Jahd Khalil

Dave Levin, Left, and Loay Malameh, Right, hold 3D printed objects in their former makerspace in Amman, Jordan. They want to develop technology outside Syria in R & D Labs and build them inside the warzone.

On face value, Dave Levin and Loay Malameh are creating a makerspace and innovation center for refugees, but their real goal is much more ambitious. “Much of what we’re doing is trying to disrupt the whole nature of humanitarian relief, of civil defense, perhaps of warfare itself,” said Levin.

Levin and Malameh are on top of a non-profit network of technologists, aid workers, and entrepreneurs that are trying to hack some of the challenges Syrians, inside and outside of conflict zones, encounter every day, from connecting to the internet to fighting barrel bombs. The consortium, “Refugee Open Ware (ROW),” ties together several different initiatives and groups and has received political, financial, and technological support from numerous diverse backers, everyone from a particle physicist at CERN to even the King of Jordan.

Manufacturing tools were strewn across Levin and Malameh’s small makerspace in Amman, Jordan when I visited late last year. One of a dozen 3D printers was buzzing, left on overnight to print a part. On a table there was a Raspberry Pi, a soldering iron, and printer components. Against one wall were shelves holding all kinds of polymers, against another a series of prosthetic hands and a model of a heart. On the table were plans for their 500 square meter innovation center, which was below our feet, which at the time was empty and is now being filled to eventually become FabLab Amman, a space where anyone can try and make their own technology.

The Amman innovation center will act as a training hub for both locals and refugees to solve their own problems with some heavy ideas behind it. Anyone can use it – students, professors, refugees, and entrepreneurs already have.

“The whole idea with the democratization of production, which is the main characteristic of the next industrial revolution, is that anyone can get access to these advanced manufacturing tools,” Levin said. He wants to use spaces like these to create technological solutions to alleviate the pain and suffering caused by the Syrian conflict.

Jahd Khalil

In ROW's former makerspace, 3d Printed ball bearings, soldering irons, and other parts for hacked humanitarian equipment are strewn across tables, alongside plans for a large innovation center, which the consortium has now moved into.

The biggest killer in Syria has been bombing by the military of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and his allies, and ROW is developing technology from after for the entire period of after the bombs fall, to when Syrians fleeing them end up in a refugee camp.

Take, for example, the recent example of a Russian airstrike. Before any survivors could be taken from the rubble, fires needed to be put out and a first-responder was left with crude tools to do so.

“A guy came out with a water tank and a garden hose,” said Levin, who explained that the first responder had to pinch the hose with his thumb to get a strong enough stream.

Syrians have access to many basic components: hoses, wires, computers, generators, and industrial equipment. Many of these simple tools can be modified—with the right know-how—into effective life saving devices.

This particular example has two proposed approaches. One was to hack a solution: figure out how to modify a liquid petroleum gas (LPG) tank to hold water pressure using only parts available in Syria, then import the knowhow.

When I heard this, I made the comparison to the scene in Apollo 13, when Houston has to take available resources and jimmy up a carbon dioxide filter.

“It’s exactly like that,” Levin said laughing. “It’s what everybody has been saying.”

Another, similar approach was to pinpoint a key part, like a nozzle, and 3D-print it. With manufacturing tools inside of Syria, ROW can provide technologies inside the warzone. If all but one of the requisite parts for, let's say, a jaws of life machine were available inside the country, it could be developed abroad and brought in. This means ROW would reduce the costs of logistics immensely, both because of the efforts that go into procurement, and the ability for custom solutions that would otherwise be more costly. This is especially true for a place where checkpoints and areas of control change weekly.

Because Bashar al-Assad’s strategy is to kill civilians and create threats strong enough to depopulate entire districts of urban Syria, just saving lives presents a threat to his generals’ own savage rendering of counter-insurgency. In fact, the pair speak cautiously about what their strategies and solutions are for this exact reason, and ROW will more closely control access to its Rescue Technology Incubator in Istanbul due to security concerns.

And in some cases, those bombs don’t explode and force people out. Unexploded Ordinance (UXO) will be an issue in Syria for many years to come. ROW has both high- and low-tech solutions for this in development. The (relatively) low-tech approach is to quickly 3D print replicas of known UXO, while the high tech solution is a computer vision app that can “see” what kind of ordinance it is and advise rescuers on how to disarm it.

If Syrians are maimed by the war, there are solutions too. There’s their prototype of a cheap echolocation device that allows the visually impaired to navigate their homes, as well as 3D printed prosthetics that custom fit, specialized for occupation, and cost less. They’ve partnered with National Syrian Project for Prosthetic Limbs (NSPPL), the largest provider of free prosthetics for the tens of thousands of Syrian amputees.

And ROW will be there for Syrians that have made the difficult choice to leave their homes, too. There’s the idea to network inside a refugee camp, enabling fire detection and monitoring of services; assisting in connecting Outernet, which allows connectivity in a place where cell phone service is overloaded by bypassing 3G and ADSL signals using satellite dishes.

Jahd Khalil

Dave Levin and Loay Malameh, pictured, want to use 3D printed technology to aid in rescues in Syria, in conjunction with an international network of activists, entrepreneurs, and engineers.

Levin and Malameh both had wanted to start a pilot program printing prosthetics for refugees and were eventually connected by an open-source community for 3D-printed prosthetics. Levin showed up at Malameh’s office with a printer on his back, and soon a refugee, Asem, printed a custom piece of his prosthetic foot for a fraction of the time and cost that finding an alternative would have.

“The momentum that came out of Asem was really impressive,” Malameh said. They asked If Asem could learn how to print a foot for himself, what would happen if hundreds were able to innovate for themselves or others? They’ve launched a research and development center in Istanbul, the innovation center in an Amman tech hub, a prostheses center in Jordan’s premier medical facility, and, most ambitiously, the goal is to launch a fabrication lab in Zaatari Refugee Camp, where just under 80,000 people live.

But in scaling up they’ve run into problems. Jordanian security services have rejected the necessary approvals to set up FabLab Zaatari multiple times. “One has to expect a great deal of caution,” Levin said. And a lot of people don’t understand what they are trying to do without visiting their makers’ space in Amman.

Their next steps are to fill their two other spaces with experts and production equipment: one in Amman, and another in the northern city of Irbid near Zaatari. They’ve received support from the highest levels of the Jordanian government, including a brief meeting with the King, and the Jordanian start-up world that provided them with the space for the lab.

Levin and Malameh come at the project from two different business backgrounds: Malameh worked for Fortune 500 companies looking to make money and Levin worked in consulting and in the impact investing world. Private investment and philanthropy make up the most of funding, with some large investments from the EU and USAID.

But their talk sounds more like a nimble techno-syndicate than a startup or even a lefty tech-fund. They talk about decentralizing the means of production, and disrupting humanitarian aid at a time when donors and stakeholders want to see balance sheets.

“Nowadays you start a non-profit and everybody wants to see what your revenue model is,” says Levin. “And when you’re producing really cutting edge technology for amputees of the Syrian conflict, how do you expect to have a revenue model from day one? Or even in year five?”

Jahd Khalil

ROW was born after Dave Levin hacked an Ultimaker 3D printer into a backpack and started printing prosthetics.

That timeline is important too. Even if the horrors of the Syrian war, and its spillover into its neighbors, make a turn for the better, the project has staying power and looks far off into the future. They’re working with a global community of humanitarian hacktivists, for lack of a better word. They hope they can easily scale into other conflict zones, and are pushing for FabLabs for refugees in Europe. In Philadelphia, NextFab, another partner in ROW, hosted the Humanitarian Rescue Tech Hackathon. Teams there devised plans for drone delivery of goods. In Barcelona, Fab Labs are focusing on prosthetics. And they are hoping more people join in.

“We’re looking for our real visionary leaders who have seen enough kids had their legs blown off by barrel bombs. Those that are frustrated by the traditional processes that are going to progress challenges in the region and challenges of conflict,” said Levin.

The network has allowed them to leverage the agility of collaboration against the bureaucracy that goes into building these kind of spaces and to bring on interested parties. They’re looking for engineers, data scientists, and software and web developers. And, people can donate on their website.

“We learned a lot from the beginning," says Malameh. "And just now we are getting physical traction.”

kelapstick, Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons

Pioneer Coal Mine in Stellarton, Nova Scotia

On Friday, Department of the Interior secretary, Sally Jewell, announced the Obama administration's plans for stopping all new leases on federal lands for coal mines. This down time will give the DOI the chance to review the government's coal program and better account for the environmental costs of burning coal with a programmatic environmental impact statement. The DOI says this review "will take a careful look at issues such as how, when, and where to lease; how to account for the environmental and public health impacts of federal coal production; and how to ensure American taxpayers are earning a fair return for the use of their public resources."

The review is scheduled to last about three years. Previously, the federal coal program underwent reviews in the 1980s and 1970s, and similar to when those reviews took place, current coal mining leases won't be affected. If you're concerned about an energy shortage, the DOI estimates that those current land leases can sustain coal production levels for the next 20 years.

In addition to reviewing the social and environmental costs, Secretary Jewell also announced a number of transparency reforms, such as a public database of the carbon cost of fossil fuels from public lands.

While this might ultimately lead to more environmentally-minded coal mining practices in the future, some Republicans have pushed back against this land lease ban, calling it a war on coal mining communities.

This land lease ban announcement comes after President Obama's State of the Union speech earlier this week, in which he claimed big victories for clean energy in America: "In fields from Iowa to Texas, wind power is now cheaper than dirtier, conventional power. On rooftops from Arizona to New York, solar is saving Americans tens of millions of dollars a year on their energy bills, and employs more Americans than coal -- in jobs that pay better than average."

John Karakatsanis via Flickr [CC BY-SA 2.0

iPhone 6

With a bill reintroduced last week, a New York Assemblyman wants to make it easy for the government to get inside smartphones. It’s a proposal that would mandate smartphone manufacturers be able to unlock the phones they make. The bill comes from Assemblyman Matthew Titone, of Staten Island’s North Shore, and was first introduced last summer. It’s sat in the Consumer Affairs and Protection committee since, so it’s still a long way from becoming law. A cryptographic back door would be bad for cryptography, privacy, and consumers.

The “back door” metaphor isn’t too far from the truth, so let’s flesh it out for a minute. In a memo sent out in support of the bill this week, the bill's author does that for us. He describes a phone that cannot be unlocked except by the owner like this:

It is as if the police get a search warrant for a safe deposit box at a bank because they have reason to believe that the safe deposit box has evidence of a crime - but they cannot open the box because the bank has thrown away its own key. Indeed, this situation is even worse because whereas a safe deposit box can, ultimately, be opened by force, a passcode-protected smartphone is virtually impregnable, unless the companies maintain the ability to open the phones that it manufactures.

Except, and I think this is the crucial point, if there’s a mandated back door, then it’s not a safe that the government can access, it’s a safe anyone can access. As security researcher Bruce Schneier wrote when Apple introduced its strong encryption:

You can't build a backdoor that only the good guys can walk through. Encryption protects against cybercriminals, industrial competitors, the Chinese secret police and the FBI. You're either vulnerable to eavesdropping by any of them, or you're secure from eavesdropping from all of them.

Under the New York bill, companies that don’t provide or build in these back doors could face huge legal penalties. The Independent describes it:

The proposed law would also make phone manufacturers pay a fine of $2,500 (£1,736) for every phone they sell that cannot be unlocked.

This would result in fines reaching into the tens of millions for companies like Apple, whose devices are designed to have no back door, and are only unlockable by their owner.

Should the bill pass, it’d likely mean no iPhones sold in the entire state of New York. Or, as one commenter noted on Twitter:

SpaceX

Falcon 9 awaits the launch of the Jason-3 satellite

The weather looks good for Sunday's SpaceX launch. The company's Falcon 9 rocket will will carry an ocean-monitoring satellite into orbit, then attempt to land on a drone ship in the Pacific ocean.

Earlier this week, the company successfully test-fired the Falcon 9, so it looks like it's all systems go for the January 17 launch—so far at least.

The launch is scheduled for Sunday at 1:42pm Eastern, but coverage will begin at 12:45. You can watch it here via a NASA livestream:

About three minutes after liftoff, the main stage rocket booster will separate from the spacecraft and return to Earth, hopefully landing safely on SpaceX's autonomous barge. Meanwhile, second stage boosters will continue to carry the Jason-3 satellite up to an orbit 840 miles above the Earth.

About 56 minutes after launch, Jason-3 will deploy its solar panels to prepare for operations. The satellite will help the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration track sea level heights, which could improve forecasting for El Nino weather patterns and predict hurricane intensity.

SpaceX's plan to land the rocket's first stage on a drone ship, if successful, will be historic. The company recently managed to land their rocket on solid ground—a feat that could usher in an era of reusable rockets and cheaper spaceflight. But landing on a moving vessel adds an extra challenge.

SpaceX

The autonomous spaceport is about the size of an American football field

Spaceflight Now reports that being able to land on the barge will come in handy when SpaceX needs to launch heavy payloads that use up all of its fuel. Without fuel reserves, the rocket could come down hard, which is a good reason to steer it out into the ocean for its landing attempt. The Sunday landing attempt, however, will be made using fuel reserves left over after the Jason-3 launch.

SpaceX came close to landing its rocket on the "autonomous spaceport" twice before, but both attempts ended in fiery failure. Will the third time be the charm? Only one way to find out.

We'll add updates here as the launch progresses.

SpaceX

SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket booster made it to space and back with no major damage

On December 21, a SpaceX rocket carried 11 satellites into space and then returned to Earth for a soft landing. It was a big deal, because recovering the rocket booster (as opposed to dumping it into the ocean) sets the company up to reuse it, and that could shave millions of dollars off the cost of launching into space.

But an important question remains: is the recovered booster in good enough shape to fly again? If it needs a lot of repairing, that would reduce the savings. On Friday, a test fire at SpaceX's Cape Caveral launchpad revealed a preliminary answer.

“That booster is in great shape,” Hans Koenigsmann, SpaceX vice president of mission assurance, said at a press conference. “We inspected it. We found nothing out of order.”

Hard-driving SpaceX CEO Elon Musk doesn't seem to have been quite so satisfied:

The company hasn't said much else about the tests, but they're still doing detailed studies.

The booster from December 21 probably won't fly again—the company wants to put it on display instead. But SpaceX plans to launch and land another booster on January 17. If all goes well, they'll have another recovered rocket to study, and perhaps even re-launch.

The Titan II rocket that launched NASA’s Gemini missions was sort of the standout odd-ball. One of only two rockets used to launch Apollo-era missions that wasn’t a Wernher von Braun design and the only to use hypergols, it was also the only launch vehicle NASA chose for a program before it had any kind of track record. It’s development was touch and go for a while, but it ultimately launched the fastest program in the space agency’s history.

USAF LAAFB

A Titan I missile launches from Cape Canaveral, 1960.

After the end of the Second World War, the US Army Air Force was getting into the business of developing its own ballistic missiles, ones inspired by but not strictly based off of recovered V-2 technology. In April of 1946, the service accepted a proposal from Convair to build a supersonic, ballistic, rocket-powered missile called Project MX-774. By December of 1954, the US Air Force was a separate service branch and MX-774, renamed Atlas, had developed as a stage-and-a-half missile: all the engines ignited at the moment of liftoff then the booster engines were jettisoned about two minutes into the flight. It was a high priority weapons system on its way to becoming America’s first strategic intercontinental ballistic missile.

But the USAF Atlas Scientific Advisory Committee was concerned that, if the Atlas failed, the service would have no other missile in its arsenal. And so, on July 21, 1954, the USAF ASAC recommended the service build a true two-stage missile to serve as a backup to the Atlas. The contract was awarded to the Martin company on October 27 the following year with the order to design and develop a new missile airframe called XSM-68, later renamed Titan.

Unlike Atlas, whose skin was so thin the rocket had to be pressurised just to avoid collapsing on itself, the Titan pioneered structural elements built into the tank walls. A chemical milling process also helped make the new rocket’s aluminium airframe stronger and lighter. But the first iteration called Titan I wasn't a perfect missile. Using a combination of rocket propellant (RP-1) and cryogenic liquid oxygen (LOX), it couldn’t wait on the launch pad until it needed to fly. For a missile meant to respond to an enemy threat, the delay between the order to launch a missile and it getting off the ground was problematic.

In 1958, the Titan I began going through testing for in-silo launches. If it could be stored ready to fly it would be a better missile to launch in a crisis. And since Martin was investigating the new storage and launch option, it opted to bring a host of other changes into the missile at this point, too. The contractor gave the new Titan a larger diameter so it could lift a heavier warhead and upgraded its inertial guidance system, but the biggest change came with the new fuel and oxidiser combination.

A Titan couldn’t be fuelled with RP-1 and liquid oxygen and left to sit in a silo; there was too much necessary maintenance to keep the cryogenic LOX super-chilled before a launch. Another option was hypergols, a fuel and oxidiser that don't need to be stored at such low temperatures and burn on contact making the need for an ignition unnecessary. After considering various options, Martin settled on Aerozine 50 as the fuel — a 50:50 mixture of unsymmetrical dimethyl hydrazine and hydrazine — and dinitrogen tetroxide as the oxidiser — a mixture of nitrogen tetroxide and nitric oxide.

USAF

A Titan II leaving a missile silo.

This upgraded missile called Titan II was a substantial improvement over the Titan I. The Titan II delivered 430,000 pounds of thrust at launch compared to the the Titan I’s 300,000 pounds of thrust. Igniting at 250,000 feet, the Titan II's second stage would deliver 100,000 pounds of thrust compared to the Titan I’s 80,000 pounds. This all meant the Titan II could be stored with a larger warhead, launch much faster, and cover a much larger distance. Martin signed a contract with the USAF to build the Titan II in May of 1960 and began production on the new missile a month later.

A year later, Martin Company personnel approached NASA the idea of using the Titan II as a launch vehicle for the lunar landing program. The agency’s Associate Administrator Robert C. Seamans was skeptical, but interested enough in the missile to entertain a more formal proposal. From there, the idea developed to use the Titan II to launch a scaled-up Mercury spacecraft as part of NASA’s upcoming Mercury Mark II program.

A formal proposal came two months later. The Mercury-Titan program, Martin personnel said, would benefit not only from the Air Force’s own Titan missile development program, it would also take advantage of the service’s preliminary attempts to man-rate it; at the time it was the planned launch vehicle for Dyna-Soar. And the same benefits the Titan II had over the Titan I promised to apply to NASA missions as well: hypergols were easier to work with, and it was a far more powerful rocket than anything NASA had at its disposal.

By the end of 1961, the Mercury Mark II program was taking shape. The two-man version of the Mercury spacecraft launched on a Titan II was the next step in NASA’s path to the Moon. The problem was, the Titan II had no track record. For NASA to make its end-of-decade deadline, it would need the Air Force to not only build but also man-rate the Titan II in time to launch the interim program. But the Air Force was more focussed on getting the Titan II ready for its role as a missile. The offshoot that met NASA’s standards was secondary and, for Air Force brass, not worth delaying the missile program.

USAF

A Titan II out of its silo.

By May of 1963, NASA Mercury program was coming to a close, Mercury Mark II was renamed Gemini, and the Titan II was beset by problems. Foremost was persistent longitudinal oscillation or pogo. This was a known issue to engineers, a phenomenon wherein unstable engine combustion causes variable thrust rates for a rocket in flight, which sends vibrations through the rocket's structure, including through the fuel tanks so the fuel goes back into the combustion chamber at variable rates and makes the problem worse. It's a dangerous situation for an astronaut, but less so for a missile, so while NASA was concerned when the pogo problem emerged, the USAF was less so. Similarly, NASA was worried about the Titan II's second stage's tendency to burn unevenly and fundamental design flaws with the engines. All told, the Titan II was nearly ready to launch a missile but far from supporting a manned spaceflight launch.

With the problems identified, the USAF started working on solutions. Aerojet-General, the subcontractor behind the Titan II’s engines, and an internal Gemini Stability Improvement Program team began tackling the rocket’s problems that fall. Progress was slow, so much so that NASA briefly considered dropping the Titan II from the Gemini program and using the Saturn I in its place, a von Braun-based design already under development.

NASA

The unmanned Gemini 1 launch

But a solution soon emerged. On November 1, 1963, Titan II Missile N-25 was launched with standpipes in the oxidizer lines and mechanical accumulators in the fuel lines to suppress the pogo effect. It worked. Pogo levels got down to within NASA’s comfort zone, and every launch over the five months that followed had the same result. By mid-January 1964, NASA had no lingering concerns over the Titan II. A little over a year later in March of 1965, the missile carried the first manned Gemini mission into orbit. It went on to launch ten successful missions in twenty months.

That NASA chose the Titan II for the Gemini so early in its development meant the missile and the man-rated version followed parallel tracks to flight worthiness. The forced collaboration between the USAF and NASA was a unique situation that George Mueller, Associate Administrator of NASA’s Office of Manned Space Flight said was likely responsible for the high reliability and remarkable success of the Titan II as a manned launch vehicle.

Sources: On the Shoulders of Titans; Titan I Chronology; Titan II Chronology; Project Gemini Chronology;

Michigan Municipal League via Flickr, CC by ND 2.0

Flint, Michigan

Experts suspect that citizens of Flint, Michigan have been drinking lead-contaminated water for over a year.

For the past year and a half, citizens of Flint, Michigan have been struggling to get clean, safe water to drink. The city switched its water source from the Detroit water supply to the Flint river, causing a slew of public health problems, including high concentrations of E. coli bacteria and a recent outbreak of Legionnaires’ disease that killed 10. But most disturbing of all was the high concentration of lead that leached from Flint's old, outdated pipes into the water flowing to citizens' homes, which may have exposed thousands of children to the toxic substance. How, exactly, does lead exposure affect a child, and are the effects permanent?

How is lead introduced to the body?

Humans have long known that lead can cause detrimental health effects—some claim it contributed to the fall of the Roman Empire. But the substance’s effects were first documented in children about a century ago, says Jay Schneider, a neuroscientist at Thomas Jefferson University. However, lead was still common in many household products—especially paint, in which it was used to add color and stability the mixture, until it was banned in 1978.

Lead paint, turning into dust and chips as it falls from the walls of old houses, is one of the most common ways in which children are exposed to the substance. But it shows up in other surprising places, too—in many vinyl-based products like shower curtains and raincoats, telephone cords, and some that are even designed explicitly for children, such as lunch boxes and toys.

Lead can be ingested, through water or other contaminated substances--the Environmental Protection Agency limits the amount of lead in water to 15 micrograms per liter, though some toxicologists think that limit should be lowered to 10 micrograms per liter. Lead can also be inhaled or sometimes even absorbed through the skin, though lead can't move from water into skin, so it's safe to bathe in lead-contaminated water as long as you don't drink it.

Once it’s in the body, lead competes with calcium to be absorbed by the body. There are lots of factors that can affect just how much of the lead is absorbed, but there is an overall higher absorption rate for lead that is inhaled versus ingested. It sticks to red blood cells—doctors usually test the blood for proof of exposure to lead—and then moves into soft tissues, like the liver and lungs. If lead is absorbed into bones, it can stay there for decades and recirculate in the person’s blood if a bone is broken or when a woman is pregnant, potentially poisoning both the mother and the fetus.

What are the health effects and dangers of lead?

When cells in the brain absorb lead, it tends to affect the frontal cortex, the area responsible for abstract thought, planning, and attention, and the hippocampus, essential to learning and memory. But the resulting symptoms vary a lot between individuals, Schneider says. “You don’t often see the same kinds of cognitive dysfunction in all kids,” he says. “From what our research has shown, there are very significant differences in the way different brains respond to this particular toxin.”

Factors like age, sex, amount of lead in the body, and genetic makeup can drastically alter the particular combination of symptoms caused by lead poisoning in the brain--younger children and boys display the strongest neurological effects.

Tappancs via Pixabay

Lead water pitcher and goblet

Lead might come with the drinking water from these vessels.

One thing is constant, however: lead is toxic, and if it makes its way into the still-developing brains of young children, many of the effects can be permanent. Lead can change how signals are passed within the brain, how memories are stored, even how cells get their energy, resulting in life-long learning disabilities, behavioral problems, and lower IQs.

“It can really change the programming of the brain, which will have considerable effects on subsequent behavioral and brain function,” Schneider says. “As we learn more about lead and its effects on the brain, even down to these molecular levels, if anything it’s even more dangerous than we thought.”

What are the treatments for lead exposure?

If you suspect that your child might have lead poisoning, Schneider recommends getting a complete evaluation from a pediatrician.

If a child has in fact been poisoned, however, there are woefully few treatments available. For very high levels of lead in the blood, doctors can give children chelation therapy, a chemical that binds to the lead so that the body can’t absorb it. “That can help to protect the peripheral organs, but most agents used for [treatment] don’t do anything to fix the damage that’s already been done,” Schneider says. There is no treatment for low levels of lead in the blood.

Schneider suggests that families take a preventative approach to lead poisoning. If you have young children and live in an old house or in an area with old water pipes, you should call an expert to test the water and paint in your home.

Scientists still have many more questions about just how lead affects the body. Schneider is curious about how lead can change a person’s genome — a field of study called epigenetics, which can modify a person’s behavior, and be passed down through generations. A better understanding of lead’s molecular and genetic effects might help scientists figure out how to reverse the damage of lead poisoning.

In the meantime, lead poisoning continues to be a public health concern, especially in low-income and minority communities.

In Flint, the situation has become dire. Late last year, the Michigan governor distributed thousands of faucet filters to take the lead out of contaminated water, but most experts think that's just a temporary solution since tainted water is still flowing into the homes of thousands of locals. The National Guard has been called in, and earlier this weekend, President Obama declared a state of emergency in the community. As a result of all the effort and attention, thousands of people will hopefully soon have clean water to drink and use. But with so much lead that has already made its way to thousands of local children, some fear that significant damage has already been done.

Printer and camera company Canon wanted to make a big splash at CES 2016 by announcing an all new service for printing Instagram photos called "UBUPrints."To promote the idea, Canon hooked us up with aerial photographer Natalie Amrossi (@misshattan) for a helicopter tour of Las Vegas, the site of CES. Canon hopes to encourage other social media stars to use the service to put their best work on physical display, in their homes or in galleries worldwide.

You can subscribe to Katie's tech podcast Katie dot Show where she shares first looks in technology and interviews some of the most notable minds in the industry.

CDC via Wikimedia Commons

Aedes aegypti mosquito

The species of mosquito responsible for the transmitting the Zika virus.

On Saturday, the Centers For Disease Control (CDC) confirmed the first case of brain damage in the United States linked to the Zika virus. The baby, born in a hospital on Oahu on Friday, had microcephaly, a rare neurological disease that has been linked to the Zika virus in babies born in Brazil. Health officials confirmed the baby was infected with the virus shortly after its birth, according to Reuters.

The virus, which is spread via mosquitoes, was discovered in 1947 but scientists have just recently linked the infection with microcephaly—a rare neurological condition that causes babies to be born with abnormally small heads and underdeveloped brains. In October, health officials in Brazil investigated the cause of the 3,000 cases of microcephaly and found that the babies’ mothers had previously been infected with Zika.

Hawaiian health officials say the mother was likely infected with the virus in Brazil while she was pregnant. Since the first confirmed Zika case was reported in Brazil last May, the outbreak has spread to at least 14 countries and territories in the Caribbean and Latin America. On Friday, the CDC issued a travel warning for those areas, and cautioned pregnant women against traveling to areas where babies have been born with microcephaly from the virus.

The Hawaii State Department of Health claims that, aside from the mother and baby—who were not infectious—there have been no Zika cases acquired within Hawaii itself. However, health officials across the United States remain cautious as just last week health officials in Harris County in Texas reported the first case of Zika on mainland U.S. The Aedes aegypti mosquito, the species that transmits Zika, is common in Texas, Florida, and other parts of the United States.

As no vaccine or treatment currently exists, the CDC emphasizes that people in high-risk areas protect themselves by using insect repellent and wearing long sleeves.

Jason Rubin is the president of worldwide studios for Oculus VR, the much-hyped virtual reality company owned by Facebook. The company is releasing its Oculus Rift headset to the public this year for the first time ever, and you can pre-order it for $599. Rubin says the initial content will be entertainment based, from video games to immersive experiences. But he also thinks the uses will go far beyond, into science, training, psychology and much more. Much as the smartphone started a simple replacement for the cell phones of yore before expanding its potential, Rubin believes VR will have a similarly widespread impact on the real world. Watch his interview with Katie Linendoll at CES 2016.

You can subscribe to Katie's tech podcast Katie dot Show where she shares first looks in technology and interviews some of the most notable minds in the industry.

Katie Peek / Popular Science

Positions Of The Planets Before Sunrise

Early-morning stargazers will catch sight of the five naked-eye planets strung in a line across the heavens. This view shows the sky at 6:45 a.m. from Atlanta on January 20, but the planets will be visible from just about anywhere, and will grace the morning sky for a month.

Starting tomorrow morning, all five* visible planets will shine down from the sky in the morning twilight. Head out about an hour before sunrise, and look toward the southeast.

The four bright ones—Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, and Venus—are pretty easy to spot, if you’ve got a star chart in hand. Venus, for example, will be the brightest thing up there (apart from the moon). Mercury is a little trickier, because it’s easily lost in the light of the soon-to-rise sun.

The planets should be visible from just about anywhere on the globe (though not from the North Pole), and the view will last until mid-February, if tomorrow’s too cold for you. And if you’re a night owl rather than an early bird, you’re in luck: The five planets will all be aligned in the evening sky come August 2016.

What makes all five visible at once? It happens because of the planets’ positions along their orbits. At the moment, these five all happen to lie to the right of the sun, when viewed from above the solar system. That means, as the earth spins, they’re all visible in the sky just before sunrise. You can think if it as a line of six, with Jupiter the first to rise and the sun rising last—and marking the end of the morning stargazing session.

Katie Peek / Popular Science

Planetary Positions

The five planets are visible all at the same time because from the Earth’s perspective they all lie to the right of the sun. So they rise one after another—Jupiter, then Mars, then Saturn, then Venus, and finally Mercury. Last, the sun rises and makes all five disappear with its morning rays.

*Yes, in total there are eight planets, but Uranus and Neptune are too dim to see without a telescope and Earth is the one just there at your feet. So we’re just talking about the big five of stargazing: Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn.

NASA/JPL-Caltech

Illustration of the star KIC 8462852

Could the weird light blips coming from this star be caused by a family of comets or collision debris?

Astronomers really want to know what's happening around a star that's 1,480 light-years away.

In October, astronomers floated the idea that the star KIC 8462852 could be surrounded by some sort of huge alien structure. While that's unlikely, scientists are still having a hard time coming up with a good explanation for the star's strange behavior.

Every so often, the star's light dims by as much as 20 percent. By comparison, a huge, Jupiter-size planet orbitiing the star would block out about 1 percent of the star's light. Astronomer Jason Wright proposed that a swarm of objects, perhaps alien solar panels, could be circling the star and causing the dimming. Scientists have since listened for radio and laser communications from this hypothetical alien civilization, but found nothing.

Up until now, the leading hypothesis was that a family of comets circles the star, occasionally clumping together to block out huge portions of its light. A new paper, published on the arXiv, says that this explanation is unlikely as well.

You would need 648,000 giant comets to explain the star's dimming pattern.

Within the paper (which hasn't been peer-reviewed yet), astronomer Bradley Shaefer from Louisiana State University describes his deep dive into Harvard's historical astronomy plates. After looking at 1,232 photographic plates from the past century, he found that the star not only dims dramatically over short periods of time today, but also that the star has been growing dimmer over time. These two very strange phenomena are probably linked.

In the past century or so, the star's brightness has dipped by 16.5 to 19.3 percent. This trend is "completely unprecedented" for a star of this type, Schaefer writes. "Such stars should be very stable in brightness, with evolution making for changes only on time scales of many millions of years."

He goes on to calculate how many comets would be needed to explain the phenomena, and the answer is: a whole heck of a lot.

Previously, scientists estimated that it would require 36 giant comets to explain the occasional 20 percent dip in light from the star. To explain the century-long fading, Shaefer calculates you'd need 648,000 comets with a diameter of 200 kilometers (124 miles) each. By comparison, the largest known comet in our solar system is 60km in diameter. And the hypothetical comets around KIC 8462852 would need to have a total mass that's four times the mass of everything in the Kuiper belt.

"I do not see how it is possible for something like 648,000 giant comets to exist around one star, nor to have their orbits orchestrated so as to all pass in front of the star within the last century," Shaefer writes. "So I take this century-long dimming as a strong argument against the comet-family hypothesis to explain the Kepler dips."

While Schaefer doesn't offer an alternative theory, his analysis provides a second line of data suggesting there really is something weird happening around KIC 8462852--that it's not just a fluke of the Kepler telescope that discovered the star's odd behavior.

Just because science doesn’t yet have an explanation for what's happening at KIC 8462852 doesn't mean it's aliens. Most major discoveries don't have an obvious explanation at first. But whatever is happening on this faraway star, it's sure to be something interesting.

[arXiv via Gizmodo]

Screenshot by author, from YouTube

Drone Lands On Car

The heavier a given drone is, the less time it can spend flying. The point of a camera-carrying drone like a Penguin-BE is to fly for a long time, its camera watching the ground below. One way to increase flight time is to get rid of parts on the plane, but after a certain point, there’s not much left to remove. The plane needs its camera, engine, wings, and the body that holds it all together. But does it really need its landing gear?

A project by the German Aerospace Center, or DLR, argues that it doesn’t, really, if there’s another way for it to land safely. The system is aimed at ultralight and fragile solar-powered planes. To catch the drone, researchers put a suspended net on top of a car, drove it at 45mph, and waited for the drone to match speed and lock onto target:

The drone's camera scans a marker that looks a lot like a QR code, and then lowers itself gently into the waiting sky-cradle.

Ta-da! For most drones, like the all-electric Penguin BE which we're pretty sure is featured in the demonstration, the savings that come with removing landing gear are modest. But for other drones, it could help a lot. Drones like Titan Aerospace’s Solara 50 are designed to fly for not hours but months or even years continuously, so it might make sense to have the landing gear separate from the plane, in the form of a chase team and a car with a special net.

The landing demonstrated is done autonomously, using the existing camera on board the drone, with the human driver having to match the speed of the landing robot. In the future, we could see an automated drone landing on an automated car. DLR writes:

The major advantage of this system is that the movement of the UAV and the ground vehicle are synchronised in real time using the developed algorithms. With both vehicles moving at the same velocity, the landing resembles a vertical helicopter landing when seen from the ground vehicle. Thereby, the horizontal velocity components are close to zero, making the landing phase simpler and safer. In the experiments performed to date, flight operations safety rules required a driver to be present in the car. The driver received calculated control commands via a graphical display, which instructed faster or slower driving. In the future, in practical applications, a robotic vehicle without a driver could be used.

Watch the robot land on the human-driven car below:

Taking time to stop and smell the flowers can be difficult when you're 248 miles above the Earth traveling at 17,500 mph. But now, the astronauts on the International Space Station actually have some flowers onboard, and they didn't even have to stop for them (not that they could).

Over the weekend, astronaut Scott Kelly showed the world a lovely orange zinnia, an annual that's usually pretty easy to grow here on Earth. But up on the ISS, getting it to grow safely was a challenge.

Back in December, NASA announced that the zinnias were not doing so well, nearing the end of their lifespan and growing a coating of mold. Frustrated with the proscribed instructions for plant care from the ground, on Christmas, Kelly requested permission to take over the plant's care, becoming one of the first autonomous space gardeners (sorry, Mark Watney).

With some careful monitoring, watering and a well-placed fan to help dry off the leaves (and inhibit mold growth), some of the plants started to recover, eventually blooming beautifully.

NASA is particularly interested in gardening, not just to learn more about plants, but as a way for astronauts to relieve stress in cramped quarters. NASA's behavorial health researchers believe that caring for plants can help astronauts maintain their mental health while in space while giving them meaningful work.

While the zinnias are among the first flowers to bloom on the space station, they aren't the first flowers to bloom in space. Sunflowers, zucchini and even lettuce have bloomed safely.

The zinnias are a step up in difficulty from the lettuce plants that the astronauts grew (and ate!) back in August last year. Successfully growing zinnias will help future Space Station crews learn enough about plant care to eventually grow tomatoes by 2017.

Lettuce and tomato...all they need now is some bacon. Space pigs anyone?

Werner Herzog is the best. This is a scientific fact. The German film director, who once ate his own shoe as a consequence of a lost bet, saved the life of Joaquin Phoenix, and made such amazing, groundbreaking films as Fitzcarraldo, Into the Abyss, and Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans, has a new documentary about robots coming out this year. Titled Lo And Behold: Reveries Of The Connected World, the film will touch on artificial intelligence, technology, and our growing interconnectivity with the "Internet of Things."

The flick will premiere at the 2016 Sundance Film Festival later this month, and judging by the trailer that Deadline Hollywood posted online yesterday (viewed above), much of the film concerns the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University, a perennial subject of interest for Popular Science.

Another trailer was released earlier this month, shedding quite a bit more details about the film:

There is no official release date on the horizon, but here are some of the most provocative quotes from various documentary subjects who appear in the trailer:

• "You could essentially, in the not too distant future, tweet thoughts."
• "Will our children's children's children need the companionship of humans?"
• "We do love Robot Eight."

Sufficed to say, we here at Popular Science are about as excited for this film as we were for another recent film that premiered not a very long time ago...

IBM graphic, adapted by author for clarity

The "Grand Loop" described by IBM neuroscientist James Kozlowski.

We don’t know much about the brain. Scientists and researchers have poked and prodded parts of our most complex organ for centuries, giving names to the most obvious parts. But we still lack answers to fundamental questions, like what the brain does with most of its energy, or how diseases make neurons in the brain affect each other.

A researcher at IBM has uncovered what could be a start to these answers: a model for what the brain does at rest, when it’s not reading or thinking or cooking you breakfast. IBM neuroscientist James Kozloski calls it “the Grand Loop."

"The brain consumes a great amount of energy doing nothing. It’s a great mystery of neuroscience,” Kozloski said. "You don’t spend that much energy on noise unless there’s a really good reason.”

Kozloski says about 90 percent of the energy consumed by the brain is unaccounted for, which is a considerable amount given that the brain takes 20 percent of the body's total energy.

He proposes that the brain is actually always looping signals through a series of pathways in the brain, made of neurons and tissue. Kozloski says these pathways are like city streets, and the brain is always tracing them, retracing them, and then tracing them again. The pathways themselves lead through three areas of function in the brain: sensory (what’s happening), behavioral (what can I do about it), and limbic (what does it mean to me).

There are areas of the brain that incorporate new information, but Kozloski credits much of the brain’s energy to these cycling processes. Since the pattern is cyclical, it’s described as a "closed loop,” rather than the traditional way of thinking, that the brain gets inputs from the world and turns that into outputs as bodily interaction.

In order to test this theory, Kozloski ran the model through IBM's neural tissue simulator, a set of algorithms that mimics the way neurons fire in the brain.

While we can see brain activity on fMRIs, this research gives us a better understanding of what’s going on in those scans, and makes it easier to study neurological disease.

Kozloski mentions that from an evolutionary perspective, this could be the mechanisms that humans use to predict what could happen in new situations, drawing from past experiences.

But one immediate application of this knowledge could be towards Huntington’s disease research. Since we now have a theory about how neurons orchestrate their communication, we can look at how neurons physically affect each other, as IBM suspects is the case in Huntington’s.

"We’re really stuck when it comes to mental health and neurogenerative disease,” Kozloski said. “Huntington’s is caused by a single gene, but there’s been no progress in understanding of how that gene causes neurodegeneration. ”

But by looking at Huntington’s with the new model in mind, information made by one wrong gene can cascade into misinformation for an entire neural pathway. If the gene makes a mutant protein, and the protein changes how a neuron sends or receives signals, that could cause a chain reaction that affects an innumerable amount of other neurons.

While this research on Huntington’s is still a hypothesis, Kozloski is optimistic that this model will help the field understand the brain in a new way. He says that the next area of research is to find out how the pathways are chosen, to greater understand the motivations of the brain. And as an evolutionary biologist, he thinks that there’s a specific reason to be found.

"If it wasn’t doing something important,” Kozloski said, “it would have been weeded out long ago."

This article has been updated to reflect the correct spelling of James Kozloski's name, and to correct a small grammatical error.

Esparta Palma/FlickrCC by 2.0

Sorry about physics, Spiderman

There is a reason that Spider-Man is a fictional character. Okay, many reasons. But one of the biggest is that he can't, in fact, climb walls like a spider.

That's a lot to take in. It's okay. Let's all calm down, and take a look at why.

In a paper published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers found that in order for something the size of a human to grip to walls the same way that geckos and spiders do, that human would need sticky pads that covered 40 percent of its body, or nearly 80 percent of its front. Needless to say, with basically your entire body stuck to the wall, that doesn't give you much space to maneuver. Hypothetically, a human superhero could cling to walls and have better maneuverability if they had very large feet, but they would have to be enormous.

"If a human, for example, wanted to walk up a wall the way a gecko does, we'd need impractically large sticky feet. Our shoes would need to be a European size 145 or a US size 114," says Walter Federle, a zoologist from Cambridge and one of the paper's authors.

And that's kind of what researchers are working on. Knowing the size limits of animals capable of scaling walls can help scientists attempt to replicate that ability in humans. But researchers aren't relying on some errant spider bite for their advances. They're looking at high-tech and very sticky materials.

Previous research for DARPA showed that humans could use gecko-like pads to climb buildings, but their pads were much larger than a human hand or foot, and the dry adhesive they used was much stronger than anything produced in nature. In addition to trying to make humans climb walls, researchers are looking at ways for drones and robots to climb walls as well.

It should be noted that in the Marvel universe, Spider-Man's wall-clinging abilities, though caused by a spider bite, have absolutely nothing to do with the way real spiders cling to walls. In the first version of The Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe, his clinging abilities are explained away by electrostatic forces:

Spider-Man’s exposure to the mutated spider venom induced a mutagenic, cerebellum-wide alteration of his engrams resulting in the ability to mentally control the flux of inter-atomic attraction (electrostatic force) between molecular boundary layers. This overcomes the outer electron shell’s normal behavior of mutual repulsion with other outer electron shells and permits the tremendous potential for electron attraction to prevail. The mentally controlled subatomic particle responsible for this has yet to be identified. This ability to affect the attraction between surfaces is so far limited to Spider-Man’s body (especially concentrated in his hands and feet) and another object, with an upper limit of several tons per finger. Limits to the ability seem to be psychosomatic, and the full nature of this ability has yet to be established.

Later versions introduced friction as the pseudo-science explanation for why he is able to stick to everything. But the real reason Peter Parker can scale walls? The writers wanted him to.

xcaballe (CC licensed)

Non-biodegradable robots may one day be a thing of the past.

Scientists at the Italian Institute of Technology (IIT) are developing materials that could allow robots to decompose at the end of their lives, much like humans, according to Reuters.

Most robots are made of plastic and metal, which are non-biodegradable. But researchers at the the IIT’s Smart Materials Group have developed a way to create a bioplastic out of food waste. This material could eventually be used to make an entirely biodegradable robot.

Athanassia Athanassiou, who leads the Smart Materials Lab at the IIT, says that the bioplastic can be flexible or tough, so it could be used for both robot ‘skin’ and interior robot parts.

“It will help us to make lighter robots, more efficient, and finally, also recyclable,” says Nikos Tsagarakis, senior researcher at the IIT.

A robot capable of decomposition could make certain jobs much simpler. As robotics Professor Jonathan Rossiter at the University of Bristol stated in 2012, “Once a biodegradable robot has reached the end of its mission, for example having performed some environmental cleanup activity following an oil spill, it will decompose into harmless material.”

Athanassiou says that creating a completely biodegradable robot could be possible in a few years.

Apple

Apple's new Music Memos app lets musicians record musical ideas, with a few special features.

Apple refreshed its music software today, in the form of an updated GarageBand and a new app called Music Memos.

The new Music Memos app is basically a retooled Voice Memos, but with a bunch of great features for musicians. (Don't worry, Voice Memos is still available, too.) The Music Memos app is geared towards recording little musical ideas; a guitarist can quickly record a riff for later, and then rate and tag it for archiving.

The app also syncs with Garageband, so your sounds can be folded into later compositions (if they make the cut). It's a mobile portal to Apple's main Garageband offering, giving the ability to quickly record tracks or ideas for later. Music Memos doesn't replace anything existing, but formalizes the use of the Voice Memos app for music, and integrates it into Apple's main GarageBand app.

Music Memos has two killer features: it recognizes the pitch of the notes it records, and it can synthesize other instruments to match with your playing.

The pitch feature is fairly accurate, testing it against online guitar tuners. I "played" an E, and it picked up an E. It got confused when I played a bunch of notes at once, but for most musicians even having the first note is a great help to remembering how to play the riff.

Virtual backing players, a bassist and a drummer, can also be added to recorded files. Music Memos analyses the tempo of your riff, and then adds an appropriately vague drum or bass line.

Music Memos is available for free on iOS today.

This article was updated to reflect the correct name of the app, Music Memos.