Do kiwis and sauerkraut make your mouth water? If so, you can thank the mood-regulating neurotransmitter called serotonin, which may also enable you to taste sour foods, according to a study published last month in the Journal of Neuroscience and covered today by Science News.
When you eat a sour food, the acid in it triggers a response in the taste receptor cells found on your taste buds. The taste receptors release chemical compounds designed to lock into special nerve cells found on the tongue, which then relay messages to the brain.
Previousstudies have suggested that eating sour foods causes the release of serotonin, a compound that can affect many basic bodily functions such as appetite, sleep, memory, mood, and sexual desire. We usually hear about serotonin's role in the brain, since it's often associated with feeling happy, but in fact the compound can be found in several parts of the body, including in the central nervous system, on the tongue. Maybe, the researchers thought, serotonin is relaying the sour message from the taste receptors to nerves on the tongue.
To test that, the researchers programmed a green-glowing protein to fit into any serotonin receptor on the nerve cells. They found the highest concentration of the fluorescing proteins on the part of the tongue known to detect sour tastes. And though other foods are known to trigger serotonin production in the brain, the researchers concluded that was the first definite evidence that serotonin is the neurotransmitter that tells the brain when a food is sour.
The researchers stumbled upon another strange finding as well: One of the anesthetics they used on their mouse subjects, called pentobarbital, blocked the receptors on nerve cells in the tongue from absorbing serotonin at all. That anesthetic is frequently used in taste studies, the researchers write, which might call previous findings into question.
Wonky serotonin levels have been linked with health conditions including insomnia and depression, but the relationship between those conditions and different types of foods or tastes is still poorly understood. Future studies may further explore the relationship between chemical compounds like serotonin and the sense of taste in humans.
The iPhone 5se could be Apple's attempt to update their smaller line of iOS smartphones. Rumors point to the device releasing in March 2016
Could Apple be on the verge of breaking with its usual annual September release cycle and reveal a new phone this March? A new report from 9to5 Mac suggests that the world's wealthiest tech company could indeed be doing just that, and more: releasing a new, smaller-screen "iPhone 5SE."
This new phone would supposedly have a 4-inch screen — the same size as the now two-generations old iPhone 5S — yet come with internal components similar to an iPhone 6 of last year.
That would be a huge change for Apple, especially given that just four months ago, the company refreshed the iPhone lineup) by releasing the iPhone 6S and iPhone 6S Plus.
These new iPhones, coming in at 4.7 and 5.5-inch screens respectively, saw new features) like 3D Touch, a faster fingerprint sensor and the ability to capture "Live Photos" (GIF-like moving images) in the camera app. The smaller 4-inch option saw no such update, and those who prefer a smaller device were forced to go with an iPhone 5S or even earlier models.
But, all that could change soon, at least according to rumors and supposed leaks of the iPhone 5SE's specs.
Xavier Harding
iPhone 4, 5s, and 5
The box design of the iPhone 5s (pictured in the middle) could see its end. A curvier 4-inch phone could be expected, if One More Thing's rumor shot is to be believed
According to 9to5Mac, iOS users who rather own smaller-sized screens are about to see a substantial update to their favorite phone.
Innards of the updates 5s device would include an A8 processor for powering the device, and M8 for tracking fitness and NFC for proper Apple Pay support. The iPhone 5SE is also expected to come with an 8-megapixel camera on the rear and 1.2 megapixel on the front with Live Photos. The tech specs are highly similar to that of the iPhone 6 released back in 2014.
On the outside, a curved design reminiscent of the iPhone 6 and 6S would come to the smaller device and colors would include the similar space gray, silver, gold, and rose gold. Images of the upcoming device leaked thanks to Apple site One More Thing. While it's unclear how the blog got their hands on the device, the photo clearly shows a 6-like prototype that's the size of the boxy iPhone 5. We can't be sure that the phone in this photo is an official Apple prototype, but it does line up with 9to5's info on the matter.
No word has yet been divulged about pricing, but it's safe to assume we can expect a similar admission fee to the current lower-end iPhone 5S, at $450 with no contract, or $0 with a 2-year contract.
While Apple tends to shy toward simpler product names, the updated 4-inch iPhone would not be the first to adopt a three-character signifier (see the iPhone 3GS). It's also worth noting that the iPhone 5SE is one letter away from being a much raunchier product name (though the "iPhone 5SEX" will likely never see the light of day, if only to prioritize Apple's preference of simplistic phone titles. Perhaps they'll save it for their first 7-inch smartphone.)
A March release date for the iPhone 5SE would be one of the first times the company has brought users a new mobile product outside of the standard fall launch window.
For many, once a year updates to the iPhone is already too often. And Cupertino pushed its luck with buyers back in 2007, when they dropped the price of the first iPhone by $200 only after a few months of it being on store shelves.
Unknowing 4-inch fans who want new features like Force Touch or Live Photos may share a similar sentiment as 2007's early adopters. But with nothing set in stone, the company could simply announce the device and wait later in the year to unleash it on the public. We'll know more as we grow closer to the rumored March 2016 Apple event.
Adam Harley's 3D Visualization of a Convolutional Neural Network lets you look inside the inner workings of artificial intelligence.
Even aside from the fear that evil A.I.s will take over the world, the field of artificial intelligence can be daunting to outsiders. Facebook's director of artificial intelligence, Yann LeCun, uses the analogy that A.I. is a black box with a million knobs; the inner workings are a mystery to most. But now, we have a peek inside.
Masters candidate at Ryerson University Adam Harley has built an interactive visualization that helps explain how a convolutional neural net, a type of artificial intelligence program used for analyzing images, works internally.
As seen in the interactive visualization, neural networks work in sequential layers. At the bottom is the input, the original idea that the computer is trying to make sense of -- in this case a numeral that you drew -- and at the top is the output, the computer's final conclusion. In between are layers of mathematical functions, each layer condensing the most important distinguishing information and passing it to the next.
Screenshot/ Adam Harley
A visualization of a convolutional neural network reading an image to determine a number.
The green pixels in the input (bottom row) correspond to what you drew, while the black is background the number must be distinguished from. If this were trying to detect a face, the 3 would be the face, and the black would be the background of the photo. In each stage, we're seeing what the image looks like after each step, not the step itself.
In the neural network, the first few layers are mainly concerned with things like edges and shapes, pulling out the general visual idea, looking for different distinguishing features that can be pulled out to emphasize what makes the shape different than its surroundings.
Each of these layers has been previously tuned to recognize this data, in a process called training. Training usually means running hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of examples through the machine to demonstrate what different types of "3" look like. The same process is used with different source material for all kinds of machine learning and artificial intelligence. Google trains its voice recognition software on randomized voice samples from people who use their service, and Facebook trains its facial recognition algorithm on images of people at different angles.
Training entails running millions of examples through the machine.
The data passed along by the first layer is simplified by the second layer (called a downsampling layer because it reduces the complexity of the data). It's then analyzed for shapes again by the third layer, which is a convolutional layer like the first. This neural network has two convolutional layers, while more complicated networks can have more than 10.
This set of shapes and edges is then processed and matched against a set of predetermined outputs, to ultimately conclude with a strong probability that the user drew a 3 (or perhaps an 8). You can see this in the color of the the data as it proceeds through layer by layer. That green number that you drew eventually is the green bit of information that designates the (hopefully) correct output.
Screenshot/ Adam Harley
Inside the mind of a convolutional neural network.
In Harley's model, the computer can simply distinguish a number, much like the original convolutional neural nets used to read check deposits in ATMs. Cutting-edge AI is far more complex, able to recognize faces with 97 percent accuracy.
There are things beyond human perception. Beyond that, we have to rely on tools to understand the world around us. It’s why we use infrared cameras to look for heat far away, or employ bomb-sniffing dogs to check for hidden drugs. And it’s why, when it comes to natural gas leaks, we might just turn to turkey vultures circling overhead, their avian senses finely attuned to an otherwise imperceptible danger.
Let me back this up. In October, a leak in an underground pipe north of Los Angeles started spewing methane into the air above the city. Methane is an extremely potent greenhouse gas, and it’s troubling even when released naturally from seafloors. It’s less studied than carbon dioxide, though that’s changing, and scientists are working on new storage solutions. The California leak is from a storage facility, which means the normally odorless gas has had an odorant added to alert humans of its presence.
The smell is described as ““rotten-egg,” “garlicky,” or “skunk-like”” by the Los Angeles County Public Health Department, which further clarified in a fact sheet that the gas:
can be irritating to the eyes, skin, and respiratory system at low levels. In this incident, the levels are so low they can escape detection by most monitoring equipment, however individuals are capable of detecting these odors. These low level exposures may cause eye, nose and throat irritation, coughing and nasal congestion, shortness of breath, nausea, stomach discomfort, dizziness, and headaches.
That’s not pleasant for anyone involved, and there has to be a better way than nausea for humans to find out there’s a leak going on. The putrid smell, it seems, has a secondary role. What’s gross to humans is enticing to turkey vultures.
As Geoff Manaugh writes at BLDGBLOG, this was deliberate.
It was thus interesting to read last night that the noxious smell artificially introduced to otherwise odorless natural gas was originally added, at least partially, because it would attract turkey vultures.
In a 1964 paper by Kenneth E. Stager called “The Role of Olfaction in Food Location by the Turkey Vulture” (PDF) we read that the “decision to conduct field tests with ethyl mercaptan (CH3CH2SH) as an olfactory attractant [the odorant added to methane] for turkey vultures came as a result of conversations with field engineers of the Union Oil Company of California.” Its purpose would be “to aid in locating leaks in natural gas lines.”
Thus, Manaugh concludes, we have the strange weirdness of a natural gas artificially given the scent of death. Perhaps, if one sees turkey vultures circling overhead and cannot see any animal corpses nearby, the rotten flesh they’re looking for instead is that of our overheating world itself.
If, instead, we want to rely on cameras and not vultures to see the gas, that methane leak looks like a damned chimney in infrared:
When the Soviet Union broke apart, one thing the Russian space program lost was, well, space. Specifically, with the independence of Kazakhstan, Russia lost its Baikonur Cosmodrome. Through leasing agreements and generally friendly relations, Russia’s been able to keep launching rockets from their old base, but the nation has long dreamed of a space launch facility in its own territory. After years of work, it finally has one in the works at Vostochny Cosmodrome.
As captured by drone, the facility looks as much office space as space office. The facility is located on the southern edge of the Amur Oblast in the Russia’s far east, not too far from the border with China. It will ultimately be the heart of a city of around 30,000 people, and will launch new rockets and new capsules, not the Soyuz capsules that are launched at Baikonur. Instead, writes Air & Space:
Russian engineers began working on a next-generation spacecraft, called PTK NP, that could make high-precision, rocket-powered landings into pre-determined spots along the flight path. However, the new capsule is too heavy to be carried by the Soyuz launcher, so a new rocket, Angara, is being modified for the job. The launch pad for Angara won’t be built at Vostochny until 2018, during the cosmodrome’s second phase of construction. If everything goes according to a very optimistic (or, according to some, highly unrealistic) schedule, Angara would lift off from the new cosmodrome for the first time in 2018.
Last week, Russian-owned media company RT provided a glimpse at the facility to the world, as filmed by drone. Watch below:
A new study from Oxford University confirms why we have to specify someone is a “Facebook friend” instead of a friend.
Professor Robin Dunbar looked at the relationship between people’s Facebook friends and real friends, and found that only 14 out of the average 150 Facebook friends a user has would express any sympathy for the user in real life; only five Facebook friends could be considered “close friends.”
The study also found that age played a significant role in the number of Facebook friends that participants had, reflecting the differences in how teenagers and adults use social media. The 18- to 24-year-old group of participants had an average of 282 “friends,” higher than the overall average of 150 “friends.” Dunbar attributes this to the fact that “children are less discriminating than adults in defining friendships,” and that social networks “typically encourage promiscuous ‘friending’ of individuals who often have very tenuous links to ego (X is a friend [or friend-of-friend-of-a-friend] of Y, so would you like to befriend them?).”
Although users with more friends than average may think they have more close friends, Dunbar found the trend actually holds for them as well:
Respondents who had unusually large networks did not increase the numbers of close friendships they had, but rather added more loosely defined acquaintances into their friendship circle simply because most social media sites do not allow one to differentiate between these layers.
According to Dunbar, friendships have “a natural decay rate in the absence of contact, and social media may well function to slow down the rate of decay.” But don’t rely on Facebook solely to keep your friendship alive – Dunbar recommends meeting face-to-face to “reinforce” the friendship.
Given that people generally find interactions via digital media (including the phone as well as instant messaging and other text-based social media) less satisfying than face-to-face interactions, it may be that face-to-face meetings are required from time to time to prevent friendships, in particular, sliding down through the network layers and eventually slipping over the edge…into the category of acquaintances.
Artist’s depiction of the gas giant planet in orbit around the red dwarf star TYC 9486-927-1, faintly visible in the background.
Scientists used to suspect a giant planet named "2MASS J2126-8140" was a rogue world, wandering the galaxy without a star to orbit. But it turns out the planet isn't homeless after all: its star is just very, very far away. Like, a trillion kilometers away (or about 621,000,000,000 miles).
To put that number into context, that's around 6,900 times the distance between the Sun and Earth. Its orbit is 140 times wider than Pluto's. At that distance, the dim red dwarf star would look like just another moderately bright star in the sky.
Astronomer Simon Murphy from the Australian National University and his colleagues uncovered the secret relationship between the planet and star after noticing that they were both located 100 light-years from Earth. Further analysis showed they were moving together as well.
The planet is believed to be a gas giant 12 to 15 times the size of Jupiter, and takes nearly a million Earth years to circle its star.
Scientists aren't sure how such a far-flung solar system could have formed. “There is no way it formed in the same way as our solar system did, from a large disc of dust and gas,” Murphy said in a press statement.
Instead, the team suspects the star-planet duo were born relatively recently (10 to 45 million years ago, compared to our solar system's birth 4.5 billion years ago), and that they formed from “a filament of gas that pushed them together in the same direction," says Murphy.
"They must not have lived their lives in a very dense environment. They are so tenuously bound together that any nearby star would have disrupted their orbit completely.”
When a ship sinks at sea and you’re thrown into the water, hypothermia sets in quickly, so every second counts. An immersion suit is designed to buy you time. Constructed like a surfer’s wetsuit, it keeps you warm for up to three to six hours, until help (hopefully) arrives. Smart sailors and fishermen carry them and, when on a boat, so should you: Even a plunge into 50-degree water will induce hypothermia within 60 minutes.
But what if help is a long time coming? The Stearns I950 ThermaShield 24+ bills itself as the most advanced immersion suit made, one that can extend that crucial in-the-water survival window up to 24 hours, and keep you alive even in freezing (32°F) water. How good is this suit? I couldn’t leap from an arctic charter to test its outermost limits at sea. But I was able to try it in northern Vermont, in early November, with snow falling, and the water in Lake Champlain hovering at that 50-degree mark. So here’s what I did.
I went down to the dock, lifted the suit’s neoprene one-piece over my body, and threw myself in. I immediately bobbed to the surface and floated. The suit has enough buoyancy to support 330 pounds. (Let’s just say I’m about a third of that.) A large air pillow on the rear of the suit naturally oriented me to float on my back. Breathing into a valve on the right shoulder fills the air pillow. Breathing into a valve on the left shoulder circulates warm breath around the core (to protect vital organs), and then arms, hands, feet, and legs.
In addition to staving off hypothermia, the suit is fire-resistant. Thankfully, our reporter didn’t have to dodge any flaming wreckage.
The hood blocks sound, so I couldn’t do much but look at the clouds. More tube breathing made me warmer and more buoyant. My fingers got wet because I didn’t cinch the suit’s wrist straps. Those fingers got cold fast. But the suit’s designers foresaw this problem: Jam your hands in the hand warmer sewn onto the stomach, then back into the gloves, and they stay as warm as need be.
I floated like that for an hour, just long enough to (theoretically) get hypothermia. But I was fine. I had, however, floated several yards from shore, and swimming back was awkward: I managed a floundering backstroke back to the dock. While I am sure I could have floated all night, I’m glad I didn’t have to.
For reasons I have never understood, bats have a bad reputation. Perhaps it is because some of them look a bit fierce, or perhaps it is because they have a habit of flying close when they are hunting; either way, their reputation is completely undeserved. Bats are a very important part of our environment.
According to the Nature Conservancy, there are more than 1100 species of bats around the world, and they make up more than a quarter of the worldwide mammal population. They range in size from the itty bitty 2-gram bumble bee bat, to the hefty, 1.5-kg "flying fox." They are very important for pest control as each one can eat more than 1000 mosquitoes in an hour. They're also an important pollinator; just like bees, some species feed on nectar or fruit, and they help spread pollen from plant to plant. Only three species are the so-called "vampire" variety, and none of them live in the US. And although we don't like to think about it, bat droppings, also known as guano, are a rich fertilizer, and it was once a major trade item.
Sadly, most bat mothers only give birth to one pup a year, and that makes bats especially vulnerable to changes in their environment. That's why two projects want to learn more about bats and how to protect then.
With iBats, volunteers load a free app onto their mobile device and record bat sounds. When combined with other data, this allows researchers to monitor changes in bat populations over time. So far, more than 600 people have collected recordings in several countries, and uploaded them to a bat database.
If getting close to bats just isn't your thing, then you can help by going to the Bat Detective site and listening to bat calls to help classify them. It turns out humans are really good at figuring out whether what they're hearing is a bat call or not.
According to Bat Detective organizers, "The ultimate goal is to use your classifications to make a new automatic programme that researchers all over the world can use to extract information out of their recordings, making it really easy to track populations of bats. This will make understanding how bat populations are being effected by global change much easier."
Both projects are a marvel of inter-organizational cooperation. iBats is a project for several national conservation groups in many different countries, as well as the Zoological Society of London and The Bat Conservation Trust. It is funded by The Darwin Initiative and The Leverhulme Trust. Meanwhile, Bat Detective is a partnership project between University College London, the Zoological Society of London, The Bat Conservation Trust, BatLife Europe, University of Auckland, and the Citizen Science Alliance.
Up until a few months ago, most Americans had never heard of the Zika Forest in Uganda, or the virus that bears this region’s name. Today, news of the infectious disease is spreading across the country sparking fear and concern. The mosquito-borne virus has gripped many parts of Brazil and has been found in many adjacent countries. It now threatens the United States as transmission has already been found in Puerto Rico. At this moment, there have been no locally-acquired cases in the rest of America but that may change with the coming spring and summer months.
Zika virus seemingly has come out of nowhere although in reality, this situation is not unexpected. Much like other generally non-lethal viruses spreading across the world, such as Chikungunya and West Nile Virus, this particular pathogen hasn’t gained significant attention in the public health realm. Indeed, if it wasn’t for the suggested link to microcephaly, little would be done to better understand its biology, pathogenesis, or migration patterns.
Now that we know about the possible secondary effects of Zika virus on the fetus, the public health spotlight is squarely on this virus. Unfortunately, due to a general lack of research, few questions have concrete answers. Instead, speculation and theory are dominating the discussion while the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and others do their best to quell fears using whatever knowledge they have. All told, this is the perfect recipe for an epidemic.
Of course, epidemics usually don’t just happen in an instant and this was the case with Zika. Although over the decades since its discovery in 1947, the virus gained little public attention, some researchers tracked its movement across the globe. It slowly spread across Africa to the Middle East, and eventually into Asia. During this time, cases were sporadic with little signs of an epidemic nature.
Then, in 2007, the situation changed as migration began to speed up. First, it was Micronesia and eventually South East Asia were afflicted. Further analysis suggested the virus was still infecting at very low levels and offered few consequences in the short and long term. There was no need to worry.
Then in 2008 a rather strange case of transmission in absence of a mosquito vector was noted. A scientist working in Senegal contracted the virus and then infected his wife after he arrived home. This apparent sexual transmission of the virus suggested a greater scope of infection within the body and possibly, an opportunity for viral evolution to improve virulence. This transmission was again seen in 2013 suggesting the 2008 cases were not unique. By 2015, sexual and other routes of human to human transmission became a concern as a result of detection of viral RNA in serum, saliva and urine. Although the virus most rapidly spread through mosquitoes, this data suggested a secondary path could lead to even greater spread.
The data also caused another serious concern regarding pathogenesis. With Zika apparently spreading within the body to places not previously encountered, the concept of a viral evolution became much more apparent. But as to what type of adaptive changes happened, there were little answers. Based on previous genetic analyses from 1968 to 2002, few changes had occurred. The 2007 version had some mutations but nothing to explain the larger spread of the virus in the body. If something had happened, it would have been after these dates.
Due to a lack of cases and samples, little could be done to determine if any shifts had occurred. The only option was to continually return back to the original samples and assess if anything had been missed. Then, in 2014, a break came when a new sequence of Zika virus became available. Researchers finally could figure out whether any evolutionary changes had occurred over the seven previous years. The sample was also from the first recorded case of perinatal transfer. At the time, however, the potential consequence of this mother-to-fetus transmission was not considered to be a priority.
After the analysis was complete, the results were released at the end of 2015. There had indeed been an evolutionary shift allowing the virus to replicate more rapidly and also potentially spread to other areas of the body. The change itself is minor, a slight difference in the way the virus produces one particular protein, but it was enough to suggest Zika had become adapted to humans and was now a much larger threat than believed.
Unfortunately, the news and warning came too late. By the time the document was ready for publication (without peer-review), the Brazilian outbreak was already in full swing. Not long afterwards, a surge of cases was seen as the once-feared epidemic began to develop into reality. Travel-related cases are being documented around the world and soon, localized transmission either through mosquitoes or sexual contact may lead to establishment of the virus in previously safe locales.
While we now have a better understanding of the Zika virus at the biological level, there is little to be done to control the spread of the virus. All that can be done now is to look towards preventative measures to minimize the risks. The epidemic has started and now we must wait to determine just how far and how bad it will be.
Astronaut Tim Peake filmed this gorgeous view of Earth from space. The short clip shows what the Arabian sea looks like from the International Space Station. If Peake had wanted to record the station's entire orbit around the Earth, the video would be 90 minutes long--about the same length as a feature-length movie.
Peake, a British astronaut, is a little over a month into his six-month scientific mission, a time in which he will be working on 30 experiments for the European Space Agency, and participating in about a dozen other research projects. He's even planning on running the London Marathon while he's up there.
U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Digital Visual Library
The Flint River in the 1970s
The people of Flint, Michigan have been drinking lead-tainted water for more than a year since the city switched its water source from Detroit's Lake Huron to the Flint River.
According to the most recent tests, Flint's water is still undrinkable, with average lead levels exceeding 10 parts per billion in a sample of 271 households (ideally, you want zero lead in your water because of a variety of health impacts). But how did the river water cause this disaster?
What's in the Flint River?
Lots of chloride ions, for starters. Chloride can occur naturally in rivers but may also be added by road salting, according to Marc Edwards, the lead Virginia Tech researcher testing Flint Water. Because of the chloride ions, the Flint River is 19 times more corrosive than the city's previous source of water. The river water corroded city pipes, and the corroded pipes leached lead into drinking water.
Flint officials could have avoided the crisis by adding orthophosphate to neutralize the chloride, says Edwards. Half the water companies in the country add this chemical to community water sources to prevent pipe corrosion, but Flint officials skipped that step (which costs $100 a day).
Courtesy of Marc Edwards
A comparison of Flint River water with Detroit water
What other problems come from corroded pipes?
Besides lead poisoning, corrosion can bring more bacteria into the water supply. Corrosive water inactivates chlorine (Cl2), a city water supply's main defense against pathogens (not to be confused with chloride). Even upping its levels of chlorine, which Flint tried doing, doesn't help, says Amy Pruden, one of the primary investigators in the Flint Water studies.
“It's kind of futile because the chlorine gets eaten up by the corrosivity of the water,” says Pruden.
The corroded pipes cause more water main breaks, which can bring in more bacteria from the surrounding soil, she adds.
The water chemistry also plays a part in making a comfy home for pathogens. For instance, one hypothesis is that iron can stimulate Legionella bacteria, the bug responsible for Legionnaires' disease (which causes pneumonia and can especially effect immuno-compromised individuals). Flint, with its corroded pipes, provides plenty of iron and there has been a spike in Legionnaire's cases the last two years. A total of 10 people have died in those outbreaks.
Could this happen again?
Flint was a perfect storm of mismanagement and malfeasance, but it also illustrates how communities must be vigilant about how their water chemistry affects infrastructure.
Though most cities are proactive about adding phosphate, in some cases it's not enough to address highly corrosive waters, says Edwards. It is an emerging problem for cities, he adds, most likely due to increasing use of road salt. In portions of the northern U.S., chloride concentration in streams approximately doubled from 1990 to 2011.
Donald Trump recently said he would like to tax Apple into making iPhones in the U.S.
Real estate tycoon turned entertainer turned Republican Presidential candidate Donald Trump recently gave a speech saying, among other things, he wants to force Apple to make its products in the U.S. instead of “other countries”.
As Trump put it: “We’re going to get Apple to build their damn computers and things in this country instead of other countries.”
Perhaps this sounds like a not terrible idea to you.
Except that no one country — not even China — makes all of the components of Apple’s leading products, they just assemble them. And the U.S. has neither the factory space nor the trained workforce to handle construction of Apple’s most popular product, the iPhone, in the immediate future.
And if they did, it would add cost to an already expensive device. And all of that would be done for significantly fewer jobs, because American labor is expensive.
That’s probably one big factory why the only major Apple product that is currently made and assembled mostly in the U.S. is the Mac Pro computer, which starts at $2,999.
With apologies to anyone who’s still on board then, Trump’s statement about bringing Apple’s production to the U.S. is probably going nowhere. Every member of Congress who took campaign funds from an international corporation in the previous and current election cycles (and there are many of them) would likely be opposed to something that costs more money. It would harm corporate profits, it would harm free trade, and it would harm us, the consumers.
Intelligent citizens can see the potential complications bubbling up from beneath the surface on this newest declaration from the four-time bankruptcy filer, but we wanted the opinion of someone who professionally handles these kinds of questions to weigh in.
John Karakatsanis/Flickr
Justin Rose is a Chicago-based Partner at The Boston Consulting Group, which, among other things, helps companies decided on things like whether to move production from a foreign country to a domestic site.
We asked him about the iPhone situation, and he was quick to make it clear how nebulous this issue really is.
While he didn’t specify Trump’s comments in his reaction, Rose admonished the discussion thus far as uninformed. “The whole discussion points to an astonishing lack of understanding of how a global manufacturing supply chain works and where and how value is created,” he explained.
What Rose means is that the iPhone isn’t a $700 device because of the assembly of a hardware device in Asian markets and a supply-demand ratio. It’s a bigger picture of marketing. “The design, marketing and software of the iPhone represent some of the most value added components – all or much of which is Made in the USA – and at much higher paying, higher skilled jobs.”
He went further on that point: “It begs the question of what exactly it means to have an "American-made iPhone.” Does it mean that the assembly happens in the US? That isn't crazy--Motorola did this recently in Texas, though they have now shuttered the facility,” explains Rose.
Indeed, that move came years after a high-profile advertising campaign touting Motorola’s “Made in America” bona fides, and after the company was acquired by Google, then offloaded to Lenovo.
"The iPhone is not a device exclusively made for U.S. customers."
It’s not just the potential price increase that needs to be considered. Motherboard put the potential immediate increase around $50 to the customer, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that Apple maintains revenue by charging an extra $50, or that the company doesn’t take a loss for a few years until new factories are online.
And we should take this opportunity to remind everyone--especially Donald Trump--that the iPhone is not a device exclusively made for U.S. customers.
The Economist did an extensive review of how other countries, with complex import laws, handle their iPhone needs, and it’s a good reminder that these things have homes in countries all around the world, rich and poor.
So yes, a lot of factors go into the decision making process. Rose listed cost, quality, flexibility, labor availability, taxes, and permits as some of major concerns.
And labor has been one of the sharpest fixation points in discussion about the Trump idea. Rose seems to think that the jobs wouldn’t be great for Americans.
“Of course, these are relatively low paying unskilled jobs,” he says, “So it is unclear that it would even be an attractive outcome for American workers. Chinese ‘value add’ has been estimated to be as low as $10-20 per phone [meaning that’s how much it saves to have them assembled there], so bringing this to the USA doesn't exactly change the game from a trade standpoint.”
And it gets more complicated from there, so stay with us.
Rose reminded us that while there were assembly factories in the crosshairs for this discussion, those factories are putting components together made at other factories. “Does [American made] mean the components are made in the US? In that sense, we would be reshoring from China but rather Korea, Germany, Japan and Taiwan for things like displays, memory chips, processors, etc. Do we mean raw materials? So we need to mine the metals that go into the phone? The question becomes increasingly ridiculous as you drill down into it.”
Wu dongjun - Imaginechina/ASSOCIATED PRESS
Workers at Foxconn factory in Guizhou, China
Foxconn is the leading manufacturer of Apple iPhones worldwide.
And even if Apple were willing to uproot that infrastructure under threat of some massive tax Trump has in mind to punish companies for offshoring, it’s not going to happen within a span of time that the former reality TV star would appear to desire.
Rose explained that “Clearly it cannot be done in a flash. Uprooting supply chains is a multi-year and sometimes decade long endeavor. Staffing a factory isn't the challenge; it is building the network of suppliers, winding down and standing up new contracts, working out the global logistics impact, etc. If there is a Trump administration, the probability of the majority of iPhones being truly ‘made’ in the sense of the components and labor sourced from the USA during his tenure is near zero.”
And even if it was moved before Trump left office, it’s probably not enough to put a dent in unemployment numbers. A Forbes piece explained that bringing low-pay jobs to the US would effectively make Americans poorer.
Rose says it would “surely create jobs—[but] the scale of the job creation would of course depend on the size of the operations brought back."
That’s because anyone planning a U.S. factory today would likely want to do as much with automation as possible.
“Robotics are increasingly used to drive efficiency and for good reason--in many industries they can reduce the cost structure by 20-30 percent or more,” says Rose. “But even when robotics are embedded in a factory production system you require humans to set up, tend to and maintain the robots. And again, many of these new collaborative jobs are higher paying than the standard assembly or material handling roles which machines take on.”
That equates to fewer employees than you’d see in an Asian factory, by far, but it still makes for some decent salaries for American citizens. Although those jobs may not be worth the huge cost of moving an entire operation to a more expensive facility just to keep the guy from The Apprentice happy.
Rose, either way, is against the idea. “I believe in free trade. We should not try to strong arm companies into coming back to the USA--we should instead focus on building a skilled workforce, making it easy to do business in the USA and streamlining the process of moving production home.”
Here’s hoping Trump, and anyone else who thinks this is a good idea, takes the advice to heart.
Lorenzo J. Burleson, U.S. Navy, via Wikimedia Commons
X-47B Hoisted Onto The USS Truman
We are living in the first age of drone warfare. While unmanned aerial vehicles can trace their origins back at least as far as 1918, it took the War on Terror and its accompanying technological advances to truly showcase the abilities of long-endurance, high-flying remotely piloted machines. Yet despite their prominence in modern battlefields, the greatest impact of drones will be felt in the future. At least, that’s the argument from Michael C. Horowitz, Sarah E. Kreps, and Matthew Fuhrmann in an interesting new paper.
In “The Consequences of Drone Proliferation: Separating Fact from Fiction,” published online this week, the authors speak to fears, both real and imagined, about more and more countries incorporating armed drones into their military arsenals. While the United States is the best-known user of armed drones, it’s hardly the only country, with Israel, Nigeria, Pakistan, and the United Kingdom having all used them in combat. The paper makes this key points: right now, drones are mostly changing the calculus for counter-insurgency and domestic warfare, but in the future, drones might change wars fought by nations against other nations.
[C]urrent-generation drones offer little utility for coercion against other governments. Contrary to the conventional wisdom, moreover, drones might actually enhance security in disputed border regions by providing states with greater ability to monitor contested regions persistently at lower cost, leading to reassurance that potential adversaries are not attempting to change the status quo through force. The limited significance of current-generation drones in interstate contexts beyond monitoring stems from a key technological limitation: UAVs currently in operation are vulnerable to air defense systems, meaning that they are much less likely to be effective when operating in hostile airspace.
So what happens when drones get better at avoiding anti-air weapons? That’s when drones start to matter a lot more between nations. Stealth technology, which made its wartime debut 25 years ago on American F-117 Nighthawk fighters in Desert Storm, is a likely future of both manned and unmanned combat planes. America’s newest bomber and its in the works replacement are both built stealthy, as are its biggest fighter program ever and the futuristic X-47B combat demonstrator.
Stealth is one factor that will make future drones fundamentally different than the drones of today. Horowitz et al. note China’s developments in this area, saying “China is currently pursuing the development of a stealth drone, reportedly named the Sharp Sword, and it has already undergone initial flight testing. The Sharp Sword would not only have a larger weapons bay than China’s CH-4 or Wing Loong, it would also have low observability characteristics that could make it harder for Western radars to detect.”
The U.S. Navy's successor drone to its X-47B unmanned demonstrator will have many of this same characteristics. Smarter, stealthier drones are a likely part of future wars. But stealth isn’t the only way for drones to change the calculus of war in the future. From the paper:
As the commercial drone market continues growing around the world, price competition for the high-end commercial market is likely to make more capabilities (excluding the military aspects of those capabilities, such as the most advanced surveillance packages and launching weapons) available at a lower price point.
One reason stealth is attractive for aircraft is that it does more to keep pilots safe against modern air defenses. Without a pilot in the plane to protect, another approach to anti-air weapons becomes viable: simply overwhelm the defenses with cheap swarms of disposable drones. Both the U.S. Air Force and DARPA are researching cheap deadly drone swarms for the future that could take out both ground weapons and enemy airplanes.
Someday, cheap and deadly or stealthy and autonomous drones may reshape the balance of power between nations, but until then, the authors argue, it’s best to focus on the impact drones will have in irregular war. The dawn of the robot warriors is still in the future.
While everyone else is going gaga over connected cars, autonomous cars, and cars that use electricity, hydrogen, or a suspension of unicorn fur as fuel, Jannarelly Automotive is creating a brand-new company that kicks it old school.
Unlike Faraday Future, Jannarelly is not creating a brand-new car from scratch. The company has built a curvy retro-futuristic rear-wheel-drive 2-seat roadster called the Design-1 around a 300-hp, 3.5-liter V6 Nissan engine just behind those seats. The frame and chassis are tubular steel and structural aluminum, but the body itself comes in fiberglass or carbon fiber.
The company was founded by Anthony Jannarelly, a designer for the Dubai-based exclusive supercar manufacturer W Motors, and Frederic Juillot, who also founded Equation Composite, which makes carbon fiber. Lucky, that.
Jannarelly is taking orders for the $55,000 car now with an expected delivery date for early buyers in summer 2016. The company estimates 3 months to build your car after you order it, plus another month or two for shipping. The Design-1 is being built in Dubai to UK standards for low-volume vehicles, which means it may be tricky to get it registered for the road in the United States. But Jannarelly Automotive recognizes that some states have arcane rules, so they offer to explain how to register the car where you live. It may mean calling it a replica of a 1957 Ferrari Testarossa to meet the requirements.
The Jannarelly Design-1 is in a strange spot, as far as automotive manufacturing goes. It’s not a replica; it’s an original design. But it’s got a Nissan power plant. It’s not really a kit car, either, since you’re not building it in your garage on weekends. It comes ready to drive. Although, if you want to swap out engines, Jannarelly says anything that will fit is fine.
Additional components and accessories are already in the works, including a larger windshield with wipers, and a hard top. As new parts become available, owners will be able to upgrade the Design-1 as they like.
Let's try a bit of problem solving. There's a box on your desk with food inside, clearly visible and smelling delicious. You've never seen this box before, but you want the food. How do you get into it? By trial and error of course.
That's the same problem that researchers recently presented to carnivorous mammals at nine United States zoos. The results of their study were published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The researchers found that the animals with a larger brain in proportion to their body size were able to solve the problem faster than other animals.
Researchers tested 140 different animals of 39 species to see how long it would take for each of them to get food out of a latched metal cage.
The cages differed in size relative to the animal — the bears and big cats got cages much larger than the otters or foxes — but all contained some kind of tasty treat. You can watch some of the animals tested go through their experiments in the video above.
Bears were the best at problem solving, able to get to the food 70 percent of the time. Meerkats and mongooses, on the other hand, had a 0 percent success rate. Poor little guys.
“Our results are robust, showing that having a larger brain really does improve the animal’s ability to solve a problem it has never encountered before,” says Kay Holekamp, biologist and author of the paper.
Deep Space Industries, in collaboration with the University of Toronto Institute Of Aerospace Studies (UTIAS) Space Flight Laboratory, recently demonstrated the first-ever control of one small satellite by another, gently handing off a human task to a machine, and clearing the way for better small satellite swarms in the future.
The demonstration involved two small satellites, with one issuing to the other an instruction to move. Deep Space Industries says:
In this experiment, one of the two spacecraft (CanX-4) autonomously programmed the other (CanX-5) to perform an orbit change using its on-board propulsion system, over a shared S-band Inter-Satellite Link (ISL) radio. CanX-5 subsequently executed the maneuver, raising its orbit.
To the best of each organization’s knowledge, this is the first time in history that one satellite has autonomously commanded another to execute propulsive maneuvers, with no operator in the loop.
Small satellites are, by definition, easier to launch than larger apparatus, and cheaper too. Working in swarms, small satellites can replicate the same effect. While humans have maneuvered satellites around each other for decades, in the past it’s required direct human control. Letting the machines reposition themselves, especially when it comes to busywork like “not colliding into each other,” is a pretty good use of robot brains.
When Star Wars Battlefront launched in November, players quickly found that it was a fun game, but needed more substance. Electronic Arts (EA), the creator of Battlefront (as well as the FIFA series and others), has finally announced its schedule for adding more content to the nostalgia-fueled first-person shooter game.
Most importantly, we're getting the Death Star.
EA announced today that it would be rolling out a series of free and paid DLC. Tomorrow, a free update will include private matches, new Hoth-themed outfits for Luke Skywalker and Han Solo, and Daily Challenges.
We're not sure what these challenges will be, but we can hazard a guess that they'll provide rewards based on metrics like kills, headshots, or objectives captured.
Later on in February, there will be a new Survival mission on Hoth, and a new Hoth map for multiplayer battles.
And if you're willing to shell out a little more for premium content, EA's Season Pass will continue to unlock new content into 2017. EA is planning to have maps for the Outer Rim, Bespin, the Death Star (!!!), and an expansion pack that is yet to be named. EA also promises new weapons and even Heroes, hopefully making up for the lack of Episode VII characters in the original Battlefront release.
However, the game still lacks a comprehensive single-player mode, or any story at all, in an almost satiric performance concerning the state of multiplayer first-person shooter games.
Christian Rudder, (left) co-founder of OkCupid and author of Dataclysm talks about the future of love with Eric Klinenberg, (right) sociologist at New York University and co-author of Modern Romance with Aziz Ansari.
Love Apptually
People today are busy. As a result, they’re staying single longer, and they’re more and more connected to their devices. In some ways, technology enhances human interaction.1 Smartphones and laptops have changed how we communicate with almost everyone: our moms, our cat-sitters, and even our best friends from grade school.2 They have certainly changed whom we have sex with and date.3
Apps like Tinder connect people who otherwise might not have met.4 And they’re becoming more efficient at it all the time.5 Apps curate our choices,6 make it easier to ask out a stranger,7 and take a lot of the risk (and cold sweats) out of first dates.8 When it comes down to it, though, online dating operates by the same social rules as dating in real life—and suffers from the same human flaws.9 But data shows it works.10
As more matchmaking apps flood the market, entrepreneurs will experiment with new algorithms and features. Some will flop.11 But the ones that succeed will help us forge connections in ways we’ve never imagined.12
[Footnotes]
1
“Technology mediates all of our relationships, operating through shared pictures, texts, even emojis.” -Eric Klinenberg
“We can now be social with screens in ways we never could before. But chatting online is a supplement, not a substitute, for meeting face to face. We mistake that at our peril.” -E.K.
“Think of online dating sites as introduction services. The best way to use these technologies is to let them make the person-to-person connection happen more quickly.” -E.K.
“The Internet has made people and ideas more disposable, whether romantic or any other kind. But it has also brought more ideas to people’s notice, so it kind of balances out.” -Christian Rudder
“The world in general is not amenable to strangers meeting; that’s why there are bars. Online dating is the newest venue created to meet people.” -C.R.
“People are not good predictors of what they actually want. People have beliefs or biases that they’re not aware of, that they don’t want to own up to.” -C.R.
“Dating will be photo-based until someone solves how to do video. But that content is way harder to moderate; Chatroulette is the prime example. You can’t let users upload videos of anything they want and hope for the best, because your site will fail.” -C.R.
“Future apps will allow you to make an online connection to someone you’re next to in real life but don’t have a way to contact. Geospatial will be the main thing. Version 3.0? I think it’s going to be teleportation. I’m kidding. Oh man, if I knew the answer to that question, I’d quit my job and move to Silicon Valley.” -E.K.
In a recent article in the New England Journal of Medicine, Anthony Fauci and David Morens from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, call the spread of Zika virus an “explosive pandemic” and point out that Zika follows a recent trend in mosquito-borne viruses that have spread across the world, including dengue, West Nile, and chikungunya.
While it isn’t entirely clear how—or if—the virus is truly responsible for the birth defects and other complications, the CDC has issued travel alerts for the affected countries, advising women who are pregnant or who are trying to get pregnant to postpone any trips to the regions or, at the very least, consult a doctor before travel. El Salvador has taken particularly extreme and unprecedented measures, reportedly telling its population to hold off on having babies until 2018.
Depending on where you live or travel, these precautions may not be necessary. “There has been some hysteria associated with the news of the recent Zika virus activity, particularly with regard to the potential role in increasing rates of microcephaly in Brazil,” says Cameron Webb, a Medical Entomologist at University of Sydney. “The critical issue is that people should not panic and there may not necessarily be a need to cancel travel to these regions. However, you should take care to avoid mosquito bites.”
"People should not panic."
Fighting mosquitoes is, as of now, the only way to curb the virus, as there is no current treatment or vaccine (although according to Time, the U.S. launched a “full-court press” for Zika vaccine development).
The main known vectors for Zika are Aedes aegypti and Aedes albopictus, which are widespread and feed on humans. Some researchers are focused on high-tech ways to control the mosquitoes. For example, Oxitec, a U.K.-based company working on genetically engineered A. aegypti to help control dengue fever, announced last week that it will open a new factory in Brazil to help combat Zika.
Such technologies may not be enough. “There is little doubt that the ever increasing arsenal of ‘high tech’ solutions will play a key role in future mosquito and mosquito-borne disease control,” Webb says. “However, it is important to remember that, despite the attention many of these approaches attract, none are likely to be the silver bullet that will beat outbreaks of mosquito-borne pathogens such as Zika virus.”
“I believe that a critical issue here is that these ‘high tech’ solutions shouldn’t be embraced at the neglect of traditional mosquito control and mosquito-borne disease risk management strategies,” Webb adds. Traditional options for the Zika-carrying Aedes species include getting rid of standing water in flower pots, buckets, and the like, which is where the mosquitoes like to breed; spraying with insecticides; and using repellents to keep the insects from biting. (For advice on picking a mosquito repellent, see this piece I wrote for Slate a couple of years ago.)
Unfortunately, as Fauci and Morens note in their NEJM piece, even preventative measures such as these are “luxuries often unavailable to impoverished residents of crowded urban locales where such epidemics hit hardest.”
