At present, more African elephants are dying than being born. Over the last century, the world's elephant population has declined 97% from trophy hunters, ruthless ivory mercenaries, and even terrorist groups. The Wildlife Conservation Society has pointed out that the global ivory trade leads to the death of up to 35,000 elephants a year in Africa. It's easy to point a finger at China as the biggest market for poached ivory in the world, yet only five years ago more than a ton of confiscated ivory was crushed in New York's Times Square by the Wildlife Conservation Society.

Deepfakes is a class of synthetic media generated by AI and represents another dark side of technology -- this form of Artificial Intelligence stole the headlines last year when a LinkedIn user by the name Katie Jones, who appeared on the platform & started connecting with the Who's Who of the political elite in Washington DC. It was alarming, how deep learning created a real-life image of a person & then penetrated the social media spreading misinformation. With the U.S presidential elections looming, lawmakers in the country are worried about how deepfakes can greatly jeopardize the transparency of the democratic process. Many of the leading tech companies have been asked for help and are working on developing tools that can detect this fake synthetic media. Global software giant, Microsoft, has now released two new tools that can spot if a certain media has been artificially manipulated.

The pandemic is helping to usher in a new era of food-production forecasts that rely more on satellite data and artificial intelligence and less on information gathered by people. The crop world, including major trading houses and statisticians at the U.S. Department of Agriculture, has long depended on scouts trudging through fields to count corn kernels and soybean pods. But travel restrictions and new virus safety measures have cut participation in field tours at a time of increasing scrutiny over food security. "Covid-19 is disrupting agricultural supply chains in developing countries, and observers on the ground can no longer report on crop conditions," said Lillian Kay Petersen, a student at Harvard University. She won the top prize of this year's Regeneron Science Talent Search, a 79-year-old competition for high school students held by the Society for Science and the Public, for her model that uses daily satellite images to predict crop yields in Africa.

Music preferences are strongly shaped by the cultural and socio-economic background of the listener, which is reflected, to a considerable extent, in country-specific music listening profiles. Previous work has already identified several country-specific differences in the popularity distribution of music artists listened to. In particular, what constitutes the "music mainstream" strongly varies between countries. To complement and extend these results, the article at hand delivers the following major contributions: First, using state-of-the-art unsupervised learning techniques, we identify and thoroughly investigate (1) country profiles of music preferences on the fine-grained level of music tracks (in contrast to earlier work that relied on music preferences on the artist level) and (2) country archetypes that subsume countries sharing similar patterns of listening preferences. Second, we formulate four user models that leverage the user's country information on music preferences. Among others, we propose a user modeling approach to describe a music listener as a vector of similarities over the identified country clusters or archetypes. Third, we propose a context-aware music recommendation system that leverages implicit user feedback, where context is defined via the four user models. More precisely, it is a multi-layer generative model based on a variational autoencoder, in which contextual features can influence recommendations through a gating mechanism. Fourth, we thoroughly evaluate the proposed recommendation system and user models on a real-world corpus of more than one billion listening records of users around the world (out of which we use 369 million in our experiments) and show its merits vis-a-vis state-of-the-art algorithms that do not exploit this type of context information.

Hyperbolic space is a natural setting for mining and visualizing data with hierarchical structure. In order to compute a hyperbolic embedding from comparison or similarity information, one has to solve a hyperbolic distance geometry problem. In this paper, we propose a unified framework to compute hyperbolic embeddings from an arbitrary mix of noisy metric and non-metric data. Our algorithms are based on semidefinite programming and the notion of a hyperbolic distance matrix, in many ways parallel to its famous Euclidean counterpart. A central ingredient we put forward is a semidefinite characterization of the hyperbolic Gramian -- a matrix of Lorentzian inner products. This characterization allows us to formulate a semidefinite relaxation to efficiently compute hyperbolic embeddings in two stages: first, we complete and denoise the observed hyperbolic distance matrix; second, we propose a spectral factorization method to estimate the embedded points from the hyperbolic distance matrix. We show through numerical experiments how the flexibility to mix metric and non-metric constraints allows us to efficiently compute embeddings from arbitrary data.

SCI COMMUN### Astronomy Talk about a sharper image: A recently constructed imaging sensor array (above) that will be used when the Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile opens in 2021 has captured a world-record 3200 megapixels in a single shot. It recorded a variety of objects, including a Romanesco broccoli, at that resolution, which is detailed enough to show a golf ball clearly from 24 kilometers away. The sensor array's focal plane is more than 60 centimeters wide, much larger than the 3.5-centimeter sensors on high-end consumer digital cameras, says the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, which built the array. When the telescope, funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation, begins operating next year, it will image the entire southern sky every few nights for 10 years, cataloguing billions of galaxies each time. The surveys will shed light on mysterious dark energy and dark matter, which make up most of the universe's mass. With its repeat coverage, the telescope will make the equivalent of an astronomical movie in order to discover objects that suddenly appear, move, or go bang. ### Biomedicine Corticosteroids given orally or intravenously should be the standard therapy for people with “severe and critical” COVID-19, the World Health Organization (WHO) said in new guidelines issued last week—but they should not be given to patients with mild cases. In June, a large U.K. trial named Recovery first showed that the steroid dexamethasone cut deaths among ventilated COVID-19 patients by 35% after 28 days of treatment. That result was confirmed by a WHO-sponsored metaanalysis published in JAMA on 2 September that included Recovery and six other studies testing dexamethasone, as well as two other corticosteroids—hydrocortisone and methylprednisolone. Many countries, including the United States, had already included corticosteroids in their national treatment guidelines. But WHO's recommendations will be important as a signal to low- and middle-income countries, says Martin Landray, one of Recovery's principal investigators. ### Public health COVID-19 virus particles drifting through a Chinese apartment building's plumbing may have infected some residents, a study has found, raising fears of yet another way that the disease could spread. The case echoes a 2003 outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) that spread through the pipes of a Hong Kong apartment building. Such transmission is difficult to prove. But scientists suspect that aerosolized coronavirus may have spread from the bathroom of a Guangzhou family of five through a floor drain and into the building's wastewater pipes. Two middle-aged couples living in apartments above the family later contracted COVID-19. The study appeared last week in Annals of Internal Medicine . ### Conservation A plan to reforest a cross-continental strip of Africa to hold back expansion of the Sahara Desert and the semi-arid Sahel has made little progress—even though the project is halfway toward its planned completion date in 2030, a report says. Participating countries have planted only 4 million hectares of trees and other vegetation for the Great Green Wall, well short of the 100 million planned to stretch 7000 kilometers from Senegal to Djibouti, says the report by the Climatekos consulting firm, presented on 7 September at a meeting of the countries' ministers. Supporters predicted the project would also create jobs and capture carbon dioxide. Scientists have said creating grasslands may be more effective than planting trees to resist desertification, The Guardian reported. ### Philanthropy Rice University last week received a $100 million gift for materials science. It is the largest to date in that discipline recorded in a database of gifts for engineering maintained by The Chronicle of Philanthropy . The funding will be used to pair materials science with artificial intelligence to advance the design and manufacturing of new materials, for applications that include sustainable water systems, energy, and telecommunications. The donor was the Robert A. Welch Foundation, which supports chemistry research in Texas. ### Conservation Scientists hailed a move last week by the European Union to ban the use of lead ammunition near wetlands and waterways. The European Chemicals Agency has estimated that as many as 1.5 million aquatic birds die annually from lead poisoning because they swallow some of the 5000 tons of lead shot that land in European wetlands each year. Its persistence in the environment is also considered a human health hazard. The EU Registration, Evaluation, Authorisation and Restriction of Chemicals (REACH) committee approved the ban after years of controversy. The German delegation, which had abstained in a July vote on the issue, changed its stance to support the measure after a letter from 75 scientists and petitions signed by more than 50,000 people called for it to do so. The European Commission and the European Parliament are expected to formally approve the ban, allowing it to go into effect in 2022. REACH may debate a complete ban on lead ammunition and fishing weights later this year. ### Chemical weapons Alexei Navalny, a Russian opposition politician, was poisoned with a nerve agent “identified unequivocally in tests” as a Novichok, an exotic Sovietera chemical weapon, German Chancellor Angela Merkel said on 2 September. Navalny fell ill on 20 August after drinking a cup of tea at a Siberian airport. He was flown to Berlin and this week emerged from a coma. German military scientists at the Bundeswehr Institute of Pharmacology and Toxicology in Munich haven't released details of their tests, but they had clear targets to hunt for: Like other nerve agents, Novichoks bind to the enzymes acetylcholinesterase and butyrylcholinesterase, creating a telltale conjugate compound. Novichok agents came to wide public notice in 2018 after one was used in an assassination attempt against former Russian spy Sergei Skripal in the United Kingdom. The attack prompted nations to push for a crackdown on Novichok agents, and last year they were added to the list of toxic chemicals regulated under the Chemical Weapons Convention. ### COVID-19 In one of the largest surveys of Americans since COVID-19 lockdowns began, a majority reported having some symptoms of depression, up from one-quarter in a prepandemic survey. The prevalence of symptoms graded as moderate to severe tripled, to 27.8% of respondents. A research team compared results from two surveys used to screen for depression: one administered to more than 5000 people in 2017 and 2018 by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the other given to 1400 people in early April by NORC at the University of Chicago. Prevalence of depression symptoms rose in all demographic groups and especially among individuals facing financial problems, job loss, or family deaths. The increases in self-reported symptoms are larger than those recorded in previous surveys after large-scale traumatic events in other countries, including outbreaks of the severe acute respiratory syndrome, H1N1, and Ebola, the authors write in the 2 September issue of JAMA Network Open . ### A U.S. vaccine leader's vow: Politics stays out “I would immediately resign if there is undue interference in this process.” So said Moncef Slaoui, scientific director of Operation Warp Speed, the U.S. effort to quickly develop a vaccine for COVID-19, in an interview with Science . To date, Warp Speed has invested more than $10 billion in eight vaccine candidates. Three are now in large-scale efficacy trials, and interim reviews of their data by independent safety and monitoring boards could reveal evidence of protection as early as October. Slaoui, an immunologist who formerly headed vaccine development at GlaxoSmithKline, answered questions from Science last week about how Warp Speed operates and addressed concerns that political pressure before the 3 November U.S. presidential election may lead to an emergency use authorization of a COVID-19 vaccine before it is proven safe and effective. (On 8 September, nine companies developing vaccines for the pandemic coronavirus pledged not to seek a premature authorization.) “It needs to be absolutely shielded from the politics,” Slaoui says. “Trust me, there will be no [authorization request] filed if it's not right. … The science is what is going to guide us. … And at the end of the day, the facts and the data will be made available to everyone who wants to look at them and will be transparent.” Slaoui defended Warp Speed's decision to not consider vaccines made of whole, inactivated viruses, a time-tested approach. China has three such vaccines in efficacy trials, but he worries they could cause serious side effects in people who receive them. Slaoui also said if it had been his choice, the United States would have participated in COVAX, a mechanism for countries to invest collectively in vaccines and share them; the Trump administration declined to join. The full interview—one of Slaoui's most detailed since taking the job in May—is at .

From an incisive ethnography of predictive policing to a compelling indictment of technology-enabled learning tools, the books on this year's fall reading list offer valuable context to the myriad challenges currently facing humanity. Dive deep into a public health disaster shrouded in secrecy, sit with the uncomfortable questions raised by a fictional foray into the future of intimacy, confront the challenges to sustainable development posed by environmental racism, and learn what a QR-coded chicken in rural China portends about the future of agriculture. When you are through, sit back and marvel at the odds stacked against humanity from the start with an entertaining romp through evolution and then leave your earthly worries behind with an ambitious tour of the Solar System. —Valerie Thompson Reviewed by Ivor Knight 1 Through a series of chance events, the pathogen we now know as severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 emerged in 2019 and infected millions of humans within a span of 6 months. But chance has driven more than just the planet's latest pandemic. In his new book, A Series of Fortunate Events: Chance and the Making of the Planet, Life, and You , Sean B. Carroll takes readers on an entertaining tour of biological discovery that emphasizes the dominant role played by chance in shaping the conditions for life on Earth. Along the way, he provides insights and humor that make the book a quick, lively read that both educates and entertains. Carroll begins with one of the most consequential chance events to have occurred in the history of our planet: the Cretaceous-Paleogene asteroid impact on the Yucatán Peninsula that resulted in the extinction of the dinosaurs and expansion of mammals. Given Earth's rotational speed, if the asteroid had hit 30 minutes earlier or later, scientists believe it would have made a much less consequential impact, landing in either the Atlantic or Pacific Ocean. If that had happened, there might still be dinosaurs today, but no humans. As he does throughout the book, Carroll compares the example from science with an example from popular culture, describing the comedian Seth MacFarlane's good fortune to have narrowly missed (by 30 minutes) one of the flights that was hijacked on 11 September 2001. Fundamental topics such as the roles that mutation and natural selection play in the evolution of diverse life-forms, the genetics of human reproduction, cellular mechanisms of acquired immunity, and the development of cancer are all treated within a framework where chance dominates. Carroll explains in detail how chance creates the genetic diversity upon which natural selection acts and results in the richness of species on Earth, as well as how random combinations among just 163 gene segments make possible a human immune system that can produce up to 10 billion different antibodies. Readers will likely be particularly interested to learn that their genome is only one of the 70 trillion possibilities that could have been produced by their parents. Written in a conversational style, the book reads like an updated version of Jacques Monod's 1970 Chance and Necessity that speaks directly to the reader, making complex subject matter more accessible. There is also a suggested reading list and an extensive bibliography included for further exploration. Carroll's central argument, that we are all here by luck, is certainly clear and compelling. What we choose to do with that luck, however, is where things really get interesting. Books such as this remind us to make our unlikely time here count. Reviewed by Gillian Bowser 2 Does a hurricane discriminate between the wealthy and the poor? Do earthquakes target specific victims? How does systemic racism influence development goals? In academic explorations of sustainable development and environmental responsibilities, our assumptions about the relationship between income and energy consumption remain largely rooted in the idea that social inequalities decrease as countries develop, thus reducing environmental inequality. No such relationship appears to actually exist. In his sobering but essential new book, Unsustainable Inequalities , economist Lucas Chancel explores the intersections of social justice and environmental sustainability with a focus on global goals established at the 2012 United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development, which informed the underlying philosophy of the 2015 Paris Agreement of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) ([ 1 ][1]). Framing his narrative through the lens of intragenerational economic inequalities, he identifies social inequality as a core driver of environmental unsustainability that leads to a vicious circle wherein the rich consume more and the poor lose access to environmental resources and become increasingly vulnerable to environmental shocks. In 1987, the World Commission on Environment and Development issued a report called “Our Common Future” that defined sustainable development as “development that meets the need of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs” ([ 2 ][2]). The idea of intergenerational environmental equity became a cornerstone concept, shifting climate policy toward the common but differentiated responsibilities enshrined in the UNFCCC. Yet questions about intergenerational responsibility and the equitable impacts of climate change and environmental degradation remain. Environmental racism, wherein communities of color are disproportionately exposed to environmental risks, is inseparable from social justice, Chancel argues, and the attainment of sustainable development that also protects the environment across generations is “extremely difficult” without first addressing economic inequality within a single generation. The notion that we may be able to attain sustainable development and achieve equal responsibility for environmental degradation feels more unreachable than ever in a world upended by a global pandemic. In prepandemic times, many nations had already failed to implement or participate in local and global environmental justice efforts, and taxation schemes to level responsibilities for environmental pollution have proven wildly unpopular. And while Chancel argues that common indicator frameworks such as the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals encourage nations to learn from one another, the continued rise of social inequality is a stark reminder of the difficult road ahead. Reviewed by Kanwal Singh 3 As the pandemic forces so many school systems and learning institutions to move online, the desire to educate students well using online tools and platforms is more pressing than ever. But as Justin Reich illustrates in his new book, Failure to Disrupt , there are no easy solutions or one-size-fits-all tools that can aid in this transition, and many recent technologies that were expected to radically change schooling have instead been used in ways that perpetuate existing systems and their attendant inequalities. The first half of the book discusses the brief histories, limited successes, and challenges of three types of large-scale technology-driven learning environments: instructor-guided, such as lectures taught through massive open online courses (MOOCs); algorithm-guided (e.g., Khan Academy); and peer-guided (e.g., the online coding community known as Scratch). Reich gives a solid accounting of the conditions needed for success with these models, the difficulties and limitations involved in adopting them in K–12 schooling, and the challenges that arise when we attempt to compare different approaches to one another. He argues that although we might think that the availability of a technology is its biggest limiter, the truth is that educational systems are simply not constructed to allow for experimentation and new ways of learning. Reich describes himself as committed to “methodological pluralism.” He supports the use of an array of learning tools and mechanisms, although he confesses to a particular admiration for peer-guided environments. He argues, however, that the incentive structures in formal education do not encourage the more innovative and deeper learning that can blossom in these environments. If we insist on maintaining current methods of assessment and ranking, which center on individual achievement, then peer-guided instruction will remain relegated to the sidelines. The second part of the book expands on the challenges of implementing educational technologies. Reich's main argument here is that educational systems are inherently conservative and that change will happen, albeit slowly and incrementally, only if technology designers, teachers, and administrators work in partnership to understand the desired learning goals and the parameters that define and constrain the learning environments. One of the most intractable pieces of the educational technology puzzle is the need to effectively conduct large-scale assessment, especially when the skills being assessed are not things that computers can do. Here, Reich cites a humorous example of an automated grading system giving high marks to an essay that begins with the technically grammatically correct sentence: “Educatee on an assassination will always be a part of mankind.” At the end of the book, Reich offers four questions that he finds especially useful to consider when examining a new large-scale educational technology. Perhaps the most useful question is the first: “What's new?” Despite what “edtech evangelists” might claim, new technologies often have closely related ancestors that can help predict their success, he argues. In the end, however, new technologies alone are unlikely to have a substantial impact on schooling. We must also be open to changing educational goals and expectations according to the possibilities offered by emergent technologies. Reviewed by Arti Garg 4 In Blockchain Chicken Farm , Xiaowei Wang reveals the myriad ways that technology is transforming our lives. They unveil, for example, the unexpected connections that exist between industrial oyster farming in rural China, livestream-fueled multilevel marketing schemes in the United States, and the app-enabled gig economy in which Chinese influencers participate. Following the threads of places and people woven together by new technologies, Wang helps readers trace the patterns emerging in the tapestry of our tech-infused world. Each chapter provides a view into not just how we use technology but why and to what end. Emphasizing the often-hidden human engine that powers our app-driven economy, Wang exposes the flaw in our tendency to conflate societal and cultural aspirations with the promises of technology and challenges us to honestly measure what value technology delivers. In the 21st century, they argue, we demand that technologists solve the problems that our governments and communities have not. In doing so, we inadvertently empower companies to exploit and amplify those same problems. Most of Wang's vignettes relate to Chinese agriculture. This decision, which roots the narrative in the visceral language of human sustenance, grounds the heady subject matter. The titular example takes readers to the GoGoChicken farm in Sanqiao, a “dreamlike” village that sits in one of the poorest regions in China. Here, Wang introduces the straw-hatted “Farmer Jiang,” who has partnered with his village government and a blockchain company to sell free-range chickens via an e-commerce site. Jiang's chickens sell for RMB 300 (∼$35) each, an amount equal to 6% of the average annual household income in that part of China. Wang explains that high-profile failures of regulatory oversight have left many Chinese with a deep distrust of the food supply chain and that upper-class Chinese urbanites will pay a premium for reassurance about food safety, which, in this case, takes the form of a vacuum-sealed chicken that comes with a QR code revealing blockchain-logged details of its life on the farm. Wang suggests that Americans, driven by concerns over animal welfare, may desire similar reassurance about their food's provenance. In both China and America, they observe, technology allows the upper class to buy its way around governmental and societal shortcomings at prices that are out of reach for most people. Technology does not correct the intrinsic problems, and most cannot reap the benefits of the technological “solutions.” Without resorting to an overly romanticized notion of rural wisdom, Wang treats individuals like Jiang, whose future remains uncertain owing to the vagaries of e-commerce supply chains, with respect and empathy. Because of this, they largely succeed in their goal of reframing our understanding of technology as neither the cause of nor the solution to our problems but rather as a force reshaping the human experience in fundamental ways. Reviewed by Heather Bloemhard 5 The Secret Lives of Planets by Paul Murdin includes a plethora of information about our Solar System. Murdin covers planets, asteroids, moons, dwarf planets, and more, approximately one per chapter. Even exoplanets—the planets that orbit a star other than our Sun—are referenced frequently, although not in their own chapter. Using only a few images, Murdin illustrates the historical and physical concepts that surround each of these elements in prose peppered with anecdotes from his own career as an astronomer. While the book's tone is pleasant and conversational, the discussions are often technical in nature, and I worry that some readers may be frustrated by its many tangents and loose organizational structure. For example, in his discussion of the formation of Mercury, Murdin references the formation of exoplanets, the discovery of 'Oumuamua, and Earth's fossil record. The same chapter also refers to Earth and Venus to help explain orbital eccentricity and precession, but this analogy may fall short for lay readers. I was also disappointed that Murdin relied almost exclusively on the accomplishments of European men to tell the story of how our understanding of the Solar System emerged over time. He writes, for example, of Nicolaus Copernicus's revelations about the geometry of our solar system but neglects the work of Muslim astronomers who developed models of heliocentric orbits hundreds of years earlier. Murdin is far from alone in this misstep, but it is well worth striving to do better. Despite these criticisms, every reader will learn something from this ambitious book. Did you know, for example, that some scientists once believed there were oases of vegetation on Mars, or that others believed that martians might try to colonize Earth? From the exchange of planetary material by way of meteorites to the formation of asteroids, Murdin covers a wide range of astronomical topics, including the aurora of Jupiter, the mysteries of Uranus, and the potential of the moons of Jupiter and Saturn to support recognizable life. I found Murdin's personal recollections to be the most compelling feature of The Secret Lives of Planets . He tells the story of how, as a student, he observed the shadows cast by the tops of clouds of different heights on Venus using a telescope similar to the one used by Galileo and uses this anecdote as a starting point to explain what the Italian astronomer discovered about the planet. Recounting the time he observed the launch of Cassini-Huygens, a probe sent to Saturn's moon Titan, Murdin explains what scientists had hoped to learn from this mission and what they ended up discovering. He also discusses attending the 2006 International Astronomical Union conference, where a debate was held about the definition of a planet, and reveals what it was like to cast a vote on the final decision. In the end, there is much to recommend The Secret Lives of Planets as an introductory text on our solar system. Reviewed by Peter Reczek 6 Modern cancer therapies are often the result of years of targeted research and development, making it easy to forget that many of the field's early breakthroughs had as much to do with chance as they did with preparation. In The Great Secret , Jennet Conant recounts one such breakthrough, which was made in the wake of a deadly disaster. Conant's engrossing story is set in the Italian port town of Bari, which was used as an important staging area for the distribution of supplies supporting Allied troops as they pushed north through Italy during World War II. On 2 December 1943, a day that would later be referred to as “a little Pearl Harbor,” German military aircraft sank more than 20 Allied ships anchored in Bari, leading to the loss of more than 1000 Allied servicemen and Italian civilians. Lieutenant Colonel Stewart Alexander, a medical officer attached to General Eisenhower's headquarters in North Africa, was sent to coordinate medical relief efforts. In Bari, Alexander found “a nightmarish scene.” In the aftermath of the air raid, “The walking wounded staggered in [to the hospital] unaided, suffering from shock, burns, and exposure after having been in the cold water for hours before being rescued. Others had to be supported, as they cradled fractured arms in improvised slings or dragged mangled limbs…Almost all of them were covered in thick, black crude oil,” writes Conant. In addition to the acutely injured, Alexander discovered victims whose injuries had emerged days after the attack and could not be attributed to the percussive effects of the bombing. After analyzing the positions of the ailing seamen, Alexander reported that an American Liberty ship, the John Harvey , was the source of the problem, speculating that it likely contained a secret cache of nitrogen mustard (i.e., mustard gas). Both the American and British governments denied any such cache, but Conant reveals that Alexander persisted, and his controversial report—which, crucially, documented a decrease in white blood cell counts in the victims—was accepted by the Allied High Command with a classification of “Secret.” After the war, Colonel C. P. “Dusty” Rhoads, who had been Alexander's superior during the Bari investigation, reasoned that an agent that reduced white blood cells might be useful in treating some forms of leukemia. While serving as the first director of the Sloan Kettering Institute, Rhoads oversaw a clinical trial to test nitrogen mustards as potential therapeutic agents for the treatment of neoplastic disease. The results exceeded expectations. “In their first attempt to treat patients with inoperable lung cancer with nitrogen mustard, the Memorial team reported that of the thirty-five patients, 74 percent showed some clinical improvement” writes Conant. Many similar compounds, collectively known as alkylating agents, are still the foundation of the combination chemotherapy used to treat some forms of leukemia. Drawing largely from archival research, Conant relies on a loose conversational style to convey a fast-paced medical detective story that demonstrates how careful scientific observation can yield unexpected benefits and serves as a reminder of the difficult choices made by governments to balance public health and secrecy in matters of security. Reviewed by Esha Mathew 7 In quantum physics, entanglement is a property wherein two particles are inextricably linked. Put another way, entangled particles are never truly independent of each other, no matter the distance between them. It is fitting then that Entanglements is an anthology of short stories about inextricably linked people and the impact of emerging technologies on their relationships. A talented set of authors, with deft editing by Sheila Williams, explore the full spectrum of intimacy and technology to great effect. As an added visual treat, illustrations by Tatiana Plakhova punctuate each story with a blend of science, mathematics, and art that complements the subject matter. Even with the length limitations of a short story, the world-building in this compilation is frequently full and often insidiously terrifying, particularly in those stories that use the familiar as breadcrumbs to lure the reader in. The very first tale, “Invisible People” by Nancy Kress, begins with a mundane morning routine and carefully layers in a story about two parents reeling from an unsanctioned genetic experiment on their child. In “Don't Mind Me,” Suzanne Palmer uses the shuffle between high school classes as a foundation on which to build a story about how one generation uses technology to enshrine its biases and inflict them on the next. The ethical implications in these stories offer fodder enough for plenty of late-night discussions. It is also chilling how entirely possible many of the fictional futures seem. But looking forward need not always be bleak. This volume balances darker-themed stories with those in which technology and people collide in uplifting and charming ways. In Mary Robinette Kowal's “A Little Wisdom,” for example, a museum curator, aided by her robotic therapy dog–cum–medical provider, finds the courage within herself to inspire courage in others and save the day. Meanwhile, in Cadwell Turnbull's “Mediation,” a scientist reeling from a terrible loss finally accepts her personal AI's assistance to start the healing process. And in arguably the cheekiest tale in this compilation, “The Monogamy Hormone,” Annalee Newitz tells of a woman who ingests synthetic vole hormones to choose between two lovers, delivering a classic tale of relationship woes with a bioengineered twist. With such a dizzying array of technologies discussed in relation to a range of human emotion and behavior, readers may experience cognitive whiplash as they move from one story to the next. But it is definitely worth the risk. The 10 very different thought experiments presented in this volume make for a fun ride, revealing that human relationships will continue to be as complicated and affirming in the future as they are today. I would recommend the Netflix approach to this highly readable collection: Binge it in one go, preferably with a friend. Reviewed by Joseph B. Keller 8 The U.S. police system is experiencing a reckoning. Protesters across the country (and around the world) have taken to the streets, arguing that police brutality disproportionately harms minority communities, and the current value of policing is being debated by city councils, lawmakers, and members of the news media. Into this tumultuous context enters Sarah Brayne's book, Predict & Surveil: Data, Discretion, and the Future of Policing . A sociologist by training, Brayne synthesizes interview data and field notes from 5 years of observation within the Los Angeles Police Department, employing a firsthand ethnographic approach to reveal how big data are currently used in tech-forward police departments in America. She chronicles both consequential and mundane interactions between officers, civilians, and data. For example, she documents officers uploading license plate numbers, field interview notes, traffic citations, and potential gang affiliations onto a private industry data platform, as well as their active surveillance of hotspots in Los Angeles predicted to be criminogenic. This fly-on-the-wall perspective captures the human aspect of a police force grappling with automated systems and machine-learning decisions in real time, juxtaposing the experiences of individual officers with institutional directives being handed down from administrators and lawmakers. Many police departments contend that the adoption of predictive analytics can improve objectivity and transparency, reduce bias, and increase accountability. Yet Brayne's book reveals how few of these metrics actually improve with predictive policing and exposes the scant evidence that supports the idea that it reduces crime rates. On the contrary, she insists, predictive policing raises glaring civil rights concerns and reinforces harmful racial biases. We all leave digital traces throughout our daily lives, and innocent people can be caught in the dragnet and cataloged in a digital criminal justice system, where a case can be built from benign data. Police unions, Brayne notes, often vehemently oppose the tracking of their own officers. She records incidents of officers turning off their car locator signals, for example, as well as other tactics used to thwart tech-infused managerial oversight. Many officers view policing as an art form rather than a scientific system that can be optimized. To some, big data policing threatens their sense of police instincts and identity. “They worry that they will become nothing more than line workers and insist that their years of accumulated experiential knowledge is irreplaceable,” observes Brayne. Brayne's book raises timely issues relevant to mass surveillance and policing amid a growing debate about facial recognition systems, which makes their omission from this work notable. Although banned in several major American cities, these systems remain a common tool for identifying potential offenders, despite abundant evidence of dangerous inconsistencies. Predictive policing can drive societal inequalities, but Brayne suggests that reducing instances of general police contact may mitigate disparities. In addition to offering immediate recommendations for changing law enforcement in the digital age, she asserts that effective programmatic reforms are typically influenced by external social organizing and guided by communities. (The likelihood of real transformation from within the police system is small, she believes.) For judicial and policing institutions genuinely seeking reform, this book provides powerful observations and analysis that suggest how we can begin. 1. [↵][3]Paris Agreement to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, 12 December 2015, TIAS No. 16-1104. 2. [↵][4]World Commission on Environment and Development, Our Common Future (Oxford Univ. Press, 1987). [1]: #ref-1 [2]: #ref-2 [3]: #xref-ref-1-1 "View reference 1 in text" [4]: #xref-ref-2-1 "View reference 2 in text"

"Anatomical actions such as heartbeat, blood flow, or breathing, create subtle changes that are not visible to the eye but still detectable computationally." A mere suspicion of doctored video can topple governments. It happened in Gabon, when the President recorded a video message that was awkwardly shot. The inconsistency was mistaken for being a product of deep fake and that led to a coup as the opposition assumed the death of the President. Though AI-generated imagery has great potential, malicious usage is equally as damning.

As machine learning has evolved, so have best practices, especially in the wake of COVID-19. Join this VB Live event to learn from experts about how machine learning solutions are helping companies respond in these uncertain times – and the lessons learned along the way. Misinformation around COVID-19 is driving human behavior across the world. Here in the information age, sensationalized clickbait headlines are crowding out actual fact-based content, and, as a result misinformation spreads virally. Conversations within small communities become the epicenter of false information, and that misinformation spreads as people talk, both online and off.

Risk is 6 player game with significant randomness and a large game-tree complexity which poses a challenge to creating an agent to play the game effectively. Previous AIs focus on creating high-level handcrafted features determine agent decision making. In this project, I create D.A.D, A Risk agent using temporal difference reinforcement learning to train a Deep Neural Network including a Graph Convolutional Network to evaluate player positions. This is used in a game-tree to select optimal moves. This allows minimal handcrafting of knowledge into the AI, assuring input features are as low-level as possible to allow the network to extract useful and sophisticated features itself, even with the network starting from a random initialisation. I also tackle the issue of non-determinism in Risk by introducing a new method of interpreting attack moves necessary for the search. The result is an AI which wins 35% of the time versus 5 of best inbuilt AIs in Lux Delux, a Risk variant.