Can we build a complete wiring diagram of the human brain?

 

A "connectome," or map of neural pathways and wires, of a human brain (Credit: Human Connectome Project) Our brains are wondrous, incredible machines. They're slower than the earliest personal computers in terms of raw processing power, yet capable of leaps of intuition and able to store a lifetime of memories that are cross-referenced and instantly-accessible at the slightest prompting. We know so very little about how they do these things, however. But imagine for a moment if we could build a complete wiring diagram of a human brain – to map in detail every one of the hundred trillion or so synapses and roughly hundred billion neurons together with all the tiniest supporting mechanisms. What might that mean, and would it even be possibl Keep thinking about that. We'll come back to it in a bit. First let's cover some more background. The functioning of a healthy brain relies on its network of neuronal connections. Multiple layers of connections and pathways, like the wires of an old mainframe computer, all add up to a single entity. This network of connections has been called the "connectome" by scientists. To map it is essentially to build the brain's wiring diagram. The human brain connectome has not yet been fully mapped at the cellular or the macro (high-level structural and functional) scale, though efforts to do the latter are much further along than the former – which has only just even become possible (more on that later). Both avenues of connectome study promise all sorts of insights about how the brain works. The Human Connectome Project, which is an international effort to map the connectomes of 1,000 people on a macro scale – mostly just the white matter, or active myelinated (insulated) nerve cell bundles – using magnetic resonance imaging, this week announced its finding that brain wiring patterns correlate with behavioral and demographic traits. An fMRI-generated connectome of the human brain that shows active connections between neurons The study found that in a sample of 460 people aged between 22 and 35, people with more education, better physical endurance, above-average memory, and other "positive" traits seem to have more strongly-connected brains than people with "negative" traits such as smoking, aggressive behavior, or a history of drug use. The results don't indicate whether one causes the other, but they do show that connectivity patterns could one day help predict traits or offer broad indicators of the effect of drugs on the brain.   It's all connected Jeff Lichtman is a professor at Harvard University. He's one of the world's leading researchers in neurobiology, which looks at the brain and nervous system of animals and humans in terms of its anatomy and physiology (i.e., its cells and tissues, and the way they function and are organized). And he runs Harvard'sLichtman Lab. His journey in the field started when he was taking a course on histology – the study of tissues of the body – in medical school. During the clinical component of the course – which delves into pathology, or the study of disorders/diseases in bodily tissues – he was struck by how there's no physical sign of what's wrong in autism, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and other maladies of the nervous system. "This was very different from all the other organ systems where when you look at the tissue there's something to see that is the physical equivalent or correlate of the disease," Lichtman tells us. There's always a physical abnormality like an inflammation or discoloration. But not so for most diseases and disorders that affect the brain. "After a while I realized that the reason there aren't abnormalities is not that there really aren't any, but because no one's ever actually looked at the brain at the level of resolution they'd have to look to see these abnormalities," Lichtman continues. The brain is vastly more complicated than any other organ, however, so it's not just a matter of zooming in further – although that's a big part of it. "People will take a single section through a piece of brain and show a synapse," Lichtman explains. "But the brain works by virtue of these connections that allow one nerve cell to talk to many other nerve cells, sort of like a Twitter account, and each nerve cell is also the recipient of a network of information from thousands of other nerve cells." As a graduate student, Lichtman studied the peripheral nervous system of human babies and other mammalian babies. He noted dramatic rewiring of the nervous system as the babies developed, then developed a technique to map it out using colors. But there aren't enough colors to show all of the wires in the cerebral cortex. He needed another method. Lichtman's Brainbow technique was used here to color code the wires in a mouse's (a) ear muscle, (b) brainstem axon tract, and (c) hippocampal dentate gyrus, as part of a 2008 study Size matters Only one animal's full connectome has been constructed thus far: the roundworm C. elegans, which has a mere 302 neurons and serves as the model for research and data sharing in the field. But researchers are also putting considerable effort into mapping the mouse connectome, since mice are easily accessible in the lab and they serve as animal models for many kinds of medical studies. It's in the mouse connectome that Lichtman and 20 of his colleagues in a joint Harvard and Boston University-led study chose to show off the latest new imaging technology earlier this year. They essentially figured out a way to adapt electron microscopy, which goes down to nanoscale resolutions, for brain imaging. And they tested the technology on a tiny slice of an adult mouse's neocortex, gaining new insights into the complex relationship between axons (nerve fibers) and dendrites (branches on neurons that act kind of like electric input sockets). Lichtman believes this technology may help with many clinical studies, such as one his lab is working on that explores the difference in brains of healthy mice and those that have an equivalent of a human autism gene for the rare neurodevelopmental disorder Rett syndrome. A key part of science is coming up not only with hypotheses to test but also with questions to ask. And nanoscale imaging of the brain promises to open up a brave new world of questions about brain function and structure on a cellular and subcellular level. Principle to the quest to map the human connectome is the question of how memories are stored. "You have all these experiences of your life that are basically in there forever," Lichtman says. "You're never going to get rid of them. You may have trouble recalling things, but once you're reminded they just pop back into consciousness, which means that they're sitting in your brain in some form. Almost certainly in the form of which particular nerve cells are connected together in little networks. But no one knows how that information is encoded." Mapping the wires of the brain might just provide the answer – which Lichtman expects will be some sort of learning algorithm that takes faces, shapes, objects, textures, sounds, names, or whatever else and converts them into wires and electrical signals. Lichtman is also excited to see whether wiring diagrams might show why and how the brain changes as we get old. He suspects that old brains may have simpler wiring diagrams than younger ones, but connectome mapping – particularly at the finer resolutions – could hold the answer. A super-close-up reconstructed view of the synapses on a dendrite, with the synaptic vesicles (little white dots that store neurotransmitters) also visible   Big data If nothing else, this wiring diagram of the brain will provide a lot of data. What you might call big data. You need to look at every cubic millimeter of brain to see every synapse, which is necessary to map the brain's connectome in full. "In a cubic millimeter of brain there is about two terabytes of image data," Lichtman says. "I think the original Google Maps was on the range of several terabytes – that was for the whole planet." As of August 2012, it was around 20 petabytes, or 20,500 terabytes, for satellite, aerial, and street imagery combined. A human brain has something on the order of a million cubic millimeters, which means you'd need around two million terabytes to store a map of its wires. Two million terabytes is around two thousand petabytes, or two exabytes. "That's a big number," Lichtman notes. "Even today. Even for Google." It's so big, even, that most people cannot fathom it. Even that 302-neuron C. elegans worm connectome is too much for most people, and it's more on the order of 12 terabytes. "You couldn't ask for a smaller [connectome] dataset than that, and it's impossibly complicated," Lichtman says. "You can't just look at it and say, 'Oh now I understand how the worm swims and why it makes a sinusoidal movement when the worm moves around in the soil or why it backs up when something noxious bumps into its nose.' It's in there, but you can't look at it and say, 'I see it.'" If you grew up in a world where a megabyte is a big dataset, you probably have no hope of understanding the scale of a human connectome dataset. If you came of age this millennium, you'll likely have a somewhat easier time of it, because your brain is wired differently, but Lichtman cautions that we may be crossing an important threshold in human development – not just in neuroscience or science more broadly, but in everything from politics to economics to religion. "The biggest casualty of big data is big ideas, in the sense that there are no big ideas that encompass the data any more," he says. "The data is more complicated than the thoughts of most people." There are too many variables and complex interactions for us to hold in our heads, basically. With the death of big ideas could come a fundamental change in the human experience, wherein we don't understand and believe so much as steer the analyses and follow the data. What we're looking at with big data is a division between understanding and analysis. We can simulate, model, and analyze with computers, but we can no longer be confident about understanding the results in their entirety. Reconstructed mouse neurons (the large blotches) with their dendrite branches   Man or machine? That's not the only potential change Lichtman sees on the horizon. As the newly-discovered behavioral links allude to, mapping the brain could radically transform how we treat people. As we demystify the brain with these wiring diagrams, he warns, "virtually all behavior can begin to be judged on the machine that's causing that behavior. Criminality becomes just an expected behavior given the starting condition of that particular brain." Conceptions of free will could evaporate, and deep-rooted philosophical and religious beliefs may be challenged to their core. That's no reason to abandon the research, because the payoffs – the secret workings of our minds – are so great, but it's cause for concern, and a possible challenge for what Lichtman concedes is a very expensive field of study that advances incredibly slowly. What we know now about the brain is infinitesimally small relative to the full picture. Lichtman says that mouse neocortex test study for nanoscale brain imaging looked at a mere three billionths or so of the brain's volume. That scale makes it a somewhat controversial point in science, because it seems like an impossible feat to map an entire human brain at the cellular level. But Lichtman says that this kind of work in general is controversial for a more fundamental reason.   Seeking description Science is traditionally experimental, whereas connectome mapping is descriptive. Experiments test ideas and manipulate things. Descriptive projects like this one or the Hubble space telescope, or the whole field of archeology, on the other hand, merely look. They are tools of ponderance: what's out there? To many people that sounds perfectly reasonable, but Lichtman says, "A lot of people in the biomedical sciences think that we are in some way beyond description." Instead, we should be manipulating things – knocking out genes, adding chemicals, activating nerve cells. Not wondering what uncharted, unheard of mysteries remain in the depths of the brain. That cylinder in the middle of the image is the tiny, cubic millimeter-sized chunk of mouse neocortex studied as a test case for nanoscale brain imaging technology Lichtman likens neuroscience on the whole to a staircase with a million stairs. At the top is a complete one-to-one mapping of the human brain. "We maybe have gone one step," he says, "but that's the goal – to turn this field into something productive enough that it is able to generate enough data that one can begin to approach these deep mysteries about the brain." In truth we probably know more about the universe beyond our Earth than about that which lies between our ears. And that is precisely why Lichtman and his connectome-mapping colleagues will persevere. "As long as we're seeing things we've never seen before, as long as we're discovering things that look different from what we expected, we should keep doing it," he says. "Obviously, because it's adding insight to things that were mysterious." "Once you understand something well enough that there's nothing to learn and everything is the same, then yeah, maybe it's time to stop. But we're far, far from there." http://www.gizmag.com/connectome-wiring-diagram-human-brain/39659

Honda presents Neowing tilting tricycle ahead of Tokyo Motor Show

 

The Honda Neowing is a tilting three-wheeled hybrid concept bike (Credit: Honda) If there's one market segment where Honda has been notably absent, it would be tilting three-wheelers. That's about to change, though, as the new concept model that Honda plans to unveil in Tokyo undeniably demonstrates its intent to enter this relatively new vehicle class. Honda calls its tricycle the Neowing, evidently pursuing a connection to the company's touring icon, the Goldwing. The 4-cylinder boxer engine helps a lot in this direction, as it's definitely reminiscent of the Goldwing's horizontally-opposed 6-cylinder motor. The press release is rather scant of information, confined to just a few lines carefully selected to magnetize our attention until the official unveiling that will take place in late October, when the 44th Tokyo Motor Show opens its gates. Honda states that the Neowing is a hybrid-powered vehicle, coupling its boxer engine with electric motors and transmitting the output to the rear wheel via what appears to be a shaft. There's no word on the internal combustion motor's capacity or performance figures, and the press release remains equally secretive on the type, number and arrangement of the electric motors. The use of plural leaves no doubt there's more than one, yet from the official image released by Honda we can only assume that these do not reside in the front wheel hubs. What is more important though is the leaning front suspension setup. Vaguely described as an "original Honda linkage mechanism," this system will probably be the focus point of this prototype tricycle when we get to examine it in more detail. The greatest assets of these three-wheeled vehicles are the safety features incurred by their tilting front suspension systems. Piaggio initiated this market segment with the MP3, based on a patented system by Studio Marabese Design. Every vehicle that followed suit – namely the Quadro 3D, Peugeot Metropolis and Yamaha Tricity – relied on its own exclusive design, so we should expect Honda to innovate as well. As powerful and exciting as this concept may seem, chances are it serves more as an eye-catching introductory platform for Honda's involvement in the tilting three-wheeled class, with ensuing production models opting for more "sensible" powertrains, both in terms of output and cost. Apart from the Neowing, Honda will also display a Light Weight Super Sports Concept in Tokyo. There is practically no information to detail the technology behind this prototype, apart from the fact that it is described as a next-generation sportbike with a "strong presence." Judging from the single front brake disc, it must be powered by a small-to-medium-capacity engine. In this segment Honda has on offer a single-cylinder 300 cc engine as used in the CBR300R, against competition from Kawasaki, Yamaha and Benelli that sport twin-cylinder motors. In less than a month we'll know if this is Honda's response. The parade of Honda concepts includes also the EV-Cub, an electric short-distance commuter based on the timeless Super Cub design. This was actually first introduced at the 2009 Tokyo Motor Show, and Honda doesn't explain if its reappearance is related to any new features brought about over the course of the last six years. The 44th Tokyo Motor Show will start with two Press Days on October 28 and 29, opening its gates for the general public from October 30 until November 8. Source: Honda   http://www.gizmag.com/honda-neowing-leaning-three-wheeled-concept-motorcycle/39654

ISIS Wants to Plant Its Black Flags In Europe. Will it Succeed?

 

For the first time in history, an author says, we have a terrorist organization that has the apparatus of a state. ISIS’s founder, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, shown here in a 2006 video, was a petty criminal and drug addict before he “got” religion and began a campaign of terror aimed at ushering in a new Islamic caliphate. Photograph by U.S. Department of Defense via Getty Images ISIS saturates the news. But few of us know much about its origins or its founder Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. In his new book, Black Flags: The Rise of Isis, Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Joby Warrick takes us inside the twisted mind of Zarqawi and his followers, reconstructs the hunt for Zarqawi by a female CIA agent who could have stepped right out of the movie Zero Dark Thirty, and traces the U.S. response to ISIS across several administrations, laying bare our mistakes. Talking from his home in Fairfax, Virginia, he describes how former Secretary of State Colin Powell first gave Zarqawi global celebrity status, how ISIS perfected the art of publicizing its violent actions via the Internet, and what we have to do if we’re to stop ISIS spreading to Europe—and beyond. The spiritual godfather of ISIS was a Jordanian terrorist, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. Tell us about him and his particular brand of jihadism. Zarqawi is probably the least likely person ever to become a major terrorist figure. He was from a middle class family in a town called Zarqa, Jordan, a gritty, industrial city not far from the capital. He was a bad seed from early on, who got into trouble with the law as a kid: heavy drinking, thuggery, petty crime, drug abuse. Later, he “gets” religion and goes to Afghanistan, where his views were shaped by being around the bin Laden generation of jihadists. These were then hardened by years in prison after he was arrested for a terrorist plot. ISIS has become expert at manipulating social media. Joby Warrick Where bin Laden had a long-term vision for slowly toppling secular Arab regimes and bringing about God’s kingdom on Earth, Zarqawi felt that if he took bold steps, shock the world with violent action, he could make these things happen in the here and now. Where does the name ISIS come from? And to what extent does ISIS draw on Islamic scripture? The so-called Islamic State grew out of Zarqawi’s original movement, Al Qaeda in Iraq. After Zarqawi’s death, it became Islamic State in Iraq, and its name reflects its ambition. It is an Islamic state, a caliphate, which doesn’t recognize secular rules or democracy. An Iraqi soldier guards the scene of the 2006 U.S. airstrike on Zarqawi’s safe house, killing him. For Nada Bakos—one of the few women in the Central Intelligence Agency to hold the position of targeter, responsible for gathering critical information in the search for an enemy—hunting Zarqawi became deeply personal. Photograph by Joao Silva, The New York Times - Pool, Getty Images There’s a long tradition in both the Koran and the Hadith supporting the idea of a caliphate or Islamic state. The symbol of the black flag can also be traced back to the Hadith. There’s one particular passage that talks about these mighty men coming from the East with black flags and long hair and beards. So you have this colorful image of armed forces marching from the East to conquer the world. Zarqawi took that literally and tried to fashion the style of his group along those lines. They had the prominent black flags with the prophet’s message on it, “There is no God but God.” They also dressed in black clothes, a style Zarqawi personally adopted. It’s laden with symbols and intended to convey to the Muslim devout that they are the warriors the Prophet told us about, and they’re on a march to take over the world. Thousands of young people are flocking to ISIS’s banner. How has ISIS managed to become a mass movement, in the way that Al Qaeda never did? There are many things bound up in this. First of all, ISIS has become expert at manipulating social media. We’ve seen that many times on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. That’s something that goes back to the earliest days. One of Zarqawi’s signature acts, the first time he presented himself to the world as a terrorist, was to use the Internet, which was just beginning to take off, to behead an American captive on screen named Nick Berg. They take this innocent young man and put him in an orange jumpsuit evoking the mistreatment, in their view, of Arab hostages and prisoners in American camps like Abu Graib and delivering retribution for all the perceived insults and abuses that Muslims have suffered at the hands of the West. Black is more than a fashion statement for ISIS’s foot soldiers, like this man in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul. Islamic scripture invokes bearded warriors with black flags coming from the East to conquer the world. Photograph by Reuters, Corbis In the dramatic final moment, Zarqawi himself takes a knife and cuts the young man’s head off. It’s a very grizzly scene using uncut, very raw videography, showing this man being beheaded in a very slow and torturous process. The video circulated around the world. It horrified most people but energized Zarqawi’s, which is exactly what he intended. He was reaching out very deliberately to a specific audience—young men frustrated that the Islamic world of the Arab states has been exploited by the West, that God’s message has gotten lost, and societies are corrupt. He appealed very strongly to these young men and gave them a cause and a purpose to believe in. Who is financing ISIS? And why can we not stop the flow of money from our so-called allies, like Qatar? We’ve done it with the drug cartels, and we were fairly effective with AQ [Al Qaeda] early on because there were well-documented routes through which money flowed to AQ, mostly from Islamic charities. Much of the Islamic State income comes not from these charitable gifts but directly from their criminal enterprises in the areas they now occupy. In the case of Syria and Iraq they now have oil wells under their control and can sell oil on the black market, and they have tentacles out in a million different directions from which they can derive income. In the early days there was also direct aid from some of our good friends in the Gulf, who began supplying people they thought were allies in the fight against Assad. Some of them now are starting to get the message. But on an individual level there are still people in Kuwait, Qatar, and other countries who continue to donate money using Twitter or other online means. In February in Amman, Jordan, people gathered near the Al Hussein Mosque to express solidarity with fellow citizen and air force pilot Muath al-Kasasbeh, who had been burned alive by ISIS after his plane crashed in Syria. His murder caused revulsion around the world. Photograph by Jordan Pix, Getty Images One of the planks of ISIS’s vision is the recreation of a pan-Arabiccaliphate. Talk about the background to this notion and Zarqawi’s vision for its modern day realization. Zarqawi became obsessed early on with the fact that the country he lived and grew up in, Jordan, and other countries around him, were created on maps by Europeans at the end of WWI for their own purposes. The traditional caliphate, which spanned traditional national boundaries, had been erased. Zarqawi’s idea was to destroy the Sykes-Picot Treaty of 1916 that had created all these countries and put into its place a caliphate. In a sense, that’s what ISIS has managed to do. They argue there is now no boundary between western Iraq and eastern Syria. It’s all part of the so-called Islamic state of Iraq and Levant. And they would like to replicate that throughout Mesopotamia and the Gulf. You write that American blunders in Iraq created “a black hole” that enabled Zarqawi’s organization to gain momentum. Are we responsible for ISIS then?  It’s hard to say that we were the primary cause of ISIS becoming what it is today, but we certainly played a role in its founding. Nobody had heard of Zarqawi in early 2003, when Secretary of State Colin Powell got up before the UN to make the pitch for an invasion of Iraq. He put Zarqawi’s photograph on the big screen and identified him as a link between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda, suggesting a nexus able to pass weapons of mass destruction from Iraqi to terrorists around the world, using this one individual as the poster child for the invasion of Iraq. It boggles your mind that another human being could carry out acts like this. Joby Warrick It turned out that Zarqawi had not even been a part of Al Qaeda. They thought he was too extreme and wouldn’t let him in. He was certainly no friend to Saddam Hussein, either. We helped turn him into an international celebrity and create a terrorist organization that came close to driving the U.S. out of Iraq a few years after President Bush’s famous “mission accomplished” speech. Zarqawi became known as “the sheikh of the slaughterers.” The most infamous example of his violent methods was the immolation of a Jordanian pilot. Describe that incident—and how it backfired. They really stretched their imaginations to come up with the most extreme way to carry out this act. They put him in a cage, doused him with fuel, and set him ablaze while filming the whole thing. They then posted the video. Not just any video. It was a very slick, well-produced video that ends with a chilling list of other pilots’ names, addresses, and pictures, offering reward money to anyone who captures or kills them. For ISIS, this was an act of revenge against the Jordanian government. But it backfired. Burning a human being, particularly a Muslim, is a great taboo in the Islamic world. There was a huge outcry from Egypt and throughout the Gulf and Levant. The leaders of both the Shia and Sunni faiths stood up and very strongly condemned it, saying, “This is not just wrong, it’s evil.” That became the turning point for many Muslims around the world. The hunt for Zarqawi was masterminded by a CIA operative named Nada Bakos. Tell us about her—and how this became a personal mission, as hunting bin Laden was for the character, Maya, in the movie Zero Dark Thirty. One of her former supervisors said to me that Nada was like someone who counts cards in Vegas. She could instantly see all the permutations of a possible deal, connect the dots, and come up with a very smart analysis to help the CIA get closer to their target. She ended up almost by accident becoming involved in the hunt for Zarqawi in the pre-invasion days. She was part of the team that tried to determine whether there was a link between Zarqawi, Saddam Hussein, and AQ. Their conclusion was that he was not involved in any significant way with either organization. Later on, as a Zarqawi expert, she becomes “the targeter, to use their term, the officer responsible for gathering intelligence to find where he was and how to kill or capture him. What shocked you most in researching this book? What was hardest was the level of malevolence that you see in ISIS’s leadership and in their followers. One thing I forced myself to do as part of my research was look at their propaganda. I get their latest Tweets and video posts on sites like Facebook. They outdo themselves with horrific acts, from crucifixion to immolation, or forcing some young kid take a gun and kill a captive. You see these things every day, and it boggles your mind that another human being could carry out acts like this. How can we stop ISIS? Or will they one day reach the gates of Vienna? With ISIS we have something unprecedented—a terrorist organization that for the first time in history has the apparatus of a state. It’s so entrenched, and its resources are so impressive, that it’s going to take a long time for us to root them out. The only way to do it is with an all-of-the-above approach, except for involvement of U.S. ground forces. As we saw in Iraq, putting boots on the ground in a Muslim country only incites people to join ISIS. We have to be involved in the intelligence game, use airpower and diplomacy to rally our sometimes-reluctant allies into doing more. All these thing have to be done aggressively and urgently because this is a problem that is not limited to the Middle East. It’s aimed at our own capitals as well. ISIS says the next stop will be Europe. So we have to be extremely vigilant to make sure they don’t get any farther than they are right now.   http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2015/09/150930-isis-book-talk-simon-worrall-terrorists-middle-east-syria-iraq

French unveil 'world first' hydrogen-powered electric bike emitting only pure water

 

12:25PM BST 01 Oct 2015 The world’s first commercial electric bike running on hydrogen with only pure water as waste, so its makers claim, has been unveiled in France – and already snapped up by the country's post office. It takes five minutes to charge and has a battery life of 100 kilometres (62 miles) and its Gallic makers claim it is a “world first”. The Alpha bike, which hides its hydrogen batteries in its frame, leaves an almost neutral carbon footprint, its designers at Pragma Industries in Bidart, near Biarritz, southwestern France insist. “The bike’s battery provides electricity from hydrogen and emits only pure water,” Pragma CEO Pierre Forté, 38, told AFP. “This is a world first,” he said. A pit stop at special hydrogen recharge ranks only requires a five-minute charge compared to “three or four hours” for other types of electrically assisted bikes, he said. The Appha hydrogen bike has a range of 100 km on a single charge  Photo: AFP/Getty Its autonomy of 100 kilometres is also higher than others. “All this with a minimal environmental footprint as these bikes are made of up ever more recyclable products," he said. The charging stations themselves run on solar or wind power to cut carbon emissions as much as possible. The bike only takes five minutes to charge  Photo: AFP/Getty Other models exist but are for now only in the “prototype phase,” said Mr Forté. The French Post Office has reportedly expressed an interest in ordering a fleet. Production will begin with 100 bikes in 2016, which will be ramped up to 1,000 by 2017. At this level of output, the cost of a bike will be around €2,300 £1,700) - no more expensive than existing top-bracket electric bikes. Alpha will be officially unveiled to the public during this year’s Intelligent Transport Systems congress in Bordeaux.   http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/france/11904005/French-unveil-world-first-hydrogen-powered-electric-bike-emitting-only-pure-water.html

A Carbon-Neutral Fuel Alternative

 

Thu, 10/01/2015 - 7:50am Lindsay Hock, Editor Image: Cellana As early as the 1950s, researchers were looking at algae for methane gas production. The algae was grown on rooftops of Massachusetts Institute Technology (MIT). Drawings and illustrations of open pond raceways on the roof of Harvard Univ. were also recovered from the 1950s. The reason for this research was algae naturally make oil, and this intrigued researchers as a feedstock for biodiesel. In the 1970s, algae for use as an alternative fuel had another push, this time related to gas-related fuels. And this push came when the U.S. Dept. of Energy (DOE)’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) started a program called the Aquatic Species Program. The program was originally meant to evaluate photosynthetic organisms that grew in or near water—including algae, seaweed, swamp-type plants and more. The program was looking for ways to supplement the amount of terrestrial biomass that could be grown, looking at different aquatic species. And very quickly into this process, NREL settled on algae, more specifically microalgae, due to their ability to produce lipids, which were known as a potential source of biofuels. The project lasted from 1978 to 1996, at which point the price of oil had gone down to about $10 to $20/barrel. And the price was thought to stay at that price for a long time. Since the interest dried up due to the decreasing price of gasoline/oil, the DOE could no longer hold funding across the board on biofuels, so they terminated the algae part of the program to continue focusing on cellulosic biofuels. From 1996 to 2006, little work was done on algal biofuels. Then, starting in 2007, interest was, yet again, sparked when the price of oil rose to $40 to $50/barrel; and companies started to form the Algae Biomass Organization in 2008. From there, algal research started up again with a vengeance. Despite the ups and downs, this alternative fuel source has seen its renaissance today, with similar funding (over $18 million spread across national labs, universities and industrial companies from the DOE and more from private sources) and more interest from companies in its potential. The trouble of commercialization stunts benefits The onset of the rise in algal biofuels research in 2006 and 2007 was the publication of the first billion ton study, which was a joint effort between the USDA and the DOE. The study posed the question of how much terrestrial biomass or lignocellulosic biomass could be sustainably produced in the U.S? And the answer, according to the study, was about a billion tons per year. “Looking at the different conversion properties and processes to turn cellulosic biomass into fuel, you can basically assume a billion tons a year could be used to produce about 60 billion gallons of gasoline equivalent a year—whether that is ethanol or some other fuel molecule,” says Philip Pienkos, Group Manager of the Bioprocess R&D Group at NREL in an interview with R&D Magazine. As a nation, we burn about 140 billion gallons of gasoline a year. We also burn 40 billion gallons of diesel, and 20 billion gallons of jet fuel. “Cellulosic biomass can only cover a small fraction of this,” says Pienkos. “Our calculations show algae could easily match cellulosic biofuels in terms of overall production. It could actually exceed the cellulosic biofuels we produce because of the lipids, sugars and other components found in algae. There is enough free space in the U.S. that isn’t being used that can cultivate algae; so, easily, 60 billion gallons of biofuels could be produced in the U.S.” However, the DOE has set a more conservative target, and is looking to establish 5 billion gallons of algal biofuels a year, with a notion it could be an order-of-magnitude higher. Yet, the commercialization of algal biofuels has proved much harder than expected. And some view algal biofuels as more hype than a reality. “The joke is algal fuels are 10 years off, and they always will be,” says Pienkos. However, the main reason why algal biofuels haven’t exploded yet is the reason why most are getting their funding: Algal biofuels aren’t quite economically viable to compete with gasoline. “They are getting there,” says Rhona Stuart, Postdoctoral Researcher at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in an interview with R&D Magazine. “And there’s research being conducted in all different pipelines, not just in the growth of algae, but also the production and conversion of algal biofuels to get it to the point where it competes with gasoline at a cost per gallon.” To help alleviate this issue, there has been much effort from the national labs and DOE-funded projects that look at techno-economic analysis and lifecycle analyses of algal biofuels. And these projects have identified two key barriers to getting these biofuels within the cost per gallon range of gasoline: low yields of algae biofuels and high costs of producing algal biomass. “The goal for the funding provided by the DOE is getting the gasoline gallon dollar equivalent of biofuel product down to less than $5/gallon,” says Stuart. “And right now, by some estimates, it’s at around $8/gallon.” “If you look at the petroleum industry, worldwide it’s a trillion dollars a year industry,” says Pienkos. “And that’s the magnitude of the opportunity for biofuels and bio-based chemicals. We are talking about an algae industry that could be on the same order of magnitude, or thereabouts, as the petroleum industry. And it’s going to take a lot of money.” The industry is starting small, and it will take success at the higher-value, smaller-market products to establish commercial revenue streams. In response, high-value products will be the main focus for near-term commercial success. And it is hoped that those revenue streams will lead to further R&D progress, eventually ushering large-scale algal biofuel production (and some companies are well on their way, such as Sapphire, Cellana and Algenol). Yet, despite the cost issue, there are many benefits to using algae instead of gasoline. How algae compares to gasoline is highly determined on the strain of algae used and chemically what oil that strain makes. Currently, some companies are engineering algae to produce oil very similar to a gasoline equivalent biodiesel that could be dropped into a car. Other downstream processes harvest the biomass, not just the oil, and convert it into ethanol. “In general why algae is a good alternative is because it’s carbon neutral,” says Stuart. “Algae is grown on non-potable water, maybe even wastewater, so you’re not using water and you’re not using arable land, because you are growing this algae in ponds. This means the cultivating of algae isn’t interfering with our food source. The algal biofuels, once produced, will take up carbon dioxide and burn that carbon dioxide immediately in a car, showing a carbon neutral process.” Essentially, the algae is taking up the same amount of carbon that’s released. In addition, algae can produce mass quantities of lipids and fats, making them easily convertible into liquid fuels, such as biodiesel or jet fuel. The barrier of pond crashes A large barrier to the commercialization of algal biofuels is pond crashes, where algae will begin to grow and then suddenly die off. The reason ponds crash is because they are open to the atmosphere and many deleterious species come into the pond and either eat or infect the algae. These pond crashes are unpredictable and must be understood to minimize their devastating impacts—basically losing whole algae harvests and starting over again. Image: Algenol Since theses crashes are unpredictable, they also are an economic barrier to making algal biofuels viable to replace gasoline, and the process to developing algal biofuel ponds and cultivating the algae is a time-consuming process, taking months. “The reason the process takes months is researchers must clean these ponds from any infected deleterious species that may have gotten in and caused the crash,” says Stuart. “That is a huge liability. So, if we can prevent even 10% of those crashes, we can really improve the annual yield.” Annual productivity is a key metric for algal biofuel production that, if optimized, could significantly decrease and stabilize biofuel price per gallon. Larger yields give algal biofuels the competitive boost they need to compete with gasoline. To study these pond crashes, the DOE has awarded Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory $1 million over the next three years. “This is new area for us at Livermore Lab, and we are only just beginning to understand the pond microbiome isn’t only an indicator of health, but also a tool for crop protection. The project will start officially on Oct. 1, 2015,” says Stuart. “But we are leveraging some other work that got funded last year in October that’s much more basic research—it’s not as applied as our project—to look at algae and the bacteria that are attached to the algae.” The research will focus on a special region called the phycosphere, a boundary layer around an algal cell, where there are many important interactions between algae and the beneficial bacteria that can attach to the algae and help them grow. “We are trying, at a very fundamental level, to understand how these beneficial bacteria attach and interact with the algae in the phycosphere, which surrounds an algal cell,” says Stuart. While still in the early stages, Livermore Lab is hoping to identify and employ what Stuart calls “probiotic bacteria,” or probiotics for algae, to increase microalgal survival by two-fold when under attack by rotifiers or chytrids in mass algal cultures. According to Stuart, rotifiers and chytrids are the common culprits of algae grazing. And by using probiotic bacteria to increase algal resistance against these grazers, Stuart estimates a 5 to 10% increase in annual productivity. “The proposed tool has several advantages over the baseline, including minimal risk of pest evolution, tailored microbiome diversity to increase ecosystem resilience and productivity and probiotics that can increase algal productivity and outgrow pests,” says Stuart. “We need to establish big algae farms to expand the future of algal biofuels,” says Pienkos. “We literally need hundreds of algae farms situated in areas around the U.S. where there is open land, some light and water availability and carbon dioxide availability.” Overall, the U.S. needs the same amount of algae farmland comparable to the acreage the U.S. plants corn on today. And keeping those algal ponds/farms safe is a first step to commercialization. But the area of algal biofuels is ripe for innovation. Two-pronged approach The importance of open ponds for algae research isn’t unnoticed, as seen in Lawrence Livermore’s upcoming work on pond crashes. And, in fact, most industrial companies looking to commercialize algal biofuels use open ponds for their research and cultivation, as the technology has been tried-and-true for decades. Yet, the issue of contamination by undesirable algae strains still looms over the technology. However, Cellana, a San Diego-based developer of algae-based bioproducts, looks to produce algal biofuels in a new way. The company’s approach presents a different way to growing algae biomass that opens research into multiple types of species never grown at the commercial-scale before. “Our approach relies on what products we want to make, and finding the right strain(s) that haven’t been produced at industrial scale before to address those products,” says Martin Sabarsky, CEO, Cellana in an interview with R&D Magazine. “This is an overall 180-degree flip on R&D and product development that has been done to date in algal biofuels research.” The technology, called ALDUO, relies on closed-culture photobioreactors (PBR) with open ponds in a two-stage process. “Most attempts of scaling-up algae production use a PBR or open pond individually, not coupled,” says Sabarsky. “PBRs by themselves are generally unable to produce algae at an acceptable rate and tend to be too costly to be commercially viable for commodity products.” With a large production plant in Kailua-Kona, Hawaii, Cellana has access to unique and naturally occurring algae strains from the Univ. of Hawaii, in addition to strains collected in Hawaii, that have been selected for high production of algae oil and rapid growth under targeted commercial production conditions. And the ALDUO process works where, first, the PBR is used to maintain constant conditions that favor continuous cell division and prevent contamination of the culture by other organisms. Image: Cellana “The PBR is like a thin-film bag that protects the crop and culture, but still allows light to pass through so photosynthesis can be used in production,” says Sabarsky. “Continuous to semi-continuous production is happening in these protected PBRs, where you are only growing the strain of algae you want. You aren’t subjecting or exposing that strain to any other species that would affect your crop.” In the second step, the algae is transferred, at dawn, after growing in the PBR for a few days, without contamination, to an open pond system of nutrient-depleted culture medium. The open pond is a paddlewheel-driven, recirculating raceway, fitted with a durable plastic liner. The goal is to expose the cells to nutrient deprivation and other environmental stresses that lead to synthesis of products, such as oils for nutraceuticals and biofuels. After two or three days, the algae cells are concentrated by gravitation into a slurry, excess water is removed and the mixture is further concentrated. “The wet biomass is then dried,” says Sabarsky. “And that dried algae biomass can then be used as a supplement for aquaculture hatchery feeds or functional foods. If the components contained within the algae are desired instead of whole algae, the algae oils, or other components, can instead be extracted for nutraceuticals, animal feeds, biofuels or other desired products.” “We pride ourselves in cutting our algae production into multiple products and maximizing the value of the entire barrel of algae, rather than just going after the low-value products like fuel,” says Sabarsky. “And by doing this, we will be able to see, in the near future, price-competitive crude oil and fuels, but also high-value products.” Four fuels are better than one Algae naturally makes oil, and they are quite good at it. And this has intrigued people as a replacement for biodiesel for over 60 years. However, another approach towards algal biofuels is producing ethanol instead of biodiesel. Algenol, Fort Myers, Fla., entered the algal biofuels arena in 2006 trying to produce ethanol, not biodiesel. “If ethanol were made directly inside the cell, then it would leak out of the cell and evaporate from a culture,” says Paul Woods, Founder and CEO of Algenol in an interview with R&D Magazine. “So that was the impetus of Algenol 10 years ago.” Making ethanol that leaves the cell is obviously different than making a heavy oil trapped inside a cell. But the company’s original approach back in 2006 wasn’t that different as they used a horizontal closed and sealed bioreactor. There algae wasn’t cultivated in a pond, but it was still produced horizontally. “And, at that point, we had made about 3,600 gallons of ethanol a year; which considering corn ethanol does 420 gallons a year, we are a world leader,” says Woods. However, that number was still far from the company’s goal of 6,000 gallons per year. And, in 2010, Algenol embarked upon an important evaluation. The company wanted to know why they weren’t getting the numbers they wanted and why they weren’t scaling up the way they wished to. “And I think this evaluation forever separated us from the competition,” says Woods. “We had the man power and money to critically examine the question of why companies fail to scale-up. And when we really examined the problem, we found the true problem with commercialization and industrialization set us apart.” Upon switching their production method from a horizontal to vertical process, Algenol began to overcome the problems commonly seen in commercialization and scale-up. Horizontal systems can never address light distribution, and when Algenol moved to a vertical panel system it addressed this problem as algae don’t want 2,000 microEinsteins of direct sun, they want 300. “And our technology really addressed these issues of heat dissipation, light distribution and photoinhibition, and it did so simultaneously,” says Woods. Algenol’s DIRECT TO ETHANOL technology uses sunlight, algae, non-arable land and carbon dioxide to produce ethanol and spent algae that can be converted into other biofuels. The technology employs enhanced blue-green algae (cyanobacteria) and photosynthesis to convert carbon dioxide and seawater into pyruvate and then into ethanol and biomass. Image: Algenol The heart of the company’s technology is a proprietary flexible plastic film PBR that facilitates product creation and collection. According to Algenol, the plastic used for the PBR construction is engineered and enhanced with resins and other features designed to optimize a variety of performance metrics. Each individual PBR consists of ports for ethanol and biomass collection and the introduction of carbon dioxide and nutrients. The technology works where gravity facilitates the collection of ethanol and spent algae from the PBRs and Algenol’s Vapor Compression Steam Stripping technology further purifies the ethanol for downstream processing using standard distillation and, potentially, novel energy-limiting membrane technologies producing fuel-grade ethanol. “Overall, the process has a carbon footprint that’s 80% less than that of gasoline,” says Woods. Algal biomass collected following the ethanol production provides the feedstock for the biomass-to-hydrocarbon fuels process. “The biomass is dewatered before it’s fed into a hydrothermal liquefaction (HTL) unit,” says Woods. “The primary output from the HTL unit is a green crude oil. And this crude oil is upgraded in a hydrotreater unit to a hydrocarbon product that contains a mixture of liquid hydrocarbons in the range of diesel, jet and gasoline fuels.” “This is what sets Algenol apart. We make four fuels. And this is far more economic than making one,” says Woods. In addition to making four fuels, the company can do this for as little as $1.30/gallon. “At this day and age, petroleum prices are very low, but at $1.30/gallon we can still be profitable and bring the benefits of algal biofuels to customers,” says Woods. And even though Algenol has produced algal biofuels at the cheapest price, Woods sees a huge benefit to making it for $1.20 or $1.00. “R&D is key to this goal,” says Woods. “And, ultimately, our key to success was R&D and optimizing the process both upstream and downstream.” Conclusion And while for some companies might still be 10 years out on the commercialization of algal biofuels, the research is there for innovation, and many companies are making great strides to near-future commercialization. The truth remains that if petroleum prices keep their upward climb, products like algae biodiesel will have value, and will be both cost-competitive to public and cheap to produce. • CONFERENCE AGENDA ANNOUNCED: The highly-anticipated educational tracks for the 2015 R&D 100 Awards & Technology Conference feature 28 sessions, plus keynote speakers Dean Kamen and Oak Ridge National Laboratory Director Thom Mason. Learn more. http://www.rdmag.com/articles/2015/10/carbon-neutral-fuel-alternative

Los nuevos telescopios que buscarán otros mundos y vida extraterrestre

 

29 septiembre 2015 Última actualización: 11:32 GMT Mientras el mundo se entretiene viendo la rareza de un eclipse de "superluna" y la NASA nos confirma que, en efecto, agua líquida fluyó por Marte, la BBC le echa un vistazo a algunas de las innovaciones que tienen emocionados a los astrónomos. Los actuales telescopios del mundo, tanto en la Tierra como el espacio, han expandido nuestro entendimiento del Universo y nos han traído extraordinarias imágenes de nuestra galaxia y más allá. Pero, dentro de la próxima década, una nueva generación de observatorios increíblemente potentes nos permitirá estudiar más profundamente el Universo con muchísima más claridad. Lee: Por qué es tan importante que haya corrientes de agua en Marte   Contenido relacionado El telescopio Planck muestra gigantes del cosmos   http://www.bbc.com/mundo/video_fotos/2015/09/150928_video_ciencia_astronomia_telescopios_nuevos_wbm

The Evolution of Daily Objects in a Century

 

Posted: 30 Sep 2015 12:00 PM PDT Federico Babina, un illustrateur et architecte italien dont nous avons déjà parlé, a développé le projet Style-Life : une série de posters sous la forme de natures mortes illustrant l’évolution des objets quotidiens (et surtout des outils technologiques) de 1900 à nos jours. On voit la machine-à-écrire se transformer en minitel puis en tablette tactile ; le phonographe devenant un gramophone puis un tourne-disque pour finir en baladeur CD ; et le téléphone d’Ader se muer en téléphone à cadran puis en téléphone mobile tactile.   www.fubiz.net

Renewables overtake coal in the UK energy mix for the first time

 

Renewable energy sources (combined solar, wind and biofuel) have overtaken coal, the most polluting energy source, in the UK for the first time (Credit:Shutterstock) Thanks to an increase in solar panels and wind turbines, as well as a particularly sunny and windy quarter, renewable energy has supplied a record 25 percent of the UK’s energy mix in Q2 2015, leapfrogging coal for the first time to come into second place behind gas fired electricity. It’s nearly a 10 percent increase on the same period last year. Total renewable energy generation rose by 51.4 percent compared to Q2 2014, with solar jumping by 115 percent, wind rising 65.2 percent thanks to expanded offshore installations, and bioenergy improving by 26.2 percent, largely due to one unit at Drax power station switching from coal to woodchip burning. Since 2012, the share of renewable energy has been rising fairly consistently. This strong result comes in the middle of a difficult year for renewables, with David Cameron’s conservative government totally ending subsidies for new on-shore wind farms, and slashing solar power support as well. Still, the situation is not looking strong for coal producers, with Goldman Sachs releasing a research paper suggesting we may already have passed "peak coal."According to the paper, Goldman believes demand for coal peaked in 2013 and will only decline in the coming years. Its projected long-term price for coal is now US$50 per tonne, down from US$65 per tonne in previous projections. Source: UK Energy Statistics, Q2 2015   http://www.gizmag.com/renewables-overtake-coal-uk-energy-mix/39602