Roche et al., Science Translational Medicine (2015)

A new device uses a catheter and two balloons to deliver a UV light-activated patch to a perforated organ wall.

A challenging operation for any surgeon to perform is to repair a hole in an organ—such as a tiny defect in the heart or a tear in the stomach wall caused by an ulcer. These problems are often life-threatening and require surgery. Even when a noninvasive technique is used, the patient is often left with a metal-based device permanently plugged into the hole, which, overtime, can erode the natural tissue surrounding the area. But researchers at Harvard University have come up with an alternative: A way to repair these holes using a minimally invasive catheter device, a pair of balloons, and UV light-activated glue. Their work was published today in Science Translational Medicine.

The new method is the first to combine the catheter and balloon technique with the light-activated glue, which was developed last year by the same researchers. The glue works via an adhesive-coated patch made of biodegradable materials, which attaches to the perforated area—whether it is in the heart, stomach, intestines, or another organ—and serves as a scaffold to allow the tissue to grow and heal. Once the tissue has completely healed, the patch melts away. Since this UV light-activated adhesion method was developed, the researchers had trouble finding a way to get the adhesive patch to the affected area without using invasive techniques like surgery.

Their new technique uses a thin hollow plastic tube called a catheter to guide the patch to its destination. During the procedure, the catheter is first advanced to the organ (either through an endoscope to digestive organs or through a catheter to the heart or bladder) and then slowly guided through the perforation or defect. Once that's secure, a system of two balloons helps put the patch in place. First the balloon on the outside of the organ inflates, which deploys the adhesive patch onto the affected area. Then a balloon on the inside of the organ is inflated, which causes the ultraviolet light to turn on. This activates the adhesive properties of the glue and forces the patch to stick onto the tissue. Once finished, the balloons deflate and the catheter is removed. The patch sits on the hole until the tissue heals itself. Once it's done, the patch dissolves.

See the procedure done on a defect in a pig heart tissue sample, in GIF form:

Credit: Roche et al., Science Translational Medicine (2015), C. Schaffer/AAAS

The entire process is fast—the maximum wait time for the adhesive material to activate and do its job is about two minutes. The researchers hope this new catheter-guided technique will allow the light-activated adhesives to be used more readily and with less invasive procedures. Particularly, they envision this device to be especially useful for closing tiny holes in the heart, which right now requires the patient to undergo a highly invasive cardiopulmonary bypass procedure.

Roche et al., Science Translational Medicine (2015)

Potential applications for the new device include repairing a perforated area of the abdominal wall, a peptic ulcer, and a defect within the heart.

When put to the test, the new technique worked just as well as a traditional invasive suture technique in healing perforations in the stomach, abdominal wall, and heart tissue of rodents and pigs. Further, they tested its ability to close a septal wall defect in the beating heart of a pig—which showed that it could withstand high-pressure blood flow.

Devices for body defect closures using a catheter as a guide have been proposed before, however, the researchers note, they have almost exclusively relied on metal-based material and require a mechanical or a suture attachment, which overtime can erode tissue.

The use of this new method in real patients is still far off, however, as the point of this early study was simply a proof of concept. The initial experiments did show some limitations, including the flexibility of the catheter device. In future studies, the researchers hope to use multiple fiber bundles and a cone-shaped tip to increase flexibility and access, which they hope will bring the device closer to being ready for clinical use.

Big Delta Houseprinter

World's Advanced Saving Project

Clay homes are as old as dirt. Well, as old as humans have been building homes. Older, if you count those made by insects. That doesn’t mean an ancient technique can’t get a thoroughly modern makeover. The World's Advanced Saving Project, or WASP, after the arthropod mud nest-builders, has a giant machine that can 3D print a home out of cheap, durable mud.

Here’s what the machine, which stands over 40 feet tall, looks like from the air:

Demonstrated last weekend as part of a three-day “Reality of Dream” rally, the printer, named Big Delta, is intended to inspire the creation of low-cost housing, made to meet the needs of the world’s impoverished. Besides clay, the printer uses straw, dirt, mud, and water found on-site, creating an effect not unlike adobe. Earth isn't the only place where people want to 3D print housing from local materials: there are architects who want to do the same on the Moon.

It’s impressive, but the real test of mechanical building is if it’s faster at building houses than this bricklaying robot.

Watch a video about Big Delta below:

[Quartz]

Microbots

Laboratory for Nanobioelectronics, UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering

Artist's rendition of how the microbots work.

In a restaurant you might prefer 'sparkling' carbonated water over the still variety, but in the oceans, carbonated water is a very bad thing.

Thanks to our penchant for burning fossil fuels, there are increasing levels of carbon dioxide (CO₂) in the atmosphere, which means there are increased levels of CO₂ in the oceans as well. Higher amounts of CO₂ in the ocean cause the water to become slightly acidic, threatening shellfish whose shells can dissolve in the water. Scientists believe that ocean acidification caused one of the worst mass extinctions in the planet's history.

So what to do? Some scientists at UC San Diego believe they may have engineered a very, very tiny solution. They have created microbots that move quickly through the water, removing up to 88 percent of all carbon from seawater and turning it into calcium carbonate, the same thing that most seashells are made of.

The microbots are powered by a chemical motor, a device that reacts with low levels of hydrogen peroxide added to the water. As the robot comes in contact with hydrogen peroxide particles, the platinum robot moves through the water, capturing the carbon and turning it into a solid.

“In the future, we could potentially use these micromotors as part of a water treatment system, like a water decarbonation plant,” Kevin Kaufmann, an undergraduate co-author of the study said in a press release.

But it will be a long time before any decarbonation plants come about. Kaufmann and his co-authors hope that they can eventually engineer micromotors that run on water instead of hydrogen peroxide, making the process even greener.

“If the micromotors can use the environment as fuel, they will be more scalable, environmentally friendly, and less expensive," Kaufmann said.

Frank C. Müller

When Apple turned on certain forms of encryption as the default setting for the iPhone a year ago, and Google followed suit on Android, the companies were picking a public fight with the government.

Last fall, FBI director James Comey likened the encrypted phone to "a closet that can't be opened," full of terrorist chatter, child pornography, and conspiracies to distribute heroin. Comey raised the spectre of the FBI "going dark," blocked from intercepting the communications of dangerous suspects, even with a warrant. This summer, Apple CEO Tim Cook, at the EPIC Champions of Freedom event, fired back at the cryptographic "backdoor" demanded by Comey – the digital equivalent of a skeleton key that would let the FBI listen in on mathematically garbled conversations. "If you put a key under the mat for the cops, a burglar can find it, too," Cook said.

The closet and the key under the mat are different ways of describing the same thing, but with very different priorities. Are the encrypted phones an impregnable closet full of horrors? Or a solidly locked front door that forces the government to use one of its many other tools to find out what’s inside?

Apple and Google’s encryption-oriented policies and marketing strategy has pleased privacy advocates, since encryption should prevent bulk surveillance by the NSA.

"Encryption will seriously interfere with the ability to routinely intercept communication, as our national intelligence seems to be doing domestically," says Ryan Calo, who studies law and emerging technology at the University of Washington. "It's been designed, tested with usability in mind, by people with three letters after their name. It's usable, and mainstream. People don't feel weird about using it."

Apple has in fact criticized Google and other companies that rely on mining the communications of customers for services that are otherwise free. Because Apple makes money primarily by selling high-margin hardware like the iPhone, creating privacy-friendly devices has fewer business trade-offs than for its competitors. Apple doesn’t need to analyze the content of your data to be profitable. But Google’s "free," advertising-supported model does make the devices a lot cheaper.

"Apple does get credit for making privacy a mainstream topic," says Oliver Day, who heads a security-oriented non-profit called Securing Change. " But at the same time Apple is so expensive it's impractical to advise activists to all purchase the latest iPhone to secure their communications with iMessage. Android seems behind in terms of security features, but I'm personally more interested in seeing advances in Android privacy technology, since it is more affordable."

"Apple does get credit for making privacy a mainstream topic."

Whatever the platform, it’s the ease of use and the power of encryption algorithms that concerns Comey -- there are certain phones in the U.S. that the FBI can't access, even when it has a warrant and a potentially dangerous suspect.

The FBI Is Not Without Options

Calo points out that the government does have a powerful tool for compelling a suspect to decrypt his phone. It's called "jail." Assuming the government obtains a search warrant, a suspect must decrypt a phone or be thrown in jail for contempt of court.

"You can force people to decrypt," he says. "That's not perceived to be a Fifth Amendment violation, usually. You're not self-incriminating by decrypting your phone."

(The exception would be if decrypting a device were tantamount to self-incrimination -- for example, knowing the passcode to a tranche of child pornography).

Still, it's not like Comey's fears are baseless. Whether lone wolf terrorists like the Tsarnaev brothers, or the young couple from Mississippi who planned to honeymoon in Syria and join ISIS, there are dangerous suspects out there among the 300 million people in the United States. These are people the FBI has a legitimate need to place under surveillance.

"What I hear from people in law enforcement and the intelligence community is that they are facing obstacles right now in tracking some terrorist communications overseas," says Shane Harris, author of @War: The Rise of the Military-Internet Complex. "That's because ISIS, for instance, has been using simple apps that allow them to encrypt their messages or erase them soon after they're sent."

The government does have a powerful tool for compelling a suspect to decrypt his phone. It's called jail.

Once easy-to-use default encryption on smartphones is pervasive, then placing the equivalent of a wiretap without the suspect's knowledge becomes much more difficult. Even if there were a warrant, the government would need to use other techniques such as bugging the person's domicile or sending in an informant in order to secretly gather intelligence.

"It does make it impossible to do a surreptitious warrant -- eavesdropping," says Calo. "That analogue doesn't exist when the phone is encrypted and only you have the key to it."

"I think that the U.S. government has a legitimate point here that encryption in the hands of terrorists is making the job of law enforcement and intelligence agencies harder," says Harris. "But it’s a big leap to go from that operational, foreign context into a broad statement that the FBI could be ‘going dark’ in a domestic setting. We need to see more data on this."

Backdoors Are Worse Than Useless

Comey's backdoors would stop millions of innocent people from avoiding mass surveillance by the NSA. And it would also create a "key under the mat" for elite hackers like The People’s Liberation Army Unit 61398. Moreover, backdoors wouldn't prevent criminals from using other forms of off-the-shelf encryption. Multiple phone tools are readily available, such as Wickr, RedPhone/Signal, or Silent Circle, as any semi-competent terrorist knows. The criminals who most benefit from Apple and Google's default encryption are the low-level players too ignorant to install the programs themselves.

"[The government] is no longer getting a windfall of unsophisticated criminals saying things out in the open," says Calo.

And if the government were to attempt to backdoor or criminalize these add-on tools as well? Encryption software created in other countries would easily migrate into the U.S. via the darkwebs. The cryptographic horse left the barn some time ago. That's why L. Gordon Crovitz's Wall Street Journal op-ed "Why Terrorists Love Silicon Valley" misses the mark.

Crovitz argues that encryption conceals ISIS sympathizers in the United States, and the geeks just must be smart enough to come up with an algorithm to break the code, if they really tried. In reality, sophisticated criminals will find ways to encrypt communication no matter what -- and cryptographers insist there's no easy technological fix to that problem. As security expert Bruce Schneier put it in an essay at Lawfare: "As long as there is something that the ISIL operative can move them to, some software that the American can download and install on their phone or computer, or hardware that they can buy from abroad, the FBI still won't be able to eavesdrop. And by pushing these ISIL operatives to non-US platforms, they lose access to the metadata they otherwise have."

In other words, the FBI already can access "metadata" about the time and location of two people communicating on encrypted tools -- just not the content of the conversation. And by imposing a draconian, Chinese-style "great firewall" on any non-backdoored software, the FBI would push ISIS to underground tools, thereby losing the metadata as well.

So How Big Is The Problem Really?

When Comey demands backdoors from Apple and Google, what he's really talking about is help for a very specific type of case that meets several conditions. This occurs when the FBI has no other way to put together its case, can't get anyone else to flip on the person, and can't compel the suspect to decrypt through the threat of arrest.

"Plus, it must be someone who, without Apple making it easy, wouldn't have encrypted," says Calo.

This past summer, the FBI apparently had such a case, in which it showed a search warrant to Apple demanding that the company turn over specific messages from iMessage in a case "involving guns and drugs." Apple responded that it did not have the ability to decrypt the messages, though it did ultimately turn over data stored on the user's iCloud account, which is not encrypted. The question is how many of these types of cases actually crop up.

"The universe of this use case, with that threat model, may not be that big. I don't know for a fact," says Calo.

"Encryption does make targeted surveillance much harder. So do cash, bearer bonds, fake mustaches, hats, hair dye, blankets, horses, boats, and forests."

The problem is that the FBI doesn't really know either. In July, Comey told the Senate Intelligence Committee that he didn’t know how many times the FBI had been unable to access an encrypted device even with a warrant. He added that the situation was occurring more frequently.

"They might start tracking that," says Shane Harris. "The FBI has got to do a better job persuading Americans that it doesn’t have any sinister motives for wanting some new policies around encryption. The bureau is going to have to do a better job making its case in this debate."

And the government would do well to remember why Apple and Google started turning on encryption by default in the first place. A majority of citizens are at least somewhat concernedabout the NSA's dragnet surveillance practices. American tech companies face a backlash from international customers who see our gadgets and software as extensions of the U.S. intelligence apparatus.

"I totally agree that [encryption] technologies do make targeted surveillance much harder," says Day. "So does cash, bearer bonds, fake mustaches, hats, hair dye, blankets -- see Snowden's keyboard shroud -- cars, horses, boats, and forests. I won't agree that it makes targeted surveillance impossible or even untenable."

US Capitol Building

Kevin BurkettCC by 2.0

Believe it or not, it turns out there is one thing members of Congress can agree on: Pollutants are not good, and maybe we should do something about really bad pollutants getting released into the atmosphere. Ahead of the Pope's speech to a joint session of Congress today, two senators re-introduced a bipartisan climate bill.

Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) and Susan Collins (R-Maine) want to set limits particularly on pollutants that are short-lived in the atmosphere, but can contribute to global warming. Those pollutants include:

• Black Carbon (a.k.a. the main component of soot)--second only to CO₂ in the amount of heat it traps in the Earth's atmosphere. The color black absorbs heat, and soot falling on glaciers and snow can make them melt faster.
• Methane--a highly potent greenhouse gas originating from decaying or digested vegetable matter. Methane leaks from the Arctic are a huge worry for environmentalists, as they could release large amounts of the gas into the air.
• Hydrofluorocarbons--another greenhouse gas typically used in refrigeration or A/C systems.

That all sounds good, but whether or not it will pass remains to be seen. The same two senators introduced the same bill last year, calling it the Super Pollutants Act of 2014.

Another bill introduced in the House of Representatives in January, called the Super Pollutant Emissions Reduction Act of 2015, directs the President to create a task force focused on short-lived but dangerous pollutants that could contribute to climate change, as well as limiting ozone near the Earth's surface, and preventing ozone-depleting substances from being released into the atmosphere.

Here's hoping that one of the bills on Capitol Hill actually makes it to the next level.

Remote Control Army Robot

Stephen Baack, U.S. Army Photo

This is an understatement: Battlefields are unsafe. For troops wounded in combat, they need to get out of battle fast and to medical care. Historically that’s been the role of human medics, who bravely risk enemy fire to save their wounded comrades. That’s profoundly dangerous work, undertaken by humans because we haven’t, historically, had any other options. Earlier this week, Major General Steve Jones, commander of the Army Medical Department Center, said that in the future, we might send robots instead. Jones said:

"We have lost medics throughout the years because they have the courage to go forward and rescue their comrades under fire. With the newer technology, with the robotic vehicles we are using even today to examine and to detonate IEDs [improvised explosive devices], those same vehicles can go forward and retrieve casualties."

The remarks came at a conference sponsored by the Association of the U.S. Army. Jones specifically mentioned the robots currently employed by bomb squads, as well as unmanned vehicles. The Pentagon has expressed interest in unmanned ambulances for years. A recent one is the Black Knight Transformer, an optionally manned craft that can fly like a quadcopter and drive like a truck.

If robots picking up soldiers from the battlefield feels like science fiction, that’s because it literally is. Last week, War is Boring editor and longtime defense journalist David Axe’s short story “It’s Going To Be Okay” about this very thing was published by Motherboard. Here’s a relevant excerpt:

We don't send a lot of human beings into the Engagement Zone, but when we do and one of them gets hurt, it's the Bear's job to literally scoop them up and carry them back to the aid station. The human aid station, I mean. Well the medics—yes, we call them that even though "mechanic" or even "wrecker" is probably more accurate—came rolling in towing this beat-up Bear and the Bear was actually slumping. Shoulders rounded. Arms dragging. A defeated kind of gesture. The latest Bears can actually talk, sort of. They've got sensors that read human expressions and simple algorithms that cue a range of pre-recorded phrases played via a speaker embedded in the robot's chest. "It's going to be okay" is the main one. And dammit if this Bear wasn't saying that to itself, over and over at low volume, as though reassuring himself. "It's going to be okay. It's going to be okay."

Evacuating casualties was only one of the roles for robots in battlefield medicine that Jones discussed. Another option is delivering medical supplies to dangerous areas, supporting troops operating behind enemy lines. To some extent we already have this, thanks to the Snowgoose powered glider, but future drones could do more, like deliver specific medicines or even blood. In the battlefields of tomorrow, when troops call for help, the cavalry that comes may be robots.

Louisiana Superdome

David Reber, via Wikimedia Commons CC BY-SA 2.0

Last week, the FAA granted the NFL legal permission to fly drones. The FAA’s authorized over a thousand businesses to fly drones, but the NFL is the first major sporting league granted such permission. The rights extend to data collection and video capture, but are limited to times when teams aren’t playing. The FAA specifically noted that drones are safer than manned aircraft for this, saying:

the FAA found that the enhanced safety achieved using an unmanned aircraft (UA) with the specifications described by the petitioner and carrying no passengers or crew, rather than a manned aircraft of significantly greater proportions, carrying crew in addition to flammable fuel, gives the FAA good cause to find that the UAS operation enabled by this exemption is in the public interest.

The permission granted from the FAA includes the same 31 standard clauses the FAA has for every drone authorization, whether it’s a modified paper airplane or every single already-authorized drone. These include a 400-foot altitude limit, a 100-mph top speed, and a 55-pound weight limit. The NFL can legally fly DJI Phantom 1, DJI Phantom 2, and DJI Inspire drones.

The NFL, and NFL Film, the specific part of the organization that will fly the drones, included in their request a note that they will only fly drones over empty stadiiums or during practice with the permission of everyone inside:

NFL Films proposes that it receive an exemption to use sUAS [small unmanned aerial systems, or quadcopters] to gather footage from closed-set locations in and around NFL stadiums (on non-game days) and NFL practice facilities. NFL Films would use the footage for the production of television programs. NFL Films would obtain the consent of all personnel in the stadiums and practice facilities in the vicinity in which the sUAS may operate.

For game days, this change means very little. For ads that play during commercial breaks, expect to see a lot more aerial photography.

[Bloomberg]

Extended color image of Pluto's "Tartarus Dorsa" mountains

NASA/JHUAPL/SWRI

We’ve seen Pluto’s ice mountains, its glacier-carved plains, its mysterious dark spots. But the dwarf planet still has a few tricks up its sleeve. Today, the New Horizons team released images that reveal a totally new Plutonian feature.

This spiky, linear landscape shown above has been likened to snakeskin, bark, and geology. The mountains stretch for hundreds of miles, and scientists are stumped as to what they are and how they got there.

“This’ll really take time to figure out,” said New Horizons’ William McKinnon. “Maybe it’s some combination of internal tectonic forces and ice sublimation driven by Pluto’s faint sunlight.”

The team is informally calling the mountain range “Tartarus Dorsa”--probably because “Mordor” is already taken.

Meanwhile, the team also released the "most detailed color map of Pluto ever made"...

Gorgeous, super hi-res image of Pluto

NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI

The colors have been enhanced to highlight Pluto's variety of compositions.

As well as a close-up on the dune-like features that border the flat expanse of Sputnik Planum:

Sputnik close-up

NASA/JHUAPL/SWRI

These hilly features (whose color has been enhanced) may be the old shoreline of Sputnik Planum's shrinking glacial lake.

STOP. ENHANCE!

Closer-up of Sputnik Planum

NASA/JHUAPL/SWRI

An even more detailed look shows that the flat, smooth plains of Sputnik Planum are not so flat after all--it's actually packed with pits. In the image above, we can see features as small as 270 meters.

Minecraft on Oculus

Oculus VR

Minecraft will be released on the Oculus Rift.

Today, Oculus VR co-founder Palmer Luckey made a surprising revelation at the developer conference Oculus Connect 2: Minecraft, the hit block-based world-building game that was acquired by Microsoft last year, will be released on the Oculus Rift.

Details of the virtual reality version of Minecraft are sparse, but it's clear that it will be one of the first major video games announced for the burgeoning platform. Oculus VR has yet to announce a release date for its virtual reality headset, the Rift, but it has promised eager customers that it will be made available in the first quarter of 2016. When the headset is finally released, Minecraft will be made available in the Windows Store and the Oculus Store for purchase on Oculus consoles.

The announcement was particularly surprising because Oculus is often thought of as a direct competitor to the Microsoft Hololens, a headset made for augmented reality applications. Microsoft proudly marched out the Hololens version of Minecraft at its BUILD developer conference earlier this year.

Now that Minecraft is coming to Oculus, it's clear that Microsoft plans to make the game available for almost every platform around. There are currently Xbox, PS4, mobile and desktop versions of Minecraft. Soon, the franchise will have augmented reality and virtual reality versions as well.

The creator of Minecraft, Markus "Notch" Persson, who left the company he created after it was acquired by Microsoft last year, was just as surprised by the announcement as everyone else. He briefly tweeted about the news while making it clear that he's moved on from his obsession with the game.

It's still unclear whether the Oculus version of Minecraft will be the same (or similar) to the Hololens version of Minecraft. Fundamentally, they are two different technologies, so it wouldn't be surprising to see two different applications for the two different platforms. As always, we'll keep you posted as the story develops.

What goes around comes around, and that might be bad news for seafood lovers. We already know that eating fish comes with risks of ingesting metals like mercury and lead, or pesticides like DDT. A new paper published today in Scientific Reports now reports that the fish we eat may also contain plastic particles and small fibers from the waste we produce.

"This is a wake-up call."

The authors of the study, a team of scientists from California and Indonesia, bought fish from local fish markets and examined the contents of the animals’ guts. In both California and Indonesia, the researchers found manmade debris in the digestive tracts of roughly one in four fish. Their study is one of the first to show a direct link between our garbage and fish that’s sold for consumption. The next step is to understand how plastic debris in our seafood might adversely impact human health.

“This is a wake-up call to the fact that our waste management systems are not be as tight and advanced as they should be, and that might be coming back to haunt us through the food chain,” said Chelsea Rochman, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of California, Davis, and lead author of the study.

Chelsea Rochman/UC Davis

UC Davis researchers found plastic fragments and textile fibers in 25 percent of fish sold in Indonesian and California markets.

In their study, Rochman and her colleagues bought 76 fish from a local market in Sulawesi, Indonesia, and found plastic in 28 percent of the fish, including in mackerel and herring. In California, the team examined 64 fish from the Bay Area, and found manmade debris in a quarter of them, including in anchovy, striped bass, and salmon. They also sampled 12 Pacific oysters and found manmade debris in four of them.

Scientists don’t currently know whether or what amount of plastics in fish poses a threat to human safety. They do know, however, that plastics are associated with a cocktail of chemicals, some of which are carcinogenic, and some of which disrupt our hormone system. Once they enter the ocean, plastics can also become a sponge for other contaminants like pesticides and industrial chemicals.

Ingesting the guts of a sea creature, such as with whole sardines, mussels, or oysters, may entail eating these plastics, noted Rochman. “If we eat the whole thing, we are in fact eating whatever plastics or fibers that animal has ingested,” she said. “Will we suffer impacts from tiny pieces of debris being in our stomachs? It may just go right through us, but it might transfer out of our gut and go other places in our body.”

Questions like that are just a few of the many that still need to be answered, said Rochman. “Proper risk assessments have yet to be done, but they are absolutely warranted, and the EPA and other government agencies are calling for them,” she said.

Rosalyn Lam

A plastic fragment, here seen under a microscope, extracted from a fish sold at market.

Scientists have found manmade debris in all marine habitats, from shallow bays and estuaries out to the open ocean and down to the deep sea. Because of this, Rochman’s team tried to include fish with many different habitats and feeding behaviors in their study. They found no significant differences in contamination based on location or feeding habits, suggesting that exposure to manmade debris is ubiquitous. “It really seems like, overall, all species are being exposed to this material,” Rochman told Popular Science.

In total, the researchers found three times more debris in fish from Indonesia than those from California. Fish from Indonesia had anywhere from zero to 21 pieces of debris in their gut, while fish from California had zero to ten pieces. These differences probably have to do with the two countries’ very different waste management systems, according to Rochman.

"When you walk out on the beach in Indonesia, you can wade into plastic that’s up to your knees."

She and her colleagues believe they didn’t find as many plastic fragments in fish from California because the U.S. has a relatively thorough waste management system, where waste is transported from people’s homes to a landfill or recycling center. That infrastructure doesn't exist in many Indonesia communities, Rochman said. In Makassar, Indonesia, where the researchers bought their fish, 30 percent of solid waste generated is not processed at all before ending up in a waterway.

Due to a lack of water sanitation infrastructure, plastic water bottles are often the cheapest way for Indonesians to get safe drinking water. That, combined with the fact that there’s no waste management to speak of in small island communities, means a lot of plastic bottles and other types of packaging get thrown directly onto the ground and eventually washed into the ocean, according to Susan Williams, a professor at the University of California, Davis, and another author of the study.

“When you walk out on the beach in Indonesia, you can wade into plastic that’s up to your knees,” Williams told Popular Science.

Dale Trockel

Students help pick up plastic from an Indonesian beach.

The presence of tiny plastic particles, or microplastics, is a growing problem worldwide. This February, a team of scientists estimated that eight million metric tons of plastic waste enter the world’s oceans each year, and predicted that that number will increase over the next decade. They also named Indonesia as one of the top contributors of plastic to the world’s oceans, along with China.

Reducing plastics in the ocean will require a concerted, multi-pronged effort, according to Rochman and Williams. Some interventions might include banning plastic microbeads in personal care products, working with big plastic producers to search for alternative materials, or even possibly putting fiber filters on washing machines, said Rochman.

Wiliams believes developed countries that are among the top producers of plastic — including the United States — should help developing countries that struggle with waste management. Although China and Indonesia produce more plastic in total than the United States, the US produces more than twice as much plastic waste per person as China does.

“Our university collaborators and the school kids we work with, they’re aware that this is a problem,” she told PopSci. “They just have fewer tools than Californians or Americans do to address the problem.”

Netflix VR

Netflix Tech Blog

Netflix is coming to Samsung's Gear VR, powered by Oculus

In case Facebook’s 360-degree video wasn’t enough for you, Netflix is bringing its streaming video service to virtual reality. With the help of Oculus, Reed Hastings and company will allow you to binge their content catalog in VR.

Announced during the Oculus Connect conference earlier today, Netflix will be available for the Samsung Gear VR. The headset, "powered by Oculus,” will allow viewers to watch content on a large screen in a plush virtual room, all created in the device itself. Now, it's important to keep in mind that even in VR, the video content will be displayed on a flat "virtual" screen. That means you won’t be able to walk into your favorite TV series or movie, nor pan around in 360-degree video — at least not yet. But the Netflix VR experience could prove a solid first step into more ambitious virtual forays for the company.

And it's not just Netflix that is taking the leap. Hulu, Vimeo, Twitch and more will also make their way to the Samsung’s Gear VR later this year. Netflix, however, will come first: later today, in fact.

On Netflix's official blog, Oculus engineer and video gaming legend John Cormack discusses his experience of bringing Netflix to the VR headset. He explains why the Gear VR doesn’t simply show just the video or even a giant TV screen. Due to distortion and resolution limitations, users get slightly less picture quality than viewing on their high-end televisions. "So forget 4K, or even full-HD,” says Cormack. "720p HD is the highest resolution video you should even consider playing in a VR headset today."

The Facebook-owned Oculus also supports the new 360-degree video format introduced by its parent company yesterday. Using VR headsets, or even one’s smartphone or desktop computer, users are able to pan around in a full circle to see the virtual environment around them. Oculus expects content to be created for this new viewing experience, calling it “original virtual reality short-form” and “unique viewing environments created for VR devices,” according to The Verge.

Netflix in virtual reality can be found in the Gear VR store today.

Netflix

Netflix Tech Blog

University of Washington graduate student Jose Ceballos wears an electroencephalography (EEG) cap that records brain activity and sends a response to a second participant over the Internet.

University of Washington

In one lab, an image of an object is shown to a study participant on a computer screen. The subject wears a cap connected to an electroencephalography (EEG) machine that monitors his brain waves.

Another participant, the asker, sits in another lab on campus. It’s her job to figure out what image the answerer was shown. The asker has a magnetic coil almost touching her skull. She selects a question from a list on a touchscreen to narrow down the object, 20-questions style.

The question she asks appears on the screen in front of the answerer. To the left and right of the screen are two LED lights, flashing at different frequencies. One side is labeled ‘yes’ and the other ‘no’. He answers the question by staring at the correct light. Chantel Prat, a psychologist at the University of Washington and a co-author on the paper, told Popular Science that the computer can distinguish what light he looks at because different frequencies of light trigger different brain patterns in response.

The computer algorithm sends its interpretation of the answerer’s brain patterns to the magnetic coil in the asker’s lab over the Internet. If the answer is yes, the coil releases a pulse that stimulates the asker’s visual cortex in the brain. The stimulation triggers a phosphene, which can look like a flash of light, a blob, a blur, or a wavy line. If it’s no, the coil still makes the same sounds and scalp-tingling sensations, but doesn’t release a pulse strong enough to cause a phosphene.

The asker notes whether they saw the phosphene flash or not, and moves onto the next question. It's a game of 20 Questions played brain to brain.

University of Washington postdoctoral student Caitlin Hudac wears a cap that uses transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMG) to deliver brain signals from the other participant.

University of Washington

In the study, published Wednesday in PLOS One, participants guessed the correct object 72 percent of the time. To make sure it wasn’t due to chance or cheating, the researchers also ran control games where the participants thought they were communicating but no data was being sent. In those conditions, they only guessed correctly 18 percent of the time.

This is a big step forward from the group’s 2014 experiment, in which they successfully transmitted the brain pattern of hand movement to another person’s brain, causing the second person’s hand to move. In this study, the asker consciously acknowledges incoming information from other person’s brain and makes a decision based on it. It’s real communication.

There are limitations. The answerer isn’t just thinking about the word ‘yes,' the way most of us would imagine mind-to-mind communication, but staring at a light that has been assigned to mean ‘yes.’ And right now, the asker can’t respond brain-to-brain, though that’s something the team is working on. The team is also experimenting with ways to move beyond binary yes/no type answers. Prat said they could use different kinds of stimulations to allow more answer options. They could use quadrants of space or different visual or auditory cues and patterns.

But these are all still symbolic patterns of light or sensation that are translated into meaning. Our spoken language is actually no different. Words and letters still only symbolize intent or emotion, and often fail to capture what we really mean. This type of brain linking could one day change that.

Prat said, “Imagine if you could just transmit the feeling of experiencing something sweet.” She said that already scientists are able to identify what object a person is thinking of, given a list of possibilities. The difficulty is recreating those abstract brain signals in another person, especially when the subject becomes more complicated than an object.

If all this has you reaching for a tin hat, don’t worry. “People get nervous that others could read their thoughts without them being aware,” said Prat. “It’s not possible that someone could be doing this to you without you knowing about it and consenting to it.” The equipment is expensive, bulky and very finicky. Moving the magnetic coil even a quarter inch away from the asker’s skull nullified the effect, and both participants had to be actively focusing on communicating.

The next step for Prat’s team is to test more immediate, practical applications for the technology, like yoking the brains of high-achieving students with those of struggling students. They want to see if they can boost learning by signaling the brain that it is time to pay attention. “Hopefully we will run that experiment in the next six months,” she said.

Huawei Nexus 6p

Android Central

The Nexus 6p is one of two Nexus devices likely coming at Google's September 29 event

Google’s event will take place on September 29, but that hasn’t stopped their newest Nexus devices from leaking. The Nexus 5X and 6P are rumored to be revealed at the search company’s announcement in San Francisco on Tuesday. But almost a full week early, the devices have appeared on camera.

Nexus 5X by LG

Android Police

LG's latest Nexus phone

Nexus 5X

Google has partnered with a variety of different hardware manufacturers to make its Nexus-branded devices, and this time, it has handed those duties off to LG and Huawei. LG’s Nexus 5X looks like most smartphones in 2015: black front, colorful back. Buyers get a choice of black, white or “ice blue” hues.

More interesting than the colors are the 5X’s specs. The phone is reported to pack a 1080p, 5.2-inch screen, Snapdragon 808 processor, and USB-C for charging, according to Android Police. The site's RAM rumors are bit more hazy—the Nexus 5X could boast either 3 GB or just 2 GB. The current line of speculation about the phone also lacks mentions of camera, battery life, wireless charging or other specifics. Though the September 29 Google event will likely include these, and all other relevant details.

Nexus 5X

Android Pit

The Nexus 5X in white

Nexus 6p

Android Police

Huawei's Nexus device for Google

Nexus 6P

Huawei is also trying its hand at fielding a new phone for Google’s Nexus program. And funny enough, the company is choosing a higher number for the phone's name than LG, perhaps in a bid to suggest to buyers that it is a better device. Rumors point to the device having a 5.7-inch screen, USB-C connector, and a Snapdragon 810 system on a chip (SoC) architecture, according to Venture Beat. If the reports are to be believed, the Nexus 6P will beat the new iPhone 6S when it comes to one very important aspect: on-device storage space. There's reportedly no 16 GB-model in Huawei’s lineup. Instead, the Nexus 6P would presumably start at 32GB, and go up to 64GB and 128GB varieties.

Nexus 6p by Huawei

Android Police

White, silver, black and gold colors for the Nexus 6p

Google’s Nexus program was initially meant to get developers devices running pure, or "stock" versions of Android. But now that Android has taken off and many companies offer stock Android phones, Google's Nexus lineup has basically transformed into its flagship, much like how Samsung, HTC, and others have very clear branding for their most important phones. With the Google stamp of approval, the Nexus phones are clearly designed to help the search company take on Apple’s iOS darling: the iPhone.

Cupertino announced its new phones at its fall event earlier this month. The iPhone 6S contains weaker specs than most competing top-of-the-line Android phones, with just 2 GB of RAM, starting at 16 GB and bringing over last year’s battery. But where the iPhone 6S differentiates itself from Android is in software features. Apple’s app ecosystem on iOS is unmatched, and iDevices are still the only place you can use iMessage. Now with 3D Touch, Apple is adding quick actions based on how hard you press on the screen.

Huawei introduced their own version of Force Touch at IFA, though besides weighing fruit we aren’t sure what it will be used for. Though with the Chinese company developing the Nexus 6P, perhaps the Google flagship will also receive its own form of 3D Touch. We’ll know for sure come September 29.

Naloxone

Wikimedia User intropin

Mega-pharmacy chain CVS announced Wednesday that it will start selling naloxone without a prescription in 12 new states. Previously, only customers in Rhode Island and Massachusetts had over-the-counter privileges for the drug, which treats overdoses from opioids like heroin, morphine, and prescription pain medications like Oxycontin and Vicodin.

When someone overdoses on an opioid, the drug attaches to receptors in their brain and blocks signals that control their breathing. Naloxone works by knocking the opioids off the brain’s receptors, allowing an overdose victim to start breathing again within minutes.

The drug comes in an injectable form and a nasal spray, which vary in price per state. In Pennsylvania, one of the new states added to CVS’s list, the injectable form will sell for $52.99 and the nasal spray for $40.69.

“Over 44,000 people die from accidental drug overdoses every year in the United States and most of those deaths are from opioids, including controlled substance pain medication and illegal drugs such as heroin,” said Tom Davis, Vice President of Pharmacy Professional Practices at CVS, in a statement. “Naloxone is a safe and effective antidote to opioid overdoses and by providing access to this medication in our pharmacies without a prescription in more states, we can help save lives.”

The new states in which CVS will be selling naloxone without a prescription are Arkansas, California, Minnesota, Mississippi, Montana, New Jersey, North Dakota, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Tennessee, Utah and Wisconsin.

CVS hopes to grow that list even more. “While all 7,800 CVS/pharmacy stores nationwide can continue to order and dispense naloxone when a prescription is presented, we support expanding naloxone availability without a prescription and are reviewing opportunities to do so in other states,” said Davis.

Some smaller independent pharmacies and other large chains, such as Walgreens, are also selling naloxone without a prescription.

Upgraded Falcon 9 engine test burn

SpaceX via Youtube

SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket, which has launched satellites into orbit and carried cargo to the International Space Station and back again on multiple occasions, is getting a serious upgrade. It's engines are getting higher throttle settings, condensed fuel, and some new structural modifications. This week, the company put the rocket through its first static test fire.

The 15-second burn looks impressive, with red-hot flames and smoke pouring out, but ultimately was rather uneventful (which is actually great news when you're firing rockets). Watch a video of it here:

SpaceX rockets have been grounded since an explosion in June destroyed a cargo shipment to the International Space Station. Investigations into the accident pinpointed a failure in struts holding a high-pressure helium tank.

But it sounds like SpaceX is just about ready to get back into the game. At a forum in Berlin on Thursday, SpaceX CEO said, “We hope to launch again in a couple of months — I guess maybe six to eight weeks or so from now — and if things go well, we’ll be able to land the rocket, although I’ll be happy if it just gets to orbit, of course... But hopefully, it will come back to land as well, and that will be an important milestone for space exploration.”

The updated engine design was already planned before the explosion, and SpaceX is taking pains to ensure that the struts don't fail again.

The new engines will boast an extra boost. According to Spaceflight Now, each of the nine engines on the Falcon 9 rocket will provide 170,000 pounds of sea level thrust—up from 147,000 on the previous version.

The new upgrades will help the rocket carry heavier cargo into space, and will hopefully leave enough propellant left over after the launch to do a controlled landing of the rocket's first stage. That would help to usher in an era of rockets that are reusable and hence, cheaper.

Boeing Cargo Plane Patent Figures

United States Patent

Cargo containers are as universal as trade itself, finding their way onto trucks, freight trains, and ocean-going vessels. Their uniform, boxy shape and sharp edges make them instantly stackable, but not terribly aerodynamic. For transport by air, that usually means fitting square pegs into round planes. A new plane design by Boeing, granted a patent this week, could change that. Instead of slotting cargo containers into a round tube, the Boeing plane would line them up longwise in a neat row, then lower its aerodynamic body on top. Here’s what that looks like:

Boeing Cargo Plane Patent

United States Patent

The plane as sketched out is largely empty body, with four power prop engines mounted on top of the wings. Its body looks like nothing so much as a giant pink eraser, with a little bubble of a cockpit added to the front. The plane’s landing gear are spaced wide enough apart that it can simply roll over its cargo containers before lowering down onto them.

Boeing imagines the plane at operating at altitudes less than 18,000 feet, so that the cargo doesn’t need to be pressurized. Boeing envisions such a plane as an alternative to the slow but cost-efficient shipment of low-priority bulk cargo on boats, trains, and trucks, and the light loads of fast but expensive cargo aircraft shipments. By flying shipping containers, a plane like this could deliver large quantities very quickly, where previously price made that impossible.

Check out the full patent here.

Machine Derived Shirts

Stitch Fix

We have trained machines to dream, but can we make them follow their dreams of moving to New York to become a fashion designer? In a world where startups use algorithms to find the next fashion trends, it’s not impossible that computers could go beyond finding what’s popular, and start creating it. Stitch Fix, a fashion startup that aims to provide a personal shopping experience remotely, already uses machine learning to understand its customers' tastes. Last week, Stitch Fix data scientist TJ Torres poked into the potential future of computer-generated clothing designs.

Titled “Deep Style: Inferring the Unknown to Predict the Future of Fashion,” Torres' post details a process not unlike that used by Google this summer to generate those really freaky images with dog faces everywhere. The core technology is an artificial neural network that can be trained to recognize a specific object by analyzing pictures of it, and gradually the computer builds up its own picture of what the object looks like. Sometimes, the computers' results are spot on. Sometimes, they misidentify Yoda from Star Wars as a giraffe. It’s a kind of machine learning, and even the bad answers are informative.

For fashion, Torres took neural networks, and fed them pictures of clothing. In response, the network generated its own image. After being fed more images, the network's output eventually evolved away from just replicating the original shirts to arrive at new styles, patterns, and variations on the theme of shirts. The process is still in the early stages, so we can’t say that machine-derived patterns will sweep the next Fashion Week. But that’s a direction this could go. Says Torres:

Finding predictive signal in extracted stylistic concepts from images of clothing would represent a big leap forward in the modeling possibilities for our recommendation systems. More broadly, developing algorithms to quantify abstract concepts like style, fashion, and art may one day move us forward toward a more complex understanding of how we as people process and analyze abstract unstructured data. At Stitch Fix, we're in very early days of this research and have yet to implement it into our pipeline. Our ultimate goal is to employ this work to boost the combination of the recommender system and stylists to provide even better personalization than we see today.

When machines start learning the nuances of fashion, who will be the first to tell them they don’t have bodies to try it on?

Sira Currasow

[University of Exeter/YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wn1ud5kJiqk

An extraordinarily endangered bird, the Sira Currasow was photographed on a camera trap earlier this year.

When endangered wildlife get caught in traps it's usually a bad thing. But in Peru's Sira Communal Reserve, it was more like a miracle. Camera traps captured some extraordinary footage of the wildlife living in this remote area, including some very endangered species.

One of them was the critically endangered Sira Currasow. There are thought to be as few as 250 of these birds left in the wild, which explains why the species hasn't shown up on any camera traps until now.

But the birds weren't the only ones caught on the cameras. Spectacled bears, also known as Andean bears, showed quite an interest in the camera traps.

The spectacled bear was named the world's best bear species by Popular Science in 2013. It is also the inspiration for Paddington Bear, even though in the wild spectacled bears do not wear raincoats, boots, or adorable hats. And there aren't many of them left. However, the fact that the bear was spotted here, over 60 miles away from its home range, is a good sign to conservationists. They believe that the park where the bear was caught on camera could shelter 350 of these bears comfortably, and provide ample space to expand--a neccesary thing for a species whose population numbers in the thousands.

Camera traps around the world are making similar discoveries and those organizing the cameras often enlist volunteers to sort through the massive quantities of data. Ordinary people played a role in this study too. The 22 cameras used in the study were crowd-funded. In addition to the spectacled bear and the Sira Currasow, the cameras also captured footage of 30 species of mammal, 145 species of bird, 41 species of amphibian, 10 species of lizard and seven species of snake.

“Being involved in such a productive expedition with a small team was unbelievable," Peruvian biologist Ruthmery Pillco Huarcaya said in a statement. "I always assumed expeditions had to be huge and cost vast sums of money! The greatest thing to me was being in the same place as the spectacled bear, a flagship species for Peru and a species I have dreamed of seeing my entire life.”

Over the summer, the University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute surveyed more than 500 drivers to gauge their feelings about autonomous cars. The results? Only about 16 percent of respondents wanted a fully self-driving vehicle. By contrast, nearly 44 percent said they didn't want their cars to do any driving at all. 

A recent study from AAA has uncovered similar findings -- though in this case, respondents were asked about something much more innocuous and, occasionally, frustrating: parking.

In theory, drivers should feel comfortable with autonomous parking. With few exceptions, parking is a low-speed activity, which reduces the risk of damage to the vehicle that's parking and the cars around it. Also, parking takes place in a relatively static environment. Sure, there may be other vehicles cruising around the parking lot or rolling by as you try to parallel, but compared to zooming down the interstate in heavy traffic, it's practically a walk in the park.

And it's not as if this is anything new: the first self-parking cars hit the streets way back in 2003. 

All of which is to say, parking presents a great opportunity for drivers to let computers take over, right?

Wrong. 

Of those that AAA polled, a whopping 80 percent said that they were masters of the parallel park. Only about 25 percent of respondents said that they'd trust an autonomous parking system.

Which is just crazy talk, because as we've discussed about a thousand times before, humans can't drive better than computers. Remember, of the 11 accidents that Google has reported since beginning tests on autonomous cars in 2009, all were the fault of humans. 

To prove that point, AAA partnered with the Automobile Club of Southern California’s Automotive Research Center to test self-parking systems on five vehicles. a 2015 BMW i3, a 2015 Cadillac CTS-V Sport, a 2015 Jeep Cherokee Limited, a 2015 Lincoln MKC, and a 2015 Mercedes-Benz ML400 4Matic.

The numbers were telling. According to AAA:

• Drivers using self-parking systems experienced 81 percent fewer curb strikes.
• Self-parking systems parallel parked the vehicle using 47 percent fewer maneuvers, with some systems completing the task in as little as one maneuver.
• Self-parking systems were able to park a vehicle 10 percent faster.
• Self-parking systems were able to park 37 percent closer to the curb. [emphasis ours]

The one shortcoming? Sometimes the autonomous systems parked so well, they managed to get vehicles within half an inch of the curb -- significantly closer than the six-to-eight inches that AAA recommends. Being that close to the curb can sometimes damage wheels and, depending on your car's suspension and your passenger's weight, scuff passenger doors. Hopefully, that's a flaw that can be fixed via a software update. (If only humans worked that way.)

Still not convinced? Check out the video above to see how simple self-parking can be. And for those on the other side of the fence, you can take some solace in the fact that at least one group of analysts believes that autonomous cars will begin to earn mainstream acceptance in about five years.

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BMW i3 parallel parking better than you

AAA

We’ve all eyeballed a parking space at the curb and decided to go for it, despite the fact that it’s a bit too small for our car, or maybe traffic is heavy and might rush our perfect parallel parking job. According to a new study by AAA and the Automobile Club of Southern California’s Automotive Research Center, we think we can nail that parking challenge. Almost 80% of drivers in the study said they were confident in their parallel parking abilities, and only about 25% said they’d trust a self-parking system to help them.

But guess what? We’re terrible judges of our parallel parking skills.

The study used vehicles with self-parking systems and vehicles equipped with just the standard back-up camera to see how drivers did with each. It turned out drivers using the park-assist vehicles had 81% fewer curb strikes -- that’s an 81% reduction in that horrible scraping sound of rims against concrete. The self-parking systems were able to settle into the spot using about half as many maneuvers, so they weren’t spending five minutes doing the front-and-back shimmy to work themselves into place, even though the humans had backup cameras to help them in the comparison vehicles. And the self-parking systems were able to get the vehicles 37% closer to the curb.

This last point is where we humans might actually be a touch better. AAA recommends parking 6-8 inches from the curb, which frankly we aren’t consistently good at either. But manufacturers have programmed the cars to snug right up to the curb -- as little as a half inch away in some cases -- which can damage tires and rims. And we human drivers can do that just fine without any robotic help, thank you.