The mass die-off of coral reefs is a catastrophe of global proportions, but the sheer scale of their success as organisms has lessons for science. Case in point: these 3D-printed &bionic corals& from Cambridge researchers that are more than scaffolds for fragile microorganisms — they&re built out of them.

If 3D-printed corals sound familiar, thatbecause a couple of years ago some other researchers suggested using structures printed to resemble the complex shapes of reefs as solid bases on which new corals and other animals could grow. Ita good idea, but theremore to a reef than a solid base.

Corals are in fact a highly evolved symbiosis between the coral organisms themselves and algae that live inside them. The algae use photosynthesis to power the creation of sugar for their host, and the coral provide a safe living environment — and, interestingly, are also highly efficient at collecting and redirecting light. This partnership has been fruitful for millions of years, though rising ocean temperatures and acidity have upset the delicate balance necessary for success.

The team at Cambridge realized that to successfully imitate the coral micro-ecosystem, they&d need to replicate that special quality of capturing sunlight and diffusing it within for use by resident algae. To do so, they studied the structure of corals closely and worked to remake it at a microscopic level. But instead of using an ordinary durable substrate, they created a sort of living gel.

&We developed an artificial coral tissue and skeleton with a combination of polymer gels and hydrogels doped with cellulose nanomaterials to mimic the optical properties of living corals,& explained Cambridge chemist Daniel Wangpraseurt, lead author of the paper in which the technique is described. Algae were infused into the mixture as well, so the researchers were essentially printing living matter.

That kind of technique is already being tested and used for medical purposes — printing part of an organ or tissue for implantation, for instance. In this case it has to be printed not with a specific large-scale shape, but with an extremely complex internal geometry that maximizes the reach of light hitting the surface. This has to be done very quickly or the algae will die from exposure.

The resulting bioprinted structure is an ideal home for the algae, producing growth rates many times the speed of an ordinary medium. That doesn&t mean the next step is growing corals super-fast — in fact, thereno reason to think this will actually lead to coral restoration. On the other hand, this type of simulation could lead to a better understanding of the ecosystem in which the coral-algae partnership thrives, and how it can be nurtured.

In the meantime, the promise of multiplying algae growth speeds has commercial appeal today, and a startup called Mantaz has been founded to pursue more near-term uses of the technology.

Instacart is adding more support roles to help its shoppers, customers and retail partners as the company faces unprecedented demand for its grocery delivery services due to COVID-19 shelter in place orders.

Today Instacart announced that it has doubled its Care team, from 1,200 agents to 3,000 agents. Care team employees will work on answering questions about how Instacart works, delivery issues, address mishaps and other general woes.

The hiring news comes after Instacart shoppers organized a strike last month, demanding personal protective equipment, hazard pay, default tips and extended sick pay.

Instacart has been on a hiring spree as customer demand increased more than 300% year over year last week alone. Last month, the Instacart shopper community grew to 350,000 active shoppers, up from 200,000 two weeks ago.

Today, along with doubling its Care team, Instacart says it has also hired and signed an additional 15,000 representatives that will join the team by May. With that, Instacart says it will have a Care team of about 18,000 members.

Some of Instacartnew hires have are experienced support agents recently laid off in the flurry of cuts across the hospitality and travel industry.

With more demand, and thus more stresses on shoppers than ever before, the new members seem like yet another move by Instacart to try to pacify its growing shopper network. Last month, Instacart outlined an extended pay policy and contactless pay option. The company also introduced new product features aimed at making delivery windows for shoppers more flexible and fast.

Earlier this week, tip-baiting emerged as a grotesque tactic used by customers. Customers have been baiting Instacart shoppers to pick up their groceries by putting large tips on the bill through the app. Then, once the shopper drops off the groceries, customers are changing that tip to a lesser amount or even to $0.

The ability to change the tip price up to three days after grocery drop-off is an option provided through the Instacart application.

According to Instacart, tip-baiting is rare. Customers either adjusted their tip upward or did not adjust tip at all on 99.5% of orders. The company also removed the &none& option in the customer tip section with hopes that customers will tip at minimum.

While these feature updates will likely have a positive impact, Instacart has still not banned customers from changing the tip after getting their groceries. The new roles will not be able to help shoppers with tip-baiting changes either, as the tip is entirely up to the customer.

The company has also not changed the default tip minimum, as worker protests asked for tip defaults to be put at 10% during this time.

The surge of hires for InstacartCare team was not related to the tip-baiting issue, says the company, but instead related to the surge of demand for the service.

VOX Space, the Virgin space subsidiary dedicated to government launches, has scored a valuable new contract with the U.S. Space Force and is about to move from testing to full operations, the company announced today.

The Space Force contract is for three launches and is valued at $35 million. The company will be launching payloads for the Defense DepartmentSpace Test Program-S28, a set of technology demonstrations in low Earth orbit. More than 36 satellites will be launched, &enabling advancements in space domain awareness and communications and informing future developments of the USSF space architecture.&

Those launches, like others planned for the U.K. and Israeli governments, aren&t exactly imminent; VOX is still in the testing phase, but expects to put payloads into orbit come 2021. (I&ve asked for more information on this and will update if I hear back.)

VOX and Virgin Orbit differ from most other launch providers in that their launch vehicles consist of a rocket strapped to the belly of a 747. This promising but unproven technique could enable a highly mobile and responsive launch infrastructure, taking off from pretty much anywhere with a runway.

After years of engineering and tests, Cosmic Girl (thatthe plane) and LauncherOne, the rocket stage that will take the payload to orbit, are almost ready for their debut.

The company is planning one last rehearsal in the form of a &cryogenic captive carry flight,& in which everything is almost exactly as it would be during a real launch, including supercooled liquid in the rocketfuel tanks, but they stop short of detaching and firing the rocketengines. The full burn and first orbital payload will be saved for the Launch Demo, which is planned for later this year.

Of course, the global pandemic hasn&t made things easy on the company. In a blog post signaling readiness for the next test, the company explained:

As the pandemic reached our home in California, we sent all of our staff home with full pay, giving them a week to prepare for the many changes that were to come for them and their families — and giving ourselves all the time we needed to design an entirely new way of working.

We reconfigured our Mission Control. We re-wrote procedures for our technicians on the shop floor and at the test site in order to meet social distancing requirements. We were already accustomed to using Personal Protective Equipment during many of our operations — but now we are ramping up our standards to match the latest guidelines from the CDC and other leading medical experts. And of course, we are spending extra time regularly sterilizing every square inch of our manufacturing facility, constantly educating our staff, and much more.

With a robust plan for safe operations in place, we began bringing essential teammates back on site — but continue to have as much as 90% of our staff working remotely.

As is the case for many industries, existing plans are being hugely disrupted and timing is up in the air, so to speak. But expect to hear more about VOXfinal tests and first commercial launches soon.

In addition to ventilators and face masks, US state governments are now in dire need of COBOL programmers to help out during the global pandemic.

New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy recently put out a call for volunteers who know how to code the decades-old computer programming language as many of the state's systems are still running on older mainframe

As the U.S. and much of the world hunkers down to slow the spread of the novel coronavirus, some virus-related conspiracy theories are having a heyday. Specifically, a conspiratorial false claim that 5G technology is linked to COVID-19 gained ground, accelerating from obscurity into the rattled mainstream by way of conspiracy theorists who&d been chattering about 5G conspiracies for years.

While there is scientific consensus around the basic medical realities of COVID-19, researchers are still filling in the gaps on a virus that no one knew existed five months ago. That relative dearth of information opens the way for ideas usually relegated to the internetfringes to slip into the broader conversation about the pandemic — a dangerous feature of an unprecedented global health crisis.

According to Yonder, an AI company that monitors online conversations including disinformation, conspiracies that would normally remain in fringe groups are traveling to the mainstream faster during the epidemic.

A report on coronavirus misinformation from the company notes &the mainstream is unusually accepting of conspiratorial thinking, rumors, alarm, or panic& during uncertain times — a phenomenon that explains the movement of misinformation that we&re seeing now.

While the company estimates that it would normally take six to eight months for a &fringe narrative& to make its way from the edges of the internet into the mainstream, that interval looks like three to 14 days in the midst of COVID-19.

&In the current infodemic, we&ve seen conspiracy theories and other forms of misinformation spread across the internet at an unprecedented velocity,& Yonder Chief Innovation Officer Ryan Fox told TechCrunch. He believes that the trend represents the outsized influence of &small groups of hyper passionate individuals& in driving misinformation, like the 5G claims.

While 5G claims about the coronavirus are new, 5G conspiracies are not. &5G misinformation from online factions like QAnon or Anti-Vaxxers has existed for months, but is accelerating into the mainstream much more rapidly due to its association with COVID-19,& Fox said.

The seed of the false 5G coronavirus claim may have been planted in a late January print interview with a Belgian doctor who suggested that 5G technology poses health dangers and might be linked to the virus, according to reporting from Wired. Not long after the interview, Dutch-speaking anti-5G conspiracy theorists picked up on the theory and it spread through Facebook pages and YouTube channels already trafficking in other 5G conspiracies. Somewhere along the way, people started burning down mobile phone towers in the U.K., acts that government officials believe have a link to the viral misinformation, even though they apparently took down the wrong towers. &Owing to the slow rollout of 5G in the UK, many of the masts that have been vandalised did not contain the technology and the attacks merely damaged 3G and 4G equipment,& The Guardian reported.

This week, the conspiracy went mainstream, getting traction among a pocket of credulous celebrities, including actors John Cusack and Woody Harrelson, who amplified the false 5G claims to their large followings on Twitter and Instagram, respectively.

A quick Twitter search reveals plenty of variations on the conspiracy still circulating. &… Can&t everyone see that 5G was first tested in Wuhan. Itnot a coincidence!,& one Twitter user claims. &5G was first installed in Wuhan and now other major cities. Coincidence?,& another asks.

In the past, 5G misinformation has had plenty of help. As The New York Times reported last year, Russian state-linked media outlet RT America began airing segments raising alarms about 5G and health back in 2018. By last May, RT America had aired seven different programs focused on unsubstantiated claims around 5G, including a report that 5G towers could cause nosebleeds, learning disabilities and even cancer in children. Itpossible that the current popular 5G hoax could be connected to disinformation campaigns as well, though we likely won&t learn the specifics for some time.

In previous research on 5G-related conspiracies, social analytics company Graphika found that the majority of the online conversation around 5G focused on its health effects. Accounts sharing those kinds of conspiracies overlapped with accounts pushing anti-vaccine, flat Earth and chemtrail misinformation.

While the 5G coronavirus conspiracy theory has taken off, itfar from the only pandemic-related misinformation making the rounds online lately. From the earliest moments of the crisis, fake cures and preventative treatments offered scammers an opportunity to cash in. And even after social media companies announced aggressive policies cracking down on potentially deadly health misinformation, scams and conspiracies can still surface in AI blindspots. On YouTube, some scammers are avoiding target words like &coronavirus& that alert automated systems in order to sell products like a powdered supplement that its seller falsely claims can ward off the virus. With their human moderators sent home, YouTube and other social platforms are relying on AI now more than ever.

Social networks likely enabled the early spread of much of the COVID-19 misinformation floating around the internet, but they don&t account for all of it. Twitter, Facebook and YouTube all banned Infowars founder and prominent conspiracy theorist Alex Jones from their platforms back in 2018, but on his own site, Jones is peddling false claims that products he sells can be used to prevent or treat COVID-19.

The claims are so dangerous that the FDA even stepped in this week, issuing a warning letter to Jones telling him to cease the sale of those products. One Infowars video cited by the FDA instructs viewers concerned about the coronavirus &to go to the Infowars store, pick up a little bit of silver that really acts its way to boost your immune system and fight off infection.&

As it becomes clear that the disruptions to everyday life necessitated by the novel coronavirus are likely to be with us for some time, coronavirus conspiracies and scams are likely to stick around too. A vaccine will eventually inoculate human populations against the devastating virus, but if history is any indication, even that is likely to be the fodder for online conspiracists.

After suffering a ransomware attack earlier this year, Travelex reportedly paid a $2.3m ransom payment to get its systems back online after they were encrypted.

Back in January of this year, hackers deployed the Sodinokibi ransomware throughout the foreign exchange company's network which led it to shut down operations at 1,500 stores around the