100 People in Oakland Will Get Free Money as Part of a Basic Income Experiment

Starting sometime this summer, a small group of people in Oakland will get free money in what may be the nation’s first basic income experiment.

The money won’t be coming from the government, though. Instead, Silicon Valley’s Y Combinator, a business incubator for tech startups backed by venture capital, will be trying to solve a problem that the tech industry is at least partially responsible for.

As more and more blue collar industries become automated, and artificial intelligence, self-driving cars, and drones threaten to eliminate the need for a human workforce in a wide array of sectors (taxi and truck drivers, news curators, fast food workers, etc), those who think about the future are starting to wonder how those who are out of work are going to survive.

One of the leading solutions? Give people a bunch of free money, a “universal basic income” that will allow everyone to at least live above the poverty line.

"We work with technology companies who are building the types of tools to let people do more with less, so automation is something we’re very aware of and it drives the interest"

“We’re on a trajectory where a lot of jobs are degrading over time in terms of job security, how much jobs are paying, some things along those lines,” Matt Krisiloff, who is heading up Y Combinator’s basic income project, told me. “If you extrapolate that going forward, it’s going to be a problem most likely. Basic income is a possible solution for those problems.”

Krisiloff and Elizabeth Rhodes, a recent University of Michigan Ph.D. grad who will serve as Y Combinator’s research director for the project, told me that the tentative plan is to give about 100 people in Oakland between $1,000 and $2,000 per month for between six months and a year.

The participants will be selected randomly from across the city but will include people across all economic tiers and will not discriminate between employed and unemployed people.

“We’re going to pull a diverse group,” Rhodes told me. “We’ll be stratifying by certain characteristics to make sure we have different income levels and ethnicities, but figuring out how we collect that sample is one of the things we’re going to be working on in the pilot.”

Proponents of basic income say that with our basic needs fulfilled, people can focus on being creative and adding something to society rather than on maintaining jobs that robots can do better than us. The theory has been developed from the Alaska Permanent Fund, which gives everyone in the state a small stipend pulled from oil reserves and “negative income tax” experiments during the 1970s.

“A universal basic income has many undesirable features, starting with its nonnegligible disincentive to work”

“I wouldn’t say it’s our responsibility [to find out if basic income works], and there’s no way we could figure it out alone,” Krisiloff said. “But our type of work drives interest in it. We work with technology companies who are building the types of tools to let people do more with less, so [automation] is something we’re very aware of and it drives the interest.”

It’s not just Silicon Valley, though, basic income is an idea that’s gaining steam all around the world: Next month, Switzerland will vote on whether the company should give every Swiss person roughly $30,000 every year, simply for living in the country. Ontario is considering a similar, smaller measure, as is Finland.

Detractors, meanwhile, say basic income is much too expensive to be taken seriously, would contribute to inflation, and would make people lose their purpose.

“A universal basic income has many undesirable features, starting with its nonnegligible disincentive to work,” economist Eduardo Porter wrote Tuesday in The New York Times. “In this world, though, where work remains an important social, psychological and economic anchor, there are better tools to help than giving every American a monthly check.”

Krisiloff says that Y Combinator’s experiment is being designed to answer many of the questions people like Porter have with basic income. If you give people free money, what will they do with their time? Are there better ways to strengthen the social safety net?

Interestingly, a basic universal income is an idea that has supporters among both conservatives and liberals. By giving it to everyone, it’s inherently “fair,” and you also manage to remove lots of the bureaucracy associated with welfare and other programs that conservatives argue are abused.

In a blog post, Y Combinator says that it plans to work with the Oakland city government on its pilot program, and, if it goes well, the company wants to do a larger, five year research program perhaps in several different cities. Oakland’s city government did not respond to a Motherboard request for comment, and Y Combinator wasn’t ready to say how involved the city would be. Rhodes said that the company will share as much information about how the study is going as it’s being done while still “protecting our participants and the integrity of the study.”

“We’re not sure this is the best solution, but we want to study this because it hasn’t been studied,” Rhodes said. “We aren’t going to be able to answer all the questions, but the point of the study is to see how it might work and then move forward from there.”

100 People in Oakland Will Get Free Money as Part of a Basic Income Experiment

Tune in Now to Watch the Pilots for Five Potential Web Shows on Motherboard

Dearest Motherboarders, I'm excited to welcome you to our first Pilot Week: a week in which we put a bunch of new video series in front of your eyeballs and see what stands out. In TV land, studios always produce one pilot episode of a series before greenlighting the show. We decided to do something similar, except instead of presenting our ideas to network executives, we’re showing them to you. You can watch the whole shebang in the stream above, or wait with bated breath as we roll our pilots out throughout the week.

We're opening up the mindspray spigots because online video is currently going through the same growing pains as editorial did in the slideshow clickbait era of the late aughts. Powered by Facebook's algorithmic nudging, there's a very specific recipe for finding a huge audience on social channels for video: It's the same formula of bite-sized snippets of multimedia—often snatched and remixed from the creator itself—packaged together as simply and grabbingly as possible.

At their best, these videos are informative and easily digested; at their worst, they're misleading, stolen, or simply vacuous. Regardless, you'll be seeing these videos in your feeds for some time to come.

This puts Motherboard in a rather interesting position. We produce the best science and tech documentaries online, and have done so for about seven years now. That won't ever change, because producing immersive, thoughtful stories is why all of us at Motherboard came here in the first place. But the problem with docs is they're expensive and slow to make. This means we don’t produce as much video as we'd like, and more importantly, we're not stress-testing nearly enough of the ideas and formats that we have scribbled away on the proverbial napkin.

With that in mind, Pilot Week is a vehicle for us to test fly video ideas ranging from the clever to the experimental. This go-round we've got five pilots just for you, and we've chopped them up to distribute on as many platforms as we can get our hands on, with the goal being to see what works, what makes us happy, and what you, dear viewer, think of what we've put together. We'll make more of the series that seem to have potential, while we'll toss the others back into the old video crock-pot to simmer a bit more.

Don't worry, we'll come to you: We're putting videos out on every platform we've got, from Instagram to VICE Media's cable network Viceland, so stay tuned! We're looking forward to hearing what you think.

This is our first time doing a Pilot Week, but it won't be the last. We're in the lucky position of being able to produce a truly diverse array of video programming, from short video to online series, longform online documentaries, television, and original scripted sci-fi, and the way to do it all is to make sure we're constantly testing our ideas in the wild. I hope you enjoy what we've got this week, and stay tuned for more.

Tune in Now to Watch the Pilots for Five Potential Web Shows on Motherboard

How Worried Should We Be About the 'Nightmare Bacteria' Making Headlines?

Late last week, news broke that may have put a damper on your long weekend barbecue: A drug-resistant “nightmare bacteria” had been found in the US for the first time.

When a headline has the word “nightmare” in it, it’s natural to be a little, uh, concerned. But how worried do you need to be about the new discovery—and is there anything you can do about it?

First, let’s recap the news. On Thursday, scientists from the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research (WRAIR) published a report in the journal Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy that revealed they had identified the first known US case of a bacterial infection with a particular gene that provides resistance to colistin—a “last resort” antibiotic.

Despite the hair-raising headlines, it’s not that one super bacteria resistant to all antibiotics has arrived in the US and now threatens to infect and kill you. In fact, the E. Coli infection identified was still susceptible to other kinds of antibiotics, and there have been cases in the US of bacteria resistant to colistin in the past. What’s notable this time is that the researchers found bacteria that had mcr-1: a gene discovered in China last year that allows bacteria to be resistant to colistin and is easily passed from one strain of bacteria to another.

“It’s not that this bacteria is highly transmissible,” said Dr. Emil Lesho, director of WRAIR’s Multidrug-resistant Organism Repository and Surveillance Network and co-author of the report. “The concern is that this gene confers resistance to one of the drugs we use as last resort because it’s the last remaining thing available to kill a type of bacteria on the rise: carbapenem-resistant Enterobacteriaceae, or CRE.”

CREs are resistant to a class of antibiotics called carbapenems, and often if you get a CRE infection, the only remaining option for treatment is colistin. That’s why this new finding is so alarming: If CRE bacteria comes into contact with mcr-1 bacteria, they could easily trade off resistance and form a superbug. But don’t freak out just yet.

“We want to make sure people are concerned about the problem of antibiotic resistance in general, but we don’t want to create panic,” Lesho told me over the phone.

In fact, there are a lot of reasons to breathe a sigh of relief. For one, the mcr-1 gene hasn’t been detected in CRE bacteria yet. For another, even if it was, it could still possibly be treated through combining antibiotics or through other “last resort” antibiotics like tigecycline, which is rarely used because it’s very harsh, only available intravenously, and usually causes nausea, vomiting, and diarrhea.

There’s more hope in the fact that the US government is closely monitoring for these kind of bugs (which is how this case was detected), which can help prevent an outbreak from spreading. This, combined with the fact that we don’t use colistin regularly, should help the mcr-1 gene from rapidly spreading. Researchers are also dedicated to finding other, non-antibiotic treatments, from phage therapy to bacteria-specific drugs that can knock out superbugs in other ways.

So should you just shrug it off? Not quite. Antibiotic resistance is a serious issue that, if left unchecked, could plunge us into a medieval time where every scraped knee and paper cut has the potential to turn deadly. Here’s what the paper’s authors said you can do about it: cook your meat thoroughly, wash your hands properly, and finish all of your antibiotics when you need them. I’d also add: consider the track record of the politicians you vote for this fall, as they’re the ones who will get to make systematic changes that will determine how we fight antibiotic resistance going forward.

How Worried Should We Be About the 'Nightmare Bacteria' Making Headlines?

All Your Base Are Belong to 25 Years Of

Screengrab: YouTube

Before Pepe, before Dat Boi, before Doge… there was Zero Wing.

The video game’s poor English translation has fed the internet meme machine for decades with the nonsensical phrase “All your base are belong to us” since “at least” 1998, according to online compendium Know Your Meme. But more importantly, the game was ported from its original arcade format to the Sega Mega Drive on May 31, 1991—exactly 25 years ago today.

Zero Wing may have spawned the first mainstream internet meme, and the first meme ever to be summarily run into the ground by nerds.

A presciently-titled Wired article from 2001—the headline “When Gamer Humor Attacks” is a lot less innocent post-Gamergate—charted the meme’s rise from a flash video to forum mainstay, and its description of the world’s response presaged what happens today when a new meme emerges from the ether of the web to freak out the Olds and the Normals:

“Chat rooms are buzzing with ‘all your base’ mutations and gossip. Web reporters are frantically searching for an explanation, firing off e-mails [sic] to geek gurus, demanding to know what is going on.”

A sign of simpler times? Not really. As precious as the idea of “web reporters” begging internet types to explain the latest meme is, we still do it.

Why are teens tweeting “fuck me daddy” at the Pope? We’d better ask some teens and find out. Why is everyone losing their shit over a CGI frog riding a unicycle? Newsrooms are on the case. Even the human subjects of latter day memes have been subject to heartfelt (or not) “where are they now?”-style write-ups.

When “All your base are belong to us” blew up, internet memes were still a relatively new concept to the mainstream. Now, they’re the waters we swim in, but the sheer quantity of niche memes proliferating across the web on any given day hasn’t done anything to lessen our interest. Hell, explaining them is a vehicle to success on its own.

Perhaps the most prescient quote in the aforementioned Wired article comes from an anonymous internet commenter: "This just goes to show, things don't have to make sense to be funny.”

All your content are belong to us.

All Your Base Are Belong to 25 Years Of

The Famous Tigers of Tinder Have Been Saved from Their Drugged-Up Hell

Dozens of tigers held captive at the infamous “Tiger Temple” in Thailand's Kanchanaburi Province were seized by wildlife authorities on Tuesday over allegations of wildlife trafficking. Approximately 40 tigers were removed in the raid, and officials told Reuters they plan to return for the remaining animals.

“When our vet team arrived, there were tigers roaming around everywhere,” Wildlife Conservation Office (WCO) director Teunjai Noochdumrong told CNN. “Looks like the temple intentionally let these tigers out, trying to obstruct our work.”

Tiger Temple, or Wat Pha Luang Ta Bua Yanasampanno, became a wildly popular destination for tourists wanting hands-on interaction with the temple’s surprisingly docile tigers. For a $273 donation, two people would be allowed to wash, walk, and bottle feed the temple’s resident tiger cubs.

Image: Tigers of Tinder

The Theravada Buddhist temple, which advertises itself as an animal sanctuary, gained internet notoriety in 2014 when a surge in Tinder “tiger selfies” prompted people to question the ethical implications of posing with the big cats for social media.

“Guys think, ‘If I can tame a tiger, then I'm worth dating—and I could tame you,’” Patti Stanger, a professional matchmaker, told the Wall Street Journal.

But wildlife groups have long suspected that Tiger Temple has operated as a front for the illegal wildlife trade.

Earlier this year, an on-site investigation by National Geographic discovered that veterinarians were cutting legally mandated microchips out of the tigers, and that several animals had inexplicably gone missing.

The nonprofit Conservation and Environmental Education for Life also found evidence that Tiger Temple had been illegally transporting tigers to and from its premises since at least 2004. Alleged veterinary records from 1999 and 2000 show that four of the temple’s tigers were captured from the wild, and that one female was imported from a farm in Laos. And a leaked contract signed by the temple’s abbot in 2005 reveals the “sanctuary” was actively involved with Laotian commercial tiger-breeding operations.

Tiger cubs at Tiger Temple. Image: Flickr/Kieran Lamb

In 2007, an Australian wildlife management expert who gained access to Tiger Temple’s private facilities for a research project told National Geographic that she witnessed monks drugging and mistreating tigers, removing young cubs from their mothers, and importing new animals so as to conceal that others had disappeared.

Both visitors and animal advocates have accused Tiger Temple of sedating its tigers so that visitors may approach them without being attacked.

“They [sic] were between 8 and 10 tigers laying around in various states of consciousness… All laying down, whilst workers spray water in their faces to get them to face the cameras,” wrote one visitor of their trip to Tiger Temple.

Visitor and monk at Tiger Temple. Image: Flickr/Kieran Lamb

According to the WCO, a search warrant was issued after Tiger Temple failed to comply with investigations into abusive and dangerous behavior surrounding its tiger programs. Temple officials refused to let authorities inside for nearly half a day. More than 2,000 people are currently involved with the capture and relocation efforts.

In 2010, the global population of wild Indochinese tigers was estimated at just 350 individuals. And while Thailand claims to enforce strict wildlife trafficking laws, the country remains the most active location for the trade of live tigers, according to the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora.

All of the tigers removed from Tiger Temple will be transferred to state-owned sanctuaries, said the deputy director-general of Thailand’s Department of National Parks. Temple officials have continued to deny accusations of illegal activity and animal abuse.

The Famous Tigers of Tinder Have Been Saved from Their Drugged-Up Hell

Car Makers Hedge Against the Future with Ridesharing Investments

Toyota’s recently-announced partnership with Uber will bring an unspecified cash infusion into the ridesharing giant and provide a fleet of Toyota vehicles to Uber drivers through a Toyota leasing program that takes payments out of drivers’ checks.

The move is a reflection of how the broader transportation industry is reacting to the popularity of on-demand, app-based car services.

In the next few months to years, self-driving cars may not be fully deployed, or even partially outside of certain enclaves. But the number of people grabbing an Uber, and indeed eschewing car ownership altogether, may increase.

With that comes a lucrative market for new cars by tapping into a network of more than 162,000 drivers and counting. Those drivers will need cars that fit Uber’s requirements. Toyota can provide those cars, and Uber can supply a way for buyers of those cars to gradually pay for them.

In other words, Uber and its ilk are forcing automakers to hedge against a future where private citizens are less likely to own an individual car than they are to use a car out of a fleet. Fleets are lucrative because car makers can sell in bulk—but at the same time, fleets tend to be more efficient in terms of usage, meaning automakers sell fewer cars. Regardless, it seems clear that car makers must adjust to a future which on-demand rides are a big part of how people get around.

No deployment of this scale has ever taken place

“All the major players are trying to see how they can be a part of it,” Sam Abuelsamid, senior research analyst at Navigant Research and an expert on personal transportation, said. It’s not just Toyota: GM invested $500 million in Lyft, and Volkswagen poured $300 million into Gett, a European competitor.

People are stepping away from owning cars, he said, driven by a move toward dense urban cores.

“At some point, the number of vehicles sold will peak and start to decline,” Abuelsamid said, adding that it all ties into a push towards more electric or hybrid vehicles, more automation, and more technological integration and connectivity.

Toyota gets a good share of this emerging market by teaming up with the biggest player in the industry and investing its capital into the company. There’s still plenty of time before Uber starts producing self-driving cars (or failing that, simply purchasing them). Until then, there will still be Uber contractors ready to take advantage of an easy path to a conveniently leased vehicle.

“In the near-term, there are still drivers that need vehicles,” Abuelsamid said.

Prius as the new Crown Vic?

There’s also a visibility effect at play. Toyota may lease a line of Priuses or Land Cruisers to Uber, but the cascade effect is that other cab companies and individual taxi services may opt out of the standard Ford Crown Victoria and move toward the Prius.

“Car companies often have relationships with the transportation industry,” Saba Waheed, research director for the UCLA Labor Center, said in an email. “For decades, they’ve had agreements with cities to provide uniform vehicles for taxis—think of the iconic NYC Ford Crown and now, many taxis are Toyota Prius. So it’s no surprise that they are moving towards transportation networking companies.”

Damodaran points out that no deployment of this scale has ever taken place. With Toyota in 170 countries and Uber in 71 and counting, there’s a huge global market, rather than a series of small and low-growth agreements like Ford may have struck with individual city’s cab companies.

Easy being green

In talking about the Prius, it’s hard not to mention: It could, in some ways, be an effort of corporate “greening” (apply your own cynicism there), in which Uber will announce the number of hybrid cars this is putting on the road.

Toyota will have six hybrid cars on the market in the next year, notwithstanding three Prius subtypes. This includes RAV4 and Highlander hybrid editions, both of which are compact SUVs. It may not be as big as a Cadillac Escalade, but it could look better on Uber’s corporate green initiatives page.

Abuelsamid downplays a corporate “social responsibility” campaign, re: hybrids, saying, “For Uber, it’s more a matter of getting their drivers into new vehicles,” and that when drivers move people around all day, “paying for fuel can add up pretty quickly.”

“It gives Toyota a market for hybrid vehicles, but also gives drivers the opportunity to get them at very competitive rates,” he said.

Leasing—a new way to get hooks into drivers

Not everyone sees this as a net plus.

“Recruiting drivers through leasing and rental options is antithetical to their initial ‘sharing’ model where drivers use their own vehicles,” Waheed said. “It will likely move drivers into driving for more hours to be able to cover the lease on top all the other costs but without the benefits and workplace protections.”

A story published this week at Bloomberg highlighted the industry that is springing up around Uber drivers who take out car leases and sometimes get trapped in debt.

“We saw this with taxis. Drivers would often work 12-hour shifts to cover their costs, particularly the lease, to make any kind of income,” Waheed said. “Yet, the risk falls completely on the driver.”

Self-driving cars

Toyota and Uber are both going big on self-driving cars. Earlier this year, Toyota announced it will spend $1 billion to develop the technology and hire top Silicon Valley talent. In May, Uber revealed the first photo of its self-driving car on the streets of Pittsburgh, where its Advanced Technologies Center and all the engineers it hired away from Carnegie Mellon University are located.

For Uber, Abuelsamid says, building a relationship with Toyota could eventually mean having access to a manufacturer to develop the driverless car. “Over the long haul,” Abeulsamid said, “it’s unlikely that Uber wants to get into the manufacturing of vehicles.”

“From Toyota’s side,” he said, “they want a part of at least one company deploying the vehicle.”

Despite all the speculation around this deal, the partnership makes a lot of sense in the most obvious way. Uber needs cars, Toyota needs to sell cars.

“For the car companies, it’s more customers,” Waheed said. “Whether it’s a taxi driver, Uber driver or carless driver, it’s cars on the streets for them.”

Car Makers Hedge Against the Future with Ridesharing Investments

This Aboriginal Keyboard App Is Helping Preserve Indigenous Languages

Canada Isn’t Ready for Future Climate Disasters, Watchdog Says

The fires that scorched swaths of Fort McMurray, Alberta, exacerbated by conditions linked to climate change, hinted at what’s in store for Canada in years to come as the effects of climate change continue to worsen, provoking more extreme weather events.

We’re not ready for what’s coming, according to an audit released by the Commissioner of the Environment and Sustainable Development on Tuesday, which examined federal support for mitigating the effects of extreme weather events. The results weren’t great.

Ottawa spent more money recovering from natural disasters in the last six fiscal years than in the previous 39 combined, according to the report. Despite this, “the federal government [has] not done enough to help mitigate the anticipated impacts of severe weather events,” the report concludes.

"Homes and other buildings [...] may not be strong enough to withstand climates in the decades to come"

Particularly unsettling are revelations that the government’s flood hazard assessment guidelines (developers perform hazard assessments to decide where to build) haven’t been updated since 1996—a full 20 years ago—and the National Building Code doesn’t currently account for severe weather brought on by climate change.

“Homes and other buildings built to withstand our current climate may not be strong enough to withstand climates in the decades to come,” the report states. “This could have possible safety repercussions.”

Basically, we’re screwed.

In response to the report’s findings, Environment and Climate Change Canada, Public Safety Canada, and the National Research Council have all agreed to update Canada’s climate data archive, its flood hazard guidelines, and its building codes, respectively.

The effects of climate change are already being felt in Canada. That the Northwest Passage, once nearly impassable due to ice, will see a carnivalesque cruise ship power through its waters later this year is just one darkly humorous, yet dystopian, example.

Less funny is the $40 million earmarked in the 2016 federal budget to “integrate climate resilience into building design guides and codes.”

While some research hubs, like the WindEEE wind testing facility in London, Ontario, are researching the effects of destructive weather on infrastructure, it’s looking like most of Canada has fallen behind in climate preparedness.

That had better change soon if we want to be ready for what’s coming.

Canada Isn’t Ready for Future Climate Disasters, Watchdog Says

A Connected World Through IoT Will Usher in the Future of Tourism and Travel

There’s no arguing that the Internet of Things is improving the quality of urban life. Countless internet-connected objects scattered across cities are enabling us to sense and analyze life patterns like never before, leading to more efficient use of resources–reducing costs, consumption, stress, and congestion.

The benefits of IoT technology are in line with what most tourists and travelers are looking for–mobility, efficiency, and convenience. Most tourists will take their smartphone and other connected devices with them on their travels. This creates an exceptional opportunity for the hospitality and transportation industries to provide them with an enhanced yet authentic experience, made possible through the deployment of IoT-based services that seamlessly connect everything–from travel services, to hotels, and tourist attractions.

Tourism is increasing at record rates, with outbound tourists in countries like China boosting the global economy. Photo: Wikicommons.

This tech is providing a glorious vision for the future of travel–a streamlined affair where tourists can enjoy the pleasures of a trip without the stresses and inconveniences of being in unfamiliar territory. This is a welcome reprieve from the logistical nightmares that countless people encounter as they traipse around the globe.

The IoT-enhanced experience starts at the airport or other transportation hub, where it can help remove much of the rub that comes with flights and traveling. Travelers will use smart, sensor-embedded suitcases to track their belongings and avoid the frustration that comes with misplaced luggage. Sensors installed across airports can provide travelers with directions and tips, and help them find their way to their flight. And for the late passengers, NFC beacons will enable gate agents to locate them and expedite their departure.

During the journey, IoT devices will gather and analyze data from the traveler’s experience in order to improve it. Relevant information and offers will be presented based on whether the tourist is on the way to the airport, halfway through their flight, or have arrived at the destination.

After a tiring flight, travelers will be welcomed at an enhanced hotel. The lodgings have already been booked through a smartphone app. Electronic keys sent to guests’ mobile devices become activated when they cross the hotel’s geo-fence, and smart locks with NFC readers will identify the user’s key and grant access when tapped by the phone.

NFC technology will allow for streamlined user experiences. Photo: Flicker- Sam Churchill

Inside the hotel suite, a host of smart sensors embedded in coffee machines, mirrors, robo-butlers, and light bulbs analyze guest proximity and movement patterns in order to personalize the environmental conditions such as room lighting and temperature. Machine-learning enhanced suites tailor the experience as guests trigger sensors and interact with connected objects and their habits become discernable. Room preferences and guest data are stored in the cloud to be reloaded for returning visitors.

As tourists set out to explore the city and its attractions, IoT technology will streamline the process. Hanging from lamp posts, sitting in parks and gardens, stuck to the roofs of buses, and embedded in the asphalt covering parking lots, IoT sensors are there to help tourists locate and find information about anything and everything they need when looking through the lens of their smartphone cameras. These sensors collect data about tourist habits and reactions to different attractions in order to determine patterns and optimize the experience.

IoT is not only helping tourism agencies improve their customer service and increase their revenue, it is also helping visitors of smart cities discover surprising ways to save money on transportation, attractions, tours, hotels and purchases.

When tourists go shopping, IoT provides brick-and-mortar retailers with the kind of real-time information that online stores always have, enabling them to offer higher value to their customers. Retailers can use a mix of connected devices and customer data to better understand the needs and preferences of customers and tailor promotions and offers for the visiting tourist. NFC and mobile payment gateways remove much of the complexity that is attributed to paying for goods while traveling–from on-the-spot currency conversion to greater security when making purchases.

IoT technologies can make shopping easier and more secure, especially for international travelers. Photo: Flicker- Christine und Hagen Graf

All of this is possible with today’s IoT technology, and the implementation of this tech is becoming more ubiquitous every day. Tomorrow’s possibilities are even more enticing, but the deployment of IoT ecosystems for tourism and travel industries come with their own caveats, especially in the domains of security and privacy, scalability, performance, power consumption, and environmental issues. Not addressing these challenges can eventually backfire and yield unwanted results. Comprehensive IoT technologies and resources such as those found in the Intel® IoT Developer Program can help achieve maximum functionality while minimizing the unwanted tradeoffs.

Security and privacy issues are chief among the difficulties riddling the IoT industry, especially at the consumer level. Tourists and travelers are especially concerned about the security of data being collected by IoT devices while they enjoy the services. Technologies employed in Intel® IoT, such as Secure Boot and the Discrete Trusted Platform Module, can secure sensor network traffic and prevent sensitive user data from being leaked to, or stolen by, malicious users. Guaranteeing the privacy and security of guest information is key to improving customer satisfaction and establishing trust with tourists and travelers.

Also of concern in the IoT transition process is the integration of new and legacy systems, especially in hotels and airports that already have established assets. Intel® Intelligent Gateway Solutions for IoT, tailored to provide connectivity for existing devices, can reduce time and cut costs for integration. As IoT ecosystems continue to expand in airports and hotels, offering more services to tourists and travelers, Intel® IoT Gateways, which are responsible for connecting sensors to cloud servers, can be scaled to continue supporting the increasing number of connected objects in their networks.

Although it is still in its infancy, IoT is already revolutionizing the tourism and travel industries. By taking advantage of IoT solutions, hotel, travel, and tourism companies can realize increased operational efficiency and more personalized guest experiences, which will directly affect revenue generation and customer retention.

What we’re seeing today is only the tip of the iceberg, a prelude to what the future of IoT holds for us. Upcoming innovations will no doubt continue to introduce even more dramatic transformations to the tourism and travel industries and create seemingly endless possibilities and benefits for future travelers. Having secure, reliable and scalable platforms will help companies to incorporate IoT into their current initiatives and also to prepare for a smooth transition to smarter, more efficient systems as the technology continues to evolve and expand.

Learn more about how you can get started with Intel® IoT

If you want samples of how Intel IoT solutions are helping introduce smart services in building and facilities, take a look at Intel’s Smart Buildings Solutions. You can also read this blog post to see practical instances where Intel® IoT technology has been integrated in buildings.

If you are a developer and want to be involved in improving the tourism and travel experience using Intel® IoT Technology, here’s where you can begin:

• Move rapidly from Prototype to Production
• Choose the Right IoT Gateway
• Download the Intel® IoT Developer Kit

A Connected World Through IoT Will Usher in the Future of Tourism and Travel

Are You Ready to Insert Your Own IUD?

When Dr. Evelyn Figueroa became a doctor in 1999, very few women were opting for IUDs, the little T-shaped birth control devices inserted into the uterus to prevent pregnancy.

The University of Illinois family medicine physician placed, she guesses, just eight of them in the span of three years. Now that IUDs are the hot, not-so-new thing—fueled by personal essays and advocates—she inserts about 12 every month, and has worked with thousands of patients who have them. Her Chicago clinic speaks to the national trend: The rate of IUDs has doubled in the last decade.

And that new frontier has its own new frontier: new science might give the average woman more power than ever to insert and remove IUDs.

Just two months ago, a group of public health researchers in India teamed up with Stanford University to pilot test a device that would make inserting an IUD a simpler process. They tested it on postpartum women with health providers who had no former experience inserting IUDs. (This process was closely monitored.) They concluded that no only was it safe, but that the device might even reduce risk of infection compared to normal techniques.

The team's new design is on the bottom. Image: GHSP

This could mean extended access to millions of women who can’t get to licensed gynecologists or family doctors for contraception, or pay for their services.

“If there isn’t access, people are going to make their own access,” said Figueroa, who was not involved with the study.

She said the risks of inserting IUDs are not high. One in 1000 women are at risk for a perforated uterus during the procedure, when it’s done by a trained medical provider. And that risk decreases with experience, so a controlled medical setting is usually the safest.

But in areas where women don’t have access to contraception, Figueroa said IUD placement would still be much safer than an unwanted pregnancy and its consequences.

Meanwhile, women are already removing their IUDs at home without a doctor’s help. There are tutorials on YouTube and multiple threads on parenting forums of women who have removed their own device or had a partner pull it out for them. The reasons they do it vary — from people who think they gained weight, to parents who are ready for a new child.

Dr. Figueroa said her own patients have removed their own IUDs usually by accident, if they’ve become partially dislodged or if they mistook the IUD strings for tampon strings. But she said self-removal is largely safe—and a sign that more women want to be in control of their reproductive health.

“People who are able to have autonomy in their birth control and not have the doctor regulate them is key.”

Are You Ready to Insert Your Own IUD?

Advertisers Might Already Be Using Your Phone’s Hardware to Track You

Your phone is like your best friend. It holds all of your secrets, and there’s a bond of trust—at least, you hope that there is. Advertisers may already be exploiting this trust and turning your phone against you, by using its tiny quirks to track you across the web.

Because people are becoming savvy to advertisers’ bag of tricks, the usual methods of following folks around online just aren’t paying off like they used to. Now and in the future, advertisers may track you with “fingerprinting”—identifying a particular device by, say, tracking its screen dimensions and plugins, alongside lots of other personalized information which is then communicated and collected through a browser before being sent to advertisers.

Recent research has pointed to a method of device fingerprinting that uses the miniscule, unique imperfections in each phone’s accelerometer and gyroscope—basically, its hardware—to create a profile of that phone that can be used to track its user’s activities across the web, without her knowledge. Unlike location data, most sites don’t ask for permission to access a phone’s motion sensors.

But this was mostly theoretical, until now.

"Motion sensor fingerprinting is a realistic threat to mobile users’ privacy"

Many websites already collect this type of information, possibly for advertising purposes, according to new research from investigators at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology.

“We can conclude that motion sensor fingerprinting is a realistic threat to mobile users’ privacy,” the researchers write in a paper published to the ArXiv preprint server. The paper is currently being peer reviewed.

“Smartphone users who use private browsing or clear their cookies to avoid tracking would find that these protection measures are rendered ineffective by fingerprinting, and they can still be tracked,” said Nikita Borisov, one of the study’s authors.

In 2011, the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada released a report dealing with device fingerprinting, which stated that if there is no option for users to opt out of this kind of information-collecting, “then organizations should not be employing that type of technology for online behavioural advertising purposes.”

Borisov and his colleagues found that 1,000 of the top 100,000 sites on the web—that’s just 1 percent, an admittedly a paltry number—collect motion sensor hardware information from mobile devices. These sites may use this data to detect screen orientation or to generate random numbers for encryption, Borisov said, but oftentimes, we have no idea what these sites are doing with it. A few of the scripts, according to the study, were downloaded from advertisers as the site’s pages loaded.

Watch more from Motherboard: All the Ways to Hack Your Phone

Device fingerprinting using motion data today is rare, if it happens at all, Borisov said, but it may still be occurring. The infrastructure is in place, and it looks like fingerprinting is the wave of the future for advertisers.

Some technologists are building protections against fingerprinting into some of their products, in the hopes of coming out ahead. The ad-blocking Brave browser, for example, has some protections built into its desktop browser client. But mobile users are still out of luck.

“I do believe technology companies should take the lead in offering protections by adopting some of our proposed countermeasures in private browsing modes,” Borisov said. These countermeasures include an option for phones to correct for the slight imperfections in motion sensing that might identify a phone—basically, fudging the numbers a teensy bit.

“I am optimistic that these protections will be available to more users in the future,” said Borisov.

In the game of cat and mouse between users and advertisers, digital rabble-rousers can hardly afford to rest on their laurels. Especially, perhaps, since advertisers seem set to use the tiny quirks in our phones to track us, if they aren’t already.

Advertisers Might Already Be Using Your Phone’s Hardware to Track You

Physicists Put Schrödinger's Cat in Two Death-Boxes at Once

Schrödinger's cat is the classic physics analogy. You know how it goes: There's a cat hidden inside a box. The box turns out to be some sort of cruel death-box and features a modification designed to dispense cat-killing poison. Whether or not the poison is dispensed is determined by whether or not a radioactive atom decays, an occurrence with the neat property of being random, or about as random as it gets.

The box is an analogy for a fundamental feature of quantum mechanics, which is quantum superposition. There's not really an in-between half-dead, half-alive state for a cat (or most living things), but that's kind of how it goes in the quantum world. Particles get to hang out in many possible states at once—if a particle could be a dead particle, it might just be a half-dead particle. At least until we look at the particle, thus interfering with it. Then, it has to "choose" a state and things are back to normal, at least the way we think of it.

As described in the current issue of Science, a team of physicists mostly hailing from Yale University has added an interesting and potentially quite useful twist to the normal Schrödinger's cat picture: another cat. Here, the cats are actually two microwave fields inhabiting two different cavities, which you might as well imagine as two boxes full of photons (photons being the carriers of the electromagnetic force, and so microwaves). These boxes are then entangled across a distance, with the result being essentially one Schrödinger's cat in two places.

While the cat-in-a-box is usually considered as an analogy, there is a specific physical thing known as a "cat state." It's basically what's described above—a bunch of photons trapped in a box—but all of the photons are sharing the same state, which is a superposition of two states. It's not as macroscopic as a cat, but it's a bit more so than the usual picture of a single superimposed particle. And unlike the half-dead/half-alive cat, this cat state is a real quantum state, a real example of quantum superposition. Two opposites together as one.

"If you look at both boxes together, you can look at it as one big cat state spread across the boxes—or you can look at it as two boxes, each with a cat state correlated such that their fates are entangled to each other," study co-author Yvonne Gao told me.

The entangled property in this case is maybe not so obvious as the things we usually hear about, like particles being in more than one place at once or spinning in opposite directions. Here, the property we want to know about, what's correlated across both boxes, is called parity.

"The question we're asking these two boxes is, together, do you guys have an even or odd number of photons?," Gao said. "We don't want to know the exact number of photons, or the parity of the individual boxes, but we want to know the parity number of photons across these two boxes."

This is much more than a cool trick. Among the more pressing challenges (or even the most pressing challenge) in quantum computation and quantum information, generally, is increasing the amount of information that can be represented. This means increasing the number of particles in the computing system, which is hard to do because quantum states are very, very fragile things.

The total number of photons dealt with in the two-cat experiment topped out at around 100, but as far as maintaining coherent quantum states goes, that's a couple of big honkin' boxes of photons.

Physicists Put Schrödinger's Cat in Two Death-Boxes at Once

The Coming Genetic Editing Age of Humans Won’t Be Easy to Stomach

Some futurists believe humans will eventually become all ones and zeroes, a result of a total merger with machines and the microprocessor, before this century is out.

Standing in the way of this are older religious humans who overwhelming control governments and legal policy around the world, and they will insist we remain biological mammalian entities for as long as possible.

One could argue, however, that the coming Star Wars-like age of speciation—as widely seen in a rough bar on planet Tatooine—will challenge our mental outlook on the human form far more than machines.

Right now, the body transformations humans undergo seems harmless to most people. Even conservatives shrug at typical modifications: pierced noses, magnets in finger tips, and implants in our forehead to make it appear like some humans have devil-like horns.

In fact, a mostly accepting culture of synthetic parts and body modifications has already partially been built into modern medicine. Dentures don’t scare us. Getting artificial hips when needed are a no-brainer. And even small implants in our hands don’t worry us too much (I have one).

But these are nothing compared to what biohackers want to do in the near future. Some want to grow a third eye on the back of their head—a feat which isn’t as complicated as it sounds and could happen in as little as five to 10 years. Some of this tech is already here. New gene editing technology, such as CRISPR techniques—where scientists cut and edit human DNA to affect human biology—has already produced dogs with larger muscles. Another CRISPR-like technology called TALEN has been used to eliminate cancer from a child.

I’ve even heard male biohackers talk about trying to grow a second penis right above their primary one

In the future, probably not too many people will mind genetic editing that makes us taller, or changes the color of eyes. And even fewer people will disagree with using this type of science to eliminate hereditary disease, such as Alzheimer’s or Diabetes. But what about growing an extra set of blue colored arms like the Hindu lord Krishna? Or what about growing a horse’s lower body so humans can become centaurs? I’ve even heard male biohackers talk about trying to grow a second penis right above their primary one.

Immediately, these ideas make many people cringe. I call this unease speciation syndrome, where witnessing significant physical genetic transformation of human beings causes revulsion and shock. It can also happen to those who undergo the transformation themselves.

Despite initial unease to major bodily modification, I like the idea of having an extra eye on the back of my head—or another set of limbs. Or even a pair of wings. Some of it can be quite functional. However, even an extra eye on the back of one’s head is likely to be shocking and possibly terrifying for most people. Can you imagine the first person that gets one? He or she is likely to become known as the weirdest person in the world.

But what exactly is it that freaks us out? Why is it an issue to have our physicality dramatically altered? To answer that question, let’s first look at speciation syndrome’s cousin concept. In technology circles, it’s known as the Uncanny Valley, where a robot that becomes too humanlike makes us feel unease or even revulsion. In fact, the more humanlike the machine becomes, the worse we generally feel.

The Uncanny Valley concept gives us some insight into the complexities of the human mind and its resistance to change. I surmise with speciation syndrome humanity will also discover its sense of limits to what genetic editing means for future human form—and this discovery will probably ultimately cause revulsion at first. After all, some people have a visceral reaction to unusual appearing humans, something I’ve witnessed firsthand in Cambodia’s Killing Fields, where physically deformed people and limbless war victims openly feature their physical differences in order to make more money begging from tourists.

Transhumanism tech like CRISPR, 3D printing, and coming biological regeneration of limbs will not only change lives for those that have deformities, but it will change how we look at things like a person with a three-foot tail and maybe even a second head.

At the core of all this is the ingrained belief that the human being is pre-formed organism, complete with one head, four limbs, and other standard anatomical parts. But in the transhumanist age, the human being should be looked at more like a machine—like a car, if you will: something that comes out a particular way with certain attributes, but then can be heavily modified. In fact, it can be rebuilt from scratch.

In the future, there may even be walk-in clinics where people can go to have various gene treatments done to affect their bodies. Already, we have IVF centers where people can use radical tech to privately get pregnant—and also control and monitor various stages of a child’s birth. Eventually, if government allows it, gene editing centers will also offer a multitude of designer baby traits, some which also would come via CRISPR. We might even eventually use artificial wombs for the whole process.

Economically, a trillion dollar industry could be created by the burgeoning genetic editing industry—one that greatly benefits human health and science innovation. But of course, first we must get over our fears of modifying the human body and the effects of speciation syndrome.

The best way to get society over that original hump is to focus on and praise CRISPR’s ability to wipe out disease. We might even eventually be able to eliminate aging via coming genetic treatments. However, before we start adding arms and extra eyes to our bodies—something I support and look forward to doing myself someday—I hope scientists will bring about socially acceptable ways to live longer and stop disease with these amazing new techniques. That way speciation syndrome may not be so uncanny afterall.

Zoltan Istvan is a futurist, author of The Transhumanist Wager, and presidentialcandidate for the Transhumanist Party. He writes an occasional column for Motherboard in which he ruminates on the future beyond natural human ability. The Coming Genetic Editing Age of Humans Won’t Be Easy to Stomach

Why Brazil's New President Has Scientists Really Worried

Brazil, as you might know, has a lot going on. The country is battling the Zika virus, preparing for the summer Olympics, and adjusting to interim President Michel Temer, who replaced former President Dilma Rousseff earlier this month after she was charged with illegally manipulating finances.

One group Temer has decidedly not won over is scientists.

While Temer is meant to be an antidote to Rousseff’s alleged corruption, his road to the office was met with thousands of protesters who said he threatened social programs and progressive values. His cabinet is all white and male in a multi-ethnic country, and his new budget plan cracks down on several ministries, including education and women’s rights.

Just a few weeks into his term, Temer also decided to combine the Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation with the Ministry of Communications to make a sort of “superministry.”

“I’ve never seen the universities go through this amount of poverty—you don’t have toilet paper and soap in some labs.”

That move, scientists say, makes their field low on the political priority list. Thirteen scientific associations sent Temer a letter on May 11 warning the merger would set them back, according to science journal, Nature. To make matters even more complicated, Brazil has seen three science ministers in the past year and a half. One of them, Aldo Rebelo, was a climate change skeptic.

These changes come at a time when Brazil’s research community is already struggling to survive years of federal budget cuts to their work. Rousseff’s last 2016 budget had allotted 24 percent less to the ministry of science than the year before.

But São Paulo-based cancer researcher Dr. Jose Emilio Fehr Pereira Lopes said he doesn’t think it’s the interim government’s job to fix the problem. He said science has not been a priority in Brazilian culture, or politics, for years.

“This is not because of Michel Temer’s government,” he said. “I’ve never seen the universities go through this amount of poverty—you don’t have toilet paper and soap in some labs.”

Lopes himself is a victim of Brazil’s science funding gaps. When he was studying at the National Foundation of Ecology in the state of São Paulo, he found a molecule that could help in treating cancer like melanoma. But he couldn’t find any funding in his own country to continue his research.

He found support in the United States. The Dana Farber Cancer Institute and Harvard Medical School invited Lopes to the country and funded his research to develop and test the molecule. Then he worked with a group of investors in New York to create a startup, Nanocare Technologies, to further his findings.

“I am watching a ‘diaspora’ as our largest scientists move to other countries,” he said. “I myself needed to leave my country to obtain credibility and ability to complete a project in science.”

Lopes said that huge oversight is catching up with the country—from Zika to academia. But he said the political turmoil in the country has made people much more aware of who they choose to put in office.

“Brazilians are waking up to the real necessity of see who you’re putting there,” he said.

Meanwhile, the molecule he discovered will belong to the United States.

Why Brazil's New President Has Scientists Really Worried

Danish Authorities Investigate OkCupid Data Dump

Earlier this month, two Danish students dumped data on 70,000 OkCupid users, including sexual preferences, turn-ons, and usernames. Although the information was already available on the dating site, the students faced widespread criticism for collecting and publishing highly sensitive information en masse without anonymising it, which meant that individuals could potentially be identified.

Now, Datatilsynet—the Danish Data Protection Authority (DPA)—has decided to to investigate the OkCupid incident.

“The Danish DPA has taken up the case on its own initiative,” Signe Vestergård Abildskov, a clerk from Datatilsynet, told Motherboard in an email. Datatilsynet's remit is, naturally, to make sure that data protection laws are followed; in this case, the Act on Processing of Personal Data.

Read More: 70,000 OkCupid Users Just Had Their Data Published

Emil O W Kirkegaard, a master's student from Aarhus University, and Julius D Bjerrekær, who studies sports science at Aalborg University and physics at Aarhus, collected the dataset between November 2014 and March 2015 using a scraper—an automated tool that saves certain pages of a webpage.

That scraper targeted basic profile information such as username, age, gender, religious opinions, and location. But it also archived answers to the 2,600 most popular multiple-choice questions on the site, such as whether users like to be tied up during sex, take drugs, or what their romantic preferences were.

The pair then used this data as part of a self-published paper, which looked at, among other things, whether it was possible to work out users' general cognitive ability based on their answers.

An open science site removed the dataset after OkCupid filed a copyright notice, and the dating site said it is exploring legal options, as the students may have broken a US hacking law.

The DPA's investigation is still in its infancy. Abildskov said the DPA had sent a letter to one of the students, which included questions on the collection, storage, and release of the OkCupid data.

“If data about individuals’ purely private matters (sensitive information) is processed in a research or statistics project, the project must be notified to the Danish Data Protection Agency and must obtain the agency’s authorisation,” the Datatilsynet website reads. That includes sexual and religious matters, and “other similar information related to one's private life,” the website continues.

When asked to confirm whether he had received such a letter, Kirkegaard declined to comment. He previously referred to his critics as “social justice warriors.”

Danish Authorities Investigate OkCupid Data Dump

In China, Uber and Competitor Didi Are Still Plagued by Driver Fraud

During his days as a driver for Didi, China’s largest ride-sharing service, Mr. Zhang would often lose money sitting on the highway. He remembers one day driving the length of the city, from north to south, without getting a single booking.

You know how horrible Beijing traffic is from 3 to 8 PM, he tells me. For hours, “my car was just stuck in the middle [of the highway], empty.”

That day, Zhang decided to take matters into his own hands. If business wasn’t coming to him, he would make his own. He took out his phone and started surfing online for an accomplice. In particular, he was looking for someone to help him perform click fraud.

A new form of fraud

Click fraud usually refers to the practice of hiring low-paid laborers to click on profitable internet links. Click fraud might take the form of companies buying fake Facebook “likes,” for instance, generated by overseas click farms that pay workers $15 per 1,000 thumbs-up.

For Uber and Didi, click fraud means something else.

The general idea behind click fraud is simple: Drivers partner up with customers who book fake rides. Then the pair split the driver’s payment, which is boosted by the large bonuses Uber and Didi give to drivers.

It’s a system buoyed by the various incentives both companies have set up to establish business in China’s still relatively-young ride-sharing market—namely, generous driver bonuses and free ride vouchers given to new sign-ups.

China's "sick" drivers

Zhang, who no longer works for Didi, told me that the industry uses the euphemisms “nurse,” “patient,” and “injection” to refer to the components of click fraud. The patient is the driver in need of business, the nurse is the fake customer, and the injection is the fake booking that brings in payment for the driver.

Drivers can request injections to boost profits during a shift. A ‘sick’ driver might request an injection from a nurse, for instance, on his way to pick up an actual customer. By coordinating a ghost ride en route, he can make money during transit and maximize his earnings.

Another lucrative time for injections is during surge hours—“particularly during morning or afternoon rush hours, which are the high-bonus periods,” said Zhang.

Drivers can also trick Uber’s platform into believing that they are serving real customers, when they are in fact sitting at home

Nurses often hoard real vouchers for free rides, which Uber and Didi give out en masse to build their user bases. When a driver asks for an injection, a nurse can redeem a coupon for a pick-up near the driver’s location. This prompts the system to match the booker with the driver.

Mr. Zhang told me that during his click fraud days, he might pay a nurse 20 yuan ($3 USD) for redeeming a 50 yuan ($8 USD) coupon. His nurse would book a route that worked for him, he’d run the car empty for 17 or 18 kilometers, and then he’d split his profit with the nurse once the ride was over—all without ever meeting in person.

This scheme can also be done without the help of coupons, but each party profits less.

Uber the underdog

Uber has been more vulnerable to click fraud than Didi, largely because of its generous driver bonuses in China, which can reach up to three times the fare of a ride.

Didi did not provide me an exact number of how much click fraud the company deals with, but spokesperson Sun Liang acknowledged over the phone that click fraud is a “minor issue” for Didi. In regards to the problem, the company is allocating more resources towards big data and deep learning to improve its anti-fraud detection tools, said Liang.

Uber declined to comment.

Overall, while Uber’s high driver subsidies may work to attract new drivers, they also prime the pump for fraud. People looking to cheat the system have already purchased hundreds of thousands of Uber driver accounts through e-commerce marketplaces such as Taobao, China’s largest consumer-to-consumer retail network.

This black market lets people bypass Uber’s vetting process for drivers. It also allows a single driver to perform click fraud with multiple accounts, using hacked software that can simulate a fake ride with “real-time” location coordinates.

Using this strategy, drivers can also trick Uber’s platform into believing that they are serving real customers, when they are in fact sitting at home. In an extreme case, according to Chinese state media, someone can own no car but still make up to 10,000 yuan ($1,527) per month as an Uber driver.

A search on Taobao for Uber click-farming returns some positive results.

The risks that come with Uber’s driver rewards create a vicious cycle for a company that has struggled to gain a foothold in China since day one. Didi, which launched an app in 2012, claims to own a 87 percent share of China’s private car-hailing market; Uber claims to have 30 to 35 percent. The reality is likely somewhere in between, but Didi is certainly ahead.

Uber is in a somewhat contradictory position here. While it is certainly not ideal to get ripped off by dishonest drivers, the underdog benefits from being able to tout an inflated number of rides per day. After all, high numbers mean popularity, which, in the virtual-capital market equates to investor attention.

A steep daily ride count could help Uber bring in more solid corporate revenue at a time when the company desperately needs it to compete. Recent reports suggest that Uber is burning $1 billion a year to reach only one million rides per day, compared to Didi’s 11 million rides per days. Meanwhile, earlier this month, Apple announced a $1 billion investment in Didi.

New algorithm, new scam?

I asked a trainee working in Didi’s marketing department to talk more specifically about the company’s strategies for dealing with click fraud. He told me that Didi’s operating platform has gradually shifted algorithms.

Whereas the company previously connected drivers and customers based on how geographically close they were, Didi is now migrating to an algorithm that mostly depends on the rating history of the driver. This means top-rated drivers will likely be exposed to more potential riders in a given area than low-rated drivers.

A ratings-oriented algorithm makes click fraud more difficult, because it means that having a nurse book a pick-up right near a patient’s location doesn’t necessarily guarantee that they will be matched.

However, a system based on ratings is still susceptible to its own scamming. Devious customers may use positive ratings as leverage, for instance, to demand discounts from drivers.

The ride-hailing industry in China is situated within a larger technology landscape that has displaced traditional jobs and made it increasingly difficult for people to make a living.

One Chinese Uber driver I spoke to over Wechat, a Chinese messaging app, told me that he had a customer start bargaining with him for a lower fare and coupons in exchange for a full-star review the minute the passenger came into the car.

A rating system could be a real nightmare, Zhang agreed, “especially when you meet some customers that have horrible attitudes.” He recalled once politely asking a customer to move some luggage that was blocking his sight. “Out of nowhere, he just got really angry and threatened to give me a one-star review,” said Zhang.

Struggling to see the future

My conversation with Mr. Zhang ended on a depressing note. After grappling to make ends meet for a year and a half, he just put in notice to quit. He couldn’t see a future driving for Didi anymore. Many Didi drivers are quitting their jobs, he told me, because they are not making enough money.

“It’s hard being a driver nowadays,” Zhang said. “Didi does not have [a] generous driver bonus policy, and for each booking service we provide, we only get 70 percent out of the total fare.”

These low wages feed into the problem itself. The ride-hailing industry in China is situated within a larger technology landscape that has displaced traditional jobs and made it increasingly difficult for people, such as drivers, to make a living. Rather than merely blaming cheating drivers, we might consider how a poor working environment in China victimizes this demographic in the first place.

Overall, the Chinese ride-hailing system seems trapped in a whack-a-mole situation, where fighting one type of corruption has the potential to give rise to another. Click fraud, hacked phones, ratings bargaining—perhaps, in the end, it’s not helpful to take each scam as it comes. Perhaps the better question to ask is whether, so long as drivers can’t make enough money, ride-hailing in China is doomed to be manipulated, one way or another.

Steph Yin contributed writing and editing.

Uber Earth is Motherboard’s exploration of the ways Uber has already changed the world and how it stands to do so in the future. Follow along here.

In China, Uber and Competitor Didi Are Still Plagued by Driver Fraud

This Machine Creates a Relaxing Shower for Violent Tunnel Explosions

A research project by Georgian and American scientists and sponsored by NATO has led to a device that can reduce the awesome, destructive power of tunnel explosions.

Explosions inside confined spaces are central to modern warfare—that is basically the entire theory behind bombs and missiles, after all. But underground explosions can make for some of the deadliest industrial accidents out there. Militaries around the world must also watch munitions stockpiles closely, some of which are buried inside tunnels.

Storing bombs inside a tunnel is typically far safer than doing so above ground. But an explosion in a confined space is far more destructive than in the open air, as shock waves violently reverberate off the hard walls, floors, and ceiling instead of dissipating quickly into the atmosphere. There is simply less space for the pressure to go.

Georgia has direct experience. During the Russian invasion in 2008, a massive explosion near the village of Skra—inside a tunnel complex used to store munitions—violently ejected thousands of shells, ammunition, and bombs into the countryside. The blast created an enormous hazard to civilians and wildlife.

The NATO-financed device works by combining sensors with a pressurized tank filled with dozens of liters of water. Mounted to the roof of a tunnel, the sensors can detect shock waves from an explosion, and automatically triggers a pyrotechnic device and the release of the water within milliseconds.

The above NATO video shows the device in action at an underground testing base in Georgia. The researchers even included a dummy rigged with sensors to study the effects of a blast on the human body.

In other words, think of it like a really intense yet calming shower for an explosion.

The effect is not to stop, but reduce the overpressure of the incoming shock wave—roughly by half—once it makes contact with the water, according to a 2015 research paper by the scientists. (Caveat: The exact numbers depend on the amount of water released and the size of the blast.)

In other words, think of it like a really intense yet calming shower for an explosion.

“We develop all sorts of different technologies in the hope that they will be used both for military and for civilian purposes,” NATO science adviser Michael Switkes said. “Fuel trucks, for example, have exploded inside tunnels causing catastrophic accidents and if those civilian road tunnels were protected by systems like this one, those catastrophic failures could be contained and lives could be saved.”

To be sure, blast suppression systems exist in tunnel networks today. These machines are more common in Europe, Russia and the United States.

But according to the scientists, these existing devices are slower to react—again, it comes down to a matter of milliseconds—requiring them to be placed farther away from a potential source of an explosion. Not every tunnel will have enough room, either, and existing systems often produce less water, which means less dampening of overpressure.

You could also use more than one dampening system in a tunnel. With a long enough tunnel, multiple devices could further degrade the shock wave as it travels down the length of the corridor.

“The presented mist generator can be applied in motorway and railway tunnels, coal mines exposed to the threat of methane explosion, land- or sea-based oil platforms, other petrochemical plants and long superstructures with limited cross-sections that could be [vulnerable to] gas or dust explosions,” the scientists wrote.

Let’s not forget ammunition dumps.

This story originally appeared on War Is Boring.

This Machine Creates a Relaxing Shower for Violent Tunnel Explosions

Why Health Canada’s Move to Sell ‘Irradiated Beef’ Is a Great Idea

Image: U.S. Department of Agriculture/Flickr

It’s barbecue season, and Canadians might soon be flipping burgers that have been bathed in radiation before they hit the grill. Health Canada is preparing to propose regulatory changes that, if they go forward, will allow the sale of “irradiated ground beef,” a spokesperson confirmed to Motherboard.

Those words have a creepy, Cold War vibe, and they definitely don’t sound very appetizing. But zapping foods with radiation is actually one of the best ways we’ve got to kill off E. coli and other dangerous, and potentially deadly, foodborne pathogens. Our food supply is increasingly complex, with links that now stretch around the world—and one outbreak can potentially put thousands of people at risk. In the US, one in six people gets sick from contaminated food and drink every year. Four million Canadians do, too.

There seems to be a growing acceptance that we should be blasting at least some of our food with radiation, so that it's safer to consume.

“The problem with beef is that we make it into hamburgers, and people don’t cook them right,” said food safety expert Keith Warriner, a professor of food science at the University of Guelph, in an interview with Motherboard. “These pathogens are very virulent,” and food safety is all about keeping dangerous pathogens away from consumers. “We assume they’re going to do everything wrong,” he said, and that nobody’s using a meat thermometer to check a hamburger patty’s internal temperature before they take a bite.

Irradiation’s already been practiced for a long time, at least on certain foods. In Canada, wheat, spices, potatoes and onions are already zapped with beams of radiation, which is akin to putting them through an X-ray machine, Warriner said.

NASA astronauts eat beef and other foods that’s been irradiated when they fly, because a bout of food poisoning would be majorly inconvenient (if not worse) aboard the International Space Station. In the US, the Food and Drug Administration has approved all kinds of foods for the process, from beef, pork, and poultry to lettuce and spices. (US foods that have been irradiated are marked with a green circle containing a tree-like symbol.)

“The millennial generation seems to be more accepting of radiation,” Warriner said. “When [I was] growing up, we associated it with the Cuba crisis, and nuclear bombs.”

People understand the dangers of foodborne illness, maybe better than ever. Canadians can’t forget the 2008 listeriosis outbreak that was linked to a Maple Leaf Foods plant. Twenty-two people died. In the aftermath, food safety experts questioned why Ottawa wasn’t allowing food irradiation. The beef industry has requested it, too.

It looks like these groups might get their wish.

Not everyone is thrilled. Critics of irradiation say that it can produce certain changes in the food—like the production of compounds known as free radicals. Warriner acknowledged that this can happen, but says that it isn’t really of concern. “At the low doses we use for our food, there are no real byproducts formed,” he said. “If you burn toast and eat it, you’ve got more of a risk of [developing] cancer than you would with irradiated food.”

One of the main problems of irradiated foods, he continued, is a “wet dog odour” that sometimes clings to meats after the process. But that’s not really a problem at low doses. (And, no, it doesn’t make food radioactive.)

At the end of the day, just about everyone would probably rather eat a non-irradiated (and non-contaminated) hamburger, instead of the alternative. But if our increasingly sprawling, and interconnected, food system is going to feed all of us—and do it safely—we’ll have to look at techniques like irradiation. This is our future.

Why Health Canada’s Move to Sell ‘Irradiated Beef’ Is a Great Idea

Narcotic Painkillers Prolong Pain in Rats

Neuroscientists from the University of Colorado have found a peculiar and paradoxical effect in rats subject to morphine treatment: They tend to experience pain longer. In rat subjects suffering from what's known as a chronic constriction injury (CCI), even just a few days of morphine administration led to an extension of chronic pain lasting for months after discontinuation. The group's work is published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The CCI is a rat model of chronic neuropathic pain in humans—a broad condition resulting from damage to the central and-or peripheral nervous system. Its symptoms are vast and varied, including but not limited to burning and shocking sensations, abnormal and uncomfortable sensations when touching things, painful reactions to non-painful stimuli, and a general amplification of normal pain. It's very often accompanied by depression and insomnia. You don't really want to know how this is simulated in lab rats, but it's plenty effective.

It's worth emphasizing that neuropathic pain is a very specific variety of pain for the simple reason that it originates within the nervous system itself. And the counterproductivity of opioid painkillers in managing it is not a new idea. Generally, this is known as the "two-hit hypothesis," in which a neuropathic injury triggers overactivity in neural-support cells known as glial cells, which are then triggered again by the introduction of the painkiller.

"Short-term decision to take such opioids can have devastating consequences of making pain worse and longer lasting"

The result is a signalling cascade driven by a protein called interleukin-1beta (IL-1b), with the effect being an increase in the activity of pain-responsive nerve cells sensitivity. In rat models, this increase persisted for months.

"Opioids superimposed on CNS neuroinflammation may have far-ranging consequences beyond pain," the PNAS study suggests. "For example, opioids may also serve as a second hit for glia primed by aging or inflammation/trauma and may lead to cognitive decline in the elderly, postoperative cognitive decline, and impaired recovery of motor function after spinal cord injury. Whether the mechanistic underpinnings revealed in the current series of studies will prove to generalize to such opioid-related phenomena remains to be defined."

The study makes the obvious point that opioids are dangerously overused, and, sure, we could probably avoid some of this if we prescribed them less. "The implications for people taking opioids like morphine, oxycodone and methadone are great, since we show the short-term decision to take such opioids can have devastating consequences of making pain worse and longer lasting," notes Linda Watkins, the CU research group's leader, in a statement. "This is a very ugly side to opioids that had not been recognized before."

But in many cases just not prescribing the drugs winds up being a pretty fake solution. Neuropathic (nerve) pain, in particular, is often only marginally treatable and otherwise miserable and frequently disabling. (Neuropathy is usually found in concert with diabetes or other conditions.)

In cases where narcotic painkillers really are needed, Watkins and her group offer at least some good news. Using a designer drug technology known rather unfortunately as DREADD, they were able to come up with a way of blocking receptors on the inflammatory glial cells.

"These data demonstrate both the critical importance of microglia and that maintenance of chronic pain created by early exposure to opioids can be disrupted, resetting pain to normal," the paper notes.

In any case, we're still talking about rats and the clinical significance for humans remains to be demonstrated. In the meantime, we have plenty of other reasons to be concerned about the "silent epidemic" of opiode painkiller overuse.

Narcotic Painkillers Prolong Pain in Rats

A New Game Compiles the 26 Best User-Made 'Mega Man' Levels

As much as I enjoyed the series when I was a wee lad, I remember Mega Man chiefly for teaching me that memorization as a form of learning often gets too short a shrift. Even now, 27 years after Mega Man 2, I find the timed rhythms remain lodged in my mind and my fingers recall precisely when to jump. That's power.

But there was plenty of fun, too, and that was the idea behind the oh-so-descriptively titled "Make a Good Mega Man Level Contest" organized by fansites Sprites, Inc and Talkhaus. And now the best entries—all 26 of them—have been compiled and released as a single downloadable fangame. It's called, ahem, Make a Good Mega Man Level Contest.

As the title suggests, much of the game looks like what I played in the days when Taylor Swift hadn't even been born. There are a few modern conveniences, though, such as an expanding hub where players can test out their skills against a wall of targets or shop around for upgrades. You also won't be getting 26 different abilities: Mega Man has only eight to choose from, based on the results of an earlier poll.

In practice, making a good Mega Man level doesn't always mean adhering to the traditions of Capcom's series. The winning entry certainly looks like something Capcom might have stuffed into its games in the '80s, but a four-hour livestreamed playthrough by Nathaniel Hoover from earlier this month reveals such wonders as levels where enemies seem more interested in chatting and puzzle physics that cause Mega Man's projectiles to swirl about in circles. Second place even went to a level that plops Mega Man into a stage that looks like it might have come from Super Mario World.

The Make a Good Mega Man Level Contest turned out to be rather popular. Organizer SnoruntPyro tied the download link to his Dropbox account, which currently hits everyone trying to download it with a message that it's generating too much traffic and to try again later. I've been trying all morning to no avail. Mere minutes before I finished writing this, though. I learned that Reddit user Torvusil Man had uploaded it to his Google Drive account, where you can download the 127 MB file.

In this age of rehashed and repurposed '80s properties, this may be about the best you'll get for a classic Mega Man revival.

A New Game Compiles the 26 Best User-Made 'Mega Man' Levels

Why Heart Cancer Isn't a Thing

Seemingly, there is a cancer for everything: brain cancer, liver cancer, breast cancer, pancreatic cancer, bone cancer, blood cancer, skin cancer. Heart cancer? Wait ...

You've almost certainly never heard of it, but heart cancer—known properly as rhabdomyosarcoma—does exist. And by "exists" I just mean that it has occurred at least one time. That is, it doesn't not exist. The Mayo Clinic, for example, estimates that it sees on average a single case of primary heart cancer annually. These extremely, infinitesimally isolated occurrences are almost invariably the result of cancer that has spread from elsewhere in the body. Cancer originating in the lungs may spread to the heart or its protective pericardial sac.

But still, it almost certainly won't.

Cancer and heart disease are the twin deathstyles of our time, but it's almost as if they've negotiated a truce. What is it that makes the heart so uniquely impervious to cancer?

The answer lies in the cardiac myocyte, by far the most abundant heart cell type. Myocytes are, broadly, muscle cells, and this is one thing that makes the heart very different from any other organ—it's just a fist of muscle.

Cardiac myocytes have the property of being "terminally differentiated." The American Cancer Institute explains: "These cells reach a point very early on in a person’s life where they permanently exit the cell cycle and stop dividing. After that, further growth occurs by expansion in cell size, not through cell division. This differs, for instance, from the epithelial cells that line other organs, which, in response to certain stimuli, actively divide and, when necessary, grow in number."

Cancer's whole thing is unregulated cell proliferation. Genetic mutations accumulate in cells over time, and, eventually, this may lead to chaotic, out-of-control cell division. This may in turn lead to the formation of a tumor, which may in turn become malignant and metastasize, spreading to other tissues and other organs. Eventually, cancer may wind up rooted in many places in the body, introducing its reproductive chaos into each one.

But heart cells aren't interested in division in the very first place. Or, rather, after a certain point very early on in human development they completely lose their ability to synthesize DNA and, thus, to create new copies of themselves. Not being able to make copies of their own genetic material means not being able to make copies of any genetic material that may have gone haywire.

The result of this winds up being a cruel catch-22. Cancer is the second-leading cause of death in the United States and falls short of heart disease by only a few tens of thousands of fatalities. Some very large part of what makes heart disease so lethal is what I just described. Heart cells don't reproduce.

The typical heart disease downward spiral starts with a heart attack in which blood is blocked to part of the heart for long enough for that part to die. Instead of replacing that tissue with new heart muscle, all we get is crappy scar tissue. And so the heart has to work harder to make up for less muscle, and soon enough another heart attack happens. More scar tissue. Eventually, the heart is whittled down to a flimsy wad of scar tissue and that's basically the end.

So, what keeps us from getting heart cancer is one of the main mechanisms behind heart disease. Poetry. (By the by, for this reason you will find a great deal of research into tricking heart cells into once again dividing, which is an interesting twist.)

It's worth noting that brain cancer is vastly more common than heart cancer, even though neurons share this same reproductive disinclination. The reason for this is that the brain is really only about half neurons, with the other half consisting of glial cells, which serve various support roles within the brain but don't do any of the information processing. Glial cells very much so continue dividing throughout human development, making them a prime ground zero for cancer. Heart cells, however, are mostly on their own.

Why Heart Cancer Isn't a Thing

This 22-Year-Old Found Four New Planets, Including a ‘Warm Neptune’

Michelle Kunimoto grew up watching the original Star Trek, which is how the University of British Columbia undergrad, who is 22, first got interested in distant planets.

As part of her coursework, she started analyzing data from the Kepler space telescope—and she just discovered four previously unknown exoplanets (planets that orbit stars other than our own sun), including an intriguing “warm Neptune” that, one can imagine, might host a moon that could even support life.

“I was given light curves from Kepler that scientists had already gone through,” Kunimoto, who is originally from Abbotsford, BC, told Motherboard. By looking for evidence of transits in the data—winks in a star’s light that suggest a planet has slipped in front of it—she found signals for planet candidates that had previously been overlooked.

“Two of them are roughly the size of Earth. One is Mercury-sized. And the last one is slightly larger than Neptune,” she said. “The Neptune one is most exciting.”

The sizes of the four new planets, shown to scale beside the planets Mercury, Earth and Neptune in our own Solar System. Image: Michelle Kunimoto, Jaymie Matthews /UBC

Its orbit is 637 days, she said, and it’s in the “habitable zone” of its host star, which means that temperatures there could support liquid water at the surface.

Now, no liquid water could actually pool on an ice giant like Neptune, which is the most distant planet from our sun (that title used to belong to Pluto, until it was demoted from planet status in 2006). But a planet like this could conceivably host a habitable moon, like Pandora in Avatar.

“We don’t think of ice giants like Neptune and Uranus of interest for life,” said Jaymie Matthews, a professor of physics and astronomy at UBC, and Kunimoto’s supervisor. These aren’t small rocky planets, like Earth, where lakes and oceans can form. “Neptune is a massive planet with lots of cold hydrogen, frozen methane, ammonia—not the kind of place you can land on.”

“If Neil Armstrong had tried to set foot on the surface of Neptune,” Matthews continued, “it would have been one giant leap for mankind because he’d sink through the cloud tops and be crushed by the pressure.”

So, there’s probably no life on this warm Neptune that Kunimoto found—at least, no life as we know it. “But in our own solar system,” Matthews said, “Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune all have extensive moon systems. They’re like a miniature solar system.”

Some of those moons have been raised as candidates for hosting life, like Enceladus, an icy moon of Saturn, or Titan, which has liquid methane at the surface and a thick atmosphere.

“We still haven’t detected any moons around exoplanets,” said Matthews, who is an advisor on the Kepler mission. “We will. We’re moving towards that kind of sensitivity.”

Finding planets like this distant “warm Neptune” is a start. Eventually, scientists will be able to scour it for exomoons.

As for Kunimoto, whose research has been submitted to the The Astronomical Journal, she’s hoping to keep studying exoplanets (she’s in her final year at UBC).

To celebrate her work, she got backstage tickets to a centennial celebration at the university on Saturday, where she met a hero. William Shatner was there as the speaker.

This 22-Year-Old Found Four New Planets, Including a ‘Warm Neptune’