News: General News

Foods And Drinks Have Gotten Sweeter Over The Last Decade, And It's a Global Problem

Sun, 31 Jul 2022 14:16:20 +0000

Humans have an evolutionary preference for sweetness. Sweet foods, like fruit and honey, were an important energy source for our ancestors.

However, in the modern world, sweetened foods are readily available, very cheap, and advertised extensively. Now, we are consuming too much sugar in foods and drinks – the kind that is added rather than sugar that is naturally occurring.

Consuming too much added sugar is bad news for health. It is linked to obesity, type 2 diabetes, and tooth decay.

Because of these health concerns, manufacturers started using non-nutritive sweeteners to sweeten food as well. These sweeteners contain little to no kilojoules and include both artificial sweeteners, such as aspartame, and those that come from natural sources, such as stevia.

Our research, published today, shows the amount of added sugars and non-nutritive sweeteners in packaged foods and drinks has grown a lot over the last decade. This is especially true in middle-income countries, such as China and India, as well as in the Asia Pacific, including Australia.

From lollies to biscuits to drinks

Using market sales data from around the globe, we looked at the quantity of added sugar and non-nutritive sweeteners sold in packaged foods and drinks from 2007 to 2019.

We found per person volumes of non-nutritive sweeteners in drinks is now 36 percent higher globally. Added sugars in packaged food is 9 percent higher.

Non-nutritive sweeteners are most commonly added to confectionery. Ice creams and sweet biscuits are the fastest-growing food categories in terms of these sweeteners. The expanding use of added sugars and other sweeteners over the last decade means, overall, our packaged food supply is getting sweeter.

Our analysis shows the amount of added sugar used to sweeten drinks has increased globally. However, this is largely explained by a 50 percent increase in middle-income countries, such as China and India. Use has decreased in high-income countries, such as Australia and the United States.

It is recommended men consume less than nine teaspoons of sugar a day, while women should have less than six. However, because sugar is added to so many foods and drinks, over half of Australians exceed recommendations, eating an average of 14 teaspoons a day.

The shift from using added sugar to sweeteners to sweeten drinks is most common in carbonated soft drinks and bottled water. The World Health Organization is developing guidelines on the use of non-sugar sweeteners.

Rich and poor countries

There is a difference in added sugar and sweetener use between richer and poorer countries. The market for packaged food and beverages in high-income countries has become saturated. To continue to grow, large food and beverage corporations are expanding into middle-income countries.
Our findings demonstrate a double standard in the sweetening of the food supply, with manufacturers providing less sweet, "healthier" products in richer countries.

Unexpected consequences of control

To reduce the health harms of high added sugar intakes, many governments have acted to curb their use and consumption. Sugar levies, education campaigns, advertising restrictions, and labeling are among these measures.

But such actions can encourage manufacturers to partially or completely substitute sugar with non-nutritive sweeteners to avoid penalties or cater to evolving population preferences.

In our study, we found regions with a higher number of policy actions to reduce sugar intakes had a significant increase in non-nutritive sweeteners sold in drinks.

Why is this a problem

While the harms of consuming too much added sugar are well known, relying on non-nutritive sweeteners as a solution also carries risk. Despite their lack of dietary energy, recent reviews, suggest consuming non-nutritive sweeteners may be linked with type 2 diabetes and heart disease and can disrupt the gut microbiome.

And because they are sweet, ingesting non-nutritive sweeteners influences our palates and encourages us to want more sweet food. This is of particular concern for children, who are still developing their lifelong taste preferences.

Additionally, certain non-nutritive sweeteners are considered environmental contaminants and are not effectively removed from wastewater.

Non-nutritive sweeteners are only found in ultra-processed foods. These foods are industrially made, contain ingredients you would not find in a home kitchen, and are designed to be "hyper-palatable". Eating more ultra-processed foods is linked with more heart disease, type 2 diabetes, cancer, and death.

Ultra-processed foods are also environmentally harmful because they use significant resources such as energy, water, packaging materials, and plastic waste.

Foods that contain sweeteners can receive a "health halo" if they don't contain sugar, misleading the public and potentially displacing nutritious, whole foods in the diet.

Focus on nutrition

When making policy to improve public health nutrition, it is important to consider unintended consequences. Rather than focusing on specific nutrients, there is merit in advocating for policy that considers the broader aspects of food, including cultural importance, level of processing, and environmental impacts. Such policy should promote nutritious, minimally processed foods.

We need to closely monitor the increasing sweetness of food and drinks and the growing use of added sugars and non-nutritive sweeteners. It is likely to shape our future taste preferences, food choices, and human and planetary health.

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TWIRL 76: SpaceX to launch South Korea's first lunar mission

Sun, 31 Jul 2022 08:01:18 +0000

We have an interesting set of launches this week. The two that stand out are the launch of South Korea’s Danuri satellite which represents its first lunar mission, and Blue Origin’s latest New Shepard tourist mission. We’ve also got launches from Rocket Lab and United Launch Alliance (ULA).

Tuesday, August 2

The first mission of the week will be performed at 5 a.m. UTC by Rocket Lab in New Zealand. The company will launch one of its Electron rockets for the U.S. National Reconnaissance Office (NRO). Due to the sensitive nature of the payload, details about it are classified. The mission has the name ‘Antipodean Adventure’. While the payload is classified, this won’t stop Rocket Lab from streaming the launch on its website.

Thursday, August 4

The last three launches of the week all take place today. The first one will blast off to space between 10:29 a.m. and 11:09 a.m. UTC from Cape Canaveral. ULA will be launching one of its Atlas V rockets carrying the U.S. military’s sixth Space Based Infrared System Geosynchronous satellite, also known as SBIRS GEO 6. The SBIRS GEO 6 will act as a missile early-warning detection system. The rocket will also be carrying the EZIO 5 and EZIO 6 CubeSats as secondary payloads. The mission will be streamed on ULA’s website.

The second launch is Blue Origin’s Mission NS-22. A New Shepard rocket will take off from West Texas Suborbital Launch Site, carrying six tourists to the edge of space. These missions tend to be quite short, with passengers experiencing weightlessness before the capsule falls back to Earth on a parachute. The crew includes Dude Perfect co-founder Coby Cotton, Portuguese entrepreneur Mario Ferreira, British-American mountaineer Vanessa O’Brien, technology leader Clint Kelly III, Egyptian engineer Sara Sabry, and telecommunications executive Steve Young. The mission is due to launch at 1:30 p.m. UTC and will be streamed on Blue Origin’s website.

The final launch of the day, and week, is the launch of SpaceX’s Falcon 9 carrying South Korea’s Danuri satellite. Danuri, also known as Korea Pathfinder Lunar Orbiter (KPLO) will be placed in an elliptical lunar orbit where it will look for landing sites on the Moon and map out the surface. It will also run a communications experiment based on disruption-tolerant network technology, use NASA’s ShadowCam to find frost or ice deposits, and look for seasons changes and terrain changes inside craters. Presumably, this launch will be streamed on SpaceX’s website and is due for launch at 11:08 p.m. UTC.

Recap

Last week, China’s Wentian module successfully docked with the Tiangong Space Station. This week, we got some footage of the crew entering the new module.

Next up, we got the maiden flight of the Lijian-1 from China.

Finally, a Long March-2D took Yaogan-35 satellites into orbit.

That’s all we have this week, check back next time!

TWIRL 76: SpaceX to launch South Korea's first lunar mission

US regulators will certify first small nuclear reactor design

Sat, 30 Jul 2022 23:21:13 +0000

NuScale will get the final approval nearly six years after starting the process.

NuScale's reactor-in-a-can.

NuScale

On Friday, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) announced that it would be issuing a certification to a new nuclear reactor design, making it just the seventh that has been approved for use in the US. But in some ways, it's a first: the design, from a company called NuScale, is a small modular reactor that can be constructed at a central facility and then moved to the site where it will be operated.

The move was expected after the design received an okay during its final safety evaluation in 2020.

Small modular reactors have been promoted as avoiding many of the problems that have made large nuclear plants exceedingly expensive to build. They're small enough that they can be assembled on a factory floor and then shipped to the site where they will operate, eliminating many of the challenges of custom, on-site construction. In addition, they're structured in a way to allow passive safety, where no operator actions are necessary to shut the reactor down if problems occur.

Many of the small modular designs involve different technology from traditional reactors, such as the use of molten uranium salts as the reactor fuel. NuScale has a much more traditional design, with fuel and control rods and energy transported through boiling water. Its operator-free safety features include setting the entire reactor in a large pool of water, control rods that are inserted into the reactor by gravity in the case of a power cut, and convection-driven cooling from an external water source.

NuScale started the certification process in 2016. According to the NRC, that process required the company to submit technical information that allows the Commission to evaluate it as follows:

Applications must closely analyze the design's appropriate response to accidents or natural events. Applications must also lay out the inspections, tests, analyses and acceptance criteria that will verify the construction of key design features. In addition, the NRC also requires design certification applicants to assess how the designs protect the reactor and spent fuel pool from the effects of a large commercial aircraft impact.

Once complete, the certification is published in the Federal Register, allowing the design to be used in the US. Friday's announcement says that the NRC is all set to take the publication step.

The NRC will still have to weigh in on the sites where any of these reactors are deployed. Currently, one such site is in the works: a project called the Carbon Free Power Project, which will be situated at Idaho National Lab. That's expected to be operational in 2030 but has been facing some financial uncertainty. Utilities that might use the power produced there have grown hesitant to commit money to the project.

US regulators will certify first small nuclear reactor design

Goodyear Is Developing New Tires for the Moon

Sat, 30 Jul 2022 15:48:18 +0000

The company is designing tires for Lockheed Martin's upcoming lunar vehicle.

Goodyear is going extraterrestrial.

The company has announced(Opens in a new window) that it's designing tires for the Lunar Terrain Vehicle (LTV) that Lockheed Martin is developing(Opens in a new window) to support NASA's upcoming Artemis(Opens in a new window) missions to the moon. (General Motors is also collaborating with Lockheed Martin on the vehicle's design, per the company's May 2021 announcement, and others will probably lend their expertise as well.)

"Goodyear is drawing from its advanced airless tire technology used on Earth with micro-mobility, autonomous shuttles, and passenger vehicles, to advance lunar mobility and withstand the challenging conditions on the Moon," Goodyear says. "The companies are already applying existing expertise to the project including testing concepts in lunar soil test beds."

The company explains that NASA's existing lunar rovers "were purposely built for just a few days of use on excursions within five miles of their landing sites." Now it's up to Goodyear, Lockheed Martin, and General Motors to design an LTV that can "traverse rugged terrain over much longer distances while operating in greater temperature extremes" in upcoming Artemis missions.

Lockheed Martin and General Motors will focus on the LTV's overall design. Goodyear will focus on its area of expertise: tires. "New tire capabilities will need to be developed for years of durability," the company says, "and even survive the night that sees temperatures of below -250 degrees Fahrenheit and daytime temps of over 250 degrees Fahrenheit."

But work on these tires won't just benefit NASA.

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Swiss cities top ranking of best places to build tech careers

Sat, 30 Jul 2022 15:45:28 +0000

The two best cities in the world for technology career development are Bern and Zurich, while the top US city is Atlanta, according to a new report based on a variety of metrics.

Bern and Zürich are the best cities in the world in which to pursue a tech career, based on data released this week by Scotland-based digital skills development organization CodeClan.

CodeClan’s study begins with the top 100 cities in the world based on Mercer’s Quality of Living rankings, and uses a combination of several weighted indices to determine their suitability for technology workers, including average salary, rent and broadband connection speed, as well as tech companies per capita.

Tech companies per capita a key metric

The results show the two Swiss cities atop the rankings, based mostly on the large numbers of tech companies per capita in each place, coupled with high available broadband speeds. US cities fill out the rest of the top 10, though only two of the country’s more traditional tech hubs—Seattle and Boston—made that particular cut. San Franciso ranked 36th, due in large part to its extremely high cost of living, and New York 68th, for similar reasons as San Francisco.

Meanwhile, the best US city in which to pursue a tech career, according to CodeClan, is Atlanta, which ranked third behind Zürich. A high concentration of tech companies, coupled with strong average broadband speeds, propelled it to third place, just ahead of Washington, D.C., in fourth. In respective order, Seattle, St. Louis, Pittsburgh, Miami, Minneapolis and Boston rounded out the rest of the top 10.

Some patterns in the data are easy to see—Australian cities like Brisbane, Perth, Melbourne and Sydney were all heavily penalized for low average broadband speeds, while low salaries pushed Japanese cities like Osaka, Tokyo and Nagoya further down the list than their other scores might have indicated.

Broken out by categories, the data also show that CodeClan’s analysis used national data, rather than local, to rank internet speeds, as all cities in a given country were given identical figures. The rest of the categories, though, provide useful comparative data on cities around the world. The highest average salaries, for example, were found in San Francisco, at $108,096, while the largest number of tech companies per capita saw a statistical tie between Zürich and Atlanta, at 0.016.

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Here’s the quickest way to grill burgers, according to math

Sat, 30 Jul 2022 15:39:41 +0000

Flipping the patty about three to four times is key, theoretical calculations suggest

If you have a hankering for a hamburger, math may have some timesaving cooking tips for you.

Increasing the number of times a burger is flipped from one side to the other reduces its cook time by up to nearly a third, theoretical calculations suggest. But cooks at home probably won’t see much benefit out of more than three to four flips, mathematician Jean-Luc Thiffeault reports June 17 in Physica D.

Thiffeault used math to model how heat moves through an “infinite” slab of meat, which cooks continuously on only the bottom side and cools on the top until the meat is flipped. Flipping heated the meat evenly, speeding up cooking, the analysis showed. And more flips led to a faster cook. For example, flipping this theoretical 1-centimeter-thick patty just once gave it a cook time of 80 seconds, while flipping it 10 times at intervals ranging from six to 11 seconds resulted in a cook time of 69 seconds. Continuing to flip the burger led to a maximum decrease of 29 percent in cooking time.

But the timesaving benefit seemed to diminish as the number of flips increased beyond a certain threshold, says Thiffeault, of the University of Wisconsin–Madison. “After three or four flips, the gain in time is negligible.”

Thiffeault’s findings align with what chef and food writer J. Kenji López-Alt has observed in the kitchen. In a 2019 article for the food and drink website Serious Eats, Kenji López-Alt compared how long it took for a burger’s internal temperature to reach about 52° Celsius, or 125° Fahrenheit, based on cooking method. Flipping a burger every 15 seconds — as opposed to flipping the patty just once — shortened cooking time by nearly a third.

But there isn’t a one-size-fits-all way to cook a burger, Kenji López-Alt notes. “The idea of the perfect anything is just nonsense, right?” he says. “It’s all based on what you want.”

Thiffeault’s friends probably wouldn’t want his theoretical hamburger, the mathematician jokes. The infinite slab of meat is considered cooked when it reaches 70° Celsius, or 158° Fahrenheit. “That’s no burger that they would want to eat because it’s quite a well-done burger,” he says.

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A physics puzzle is resolved through a new duality.

Sat, 30 Jul 2022 15:33:13 +0000

According to traditional thinking, distorting a flat space by bending it or stretching it is necessary to create a curved space. A group of scientists at Purdue University has developed a new technique for making curved spaces that also provides the answer to a physics mystery. The team has developed a method using non-Hermiticity, which occurs in all systems coupled to environments, to build a hyperbolic surface and a number of other prototypical curved spaces without causing any physical distortions of physical systems.

“Our work may revolutionize the general public’s understanding of curvatures and distance,” says Qi Zhou, Professor of Physics and Astronomy.

“It has also answered long-standing questions in non-Hermitian quantum mechanics by bridging non-Hermitian physics and curved spaces. These two subjects were assumed to be completely disconnected. The extraordinary behaviors of non-Hermitian systems, which have puzzled physicists for decades, become no longer mysterious if we recognize that the space has been curved. In other words, non-Hermiticity and curved spaces are dual to each other, being the two sides of the same coin.”

A Poincaré half-plane can be viewed in the background which demonstrates a curved surface. The white geodesics of the curved surface are shown as an analog of straight lines on a flat space. White balls moving in the right direction demonstrate the geometric origin of an extraordinary skin effect in non-Hermitian physics. Credit: Chenwei Lv and Ren Zhang.

The team’s results were published in the journal Nature Communications in an article titled “Curving the Space by Non-Hermiticity.” Most of the team’s members are employed at Purdue University’s West Lafayette campus. The Purdue team is made up of Professor Qi Zhou, Zhengzheng Zhai, a postdoctoral researcher, with graduate student Chenwei Lv serving as the primary author. Professor Ren Zhang from Xi’an Jiaotong University, who is a co-first author of the paper, was a visiting scholar at Purdue when the study was originally started.

One must first comprehend the distinction between Hermitian and non-Hermitian systems in physics in order to comprehend how this discovery works. Zhou explains it using the example of a quantum particle that can “hop” between several locations on a lattice.

If the probability for a quantum particle to hop in the right direction is the same as the probability to hop in the left direction, then the Hamiltonian is Hermitian. If these two probabilities are different, the Hamiltonian is non-Hermitian. This is the reason that Chenwei and Ren Zhang have used arrows with different sizes and thicknesses to denote the hopping probabilities in opposite directions in their plot.

“Typical textbooks of quantum mechanics mainly focus on systems governed by Hamiltonians that are Hermitian,” says Lv.

“A quantum particle moving in a lattice needs to have an equal probability to tunnel along the left and right directions. Whereas Hermitian Hamiltonians are well-established frameworks for studying isolated systems, the couplings with the environment inevitably lead to dissipations in open systems, which may give rise to Hamiltonians that are no longer Hermitian. For instance, the tunneling amplitudes in a lattice are no longer equal in opposite directions, a phenomenon called nonreciprocal tunneling. In such non-Hermitian systems, familiar textbook results no longer apply and some may even look completely opposite to that of Hermitian systems. For instance, eigenstates of non-Hermitian systems are no longer orthogonal, in sharp contrast to what we learned in the first class of an undergraduate quantum mechanics course. These extraordinary behaviors of non-Hermitian systems have been intriguing physicists for decades, but many outstanding questions remain open.”

He further explains that their work provides an unprecedented explanation of fundamental non-Hermitian quantum phenomena. They found that a non-Hermitian Hamiltonian has curved the space where a quantum particle resides. For instance, a quantum particle in a lattice with nonreciprocal tunneling is in fact moving on a curved surface. The ratio of the tunneling amplitudes along one direction to that in the opposite direction controls how large the surface is curved.

In such curved spaces, all the strange non-Hermitian phenomena, some of which may even appear unphysical, immediately become natural. It is the finite curvature that requires orthonormal conditions distinct from their counterparts in flat spaces. As such, eigenstates would not appear orthogonal if we used the theoretical formula derived for flat spaces. It is also the finite curvature that gives rise to the extraordinary non-Hermitian skin effect that all eigenstates concentrate near one edge of the system.

“This research is of fundamental importance and its implications are two-fold,” says Zhang. “On the one hand, it establishes non-Hermiticity as a unique tool to simulate intriguing quantum systems in curved spaces,” he explains. “Most quantum systems available in laboratories are flat and it often requires significant efforts to access quantum systems in curved spaces. Our results show that non-Hermiticity offers experimentalists an extra knob to access and manipulate curved spaces.

An example is that a hyperbolic surface could be created and further be threaded by a magnetic field. This could allow experimentalists to explore the responses of quantum Hall states to finite curvatures, an outstanding question in condensed matter physics. On the other hand, the duality allows experimentalists to use curved spaces to explore non-Hermitian physics. For instance, our results provide experimentalists a new approach to access exceptional points using curved spaces and improve the precision of quantum sensors without resorting to dissipations.”

Now that the team has published their findings, they anticipate it spinning off into multiple directions for further study. Physicists studying curved spaces could implement their apparatuses to address challenging questions in non-Hermitian physics.

Also, physicists working on non-Hermitian systems could tailor dissipations to access non-trivial curved spaces that cannot be easily obtained by conventional means. The Zhou research group will continue to theoretically explore more connections between non-Hermitian physics and curved spaces. They also hope to help bridge the gap between these two physics subjects and bring these two different communities together with future research.

According to the team, Purdue University is uniquely qualified to foster this type of quantum research. Purdue has been growing strong in quantum information science at a fast pace over the past few years. The Purdue Quantum Science and Engineering Institute paired with the Department of Physics and Astronomy, allows the team to collaborate with many colleagues with diverse expertise and foster interdepartmental and collegiate growth on a variety of platforms that exhibit dissipations and nonreciprocal tunneling.

Reference: “Curving the space by non-Hermiticity” by Chenwei Lv, Ren Zhang, Zhengzheng Zhai, and Qi Zhou, 21 April 2022, Nature Communications.
DOI: 10.1038/s41467-022-29774-8

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Ocean Discoveries Are Revising Long-Held Truths about Life

Sat, 30 Jul 2022 15:26:26 +0000

New findings show that the ocean is much more intertwined with our lives than we ever imagined

For more than 50 years deep-sea exploration has been a continuous fount of discoveries that change how we think about life in the ocean, on dry land and even beyond our planet. Consider the following three events.

On October 16, 1968, a cable tethering the submersible Alvin to a research ship located 100 miles off Nantucket broke. The sub sank to the seafloor more than 5,000 feet below; the crew of three escaped safely. Nearly a year later, when a team brought Alvin back to the surface, the biggest surprise was that the crew's lunch—bologna sandwiches and apples in a plastic box—was strikingly well preserved. Bacteriological and biochemical assays proved it.

Someone even took a bite. Subsequent experiments in the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution laboratory where I'm writing this article found that rates of microbial degradation in the retrieved samples were 10 to 100 times slower than expected. This discovery, and others, led to the conclusion that metabolic and growth rates among deep-sea organisms were much slower than those of comparable species at the ocean's surface.

In 1977 scientists diving in the restored Alvin made another historic discovery—the first in-person observations of life around hot, hydrothermal vents rising from the seafloor. This sighting overturned the long-held view that our entire planetary food web was built on photosynthesis—using sunlight's energy to convert carbon dioxide and water into complex carbohydrates and oxygen. The hydrothermal organisms, and the entire ecosystem, thrived in pure darkness, converting chemicals in the vent fluid into life-sustaining compounds through a process we now call chemosynthesis.

If that revelation wasn't surprising enough, an expedition I was part of in 1993 exposed an earlier mistaken belief. We had discovered a significant hydrothermal vent ecosystem on the East Pacific Rise. The system had been destroyed by a seafloor eruption just a few years earlier, yet it had already been bountifully recolonized. A bologna sandwich might decay so slowly in the deep that you could eat it a year later, but it turned out that biological processes in the deep sea could be extremely fast as well.

Each new ocean discovery that disrupts old dogma reinforces a much larger truth: the ocean is far more complex—and much more intertwined with our own lives—than we ever imagined. For much of the 20th century, for example, scientists maintained that the deep ocean was a harsh, monotonous place of perpetual darkness, frigid temperatures, limited food and extreme pressure—conditions that should make complex forms of life impossible. But new tools for observing, sensing and sampling the deep ocean, such as increasingly sophisticated underwater vehicles with high-definition camera systems, have demonstrated that biodiversity in the darkest depths may rival that of rain forests and tropical coral reefs. These missions have further revealed that the depths are far from uniform; like kangaroo habitat in Australia and tiger lands in Asia, they are home to evolutionarily distinct biogeographic regions.

We are beginning to appreciate how connected these realms are to our own. The rapid three-dimensional change of conditions such as temperature, salinity and oxygen concentration in the deep ocean and the currents and eddies that establish the boundaries of these provinces are expected to fundamentally change as the effects of human activity reach ever farther below the surface. Already lobsters are moving to deeper, colder waters and molting at different times of the year. Commercially important groundfish such as cod and haddock are migrating poleward in search of more suitable habitat.

We are seeing that the ocean's biogeographic boundaries are neither immutable nor beyond the imprint of humans. In studies, more than half of sampled hadal organisms—those living in the deepest parts of the ocean, beyond 20,000 feet—had plastics in their gut. PCBs, which were banned in the U.S. in 1979 and phased out internationally as part of the Stockholm Convention beginning in 2001, are also common in tissues of animals from the extreme bottoms of the sea.

We are also starting to learn that life in the deep might have things to teach us. Deep-sea fish produce biomolecules called osmolytes that permit cellular functions, such as the precise folding and unfolding of proteins, to proceed unimpeded by crushing water-column pressures exceeding 15,000 pounds per square inch. Medical researchers have determined that some of these molecules could help treat Alzheimer's disease, which is characterized by misfolded proteins. In addition, decoding the genes that govern traits we see in deep-sea animals, such as those that stave off errors in DNA replication, transcription and translation, might be used in therapies for cancer and other afflictions.

The greatest paradigm that ocean exploration may tear down is that Earth represents the sole example of life in the universe. Life might have existed on Mars when it hosted liquid water, and the fact that Earth and Mars have shared ejected material in the past means we could have exchanged the building blocks of life. But the discovery of chemosynthetic life on Earth and the more recent finding of perhaps 13 liquid-water oceans underneath the icy shells of moons such as Jupiter's Europa and Saturn's Enceladus—places that may have been too distant to have shared life-bearing material with Earth in the past—raise the possibility of a second, independent genesis of life. And if life can form twice in one solar system, then it could be anywhere we look in the heavens.

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Tech's great layoffs: Over 30,000 tech employees lost their jobs as of July. These are their stories in their own words.

Sat, 30 Jul 2022 15:21:12 +0000

Over 30,000 tech workers have lost their job as of July.

Insider spoke to employees from Tesla to Coinbase to hear their stories.

These are their stories of the personal and economic toll of layoffs in the industry.

According to the latest data from the US department of labor, unemployment claims have jumped to an unexpected 8-month-high.

As the economy slows down many big tech companies have warned their employees of corporate downsizing and layoffs. Ahead of Facebook's poor earnings report, several executives sent memos to their teams warning of job cuts ahead.

Earlier in the year, as cryptocurrencies crashed in one of the coldest dips the asset-class has experienced in years, the hot-shot crypto-exchange, Coinbase, laid off nearly 20% of its employees. The company went as far as rescinding job offers from new recruits.

Last month, Tesla let go of more than 200 employees.

According to Crunchbase, more than 30,000 tech employees have been laid off as of July.

At Insider, we are chronicling how the economic downturn is impacting tech's most vulnerable workers.

Here's a running list of first-person and and as-told-to stories that show the human toll of industry layoffs.

A Tesla IT manager: 'I noticed red flags the day I got fired'

A Tesla IT worker tells Insider about the red flags they noticed before being laid off.

The employee describes the scene at Tesla's Fremont, California factory, where on the day of the layoffs last month, people wept as they exited the lobby.

The company offered the worker an Uber voucher to get home. But they told Insider editor Jenna Gyimesi, "I feel like I'm starting over."

Despite this experience they still feel Tesla is doing good things for the world

A Coinbase program manager: 'I've never experienced such lack of empathy'

For Miguel Cuevas, working at Coinbase was a dream come true.

But he was one of the 1,100 employees the company laid off as cryptocurrencies crashed earlier this year.

In the weeks prior, many employees asked if layoffs were imminent but, according to Cuevas, management told everyone to "keep chugging along as though things were normal."

He tells Insider reporter, Jessica Xing, that he felt the company failed to deliver on its promises.

A Netflix copywriter: "I truly think it's evil what was done to me and my colleagues today"

A copywriter at Netflix's shuttered fan site Tudum describes the layoffs at the now-shuttered site.

First, they found out their manager's Slack had been deactivated.

Then they noticed a call they had ignored. Others had described getting the bad news over the phone. When they called back, they received the news: two weeks pay, but their job was no more.

A Tesla recruiter: 'I struggled to maintain my composure and not cry'

For Quishon Walker, working at Tesla was a dream job.

As a recruiter, he was among the first to lose his job last month as the company announced they would be downsizing.

The company also announced they would freeze hiring for the time being.

When he saw an ominous calendar invite, he knew his time was up after only two weeks of working at the company.

A Coinbase engineer: "I'm worried and panicking"

Ashutosh Ukey was an entry-level engineer who was offered a dream job at Coinbase after finishing his degree at the University of Illinois.

As a visa-holder, Ukey's status to remain in the US is contingent on finding an employer to sponsor their visa.

When Coinbase told him they were rescinding his job offer, he was worried about whether he would be able to stay in the country.

Ukey says he's not sure if he'll want to work in crypto again considering the precarity of his visa situation and the uncertainty of the industry.

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Long-lasting loss of smell, taste in 5% of COVID cases: study

Sat, 30 Jul 2022 15:10:44 +0000

Around five percent of people who have had COVID-19 develop long-lasting problems with their sense of smell or taste, a large study said Thursday, potentially contributing to the burden of long COVID.

A lost sense of smell has been a hallmark of contracting coronavirus since the early days of the pandemic, but it has not been clear how often symptoms like this occur—or how long they can last.

Seeking to find out, researchers analysed the findings of 18 previous studies involving 3,700 patients.

In a new study published in the BMJ, they found that six months after contracting the virus, four percent of patients had not recovered their sense of smell. Meanwhile two percent had not recovered their sense of taste.

It was unclear if this represented a full or partial recovery, however.

The researchers estimated that loss of smell may persist in 5.6 percent of patients, while 4.4 percent may not fully recover their sense of taste.
One woman told the researchers that she had not recovered her sense of smell more than two years after contracting COVID.

The researchers said that while most patients should recover their sense of smell and taste within the first three months of getting COVID, "a major group of patients might develop long-lasting dysfunction".

"That (may require) timely identification, personalised treatment, and long-term follow-up."

Danny Altmann, an immunologist at Imperial College London not involved in the research, said it was a "strong and important study".

"Studies such as this alert us to the hidden burden out there of people suffering with persistent symptoms, but perhaps not having thought it worth contacting the GP on the assumption there wouldn't be much to be done," he said.

The research also found that women were less likely to recover these senses than men.

The cause of the disparity is not clear, but the researchers suggested women tend to have better senses of smell and taste in the first place, meaning they have more to lose.

The data did not include which COVID variant the patients contracted. Previous research has indicated that more recent Omicron variants are less likely to lead to smell loss.

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As BA.5 continues to blaze across US, feds scrap summer booster plans

Fri, 29 Jul 2022 21:03:47 +0000

Officials are focusing on bivalent fall boosters, which may be ready in September.

Federal officials have reportedly scrapped plans to expand access to second COVID-19 booster doses this summer, opting instead to pressure vaccine-makers Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech to produce their next-generation BA.5-targeting boosters even faster than before, possibly in September.

Currently, people ages 50 and over, as well as those 12 and up with certain health conditions, can received a second COVID-19 booster dose. But, with the ultratransmissible BA.5 wave threatening more infections and reinfections at a time when vaccine protections are fading, officials earlier this month toyed with the idea of opening second boosters to all adults. At the time, they were expected to decide the matter within the following weeks.

That decision window has now closed. And although BA.5 is still raging, the Biden administration has reportedly abandoned the plan to instead focus on the new booster vaccines for those 12 and up, which were previously expected to roll out in October and November.

In June, the Food and Drug Administration advised vaccine makers to create a bivalent next-generation booster for a fall rollout that could thwart a winter wave of infection. The bivalent shot would again target the spike protein of the ancestral strain of SARS-CoV-2, but also the mutated spike protein shared by the BA.4 and BA.5 subvariants. The regulator's thinking—along with its committee of independent expert advisers—was that the bivalent booster targeting BA.4/5 would likely offer better protection against the currently circulating subvariants.

Uncertainty

But this bivalent booster plan is a gamble. There is little to no data indicating that the BA.5-targeting bivalent booster will be significantly better than the current booster at preventing infection and disease. It's also unclear how long BA.5 will remain the dominant subvariant. Though there's no clear successor nipping at BA.5's heels so far, waves of omicron subvariants have come in a rapid sequence in the last few months, with BA.5 being the third omicron subvariant to achieve dominance since March when BA.2 reigned, followed by the rise of BA.2.12.1. It's conceivable that BA.5 will be in decline by the time the next-generation boosters are available, even with the hastened timeline of an early-to-mid-September rollout.

In June, vaccine makers suggested that an October to November rollout would be a heavy lift. But unnamed officials in the administration have told reporters that the companies have now offered assurances that they can get them out sooner, in September.

The officials offered some insight into the administration's deliberations. For instance, top infectious disease expert Anthony Fauci and White House Pandemic Response Coordinator Ashish Jha both advocated for offering more second boosters now, in the summer, while transmission is high and protection is waning.

But the FDA and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reportedly pushed for focusing on the fall campaign. Their thinking is that a summer booster drive so close to the fall could confuse Americans on when to re-up their protection and potentially cause some to lose confidence in the shots if boosters are offered in such quick succession. There's also the scientific concern that yet another vaccine dose targeting the ancestral strain—which is no longer circulating—could bias immune responses in a way that makes them less effective at fighting off variants. (Though this argument has not been used to deter people over 50 from getting a second booster.)

Last, there's also the time constraint: If people get second boosters now, it could delay them from getting the bivalent booster in the fall. Or, if people got two boosters close together—a month or two apart—it could render the second shot useless.

"You can’t get a vaccine shot Aug. 1 and get another vaccine shot Sept. 15 and expect the second shot to do anything," Shane Crotty, a virologist at the La Jolla Institute for Immunology, told The New York Times. "You’ve got so much antibody around, if you get another dose, it won’t do anything."

Mixed messages

Still, it's unclear why fall booster availability couldn't stretch over several months to accommodate different boosting windows. That is, for those who want a second boost now, why couldn't they simply wait until November or December to get the bivalent booster? In a press briefing earlier this month, CDC Director Rochelle Walensky directly argued for this scenario: that shots in late summer would not preclude fall boosters.

"As we've looked at the cadence of where we've needed to get boosts before, it's been four, five months," Walensky said. "We anticipate that that's going to be a similar cadence. We also really want to emphasize that there are many people who are high risk right now, and waiting until October/November for their boost—when, in fact, their risk is in the moment—is not a good plan," she added. "So, we really do want to say 'Now get your boost. We have every anticipation that the data will suggest that you will be eligible for a [bivalent] boost in the fall.'"

Expert opinion on the booster plan is mixed. Some experts align with federal officials' plan to focus on the fall, creating a simpler, potentially more impactful booster drive. "I think this is the right call," Dr. Celine Gounder, a senior fellow at the Kaiser Family Foundation, told NPR. "If you get a booster now with the original formulation of the vaccine, this may in fact be counter-productive."

But others called for expanded access to boosters now. Eric Topol, director of the Scripps Research Translational Institute, posted a string of critical questions on Twitter, including why unused boosters that might otherwise go to waste are not being offered to people who are at higher risk, such as health care workers under the age of 50.

Robert Wachter, chair of the department of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, is also in favor of offering more second boosters now. "You're talking about, you know, literally hundreds of millions of people who are at a higher risk than they need to be for months," Wachter told NPR. "And that will mean potentially millions of preventable infections, certainly thousands of preventable hospitalizations, and probably hundreds of preventable deaths."

Currently, the US is logging an average of nearly 130,000 new COVID-19 cases a day, though that is certainly a significant undercount given the use of at-home testing. Hospitalizations are averaging around 44,000 per day, up 11 percent over the past two weeks. Intensive care stays are up 13 percent, to over 5,000 per day. And average daily deaths are at 438, according to data tracking by The New York Times.

As BA.5 continues to blaze across US, feds scrap summer booster plans

Genetically engineered rice needs less fertilizer, makes more food

Fri, 29 Jul 2022 21:03:05 +0000

The change coupled enhanced photosynthesis with improved nitrogen use.

A terraced rice field in Vietnam.

Getty Images

Nitrogen fertilizer is made from natural gas. Extracting and burning natural gas is harming life on our planet, so we should probably stop doing it (or at least try to cut back considerably). But food crops, like all plants, need that nitrogen. It’s quite the conundrum, especially since the human population relying on those crops is slated to grow over the next few decades, while the acreage of arable land is slated to drop.

In response, genetic engineers in China have been developing crops that can thrive with less nitrogen, and they made a strain of rice with a yield that’s 40 to 70 percent higher than that of regular rice. It has more grain per branch, each grain particle is bigger and denser, and the plants flowered earlier. Most breeding methods currently used in cereal crops can only generate a yield increase of less than 1 percent, so this is a pretty big deal.

One gene alters many

The scientists started by looking at proteins called transcription factors, which often control the expression of a set of genes that are often involved in varying aspects of a single physiological function. In this case, the focus was on transcription factors that were already known to regulate photosynthesis.

To find the perfect target, the researchers screened a set of 118 transcription factors previously identified to regulate photosynthesis in rice and maize to find any that were also upregulated in response to light and low levels of nitrogen. When they found one, they generated transgenic rice lines that made lots of it. Overexpressing a transcription factor like this instead of the individual genes it controls is like demanding to speak to the manager instead of getting bounced around between assorted customer service reps in different departments.

The resulting rice plants were put in fields with different environmental conditions: temperate fields near Beijing, tropical fields in Hainan province, and subtropical fields in Zhejiang province.

Over the course of three years, all of the rice plants exhibited enhanced photosynthetic capacity and improved nitrogen use efficiency. They had more chlorophyll and more and larger chloroplasts than wild-type rice. They also had more efficient nitrogen uptake in their roots than wild-type rice, and they had more efficient transport of that nitrogen from their roots to their shoots than wild-type rice. This elevated their grain yield, even when the plants were grown with less nitrogen fertilizer.

Other experiments were done with the transgenic plants grown hydroponically and in rice paddies, and they did equally well. Overexpressing the same transcription factor in a fancier strain of rice (japonica, as opposed to the plebian Oryza sativa that was used in the bulk of the other experiments) as well as in wheat and Arabidopsis (the most commonly used model organism in plant biology) had similar effects on those important plants.

Downstream effects

This transcription factor upregulates the activity of 345 genes, most of them known to respond to salt, drought, and cold stresses. When the scientists overexpressed one of these genes, one involved in early flowering, the plants did flower earlier, but they were dwarfed and exhibited reduced grain yields. This is probably because the early flowering trait in isolation from the enhanced carbon and nitrogen use conferred by the transcription factor did not allow the plants to build up sufficient resources in their shortened growing time.

The authors suggest that genome editing could be used rather than the transgenic techniques they relied on to overexpress this transcription factor in other crops so they too can achieve a higher yield. Such cultivars could come in handy in cases where growing seasons and field space may become constrained and nitrogen fertilizer may become scarce—by, you know, rare scenarios like wildfires, floods, and droughts. And war.

Science, 2022. DOI: 10.1126/science.abi8455

Genetically engineered rice needs less fertilizer, makes more food

DeepMind research cracks structure of almost every known protein

Fri, 29 Jul 2022 21:02:14 +0000

Breakthrough by AI company will reduce time required to make biological discoveries.

An image released by the EMBL’s European Bioinformatics Institute showing the structure of a human protein that was modeled by the AlphaFold computer program.

EMBL-EBI/AFP/Getty Images

Artificial intelligence has surpassed the limits of scientific knowledge by predicting the shape of almost every known protein, a breakthrough that will significantly reduce the time required to make biological discoveries.

The research was done by London-based AI company DeepMind—owned by Google parent Alphabet—which used its AlphaFold algorithm to build the most complete and accurate database yet of the more than 200 million known proteins.

Prediction of a protein’s structure from its DNA sequence alone has been one of biology’s greatest challenges. Current experimental methods to determine the shape of a single protein take months or years in a laboratory, which is why only about 190,000, or 0.1 percent, of known protein structures have been solved.

DeepMind’s chief executive, Demis Hassabis, said the AI had “provided structural biologists with this powerful new tool now, where you can look up a 3D structure of a protein almost as easily as doing a keyword Google search.”

“[It’s] opening up huge opportunities for AlphaFold to have impact on... sustainability, food insecurity, and neglected diseases,” he added.

DeepMind’s chief executive, Demis Hassabis, says the powerful new tool would allow users to "look up a 3D structure of a protein almost as easily as doing a keyword Google search."

AFP/Getty Images

In July 2021, DeepMind announced it had predicted the shape of all human proteins, helping to better understand human health and disease. That database has been expanded 200-fold and now contains more than 200 million predicted protein structures, covering almost every organism on Earth that has had its genome sequenced—from the malarial parasite to the honeybee.

These structures are now available via a public database hosted by the European Bioinformatics Institute at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL-EBI). In the year since its launch, more than 500,000 researchers around the world have accessed the AlphaFold database to view more than 2 million structures, the company said.

“Almost every drug that has come to market over the past few years has been in part designed through knowledge of protein structures,” said Janet Thornton, a senior scientist and director emeritus at EMBL-EBI. “Having access to all of these new structures, especially for... unusual organisms for which we did not have structural data, there is a real opportunity there not only to design new drugs... but to ensure those drugs don’t hit human proteins and cross react.”

Proteins are often referred to as the building blocks of life. Their structures matter because they dictate how proteins do their jobs. Knowing a protein’s shape, for example a Y-shaped antibody, tells scientists more about what that protein’s role is.

Being able to easily predict a protein’s shape could allow scientists to control and modify it, so they can improve its function by changing its DNA sequence or target drugs that could attach to it. For instance, studying surface proteins on a malarial parasite can help understand how antibodies bind to it, and therefore how to fight the pathogen effectively.

“The use of AlphaFold was really transformational, giving us a sharp view of [a] malaria surface protein,” said Matthew Higgins, a biochemistry professor at Oxford University who studies malaria. His team is using these insights to develop a new malaria vaccine, he said.

While scientists will still need to confirm a protein’s structure through experiments, these predictions will provide a massive head start and reduce the time required to complete the process.

DeepMind said it had excluded viruses from the database to prevent this data from being potentially weaponized by bad actors or bioterrorists.

In November 2021, DeepMind announced a spinoff company, Isomorphic Labs, which it said would apply AlphaFold and other AI tools to accelerate drug discovery. It announced on Thursday that it would open a traditional wet laboratory at the Francis Crick Institute to achieve this aim.

“We can start thinking about end-to-end drug design. That would be my dream, where you speed up the entire process, not just the structure parts... for new drugs and cures,” Hassabis said. “That is coming.”

DeepMind research cracks structure of almost every known protein

The Case for Making Public Transit Free Everywhere

Fri, 29 Jul 2022 20:59:31 +0000

From Spain to Germany and Luxembourg to Estonia, more and more countries are experimenting with fare-free transportation.

Used to spending hundreds of dollars on public transit every month? Soon, depending on where you live, all those bus, train, and tram journeys could be totally free. Sure, transit operators would earn less revenue. But some are willing to risk the cash to find out whether free fare policies can help reduce car journeys and make cities run more smoothly.

Does it work? So far, the evidence is mixed—but ditching tickets has other benefits, from ensuring equitable access to transport to keeping buses running on time, with costs offset by savings on ticketing systems or fare enforcement.

If it feels strange not to pay, experts draw parallels with public health, libraries, and schools—services that some use more than others, but everyone pays into. “When you remove fares that says to people that you’ve got a right to get around regardless of your means, it’s a public good,” says Jenny Mcarthur, urban infrastructure researcher at University College London. The need for new thinking is acute: Road transport makes up a tenth of global carbon dioxide emissions, with soaring fuel prices also putting a squeeze on already stretched household budgets.

This is why cities and countries around the world have been edging toward free fares. Spain is the latest to join the list, offering free train travel on a selection of routes for a few months to relieve pressure on commuters as the cost-of-living crisis bites. Officials in Germany introduced a 9-euro-a-month travel pass, Ireland slashed fares for the first time in 75 years, and Italy doled out a 60-euro, one-off public transport voucher for lower-income workers. Luxembourg and Estonia ditched fares to get commuters out of cars years ago, which is the same motivation for Austria’s 3-euro-a-day Klimaticket for countrywide transport, launched last year.

Free fares boost ridership, but not necessarily from drivers. In Estonia, free transport was more likely to be used by those who were walking or cycling, a trend repeated elsewhere. That’s a problem, as pedestrians and cyclists create fewer emissions than public transport.

Short trials make it difficult to discern impact. Car use in Copenhagen initially dropped after a one-month trial of a free transport ticket, but people eventually returned to their old habits. But that’s not always true: Initial analysis of German traffic in June, just a few weeks into the 9-euro-a-month tickets, showed fewer cars on the road and faster driving times in most of the cities studied.

In 2020, Luxembourg became the first country to offer free public transport, but its tickets were already cheap, and it’s a small country—with a population of about 630,000, plenty of cities are larger—that’s famously wealthy. Two years later, traffic remains about the same or worse than before the free fare policy, at least partially because a large number of people who can’t afford to live in Luxembourg commute from across the border.

So while free fares can and do boost public transport use, such policies don’t necessarily get cars off the road. But free transport has benefits beyond the environment. In Spain, free tickets have been introduced to ease the burden of inflation and rising fuel prices rather than to directly target emissions.

Free train tickets might entice drivers to ditch the car when fuel prices are high, traffic is snarled, or when traveling for a holiday. But for low-income people who are unable to afford a car, free transport keeps cash in their pockets—and means some who can’t afford a ticket can catch a ride rather than walk. “It’s common for people to rationalize their trips when public transport is very expensive,” says Mcarthur. “They make one trip to the shops each week and can’t go whenever they please because it adds up too much.”

Local context matters. In Australia, the Tasmanian government made buses free for five weeks to offset cost of living increases. While that project was deemed a success, researchers argue that expanding the policy elsewhere in the country would benefit richer residents, as public transport in Australia is more heavily used by residents of inner cities or central suburbs traveling to central business districts—in other words, people living in expensive neighborhoods commuting to well-paying jobs. The farther away people live from central areas, the more likely they are to rely on cars to travel to dispersed workplaces, the researchers say, and that means free fares benefit wealthier people rather than those on low incomes.

In Spain, the free tickets will overwhelmingly benefit people living in urban areas that can access regional trains, known as Media Distancia, and suburban railways called Cercanías. “85 percent of Cercanías trips are done daily in Madrid and Barcelona,” says Pablo Muñoz Nieto, a campaigner at environmental activist group Confederación de Ecologistas en Acción, adding that regional trains have suffered from lack of investment and many areas don’t have services. “What do you want a free train ticket for if you don’t have a train?”

In the US, the divide between the haves and have-nots often falls along racial lines, meaning free fares could support racial equity. But while that’s true on financial grounds, there’s more to the story. As community organizer Destiny Thomas notes, US transit systems “rely on the criminalization of poverty as a primary source of revenue,” with operators issuing significant fines to those who lack the funds to buy a ticket. In 2019, the city council in Washington, DC, voted to slash fines and remove the risk of jail for fare evaders following evidence that nine in ten court summons for failing to have a ticket were given to African Americans. By removing fares entirely, transit operators avoid the risk of discriminatory enforcement.

Free fares also remove the financial cost of creating ticketing systems and enforcing them. In Boston, an extension of a free fare trial was in part inspired by a $1 billion new ticketing system, Mcarthur says—a serious investment when bus fares bring in only $60 million annually. A single-route bus trial in the city revealed an unexpected benefit: faster boarding time. “That means faster and more reliable journey times, and improved overall service,” Mcarthur says. “If you’re a public transport agency, a lot of money is spent trying to get dwell time down.”

But the rush for free or heavily-discounted tickets can have the opposite effect. In Germany, the first long weekend of the 9-euro-a-month tickets led to overcrowding, service disruptions, and thousands of hours of overtime for staff. In Spain, Muñoz Nieto warns that if train frequencies aren’t increased, services will become overcrowded; plus, making one mode free and not others could pull passengers away from buses or metro services.

Boosting services when cutting fares costs money—which has to come from somewhere. In Spain, the free tickets will be paid for out of a windfall tax on energy companies and banks that the government believes will be worth 7 billion euros over two years. “Subsidizing trains is phenomenally expensive, but it needs to be done if you want to get lots of people in and out of cities for work,” says Paul Chatterton, professor of urban futures at the University of Leeds.

And mass transit systems across the world are already subsidized to some extent by public funds. In France, fares make up as little as 10 percent of public transport budgets. Luxembourg could easily make trains free because a two-hour ticket costs only 2 euros, with fares pulling in just 30 million euros in revenue out of a 1 billion euro budget. But two-thirds of Transport for London’s budget is from fares, meaning the central government would have a bigger gap to make up if it wanted to make all public transit in the capital free.

Transit systems that rely heavily on fares for funding were put under enormous strain during the pandemic, with many networks still struggling as commuters switch to hybrid working. An empty office on a Monday, for example, also means a lot of empty commuter trains. “All the funding models have been predicated on this huge demand for commuter travel, which has been stable for 50 years,” Mcarthur says. “But then the pandemic came along and that model fell apart.”

One alternative to free fares for all is targeted discounts, offering free or cheap passes to students, young people, seniors, and those on benefits, already a common practice. Rather than subsidize transport costs for those who can afford it, free passes could be given to those on lower incomes or in regions where public transport is available but unpopular. Another intermediate step is charging a cheap flat rate, as Germany has done this summer. “People would still value the service, but you also generate some revenue,” Chatterton says.

Free fares might not get everyone out of cars, but will convert some journeys, which benefits everyone in terms of carbon reduction and improving local air quality—and even helps drivers by calming traffic. Free fares won’t pull low-income people out of poverty, but will keep money in their pockets and ensure everyone can travel when they need to. Ditching fares comes at a cost, but there are savings to be had by not investing in expensive ticketing systems and wider logistical and societal benefits.

But setting aside figures about costs and statistics about ridership, there’s another way to look at it: Public transport should be considered a human right, alongside access to health and education. It’s necessary to life in a city, says Mcarthur. “Public transport is an extremely efficient way to get people around,” she says. “Buses and trains are not only efficient for people who use them, but also people who don’t.”

The Case for Making Public Transit Free Everywhere

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Inflating spider corpse creates robotic claw game of nightmares

Fri, 29 Jul 2022 20:58:07 +0000

Welcome to the exciting, rather macabre new field of "necrobotics."

Preston Innovation Laboratory

Shortly after the Preston Innovation Lab was set up at Rice University, graduate student Faye Yap was rearranging a few things when she noticed a dead curled-up spider in the hallway. Curious about why spiders curl up when they die, she did a quick search to find the answer. And that answer—essentially, internal hydraulics—led to delightfully morbid inspiration: Why not use the bodies of dead spiders as tiny air-powered grippers for picking up and maneuvering tiny electronic parts?

Yap and her colleagues—including adviser Daniel Preston—did just that. They transformed a dead wolf spider into a gripping tool with just a single assembly step—essentially launching a novel new research area they have cheekily dubbed "necrobotics." They outlined the process in detail in a new paper published in the journal Advanced Science. The authors suggest the gripper could be ideal for delicate "pick-and-place" repetitive tasks and could possibly be used one day in the assembly of microelectronics.

Preston's lab specializes in so-called soft robotics, which eschews the usual hard plastics, metals, and electronics in favor of more nontraditional materials. Hydrogels and elastomers, for example, can serve as actuators powered by chemical reactions, pneumatics, or even light. Roboticists have also long found inspiration for their designs in nature, studying the locomotion of such animals as cheetahs, snakes, insects, starfish, jellyfish, and octopuses. (See, for example, our story on the development of the OctaGlove, designed to grip slippery objects underwater.)

An illustration shows the process by which Rice University mechanical engineers turn deceased spiders into necrobotic grippers, able to grasp items when triggered by hydraulic pressure.

Preston Innovation Laboratory

Count spiders among those creatures that continue to fascinate and inspire robotics, thanks to how well their bodies integrate both rigid and soft components. There's also the unique means by which they control their legs. “Spiders do not have antagonistic muscle pairs, like biceps and triceps in humans,” Yap said. “They only have flexor muscles, which allow their legs to curl in, and they extend them outward by hydraulic pressure. When they die, they lose the ability to actively pressurize their bodies. That’s why they curl up. We wanted to find a way to leverage this mechanism.”

Past researchers have designed spider-inspired pneumatics, joints, and muscles, but fabricating those components at such small scales typically requires multiple, painstaking steps. There have also been biohybrid systems based on live or active biological materials, but Yap et al. note that these demand careful and precise maintenance. One memorable paper reported controlling a live spider with electrical stimulations, and scientists have found uses for spider silk and molted spider exoskeletons. But on the whole, "the incorporation of biotic materials derived from the spider body itself has not yet been explored," the authors wrote.

Rice University graduate student Faye Yap with a deceased wolf spider for use as a necrobotic gripper.

Brandon Martin/Rice University

In fact, the Preston lab might be the first to just repurpose the actual cadavers of dead spiders as a raw material for robotic components. And it didn't require much effort to do so. A spider's prosoma, or hydraulic chamber, contains internal valves that enable the creature to control each leg individually. Once the spider dies, that control is gone and the legs work in unison. That was an advantage for Yap et al.'s plan to turn the spider into a gripping device.

All they needed to do was insert a needle into the prosoma of a dead spider and affix it to the spider's body with superglue to form a hermetic seal. They just placed a droplet of superglue on the needle shaft and let the natural minimization of surface energy play out. Gravity pulled the droplet down the shaft until it contacted the spider cuticle and formed a meniscus along the interface between the needle and cuticle that resulted in an air-tight seal as the glue cured. The whole process took 10 minutes.

A gripper is used to lift a jumper and break a circuit on an electronic breadboard, turning off an LED.

Preston Innovation Laboratory

The other end of the needle is attached to either one of the lab's test rigs or a handheld syringe. Administering tiny puffs of air pressurizes the chamber and activates the legs instantaneously, causing them to open. Depressurizing the chamber causes the legs to close up again. The team tested their spider-gripper on a variety of objects. For example, they used it to remove a jumper wire on an electric breadboard to disconnect the LED; to pick up a block of red-dyed polyurethane foam; and even to pick up another dead spider.

It's an admittedly creepy visual effect, watching those lifeless spidery legs repeatedly open and close. But contrary to a few over-excited headlines, these are not reanimated or "zombie" spiders. “Despite looking like it might have come back to life, we’re certain that it’s inanimate, and we’re using it in this case strictly as a material derived from a once-living spider,” Preston said. “It’s providing us with something really useful.”

Rice University researchers have found a way to use dead spiders as a raw material for robotic grippers.

The testing showed that the spider-gripper could reliably lift objects that were more than 1.3 times the spider's own body weight, exerting a peak gripping force of 0.35 millinewton. It's known that smaller spiders can carry heavier loads relative to their own body weight, while larger spiders can only manage smaller loads relative to their body weight. One avenue of future research would be to study the gripping force for spiders of different sizes or species to learn more about this relationship between size and gripping force.

The spider-gripper also proved to be surprisingly robust, completing 1,000 open/close cycles before the wear and tear on the joints caused the body to break down after a couple of days. Yap et al. believe this has something to do with dehydration in the joints over time. One possible way to extend the functionality of the gripper would be to apply a thin layer of vapor-impermeable coating. The team tested this by coating a spider-gripper with beeswax to mitigate water loss, resulting in significant improvement.

At least the spider bodies are fully biodegradable. "So we're not introducing a big waste stream, which can be a problem with more traditional components," said Preston.

DOI: Advanced Science, 2022. 10.1002/advs.202201174 (About DOIs).

Listing image by Preston Innovation Laboratory

Inflating spider corpse creates robotic claw game of nightmares

I think I have long COVID. What does that mean?

Fri, 29 Jul 2022 16:54:22 +0000

There is no universal definition of the condition, making it harder to track and treat

In the year before the omicron variant began to spread in the United States, an estimated one-third of 18- to 45-year-olds had gotten sick with COVID-19. Just three months later, that figure doubled, and I was among the people who caught the coronavirus for the first time.

I was in the first wave of people who got omicron in December 2021, as I was finishing my fall semester at Cornell University. On the day I received my positive test result, I knew it was coming. I had a sore throat, cough and my whole body ached. For the next several days, I was so tired that I had to sleep for more than half the day while trying to finish my final exams and help report on the outbreak for my college daily newspaper. Days later, after taking every vitamin, supplement and over-the-counter medicine I could get, I tried to get back to my normal routine, starting with a workout on Zoom. I found myself needing to stop every couple of minutes to catch my breath.

Time passed. I began to exhaust the list of YouTube workouts, and I began to feel better, but I never really got to 100 percent. Six months later, my friends and family no longer asked: “Do you feel any better?” In some ways I do. But between feeling much more out of breath every time I go to exercise than I used to or often hitting a wall at 3 p.m., I’ve wondered: Am I among the estimated 1 in 5 people in the United States who have long COVID?
What initially seems like a simple question is actually much more complicated than yes or no. There is no biological test — no swab or blood test — to say that someone has long COVID. Doctors and public health organizations don’t have a universal definition of the condition.

Putting a name to it

While the disease caused by the novel coronavirus was given the name COVID-19 in February 2020, long COVID surfaced a few months later as a hashtag on Twitter when Elisa Perego began using the term in her tweets. The archaeology researcher who has become a long COVID advocate, first fell ill in late winter of 2020 in Lombardy, Italy. Three months later, she relapsed — her blood oxygen levels began to drop again, and she may have had a small blood clot in her lungs. This was not the same COVID-19 that Perego was seeing on the news.

“For me, the idea of long COVID was about reframing COVID,” she told me over e-mail because of ongoing symptoms that make it difficult to talk for long periods of time. The term not only gave her experiences a name but began to unite what was a growing group of those who had COVID-19 and couldn’t seem to shake the aftereffects.

“Very prolonged positive tests were being talked about in Italy. A grassroots movement of people who weren’t recovering from COVID was burgeoning on Twitter and other media,” she says. “So I thought the hashtag and the name long COVID could be a way to link this growing community.”

Since then, other terms have also been used: post-acute sequelae of SARS CoV-2 infection, or PASC, post-acute COVID-19 and post-COVID conditions. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention uses that last one, writing broadly “post-COVID conditions are a wide range of new, returning or ongoing health problems that people experience after first being infected with the virus that causes COVID-19.”

The only clear distinction that health professionals seem to agree on when it comes to long COVID is that it is the emergence or change of symptoms some time after being infected with the coronavirus. But how long after and what those symptoms are aren’t universally agreed upon.

Right now, that may be for the best, experts say.

A broad definition helps people with long COVID recognize that they have it and receive the care they need, says neuroscientist David Putrino at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York City. It also helps people from historically excluded groups who have long COVID get a proper diagnosis, when they may have otherwise been written off and labeled as psychosomatic.

Yet, even with a broad definition, people might not know they have it. While recently recruiting for a long COVID clinical trial, Putrino found that about half of the people that reported they had “fully recovered” failed his screening for post-COVID conditions because they still had lingering symptoms.

Many of these people fall into a similar camp as I do: They are not debilitated but they are “slowed down.” And similar to me, Putrino says, many of them say that they have fully recovered but have one symptom that doesn’t seem to go away — like having trouble exercising or needing to go to sleep much earlier than they used to or noticing they need an extra cup of coffee in the afternoon.

When COVID-19 becomes long COVID

A key question in knowing who has long COVID is defining when acute COVID ends and long COVID begins. And there is disagreement there, too. The CDC starts its clock for long COVID at four weeks post-infection, while the World Health Organization says it’s closer to 12 weeks. The National Institutes of Health, in recruiting for its initiative to study long COVID, defines “post-acute” as starting 30 days after infection for children but does not define the window for adults.

There’s risk in making the time too short or too long. Too short, and doctors may include people that are just having a particularly long bout of acute COVID. They are likely to recover regardless of treatment, so including them makes it difficult to determine if a long COVID treatment is effective. For his work, Putrino is firmly in “team WHO” because he says that there are people that are still dealing with the acute symptoms of being infected with SARS-CoV-2 four weeks in.

“We do not want to propagate the narrative that a certain percentage of long COVID patients spontaneously recover,” he says. “That’s not the case. I think that the individuals who are sick at four weeks who then go on to recover without doing anything interventional were just individuals who were still sick with COVID and ultimately recovered.”

However, if the start point is too far off, it will delay people getting care.

This is why Perego leans toward the four-week timeframe so that people can seek care sooner. But she says that researchers may want to track changes in a person’s condition over longer periods of time.

“Clinically, my hope would be to have support as early as possible. The timing of the disease development might change in different patients,” she says. “There might be changes into how the disease develops with vaccination and the new variants. But I don’t like the idea of letting people with no in-depth care to wait for the moment they match a specific clinical case definition, which might be an artificial construct and quite delayed.”

In a lot of ways, defining long COVID is like trying to hit a moving target but better understanding how long COVID changes over time will help researchers “figure out exactly what it is and maybe what it isn’t,” says Josh Fessel, a senior clinical advisor at the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences, a part of the National Institutes of Health. Aside from tracking timing, another way to do that is tracking symptoms.

Symptoms of long COVID

I had what all of the experts I talked with see as the most common symptoms — fatigue and shortness of breath. But others have trouble thinking or concentrating, a pounding heart, joint or muscle aches to name a few (SN: 2/2/22). While this long list of potential symptoms casts as wide a net as possible, it also creates a “diagnosis of exclusion,” says Emily Pfaff, a clinical informaticist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. In order for patients to know they have long COVID, they must first prove that their symptoms don’t have other causes.

“That is an effort to ensure that we’re not confusing long COVID with other stuff, but what that can do is sort of put patients on this kind of diagnostic odyssey where they’re trying to match up their symptoms and their physicians and providers are trying to match them up with various diseases only to rule those out in order to say ‘Yes, maybe this is long COVID,’” she says.

What makes ruling conditions out and homing in on long COVID difficult is that long COVID has flavors; it doesn’t come with the same symptoms, and it may not be caused by the same thing in everyone who has it. “We envision that long COVID has at least seven different mechanisms,” says Joan Soriano, a medical epidemiologist who helped WHO write its definition of long COVID. “This is similar to chronic fatigue syndrome or post-intensive care unit syndrome. Accordingly, any definition of long COVID will not be simple.”

A definition of long COVID has to encompass people who may still have virus circulating in their bodies, those who may have had autoimmune issues following infection, still others who have microclots in their blood and maybe people like me with a nagging feeling of not being quite back to normal. As researchers try to understand long COVID, and how to treat it, they will need to differentiate between these different flavors, called endotypes, Putrino says. Different flavors will call for different treatments. Something like an antiviral will probably work only for those people whose long COVID symptoms are caused by viral persistence. A blood thinner wouldn’t work for them but could help those with microclots.

One thing that could help with grouping the flavors of long COVID and recognizing how symptoms persist in large groups of patients is artificial intelligence, Soriano says. This is the type of work Pfaff, at UNC, is currently doing. She is creating a machine learning algorithm that can look at a patient’s health records and predict if they will have long COVID. “It’s never going to be 100 percent,” she says. But her algorithm is beginning to be able to accurately predict who will have it, and she is beginning to use it to figure out what flavor they might have.

Data, however, can’t operate in a vacuum, she says. Researchers need information from people like me and many others to get a firm grasp on what long COVID is and how to treat it. Merging hospital data with survey data from patients is the only way forward on creating a definition, Pfaff says.

I’m still not sure where I stand with my own case. A couple of weeks ago, I felt sheepish even mentioning that having long COVID was something that was on my mind. Long COVID is not something that really comes up in my everyday conversations, especially as an active 22-year-old. That quickly changed when Putrino, unprompted, described a class of people who just can’t get back to working out, or need an extra cup of coffee to keep up with their pre-COVID pace. This described how I have felt for months to a tee. Putrino, Pfaff and Fessel agreed that I fall into what is generally a pretty large group of people with long COVID, and Fessel told me he wouldn’t bat an eye if I were to apply to enroll in the NIH’s clinical trial.

Still, I struggled to use the term. I haven’t been put out of work as Perego and hundreds of thousands of others have. Despite my aversion to saying I have long COVID because it has disrupted the lives of so many more than it has my own, defining the broad spectrum of experiences it’s led to may be important. Until we have reliable tests for the condition, what matters is people sharing their individual experiences.

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It doesn't matter much which fiber you choose—just get more fiber

Fri, 29 Jul 2022 16:48:18 +0000

That huge array of dietary fiber supplements in the drugstore or grocery aisle can be overwhelming to a consumer. They make all sorts of health claims too, not being subject to FDA review and approval. So how do you know which supplement works and would be best for you?

A rigorous examination of the gut microbes of study participants who were fed three different kinds of supplements in different sequences concludes that people who had been eating the least amount of fiber before the study showed the greatest benefit from supplements, regardless of which ones they consumed.

"The people who responded the best had been eating the least fiber to start with," said study leader Lawrence David, an associate professor of molecular genetics and microbiology at Duke University.

The benefit of dietary fiber isn't just the easier pooping that advertisers tout. Fermentable fiber—dietary carbohydrates that the human gut cannot process on its own but some bacteria can digest—is also an essential source of nutrients that your gut microbes need to stay healthy.

"We've evolved to depend on nutrients that our microbiomes produce for us," said Zack Holmes, former Ph.D. student in the David lab and co-author on two new papers about fiber. "But with recent shifts in diet away from fiber-rich foods, we've stopped feeding our microbes what they need."

When your gut bugs are happily munching on a high-fiber diet, they produce more of the short-chain fatty acids that protect you from diseases of the gut, colorectal cancers and even obesity. And in particular, they produce more of a fatty acid called butyrate, which is fuel for your intestinal cells themselves. Butyrate has been shown to improve the gut's resistance to pathogens, lower inflammation and create happier, healthier cells lining the host's intestines.

Given the variety of supplements available, David's research team wanted to know whether it may be necessary to 'personalize' fiber supplements to different people, since different fermentable fibers have been shown to have different effects on short-chain fatty acid production from one individual to the next.

"We didn't see a lot of difference between the fiber supplements we tested. Rather, they looked interchangeable," David said during a tour of his sparkling new lab in the MSRB III building, which includes a special "science toilet" for collecting samples and an array of eight "artificial gut" fermenters for growing happy gut microbes outside a body.

"Regardless of which of the test supplements you pick, it seems your microbiome will thank you with more butyrate," David said.

The average American adult only consumes 20 to 40 percent of the daily recommended amount of fiber, which is believed to be a root cause behind a lot of our common health maladies, including obesity, cardiovascular disease, digestive disorders and colon cancer. Instead of having to go totally vegetarian or consume pounds of kale daily, convenient fiber supplements have been created that can increase the production of short-chain fatty acids.

The Duke experiments tested three main kinds of fermentable fiber supplements: inulin, dextrin (Benefiber), and galactooligosaccharides (GOS) marketed as Bimuno. The 28 participants were separated into groups and given each of the three supplements for one week in different orders, with a week off between supplements to allow participants' guts to return to a baseline state.

Participants who had been consuming the most fiber beforehand showed the least change in their microbiomes, and the type of supplement really didn't matter, probably because they were already hosting a more optimal population of gut bugs, David said.

Conversely, participants who had been consuming the least fiber saw the greatest increase in butyrate with the supplements, regardless of which one was being consumed.

In a second study the David lab performed with support from the U.S. Office of Naval Research, they found that gut microbes responded to a new addition of fiber within a day, dramatically altering the populations of bugs present in the gut and changing which of their genes they were using to digest food.

Using their artificial gut fermenters, the researchers found the gut microbes were primed by the first dose to consume fiber, and digested it quickly on the second dose.

"These findings are encouraging," said graduate student Jeffrey Letourneau, lead author of the second study. "If you're a low fiber consumer, it's probably not worth it to stress so much about which kind of fiber to add. It's just important that you find something that works for you in a sustainable way."

"It doesn't need to be a supplement either," Holmes added. "It can just be a fiber-rich food. Folks who were already eating a lot of fiber, which comes from plants like beans, leafy greens, and citrus, already had very healthy microbiomes."

The research was published in Microbiome and The ISME Journal.

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NASA revises Mars’ sample return plan to use helicopters

Fri, 29 Jul 2022 07:46:34 +0000

The experience with the Ingenuity helicopter has changed the equation.

On Wednesday, NASA announced that it had made major changes to its plan for returning samples from the surface of Mars in the early 2030s. Currently being collected by the Perseverance rover, the samples are set to be moved to Earth by a relay of rovers and rockets. Now, inspired by the success of the Ingenuity helicopter, NASA is saying it can lose one of the rovers, replacing it with a pair of helicopters instead.

The Mars sample return plan involves a large collection of challenges, but a central one is that the samples are currently in Perseverance, but eventually have to end up in a rocket that takes off from the surface of Mars. That means that Perseverance will have to get close enough to the rocket's landing site—which we can't choose precisely—to exchange the samples, possibly diverting it from scientific objectives. It also can't be too close when the rocket lands since the rocket's landing and its associated hardware could pose a risk to the rover and its samples.

The original plan included a contingency. Perseverance would approach after the rocket had landed, and the samples would be transferred directly. If that didn't work out for whatever reason, a second rover sent to Mars by the ESA would act as an intermediary, visiting a site where the samples had been cached, retrieving them, and then delivering them to the rocket.

In the new plan, that second rover has been eliminated. In its place? Two helicopters. These will be delivered as part of the same payload as the rocket carrying the samples to orbit. As a result, the new plan involves only a single lander (beyond the one that delivered Perseverance) that will carry both the rocket and the helicopters, significantly lowering the risk of the overall plan.

These helicopters, naturally, will be based on the design of Ingenuity, which was sent to Mars as a test vehicle and significantly outperformed expectations, completing 29 flights over a year. Given that experience, NASA is confident that helicopters can be designed to carry small payloads and potentially complete multiple flights between the return rocket and wherever the samples are located—either on Perseverance or at a cache location.

After that, the plan remains the same. The samples will be loaded into a container placed on the NASA-designed Mars Ascent Vehicle carrying them to orbit. There, the container will be transferred to the Earth Return Orbiter, built by ESA, which will get them back to Earth in 2033, at which point they will drop through the atmosphere for retrieval and study.

The next step will be approval by ESA, after which both agencies will start the preliminary design phase, which will handle all the details on the different vehicles that will be needed. Meanwhile, Perseverance has already gathered a dozen samples from the surface of the red planet.

NASA revises Mars’ sample return plan to use helicopters

NASA Delayed the Psyche Launch. Here’s Why That’s a Big Deal

Thu, 28 Jul 2022 20:29:30 +0000

Heavenly bodies are always in motion: Pushing back the asteroid probe’s blastoff date could require a new trajectory, longer travel time, and much more power.

For years, Lindy Elkins-Tanton had been looking forward to blasting a probe to the metallic asteroid Psyche, which is orbiting about 230 million miles away and may be the remains of a protoplanet whose surface was smashed to bits eons ago. She and her team designed and assembled the NASA spacecraft—also called Psyche—and booked a ride for it on a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket. Launch day was supposed to come sometime between August and early October.

But Psyche’s software derailed their plan. While engineers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory have completed the guidance, navigation, and control system, they and their colleagues at Maxar Technologies haven’t been able to thoroughly test and validate it. That means they’ll have to miss their crucial 2022 launch period. “We have no known problems with the [guidance] software, but we just haven’t been able to test it,” Elkins-Tanton, a planetary scientist at Arizona State University and head of the mission, said during a virtual press conference in June announcing the delay. “We have today a beautiful functioning spacecraft, built and ready, but there was that one challenge we couldn’t overcome in time to launch in 2022 with confidence.”

NASA’s new plan is to launch in July 2023 at the earliest, or perhaps in 2024. But this postponement won’t mean that Psyche will arrive at its destination just a year or two later than planned. In fact, what was once a four-year journey will now likely extend into a six-year one, and the probe won’t get to its eponymous space rock until 2029 or 2030. Understanding why requires learning a bit about the intricacies of orbital mechanics.

Flying to Psyche, a massive member of the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, is no simple matter. It requires lots of energy to voyage that far, so NASA had originally planned for the probe to attempt a Mars flyby—a convenient halfway point—to provide an extra power boost some call a “gravity whip.” The move would turn gravitational energy into kinetic energy, speeding up the craft. (The maneuver in effect steals energy from the planet, slowing Mars’ orbit, but by a negligible amount.)

Timing is also key: NASA scientists have to coordinate the destination’s orbit with those of Earth and any intermediate bodies that could provide gravity boosts. “For planetary missions, we have to align everything just right, so that when we leave Earth when the planets are aligned, we can get to the destination with a reasonable amount of fuel,” says Jeff Parker, lead mission designer for EscaPADE, an orbiter mission to study Mars’s atmosphere that was planned to launch along with Psyche. He’s also the chief technology officer at Advanced Space, an aerospace company based in Westminster, Colorado.

And therein lies the problem: Heavenly bodies are always in motion. By the time the next launch window opens, Earth, Mars, and the asteroid will no longer be in exactly the same alignment they would have been this fall. If researchers miss the best possible alignment, they usually can’t wait decades for the orbits to optimally sync up again. Taking the shot in 2023 or 2024 will require new calculations about the energy it will cost Psyche to reach its destination. The energy-boosting Mars maneuver may no longer be feasible. And the journey will be two years longer, mainly because the orbital positions of Earth and Psyche will make for a longer distance to cover.

NASA and the Psyche team declined interview requests until an independent review of the mission delay has been completed. Agency officials will make a decision about next steps based on that review in the coming months, said Lori Glaze, head of NASA’s planetary science division, at last month’s press conference. But WIRED spoke with other experts about options for sending a probe deep into the solar system, even if you can’t whip it past Mars.

Parker, for example, thinks it might be feasible for Psyche to reach its asteroid by relying more on the spacecraft’s solar-electric propulsion system. This system has solar arrays that will unfold to the size of a tennis court, and they’ll convert sunlight into electricity to power Psyche’s Hall thrusters, efficient and long-lasting devices that emit a blue glow.

Parker says that using the Falcon Heavy for launch is another advantage, because it will give the spacecraft more kinetic energy to start with than a smaller rocket would, which means it has to come up with less solar energy en route. Focusing on power from the liftoff and from the onboard propulsion system would give the mission planners some flexibility about launch times, he thinks, potentially allowing them to make the journey without counting on an alignment with Mars.

Another option for a spacecraft that needs a speed boost is to fling itself past Earth. This was the option chosen for the European Space Agency’s Rosetta spacecraft, which launched in 2004 on a comet-bound mission, says Andrea Accomazzo, the head of the agency’s solar system and exploration missions division. During the probe’s 10-year voyage, it gained speed through three Earth flybys and then swung by Mars before making a beeline for the Churyumov-Gerasimenko comet and deploying the Philae lander to it.

Rosetta’s team faced two additional challenges: The comet had a swooping elliptical orbit rather than a more circular one like most asteroids, which made it hard to match its speed and velocity. And the researchers wanted to plan the trek so that Rosetta and its lander sidekick would rendezvous with the comet when it wasn't very close to the sun, where it would be more active, ejecting bits of ice and dust and complicating a landing that already would be tricky to pull off.

Engineers design spacecraft with launch and trajectory options in mind, and in this case, a few trips around Earth was the best path. “You start from the target, and then you work backward,” says Accomazzo. “You have three sources of energy: the initial energy of the rocket, the energy in the propellant tanks of the spacecraft, and the energy you can get from planetary swing-bys. It’s a bit of handcrafted work of my colleagues who tried to find the optimal solution.”

Parker points out that the utility of planetary swing-bys depends on the geometry of the spacecraft’s trajectory, so they’re not always an option. But he agrees they can be beneficial, especially when the destination’s far away. “Those main-belt asteroid missions are hard, and they take a lot of fuel,” he says. “Psyche could have launched straight to its target with a bigger launch vehicle or a smaller spacecraft or different engine,” but that could have increased costs or reduced the scientific exploration that could be accomplished once the spacecraft arrives. NASA has been planning for the probe to orbit the asteroid for at least 21 months while it images it and uses a magnetometer to search for remains of a magnetic field, which might indicate it was originally a planet’s core.

And there’s always a third option: terminating a mission. A very long delay can make the science motivation of a mission, or the technologies involved, obsolete. A big delay can also be detrimental if there’s a little competition between missions with similar goals—one can end up eclipsing the other.

Psyche’s postponement has consequences for other, smaller missions. To keep costs down, NASA often has sets of spacecraft launch together on the same rocket, sort of like a rideshare. The EscaPADE Mars mission that Parker was working on was initially supposed to ride with Psyche, but the originally planned launch period didn’t work out for his team. (They’re looking for another rideshare opportunity in early 2024.)

So researchers lined up a different mission to co-launch with Psyche, called Janus. This one calls for launching a pair of spacecraft to a binary asteroid, completing two Earth flybys on the way. The Janus team will now have to wait to see if they can launch along with Psyche on a later date. If not, they’ll have to find another ride to space—and make new calculations for their crafts’ trajectory.

No matter what happens with Psyche, space fans won’t have to wait until 2029 or 2030 for a close-up look at an asteroid. NASA’s OSIRIS-REx probe, which rendezvoused with the asteroid Bennu in 2020, will deliver a sample to Earth in 2023.

And after NASA’s DART spacecraft deliberately crashes into Dimorphos later this fall—a practice test of asteroid deflection—the European Space Agency plans to send a follow-up spacecraft called Hera, which will arrive in 2026 to scope out the aftermath.

NASA Delayed the Psyche Launch. Here’s Why That’s a Big Deal

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This Stamp-Sized Ultrasound Patch Can Image Internal Organs

Thu, 28 Jul 2022 20:27:53 +0000

Getting a scan usually means a visit to a doctor and some giant equipment. What if that gear was wearable?

When a patient goes into a clinic for an ultrasound of their stomach, they lie down on crinkly paper atop an exam table. A clinician spreads a thick goo on their abdomen, then presses a small probe into it to send acoustic waves into the patient’s body. These waves bounce off their soft tissues and body fluids, returning to the probe to be translated into a 2D image. As the probe moves over the person’s stomach, a blurry black-and-white picture appears onscreen for the clinician to read.

While ultrasound technology is a staple in many medical settings, it is often big and bulky. Xuanhe Zhao, a mechanical engineer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, aims to miniaturize and simplify the entire thing—and make it wearable. In a paper published today in Science, Zhao and his team describe their development of a tiny ultrasound patch that, when stuck to the skin, can provide high-resolution images of what lies underneath. The scientists hope that the technology can lead to ultrasound becoming comfortable for longer-term monitoring—maybe even at home rather than at a doctor’s office.

Because ultrasound equipment is so large and requires an office visit, Zhao says, its imaging capabilities are often “short term, for a few seconds,” limiting the ability to see how an organ changes over time. For example, physicians might want to see how a patient’s lungs change after taking medication or exercising, something that is difficult to achieve within an office visit. To tackle these problems, the scientists designed a patch—approximately 1 square inch in size and a few millimeters thick—that can be placed practically anywhere on the body and worn for a couple of days. “It looks like a postage stamp,” Zhao says.

Detaching the bioadhesive ultrasound device from the skin.

Photograph: Xuanhe Zhao

The patch is multi-layered, like a candy wafer, with two main components: an ultrasound probe which is stacked on top of a couplant, a material that helps facilitate the transmission of acoustic waves from the probe into the body. The scientists designed the probe to be thin and rigid, using a 2D array of piezoelectric elements (or transducers) stuck between two circuits. Chonghe Wang, one of the coauthors on the study, says that these elements can “transform electrical energy into mechanical vibrations.” These vibrations travel into the body as waves and reflect back to an external imaging system to be translated into a picture. Those vibrations, Wang adds, “are fully noninvasive. The human cannot feel them at all.”

To create the ultrasound probe, the scientists used 3D printing, laser micromachining, and photolithography, in which light is used to create a pattern on a photosensitive material. The probe is then coated with a layer of epoxy, which helps protect it from water damage, like from sweat. Because these techniques are high-throughput, the scientists say, one device can be manufactured in approximately two minutes.

The jellylike couplant layer helps those ultrasound waves travel into the body. It contains a layer of hydrogel protected by a layer of polyurethane to hold in water. All of this is coated with a thin polymer mixture that acts as a strong gluelike substance to help the entire thing stick. The scientists found that the patch can cling to skin for at least 48 hours, can be removed without leaving residue, and can withstand water.

The MIT team is among a small group of labs that have produced similar miniaturized ultrasound devices over the past few years. Labs at UC San Diego and the University of Toronto are working on related projects—Wang produced an earlier patch model at UCSD. But these were often limited in their imaging capabilities or were larger than postage-stamp-sized.

The new design—with a rigid probe on top of a stretchy couplant layer—is a detour from other patches, says Zhao, which often made the actual probe flexible. A flexible probe creates a problem, he says: “The ultrasound probe is similar to the imaging sensor of your camera. Imagine if you distort that imaging sensor; then the images captured will be distorted and the resolution will be lost.” By keeping the probe rigid but letting the couplant layer bend and stretch, the scientists were able to achieve a higher resolution with better imaging quality. Their version also lets them customize the imaging depth—seeing as far as 20 centimeters below the skin—and resolution.

To measure wearability, they placed the patch on 15 human subjects for 48 hours. Only one person noted slight itchiness. The scientists also stuck the patches on themselves to get firsthand feedback. “I forgot that it was there,” says Xiaoyu Chen, another coauthor on the paper. “It’s very comfortable.” Wang agrees, adding that it’s much more pleasant than traditional ultrasound gel, which “will make a mess on your skin—it’s cold and itchy.”

Their current design has one big drawback: It’s not wireless. That meant that to test the imaging capabilities of each patch over that two-day period, the subject had to agree to stay hooked up to a conventional laboratory ultrasound imaging system through a cable. The cable was long enough that the subject could still “move around, walk around; for example, they can also walk on a treadmill or bike on a cycling machine,” Zhao says.

By sticking the patch on different parts of the subject’s body, the researchers could get images of the stomach, muscles, blood vessels, lungs, and heart. After the subject exercised, the scientists showed that the left ventricle of the heart expanded and the blood-flow rate in the carotid artery increased. In another set of images, the scientists found that the subject’s stomach would expand as they drank juice, then contract as the juice was processed. “We also imaged the bladder, but we didn’t put that data inside this paper,” Wang quips.

Chandra Sehgal, a radiology researcher at the University of Pennsylvania, notes that the miniature nature and user-friendliness of a patch like this could help clinicians feel confident that any changes observed in the images are actually due to the patient changing their behavior and not operator error. “Ultrasound is known for its variability and user-dependence,” he says. For example, accidentally moving the probe a smidge to the side can make a vein look larger than it is. With the patch, it would be easier to tell if this apparent vein expansion was a mistake or could be attributed to something real, like the patient lying down. “You can do this measurement in a more reliable way,” he adds.

This work “is very exciting,” says Lawrence Le, who runs a laboratory focused on ultrasound imaging and technology development at the University of Alberta. He notes, though, that cables and wires are still needed to connect the patch to an external imaging system. “In the future, I think it’s possible that this data can be wirelessly sent out,” Le says, given recent advances to miniaturize and integrate the imaging system. “It’s getting there.”

Zhao and his team are already envisioning how this patch can be used in medical settings. One application, he says, could be for monitoring the lung function of a Covid patient at home—seeing how it changes over time. Another could be for measuring blood pressure and heart function in people with cardiovascular diseases. Zhao says that it could also be used to supplement something like an EKG, which records electrical signals from the heart but not images, to give a fuller picture of what is going on inside the body.

While the scientists have demonstrated that the patch works, they agree with Le that it would be better if it were wireless so that the patient would not need to be constantly hooked up to a machine. They are also working on further improving the image resolution with the goal of “reaching or exceeding the resolution of point-of-care ultrasound,” Zhao says. A patch that users could wear for long periods opens up the possibility of long-term continuous imaging, he adds: “We have the opportunity to obtain huge amounts of data of different organs.” And so, he says, it will be important to build algorithms to process that data, so that clinicians can potentially diagnose conditions from the images.

In the meantime, though, the team is thrilled that a stamp-sized patch can actually visualize a person’s organs. Being able to “see something inside my body in the moment,” Chen says, is “amazing.”

This Stamp-Sized Ultrasound Patch Can Image Internal Organs

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The Big Business of Burying Carbon

Thu, 28 Jul 2022 20:24:32 +0000

The porous rock beneath the Gulf Coast launched the petroleum age. Now entrepreneurs want to turn it into a gigantic sponge for storing CO₂.

Sometime after the dinosaurs died, sediment started pouring into the Gulf of Mexico. Hour after hour the rivers brought it in—sand from the infant Rockies, the mucky stuff of ecosystems. Year after year the layers of sand hardened into strata of sandstone, pushed down ever deeper into the terrestrial pressure cooker. Slowly, over ages, the fossil matter inside the rock simmered into fossil fuels.

And then, one day in early 1901, an oil well in East Texas pierced a layer of rock more than 1,000 feet below Spindletop Hill, and the well let forth a gooey black Jurassic gusher, and the gusher began the bonanza that triggered the land rush that launched the age of petroleum.

One of the products of the economy that black gold built is the city of Port Arthur, Texas. Perched on the muggy shores of Sabine Lake, just across the border from Louisiana, it’s among the global oil-and-gas industry’s crucial nodes. Port Arthur is home to the largest petroleum refinery in North America, opened the year after the Spindletop gusher and now owned by the state oil company of Saudi Arabia. The area emits more carbon dioxide from large facilities every year than metropolitan Los Angeles but has a population 3 percent the size. Smokestacks are its tallest structures; nothing else comes close. Around town, pipeline pumping stations jut up from shopping-center parking lots, steam from petrochemical plants hisses along highways, and refineries flank both sides of main roads, their ductwork forming tunnels over traffic. Janis Joplin, who grew up here, described it in a 1970 ballad called “Ego Rock” as “the worst place that I’ve ever found.”

Tip Meckel has a more hopeful view of the place, maybe because he spends so much time looking down. A lanky research scientist at the University of Texas’ Bureau of Economic Geology, Meckel has worked for most of the past decade and a half to map a roughly 300-mile-wide arc of the Gulf Coast from Corpus Christi, Texas, through Port Arthur to Lake Charles, Louisiana. Though he’s the grandson of a refinery worker and the son of an oil consultant, his interest isn’t in extracting more petroleum from this rock. Instead, he has devoted most of his career to figuring out how to turn it into a commercial dump for CO2.

The idea is that major emitters will hoover up their own carbon waste, then pay to have it compressed into liquid and injected back down, safely and permanently, into the same sorts of rocks it came from—carbon capture and sequestration on a scale unprecedented around the globe, large enough to put a real dent in climate change. Suddenly, amid surging global concern about the climate crisis, some of the biggest names in the petroleum industry are jumping in.

On the rainy morning I meet Meckel in Port Arthur, the brown-haired geologist is dressed in a blue Patagonia fishing shirt, black jeans, and running shoes, with sunglasses dangling from a leash around his neck. We pile into his gray Toyota 4Runner and head south, through the petro-sprawl, toward the Gulf. We’re off to see a patch of ocean that Meckel thinks could be key to the drive for decarbonization.

“You don’t throw trash out of your car, do you?” he says as we cruise down a coastal highway, the city receding into the rearview mirror. “Well, we don’t want to dump our CO2 into the atmosphere either.” Maybe the problem, Meckel says, is that the gas is invisible. “If it was purple, and the skies had turned purple by now, everyone would be like, ‘Shit. We really screwed up.’ Maybe they should just dye the CO2 that’s coming out of the stacks and let people see where it goes.”

Tip Meckel holds a sandstone sample.

Photograph: Katie Thompson

By some estimates, there’s enough suitable rock on Earth to lock away centuries’ worth of CO2 emissions, past and future. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the world’s preeminent climate-science body, has repeatedly affirmed that extensive long-term carbon storage is likely necessary to meet any of its targets to seriously mitigate the overheating of the planet. Globally, in 2021, a paltry 37 million metric tons were sequestered—roughly what the Port Arthur metropolitan area emits in a year. Meckel and his colleagues have worked hard, with millions of dollars in funding from the petroleum industry, the state of Texas, and the federal government, to prove that the Gulf is the best place in the country, if not on Earth, to get this new industry truly ramped up.

The work has focused on mapping the region’s underground rock, a process that combines physical evidence, computerized extrapolation, and intuition. Meckel’s university lab in Austin holds a gigantic collection of well logs—long paper strips, rather like the printouts from a heart monitor, that reveal instant-by-instant, centimeter-by-centimeter measurements of myriad features of the underworld, typically from sensors that have been carefully lowered thousands of feet into a borehole. (The folded strips are stored in narrow manila envelopes in row upon row of metal shelves in the basement.) Meckel and his colleagues augmented the logs with 3D seismic data, which they got at a discount; the data company selling it had seen a drop-off in interest in the Gulf from oil-and-gas drillers. Armed with that data, Meckel says, they began to “mow the ground” along the coast, methodically assessing it.

The Bureau of Economic Geology in Austin, Texas, stores thousands of oil well logs.

Photograph: Katie Thompson

Meckel interprets a well log.

Photograph: Katie Thompson

The search drew their attention to a layer of sandstone from the Miocene epoch, ranging in age from 5 million to 23 million years old, which lies partly under waters controlled by the state of Texas and stretches into Louisiana. The layer is porous (lots of holes to hold liquid) and sits close to many big polluters (lower piping or shipping costs for the waste CO2). The sandstone is also covered by a less porous layer of rock that can act as a carbon-tight seal. Meckel and his team built new computer models, then ran simulations of how injected carbon dioxide might flow through the rock. By 2017, they had published an atlas of the Gulf Miocene layer, 74 pages of intricate maps and tiny print.

The year after that, events in Washington transformed the atlas from an academic treatise to an economic playbook. Amid rising climate concern, Congress fattened a federal tax credit for carbon capture and sequestration that until then hadn’t attracted much commercial interest. The new subsidy, modeled broadly on ones for renewable energy, gave developers a credit topping out at $50 for every ton of waste carbon dioxide they captured and geologically stored. That $50-per-ton prize coincided with a surge in warming-related natural disasters, which catapulted climate change to the top of many corporate agendas. It also launched the US carbon-storage race. Meckel’s atlas, available to anyone, became the racers’ guide to the best route.

The result today is that, more than a century after opportunists first swarmed the Gulf to profit from its hydrocarbons, a new swarm has descended, this time to profit from mitigating the damage those hydrocarbons have wrought. A quest that just a few years ago was a science project has become a high-stakes contest to lock up good rock. Within about a 75-mile circle around Port Arthur, more than half a dozen industrial-scale projects are in various stages of preparation. Their backers include oil giants such as ExxonMobil, ConocoPhillips, BP, and TotalEnergies, which have announced the possibility of more than $100 billion in investments; major pipeline operators, which see human-generated CO2 as a huge new market; renewable-energy developers who once lambasted fossil fuels but now want to decarbonize them for profit; and landowners who sense a new way to monetize their dirt. A stampede for capital, land rights, and regulatory approval is underway.

Meckel pulls his Toyota into Sea Rim State Park, a beach on the Gulf. The parking lot is open, but much of it is flooded. Roseate spoonbills wade through puddles on the asphalt.

We wander onto the sand. Looking seaward, Meckel points to a line of oil platforms squatting on the horizon. He envisions dozens of new wells drilled in the coming decades, this time to inject CO2. “We’re talking about a whole area the size of Texas that you can develop for storage,” he muses. “Who’s not going to think that’s a good idea?”

Meckel concedes that carbon storage is a “blunt” and “dumb” approach to curbing climate change. “You’re basically just landfilling,” he says, not decoupling the economy from the production of heat-trapping gases. But with it, he adds, “you buy the time to use the scalpel to do all the cool stuff,” by which he means renewables at a scale big enough to power the planet.

Just off this coast sits what may be Texas’ most promising site for a CO2 landfill, a spot to which Meckel is directing my gaze. It includes a well-mapped block of underwater acreage that oil-and-gas insiders call High Island 24L. In Meckel’s color-coded atlas, the rock that will likely accept the most injected carbon is rendered in shades of orange and red. The area encompassing this block is crimson. He and his colleagues have studied it intensely and found it to be especially capacious. As the land spreads east, toward Louisiana, the color holds—and the rock does too.

Steam escaping from stacks at an oil refinery in Port Arthur, Texas.

Photograph: Katie Thompson

View from Sea Rim State Park.

Photograph: Katie Thompson

Last year, the Texas General Land Office, which leases out state waters for economic activity, held its first auction for carbon-injection rights. On the block was a 360-square-mile patch of Gulf that includes High Island 24L. The winning bid, for a portion of the big patch, came from a joint venture launched by a startup called Carbonvert, which is run by Alex Tiller, an entrepreneur, and Jan Sherman, a veteran of the oil industry. When I meet them one morning in Port Arthur, Tiller is sporting a version of the standard founder uniform—untucked dress shirt, dark jeans, Panerai watch, Tumi briefcase, baseball cap advertising his startup. Sherman is in jeans and an athletic shirt bearing the maroon logo of her alma mater, Texas A&M University. We head outside and pile into the leather-lined cab of a hulking black F350. The license plates read “88GIGEM.” That’s as in 1988, the year Sherman’s husband graduated from college, and “Gig ’em,” the Texas A&M motto. Sherman usually drives her BMW SUV, whose plates read “89GIGEM.” Tiller drives an electric Audi.

Carbonvert’s story dates to 2018. At the time, Tiller, based in Denver, was running a renewable-energy investment fund for a San Francisco financial firm. His specialty was the trade in so-called tax equity. He would find solar developers whose projects qualified for tax credits but whose tax bills were too small to take advantage of them. Then he would arrange deals in which the developers sold their credits—and pledged revenue from five years of electricity sales—to Tiller’s investors in exchange for an influx of cash. Tiller knew the game well. He had learned the tax-equity ropes helping build a solar company in Hawaii, whose sale in 2014 brought him a small fortune. When Congress passed the $50 carbon incentive, Tiller says, he pounced on it as an “opportunity to ride a wave that I’d seen before.” But he had “zero idea” about burying carbon. So he hit the conference circuit, where he got wind of Texas’ coming auction. He heard of Sherman through a friend and reached out to her—a lot.

Sherman fairly bleeds oil. During college, she spent summers fixing leaks on wells. She worked her entire career at Shell, most recently as head of the company’s US carbon-storage business. The month before Tiller contacted her, she had retired, having concluded that a new corporate reorganization made it likely many of her team’s projects would slow down. Sherman decided she wanted to either go big with the carbon-storage knowledge she had amassed or go home. At first, she didn’t answer Tiller’s entreaties. “He kind of stalked me,” she says. By February 2021, after a few months of nudging, she signed on.

Jan Sherman and Alex Tiller in front of an oil rig.

Photograph: Katie Thompson

Sherman was skeptical that the state would entrust a big project to an unproven startup. “I didn’t think Carbonvert could do it,” she says. “I even said, ‘I don’t think that the world is going to let us do that.’” But Meckel and his colleagues had revealed “a ginormous storage opportunity in the Miocene formation,” she says, so the foundational geologic work was done. Sherman and Tiller struck up a partnership with Talos Energy, a Houston-based firm with offshore experience and its own valuable trove of local seismic data. Then they set about figuring out where, in the area that Texas was expected to offer for lease, they thought they could bury carbon in a way that would please both investors and regulators.

The Carbonvert-Talos team focused on areas pierced by comparatively few existing wells, because those can be paths for carbon dioxide leaks. And because each new injection well would cost between $20 million and $30 million to drill, the team avoided geologic features such as synclines—areas where the rock layer dips, as if forming a bowl, effectively cleaving the injectable acreage. Carbonvert and Talos submitted their bid in May 2021. The list of bidders, according to the Texas General Land Office, included much bigger players, among them Marathon Petroleum, an oil company; Denbury Resources, a major pipeline operator; and Air Products, a chemical company. Three months later, Carbonvert and Talos won a 63-square-mile lease. This will be the future home of Bayou Bend CCS (short for “carbon capture and sequestration”). Earlier this year, Chevron threw its weight behind the project, announcing that it would invest $50 million for half of Bayou Bend.

One of the biggest hurdles now for Tiller and Sherman is to sign up enough polluters to make the project economically viable. The business model envisions that polluters will collect the carbon—and the tax credit—and then pay Bayou Bend a transport-and-disposal fee that Tiller says is likely to be $20 to $25 per ton. (That fee could fluctuate.) Scoring clients is a scrappy, dog-eat-dog process. I get a taste of it as Sherman, with Tiller in the back seat, drives me around Port Arthur in the monster truck.

On paper, grabbing carbon emissions in and around this town should be like shooting fish in a barrel. They’re not only plentiful but also localized: A small handful of super-emitters accounts for a large part of the output, and a free and easily downloadable federal database reports each facility’s emissions. But a refinery, petrochemical plant, or liquefied-natural-gas terminal is a dizzyingly complex collection of industrial processes, each of which produces CO2 in different concentrations, ranging from near purity to nearly nil. The less concentrated the carbon in a waste stream is, the costlier it is to capture. According to the National Petroleum Council, the $50 tax credit is enough to incentivize sopping up less than 5 percent of US emissions (mostly from ethanol and natural gas processing plants, whose CO2 emission streams are highly concentrated). But carbon from, say, a coal-fired power plant or a diesel refinery doesn’t currently pay to clean up.

Tiller, Sherman, and their partners ultimately hope to inject at least 10 million tons of CO2 a year to make the profit on which they and their investors have penciled out the project. To get the financing to break ground, the bar is lower—they will need to have inked contracts with polluters to inject 4 million tons a year. By then, however, Bayou Bend will have spent tens of millions of dollars preparing and designing the project. “There is a bit of a build-it-and-they-will-come philosophy,” Sherman says.

The crux of the dilemma is that only about 2 million of the 35 million tons of industrial CO2 emitted annually by large facilities in the Port Arthur area, which includes neighboring Beaumont, is, as Tiller puts it, “low-hanging fruit”—meaning that the tax credit of $50 a ton can cover the cost of capturing, transporting, and burying it.

Back in the truck, which is stocked with 2-pound tubs of honey-roasted peanuts and cheddar Goldfish for long days of sleuthing, Sherman drives us by the oil refinery that opened just after Spindletop. Today it occupies 2 square miles and emits millions of tons of CO2 every year. “Most of this is all $50 or higher,” she says, her right hand on the steering wheel as her left hand sweeps across a windshield filled with the facility.

The next morning, Sherman, Tiller, and I take a boat ride from Port Arthur to the area of the Gulf that they have leased. Over the engine roar, Tiller explains to me that he gave our charter captain only the vague location of the lease area. “He’s under NDA”—a nondisclosure agreement—Tiller yells.

When we reach the prospective carbon-injection area, the captain idles the boat. We’re in about 40 feet of water; the rock into which the Carbonvert group hopes to inject greenhouse gas is more than a mile and a half below that. I check my phone; it still gets service, because we’re only about 5 miles off the coast. To the east, hulking tankers, many of them carrying liquefied natural gas, head out to sea. To the west, every now and then we see a shrimping boat. It’s a beautiful morning on the water. And everything in view is belching carbon.

Toward the end of the trip we motor up the Gulf Intracoastal Waterway, a constructed canal that serves as a long driveway in which ships park and take on product from Port Arthur before ferrying it to the world. We pass a biodiesel plant, one of the biggest in Texas, and the boat captain mentions that he used to work there. Sherman plies him for details about the places in the plant that emit carbon. “Where would it come from?” she asks.

Even if the Carbonvert consortium signed up every pound of carbon dioxide it needed, it would still face another hurdle: The US Environmental Protection Agency has yet to issue its first permit for large-scale commercial carbon injection. Permit reviews are widely expected to take years, and the outcome isn’t assured. The proposed Bayou Bend project will eventually need as many as 10 injection wells, each of which must win an EPA permit. The timing of that, Tiller says, is “an enormous risk.”

If anyone is at the front of the line of the EPA approval process, it’s a man named Gray Stream, the steward of a roughly 100,000-acre patchwork of southwest Louisiana that Meckel’s atlas suggests is at least as red as High Island 24L. Stream is a scion of the Louisiana dynasty that owns Gray Ranch, and he’s betting that his chunk of Gulf Coast rock gives him pole position in the carbon-storage race. “Mine goes to 11,” he tells me, smiling wryly as he evokes a line from This Is Spinal Tap, the 1984 mockumentary about a British rock band with extra-loud amplifiers. He hopes the EPA, in particular, will like his ranch’s carbon-carrying capacity.

The Stream family offices in Lake Charles, Louisiana.

Photograph: Katie Thompson

Stream grew up in Nashville and went to college at Vanderbilt, then did a stint as a legislative aide on Capitol Hill. He hoped to become a Navy SEAL officer, but when that didn’t pan out he dove into managing the family business. His office is in a former bedroom in the family’s business headquarters—a grand, colonnaded redbrick house in the city of Lake Charles built in 1923 by Stream’s great-great-aunt, a noted collector of Fabergé eggs. The office is decorated today with intricately carved walking sticks and antique sabers. It overlooks the backyard, which boasts a Japanese tea garden and, as if out of a Faulkner novel, a two-story, octagonal pigeonnier.

Stream assumed his filial responsibilities in 2004, at a time when diversifying beyond oil and gas was becoming increasingly important to the family and the region. That was partly because fields deplete over time, and those beneath Gray Ranch had been pumped for a century. But it was also because momentum in the oil-and-gas industry was starting to shift to so-called unconventional plays—the shale that fracking had unlocked—and Gray Ranch was conventional rock. The surge in shale production was spurring an industrial boom in and around Lake Charles. But on Gray Ranch, as on much of the land along the Gulf Coast, production was in a long decline.

Gray Stream visits with the horses at Gray Ranch.

Photograph: Katie Thompson

In 2018, when Congress increased the carbon-storage tax credit, Stream started having ideas. He and some colleagues consulted the work of Meckel and others—not only their assessments of the Miocene layer under the Gulf but also an earlier experiment involving a layer of rock called the Frio.

The Frio sits below the Miocene layer. One of its chief allures is that, beneath Gray Ranch, it’s particularly thick—and therefore, at least theoretically, able to hold a lot of CO2. It’s also far below sources of drinking water and is topped by the Anahuac shale, which appears to be a carbon-tight caprock. After extensive study, Stream and a team of technical experts he hired decided to bet their bid on the Frio. He says he hopes the EPA will see its combined characteristics as a “belt-and-suspender” approach—a level of safety that will give the agency confidence that his company, Gulf Coast Sequestration, deserves to become the country’s first commercial collector of other people’s carbon trash.

Applicants for EPA carbon-storage permits must persuade the agency that they can contain both the plume of injected carbon dioxide and a secondary plume of saltwater that the CO2 displaces from the rock—what drilling engineers call the pressure pulse. The EPA requires evidence that neither plume will contaminate drinking water while a project is operating and for a default period of 50 years after CO2 injection stops—but the agency can decide to shorten or lengthen that for a particular project.

Stream employs a well-heeled team, including oil industry veterans and a former top EPA official, to shepherd the permit application, which was submitted in October 2020 and which remains, nearly two years later, under agency review. Inside his company, Stream dubbed the carbon-storage play Project Minerva, after the Roman goddess of wisdom (and sometimes of war).

Heading up the technical work is a British petroleum geologist named Peter Jackson, who used to work at BP. His team planned for Project Minerva in much the way Meckel’s UT group had mapped the Gulf Coast. Using well-log and 3D seismic data, the scientists modeled the Frio under several tens of thousands of acres on and around Gray Ranch. Then they simulated how the carbon dioxide plume and the pressure pulse would behave, depending on where they drilled wells and how they operated them.

In their computer models, the resulting plume movements appeared as multicolored blobs against rocky backgrounds of blue. The best blobs were round, a cohesive shape that suggests the plume will be easier to control. In other spots, the CO2 wouldn’t behave: Sometimes it escaped upward; other times it spread out like a pancake or, Jackson recalls, “like a spider.” Either shape, the team fretted, might degrade project safety and set off alarms at the EPA. The simulations led the Stream team to choose two general locations on the ranch where they intend to drill wells.

Stream agrees to show them to me one morning. He picks me up in Lake Charles in his decked-out black Chevy Tahoe, and we head west, toward Texas, until we’re several miles shy of the state line. We exit the highway at the town of Vinton, Louisiana, and arrive at Gray Ranch. We turn right onto Gray Road. We turn left onto Ged Road. Then, beside cowboy-boot-shaped Ged Lake, we mount a subtle rise known as the Vinton Dome.

One of many peacocks at Gray Ranch rests on a fence.

Photograph: Katie Thompson

A white house sits atop the Vinton Dome overlooking Gray Ranch.

Photograph: Katie Thompson

These are iconic names in Stream family lore. As early as the 1880s, a local surveyor named John Geddings Gray—“Ged”—started assembling this acreage to profit from timber and cattle. Four years after the gusher at Spindletop, Ged saw in the Vinton Dome a topographically similar prospect, and he bought it too. He opened the area for drilling, and his hunch paid off.

Today, the top of Vinton Dome offers a panorama of part of the Stream empire. To the right stand barns bearing the family’s cattle brand and quarter-horse brand. All around, rusty pump jacks rise and fall, pulling up oil and gas. Stream, Ged Gray’s great-great-grandson, likens the ranch to the cuts of beef he grills for his three young children, who think he’s the best steak cooker around. “It’s only because I just buy the prime fillet,” he says. There’s one rule: “Don’t screw it up.”

We stop at one of the expected well sites. The area around it is resplendent with wire grass, bluestem, and fennel. It’s frequented by three kinds of egret: cattle, great, and snowy. This being Louisiana, it’s also stamped with a line of yellow poles; they mark the underground route of the Williams Transco Pipeline, which whooshes natural gas from offshore platforms in the Gulf to the interstate gas-distribution system. If it seems strange that this ranch, which for a century has served up fossil fuels, may play an influential part in curbing greenhouse gas emissions, it’s also instructive—a measure of how economic signals are changing in a part of the world that has long adapted the way it exploits its natural resources to meet shifting market demand. “People are ultimately going to have to put up” to tackle climate change, Stream says. “They can’t just talk about it.”

Stream is right: Humanity must choose. As he talks, I’m reminded of Meckel’s reaction when, as we stood on the beach, looking out at the waves over High Island 24L, I asked the geologist about the dangers associated with storing carbon dioxide underground. I brought up a bizarre disaster that struck Cameroon in 1986, when a massive, naturally occurring cloud of carbon dioxide suddenly burped up from the depths of Lake Nyos and fell onto nearby villages, crowding out ambient air and asphyxiating to death an estimated 1,800 people. “Now that we know that shit happens, put a sensor down there,” Meckel told me, pointing to the Gulf. (At the Cameroon lake, a vent was added.) Meckel doesn’t deny there are dangers. But, as he told me in another of our conversations, people “have to decide that the risks of CO2 going into the atmosphere are more fundamental than the risks of CO2 going into the ground.”

View of the cypress swamp at Lost Lake, part of the Gray Ranch property.

Photograph: Katie Thompson

Meckel, of course, was arguing his pocketbook—and that of the fossil fuel industry, which helps fund his work, and of Carbonvert, and of Stream, and of each of the companies now gunning to make a buck from carbon burial. Yet his point stands: Every potential climate fix carries risks.

Storing carbon at a scale large enough to materially help the climate is now, many scientists say, a must. But it would require facing devilishly difficult dilemmas that extend beyond the technical to the philosophical. What level of confidence should regulators demand before blessing a proposed carbon-storage project as unlikely to leak? Who should be held legally responsible for monitoring the safety of injected carbon, and for how long, and with what penalty for failure? Fights between environmentalists and industry over such questions are growing more intense. And yet, as always in the battle over what to do about the climate, if anything significant is to happen, someone will have to budge, and something is almost certain to go wrong.

Along the road from Beaumont to Port Arthur is a museum dedicated to the Spindletop gusher. It houses a life-size replica of part of a turn-of-the-century boomtown—a vision of the good life, lubricated by oil. The museum stages free gusher reenactments, using water. A long wooden boardwalk guides visitors to a pink granite obelisk, where an engraving on the base says petroleum “has altered man’s way of life throughout the world.”

When the prospectors at Spindletop sold their first barrels of crude, they didn’t know the trade-off they were making on behalf of all humanity. They didn’t know that the price of cheap energy and better living through petrochemicals would be environmental degradation at planetary scale. We have been playing with fire, and it has warmed us and burned us. This suggests a broader lesson worth remembering as we advance, however slowly, from the age of hydrocarbons through the age of decarbonization to the age of renewables. Maybe, when we encounter energy’s next big threat to the environment, we can resist the urge to stick our heads in the sand—and so avoid the last-ditch, multitrillion-dollar, existential slog to bury the problem.

The Big Business of Burying Carbon

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You won’t be confused about electric vehicle charging after reading this

Thu, 28 Jul 2022 20:14:51 +0000

Charging an EV is not nearly as complicated as people think.

A significant factor that scares people away from electric vehicles is confusion around charging. Every gas station in the land is fitted with nozzles that will fill any gasoline-powered car's fuel tank. But not all EVs use the same plug, and then there's the matter of alternating current (AC) versus direct current (DC) systems. And what do the different levels of charging mean?

The good news is that it's not that complicated, and we're here to explain everything you need to know.

EVs require electricity to charge, as the "E" in EV suggests. But that electricity can be AC, like the appliances in your home, or DC, like a USB device, only many times more powerful.

First, a quick note on charging times. Many factors can affect how long charging takes, including the capacity of the battery, its state of charge at the start of the session, the battery's temperature at the start of the session, the actual cell chemistry, and, of course, how much power can be drawn by the EV's battery. Charges can range from a few miles of range added every hour, if you're relying on a household 120 V socket, to as much as 100 miles of range in 10 minutes if you're charging from a powerful DC charger.

It's also worth noting that an EV's battery has a gross capacity that is larger than the useable capacity. Automakers build some overhead into the pack that never gets fully depleted, and we have seen some car companies increase the net capacity with software updates as they become more comfortable with monitoring battery life.

On that topic, remember that any EV sold in the US must have an eight-year/100,000-mile battery warranty. And despite any scary stories you may have heard, there is no reason to think an EV's battery will have to be replaced any sooner than a gasoline-powered car needs a new engine. Finally, since Ars is a US-based site for a primarily US-based audience, this article is focused on US EVs and chargers.

Level 1

Let's start with AC charging, the least-powerful option that takes the longest time to recharge a battery. Most EV owners can charge at home, and at-home charging means using AC. AC charging is also more kind to a lithium-ion EV battery than fast charging, although, again, the myth of deteriorating EV batteries is a misconception; your battery should last the lifetime of the car, just as an engine or fuel tank does.

The cheapest way to do AC charging, and the slowest, is to use a normal 120 V outlet. That's unlikely to supply the car's battery with much more than 1.5 kW, and since EV batteries are mostly in the range of 60–120 kWh, you can see you'll be in for an impractically long wait if you want to take a battery from a low state of charge back to 100 percent. In fact, many OEMs have stopped listing level 1 charge times in their press kits.

But AC charging will add between two to four miles of range each hour, and plenty of EV owners do use level 1 charging, particularly on older EVs with smaller batteries, like the Chevrolet Bolt or Nissan Leaf. And while a full charge might take several days to charge starting from empty if it has a big battery (like a Hummer EV), an EV primarily used for short trips is much easier to keep topped off so that each morning starts with a full battery.

Level 2

The next option still uses AC electricity but at a higher voltage and amperage—240 V and as much as 80 A, although more likely somewhere closer to half of that. How much power an EV can draw from a level 2 supply depends on that car's onboard charger and the amperage of the outlet that the EV supply equipment (EVSE) is connected to. Some might be as low as 3.3 kW in the case of a plug-in hybrid EV, but 7.7 kW or 9.6 kW are common for battery EVs, with a handful able to charge at 19.2 kW.

This Ford E-Transit has its charging port at the front of the van. Here, it's connected to a level 2 charger.

Jonathan Gitlin

An EV usually comes from the manufacturer with a portable EVSE, most often rated at 32 A. For level 2 charging at home at higher rates of power, an EV owner will need to install a hardwired EVSE, either from the OEM or a third party like Juicebox. Also, the free chargers you might find at a shopping mall or parking garage will almost certainly be level 2 chargers.

Again, it's impossible to give exact charging times to 100 percent without knowing the make and model of the EV and the EVSE's power, but a level 2 charger will typically be sufficient to recharge a battery EV overnight. You can expect a level 2 charger to add between 10 to 20 miles of range each hour, depending on the specifics of that EV.

Level 3

An Electrify America DC fast charging station.

Electrify America

Using DC to recharge an EV is where things get much quicker—and more expensive. Between permits and upgraded electrical infrastructure and the actual cost of the DC charger, plus any battery storage, a DC fast charger can cost anywhere from $150,00 to $200,000, making them impractical for home use. But they're useful if you need to drive farther than your battery's range or if you don't have the ability to charge at home, as a level 3 charge—more commonly called a DC fast charge—will rarely take even an hour.

Unlike with AC charging, DC charge times are invariably only quoted to 80 percent. The line that describes a battery charging over time is not linear; it's S-shaped. That means the first few kWh are charged much more quickly than the last few, and it can take as long to fast-charge a battery from 80 to 100 percent as it can from 10 to 80 percent.

Level 3 chargers come in many different kW ratings. Older (or broken) chargers might offer as little as 50 kW—OK for older EVs like the Chevrolet Bolt—but that means more than an hour of waiting time for a newer EV with a larger battery.

As ever, actual charging times will depend on a multitude of factors. Between 30 to 40 minutes to 80 percent is quite common for new EVs, particularly if they're limited to lower power or have battery capacities on the large side. Most EV batteries operate at 400 V, but some use 800 V or even 920 V, and these EVs can charge much more rapidly if they're plugged into a 350 kW level 3 machine. This is how a Porsche Taycan can charge to 80 percent in 22.5 minutes or a Kia EV6 or Hyundai Ioniq 5 can charge to 80 percent in 18 minutes.

Tesla Superchargers may be a walled garden for now, but they do provide a superior user experience.

Tesla

One thing worth bearing in mind is that many charging networks currently appear more focused on deploying new chargers than maintaining existing ones. Although many public level 3 chargers have credit card readers, they're often inoperable, and you may need to download the charging network's app (such as Electrify America, EVGo, ChargePoint, and so on) and create an account to use a charger with the least amount of hassle.

Plugs

Then there's the plug business. While it's true that not all EVs use the same plugs, the reality in 2022 is that there is, in fact, a de facto standard across the US that every new EV sold today uses, with one large and one small exception. This means that it doesn't matter if you drive a Volkswagen ID.4, a Mercedes-Benz EQS, a Nissan Ariya, or a Kia EV6 (to name but four)—all of them use the same plugs and can charge at the same chargers.

The Tesla and CHAdeMO plugs are not to scale, but the CCS Type 1 and J1772 plugs are both shown at the same scale.

Level 1 and level 2 chargers both use the same plug, the SAE J1772. It's a relatively bulky thing with five pins and is rated for everything from 1.4 kW to 19.2 kW.

The de facto standard level 3 plug is the Combined Charging System (CCS) Type 1. It's a much bulkier plug since it combines the already big J1772 plug with two large DC pins below, all attached to a thick and heavy cable. If you buy a new EV today from almost any car maker, it will use CCS Type 1 to fast-charge.

The big exception is Tesla. The company deployed the first of its Superchargers—its brand name for level 3 chargers—in September 2012, while the rest of the auto industry was still getting its act together. So it went with a proprietary plug of its own, a much more elegant and much lighter design. However, even this may change.

The European Union isn't crazy about companies locking customers into proprietary plugs, and European Teslas actually use the European version of CCS, Type 2. Here in the US, federal funding for charging networks requires that the chargers adhere to industry standards, which has led Tesla to explore the idea of adding CCS Type 1 plugs to Superchargers at some point in the future.

The small exception is the Nissan Leaf, which used a rival Japanese charging standard called CHAdeMO. This offered an even bigger, even more cumbersome connector. What's more, it required an EV to have two separate sockets, one CHAdeMO and a second J1772, unlike CCS, which includes the J1772 port. CHAdeMO remains a thing in Japan, but the only EV on sale in the US that still uses CHAdeMO is the Nissan Leaf, and that model is reportedly not long for this world. Consequently, CHAdeMO chargers may be harder to find, but every Electrify America location should include at least one CHAdeMO plug.

Route planning

Of course, in order to charge an EV on the road, you have to be able to find a public charger. And unlike gas stations, charging stations don't often advertise themselves with large illuminated signs that are visible from miles away. That means a road trip requires an extra planning step. But don't worry—it's not nearly as difficult as having to print out MapQuest directions like we used to do, never mind the olden days of road atlases.

Odds are good that the EV you're driving will know where all the chargers are and will be happy to navigate you to them via its onboard navigation system. Depending on the car, it might even know the status of the actual chargers there and may even begin heating your battery to ensure the quickest fast charge once you plug in.

But, many EV drivers rely on third-party smartphone apps, including PlugShare and A Better Route Planner (although this one requires a subscription). Usually, these apps let you plan routes, taking into account the battery capacity and efficiency of the EV you're driving, its starting state of charge, and how much charge you want remaining when you arrive at your destination.

It's also useful to download the apps for charging networks, as those apps will provide the real-time status of chargers—whether they're functional, in use, or broken. If you're in a pinch, especially if you're driving in rural areas, some dealerships will let you use their level 2 chargers. An app like PlugShare will list those, along with check-ins from users that have successfully charged there.

You can even use the US Department of Energy's database of EV charging stations website (or its smartphone apps), which as of press time contains 49,430 level 2 and 3 locations in total, of which 6,415 are level 3 fast chargers.

Expect those numbers to grow significantly in the next few years as the federal government spends $5 billion on fast chargers located roughly every 50 miles across the Interstate Highway System.

You won’t be confused about electric vehicle charging after reading this

India isolates monkeypox virus, first step to vaccines

Thu, 28 Jul 2022 06:04:16 +0000

Monkeypox virus is an enveloped double-stranded DNA virus with two distinct genetic clades—the central African (Congo Basin) clade and the West African clade.

The fluid inside skin lesions of an infected patient was used to isolate a live virus, since this fluid has concentrations of the pathogen. (HT Photo)

The National Institute of Virology in Pune said on Wednesday that it has successfully isolated the monkeypox virus from the clinical specimen of a patient, overcoming a key hurdle for any future vaccination plan since this now allows researchers in the country to begin working on an inoculation as well as test kits.

At present, the sole licensed vaccine for monkeypox is the one made for smallpox by a Danish company, and the live virus on which it is based – the variola virus, a family of pathogens to which both diseases belong – is stored only at two locations, the Centers for Disease Control lab in Atlanta, Georgia and the State Research Center of Virology and Biotechnology (VECTOR Institute) in Koltsovo, Russia.

“The isolation of the monkeypox virus will help in the development of diagnostic kits and also vaccines in future. For smallpox, live attenuated vaccine was successful for mass immunisation in the past. Similar approaches on new platforms can be tried for making vaccines,” said Dr Pragya Yadav, a senior scientist at NIV Pune.

She added that the virus isolate will also researchers study its behaviour and how it infects, helping work on containment measures.

Monkeypox virus is an enveloped double-stranded DNA virus with two distinct genetic clades—the central African (Congo Basin) clade and the West African clade.

The fluid inside skin lesions of an infected patient was used to isolate a live virus, since this fluid has concentrations of the pathogen.

Health experts explained that pathogen isolation is challenging and requires a sophisticated facilities to ensure there is no contamination and scientists do not het infected.

“Taking the process of virus isolation to vaccine production is even more complicated because that requires really high bio-safety levels. Only few facilities in the world have this,” said Dr Giridhar Babu, professor and head life course epidemiology at Public Health Foundation of India.

“They did it in case of Covid-19 where the virus was isolated at NIV and it production was initiated by Bharat Biotech. They can follow the same process but not every vaccine works in the same way,” he added.

NIV Pune is certified as a Bio Safety Level 4 (BSL 4) laboratory, which allows it to handle live viruses.

Wednesday’s development harks back to the early days of the pandemic when NIV Pune isolated the Sars-CoV-2, and the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) then entered into an agreement with Bharat Biotech to produce a vaccine, which eventually was branded as Covaxin and is now one of the two most widely used in the country.

The lab also entered into an agreement with Cadila Healthcare, sharing the details of the Sars-CoV-2 pathogen that allowed the Gujarat-based company to create its vaccine, the ZyCoV-D.

India is among the world’s pharma powerhouses, with some of the biggest vaccine producers by volume, such as Serum Institute of India and Biological E churning out millions of doses of various inoculations every month.

India isolates monkeypox virus, first step to vaccines

AI Could Become Bigger Threat Than Nuclear Weapons, Warns Ex-Google CEO

Thu, 28 Jul 2022 05:57:43 +0000

"We’re not ready for the negotiations we need," Schmidt argues.

Autonomous AI weapons are starting to emerge on battlefields, but the world has not agreed how to regulate them. Image credit: Design Projects/Shutterstock.com

Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt put forward a bold warning that the unmitigated advance of artificial intelligence (AI) could snowball into a global conflict of mutually ensured destruction, not too dissimilar from the potential impact of the nuclear weapons arms race that exploded in the Cold War.

Speaking at the Aspen Security Forum on July 22, Schmidt argues that the global powers are simply not ready to negotiate about how to manage the growing advance of AI. In turn, this could further weaken trust between two jostling superpowers, such as the US and China, and even slip into conflict.

Citing the power of information technology, he goes on to talk about how geopolitical powers like China and the US need to start having a conversation about AI regulation and establish treaties on the technology.

However, he says it’s currently unclear how such a negotiation would unfold since both diplomatic parties would need to bring individuals with in-depth technical knowledge of AI and its potential future.

“Let’s say we want to have a chat with China on some kind of treaty around AI surprises. Very reasonable. How would we do it? Who in the US government would work with us? And it’s even worse on the Chinese side. Who do we call? […] We’re not ready for the negotiations we need," Schmidt argues.

With geopolitical paranoia mounting across the world, he suggests that this is a similar situation to the nuclear arms race of the Cold War – but with worryingly less oversight than before.

“In the 50s and 60s, we eventually worked out a world where there was a ‘no surprise’ rule about nuclear tests and eventually they were banned. When somebody launches a missile, for testing or whatever, they notify everyone. Everyone then uses their missile defense system to watch to train the systems,” he explained.

“It’s an example of a balance of trust or lack of trust: it’s a ‘no surprises’ rule. I’m very concerned that the US view of China as corrupt or Communist or whatever, and the Chinese view of America as failing will allow people to say ‘Oh my god, they’re up to something,’ and then begin some kind of conundrum. Begin some kind of thing where, because you’re arming or getting ready, you then trigger the other side,” said Schmidt.

It’s unclear what exactly Schmidt is alluding to here, but he’s leaning on the premise that many global powers are in the dark about what their potential adversaries are up to, at least when it comes to AI.

If one power, rightly or wrongly, started to suspect their rival was developing AI autonomous weapons, then we could see how tension would escalate and they may feel the need to squire such weapons. This is all just a thought experience for now, but Schmidt argues that it’s something the world urgently needs to consider before it’s too late.

Schmidt is not alone with his warnings. Even Elon Musk – who generally opposes government intervention, unless you include subsidies for his own businesses – has also been a prominent voice calling for greater regulation of AI.

“We don’t have anyone working on that and yet AI is that powerful,” Schmidt warned.

AI Could Become Bigger Threat Than Nuclear Weapons, Warns Ex-Google CEO

Study sheds light on how dogs recognize their favorite toys

Thu, 28 Jul 2022 05:47:18 +0000

Dogs construct "multisensory mental representations" by encoding different features.

A new study found that dogs form a “multi-model mental image” of their toys.

Specific breeds of dogs, like border collies, can learn the verbal names of their favorite toys, but what is going on in the dog's mind when it's told to fetch a given toy? According to a recent paper published in the journal Animal Cognition, these dogs store key sensory features about their toys—notably what they look like and how they smell—and recall those features when searching for the named toy.

"If we can understand which senses dogs use while searching for a toy, this may reveal how they think about it," said co-author Shany Dror, a biologist at Eotvos Lorand University in Budapest, Hungary. "When dogs use olfaction or sight while searching for a toy, this indicates that they know how that toy smells or looks like."

Prior studies suggested that dogs typically rely on vision, or a combination of sight and smell, to locate target objects. Few dogs can also identify objects based on verbal labels, which the authors call "gifted word learner" (GWL) dogs. "Just like humans, GWL dogs not only recognize the labeled objects—or categories of objects—as stimuli they have already encountered, but they also identify them among other similarly familiar named objects, based on their verbal labels," the authors wrote. They wanted to investigate whether GWL dogs have an enhanced ability to discriminate and/or recognize objects compared to typical dogs.

To find out, they conducted two separate experiments. The first involved 14 dogs, three of which were GWL dogs (all border collies): Max, Gaia, and Nalani. All three had participated in prior studies and demonstrated they knew the names of more than 20 dog toys. Most of the dogs were tested in the lab; three were tested in their homes using the same experimental setup. The experimenter and the dog's owner stood with the dog in one room. An adjacent room held dog toys. The rooms were connected by a corridor and separated by heavy curtains. All the windows were covered with dark nylon sheets.

This very good boy named Max happily poses with a collection of toys.

Cooper Photo

The same 10 unfamiliar dog toys were used with all the dogs, and the toys were of different shapes, sizes, colors, and materials. The experimenter randomly divided the toys into two sets, and then picked one toy randomly out of each set to be the target toy. The other four toys in each set were "distractor objects." The owner then played with their dog using a target toy, sometimes placing it with the other toys and commanding the dog to retrieve it. When the dog successfully retrieved the target toy, the dog received a reward.

After the training phase, each dog was tested in both light and dark conditions with the corridor, and toy room lights turned off. They were asked 10 times to retrieve the target toy from among the other four toys in a set, which had been randomly scattered on the floor. The toys were reshuffled between each iteration. Everything was recorded using an infrared video camera, and the researchers recorded not just toy selection and retrieval but also searching and sniffing behavior.

The second experimental setup and location were the same as the first, but only the three GWL dogs were tested, along with an additional GWL dog named Whisky. All four knew the names of the 20 toys used in the experiment, scattered randomly on the floor. This constituted a more complex case of object recognition; the dogs could not simply rely on familiarity with the toys to retrieve the target toy successfully. Each owner commanded their dog to retrieve a particular toy by naming it. If the dog retrieved the correct toy, it was rewarded. Once again, the dogs were tested in both light and dark conditions.

All the dogs in the first experiment—regardless of whether they were GWL dogs or typical dogs—successfully picked out the target toys in both light and dark conditions, although it took them longer to locate the toys in the dark. Most relied on visual cues, even though dogs possess an excellent sense of smell. However, the dogs sniffed more frequently and longer when searching for the toy in the dark. The GWL dogs in the second experiment were also able to select the named toys when commanded by their owners, with similar reliance on visual cues—what the toy looks like—augmented by their sense of smell (what the toy smells like), particularly in dark conditions.

According to the authors, this confirms that when dogs play with a toy, they record its features using multiple senses, creating a "multistory mental image." They prefer to rely primarily on visual cues, but dogs can incorporate other sensory cues, most notably smell, when the conditions call for it.

In short, "Dogs spontaneously encode different features of the objects, leading to the construction of multisensory mental representations," the authors concluded. "In the case of GWL dogs, a memory of the multisensory representation is evoked by hearing the objects' verbal labels as they perform complex object recognition tasks."

DOI: Animal Cognition, 2022. 10.1007/s10071-022-01639-z (About DOIs).

Listing image by Cooper Photo

Study sheds light on how dogs recognize their favorite toys

News: General News

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The Big Business of Burying Carbon

The porous rock beneath the Gulf Coast launched the petroleum age. Now entrepreneurs want to turn it into a gigantic sponge for storing CO2.

You won’t be confused about electric vehicle charging after reading this

Charging an EV is not nearly as complicated as people think.

Level 1

Level 2

Level 3

Plugs

Route planning

India isolates monkeypox virus, first step to vaccines

AI Could Become Bigger Threat Than Nuclear Weapons, Warns Ex-Google CEO

"We’re not ready for the negotiations we need," Schmidt argues.

Study sheds light on how dogs recognize their favorite toys

Dogs construct "multisensory mental representations" by encoding different features.

The porous rock beneath the Gulf Coast launched the petroleum age. Now entrepreneurs want to turn it into a gigantic sponge for storing CO₂.