2017 feels like another era these days, but if you cast your mind back that far, you might remember Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s vaporware Roadster 2.0. Full of nonsensical-sounding features that impressed people who know a little bit about rockets but nothing about cars, the $200,000 electric car promised to have a suction fan and “cold gas thrusters,” plus 620 miles (1,000 km) of range and a whole load of other stuff that’s never happening.
Plenty of other electric automakers have introduced electric hypercars in the eight years since Musk declared the second Roadster a thing, with no sign of it being any closer to reality, if the latest job postings are accurate. And it seems that over time, a lot of the people who gave the company a hefty deposit—some say interest-free loan—have become tired of waiting and want their money back.
And that’s not quite so easy, it turns out. Musk’s current Silicon Valley rival is the latest to discover this. According to Sam Altman’s social media account, he placed an order for a Roadster on July 11, 2018, with a deposit of $45,000 ($58,206 in today’s money). But after emailing Tesla for a refund, he discovered the email address associated with preorders had been deleted.
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Perhaps Altman forgot to ask ChatGPT how best to go about getting his money. If he had, he might have stumbled across the experience of streamer Marques Brownlee, who eventually had to pick up a telephone and call someone to get most of his $50,000 back. Or perhaps some of the threads at Reddit or the Tesla forums, where other people who fell for the cold gas thruster-equipped two-seater with Lucid-busting range and F1-beating acceleration have gathered to share stories of how best to make Tesla return their money.
You’ll often hear plastic pollution referred to as a problem. But the reality is that it’s multiple problems. Depending on the properties we need, we form plastics out of different polymers, each of which is held together by a distinct type of chemical bond. So the method we use to break down one type of polymer may be incompatible with the chemistry of another.
That problem is why, even though we’ve had success finding enzymes that break down common plastics like polyesters and PET, they’re only partial solutions to plastic waste. However, researchers aren’t sitting back and basking in the triumph of partial solutions, and they’ve now got very sophisticated protein design tools to help them out.
That’s the story behind a completely new enzyme that researchers developed to break down polyurethane, the polymer commonly used to make foam cushioning, among other things. The new enzyme is compatible with an industrial-style recycling process that breaks the polymer down into its basic building blocks, which can be used to form fresh polyurethane.
Breaking down polyurethane
The basics of the chemical bonds that link polyurethanes. The rest of the polymer is represented by X’s here.
The new paper that describes the development of this enzyme lays out the scale of the problem: In 2024, we made 22 million metric tons of polyurethane. The urethane bond that defines these involves a nitrogen bonded to a carbon that in turn is bonded to two oxygens, one of which links into the rest of the polymer. The rest of the polymer, linked by these bonds, can be fairly complex and often contains ringed structures related to benzene.
Digesting polyurethanes is challenging. Individual polymer chains are often extensively cross-linked, and the bulky structures can make it difficult for enzymes to get at the bonds they can digest. A chemical called diethylene glycol can partially break these molecules down, but only at elevated temperatures. And it leaves behind a complicated mess of chemicals that can’t be fed back into any useful reactions. Instead, it’s typically incinerated as hazardous waste.
To find something that could work better, the research team focused on finding an enzyme that could be integrated into the process with diethylene glycol. To begin, they tested all the enzymes reported in the literature as capable of breaking down polyurethanes. After testing all 15 of them, only three had decent activity against the polymer they were testing with, and they largely failed to break the polymer down to its constituent starting materials.
So, the researchers focused on the enzyme that had the highest activity, searching for related proteins in public databases, and using the AlphaFold database of predicted structures to identify more distantly related proteins that folded up into a similar structure. On their own, none of these worked especially well either. But they turned out to be useful because they could be used to train an AI to look for sequences that could fold up into a similar structure.
A new enzyme
The tool the team started working with is called Pythia-Pocket, which is a neural network that specializes in determining whether any given amino acid in a protein is likely to contact whatever chemicals that structure can bind, along with any other functional features. That was combined with plain old Pythia (also a neural network), which predicts whether any given protein is likely to form a stable structure.
The researchers reasoned that a good candidate for breaking down polyurethane would have a number of features. It would look, structurally, like the enzyme they had already been working with. It would also face a trade-off between having a structure that was ordered enough to form a similar binding pocket that would have enzymatic activity, but not so rigid that it couldn’t flexibly fit around different types of polyurethanes. To strike this balance, the team used a message-passing interface that updated amino acid positions with each pass and balanced optimizing the structure and binding pocket. They called the resulting software GRASE, for graph neural network-based recommendation of active and stable enzymes.
The results were pretty spectacular. Of the 24 most highly rated proteins the software evaluated, 21 of them showed some catalytic activity, and eight did better than the best enzyme we had known about previously. The best of these designs had 30 times the activity of that enzyme.
Things got even better when the researchers mixed in the diethylene glycol and heated the mixture up to 50° C. Under those conditions, the newly designed enzyme was over 450 times as active as the best-performing natural enzyme. It took 12 hours, but it could break down 98 percent of the polyurethane in the reaction mixture. And the enzyme was stable enough that it could be given a fresh mixture of polyurethane two additional times before its enzymatic activity started to wear out.
Shifting from lab tests to kilogram-scale digestion showed the same thing: 95 percent or more of the material was broken down into the starting materials the polyurethane was made from.
The researchers highlight the fact that their tools go beyond simply focusing on the structure formed by the protein, but incorporate information about its function, such as its stability and the amino acids that are likely to interact with the material it’s digesting. And they suggest that these approaches may tell us more about how to get functional proteins by focusing on forming a similar 3D structure.
The US inched one step closer to taking over TikTok’s algorithm after President Donald Trump met with Chinese President Xi Jinping on Thursday.
Neither leader confirmed that China has agreed to the terms of Trump’s proposed deal, which would create a US version of TikTok that licenses the Chinese-owned algorithm. But the Chinese Commerce Ministry provided a statement following the meeting; translated, it indicates that “China will properly resolve TikTok-related issues with the United States.”
Trump, who has long vowed to “save” TikTok, was notably silent on Thursday, but US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told Fox News ahead of Trump’s meeting with Xi that “we finalized the TikTok agreement in terms of getting Chinese approval.” According to Bessent, the deal will “finally” be resolved over the “coming weeks and months,” Reuters reported.
Whether China will require changes to Trump’s deal will likely become clear soon, but terms allowing ByteDance to retain a 20 percent ownership stake and keep the algorithm are widely viewed as favorable to China. Dan Ives, a tech analyst at the financial advisory firm Wedbush Securities, memorably quipped that “buying TikTok without the algorithm would be like buying a Ferrari without the engine.”
With no deal reached during Trump and Xi’s meeting, it’s likely that China isn’t satisfied with Trump’s proposal—or at the very least is reluctant to relinquish control of an app that unexpectedly became an “American social media phenomenon,” Bloomberg reported. Louise Loo, head of Asia economics at Oxford Economics, told CNBC that we simply don’t know enough details yet to determine if “Beijing’s interests in the TikTok contention truly aligns with President Trump’s motivations to spin off the entity’s US business.”
ByteDance did not respond to Ars’ request for comment. The TikTok owner has remained quiet throughout the Trump administration’s negotiations with China over the US sale, which is supposed to resolve US national security concerns that China may influence content on the app.
TikTok US app may look radically different
If the sale goes through without major changes to the terms, TikTok could radically change for US users.
After US owners take over, they will have to retrain TikTok’s algorithm, perhaps shifting what content Americans see on the platform.
Some speculate that TikTokers may only connect with American users through the app, but that’s likely inaccurate, as global content will remain available.
While global content will still be displayed on TikTok’s US app, it’s unclear how it may be filtered, Kelley Cotter, an assistant professor who studies social media algorithms in the Department of Human-Centered Computing and Social Informatics at Pennsylvania State University, told Scientific American.
Cotter suggested that TikTok’s US owners may also tweak the algorithm or change community guidelines to potentially alter what content is accessed on the app. For example, during conversations leading up to the law that requires either the sale of TikTok to US allies or a nationwide ban, Republican lawmakers voiced concerns “that there were greater visibility of Palestinian hashtags on TikTok over Israeli hashtags.”
If Trump’s deal goes through, the president has already suggested that he’d like to see the app go “100 percent MAGA.” And Cotter suggested that the conservative slant of Trump’s hand-picked TikTok US investors—including Oracle, Silver Lake, and Andreessen Horowitz—could help Trump achieve that goal.
“An owner that has a strong ideological point of view and has the will to make that a part of the app, it is possible, through tweaking the algorithm, to sort of reshape the overall composition of content on the platform,” Cotter said.
If left-leaning users abandon TikTok as the app shifts to US ownership, TikTok’s content could change meaningfully, Cotter said.
“It could result in a situation,” Cotter suggested, where TikTok would be “an app that is composed by only people based in the US but only a subset of American users and particularly ones that perhaps might be right-leaning.” That could “have very big impact on the kinds of content that you see there.”
For TikTok’s US users bracing for a feared right-wing overhaul of their feeds, there’s also the potential for the app to become glitchy as all US users are hastily transferred over to the new app. Any technical issues could also drive users off the app, perhaps further altering content.
Ars updated this story on Oct. 30 to note that speculation that American users will be siloed off is inaccurate.
With the milestone just days away, you are likely to hear this week that there has now been a continuous human presence on the International Space Station (ISS) for the past 25 years. But what does that quarter of a century actually encompass?
Fortunately, the astronauts and cosmonauts on the space station have devoted some of their work time and a lot of their free time to taking photos, filming videos, and calling down to Earth. Much of that data has been made available to the public, but in separate repositories, with no real way to correlate or connect it with the timeline on which it was all created.
That is, not until now. Two NASA contractors, working only during their off hours, have built a portal into all of those resources to uniquely represent the 25-year history of ISS occupancy.
ISS in Real Time, by Ben Feist and David Charney, went live on Monday (October 27), ahead of the November 2 anniversary. In its own way, the new website may be as impressive a software engineering accomplishment as the station is an aerospace engineering marvel.
ISS in Real Time – Overview
Scraping space station data
“Everything that is on the website was already public. It’s already on another website somewhere, with some of it tucked away in some format or another. What we did was a lot of scraping of that data, to get it pulled into the context of every day on the space station,” said Feist in an interview with collectSPACE.com.
As an info box on the front page of ISS in Real Time tallies, at its debut the site contained mission data for 9,064 days out of the 9,131 (99.32 percent coverage); 4,739 days with full space-to-ground audio coverage; 4,561,987 space-to-ground comm calls in 69 languages; 6,931,369 photos taken in space over 8,525 days; 10,908 articles across 7,711 days; and 930 videos across 712 days.
Or, to put it another way, particularly appropriate for the history it spans, had this project relied only on the technology that existed when Expedition 1 began, the data archive would fill 3,846 CD-ROMs.
Statistical data about the contents of the <em>ISS in Real Time</em> website at its debut.
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ISS in Real Time
And they did all this in a period of about 11 months, but only in the hours when they were not at work writing software (Feist) or designing user interfaces (Charney) for Mission Control, the EVA (Extravehicular Activity, or spacewalk) Office, or other communities supporting the ISS and Artemis programs at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston.
“Being inside NASA actually didn’t help at all,” said Feist. “If you’re inside NASA and you want to use data, you have to make sure that it’s public data. And because there’s this concept in the government of export control, you have to never, ever make the mistake of publishing an image or something else that you found somewhere else without knowing if it’s already public.”
“So even though we were at NASA, what we had to do was pretend we weren’t there and find the data anywhere we could find it in the public already,” he said.
As it turned out, that worked fairly well for days beginning in 2008 and onward. ISS occupancy, however, pre-dates a lot of the multimedia archives we take for granted today.
“This was the problem,” said Feist. “If stuff was released publicly back then, it was done to media on tape. There was no such thing as streaming video in 2000—YouTube wasn’t invented until 2005. So there’s just no way to go back in time on the Internet and go find the treasure trove that we know exists internally. We know NASA has full days archived on tape, but it just hasn’t been exported yet.”
Even after the change to digital photography and video, there still remained the challenge of linking each file to the day, hour, minute, and second that it was captured. For example, while the Internet Archive has been a tremendous source for the project, only sometimes do the videos it holds include the unique identifier that is needed to determine when the video was taken.
<em>ISS in Real Time</em> creators Ben Feist (at right) and David Charney stand inside the International Space Station control room at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas.
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ISS in Real Time
In other situations, Feist turned to artificial intelligence to sort through the tens of thousands of files to learn if they were appropriate for inclusion.
“We know that NASA publishes all of its PAO [public affairs office] photos to Flickr. Right now, there are about 80,000 photos in just the Johnson Space Center collection on Flickr alone. So we scraped those, and then I wrote an AI process as part of the pipeline to figure out which of those photos were flight photos and which of them were ground photos, so that we only show flight photos,” he said.
Visualizing 25 years
As Feist was figuring out how to import all the data, Charney was figuring out how the public would access it all.
This is not the first project of its type that Feist and Charney have brought online. In 2019, they introduced Apollo 11 in Real Time, which did for the 50th anniversary of the first moon landing what ISS in Real Time does for the 25 years of human occupancy. Apollo 13 and Apollo 17 sites followed (and more Apollo missions are still to come, Feist and Charney say).
They also built a version of ISS in Real Time for NASA, called Coda, which has been in use internally at the space agency for the past four years.
Even with all of that as a foundation, designing the user interface for ISS in Real Time required Charney to wrap his head around all of the different ways people would be using the site.
“The entire site is an experience,” Charney told collectSPACE. “Just the idea that we could visualize 25 years of what went on, or that we even have every day over the past 25 years in here, is something we wanted to explore and feel the data throughout those 25 years.”
<em>ISS in Real Time</em> begins 25 years ago on Nov. 2, 2000, with the ISS Expedition 1 crew’s arrival at the space station.
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collectSPACE.com
One of the questions was what users would find if they picked a day when no data is available. How could they still make it interesting and still play as though you were in Mission Control?
“Some days have all of the media available—video and tons of photos. And then there are other days where there is no data. There are a lot of days that have at least a photo, but for others, we found there are a lot of great articles we could use so that even on a day that doesn’t have a lot of media, there is some interesting information you can access,” said Charney.
Through Charney’s design, in addition to the data coming from the space station, users can also see where the ISS was in its orbit over Earth, which astronauts were aboard the station, and what spacecraft were docked at any given moment. Visitors can also access transcripts of the space-to-ground comm audio, including translations when the discussion is not in English.
Feist and Charney plan to continue to build out the site and add more data as it is released by NASA, so it remains as close to as “in real time” as possible. They also have ideas for other data sets they could add, including the archived and live telemetry that provide the status of systems and conditions aboard the ISS.
Ultimately, it is the longevity of ISS in Real Time that sets it apart, they said.
“One thing that’s cool about this is you can go to the first day that the Expedition One crew was aboard and let it play. It will then play all the way through that day’s timeline and go to the next day, and then play all the way through that timeline and go to the next day,” said Charney. “So if you start on November 2 and have 25 years to go, the space station, as currently planned, will likely have long met its end before you reach the end.”
“So this might be the longest interactive experience ever built,” said Feist.
Social media platforms have agreed to comply with Australia’s social media ban for users under 16 years old, begrudgingly embracing the world’s most restrictive online child safety law.
On Tuesday, Meta, Snap, and TikTok confirmed to Australia’s parliament that they’ll start removing and deactivating more than a million underage accounts when the law’s enforcement begins on December 10, Reuters reported.
Firms risk fines of up to $32.5 million for failing to block underage users.
Age checks are expected to be spotty, however, and Australia is still “scrambling” to figure out “key issues around enforcement,” including detailing firms’ precise obligations, AFP reported.
An FAQ managed by Australia’s eSafety regulator noted that platforms will be expected to find the accounts of all users under 16.
Those users must be allowed to download their data easily before their account is removed.
Some platforms can otherwise allow users to simply deactivate and retain their data until they reach age 17. Meta and TikTok expect to go that route, but Australia’s regulator warned that “users should not rely on platforms to provide this option.”
Additionally, platforms must prepare to catch kids who skirt age gates, the regulator said, and must block anyone under 16 from opening a new account. Beyond that, they’re expected to prevent “workarounds” to “bypass restrictions,” such as kids using AI to fake IDs, deepfakes to trick face scans, or the use of virtual private networks (VPNs) to alter their location to basically anywhere else in the world with less restrictive child safety policies.
Kids discovered inappropriately accessing social media should be easy to report, too, Australia’s regulator said.
Tech companies have slammed Australia’s social media ban as “vague,” “problematic,” and “rushed,” AFP reported.
Each platform is expected to detect age based on a range of signals, such as “how long an account has been active,” whether the users engage with content geared toward younger users, how many friends “who appear to be under 18” they have, or whether they appear to be underage in their profile pictures or image uploads. The eSafety regulator said platforms can also rely on audio analysis to detect age based on users’ voices.
Platforms could also analyze users’ activities for clues and may dig through users’ interactions to analyze “the language level and style” of both the user and their friends, the official guidance said. Or they could detect that a suspected child user’s posting seems to align with “school schedules.”
These signals are not expected to perfectly detect users’ ages, but platforms simply need to show they took “reasonable steps” to block banned users, Australia’s law says. Officials have recommended that platforms use a “layered” approach to overcome attempts at circumvention, the BBC reported.
Everybody accepts that age checks won’t be perfect
When the ban takes effect in December, many kids will likely go undetected, and some adult users will inevitably be falsely flagged as being underage.
A study commissioned by Australia’s regulator found that all methods for detecting kids—including “formal verification using government documents, parental approval, or technologies to determine age based on facial structure, gestures,” or behaviors—were “technically possible.” But there is no “single ubiquitous solution that would suit all use cases, nor did we find solutions that were guaranteed to be effective in all deployments,” the BBC reported.
Perhaps most glaringly, face scans have a notably higher error rate when attempting to distinguish between a 16- and 17-year-old, the study showed.
Many platforms are concerned about enforcement risks, despite the regulator noting that compliance won’t be perfect—directly acknowledging in the FAQ that “no solution is likely to be 100 percent effective all of the time.” To shield adult users from any unintended censorship, the law requires platforms to provide a simple way for users to challenge underage account bans.
Meta’s policy director for Australia and New Zealand, Mia Garlick, told AFP that removing underage accounts will pose “significant new engineering and age assurance challenges.” Nevertheless, Meta plans to comply with the law and remove all users under 16 once the law kicks in later this year.
Australia’s law is supposed to reduce harms by keeping harmful content out of reach and reducing social media “pressures.” But experts have warned that kids can still access harmful content on platforms not impacted by the ban, and there’s no clear evidence that the ban will reduce kids’ screentime.
Instead, critics worry the ban will push kids to darker corners of the Internet while removing an important tool that allows some users, like kids with disabilities, to connect with others. Some advocates have pushed the government to consider exemptions for kids with disabilities. But Australia’s regulator backs the law as a necessary “delay” of all minors’ social media use, insisting that under the new regulations, “no under-16s have to feel like they’re ‘missing out’” since none of their peers will have social media.
Rachel Lord, an Australian spokesperson for YouTube, told AFP that “the legislation will not only be extremely difficult to enforce, it also does not fulfil its promise of making kids safer online.” YouTube is among the ban’s loudest critics.
Australia has proposed reviewing the law’s impacts after two years. In the meantime, other countries could adopt similar legislation, as concerns over child safety have only heightened. Age checks laws have become more popular, and artificial intelligence features that have alarmed parents and lawmakers are increasingly embedded in social media.
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The basics of the chemical bonds that link polyurethanes. The rest of the polymer is represented by X’s here.
Statistical data about the contents of the <em>ISS in Real Time</em> website at its debut.
Credit:
ISS in Real Time
<em>ISS in Real Time</em> creators Ben Feist (at right) and David Charney stand inside the International Space Station control room at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas.
Credit:
ISS in Real Time
<em>ISS in Real Time</em> begins 25 years ago on Nov. 2, 2000, with the ISS Expedition 1 crew’s arrival at the space station.
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