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In Metadata We Trust, Minus The Margins Of Error

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Sgt. Sotkin's Selfies
This Russian soldier recently garnered international attention when his Instagram feed suggested he'd crossed the Ukrainian border.
Alexander Sotkin/Instagram

Sergeant Alexander Sotkin, a communications specialist in the Russian army, has big gray-green eyes, soft stubble, a strong chin—and a penchant for taking selfies. So far, the 24-year-old has posted 530 photos on Instagram: a typical mish-mash of his best angles, new tattoos, blurry concerts, and friends mugging for the camera. (He even has a few cute kitten pics thrown in for good measure.)

On June 23, the backdrop of Sotkin's feed shifted when he and other soldiers were deployed to a base in Voloshino on the Ukrainian border. In the ensuing weeks, Sotkin continued updating his Instagram account from the conflict zone. Most of the photos were innocuous—Sotkin drinking water, Sotkin eating watermelon, Sotkin looking sleepy. But early on July 5th, one shot stood out. The photo itself is just another headshot, but the geotag—a data point indicating latitude and longitude—on his Instagram map indicated the photo was taken in the village of Krasnyi Derkul, just west of the Ukrainian border, where several major military engagements had recently flared.

BuzzFeed, which recently launched an investigative reporting unit, published a string of Sotkin’s photos under the headline, “Does This Soldier’s Instagram Account Prove Russia Is Covertly Operating In Ukraine?” The article also suggested Sotkin was in an SA-11 Buk surface-to-air missile system—a weapon that Russian-funded separatists used to blow up the Malaysian Airlines flight MH17. If true, this could have finally been cold, hard proof that Russian troops had encroached into eastern Ukraine.

But there are several problems with BuzzFeed's conclusions. For one, no one knows how Sotkin’s location was geotagged. GPS is usually fairly precise, but it can be fickle depending on the weather, physical surroundings, and the gadget used to estimate GPS location. When software determines this data isn't reliable, most phones triangulate an approximate position using nearby cell phone towers and basic geometry. By sending signals to the towers, whose stationary locations are known, the lag in response times can roughly estimate the phone's position. The more towers, the more accurate the process is, but even in densely packed urban areas, it’s always an estimation. 

This could have finally been cold, hard proof that Russian troops had encroached into eastern Ukraine.

Rural eastern Ukraine isn’t exactly reknown for its cellular infrastructure. So, there’s a strong likelihood that Sotkin’s location contained a margin of error large enough to explain the roughly five miles of distance between Voloshino and Krasnyi Derkul. It'd certainly be large enough to call into question whether he actually crossed the border. Other parts of the accusation haven’t panned out either. For example, “buk,” a crucial part of a caption that led to the alleged claim about the SA-11, turns out to be Russian slang for notebook computer, and Peter Vine on Medium pointed out the word was followed an emoji of a laptop. And then there's the ability for an Instagram user to choose a nearby location by name, even if that location is many miles away.

That’s not to say there aren’t Russian troops in the Ukraine. There’s video evidence that Russian tanks are headed toward the border. Russian soldiers are tweeting pictures of convoys on the move. And the border discussion itself may soon become academic: The Obama administration has released surveillance photos showing Russia has fired artillery rounds from within the country against Ukrainian targets, basically proving Russian authorities haven’t been telling the truth about their support of separatist insurgents. But a modicum of restraint in interpretations is important if Internet sleuthing is to be of real service—the false culprits fingered in a Reddit frenzy following the Boston marathon is another poignant example of the danger of leaping to conclusions.  

Veracity aside, the whole debate is a good reminder of what most what most of us cheerfully Snapchatting, Instagramming fools conveniently forget: Our phones store metadata with every photo we take. Unless you spend a lot more energy than most people finding tools that scrub your files, EXIF data on every selfie includes the GPS coordinates of your photos, the time they were taken, and enough other information that makes it easy to track down personalized details about you. Even if there's no embedded EXIF data, if a photo's location is placed on a map, software can scrape those locations and associate them with the images.

The impact this has on our privacy is profound. Programmer and artist Owen Mundy recently visualized these kinds of privacy issues in his project, I Know Where Your Cat Lives. Using publicly available photos from people’s feeds, he locates photos of cats on a global map, with an estimated error margin of 7.8 meters. “I have a daughter and had been posting pictures of her on Instagram,” Mundy told Vice. “Then I realized Instagram had created a map of every picture I had been sharing with the world. That scared me.”

If this frightens you enough to do something different, you can download metadata apps like TrashExif to doctor your photos before sharing. Or, as a Russian lawmaker proposed in a new ruling that would forbid soldiers to use social media, the best way to keep delicate subjects private may be to refrain from posting altogether. (Common sense, perhaps, but it’s a larger philosophical commentary of the times we live in that this is not always immediately obvious.)

Still, the positive spin on all this sharing is its humanizing effects: If you just read Sotkin’s captions, you see a young man wrestling with the overwhelming boredom that can come with quiet time in conflict zones. “I still don’t understand what we’re doing here," Sotkin wrote in one caption, "so we’re continuing to go slightly crazy, listen to #swedishhousemafia and wait for new news from Ukraine!”

Such an intimate insight into a stranger’s life helps us remember that boots on the ground are young men too. 









A Spotter's Guide To Military-Grade Gear Now Being Used By Police

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Virginia Beach SWAT team members ride the running boards of an armored van to get into position to assault Building 1155.
NASA/Sean Smith
Following the fatal police shooting of teenager Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri last Saturday, a protest movement broke out in the small town. Police from St. Louis County responded, showing up with body armor, gas masks, rifles, camouflage uniforms, armored cars, and tear gas. This excessive show of force, combined with gear that looks very military, has lead to widespread outcry against police militarization, including some objections from veterans themselves. Here's a look at some of the gear on the ground in Ferguson and how it made its way from military service to police armories.

Long Range Acoustic Device (LRAD)

What it is: A powerful sonic cannon, the LRAD blasts beams of sound at people up to 3,200 feet away.

Original Military Use: An alternative to shooting a bunch or making something explode, LRADs have found a use on both land and sea. For naval or commercial vessels, they're great at deterring pirates. At military checkpoints on land, LRADs force vehicles to slow down or stop, and they do so more calmly than shooting would.

Ferguson Use: Keeping protesters away from police armored vehicles.

Grenade Launchers

What it is: A gun that hurls a canister of some type.

Original Military Use: Lobbing small explosives further than troops can throw them. In some situations, less-lethal ammunition is used.

Ferguson Use: Firing flash-bang grenades, tear gas, or other less-lethal munitions to try and forcibly disperse a crowd. Worth noting that while these are less-lethal weapons, they can still cause serious harm. During a SWAT raid in Georgia, a flash bang grenade fell into a toddler's crib and put the infant into a coma. The toddler appears to be recovering.

Camouflage

What it is: Pants that look like plants.

Original Military Use: Making it harder for enemies to see troops, as they blend into the surrounding environment.

Ferguson Use: Looking like the military. Because police are not expected to come under hostile fire from an enemy force at any moment, there's very little need for them to dress like their surroundings.  According to both journalist Radley Balko and a report on police militarization by the ACLU, the major effect of military uniforms is an ego boost for the cops wearing them. Balko quotes a letter to the editors at Washington Post from retired police sergeant Bill Donelly: "One tends to throw caution to the wind when wearing ‘commando-chic’ regalia, a bulletproof vest with the word ‘POLICE’ emblazoned on both sides, and when one is armed with high tech weaponry."

Armored Personnel Carriers

What it is: A relatively bulletproof vehicle. About half of these in police use are retired Mine Resistant Ambush Protected (MRAP) vehicles once used by the military in Iraq and Afghanistan. But there are plenty of other models from older wars in use, as well as some specifically made for police purposes.

Original Military Use: Keeping troops safe in gunfights, by providing a sturdy and armored way to either get more troops to the fight or get wounded people out of danger.

Ferguson Use: There are situations in American policing where an armored car might be needed in a gunfight between law enforcement and criminals. That was not the case in Ferguson, where the largely peaceful protesters were armed mostly with signs and chants.

Scoped and Leveled Rifle

What it is: A tool that puts holes in people.

Original Military Use: Killing people far away, doing so accurately, and with a minimum number of shots fired. If a crowd situation turns into a battle, snipers can pick out more threatening people farther away from where they are.

Ferguson Use: Intimidation? It's hard to imagine a scenario during nonviolent protests, or even minor rioting, that necessitates the use of a scoped rifle.

Rare are the situations where it's advantageous for police to have armored cars, camouflage, grenade launchers, crowd control weapons, and sniper rifles. Such a show of tactical equipment isn't just excessive, but it can escalate a relatively calm demonstration into something more volatile and unsafe.








This Pill Can Stop HIV

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Truvada Pills
The drug that could end the HIV pandemic is already here. Branded Truvada, this pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) prevents HIV infection by blocking the virus’s ability to replicate. “It’s a big deal,” says Robert Grant, a leading HIV/AIDS investigator at the University of California, San Francisco. “It’s an opportunity for uninfected people to proactively protect themselves.” 

Approximately 50,000 Americans will develop HIV this year. But since Truvada was approved as a PrEP in 2012, only 10,000 patients—or two percent of the 500,000 Americans identified as “high risk” by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)—have gotten a prescription for it.

Critics have vocalized concerns about side effects. “People have memories of what it was like to be treated with very high doses of drugs in the 1980s,” Grant says. “That lingers on even though HIV medication is much safer than it used to be.” In fact, Truvada has been used to help treat HIV for a decade. But, as with birth control in the 1960s, the concept of a pill regimen for safer sex was stigmatized, triggering a backlash against so-called “Truvada whores.”

So in May, the CDC laid out clear clinical guidelines: High-risk patients should take a daily pill and get an HIV test every three months. Truvada should supplement, not replace, condoms. Results from a 2012 trial showed that when participants took the pill every day, their risk of developing HIV was cut by 92 percent.

Some still balk at paying for preventative medication, though Truvada is covered by insurance. “Price is always an issue,” says Anthony S. Fauci, an immunologist at the National Institutes of Health. “But if you look at the cost of treatment when someone gets infected, it dwarfs the cost of prevention.” 

The next step is coming up with streamlined delivery methods, says Dawn Smith, an epidemiologist at the CDC. A weekly pill or monthly injection could minimize the hassle. And perhaps the stigma, too.

The History Of Safer Sex (The Short Version)

1939: Condoms, issued to soldiers in WWII, gain social ​acceptance.

1960: Oral birth control, a.k.a. “the pill,” hits the market.

1965: A landmark case expands access to contraceptives.

1981: The New York Times runs a story on “rare cancer” in homosexuals.

1984: Scientists identify human immunodeficiency virus (HIV).

1993: Hollywood explores the homophobia surrounding HIV and AIDS in Philadelphia.

1994: AIDS becomes the number one cause of death for Americans 25 to 44.

1996: Time magazine names HIV/AIDS researcher David Ho its “Man of the Year.”

2004: Truvada gets FDA approval for treatment of HIV and AIDS.

2013: The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation launches a competition for a better condom.

2014: Pill-takers proudly wear #TruvadaWhore T-shirts.

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








1,024 Robots Self-Assemble Into Any Shape You Want

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photo of Kilobots arranged into a rectangle
At Your Service
Michael Rubenstein, Harvard University

How does one charge 1,000 robots? It would be a pain to plug them all in individually. Luckily, there's an easier way with Kilobots. These little robots have round bodies about the diameter of a quarter, with a metal spring on top and three thin metal legs. To charge them, you push them -- 10 at a time -- against a long charging rack. They all charge at once, as long as each has its spring top and two of its legs touching the rack. "It's kind of like a bumper car charging system," says Mike Rubenstein, who uses a long stick to corral his Kilobots.

Rubenstein is an engineer at Harvard University and a member of the team that invented Kilobots (kilo meaning 1,000). The Harvard team began building simple, cheap robots more than three years ago, with the idea that the machines could be part of a cooperative swarm. They thought about issues such as how to charge a lot of them at once. Now, the engineers have improved the hardware and written software that allows them to send a single command out to 1,024 Kilobots; and in response, the little bots will start shuffling into place to form any solid shape researchers request:

It's kinda creepy, until you realize it takes the robots 12 hours to make a shape. So they have their limitations.

That's not to downplay Rubenstein and his team's accomplishment. This is the first time anybody has been able to direct so many programmable robots at once. "They're definitely on a point on the frontier where nobody else is," Kevin Lynch, an engineer at Northwestern University who studies cooperative robots, tells Popular Science. Previous efforts used somewhere around 100 robots.

The Harvard work is part of a hot field in robotics. Basically, everyone in this field is trying to develop systems in which a large number of robots work together to accomplish a goal ("Robot swarm" is the popular term). The robots should be able to do so in response to just a few commands sent by one person. After that, the robots' own basic algorithms need to be able to dictate how they should act individually to get the big job done. It's maximum robot power with minimum human input.

Lynch offers an idea for what a cooperative robot system could do in the future. What if a person could send a single command to a fleet of drones to search a collapsed building for survivors? The drones could all enter at once, then use their algorithms to decide when to split up, to check different rooms, and to track which rooms have been checked already.

photos of Kilobots self-assembled into K, star and wrench shapes
Kilobots Gathered in Programmed Shapes
Michael Rubenstein, Harvard University

The challenge in building such systems is that there's a limit to how complex each robot can be. For one thing, they must be cheap enough that someone could afford to own hundreds or thousands of them. The Kilobots cost about $14 in parts. Their only sensors are infrared ones that calculate the distance between themselves and their neighbors. That's why the robots always march at the edge of the group, as you can see in the video. They're keeping close to others because if they wander too far, they're blind, unable to see their surroundings or calculate their positions.

Yet swarm robots must also be able to create sophisticated larger effects with their own simple capabilities. "It's an interesting question of how do you go from a desired function -- like if you want them to flock in a particular way or form a particular shape -- how do you go from that to individual rules?" Rubenstein says. Coming up with those rules for the Kilobots, including rules for glitches such as a bot's motor failing, was a major part of the research effort.

Although the Kilobots' shapely 12-hour dances seem far from practical applications, Rubenstein says they could be a step toward robots that self-assemble into specialized shapes when needed. That kind of capability is especially of interest for doing projects in space. Engineers could send up parts of a larger satellite, for example, and count on the pieces to assemble themselves once they've been released into orbit. (Like Ikea furniture, but in space.) The smaller parts could be easier and cheaper to rocket into space than one large satellite.

Lynch adds that the Harvard work is basic research meant to push the field. "You can't say well what it's going to do for me tomorrow in a factory or how am I going to make money on this?" he says. "They're asking new questions that are important."

Rubenstein and his colleagues published their work yesterday in the journal Science.








Extreme Rainfall Is The New Normal, And We're Not Ready For It

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Detroit Flood.
On August 11, more than 4 inches of rain fell on Detroit in less than a day. Drivers abandoned their cars as many metro area highways turned into lakes.

Six weeks worth of rain fell on greater Detroit on Monday, much of it during afternoon rush hour. Local drainage systems quickly topped out, and the deluge transformed highways into lakes studded with hundreds of stranded drivers and submerged cars. Flooded roads and highways in greater Detroit began to reopen on Wednesday, two days after the storm, according to The Wall Street Journal, but the cleanup and repair is likely to take months.

The flooding came about, most directly, due to very high humidity on Monday combined with a low pressure system from the southwest. The resulting storms moved so slowly (sometimes even reforming after initially raining themselves out) that the rain was concentrated across a small geographic area.

This is weather common to tropical regions of the world, not temperate Michigan. But it's in line with the National Climate Assessment, which found that over the past six decades incidents of extreme precipitation have increased across the continental U.S. due to human-propelled climate change. Rising temperatures increase the evaporation of water into vapor, and warmer air can take on greater amounts of water vapor than cooler. When all that vapor finally condenses into rain (or snow), there's more of it to dump onto the communities below.

This new normal of extreme precipitation is hitting Northeastern states the hardest, followed by the upper Midwest, as this map from Climate Central shows:

Map of heavy rainfall increase across the USA, 2014
Extreme Precipitation in US Increasing
Data from the latest National Climate Assessment shows that brief, heavy downpours are increasing across the United States, with the Northeastern and Upper Midwestern states hardest hit.

 

There's another thing that's changed since the 1950s: the built environment. There is a lot more of it.

Officially Monday's rainfall in Detroit totaled 4.57 inches (some areas saw up to 6 inches), just missing the one-day rainfall record of 4.75 inches set in 1925. “But as bad as that Prohibition-era deluge must have been,” wrote WXYZ's Chris Edwards,“it fell on a city with a lot less paved area than we have now.”

The large amount of pavement in Detroit, or any large urban area, allows less rainfall to soak into the ground and creates more runoff during intense storms. So when considering how the metro area has changed since 1925, this may have been the most serious flooding event ever recorded in Detroit.

Much of U.S. highway system was planned and built in the mid-20th century with historical rain and snow conditions in mind. Now these same systems are decades-old, under-maintained, and failing under the new normal we've created of extreme precipitation.

Much of Detroit's infrastructure is due for major renovation, replacement, or re-imagining. While many civic leaders and engineering visionaries imagine a bright future for the Motor City, in the present the city's near-bankruptcy has meant tens of millions of dollars in neglected maintenance on basic urban necessities like water mains, as Michigan Radio reported in February. 

But it's unfair to single-out Detroit. Failing infrastructure and flash flooding are big problems for the entire U.S.

A day after the Michigan floods, these factors came together again in Tuesday's torrential downpours along the East Coast. A low pressure storm system crawling up the mid-Atlantic seaboard dropped several inches of rainfall within 24 hours on communities from Maryland to New York. A near-record 6.3 inches of rain fell at Baltimore-Washington International Airport–  trumped only by the amount of rain that fell during a 1933 hurricane, Climate Central reports. Some parts of greater Baltimore saw over 10 inches of rain before the storms moved off.

Flooded parking lot at BWI Airport
Baltimore Flooding
Sudden heavy rains swamped parts of the Baltimore area on August 12, including this parking lot at BWI Airport.

By 9:30 am Wednesday, the system was moving over the New York City metro area. Long Island recorded 13.26 inches of rainfall in less than a day, according to the National Weather Service, breaking the New York state record set during Hurricane Irene in 2011. Severe roadway flooding trapped many drivers on roadways, and cut off parts of eastern Long Island from the rest of the state. 

A flooded parking lot at LIRR Islip station due to periods of heavy rain during morning rush hour on Wednesday, August 13, 2014.
Flooding on Long Island
On August 13, 2014, torrential early morning rainfall flooded roads and highways in Long Island, New York, turning this parking lot at the Long Island Rail Road station in Islip into a lake. Water quickly rose in many areas, closing roads and highways and breaking the state's record for rainfall in a 24-hour period.
MTA

By Wednesday night the storm system was hoving over southeastern Maine. Over 4 inches of rain fell on Portland between 9 and 11pm; by midnight the deluge officially hit a record-setting 6.44 inches, according to the Portland Press Herald. (By some unofficial weather radar estimates, it topped 8 inches.) Thousands lost power as streets and basements flooded all over southern Maine.

And just so the U.S. heartland doesn't feel left out, here's a video of flash-flooding in Kearney, Nebraska shows a 9-foot-high wall of storm water breaking through tall glass doors to engulf a hospital dining room:

Kearny historically has averaged barely two inches of precipitation per month. But from Friday into Saturday, as nearly 4 inches of rain poured on Kearney in a few hours, spurring floods that "overwhelmed the city's storm sewer system and broke through the two-story ground-to-ceiling windows of the dinining room at Good Samaritan's Central Cafe," reported the Omaha World-Herald. "The hospital basement flooded, and there was water damage in other portions of the main building."

On Facebook the hospital expressed relief that no one was injured in the flash flood:

It’s hard to put into words exactly what Saturday’s conditions were like and just how seriously our facility was impacted. And to say that we’re emotional about the whole situation is a bit of an understatement. This security camera footage is just a glimpse into the series of events that unfolded Saturday.








Adorable Panda Babies And Other Amazing Images Of The Week

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Rare Panda Babies Are Also Ridiculously Cute
A species that is very much endangered, pandas have an extremely low reproductive rate. Scientists have gone through great pains to artificially inseminate them for decades, often with frustrating (and, occasionally, comedic) outcomes. But on July 29, a panda in the Chimelong Zoo in Guangzhou, China, gave birth to three babies, each smaller than the size of a human palm. They are the only surviving panda triplets; one of the cubs died after the last set was born in 1999. This birth was even more exciting to researchers because conception happened naturally.








A Machine That Sniffs Out American Cash

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photo of several U.S. $1 bills
Dollar Bills
iBid, State of Illinois

You know that unique smell of money. You're not imagining it, either; it's real, produced from a combination of the paper and ink it's printed with, and it's even detectable by sniffer dogs.

Now, one California company is hoping to build a portable machine that can smell out money as well as a dog can. KWJ Engineering is developing something it's calling the Bulk Currency Detection System, to detect fat stacks of laundered American cash as it's carried across national borders, Newsweek reports.

Law-enforcement dogs do that job now, but KWJ Engineering hopes to make the Bulk Currency Detection System cheaper than the cost of training a dog. Of course, there are many challenges for the company to overcome before a cash-sniffing machine becomes a viable alternative to a cash-sniffing canine. The machine will have to be small and light enough for a security officer to carry. It also has to analyze the air it samples quickly. The system is based on gas chromatograph-mass spectrometers, which are common in chemistry labs, but are normally slow-working and about the size of a baby bathtub.

To scientifically define the smell of money, KWJ engineers analyzed a hundred $1 bills in all life stages, from crisp and fresh to worn and oily, the BBC reports. The engineers sought a chemical profile that was common among all the bills, in spite of their differing histories.

It turns out the common profile is there, but it consists of just a tiny handful of chemicals among the thousands that the machine would encounter as it sweeps over people's suitcases and taped-up boxes. So distinguishing between the true smell of money, and the stink of everything else in life, will be a big challenge for KWJ, too.

[Newsweek, BBC]








Google Protects Its Undersea Fiber Optic Cables... From Sharks

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Shark bites are a real threat to undersea fiber-optic cables. No, really. Google actually goes so far as to wrap its wires in a Kevlar-like material to prevent damage from sharks, a company spokesperson recently disclosed. As you can see in the video below, the animals have been known to bite cables. 

For some reason, sharks seem to like fiber-optic cables more than old-fashioned coaxial copper wires, although it's unclear why ("Sharks have shown an inexplicable taste for the new fiber-optic cables that are being strung along the ocean floor," the New York Times wrote in 1987). It may be because the sharks are "encouraged by electromagnetic fields from a suspended cable strumming in currents," according to a report commissioned by the United Nations Environment Programme and the ever-sexy International Cable Protection Committee Ltd. Sharks can sense electromagnetic fields, so it's possible the cables alarm or interest them enough to take a chomp. 

Here's more about shark-cable interactions from the report:

Fish, including sharks, have a long history of biting cables as identified from teeth embedded in cable sheathings. Barracuda, shallow- and deep-water sharks and others have been identified as causes of cable failure. Bites tend to penetrate the cable insulation, allowing the power conductor to ground with seawater. Attacks on telegraph cables took place mainly on the continental shelf and continued into the coaxial era until 1964. Thereafter, attacks occurred at greater depths, presumably in response to the burial of coaxial and fibre- optic cables on the shelf and slope. Coaxial and fibre-optic cables have attracted the attention of sharks and other fish. The best-documented case comes from the Canary Islands, where the first deep-ocean fibre-optic cable failed on four occasions as a result of shark attacks in water depths of 1,060–1,900 m [3,478 to 6,234 feet].

Sharks may also bite the cables simply because they're curious. “If you had just a piece of plastic out there shaped like a cable, there’s a good chance they’d bite that too,” Chris Lowe, a researcher at California State University, told Wired.

Call me a crank, but it's somewhat comforting to me that in our modern age, where people "are living in the future" and communications can zip back and forth at the speed of light, that the cables which allow this to happen are still at risk from an ancient predator. "Where's your homework, Doug?" "Oh, sorry, a shark bit an undersea cable while I was emailing it to myself, so I don't have it."









The Scientifically Best Way To Get Through A Day On No Sleep

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photo of a man sitting at a desk with his eyes closed
How to Avoid This

Thank you, Science! Science is an endeavor by a bunch of flawed people, and the institution can be problematic, so I'm not usually one to say things like, "I love science!" This time, however, I'm grateful. New York Magazine talked with sleep researchers about the best strategies for getting through a busy day after getting little sleep the night before. Sure, we all know we should get more sleep, but short nights still happen sometimes. NYMag lays out all its tips in a timed schedule. Awesome. 

Here are a few of the more surprising strategies I learned:

  • Eat breakfast within an hour of getting up

  • Expose yourself (not like that) to natural light, but don't wear sunglasses

  • This terrifying tidbit, from 9 am:

    . . . this is it; it's the most alert you'll be all day. Best take advantage of it, because it's a very small window for the sleep-deprived brain, opening about one hour after waking and closing two hours later.

Check out NYMag for more, and check out the scientifically best times to drink coffee during the day, too.

[New York]








This Week In Numbers: Washington Stops Wildfires, California Greets Wolves, And Michigan Battles Floods

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Washington Burning
This image, taken by equipment on NASA's Aqua satellite on the evening of August 11, 2014, shows a dozen wildfires burning across the state of Washington (as well as a couple in Montana to the far right).
NASA Rapid Response MODIS
256,108: the area, in acres, of forest that the Carleton Complex wildfire has burned across Washington state. Officials on Monday declared the wildfire "100 percent contained."

1.7 million: acres of forest that have been scorched by wildfires this summer. It has been one of the quietest burning seasons in a decade. 

81 percent: proportion of the American populace who have detectable levels of bisphenol S in their urine, which some studies suggest is almost as toxic as the now-banned bisphenol A chemical.

Plastic bottles
jumpthemap / YouTube

1,200: number of miles traveled by OR-7, the first gray wolf spotted in California in 87 years.

The gray wolf hasn't been seen in California in 90 years... until recently.
Alexandra Ossola

99.5: percent of visible light absorbed by this material created by NASA, which hopes to use it as a coating for telescope components to absorb unwanted light.

An Array Of Materials NASA Is Testing In Space
The super-black material appears in circle "D."
NASA/Bill Squicciarini

3,200 feet: the maximum distance at which a person can stand and still feel the effects of an LRAD, a military-grade sonic cannon capable of shooting powerful beams of sound. LRADs were used this week in Ferguson, Missouri to keep protesters away from police armored vehicles.

Virginia Beach SWAT team members ride the running boards of an armored van to get into position to assault Building 1155.
NASA/Sean Smith

1,975: total number of cases, as of Thursday, of Ebola in West Africa's current outbreak, including 1,069 deaths. Sarah Fecht reports on four predictions made by a Columbia University epidemiologist.

Ebola Virus.
Ebola filaments (red) bud from a cell (blue).

1,024: number of Kilobots created by a Harvard University engineer. These tiny robots can swarm and self-assemble into any solid shape that the researchers request.

12: number of hours it takes for the Kilobots to make a shape. This robot army ain't going nowhere yet.

At Your Service
Michael Rubenstein, Harvard University

4.57 inches: the rainfall in Detroit last Monday. Nearly six weeks worth of rain fell on the region in one afternoon, and many other areas in the U.S. have been hit just as hard in recent times.

Detroit Flood.
On August 11, more than 4 inches of rain fell on Detroit in less than a day. Drivers abandoned their cars as many metro area highways turned into lakes.







The Week In Drones: Lollapalooza Lollygaggers, Archaeology Aids, And More

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A Hexarotor Drone
This drone is similar to that purchased by the San Jose Police Department, though it isn't the specific model.
Adrian Michael, via Wikimedia Commons

Here's a roundup of the week's top drone news, designed to capture the military, commercial, non-profit, and recreational applications of unmanned aircraft.

Droneapalooza

A drone was spotted in the skies above Chicago, specifically above the Lollapalooza music festival. The Federal Aviation Administration is looking into it. According to the drone's pilot, the aircraft only flew to 230 feet in elevation, well below the 400-foot ceiling recommended for model airplanes. The FAA instead will investigate, not for the altitude, but for the danger of the setting: over a populated area.

Watch the drone's footage, including a shout-out from Skrillex, below.

Model Airplane Day

Tomorrow is National Model Airplane Day, sponsored by the Academy of Model Aeronautics (AMA). The day is designed to celebrate the hobby and its history. In support, the FAA released a statement on safety that strongly alludes to the criticism the FAA has received in its handling of drone regulations.

“Safe model aircraft operations bring the joy of recreational or hobby flying to more people than ever before,” said FAA Administrator Michael Huerta. “We commend AMA for its outstanding work. AMA’s detailed procedures promote safe model operations and serve as an excellent resource for AMA members and non-members alike."

This quote is then followed by a link to the "Academy of Model Aeronautics National Model Aircraft Safety Code," which emphasizes the 400 foot ceiling recommendation.

Farmers Excited Over Robots

At the Farmfest tradeshow in Morgan, Minnesota, farmers were treated to a seminar on the agricultural benefits of drones, sponsored by none other than John Deere. Some of the low-hanging fruit in agricultural drone use is simple photography of farmland, allowing farmers to see anomalies in the land  by the coloration of their plants. At a vineyard in California, the vintners found a section of grapes getting more water than they anticipated, allowing them to harvest that section sooner. Besides photography, there are other potential benefits from drone use. Sweetener company Stevia First plans to fly light-shining drones over their stevia crops at night, goading the plants into growing faster.

Protectors Of The Past

In Peru, a technology of the future can save the past from the pressures of the present. As people claim more and more land they encroach on unprotected historical sites. To balance the needs of the people today with a desire to preserve the past, archeologists with the Minister of Cultural Heritage are enlisting drones as a cheap and fast way to photograph the ruins, and a computer program stitches the images together into 3-D models of the sites. By knowing they're there, it makes it that much easier to preserve the ruins for future generations.

Watch video of it below:

San Jose Police Disputes FAA On Drone Use

The San Jose police department acquired a drone in January and then kept it secret, according to recently released documents. While there are other police departments that fly drones, that drone use is subject to prior FAA approval. Previously hobbyists have disputed the FAA's authority over private drone use, and it's possible that the San Jose Police Department could challenge that ambiguity as well. It doesn't look like that's the case, however.

Weirder is that the grant to buy the drone came from the Department of Homeland Security, which means one part of the federal government funded the drone before another granted the police department approval to fly it.

San Jose Police Department's own logic hinges on a semantic debate: According to a memo circulated among police in March, they reasoned "The UAV is not a drone. Drones are regulated by the FAA. The FAA doesn't regulate our device."

Did I miss any drone news? Email me at kelsey.d.atherton@gmail.com








How To Raise Your Own Edible Crickets

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Crunchy and delicious.
Science Photo Library/Getty Images

In April, Big Cricket Farms became the first U.S. company to raise insects for human consumption. It’s no surprise crickets are leaping onto our plates—they require less space and fewer resources than cows or chickens, and they’re packed with protein and other nutrients. But farmed crickets and premade cricket foods can be expensive. Why not breed your own crunchy critters instead? (Don't miss our recipe for cooking crickets, below.)

Instructions

1) Set terrariums near heat. In one, put crickets, food, water, soil dishes, and egg carton.

2) Periodically, check the soil for eggs. When found, move dishes to the other terrarium. 

3) When the eggs hatch, return baby crickets and dishes of fresh soil to first terrarium.

4) To eat, grab young crickets with no wings. Freeze for 24 hours, blanch, and start cooking! 

Materials

• Two 14-gallon terrariums with mesh lids (or clear boxes with mesh-covered air holes)

• Heat source at about 85°F

• 30 crickets 

• Organic whole grains for food

• Soaked sponges for water

• Two shallow plastic dishes filled with pesticide-free soil

• Egg carton to vary landscape

• Spray bottle to moisten habitat

Stats

Time: 6 weeks

Cost: $22

Difficulty: 1

Recipe: Dry Roasted Chocolate-Covered Crickets

WARNING: You're not a lizard. Clean insects before consuming and eat them at your own risk. 

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








Ticks That Can Make People Severely Allergic To Meat Are Spreading In The U.S.

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The Lone Star tick
CDC
Mike Abley will always remember the last hamburger he ever ate. It was more than 20 years ago, and he recalls the meat being particularly juicy and delicious.

But a few hours after dinner, Abley started itching like mad. He burst into hives, his tongue swelled, and he eventually passed out, prompting his wife to call 911. At the hospital, doctors determined he had gone into anaphylactic shock—a potentially deadly allergic reaction.

Fortunately, Abley pulled through, and he later met with an allergist to determine what had caused the terrifying episode. A series of tests revealed something strange: The hamburger had triggered the reaction. And it wasn’t just the beef he was allergic to; it was practically all red meat.

“I’ve always said I think it’s karma,” says Abley, now 73, a lifetime resident of Virginia. “My family have been cattle ranchers for generations.”

Abley is one of at least 1,500 people in the United States who suffer allergic reactions after eating meat, and doctors interviewed by Popular Science believe such cases are on the rise. But what’s even more bizarre is the source of the allergy. The condition, called alpha-gal allergy, is caused by the bite of a Lone Star tick—a species traditionally found mostly in the Southern United States but has spread farther north in recent years. 

And as the tick spreads, more and more cases of meat allergies are being reported. In one area of Long Island, New York, for example, one doctor we spoke with has seen and increase of 200 cases in the past three years—up from practically zero in 2011.

The distribution of the Lone Star tick

The connection between Lone Star ticks and meat allergies in America first came to light in 2008. At the time, Thomas Platts-Mills and Scott Commins, both allergy specialists at the University of Virginia Health System, were trying to understand why some of their patients had developed a severe allergic reactions to cetuximab, an intravenous cancer-fighting drug called. The doctors eventually learned that Immunoglobulin E (IgE) antibodies in their patients were reacting with a sugar in the drug called alpha-gal. It was peculiar, since nearly everyone produces these antibodies, but not every patient reacted poorly to the drug.

Commins and Platts-Mills discovered these strange reactions occurred in patients who all hailed from the same place: the southeastern United States. So a lab technician Googled for medical conditions that fit geographically with the allergy they were seeing. Sure enough, they found that Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever—a tickborne disease—affected the same areas.

“We went back to our patients and started asking them about ticks,” says Commins, who, along with Platts-Mills, published their findings in 2008 in The New England Journal of Medicine. “It became clear over a series of months that this tick theory fit better than anything else we could find.”

“I've always said I think it’s karma, because my family have been cattle ranchers for generations.”

Around the same time, more and more healthy patients began reporting meat allergies (one of them being Abley). The symptoms began three to four hours after eating meals that contained beef or pork. Like the patients allergic to cetuximab, these patients were also predominantly from the Southeast, a region crawling with ticks. It didn’t take long for Platts-Mills and Commins to figure out the allergies were connected—and that the link was alpha-gal sugar.

Alpha-gal is a major component of cetuximab, but it’s also found in a far more common, natural source: non-primate mammals such as pigs, sheep, and cows. Humans don’t make the sugar, and we all have some form of immune response to it. In fact, alpha-gal is the main barrier preventing cross-species organ transplants; the sugar, found in the animals’ organ tissues, triggers rejection in humans.

Yet most people have no biological reaction to eating livestock, which makes the tickborne meat allergy so surprising. Moreover, the patients of Commins and Platts-Mills weren’t born with the condition, and they reportedly showed symptoms much later in life—a unique trait for an allergy.

So the doctors finally asked the question they'd wanted to since discovering a potential connection: Are ticks actually causing this alpha-gal allergy? In a series of revealing experiments, they sampled blood from their patients with meat allergies and combined them with various tick extracts. They discovered that the IgE antibodies in their patients’ blood samples binded to the Lone Star tick extract; meanwhile, the same antibodies from people without the meat allergy did not glom onto the tick proteins. So in some way, these tick bites could manipulate people’s immune systems, changing the IgE response.

Alpha-gal (galactose-alpha-1,3-galactose) is a sugar found in the tissues of most non-primate mammals. Humans don't make it, and we all have an immune response to it -- but those with meat allergies have especially severe reactions.

Despite identifying the vessel for the mysterious meat allergy, Commins and Platts-Mills​ say many questions remain unanswered about the condition.

“How do does the tick induce this IgE response, essentially breaking tolerance, and why does it take four hours for symptoms to show?” says Platts-Mills. One hypothesis has to do with fat absorption in the body, which takes approximately two hours. Whatever the case, he says “those two questions will keep us occupied for a long time.” It's also uncertain if all Lone Star ticks carry some factor that causes the condition, or if only some do (as is the case with Lyme disease, which is caused by a bacterium).

As Commins and Platts-Mills struggle to understand the mechanisms behind this allergy, the number of cases they’re seeing is trending upward—and the allergy is no longer confined to the South. Dr. Erin McGintee, an allergist on New York’s Long Island who’s worked with the UVA team, has diagnosed approximately 200 cases of this allergy in the area she works. She thinks wild turkeys may be to blame; they were reintroduced to Long Island a couple of years ago for hunting enthusiasts, and the birds may have carried the Lone Star tick with them. A rising deer population may also explain the tick’s spread, as they are also big carriers of the parasites.

Whatever the cause, McGintee expects to see more cases in the future: “I don’t think it’s a nationwide epidemic, but as the Lone Star tick geographical distribution increases, I think it’s going to be a regional epidemic in many areas.”

"I think it’s going to be a regional epidemic in many areas."

Meanwhile, many of the meat allergy sufferers have had to adjust to a new normal. Abley initially refused to accept his diagnosis, experimenting with different meats to see if he could tolerate them. He tried pork and lamb, but both caused reactions. He finally narrowed down his list of acceptable meats to chicken and seafood, but all others he had to avoid consistently, lest he wind up in the hospital.

So he decided to become a vegetarian, for the most part—not by choice, but to save his life. Now, whenever Abley and his wife go out to eat, he must be very forthright with his waiters: His food can’t contain red meat of any kind, or he could have another attack. Even foods like JELL-O are off the table, because they contain gelatin, which is made from meat byproducts.

“It’s been really, really difficult 'cause I am a meat eater,” says Abley. “Fortunately I live in an area where seafood is plentiful. But I love beef and I love pork, so I missed it for years."

However, there is a spot of good news for those who fall prey to the Lone Star tick’s bite. The effects seem to be temporary, lasting a few months or a few years—as long as you don’t get bit again. For Abley, that’s not really an option, given his location, but he says the pros outweigh the cons.

“It’s possible that if we move some place where I didn’t get tick bites, I could eventually get over this. But I live on a small farm in the middle of the woods in Surry County, Virginia, and I’d rather have the allergy than leave that.”








Why Scientists Want To Throw Lawn Darts At Mars

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The ExoLance Concept.
"Arrows" fall from a spacecraft, penetrate the ground, and expose the life-detecting equipment inside.
Explore Mars Inc.

Mars almost definitely has water below its surface, and it’s possible that it might have life there too -- buried deep in the soil, where it’s protected from dryness, radiation and temperature extremes. Unfortunately, NASA doesn’t seem too interested in looking for it, preferring to look for "conditions" that might support life instead. But a group of aerospace and robotics engineers -- many of whom work for NASA, and one of whom even operates the Curiosity rover -- think NASA should be going with a more direct approach, and they're taking matters into their own hands.

“While current NASA missions are looking for evidence of past life, no NASA mission is planned to look for current life,” they write on their website. “We believe this is a mistake. To find life on Mars, we actually need to look for life on Mars.”

Part of the challenge of looking for life on Mars has been in designing the right equipment to dig for it. Curiosity was the first robot to drill into Martian soil. That was in 2013, and the hole was two inches deep. To search for life, robots have to dig a lot deeper than that. But scientists are struggling to come up with a design small enough to fit onto a rover yet robust enough to survive being pelleted with dust and radiation.

So, rather than sending giant drills to Mars, the scientists behind the ExoLance Indiegogo campaign are suggesting we dig in with big lawn darts instead.

The concept is fairly simple by NASA standards. ExoLance could theoretically piggyback on another mission to Mars, and as the spacecraft enters the Martian atmosphere, a dart dispenser (named “Quiver”) separates from the ride. As it falls to the ground at supersonic speeds, it drops the “arrows," which bury themselves 3 to 6 feet into the Martian soil.

"No NASA mission is planned to look for current life. We believe this is a mistake. To find life on Mars, we actually need to look for life on Mars."

As an arrow burrows, its nose separates from its back end to expose the life-detection equipment pack inside. This would be a metabolic test that can distinguish between living and non-living chemistry, the ExoLance team says. (Alternate strategies have proposed looking for DNA or ribosomal RNA.) Meanwhile, the hind end of the arrow stays above the surface, to communicate with an orbiter about the scientific findings.

Other scientists have come up with concepts similar to ExoLance. Last year one British team successfully fired darts at an 11-ton block of ice, at a speed of 760 miles an hour, to test whether the method was viable to hunt for life on icy moons like Europa and Enceladus.

Through crowdfunding, the ExoLance scientists are trying to raise $250,000 to build prototypes that they will then test by dropping them out of an airplane in the Mojave Desert. Phase II (which requires a lot more funding) will focus on developing the life-detection equipment.

“Once the concept is sufficiently tested and we have proven the viability of the mission concept, we will approach NASA, other space agencies, and potential commercial providers to carry ExoLance on one or more future Mars missions,” their website says.

The team has many challenges ahead of them, which they note on their campaign site. For one, the project will likely cost between $1 and $10 million overall. They’ll need to make sure the arrow penetrates to just the right depth; they’ll need a reliable power source; they’ll need to secure a chance to piggyback on another mission; and they’ll need to keep the payload as small and lightweight as possible to avoid extra costs.

The implications of looking for life on Mars are potentially huge. If we discover microorganisms there, it could rewrite biology, evolution, and history. It could also mean that life on Earth preceded life on Mars, or vice versa. Or, if we find nothing, at least it'll be a clear answer.








A Pocket Fitness Tracker That Studies Your Breathing

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Spire
Brian Klutch
Fitness trackers use suites of sensors and algorithms to turn data from your training regimen into (hopefully) meaningful information about how race-ready you are. But for the rest of the time—when you’re sitting at a desk—there’s not much for devices to do. Spire, a clip-on tracker that looks like a small, silvery stone, monitors a more subtle aspect of your physiology: your breath. By measuring the small vibrations and abdominal movements caused by inhaling and exhaling, Spire’s analytics software can determine how stressed or focused you are, the company says. If you haven’t taken a deep breath in a while, Spire’s smartphone app will kindly remind you. It will even guide you through a calming exercise.

Spire

Price: $150

Battery life: Seven days

Charging: Qi wireless

How are breath and emotion connected?

Vagal Tone: The term refers to activity of the vagus nerve—a cranial nerve that originates in the brain stem and connects with and regulates the resting states of many of the body’s organs, including the heart. Since vagal tone cannot be measured directly, researchers assess other biological processes, such as respiratory sinus arrhythmia, or changes in heart rate during a breathing cycle. During stressful situations, heart rate varies more wildly.

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









FYI: Can Praying Mantises Eat Hummingbirds?

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I was recently alerted to a video showing a praying mantis attacking a hummingbird.

"Wait," I thought, "mantises can catch hummingbirds?" This seemed unlikely to me, due to the size difference. I searched and found several videos purporting to show a hummingbird "murdered" by a mantis, or something similar. Almost all of these videos presented a mantis holding onto a hummingbird and appearing to eat it -- but none of them showed the moment of attack itself. 

I kept looking and finally found this video which does show a mantis successfully catching a hummingbird and beginning to gnaw on it. Unfortunately, it's impossible to say with 100 percent certainty that the mantis would have won the match, because the maker of the video decided to flick the mantis, sending the insect and its avian prey tumbling. (Go ahead and skip to 0:36 to see the mantis strike.)

But, after a bit of research, it seems pretty clear that mantises are capable of catching hummingbirds. In this 1982 study in Biological Reviews, the authors report that praying mantises can indeed catch small hummingbirds. "Praying mantises reach a length of 98 mm [3.9 inches] and may feed on small birds," the authors write. However, "the actual observations in the literature are inconclusive as the captured birds were ultimately released by concerned ornithologists," they continued, somewhat perplexingly, since it is generally frowned upon for scientists to intervene in the lives of the animals they study.

It makes more sense if you consider that these ornithologists -- all bird lovers, no doubt -- likely observed these things in passing and weren't specifically studying avian-insect interactions. I wonder if a mantis specialist had witnessed this: What might he or she do?

Here's a video of a mantis catching a hummingbird, and promptly falling off the bird feeder, perhaps to savor its bird-treat on the ground... or maybe not. (Jump to 0:46).

There's another account (albeit second-hand) in The Wilson Journal of Ornithology of a ruby-throated humming bird being caught by a praying mantis. But this man also helped the hummingbird escape. Another 1949 anecdote from The Auk records a praying mantis catching a hummingbird, and a more modern piece from Birdwatcher's Digest recounts one bird lover's tail of the same thing, with photos. This may be the only account I've seen where the author/witness didn't try to free the bird. 

It all goes to show that praying mantises are not to be toyed with, at least by creatures that are approximately mantis-sized or smaller. These insects have also been known to attack and eat small mice

In celebration of the mantis, here is "True Facts About The Mantis," which is at least mostly factual. 








The 10 Best Things Coming This September

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Parrot's Jumping Sumo
Courtesy Matt Wiechec

Each month at Popular Science, we sift through a mountain of new products—everything from gadgets and tools to books and movies—so that you don't have to.

View the gallery below to see 10 of our favorite things hitting the shelves (or are already on them) this September.

This article orignially appeared in the September 2014 issue of Popular Science.








South Africa's New AHRLAC Fighter Is A Drone Alternative

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AHRLAC In Flight
Its name is an acronym that means "Advanced High‐performance Reconnaissance and Surveillance Aircraft."
Aerosud & Paramount Group

Powered by a pusher propeller, covered in pixel camouflage, and furnished with stadium-seating for its two crew members, the Advanced High Performance Reconnaissance and Surveillance Aircraft (AHRLAC) looks like an alternate history version of a World War I fighter. The result of a collaboration between South Africa's Aerosud aviation firm and the Paramount Group, the AHRLAC is designed as a cheap alternative to the big name in military surveillance right now: drones.

The AHRLAC is designed for flexible roles, depending on how it's equipped. These range from surveillance to light attack, which could make it a useful tool for border patrol, some forms of counter-insurgency warfare, and, perhaps most relevantly, anti-poaching activities. The pusher propeller design -- in which the propellers are mounted behind their respective engines -- helps the plane fly slowly, an important task for surveillance aircraft. (Pusher propellers were also used on the infamous Predator drone.) AHRLAC's maximum speed is about 310 mph, and it can fly for up to 7.5 hours. It's made to carry everything from surveillance cameras and radar to rockets, flares, and some missiles. 

The manufacturers boast that AHRLAC is the "first ever aircraft to be fully designed and developed in Africa," though that claim is contested. Several features make it well suited for rural use: A short takeoff distance of only 1,800 feet and high wings mean it can even take off from fields with some underbrush.

Watch a video of it below:








Google Can Now Delete Your Past -- But How Much Should Be Erased?

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Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales is part of a new advisory board formed by Google that will help establish new guidelines for removal requests.
Wertuose via Wikimedia Commons
In the late 1990s, Mario Costeja González ran into financial trouble and a bank foreclosed on his house in Spain. Eventually he put the situation behind him, but more than a decade later, newspaper notices of the subsequent auction still popped up in Web searches for his name. So in 2010, González filed a complaint against the paper and Google, arguing that the foreclosure had been long-since resolved and should be scrubbed from their sites. The European Court of Justice (ECJ) ruled in May that González can’t compel the paper to remove any accurate information, but he and other private citizens may request that search engines remove erroneous, inadequate, or irrelevant links from their results. The landmark decision granted Gonzalez what’s known as the right to be forgotten. 

This legal doctrine asserts that people should be able to leave their past in the past. Although the concept has roots in centuries-old French law, the growth of the Web and social sharing in the last decade has prompted legal experts to reexamine it. The ease with which Google serves up a de facto profile of any private citizen is enough to make many people leery of how their lives look online. The ECJ ruling, however, is a major overcorrection. It could allow individuals to revise or censor their histories at will. 

Google received more than 41,000 removal requests in the first four days it accepted them, and began deleting links in early July. “The court has handed Google a gavel and given it lower-court status,” says Meg Ambrose, assistant professor of international technology policy at Georgetown University. To help establish guidelines and processes for this new digital gray area, the company formed an advisory board that includes Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales and former Spanish Data Protection Agency director José-Luis Piñar.

The ease with which Google offers a profile of anyone makes many people leery of how their lives look online.

One likely suggestion from the committee: Make search results more timely and relevant. Google has been making those types of refinements for years; in 2011, for example, the company placed an increased value on timeliness. This June, it boosted the mobile-search rank of sites with designs responsive to mobile browsers—a revision that could bury outdated hits. Lesser-known search engines have pushed this idea even further. NowRelevant, for one, only shows results posted in the past 14 days. 

Still, this doesn’t get to the root of the problem: How do we best deal with outdated content? Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, professor at the Oxford Internet Institute, who’s been called the godfather of the right to be forgotten, has suggested that publishers assign content-expiration dates based on the lifespan of the information’s relevance. He envisions a new profession focused on the proper handling of data—each company would employ one such handler, the same way it would have an accountant or office manager. In essence, he wants a set of standards that leave the decisions about how data is used to its publishers. This would curtail censoring from individuals guided only by self-interest, and eliminate the prospect of sweeping, arbitrary deletions by Google, which should never have been given final say to begin with.

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








This Bacterium Shoots Out Wires From Its Body To Power Itself

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microscope images of bacteria with thin strings attached to them
Bacteria and their Nanowires
These photos show two bacteria, labeled B and C, and their nanowires. The glowing inset images are pictures of the same bacteria, taken with a different microscope technique.
Sahand Pirbadian et al., PNAS 2014

Power companies channel electrons around using copper wires. As it turns out, certain bacteria appear to do something similar. In the absence of oxygen, a number of common soil bacteria species grow tiny nanowires, along which they push electrons to nearby rocks. This movement of the electrons produces energy, which the bacteria use to make ATP -- the molecule all cells use to power everything they do. However, this energy production strategy is rather unusual; outside of these species, most cells, including human cells, produce their energy using internal processes, not external ones.

That said, scientists have long known about these bacteria that transfer electrons to minerals. It's just that the details of the process were hazy. After all, it's difficult to visualize bacterial nanowires, which can be just 10 nanometers wide. But now, one team of physicists and biologists has imaged Shewanella oneidensis soil bacteria growing nanowires live. Yes, as in "live on TV." Along the way, the scientists discovered what the nanowires are made of. The wires are actually formed from the bacteria's outer membranes; the species has two membranes that form their "skin."

"What the cell is doing is actually morphing a little bit," Mohamed El-Naggar, a physicist at the University of Southern California who led the new study, tells Popular Science. "It's extending its outer membrane in the shape of a long tube." Previously, scientists had thought bacterial nanowires were made of pili, hair-like appendages that are common on single-celled organisms.

"This solves a long-standing mystery about how exactly does the charge move on these structures," El-Naggar says. Bacterial cell membranes have proteins embedded in them called cytochromes, which—ta-da!—are known to pass electrons to one another. Pili don't have cytochromes. (Nevertheless, there's evidence that other species may truly use pili to make their nanowires, El-Naggar says.)

El-Naggar has studied nanowire-making bacteria for several years now. In 2012, Popular Sciencenamed him one of the Brilliant 10 young scientists of the year for his work. Studies like his could one day lead to bioelectric devices that combine both silicon components and biological ones. After all, if there are bacteria that are able to transfer electrons to rocks, then they could also transfer electrons to components in a circuit. Engineers are also trying to incorporate nanowire-making bacteria into fuel cells.

There's still plenty of work to do on both fronts. There's no guarantee bacterial fuel cells or circuits will be more efficient than the ones being used today. But the idea is that if biological circuits do work, "you kind of end up getting the best of both worlds," El-Naggar says. The resulting circuit could have both components that fix themselves and replicate themselves (from the bacteria) as well as super-precise components (the man-made parts).

El-Naggar and his team published their work today in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.








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