Month: October 2020

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson / Getty Images)

Facebook is pushing yet another set of new features and policies designed to minimize harm in the homestretch to Election Day while also increasing "community" for users. But these features will do nothing to mitigate existing problems—and they will likely cause new, more widespread harms to both users and to society.

The most recent issue is a frustrating set of changes to the way that Facebook handles groups. Last week, Facebook announced yet another new way to "help more people find and connect with communities," by putting those communities in your face whether you want to see them or not. Both the groups tab and your individual newsfeed will promote group content from groups you are not subscribed to in the hope that you will engage with the content and with the group.

These changes are new, small inconveniences piled atop frustrating user-experience decisions that Facebook has been making for more than a decade. But they are the latest example of how Facebook tries to shape every user's experience through black box algorithms—and how this approach harms not only individuals but the world at large. At this point, Facebook is working so hard to ignore expert advice on how to reduce toxicity that it looks like Facebook doesn't want to improve in any meaningful way. Its leadership simply doesn't seem to care how much harm the platform causes as long as the money keeps rolling in.

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  Cosmic Girl releases LauncherOne mid-air for the first time during a July 2019 drop test. [credit: Virgin Orbit/Greg Robinson ]

The slim white, red, and black rocket dropped into the blue sky for the first time in late May. For a few, tantalizing seconds, all appeared well as the booster cleared the 747 carrier aircraft, and ignited its NewtonThree engine.

The engine burned brightly in the thin atmosphere, but it was not to last. The line feeding liquid oxygen into the rocket engine breached and, without a supply of oxidizer, the kerosene fuel would not burn. As the engine starved, the rocket was lost—and so were Virgin Orbit’s hopes of reaching orbit on its first try out.

In the wake of this letdown, company officials were upbeat, promising to move swiftly toward another launch attempt. “We took a big step forward today,” said Dan Hart, the chief executive of Virgin Orbit, hours after the rocket tumbled into the Pacific Ocean.

Enlarge (credit: Sabin et al. 2020)

One of the things archaeology consistently teaches us is that humanity is remarkably resilient in the face of crisis. Another is that poop is forever. Archaeologists have already explored the contents of coprolites and the chemicals left behind by a city’s worth of human waste. And according to a recent study, DNA from your gut microbes can stick around for centuries under the right conditions.

Archaeogeneticist Susanna Sabin and her colleagues found DNA from human gut-dwelling microbes in samples from a 600-year-old household cesspit in Jerusalem and a 700-year-old public toilet in Riga, Latvia. Eventually, that data will help researchers plumb the depths of medieval microbiomes to understand how the microscopic populations of our intestines have evolved over the centuries. For now, the study offers a few small hints about medieval life and suggests that ancient toilets have more to tell us.

Medieval vs. modern microbiomes

We already know that the microbiomes of modern hunter-gatherers and modern urban dwellers look quite different from each other. Figuring out how those differences evolved could offer some insights about health problems in modern urban dwellers. Sabin and her colleagues thought medieval latrines might be a good place to start looking for clues since medieval cities were urban but not yet industrialized. They sequenced DNA in sediment samples from a 15th-century cesspit in Jerusalem and a 14th-century public latrine in Riga.