It turns out, it’s not just the Lamborghinis that Bitcoin enthusiasts seem to be obsessed with that are pumping CO2 into our atmosphere; accruing the wealth itself is extremely wasteful, releasing 20 megatons of CO2 into the atmosphere a year—as much as the whole republic of Ireland.
Bitcoin mining is incredibly resource intensive by design, forcing Bitcoin miners to get creative about where they get their energy, including going to Canada. Put simply, mining works such that the more energy you burn, the faster your computer can commutate, the more likely you are to “win” Bitcoins. A mining operation may only gain a dozen Bitcoins, but with the currency currently valued (as of this writing) at $6,422 each, a few is all you need to justify a huge demand of energy.
A report from Credit Suisse in January found that somewhere around 80 percent of miners’ winnings are invested back into electricity consumption, according to The Guardian. Should Bitcoin reach $50,000 or each unit, or over five times its current rate, energy usage dedicated to mining would shoot up ten-fold. Should it ever hit $1.1 million, then it would theoretically be profitable to use all of the electricity currently generate on the planet to mine Bitcoin alone.
Now, Bitcoin reaching even $50,000 a unit seems implausible, but it certainly looks like the problem is getting worse not better, no matter where Bitcoin’s value goes. Remember, you have to mine competing crypto currencies as well, and that all adds up. That crytpo mining isn’t regulated like transportation emissions is unreal.
Huawei doesn’t have the best track record when it comes to advertising. Campaigns for both its P8 and P9 phones were revealed to be at least a little dishonest, and it seems the advertising around its newest launch, the Nova 3, falls into the same category.
A 30-second advert for the phone features a couple. The man wants to take a quick selfie, but because she’s hanging out at home she’s not got any make up on, so she’s not on board. Enter the Nova 3 and its beauty AI feature, making it look like she’s wearing a full face of on-point make up. A lovely selfie ensues. Look!
So far, so innocuous (well, apart from the entire narrative around women needing a makeup filter in the first place, but that’s another story). But it’s all gone south for Huawei because the advert’s actress, Sarah Elshamy, posted a few behind-the-scenes snaps of the filming on her Instagram account. And it turns out that lovely selfie was actually captured by a great big DSLR, and not in fact the Nova 3. As the since-deleted picture below shows, the guy taking the supposed selfie in the typical arms-outstretched position is actually holding… nothing. Whoops.
Now, Huawei never explicitly said that the advert was shot on the Nova 3, and of course it’s well-accepted that advertising is a land of smoke and mirrors and probably not that big a deal in the grand scheme of things – companies tweak the truth all the time in order to peddle their wares. But this is just deliberately misleading. And pretty embarrassing for the company, too. We’ve reached out to Huawei for comment on this, although you can probably expect a statement similar to the one issued after the P9 fiasco, where the company waxed lyrical about its intentions to “inspire the community”.
At the heart of the Relativity factory is the “Stargate” 3D printer, which the company says is the largest metal 3D printer in the world.
Relativity Space
Relativity is one of the most ambitious companies in the rocket industry. It seeks to manufacture the entirety of its rockets using 3D printing techniques, hoping to one day print a rocket on the surface of Mars to launch from there. But are either of these goals achievable?
Some new moves by the company suggest they just might be. On Monday morning, Relativity will announce the hiring of Tim Buzza as an adviser to shepherd the company’s launch vehicle execution. These duties will include finalizing the selection of a US-based launch site (a decision will come before the end of this year) and overseeing development of ground launch systems at that site.
Relativity Space
Buzza is a well-known figure in the aerospace industry. He was employee number five at SpaceX, having hired on in 2002, and over a 12-year career ended up as the company’s vice president of launch operations. In an oral history interview in 2013 with NASA, Buzza explained his early duties at SpaceX.
“I got to work at SpaceX from the beginning working on Falcon 1, and I initially was hired in to run the testing,” Buzza said. “Because the test site in Texas became so similar to what a launch site should be like, I then was given the responsibility for the initial launch site at Vandenberg Air Force Base. Then we moved to Kwajalein and built a launch site there. Completed our Falcon 1 development in Kwajalein and then moved on to Cape Canaveral for Falcon 9.”
This significance of this experience, clearly, is that Buzza has seen what it takes to get from the development stage of a rocket into space. Buzza has experiences with avionics, propulsion, and launch software. “The guy literally knows everything there is to know about rockets,” said Tim Ellis, the cofounder and chief executive of Relativity, in an interview with Ars.
Since leaving SpaceX in 2014, Buzza has spent the last four years at Virgin Galactic and then Virgin Orbit, helping that company bring its LauncherOne rocket to readiness. If all goes well, that vehicle should launch later this year.
Printing certification
Relativity also says that it has made significant progress toward its goal of printing an entire rocket, from the engines up to the payload fairing, with its “Stargate” 3D printer. Ellis said the company recently printed its first materials that passed the most stringent specification for fusion-welded materials in the aerospace industry, a standard known as AWS D17.1 Class A.
The significance of this, Ellis said, is that it demonstrates that the 3D printing process it is using for its engines and rockets meets the highest quality level of the aerospace industry. “So many people question or ask us if 3D printed materials are strong enough,” said. “This gives our customers the highest confidence that it is.”
According to Ellis, Relativity remains on track to complete development of its Terran rocket by 2020. It has a planned capacity to deliver 1,250kg to low-Earth orbit and a per-launch cost of $10 million. Commercial launches may begin in 2021.
But Relativity’s ambitions don’t stop there, as it has set a long-term goal of 3D printing a rocket on the surface of Mars, and launching from there back to Earth. “Other than SpaceX we’re the only company where Mars is a core part of our mission,” Ellis said. “Other companies seem focused on launching small satellites. They wear that mission with pride. We do too, but we’re about more than that.”
Georgia Tech researchers color-coded fire ants with markers to better monitor their movements.
Rob Felt/Georgia Tech
The next time you’re stuck in traffic, consider taking a cue from the lowly ant. Fire ants may hold the secret to regulating traffic flow, whether it be dealing with cars packed on a freeway during rush hour, shepherding crowds through narrow passageways, or coordinating swarms of robots.
“Ants that live in complex subterranean environments have to develop sophisticated social rules to avoid the bad things that can happen when you have a lot of individuals in a crowded environment,” said Georgia Tech physicist Daniel Goldman, who has been studying fire ants for years and is co-author of a new paper in Science detailing how they optimize their tunnel-digging efforts.
In a jam
Physicists have long been fascinated by traffic jams, especially so-called “phantom” traffic jams (aka, “jamitons”), where there doesn’t seem to be any good reason for the slowdown. It all comes down to density and the physics of self-organization. Traffic moving freely “flows” like a liquid. Traffic jammed to a standstill is akin to a solid.
But there’s a special state in between that German physicist Boris Kerner dubbed “synchronized flow.” It’s where car density reaches a critical threshold and vehicles become highly correlated with other, moving in unison. Here, the slightest perturbation, even if it’s a single driver braking suddenly, sends little ripples through the chain of cars behind. It’s an example of emergent collective behavior, and it’s one reason why slowdowns typically occur near merge points.
Fire ants (and ants in general) provide another textbook example of collective behavior. A few ants spaced well apart behave like individual ants. But pack enough of them closely together, and they behave more like a single unit, exhibiting both solid and liquid properties. You can pour them from a teapot like ants, as Goldman’s lab demonstrated several years ago, or they can link together to build towers or floating rafts–a handy survival skill when, say, a hurricane floods Houston. So it’s not surprising that they also excel at regulating their own traffic flow. You almost never see an ant traffic jam.
Here’s why. In 2008, German scientists built a tiny ant motorway, complete with the equivalent of highway interchanges, so that the ants in their laboratory could navigate between their nest and a sugary food source. Then they monitored how the ants quickly found the shortest possible route between the two. You’d expect jams to form near interchanges, as they do on human highways during rush hour. Instead, whenever a route started to clog, the ants returning to the nest with sugar blocked ants traveling in the opposite direction toward the nest, forcing them to find an alternate route.
Uncooperative
It’s more difficult to get human drivers to alter their behavior for the collective good. Aided by apps like Waze and Google Maps, we generally take whatever is the quickest route for us, with nary a thought about how this affects traffic patterns at large or our fellow drivers. That’s one reason why just widening highways doesn’t really reduce congestion—there’s an inherent conflict of interest between what benefits us personally and what benefits us collectively, so the result is 30 percent longer commute times, per another 2008 study. (The authors dubbed it the “Price of Anarchy.”) But shutting down a few select streets—akin to blocking oncoming ants—forced drivers to act like the ants and find alternate optimal routes, even if they didn’t consciously do so.
Now there are some new insights into the issue, thanks to Goldman’s crew in Georgia. The group first collected ten nests of fire ants over three summers and set up colonies of 30 ants each in the laboratory, housed in transparent containers filled with glass particles to simulate soil. They painted individual ants different colors, the better to track them for the experiments. Then they let the ants go about their business digging vertical tunnels in their containers for 48 hours, all under the watchful eye of a video camera. Those tunnels are narrow, with barely enough room for two ants to pass, yet jams rarely happened.
Robots make like fire ants and dig into 3D printed spheres.
Georgia Tech
Why? When an ant encounters a tunnel in which other ants are already working, it retreats to find another tunnel. It also helps that only a small fraction of the colony is digging at any given time: 30 percent of them do 70 percent of the work.
According to Goldman, this inequality among worker ants actually benefits the community, ensuring that the digging gets done efficiently with minimal delays while expending the least amount of energy. But don’t assume that the idle ants are lazy: when the scientists removed five of the hardest working ants, other members the colony stepped in to keep the work flowing smoothly.
To find out if this optimization strategy might work more broadly, one of Goldman’s graduate students built ant-like robots and programmed them to dig through 3D printed magnetic plastic balls designed to simulate moist soil. The robots traveled along narrow tracks, mimicking the narrow tunnels of the ants. The researchers found that up to three robots could efficiently dig together, but adding a fourth jammed up the process and work came to a halt.
They reprogrammed some of the robots to retreat when encountering an occupied tunnel, and others to be more prone to dawdling. They found that the former prevented jams but dug with less efficiency than their more laid-back, energy-conserving robot brethren. So the optimization strategy worked in principle, although Goldman admits the ants are much better at it than his robots, in part because they are more flexible.
Robot swarms capable of efficiently digging underground without jamming would be super beneficial for mining or disaster recovery efforts, where using human beings might not be feasible. And imagine how useful such swarms would have been to a stranded Mark Watney in The Martian (2015), capable of quickly digging protective tunnels to shield him from sudden dust storms on the red planet.
As college tuition rises so too has demand for insurance to cover what in many cases is among a family’s biggest investments.
For Mindy DiCostra, a tuition-insurance policy was a life-saver last year after her daughter withdrew mid-semester in her junior year at Marymount Manhattan College in New York following an allergic reaction to an anxiety medication.
Because Ms. DiCostra agreed to pay $238 for tuition insurance when doing paperwork for the school, she was eligible to receive a full reimbursement for the $16,000 in tuition she and her husband had paid for the semester.
“I had no idea how important it would be when I checked that box,” she said.
Tuition insurance protects families in case their son or daughter has to drop out of school past the point at which a school offers tuition reimbursement, usually around halfway through the semester. Driving the increased demand are higher college costs and, to a lesser extent, rising mental-health disorders among college students that have raised concerns among parents that their children may struggle away from home.
About 70,000 policies were written across the U.S. market last year, up from 20,000 five years ago, said John Fees, co-founder of GradGuard, which started selling tuition-reimbursement insurance seven years ago. It works with campuses including the University of Pennsylvania, Auburn University and New York University, its website says.
“The cost of college is driving this,” said Mr. Fees. “Families cannot afford the loss of $30,000.”
The average published tuition and fees at a private college has increased to $34,740 in 2017 from $15,160 in 1988 according to the College Board. The numbers are adjusted for inflation.
“I think a lot of families don’t fully grasp that if they have to withdraw midterm it can have a significant financial impact,” said Paige Lee Director of Tuition Insurance at Allianz. College is “the second largest investment most families will ever make” after a home.
Most schools have some sort of reimbursement policy but they generally don’t cover withdrawals during the second half of the semester. At Vanderbilt University, a student will be reimbursed for some portion of his or her tuition and room and board up until about halfway through the semester. After that, they don’t receive anything.
Tuition and housing at Vanderbilt costs about $59,000, and 80% of that can be reimbursed with insurance, which costs about $530, said Chris Cook, who oversees the financial accounts of students at the school.
Several companies provide tuition insurance, Most policies charge in the neighborhood of 1% of the cost of school. A semester that runs $30,000 would cost about $300. At least 200 schools now work with insurers, offering the coverage to families when the pay the tuition bill.
Liberty Mutual Insurance started offering tuition-reimbursement policies this year, in part because of consumer demand. When a student drops out mid-semester parents are often “very surprised to learn that you may not get anything back,” said Michelle Chevalier, a senior director at Liberty Mutual.
Not everyone thinks the plans are necessary. Jodi Okun, a college financial adviser in Los Angeles, said she has so far steered her clients away from tuition insurance because she doesn’t feel it is necessary in most cases. However, she has but counseled them to be aware of the timeline for withdrawals, so if a student is struggling with a mental-health issue they can leave in time to recoup the cost.
“I tell them, make sure you know when the deadlines are, especially if they are going far away to school,” she said.
Plans don’t typically cover students who drop out for academic or disciplinary reasons but will for medical reasons. Generally, insurers don’t ask about pre-existing conditions, either mental or physical. The idea, GradGuard’s Mr. Fees said, is: “If a student is healthy enough to start to a semester, they qualify.”
Insurers say that the number of claims they receive citing mental health incidents has risen. As many as one in four students at some elite U.S. colleges are now classified as disabled, largely because of mental-health issues such as depression or anxiety, according to the National Center for Education Statistics and interviews with schools.
Carmen Duarte, a spokesperson for A.W.G. Dewar, Inc. which has been offering tuition-reimbursement policies since the 1930, said claims have remained flat for physical-health incidents but increased for mental-health reasons. She said policies are most likely to be bought by families of first year students. Allianz Insurance, which began selling the policies in 2015, said about 20% of claims were for mental health and 70% were for physical health.
Karen Petrou, an influential adviser to bankers and regulators, has made a career of deciphering complicated financial regulations. Now she’s trying to decode another type of puzzle.
The conundrum: Matching medical researchers who need money with investors who have it. A bill outlining her strategy, which would include a government guarantee, was introduced in the House of Representatives last month.
Today, Valve quietly debuted what appears to be a new video game streaming platform, which could be a direct competitor to Twitch, called Steam TV.
Earlier today it came to light that the company had registered the domain Steam.tv after it was first spotted by Pavel Djundik, the curator of the third-party website Steam Database. Hours later the site has gone from a blank webpage that simply read “Welcome to steam.tv” to a live feed of The International 2018, Valve’s esports tournament for Dota 2, its popular free-to-play MOBA.
Valve already allows live broadcasts of video games at the Steam Community hubs for various games, but Steam.tv appears to be a much more robust platform with chat integration. Based on my short time messing around with it, Steam.tv has the ability to easily create groups for discussing streams with people you know based on your existing friends list, rather than being subject just to the ambient conversation of a bunch of strangers.
Valve did not immediately respond to a request for more information about its plans for the platform.
