Good journalism is worth paying for, full stop. As part of a larger plan to help valuable reporting thrive in an age where content is a commodity, Google unveiled a new tool for publishers called Subscribe that makes it trivial to — what else? — subscribe to premium news services.
Now, Google isn’t exactly new to news subscriptions; the ability to buy monthly access to top-tier newspapers and magazines has been a part of the Google Play experience for years. Subscribe is special because it works directly in-browser. If you’ve hit your final free New York Times article for the month, you’ll be able to quickly set up a subscription with your Google account and pay with any card you’ve used with that account in the past. At its most effective, Google’s Subscribe takes a process that lasts a few minutes and involves scrounging around for your credit card and strips it down to a couple of taps. For better or worse (we’d argue better), Google turned premium news into an impulse buy.
Google says it’s working to get more publishers onboard with Subscribe, but the search giant’s initial list of partners is a who’s who of influential media organizations. The first wave includes Les Échos, Fairfax Media, Le Figaro, the Financial Times, Gannett, Gatehouse Media, Grupo Globo, The Mainichi, McClatchy, La Nación, The New York Times, NRC Group, Le Parisien, Reforma, la Republica, The Telegraph, and The Washington Post.
Once you’ve subscribed to any of these publications, you’ll start to see Google operate a little differently, too. Since Google looks at subscriptions as a sign of trust in an outlet, it will highlight articles from that outlet when they’re relevant to your search terms. Google was quick to say that those highlighted results won’t change "search ranking for the rest of the page," but that still means your trusted news providers get more web traffic than it otherwise might have. You get the news, your preferred publications get more money and better metrics — it all sounds great in theory, but it’ll be a while yet before Google’s system becomes ubiquitous.
Transmission electron micrograph of multiple bacteriophages attached to a bacterial cell wall.
In 2012, a 76-year-old Connecticut doctor had surgery to repair a life-threatening bulge in his aortic arch—the hulking bend that hooks the massive artery around the heart, routing oxygenated blood both upward and downward. Surgeons successfully used a synthetic graft to shore up the vital conduit. But soon after, a tenacious film of drug-resistant Pseudomonas aeruginosa bacteria formed on the graft.
The doctor spent the next four years battling the infection, slipping in and out of the hospital. His surgeons and doctors at Yale deemed him too high risk for another operation and put him on mega-doses of antibiotics, prescribed indefinitely. The drugs couldn’t clear the infection, they merely knocked it back enough to keep it from killing him. But the chronic inflammation that ensued took its own toll. His team of doctors started to worry his immune system was chipping away at his aorta. With a bleak outlook, the man agreed in 2016 to an experimental treatment: a virus that researchers had fished out of a nearby pond.
The case is a clinical win for using viruses when antibiotics fail to kill bacteria. It’s an idea that has been around for decades. Viruses that exclusively infect and kill bacteria—called “bacteriophages” or just “phages”—have been used in former Soviet republics and some parts of Eastern Europe for nearly a century. Phages kill in the same way as many viruses; a phage infects a host cell, usurps its cellular machinery to make copies of itself, then the clone army bursts out, destroying the host cell in the process. And there are plenty of phages to harness for potential therapies. In water samples, for instance, some researchers have estimated that there are 10 phages for every bacterial/archaeal cell. To put that in perspective, the open ocean is estimated to contain 1.2 × 1029 bacterial and archaeal cells.
But in Westernized countries, phage therapy has largely been passed over by researchers, given the success of antibiotics. As such, phages have failed to garner the needed research attention to establish their safety and efficacy. That’s changing now, albeit slowly, with the rise of antibiotic-resistant bacteria.
But this pond phage isn’t your garden-variety microbial marauder. The phage—dubbed OMKO1—has the unique ability to force surviving drug-resistant bacteria into ditching their drug resistance. This is critical. One of the main arguments against turning to phage therapy is that bacteria can readily evolve resistance to them. Researchers have plenty of evidence of this. Thus, some researchers fear that any effective phage therapy is destined to the same impotent fate as many of our once powerful antibiotics.
But, if phages can kill bacteria and make survivors evolve to be vulnerable to drugs, then a one-two punch of phage and drugs could knock out any infection, resistant or not. In other words, “phage such as OMKO1 that appear to force a clinically relevant trade-off may present an effective solution to the inevitable evolution of resistance by pathogenic bacteria,” the Yale researchers conclude.
Viral KO
Those researchers, led by surgeon Deepak Narayan and ecology and evolutionary biologist Paul Turner, wanted exactly this type of phage for the sick doctor. Luckily, Turner had been surveying phages from environmental samples that could strong-arm bacteria into a deadly genetic trade-off.
Turner and his lab had collected phages from sewage, soil, lakes, rivers, streams, and compost. They found 42 that could infect P. aeruginosa, an abundant opportunistic pathogen often found to be resistant to antibiotics. The researchers were motivated to go after this particular pathogen because it is “poised to become a common [pan-drug-resistant] disease problem,” Turner and his colleagues wrote in 2016. That is, they suspect it will become resistant to all potential antibiotic treatments in the foreseeable future.
The basic idea: Therapeutic concentrations of antibiotics are unable to penetrate biofilms due to poor permeability and depressed metabolism of biofilm constituents. Phage OMKO1, however, is able to replicate within bacteria present in biofilm. Next, biofilm instability occurs as phage OMKO1 replicates. Finally, with the biofilm disrupted, therapeutic concentrations of antibiotic can better reach target bacteria, and any cells resistant to phage OMKO1 infection are expected to be more susceptible to antibiotics (i.e., less capable of efflux).
Intraoperative photograph showing aortic graft and P. aeruginosa infection (arrow) over myocardium, taken during operation to debride and to wash out infected tissues.
Comparative CT image showing infected collection (arrow) and site of targeted aspiration during therapy.
Turner and his team hypothesized that they could wipe the floor with resistant P. aeruginosa if they matched the phage to the type of drug resistance the bacteria carry. Phages, like all killer viruses, need to be able to recognize and grab onto a potential host cell before it can invade and kill. Influenza viruses famously do this by latching onto sialic acids that hang on the outside of human cells in the respiratory tract.
Conveniently, P. aeruginosa thwarts many antibiotics using a bit of machinery called an efflux pump. This molecular device works a lot like a sump pump, creating a pore in the cell through which it actively pumps out certain antibiotics before they can cause cellular damage. As such, the pump is situated at the outer membrane—where phages can latch on to it.
In their survey, Turner and company found one phage that infected P. aeruginosa by grabbing on to part of this pump, a part called the outer membrane porin M. The phage was collected from Dodge Pond, about 65km east of Yale. The researchers dubbed it OMKO1 or outer-membrane-porin M knockout dependent phage #1.
If the deadly bacteria have the pump, the phage can grab hold and kill them. If the bacteria lack the pump or have a mutant, broken version, that means that phage can’t get in and kill—but standard antibiotics can.
Saving the doctor
In early lab tests, published in Scientific Reports in 2016, Turner and his lab showed that as P. aeruginosa evolved resistance to OMKO1, it became more susceptible to antibiotic treatments. To verify that this phage could one day be clinically useful, they tested it out on several P. aeruginosa strains that Yale colleagues had isolated from patients—including one who had a chronic infection on an aortic arch graft.
As Turner and his lab carried out their work, the doctor’s health continued to slip. Doctors and researchers made the bold decision to try out the phage. Turner’s lab collected bacteria-laden discharge from a fistula that formed in the doctor’s chest and mixed it with phage. The pond virus killed off most of the bacteria and re-sensitized the survivors to antibiotics. With such promising lab results, the team got an emergency investigational new drug approval from the Food and Drug Administration to treat the sick doctor with their pond phage.
With the doctor’s aorta seemingly disintegrating, Narayan and Turner’s teams injected a high dose of purified OMKO1 in combination with the antibiotic ceftazidime directly into the fistula in his chest.
The next day, the doctor had stable vital signs and had no complaints. He was subsequently released from the hospital. Things were looking up until four weeks later, when his chest wound started bleeding. Doctors had no choice but to perform emergency surgery. With his chest open, the surgeons found that a bone fragment from his sternum had broken off and pierced his aorta. But what they didn’t find was any evidence of a P. aeruginosa infection. The surgeons repaired damage and replaced the aortic graft. Shortly after, they took him off antibiotics and he has been off them ever since.
The researchers concluded that the phage was critical for ridding the doctor of his deadly infection. “Eventual controlled trials examining phage application as adjunctives may reveal improved clinical outcomes in cases of recalcitrant infection,” they wrote.
For now, they conclude, “the current case study indicates the fortuitous possibility for a single phage to apparently resolve the bacterial infection, where pre-treatment understanding of the evolutionary mechanism… underlying bacterial resistance informed the choice of phage used in experimental therapy.”
The Magic Leap One is the first step to getting a billion people wearing AR glasses by 2025, according to Epic CEO Tim Sweeney.
SAN FRANCISCO—A little under three years ago, Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney predicted that augmented reality glasses (which layer virtual 3D images on top of your view of the real world) would completely replace all traditional screens in a ten-year timeframe. At the Game Developers Conference (GDC) this week, the head of the company behind the Unreal Engine and Fortnite said he still expects that to happen, predicting a billion users for such AR glasses by 2025.
“I expect this to eventually replace smartphones,” Sweeney told Ars in an interview. “Walking around in real life, instead of watching people fiddling around with the cell phone in their pocket, you’ll be watching them make gestures to interact with this [augmented reality] user interface.”
It won’t be an instant transition, of course. Sweeney suggested we could get to 10 million early adopters for AR glasses “in the next two or three years.” From there, “you take, say, 10 million users and really astonish them and give them a product that’s really amazing in order to get to 100 million users. Then you have to satisfy the 100 million users to get to a billion users and so on. It’s going to deploy over time.”
Sweeney was extremely bullish on Magic Leap, the still-secretive AR glasses company that announced a development partnership with Unreal Engine at this year’s GDC. The company’s Magic Leap One glasses, which are targeting a “developer edition” release this year, are “really a magical piece of technology that is the missing link towards making that experience possible,” Sweeney said.
“Magic Leap is the first product where the rubber really meets the road,” he continued. “They have all the key components there. They make it all work. The challenge for subsequent generations of hardware will be miniaturizing to the point where it really is truly nothing bigger than your Oakley sunglasses, and the pixels are truly indistinguishable from reality.”
Sweeney predicts there will be “a few years of overlap” between AR glasses and today’s virtual reality displays but that “ultimately AR is a superset of VR.” While AR glasses can provide a VR-style world by blocking out your view of the real world, “VR will never be able to project the real world into your view,” he said. Virtual reality will peak at a smaller audience of about 200 million people worldwide, Sweeney suggested, composed mainly of hardcore gamers and “on-site entertainment solutions” like theme parks.
Console quality on mobile
In the nearer term, Sweeney sees a complete overhaul in the level of quality Western audiences expect from mobile games in the coming year. Relatively feature-complete mobile conversions like Fortnite, PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds, Ark: Survival Evolved, and Rocket League on Nintendo Switch that have started to capture a trend toward console-quality mobile titles have been present in Asian countries for years, he said.
“We’re seeing the convergence of all these different platforms. For a decade we had indie mobile games that were really casual in design, completely separated from PC and console game design… in China and Korea already ‘serious games for gamers’ are the No. 1 category on mobile both by revenue and playtime. Now we’re seeing these trends come here, and I think by the end of this year I expect you will see ‘games for gamers’ as the leading category on mobile [in the West],” he said.
The transition to high-end mobile games is partly a cultural shift in the way a new generation of players is integrating games into their lives as a “real social phenomenon,” Sweeney said. But there has also been a technological shift allowing a big jump in the quality of gaming ports possible on mobile hardware recently.
“I think late last year was really the first time” many high-end console games could achieve a competent mobile port, he said. “You have awesome high-end CPUs on these devices, you have great GPUs, you have really low overhead graphics APIs, Metal on iOS, and Vulkan on Android, that make a whole new level of performance possible; it’s like what DirectX did for the PC.”
The transition to bigger and better mobile games will have benefits even for people not interested in tapping at tiny touch screens, Sweeney added. “A couple of months ago, when Fortniteachieved the ability to run at 60 frames per second on the PS4 and Xbox One, that actually started with the mobile optimization effort. Long before it was announced, in order to get the game running well on iOS and Android, we optimized the hell out of the graphics systems, the streaming, and the gameplay. It gave us a whole lot of benefits on console also.
“We’re putting a concerted effort in both our game development and engine development efforts to having one game ship everywhere, full feature set, full interoperability networking, everything across all platforms,” he added.
Photograper Catches Superhero Action Figures as They Come to Life [Pics]
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Photograper Catches Superhero Action Figures as They Come to Life [Pics]
Here is a series of cool photos by Japanese photographer Hot.Kenobi where the man brings superhero action figures to life using toys from Marvel & DC. Check ’em all out below!
A Chinese Space Lab Will Soon Fall From The Sky. Where It Lands, No One Knows
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A model of the Tiangong-1 space station at a Chinese airshow in 2010. The real Tiangong-1 will reenter the atmosphere around the end of March.
Kin Cheung/AP
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Kin Cheung/AP
A Chinese space lab the size of a city bus will soon be falling back to Earth, and no one knows exactly where bits of it might crash down.
Current predictions say that the 19,000-pound lab should re-enter the earth’s atmosphere sometime in the last few days of March or the first few days of April.
The lab is called Tiangong-1, which means “heavenly palace.” China launched it into space in 2011. The outpost was briefly visited twice by Chinese taikonauts, including Wang Yaping, who beamed down a science lecture to schoolchildren.
Although Tiangong-1 has been called a Chinese “space station,” it actually is just a precursor to China’s planned space station, says Joan Johnson-Freese, a professor at the Naval War College.
Since 1992, she says, China has been following a methodical program “to demonstrate human space flight and culminate with a large space station.”
For that, China’s space agency needs to get experience with things like docking and long-term life support in space. Tiangong-1 and another lab in orbit called Tiangong-2, “have been technology test bed laboratories to do experimentation on all those different areas and more,” she explains.
Now, though, Tiangong-1 is headed back down. And even though space junk this size falls to Earth a few times a year, it’s usually something like a spent rocket stage — not a home-away-from-home for space travelers.
“These kinds of events are noteworthy and people in this business kind of watch to see what they can learn about how these things come apart as they come down,” says Bill Ailor of the Aerospace Corporation’s Center for Orbital and Reentry Debris Studies.
Most of it, though not all, should burn up during the fiery re-entry.
“Somewhere between, say, 2,000 and 8,000 pounds might come down,” Ailor says.
The possible impact zone covers about two-thirds of the globe, including a lot of the continental United States. But exactly where and when is hard to predict because the vehicle will interact with the atmosphere, which is constantly changing.
Still, don’t worry about getting hit, says Ailor. “It’s just not a very likely event that a particular person would have a problem with it,” he says.
In 60 years of space exploration, only one person — an American woman named Lottie Williams — is known to have been struck by falling space junk, says Ailor, “and it was just like a piece of fabric material that kind of brushed her on the shoulder.”
He hopes that someone gets to see the bright streaks created by Tiangong-1 breaking up and burning.
“It would be a beautiful thing to watch,” says Ailor.
But since most of our planet is covered by oceans, he says the most likely scenario is that it will come down over the water and never be seen or heard from again.
Cambridge Analytica Is Finally Under Fire Because of Whistleblowers
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A year ago, The Intercept published a story about a Trump campaign affiliate that was circulating personality tests to collect Americans’ personal information. The company, called Cambridge Analytica, had already been unveiled by the Guardian in a chilling report that detailed its voter-targeting operation. There was every reason to be concerned. These revelations arrived in the midst of a year in which aggressive political campaigning, concerns over fake news, and the rise of bots that spread propaganda gave us reason to question the kinds of information we were handing over to third party applications, like Facebook, and how this freespun data deluge might come back to bite us in the ass.
But this awareness of Cambridge Analytica, and their covert manipulation of our data, didn’t coalesce into rage until late Friday night, when the words of a pink-haired, gay, vegan Canadian hit a cultural nerve. At 28, Christopher Wylie agreed to talk, he told The Guardian, out of a sense of guilt. Four years earlier, Wylie says he came up with the idea to pull big data and social media to fuel a form of information warfare: an idea that led to the creation of Cambridge Analytica. Coming forward involved breaking a nondisclosure agreement, yet Wylie did it, he explained, because he felt morally conflicted. “I assumed it was entirely legal and above board,” he told The Guardian. But he’d helped to create a weapon, and he was ready, as best he could, to participate in its dismantling.
Judging by content alone, Wiley’s reckoning doesn’t make for a huge news moment; the details he reveals about the inner workings of Cambridge Analytica have, for the most part, already been disclosed by investigative reporters. But Wiley triggered something that countless news stories weren’t able to: A latent rage that may lay the groundwork for a movement that demands accountability from Facebook.
The unchecked power of companies that harvest our data is a great problem—but it’s hard to get angry about an idea that’s so nebulous. Like climate change, the reaping of our data is a problem of psychology as much as business. We know that the accumulation of massive power in so few hands is bad, but it’s impossible to anticipate what terrible result might come of it. And if we could envision them, these consequences are imaginary: abstract and in the future. It feels so oppressively intractable it’s hard to summon the will to act.
Like climate change, the reaping of our data is a problem of
psychology as much as business.
Even if we could act, the options aren’t great. Except for the very very rich, or the extraordinarily poor, participating in the economy requires leaving a digital footprint. Most of us scroll through privacy terms on the sites we use without reading them, and accept updates without noticing or understanding the consequences. We all know we’ve been compromised already.
In a flash, Wylie’s story made the idea of misused big data concrete—and urgent. Unlike, say, Phillip Morris, which sold a product that directly caused people to get cancer, the problems of big tech are abstract enough that they require people to illustrate their impact. Wylie is just one in a small-but-growing cadre of digital whistleblowers who have come of age in the early decades of the Internet, and played a hand in helping tech companies and government institutions harness the power of the data that has emerged, and now regret their roles. Former CIA employee and government contractor Edward Snowden leaked classified information from the National Security Agency in 2013 because he said he was concerned about global surveillance techniques. Tristan Harris rose to become a design ethicist at Google before he left in 2016, and concerned that technology companies design addictive software applications, began a campaign to produce technology that is good for people. Former Facebook product manager (and current Wired columnist) Antonio Garcia Martinez helped develop advertising at Facebook; now he speaks out, after writing a book about his experience. Guillaume Chaslot, a former YouTube engineer, detailed his concerns about the platform’s recommendation algorithm to the Guardian earlier this year.
Wylie, like a lot of these whistleblowers, doesn’t come across great in the Guardian piece. He’s young. He’s silly. He used his new Twitter account, which he only just started Friday, to complain that now he’s been booted off Instagram. Like a lot of engineers, he didn’t really care much about ethics when he was creating programs that would redefine ethical boundaries. But that only enhances his case: it provides a window into how little oversight goes into making the tools that have influenced our political system, and by extension, shaken our democracy.
It’s difficult for any of us to understand where our information goes and how it’s used. Companies and governments are rarely transparent about collecting personal information. Even when they are, their data privacy measures can be lax. While Facebook told The Intercept last year that it had asked Cambridge Analytica to delete its data, Wylie said he’d received exactly one email from Facebook asking him to delete. “All I had to do was tick a box and sign it and send it back, and that was it,” Wylie told The Guardian. “Facebook made zero effort to get the data back.”
Wylie may follow in the footsteps of the Cassandras who’ve come before him, parlaying his moment of public attention into a book deal or public speaking platform that raises his own profile more than it helps force a reckoning. But Wylie will not be the last of these digital whistle-blowers. Indeed, his story will likely galvanize a group waiting in the wings. The challenge, however, is how to use this moment to summon the will to lean on governments and companies to better protect individuals before this moment passes completely, and we must wait for the next whistleblower to give us reason to pay attention.
This Optical Illusion of Multiplying Dogs Is a Crash Course In How Digital Image Editing Works
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GIF
Kensuke Koike’s Top Breeder illusionGIF: Kensuke Koike (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f1fXCRtSUWU)
Slice up a photo of a dog and reassemble it, and you’ll be left with two images of the same pup. Slice those photos up again, and somehow you’ll then have four images of that doggo. It seems like an impossible optical illusion, but this neat trick is actually a very basic demonstration of how image editing apps work.
To be fair to a complicated application like Photoshop, Kensuke Koike’s fun video is a gross simplification of how a digitized image is reduced in size. Complex algorithms are used to ensure that when a pixelated image is shrunk, the results are sharp while lines and edges remain smooth.
But slicing this real-life dog photo both vertically and horizontally essentially turned it into a compilation of smaller pixels. And when you throw away every other pixel in an image, the results are half as large as the original, but still completely recognizable, if the pixels are small enough.
