SCiO is made to analyze ... everything

 

The SCiO Pocket Molecular Sensor

Wondering how nutritious that food is, if that plant needs water, or just what that misplaced pill is? Well, the makers of SCiO claim that their device is able to tell you all of those things, plus a lot more. To use it, you just scan the item in question for one or two seconds, then check the readout on a Bluetooth 4.0-linked smartphone.

SCiO is actually a miniature spectroscope. Like the bigger, more expensive laboratory-grade models it's based on, it works by shining near-infrared light on materials, exciting their molecules in the process. By analyzing the light that's reflected off those vibrating molecules, it's reportedly possible to identify them by their unique optical signature, and thus determine the chemical composition of the material.

In the case of SCiO, an accompanying iOS or Android app sends its readings to the cloud, where algorithms process the data in real time. The results should appear on the phone's screen within a matter of seconds.

According to Consumer Physics, the Tel Aviv-based company that's developing the device, it will initially come with apps that allow it to analyze food, plants and medication. As described in a press release:

"The food app delivers macro nutrient values (calories, fats, carbohydrates, and proteins), produce quality, ripeness, and spoilage analysis for various foods, including cheeses, fruits, vegetables, sauces, salad dressings, cooking oils, and more. SCiO can also identify and authenticate medication in real-time by cross-checking a pill's molecular makeup with a database of medications. Finally, SCiO can analyze moisture levels in plants and tell users when to water them."

The company also plans on providing an Application Development Kit, so that third parties can create their own apps for use with SCiO. These apps could greatly expand the variety of materials that can be analyzed, as the designers claim that it should work on just about any material, "including cosmetics, clothes, flora, soil, jewels and precious stones, leather, rubber, oils, plastics, and even human tissue or bodily fluids."

SCiO is powered by an integrated battery, that should provide approximately one week of use per charge. It's compatible with iPhone 4S and up, iPad 3rd generation and later, and with devices using Android 4.3 and later. Consumer Physics is currently raising funds for its commercial production, through Kickstarter. A pledge of US$179 will get you one when and if they're ready to ship, this December.

The very similar TellSpec is also presently in development, although it's being marketed more as a food-specific device.

 

Sources: Consumer Physics, Kickstarter

Scientists spin up graphene in a kitchen blender

 

Bottles filled with water, detergent and graphene flakes – the graphene absorbs a small amount of light, leading to the darkened appearance of the mixture (Photo: CRANN)

It is one atom thick and touted to be stronger than steel. Graphene has captured the scientific and public imagination as the wonder material of the 21st century. Now, researchers at Trinity College Dublin have found a way to extract the substance from graphite – using a kitchen blender and some liquid soap.

Since Konstantin Novoselov and Andre Geim of Manchester University managed to extract graphene (which is a two-dimensional slice of graphite) using a piece of transparent tape, the buzz around this super-strong, super-conductive material has tended toward the superlative. Novoselov and Geim received the Nobel Prize for their discoveries in 2010, but still the quest continues for a method of scaling up graphene extraction to an industrial, or even a vaguely practical level.

Now, researchers at Trinity College Dublin have found a new and relatively quick way to obtain graphene from a sample of graphite, and their revolutionary equipment consists of a modest kitchen blender and liquid detergent. According to Dr. Keith Paton, who worked on the project, this was a "sighting" experiment, which was carried out "to test the feasibility of using shear mixing to exfoliate graphene."

Method

In their experiment, the Trinity College Dublin team describe how they took a high-power (400-watt) kitchen blender and added half a liter of water, 10-25 milliliters of detergent and 20-50 grams of graphite powder (found in pencil leads). They turned the machine on for 10-30 minutes. The process resulted in a large number of micrometer-sized flakes of graphene, suspended in the water.

Kitchen-sink solutions

The cheapest shear-mixing appliance is a regular kitchen blender, Dr. Paton explains, which was why the team chose to employ it in the first trials. Though adding liquid to the blender with the graphite allowed the graphene to shear off, at the end of the process the material would just settle at the bottom of the blender and re-aggregate.

The researchers realized they needed a surfactant to keep the flakes separated and dispersed in the liquid. Again, they decided to begin with the most available source, regular liquid dish-washing detergent, and they found that this worked nearly as well as an industrial product.

A standard kitchen blender, and transmission electron microscope images of graphene flakes (Photo: CRANN)

Scaling up

While the kitchen blender and dish soap experiment proved the concept, the researchers are keen to emphasize that this method is not easily scalable for industrial or commercial use. As their relatively low-tech trial was successful, they then moved to more sophisticated equipment. The rotor-stator mixer is a laboratory-quality device that has rotating blades and a stationary screen. There is a very small gap between the elements through which the liquid and graphite are squeezed, and this yields very high rates of shearing and exfoliation of graphene from the graphite.

Dr. Paton likens the process to "sliding your hands across a deck of cards," causing them to spread and separate. After being exfoliated in flakes, the graphene can be recovered in a number of ways, including using filtering processes or by allowing the liquid to evaporate. The experiment with the rotor-stator proved that the blender method could be scaled up to an industrial level of production, and this is what is getting people excited.

 

The stronger, lighter, super-conductor

The excitement is generated by the potential for the new material, graphene. The marvel is in its strength (said to be 200 times that of a comparable quantity of steel), the fact that it is extremely lightweight, and because it is highly conductive. According to Dr. Paton, this means that "commercial printing techniques, such as ink-jet or screen-printing, could be used to create very thin, flexible electronics, including batteries and super-capacitors.” There is also talk of a folding touchscreen device that uses graphene for the screen or for the connecting circuit.

Graphene could also be used for very thin, flexible, perhaps more efficient and transparent solar cells. And there is significant potential in strengthening plastics. Since a very minute amount of graphene can improve the strength of PET (plastic used widely in drink bottles) by around 40 percent, this could result in a huge reduction in the amount of plastic required.

All that having been said, two separate studies have recently raised concerns about the dangers that graphene could pose both to ourselves, and to the environment.

While it may seem to have burst onto the scene, experiments with graphene go back at least to 2004, when Novoselov and Geim conducted their tape experiment. This latest discovery was the outcome of a collaborative project between Thomas Swan (manufacturer of specialty chemicals) and CRANN (the Centre for Research on Adaptive Nanostructures and Nanodevices) at Trinity College Dublin. The work was carried out at CRANN where the team was led by Professor Jonathan Coleman.

Source: Nature.com

New research shows blood tests could be effective in diagnosing depression

 

Research suggests a blood test to detect depression is possible (Photo: Shutterstock)

At present, reaching a diagnosis for depression typically involves interviews with the patient, resulting in a drawn out and costly process. Some recent research efforts have sought to address this, such as a diagnostic technique that measures electrical activity in the brain to more quickly detect mental illness. Now a team of Austrian researchers has demonstrated a link between levels of serotonin in the blood and the depression network in the brain, meaning that diagnosing depression could soon become a much more efficient undertaking.

Working at the Department of Biological Psychiatry at the Medical University of Vienna, a team led by Associate Professor Lukas Pezawas examined the relationship between the speed of serotonin uptake in blood platelets and the neural depression network in the brain.

The study focused on the serotonin transporter (SERT), a protein in the membrane that enables serotonin to be transported into the cell. In the brain, this regulates the depression network and is key in fending off depressive conditions.

Recent studies have demonstrated that not only is this serotonin transporter also present in the blood, it works in the same way that it does in the brain, ensuring that the concentration of serotonin in the blood plasma is kept at healthy levels. In observing this process alongside functional magnetic resonance imaging of the brain, the team concluded that there is in fact a close relationship between the rate of serotonin uptake in the blood and the function of the neural depression network.

"This is the first study that has been able to predict the activity of a major depression network in the brain using a blood test," says Pezawas. "While blood tests for mental illnesses have until recently been regarded as impossible, this study clearly shows that a blood test is possible in principle for diagnosing depression and could become reality in the not too distant future."

The team's research was published in the journal PLOS ONE.

Source: Medical University of Vienna

Wonder-material graphene could be dangerous to humans and the environment

 

Jacob D Lanphere, a Ph.D. student at UC Riverside, holds a sample of graphene oxide

I've been waiting for some time now to write a headline along the lines of "scientists discover thing that graphene is not amazing at" ... and here it is. Everybody’s favorite nanomaterial may have a plethora of near-magical properties, but as it turns out, it could also be bad for the environment – and bad for you, too.

It’s easy to get carried away when you start talking about graphene. Comprised of single atom thick layers of carbon, graphene is incredibly light, incredibly strong, extremely flexible and highly conductive both of heat and electricity. Its properties hold the promise of outright technological revolution in so many fields that it has been called a wonder material.

But it’s only been 10 years since graphene was first isolated in the laboratory, and as researchers and industries scramble to bring graphene out of the lab and into a vast range of commercial applications, far less money is being spent examining its potential negative effects.

Two recent studies give us a less than rosy angle. In the first, a team of biologists, engineers and material scientists at Brown University examined graphene’s potential toxicity in human cells. They found that the jagged edges of graphene nanoparticles, super sharp and super strong, easily pierced through cell membranes in human lung, skin and immune cells, suggesting the potential to do serious damage in humans and other animals.

"These materials can be inhaled unintentionally, or they may be intentionally injected or implanted as components of new biomedical technologies," said Robert Hurt, professor of engineering and one of the study’s authors. "So we want to understand how they interact with cells once inside the body."

Another study by a team from University of California, Riverside’s Bourns College of Engineering examined how graphene oxide nanoparticles might interact with the environment if they found their way into surface or ground water sources.

The team found that in groundwater sources, where there’s little organic material and the water has a higher degree of hardness, graphene oxide nanoparticles tended to become less stable and would eventually settle out or be removed in sub-surface environments.

But in surface water such as lakes or rivers, where there’s more organic material and less hardness, the particles stayed much more stable and showed a tendency to travel further, particularly under the surface.

So a spill of these kinds of nanoparticles would appear to have the potential to cause harm to organic matter, plants, fish, animals, and humans. The affected area could be quick to spread, and could take some time to become safe again.

"The situation today is similar to where we were with chemicals and pharmaceuticals 30 years ago," said the paper’s co-author Jacob D. Lanphere. "We just don’t know much about what happens when these engineered nanomaterials get into the ground or water. So we have to be proactive so we have the data available to promote sustainable applications of this technology in the future."

At this stage, the Material Safety Data Sheet governing the industrial use of graphene is incomplete. It’s listed as a potential irritant of skin and eyes, and potentially hazardous to breathe in or ingest. No information is available on whether it has carcinogenic effects or potential developmental toxicity.

But researchers from the first study point out that this is a material in its infancy, and as a man-made material, there are opportunities at this early stage to examine and understand the potential harmful properties of graphene and try to engineer them out. We’ve got a few years yet before graphene really starts being a big presence in our lives, so the challenge is set to work out how to make it as safe as possible for ourselves and our planet.

The Brown University research was published online in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The UC Riverside paper was published in a special issue of the journal Environmental Engineering Science.

Sources: Brown University, UC Riverside

Secondary source:

Climate Change and the Medical Analogy

 

I’ve often used the insurance analogy to promote action in response to the threat of climate change: since the potential exists for a fire to damage or burn down your home, you’ve probably taken out fire insurance along with removing some of things that might cause the fire and, perhaps, have placed a fire extinguisher or two around. In climate change parlance, these are forms of mitigation and adaptation.

And that’s in response to the mere threat of a problem, not the reality of an oncoming fire. In the case of climate change, according to the IPCC and others, we’ve moved from threat to actual occurrence.

But perhaps there’s a better analogy. At a recent New School conference (and this makes two successive posts emerging out of conferences at The New School, where I teach), Paul C. Stern drew a medical analogy. Climate scientists, he said, could be seen as the equivalent of medical doctors diagnosing a patient, with the patient being the planet. Expanding the analogy, humanity is the guardian of the planet. Having sought multiple opinions, the vast consensus is that the patient is suffering from “a serious progressive disease” -- anthropocentric climate change -- and we, as guardians, need to address the problem.

As with medical diagnoses, one can treat causes or symptoms. With climate change, addressing the causes is termed mitigation, as opposed to addressing the symptoms, which is adaptation. Typically it’s better to work toward mitigation since, if is successful, adaptation is unnecessary. However we don’t know whether it’s too late to effectively prevent catastrophic climate change impacts, and that means we need to work on both mitigation and adaptation.

These metaphors are needed because, as more than one speaker at the conference noted, many people have a hard time getting their heads around the issues of climate change. As Columbia Earth Institute prof Elke Weber stated in the opening panel, “we are overwhelmed by the magnitude of the required response.” There are a multitude of goals involved, some of which are conflicting and one result is that we don’t feel in control. In a line I especially liked, she said “there are no silver bullets, only silver buckshot.” Which is another way of saying we need to pursue both mitigation and adaptation.

In the concluding panel, NYU Professor of Environmental Studies and Philosophy Dale Jamieson expanded on the difficulty we have grasping the complexity and urgency of global warming. “[Climate change] is not just a really hard problem, but an unprecedented problem.” We try to “fit it into boxes,” but because it is unprecedented, that doesn’t often work.

These analogy “boxes” may not fit perfectly, but the fact that climate change is such a “wicked problem” makes analogies all the more important in enabling us to deal with the problem.

A version of this post originally appeared in EcoOptimism.com.

 

Canopy: A Curated Site That Finds the Best Stuff You Can Buy on Amazon

 

All this stuff’s on Amazon? Whaaaat? Photo Illustration: WIRED

Amazon is a great place to shop. It is not a great place to browse. The downside of having an inventory that spans everything from spatulas to stuffed animals to micro SD cards is that it inevitably becomes a destination for buying those sorts of humdrum products, not a place you go to discover cool new ones.

Buried deep in its massive catalog, though, Amazon does indeed have all sorts of nice stuff. Canopy was built to help you find it.

Created by a group of former Google designers without any official affiliation to Amazon, Canopy is a curated storefront trading exclusively in beautiful products that happen to be sold on Amazon.com. It’s the same type of fare you might expect to find on sites like Svpply or Uncrate: well-designed watches, bowls, knives, stools and blankets. But where those sorts of sites so often lead to 404 pages and out-of-stock listings, Canopy comes with a built-in guarantee: everything you see is not only available to buy with a few clicks but is also eligible for free 2-day shipping with your Prime account. Online shoppers with little self-control, beware.

Treating Products Like Works of Art

The idea to build a shopping layer on top of Amazon took shape around a simple realization: while Amazon’s back-end can’t be beat, its front-end is a total mess. “We all prefer to buy things on Amazon to just about anywhere else,” says Brian Armstrong, one of the designers who co-founded the site. “Amazon has a great infrastructure to deliver products. But they’re much less involved in the kind of questions of taste around products, and how to best provide context that’s going to make you feel special when you’re buying it. These are areas we think are super important.”

Canopy: a boutique store where everything’s eligible for Prime shipping. Image: Canopy

Taste is the first filter for the stuff you’ll find on Canopy. Every one of the 7,000-some products currently on the site was hand-picked by Canopy’s five-person staff. They are, by and large, things you would not expect to find on Amazon. Visiting the site for the first time can be surprising. The real life equivalent would be like walking into a boutique store, finding a nice throw pillow, and realizing upon check-out that the inventory room in the back is actually a fully stocked Walmart.

But Canopy’s not just concerned with curation. It’s also an effort to change how these products are being presented. On Amazon, Armstrong points out, every product is shuffled into the same homogenized product page. “I recently bought a sim card adapter on Amazon–some cheap, $2 plastic thing, and the detail page for that is exactly same as an iPad or a beautiful piece of furniture,” he says. Even the nicest, most thoughtfully made objects lose some luster under the fluorescent glare of Amazon’s sterile virtual shelves. “They’re not treated with the respect that they deserve,” Armstrong explains.

Canopy’s product page, by comparison, is much cleaner–and much more deferential to the product itself. It shows a photo, a few related items, comments that have been left by Canopy members, and a prominent link to Amazon. According to Armstrong, the idea is to treat each product like a piece of art.

To this end, Canopy puts special care into product photography. It’s one place where Amazon’s disinterested approach to its inventory is occasionally made plain. Armstrong remembers seeing a nice mortal and pestle set in a New York Times gift guide last holiday season, accompanied by a beautiful photograph the Times itself had commissioned. Out of curiosity, Armstrong checked to see if it was on Amazon. It was–with a 50 x 50 pixel image, blown-up to a point of near indecipherability. “It looked terrible,” he recalls.

To avoid this sort of mess, Canopy manually curates the image for every product it adds to the site. The team could even start doing product photography of its own for future sections of the site.

The idea is to treat each product like a work of art. Image: Canopy

Giving Amazon a New Face

Canopy recently opened up to the public, but it’s still figuring out what exactly the experience should entail. Currently, the default view is a popular page, where products are algorithmically surfaced based on the number of users who have recommended them. You can also browse by category or search if you’ve got something in mind. The next step is figuring out how to get people to come back to the site.

“We think of Canopy like a museum of amazing products where all of the products are available to buy right now,” Armstrong says. “It’s similar to the MOMA store in some way. And I think right now we’ve built the MOMA store. What we haven’t built are the exhibits.” Amazon doesn’t have any trouble bringing buyers back to the site; we head there by reflex when we need a book, or a spatula, or a SIM card adapter. One challenge Canopy faces is figuring out how to draw people back to their less-expansive offerings.

The big question, of course, is how Amazon feels about a bunch of upstarts building a museum store on top of its infrastructure. Apparently, totally fine. Armstrong met with a group of Amazon execs early in the development of the site and received their blessing. After all, while Canopy’s referral links will net its creators a small percentage of every transaction, the site ultimately serves to drive buyers to Amazon itself.

There’s a chance, however, that Canopy could ultimately help Amazon in ways that go beyond its discovery problems. Armstrong says he’s already been contacted by a number of companies who don’t normally associate with Amazon. Where their brands don’t necessarily align with Amazon’s, they might well be a good fit for Canopy. Armstrong had just had a conversation with an L.A.-based essential ware outfit earlier this month. “They had never actually considered shipping on Amazon before,” he says, “but they were willing to go through the process of getting their products on Amazon in order to be on Canopy.”

By offering an alternative to Amazon’s unglamorous virtual shelves, in other words, Canopy could actually help bring new products into the ecosystem. In that sense, a prettier face for the world’s biggest virtual store could be something everyone welcomes.

 

A Razor That Reaches Every Weird Spot on Your Face

 

 

Photo: Courtesy of Gillette

Gillette’s new FlexBall razor may be the first razor designed to eliminate craning your neck and making dumb faces while shaving.

Rather than add yet another blade to its shaving cartridges, the FlexBall features a new handle design. The key addition is a more nimble pivoting head, one that swings side to side with a 24-degree range of motion and works with the company’s existing ProGlide blade cartridges.

The FlexBall isn’t literally a ball joint, but it behaves like one. The dual-hinge system–a side-to-side pivot beneath the traditional tilting blade mechanism–allows the blade to stay in contact with skin more regularly, sort of like a car with an independent suspension system.

“We shave in straight lines, but our faces aren’t flat,” says Stew Taub, director of Shave Care research and development at Gillette. “That causes the blade to miss contact, and men try to alter their faces to improve contact with the blade.”

The FlexBall’s more pliable design also means you don’t have to lift and reposition the razor as often. According to Taub, the average number of individual lifts and strokes per shave is around 150. Some 750-stroke shaves have even been documented. The new pivothead makes it more like shaving in cursive. Gillette says you can trim your entire face with a single meandering sweep of the new razor. That’s a unlikely shaving strategy, but it’s possible with this razor.

Gillette says FlexBall has been in development for five years, time needed to nail down the right range of motion and resistance for the razor. Because no one shaves the same way–and no two faces are the same–it took several years to get it right. The company leaned heavily on computer simulations and high-speed cameras that helped capture data on peoples’ shaving habits in Gillette’s labs.

“For me, the problem area is under the chin,” says Taub. “Every guy’s face is different, and we all use different pressure on the razor. Our hair density is different. Whether you shave in the shower or at the sink, how well you hydrate hair–all these things make a huge difference in the shave. What the FlexBall does, you don’t have to go over tricky areas as much. Overall it will lead to a lower probability of cutting yourself or missing hairs.”

Video: Courtesy of Gillette. GIF: WIRED

In my experience, the new razor’s fluidity and flexibility does seem to come in handy when you’re transitioning from your jowls to under your jawbone or shaving along the cheekbone–prime areas to end up dotted with little squares of toilet paper. But old habits die hard, and it’s tough to get used to just shaving a large patch in one fell swoop; you’ll probably find yourself lifting the razor as often as ever to start. Is it the most revolutionary thing to ever happen in the world of shaving? No, but the experience did feel smoother than shaving with my normal razor. It is an improvement.

Still, there’s a bit of controversy surrounding the new system. New York Magazine’s Kevin Roose calls FlexBall an example of “everything that’s wrong with American innovation,” mostly because Gillette added predictable stuff like another pivot point instead of adding cooler stuff like lasers. And Quartz’s Gideon Lichfield compares the new razor to a duck’s penis.

The main points of contention are that the razor industry is always up to something, and that something has everything to do with selling more blades. In recent years, new companies such as Dollar Shave Club have established themselves as cheaper, hassle-free alternatives to the traditional routine of selling cheap handles and pricey cartridges. Coming from the old guard, a system like FlexBall seems like another forced-upgrade gimmick.

But beyond the smoother-feeling shave, there’s evidence that Gillette’s new tricks go beyond that.  It has responded to Dollar Shave Club’s model by launching its own lower-priced blade-subscription service. And the fact that the FlexBall razor uses existing blades is a welcome oddity in the world of razors, where new systems are often introduced simply to sell newer, pricier cartridges. According to Taub, the new handles will do a better job with the same blades.

“We knew from the beginning that we wanted it to be compatible with (ProGlide blades), because it took us nearly a decade to develop ProGlide,” says Taub. “We knew we already have the best cartridge technology. But we needed to help the cartridge work better. That’s a handle problem, not a cartridge problem.”

400 Years of Beautiful, Historical, and Powerful Globes

 

 

Globes