Tag Archive : SCIENCE

Like a hit-and-run driver who races from the scene of a crash, the interstellar guest known as ’Oumuamua has bolted out of the solar system, leaving confusion in its wake. Early measurements seemed to indicate that it was an asteroid—a dry rock much like those found orbiting between Mars and Jupiter. Then by this past summer, astronomers largely came around to the conclusion that it was instead a comet—an icy body knocked out of the distant reaches of a far-off planetary system.

Quanta Magazine

About

Original story reprinted with permission from Quanta Magazine, an editorially independent publication of the Simons Foundation whose mission is to enhance public understanding of science by covering research developments and trends in mathematics and the physical and life sciences.

Now a new analysis has found inconsistencies in this conclusion, suggesting that ’Oumuamua may not be a comet after all. Whether it’s actually a comet or an asteroid, one thing is clear: ’Oumuamua is not quite like anything seen before.

The object was first spotted a year ago by scientists with the Pan-STARRS telescope in Hawaii. ’Oumuamua (a Hawaiian word meaning “scout”) appeared to be a rocky, elongated asteroid at first, a stubby cosmic cigar.

Other astronomers quickly joined in the hunt, measuring everything they could. (One team even trained radio telescopes on it to check whether it might be transmitting extraterrestrial broadcasts. It was not.) By last December, a team of astronomers published ’Oumuamua’s electromagnetic spectra, which can be used to probe what an object is made of. The researchers found that ices with organic material similar to those seen in comets in our solar system lurked just below ’Oumuamua’s surface; that ice could have survived a long interstellar journey.

They also looked at ’Oumuamua’s rotation. Many asteroids tend to spin around their long axis like an expertly thrown football. ’Oumuamua, by contrast, tumbled slightly like an errant pass by Charlie Brown.

A few months later, another collaboration found that ’Oumuamua wasn’t just being pulled by the sun’s gravity. Instead, it was being slightly accelerated by an unseen force, which they argued could only be attributed to comet “outgassing” acting like a thruster. With this additional information, the case appeared to be closed. “Interstellar asteroid is really a comet,” read the headline of a press release put out by the European Space Agency.

The explanation seemed to fit with what we know about our own solar system. In the distant reaches beyond Neptune, countless comets orbit our sun. Anytime one of these comets gets too close to a planet, it could be ejected out into the galaxy. In contrast, there are far fewer asteroids in the asteroid belt, and they orbit closer to the sun, where they’re harder to knock into interstellar space. “There are more comets, and it’s easier to fling them away from a planetary system,” said Ann-Marie Madigan, an astrophysicist at the University of Colorado, Boulder. “For the first interstellar traveler that we see in our solar system, for that to be an asteroid, would be shocking.”

Yet comets have tails. And ’Oumuamua, if it was indeed made out of icy rock and propelled by jets of gas as it passed by the sun, should have displayed a tail that would settle the question of its origin. Yet no tail was ever found.

Now in a new study that is currently under peer review, Roman Rafikov, an astrophysicist at the University of Cambridge, argues that the same forces that appeared to have accelerated ’Oumuamua — the same forces that should have also produced a tail — would have also affected its spin. In particular, the acceleration would have torqued ’Oumuamua to such a degree that it would have spun apart, breaking up into smaller pieces. If ’Oumuamua were a comet, he argues, it would not have survived.

“There’s very strong and unequivocal evidence on both sides,” said Rafikov. “If it’s an asteroid, then it’s really unusual, with exotic scenarios for its formation.” He proposed such a scenario earlier this year, whereby an ordinary star dies, forming a white dwarf, and in the process rips apart a planet and launches the shards clear across the galaxy. ’Oumuamua is one of those shards. “Basically, it’s a messenger from a dead star,” he said.

In part to help resolve the impasse, researchers have tried to identify the star system where ’Oumuamua originated by combing through the newly released data troves of the Gaia space telescope. Perhaps it came from a binary star system, or a system with a giant planet, either of which could have launched the object into interstellar space.

But of all the possible candidate star systems, none provided a match. ’Oumuamua’s trajectory was at least two light-years away from all the candidates anyway — too far for them to be its source. And if ’Oumuamua got launched hundreds of millions of years ago, all the local stars will have shifted quite a bit since then. “It’s unlikely you’d ever be able to track it back to a single individual parent system, which is a shame, but it’s just the way things are,” said Alan Jackson, an astronomer at the University of Toronto.

Ultimately the transient nature of the observations has frustrated astronomers’ ability to solve the mystery of our first interstellar guest. “We had only a few weeks, with almost no planning, to make the observations,” said Matthew Knight, an astronomer at the University of Maryland. “Everybody’s trying to wring out every last bit of information they can from what data we were able to collect as a community.” Had ’Oumuamua been spotted earlier, or had Hurricane Maria not taken Puerto Rico’s Arecibo Observatory out of action, astronomers would have more to go on.

And although ’Oumuamua was the first visitor from outside the solar system, astronomers will soon have more to puzzle over. Estimates are that the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, scheduled for “first light” in 2021 in Chile, could find as many as one such object every year for a decade.

“What I hope ’Oumuamua brings home is that planetary systems grow and evolve. They create trillions of little planetesimals throughout the galaxy, and some of those will come and visit us every once and a while,” Bannister said. “Our planetesimals are no doubt visiting other stars.”

Original story reprinted with permission from Quanta Magazine, an editorially independent division of SimonsFoundation.org whose mission is to enhance public understanding of science by covering research developments and trends in mathematics and the physical and life sciences.

This is sort of awesome. It's a concrete gravity battery. What? Yup. The idea is to even out the balance between power generation and power usage; like with any battery, this one allows you to store extra energy for use at a later time when demand is higher. Or maybe you could use solar power during the day to store energy in the battery to be used at night—you know, when the sun doesn't shine.

So, how does this work? There are really two physics parts to this concrete battery: gravitational potential energy and electric motors.

Gravitational Potential Energy

If you pick up a textbook from the floor and put it on a table, it will require about 10 joules of energy—a unit where 1 J = 1 kg*m²2/s². We can calculate the change in energy by lifting things using the work-energy principle. This says that work done on a system is equal to the change in energy of that system, and also that work depends on the force pushing on that system and the distance the force moves. Here I am using "system" to mean some thing or collection of things.

In the expression for work, Δr is the distance the force moves, and θ is the angle between the force and the direction it is moving.

If you want to lift a book with a mass (this includes most books you will find), then you will need to push up with a force equal in magnitude to the gravitational force. On the surface of the Earth, the gravitational force is the product of the mass (in kilograms) and the gravitational field with a value of approximately 9.8 newtons per kilogram.

So lifting a book up a distance h would have an angle between the force and displacement of 0° (remember that cosine of 0° = 0 1). The work done lifting an object of mass (m) and height (h) would then be:

This change in energy of the book is called gravitational potential energy. The more mass you lift, the greater the stored energy. The higher you lift the mass, the greater the potential energy. If you increase the gravitational field—oh wait. The only way to change the gravitational field is to change the size or mass of the Earth. Forget that part.

Motors and Generators

OK. You lift some mass and you can store energy. That's great, but how do you get the energy back into something useful? The answer is to use the same thing that lifted the mass—an electric motor. Yes. You can get energy out of a raised mass and an electric motor.

An electric motor isn't that complicated. It's really just a coil of wire and a magnet. As you run electric current through the wire, the current creates a magnetic field. This current-induced magnetic field interacts with the magnetic field produced by the other magnets, resulting in a rotating motor. If you want, you can probably build a simple electric motor with stuff you have around the house. Here are the instructions.

Let me show you an electric motor connected to a battery.

This electric motor lifts the mass to store the energy—but it also produces electricity. Suppose you take your electric motor and disconnect it from the battery that was running it. Now you rotate the coil of wire inside the motor. It just so happens that a loop of wire moving through a magnetic field creates an electric current. Yes, it's true.

If you take that exact same electric motor and turn it with something, it will generate electricity. You can see this with that same demonstration motor above as I turn it and power a small light.

An electric generator and an electric motor are the same thing. It just depends on how you use it. So, for this concrete gravity battery, the electrical energy goes into a motor to lift a mass a certain height. When you want to get the energy out of the battery, you use the same motor to lower the mass back down to the ground, causing the generator shaft to spin and create electricity. There's your gravity battery.

Energy Stored in a Concrete Gravity Battery

Now for an estimation. How much energy can you store in a stack of cement blocks? I will need to make some approximations first.

• Each cement thingy is a 55 gallon drum filled with cement. This would be a volume of 0.208 m³. Oh, I am going to say that a 55 gallon drum has a height of 0.889 meters.
• The density of cement (I know I said concrete earlier—to first approximation, these are the same) is 3150 kg/m³.
• The mass of the drum (assuming it's all cement) is the volume multiplied by the density. This puts it at 655.2 kilograms.
• The maximum stack height is 15 meters. I don't know if this is true. I'm just saying if I built one of these things, that's how tall my crane would be in my imaginary world.

Let's start simple. I have a cement drum on the ground and I put another one on top of it. I don't get any stored gravitational energy for that first cement thingy since it can't go any lower than it already is—but the one on top of that has a stored energy that depends on the gravitational field, the mass, and the height. For the height, I am going to use the length of a cement drum (0.889 meters). The height of the center of mass for this drum is important, but if I put it back on the ground, the center of mass only moves 0.889 meters.

This means that one drum stacked on another one has a potential energy of 5,708 joules. That might seem like a bunch of energy, but your smartphone battery can store about 20,000 joules (crazy but true). But wait! If I stack another drum? This second drum will have a stored energy that is twice that of the first one, since it will be twice as high. Higher cement things have more energy.

I'm going to just continue stacking stuff higher and higher until I get up to 15 meters. At that point, I will start back at the ground and stack again. Just for fun, here is a plot of stored energy as a function of the number of stacked drums.

Oh, you might want the code I wrote to create this graph. Boom. But that gives 2 million joules of stored energy with just 50 cement drums (assuming energy transfers are 100 percent efficient—which they aren't). That's not too bad. Of course the Tesla Powerwall can store about 50 million joules, so 50 drums might not be enough.

Still, this battery as some nice features. It's mechanically simple to build. If you stack some cement drums, they are going to stay like that for a long time, so you don't have to worry about battery drainage. Also, in the end all you need is a crane, a motor, and some cement.

This story originally appeared on The New Republic and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Germany was supposed to be a model for solving global warming. In 2007, the country’s government announced that it would reduce its greenhouse gas emissions by 40 percent by the year 2020. This was the kind of bold, aggressive climate goal scientists said was needed in all developed countries. If Germany could do it, it would prove the target possible.

So far, Germany has reduced its greenhouse gas emissions by 27.7 percent—an astonishing achievement for a developed country with a highly developed manufacturing sector. But with a little more than a year left to go, despite dedicating $580 billion toward a low-carbon energy system, the country “is likely to fall short of its goals for reducing harmful carbon-dioxide emissions,” Bloomberg News reported on Wednesday. And the reason for that may come down not to any elaborate solar industry plans, but something much simpler: cars.

“At the time they set their goals, they were very ambitious,” Patricia Espinosa, the United Nations’ top climate change official, told Bloomberg. “What happened was that the industry—particularly the car industry—didn’t come along.”

Changing the way we power our homes and businesses is certainly important. But as Germany’s shortfall shows, the only way to achieve these necessary, aggressive emissions reductions to combat global warming is to overhaul the gas-powered automobile and the culture that surrounds it. The only question left is how to do it.

In 2010, a NASA study declared that automobiles were officially the largest net contributor of climate change pollution in the world. “Cars, buses, and trucks release pollutants and greenhouse gases that promote warming, while emitting few aerosols that counteract it,” the study read. “In contrast, the industrial and power sectors release many of the same gases—with a larger contribution to [warming]—but they also emit sulfates and other aerosols that cause cooling by reflecting light and altering clouds.”

In other words, the power generation sector may have emitted the most greenhouse gases in total. But it also released so many sulfates and cooling aerosols that the net impact was less than the automobile industry, according to NASA.

Since then, developed countries have cut back on those cooling aerosols for the purpose of countering regular air pollution, which has likely increased the net climate pollution of the power generation industry. But according to the Union of Concerned Scientists, “collectively, cars and trucks account for nearly one-fifth of all U.S. emissions,” while “in total, the US transportation sector—which includes cars, trucks, planes, trains, ships, and freight—produces nearly thirty percent of all US global warming emissions … .”

In fact, transportation is now the largest source of carbon dioxide emissions in the United States—and it has been for two years, according to an analysis from the Rhodium Group.

There’s a similar pattern happening in Germany. Last year, the country’s greenhouse gas emissions decreased as a whole, “largely thanks to the closure of coal-fired power plants,” according to Reuters. Meanwhile, the transportation industry’s emissions increased by 2.3 percent, “as car ownership expanded and the booming economy meant more heavy vehicles were on the road.” Germany’s transportation sector remains the nation’s second largest source of greenhouse gas emissions, but if these trends continue, it will soon become the first.

Clearly, the power generation industry is changing its ways. So why aren’t carmakers following suit?

To American eyes, Germany may look like a public transit paradise. But the country also has a flourishing car culture that began over a hundred years ago and has only grown since then.

Behind Japan and the United States, Germany is the third-largest automobile manufacturer in the world—home to BMW, Audi, Mercedes Benz, and Volkswagen. These brands, and the economic prosperity they’ve brought to the country, shape Germany’s cultural and political identities. “There is no other industry as important,” Arndt Ellinghorst, the chief of Global Automotive Research at Evercore, told CNN.

A similar phenomenon exists in the United States, where gas-guzzlers symbolize nearly every cliche point of American pride: affluence, capability for individual expression, and personal freedoms. Freedom, in particular, “is not a selling point to be easily dismissed,” Edward Humes wrote in The Atlantic in 2016. “This trusty conveyance, always there, always ready, on no schedule but its owner’s. Buses can’t do that. Trains can’t do that. Even Uber makes riders wait.”

It’s this cultural love of cars—and the political influence of the automotive industry—that has so far prevented the public pressure necessary to provoke widespread change in many developed nations. But say those barriers didn’t exist. How could developed countries tweak their automobile policies to solve climate change?

For Germany to meet emissions targets, “half of the people who now use their cars alone would have to switch to bicycles, public transport, or ride-sharing,” Heinrich Strößenreuther, a Berlin-based consultant for mobility strategies told YaleEnvironment360's Christian Schwägerl last fall. That would require drastic policies, like having local governments ban high-emitting cars in populated places like cities. (In fact, Germany’s car capital, Stuttgart, is considering it.) It would also require large-scale government investments in public transportation infrastructure: “A new transport system that connects bicycles, buses, trains, and shared cars, all controlled by digital platforms that allow users to move from A to B in the fastest and cheapest way—but without their own car,” Schwägerl said.

One could get away with more modest infrastructure investments if governments required carmakers to make their vehicle fleets more fuel-efficient, thereby burning less petroleum. The problem is that most automakers seek to meet those requirements by developing electric cars. If those cars are charged with electricity from a coal-fired power plant, they create “more emissions than a car that burns petrol,” energy storage expert Dénes Csala pointed out last year. “For such a switch to actually reduce net emissions, the electricity that powers those cars must be renewable.”

The most effective solution would be to combine these policies. Governments would require drastic improvements in fuel efficiency for gas-powered vehicles, while investing in renewable-powered electric car infrastructure. At the same time, cities would overhaul their public transportation systems, adding more bikes, trains, buses and ride-shares. Fewer people would own cars.

At one point, the U.S. was well on its way toward some of these changes. In 2012, President Barack Obama’s administration implemented regulations requiring automakers to nearly double the fuel economy of passenger vehicles by the year 2025. But the Trump administration announced a rollback of those regulations earlier this month. Their intention, they said, is to “Make Cars Great Again.”

The modern cars they’re seeking to preserve, and the way we use them, are far from great. Of course, there’s the climate impact—the trillions in expected economic damage from extreme weather and sea-level rise caused in part by our tailpipes. But 53,000 Americans also die prematurely from vehicle pollution each year, and accidents are among the leading causes of death in the United States. “If US roads were a war zone, they would be the most dangerous battlefield the American military has ever encountered,” Humes wrote. It’s getting more dangerous by the day.

Related Video

Science

Al Gore Answers the Web's Most Searched Questions on Climate Change

Politician and activist Al Gore answers the Internet's most searched questions about climate change.

Is there any more tantalizing headline than “Scientists Discover a Cure for Cancer”? Some version of this fantastical claim has been dropped into the news cycle with the regularity of a super blood wolf moon for the better part of a century. In 1998, James Watson told The New York Times that a cancer cure would arrive by Y2K. This magazine hasn’t been immune either, running an “End of Cancer” headline a few years later. Each instance stirs up hope for patients and their families desperate to find a solution, no matter the risk or cost. And yet, here we are in 2019, with that constellation of complex, diverse diseases we lump together and call “cancer” for convenience's sake still killing one in eight men and one in 11 women, according to the World Health Organization’s latest stats.

You’d think creators and consumers of news would have learned their lesson by now. But the latest version of the fake cancer cure story is even more flagrantly flawed than usual. The public’s cancer cure–shaped amnesia, and media outlets’ willingness to exploit it for clicks, are as bottomless as ever. Hope, it would seem, trumps history.

What’s Happening

On Monday, the Jerusalem Post, a centrist Israeli newspaper, published an online story profiling a small company called Accelerated Evolution Biotechnologies that has been working on a potential anti-cancer drug cocktail since 2000. It was somewhat cautiously headlined “A Cure for Cancer? Israeli Scientists Think They Found One” and relied almost entirely on an interview with the company’s board chair, Dan Aridor, one of just three individuals listed on AEBi’s website. In it, Aridor made a series of sweeping claims, including this eye-popper: “We believe we will offer in a year’s time a complete cure for cancer.”

It was an especially brash move considering the company has not conducted a single trial in humans or published an ounce of data from its completed studies of petri dish cells and rodents in cages. Under normal drug development proceedings, a pharmaceutical startup would submit such preclinical work to peer review to support any claims and use it to drum up funding for clinical testing. AEBi’s PR move might be an attempt at a shortcut. In an interview on Tuesday, the company’s founder and CEO, Ilan Morad, told the Times of Israel that lack of cash flow is the reason AEBi has elected not to publish data.

The original Jerusalem Post article did not interview any outside experts in the oncology field. Nor did it inject any skepticism about the gap between speculative, preclinical work in controlled laboratory environments and a universal cure on a 12-month timeline. Anyone who knows anything about oncology will tell you that a vast number of promising treatments fail human testing. One recent estimate put success rates for cancer drugs getting to market at a dismal 3.4 percent.

What People Are Saying

About 12 hours after the Jerusalem Post tweeted out a link to its story, figures from the far right began to amplify its optimistic headline. Pro-Trump twitter troll Jacob Wohl posted it, followed shortly by conservative political pundit Glenn Beck, who added his own self-aggrandizing touch. “As we have hoped and prayed, and I spoke about happening by 2030: A TOTAL cure for cancer.”

By Tuesday morning, Fox News had published its own report. The story did add some caveats, including a strongly worded comment emailed from a New York oncology expert, who called AEBi’s claim likely to be “yet another in a long line of spurious, irresponsible, and ultimately cruel false promises for cancer patients.” But Fox’s grabby headline retained a nearly identical formula to the original Jerusalem Post story and was copied by similar reports that cropped up on local TV news spots from Philadelphia to Melbourne, Australia.

While many major news outlets ignored the story, the New York Post and Forbes both published their own glowing versions, based largely on the Jerusalem Post’s reporting. But within 24 hours, both sites had come out with new, decidedly less rosy stories, in which they (gasp!) interviewed cancer experts. Forbes actually published two. One, by the original story’s author, was entitled “Experts Decry Israeli Team’s Claims That They Have Found the Cure for Cancer” and another, headlined even more explicitly: “An Israeli Company Claims That They Will Have a Cure for Cancer in a Year. Don’t Believe Them.”

Such course correction is not unusual, nor nefarious, in the fast-moving world of online journalism. But, as scholars of the internet attest, misinformation spreads faster online than attempts to claw it back. While outrage may be the fuel that feeds the virality of most fake news stories, when it comes to news about our health, people tend to be motivated by a more upbeat impulse. “Positivity looms larger in deciding both what to read and what to share,” wrote Hyun Suk Kim, a communications researcher at Ohio State University, in one analysis of how health news stories get shared through social networks.

So the “Cancer Cured!” piece is going to travel farther, faster, than the “Cancer Still Sucks” story. Case in point: When Forbes tweeted out its original article, it received 47 replies, 821 retweets, and 1,635 likes. The one that went out a day later, publicizing a 180-degree reversal in tone, has so far received a mere four replies, 30 retweets, and 61 likes.

Why It Matters

Social media makes it easier than ever to be a noncritical consumer of information. The constant scroll-scroll-scroll is practically designed to encourage lazy thinking. At the same time, people are hungry for a life preserver of good news amid the toxic content spewing from platforms like Twitter and Facebook. When every day online feels like a battle across party, sex, race, class, and even generational lines, cancer is a unifying enemy. A story about the end of cancer could be an olive branch to a sick friend or a relative across the social divide. Or it might just allow you to believe, for one blissful moment, that your body’s cells aren’t already on an unstoppable mutational march toward your demise.

But all the armchair philosophizing in the world can’t change the ugly truth of the persistent cancer-cure meme: Peddling false hope is immoral.

When Melissa Moore was tinkering around with RNA in the early 90s, the young biochemist had to painstakingly construct the genetic molecules by micropipette, just a few building blocks at a time. Inside the MIT lab of Nobel laureate Phil Sharp, it could take days to make just a few drops of RNA, which ferries a cell’s genetic source code to its protein-making machinery. She didn’t imagine that nearly three decades later she’d leave academia to work for a company that cranks out the stuff 20 liters at a time.

Moore heads up RNA research at Moderna Therapeutics. Worth an estimated $7 billion, it’s one of the most valuable private healthcare companies in the world, according to CB Insights. The Boston area-based biotech firm is one of a handful of businesses developing technologies to turn people’s own cells into drug manufacturing plants using messenger RNA, or mRNA. These strings of instructions could convince a patient’s body to make things like cancer-killing chemicals, heart-healing proteins, or virus-hunting antibodies. “Once you understand how to get these medicines where they need to be you can just change the sequence and make a new medicine very quickly,” says Moore. “It’s a complete sea change in our abilities.”

Maybe so, but Moderna’s pipeline remains in the early stages eight years after its founding. Operating in stealth for the first two years, the company earned an early reputation for secrecy. The editors of Nature Biotechnology at one point chastised the company—along with other biotechs, including the embattled Theranos—for its lack of publishing.

It’s only in the last year and a half, as Moderna has put several drug candidates in clinical trials, that it has begun to open up publicly, finally publishing papers with some details about the technology it’s developing. And as those trials expand—right now it has 10, with 11 more on the way—so too does Moderna. Last week the company opened a new 200,000-square-foot, $110 million manufacturing facility that will stock its trials and pre-clinical research teams with all the mRNA they require, at least for now.

“It’s counterintuitive to a startup,” said Moderna chief of staff and the new site lead, Stephen Harbin, acknowledging that the company is still years away from producing commercial products. “But it’s entirely intuitive to this startup.”

Earlier this month, when England’s hope for a World Cup trophy was still very much alive, the cowboy-booted Brit showed WIRED around the new Moderna site where employees paused in passing to exclaim things like “You going all the way?!” Harbin explained how gowned, gloved, hair-netted scientists would move through the building’s five fluorescently lit clinical clean rooms making Moderna’s first official GMP—for good manufacturing practices, the guidelines required by drug regulators—batch of mRNA when it opened on July 17.

In the first room, large stainless steel machines turn a digital sequence of genetic building blocks called nucleotides into ring-shaped DNA plasmids. In the second, enzymes convert that DNA into strands of mRNA. In room three, the mRNA gets coated in lipid nanoparticles to help it enter cells.

The last and most critical room is deep in the middle of the building, in a sealed-off aseptic block. To go there, employees have to don double layers of gowns and gloves, and move slowly so they don’t stir up any microbes that might have slipped past air filters and sanitizing scrub-downs. Preventing contamination here is of utmost importance. It’s where the mRNA gets deposited into the vials that will take them to their final destination.

Behind the clean rooms, in a part of the building Harbin says we’re not allowed to visit, workers are still finishing Moderna’s “ballrooms,” where the company plans to install a handful of refrigerator-sized, custom-designed robots for producing personalized cancer vaccines later this year. In addition to the programs that Moderna has for infectious diseases, cardiovascular disorders, and rare disease, perhaps nothing has attracted attention like the idea of designing one-off cancer-fighting drugs. A decade ago, the economics would have made it unthinkable. In terms of human labor it would cost the same to make a medicine for one patient as for a million patients, according to Moderna president Steven Hoge . But automation and advanced sequencing technologies are changing that.

“We’re going to be able to make medicines that address diseases in different people in very different ways as a result of mostly removing humans from the process,“ Hoge told WIRED earlier this year. “It’s not something that is like ‘oh, this is the right color for you,’ it’s actually, “no, we invented this color for you.’”

Like others attempting this approach, Moderna starts the process of making each individualized treatment with a pair of genetic profiles taken from a cancer patient. One comes from a gob of tumor tissue, one from a vial of their blood. By comparing the two, an algorithm scours for the mutations that caused that particular cancer. Another algorithm produces a list of 20 protein targets it predicts will teach the patient’s immune system to attack the tumor, based on those mutations. And yet another designs the string of nucleotides that Moderna’s unique automated machines will assemble into an mRNA medicine. Human workers monitor the process from a workstation and run quality control checks, but machines do the bulk of the work.

Moderna began clinical trials for solid tumors last fall in partnership with Merck; the first patient received her individualized treatment just before Thanksgiving. The vaccines are being tested in combination with Merck’s immunotherapy drug, Keytruda, which works by impairing the cancer’s tricks for eluding the immune system.

It’s a collaborative strategy at least some of Moderna’s rivals are also employing, in the hopes of being first to the market. Germany-based BioNTech has already begun Phase 1/2 trials for its individualized cancer vaccine in patients with multiple tumors with its partner, Genentech. It got its first good manufacturing practices authorization back in 2011. CureVac, also based in Germany, established the world’s first GMP manufacturing facility for mRNA back in 2006. It’s currently in the process of building its third and fourth plants, which will increase the company’s capacity thirty-fold by 2020. It has three cancer-fighting vaccine programs currently in clinical trials.

Some industry analysts say the lack of progress in mRNA-based cancer vaccines should cause investors concern. Dirk Haussecker, a biotech consultant based in Germany, is already turning his attention to newer technologies like Crispr gene editing, which he thinks will render most applications of mRNA, including personal cancer treatments, obsolete.

Nils Walter, a director at the University of Michigan’s Center for RNA Biomedicine, isn’t so pessimistic. He thinks the time is finally right for RNA-based therapeutics and that companies like Moderna, CureVac, and BioNTech will likely be the vanguard. But he cautions that there’s still a lot left to learn about the biology of these potential cures. “If you want to go beyond just vaccines you have to start to worry about what that mRNA is doing, because it can escape elsewhere into the body,” he says. “You inject into the muscle and it magically appears in the bloodstream.”

But he says adding Melissa Moore, who left her well-respected post at the University of Massachusetts Medical School's RNA Therapeutics Institute for Moderna, will undoubtedly help the company address those questions. “With her scientific caliber, maybe they’ll be able to see potential bottlenecks, be honest about them, and overcome them quickly, he says.” After all, she has developed many of the field's widely used RNA techniques. In a meeting with Moderna’s process innovation group, Moore realized they were using a technique she invented as a post-doc 30 years ago. She dredged up her old lab notebooks to show them.

As Moderna moves into this new chapter, she might also help them break out of their cycle of secrecy. Moore says her team is about to publish a paper showing they can engineer an off-switch into mRNAs, so they only express proteins in the cells Moderna wants them to, like, say, cancer cells. And they’ve got more research coming about designing mRNAs to last longer in the body, which will be important for treating genetic diseases that require taking the medicine over a lifetime. The proof will be in the publishing.

This story originally appeared on Grist and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

On a crisp winter morning, while my daughters lingered over pancakes with their grandparents, I drove a couple of miles past houses nestled among incense cedars, Ponderosa pines, and Douglas firs. I couldn’t help imagining those trees roaring with flames, because I was going to watch the neighbors set a patch of land on fire.

I grew up here, in Nevada City, California, about halfway between Sacramento and Lake Tahoe in the northern foothills of the Sierra Nevada mountains. Like many of our neighbors, my family came for the forest, but with the forest comes forest fires. And in the last few years, it seems like all of the West has been on fire.

A quarter mile up a steep driveway, where the rising sun illuminated a panorama of wooded ridgelines, I met Dario Davidson, a retired forester wearing a grubby baseball hat and well-worn leather gloves. He was there to conduct a controlled burn, a way of clearing out the underbrush and leaves that provide tinder to wildfires. In one hand he picked up what looked like a low-key flamethrower, called a drip can, and with the other, he flicked a lighter until the mixture of gasoline and diesel at its wick flared. Then he tipped the can forward and dribbled out a line of flaming fuel onto the forest floor.

LEARN MORE

The WIRED Guide to Climate Change

Immediately, a knee-high fence of fire rose behind him. Fire can mesmerize. It’s easy to get lost staring into the flames at a hearth; it’s even more fascinating to see them spread outdoors. I watched as the blaze transformed the top few inches of pine needles and oak leaves into a film of ash atop the older, decomposing duff. Sweet-smelling smoke gusted around us, and we backed away.

Perhaps I should have felt some respectful fear that this mini-forest fire might grow beyond our control. Sooner or later, a real wildfire will rage through here. Houses will burn, and the narrow roads will jam up. People I love, including my aging parents, could die. But I wasn’t even apprehensive: I’ve lived with the reality of wildfire for 40 years. So instead of fear, I felt a twinge of excitement as the flames rose.

Davidson gestured toward the blackened patch where the flames were guttering out, diminishing to smoke. He explained that the goal of this burn was to reduce the amount of fuel available to a future wildfire.

“This land has been pretty well-managed,” Davidson said. “There’s maybe 10 tons of fuel per acre here, versus 60 tons on nearby properties that haven’t been cleared out. That’s a big difference in terms of the BTUs [the sheer heat], and the number of embers that a big fire will produce.”

Even if you’re not surrounded by forest, that heat can be deadly. Nearby homes can burst into flames with high enough temperatures. And flying embers can seed dozens of new blazes. But trees and houses can survive a lower-intensity burn.

Davidson spread more fire, and the flames licked up tree trunks, charring the thick bark that evolved to insulate the living tissue inside from fire. For more than a century, we’ve managed to squelch fires, inadvertently creating the conditions for catastrophe. People have been doing prescribed burns for decades, but too few and too rarely to make much of a difference. After years of disastrous inaction, it was a relief to witness this little action — the fire’s warmth felt good, and the entire experience felt salutary. It was like getting out for a run after resolving to stop eating Christmas cookies and start exercising. This isn’t so bad, you think, why don’t we do this all the time?

The people of Nevada County are no strangers to fire. Wildfires stud my memories of growing up in Nevada County. In 1988, my parents packed valuables into our car as a blaze threatened to sweep through town. A few years later, when my brother and I were teenagers home alone one afternoon, we lugged a pump and hose out to our pond as embers fell around us and helicopters roared overhead. Winds kept that first fire out of the most densely populated areas, and people rebuilt what burned down. The second fire was a small blaze just over the hill from my father’s house, which firefighters managed to suppress within a few hours.

But things are getting worse. People here are feeling unusually nervous since wildfires consumed neighborhoods in Santa Rosa, Santa Barbara, Malibu, and Redding. Last year, the Camp Fire devoured the entire town Paradise just 50 miles north of here. When officials held a fire-safety meeting in Nevada County last month, residents filled the government building and packed the steps outside the meeting room.

“Business as usual” makes things a little worse every year. First, there are greenhouse gas emissions that make the summers hotter and drier in the West. Second, the forests produce tons of new fuel every year. For the 100-odd years that the government has been putting out fires in the western United States, the trees have been producing a steady rain of branches, leaves, and needles, creating a layer of duff that, in some places, is thick enough to keep water from trickling down to tree roots. Add that to the worst drought in history that parched the state from 2011 to 2014, throw in some voracious bark beetles, and you get 129 million dead trees in California, drying out and magnifying the risk of yet another devastating wildfire for the state.

Even if people don’t see the threat, insurance companies do. The increasing risk of fires is driving up the cost of insuring houses in wildfire-prone neighborhoods. Newspapers have run a bunch of stories about people around Nevada City who have found the cost unaffordable, and are moving out. The state insurance commissioner recently said that California is “slowly marching toward a world that’s uninsurable.” One company, Merced Property & Casualty Company, went belly up after the fire in Paradise burned down many of its customers’ houses.

Despite a flurry of stories in the media about people losing their insurance and leaving the area, Mark Sektnan, president of the Property Casualty Insurers Association of America, told me, “We’re not seeing a trend.” Insurance prices are increasing in some places, but California doesn’t allow insurers to jack up premiums based on recent disasters, and nearly everyone can find home insurance if they want it, he said. (Whether they can afford it is another question.)

“We started seeing all these stories about uninsurable properties and we thought we were seeing a crisis here,” Sektnan said. “But it turned out the same guy had talked to four different media outlets.”

The fire danger and high insurance prices will likely drive some Nevada City residents to relocate, but most seem to be staying put — at least for now. Big, slow trends, like climate change, hardly ever trigger radical actions. Instead, these shifts lead to gradual, piecemeal adaptation.

During my stay in Nevada City this winter, I asked several locals about the risks of staying put, they were sanguine about the wildfires menacing their homes, and insurance rates reflecting that risk. “When we moved here we realized the danger,” said Suzanne Ferroggiaro, who lives a few miles from my mother. “We’ve lived in different places and we’ve always had threats — tornado threats, hurricane threats, flood threats.”

It’s impossible to completely insulate yourself from natural disasters, and even the threat of wildfire is more widespread than you might expect. It’s not just a rural danger. The state fire agency, Cal Fire, says the towns in Nevada County are “very high fire hazard severity zones,” but so are swaths of Los Angeles, Oakland, and San Diego.

Most people aren’t retreating; instead, they are trying new techniques.

Back at the burn, Davidson was teaching the neighbors and a group of young foresters how to manage a controlled burn. Because fire moves uphill, they’d started near the top of the slope so that fire quickly moved to the upper perimeter — a line of bare dirt — where it ran out of fuel and burned out. Then the workers moved down a few feet and set a new line of fire so that the flames reached the previous burn scar before dying. With this technique, the fire always goes out on its own: You have to work to get the controlled burn to spread. “You just want it to be really slow and boring,” Davidson said.

Nonetheless, the workers had raked (“scratched” in forester jargon) out a perimeter line, clearing the needles (“down to mineral soil,” Davidson advised), which kept the fire a good 100 feet from Kathy Keville’s house. The controlled burn was something of a demonstration project for the Lower Colfax Firewise Community association, and neighbors had gathered to watch, learn, and help out.

This is a new phenomenon here in California’s fire country: not the use of controlled burns, but the willingness to participate in community organization to stem future fires. The numbers reflect this: There are 23 of these associations in Nevada County, 25 more have filed their papers to be officially recognized, and another 25 are organizing, according to the County fire council.

My parents have always cut back the manzanita and scotch broom to maintain Cal Fire’s recommended 100 feet of “defensible space” around their homes (though as they get older they hire others to do most of the work), but we never were part of a communal effort.

It was the same for Davidson. “I maintained my little five acres and thought I was safe,” he said. “Then I started looking at fire maps and I realized it was just a little postage stamp. I could do all the work I wanted and it would still burn if my neighbors did nothing.”

So in 2016, he began organizing meetings. From an initial mailing list of 26, the Lower Colfax Firewise Community association has grown to encompass 680 people, living on 421 parcels covering 2,900 acres.

These community associations are a relatively recent development in California and a necessary one, said Scott McLean, spokesperson for Cal Fire. Neighbors help motivate each other, they educate each other, and they figure out who needs help. That last point is crucial during emergencies when fire agencies count on individuals to save one another.

“People need, not just a personal plan, but a community plan,” McLean said. “What about the little street they live on? Who is going to help out the elderly neighbors?”

When McLean’s former boss, Cal Fire Director Ken Pimlott, retired this year he gave a series of blunt exit interviews. “Folks can say what they want to say, but firefighters are living climate change. It’s staring them in the face every day,” he said. Individuals will have to organize themselves and local governments will need to improve their planning and regulations, Pimlott said.

So everything will have to change, but that has always been true. Californian’s have always had to adapt to their beautiful surroundings. “Fire is a way of life in California, and we have to learn how to live with it, we have to learn how to have more resilient communities,” he said.

As the climate continues to change we can expect to see a lot more adaptation like this. Where you might expect to see mass migration and big headline-grabbing actions, look for lots of local meetings, hyper-local associations springing up, and plenty of tinkering around the edges. Whether politicians in Congress ever figure out how to address the drivers of climate change, individuals no different from you and me will continue to hunt solutions that fit their communities.

I left before the burn was finished (these things can take all day). At the end, the workers would tamp out embers and spray the area with water. They’d planned the burn between winter storms — a drenching rain with a chance of snow was due at the end of the week. Back at my mom’s house, I could see a scrim of smoke rising through the ponderosas from the direction of Keville’s property. But you probably wouldn’t notice the smoke if you weren’t looking for it. The sky was blue, and the air clear enough for me to see beyond the canyon where the Bear River runs, out past the next ridge that separates it from the American River watershed.

That tiny fire Davidson set might make this place a bit safer for my parents, and for my children when I drop them off for summer visits. There’s no way to completely avoid the environmental risks cued up by the missteps of the past. But if this sort of thing inspires more community efforts, and more individuals stepping up to take responsibility for the problems within their grasp, it might make us all a little safer.

If you had your very own home robot, what would you want it to do, exactly? Pick up after you? Do the dishes? Help you make coffee? Yeah, me too, but that kind of robot is a long, long ways off.

That isn’t stopping robotics companies from jumping into the robotic assistant fray. Consider Jibo, essentially a dancing Amazon Alexa. And Kuri, a miniaturized R2-D2 that roams around your house taking pictures. If that doesn’t sound particularly impressive to you, well, the market felt the same way. Jibo Inc. has reportedly laid off the bulk of its staff, and Kuri’s maker, Mayfield Robotics, announced last month that it’s pausing operations and refunding pre-orders.

Now joining the scrum is a rather more established company, Anki, which makes the popular Cozmo, a robot toy you control with your phone. Today it’s announcing that it has taken Cozmo and supercharged it from a plaything into an autonomous home assistant—named Vector. It’s charming, it’s (relatively) smart, and it’s mobile, the product of a recent convergence of technologies in robotics. The question is: Can Vector succeed where other home robots have failed?

Like, many others. Robot makers have been trying to fill our homes with social robots since the early '80s. Pretty much all, though, have been dumber than a box of rocks. If you wanted your Omnibot to bring you breakfast in bed, you had to make that breakfast yourself, then place it on the robot’s tray, then remote-control the robot into your bedroom, then get back in bed, then look up from your newspaper and act all surprised that a robot had made you breakfast in bed.

Jibo, Kuri, and now Vector don’t bother with manipulating all the stuff in your home—that’s still a challenge even for research robotics. But they’re vastly more intelligent than their predecessors, thanks to advances in machine intelligence and processing power. Gaming in particular has led to graphics processing units that help small robots process their surroundings. And the machine-learning algorithms that used to require bulky computers in the cloud to run are now streamlined enough to run right on the robot. Accordingly, Vector only needs to call up to the cloud to process voices, while it can navigate its environment and recognize faces thanks to algorithms running locally.

Think of Vector as a miniaturized self-driving car for your home. It’s meant to live on countertops and tables, where it explores its environment with lasers and a camera, remembering where objects are and stopping just shy of plummeting off the edge. Ask it what the weather is, and it’ll tell you. Or tell it to set a timer for you. It’ll perk up when you step into a room. It’s a bit like Google Home, only with an actual personality.

It may not be able to do much at the moment (Anki says it will keep adding capabilities after launch in October), but it is undeniably charming. If it rolls too close to the edge of the table, for instance, it’ll recoil and twitter, as if to say that could have killed me. “Having a character built-in allows us to do things which are otherwise socially not super acceptable from an appliance,” says Hanns Wolfram Tappeiner, cofounder and president of Anki. “Vector doesn't just sit there and wait until you ask him something.” It'll get excited and chatty when it sees you.

Communication also comes nonverbally from Vector’s digitized eyes, which are meticulously animated by former Pixar wizards to woo you. They express the robot’s “emotional” state—tip it on its side and it looks flustered, for instance—but also reel you in, because humans live for eye contact, even with machines.

“If we don't do things like eye contact really well—for example, how frequently does the robot make eye contact with a person, or how long does he keep that eye contact?—then something that feels like an alive character immediately feels not alive or very detached, like a turtle or or a hamster or something like that, versus a toddler or a dog,” Tappeiner says.

Let’s be real: No one’s interested in a digital turtle. But it’s not totally clear that consumers want a digital dog, either (especially one that tromps around on a tabletop). And customers have been burned before. “They expected too much and got too little,” says Aditya Kaul, research director at Tractica, which studies consumer robotics. “That has something to do with science fiction and popular culture, and what we expect to see from robots is not really what we are getting.”

It’s also, though, a matter of these companies underdelivering. “Jibo really represented a novelty, the same with Kuri,” says Nick Maynard, a research analyst at Juniper Research, which also studies consumer robotics. “They were there for people who wanted to say they had them—they didn't really offer a compelling differentiator. They didn't really offer the advanced features that users would actually want.”

What do consumers want for sure? Voice assistants like Amazon Alexa. And if Amazon’s rumored foray into home robotics is any indication, it may well be those devices that drive the evolution of personal robots. “I think what we will see is the lines between voice assistants and home robots will start to blur, and we’ll begin to see devices that include both functions,” Maynard says. It’s territory that Vector is beginning to explore.

Can Vector be both charming and useful? Charming, absolutely, but its usefulness is yet to be seen. It won’t bring you breakfast in bed, but for the moment, that’ll just be something you’ll have to live with.

More Great WIRED Stories

• In nature, Google Lens does what the human brain can’t
• Crying ‘pedophile‘ is the oldest propaganda trick around
• The wild inner workings of a billion-dollar hacking group
• Inside the 23-dimensional world of your car’s paint job
• Crispr and the mutant future of food
• Looking for more? Sign up for our daily newsletter and never miss our latest and greatest stories

Related Video

Science

The Genesis of Kuri the Companion Robot

This is the story of how an adorable robot went from Lego prototype to family companion.

This story originally appeared on Grist on Jan. 31 and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

This January should be remembered for its unusual warmth, not its cold.

Yes, it’s so cold right now that even hardy Minneapolis is shutting down schools, but even with these few days of extreme cold, Minnesota should end up with a near “normal” month thanks to weeks of unusual warmth. It was in the 70s and 80s as far north as Maryland on New Year’s Day. Alaska has been so warm that they’re canceling sled dog races. So far this month, there have been 651 record daily highs across the United States, compared to 321 record daily lows—a roughly 2-to-1 ratio. And that’s just in the U.S.

Globally, the ratio of record highs to lows was about 20-to-1, with new all-time records in Namibia, Chile, and Reunion Island.

It’s summer in the southern hemisphere, and a brutal heat wave in Australia is melting roads and killing wildlife on a mass scale. On January 18, one town never dropped below 96.6 degrees F—marking the hottest night in Australian history. Thursday was the hottest day so far in relatively mild Sydney, with temperatures reaching 104 degrees F and knocking out power for tens of thousands of people.

Ongoing bushfires in Tasmania are threatening a World Heritage site with thousand-year-old pine trees—parts of the same area burned in 2016. Fires in this protected alpine wilderness were once unheard of; now they’re becoming routine.

To put it bluntly, events like this can’t happen in a normal climate. The harsh truth is we are not only losing the weather of the past, but there’s no hope of it stabilizing any time soon.

LEARN MORE

The WIRED Guide to Climate Change

Underlying this warmth and extreme weather is the irreversible heat buildup of the oceans. The waters in the South Pacific are off the charts right now, triggering the highest alert for coral bleaching and boosting the likelihood of significant mortality in marine ecosystems. Sea ice on both poles is near record lows, with profound effects for the world’s weather. Current temperatures in the Arctic are likely the warmest they’ve been in at least 115,000 years, with melting ice beginning to reveal plants and landscapes buried for at least 40,000 years, according to new research.

Climate change is the sum effect of changes to daily weather, and our weather these days is bordering on indescribable. We are pushing the atmosphere into uncharted territory. That means what happens next is inherently unpredictable.

According to the Trump administration’s just-completed National Climate Assessment, “positive feedbacks (self-reinforcing cycles) within the climate system have the potential to accelerate human-induced climate change and even shift the Earth’s climate system, in part or in whole, into new states that are very different from those experienced in the recent past.”

The real danger of climate change is not that we are proving ourselves unable to heed scientists’ warnings, but that those warnings are inherently too cautious and we’ve already gone past the point of no return. Even the bombshell IPCC report, which recently kicked off an unprecedented youth movement advocating for a Green New Deal, may have underestimated how dire things truly are.

This is the core truth of our time: We have left the stable climate era that gave rise to civilization. Our society is brittle, and our new context—for generations to come—will be constant change. Even if we manage to rapidly stabilize greenhouse gas emissions in the next 10 years or so, as the IPCC report says we must, weather will continue to worsen for decades and the seas will continue to rise for hundreds of years.

With this extreme month as yet another warning sign, we need to wrap our heads around what it will take to match our solutions with the scale of the problem.

The first statewide carbon tax in the United States almost certainly isn't going to happen. Washington votes by mail, so it ain’t over yet, but the No side of Initiative 1631 has just over 56 percent, with more than two thirds of the votes counted. It doesn’t look good.

LEARN MORE

The WIRED Guide to Climate Change

That’s a disappointing end for a bill that some environmentalists and journalists had held out as a bellwether. Success would’ve told politicians and policymakers that, yes, Americans were finally ready to pay a little more money to save the planet. Initiative 1631 was technically a fee, not a tax; It would’ve charged many emitters $15 per metric ton of carbon, increasing every year until emissions declined—and the money would pay for green infrastructure like clean power generation, environmental remediation, and projects in communities most affected by pollution. (Polluters might well have passed on that price to consumers.) On the yes side: The Nature Conservancy, Bill Gates, REI, and a coalition of political groups. On the no side: $31 million of oil company money.

It would’ve been the first major carbon tax in the US, but not in the world. Finland was first, in the 1990s. They’re common throughout Asia and Europe. In Canada, British Columbia has had one since 2008, and its outcomes have reportedly been good—more jobs, reduced emissions. The US is the outlier here, though the idea has floated up at the federal level in the US, too—most recently from Carlos Curbelo, a Republican representative from Florida. (Washington state rejected a straight carbon tax in 2016; the money it raised was supposed to go back to taxpayers as rebates.)

A carbon tax is the sort of thing that economists have mostly agreed is obvious—greenhouse gases are an “externality,” a damaging side effect that causes harm to the environment but isn’t included in the price of a carbon-based economy. It’s possibly, theoretically, to figure out how much more damage an additional unit of pollution causes; those are so-called marginal damages. “In textbook economics, you set the price equal to the marginal damages, and that gives you a cost-efficient reduction in the damages caused by the externality,” says Marc Hafstead, director of the Carbon Pricing Initiative at Resources for the Future. It’s a little more complicated than that, Hafstead allows, because emissions are global and it’s hard to pin down exactly what the marginal damages are, but the basic idea is, if you tax emissions, people will emit less to avoid paying the tax wherever they can.

Washington voters seem to agree that the place where it’s most efficient to reduce emissions is “nowhere.” Most Americans believe global warming is real, people are a cause, and someone should do something. But on that last thing, they may not agree who or what. Opponents of the Washington bill argued what opponents of taxes usually argue: not enough oversight over how the money would be spent, wouldn’t achieve the goal it set out to, wasn’t fair. “It acts as a regressive tax, hurting those who can least afford to pay more, and it’s going to be ineffective at reducing Washington’s greenhouse gases,” said the No on 1631 campaign spokesperson Dana Bieber on election day. (A carbon tax doesn’t have to be regressive; that’s the sort of thing economists and policymakers fight about, but 1631’s supporters worked with communities that might have taken a harder hit to satisfy their concerns, and arguably the public health benefits would outweigh any expense.)

On its face, 1631’s apparent defeat was the capstone on a pretty bad day for environmental legislation. Arizona voted against a harder shift to renewable energy. (California tech billionaire Tom Steyer spent almost $18 million trying to put that one over the top; the local power company spent more.) Nevada said yes to renewables but declined to break up the state energy monopoly. Colorado voted to expand oil and gas drilling. Curbelo, the climate-minded Florida rep, lost his re-election bid. The planet is still burning.

From a political perspective, all of that suggests dealing with climate change will require strong national leadership. About which, uh oh, since President Trump doesn’t believe human beings cause climate change and lots of big Republican funders are tied to carbon-emitting industries.

Still, you could choose to look at your glass of petrochemicals as being half full. “Ballot measures are often susceptible to misinformation and lots of out-of-state money pouring in, and there are limitations on what a ballot measure can cover,” says Dylan McDowell, deputy director of the National Caucus of Environmental Legislators, a group that helps state legislators enact climate laws. “State legislation is more able to deal with something as complex as carbon pricing.”

Thanks to Democratic takeovers of governorships and state houses in 2018, that’s now more likely. New York, Colorado, New Hampshire, Maine, and Minnesota now have pro-environment majorities. Massachusetts is moving toward carbon pricing; Oregon legislators will probably vote on a cap-and-trade law next year. The governors-elect of Illinois, Colorado, and New Mexico all campaigned on renewables. And California still has its cap-and-trade system for carbon, and a new governor fired up to head into combat with the president. So the state level may still be a place for climate legislation.

Those state legislators sometimes become national policymakers. NCEL’s McDowell points out that his group worked closely with Iowa congresswoman-elect Abby Finkenauer when she was in the legislature. “One of the amazing takeaways is that the urgency we feel about taxing climate change has actually increased since we began the campaign,” Mike Stevens, state director in Washington for the Nature Conservancy, said on election day. Washington’s carbon tax might not be the first in the nation, but someone’s will be.

Since 2016, IBM has offered online access to a quantum computer. Anyone can log in and execute commands on a 5-qubit or 14-qubit machine located in Yorktown Heights, New York, from the comfort of their own home. This month, I finally tried it—nervously. I did not know what I was doing and worried I might break the hardware. “You won’t mess anything up,” IBM physicist James Wootton assured me via Skype.

I chose the 5-qubit machine. The online interface resembles a musical score consisting of five horizontal lines, one line corresponding to each quantum bit, or qubit. Qubits, the basic building block of a quantum computer, are pieces of hardware that represent numbers, just like the transistors in your computer—except they obey the bizarre laws of quantum mechanics. Designs vary, but IBM’s qubits consist of tiny circuits made of superconducting wire, kept in a refrigerator very close to absolute zero. The circuits can only hold information at low temperatures.

The potential of quantum computing lies in the weird behavior of these tiny circuits. If a transistor was a Lego, a qubit would be a blob of slime: the two components follow completely different rules, and can be used to build entirely different structures. For example, the circuits can be programmed into a delicate quantum state known as a superposition, where they are equal to neither 1 nor 0, but some combination of the two. Qubits offer a fluidity inaccessible to ordinary computers, which box the world in binary. Researchers are excited about this new capability—but don’t quite know how to take advantage of it yet.

LEARN MORE

The WIRED Guide to Quantum Computing

As the conductor of my quantum orchestra, I decided what each little superconducting circuit did by dragging brightly colored icons representing commands onto its corresponding line at random. I clicked “Run.” The computer in New York obeyed, applying a cacophony of microwave pulses to the qubits to change their values. After about a minute, IBM sent me an automated email with my computation results. I examined the final value. Four qubits equaled 0, while a fifth one hovered in a superposition state that was 98 percent equal to 0, and 2 percent equal to 1.

“Of course, running something comprehensible requires you to read the user guide,” Wootton had told me.

It’ll take more than that. But the app, dubbed “The IBM Q Experience,” has already executed more than seven million quantum programs, and they aren’t just random gobbledygook like mine. Legit researchers, many unaffiliated with IBM, have published more than 120 academic papers using it.

The app is part of a larger effort to boost literacy in quantum computing. Other companies have also been releasing open-source software packages to reach out to the masses—or more probably, nerds with niche interests. They hope that a diverse pool of users can guide them toward more creative uses for the machines. “Anyone who is an enthusiast can play with these tools,” says physicist Nathan Killoran of Xanadu, a quantum computing startup based in Toronto. This November, Xanadu released an open source library called PennyLane that is compatible with IBM’s hardware. “The more people get into it, the quicker ideas can develop,” says Killoran. “And I think the best way to do that is to crowdsource the ideas.”

There’s a learning curve, for sure. The packages, predominantly written in Python, strive to make the software as user-friendly as possible with detailed tutorials and interactive apps. But to really exploit the computer’s quantum-ness, you have to develop an intuition about how qubits flow in and out of superposition and interact with each other via bizarre properties known as entanglement. “We try to ease the transition as much as possible,” says Killoran. “But at some stage, people do have to learn a little bit about the quantum side of things.” Users need some specialized technical knowledge, much like the twentieth-century operators of vacuum tube computers did.

Still, by letting everybody in, researchers are hoping that somebody will finally crack the mystery of quantum computing. Because despite the hype—it’ll break modern cryptography! It’ll design super-efficient batteries! It’ll reinvent the fertilizer business!—quantum computing’s advantages over conventional computing are still purely theoretical. The industry’s reach goals require powerful hardware made of millions of error-free qubits that will require a few decades to develop. So far the biggest device, announced Tuesday by Maryland-based startup IonQ, purportedly contains 160 error-prone qubits.

But researchers think these angsty teenage devices still have potential. Google, for example, has a 72-qubit quantum computer that it plans to make available to outside researchers. One of its projects is to promote the use of its computer in drug discovery and materials design, says Google chemist Jarrod McClean. To that end, the company released a software package this year called OpenFermion. Experts think that quantum computers should be able to simulate chemistry more accurately than conventional computers, since electrons, atoms, and molecules obey the same quantum laws of superposition as qubits.

Companies also want artificial intelligence experts to start using their computers. Quantum computing researchers suspect, though they don’t know for sure, that their new devices could speed up machine learning algorithms or improve their accuracy. Because quantum computers obey different mathematical rules, they should be able to identify different patterns in data sets, says physicist Maria Schuld of Xanadu. Last month Xanadu released PennyLane, a software package meant to make it easier to run machine learning algorithms on a quantum computer.

Software packages like Xanadu’s and Google’s are compatible with multiple quantum computing architectures. That’s because it’s still unclear which company’s hardware will reign supreme, says Google physicist Dave Bacon. Google and IBM both use qubits made of superconducting circuits; IonQ’s computer is made of single ions placed on a chip; Xanadu is trying to make qubits out of individual photons of light. Quantum software developers have had to remain open-minded about rival companies’ hardware.

Besides, the hardware is far from complete, says Schuld. It has a symbiotic relationship with its software: hardware experts can adapt their machine designs to better suit the algorithms with the most potential. At the same time, the limitations of the hardware inform how software developers build their tools. “[Software developers] can predict what’s interesting for the hardware people to try, and the hardware people can say, ‘ahh, stop, we can’t do this easily,’” she says.

To encourage people to use the code, IBM and Xanadu also run contests for the best projects that use their tools. What are they looking for? They’re not picky: Xanadu’s contest is offering $1000 for “[a]lmost anything,” they wrote in a publicity post. They do highlight one particular area of need: communications projects that explain what quantum computing is.