Apps used to help smartphone-addicted teens battle depression

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Psychiatrists and parents have long been worried about the psychological and emotional risks of high rates of social media use among teens, with so much time spent on their phones limiting face-to-face interaction, the development of social skills, and potentially contributing to depression and anxiety. But now, researchers are trying to find ways to use the fact that teens are on their phones so much to track possible signs of depression and intervene.

“The goal of our work aims to turn smartphones into ‘fitness trackers’ for the human brain,” Dr. Alex Leow, an app developer and associate professor in psychiatry, bioengineering and computer science at the University of Illinois at Chicago, tells Rolling Stone. The app she’s working on, BiAffect, uses iPhone metadata, such as “proximity sensor, ambient light sensor, camera, accelerometer, gyroscope, compass, barometer, Touch ID and pressure-sensitive display,” to track users’ mood and mental health, and is one of several similar projects in development.

Several recent studies show a correlation between social media and smartphone use and depression, anxiety, and loneliness: One showed that the more people used Facebook in a given time period, the more likely they were to be unhappy. Another recent study showed that in addition to total time spent on one social media site, people who used multiple networking sites or apps were more likely to be depressed. And yet another showed that among young adults, those who used social media for more than two hours per day were more likely to deal with feelings of social isolation than those who used it less.

And teens and young adults are, notoriously, the heaviest social media and smartphone users — 88 percent of people between the ages of 18 and 29 reported that they use social media, according to a 2018 Pew Research Center survey, and 92 percent of teens and young adults owned a smartphone as of 2015. The same demographic has seen a spike in depression and anxiety in recent years. A 2017 study of over half a million 8 to 12th graders found that depressive symptoms among that group increased by 33 percent between the years of 2010 and 2015, and matched that increase to the spread of smartphone adoption, year by year. Suicide rates in teens have skyrocketed in the last several years, increasing by over 70 percent between 2006 and 2016, and several experts point to social media as a contributing factor.

Experts in adolescent mental health generally advise parents to limit their kids’ social media use, monitor their online activity, and model good habits by limiting their own screen time. But as smartphones become more and more ubiquitous, these tactics can feel increasingly futile and insufficient. So, some researchers decided, if teens are going to be on their phones all day anyway, maybe that’s the place to intervene and spot signs of depression before they escalate to dangerous levels.

“BiAffect analyzes data streams generated by a user’s interaction with their smartphone to create insights about their mood and cognition,” Dr. Leow says. “From these data, patterns associated with particular moods or cognitive states are identified which can be used to inform the care of people with mental health disorders and promote improved outcomes.”

BiAffect and other apps like it are currently in the research stage, and experts estimate we’re likely still a few years away from mood-sensing apps being widely available and effective. In addition to perfecting the science, there are also ethical questions involved in tracking such intimate information, and the general public is already wary of data-collecting apps since they often exist to sell personal data to corporations for profit.

“Critically ensur[ing] data security and participant privacy is the biggest challenge thus far,” Dr. Leow says.

Cell companies are still selling your real-time location data

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A new bombshell report from Joseph Cox over at Motherboard details how carriers like Sprint, AT&T and T-Mobile are all in the business of selling real-time location data of subscribers. While this in and of itself isn’t a new development, Motherboard reveals that this location data far too often ends up in the hands of bounty hunters who are willing to give up an individual’s location for the right price.

Cox himself used himself as a guinea pig of sorts and paid a bounty hunter $300 to help him track down the location of a friend who agreed to be part of the experiment. The bounty hunter, armed with only the phone number of the target, was able to track down the target’s location to a hyper-specific area and sent a snapshot of the location via Google Maps.

“The bounty hunter did this all without deploying a hacking tool or having any previous knowledge of the phone’s whereabouts,” the report reads. “Instead, the tracking tool relies on real-time location data sold to bounty hunters that ultimately originated from the telcos themselves, including T-Mobile, AT&T and Sprint, a Motherboard investigation has found.”

Again, it’s never been a secret that carriers provide location tracking to authorized third-parties in specific scenarios. For example, a carrier might allow a bank access to a user’s real-time location as a means to better detect fraud. The problem, naturally, is that this data inevitably ends up in the wrong hands. And speaking to the number of players with access to said data, Cox reveals that upwards of six third-parties had access to the target’s location.

In the case of the phone we tracked, six different entities had potential access to the phone’s data. T-Mobile shares location data with an aggregator called Zumigo, which shares information with Microbilt. Microbilt shared that data with a customer using its mobile phone tracking product. The bounty hunter then shared this information with a bail industry source, who shared it with Motherboard.

And though Cox paid $300 for his experiment, sometimes a phone can be tracked for as little as $5.

It’s also interesting that this experiment was done with a T-Mobile device given that John Legere this past June pledged that his company “will not sell customer location data to shady middlemen.”

NASA: Icy object past Pluto looks like reddish snowman

Ultima Thule Getty Images

LAUREL, Md. — A NASA spacecraft 4 billion miles from Earth yielded its first close-up pictures Wednesday of the most distant celestial object ever explored, depicting what looks like a reddish snowman.

Ultima Thule, as the small, icy object has been dubbed, was found to consist of two fused-together spheres, one of them three times bigger than the other, extending about 21 miles in length.

NASA’s New Horizons, the spacecraft that sent back pictures of Pluto three and a half years ago, swept past the ancient, mysterious object early on New Year’s Day. It is 1 billion miles beyond Pluto.

On Tuesday, based on early, fuzzy images taken the day before, scientists said Ultima Thule resembled a bowling pin. But when better, closer pictures arrived, a new consensus emerged Wednesday.

“The bowling pin is gone. It’s a snowman!” lead scientist Alan Stern informed the world from Johns Hopkins University’s Applied Physics Laboratory, home to Mission Control in Laurel, Maryland. The bowling pin image is “so 2018,” joked Stern, who is with the Southwest Research Institute.

The celestial body was nicknamed Ultima Thule — meaning “beyond the known world” — before scientists could say for sure whether it was one object or two. With the arrival of the photos, they are now calling the bigger sphere Ultima and the smaller one Thule.

Thule is estimated to be 9 miles (14 kilometers) across, while Ultima is thought to be 12 miles.

Scientist Jeff Moore of NASA’s Ames Research Center said the two spheres formed when icy, pebble-size pieces coalesced in space billions of years ago. Then the spheres spiraled closer to each other until they gently touched — as slowly as parking a car here on Earth at just a mile or two per hour — and stuck together.

Despite the slender connection point, the two lobes are “soundly bound” together, according to Moore.

Scientists have ascertained that the object takes about 15 hours to make a full rotation. If it were spinning fast — say, one rotation every three or four hours — the two spheres would rip apart.

Stern noted that the team has received less than 1 percent of all the data stored aboard New Horizons. It will take nearly two years to get it all.

The two-lobed object is what is known as a “contact binary.” It is the first contact binary NASA has ever explored. Having formed 4.5 billion years ago, when the solar system taking shape, it is also the most primitive object seen up close like this.

About the size of a city, Ultima Thule has a mottled appearance and is the color of dull brick, probably because of the effects of radiation bombarding the icy surface, with brighter and darker regions.

Both spheres are similar in color, while the barely perceptible neck connecting the two lobes is noticeably less red, probably because of particles falling down the steep slopes into that area.

So far, no moons or rings have been detected, and there were no obvious impact craters in the latest photos, though there were a few apparent “divots” and suggestions of hills and ridges, scientists said. Better images should yield definitive answers in the days and weeks ahead.

Clues about the surface composition of Ultima Thule should start rolling in by Thursday. Scientists believe the icy exterior is probably a mix of water, methane and nitrogen, among other things.

The snowman picture was taken a half-hour before the spacecraft’s closest approach early Tuesday, from a distance of about 18,000 miles.

Scientists consider Ultima Thule an exquisite time machine that should provide clues to the origins of our solar system.

It’s neither a comet nor an asteroid, according to Stern, but rather “a primordial planetesimal.” Unlike comets and other objects that have been altered by the sun over time, Ultima Thule is in its pure, original state: It’s been in the deep-freeze Kuiper Belt on the fringes of our solar system from the beginning.

“This thing was born somewhere between 99 percent and 99.9 percent of the way back to T-zero (liftoff) in our solar system, really amazing,” Stern said. He added: “We’ve never seen anything like this before. It’s not fish or fowl. It’s something that’s completely different.”

Still, he said, when all the data comes in, “there are going to be mysteries of Ultima Thule that we can’t figure out.”

Chinese probe sends back first snap of ‘dark’ side of the moon

The Chang'e-4 lunar probe, seen through the monitor at Beijing Aerospace Control Center in Beijing. AP

BEIJING — China’s burgeoning space program achieved a first on Thursday: a landing on the so-called dark side of the moon.

Three nations — the United States, the former Soviet Union and more recently China — have sent spacecraft to the near side of the moon, which faces Earth, but this landing is the first-ever on the far side.

The China National Space Administration said the 10:26 a.m. touchdown of the Chang’e 4 craft has “opened up a new chapter in human lunar exploration.”

A photo taken at 11:40 a.m. and sent back by Chang’e 4 shows a small crater and a barren surface that appears to be illuminated by a light from the lunar explorer. Its name comes from that of a Chinese goddess who, according to legend, has lived on the moon for millennia.

The landing highlights China’s growing ambitions to rival the US, Russia and Europe in space and more broadly, to cement the nation’s position as a regional and global power.

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The first image of the moon’s far side taken by China’s Chang’e 4 probe.AP

“The space dream is part of the dream to make China stronger,” President Xi Jinping said in 2013, shortly after becoming China’s leader.

In year-end wrap-ups, Chinese media and officials hailed the Dec. 8 launch of Chang’e 4 as one of the nation’s major achievements in 2018. The landing on Thursday was announced to the public by state broadcaster CCTV at the top of the noon news.

“On the whole, China’s space technology still lags behind the West, but with the landing on the far side of the moon, we have raced to the front,” said Hou Xiyun, a professor at Nanjing University’s school of astronomy and space science.

He added that China has Mars, Jupiter and asteroids in its sights: “There’s no doubt that our nation will go farther and farther.”

In 2013, Chang’e 3, the predecessor craft to the current mission, made the first moon landing since the former Soviet Union’s Luna 24 in 1976. The United States is the only country that has successfully sent a person to the moon, though China is considering a crewed mission too.

For now, it plans to send a Chang’e 5 probe to the moon next year and have it return to Earth with samples — also not done since the Soviet mission in 1976.

The moon’s far side isn’t always dark but is sometimes called the dark side because it faces away from Earth and is relatively unknown. It has a different composition than the near side, where previous missions have landed.

Chang’e 4, a combined lander and rover, will make astronomical observations and probe the structure and mineral composition of the terrain above and below the surface.

“The far side of the moon is a rare quiet place that is free from interference from radio signals from Earth,” mission spokesman Yu Guobin said, according to the official Xinhua News Agency. “This probe can fill the gap of low-frequency observation in radio astronomy and will provide important information for studying the origin of stars and nebula evolution.”

One challenge of operating on the far side of the moon is communicating with Earth. China launched a relay satellite in May so that Chang’e 4 can send back information.

China conducted its first crewed space mission in 2003, becoming only the third country to do so after Russia and the US. It has put a pair of space stations into orbit and plans to launch a Mars rover in the mid-2020s. Its space program suffered a rare setback last year with the failed launch of its Long March 5 rocket.

Wu Weiren, chief designer of the China Lunar Exploration Project, called the landing a trailblazing milestone.

“Building a space power is a dream that we persistently pursue,” he said in an interview with CCTV at the Beijing Aerospace Flight and Control Center. “And we’re gradually realizing it.”

2018 wasn’t even close to the worst year ever

Feeling down? Struggling to cope? Does life feel like a “Game of Thrones”? Well, perhaps your worries really are just first-world problems.

Throughout history, our ancestors have had more pressing concerns. Finding wild weather a problem? How about 18 straight months of fog? Supermarket prices getting too high? How about watching all your crops wither and die?

Constantly catching some new bug? How about contending with the Black Plague? Sick of government leadership slip-ups? How about the collapse of civilization itself?

Put it all together, and you get a date: 536 AD.

Harvard University medieval historian Michael McCormick has set out to find out just how bad things were, and what caused it all. He’s come up with some answers.

“It was the beginning of one of the worst periods to be alive, if not the worst year,” McCormick says.

It was the darkest moment of the Dark Ages. Now we know why. And when things started to get better again.

Blank and pitiless as the sun

Times weren’t great. The Western Roman Empire had collapsed 60 years earlier when Emperor Romulus was defeated by the Germanic warlord Odoacer.

Without the central rule of law, Rome’s old provinces throughout Europe became increasingly isolated. Infrastructure such as aqueducts, public baths and roads were failing. The highways were thick with brigands. Local strongmen surged forward to fill the power vacuum.

But things were about to get much, much worse.

McCormick told the American Association for the Advancement of Science that 536 may not have been the exact worst year — but it was the year things fell apart.

The next decade would be a living hell. The results of his study were published in the journal Antiquity. It was as if the gods had abandoned Europe, China — and much of the land in between. A mysterious fog rolled over Europe, the Middle East and parts of Asia.

It did not lift.

For 18 months it sat there — plunging the lands into darkness.

“And it came about during this year that a most dread portent took place,” wrote Byzantine historian Procopius. “For the sun gave forth its light without brightness, like the moon, during the whole year.”

It was just the start. The following decade would be the coldest recorded for at least 2,300 years. But, in 536, snow would fall in summer. Crops withered and died. People starved — en masse. What caused it all has long been unknown.

But a 1990s analysis of the growth of tree rings during the era proved the historic records: The summers around 540 AD were certainly very cold, severely stunting trees’ growth.

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world

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Rome’s Western Empire may have collapsed. But the Eastern Empire still stood. Emperor Justinian the Great seemed firmly ensconced. He was in the 10th year of his — until then — prosperous reign.

Then, the skies grew dark.

“And it seemed exceedingly like the sun in eclipse, for the beams it shed were not clear nor such as it is accustomed to shed,” Procopius described.

Elements of the thriving network of international trade established over the past 600 years lingered. Nations and provinces still relied upon each other for vital resources.

After 536, this would not last. But it would contribute to making things worse.  The bubonic plague began its relentless march. Among people and animals already reeling from starvation, the Black Death would extract a terrible toll. And the disease-carrying parasites would spread far and wide, carried by ships, wagons and travelers.

In 541, the Roman port of Pelusium in Egypt became the first major population center to be brought to its knees by the plague. The following Plague of Justinian killed up to half of the entire population of the Eastern Roman Empire — bringing on its collapse.

Europe, the Middle East and much of Asia fell into economic and societal collapse that would last just over a century.

It was what would commonly become known as the Dark Ages. Entire peoples would uproot and swarm across Europe, seeking new lands to plant their crops.

It was the era that spawned legends such as that of King Arthur — with lingering memories of a lost golden age, and a yearning for a hero to bring back the good times.

Some revelation is at hand

How things got so bad, so fast, has long puzzled historians.

Was the Roman Empire simply too corrupt to survive? Were the “barbarians” stampeding and ravaging their way across Europe? And what was the cause of that choking cloud of fog?

McCormick and his team say they now have an answer.

Careful analysis and dating of ice cores exposed evidence of an event that sparked the global catastrophe. Volcanic ash. Vaporized glass. Sulfur. Bismuth. All were blasted high into the sky, creating a thin film reflecting sunlight back into space.

Glaciologist Paul Mayewski of the University of Maine says the ash appears to have come from a volcano in North America, or perhaps Iceland. It blew — big time — in early 536. It spewed ash across the entire Northern Hemisphere. But that wasn’t the end of it.

The volcano erupted twice more — in 540 and 547. The consequent ash clouds served only to revitalize the climate-changing impact of the first. But the ice core reveals more.

Each tree-ring-like layer of ice acts like nature’s logbook of what was happening at the time.

Among those layers associated with 640 AD was found a sudden spike in particulate lead. And historians knew where that came from.

Industry had revived. Economies had fired up. The wheels of trade had begun to roll again. And greasing it all was the flow of freshly minted silver coins — the processing of which produced the lead pollution.

The darkness drops again, but now I know

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Penny minted around 660Antiquity Publications; T. Abramson

McKormick’s team found microscopic particles of volcanic glass in a Swiss glacier dating from 536. Ice cores and tree rings from Greenland and peat bog cores from elsewhere in Europe also contained similar particles.

Indications are they came from a volcano in Iceland, but the samples are too small to be certain. The researchers say they want to examine cores from lakes in Europe and Iceland to identify more fallout from this catastrophic event.

Once identified, there may be clues as to why this particular eruption proved so devastating. Wherever the volcano, the jet-stream winds propelled the plume across Europe and Asia. Beneath it, the chilled fog formed.

The ice also tells the tale of the end of this dark age.

Archaeologist Christopher Loveluck of the University of Nottingham says in Antiquity that the ability to precisely date sample cores was a major breakthrough for historians. Ice cores are proving to be a fantastic resource for inferring what was happening at any given point in history. Each snowfall lands on top of another, building up, layer by layer, ice sheets that capture snapshots of what was in the air for each given season.

The cores reveal the smelting of lead ore to extract silver produced a surge in pollution in 640, and again in 660.

Economies were thriving once again. Gold was becoming scarce for coins. So silver found itself suddenly in great demand.

“This unambiguously shows that, alongside any residual pool of Roman bullion and imported metal, new mining facilitated the production of the last post-Roman gold coins — debased with increasing amounts of silver — and the new silver coinages that replaced them,” the researchers wrote.

Loveluck added: “It shows the rise of the merchant class for the first time.”

It was a golden age set to last 700 years. Then the ice cores tell another tale. Once again, lead vanished from the air. Between 1349 and 1353, the Black Death once again swept through Europe.

Once again economies collapsed. Crops failed. But it wouldn’t prove as bad as 536.