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Apple to Announce iPad 3 on March 7th (With Bonus Rumors)

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iPad 3 Announcement Apple

Apple just sent out invites to what, with our Holmesian deduction skills, we can safely say will be an event announcing the next iPad. It'll be held on March 7th in Apple's favorite announcement spot, the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, and of course we will be breathlessly reporting the details of the gadget that will inspire us to throw our current iPads out of the 9th-floor windows of our office in disgust.

The rumor mill is already pretty well churning with the possibilities of the new tablet. Given the phrase on the invite, "We have something you really have to see," most outlets are assuming the iPad will see a bump in screen resolution, which would be welcome. Our friends at Gizmodo performed an exhaustively detailed reenactment of the photo in the invite, analyzing the position of the raindrops and icon spacings (!), and deduced that it is likely that the screen resolution is higher. Even odder, they make a fairly convincing argument that Apple is eliminating the home button in place of some kind of touch button.

Other rumors: a faster A6 chip (the current iPad has an A5), possible 4G LTE antenna (the iPad has a big enough battery that it could cope with the strain of that network), improved cameras, and the addition of Siri. We'll let you know how many of these come true on March 7th.


Under the Sea: In the Age of Wireless, Can't We Do Better than Intercontinental Fiber Optic Cables?

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Fiber Optic Cables rpongsaj (CC licensed)
This week's outage in Africa reminds us of the vulnerable physicality of the Internet

On Saturday, a ship waiting to enter the Kenyan port city of Mombasa wandered into a restricted area and dropped its anchor, inadvertently severing a major undersea Internet and phone link to East Africa. This kind of thing happens from time to time, but Saturday's incident represents a particular stroke of bad timing. The cable severed was already overworked, rerouting data from three other cables that were accidentally severed a week prior in the Red Sea. All said, these fiber-optic channels are the backbone of East Africa's telecommunications infrastructure. Now one single undersea fiber-optic link is left to carry the entire load for all of East Africa, slowing internet connections in Rwanda, Kenya, Burundi, Ethiopia, Tanzania, and South Sudan by 20 percent until repairs are made, a process that could take weeks.

Before plugging into the high-capacity subsea fiber optic network three years ago, most Internet traffic in East Africa moved through expensive satellite connections or painfully slow telephone lines. Since then economies in the region have come to rely on their increased connectivity, so this weekend's incident comes dangerously close to spelling a small economic disaster. It also raises a larger question: Why, when global economies and day-to-day life are so reliant on access to the Internet, are we still relying on these seemingly vulnerable undersea cables, these accident-prone physical "tubes" connecting continents across the oceans? Why, in a world that's increasingly wireless, are we still so wired? Isn't there a better way to connect the globe?

The answer is: Not really. Fiber optic communication, for all of its shortcomings, is actually pretty amazing, and it's getting better by the year. Accidents do happen. In 2006 earthquakes in the Luzon Strait near Taiwan severed seven of nine cables and wrought havoc on communications networks for weeks, and twice in 2008 cables in the Mediterranean were damaged, disrupting communications in the Middle East, Africa, and the Indian subcontinent (and that's just two recent examples--there are many, many more). But there's really no technology that can touch our current fiber optics technology. The solution to problems like those East Africa is currently experiencing is not less fiber optic cable, but more.

"It's amazing that we're reliant on these physical links, but the reason we are is because of the kind of quantum leaps that fiber optic technology offers," says Andrew Blum, author of the forthcoming book Tubes: A Journey to the Center of the Internet. The physical cables running along (and sometimes under) the seabed carry huge volumes of data in the form of light, orders of magnitude more data than can be packed into radio signals that might be beamed wirelessly via satellites or antenna towers. The idea of replacing those cables with some kind of through-the-air technology is tempting, but for the foreseeable future we're stuck with fiber optics.

Fiber optic cables carry orders of magnitude more data than can be beamed wirelessly "The problem is that the volumes of data we're talking about require a very wide spectrum of frequencies," Marvin Sirbu, professor of engineering and public policy at Carnegie Mellon University, says. "And in order to get a wide spectrum of frequencies you need to get into very high-frequency electromagnetic waves. Light waves are very, very high-frequency. If you look at the frequencies we normally think of as radio waves, to find that much spectrum you'd have to be at frequencies so high that--like light--they fade in fog or in rain, and therefore can't really be used to go to a satellite and back, or even over long distances on the ground."

Instead, Sirbu says, we put those high-frequency signals into optical fiber in the form of light. The fiber is extremely transparent so the signal doesn't fade over distance. There's no fog or rain or other atmospheric moisture inside to interfere with the signal, so it maintains its integrity whether traveling across the room or across the Pacific. When you run out of capacity, you lay a new cable. Or, even better, you can dial up the capacity in the cables already laid.

This is where fiber optics creates those "quantum leaps" forward, says Blum. The standard operating unit for fiber optics right now is something like 10-gigabits per second. But new optical modules that are being swapped into common systems boost that capacity to 40 or even 100 gigabits per second. The same cables can then carry ten times more capacity, growing the system without laying a single new cable on the seafloor. Other tricks--involving everything from new ways of channeling signals to implementing lenses known as "time telescopes" to manipulate light pulses--could potentially keep that capacity growing at a rapid pace for the foreseeable future.

The key to averting disasters like the one East Africa is flirting with is redundancy, Sirbu says. "If you look at the U.S., we have cable landing sites at many different places, from Florida to Maine and all up and down the West Coast as well," Sirbu says. "Given the interconnection of networks around the world, if fiber going into one landing location is broken there is fiber landing at other locations that will still be operational. But Africa is probably the continent least densely served by fiber optics, especially when compared to Europe, North America, or East Asia. They're in a riskier position."

That's a problem for East Africa, particularly in a situation like this wherein two separate incidents have severed two of the three main fiber optic nerves feeding data into and out of the region. And while it seems that vulnerable undersea cables are the cause of the region's current connectivity woes, the key to ensuring that East Africa doesn't find its communications infrastructure hanging by a single fiber optic thread ever again--to ensure it doesn't end up temporarily back in the days of dial-up and satellite signals--is route diversity. In other words, the answer is more fiber optics cables, not fewer.

"These cuts are always exciting because these are the moments that remind everyone that the cables are there," Blum says. "This cut in particular is more exciting because it's the first time you really get to see what it means for East Africa to have fiber when three years ago it didn't. So I optimistically look at it upside down. Its only the incredible capacity of fiber optic technology that has allowed the Internet to progress across the world. You wouldn't have this global Internet without fiber optics--that's what's so amazing about it."

Video: Hack a Common Slingshot into a USB Peripheral for 'Angry Birds'

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The USB Slingshot for Angry Birds via mbed

Launching Angry Birds from a slingshot on your iPhone screen is fun, but actually launching Angry Birds from a slingshot sounds difficult, and borderline dangerous (well, definitely dangerous to the bird, variably dangerous to you depending on size of bird and degree of anger). A clever hack over on mbed shows you how to have the best of both worlds--real slingshot, digital birds--by turning a slingshot into a USB peripheral for playing Angry Birds.

The idea here is to turn the slingshot into a USB mouse, and thus translate all the physical movements of the handheld projectile launcher into the corresponding mouse controls necessary to make the slingshot on the screen emulate the slingshot in your hand. This requires the implementation of an accelerometer that can track the tilt of the slingshot and a rubber stretch sensor that can identify how much sling tension, and thus thrust, you are putting into your shot.

Building the thing is a mix of digital (wiring up the three-way accelerometer, the microcontroller, the stretch sensor, the USB connector, etc.) and the analog (whittlin' yourself a slingshot). After that, it's mostly just adding the code, which is included in full over at mbed along with the rest of the instructions on how to hack your way to better bird-launching. Enjoy.

Video: Microsoft IllumiShare Lets You Play Remotely With Physical Objects

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Microsoft IllumiShare Microsoft

IllumiShare, from Microsoft Research (also responsible for holodesks), is a system to allow two people to interact with various objects remotely. It gives cooperative activities like taking notes or creating documents a physicality: You're not typing in Google Docs, you're actually writing with ink and paper. Or playing cards with real cards, only your partner is on the other side of the world.

The IllumiShare is really just a cool implementation of a combined projector and camera. When two of them are communicating, each one records what it sees while simultaneously beaming that video to the other IllumiShare setup and projecting what it receives from its brother. Since it uses a regular camera, you can use physical objects like a pen and paper, or cards, or dice, as shown in the video below.

The drawback is that compared to a completely digital experience, you can only control the physical objects that are actually in front of you. So no, this doesn't allow you to reach through a wrinkle in space-time to manipulate your friends' cards. But it looks pretty seamless and probably wouldn't even be all that expensive to make. Microsoft hasn't implied any release date for it, though.

[via The Atlantic]

Will Doctors Ever Cure Migraines?

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Brain Pain Jonathan Carlson

My first migraine arrived in a fuzzy cloud of reds and purples, a stab of pain that left me bent over in the back of an auto-rickshaw, squinting and nauseous, on my morning commute to Connaught Place, in New Delhi. Months later, when I left India, I thought that the headaches would disappear along with the chaos of the overcrowded capital. They didn't. And finally, after months spent stumbling into my room, drawing the curtains, and lying in the darkness for hours wishing for sleep, I went to an internist, who prescribed a brain scan. When he found nothing, he told me what I already suspected: migraines. I asked him the cause, but all he could say was, "Stress, probably, which can mean any number of things."

It was an unsatisfying answer, but accurate-36 million Americans suffer from migraines, and no one knows why. In the seven years since my diagnosis, neurologists have come closer to understanding how migraines work. Last summer at a conference, David Dodick, a neurologist at the Mayo Clinic in Arizona and the president of the American Headache Society, explained that the thalamus, the region of the brain responsible for sensory information and sleep cycles, was "acting as a sort of railway station to transmit migraine pain to pain receptors throughout the brain." Scientists have also developed a treatment for migraines in which a tiny subcutaneous battery is wired to the patient's spine to deliver small pulses of electricity to the thalamus. The method, which falls under a broad range of treatments called neurostimulation, seems to derail the thalamus's pain transmissions during a migraine.

Despite this progress, the gulf between treating migraines and curing them is still broad. Neurologists in Belgium, Italy, Germany and Chicago have confirmed that neurostim prevents pain, but just why it works is a mystery. As a team at the University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf wrote, "underlying neuronal mechanisms are . . . still unknown." Even with treatments in hand, scientists appear trapped in a Zeno's paradox of research: The closer they come to discovering the cause of migraines, the more baffling the brain gets. They've found the railway station but don't yet understand its switches.

To better comprehend why scientists seem further than ever from finding the cause of migraines, I called James Fallon, a neuroscientist at the University of California at Irvine. Fallon teaches deep-brain stimulation, a method of treatment that's similar to neurostim. After nearly four decades studying the mysteries of the brain, he said he has come to realize that we may never have all the answers. Everyone's brain is different, he said, so a cure would have to be as unique as my migraines are to me. The aura I saw that day in India-a fuzzy cloud of reds and purples-had everything to do with my brain at that precise moment in time. I've never seen a vision like it since. Our brains are as singular as we are, so it's no surprise that the cure to their ailments may be beyond our ken.

Check out more from our Future of Medicine issue here.

No Pulse: How Doctors Reinvented The Human Heart

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Artificial Heart Jack Thompson
This 10,000-rpm, no-pulse artificial heart doesn't resemble an organic heart--and might be all the better for it

Meeko the calf stood nuzzling a pile of hay. He didn't seem to have much appetite, and he looked a little bored. Every now and then, he glanced up, as though wondering why so many people with clipboards were standing around watching him.

Fourteen hours earlier, I'd watched doctors lift Meeko's heart from his body and place it, still beating, in a plastic dish. He looked no worse for the experience, whisking away a fly with his tail as he nibbled, demonstrably alive-though above his head, a monitor showed a flatlined pulse. I held a stethoscope to his warm, fragrant flank and heard, instead of the deep lub-dub of a heartbeat, what sounded like a dentist's drill or the underwater whine of an outboard motor. Something was keeping Meeko alive, but it was nothing like a heart.

As many as five million Americans suffer some form of heart failure, but only about 2,000 hearts a year become available for transplant. The obvious solution to that scarcity is to build an artificial heart, and how hard could that be? The heart's just a pump, after all, and people have been making pumps since the Mesopotamians invented the shadoof to raise river water 3,000 years before the birth of Christ. Doctors started thinking seriously about replacing the heart with a machine around the time Harry Truman was president.

To understand why they still haven't succeeded, pick up a two-pound barbell and start curling it. Two pounds: nothing. But see how long you can keep it up. Twenty minutes? An hour? Two? Your heart does that all day and all night-35 million beats a year-for as long as you live, without ever taking a rest. Manufacturing a metal and plastic heart capable of beating that way for more than about 18 months has so far proved impossible.

The problem is the "beating" part. Among the first to envision an artificial heart was, amazingly, the ventriloquist Paul Winchell. When not in front of a TV camera manipulating his dummies Jerry Mahoney and Knucklehead Smiff, Winchell was developing patents, some 30 in all, including one for an artificial heart that he invented with Dr. Henry Heimlich, of the eponymous anti-choking maneuver. Back then, and up through the famous Jarvik-7-the first machine to replace a human heart, in 1982, albeit briefly-inventors could only imagine imitating the heart's lub-dub. That is, they envisioned filling a chamber with deoxygenated blood returning from the body and pumping it out to the lungs to be infused with oxygen-lub-and then drawing that good red blood back into a second chamber and pumping it back out to the body-dub.

It turns out that imitating a beating heart with metal and plastic has several limitations. First, the Jarvik-7 and its successors that are still in use require an air compressor outside the body. Through hoses that pierce the skin, the compressor fills a balloon inside one of the Jarvik's chambers, pushing blood to the lungs. Then it fills a second balloon in another chamber to push blood back out to the body. The two balloons inflate and deflate in an alternating rhythm. It works, but it also means that a patient has to sit beside a big, noisy compressor 24 hours a day. That's better than dying of heart failure, but it doesn't make for a great quality of life. Barney Clark, the first person to live entirely on a Jarvik-7, asked his doctors several times, during his 112 days on the device, to let him die.

Clark probably would not have been able to hang on much longer in any case. Those balloons, and all other moving parts in a beating mechanical heart, wear out quickly. That's why, almost 30 years after the first Jarvik-7, artificial hearts remain what is delicately termed "bridges to transplant"-something to keep you alive until a real heart can be found.

A transplantable heart, alas, is an increasingly rare find. It has to come from a person who is in the blush of good health and also, somehow, dead. As cars have gotten safer and states have passed laws requiring seatbelts and motorcycle helmets, the number of such hearts has dwindled. The need for hearts, on the other hand, has grown with the world's population and the conquering of other diseases. And even when a heart is found, patients face the risk of tissue rejection.

Building a heart that mimics nature's lub-dub may be as comically shortsighted as Leonardo da Vinci designing a flying machine with flapping wings. Nature is not always the best designer, at least when it comes to things that humans must build and maintain. So the newest artificial heart doesn't imitate the cardiac muscle at all. Instead, it whirs like a little propeller, pushing blood through the body at a steady rate. After 500 million years of evolution accustoming the human body to blood moving through us in spurts, a pulse may not be necessary. That, in any case, is the point of view of the 50-odd calves, and no fewer than three human beings, who have gotten along just fine with their blood coursing through them as evenly as Freon through an air conditioner.

"His giant heartbeat," Rainer Maria Rilke wrote of God early in the past century, "is diverted in us into little pulses." Nowadays, maybe not.

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The Texas Medical Center is a city within a city. Its 13 hospitals and 21 schools cover a swath of Houston bigger than New York's Central Park. Navigating its raised sidewalks, light rail and glass towers feels like getting lost on a set for The Jetsons. One hundred thousand people work and study here every day. The place has its own zip code./>

Among the towers is the Texas Heart Institute, in which I found Dr. Billy Cohn, a big, fit man in his early 50s with light hair, blue eyes, and an office that would no doubt have exasperated his mother. It looked like the mad scientists' club at a middle school, every surface covered with sketches, tools, bits of machined metal, wire, statuettes, playing cards and such toys as a Darwinian evolution action-figure set (horseshoe crab, various monkeys and a gray-bearded intellectual). A static-electricity generator flashed lightning bolts, and a three-dimensional model of the human heart loomed over Cohn's desk. Even his file cabinet looked weird, pimpled with tiny bits of metal.

"Rare-earth magnets!" Cohn cried, straining to pull one free. He put it in my hand. It was the size of a pencil eraser, and when I loosened my grip, it shot like a bullet to the file cabinet with a clang. "Extremely powerful." Cohn has pioneered the use of rare-earth magnets to move catheters into place deep inside the body. He avoids having to cut patients open by threading the magnets, and their tiny loads, up through arteries. He pawed several sheets of paper off the floor and drew diagrams on their unused backs, launching an hour-long discourse on the instruments and procedures he's built around miniature magnets.

Building a heart that mimics nature's lub-dub may be as comically shortsighted as Leonardo Da Vinci designing a flying machine with flapping wings.On his wall hung four metal serving spoons of the kind you might see on a cafeteria line. One was intact; the other three had intricate slots cut in them. Years ago, Cohn butchered the spoons in his home garage to solve the problem of holding a heart still while operating on it. The standard way, at the time, was to shut off the heart altogether and put the patient on a heart-lung machine. But that was risky. Cohn's spoons let surgeons hold a heart in place while still giving them access to the parts they needed to slice or stitch. Through the custom-cut slots, the surface of the heart would emerge and hold still for tinkering, even while the rest of the heart thrashed around under the spoon. Cohn refined the idea and sold it to a medical-devices company, which has marketed the tools worldwide.

Cohn grew up building rockets in the garage with his older brother John, and neither of them ever quite outgrew it. (John is one of 80 IBM fellows, the company's highest technical rank.) "That there?" Billy Cohn said, pointing to what I'd thought was a scuba diver's speargun. It hung on the wall beside laminated newspaper clippings about him. "I invented that out of old parts in the garage. It puts a bag, like a big sock, all the way around the heart." He spent 20 breathless minutes describing why a surgeon would want to do such a thing.

It's the continuous-flow artificial heart Cohn installed in the chest of Meeko the calf, though, that enthralls him now. Using such turbines to assist sick hearts has been standard practice since the mid-1990s. But along with his research partner, Dr. O.H. "Bud" Frazier, Cohn is experimenting with using them to replace the heart entirely-and doing so with the hands-on ingenuity of the professor on Gilligan's Island. He rummaged through the detritus on his desk and placed in my hands two gray metal cylinders-turbines, each the size and shape of a saltshaker-connected to each other by white tubing. Also attached to each was a white cone made of a spongy rubberized cloth.

"Dacron polyester," he said. Because the cones are what get sewn to the remainder of the heart's atria, their design was tricky. He ticked off the concerns on his long fingers. "The materials needed to be blood-friendly. The structure needed to be resilient to deformation. It had to be formable in a limited space. We needed to be able to sew it, but the needle holes couldn't let blood leak. And we had to be able to customize it in the OR by cutting it. I bought some ordinary Dacron from the fabric store and RTV silicone from Home Depot to impregnate the outside. I did all this in my garage. My wife calls them dolly dresses."

The continuous-flow heart solves the biggest problem with artificial hearts: longevity. One little turbine like the ones Cohn showed me has been running continuously in a lab for eight years and shows no sign of wearing out. Another advantage is that it runs on a battery no bigger than a videocassette. The patient can wear it in a kind of shoulder holster-cumbersome, but not as bad as sitting day and night beside a hissing compressor the size of a dishwasher.

It all made sense in theory, sitting in Billy Cohn's office. But the whole idea of life without a pulse was a little too weird for me to grasp. It seemed like some sort of parlor trick. How could someone be alive without exhibiting the most fundamental sign of life? And how did anybody even dream up such a thing?

The dire need for a practical artificial heart hit Bud Frazier like a thunderclap one awful night in the 1960s. An eager medical student, Frazier had watched the legendary heart surgeon Michael DeBakey open the chest of a 24-year-old man and install a new heart valve. Later that night, the man's heart stopped. It was up to Frazier to reach in, grab the warm but flaccid heart, and massage it with his hand to keep the blood pumping. As long as Frazier kept opening and closing his hand around the man's heart, the man stayed alive. And Frazier was highly motivated to continue. The man's eyes were open and looking right at him./>

Today, Frazier is a white-haired eminence at the Texas Heart Institute, as calm, soft-spoken and slow-moving as his partner Cohn is loud and speedy. "DeBakey finally told me ‘Stop,' " Frazier recalled. " ‘We can't save him.' The chief resident said the same thing; told me to quit. I didn't want to stop. I had the boy's eyes right on mine. Finally, I stopped, and he died. I thought, ‘My god, if I can do that with my hand, we must be able to develop something we can pull off a shelf.' "

For Richard Wampler, the road to the continuous-flow heart began in 1976 in the Egyptian village of El Bayad. Wampler, a surgeon and engineer whose passion is medical devices, was in Egypt volunteering on a medical mission, watching villagers use an Archimedes' screw to pump water from a well. The screw, named for its third-century-B.C. inventor, is a simple auger in a pipe. As it turns, it lifts liquid with it. The image of that village well never left him. Less than a decade later, Wampler patented a device to move blood through the body, without a pulse, using an Archimedes' screw. ("My experience with creativity is like that," he told me on the phone. "I'll be jogging or lying in the pool, and it will come to me.")

"As long as Bud Frazier kept opening and closing his hand around the man's heart, the man stayed alive."Wampler brought a prototype of his idea to Frazier, who was by now a renowned heart surgeon. It was the early 1980s, and the hot idea in heart surgery was to install a small pump in the chest, not to replace the heart but to assist the left ventricle in pushing blood throughout the body. (The work of the right ventricle-pushing blood to the lungs to be reoxygenated-was left to the natural heart.) Used that way, the pump was called a left-ventricle assist device, or LVAD. The problem was that the patient still had to be hooked up to a cumbersome compressor, and, because the LVAD pulsed like a heart, it wore out relatively quickly. Frazier and Wampler thought the Archimedes' screw might prove to be a longer-term and more comfortable solution.

Most people in the cardiac-surgery world were skeptical. The International Society for Heart & Lung Transplantation's journal turned down Frazier's paper, saying (as Frazier recalled) that this was of some interest to Dr. Frazier but of no interest to the general clinical population and will have no impact on the treatment of heart failure. Sitting in his majestic, book-lined office, Frazier flapped a hand contemptuously. "I was like Robinson Crusoe doing magic tricks for the goats."

But he'd pressed on. The most foreseeable problem with using an Archimedes' screw to move blood, in his view, was damaging the blood itself. The most a person can tolerate is one shredded cell in 200,000. The continuous-flow turbine, spinning like a blender on high speed, seemed likely to tear the red cells apart. There was only one way to find out.

Frazier began implanting continuous-flow pumps, based on the Archimedes' screw, in calves-not as complete artificial hearts, only as assists to the left ventricle. They were crude, the screw inside the animal connected by a spinning cable to a motor outside. It wouldn't be anything a human would want, but it proved that the concept could work; the turbine did no damage to the blood-perhaps, Frazier theorized, because it shot the blood cells through so fast.

While Frazier was installing left-ventricle pumps in calves, a NASA engineer named David Saucier received a heart transplant from Frazier's old mentor Dr. DeBakey. On follow-up visits to DeBakey at the Texas Heart Institute, the engineer became acquainted with Frazier's project, and it got him thinking. Years before, Saucier had worked on the space shuttle, helping to put together the pumps that fed propellant to the main engine. Perhaps there were features of the pump that could inform the design of a better blood pump, one that wouldn't need to connect to an outside motor.

Saucier got NASA to open an investigation in conjunction with Baylor College of Medicine, which is part of the Texas Medical Center. Squeezing the screw and the motor into a package small enough to fit in a person's chest proved to be a knotty problem. When it wasn't going well, one of the doctors cracked to a NASA engineer, "If you can send a man to the moon, then why can't you make a blood pump?" The engineer replied, "They gave us a hell of a lot more money to send a man to the moon."/>

In 1995, 11 years after Saucier started NASA's informal work on an implantable continuous-flow blood pump, some of the NASA and Baylor researchers helped create a company called MicroMed to bring the pump to market, and three years later, surgeons implanted one in a patient in Europe. (The FDA hadn't yet approved it for use in the U.S.) By now, MicroMed had competition from a company called Thoratec, which had an Archimedes'-screw continuous-flow blood pump of its own moving through the FDA approval process. Eager to stay ahead, MicroMed made the bubble-era mistake of letting itself be acquired by a hedge fund called Absolute Capital Management, which starved the project as it imploded spectacularly, its principals facing charges of fraud. Thoratec zoomed past the wreckage of MicroMed and was soon testing its own device, the HeartMate II, in clinical trials.

The HeartMate II was an Archimedes' screw with magnets implanted in the axle and an electric coil in the cylindrical case surrounding it-the saltshaker-shaped device that Cohn had placed in my hands. A charge zipped around the coil, drawing the screw along at 8,000 to 12,000 revolutions per minute. The axle spun on a synthetic-ruby bearing, lubricated by the blood itself. Connected to a portable battery, it let patients live fairly normal lives and was designed to stay in place forever, not merely as a "bridge to transplant." Patients' own hearts still worked; the continuous flow of the pump just helped things along.

And here's where the story gets spooky. In November 2003, Frazier installed the newly approved HeartMate II to assist the failing heart of a young man from Central America who barely spoke English. His family members spoke none. So none of them fully understood Frazier's instructions to return to the hospital frequently for follow-up. The young man walked out of the hospital and disappeared.

When he finally showed up eight months later, Frazier held a stethoscope to his chest and was stunned to hear no heartbeat at all. None. Even more-sensitive instruments would have found nothing resembling a pulse. The young man's heart continued to flutter weakly, but it had effectively shut down. Although the HeartMate II had been designed to assist the heart, not replace it, in this case it seemed to be doing all the work: not just helping the left ventricle push oxygenated blood to the body, but pushing the blood hard enough to flow through the body, then back through the useless heart to the lungs, through the useless heart again, and into the pump to complete the loop and begin the process all over again. The reason the young man had never come back for follow-up, he told Frazier, was that he'd felt perfectly fine.

Thoratec won FDA approval of the HeartMate II in 2008, and surgeons have now installed continuous-flow LVADs alongside the hearts of some 11,000 people worldwide (among them former vice president Dick Cheney). But cases like that of the Central American man remain extremely rare. Newspapers reported that Cheney had no pulse, but in fact he and most other recipients continue to experience, as Cohn describes it, "cyclic fluctuations of pressure with each heartbeat." Even though such fluctuations might be detectable only by an intra-arterial monitoring line hooked to a pressure transducer, they remain present. Patients walk around with videocassette-size batteries hanging under their armpits, their hearts still beating. Frazier, who invited Billy Cohn to join him at the Texas Heart Institute in 2004, has installed many LVADs. He showed me a video of one of his patients playing basketball and another participating in a hip-hop dance contest.

One of the most surprising things about the LVAD is that it does something the medical community had thought impossible: It reverses heart failure. Until the past few years, damage to the heart was thought to be permanent. But it seems that by relieving strain, an LVAD lets some hearts damaged by, for instance, heart attacks repair wall tissue and grow healthy again. Often the LVAD can be removed. "It's like putting a cast on a broken ankle," Cohn says. "You take it off when it's healed. We had no idea that could happen."

Some hearts, though, can't be healed. And for those who continue to worsen even with an LVAD, the only choices are the increasingly hard-to-come-by transplant, or replacement with a machine. The experience of Frazier's Central American patient told Frazier and Cohn that it was theoretically possible to replace hearts entirely with continuous-flow pumps. But that raised the kind of questions nobody had ever before had to consider. Our bodies have evolved to have blood move through us in pulses. Was a pulse necessary for reasons we couldn't yet imagine? One possible snag that occurred to Cohn was the lymphatic system. Unlike blood, the ducts that move lymph through the body have no motor of their own. They surround arteries and get their motion from the pulse of the blood. "It was a good theory," Cohn laughs. "So far, though, we haven't found any evidence that continuous flow creates problems with the lymph."

Cohn knows this because a few people, like Frazier's Central American patient, do continue to walk around with no pulse at all. Describing a miracle patient he wanted me to meet, Richard Wampler told me that Rahel Elmer Reger had a functionally inert "stone heart" yet was living comfortably in upstate New York. I got on a plane./>

Reger was 36 years old, a mother of two- and five-year-old girls, when she finally consented to have her heart valve replaced in 2009. She'd had no symptoms, but her cardiologist said the heart murmur she'd had since childhood really should be fixed. Her aortic valve, if left untreated, could someday seal up altogether. So Reger cleared her calendar and checked into Strong Memorial Hospital in Rochester, New York, thinking she'd be laid up for seven to 10 days.

Neither she nor her doctors know exactly what went wrong, but for some reason her heart wouldn't restart after the surgery. She stayed on a heart-lung machine for an extremely damaging 14 hours. "Prepare yourself for your wife never to leave the hospital," the surgeon told her husband, Tim, adding, with all the delicacy for which heart surgeons are renowned, "Now I'm going to get some soup." By the time Tim saw his wife, in an intensive-care room so crammed with electronics that it looked like a discount store, she was being kept alive by two Thoratec CentriMags-big centrifugal pumps operating outside her body. From the looks of things, she wasn't going anywhere anytime soon.

When Reger developed dangerous clots, the surgeon disconnected the left external pump and inserted a HeartMate II into her chest. She reacted well, and eventually they also disconnected the right-side external pump. Her own heart had never restarted-it lay in her chest almost completely still-but the HeartMate II seemed to be powerful enough to move her blood throughout her body. Seventy-two days after checking in for what she thought would be a week's hospitalization, Reger went home to her daughters without a pulse.

I met her one drippy morning at her home in Clinton, a Norman Rockwell-perfect town outside Utica. Her husband is the Episcopal priest in town, and they were living in the yellow-painted rectory beside the 19th-century church. I expected Reger to look sickly, so when the door was opened by a vigorous, pink-cheeked woman of small stature yet big personality, I figured she was a nurse or a friend. Reger stood only five feet tall but had a piercing stare and a strong voice utterly unaccented by her Swiss-German childhood. She shook my hand firmly and led me inside. On her back, she wore a small quilted backpack; a cable ran from it and up her shirt.

"I remember going in and out that first day, and when Tim told me my family was coming from Switzerland, I knew it wasn't good," she said as we sat in a warm living room decorated with her daughters' artwork. She extended her wrist for me to hold. It was warm, but might otherwise have been that of a dead woman: no pulse.

Reger's heart doesn't seem to be getting better, but it could hardly get worse. Like the heart of Frazier's Central American patient, Reger's has all but given up. Logically, she should be dead. Instead, she feels fine, caring for her daughters and walking a pedometer-measured two miles a day. So far, living without a pulse has caused no problems with her lymph or anything else.

A few people continue to walk around with no pulse at all. One of them was living comfortably in upstate New YorkThe little quilted backpack held two lithium-ion batteries and the HeartMate II's computerized controller, which are connected by cable through a hole in Reger's side. Needless to say, she has never left her backpack on a bus. "My cousin once disconnected me, though, by mistake," she said. "I was showing her how to change the battery. She disconnected one, and then-I was distracted for a second-the other. I yelled, ‘You can't do that!' and then passed out. The device blares at you. She reconnected it, and I came back. I was probably out for 10 seconds. She was completely freaked out. She wanted to go right back to Switzerland."

Reger and the Central American patient proved that humans could survive, indeed thrive, with no pulse. But Frazier and Cohn were attempting to achieve intentionally what those patients had done inadvertently. Rather than augmenting an existing heart, which may lack sufficient strength and is in any case full of crannies that can grow dangerous clots, they would replace it entirely with two turbines, one to do the work of the left ventricle and one to do the work of the right.

Last March, they got their long-awaited chance. A 55-year-old man named Craig Lewis showed up at the Texas Heart Institute with a case of amyloidosis, an extremely rare and severe condition in which the body produces a rogue protein that gradually fills the organs with what Cohn calls "an insoluble muck." Lewis had slid from perfect health to death's door in less than a year.

The doctors attached him to a heart-lung machine, and another device took over the function of the kidneys. He kept going into cardiac arrest, though, and staying attached to the machines was no longer feasible in any case. "That's permissible for only five days, and he was on day 14," Cohn says. "That's when we started thinking about our device. There was no way he would have survived a heart transplant; the amyloid would have attacked it." Lewis knew he didn't have much choice and decided to give the turbine a shot. Cohn removed Lewis's diseased heart and replaced it with a pair of HeartMate IIs.

Two days after surgery, Lewis sat up in bed and spoke with his family. An aspiring engineer, he even sketched ideas for how better to hook up the heart. Cohn showed me a photo of him drawing diagrams on a pad. The patient's liver failure from the amyloidosis was so bad that within five weeks, he lost consciousness and his family asked Cohn to switch the heart off. But he'd gotten those five weeks-time to say goodbye. And he'd left a legacy. In those five weeks, Frazier and Cohn had proved that two tiny, continuous-flow turbines could replace a natural heart.


When Cohn and I entered the operating room, all we could see of Meeko was a tall mound of blue surgical drapes and a red rectangular cavern: Meeko's chest cavity. Other surgeons had prepped the calf for surgery. Cohn was stepping in, as usual, to work the final miracle./>

Twenty-eight people attended-technicians running the heart-lung machine, anesthesiologists, veterinarians of various stripe, photographers and goggle-eyed medical students. Everybody was walking around and talking; it was like a big cocktail party, only the guests wore scrubs and all you could see above their masks were their eyes. Among the guests was Bryan Lynch of MicroMed, the hedge-fund-wrecked company, now risen from the dead. Lynch and a few others from the company's early days had bought their company back from the debris of Absolute Capital Management for a net outlay of $2 million-pennies on the dollar-and had a design that put the magnets in the blades of the screw instead of the axle. That shrunk the axle and made the blades bigger, which meant the screw could turn more evenly. That and a new silica-carbide bearing, Lynch hoped, would reduce the risk of creating dangerous blood clots. It was MicroMed's pumps that Cohn was preparing to implant in Meeko's chest.

Overhead, a big flat-screen TV, connected to a miniature camera on Cohn's forehead, gave us a surgeon's view of the procedure. The medical students gazed at it raptly. I didn't use it because Cohn had told me to stand at his left elbow, where I could peer straight down onto the calf's red, thrashing heart.

Working with an electric cauterizing scalpel that sizzled as it touched flesh (and sent up a distinct steakhouse aroma), Cohn peeled tissue from around the heart. The more its constraints were peeled away, the more vigorously the heart seemed to buck. "Go on!" Cohn yelled, which was the signal for the heart-lung machine to take over. A thick transparent tube filled with dark, purple blood from the calf, and another tube returned it a livid red. With a few deep, swift strokes, Cohn cut the heart free and lifted it on his palm. He left the atria of the heart-a sort of lid, where the big vein and artery go in and out-inside Meeko's chest. The rest of it continued to beat as he laid it in a basin because residues of blood remained in the small coronary arteries. Cohn cocked an eye at me over his mask. "I'll bet you're thinking, ‘How dare he.' " Actually, what I was thinking was: Thus begins my life as a vegetarian.

Working fast, Cohn sewed collars of rubberized Dacron onto the atria. His stitching looked like plain old needle-and-thread work, low-tech and almost casual in its rapidity. Within a few minutes, he had fixed in place two white, doughnut-shaped collars. He lifted the turbines from a dish of saline, their rubberized-Dacron dolly dresses dangled from them. They were marked "Not Approved for Human Use," but each was smaller than the HeartMate II, another advantage MicroMed hopes one day to exploit.

Working as deftly as ever, Cohn sewed the dolly dresses onto the collars he'd installed in the atria. There was no dramatic moment when the turbines were activated and the heart-lung machine turned off; it happened sometime during the third hour of surgery. But at one point, I noticed that the blood-pressure monitor no longer displayed two numbers-120 over 80-but one: 78. "Usually we measure blood pressure at the moment the heart squeezes and the moment it relaxes, the systolic and diastolic numbers. This calf has only one now. And check out the pulse."

Flatline. William Shakespeare, many scholars believe, wrote sonnets in iambic pentameter to imitate the sound of a human heartbeat. What, I wondered, would the Bard make of this?

Cohn kept freaking me out doing magic tricks. In the elevator on our way upstairs from the operating room, he pulled five one-dollar bills from his pocket. "Five singles, right?" he said. He turned the bills over in his hand and swiveled the palm upward with a flourish. The five ones had turned into five 100s. There was nothing up his sleeve; he still had on his short-sleeved scrubs.

Back in his office, he asked me to pick a card at random from a deck, look at it, and put it back in the deck. It was the 10 of diamonds. He told me to draw a shape in the air with my finger. I drew a triangle. "Think of a color but don't tell me what it is," he said. I thought of green. He cut the deck, and there was the 10 of diamonds, a green triangle inked on it. I almost passed out.

It wasn't until that evening, when we sat in a windowless break room drinking terrible coffee, that he revealed why he'd kept showing me magic tricks-to refute, in a way, Arthur C. Clarke's famous dictum, that advanced technology is "indistinguishable from magic." First, though, Cohn set aside his coffee and cracked his knuckles. "Now," he said in a P.T. Barnum voice, "I'll show you the amazing disappearing saltshaker. Usually I do this with a special silk, but . . ." He looked around, grabbed a stiff brown paper towel, shrugged, and wrapped the plastic shaker in it. "No, wait," he said, the smoothness of his act ruined. "This is the amazing saltshaker-through-the-table." He set the wrapped saltshaker down on the table with a loud clunk, stopped, took it away, and said, "Sorry. Maybe it'll work better with these." He put some packets of pepper on the table, thought a second, and then swept them away. Something had him rattled, I couldn't tell what. "No, it's the saltshaker. That's right." He set it up on the table again with one hand and smacked it hard with his palm. The paper towel flattened out, and we heard the saltshaker bounce off the floor below the table. I bent to retrieve it, flummoxed.

"OK," he said gently. "Let me deconstruct it for you." All those fumbling mistakes with the silk and the pepper packets were, as it turned out, part of the trick, designed to distract me from what was really going on: his molding the stiff paper towel to the saltshaker and secreting the shaker under the table. When he smacked down the towel, he released the shaker, which he'd been holding under the table. "It's all part of a script. Every word I said, every motion of my hands, had a role in making the trick work. It seemed random-even like mistakes-to you. But it was all part of the script."

He sat back and spread his hands. "That's what heart surgery is," he said with a soft laugh. "It's a script. To you, it probably looked like I was just sewing those collars into Meeko's chest any old way. But every motion was planned, tested, practiced. Turn my hand eight degrees and poke the needle through; swivel my hand back 22 degrees and draw the needle up four inches; turn my hand back just so and bring it to the left a half inch: a precise number of stitches, pulled just so tight and no tighter. What heart surgery takes is remembering an incredibly long and complicated script and following it exactly, step by step."

Walking back to his office, I pressed him on how long it would be before people were walking around with continuous-flow artificial hearts. Some people think that pressure from the medical-equipment industry makes the FDA too hasty in approving new medical devices. Others think the opposite-that pressure from the insurance industry makes the FDA drag its feet, because insurance companies don't want to pay for expensive new therapies or, god forbid, keep deathly ill people alive longer. Cohn was in neither camp. "They have a hard job to do, and we want them to be careful," he said as we sat down again amidst his playing cards and heart models. Besides, the technology really isn't ready, he said. Using two turbines, with two computerized controllers, is cumbersome. "It really needs to be one integrated unit." That will take another three or four years to develop, he estimated, and then another six or seven for the trials necessary for FDA approval. But the principle has been proven, he thinks. The delay didn't bother him; it's part of scientific advancement: "The Wright brothers flew 800 feet in 1903, and commercial air travel began in 1920."

"Oh, hey! Look at this," he suddenly cried, pawing through the mess on his desk. He came up with a small cardboard box. On the lid, he'd pasted a photograph of the continuous-flow artificial heart, and below it, the letters S, M, L and XL. He'd circled the L with a red Sharpie. "Doesn't that look cool?" he said, holding it up for me to admire. It looked like a novelty item you'd pick up at a magicians' supply store. "It's a joke," he said, "but this is kind of what I envision. That you'll be able to walk into Costco, pull this off a shelf, and have your surgeon stick it in your chest. These things are so simple, we'll be putting them in the chests of 100,000 people a year." He set down the box, picked up the turbines with their dolly dresses, and turned them over lovingly in his hands. Just as human flight wasn't possible until people gave up the idea of imitating birds, permanently replacing the most vital of organs may not be possible without ridding our minds of the heart's telltale beat. "I think we're on the verge, right now, of solving the artificial-heart problem for good," he said. "All we had to do was get rid of the pulse."

Dan Baum is the author, most recently, of the book Nine Lives:Mystery, Magic, Death and Life in New Orleans.

Check out more from our Future of Medicine issue here.

Chinese Drones Will Use Genetic Algorithms to Learn to Hunt For Submarines

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The U.S. Navy's Fire Scout Ship-Launched UAV China plans to hunt submarines using its own sea-launched UAVs running genetic algorithms. U.S. Navy

China usually holds its military hand very close to the vest--that, or things "mysteriously" leak that it doesn't (does) want the world to know about--so we're left to wonder why the People's Republic has decided to publish this in the journal Advanced Materials Research. Nonetheless, it's pretty interesting. Chinese navy researchers have plans for a new submarine hunting scheme that uses ship-launched UAVs running genetic algorithms.

Genetic algorithms narrow down a range of possibilities to an optimal solution much the way evolution does (at least in a simplified sense)--by weeding out the weaker offspring and mating the best with the best to create stronger candidates. These algorithms would take into account things like fuel economy, potential air and sea threats, and oceanographic geography to zero in on the most likely places for submarines to be moving at a given time.

Working with dropped sonar buoys, the drones would then attempt to locate enemy subs in action. Just whose subs are Chinese hunting for, and in what waters do they expect to find them? Surely this revelation by the Chinese "underwater weaponry and chemical defense department" (yup, that's a single department) at the naval academy at Dalian couldn't have anything to do with Taiwan, the U.S., or the Pentagon's renewed focus on the Pacific. More at New Scientist.

[New Scientist]

Video: The Doctors Who Made the No-Pulse Heart

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Heart Stop Beating is a three-minute documentary film about the no-pulse, continuous-flow artificial heart, which Dan Baum writes about in our Future of Medicine issue. It tells the story of Billy Cohn & Bud Frazier, two visionary doctors from the Texas Heart Institute, who in March of 2011 successfully replaced a dying man's heart with the device they developed, proving that life was possible without a pulse or a heart beat.


directed by Jeremiah Zagar


Video: Japanese Robots Attempt Chaotic Game of American Football

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Robot Football Line of Scrimmage via YouTube

During the dark sports month of February, when there's nothing to watch but mid-season NBA games, sometimes I think about the NFL draft. With so many long months to go before the NFL returns, it's the only football-related thing I have, okay? But now I can look at this - some Japanese robots playing football! Not European football, but actual, real American football!

It is not clear exactly what they're trying to accomplish, though the tournament website says the rules follow the same ones as NFL football. It doesn't look like it, but in any event it is fun to watch the robots scramble and fall all over themselves in pursuit of the small blue pigskin. One red robot grabs it and promptly, awkwardly fumbles, prompting other robots to flip into the air and attempt to recover it.

The tournament is for high school students in Japan and there are several regulations, including the height and size of the robots. They can't weigh more than 6.6 pounds and are remote-controlled. It looks like pure chaos, but it also looks like fun.

[IEEE Spectrum]

Remote Aliens Could Detect Life On Earth By Looking At the Moon

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Crescent Moon and Earthshine The thin crescent moon sets over ESO's Paranal Observatory in Chile. The crescent is clearly visible, but you can also see the rest of the moon very faintly, because of the phenomenon known as earthshine. Sunlight bouncing off the Earth illuminates the surface of the moon. This image was captured Oct. 27, 2011. Mercury and Venus are there, too, by the way. ESO/B. Tafreshi/TWAN
New detection method could help spot signs of life on exoplanets

So many exoplanets may hold water, atmospheres, just-right temperatures and a rocky surface for life to flourish - we just need to know where to look. Once astronomers have pinpointed a good candidate, we also need to know how to look - which instruments and methods might sniff out the right chemical signatures of life. A new trick that essentially amplifies those signatures could be one way to do it. Astronomers at the European Southern Observatory just discovered life on Earth with this method, treating our home as if it were an exoplanet.

Even from the point of view of closely orbiting satellites, it's not immediately clear that this planet hosts life - you can't see it (with the exception of green vegetation, of course). But the chemical signals are crystal clear. Earth has far more oxygen and methane in its atmosphere than would exist naturally, without some sort of generation and consumption cycle driven by life's metabolism.

Spectroscopy can detect these gases, along with other so-called biosignatures, but they can be weak signals. This involves breaking up the light that reflects off a planet into its constituent colors, like putting it through a prism, and then determining which elements are present on the planet based on the colors they emit and absorb. This will be especially hard for distant exoplanets, whose blazing host stars drown out the planets' feeble light. "[It's] a bit like trying to study a grain of dust beside a powerful light bulb," said Stefano Bagnulo of Armagh Observatory in Northern Ireland, in an ESO statement.

But astronomers can exploit a characteristic difference between planetary reflected light and original starlight - reflected light is polarized, while starlight is not. As light passes through the atmosphere, it is linearly polarized in two ways, by reflection from the oceans and vegetation on land, and by particles in the air. So by looking at polarized light - called spectropolarimetry - astronomers can pinpoint the planet's reflected light and study it in much greater detail.

Bagnulo, Michael F. Sterzik and Enric Palle at ESO tried this out with the sunlight that reflects off our planet onto the moon. They used a spectrograph at the Very Large Telescope in Chile and measured the linear polarization spectra of earthshine. They were able to determine that Earth is partly cloudy, that it has oceans, and that it has vegetation. The observations were so sensitive that they could pinpoint visible areas of vegetation as small as 10 percent, and they could tell changes in cloud cover at different times as the rotating Earth reflected its light. Then they confirmed these measurements with cloud-observing satellite data, to prove they were indeed seeing clouds via the moon.

This method establishes a baseline for looking at other planets, the researchers say. Spectropolarimetry could ultimately tell whether photosynthetic life has emerged elsewhere in the universe.

It doesn't have much to say about intelligent life, but it's still a big a step toward finding out whether life exists anywhere other than here. The research appears in this week's issue of Nature.

Video: NASA's Methane-Powered Launcher Lifts Off With a Blue-Hot Column of Flame

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Project Morpheus Launch Project Morpheus hot fire #5 was successful earlier this week. NASA

NASA's Project M, an awesome concept to use vertical launch systems to send robonauts to the moon, is still moving forward despite Robonaut's one-way trip to the International Space Station. It's now called Project Morpheus, and it's a test bed for autonomous, environmentally friendly vertical launch systems. Watch below as Morpheus fires its new engine for the first time.

The spacecraft is capable of carrying 1,100 pounds of cargo to the moon, possibly a robonaut, a rover or a moon-dust lab, according to its designers at NASA's Johnson Space Center. And it can do it all autonomously.

The best part is its propulsion system, which is fueled by methane and liquid oxygen. Methane is a waste gas on the ISS and could also conceivably be harvested from ice in lunar craters or at the Martian poles. So it would be cheap to fill up small launchers like Morpheus for sample-return trips, something this country has never done before. It could be configured to land on an asteroid, too.

Engineers at Armadillo Aerospace, which aims to send up its own vertical takeoff rockets, built the prototype according to NASA designs. The team tried out its new engine for the first time Monday, with Morpheus tethered to a tower so it couldn't take off on its own. This is the fifth "hot fire" test, but the first with this engine.

In the face of painful budget cuts, it's nice to see new launchers like this are still in NASA's future. Here's hoping Morpheus brings some robonauts to the moon after all.

[via IEEE Spectrum]

Lytro Light-Field Camera Review: Shoot, Then Focus

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Lytro and Buildings John Mahoney
Lytro's promise of post-shot refocusing is unlike anything we've ever seen--but does it live up to expectations?

To win our Innovation of the Year award, the Lytro had to captivate us enough for us to pass over significant medical diagnostic breakthroughs and a complete reinvention of the internal combustion engine--and it did. So we're naturally excited about the opportunity to spend a little QT with the Light-Field camera. The Lytro, which is culmination of over a decade of work by CEO Ren Ng in the world of light-field photography, is the first camera that allows its user to refocus an image after it's taken. It sounds unbelievable, but after taking our own pics with the Lytro (below), we're happy to report that it's reality.


Click to launch a gallery of Lytro-taken shots, as well as a tour of the camera's hardware.

So, a quick refresher on what exactly this light-field stuff is all about: Typical digital cameras align a lens in front of an image sensor, which captures the picture. The Lytro adds an intermediate step, an array of micro-lenses between the primary lens and the image sensor. That array fractures the light that passes through the lens into thousands of discrete light paths, which the sensor and internal processor save as a single .LPF (light-field picture) file. Your standard digital image is composed from pixel data, like color and sharpness, but pixels in a light-field picture add directional information to that mix. When a user decides where in the picture the focus should be, the image is created pixel-by-pixel from either the camera's internal processor and software or a desktop app.

Given its fundamentally different way of dealing with imagery, the Lytro specs out differently than any other digital camera. Worrying to those who have to create spec lists is the lack of a true megapixel count or relatable sensor specs. Its sensor is physically slightly smaller than your everyday point-and-shoot, but it's designed to capture more data. The Lytro's sensor captures 11 megarays of data ("megarays" refers to the number of light paths the sensor captures), which, if flattened into a simple JPEG--removing the ability to refocus the image--results in a three-megapixel image. That sounds low, but remember that the megapixel count refers only to the size of the photo, not to its quality. The only manual control left to the user is exposure--you can't actually set it, but you can tap on the screen to tell the Lytro where in the image you'd like it to base its exposure.

Handling the Lytro is also unlike anything you're likely to have used before. Users frame shots by holding the 4.4-inch-long device like a pirate looking through a spyglass, staring down the barrel through a 1.5-inch touchscreen/viewfinder on the rear (more on this in the gallery). The front two-thirds of the camera is an f/2 optical zoom lens (it zooms up to 8x) encased in aluminum, while all the controls that aren't touchscreen-based--shutter, capacitive zoom slider, and power button--are situated on the rubberized grip. Cameras come with either 8 or 16 GB of internal storage, which give you space for 350 or 750 images, respectively (if you're nit-picking the math on that one, the difference is due to the software/OS taking up precious storage). The camera feels great: solid but not heavy, with a thoughtful, modern design. The magnetic lens cover is a particularly nice touch.

Smartphone or iPod touch users will have no issue navigating on the Lytro, which is very responsive. In live-view, they access a pop-up menu by pulling up from the bottom of the screen. To scroll through previous shots, swipe from left to right as on an iDevice. In playback mode, they can "star" images as favorites, which gives those images priority when syncing with a computer later.

When we set out to shoot with the Lytro for the first time, it was immediately clear that, as we've said before, this is an entirely new type of digital photography. And, as with anything that's truly completely new, the Lytro comes with a rather steep learning curve. Our "see the picture, take the picture" mentality for point-and-shoot cameras needed some rewiring. The trick with the Lytro is to internalize where it's likely to perceive different focal planes; images with a clear fore- middle- and background separated by several feet provide the clearest examples of what light-field photography can do.

Once you get the swing of it, the Lytro does exactly what it claims to do. On every photo we took, we could change the focal point with a click -- but keep in mind that there are shades of gray involved here. Often, when subjects were grouped closely, the shift in focus from point to point was nearly imperceptible. This is how the Lytro acts by default in "everyday mode," which limits zoom to 3.5x and has a minimum focusing distance of about 5 inches. Everyday mode is ideal for images where the primary subject and secondary one are far from both the lens and one another, much like our little squirrel friend and his faraway observer.

To provide more control, Lytro has added what it calls "creative mode," which allows the users to cheat the optics to make clear distinctions between focal planes. This mode extends the camera's zoom range up to its maximum 8x and brings its minimum focusing distance down to nil. Before taking the shot, tap the screen where you want the Lytro to think of as the "middle" of your image from front-to-back, almost like on a tap-to-focus smartphone. Doing so forces the camera (quite literally, in fact; there is an audible mechanical noise inside the lens casing when you select a new midpoint) to perceive that plane as the center of its focal range and assess other planes in front of and behind it more clearly.

We had the most luck using creative mode for macro shots, like groups of balls on a coffee table. But it's also useful to separate objects that are close to one another in the foreground, while still keeping a distinctive background.

If you're running on a Mac, uploading pics from the Lytro is a true plug-and-play experience. (A Windows client is coming soon.) When you plug the camera in over USB for the first time, it automatically launches an installer for its desktop software. The camera then begins transferring images to the computer - your starred favorites go first, then the rest of the lot. This can take a while, a long while. Because each image file contains thousands of light paths, one file can bloat up to 12MB. From there, you can upload the full clickable image to Lytro.com or Facebook, or export a still JPEG with the point of focus you want selected. Should you wish to print those image, Lytro recommends you not go any larger than a 5-by-7 equivalent.

Right now the Lytro is essentially a one-trick pony, but let's not forget that it's quite the trick. Think of it this way: this camera captures multiple depths of field with one shutter click, a feat only possible previously with either a whole room filled with lenses or taking multiple versions of the same image with a regular camera. We'd love to be able to say that the final images it creates are flawless, but that's sadly not the case; in low-light there's a noticeable amount of noise--especially at high ISOs. Image blur is a real issue, as well; the slightest shake of the hand or sudden movement from the subject renders shots irretrievably blurry.

As Lytro continues to refine its image-processing engine, you'll be able to edit images to be entirely in focus or choose two distinctive light paths in order to create a 3-D effect without a dedicated 3-D camera. But the promise of light-field photography for the everyday Joe isn't limited to this one device; should the Lytro's capabilities be merged with other now-common features (adjusting ISO, exposure, white balance, and the like), it could fundamentally change how we think about a large portion of modern photography. A light-field engine on a smartphone, for instance, could remove much of the guess-work from on-the-fly shots and allow those pics to have depth previously reserved for today's DSLRs and interchangeable-lens cameras.

The Lytro light-field camera is available now for $400-$500.

Embedded interactive images taken by Corinne Iozzio. For an assessment of the Lytro from a photographer's point of view, check out Popular Photography's take.

Virgin Oceanic Wants to Send Humans Back Down into the Mariana Trench

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Virgin Oceanic's Proposed Submersible Virgin Oceanic

If you thought space was the only frontier Virgin has an interest in tackling, you've been missing out on Virgin Oceanic's drive to pilot the first manned submersible all the way to the very bottom of the Pacific Ocean's Mariana Trench--and thus dive deeper than any solo human has ever dived before. It's a cool story that is still ongoing, and PopSci favorite IEEE Spectrum has an amazing semi-long read from its March issue up online today.

If you're short on context, the context is this: the Mariana Trench is the deepest subsea place on the planet, reaching a known depth of more than six-and-three-quarters miles (some measurements are deeper but unconfirmed). Only two people have been down there, together, back in 1960 aboard what's known as a bathyscaphe. The pressure there is something like 1,100 times greater than that at sea level--enough to crush most submersibles like an empty beer can. The temperatures down there are absolutely frigid. So naturally, Virgin is going to send a lone human down there.

The short video trailer below provides a bit more background, but we highly recommend a click through to the IEEE Spectrum piece, which takes you aboard the expedition paving the way for the manned dive. It's worth perusing.

[IEEE Spectrum]

Hands-On: Windows 8 Brings Tablet-Style Simplicity To The Desktop

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Windows 8 Metro Start Menu There's a mix of Metro apps (the brightly-colored ones like Photos, Store, and Weather) and regular Windows programs (like Internet Explorer) in this new Start screen. Dan Nosowitz
Windows 8 might be a gamechanger for tablets, but it's designed for desktops too. How does it fare with a keyboard and mouse?

Since Windows 7, Microsoft's been busily honing the interface for Windows tablets, which uses a bold bunch of squares and rectangles in flat neon colors and has been christened "Metro." Windows 8--undoubtedly the biggest change to the operating system in a few generations--finally brings Metro to the desktop. So how does it work with a keyboard and mouse?

Windows 8 integrates Metro with what in reality is a barely-changed version of Windows 7, with all the programs and behavior we've gotten familiar with for the past decade or two. It sounds disjointed, but functionally, after using it for a minute, I see what Microsoft is doing here, and it makes sense. For tablet users, Metro is everything. For desktop users, it's essentially Microsoft's new Start menu.

On a tablet, Metro is highly touchable, with big buttons and swipey gestures and pretty bright colors. Apps run in full-screen, with the additional option of sticking an app in a quarter of the screen on the left or right (great for stuff like Twitter or an instant-message client). On a desktop, Metro's still useful, but it's not where you'll spend most of your time. A desktop user triggers Metro by clicking, from anywhere, on the lower left-hand corner of the screen (or by hitting the Windows button on your keyboard), and there you are: home base.

Metro is where you see basic updates. You can go into a pretty weather app, check your email, look at photos, listen to music (no longer called Zune, which is smart; despite Zune being reliably excellent throughout its tenure as Microsoft's most-mocked property, it was also reliably unpopular), play some quick games, or do a little light messaging. It's also the spot from which you'll launch all your apps. Here's where it gets kind of tricky: there are two kinds of apps, Metro apps and regular Windows apps. You can "pin" both of these types of apps to your Metro screen, anywhere you want, but the Metro apps will launch in Metro and the Windows apps will launch in regular Windows (which, as I said before, looks pretty much exactly like Windows 7).

Metro is pretty simple to use. A right click brings up a sidebar on the bottom (bottombar?) with context-sensitive options. You scroll through your Metro thumbnails with the mouse wheel (or, once Windows 8 is optimized for laptops, with the trackpad). The hot corners, to borrow a phrase from Mac OS, work whether you're in Metro or not. Stick your cursor in the upper left corner to see a little popup of your most recently used app, which you can click on to be taken there. Or you can move the cursor down to see more of your recently used apps. At the bottom of this list is always a thumbnail of Metro--your new Start button. (I imagine many desktop users will stick to the tried-and-true Alt-Tab method of app switching--it's quite a bit faster.)

Over in the upper right-hand corner, you've got what Microsoft calls "charms." These are a couple quick, important keys: Search, Share, Devices, Settings, and another Start button. Not sure why there are two Start buttons available at all times, but there they are. The search function is Metro-fied and works well, but it's not universal--you have to tell it whether you're looking for an app, a setting, or a file. Mac OS X's universal search "Spotlight" is better, I think, but this works pretty well.

Tablet users, I imagine, will stay pretty much entirely in Metro. It's just right for touch-based interaction on a small screen. But desktop users will be just the opposite: you might look at the weather app in Metro, or use the Metro calendar, or maybe check your email (though the email app has some issues; read more below in the "apps" section), but I can't imagine a desktop user wanting to use, say, a Twitter or instant-message app in Metro. For one thing, you'd have to keep leaping between your desktop and Metro, which is kind of jarring (Alt-Tab includes both Metro and regular windows apps)--even more than heavily using widgets on Mac OS or gadgets in Windows 7, and those are nowhere near as involved as Metro apps. For another, Metro apps are designed to be super lightweight and speedy and simple. That's fine for some stuff, but the email app is basically a touchscreen email app--if I'm using a desktop computer, with a keyboard and mouse and an ugly black tower filled with space-age components, why wouldn't I just use an email app like Thunderbird, or even a web-based client like Gmail, both of which are more powerful, flexible, and better suited for keyboard-and-mouse use than Metro's email app?

METRO APPS

Given that this is a preview and not a finished product, it's expected that there's a very limited number of Metro apps. There's no Twitter app, no Facebook. The only IM client is Microsoft's own, which doesn't support Google Chat or AIM, only Facebook and Windows Live Messenger (good for 14-year-olds and Europeans, respectively, but I am neither). There are a few simple games, and the Xbox app has some interesting possibilities--looks like you'll be able to send videos to your Xbox 360 in addition to the expected access to Xbox settings and friends.

The email app is super pretty, as is basically everything in Metro, but it's also super simple. When I'm on a desktop, I can't imagine using this app over a regular email program or a decent web app. There's not enough room left for the actual message, not enough controls, not enough information on the screen, compared to the alternatives.

The calendar app is excellent, much cleaner and simpler than previous Windows calendars or even Apple's iCal, with its silly digital leather stitching. The music app is far too basic for desktop use--I have a keyboard and mouse, why do I need to scroll through a billion giant thumbnails? (The Music and Video apps are tied in pretty thoroughly with the formerly-named Zune store.) On the other hand, the photos app is simple, but works nicely--I like having a simple photo app that just shows me my photos. It's not going to replace Picasa, which has much more robust uploading and editing and management tools, but to just take a look through some photos? Great.

WHAT ABOUT THE REST OF WINDOWS?

There haven't been any real major changes to the "normal" part of Windows 8. Windows Explorer is still Windows Explorer. There are some slight granular differences in the menu bars and things like that, but nothing will really be shocking to anyone who's used Windows 7. The Start icon is gone from the taskbar, but otherwise it looks exactly the same--you right-click on any app in the "all apps" section of Metro, and hit "Pin to taskbar" to stick it right there. All of those great Windows 7 previews are still here, so you can hover over the items on the taskbar for a preview and things like that.

Internet Explorer does not suck. I'm as surprised as anyone. It's pretty and fast and minimal. It doesn't have a killer feature like Firefox's scores of extensions or Chrome's search bar, but it does not deserve scorn, which is high praise for this particular dinosaur of a program.

The Control Panel is still confusing as all hell. You can use the new "PC Settings" area in Metro for basic stuff--accounts, personalization, notifications, updates--but it's a pretty shallow set of options for a desktop, and you'll definitely have to close your eyes and plunge your arm into the toilet of Control Panel at some point. Microsoft promises that they've vastly cut down on the quantity and incomprehensibility of error messages, but as I didn't see any, I can't vouch for that. Or can I?

All of my Windows 7 programs worked. Actually everything seemed to work a little better than before--maybe it's just that Metro is so ridiculously smooth and fast, but the whole computer felt snappier than I remembered Windows 7 ever being. (For reference, I'm using a few-years-old Dell desktop with 8GB of memory and a triple-core AMD Phenom processor--faster than your average workstation, but by no means a speed beast. As a side note, I had to dig it out of my closet, where it was entirely covered with dust, and plug it into my HDTV, because I no longer have a monitor, so all things Metro seem impossibly bold and bright. I tried to install it via both Boot Camp and Parallels on a Macbook Pro, hoping to try out some multitouch, but had no luck in getting it to run in any reasonable way. This will probably change soon.)

SINCERELY, IN CONCLUSION

I like Windows 8 a lot! But it's important to remember that while Windows 8 is a huge, game-changing step for tablets, in the desktop world it'll be more like the step from Snow Leopard to Lion on Mac OS. It brings a whole bunch of tablet ideas, but it's still a desktop OS, and it's really not as different from the previous version as it sounds or looks at first. And, by the way, Windows 8 is going to freak the hell out of a lot of people--Metro is the first thing you see, and you'll keep going back to it for settings and launching apps and things like that, and it looks like Microsoft burned Windows to the ground and built a new OS out of neon construction paper and a T-square. But it's really not a huge deal--desktop users will treat Metro like the fanciest, best Start menu/app launcher there ever was. And it is, too; Metro's changes are infinitely more modern and welcome than Lion's weird, useless iPad-like app launcher and all the other mobile-inspired ideas Apple crammed into the latest version.

I have no hesitation in recommending an upgrade; I've had absolutely no hiccoughs or errors after my upgrade, everything runs perfectly smooth, and Metro is, though not a gamechanger, really, really cool. Especially if you haven't played with other Metro products like the new Xbox homescreen or Windows Phone, it'll be a shock--but after you figure out what Metro is and what it isn't, it'll be just fine. Better, even.

You can download the Windows 8 Consumer Preview from Microsoft here, for free. It'll expire in late 2013.

Text Message Autocorrect Results in Police Lockdown

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Autocorrect

IMHO, people should spell out their words in text messages. Otherwise you get embarrassing mistakes. Then your whole school gets locked down. This just happened in Florida. Srsly.

On Wednesday, a student at West Hall middle or high school in Gainesville, Fla., tried to send a buddy a text with the message "gunna be at west hall today." The autocorrect feature on this student's phone changed it to "gunman."

So the text - which also went to the wrong number - read "gunman be at west hall today." Someone reported this to school officials and West Hall middle and high schools were locked down. The lockdown ended a couple hours later after school officials figured out what happened, according to the Gainesville Times.

This would be funnier if it didn't come three days after a deadly school shooting in Ohio. That tragedy, as well as the legacy of Columbine High School in Colorado and of Virginia Tech, appropriately sends school officials on edge anytime someone uses the word "gun."

Still, you kind of have to laugh. It's not clear what brand the phone was in this case, but anyone with autocorrect has accidentally sent a text saying, perhaps, that you're sending the dog to the "broiler" when you mean "groomer" or maybe "renown" instead of "Tebow" or something inappropriate when you meant "pizza" and so on.

But "gunman"?


Storm Watch: Driven By Warm Air, Massive Tornado Outbreak Forecast for Friday

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Tornado NOAA via Wikimedia Commons

A storm system brewing in the Rockies today might trigger an outbreak of deadly tornadoes in the nation's midsection on Friday, according to meteorologists. In case you missed it, read PopSci senior editor Seth Fletcher's piece about how tornadoes form - and how climate change may be making them worse.

The midwest already suffered plenty of severe weather this week, with 30 tornado reports and 12 deaths Tuesday night and into Wednesday. Is 2012 shaping up to be another 2011?

Last year was a banner year for tornadoes, with a deadly spate of twisters leveling homes and businesses throughout the midwest and south in the early part of the year. And, of course, the city of Joplin, Missouri. Fletcher recounted the damage to his hometown in our January issue, in which he also ponders whether global warming may have contributed to that tornado's incredible power. Check it out for a thorough description of how tornadoes form, and how a warming atmosphere may be making them worse. Meanwhile, fellow midwesterners, heed those tornado sirens.

Japanese Home-Levitation System Could Protect Buildings From Earthquakes

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Earthquake Levitation System via Spoon & Tamago

Instead of building super-strong yet flexible structures to withstand earthquakes, what if you built your house to levitate on a cushion of air? This is already being employed in Japan, a little less than a year after the massive earthquake and tsunami that devastated the country.

The levitation system is the brainchild of a company called Air Danshin Systems Inc., which the Japanese-culture-and-art site Spoon & Tamago says roughly translates to "anti-seismic." It was founded in 2005 but has caught on after the March 11, 2011 Tohoku earthquake.

It consists of a sensor network, an air compressor and an artificial second foundation beneath the home's bottom level and just above the ground. An earthquake-sensitive motion sensor recognizes when the earth is unstable, and an air compressor activates within half a second to fill the space between the building and the ground. It can lift a structure 1.2 inches off the ground, according to a report in DigitalTrends.

While the earth moves, the levitating home would stay still, protected by the air cushion. Apparently 88 homes in Japan already had this home-airbag system as of last summer.

There's even a video demonstration below - seems like it works pretty well. (Why didn't they let the old guy sit in the comfortable chair?)

The whole thing seems like a good idea, if slightly impractical - it would not be easy to lift a home off the ground and install this second artificial foundation. But then again, it would be better to install this rather than let the earth move your house for you.

[via Digital Trends, Spoon & Tamago]

Speech Jamming Gun Freezes Any Talker Mid-Sentence

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BAM! You've Just Been Speech Jammed via arXiv

Want to be the kind of person who causes entire rooms to fall silent when you enter? Researchers from the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology in Tskuba and Ochanomizu University in Japan have created a speech jamming gun that takes the words right out of speakers' mouths using a clever trick of psychology.

Psychologists have long known that for whatever reason, it's very difficult to talk when your words are being immediately repeated to you. Not annoying-younger-sibling repeated to you, but spit back at you just a fraction after you've spoken. So by using a simple directional microphone and speaker device, the researchers have created a handheld "speech jammer" that records what a person is saying and repeats it back at them with a two-tenths-of-a-second delay.

In tests, the researchers said the device works well at a distance, rendering the person at the receiving end without causing any physical discomfort (nevermind the mental discomfort caused by suddenly being rendered mute). The only limitation is that it only works with words; meaningless syllables like those often expressed by pirates or onomatopoeia don't necessarily work.

The researchers see it as a tool to maintain order in meetings or discussion groups where someone is trying to dominate the conversation. But the commercial applications are virtually endless, as there are obvious applications for anyone who ever plans to get into a relationship with another human being ever.

[Technology Review]

Video: The Smart Shopping Cart of the Future Follows You Through the Store

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The Smart Shopping Cart of the Future is Windows 8 Enabled
Using Kinect and Windows 8

Since the less-than-earth-shattering development of the self-checkout line, grocery shopping hasn't come a long way, technologically speaking. But Whole Foods is looking into creating a new kind of shopping experience, thanks to a new smart cart developed by Austin-based Chaotic Moon--one that pulls the lowly shopping cart into the 21st century with the help of a Microsoft Kinect.

We'll let the video demo below speak for itself, but briefly: Chaotic Moon has imbued its smart shopping cart with puppy-like brains via a Windows 8 tablet and vision via an Xbox Kinect setup. That means you can upload your shopping list to the cart and then walk around the store as the shopping cart follows you (did we mention this shopping cart is self-propelled?). As you place items in the cart, you scan their bar codes. The tablet ticks each item off your list, alerts you if you accidentally grab the wrong item, and--best of all--checks you out automatically when you're done, no waiting necessary.

The project is just getting underway--as you'll see below, all the kinks haven't quite been worked out of the system--but Whole Foods is already conducting a trial run of the smart carts. That should shorten the amount of time shoppers spend in the store and ease the overall shopping experience, though it won't make that organic hormone-free grass-fed locally-raised USDA Grade AAA dinner any easier on the pocketbook.

[GeekWire via SmartPlanet]

Now Underway: the U.S.'s First Suborbital Balloon Factory

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Near Space Corp Balloon Near Space Corporation

The Near Space Corporation, which has won contracts from NASA in the past, announced this week that it'll be building a commercial high-altitude (still suborbital) balloon flight facility, the first of its kind in this country.

The balloons go up to around 130,000 feet, right at the edge of space, so they can be very useful for testing technologies and ideas in an atmosphere that very closely mimics what's in space--but at a fraction of the cost. Construction on the facility is set to begin in the fall of this year, and will include your standard suborbital balloon infrastructure. I assume you know what that entails already, but just for completeness's sake, there'll be, according to Network World, "a balloon launch circle, the observation tower, the payload integration hangar, engineering and administration offices, and the balloon production wing."

No word on whether people will be able to go up on the balloons--certainly they're capable of carrying the weight, as Near Space balloons can apparently carry up to thousands of kilograms in cargo.

[Network World]

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