The titanosaur is so long that it's head reaches out the door, welcoming visitors into its hall.
In January, the American Museum of Natural History in New York City unveiled its new, 70-ton dinosaur named Titanosaur. And as any good child would do (or, who am I kidding, I do this), AMNH has created an adorable social media personality for its new fossil.
Over on its Tumblr page, AMNH has posted a series of texts between Titanosaur and the museum's other giant specimen: Blue Whale. "Separated by 3 floors of the Museum, how do these pals stay in touch? They text, of course!" AMNH writes.
Screenshot via tumblr.amnh.org
Texts from Titanosaur
A nice blend of fact and fiction, you get to know a little more about this giant dino through its texting habits.
Titanosaur is adorably naive sometimes, not knowing that it's way too big to take the subway or ride a CitiBike. And its Argentinian roots also show through, when it thinks mixes up football and soccer. And like any skilled texter out there, Titanosaur and Blue Whale are masterful at using emojis to talk about food, though maybe the emoji gods should think about creating a dinosaur one, eh?
You can read all of Titanosaur's and Blue Whale's texts in part one, part two, and part three. Let's hope part four keeps things friendly between the two giants.
A shorter version of this comic originally appeared as a bonus alongside Part Four of this series. But cartoon Health Physicist, Phil Broughton, kindly pointed out to me that it was incorrect. I went to fix the mistake, and ended up drawing an entire page. Oops. Enjoy!
Here's Phil:
...Activating stable iodine isn't how we make I-131. There's some very short half life steps on the order of minutes in the there that send the party off in radioxenon territory. We normally make I-131 by activating stable Te-130 when we want to do it on purpose. Like Sr-90 and Cs-137, all the radioiodines but particularly I-131 are fission products.
The creation of radioactive P-32 from stable P-31 is pretty straightforward single neutron absorption activation. P-32 is also a very common isotope used in research that people will recognize.
You could do the creation of tritium, H-3, from deuterium, H-2, but that asking people to recognize there's more than one kind of hydrogen in the world for their water.
Ed Mitchell was one of the men chosen to join NASA's astronaut corps as part of Group 5 in April of 1966. He was on Apollo 9's support crew, then the backup Lunar Module Pilot on Apollo 10, which put him in line to fly on Apollo 13. Of course, the mission's Commander Al Shepard had to slip to a later flight when his Meniere's flared up, so Mitchell ended up on Apollo 14. On February 5, 1971, he became the sixth man to walk on the Moon.
Mitchell passed away Thursday, February 4, 2016, one day before the 45th anniversary of his lunar landing. Rather than write a long commemorative article of a man lucky and clever enough to join the elite group of astronauts who walked on the Moon, I thought I'd let Mitchell tell you about his mission in his own words.
It’s February, and the cupids are fluttering about, their tiny composite bows trained upon unwitting victims. Amongst the relentless onslaught of red-colored stationery comes another assault, one to which I will always surrender: that of chocolate. No matter how strong your curmudgeonesque gripes with Valentine’s Day, it's hard to hate chocolate.
At Johns Hopkins University, a materials science class took confectionery love to a new level. A microscopic level, that is. With a scanning electron microscope, students zoomed in at magnifications of 400 to 5,000 times and gazed upon an alien world called chocolate, made up of sugar crystals and cocoa butter globules melded together in a bumpy pockmarked surface. The course was a part of a larger effort to engage students in relatable ways to materials sciences. And while this unusual view of chocolate was not one that made me personally salivate, it’s fascinating nonetheless.
James Clapper Jr With Lt. Gen Burgess And Leon Panetta
Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta walks with James Clapper Jr., left, director of National Intelligence, and Lt. Gen. Ronald Burgess Jr., director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, before the agency's 50th anniversary commemoration ceremony on Joint Base Anacostia-Bolling in Washington, D.C., Sept. 29, 2011.
Cybersecurity remains America’s greatest threat, according to a report presented today by James R. Clapper, Director of National Intelligence, to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.
Almost two and a half centuries after America declared independence, over 150 years since the end of the Civil War, and 66 years since the Soviet Union became the second country in the world to possess nuclear weapons, the greatest threat the intelligence community sees facing the United States is Wi-Fi-enabled toasters. No, really.
Item one, bullet point on in the report is “Internet of Things,” the broad catch-all for internet conencted home appliances, ranging from baby monitors to thermostats. Here’s how Clapper describes the risk:
Security industry analysts have demonstrated that many of these new systems can threaten data privacy, data integrity, or continuity of services. In the future, intelligence services might use the [Internet of Things] for identification, surveillance, monitoring, location tracking, and targeting for recruitment, or to gain access to networks or user credentials.
“Intelligence services” here mostly means spy networks from other countries, with hackers and spooks cracking into unsecured devices and peeking around inside. As threats go, this is relatively easy to mitigate and almost impossible to prevent entirely. Many devices, like pacemakers, come with either no or just default encryption settings.
That was enough for former vice president Dick Cheney to disable the online features of his pacemaker. It’s also something that manufacturers can mostly fix, but adopting better cybersecurity practices and making sure their devices hold up to attacks. Interestingly, President Obama also chose today to ask Congress for more money to bolster private and public cybersecurity practices nationwide.
Something as straightforward as requiring a password before someone on a wifi network can access a device goes a huge way to reducing the risk. There are classes in security and even online educational games that teach the raw basics. Widespread and basic knowledge of cybersecurity best practices will go a long way to mitigating the threat, even if perfect security is impossible.
Besides hacked baby monitors, the cybersecurity part of the report is specifically worried about the rise of artificial intelligence. As humans turn over decision making, or parts of decision making, to exceptionally clever machines, we can expect the machines to fail in new and unique ways, sometimes as the result of an attack. From the report:
A.l. systems are susceptible to a range of disruptive and deceptive tactics that might be difficult to anticipate or quickly understand. Efforts to mislead or compromise automated systems might create or enable further opportunities to disrupt or damage critical infrastructure or national security networks.
Specifically, it cites the risk from unanticipated behavior in algorithms that are allowed to play with the stock market. That’s a very real danger, though history is rich with incidents of humans themselves being so bad at the stock market that our economy collapses over and over again. Giving A.I. human responsibility creates new avenues for systemic failure, but the systems themselves can fail in well understood, human ways.
Just as important as the threats are the actors behind them. Clapper anticipates Russia, China, Iran, North Korea, and nonstate actors will all use cyber attack against the United States (and, indeed, many have already done so).
However, with every crisis comes an opportunity. And Clapper's report not-so-slyly implies the U.S. spy apparati will go ahead and use our growing accumulation of connected devices in the Internet of Things to peer deeper into the homes, workplaces, and lives of suspected wrongdoers.
From the countries, this mostly means a range of activity below the level of war—from espionage and reconnaissance to attempted industrial sabotage, all hovering below the level of outright war. Nonstate actors here includes terrorists domestic or otherwise publishing the home addresses of others in hopes of inspiring others to take violent action. It also includes criminals, sending malware or ransomware to steal and lock information unless the victims pay.
None of this is great, but it’s a weird moment to live in where the greatest identified threat to America is hacked baby monitors, stolen email passwords, and new spying techniques.
That is not to say they are the only threats: terrorism is listed next, followed by nuclear weapons and weapons of mass destruction. All three of these threats: 1.) cyber attack, 2.) terrorism, and 3.) weapons of mass destruction, do something few other attacks can: cross the giant oceans insulating America from most of the world, and strike at people directly at home.
Of those three, cyber attacks are simultaneously the easiest to pull off and the least threatening when successful. Nuclear weapons risk the very end of the world.
Terrorism, while often feared disproportionately to its actual harm, kills people. Cyber attacks, at their very worst, do less harm to American infrastructure than squirrels. So far, at least...
Part of the Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak (EAST).
A Chinese fusion reactor managed to sustain plasma at temperatures of over 90 million degrees for 102 seconds, according to an article published in the South China Morning Post. That's over a minute in which a machine sustained an electrically charged gas with a temperature approximately three times hotter than the core of the sun.
This achievement at the Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak (EAST) in Heifi, China, comes just days after German chancellor Angela Merkel inaugurated the Wendelstein 7-X, another experimental fusion reactor. At the time, the German group was quite pleased to create 80 million degree Celsius hydrogen plasma for a quarter of a second, an achievement now dwarfed by the Chinese machine. However that comparison doesn't mean too much, as the two machines are in vastly different stages of their life cycles. While the Wendelstein 7-X is just gearing up, creating its first hydrogen plasma last week, EAST has been going for years. It created its first plasma in September of 2006, nearly a decade ago.
EAST is a tokamak, a doughnut shaped device originally designed by the Soviets. It holds the plasma in place using magnetic fields, and operates in pulses. The Wendelstein 7-X, in contrast, is a stellarator, a similar design but one that can theoretically operate continuously, like an artificial sun.
Both are expecting to be dwarfed by the ITER, a tokamak-style fusion reactor currently under construction in France. When completed, the internationally-funded reactor will be the largest in the world.
ITER's central goal is to build a reactor capable of producing 10 times the power needed to run it. They hope that once it is built, it will operate for around 20 years.
For the record, the hottest plasma temperature created in a lab was 510 million degrees Celsius at the Tokamak Fusion Test Reactor which operated at Princeton between 1982 and 1997.
Kenneth Hayworth/The Brain Preservation Foundation
Robert McIntyre taking a rabbit brain out of a -135 degrees Celsius freezer unit after overnight storage. The brain is completely solid.
Five years ago, a non-profit organization called the Brain Preservation Foundation (BPF) challenged the world’s neuroscience community to a tough task: to preserve a mouse brain (or a mammalian brain of equal size) for extreme long-term storage. All the neurons and synapses within it would have to remain intact and visible while viewed under a special electron microscope. If achieved, the accomplishment would allow scientists not only to have a better way of studying and possibly treating brain diseases, but it would also pave the way to the idea that we might someday be able to preserve the memory stored in the brain's trillions of microscopic connections.
Today, BPR has announced that a project done by 21st Century Medicine and led by Robert McIntyre, a recent graduate of MIT, has won the prize and brought the five-year race to a successful end. The team was awarded $26,735 for their work.
McIntyre and his team figured out how to preserve the brain's circuitry by using strong chemicals to first fixate or suspend the neurons and synapses, and then chilling them to extremely cold temperatures. His technique, called “Aldehyde-Stabilized Cryopreservation”, was published this past December in the journal Cryobiology. It was then reviewed by a group of judges that included the foundation’s president, Kenneth Hayworth, a neuroscientist at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. “Every neuron and synapse looks beautifully preserved across the entire brain,” Hayworth said in a press release.
The key step in McIntyre’s technique, which sets it apart from others proposed, is the use of a toxic chemical called glutaraldehyde (currently used as an extremely strong disinfectant). As glutaraldehyde rapidly spreads throughout the rabbit’s brain it stops decay and fixes the protein within the brain’s vascular system in place. This stabilizes the tissue and creates an intact brain that, when stored at -135 degrees celsius, could be successfully preserved for centuries.
Kenneth Hayworth/The Brain Preservation Foundation
Robert McIntyre placing the rabbit brain in a -135 degrees Celsius freezer unit.
McIntyre says the technique was originally proposed in a book called Engines of Creation by engineer Eric Drexler, in 1986, but Drexler didn’t pursue it any further. In 2010, Greg Fahy, the chief scientific officer of 21st Century Medicine, used the technique in experiments to preserve kidneys. And then in 2014, McIntyre began to perfect the technique in small mammal brains.
The classic idea of cryonics—putting a terminally ill person into long-term stasis so that one day, when better technology exists, he or she could be revived and potentially cured—is still largely unachievable. So neuroscientists have funneled their resources into a more pragmatic goal: preserving the brain's "connectdome," or all of its neurons and synaptic connections, only.
When our brains form new memories, says McIntyre, that memory formation is equal to an increase in the size of our synapses. So preserving a brain’s connectome theoretically preserves memories as well. The hope is that we might one day find a way to upload the information and memories stored within an intact brain. “We know that it can be stored for centuries and not decay,” says McIntyre. “What if we image the tech we have now, but a million times faster. It’s not absurd.”
In the meantime, scientists might use the technique to study how the brain works in a much more detailed way, allowing them to better understand and treat diseases. For example, it might reveal details, like the formation of neural plaques, that are difficult to observe in Alzheimer's. The technique might also enable researchers to develop better artificial intelligence: A complete picture of the brain's circuitry could serve as a model for how artificial intelligence could work in the future.
For now, the next step is to perfect this technique in larger mammals, which is the second half of the BPF’s challenge. And that could serve as a model for how the technique might be used in humans. McIntyre’s group has already preserved a pig’s brain, but the prize's judges have yet to examine it. In January, McIntyre formed the company Nectome to continue with this research.
How long this research will take and whether a human brain—and all of the memories and information it contains—will ever be preserved successfully remains to be seen. But McIntyre is optimistic about his technique and the field of cryonics in general. “The timeline of this is not written in stone,” he says. But “in an ideal world, we would envision a future, where if you are facing end of life, you could have your brain preserved at this level of detail.”
On Tuesday, Twitter announced the formation of the Twitter Trust & Safety Council in a blog post by Patricia Cartes, Head of Global Policy Outreach. The council will serve as an advisory board to Twitter, that will help the company to “develop products, policies, and programs” in their field of expertise.
Twitter has a history of abusive content and cyberbullying. Former CEO Dick Costolo even admitted as such, writing in an internal memo obtained by The Verge, "We suck at dealing with abuse and trolls on the platform and we've sucked at it for years."
Failure to address these problems has exacerbated the potential effects of ongoing incidents like GamerGate, which show how quickly tweets can escalate to real danger, including verbal abuse and threats of rape and/or death (often of female users).
Now the company hopes that its council of experts will address these concerns and develop a balance between “fighting abuse and speaking truth to power.”
The Trust & Safety Council is comprised of “more than 40 organizations and experts from 13 regions.”
In developing the Council, we are taking a global and inclusive approach so that we can hear a diversity of voices from organizations including:
Safety advocates, academics, and researchers focused on minors, media literacy, digital citizenship, and efforts around greater compassion and empathy on the Internet;
Grassroots advocacy organizations that rely on Twitter to build movements and momentum;
Community groups with an acute need to prevent abuse, harassment, and bullying, as well as mental health and suicide prevention.
A full list of the inaugural members of the council can be found here.
It's well known that Twitter's user base has essentially stopped growing (it currently sits around 320 million users), and Twitter is trying all sorts of new features to make it easier to engage with the platform, including their curated roundup of trending topics called "Moments,"replacing favorites with likes, putting Periscope streams directly in tweets, and more.
However, the repeated patterns of abuse Twitter is now characteristically known for make it unwelcoming for new users and unlikely for users who have quit the site to return. Combine that with Twitter's stock plunging to all-time lows since Dorsey took charge of the company, and investors are not happy.
Tomorrow, Twitter will release its Q4 earnings. The timing of this council's formation can't be a coincidence, and will give Twitter some good news to talk about, no matter what the earnings reveal.
Meanwhile, Twitter continues to try and offer more options for selling ads. In a separate blog post by Revenue Product Manager Deepak Rao, Twitter also announced First View, a new way for marketers and brands to promote their tweets through a big video that will appear in users' timelines when they open the Twitter app anytime during a full day.
Unlike regular promoted tweets, First View will give “exclusive ownership of Twitter’s most valuable advertising real estate [author’s note: the top ad spot on a timeline] for a 24-hour period.” First View will begin “gradually to managed clients in the US,” and expand worldwide in the coming months. Whether or not companies will want to continue to invest in Twitter ads, though, is far from clear.
Vulture reports that the forthcoming, all-new Star Trek TV series on CBS is not only still a go, but that Star Trek TV alum Bryan Fuller will be a co-creator, executive producer, and showrunner for the new series. Fuller joins Alex Kurtzman, another Star Trek veteran and writer of the recent films, who has already signed on as an executive producer and co-creator.
The series is expected to premiere next year on CBS. The first episode will air on TV, but to watch subsequent episodes, fans will need to purchase access to CBS' new streaming service, CBS All Access.
Fuller's relevant work experience includes writing for Star Trek: Deep Space Nine and writing, editing and producing episodes of Star Trek: Voyager. More recently, he created Dead Like Me, Pushing Daisies, and NBC's cult-hit Hannibal. He also has a new adaptation of Neil Gaiman's American Gods coming soon to Starz. That could mean that his new Star Trek series will be darker, more complicated, and even a little spookier than some other incarnations.
“Bryan is not only an extremely gifted writer, but a genuine fan of Star Trek,” CBS Studios head David Stapf told Vulture. “Having someone at the helm with his gravitas who also understands and appreciates the significance of the franchise and the worldwide fan base was essential to us.”
Based on initial reaction on Twitter and social media, the fans seem to agree.
The next few years will have plenty of Star Trek with a movie set to premiere in June and the series looking at an early 2017 launch date.
All we have to hope now is that these new installments live up to fans' hopes and dreams.
Since 2014, NASA has had a rotating crew of four people living in the close quarters of a fake spacecraft for 30 days at a time, in order to simulate a 715-day trip to a near-earth asteroid. The four crew members only communicate regularly with each other and mission control and have no access to internet.
The mission is intended to advance understanding of how isolation and confinement affect individual and group behavior, according to NASA’s Tumblr. Now NASA has released a 360-degree video on Facebook of the Human Exploration Research Analog (HERA), the compact, three-story habitat where the crew lives, located at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas. Check it out above.
In order to make the simulated mission as realistic as possible, the crew also experiences a 1-10 minute delay on all communications with mission control, according to NASA. Researchers are monitoring information on the crew's teamwork, mood, performance, and cohabitation.
Still, the quarters are clearly quite cramped and claustrophobic, as the new 360-degree view indicates.
Luckily, NASA seems to keep the crew busy. Once they reach their destination, they will simulate virtual spacewalk missions to inspect and collect samples from the asteroid. And they'll apparently have to respond to a few emergency scenario simulations, including navigating a debris field during the return transit phase of the mission. Plus, they're not entirely alone on HERA. They also have the company of plants and brine shrimp, which they're taking care of and studying.
This isn't the first 360 video NASA has released on Facebook since the option first became available. Last week, the agency posted a 360-degree view of Mars, created by stitching together several still images captured by the Curiosity rover, which is currently still exploring the surface of the Red Planet.
Lumberyard is at your service if this guy should ever attack.
In the event of a zombie apocalypse, Amazon wants to make sure users are still able to use its new 3D game engine software.
Reddit user SvenNeve brought one clause of the company’s updated web services terms to the internet's attention this morning. The updated terms state in section 57.10 that the new software, called Lumberyard, should not be used with “life-critical or safety-critical systems."
But there’s one exception.
“However, this restriction will not apply in the event of the occurrence (certified by the United States Centers for Disease Control or successor body) of a widespread viral infection transmitted via bites or contact with bodily fluids that causes human corpses to reanimate and seek to consume living human flesh, blood, brain or nerve tissue and is likely to result in the fall of organized civilization.”
Check out the entire clause here:
Screenshot
Section 57.10 of Amazon's service terms
It’s important to note that this only applies if the zombie apocalypse has been CDC certified.
You don't need eyes to see--at least, not if you're a cyanobacteria.
In a paper published in eLife, researchers say that they've figured out how cyanobacteria and other single-celled bacteria can detect and move toward a source of light. It turns out that they use their entire body as an eye.
“The fact that bacteria respond to light is one of the oldest scientific observations of their behaviour,” lead researcher Conrad Mullineaux said. “Our observation that bacteria are optical objects is pretty obvious with hindsight, but we never thought of it until we saw it. And no one else noticed it before either, despite the fact that scientists have been looking at bacteria under microscopes for the last 340 years.”
Mullineaux and colleagues examined a kind of cyanobacteria called Synechocystis. Synechocystis has a round shape, and the researchers observed that as light hit on one side of the bacterium, the bacterium acted as a lens, refracting the light and focusing it in a concentrated point on the opposite side. Light receptors in the cell pick up on the concentration of light and move away from it, towards the light source, using tiny tentacles called pili.
eLife
How Cyanobacteria 'See'
Though the end result (being able to navigate the world by sensing light) is the same in both cyanobacteria and seeing animals (such as humans), the actual biology is very different. It kind of has to be, since a cyanobacterium is a single cell and a single human retina contains millions of cells. But, amazingly enough, both human eyes and cyanobacteria can see in a similar way.
Just like the initial images produced by a human eye, the image seen by a cyanobacteria is upside-down. Unlike them, we have a brain that flips the image back upright. We have another advantage too. All those millions of cells give us a much clearer and more defined picture than cyanobacteria could ever hope to get.
To get a sense of the cyanobacteria's capacity for movement check out this time lapse of the growth of a Synechocystis colony.
Yesterday we posted about three awesome new posters commissioned by NASA. Well, it turns out the agency had more up its sleeves. The gallery above contains the whole collection, including a few exoplanet posters that were released last year.
In recent years, scientists have been developing new and creative ways to put electronics in the brain. These devices are useful for paralyzed patients to control prosthetic limbs with their minds, to help locked-in patients communicate with the outside world, or to help researchers better predict seizures in epileptic patients. But implanting them requires opening the skull, an intrusive procedure. Now researchers from the University of Melbourne have created a device that can be inserted into the brain through the blood vessels, no invasive surgery required. The study was published this week in Nature Biotechnology.
The device, about an inch long, looks similar to a stent, an apparatus placed around the heart to open up clogged blood vessels—in fact, the researchers named it a “stentrode.” To insert it, the researchers put a catheter into a vein in the neck, then snake it through the blood vessels into the head until the end is in the desired part of the brain, next to the motor cortex. Once the catheter reaches the right spot, the stentrode sticks to the sides of the blood vessel, where it can collect data from the activity of neurons nearby. The data reaches the researchers’ computers through a wire that comes out of the neck.
When the researchers tested the device on sheep, they found that the stentrodes were sensitive and transmitted good data. They also stayed in the sheep for 190 days without issue, indicating to the researchers that the devices could stay in humans for a long time without issue.
The stentrode, and similar devices that can be implanted in the brain without opening the skull, might even be useful beyond a medical capacity, becoming commonplace and changing the way we interact with computers. Of course, the necessity of a wire coming out of a user’s neck is less than ideal, so these devices might first have to become wireless if they’re going to become widespread among the population.
The researchers hope to test the stentrode in humans next year.
British astronaut Tim Peake, currently aboard the International Space Station, has been posting some stunning short videos on Instagram and Twitter showing his view of the Earth some 250 miles below.
As he notes in the Instagram post below, it's amazing to watch lightning and the aurora illuminate the thin bubble of atmosphere around our planet.
Response to Peake's photos and videos from his followers has been overwhelmingly positive, with parents writing to tell him how much he's inspired their children, people thanking him for taking pictures of their hometowns, and even a few people writing in with requests to see their home countries from space:
Instagram comments
Some astronauts, like American astronaut and Space Station Commander Scott Kelly, are trained in photography along with other skills as part of their preparations for space. And Popular Science spoke with NASA last year in great detail about the agency's new and extensive social media training for astronauts.
Meanwhile, Kelly and his Russian counterpart Mikhail Kornienko are due to return to Earth in early March after spending over a year aboard the International Space Station, the longest continuous mission of its kind aboard this floating orbital habitat (also the longest continuous stay in space for any American astronaut so far in history).
A new study from the user interfaces group at Finland’s Aalto University shows that, when it comes to typing, it’s not the number of fingers used that determines speed, but how they’re used. Doctoral candidate Anna Feit, together with Dr. Daryl Weir, put motion-capture dots on peoples' finger joints and had them type at a computer while high-speed cameras watched and recorded their movements.
The motion capture data showed that, instead of the number of fingers, there are other factors that predict typing speed. For example, fast typists have learned to keep their hands fixed on one position, instead of moving them over the keyboard, and more consistently use the same finger to type a certain letter.
Typing speed varied across the identified approaches of the typists, with some touch-typers as fast as some untaught typists. Curiously, they also found that while touch typing doesn’t necessarily improve typing speed, people who learned to touch type looked down at the keyboard a lot less when typing, making it a useful skill nonetheless.
Mario and his buddies found a few X-Wings and TIE fighters to race in. Awesomeness ensues.
Few games are more fun than Mario Kart, the Nintendo item-filled cart racer. And few franchises capture our imagination about space travel like Star Wars does. Now we don't have to enjoy one without the other.
YouTube user Dark Pixel has assembled a mashup between the two popular franchises to bring us Star Kart. The footage shows Mario, Bowser, Yoshi and others traveling through hyperspace, flying across Tatooine, and encountering the Death Star. All while gathering coins, of course. Seeing is believing so you can watch the video below.
Nintendo is no stranger to adding downloadable content (DLC) to its games nowadays. Most recently, the company brought two new characters to its Super Smash Bros series. Corrin and Bayonetta mark the final two fighters to be added to the game--one of them being voted on by fans. We streamed gameplay of the new additions and found them to be quite formidable, if not a little NSFW. The latest Mario Kart also took part in the downloadable fun with characters from Legend Of Zelda and Animal Crossing added to the race track.
On the Star Wars side, games like Battlefront have also seen their fair share of DLC. Most recently, the Battle Of Jakku download added to Battlefront allows players to fight on Rey's home planet (unless, you know, it isn't). With both properties being open to adding extra content to the game, we could very well see Mario content in a Star Wars title or vice versa.
Eiffel Tower during the COP 21 Paris Climate Talks
During the December 5-12, 2015 international climate summit in Paris, the Eiffel Tower was lit-up to represent the energy created by the physical activity thousands of crowd-sourced volunteers around the world. Their energy output was measured via an app, a project known as "HUMAN ENERGY."
In the immediate aftermath of the international climate conference in Paris last December , there was widespread celebration around the world. The agreement reached by the representatives of 187 nations, one could argue, signaled that politics had finally caught up to science, and that there is now a global consensus that climate change is a “Big Problem.”
But the truth is that the agreement amounts to little more than a gentleman’s handshake. The terms are entirely unenforceable, for one thing. And though the goals are laudable, it’s ultimately too little, too late.
There’s also no framework that explains how the various countries are going to meet their targets. (What technologies or cuts will they use? This is mostly left up to the imagination, for now.) And it’s unrealistic, given that the global energy supply, while generally moving in the right direction toward clean tech, is doing so at a dangerously slow pace.
To reach the agreement’s goal of holding the average global temperature to 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, we’ve placed a lot of our bets on unproven, uncommercialized, or yet unknown future tech. This means the climate agreement is banking on blanketing the Earth in renewables and other fossil fuel-free energy sources, while deploying large-scale, emissions reductions technologies. And fast. It’s not going to happen.
So really, what the Paris agreement provides humans with is a big psychological nudge. As a species, we tend to not get serious about addressing predicted, preventable problems until they’re directly upon us, and therefore no longer preventable.
On climate change, we’ll have to start fighting against our nature to ignore problems until they are too big to avoid. Perhaps the agreement will spark this type of proactive thinking—and lead to greater action. NPR’s Adam Frank summed it up well when he described it as a “first step in developing a new set of behaviors for human civilization.” No big deal, right?
Simultaneously, we’re also going to need more energy overall, not less. Experts predict that the population will swell to more than nine billion people by the middle of this century, and the International Energy Agency predicts that energy demand will grow by 37percent by 2040. So while cutting back on usage is a critical part of the equation, the larger question is: how do we build a smart energy portfolio?
What that portfolio looks like is yet to be seen, but we’ll certainly want cheaper and more efficient renewables like solar and wind, while replacing evils such as coal with lesser evils such as natural gas. There will likely be carbon taxes and economic incentives, too. And we need tremendous investment in and public support for new clean tech.
leniners/Flickr
A City in the Clouds
Clouds of pollution, that is. Sorry, Shanghai.
In fact, the U.S. might want to consider taking a page from pollution-plagued China. In 2015, China invested a whopping $110.5 billion on clean energy, whereas the U.S. spent about half that. China, at least, is throwing lots of options at the wall to see what sticks. No one would argue that it’s the most efficient strategy, but you have to applaud the tenacity. It’s an investment in the future, a future that sits out beyond the latest election cycle and political gridlock. It certainly doesn’t hurt the case for clean-tech in China that Beijing has been blanketed in dangerous levels of smog multiple times over the past several years.
The U.S. doesn’t have the same energy needs as China, nor its problems with air pollution. . But it’s not China’s approach that should necessarily be emulated, but the government’s attitude of urgency.
It’s making a difference: China’s 2015 coal imports dropped 30 percent from 2014, and the country plans to close 1,000 mines this year, as well as halt approval of new ones. Research into clean coal, better solar, and safer nuclear is getting the big bucks, and innovators from all over are hungry to collaborate.
For example, the Chinese government signed an agreement with Bill Gates’ TerraPower in October to advance nuclear power that would be safer, far more efficient, more cost effective, and have easier waste disposal. That kind of thing doesn’t often happen in the U.S. due to regulation and lack of public support.
“Out of a sense of desperation in China, there’s a great energy revolution going on,” says Michael Shellenberger, a founder of the Breakthrough Institute. “We’re all going to need that kind of revolutionary thinking to get serious about a zero-carbon future.”
Indeed, a recent report from the IEA emphasized the need for “new, groundbreaking” cleantech, going as far to say that it’s the “only way the world can meet its climate goals.” Big time innovation is currently too slow and underfunded—the report dramatically called for tripling public spending on clean energy R&D. Whether cash can substitute for time is another matter to be seen.
Even techno-optimists allow that wholesale innovations such as armies of carbon-eating nanobots, and say, fusion, take time. Lots and lots of time. “Energy technology evolves more slowly than any other tech in our society,” says Shellenberger, “The transition from wood to coal started in the 16th century, and it’s still going on.”
That’s why major names in the worlds of climate science and tech (Columbia University’s James Hansen and PayPal founder Peter Thiel, for example) are advocating for improving—and using—tools we already have, such as nuclear power. The idea is that we need to embrace nuclear, make it better, and implement it more cheaply and safely.
Perhaps the millennial generation, who weren’t around for the Three Mile Island and Chernobyl disasters, will be more open to improving nuclear energy instead of writing it off entirely. Just ask MIT’s Leslie Dewan and Mark Massie, who are working a molten salt reactor that will burn 75 times the electricity per ton of uranium and be virtually accident-proof.)
Continuing to push back with ideological blockades means we’re making zero progress toward reducing our dependence on fossil fuels, as more humans need more energy. And stalling until we find a perfect solution is a tactic that has long run out of time.
We were so busy looking at the sky, we forgot to notice the changes happening on the ground. As automation improves, and as sensors get better and people get more comfortable trusting the autonomy of machines, the biggest change to delivery may not be flying unmanned robots, it will be smart package-carrying vans.
As discovered by Mike Murphy of Quartz, the patent filed yesterday is for a truck with a bunch of lockers on its back, each with a unique identifier. The car drives to the delivery location, and then the customer presumably goes out, finds his or her locker, and unlocks it with a pin code. Then the truck continues on autonomously, delivering more packages to more people.
This is roughly similar to the drone delivery concepts developed by both Amazon and Google, which envision flying robots dropping off a single package at a time, before returning to a central warehouse. Those plans are as cool to think about as they are likely to face legal tangles regarding airspace usage and pilot line-of-sight.
One appealing alternative by a company called Horsefly takes the drone delivery concept, and puts it on a truck. With Horsefly, the truck drives to a neighborhood, parks, and then the drone goes about delivering packages, hitching a ride back on the truck when it’s done.
Google’s new patent eliminates the drone entirely, and the human driver too. Building on Google’s expertise with driverless cars, the truck itself is the delivery mechanism, relying on people to get out of their homes to retrieve packages. Slick, but not without risk: the liability issues behind driverless cars are potentially huge. If the folks at Google go ahead with this patent, maybe they should take some time to read up on robot law.
A research assistant creates artificial tissues using a commercial cotton candy machine.
What do cotton candy and artificial tissues have in common? They are both made of layers of thin, fibrous material. And now they can both be made with a $40 cotton candy machine, according to Vanderbilt News and reported today by Fast Company. The researchers published their proof-of-concept study last week in the journal Advanced Healthcare Materials.
The researchers were making hydrogels, a matrix of gelatinous fibers that can support living cells and replace any number of tissues in the body, especially muscle tissue like those in the heart. Hydrogels are about as close as researchers can currently get to emulating human tissues because the moist fibers that make up the hydrogel allow oxygen and nutrients to flow to and from the living cells. To create these gels, researchers spin polymer fibers together into a mass using a process called electrospinning. However the process of making viable hydrogels would often take weeks and the water-soluble gel material frequently would not dry or cool properly.
Researchers at Vanderbilt University wanted to see if electrospinning using a cotton candy machine would work as well as the traditional processes. After fiddling with the contents and concentration of the polymer solution, the researchers figured out that they could sprinkle in the human cells and an enzyme called transglutaminase--colloquially called “meat glue” in the food industry--to make the gel coalesce. The resulting material looks a lot like cotton candy, as you might imagine, but it’s a mass of living cells connected by fibers about the same size as a human capillary. Once the mass had cooled, the researchers pumped it full of oxygen and other nutrients the cells needed to survive. After a week, 90 percent of the cells were still alive, compared to the typical 60-70 percent in solid synthetic tissue that doesn’t have the fibers.
Hydrogels like this one provide a matrix in which living cells can live and function, just like in real tissues.
This is the latest in scientists’ recent efforts to create low-cost artificial organs—3D printing is the other popular method. But since the distribution of polymer fibers is more complex in the cotton candy hydrogel, this might be the most life-like technique to date.
In future studies the researchers hope to test their cotton candy technique with other types of cells to create tissues similar to those found in several different organs in the body.
