A gorilla got loose on the International Space Station, escaping from its containment unit and chasing after astronaut Tim Peake. At least, that's what it looks like.
Mark Kelly, brother of fellow astronaut Scott Kelly posted the short and fun video on Twitter earlier today, showing the gorilla's hijinks set to the tune of Yakety Sax.
Mark Kelly couldn't resist ribbing his twin brother, who is about to complete his year-long stay on the International Space Station. Tech Insider reports that the gorilla suit was a gift from Mark to Scott, part of a care package sent to the space station during one of the re-supply missions to the space station.
Scott Kelly later posted a different, slightly longer version to his own Twitter account:
Andy Bohn, François Hébert, William Throwe, Darius Bunandar, Katherine Henriksson, Mark A. Scheel, and Nicholas W. Taylor
Simulation Of Two Merging Black Holes In Front Of Milky Way
Earlier this month, scientists announced the first official discovery of the gravitational waves that Einstein predicted 100 years ago. The ripples in space-time emanated from the massive collision of two black holes 1.3 billion light-years away from us. Now, observations from the Fermi Space Telescope could tell us more about the nature of those black holes.
Fermi detected a gamma ray burst just 0.4 seconds after the gravitational waves were detected. And although the European INTEGRAL gamma-ray satellite could not confirm the signal, the researchers think the signal could mean that the two black holes that collided were actually born in the same, massive star.
Ordinarily, at the end of its life, a massive star would collapse into one black hole. But sometimes if the star is spinning rapidly, it can stretch out into a dumbbell shape that separates into two black holes.
"It's the cosmic equivalent of a pregnant woman carrying twins,"said astrophysicist Avi Loeb of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.
After their birth, the two baby black holes, which weighed about 29 and 36 times the mass of the Sun, may have begun feeding on the remains of their mother star, consuming huge amounts of matter and burping out those gamma rays that Fermi detected. Says a press release:
In order to power both the gravitational wave event and the gamma-ray burst, the twin black holes must have been born close together, with an initial separation of order the size of the Earth, and merged within minutes.
We're glad that the human process of giving birth to twins is not quote as violent as all that.
Still, it's important to note that Fermi's signal could certainly be a false alarm, since the other telescope couldn't confirm it. It's possible the binary black holes formed in the 'usual' way, during the merger of two galaxies.
Facebook wants Oculus and their social network to stream the quickest, high resolution 360 videos out there
There are many uses for virtual reality. Along with gaming, immersive tutorials, and… adult activities (ahem), 360-degree videos are a large reason to get involved in VR. Cameras that record the world around you are trending, with LG and Samsung having gotten into the mix, and VR offers users the chance to view as if they’re actually there.
But when it comes to streaming 360-degree videos online, file sizes aren’t small. Facebook's investment in Oculus gives them a strong reason to change that.
Facebook as a whole has always been open about discussing the behind-the-scenes details of their 360-degree video tech. At MWC 2016 in Barcelona, Max Cohen—Oculus’s Vice President and Head Of Mobile—discussed with Popular Science other uses for VR besides gaming, and 360-degree video, using Facebook’s dynamic streaming, is a huge part of that.
"Usually the 360-degree videos you see [in Gear VR] are a 4K video,” Cohen tells us. "4K quality is spread all around you but you only see a segment of that at one time. What dynamic streaming does is chop up that video into lots of little pyramids and then show you the highest resolution wherever you’re looking at and a lower resolution wherever you’re not."
"The benefit of this is that if you want to still watch something in 4K, you end up using one-fifth the bandwidth,” says Cohen. The same level of streaming that previously needed a 5Mb connection, for example, would now only need 1Mb. If you have that faster connection, you can now achieve higher levels of resolution, like 6K.
While the majority of immersive videos may be home videos at the moment, faster access to movies that surround us can only lead to the format becoming more prevalent and, one day, even preferred.
Nefertiti belongs to the ages. Does her likeness belong to the people? That’s a question for philosophers and museum curators to debate, but thanks to an enterprising group of secretive scanners, it has a practical answer: yes. Using Microsoft Kinect scanners hidden under scarves, Nora Al-Badri, a German-Iraqi artist, and Jan Nikolai Nelles, a German artist, recorded the bust of Nefertiti at the Neues Museum in Berlin last year. That bust is now available as a 3D rendering that people can download and 3D print.
Queen Nefertiti ruled Egypt with her husband, the pharaoh Akhenaten, during Egypt’s 18th dynasty, around 1350 BC to 1334 BC. Archaeologists search for her tomb to this day. The bust of Nefertiti was found in an ancient sculptor's workshop in Egypt in 1912, and taken to Germany, where it has resided ever since. Here’s what the scan of the bust looks like:
Since the bust’s discovery, it’s become both a symbol and figurehead of tensions in preservation culture and museums. Standards for archaeological work have changed a lot over the past century, and the once-fashionable idea that artifacts needed to be in European museums for safekeeping is now met with calls for returning art and artifacts to their country of origin.
Germany has so far not granted the bust of Nefertiti a right to return home to Egypt, so instead, scans of it may be the next best thing. At Hyperallergic, Claire Voon writes:
Ultimately, the artists hope their actions will place pressure on not only the Neues Museum but on all museums to repatriate objects to the communities and nations from which they came. Rather than viewing such an idea as radical, they see it as pragmatic, as a logical update to cultural institutions in the digital era: especially given the technological possibilities of today, the pair believes museums who repatriate artifacts could then show copies or digital representatives of them. Many people have already created their own Nefertitis from the released data; the 3D statue in the American University in Cairo stands as such an example of Al-Badri and Nelles’s ideals for the future of museums, in addition to being one immediate solution that may arise from individual action.
Samsung took to the stage on Sunday at Mobile World Congress 2016 to finally unveil its new Galaxy S7 and S7 Edge devices. The devices come with a bevy of new specs and features: a super AMOLED display for staying on without using much battery, a beefed up battery, and (finally!) the return of removable micro-SD cards. But some of the most important improvements have come to the camera.
Along with higher resolution and a brighter lens, Samsung now sells cases for the Galaxy S7 that double as lens attachments. We took some untouched photos with and without the case on Sammie's new phone. Here's how they compare:
You inherit your first microbiome, the colony of bacteria that live in and on your body, from your mother at the moment you’re born. As scientists have started to decode the microbiome and understand its connection to many of the body's systems including immunity and metabolism, they have learned that the type and concentration of bacteria in a baby’s microbiome varies depending on whether the baby was born via C-section or vaginal birth. In a recent experiment, scientists found that they could transfer a mother’s vaginal microbiome to a C-section baby cheaply and effectively using a swab of gauze, a technique called vaginal seeding. But according to an article published today in the British Medical Journal, that practice could be dangerous to the babies.
While the mother’s vagina contains a lot of bacteria that are good for a baby, it might also have some dangerous pathogens that the mother never even knew she had. The researchers mentioned B streptococcus, which is found in up to 30 percent of women and can cause an infection in the baby’s blood; as well as herpes virus and the bacteria that cause chlamydia and gonorrhea in adults and can bring on a nasty eye infection in newborns. Helping babies avoid those potential pathogens, which they're exposed to during vaginal birth, is one of the advantages of a C-section.
In the swabbing experiment published earlier this month, the mothers were screened for just these sorts of microorganisms in order to be eligible for the experiment, which is not common practice for most pregnant women. Passing on the mother’s microbiome without that sort of test would put babies at risk of developing those sorts of infections, the study authors write.
The scientists behind the swabbing experiment admit that it will take years or decades until they know if vaginal seeding benefits babies in the long term. Until then, the researchers recommend that new moms don’t request the procedure at the hospital or do it themselves. And while the study authors write that doctors should respect the autonomy of mothers who do decide to do vaginal seeding, they also suggest that other practices, such as breastfeeding and limiting the use of antibiotics could have a much bigger effect on a baby’s microbiome without any of the additional risks.
The Parkes telescope spotted the Fast Radio Burst in this study
In just a tiny fraction of a second, a Fast Radio Burst can emit as much energy as the entire Sun radiates over 10,000 years. Our telescopes have recorded 16 of these powerful pulses, but thousands may be happening every day.
Scientists still don't know what causes these enormous bursts of energy, but they have a lot of ideas. Cosmic strings, stellar birth, collapsing neutron stars, evaporating black holes, and of course, aliens, are just a few.
Most Fast Radio Bursts (FRBs) aren't discovered until months or years after they occur, when scientists are sifting through the data deluge from telescope observations. But in a study just published in Nature, a team of scientists developed a way to detect the bursts swiftly, then alert other telescopes that can help study the phenomenon.
Alex Cherney
CSIRO's Compact Array in Australia was one of a network of telescopes that helped to measure the burst
By studying the burst and its afterglow, which lasted for six days, the team was able to pinpoint the FRB's origin with 1000 times more precision than ever before. This particular burst, recorded in April 2015, came from an elliptical galaxy 6 billion light-years away.
The stars in that galaxy are old, suggesting this burst didn't come from the explosive birth of a star. Instead, the team suspects it came from the collision of two compact stars, however not all FRBs are necessarily created in the same way.
“Our discovery opens the way to working out what makes these bursts,” said study co-author Simon Johnston, an astrophysicist at Australia's Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation.
Missing Matter, And More
Now that scientists can measure how far away these bursts are, it opens a new door to studying the structure of the universe. For example, the team was able to use this FRB to find matter that had "gone missing."
Models suggest that the universe is made up of 70 percent dark energy, 25 percent dark matter, and just 5 percent of the regular matter that we're familiar with. However, half of the universe's ordinary matter seems to be missing.
When an FRB fires off, its high-frequency waves travel fastest, reaching our measuring equipment sooner than the low-frequency waves. The relative travel times of those waves tell scientists how dense the interstellar medium is between the burst's origin and Earth. Knowing how far the waves traveled is integral for making this measurement.
“Essentially this lets us weigh the Universe, or at least the normal matter it contains,” said Johnston in a press release.
And the result was, the team found the missing matter. The measured "weight" of the interstellar medium was just as the models predicted.
What's more, FRBs may one day aid in the study of gravitational waves as well, according to astrophysicist Duncan Lorimer, whose team discovered the first FRB in 2007. In a letter accompanying the Nature paper, Lorimer suggests that whatever massive phenomenon is emitting the FRBs may also be emitting detectable gravity waves.
Lorimer also notes that new telescopes coming online in the next few years should help scientists detect FRBs and learn more about their nature.
"A large census of FRBs will not only add to our understanding of their population," he writes, "but also map out the cosmic web in great detail, provide stringent tests of general relativity, and even yield new constraints on the nature of dark energy."
Drones are a set of limitations that fly. Batteries limit how far drones can go, memory limits how much a drone can record, signal strength (and the lack thereof) limits how far drones can fly. The DroneBox, presented by H3 Dynamics at last week’s Singapore Air Show, is a way around those limitations: a home for drones, connected to a network of drones, that are together an Internet of Drones.
With DroneBox, a quadcopter lives most of its life inside a landing pad. The top of the box has solar panels to charge the drone, and it can be connected to the grid too. When the drone wants to fly, the roof retracts and the platform elevates, letting the quadcopter fly free. Or not free, if instead the quadcopter is tethered to its home like a dog leashed in the hard, an alert sentry over a very small area. These Droneboxes will connect to other drone boxes, and eventually back to a central control system. This means they can be networked, short-flying drones communicating with other stations in an "internet of drones."
To really work, though, a customer needs to buy a lot of DroneBoxes and set them up over an area. This could be a military that wants to place scouts along a front line, a conservation group that wants to monitor wildlife in remote areas, or an oil company trying to check on the far flung parts of a pipeline. With external power stations and weather monitoring units, as well as wireless data download and transfer to server, Droneboxes could be a surrogate network of watchers, watched by a relatively small staff of people.
Virtual reality headsets are not yet commonplace, but they already have the potential to revolutionize many aspects of our lives—how we view entertainment like movies and video games, how we seethe world, and even how we do science.
Now researchers at Weill Cornell Medicine in New York City have started using the technology to better understand the genetic mutations that drive cancer. They've developed a new program for the Oculus Rift VR headset that lets users see and interact with 3D models of microscopic proteins. Called "IPM VR,” short for Institute of Precision Medicine VR, the program aims to make it easier for researchers to pinpoint where and how a person’s DNA has mutated to cause cancer. Their goal is to help doctors all over the country better understand the mutations in order to quickly find the best treatment to stop the disease.
A couple of us here at Popular Science recently got the opportunity to test IPM VR ourselves, as well as to learn more about the program from the researchers who developed it. Here's what we discovered.
Why do we need to pay attention to proteins?
In order to understand the value of IPM VR in fighting cancer, you first need to know about how cancer is formed in the body. It all goes back to DNA, the blueprint by which your body, and the body of every living creature on Earth, manufactures proteins.
Everyone has some mutations in their DNA. Some are inherited, others are acquired from environmental factors such as smoking or sun, and others simply happen spontaneously new cells form. Most of these are benign, but the wrong combination of mutations can sometimes cause cells in a particular organ or area to grow out of control, which can eventually inhibit the normal functioning of the body. That runaway growth process is cancer, in all of its various forms.
Tumors usually contain about a thousand genetic mutations, but only a handful drive the cancer to grow and move throughout the body. Figuring out which mutations are the drivers of a particular cancer can be the genetic equivalent of a needle in a haystack. But if doctors can do it, they can target only those cells with that particular mutation, allowing healthy cells to continue to function — a better outcome for the patient overall. That’s the field of precision medicine.
It’s only by looking at proteins — the body's molecular building blocks created from the genetic instructions in our DNA — that a genetic mutation becomes evident, says Olivier Elemento, a specialist in precision medicine at the Meyer Cancer Center at Weill Cornell. “A mutation at the DNA level does nothing—it’s only when the gene is transcribed and made into a protein that the mutation expresses itself, and the function of a mutation becomes important,” he says.
Proteins are three-dimensional structures, but they’re often depicted flat on paper. If clinicians don’t see the proteins in 3D, they can’t fully understand the role of the mutations, Elemento says. When clinicians are trying to determine if a new mutation could be driving cancer, they check to see if it’s close to a hotspot, a concentration of genetic mutations that indicates that the error is common in other patients with the same type of cancer.
“In a one-dimensional representation of a protein, if a mutation falls in a hotspot, it’s a no brainer—it’s important,” Elemento says. But because proteins fold, a mutation that might seem far away in a 2D representation could actually be positioned very close to a hotspot in the three-dimensional protein.
That might sound like a small difference, but the significance for the patient could be huge: It shows the clinicians that the mutation might be driving the cancer, and that knowledge might help them select a drug that could target it. It’s not an exaggeration to say that this information could make the difference between life and death for a patient.
Using virtual reality to look for cancer-causing mutations
Scientists at Cornell used an early developer version of the Oculus Rift VR headset and gaming software to develop IPM VR, giving researchers and clinicians an immersive way to explore a patient’s unique genetic mutations.
The Oculus Rift VR headset is equipped with a motion sensor that detects what direction you're looking. IPM VR also relies on the presence of a few external cameras not included with the headset, which further track the motion of your body and hands.
After researchers sequence all the genes in a patient’s tumor, the software projects all of the mutations onto a particular protein, the shape of which the researchers downloaded from the protein data bank, a digital archive of 3D protein shapes.
The clinician wearing the headset can change the view to see only the mutation hotspot or only the mutation in question, navigating through the simulated protein with hand and arm gestures. For more information, the clinician can pull up two-dimensional “documents” pertaining to the patient—the report about the type of cancer, or the patient’s medical history from the electronic medical record.
In my brief time using it, it was a truly impressive piece of software to operate. It was my first time using an Oculus VR headset and I flailed clumsily to move through the protein, while my more VR experienced colleague Dave Gershgorn got his sea legs much quicker. He navigated to the mutation hotspots with ease. You can watch our experiences in the video at the bottom of this article.
If my ineptitude is any indication, it will take clinicians a little while to get used to IPM VR and the Oculus Rift headset more broadly. The researchers behind the software are still tweaking some of these features to see what best fits clinicians’ needs, says Alexandros Sigaras, a research associate in computational biomedicine at Weill Cornell Medicine. And though many researchers around the country are working on different aspects of precision medicine, Sigaras and Elemento believe that theirs is the only one integrating patient information into virtual reality.
How VR could become a game-changer for medical treatment
Right now this tool is primarily for research, Sigaras says, but the Cornell team is hoping that it will soon make its way to clinicians all over the country. “The idea of using Oculus is not to replace every computer—it’s to enhance information that would otherwise be very hard to get,” Sigaras says.
He’s aiming to make the complex information about genetic mutations and protein shapes instantly intuitive to clinicians, who wouldn’t have to learn to use another piece of software on their computers. Plus, clinicians would be able to collaborate more seamlessly—using their own headsets, specialists in different disciplines could see the same information to discuss a particular case.
Ideally, Sigaras would like the software to contain all of a patient’s information so that clinicians can analyze it without the distractions and technical requirements offered by a computer. That’s especially important for precision medicine, where the immense amount of genetic and health data can easily overwhelm doctors looking for the best way to treat a patient.
Of course, most doctors don’t yet have virtual reality headsets. But Sigaras, Elemento, and their team strongly believe that the platforms will soon be commonplace. “These Oculus devices are going to democratize themselves very quickly,” Elemento says.
Even at $599 for the recently announced Oculus Rift consumer edition, plus the separate high-powered graphics PC needed to run them, the setup isn't very expensive compared to other medical equipment, he says. He and others believe that price is sure to drop, too, as more competitors enter the field of VR (though HTC's upcoming Vive Pre VR headset is actually slightly more expensive at $699).
“I think that in maybe five years, maybe 10, every clinician will have one of these,” Elemento adds. He hopes that his team’s software will be among the first pioneers to make virtual reality attractive to doctors.
To get there, though, the precision medicine software needs to provide a clear advantage to clinicians, Sigaras says. They’re still figuring out just what kinds of information doctors would want to see in virtual reality, and what they prefer to see on a computer or even in hard copy.
The Oculus Rift VR headset is merely a means to an end to this team, which seems to be somewhat platform-agnostic. Sigaras has tested similar software on other virtual and augmented reality platforms including Google Glass, and even smartphone-powered VR headsets like Google Cardboard. He's also trying to get a Microsoft HoloLens to try his software in augmented reality, too.
In the end, Sigaras and Elemento care most about getting more information to clinicians more quickly and intuitively. “The real question is: How do you make your clinician more productive?” Sigaras says. “We want to enable clinicians to go through an immense amount information at a faster pace.” More often than not, fighting cancer is a race against time, he adds, and if a virtual reality tool can give doctors an advantage in finding the right treatment more quickly, patients will reap the benefits.
Researchers trained mice to associate a particular space with cocaine, a highly addictive drug, shown above.
Combatting an addiction is far more complicated than stopping the chemical cravings—a person can associate places or other people with drug use, making the habit much harder to kick. Now a team led by neuroscientists from the University of Oxford have used light to alter mice's memories so that they no longer associate particular locations with cocaine, according to a study published this week in Nature Neuroscience. Eliminating that association might present a whole new way to treat drug addiction.
In the study, the researchers trained mice to associate a particular space with cocaine. Over time, they preferred to hang out in that space over the other places that were associated with a simple saline solution. They suspected that neurons in the hippocampus, a seahorse-shaped part of the brain that is essential for long-term memory and spatial navigation, were responsible for that association, but they didn’t know exactly which neurons were responsible.
To figure it out, the researchers injected the mice with a chemical that caused the neurons to produce a light-sensitive protein when the mouse was in the cocaine-associated area. They found 133 neurons that lit up and implanted light-transmitting fibers near the neurons in the mice’s brains. When the researchers used light to turn off those spatial mapping neurons in the hippocampus, the mice no longer preferred the cocaine-associated area. To the study authors, that meant that the mice’s memories had been altered to forget the drug-related association.
This isn’t the first study to suggest that altering memories and making the brain forget could reduce addiction in humans. And this one isn’t exactly the most feasible—it wouldn’t be very practical for people to walk around with optical cables implanted in your brain. But the researchers do believe that their findings show that altering the spatial memories associated with drug use could be a good way to reverse drug addiction, or other compulsive and harmful habits. If the researchers could use their findings to discover a less invasive way to limit neuron function in the hippocampus, the technique could someday be useful in clinical practice.
What do you get when you combine a beetle, a cactus, and a pitcher plant? A whole new way to harvest water out of thin air.
In a paper published today in Nature, researchers explain how they combined the water-collecting traits of two desert-dwellers (a Namib desert beetle and a cactus) to create a new material adapted to pull water out of the air — even really warm air that would normally be very difficult to retrieve any water from.
The beetle's contribution to the textured material was the design of the bumps, which grow on its back. These bumps not only allow water to condense more quickly, but also cause it to form larger droplets, which are easier to retrieve than droplets formed on a smooth, flat surface.
But once the water droplets condense on the bumpy surface, where do they go? That's where the cactus comes in. By mimicking the asymmetrical spikes of a cactus, the researchers were able to develop a texture that swiftly funnels water droplets into even larger drops, even moving them against gravity to collect every last drop from the surface.
A third biologically-inspired trait was incorporated from a pitcher plant, a carnivorous plant that traps small prey in a bulbous opening. The researchers added a coating that mimicked the slippery interior of a pitcher plant, which allowed the new material to drain water even quicker.
The technique could be useful in areas where every drop of water counts, letting communities in arid places harvest water from the air. It could also be useful in more industrial applications like desalination plants, dehumidifiers, and other machines where it is useful to get water out of the air quickly.
In order for any of that to happen, however, researchers will first have to figure out how to incorporate the biology-inspired designs into industrial manufacturing, a process that could take quite some time.
Evolution goes like this: cockroach, octopus, robot swarm. At least, that’s the rough impression I got after talking to James Crowder, a Raytheon engineer who’s working on solving the problems of artificial intelligence.
Crowder’s focus is on systems that reason and learn on their own. For a decade, this meant building a robotic cockroach that’s afraid of light. Now, it means an octopus-inspired robot with a central brain that filters responses from smaller sub-brains. In the future, lessons from this octo-bot could power autonomous swarms of drones.
“My thought is that if I can’t build self-evolving lifeforms at the cockroach level, I’ll never build C-3PO,” Crowder told Popular Science. “Can I build something that will self-adapt at a lower brain level, because if I can’t do it at that level, I’ll never do it at an adult human level.”
His robo-roach is a success: it can detect light, and moves away from the light either by turning or, if it can’t turn, by backing up.
So why the leap from roach to octopus?
“A biologist suggested I try a distributed brain model like an octopus,” Crowder said, “because an octopus has like mini-brains in each leg and then a central mediator that mediates how they interact with each other and how they work. The mediator carries the objectives and goals but each of the other distributed neuro pieces does what it needs to to accomplish those.”
This is cool science, but Raytheon isn’t into research just because it's interesting. Going from a roach to an octopus (or, currently, a two-limbed robotic dipus) will teach the defense giant how to make better, smarter drones.
“Right now it takes multiple people to run one UAV,” said Crowder. “We’d like to get to where one person can run multiple UAVs, but that requires them to have some degree of autonomy.”
So if drone swarms are going to be a thing, with humans controlling multiple robots all at once, then robots are going to have to handle the basic tasks themselves. And to do that, they’re going to need to learn from a robotic octopus.
A child in a slum in Dhaka, Bangladesh walks near an open sewer. High numbers of bacteria found here might be limiting a child's nutritional uptake and stunting his growth.
When you were a kid, you were probably told once or twice that certain substances would stunt your growth, such as coffee (that’s a myth), smoking (maybe true), or not drinking enough milk (that’s calcium, and it’s likely true). But stunted growth doesn’t just mean that you don’t grow as tall as you might have otherwise—many of the 165 million children who are stunted have cognitive disabilities and a greater likelihood of death before they turn five.
It turns out that too many bacteria living in the large intestine may play a role in stunting growth, according to a study published yesterday in the journal mBio. By understanding the relationship between intestinal bacteria and nutrition, researchers could find treatments for stunting.
The researchers looked into a condition called Small Intestine Bacterial Overgrowth (SIBO), an infection thought to inflame the intestine and limit the nutrients a person can absorb from food. The condition is more common among children who live in slums, possibly due to the presence of open sewers.
The researchers evaluated 90 children raised in the slums of Dhaka, Bangladesh. They followed the children from birth to age two to track the association between SIBO and stunted growth. Though the families were given access to medical care and nutritional counseling, and the children were vaccinated, the number of children with stunting nearly tripled during the first year of their lives, from 10 percent to 28 percent. Using a breath test, the researchers found that about 17 percent of children in the cohort had SIBO. Children living near a sewer were much more likely to have SIBO. In the slum environment, even the kids that didn’t have SIBO had some degree of intestinal stress, the researchers suspect.
The researchers believe that SIBO is causing malnutrition, which is resulting in stunted growth, though future studies into the long-term relationship and mechanism would need to confirm that. If researchers can confirm the mechanism linking the two, they could help public health officials better treat stunting before it permanently affects a child’s development.
Treating that damage to the gut, though, would be a much larger public health issue. The researchers didn’t weigh in on a long-term treatment for SIBO; antibiotics would provide a quick fix, but extended use could breed antibiotic resistance, especially since many of the most vulnerable children live near bacteria-infested sewage.
The English Channel is a barrier. Ever since William the Bastard crossed the narrow band of sea in 1066 and earned the title William the Conqueror, the channel has stood as an impenetrable barrier to invaders.
This has also made it the site of a bit of aerial sport. Despite the channel being just over 20 miles across at its narrowest point, aviators since the dawn of aviation have clamored to be the first to fly across the channel with a new craft. In 1909, Louis Blériot became the first person to do so, but records have been claimed as recently as last year, when the first two entirely electric airplanes crossed the channel, each claiming to be the first plane like that to do so (it’s still disputed which one was first). This week, we might be able to add a new craft to historic channel crossers: an unmanned quadcopter piloted by Richard Gill of Team Ocuair as he sat from inside a little boat.
The flight took place on February 16th, with the custom-built quadcopter flying almost 22 miles in 72 minutes. The pilot at all times was within 1600 feet of the drone, to comply with local laws, but “with GPS guidance and automated flight it is perfectly feasible that the drone could have made this flight independently,” Gill and his team write in their summary of the video on YouTube. The point of crossing the channel is, like that of all who flew over it before them: to prove that the flying machine can fly that far, and to do it over water so there’s risk if it can’t.
The Tesla Model X is taking a 30-city tour of the United States to meet its fans. Not just any fans, though – these are the buyers who put down deposits ages ago in anticipation of driving home the company’s first SUV.
Asoka, a lanky middle-aged guy in jeans and wire-framed glasses, attended the meet-and-greet in Portland, Oregon. He was one of the first to make a reservation for the Model X; he’s got a Tesla Roadster (license plate NV MYEV) but not a Model S sedan. He does have a Honda CR-V for the mix of utility and decent gas mileage. That’s why he was so eager to get in line for the Model X. “It’s a bigger, better Honda CR-V,” he said.
The Model X is based on the same platform as the Model S – same batteries, same drive train. The body shape is the biggest difference, but it is a huge difference in several ways.
The Model X can seat up to seven in three rows, and the company says the show-offy Falcon Wing doors will allow for graceful entrances and exits, but that seemed unlikely. Until I saw it with my own eyes. People were as eager to climb into the back seats to test the fit as they were to sit in the driver’s seat. I got in and out with a giant messenger bag full of gear in tow, and the aisle between the middle seats as well as, yes, the winged doors made it less awkward than third-row seats usually are.
The body shape is the biggest difference, but it is a huge difference.
Another surprise for an electric SUV: the Model X is rated to tow up to 5,000 pounds with 713 lb-ft of total torque from both of its motors. Asoka was already planning on buying a utility trailer for trips to the farmers’ market in their Model X after making his wife hold a large plant in her lap in the Roadster on the way home last summer.
The Model X will better both the range of Asoka’s Roadster and the efficiency of his CR-V. He says he currently sees a maximum of about 170 miles in the Roadster, while the Model X P90D performance model used for the test drives has a 250-mile range. And the Honda’s 30 mpg or so will be tripled to about 90 MPGe in the Model X P90D.
The Model X has other new elements that differentiate it from the Model S, like the windshield that extends up over the heads of the front seat occupants and the doors that open automatically as you approach (as long as you have the key fob somewhere on your person).
Asoka said he bought the Tesla Roadster three years ago because he wanted an electric car. Since then, it’s become the daily driver in his household, accounting for far more than half of the annual miles he and his wife drive. As he mashed the accelerator on an empty stretch of road, he noted that the SUV compares well with the two-seater sports car. “That acceleration never gets old,” he said with a grin.
Things are heating up. With climates around the world still changing, deadly heat waves are becoming more common, especially in places like the Middle East which are already struggling with scorching summers. And the forecast isn't looking all that cool for other places either.
In a paper published in Climatic Change researchers found that heat waves that currently occur only once every 20 years could occur every year in the near future. And these aren't isolated incidents. The study predicts that by 2075, 60 percent of the land surface on the Earth could experience these dramatic events.
The researchers also found that those extreme heat waves were more likely to be even hotter than those experienced in the present, with heat waves across 60 percent of the land surface having temperatures 5.4 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than heat waves now.
Though that might not seem like much, even a few degrees can mean the difference between life and death for vulnerable populations. Heat stress is a dangerous thing, and can prove fatal to the very young, the elderly, and people already suffering from illnesses. Heat waves are typically most deadly for the impoverished, especially those who don't have access to the respite offered by cooling facilities, electricity, or air conditioning.
Luckily, this isn't our only possible future. The researchers point out that if we manage to cut greenhouse gases dramatically, emitting less heat-trapping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, we can reduce the frequency of these events.
"The study shows that aggressive cuts in greenhouse gas emissions will translate into sizable benefits starting in the middle of the century for both the number and intensity of extreme heat events," study author Claudia Tebaldi said. "Even though heat waves are on the rise, we still have time to avoid a large portion of the impacts."
Julia Mahamid, Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry and Elizabeth Villa, UC San Diego
Cryo–electron tomographic image
An color-coded image taken of the border between the nucleus and the cytoplasm, the rest of the cell.
Much like a car, a cell wouldn’t function without all its parts. Unlike a car, though, scientists still haven’t been able to fully understand just how all the parts of cells fit together.
That’s mostly because even the most advanced imaging technology to date hasn’t given them a good enough look at the border between the nucleus and the rest of the cell. Now researchers from the Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry and the FEI microscopy company in the Netherlands have used cryo–electron tomography to take 3D images of the insides of cells to learn more about how they function as a whole. They published a study with their findings today in Science.
Cryo–electron tomography can snap images of cells down to the nanometer scale, but the specimens have to be frozen at extremely low cryogenic temperatures (below -238 degrees Fahrenheit). The researchers used liquid nitrogen to freeze HeLa cells, common in lab experiments despite their controversial origin (taken in 1951 from a cervical cancer biopsy of unwitting African-American woman Henrietta Lacks). Then they sliced them into thin just 200 nanometers.
To better preserve the cell structures, the researchers coated the sides of each slice with a thin layer of metal so that the focused beam of electrons needed to create the image, connected better with the surface and created clearer images. The electrons shot at the slices would bounce off and into a detector, generating an image of each tiny structure inside.
Using this advanced imaging technique, the researchers were able to analyze cells’ nuclear pore complexes, the holes in the outer envelop of the nucleus that allow important biological molecules to pass between it and the rest of the cell.
When the researchers looked at these pores at different phases in the cells’ developmental cycle, they realized that the size of the pores were the same within each cell, indicating that the size of the pores likely depends on the cell’s physiological phase, probably because the rest of the cell needs different amounts of information from the nucleus at different points in its life cycle.
The researchers believe this will be the first of many discoveries about the relationship between a cell’s form and function thanks to this advanced imaging technology.
Wildlife officials are using robotic bears to catch poachers before they can do any damage to real bears like this guy.
Robotic taxidermied animals are serving as a new breed of undercover agents. Wildlife officers are using them to bait and catch poachers across the United States, according to the Washington Post.
The officers set up the animals in environments where shooting them is illegal and then wait out of sight for poachers who attempt to shoot. They can control the robots with a remote. Although the robotic animals can’t walk or run, they are capable of more subtle movements like lifting their leg or turning their head. And as recent reports suggest, they’re realistic enough to be effective at luring in poachers.
Companies such as Robotic Decoys and Custom Robotic Wildlife sell a variety of mechanical animals, including deer, elk, foxes, and bears. Mike Kleman, owner of Robotic Decoys, explains that he makes the animals by following the general taxidermy procedure of fastening a hide to a form. But then, he adds servo motors—the type also used in model cars and airplanes—to the neck, ears, tail, or legs. His robo-animals can be controlled using a radio remote or soon, an app.
Kleman's company is based in Wisconsin, but they ship to officers around the country. The robo-animals range from around $700 for a fox to $4800 for a moose, but organizations such as the Humane Society Wildlife Land Trust ease the financial burden by donating robot animals to cash-strapped government agencies. The organization has donated robot animals to agencies in 16 different states, according to its website.
And in the future, the robo-animal agents could help tackle international poaching problems, too.
“I would like to figure out how to make rhinos,” Kleman told Popular Science.“There’s a humongous issue overseas about rhino poaching.”
“The All Writs Act Does Not Provide A Basis To Conscript Apple To Create Software Enabling The Government To Hack Into iPhones” opens the “arguments” section of the motion Apple filed this afternoon against a court order that Apple help the FBI unlock one of the San Bernardino shooting suspects' phones. In one weirdly formatted line, we have the centerpiece of much of the modern digital economy, an overstretched law from 1789, and a very curious definition of the word “conscript.”
The motion to vacate is the strongest move yet from Apple in its growing legal battle with the FBI over the specifics of a phone used by San Bernardino shooter Syed Farook, and the broader fight over the security and privacy of our increasingly vital mobile devices.
A week ago Tuesday, a judge ordered Apple to help the FBI unlock the old iPhone 5C administed to Farook by his employer, San Berardino County, months before Farook and his wife, Tashfeen Malik, shot and killed 14 people in December 2015.
The FBI wanted to brute force its way into the phone, by guessing at the phone’s password as many times as they could until they got it right. A feature on the operating system of the iPhone 5C is designed to protect against this: guess the password ten times, and the phone wipes out all user data. Rather that guess wrong and risk losing any useful information Farook may have had, the FBI is instead asking Apple to create and sign a software update that will disable the auto-wipe feature.
Apple is refusing to create this software. Shortly after a judge ordered Apple to comply with the FBI's request last week, Apple CEO Tim Cook published a public letter on Apple's website, saying this was against the interests of Apple, its customers, and the basic security of phones themselves.
The information the FBI is seeking in this case isn't coming from iCloud, it’s cloud storage setup, which Apple has provided, and will continue to turn over to the courts when served with a proper warrant. Because iCloud information is held on Apple servers, it’s Apple’s information to hand over. But information stored on the phone's internal hard drive or cached on the phone from other third-party apps and services, Apple argues, isn’t the company's to turn over.
To highlight this, Apple executives on a media call referred to the software they’re being asked to build as "GovOS," a play on Apple's iOS operating system. Apple makes it very clear in its motion that this isn’t just about one phone, but about the sanctity of all smartphones.
This is not a case about one isolated iPhone. Rather, this case is about the Department of Justice and the FBI seeking through the courts a dangerous power that Congress and the American people have withheld: the ability to force companies like Apple to undermine the basic security and privacy interests of hundreds of millions of individuals around the globe. The government demands that Apple create a back door to defeat the encryption on the iPhone, making its users’ most confidential and personal information vulnerable to hackers, identity thieves, hostile foreign agents, and unwarranted government surveillance. The All Writs Act, first enacted in 1789 and on which the government bases its entire case, “does not give the district court a roving commission” to conscript and commandeer Apple in this manner.
The implications for Apple are clear: if they follow this one exception, every phone and every device they make will be compromised. It’ll be like requiring all suitcase locks to be opened by the same government-held master key, and then being surprised when that master key is copied and used by people besides the government to steal belongings. (This is a real thing that happened). Apple continues:
The order demanded by the government compels Apple to create a new operating system—effectively a “back door” to the iPhone—that Apple believes is too dangerous to build. Specifically, the government would force Apple to create new software with functions to remove security features and add a new capability to the operating system to attack iPhone encryption, allowing a passcode to be input electronically. This would make it easier to unlock the iPhone by “brute force,” trying thousands or millions of passcode combinations with the speed of a modern computer. In short, the government wants to compel Apple to create a crippled and insecure product. Once the process is created, it provides an avenue for criminals and foreign agents to access millions of iPhones. And once developed for our government, it is only a matter of time before foreign governments demand the same tool.
Much of the case hinges on alternative ways for the government to address the trade-off between security and privacy. The motion is a wagging finger at the failure of Congress to craft and pass meaningful legislation for circumstances like this, and that in their failure, law enforcement is forced to use a broad and archaic law.
This motion also puts Apple very squarely at a fight that will define much of security for the next century: are normal people allowed to use the encryption that makes them and their personal information safest, even if that safe encryption can at times shield terror suspects? Or will we have a world of back doors, where encryption is so easily circumvented by the government, malicious actors, and bored hackers so often as to be functionally meaningless?
Apple unequivocally sides with a greater good of strong, meaningful encryption for all. We’ll see if the courts do, too.
Picture of Buk missile launcher 211, photographed on a training field near Kapustin Yar, 18 July 2013.
How long is it possible to conceal a war crime? On July 17th, 2014, Malaysia Airlines flight MH-17 was torn out of the sky while flying over eastern Ukraine. Immediate speculation pointed to a Soviet-designed missile system, and as the investigation into the cause of the crash continues, those early suspicions have been confirmed. Now that there’s a rough consensus on what shot down the civilian plane, the argument has moved on to whom. Open-source intelligence analysts Bellingcat yesterday released a report linking that missile launch to Russia’s 53rd Anti-Aircraft Missile Brigade.
Part of what makes this investigation messy is that it takes place during the middle of a proxy war. Following the Euromaidan movement that drove out a Russian-backed president out of Kiev, Russia responded aggressively to Ukrainian assertions of independence, first by taking full control of the entire Crimean peninsula, and then by supporting pro-Russian separatists around the eastern Ukrainian city of Donetsk. The Buk missile launcher and system that shot down MH-17 is significantly more advanced hardware than armed rebels usually get, consisting of multiple military vehicles, with radar systems and powerful anti-air missiles. Previous efforts by Bellingcat placed the key Buk launcher at the site and time of MH-17’s untimely demise. This new report focuses on the Russian soldiers to whom the missile launcher belongs.
Bellingcat’s report is entitled “Potential Suspects and Witnesses from the 53rd Anti-Aircraft Missile Brigade,” and in 115 pages it details the unit that had the culpable system, evidence of them in Ukraine, its movements, the members, and finally, it ends with blame placed squarely, not at any rogue operative, but the government of Russia itself. From the report summary:
We provide partially anonymized information regarding 14 officers of the 2nd Battalion of the 53rd Brigade, including the commanders of the Buk unit vehicles within the battalion. Sergey Borisovich Muchkaev, the commander of the 53rd Anti-Aircraft Missile Brigade, is closely detailed, along with his superiors, including Aleksey Zolotov of the Air Defense of the 20th Guards Army and Andrey Kokhanov of the Air Defense of the Western Military District. Ultimately, responsibility for the downing of MH17 from a weapon provided and possibly operated by the Russian military lies with the Ministry of Defense and the Supreme Commander of the Russian Armed Forces, President Vladimir Putin.
Findings from this report were shared with the international Joint Investigative Team responsible for an official account of what happened to MH-17. With the information from this open-source research, they may be able to follow the lead as far as it goes.
