Try these book pairs:
For more suggestions and full lessons, check out Perfect Pairs :
Here's the synopsis accompanying the YouTube video:
This is a working particle accelerator built using LEGO bricks. I call it the LBC (Large Brick Collider). It can accelerate a LEGO soccer ball to just over 12.5 kilometers per hour. Watch the follow up video to see how it works: http://youtu.be/sjRPTDgjM0Q If you would like to see this potentially become an official LEGO set be sure to head over to LEGO Ideas and support the project! https://ideas.lego.com/projects/86253 You can find more information about how it works on my website at http://jkbrickworks.com/lego-particle...
Zz.
When research chemist Jeannette García found a candy-size lump of white material in a flask she had recently used, she had no idea what she had created. The material stuck firmly to the glass, so she used a hammer to break it free. But when she turned the hammer on the material itself, it refused to crack. “When I realized just how high its strength was, I knew I needed to figure out what I'd made,” García says.
García, a scientist at IBM Research–Almaden, enlisted the help of several colleagues to solve the puzzle. They found that she had stumbled on a new family of thermoset polymers, exceptionally strong plas-tics that are used in products ranging from smartphones to airplane wings. Thermosets account for about one third of the global polymers produced every year, but they are difficult to recycle. García's new material, nicknamed Titan, is the first recyclable, industrial-strength thermoset ever discovered.
Unlike conventional thermosets, which pretty much refuse to be remolded, the new polymer can be reprocessed through a chemical reaction. García and her colleagues reported their discovery in May in .
Global demand for durable, recyclable plastics is expected to soon increase. By 2015, for example, both Europe and Japan will require that 95 percent of car parts produced there be recyclable. “This is a perfect example of a material that would work for that,” García says. But she believes that the new thermoset could also eventually extend into a range of applications—anticorrosive and antimicrobial coatings, drug delivery, adhesives, 3-D printing, water purification, among others.
Titan came with a bonus, too. García and her colleagues discovered a second form of the material—a self-healing, gel-like substance they call Hydro—that forms at lower temperatures. “If you cut it in half and then put it back together, it instantly forms bonds,” García says. It could be used as an adhesive, she notes, or as a self-healing paint. Other, related compounds could follow. “It's not just this one new polymer but a new polymer-forming reaction.” García says.
For more on this year's World Changing Ideas, go to
More than 50 green sea turtles were released into the Gulf of Mexico after recovering from cold-stunning, or hypothermia, brought on by a drastic drop in water temperature.
November 28, 2014
France wants to gradually phase out the use of diesel fuel for private passenger transport and will put in place a system to identify the most polluting vehicles
November 28, 2014
A sharp cry pierces the air. Soon a worried mother deer approaches the source of the sound, expecting to find her fawn. But the sound is coming from a speaker system, and the call isn't that of a baby deer at all. It's an infant fur seal's.
Because deer and seals do not live in the same habitats, mother deer should not know how baby seal screams sound, reasoned biologists Susan Lingle of the University of Winnipeg and Tobias Riede of Midwestern University, who were running the acoustic experiment. So why did a mother deer react with concern?
Over two summers, the researchers treated herds of mule deer and white-tailed deer on a Canadian farm to modified recording of the cries of a wide variety of infant mammals—elands, marmots, bats, fur seals, sea lions, domestic cats, dogs and humans. By observing how mother deer responded, Lingle and Riede discovered that as long as the fundamental frequency was , those mothers approached the speaker as if they were looking for their offspring. Such a reaction suggests deep commonalities among the cries of most young mammals. (The mother deer did not show concern for white noise, birdcalls or coyote barks.) Lingle and Riede published their findings in October in the .
Researchers had previously proposed that sounds made by different animals during similar experiences—when they were in pain, for example—would share acoustic traits. “As humans, we often ‘feel’ for the cry of young animals,” Lingle says. That because emotions are expressed in vocally similar ways among mammals.
Wearing small recording devices could reduce violent confrontations, but without careful planning and better research, the attempt could backfire
From baseball to billiards, robots are improving their play, even competing in the RoboCup and RoboGames
November 27, 2014
People are increasingly broadcasting symptoms of mental illness on social media. We should listen
Peter's Facebook friends knew something was wrong months before he had a manic episode. He had been posting about expensive shopping trips and name-dropping celebrities he claimed to have partied with—seemingly out of character for the 26-year-old former dental student from Atlanta. When Peter (not his real name) ran away from home in April 2013, he unleashed a flurry of paranoid, all-caps status updates saying his family was out to get him. Meanwhile his sisters left messages on his Facebook wall begging him to come home.
What might have been a family affair a decade ago instead played out in front of hundreds of eyes, as friends and acquaintances watched the saga unfold on their news feeds. Some people sent him private messages. Others posted on his wall. Many commenters expressed support and concern, but a few were mocking and unhelpful. One person wrote “lol.” Most people, however, only watched.
*You must have purchased this issue or have a qualifying subscription to access this content
As nations dither on meaningful steps to combat climate change, localities are stepping in with their own measures to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases
Artificial sweeteners. (Credit: PunchingJudy/Flickr)
I find it ironic that Thanksgiving coincides with . In honor of that irony, two recently published studies have suggested a possible link between what you eat, how it impacts the behavior of the microbes living in your gut, and type II diabetes.
To further explain, allow me use the most adorable analogy I could dream up: minions.
Consumption of artificial sweeteners has been shown to alter the community composition of the gut microbial communities in mice, rats and humans. (Figure credit: Erin McKenney, Duke University)
Sweet'N Low is a brand of artificial sweetener made primarily from granulated saccharin. (Credit: Mike Mozart/Flickr)
Their experiment revealed that mice did exhibit different microbiome profiles after consuming artificial sweeteners, just as with the human volunteers who had developed glucose intolerance. And importantly, the humans who did not show glucose intolerance after consuming artificial sweeteners also did not see changes in the community composition of their microbiome.
“[We were surprised] that unlike mice, not all humans consuming artificial sweeteners will be affected in the same manner. We were able to demonstrate that this may be mediated by changes in the composition of the microbiota,” says Suez.
Consequently, this change in microbial community in mice also modified how the microbiota functioned as a group to regulate metabolism. Pathways that impact the transport of sugar in the body were found to have decreased function after saccharin treatment and, notably, there was an increased abundance of short-chain fatty acids (SCFAs), which are implicated in lipid biosynthesis.
found similar results in a study published in October in the journal .
Artificial sweeteners are packing a double-punch.
As compelling as results from these studies might appear, it’s only fair to digest these findings with a grain of Sweet’N Low. ranging from anti-cancer properties to regulating satiety.
But the take home point is this: findings from two independent studies suggest that messing with the microbiome may have despicable consequences. Artificial sweeteners were originally intended to stave off the increasing obesity and metabolic disease , but instead they may have directly contributed to it.
FRYTOWN, Iowa—Warren McKenna's Jeep SUV glides past stubbled farm fields, kicking up dust and fresh snow where only weeks ago a bumper crop of corn and soybeans filled the horizon.
Among the Amish and Mennonite families who have farmed this part of southeast Iowa for generations, McKenna is an outsider, or an "English," as the German-speaking Amish call non-natives. Yet he is well-known in both town and country as manager of the 650-member Farmers Electric Cooperative of Kalona, a job he has held since 1992.
One day earlier this month, McKenna was making rounds with a visitor when he pulled the SUV into a farm where Leighton Yoder and his family raise Jersey cows and operate a small dairy. McKenna wasn't there to talk about milk, but another farm product Yoder has been nurturing.
"How's the power?" asks McKenna from inside the Jeep.
"It's real good," answers Yoder. "We've got strong sun and wind today. I figure I'm making more than 20,000 watts out there."
The 20 kilowatts, which help form the backbone of the electric cooperative's 216-square-mile distribution grid, are coming from Yoder's farm-based energy systems. They include two 7.2 kW solar arrays mounted on the south-facing slope of a nearby field and a 10 kW wind turbine set atop a steel tower that may be the tallest structure around outside the Frytown grain elevator.
Yoder, whose Mennonite traditions generally eschew many energy-consuming home comforts, takes pride in his farm's energy self-sufficiency and clean energy credentials. But the economics of renewable energy, and particularly solar power, bring the most satisfaction to the tall, 50-year-old farmer.
"I do like renewable energy," he says. "And if I can make it pay, I'll do it."
Yoder makes it pay to the tune of $500 to $700 each month in avoided energy costs, or roughly half what his electricity bill totaled before he installed the turbine and solar panels and began selling power to the Kalona co-op under a unique feed-in tariff program that is tailored to the locals' strong sense of self-reliance and energy independence.
Arrays spread over cornfields
Together, they form the most successful community-based solar energy programs in the United States, according to the Solar Electric Power Association, which recently highlighted the Kalona cooperative for its pioneering solar work and named McKenna "utility CEO of the year." The co-op also boasts the nation's No. 1 ranking in installed solar watts per customer, with a cumulative capacity of more than 1,800 watts per member.
According to SEPA, McKenna and a small cadre of colleagues have made the Kalona farmers' co-op "a national model for a hands-on, keep-it-simple approach to financing and building solar energy projects." More significantly, they have done it in a deeply conservative corner of a Midwestern state with average solar insolation and where renewable energy is usually equated with big wind farms.
Iowa ranks third among the states for installed wind power capacity, with roughly 5,200 megawatts. That compares to 4.6 MW of grid-connected solar capacity, or less than one-third of the solar capacity installed in neighboring Minnesota and one-tenth of Illinois' solar output, according to data from the Interstate Renewable Energy Council.
Yet Kalona is bucking the trend. The co-op today manages 1.2 MW of solar generation, or 30 percent of its members' peak demand, using a variety of solar applications, including farm-based PV arrays like Yoder's. There is also a 40 kW community solar garden in Frytown and an 800 kW solar farm completed last year by Eagle Point Solar of Dubuque, whose output is purchased by the co-op under a power purchase agreement.
The utility also has reached out to the area's ultra-traditional Amish, many of whom are fully off-grid, by installing PV arrays atop roadside telephone stations that serve as the community's primary telecommunications link to the outside world.
"The old lines won't work when the new phones have fiber optics," explained McKenna.
Leaving a fossil-fueled tradition
Indeed, the Kalona co-op's full embrace of distributed energy, and especially solar, stands in contrast to the more guarded view of solar taken by Iowa's large investor-owned utilities and even other rural co-ops that deliver power to roughly 650,000 Iowans through a network of distributors.
"Warren is kind of a lone voice out there among the utilities," said Barry Shear, president and chief executive of Eagle Point Solar, which recently won an Iowa Supreme Court case upholding the legality of third-party solar agreements in the state (, July 14). "When you're an investor-owned utility looking at distributed solar power, chances are you're thinking about lost generation revenue. What Warren is doing is building a generation base for his customers."
But going long on solar in rural Iowa is not an easy sell.
McKenna also set about turning others who could help community-based solar energy from concept to reality in his rural district. Among the early targets was Dale Yoder-Short, whose day job was, and still is, teaching high school science at the nearby Iowa Mennonite School.
Yoder-Short, who earned a Ph.D. in physics from Purdue University, also ran a part-time business as an electrician, and as McKenna recalls, he collared the teacher for a weekend course in solar energy systems offered by the Midwest Renewable Energy Association. The two men trained in Duluth, Minn., and came back with the gumption and know-how to build farm-based solar PV systems.
What began as a smattering of interest, including among Yoder-Short's students and parents at the Mennonite school, which now supports its own 50 kW solar array, has mushroomed into an understated but unmistakable solar energy boom, the likes of which McKenna had hoped for but never expected.
"Our goal was to shift more of our energy resource local," said McKenna. "And if we could get our members to bear some of the cost of that generation, so much the better."
As often happens in agricultural communities, the early solar adopters set a template for neighbors to study and replicate. And, McKenna added, the utility was deliberate about not pushing the technology too hard, but rather allowed customers to make up their own minds about the costs and benefits of participating in the solar program.
Feed for the local grid
The array, installed in November 2013, has reduced Erb's power bills by an average 40 percent, or $700 per month, thanks to the feed-in tariff along with federal and state tax incentives that came with the project's construction.
Like Yoder, Erb stressed the project's bottom-line benefits, not its environmental ones. "I would say I did it for the sole purpose of generating energy," he said.
Even so, he now routinely gets drive-by visitors wanting to know how the solar panels fit into his farm's daily operations and management. "The main question I get is how the electricity is getting used on the farm. People like the idea of pulling power directly off the roof and using it to feed hogs or run equipment. It doesn't work that way."
Indeed, it's the rural co-op's 110-mile distribution grid that is being "fed" the electricity.
The feed-in tariff program adheres to a "buy all, sell all" model whereby participants purchase all their electricity from the co-op but also sell all of their distributed generation to the utility at fixed rates.
Currently, the co-op pays 20 cents per kilowatt-hour for the first 25 percent of a distributed solar system's monthly generation. The rate steps down to 12.5 cents per kWh for additional generation that does not exceed that participant's monthly consumption. If a distributed generator produces more than he or she consumes, the rate for the excess power drops to 6 cents per kWh.
For owners of renewable energy systems who do not want to participate in the feed-in tariff program, the co-op offers direct cash incentives amounting to 50 cents per watt for solar and wind power, with a cap of $2,500.
It also allows customers to invest in a community solar garden that has nearly tripled in size since the first panels were constructed. The entry cost is $375 to $475 per panel, with a payback rate of 12.5 cents per kWh.
"It has been successful," McKenna said of the half-acre solar garden. "There's currently only 40 kW installed in there, but it has more than 100 owners, and I've got a waiting list. We can't add new panels fast enough."
www.eenews.net
Early in its history the Milky Way gobbled up many tiny galaxies. The cosmic rubble it left behind is now yielding fresh clues into how our corner of the universe came to be
Go outside on a dark, clear night, far away from the glare of city lights, and look up. You will see the glowing band of the Milky Way arching dramatically overhead. It has now been four centuries since Galileo Galilei first turned a telescope toward this awesome sight and noted that the “milk” is actually countless individual stars, too faint to be separated by the naked eye. It took another three centuries for astronomers to convince themselves that the Milky Way is just one of billions of galaxies in the universe.
In fact, the Milky Way itself is not simply one galaxy: recent work has shown that it has lured in and engulfed many smaller galaxies over time, integrating their stars into itself. At least 20 dwarf galaxies—ranging in size from one millionth to one hundredth the size of the Milky Way—are known to orbit it now, with dozens more probably still undiscovered. And the current satellites are thought to be just a tiny fraction of those that ever existed, the rest having been drawn into our galaxy by gravity and absorbed long ago. This ingestion started when the Milky Way was younger and smaller than it is now and continues today—the satellite galaxies that still exist may eventually be swallowed up.
*You must have purchased this issue or have a qualifying subscription to access this content
Right before dying, many people experience vivid and meaningful dreams and visions, according to accounts across cultures and throughout history. Yet little scientific research has investigated the phenomenon. A new study in the , the first study to focus primarily on the patient's perspective, found that most of these dreams are a source of personal comfort. They bring about a sense of peace, a change in perspective or an acceptance of death, suggesting that medical professionals should recognize dreams and visions as a positive part of the dying process.
Researchers at Daemen College and at Hospice Buffalo, an agency of the Center for Hospice & Palliative Care, studied 63 patients admitted to the hospice over a period of 18 months. Investigators interviewed patients daily, asking them about any dreams and visions and taking down detailed descriptions of them. Most participants reported experiencing at least one dream or vision, memorable in much more clarity than other dreams or delirious episodes and characterized by an impression of realism and emotional significance. The researchers' analysis revealed six categories that encompassed all the dreams—often participants saw deceased loved ones waiting for them, for example. As patients approached death, they tended to transition from dreaming about living people to dreaming about the dead, which the patients described as more comforting.
The overarching theme that emerged from the study was that end-of-life dreams and visions are a source of comfort. Previous studies have come to similar conclusions: a survey of hospice nurses in 2013 found that 89 percent believed these experiences were associated with calm and peaceful deaths. Yet medical professionals tend to discount predeath dreams and visions, according to physician Christopher W. Kerr, one of the study's co-authors. He says that most doctors offhandedly attribute these incidents to delirium or the side effects of medication.
The researchers believe that such a dismissive attitude toward dying patients' experiences can be detrimental to their mental health. “We need to treat the patient, not only the disease; overall quality of life at the end of life is important,” says Pei C. Grant, director of research at Hospice Buffalo. She and her colleagues suggest that families and practitioners talk about dreams with patients—who are often excited to share their dreams when asked about them. Doing so allows patients to review their life, process feelings about death and come to terms with past experiences. “Just being there and listening—that's really what the patient wants,” Grant says. Acknowledging the personal significance of these end-of-life experiences may help patients and families through the difficult transition from dying to death.
As patients approach death, they often have realistic and memorable dreams in one or more of these six categories, according to the new study:
Camera traps are a great way to monitor the forest without actually being there.
In order to get more information about the forest here at the in North Sumatra, I’ve set up four camera traps, which I’m using to get a better look at the wildlife around the site.
The traps have been so successful in such a short time period that together with another graduate student, John Abernethy of , and the , we’ve decided to launch a crowdfunding campaign over at Experiment, . Hopefully the campaign will be a success, and periodically I’ll post the best of my pictures so you can see how unbelievable animal life in the forest is in Sumatra!
Camera traps are great, because a lot of animals will run from humans or are nocturnal, meaning that we’d never get to see them otherwise. I’m using the idiot proof but slightly cumbersome and the more complicated but compact , which I attach to trees using locks to prevent them from being stolen. In the daytime the cameras shoot bursts of three color photos and at night they produce an infrared flash allowing for night vision without scaring the animals. Typically, with eight-rechargeable-AA or four-D batteries the units can be left for around a month, though I’ve been switching the batteries and memory cards every three weeks or to be on the safe side.
The cameras are attached to trees in clearings on game trails and left to run on their own. The batteries and memory cards are changed every three to four weeks.
So, what have I got so far? A lot is the simple answer!
To start with, I have a ridiculous number of pictures of great argus pheasants, since the sites of their mating dances make ideal locations for my camera traps. The males of this odd looking bird will wander around cleaning their chosen spot while making a very distinctive two-tone sound to try and attract a female. When a female arrives the male will puff up its wings in a display showing off the hundreds of “eyes” on its beautiful plumage.
The male great argus pheasant, Argusanius argus, possesses a spectacularly long tail and secondary wing feathers that are decorated with hundreds of ocelli. He clears a spot in the forest to dance for females, which also makes the perfect location for a camera trap!
As for mammals, the cameras are a big draw for groups of terrestrial pig-tailed macaques, which love to play with them and strike hilarious poses, much to the delight of my field assistants, who I think might enjoy looking at the pictures more than I do!
Southern pig-tailed macaques, Macaca nemestrina, love to play with the camera traps and will often spend hours sitting in front of this strange object teasing and slapping it around. As of yet they haven’t done any real damage.
On one occasion, I’ve also captured pics of a few individuals of another primate species, the endemic Thomas’s leaf monkey, also known as Thomas’s langur, which was cool, since they don’t spend much time on the ground. However, as of yet, I haven’t photographed any orangutans, which fits in with the idea that the threat of predation by tigers keeps the Sumatran species largely arboreal.
The Thomas’ langur, Presbytis thomasi, is a striking endemic leaf monkey found only in North Sumatra. Here a mother grasps her infant while resting in front of the camera trap, which her troop came to investigate.
At night, the pheasant clearings seem to attract Sumatran porcupines, which lumber around in twos and threes. Their appearance was a big shock, since I didn’t know porcupines live in the jungle!
The Sumatran porcupine, Hystrix sumatrae, is a large rodent, common across the island, and is hunted for food.
The pheasant clearings are all on our trail system, which is commonly used by jungle pigs, along with their incredibly adorable, though extremely well camouflaged piglets!
The western bearded pig, Sus barbatus oi, lives in family groups in the Sumatran rainforest. These piglets are incredibly well camouflaged for the dry forest environment at Sikundur.
The big stars in Sumatra that everyone wants to see are the elusive and rare cat species, including tigers, and the bigger mammals like sun bears, rhinos (not present at Sikundur, sadly) and forest elephants.
I haven’t been lucky enough to get any tigers yet, but I’m cautiously optimistic that by moving the cameras away from human habitation they’ll show up sooner or later! I did, however, photograph beautiful clouded leopards on two occasions, although one images is heavily over-exposed, so I can’t tell if it’s the same individual.
The Sunda clouded leopard, Neofelis diardi, is an endangered cat species found only on the islands of Sumatra and Borneo. They’re found in low densities on Sumatra, most likely due to sympatric competition with tigers. These two photos highlight one of the difficulties with camera trapping: if an animal gets too close to the IR flash or moves too quickly, the cameras are likely to lose a lot of detail.
I’ve also encountered just the one sun bear to date, though again I’m hopeful that when I place the cameras away from the village, they’ll appear more regularly.
The sun bear, Helarctus melayanus, is an endangered bear found in the rainforests of South East Asia. It’s the smallest species of bear in the world, and is threatened by deforestation and commercial hunting for eating, traditional medicine, the pet trade and bile farming.
The best photos I’ve taken so far came from a group of forest elephants that spent three hours in front of my camera before smashing it! I’m hopeful the camera can be salvaged, however, and the photos are so good that I’m totally fine with junking the camera if not!
The Sumatran elephant, Elephas maximus sumatranus, is a critically endangered subspecies of the Asian elephant native to Sumatra. They’re critically endangered due to habitat loss and fragmentation, which puts them into direct conflict with human agriculture and makes them susceptible to poaching for ivory. Half of the population has been lost in the past 25 years—just one generation for an elephant—along with 70 of its habitat. At Sikundur, we commonly encounter groups of elephants in the lowland forest since this is their ideal habitat. However, we also hear the sound of gunfire being used every single day to scare the elephants away from raiding the nearby agricultural plantations. A matriarch leads this particular group with only juvenile males present.
Based on the success of just four camera traps in these first few months, we definitely want to set up a larger system, using rigorous methods to accurately measure the densities and locations of the amazing taxa found in this incredible forest! These pictures, the best of over 2,500 the cameras have taken in less than 100 trap nights, highlight just how diverse our small chunk of is (imagine what the areas without anthropogenic disturbance must be like!) and how vital it is that we fight to conserve every last patch of forest that remains.
The Ecuadorian government's closure of the station's gift shop could doom the foundation that runs the key research station
Walking in crowds means predicting the future. When navigating heavily trafficked areas, people adjust their paths after subconsciously calculating how long it would take to collide with another person.
Researchers have come to this conclusion by analysing videos of crowds. They say that it could lead to safer design of public spaces and help in the development of crowd-monitoring methods to prevent deadly stampedes.
Brian Skinner, a physicist at the Argonne National Laboratory in Lemont, Illinois, and his colleagues will publish the work in an upcoming .
When scientists study crowd movement, they often model people as moving particles that repel each other, similarly to electrostatic charges of the same sign. Skinner and his colleagues expected that the ‘repulsive force’ would depend on the separation in space between the pedestrians, making them change trajectory when they get too close, so as to avoid collisions.
If the electrostatic analogy were correct, the strength of the force would be proportional to the inverse square of the mutual distance, with the repulsion becoming rapidly stronger as two people approach each other. Instead the team found that the force is proportional to the inverse square of the anticipated time to the next collision. In particular, the researchers point out, if two people walk side-by-side — and therefore do not anticipate bumping together — they can do so at very close distance without feeling the need to put more distance in between.
“What’s exciting is not so much the understanding of one person navigating through a crowd, but the promise of predicting what crowds do by using one simple rule,” says Skinner.
This rule accurately described the motion of people navigating university campuses in Israel and of participants in crowd experiments in Germany, both captured in videos. In addition, simulations showed that the simple time law also reproduced many known properties of crowd interactions (see video below), such as cramming around narrow passages and spontaneously forming lanes.
But the team’s model breaks down if the anticipated time to the next collision is longer than three seconds, Skinner says. This may reflect the possibility that people in a crowd do not concern themselves with what will happen beyond that interval, he says.
Mehdi Moussaid, who studies crowd behaviour at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin, says: “The nice thing about this paper is that it is based on empirical observations, and that the result is clean: the exact same power law emerges from different data sets.” The model could also help to “fine-tune predictions of crowd movements during mass events, such as the Mecca pilgrimage,” adds Moussaid, who has studied the motion of the immense crowds that . “But when it comes to crowd accidents and crowd disasters, the open question is whether the same rule is still valid under high-stress conditions, for instance during panics and emergency evacuations.”
If we could somehow make our own cells do our bidding, they might manufacture insulin, attack tumors and do other helpful things. But hijacking a cell is not easy. Current methods entail penetrating the cell walls with a virus, which tends to inflict permanent damage.
In 2009 researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology solved this problem, by accident. The researchers were playing around with a method of implanting cells with large molecules and nanomaterials using a microscopic water gun. Mainly, they were trying to get things inside a cell—the sorts of things that might alter a cell's behavior while keeping it alive. Chemical engineer Armon Sharei noticed that some of the water-shot cells became momentarily misshapen, and while they were, the material was getting inside them. “It turns out if you deform a cell fast enough, you can temporarily break down its membrane,” Sharei says. The water gun was too crude a tool, however. They needed a gentler way to squeeze cells.
Sharei, working under Klavs F. Jensen, a founder of the field of microfluidics, and biotech pioneer Robert S. Langer, developed a silicon-and-glass microchip that is etched with channels through which cells flow. The channels narrow gradually, until the gap tapers into a space slimmer than the cells themselves. The squeezed cells are supple, and they force their way through. In the process, temporary holes form in the cell membrane. The holes are tiny but wide enough to let in a variety of behavior-altering agents, including proteins, nucleic acids and carbon nanotubes. The technique works even on stem and immune cells, which were too sensitive to be manipulated using previous methods. “We were taken aback by how many cells this approach could apply to,” Sharei says.
Since the initial discovery, the group has developed 16 different chips with channel arrays designed to squeeze different cells. More chips are coming, and the device, which can already process 500,000 cells a second, continues to get faster and more efficient. The group has started a company to commercialize the technology—called SQZ Biotech—and scientists in France, Germany, the Netherlands and the U.K. will soon be using its products.
On a visit to China a few years back, I asked a local official about pollution controls after enjoying my first . China’s new coal-fired power plants and other industrial boilers often came equipped with expensive scrubbers to clean acid rain and smog-forming sulfur dioxide out of the hot mix of gases that went up and out the smokestack. But the scrubbers required energy to run, this official noted, and therefore were shut off except on days when dignitaries (or foreign journalists) visited.
© David Biello
According to Hu Tao, an ecologist and environmental economist who directs the China program at the World Wildlife Fund, not much has changed. On his recent visit to a coal-fired power plant, the scrubber was turned off for “inspection,” he explained at a talk at the Woodrow Wilson Center’s China Environment Forum on November 24. How often were such machines inspected, Tao inquired? Well, if no one from the government was visiting, the plant manager told him, the machine is turned off every day.
© David Biello
That is the current context for China’s recent decree that the country will never consume more than 4.2 billion metric tons of coal per year, the action following a to begin to combat climate change. Already, caps on the amount of coal a given locality can burn seem to have dropped coal’s share of total energy in China for the first time in the 21st century, though overall it has tripled since 2000. “The vast majority of China’s CO2 emissions are a result of ,” said Jake Schmidt, director of the Natural Resources Defense Council’s international program at the CEF event.
If the central government’s cap is achieved, then would never top 12 billion metric tons per year or so—up from roughly 10 billion metric tons per year as of now. Already, China’s coal burning alone accounts for 20 percent of the entire world’s CO2 pollution.
Courtesy of U.S. Energy Information Administration
For comparison, the U.S. emits slightly more than 5 billion metric tons of CO2 per year these days. And if the , the American and Chinese lifestyles would converge at a pollution level of roughly 10 metric tons per person by 2030.
This is a tall order. To achieve such a halt in coal consumption, China will have to build as much , , and in the next 10 years as it has built coal-fired power plants in the last 10 years—as much as 1000 gigawatts worth of , also including natural gas, whether pipelined from Russia or deposits. And even if that dream is realized, an suggests such a build out, though possible, is not sufficient to slow rising coal consumption unless China’s economic or electricity use growth also slow significantly. To truly get China’s CO2 pollution problem under control will require yet more technology, such as , to clean up the emissions from existing coal-fired power plants.
The question is: once that technology is installed, will it be turned on?
© David Biello
and getting cheaper in China. In fact, though the country may require more and more coal imports to satisfy its voracious demand, the cost of coal is cheaper now than in 2000, according to an analysis by WWF’s Hu. As a result, the owners of coal-fired power plants can still make money burning the polluting rock to generate electricity—and even more money if they keep pollution controls in the off position. Local governments have few reasons to complain (unless the provincial or central government steps in) given the resulting economic growth, increasing number of jobs and tax revenue. As a result, China’s carbon intensity—the amount of CO2 produced per unit of economic output—has in recent years. thanks mostly perhaps to the unprecedented boom in burning coal to make cement and steel to and infrastructure. “For the companies, one side is low coal price and the other side is coal cap regulations. Which one should they follow?” Tao asked, noting that a could solve this conundrum decisively. “One says use more and one says use less.”
© David Biello
The real crisis in China is not invisible CO2 but the more visible kind of air pollution, which, in addition to killing people prematurely, is obscuring entire cities. The joke the last time I visited China was that the from U.S. spy satellites but the truth is that cities like Beijing, , and Shenyang suffer from soot and smog in the air at levels at an level above 200 on some days. The central government considers anything below 100 to be a “blue sky day” though the World Health Organization recommends the AQI should never go above 20 (the U.S. and Europe also fail to meet that standard). “If you live in Beijing, it doesn’t matter if you are poor or rich, you cannot avoid air pollution,” Schmidt noted.
As a result, air pollution has become a central focus of the central government—and the country’s prime minister Li Keqiang went so far as to . “Air pollution has become one of the most important issues facing China today, both for social stability and also international reputation,” said Barbara Finamore, NRDC’s Asia director and Beijing resident, in a conference call with reporters on November 6. “Efforts to drive air pollution down are having very beneficial impacts on coal use.”
WWF’s Hu suggests the best way to reduce coal use even further is to make sure the price goes up by imposing the equivalent of a carbon tax—and the central government is considering a countrywide as part of a national cap and trade market in greenhouse gas pollution in coming years. Such a program might also give the central government a better chance of seeing what’s actually happening with coal use and pollution control at the local level. “If we don’t reduce coal consumption, we have no way to reduce PM 2.5,” or particular matter of 2.5 microns smaller, more commonly known as soot, added Yang Fuqiang, NRDC’s senior advisor on energy, environment and climate change in Beijing, at the CEF event.
© David Biello
But battling soot does not necessarily mean curbing CO2 pollution as well. One solution for air quality in a city like Beijing is to move factories and other coal-fired industry out of the city or to turn or liquids before burning it, which reduces the soot choking lungs but results in even more CO2 pollution than just burning the coal directly. “There is a real potential for shifting coal use in China from most polluted regions inland, which is why a national cap on coal consumption that’s mandatory is so important,” Finamore said.
At the same time, regions in the west of China may now rush to and industry before any national efforts take effect. “We give a warning to the western regions, you have to set up coal right now,” Yang said. “In the future, it is too late.”
In short, its energy system in the next decade or so will determine whether or not the world has any real hope to combat climate change. If the Chinese dream does include a good environment, as China’s President in the past, then a transformation even more remarkable than the one the country has undergone in the last 25 years will be required. And that means turning the pollution controls on for good.
Steve Jobs often swam against the tide of prevailing opinion. (“You can't make a mouse without two buttons!” “You can't make a computer without a floppy drive!” “You can't make a cell phone without a swappable battery!”) He turned out to be right many times.
Occasionally, though, his decisions took the industry into awkward directions from which we've never really recovered. Jobs was fixed, for example, on the idea of a cell phone without any keys. The iPhone became a hit, it spawned imitators, and the rest is history (or the future, depending on how you look at it).
Eliminating the keyboard has its perks. It leaves more room on the phone for screen area—for photographs, movies, maps and reading material. Only one activity really suffers: entering text.
The first iPhone offered an on-screen keyboard. The advantage, as Jobs pointed out, was it could disappear when you didn't need it. It could also change languages or alphabets in a flash.
But at its core, typing on glass is slow and unsatisfying, especially compared with using a physical keyboard such as the BlackBerry's. The history of contemporary smartphones has been a seven-year quest to fix that problem.
The original iPhone tried to help in two minor ways, which are still at work today. First, the on-screen keys change size based on probability (not visually but behind the scenes).
Second, there is autocomplete: spawner of a billion curses, source of much hilarity but also often quite helpful.
The next big breakthrough was predictive text. That's where you see three words just above the keyboard—words that, statistically speaking, you're most likely to type next. When the phone predicts correctly, you feel a little surge of happiness. You type “the best,” and the phone offers “thing,” then “about.” On the other hand, predictive text brings frustration of its own—such as when the software doesn't catch what you intend.
These predictive algorithms learn over time. And they save a lot of mistakes. But they're not the Ultimate Solution. They force you to split your focus between the keys and the suggestions as you type, which slows you down.
What about speech recognition? Isn't that the perfect solution?
Not really. As we all know, cell-phone dictation is far from perfect; you have to correct the mistranscriptions manually. It's a tough technology to perfect, of course—people have a million different accents and dialects, and you're transmitting their words over a connection to distant servers that convert the lo-fi audio into text.
Even if the accuracy were as good as it is on a desktop PC—when you're in a quiet room, wearing a headset microphone—you would still need a keyboard occasionally. “Bookmark it” sounds like “book market”; “the right or left” sounds like “the writer left.” How can your phone algorithm know which you wanted?
So the world's engineers keep hammering away at the typing-on-phones problem. They have come up with alternative on-screen keyboards for popular phones. Swype and SwiftKey, for example, let you drag your finger sloppily and quickly across the keys, aiming for the letters you want.
The sheer quantity of attempts to solve the text-input problem hints at a larger truth: There is no obvious, perfect solution. There are only different sets of pros and cons.
We can take comfort from the fact that dictation, prediction and autocompletion solutions improve every year. (The word choices on iOS 8's predictive-text buttons, for example, attempt to reflect your style for different contexts—say, texting a friend versus e-mailing your boss—and predict what word you might prefer to use.) But text entry without a physical keyboard may be one of those receding-horizon deals: no matter how far we travel, we'll never quite reach the finish line.
Then again, we made the sacrifice for a good reason: to give ourselves a big, friendly screen for showcasing everything else our phones do. For most of us, it's been a trade-off worth making.
SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN ONLINEhttp://ift.tt/15m8San
