Motherboard: Researchers Built a Cat Paradise for Science

As detailed in a recent paper in the Journal of Feline Medicine and Surgery, the research facility was created by University of Illinois researchers in order to study a new type of feline contraceptive that could drastically reduce feral cat populations. Although spaying and neutering cats is an effective way to control feline populations, the minor surgeries are expensive and invasive. An injectable contraceptive vaccine called GonaCon showed promise as an alternative population control mechanism in a variety of mammals, including laboratory-raised cats, but testing its effectiveness in the wild proved difficult. [...]

"Many facilities have come a long way in making research conditions more humane for the animals, but they still involve small enclosures without a lot of enrichment," said Amy Fischer, a researcher at the University of Illinois’ Department of Animal Sciences. "We wanted to make our cats' environment much more stimulating."

Of the 35 cats that live in the lab, 30 are female and all the cats were taken from local animal shelters. This in itself was a major departure from usual research protocols, which almost always use genetically identical, lab-raised cats. The hope was that this would provide better insight into the effectiveness of the vaccine as it would actually work in the wild.

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Motherboard: The World Spent $14.4 Billion on Conservation, and It Actually Worked

Between 1992–2003, $14.4 billion was spent in total in the 109 countries studied, including Brazil and China. (Dollar amounts here are in what researchers call "international dollars," a conversion from US dollars to account for differences in purchasing power in each country.) That investment resulted in a 29 percent-per-country average decrease in the rate of biodiversity decline between 1996–2008, the new paper concludes. [...]

"Our study answers the big question about the effectiveness of conservation investments," said Waldron. Most of the funding in that time period supported reserves and protected areas. "We only looked at spending that went directly to conservation, such as funding for park rangers, habitat protection, and so on." [...]

An additional $5 million investment in conservation could have slowed the loss of plant, animal, and other species by 50 percent in Peru and 90 percent in Rwanda during the period studied, according to the model. In some poor countries, the entire conservation budget amounts to $10 million or less, so an additional $5 million could have a big impact, Waldron said. [...]

In 2010, the 193 countries that are part of the UN's Convention on Biological Diversity agreed to put under protection 17 percent of land and 10 percent of oceans globally by 2020 to reduce the loss of biodiversity. But only a few countries are actually expected to reach their targets, according to a 2016 report.

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Motherboard: Young Iranians Are Using These Apps to Bypass Government Oppression

In a country where 60 percent of the 80 million population is under 30 years old, the mobile-savvy, VPN-using youth in Iran have been resisting government control. Telegram, the encrypted messaging service, has become a popular form of communication for political expression, for example. But young people are also up against internet censorship, moral policing and fundamental religious clerics. Even with a relatively more liberal leader like Rouhani, Facebook and Twitter are still banned. [...]

One app that sparked success upon its release was Gershad, which helps users protect themselves from the Gasht-e Ershad (guidance patrol), the so-called "morality police" of Iran. This de facto police force identifies and arrests anyone deemed to be inappropriately dressed, or in violation of Islamic cultural values, as reported by Iran Wire. Inevitably, women are more persecuted than men, as one of the main responsibilities of the morality police is to make sure women wear the hijab according to Islamic law. [...]

Sandoogh96, which translates to Vote17 (2017 is 1396 in the Iranian calendar), is an app that was launched just before the elections last May. The app is inspired by the infamous dating app Tinder, which allows users to swipe right on another user if they're interested, or swipe left if they're not. But instead of swiping right or left for a date, Sandoogh96 users swipe to find out which politician is more in line with their ideas. [...]

HamDam includes the usual ovulation and period tracking features, but contains additional information about reproductive and legal rights for Iranian women. This is especially important because sexual education in Iran is very limited to young, straight couples getting married, according to the HamDam project lead Soudeh Rad. [...]

In Iran, approximately 63 percent of all women are subject to verbal, sexual, or psychological abuse, and most women do not report this to the authorities for reasons varying from guilt, or fear of economic hardship. But technology is trying to come to the rescue: Toranj mimics Circle of 6 to suit Iran's context, and has information similar to that present in HamDam.

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Motherboard: Bees Can Count to Four, Display Emotions, and Teach Each Other New Skills

And now, thanks to some of Perry's research published this week in PLOS Biology, we now know bees can also learn new skills just by watching other bees. Perry and his team figured this out by first teaching bumblebees a new skill that they wouldn't naturally learn in the wild: pulling a string to free a disc from under a plexiglass covered in order to access the nectar inside. [...]

It was already pretty cool that bees were able to master this tricky (for them) skill, but what was really remarkable was the bees' ability to pass this knowledge on to the rest of the hive. This was accomplished in two methods. In one, an "observer" bee was placed in a small chamber near an actively foraging trained bee, and would watch the trained bee performing the task over and over. After watching the task just ten times, the student bees were released and 60 percent were able to solve the puzzle within five minutes. [...]

"The decline around the world, of both honeybees and bumble bees and pollinators in general, is a serious concern," Perry said. "One of our hopes is that people will have a different perspective on bees and insects. They're more than just behaviorally rigid machines. They do have these complex cognitive capacities, and maybe this can help our conservation efforts because people will view them more as individuals with memories and preferences, and not just nuisances."

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Motherboard: We’re a Cheap Battery Away From Phasing Out Fossil Fuels

A study published in January in the Journal of Sustainable Finance & Investment predicts that the combination of battery storage with renewable energy will make fossil fuels increasingly obsolete. The driving forces of this disruption include the "decline in retail renewable electricity prices," along with plummeting costs of batteries, in which technological efficiencies are improving exponentially.

Fossil fuels are the most widely used source of energy because of base load power, which means they provide energy at all times, night and day. In contrast, renewables have faced the 'intermittency' challenge—the sun doesn't always shine, and the wind doesn't always blow.

But authors Jemma Green and Peter Newman of Curtin University in Australia show that as storage gets cheaper, renewables will become more competitive with fossil fuels on costs and reliability. By 2050, these irresistible technological and market forces could make oil, gas and coal seem too costly and cumbersome, leading renewables to account for "100 percent of global energy demand." [...]

In three years, he said, it will "begin to transform" the electricity infrastructure of major cities. "Solar storage is pitched to become so cheap it will make relying on natural gas peaker plants pointless…It will lead to rapid adoption of solar by businesses, local governments, and households—not because people are environmentally conscious, but simply because it will make more economic sense." [...]

The next stage in this process will come when these solar households start buying lithium-ion battery systems. The combined price of solar storage, say Green and Newman, could guide us toward grid parity—equal to or less than the price of purchasing electricity from the national grid. When this happens, solar storage "will flood the market, increasing supply and creating a lower market price for electricity," Mayor said. [...]

Another issue is whether the solar storage disruption will survive growing hostility from the fossil fuel industries, and the governments protecting them. The Trump administration, for instance, has openly declared war on clean energy. I asked Mayor whether this will throw a giant spanner in the works of the "new electricity ecosystem".

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Motherboard: France Wants to Ban Diesel and Gas Vehicles by 2040

France could clear its roads of all petrol and diesel vehicles by 2040, according to the country's environment minister Nicolas Hulot, who on Thursday announced radical environmental directives as part of President Emmanuel Macron's Paris Agreement agenda.

"The threat to our fellow citizens is diffuse, unpredictable, and the exact timeline can not be scientifically determined," Hulot said in a prepared statement from France's Ministry of Ecology, according to France's largest newspaper Le Monde. "Our responsibility is to make this subject dominant over all others."

Between now and 2040, the French government will reduce sales and advertising of petrol and diesel vehicles, seeking to enforce a complete ban on 100 percent diesel, and petrol-reliant vehicles, within 22 years. France joins Germany, India, Holland and Norway in seeking to ban vehicles that rely on diesel and petrol combustion. [...]

To start France's transition, Hulot said that owners of high pollutant vehicles will receive government incentives whereby they will be eligible to trade what they have for cleaner cars. [...]

Other initiatives announced by Hulot include reducing France's usage of nuclear energy to just 50 percent of the country's entire energy mix by 2025, closing excess nuclear reactors in the meantime. Hulot also announced that France would end all coal energy production by 2022, hoping to achieve complete carbon neutrality for the country by 2050. In 2015, 2.2 percent of France's electricity production came from coal.

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Motherboard: Universal Basic Income Is the Path to an Entirely New Economic System

Across the country, 42 percent of the workforce is at high risk of being automated out of a job, according to a recent report from the Brookfield Institute, a Toronto think tank. The time seems is ripe for a fresh debate about basic income, and Canada's 150th anniversary isn't just a time to reflect on the country's past—it's an opportunity to look towards the future. [...]

It's extremely important to note is that a basic income won't necessarily result in one outcome or another on its own. There are external factors—including legislation governing how automation will be implemented—that will determine things like how many jobs are available, or if there is a job market to speak of. [...]

As capitalist industry has already done over the last century of automation, new jobs will be created, but they won't necessarily be better jobs. Basically, our unending march of misery toward the heat death of the universe will continue apace as long as the state continues to prop up capitalism, but with robots manufacturing our running shoes instead of people. [...]

So, proponents of this second, more radical path would say, "Hell yeah, automate those jobs. In fact, automate every job, or as many as possible." Let the robots do the work, and let society enjoy the benefits of their unceasing productivity and the wealth it generates, in the form of a basic income. This is the basic thinking behind the idea of "fully automated luxury communism," which argues that robots, collectively owned by the state, can take care of most of our basic needs while humans hang out and do whatever we feel like.

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Motherboard: Facebook Celebrates Pride, Except Where Homosexuality Is Illegal

Such measures are important, and can help queer Facebook employees and users of the platform to feel included and seen. One feature, a rainbow "reaction" ("like") button, allows users to express their pride, or solidarity, in response to posts. But as Sarah Kessler pointed out at Quartz, that feature was only rolled out to users in certain markets...namely, "major markets with Pride celebrations." Other users are able to opt in to the feature by liking Facebook's official LGBTQ@Facebook page. [...]

After sending out some messages to friends in other places, I discovered that the feature was unavailable in a number of countries, including Egypt, Palestine, Bahrain, Lebanon, Singapore, Russia, and the UAE. While Facebook admits—in both its press release and in response to a question posed by a Singaporean user on its official LGBTQ page—that the feature isn't available everywhere yet, my testing demonstrated that it's widely available throughout the world...except in places where homosexuality is either illegal or of questionable legal status.

Facebook hasn't said why the feature is restricted to those particular countries, but the company is likely worried about putting users at risk. That's a fair concern, to be sure—gay and bi men are being rounded up and killed in Chechnya, for example—but it's worth noting that Facebook's "authentic name" policy is part of why such users are at risk to begin with. Despite protests from queer users for nearly a decade, Facebook has continued to reaffirm the value of the policy in promoting "civility," despite evidence to the contrary. [...]

"Facebook policies have [contained] a lot of discrimination in so many aspects," Aoun told me. "It's the same when a certain terrorist attack happens in Lebanon, we don't have the safety check. Unfortunately, the world nowadays is built on the priorities of … people who are living in Western countries, especially white people who are living in those countries."

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Motherboard: Two Dudes Wrote a Fake Penis Study and Got It Published to Slam Gender Research

The 3,000-word "paper" is dense and winding, and argues that the penis is better thought of a social construct than an actual anatomical body part. It goes on to state that if we shift our societal understanding of the penis, we could better combat climate change. [...]

It this feels like it doesn't make a whole lot of sense, that's because it wasn't supposed to. The authors Peter Boyle and Jamie Lindsay were actually pseudonyms for Peter Boghossian and James Lindsay, two skeptic, atheist, shitdisturbers with backgrounds in philosophy and mathematics, respectively.

After publication Boghossian and Lindsay published a confessional in Skeptic magazine stating that they intentionally wrote a barely-coherent argument in an effort to bring a critical lens to both pay-to-publish journals and the field of gender studies. [...]

But other scientists have come to the defense of the field of gender studies, pointing out that flawed, weak, or incorrect papers get published in practically all disciplines, including medicine and math. The journal in question also isn't as well-regarded as Boghossian and Lindsay claimed, meaning the larger issue may lie with predatory, pay-for-publication, open access journals which charge authors a fee to publish material, creative a clear conflict of interest. This problem has long been identified and expands far beyond gender or social sciences.

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Motherboard: Dubai Wants to Use Data to Become the 'Happiest City on Earth'

Dubai doesn't ever do anything halfway. They've got the tallest skyscrapers in the world, police that drive Lamborghinis, resorts on man made islands, and profound income inequality. In that spirit, city officials are now working on connecting and digitizing all aspects of urban life into a single platform. The goal is to make Dubai the most efficient and "happiest" city on Earth. Her Excellency Dr. Aisha Butti Bin Bishr, the director general of Smart Dubai—the office overseeing this grand plan—sat down with Motherboard at the Smart Cities NYC 2017 conference to explain it all. [...]

Yes, it is called the Dubai Now Application, or the Dubai Now Platform and anybody can download it and use it for services like health, driving, residency visas, businesses, housing, education, security and justice, transportation—people can manage their day to day aspects and become more mindful about what's going on in the city around them. [...]

But when it comes to cognitive and deeper needs, we don't fully understand them. We want to discover these needs and hopefully change our policies, our systems, our services to fulfill these needs. The Happiness Meter is not the end of our story when it comes to happiness. We have an agenda to make sure everything we design and build in our city is around making people happier.

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Motherboard: These Plastic-Eating Machines Will Filter Our Junk From the Ocean

This directly targeted the growing, almost incomprehensible problem of plastic in our oceans. As a result of our disposal of plastic waste into the ocean, five giant concentrated areas of garbage have formed across the world, the largest called the The Great Pacific Garbage Patch. [...]

What began as a $2 million startup in 2013 developed into a foundation that has raised 21.7 million dollars since November 2016 and 31.5 million dollars since their origin in 2013. The funds have allowed them to deploy their pilot technology at the end of 2017 and begin their 10 year mission to remove half of the plastic from the Great Pacific Garbage Patch in 2020. [...]

Thanks to the new discoveries he and his scientists made, and the updates to The Ocean Cleanup machine, they now plan on removing 50 percent of the plastic from the Great Pacific Garbage Patch in just five years, with the first machine set to launch within the next 12 months.

Slat's plan is not foolproof. Some scientists have pointed out that land-based interventions would work more effectively than cleaning up in the sea itself. And others say the funding would be better used to treat the problem at its source: waste management.

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Motherboard: China Is on Track to Fully Phase Out Cash

The apps fuelling this cashless trend are Tencent's WeChat and Alibaba's Alipay. Launched in 2011, WeChat is a multi-function app based around a messaging system that incorporates WhatsApp and Twitter-like elements. The app is phenomenally popular in China—the majority of WeChat's roughly 889 million monthly-active users worldwide are based in the People's Republic. Chinese users of apps like WeChat tend to not be put off by the personal data storing and sharing that goes on in them. Snooping by authorities is pretty much accepted. [...]

Tencent says that over 600 million users use its mobile payment services, which include WeChat Pay; Reuters estimated that $556 billion worth of transactions were made via the app in 2016. Alipay, which functions in a similar way to WeChat Pay, has around 270 million monthly active users, with around 175 million transactions going through the service every day. [...]

Last month China Tech Insights released a report after polling Chinese WeChat users, that again underlined the rise of mobile payments. It found that in 2015, 65 percent of users spent less than 500 yuan ($73) a month through WeChat Pay, but in 2016 the figure had dropped to under 40 percent. Forty-five percent of users said they used WeChat Pay because they didn't carry cash, with around 60 and 55 percent saying they used it because it was "fast" and "easy" respectively.

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Motherboard: Millions of bats have died because of a fungal disease that no one knows how to stop

Millions of animals dead, a disease devastating entire populations in multiple states, and no cure or treatment in sight: That’s the reality of white nose syndrome, a disease that has killed over 5 million bats in the U.S. in the past decade. Still, scientists aren’t giving up. [...]

That’s not what kills bats, though. The real issue is that the disease alters the bats’ behaviors. Instead of spending the winter in hibernation, infected bats wake up and fly around. Because of this, they end up expending a lot more energy than they normally would, at a time when there’s no food available to sustain them. Infected bats become emaciated — and eventually die from starvation.

White nose syndrome isn’t just bad for bats; it’s also a huge problem for the U.S. economy. Bats eat a lot of insects, which means they’re crucial for pest control. Because of this, these small mammals save American farmers an estimated $3.7 billion in crop damages every year. Without them, farmers could stand to lose a ton of money. And given current bat declines, even if scientists find a solution now, populations will take a very long time to recover. “Right now we’re at about 10 years of white nose losses,” Carter said. “If we could wave a magic wand today and just get rid of white nose, it would be more than a thousand years before bats can get back to where they were just 10 years ago.”

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Motherboard: This Is the Evidence Linking Russian Hackers to the French Election

In the last two months, according to the cybersecurity firm Trend Micro, the Russian hacking group known as "Fancy Bear" or APT28 registered at least four different fake domains in an apparent attempt to launch a phishing campaign against Emmanuel Macron, the moderate and pro-European candidate who won the election's first round on Sunday. The company, however, only published one of those domains, and didn't reveal why it was so confident that Fancy Bear was behind the alleged phishing campaign. [...]

Associated Press reporter Raphael Satter also found this link on Monday. And a Trend Micro spokesperson confirmed to Motherboard that these are indeed the four domains they identified.

Here's a graph showing all the connections and links between these domains. [...]

ThreatConnect, another security firm, delved into the little data that's public and found that there are indeed some links to Fancy Bear. In particular, the company pointed to the use of a @mail.com address to register the domains; an IP address (194.187.249[.]135) that was identified by the US Department of Homeland Security as being used by Russian hackers; and other associated IP addresses registered with the hosting service THCservers, which has been previously used by Fancy Bear. The company also identified a fifth domain (en-marche[.]co)  allegedly linked to the other four phishing domains.

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Motherboard: The First Space Colonies Might Be Illegal

Chief among them is the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, which makes it illegal for countries to appropriate the moon or other celestial bodies. That treaty notoriously does not specifically mention private citizens, which has led to people like Dennis Hope, a Nevada-based “real estate agent” selling tracts of land on the moon and claiming the treaty doesn’t apply to him as a private citizen. So far, Hope hasn’t run into much legal trouble, but that’s because he’s basically selling novelty certificates to suckers (no offense). The whole paradigm changes when someone like Bigelow Airspace, who is currently working with NASA, decides to make a private space station or announces plans to put an inflatable on the moon.  [...]

But that doesn’t mean that commercial space is inherently doomed. Amending the space treaty isn’t going to be easy, but it also might not even be necessary. Sattler says that there is enough wiggle-room in the language of the treaty that spacefaring nations can sign memoranda of understanding with each other to allow specific commercial activities, a move that would be several orders of magnitude easier to finagle than a whole new international treaty.  [...]

Instead, the State Department or some other national body is going to have to strike a deal with other nations—and other nations that want to do this are going to have to strike a deal with us. Considering that Russia just announced plans to have moon bases by 2030 (and potentially plans to extract minerals there) and says it’s done working with the United States in space, that may be a negotiation that requires more than just a rubber stamp.

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Motherboard: In the Future, the Holocaust Is Just Another Hologram

Gutter's entire body is displayed on a giant, vertical, flat screen TV. When I push a button to talk, my question is processed by speech recognition and natural language processing to fetch the right answer from a library of over 1,900 video clips of Gutter, who's in his mid-80s today. The clips were recorded over 20 hours of interviews, so Gutter is able to answer almost any question about his life, including a whole line of interrogations about Holocaust denial.

The videos were captured with 120 4K cameras from all angles in order to future-proof Gutter's testimony, and he's not only able to respond to questions via a screen. At the Tribeca Film Festival last weekend, USC premiered a version of the survivor's story where he walks viewers in VR through the Majdanek concentration camp. In the future, USC hopes to turn Gutter into a responsive hologram that can be rolled into classrooms. [...]

The Illinois Holocaust Museum will be the first location to host a permanent installation of New Dimension in Testimony starting in October, but I also got to see a prototype of an online version that anyone will be able to access in the future.

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Motherboard: Great Britain Is Leaving the Coal Age—For a Whole Day

The UK is poised to go an entire day without using any energy from coal sources, according to British electricity network National Grid—the first time Britain will have done so since the late 19th century.

Britain's reliance on coal has been falling steadily since the 1950s and peak coal production, some 287 million tonnes, occurred way back in 1913. But at around 11pm tonight, the UK is expected to witness an entire 24-hour period passing without electricity generated by coal, as alternative power sources such as wind, solar, and nuclear become more popular and the warming months reduce electricity demand in the country. [...]

The importance of coal in the UK power economy may have dwindled quickly of late, but it may still have a part to play in the future, Staffell suggested. It's likely that for several years to come, coal could be useful as an on-demand energy source to help the National Grid deal with peak periods.

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Motherboard: The Taliban Want to Go Green

The announcement proved strange not only because of its message but also because, though the Taliban might issue many such statements, Akhundzada rarely signs them. So I contacted Qari Muhammad Yousuf Ahmadi and Zabihullah Mujahid, spokesmen for the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, the Taliban's self-styled government in exile, to talk about the insurgents' counterintuitive plans to go green.

"The US invasion destroyed many sectors of Afghanistan, including the environment, in a very bad way and for the long term," Mujahid told me via WhatsApp. "The Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan has the perfect plan for environmental protection through planting trees. Every citizen of the country should plant at least one tree a year. Also, we support all actions taken for the support of the environment, including the state's efforts to invest in this sector. In fact, we support any action to this end." [...]

The Taliban would prove far from the first terrorist organization to embrace environmentalism. Osama bin Laden, the insurgents' onetime ally, also lent his support to environmentalists by slamming climate change denial in the Western world.

Of course, the Taliban's actions contradict its statements: the insurgents have involved themselves in illegal logging, illegal mining, and—the linchpin of the Taliban's war economy—the illegal drug trade. Short term at least, the insurgents have only contributed to climate change. Deforestation hastens global warming, and mining can lead to environmental degradation. Growing opium, on which the Taliban has a near monopoly, results in habitat destruction and soil erosion while processing it often requires hazardous materials.

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Motherboard: Russia and America Are Collaborating on the Most Ambitious Venus Mission Ever

But given that our sister world experiences average temperatures of 462 degrees Celsius (864 degrees Fahrenheit), crushing 90-bar pressures, and suffocating clouds of carbon dioxide laced with sulfuric acid rain, it's no wonder that Venus has not inspired the same frontier spirit as say, Mars. Indeed, proposed Venus missions have been repeatedly snubbed in favor of others to the red planet, asteroids, and less wholly nightmarish worlds. 

Now, NASA and the Russian Academy of Sciences' Space Research Institute (IKI) are teaming up on a project called Venera-D, which makes the case that Venus is as valuable an exploration target as any alien world, perhaps more so because the planet's runaway greenhouse gas effect, which generates its harsh conditions, can inform our efforts to prevent a similar problem on Earth. [...]

This Russian/American partnership, formed in 2015, is called the Venera-D Joint Science Definition Team (JSDT). In January 2017, it released a thorough report of the two nations' shared objectives on Venus, which include extended observations of the surface environment over a period of months, precise measurements of atmospheric aerosols and composition, and a solution to the longstanding mystery of atmospheric superrotation, a phenomenon in which wind speeds on Venus outpace the planet's rotation by a factor of 60.

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Motherboard: Why Bottled Water Is Insane

Bottled water as a concept has been visible for a very long time, of course, and most histories of the phenomenon mark the introduction of Perrier in 1976 as the genesis of modern bottled water. It wasn't until the mid-'90s, however, that bottled water became everyday and, you know, for the common folks. Those of us that remember this period are lucky enough to have witnessed one of the most insane events in consumer history, when the soda industry figured out how to sell the same thing in bottles that people already had piped into their houses. [...]

There is also Nestle, which sits at the cheaper end of the "all natural" bottled water market, and which is helping to illustrate the general insanity of bottled water quite well right now in Colorado. In this case, marketing equals an unceasing stream of semi-trucks driving between a series of wells and a bottling plant in Denver, about three hours away. One truck pulls up, fills, and drives on, to be immediately replaced by another empty truck, and so on. In the process, they are draining an aquifer that feeds the Arkansas River. [...]

Meanwhile, aquifers are drying up, fast; in the U.S., groundwater levels are falling faster than at any other time in the past century. Pollution is hurting the supplies we have. In other places, fights over water can look a lot more brutal than shouting at a town hall. Winning the impeding water wars, which will be between countries but, even more so, against profits, will involve staring down the basic, absurd assumption that water is a thing that we must pay a lot for, and for a lot more than just money.

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