Lifeboat Foundation

The president of Turkey said on Wednesday that he might speak to Elon Musk to negotiate a way to opt out of paying for a proposed $8-a-month Twitter verification fee.

Reuters reported the news, citing an interview with Turkish broadcaster ATV.

Recep Tayyip Erdogan told ATV he was considering talking to Musk about the monthly $8 subscription, which would give users a blue checkmark, the ability to post long-form video, priority in search, and fewer ads, per Reuters.

Nuclear War?! — We would be one of the first ones to go, but who or what would survive a nuclear war?

Posted on Big Think.

Programmable bacteria attached to electrodes that deliver a electrical signal when the bacteria detect a target contaminant, enables real-time sensing, reports a study from Rice University. The engineered E.coli and electrodes are encapsulated in an agarose capsule to prevent the bacteria from falling off the electrodes. Prototypes developed by the team can detect contaminants in water such as thiosulfate and an endocrine disruptor in under five minutes.

Most delivery drones can only carry about one-third of their mass as payload, because most of their mass is both critical, like wings, and comes in the form of things that are essentially useless to the end user, like wings. But EPFL researchers have invented a drone with wings made from rice cakes.

In the past 30 days, SpaceX has completed 8 orbital launches. If they kept this up for a year, they would be doing 8 12 = 96 which is about their goal for next year. To give you an idea of how fast SpaceX is growing, last year, SpaceX only did 31 launches which was a record for them.

Even more impressive, one of these launches was a Falcon Heavy which is basically 3 Falcon 9’s tied together. So SpaceX completed 10 orbital launches of Falcon 9s in the past 30 days which would be a rate of 120 Falcon 9 orbital launches per year!

A history of orbital rocket launches.

Chinese hackers are abusing antivirus software to sideload LODEINFO.

A set of four malicious applications currently available in Google Play, the official store for the Android system, are directing users sites that steal sensitive information or generate ‘pay-per-click’ revenue for the operators.

Some of these sites offer victims to download fake security tools or updates, to trick users into installing the malicious files manually.

At the time of publishing, the apps are still present on Google Play under a developer account called Mobile apps Group, and have a total install count of more than one million.

People like Jason Calacanis and David Sacks could play a huge role in charting the social media platform’s future—for better or worse.

Brain changes in autism are comprehensive throughout the cerebral cortex rather than just particular areas thought to affect social behavior and language, according to a new UCLA-led study that significantly refines scientists’ understanding of how autism spectrum disorder (ASD) progresses at the molecular level.

The study, published today in Nature, represents a comprehensive effort to characterize ASD at the molecular level. While neurological disorders like Alzheimer’s disease or Parkinson’s disease have well-defined pathologies, autism and other psychiatric disorders have had a lack of defining pathology, making it difficult to develop more effective treatments.

The new study finds brain-wide changes in virtually all of the 11 cortical regions analyzed, regardless of whether they are higher critical association regions—those involved in functions such as reasoning, language, social cognition and mental flexibility—or primary sensory regions.