The vigilante app Citizen, your source for perusing footage of your neighbors’ flaming homes and potentially deadly car accidents, is soliciting applications for users looking to livestream nearby emergencies. For $200-$250 a day, you can be the hero this city needs; alternatively, a tabloid fiend with a smartphone slowly devolving into a bug-eyed insomniac and losing any remaining shred of humanity because human suffering = great content.
Citizen confirmed to Gizmodo that it’s had such paid camera people, or “Street Teams,” since its inception. It currently has 12 team members in “some cities,” a spokesperson said. They described the street team mission as modeling “responsible broadcasting practices” by demonstrating how to broadcast “in an effective, helpful, and safe way.”
A job listing on JournalismJobs.com, which Citizen confirmed is for a Street Team member, describes the position as freelance newshound who would be dispatched to locations where a dog has been locked in a car, someone has reported a missing child, a house is on fire, or other “events.” Applicants are expected to “interview” police and witnesses. It adds that it’ll never ask users to visit “actively dangerous” scenes and that you’re supposed to stay behind police tape. The job pays $200 per 8-hour shift in New York and $250 per 10-hour shift in Los Angeles. In LA, you get a driver.
Citizen told the New York Post that one user who’s streamed 1,600 videos and broadcasts from numerous scenes each night works for the app. The Daily Dot reported on Citizen’s use of “street teams” in Los Angeles in late June, having noticed a man who seemed to stumble across one disturbance after another. It’s not hard to imagine how dispatching laypeople to scenes of accidents and injuries could go sideways; just look at Citizen. In May, an anchor for the app’s live pseudo-news channel expressed regret for offering a $30,000 bounty with a photo of an innocent man who it claimed was a suspected arsonist and setting off a manhunt.
Shortly after, Citizen also dropped a program in which it dispatched a Citizen-branded SUV to a users’ aid, a program which one anonymous former employee described to Motherboard as a “secondary emergency response network.”
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The app, now fifth in the App Store under “news,” monitors police scanners and broadcasts the location of active crime scenes and emergencies. It’s ostensibly a tool to alert citizens of nearby and imminent danger, but also the apparatus for vigilante justice—Citizen was more upfront with the latter pitch back when it launched as “Vigilante” in 2016. (A sensational launch ad, modeled after a crime procedural, shows male users coming to rescue a woman sprinting from a hooded stalker while others livestream from their windows.) The App Store banned “Vigilante,” which changed its name to the more anodyne “Citizen,” but in 2019, founder Andrew Frame told Forbes that everything else stayed the same.
Here’s what’s up from New York City over the past 24 hours: several fires, overturned cars (shot from drivers’ seats), a man shot in the foot, a report of a missing child. A person who looks no older than 16 can be seen narrating as the cameraperson films a victim lying on the ground, remarking, “shash victim, in the flesh.” Commenters frequently lament each as an example of the city’s scourges: aggressive driving, supposedly rampant crime, the “revolving door” justice system, and Democrats, commonly laced with racial epithets and packed with cheers for cops.
Citizen’s cop-glorifying comments section occasionally veers toward violent ideations. From my photo roll, a memorable screengrab over a video of a Black Lives Matter protest: “They better not be in my way when I drive down the street in an hour.”
Recovering from substance addiction is an uphill battle. Yet, more than 22 million Americans are on the road to recovery. Though there is no single solution to treating addiction, many effective treatments have been studied. Unfortunately, relapse is a common concern for many recovering addicts. This is why medications have become an increasingly popular treatment option to help curb cravings and withdrawal symptoms. Cue ibogaine, a plant-based psychedelic that is growing in popularity internationally for battling addiction. Now it may seem counterintuitive to treat substance addiction with a psychedelic substance. However, given this drug’s rich history and purported healing properties, it could offer a promising new way to treat drug dependency disorders.
The Roots of Ibogaine
Ibogaine holds cultural significance in certain parts of the world. The psychedelic originates from the roots of a rainforest shrub called Tabernanthe iboga which is native to West Africa. Historically, ibogaine was utilized by indigenous people to combat fatigue, hunger and thirst. Higher doses of the drug were reserved for initiation rituals and religious ceremonies. Visual effects of high doses of ibogaine could lead to intense visions accompanied by a vivid recall of autobiographical visual memories.
You might be wondering how ibogaine transitioned from a recreational drug used for spiritual and wellness purposes to a potential cure for addiction. The answer dates back to 1962, when Howard Lotsof, a man struggling with heroin dependency, stumbled on the antiaddictive properties of ibogaine. According to The New York Times, Lotsof found that he no longer had heroin withdrawal symptoms after taking ibogaine. In fact, all of his cravings for the opioid diminished. After receiving similar anecdotal testimonies from former drug users who tried ibogaine, Lotsof went on to create the Global Ibogaine Therapy Alliance, an advocacy organization that oversees ibogaine research and continues to push for the use of ibogaine for addiction treatment and therapy.
Today, a majority of the T. iboga plants are found in the tropical forests surrounding the Congo Basin. The roots of the plant contain three main alkaloids: ibogaine, ibogaline and ibogamine. Typically, 80 percent of the root bark is made up of ibogaine. Ibogaine is extracted from the bark of the tree root, which is ground into a powder form and orally ingested. The effects of the drug are largely dependent on dosage. While a low dosage can help relieve minor physical discomforts such as a headache, a higher dosage brings out ibogaine’s strong psychedelic effects. But ibogaine also comes with serious health risks such as slowed and irregular heart rates, making it off-limits for people with pre-existing heart conditions. High doses of ibogaine can result in ibogaine poisoning. In fact, 19 ibogaine-related fatalities were recorded between 1990 and 2008 worldwide. It’s also considered unsafe to mix with other drugs including alcohol, benzodiazepines, amphetamines and opiates.
So how exactly does ibogaine thwart addiction? Discover reached out to Xaver Koenig and Karlheinz Hilber, researchers at the Medical University of Vienna, for further insight. According to the researchers, ibogaine has shown promising anti-addictive results in both animals as well as human studies.
Ibogaine’s mysterious therapeutic qualities stem from the drug’s complex pharmacology. Koenig and Hilber explained that Ibogaine has an effect on multiple neurotransmitter systems in the brain. Neurotransmitters are chemical messengers in the body that allow the brain to regulate bodily functions such as heart rate, muscle function, breathing, sleep, mood,
concentration and appetite. Because ibogaine influences these various neurotransmitter systems, the researchers admit that this makes the situation very complex in pinpointing the detailed mechanisms by which ibogaine helps to fight addiction. Ultimately, due to ibogaine’s pharmacological makeup, the interaction with these various neurotransmitters can effectively alleviate drug cravings by easing both physical and mental effects of addiction and help return the brain to a preaddiction-like state.
Though ibogaine can act as a treatment for alcohol and other substance-related addictions, the drug has proven to be especially effective in curbing opioid cravings. A 2017 observational study explored ibogaine’s ability to treat opioid addiction among participants receiving a single ibogaine treatment over the span of a year. Addiction severity was measured in 14 participants using the Addiction Severity Index. According to the assessment tool, the higher a subject’s score, the greater the addiction severity and need for treatment. Results of the study indicated a significant reduction in ASI scores across a majority of the participants after receiving ibogaine treatment. Opioid withdrawal symptoms were also measured before and after the course of treatment through the Subjective Opioid Withdrawal Scale. All participants of the study showed a significant reduction in withdrawal symptoms.
Despite these promising results, using ibogaine to combat drug addiction comes with risks.
What Are the Risks?
Reports of life-threatening complications and rare death cases have been linked to the administration of ibogaine. Koenig and Hilber explain that these adverse reactions seem to be associated with the drug’s tendency to induce cardiac arrhythmias, or irregular heartbeats. According to the researchers’ 2015 study on ibogaine and the heart, the psychedelic can affect the heart and the cardiovascular system. In addition to lowering heart rate, the drug can also lead to cardiotoxicity, a condition that causes damage to the heart muscles and prevents the heart from properly pumping blood throughout the body. While these risks are serious, the researchers indicate that patients with preexisting heart problems are typically the most vulnerable.
Despite the drug’s risks, Koenig and Hilber agree that ibogaine still has a fighting chance to become the future of treatment for addiction. The researchers explained that the cardiac risks of the drug are manageable if ibogaine application takes place under strict medical observation and individuals are properly screened in order to eliminate additional risks.
Rising numbers of substance addiction across the world point to an ever-growing medical need for an effective anti-addiction treatment. Ibogaine stands as a possible treatment option with the capability to fulfill that need.
Scientists worry that growing numbers of rocket flights and the rise of space tourism could harm Earth’s atmosphere and contribute to climate change.
When billionaires Richard Branson and Jeff Bezos soared into space this month aboard their companies’ suborbital tourism vehicles, much of the world clapped in awe.
But for some scientists, these milestones represented something other than just a technical accomplishment. Achieved after years of delays and despite significant setbacks, the flights marked the potential beginning of a long-awaited era that might see rockets fly through the so-far rather pristine upper layers of the atmosphere far more often than they do today. In the case of SpaceShipTwo, the vehicle operated by Branson’s Virgin Galactic, these flights are powered by a hybrid engine that burns rubber and leaves behind a cloud of soot.
“Hybrid engines can use different types of fuels, but they always generate a lot of soot,” said Filippo Maggi, associate professor of aerospace engineering at Politecnico di Milano, Italy, who researches rocket propulsion technologies and was part of a team that several years ago published an extensive analysis of hybrid rocket engine emissions. “These engines work like a candle, and their burning process creates conditions that are favorable for soot generation.”
According to Dallas Kasaboski, principal analyst at the space consultancy Northern Sky Research, a single Virgin Galactic suborbital space tourism flight, lasting about an hour and a half, can generate as much pollution as a 10-hour trans-Atlantic flight. Some scientists consider that disconcerting, in light of Virgin Galactic’s ambitions to fly paying tourists to the edge of space several times a day.
“Even if the suborbital tourism market is launching at a fraction of the number of launches compared to the rest of the [tourism] industry, each of their flights has a much higher contribution, and that could be a problem,” Kasaboski told Space.com.
Virgin Galactic’s rockets are, of course, not the only culprits. All rocket motors burning hydrocarbon fuels generate soot, Maggi said. Solid rocket engines, such as those used in the past in the boosters of NASA’s space shuttle, burn metallic compounds and emit aluminum oxide particles together with hydrochloric acid, both of which have a damaging effect on the atmosphere.
The BE-3 engine that powers Blue Origin’s New Shepard suborbital vehicle, on the other hand, combines liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen to create thrust. The BE-3 is not a big polluter compared to other rocket engines, emitting mainly water along with some minor combustion products, experts say.
Rockets pollute the otherwise pristine upper layers of the atmosphere. (Image credit: NASA)
Too little is known
For Karen Rosenlof, senior scientist at the Chemical Sciences Laboratory at the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the biggest problem is that rockets pollute the higher layers of the atmosphere — the stratosphere, which starts at an altitude of about 6.2 miles (10 kilometers), and the mesosphere, which goes upward from 31 miles (50 km).
“You are emitting pollutants in places where you don’t normally emit it,” Rosenlof told Space.com. “We really need to understand. If we increase these things, what is the potential damage?”
So far, the impact of rocket launches on the atmosphere has been negligible, according to Martin Ross, an atmospheric scientist at the Aerospace Corporation who often works with Rosenlof. But that’s simply because there have not been that many launches.
“The amount of fuel currently burned by the space industry is less than 1% of the fuel burned by aviation,” Ross told Space.com. “So there has not been a lot of research, and that makes sense. But things are changing in a way that suggests that we should learn about this in more detail.”
Northern Sky Research predicts that the number of space tourism flights will skyrocket over the next decade, from maybe 10 a year in the near future to 360 a year by 2030, Kasaboski said. This estimate is still far below the growth rate that space tourism companies like Virgin Galactic and Blue Origin envision for themselves.
“Demand for suborbital tourism is extremely high,” Kasaboski said. “These companies virtually have customers waiting in a line, and therefore they want to scale up. Ultimately, they would want to fly multiple times a day, just like short-haul aircraft do.”
The rate of rocket launches delivering satellites into orbit is expected to grow as well. But Kasaboski sees bigger potential for growth in space tourism.
“It’s like the difference between a cargo flight and a passenger flight,” Kasaboski said. “There’s a lot more passengers that are looking to fly.”
The problem is, according to Ross, that the scientific community has no idea and not enough data to tell at what point rocket launches will start having a measurable effect on the planet’s climate. At the same time, the stratosphere is already changing as the number of rocket launches sneakily grows.
“The impacts of these [rocket-generated] particles are not well understood even to an order of magnitude, the factor of 10,” Ross said. “The uncertainty is large, and we need to narrow that down and predict how space might be impacting the atmosphere.”
Solid rocket boosters, such as those used in the past to launch NASA’s space shuttle, generate ozone-damaging substances. (Image credit: NASA/Bill Ingalls)
Space shuttle’s ozone holes
So far, the only direct measurements of the effects of rocket launches on chemical processes in the atmosphere come from the space shuttle era. In the 1990s, as the world was coming together to salvage the damaged ozone layer, NASA, NOAA and the U.S. Air Force put together a campaign that looked at the effects of the emissions from the space shuttle’s solid fuel boosters on ozone in the stratosphere.
“In the 1990s, there were significant concerns about chlorine from solid rocket motors,” Ross said. “Chlorine is the bad guy to ozone in the stratosphere, and there were some models which suggested that ozone depletion from solid rocket motors would be very significant.”
The scientists used NASA’s WB 57 high-altitude aircraft to fly through the plumes generated by the space shuttle rockets in Florida. Reaching altitudes of up to 60,000 feet (19 km), they were able to measure the chemical reactions in the lower stratosphere just after the rockets’ passage.
“One of the fundamental questions was how much chlorine is being made in these solid rocket motors and in what form,” David Fahey, the director of the Chemical Sciences Laboratory at NOAA, who led the study, told Space.com. “We measured it several times and then analyzed the results. At that time, there were not enough space shuttle launches to make a difference globally, but locally one could deplete the ozone layer due to this diffuse plume [left behind by the rocket].”
The space shuttle retired 10 years ago, but rockets generating ozone-damaging substances continue launching humans and satellites to space today.
In fact, in 2018, in its latest Scientific Assessment of Ozone Depletion, which comes out every four years, the World Meteorological Organization included rockets as a potential future concern. The organization called for more research to be done as the number of launches is expected to increase.
Rocket planes inject pollutants into very high altitudes. (Image credit: Virgin Galactic)
Worse than geoengineering
Rosenlof’s team studies the broader effects of human-made substances in the higher layers of the atmosphere using powerful NOAA supercomputers. The work is akin to predicting the proverbial butterfly effect, the influence of minuscule changes in the chemistry of the air tens of miles above Earth on climate and weather patterns on the ground. For her, black carbon, or soot, emitted by rockets burning hydrocarbon fuels, is of particular concern.
“The problem with soot is that it absorbs ultraviolet light, and that means that it could heat the stratosphere,” Rosenlof said. “When you start heating the stratosphere, the layer above the troposphere [closest to the ground], you start changing the motion in the stratosphere. You are changing the energy transfer, and that could actually affect what is happening on the ground.”
Rosenlof points out that many of the particles generated by some rockets have been of interest to scientists due to the possible effects they could have on the global climate in a different context — that of geoengineering, the deliberate tampering with the atmosphere with the aim of stopping or mitigating global warming.
Rosenlof recently co-authored a paper that used the same powerful NOAA supercomputers to model what the scientists call a climate intervention. The team was interested in the climate effects of dispersing sulfur dioxide particles, which are known to reflect light away from Earth, in combination with soot (which is also part of rocket emissions) in the lower stratosphere. Soot absorbs energy from sunlight and pushes the sulfur dioxide aerosol particles to a higher altitude by warming up the surrounding air. At that higher altitude, the sulfur dioxide can start its climate-cooling work. The experiment modeled what would happen when 1.1 million tons of sunlight-reflecting sulfur dioxide mixed with 11,000 tons of black carbon were released in the upper troposphere by aircraft over a 10-day period.
The study didn’t find any significant negative effects on weather on Earth. Yet, those results do not dispel Rosenlof’s concerns about the possible risks associated with the growing number of rocket launches.
Altering the jet stream
“Black carbon in the geoengineering experiment that we did isn’t as high as the stuff from these rockets,” she said. “The problem is that the higher you go, the longer something lasts. Neither of them is ideal, because either of them would produce heating in places where we don’t have heating right now.”
According to Maggi, the soot particles generated by hybrid rocket engines are extremely small and light-weight. In fact, when he and his colleagues tried to measure the soot output of hybrid rocket engines in a laboratory, they couldn’t reliably do it with precision because of the particles’ minuscule size.
“We were able to measure the particle output from solid rocket motors,” Maggi said. “These are about a micron in size, and there [are] a lot of them. But because they are large, they fall to the ground more quickly. In hybrid rocket engines, we were not able to collect the soot from the plume because it’s extremely fine, a few nanometres in size.”
Maggi fears these particles could, in fact, stay in the stratosphere forever.
“They have the same size as the carbon emitted by aircrafts,” Maggi said. “And we know that there is a layer of carbon in the atmosphere at the flight level of aircrafts which is staying there. It’s very likely that particles coming from rocket motors will do the same.”
The accumulation of these particles over years and decades is what worries the scientists. Just as the current climate crisis started relatively slowly as the amount of carbon released into the atmosphere grew, the pollution in the stratosphere may only start causing harm some years down the road.
Rosenlof added that in the long term, injecting pollutants into the stratosphere could alter the polar jet stream, change winter storm patterns or affect average rainfall.
“You might go from 25 inches [64 centimeters] a year to 20 inches [51 cm] a year in some places, which maybe doesn’t sound like that big of a deal unless you are a farmer trying to grow your wheat right there,” Rosenlof said. “Then a subtle change in rainfall can impact your crop yields.”
Work to be done
For this reason, Fahey says, it is critical that scientific work starts now to evaluate the future risks.
“There is this fundamental gap where we just don’t have the numbers, and that means that the science is limited because we have this lack of information,” he said. “We feel it is part of our responsibility [at NOAA] to assess the impact of human activity on the stratosphere. Rockets are a principal and unique source [of stratospheric pollution], the launch frequencies are increasing and the effects are accumulating.”
Fahey envisions a wider research program that would analyze the emissions and impacts of individual types of rocket engines and fuels on the stratosphere. The data could be used in Rosenlof’s models to better predict the effects in accordance with the expected growth of the number of launches. Fahey, however, says that a political decision would have to come first to provide NOAA and its partners with funding that would enable them to take the high-altitude aircraft to the sky again and gather the data. The good news is, he added, that the U.S. Congress seems to be aware of the problem and things might soon start to move.
“We would like to see a national program run by NOAA or the Air Force that would develop a database with basic emission characteristics of modern propulsion systems based on observations,” he said. “We could gather some data in ground tests but also in the same way that we did with the space shuttle — by flying through the plumes just after launch.”
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