Thanks to vast improvements in hygiene, pharmaceuticals, and surgical techniques and devices, medical treatments today tend to be significantly less painful—and less deadly—than they were a century ago. Though the cures of yesteryear often seem brutally primitive, some, like the five treatments in this gallery, stand on solid science.
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Last month, I wrote about an overlooked passage in Rachel Carson’s famous book, Silent Spring. To recap, the excerpt goes like this:
“It is not my contention that chemical insecticides must never be used. I do contend that we have put poisonous and biologically potent chemicals indiscriminately into the hands of persons largely or wholly ignorant of their potentials for harm.”
My point was that Silent Spring wasn’t a call for the end of pesticides, as some Carson-haters claim, but a plea for more judicious use of the chemicals. In Carson’s time—indeed, immediately following WWII and the advent the first synthetic pesticides—we went a little crazy with the stuff. Carson advocated for more attention to be paid to the overall ecology of the landscape, so that pesticide application could be limited and targeted to avoid killing the wrong things.
Silent Spring is mostly about insect control, but I recently came across an example of thoughtful pesticide use in plant control that I think she would have appreciated.
The terrain was too dangerous to search by foot, so Menard and his team spent three years mapping the mountain forests by helicopter, marking potential invasive plants and animals with GPS. One plant the scientists saw was especially disconcerting: the fast-growing Australian tree fern, which can tower thirty feet and spawn tens of millions of spores. “The thing that was really scary about Australian tree fern was the distribution,” Menard told me week before last by phone. “Most weeds, you see a core invasion, and then you’ll see the leading edge, and then no weeds. And usually we focus on those leading edges of the weeds. But with Australian tree fern, man, it was everywhere. We were finding it in the deepest, most remote parts of the forest.”
Menard needed an easier, more accurate way to map the forest in order to better pinpoint the giant invasive ferns. In 2006, he teamed up with the Stephen Ambagis, then at the US Geological Survey. Later, they worked with a company called Resource Mapping, which provided a method of combining both wide angle and telephoto digital images into georeferenced maps with the help of an Israeli company called Icaros, Inc, which had propriety software originally developed to identify IEDs (in 2008, Ambagis and Dana Slaymaker, the principle researcher at Resource Mapping, launched Resource Mapping Hawaii).
At the same time, Menard was trying to figure out how he would kill the Australian tree ferns once he found them. There was no way to attack the plants from the ground—again, it was too treacherous to go by foot. Even if it weren’t, the ferns were too massive to remove manually, and there were just too many of them. He would have to use an herbicide, and he’d have to apply it from the sky.
Menard had to select his herbicide carefully. In addition to the invasive plants, the Kauai forests are filled with hundreds of native plant species, some of which are endangered, which meant the wrong herbicide could cause irreparable
Most of the herbicides Menard tested that were legal to use in forests and watersheds killed the Australian tree ferns in the lab, but required a big dose. Spraying voluminous shots of liquid herbicide from a helicopter could inadvertently splatter it on the wrong plants. It would also mean the helicopter would have to take extra trips to refill the herbicide tanks, which would make the rides prohibitively expensive.
By a stroke of luck, Menard heard from James Leary, a friend and an invasive plant specialist at the University of Hawaii, who suggested the herbicide imazapyr for the project. In tests, it only required an average of 10 milliliters, or around two teaspoons, aimed into the center of the fern where the fronds sprout from the trunk. Between this and the fern's massive size—which made it relatively easy to spot from the air—Menard had found its Achilles heel. He and his team rigged up a helicopter delivery system and traipsed the Kauai forests zapping the invasive plant like something out of an eighties arcade game. (In earlier tests, they hit the ferns with herbicide-filled paintball guns; today, they use a spraying device called a "stinger" that is lowered from the belly of the helicopter).
Over the past four years, Menard’s group has treated around 10,000 Australian tree ferns over a spread of 15,000 acres. And here’s the best part: they’ve used only 23 gallons of herbicide. That’s a little over a teaspoon per acre. It's hard to find a good comparison that expresses how little herbicide this is. When I asked Menard for one, he said these types of control projects are "an apples and oranges thing." He added: "Whenever I’ve told our partners and other folks doing conservation and forestry weed control how much herbicide we used, they are generally shocked it’s so low."
It’s too early to tell if Menard and his crew are working fast enough to kill the Australian tree ferns before the millions of spores can spread the invasive plant further, but they're currently remapping the forest to see if the ferns are receding. The work could be published within the year.
***
Additional reading:
Pacific Invasion: New technologies combat super weeds that threaten Kauai’s forests by Matt Jenkins, Nature Conservancy Magazine
Green Avenger: Botanical Guardian Assaults Alien Flora by Ben Paynter, Wired (sadly, Menard no longer uses paintball guns to deliver the herbicide)
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Vine earned the title of top free download in the App Store in less than three months. Why such a splash? It’s the first app to make mobile video uploading easy. Vine’s success is more about simplicity than code; users record the quick six-second clips with one tap. Now, the app’s more than 40 million users post tons of videos—including résumés, music videos, ads, and comedy sketches—every day. Free
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These spiders are not spiders you would want in your house, for sure. But spiders’ presence in fruit is generally not a bad thing. It’s a result of pest management practices that aim to use fewer chemicals on our food, allowing natural insect enemies to help out.
“From a pest management perspective, spiders are beneficial. They eat a lot of pest insects,” says Rick Foster, a professor of entomology at Purdue University who studies arthropod pests of fruits and vegetables. “We want to keep them there in the field, and what we don’t want to do is bring them into the grocery store and into your homes. But it’s kind of hard to have it both ways.”
Grapes provide nice secluded spots for spiders to hang out and build their webs, Foster says. They’ll eat just about any type of insect, and plenty of insects eat grapes and grape leaves, providing spiders a bounty of possibilities. And grapes are harvested in the field, usually without any washing or other processing that might remove the arachnids. (One of the black widows was spotted while a Pennsylvania woman was washing grapes in her sink.)
It wasn’t clear where the grapes were grown, but black widows are native to Missouri and California, where many grapes come from. Both the spiders and the grapevines prefer temperate climates. But plenty of other spider species set up shop in fruit trees and bushes, not just black widows, Foster notes.
In the case of the bananas, a Brazilian wandering spider had built a nest on a bunch of bananas that were sold at a Sainsbury’s in southwestern London. The fruit had been imported from Colombia, according to the Mail.
In years past, growers would spray their crops with broad-spectrum insecticides, which kill not only crop pests but also their predators. But using integrated pest management, a relatively new philosophy of pest control, growers might not use insecticides or they may spray selectively, sparing the spiders.
“It’s one of the little negative side effects of doing a better job of controlling insects,” Foster says.
Brazilian wandering spiders, also called banana spiders, are in the Guinness Book of World Records as the world’s most dangerous spider. Their venom is a potent neurotoxin, but like other spider venoms, it's being studied for therapeutic use— in their case, for erectile dysfunction. They’re aggressive and can grow up to 6 inches long. They live in banana plantations where they can feast on other creatures, like lizards, crickets and katydids, and tree frogs.
Black widows are also venomous, but they’re far less dangerous. A bite will cause chills, nausea, cramps and abdominal pain, and general achiness. While they can be harmful to young children, the average adult doesn’t have much to worry about, according to Foster. Antivenin is available, but in most cases, it’s not even worth going to an emergency room, he says. Rather, black widows are frightful because of their sleek, obsidian appearance and their cultural importance.
“They’re even in movies; there’s a whole mythology along with black widows,” Foster says.
I asked him what would have happened if the grape stowaways had been a different species. “I think if it was a jumping spider, no one would have noticed,” he says.
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Just like the human versions, nonhuman primates are social creatures. They clean each other, cooperate with each other, help each other with eating. This year, a few studies added even more to what we know about primate relationships, and indeed, science has been investigating this topic for quite some time. In 1991, the journal Lab Animal Science published a study on the topic titled “Social interaction in nonhuman primates: an underlying theme for primate research.” And then more than a decade later, a 2002 paper discussed the use of the “f-word” (aka friendship) in primatology. In the paper, primatologist Joan B. Silk, writes that using friendship to describe primate relationships is a possible “backlash against what some researchers see as a narrow-minded preoccupation with the negative aspects of animal behavior, such as competition, conflict, manipulation, coercion, and deception.” Instead of all that negativity, some scientists are looking at the more positive side of primate behavior. Despite critics of referring to these relationships as bonafide friendships, humans still turn to our fuzzy cousins as targets upon which to foist our friendly feelings.
Here are some of our favorite studies of primate companions:
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"Tour" is probably too grand a word for the scale of this comic, but while researching what was or was not plausible for this story (I know, really that all went out the window with the talking Thrinaxodon. But whatever.) I learned a lot about life in the Early Triassic. Readers also helped with many details, such as the fact that grass didn't appear until as recently as 65 million years ago. Trying to find a suitably scary predator for the time period also took a bit of stretching and speculation. But in the end, I hope the results outweigh the pinpoint accuracy of the subject matter.
For those of you celebrating Thanksgiving tomorrow, safe travels, and I'll see you all next week.
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When Camille Beatty was 10 years old, she dismantled a TV remote and handed the parts to her surprised father, Robert. Next came a string of questions about the circuitry. “I got to a point in my life where electronics seemed magical, but I knew they weren’t,” says Camille, now 13. “So I started opening some up. I wanted to know what was inside and how they worked.” Robert hadn’t a clue, so he, Camille, and his other daughter, Genevieve, now 11, searched the Web to find out. The family used their newfound knowledge to build their first robot only weeks later.
Today, the Beattys’ garage in Asheville, North Carolina, is a veritable bot factory. “We’ve built robots that crawl, robots that fly, robots that shoot BBs, and robots that can autonomously move around the house,” says Camille, who handles machining and mechanical assembly while Genevieve does the soldering and wiring. One of their projects has even made it into the New York Hall of Science, where nearly 500,000 annual visitors can see it and drive it around a faux Martian landscape.
The family’s museum collaboration began with a robot they named Spirit II, a 500-part, six-wheeled, remotely operated machine built in the likeness of NASA’s solar-powered Spirit rover. They re-created the rover’s complex rocker-bogie suspension system, which can clear tall obstacles, and studied patents to replicate the unique gearing that turns Spirit in place 360 degrees. Samuel Litt, the museum’s director of information technology, was looking to replace a three-wheeled “mousebot” in a Mars exhibit when he stumbled upon photos of Spirit II on the Beattys’ workshop blog. “It looked like some really impressive technology,” Litt says. “Meanwhile, our old robot just crept along and didn’t even look like anything you’d put in space.”
At Litt’s request, the Beattys agreed to build another—this time with a few modifications. The museum wanted a durable bot that could last nine hours on one charge. It also needed to display infrared video revealing a heated rock (a crude but effective simulation of discovering water-containing Martian minerals, which reflect infrared). To fit comfortably within the exhibit’s 250-square-foot enclosure, the girls and their dad also designed the new version to be about a third smaller than Spirit II.
The Beattys installed eight range-finding sonar sensors on the wheels to prevent anyone from driving the robot into a wall. They also added a green laser to show the location being measured by a temperature sensor. In June, the Beattys donated the robot to the museum, which named it Camille. The family also built and donated a second unit, called Genevieve, with streamlined electronics and an upgraded camera.
Since the robots’ debut, project requests have poured into the Beattys’ home from around the world. These days, the family is handcrafting a half-dozen likenesses of space robots, including Russia’s Lunokhod moon rover, for a museum in Prague. “It’s sometimes irritating when the girls have to do homework,” Robert says. “I’d rather be building robots with them.”
A rechargeable 7.4V lithium-ion battery with an electric power capacity of 10,000 mAh stores enough energy for a full day of nonstop roving—and then some. The solar panels are real but don’t function well indoors.
A UHF radio chip inside the rover lets museum visitors steer it wirelessly. Staff can also drive the robot using a radio remote control that Camille (left) and Genevieve (right) once built for a BB-shooting tank bot.
A rocker-bogie suspension enables the rover’s wheels to clear obstacles taller than a foot. Servomotors allow each wheel to move independently and turn the robot 360 degrees in place.
Custom CNC Mill
Hand tools weren’t cutting it for high-quality robots, so the Beattys built a computer-guided milling machine. A water-cooled spindle turns at 24,000 rpm, while a three-axis gantry system moves the spindle to carve out metal, plastic, and other materials.
Time:1 year
Cost: $2,000
Wireless Telegraph
When Camille and Genevieve started tapping out messages in Morse code, their dad came up with a quieter idea: a 21st-century telegraph. They wired two antique telegraph keys to an Arduino Nano microcontroller, a UHF radio, and a speaker. The devices can communicate up to a mile away.
Time:2 weeks
Cost: $200
This article originally appeared in the December 2013 issue of Popular Science.
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For the first time in more than three decades, the moon may soon see some soft-landing, human-made visitors. China launched its first moon rover—and third moon mission—at 1:30 am today, local time.
The Chinese rover should land December 14 or 15, Space.com reports. The last soft lander to visit the moon's surface was a Russian craft in 1976. The last people on the moon were Americans, in 1972. Since then, space agencies have sent instruments purposefully crashing onto the moon's surface, but nothing designed to remain intact after landing, which is more difficult to do.
China wasn't exactly ready to enter the moon race in the 1960s, but over the past few years, the country has made up for lost time with a number of moon missions, which help Chinese scientists develop their own spacefaring technology. For the far future, Chinese officials are also interested in the moon as a source of minerals and energy, the BBC reports.
The country seems to be meeting the goals it has announced, including a confirmation in 2011 that officials wanted to land a moon rover in 2013 (And here we are!). After this, China wants to get moon rock samples back to Earth by 2020 and, eventually, to launch a manned mission to the moon.
The rover is named Yutu, or "Jade Rabbit," which is the name of the pet bunny of the Chinese moon goddess Chang'e. The lander itself is called Chang'e 3. The unmanned Chang'e 1 launched in 2007, and Chang'e 2, in 2010.
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Click here to see a larger version of this image.
The age of battleships is long over. The United States built the USS Missouri, the nation's last battleship, in 1944, even as that category of "heavy ship with many powerful guns" was superseded by "floating runway with many powerful planes." Though aircraft carriers would eventually replace battleships, both were used during WWII. Readers on the home front were curious about how these behemoths worked, and in October 1943, Popular Science obliged with the above infographic of the North Carolina class of battleships.
The North Carolina class was primarily armed with three turrets, each containing three guns 16 inches in diameter. These guns could fire two explosive or armor-piercing rounds a minute, at enemies up to 22 miles away. That's an impressive distance for a single gun, but still not enough to match the increasing advantage of airplanes: the F4U Corsair, a standard Naval fighter used on aircraft carriers during the era, could fly more than 1,000 miles while carrying bombs. Despite many mighty guns, the battleship's limited power in the new age of carrier warfare relegated it to a support role. Large crew sizes—the North Carolina class regularly traveled with 2,339 people on board—were another reason for the battleship's eventual retirement.
Bonus! Here's a U.S. Navy training video from 1955. It took 79 men to load and operate a battleship gun turret:
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If you're a Rubik's cube expert and a bit of an exhibitionist, maybe you'll be interested in this mind-blowing project from artist Javier Lloret: a giant, remote-controlled LED puzzle cube made out of a building.
For the project, called Puzzle Facade, Lloret built a gray puzzle cube with built-in orientation sensors. Then, he connected the cube via Bluetooth to a computer, which controlls the LED facade of the Ars Electronica Center in Linz, Austria. Whenever the cube twists, the lights on the building move in tandem.
There's also an added layer of challenge: you can only see two sides of the building at once while you're attempting to match colors. So maybe if Rubik's cubes aren't your thing you can just stick to building-Tetris.
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The Tesla Model S, for all its technical and design artistry, has a dirty little secret: the car has a substantial appetite for kilowatt-hours even when turned off and parked.
Since the Model S was introduced in 2012, this "vampire" power drain from the cars sold so far has consumed roughly 15 gigawatt-hours of electric energy, nearly a day's output for a mid-size nuclear power plant. It's enough wasted energy to drive the cars 50 million miles.
After nine months of promises to fix it, Tesla finally sent out a software update a week ago to the Model S fleet that it claims "significantly reduces power usage when (the car is) shut down."
But based on a week's worth of measurements on my 60-kWh Model S, I've concluded that the new software is only mildly effective.
As far as I can tell, the vampire's fangs are still sharp.
Shortly after taking delivery of my Model S last February, I noticed that I would typically lose 10-15 miles of indicated range overnight. On average, I was losing 23 miles of indicated range every 24 hours.
But indicated-range numbers can be quirky, so I asked an electrical engineer friend to cobble together a kilowatt-hour meter. Using the meter, I measured my vampire power drain at about 4.5 kilowatt-hours per day.
That's the equivalent of three 60-watt light bulbs burning 24/7. It was enough energy to drive about 13 miles per day--almost 5,000 miles a year.
However you measured it, the Model S vampire was a voracious beast.
The Chevy Volt and Nissan Leaf, the other two best-selling electric cars in the U.S., have essentially zero vampire loss. As far as I know, so do all the other electric cars on the market.
So what's the problem with the Model S?
According to Tesla, the car needs a constant flow of power to keep its computers and systems switched on 24/7, ready to boot up instantly when the driver gets into the car.
It's a popular myth among Model S owners that much of the vampire power goes to keep the battery warm during cold nights. This is simply not true.
According to Tesla, there is no thermal management of the Model S battery when the car is turned off and not charging--no matter how cold it gets.
We can't help but notice that General Motors and Nissan seem to have figured out a way to make their cars start up instantly without a similar 24/7 power drain. Odd that a multibillion-dollar company in the heart of Silicon Valley couldn't figure out a way to do that, too.
Ironically, the Model S had very little vampire drain when it was first introduced.
My owner's manual is based on the original software in the car. "When you're not driving Model S, the Battery discharges very slowly to power the onboard electronics," it purrs reassuringly. "On average the battery discharges at a rate of 1 percent per day."
Unfortunately, the "sleep mode" software in those early cars triggered all sorts of glitches in the car's other systems. Eventually, the problems became so persistent that Tesla simply disabled the sleep mode.
With sleep taken away, the vampires came out to play. And instead of draining 1 percent every 24 hours, the Model S battery suddenly began losing 5 or 6 percent of its charge every day. (In the case of 60-kWh cars like mine, it's closer to 7 or 8 percent.)
Last March, Tesla CEO Elon Musk addressed the vampire/sleep-mode issue in a meeting with Norwegian Model S buyers in Oslo. Musk promised that a new sleep mode would reduce vampire losses to a mere 0.2 percent--an insignificant 170 watt-hours--per day.
And, he said, the new sleep-mode software would be installed by the time the Model S was introduced in Norway--then set for July.
It didn't happen. And the backtracking began almost immediately.
Later that spring, a Tesla owner's hot-line rep told me the new sleep mode would be introduced in two phases: a preliminary software update that would cut the vampire drain in half by summer, followed by Musk's promised total solution before the end of the year.
But as the summer progressed, several software updates came along, with nary a hint of a sleep mode.
Finally, in August, new cars began rolling off the production line with software update 5.0, which contained the long-awaited vampire-slayer, among other improvements. Tesla made no claims about how much energy would be saved, but one electric-car news site, without citing its sources, put the vampire reduction at 50 to 75 percent.
Unfortunately, update 5.0 proved to have serious bugs in some of its other features, particularly the GPS system. It was sent out to only a few cars in the field. (Mine was not one of them.)
In October, an improved version, update 5.6, was rolled out, again to a limited number of cars in the field. (Again, not mine.)
Finally, in mid-November, my car was updated remotely by the factory with version 5.8, apparently along with the entire fleet of Model S cars then on the road.
(Version 5.8 replicated all of the updates in 5.6, including the anti-vampire mode, and also disabled the high-speed "crouch" feature on cars with air suspension, apparently to reduce the car's susceptibility to damage from road debris. But that's an entirely different story.)
I was ecstatic. Free at last--or at least 50 to 75 percent free at last-- from the fangs of the loathsome beast!
Unfortunately, it appears as if the vampire-slayer software is only mildly effective, at best.
The first night after downloading update 5.8, I lost 6 miles of range overnight, equal to a rate of 16 lost miles for a full day. After six nights, I was averaging 15 indicated miles lost per day. That's about 35 percent less than the comparable figure (23 miles) from my tests last spring.
But indicated miles, subject to the vagaries of temperature and algorithm, don't tell the whole story. Only a kilowatt-hour meter can give an accurate figure.
So far I've run three overnight tests with the kWh meter. For each test, I charged the car up in the evening to its usual selected level (In my case, about 80 percent). Then I removed the charge plug. I allowed the car to sit unplugged overnight and on into the next day, until I needed to drive it. (Typically a span of 12 to 24 hours.)
Before driving it, I plugged it back in to top off the vampire-depleted battery back to its original level. Then I checked the kWh-meter.
The three tests showed vampire losses of 2.3 kWh in 17 hours, 1.9 kWh in 23 hours, and 4.2 kWh in 18 hours. Total vampire power lost was 8.4 kWh in 58 hours.
That's an average of 3.5 kWh per day--roughly 25 percent lower than the losses I measured previously.
I can't explain the wide variation in the vampire draw over the three tests. Clearly, more than three tests will be required to come up with an accurate figure.
But it's clear to me that the new vampire-slayer software is pretty weak stuff.
It's better than nothing, I suppose. A 25-percent improvement means that the 20,000 Model S cars now on the road will only waste about 70 megawatt-hours of power a day, down from 90 MWh.
And it means that Musk's anti-vampire prediction has turned out to be one-quarter true in twice the time.
Update 6.0, anyone?
This article, written by David Noland, was originally published on Green Car Reports, a publishing partner of Popular Science. Follow GreenCarReports on Facebook, Twitter, and Google+.
Is $25K Still The Barrier For Electric Car Ownership?
Fast & Furious Star Paul Walker Dies In Fiery Crash, Authorities Investigate
Electric-Car Charging-Station Tax Credit Expires On Dec 31st
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Well, that's one way to go about it. Over the past few weeks, Australian scientists have collected billions of sperm from spawning coral in the Great Barrier Reef, Australian news station ABC News reports. The sperm are to be cryogenically frozen, in case scientists want to rebuild parts of the reef in the future.
Since 1985, the Great Barrier Reef has lost more than half of its coral, one study found last year. The losses stem primarily from tropical cyclones, coral bleaching and predation by a certain species of starfish. Storms and coral bleaching will worsen with climate change.
If Australian scientists decide one day to thaw their collected sperm, they would use it to seed the ocean, where hopefully it will combine with fresh eggs released by existing coral. The frozen sperm could add genetic diversity back into coral populations that have fallen too low to be diverse. The reseeding could help the reef better weather further change, Taronga Zoo researcher Rebecca Spindler told ABC News. Spindler will be in charge of the Great Barrier Reef sperm bank, which will be the largest cryogenically frozen population in the world.
Several zoos in the U.S. maintain conservation-minded sperm banks, including the National Zoo (many species), the Cincinnati Zoo & Botanical Garden (rhinos) and the Memphis Zoo (amphibians). Researchers in Hawaii pioneered the techniques needed to freeze coral sperm and embryos, and there's a bank at the University of Hawaii. One of the technique's creators, marine biologist Mary Hagedorn, will help with the Australian effort.
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The infographic shows all exoplanets within 60 light years of Earth that sit in a habitable, or "Goldilocks" zone: not too close, and not too far from a star. In other words, just the right distance to support liquid water. All of the planets are organized by approximate size, with Earth placed in the center for a sense of scale.
What the infographic doesn't give is a sense of distance or position. Obviously, Earth doesn't have a nice little square of space cut out around it, and the actual distance between these exoplanets is absurdly huge. It provides the what, not the where.
This might also provide a litmus test for cynics. Your thoughts when you see this either go along the lines of a) Wow, so many planets right next to us! or b) In 60 light years, that's it?
[xkcd]
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It’s fun to make fun of Amazon’s delivery drones. “Amazon is exploring drone delivery,” tweeted Atlantic writer Philip Bump last night. “Or, put another way, ‘Amazon gimmick gimmick gimmick.’ ” Today’s Gizmodo headline was even more gleeful: “Amazon Drones Are Truly Revolutionary [Marketing].”
Dogpiles might be unseemly, but with the future of commercial drones currently being determined by the FAA, this kind of publicity deserves a heaping of scorn. On last night’s 60 Minutes, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, unveiled Prime Air, a drone-based delivery service that could drop small packages off to customers within a half-hour. According to Bezos, it could happen “as early as 2015,” depending on the FAA’s upcoming regulations.
Some might call that optimistic. The FAA has until September of 2015 to come up with a detailed rundown of how it plans to regulate the safe operation of drones in commercial American airspace. Don’t try to parse that last sentence—it’s intentionally circuitous, because the FAA doesn’t want to commit to actual regulations or deployment of commercial drones by 2015. It’s a relatively hollow deadline, and the agency won’t be pinned down on what sort of unmanned aerial systems (UAS) will be in the air by the end of 2015 (trust me, we’ve tried).
But the experts we’ve talked to, whose livelihood revolves around the planned rollout of commercial flying robots, have come to a relatively universal census: the first wave of commercially-operated drones will be little more than remote-control aircraft.
Specifically, the FAA is expected to initially certify and approve the use of small UAS under three conditions: they must fly in daylight, they must stay below 400 feet, and they must remain within line-of-sight of a human operator at all times.
Those requirements aren’t written in stone, or officially confirmed. They’re received wisdom, based not on leaked reports but run-of-the-mill industry scuttlebutt. Low-flying, line-of-sight drone operation is an expectation shared by the likes of Michael Toscano, president and CEO of the Association of Unmanned Vehicle Systems International (AUVSI), a non-profit organization that promotes the development of UAS. Toscano characterizes a 2015 deployment of Prime Air as a "phenomenally optimistic timeframe," due largely to the FAA's priority on safety, as well as the general need to address privacy concerns. “By 2015, we’ll be going after the low-hanging fruit, such as precision agriculture,” says Toscano, referring to one of the more established usage cases for commercial drones, as low-cost airborne crop monitors. “When you’re in the middle of thousands of acres of fields, there are no human beings, and no privacy issues.”
Here, then, is what Prime Air might look like in 2015, assuming Amazon is extremely lucky in its certifications.
The delivery request comes in, and the drone pilot gets ready to move. He can’t lounge in a central command center, joysticking the octocopter over city streets to its destination. He needs constant, visual line-of-sight. So maybe he’s peering up at the machine from the open top of a convertible. He certainly isn’t driving, so he’s riding shotgun, head craned toward the sky. Better yet, perhaps he’s in a sidecar? Whatever his mode of transportation, he is leashed, essentially, to that aerial robot, unable to break contact as it buzzes over and through urban canyons. When it sets down its cargo, he’s eyeballing it still. Like a concerned parent surreptitiously following a child’s first unattended walk to school, the human is the robot’s faithful guardian.
If you’re wondering why this 2015-era Amazon drone pilot doesn’t simply cut out the mechanical middle man, and hand-deliver the package in question, here’s the thing: Prime Air is not happening by 2015. The FAA isn't going to throw up its collective hands and allow Amazon to do as it pleaes, operating autonomously over crowded streets within the next two years. Regulations don't leap into the future, in advance of technological capacities. They crawl forward, always lagging behind what's technically possible. And Jeff Bezos knows better, or should—he’s one of a trio of software wunderkinds, along with Elon Musk and John Carmack, who’ve sunk their riches into the unforgiving world of rocket science, and worked with the FAA to receive flight clearances. As founder and CEO of Blue Origin, which has tested and flown (in a limited capacity) would-be spacecraft, this isn’t Bezos’s first midair rodeo.
In that same 60 Minutes segment, Bezos mentions that Prime Air might wind up happening in 4 or 5 years. That’s entirely possible, pending evolving FAA safety regulations. By 2018, private drones—not to be confused with the hundreds of law enforcement or research-oriented models already approved on a case-by-case basis by the FAA—could be relatively commonplace. And AUVSI’s Toscano applauds Bezos for making commercial drones seem like a tangible future. “Now, the average person in the street realizes this is in the realm of possibility,” says Toscano. “The seeds have been planted. The question is when, and to what capacity?”
I agree that Bezos has kickstarted the process of educating the public regarding the very real, and very transformative onset of commercial UAS. But to start that conversation with a complete disregard for regulatory realities, pretending that autonomous, self-guided robots will be populating our airspace by 2015, is a troubling piece of marketing. If Bezos is hoping to socially engineer the FAA into collapsing its expected timetable, that’s just as troubling, if not moreso.
Whatever Bezos is doing, perhaps he did it too soon, and planted a false flag in 2015, to manufacture relevance and affix Amazon’s brand to the wider, ongoing commercial drone discussion.
But if you want the public to accept robots into their lives, don’t start with a lie.
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Where do humans fall in the food chain? You can probably already guess it's somewhere between cows and polar bears, but a new study now puts a number to it: Somewhere between 2.0 and 2.6, depending on where you live. That's on a scale of 1 to about 5, in which plants are 1s and carnivorous apex predators like killer whales are 5.5s.
In other words, humans are in kind of the same plane as anchovies and pigs.
The technical term for the number the researchers calculated is the "trophic level." A species' trophic level is based on the balance of meat and plants it consumes, and whether that meat comes from herbivores or animals higher up in the food chain. (Eating tuna gives you a bigger trophic level boost than eating sardines.) This is why people fall in the middle, although unlike pigs, they have the technology to take down animals in higher trophic levels, such as lions and tigers. Ecologists calculate species' trophic levels to help them get a handle on how energy and edibles move through different ecosystems.
No one has ever calculated a trophic level for humans, the research team wrote in a paper it published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The team decided to do so to show that it could be useful as a way of comparing diets in different countries. It could also be an easy-to-understand shorthand for tracking food trends around the world. For example, as people in developing countries eat more and more meat, their trophic levels rise. In 1961, the median trophic level for people in China and India was 2.05. By 2009, those countries' median trophic level was 2.20.
Other interesting things the researchers found about people's trophic levels:
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We've had a laugh at drone-delivery marketing gimmicks before, and Amazon Prime Air—announced yesterday during a flattering segment on 60 Minutes—may very well be more of the same. But that's just for now. Drone-based package delivery could totally become reality in the next 10 years.
Here's the primary reason for skepticism about Prime Air: Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos says drones could being delivering packages as early as 2015. Here's how Amazon envisions those deliveries.
As my colleague Erik Sofge notes, if it exists in 2015, Amazon Prime Air will looking nothing like the promotional video. At best, says Sofge, this is what the 2015 delivery system will look like:
The delivery request comes in, and the drone pilot gets ready to move. He can’t lounge in a central command center, joysticking the octocopter over city streets to its destination. He needs constant, visual line-of-sight. So maybe he’s peering up at the machine from the open top of a convertible. He certainly isn’t driving, so he’s riding shotgun, head craned toward the sky. Better yet, perhaps he’s in a sidecar? Whatever his mode of transportation, he is leashed, essentially, to that aerial robot, unable to break contact as it buzzes over and through urban canyons. When it sets down its cargo, he’s eyeballing it still. Like a concerned parent surreptitiously following a child’s first unattended walk to school, the human is the robot’s faithful guardian.
The primary limitation here is legal. Without special authorization from the Federal Aviation Administration, drones can only be used for commercial purposes so long as the pilot keeps the drone within eyesight. The FAA has a plan to change these rules, outlined in its recently published roadmap, but the agency is slow moving. Before Amazon distribution centers can send drones on deliveries, the FAA must figure out how to safely integrate all these new flying objects into U.S. airspace.
That challenge will be met with new technology. Currently, airplanes and helicopters with onboard human pilots work with "see and avoid" rules, in which pilots see other vehicles and follow rules about right-of-way to avoid collisions. Drones lack onboard human eyeballs, so they need a different approach. The goal is "sense and avoid," where drones can detect each other and other flying objects, be they airplanes, helicopters, or geese. Drones will need to be able to safely plot a course that avoids collision. This technology is very much still in development, but the FAA wants it ready to go before unleashing swarms of flying delivery robots on the skies.
According to the FAA roadmap, initial certification of sense-and-avoid drone systems is scheduled for between 2016 and 2020. Should the technology work by then, it's entirely possible a future fleet of Amazon drones could carry packages directly to doorsteps.
If this is so far off in the future, why is Amazon talking about it now? The FAA is set to announce which six states it has selected as drone test sites at the end of 2013. While drones have already proven their worth to small-town police departments and rural farmers, the prospect of overhead robots isn't exactly appealing for some people, especially since most commercial and safety gains anticipated with drones come from their role as flying cameras. Amazon Prime Air is a daring bid, and one that might finally help people distinguish between military Reaper drones and smaller drones like quadcopters. That change in perception is probably necessary for any future drone delivery operation, and while Bezos is almost certainly wrong about this working in 2015, it might very well be a reality by 2020.
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Forty-one years ago, Magnavox introduced the first cartridge-based console, the Odyssey. Seven generations later, the boxes have become fixtures in our entertainment centers. What’s not to love? Consoles represent the pinnacle of electronic engineering (the PlayStation 4’s graphics processor, for example, can perform 1.8 trillion operations per second). Yet despite that, it’s been a rough couple of years for console gaming. Sales and rentals of disc-based games, like the ones that are core to the Xbox and PlayStation ecosystems, dropped by 21 percent last year. The console won’t be far behind.
The issue isn’t that gamers have suddenly stopped playing; they’re just getting their games in different ways. Virtual shops, such as Steam, have made it easy to download titles without relying on brick-and-mortar stores. (Digital downloads spiked 16 percent in 2012.) And cloud services such as OnLive stream games directly over the Internet. As a result, developers no longer need to choose between the Sony and Microsoft ecosystems or spend time coding titles for both platforms. Games can now be console agnostic.
Beyond that, what passes for a console is also changing. The Razer Edge Pro, a Windows 8 tablet, can download and render console-quality titles, such as Dishonored and The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. The Nvidia Shield, an Android-based handheld, can stream PC games. Both devices have powerful enough graphics engines—the Shield’s chipset can handle nearly a trillion operations per second—to drive an image on an HDTV over HDMI and do so with little sacrifice in quality.
In this democratized gaming world, where consumers have more places to get games and more ways to play them, consoles can’t compete. Right now, a couple of people in a basement can release a game instantly in the Google Play store and make a solid profit charging a few bucks per download. And it won’t stop at small start-up vendors. If tablets can play blockbuster games, big-name developers can cut themselves off from Sony and Microsoft too. Consoles are going the way of CD players—and for better or worse, the eighth generation will likely be our last. —Colin Lecher
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Bartenders are still using fresh and local produce, but they’re fine-tuning every aspect of the cocktails in which they’re used, from temperature to texture to physical format. In this slideshow we look at some of the cutting-edge equipment used in bars around the world.
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Here, I unveil an Our Modern Plagues series, which was inspired by Stephen Colbert’s recurring segment Better Know a District. My version—Better Know a Plague—will introduce you to a plague-like critter every month or two, whether it is something we really need to worry about or whether it’s just a bug or parasite that makes us squirm psychologically. A complementary series called Better Know a Fix will explore some of the interventions we use to combat these plagues.
To start the series, I present the common bed bug, Cimex lectularius. I picked the bed bug for two reasons. First, it’s an age-old pest with a recent widespread resurgence. Second, I am writing a book about bed bugs, which makes it an easy target.
The bed bug is a temporary ectoparasite. “Parasite” means that it makes its living by leeching nutrients from another organism. In this case, that organism is you or, occasionally, birds or bats or house pets. The nutrients come from blood. Ecto- means “on the outside,” so this is a parasite that lives outside of its host’s body. Temporary means that, unlike lice or other permanent ectoparasites, bed bugs don’t live on their host, instead only dropping in to feed.
Bed bugs are also called obligate parasites because to make it through each step of their five-stage lifecycle, they require a blood meal (actual scientific term and awesome potential band name). Female bed bugs also must have a blood meal before they are able to lay eggs; the more blood they eat, the more eggs they can make. Usually, they will lay around 100 or 200 in their lifetime. Bed bugs also appear to be immune to inbreeding, which usually amplifies genetic defects. This means a bed bug infestation can arise from a single fecund female.
The bed bug carries out a secretive life. When it isn’t feeding, it hides in tight spaces. It’s true that these spaces are often the seams of a mattress or the corners of a bedframe, but the bugs will also hide in any available crack—the head of a screw, a picture frame, or even a clock radio. Or, perhaps, a suitcase or a purse, which is how they spread between homes, hotels, and virtually any other place where people hang out.
Bed bugs usually feed at night and hide during the day, but they aren’t truly nocturnal. If their host’s sleeping patterns change, so will the bugs’ feeding schedule.
We thought we wiped out the bed bug in the US after World War II and the advent of DDT. In the UK, experts credit a similar dip to the demolition of infested public housing in the 1930s (DDT probably contributed in the following decades). The precise reason why bed bugs resurged over a decade ago isn't entirely known, but it is likely a combination of insecticide resistance, an increase in travel, and changes in pest management tactics.
Although the bed bug’s comeback was a shock to many, we actually share a long history. In 1999, a team of paleoecologicists and archaeologists published a paper describing preserved bed bug remains found at an Egyptian site that dates to 1352 BCE. Specialists theorize the bugs have been with us far longer, possibly first feeding on our ancient relatives 100,000 years ago during the Pleistocene. The hypothesis suggests that when early hominids started living in caves in the modern-day Middle East, bat bugs feeding off those bats shifted attention from one host to the other, and then followed us ever since.
However long we’ve lived with bed bugs, their resurgence over the past 15 years or so is more of a return to normal than an anomaly. Today, the bugs are in every state in the US and 99% of American exterminators treated for them over the past year, up from 95 percent in 2010, 25 percent a decade before, and 11 percent before that. In Australia, the bugs jumped an estimated 4500% between 2000 and 2006. Similar trends are seen in Europe and in parts of Asia, and although some argue the bug’s spread is slowing down, it is still moving from large coastal and cosmopolitan centers to smaller cities and towns further inland.
Bed bugs aren't known to spread disease, although the possibility hasn't been entirely ruled out. Still, even if they're capable of spreading pathogens, it isn't likely a disease would spread very far. Even though they're good hitchhikers, most individual bugs spend their entire life in a single room or home feeding on a small number of people, which isn't the ideal environment for a pathogen to spill over into the population.
I could go on (and on and on). I won’t. But if you'd like to even better know the bed bug, I leave you with the terrifying details of bed bug sex (including a self-penned limerick), new research on how hairy bean leaves might lead to new traps, how researchers are using DNA to track the bug resurgence, a dubious bed bug pill, how to feed bed bugs on blood in the lab, why they are so hard to kill, and why, despite all these efforts, we’ll probably never get rid of this particular modern plague.
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After coming up with this series and writing the first post, I realized that there is already a Better Know a Fish blog by Ben Young Landis. So if you’d like to better know any fish, please do go check out his work.
For more on the bed bug’s lifecycle and what it looks like, see the bed bug fact sheets from the University of Kentucky or Virginia Tech (also available in Spanish)
For the fascinating history of how we’ve tried to kill bed bugs, check out “The History of Bed Bug Management—With Lessons from the Past,” by Mike Potter.
If you think you might have bed bugs and are seeking advice, I recommend searching or posting at Bedbugger.com
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