Protist T. thermophila, Imaged with a Lattice Light-Sheet Microscope

Click here to enlarge.

Betzig Lab, HHMI

There's a new microscope in town and the images it produces are stunning. An international team of engineers and biologists is announcing it's made a microscope that's able to see phenomena such as single proteins diffusing through thickly-packed cells, and the movement of the fibers that pull cells apart when they divide. Everything remains alive and active under the microscope.

"The results provide a visceral reminder of the beauty and the complexity of living systems," the team wrote in a paper, published online today, that describes the microscope. In other words, biology is beautiful.

The cool thing about the new 'scope is that it's able to record both small features and swift movements. Normally those two qualities are trade-offs. If you want to make an instrument that sees in high resolution, it'll be slower, because it needs to take more measurements. In addition, powerful microscopes often pump tons of light radiation into the samples it images, killing living cells.

The new microscope, called a lattice light-sheet microscope, solves two problems at once by using one light beam that's divided into seven parts. Each seventh of a light beam covers its own portion of the sample, so users don't have to wait for a single light beam to sweep over the whole sample. The divided beam also ensures samples get a lesser dose of radiation than they normally would, although engineers didn't think of that when they first tested the divided-light idea.

"What was shocking to us was that by spreading the energy out across seven beams instead of one, the phototoxicity went way down," the microscope's lead engineer, Eric Betzig, said in a statement. (Betzig won a Nobel Prize this year for other advances in microscopy.) "What I learned from that experience is that while the total dose of light you put on the cell is important, what's far more important is the instantaneous power that you put on the cell," he said.

The light a lattice light-sheet microscope uses is also unusual. It uses a Bessel beam, which is a special kind of laser light that doesn't diffract, or splinter. (Learn more about that here.) The Bessel beam is arranged so that it makes a lattice of light—yep, like the top of a cherry pie—that's exceptionally thin. The thinness gives it its high spatial resolution.

Betzig and his colleagues made a Bessel-beam microscope in 2011, but recently improved the instrument by adding algorithms that fix blurry spots that used to appear in the microscope's images.

Okay, enough explanation. On to the images!

Here's a white blood cell squidging through a matrix of collagen fibers. (Pretty sure "squidging" is the scientific term for this.)

Here's a series of images that show an immune-system cell, called a T cell, approaching a target cell for destruction. (T cell in orange, target in blue. The scale bar represents 4 micrometers.) Go, T cell, go! 

T Cell Approaches Target Over 200 Seconds

Betzig Lab, HHMI. Click here to see this image larger.

Here's a closer look at that T cell from different angles. Look at that gaping maw. The scale bar here represents 5 micrometers.

T Cell

Betzig Lab, HHMI. Click here to see this image larger.

A fruit fly embryo, imaged while it's developing. Weird.

Lastly, a cell in the middle of dividing. The orange stuff is the cell's DNA, which it is now dividing into two portions. The short strands all around the DNA are fibers called microtubules, which help pull everything apart. The microtubules are color-coded by how fast they're moving. The red microtubules are the fastest, moving at a speedy 1.5 micrometers per second.

Cell in Anaphase

Betzig Lab, HHMI

Scientists who want to use the new microscope can apply here. The microscope is housed at Janelia Farm, a private research campus in Virginia, and it's free to use. There are also new lattice light-sheet microscopes at Harvard University and the University of California, San Francisco.

To The Moon

davejdoe vis Flickr CC by 2.0

The first privately funded lunar mission launched today. The mission involves sending a 31-pound spacecraft called 4M, fitted with an antenna, small computer, and radiation sensor, on a Chinese rocket to Earth's satellite. Funded by private company LuxSpace, the craft will fly by the moon transmitting a signal back to Earth that can be picked up by amateur radio enthusiasts. The project is hitchhiking on a Chinese rocket transporting China's latest lunar spacecraft, which is also scheduled to fly by the moon -- another step in their moon exploration program.

4M began broadcasting exactly 77.8 minutes after it's launch at 1:59 PM Eastern Daylight Time. LuxSpace is hosting a contest to see who can recieve the most messages from the private payload before the mission ends (You can compete either as an individual or as a team.). The messages sent from the payload will be sequences of tones broadcast at different frequencies. Even if you don't want to participate in the contest, you can track the mission's progress online. 

The mission is scheduled to last for eight days, but it could go on for longer. "The secondary power supply of 4M comprises solar cells and would extend the mission life to keep 4M operational in an orbital region where few spacecraft have been before," LuxSpace system engineer Hubert Moser told Space.com. "Nevertheless, this secondary power supply (therefore, life of 4M) depends strongly on the attitude of the last stage of the launcher, i.e. the availability of sunlight."   

4M stands for the Manfred Memorial Moon Mission, named in honor of Manfred Fuchs, who founded the company OHB, the parent company of LuxSpace. The payload was relatively inexpensive too; the entire cost of the mission is less than six figures. 

Helping Hand

Takao Someya Group/University of Tokyo

Engineers make disaster-response robots precisely because robots are able to work in situations that are too dangerous for humans. Now the humans have got a new idea: Perhaps robots could carry off waste from Ebola patients, or bury the bodies of people who have died from Ebola in West Africa. Roboticizing such tasks would keep people from having to touch bodies when they're most infectious.

Working with the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, robot engineers will meet early next month to talk about whether they could repurpose existing machines for these tasks and more, Computerworld reports. The engineers will talk about how robots can work in both West African clinics and U.S. ones. The proposition faces many challenges, which Computerworld outlines. It may turn out that today's robots aren't sophisticated enough to help out in this Ebola outbreak at all—we'll see.

Of course, some hospitals do have a few simple robots already. There are telepresence robots, which let doctors check on patients from afar. That may be especially helpful for Ebola cases in the U.S., where few physicians have encountered the virus before. In both the U.S. and abroad, telepresence may make isolation and quarantine less lonely, and isolated folks more likely to stick to the rules. Earlier this month, there was a bit of coverage about a hospital "robot" that sends out powerful UV light to decontaminate rooms, although we would call it more of a wheeled machine. It doesn't move on its own and it doesn't seem to be able to take very sophisticated commands.

Defense One reports on more complex robots that may work for Ebola aid, including a robot, built for the Tokyo Fire Department in 2008, that's designed to carry bodies. It's unclear whether that robot will be useful, however. It depends on whether the friends and family of those who died would feel okay with it handling their loved ones. Engineers attending the workshops in November will focus on listening to what people on the ground say they need, Texas A&M computer scientist Robin Murphy told Computerworld. It sounds like they'll have a lot to talk about.

[Computerworld]

Ebola ward in Lagos, Nigeria.

CDC Global via Flickr CC By 2.0

The Ebola outbreak in West Africa is growing exponentially. The latest reports suggest that at least 9,915 people have been infected, and 4,555 have died. And this is just the beginning. Previously, the CDC estimated that a startling 1.4 million West Africans could be infected by January.  

The outbreak is already considered to be out of control, and according to a paper published today in The Lancet Infectious Diseases, the window of opportunity to avoid a total catastrophe is closing. They calculated that sending aid immediately to Montserrado, Liberia, could prevent up to 98,000 cases of Ebola. However, if the international community stalls for another two weeks, the same amount of aid would prevent 54,000 deaths at best.

The reason why comes down to some pretty simple math. (Don’t worry, you won’t need a calculator.)

The study authors -- epidemiologists from Yale as well as Liberia’s Ministry of Health and Social Welfare -- charted the spread of Ebola between June 14 and September 23 in Montserrado, a county in Liberia that has been one of the hardest-hit by the virus. The researchers used that growth rate to forecast how many new cases could be expected in the coming months. The model predicts a worst-case scenario of 170,000 new cases and 90,000 deaths in Montserrado by December 15.

Next, they estimated the impact various types of aid could have in preventing those new cases. Anti-Ebola measures include building treatment centers to care for the sick, identifying and monitoring people who’ve come in contact with Ebola patients, and distributing kits that help people set up at-home isolation wards for when hospital beds are not available.

Up to now, the U.S. has pledged the largest amount of Ebola aid, setting up 17 treatment centers that will isolate and treat 1,700 patients in total. Unfortunately, the researchers found that this level of aid is “woefully inadequate”.

To avert the worst of the epidemic, Montserrado would need nearly three times that amount of aid—setting up 4,800 new beds, while also scaling up contact tracing by five times its current levels and distributing home isolation kits. And that’s just to prevent 98,000 cases in Montserrado; it’s not enough to stop the outbreak in its tracks, and it doesn’t include the rest of Liberia, or Guinea or Sierra Leone where the outbreak is also raging.

To prevent those 98,000 cases, the aid would need to be sent by October 31, according to the researchers. To wait until November 15 would mean that the same amount of aid could only prevent 54,000 cases at best. The same aid, if it had been sent on October 15, could have prevented 137,000 cases.

That’s because every West African who contracts Ebola infects two people, on average. Then each of those two cases infects two more people, and so on, making the outbreak grow exponentially. Delivering aid sooner rather than later interrupts the exponential growth curve, preventing more cases in the long run.

“The key take-home message for readers is this: we have no time to waste,” epidemiology David Fisman, from the University of Toronto, wrote in a commentary. “The urgency of timely intervention in the Ebola epidemic cannot be overstated.” 

Ebola predictions

This graph shows the number of Ebola cases that could be averted by building new treatment centers (ETCs) and increasing contact tracing (on a scale of 0 to 4B, 0= baseline, 4B=200%) in Montserrado, Liberia. The graph shows that deploying aid on October 31 (shown in black) can save thousands more lives than deploying the same aid on November 15 (blue). Click to enlarge.

J.A. Lewnard et al./Lancet Infectious Diseases

It's unclear whether the predictions made for Montserrado could be extrapolated for the rest of Ebola-stricken West Africa. The region has been one of the hardest-hit, accounting for 1,600 cases and 1,000 deaths. But because 90 percent of Montserrado residents live in the capital of Monrovia, study author Joseph Lewnard explained in an email that controlling the epidemic there (and in other urban centers, such as Conakry and Freetown) could be more straightforward than in rural areas:

Lewnard also added that since September 23, Montserrado increased their number of hospital beds to 620 and scaled-up their distribution of protection kits, so the worst-case scenario is less likely now.  

Nevertheless, the study paints a bleak picture of the situation in West Africa. One ray of hope is in the form of two experimental vaccines, which will begin trials in West Africa in January. But unless those vaccines prove to be safe and effective, treatment centers and contact tracing will be the best bet in the fight against Ebola during the coming year.

Fisman, in his commentary, points out that ultimately, the international community will help itself by helping West Africa. CDC director Tom Friedan appears to agree:

We can’t get to zero risk in U.S. until we stop the #Ebola epidemic at its source in Liberia, Sierra Leone & Guinea.

— Dr. Tom Frieden (@DrFriedenCDC) October 22, 2014

With the rise of open-source software and hardware, 3-D printing, and crowdfunding, it’s easier than ever to be a maker. Over the past year, some inventors have created potentially world-changing projects.

Popular Science wants to celebrate these amazing builders, tinkerers, and DIY enthusiasts. That’s why we’re featuring them in our annual Invention Awards issue. And to find the best of the best, we need you to submit your amazing creations.

We want to know about game-changing innovations developed by independent inventors (not big corporate R&D labs). We’re looking for people who are designing revolutionary tools, crowdfunding fantastically useful gadgets, or building life-saving products and technologies. Their creations solve real-world problems in interesting and original ways.

Enter the ninth annual Popular Science Invention Awards by filling out our entry form at popsci.com/inventionawardsform. And if you have friends who might want to enter, please share this post (popsci.com/inventionawards2015).

From these entries, our editors will select 10 finalists to be featured in Popular Science, the world's largest science and technology magazine, and on our website—an audience of many millions, plus those of TV, radio, and web shows that often highlight our finalists.

Before submitting, please carefully read our rules below, and note that our entry form will close after 11:59pm ET on December 1, 2014.

Rules:

• There is no fee to submit, and there are no prizes.
• Inventions must be the work of independent inventors or small teams.
• Inventions must be new, not just minor tweaks to existing objects or processes.
• There must be a working prototype, or some demonstration that an invention works.
• Inventions on their way to becoming commercial products are welcome, but they can't already be for sale (or have shipped preorders or rewards, as in the case of crowdfunding) before April 2015.

Previous Winners:

• 8th Annual Invention Awards (2014)
• 7th Annual Invention Awards (2013)
• 6th Annual Invention Awards (2012)
• 5th Annual Invention Awards (2011)

Guidelines and tips:

• An invention should be poised to create a market or disrupt an existing one—not be a solution in search of a problem.
• Pictures of or relating to your invention are worth a thousand words (and videos even more!).
• We love inventions that are physical objects and are highly visual, not abstract processes or concepts (e.g. computer code). This helps us show off the winners in print and online.
• Popular Science will not publish an entry without notifying the inventor first. As part of our rigorous vetting and fact-checking process, we will also contact outside experts to verify the technology and significance of the invention prior to publication.
• Intellectual property (IP) protection is the responsibility of the entrant.

The sooner you submit, the better your chances. The entry form closes after 11:59pm ET on December 1, 2014, but we start compiling the candidates... now!

As the winter months approach, darkness is falling earlier and earlier. Do not bike gentle into that good night! By spending a few hours tinkering with LEDs, you can outfit your dull wheels with hypnotically glowing rings.

Some kits on the market use customizable circuit boards to form animations as the wheel spins. Wiring your wheel to display a lighted circle is easier and cheaper, making it an ideal first foray into DIY electronics. Try varying the color, number, and placement of the LEDs to create intricate patterns. Or swap individual lights for a color-changing LED strip and an Arduino.

Even if you choose the simplest version of the project, it will still be visible in nighttime traffic. The video above shows a test-drive of this illuminated wheel—which bike-commuting Popular Science editors built in a candy-fueled electronics session.

You can choose how many LEDs your wheels need. The number should be six or less, and ideally a factor of the number of spokes on your wheel. 

Materials

• 3 to 6 LEDs
• Measuring tape
• 3 to 6 resistors
• Insulated wire
• Heat-shrink tubing
• Electrical tape
• 9-volt battery
• 9-volt battery connector
• Zip ties
• Black duct tape

Tools

• Measuring tape
• Lighter
• ire stripper
• Soldering Iron

WARNING: When working with electronics, take care not to burn or electrocute yourself. When biking with electronics, follow the road rules and wear a helmet!

Instructions

1. Before selecting your resistors, check the LED packaging for its forward voltage and current. Subtract the voltage from nine, and then divide this number by the current in amps. For example, the pictured LEDs have a forward voltage of 3.1 volts and a current of 20 milliamps, or 0.02 amps, so this is the equation: (9 – 3.1)/0.02 = 295. Choose the nearest standard resistor value larger than this number—in this case, 330 ohms. You will need one resistor per LED, unless you choose to connect the LEDs in series.

2. If you have an even number of LEDs, and their forward voltage is three or less, you can use two lights per resistor—just wire two LEDs in series. (With a forward voltage of two or less, you can wire three lights in series.) In this case, adjust your resistor calculation: Instead of subtracting one light’s voltage from nine, subtract the voltages of both (or all three) before dividing by the current. With two LEDs in series, the prior example becomes (9 – 3.1 – 3.1)/0.02 = 140, so you could use one 150-ohm resistor for every two LEDs.

3. Mark evenly spaced spokes a few inches from the rim of the wheel. Placing the LEDs the same distance from the rim will create a glowing circle when the wheel spins.

4. Measure the distance between an LED’s position and the hub of the wheel. Cut two wires per LED to this length and strip both ends.

5. Twist one end of a wire around each LED’s longer leg (positive end) and twist one end of a resistor around its shorter leg (negative end). Connect the loose end of the resistor to a second piece of wire.

6. If you are wiring two LEDs in series, attach the negative leg of the first LED to the positive leg of the second with a length of wire, which must be long enough to stretch down to the hub of the wheel and then back up to the second LED. As before, attach the appropriate resistor and length of wire to the negative end of the second LED.

7. Solder the assembly together, mark its positive end, and cover the exposed joints with electrical tape and/or heat-shrink tubing. You can use the lighter to tighten the tubing—just make sure not to burn the components underneath.

8. Twist the positive ends of each LED assembly together and solder them to the positive wire of the 9-volt battery connector. Do the same for the negative ends and the negative wire. Cover the exposed wires with tubing and/or tape.

9. Firmly attach the 9-volt battery to the hub with duct tape and a zip tie. Leave room for the 9-volt battery connector to snap on.

10. Use duct tape and zip ties to securely attach LEDs and wires to the spokes. Snap the battery connector to the battery and give your wheel a spin!

This article originally appeared in the November 2014 issue of Popular Science, under the title “Light Up Your Bike”.

A Doctor Prepares a Measles Vaccine in Guinea, 2014

Photo by UNICEF Guinea on Flickr, CC BY-NC 2.0

The World Health Organization said it will have Ebola vaccines ready to give to hundreds of thousands of West Africans by the middle of next year, Reuters reports. Right now, there's no approved vaccine for Ebola. Researchers worked on vaccines before, but trials stalled because the disease is rare and because it mostly afflicts poor countries, so companies haven't been motivated to complete trials. 

WHO is now considering two vaccines that have started testing in humans, plus five additional vaccines that aren't yet ready for human trials. Typically, clinical trials of experimental vaccines and drugs take years to conduct, but drug companies and other groups are trying to figure out how to get these vaccines through faster.

A vaccine alone won't end the epidemic in West Africa, but WHO thinks it could "turn the tide," Reuters reports. Marie-Paule Kieny, the assistant director general for health systems and innovation at WHO, has volunteered for vaccine trials herself, Science reports.

Vaccines must meet an especially high bar before approval because healthy people get them. They're not like experimental treatments, which would go to people already at some risk for dying of Ebola. While both vaccines and treatments generally go through the same approval process, when regulators and ethicists make judgments about, "Do I want to approve this?" they're often much stricter about side effects when it comes to vaccines. An Ebola treatment might get approved even if it gives people severe side effects. An Ebola vaccine might not. Still, drug companies, WHO, and other organizations are figuring out ways to speed approval while keeping risks low, compared to the potential benefit of having a way to protect healthcare workers and the friends and family of people who fall ill with Ebola.

Science's reporting offers insight into some strategies companies may use. GlaxoSmithKline, a Belgium-based pharmaceutical company that's working on what's now the world's most advanced Ebola vaccine, has proposed using speedier quality-control tests. The company also plans to run two trials of its vaccines at once. The two trials will take place in different countries—Liberia and Sierra Leone—and will have different structures—the Liberia trial is more classically designed, with some study volunteers taking a placebo, while the Sierra Leone trial has a "stepped-up wedge" design that involves giving everybody the experimental shot, just at different times. It's a case of hedging their bets. "One of the trials may fail for logistics reasons," the head of GlaxoSmithKline's Ebola vaccine effort, Ripley Ballou, told Science. "We only have one shot to get this right.

Meanwhile, simply making enough vaccines is a challenge. The Ebola vaccine must be packaged in a biosafety level 2 facility, but GlaxoSmithKline is asking regulatory agencies whether they can relax some rules, Science reports. If not, the company says it will have trouble producing enough of the other vaccines it sells, such as measles, mumps, and rubella vaccines.

The first doses of the vaccine will go to people at high risk for contracting Ebola, including healthcare workers, contact tracers, and workers who bury the dead. A wider vaccination campaign may happen after that.

[Reuters, Science]

Poisoning Cancer

Encapsulated toxin-producing stem cells (in blue) help kill brain tumor cells in the tumor resection cavity (in green).

Khalid Shah, MS, PhD

In the realm of cancerous diseases, tumors affecting the brain can be particularly difficult to cure. Many are fast moving and take hold of key sections of the body’s most fundamental organ, rendering surgical removal extremely difficult or impossible.

Now, researchers at Harvard Stem Cell Institute have come up with a new method for battling these deadly brain tumors — by taking them apart from the inside out. In a new study, the scientists have engineered stem cells to secrete cancer-killing cytotoxins that degrade the tumor from within its core.

Cytotoxins are poisonous to all living cells, but for the past couple of decades, doctors have figured out ways to alter them so that they only target specific tumor cells. Essentially the cytotoxins will only enter cancer cells with specific surface molecules. Then, once inside the cancer cell, the cytotoxin shuts down protein production, causing the cell to die.

Against certain kinds of blood cancers, cytotoxins are pretty successful. But when it comes to defeating solid tumors, especially those in the brain, these poisons don’t always measure up. “Many of these drugs have a short half-life, there’s inadequate distribution throughout the tumor, plus delivery to the brain is difficult because of the existing blood brain barrier,” Dr. Khalid Shah, neuroscientists and lead researcher on the study, tells Popular Science. This means that simply injecting cytotoxins into the body won’t cut it for killing brain tumors, and efforts to inject cytotoxins directly into brain tumors have failed in the past. 

So Shah came up with a better form of delivery for the cytotoxins: packaging them within stem cells. His research team engineered stem cells to act like little toxin factories, constantly secreting cytotoxins over time. This solves the issue surrounding cytotoxins' short lifespans, as the stem cells are continuously secreting therapeutic toxins. By placing these stem cells directly within a tumor, they eat away at the cancer cells from within.

But in order for their drug delivery system to work, Shah needed to make sure the cytotoxins didn’t destroy their stem cell hosts first. He and his team made the cells with a mutation that stops the toxins from acting within the cell. Additionally, an extra piece of genetic code allows the toxin-resistant stem cells to make and secrete the poisons. 

And then to top it all off, the cytotoxins were programmed to target cells with either epidermal growth factor receptors (EGFR) or interleukin-13 receptor alpha 2 (IL13RA2); EGFR is a common receptor found in most tumors, and IL13RA2 is found in many brain tumors. 

To test their stem cells’ cancer-killing abilities, the researchers used them to treat brain tumors in mice. “Around 70 to 75 percent of patients who have a grade-4 brain tumor, they get operated on,” says Shah. “Their tumor is partially removed, so we have mimicked the same thing in mice.” Once part of the tumor was taken out, the researchers placed the stem cells in a biodegradable gel inside the resulting cavity. They then tracked the stem cells as they released their toxins, stopping protein synthesis in the cancer cells. Overall the toxins killed the cancer cells and prolonged the overall survival of the mice. 

Shah and his team have already developed a similar method for killing cancers, by loading up stem cells with cancer-killing herpes viruses. Now they are seeking FDA approval for their technique. In the future, Shah says the cytotoxins could be altered to target different types of cancer receptors, in order to make treatments more personalized. “It varies from tumor to tumor. These receptors might work better for brain tumors, but not so good for others,” says Shah. “It’s all target based.”

The researchers published their work in the journal Stem Cells.

Ebola Healthcare Workers

U.S. healthcare workers train to work in an Ebola treatment center in West Africa.

Nahid Bhadelia/CDC

New York City has its first case of Ebola, and it's not surprising in the least. Months ago, experts predicted that, with the outbreak raging in West Africa, the disease would inevitably find its way into the major cities of the world. But the good news is, we have the infrastructure and resources to stop an outbreak in its tracks.

"We want to state at the outset there is no reason for New Yorkers to be alarmed,"said NYC mayor Bill DeBlasio in a press conference.

Craig Spencer, a physician with Doctors Without Borders, arrived in New York City on October 17 after treating Ebola patients in Guinea. On October 23, he began developing a fever, nausea, and other Ebola-like symptoms. He immediately informed Doctors Without Borders of his condition, and he was rushed to the hospital and placed in isolation. Laboratory tests confirmed he has Ebola.

It appears that Spencer did everything required of him to prevent exposing anyone else to the disease, and only his fiancée and two of his friends are believed to have been exposed. They've been placed under quarantine.

The rode the A, L, and 1 trains, and went out bowling before he developed symptoms. Ebola is not contagious until the infected person starts exhibiting symptoms, yet the Twittersphere rained down criticism on Spencer, saying he should have put himself under quarantine for 21 days -- the maximum time it would take for Ebola symptoms to set in.

Dr Craig Spencer, when he emerges well we hope thx to NYC health care workers who are at risk, should be prosecuted for defying quarantine.

— Miao (@TPGee) October 24, 2014

N.Y. Ebola doctor is an international emergency specialist WHO BROKE VOLUNTARY QUARANTINE http://t.co/vWO3mjL1YN

— JT (@cbinflux) October 24, 2014

The thing is, as Forbes science writer David Kroll points out, Spencer didn't break quarantine, because he wasn't under quarantine. Doctors Without Borders doesn't require staff coming back from Ebola-stricken areas to be quarantined, and neither do the city, state, or federal governments. Kroll notes that Spencer followed all of DWB's protocols, which are the same as the CDC's, including:

The lack of quarantine for medical staff returning from Ebola-ravaged countries may be in flux. On October 22, five days after Spencer returned from Guinea, the CDC announced that everyone arriving from Ebola-stricken countries will go through “enhanced screening”-- including having their temperatures taken, and answering questions about possible exposure to the virus. CDC director Tom Friedan said that:

So Spencer just missed having to adhere to these new rules. If he had returned to the U.S. after October 22, maybe things would have been different -- or maybe not. A few things need to be clarified:

First, the CDC news briefing did not address how incoming medical staff would be handled.

Second, "quarantine," by CDC standards, means restricting a person's movements but not completely isolating them. So even if Spencer had been officially quarantined, he still may have been allowed to go bowling.

And third, Friedan defines a "high risk contact," vaguely, as "someone who had an exposure to Ebola while they were there. Such as a needle stick, or blood or body fluids without wearing appropriate personal protective equipment."

Does treating Ebola patients while wearing protective gear count as “high risk”? Considering many health care workers, including two nurses who treated Texas Ebola patient Thomas Duncan, have contracted Ebola while removing their protective garments, “high risk” is probably not an unreasonable categorization.

We'll followup as we get more information from the CDC.

Update, 5:15pm:Reuters is reporting that Congress is now considering a mandatory quarantine for all Ebola healthcare workers returning from West Africa. According to Bloomberg, "doctors are pushing back, warning that the added burden could deter many from volunteering to fight the outbreak at its source."

Gene Circuit on a Paper Ticket

Harvard's Wyss Institute

The paper ticket you see pictured above is actually a little biology machine. It's a gene circuit stored on a slip of paper. To turn the gene circuit on, you simply wet the paper with a dropper and all of its microscopic components will come to life. Depending on what circuit scientists freeze-dry onto the paper, these slips could be used to detect disease-causing microbes or medically important molecules, such as glucose. They could even produce molecules scientists want.

As a demonstration, the development team made two types of sensors on paper tickets. One sensor had circles that changed colors when they were wetted with a solution that contained antibiotic-resistant bacteria. The other had circles that changed into one of two colors when it was wetted with samples of the Sudan versus the Zaire strains of Ebola virus. The sensors still aren't able to detect low amounts of bacteria and viruses, so they won't be used to detect outbreaks anytime soon. But their makers are hoping they're a first step toward cheap, easy-to-use field sensors. The paper slips might also show up sooner in labs, for other scientists looking to perform quick experiments, and for scenarios in which the stakes aren't life-or-death.

A gene circuit works a bit like an electronic one, only all its components are biological. Gene circuits include dozens of genes, plus the proteins needed to read those genes. Together, the genes and proteins perform a task. There are natural gene circuits, such as the genes and proteins that work together to perform photosynthesis in plants. On these paper tickets, however, scientists are able to design any circuits they like, not just naturally-occurring ones. They might mix together genes from different species, for example, to get the paper to react how they want. The team that developed the paper slips, including biologists and engineers from Boston and Chevy Chase, Maryland, came up with a circuit that triggers color changes after detecting specific genetic material—such as genes from certain bacteria, or those Ebola viruses.

The tickets' makers freeze-dry their circuit components onto the paper slips, which users can store for up to a year at room temperature. They published an article describing their work yesterday in the journal Cell.

Pig-Tailed Macaque Bites A Car

Lip Kee, via Wikimedia Commons

In the jungles on the island of Borneo, flying robots are following monkeys. These drones aren’t part of a sinister pre-emptive strike against the Planet of the Apes. Instead, they’re trying to find the source of new malaria outbreaks among the monkeys. It’s the best the future has to offer: humans using robots to save monkeys from disease.

“Mapping infectious disease landscapes: unmanned aerial vehicles and epidemiology,” a study published Wednesday in Trends in Parasitology, details the project. Researchers flew 158 drones flights between December 2013 and May 2014 to map the habitats of two species of macaques. Just like humans, monkeys can also get malaria, and tracking these outbreaks within certain populations can be beneficial for both macaque health and human health. Normally, humans and monkeys don't get the same kinds of malaria, but sometimes a variant can cross from monkey to human or vice versa.

The drones used were lightweight Sensefly eBees, which can fly for up to 50 minutes at a time and take 16 megapixel images of the landscape below. The drone flights provided accurate information about the area, and did so even as it changed. From the study:

Changes in the landscape, like cutting forests to make way for a plantation, can create new conditions that better foster malaria-carrying mosquitos, posing a risk to both the macaques and humans living in the area. In the past decade, a variant of malaria native to certain macaque species in southeast Asia has infected humans, which is a new development and might have to do with both changes in the environment and human-macaque interaction. On top of these drone-provided maps, researchers added movement data from humans carrying GPS trackers and macaques collared with trackers. This movement data, combined with the new drone-made maps, is a boon to public health.

Tracking malaria among macaques is just a case study. In the future, drones could respond to epidemics as they happen, providing information that people can’t or won’t provide. In the war on disease, humans (and monkeys) might just have found some robot allies.

Eustace Hangs From His Parachute

Paragon Space Development Corporation

When Feliz Baumgartner's dove 24 miles from Earth's upper atmosphere, he, along with his Red Bull sponsors, made sure millions of people would follow along. Today, Google vice president Alan Eustace dove from almost a mile higher—135,000+ feet above Roswell, New Mexico—with a fraction of the fanfare.

On his way up, Eustace dangled from a balloon that lifted him at about 1,000 feet per minute, according to a release from the Paragon space exploration company. Unlike Baumgartner, who rode a pod to his jump site, Eustace was fixed directly to his balloon. He wore a space suit designed by Paragon to protect him from the inhospitable upper atmosphere.

After more than two hours of climbing, Eustace spent a half hour dangling and "experiencing" his astonishing altitude, according to Paragon. Once he dropped, early this morning, he breached the speed of sound in 90 seconds. His parachute deployed at 18,000 feet.

Baumgartner jumped from a pod 128,000 feet above Earth two years ago. He bested a record that stood for more than five decades.

Laboratory for the Design and Control of Energetic Systems / Vanderbilt

In the future, some forms of brain surgery may not require surgeons to drill through your skull.

Researchers from Vanderbilt University have announced a robot, still under development, that can target precise spots in the brain through the cheek--a route that could avoid critical regions of the skull and nervous system. For patients with severe forms of epilepsy that do not respond to other treatments, the robot could offer a far less invasive form of surgery than traditional approaches, which sometimes involve drilling through the skull to destroy epilepsy hotspots in the brain. But that procedure is a last resort because of its risk to patients. This robot could follow a precise, twisting path through the brain that would minimize damage.

"[The needle] feels springy, " says David Comber, a graduate student who worked on the design.

The springyness enables the robot to force the heated nickel and titanium alloy needle through a tube and cast it in the shape of its eventual route through the brain. After the needle emerges from the end of the tube, bit by bit, it returns to its original shape. "It's like an inch worm where you're incrementally advancing the needle," Comber says.

Eventually, doctors will conduct the surgery inside an MRI machine, which can track the needle's minute progress through the soft tissue. But making sure that progress doesn't slice up the surrounding brain is a challenge.

"Whatever path the tip takes, the next segments have to follow that," says ComberAny deviation could be devastating. Their machine's reported accuracy is 1.18 millimeters -- only 0.04 millimeters wider than the needle itself.

Eric Barth, who designed the pneumatic systems that force the needle through the tube, and Bob Webster, who studies memory alloys, came up with the project when discussing ways their research could intersect. Comber and neurosurgeon Joseph Neiman got involved farther down the line to help address the particular challenges of building a robot capable of neurosurgery. They expect to see the device used in surgery within a decade.

Grapevines In A Vineyard, Napa Valley

Jim G, via Wikimedia Commons

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

Pocket Drone

Made by Cyphy Works, this tiny hexarotor solves one big problem for small drones -- short battery life -- by replacing it with an entirely different problem: tethering. The drone carries 250 feet of filament behind it, connected to a cell phone. The pilot uses the phone to steer the drone, and the drone draws on the cell phones battery power. The limitations of the tether are big; it does make the drone much harder to hack.

Watch it fly through an office below:

Vineyard Flyer

Earlier this month, Yamaha tested a remote controlled helicopter drone at vineyards in California. Vintners have already used drones to better understand their crops, but so long as drones are remote controlled, the labor savings of robotic crop monitoring will remain out of reach. Still, the fact that Yamaha is excited to show off a drone before it has autonomy is a good sign for the future of drone-assisted farming, if not so great for the present.

Threats To The Crown

Earlier this week, the University of Birmingham in the United Kingdom published a report on "The Security Impact Of Drones." The report discusses a variety of threats drones might pose to the U.K. back home. The report also weighs in on the ethics of using drones for war with a fairly reasoned response. From the summary:

Northern Pig-tailed Macaque

Similar to the kinds of macaques researchers used drones to monitor in Malaysia.

JJ Harrison via Wikimedia Commons

Monitoring Monkeys, Fighting Malaria

This week researchers published a study about using drones to track malaria in Malaysia. Humans and monkeys wore GPS trackers, and the drones flew over the island to map changes in environment and development. The goal: tracking a monkey-specific strain of malaria that has started to cross over to humans.

Soccer And Skycameras

It’s been a busy couple of weeks for drones at soccer matches. Last week, during a match between Serbia and Albania in Belgrade, a drone carried an antagonistic Albanian flag. The drone was so disruptive that the game was abandoned halfway through. Earlier this week, in Manchester, police arrested a man for flying a drone over a soccer match. The drone was a quadcopter, and the 41-year-old man piloting it was over in a nearby parking lot.

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

Travel By Wormhole

jodipheonix via DeviantArt

As a curious species, humans have long dreamed of traveling to the farthest depths of space. That's the major theme of the upcoming science fiction epic Interstellar, which will take Matthew McConaughey and Anne Hathaway to the places we hope to one day reach ourselves. Except for that tiny hiccup called deep space travel.

The universe is big. And along with its enormous size, it's also incredibly spread-out; any neighboring planets, stars, and galaxies are depressingly distant. Proxima Centauri, the closest star to Earth, for example, is 4.22 light years away. If the fast-moving Voyager spacecraft attempted to reach Proxima Centauri, it would take the tiny probe more than 80,000 years to get there.

So how are we supposed to explore the universe in a way that won’t take us thousands of generations? Among the many concepts researchers have devised, one technique has remained particularly popular, especially in the realm of science fiction: shortcuts, or theoretical tunnels known as wormholes.

In theory, wormholes are tunnel-like connections made out of spacetime, offering a shorter distance between two vastly separated areas of the universe. The idea is that space travelers can use these tunnels to make space commutes much shorter than thousands of years. Numerous books, TV shows, and films have utilized the wormhole concept for deep space travel—from Dr. Arroway's mysterious alien-filled journey in Contact to the Bajoran Wormhole, which allows access to the unexplored Gamma Quadrent in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine.

This plot device will be utilized yet again in Interstellar. In the film, a band of astronauts travel through a newly discovered wormhole connecting widely separated areas of space-time, in order to find a new world to call home. It sounds incredible, as if all our space travel fantasies can come true. But is it possible? Could humans one day use a wormhole to travel to another galaxy or beyond?

The science says it’s highly unlikely, yet possible. However, to make a traversable wormhole, we're going to need a lot of specific conditions and an understanding of where these amazing secret passages come from.

What is a wormhole?

Up until the early 1900s, Newton’s theory of gravity held supreme. It was the idea that all objects in the Universe—including you and me—have an innate force within us that attracts other objects. The larger an object, the greater this intrinsic gravitational pull. This explains why we “stick” to the Earth instead of flying off into space.

But in 1915, Albert Einstein completely tore that idea apart. He theorized that gravity is actually the result of a warping in spacetime (a combination of space and time into one continuum). Essentially, an object’s very existence deforms space and time around itself, creating an imprint on the universe.

And it’s this deformation of space-time that gives rise to gravity’s effects. “Suppose that there’s you and another mass. You deform the spacetime around you and the mass deforms the space-time around it, and you’re both falling into each other’s wells,” says Richard Holman, a physics professor at Carnegie Mellon University.

Now here's the part where this all ties into wormholes. According to Einstein and his colleague Nathan Rosen, a wormhole is actually deformed space that has warped in such a way to connect two different points in space-time. The result is a tunnel-like structure that could be straight or curved, linking two areas of the Universe that are incredibly far apart.

Einsteinian mathematical models predict that wormholes exist, but none have ever been found. Fumio Abe, an astrophysicist at Nagoya University, has proposed a way to search for large wormholes (big enough for a spaceship) by looking at a star’s brightness when it moves in front of the tunnel. An effect called gravitational lensing would cause the brightness to fluctuate in a unique way.

However, chances are that we’re not going to find big wormholes any time soon.

Enter If You Dare

SGAlteran via DeviantArt

The problem with wormholes

So far, physicists haven’t determined a way in which wormholes would form naturally in the Universe.  However, theoretical physicist John Wheeler said it’s possible that wormholes may spontaneously appear and disappear, according to his quantum foam hypothesis (the idea that virtual particles are, quite weirdly, popping in and out of existence at all times).

Unfortunately, Wheeler theorized that these impromptu wormholes would be super small, appearing at the Planck scale. That’s about 10^-33 centimeters long. In other words, the wormhole would be so small that it'd be almost impossible to detect.

Let’s suppose, however, that we could find tiny wormholes as they pop into existence: We might be able to make them bigger. And to do that, you’d need a funky material called exotic matter.

“The rule of ordinary matter in the universe is that it has positive energy density and positive pressure,” says Eric Davis, a senior research physicist at the Institute for Advanced Studies at Austin. “Exotic matter is a little bit different. It’s matter that has negative energy density and/or negative pressure. You can have a clump of matter with negative energy and positive pressure or visa versa.”

Negative properties of exotic matter might push the sides of a wormhole outward, making it large enough—and stable enough—for a person or a spaceship to fit through it. Except exotic matter isn’t exactly easy to come by; it exists only in theory, we don't know what it looks like, and we have yet to know where to find it.

But say we surmount even that in our hypothetical. We’ve found a tiny wormhole, we somehow have obtained some exotic matter, and we’ve expanded and stabilized the tunnel to be big enough to fit a spaceship. Holman explains that it’s possible inserting anything that isn’t exotic matter would destabilize the wormhole completely. In other words: Entering a wormhole could immediately kill you.

Wormholes come with a lot of caveats, but here’s an even bigger one. Wormholes could very well connect two completely different space-times; i.e. the entry point might exist in a completely different era. That means traversing via wormhole comes with the risk of winding up in a different time in the universe's history. Some have even theorized that wormholes could connect completely different universes altogether. Wrap your head around that one for a second.

When it comes to the prospect of using wormholes for space travel, Davis is a bit more optimistic than Holman, explaining that harnessing exotic matter is all you need to create your own functional wormhole from scratch. (He’s currently working on a way to create exotic matter in his lab at Icarus Interstellar.) Holman takes a more realistic approach.

“If you really could do it, with all the exoplanets and stars out there, you’d figure someone ‘else’ would already have done this,” Holman explains. “And as far as we could tell, from looking at a decent fraction of the universe, we’re not seeing any evidence of that. That starts telling you that you may just have to travel the hard way.”

Wormhole

qingqing3 via Flickr CC by 2.0

135,000 feet: New freefall world record, set Friday morning over Roswell, New Mexico. That's 7,000 feet higher than the previous record-holder, Felix Baumgartner.

57 years: Age of Alan Eustace, the Google executive who dove through the upper stratosphere.

Eustace Hangs From His Parachute

Paragon Space Development Corporation

40 billion: Number of habitable worlds scientists believe may exist in our galaxy--just one of the amazing facts we learned in our coverage of the science of the movie Interstellar. 

98,000: Number of new Ebola cases that could hit Liberia soon without immediate assistance. 

Ebola ward in Lagos, Nigeria.

CDC Global via Flickr CC By 2.0

149 mph: New speed record for driverless cars. Audi says an automated RS7 hit the mark on a closed course. 

A 2014 Audi RS7

According to Audi, a driverless version of this car set a driverless speed record.

Sarah Larson, via Wikimedia Commons

4 years: Time Darek Fidyka spent paralyzed after getting stabbed in the back. An injection of brain cells to his spine helped him walk again. 

David Nicholls (left) and his son Dan, who is paralyzed. The Nicholls Spinal Injury Foundation provided funding for the research.

Nicholls Spinal Injury Foundation (nsif)

When humans finally set foot on an alien world, they’ll be joined by robots. That’s not a bold prediction. It’s a statement of the obvious. Machines have already beat us to Mars and proven their worth as tireless scouts, surveyors, and sample collectors. A manned expedition will no doubt include at least one bot, if not a whole fleet of them.

What’s less obvious, though, is the form these robots will take. Some might take familiar shapes, like wheeled or tracked rovers, or a flock of microsatellites that can provide useful aerial footage. But what about robots assigned to work directly with astronauts, moving safely and helpfully within the same vehicles and environments as their human masters? Would they be humanoids, like NASA’s present-day experimental bot, Robonaut 2, which is currently being tested aboard the International Space Station? Or would they be more alien themselves, with bodies and behaviors that support humans, without physically mimicking them?

In the upcoming movie Interstellar, we see the latter option. The robots that accompany a manned expedition to another world are monolithic space oddities, rectangular slabs whose plank-like segments can decouple and rotate to pull off a variety of actions. The trailers offer brief examples, such as bipedal walking and a flailing sort of cartwheel across the surface of a body of water.

The bots are called TARS and CASE. They are beautiful, eye-catching designs. They’re also pretty ridiculous.

The movie’s director, Christopher Nolan, has shared very little about the robot’s design, telling Empire that it’s quadrilateral, and that, “you've got four main blocks, and they can be joined in three ways.” It’s a visually arresting approach, and one with no real-world precedent. Therefore, there’s no basis for praise or abuse, in terms of predicting where robotic locomotion is headed. And hey, cool robots look cool, which is more than good enough for Hollywood.

Still, there’s plenty that’s silly about this design when it comes to the field of collaborative robotics, or co-bots, which can function alongside humans without causing confusion or injury.

The go-to example of the state of the art in co-bots is Baxter, a two-armed robot laborer from Massachusetts-based Rethink Robotics that can be taught to perform menial, repetitive tasks—such as grabbing specific parts from a conveyor belt. Best of all, Baxter isn’t going to kill you, the way that some industrial robotics might if you were to wander past the safety measures that keep auto-assembly bots separated from their human co-workers. Baxter is, above all things, social and safe. And while Baxter isn’t exactly space-worthy, its two best features are worth considering for the planetary explorers to come.

Baxter At Work

Rethink Robotics

The Importance of Appearing Earnest

Baxter is one of the most expressive robots on the planet. By adjusting its on-screen eyebrows, the tablet-like face can instantly signal confusion over a command. And by turning that face on its stalk-like, articulated neck to face you, Baxter provides the unspoken confirmation that this machine is listening to you, or waiting for your next order, or even acknowledging your approach. Baxter doesn’t speak, but it communicates in ways that most robots can’t.

This is a crucial feature for a co-bot, and the differentiating factor between a robot that works effectively alongside people, and one that simply invades your personal space. “Let’s say you have a robot that listens to voice commands,” says Dmitry Berenson, a roboticist at Worcester Polytechnic Institute who works with collaborative robotic systems. “If it doesn’t seem to acknowledge what you said, people are going to get confused.” Imagine a human who doesn’t answer a request with a verbal confirmation, or thumbs up, or even the tiniest of nods. With fewer social skills and hardware than most humans, an unresponsive co-bot can quickly become a source of frustration and a less efficient collaborator. “Sometimes, the usability of the robot depends on how well you can interact with it,” says Berenson.

Now imagine a robot whose job is to pitch in during emergencies on some remote celestial body, where a single slip-up could kill an explorer. A system that requires an audible verbal exchange, and possibly even a direct communications link, doesn’t inspire much confidence as a co-bot. As Berenson points out, expressivity doesn’t mean creating a cutesy humanoid or eerily life-like android. Baxter makes do without a nose, mouth, or voice. Jibo, the social robot designed by MIT roboticist Cynthia Breazeal, has stunned backers and the greater robotics community with its non-anthropomorphic, icon-based interaction, using colors and shapes to quickly connect with users (It’s racked up $2.2 million in funding on Indiegogo.). As slick as Interstellar’s bots look, a perpetual poker face isn’t an asset for any co-bot, much less one you have to interact with through a space suit.

Hand in Hand

Robonaut 2 shakes the hand of a fellow astronaut.

NASA

The Stay-Puft Co-Bot

Baxter’s other standout feature is safety. The robot’s actuators are built to yield. In training mode, you can physically walk it through its assigned task, guiding its limbs throughout the workspace. During standard operations, Baxter’s limbs will still move when pushed on. In fact, Baxter stops moving as soon as it detects an approaching human, to further minimize the risk of accidental collisions.

This level of caution is smart for a manufacturing bot, but probably overkill for a full-fledged co-bot, particularly one designed to assist astronauts. According to Berenson, the more compliant a robot’s actuators are, the less precision and strength they’re capable of. If a space co-bot is intended to fill in for humans, punching away at tightly spaced buttons and controls, its limbs and motors might have to exert more force and yield less than Baxter’s. Likewise, a bot with enough power to walk, swim, and be of any use to planetary explorers probably shouldn’t be all that compliant.

What a space co-bot should be, however, is squishy. Robonaut 2 has hard components, but its limbs are padded and self-contained, with no exposed joints to crush errant biological fingers. A thoroughly soft robot, like the gas-powered systems demonstrated by researchers at MIT, would likely fall on the wrong side of compliance vs. power tradeoff. But the bots in Interstellar are on the opposite end of that spectrum and appear to be something of a co-robotic menace. “You don’t want sharp angles around people in space suits,” says Berenson. “That could cause a problem. Having softness is just good practice for most robots. There’s not much of a reason not to have a little padding.”

Until we know when and where humanity is headed, it’s impossible to sketch out a complete design for the space co-bots to come. In fact, with all due respect to Baxter, we have yet to produce a co-bot on Earth—a robot that freezes when you come near isn’t much of a collaborator. But it’s safe to say they’ll be nothing like the stark, featureless bots in Interstellar. They’ll be expressive, ready to communicate in obvious as well as subtle, non-verbal ways. And they’ll be soft to the touch, prepared to execute orders in close quarters, without accidentally crushing or killing the very people they were built to assist.

Walking On Water

From Interstellar, copyright Paramount Pictures

Bromine, Hydrogen, Bromine

Photos of both the bromine and hydrogen samples were taken by Heinrich Pniok (www.pse.mendelejew.de), CC BY-NC-ND 3.0

Fresh evidence suggests there exists a type of chemical bond that nobody has ever seen before, Chemistry World reports. 

Not that they haven't looked. In the early 1980s, chemists searched for--but couldn't find--evidence of this type of bond after some theorized it should exist. The bond occurs between two heavy atoms with a hydrogen atom, which is light, in the middle. Normally, chemical bonds only happen when the bonding reduces the potential energy of the system. In this case, the potential energy of the system is higher after bonding. Still, the bond appears because something called the vibrational zero point energy decreases so much, it stabilizes the system. The bond is called a vibrational bond.

Now, two recent experiments found evidence of a bromine-hydrogen-bromine molecule with vibrational bonding, Chemistry World reports. One found the bond by creating exotic versions of hydrogen. The discovering team created isotopes of hydrogen by replacing hydrogen's electrons with exotic particles called muons. Only muonium made vibrational bonds with the bromine atoms.

These new findings were made possible by quantum chemistry techniques, which allowed researchers to calculate the vibrational zero point energy of the system, Chemistry World reports. Such techniques didn't exist back in the 1980s.

[Chemistry World]

Aiden Gillen

Ambition

We’ve been telling you all along that the Rosetta mission is incredible—the spacecraft has traveled for 10 years and some 250 million miles, and on November 12, it’ll become the first spacecraft ever to land on a comet. Now it appears that Aidan Gillen, the guy who plays ‘Littlefinger’ on HBO’s Game of Thrones, is also getting behind the mission. In a sci-fi short named Ambition, Gillen's character explains why Rosetta is awesome.

The flick, which was a collaboration between Platige Image and the European Space Agency, is mostly about overcoming failure. That’s because the Rosetta mission was originally intended to launch on an Ariane 5 rocket in 2003, to rendezvous with a comet named 46P/Wirtanen in 2011. Then, in 2002, an Ariane 5 rocket exploded while launching a communications satellite, putting the Rosetta mission in jeopardy. Undaunted, the mission launched in 2004 instead on another Ariane 5 rocket, with a new comet in its crosshairs.

“Ambition, stubbornness, nothing has changed,” says Gillen’s character in Ambition. “We fall. We pick ourselves up again, and we adapt.”

Watch the video here: