. Then, in July 2017, Amazon launched 1492, a secret lab dedicated to healthcare technology.
Just last week, Amazon, Berkshire Hathaway, and JPMorgan Chase announced they'd chosen a CEO for their new healthcare venture. The acquisition of PillPack likely puts us one step closer to the day when we can simply ask Alexa to refill our medications.
Baidu’s Autonomous Buses Will Start Transporting Passengers in Japan Next Year
The company just landed an order for 10 of its buses.
FROM CHINA, WITH LOVE. On Wednesday, Internet giant Baidu (the Google of China) announced a new partnership. Baidu has agreed to produce 10 of its self-driving Apolong buses for SB Drive, a subsidiary of Japanese conglomerate SoftBank, according to a Bloomberg report. Chinese bus manufacturer King Long will handle the production of the autonomous buses, which could arrive in Japan as soon as early-2019. Company executives made the announcement at Baidu Create 2018, the company's annual AI developer conference in Beijing.
MEET THE APALONG. Each 14-passenger Apolong bus is capable of Level 4 autonomy — that means they're "fully autonomous" but aren't designed to handle every possible driving scenario. The buses operate using Baidu's Apollo autonomous driving system, the basis for Baidu's partnerships with Ford, Honda, and other companies.
As of Wednesday, Baidu has produced 100 of the vehicles. While most of those are slated to carry passengers in China, the partnership with SB Drive confirms that Baidu has ambitions for the Apalong beyond its home nation.
SAFER, CLEANER TRANSPORTATION. This isn't the first time Japan has expressed interest in autonomous public transportation, nor is Baidu the only company creating such vehicles. There are several good reasons for that.
First, public transportation is better for the environment, and it can help cities cope with the issue of transporting ever-growing populations. Second, experts predict autonomous vehicles will be far safer than their human-driven counterparts.
Autonomous buses, then, could be the safest, most environmentally friendly way to move from point A to point B, and Baidu appears ready to help usher in this new era of transportation.
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Blue Origin Plans to Begin Colonizing the Moon No Later Than 2023
“It is time for America to return to the Moon — this time to stay."
LUNAR UPDATE. A.C. Charania, business development director for Blue Origin, says the private aerospace company plans to complete a lunar landing mission before 2023, which would eventually “enable human lunar return.” That is: send humans back to the Moon.
That's an earlier, and more specific, timeframe than anyone at the company had specified up to this point — last year, the Washington Post reported that its Blue Moon project — which includes plans to colonize the Moon, as well as an Amazon-like Moon delivery service — was slated for the mid-2020s.
This news about Blue Origin's came during the Space Frontier Foundation’s NewSpace conference in Renton, Washington, in late June, according to a GeekWire report.
A LITTLE HELP FROM NASA. Blue Origin first revealed its ambitions for a Moon colony in March 2017. “It is time for America to return to the Moon — this time to stay,” Bezos told The Washington Post. “A permanently inhabited lunar settlement is a difficult and worthy objective. I sense a lot of people are excited about this.”
At the time, Blue Origin was looking to NASA and the U.S. government for assistance in the endeavor. Since then, it's become one of 10 companies chosen to share $10 million in NASA funding for lunar research. That has apparently helped the company to move up the timeframe for when Blue Moon might be accomplished.
“Blue Moon is on our roadmap, and because of our scale, because of what we see from the government, we brought it a little bit forward in time,” Charania said during the NewSpace conference. “I think we are very excited to now implement this long-term commercial solution with NASA partnership.”
A CROWDED SPACE. Blue Origin isn't the only aerospace company eying a return to the Moon. SpaceX has floated plans for future Moon colonization, while NASA, China Manned Space Agency, and Russia's space agency Roscosmos all have manned lunar missions in the works.
With so many organizations in on the effort, it seems like it's only a matter of time before humans take that one small step once again.
The World’s Smallest Surgical Robot Is Almost Ready for the Operating Room
The bot can decrease patients' risk of infection and need for painkillers.
MEET VERSIUS. By the end of 2018, surgeons in the United Kingdom could have a new assistant in the operating room: Versius, the world's smallest surgical robot.
Created by CMR Surgical, the bot is essentially three robotic arms attached to a mobile unit about the size of a barstool, according to a recent report by The Guardian. A surgeon controls the bot from a control panel, guiding the arms as they carry out keyhole procedures (surgeries performed through tiny incisions in the body — much less invasive than open surgeries, which require much larger incisions).
BETTER FOR SURGEONS. CMR Surgical is in the process of getting Versius approved by UK regulators so that it can move out of the training room and into the operating room. The company hopes to pass this regulatory hurdle before the end of this year. If approved, the bot could benefit both the surgeons that wield it, and the patients under its tiny knife.
Doctors often find themselves in uncomfortable positions when they perform keyhole surgeries. To get their instruments right where they need to be, they may need to bend their bodies at strange angles, and hold them for extended periods of time. Versius lets them avoid these potentially painful positions by doing the maneuvering for them, while the surgeons can do their work by simply sitting or standing at the bot's console.
This AI Analyzes Ash to Figure out the Cause of a Volcanic Eruption
Knowing what kind of volcano they're dealing with can help emergency responders deploy resources wisely.
ASH-ANALYZING AI. The shape of a particle of volcanic ash can help volcanologists determine the type of eruption that produced it, which can help response teams know how to react in the aftermath of an eruption. For example, it might let them know how large of an area to evacuate. But in the past, categorizing ash was time-consuming, subjective, and reliant on the availability of highly trained experts.
ASH-ANALYZING AI. The shape of a particle of volcanic ash can help volcanologists determine the type of eruption that produced it, which can help response teams know how to react in the aftermath of an eruption. For example, it might let them know how large of an area to evacuate. But in the past, categorizing ash was time-consuming, subjective, and reliant on the availability of highly trained experts.
Now, scientists from the Earth-Life Science Institute at the Tokyo Institute of Technology have developed an artificial intelligence (AI) program that analyzes volcanic ash particles to determine their shape. The scientists detail their research in a paper published in May in the journal Scientific Reports.
TRAINING THE CNN. The Tokyo team's AI is what's known as a convolutional neural network (CNN), a kind of AI frequently used to analyze images. To train it, the researchers used an automated particle analyzer to generate thousands of two-dimensional images of ash particles.
Then, they manually classified the particles into four base shapes: blocky, vesicular, elongated, or rounded. Some particles were a combination of shapes. Next, they fed their CNN 200 images of particles that fit neatly into each category, using those images to teach it to categorize the particles based on certain parameters (for example, rounded particles should have a high degree of circularity).
PASSING THE TEST. After training, the team tested their CNN using about 40 other images of each type of particle. They found that the system was 92 percent successful in accurately categorizing an image. For images it couldn't categorize, it provided probability ratios (for example, a 90 percent probability that a particle is vesicular and a 10 percent probability that it's blocky).
As is, the system could already prove useful in eruption response efforts, but the researchers hope to upgrade their CNN to analyze additional aspects of volcanic ash, including its color and texture, providing even more valuable insights into the type of eruption behind the ash.
NASA Starts Tests to Prepare For Flight of "Quiet" Supersonic Jet
The aircraft would turn a disruptive sonic boom into a subtle sonic thump.
WHAT GOES UP REALLY FAST... On Friday, NASA released a video of an Armstrong Flight Research Center test pilot flying an F/A-18 high into the sky and straight back toward the Earth again at more than the speed of sound (767 miles per hour).
The goal wasn't to test the pilot's stomach, though — the maneuver simulates the sonic "thumps" NASA's supersonic jet, the X-59, would generate when in use and flying parallel to the ground. These tests allow NASA to gather data on the ground about the sound the aircraft makes so that, someday, the X-59 (or something like it) could be allowed to fly.
SUPER FAST. SUPER NOISY. In 1973, the U.S. banned supersonic travel over land. The reason? It was just too loud.
Anytime an aircraft exceeds the speed of sound, it creates what's known as a sonic boom. Like a boat pushing aside water as it travels, a supersonic aircraft quickly pushes aside air molecules. This builds up pressure in the molecules and causes shock waves. These shock waves extend behind the craft in two ever-widening cone shapes, one from its front and one from its rear.
The pressure of the molecules releases at the end of each cone, causing a "boom" sound the entire time. When those ends reach the ground, we hear the trademark "boom-boom" of a supersonic jet.
FROM BOOM-BOOM TO THUMP-THUMP. If commercial airplanes were allowed to fly at supersonic speeds, it could dramatically reduce the time it takes to fly from one place to another. Unwilling to give up this possible future, engineers are taking on the task to make a quieter supersonic jet.
In 2016, NASA awarded Lockheed Martin $20 million to work on a quieter supersonic jet. The aircraft they created, now called the X-59, is able to be super quiet and also supersonic thanks to its design — the shape of the X-59's body affects the shape of the shockwaves. This transforms what would normally sound like two sonic booms into a pair of "thumps" — at least, that's how it would work in theory. In April, NASA gave Lockheed Martin $247.5 million to actually build the X-59, but it isn't expected to deliver the craft until the end of 2021.
For now, NASA will continue testing the quiet sonic booms generated by the F/A-18's daredevil maneuver through a series of flights scheduled for November over Galveston, Texas. During those tests, the agency is planning to have volunteers on the ground let them know what they hear.
The data NASA collects might help to convince the U.S. government to lift its ban on supersonic air travel over land. If the government does lift the ban on supersonic travel over land as a result of NASA’s “quiet” technology, we could see commercial supersonic jets take flight, cutting travel times between destinations without disrupting the people still Earth-bound.