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SpaceX Unveils Crew Dragon Capsule For First Private Astronaut Flights

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If things go as planned, 2017 will mark the year when private companies will deliver astronauts to the International Space Station for the first time. And it looks like anyone riding with SpaceX will be riding in style. The company is finalizing the interior design of their Crew Dragon capsule, and they just released some futuristic new pics. Flip through the gallery above to look inside.

The interior is sleeker than previous designs, though the close-up angles provide a better idea of how small these vessels really are.

Exterior of the Crew Dragon capsule

SpaceX

The gumdrop-shaped capsule measures about 20 feet tall by 12 feet in diameter, which is not a lot of space, considering it’s designed to carry up to 7 astronauts at a time. It’s considerably larger than the Russian Soyuz, which can carry up to three passengers. Luckily, a trip to the space station can take as little as 6 hours.

Unlike Soyuz, the Crew Dragon will use thrusters to land, instead of splashing down in the ocean. According to SpaceX, “This system also enables Dragon v2 to land propulsively on Earth or another planet with the precision of a helicopter, making possible interplanetary trips that would otherwise be constrained by ocean landings.”

Hopefully SpaceX has a different spacecraft in mind for Mars, though—otherwise the crew would risk murdering each other after being crammed in this vessel with no privacy for a year. Also … it doesn’t have a bathroom.


Canon Teases Its Own Virtual Reality Headset

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Dave Gershgorn/ Popular Science

Canon teased a prototype of a virtual reality headset this week at its 2015 Expo in New York City.

Most of the virtual reality offerings we’ve seen so far have been from dedicated startups like Oculus, or mobile companies looking to the future, like HTC and Samsung. But now a company known for its optics has entered the fray.

Canon showed off an early “secret” VR prototype at its 2015 Expo this week, in the form of a relatively large handheld device. The VR periscope is held to the user’s face, and then tracks motion in a 360 degree sphere. The headset has total 2.5K resolution, with 120 degree field of vision. Inside, there are two 5.5" displays, each 2560x1440. Canon says the video itself is recorded at a 56000x28000 resolution.

I got a chance to try a pre-baked demo on the headset. Headphones were separate from the device, which in true prototype form had a thick cable running from one handle to an undisclosed location.

My first thought when I saw the device was that it looked heavy, and arm fatigue is a killer when it comes to strapless VR. But throughout the demo, which lasted about five minutes, my arms didn’t get tired and I honestly forgot I was even holding something up to my face. The display was impressively sharp and tracked well, with no visible blind spots. In the demo I was circled by what I surmised was a Flamenco band, who were all singing at me, then I was listening to an orchestra, and then I was looking up at the night sky. The entire video was shot on Canon equipment, so its clear the company is looking to make VR an end-to-end Canon experience (however, the internal LCD panels were not built by Canon).

Canon also showed off an array of seven 6D cameras, and a 24-camcorder setup, that were used to capture the VR experience's video.

The Canon representative at the demo said that the design is preliminary, so a finished product could end up being truly head-mounted. They see this in use for education, military, and of course, personal entertainment. To me, it feels like an educational device. It’s sturdy, easy to use, and best of all, doesn’t take a lot of finagling to put on and use—just hold it to your face. I was also able to use it with my glasses, which is a huge plus for me (and I’m sure the dozens of us who resist the siren’s call of contact lenses).

Canon is also developing its own mixed-reality headsets for use in manufacturing, which allows designers to work with virtual elements in tandem with fabricated automotive and airline parts.

What Would Happen If We Burned All The Fossil Fuels On Earth?

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Gas Flare

Gas Flare

Natural gas being disposed of in an oil field by burning.

If you've ever poured yourself some iced tea on a hot summer's day, you know that that icy goodness doesn't stick around for long. That's because (SPOILER ALERT) ice doesn't do well in heat.

Those same (wildly obvious) laws of thermodynamics that govern your refreshment also govern the rest of the world. Ice, when confronted by heat, will melt, whether it's a cube, or the ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica.

A new study published today in Science Advances finds that if we burn all of the remaining fossil fuels on Earth, almost all of the ice in Antarctica will melt, potentially causing sea levels to rise by as much as 200 feet--enough to drown most major cities in the world.

Worst Case Scenarios

Worst Case Scenarios

Ken Caldeira and Ricarda Winkelmann

How Antarctic ice (in blue) would fare during different carbon emissions scenarios.

Fossil fuels are considered non-renewable resources and consist of coal, oil, and natural gas. They release carbon dioxide, a potent greenhouse gas, into the atmosphere when burned. Greenhouse gases trap heat from the sun in the Earth's atmosphere, causing temperatures to rise.

"Our findings show that if we do not want to melt Antarctica, we can't keep taking fossil fuel carbon out of the ground and just dumping it into the atmosphere as CO2 like we've been doing," climate scientist and co-author of the paper Ken Caldeira said in a press release. "Most previous studies of Antarctica have focused on loss of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet. Our study demonstrates that burning coal, oil, and gas also risks loss of the much larger East Antarctic Ice Sheet."

Second opinions aren't much better. Another recent study from Stanford found that while the East Antarctic Ice Sheet has been more stable than we've given it credit for (even during very hot times in Earth's history) a conservative estimate still shows sea level rising by a dramatic 44 feet if it returned to (pre)historic extremes.

And if you narrow the scope down to a more human time scale, the news is still fairly gloomy. NASA estimates sea level rise will go up by a minimum of 3 feet, probably over the next century. That may not seem like much compared to 200 or 44 feet, but even one foot of sea level rise is enough to start encroaching on important NASA facilities, many of which are in coastal areas, not to mention many large cities located on the coast.

Luckily, there are alternatives. This particular watery end can be avoided if energy use is directed away from fossil fuels and towards renewable energy options like wind and solar (or even nuclear energy, though getting rid of nuclear waste presents a different set of long-term problems).

And there's no need to head for the hills just yet. Even the most extreme cases of sea level rise aren't likely to happen for a few thousand years. The authors predict that sea levels will creep up as ice in the polar regions melts, at a rate of a little over an inch per year. So if we want cities to avoid the fate of the boiled frog, we'd better jump on some climate solutions soon.

Are We Alone? Have We Always Been? How Do We Know?

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The Lick Observatory's Automated Planet Finder Will Help Out In The Search For Life

ST. LOUIS — It's the loneliest question in the cosmos: Are we, creative and intelligent and flawed as we are, really all there is? Are we alone, and have we always been? Is there anybody else out there?

Leave it to the people of DARPA to think not only of answers, but of completely new ways to ask this question.

We might not be alone at all, but we probably won't find out by doing what we've been doing for the past few decades, said Lucianne Walkowicz, an astronomer at the Adler Planetarium in Chicago who works on the Kepler Space Telescope. Walkowicz spoke on a panel Friday on the last day of Wait, What? — a future technology forum sponsored by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the Pentagon's blue-sky wing.

"We haven't really looked," she said. "Astrobiology is a wonderful hot new thing in astronomy, but to say that you're looking for intelligent life in the universe is still actually a pretty fringe-y thing to do. We have this image that we've been listening for radio signals, that we've been searching for life in the universe, but actually we've been resource poor in that area."

We assume that other intelligent civilizations would broadcast radio signals like we do, she said — but we've been radio-loud for a short time, and we're actually getting quieter as our technology improves. And it's more complex than that anyway. We assume other intelligent civilizations would want to talk to us at all, or that they would even know to look. But what if other planets play host to hyper-intelligent space dolphins, who, in an attempt to evade dangerous stellar radiation, never left the sheltering waters of their world? They wouldn't even know there were other stars, Walkowicz said. Our interest in whether life is out there stems from our ability to see the stars, and recognize that we are a planet orbiting just one of them.

"There is a lot of leeway to understand what kinds of life may be out there, and what other biosignatures might we be looking for," she said. "Pressing that frontier forward, understanding what other signatures might be out there, is something we could potentially do experimentally."

wait-what-panel

Rebecca Boyle

Lucianne Walkowicz, left, describes new ways we might want to look for aliens at a DARPA future technology forum in St. Louis Sept. 11.

Jeff Gore, a physicist at MIT, and Mark Norell, a paleontologist at the American Museum of Natural History, joined Walkowicz in chatting about the Fermi paradox, the Great Filter, and other cosmic condundrums. The Great Filter is the concept that something, which we can't understand yet, may prevent life from expanding into the universe; the Fermi paradox is the contradiction between the apparently great likelihood of finding alien life and the fact that we haven't.

It may be that we're not listening properly, as Walkowicz said. Or it may be that everyone else is just too far away, Gore suggested.

"Maybe it's just not practical to get to neighboring planets," he said.

Closer to home, many scientists think if life still exists elsewhere in our solar system, or if it ever did, there's a very good chance it was on Mars. So how should we treat the fourth planet? If it's barren, we might feel less hesitation to terraform or colonize it, Gore said. But Walkowicz said it should be protected if for no other reason than to help us understand life's possible origins.

"The way we should default to thinking about Mars is thinking about it as a nature preserve," she said. "It is our most reachable target for understanding the possible independent origin of life, or the independent evolution of life. ...If we were to go to Mars and terraform it, we lose the ability to answer the question of whether there is an independent origin of life."

"The way we should default to thinking about Mars is as a nature preserve."

Although nobody has found life elsewhere yet, there's not necessarily reason to despair, said Norell. Mass extinctions have wiped out vast majorities of species in our planet's 5-billion-year history, yet here we are.

"The one thing replicating DNA seems to have in common on this planet is it is very resilient. The rebound has been fast," he said, adding that this resilience may be true for alien worlds, too. "You would be pretty hard-pressed to go to a place on another planet and only find fossil life, and find everting on the entire planet totally exterminated."

Why talk about all these things at the Defense Department's research wing? Moderator Geoff Ling of DARPA said thinking about distant civilizations fits into the agency's mandate: "To go and think of things that others really don't."

"You won't find unless you explore," he said. "Biology is a very rich discipline, and is a place where, I would argue, surprise is waiting for us. If somebody is going to do it, let it be DARPA."

Library Will Vote On Giving Patrons Access To Anonymous Tor Browsers

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Kilton Public Library

Kilton Public Library

Hiding from surveillance is a good way to get noticed by law enforcement in the US. Tor, is a free browser tool that sends traffic from a users’ computer through several different servers and machines, making it unclear where the request originated. In light of the revelations from former NSA contractor Edward Snowden about massive government surveillance of the internet and telecommunications, the Kilton Public Library in Lebanon, New Hampshire became part of the Tor network. This meant some traffic from anonymous users on the Tor network would pass through the computers in New Hampshire, regardless of their point of origin. The Kilton library joined Tor in July. Shortly thereafter, the received an email from the Department of Homeland Security.

Homeland Security contacted the local police department, and police and city officials had a meeting with the library in mid August. In response, the library shut down its Tor nodes. Next week, on September 15th, the Library is voting whether to turn its nodes back on. Apparently, when making their case, police officials discussed the benefits that anonymous browsing can provide to criminals.

That may be the case, but anonymity benefits far more people than just those who wish to mask ill intent. A letter published by the Library Freedom Project urges the Kilton library to resume its role as a Tor exit relay, saying:

The underlying fear—that Tor is primarily for criminals ­is a gross misrepresentation of Tor and its users, effectively criminalizing the millions of people who use the network for fully legitimate purposes. As recognized by its funders at the State Department, Tor is an essential piece of internet infrastructure, granting people worldwide a measure of freedom from surveillance and censorship. Kilton Library has the right to use Tor, free from federal interference and fear mongering.

The trade-off between security and freedom are as ancient as government itself, but it’s still a strange era where a library attempting to provide anonymity is seen as a threat in and of itself.

[ProPublica]

Embedded 3D Barcodes To Ensure Pills Are Real

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Plastic prototype pill with 3-D barcode

Ben Whiteside, University of Bradford

A new kind of barcode could be structurally built into a pill or other product, rather than just slapped on the packaging. A team of engineers unveiled the new technology this week at the British Science Festival in Bradford, UK.

Researchers from the University of Bradford and Sofmat, an anti-fraud technology company, developed a system to add microscopic indentations to the surface of a product. Tiny pins are set to different heights, each encoding a letter or digit. The pins can either be embedded in the mold a product is made from or stamped on afterwards.

The resulting code is almost invisible, and too tiny to feel. But a quick laser scan could prove a product’s origin, which the engineers say could track and verify products to combat fakes. The annual global value of counterfeit goods has been projected to be more than $1.5 trillion by the International Chamber of Commerce.

Counterfeit electronics are a problem, and counterfeit medication can be downright dangerous, containing the wrong dose or no active ingredient at all. This is especially an issue in the developing world. The World Health Organization estimates more than 25 percent of the medication consumed in poorer countries is counterfeit or substandard.

Existing tools to fight this include a verification system wherein a patient can scan the packaging of their medication and text a special code to ensure their medication is genuine. The FDA has also designed a device that uses UV light to scan pills and their packaging. But packaging can be copied or switched. The new 3D barcode actually becomes part of the product.

“For the first time,” said Sofmat director Phil Harrison in a press release, “the same technology and coding can be used on bulk packaging, individual packaging, and on the actual product, making it much harder to create and ship fake products.”

The 15-Year-Old Inventor Who Launched A Business

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http://cf.c.ooyala.com/Y2bjlidzo45c15d01ff2XwXn5QTSE6li/promo266179137

When Brooke Martin realized her pet dog had separation anxiety, she decided to help. "We have all of these ways to communicate with our friends and family that we're not physically with," Martin says. "Why can't we do that with our pets?" She invented a telecommunications device for pets, the iC Pooch, but she didn't stop there. With help from her father, Martin is turning her idea into a business, even as she comes up with new inventions.

Petrified Sand Dunes On Mars, A Pink Dolphin, And Other Amazing Images Of The Week


A Major Study Calls For Even Lower Blood Pressure In Older Adults

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Blood pressure monitors are old technology, though new recommendations may change what they should show.

Cardiologists have long questioned what the acceptable range of healthy blood pressure is for adults who are 50 years and older, and in a paper published today, researchers argue for an even lower target than what is recommended by current guidelines.

Announced today by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the preliminary results of the study, called SPRINT, show major benefits of having a systolic blood pressure – the pressure when the heart is contracting and the first number in a blood pressure reading – of 120 mm Hg for people over 50, which is below the current target of 140 mm Hg.

The trial was meant to last for eight years, however, after six years, the researchers decided that their results were significant enough that they should be shared as soon as possible and the trial was discontinued.

“This study provides potentially lifesaving information that will be useful to health care providers as they consider the best treatment options for some of their patients, particularly those over the age of 50,” said Gary H. Gibbons, M.D., director of the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI), in the announcement.

A third of the U.S. population has high blood pressure, also known as hypertension, which puts patients at a greater risk for heart disease, stroke, and kidney failure. In 2009, researchers for the SPRINT study began comparing outcomes between adults who lowered their high blood pressure to 140 mm Hg using medication, and those who were able to lower their blood pressure even further, to below 120 mm Hg.

They found that compared to patients who maintained their systolic pressure at 140 mm Hg, those who kept it at 120 mm Hg or lower, saw a reduced risk of death by almost 25 percent and a one-third lower rate of stroke and other dangerous cardiovascular events such as heart attack or heart failure. These preliminary results seem to contradict decades-old arguments that the side effects of hypertension drugs outweigh their benefits.

Nonetheless, the breakdown of the data is still to come. SPRINT's answers to questions about blood pressure will become more clear when its complete results are released in the next few months.

Long-Lost GoPro Found After Falling From The Edge Of Space

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Grand Canyon From Space

Grand Canyon From Space

Screenshot by author, from YouTube

In 2013, some friends attached a GoPro camera to a weather balloon, as was the fashionin thosedays. Encased in a 3D printed body, they drove to their launch site, 20 miles west of the Grand Canyon. The camera captured its journey on the way up, from above the team’s heads:

...to the edge of space itself:

And then the weather balloon burst, like weather balloons always do when they, like Icarus, reach too high into the sky. After climbing upwards for 87 minutes, the camera was tumbling back to earth, as planned.

That was supposed to be the end of it. The crew finds the camera, looks at the video they managed to capture from the edge of space, and then uploads a cool video to youtube. All that happened, but with a hitch: the team couldn’t find the camera when it fell. Two years later, a hiker found the rubble. Here’s how Bryan Chan, who launched the camera, explained it in a post on Reddit:

We planned our June 2013 launch at a specific time and place such that the phone was projected to land in an area with cell coverage. The problem was that the coverage map we were relying on (looking at you, AT&T) was not accurate, so the phone never got signal as it came back to Earth, and we never heard from it. We didn't know this was the problem at the time - we thought our trajectory model was far off and it landed in a signal dead zone (turns out the model was actually quite accurate). The phone landed ~50 miles away from the launch point, from what I recall. It's a really far distance considering there's hardly any roads over there!

TWO YEARS LATER, in a twist of ironic fate, a woman who works at AT&T was on a hike one day and spotted our phone in the barren desert. She brings it to an AT&T store, and they identify my friend's SIM card. We got the footage and data a few weeks later!

Watch the recovered video below, and marvel at the recent time capsule of our planet's surface:

Aeroscraft Shows Off Its Giant Airship

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Dragon Dream Outside Hangar

Dragon Dream Outside Hangar

Aeroscraft Corporation

Lighter than air vehicles are, for the most part, relics of a distant past. The first Zeppelin age ended with cries of “oh, the humanity.” One problem of the Hindenburg was its reliance on flammable hydrogen, but modern airships take advantage instead of inert helium for buoyancy. Despite the past century of flight mostly belonging to airplanes and helicopters, there’s been a slight resurgence of dirigibles this century. Not least among them is the Dragon Dream, by the Aeroscraft Corporation. This is only half the size of their planned airship, and look how huge it is:

Dragon Dream With People

Dragon Dream With People

Aeroscraft Corporation

Rather than the slow-moving luxury cruisers of old, the Aeroscraft is a working vehicle designed to carry 66 tons of cargo reliably to parts of the world without runways. The 555-foot-long craft is at a design freeze. Aeroscraft thinks they have the vehicle they want, and to meet deadlines on time, they’re going to stop tinkering with the design and just make the dang thing.

Here’s what it looks like in concept:

Aeroscraft Remote Delivery Concept

Aeroscraft Remote Delivery Concept

Aeroscraft Corporation

The Aeroscraft is just one of a small new world of gigantic lumbering dirigibles. In 2013, the U.S. Army canceled its LEMV surveillance zeppelin, but the project has since been revived in the United Kingdom as a working machine, and Goodyear is looking at replacing its soft-bodied blimps with more durable rigid airframes.

[General Aviation News]

DARPA Taps Into the Brain To Give Patients Robo-Touch and Better Memory

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Rebecca Boyle

This prosthetic hand contains sophisticated torque sensors that can detect when pressure is being applied to any of its fingers, giving a user the sense of touch.

ST. LOUIS — By hard-wiring into the brains of people with traumatic injuries, scientists have been able to restore the feeling of touch and to improve memories, according to researchers at DARPA.

In one study, a 28-year-old man who was paralyzed more than a decade ago became the first person to “feel” physical touch through a prosthetic hand. The patient could already control the robotic hand through his thoughts, which other people have already done. But this was the first time anyone could feel through it, too.

In another breakthrough, volunteers who got electrical arrays implanted in their brains are seeing improvements in their memory, DARPA said. The project, called Restoring Active Memory (RAM), could help people suffering from traumatic brain injury. The Defense Department’s research wing shared both milestones last week at a conference called “Wait, What?”

Mind-controlled robot limbs have gotten incredibly sophisticated in the past few years, culminating in the FDA’s approval of a bionic arm developed with DARPA funding. The agency’s newest research department, the Biological Technologies Office, is trying to make them better, said program manager Justin Sanchez.

“Without feedback from signals traveling back to the brain, it can be difficult to achieve the level of control needed to perform precise movements,” he said.

In a study that’s still being peer-reviewed, DARPA engineers and scientists at Johns Hopkins University’s Applied Physics Laboratory first inserted electrodes into the patient’s motor cortex. This allowed him to control the hand with his thoughts. The hand contains sensors that can detect when pressure is being applied to its fingers, and converts this pressure into electrical signals that the brain implant reads. In a series of tests, the team touched each of the prosthetic hand’s fingers while the patient was blindfolded.

He was able to tell, almost 100 percent accurately, which finger was being touched.

“At one point, instead of pressing one finger, the team decided to press two without telling him,” Sanchez said in a statement. “He responded asking whether somebody was trying to play a trick on him. That is when we knew that the feelings he was perceiving through the robotic hand were near-natural.”

In another study, people who were undergoing brain surgery and volunteered to get electrode implants saw improvement in their scores on memory tests, DARPA said. They received small electrode arrays placed in brain regions involved in the formation of declarative memory, according to DARPA. That’s the type of memory we use to remember lists, as well as spatial memory, according to the agency.

Researchers were able to capture signals coming from the brain during the process of memory formation and recall. The goal is to improve memory by using targeted electrical stimulation, which could help people with memory problems — including those with traumatic brain injuries, Sanchez said.

“As the technology of these fully implantable devices improves, and as we learn more about how to stimulate the brain ever more precisely to achieve the most therapeutic effects, I believe we are going to gain a critical capacity to help our wounded warriors and others who today suffer from intractable neurological problems,” he said.

Sierra Nevada Snowpack Is At Its Lowest Level In 500 Years

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East of The Sierra Nevada (from The San Joaquin Valley)

François B. Lanoë

With record-setting temperatures and the first ever mandatory state-wide water restriction, it’s not as if Californians need another reminder of just how serious the current drought is. Unfortunately, a study published today in Nature Climate Change does just that. And the news is ominous. As of April 1st, 2015, the snowpack in the Sierra Nevada mountains--which provides 30 percent of the state’s spring and summer water--is at its lowest level in 500 years. This has grave implications for both human and natural water systems in the state.

California gets 80 percent of its yearly precipitation during the winter months. The snowpack that builds up in the Sierra Nevadas in the winter later provides much-needed water for both humans and ecosystems during the drier summer months. The snowpack, which typically starts to melt around April, is critical in replenishing California’s reservoirs. But this past April, when scientists measured the volume of water in the snowpack, it was 95 percent lower than the historical average--coinciding with the hottest January-March period in California's recorded history.

The drought in California is not just a state issue, but a national one.

California's millennium-length paleoclimate records already reveal the exceptional nature of the current drought, but until this study, there have been no historical records for the yearly snowpack levels in the Sierra Nevada. So researchers used the rings of blue oaks trees to reconstruct the area's snowpack levels throughout the past 5 centuries. The blue oak is a long-lived species that is sensitive to winter precipitation--blips and anomalies in its rings expose extreme drought events of the past. Laid out next to these numbers, the April 2015 measurements are unprecedented.

Sierra Nevada snowpack comparison

NASA/MODIS

Already reeling under the mercilessness of this drought, it’s a further blow to the state to find its primary natural water storage system in critical condition. The main concern with these findings, however, is that the longer this drought continues, the more damaging and lasting the effects of the mountains’ low snowpack levels will be on urban and agricultural water supplies, hydroelectric power, and the overall ability of natural water systems to recover. Not to mention increased risk of wildfires. Unfortunately, climate change is expected to increase the frequency and severity of these types of droughts, and the Sierra Nevadas’ snowpack is expected to drop a further 25 percent by 2050.

California, for its part, is not taking any of this lightly. Along with setting sweeping water restrictions, the state is helping its citizens by providing various tips and tactics on how to cut their water use and stretch their resources.

The drought in California is not just a state issue, but a national one. It remains the United States’ largest state economy and as climate change continues, many other states will feel the squeeze.

What Are The Real Risks of Bioweapons Research?

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Cover, Chem-Bio Defense Magazine Volume 8 No. 1

Cover, Chem-Bio Defense Magazine Volume 8 No. 1

After a scandal-plagued summer, last week the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention revealed that some of the Pentagon’s labs responsible for bioweapons research had accidentally sent out, well, plague. This comes after several months of revelations about Pentagon mishandling of dangerous specimens, which start with an Anthrax scare back in May.

While it is part of the Pentagon’s mission to protect the American public from weaponized disease, it seems there’s an inherent risk of human error when studying disease, and large scale research like this inspires little confidence.

To better get a grasp on the ethics and risks of bioweapons research, Popular Science spoke with Dr. Nicholas G. Evans, a Postdoctoral Fellow in Advanced Biomedical Ethics at the University of Pennsylvania. The interview was conducted by email, and has been lightly edited for clarity.

Popular Science: What, in your view, is the biggest risk posed by bioweapons today?

Nicholas G. Evans: Today? Still nation-states. For now, I still believe that nation-states are the best equipped to produce biological weapons, and that their resources make all the difference relative to terrorist groups, individuals, organized criminal organizations, and so on.

That’s changing as the life sciences becomes more accessible, and more powerful, so in 5-10 years my answer will likely be different. Last year, for example, Science ran an expose on charges against scientists in Italy for illegally selling samples of avian influenza, and possibly even spreading it, to profit off the avian flu epidemic in Europe. That’s a little out of left field for what most people think in terms of biological weapons; still, when you start thinking about bioweapons as tools of extortion and profiteering—when there's money to be made in bioweapons—that’s when things get really scary.

What is the pro-case for bioweapons research. You mentioned that nation states are the biggest risk, is there some value (deterrence or otherwise) to studying bioweapons a hostile nation might use in the future?

Great question. I’m not sure that things like strategic deterrence are strictly “pro,” but there might be an incentive for a nation to pursue biological weapons in the advent that they can’t pursue nuclear weapons. Though nowhere near as powerful as modern nuclear weapons, biological weapons are attractive for their capacity to kill large numbers of people, but are easier to manufacture and harder to detect that a fully-fledged nuclear program. They also cause a lot of fear—as the Ebola virus disease outbreak demonstrates, the public are terrified of infectious disease.

There’s one more reason to pursue modern biological weapons: force multiplication. There’s an increasing number of agents at the intersection of chemical and biological weapons that interfere with brain chemistry, causing people to become calm or terrified. Either effect is potentially useful for a military attempting to engage an enemy in a civilian population. At present, there is not a lot of international agreement about the development of such agents, which are technically permissible under the Chemical Weapons Convention as agents for use in law enforcement, and are likely to derive from peaceful applications of biotechnology such as the pharmaceutical industry.

Was there a major expansion in the United States of research into Chemical & Biological weapons, and if so, what was the precipitating event?

Yes, absolutely: the Fall 2001 anthrax attacks (also known as “Amerithrax”). (There is another story that places the germ of the expansion at the feet of Clinton, not Bush, after Clinton read the Cobra Event by Richard Preston.)

The US has poured more than $20 billion on research alone into biodefense since 2001. Much of this has applications beyond defending against biological weapons attacks—such as research into pandemic influenza—but a lot involves the use Select Agents: biological agents that pose a bioweapons risk or other serious risk to humans, livestock, or the environment. The Select Agent Program came out of the PATRIOT Act, so it is easy to see how 9/11 and the Amerithrax attacks generated all the magnitude of the research on bioweapons agents that backgrounds the accidental releases of the last 12-18 months.

Was the risk of, say, loose samples of plague, foreseen by outside experts?

Absolutely. In the beginning, the central concern was whether the money spent on these relatively unlikely scenarios was really justified compared to other, more likely (and, over time, much more costly to human health) health risks: the amount of research on road accidents, gun control, or malaria doesn’t match biodefense research in terms of dollars spent to people killed. In terms of strict proportionality, $20 billion as a result of five deaths over roughly fifteen years ~ $267 million per death per year. If we spent that much on research about road fatalities, we’d be spending $8 trillion and change per year.

Concern about safety really started in the nongovernment community about 3-4 years ago, and has reached fever pitch in the last 15 months. The Government Advisory Office, on the other hand, has been asking questions about safety for 12 years! So there’s a history here that is just getting attention because of the high-profile accidents.

What steps can the Pentagon take to limit such accidents in the future?

First, more science - we have to do more work on collecting data about the risks of laboratory releases, and better ways to inactivate pathogens. Second, personnel reliability. This is a problem with people, and if you can’t take the care these pathogens deserve—and many scientists can and do—you shouldn’t be working with them.

DARPA Put Robot Legs On A Helicopter Drone

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DARPA MAR Lander

DARPA MAR Lander

Screenshot by author, from YouTube

If takeoffs and landings are the trickiest parts of flight, then landing at sea, especially in choppy weather, is quite possibly the hardest landing this side of space. One way to improve the outcome of landings at sea is to give pilots more training and experience. Another, explored by DARPA, is to change how the vehicle itself lands. What if, instead of using fixed, rigid landing gear, a helicopter could land on flexible legs? Here’s how the concept behind DARPA’s Mission Adaptive Rotor program is supposed to work:

And here’s how it actually lands, on an unmanned helicopter:

Flexible legs mean even when it lands on an uneven surface, the helicopter is stable. In flight, these robot legs fold up alongside the copter’s body, giving the appearance of an oversized insect. here’s how DARPA describes the breakthrough:

As part of its effort to provide such a breakthrough capability, DARPA has conducted an experimental demonstration of a novel robotic landing gear system. The adaptive system replaces standard landing gear with four articulated, jointed legs that are able to fold up next to the helicopter’s fuselage while in flight and are equipped with force-sensitive contact sensors in their feet. During landing, each leg extends and uses its sensors to determine in real time the appropriate angle to assume to ensure that the helicopter stays level and minimize any risk of the rotor touching the landing area.

Helicopters with legs like this could land on grades of up to 20 degrees, as well as rough, boulder-strewn terrain. For just a little extra weight on the copter, it gives them a real leg up in landing.

Watch the full video below:


Former Hyundai CEO Will Lead Google's Self-Driving Car Initiative

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Google Self-Driving Car Prototype

Google

John Krafcik will now lead the project

Google is getting serious about its driverless vehicle program. Their autonomous pod prototype moved from the company's campus to actual roads in 2015. Then the search giant brought its self-driving Lexus SUV to public roads in Austin, Texas the same summer. Now, moving things right along, Google has hired former Hyundai CEO John Krafcik to oversee the project.

Krafcik comes to Google with 25 years of car knowledge under his belt. For 10 years he worked at Hyundai, five as president and CEO. The former chief executive officer’s most recent gig however was as the head of TrueCar—where he will continue to serve on the board.

The driverless car program will remain a project of Google X, the company's science-fictiony research division, for now, but a spokesperson says the self-driving car division is a “good candidate” to become Alphabet's next spin-off company.

Uber’s CEO, Travis Kalanick, recently discussed the importance of driverless cars on Stephen Colbert’s The Late Show. Responding to worries that vehicles on autopilot would put drivers out of business, he said “[Google, Tesla, and Apple are] doing the driverless thing. This is gonna be the world. And so the question for a tech company is, ‘Do you want to be part of the future? Or do you want to resist the future?' And we feel that in many ways we want to not be like the taxi industry before us."

With Tesla autonomous vehicles “almost ready” to drive and park themselves and Apple cars rumored to be on their way, Google’s vehicle program will face increasing competition. Unlike Elon Musk's and Tim Cook’s entrants, Google is taking an Android-like approach. The company wants to make their self-driving car tech available for existing manufacturers—not produce their own line of vehicles.

If manufacturers are willing to cooperate, that is. Many existing car-makers like Honda and Toyota are readying their own driverless technologies. Google’s five years of testing self-piloting tech could give them an advantage. But regardless, the numerous advancements in self-driving may drive competition to producing the safest cars yet.

Bats Are Worth $1 Billion To Corn Industry

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It's almost that time of year again.

The weather is cooling down, just in time for decorations of harvest and Halloween to adorn candy shelves and craft stores. Bushels of corn and bats are at just about every grocery and drug store in the country, but bats and corn don't just make attractive fall-themed decorations. They're actually colluding in a billion-dollar partnership that benefits farmers across the nation.

Scientists and farmers have known for a long time that bats were a valuable contributor to the agricultural landscape, eating pests that would otherwise be eating crops. But they didn't know exactly how much bats helped. In a new study published in PNAS, researchers were able to finally quantify the collaboration, and found that annually bats prevent nearly a billion dollars in pest damage around the world.

To get to this conclusion, researchers (funded by the non-profit Bat Conservation International) looked at 12 plots of corn in Illinois during the growing seasons of 2013 and 2014. In 6 of the areas, the researchers erected huge netting enclosures every night, keeping the bats at bay. In the other 6, bats were allowed to go about their batty business. The researchers found that the plots of land that were prevented from having bats had roughly 60 percent more corn earworm larvae gnawing on the ears of corn. The non-bat plots also had more fungus growing on the corn.

And while one corn fungus, known as corn smut, is slowly turning into a delicacy in some places, for the most part farmers would prefer their crops be pest and fungus-free.

Despite playing such a large role in agriculture, bats are the most endangered land mammal in North America. Luckily, there are plenty of promising efforts to save bats from disease and human activity, which is good news, not just for the bats, but for anyone who loves popcorn or corn on the cob.

Could Netflix Be The Best Untapped Dating Network Online?

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Netfling dating app Netfling concept app video screenshot

'Netfling' is a concept for a dating app based on Netflix ratings

A proposed app hopes to skip the pleasantries and get to the most important online dating question: what shows do you like to stream?

The app, called "Netfling," is so far just a concept proposed by "digitally born and raised" ad agency SuperHeroes Amsterdam, albeit one whose timing couldn't be more perfect: the term “Netflix and chill” has rapidly become the preferred euphemism for proposing a "hook up" by young adults. (Netflix, for its part, counts streaming hours even if you’re not paying attention to the screen).

The honest truth is that streaming services and bingewatching movies and TV unites people intimately, whether they end up paying attention to what’s on or not. Netflix had more than 65 million users as of last count, 42 million in the US alone. For comparison, the much-ballyhooed dating app Tinder has an estimated 50 million users worldwide (the company hasn't released official figures).

Combining the audiences certainly presents advantages for people looking for someone with shared interests — or at least mutual interest in Netflix and dating. And for users, Netflix is a significant factor in determining shared interests, given that the average Netflix subscriber uses the service for about two hours a day.

Netfling and its probable competitor Binger, are hoping to enter the market but await the return of an open Netflix application programming interface (API) — the system used by third-party software developers to build apps based on a company's data — which Netflix discontinued in 2014. Would-be Netflix-based dating apps will need that in order to do with Netflix what Tinder does with Facebook. Without an open API, it’s unlikely we’ll actually see either app enter the market anytime soon.

Here’s hoping it does, even at the cost of star-crossed lovers with differing opinions on The Walking Dead.

A Quick Soak In Solution Turns Brain Tissue Transparent

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From X-rays to MRIs, doctors learn a lot about the body any time they find a new way to see it. For years, researchers have been trying to find a way to see inside the brain to better understand how different structures work together. Now a team of Japanese researchers has developed a method that could help answer questions about diseases like Alzheimer’s. A study about the new technique was published today in Nature Neuroscience.

“While Superman's X-ray vision is only the stuff of comics, our method, called ScaleS, is a real and practical way to see through brain and body tissue,” Atsushi Miyawaki, one of the study authors, said in a press release.

Scientists often clear and stain tissues to understand how bodies work. Chemicals render the skin and outer tissues invisible, and dye the structures of interest. But these chemicals often damage the delicate structures that researchers are trying to study in the first place.

The ScaleS technique uses two chemicals to clear tissues: sorbitol, a sweet-tasting sugar alcohol found in fruits, corn, and seaweed; and urea, an organic compound that the body usually expels in urine. Brains that the researchers soaked in this solution became see-through and, unlike those exposed to similar solutions, didn’t become mushy, which meant that researchers could still cut them into micron-thick slices and look at them through a microscope. When left to soak in the ScaleS solution, samples can last for at least a year without being damaged.

A 3D rendering of both hemispheres of a mouse brain with Alzheimer's disease. The amyloid beta plaques are in green.

The researchers tested this technique on the brains of mice that had Alzheimer’s. They combined the sorbitol and urea solution with another chemical that illuminated the notorious amyloid beta plaques, which build up as part of the disease (though no one is quite sure why), then tooks scans to make 3D models. Then they used the ScaleS solution on brain tissue samples from human Alzheimer’s patients to better understand how the plaques fit in with normal brain cells. The researchers were surprised to find that the plaque cells clustered close to microglial cells, which are neurons’ immune defense, but only in the early stages of the disease.

The researchers anticipate that the ScaleS method can be a useful and effective way for researchers to better understand diseases that affect the structure of the brain, such as Parkinson’s and Huntington’s disease, neither of which currently has a cure. Though the brain is clearly the most immediate target for this method, it could also be used to better understand diseases elsewhere in the body where cells fit together in a unique way, such as the heart, lungs, or intestines.

Can Ozone Therapy Treat Ebola?

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A patient undergoing ozone therapy

At this time last year, the Ebola outbreak was just beginning to ravage its way through West Africa. Now, as the death toll has risen to unprecedented numbers, scientists have scrambledto find quick, effective treatments. According to a study published in the 2016 issue of the African Journal of Infectious Diseases, medical practitioners say they have been able to inactivate the devastating virus using ozone therapy.

Ozone is an unstable version of an oxygen molecule, made of three bound oxygen atoms while the typical stable molecule has just two. You’ve probably heard of ozone in the atmosphere--we need it to accumulate about six miles above us in the stratosphere to protect us here on the Earth’s surface from harmful radiation. But when it's introduced into the body, it plays a completely different role. For over a century, ozone has been used to treat disease, however today it is regarded as an alternative medicine therapy. At high concentrations, the gas is toxic. But at low doses, ozone is thought to increase the number of antioxidants in the blood. It was used in World War I to disinfect wounds; today its proponents claim that ozone is an effective treatment for arthritis, AIDS, Parkinson’s, cancer, heart disease, and diabetes.

But scientists aren’t convinced that ozone is the medical miracle that others claim. One 1991 study found that ozone inactivated HIV in a cell culture, but one expert pointed out that the researchers found the same results when they exposed the culture to nitrogen. And while some scientists have found that ozone can be useful as a disinfectant, it comes with significant and sometimes lethal side effects; other studies have found that ozone therapy isn’t clinically useful at all, or may even speed up the progression of some degenerative diseases. The Food and Drug Administration doesn’t consider it an effective treatment, but it still limits the amount of ozone that can be used in clinics in order to prevent the harmful side effects.

In this new study, several doctors who are proponents of ozone therapy tried it out on four healthcare workers in Liberia with Ebola symptoms (three tested positive for the disease, the other had been exposed to the virus but that patient's tests had still come back negative). For ten days, the researchers gave the patients ozone by infusing it into their blood through their veins, passing it into their rectums, and giving them ozonized water to drink. The researchers write that the patients’ symptoms abated after just a few days, and none died--which surprised the researchers, since the survival rate of healthcare workers infected with Ebola was just 40 percent. “Typically, death occurs within a week or less in the majority of cases. In all our ozone treated cases, symptoms did not progress from the start of ozone therapy, and symptomatic patients were totally free of all symptoms, inclusive of fever, generally by day 3 of treatment,” the researchers write. Though they haven’t tested the mechanism in the lab, the researchers suspect that the ozone damages the surface of the virus so that it can’t infect the cells of its host. And, unlike other emerging Ebola treatments, ozone therapy is inexpensive, costing only $10 per day.

There are reasons to be skeptical of this research. When news of the treatment leaked in 2014, those with a background in science expressed extreme concern over the legitimacy of the treatment. Further, the researchers only tested the therapy on four patients, all of whom were treated at the ideal time: very shortly after symptoms developed. While the patients’ survival rate was higher than the typical rate in the clinic, the sample size was too small to be certain that it wasn’t just due to chance, that ozone therapy did, in fact, make them better.

Such a small study likely does not provide enough evidence to convince doctors to use ozone therapy instead of vaccines to treat Ebola--especially because the therapy has not yet been definitely proven to be useful against other diseases. As the Ebola outbreak subsides, the desperate search for rapid, effective treatments has slowed. That might provide researchers enough time to thoroughly evaluate ozone therapy to see if the study’s findings hold up, and determine if ozone therapy would be a viable treatment option should another outbreak happen in the future.

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