Chile’s Calbuco Unleashes Dramatic Explosive Eruption

Skip to story The eruption of Chile's Calbuco on April 22, 2015 with Puerto Varas in the foregroundThe eruption of Chile's Calbuco on April 22, 2015 with Puerto Varas in the foreground Julio Del Rio C. (used by permission)

What has been a relatively quiet year volcanically in Chile (beyond Villarrica) came to an abrupt end today when Calbuco produced an impressive explosive eruption that towered over the city of Puerto Montt. Calbuco, in southern Chile, hadn’t erupted since 1972, but the volcano unleashed a towering ash column after very little warning (somewhat similar to Chaiten’s 2008 eruption). The plume may have reached as high as 20 kilometers (65,000 feet – N.B., this height still isn’t confirmed, although the Buenos Aires VAAC has the plume ash reaching ~10 km / 33,000 feet) above sea level and pyroclastic flows enveloped the top of the volcano. With its proximity to Puerto Montt, Calbuco is an especially hazardous volcano, not only because of potential ash fall but also lahars generated from melting snow/ice mixing with the volcanic debris from the eruption itself.

The eruption was caught on video by people living in and around Puerto Montt, so there are some great sequences showing the opening salvo from the eruption as the plume was still rising convectively. As some of the later images show, the plume then spreads out as it reaches neutral buoyancy and spreads in the prevailing winds — a classic Plinian column.

The SERNAGEOMIN (Chilean Geological Survey) and ONEMI (the Chilean Emergency Management Agency) have declared a 20 kilometer exclusion zone around the volcano as the volcano was raised to red alert status. So far, 1500 people living near Calbuco have been evacuated. This eruption was unexpected as the volcano was on green alert status (lowest) until a volcanic tremor swarm began in the mid-afternoon today at the volcano. Within as little as 15 minutes, the eruption commenced. This suggested rapid ascent of magma from its source under the volcano but as the intensity of the eruption appears to have waned as nightfall arrived.

GEOS-13 satellite image of the plume from the April 22, 2015 eruption of CalbucoGEOS-13 satellite image of the plume from the April 22, 2015 eruption of Calbuco NOAA (courtesy of Dan Lindsey)

The eruption was caught by GOES-12 satellite as a bump on the edge of the planet, showing just how impressive this ash plume was. You can also check out a cool GEOS-13 satellite loop that shows the eruption starting, with the warmer cooler indicating a taller (and cooler) top of the plume, along with a great shot of the plume before sunset in Chile from the same satellite (see above).

There is a webcam pointed at Calbuco, so you can try to check out the eruption (if the webcam loads depending on traffic).

More updates as information comes out from this impressive eruption in Chile.

Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. GIF and a Graf: Coulson Knows What’s Up

Picking just one moment to highlight from last night’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. is tough. Maybe it was Cal (Kyle MacLachlan) talking about how the Internet ruined everything? Or perhaps Fitz (Iain De Caestecker) lunging at the recently-reunited-with-S.H.I.E.L.D.-Hydra-operative Ward (Brett Dalton)? Or when Skye (Chloe Bennet) actually saw Ward? Those were all fine, but the real gem was the episode’s final salvo, in which Agent Coulson (Clark Gregg) was confronted by agents Mack (Henry Simmons) and Bobbi (Adrianne Palicki). He’s been a little off-message for a while now, and everyone—including May (Ming-Na Wen) and Simmons (Elizabeth Henstridge)—have been wondering whose side he’s on. Meanwhile, Robert Gonzales (Edward James Olmos) has been leading another faction of S.H.I.E.L.D. So when Coulson raised his hands and said, “Take me to your leader,” to Gonzales’ agents Mack and Bobbi, it was a peace offering—and perhaps a reminder that not too long ago Nick Fury put him in charge. It was also funny on many levels in a way only Marvel universe properties can seem to get away with. Kudos, Coulson.

Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. GIF and a Graf: Coulson Knows What’s Up

Picking just one moment to highlight from last night’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. is tough. Maybe it was Cal (Kyle MacLachlan) talking about how the Internet ruined everything? Or perhaps Fitz (Iain De Caestecker) lunging at the recently-reunited-with-S.H.I.E.L.D.-Hydra-operative Ward (Brett Dalton)? Or when Skye (Chloe Bennet) actually saw Ward? Those were all fine, but the real gem was the episode’s final salvo, in which Agent Coulson (Clark Gregg) was confronted by agents Mack (Henry Simmons) and Bobbi (Adrianne Palicki). He’s been a little off-message for a while now, and everyone—including May (Ming-Na Wen) and Simmons (Elizabeth Henstridge)—have been wondering whose side he’s on. Meanwhile, Robert Gonzales (Edward James Olmos) has been leading another faction of S.H.I.E.L.D. So when Coulson raised his hands and said, “Take me to your leader,” to Gonzales’ agents Mack and Bobbi, it was a peace offering—and perhaps a reminder that not too long ago Nick Fury put him in charge. It was also funny on many levels in a way only Marvel universe properties can seem to get away with. Kudos, Coulson.

House Passes Cybersecurity Bill Despite Privacy Protests

Skip to story The U.S. Capitol building in Washington, DC. The U.S. Capitol building in Washington, DC. Bill Clark/Getty Images

Congress is hellbent on passing a cybersecurity bill that can stop the wave of hacker breaches hitting American corporations. And they’re not letting the protests of a few dozen privacy and civil liberties organizations get in their way.

On Wednesday the House of Representatives voted 307-116 to pass the Protecting Cyber Networks Act, a bill designed to allow more fluid sharing of cybersecurity threat data between corporations and government agencies. That new system for sharing information is designed to act as a real-time immune system against hacker attacks, allowing companies to warn one another via government intermediaries about the tools and techniques of advanced hackers. But privacy critics say it also threatens to open up a new backchannel for surveillance of American citizens, in some cases granting the same companies legal immunity to share their users’ private data with government agencies that include the NSA.

“PCNA would significantly increase the National Security Agency’s (NSA’s) access to personal information, and authorize the federal government to use that information for a myriad of purposes unrelated to cybersecurity,” reads a letter signed earlier this week by 55 civil liberties groups and security experts that includes the American Civil Liberties Union, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Freedom of the Press Foundation, Human Rights Watch and many others.

“The revelations of the past two years concerning the intelligence community’s abuses of surveillance authorities and the scope of its collection and use of individuals’ information demonstrates the potential for government overreach, particularly when statutory language is broad or ambiguous,” the letter continues. “[PCNA] fails to provide strong privacy protections or adequate clarity about what actions can be taken, what information can be shared, and how that information may be used by the government.”

Specifically, PCNA’s data-sharing privileges let companies give data to government agencies—including the NSA—that might otherwise have violated the Electronic Communications Privacy Act or the Wiretap Act, both of which restrict the sharing of users’ private data with the government. And PCNA doesn’t even restrict the use of that shared information to cybersecurity purposes; its text also allows the information to be used for investigating any potential threat of “bodily harm or death,” opening its application to the surveillance of run-of-the-mill violent crimes like robbery and carjacking.

“This is little more than a backdoor for general purpose surveillance.”

Congressman Adam Schiff, who led the advocacy for the bill on the House floor, argued in a statement to reporters that PCNA in fact supports privacy by protecting Americans from future hacker breaches. “We do this while recognizing the huge and growing threat cyber hacking and cyber espionage poses to our privacy, as well as to our financial wellbeing and our jobs,” he writes.

“In the process of drafting this bill, protecting privacy was at the forefront throughout, and we consulted extensively with privacy and civil liberties groups, incorporating their suggestions in many cases. This is a strong bill that protects privacy, and one that I expect will get even better as the process goes forward—we expect to see large bipartisan support on the Floor.”

Here’s a video of Schiff’s statement on the House floor:

PCNA does include some significant privacy safeguards, such as a requirement that companies scrub “unrelated” data of personally identifying information before sending it to the government, and that the government agencies pass it through another filter to delete such data after receiving it.

But those protections still don’t go far enough, says Robyn Greene, policy counsel for the Open Technology Institute. Any information considered a “threat indicator” could still legally be sent to the government—even, for instance, IP address innocent victims of botnets used in distributed denial of service attacks against corporate websites. No further amendments that might have added new privacy restrictions to the bill were considered before the House’s vote Wednesday. “I’m very disappointed that the house has passed an information sharing bill that does so much to threaten Americans’ privacy and civil liberties, and no real effort was made to address the problems the bill still had,” says Greene. “The rules committee has excluded amendments that would have resolved privacy concerns…This is little more than a backdoor for general purpose surveillance.”

In a surprise move yesterday, the White House also publicly backed PCNA and its Senate counterpart, the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act in a statement to press. That’s a reversal of its threat to veto a similar Cybersecurity Information Sharing and Protection Act in 2013 over privacy concerns, a decision that all but killed the earlier attempt at cybersecurity data sharing legislation. Since then, however, a string of high-profile breaches seems to have swayed President Obama’s thinking, from the cybercriminal breaches of Target and health insurer Anthem that spilled millions of users’ data, to the devastating hack of Sony Pictures Entertainment, which the FBI has claimed was perpetrated as an intimidation tactic by the North Korean government to prevent the release of its Kim Jong-un assassination comedy the Interview.

If the White House’s support stands, it now leaves only an upcoming Senate vote sometime later this month on the Senate’s CISA as the deciding factor as to whether it and PCNA are combined to become law.

But privacy advocates haven’t given up on a presidential veto. A new website called StopCyberspying.com launched by the internet freedom group Access, along with the EFF, the ACLU and others, includes a petition to the President to reconsider a veto for PCNA, CISA and any other bill that threatens to widen internet surveillance.

OTI’s Greene says she’s still banking on a change of heart from Obama, too. “We’re hopeful that the administration would veto any bill that doesn’t address these issues,” she says. “To sign a bill that resembles CISA or PCNA would represent the administration doing a complete 180 on its commitment to protect Americans’ privacy.”

Tesla Isn’t an Automaker. It’s a Battery Company

Tesla is admired for building the cars of the future. But it’s not really a car company. It’s a battery company that happens to make electric cars.

At least, that’s the trajectory suggested by the news that Tesla will soon sell mega-batteries for homes and electric utility companies. CEO Elon Musk mentioned the possibility during an earnings call last February, and the plan was reportedly confirmed in an investor letter revealed yesterday. The official announcement is set to come next week.

Selling batteries for homes, businesses, and utilities may seem like a departure for a car company. But for Tesla, it makes perfect sense. An electric car is only as green as the electrical grid that powers it. And if Tesla’s batteries become widespread, they could help utilities take better advantage of inconsistent renewable energy sources like wind and solar. As demand for renewables rises, whether through regulatory mandate or consumer desire, so would utilities’ demand for batteries that could help maintain a consistent flow—a demand Tesla is well-positioned to meet.

In a world with fewer cars, Tesla will need new lines of business, and selling batteries might be just the ticket.

Renewable power can come in fits and stops, depending on whether the wind is blowing and if the sun is shining, but the supply doesn’t always come at the exact same time as demand. Improved batteries could help utility companies store power from renewable power to even-out the spikes and spikes and valleys those sources produce. And, of course, residential homes could store more solar power from their own solar panels to reduce their reliance on the over-taxed grid—a reduction that utilities would also welcome.

Tesla’s move into the electrical utility market isn’t exactly novel says Sam Jaffe, a former industry analyst at Navigant Research and founder of battery technology company Cygnus Energy Storage. There are already dozens of companies offering battery packs for utility companies. But he says Tesla’s move is a validation of the market, and its scale will make it a major player.

“In 10 years the grid will be cleaner, less expensive to maintain, and more reliable,” Jaffe says. “And that will be thanks to energy storage technology.”

Excess Capacity

Tesla’s first expected foray beyond cars also highlights that the company’s battery manufacturing capacity may soon be its strongest asset. Last year Tesla announced its plans to build a 10-million-square-foot battery manufacturing plant christened the Gigafactory. That capacity could easily be put to use building batteries for not just cars and houses, but for electronics such as laptops and cell phones. And that could be just the beginning.

Tesla relies on Panasonic to manufacture its battery cells, which Tesla then assembles into custom battery packs and modules. “As the biggest buyer of batteries from Panasonic, Tesla will be able to command the best rates and offer the best prices,” he says. “It makes sense to play in the utility market, where there will be huge growth in the coming years.”

The goal of the Gigafactory is to make batteries so cheap that electric cars can compete with conventional gasoline powered cars on price. Although it’s possible that Tesla won’t be able to radically reduce the cost of batteries, energy storage technology will still play a vital role in the company’s future. Americans are driving less, and the fleets of self-driving car services that companies like Google and Uber imagine probably won’t help much. In a world with fewer cars, Tesla will need new lines of business, and selling batteries—maybe even to other car companies—might be just the ticket.

Facebook ‘Hello’ Will Get You Talking on the Phone Again

The most neglected aspect of any smartphone tends to be the actual phone. You know, the part where you communicate with another human being using your voice and not a pizza emoji. That’s partly because talking on the phone is invariably an exercise in agonizing cross-talk and stutters, but it’s also because of how we organize our contacts today. In short, we don’t. But you know who does? Facebook.

Today, Facebook introduces Hello, an Android app (iOS doesn’t let apps play with the necessary phone permissions) that takes the service’s unprecedentedly comprehensive access to all of our contact information and crams it into a delightful dialer. That a dialer can be considered delightful in the first place might seem like a stretch; it is, after all, just a bunch of numbers, an entry field for contacts, a star, and a pound sign whose main function is reminding you of how much you despise hashtags. It’s the most utilitarian part of your phone, and it enables your most awkward moments with it.

seewhoscalling copy_greenbg Facebook

And yet! Hello manages to rethink the dialer in subtle ways that make the process of calling someone (or, importantly, some business) exceptionally simple—as long as you and that someone have complementary Facebook privacy settings, or they were already in your phone’s contact list to begin with. Which is to say, if you’re friends with someone and they’ve made their number available, they’re suddenly in your phone, whether they’ve given you their number directly or not. If they haven’t made their number public, you won’t suddenly be able to prank them. You will, though, be given the option to place a VOIP call over Facebook Messenger, and get access to whatever other contact info—like, say, an email address—they’ve made public.

If this all sounds like an LSAT practice exam set-up, that’s only because Facebook’s privacy settings permutations are manifold. In practice, it’s very simple: You can either call a Facebook friend or you can’t. If you can’t, you can just message them, or email them, or better yet leave them alone.

If this also sounds like a reminder to double check your Facebook privacy settings, good! You should. Before you use Hello you should go to your Facebook Page and dig into the Privacy portion of the Settings page. There, you can adjust who can look you up by your phone number, be it Everyone, Friends of Friends, or just Friends. That’s still not quite granular enough for my liking, especially with the kind of access Hello gives. It’s unlikely you want every single friend you’ve picked up in the last decade of social networking or so to know what hemisphere you live in, much less give them a direct conduit to breathing heavily into your ear holes.

But Facebook has put systems in place to help with the unpleasant sides of phone communication as well, that range from subtle to absolute. Incoming calls will show a profile picture of an incoming caller, even if they aren’t in your phone’s contact list, along with whatever FB info they make public, like city and employer. It’ll even tell you if it’s their birthday, so you know to launch into song. Nuisance callers can be perma-blocked with a simple tap, and you can ask Hello to automatically block numbers that other users have blocked in volume, which is to say telephonic spammers.

PressKit-04-Search Facebook

My favorite part, though, in my brief time with Hello, is being able to call up a business of interest directly from the dialer. Feel like carryout pizza? I just start typing Post Office Pies in Hello, and I’m suddenly a single tap away from placing my order. I’m not friends with Post Office Pies on Facebook, nor am I a fan of its page. But it’s near me, and the number is publicly listed on Facebook, so it’s ready and waiting for me.

That doesn’t save me all that much time from searching for the same company in Chrome, finding the right result, tapping the number, being booted to the stock Android dialer, and making the call. But it does save time, and more importantly removes nearly all of the friction from placing the call in the first place. I may still hate the destination of talking on the phone, but at least with Hello I no longer hate the journey.

So far I’m on board with Hello. It only took about a minute to sync nearly 1500 contacts, and the app both looks nicer and promises more functionality than the stock Android dialer. Little touches also make a significant difference; if I search for WIRED in Hello, I’m met with a list all of my contacts who have it listed under their work experience. Similarly, a search for Chicago brings up my friends who live there. It’s an instant set of organizing principles for your mobile phone book, as nimble as your friends’ profile completeness allows them to be.

More importantly, it addresses the serious contact gaps caused by how we interact today. Exchanging email addresses and phone numbers simply doesn’t happen as much as a lazy friend request might. Our contact lists are incomplete, out of date, disorganized, and full of redundancies. Facebook, for all of its faults and despite the attending privacy concerns, is none of those things. Hello is a contact list that evolves with your life and the lives of your friends, without requiring you to regularly track those friends down.

As for what Facebook gets out of it, for now it might be enough simply to make new app experience that people embrace, after a litany of disappointments from Home, Slingshot, and beyond. And it’s not hard to see how eventually it’ll be able to monetize interactions like my Post Office Pies search, or push me into Messenger interactions that I might otherwise have taken to SMS.

More than that, though, Hello has already reminded me of what makes Facebook essential. No matter how long I go without checking it, no matter how much I forget that it’s there, it remains a Rolodex of my life. Crippling phone anxiety may make calling my friends difficult sometimes, but now at least I know I’ll still be able to find them when I need to.

The Biggest Threat to the Earth? We Have Too Many Kids

Today is Earth Day. For 45 years, the secular holiday has brought people—along with their ideas and enthusiasm—together to confront the world’s environmental challenges. There will be speeches about sustainability, discussions about air quality, and pamphlets on how to reduce your carbon footprint. You might even learn how to help save some sub-Saharan elephants, but nobody will be addressing the elephant in the room. That’s the fact that every single environmental solution is addressing the same, ugly problem: The world has to support a lot of hungry, thirsty, fertile people.

“No question, the human population is the core of every single environmental issue that we have,” says Corey Bradshaw, an ecologist at the University of Adelaide in Australia. There are seven billion of us and counting. And though people are developing technologies, regulations, and policies to make humanity less of a strain on the Earth, a number of environmentalists believe that these fixes will never catch up to the population as long as it continues to grow. The only way to save the world is to stop making more (and more, and more, and more) humans.

This is not a new idea—but it has been driven underground for a time. Built on Malthusian foundations, and bolstered by books like The Population Bomb, reigning in human reproduction was a major talking point at the first Earth Day, in 1970. The idea almost went mainstream in America, but extremists advocating for government regulation of fertility gave it a bad reputation. China’s one-child policy, in 1980, didn’t help.

But advocates for population stabilization—which they soften up by calling “family planning”—say mandatory family sizes are not the answer, never were. Instead, they say they’ll get people to regulate their reproduction through other (more publicly palatable) goals: “We need to raise people out of poverty, give them better health care, and educate them,” says Suzanne York, a spokesperson for the Institute of Population Studies in Berkeley, California.

Humanitarian sorcery? Nay. These goals work in service of something called demographic shift, a well established sociological principle. Basically, it’s a way of looking at the survival instinct on a societal scale. See, in pre-industrial societies, people die often. OK, children die often. So people in pre-industrial societies tend to have a lot of children. As a society progresses—getting richer, healthier, and more educated—the child mortality rate drops. The birth rate stays high for a while, but eventually it too tapers off. (This lag period of fast population growth is what happened in Europe prior to the Industrial Revolution, it was the situation in China before One Child, and it’s happening right now in parts of Africa.) Family planning simply makes sure that this gap between death and birth rates doesn’t lead to a huge population boom.

Not everyone is behind family planning, though. To some, the term is still a euphemism for totalitarian population control, and it invokes the specter of intrusive, abusive government policies (such as China’s, which has produced horror stories like forced abortions). And some people working on the population problem even think we need to be stabilizing the population by having more babies.

It’s OK, you can take a moment to read that again. “I see people as the ultimate resource,” says Steven Mosher, of the Population Research Institute in Virginia. According to Mosher, more people means more minds to contribute to solutions, and more competition leading to more innovation—innovation that can tackle the problems created by too many bodies. Eventually, society will reach demographic transition on its own, no birth control necessary. Mosher says this also frees people from having the terms of their societal transition dictated to them.

Other experts are skeptical that the population can balance itself out. “That idea is so wrong in so many ways that I don’t know where to begin,” says Bradshaw. He says unregulated reproduction ignores an ecological principle called density feedback. “When you increase population in a finite space, you increase per capita aggression, and increase competition for resources. You see more conflict, more suffering, more pain, more death,” he says.

Bradshaw agrees that it’s important that societies that undergo demographic transition aren’t denied the comforts of post-industrialization. But he says that limitless population growth will make conditions much much worse, before they ever (if ever) get better. This is because any technology allowing the planet to support more people has always lagged behind the rate of population growth. “We can’t even feed the people on the planet now,” says Bradshaw, noting that there are nearly one billion hungry people on the planet.

The key, says Bradshaw, is to augment family planning with tech fixes that reduce the environmental impact of each individual. In the end, any number of population control techniques—from farcical mass abortion plots to widespread war and famine to reasonable strategies targeting unplanned pregnancies—won’t stall global population growth, as Bradshaw noted in a paper he co-authored last year (with the give-away title “Human population reduction is not a quick fix for environmental problems“).

In that paper, Bradshaw evaluated several methods of population control, and some of the best results came from targeting unplanned births—which number about 33 million a year. “Through education, if you could stop the unintended pregnancies that result in unplanned births, you’d have the same net effect as having a global one-child policy in place by 2100,” says Bradshaw.

But even under these best of circumstances, with the best of outcomes, Bradshaw’s projected global population in 2100 would be about the same as today: seven billion hungry, thirsty people. Maybe we should get to work on improving air quality after all.

Amy Schumer GIF and a Graf: The Media Sure Hates Old Ladies

And then Amy Schumer hit the “Detonate” button. In the Season 3 premiere of her eponymous show, the comedienne put out one viral-worthy sketch after another. “Football Town Nights” slapped football’s rape culture on the ass and gave it a wink, and “Milk Milk Lemonade” recruited Amber Rose and Method Man to elucidate what we’re really fetishizing when we talk about booty. But it was the “Last F**kable Day” bit that really saw everything we love about Schumer culminate into a razor sharp point. The idea that any actress has a final day where she’s considered desirable might sound dreary, but it’s really a celebration! A milestone in every actress’s life when she is put out to pasture (or swaddled in full-coverage sweaters), because she is no longer seen by the media as a sex object. And on this day Schumer happened into a leafy glade where Julia Louis-Dreyfus was being honored with a small fete attended by Tina Fey and Patricia Arquette, both of whom have already taken their rites of passage. Bless.

Schumer is thrilled to be amidst her idols, but confused at their willingness to acquiesce in the face of societal pressure. And when Schumer asks if men have a “Last Fuckable Day,” Fey patiently explains they could be old as hell with nothing but a mist of white spiders rewarding their sexual efforts and they would still always be considered desirable by Hollywood. Such is the way. It’s all very hysterical and sad and true and smart, and demonstrates what a major voice Schumer has become in comedy and feminist commentary over the past two years. These women have enough Emmys and money between them to build homes of gold, and when Amy Schumer called they said “yes.” Keep fighting the good fight, Amy.

Google’s New Phone Service Bridges Cell and Wi-Fi Gaps

Google is inviting a small number of people onto a new wireless phone service it calls Project Fi. The company says that the service will simplify how people pay for cellular access, and that it will help phones bridge the gaps between traditional cellular networks and the Wi-Fi networks available inside so many homes and businesses.

The unveiling is the first real look at the service, which a Google executive promised last month at a conference in Barcelona. Today, Google launched a site where anyone can request an invitation.

Google is intent on lowering the cost of wireless service and improving how it operates.

Well, at least anyone with a Nexus 6 phone, the flagship Android handset Google developed in partnership with hardware maker Motorola. For now, it’s the only device that can use the service. “Similar to our Nexus hardware program, Project Fi enables us to work in close partnership with leading carriers, hardware makers, and all of you to push the boundaries of what’s possible,” the company said.

This latest move fits an established pattern at Google, which so often introduces projects deemed experimental that nevertheless end up pushing markets in new directions. The most prominent example is Google Fiber, the company’s ultra-high-speed wireline Internet service, which has nudged the likes of AT&T and Comcast into offering their own high speed services.

Closing the Gap

Google did not respond to a request to discuss the project. But according to its blog post and other public comments, Google is intent on lowering the cost of wireless service and improving how it operates.

Specifically, Google says Project Fi will offer new technology that “gives you better coverage by intelligently connecting you to the fastest available network,” whether that’s a cellular network or a Wi-Fi network. The service works with existing cellular networks from US carriers Sprint and T-Mobile, and according to Google, it can automatically connect phones to more than a million open Wi-Fi hotspots that it deems fast and reliable.

Google, with its control over so many popular Internet applications and so many of the world’s Android phones, has the muscle to make an impact.

As you move onto Wi-Fi networks, Google says, you can still make calls and send and receive texts, as you would on a cellular network. What’s more, the service separates you phone number from a particular device—so that you make calls and text from a single number on multiple devices.

At the same time, Google says, it will offer a simple way to pay for the service. A flat $20-per-month fee provides unlimited calls and texts, including when you travel outside the country. You pay $10 per gigabyte of internet data sent and received across the network. If you don’t use your entire gig, you receive a credit.

Though Google doesn’t say this outright, the company is clearly aiming to change the way we pay for wireless service. Traditionally, carriers have not provided such credits for unused data, and they often charge exorbitant fees when you travel abroad. Companies such a T-Mobile have worked to change things as well. But Google, with its control over so many popular Internet applications and so many of the world’s Android phones, has the muscle to make an even bigger impact. It wouldn’t be the first time.

House Passes Cybersecurity Bill Despite Privacy Protests

Skip to story The U.S. Capitol building in Washington, DC. The U.S. Capitol building in Washington, DC. Bill Clark/Getty Images

Congress is hellbent on passing a cybersecurity bill that can stop the wave of hacker breaches hitting American corporations. And they’re not letting the protests of a few dozen privacy and civil liberties organizations get in their way.

On Wednesday the House of Representatives voted 307-116 to pass the Protecting Cyber Networks Act, a bill designed to allow more fluid sharing of cybersecurity threat data between corporations and government agencies. That new system for sharing information is designed to act as a real-time immune system against hacker attacks, allowing companies to warn one another via government intermediaries about the tools and techniques of advanced hackers. But privacy critics say it also threatens to open up a new backchannel for surveillance of American citizens, in some cases granting the same companies legal immunity to share their users’ private data with government agencies that include the NSA.

“PCNA would significantly increase the National Security Agency’s (NSA’s) access to personal information, and authorize the federal government to use that information for a myriad of purposes unrelated to cybersecurity,” reads a letter signed earlier this week by 55 civil liberties groups and security experts that includes the American Civil Liberties Union, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Freedom of the Press Foundation, Human Rights Watch and many others.

“The revelations of the past two years concerning the intelligence community’s abuses of surveillance authorities and the scope of its collection and use of individuals’ information demonstrates the potential for government overreach, particularly when statutory language is broad or ambiguous,” the letter continues. “[PCNA] fails to provide strong privacy protections or adequate clarity about what actions can be taken, what information can be shared, and how that information may be used by the government.”

Specifically, PCNA’s data-sharing privileges let companies give data to government agencies—including the NSA—that might otherwise have violated the Electronic Communications Privacy Act or the Wiretap Act, both of which restrict the sharing of users’ private data with the government. And PCNA doesn’t even restrict the use of that shared information to cybersecurity purposes; its text also allows the information to be used for investigating any potential threat of “bodily harm or death,” opening its application to the surveillance of run-of-the-mill violent crimes like robbery and carjacking.

“This is little more than a backdoor for general purpose surveillance.”

Congressman Adam Schiff, who led the advocacy for the bill on the House floor, argued in a statement to reporters that PCNA in fact supports privacy by protecting Americans from future hacker breaches. “We do this while recognizing the huge and growing threat cyber hacking and cyber espionage poses to our privacy, as well as to our financial wellbeing and our jobs,” he writes.

“In the process of drafting this bill, protecting privacy was at the forefront throughout, and we consulted extensively with privacy and civil liberties groups, incorporating their suggestions in many cases. This is a strong bill that protects privacy, and one that I expect will get even better as the process goes forward—we expect to see large bipartisan support on the Floor.”

Here’s a video of Schiff’s statement on the House floor:

PCNA does include some significant privacy safeguards, such as a requirement that companies scrub “unrelated” data of personally identifying information before sending it to the government, and that the government agencies pass it through another filter to delete such data after receiving it.

But those protections still don’t go far enough, says Robyn Greene, policy counsel for the Open Technology Institute. Any information considered a “threat indicator” could still legally be sent to the government—even, for instance, IP address innocent victims of botnets used in distributed denial of service attacks against corporate websites. No further amendments that might have added new privacy restrictions to the bill were considered before the House’s vote Wednesday. “I’m very disappointed that the house has passed an information sharing bill that does so much to threaten Americans’ privacy and civil liberties, and no real effort was made to address the problems the bill still had,” says Greene. “The rules committee has excluded amendments that would have resolved privacy concerns…This is little more than a backdoor for general purpose surveillance.”

In a surprise move yesterday, the White House also publicly backed PCNA and its Senate counterpart, the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act in a statement to press. That’s a reversal of its threat to veto a similar Cybersecurity Information Sharing and Protection Act in 2013 over privacy concerns, a decision that all but killed the earlier attempt at cybersecurity data sharing legislation. Since then, however, a string of high-profile breaches seems to have swayed President Obama’s thinking, from the cybercriminal breaches of Target and health insurer Anthem that spilled millions of users’ data, to the devastating hack of Sony Pictures Entertainment, which the FBI has claimed was perpetrated as an intimidation tactic by the North Korean government to prevent the release of its Kim Jong-un assassination comedy the Interview.

If the White House’s support stands, it now leaves only an upcoming Senate vote sometime later this month on the Senate’s CISA as the deciding factor as to whether it and PCNA are combined to become law.

But privacy advocates haven’t given up on a presidential veto. A new website called StopCyberspying.com launched by the internet freedom group Access, along with the EFF, the ACLU and others, includes a petition to the President to reconsider a veto for PCNA, CISA and any other bill that threatens to widen internet surveillance.

OTI’s Greene says she’s still banking on a change of heart from Obama, too. “We’re hopeful that the administration would veto any bill that doesn’t address these issues,” she says. “To sign a bill that resembles CISA or PCNA would represent the administration doing a complete 180 on its commitment to protect Americans’ privacy.”

Tesla Isn’t a Car Company. It’s a Battery Company

Tesla is admired for building the cars of the future. But it’s not really a car company. It’s a battery company that happens to make electric cars.

At least, that’s the trajectory suggested by the news that Tesla will soon sell mega-batteries for homes and electric utility companies. CEO Elon Musk mentioned the possibility during an earnings call last February, and the plan was reportedly confirmed in an investor letter revealed yesterday. The official announcement is set to come next week.

Selling batteries for homes, businesses, and utilities may seem like a departure for a car company. But for Tesla, it makes perfect sense. An electric car is only as green as the electrical grid that powers it. And if Tesla’s batteries become widespread, they could help utilities take better advantage of inconsistent renewable energy sources like wind and solar. As demand for renewables rises, whether through regulatory mandate or consumer desire, so would utilities’ demand for batteries that could help maintain a consistent flow—a demand Tesla is well-positioned to meet.

In a world with fewer cars, Tesla will need new lines of business, and selling batteries might be just the ticket.

Renewable power can come in fits and stops, depending on whether the wind is blowing and if the sun is shining, but the supply doesn’t always come at the exact same time as demand. Improved batteries could help utility companies store power from renewable power to even-out the spikes and spikes and valleys those sources produce. And, of course, residential homes could store more solar power from their own solar panels to reduce their reliance on the over-taxed grid—a reduction that utilities would also welcome.

Tesla’s move into the electrical utility market isn’t exactly novel says Sam Jaffe, a former industry analyst at Navigant Research and founder of battery technology company Cygnus Energy Storage. There are already dozens of companies offering battery packs for utility companies. But he says Tesla’s move is a validation of the market, and its scale will make it a major player.

“In 10 years the grid will be cleaner, less expensive to maintain, and more reliable,” Jaffe says. “And that will be thanks to energy storage technology.”

Excess Capacity

Tesla’s first expected foray beyond cars also highlights that the company’s battery manufacturing capacity may soon be its strongest asset. Last year Tesla announced its plans to build a 10-million-square-foot battery manufacturing plant christened the Gigafactory. That capacity could easily be put to use building batteries for not just cars and houses, but for electronics such as laptops and cell phones. And that could be just the beginning.

Tesla relies on Panasonic to manufacture its battery cells, which Tesla then assembles into custom battery packs and modules. “As the biggest buyer of batteries from Panasonic, Tesla will be able to command the best rates and offer the best prices,” he says. “It makes sense to play in the utility market, where there will be huge growth in the coming years.”

The goal of the Gigafactory is to make batteries so cheap that electric cars can compete with conventional gasoline powered cars on price. Although it’s possible that Tesla won’t be able to radically reduce the cost of batteries, energy storage technology will still play a vital role in the company’s future. Americans are driving less, and the fleets of self-driving car services that companies like Google and Uber imagine probably won’t help much. In a world with fewer cars, Tesla will need new lines of business, and selling batteries—maybe even to other car companies—might be just the ticket.

Facebook ‘Hello’ Will Get You Talking on the Phone Again

The most neglected aspect of any smartphone tends to be the actual phone. You know, the part where you communicate with another human being using your voice and not a pizza emoji. That’s partly because talking on the phone is invariably an exercise in agonizing cross-talk and stutters, but it’s also because of how we organize our contacts today. In short, we don’t. But you know who does? Facebook.

Today, Facebook introduces Hello, an Android app (iOS doesn’t let apps play with the necessary phone permissions) that takes the service’s unprecedentedly comprehensive access to all of our contact information and crams it into a delightful dialer. That a dialer can be considered delightful in the first place might seem like a stretch; it is, after all, just a bunch of numbers, an entry field for contacts, a star, and a pound sign whose main function is reminding you of how much you despise hashtags. It’s the most utilitarian part of your phone, and it enables your most awkward moments with it.

seewhoscalling copy_greenbg Facebook

And yet! Hello manages to rethink the dialer in subtle ways that make the process of calling someone (or, importantly, some business) exceptionally simple—as long as you and that someone have complementary Facebook privacy settings, or they were already in your phone’s contact list to begin with. Which is to say, if you’re friends with someone and they’ve made their number available, they’re suddenly in your phone, whether they’ve given you their number directly or not. If they haven’t made their number public, you won’t suddenly be able to prank them. You will, though, be given the option to place a VOIP call over Facebook Messenger, and get access to whatever other contact info—like, say, an email address—they’ve made public.

If this all sounds like an LSAT practice exam set-up, that’s only because Facebook’s privacy settings permutations are manifold. In practice, it’s very simple: You can either call a Facebook friend or you can’t. If you can’t, you can just message them, or email them, or better yet leave them alone.

If this also sounds like a reminder to double check your Facebook privacy settings, good! You should. Before you use Hello you should go to your Facebook Page and dig into the Privacy portion of the Settings page. There, you can adjust who can look you up by your phone number, be it Everyone, Friends of Friends, or just Friends. That’s still not quite granular enough for my liking, especially with the kind of access Hello gives. It’s unlikely you want every single friend you’ve picked up in the last decade of social networking or so to know what hemisphere you live in, much less give them a direct conduit to breathing heavily into your ear holes.

But Facebook has put systems in place to help with the unpleasant sides of phone communication as well, that range from subtle to absolute. Incoming calls will show a profile picture of an incoming caller, even if they aren’t in your phone’s contact list, along with whatever FB info they make public, like city and employer. It’ll even tell you if it’s their birthday, so you know to launch into song. Nuisance callers can be perma-blocked with a simple tap, and you can ask Hello to automatically block numbers that other users have blocked in volume, which is to say telephonic spammers.

PressKit-04-Search Facebook

My favorite part, though, in my brief time with Hello, is being able to call up a business of interest directly from the dialer. Feel like carryout pizza? I just start typing Post Office Pies in Hello, and I’m suddenly a single tap away from placing my order. I’m not friends with Post Office Pies on Facebook, nor am I a fan of its page. But it’s near me, and the number is publicly listed on Facebook, so it’s ready and waiting for me.

That doesn’t save me all that much time from searching for the same company in Chrome, finding the right result, tapping the number, being booted to the stock Android dialer, and making the call. But it does save time, and more importantly removes nearly all of the friction from placing the call in the first place. I may still hate the destination of talking on the phone, but at least with Hello I no longer hate the journey.

So far I’m on board with Hello. It only took about a minute to sync nearly 1500 contacts, and the app both looks nicer and promises more functionality than the stock Android dialer. Little touches also make a significant difference; if I search for WIRED in Hello, I’m met with a list all of my contacts who have it listed under their work experience. Similarly, a search for Chicago brings up my friends who live there. It’s an instant set of organizing principles for your mobile phone book, as nimble as your friends’ profile completeness allows them to be.

More importantly, it addresses the serious contact gaps caused by how we interact today. Exchanging email addresses and phone numbers simply doesn’t happen as much as a lazy friend request might. Our contact lists are incomplete, out of date, disorganized, and full of redundancies. Facebook, for all of its faults and despite the attending privacy concerns, is none of those things. Hello is a contact list that evolves with your life and the lives of your friends, without requiring you to regularly track those friends down.

As for what Facebook gets out of it, for now it might be enough simply to make new app experience that people embrace, after a litany of disappointments from Home, Slingshot, and beyond. And it’s not hard to see how eventually it’ll be able to monetize interactions like my Post Office Pies search, or push me into Messenger interactions that I might otherwise have taken to SMS.

More than that, though, Hello has already reminded me of what makes Facebook essential. No matter how long I go without checking it, no matter how much I forget that it’s there, it remains a Rolodex of my life. Crippling phone anxiety may make calling my friends difficult sometimes, but now at least I know I’ll still be able to find them when I need to.

The Biggest Threat to the Earth? We Have Too Many Kids

Today is Earth Day. For 45 years, the secular holiday has brought people—along with their ideas and enthusiasm—together to confront the world’s environmental challenges. There will be speeches about sustainability, discussions about air quality, and pamphlets on how to reduce your carbon footprint. You might even learn how to help save some sub-Saharan elephants, but nobody will be addressing the elephant in the room. That’s the fact that every single environmental solution is addressing the same, ugly problem: The world has to support a lot of hungry, thirsty, fertile people.

“No question, the human population is the core of every single environmental issue that we have,” says Corey Bradshaw, an ecologist at the University of Adelaide in Australia. There are seven billion of us and counting. And though people are developing technologies, regulations, and policies to make humanity less of a strain on the Earth, a number of environmentalists believe that these fixes will never catch up to the population as long as it continues to grow. The only way to save the world is to stop making more (and more, and more, and more) humans.

This is not a new idea—but it has been driven underground for a time. Built on Malthusian foundations, and bolstered by books like The Population Bomb, reigning in human reproduction was a major talking point at the first Earth Day, in 1970. The idea almost went mainstream in America, but extremists advocating for government regulation of fertility gave it a bad reputation. China’s one-child policy, in 1980, didn’t help.

But advocates for population stabilization—which they soften up by calling “family planning”—say mandatory family sizes are not the answer, never were. Instead, they say they’ll get people to regulate their reproduction through other (more publicly palatable) goals: “We need to raise people out of poverty, give them better health care, and educate them,” says Suzanne York, a spokesperson for the Institute of Population Studies in Berkeley, California.

Humanitarian sorcery? Nay. These goals work in service of something called demographic shift, a well established sociological principle. Basically, it’s a way of looking at the survival instinct on a societal scale. See, in pre-industrial societies, people die often. OK, children die often. So people in pre-industrial societies tend to have a lot of children. As a society progresses—getting richer, healthier, and more educated—the child mortality rate drops. The birth rate stays high for a while, but eventually it too tapers off. (This lag period of fast population growth is what happened in Europe prior to the Industrial Revolution, it was the situation in China before One Child, and it’s happening right now in parts of Africa.) Family planning simply makes sure that this gap between death and birth rates doesn’t lead to a huge population boom.

Not everyone is behind family planning, though. To some, the term is still a euphemism for totalitarian population control, and it invokes the specter of intrusive, abusive government policies (such as China’s, which has produced horror stories like forced abortions). And some people working on the population problem even think we need to be stabilizing the population by having more babies.

It’s OK, you can take a moment to read that again. “I see people as the ultimate resource,” says Steven Mosher, of the Population Research Institute in Virginia. According to Mosher, more people means more minds to contribute to solutions, and more competition leading to more innovation—innovation that can tackle the problems created by too many bodies. Eventually, society will reach demographic transition on its own, no birth control necessary. Mosher says this also frees people from having the terms of their societal transition dictated to them.

Other experts are skeptical that the population can balance itself out. “That idea is so wrong in so many ways that I don’t know where to begin,” says Bradshaw. He says unregulated reproduction ignores an ecological principle called density feedback. “When you increase population in a finite space, you increase per capita aggression, and increase competition for resources. You see more conflict, more suffering, more pain, more death,” he says.

Bradshaw agrees that it’s important that societies that undergo demographic transition aren’t denied the comforts of post-industrialization. But he says that limitless population growth will make conditions much much worse, before they ever (if ever) get better. This is because any technology allowing the planet to support more people has always lagged behind the rate of population growth. “We can’t even feed the people on the planet now,” says Bradshaw, noting that there are nearly one billion hungry people on the planet.

The key, says Bradshaw, is to augment family planning with tech fixes that reduce the environmental impact of each individual. In the end, any number of population control techniques—from farcical mass abortion plots to widespread war and famine to reasonable strategies targeting unplanned pregnancies—won’t stall global population growth, as Bradshaw noted in a paper he co-authored last year (with the give-away title “Human population reduction is not a quick fix for environmental problems“).

In that paper, Bradshaw evaluated several methods of population control, and some of the best results came from targeting unplanned births—which number about 33 million a year. “Through education, if you could stop the unintended pregnancies that result in unplanned births, you’d have the same net effect as having a global one-child policy in place by 2100,” says Bradshaw.

But even under these best of circumstances, with the best of outcomes, Bradshaw’s projected global population in 2100 would be about the same as today: seven billion hungry, thirsty people. Maybe we should get to work on improving air quality after all.

Amy Schumer GIF and a Graf: The Media Sure Hates Old Ladies

And then Amy Schumer hit the “Detonate” button. In the Season 3 premiere of her eponymous show, the comedienne put out one viral-worthy sketch after another. “Football Town Nights” slapped football’s rape culture on the ass and gave it a wink, and “Milk Milk Lemonade” recruited Amber Rose and Method Man to elucidate what we’re really fetishizing when we talk about booty. But it was the “Last F**kable Day” bit that really saw everything we love about Schumer culminate into a razor sharp point. The idea that any actress has a final day where she’s considered desirable might sound dreary, but it’s really a celebration! A milestone in every actress’s life when she is put out to pasture (or swaddled in full-coverage sweaters), because she is no longer seen by the media as a sex object. And on this day Schumer happened into a leafy glade where Julia Louis-Dreyfus was being honored with a small fete attended by Tina Fey and Patricia Arquette, both of whom have already taken their rites of passage. Bless. Schumer is thrilled to be amidst her idols, but confused at their willingness to acquiesce in the face of societal pressure. And when Schumer asks if men have a “Last Fuckable Day,” Fey patiently explains they could be old as hell with nothing but a mist of white spiders rewarding their sexual efforts and they would still always be considered desirable by Hollywood. Such is the way. It’s all very hysterical and sad and true and smart, and demonstrates what a major voice Schumer has become in comedy and feminist commentary over the past two years. These women have enough Emmys and money between them to build homes of gold, and when Amy Schumer called they said “yes.” Keep fighting the good fight, Amy.

Google Unveils Wireless Service To Bridge Cellular and Wifi

Google is inviting a small number of people onto a new wireless phone service it calls Project Fi. The company says that the service will simplify how people pay for cellular access, and that it will help phones bridge the gaps between traditional cellular networks and the WiFi networks available inside so many homes and businesses.

The unveiling is the first real look at the service, which a Google executive promised last month at a conference in Barcelona. Today, Google launched a site where anyone can request an invitation.

Google is intent on lowering the cost of wireless service and improving how it operates.

Well, at least anyone with a Nexus 6 phone, the flagship Android handset Google developed in partnership with hardware maker Motorola. For now, it’s the only device that can use the service. “Similar to our Nexus hardware program, Project Fi enables us to work in close partnership with leading carriers, hardware makers, and all of you to push the boundaries of what’s possible,” the company said.

This latest move fits an established pattern at Google, which so often introduces projects deemed experimental that nevertheless end up pushing markets in new directions. The most prominent example is Google Fiber, the company’s ultra-high-speed wireline Internet service, which has nudged the likes of AT&T and Comcast into offering their own high speed services.

Closing the Gap

Google did not respond to a request to discuss the project. But according to its blog post and other public comments, Google is intent on lowering the cost of wireless service and improving how it operates.

Specifically, Google says Project Fi will offer new technology that “gives you better coverage by intelligently connecting you to the fastest available network,” whether that’s a cellular network or a WIFi network. The service works with existing cellular networks from US carriers Sprint and T-Mobile, and according to Google, it can automatically connect phones to more than a million open WiFi hotspots that it deems fast and reliable.

Google, with its control over so many popular Internet applications and so many of the world’s Android phones, has the muscle to make an impact.

As you move onto WiFi networks, Google says, you can still make calls and send and receive texts, as you would on a cellular network. What’s more, the service separates you phone number from a particular device—so that you make calls and text from a single number on multiple devices.

At the same time, Google says, it will offer a simple way to pay for the service. A flat $20-per-month fee provides unlimited calls and texts, including when you travel outside the country. You pay $10 per gigabyte of internet data sent and received across the network. If you don’t use your entire gig, you receive a credit.

Though Google doesn’t say this outright, the company is clearly aiming to change the way we pay for wireless service. Traditionally, carriers have not provided such credits for unused data, and they often charge exorbitant fees when you travel abroad. Companies such a T-Mobile have worked to change things as well. But Google, with its control over so many popular Internet applications and so many of the world’s Android phones, has the muscle to make an even bigger impact. It wouldn’t be the first time.

This Indoor Farm Can Bring Fresh Produce to Food Deserts

Almonds got the brunt of the bad press, but they hardly deserve all the blame for California’s water woes. Sure, it’s worth considering how to minimize your water footprint, and forgoing your daily handful of almonds in solidarity with the parched earth couldn’t hurt. But considering how widespread the water crisis is, and the fact that agriculture is responsible for 80 percent of the country’s water consumption, the more crucial question to be asking now—particularly on Earth Day—is what can be done to fundamentally change the way our food gets made?

Mattias Lepp says at least part of the answer involves making it easier for anyone—even city dwellers—to farm their own food. That’s why Lepp, founder of the Estonian startup Click & Grow, has developed what he calls a Smart Farm, an indoor farming system that requires 95 percent less water than traditional agriculture.

vert_farm_inline Click & Grow

You may remember Click & Grow from their uber-successful Smart Herb Garden Kickstarter campaign a few years back. That product let people easily grow herbs in their homes with minimal maintenance. The Smart Farm is similar, but on a much larger scale. The system, which Lepp spent years developing in partnership with universities across Estonia, France, and Russia, can hold 50 to 250 plants at a time, making it a viable option for urban areas that don’t have access to fresh produce—areas the US government calls food deserts. Ideally, a shift to urban farming could drastically reduce the distance between where food is grown and where it is consumed.

The market for these indoor farms, or so-called vertical farms, is already fast-growing, driven by the growing realization that the current water-chugging agricultural system is unsustainable. On one end of the spectrum, countless DIY indoor farming enthusiasts are growing small gardens in their homes. On the other are professional outfits like Green Sense Farms out of Chicago, which grows leafy greens indoors and sells them at local stores. Even tech giants like Panasonic and Toshiba have begun developing gigantic de facto farms of their own in Asia, where there is a severe shortage of agricultural land.

plants_farm_inline Click & Grow

And yet, the majority of these larger farms use hydroponic farming, a process that involves growing plants in mineral solutions instead of soil. They save anywhere from 70 to 80 percent of the water required for traditional agriculture, but they’re complex and can cost tens of thousands of dollars. For most of us, it wouldn’t be economically practical for you or me to grow a full-scale farm at home.

With the Smart Farm, which costs just $1,500, Lepp says it can be. “People all over the world have worked intensively the last 10 or 20 years on bringing food production closer to cities and finding ways to grow it more efficiently,” he says. “But today they all are using hydroponics, and that is unfortunately expensive and messy. We see how we can change this.”

Rather than relying on hydroponics, the Smart Farm uses a new type of soil called Smart Soil, which Lepp developed in partnership with academic advisors. The soil itself is spongey, allowing air and nutrients to flow through. Meanwhile, the nutrients are covered in a special coating that responds to soil moisture. The hardware, which looks like a glass refrigerator, consists of trays for each plant equipped with LED lights and sensors that detect when the moisture levels are off balance. The “farmer” can use an app to adjust the water levels in the system, which triggers more nutrients to be released.

This process cuts down on the amount of water required to grow the plants, Lepp says, because no wastewater is produced. At the same time, the time people have to spend actually tending to the plants is minimized.

inline_farm Click & Grow

“Click & Grow can give the plant the perfect conditions to grow, because air, water, and nutrients are dosed perfectly without any obstacles,” says Uno Mäeorg, a professor at the University of Tartu in Estonia, who worked with Lepp on the development of Smart Soil “And since those conditions are perfect for the plant, it provides us healthier plants.”

Be that as it may, the Smart Farm is still a long way from accomplishing Lepp’s eventual dream of putting a full-scale farm in every urban neighborhood. For starters, the system only supports a limited number of plants today, including strawberries, tomatoes, lettuce, and other herbs, though Lepp says that will change with time. Also, for now the Smart Farm is only available on a built-to-order basis. While the company already has orders coming in and pilot projects with universities, it won’t begin full-scale retail distribution until 2016.

Then there’s the simple fact that we’re all just plain used to buying food from a store. The dream of distributed farming may always be limited to the number of consumers who care enough to try it out.

Still, according to Dr. Dickson Despommier, a professor of public health and microbiology at Columbia University and author of the book The Vertical Farm, that number is growing steadily. And as more people become willing to give indoor farming a try, he says it’s critically important that they have tools, like the Smart Farm, to ease the effort.

“I think it could make a dent in the commercial side of things,” Despommier says of indoor farming’s potential to impact mainstream agriculture. “And if you look at what’s happening in California, there may not be a commercial side of things for much longer.”

Science Is Closing in on Dark Matter, But Beware the Hype

After decades of careful searching, astronomers and physicists are finally closing in on dark matter—the unseen majority of stuff in the universe.

Physicists first theorized in the 1930s that a mysterious form of matter was holding galaxies together. By the early 1980s, researchers began sharing ideas about what kind of properties those hidden particles might have. Recently, many instruments designed to hunt for dark matter have come online (including those in the gallery above), and scientists are finally beginning to see results emerge—as evidenced by the bevy of dark matter announcements and press in the last few weeks.

Some of the observations and claims from those instruments have been genuinely thrilling, hinting at the type of particle (or particles) that actually makes up the dark stuff; others have been dubious, to put it kindly. Let us separate the hope from the hype for you.

Dark Forces at Work: Potentially Revolutionary

In the Abell 3827 galaxy cluster, visible from the Southern Hemisphere, a group of faraway galaxies are colliding in a grand cosmic pileup. Last week, astronomers looking carefully at those collisions published that curiously, the dark matter in those galaxies seems to be interacting with itself. That’s a surprise, because dark matter has built a reputation for being almost maddeningly shy. (It doesn’t seem to interact with anything, except for gravity. It doesn’t reflect light. It doesn’t feel magnetism. In fact, it doesn’t seem to care very much about us at all.)

Spying on the galaxies in Abell 3827 with the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (seriously, that’s its name) and NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, astronomer Richard Massey and colleagues saw that dark matter—detectable through gravitational lensing—seems to be lagging behind, decoupled from its home galaxy as if it were sticking to something. That means that the dark matter might be feeling its own force (or forces), a refinement of a similar observation made in the same cluster in 2010 by Liliya Williams and Prasenjit Saha, both of whom worked on the new study.

For Massey, who has spent his career tracking dark matter, the observation feels like validation. “After chasing something for so long,” he says, “it’s really nice to have finally caught it in the act of doing something.” Any hint of activity could help physicists nail down exactly what dark matter really is. (The group’s last news release, in late March, was less exciting: An examination of 72 galactic cluster collisions using Hubble and NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory revealed hardly any evidence that dark matter interacted with itself.)

There is something very special about Abell 3827, also called the Bullet Cluster, says Joel Primack, one of the formers of the dominant model for dark matter. Astronomers have observed a lot of cluster collisions, but there’s something unique about the angle and position of this one that allowed dark matter’s stickiness to stick out. “No one’s ever seen such a thing before, with clarity and precision, except in this cluster,” says Primack. It’s too early to call this a discovery, he says, “but they’ve done a beautiful job analyzing images, and this could be very important—potentially revolutionary.”

(What it is not is evidence that dark matter is somehow “less dark” than we thought, as has been reported elsewhere. Boo on bad press release headlines—I’m talking to you, ESO.)

Southern Map Maker: Old Reliable

In Chile, atop a mountain, one of the world’s most powerful digital cameras (570-megapixels) is bolted to Victor M. Blanco Telescope, giving scientists in the Dark Energy Survey collaboration an unprecedented view of the southern skies. Last week they released their first map detailing the presence of dark matter across a large region of previously-unmapped sky. This is just the first of many maps they’ll release over their five-year mission.

The project doesn’t have any grand aspirations to define dark matter—it’s just a mapping project. Astronomers have made dark matter maps before, and the observations from DES jive perfectly with how they already understand dark matter to behave. But that doesn’t mean the survey’s results are worthless: Many researchers, including Primack, are excited to follow the work of DES as it illuminates new areas of the sky with greater precision than ever before.

Spectro-Speculation: Maybe Hogwash

Primack doesn’t feel the same way about the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer, an instrument aboard the International Space Station reading cosmic rays, high-energy radiation that’s constantly zipping through space. AMS shared their latest results last week, saying they had detected more antiprotons in the cosmic radiation than they expected. In some models dark matter can form an excess of antiprotons—meaning astronomers might be able to detect dark matter by detecting that radiation.

Although AMS has made a lot of noise about their antiproton findings, they already fit within standard model physics, says Stefano Profumo, a theoretical physicist at the Santa Cruz Institute for Particle Physics. The radiation detected by the AMS could just as easily arise from non-dark matter sources.

“There is absolutely no reason to think AMS results have anything to do with dark matter or new physics,” Profumo says. Primack goes further: “This is basically a stupid instrument.” It’s nice to get more data about the physics of cosmic rays, he qualifies, “but is it teaching us anything new? The answer is no.” AMS didn’t respond in time to a request for comment.

Experimenters are eager, and occasionally desperate, to share relevant discoveries. Yet detecting dark matter is such a difficult task, says Katie Mack, a postdoctoral astrophysicist at the University of Melbourne and columnist at Cosmos magazine, that astronomers should greet each claim of dark matter detection with a skeptical eye.

When you’re trying to find a signal, she says, “you have to contend with all of the astrophysical processes in the universe, some of which we can’t see easily or which might produce weird effects. And you have to convince yourself that some strange excess that you found is not to do with anything in known—or not-yet-known—non-dark matter astrophysics. That’s a big ask.”

Awesome Stuff on the Horizon

All the same, these are extremely exciting times for fans of dark matter. The Large Hadron Collider, which just restarted, might be on the cusp of making dark matter. “So, we’re hopeful,” says Mack. “And this is one of the things that would make these indirect detections much more compelling—if you can create something in the lab that is consistent with a sky signal.”

You bet scientists are entering a special time for dark matter, says Primack, but it’s been a long time coming. “Everyone in the field knows we’re going to discover what dark matter is before too long,” he says. “And considering that dark matter is responsible for most of the mass in the universe, it’s not a minor detail.”

What if Your Computer Cared About What Makes You Smile?

Your computer doesn’t care if you’re smiling. Why would it?

Your computer isn’t a person. It’s a computer! A tool. A machine. Computers are logical. They’re rational. They don’t get tired, or sad, or frustrated. They don’t get distracted. They’re oblivious to human happiness. They weren’t programmed to do emotion.

Your computer cares about important, useful things. It cares about your environment, dimming its screen when you turn off the lights. It cares about connecting you to friends and family, lighting up with a buzz whenever they want to get in touch. Increasingly, it cares about context: your next appointment, your next flight, the traffic in your city.

A smile? That’s just obviously not a computer’s concern.

All of which is to say: Smile Suggest, a Chrome extension that uses an open source computer vision library to automatically bookmark and share websites that make you smile—like, actually smile, with your mouth—is obviously a lark. Martin McAllister, the British copywriter who created it, called it “daft” no fewer than three times in our brief conversation, just so there was no confusion. There isn’t. It’s a joke! We don’t control our computers by smiling at them.

Smile SuggestSmile Suggest WIRED

Still, McAllister did hazard what I thought was an astute observation about his “daft little b-side.” He began cautiously: “If I can read into it this deeply, Smile Suggest is a slight, flippant way of making a deeper point. When we like or share something, it’s not totally genuine. It’s something we’re putting our name on. A smile is something you do without thinking. You don’t have those layers of cynical thought. It’s just what you like and what’s funny to you.”

To any modern computer user, the idea of having every site that elicits a smile beamed automatically to Facebook is mortifying. But McAllister’s little extension got me wondering: Could a smile be a useful signal for a computer? Might we be able to do something interesting with such a genuine, unfiltered bit of input? Probably. I would like to review every YouTube video that made me laugh in 2012. I’d be delighted if my computer pointed me to a Gchat conversation, long forgotten, that made me crack up in college.

Granted, in a world of presumed total surveillance, it’s upsetting to imagine our computers having access to something as intimate as our unmediated emotions. That’s our last stand against the bureaucrats and the brands, the unquantifiable inner sanctum of self.

But supposing some alternate arrangement in which we could actually trust our devices and the people making them, emotion could be a profoundly powerful principle to design around. The Apple Watch will buzz you with a reminder to stand up if you’ve been sitting too long, perhaps the first time a mainstream consumer electronics device has tried to spur a healthy behavior change by default, right out of the box. Is it inconceivable that someday our gadgets would care about our emotional health in the same way? Smile Suggest is unthreateningly, unambiguously a lark—but what if it didn’t have to be?

A smile is the most basic unit of human happiness, the joy response embedded in our genes, more universal than any language or culture or custom. Shouldn’t that obviously be a computer’s concern?

Your computer already cares about a bunch of dumb things. It cares about your environment, dimming its screen when you turn off the lights, even though its blue light is screwing up your circadian rhythms. It cares about connecting you to the companies whose apps you’ve installed, lighting up with a buzz whenever they want to engage you. Increasingly, it cares about context: your next appointment, your next flight, the traffic in your city—even though, as a high school sophomore in Baltimore, you don’t use a calendar app, aren’t flying anywhere, and are still a decade away from your first rush hour commute.

Your computer isn’t a person, but as psychological studies have shown, you often can’t help but treat it like a one. Nope, your computer is just a dumb tool, a lowly machine. Computers were designed to be logical, rational, like we once thought humans to be, before we knew better. Computers don’t know to help when you’re tired, or sad, or frustrated. They don’t steer you away from distractions. They’re oblivious to your happiness. We don’t design them to do emotion.

Your computer doesn’t care if you’re smiling. It can’t hurt to occasionally ask: Why doesn’t it?

Researchers Uncover Method to Detect NSA ‘Quantum Insert’ Hacks

Among all of the NSA hacking operations exposed by whistleblower Edward Snowden over the last two years, one in particular has stood out for its sophistication and stealthiness. Known as Quantum Insert, the man-on-the-side hacking technique has been used to great effect since 2005 by the NSA and its partner spy agency, Britain’s GCHQ, to hack into high-value, hard-to-reach systems and implant malware.

Quantum Insert is useful for getting at machines that can’t be reached through phishing attacks. It works by hijacking a browser as it’s trying to access web pages and forcing it to visit a malicious web page, rather than the page the target intend to visit. The attackers can then surreptitiously download malware onto the target’s machine from the rogue web page.

Quantum Insert has been used to hack the machines of terrorist suspects in the Middle East, but it was also used in a controversial GCHQ/NSA operation against employees of the Belgian telecom Belgacom and against workers at OPEC, the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries. The “highly successful” technique allowed the NSA to place 300 malicious implants on computers around the world in 2010, according to the spy agency’s own internal documents—all while remaining undetected.

But now security researchers with Fox-IT in the Netherlands, who helped investigate that hack against Belgacom, have found a way to detect Quantum Insert attacks using common intrusion detection tools such as Snort, Bro and Suricata.

The detection focuses on identifying anomalies in the data packets that get sent to a victim’s browser client when the browser attempts to access web pages. The researchers, who plan to discuss their findings at the RSA Conference in San Francisco today, have written a blog post describing the technical details and are releasing custom patches for Snort to help detect Quantum Insert attacks.

How Quantum Insert Works

According to various documents leaked by Snowden and published by The Intercept and the German newspaper Der Spiegel, Quantum Insert requires the NSA and GCHQ to have fast-acting servers relatively near a target’s machine that are capable of intercepting browser traffic swiftly in order to deliver a malicious web page to the target’s machine before the legitimate web page can arrive.

To achieve this, the spy agencies use rogue systems the NSA has codenamed FoxAcid servers, as well as special high-speed servers known as “shooters,” placed at key points around the internet.

In the Belgacom hack, GCHQ first identified specific engineers and system administrators who worked for the Belgian telecom and one of its subsidiaries, BICS. The attackers then mapped out the digital footprints of chosen workers, identifying the IP addresses of work and personal computers as well as Skype, Gmail and social networking accounts such as Facebook and LinkedIn. Then they set up rogue pages, hosted on FoxAcid servers, to impersonate, for example, an employee’s legitimate LinkedIn profile page.

The agencies then used packet-capturing tools that sniffed or sifted through internet traffic—which can occur with the cooperation of telecoms or without it—to spot footprints or other markers that identified the online traffic of these targets. Sometimes the fingerprints involved spotting persistent tracking cookies that web sites assigned to the user.

When the sniffers spotted a “GET request” from a target’s browser—messages sent by the browser to call up a specific URL or web page such as the user’s LinkedIn profile page—it would notify the NSA’s high-speed shooter server, which would then kick into action and send a redirect or “shot” to the browser. That shot was essentially a spoofed Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) packet that would redirect the user’s browser to a malicious LinkedIn page hosted on a FoxAcid server. The FoxAcid server would then download and install malware on the victim’s machine.

Quantum Insert attacks require precise positioning and action on the part of the rogue servers to ensure that they “win” the race to redirect and serve up a malicious page faster than the legitimate servers can deliver a page to the browser. The closer the traffic-sniffing and shooter machines are to the target, the more likely the rogue servers will “win” the race to the victim’s machine. According to one NSA document from 2012, the success rate per shot for LinkedIn pages was “greater than 50 percent.”

How to Catch a Quantum Insert

But hidden within another document leaked by Snowden was a slide that provided a few hints about detecting Quantum Insert attacks, which prompted the Fox-IT researchers to test a method that ultimately proved to be successful. They set up a controlled environment and launched a number of Quantum Insert attacks against their own machines to analyze the packets and devise a detection method.

According to the Snowden document, the secret lies in analyzing the first content-carrying packets that come back to a browser in response to its GET request. One of the packets will contain content for the rogue page; the other will be content for the legitimate site sent from a legitimate server. Both packets, however, will have the same sequence number. That, it turns out, is a dead giveaway.

Here’s why: When your browser sends a GET request to pull up a web page, it sends out a packet containing a variety of information, including the source and destination IP address of the browser as well as so-called sequence and acknowledge numbers, or ACK numbers. The responding server sends back a response in the form of a series of packets, each with the same ACK number as well as a sequential number so that the series of packets can be reconstructed by the browser as each packet arrives to render the web page.

But when the NSA or another attacker launches a Quantum Insert attack, the victim’s machine receives duplicate TCP packets with the same sequence number but with a different payload. “The first TCP packet will be the ‘inserted’ one while the other is from the real server, but will be ignored by the [browser],” the researchers note in their blog post. “Of course it could also be the other way around; if the QI failed because it lost the race with the real server response.”

Although it’s possible that in some cases a browser will receive two packets with the same sequence number from a legitimate server, they will still contain the same general content; a Quantum Insert packet, however, will have content with significant differences. The researchers have detailed in their blog post other anomalies that can help detect a Quantum Insert attack. And in addition to making patches available for Snort to detect Quantum Insert attacks, they have also posted packet captures to their GitHub repository to show how they performed Quantum Insert attacks.

Fascinating Photos Take You Behind the Scenes of Hubble

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In 1929, Edwin Hubble used the telescope at the Mount Wilson Observatory outside of Los Angeles to prove that the universe is expanding. The space telescope bearing his name launched into Earth orbit aboard the shuttle Discovery 51 years later on April 24th, 1990. Michael Soluri

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Between 1993 and 2009, crews have rocketed up to service and upgrade the Hubble five times. This image was made just after the crew of the Atlantis released it into its orbit some 360 miles above water-world Earth in 2009. Michael Soluri

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To work in the vacuum of space, astronauts need to practice in spacesuits in water. Here, Andrew Feustel is training in the largest deep-water pool in the world at the Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory at NASA’s Johnson Space Flight Center in Houston. Michael Soluri

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K. Megan McArthur was a rookie on the fifth and final mission to service Hubble in 2009. As both the robotic arm operator and the ascent and entry flight engineer, she is arguably the last human to have “touched” the scope when she released it from the cargo bay of the Atlantis. Michael Soluri

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Seated behind Commander Scott Altman and Pilot Greg Johnson, McArthur along with Michael Massimino practice a landing in the shuttle orbiter simulator at NASA’s Johnson Spaceflight Center. Michael Soluri

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The launching of rockets into space takes place in a high security, industrial scale at the Kennedy Space Center. Here, a security guard sits at the entrance to the shuttle launch pad a few weeks before the May 2009 launch. Michael Soluri

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The instruments and tools destined for the Hubble are prepared here in the dust-free high bay of the Payload Hazardous Servicing Facility. NASA’s probes to Mercury, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, and Pluto have also been readied for their journey under these high-pressure sodium lights. Michael Soluri

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A technician prepares to stow the Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph Fastener Capture Plate. The STiS FCP was used by Mike Massimino to remove 111 fasteners and washers into 111 self-contained boxes so they wouldn’t float off into the telescope. Michael Soluri

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April 2009: the astronaut crew and senior Hubble engineers during a restricted last review and familiarization session in the high bay of the Payload Hazardous Servicing Facility at Kennedy Space Center. A few days later the hardware is transported to the cargo bay of Atlantis. Michael Soluri

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Here, four "space-walking" astronauts and their mission trainers review one of the tool boxes they will be accessing in the cargo bay of the Atlantis in just a few weeks. Michael Soluri

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The tools the astronauts use look like one-of-a-kind sculptures. Soluri photographed them on black & white film on a light table in the high-security high bay at the Goddard Spaceflight Center in Maryland. This is the Mini Power Drill, specifically designed for spacewalks at the Hubble. Michael Soluri

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This Advance Camera for Survey Indexing Card Extractor was designed so that John Grunsfeld, wearing pressurized gloves, could remove four failed circuit boards from the Advance Camera for Surveys electrical system, the second most important high-resolution camera system aboard the Hubble. Michael Soluri

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Handrails are ubiquitous on spacecraft like the ISS and the Hubble. This handrail was recovered from the Hubble, and due to one stripped bolt, astronaut Mike Massimino had to forcibly pull it off in order to place the Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph Fastener Capture Plate over an access panel to the failed instrument. Michael Soluri

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Soluri actually coached some of the crew to help them take more visual photographs in space. Responding to the shiny metallic surface of the Hubble, John Grunsfeld made this self portrait of himself, Earth, and the space shuttle Atlantis. Michael Soluri

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This image was created in 2010 with Hubble's new wide field camera 3; it's two galaxies interacting with each other 340 million light years from Earth. Michael Soluri

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"Crawling around inside the engine compartment of the Atlantis was like being inside of a fine jeweled watch," says Soluri. Here, James Delie, a space shuttle rocket technician, crouches by the main fuel line to the shuttle’s three engines before the May 2009 launch. Michael Soluri

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During the last 20 years of the shuttle program, Ravi Margasahayam was a flame trench/blast shield thermal and acoustic launch pad engineer. He’s standing on the blast shield in the Apollo-era flame trench of shuttle launch pad 39A. Michael Soluri

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For most of the shuttle program Rene Arriens, an advanced systems shuttle technician, helped get the astronaut crews into their spaceships from the "white room" cantilevered out over the launch pad. Rene’s takeaway after 20 years of high pressure countdowns: "Give your people time to think." Michael Soluri

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"Cave art" in the flame trench under the shuttle launch pad. The image reveals the cumulative burn signature from the ignition of the three main engines of the space shuttle. Michael Soluri

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This “Kid Pic” mural was drawn by the children of the crew of the fifth and final servicing mission to the Hubble. Begun as a tradition after the Challenger disaster, the kids spend several hours drawing while waiting for the launch of their astronaut parent. Michael Soluri

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On the ground floor of the cathedral like Vertical Assembly Building at the Kennedy Space Center is the signature wall bearing some 7,350 signatures from essentially the entire space shuttle labor force between 1981 and 2011. Michael Soluri

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2:01 PM, May 11, 2009: The Atlantis launches. As Soluri puts it "there is nothing emotionally comparable to seeing and feeling the launch of a rocket more than three miles away, knowing that seven of your friends are buckled in the nose of that machine ascending into space." Michael Soluri