Month: March 2019

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With Interactive TV, Every Viewer Is a Showrunner Now

March 20, 2019 | Story | No Comments

As we’ve taken our small-screen destiny into our own hands—skinny bundles, “over the top” content, a device-agnostic smorgasbord of streaming—our hands have become empty, idle. Channel surfing feels futile, if not obsolete. TV is no longer a remote-controlled menu to peruse as much as it’s a Tube Goldberg machine carrying our eyes from one diversion to the next. Choice is everywhere; agency, not so much.

Algorithms forever recommend what to watch. Autoplay functions cue up the next episode without waiting for your input. With nothing left to do but gaze and glaze, a viewer’s chief responsibility is to not fall asleep (lest you wake to find yourself five episodes into an unwitting binge of Hell’s Kitchen). It’s strange, then, given its role as the architect of programmatic passivity, that Netflix is handing back the reins via choose-your-own-adventure experiences it’s calling “interactive content.”

Starting in late 2017, Netflix piloted the idea in a handful of children’s shows, peppering installments of Puss in Boots and Buddy Thunderstruck with moments that asked viewers to pick a prompt: Should Puss kiss Dulcinea or shake her hand? Should Buddy and Darnell have a Wet Willie contest or work out and “get jacked”? The decisions gave you a glimmer of control, but Netflix’s latest ambitions lie more in a Sliding Doors or Clue direction: complex stories for grown-ups that reward their choices with starker consequences.

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Netflix’s first concerted push into interactive TV, “Bandersnatch,” aired at the end of 2018. A standalone episode of dystopian sci-fi satire Black Mirror (of course), it told the tale of a video­game designer who tries to adapt a choose-your-own-adventure novel that drove its author insane (oh, of course). Not a fourth wall was left standing. The result, a time-­bending existential thriller with terrifying overtones, was twisty and meta enough not to feel like a gimmick. But it’s difficult to imagine another, less shrewd show pulling off such structural contortions.

Not to say they won’t try. As Todd Yellin, Netflix’s vice president of product, told me before “Bandersnatch” premiered, “We’re starting to hear other stories. There’s a rich vein.” Corporate coquettishness aside, more experiences are in the offing—and judging by the company’s prodigious investments in anime, romantic comedy, and other genres, plenty of them.

Netflix knows the value of our choices well. We’re already being prompted to navigate narrative junctures; it’s called “personalization.” We watch shows, so we’re offered new shows. We watch those shows, then learn about still other shows. Each time we bump from one to the next unravels a Boolean knot, an if-then dance of demographics and precedent—who you are, what you’ve watched—that seeks to keep you right where you are rather than discovering the charms of another streaming platform.

Interactive TV may support more insidious ends, though. We’re already on the cusp of relinquishing our subconscious to technology: VR headsets that track our gaze and see our pupils dilate; virtual assistants that read our mood; sneakers that can tell we’re getting tired because our running stride falters. These are reactions, not choices. They don’t have an opt-out feature. And while they might not seem it, our narrative choices add up to a near-biometric signature too, a portrait visible only in aggregate. Do we seek chaos? Play it safe? How long does it take us to select an option about breakfast cereal versus one where we can urge a character to commit suicide? Netflix already famously pores over every byte of viewer behavior data. Now the buttons we choose, the prompts we pick, the tastes they suggest could become part of that great graph that defines how the company sees us. Television in the age of psychographics.

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Officially, Netflix sees the interactive option as a “lean in” alternative to the “lean back” nature of conventional TV. But what really changes, experientially? Choose-your-own-adventure storytelling is, at its root, curiosity dressed up as control. By the third time you’ve followed one of the paths in “Bandersnatch” to an arbitrary ending, the only reason to loop back to try another tributary is a completist’s sense of duty. (What’s a watercooler moment when everyone at the watercooler saw only a portion of what’s possible?) When the show finally ends, you feel respect for creator Charlie Brooker’s ingenuity, but you don’t come away feeling changed, as you might after a tightly written, sharply edited, well-constructed hour of television. The more malleable the story, the less cogent the experience.

Videogames, the only real analog for interactive storytelling, have always balanced the trade-off by choosing their illusion, giving players pockets of free will in a straitjacket. You may not affect the outcome in an adventure game like God of War or Red Dead Redemption 2—you’ll get there or you won’t—but navigating the challenges in the story offsets the determinism with a visceral sense of autonomy. (Multiplayer games like Overwatch and Fortnite do away with explicit narrative entirely, baking their lore into the background so as not to interfere with their compete-die-repeat Groundhog Day-ness.)

Netflix’s choose-your-own-adventure content will find its audience—first through novelty, then because creators will tease ever more fireworks out of the form. But interactive TV starts at a disadvantage: It is arriving just as we’ve learned, in so many ways, not to interact at all.

Peter Rubin (@provenself) wrote about the Tetris effect in issue 26.11.

This article appears in the February issue. Subscribe now.

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By GETAWAYTHEBERKSHIRES

Something's Off About This Slow-Motion Bullet Video

March 20, 2019 | Story | No Comments

Who doesn't love a good slow motion video? The Slow Mo Guys—Gav and Dan—sure do! In this video of theirs, they use a high speed camera to capture the motion of four different bullets. And lucky for me, the motion looks to be perfect for a video analysis: They give both a reference scale (the black and white markers in the back) as well as the frame rate (100,000 frames per second).

Let's just jump right into an analysis. I will be using Tracker Video Analysis to get position and time data for each bullet after it leaves the weapon. The bullets are so small that it can be difficult to always see them—for all but the largest bullets, I can only mark the bullets when they are passing in front of the white backgrounds. Still, this should be enough for an analysis.

Now for the data. I marked all the bullet positions so you don't have to. Here's a plot of position vs. time for each one (you can also view the plotly version).

I'm pretty happy with this—however, there is a problem. During the video, Gav and Dan switched from the slow-mo view back to a commentary view because the 45 caliber bullet was taking too long. When they switched back to the slow motion view, their timing was off. You can see this in a graph of position vs. time for that bullet. Oh, you can also notice the missing data when the bullet passed in front of the black parts of the background.

But how off is it? Let me first make the assumption that the bullet has a constant velocity in the horizontal direction. If this is the case, then a linear fit to the first part of the data gives a speed of 287.6 m/s. I should add that this speed would convert to 642 mph, which is faster than the speed listed on the video at 577 mph. Perhaps the displayed frame rate is different than the recorded frame rate? Maybe Gav and Dan could give me the answer here.

Anyway, back to the data. From the linear fit, I get the following equation of motion for the bullet.

This equation of motion should give the position of the bullet for any time. The "jump" time is at 0.00825 seconds. The constant velocity equation says that the bullet should have a position of 1.795 meters but the data from the video puts it at 1.886 meters. What about the reverse of this problem? If I know that the position is 1.886, what time should it be? That's a pretty straightforward problem to solve (algebraically). You can do that for yourself as a homework assignment, but I get a correct time of 0.008567 seconds. So, they were "late" by 0.000317 seconds. But wait! That's how far they were off in "real" time, but the video was played back in slow motion. It was recorded at 100,000 fps—but I assume it was displayed at 30 fps. That means this short time interval was actually off by 1 second. That's the mistake.

But that's just a cosmetic error, not really what I wanted to look at. Instead, I want to know if it's possible to estimate the amount of air resistance on these bullets as they leave the muzzle. I have to admit that air resistance on bullets can be pretty tricky. When these suckers are moving super fast, the simpler models for air resistance don't always work. But no matter what, an air drag force on a bullet should push in the opposite direction of the motion of the bullet and slow it down. So I will see if I can estimate the acceleration of the bullet during this short flight.

In one dimension, the acceleration is defined as the change in velocity divided by the change in time. That can be written as the following equation.

I just need to find the velocity at the beginning of the trajectory and then at the end. This will just be the slope of the position-time graph at these two points. Then I can divide by the time of flight for a rough approximation of the acceleration. Here's what I get:

  • Barrett: v1 = 934 m/s, v2 = 854 m/s, Δt = 0.0051 sec, acceleration = 15,686 m/s2. This seems very high.
  • AK-47: v1 = 752 m/s, v2 = 698 m/s, Δt = 0.0062 sec, acceleration = 8710 m/s2.
  • 45 cal: v1 = 246 m/s, v2 = 242 m/s, Δt = 0.012 sec, acceleraiton = 333 m/s2.
  • 9 mm: v1 = 351 m/s, v2 = 330 m/s, Δt = 0.0105 sec, acceleration = 2000 m/s2.

Since these values for the acceleration seem super high, I am going to roughly estimate the acceleration using a basic model for air drag. Here is the equation I will use:

In this expression, ρ is the density of air (about 1.2 kg/m3), A is the cross sectional area of the bullet and C is the drag coefficient. I can approximate the bullet size and mass from this wikipedia page and I will just use a drag coefficient of 0.295. With these values and the velocity right out of the barrel, I get an acceleration of 624 m/s. OK, that is high—but not quite as high as the measured acceleration. Still, I think the values from the video aren't super crazy. That bullet is moving really fast and interacting with the air that will make it slow down quite a bit—especially at first.

Of course ballistics physics can get pretty complicated, but that will never stop me from making some rough estimates.

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The Slow Mo Guys Answer Slow Motion Questions From Twitter

The Slow Mo Guys (Gavin Free and Dan Gruchy) use the power of Twitter to answer some common questions about The Slow Mo Guys, The Super Slow Show, and filming in slow motion. What is their process like when coming up with new video ideas? What's their favorite video they've done? Where do they get all the food for the Super Slow Show?
The Slow Mo Guys star in the YouTube original series The Super Slow Show. Catch the final episodes April 11th.

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By GETAWAYTHEBERKSHIRES

#WhyIDidntReport and the Tragic Banality of Rape in America

March 20, 2019 | Story | No Comments

Professor Christine Blasey Ford was a teenager when she says Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh tried to rape her. You know the story by now. She didn’t report it at the time, but has come forward now that Kavanaugh is close to being confirmed as a justice to the highest court in the land. On Friday morning, President Trump tweeted that he had “no doubt” that if it had happened, Blasey Ford would have reported it right away.

That’s not how this works. That’s not how any of this works. I know this because this is my story, too, and the story of millions of people. Don’t believe me? Look at Twitter today. Look at the hashtag #WhyIDidntReport. Read the cacophony of stories—each different but the same. Stories of assault by strangers, friends, family members, teachers. The hashtag exposes the sheer banality of rape in America. Sexual assault is not rare. It’s common. According to the National Crime Victimization Survey, there were 320,000 sexual assaults in the US in 2016. And 77 percent of people who experienced rape or sexual assault say they did not tell police.

That number is likely much higher. Though the NCVS data is the best the US has for now, critics have long warned that in addition to suffering from the risk of underreporting that befalls all self-reported surveys, its methodology specifically discourages reporting. In a study from five years ago, the National Academy of Sciences found that the government’s survey was probably vastly undercounting sexual crimes. That report found that a separate survey devoted to sexual assault and rape would have more accurate results.

Tweets are not a replacement for this data. But they can augment it. The stories told today give texture to the statistics that tell us this is common. Three hundred and twenty thousand—even if that number is low—is too big and abstract a number to really fathom. But the tweets shared this morning are real, and individual, and impossible to forget.

In an era of misinformation and bots on social media, when we have daily coverage of the pain that can be inflicted by social media, this hashtag is a reminder of how powerful these mediums can be in bringing people together. (Of course, it was also Twitter that the president used to share the tweet that so startled sexual assault survivors this morning.)

But it’s also worth remembering that a hashtag doesn’t tell the whole story of sexual assault in America. Not everyone is on Twitter, and many people aren’t comfortable sharing their stories—even vaguely—in such a public place. But for some, it’s a crucial outlet to validate our identities at a time when it feels like those in power would like us to be silent. Or invisible.

I say our, because I am included in this. When I read Trump’s tweet this morning, first I stopped breathing. When the most powerful person in the land denies your lived experience, it feels like someone punching you in the diaphragm.

When I breathed again, I paced the room, thinking about when I was a teenager, three years older than Ford at the time of her alleged assault. I was in college, and a boy I trusted date raped me in his room. I told a few friends and then didn’t mention it for years. I didn’t report it. I had a lot of reasons not to, but chief among them was: I didn’t think anyone would care. Why were you in his room, I thought they’d ask. I had previously reported a much less serious sexual assault—groping—in high school, and nothing had happened. Why go through the public embarrassment of that again? I didn’t even tell my family about it for 15 years.

This morning, I picked up my phone and tweeted about that incident. I wanted to speak directly to the president, or anyone reading his tweet and thinking it sounded right. Like the women and men who took to Twitter this morning, I wanted to declare: I exist, here is my story.

Reading through the tweets on the hashtag drives home the innumerable reasons people do not report these events. Chief among them is that they won’t be believed, and then they’ll be punished by whoever has an interest in protecting the status quo. Yet, the collectivism in a hashtag gives us all solidarity. Though it is at once the most public airing of our most personal story, it somehow feels less intimate to tweet about this kind of experience than to sit across the table from a family member or friend and tell them.

Why don’t people report? Here’s what some said.

I’m a man and it would make me seem weak.

It would ruin my career before it had even begun.

Nothing happened the first time I reported.

The person who raped me is the person I would have needed to report to.

They were a friend and I was in denial.

He told me he’d kill me if I told anyone.

Men are tweeting about how, for them, the stigma of coming out and reporting their sexual assault was too much to bear. That’s in line with research that’s been saying the same thing for years. People are sharing about how they didn't report professors or bosses who had power over their professional lives. Or how they didn't report family members on whom they literally depended for everything. They’re tweeting about police officers and administrators whom they did tell, but who doubted and blamed them.

This hashtag has power. After I had tweeted and I later saw the trending hashtag, I felt like my story was a raindrop in a lake, at once singular but part of something bigger. I was grateful.
I was floored by what so many people have gone through, even while not being surprised. The specifics of their pain: “He held my face so I couldn’t breathe.” “He was stronger than me, and my cousin.” “I was 13.”

Every woman and many men I know have a story. Or many stories. In 2016, in the weeks after the Access Hollywood tape came out, I wrote a list of the sexual assault and harassment in my life that I could remember. It wasn’t exhaustive, but it was exhausting. It had never occurred to me to write them down before because that kind of experience is so much an accepted part of life for women. “After we are leered at and groped, we get off the train, and go to work, and we don’t mention it, because why would we? This is part of being a woman,” I wrote at the time. I assumed everyone knew.

But everyone doesn’t know. That’s what the #metoo movement, and the backlash to it, has taught us. And that’s why so many people are reliving their own assaults today to share their stories. It hurts to educate people about the ordinariness of sexual assault. It means having to think about something someone might not want to think about. It means remembering the reasons you felt stifled from sharing in the first place. For many of us, it means remembering how violated and embarrassed and guilty, and above all, alone we felt.

I hesitated to tweet this morning. Even though I’d already written about my experience and told my family, and even though I really don’t feel as traumatized by it as I used to, I worried it could in some way seem unprofessional to tell my story. But this thing that happened to me when I was 18; it’s a truth I carry inside me every day.

Even now, telling feels dangerous, despite the fact that the story being told is so universal, which is exactly the point. These are our stories to tell.

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By GETAWAYTHEBERKSHIRES

NASA’s InSight Lander Will Probe Mars, Measure Its Quakes

March 20, 2019 | Story | No Comments

For the first time since launching the Curiosity rover in 2011, NASA is sending a spacecraft to the surface of Mars. Exciting! Surface missions are sexy missions: Everyone loves roving robots and panoramic imagery of other worlds. But the agency's latest interplanetary emissary won't be doing any traveling (it's a lander, not a rover). And while it might snap some pictures of dreamy Martian vistas, it's not the surface that it's targeting.

InSight—short for Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy, and Heat Transport—will be the first mission to peer deep into Mars' interior, a sweeping geophysical investigation that will help scientists answer questions about the formation, evolution, and composition of the red planet and other rocky bodies in our solar system.

The mission is scheduled to launch some time this month, with a window opening May 5. When the lander arrives at Mars on November 26 of this year, it will land a few degrees north of the equator in a broad, low-lying plain dubbed Elysium Planitia. The locale will afford InSight—a solar-powered, burrowing spacecraft—two major perks: maximum sun exposure and smooth, penetrable terrain. It is here that InSight will unfan its twin solar arrays, deploy its hardware, and settle in for two years of work.

Using a five-fingered grapple at the end of a 2.4-meter robotic arm, the lander will grab its research instruments from its deck (a horizontal surface affixed to the spacecraft itself), lift them into the air, and carefully place them onto the planet's surface. A camera attached to the arm and a second one closer to the ground will help InSight engineers scope out the lander's immediate surroundings and plan how to deploy its equipment.

"Have you ever played the claw game at arcades?” asks payload systems engineer Farah Alibay. “That's essentially what we're doing, millions of miles away." The process will require weeks to prepare, plan, and execute, and involve JPL's In-Situ Instrument Lab—a simulation facility in Pasadena, California where mission planners can practice maneuvering the lander before beaming instructions to Mars. But if the InSight team can pull it off, it will be the first time a robotic arm has been used to set down hardware on another planet.

InSight has two main instruments, the first of which is the Seismic Experiment for Interior Structure, or SEIS. An exquisitely sensitive suite of seismometers, SEIS is designed to detect the size, speed, and frequency of seismic waves produced by the shifting and cracking of the Red Planet's interior. You know: Marsquakes.

"It's as good as any of the Earth-based seismometers that we have," says InSight project manager Tom Hoffman; it can measure ground movements smaller than the width of a hydrogen atom. "If there happened to be a butterfly on Mars, and it landed very lightly on this seismometer, we'd actually be able to detect that," Hoffman says. Other things it could detect, besides Marsquakes, include liquid water, meteorite impacts, and plumes from active volcanoes.

For as sensitive as it is, SEIS is damn hardy. "Seismometer designs on Earth are meant to be delicately handled, placed down, and never touched again," says lead payload systems engineer Johnathan Grinblat. SEIS's journey to Mars will be a little more exciting, what with the rocket launch, atmospheric entry, descent, and landing. "It's going to vibrate and experience lots of shocks, so it has to be robust to that," Grinblat says.

It'll also need to withstand dramatics swings in temperature; temperatures at Mars' equatorial regions can reach 70° Fahrenheit on a sunny summer day, and plummet as low as -100° Fahrenheit at night. To see that it does, InSight engineers matrioshka-d its instruments inside multiple layers of protection. The first is a vacuum-sealed titanium sphere, the second an insulating honeycomb structure. The third is a domed wind and thermal shield that will cover the sensors like a high-tech barbecue lid.

Those systems in place, InSight will reach for its second instrument, the Heat Flow and Physical Properties Probe. Also known as HP3, the 18-inch probe is effectively a giant, self-driving nail. It will jackhammer itself some 16 feet into Mars' soil—deep enough to be unaffected by temperature fluctuations on the planet's surface. "When scientists study temperature flow on Earth, they have to burrow even deeper," says Suzanne Smrekar, InSight's deputy principal investigator, because the moist soil conducts heat deep underground. “So Mars is actually pretty easy, relatively speaking.”

Tell that to the probe. Its descent through the Martian terrain will take weeks. As it burrows, it will pause periodically to measure how effectively the surrounding soil conducts heat. Temperature sensors will trail the probe on a tether, like thermometric beads on a string. Together, the temperature readings and conductivity measurements will tell InSight's scientists how much heat is emanating from the planet's insides—and that heat, or lack of it, will help tell researchers what the planet is made of, and how its composition compares to Earth's.

But before InSight takes Mars' temperature and senses for quakes, it'll have to launch, brave the desolate wilds of interplanetary space, and land. Exciting? Unquestionably. But also: "Everything about going to Mars is terrifying," Alibay says. "We're launching on a rocket that is a barely controlled bomb. We're going through six months of vacuum, being bombarded by solar electric energetic particles. We're going to a planet that we have to target, because if we miss it, we can't just turn around. And we have to land. And once we're on the surface, doing the deployments, any number of things could go wrong."

Alibay's not a pessimist. She's an engineer; anticipating misfires and miscalculations, she says, is part of the job description. Plus, she knows her history: Fewer than 50 percent of Mars missions succeed. "Not because we don't know what we're doing," she says, "but because it's really hard."

Not that that should ever prevent NASA from trying. After all: We do not go to space because it is easy.

More Mars

  • Check out the clean room where NASA prepared InSight for launch.

  • Researchers recently discovered clean water ice just below Mars' surface. InSight could detect even more.

  • Go behind the scenes as NASA tests the most powerful rocket ever, part of the agency's a decades-spanning effort to send astronauts to explore asteroids, Mars, and beyond.

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NASA Discovers Evidence for Liquid Water on Mars

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By GETAWAYTHEBERKSHIRES

2018 Had the Biggest Box Office Ever. Thanks, Black Panther

March 20, 2019 | Story | No Comments

Happy gnu year, and welcome back to The Monitor, WIRED's roundup of the latest in the world of culture, from box-office tallies to casting news. In today's installment: A final look at the money-making movie titans of 2018; Coachella announces its headliners for 2019; and a reminder that Hollywood is still an institutionally corrupt patriarchy struggling to keep up with the times!

Ticket Masters

The box office reached an all-time high in 2018, earning nearly $12 billion in revenue in the United States alone—and eclipsing a previous record set in 2016. Last year's big winner, not surprisingly, was Disney, which released 2018's three top-grossing films—Black Panther, Avengers: Infinity War, and Incredibles 2—as well as Ant-Man and the Wasp and, uh, Solo. Overseas, foreign box office totals were also up over the previous year, reaching nearly $30 billion, thanks in no small part to such worldwide smashes as Venom and Bohemian Rhapsody. And though an official tally for attendance isn't available yet, it's expected that the number of North American ticket-buyers in 2018 increased as well—which is good news for 2019. However, a different new data set is far less optimistic about the state of the industry…

Hollywood's Gender Disparity

A new study by San Diego State University's Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film finds that, despite increased coverage and awareness of Hollywood's woefully out-of-whack approach to gender equality, women are still underrepresented in filmmaking. The study notes that 20 percent of 2018's top 250 films featured women in roles characterized as "above-the-line"—an admittedly imperfect term used to describe the work of directors, writers, producers, and other key creatives. That number is up slightly from 2017, but it still amounts to "radical underrepresentation", according to Martha Lauzen, the study's author, who notes that, without equally radical steps to correct the issue, "we are unlikely to see meaningful change."

Coachella Gets a Grande Lineup

Coachella released the lineup for its April festival on Thursday, and this year the multi-weekend gathering will be headlined by Childish Gambino, Ariana Grande, and Tame Impala. (There are also reports that Kanye West was going to land a top-billed spot, but that negotiations broke down when the festival's organizers wouldn't let him mess with the design of the desert venue's main stage. Perhaps he wanted all of the lights on at once?) Also on the lineup: Solange Knowles, Bad Bunny, the 1975, and Kacey Musgraves, among 2,386 others. Sadly, neither One of Pig nor Smushy Twin made the cut.

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By GETAWAYTHEBERKSHIRES

Will Russia's Olympic Ban Shred the Culture of Doping?

March 20, 2019 | Story | No Comments

It took a while, but Russia finally got body-checked out of the Olympic Games. The road to ruin began in 2015, when two Russian track athletes-turned-whistleblowers raised suspicion about widespread state-sponsored doping at the 2012 London Games, followed by an independent report about problems at the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics. Now, the International Olympic Committee has slammed the door on Russia's Olympic dreams, accusing the country of running a state-sponsored program involving more than a thousand athletes since 2011. The Russian team and all of its sports officials were banned from the upcoming winter games in PyeongChang, South Korea, in February, although individual Russian athletes who prove they are clean could compete under a neutral flag.

IOC president Thomas Bach announced the ban at a press conference in Lausanne, Switzerland Tuesday, citing a 17-month investigative report by Samuel Schmid, Switzerland’s former president. “The report clearly lays out an unprecedented attack on the integrity of the Olympic games and sport,” Bach said. “As an athlete myself, I’m feeling very sorry for all the clean athletes who have suffered from this manipulation.”

Despite the earlier warnings of Russian foul play, Bach said Tuesday the IOC didn’t have all the information needed back then to make its decision. The Schmid report detailed the structure of the Russian sports bureaucracy and how it is intertwined with the Russian government. It also gave interesting details about how Russian intelligence agents were able to unlock tamper-proof urine sample bottles—using a dental instrument and a lot of hard work.

Swiss forensic investigators spent two months to unlock the secrets of the supposedly impregnable BEREG-KIT bottles. These Swiss-made bottles are considered tight after five clicks of the sealing ring, with a maximum closure of 15 clicks. But by using a long, thin pointy metal instrument, the investigators were able to jimmy open the seal by carefully inserting it into the plastic ring and pushing it up. The process left tiny scratches on the inside of the bottle—though they were only visible under a microscope. That's how they were able to identify tampering in the Sochi samples.

More than a quarter of the Russian urine samples were likely tainted or swapped out with clean urine collected from the same athletes months earlier. The report also found that suspect Russian urine samples contained high levels of salt, several times higher than found in the human body, which was used to reconstitute the urine.

The Russians didn’t invent any new performance enhancing drugs for Sochi. “They just bought them from the pharmacy,” says Mark Johnson, a San Diego-based author who has written about doping in sports. “It shows that where when you take the resources of a government, both the scientific and financial resources and their research resources and apply it to a problem, they can find a solution,” Johnson says. “If it is one athlete trying to pry open a bottle, you can’t do it.”

The culture of doping in Russia and the Soviet Union goes back to the 1960s, when success in sports brought glory to the nation. Between 1968 and 2017, Russian athletes were stripped of 50 Olympic medals—including one third of their 33 won at the Sochi games.

The IOC’s Bach said that international athletes that finished behind the Russians who doped will have a special ceremony in South Korea. “We will do our best to reorganize ceremonies in PyeongChang in 2018 to try to made up for the moment they missed on the finish line or the podium,” Bach said. “The IOC will propose or will be taking measures for a more robust anti-doping system under [the World Anti-Doping Agency] so that something like this can not happen again.”

    More on the Olympics

  • Eric Niiler

    Olympic Drug Cops Will Scan for Genetically Modified Athletes

  • Chelsea Leu

    It’ll Be Really Hard to Test for Doping at the Rio Olympics

  • Emma Grey Ellis

    What Would Happen if the Olympics Banned Russia?

But Johnson and other critics are skeptical that the IOC’s Russia ban or a new testing system instituted will make a difference in future Olympic games. He notes that record-breaking athletic performance—regardless of whether it is the result of drugs, or perhaps soon through gene-editing techniques—is part of what draws TV viewers, advertisers, and national prestige.

“The objective of pro sports is to entertain and push the boundaries of performance, it’s not to be a moralistic teacher or imposer of values,” says Johnson. Of course, Olympic officials beg to differ. They point to the stated "Olympism" values of fair play, ethics. and hard work.

But sports and national prestige will always go together, and Russians have long since decided doping is worth the risk. Vitaly Murko, Russia’s former minister of sport, was implicated in having a direct role in the doping program by the Schmid report and an earlier 2015 investigation by WADA. On Tuesday, the IOC gave him a lifetime ban. But even though Murko can’t go to the Olympics, he won't be leaving sports behind. Now the country’s deputy prime minister, he is also president of the Russian football union—and next summer, he will be an official host of Russia’s World Cup soccer tournament.

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By GETAWAYTHEBERKSHIRES

How Trump's Immigration Policy Ended Up in Peter Jackson's New Movie

March 20, 2019 | Story | No Comments

Early on in Mortal Engines, the forthcoming movie based on Philip Reeve's book, a small Bavarian population gets consumed by the moving metropolis of "London." (The movie, like the book, is set in a future where roving "predator cities" ingest smaller towns for their resources.) As its citizens are forced to resettle in their new home, voices on loudspeakers tell them where to go and what to do. Most of the instructions are commonplace for authoritarian dystopias: stay in line, no weapons are allowed, etc. But then there's this one: "Be aware, children may be temporarily separated from parents."

The line wasn't always there—it wasn't in the book, or the original script. But earlier this year, as the Trump administration's zero-tolerance immigration policy led to detentions and child-separations at the southern US border, the loudspeaker announcement found its way in. The movie, says director Christian Rivers, isn't meant to be a "message film," but since it deals with life after a catastrophic war and the ever-repeating cycle of human nature, the line seemed fitting, and adding it amounted to little more than an extra voiceover.

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"We thought it was worth making a little comment about that," says Peter Jackson, who produced the film and co-wrote the screenplay, referencing the "horrific" acts of American immigration authorities. "They’ve become the Child Catcher of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, really."

That line may be the most politics-focused the film gets, but it's definitely not the only moment in Mortal Engines during which the past haunts the future. The premise is that a "60 Minute War" has ravaged Earth, destroying most of humanity, and their history along with it. The survivors have been left to roam in moving cities, looking for resources. What artifacts they've been able to recover from the 20th and 21st centuries don't offer many clues, other than the fact that people were consumed by TV, computers, and smartphones; the period is referred to in the film as the "Screen Age." (Also, based on large statues of the Minions, survivors think the Despicable Me characters might have been worshipped like gods.) Those things, like the immigration line, "make this futuristic world more relatable," Rivers says.

And audience relatability is important. Mortal Engines hits theaters on December 14, fighting for audience attention against films like Transformers flick Bumblebee and Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse. Not being a known franchise, and coming from a book series that doesn't have the following of The Lord of the Rings, it's got an uphill battle. "We're surrounded by franchise films or sequels or whatever—Aquaman and Mary Poppins Returns—and there's all this stuff surrounding us that's got pre-determined audiences," Jackson says. "We're this sort of little orphan film that no one knows anything about."

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By GETAWAYTHEBERKSHIRES

A Robot Does the Impossible: Assembling an Ikea Chair Without Having a Meltdown

March 20, 2019 | Story | No Comments

And just like that, humanity draws one step closer to the singularity, the moment when the machines grow so advanced that humans become obsolete: A robot has learned to autonomously assemble an Ikea chair without throwing anything or cursing the family dog.

Researchers report today in Science Robotics that they’ve used entirely off-the-shelf parts—two industrial robot arms with force sensors and a 3-D camera—to piece together one of those Stefan Ikea chairs we all had in college before it collapsed after two months of use. From planning to execution, it only took 20 minutes, compared to the human average of a lifetime of misery. It may all seem trivial, but this is in fact a big deal for robots, which struggle mightily to manipulate objects in a world built for human hands.

To start, the researchers give the pair of robot arms some basic instructions—like those cartoony illustrations, but in code. This piece goes first into this other piece, then this other, etc. Then they place the pieces in a random pattern front of the robots, which eyeball the wood with the 3-D camera. So the researchers give the robots a list of tasks, then the robots take it from there.

“What the robot does is to first figure out where exactly is the original position of the frame,” says engineer Quang-Cuong Pham of Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, “and then calculates the motion of the two arms automatically to go and grasp it and transport it.”

As one arm grasps, say, the back of the chair, the other arm picks up one of those infernal wooden pegs and tries inserting it into a hole at the joint. That 3-D camera only has an accuracy of a few millimeters, so the robot has to feel around. The robot makes swirling motions around the hole, and when it feels the force pattern change, it knows the peg has dropped in slightly, then will apply more force to fully insert the thing.

This, though, is where the robot tends to have problems. If it hasn’t scanned the hole accurately enough, it might start swirling too far away—all the way over the edge of the piece. “Then the changes in force pattern are the same, so it would think that it has found the hole and it would go and insert in the void,” says Pham.

Matters grow more complicated when the robot arms have to grip either end of a larger piece of the chair. Not only does each robot arm have to calculate its own grasping and lifting motion, but it has to do so in consideration of the other arm. Think if you grasped the ends of a baseball bat and swirled it around—each arm is restricted by the movements of the other.

The stakes are even higher for the robot because it’s making calculations as it’s eyeballing the pieces, and has to commit to the plan it works out. “If there is a small error, for example in the modeling of the object, then the arms would fight each other, pulling this direction and the other pulling in another direction,” says Pham. “If that happens the robot will break the object.”

The solution is the force sensors. “When we sense that the force is too much, then it would change the motion of the robot to accommodate the errors,” Pham adds.

Pretty impressive stuff, but the fact remains that the researchers have to do a good amount of hand-holding. "This is a nice result,” says UC Berkeley’s Ken Goldberg, who works in robotic manipulation. “The big challenge is to replace such carefully engineered special purpose programming with new approaches that could learn from demonstrations and/or self-learn to perform tasks like this."

Which is exactly what the researchers are now working on. The next level of autonomy could be something called imitation learning, in which a human either joysticks the robots to learn to do the tasks in the right sequence, or the robot watches the human do it and then mimics.

The ultimate goal? “The final level is we show the robot an image of the assembled chair and then it has to figure it out,” says Pham. “But I would envision this last step not in the next probably five or six years or so.”

This kind of advanced learning will be essential for robots going forward, because there’s just no way engineers can program them to manipulate every object they come across in the complicated world of humans. That means facing challenges including but not limited to bringing down the tyranny of flat-packed Ikea furniture.

Curse you, Stefan. Curse you.

More helpful robots

  • Over at UC Berkeley, engineers have taught Brett the robot to teach itself to master a children's game by failing over and over.

  • As far as imitation learning is concerned, a startup called Kindred is helping picker robots learn to manipulate products in fulfillment centers.

  • Journey inside the Panoptic Studio, which is giving robots the super senses necessary to explore our world.

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Playing Kingdom Hearts III Feels Like Coming Home

March 20, 2019 | Story | No Comments

It's impossible for me to tell you whether you're going to like Kingdom Hearts III. I also can't tell you whether it's good. What I can say, though, is that it means something to me.

I still remember beating the first Kingdom Hearts. I remember being sick, home from school, my body aching as my fingers slid over the controller. I remember white winter light peeling in through my bedroom window. I remember that, at the time, I didn't actually own the game. It was rented, and I would insist my mom or grandmother check it back out from the video store for me every week.

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Personal narratives about playing videogames are a little passé at this point, I know. So many people grew up playing videogames that almost everyone has a story like this. But Kingdom Hearts is a series that was there for me at the precise time I needed it, the exact presence I required in my life at that moment. Since age 11, the long, winding, bizarre Kingdom Hearts series has been with me. Playing the third numbered title, after all this time, isn't just playing another game. It’s a sort of homecoming.

For those who didn't spend their childhood with this series, a rough recap: Kingdom Hearts is primarily the story of Sora, an adventurous and happy young boy who teams up with Donald Duck and Goofy (yes, the Disney characters) to explore a universe full of isolated Disney-themed worlds in order to fight monsters and find their friends. It gets more complicated than that—indeed, over the course of nearly a dozen titles of various sizes since, it has gotten a lot, lot more complicated—but that's the core of it. Sora is just trying to help his friends in a vast, confusing world of anime villains, monsters born of pure darkness, and cartoon characters.

Something about it fascinated me on a deep, personal level. When I beat the original Kingdom Hearts, I wanted to know what happened to Sora next. I wanted to learn the fate of his brooding, long-haired rival/best friend, Riku. I was tantalized by the mysteries of the Keyblade, the magic sword/key hybrid that, yes, long-time Final Fantasy creative Tetsuya Nomura definitely came up with on his own.

So I joined an online message board for hardcore fans. We crafted stupid theories. We bonded. A series about the power of friendship, filtered through the lens of Japanese role-playing-game eccentricity, became a pathway to real friendships. I grew up, and my relationship to Kingdom Hearts changed, matured, and gained nuance, but those friendships remained. They influenced my choice of college. They helped develop me into a full person. I don't speak to those people much anymore, but their presence in my life fundamentally changed it and improved it.

I can't possibly separate Kingdom Hearts from what Kingdom Hearts has meant to me. But I can tell you a few things about Kingdom Hearts III. I can tell you that it manages to complete the story started in that original game in 2001 with the sort of goofy, nerdy elegance that's come to define the series, weaving together nearly two decades of complicated, insular plot lines to create moments of sincere, heartfelt connection between its impossible characters and their Disney friends.

I can also tell you that it feels great to play, the simplistic button-mashing of the earlier titles replaced by a system that resembles previous ones but transcends them, with transforming Keyblades and special moves meant to imitate Disney theme park rides that can be optionally sprinkled into the combat, making the player a sort of symphony conductor of brightly colored chaos.

And, like the other games, this one awkwardly mixes in levels that are recaps of Disney movies with an original plot that's like a Final Fantasy game if Final Fantasy was a series about the power of light and friendship. I can also report that, at one point, Elsa from Frozen sings "Let It Go" for its full runtime while Sora, Donald, and Goofy look on in awe, and I can tell you I laughed uncontrollably.

I can't tell you whether any of that will resonate with you. It might come off as unbearably twee, or naive, or confusing and poorly plotted. But for me, every moment, even the absolute dumbest, worked. It worked because of nostalgia, sure, and because of the sentimental connection I have with the series as a whole. I'm invested in these characters and the world they live in. But also because its thematic content, its ideas about friendship and hope and heroism, resonate. Kingdom Hearts III is a game about growing up, about facing tragedy and death and deciding, y’know what, screw that stuff, we have our friends and we're going to fight. It's willfully, thoughtlessly cheerful and straightforward, even in the bleakest circumstances. When I was a kid that seemed charming. Now, it seems vital, and playing Kingdom Hearts is an exercise in holding on to those optimistic parts of myself.

Sora is a hero who goes around talking about how his friends are his power, how together they can get through anything. I really, really want to believe him. Whether you like Kingdom Hearts III is largely going to be a matter of whether you want to believe him, too.

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By GETAWAYTHEBERKSHIRES

Science Is Getting Us Closer to the End of Infertility

March 20, 2019 | Story | No Comments

About 40 years ago, Louise Brown, the first human created using in vitro fertilization, was conceived in a petri dish. Not long after her birth, Leon Kass, a prominent biologist and ethicist at the University of Chicago, wrung his hands about the then-­revolutionary technology of joining sperm and egg outside the body. The mere existence of the baby girl, he wrote in an article, called into question “the idea of the humanness of our human life and the meaning of our embodiment, our sexual being, and our relation to ancestors and descendants.” The editors of Nova magazine suggested in vitro fertilization was “the biggest threat since the atom bomb.” The American Medical Association wanted to halt research altogether.

Yet a funny thing happened, or didn’t, in the decades that followed: Millions of babies were conceived using IVF. They were born healthy and perfectly normal babies, and they grew to become healthy and perfectly normal adults. Brown is one of them. She lives in Bristol, England, and works as a clerk for a sea freight company. She’s married and has two healthy boys. Everyone is doing fine.

Nothing so excites the forces of reaction and revolution like changes in human reproduction. When our ideas of sex are nudged aside by technologies, we become especially agitated. Some loathe the new possibilities and call for restrictions or bans; others claim untrammeled rights to the new thing. Eventually, almost everyone settles down, and the changes, no matter how implausible they once seemed, become part of who we are.

We are now on the brink of another revolution in reproduction, one that could make IVF look quaint. Through an emerging technology called in vitro gametogenesis (or IVG), scientists are learning how to convert adult human cells—taken perhaps from the inside of a cheek or from a piece of skin on the arm—into artificial gametes, lab-made eggs and sperm, that could be combined to create an embryo and then be implanted in a womb. For the infertile or people having trouble conceiving, it would be a huge breakthrough. Even adults with no sperm or eggs could conceivably become biological parents.

In the future, new kinds of families might become possible: a child could have a single biological parent because an individual could theoretically make both their own eggs and sperm; a same-sex couple could have a child who is biologically related to both of them; or a grieving widow might use fresh hair follicles from a dead spouse’s brush to have a child her late husband didn’t live to see.

At the same time, modern gene-editing technologies such as Crispr-Cas9 would make it relatively easy to repair, add,
or remove genes during the IVG process, eliminating diseases or conferring advantages that would ripple through a child’s genome. This all may sound like science fiction, but to those following the research, the combination of IVG and gene editing appears highly likely, if not inevitable. Eli Adashi, who was dean of medicine at Brown University and has written about the policy challenges of IVG, is astounded by what researchers have achieved so far. “It’s mind-boggling,” he says, although he cautions that popular understanding of the technology has not kept pace with the speed of the advances: “The public is almost entirely unaware of these technologies, and before they become broadly feasible, a conversation needs to begin.”

The story of artificial gametes truly begins in 2006, when a Japanese researcher named Shinya Yamanaka reported that he had induced adult mouse cells into becoming pluripotent stem cells. A year later, he demonstrated that he could do the same with human cells. Unlike most other cells, which are coded to perform specific, dedicated tasks, pluripotent stem cells can develop into any type of cell at all, making them invaluable for researchers studying human development and the
origins of diseases. (They are also invaluable to humans: Embryos are composed of stem cells, and babies are the products of their maturation.) Before Yamanaka’s breakthrough, researchers who wanted to work with stem cells had to extract them from embryos discarded during IVF or from eggs that had been harvested from women and later fertilized; in both cases, the embryos were destroyed in the process of isolating the stem cells. The process was expensive, controversial, and subject to intense government oversight in the United States. After Yamanaka’s discovery, scientists possessed a virtually inexhaustible supply of these so-called induced pluripotent stem cells (or iPSCs), and all over the world, they have since been trying to replicate each stage of cellular development, refining the recipes that can coax stem cells to become one cell or another.

In 2014, as a consequence of Yamanaka’s work, a Stanford researcher named Renee Reijo Pera cut skin from infertile men’s forearms, reprogrammed the skin cells to become iPSCs, and transplanted them into the testicles of mice to create human germ cells, the primitive precursors to eggs and sperm. (No embryos were created using these germ cells.) Two years later, in a paper published in Nature, two scientists in Japan, Mitinori Saitou and Katsuhiko Hayashi, described how they had turned cells from a mouse’s tail into iPSCs and from there into eggs. It was the first time that artificial eggs had been made outside of an organism’s body, and there was even more extraordinary news: Using the synthetic eggs, Saitou and Hayashi created eight healthy, fertile pups.

But baby mice do not a human make, and Saitou and another scientist, Azim Surani, are each working directly with human cells, trying to understand the differences between how mice and human iPSCs become primordial germ cells. In December 2017, Surani announced a crucial milestone concerning the eight-week cycle, after which germ cells begin the process of transforming into gametes. His lab had successfully nudged the development of stem cells to around week three of that cycle, inching closer to the development of a human gamete. Once adult human cells can be made into gametes, editing the stem cells will be relatively easy.

How soon before humans have children using IVG? Hayashi, one of the Japanese scientists, guesses it will take five years to produce egg-like cells from other human cells, with another 10 to 20 years of testing before doctors and regulators feel the process is safe enough to use in a clinic. Eli Adashi is less sure of the timing than he is of the outcome. “I don’t think any of us can say how long,” he says. “But the progress in rodents was remarkable: In six years, we went from nothing to everything. To suggest that this won’t be possible in humans is naive.”

Some cautiousness about IVG and gene editing is appropriate. Most medicines that succeed in so-called mouse models never find a clinical use. Yet IVG and gene editing are different from, say, cancer drugs: IVG induces cells to develop along certain pathways, which nature does all the time. As for gene editing, we are already beginning to use that in non-germ-line cells, where such changes are not heritable, in order to treat blood, neurological, and other types of diseases. Once scientists and regulators are confident they have minimized the potential risks of IVG, we could easily make heritable changes to germ cells like eggs, sperm, or early-stage embryos, and with those changes, we’d be altering the germ line, our shared human inheritance.

Used together, we can imagine would-be parents who have genetic diseases, or are infertile, or want to confer various genetic advantages on their children going to a clinic and swabbing their cheeks or losing a little piece of skin. Some 40 weeks later, they’ll have a healthy baby.

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The demand for IVG coupled with gene editing would be significant. Around 7 percent of men and 11 percent of women of reproductive age in the US have reported problems with fertility, according to the National Institutes of Health. And IVF, which is typically the last, best hope for those struggling to conceive, is invasive, often doesn’t work, and can’t work for women who have no eggs at all.

Then there is genetic disease. Of the more than 130 million children who will be born next year, around 7 million will have serious genetic disorders. Today, parents who don’t want to pass on genetic abnormalities (and who have the thousands of dollars often required) might resort to IVF with preimplantation genetic diagnosis, where embryos are genetically tested before they are transferred to a woman’s uterus. But that process necessarily involves the same invasive process of IVF, and it entails rejecting and often destroying embryos with the unwanted genes, an act that some parents find morally impermissible. With IVG and gene editing, prospective parents would think it unremarkable to give doctors permission to test or alter stem cells or gametes. A doctor might say, “Your child will have a higher chance of developing X. Would you like us to fix that for you?”

Proving that IVG and gene editing are broadly safe and reliable will be necessary before regulatory agencies around the world relax the laws that currently preclude creating a human being from sythnetic gametes or tinkering with the human germ line. Although IVF was greeted with alarm by many mainstream physicians and scientists, it nonetheless was subject to little regulation; it slipped through the federal regulatory machinery charged with overseeing drugs or medical devices, as it was neither. Because IVG and gene editing are so strange, there may be popular and expert demand for their oversight. But in what form? Richard Hynes, a professor of cancer research at MIT, helped oversee a landmark 2017 report on the science and ethics of human genome editing. “We set out a long list of criteria,” Hynes says, “including only changing a defect to a gene that was common in the population. In other words, no enhancements; just back to normal.”

Critics imagine other ethical quandaries. Parents with undesirable traits might be coerced by laws—or, more likely, preferential insurance rates—to use the technologies. Or parents might choose traits in their children that others might consider disabilities. “Everyone thinks about parents eliminating disease or [about] augmentation, but it’s a big world,” says Hank Greely, a professor of law at Stanford University and the author of The End of Sex and the Future of Human Reproduction. “What if there are parents who wanted to select for Tay-Sachs disease? There are plenty of people in Silicon Valley who are somewhere on the spectrum, and some of them will want children who are neuro-atypical.”

And what of unknown risks? Even if Saitou, Hayashi, and their peers can prove that their techniques don’t create immediate genetic abnormalities, how can we know for sure that children born using IVG and gene editing won’t get sick later in life, or that their descendants won’t lack an important adaptation? Carriers of the gene for sickle cell, for example, enjoy a protective advantage against malaria. How can we know if we are shortsightedly eliminating a disorder whose genes confer some sort of protection?

George Daley, the dean of Harvard Medical School, has a simple answer to that question: We can’t. “There are always unknowns. No innovative therapy, whether it is a drug for a disease or something so bold and disruptive as germ line intervention, can ever remove all possible risk. Fear of the unknown and unquantifiable risks shouldn’t absolutely prohibit us from making interventions that could have great benefits. The risks of a genetic, inherited disease are quantifiable, known, and in many cases devastating. So we go forward, accepting the risks.”

Among the current unknowns are the name and sex of the first child who will be born using IVG. But somewhere there might be two people who will become her parents. They may not know each other yet or the difficulties with fertility or genetic disease that will prompt their physician to suggest IVG and gene editing. But sometime before the end of the century, their child will have her picture taken for a birthday profile in whatever media exists. In the likeness, her smile, like Louise Brown’s today, will be radiant with the joy of being here.

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Tools for Fetal Surgery •
Save the Preemies •
The Year's Best Tech Playthings •
Cashing in on Kiddie YouTube •
The #MiniMilah Effect •
Rethinking Screen Time •
A Brief History of Digital Worries •
Solving Health Issues at All Stages

Jason Pontin (@jason_pontin) is the former editor in chief and publisher of MIT Technology Review.

This article appears in the April issue. Subscribe now.

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