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Knead To Know: The Secrets of Gluten, Revealed

March 20, 2019 | Story | No Comments

If your homemade country loaf comes out of the oven shrunken and unfluffy, you may have neglected a central tenet of breadmaking: Hydrate the flour. When you knead the dough, you are massaging moisture into the wheat’s proteins, creating a matrix of gluten that traps gases so the bread can inflate from the inside. “The gluten structure is stretchy but impermeable,” says Nathan Myhrvold, the tech millionaire, chef, and creator of 2011’s six-volume science-of-cooking megawork, Modernist Cuisine. Now, Myhrvold and his team of food scientists and photographers are back with five more volumes, focused exclusively on bread.

The photos in the $625 labor of loaves, ­Modernist Bread, range from cross-sections of rising sourdough to artful, side-lit layers of injera. But so much about baking, as any practitioner worth their pinch of salt will tell you, takes place at the invisible-to-the-eye chemical level, and Myhrvold wanted to expose that hidden process.

For the image above, his crew rinsed a small ball of dough with water to wash away starch granules and water-soluble proteins, leaving behind a blob of near-pure gluten. Then, using a scanning electron microscope borrowed from Myhrvold’s company, Intellectual Ventures, they captured a slice of the gluten magnified to 734X, tweaking the contrast of the black-and-white image to give maximum visibility to the webby network at the heart of every perfectly quenched, ready-to-bake gob of pre-bread. As Myhrvold puts it, “That web makes wheat breads what they are.” Meaning: chewy, delicious, and upsetting to gluten-sensitive stomachs everywhere.

The first thing you notice when you walk into the theater is the smell of soap, followed by a faint stickiness on the carpeted floors, and a tacky coating on the armrests of the seats.

When the lights come up at the Gazillion Bubbles Show, it quickly becomes clear what's going on. Powerful fans blow tiny soap bubbles into the audience by the thousands. Little kids giggle; bigger kids scream. And like a magician, 27-year-old Melody Yang pulls out her wands.

She uses water-based vapor (she calls it "smoke") to create bubbles that erupt like volcanoes, and some that launch into the air like rockets. She brings kids on stage and makes huge, tubular bubbles that can encase five of them inside.

"People love it. It's just something that is so universal," she says. "It's something that takes you back to your childhood because a lot of the times when we see a bubble we see it when we're very young, and we're just like 'what is that?' You know, it puts us back in the moment."

Yang grew up on this stage. Her parents, Fan and Ana, have been performing together for decades, and over the years they brought Melody and her brother, Deni, into the act as well.

"Me and my brother would walk on stage and he'd put us in a bubble," Melody says of her father, "and then he would slowly teach me and my brother the routine."

Now, the Yangs take turns performing in New York, where they share a space with the Tony Award-winning musicals Avenue Q and Jersey Boys, and in venues around the world.

The family has set more than a dozen world records, for everything from Encasing the Largest Land Mammal in a Bubble (an elephant) to fitting the Most People Inside a Bubble (181 was their record) to making the world's Longest Soap Bubble Wall (a 166-foot, 11-inch bubble), a record that still stands. Their records not only prove that the Yangs are bubble experts, but also that there's a record for just about everything.

Watch the video above to see the incredible bubbles Melody makes—and to learn some of her tricks for making them at home.

Satellites do an incredible job of mapping algal blooms, the green mats that spread over lakes and oceans during warm, nutrient-rich summers. But the hypnotic, swirling images from space can't tell if toxins are lurking in a carpet of cyanobacteria, threatening the safety of water.

Ecologists and hydrologists can test water's drinkability by boating through the blooms—though collecting samples off the side of a power boat is tricky and inconvenient. So this year, scientists are monitoring Lake Erie with a robot, 18 feet below the water’s surface.

The so-called Environmental Sample Processor, ESPniagara, sits on the floor of Lake Erie’s western basin. It collects algae from the surrounding water, analyzes microcystin (a small, circular liver-toxic protein), and uploads results for researchers at the end of every test. They're watching this toxin closely, because elevated levels of it could swiftly poison the water supply for humans and wildlife in the surrounding area.

A no-frills charm dominates the ESPniagara's aesthetic. “It kind of looks like a trash can,” says Tim Davis, a molecular ecologist at NOAA in Ann Arbor. Tentacles of clear plastic tubing for sample processing swirl around the lab-in-a-can’s lower half, while circuits and wiring snake between the components above. Those electronics and the machine’s batteries—400 D cell batteries power the unit—understandably need some protection to sit at the bottom of the lake. “The metal trashcan is essentially a pressure case that can withstand very, very high pressures, and essentially keeps it dry,” Davis says.

Staying dry isn’t the only requirement for the lab capsule. ESPniagara also needs to stay put, remain upright, and avoid sinking too deeply into the gunky mud. So NOAA recruited applied physicists at the University of Washington to design the 1,000-pound frame encasing the unit. By their calculations, even if Hurricane Sandy-level winds hit Michigan, the water sampling could continue. And at the lake’s surface, a round orange data buoy relays information from its tests via a cellular modem, like the one in your phone.

So far ESPniagara has been testing the water every other day. But as of August 1, with the risk of harmful blooms steadily rising, it began testing on a daily schedule. It pulls lake water in, concentrating algae cells onto a filter. When the filter is clogged with plenty of algae to measure, the biology begins.

While full-scale labs use temperature-controlled water baths, freezers, and centrifuges to run these kinds of experiments, the ESPniagara accomplishes the same tests with a few carefully formulated protocols. Each toxicity measurement happens within a quarter-sized puck that’s about an inch and a half tall.

To measure the algae’s microcystins, it’s important to know that the cyanobacteria hold most of their toxins inside their cells. “So in order to get accurate concentrations, you need to be able to break the cells open,” Davis says. A bit of methanol-Tween-20 (basically dish detergent) does the trick, along with some heat and pressure. And once the cells are cracked open to reveal all the toxins, the ESPniagara dots samples into a four-by-five grid for quantification.

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The toxin detection relies on antibodies that fluoresce when they’ve bound a specific substance. In this case, the antibodies that don’t bind a toxin light up, so brighter dots mean safer water. An internal camera photographs the test array, and at the end of this whole process—it takes roughly four hours—the data buoy sends off that photo. The results end up with collaborators all the way across the country, at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute servers. Then Davis and his team download them for their own analysis.

Once they've got toxicity data, they combine it with satellite measurements for algal biomass and hydrodynamic models of windspeed and current. That full picture tells them how toxic the bloom is, and where the toxins will end up next. Knowing that strong winds are about to send more toxins into the water supply, for example, helps treatment plants decide how to act. When more microcystins arrive, they’ll know to roll out extra filtration steps—like particle activated charcoal neutralization—to keep drinking water safe. It’s almost like the ESPniagara gives water treatment plants … extrasensory perception.

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Tap Water

You can't see it, but there's a lot going on inside a glass of tap water. The faucet aqua is essentially an invisible cocktail of sulfates, resins, varying levels of lead, and so much more. Find out what else is inside.

Let's get this out of the way: You've seen the first trailer (and, before that, the TV spot) for Solo: A Star Wars Story, right? If not, go ahead and do that. OK, now that we have your undivided attention, we can get on with all the other Star Wars news of the last few weeks. And there's a lot. Can you say "a whole new series of movies, and even more"?

The Solo Han Solo Film Had Two Han Solos Behind the Scenes (Got All That?)

The Source: Lucasfilm president Kathleen Kennedy

Probability of Accuracy: If Kennedy is saying it, it’s legit.

The Real Deal: While the new trailers didn’t show much in terms of Alden Ehrenreich’s Han Solo, it was revealed via Entertainment Weekly that the original Han Solo, Harrison Ford, was involved in the making of Solo: A Star Wars Story, acting as an advisor to his successor. “What [Ford] did so beautifully for Alden was he talked a lot about what he remembered when he first read Star Wars, and what George had done with Han,” Lucasfilm president Kathleen Kennedy explained. “Who the character was and the conversations he had for so many years with George about how that character developed… He gave Alden that kind of insight which was invaluable. There were several times in the course of making the movie where Alden would actually recount some of the things that Harrison had pointed out. I think that was really, really helpful to him.” How much of this will come across onscreen, of course, no one will know until May.

Fans Won’t See the Seams In Solo

The Source: Director Ron Howard

Probability of Accuracy: The proof will be in the pudding when the movie’s out, but he seems very sincere, if nothing else.

The Real Deal: EW also talked to director Ron Howard about stepping in and taking over Solo after the dismissal of original directors Phil Lord and Chris Miller. When asked about how much of the finished movie is his, versus Lord and Miller’s, he demurred. “I don’t really want to explain it. I don’t really want to be specific about that because, again, I don’t even want that to matter to fans,” he said. “I could understand why you’d ask, and some might even be curious, but look, everybody who has been involved in this has done nothing but love what this movie could be, and that’s been the vibe around it. I think audiences are gonna feel that love and excitement.” Well, that’s the hope, at least…

Winter Is Coming. Kind Of

The Source: An official Lucasfilm announcement

Probability of Accuracy: It’s an official announcement; this is as accurate as it gets.

The Real Deal: In a surprising move, Lucasfilm announced last week that Game of Thrones executive producers David Benioff and D.B. Weiss are going to be heading to the galaxy far, far away once their time in Westeros is up, signing on to create a new series of Star Wars movies for the studio. Lucasfilm didn't provide any details beyond that—but that didn’t stop people from speculating that they could be working on a Knights of the Old Republic movie, just like they did when it was announced that Rian Johnson would be working on a new Star Wars movie series. At this point, someone needs to make a real Old Republic movie just so fans won't have to speculate about it anymore.

Are There Secret Star Wars Movies in the Works?

The Source: Mysterious, vague rumors on Twitter

Probability of Accuracy: Who can even tell…?

The Real Deal: The hiring of Weiss and Benioff also launched a conversation online about the fact that Lucasfilm seems unable to hire anyone to make a Star Wars movie who isn’t a white man, at a time when the movies themselves are making efforts to branch out in terms of the diversity of their leads. This piece by Marc Bernardin is a fine example of why this is a problem, and what it means for the future of Star Wars movies and the fandom as a whole. Which is what made these tweets particularly interesting…

…Are there secret Star Wars movies in the works that no one knows about, being made by people that no one knows is working on them? It sounds unlikely and deeply paranoid … but also not entirely impossible, despite that.

A Galaxy Streaming Very Close to You Indeed

The Source: Disney CEO Bob Iger

Probability of Accuracy: It’s a vague announcement, but it's something that Iger has no reason to fib about, so let’s call it accurate.

The Real Deal: Star Wars: Rebels is coming to an end, but that doesn’t mean that there won’t be any more Star Wars on the small screen. Indeed, just the opposite; speaking to investors recently, Disney CEO Bob Iger revealed, “We are developing not just one, but a few Star Wars series specifically for the Disney direct-to-consumer app. We've mentioned that and we are close to being able to reveal at least one of the entities that is developing that for us. Because the deal isn't completely closed, we can't be specific about that.” Multiple series? Start your speculation engines.

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This App Maps Opioid Overdoses in Real Time

March 20, 2019 | Story | No Comments

The opioid epidemic is ripping through America like a fire untamed. Blame big pharma, if you want. Blame cheap pain pills and cheaper heroin. Blame the mesolimbic reward system. Just don't wallow in it—the blame. Wallowing takes time, and with opioid abuse killing close to 100 Americans a day, time is in exceedingly short supply. “The number one question is, how do we get a better sense of what's going on in our communities in real-time," says Jeff Beeson, deputy director of the Washington/Baltimore High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area. Not a year from now. Not a month from now. Today.

So last year, the Washington/Baltimore HIDTA set out to create a tool that would give law enforcement and health officials the data they need to respond to the public health crisis as swiftly as possible. The result was a web app called ODMAP that combines street-level data with tools from Esri, the digital mapping company, to help public health officials, police departments, and first responders track and respond to overdoses in real time.

ODMAP's national scope distinguishes it from similar opioid-tracking apps. States across the US are racing to develop tools for managing the country's opioid crisis, and Indiana in particular has successfully tracked trends, collecting data from local agencies to build a statewide database of things like drug arrests, seizures, and administrations of the overdose-reversing drug naloxone. ODMAP takes a similar approach, but focuses on mapping overdoses, specifically—whether they're happening locally, two towns over, or several states away.

That's the kind of geospatial data that can help communities brace for overdoses before they happen. "You've seen those epidemiology maps where a disease spreads outward from an initial set of dots? We're seeing similar patterns on a daily basis with ODMAP," says Beeson. If ODMAP registers a spike in overdoses in Anne Arundel County, Maryland, the app immediately notifies public health officials in Berkeley County, West Virginia, 120 miles away. Why? Because in 8 to 10 hours, West Virginia's eastern panhandle is going to start seeing overdoses, too.

"A lot of these geographic correlations, we didn't know they existed until we started tracking overdoses with the app," Beeson says. By anticipating a ripple effect of overdoses, regional officials can warn their communities, notify hospitals, and ensure first responders have the naloxone they need to administer to overdose victims.

Meanwhile, the same data helps law enforcement officials double-check theories about the way drugs travel into and out of their jurisdictions. Take the relationship between Berkeley and Anne Arundel. Washington/Baltimore HIDTA had suspected a link for years, Beeson says, based on arrest data. "But if we pick someone up for trafficking in Baltimore, it's not like we know where that person's drugs are going. Now, we're basically tracking the drug. We're able to see it in black and white, as it spreads throughout a region." And the more data ODMAP collects, the more regional relationships health and law enforcement officials can confirm. "We've never had overdose data like this before—and we've never shared it with each other," Beeson says.

Health and law enforcement officials I spoke with about the tool say they like it because it's simple, powerful, and free. First responders at the scene of an overdose (Beeson says there are currently close to 1,000 registered nationwide) log in to ODMAP via a password-protected web portal. The interface lets these so-called Level I users specify whether the overdose was fatal, whether they administered naloxone, and, if they did, how much. That information, along with the time and location of the overdose, goes to ODMAP's central database. For first responders, that's all there is to it; the process takes seconds to complete and requires no personal information about the victim.

Police have additional, password-protected access to a form that lets them enter information like the victim's date of birth and overdose history; witness information; whether the victim overdosed on fentanyl, oxycodone, or some other narcotic; whether any drugs were found at the scene; even a photograph of the drugs' packaging. That information is stored on a separate database, to keep everything HIPAA compliant. If any of the data matches a previous overdose report, ODMAP will connect the reporting officers so they can coordinate.

Things get more interesting on ODMAP's backend, which is accessible to Level II user like sheriffs and public health chiefs. It requires a separate username and password and provides a bird's-eye view of overdose incidents at the national level. Every overdose appears on the map in the form of a color-coded blip. Accessing data for a state, county, or neighborhood is as simple as panning and zooming.

"It's like having real-time traffic data on Google Maps," says Aaron Kustermann, chief of intelligence for Illinois State Police, one of several organizations in the state that recently began using ODMAP. "Being able to monitor trends and see what's happening and compare with other areas? That's where the power is." Understanding where and how people are overdosing can take local health and law enforcement months to suss out. "With this tool, we can react in real time to a spike in fentanyl-related deaths, or purity-related deaths."

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Adoption will make or break this tool. "From a surveillance perspective, the more data you have on a given health issue the better," says Harvard University's John Brownstein, a computational epidemiologist who uses digital tools to map disease and drug abuse across populations. "Having direct data on overdoses is super exciting, but it's a crowdsourcing tool, so you want as much engagement as possible."

From the looks of it, ODMAP is spreading quickly. It launched on January 18th in just two West Virginia counties. Today, 70 counties across 19 states are actively contributing data to the system. Last week there were 16 states on board, and in the past few days, the number of health and law enforcement agencies using the program jumped from 168 to 186. The opioid crisis might be sweeping the country, but so, too, are the tools that could curb its spread.

“Ask any health or law enforcement agency in the country: We don’t have the time, and we don’t have the resources to sufficiently deal with the opioid crisis,” Beeson says. “We can’t throw money at it, and we can’t arrest our way out of it. But what we can do is use data and technology as a tool, to maximize what limited resources we have.”

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CrisprCon is not a place where spandexed, beglittered, refrigerator drawer fans come together for an all-you-can-eat celebration of unwilted produce. No. Crispr-Cas9 (no E), if you haven’t been paying attention, is a precise gene editing tool that’s taken the world by storm, promising everything from healthier, hangover-free wine to cures for genetic diseases. Like, all of them. And CrisprCon is where people come not to ask how to do those things, but rather, should we? And also, who’s the we here?

On Wednesday and Thursday, the University of California, Berkeley welcomed about 300 people—scientists, CEOs, farmers, regulators, conservationists, and interested citizens—to its campus to take a hard look at the wünderenzyme known as Cas9. They discussed their greatest hopes and fears for the technology. There were no posters, no p-values; just a lot of real talk. You can bet it was the first Crispr conference to sandwich a Cargill executive between a septagenarian organic farmer and an environmental justice warrior. But the clashing views were a feature, not a bug. "When you feel yourself tightening up, that's when you're about to learn something," said moderator and Grist reporter, Nathanael Johnson.

Which, to be honest, was totally refreshing. Serious conversations about who should get to do what with Crispr have been largely confined to ivory towers and federal agencies. In February the National Academy of Sciences released a report with its first real guidelines for Crispr, and while it suggested limitations on certain applications—like germline modifications—it was largely silent on questions outside of scientific research. What sorts of economies will Crispr create; which ones will it destroy? What are the risks of using Crispr to save species that will otherwise go extinct? Who gets to decide if it’s worth it? And how important is it ensure everyone has equal access to the technology? Getting a diverse set of viewpoints on these questions was the explicit goal of CrisprCon

Why was that important? Greg Simon, director of the Biden Cancer Initiative and the conference’s keynote speaker, perhaps said it best: “Crispr is not a light on the nation, it’s a mirror.” In other words, it’s just another technology that’s only as good as the people using it.

Panel after panel took the stage (each one, notably, populated with women and people of color) and discussed how other then-cutting-edge technologies had failed in the past, and what history lessons Crispr users should not forget. In the field of conservation, one panel discussed, ecologists failed to see the ecosystem-wide effects of introduced species. As a result, cane toads, red foxes, and Asian carp created chaos in Australia and New Zealand. How do you prevent gene drives—a technique to spread a gene quickly through a wild population—from running similarly amok?

From the agricultural field, the lessons were less nebulous. First-generation genetically modified organisms failed to gain public support, said organic farmer Tom Willey, because they never moved agriculture in a more ecologically sustainable direction and it never enhanced the quality of food people actually ate. At least, noticeably so. Instead, most modifications were to commodity crops like corn and soy to improve their pest resistance or boost yields.] “It was a convenience item for farmers,” he said. “And a profit center for corporations.” In order for gene-edited foods to avoid the same fate, companies like Monsanto, Dupont Pioneer, and Cargill, who have already licensed Crispr technologies, will need to provide a more tangible value than corn you can spray the bejeezus out of. Like say, extra-nutritious tomatoes, or a wine with 10-times more heart-healthy resveratrol and fewer of the hangover-causing toxins.

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The presence of executives from each of these three companies signaled that they’re serious about not making the same mistakes they did in the ‘90s when GMOs first came to market. “Back then we were only talking to farmers,” said Neal Gutterson, vice president of R&D at Dupont Pioneer during a break between panels. “I can’t remember anyone going to anything like this or casting as wide a net in our discussions with the public.”

Of all the fields Crispr will touch, medicine is the one most primed for disruption. So it’s of great concern to conference-goers that Crispr doesn’t become a technology only for the haves and not the have-nots. Shakir Cannon, founder of the Minority Coalition for Precision Medicine, pointed out the myriad ways doctors and researchers have exploited people of color in the name of scientific advancement, while neglecting diseases that hit underserved communities the hardest. In a breakout session on Wednesday, Rachel Haurwitz—CEO of Caribou Biosciences, one of the big three Crispr companies—asked Cannon and his colleague, Michael Friend, how industry leaders could help make sure that doesn’t happen. “First, you have to build trust with communities,” said Friend, whose work focuses on sickle cell anemia. “But we think Crispr could be a real turning point.”

Still, CrisprCon was just more talk—which the field has seen a lot of recently. Crispr’s co-discoverer Jennifer Doudna has taken a step back this past year from her lab at Berkeley to travel the world and discuss the importance of coming to what she calls a “global consensus” on appropriate uses for gene editing technologies. And in her opening address on Wednesday, the standing-room-only auditorium heard a line she’s trotted out many times before. “I've never seen science move at the pace it’s moving right now,” Doudna said. “Which means we can’t put off these conversations." The conversations happening at CrisprCon were all the right ones. But action, whether in the form of regulations, laws, or other populist social contracts, still feels a long way off.

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The Quiet, Steady Dominance of Pokémon Go

March 20, 2019 | Story | No Comments

Two years ago today, a studio called Niantic released a game with a novel proposition: Go outside. Point your smartphone at the real world. Catch some monsters. Within a day, Pokémon Go was at the top of every app store chart. Within 200 days, players had spent a billion dollars on in-game upgrades—the shortest time to reach that milestone by a wide margin. In the summer of 2016, you couldn’t walk two blocks without running into, sometimes literally, a person in hot Pidgey pursuit. And then it stopped. Or so it seemed.

The news reports faded. Shops that had seen a sharp spike in sales thanks to Pokémon hot spots settled back into their normal routines. In just four weeks, between that August and September 2016, Pokémon Go shed nearly 20 million players, as enthusiasts headed back to school, or lost themselves in various other viral pursuits.

But the game’s long retreat from that initial burst belies its continued, unprecedented success. And in the gap between what you might think happened to Pokémon Go and the game’s current-day dominance lies an important lesson about the future of apps.

Pokémon Went

It’s true that far fewer people play Pokémon Go today than did two years ago. In July 2016, the crush of players boosted attendance at Pokémon-heavy Crystal Bridges Museum in Fayetteville, Arkansas by 50 percent year over year. By that August, the tide was already ebbing. “It seems like the hype died down in the span of a month,” says Crystal Bridges public relations director Beth Bobbitt. (She adds, “We still have a lot of ‘pokestops’ and ‘gyms’ all around the museum campus so I think we’re still a great location to play the game, for those who still are.")

Niantic CEO John Hanke

You’ve seen this yourself, anecdotally. There are no viral videos of Pokécrowds gone amuck anymore. No one makes Weedle jokes at the water cooler. The natural conclusion: Pokémon Go is just another fad that disappeared in a blink, a fameball of Pog proportions. But writing off Pokémon Go after the initial frenzy is like assuming PyeongChang no longer exists post-Olympics. What matters isn’t how Pokémon Go looked at its zenith, but how it held on from there.

“It was completely uncharted territory. The initial fervor, that global excitement around the game and the way it spread virally, globally, in such a short period of time. It was a new experience for all of us,” says Niantic CEO John Hanke. “But looking at it in retrospect, it looks very similar to all games. There’s an attrition curve that’s reasonably consistent across games. Some games are better at that attrition curve than others. That kind of separates the winners from the losers.”

By every measure that matters, Pokémon Go has been a winner. Since its launch, it has almost never dropped out of the daily top 100 downloaded apps in both the iOS App Store and the Google Play Store, according to app analytics company App Annie. It has been the top-grossing app in the Play Store this entire week. In two years, according to an estimate by app analytics firm Apptopia, it has taken in $1.8 billion in revenue.

"Even though the mega spending at the beginning has died off, the rate of revenue is still highly impressive," says Apptopia communications lead Adam Blacker. "Where the money comes from is actually pretty evenly split between iOS and Android, which is unusual"

It also helps that mobile games don’t necessarily require lots of players to be successful. Revenue generally comes from power users, the whales that invest in PokéCoins—or whatever their poison—the way others might their 401k.

“Generally speaking within games, a smaller portion of your users are spending a lot of money. That’s true of most premium games,” says App Annie analyst Lexi Sydow. “I would imagine that trend would hold for this game.”

But the most impressive indicator of Pokémon Go’s sustained success is how much of their lives people devote to it. To this day, more cumulative time is spent playing Pokémon Go than any other game. It’s not even close: One in five minutes spent on the top 20 games on Android in May was devoted to chucking virtual Pokéballs.

“The game has been remarkably consistent and stable in terms of its performance post that bubble era, if you want to think of it that way, when we first launched,” Hanke says.

In fact, only a handful of apps—hello there, Candy Crush Saga—have had anything close to Pokémon Go’s staying power. The durability is surprising, especially if you’d forgotten Pokémon Go even existed. But it’s also instructive, especially as the app economy fully embraces the augmented reality experiences Niantic pioneered.

All Inclusive

Niantic doesn’t offer much in the way of demographic specifics on its players, but suffice to say they don’t much resemble the Fortnite crowd. The game attracts proportionally more older people and more women than its peers—and in fact can credit much of its initial success to enthusiasts who otherwise wouldn’t be playing anything at all.

Pokémon Go was not displacing other games. It wasn’t taking time away,” Sydow says. “We saw that it was actually additive time. People were taking more of their day playing Pokémon Go but also doing what they would originally.”

Pulling from a broader pool has helped keep Pokémon Go going. While it experiences steady attrition like any other game, it has a higher ceiling on potential new players to attract. And because it’s a game that takes place in the real world, it has more ways of making sure those players stick around.

“I think the design of the game in terms of it being an MMO should not be overlooked,” says Hanke, referring to the massively multiplayer online game genre of which Pokémon Go is a prime example. World of Warcraft would be another, a comparison that Hanke invites. Just as a WoW guild encourages regular, cooperative play, exploring the world through a Pokémon Go lens with friends can be mutually reinforcing.

“I think in Pokémon Go, because it’s a real-world game, it’s even more sticky than with League of Legends or something, where you’ve got a team but never see them face to face," Hanke says. "With Pokémon Go, you are meeting those people face to face. You’re forming real friendships with them. Friendships are sticky. That’s probably the secret sauce of the game, right there.”

Niantic has, naturally, leaned into this advantage. In June 2017 it introduced so-called Raid Battles, a cooperative mode where groups of players team up to take down especially powerful bosses. This past January, it began organizing a monthly worldwide Community Day, using special Poké-bonuses to lure enthusiasts out into the open in major cities. And just last month, it started rolling out a Friends feature, which enables sending of gifts and trading of Pokémon among people you know in real life.

The roadmap from here follows that same course, buttressing the gaming appeal of Pokémon Go with hints of a social network. “I think there’s a ton more we can do there to basically enrich the game when you’re playing it together with people that you know,” Hanke says. That includes a system for dueling other players, which Niantic still plans to implement at some point.

Brave New Worlds

Whether Pokémon Go’s durability, two years later, surprises you likely depends on if you still play it. But its disappearance for so many people for so long underscores how little we know about what happens on other people's phones.

"Our mobile phones are our most personal devices. We have our bank accounts linked, we have our messages to our family members, we have our emails," Sydow says. "I think that translates here."

Its success may also prove difficult to replicate, although you can expect a swath of imitators now that both Apple and Google have invested deeply in augmented reality, and Niantic itself has opened up its platform to outsiders.

Pokémon Go is itself, after all, a spin on Ingress, a game Niantic launched in 2012 that follows the same basic pattern—minus the Pikachu appeal. Ingress had its devotees, but without generations of Pokémon fans to tap into, it had nowhere near the cultural impact. Niantic's upcoming effort, Harry Potter: Wizards Unite, will also map a famous fictional property over the real world. As AR becomes less of a novelty than the norm, the trick will be to create those experiences without the failsafe of a megahit's built-in fan base.

Still, surely something else will catch the same lighting in a bottle—or Blitzle in a Pokéball—that Niantic has. When that happens, all due credit to the model that enabled it: Go outside. Point your smartphone at the real world. And find some friends to do it with.

It’s been less than a year since Elon Musk announced his plans to settle humans on Mars during a talk in Guadalajara, Mexico. On stage at the International Astronautical Congress, the billionaire invoked the lore of Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy and Battlestar Galactica while describing a massive passenger ship loaded with the essentials—you know, like a movie theater and a restaurant. SpaceX hoped to launch these breezy cruises to the red planet in the early 2030s.

Plot twist: Musk's original vision is no longer canon in his universe. On Wednesday, Musk took questions during a keynote discussion at the International Space Station R&D conference in Washington, DC. In between dad jokes about tunnel digging, a staple artificial intelligence threat assessment, and a spirited attempt to unpack the potential for interplanetary war, he candidly revealed a series of obstacles for SpaceX and its plan to build a city on Mars. SpaceX is rebooting its colonization plan, and may pivot to focus on a moon base that would aid that effort.

The Hawthorne, California-based spaceflight company has spent years touting propulsive landing technology for the next version of its Dragon spacecraft. SpaceX expected to equip the Dragon V2, rated for crew and cargo, with four small SuperDraco engines and deployable landing legs to allow for a guided surface touchdown—first on the Earth’s surface, and then, maybe, on Mars. SpaceX was confident enough in the design to propose a variant of the vehicle Musk claimed would be able to land anywhere in the solar system.

The pitch for those uncrewed Red Dragon missions to Mars included a collaboration with NASA to gather landing data, test communications, and plan for potential contamination from Earth-based microbes. The space agency, of course, has its own boots-on-Mars ambitions, and hopes to send astronauts to the red planet aboard the Orion spacecraft by 2040. Musk would later compare Red Dragon launches to a “train leaving the station,” delivering cargo and science to Mars in preparation for a human mission.

But now, SpaceX has pulled the plug on its prologue to an interplanetary future.

Musk explained that Red Dragon was no longer in line with the evolving vision SpaceX has for getting to Mars—specifically, the part where you have to land on Mars. The company is hitting pause on the development of its propulsive landing technology on the Dragon V2 spacecraft. Musk argued that while the technology works, SpaceX would be put through the wringer trying to meet NASA’s safety standards for landing a human crew on the ground. “It doesn’t seem like the right way to apply resources right now,” Musk said. “I’m pretty confident that is not the right way, and that there’s a far better approach.” He later tweeted that SpaceX would still land with propulsive thrusters on Mars, but with a larger spacecraft.

SpaceX has had a busy year adding to its growing arsenal of recovered rockets while launching more times than any other year since its founding. The company also managed to re-fly both its Falcon 9 rocket and Dragon cargo capsule. In the flurry of praise surrounding rocket landings and Mars concepts, the fact that SpaceX has yet to attempt or complete a deep space mission of any kind still weighs on the company’s future. Red Dragon would have been SpaceX’s first toe into the deep end of the pool.

Its journey would have begun atop the triple-booster Falcon Heavy rocket, the famously-delayed launch vehicle that Musk claims has over twice the payload capability of a single Falcon 9 rocket, able to easily deliver 100,000 pounds to low-Earth orbit. At the ISS R&D conference, Musk invited the audience and those watching the livestream to witness the launch of the vehicle—currently projected for this fall—from Kennedy Space Center. But he followed with an uneasy disclaimer: “Real good chance that vehicle doesn’t make it to orbit.”

That uncertainty doesn’t bode well for Musk’s original Mars ambitions. Musk argued that the Falcon Heavy was impossible to test on the ground due to the machine’s complexity. And he said that development was far more difficult than SpaceX expected, admitting that the company was naive in its original projections. The simultaneous firing 27 orbital engines notwithstanding, launching a Falcon Heavy includes changing aerodynamics, heightened vibration, and an enormous thrust that pushes qualification levels of the flight hardware to the limit. Musk admitted on Wednesday that limited damage to former Apollo 11 Pad 39A would be a “win” in the aftermath of the Falcon Heavy test flight. Along with Musk, the audience laughed nervously.

According to Musk’s keynote this week, SpaceX is planning to scale down its Mars-bound spacecraft to a size suitable for a wider range of missions—missions that would help pay for its development costs. A size reduction would certainly have a large economic impact on manufacturing, but savings could be augmented by focusing all efforts on a single reusable vehicle that could serve both low-Earth orbit and deep space. And Musk also offered that building a base on the moon is essential to getting the public excited about space again.

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But is that a suggestion to another company? To NASA? Or is SpaceX going to unveil plans for a moon base as part of their updated Mars architecture?

Elon Musk has said that he would offer priority seating to NASA for missions to lunar orbit. SpaceX was the first private company to dock with the space station and the success between the federal space agency and the spaceflight company could point to a continuing partnership that expands beyond low Earth orbit. The ISS won’t be around forever, and with NASA shifting toward deep space exploration, the opportunity to give the agency a lift is there. Especially if NASA wants to return to the moon.

But that doesn’t mean SpaceX is abandoning its Mars ambitions; far from it. SpaceX owes much of its financial and development success to its partnership with NASA, and there’s no doubt Musk will pursue that partnership beyond low-Earth orbit. That means that NASA astronauts could one day be flying on these deep space missions under lucrative taxpayer-funded contracts. Before then, SpaceX will have to fully prove its technology, along with life support systems and radiation protection for crewed missions.

Just a week ago, Musk dispatched SpaceX VP Tim Hughes to make the case for deep space in front of the Senate Subcommittee on Space, Science & Technology. Hughes used the success of SpaceX and NASA’s commercial resupply missions and the governing Commercial Orbital Transportation Services program to make a case for partnership in deep space exploration. "To this day, America’s achievement of landing men on the moon and returning them safely to Earth likely represents humankind’s greatest and most inspirational technological achievement,” he said. “Now, other nations like China seek to replicate an achievement America first accomplished 48 years ago.“ Maybe SpaceX can add private companies to the roster.

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The Fall of the TV Family in Trump's America

March 20, 2019 | Story | No Comments

Donald Trump is ruining television. Consider how the principal foci of TV seemed to shift when he became president—figuratively bullhorning his way into TV’s domestic interior in a way that has clogged the thematic daring on a number of shows across network, cable, and streaming platforms. Shows of every hue now engage the tempest of Trump's reach and rule. With Roseanne, which returned to ABC last night after 20 years off the air, we again see what happens to a sitcom exacerbated by the realities of 2018: It becomes a feral thing, a carnival of political and social discourse where opinions detonate left and right but solutions run dry.

Predictably, the show is drowning in the anxieties of the Trump era. "Knee still giving you trouble, Roseanne?" Jackie (Laurie Metcalf) remarks in an early scene. "Why don’t you get that fixed with all the health care you suckers got promised." She sharply lobs the insult while clad in a pink pussyhat and a T-shirt with the words “Nasty Woman” emblazoned on the front—just in case it wasn’t clear who she didn’t vote for.

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For the uninitiated: Roseanne is pure Americana. The show originally ran from 1988 to 1997 (the debut pulled in 21 million viewers) and chronicled a working-class family from an Illinois suburb. Living and loving paycheck to paycheck, they scraped by doing what they could—money, bills, and food were always cause for debates around social status—but they did have each other. At the head of the Conner tribe were Roseanne (Roseanne Barr), with her squawk of a laugh and pro-choice politics, and Dan (John Goodman), an overworked, lovable bull of a husband. The Conners, like most families, thrived on the theatre of kinship: its ceremonial arguments, its tender heart-to-hearts, and its awkward and hard-fought routes to empathy.

As with any show returning to television, there’s an overwhelming amount of ground to cover. The problem with Roseanne, already dangerously apparent in its first episode, arises from its insistence on doing just that: trying to be and become everything. (HBO’s preachy Here and Now suffers from a similar problem.) Dan can barely afford to pay for their prescription medication. DJ (Michael Fishman), recently back from a military tour in Syria, has a black daughter. Darlene (Sara Gilbert) is struggling to find work in a bone-thin job market. And Roseanne is a proud-and-loud Trump acolyte; she’s become someone who earnestly refers to conservative media as "the real news."

Writing for Vulture, executive producer and co-showrunner Whitney Cummings defended the revival’s thematic expansion. "This show is not about Trump," she wrote, "it’s about the circumstances that made people think Trump was a good idea." In an interview with The New York Times, Barr elaborated, saying that the show would be what it always was, a sitcom about the struggles families come up against on a daily basis “and what they do about it.”

It’s hard not to be cynical, though. The series shamelessly cycles through a litany of current events, a rotating chorus of podium-worthy monologues and pedestrian zingers: from gun ownership and gender fluidity to a duplicitous health care state, Colin Kaepernick, women’s rights, and surrogacy. And that’s just the first episode. These are tough, knotty issues that deserve to be lived in, to be fussed over with that classic Conner irritability—if that’s what Roseanne wants to be, and I believe it does—not rushed through on the way to the next joke.

Alan Ball’s Here and Now, the new HBO drama about a progressive multiracial family in Portland navigating the pitfalls and promises of contemporary life, is afflicted by a similar stumbling block, only on the opposite end of the political spectrum. Ball’s never been shy about his investigations into family alchemy—picking at the who, the how, the why. With Six Feet Under, he orchestrated a symphony of grief, death, and difficult love in the shape of the Fisher family, innkeepers of a Los Angeles funeral home. On True Blood, he again inverted the understanding of community and belonging through the residents of Bon Temps, a fictional Louisiana town besieged by shapeshifters and sex-obsessed vampires.

Here and Now, though, dives head-first into the mire of 2018. Trump’s name is rarely spoken, but his shadow looms large in the background. The show introduces talking points with real meat—Muslim faith, trans issues, police mistreatment, racial microaggressions—but often overcooks the essence of their messages. By the time we meet Greg Boatwright (Tim Robbins), a disaffected philosophy professor who finds himself powerless to the "cruelty of existence," he wants to feel connected to the world again. He portends wisdom in lumpy bursts of illumination, saying things like, "Maybe grand gestures are the best we can offer in a dying civilization" and "Anxiety is a completely appropriate response to today’s reality." It’s the kind of existential neurosis that on another show might seem useful, but here feels performative and overplayed.

The show, like Roseanne, is stuffed with racial and political overtones—but, again like Roseanne, is not without hope. Family dramas and sitcoms remain one of the more fascinating modes to understand American life, even after all this time. Just look to Black-ish or Jane the Virgin or Transparent; all have reoriented our view into the domestic interior in bright, unconventional ways. The problem with Roseanne and Here and Now is density. The former propels too quickly through powerful issues, while the latter treats them with the acuity of a college freshman: eagerly and immodestly, if sometimes too naively. That’s not to say there won’t be a payoff in the end. It’s the getting there that feels like a strain.

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Last August, Masahide Sasaki and his team instructed a satellite to shoot laser beams at a suburb of Tokyo. No, not like that. The laser beam, made of infrared light, was invisible to the human eye. By the time it had traveled through hundreds of miles of outer space and atmosphere, the light was harmless: It had spread out like a spotlight, about as wide as 10 soccer fields. Some of that light made its way into the end of a telescope, where it bounced off mirrors and flew through lenses and filters onto a photon-measuring detector.

Someday, Sasaki hopes, that light could be more than invisible wavelengths hitting a telescope—it could be encoded with information. Today, the radio waves beamed in satellite communications have limited bandwidth, which means they can’t transmit a lot of data at once. But if you can encode a message in infrared photons, you can transmit a million times more data per second, says Sasaki, a physicist at the National Institute of Information and Communications Technology in Japan.

For years, space scientists have proposed this kind of laser-beaming sat, which could make it possible to communicate with unmanned space rovers on faraway planets faster than radio waves allow. But laser light will die out as it travels 55 million miles to Mars—only a few photons might actually reach a receiver on a rover. So scientists first need to be able to read encoded information from a single quantum of light.

Capturing and reading individual photons from a satellite is a tough experiment that took Sasaki’s group seven years to pull off—and by then, someone else had already done it. Physicists in China published in Science last month that they’d managed an even more difficult version of the experiment, where their satellite beamed two photons to two different cities at the same time. But the Japanese group’s claim to fame, published in Nature Photonics, is that they did their experiment in a tiny satellite known as a microsatellite—a cube that weighs about 100 pounds, somewhere between the size of a microwave and a refrigerator. “The microsatellite weighs less than one-tenth of the Chinese satellite,” Sasaki says.

That weight difference also means it’s a lot cheaper to launch: you can launch a 100-pound satellite for about 2 million dollars, as opposed to hundreds of millions for larger satellites. That price point is appealing to a lot of companies. “Many companies that are not specialists in space technology can enter this new field,” Sasaki says.

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Sasaki’s group is working with a company in Japan that wants to launch a network of small sats. It wants to investigate laser communication as a technique for sending messages within its network, as well as a fringey encryption technique known as quantum cryptography to secure those messages. Sasaki won’t name the company, but it’s definitely not the only game in town: US company Planet launched 88 small satellites in February, though its focus is imaging, not communications. Japanese company Axelspace has also launched a few, with a grand plan of a network of 50. Even Canon has a 110-pounder up there right now, carrying photography system based on one of its DSLR cameras. In 10 years, Sasaki expects 4,000 of these tiny satellites will be in low Earth orbit, many of which might need secure communication technology.

All these companies are interested in launching small satellites because they’re cheap—and now that tech is finally small enough to fit on them (thanks, Moore’s law!) there’s not much holding them back. “You can actually start to do significant things in small satellites that you could only do before in a large satellite,” says Todd Harrison, a space security expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

The US military might, for example, be able to use a laser-beaming sat to communicate with drones, Harrison says. Military drones take lots of high-resolution photographs and need fast, secure data transmission. So you could launch a dedicated microsatellite for downloading and delivering drone data. Laser communication, unlike radio waves beamed from conventional satellites, delivers a targeted beam, which means it’s best used in a one-on-one setting.

These small satellites could also change military satellite networks, which consist of a handful of conventional large satellites. “We’re heavily dependent on each individual satellite,” says Harrison. “To make [the network] more resilient, instead of building a small number of large satellites, you could build a large number of small satellites.” Last week, The New York Times reported that the US government was planning to launch a fleet of small satellites to watch for North Korean missile tests.

Still, Sasaki’s communications tech is far from deployment. To send a message fast, they have to be able to detect as many photons as quickly as possible, and their group could only detect about one in every hundred million photons sent from the satellite. “This time, we decided to widen the laser beam to make the experiment more feasible,” Sasaki says. “But it’s kind of an embarrassing specification.” Right now, they can’t do their experiment in the daytime because the sunlight completely drowns out their tiny signal, even with filters. They’re planning to shrink the size of the laser beam so that more of it goes in the telescope. Then maybe they can send that good morning text to Mars.

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