Day: June 9, 2018

No, NASA hasn’t discovered life on Mars yet—but a new result makes it seem like maybe, at some point in the planet’s history, the conditions were ripe for some extraterrestrial beings. Maybe.

The scientists behind experiments conducted by the Curiosity rover are today reporting two results that make the Red Planet’s story even more interesting. One group found carbon-containing organic matter in 3.5-billion-year-old rock. Another noticed the methane levels around Curiosity varied by the season. Combined, these results present tantalizing hints of a potentially habitable Martian past.

From everything we can tell of the chemistry and the minerals deposited in the Gale crater where Curiosity is stationed, “we think it was a habitable environment,” Jennifer Eigenbrode from the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center told Gizmodo. “It had the ability to support life—but doesn’t mean life were there.”

NASA’s Curiosity rover has wandered around Mars’ Gale crater, a presumed ancient lakebed, since 2012. Part of its duties include sampling the dirt and the atmosphere for interesting molecules, like those that may reveal a history of life or habitability.

The most recent studies, both published in Science, shed light on that history. The rover’s Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM) instrument cooked some of the Martian dirt and unlocked some long-hidden carbon-containing molecules, some with sulfur and others with relatively complex structure. “Perhaps they were from life, or maybe there was just an additional nutrient here for life,” Eigenbrode said. Organic molecules pop up frequently in space, but it’s neat that Mars had life’s building blocks during a time when many think it was more habitable.

As for the methane, Curiosity’s Tunable Laser Spectrometer measured the methane levels in its surrounding atmosphere over five years. The levels averaged at 0.41 parts per billion by volume, but ranged from 0.24 to 0.65 depending on the season. Here on Earth, we associate methane with life, but it’s a mystery what could be causing it on Mars. Perhaps it’s some geologic process. “It probably indicates more active water in the subsurface than we understood,” scientist Kirsten Siebach, Martian geologist at Rice University not involved with the studies, told Gizmodo.

On Earth, we have a process by which underwater volcanoes interact with rock, producing methane that feeds bacteria. Maybe there are subsurface Martian bacteria eating that methane, Tanya Harrison, director of research for Arizona State University’s Space Technology and Science (“NewSpace”) Initiative, told Gizmodo. But for now, there’s no evidence for any such bacteria.

The methane is cool, whether it’s linked to life or not. “We thought Mars was dead internally,” Harrison said. “Now we have data to confirm that there’s a seasonal cycle, suggesting the methane is being generated by something.”

All of the outside sources I spoke with said it’s important to be skeptical about claims of life, extinct or otherwise, on the Red Planet. After all, these are just organic molecules on their own, so we’re still in the stage of chemistry, rather than biology. Plus, scientists don’t know what the original molecules were before Curiosity heated the rocks to take the measurement, Utrecht University scientist Inge Loes ten Kate, who was not involved with the research, told Gizmodo.

There’s so much left to learn about Mars. The Insight and ExoMars missions will teach scientists more about the planet’s geology and methane. Mars2020 will shed light on the organic molecules—and prepare a sample that some future mission could bring back to Earth. Mars doesn’t recycle its rock the way that Earth does—maybe its ancient dust can teach us a thing or two about our own planet’s history, said Siebach.

I asked everyone I spoke with if they thought there was life on Mars, and the consensus was maybe, maybe not. “If you explore both of those paths forward, it’s astounding,” Eigenbrode said. “It’s fascinating what they mean for understanding life in our universe.”

[Science, Science]

Google is committing to not using artificial intelligence for weapons or surveillance after employees protested the company’s involvement in Project Maven, a Pentagon pilot program that uses artificial intelligence to analyze drone footage. However, Google says it will continue to work with the United States military on cybersecurity, search and rescue, and other non-offensive projects.

Google CEO Sundar Pichai announced the change in a set of AI principles released today. The principles are intended to govern Google’s use of artificial intelligence and are a response to employee pressure on the company to create guidelines for its use of AI.

Employees at the company have spent months protesting Google’s involvement in Project Maven, sending a letter to Pichai demanding that Google terminate its contract with the Department of Defense. Several employees even resigned in protest, concerned that Google was aiding the development of autonomous weapons systems.

Google will focus on creating “socially beneficial” AI, Pichai said, and avoid projects that cause “overall harm.”

“How AI is developed and used will have a significant impact on society for many years to come,” Pichai wrote. “These are not theoretical concepts; they are concrete standards that will actively govern our research and product development and will impact our business decisions.”

The AI principles represent a reversal for Google, which initially defended its involvement in Project Maven, noting that the project relied on open-source software that was not being used for explicitly offensive purposes.

The principles were met with mixed reactions among Google employees. Despite Google’s commitment not to use AI to build weapons, employees questioned whether the principles would explicitly prohibit Google from pursuing a government contract like Maven in the future.

One Googler told Gizmodo that the principles amounted to “a hollow PR statement.” Several employees said that they did not think the principles went far enough to hold Google accountable—for instance, Google’s AI guidelines include a nod to following “principles of international law” but do not explicitly commit to following international human rights law.

“While Google’s statement rejects building AI systems for information gathering and surveillance that violates internationally accepted norms, we are concerned about this qualification,” said Peter Asaro, a professor at The New School and one of the authors of an open letter that calls on Google to cancel its Maven contract. “The international norms surrounding espionage, cyberoperations, mass information surveillance, and even drone surveillance are all contested and debated in the international sphere. Even Project Maven, being tied to drone surveillance and potentially to targeted killing operations, raises many issues that should have caused Google to reject it, depending on how one interprets this qualification.”

Another Googler who spoke with Gizmodo said that the principles were a good start, mitigating some of the risks that employees who protested Maven were concerned about. However, the AI principles do not make clear whether Google would be precluded from working on a project like Maven—which promised vast surveillance capabilities to the military but stopped short of enabling algorithmic drone strikes.

Google Cloud CEO Diane Greene defended her organization’s involvement in Project Maven, suggesting that it did not have a lethal impact. “This contract involved drone video footage and low-res object identification using AI, saving lives was the overarching intent,” Greene wrote in a blog post.

“We will not be pursuing follow on contracts for the Maven project, and because of that, we are now working with our customer to responsibly fulfill our obligations in a way that works long-term for them and is also consistent with our AI principles,” she added, confirming Gizmodo’s reporting last week that Google would not seek to renew its Maven contract after it expires in 2019.

“On most fronts, these are well thought-out principles, and with a few caveats we’d recommend that other major tech companies set out similar guidelines and objectives for their AI work,” Peter Eckersley, chief computer scientist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told Gizmodo. To improve upon its principles, Google should commit to independent and transparent review to ensure that its rules are properly applied, he said. Pichai’s assertions about not using AI for surveillance also left something to be desired, Eckersley added.

“The company has constrained itself to only assisting AI surveillance projects that don’t violate internationally accepted norms,” Eckersley said. “It might be more comforting if Google tried to avoid building AI-assisted surveillance systems altogether.”

In internal emails reviewed by Gizmodo, a Google employee working on Project Maven said that the company would attempt to provide a “Google-earth-like” surveillance system, offering “an exquisite capability” for near real-time analysis of drone footage.

Academics and students in the fields of computer science and artificial intelligence joined Google employees in voicing concerns about Project Maven, arguing that Google was unethically paving the way for the creation of fully autonomous weapons. Asaro praised Google’s ethical principles for their commitment to building socially beneficial AI, avoiding bias, and building in privacy and accountability. However, Google could improve by adding more public transparency and working with the United Nations to reject autonomous weapons, he said.

The internal and external protests put Google in a difficult position as it aims to recenter its business around the development and use of artificial intelligence. Although its contract with the Defense Department for Maven was relatively small, Google considered its Maven work as an essential step in the process to winning more lucrative military contracts. Google likely planned to bid on JEDI, a cloud computing contract with the Defense Department that could be worth as much as $10 billion. It’s unclear now whether bidding on the JEDI contract would amount to a violation of Google’s newly announced principles—or wether the Pentagon would consider partnering with Google again after the company backed away from Maven.

True cures in medicine are surprisingly rare. But for nearly five years, doctors have had one available for hepatitis C, an often chronic, life-shortening viral disease that wreaks havoc on the liver. The only problem, as a depressing study published Thursday in Open Forum Infectious Diseases highlights, is that private insurance companies and even public payers like Medicaid and Medicare are still refusing to pay for it.

Known as direct-acting antivirals (DAAs), the first of these drugs was approved in 2011 by the Food and Drug Administration. DAAs target proteins found in the virus, inhibiting or interfering with its replication. The first DAAs were able to clear the virus from around two-thirds of people living with chronic hepatitis C caused by the most common genotype of the virus (there are six distinct genotypes). That cure rate was already shoulders above the standard treatment of interferon therapy, which only treated about 20 percent of people. But since 2014, newer DAAs have achieved cure rates over 90 percent and have been able to treat other types of hepatitis C.

But DAA therapy is also expensive, with the 12-week treatment regimen running as high as $100,000. As a result, both private and public insurers have been notoriously stingy about paying for it. Many have created strict guidelines for who should be eligible, and denied coverage to those who don’t fit the criteria. These might include requiring that a patient be seen by a costly specialist first or have advanced liver disease. They’ll also often exclude people who use illicit drugs, a group especially vulnerable to the blood-borne and sexually transmitted disease.

Insurance companies have argued that the restrictions ensure treatments aren’t wasted on people who won’t benefit from it. But doctors have pushed back hard against these guidelines, saying there’s no medical rationale for them and most anyone with chronic hepatitis C should be able to get DAA therapy.

The initial back and forth sparked outrage from doctors, patient advocates, and government officials, and even prompted class-action lawsuits from patients against insurers and Medicaid for denying coverage, which has led to some relaxing of the guidelines. But this new study suggests that in some ways, things have only gotten worse.

The researchers looked through DAA prescriptions for over 9,000 patients submitted between January 2016 and April 2017 to a specialty pharmacy that services 45 states. They found that overall, 35 percent of DAA prescriptions were flatly denied. Among patients on private insurance, 52.4 percent were denied, compared to 34.5 percent of patients on Medicaid and 14.7 percent on Medicare.

“We thought things were going to improve,” senior author Vincent Lo Re, an associate professor of Infectious Disease and Epidemiology, told Gizmodo. Lo Re and his team published a similar study in 2015, looking at DAA prescriptions submitted in the Northeast US. “But despite the availability of new regimens, and changes in the restrictions of these therapies, denial has remained high and increased over time.”

Indeed, the 2015 study found lower rates of denial among private insurers (10 percent) compared to Medicaid, the opposite of the more recent data. And though Medicaid denial rates were higher back then, the denial rate from all insurers in the new study only rose as time went along, from 27.7 percent in 2016 to 43.8 percent in 2017.

Though untreated chronic hepatitis C infection often causes no symptoms at first, it’s known to make people vulnerable later on to liver disease, including cirrhosis or cancer. It might also increase chances of skin problems, bone disease, and possibly even dementia. And of course, leaving it untreated makes it possible for people to spread it to others.

“As a provider, if I have to go back to my patients and tell them ‘Sorry, but your insurer denied your treatment,’ that’s only going to promote an enormous amount of anxiety and stress,” said Lo Re, “and quite frankly, it provokes distrust of the healthcare system and even of me. That’s an important opportunity for patient engagement, education, and a cure that’s now irrevocably lost.“

Despite these frustrations, the drugs have allowed us to imagine a world in which hepatitis C is completely eradicated. A 2016 report estimated that we could end the disease within the US by 2030, so long as at least 260,000 people receive proper treatment every year. But fewer than 10 percent of people diagnosed with chronic hepatitis C have received DAA therapy, according to Lo Re, putting us far short of that goal. It’s thought at least 3.5 million people have chronic hepatitis C in the US, though only half actually know they are infected. And the opioid crisis has likely only led to more cases, since drug use that involves sharing needles (as can be the case with heroin use) can help spread the virus further. Worldwide, 130 million to 150 million people carry the disease, and it kills as many as 500,000 people annually.

“Here’s a disease that’s curable, that can be eliminated as a public health problem, but we don’t have the will to do it,” said Lo Re.

[Open Forum Infectious Diseases]

One week after suffering a hack that took its website and services offline, events ticketing company Ticketfly revealed Thursday just how bad the data breach was, and it certainly doesn’t look great. According to the company, the personal information of 27 million accounts—including ticket buyers and venue operators—was accessed by a hacker.

The stolen information includes names, addresses, email addresses and phone numbers of Ticketfly customers. The company said passwords and financial information were not accessed, though Ticketfly conceded that it is possible that “hashed values of password credentials could have been accessed.” As a precautionary measure, the company reset the passwords of all buyers and clients on June 2nd.

Here’s the full statement provided to Gizmodo by a Ticketfly spokesperson:

Last week Ticketfly was the target of a malicious cyber attack. In consultation with third-party forensic cybersecurity experts we can now confirm that credit and debit card information was not accessed. However, information including names, addresses, email addresses and phone numbers connected to approximately 27 million Ticketfly accounts was accessed. Upon first learning about this incident we took swift action to secure the data of our clients and fans. We take privacy and security very seriously and regret any disruption this has caused. We’re extremely grateful for the patience and support of the Ticketfly community.

The exposed data disclosed by Ticketfly appears to match the information that the hacker, who goes by IsHaKdZ, circulated after the breach. Have I Been Pwned, a service that alerts people if their email address was included in a data breach, reported receiving more than 26 million records exposed in the Ticketfly hack. The data was described as containing “email addresses along with names, physical addresses, and phone numbers.” (You can check to see if your email was included in the Ticketfly breach on Have I Been Pwned.)

IsHaKdZ told Gizmodo last week he was in possession of a “complete” database of customer information but didn’t disclose anything further. He did not respond when contacted Thursday and asked if the data disclosed by Ticketfly was the extent of the data he is in possession of.

IsHaKdZ seems to have mostly gone dark since carrying out the hack, which he claims to have executed by exploiting a vulnerability in Ticketfly’s site that allowed him to gain access to user data. The hacker said he tried to alert Ticketfly of the vulnerabilty—while also attempting to extort one bitcoin out of the company for “protection”—but the company didn’t take the warning seriously.

In addition to exfiltrating user information, IsHaKdZ also defaced the Ticketfly website and forced it offline for nearly a full week. The hack also knocked some of Ticketfly’s operations offline, making it difficult for ticket buyers to access their tickets online. Venues were provided a physical list of people who purchased tickets and were made to manually check in each person for an event.

The site is back online, as is the company’s product called Ticketfly Backstage, which provides a suite of services to venues including ticket sales. The company’s iOS app, as well as a number of other tools including Promoter and Fanbase, remain offline.

The U.S. Justice Department made an unusual argument to a federal court last night, claiming that Obamacare’s protections for people with pre-existing medical conditions are unconstitutional. Roughly 1 in 4 Americans have pre-existing conditions that would make it difficult to buy insurance without those protections. If the DOJ is successful, millions of American could be denied the ability to buy health insurance.

Under the Affordable Care Act, commonly called Obamacare, insurance companies can’t deny coverage to people with pre-existing medical conditions, and it puts limits on how much those companies can charge. But the Trump regime wants to change all that, arguing in federal court along with 20 states that protections for pre-existing conditions should be abolished.

It’s considered very strange for the U.S. Department of Justice to argue against existing law, but that’s precisely what President Trump’s DOJ is doing by joining 20 conservative-led states. Obamacare has been unpopular among some conservatives, but the protections for people with pre-existing conditions have been incredibly well received. According to a Kaiser poll last year, 70 percent of Americans overall believe that insurance companies shouldn’t be able to charge consumers more if they have pre-existing conditions. When the numbers are broken down by party, a strong majority, 59 percent of Republicans, still believe that people with pre-existing conditions should be protected.

Attorney General Jeff Sessions sent a letter to Republican congressman Paul Ryan and Democratic congresswoman Nancy Pelosi yesterday saying that he was acting with the explicit approval of President Trump, despite Trump’s previous promises that he would make sure all Americans get better, cheaper health care. The president has done nothing to actually achieve that, of course, and Trump supporters often give credit to Trump when they benefit from provisions of the Affordable Care Act.

The new Republican-led tax cut, an enormous transfer of wealth from the poorest Americans to the wealthiest Americans, got rid of the individual mandate which required all Americans to buy health insurance. Sessions claims that the tax law’s elimination of the individual mandate should invalidate the requirement that health insurance companies not discriminate based on pre-existing conditions.

Texas first filed its lawsuit to completely dismantle the ACA on February 28, 2018 in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas and saw 19 other states join. But 17 Democratic-controlled states, led by California, intervened in April to fight back against the attacks on Obamacare.

“The lawsuit initiated by Texas is dangerous and reckless and would destroy the ACA as we know it. It would leave millions of Americans without access to affordable, quality healthcare. It is irresponsible and puts politics ahead of working families,” California’s Attorney General Xavier Becerra said in a statement. “We won’t sit back as Texas and others try yet again to dismantle our healthcare system. Our coalition of states and partners across the country will fight any effort to strip families of their health insurance.”

Where will things shake out? The judge overseeing the case in Texas was appointed by Republicans, and as the New York Times notes, three DOJ lawyers who were working on the case abruptly quit yesterday, presumably because they weren’t happy with the decision to dismantle Obamacare and protections for consumers. If Texas and the DOJ win, the most popular elements of the ACA will disappear. And it will sure be interesting to see who Trump supporters blame if the DOJ succeeds in stripping health care away from millions of people. Somehow, you know it won’t be Trump.

[New York Times]

The annual rate of death by suicide has steadily risen in the US since the turn of the millennium, according to a new report released this week by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In many cases, those who died had not been diagnosed with any mental health condition—though the data does not specify whether those people had no diagnosis because they did not seek or have access to mental health care, or because they had received care but no formal diagnosis.

From 1999 to 2016, the report found, the annual rate of suicide rose by nearly 30 percent among Americans over the age of 10. In 2016 (the latest year for which we have national data), nearly 45,000 Americans died by suicide, more than double the number of Americans known to have been murdered that same year. While suicide has remained the tenth leading cause of death for some time, it is one of the three leading causes whose rate has increased in recent years.

On a state level, rates of suicide rose across 44 states and Washington DC, with 25 states seeing an increase of more than 30 percent. The only state that didn’t report steadily higher rates over that time was Nevada, but rates there were already consistently high. Montana had the highest rate from 2014 to 2016 (29.2 deaths per 100,000 Americans), while Washington DC had the lowest (6.9 deaths per 100,000). The rate of emergency room visits due to nonfatal self-harm similarly increased by 42 percent from 2001 to 2016.

Suicide is a complex phenomenon with no single cause. But we know that pre-existing mental health problems can contribute to suicidal ideation. And we know that interacting with mental health professionals can often help people struggling with suicidal thoughts. From that perspective, the CDC’s report is sobering in another way: It found that 54 percent of people who died by suicide in 2015 had no known mental health diagnosis, according to data from 27 states.

When it came to certain risk factors for suicide and suicidal ideation, the CDC report found some differences between people who did not have a mental health diagnosis. Those without a diagnosis were more likely to have reported relationship problems (45.1 percent versus 39.6 percent of those with a diagnosis), to have significant life stressors (50.5 percent versus 47.2 percent), and to have recently had a emotional crisis (32.9 percent versus 26.0 percent). They were also more likely to have committed homicide just prior to their death, and to have been enrolled in the military.

More men died of suicide, though overall rates across the 17-year period increased in 43 states for women, compared to 34 states for men. The largest absolute increase was seen among people aged 45 to 64, though increases were seen across every age and racial/ethnic group, as well as in every urbanization level, from cities to rural areas. Firearms remained the most common cause of death overall, though rates of suicide by firearms were nearly double in rural areas compared to urban counties.

Despite these findings, there are effective ways to prevent suicide and help those at risk, the authors of the CDC report noted. These include everything from providing struggling people with stable homes and financial support to “promoting social connectedness to increase a sense of belonging and access to informational, tangible, emotional, and social support,” they wrote.

If you or someone you know is having a crisis, please call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 800-273-8255 or text the Crisis Text Line at 741-741.

[CDC]

Behold Summit, a new supercomputer capable of making 200 million billion calculations per second. It marks the first time in five years that a machine from the United States has been ranked as the world’s most powerful.

The specs for this $200 million machine defy comprehension. Built by IBM and Nvidia for the US Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Summit is a 200 petaflop machine, meaning it can perform 20 quadrillion calculations per second. That’s about a million times faster than a typical laptop computer. As the the New York Times put it, a human would require 63 billion years to do what Summit can do in a single second. Or as stated by MIT Technology Review, “everyone on Earth would have to do a calculation every second of every day for 305 days to crunch what the new machine can do in the blink of an eye.”

The machine, with its 4,608 servers, 9,216 central processing chips, and 27,648 graphics processors, weighs 340 tons. The system is housed in a 9,250 square-foot room at Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s facility in Tennessee. To keep this machine cool, 4,000 gallons of water are pumped through the system. The 13 megawatts of energy required to power this behemoth could light up over 8,000 US homes.

Summit is now the world’s most powerful supercomputer, and it is 60 percent faster than the previous title holder, China’s Sunway TaihuLight. It’s the first time since 2013 that a US-built computer has held the title, showing the US is keeping up with its main rival in this area, China. Summit is eight times more powerful that Titan, America’s other top-ranked system.

As MIT Technology Review explains, Summit is the first supercomputer specifically designed to handle AI-specific applications, such as machine learning and neural networks. Its thousands of AI-optimized chips, produced by Nvidia and IBM, allow the machine to crunch through hideous amounts of data in search of patterns imperceptible to humans. As noted in an Energy.gov release, “Summit will enable scientific discoveries that were previously impractical or impossible.”

Summit and machines like it can be used for all sorts of processor-heavy applications, such as designing new aircraft, climate modeling, simulating nuclear explosions, creating new materials, and finding causes of disease. Indeed, its potential to help with drug discovery is huge; Summit, for example, could be used to hunt for relationships between millions of genes and cancer. It could also help with precision medicine, in which drugs and treatments are tailored to individual patients.

From here, we can look forward to the next generation of computers, so-called “exascale” computers capable of executing a billion billion (or one quintillion) calculations per second. And we may not have to wait long: The first exascale computers may arrive by the early 2020s.

[Energy.gov, New York Times, MIT Technology Review]