TABLE OF CONTENTS

The World Must Secure Pakistans Nuclear Missiles

How To Stop Drug Price Gouging
A Fake And A Fraud
Paging The Trump Armada
And Now, The Dreaded Trump Curse
Donald Trump Threatens To Sabotage Obamacare
Texans Gone Wild
50 Years Ago, A Computer Pioneer Got A New York Subway Race Rolling
In Janesville, When The G.M. Plant Closed, Havoc Followed
The Man Who Lit The Dark Web
Edward Snowden: The Internet Is Broken
This Scientist Re-Wires Frogs To Grow Extra Limbs
China's Race To Space Domination
The Future Of Money
The Worlds Most Stable Currency Is Backed By Carbon
Cryptocurrency
Can Your Genes Make You Kill?
Who Should Be Allowed To Use Crispr
Fukushima: Five Years Later
Hydrogen Hits The Road This Fall
10 Brain Myths Busted
THE WORLD MUST SECURE PAKISTANS NUCLEAR WEAPONS
By Rahmatullah Nabilapril 20, 2017

Pakistan is not just one of nine countries with nuclear weapons, it is also a hotbed of
global jihadism, where the military and the intelligence services use terrorist networks
to advance their regional goals. And even as Pakistani officials proclaim that their
nuclear assets are secure, evidence, including internal Pakistani documents, suggests
that they know better.
Having served in senior roles in Afghanistans intelligence services, I have good
reason to be skeptical about Pakistans ability to keep its nuclear weapons safe from
extremists.
The international community, working with the United Nations Atomic Energy
Agency or the United Nations Security Council, must take action to prevent a global
catastrophe before it is too late. Pakistan is believed to have the fifth-largest nuclear
arsenal in the world, larger than Britains. It also has an established history of giving
nuclear technology to countries like Iran and North Korea. As the Trump administration
begins developing its policies toward Pakistan and toward nuclear nonproliferation, it
should make Pakistan a top priority.
Pakistanis with the most knowledge of the countrys nuclear program are among the
most worried. On Dec. 16, 2014, the Taliban launched a deadly attack on an army-run
school in the Pakistani city of Peshawar. Afterward, Pakistans Atomic Energy
Commission sent an urgent letter to the director general of the Strategic Plans Division,
which is responsible for securing Pakistans nuclear assets, expressing concern. The
Atomic Energy Commission requested that the military devote more resources to
ensuring that the personnel with knowledge of the nuclear program are monitored. This
letter, which has been kept secret until now, reveals just how concerned some Pakistani
officials are and how worried the rest of the world should be.
The Atomic Energy Commission is not the only group sounding alarms about the
role of extremists inside Pakistan. In early 2014, the ministry of interior issued a policy
paper called the National Internal Security Policy 2014-2018, a classified document that
outlined the governments security priorities. It warns that Pakistan is home to
hundreds of terrorist and extremist groups, and points out that many of them are
operational in all four provinces of Pakistan, including in the areas in Punjab near some
of Pakistans nuclear facilities. This document also raises concerns over the growing
influence of certain terrorist groups, in particular Lashkar-e-Taiba, inside the Pakistan
Army and intelligence agencies, and within the families of senior and midlevel military
officers.
Despite all of this, the Pakistani authorities continue to insist in public that their
nuclear assets are safe. As a senior official told The Atlantic magazine in 2011, Of all the
things in the world to worry about, the issue you should worry about the least is the
safety of our nuclear program. When Pakistani officials came to Washington for a
nuclear security summit last spring, they affirmed in the broadest terms their countrys
commitment to nuclear security from the entire spectrum of threats playing down
terrorism specifically, or the fact that Pakistan represents a particular threat.
The Pakistanis say they are confident in the Strategic Plans Divisions
professionalism. And the division claims to have strong systems in place to screen
personnel for integrity, weeding out those who have dangerous political, ethnic or
religious affiliations. They also report that Pakistans nuclear weapons are de-mated,
meaning the warheads are separated from their delivery mechanisms. But even if this is
true, it doesnt mean that all nuclear material is safe. There are reports that Pakistan is
building tactical nuclear weapons, smaller arms that are easier to use on the battlefield.
It is unclear how the Strategic Plans Division intends to secure them.
Instead of asking for help dealing with these vulnerabilities, the Pakistani Army and
intelligence community close themselves off. They fear that the United States is trying to
seize their nuclear weapons and say that the West refuses to allow a Muslim country to
have access to the worlds most powerful weapons, a line often repeated by extremists.
Pakistan should instead be asking for help keeping its nuclear weapons out of
terrorists hands. But until that happens, the United Nations Security Council and the
United States, an ally of Pakistans should step in.
First, Pakistan must be forced to stop playing a double game, supporting extremist
groups while publicly proclaiming that it is fighting terrorism. Second, the government
in Islamabad should welcome the help of the United Nations Atomic Energy Agency in
securing nuclear assets. Government agencies inside Pakistan have admitted that the
countrys nuclear assets are in danger. The rest of the world should take heed and try to
protect them before its too late.
HOW TO STOP DRUG PRICE GOUGING
Tim Wu April 20, 2017

One of Donald Trumps few universally welcomed campaign promises was to do

something about the prices of pharmaceutical drugs. Most Americans recognize that
prices are too high, and are bothered by the rise of pharmaceutical price gouging: the
giant price increase for decades-old drugs and devices by the likes of Martin Shkreli with
Daraprim or Mylan with the EpiPen. But what few people realize is that the president
already has the power to do something about drug prices if he really wants to. If Mr.
Trump wishes to show hes serious about his populist promise, the place to start is by
declaring war on the price gougers.
The key power is found in the import relief law an important yet unused
provision of the Medicare Modernization Act of 2003 that empowers the Food and Drug
Administration to allow drug imports whenever they are deemed safe and capable of
saving Americans money. The savings in the price-gouging cases would be significant.
Daraprim, the antiparasitic drug whose price was raised by Mr. Shkreli to nearly $750
per pill, sells for a little more than $2 overseas. The cancer drug Cosmegen is priced at
$1,400 or more per injection here, as opposed to about $20 to $30 overseas.
The remedy is simple: The government can create a means for pharmacies to get
supplies from trusted nations overseas at much lower prices. Doing this would not only
save Americans a lot of money but also deflate the incentive to engage in abusive pricing
in the first place.
Why hasnt the law been used? Over the years, the industry has tried to describe the
statute as a nuclear option, repeatedly warning of the catastrophic danger of relying on
the drugs used by those reckless Canadians. More legalistically, the industry has insisted
that the Department of Health and Human Services (which oversees the F.D.A.) cannot
reliably certify that imports would pose no additional risks to public health and safety
as the statute requires. But Health and Human Services is an executive agency, bound to
obey the president, and the needed cost and safety determinations are well within its
capacity.
The safety fears, if not purely imaginary, are wildly exaggerated. Twenty-five percent
or more of drugs labeled American-made are actually manufactured in other countries,
in plants inspected by the F.D.A. (So are 80 percent of the active ingredients used in the
production of drugs in American factories.) The imports that the industry refers to are
the same pills as those American-made drugs, produced by the same F.D.A.-inspected
plants overseas. The only difference is that some of those drugs are shipped to countries
like Canada, while others are sent directly to the United States, where they are sold for
10 or sometimes hundreds of times the Canadian price.
The F.D.A., in other words, is already regulating imported drugs. It might as well use
those powers to fight price gouging. Indeed, over the past six years the F.D.A. has been
allowing imports of drugs to deal with shortages in accordance with a 2011 executive
order. For example, when facing shortages of the cancer drug Doxil, the F.D.A.
authorized imports of a substitute, Lipodox, manufactured at an F.D.A.-inspected plant
in India. Lives have been saved, not lost, and the practice confirms that this country
already knows how to ensure that importing drugs from trusted nations can be safe. The
industrys safety warnings are more politics than reality.
 President Trump can do serious damage to the pharmaceutical price-gougers if he
wants to, and will be cheered on by everyone who is not on the payroll of the
pharmaceutical industry, and even some of them as well. A suitably aggressive
beginning would be to select the 10 most outrageous instances of excessive pricing (I
would define that as an unjustified price increase of more than 1,000 percent for a drug
that is no longer protected by a patent). Go after the worst offenders first: the owners of
drugs like Daraprim, Cosmegen, Thiola, Mustargen and Indocin, all of which have had
price increases of 1,000 percent to 5,000 percent. Let companies like Ovation, Turing,
Valeant, Mylar and other abusers of the system become a warning to others who might
want to make price-gouging their business model.
Obviously, waging war on pharmaceutical pricing abuses would not represent a full
solution to the broader problems in drug pricing. Congressional proposals, including a
new Senate bill introduced by Bernie Sanders, independent of Vermont, Amy Klobuchar
and Al Franken, Democrats of Minnesota, and others, would go further. But it would be
the beginning of imposing discipline on an industry accustomed to its absence and a
signal that this administration is serious about using the powers it has to make drugs
affordable.
President Trump ran as an economic populist who would take on industry on behalf
of the people. Here, the people clearly want something done. All it really takes is a chief
executive who has the courage that he claims.
Tim Wu, the author of The Attention Merchants: The Epic Struggle to Get Inside
Our Heads, is a professor at Columbia Law School and a contributing opinion writer.
A FAKE AND A FRAUD
Charles M. Blow April 20, 2017

Donald Trumps mounting reversals, failures and betrayals make it increasingly clear
that he is a fake and a fraud.
For many of us, this is affirmative reinforcement; for others, it is devastating
revelation.
But it is those who believed and cast supportive ballots who should feel most
cheated and also most contrite. You placed your faith in a phony. His promises are
crashing to earth like a fleet of paper airplanes.
He oversold what he could deliver because he had no idea what would be required to
deliver it, nor did he care. He told you what you wanted to hear so that he could get what
he wanted to have. He played you for fools.
That wall will not be paid for by Mexico, if in fact it is ever built. If it is built, it will
likely look nothing like what Trump said it would look like. His repeal and replace of
Obamacare flopped. That failure endangers his ability to deliver on major tax reform
and massive infrastructure spending. China is no longer in danger of being labeled a
currency manipulator. The administration is now sending signals that ripping up the
Iran nuclear deal isnt a sure bet.
Trump has done a complete about-face on the Federal Reserve chairwoman, Janet
Yellen, and when was the last time you heard him threaten to lock up Hillary Clinton?
This is by no means an exhaustive list of the positions he took for in-the-moment
advantage that have been quickly converted into in-reality abandonment.
He isnt cunningly unpredictable; hes tragically unprepared and dangerously
unprincipled.
No wonder then that a Gallup poll released Monday found:
President Donald Trumps image among Americans as someone who keeps his
promises has faded in the first two months of his presidency, falling from 62 percent in
February to 45 percent. The public is also less likely to see him as a strong and decisive
leader, as someone who can bring about the changes this country needs or as honest
and trustworthy.
While the largest decline in the percentage of those who think Trump keeps his
promises came among women, young people and Democrats, the number also dropped
11 percentage points among Republicans and nine percentage points among
conservatives.
Even so, The Washington Posts The Fix warned readers to beware the myth of the
disillusioned Trump voter, citing a Pew Research Center poll released Monday
showing very little buyers remorse among Trump voters.
As the newspaper pointed out: The poll showed just 7 percent of Republicans and
Republican-leaning independents say Trump has performed worse than they expected
him to. Fully 38 percent five times as many say he has performed better.
This seems to me a fair point, but it requires us to have a better handle on the
expectations for him in the first place. After all, the union has yet to crumble into ashes
and his Twitter tirades have yet to push us into an impulse war.
Furthermore, the stubborn human resistance to admitting a mistake should never be
underestimated. Admitting that Trump is failing, even when he is failing you and your
family specifically, is an enormous pill to swallow. Acknowledging that your blindness,
selfishness and fear compelled you to buy into a man who is selling you out may take
more time.
But I think that time is coming, because Trump is an unabashed leech and an
unrepentant liar.
Trump cares only about Trump, his brand and his image, his family and his fortune.
Indeed, his personal philosophy as president might best be described as clan over
country.
Instead of being a grenade-throwing iconoclast bent on blowing up the D.C.
establishment and the big-money power structures, he has stocked his inner circle with
billionaires and bankers, and he has bent to the establishment.
Trump sold himself as a populist only to line his own pockets. Trump built his entire
reputation not as the champion of the common man, but by curating his image as a
crude effigy of the cultural elite.
He accrued his wealth by selling hollow dreams of high society to people who wanted
to flaunt their money or pretend that they had some.
Put another way, Trumps brand is built on exclusivity, not inclusivity. It is about the
separate, vaulted position of luxury, above and beyond the ability for it to be accessed by
the common. It is all about the bourgeois and has absolutely nothing to do with the blue
collar.
And yet somehow, it was the blue collar that bought his bill of goods. People saw
uncouth and thought unconventional; they saw raffish and thought rebel.
They projected principle and commitment onto a person anathema to both. Now, we
all have to pay a hefty toll as Trumps legions cling to thinning hope.
PAGING THE TRUMP ARMADA
Gail Collins APRIL 20, 2017

The aircraft carrier Carl Vinson. Its not easy to misplace a flotilla of warships, but it
wasnt headed last week where the president said.
Lets consider the case of the wrong-way warships.
Last week, North Korea was planning a big celebration in honor of its founders
birthday. For North Koreans, holiday fun is short on barbecues and high on weaponry.
The big parade in Pyongyang featured monster canisters that theoretically contained
intercontinental ballistic missiles. Its possible they were actually empty and that right
now, North Korea only has bragging rights in the big-container race.
But its intentions were definitely bad, and the United States was worried there might
be a missile launch or an underground nuclear test.
What should Donald Trump do? Were sending an armada, said the president.
Possible confrontation? As a concerned citizen, you had to be very worried. North Korea
is, in every way, a special and dangerous case. It has a leader who is narcissistic to the
point of psychosis, with a celebrity fixation and a very strange haircut.
O.K., maybe not entirely unique.
Trump was talking about bringing in four warships, one of them an aircraft carrier.
Was this going to mean real shooting? His critics back home had to decide whether to
protest, wave the flag in support or simply stock the fallout shelter. (This would be the
fallout shelter you repurposed a couple decades ago as a wine cellar, but lately youve
been thinking it can work both ways.)
Everybody was talking about the dangers. If North Korea sent up a missile, would the
U.S. retaliate? Then what would happen to South Korea and Japan? People debated all
the variables. The only thing that did not come up was the possibility that the American
flotilla was actually no place near the neighborhood.
Yet, as Mark Landler and Eric Schmitt reported in The Times, at the moment the
president was announcing his armada, the warships in question were actually going in
the opposite direction, in route to a destination 3,500 miles away, where they were to
take part in joint exercises with the Australian Navy.
Whoops. The official response was that the administration was sending an armada
eventually.
We said that it was heading there. And it was heading there, it is heading there,
said press secretary Sean Spicer on Wednesday. Under this theory, the president could
have responded to North Koreas latest saber-rattling by announcing that he was going
to China, since chances are hell get there someday. Sooner or later. Especially if the
Chinese can come up with a gold coach like the queen of Englands.
Poor Sean Spicer. Every day a new official fantasy to defend. Tonight the president
will go to bed and dream that hes actually the true heir to the principality of
Liechtenstein. Tomorrow Spicer will come into the pressroom on skis and announce
were declaring war on Switzerland.
But about the missing warships. Its possible Trump was bluffing, which certainly
sounds like a bad idea. After all, if this administration has a strong card in foreign
policy, its that the rest of the world thinks hes so crazy he might do anything. It seems
more likely that the administration just screwed up, and some people thought the
warships had been rerouted when they really werent.
 Were really not asking for a lot, but cant the president at least be clear about the
direction our ships are headed? Concerned citizenry has already adapted to the idea that
half the things Trump said during the campaign have now been retracted. NATO is
great, the Chinese dont manipulate their currency. And the Export-Import bank is, well
Pop Quiz: Which best describes your feelings about the presidents attitude toward
the Export-Import Bank?
A) Happy when he denounced it during the campaign.
B) Glad when he said it was a good thing after all.
C) Worried when he nominated an Export-Import Bank head who seems to hate it.
D) I dont care about the Export-Import Bank! What about all those bombs?
O.K., O.K. In the end, the North Koreans did test a missile but it exploded right after
launch. It is possible this was due to a long-running American cybersabotage program.
If so, Trump couldnt have mentioned it as a matter of security. Otherwise hed certainly
have been out there expressing his gratitude to the Obama administration for having
done so much work on it. Hehehehe.
When it comes to Trump and foreign affairs, the big problem is that you want to be
fair, but you dont want to encourage him. A lot of Americans liked the idea of
responding to a chemical attack in Syria by bombing a Syrian air base. But if the
president thought it was popular, wouldnt he get carried away? Its like praising a 4-
year-old for coloring a picture, and the next thing you know hes got his crayons out,
heading for the white sofa.
What we want to do is take the crayons away and murmur: Good boy. Now why
dont you go off and nominate some ambassadors for a change?
And go find your boats.
AND NOW, THE DREADED TRUMP CURSE
Gail Collins March 31, 2017

These days, the last thing you want is to be known as a Friend of Trump. Hes doing
great hes president, for heavens sake. His kids are getting jobs, his hotels are getting
promoted 24/7. He goes golfing more than your average Palm Beach retiree. Meanwhile,
the people he hangs around with are watching their reputations crumble into
smithereens.
This has an impact on congressional politics. If youre a swing vote in the House or
the Senate, the idea of getting a hug in the Oval Office might seem more like a threat
than an opportunity. Lets consider some of the F.O.T.s whove already been undone:

Devin Nunes
Nunes is now famous as the guy who was sneaking around the White House lawn in
the middle of the night. He says it was still daylight, which will have no bearing
whatsoever on the legend. Theres a lot of stuff on his rsum eight-term
congressman, father of three, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee. But
wherever he goes for the rest of his life, people are going to say, Oh yeah, he was the
one sneaking around the White House lawn in the middle of the night. Itll be the lead
in his obituary.

Paul Ryan
Until recently, Ryan was regarded as the Republican idea man, whose riff on cutting
entitlements made conservative intellectuals swoon. When Trump came along Ryan was
leery at first, then thrilled with his partys total control of the government. Finally he
could take the knife to Medicaid!
Weve been dreaming of this since you and I were drinking out of a keg, Ryan told
National Review editor Rich Lowry in an onstage interview. Lowry immediately
protested that he had not been fantasizing about health care for the poor when he was
chugging beer in college. It was a preview of all that was to come. Ryan was not only
going to lose the big health care battle, he was going to look like an idiot doing it.
Hell go down in history as the first big congressional power to get rolled over by the
Trump bus. Maybe with a footnote about his passion for pulling catfish out of the water
with his bare hands.

Reince Priebus
Not too long ago, Priebus was laboring in happy obscurity. Now hes chief of staff at a
White House where everything is a mess. Reince doesnt have a magic wand, one
Republican National Committee apparatchik told The Associated Press. Nobody wants
to get to the point where the best argument in your favor is wand shortage.

Chris Christie
Chris (Still the Governor) Christie was at the White House this week in his new role
as head of a commission on drug addiction. How could anything bad happen? Well, just
as Christie was being photographed grasping the presidents hand, two of his former
associates were sentenced to jail for their roles in the famous bridge-jamming episode.
Not Trumps fault, but he did seem to mess with Christies karma when he kept treating
him like a well-dressed fast-food clerk during the campaign.

Coal Miners
Trump recently signed an executive order trashing the Obama initiatives to combat
global warming. He was surrounded by happy-looking men from coal country, helping
continue the grand new White House tradition of male-only photo sessions.
Youre going back to work, the president told them gleefully. In reality, the guys in
the room already had jobs, some as coal company executives. And Trumps order wont
fix their regions unemployment problems. However, the administration has indeed
changed the world for some residents of Appalachia, greatly improving their chances of
living near a stream filled with mining debris.

Jeanine Pirro
Unless you are a very serious fan of Fox News, you probably never heard of Judge
Jeanine, a talk-show host with a scary vocal range. Until the other day, when Trump
urged his Twitter followers to watch Pirros show, which featured a manic denunciation
of Paul Ryan. Late-night comedians had a field day and New Yorkers were reminded
that this was the woman who ran for New York State attorney general and got taped
talking about wiretapping the family boat to see if her husband was having an affair with
the wife of his defense lawyer.

Sean Spicer
Oh my God, poor Sean Spicer. You wouldnt wish this on anyone.
Russia
Russians worked hard to get Donald Trump elected president. And what did they get
out of it? Multiple high-level investigations. Enormous rancor in Congress. Plus a
drought of free food no sane politician is going to want to be seen having dinner with
a Russian diplomat.
Really, these days in Washington youd be much better off being a Mexican.

Michael Flynn
Of all the American influence-peddlers whove been on the payroll of Russian
oligarchs, only one is currently seeking immunity before he testifies at a congressional
hearing. Remember when Flynn kept yelling Lock her up! during the Republican
convention? Hehehehehe.
DONALD TRUMP THREATENS TO SABOTAGE OBAMACARE
The Editorial Board, April 19, 2017

After Republican leaders in Congress failed to destroy the Affordable Care Act last
month, President Trump tweeted that the law would explode. Now he seems
determined to deliver on that prediction through presidential sabotage.
Mr. Trump is threatening to kill a program in the A.C.A. that pays health insurers to
offer plans with lower deductibles and out-of-pocket expenses to about seven million
lower-income and middle-class people. The president thinks that this will get Democrats
to negotiate changes to the 2010 health law. This is cruel and incredibly shortsighted.
Without these subsidies, health care would be unaffordable for many Americans,
including people who voted for Mr. Trump because they were frustrated by high medical
costs.
These subsidies lower the cost of medical care for people who earn between 100
percent and 250 percent of the federal poverty level. For a family of four, that income is
$24,600 to $61,500 a year. For example, the deductible on qualifying Obamacare
policies for families living at the poverty line in Charlotte, N.C., would be $1,000,
compared with $10,000 for a standard policy, according to government data. In
Philadelphia a similar family would have no deductible, compared with a $5,000
deductible for policies without subsidies. The government is expected to spend $7
billion on subsidies in 2017, and nearly 60 percent of the 12.2 million people who
bought Obamacare policies for 2017 benefit from them.
Conservatives have been trying for years to end these subsidies in an effort to
destabilize the A.C.A. House Republicans filed a lawsuit in 2014 to prevent the Obama
administration from making these payments to insurers without appropriations from
Congress. A Federal District Court ruled in the Republicans favor, but President Barack
Obama appealed the case and the payments have continued so far, at least. Mr.
Trump has to decide how to proceed.
It is not surprising that Mr. Trump would see the subsidies as a bargaining chip.
Governing, to him, is a matter of quick-hit deals, and he shows no concern about
gambling with the health of millions of people.
Even if Mr. Trump does not end the subsidies, experts say, many insurers are already
skittish about the administrations animosity toward the A.C.A. They could stop selling
Obamacare policies if the payments went away. Some counties in red states like Arizona,
Oklahoma and Tennessee could be left with no insurers for individuals and families that
do not get coverage through employers. Companies that remain would increase
premiums by an average of 19 percent to make up for the loss of government money,
according to the Kaiser Family Foundation.
Many insurance companies and health experts are also worried that the government
will stop enforcing the A.C.A. provision that requires people to buy coverage or pay a
penalty. That would encourage healthy people to forgo insurance, leaving companies to
cover a smaller, sicker population. The administration has suggested that it might look
the other way if individuals dont buy insurance.
There would be a huge political cost for disrupting the health insurance market. A
recent Kaiser poll found that 61 percent of Americans say that Mr. Trump and
Republicans in Congress would be responsible for any future problems with the A.C.A.
Lawmakers need look no further than recent town hall meetings where voters lashed out
at Republicans for trying to take health care away from 24 million people. Referring to
the subsidies, Mr. Trump recently told The Wall Street Journal: Obamacare is dead
next month if it doesnt get that money. I havent made my viewpoint clear yet. I dont
want people to get hurt.
This isnt Mr. Trumps promised insurance for everybody. It sounds more like a
two-bit Hollywood villain promising carnage if he doesnt get his way.
TEXANS GONE WILD
By Ann Beeson April 20, 2017

Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick of Texas, who has led the charge on a far-right agenda in the
state.
AUSTIN, Tex. In the wee hours of Nov. 9, I had an overwhelming urge to climb up
on my roof here with a megaphone and shout to the rest of the country, Welcome to
Texas, yall!
Republicans have controlled all three branches of government in my home state for
more than a decade. Many policies now being championed by President Trump and
Congressional leaders seem old hat to Texans: defunding public education, going after
immigrants, shredding the safety net. But rather than resting their boots on the table,
political leaders in Texas have moved farther to the right.
Our 140-day every-other-year Texas legislative session began in January. Lt. Gov.
Dan Patrick who controls the Senate and is arguably more powerful than Gov. Greg
Abbott is leading the far-right charge. Under his sway, the Senate has already passed
bills that starve government, crack down on undocumented immigrants and
discriminate against transgender people. Despite opposition from law enforcement,
business and nonprofit groups like mine, the bills sailed through the Senate and await
consideration in the House.
One Senate bill threatens local law enforcement officials and department heads with
criminal prosecution and police departments with loss of state money if they fail to
comply with federal immigration orders. Even before the bill passed the Senate in
February, Governor Abbott cut $1.5 million in criminal justice funding to Travis County
(which includes Austin) to punish it for its policy of reducing cooperation with
Immigration and Customs Enforcement. During the same period, immigration raids in
Austin terrified immigrant families and led to the arrest of 51 people, most of whom had
no previous convictions.
Lieutenant Governor Patrick also championed a bathroom bill modeled on the one
North Carolina recently repealed, which would require transgender people to use public
bathrooms that match the sex on their birth certificates. When the N.F.L., shortly after
this years Super Bowl in Houston, dared to suggest that the law would be a factor in
scheduling future N.F.L. events in Texas, Governor Abbott in a me too! gesture to
Mr. Patricks pandering told league officials to get the hell out of politics. The Senate
passed the bathroom bill in March.
The Texas Senate also recently passed a school vouchers bill that would drain
millions from public school funds to pay for private tuition. Having starved state
government for years, the Legislature is now determined to make it harder for cities and
counties to raise money for themselves. The latest crusade began last spring, when Paul
Bettencourt, a Republican state senator from Houston, used bogus math to whip local
taxpayers into a frenzy over alleged property tax increases. The result was the passage in
March of a Senate bill that limits the ability of cities and counties to raise the revenue
needed to pay for education, health care and public safety.
There are two silver linings in the thundercloud of extremism billowing over Texas.
One is the potential for a revived moderate middle that believes in fact-based public
policy. The other is the groundswell of public engagement.
 As a veteran local lobbyist joked recently, the only thing standing between Texas and
the Middle Ages is the House, ably presided over by Speaker Joe Straus, Republican of
San Antonio. In contrast to the Senates far-right agenda, the Houses common-sense
priorities include remodeling our outdated school finance system and advancing mental
health reforms. It remains to be seen whether moderates in the House have the votes to
stop all the bad bills coming their way from the Senate.
Fortunately, many Texans are out in force to help them. Frequent public rallies and
marches have drawn record crowds around the state, including the nearly 50,000
people who turned out for the Womens March in Austin. At a community forum with
more than 1,000 people, one group of newly engaged Texans announced detailed plans
to push for reforms of the states Child Protective Services Division. Both houses have
now passed C.P.S. reform legislation.
Another inspiring morning was Muslim Day at the Capitol in January, when groups
organized a human chain to protect Muslim speakers and participants outside the
building. Texas Muslims were deeply moved by the gesture. In all the years, weve
never seen the sea of supporters that we see today, said Alia Salem of the North Texas
chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations. It was a stark contrast to the
prior legislative session, when Muslims were greeted with hateful signs during a news
conference and an agitator grabbed the mike from an imam to shout anti-Islam slogans.
Will the recent surge in civic engagement help elect leaders who are more
representative of the states diversity in 2018? Two recent court rulings may help.
Federal courts in Texas held that the states voter ID law and congressional redistricting
maps intentionally discriminated against Latino and black voters.
The halls of the state Capitol remain crowded as we approach the final month of the
legislative session. Thousands have traveled to Austin to voice their opposition to bad
bills, often waiting for hours to testify for just a few minutes. Last month, children of
undocumented parents stayed up late to ask lawmakers not to deport their parents.
It was chilling to watch many legislators, stone faced, ignore their pleas. But even so,
while people of all ages and backgrounds waited bleary-eyed in the hallways to share
their stories and the values that come with them, I could see the potential for a brighter
future for Texas
50 YEARS AGO, A COMPUTER PIONEER GOT A NEW YORK SUBWAY
RACE ROLLING
By Sam Roberts April 19, 2017

Fifty years ago, Peter Samson, one of the inventors of Spacewar, considered the
worlds first video game, began another craze underground.
Inspired by the story of a Flushing High School senior who a decade earlier traversed
the entire 400-mile New York City subway system on a single 15-cent token, Mr.
Samson and his college classmates harnessed the Massachusetts Institute of
Technologys embryonic mainframe computer in their race to reach every station and in
record time.
The confluence of Mr. Samsons three obsessions trains, computers and New York
City evolved into the Amateur New York Subway Riding Committee and a bevy of
eager contestants who have periodically sought an even faster circumnavigation of the
system. So far, six have made it into the Guinness Book of World Records.
Mr. Samson, who is 75 and was a computer software pioneer, will reminisce about
his subway adventure with Michael Miscione, the Manhattan borough historian, at 7
p.m. Friday at Hunter College.
Peter used M.I.T.s most advanced computer a mainframe about the size of a
passenger elevator to calculate the most efficient route to ride the entire subway
system in the least amount of time, Mr. Miscione said. In their wild attempt to break
the existing riding record they employed pay phones, runners and a teletype hookup
between a makeshift data center in Midtown Manhattan and the mainframe in
Cambridge, Mass.
There are two points Id mention, Mr. Samson said this week of his teams record-
breaking ride. First is simply the competitive aspect: Can I combine my computer skills
and physical endurance to beat someone else? Second, more satisfying in the long run,
is the sense of mastery over a large and complex system: the New York subway.
Mr. Samson was on spring break from college in 1966 when he noticed a blurb on the
back of a subway map about an unnamed Flushing youth (later identified as Jerome
Moses) who had gotten his moneys worth by paying one fare to ride every route on the
system or about as long as a train trip from New York to Pittsburgh.
It took him 25 hours and 36 minutes. (In 1940, another buff, Herman Rinke, had
taken a similar tour as a sentimental gesture, he said, before the three lines were
unified.)
I had previously used the computer to solve some small subway-network puzzles
minimum-transfer routes, for example, Mr. Samson recalled, and suddenly saw a way
to put all of my loves together: computers, trains and New York.
A detail of Mr. Samsons New York City subway map from July 21, 1966
But this was the mid-60s, an era well before cellphones and laptops. Digital
technology was so new that it was big news that year when a 27-year-old Queens man
became the first parking ticket scofflaw tracked down by a computer search. (He
pleaded guilty to 26 unpaid tickets.)
Using a computer to simulate a route, Mr. Samson applied Samsons Rule: travel
takes one minute a station, a half-minute a stop, five minutes to cross the East River,
one minute to change platforms and five minutes during the day for a train to come. He
estimated the complete ride at 25 hours.
 A six-man party (Mr. Samson, George Mitchell, Andy Jennings, Jeff Dwork, Dave
Anderson and Dick Gruen) began at 6:30 a.m. from the Pacific Street station in
Brooklyn. But when they finally pulled into the platform at Pelham Bay Park after a little
more than 25 hours and 57 minutes, reporters confronted them with an unexpected
question: How come they hadnt done as well as Geoffrey Arnold had?
They had never heard of Mr. Arnold, but apparently in 1963 he completed his
version of the circuit faster (variously reported as 24 or 25 hours and 56 minutes).
Worse, he was from Harvard.
I decided to take it on a little more seriously, Mr. Samson recalled.
With his competitive juices fired up, he got serious. He collaborated with Mr. Arnold
on official rules and prepared for a full-fledged computer-driven record-breaking
attempt with 15 volunteers on April 19, 1967.
All the schedules were entered into the PDP-6 computer at M.I.T., and I wrote
software that would find what nominally would be the quickest route, Mr. Samson said.
The plan was that as a party of two people would actually compete for the record
attempt, other participants would report their progress by pay phone, we would update
the computer, and according to the new circumstances it would print out a revised route
for the rest of the run. Then yet other individuals, positioned around the subway system
and standing near pay phones, would be called with the revised information to hand to
the party on the run as they came by.
By the official Class A rules, which required riding every mile of right of way, Mr.
Mitchell and Mr. Jennings started at 2:43 p.m. at the 168th Street station on the
Jamaica el and clocked in the next afternoon just after 4:30 in Pelham Bay Park. They
completed the route in 25 hours, 50 minutes and 30 seconds.
Since then, some routes have been eliminated and some rules amended. Armed with
better software, more experience and competing in other versions of the race, six
competitors have set Guinness Book records.
What type of person does this?
Someone who likes systems and networks, routes and timetables, Mr. Samson said.
For himself, he said, I have indelible memories; I would not have done anything else
with that time in retrospect.
The fastest time so far was set last year when Matthew Ahn, a 25-year-old lawyer,
who held the previous record, finished in 21 hours, 28 minutes and 14 seconds,
including the new Flushing Line extension.
I think the figures we are seeing now are close to the minimum possible, Mr.
Samson said. And with the Second Avenue line having opened, the current record may
be hard to match.
IN JANESVILLE, WHEN THE G.M. PLANT CLOSED, HAVOC FOLLOWED
By Amy Goldstein

Over the course of his career, Paul D. Ryan, the House speaker, has been described
as a policy nerd, a lightweight, a canny tactician, a dreadful tactician, a man of principle
and a man whose vertebrae have mysteriously gone missing.
But in the opening pages of Janesville: An American Story, Amy Goldsteins
moving and magnificently well-researched ethnography of a small Wisconsin factory
city on economic life support, Ryan is just another congressman, pleading on behalf of
his hometown, population 63,000.
Its 2008, and Ryan has just received a phone call from Rick Wagoner, then the
chairman and chief executive of General Motors, to alert him that the company will
shortly be stopping all production in Janesville.
The news is too improbable to register. Janesville has a storied place in labor history,
changing and repurposing itself as the times required. Barack Obama used its plant as a
backdrop for a speech about the economy early on in his 2008 campaign. Most
presidential candidates eventually buzz through. The place has been manufacturing
Chevrolets for 85 years. The congressman is stunned.
Give us Cavaliers, he begs. Give us pickups. Any model other than the unpopular
SUVs the plant is currently churning out, he means. You know youll destroy this town
if you do this! he yells into the phone.
Whether the closure of this fabled 4.8-million-square-foot facility does or does not
destroy Janesville is for the reader to decide. Goldstein, a longtime staff writer for The
Washington Post who was part of a reporting team that won a Pulitzer Prize in 2002,
opts for complexity over facile explanations and easy polemics. (Neither Obama nor
Ryan comes off looking particularly good; and no, she does not conclude that these
layoffs put Donald J. Trump in the White House.) Her book follows a clutch of
characters over the course of five years, from 2008 to 2013, and concludes with an
epilogue in the present, when unemployment in Janesville is less than 4 percent.
Terrific news, you might say. But that number belies some harsh realities on the
ground, as we learn throughout the book. Real wages in the town have fallen. Marriages
have collapsed. And Janesville, a town with an unusual level of civic commitment, unity
and native spirit the Ryan family has been there for five generations has capitulated
to the same partisan rancor that afflicts the rest of the nation.
It was not the sort of place, for instance, where a beloved local politician might find
someone unfurling his middle finger at him during Labor Fest until 2011, which
happened to be the year that Scott Walker, a flamboyantly anti-union and polarizing
figure, took up residence in the governors mansion. The town is now riven by an
optimism gap, as Goldstein calls it, with dispossessed workers on one side and bullish
businesspeople on the other.
Janesville joins a growing family of books about the evisceration of the working
class in the United States. What sets it apart is the sophistication of its storytelling and
analysis.
The characters are especially memorable. This may be the first time since I began
this job that Ive wanted to send notes of admiration to three people in a work of
nonfiction.
 Readers will also finish Janesville with an extremely sobering takeaway: Theres
scant evidence that job retraining, possibly the sole item on the menu of policy options
upon which Democrats and Republicans can agree, is at all effective.
In the case of the many laid-off workers in the Janesville area, the outcomes are
decidedly worse for those who have attended the local technical college to learn a new
trade. (Goldstein arrives at this conclusion, outlined in detail, by enlisting the help of
local labor economists and poring over multiple data sets.) A striking number of
dislocated G.M. employees dont even know how to use a computer when they first show
up for classes at Blackhawk Technical College. Some students dropped out as soon as
they found out that their instructors would not accept course papers written out
longhand, Goldstein writes.
It makes you realize how challenging and humiliating it can be to reinvent
oneself in midlife. To do so requires a kind of bravery for which no one gets a medal.
But perhaps the most powerful aspect of Janesville is its simple chronological
structure, which allows Goldstein to show the chain reaction that something so
calamitous as a plant closing can effect. Each falling domino becomes a headstone,
signifying the death of the next thing.
Because the G.M. plant closes, so does the plant at the Lear Corporation, which
supplied it with car seats and interiors. Because so many in Janesville are now out of
work, nonprofits lose board members and contributions to local charities shrivel.
Because their parents are out of work, students at Parker High start showing up for
school both hungry and dirty. A social studies teacher starts the Parker Closet, which
provides them with food and supplies. (Deri Wahlert: Shes one of the people to whom
Id like to write a fan note.)
The fabric of hundreds of families unravels, as an itinerant class of fathers
Janesville Gypsies, they call themselves start commuting to G.M. factories in Texas,
Indiana and Kansas, just so they can maintain their wage of $28 an hour. Those who
stay home invariably see their paychecks shrink drastically. One of the men Goldstein
follows, Jerad Whiteaker, cycles through a series of unsatisfying, low-paying jobs, finally
settling in one that pays less than half his former wage and offers no health insurance.
His twin teenage girls to whom Id also like to send awed notes share five jobs
between them, earning so much money for their family that they compromise their
eligibility for student loans.
You will learn a lot about the arbitrary rules and idiosyncrasies of our government
programs from this book. They have as many treacherous cracks and crevices as a
glacier and offer about as much warmth.
Janesville is not without shortcomings. It can be overwhelming at first, with many
characters raining down on the reader at once its a bit like getting caught in a
hailstorm of pickup sticks. (Though theres a cheat sheet in the front of the book, which
helps.) Theres almost no discussion of globalization and outsourcing jobs to Mexico,
which seems a strange omission. Surely, the residents of Janesville must have an
opinion about this?
But these are minor objections, ultimately. Janesville is eye-opening, important, a
diligent work of reportage. I am sure Paul Ryan will read it. I wonder what he will say.
THE MAN WHO LIT THE DARK WEB
By Charles Graeber August 30, 2016

Before Chris White could help disrupt Jihadi finance networks, crush weapons
markets, and bust up sex-slave rings with search tools that mine the dark Web, he first
had to figure out how to stop himself from plummeting through the open gun door of a
banking Black Hawk helicopter.
No hand-holding in a war zone, he thought.
It was September 2010. White was on his way to a forward operating base outside
Kabul headquarters, as part of a secret intelligence cell to help confront the Taliban and
al-Qaida, smash their encrypted online money stream, and win over the hearts and
minds of the Afghanistan population.
Slight and lanky and 28, White felt Dukakis-ridiculous in his unwieldy body armor
and bulbous helmet with "Dr. White" scrawled in marker on duct tape across the front,
and with the dust from liftoff, he was finding it hard to breathe. He was still struggling
with the unfamiliar seat straps when the pilot hit the stick, sending White sliding toward
the hot square of the door and the desert 200 feet below.
Down there, Afghanistan was a messy, dangerous place for pretty much everybody.
After nearly a decade of U.S.-led war, the American body count had hit 1,000, and
civilian casualties were beyond calculation, as President Obama's 30,000-troop surge
intensified the fighting that spring. Many feared the situation was only going from bad
to worse. The U.S. was escalating drone strikes across the border in Pakistan. And U.S.
command was under assault after Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the surge's architect, found
himself without a job after he and his staff made disparaging remarks about the
commander in chief in some music magazine.
It is hard to imagine that only a few weeks earlier, White had been just another
impossibly young-looking Harvard postdoc in flip-flops looking forward to a Cambridge
summer. Helicopter gunships and war zones weren't on the radar; there were lattes in
the square and rock climbing, and on the other side of campus, a prestigious fellowship
in the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, where he was working at the
intersection of big data, statistics, and machine learning. He had earned academic pole
position and had every expectation it would continue that way forever -- becoming a
professor, building a lab, and sniping out white papers from a tenured ivory tower.
But then his mentor asked him to attend a weekend conference at DARPA. White
knew it as the alphabet soup that spelled out Defense Advanced Research Projects
Agency, the Pentagon's scientific-innovation department, the folks who brought you
bionic exoskeletons, night vision, the M16, agent orange, GPS, stealth technology,
weather satellites, and the Internet. DARPA projects combined smart people, big ideas,
and big government dollars. Their goal was to help the nation prevent technological
surprise, and every five to 10 years, wheel out world-changing tech with a strategic edge.
White had gone grudgingly, expecting a PowerPoint presentation, a recruiting
speech, "and maybe some theoretical question like you'd expect from DARPA -- you
know, see if we can build some giant laser," White says. Instead, he got a top-level
briefing on the world at war. He learned there were dark forces out there. Their acts
were brutal, but their tactics and bureaucracy were sophisticated. They were killing and
terrorizing, growing and winning. He also heard there was an opportunity to use big
data to counter those forces; his country was eager to seize that advantage as quickly as
possible.
By the end of a full day, White the wunderkind postdoc felt humblingly naive.
I don't know anything about war, he thought. White had never been privy to the
details from a practical, operational perspective. Increasingly, that perspective involved
a need to make sense of gargantuan icebergs of raw and seemingly unconnected data, to
pull plans and policies out of frozen mountains of intel.
America needed a way to make sense of gargantuan icebergs of raw and seemingly
unconnected data.
America, it turned out, could use a guy like White in a war zone.
But first, he had to stop himself from plummeting through that chopper door. White
scrabbled back to his seat, grabbed the straps, and held on as gunners slouched in the
open door, watching for ground fire. These veteran warriors were like characters out of
Mission: Impossible, White thought.
White was on their team but with a different role, as part of a nerd A-team in a
classified DARPA program called Nexus 7. For nearly a decade, the U.S. military had
been collecting intel in Afghanistan, reportedly courtesy of the CIA, the National
Security Agency, GPS satellites, cellphone records, battlefield reports, digital financial
streams, surveillance cameras, foreign intercepts, and fire-hose streams from every
online social network out there. While this intel had been useful -- for, say, a targeted
drone strike -- it mostly amounted to a data dump. And there was even more that the
U.S. wasn't utilizing in its quest to understand what Afghanistan's citizens wanted and
needed. These overlooked clues were, as Maj. Gen. Michael Flynn, then-head of U.S.
intelligence in Afghanistan, put it, a "vast and underappreciated body of information."
To fix that, DARPA had sent in White and a dozen other geeks to embed with
fighting units and make better use of this data trove. Some of the geeks would fuse
things like satellite data and on-the-ground surveillance to visualize how traffic flowed
(or didn't flow, indicating a nearby Taliban checkpoint or a roadside bomb). White's
team mission was to target the digital trail of the Taliban and al-Qaida's financing.
Their data-mining tools were specific to the needs of the war, and successful enough
to garner him promotions, medals, and citations. Eventually, White would take these
tools and the lessons he learned back home, where they would help revolutionize
criminal investigative work, lend a hand to the journalists probing massive downloads
like the Panama Papers, and shine light into the dark data realm where drugs, guns, and
human beings are bought and sold, and where illicit bitcoin billions flow freely. One day
soon, they might even help pave the way for a more informed democracy.
Sliding toward that Black Hawk's open door, White assumed it was the end. It was
only the beginning.
White is not a stuttering, Beautiful Mind type of genius. He's more of a stealth nerd. I
first met up with him this past November in the lobby of a hotel in downtown Seattle.
The lithe and darkly handsome Oklahoman I found in a bright blue Patagonia
windbreaker by the front desk came across as something like a smaller, quieter hipster
Carl Sagan. Which is to say he's not just bright and passionate, but he's also nice and
strangely normal -- qualities that might seem at odds with his role as anointed visionary
whiz kid. But apparent contradiction is White's secret sauce: He's an accomplished
Ashtanga yoga practitioner who has been to war, a former government employee on a
first-name basis with celebrity Buddhists and legendary hackers, and a practiced martial
artist who's dedicated to the solitary sit-down science of staring at computer screens.
These apparent contradictions have allowed White, now 34, to bridge worlds
between experts. He's not the genius cranking out code, the analyst looking for the next
big IPO, the hand-shaking CEO, or the wartime general turning a pile of intel into a
plan. He's the guy who can talk to all of those people, understand them, and combine
their strengths into a matrix none individually would have imagined.
Currently, that matrix has to do with making the Internet a more interesting, useful,
and democratic tool for exploring our data universe. And it turns out, that's not a career
he could plan for. Post high school, White had surprised classmates by veering into the
hard sciences. He then surprised his family and himself by abandoning a pre-med track
for electrical engineering. He continued to surprise them with his facility for statistics
and computer science, leading to a rarefied academic byway where machine learning
and big data intersected with human language.
"Some of the best minds of our generation are using the Internet to make advertisers
richer," White says. "But the connectivity of the Internet is also an unprecedented
mechanism for compassion, for understanding each other, ourselves, and our world.
What could be more interesting than that?"
But by the time White traveled from his Harvard postdoc to that DARPA briefing, he
had already parlayed an electrical engineering degree from Oklahoma State University
into a fellowship from the Department of Homeland Security, and earned his Ph.D. at
the Center for Language and Speech Processing at Johns Hopkins University. He'd also
worked with Microsoft, MIT, IBM, and Google. And, he says, none of that had prepared
him for what he calls the "no-kiddingness" of the mission in Afghanistan.
"I was blown away," says White. "It was scary, and it was stressful, and I was really
intensely focused on the work. I knew I was contributing to something important. But I
had no idea that I was making a radical life change."
At the time, DARPA was changing too. Its new director, Regina Dugan, had
shepherded Nexus 7 through the Pentagon bureaucracy. She believed in the power of
crowdsourcing complicated problems and wanted DARPA to take on a more active
wartime role, rather than blue-skying technologies that might remake the military 10
years down the road. As she had told a Congressional panel, she wanted military leaders
to know DARPA was in the fight.
Nexus 7 would be the tip of the spear. The effort was designed by DARPA project
manager Randy Garrett, overseen by Dugan, and greenlit by Gen. David Petraeus. The
teams were split into two groups totaling about 100 computer scientists, social
scientists, and intelligence experts. The larger group remained stateside, writing code
and mashing up military data sets; White was in the smaller group, looking over
shoulders in military HQ tents in Afghanistan.
The Taliban and al-Qaida were military organizations committing atrocities in the
name of Allah, but increasingly they operated like criminal organizations that ran not on
religion, but money. That money paid for every bullet and bomb, kept troops together
and villages friendly, and bought information and protection, vehicles and fuel, hearts
and sometimes minds.
Like any criminal operation, most of that money came from criminal activity:
physical theft, or the sale of wares such as weapons, drugs, and, increasingly, human
beings for ransom, slavery, or sex.
 "One thing about war is people are really busy."
Those transactions, and the profits from them, were hidden and laundered through
legitimate businesses and shell corporations. Some of this happened in the physical
world -- real drugs, real people, real wads of cash money. But increasingly, that criminal
activity -- everything from the buying and selling of wares via the dark Web and social
media, to the filtering of proceeds through bitcoin transactions and encrypted accounts
-- could be carried out more easily online, in the same digital world White had spent his
career studying.
The coalition generals in Afghanistan had known this for years, but that didn't mean
they knew all the details. Nexus 7's larger role was to find useful needles in the haystack
of U.S. intelligence -- including anything that could help the generals better understand
the needs of the Afghan people. White's team focused on the source of the money, the
guns, the drugs, and the human sex-traffic, figuring out where and why these
transactions took place and who was involved. White played middleman between the
DARPA teams coding stateside and the needs of the military commanders in
Afghanistan.
"Unfortunately, that meant a lot of cold calling, a lot of asking for meetings from
these big commanders. It was really stressful," White says. "I'm not really sociable. But I
knew I had to just swallow that because that was the job."
Getting into conversations with people in a war zone who didn't know or care why
White was interrupting their job was a learning curve steeper than a Black Hawk's
takeoff, and a waking anxiety nightmare. White didn't talk crap or sports -- or, frankly,
particularly like people at first. Worst of all, he was a civilian. He had no military
uniform, military training, or military rank -- the shorthand on the collar or sleeve for
who needs to make time for whom.
"One thing about war," White says, "is people are really busy."
He didn't even have a particularly military bearing. While other guys pumped iron,
the lithe little yoga dude they called Dr. Spaghetti Man was stretching and breathing on
the wrestling mats, an Ivy Leaguer downward-dogging in a world of booyah. Gradually,
as he extended his stay from nine days to 90, and then signed on for more stints in the
country over the next year and change, he became DARPA's senior in-country lead in
charge of Nexus 7, and a citizen of this military world. He learned to invoke the "Dr."
early and often, learned that the embarrassingly fancy watch his dad had given him
worked like stars and bars in the government dress code. And he learned that using
martial-arts skills to put big guys on their asses during rec time made a positive
impression, and turned fighting men into friends. It also helped White and his team do
their jobs. The specific metrics are classified, but the presidential reports and citations
are clear: Nexus 7 made a meaningful contribution to the war for hearts, minds, and
lives.
By the end of his time in Afghanistan, Nexus 7 had earned the respect of the
commanders too, and Dr. Spaghetti Man held a DARPA rank equivalent of a one-star
general. Nexus 7's efforts also gained citations and medals from the Department of
Defense and the Department of the Treasury. Among other things, White's team was
commended for creating the "large data analytic framework" that provided "unique and
valuable insights against key strategic and operational questions." White personally was
cited as a credit to the agency.
 But all the lacquer and ribbon came at a cost. Chris White was no longer the same
wide-eyed postgrad who had boarded a jet to Kabul. "By the end, I'd dropped out of
Harvard and lost my long-term girlfriend," White says. But most changed was his view
of the world.
Those crimes didn't exist in Afghanistan alone. And it didn't take a plane to find
them; it took a modem.
White wouldn't say he was shell-shocked. He hadn't been battering doors and
stepping on strange earth loaded with explosives. But for the first time, he'd seen what
the enemy -- what people -- were capable of.
The job was over; it was time to move on from the war. But White felt he wasn't
ready to leave every battle behind. He would soon get the chance to take one battle
beyond the boundaries of war.
The data White had helped track had led the people who risked their lives toward
places where women and children were traded as commodities, and White had seen
firsthand how vulnerable those women and children were. He also learned that those
crimes didn't exist in Afghanistan alone. And it didn't take a plane to find them; it took a
modem.
The Internet you know is not the Internet. Or not all of it. To start, theres the
Internet of Bing, Google, Firefox, and Sirithe places where your Gmail and bookmarks
live, where you find cat litter and football scores. Thats said to represent over 200
terabytes of data, more than if you digitized all the printed material in the Library of
Congress. Thats a lot of reading, but its not the Internet; its just the surface.
Estimates vary, but the surface Web, or open Web, represents between 5 and 20
percent of whats out there. The rest resides in places that most crawlers cant reach or
index. Some data are deep, in password-protected places like social media and
message boards, or in increasingly common dynamic websiteswhich are more like
apps than pages from a book, and change when you interact with them, like Kayak. The
rest of the Web is dark.
But the dark Web isnt a road youve neglected to drive down on your way to
amazon.com. The main tool of access is Tor (originally an acronym for The Onion
Router). Onion routing was first developed by the U.S. Naval Research Lab to ensure
secure intelligence communication. It bounces encrypted information through a series
of anonymized nodes, rendering it virtually untraceable, letting you browse a Web you
wouldnt want cookies and targeted ads to trackand creating a haven for those who
fear surveillance and authoritarian control.
The dark Web does not discriminate among government users, savvy cyber
libertarians, planning boards for ISIS, whistle-blowing hacktivists, or Arab Spring
planners. Its free markets are unregulated, and specialize in goods that need to be
bought and sold anonymously. In the dark, youre always only three clicks from the
illegal, repulsive, or violent, or, more often than not, from sharing a jail cell with Jared
from Subway. You can probably find China White heroin, fake E.U. and U.S. passports,
non-sequential supernote Benjamins, Peruvian flake, DMT, Hard Candy, Pink Meth,
and dump sites for hacked nude celebrity selfies.
If youre one of the estimated 2.5 million daily visitors to this dark world, youre
laughing unkindly (or trashing this description online). No dark-Web catalog can ever
be complete or correct. This game of Whac-A-Mole is liberating for some, frustrating for
others. Its also a perfect landscape for criminal organizations and terror groups to
communicate, advertise, or buy or sell anything, including human beings. As you read
this, an estimated 21 million people are being trafficked around the planet. More than
half are women and girls. More than 1 million are children. Nearly one-quarter are
bought and sold as sex slaves. Only 1-in-100 victims of human trafficking is ever
rescued. Its a booming business. High profits and low risk make human trafficking one
of the fastest-growing and most lucrative crimes on the planet; the U.N. recently
estimated that trafficking nets $150 billion a year.
And as a business, it differs negligibly from the sale of kitty litter or crew-neck
sweaters; in order for consumers to buy your product, they have to be able to find it.
While the makers of Tidy Cats can take out a billboard, human traffickers need to be
visible enough that their customers can find them, but hidden enough that they cant be
tracked down by authorities. Not surprisingly, that puts the majority of sex-traffic data
in the deep or dark Web, or hidden in plain sight in the terabytes of the surface Web, in
ways quite different from legal businesses that want to be found by consumer Web-
search engines.
The exact formula for how search engines like Bing and Google rank results is
governed by secret algorithms mere mortals arent allowed to know. But two factors
dominate: Pages linked by other pages are ranked higher, as are pages with keywords
matching the search terms. Thats what puts Wikipedia pages at the top of most Google
searchesthey cite, and are cited by, numerous other lesser sources (such as blogs). But
sex traffickers dont want to be found via Web search. To throw off the index, they
advertise through one-off ads, unlinked to others. They hide deep in chat rooms or
uncrawlable social-media posts. They avoid search-engine optimization. Instead of
keywords, they use photos and code words. At this moment, there are likely hundreds of
thousands of active ads for sex for sale on the Internet. Detectives using regular search
engines have an extremely difficult time finding these or making cases against criminals
who dont play by Googles rules.
Chris White was given the chance to change the rules.
Once upon a time, White had traded a safe academic track for an intellectual military
adventure. Two years later, both were over, and at 30 years old, he had to make a new
path. From the outside, his life might have seemed a logical progression. But to White, it
was as if hed fallen down a rabbit hole and come out the other side. And then DARPA
offered him the position of program manager. Hed found his Wonderland.
Once, Id wanted to be a thing, White saysa respected position like a doctor or a
primary investigator. But now I realized I wanted to do a thing.
As a DARPA program manager, White could name his project. And the thing he
wanted to make was a new breed of search engines, capable of mining the entirety of the
Internet.
In Afghanistan, there were few off-the-shelf tools for mining big data or visualizing
the results; they were built mostly for experts and for specific projects. But what if they
could build off-the-shelf pieces and make them available to everyone? A sort of Erector
Set of super-search-engine pieces that you could assemble any number of ways.
The result was initially a three-yearand reportedly up to $50 millionproject to
construct that search-engine Erector Set: a suite of perhaps 20 new super-search-engine
parts, coded by 17 different units from private industry and universities, and dedicated
to providing better ways of interacting with and understanding the data available on the
whole Internet, in ways farther reaching and more transparent than anything possible
with Firefox, Safari, Google, or Bing.
They called it Memexa name combining memory and indexborrowed from a
1945 article by the visionary former director of the Office of the Scientific Research and
Development, Vannevar Bush. Memex would be a tool to visualize connections between
ideas and facts. If it worked, it could empower human researchers with superhuman
insights.
As White explains, data on the Internet is essentially descriptions of what happened
in the real worldphotos, emails, blogs, phone calls, GPS trails, and social-media posts.
The goal of an investigator is to dig through the descriptions and work backward,
White says, to understand that real-world event.
With a traditional Web browser, thats no easy task.
Type a search termsuch as a phone numberinto Google, and you might get
20,000 results, links to pages from the surface Web, ranked in order of keyword hits
and the number of hyperlinks each page has to and from other pages. Your only option
is to click through those results one by one, checking each page for the single answer you
are hoping to find. Thats fine for discovering facts such as What is the capital of
Montana? But for complicated investigations, White likens it to using a push mower to
mow a golf course. Its sequential and prone to error, he says. There are better ways.
Whites Memex project would be a portfolio approach. Some tools would dive into
the dark Web and present all the hidden onion sites to be found there as a list,
something previously considered too difficult to bother with. Others would index and
sort the enormous flows of deep and dark Web online forums (which are otherwise
unsearchable). Others would monitor social-media trends, connect photos, read
handwritten information, or strip out data from Web pages and cross-index the results
into data maps. ?
In theory, Whites search-engine Erector Set could be useful for any number of real-
world applications; as a DARPA project, they needed to prove it could be effective for at
least one. Ideally, that test application would attack a real-world data-rich problem that
could help investigators make the world a better place, and the country safer.
White decided to focus the Memex test application on helping American law
enforcement target a crime hed been shocked to learn about in Afghanistan and found
inherently horrible: the buying and selling of human beings.
On a computer screen in the Memex lab in Arlington, Virginia, Wade Shen, its
current program manager, demonstrates how some of the Memex tools have been
tweaked for sex-traffic investigating. The first is Datawake. Normally, a detective
following a lead (for example, an email associated with a prostitute) plugs that info into
Google, gets no exact matches but perhaps 25,300 results, and might open only a few of
those before spotting a potential new clue and plugging that into the search bar instead,
and moving on. Searching the entire 25,300 hits this way would take a detective two
weeks of 12-hour shifts.
Datawake combs those same Google results, pulls the information off the pages, and
organizes it visually. On-screen, the results appear as a series of circles. Lines between
the circles indicate connections between datanames, phone numbers, and photos that
might appear repeatedly alongside that email. The detective gets a peek into all 25,300
resultsand can start chasing down the most promising leads without leaving behind
any of the other results.
 Tools such as these have allowed district attorneys offices to go back to the case files
of their successfully prosecuted sex cases, and reuse the phone numbers, names, emails,
and physical addresses already established as evidence. The Memex tools allow these old
cases to provide search terms to build new cases and prove criminal conspiracy, linking
guys in prison to sex rings still operating.
One of the most useful tools is TellFinder, which pulls and organizes co-referenced
information from sex ads. By finding commonalities in adsthe authors tellsit can
group together ads from the same author or organization, giving investigators a greater
insight into the scope of the business. In one demo, Shen pulls up 869,000 current ads
represented like population-density bubbles across the states. He zooms in to towns and
jurisdictions and scrolls backward through dates, revealing where ads were posted and
faded away over time. The map also shows phone numbers, emails, and physical
addresses the ads have in common, and even photos with the same background (the
same motel drapes and wallpaper in the background can lead detectives to a sex-
trafficking site). With a few clicks, Shen shows how ads for one woman moved across the
country, demonstrating the probable track of her being trafficked.
Another tool, called Dig, takes that co-referenced information and sorts it into a list
that looks a bit like the results of an Amazon search. Along the side, key categories and
terms allow investigators to filter the results down to just the information theyre
looking for. Dig also takes TellFinders image-search capabilities and kicks them up a
notch. Its just another way of looking at the same problem, Shen explains. And these
are just examplestheres no one way to use these tools.
Some Memex tools have been specialized to perform similar tasks in the dark Web,
crawling the otherwise unsearchable sites for specific information types.
White showed me another tool back in Seattle: Aperture Tiles. It makes formerly
unmanageable amounts of information think billions of moving data points on a map
manageable. To demonstrate, he combined motel addresses associated with sex
trafficking, and the location information attached to online posts made near those
addresses. (Most people have no idea that when theyre accepting the permissions on a
free app, its them and their data thats the commodity, he notes.)
Often, patterns emerged: The people posting the ads would drive from city to city
around the U.S., deciding every few days to get out of Dodge, likely as a way to stay
under law enforcements radar. Some people who posted frequently in the U.S. also
posted frequently in Southeast Asia. What that means, White says, is a question only a
full investigation can answer, but its reasonable to assume it indicates a connection
with international sex trafficking.
White decided to focus the test application on a crime he found inherently
horrible: the buying and selling of human beings.
On December 19, 2014, Froilan Rosado sat in an idling van outside a midtown
Manhattan sex hotel, a pregnant 16-year-old in the passenger seat. In his late 30s,
Rosado was the kind of guy who liked to post Facebook photos of him and his family
dressed like convicts for Halloween, and selfies in mirrored shades with his hair braided
into cornrows, a pencil goatee framing a scowl. Rosado was a pimp. Inside the hotel was
his 18-year-old prostitute, Flora. Undercover cops had picked her up in a run-of-the-
mill prostitution-sting operation.
But really, she was the victim.
 Flora told investigators shed been kicked out of her foster home and had nowhere to
go. Rosado took her in, then started pimping her out. Investigators soon learned that
Rosado had become an expert at luring girls and women into the street trade over social
media; getting young woman already under his sway to contact girls on Facebook as
young as 15. Once lured in, he kept them in line with violence, drugs, and promises of
money. In one instance, he choked a girl who refused to obey. In a text, he referred to a
girl as fresh meat. He put their photos in Backpage sex ads with a contact number.
Hed take the call, book the dates, and wait outside to get his cut.
To build a stronger case against Rosado, the Office of Manhattan District Attorney
Cyrus R. Vance Jr. wanted to track more girls. Flora didnt know their full names, phone
numbers, or whereabouts. And she didnt really know the details of how Rosado covered
his digital tracks. She didnt know, for example, that he routinely deleted or changed his
girls online ads, or changed their names, or switched out burner phones. And so the
investigators had nothing that could connect Rosado to a larger prostitution ring, even
while he ran his business over the phone from New York Citys Rikers Island jail.
They turned to Memex, which started collaborating with their offices in 2014.
Analysts used early versions of Dig and TellFinder to mine Rosados invisible traces
across deleted and current sex ads, and instantly linked photos, names, emails, phone
numbers, and more girls. As Rosado continued his business from jail, investigators
listened in as he mentioned new phone numbers, which they could then plug in to
Memex and connect to the others. Soon they identified and located even more victims,
building the evidence that linked Rosado to a prostitution ring, including 10 teenagers
ranging from 15 to 18 years old, and a case that would stick. On September 15, 2015,
nearly a year after Rosado was arrested, he was sentenced to seven-to-14 years in prison
on charges of sex trafficking and promoting prostitution. Today, the Manhattan District
Attorneys office employs Memex in all of its human-trafficking investigationshaving
screened 4,752 potential cases in the first six months of 2016 alone.
On a drizzling Tuesday this past November, I met Chris White at his new office in
Microsofts town-size campus in Redmond, Washington, about a dozen miles northeast
of Seattle. Whites directions led along route 520 to a parking garage and a modern
glass-fronted building marked with the number 99, and inhabited almost exclusively by
Ph.D.s.
It was after-hours when White brought me past security and into the maze of offices
filled with prototypes and experiments, and glass walls covered in equations. White had
left DARPA in May 2015, just before his appointment there ended (the organization
employs its researchers for only a limited amount of time in order to keep new ideas
flowing and the talent pool fresh). But again, White felt that hed been popped out of a
rabbit hole and faced a crossroads.
At first he considered starting a company that would use automation and artificial
intelligence to allow companies to do their own data analysis and online-security work.
The idea was good enough to get interest from venture-capital groups. But then White
thought about life as a startup CEO, the toll on his life with his fiance (White married
this past March), and the limited impact it would have on the world.
And so, instead of burning a decade being a CEO, White opted to make a thingand
an existencethat he considered simpler, yet bigger.
 As a principal researcher in Microsofts Special Projects division, he gets to build on
his work with Memexmaking affordable, user-friendly, data-exploring and
visualization tools for businesses (and journalists, and everyone else).
The bar is even higher, he says. The question is no longer Can we make
something that works? Its Can we make something that works for a billion people?
White hopes his new project will, among other things, change peoples relationship
with big data, and each other. It could also impact our democracy in ways no one has
ever imagined.
Before I left, White flipped open his Lenovo ThinkPad X1 and opened a tool called
Newman, a data-visualization tool that shows patterns in an email historyin this case,
Jeb Bushs email from eight years as Floridas governor. In seconds, Newman sorted
250,000 emails into a nodal flower, showing who Bush had emailed and how often, who
was CCed, where those were forwarded, and how quickly those emails were responded
to. It was, in effect, an interactive map of influence and decision-making, the guts of
democracy made transparent. White easily could have run the program over time to
show relationships with lobbyists or donors, turning the candidates record round and
round, like an apple in the hand.
In a knowledge economy, this is power, White says. Right now there are only a few
browsers, and theyre the only interface to the worlds information. With Memex, we
thought we could really do something about that.
Memex tools can show the movements of ISIS recruits or propaganda; links between
shell companies and money laundering; the flow of illegal guns or labor; and heat maps
showing the frequency of social-media mentions for words and ideas, and the intention
around them, live across the map. Theyve been sought out to track an Ebola outbreak in
West Africa, to understand how people moved in and out of hot zones, and to help the
White House determine how to respond to the outbreak. They can also track and map
moods and public sentiments as they ripple and change across the planet.
Its not difficult to imagine how such transparency might inform our understanding
of global opinions far beyond our limited views of Twitter or our personal Facebook
feed. Even easier to imagine is the threat such transparency poses to the current
Internet power and profit modelthe advertisers who depend on paid experts to rank or
review their product, or use SEO tricks or money to steer Internet searches toward their
goods, and search companies that make their money selling access to that influence. Or
dictatorships using those same techniques to influence and control citizens. Or even a
democracy, where a handful of tech companies control the information flowmaking it
hard for even the most benevolent corporations to avoid an invisible bias in what tech
users see, the information on which they base their choices and opinions.
If White is correct, Memex is just the beginning of a generation of tools that can help
save the Internet from becoming a glorified shopping mall. Thats good. Its much better
than what we have now. But will it be profound? Will it make us better citizens, or more-
realized human beings?
White watches me a moment, then almost smiles.
These are very interesting and very important questions, he says.
And ones he has only begun to shine his light on.
EDWARD SNOWDEN: THE INTERNET IS BROKEN
By Matt Giles April 21, 2016

In 2013, a now-infamous government contractor named Edward Snowden shined a

stark light on our vulnerable communications infrastructure by leaking 10,000 classified
U.S. documents to the world.
One by one, they detailed a mass surveillance program in which the National
Security Administration and others gathered information on citizens via phone
tracking and tapping undersea Internet cables.
Three years after igniting a controversy over personal privacy, public security, and
online rights that he is still very much a part of, Snowden spoke with Popular Science in
December 2015 and shared his thoughts on what's still wrong and how to fix it.
Popular science: how has the internet changed in the three years since the
release?
Edward Snowden: There have been a tremendous number of changes that have
happened, and not just on the Internet. It has changed our culture, it has changed our
laws, its changed the way our courts decide issues, its changed the way people consider
what the Internet means to the them, what their communication security means to
them.
The Internet as a technological development has reached within the walls of every
home. Even if you dont use it, even if you dont have a smart phone, even if you dont
have a laptop or an Internet connection or a phone line, your information is handled by
tax authorities, by health providers and hospitals, and all of that routes over the
Internet.
This is both a force for tremendous good but it is something that can be abused. It
can be abused by small time actors and criminals. It can also be abused by states. And
this is what we really learned in 2013. During an arrest, police traditionally have had the
ability to search anything they find on your person if you had a note in your pocket,
they could read it. But now we all carry smartphones on us, and smartphones dont just
have this piece of ID, or your shopping list, or your Metrocard. Your entire life now fits
in your pocket. And it was not until after 2013 that the courts were forced to confront
this decision.
In the post-9/11 era, in the context of this terrorism threat that has been very heavily
promoted by two successive administrations now, there was this idea that we had to go
to the dark side to be able to confront the threat posed by bad guys. We had to adopt
their methods for ourselves.
We saw the widening embrace of things like warrantless wire-tapping during the
Bush administration, as well as things like torture1. But in 2014, there was the Riley
decision that went to the Supreme Court that was one of the most significant
changes.2
Which is that in the Riley decision, the courts have finally recognized that digital is
different. They recognized that the unlimited access of government to continuum of
your private information and private activities, whether that is the content of your
communication or the meta data of your communications, when it is aggregated it
means something completely different than what our laws have been treating it as
previously.
 It does not follow that police and the government then have the authority to search
through your entire life in your pocket just because you are pulled over for a broken
taillight. When we change this over to the technical fabric of the Internet, our
communications exist in an extraordinarily vulnerable state, and we have to find ways of
enforcing the rights that are inherent to our nature. They are not granted by
government, they are guaranteed by government the reality is a recognition of your
rights, which includes your right to be left alone (as the courts describe privacy) and to
be free from unreasonable search and seizure, as we have in our Fourth Amendment..
And one of the most measurable changes is guaranteeing those rights, regardless of
where you are at and regardless of where the system is being used, through encryption.
Now it is not the magic bullet, but it is pretty good protection for the rights we enjoy.
About eight months out from the original revelations, in early January 2014,
Googles metrics showed there was a 50 percent increase in the amount of encrypted
traffic that their browsers were handling3. This is because all of the mainline Internet
service providers Gmail, Facebook, and even major website providers are
encrypted, and this is very valuable. You can enforce a level of protection for your
communications simply by taking very minor technical changes.
"We are starting to see a sense of obligation on the part of technologists to clothe the
users ... We can move this status quo to a dynamic where everyone is safe."

And this is the most fascinating aspect. Encryption moves from an esoteric
practice to the mainstream. Does that become universal, five to 10 years
later?
Yeah, the easiest way to analogize this is that 2013 was the "atomic moment" for the
profession of computer scientists and the field of technologists. The nuclear physicists of
a previous era were just fascinated with their capabilities and what secrets they could
unlock, but didn't consider how these powers would be used in their most extreme
forms.
It is the same way in technology. We have been expanding and expanding because
technology is incredibly useful. It is incredibly beneficial. But at the same time, we
technologists as a class knew academically that these capabilities could be abused, but
nobody actually believed they would be abused. Because why would you do that? It
seemed so antisocial as a basic concept.
But we were confronted with documented evidence in 2013 that even what most
people would consider to be a fairly forthright upstanding government was abusing
these capabilities in the most indiscriminate way. They had created a system of "bulk
collection", as the government likes to describe it the public calls it mass surveillance.
It affected everybody. It affected people overseas and at home, and it violated our own
Constitution. And the courts have now ruled multiple times that it did do so4.
Prior to 2013, everybody who thought about the concept of mass surveillance either
had to consider it an academic concept, or they were a conspiracy theorist. Now, though,
we have moved from the realm of theory to the realm of fact. We are dealing with actual
credible and documented threats, and because of that, we can actually start to think
about how do we deal with that? How do we remedy the threats?
And how do we provide security for everybody?
And brazil recently shut down whatsapp.
 Right, and this is more topical. Because of the way the WhatsApp service is
structured, the largest messaging service in the world doesnt know what you are saying.
It doesnt hold your messages, it doesnt store your messages in a way that it can read.
Which is much safer against abuse than if you simply have AT&T holding a record of
every text message youve ever sent.
During the first crypto-war in the 1990s, the NSA and the FBI asked for backdoors
for all the worlds communications that were running on American systems. The NSA
designed a chip called the Clipper chip that encrypted the communications in a way that
they could be broken by the government, but your kid sister wouldnt be able to read
them6. The NSA said no one is actually going to be able to break this it is not a real
security weakness, it is a theoretical security weakness.
Well, there was a computer scientist at AT&T Bell Laboratories, Matt Blaze, who is
now a professor at University of Pennsylvania, who took a look at his chip and as a
single individual, broke the encryption, which the government said was unbreakable7.
Only they could break it. This is what is called nobody but us sort of surveillance. Well,
the thing is, it is very difficult to substitute the judgment of ten engineers behind closed
doors in a government lab somewhere for the entire population of the world, and say
these ten guys are smarter than everybody else. We know that doesnt work.
This leads the question of the future. Technology progresses at what we see appears
to be an accelerating rate. Before 2013, before we had a leg to stand on and say this is
what is actually going on, we had developed a panopticon8, which no one outside of the
security services was fully authorized to know. Even members of Congress, like Ron
Wyden, were being lied to on camera by the top intelligence officials9 of the United
States what if we were never able to take any steps to correct the balance there?
Prior to 2013, everything we did on the Internet was more or less simply because no
one wanted to make the effort. There were capabilities that existed. There were tools
that existed. But by and large, everything we did on the Internet, as we engaged on the
Internet, we were electronically naked, and this is really the most lasting impact is for
the classes of cryptographers and security engineers that recognize the path across the
network is hostile terrain.

And this has now changed significantly, with tor and signal.
We are starting to see a sense of obligation on the part of technologists to clothe the
users. And users isnt the best language to use. We use users, we use customers as a
sector, but we mean people.
And this is not just the United States problem, it is a global problem. One of the
primary arguments used by apologists for this surveillance state that has developed
across the United States and in every country worldwide is a trust of the government.
This is critical even if you trust the U.S. government and their laws, weve reformed
this issues, think about the governments you fear the most, whether it is China, Russia
or North Korea, or Iran. These spying capabilities exist for everyone.
Technically they are not very far out of reach. The offense is easier than the defense,
or has been, but that is beginning to change. We can move this status quo to a dynamic
where everyone is safe.
Protecting the sanctity of critical infrastructure of communications online is not a
luxury good or right. It is a public necessity, because of what is described as the cyber-
security problem. Look at the Sony hack10 in late 2014, or the Office of Personnel
Management hack11 last summer, where the federal government arguably the world's
most well-resourced actor got comprehensively hacked. They werent using any form
of encryption to protect the incredibly sensitive records of people who have top secret
clearances. The only way to provide security in this context is to provide it for everyone.
Security in the digital world is not something that can be selective.
There is a seminal paper called 'Keys Under Doormats'. It's really good. The idea
here is that if you weaken security for an individual or for a class of individuals, you
weaken it for everyone. What you are doing is youre putting holes in systems, keys
under doormats, and those keys can be found by our adversaries as well as those we
trust.
"If you were to stop a terrorist attack, you target a suspect, an individual. That is the
only way you can discriminate and properly apply the vast range of military and law
enforcement intelligence capabilities. Otherwise, you are looking at a suspect pool of
roughly 7 billion people in the world."

Is there any way that the technology and intelligence communities can
reconcile?
There actually is. The solution here is for both sides of the equation to recognize that
security premised on a foundation of trust is, by its very nature, insecure. Trust is
transient. It isnt permanent. It changes based on situations, it changes based on
administrations.
Let's say you trust President Obama with the most extreme powers of mass
surveillance, and think he won't abuse them. Would you think the same thing about a
President Donald Trump, having his hand on the same steering wheel? And these are
dynamics that change very quickly.
This is not just an American thing; this is happening in every country in every part of
the world. We first need to move beyond the argumentation by policy officials of wishing
for something that is technically impossible. The idea Let's get rid of encryption. It is
out of their hands. The jurisdiction of Congress ends at its borders. Even if all strong
encryption is banned in the United States because we dont want Al Qaeda to have it, we
can't stop a group from developing these tools in Yemen, or in Afghanistan, or any other
region of the world and spreading the tools globally.
We already know the program code, and again, we dealt with this in the '90s. It is a
genie that wont go back in the bottle.
Once we move beyond what legislation can accomplish, we need to think about what
it should accomplish. There is an argument where the government says, You should
give up a lot of your liberty because itll give us some benefit in terms of investigatory
powers, and we believe it might lead to greater security. But security, surveillance, and
privacy are not contrary goals. You dont give up one and get more of the other. If you
lose one, you lose the other. If you are always observed and always monitored, you are
more vulnerable to abuse than you were before.
They are saying we are balancing something, but it is a false premise. When you cant
protect yourself, you are more vulnerable to the depredations of others, whether they
are criminal groups, government, or whomever. What you can't have is what the courts
have referred to as the right to be left alone, in which you can selectively participate and
share. You can't experiment or engage in an unconsidered conversation with your
friends and your family because you'll worry what that is going to look like in a
government or corporate database 20 or 30 years down the road.
There are those who argue we need get rid of that. All of this individuality is
dangerous for large and well-organized societies. We need people who are observed and
controlled because it is safer. That may be a lot of things, but the one thing Id argue it is
not is American.
57: Percentage, according to a 2015 Pew study, of Americans who believe the Feds
shouldn't monitor their communications.
We are comfortable sharing our data with amazon, but not the government.
Does that seem counterintuitive?
When we think about privacy, what we are describing is liberty. We are describing a
right to be left alone. We can always choose to waive that right, and this is the
fundamental difference between corporate data collection and government surveillance
from every sort of two bit government in the world.
You can choose not to use Amazon, or log onto Facebook12 you cant opt out of
governmental mass surveillance that watches everybody in the world without regard to
any suspicious criminal activity or any kind of wrong doing. This is the challenge.
Its not that all surveillance is bad. We don't want to restrict the police from doing
anything. The idea is that traditional and effective means of an investigation don't target
a platform, a service, or a class. If you were to stop a terrorist attack, you target a
suspect, an individual. That is the only way you can discriminate and properly apply the
vast range of military and law enforcement intelligence capabilities. Otherwise, you are
looking at a suspect pool of roughly 7 billion people in the world.
This is the reason mass surveillance doesnt work. You dont have to take my word
for it, particularly in the context of public communication. You can cite the Privacy and
Civil Liberties Oversight Boards review on section 21513, and their specific quotes, this
is their words, We are aware of no instance in which the [mass surveillance] program
directly contributed to the discovery of a previously unknown terrorist plot or the
disruption of a terrorist attack14."
This begs the question: why? Why doesnt mass surveillance work? That is the
problem with false positives and false negatives. If you go look, our program is 99.9
percent effective, and that sounds really good, but when you think about that in the
context of a program, that means one out of every thousand people is going to be
inaccurately identified as a terrorist, or one out of every thousand terrorists is actually
going to be let go by the system, and considered to not be a terrorist.
And the real problem is that our algorithms are not 99.9 percent effective. They are
about 80 percent effective at best. And when you upscale that to the population of the
entire world, even if they were 99.99999 percent effective, suddenly you are
transforming millions of completely innocent people into terrorists. At the same time,
you are transforming tons of actual terrorists, whom any police officer, after a cursory
review of their actions, would say Thats suspicious, into law-abiding citizens. That is
the fundamental problem there, and why it hasnt worked, so if is hasn't been effective,
why are they doing it? It costs a lot of money, so why deal with it at all?
And why do we continue to have these same conversations?
These programs were never about terrorism. They are not effective for terrorism. But
they are useful for a lot of other things, like espionage, diplomatic manipulation, and
ultimately social control.
Imagine yourself sitting at a desk, and you have a little box that lets you search
anybodys email in the world; it lets you pull up their entire web history, anything
theyve ever typed into a search engine; you can read the message they are typing on
Facebook as they do it; you can turn on the webcam on any private home; you can follow
where anyone goes through their cell phone at any time. This is obviously an
extraordinarily valuable mechanism of influence, of power, of capability.
What it doesnt do, though, is stop terrorist attacks.
And this is one of the fundamental problems of the public debate. The officials who
are promoting and desire these capabilities recognize this Look, itll give us an
advantage in foreign intelligence collection. Itll allow us to compete on a stronger basis
in the global economic market. These are arguments they still might win because people
may be OK with that bargain: Thats fine. I dont care if you spy on foreigners. I dont
care if you commit economic espionage as long as it benefits us. I dont care if you are
monitoring protestors because I dont agree with protestors.
But that is a very different argument, and one that is more difficult to win, than
saying this will save lives, this will stop terrorism, and this is the solution to our
problems.
Most people can get behind surveillance as a means to saving lives, but to
commit economic espionage, or just spying for spying's sake, the arguments
are more difficult to make.
Right. And they have been making this argument since 2001, but we are now in
2016. To me personally, this is why I think the environment, and the response, has
changed so much since 2013. They said, 'What this guy did was dangerous. The press
was irresponsible reviewing classified programs. Even if [the NSA] did violate the law,
even if they did violate the constitution, people will die over this.
Since 2013, all the top officials at the NSA and the CIA have been brought on the
floor of Congress, and Congress has begged them repeatedly, Can you show us any
cases? Name a single person who has died as a result of these disclosures? And theyve
never been able to do that. Theyve never been able to show a particular national
security operation that has been damaged as a result.15
The dynamic here is the same it had been easy to make the argument that you
should be afraid because we just dont know. That argument is no longer the case 15
years later.

The rise of hacktivism and white hat hackers, then, seems like a direct
argument against that.
There are a number of organizations around the world, like the TOR project, that,
even if they cant solve the problem, they are improving the status quo that people are
dealing with around the world. Even if you, sitting in Chicago, are being
comprehensively surveilled, you might not be concerned. But if you allow that to happen
simply because you dont care about its impact, you are ignoring the collective impact it
has on everyone else. This is the fundamental nature of rights. Arguing for surveillance
because you have nothing to hide is no different than making the claim, I dont care
about freedom of speech because I have nothing to say.
Rights are not just individual. They are collective and universal. And I am now
working at the Freedom of the Press Foundation to look at: How do we help people in
the most difficult circumstances, and who face the most severe threats of surveillance?
Politicians are trying to convince the public to rely on security that is premised on
the idea of trust. This is the current political problem: Let us do this stuff, and we wont
abuse it. But that trust is gone. They violated it.
There is a technical paradigm that is being shifted to where we no longer need to
trust the people handling our communication. We simply will not give them the
capability to abuse it in the first place. We are not going to bare our breast for them to
drive the knife in if they change their mind about us.
You have said, and i am paraphrasing, that the internet allowed you to
explore your capacity as a human being. What does that mean for future
generations more immersed online?
Lets think about the example of AT&T sharing with the government more than 26
years of phone records16. Thats the full span of these peoples lives. Theyll never have
made a phone call on AT&T that hasnt been captured. Their very first AT&T call, when
they were four years old and called their mom, has been recorded. And the argument
It is just metadata. This is just your phone bills and calling records' misunderstands
what it really is and why it matters.
Metadata is the technical word for an activity record, so the government has been
aggregating perfect records of private lives. And when you have all of someones phone
records, purchase records, every website theyve ever visited or typed into Google, or
liked on Facebook, every cell phone tower their phone has ever passed and at what time,
and what other cell phones were at that tower with them, what youve done is youve
written a secret biography of every person that even they themselves dont know.
When we think about surveillance as being a mechanism of control, at the lowest
level it means that this young cohort is growing up in a society that has transformed
from an open society to a quantified society. And there is no action or activity they could
take that could be unobserved and truly free. People will say 'We trust well be ok, but
this is an entire cohort that at any moment in the future could have their life changed
permanently. And this is what I described in that first interview as 'turnkey tyranny'17.
Its not that we think of it as evil. Its that weve said for generations that absolute
power corrupts absolutely, and this is a country where the Supreme Court said two years
ago that the American Revolution was actually kicked off in response to general
warrants of the same character that are happening in the U.S. today.18
"We havent solved everything. But no single person acting in a vacuum is going to be
able to solve problems so large on their own."
Let's interject a bit of levity to the discussion. Pop culture has garnered
praise recently for accurately portraying those threats, and depicting
hacking. Do you partake in shows like 'mr. Robot'?
Hollywood is only going to be so accurate in the technical sense, but yes, I do watch
it. [Television and movies] are improving slowly. They are certainly better than the neon
3D virtual city back in the '80s. But it is going to be a long road.
 There is also a very interesting cultural dynamic we see shifting. For example,
Captain America, in the recent Winter Soldier movie, quite openly questioned whether it
is patriotism to have absolute loyalty to a government, is it more critical to have loyalty
to the countrys values? There is that old saying, my country, right or wrong, that was
criticized for a long time as blindly jingoistic, but eventually it has been reformulated,
My country right or wrong. Right to be kept right, wrong to be put right.
And this is something we are rediscovering. It is critical that the United States not
just be a strong and a powerful country. We have to have a moral authority to recognize
that we have the capability to exercise certain powers, but we dont. Even though it
would provide us an advantage, we realize it is something that would lose us something
that is far more valuable. We saw this in the Cold War that we forgot about in the
immediate post 9/11 moment.
With the benefit of hindsight, what would you have done differently in
2013?
It was never my goal to fundamentally change society. I didnt want to say what
things should or shouldnt be done. I wanted the public to have the capability and the
right to decide for themselves and to help direct the government in the future. Who
holds the leash of government? Is it the American people, or is it a few people sitting
behind closed doors?
And I think we have been effective in getting a little bit closer to the right balance
there. We havent solved everything. But no single person acting in a vacuum is going to
be able to solve problems so large on their own. And none of this would have happened
without the work of journalists.
Would I have done anything different? I should have come forward sooner. I had too
much faith that the government really would do no wrong. I was drinking the Kool-Aid
in the post-9/11 moment. I believed the claims of government, that this was a just cause,
a moral cause, and we don't need to listen to these people who say we broke this law or
that law. No one could really prove with finality that this was not the case, that the
government was actually lying.
One of the biggest legacies is the change of trust. Officials at the NSA and the CIA
were seen as James Bond types, but now, they are seen as war criminals. At the same
time, people like Ashkan Soltani was hired to the White House. He had been reporting
on the archive in 2013 and printing classified information to the detriment of these
people19. There is this really interesting dynamic where the people you would presume
would be persona non gratis in Washington are now the ones in the White House, and
the ones previously in the White House are now exiled and are being asked 'Why haven't
you been prosecuted?' It gives the flavor of that change.
So how does the internet look now, after this seminal moment? We have
more encryption that ever before, air gapped laptops, burner phones. How
do you see our changing relationship with the internet in the coming
decades?
We are at a fork in the road. Well move into a future that is just a direct progression
from the pre-2013 development of technology, which is where you cant trust your
phone. You would need some other device. You would need to act like a spy to pursue a
career in a field like journalism because you are always being watched.
 On the other hand, there is the idea you dont need to use these fancy trade craft
methods. You dont need to worry about your phone spying on you because you dont
need to trust your phone. Instead of changing your phone to change your persona
divorcing your journalist phone from your personal phone you can use the systems
that are surrounding us all of the time to move between personas. If you want to call a
cab, the cab doesnt need to know about who you are or your payment details.
You should be able to buy a bottle of Internet like you buy a bottle of water. There is
the technical capacity to tokenize and to commoditize access in a way that we can
divorce it from identity in such a way that we stop creating these trails. We have been
creating these activity records of everything we do as we go about our daily business as a
byproduct of living life. This is a form of pollution; just as during the Industrial
Revolution, when a person in Pittsburgh couldnt see from one corner to another
because there was so much soot in the air. We can make data start working for us rather
than against us. We just simply need to change the way we look at it.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
This article was originally published in the May/June 2016 issue of Popular Science,
under the title The Internet is Broken.
Footnotes
1.The Torture Memo, co-authored by John Yoo, a lawyer at the Justice Department,
authorized enhanced interrogation techniques to be used against 'unlawful combatants'
in the wake of 9/11. This included 'abdominal slaps', 'longtime standing', and 'simulated
drowning' aka waterboarding.
2.The Supreme Court unanimously ruled that police need to obtain a warrant before
searching a cell phone of someone that has been arrested.
3.According to Google's most recent Transparency Report, filed in March 2016, 77
percent of traffic on Google's servers is encrypted.
4.In 2015, a three-judge panel for the United States Court of Appeals for the Second
Circuit ruled a key portion of the Patriot Act Section 215, which allowed for bulk
collection of Americans' phone records was illegal.
5.WhatsApp was briefly shut down in Brazil after the company refused to comply
with wiretaps mandated by a judge in So Paulo. Roughly 100 million Brazilians use the
service. The judge's order was followed several months later by the arrest of a Facebook
executive in Brazil WhatsApp is owned by Facebook for failure to turn over
information from a WhatsApp account linked to a criminal investigation.
6.In April 2016, WhatsApp announced that the service had completed its end-to-end
encryption rollout that it began nearly two years prior.
7.The encryption algorithm was said to be stronger than anything currently used at
that point, with a unique twist: the encrypted data would include a copy of the key used
to encrypt it, which was held 'in escrow' by the federal government. All an agency like
the NSA or FBI had to do was take the key out of escrow to encrypt the necessary
information.
8.In an op-ed published by the Washington Post last December, Blaze wrote,
"Clipper failed not because the NSA was incompetent, but because designing a system
with a backdoor was and still is fundamentally in conflict with basic security
principles ... For all of computer sciences great advances, we simply dont know how to
build secure, reliable software of this complexity."
 9.PRISM was enacted in 2007, and enabled the NSA to collect Internet
communications from upwards of nine U.S. companies. In 2013, President Barack
Obama weighed in on the NSA's data-collecting omnipotence, calling the agency's
position "a circumscribed, narrow system directed at us being able to protect our
people."
10.One consequence of the hack was Amy Pascal losing her job as co-chairman of
Sony Pictures Entertainment.
11.About 21.5 million records, including Social Security numbers, are estimated to
have been stolen.
12.According to a 2015 Pew study, 40 percent of those surveyed believe that social
media sites should not save data from their browsing history.
13.On May 31, 2015, the most controversial aspects of Section 215 of the Patriot Act,
which included the collection of phone records (among others) in bulk, expired.
14.President Obama did not agree with the board's decision, which was announced
in January 2014: "I believe it is important that the capability that this program is
designed to meet is preserved."
15.In July 2013, then-NSA chief General Keith Alexander alleged that intelligence
from the agency's various surveillance programs prevented 54 different 'terrorist-related
activities.' That same year, though, Patrick Leahy, a Democratic Senator from Vermont,
asked Alexander at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing about the validity of his
statement: "Would you agree that the 54 cases that keep getting cited by the
administration were not all plots, and of the 54, only 13 had some nexus to the U.S.? To
which Alexander simply replied, "Yes."
16.Called the Hemisphere Project, the New York Times reported in 2013 that the
DEA, through the use of subpoenas, has access to all calls that passed through an AT&T
switch (which doesn't limit the calls to AT&T customers) for the past 26 years. This
amounted to 4 billion call records daily.
17.To Glenn Greenwald of the Guardian in 2013.
18. Writing for the majority in Riley v. California, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote,
"Opposition to such searches was in fact one of the driving forces behind the Revolution
itself."
19.Soltani was hired as a senior advisor in the Office of Science and Technology
Policy in late 2015. He was denied security clearance several months after his move was
announced, prompting speculation that his reporting on Snowden and mass
surveillance at the Washington Post had irked many within the intelligence communit
THIS SCIENTIST RE-WIRES FROGS TO GROW EXTRA LIMBS. COULD IT
WORK IN HUMANS?
By Adam Piore posted Dec 26th, 2016

Michael Levin rewires bodies

One morning in spring 2000, Michael Levin flopped in his chair and clicked on his
desktop computer. A newly minted assistant professor at Harvard, Levin, then 30, was
looking to solve a riddle that had baffled science for centuries: How do our dividing
embryonic cells know on which side of our bodies to grow our hearts, our livers, our gall
bladders? Countless people throughout history have been born with some, even all, of
their organs transposed, and yet functioning. Levin suspected DNA alone was not to
blame; there had to be some other trigger. Days earlier, he had ordered an imaging test
on a half dozen chick embryos at the verge of organized development. As he pulled up
the results, he stared, amazed. Electrical charges, rendered in yellows and reds, lay
across the cells in patches, left to right, as clearly as a neon This Way arrow. Levin sat
back and blinked. He was witnessing, for the first time in history, embryo cells telling
each other left from right via electricity.
For decades, genetics taught us a simple truth: Each cell in our body (and there are
billions) contains the blueprint that tells us how to grow. That might not be the whole
story. Levin and a few others now say that tiny bioelectric signals surging through and
among our cells act as an instruction to kick-start gene expression. These signals point
cells in the right direction as they start to grow into things like hearts, and influence the
shape and function of the body. For two decades, Levin has set about proving it.
In doing so, he has created a startling Island of Dr. Moreau zoo of freaks. He forced
tadpoles to grow an eye on their gut; induced frogs to sprout six legs; and caused worms
to grow two heads, which, when severed, will grow back just like a salamanders severed
tailall by manipulating the faintest of bioelectric signals.
He now thinksno, he knowshe will one day do the same for humans. So if a
solider loses an arm to a bomb on the battlefield, he will simply grow a new one. I dont
know if it will be faster than the normal process of human fetal growth, says Levin,
sitting in his laboratory office at Tufts University where he now works, tending his
creations as well as a jungle of houseplants. Worst-case scenario: If you get your arm
blown off at 25, by 35 you will have a teenagers hand, which is very functional.
To do this, Levin traverses the most infinitesimal of passages. Across the surface of
each cell sit hollow proteins known as ion channels. Charged molecules (or ions) surge
through these pathways, entering and exiting cells and changing cell polarities and
voltage gradients (the difference in voltage across the body). Tiny gates inside the
channels control flow, swinging open and closed based on certain signals; when enough
gates open, ions flood the cell and change its charge. The cell passes information to its
neighbors through another group of gated proteins called gap junctions. By deploying
such microscopic tools as neurotoxins, Levin easily opens or blocks channels, flooding
them with ions or strangling them. In the process, he creates creatures that nature never
designed and that few of us have ever imagined.
The endgame of this field, Levin says, is complete specification of shape. Youd be
able to sit down on a computer, like in Photoshop, and draw what you want, and out it
comes. If you said, I want a triangular frog with seven legs, and the eyes should be over
here, I dont see any reason you couldnt do that.
 Its a goal that sounds megalomaniacal, preposterous, Frankensteinian. Even
supportersincluding his former Harvard mentor, developmental biologist Cliff Tabin
question his controversial claims. While the genetics field now believes that ion
channels play a role in creating and differentiating organ placement in the body, many
doubt Levin can drive the mechanism. How do you control it? asks Tabin. If you are
designing the logic of the system, how do you decide where to make a head as opposed
to where you make a tail? You might need channel proteins to make these decisions, but
that might not be the linchpin of the decision itself.
Levin disagrees. And his lifes work, his motivating animation and purpose, is to
prove he can use bioelectricity to fix anything.
At 47 years old, on the short side, with pale blue eyes, and an often untidy beard,
Levin looks a lot like Pavel Chekov, the navigator in the original Star Trek TV show.
Mostly its the lax brown hair pasted across his forehead. But hes also Russian, as was
Chekov. Despite immigrating to Swampscott, Massachusetts, a seaside town north of
Boston, when he was child, his slight Boston accent is sometimes colored by a subtle
Slavic inflection.
Thats a six-legged frog we made, showing you can trigger ectopic limb formation by
appropriate voltage gradients, Levin says, in his usual clinical deadpan. He rarely
betrays amazement, humor, or even a glint of smug at what he has wrought. He is
standing in the corridor outside his office, a stretch of hall dominated by an unsettling
gallery of his creations. Like a music producers gold-record collection, he has hung at
least a dozen poster-size blowups of his scientific journal covers, such as a 2007
Development, depicting a frog with two legs, one left arm and three crab-arm-like
protrusions blooming from the right side of its body.
When Levin was a kid, about 10 years old, his father would bring home computers
from his programming job at Digital Equipment Corporation, which made those boxy
computers you see in Eddie Murphy cop movies. Levin used them to log into the
companys mainframe to learn coding. By 15, he wrote a version of Pac-Man, created a
software-graphics editor, and published a journal paper, showing how to use
trigonometry to draw 3D-like shapes on a 2D screen.
A year later, in 1986, Levins father took the family to Vancouver for Expo 86 (aka
the Worlds Fair). The experience would change Levins life. A monorail hummed
overhead. Eurythmics played. General Motors showed off a new holographic technology.
But Levins big lightbulb moment didnt happen in a pavilion or aboard a magnetic
levitating train. It happened in a tiny bookstore, in downtown Vancouver, far from the
crowds.
One day, rummaging the stores shelves, Levin found a copy of the 1985 The Body
Electric: Electromagnetism and the Foundation of Life by Robert Becker and Gary
Selden. An orthopedic surgeon for the U.S. Veterans Administration, Becker had
become fixated on bioelectricity: the way our bodies interact with magnetic fields (like
power lines) as well as the impulses that animate our muscles and brains. As far back as
the 1780s, Italian physicist Luigi Galvani discovered the presence of animal electricity
by attaching electrodes to a dead frogs legs and making them twitch. Other scientists
later figured out that ions carried this energy through the body. It wasnt until the 1930s
and 40s that new tools helped researchers learn that ion flows could control a cells
polarity.
 Becker cited these studies and added details from his own experiments. He
amputated the limbs of frogs and salamanders, and applied a voltmeter to the wound
sites. He found that within 24 hours of an amputation, the wound-site voltage in both
species spiked from -10 mV to +20. But the voltage in the salamander later plummeted
to -30 mV, a pattern that preceded limb regeneration.
Becker wondered if you could change the voltage in the frog, would it do the same:
regrow the lopped-off limb? He thought so. But at the time, he did not have tools precise
enough to try it.
Levin, just 16 years old, was electrified by this question. When he returned home, he
tracked down each study Becker cited, read it, looked up the references, read those, and
followed the trail back to Galvani, Xeroxing hundreds of papers along the way.
His obsession remained a hobby, a side project to his real work: coding. Still, it kept
nudging its way into his work. Later, as a computer science major at Tufts, he wanted to
create an artificial intelligence, which he felt would need the ability to self-repair. But to
figure out how to make a machine do it, he first needed to figure out how nature does it.
So he borrowed magnetic coils from the physics lab, wrapped them around sea urchin
embryos, and measured the way electromagnetic waves changed the rate of cell division,
findings that led to his first two scientific papers. By senior year, he had started a
software company. But what he really wanted was to join a research lab to make science-
altering discoveries. So he left the software company and soon found himself in Tabins
lab at Harvard Medical School.
At the time, Tabins team had identified a signaling gene that seemed to express on
the left side of the body early in development. They knew a bit about what it did in later
stages, but they hadnt looked into why it was located where it was. Not one of his
postdocs would tackle the deeper questions of why and how. I have a number of really
smart, talented, and ambitious students; none of them would touch it with a 10-foot
pole, says Tabin. They did not want to take the risk of throwing years of their lives into
a black hole. As soon as he entered the lab, Levindespite doubts from his thesis adviser
jumped on it. Levin realized, correctly, says Tabin, that it was an richly unexplored
bit of science. Mike, when he sees something he thinks is a really cool idea, he doesnt
worry about what other people think, says Tabin.
Levin then found other genes that controlled the left-right symmetry of body parts,
and eventually illuminated the genetic pathway that helped direct the action. But he still
believed something else drove the signals forward. By 2000, he knew it was
bioelectricity, but he needed to know more about how it worked. A colleague had access
to a tool that made the cells fluoresce red, green, yellow, and blue based on voltage.
Levin asked him to try it on some chick embryos. And then, on that spring day in 2000,
there it was: proof electricity played a key role in gene expression, in influencing where
and when organs grow.
Levin must traverse the tiniest of passages, a hollow protein known as an ion
channel, no more than an atom or two wide.
Sparking life into severed stumps to make them regrow is not all that new. In the
1970s, pioneers such as biologists Lionel Jaffe and Richard Borgens showed they could
ignite the beginnings of limb regeneration in frogs by applying electrical currents. But
they had conducted their experiments with simple batteries. Levin is the first to
precisely tweak bioelectric signals at the cellular level, and to try to crack the code for
what it means to those cells. At Tufts, he built a complex toolbox to do this. Among
those tools: neurotoxins and drugs that block ion channels that would otherwise stay
open, or open those that would stay shut; RNA that also codes for new channels, which
Levin injects into cells via glass micropipette; molecules that can transport ions through
cell membranes; and genes that code for ion channels (discovered by brain, kidney, and
gut specialists). He tracks the impact of voltage changes using fluorescent proteins and
dyes, which grow brighter as the voltage gradient rises.
Each cell surface hosts hundreds of ion channels. But only one or two dominate these
voltage gradients, so Levin can easily manipulate them. For instance, just four channels
act as the master control knobs that determine if organs grow on the correct side of the
body. Tweaking any one of them randomizes the organ placement. Levin grew an eye on
a tadpoles gut, just by adding one extra channel. If you ask the question, Where does
the eye come from in the first place? you look in the embryo, and you can see that
theres a particular bioelectric pattern that sets up the endogenous eye field, Levin
explains. Now if I set up that same pattern somewhere else, will I get an eye? The
answer, as we know, is yes.
Inducing a limb to regrow requires a little extra TLC. To make a tadpole regrow a
tail, Levin soaks the wound in a solution so charged ions flood its cells. Soak time: one
hour. Eight days later: new tail. To regrow a limb takes a 24-hour soak. A functional leg
takes about six months. The purpose of the soak, Levin says, is that it kick-starts all
these other cascades of gene expression, of cell behavior.
Levin faces challenges to do the same for humans, or any warm-blooded mammal.
First, warm-blooded animals have much higher blood pressure than reptiles. So theres
a huge risk of bleeding out if the wound is not papered over with a scab. Second, warm-
blooded limbs tend to grow more slowly, allowing a greater risk that infection will take
hold. And just as with any animal, the body attacks infection with inflammation, which
could inhibit cellular growth. Also, to conduct electrical current around a wound, it must
stay moist and be protected from air.
Levin, along with David Kaplan, chairman of Tufts department of biomedical
engineering, developed a watertight BioDome that they place over an animals wound
site. Levins hope is that a human amputee would have to wear it only a few hours, just
long enough to give the cells the initial signal to start growing. Made of silicone, rubber,
and silk, it would contain an aquatic habitat similar to what you find surrounding an
embryo, but filled with the sort of ion-manipulating tools that would trigger limb
regrowth. The pair have put BioDomes over frogs severed limbs, which helped the frogs
regrow functioning legs. The tools are there, says Kaplan. Its just getting everything
to work together, so its only a matter of time.
Levins work could soon change cancer treatment. This past March, he and
colleagues made global headlines when they reversed cancerous tumors in frogs using
light to manipulate bioelectric signals. Many cancerous tumors, Levin says, have
abnormal bioelectric signaling, in the form of massive cell depolarization. Its this wonky
signal, he believes, that causes them to grow and spread.
Instead of nuking the body with chemo, it might be possible to one day coax deviant
cells back into normal tissue. He has also shown he can reverse embryonic birth defects,
such as a malformed forebrain in a frog, a defect that bears similarities to those caused
in human embryos by a parents alcohol abuse.
Already doctors use ion-channel drugs to treat certain cardiac and neurological
illnesses. Levin says those same drugs might be used to treat cancers and correct birth
defects, if detected in the embryo, by restoring the necessary signals. Id put money on
the fact this is going to happen within the next 25 years, Levin says. Im being
conservative, but I think in my lifetime, well see that.
Not everyone is sure. Most of the work in regenerative medicine takes place around
the genome and stem cells. And while some scientists think that sort of singular focus
neglects other potential factorssuch as bioelectricityscience as a whole is not quite
ready to accept Levins assertions that bioelectricity is a primary trigger.
For us to fully buy into a lot of the things he is talking about, I think there should be
a bit more mechanistic insight, says Andre Levchenko, a biomedical engineer who
directs the Yale Systems Biology Institute. We should understand at the same level and
clarity as we understand genetic information that controls cell function. We dont have
such an understanding for electrical potential. If his aim is to gain the same level of
understanding, its laudable. He should be supported. Its clearly part of the story.
Despite lingering doubts, Levin has landed powerful backing for his experiments,
which have been funded by the National Institutes of Health. Last April, the Paul G.
Allen Frontiers Group, launched by the billionaire Microsoft co-founder, bestowed a $10
million grant, which could balloon to $30 million. Thomas C. Skalak, the groups
executive director, recalled the reaction after Levin gave a lecture the previous winter
with a slide show of his creations. It was earth-shattering, Skalak says. People were
saying it changed their whole view of biology, that they had never seen data that showed
one could have permanent changes in morphology of an organism above the level of a
genetic change. It really was an eye-opener. His hope is that Levin will crack open a
new field in bioscience. We expect it to mushroom, he says.
So does Levin. His most ambitious goal is to grow any shape he wants, in the lab or
in utero. That level of understanding would mean he could fix any malady. And he is
using his computer skills to do it. He is designing computational models and artificial -
intelligence programs that will analyze and predict how changing gradients affect an
organisms shape and functionin essence, cracking lifes bioelectric code in order to
fully control it.
We know only a little bit about it right now, Levin says. We need to do much more
to really have good control. He likens it to brain science. We know memories are
embedded in the brain, but neuroscientists dont know how to tweak specific neuron
states to edit them. Same with us, says Levin. We know electrical properties encode a
sort of pattern memory in tissues that cause morphological change. But we are only
beginning to understand the formula that connects those patterns. He adds: Im
optimistic we will see the long-term stuff. Its very hard. This is frontier stuff. But you
and I will see it in our lifetime.
CHINA'S RACE TO SPACE DOMINATION
By By Clay Dillow, Jeffrey Lin, and P.W. Singer September 20, 2016

Before this decade is out, humanity will go where its never gone before: the far side
of the moon. This dark sideforever facing away from ushas long been a mystery. No
human-made object has ever touched its surface. The mission will be a marvel of
engineering. It will involve a rocket that weighs hundreds of tons (traveling almost
250,000 miles), a robot lander, and an unmanned lunar rover that will use sensors,
cameras, and an infrared spectrometer to uncover billion-year-old secrets from the soil.
The mission also might scout the moons supply of helium-3a promising material for
fusion energy. And the nation planting its starry flag on this historic trip will be the
Peoples Republic of China.

After years of investment and strategy, China is well on its way to becoming a space
superpowerand maybe even a dominant one. The Change 4 lunar mission is just one
example of its scope and ambition for turning space into an important civilian and
military domain. Now, satellites guide Chinese aircraft, missiles, and drones, while
watching over crop yields and foreign military bases. The growing number of missions
involving Chinese rockets and taikonauts are a source of immense national pride.
China sees space capability as an indication of global-leadership status, says John -
Logsdon, founder of the Space Policy Institute at George Washington University. It
gives China legitimacy in an area that is associated with great power.
In June, China launched its Long March 7, the latest addition to an emerging fleet of
massive rockets. How it works: (1.) The cargo area brings supplies, like satellites, into
orbit. (2.) Stage two holds tanks of liquid oxygen and kerosene. (3.) Four Engines use
71.7 tons of propellants. (4.) The boosters detach via pyrotechnic separation. 5.The total
Liftoff thrust is 7,080 kilonewtons.
Chinas estimated space budget is still dwarfed by NASAs, which is $19.3 billion for
this year alone. But Chinas making the most of its outlay. This past year, it had 19
successful space launchesthe second-highest number behind Russias 26, and ahead of
Americas 18. The decades ahead will see a range of Chinese missions that will match
and maybe even surpassprevious NASA exploits, including quantum communications
satellites and a crewed mission to the moon in the early 2030s.
By landing on the moon, China isnt just joining an exclusive two-nation club. It is
also redefining what space meansmilitarily, economically, and politicallyin the 21st
century. There are plans for heavy-lift rockets, manned space stations, and one of the
worlds largest satellite-imaging and -navigation networks. Meanwhile the U.S.
particularly where human spaceflight is concernedis hardly moving at all. I dont
worry about China suddenly leapfrogging us, says James Lewis, a director at the Center
for Strategic and International Studies, a D.C. think tank. I worry about us being
distracted and waking up to realize that they have a much more powerful position in
space.
As in the U.S. space marketplace, China relies on many state-linked aerospace
companies working with its China National Space Administration (CNSA) to perform a
dual role of supporting its military. Theres the Aerospace Science and Technology
Corporation (the primary contractor for building spacecraft), its Academy of Launch
Vehicle Technology subsidiary (which helps design the nations so-called Long March
rockets), the Academy of Space Technology (designing many of Chinas satellites), and
the Aerospace Science and Industry Corporation, a defense contractor that builds items
like the atomic clocks on navigation satellites.
Such interconnectedness goes back to the beginnings of Chinas rocket age and,
ironically, to American soil. The man considered the father of Chinese rocketry is Qian
Xuesen. A Chinese national, Qian had attended MIT in 1935, went to work on the
Manhattan Project, and later became a co-founder of Caltechs famed Jet Propulsion
Laboratory. But during the Joseph McCarthy era, he was accused of being a communist
sympathizer, put under house arrest for five years, and, in 1955, he returned to China.
There he was greeted as a hero. He later developed Chinas ballistic-missile and space-
rocket programs. In fact, China still relies on the Long March rockets he helped develop
to launch its space systems.
Starting in the 80s, China put up sophisticated communications and intelligence
satellites, and offered cheap satellite-launch services to other nations. It began a
taikonaut (a mashup of the Mandarin word for outer space and naut, which is Greek
for sailor) training program, and started building out manned mission capsules and
space planes. With the launch of its manned Shenzhou 5, which carried taikonaut Yang
Liwei into space for 21 hours in 2003, Chinas space race began to hit its marks. From
there, China made rapid leaps: multiple crewed missions, spacewalks, and, in 2011, the
launch of Tiangong-1, a two-person space lab. Early next year, it will launch its first-
generation cargo ship, Tianzhou-1, which means heavenly vessel. The ship will dock
with an existing Chinese space lab and bring supplies for science experiments.
If any of this sounds like a repeat of feats already accomplished decades ago by
others (U.S. and Soviet Union), that glib observation falls to pieces when you consider
technologies like Chinas QUESS satellitewhich will likely be orbiting overhead by the
time you read this. Short for Quantum Experiments at Space Scale, QUESS marks a
first-of-its-kind attempt to beam quantum-encrypted information between an orbiting
satellite and ground stations below. By encoding that information into the quantum
states of particles like photons, such security schemes ensure that any attempt to
intercept or tamper with the transmission alerts both sender and receiver, making
quantum encryption theoretically unbreakable.
In an era of global electronic surveillance, a quantum-communications network
could sidestep even the best cyberintelligence operations, allowing Chinese military and
intelligence assets to swap information while keeping potential adversaries or spies in
the dark. As long as China is the only nation bouncing quantum communications
around the atmosphere, it will enjoy scientific and strategic security advantages, as well
as a boost to economic security: QUESS researchers say that a long-term goal is the
protection of financial communications.
Chinas rising space prowess has, predictably, come with geopolitical friction
between Beijing and Washington. While the nations have deep levels of trade with each
other, they also eye one another as a security threat. In fact, Chinas space program is
repeatedly cited in U.S. security reports with a growing sense of unease. As the U.S. and
Soviet Union learned in the 1960s and 70s, showcasing capability in space often
translates to influence on the ground. The military benefits of going to the moon are
zero, but the geopolitical effects are real. Chinas going to get back to the moon before
we do; theyre going to have people walking around on another body, and were not,
Lewis says. Right now the U.S. is seen as the leader in space, but were kind of resting
on our laurels. So what happens when the rest of the world wakes up and realizes that
China is the leader?
That means Chinas heavenly rise could realign partnerships in space. With its steady
drumbeat of near-term mission milestones and concrete objectives (as opposed to a
vague trip to Mars), the CNSA gives a lot of countries a nice opportunity to develop new
partnerships to stay active in space exploration, says Alanna Krolikowski, an expert in
Chinese technology policy and a visiting professor at the University of Gttingen in
Germany.
Chinas going to get back to the moon before we do; theyre going to have people
walking around on another body, and were not.
China is also playing geopolitics with nation states that arent always willing to be
aligned with Washingtons self-interests. It has been offering cheap and easy access to
space, launching satellites for countries like Venezuela, Laos, Nigeria, and Belarus.
Pakistan has used Chinas military-grade satellite-navigation system, suggesting that
China will also allow use of space-derived intelligence as part of future alliance building.
And if it continues its pace, China will launch its experimental Tiangong-2 space lab
later this year, followed by a crew that will dock there and test technologies critical for
building a permanent manned outpost in orbit. The first module of that outpost
Tiangong-3is Chinas highest- profile project. It is expected to lift off in 2022, marking
a new era of Chinese space research. Tiangong-3 will be able to support three
taikonauts, in addition to a bevy of scientific research. Notably, CNSA has already rolled
out the welcome mat to other countries, offering the opportunity to place experiments,
and astronauts, aboard.
Given a Congressional ban that prohibits NASA from cooperating with the CNSA in
space, its unlikely the U.S. will be among them. But many of Americas current partners
in space very well might. After all, if the U.S. and co-owners shutter the expiring
International Space Station in 2024 as planned, China will be the only country up there.
Just as in the Cold War, there is also the possibility that space activities could yield
more peace, not less. As Chinas military and civilian dependence on space begins to
mirror that of Americas, the hazard-filled nature of space operations creates an
incentive for both nationsalong with other space actorsto a maintain at least an
uneasy cooperation. Global reliance on the space-based communications and navigation
that power our digital age means that America and China will have to work together to
draw up the rules for the crowded new space age. After all, the solar system is our
communal turf. At least for now.
THE FUTURE OF MONEY
By Kashmir Hill December 22, 2015

The next time you pull a tattered $5 bill out of your pocket to pay for a coffee,
consider the fact that youre handling one of societys oldest and most important
inventions: money.
Relatively soon after humans decided that we liked living in groups, instead of in
panda-style isolation, we came up with ways to value what we hadand make people
pay for it. We bartered cattle and grain until the Lydiansthe Bronze Age inhabitants of
what is modern-day Turkeyrealized those were hard to stuff into a wallet, and
introduced government-minted coins. It turned out coins were still a pain to carry
around, so eventually they evolved into the paper money we all use today.
But paper was still just a stand-in for metal: Sure, coins mostly disappeared, but we
were symbolically carrying gold around in the pockets of our bell-bottom jeans until
1971, when Richard Nixon took the U.S. off the gold standard. Divorced from the
physical, money became a kind of belief system. It went from representing something
precious and valuable to representing value in and of itself. Everyone agrees that if you
walk into Starbucks with a $5 bill, you can walk out with a latte.
Divorced from the physical, money became a kind of belief system.
Of course, rarely do any of us walk into Starbucks with a $5 bill anymore. We walk in
with a credit card, or a Starbucks gift card, or with an Apple Pay app on our iPhone. And
thats another way money has changed. Its become more and more abstracted. Its
numbers sitting in our bank accounts or on our credit-card statements. Its a series of
digital ledgers kept by banks, payment processors, and financial startups. The USA
Networks Mr. Robot imagines the fragility of that system. The plot follows hackers who
planned to break into the servers of the countrys biggest lender and erase all the data
obliterating debt and ushering in a new anarchic, moneyless society.
Money grows more complex by the day, particularly now that Silicon Valley has
taken it up as one of its causes clbres. Startups offer dozens of schemes to disrupt it.
Yet, Silicon Valley, which has changed the world in so many fundamental ways, hasnt
actually changed money that much; its just evolved how we spend it. Paypal, Square,
Stripe, Venmotheyre all apps built on top of the old technology that is money. Just as
paper once required metal, most payment apps require a bank account or a credit card.
The only true disruption to money that weve seen in the Internet age came not from
a Palo Alto garage but a list-serv for tech-savvy libertarians. Bitcoin, which spun out of
the mind of the pseudonymous engineer Satoshi Nakamoto in 2008, is a
cryptographically maintained currency with value imbued by the computers of its users,
not a government mint. Theoretically, it is far more secure than credit cards. If you used
Bitcoin to buy something at Target, say, and Target later got hacked (possible, as we
have learned), youd suffer no consequences. Its like programmable cash.
But thats not a concept most people can get their heads around, which has been
Bitcoins great limitation. It might overcome that hurdle, or it might not. The only
certainty is that money will keep evolving. If money represents value, and value is a
reflection of our needs and desires, then money is simply a reflection of us. And it will
continue to change as long as we do.
Bitcoin And Beyond
 Allegations and admittances are once again circling about the identity of Satoshi
Nakamoto, the alias of the unknown creator of Bitcoin. The Economist, BBC, and GQ
have all reported that Craig Wright, who has been previously accused of being Satoshi, is
claiming that he is indeed Bitcoin's creator. Wright himself has even published a long
blog post, where he waxes poetic about Jean-Paul Sartre and thanks his many
supporters.
"If I sign Craig Wright, it is not the same as if I sign Craig Wright, Satoshi," he
writes, twisting Sartre for his own means.
But the dust is nowhere near settled on this debate. Bitcoin and security
researchers are furiously blogging their efforts to confirm or denounce Wright as the
real Satoshi, and coming to mixed results.
Security researcher Dan Kaminsky was unable to verify the signature that Wright
provided, but then later updated his post saying it worked with a different version of
software. Reddit is on its usual tear, claiming that the signature provided is bunk.
Blogger and Starfighter CEO Patrick McKenzie posted on GitHub that his attempts to
verify the signature failed.
"Flimflam and hokum"
"Wright's post is flimflam and hokum which stands up to a few minutes of cursory
scrutiny, and demonstrates a competent sysadmin's level of familiarity with
cryptographic tools, but ultimately demonstrates no non-public information about
Satoshi," McKenzie writes.
To many familiar with Bitcoin, the most puzzling detail is the endorsement of
Gavin Andresen, chief scientist at the Bitcoin Foundation. Andresen claims to have
communicated with Satoshi in 2010 and 2011, and was convinced that Wright was the
person behind those messages after being flown to meet him in London.
Part of the time the two spent together was "a careful cryptographic verification of
messages signed with keys that only Satoshi should possess," Andresen said, although
that verification has proven to be unreliably replicated.
In a Reddit post this morning, Andresen explains how the verification worked.
"Craig signed a message that I chose ("Gavin's favorite number is eleven. CSW," if I
recall correctly) using the private key from block number 1. That signature was copied
on to a clean usb stick I brought with me to London, and then validated on a brand-new
laptop with a freshly downloaded copy of electrum. I was not allowed to keep the
message or laptop (fear it would leak before Official Announcement)," he wrote.
Short of Wright releasing more concrete evidence that he is Satoshi, the debates
will continue. We'll update this article with any other revelations, but the big takeaway
from the news is to stay suspicious, because blockchains are still falling into place.
THE WORLDS MOST STABLE CURRENCY IS BACKED BY CARBON
By Jeremy Deaton Nexus Media October 13, 2016

Even casual viewers of Fox News have seen commercials for companies like
Goldline.com. You send them money. They send you gold. Its a smart pitch to the
networks core daytime audience of people who worry that currency has no intrinsic
value.
To be fair, inflation anxiety sells. Who among us hasnt wondered what gives money
its worth? At one time, every dollar in circulation represented a fragment of gold or
silver stored in a federal vault. Today, the dollar is backed not by precious metals, but by
the full faith and credit of the U.S. government. Whether our currency should derive its
value from gold, silver or something more abstract is a question that has vexed
capitalists of every stripe.
Its like a rabbit hole, said Stan Stalnaker, an American entrepreneur. You go
down the idea of What is money? What is currency?
In the age of BitCoin, the answer is squishy. Computer geeks, operating
independently of any government, create digital currencies that are exchanged around
the world. Stalnaker is one of them. He invented a digital currency called Ven. It lives
online. It can be shared across borders. And??heres the kicker??its partly backed by
carbon.
Dont tell the folks at Goldline.com, but Stalnakers digital shekel might be the most
stable currency on Earth.
A post-national currency
Stan Stalnaker has a gift for people, a knack for the kind of easy back-and-forth
prized in barbers and politicians. Impeccably mannered and stylishly dressed, he would
find himself the life of the party at a strangers wedding. Should you fall into his orbit
near the open bar, prepare to shake hands with every man, woman, girl, boy and guide
dog within shouting distance.
His magnum opus is, predictably, a global social network.
That network, Hub Culture, takes its name from the eponymous book by Stalnaker,
which grew out of a column he wrote for Time and CNN.com. During a stint in Hong
Kong, the author-turned-entrepreneur had a front-row seat to globalization. His
response to the dizzying interconnectedness of humanity was to dive in.
Hub Culture was born, and with it, dozens of associated co-working spaces from
Stockholm to Singapore. Members of the post-national social network needed a way to
do business with each other, and the proliferation of currencies made transactions slow
and expensive. In 2007, Stalnaker launched Ven, a digital currency that could be
exchanged across borders with no fees.
A thing like Ven has tremendous utility, and not just for tech-savvy cosmopolitans. It
is could also prove useful in developing countries where coin-and-paper currencies may
be volatile and difficult to exchange. Last year, Stalnaker won a grant from the Bill and
Melinda Gates Foundation to bring his currency to the mobile phones of the global poor.
By lubricating financial transactions, Ven could be to poverty what condoms and
mosquito nets are to disease. And this may have you wondering, what exactly is a digital
currency?
A less creepy BitCoin
 You have probably heard of BitCoin, the most famous and infamous of digital
currencies. Like all digital currencies, it only exists electronically and incurs low
transaction costs. BitCoin earns its value from its scarcity. New coins are digitally
mined, unlocked by solving complex math problems. Its value is extremely volatile.
Stalnaker isnt a hoodie-clad hacker and his currency isnt BitCoin. Ven is issued by a
private central reserve unaffiliated with a government. Its backed by a mix of currencies
and commodities, including dollars, euros, gold, silver and wheat. A single Ven is worth
around a dime.
Because Ven is asset-backed, its far more stable than BitCoin. A report from Arbor
Research shows Ven to be more stable than traditional currencies, as well. Stalnaker was
more emphatic. It is literally the most stable currency in the world, and it has been
since 2009, he said.
The chart on the left shows the volatility of the dollar (blue line) compared to the Ven
(green line). The Ven generally reliably tracks the dollar. The chart on the right shows
the volatility of BitCoin (red line) compared to the dollar (blue line). BitCoin shows wide
swings in value compared to the dollar.
The key is diversification. Some assets will go up in value. Others will go down. Ven
remains stable over time.
Its really a currency thats designed for traders, said Stalnaker. And thats almost
antithetical to the financial trading markets, where everyone is looking for volatility so
they can make money on the swings.
In 2014, we started trading on regulated exchanges. From there, the volume
exploded. We did half a billion Ven in trading just in the first year, he said. These are
certified financial institutions, or regulated entities who would hold Ven and trade it.
For all its stability, Ven isnt just a proxy for the value of dollars, euros and gold. In
addition to those assets, Stalnakers currency is backed by another increasingly
important commodity: carbon.
The first green currency
In a race toward global catastrophe, the Earths climate has been setting records
faster than Katie Ledecky. 2014 was the hottest year on record, until 2015 supplanted it
in the record books. After months of history-making heat, it is almost certain that 2016
will take the crown.
Experts say that if we want to keep the global thermostat at a tolerable level, well
have to do more than drive Teslas and install solar panels. Well have to scrub decades of
accumulated carbon pollution from the skies. Techno-utopians envision planet-saving
machines that would vacuum up surplus greenhouse gases, but early attempts are costly
and impractical. So far, our best tool is a tree.
Trees scrub carbon from the skies and store it in their leaves and branches. They are
what climate nerds call a carbon sink. Because trees soak up a quantifiable sum of
pollution, forests produce what are known as carbon credits, tradable certificates
representing averted carbon pollution.
Ven Mobile
Hub Culture
Ven Mobile
What does this have to do with a carbon-based currency?
Every time Hub Culture issues more currency, it buys carbon credits, helping to
protect a vital carbon sink from degradation and destruction. The company has helped
protect 25,000 acres of Amazon rainforest. According to Stalnaker, it is the worlds first
green currency. Carbon represents 7 percent of its value.
We can point to forests and say, This forest is helping to back this currency, said
Stalnaker. It creates an economic incentive for holding and generating forests.
This is a bright idea when it comes to the climate, but its also shrewd financial
planning. As the Paris Climate Agreement enters into force, it will signal the beginning
of the end of the fossil fuel era. World leaders are pushing through policies to put a price
on carbon pollution. Depending on how these measures are structured, carbon credits
will become more valuable, and so will Ven.
If carbon credits fail to appreciate, that wont undo the currency. Carbon represents
only a small portion of its total asset backing. Ideally, however, Ven would become more
valuable over time. More people would use the currency, preserving more acres of
carbon-trapping forests.
If you scale Ven, you are scaling an economic value for natural preservation, said
Stalnaker. Thats why I love it. Thats why Im passionate about what we do.
Asked what he envisioned for the future of Ven, Stalnaker answered in one word:
Ubiquity.
A Ven in every wallet

Ven didnt start off as a green currency. In its early days, it was partly backed by oil.
Then Stalnaker found religion. In support of the fossil fuel divestment movement, he
replaced oil with steel. Carbon credits made Ven that much greener. Soon, the currency
was less a tool of exchange than an expression of his values.
Stalnakers next aima Ven in every wallet??will take some work. Currently, only
Hub Culture members can use Ven, and membership is by invitation only. The currency
operates in a closed system, rendering it impervious to any number of rules and
regulations. If he wants to ramp up circulation, he will, at some point or another, have to
enter the regulatory thicket.
Dont expect this to slow him down. Stalnaker is an unrepentant dreamer. He talks
about self-actualization and self-transformation with the casual fluency of a self-help
evangelist. But he is also the rare entrepreneur who can turn buzz words into business.
His digital currency speaks to his highest ideals.
I went to Antarctica in 2005, and I saw the firsthand effects of climate change??
literally everything melting, said Stalnaker. I have traveled all over the world and seen
so much environmental destruction.
Human history is punctuated by stories of societies cut down by environmental
catastrophe. Climate change threatens to extend the list of casualties. We have every
incentive to plunder the earth of its limited resources hoarding fish from our oceans,
coal from our mountains, wood from our forests??and we have frighteningly little
incentive to do otherwise.
Right now, our society is not geared to protect resources, said Stalnaker. There
have to be financial mechanisms in place that guide us towards resource generation or
resource protection.
Ven is an attempt to turn living forests into a valuable commodity; build their value
into a universal currency. Every exchange, every transaction would be an expression of
our aspirations to build a safer, more verdant world.
 I dont think its worthwhile to do things just for sake of doing them or especially
just to make money, said Stalnaker. I think you have to have something more
meaningful in mind.
CRYPTOCURRENCY
By Katy Peek December 22 2015

If youre not a math genius or a cryptographer, it can be hard to wrap your head
around what Bitcoin is. So two years ago, I decided to get familiarized by immersing
myself in it. I got rid of my cash and credit cards, and spent a week in San Francisco
living on Bitcoin. At the time, few people had heard of the cryptocurrency, and fewer
actually accepted it. I couldnt pay my rent. I had to walk or bike everywhere. The only
food places that took it were a sushi restaurant, a cupcake shop, and a grocery store,
which were all miles away (I lost 5 pounds in a week). It was hard, but I got to know the
fervent libertarians, entrepreneurs, cryptogeeks, and fringe economists who were part of
Bitcoins then-small community. They so desperately wanted their radical currency to
succeed, and they were worried at the time that the U.S. government might ban it.
A year later, in 2014, I repeated the experiment and had a completely different
experience. Venture capitalists had discovered Bitcoin, pouring money into startups that
made it easier to use. Intense interest from China sent Bitcoins value over $1,000,
minting many of those early cryptogeeks into multimillionaires, at least on digital paper.
Businesses had learned that accepting Bitcoin was an easy way to get press. So I was
able to use Bitcoin to go on a wine tour of Santa Cruz and eat a 14-course dinner at a hip
new restaurant. I even visited a strip club, where I convinced the exotic dancer to create
a Bitcoin wallet while I watched.
I even visited a strip club, where I convinced the exotic dancer to create a Bitcoin
wallet while I watched.
For many early adopters, this was all a bit depressing; their indie band had gone
mainstream. China had mining operations with hundreds of servers. The venture-
capital firm Andreessen Horowitz was funding a secret mining company. Most people
no longer focused on how Bitcoin could free us from government monetary control.
Instead, they talked of how it could be better regulated to power the robot-to-robot
transactions just over the horizon.
That future might be coming, but its slower to arrive than most enthusiasts think.
Even a year later, if I tried to live only on Bitcoin for more than a week, Id either be very
hungry or very bored with my meal options. And thats really the central issue with
Bitcoin: Unless it becomes even easier for consumers and vendors to use, it could still
become the Apple Newton of moneyan incredible technology that flops.
This article is part of the Future Of Money feature from our January/February 2016
issue. Read the rest of the feature here.
CAN YOUR GENES MAKE YOU KILL?
By Lois Parshley April 28, 2016

Javier Jan
The killer read his Bible. He drank. Heavily. It was a fall night in 2006, when Bradley
Waldroup walked out of his rural trailer in southeastern Tennessee, carrying his .22
caliber hunting rifle. His estranged wife and her friend, Leslie Bradshaw, had just pulled
up to drop off the Waldroups four children. Waldroup began arguing with his wife and
Bradshaw, who was unloading the car. Drawing his gun, Waldroup shot Bradshaw eight
times, killing her. He used a knife to cut her head open.
He then chased his wife with the knife and a machete, managing to slice off one of
her pinkies before dragging her into the trailer. There, he told their frightened children,
Come tell your mama goodbye, because it was the last time theyd ever see her.
Miraculously, his wife managed to slip his grasp and escape.
Three years later, in a county court, Waldroup admitted the whole thing. He said he
had snapped. Im not proud of none of it, he told the judge. Convicted of felony
murder, he faced the death penalty.
To save his life, his legal team took an unusual approach, never before admitted in a
capital-murder case. They sent a sample of Waldroups blood to the molecular genetics
lab at Vanderbilt University in Nashville. Lab techs there were told to look at a specific
gene. Sure enough, they found Waldroup had a genetic variant on his X chromosome,
one that coded the enzyme monoamine oxidase-A (MAOA).
MAOAs job is to break down crucial neurotransmitters, such as dopamine and
serotonin. If left unchecked, these potent chemicals can build up in the brain and cause
a loss of impulse control and an increase in violence and rage. In part, Waldroups
lawyers were claiming, his genes made him do it.
Its been more than two decades since geneticists linked MAOA deficiency to violent
behavior. And its been a decade since the media dubbed one of the genes that causes the
deficiency the warrior gene. It is among the most controversial of several genes linked
to violence and psychopathic behaviors.
Mental illnesses have also been linked to genetic causes. In January, Harvard
scientists jolted the mental-health field when they identified a gene that might lie at the
root of schizophrenia: During adolescence and early adulthood, a variant of the gene
causes the overpruning of synapses in the brains decision-making frontal lobe,
impairing things like attention and impulse control. While only a fraction of the 2 .2
million Americans suffering from schizophrenia turn violenta point that mental-
health workers are careful to point outpeople with serious mental illnesses are two to
three times more likely to become violent than those who are not.
As each mass shooting and road-rage murder fills our daily newsfeeds, scientists,
law-enforcement officials, politicians, mental-health experts, and the public ask what we
can do to stop the next one. Can we identify violent people before they hurt someone? Is
there a genetic link among serial killers like Ted Bundy, mass murderers like Adam
Lanza, and roadside shooters like the Uber driver, Jason Dalton, who police charged
with killing six people in a random rampage in Michigan this past February?
These are uncomfortable questions, ones that conjure the quackery of phrenology
and the eugenics of the Nazis. But as geneticists come closer to unlocking the doors of
personality traits and pathologies, we seem to be stepping beyond behaviorism to
embrace genetic determinism. We accept science has found a gene that increases the
risk for alcoholism, a condition once associated with weakness of character. We accept
that genes can alter brain function and may trigger anxiety behaviors. There is evidence
that the same could be said for violence.
Is there a genetic link between Ted Bundy and Adam Lanza? Its an uncomfortable
question that conjures up eugenics.
Kent Kiehl works inside a portable trailer on the grounds of the Western New Mexico
Correctional Facility, home to 440 inmates in the small town of Grants. He sits at a
cramped desk in front of computer screens that monitor activity in a nearby and loudly
humming cylindrical tube. It is a $2.2 million functional magnetic-resonance-imaging
scanner (fMRI). One by one, Kiehl slots in murderers, rapists, arsonists, and other
violent criminals, and then peers into their brains. He has become a top expert on the
neuroscience of schizophrenia and psychopathy.
Kiehl has a unique and personal perspective on the subject he studies. His family had
lived down the street from Ted Bundy in a quiet Tacoma neighborhood. When Bundy
was arrested in 1975 and later accused of killing more than 36 women over nearly two
decades, it sent a collective shiver through his neighborhood. Kiehl wondered, How
could someone like that grow up in our sleepy little suburb? As a neuroscientist at the
University of New Mexico, he has spent the past 25 years looking for an answer.
Psychopaths suffer from severe emotional detachment. They lack both empathy and
remorse. Kiehl has found that they make up about 16 percent of the U.S. prison
population. Such people also comprise about 1 percent of the general population. To put
that in perspective, it is about as common as bulimia but much more difficult to
diagnose. Thats troublesome because psychopaths are inclined to violence. On average,
a criminal psychopath will be convicted of four violent offenses before age 40. Twin
studies have pointed out a genetic component to psychopathic traits, but few experts
agree on an exact cause for the disorder. Kiehl believes it can be traced to defects in the
limbic and paralimbic cortex, used in generating emotions, controlling impulses, and
paying attention.
During an exam, an inmate lays his head beneath a coil that sends and receives
magnetic signals. Kiehl displays phrases, like stealing from your job site, or images,
like that of a car crash, on a screen. He asks the inmate to rate the moral offensiveness of
each.
As the inmate makes decisions, his or her neurons fire, and the computer records the
response time and the area of the brain activated. A nonpsychopath will show activity in
regions, such as the almond-shaped amygdala, related to empathy and emotion.
Psychopaths will not. Depending on which region is active, Kiehl can determine how the
inmate processes the material. A psychopath might show little activity in the amygdala
and instead be processing the material in a logical portion of the brain, in some cases
trying to trick Kiehl or give Kiehl answers he thinks are appropriate or that he thinks
Kiehl wants to hear.
Altogether, Kiehl has collected brain-imaging data from more than 4,000 criminals
at eight prisons in two states, building what amounts to the largest forensic
neuroscience library in the world. He has found that psychopaths tend to have less gray
matter in the region that hes targeting, as well as smaller amygdalas. In short, he says,
they have different brains. And those differences are at least 50 percent caused by
genetics, he says, adding, That shouldnt surprise people with neuroscience
knowledge.
Kiehls work has become so well-known that parents of troubled kids frequently seek
his advice. Its a situation he finds depressing because he doesnt yet have answers for
them. I get an email at least once a week from a parent whose child is struggling. And
its heartbreaking, Kiehl says. Is my child a psychopath? Im the last guy they want to
call.
The modern search for the genetic roots of violence began when a woman walked
into a university hospital in Nijmegen, Netherlands, in 1978. She had come to seek help
for the men in her familyseveral brothers and her own sonwho she suspected were
suffering from the same mental disability. Two had committed arson. One had tried to
rape his sister. Another tried to kill his boss by ramming him with a car. Another had
drawn a knife against his sisters and forced them to undress. In fact, the family violence
appeared to stretch as far back as the 1870s, according to a detailed family tree of violent
offenders that a concerned uncle drew up in 1962.
More than a decade after the woman appeared at the Nijmegen hospital, researchers
there finally figured out what was wrong. The violent men possessed a mutation on their
X chromosome. That defect turned out to be a flaw in the MAOA gene. Since the gene is
on the X chromosome, menwho have only one X chromosomeare more likely to
suffer its effects than women, in whom a second, normally functioning X chromosome
can compensate for the problems of the defect. Women can, however, pass the defect to
their sons. Soon the women in the family were coming in to be tested to figure out if they
were carriers.
Men in one Dutch family with a history of violent rape, assault, and arson shared the
same genetic disorder.
Since then, several projects have found other genetic risk factors for violent behavior.
In 2011, a German researcher canvassing the field, found a connection between
homicidal behavior and a variant in a gene that codes for a protein called atechol-O-
methlytransferase (COMT). Like MAOA, it regulates dopamine. Four years later,
Finnish researchers studying prison inmates found that violent offenders often
possessed MAOA variants or variants of genes that code for CDH13a protein that
assists in brain-cell signaling. Previous studies linked those same variants to autism,
schizophrenia, and attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder. The inmate study, which
appeared in the journal Molecular Psychiatry, concluded that the CDH13 variant, and
the cellular dysfunction that it contributes to, was a plausible factor for violent
criminal behavior.
The notion that a biological basis to aggression might exist troubles many scientists
and ethicists. They are quick to note that environmental factors play a huge role in how
genes are expressed. Having a gene that increases the risk for breast cancer doesnt
mean a woman will get breast cancerand having a gene linked to schizophrenia
doesnt mean you will develop it. Genes are programs that run every activity of every
cell in your body every second you are alive, says Daniel Weinberger, director of the
Lieber Institute for Brain Development at Johns Hopkins University. If you inherit
small glitches, little pieces of noise, this sets you on a path. But it doesnt determine you
will end up with mental illness. These glitches arent fate. They are for risk.
Environmental factors are at play too.
 Plenty of people carry the same gene variant as the man who killed his wifes friend,
and theyll never kill anybody.
After all, plenty of people carry the same gene variant as Bradley Waldroup, the man
who killed his wifes friend, and theyll never kill anybody. But courts have proved ready
grounds for the genes-made-me-do-it ethical and science debate. Criminal defense cases
have cited genetics nearly 80 times in the U.S. between 1994 and 2011. Attorneys are
getting more sophisticated in looking for explanations for behavior, says Deborah
Denno, director of the Fordham University Neuroscience and Law Center.
In the case of Waldroup, the jury spared him the death penalty and found instead
that he should spend his life in prison. The killer-gene defense worked. After, when
asked if Waldroups genetics informed her decision, one juror said, Oh, Im sure.
But Denno says the role of gene variants, and links to increased risks of violence, has
been misunderstood in the courts and by the media. Behavioral genetics seeks to study
genetic as well as environmental sources for clues to behavior. It is interdisciplinary,
incorporating psychology, sociology, statistics, and other fields. While genes influence
behavior, Denno has noted, they do not govern nor determine it.
In fact, environmental factorsas varied as malnutrition, social and economic strife,
and poor educationremain some of the strongest predictors of behavioral pathologies
in adulthood. Psychologists have long known that childhood abuse alone is a risk factor
for violence. Boys exposed to erratic, coercive, and punitive parenting are at risk of
developing antisocial personalities and becoming violent offenders, according to a 2002
study in Science. Of course, not all abused boys become violent. The idea that gene
variantslike those leading to neural disruption or hyperactivity in the brainmight put
them at increased risk for violence is an intriguing one. But it is by no means the sole
cause or even a root cause.
One afternoon last fall, the University of Connecticut Health Center campus in
Farmington stood nearly flooded after a late-season downpour. Julian Ford, a clinical
psychologist who specializes in children and adolescents with PTSD, sat in his book-
lined fourth-floor office. Ford helped write the official 114-page investigative report on
Adam Lanza and the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting.
After Lanza killed 20 schoolchildren, six staffers, his mother, and himself, the states
medical examiner sent a piece of his brain to UConn geneticists and asked them to
analyze his DNA. It was the first time a mass murderers genome had ever been studied.
Despite formal requests from Popular Science, neither the medical examiner,
UConn, nor its geneticists would release the reports findings or even discuss what they
were looking for. But they most likely searched for gene variants linked to mental
illnesses.
During his early life, Lanza suffered from insomnia and struggled with speech. Shy,
quiet, and a social outsider, he wrote a story for a fifth-grade project called The Big
Book of Granny. In it, an old woman shoots children and talks about preserving a boy
for her mantle. Lanza was eventually diagnosed with Aspergers syndrome, anxiety, and
obsessive-compulsive disorder. While Aspergers is not associated with violence, it
might have masked his violent thoughts and behaviors. On the basis of a
recommendation by a psychiatrist, his mother took him out of school to teach him at
home. While various people had noted Lanzas challenges, What was apparently
missed, says Ford, was his emotional turmoil.
 Adolescence is a vulnerable period, and not just because of mood swings caused by
surging hormones. It is a time when mental illness is most likely to manifest. With
schizophrenia, for example, symptoms often appear suddenly during this period and in
early adulthood. In their landmark study at Harvard this past January, scientists
identified a gene potentially responsible for this timing: The natural process of synaptic
pruning, during which the brain deletes ineffective connections between neurons, occurs
as the brain matures. This takes place in the prefrontal cortex, where thinking and
planning are based. People who carry a gene variant that accelerates the pruning have a
higher risk of developing schizophrenia.
Thats why its critical that adolescents get care, says Steven McCarroll, a Harvard
geneticist and senior author of the study. Often when teenagers manifest symptoms,
theyre seen by pediatricians without psychiatric specialization, he says. One success
story he cites is an ongoing Australian mental-health program for adolescents, started in
2006, called headspace, which runs more than 80 clinics in some unusual and
convenient places. Some are in shopping malls, he says. They have warm colors and
welcoming furniture to avoid a clinical feel. Itd be wonderful to have something like
that here.
But what about kids like Adam Lanza who fell through the healthcare-system cracks?
Would genetic screening have helped? As of now, no. And researchers are skeptical that
it ever could in the future. We dont know enough about genetics yet to use genetics as
part of diagnosis, says McCarroll.
There are plenty of reservations about what we would look for and what wed find
worries over privacy and stigmatization, the question of what to do once you know
someone has a genetic risk of violence. But learning about genetic markers, even if it
doesnt entail screening for criminals, still helps us better understand violence and its
origins. The more we understand, the more we can do to prevent it.
So its hard to stop looking for genetic clues. Daniel Weinberger, the Johns Hopkins
neuroscientist, has the worlds largest collection of brains from deceased PTSD
sufferers. He studies them for molecular clues to mental illness. For a century, we knew
what mental illness looked like, sounded like, what it felt like, he says. But we didnt
know the basic underlying cause. Today, thanks to genetics, were able to explore things
that were science fiction 10 years ago.
But even he worries about what science will find and how society will act on it. After
all, he says, everyones genome has a different level of risk for different disorders.
Everyones got something.
WHO SHOULD BE ALLOWED TO USE CRISPR
By Claire Maldarelli February 16, 2017

Sam Ward
This week saw a resolution to the grueling legal battle between the University of
California at Berkeley and the Broad Institute over the discovery of the novel, cheap, and
easy-to-use gene-editing technique known as CRISPR. The techniques original
discoverers, Berkeleys Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier, lost a patent
battle to the Broad Institute's Feng Zhang over who first discovered that the technique
could be used to edit human and animal DNAa feat that has massive potential to treat
and cure diseases.
But what still hangs in the air, detailed in a report out today in the journal Science, is
who will be allowed to use this technology and in what way. Despite the fact that the
patent rights to CRISPR were being disputed in court, private companies have seized on
the opportunity to use this technology to research disease treatments, and entering into
licensing agreements with the research institutions to gain exclusive rights to use
CRISPR in a particular way to treat a particular disease. That would mean that no other
company could do similar research. How can this be?
A set of guidelines from the National Institutes of Health in 1999 and another, called
the Nine Points, that was agreed upon by a number of universities (including UC
Berkeley, Harvard, and MIT) in 2007 state that any research tools that a research
university invents should be made publicly available to any scientists or institution that
wants to use it.
But most discoveries arent actually research tools, says Jorge Contreras, an
intellectual property lawyer at the University of Utah and a co-author of today's report.
So, for example if someone at a research university discovers a new molecule thats
effective against a particular protein that would lead to a new way to treat a disease,
thats a therapy and its appropriate to license it exclusively.
Drawing the line between a research tool and a therapy is incredibly important. Take
PCR, for example. The polymerase chain reaction, discovered in 1985, allows
researchers to select a tiny and specific sample of DNA, and replicate it billions of times.
Today, PCR helps scientists study bacteria, viruses, and genetic diseasesand its helped
to discover many vital treatments and breakthroughs. Nearly every lab in the world now
uses PCR, for any reason they want. Thats because its considered a research tool.
So whats CRISPR? Thats the main question that needs to be answered, says
Contreras. Currently, its not considered a research tool. Because of that, private
companies have already entered into whats called surrogate licensing agreements with
both Broad (which is a collaboration between MIT and Harvard) and UC Berkeley.
Thats where we think CRISPR crosses the line, Contreras says.
Contreras is afraid of what would happen if CRISPR remains where it is. For
example, the private company Juno therapeutics has entered into surrogate licensing
agreements with MIT and the Broad Institute to do research using CRISPR and the
immunotherapy cancer treatment called CAR T-cell treatment. The treatment, which is
still in clinical trials, is thought by many to revolutionize the way cancer is treated, and
perhaps CRISPR could significantly help that. But Contreras concern is what happens if
Juno folds, or is subject to lawsuits? The rights that it (or any other company) has could
be tied up in courts for decades, delaying vital research. If Juno went bankrupt, no one
else could use CRISPR and CAR T together to develop effective therapies. This strikes
me as a real shame and a loss to society, says Contreras. Further, if other companies
did apply to that company to use their licensed CRISPR therapy, that company can
decide not to give it to them, especially if they are a competitor or if they think they will
do the research that that company wants to do now in the future.
But Contreras says that because CRISPR is very much still in the research phase (and
parties are still fighting over who owns the patents on these discoveries), its an ideal
time to rethink how CRISPR should be viewed. There can be some renegotiation of the
basic CRISPR licensing, he says.
Contreras says the recent court decision will almost surely be appealed. And he
doesnt think anything major will happen until those court decisions have been
finalized. But in the meantime, private companies who want to be in this market are
already positioning themselves and are paying a lot of money for some of these licenses
that they think they are going to need.
To ensure that everyone who wants to do research on CRISPR has access, Contreras
says the NIH should go back and rethink its old 1999 policy to ensure theres no gray
area that CRISPR can slip through, and that all broad research platforms, including
something like CRISPR, should be licensed non-exclusively. CRISPR definitely crossed
over the line, and it should go back behind the line.
FUKUSHIMA: FIVE YEARS LATER
By February 23, 2016

A 50-foot wall of water spawned by the quake exploded over Daiichis seawall,
swamping backup diesel generators. Four of six nuclear reactors on-site experienced a
total blackout. In the days that followed, three of them melted down, spewing enormous
amounts of radiation into the air and sea in what became the worst nuclear disaster
since Chernobyl in 1986.
The Japanese government never considered abandoning Fukushima as the Soviet
Union did with Chernobyl. It made the unprecedented decision to clean up the
contaminated areasin the process, generating a projected 22 million cubic meters of
low-level radioactive wasteand return some 80,000 nuclear refugees to their homes.
This past September, the first of 11 towns in Fukushimas mandatory evacuation zone
reopened after extensive decontamination, but fewer than 2 percent of evacuees
returned that month. More will follow, but surveys indicate that the majority dont want
to go back. Some evacuees are afraid of radiation; many have simply moved on with
their lives.
Another town scheduled to reopen, sometime in the next two years, is Tomioka, 6
miles south of the nuclear plant. One night this past fall I drove around Tomiokas
waterfront, which the tsunami had completely wiped out. It was eerily quiet, save for a
loud, metallic clap echoing through the empty streets from the direction of an
incineration facility. Wild boar scampered through fields where the old train station
once stood. And a breeze carried the scent of mold and rot from shops and homes that
had been cracked open by the earthquake and gutted by the tsunami. In one shop, a
truck had been carried through a display window and deposited on the floor as if it had
been deliberately parked there.
During the day, Tomioka, which once had 16,000 residents, is a vast construction
site sprawling for miles across residential neighborhoods, commercial districts, and
fallow rice fields. Thousands of decontamination workers equipped with little more than
shovels strip 2 inches of contaminated topsoil in a 65-foot perimeter around every
structure in town. They dump the soil into black decontamination bags, which they pile
onto every street corner and empty lot. Some bags have been there so long, theyve
sprouted weeds. The workers also use dry hand towels to wipe down every single
building, from the roof to the foundation, and pressure-wash any asphalt and concrete.
Its tedious, exhausting work.
"Tomioka exists only in name. Itll never be a town again."
The town allows residents to visit during the day, but special permission is required
for overnight stays. When I met him, Kenichi Hiyashi, a broad-shouldered supervisor
for a company cleaning up Tomioka, was about to move back to his house on the
outskirts of town. Four and half years earlier, when he evacuated with his daughter and
parents, radiation levels were 5 microsieverts per hour (Sv/h). Now they hovered at
around 0.6 Sv/hstill more than twice the governments long-term goal of 0.23 Sv/h,
and about 15 times the normal background level in Tokyo. Hiyashi had returned to
Tomioka, a mildly radioactive ghost town, for reasons millions of suburbanites could
appreciate.
The commute was killing me, he lamented.
 Hiyashi took me to see his house, which had been decontaminated just that week. In
the driveway, an empty decontamination bag sagged in a steel frame. Bright pink tape
marked areas of high radiation: downspouts, faucets, electrical conduit. We walked
around the yard, avoiding piles of clean fill that hadnt been raked out yet. The sun was
going down over a dark stand of pine trees across the road. Crickets began to stir in the
high grass growing beyond the decontamination buffer zone. Hiyashi put his hands on
his hips and looked around at the neighborhood of darkened houses.
Tomioka exists only in name, he said. Itll never be a town again. I got the sense
that Hiyashi, like so many evacuees, would rather be compensated to relocate. Owning a
house in a place few want to live isnt much of an inheritance for his daughter.
While the Japanese government rebuilds Fukushima prefecture, the Tokyo Electric
Power Company (TEPCO) is slowly dismantling the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power
plant, a process thats expected to cost at least $15 billion. Two weeks after I visited
Hiyashi, I drove through Tomioka again, this time on a bus with a handful of other
journalists headed to the site.
Inside the plant gates, guides wearing white TEPCO golf shirts herded us inside the
Entrance Control Building, where some of the 7,000 employees who now work at
Fukushima Daiichi strip out of their protective clothing in front of long rows of lockers.
One of our guides said that things were beginning to return to normal, pointing out that
workers no longer needed to wear full-face respirators at 90 percent of the site, and also
that vending machines were recently installed outside the cafeteria. Given the popularity
of vending machines in Japan, this wasnt a stretch.
After a briefing, we were taken to an adjoining building where TEPCO had a special
viewing room outfitted with thick, radiation-proof portholes. Carved from a 115-foot
coastal bluff in the late 1960s, the Fukushima Daiichi complex has two main terraces
separated by a steep slope. From my vantage point seven stories above the upper
terrace, I could see the entire 860-acre site, a bustling city of workers garbed in white
Tyvek suits. Construction vehicles rumbled down roads between blocks of drab
industrial buildings. Before the disaster, much of the plants grounds were covered in
pine trees that served as a bird sanctuary.
Every time I come here, Im so surprised, said one TEPCO guide as he stared in
awe at row upon row of water tanks below. Two years ago, it was all flat land. Half a
mile to the east, where the site meets the Pacific Ocean, four of the reactors rise up from
the lower terrace: Unit 4 with its trellislike support structure; the stub of Unit 3; the
deceivingly intact Unit 2, which is the only damaged reactor to still sport its outer shell;
and Unit 1, clad in beige panels. The different appearance of each reactor reflected the
complexity of decommissioning the site.
At Fukushima Daiichi, theres no textbook, said chief decommissioning officer,
Naohiro Masuda, when I spoke to him at TEPCOs headquarters in Tokyo a week earlier.
There are three reactors [that melted down], and each has a different manner in which
the fuel melted. The buildings are damaged in different ways. So we need to think of
three different methods to solve this problem. In other words, Fukushima Daiichi has
three separate decommissioning projects, not just one.
A reactor like those at Fukushima Daiichi is essentially a sophisticated machine for
boiling water. Fission heat from nuclear fuel rods makes steam that spins a turbine,
producing electricity. The steam is condensed, cooled, and pumped back into the reactor
core to keep the fuel from overheating, and to make more steam. If water circulation
stops, the rods can get so hot that they begin to lose integrity. In a worst-case scenario,
they melt like wax candles, and the molten fuel pools up inside the reactor, releasing
massive amounts of radiation.
The technologies required to scoop melted fuel out of the damaged reactors dont
even exist yet.
Masuda estimates that decommissioning the Fukushima Daiichi siteremoving all
nuclear and radiological hazardswill take three to four decades, although he
acknowledged that the technologies required to scoop melted fuel out of the damaged
reactors dont even exist yet.
Engineers are studying the problem, he says, but we dont think that theres no
way to remove the fuel. Theres huge risk involved. If you make one small mistake, it
might cause a huge problem for the local people, or even worldwide. We have to be
aware of that possibility.
To get a closer look at the reactors, we donned anti-contamination gear: safety
helmet, dust mask, goggles, two pairs of latex gloves, one pair of cotton gloves, long-
sleeved undershirt with breast pockets to hold a dosimeter (a device the size of a flip
phone that measures the amount of radiation a person absorbs), disposable pants, two
pairs of socks, Tyvek suit, rubber boots, disposable boot covers, and masking tape to seal
the shirt cuffs. All of these precautions were supposed to keep radioactive contaminants
from getting inside our lungs and on our skin. It provided no protection whatsoever
against gamma radiation. A TEPCO handout informed us that our dosimeters were set
to beep in 20 Sv intervals. Properly clothed, we clambered aboard a bus upholstered in
thick plastic and duct tape.
Once landscaped with greenery, the long, steep slope separating the upper and lower
terraces of Fukushima Daiichi is now a moonscape of smooth concrete, designed to keep
rainwater from soaking into the contaminated ground. As the bus descended toward the
ocean, we passed an area piled high with the sun-bleached trunks of dead pine trees.
Only a few cherry trees had been spared the chainsaw.
Our first stop was an unremarkable windowless building situated on a hillside.
Standing on top of it, I was eye-level with the roofs of the four damaged reactors. They
were 19 stories tall, except for Unit 3, shortened by a hydrogen explosion that blew its
top off. Crane booms used to erect new reactor coverings dangled high above them. The
coverings prevent the spread of radioactive dust. Ultimately, they will provide a frame
from which to suspend equipment, when TEPCO finally gets around to extracting the
melted fuel.
Even under ordinary conditions, retrieving fuel rods from a nuclear reactors core is
a delicate procedure requiring the use of specialized machinery. The fuel rods are sealed
inside a reactor pressure vessel (RPV), a 750-ton steel capsule filled with water lodged in
the heart of the reactor. Surrounding the RPV is the primary containment vessel (PCV),
a massive, pear-shaped structure made of concrete up to 5 feet thick and lined with 5
inches of steel. The PCV, in turn, is embedded in a concrete honeycomb of utility rooms
filled with a labyrinth of pipes, pumps, and other equipment. The only part of the
reactor visible to the eye is a thin outer layer of sheet metal and concrete.
Fatal radiation levels make it impossible to send inspection crews inside the reactor.
Instead, TEPCO sent two robots.
Shucking our contaminated shoe covers, we boarded the bus and motored down a
road at the base of the reactors. Units 1, 3, and 4 had suffered hydrogen explosions that
looked dramatic in news footage. In reality the explosions blew apart only the reactors
thin outer layers, leaving the massive PCVs mostly intact. At least thats the hope.
Nobody can say for certain if the earthquake, hydrogen explosions, or some unknown
eventa mysterious explosion was heard coming from deep inside Unit 2, for instance
had cracked the PCVs. Fatal radiation levels make it impossible to send inspection crews
inside the reactors.
Instead, TEPCO sent two robots into the PCV of Unit 1 this past April to locate the
melted fuel. One robot stopped working within three hours; the other persevered for
four days. The best information TEPCO has received so far about the location of fuel
debris came from a recent muon scan of Unit 1. The scan revealed a void inside the
reactor pressure vessel, confirming the worst-case scenario: Molten fuel had burned
clean through it and slumped to the bottom of the primary containment vessel. Fuel had
probably melted through the RPVs in Units 2 and 3 as well. The likelihood of TEPCO
meeting its 2021 deadline for the start of fuel-debris removal is, at best, remote. In the
meantime, theres plenty of other decommissioning work to keep the company busy.

My dosimeter beeped its first 20 Sv alert as the bus passed the Common Pool
Building, where thousands of spent nuclear fuel assemblies sit submerged underwater.
Nuclear reactors have to be refueled about every three years. At Fukushima Daiichi, hot
spent fuel initially cools off in a pool on the top floor of the reactors before being
transferred to the Common Pool Building. Unit 4 was offline at the time of the disaster,
and therefore didnt melt down. In December 2014, TEPCO reached a major milestone
when cranes hoisted the last fuel assembly from Unit 4s spent fuel pool. It plans to
pluck the remaining spent fuel from the other reactors beginning in 2019.
The bus turned sharply onto a steel-plated road that ran between the ocean and the
four turbine buildings. Together, the buildings formed a featureless white wall longer
than a Nimitz-class aircraft carrier. Tsunami-tossed wreckage was strewn against their
foot: twisted ductwork, chunks of broken concrete pronged with rusty rebar, and large
pieces of smashed equipment. We were perhaps 12 feet above sea level, the lowest point
at the site, and an ideal vantage point from which to appreciate the immensity of both
the reactor facilities and the tsunami that inundated them. Looking out to sea, it was
terrifying to imagine a 50-foot tide of water rolling over the breakwaters and plowing
into the bus.
Five years after the meltdowns, contaminated water continues to flow from the site
into the ocean. Although TEPCOs most recent analysis of seawater shows a
nondetectable level of cesium, that level merely reflects a regulatory threshold. Non-
detectable doesnt mean the plant isnt leaking into the sea, says Ken Buesseler, a
marine chemist with Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. In fact, TEPCOs data,
like our own, shows continued elevated levels of cesium in ocean waters closest to the
plant.
The bus braked in front of Unit 4. We got out to look at what TEPCO called the
seaside impermeable wall: 594 concrete-and-steel piles that run almost half a mile
along the waterfront. It is the last line of defense between Fukushima Daiichi and the
sea, though it is designed to protect the sea from the nuclear plant, not vice versa.
To understand the full scale of the water problem at Fukushima Daiichi, you have to
go back to the disasters early days. Under normal conditions, water circulates through
the reactor facilities in a closed loop to cool the nuclear fuel and generate steam. That
loop broke during the disaster, and TEPCO resorted to pouring seawater into the
overheating reactors. The reactors and turbine buildings quickly began filling up with
thousands of tons of highly contaminated seawater.
A few more days and water would have overflowed the plant, which wouldve taken
whatever they had and squared it in terms of a catastrophe, recalls John Raymont,
founder of Kurion, a nuclear waste management company based in Irvine, California.
We heard that some of the men at the site would step in a puddle and get radiation
burns immediately from it.
There are no longer skin-searing puddles of radioactive water on the ground at
Fukushima Daiichi. But TEPCO is still circulating 320 metric tons of water per day into
the reactors to keep the melted fuel cool. An ad-hoc circulation loop now pumps
contaminated water from the reactors to a purification system custom-built by Kurion
that removes two of the worst radionuclides: cesium and strontium. Most of the water
then goes back into the reactors, while some gets piped to the tank farm.
In two hours on-site, most of it riding on a bus, I'd received a radiation dose
equivalent of at least four chest x-rays.
There are 1,000 tanks at Fukushima Daiichi, containing more than 700,000 metric
tons of contaminated water, equivalent to nearly 300 Olympic-size swimming pools.
TEPCO cant go on building tanks forever, nor can it discharge the water into the ocean.
The water is contaminated with high levels of tritium, a radioisotope that cant be
removed using conventional filtration technology. Even if TEPCO could eliminate the
tritium overnight, its doubtful the government would allow the company to dump
potentially 1 million tons of purified Fukushima water into the ocean before the 2020
Tokyo Olympics; it would be a public relations nightmare. In the meantime, water tanks
are sprouting up all over the site like colonies of toadstools after a rainstorm.
We boarded the bus and headed toward reactor Units 5 and 6. On the way, we
stopped briefly at various well heads and filtration facilities designed to trap and treat
hundreds of tons of groundwater that flows downhill toward the ocean every dayright
beneath the crippled reactors. Some of the groundwater mixes with the highly
contaminated water in the reactors and must be treated and pumped to the tank farm;
some ends up leaking into the ocean, untreated. TEPCO has been testing an
underground ice wall to divert the flow of groundwater around the reactor facilities,
but theres no word on when the company will switch it on.
Located on high ground, Units 5 and 6 were untouched by the tsunami. But they lie
directly in the path of the radioactive plume that ended up contaminating 3,500 square
miles of land northwest of the plant. We passed dead pine trees scattered like orange
toothpicks along the edge of a wooded area. Pine trees are particularly radiosensitive,
and these had probably suffered the same fate as trees in Chernobyls infamous Red
Forest, a tract of pines killed by fallout. For the second and last time, my dosimeter
beeped a 20 Sv alert. In two hours on-site, most of it riding on a bus, Id received a
radiation dose equivalent of at least four chest X-rays.
The Fukushima disaster had a chilling effect on the nuclear-power industry
worldwide. Germany, for example, is phasing out of nuclear energy altogether. China
suspended its rapidly expanding nuclear-energy program. And in Japan, where nuclear
power supplied 30 percent of the countrys energy, the entire reactor fleet was taken
offline. But the nuclear chill has begun to warm up lately. Ten new reactors went online
last year, the most since 1990. China now has 24 reactors under construction, with more
on the books. Last August, Japan quietly restarted its first reactor since the disaster.
Ikuro Anzai, an owlish 75-year-old nuclear scientist from Kyoto, is skeptical of this
development. Hes spent his career criticizing the incestuous relationship between
government regulators and the nuclear industry that allowed companies like TEPCO to
ignore safety warnings. In his view, Japan should follow Germanys example. Until that
happens, the least the government could do is educate a skittish public about the health
effects of radiation exposure. Anzai cant do much about the former, but few are better
equipped, or motivated, to address the latter. He travels to Fukushima prefecture every
month to measure radiation levels to reassure those who no longer trust the government
to say nothing about the nuclear industryto protect their safety.
The accident destroyed peoples trust in the industry, in the government, and
experts, Anzai said. As a scientist, I want to make a sincere effort to stand beside
victims and help minimize their exposure to radiation, and to restore trust in scientists.

On a drizzly afternoon, I met Anzai at the Torikawa Nursery School in Fukushima

City, about 40 miles from Fukushima Daiichi. Although residents were never evacuated,
radioactive hot spots in some parts of town still exceed the governments long-term
decontamination goal of 0.23 Sv/h. A gamma spectrometer hung on a strap over
Anzais shoulder as I followed him down winding lanes to an old Buddhist temple in the
center of a residential neighborhood. Anzai knelt next to a swing set and held the
spectrometers sensor over a hole hed made in the coarse sand. Zero point zero seven
microsieverts per hour, he announced. Its the same as my office in Kyoto.
That was less than half the radiation levels Anzai found when he surveyed the same
walking route two years ago, good news for the children who attended Torikawa Nursery
School. Ever since the disaster theyve been cooped up out of fear of being exposed to
radiation. Now they could take their daily walk again.
Its important for children to be able to touch the snow and step on the ice, the
director of the nursery school, Miyoko Sato, told me. But we still worry about the food
the children eat. Food grown in Fukushima prefecturefamous for its produce in
Japanis closely monitored for radioactive contamination, but the school still sources
its food from outside it. Understandably, many parents no longer trust authorities on
any matter concerning radiation, which is ironic, because the food restrictions that the
government put in place after the disaster were, in Anzais view, one of the few things it
did right.
As the cleanup of Fukushima prefecture and the decommissioning of the nuclear
plant move forward, Anzai has one simple piece of advice for Japans government and
its nuclear industry, one that hes been repeating for more than four decades: Dont
hide, dont lie, and dont underestimate.
In many ways, rebuilding Fukushima is the easy part. Japan has recovered from far
worse. Restoring public faith will be much more difficult because trust has no half-life.
HYDROGEN HITS THE ROAD THIS FALL
Toyota

Like jetpacks or robot butlers, hydrogen vehicles have historically been high on
promise and low on delivery. Matt McClory, an engineer at Toyota, says he can change
that. On a scalding day on the outskirts of Los Angeles, he leads me across an even more
scalding parking lot to the new Toyota Mirai. The hydrogen-powered car is a first for
Toyota, and it represents more than two decades of research and development. When it
hits streets this fall, it will be the biggest hydrogen-vehicle launch in history (think
hundreds, not dozens).
That means it carries more heft than the tiny hydrogen-vehicle launches of the past.
Like Toyotas Prius nearly 20 years ago, the Mirai is more than a curiosity. It has the
potential to reshape the automotive landscape.
?If anyone knows the Mirai, its McClory, who has spent eight years working on it.
What makes it unique, he says, is its exceptional range: about 310 miles on a single tank.
Thats more than its hydrogen competitionthe Honda FCX Clarity and the Hyundai
Tucson Fuel Celland more than any electric car on the road. Even the Tesla Model S
tops out around 250 miles on a charge.
For hydrogen cars to have an impact on society, you need lots of them.
Today, well test that efficiency. From Toyotas campus in Torrance, well drive west
to the Pacific, then up and down the coast, racking up as many miles as time will allow,
and then see how much fuel weve used. That were driving the Mirai in California is no
fluke. Its sold only here, because California is the only state with a critical mass of
hydrogen filling stations. (That critical mass? Eight, though 40 more are on the way by
the end of next year.)
As we set out, McClory goes over how the Mirai works. Behind me, two bottles of
roughly 5 kilograms of hydrogen sit hidden beneath the back seat. The fuel-cell stack
the key to the entire operationrests under the drivers seat. Air enters the front grill,
and the oxygen combines with hydrogen in the fuel cell. The result is electricity to drive
the motor, with water as the only emission. Nickel-metal hydride batteries under the
hood store any electricity thats not used in the moment. (Regenerative braking also
charges the batteries.) With the windows up, the only sound I hear is the subtle whine of
the supercharger drawing air to the fuel cell.

Driving through Orange County traffic is predictably stop-and-go. At the coastal

highway, the road opens up. I press the pedal and the Mirai zips from zero to 60 in nine
secondshardly a supercar but perfectly respectable. I hold fast at about 60 mph,
weaving through the turns. The day has turned even hotter. Catalina Island bobs to my
right.
While I drive, I keep an eye on the fuel-cell monitors in the dash. Were averaging the
equivalent of 66 miles per gallon pretty good, though its hard to make a 1-to-1
conversion between pounds of hydrogen to gallons of gasoline. That said, were looking
a bit low, so we stop at a nearby hydrogen fueling station. Predictably, all the pumps are
available, the facility is clean, and the process simple: Lock the handle to the receptacle.
Five minutes later, your tanks are topped.
Fuel cells offer clear benefits. They extract more power from fuel than either electric
batteries or gas engines, and that fuel can come from more places, even from landfill
emissions. Also hydrogen can power big vehicles in ways batteries cant. There are only
so many batteries you can cram into a bus or a semi without bumping up against the law
of diminishing returns. For these reasons, McClory says, hydrogen has to be part of our
alternative-fuel equation. For fuel cells to have an impact on society and the
environment, you need volumelots of fuel-cell cars and larger vehicles, he says. I
think on that. McClory said hed convince me about the importance of hydrogen cars,
and he has. The Mirai isnt flashy. Its a sedan, and an expensive one at thatabout
$57,500. But driving it, you get a sense that its specialthat despite the challenges of
infrastructure and distribution, it might just be the next Prius.

What Will It Take?

The launch of an affordable hydrogen-powered car is a major milestone. But fuel
needs to flow in order to run it. Right now, thats a problem. In some markets around
the country, hydrogen gas is available via pipeline, where its used in industrial and
commercial settings. Elsewhere, it must be stored at filling stations in large pressurized
tanks. So far, there are only 12 such stations in the U.S., and 10 of them are in California.
Over the next five years, the state is investing $200 million and partnering with several
gas providers and automakers to open 100 more. Similarly, the Department of Energy is
working to expand stations nationally. Even so, hydrogen still faces a fundamental
economic hurdle: Refining the gas uses a lot of energy, which makes hydrogen cars less
efficient than their battery-electric and gasoline-powered peersat least until cleaner
production methods come on line.
10 BRAIN MYTHS BUSTED
By November 2, 2015

In the Hollywood action-film Lucy, actor Morgan Freemanplaying a world-

renowned neurologist speaks to a packed auditorium. Its estimated most human
beings only use 10 percent of their brains capacity, he says. Imagine if we could access
100 percent. You may have heard that claim before. Unfortunately, its just not true.
And after watching Lucy, Ramina Adam and Jason Chan, two neuroscience graduate
students at Western University in Ontario, decided to set the record straight. We
realized we had to do something about all this misinformation, Adam says. They set out
to collect common misperceptions about how the brain works, and we lent a hand in
debunking them.
Click through the gallery above to find out the truth about 10 common neuroscience
myths.
How To Stay Sharp
While crossword puzzles and classical music arent going to make you smarter, here
are three proven strategies to keep your brain at peak performance for your entire life.
1. Get The Blood Flowing
In a 2014 study at the University of British Columbia in Canada, women who walked
briskly for an hour twice weekly for six monthsbut not those who strength-trained or
did no exerciseincreased brain volume in the areas that control thinking and memory.
2. Eat Your Greens
A team of researchers with the federally funded Nurses Health Study tracked 13,388
women over decades and discovered the more leafy vegetables they ate, the better they
performed on learning and memory tests. That might be due in part to folic acid in
veggies: A long-term study of 60 Roman Catholic nuns in Minnesota identified folic acid
as a key factor in delaying the onset of dementia.
3. Talk To People
In 2004, scientists at Johns Hopkins University found that more social interaction
was associated with less cognitive decline for people aged 50 and above. Plus, one of the
major risk factors for death in the elderly is social isolationloneliness really can kill
you.

Plot Twists
Neuromyths have gotten folded into popular culture, says Nicholas Spitzer, co-
director of the Kavli Institute for Brain and Mind at the University of California at San
Diego. Its been an uphill battle to dispel them. Here are three culprits from TV and
the movies.Nicole Lou
Myth #1. Alcohol kills brain cells
Before taking his remedial high school science exam, Homer says in The Simpsons
(1993), All right, brain. You dont like me and I dont like you, but lets just do this and I
can get back to killing you with beer.
Myth #2. ESP is a scientific certaintyEverett Collection
The premise of Steven Spielbergs Minority Report (2002) rests on the ability of a
psychic police force to stop murders before they happen (and gives rise to a slew of ESP-
centric crime shows, such as Medium).
Myth #3. Being in a coma is like being asleep
 A single mosquito bite awakens Beatrix Kiddo, the Bride in Quentin Tarantinos Kill
Bill: Vol. 1 (2003). After spending four years in a coma, she is able to get out of bed and
immediately begin a killing spree.

1. We use only a fraction of our brains.

In 1907, famed psychologist William James claimed, We are making use of only a
small part of our possible mental and physical resources. A journalist later misquoted
him as saying the average person develops only 10 percent of his mental capacity. Scans,
however, show that we use every part of our brain, though not all regions are active at
once. (Sorry, Morgan.) Thats why damage to any area of the brainsuch as the
aftermath of a strokeusually results in mental and behavioral effects.

2. Playing classical music to infants makes them smarter.

The state of Georgia began distributing classical-music CDs to the families of
newborns in 1998. Each CD included a message from the governor: I hope both you
and your baby enjoy itand that your little one will get off to a smart start. While the
sentiment is appealing, the so-called Mozart Effect is dubious. The idea sprang from a
1993 study at the University of California at Irvine, which showed that 36 college
students performed better on an IQ test after listening to Mozart than after relaxation
exercises or silence. No one has been able to replicate those results. In fact, a 1999
Harvard University review of 16 similar studies concluded the Mozart Effect isnt real.

3. Adults cant grow new brain cells.

Adult rats, rabbits, and even birds can grow new neurons, but for 130 years,
scientists failed to identify new brain-cell growth in adult humans. That all changed in
1998, when a Swedish team showed that new brain cells form in the hippocampus, a
structure involved in storing memories. Then, in 2014, a team at the Karolinska
Institute in Sweden measured traces of carbon-14 in DNA as a way to date the age of
cells, and confirmed that the striatum, a region involved in motor control and cognition,
also produces new neurons throughout life. While our brains arent exactly an orgy of
wildly replicating cells, they do constantly regenerate.

4. Male brains are biologically better suited for math and science, female brains for
empathy.
There are small anatomical differences between male and female brains, this much is
certain. The hippocampus, involved in memory, is usually larger in women, while the
amygdala, involved in emotion, is larger in men. (The opposite of what youd expect
from this myth.) But evidence suggests gender disparities are due to cultural
expectations, not biology. For example, in 1999, social psychologists at the University of
Waterloo in Ontario gave women and men a difficult math test. Womeneven those
with strong math backgroundsscored lower than men, unless told the test had
revealed no gender differences in the past. Then the women performed equally well as
the men.

5. Being in a coma is like being asleep: You wake up intact and well rested.
In the movies, comas look harmless: A well-groomed patient lays in bed for a few
months and wakes fully articulate, seemingly unscathed by his or her ordeal. In real life,
those emerging from comas often suffer disabilities and need rehabilitation. Brain scans
point to why. Scientists at the French National Center for Scientific Research, in 2012,
found that high-traffic brain regionsnormally bright hubs of activity, even during sleep
are eerily dark in coma patients (while other areas inexplicably light up). Most comas
also dont last more than two to four weeks. So dont believe everything (or anything)
you see on Greys Anatomy.

6. Doing crossword puzzles improves memory.

If youve ever despaired at the Sunday crossword, heres good news:
Neuroscientists have found that doing crossword puzzles makes you very good at
drumroll, pleasedoing crossword puzzles. A 2011 study, led by researchers at the
Albert Einstein College of Medicine, found that solving crossword puzzles initially
delayed the onset of memory decline in individuals between the ages of 75 and 85, but
sped the decline (for reasons unknown) once a person showed signs of dementia. Today,
most neuroscientists agree there is no harm in the activity. But dont expect it to make
you any better at finding your keys come Monday morning.

7. Students learn best when teaching styles match their learning styles.
Ever asserted that you need lessons delivered visually or verbally? We hate to break
it to you, but theres just no support for that. In 2006, psychologists at the University of
California at Santa Barbara found that students didnt perform any better on a test when
given instructions in their preferred style. And a 2009 review paper found no studies
upholding the claimpopular among both educators and studentsthat teaching and
learning styles should match. That said, there are broad principles under which
everyone seems to learn better, such as through repetition, testing, and by spacing out
learning sessions.

8. Drinking alcohol kills brain cells.

That woozy feeling you get after three or four glasses of wine isnt from brain cells
expiring. When scientists at the Bartholin Institute in Denmark compared the brains of
deceased alcoholics and nonalcoholics, they found the total number of neurons to be the
same. Alcohol, like other substances, can kill brain cells at high doses (especially the
sensitive brain cells of developing fetuses), but moderate alcohol use does not. It does
interfere with how neurons communicate, affecting ones ability to perform tasks like
walking, speaking, and making decisions. But you already knew that.

9. We know what youre thinking: ESP is a scientific certainty.

Extrasensory perception (ESP), the so-called sixth sense, can be traced back to an
experiment in the 1930s. Joseph Banks Rhine, a botanist at Duke University, claimed
that individuals who were shown the blank face of a card could correctly guess a shape
printed on the back (supposedly by reading the mind of the person administering the
test). Although no other type of test has produced evidence for ESP, the myth lives on
thanks in part to the CIA, which employed psychic spies during the Cold War. The spy-
masters shut down their psychic network in 1995, when they finally concluded ESP isnt
a weaponor even a thing.

10. Some people are left-brained (logical) and some are right-brained (creative).
 In the 1960s, Roger Sperry, a neuropsychologist at the California Institute of
Technology, cut fibers connecting the brains two hemispheres in a handful of epilepsy
patients to reduce or eliminate their seizures. He then ran an experiment, flashing
imagesof letters, lights, and other stimuliinto either the left or right eye of the
patients. Sperry found that the brains left hemisphere better processed verbal
information and the right hemisphere, visual and spatial. Over decades, those findings
became misinterpreted as dominance, particularly in self-help books. There is no
evidence to support personality types based on dominant hemispheres, but theres
plenty of evidence to refute it: In 2012, for example, psychologists at the University of
British Columbia found that creative thinking activates a widespread neural network
without favoring either side of the brain.