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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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Virtual reality, as it’s been promised to us by science fiction, is a singular realm of infinite possibility. Star Trek’s Holodeck, Yu-Gi-Oh!’s Virtual World, Snow Crash’s Metaverse: Each is the all-powerful experience generator of its world, able to accommodate a character’s any desire. Novelist Ernest Cline sharpened this vision in his 2011 debut, Ready Player One, which hits theaters in March courtesy of Steven Spielberg. While the story is set in the strife-torn meatspace of 2045, most of its action unfolds in a vast network of artificial worlds called the OASIS. And in the tradition of reality playing catch-up to sci-fi, the OASIS has become the endgame for real-world VR developers, many of whom are actively trying to replicate its promise. Are they making progress? Absolutely. Are they doing it right? Absolutely not.

The OASIS is saddled with a terrible acronym—hopefully Spielberg never lets one of his characters say “Ontologically Anthropocentric Sensory Immersive Simulation”—but it offers something attractive: breadth. Some of the environments contained in the OASIS are created by users, others by government agencies; they range from educational to recreational (reconstructions of ’80s fantasy novels are popular), nonprofit to commercial.

Today’s real-life multiuser VR experiences, by contrast, are less OASIS and more ­PUDDLE (Provisionally Usable Demonstration of Dazz­ling Lucid Environments). Some of the constraints are aesthetic: In AltspaceVR, users are limited to a narrow range of expressionless human and robot avatars, while the goofy up-with-people charm of Against Gravity’s Rec Room hinges on you not caring that avatars lack noses. Other constraints are experiential: Facebook’s Spaces lets you hang out only with people you’re already Friends with. Startups with OASIS-size ambitions are hampered by still other issues, whether that’s a noob-unfriendly world-building system (Sansar) or a dark-side-of-Reddit vibe that invites trollery (VRchat).

The problem, though, isn’t such metaphorical boundaries—it’s literal ones. None of these PUDDLEs touch. You can’t hop from Rec Room to VRchat; you’re stuck where you started. That’s why it’s hard to feel truly immersed. To reach Cline’s 2045, developers need to start laying the foundation now for an infrastructure that links each of these worlds. If that sounds idealistic, or even dangerous, it’s not. Think of the days before the internet, when various institutions ran their own walled-off networks. Only when computer scientists came together to standardize protocols did the idea of a single network become possible. Now imagine applying that notion to VR—a metaverse in which users can flit between domains without losing their identity or their bearings as they travel.

The OASIS works because it feels like it has no owners, no urgent needs. It’s a utility, a toolkit available for artisans and corporations alike. If we want to realize this potential ourselves—universal freedom and possibility—let’s start thinking about VR the way Cline does: not as a first-to-market commodity, but as an internet all its own.


Peter Rubin (@provenself) is the author of the upcoming book Future Presence.

This article appears in the March issue. Subscribe now.

All photo references by Getty Images

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In October 2016, the organizers behind a microbiome conference sent promo materials to some prominent scientists. Elisabeth Bik was one of them. With nearly 12,000 followers, her tweets could help publicize their upcoming event in San Diego. But when she scanned the lineup, she noticed that almost every speaker was a man. Add more women, she suggested—or the conference should expect backlash.

She was right: Biologist Jonathan Eisen—“Guardian of Microbial Diversity,” his Twitter bio says—brought the biased list to the attention of his 46,000 followers with a blog post called "The White Men's Microbiome Congress." The organizers, Kisaco Research, added more female speakers before the conference convened and issued a penitent statement.

Bik, who runs the widely read Microbiome Digest, didn’t raise the alarm at the time. “They looked like they were going to do better," she says, "so I didn't want to make a big stink."

But last week she saw the latest speaker list for the Kisaco-organized European Microbiome Congress happening this November: same story. Eisen did, too.

In the past few months, two other high profile science conferences—Starmus and the World Science Festival—have also ignited internet ire for their lack of representation. And websites exist specifically to point out the most egregious examples: There’s Bias Watch Neuro, an All Male Panels Tumblr, and the hashtag #manel. The Gender Avengers, a community dedicated to hearing women's voices in public conversation, asks professionals to pledge not to serve on such panels.

Yes, it's 2017. Yes, this is still happening. “Women tell themselves, ‘Our generation is going to do better. When I'm in my 40s, I'll be the speaker,’” Bik says. “I thought that. It hasn't happened.”

Women have experienced underrepresentation over decades and in different departments of study. And it has real-world repercussions: Who enters science and who rises to the top of a field both have a dramatic impact on the type of research that gets done. But people like Bik, and the online communities around them, are working to make it better next time. Really.

Starmussed

Gender representation has been pretty imbalanced for the VIP-laden Starmus conference's six-year history, in part because organizers pride themselves on inviting fancy people of a specific sort. Nobel laureates, astronauts, Stephen Hawkings—all designations sooted with historical and cultural biases of their own.

Although Starmus still doesn’t have speaker stats to boast about—less than a quarter of main-stage speakers have been women—more female scientific stars appeared at the June meeting in Trondheim, Norway, than in the past. Still, “there got to be an undercurrent in the audience, when you see this stage full of men with a token woman or no one at all," says astronomer Jill Tarter, who has been the only woman on Starmus' board. "It just festered.”

The festering reached a fever pitch during a panel with seven men and zero women, after economist Christopher Pissarides confessed that he had changed Siri to a male voice. You know, because he trusts it more.

When question time came, Tarter commandeered the mic. “I’m wondering,” she said, “why after a beautiful, inspiring lecture by Jeffrey Sachs this morning about [how] we have to solve our problems globally—everybody needs to be in the game—why our very wise, knighted Nobel laureate found two opportunities on the stage of this conference to piss off half the world’s population?” After the session, young women mobbed Tarter with gratitude.

It's one thing to be a well-known scientist like Tarter, demanding attention at a microphone. But participants have stepped up too, as one audience member did at the World Science Festival in New York in June. There, theoretical physicist Veronika Hubeny found herself surrounded by six men, not given much opportunity to speak for the first hour. "We haven't heard enough from you," the moderator said, and started to ask her a question. But he then repeatedly talked over her to explain string theory (her field) instead of allowing her to answer.

After about three minutes of intermittent interruptions from the moderator, audience member Marilee Talkington shouted: “Let her speak, please!”

The room erupted into clapping and cheers—support that continued after Talkington recalled the account on Facebook. Thanks directed to Tarter multiplied online as well.

But so did the thousand discriminatory papercuts from speakers and organizers. Today, the public record of sexism, at Starmus and the World Science Festival and beyond, reaches past the physical conferences and their chronology—to the postdoc watching the livestream on lunch break, to the student who searches YouTube five years from now to learn about astronauts. Instead of inspiration, they can find a demonstration of just how steep the uphill battle is.

What Now?

The problems on display at science conferences aren't new. To some extent, they reflect the fundamental gender imbalance in science: The tenured scientific elite has higher male-to-female ratios than the ranks of postdocs and assistant professors. But speaker imbalance still often outstrips that within a field. Self-promotion may amplify the divide: Men on average are more likely to see and sell themselves as important figures (a tendency that shows up on paper, with men citing their own work 56 percent more than women).

So how do you get those numbers to change? If you talk to conference organizers, especially ones with a surfeit of men, they’ll often exclaim (as both Starmus and Microbiome Congress organizers did) that they invited more women. Those women just declined the opportunity! Here's why: They're busy. Conference organizers often have, in their heads, a list of Rock Star Female Scientists to scan through when they need some women. But those rock stars are already attending 55,000 conferences. “You have to invite more women than men because they're being stretched thin,” Bik says.

The good news is that pseudocelebrity scientists aren't the only ones who do robust research and speak comprehensibly. Finding other contributors isn't hard—it just requires looking to different sources.

Bik, for example, maintains a list of women in microbiology who would be happy to give a great keynote speech at your conference. The American Astronomical Society has a similar database. Organizers can also check out this Diversity Distribution Calculator to see how their meetings measure up.

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The field of microbiology also offers some hope. In 2011, women made up just 27 percent of the speakers at the American Society of Microbiology general meeting. By 2015, the society had bumped that up to nearly 50 percent. How? Researchers from Johns Hopkins University showed organizers numbers from their own meetings: When the committee in charge of speaker selection included at least one woman, sessions had 72 percent more female speakers and were 70 percent less likely to be only male. In response to this and other past-meeting data—and then a call to be better about avoiding all-male panels—conference conveners brought more women into the decision-making, and soon the number of women speaking nearly matched the number of men speaking.

Some conferences set out with the goal of gender parity, and then choose their speaker list accordingly. It requires planning, sure, but Twitter is here to keep scientists from stalling out in their search. The key? Just ask, like neurobiologist Leslie Voshall did a few days ago as she began to schedule talks for 2019.

If an organizer doesn't have enough reach of their own, they can solicit suggestions using hashtags such as #WomenInSTEM or search for lists of science-internet influencers such as the WomenTweetScienceToo rolodex, which popped up after Science put only four female scientists on its top 50 tweeters list. It has 316 badass, smart women who can write 140 informative characters or, you know, wow a weary audience at the 8 am plenary session.

Coordinators can also ping #BlackInSTEM and #QueerInSTEM for speaker suggestions. Because diversity isn't just about women. “Anybody who is a minority will feel the same,” Bik says. “They will look at the podium and wish there was someone there who looked like them.”

Thanks to the internet, there's really no excuse for that wish to go unfulfilled.

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This week, Overwatch has a new hero, the Video Game Awards are here to give us something to argue about, and Telltale's ending becomes permanent. Let's get to it.

Ashe Is the Newest Cowboy in Overwatch, a Game With a Surprising Number of Cowboys

Games like Overwatch grow via the introduction of new characters, playable heroes that expand the roster and change up the climate of play in casual and competitive modes. This week, Overwatch introduces its newest character, Ashe, the leader of the villainous Deadlock gang, a cowboy-themed heroine with a semi automatic rifle and a robot companion.

This means that, alongside launch hero McCree, Ashe is now the second cowboy-themed character in Overwatch. That's weird, right? That futuristic cops and robbers have whole gangs of cowboy warriors? Like, I can't be the only one bothered by that. Do the rest of the cast think they're just, like, cosplayers? Anyway, Ashe is live now for casual play, and will be available for ranked in a couple of weeks. If you need some extra lore, enjoy her origin story, as first revealed a Blizzcon a couple of weeks ago.

Celeste Shows Up Big (and the Trending Gamer Is MIA) in TGA Nominations

Another year, another iteration of The Game Awards (née the Spike Video Game Awards), the Geoff-Keighley-hosted extravaganza celebrates the accomplishments of the videogame industry while presenting itself as a major promotional event. One delightful surprise this year is the indie game Celeste —which we at WIRED very much enjoyed—being a finalist for Game of the Year, as well as Best Score, Best Indie Game, and the Games for Impact award. (We at WIRED, we should also point out, are also one of many nominating outlets helping determine said finalists.)

One casualty of the growth of the awards is the Trending Game award, a fan-voted award that in recent years has had a tendency to go to fairly controversial figures in the community. Instead, we've got the slightly less authoritative Content Creator of the Year award, which is nice and all but doesn't quite have the same "yes, I'm the President, for VIDEOGAMES" ring to it that the other award had. Probably for the best.

Telltale Is Liquidating, for Real This Time

It's official, now: the slow, messy, worker-abusing death of Telltale Games is complete. According to Variety, the company has formally begun liquidating, pulling its titles from the Steam store and filing for assignment proceedings (like bankruptcy). It's an ignominious and disappointing end for a company that, had it maybe valued its workers more, been a good deal more successful than it was. Let's hope those who used to work at Telltale land safely, and let's work to make this industry a more hospitable place.

Recommendation of the Week: Spyro Remastered for PlayStation 4, Xbox One, PC, Nintendo Switch

Spyro the Dragon is one of the most surreal platformers of the early 3D age. A world of petrified dragons, roaming wizards, and platforms and cities drifting in the clouds, it was transfixing, strange, candy to my childhood brain. Now, Spyro and its two sequels are back in fully remastered fashion, attempting to take that dream and make it shine with modernized controls, fancy graphics, the whole package. Attempts to do that can easily lose the magic of certain lo-fi games, and Spyro is no different. But my childhood self would still encourage you to check these out. They're like goofy, exciting Saturday morning cartoons. And who doesn't love Saturday morning cartoons?

Space is indifferent to your suffering. It doesn’t care that it’ll freeze you to death unless you’re wearing a fancy suit, or that even before freezing you’ll suffocate in its vacuum. And it certainly doesn’t care how difficult it is for humans to get stuff done in the void: practical things like screwing in bolts and drinking water and 3-D printing replacement parts.

But a company called Made in Space is indifferent to space’s indifference. In a first, it’s showed that it can 3-D print in a thermal vacuum chamber, which simulates the nastiness of space. It’s a milestone in the outfit’s ambitious Archinaut program, which hopes to launch a 3-D printer with robot arms into orbit. You know, to build things like satellites and telescopes and stuff.

This 3-D printer works like one you'd buy for yourself, extruding layer upon layer of polymer to build a structure. The difference being, this (deep breath…) Extended Structure Additive Manufacturing Machine is encased for thermal control, just like the components of a communications satellite would be to protect the electronics. “Our tactic has been, let's control the environment that's inside the printer, because we can't do anything about what's outside,” says Eric Joyce, project manager of Archinaut.

The challenge is that Archinaut will have to print out tubes far larger than itself—which means the machine needs an aperture to spit out its creations. But that would expose its insides to the freezing vacuum as it's printing. So Joyce and the team selected components that are low outgassing, meaning they don't lose material in a vacuum. "There's nothing proprietary in our selection process," Joyce says. "Just good engineering." If all goes according to plan, one day Archinaut's robotic arms will use machine vision to grab printed parts as they leave the machine, then piece them together into satellites or dishes.

There's one thing space does to make this job easier: Up there, Archinaut's printed structures would be able to grow to incredible size without collapsing into a cloud of space junk. That and individual rods can be extra long without snapping. On Thursday, Made in Space showed off a 100-foot, 20-pound beam the team had printed (though not in a vacuum), strung from the ceiling at its NASA Ames Research Center office. That’s the kind of scale we’re talking about here.

Why go to all this trouble for an orbital 3-D printer? Right now, the stuff we put into space is limited by the rockets we use to launch them. If you want to put a satellite in orbit, it has to be small enough to cram into the nose of a rocket. It also has to withstand the insane forces of the launch. And then there's the problem of weight: If your object is too massive, it'll never get into orbit. That and it'll cost you $10,000 or more a pound to get your goods on a rocket in the first place.

But if engineers could build satellites in orbit, they’d be free of size limitations. They could construct not only bigger satellites, but bigger telescopes as well. And the bigger your telescope, the more power you have to peer ever further into the cosmos.

Satellites and telescopes would be just the start for Archinaut. Made in Space was founded with the mission to promote space exploration. Because if humanity wants any hope of reaching Mars and beyond, it’s not going to be able to cram as much junk as it can in a rocket and shove off. Instead, astronauts could 3-D print supplies and structures in orbit, around Earth or the moon or even Mars. “You take different tools if you're going to go on a camping trip versus if you're going to go and settle the frontier, and space is no different,” says Andrew Rush, president and CEO of Made in Space.

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NASA is certainly on board. Made in Space is operating on a two-year, $20 million contract with the agency. And the company has already been 3-D printing on the International Space Station with a different device, learning how to tackle the problems of microgravity. The company’s next step is to further develop the robotic arms and pair them with the printer, then ideally start testing with NASA up in orbit.

That ain't going to be easy, though. On top of the team getting all the technology right, space is expensive. And NASA is, by necessity, an exceedingly cautious organization—it didn't put humans on the moon and house them in a $150 billion space station (in fairness to other nations, it's been a group funding effort) by being imprecise. But then again, it doesn't hand out $20 million to just anyone.

So one day, maybe Archinaut will graduate to the massive, on-demand structures humans will need to get off this rock. “We're going to need fairly complex, large, and capable systems for human exploration that we're going to use kind of over and over again,” says Steve Jurczyk, associate administrator of NASA’s Space Technology Mission Directorate. “The habitation systems and the transportation systems, we're going to stage them in lunar orbit. We're going to go to Mars orbital missions or landing missions, and then we're going to come back.”

Take that, space.

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Snapchat Dysmorphia

n. A fixation on perceived flaws in one’s appearance, caused by seeing too many filtered photos.

People used to show up in plastic surgeons’ offices with photos of movie stars, asking for Angelina’s lips or Jon Hamm’s chin. Today they come with selfies, asking to look like themselves. Not the human selves that mock us all in fitting-room mirrors, of course, but the sparkling, digitally embellished versions that increasingly populate our social feeds.

On platforms like Snapchat and Instagram, users now routinely deploy filters and tools like Facetune for selfie-improvement, fashioning reflections that better capture their true inner beauty. Swipe away acne or wrinkles. Swipe again for big soulful eyes, a thinner nose. You can even change the shape of your face.

Such fixes used to be just for glamour shots of celebrities. But nowadays, with flawless skin and symmetrical faces all over social media, the “beautiful people” are our peers. It’s enough to give you a complex. In fact, doctors have begun to speak of “Snapchat dysmorphia,” an obsession with normal imperfections that, for teens especially, can cause real harm. And it’s driving many to seek surgery, in hopes of editing their faces IRL like they do on their phones.

Snap Inc. can’t be thrilled to have its name on a new mental disorder (a brand hijacking almost as bad as the one Hormel suffered with spam). It’s response: Lighten up, filters are just a fun tool for personal expression. Yep, all good fun—until your kid comes home from the surgeon with permanent deer face.


This article appears in the November issue. Subscribe now.

The cook, complete with hair net, lays the red patty down on the grill and gives it a press with a spatula. And there, that unmistakable sizzle and smell. She flips the patty and gives it another press, lets it sit, presses it, and pulls it off the grill and onto a bun.

This is no diner, and this is no ordinary cook. She's wearing not an apron, but a lab coat and safety goggles, standing in a lab-kitchen hybrid in a Silicon Valley office park. Here a company called Impossible Foods has over the last six years done something not quite impossible, but definitely unlikely: Engineering a plant-based burger that smells, tastes, looks, and even feels like ground beef.

There are other veggie burgers on the market, of course, but Impossible Foods wants to sell consumers a real meat analog—one that requires a very different kind of engineering than your Boca or black bean burgers. So WIRED wants to take you on the deepest dive yet into the science behind the Impossible Burger.

Biting into an Impossible Burger is to bite into a future in which humanity has to somehow feed an exploding population and not further imperil the planet with ever more livestock. Because livestock, and cows in particular, go through unfathomable amounts of food and water (up to 11,000 gallons a year per cow) and take up vast stretches of land. And their gastrointestinal methane emissions aren’t doing the fight against global warming any favors either (cattle gas makes up 10 percent of greenhouse gas emissions worldwide).

This is the inside story of the engineering of the Impossible Burger, the fake meat on a mission to change the world with one part soy plant, one part genetically engineered yeast—and one part activism. As it happens, though, you can’t raise hell in the food supply without first raising a few eyebrows.

The Lean, Mean Heme Machine

What makes a burger a burger? The smell, for one, and taste and texture, all working in concert to create something animal. It’s loaded with all manner of proteins that interact with each other in unique ways, creating a puzzle of sorts. But Impossible Foods thinks the essence of a meat lies in a compound called heme, which gives ground beef its color and vaguely metallic taste—thanks to iron in the heme molecule. In blood, heme lives in a protein called hemoglobin; in muscle, it's in myoglobin.

Interestingly, you’ll find globins (a class of proteins) not just across the animal kingdom, but in plants as well. Soy roots, for example, carry a version called leghemoglobin, which also carries heme. Leghemoglobin in soy and myoglobin in meat share a similar 3-D structure consisting of what's known as an alpha helical globin fold, which wraps around the heme.

So what if you could extract the heme from a plant to obtain that secret ingredient in ground beef? Well, the main problem, Impossible Foods found, is that you'd need a heck of a lot of soy: One acre of soybeans would yield just a kilogram of soy leghemoglobin.

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Impossible Foods founder and CEO Pat Brown figured out how to hack together a better way. Technicians take genes that code for the soy leghemoglobin protein and insert them into a species of yeast called Pichia pastoris. They then feed the modified yeast sugar and minerals, prompting it to grow and replicate and manufacture heme with a fraction of the footprint of field-grown soy. With this process, Impossible Foods claims it produces a fake burger that uses a 20th of the land required for feeding and raising livestock and uses a quarter of the water, while producing an eighth of the greenhouse gases (based on a metric called a life cycle assessment).

Now, engineering a “beef” burger from scratch is of course about more than just heme, which Impossible Foods bills as its essential ingredient. Ground beef features a galaxy of different compounds that interact with each other, transforming as the meat cooks. To piece together a plant-based burger that’s indistinguishable from the real thing, you need to identify and recreate as many of those flavors as possible.

To do this, Impossible Foods is using what's known as a gas chromatography mass spectrometry system. This heats a sample of beef, releasing aromas that bind to a piece of fiber. The machine then isolates and identifies the individual compounds responsible for those aromas. “So we will now have kind of a fingerprint of every single aroma that is in beef,” says Celeste Holz-Schietinger, principal scientist at Impossible Foods. “Then we can say, How close is the Impossible Burger? Where can we make improvements and iterate to identify how to make each of those particular flavor compounds?”

This sort of deconstruction is common in food science, a way to understand exactly how different compounds produce different flavors and aromas. "In theory, if you knew everything that was there in the right proportions, you could recreate from the chemicals themselves that specific flavor or fragrance," says Staci Simonich, a chemist at Oregon State University.

Then there’s the problem of texture. Nothing feels quite like ground beef. So Impossible Foods isolates individual proteins in the meat. “Then as we identify what those particular protein properties are, we go and look at plants for plant proteins that have those same properties,” says Holz-Schietinger. Plant proteins tend to taste more bitter, so Impossible Foods has to develop proteins with a cleaner taste.

What they’ve landed on in the current iteration is a surprising mix. Ingredients include wheat protein, to give the burger that firmness and chew. And potato protein, which allows the burger to hold water and transition from a softer state to a more solid state during cooking. For fat, Impossible Foods uses coconut with the flavor sucked out. And then of course you need the leghemoglobin for heme, which drives home the flavor of “meat.”

For something that so accurately mimics the taste and look and feel and smell of meat (and trust us, it does), the Impossible Burger is actually not all that complex. “Earlier iterations were much more complex because we didn't fully understand it,” says Holz-Schietinger (experiments with cucumber and the famously smelly durian fruit didn't … pan out, nor did trying to replicate the different connective tissues of a cow). “Now we understand which each component drives each sensory experience.”

At the moment, the Impossible Burger is only available in select restaurants, though Impossible Foods just opened a plant with the idea of increasing production from 300,000 pounds a month to a million. But as they focus on expansion, some critics are raising questions about the burger of tomorrow.

Government, Meet the Future. The Future, Government

In 2014, Impossible Foods filed what’s known as a GRAS notice, or “generally recognized as safe,” with the FDA. In it, the company listed the reasons it considered soy leghemoglobin safe for humans to consume. Leghemoglobin, they argued, is chemically similar to other globins considered safe, so it should carry the same confidence with consumers. Food companies aren’t required to tell the FDA when they’re introducing new ingredients, and filing this sort of self GRAS determination is not mandatory, but Impossible Foods says it did so in the name of transparency.

“Leghemoglobin is structurally similar to proteins that we consume all the time,” says Impossible Foods’ chief science officer David Lipman. "But we did the toxicity studies anyway and they showed that that was safe.” They compared the protein to known allergens, for instance, and found no matches. The company also got the OK from a panel of experts, including food scientist Michael Pariza at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

But the company didn't get the blessing it was looking for from the FDA. As detailed in documents FOIA'ed by environmental groups and published by The New York Times in August, the FDA questioned the company’s conclusions. “FDA believes that the arguments presented, individually and collectively, do not establish the safety of SLH [soy leghemoglobin] for consumption, nor do they point to a general recognition of safety…,” the FDA wrote in a memo. That is not to say the FDA concluded leghemoglobin to be unsafe, just that it had questions.

The FDA also noted that the company's engineered yeast doesn't just produce leghemoglobin—it also produces 40 other normally occurring yeast proteins that end up in the burger, which "raises further question on how the safety argument could be made based solely on SLH." Impossible Foods insists these proteins are safe, and notes that the yeast it has engineered is non-toxic, and that its toxicity studies examined the whole leghemoglobin ingredient.

Impossible Foods withdrew its GRAS notice in November 2015 to perform a new study. They fed rats more than 200 times the amount of the leghemoglobin ingredient than the average American would consume if the ground beef in their diet—an average of 25 grams a day—was replaced with Impossible's fake meat (adjusted for weight). They found no adverse effects.

Meanwhile, the Impossible Burger is on the market, which has some environmental groups peeved. That and there's the larger question of whether GRAS notifications should be voluntary or mandatory. “The generally recognized as safe exception was meant for common food ingredients, not for the leading-edge products, especially the innovative like the leghemoglobin,” says Tom Neltner, chemicals policy director at the Environmental Defense Fund, which was not involved in the FOIA. “We don't think it should be a voluntary review, we don't think the law allows it.” Accordingly, the group is suing the FDA over the agency’s GRAS process.

Others are concerned that leghemoglobin—again, a new ingredient in the food supply, since humans don't typically eat soy roots—hasn’t gone through enough testing to prove it’s safe, and agree with the FDA that Impossible Foods’ GRAS notification came up short. “The point of some of us that are being critical of this is not that everything that's engineered is unsafe or anything like that,” says Michael Hansen, senior staff scientist at the Consumers Union, which was also not involved in the FOIA. “It's like, look, any new food ingredient, some new food additive, of course it should go through a safety assessment process.”

Hansen takes issue with the idea that leghemoglobin is similar to other edible globins are therefore safe. “As the FDA pointed out in their response, just because proteins have similar functions or similar three-dimensional structures, doesn't mean that they're similar," Hansen says. "They can have a very different amino acid sequence, and just slight changes can have impacts."

This is what happens when the future of food lands on the government’s plate. The central question: Should Americans trust companies to do their own food safety testing, or should that always be the job of the feds?

The reality is, different kinds of modified foods attract different levels of regulatory attention. "It is a patchwork system with little rhyme or reason," says crop scientist Wayne Parrott of the University of Georgia. "It depends on what is done, how it is done, and its intended use." You hear plenty about the crops, and most certainly about the long hullabaloo over that GM salmon. But not engineered microorganisms, which are extremely common. Why?

"Out of sight, out of mind," says Parrott. "And people also get more emotional over animals than they do over other things. With the salmon it was political. Very, very political."

Really, there's no inherent danger in genetically modifying a food. After all, the FDA wasn't raising its voice about soy leghemoglobin because it comes from genetically engineered yeast. The agency's job is to determine the safety of foods. "Any risk that's associated comes from traits," Parrott says. "It doesn't come from the way you put those traits in there."

This is only the beginning of a new era of high-tech, genetically engineered foods. Because if we want to feed a rapidly expanding species on a planet that stays the same size, we’re going to need to hack the food supply. Our crops will have to weather a climate in chaos. "We want to improve efficiency so we can feed 9 billion people without more land, without more water, without more fertilizer or pesticides," says Parrott.

And humanity will sure as hell have to cut back on its meat consumption. “We'll change the world more dramatically than any company possibly in history has ever done it,” says Impossible Foods founder Brown. “Because when you look at the impact of the system we're replacing, almost half of the land area of Earth is being occupied by the animal farming industry, grazing, or feed crop production.” That system, of course, will not give up ground quietly.

But who knows. Maybe shocking the system isn’t so impossible after all.

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Infoporn: 100 Years of Sci-Fi, Explored

March 20, 2019 | Story | No Comments

AI Researcher Bethanie Maples has been reading science fiction since she was given a copy of Dune at 10 years old. Still, two decades and nearly 1,000 books later, the self-described sci-fi fanatic struggles to find books that delve into her most niche interests, like the link between AI and transhumanism. So last year, while working at Stanford’s Human Computer Interaction lab, she teamed up with data scientists Eric Berlow and Srini Kadamati to create a book recommendation tool based on more than 100 salient sci-fi themes, from hyperspace to magical feminism. Using data scraping, network analysis, and machine learning, the resulting Science Fiction Concept Corpus includes more than 2,600 books written since 1900. We made our own voyage into Maples’ sci-fi universe.

Alternate Histories

The Science Fiction Concept Corpus is built on plot descriptions, reviews, and user-generated tags scraped from Goodreads, sci-fi forums, and other sources. “It was interesting to see how sci-fi authors foreshadowed developments in history, like AI winters,” says data scientist Eric Berlow, who helped create the Corpus.

Expand Your Horizons

The Sci-Fi Corpus reveals “first-degree neighbors,” books that share some—but not all—common themes. The tool helps readers discover a broader range of relevant books from the past and present.

Book Recommendation Generator

The Corpus suggests titles based on 108 topics of interest, enabling intelligent browsing rather than algorithm-­driven results, Maples says.

Sci-Fi Concepts Over Time

The researchers analyzed the prevalence of more than a dozen high-level concepts in science fiction, from human control to augmentation. “Powerful books can fuel our imagination or instill fear,” Maples says. “You can often draw a slender thread between technology trends and
social movements.”

Genre Benders

By linking books that share relevant keywords, the Corpus exposes hidden correlations between various sci-fi themes.

By the Numbers

The most popular sci-fi books, by decade:

View the complete Sci-Fi Corpus at app.openmappr.org/play/100YrsOfSciFi


Lauren Murrow (@­laurenmurrow) wrote about the tech gender gap in issue 26.10.

This article appears in the March issue. Subscribe now.

Hello, and welcome to a slightly-late-because-of-President’s-Day presentation of The Monitor, WIRED's look at all that's good (and sometimes bad) in the world of pop culture. What’s up for today? Well, Netflix just cancelled its last two Marvel shows, the creator of #OscarsSoWhite is going to the Oscars, and there still isn’t gender parity in Hollywood. Go figure.

So Long, Jessica Jones and The Punisher

In a decision that most observers figured was inevitable, Netflix announced Monday that it’s canceling Jessica Jones and The Punisher—the last two Marvel shows left on the streaming service. The cancelations come on the heels of Daredevil, Iron Fist, Luke Cage, and The Defenders getting the axe last year. Marvel parent company Disney is planning to launch its own streaming service, Disney+, later this year, and will—presumably—be consolidating all, or most, of its content onto one platform.

The Creator of #OscarsSoWhite Is Going to the Oscars

April Reign, the woman who created the #OscarsSoWhite movement in 2015 in response to the lack of diversity amongst Oscar nominees, has accepted an invitation from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to attend this year’s ceremony on Sunday. “I feel immense pride and a sense of coming full circle, back to where it all began,” Reign told The Hollywood Reporter. Yes, indeed, it’s about time.

Women Led More Films in 2018, But…

And finally, some encouraging (and disappointing) news about the state of women in Hollywood. According to a new report from the San Diego University Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film, 31 percent of the movies released in 2018 were led by women. That’s up from the 24 percent of movies with female protagonists in 2017, and 29 percent in 2016. But, there’s a catch: The study also found women only had 35 percent of the speaking parts in the 100 top-grossing movies of 2018, up just one percentage point from 2017.