Mysterious circles

Jacob T. Johansen, journalist

"It has nothing to do with either bomb craters or landing marks for aliens," said biologists Marianne Holmer from University of Southern Denmark and Jens Borum from University of Copenhagen in a statement. "Nor with fairies, who in the old days got the blame for similar phenomena on land, the fairy rings in lawns being a well known example."

As can be seen in the photo, the circles are made up of a dark green, almost black color. These are rings of eelgrass, a flowering underwater plant. Normally these plants create meadows, but here off Denmark's island of Møn, the ocean bottom is chalky, and mostly devoid of mud that the plants like. So they grow by sending shoots outward, and expand radially. These clumps of vegetation accumulate mud, which has high levels of sulfide, as described in a study published this month in the journal Marine Biology. Sulfide is toxic to eelgrass in certain concentrations, and eventually it builds up in the center of these circles, killing the older plants. The younger but well-established plants at the outer rim of the circles survive, however, leaving behind the rings you see in the photo.

DMZ

Wikimedia Commons

At this point, we've probably seen more non-gaming uses for the Kinect, Microsoft's Xbox camera, than actual game-related ones. But national security? That's a new one.

Kotaku reports that the Kinect has been deployed at the heavily guarded Korean border, known as the Korean Demilitarized Zone, running between North and South. A South Korean programmer named Jae Kwan Ko built the system, which can apparently detect the difference between animals and humans crossing in front of it and then alert the nearest outpost if a person is detected. Since this is a national security issue, those are about all the details being released right now. But for the time being, rest easy, since the same technology watching sedate gamers is keeping an eye on a flashpoint of military conflict.

[Kotaku]

Laser Walker

Screenshot from "Mobilaser – Mayo Clinic" by Mayo Clinic on YouTube

Parkinson's disease and related disorders can make it difficult for people to walk, as their steps become shorter and stiffer. As early as the 1960s, however, doctors noticed that visual cues could help some patients walk with longer, more natural steps again. For example, studies showed that patients could walk more naturally when they looked at a series of white lines marked on a dark floor.

The world isn't usually so conveniently marked, but, over the past few years, researchers have developed a way for patients to take the lines with them. They've made laser walkers and walking sticks that project a red laser line onto the ground. Reuters has a new video showing a man with parkinsonism using one such walker. Four years ago, Wayne Puckett was wheelchair-bound, but since his doctor suggested he try a laser walker, he's been on his feet, Reuters reports. His doctor, Jay Van Gerpen of the Mayo Clinic in Florida, developed the walker Puckett uses.

There's still some work for researchers to do before they'll know how much  help most people with parkinsonism. A couple of studies havefound laser devices do help, while other studies found no difference between Parkinson's disease patients using normal walkers and patients using a laser-equipped ones.

Meanwhile, Puckett seems pretty pleased. In one of his most endearing quotes, he describes his skepticism when Van Gerpen first offered him a laser walker. He is a father of five, Reuters reports, and for just a few seconds, it does sound like he spends a lot of time around teenagers. "I was like, there ain't no way," he says. "I was like, whatever, and he gave me this thing and I was like, wow. And it worked."

[Reuters]

Tongues Out

Constance Bannister Corp/Getty Images

Different diseases affect different fluids in the body, so it’s hard to give a simple answer to this question. HIV, for example, shows up at infectious levels in blood, semen, vaginal and rectal secretions, and breast milk. But an HIV-infected patient’s sneeze or spit poses very little danger. On the other hand, the germs that cause conjunctivitis, or “pink eye,” come out in tears, and the virus responsible for mononucleosis swims around in the saliva.

If we limit the discussion to our most common germs, spit turns out to be relatively harmless. Rhinovirus, which causes up to half of all colds, multiplies in the cells that line the nose and upper respiratory tract. As a result, the easiest way to transmit a cold is through nasal mucus. “You can get some virus out in saliva, but you’d have to work real hard,” says J. Owen Hendley, professor of pediatric infectious disease at the University of Virginia. He cites one study where even prolonged “soul kissing” didn’t transmit rhinovirus. Getting sneezed on isn’t so bad either, since people sneeze mostly from their mouths.

Other respiratory illnesses have their own modes of transmission. Influenza, for example, tends to dig into the lungs. As a result, a cough may aerosolize the virus. “If I were splashed in the face with something at the hospital,” says John Lynch, professor and director of an infectious disease clinic at the University of Washington School of Medicine, “I’d be most worried about the respiratory sample.”

This article originally appeared in the February 2014 issue of Popular Science.

Phantom: All Lit Up

Dan Bracaglia

As Salvadorans lined up to vote for a new president this Sunday, Salvadoran newspaper La Prensa Gráfica sent a drone out to record video of them from above.

This is the first time anyone in El Salvador has used a drone for journalism, La Prensa Gráfica announced. La Prensa has a graphic explaining its drone's abilities. The DJI Phantom 2 Vision quadcopter takes high-quality photos and videos, is able to fly as high as 2,300 feet (716 meters), and can stay in the air for 25 minutes. A human pilots it remotely. (We reviewed the drone in December.)

La Prensa follows some great examples of drone journalism in Latin America. La Prensa de Peru has used drones for reporting on road work and closures. Last year, Brazilian media Folha de São Paulo and Globo used drones to offer views of protestors demonstrating against government spending and rising public transportation prices. Considering how difficult it is to estimate the sizes of crowds, a drone's-eye view could be especially helpful for reporting on demonstrations.

The Prensa Gráfica drone didn't seem to have captured anything unusual this time. A video from Sunday shows short lines and calm folks at polling locations. At one location, a school, you can see voters holding up their cellphones to take pictures of the drone hovering above them. Maybe the best drone-taken pictures were those showing members of the National Republican Alliance (Arena) party in formation for speeches and prayer.

The Salvadoran race turned out tight enough to mandate a runoff.

The Oregon chub

U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service

In 1993, a small minnow named the Oregon chub was listed as endangered. At that time, it was only found in eight areas, with a total population of about 1,000. But now the fish has multiplied, thanks to protections put in place by state and local government and residents. Today (Feb. 4) the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service proposed removing it from the list of endangered and threatened wildlife under the Endangered Species Act; its population now stands at more than 150,000 fish in 80 locations. It would be the first fish to swim its way off the endangered list. 

So far, 26 species have successfully recovered and been removed from the list since it was created 40 years ago.

"While the chub isn't an iconic fish species that many think about... it is a very important part of the ecosystem and indicator of good water quality and ecosystem health," said Paul Henson, with the Oregon Fish and Wildlife Office, in a statement. "By successfully recovering the chub, we're helping many iconic wildlife species and improving the watershed for all Oregonians."

The Oregon chub is threatened by habitat loss and nonnative fish. Over the past 20 years, these threats have been lessened "through collaborative partnerships to restore and acquire habitat, promote natural water flows, and conduct education and outreach to local landowners and residents; efforts that were accompanied by the reintroduction of chub into historical habitat," according to the Fish and Wildlife Service. 

The animals are found "in slack water off-channel habitats such as beaver ponds, oxbows, side channels, backwater sloughs, low gradient tributaries, and flooded marshes" in western Oregon's Willamette River Valley, according to the agency. 

Hooray for you, little fish. Enjoy those oxbows! 

Astronomers announced they had discovered planets around other stars—the first so-called extrasolar planets—in 1992. Other discoveries came a few years later, one by one at first and then in a steady stream by the mid-2000s. The Kepler mission turned that stream into a flood; when its data is fully mined, it will have more than quadrupled the size of the exoplanet catalog. As that mission wraps up, astronomers are taking stock. Early analysis hints that although true Earth twins are thus far elusive, they’re probably common. It’s just a matter of looking deeper, longer, and smarter.

Click the buttons at the bottom of the infographic to sort the planets by category.

This article originally appeared in the February 2014 issue of Popular Science.

Clostridium perfringens

CDC

Nobody knows exactly what causes multiple sclerosis, an autoimmune disease that affects the brain and spinal cord, though a combination of environmental and genetic factors plays a part. But new research suggests that, in some cases, a strain of bacteria normally found in soil and undercooked meat could be involved.

A new study by a group from Weill Cornell Medical College found that mice infected with Clostridium perfringens type B showed brain damage similar to that in humans with MS, the BBC reported. The research follows up on a October 2013 study in PLOS ONE by the same group, which for the first time identified this pathogen in a human--a young woman with MS. 

Experts cautioned that more research is needed to explore a potential link. "This is interesting research but the findings now need to be validated in larger studies to establish if this toxin really is a potential trigger for MS," Dr. Susan Kohlhaas, head of biomedical research at the MS Society, told the BBC.

But the study, presented at a meeting of the American Society for Microbiology, is intriguing. In infected mice, the bacterium made leap from the blood stream to the brain, and killed myelin-producing cells--the type of damage seen in MS.

[BBC]

Photograph of a Madagascar Cockroach with connectors, tube and check-valve

K. Shoji et al

What if tiny scurrying insects could power batteries with their own bodies? Thanks to a team of researchers from the Tokyo University of Agriculture and Technology and the Department of Mechanical Engineering at Osaka University, we now know this is possible. The team built a fuel cell that goes on the backs of cockroaches and is powered by the roaches themselves.

The scientists used Madagascar cockroaches, which have the benefit of being enormous. To the back of a cockroach, researchers attached a fuel cell, which contains fluid and electrodes, and connects to the insect's body fluid through two tiny pipes: one that lets roach body fluid into the cell, and one at the other end that returns the fluid to the roach. The paper includes this helpful schematic:

Cockroach Biofuel Cell Schematic

How the fuel cell works

K. Shoji et al

The fuel cell generates electricity via an oxidation-reduction reaction. It uses trehalose, the main sugar in the circulatory fluids of insects. Inside the fuel cell, enzymes break the trehalose down into glucose. The glucose is then oxidized, and electricity generated. Researchers fed the cockroaches trehalose-rich diets to make sure they had enough in their systems to power the battery. The system generates about 50 microwatts.

Why do all of this? To turn the roaches into better cyborgs! It's already possible to control roaches with electrical stimulation. This fuel cell provides a stronger power source for electric control plans, and could lead to an army of tiny terrifying robots controllable bugs that can go places people can't, for safety or size reasons. Say the researchers:

Especially, insect cyborgs which are robots controlled by electric stimulation of their brain and neurons are desired for rescue, environmental monitoring and working in a radiation environment.

Read the paper here.

Bird Market

Domestic pigeons in a live poultry market in eastern China. Photo taken in 2009.

felibrilu on Flickr, CC BY-NC 2.0

A 73-year-old woman in China has died after contracting an entirely new bird flu virus, researchers from China reported yesterday. The new virus is an H10N8 flu, and this is the first time scientists have seen a human with an N8 flu.

When they analyzed the H10N8 virus' genes, the researchers found it has characteristics that make it especially severe in people. They also found that another person became ill with the H10N8 virus a little more than a month after the first patient died—which means the infection is circulating. This doesn't mean there's an H10N8 epidemic going on, but researchers believe the virus has the potential to spread, they wrote in a paper published today in the journal Lancet. It's difficult for scientists to predict exactly which viruses will cause epidemics.

The 73-year-old came from Nanchang City in central eastern China. She had high blood pressure, heart disease and a muscular disease called myasthenia gravis, but researchers aren't sure to what extent those conditions contributed to her death, and to what extent they can blame her flu. In any case, she first came to a hospital with a fever on November 30, 2013, the third day of her flu. Doctors gave her antibiotic and antiviral treatment, but she eventually developed severe pneumonia, septic shock and multiple organ failure. She died December 6.

By December 7, researchers had analyzed the genome of her flu and determined it was an H10N8 virus, which doesn't normally infect humans. But this H10N8 seems to have exchanged genes with other avian flus, so that it has some genes in common with H7N9 and H5N1, which spawned pandemics in Asia. China is still reporting new cases of H7N9, which can be deadly.

From its genetic analysis, the Chinese team hypothesizes that the new H10N8 first arose in wild birds, then found its way to domestic poultry. At that point, the virus exchanged genes with flu viruses of the H9N2 type—which normally causes mild illness in people—before making that final jump to humans.

Researchers still aren't exactly sure how the Nanchang woman got the flu. Live poultry markets are a hotspot for people to contract bird flus, and the woman had visited one four days before she got sick. When investigators took samples from the market, however, they didn't see the H10N8 anywhere.

Investigators also tested 17 people close to the woman, including her relatives and her caretakers at the hospital. They were all in the clear.

The Skully P-1

Sam Kaplan

At a time when screens are being integrated into everything, Skully engineers saw an opportunity to upgrade something that’s remained largely unchanged for decades: the motorcycle helmet. The P-1 is the first helmet with a digital head-up display. The one-inch screen sits at the right-hand edge of the driver’s field of view and projects a live feed from a 180-degree rear-facing camera, eliminating the blind spots that plague other helmets. The system can also broadcast turn-by-turn directions and pair with a smartphone to read back text messages, so the rider’s eyes can stay glued to the road.

Skully P-1 

Rear camera viewing angle: 180 degrees
Battery life: 9 hours
Safety approval: DOT and ECE certified
Price: Not set

P-1 Display

The P-1's head-up display broadcasts turn-by-turn directions.

Courtesy of Skully

LG G Flex

Sam Kaplan

If you compare the phone in your pocket to the model before it, you probably won’t find a lot of change. Maybe a faster processor and a bigger screen, but those are small potatoes. The last time phones underwent any big hardware shift was when manufacturers began swapping dim LCD screens for bright OLEDs a few years ago. This year, another big change is in the works: phones with curved screens. Samsung’s Galaxy Round bends in from the sides, and LG’s G Flex bows inward from the top and bottom. Apple has also filed a patent for a curved battery, a critical component for a contoured phone. 

At first glance, curved OLED screens could appear to be just a marketing stunt. But according to Raymond Soneira, an analyst who specializes in screens and the founder of DisplayMate Technologies, a concave screen subtly magnifies a user’s face, which helps block light pollution and reduces glare. With less interference from ambient light, screens are easier to read, and users won’t feel the need to crank up the brightness and drain their batteries.  

Curves are also one step forward in the march toward fully flexible displays. LG engineers built the G Flex’s OLED with plastic instead of hardened glass and used a battery assembled in stacks. The design changes allow the phone to bend slightly when pressed. According to Stephen Forrest, a researcher who runs an OLED research lab at the University of Michigan, developers are well on their way to creating moldable, virtually unbreakable screens that roll up as easily as newspapers or magazines. A few product generations from now, static, inflexible screens may seem as outdated as flip phones.

This article originally appeared in the February 2014 issue of Popular Science.

Denis Aabo Sørensen Wears the Experimental Prosthetic, March 2013

LifeHand 2/Patrizia Tocci

Denis Aabo Sørensen lost his left hand nine years ago, while handling fireworks. Since then, he has used prosthetic hands, but never one like this. Last year, a team of European engineers created for him a prosthetic hand that connects directly to the remaining nerves in his upper arm. That means the hand is able to send sensations of touch back through his arm and into his brain. Plus, when Sørensen wanted to grab something, he could move the hand by simply thinking about it.

"The sensory feedback was incredible," Sørensen said in a statement. "When I held an object, I could feel if it was soft or hard, round or square."

"I could feel things that I hadn't been able to feel in over nine years," he said.

His feeling-hand prosthetic was an experimental prototype, so researchers had to remove the implant after a month of wear, following European law about experimental medical devices. While Sørensen had it on, however, he demonstrated for researchers that he was able to do things like distinguish between a bottle, a baseball and a mandarin orange, and press things with light, medium or firm pressure. He wore a blindfold and headphones while completing each of these tasks, to prove he could do them only by touch.

Researchers Monitor Sørensen's Prosthetic

LifeHand 2/Patrizia Tocci

He could even adjust his grip as needed, all from his robotic sense of touch. "What we did was to provide this tactile information," Silvestro Micera, the hand's lead engineer, says. "It is the first time this is exploited in real time for modulating the force during the grasp." Micera is a robotics researcher with the Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna in Italy and the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne in Switzerland.

The implant is one more step in a worldwide effort by researchers to create prosthetics that have a natural sense of touch. Touch is essential for so many everyday tasks. Without it, prosthetics wearers must watch what they're picking up to help them judge whether they've got a good—but not too tight—grip on that banana or coffee cup. While that's workable, it's a far cry from the unconscious ease with which someone with natural hands is able to grip everything from a hammer to an egg.

Closeup of the Hand

LifeHand 2/Patrizia Tocci

Other researchers have made experimental, feeling prosthetics similar to Sørensen's and tested them in humans. One notable experiment was actually carried out 10 years ago. Sørensen's hand is another step forward, outside researchers I talked with say. One thing everyone was impressed by: The detail with which Micera and his team recorded what Sørensen could do with touch. The study volunteer, who is 36 years old and lives in Denmark, performed 700 individual tasks for the hand's creators.

"They really showed the value of having this feedback to the user and, in some ways, justified, in an actual use setting, an implanted interface with the nerve," says Dustin Tyler, a biomedical engineer at Case Western Reserve University who has made and studied feeling prosthetics in people.

"In my view, that volunteer is really doing science a great favor," says Daofen Chen, the program director in systems and cognitive neuroscience at the U.S. National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, who was not involved in the recent study.

Of course, touch-enabled prosthetics have a long way to go before they're available for most people to use. Sørensen's experimental hand illustrates what's left to do, and what many researchers, including Micera and Tyler, are working on now.

The hand required surgeons to implant electrodes directly onto Sørensen's nerves. There need to be more studies of how long electrodes like that last in the body. (No one wants to have to undergo extra surgeries because, oh no, my electrodes wore out again.) There's also the problem of all the computing hardware. Sørensen's prosthetic did serious math to translate what its sensors felt into an electrical signal that was meaningful to Sørensen's nerves and brain. So the hand connected to a laptop, to run the calculations, before connecting back to his nerves. Researchers are working on miniaturizing the computer so it can fit right in the implant.

Micera and his team published their work on Sørensen's implant today in the journal Science Translational Medicine.

Sochi

Courtesy Snow Secure

Within Russia, Sochi is known for its pleasant subtropical climate, which presents obvious challenges for a competition that revolves around ice and snow. During the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver, another relatively mild site, snow cover was so poor that some of the ski and snowboarding courses had to be built up with straw bales first. To avoid a similarly embarrassing fate, organizers for the 2014 games hired the Finland-based logistics company Snow Secure. Its technicians homed in on the ski-jumping venue (altitude: 2,300 feet) as the site most likely to lack snow and developed a three-pronged strategy to ensure good coverage.

Snow Banking

In 2013, workers pushed about 28 million cubic feet of artificial and natural snow into massive piles and covered it with thick reflective blankets to reduce melting. Snow from these reserves, located high in the Caucasus Mountains, can be transported down to the ski jump as needed.

Standard Snowmaking

Most of the snow on the ski jump will be artificial. Ten large snow guns (out of 500 total at Sochi) have been running 24/7 there since early December. They blast atomized water into the air when it’s coldest—usually at night and in the early morning. The droplets freeze and become snow.

Above-Zero Snowmaking

If the temperature rises above freezing, another snowmaking system will use cooling units to create an ice slurry. Snow can be separated out, but the method is costly and inefficient. It takes a day to produce 26,000 cubic feet of snow, an amount that standard machines can make in about 20 minutes.

Click here for the rest of our 2014 Olympics coverage.

This article originally appeared in the February 2014 issue of Popular Science.

Don’t let the headphones and baggy pants fool you. Snowboarders are intensely competitive. Last fall, members of the U.S. team began recording their velocity, body angle, and G-force with a wearable device to gain an advantage. The Catapult Sports Minimax S4 contains an accelerometer, gyroscope, and magnetometer; during training runs in the half-pipe, it takes readings every tenth of a second. Athletes can then match the data to video footage to pinpoint areas for improvement. 

For example, the data shows that snowboarders experience surprisingly high G-forces when they land tricks—up to 15 Gs, or three times the force Formula 1 drivers feel as they’re braking. Knowing exactly when to expect those forces allows athletes to adjust their body position so they don’t lose speed going into the next trick, says Mike Jankowski, the team’s head coach. “Ultimately, more speed equals more amplitude,” he says, “and going big is what half-pipe’s all about.”

Half-Pipe

Snowboarder Scotty Lago, who won bronze at the 2010 Olympics, trains with a data recorder strapped to his boot in order to figure out what works and what doesn’t and why.

Richard Bord/Getty Images

Click here for the rest of our 2014 Olympics coverage.

This article originally appeared in the February 2014 issue of Popular Science.

A 0.50 caliber bullet wound of the face

From World War II. Patient later died from the injury.

Otis Historical Archives of “National Museum of Health & Medicine

Of all the places a person could get shot or receive a blast injury, the face is probably the worst. Science confirms it.

Published this month in the Journal of Trauma and Acute Care Surgery, "Gunshot wounds and blast injuries to the face are associated with significant morbidity and mortality: Results of an 11-year multi-institutional study of 720 patients" brings scientific precision to the common-sense proposition that bullets to the face are really bad.

The doctors treated 720 patients from the start of January 2000 to the end of December 2010. The gender balance of their patients was overwhelmingly male at 75 percent. They were on the younger side, but not terribly so: the median age of patients in the study was 29 years old. Most were injured by handguns (41 percent), followed closely by unknown injuries at 33 percent. Explosive shotgun blasts injured another 20 percent, and rifles accounted for 6 percent of the face injuries. Just over a quarter of the patients died from their injuries, and of those the majority did so within 48 hours. Brain injury was the cause of 97 percent of deaths. A third of the patients needed to have their airways cleared before getting to the hospital.

Bad Places To Be Shot

Seriously, try not to be shot here.

Shackford et al

This being a study published in a journal of trauma medicine, the goal is of the study wasn't necessarily to figure out the cause of the injuries, but how best to treat them. To classify injuries, the doctors divided the face into three zones, as seen above. Just over a fifth of injuries hit above the brow line (zone three), while slightly more than a third of injuries fell from the nose up to the brow line (zone two), and just shy of a third of injuries feel between the chin and the base of the nose (zone one). The rest of the injuries were blasts (which tend to not fall into tidy categories) or injuries that straddled the zones. Including zone three, the forehead zone, this study showed a higher mortality rate for gunshot wounds than others which have come before.

The major finding of the study is that patients required an average of 5.4 operations, much higher than the 1.5 to three operations reported by earlier studies. Since treatments for face injuries are divided among different medical specialists, the care for bullet injuries requires coordinating specialists across disciplines, and frequently getting the patient back into the operating room.

Read the full study here.

Close Friends

U.S. Census Bureau, Public Information Office (PIO)

The coffeeshop is nearby.
We're close friends.
My birthday seems so far away.

In English, at least, we use the same words to describe spatial, social and temporal distances. Weird, right? Psychologists have noticed and written about this for a few years now, but now a new study has found there's also something physical in the brain to explain the overlap.

"What we were looking for was a region of the brain that would treat these distances in the same way," Thalia Wheatley, a psychology researcher at Dartmouth College and the lead researcher in the study, tells Popular Science. She and her two colleagues found what they were looking for. In a series of fMRI brain scans, they found a small part of the brain that lights up with distinct patterns when people think about the concepts "near" and "far"—yet creates the same pattern for "near me," "close friends" and "now," as well as a second pattern that encompasses "far away from me," "distant friends" and "later."

The region is in the right inferior parietal lobe, which scientists think may be involved in processing space, says Carolyn Parkinson, a doctoral student in psychology at Dartmouth who worked on the study. While other parts of the brain certainly do react differently to different kinds of distance, in this particular region, spatial, temporal and social distance look all the same.

Wheatley, Parkinson and their colleague Shari Liu examined only 15 people for this study, so it's not clear these overlaps would show up in all people. (For example, I got curious if this would happen in people who spoke languages that don't talk about social and temporal distance using physical distance words. No one has studied this yet, Wheatley says, but it's a developing area of research.) If the overlaps are common to many people, they support a fascinating hypothesis in neuroscience. Some scientists think that as humans evolved to be more sophisticated—to plan, to maintain social relationships—the brain kept up by repurposing more ancient pathways. Need to give humans a way to think about social ties? Why not put the part of the brain dedicated to spatial distances to work to do it?

"How do we get here? One answer is that we got here by repurposing, recombining evolutionarily older abilities," Wheatley says.

Her and her colleagues' work appeared last week in the Journal of Neuroscience.

A couple months ago, video of a flying, robotic jellyfish was floating around. (Har har, get it, it "floated" both literally and figuratively. Jokes!) But who were the masterminds behind this wonderful robot, which was certain to one day overtake the planet? 

Cool Hunting interviewed the NYU team behind the 'bot (and quite a few other flying machines) for the short documentary you see here, wherein professor Leif Ristroph explains why we're in a new Wright Brothers age--except with, you know, jellyfish.

[Cool Hunting]

Distracted Driving

Ryan Harvey via Flickr

Instead--paradoxically--technological fixes may be necessary, write Montreal physicians Dr. Barry Pless and son Dr. Charles Pless. Gadgets and apps that "nudge" people toward safer driving could be the best hope to solve the problem. These could include software that prevents texting while driving, set as a factory default, as well as automatic messages telling callers that the recipient is driving.

Other fixes "include a sensor such as a signal jamming key that prevents mobile phone reception when the ignition is engaged," which is already available at www.key2safedriving.com. (Here's another device that does the same thing.) The doctors also like the idea of technology which can detect that a phone is in a moving car, and thus blocks non-emergency calls, routes incoming calls to voicemail and stores incoming texts. There's already one app for that called TeenSafer.

Laws could also help, although studies show conflicting results on the matter. But perhaps legislation just needs to be tougher. "Part of the responsibility lies with the law makers to make sure the penalties are severe,” Dr. Barry Pless told The Globe and Mail, noting that New York state has put forward legislation that would double a young driver’s license suspension from the current six months for texting while operating a vehicle. "If you’re a kid and you know you’re going to lose your licence for a year ... and you have a reasonable expectation of being caught, then one hopes that you will be persuaded not to do it," he added.