When it comes to ferreting out explosives in public places, bomb-sniffing dogs still rule, though scientists are trying to find a way to reproduce their expertise with tech. Now, Cornell University's William Dichtel and graduate student Deepti Gopalakrishnan have created a polymer that could one day replace the canine bomb squad, as they describe in a recent paper in the Journal of the American Chemical Society.

The fluorescent polymer responds to the presence of RDX, a powerful explosive whose low vapor pressure typically makes it crazy difficult to detect without direct contact.

Under normal circumstances, the polymer acts kind of like a glow stick, absorbing light and turning it into energy, then releasing it as light again. If, as that energy flows through the structure of the polymer, it happens upon a molecule of RDX, though, it is converted into heat instead of light. The polymer ceases to glow, signaling that an improvised explosive device is nearby.

This method can detect trace amounts of explosives and alert authorities to people who have handled them recently. In the future, it could be used in small, handheld detectors in the style of Fido, a fluorescent detector for TNT.

"One of the goals is to make detectors that can detect not just explosives on someone's hands, but in the cloud around them," Dichtel said in a statement. "If someone had an IED in their bag, it would be nice to not have to open it." Nice indeed.

In 2012, wind power added more new electricity production in the U.S. than any other single source. But even with 60 gigawatts powering 15 million homes, wind supplants just 1.8 percent of the nation's carbon emissions. Tomorrow's turbines will have to be more efficient, more affordable, and
in more places.

The Supersize Route

Bigger Blades

Big rotors generate more electricity, particularly from low winds, but oversize trucks hauling blades the length of an Olympic pool can't reach many wind-energy sites. Blade Dynamics fabricates its 160-foot, carbon-fiber blade in multiple pieces, which can then be transported by standard trucks and assembled at a nearby location. It's a stepping-stone for 295-foot and 328-foot blades now being designed for offshore turbines. (Currently, the world's longest prototype is 274 feet.) The colossal size should enable 10- to 12-megawatt turbines, double the generation capacity of today's biggest models.

The Networked Solution

Smarter Turbines

Reducing the variability of wind energy could position it to compete as a stable source of power. General Electric's new 2.5-megawatt, 394-foot-diameter wind turbine has an optional integrated battery for short-term energy storage. It also connects to GE's so-called Industrial Internet so it can share data with other turbines, wind farms, technicians, and operations managers. Algorithms analyze 150,000 data points per second to provide precise region-wide wind forecasts and enable turbines to react to changing conditions, even tilting blades to maximize power and minimize damage as a gust hits.

The Hybrid Hail Mary

Man-Made Thunderstorm Power

Solar Wind Energy's downdraft tower is either ingenious or ludicrous. The proposed 2,250-foot-high concrete tower will suck hot desert air into its hollow core and infuse it with moisture, creating a pressure differential that spawns a howling downdraft. "You're capturing the last 2,000 feet of a thunderstorm," says CEO Ron Pickett. The man-made tempest would spin wind turbines that could generate up to 1.25 gigawatts (though it's designed to operate at 60 percent capacity) on the driest, hottest summer days-more than some nuclear power plants. The Maryland-based company plans to break ground in Arizona as soon as 2015, provided it can secure $900 million in funding-a large sum but perhaps not outlandish when compared with a $14-billion nuclear reactor now under construction.

If you tried to list the biggest contributors to greenhouse gas emissions, you might say cars, or cows, or airplanes. Those are all major problem sources, but they're not the only ones, or even necessarily the biggest ones.

Ecofys, a sort of sustainable energy consultancy firm, put together this infographic showing exactly where the greenhouse gases are coming from. It's broken down into two categories first: emissions from burning fossil fuels (which amounts to 65 percent of the total) and all other emissions, like gassy cows. Greenhouse gases from fossil fuel burning are further broken down into type (coal, oil, natural gas) and then even further to specifics like cars, airplanes, and industries like paper or iron production.

Cars are, predictably, the biggest individual contributor. But the next biggest? Deforestation. Chopping down forests doesn't just make our land less pretty or put plant and animal species at risk: it reduces the planet's natural ability to filter out our garbage in the air.

Check out the full infographic here (warning: large PDF).

[via Motherboard]

In October, at the Deschutes National Forest in central Oregon, a team of scientists and engineers began pumping 11 million gallons of water underground, right near the caldera of the famed Newberry Volcano. The Northwest weather was a cool 50 degrees most days, about the same temperature as the water the engineers drove, up to 375 gallons a minute, 10,000 feet into the ground. There, deep in the earth's crust, the temperature reaches more than 600 degrees. That's what the engineers were pumping for: If everything goes according to plan, a company called AltaRock Energy will suck the super-heated water from underground and use it to spin turbines and juice the area with renewable power.

Over the next two months, the engineers would keep pumping the water, as the weather started to turn. Snow gathered itself up tree trunks and the engineers' equipment, eventually forcing them to lower ground. All the while, the team listened for rumblings from deep underground. The water pushed against fractures deep in the earth at 2,400 pounds per square inch, more pressure than an alligator's bite, expanding natural cracks in the rock until a network of watery tunnels formed below ground. Not long after starting, the team picked up the first earthquake, then, over the course of their experiment, picked up 219 more.

The process is called "enhanced geothermal engineering," or EGS, and as the name suggests, it's a special form of geothermal engineering that relies on manufactured rifts in the ground to produce clean energy. With traditional geothermal engineering, you tap water and steam from naturally occurring hydrothermal reservoirs deep underground. But there aren't that many hydrothermal reservoirs to go around; you find them primarily the Western United States or on other continents in the Ring of Fire, where volcanoes and other geological hot spots crop up. That places a ceiling on the size and number of traditional geothermal engineering projects that can be built. About 3,000 megawatts of energy were generated through traditional geothermal in 2010, which sounds impressive until you put that in perspective: it accounted for about half of a single percent of energy produced in the United States, according to the Natural Resources Defense Council.

With EGS, you create your own hydrothermal reservoirs by pouring water into the hot rock deep underground to create new fractures or deepen existing ones. The result: a man-made, underground boiling pot that can be harnessed for green energy. If replicated-and AltaRock believes it can be replicated pretty much anywhere-the process could generate up to 10 percent of American energy.

But the technology isn't cheap. Newberry is expected to cost an estimated $44 million, whereas traditional geothermal projects typically cost between $5 and $20 million. Perhaps more worrisome in the long run are the unknown environmental impacts. EGS is relatively new and untested. And from where the residents of nearby Bend, Oregon are sitting, "more than 200 earthquakes" is a phrase that doesn't exactly inspire confidence.

Susan Petty founded AltaRock Energy in 2007. A graduate of Princeton and the University of Hawaii who'd already spent time working on geothermal engineering projects, Petty decided that geothermal extraction technology were advanced enough to try something different: "The biggest issue is that we can't make multiple zones to stimulate [geothermal] in the well... I said, 'Well, I think I have some ideas on that.'" With a team of scientists and engineers (and both private and public funding in hand), Petty attempted to build an enhanced geothermal energy project at The Geysers, a geothermal hotspot just north of San Francisco. Everything seemed to be going right. The Obama administration even positioned AltaRock as a paragon of American energy independence--a startup U.S. company working toward a brighter, greener future.

AltaRock's timing was decidedly inauspicious. In December 2006, earthquakes started near an enhanced geothermal project in Basel, Switzerland. Markus O. Häring, a former geologist and oilman who started the geothermal power company Geopower Basel, tried to shut down the operation, but it was too late. Earthquakes rocked the area for a year, doing almost $9 million worth of damage. Häring faced criminal charges for the damage, potentially facing up to five years in prison as prosecutors argued he downplayed the risks (he was later acquitted). He was quoted as saying the people in the area knew the risks, and that the quakes were "a learning process for everyone involved."

After the quakes, The New York Times ran an article about AltaRock's project in northern California, saying,

Before long, AltaRock was being portrayed as the bad guy-a super-villain out to damage surrounding areas. The Energy Department and the Bureau of Land Management ordered a new review of the safety of The Geysers project. Eventually the project was approved anyway, but, plagued by technical problems, Obama's paragon of American energy independence decided to head north, to Oregon, instead.

The Newberry project is one of the most ambitious EGS project to date: It is expected to generate 10 or more megawatts of energy when it's completed roughly two years from now, enough to power thousands of homes on H2O.

Here's how Petty's system works: After drilling deep underground, engineers pump water into existing fractures in the earth. Along with the water, engineers pump in a biodegradable polymer. As the water's pumped, it widens those fractures, and the polymer blocks off outlets for the water as it goes, sending it deeper and deeper into the earth. Eventually, with enough heat, the polymer degrades, and lets the water in to other cracks. A second pump, which hasn't been built yet for the Newberry project, removes the heated water and sends it through a turbine, which then converts it to power to be sent just about anywhere. It's a closed-loop system: 11 million gallons of water gets pumped into fractures, the water heats up, then it shoots through the turbines, before getting pumped back into the fractures.

The process is called "hydroshearing," and if you know anything about harvesting energy, you know that it sounds eerily reminiscent of hydraulic fracturing, or "fracking." Fracking is the controversial practice of dumping chemical cocktails and water underground to fracture rocks and release petroleum or natural gas. AltaRock simultaneously acknowledges those similarities while staying an arm's length from them. (Petty acknowledges insists her technique does not use chemicals or the sort of pressure that mangles rocks and pollutes surrounding areas.)

Shortly after AltaRock started work on the project, the company fended off some media reports with a post titled "Clarifications to recent headlines," which included "Energy Company Plans to Frack a Volcano" and "Is Disturbing A Sleeping Volcano To Get 'Clean' Energy Safe?"

Some of the claims, like the idea that the volcano will erupt because of the project, don't have much basis in science.Some of the claims, like the idea that the volcano will erupt because of the project, don't have much basis in science (although the volcano went through a period of dozens of eruptions thousands of years ago, and "is certain to erupt again," according to the U.S. Geological Survey). As AltaRock is quick to point out, it's not pumping directly into the volcano, but nearby it. But the earthquake link was enough for the government to order a study and risk analysis of the project. URS Corporation, an independent body, released its verdict: any risk was low, and the "effects of induced seismicity will be more of a nuisance than a hazard to the vast majority of local residents because of the small size of the events and distances to centers of population"

Trenton Cladouhos, AltaRock's Senior Vice President of Research and Development, handles the geology side of the Newberry project. The largest earthquake picked up during testing ("and it was only one") was a magnitude 2.4 quake, he says. Most of the rest were under a magnitude one. That could qualify as a "felt" earthquake, but Petty says that measurement only indicates the scale of the quake deep underground, where it's muffled by layers of earth, shaking well below the public. Still, AltaRock created a contingency plan in case of earthquakes that were felt, up to and including shutting down the entire system.

Could the process be 100-percent guaranteed safe? "There's never guarantees in any kind of geothermal situation," Petty says, while insisting that the safety risks are so low, they amount to more of a rounding error than a serious threat. As for the Basel incident, she says that's something else entirely: "What they were doing was more like oil and gas." The water pressure of the Basel project, she says, was higher than AltaRock's.

"There's not a lot of cases to look at in terms of enhanced geothermal engineering systems," says David Oppenheimer, a scientist at the U.S. Geological Survey. But the process might have been "misrepresented" as more dangerous than it is. It's not just enhanced geothermal engineering projects, after all, that have been linked with earthquakes. At the Geysers, the USGS has been monitoring earthquakes since 1975, and all of them are induced by people. Those earthquakes have been rattling the earth since the 1960s, including the largest, a quake clocking in just under a 4.5 magnitude.

Barring another Basel incident, EGS projects like Petty's could flourish in coming years. There's a considerable amount of weight on AltaRock's shoulders to make that happen. No commercial-level EGS plants exist right now. If AltaRock's experiment works out, that could change.

It's still hard to really think of AltaRock--and EGS in general--as a renewable energy source in the vein of wind or solar, though. In many ways it sounds closer to nuclear power, a source with small, accepted risks and hazards that's nonetheless implemented because of outsize demand. Or, it could be something else entirely.

After a century as an only child, the Panama Canal is about to get a sister. Nicaragua announced recently that it is awarding China a contract to build an alternative to the Panama Canal, a move that could have huge implications for everything from military power to international trade.

The new Nicaraguan canal will connect the Pacific and Atlantic oceans through Central America and is expected to be larger than the Panama Canal, even after the Panama Canal completes a major expansion project in 2015. The broadest impact will be felt in the commercial sphere. With a second central American canal, more transport between the Pacific and Atlantic is possible, lowering the cost of oceanic trade. The larger size of the new canal will also increase the total volume of goods shipped, further reducing shipping costs.

This size increase also means that the U.S. Navy's next generation of aircraft carriers, the Ford Class, could sail through the new canal, giving the U.S. military more flexibility in moving around the world. Provided, of course, that China is comfortable facilitating the cross-ocean travel of U.S. aircraft carriers.

But if history is any guide, the new canal could also compromise American naval power. American strategist Alfred Thayer Mahan, who is to naval theory what Einstein is to physics, emphasized ruling the ocean through control of select and narrow passages. The ocean itself is vast, but there are only so many places where a navy can cross between oceans, and these are tremendously important for maritime power and commerce. For example, the British Empire was able to control the Mediterranean with bases at the entrance in Gibraltar in the west and the Suez Canal in the east. Controlling the fastest, most direct route between the Atlantic and Pacific gave the United States a very strong position at a relatively low cost. A second canal, at best, complicates that.

Nicaraguan canals have been considered for almost 150 years. Interestingly, the United States first planned a Nicaraguan canal, abandoning the idea only after taking over the Panama canal project from France. The U.S. plan, from the 1870s, took advantage of Lake Nicaragua's length for the largest stretch of the journey.

For years, racquet designers at Head struggled with the same problem: They couldn't increase the power of their racquets without adding weight. The more weight a racquet has, the more momentum it generates during a swing and the more power it delivers to the ball. Too much weight, though, and a racquet becomes hard to control. The designers discovered that adding weight to the top of the head and the handle would make for a more balanced racquet. But with less weight in the middle, their prototypes kept cracking. So they looked to graphene, the world's strongest material by weight. By incorporating a small amount of graphene into the middle of the frame, designers improved its strength dramatically. The result is the YouTek Graphene Speed Pro, one of the first racquets to deliver both crushing power and precise control.

HEAD YouTek Graphene Speed Pro

Weight; 11.1 ounces
Swing weight; 292
Length; 27 inches
Price;$200

Last night we learned about PRISM, a classified National Security Agency program that involves huge, wide-ranging data pulls from major tech companies including Google, Microsoft, Apple, and Yahoo. A reader tip sent in to Talking Points Memo this morning alerted us to the possibility that Palantir Technologies, a Silicon Valley firm, is, according to the tipster, providing the technology that enables the mass-surveillance NSA project known as PRISM. Here's how Palantir describes itself:

It's vague, to be sure; Palantir (which, at time of writing, had not responded to requests for comment) was founded in 2004 by, among others, venture capitalist Peter Thiel and CEO Alex Karp. It's a sort of second-party data intelligence company--it's not a public company, but it was founded with early investment from the CIA and is heavily used by the military and the White House. Karp is an ex-PayPal guy, and leveraged his expertise in security he gained at PayPal (which was constantly fighting off hackers) into his new venture.

It makes sense that Palantir (the name, by the way, is a reference to Lord of the Rings) would be used by the government to collect data from tech companies for PRISM; the responses from the tech companies have all been of a type. "We have never heard of PRISM," said Apple. "We do not provide the government with direct access to our servers, systems, or network," said Yahoo!. "Google does not have a 'back door' for the government to access private user data," said Google. But none of that would be technically untrue if the government was using an external organization as a middleman to extract and analyze data from these companies.

It also explains how a ridiculously wide-ranging and complex project like PRISM only cost the government $20 million--because the government could have paid someone else to do the heavy lifting.

Says Palantir of the company's intelligence work, on its site:

Everyone, meet the company that could well have access to your searches, phone calls, text messages, browsing history, and porn preference. A semi-private company, one that's not accountable to us. Hi Palantir!

The era of exotic meats grown to order--with no animals killed in the process--could be on its way. This summer in London, Dr. Mark Post's team from Maastricht University is at long last going to serve up the famous burger made from beef cells grown in a laboratory bioreactor.

The highly anticipated in-vitro meat has been under development for years, and the project has cost a reported quarter-million euros. Cells are extracted from living animals and cultured in the lab on a diet of glucose and amino acids, where they grow into small strips of muscle tissue. In order for the tissue to be more than a flabby gel, it must be exercised regularly. Thousands of the strips pressed together amount to a burger's worth of meat.

Looking at how the sausage is made, be it traditional or lab-grown, is never appealing, But the potential here, for a world of delicious meat grown with no livestock involved, is pretty wild. CBC quotes Isha Datar of New Harvest, a nonprofit organization dedicated to meat alternatives:

PopSci agrees.

[CBC]

Yeesh. After surveying 275 reusable gastrointestinal endoscopes from U.S. hospitals, researchers found that 15 percent aren't up to cleanliness standards.

Gastrointestinal endoscopes carry cameras into the small intestine, stomach or colon, to help doctors examine those areas. As you can imagine, they get pretty dirty. If they're not well cleaned, they can transmit microbes and other biological matter between people.

Researchers from the technology company 3M gathered endoscopes from five U.S. hospitals. They found different numbers of substandard cleaning for different types of scopes. Thirty percent of endoscopes designed to go into the small intestine weren't cleaned to standard. Twenty-four percent of endoscopes designed to go into the stomach had the same problem. Scopes for the colon fared the best, with only 3 percent hitting below standard.

Scientists have long known that clean endoscopes are a problem in hospitals. A 2008 report from the U.S. Centers of Disease Control and Prevention found that while the numbers of reported infections from contaminated endoscopes were low--one in 1.8 million endoscopy procedures causes infections--the scopes were still the number-one medical device associated with hospital infection outbreaks. The same report found that following strict rules on how to clean endoscopes works well, but technicians don't always follow the rules.

In general, technicians are supposed to follow several steps when they clean endoscopes. They first scrub and flush the devices, using water and a detergent. Then they soak the scopes in a disinfectant for however long the disinfectant maker suggests. Finally, they rinse the scopes with water and alcohol and dry them quickly, to prevent them from getting recontaminated by microbes present in water.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention don't mention a standard for measuring whether a cleaned endoscope is really clean. The 3M researchers used a benchmark that other studies have used, based on ATP, an enzyme that all cells have. A properly cleaned scope should have less than 200 light matter units of ATP on it. One previous study found that before cleaning, the exteriors of scopes have, on average, more than 10,000 light matter units of ATP.

The 3M researchers are presenting their survey today at a conference for infection control specialists.

[EurekAlert]

Easy-to-Carry All-in-One Goes Everywhere You Go

As a discriminating photographer, you choose to carry a digital SLR on your travels because its superior picture quality, responsiveness and control enable you to transcend the ordinary snapshot and create truly memorable images. Now, with the phenomenal Tamron 18-270mm Di II VC PZD, you can multiply the virtues of your APS-C DSLR with a single all-in-one super-zoom that's brilliantly compact, lightweight and versatile. With its 15x range delivering wide-angle to super-telephoto coverage, you gain unparalleled freedom to compose and frame your shots, with extended reach for distant subjects, and up to 0.26x magnification, for striking, portfolio-enhancing close-ups.

You're also traveling with less gear in your bag. And with a reduced need to change lenses, you minimize image-degrading dust entering your camera while increasing your readiness to capture moments of fleeting beauty. What's more, the advanced optical design of this lens assures crisp, colorful and faithful images. And its state-of-the-art PZD autofocus and VC image stabilization extend your possibilities for candid and low-light photography.

$50 MAIL-IN REBATE, Valid 6/7 to 6/17. LEARN MORE

VC (Vibration Compensation) counteracts hand-held camera shake, freeing you from your tripod

Tamron's latest Vibration Compensation (VC) system is a new lightweight design that reduces the size and weight of the lens and improves its responsiveness in counteracting blurring produced by handheld camera shake. With it, you can leave your tripod at home and shoot more spontaneously anywhere you travel. Unlike traditional stabilization systems, VC compensates for motion in three planes. That's a big plus for achieving a stable viewfinder image and assuring crisp picture detail at long-reach focal lengths, when shooting in low light, or if you're in a vehicle, a boat or even on horseback. It's a great feature that helps make the Tamron 18-270mm Di II VC the perfect all-in-one lens for traveling light and capturing the unexpected.

Tamron's near-silent, high-speed PZD (Piezo Drive) autofocus responds instantly to the decisive moment

Piezo Drive (PZD) is an exclusive Tamron innovation employing a tiny, high frequency micro-motor to focus the lens more silently, swiftly and precisely than ever before. With its lightning-fast response, you can capture moments that might otherwise disappear in the blink of your eye. And because the PZD mechanism is so much smaller and lighter than a conventional AF drive, it helps make the Tamron 18-270mm Di II VC incredibly compact and portable for its vast range, measuring only 3.8 inches long and 2.9 inches in diameter and weighing in at just under a pound.

www.tamron-usa.com

Palantir Technologies has denied, sort of, that it is involved in the massive PRISM scandal, in which the National Security Agency was found to have gotten access to massive amounts of user data from companies like Microsoft, Google, Verizon, and Apple. Some reporters believe this denial. I do not.

Talking Points Memo reintroduced us all to Palantir Technologies, a data-collecting semi-private intelligence service that may or may not have been involved with the mass collection of data from private citizens by the National Security Agency. The NSA's program is called PRISM. Palantir has a program called Prism. Connections were made.

Despite the fact that Palantir Technologies is a CIA-funded intelligence-gathering organization, and that a major part of the company's business involves analyzing and visualizing mass datasets, despite that the company works with military and intelligence organizations, despite that the company once made a PowerPoint in which it discussed how to silence journalists, despite the fact that this is a massive corporation with offices in Washington, DC, London, Singapore, New York City, and Abu Dhabi, among others--Palantir is still a Silicon Valley company. And so you should absolutely ignore everything said by the Silicon Valley press, especially this ludicrous post from TechCrunch's Alexia Tsotsis.

Palantir is based in Palo Alto. It was funded by Peter Thiel, a legendary Silicon Valley venture capitalist. It is a Silicon Valley success, and those heavily invested in Silicon Valley's reputation and success, like TechCrunch (which both covers and, through the indirectly related CrunchFund venture capital firm, invests in Silicon Valley startups--yeah, I know), are completely unwilling to criticize it. Tsotsis's post relies on a stock statement from Palantir, which I also received, in response to a request for comment. Here it is:

Like every other statement from the private companies involved in PRISM, this statement is constructed entirely of loopholes, like an official Olympic logo where each ring is another perfect half-truth. (These statements, by the way, share specific phrases, like "direct access," making it seem almost as if they're collaborating on them.) Is Palantir's Prism platform related to the government's PRISM project? Probably not! That would be sort of an obvious giveaway for a classified NSA project. But that's not the question, anyway, or at least, it's not what I asked. What I asked was, was Palantir involved in any way with the government's PRISM program? The response to that, with punctuation intact:

TechCrunch didn't even follow up to this extent, instead believing an obviously misdirecting stock quote from a company so shifty that nobody really knows what they do. Their article's headline insists that, well, Palantir says their own Prism program isn't the same as the NSA's PRISM program. Therefore everyone shut up. This is not even a subtle half-truth! It's an answer to a mostly irrelevant question!

Even more insane: Tsotsis writes that "it is apparently already causing the startup recruitment damage on Hacker News." She is worried that media attention on this scary company will alert young employees to the fact that it is a scary company."

(The original headline of Tsotsis's post, by the way, was "Despite Naming Coincidence, Palantir Not Part Of PRISM Program." It now reads: "Despite Naming Coincidence, Palantir Says It's Not Part Of PRISM Program." It's better now.)

The other problem: do we trust the public relations response to our questions? What real motivation does Matt Long, spokesman for Palantir, have to tell me the truth? What pressure can I really put on him that can't be easily outweighed by what his employer or the government is capable of?

Do not trust anybody who takes any explanation of the PRISM story from one of its principals at face value. They have absolutely no reason to be forthright and honest with us. Palantir may indeed not be associated with PRISM, despite all the circumstantial evidence. But! The fact that they say they're not associated with PRISM is hardly evidence.

The Problem

When the Sellwood Bridge in Portland, Oregon, was built in 1925, it wasn't designed to carry 30,000 vehicles a day. Or to hold back a slow landslide. But by the 1980s, cracks were forming in the bridge's supports, leading inspectors to rate the bridge a 2 on a 100-point federal safety scale and to eventually ban heavy trucks, buses, and fire engines. So county engineers decided it was time for a new bridge, and the least expensive option ($306 million) was to move the existing structure over to serve as a detour while a new one was built in its place. But the bridge's rare design-a one-piece, 1,100-foot, 3,400-ton truss-posed an unusual problem. How do you move a whole bridge at once?

38-second time-lapse of the Sellwood Bridge move from JLA Involve on Vimeo.

The Solution

The great shift took place over 14 hours on January 19. Between the Sellwood's old and new locations, engineers built tracks, covered with Teflon pads and doused with liquid soap to make them slippery. Then 40 150-ton hydraulic jacks picked up the bridge and placed it on ski-like steel beams that could slide inside the tracks. Finally, a second set of jacks pushed the bridge inch by inch to its new home. (Because Sellwood's west end had to move 66 feet and its east end only 33, the engineers developed a system that tempered the flow of fuel to each jack, controlling how fast they pushed.) The new bridge is expected to open in 2015, after which the old Sellwood will be scrapped.

By the Numbers

3,400 tons: Weight of the Sellwood Bridge
33-66 feet: Distance the bridge needed to move
~25: Number of workers required
50: Number of hydraulic jacks

Click here for a step-by-step guide to making homemade Soylent

My best friend's graduation ceremony starts in 10 minutes and I'm trying to suppress vomit at a Speedway.

It's my third day on homemade Soylent-a food-replacing beverage made of nutrients in their raw chemical forms-and this is the second time I've made my friend Tom pull over on the way to the ceremony. I've been nauseous ever since chugging two glasses this morning, and every time I get out of the car, the fresh air helps just enough that I can't make anything come up.

As I breathe deeply and wrestle down bile, Tom decides to wax philosophical. "I think every generation has its preferred word for vomit, and I think ours is ‘vom,'" he says. Speaking as someone about to vom, this does not help.

But somehow, I make it. My stomach settles. I see Sarah walk across the stage in her cap and gown and I don't blow Soylent all over her family's Sunday best.

Later, at my parents' house, my dad walks in to the living room where Sarah and I are sitting with our other best friend, Cortney, who was recently accepted to several masters' programs.
"It looks like you all deserve congratulations," he says. "Sarah graduated, Cortney, you're going to graduate school, and Julie, you didn't vomit up that stuff."

***

That stuff is the brainchild of Rob Rhinehart, a Silicon Valley software engineer who got fed up with food and went looking for an alternative. "Food just seems to pop up, like this obnoxious biological need that I need to get rid of," he says.

When you're on a liquid diet, everyone wants to know about your poop.
Basically, Rhinehart turned to the Food and Drug Administration's recommended daily values for all the different nutrients we need-everything from carbohydrates and protein to things we only need a few micrograms of, like Vitamin K and selenium--and combined them into a drink he named Soylent. Rhinehart also includes a few things that aren't strictly necessary, but which studies have shown to have positive effects, like lycopene and omega-3 fatty acids. Olive oil provides the fat; everything else is in powder form. Soylent is not yet commercially available, but Rhinehart has raised nearly half a million dollars on his crowdfunding campaign and says he is in talks with manufacturers.

After living on only Soylent for a month, Rhinehart wrote a blog post called "How I Stopped Eating Food." In four weeks, he had more energy, he claimed, his skin was clearer, his sleep better, his reflexes improved. And he lost 13 pounds.

The Internet, being the Internet, latched on quickly, and I was one of the many people who found myself intrigued by the little slice of science fiction that Rhinehart presented. It's hard to be healthy. And no one can quite agree on how. (Paleo? Mediterranean diet? Eat food, not too much, mostly plants?) I want to believe that one drink could be a perfectly balanced diet, that it could help me sleep better, give me more energy, help me lose weight, clear up my skin. Rhinehart cautions me that weight loss is not the goal of Soylent, and, sure, that's only part of its appeal. (Rhinehart also says Soylent could have implications for world hunger.) But it's hard not to think of it as a silver bullet for all the problems we have with our bodies, especially when he's gone and made the tagline for his product "Free Your Body."

Some nutritionists refute Rhinehart's claim that Soylent is healthy. One nutritionist told Business Insider that she sees "a red flag for a potential eating disorder." Another accused Rhinehart of "hubris" on NPR, saying he shouldn't assume he knows what his body needs.

Nevertheless, a small community of people determined to make their own Soylent sprung up and became active on forums (Rhinehart doesn't officially recommend the homemade version, for liability reasons). One of those DIYers is my friend Tom, a chemical engineering grad student at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, the town over from where I grew up. "I have a weird thing to tell you," he said on Gchat one day, and less than two weeks later I was on a bus to Michigan, determined to try it for myself.

***

For the month that he's been on Soylent so far, Tom has been hiding his operation in his bathroom. A blender sits by the toothpaste on the counter, and he fills it with a variety of white powders--salt, fiber, potassium chloride, monosodium phosphate and maltodextrin (carbohydrates) from an enormous tub labeled "Muscle Feast" and adorned with a weirdly muscular dog. A liquid multivitamin, some whey protein (pick your flavor: chocolate, strawberry or plain), olive oil and some water to dilute it, and we end up with a blenderful of fizzing, frothy liquid, a watery beige color like the peeling paint of a high school hallway. Plus 13 pills to take that he didn't grind up and put in the drink, for the sake of avoiding chunks.

I tilt the glass up to my lips but don't drink, like leaning over the edge of a cliff. Tom chugs his down in mere seconds. I take a cautious sip, and it's immediately clear that his approach was better.

"This is the moment when you realize you've resigned yourself to drinking this for a week," he says.

It is not good.

The chocolate, strawberry and plain-flavored whey makes the Soylent taste like a chocolate malt, a strawberry wafer cookie and a vanilla milkshake, respectively, except not quite. It's as though an alien race tried to recreate the taste of those things out of chemicals they had available to them and they came very, very close, but couldn't quite make it. There's a chemical aftertaste that lingers, rising in your throat like a vapor. After that first day, I stick to the "plug and chug" system-plug your nose and chug it.

The thing I notice most about living on Soylent is how I don't feel particularly different. In fact, most of the time, I feel no extremes at all. I'm not hungry, I'm not full, I'm not tired, I'm not particularly energetic. The nausea on the way to Sarah's graduation seems to be a fluke associated with the plain whey; neither strawberry nor chocolate make me sick. Drinking Soylent doesn't make me feel full in the classical sense; there's no heaviness in my stomach, no food baby. I just stop being hungry. Which is not to say I don't want food. The first night, Tom and I go out with friends and drink beers, watching while they chow down on burgers and macaroni and cheese.

"You took me to a place that has pulled pork nachos?" I accuse, looking at the menu.

On day two, my dad makes barbecue and my family eats it in front of me, unconvincingly calling it "gross," for my sake. On night four I have a dream that I can't take it anymore and I eat a meatball sandwich, only to make myself throw it up so I don't ruin the integrity of this article. On day six I tell a friend that never having a food baby is overrated, that if I had one now I would cherish it and care for it. I would put headphones on my stomach and play it Baby Mozart if only I could eat a hamburger.

I tell people I've 'transcended food.'
But these are isolated incidents, and for the most part, I find the ease alluring. I never have to think about what I'm going to eat, or decide between packing a lunch and being on time to work. Though I have cravings, I'm never actually hungry. I tell people I've "transcended food." In seven days, I lose three and a half pounds, and two and a half inches off my waist. And my skin is clearer.

I get used to living on Soylent. I usually take my pills and drink two glasses in the morning, one around lunchtime and one for dinner. I think of it much in the same way I do exercise--you just have to make yourself miserable for a finite period of time, to reap the benefits later. When I stop to think, on the second to last day, that I haven't chewed and swallowed something in six days--such a seemingly basic process--it feels incredibly strange.

To combat the weirdness of being on a liquid diet, I chew a lot of gum. But I'm careful not to swallow it. Tom made that mistake in his early days of Soylent, which of course meant the only solid thing in his stomach was the gum. "When push came to shove," as he puts it, he spent a good amount of time in the bathroom. Apparently it felt a lot like blowing a bubble.

When you're on a liquid diet, everyone wants to know about your poop. Rhinehart says reporters (myself included) ask him about it all the time. I bring some Soylent home to Chicago to finish out my week, and it's the first thing my co-workers ask me.

"You want your poop to be soft, like a snake," one of them advises.

Rhinehart says he still poops on Soylent, just much less. I'm a little loath to go into too much detail on my experience in case I ever have a date with an overzealous Googler, but I will say I spend more time in the bathroom than Rhinehart led me to expect, and on that fateful plain whey day I climb higher on the Bristol Stool Scale than I ever care to again. The other days aren't so bad, though.

***

My last day of Soylent is bittersweet. "Soylent, my old friend," I say aloud in my kitchen to no one. "We've had some times together, have we not?" I go to the grocery store, because there is no food in my house, and think of it as "shopping for my new life," which is...weird. I get overwhelmed by all of the different flavors available to me. I almost don't remember the taste of anything else.

Almost everyone has expressed disbelief that I've made it this long. "You didn't cheat once?" my boss asks. "You didn't sneak a bite of anything?"

Even Tom, who was supposed to be my partner in this journey, let me down. He only made it three days in a row.

"You are weak and I hate you," I tell him.

I think of my Soylent journey as my own personal "There and Back Again" (both "there" and "back" often being "to the bathroom"). Perhaps the lasting value of this experiment will be proof of my fortitude. If I can force myself to live on only Soylent in the face of mac and cheese, my dad's barbecue and pulled pork nachos, surely I can make myself eat healthy things that I don't have to plug my nose while ingesting once in a while. On my first day back on food, though, I purchase and consume an entire pizza. So I guess we'll see.

This was a bad week for spies, and a great week to find out how we were spied on. Following revelations Wednesday that Verizon handed over millions of call records to the National Security Administration, news broke Thursday that the FBI and NSA had access (probably not direct) to servers for nine U.S. internet companies. The name of this program is PRISM, as a reference to splitting light on fiber-optic cables.

Authorization for this program dates back to an anti-terror surveillance bill passed by Congress in 2007. While aimed at finding communication between foreign terrorists, the language was broad and never restricted government surveillance of communications between people within the United States. Instead, the NSA uses a rough metric to make sure they are only listening to communications with 51 percent confidence in their "foreignness," which sounds ridiculous because it is. The legislation was supposed to expire in six months, but many of its provisions were reauthorized by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 2008.

The PRISM program grew from this authority. President as a rule regard themselves:

The White House then chooses how much of this information to filter down to Congress. Under the Constitution, the President has primary authority and responsibility for foreign affairs and national security. This primacy, combined with the vast array of intelligence collection agencies under the executive branch, create an institutional bias towards intelligence collection as a preventative measure against terror attacks. This is heightened by repeated coverage of the intelligence collection and communication gaps that failed to prevent the September 11th, 2001 attacks, creating a strong incentive for a sweeping data collection apparatus.

PRISM itself doesn't generate new information. Instead, it perches atop the architecture of the internet like a gargoyle, and gathers everything that passes through. PRISM currently accesses data from nine companies: Micrsoft, Google, Yahoo!, Facebook, PalTalk, YouTube, Skype, AOL, and Apple. Microsoft joined first in 2007, with Apple becoming part of the program last, in 2012. While the law that authorized this program was set to expire in 2012, Congress passed a re-authorization extending it to 2017.

Information is pulled from the servers of these companies, again with the goal of finding communications between foreign terrorists and people within the United States. Rather than looking for direct linkages, however, it just hoovers up an obscene amount of information and assumes the connections will reveal themselves later in analysis.

On its own, the program is unlikely to catch a terrorist. Corey Chivers ran a Bayesian probability analysis of the program, and by his math:

That's an insane false positive ratio for a program, which makes it very unlikely that the program is actually being used to find specific terrorists. Instead, my hunch is that this builds cases backwards, creating an available log of information for individuals that can be brought up as supporting evidence when hard evidence emerges.

When asked about PRISM at a Friday afternoon press conference, President Obama responded:

Such trade-offs are inevitable in society. In order to do so, however, we need a modern, updated, legal understanding of privacy. The laws that govern email, for example, treat it only as private when unopened in an inbox, because law is based on an understanding of mail that dates back to physical letters. Metadata on phonecalls, which made news earlier this week when the government obtained it in the millions from Verizon, is based on law that largely predates mobile phones and GPS location tagging. The privacy of individual information, as held by companies online and in electronic storage, is governed by company policy and unread Terms of Use agreements, but the way the law exists and is defined doesn't reflect actual assumptions of privacy, and people use this technology under the false premise that it is far more private than it actually is.

PRISM is a technically legal way for the government to bypass privacy in the interest of national security, but no part of how it operates fits in with the privacy people (albeit falsely) assume they have online. Congressional action, as well as more modern legal rulings on privacy, are what it would take to bring the law around to common usage.

Until then, expect programs like PRISM to remain a part of online life in America.

When the U.S. and Soviet Union tested nuclear weapons aboveground in the 1950s and 1960s, they left their mark on everyone alive at that time. The tests released unusual amounts of carbon-14 into the atmosphere, which people's cells would sometimes incorporate into their DNA when they divided-whenever skin cells renewed themselves, for example, or hair strands grew one cell longer.

In 1963, the Limited Test Ban Treaty banned such aboveground tests. Those isotopes of carbon-14, which are unstable, decayed. Now, a team of biologists from Europe and the U.S. has used that timely marking in an innovative way. The researchers looked for carbon-14 in the brain cells of those who were adults during aboveground nuclear testing, but since died and donated their brains to research, Science reported. The team's results bolster evidence for the idea that adults are able to form new brain cells.

In fact, you might be surprised how little evidence there had been before of adult brain cell formation. I was. Only one study has ever shown that adult humans make new brain cells, the Europe-U.S. researchers wrote in a paper they published yesterday in the journal Cell. Scientists have worked since then to show that other adult animals make new brain cells, but nobody repeated the study in humans because scientists later discovered that the chemical they used on their human volunteers was toxic. (It's not just scientists who give a lot to understanding the natural world.)

The Europe-U.S. team calculated that adult brains make about 1,400 new brain cells every day. That's not a net gain--the brain loses cells and then makes new ones to replace them, Kristy Spalding, a biologist at the Karolinska Institutet in Sweden and one of the study's lead authors, told Science.

Check out the Science link for more about how Spalding and her colleagues worked to develop their carbon-14 dating technique. Before working on brains, the team dated a lot of cool things with the nuclear signatures of the Cold War.

[Science]

55 million years: the age of the sedimentary rock strata in which scientists discovered this skeleton of a Archicebus achilles, the oldest-known primate fossil

90 days: the record-breaking time in which a Chinese firm plans to build the world's next tallest building, the 2,750-foot, 220-story Sky City

2017: the year NASA will test an intergalactic GPS that can determine your location even in deep space

300 light-years: the distance from Earth to this newly discovered planet, the lightest exoplanet ever caught on camera

2.6 miles: the span of last week's tornado in El Reno, Okla., the widest twister ever recorded

70 percent: the percent by which the presence of nearby islands can worsen a tsunami, according to a new computer simulation

1 million: the average number of skin cells a human loses in a 24-hour period (that's why people lose their tans in the winter)

$30,000: the cost to train a bomb-sniffing dog. Scientists are trying to build a mass-producible, artificial nose that detects explosives as well as a canine's.

200: the number of times more of the isotope Lithium-6 in our universe than Big Bang theory accounted for-until now. Scientists resolved this major inconsistency after a telescope upgrade revealed that earlier measurements of the isotope were faulty.