Alive News

Jun Takahashi (left), professor at Kyoto University’s Center for iPS Cell Research and Application, attends a news conference in Kyoto, Japan, on July 30, 2018. Photo: Kyodo via Reuters

TOKYO: Japanese scientists said on Monday they will start clinical trials next month on a treatment for Parkinson’s disease, transplanting “reprogrammed” stem cells into brains, seeking a breakthrough in treating the neurodegenerative disorder.

The south polar cap of Mars as it appeared to the Mars Global Surveyor (MGS) Mars Orbiter Camera (MOC) on April 17, 2000. Photo Courtesy: NASA/Handout via Reuters

WASHINGTON: Using a radar instrument on an orbiting spacecraft, scientists have spotted what they said on Wednesday appears to be a sizable salt-laden lake under ice on the southern polar plain of Mars, a body of water they called a possible habitat for microbial life.

Alex Young, solar scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center (middle), Nicola Fox, Parker Solar Probe project scientist at Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) (right), and Betsy Congdon, Parker Solar Probe Thermal Protection System lead engineer at APL (left), speak during a preview briefing on the NASA’s Parker Solar Probe at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, US, on July 20, 2018. Photo: Reuters

CAPE CANAVERAL: NASA is preparing to send a probe closer to the Sun than any other spacecraft has ventured, enduring wicked heat while zooming through the solar corona to study this outermost part of the stellar atmosphere that gives rise to the solar wind.

The Parker Solar Probe, a robotic spacecraft the size of a small car, is slated to launch from Cape Canaveral in Florida, with Aug. 6 targeted as the launch date for the planned seven-year mission. It is set to fly into the Sun’s corona within 3.8 million miles (6.1 million km) from the solar surface, seven times closer than any other spacecraft.

“To send a probe where you haven’t been before is ambitious. To send it into such brutal conditions is highly ambitious,” Nicola Fox, a project scientist from the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, told a news conference on Friday.

The previous closest pass to the Sun was by a probe called Helios 2, which in 1976 came within 27 million miles (43 million km). By way of comparison, the average distance from the Sun for Earth is 93 million miles (150 million km).

The corona gives rise to the solar wind, a continuous flow of charged particles that permeates the solar system. Unpredictable solar winds cause disturbances in our planet’s magnetic field and can play havoc with communications technology on Earth. NASA hopes the findings will enable scientists to forecast changes in Earth’s space environment.

“It’s of fundamental importance for us to be able to predict this space weather, much like we predict weather here on Earth,” said Alex Young, a solar scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland. “In the most extreme cases of these space weather events, it can actually affect our power grids here on Earth.”

The project, with a $1.5 billion price tag, is the first major mission under NASA’s Living With a Star program.

The probe is set to use seven Venus flybys over nearly seven years to steadily reduce its orbit around the Sun, using instruments designed to image the solar wind and study electric and magnetic fields, coronal plasma and energetic particles. NASA aims to collect data about the inner workings of the highly magnetized corona.

The probe, named after American solar astrophysicist Eugene Newman Parker, will have to survive difficult heat and radiation conditions. It has been outfitted with a heat shield designed to keep its instruments at a tolerable 85 degrees Fahrenheit (29 degrees Celsius) even as the spacecraft faces temperatures reaching nearly 2,500 degrees Fahrenheit (1,370 degrees Celsius) at its closest pass.

File – In this photo, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg makes the keynote address at F8, Facebook’s developer conference in San Jose, California on May 1, 2018. Photo: AP

NEW YORK: Denying the Holocaust happened is probably OK on Facebook. Calling for a mob to kill Jews is not.

Mark Zuckerberg’s awkward and eyebrow-raising attempt this week to explain where Facebook draws the line illustrates the complexities social media platforms face as they take on the unwanted role of referee in this age of online misinformation, manipulation and hate speech.

Facebook, with 2.2 billion users, disallows such things as nudity, the selling of guns, credible threats of violence, and direct attacks on people because of their race, sex or sexual orientation.

Hours after the Facebook founder’s comments about Holocaust deniers aired on Wednesday, the company announced it will also start removing misinformation that could lead to bloodshed. The policy will begin in Sri Lanka and expand to Myanmar, where Facebook users have been accused of inciting anti-Muslim violence.

But beyond those guidelines, there are large gray areas. What, exactly, qualifies as supporting terrorist groups versus merely posting about them? Or mocking someone’s premature death — something that is also prohibited?

If Facebook were to ban Holocaust denial, it might also be called on to prohibit the denial of other historical events, such as the Armenian genocide or the massacre of Native Americans by European colonizers. This, Facebook might argue, could lead to a slippery slope where the company finds itself trying to verify the historical accuracy of users’ posts.

So, where it can, Facebook stays out of policing content.

While thousands of Facebook moderators around the world are assigned to review potentially objectionable content, aided by artificial intelligence, executives like to say the company doesn’t want to become an “arbiter of truth” and instead tries to let users decide for themselves.

This is why fake news isn’t actually banned from Facebook, though you might see less of it these days thanks to the company’s algorithms and third-party fact-checking efforts. Instead, Facebook might label disputed news stories as such and show you related content that might change your mind.

YouTube recently started doing this too. Twitter has been even more freewheeling in what sorts of content it allows, only recently ramping up a crackdown on hate and abuse.

“Facebook doesn’t want to put time and resources to policing content. It’s costly and difficult,” said Steve Jones a professor of communications at the University of Illinois at Chicago. “It’s a difficult job, I’m sure an emotionally draining job, and given the scale of Facebook, it would take a lot of people to monitor what goes through that platform.”

At the same time, Jones said he has his doubts that throwing more moderators (Facebook’s goal is to increase the number from 10,000 to 20,000 this year) and more technology at the problem would make a difference. He said he has no idea how Facebook can fix things.

“If I knew,” he said, “I’d probably be sitting next to Mr. Zuckerberg asking for a big fat check.”

Why these companies try to stay out of regulating speech goes back to their roots. They were all founded by engineers as tech companies that shun labels such as “media” and “editor.” Facebook’s chief operating officer, Sheryl Sandberg, even said in an interview last year that, as a tech company, Facebook hires engineers — not reporters and journalists.

Then there’s the legal shield. While a newspaper can be held responsible for something printed on its pages, internet companies by law are not responsible for the content others post on their sites. If they start policing content too much — editing, if you will — tech companies risk becoming media companies.

Zeynep Tufekci, a prominent techno-sociologist, said on Twitter that the notion that you can “fight bad speech with good speech” doesn’t really work in a Facebook world, if it ever did.

“Facebook is in over its head,” she tweeted Thursday, but she also confessed that “nobody has a full answer.”

In an interview with Recode , Zuckerberg, who is Jewish, said posts denying the Nazi annihilation of 6 million Jews took place would not necessarily be removed. Zuckerberg said that as long as posts are not calling for harm or violence, even offensive content should be protected.

While this has been a longstanding position at the company, Zuckerberg’s statement and his reasoning — that he doesn’t think Holocaust deniers are “intentionally” getting it wrong — caused an uproar.

The Anti-Defamation League said Facebook has a “moral and ethical obligation” not to allow people to disseminate Holocaust denial.

Zuckerberg later tried to explain his words, saying in an email to Recode’s Kara Swisher that he personally finds “Holocaust denial deeply offensive, and I absolutely didn’t intend to defend the intent of people who deny that.”

Still, for now the policy is not changing.

A life reconstruction of the newly discovered Cretaceous Period armored dinosaur Akainacephalus johnsoni, which lived 76 million years ago in Utah, surrounded by the crocodilian Denazinosuchus is seen in this image provided July 19, 2018. Photo: Andrey Atuchin/Denver Museum of Nature & Science/Handout via Reuters

WASHINGTON: With its head and snout covered in bony armor shaped like cones and pyramids, a spiky tank-like dinosaur unearthed in southern Utah was not just another pretty face.

File – In this photo, a 4-year old Female black Rhino, runs after it was darted at Nairobi National Park on Saturday Jan.14, 2006. Photo: AP

NAIROBI, KENYA: Eight critically endangered black rhinos are dead in Kenya after wildlife workers moved them from the capital to a new national park, the government said Friday, calling the toll “unprecedented” in more than a decade of such transfers.

Preliminary investigations point to salt poisoning as the rhinos tried to adapt to saltier water in their new home, the Ministry of Tourism and Wildlife said in a statement, describing how the animals likely became dehydrated and drank more salty water in a fatal cycle.

The ministry suspended the ongoing move of rhinos and said the surviving ones in the new park were being closely monitored.

The loss is “a complete disaster,” said prominent Kenyan conservationist Paula Kahumbu of WildlifeDirect.

Conservationists in Africa have been working hard to protect the black rhino sub-species from poachers targeting them for their horns to supply an illegal Asian market.

In moving a group of 11 rhinos to the newly created Tsavo East National Park from Nairobi last month, the Kenya Wildlife Service said it hoped to boost the population there. The government agency has not said how the rhinos died. Fourteen of the animals were to be moved in all.

“Disciplinary action will definitely be taken” if an investigation into the deaths indicates negligence by agency staff, the wildlife ministry said.

“Moving rhinos is complicated, akin to moving gold bullion, it requires extremely careful planning and security due to the value of these rare animals,” Kahumbu said in a statement. “Rhino translocations also have major welfare considerations and I dread to think of the suffering that these poor animals endured before they died.”

Transporting wildlife is a strategy used by conservationists to help build up, or even bring back, animal populations. In May, six black rhinos were moved from South Africa to Chad, restoring the species to the country in north-central Africa nearly half a century after it was wiped out there.

Kenya transported 149 rhinos between 2005 and 2017 with eight deaths, the wildlife ministry said.

According to WWF, black rhino populations declined dramatically in the 20th century, mostly at the hands of European hunters and settlers. Between 1960 and 1995 numbers dropped by 98 percent, to fewer than 2,500.

Since then the species has rebounded, although it remains extremely threatened. In addition to poaching the animals also face habitat loss.

African Parks, a Johannesburg-based conservation group, said earlier this year that there are fewer than 25,000 rhinos in the African wild, of which about 20 percent are black rhinos and the rest white rhinos.

In another major setback for conservation, the last remaining male northern white rhino on the planet died in March in Kenya, leaving conservationists struggling to save that sub-species using in vitro fertilization.

This image provided by Google shows a page of Local news in the free YouTube app for TV screens. Photo: AP

NEW YORK: Google’s YouTube says it is taking several steps to ensure the veracity of news on its service by cracking down on misinformation and supporting news organizations.

The company said Monday it will make “authoritative” news sources more prominent, especially in the wake of breaking news events when misinformation can spread quickly.

At such times, YouTube will begin showing users short text previews of news stories in video search results, as well as warnings that the stories can change. The goal is to counter the fake videos that can proliferate immediately after shootings, natural disasters and other major happenings. For example, YouTube search results prominently showed videos purporting to “prove” that mass shootings like the one that killed at least 59 in Las Vegas were fake, acted out by “crisis actors.”

In these urgent cases, traditional video won’t do, since it takes time for news outlets to produce and verify high-quality clips. So YouTube aims to short-circuit the misinformation loop with text stories that can quickly provide more accurate information. Company executives announced the effort at YouTube’s New York offices.

Those officials, however, offered only vague descriptions of which sources YouTube will consider authoritative. Chief Product Officer Neal Mohan said the company isn’t just compiling a simple list of trusted news outlets, noted that the definition of authoritative is “fluid” and then added the caveat that it won’t simply boil down to sources that are popular on YouTube.

He added that 10,000 human reviewers at Google — so-called search quality raters who monitor search results around the world — are helping determine what will count as authoritative sources and news stories.

Alexios Mantzarlis, a Poynter Institute faculty member who helped Facebook team up with fact-checkers (including The Associated Press), said the text story snippet at the top of search results was “cautiously a good step forward.”

But he worried what would happen to fake news videos that were simply recommended by YouTube’s recommendation engine and would appear in feeds without being searched.

He said it would be preferable if Google used people instead of algorithms to vet fake news.

“Facebook was reluctant to go down that path two and half years ago and then they did,” he said.

YouTube also said it will commit $25 million over the next several years to improving news on YouTube and tackling “emerging challenges” such as misinformation. That sum includes funding to help news organizations around the world build “sustainable video operations,” such as by training staff and improving production facilities. The money would not fund video creation.

The company is also testing ways to counter conspiracy videos with generally trusted sources such as Wikipedia and Encyclopedia Britannica. For common conspiracy subjects — what YouTube delicately calls “well-established historical and scientific topics that have often been subject to misinformation,” such as the moon landing and the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing — Google will add information from such third parties for users who search on these topics.

A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket’s exhaust plume is illuminated during a launch just before dawn on Friday, June 29, 2018 at Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral, Florida. Photo: AP

CAPE CANAVERAL, FLORIDA: A SpaceX rocket that flew just two months ago with a NASA satellite roared back into action Friday, launching the first orbiting robot with artificial intelligence and other station supplies.

The used Falcon rocket blasted off before dawn, hauling nearly 6,000 pounds (2,700 kilograms) of cargo including the spherical AI bot named Cimon, genetically identical mice and super-caffeinated coffee for the crew of the International Space Station.

The shipment — packed into a Dragon capsule that’s also recycled — should reach the station Monday.

It was an especially gorgeous launch, delighting spectators as the rocket plume expanded in the clear night sky like a giant halo beneath a nearly full moon and a gleaming Mars.

SpaceX’s Jessica Jensen described the high-altitude plume, illuminated against the dark sky, as “the space jellyfish that’s coming down after us.”

“I was going to say breathtaking, but maybe awakening might be a better word,” said NASA’s space station program manager, Kirk Shireman.

This marked SpaceX’s fastest reflight of a booster. The same first-stage booster launched the planet-hunting Tess satellite in April. The capsule, meanwhile, flew in 2016.

Aiming to lower launch costs by reusing rockets, SpaceX did not retrieve the booster for another flight and ditched it in the Atlantic instead. The company is switching to a new and improved line of boosters.

The space station and its six inhabitants were sailing 250 miles (400 kilometers) above the South Pacific when the Falcon 9 took off.

The Dragon will deliver the robot Cimon, pronounced Simon. Slightly bigger than a basketball, the round, 3D-printed German Space Agency robot will assist German astronaut Alexander Gerst with science experiments. IBM provided the AI brain. Cimon will remain indefinitely on the orbiting lab.

Cimon stands for Crew Interactive Mobile Companion. The name also refers to the genius doctor in the science fiction tale “Captain Future.”

Also on board are two sets of genetically identical brown female mice, or 20 mousetronauts altogether. Northwestern University researchers want to study the bacteria in the animals’ guts and compare them to their identical sisters on the ground. They did the same with former NASA astronauts and identical twins Scott and Mark Kelly, during Scott’s yearlong space station mission a few years ago.

Groceries include ice cream bars, fresh blueberries from Texas, home to Mission Control, and 60 freeze-dried packets of Death Wish Coffee from New York state. A former NASA astronaut helped arrange the java delivery for the space station’s Serena Aunon-Chancellor, a coffee lover.

“We like to keep our astronauts super-caffeinated because they work harder then,” Shireman joked after liftoff.

New food — especially treats — is “a huge psychological benefit” when you’re stuck with a space menu that repeats every eight or nine days, Shireman said. “The crew’s going to be opening up and eating blueberries, drinking coffee and eating ice cream, I’m sure, before you know it.”

This photo provided by the German Aerospace Center shows the “Cimon” (Crew Interactive MObile companioN) robot during a communications test at the ESA European Astronaut Center in Cologne-Porz, Germany on Jan. 30, 2018. Photo: AP

CAPE CANAVERAL, FLORIDA:  A robot with true artificial intelligence is about to invade space.

The large, round, plastic robot head is part of SpaceX’s latest supply delivery to the International Space Station.

Friday’s pre-dawn liftoff also includes two sets of genetically identical female mice, 20 mousestronauts that will pick up where NASA’s identical twin brother astronauts left off a few years ago. Super-caffeinated coffee is also flying up for the space station’s java-craving crew.

As intriguing as identical space siblings and turbo-charged space coffee may be, it’s the German robot — named Cimon, pronounced Simon, after a genius doctor in science fiction’s “Captain Future” — that’s stealing the show.

Don’t worry about AI running amok on the space station. Cimon’s human handlers promise the first AI space bot will behave. No mutinous takeovers like HAL from the 1968 film classic “2001: A Space Odyssey.”

“He’s a friendly guy and he has this hard power-off button,” German Space Agency physicist Christian Karrasch, the project manager, told The Associated Press on Thursday.

Like HAL, the autonomous Cimon is an acronym: it stands for Crew Interactive Mobile Companion. Its AI brain is courtesy of IBM.

German astronaut Alexander Gerst, who arrived at the orbiting lab a month ago, will introduce Cimon to space life during three one-hour sessions. Already savvy about Gerst’s science experiments, the self-propelling Cimon will float at the astronaut’s side and help, when asked, with research procedures.

Cimon has Gerst’s face and voice imprinted in its memory. So while the robot could assist the five other station astronauts, it is best suited for Gerst, according to Karrasch.

To get Cimon’s attention, Gerst will need only to call its name. Their common language will be English, the official language of the space station.

Next year, Italian astronaut Luca Parmitano will be Cimon’s orbital master. That’s when the AI researchers will delve more into mood.

As it is, Cimon smiles when it senses the conversation is upbeat and frowns when it’s sad. A small screen on the sphere serves as its face.

During its open-ended stay on the space station, Cimon should grow ever smarter and more knowledgeable, its system updated via IBM’s Cloud.

Researchers chose a ball rather than a humanoid face for Cimon because they thought it would be less potentially disturbing or creepy. Because it’s perfectly round — a little bigger than a basketball — it’s also safer, with no sharp edges that could damage space station equipment or poke astronauts.

The entire project, barely two years in the making, came in under 5 million Euros, or $5.8 million.

The real AI payoff will be when astronauts travel to the moon, Mars or other distant destinations. In a medical emergency, no one will want to wait 20 minutes for a call for help to reach Earth and then another 20 minutes for advice to get back to the stricken crew, said NASA’s space station program manager Kirk Shireman. An AI companion could provide instant assistance.

Cimon is meant for additional brainpower, so it doesn’t have legs or arms. NASA’s humanoid Robonaut, on the other hand, lacked AI but was envisioned as a Spiderman of sorts, its hands and feet designed for grabbing and climbing. Its creators saw Robonaut as a potential spacewalker, off in the future, that could venture outside for mundane tasks, saving astronauts considerable time and risk.

Robonaut is back on Earth. It returned aboard a SpaceX Dragon capsule in May after long bouts of inactivity and wiring trouble. Once fixed, an improved Robonaut may fly back to the space station.

This computer graphics image provided by the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) shows an asteroid and asteroid explorer Hayabusa2. Photo: AP

TOKYO: A Japanese space explorer arrived at an asteroid Wednesday after a 3½-year journey to undertake a first-ever experiment: blow a crater in the rocky surface to collect samples and bring them back to Earth.

The unmanned Hayabusa2 spacecraft reached its base of operations about 20 kilometers (12 miles) from the asteroid and some 280 million kilometers (170 million miles) from Earth, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency said.

Over the next year and a half, the spacecraft will attempt three brief touch-and-go landings to collect samples. If the retrieval and the return journey are successful, the asteroid material could provide clues to the origin of the solar system and life on Earth.

The mission is challenging. The robotic explorer will spend about two months looking for suitable landing places on the uneven surface. Because of the high surface temperature, it will stay for only a few seconds each time it lands.

The asteroid, named Ryugu after an undersea palace in a Japanese folktale, is about 900 meters (3,000 feet) in diameter. In photos released by JAXA, the Japanese space agency, it appears more cube-shaped than round. A number of large craters can be seen, which Project Manager Yuichi Tsuda said in an online post makes the selection of landing points “both interesting and difficult.”

The first touchdown is planned for September or October. Before the final touchdown scheduled for April-May, Hayabusa2 will send out a squat cylinder that will detonate above the asteroid, shooting a 2-kilogram (4.4-pound) copper projectile into it at high speed to make a crater.

Hayabusa2 will hide on the other side of the asteroid to protect itself during the operation and wait another two to three weeks to make sure any debris that could damage the explorer has cleared. It will then attempt to land at or near the crater to collect underground material that was blown out of the crater, in addition to the surface material from the earlier touchdowns.

The spacecraft will also deploy three rovers that don’t have wheels but can hop around on the surface of the asteroid to conduct probes. Hayabusa2 will also send a French-German-made lander to study the surface with four observation devices.

Asteroids, which orbit the sun but are much smaller than planets, are among the oldest objects in the solar system. As such, they may help explain how Earth evolved, including the formation of oceans and the start of life.

Hayabusa2 was launched in December 2014 and is due to return to Earth at the end of 2020. An earlier Hayabusa mission from 2003 to 2010 collected samples from a different type of asteroid and took three years longer than planned after a series of technical glitches, including a fuel leak and a loss of contact for seven weeks.

NASA also has an ongoing asteroid mission. Its Osiris-Rex spacecraft is expected to reach the asteroid Bennu later this year and return with samples in 2023.

File – In this image made from a dashboard camera video, a meteor streaks through the sky over Chelyabinsk, about 930 miles east of Moscow on Feb. 15, 2013. Photo: AP

CAPE CANAVERAL, FLORIDA: The US government is stepping up efforts to protect the planet from incoming asteroids that could wipe out entire regions or even continents.

The National Science and Technology Council released a report Wednesday calling for improved asteroid detection, tracking and deflection. NASA is participating, along with federal emergency, military, White House and other officials.

For now, scientists know of no asteroids or comets heading our way. But one could sneak up on us, and that’s why the government wants a better plan.

NASA’s planetary defense officer, Lindley Johnson, said scientists have found 95 percent of all these near-Earth objects measuring one kilometer (two-thirds of a mile) or bigger. But the hunt is still on for the remaining 5 percent and smaller rocks that could still inflict big damage.

Altogether, NASA has cataloged 18,310 objects of all sizes. Slightly more than 800 are 460 feet (140 meters) or bigger.

There’s no quick solution if a space rock is suddenly days, weeks or even months from striking, according to Johnson. But such short notice would give the world time, at least, to evacuate the area it might hit, he said.

Ground telescopes are good at picking up asteroids zooming into the inner solar system and approaching from the night side of Earth, Johnson said. What’s difficult to detect are rocks that have already zipped past the sun and are heading out of the solar system, approaching from the day side. That’s apparently what happened in 2013 when an asteroid about 66 feet (20 meters) in size suddenly appeared and exploded over Chelyabinsk, Russia, damaging thousands of buildings and causing widespread injuries.

An asteroid double or even triple in size exploded over Tunguska, Russia, in 1908, leveling 770 square miles (2,000 square kilometers) of forest. According to the report released Wednesday, casualties could be in the millions if a similar event struck New York City.

A giant space rock wiped out the dinosaurs when it smacked into Mexico’s Yucatan peninsula some 65 million years ago.

Johnson stressed it would take years to attempt to turn away a potential killer asteroid — several years to build a spacecraft then another few years to get it to the target. Ideally, he’d like at least 10 years’ advance notice.

A mission to defend planet Earth could involve hitting the asteroid or comet with big, fast-moving robotic spacecraft in hopes of changing its path; or worst case, launching a nuclear device not to blow up the asteroid but rather to superheat its surface and blow off enough material to divert it.

All that involves current technology, Johnson said.

“Part of what this action plan is about is to investigate other technologies, techniques for both deflection and disruption of the asteroid,” he told reporters.

Most of the extra work can be done with existing funds, said Aaron Miles of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.

“This is more about figuring out how to use those resources smartly,” he said.

The bottom line, officials said, is the US government wants to be prepared to decide which action is best if needed.

Scientists hope to learn a lot more about asteroids from a pair of missions currently underway. NASA’s Osiris-Rex spacecraft will reach the asteroid Bennu later this year and return samples in 2023, and Japan’s Hyabusa 2 is closing in on the asteroid Ryugu, with samples to be returned in 2020.

Forget about sending astronauts, Hollywood style.

“It makes a good movie, but we did not see in our study any technique that would require the involvement of astronauts,” Johnson told reporters. Missions like this lasting months or years make it difficult if not impossible for humans, given current technology, he noted.

Fabiola Gianotti CERN’s Director general and Pierre Maudet (2L) Swiss Canton of Geneva member of Government attend a ceremony to launch the civil engineering works for the High Luminosity LHC Project (HL-LHC) at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Meyrin near Geneva, Switzerland June 15, 2018. Photo: Reuters

GENEVA: Europe’s physics research centre CERN launched an upgrade of its Large Hadron Collider (LHC) on Friday, six years after the huge particle accelerator solved an enduring riddle by confirming the existence of the elusive Higgs boson.

Kevin Systrom, CEO and co-founder of Instagram, prepares for Wednesday’s announcement about IGTV in San Francisco, on Tuesday, June 19, 2018. Photo: AP

SAN FRANCISCO: Facebook’s Instagram service is loosening its restraints on video in an attempt to lure younger viewers away from YouTube when they’re looking for something to watch on their smartphones.

The expansion announced Wednesday, dubbed IGTV, will increase Instagram’s video time limit from one minute to 10 minutes for most users. Accounts with large audiences will be able to go as long as an hour.

Video will be available through Instagram or a new app called IGTV. The video will eventually give Facebook more opportunities to sell advertising.

It’s the latest instance in which Instagram has ripped a page from a rival’s playbook in an effort to preserve its status as a cool place for young people to share and view content. In this case, Instagram is mimicking Google’s YouTube. Before, Facebook and Instagram have copied Snapchat — another magnet for teens and young adults.

Instagram, now nearly 8 years old, is moving further from its roots as a photo-sharing service as it dives headlong into longer-form video.

The initiative comes as parent company Facebook struggles to attract teens, while also dealing with a scandal that exposed its leaky controls for protecting users’ personal information.

Instagram CEO Kevin Systrom told The Associated Press that he hopes IGTV will emerge as a hub of creativity for relative unknowns who turn into internet sensations with fervent followings among teens and young adults.

That is what’s already happening on YouTube, which has become the world’s most popular video outlet since Google bought it for $1.76 billion nearly 12 years ago. YouTube now boasts 1.8 billion users.

Instagram, which Facebook bought for $1 billion six years ago, now has 1 billion users, up from 800 million nine months ago.

More importantly, 72 percent of U.S. kids ranging from 13 to 17 years old use Instagram, second to YouTube at 85 percent, according to the Pew Research Center. Only 51 percent of people in that group now use Facebook, down from 71 percent from a similar Pew survey in 2014-15.

That trend appears to be one of the reasons that Facebook is “hedging its bets” by opening Instagram to the longer-form videos typically found on YouTube, said analyst Paul Verna of the research firm eMarketer.

Besides giving Instagram another potential drawing card, longer clips are more conducive for video ads lasting from 30 seconds to one minute. Instagram doesn’t currently allow video ads, but Systrom said it eventually will. When the ads come, Instagram intends to share revenue with the videos’ creators — just as YouTube already does.

“We want to make sure they make a living because that is the only way it works in the long run,” Systrom said.

The ads also will help Facebook sustain its revenue growth. Total spending on online video ads in the US is expected to rise from nearly $18 billion this year to $27 billion in 2021, according to eMarketer.

Lele Pons, a YouTube sensation who also has amassed 25 million followers on Instagram, plans to launch a new cooking show on IGTV in hopes of increasing her audience and eventually generating more revenue. “It’s like Coca-Cola and Pepsi,” she said. “You will never know what you like better unless you try both.”

IGTV’s programming format will consist exclusively of vertical video designed to fill the entire screen of smartphones — the devices that are emerging as the main way younger people watch video. By contrast, most YouTube videos fill only a portion of the screen unless the phone is tilted horizontally.

Snapchat began featuring vertical video before Instagram, another example of its penchant for copying rivals.

But Systrom sees it differently. “This is acknowledging vertical video is the future and we want the future to come more quickly, so we built IGTV.”

A medical assistant at a community health center gives a patient a flu shot in Seattle, US, on January 12, 2018. Photo: AP/ File

NEW YORK: A newer kind of flu vaccine only worked a little bit better in seniors this past winter than traditional shots, the government reported Wednesday.

Overall, flu vaccines barely worked at all in keeping people 65 and older out of the hospital, with roughly 24 percent effectiveness.

The best performance was by a new shot called Flucelvax; it was about 26.5 percent effective in that age group. The difference wasn’t as large as some had hoped.

“The big problem is still the same — we need better vaccines. But these incremental improvements are very important,” said Brendan Flannery, a flu expert at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The findings of the Food and Drug Administration study were presented in Atlanta Wednesday to a panel that advises the government on vaccine recommendations.

The vast majority of flu shots in the US are made in chicken eggs. Seqirus’ Flucelvax is made by growing viruses in animal cells instead.

The US just went through one of the most severe flu seasons in more than a decade, driven by a nasty flu bug that tends to cause more hospitalizations and deaths, particularly among the elderly. Researchers are finding vaccines made in eggs don’t work well against that kind of flu bug. Growing vaccines in cells is thought to provide a better match.

In a statement, Seqirus said it was encouraged by the results and is doing additional analysis.

The FDA study included more than 13 million Medicare beneficiaries. It looked at what kind of flu shots they got and whether they came down with a flu that put them in the hospital. Flu diagnoses were not based on lab confirmations, though, so the results could have underestimated the vaccines’ effectiveness if other bugs had made them sick, experts noted.

The study also showed that a higher-dose, egg-based vaccine intended for seniors worked slightly better than the traditional dose.

For Americans of all ages, the CDC estimates that flu shots were 40 percent effective against all strains this past season. They were far less effective against the kind that made most people sick.

File – In this photo, smoke rises behind a destroyed apartment complex as a wildfire burns in Ventura, California on Dec. 5, 2017. Photo: AP

SALIDA, COLORADO: We were warned.

On June 23, 1988, a sultry day in Washington, James Hansen told Congress and the world that global warming wasn’t approaching — it had already arrived. The testimony of the top NASA scientist, said Rice University historian Douglas Brinkley, was “the opening salvo of the age of climate change.”

Thirty years later, it’s clear that Hansen and other doomsayers were right. But the change has been so sweeping that it is easy to lose sight of effects large and small — some obvious, others less conspicuous.

Earth is noticeably hotter, the weather stormier and more extreme. Polar regions have lost billions of tons of ice; sea levels have been raised by trillions of gallons of water. Far more wildfires rage.

Over 30 years — the time period climate scientists often use in their studies in order to minimize natural weather variations — the world’s annual temperature has warmed nearly 1 degree (0.54 degrees Celsius), according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. And the temperature in the United States has gone up even more — nearly 1.6 degrees.

“The biggest change over the last 30 years, which is most of my life, is that we’re no longer thinking just about the future,” said Kathie Dello, a climate scientist at Oregon State University in Corvallis. “Climate change is here, it’s now and it’s hitting us hard from all sides.”

Warming hasn’t been just global, it’s been all too local. According to an Associated Press statistical analysis of 30 years of weather, ice, fire, ocean, biological and other data, every single one of the 344 climate divisions in the Lower 48 states — NOAA groupings of counties with similar weather — has warmed significantly, as has each of 188 cities examined.

The effects have been felt in cities from Atlantic City, New Jersey, where the yearly average temperature rose 2.9 degrees in the past 30 years, to Yakima, Washington, where the thermometer jumped a tad more. In the middle, Des Moines, Iowa, warmed by 3.3 degrees since 1988.

South central Colorado, the climate division just outside Salida, has warmed 2.3 degrees on average since 1988, among the warmest divisions in the contiguous United States.

When she was a little girl 30 years ago, winery marketing chief Jessica Shook used to cross country ski from her Salida doorstep in winter. It was that cold and there was that much snow. Now, she has to drive about 50 miles for snow that’s not on mountain tops, she said.

“T-shirt weather in January, that never used to happen when I was a child,” Shook said. When Buel Mattix bought his heating and cooling system company 15 years ago in Salida, he had maybe four air conditioning jobs a year. Now he’s got a waiting list of 10 to 15 air conditioning jobs long and may not get to all of them.

And then there’s the effect on wildfires. Veteran Salida firefighter Mike Sugaski used to think a fire of 10,000 acres was big. Now he fights fires 10 times as large.

“You kind of keep saying ‘How can they get much worse?’ But they do,” said Sugaski, who was riding his mountain bike on what usually are ski trails in January this year.

In fact, wildfires in the United States now consume more than twice the acreage they did 30 years ago.

The statistics tracking climate change since 1988 are almost numbing. North America and Europe have warmed 1.89 degrees — more than any other continent. The Northern Hemisphere has warmed more than the Southern, the land faster than the ocean. Across the United States, temperature increases were most evident at night and in summer and fall. Heat rose at a higher rate in the North than the South.

Since 1988, daily heat records have been broken more than 2.3 million times at weather stations across the nation, half a million times more than cold records were broken.

Doreen Pollack fled Chicago cold for Phoenix more than two decades ago, but in the past 30 years night time summer heat has increased almost 3.3 degrees there. She said when the power goes out, it gets unbearable, adding: “Be careful what you ask for.”

The AP interviewed more than 50 scientists who confirmed the depth and spread of warming.

Clara Deser, climate analysis chief at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, said that when dealing with 30-year time periods in smaller regions than continents or the globe as a whole, it would be unwise to say all the warming is man-made. Her studies show that in some places in North American local — though not most — natural weather variability could account for as much as half of warming.

But when you look at the globe as a whole, especially since 1970, nearly all the warming is man-made, said Zeke Hausfather of the independent science group Berkeley Earth. Without extra carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases, he said, the Earth would be slightly cooling from a weakening sun. Numerous scientific studies and government reports calculate that greenhouse gases in the big picture account for more than 90 percent of post-industrial Earth’s warming.

“It would take centuries to a millennium to accomplish that kind of change with natural causes. This, in that context, is a dizzying pace,” said Kim Cobb, a climate scientist at Georgia Tech in Atlanta.

Others cautioned that what might seem to be small increases in temperature should not be taken lightly.

“One or two degrees may not sound like much, but raising your thermostat by just that amount will make a noticeable effect on your comfort,” said Deke Arndt, NOAA’s climate monitoring chief in Asheville, North Carolina, which has warmed nearly 1.8 degrees in 30 years.

Arndt said average temperatures don’t tell the entire story: “It’s the extremes that these changes bring.”

The nation’s extreme weather — flood-inducing downpours, extended droughts, heat waves and bitter cold and snow — has doubled in 30 years, according to a federal index.

The Northeast’s extreme rainfall has more than doubled. Brockton, Massachusetts, had only one day with at least four inches of rain from 1957 to 1988, but a dozen of them in the 30 years since, according to NOAA records. Ellicott City, Maryland, just had its second thousand-year flood in little less than two years.

And the summer’s named Atlantic storms? On average, the first one now forms nearly a month earlier than it did in 1988, according to University of Miami hurricane researcher Brian McNoldy.

The 14 costliest hurricanes in American history, adjusted for inflation, have hit since 1988, reflecting both growing coastal development and a span that included the most intense Atlantic storms on record.

“The collective damage done by Atlantic hurricanes in 2017 was well more than half of the entire budget of our Department of Defense,” said MIT’s Kerry Emanuel.

Climate scientists point to the Arctic as the place where climate change is most noticeable with dramatic sea ice loss, a melting Greenland ice sheet, receding glaciers and thawing permafrost. The Arctic has warmed twice as fast as the rest of the world.

Alaska has warmed 2.4 degrees annually since 1988 and 5.4 degrees in the winter. Since 1988, Utqiagvik (oot-GAR’-vik), Alaska, formerly known as Barrow, has warmed more than 6 degrees yearly and more than 9 degrees in winter.

“The temperature change is noticeable. Our ground is thawing,” said Mike Aamodt, 73, the city’s former acting mayor. He had to move his own cabins at least four times because of coastal erosion and thawing ground due to global warming. “We live the climate change.”

The amount of Arctic sea ice in September, when it shrinks the most, fell by nearly one third since 1988. It is disappearing 50 years faster than scientists predicted, said Michael Mann, a climate scientist at Pennsylvania State University.

“There is a new Arctic now because the Arctic ocean is now navigable” at times in the summer, said Mark Serreze, director of the National Snow and Ice Data Center.

The vast majority of glaciers around the world have shrunk. A NASA satellite that measures shifts in gravity calculated that Earth’s glaciers lost 279 billion tons of ice — nearly 67 trillion gallons of water — from 2002 to 2017. In 1986, the Begich Boggs visitor center at Alaska’s Chugach National Forest opened to highlight the Portage glacier. But the glacier keeps shrinking.

“You absolutely cannot see it from the visitor center and you haven’t in the last 15 or so years,” said climatologist Brian Brettschneider of the University of Alaska Fairbanks.

Ice sheets in Greenland and West Antarctica have also have shriveled, melting about 455 billion tons of ice into water, according to the NASA satellite. That’s enough water to cover the state of Georgia in water nearly 9 feet deep.

And it is enough — coupled with all the other melting ice — to raise the level of the seas. Overall, NASA satellites have shown three inches of sea level rise (75 millimeters) in just the past 25 years.

With more than 70 percent of the Earth is covered by oceans, a 3-inch increase means about 6,500 cubic miles (27,150 cubic km) of extra water. That’s enough to cover the entire United States with water about 9 feet deep.

It’s a fitting metaphor for climate change, say scientists: We’re in deep, and getting deeper.

“Thirty years ago, we may have seen this coming as a train in the distance,” NOAA’s Arndt said. “The train is in our living room now.”