THE FBI HAS SUCCEEDED IN UNITING SILICON VALLEY...AGAINST THE FBI

Tech companies aren't exactly known for playing nice with one another. Apple and Microsoft were once the fiercest rivals of personal computing. These days, Apple is up against Google in smartphones, while Google and Microsoft battle it out over business software. Amazon is fighting Apple when it comes to devices and media, and Microsoft when it comes to cloud hosting services (among other markets). Facebook is crushing Twitter in terms of social media users, and now Facebook and Google are vying for more mobile Internet eyeballs and ad dollars.

It's a rare day when all six of these companies can agree on something, butthat day seems to have arrived, thanks to the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation.

Microsoft, Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Twitter all appear to be uniting behind Apple's move

Last week, a judge ordered Apple to comply with an FBI request that Apple help circumvent security features on an iPhone used by a San Bernardino shooting suspect. Today, Apple filed a motion to dismiss the order to help unlock the iPhone for the FBI, and now Microsoft, Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Twitter all appear to be uniting behind Apple's move.

Google first showed tepid support for Apple in this fight last week, when CEO Sundar Pichai tweeted that "forcing companies to enable hacking could compromise users’ privacy."

Then it seemed like Microsoft might be siding with the FBI, when co-founder and former CEO Bill Gates gave an interview to the The Financial Times earlier this week saying that the FBI was only looking for Apple's help in this specific case. Apple has repeatedly contended that what the FBI is asking for — a way to bypass the auto-deletion feature on an iPhone 5C when a password is guessed incorrectly too many times — could be used to compromise other iPhones, including the hundreds of millions used by Apple's customers around the world.

But Gates, who is now just an "advisor" at Microsoft, later walked back those remarks, and today Microsoft's president and chief legal officer Brad Simstestified before Congress that his company "wholeheartedly" supports Apple and will be filing an amicus brief in the court case to that effect (amicus briefsare legal documents filed by parties who aren't directly involved in the case, but who have a strong interest in the outcome and may be affected by it.)

As it turns out, Microsoft isn't the only one about to do this: now Google, Facebook, and Twitter, are all coming together to file a joint amicus brief in support of Apple, according to USA Today. Amazon is also said to be working on "amicus brief options," according to a spokesperson who spoke toBuzzfeed.

Other smaller tech companies and digital advocacy groups including the Electronic Frontier Foundation have also said they plan to support Apple by filing such amicus briefs as the case moves forward.

It seems that the FBI has succeeded in uniting most of Silicon Valley's power players against it.

The broad, seemingly unified coalition in tech against the FBI and the government order in this case is striking. I can only think of a few examples where U.S. tech companies and advocacy groups formed anything like this kind of unanimous front in recent years, namely the opposition to the International Telecommunications Union cyber agreement of 2012, the successful bid to kill the American SOPA and PIPA cybersecurity bills of that same year, and the criticism of another failed cybersecurity bill called CISPA.

Yet none of these examples have had so many big tech companies on the same side against a government. Whether the words of some of America's most powerful and well-known companies makes a difference to the courts, we'll find out soon enough. In the meantime, Apple and the FBI are set to testify to their positions in a hearing before the U.S. Congress on March 1st. Congress itself may end up passing a law that resolves this case and creates a framework for future situations like this.

At stake is the issue of security and privacy of our most personal devices: can and should they be compromised at the government's bidding in criminal and terror investigations? And to what extent? That's the question before the courts and Congress now, and it seems that the FBI has succeeded in uniting most of Silicon Valley's power players against it.

Correction: this article originally misstated the name of Google's CEO as Satya Nadella, who is in fact, Microsoft's CEO. We have since corrected the error and apologize for it.

HOW WE'LL FLY FROM LOS ANGELES TO TOKYO IN 30 MINUTES

The Wright brothers aren’t the only siblings to push the limits of flight: In 1986, pilot Dick Rutan flew nonstop around the world, spending nine days in the air on a single tank of gas. He made the trip in a plane called Voyager, which his brother, Burt, designed. Today he’s still at the forefront of aviation, busy building a new hyper-efficient engine and reimagining what aircraft might be.

In his own words:

Burt and I were issued flight plans instead of birth certificates. When we flewVoyager nonstop around the world, we showed that you could build a light, strong plane out of carbon fiber that will last indefinitely. Now we’re at the dawn of learning how to fly into space—in planes. Burt designedSpaceShipOne, which won the Ansari X Prize. Its successor, Virgin Galactic’sSpaceShipTwo, is on track to send civilians into space.

"I had an abnormal fascination for aviation at the expense of more normal character development."

Innovators like Richard Branson of Virgin Galactic and Elon Musk of SpaceX can get you and me to space. And they can do it more efficiently and reliably than the government. Yes, there are risks involved. They will have problems and challenges, just as people did when the development of airplanes ramped up in the 1920s. But my mom always told me that it’s not a crime to fail; it’s a crime not to try.

With a company called Engineered Propulsion Systems, I’m now trying to transform planes’ fuel flexibility and efficiency into something worthy of this century instead of the previous one. Our liquid-cooled cycle compression engines can run on any kind of fuel, from bacon grease to diesel to traditional jet fuel—a change that will revolutionize general aviation. The engines run beautifully smooth, with 35 percent better efficiency, and they’re incredibly quiet.

"We can solve the problem of disruptive noise by taking hypersonic travel out of the air altogether."

Disruptive noise is actually one thing that holds back commercial aviation. We have the ability to fly large planes faster than the speed of sound, but U.S. law restricts their flight, in part, because of the sonic booms they create. We can solve that problem by taking hypersonic travel out of the air altogether. My vision is that we build something along the lines of the hyperloop: a system of carbon-fiber vacuum tubes. Inside, capsules can accelerate to, say, 10 times the speed of sound. Because they slide through an airless vacuum, there’s no sound—and no sonic booms. You could go silently from Los Angeles to Tokyo in half an hour. It’s doable right now. It just takes some vision.

This article was originally published in the October 2015 issue of Popular Science, under the title “Dick Rutan on the Future of Flying.”

EXTREME SCIENCE NEAR YOU

If you're looking for some more extreme science, here are Popular Science’s picks in each state. Mouse over or tap to read more about the geological, astronomical, anthropological, ecological, or math-ological adventures that await.

FACEBOOK'S LONG, PSYCHOLOGICAL JOURNEY TO REACTIONS

  

 

Facebook Reactions are here, and they’ve been a long time coming.

Since at least 2012, Facebook has been searching for ways to make its service more expressive. In the minds of product developers and managers at the social media company, there shouldn’t be an emotion that you can’t express on Facebook. The group's quest brought them all the way back to Charles Darwin, with pitstops at Berkeley University and Pixar Labs.

The Reactions rolled out today are meant to be a quick way to express a flash of emotion, like amazement, a laugh, anger, a pang of sadness, or the feeling of love. Facebook has taken these emotions and assigned them animated emoticons with bits of text: Love, Haha, Wow, Sad, and Angry. These don’t replace the Like button, but are meant to be used alongside it.

Facebook

Facebook's new Reactions make the Like more robust.

Really like something? Pop a Love on it. See an awesome photo of a double rainbow? Drop some Wows.

This is huge. The Like button is iconic and monolithic, and the last remaining binary (on or off) feature that Facebook has. Businesses hang “Like Us On Facebook” on their doors, and the Like has pretty much been copied by every other social media platform since Facebook. It works. And now Facebook is messing with the recipe.

Facebook’s first attempt at a more expressive platform was in the instant messaging tool. This was done through "stickers," little animated emoticons users could send back and forth. They called on researcher Dacher Keltner, a professor of psychology at UC Berkeley, and he worked with Pixar designer Matt Jones to make a set of stickers starring a character called Finch.

"Reactions, I believe, come straight out of Darwin."

Finch is a little yellow ball with facial expressions that harken to Darwin’s original sketches. (You can still find Finch by searching Stickers in Facebook Messenger.) In Darwin’s 1872 book, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, he outlined more than 50 universal emotions. Keltner gave Facebook about 40 emotions with sketches from Jones, all tested at his lab for readability. The would show dozens or hundreds of people the emotions, and simply see if they could recognize each one. For Finch, Facebook pared it down to about 16, and refined the ideas internally. These launched in 2013, and Facebook saw them as a success, keeping a team around to make more new stickers.

Finch served as a jumping-off point for Facebook’s new Reactions. About a year ago, Facebook reached out to Keltner again, this time to talk about which emotions might accompany the Like button. He worked with his team to send 43 ideas, and from that list Facebook picked, refined, and launched four, in addition to the "Love" Reaction.

Matt Jones

The list was created partially from Darwinian emotions, and partially from the work of fellow UC Berkeley professor Paul Ekman, a psychologist whose research in the 1970s informed most of what we know today about facial expressions.

“Reactions, I believe, come straight out of Darwin,” Keltner told Popular Science. “The artistic rendering process that led to Finch and had great influence on Reactions is very much rooted in science and anatomy.”

But as attuned to our psychology as Reactions are, there are limits.

Every emotion that Facebook chose had to be extremely easily recognizable. Keltner says that he’s urged Facebook to add like voices or vocal inflections to the emoticons. He’s also advocated for giving the Reactions and Stickers arms or bodies in certain situations, saying that it’s easier to read body language than the face sometimes.

Prior to launch, Facebook’s Reaction team has been testing in seven countries, including Ireland and Spain. The Reactions will be translated into all of the 70+ languages that Facebook supports, which posed a huge challenge to Facebook’s sticker team.

For instance, the team was originally going to launch a “Yay” reaction, but it wasn’t being used in some countries so the team decided to launch without it, says Sammi Krug, who led the Reactions team.

The set of emotions are the same right now across the whole world, and the translations are all as close as they can be, too.

However, the Reactions team is looking to make changes if necessary. Seven countries don’t speak for the entire world, and despite their efforts of bringing native speakers onto the team, there’s always more data to be had.

“We’re going to continue, after we’ve launched the entire world, to get so many data points back, and the team will learn and iterate,” Krug says.

Facebook Reactions are rolling out today, and you can access them by either hovering over the Like button with your mouse on a computer, or pressing and holding the Like button on mobile.

TURNING TO THE OCEAN TO TACKLE ANTIBIOTIC RESISTANCE

Back when antibiotics were first released in 1945, the concept of resistance, although present, was not considered to be a significant threat. Over the last seventy years, that view has changed significantly. Now, antibiotic resistance is one of the greatest concerns facing human health.

Although natural development of resistance happens naturally, the process can be facilitated in the matrix of a biofilm. These micro-colonies of bacteria offer the perfect place to dilute out the antibiotic to sublethal levels. As this happens, the individual cells can evolve to develop mechanisms to tolerate the existence of the chemical. If allowed to continue, tolerance can eventually develop into full blown resistance to any concentration.

Removing biofilms, however, is not an easy task. They are highly stablestructures at the molecular level and have strong adhesion properties. Removing them requires some form of physical manipulation such as sonication or chemical means such as enzymes and disinfection. While this may be useful in the lab, in a clinical environment, these options are not usually feasible.

Identification of biofilm control measures in the medical setting has been a goal of research for over twenty years. Explorations have incorporated a variety of chemical options as well as modified physical disruption technologies. Yet little success has been realized. Essentially, to find a viable option to combat these natural structures, a natural solution could be needed.

The hunt for natural chemicals gained momentum over a decade ago although the environment wasn’t the clinic, it was the sea. Biofilms are also involved in fouling of marine structure. In 2000, a variety of natural products from marine bacteria somehow had the ability to reduce the potential for biofilm formation. Not long after that, in 2004, a metabolite from seaborne lichen known as usnic acid also revealed biofilm-killing activity. This opened the door to a new direction in biofilm control in which the ocean became a potentially never ending source of anti-biofilm options.

Now another group of marine chemicals can be added to the list. Last week, an international team of researchers published the discovery of a novel biofilm inhibitor found in a marine bacterium belonging to one of the most historic genera in the history of antibiotics, Streptomyces. As they found out, this species had a never before seen mechanism to control biofilms.

The team examined marine sediments taken from the Punta Mona Island in the Gandoca Manzanillo region of Costa Rica. The bacteria were grown in the lab and then tested against a biofilm-producing bacterium, Acinetobacter baumannii, which is known for its ability to cause healthcare associated infections. Once they found a species capable of inhibiting biofilms, they went to work to identify the active molecules.

From the collection of bacteria, a relatively novel species, Streptomyces gandocaensis, was found and underwent further analysis. Using a technique to mutate out the anti-biofilm activity, the team were able to hone in on a group of molecules carrying out this action. They were small secondary metabolites produced in response to environmental stressors. Much like the species, these molecules also were novel and the group decided on the name cahuitamycins (presumably in honour of the Cahuita region of Costa Rica).

At first, three natural cahuitamycins were found, named A through C. When tests were conducted to determine which ones were most effective, A and C were the best. However, with some mutational analysis of laboratory-derived strains, two more versions of the molecule were produced, D and E. The D analogue had an almost twofold increase in inhibitory activity over the natural molecules.

For the authors, both C and D showed the best potential for use in an applied setting in healthcare. These cahuitamycins could be used as coatings for various medical devices, such as catheters to help ensure biofilms do not form. This could improve the likelihood of a safe medical intervention and also reduce the chances for complications due to infection.

Apart from finding the cahuitamycins, this study also offers a glimpse of the future for those hunting for antibiotic and anti-biofilm molecules. As expected, there is much to be gained by looking in the oceans of the world. There may be innumerable possibilities lying on seabeds just waiting to be discovered. But more importantly, once appropriate organisms are found, they can undergo further analysis and mutational studies in the lab to identify even more effective analogues.

Though the idea of using mutated strains of bacteria may sound troublesome, the practice isn’t new when discussing medical discoveries. In chemistry, these types of alterations are the foundation for the development of novel medicines. The only difference is that unlike the synthetic pathways of chemistry, these alterations are completely natural. Moreover, since they are performed within a bacterium, upscaling may be even easier as the only requirement for mass production would be a bigger incubation vessel.

Protecting the world's news from digital attack

The web is an increasingly critical tool for news organizations, allowing them to communicate faster, research more easily, and disseminate their work to a global audience. Often it's the primary distribution channel for critical, investigative work that shines a light into the darkest corners of society and the economy—the kind of reporting that exposes wrongdoing, causes upset and brings about change.

Unfortunately there are some out there who want to prevent this kind of reporting—to silence journalism when it’s needed most. A simple, inexpensive distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack can be carried out by almost anyone with access to a computer—and take a site completely offline before its owners even know they’ve been attacked.

These attacks threaten free expression and access to information—two of Google’s core values. So a few years ago we created Project Shield, an effort that uses Google’s security infrastructure to detect and filter attacks on news and human rights websites. Now we’re expanding Project Shield beyond our trusted testers, and opening it up to all the world’s news sites to protect them from DDoS attacks and eliminate DDoS as a form of censorship.

We learned a lot from our early group of Project Shield testers. Not only have we kept websites online during attacks that otherwise would have taken them offline, we learned crucial information about how these types of attacks happen, and how we can improve our services to defend against them.

With this expansion, tens of thousands of news sites will have access to Project Shield. And because Project Shield is free, even the smallest independent news organizations will be able to continue their important work without the fear of being shut down.

Finally, Project Shield is not just about protecting journalism. It’s about improving the health of the Internet by mitigating against a significant threat for publishers and people who want to publish content that some might find inconvenient. A free and open Internet depends on protecting the free flow of information—starting with the news.

Visit our website to learn how Project Shield works and, if you work in journalism, discover how you can join the fight to protect the world’s news.