At the 2010 World Cup, Adidas debuted the Jabulani, the tournament’s official game ball. It flopped. Players lamented its tendency to break unpredictably in the air—a consequence of its smooth stitching (see “The Physics of Flying Objects,” below). With this summer’s Cup to prepare for, Adidas didn’t want to repeat its mistake. The company tested the new Brazuca with more than 600 players over the course of three years. Although the ball has fewer panels than its predecessor—six versus eight—its seams are three times deeper, giving it less drag, which helps ensure it’ll fly where a player wants.
The amount of drag an object experiences determines how it will fly through the air; the less outside forces it interacts with, the truer it will fly. As air passes over a smooth sphere, like the Jabulani, it breaks away from the surface, cutting a wide path that’s susceptible to forces such as wind. A more-textured sphere, like the Brazuca, holds airflow close to the object, creating a narrower path that’s harder to disrupt.
One of the Brazuca testers was U.S. Men’s National Team defender Omar Gonzalez. As a defender, Gonzalez sends plenty of long passes up the field. Here, he explains how to do so successfully:
Step 1: Find your target
“I make eye contact with a teammate to make sure he’s on the same page as I am. When he’s getting ready to take off, I know I have to lead him with a long pass.”
Step 2: Strike the ball
“Try to have more technique rather than hitting the heck out of the ball. Plant your nonkicking foot next to the ball, and strike the ball below the middle so you can get some flight on it.”
Step 3: Follow through
“You want to have a nice, easy swing to make contact with the ball. I try to follow through in the direction I’m trying to hit the ball. When I do that, I know it will be getting to my teammate.”
This article originally appeared in the June 2014 issue of Popular Science.
John McCormick, a 63-year-old cab driver, was on his porch the morning of July 26, 1978, when he was robbed and shot dead. His wife, awakened by the commotion, reported that she saw the assailant flee wearing a face stocking, which investigators later found near the scene. Police identified 17-year-old Santae Tribble as the prime suspect after an informant linked him to the gun. At Tribble’s trial, an FBI agent testified that one of the hairs found in the stocking “matched in all microscopic characteristics” to Tribble. While half a dozen witnesses corroborated Tribble’s alibi, the hair was enough to convince the jury. Tribble served 23 years before he was paroled in 2003. Nine years later, mitochondrial DNA testing on the same hair samples revealed that Tribble was no match at all. In fact, one of the hairs was canine.
Tribble is one of more than 350 people who have been exonerated by DNA testing after going to prison. Horrifically, 18 of the wrongly accused made it to death row before the truth came to light. It’s no secret that sloppy forensic science shoulders a lot of the blame. The Innocence Project has found, for example, that unverified or improper forensic analysis has contributed to more than 50 percent of its DNA exonerations. The National Research Council, meanwhile, released a blistering 328-page report in 2009 calling out qualitative forensic practices such as those routinely used to compare hair, bite marks, bullet markings, shoe patterns, and tire prints.
But it’s not just bad science that’s driving the problem. After all, some techniques, such as DNA analysis and blood typing, bear the imprimatur of rigorous, reliable research. The bigger issue is the way people perform the techniques—that is, largely without scientific training, oversight, or standardization.
Take the troubled crime lab of St. Paul, Minnesota. In 2012, it suspended all drug and fingerprint analysis after lawyers revealed that its operators had no standardized procedures, possessed little understanding of basic science, submitted illegible reports, and used dirty equipment. Like many crime labs in the U.S., it hadn’t been accredited by an independent forensic-science organization—something that’s required in only a few states. As the National Research Council report noted, “nearly anyone with a garage and some capital could theoretically open a forensics laboratory.”
Things are slowly improving. In January, the U.S. Departments of Justice and Commerce created a National Commission on Forensic Science to establish countrywide standards. The panel includes forensic scientists, lawyers, and police who are tasked with writing recommendations for the U.S. attorney general. Some rules, such as requiring crime labs to be clean and accredited, are no-brainers. But the justice system should also invest more money into a woefully neglected area: forensic-science training programs. Most programs don’t go beyond the undergraduate level, and many focus on the criminal-justice system rather than science and statistics. As the mess in St. Paul revealed, even the best technology is useless if analysts on the front lines don’t know how to use it. Just ask Santae Tribble.
This article originally appeared in the June 2014 issue of Popular Science.
Not a smoker? You're missing out on a not-insignificant amount of fun, at least according to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. The agency recently released a cost-benefit calculation that included how much pleasure Americans lose by not smoking electronic cigarettes and some other tobacco products, Reuters reports. The calculation was a part of the decision-making into the FDA’s new proposed rules for regulating e-cigarettes.
Apparently the FDA values the pleasure of smoking quite highly. From Reuters:
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration says . . . that the projected benefits of the new rules, which also apply to cigars, hookahs and other vapor products, should be cut by 70 percent to account for the deprivation consumers would suffer.
That means if the agency puts a value of $100,000 on the longer and improved life that might be achieved by deterring someone from smoking, then it would cut that benefit assessment to $30,000 because of the pleasure they lost.
If this seems a bit unusual to you, you’re not alone. Among economists, subtracting fun from the benefits of a proposed law is considered a “radical” addition to federal number-crunching, Reuters reports. Tobacco-control advocates worry the calculation will provide fodder for companies to argue that e-cigarettes and hookahs shouldn’t be as tightly regulated.
Reuters reports on an FDA’s spokeswoman’s explanation of the agency’s decision, as well as the government’s history of taking pleasure into account. The whole story is fascinating. You should check out the story there.
Meanwhile, we’d like to take a moment to think about what other cost-benefit calculations lost pleasure should play into. Regulating soda sizes? Restrictions on illegal drugs? Abstinence-only sex ed??
[Reuters]
It’s like a police lineup for medicines and snacks. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration maintains a Flickr album just for pictures of drugs, supplements and pet and people foods it’s recalled from the market. How did we not know this before?
The photo collection is weirdly fun to look at and potentially useful—it encourages you to spot whether anything in the stream looks familiar. We wouldn’t rely on the photostream to keep up to date on recalls, however. Not all the products the FDA recalls make it to Flickr, not by a long shot. To see all recalls, you can read the FDA’s weekly Enforcement Reports. Many recalls also get press releases, which explain the reasons for the recalls a little.
Fun fact: Many government employees and agencies maintain Flickr streams, with which we are mildly obsessed. Some are works of art. Others provide fun looks into history.
The FDA’s recalled products streams are notably utilitarian. While all the photos are clear enough to read, some are just barely so. I mean, really. Can’t you guys try a little harder? There are also some sketchy gems among the photos. However, keep in mind it’s not just “male strength” companies that suffer recalls. Many well-known companies end up having to pull their products from store shelves. Just last month, snack dips from Target and Trader Joe’s were recalled for possibly containing Listeria bacteria and a Whole Foods noodle dish was recalled because the packaging didn’t declare it contained a potential allergen, soybeans.
We made a gallery of our favorite recall photos! Yum. Click here or below to enter the gallery. All these products were recalled this year.
Like Olympic skiers racing in single file to reduce air resistance, two 18-wheeler trucks in Nevada recently proved that uncomfortably close convoys can save drivers fuel and money. The key, instead of bold Olympic athleticism, is robotic assistance. A computer-assisted truck was able to follow closely behind a human-driven truck perfectly, maintaining exactly 33 feet of distance between the vehicles. The promise is a future of safer, more fuel efficient, and more robotic trucking.
While Nevada is a friendly state for driverless cars, the system tested is only partially automated, with a driver in the computer-assisted truck still responsible for steering. In a way, that makes this a very, very advanced cruise control. The technology, developed by Peloton Tech, uses radar and a wireless link so that the following trucks travel at the same speed, braking simultaneously for safety, and doing so on an automated system that doesn't have the delays of human reaction time. In addition, the drivers of both vehicles also have a video display, expanding both drivers' vision and reducing blind spots.
Besides safety, the major selling point of this system is that the reduced drag saves fuel costs. Peloton says the "technology saves more than 7% [of fuel] at 65mph – 10% for the rear truck and 4.5% for the lead truck," which is tremendous because "Long-haul fleets spend 40% of operating expenses on fuel, accounting collectively for over 10% of U.S. oil use and related carbon emissions." These savings come primarily from reduced aerodynamic drag.
In Europe, countries have been testing a similar, albeit more autonomous, technology for a few years now. Dubbed SARTRE (Safe Road Trains for the Environment), it lets a vehicle find a leader, link up, and then follow along autonomously. No word yet if it inspired existential angst in the human drivers who are no longer needed.
Watch video of the trucks in action below. It goes really well with C.W. McCall's 1975 novelty hit "Convoy," which inspired the similarly odd 1978 trucker film "Convoy."
Power plants nationwide must cut their carbon dioxide pollution by up to 30 percent in less than two decades, under the “clean power plan” released today by the Obama administration.
It is the most sweeping CO2 reduction in the power sector ever mandated by the Environmental Protection Agency, and the biggest move to date by the administration in bypassing the gridlocked Congress to take direct action on global warming. Air pollutants linked to rising rates of lung and heart diseases would also decrease under the plan, although it doesn't regulate them directly.
Gina McCarthy, head of the Environmental Protection Agency, formally announced the plan this morning before an upbeat Washington, D.C., audience of federal staffers and officials.
The new carbon rule doesn't require specific reductions at individual power plants, or add them up via metric tons of CO2. Rather, it sets state-by-state requirements for reducing the power sector's rate of “carbon intensity”: the amount of carbon pollution created per megawatt hour of generated electricity.
Each state has an interim goal for reducing carbon intensity between 2020-2029, based on its mix of power sources in 2012 (the most recent year for which full data are available), and a final goal for 2030 and afterwards. It is not clear what would happen if a state missed its goals. EPA used emissions data from 2005--a benchmark the U.S. has used as well at recent international climate talks--to estimate the overall reduction of 30 percent by 2030.
(Under the Kyoto climate agreement, which the U.S. never ratified, greenhouse gas emissions cuts were benchmarked at 1990 levels.)
In the rule, EPA identifies four “building blocks” for carbon-reduction strategies that are already being used by many states and utilities to reduce carbon emissions, including:
But McCarthy stressed today that the states will be in charge of tailoring their plans to their own particular conditions and needs. In fact, if observers could have taken a drink for every time McCarthy said word “flexibility,” everyone would have been buzzed by the end of her speech.
States may also collaborate to cut CO2 pollution under the rule. Connecticut, Delaware, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New York, Rhode Island, and Vermont are ahead of the game with their joint Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, formed in 2005 to create a market for carbon emission allowances, also called cap-and-trade. RGGI is credited with cutting the region's carbon dioxide pollution by up to 40 percent, and lowering electricity bills after an initial spike. (New Jersey left RGGI in 2011.)
States not already in an emissions market can also look to California's carbon cap-and-trade program, established in 2012 to help the state reach its goal of cutting greenhouse gas pollution to 1990 levels by 2020, and then another 80 percent beyond that by 2050.
McCarthy emphasized that the new rule confronts well-known threats to both public health and the economy, which are tied to power plant CO2 emissions and now made more complex by the impacts of global warming. “Rising temperatures bring more smog, more asthma, and longer allergy seasons. If your kid doesn’t use an inhaler, consider yourself a lucky parent,” said McCarthy, “because 1 in 10 children in the U.S. suffers from asthma. Carbon pollution from power plants comes packaged with other dangerous pollutants like particulate matter, nitrogen oxides, and sulfur dioxide, putting our families at even more risk.”
“This is not just about disappearing polar bears or melting ice caps. This is about protecting our health and our homes. This is about protecting local economies and jobs,” McCarthy said, and then added, off-script, “Although I like polar bears, and I know about melting ice caps.”
Taking aim at critics of regulating carbon emissions, McCarthy dismissed charges that the plan's mandated cuts will cause power prices to skyrocket, or cripple industries like the automobile sector, as “empty allegations...the same tired play from the same special-interest playbook they’ve used for decades,” such as the creation of smog-reducing regulations in the 1960s, or curbs on pollutants causing acid rain in the 1990s.
“Time after time, when science pointed to health risks, special interests cried wolf,” said McCarthy. “And time after time, we followed the science, protected the American people, and the doomsday predictions never came true...[T]heir claims that the science-driven action that’s protected families for generations would somehow harm us flies in the face of history, and shows a lack of faith in American ingenuity and entrepreneurship.”
McCarthy's sharp tone was of a piece with the Obama administration's recent pugnacity in affirming the scientific evidence that carbon pollution created by human activities has destabilized the climate, and maintaining that taking action now to slow down global warming will bring near-immediate as well as long-term economic benefits.
In 2007, the Supreme Court upheld the EPA's authority under the Clean Air Act to regulate CO2 emissions from power plants--a leading cause of human-propelled global warming—as long as the agency could affirm that the greenhouse gas was a threat to public health and welfare. EPA made just such an “endangerment finding” in 2009, and has used this power since then to tighten up auto fuel economy standards, as well as carbon regulations on new power plants and industrial facilities.
New EPA Regulations Would Force Power Plants To Find 30% More Loopholes By 2030 http://t.co/W001fh9v3Xpic.twitter.com/Qoqod8mZdm
— The Onion (@TheOnion) June 2, 2014No one knows exactly how the coconut rhinoceros beetle made its way to Hawaii, but state and federal officials are working hard to eradicate the giant pest before it inflicts significant damage. In 2007, the beetles destroyed an estimated 50 percent of the palm trees on the island of Guam.
"The beetles could have come from a variety of places including areas where they are deemed invasive or their native range in Southern Asia," said Darcy Oishi, an entomologist for the Hawaii Department of Agriculture.
They were first detected just before Christmas in traps specifically designed to catch invasive insects around Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam on the island of Oahu, Hawaii. The traps run on solar power and are equipped with UV light and a pheromone lure that's attractive to nocturnal beetles. Since the beginning of the year, coconut rhinoceros beetles have been caught in over a dozen traps.
Officials initially identified a particularly productive breeding site in a mulch pile on the base's golf course "but no additional breeding sites have been detected," according to Rosenthal.
Officials are now in a race against time to quell the spread of the beetle, which can destroy palm tree, date palm, sugarcane and banana tree populations.
A potential method for detecting the beetles involves the use of acoustic monitoring devices to determine which trees are infested. Richard Mankin, an entomologist with USDA, previously employed sound and vibration detection devices to locate the beetle in Guam.
"There's a number of insects like the coconut rhinoceros beetle that you can't see when they get into tree trunks. For a long time we've been using sounds to detect these hidden insects, particularly to detect large species," said Mankin. "For example, adults can communicate to attract mates, and larvae can be communicating inside a dead log about whether they are eating too close to each other."
Advanced acoustic monitoring equipment can also detect vibrations using accelerometer sensors similar to those capable of deploying airbags after detecting vehicle impact. The sensors are approximately a thousand times more sensitive than those used in vehicles.
"While acoustic monitoring isn't currently being used in Hawaii, it's particularly effective because sounds and vibrations can be used to identify infested trees that need to be cut down or treated with systemic insecticides," said Mankin. "Otherwise, if you are trying to eradicate an infestation, you might have to cut down all the host trees just in case."
In Guam, acoustic monitoring worked effectively to locate invaders but not enough was done to eradicate the insects after detection. As a result, the beetles spread to most areas of the island and now the invasive population is controlled through community efforts. For example, Guam residents are educated to chip up and burn dead trees, an ideal breeding ground for the beetle's larvae.
In Hawaii, trapped coconut rhinoceros beetles are destroyed in compost bins heated to temperatures between 140-180 degrees Fahrenheit. The heated decomposition process produces ammonia, which kills the beetles. HDOA and APHIS are also working to develop a long-term federally funded eradication effort, which may include the controlled introduction of biological predators like a fungus that's known to attack the beetle.
Whatever the final plan, the lesson from Guam is clear. Officials must implement a comprehensive detection and eradication effort quickly to avoid devastation of a sensitive island ecosystem and a culture so tied to the palm tree.
"Suspended animation" -- literally putting life on hold -- has long been a medical dream. (The preferred scientific term for the procedure is emergency preservation and resuscitation [EPR].) Dr. Sam Tisherman and a team of surgeons at UPMC Presbyterian Hospital in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, have recently started human trials for a practical application of EPR. This surgical technique replaces all of a patient's blood with a solution to cool the body down and buy time for doctors to fix injuries without losing patients to blood loss.
Dr. Peter Rhee at the University of Arizona in Tucson first started researching suspended animation when asked by the military to find a way of preserving wounded victims before they reached the hospital, and together with his colleagues developed a technique through experimenting on pigs. Dr. Tisherman of the University of Pittsburgh and his team developed another method, which is what will be tested in the new human trials.
Hypothermia -- an abnormally low body temperature -- dramatically decreases the human body's need for oxygen. This is similar to how animals hibernate. In EPR, doctors will induce hypothermia in patients by swapping their blood with very cold salt water to cool the entire body down to 10°C (50°F) in 15 minutes. Normally, we can't survive with our blood missing -- it carries the oxygen that cells need to make energy. However, when the body temperature is very low, cellular activity stops and cells survive without oxygen, thus preventing further damage to tissues and organs. It's also important to cool the body down quickly when trauma patients are losing blood rapidly. If they don't have any blood flow to the brain for 4 to 5 minutes, while the body is at normal temperature, there could be irreversible damage.
Here's how this particular suspended animation technique will work.
No humans have yet undergone this procedure, as Dr. Tisherman and his team are still waiting for the right patients to come in. The human trial will go on until there are enough data to analyze, which could take up to a year. Dr. Tisherman anticipates that enrollment will begin as summer approaches. Hopefully in the near future, suspended animation can be extended to other trauma conditions to save lives.
Dr. Tisherman answers frequently asked questions in the video below.
Alexander "Sasha" Shulgin, a chemist and author credited with pioneering the pharmaceutical use of MDMA, died Monday at the age of 88. The Erowid Center, a nonprofit offering information on psychoactive chemicals, reported that he "gently died after several years of battling various illnesses. He had recently been diagnosed with terminal liver cancer."
Shulgin was a chemist at the Dow Chemical Company in the 1960s, but left to begin his own independent research on psychoactive chemicals, synthesizing MDMA and hundreds of other compounds. By tweaking the chemical composition of known psychoactives, he created hundreds of new compounds, similar to other drugs but with novel structures. He often tested the chemicals on himself, and eventually collected information about them in his popular underground books PIHKAL: A Chemical Love Story and TIHKAL: The Continuation, both authored with his wife, Ann.
Before MDMA, more commonly known as ecstasy, was banned in the United States, Shulgin became a proponent of its use as a medicine. He was largely able to avoid DEA prosecution for his work, as many of his chemicals had never been synthesized before, but in 1993 his lab was raided and a license to produce the chemicals stripped away.
For decades, Shulgin has been seen as a fringe character in research -- "at best a curiosity and at worst a menace," as the New York Times put it in 2005. But new research suggesting the benefits of MDMA therapy, along with a growing willingness to let researchers experiment with scheduled drugs, may eventually provide some vindication for his work.
A team of materials scientists has created a copper wire that’s able to store electricity as well as transmit it. Two in one! It’s like the shampoo/conditioner of the electronics world. Above, you can see the wire lighting an LED using stored electricity, wohoo.
In the future, wires like this could take the place of batteries, making battery-run devices smaller and battery-run cars lighter and roomier. Energy-storing wires could also go into fabrics, for jackets that act as emergency chargers for your cellphone, or that are devices themselves.
To make the wire, a team from the University of Central Florida basically wrapped a regular, conducting copper wire in a supercapacitor. The wrapping stores electricity while the wire core conducts it. The supercapacitor wrapping contains two layers of nano-fibers that stick straight out from the surface of the wire, like bristles on a brush. The fibers increase the surface area of the wire by 100 times, which is important for energy storage, Drexel University nanotechnology researcher Yury Gogotsi, who was not involved in the research, wrote in a comment in the journal Nature.
Although these wires are still just lab prototypes, some of their qualities already make them promising for real-world applications, Gogotsi writes. The wires did well in tests in which its makers bent them and charged and discharged them 5,000 times. That means they’re pretty stable upon bending and repeated use. Before such a wire can go into real-world products, its creators must work on making the supercapacitor layer store more electricity, Gogotsi writes.
The wire’s creators, led by nanotechnology scientist Jayan Thomas, will publish their work in the journal Advanced Materials.
Earlier this week Fabien Cousteau, oldest grandson of ocean explorer Jacques Cousteau, descended to the Aquarius undersea lab of Key Largo, Florida. Cousteau will live in the habitat 31 days, attempting to best the duration his grandfather lived in his undersea habitat, Conshelf II, over 50 years ago.
The Aquarius research lab is positioned roughly 60 feet underwater, and has full life-support systems, including a simple kitchen, bunks, air conditioning and a shower, internet, and portholes that let light in and allow the aquanauts to view the reef and wildlife outside the windows.
We’ll be conducting an interview with Cousteau on Thursday via video conferencing, and will ask him the best questions from our readers about his mission to live underwater for a full month. Tweet us your questions (@PopSci) or leave them in the comments below.
“There’s a lot of hype around this issue,” says Upmanu Lall, professor of earth and environmental engineering at Columbia University and director of its Water Center. But, he says, we’re in little danger of running out of water overall. One could conceive of a scenario in which we’ve used up all the freshwater locked in ice or aquifers. Indeed, the water table has already dropped at an alarming rate in specific regions. (We’re on pace to deplete the Ogallala Aquifer, which underlies much of the Great Plains, in the coming decades, for example.) But even if that happened, we’d still have access to other forms of water. “The most common resource is rainfall, and that’s renewable,” Lall explains. “It’s nature’s way of treating water through a distilling mechanism.”
'The most common resource is rainfall, and that’s renewable.'
In places where water has grown scarce, farmers may be forced to change their approach to watering crops. Some may switch from using groundwater to collecting rain, or another more efficient option. In the Great Plains, exploitation of the Ogallala has made further pumping much more expensive than it was. It may soon make more sense to invest in better means of irrigation. Some are even talking about piping in water from the Great Lakes. With water, it’s easy to fret over a grim future. What’s harder is innovating our way toward a brighter one.
This article originally appeared in the June 2014 issue of Popular Science.
Marc De Repentigny was only trying to be responsible when he built an 80-pound, seven-foot-tall motorized Transformers suit. Married with kids, he decided to audition for a French-Canadian game show that offered a chance at prize money to the most unusual contestants. De Repentigny molded styrene plastic into armored paneling, made motorized LED eyes, and spent months perfecting realistic-looking thrusters. A servomotor in the thrusters triggers a puff of compressed air and a flashing LED light, making the robot appear ready to blast off. His arms slip into the robot’s wide shoulders, and his hands reach into the bot’s elbows, where buttons let him activate the motorized fingers and faceplate. The suit doesn’t transform into a jet, but it did get De Repentigny on the game show—where he won $128,500. Next he plans to be first in line for Transformers: Age of Extinction, just not while wearing the suit. “I couldn’t sit down!” he says. “I’d have to watch the movie standing up.”
Time: 2 years
Cost: $1,500
This article originally appeared in the June 2014 issue of Popular Science.
DEET is a popular insect repellent—an estimated 30 percent of Americans use it every year—yet it sounds like a good number of people are wary of it, too. A Google search of "DEET dangers" found a Mercola article saying DEET kills mosquitoes, although it doesn’t (Perhaps they’ve confused DEET with DDT?). A site called FitSugar says “DEET pumps through your nervous system and has been proven to kill brain cells,” neither of which is true. Weird! Guess DEET does really suffer from a "perception problem," as the Los Angeles Times reported in 2011.
Now, recent review of DEET’s effects on human health has found the insect repellent is safe to use on the skin. The review is one of several that researchers have done over the past 20 years, all finding that DEET is generally safe. In fact, there’s no direct evidence using DEET normally harms the nervous system. Bad reactions to DEET, when applied to the skin in bug sprays, are extremely rare, but not non-existent.
Why use DEET if there’s any risk of health problems at all? The chemical is the best insect repellent people have ever invented. Nothing else has the same history of efficacy, although a few others have strong evidence for them, too. Still, in regions where people are at risk for serious insect-borne diseases such as malaria or West Nile virus, DEET is what doctors recommend. In addition, doctors recommend using DEET in concentrations between 20 percent and 50 percent. The idea is that lower concentrations require people to reapply more frequently than they're apt to (while concentrations higher than 50 percent don't necessarily work better or longer). This means if you want DEET protection, you’ll have to resign yourself to using pretty high concentrations of the stuff.
Let’s start with the evidence for neurological problems from DEET, which FitSugar was so afraid of. In the scientific literature—in all of scientific literature since 1957, when DEET first appeared on store shelves—researchers have reported 14 cases of kids who suffered encephalopathy, including seizures, after using DEET on their skin. All but one were kids under age 8. Three children died. The others recovered fully. In each of the cases, it was difficult to determine whether DEET caused the brain symptoms. Such data are just hard to come by; the kids could have been exposed to other things, but it could have been the DEET, too.
More straightforward is one study researchers conducted, following women in Thailand who used DEET from their second trimester of pregnancy onward. DEET reduced the incidences of malaria the women suffered, the study found. In addition, babies born to moms who used DEET didn’t differ from babies born to moms who didn’t use DEET. Babies in the two groups had the same weights and lengths and had the same head circumferences. All the babies also performed the same in neurological tests.
The U.S. Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry has a page of reports in the U.S. of health problems in people after using DEET. Among the cases are two deaths in adults and three cases in which pregnant women who used large amounts of DEET gave birth to babies with problems. One baby died. As with the kids with encephalopathy, in the nearly all of the ATSDR-reported cases, it’s difficult to know if DEET was the culprit. Compared to how often people use DEET around the world, those cases are very rare. Researchers estimate people around the world put on DEET 200 million times a year.
These figures are all for people who use DEET on their skin. Doctors definitely don’t recommend ingesting a lot of DEET or getting it in your eyes. Don’t leave bug sprays in a place where a kid could do either by accident. MedlinePlus lists symptoms of DEET ingestion, plus recommendations for what to do if someone does consume a lot of DEET or get it in his eyes.
We’ll leave you with what’s perhaps science’s strangest report of DEET-related problems. From the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry:
Happy camping, dear readers.
The stem cells that scientists announced they’d created in January may never have existed, Nature News reports.
The stem cell discovery, at first hailed as a milestone, has come under fire over the past few months. First, independent research teams that tried to reproduce the stem cells weren’t able to. Then, some scientists noticed that parts of the paper describing the new stem-cell-creating technique were plagiarized.
RIKEN, a Tokyo-based research institution that employs many of the scientists who were involved in the questioned discovery, launched an investigation with two goals. One was to determine whether the stem cell paper’s lead author, a young RIKEN scientist named Haruko Obokata, had cheated in writing the paper. That branch of the investigation concluded in April and found she did cheat. The second goal was more interesting: to determine whether the stem cells the team said it made were real. Genetic test conducted by an anonymous, independent lab suggest they were not, Nature News reports.
We thought this was an apt time for the blog Retraction Watch to publish one of its latest stories. The story is about what it was like to work in a stem cell lab that’s now undergoing an investigation for allegations of cheating.
The lab, based at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, has nothing to do with the stem cell research above. Nor can we know whether the atmosphere in the Brigham and Women’s Hospital lab, led by physician Piero Anversa, is anything like the atmosphere in the RIKEN lab in which Obokata and her colleagues worked. There are surely many ways for a lab to go wrong. An anonymous former research fellow describes how things were in the Anversa lab:
You may recognize yogurt company Chobani by the ostentatious "100" rainbow-plastered on their cups. This is to inform the buying public that each cup has 100 calories. By what dark blood oath did these innovators accomplish such a feat? Simply put, they removed all of the science, an adulterant known to dramatically inflate calorie count.
Remove the lid from a cup of Chobani, and you may now be greeted by this printed tagline: "Nature got us to 100 calories, not scientists. #howmatters." This is an incredible work of PR, perhaps bested only by "a cup of yogurt won’t change the world, but how we make it might." The claim accomplishes the two-fold goal of being both demonstrably false and wildly offensive, to scientists, the IQ of consumers, and likely people working for Chobani. It is a minor miracle. Let us explore.
These are the ingredients in a cup of CHOBANI SIMPLY 100™ BLACK CHERRY. ("Decadence so healthy, you’ll want to dance.")
Nonfat Yogurt (Cultured Pasteurized Nonfat Milk), Live and Active Cultures: S. Thermophilus, L. Bulgaricus, L. Acidophilus, Bifidus and L. Casei, Chicory Root Fiber, Black Cherries, Water, Cherry Juice Concentrate, Evaporated Cane Juice, Pectin, Natural Flavors, Locust Bean Gum, Monkfruit Extract, Stevia Leaf Extract.
You will notice items like "pasteurized nonfat milk," a variety of nonfat milk that comes, not from the pasteurization process, but from the Pasteur Cows of the Lower Himalayan Range. (No, it's from pasteurization.) There is also "evaporated cane juice," a substance so rare it must be bartered for from one of the eight living practitioners of the cane juice evaporation process, an ancient family trade lost to the sands of time. (No, it's basically sugar, it's processed like sugar, and the labeling got Chobani slapped with a lawsuit for not calling it sugar.)
There are other issues to take with the statement as well. You get the idea.
To Chobani's credit, they will be phasing out the lids. In the meantime, enjoy the stream of #howmatters tweets, helpfully provided by Chobani and now hijacked by pro-science Twitter users.
Jose Salvador Alvarenga was fishing off the coast of Mexico in late 2012 when a powerful storm sent his boat adrift. Marshall Islanders found the battered vessel nearly 16 months later, stuck on a reef—with Alvarenga still alive inside. Rainwater and a diet of fish and turtle sustained him (or so he told the press). Curious how DIY savvy could stave off disaster, we asked Frances and Michael Howorth, authors of The Sea Survival Manual, for advice.
Shelter: Don’t discard any clothing; multiple layers can keep you warm during cold nights. On hot days, drape or prop clothes overhead.
Water: Never drink seawater. If you have a raincoat, detach the hood and use it to catch and store rainwater. Plastic bags and rain boots also make excellent containers. Always rinse them with the first raindrops to wash away salt from sea spray.
Food: A boat’s shadow can attract fish. To catch them, string jewelry into a lure. (Pieces from a smartphone can work too.) Shoelaces or unraveled sock threads can serve as fishing line. Save any uneaten bits for bait.
Rescue: Relax and find familiar shapes in clouds to ease boredom—and keep an eye out for planes and ships. If you spot one, use a pocket mirror or a smartphone screen to reflect sunlight. The signal can be seen up to 10 miles away on a sunny day.
For more sea-survival tips, head to the Howorths’ website, thehoworths.com.
WARNING: Use these methods as last resorts. If they don’t work, direct your complaints to ididnotsurvive@popsci.com.
This article originally appeared in the June 2014 issue of Popular Science.
Medical marijuana isn't always as advertised—at least not in the Seattle area, as one lab found out.
The lab, Analytical 360, recently worked with medical-marijuana patient Jessica Tonani to test samples from 22 area dispensaries and growers, The Seattle Times reports. The samples were all supposed to be of a strain of marijuana called Harlequin that has low levels of intoxicating chemicals, but high levels of therapeutic ones. Instead, five of the samples were the opposite. They were high in psychedelic tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), but had "virtually no" cannabidiol, which medical-marijuana users seek to help with the symptoms of epilepsy, inflammatory bowel disease and other diseases.
"You don't want a 6-year-old with epilepsy being put on a bus under the influence of a psychedelic chemical," Tonani told The Seattle Times. No, you do not.
As more states have legalized medical and recreational marijuana use, there's been growing interest in making sure pot products are clean and consistent and offer customers the effects they want. It’s just like any other commercial product, from ibuprofen to Greek yogurt. Last year, Chemical & Engineering News reported on small commercial labs, including Analytical 360, that had popped up to offer marijuana chemistry-testing services. "Why should medical marijuana be different from any other pharmaceutical?" C&EN asked, rhetorically. Before that, Slatepublished a story that included the reporter's brother, a scientist for a commercial lab who helps breeders and dispensaries determine the strength and quality—no mites or mold, please—of their stuff.
So the infrastructure for maintaining quality control in commercially sold marijuana is there. But the new Seattle Times report shows not every dispensary is testing its products, or heeding the results of tests. Consumer demand for more consistent products may push dispensaries to shape up. So might stricter laws. The Times points to the state government of Connecticut, which doesn't allow marijuana growers to give plants certain names, such as Harlequin, unless those plants meet certain chemical profiles.
What we don't recommend is relying on the goodwill of people who are in the business, despite what one grower told The Seattle Times:
The tubes that make up the internet cover much of the world, but not all of it. Google has announced plans to get internet to where the tubes can't reach, with three technologies: balloons, high-altitude solar-powered drones, and the latest, satellites in space.
Google would not be the first to use satellites to cover the earth in internet. The early dotcom boom of the late 1990s saw companies like Iridium, Globalstar, and Teledisc market satellite phones and promise internet service, but most failed or declared bankruptcy in the face of tremendous initial costs and poor management. In 2010, the Pentagon tested routing internet through a satellite. Google's own satellite team will be headed by eminent alumni of satellite internet company O3b.
It is too soon to say whether Google's balloons, drones, or satellites will successfully expand internet access to the parts of the world without it. Whichever works, it is clear that Google is willing to go to the edge of space and beyond to spread the internet beyond the terrestrial tyranny of tubes.
