12 | New Scientist | 6 November 2021
PREPARE for plenty of confusion
in the coming months, because
Facebook – whose products are
used by more than 3 billion
people worldwide – has decided
to rebrand itself. Here is
everything you need to know.What has happened?
Facebook, the company that owns
platforms including Facebook,
Instagram and WhatsApp,
rebranded as Meta on 28 October.
“Right now, our brand is so tightly
linked to one product that it can’t
possibly represent everything that
we’re doing today, let alone in the
future,” said CEO Mark Zuckerberg,
announcing the change. “Over
time, I hope that we are seen as a
metaverse company, and I want
to anchor our work and identity
on what we’re building toward.”Sorry, what is a metaverse?
The name for a shared online
3D virtual space that a number
of companies are interested
in creating as a sort of future
version of the internet.
“In this future, you will be able
to teleport instantly as a hologramto be at the office without a
commute, at a concert with
friends, or in your parents’ living
room to catch up,” Zuckerberg
wrote in a letter announcing
Facebook’s rebranding as Meta.
But that is in the future.
The metaverse unveiled by
the company in August looks
like The Sims or another
immersive world: the 2003
video game Second Life.Why is Zuckerberg doing this?
“My suspicion is that this is about
owning the operating system
of the future, and Facebook’s
experience of being an app on
other people’s – rivals’ – operating
systems,” says Anupam Chander
at Georgetown University Law
Center in Washington DC.
“They don’t want to be prisoner
on other people’s platform.”Doesn’t Meta have bigger
things to worry about?
There has been a steady drip
of negative stories followingthe release of the Facebook Papers,
internal documents highlighting
issues with the company, secreted
out of the firm by whistleblower
Frances Haugen. Some see the
new name as a way to distract
from this narrative.
“All the bad press and political
battles it is currently fighting
have to do with its social
networking products, so
launching something entirely
new – in their minds – is a way
to completely rebrand and start
fresh, without changing much
with the existing problematic
products,” says Taina Bucher at
the University of Oslo, Norway.What happens if Meta succeeds?
Meta could play a pivotal role in
our lives as the sole company
underpinning the metaverse if
its vision of the future becomes a
reality. The company has struggled
with outages that removed the
ability to communicate for
large parts of the world in recent
months, and if such a thing were
to happen in an all-pervasive VR
universe like the metaverse, the
consequences could be huge. ❚TechnologyChris Stokel-WalkerMICHA
EL
NAGL
E/BLOOMBE
RGVIAGETTY^ IMAGESFacebook is now Meta – but why,
and what even is the metaverse?
News
Solar systemNASA’s Curiosity rover has tested
a new way of seeking signs of life
on Mars. Although it found no such
evidence, the trial suggests future
missions to other worlds could
use the same method.
In March 2017, the rover
scooped material from the
Bagnold dunes, a band of sand
dunes stretching tens of kilometres
on the Martian surface. In December
2017, Curiosity transferred someof this material into its Sample
Analysis at Mars (SAM) instrument.
SAM has 74 “cups”, or holders,
that are used to analyse samples.
Most are otherwise empty, with the
samples in them heated by the rover
so they can be studied, but nine
contain solvents that can dissolve
materials, which allows us to better
work out their compositions. The
test in December 2017 saw some
of these solvents used for the first
time, to see whether this technique
could be useful on other worlds.
The results showed it could. After
years of careful work on Earth to
understand what they were seeing,Maëva Millan at Georgetown
University in Washington DC and
her colleagues found evidence for
organic molecules in the samples
that would have been missed by the
rover’s heat-based analysis. While
these molecules aren’t concrete
evidence of life, such as amino
acids, the results show the benefits
of these so-called wet chemistry
derivatisation experiments
(Nature Astronomy, DOI: 10.1038/
s41550-021-01507).
“We have proved that this
experiment can work,” says
Millan. “That means we can do
this same experiment again ondifferent minerals like clay and
sulphates that can better preserve
organic molecules.”
That includes further studies on
Mars by Curiosity in regions that are
more promising in the hunt for life.
Its sister rover, Perseverance, is also
seeking signs of life, but lacks the
same “wet chemistry” equipment.
The technique will be used
on upcoming missions, such
as Europe’s Rosalind Franklin
Mars rover launching in 2022
and NASA’s Dragonfly, a drone
that will explore the surface of
Saturn’s moon Titan in 2036. ❚Mars rover tests
a new way to
hunt for alien lifeJonathan O’CallaghanCEO Mark Zuckerberg
announcing Facebook’s
rebranding as Meta