How to Make Guns Safer

 

Biometrics, RFID and microstamping technologies aim to prevent deaths and crime By Erik Schechter Sep 15, 2015 Thomas Fuchs For the first time in decades the annual number of gun-related deaths in the U.S. is expected to surpass the annual count of automobile fatalities. In 2013, the most recent year for which data are available, the two were on par: motor vehicles killed 33,804 people, and firearms killed 33,636, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Firearm deaths and injuries have grown to pose a major public health problem, says Stephen Teret, co-director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Law and the Public's Health. Teret studies how to make safer guns for consumers. And he is not the only person doing so. The first symposium on smart guns—weapons that only specific users can fire—was held earlier this year. Several gun technologies to prevent unauthorized or accidental discharge and to stem crime have moved beyond proof of concept and into production—albeit at a limited scale. Radio-Frequency Identification (RFID) The most mature smart guns on the market are RFID systems equipped with a locking mechanism that releases only when a gun draws close to a device broadcasting a particular radio band. German firm Armatix introduced an RFID gun to the U.S. in 2013 that activates when a person enters a PIN on a nearby paired watch. Similarly, the company TriggerSmart Technologies sells a gun that automatically unlocks when the owner's ring, which contains an authorization tag, comes within two inches of a reader in the weapon's handle. These guns could cut down on teen suicides and accidental shootings, Teret says. Biometrics Biometric smart guns require proof of identity—via human body characteristics—to operate. In theory, anything from a voiceprint to a retinal scan could serve as a key, but most versions available analyze hand-related features, such as fingerprints. The company Intelligun, for example, sells a fingerprint-locking system for $399 that can be mounted on the grip of a model 1911 pistol. As soon as the owner relaxes his or her hold, the gun relocks. But gloves, dirt and blood can interfere with these readers. So engineers at the New Jersey Institute of Technology have worked with the U.S. Army Armament Research, Development and Engineering Center on a dynamic recognition technology that reads the pressure profile of the owner's clutch. Tests with a prototype of the technology on the SIG Sauer P228 (a handgun used by police departments in New Jersey and elsewhere) are ongoing. Microstamping A technique called microstamping imprints tiny identifying marks from a gun onto a cartridge as it fires. The resulting indentations could help law enforcement quickly link an individual weapon, and therefore a suspect, to a shooting. During manufacturing and assembly, lasers etch microscopic markings on internal parts of the gun, such as the firing pin. When the gun is fired, those imprinted parts strike the softer metal of the cartridge, transferring the markings. In 2013 experts tested the system on different types of firearms and ammunition and found that the success of transfer varied widely. The technology, however, continues to make inroads. In February a district court judge upheld the constitutionality of a 2007 California law that bans the sale of new handguns without microstamping capability. New York State is now considering a similar law. http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-to-make-guns-safer/

Barbes et moustaches

 

Fitness Technology That Helps the Blind Get Moving

 

A drone that guides blind runners around a track is just one of several new fitness technologies designed to assist the visually impaired. By Christina Couch on October 16, 2015 Why It Matters Half of all disabled adults in the U.S. are obese. While NASA is working to make drones quieter, one researcher at the University of Nevada, Reno, is using its noise to benefit blind athletes. Eelke Folmer, an associate professor of computer science and the head of UNR’s Human Plus Lab, has built a prototype drone system that guides blind runners around a track, allowing them to exercise independently without a sighted guide. Equipped with two cameras—a downward-facing one that follows the lines on a track and a separate camera that focuses on a marker on the runner’s shirt—Folmer’s quadcopter flies at eye level, about 10 feet ahead of a runner, guiding them by sound. If the runner speeds up or slows down, the drone adjusts its own speed. Folmer says he hasn’t been able to test it outdoors yet because the university is so close to the Reno airport it is subject to FAA regulations on drones. He is currently seeking permission from the airport’s radio tower to override this rule. “We’ve done some very simple trials inside just following a straight line and it seemed to work,” Folmer says. “I’m not sure how it’s going to be on a real oval where you also have to go through a turn.” Researcher Eelke Folmer used this drone with a foam hull for the project to prevent damage or injury if someone were to run into it. Assistive devices for navigation and communication abound, but relatively few technologies aim to help the visually impaired tackle fitness and obesity, the latter of which disproportionately impacts the disabled community. About one in three able-bodied adults in the U.S. are considered obese or extremely obese according to research published in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, but among disabled adults, that rate rises to one in two. For those with mobility, navigation, or vision impairments, doing vigorous activities—the kind that actually burn calories and build muscle—can be tough. Another of Folmer’s projects focuses specifically on increasing accessibility to moderate and vigorous exercise. VI Fit is a series of video-less video games created for blind children, though able-bodied users can play along. Developed for the PC platform, each of the three fitness games in the VI Fit series uses a Nintendo Wii controller to track motion, and guides players through bowling, tennis, or whack-a-mole style play using audio and tactile cues. The games are free and two use open-source code, allowing developers to tweak the games as they see fit or create new ones. “Most of the accessibility research [for the blind] focuses more on things like screen readers and making the Web more accessible,” Folmer says. “The community of blind people still has major problems pertaining to health, socialization, and quality of life. It would be more helpful for this demographic if we research how technology can improve these issues.” A few other projects also aim to make it easier for blind people to get fit. Kyle Rector, a graduate computer science and engineering student at the University of Washington, is the creator of Eyes-Free Yoga, a system that uses a Microsoft Kinect to guide visually impaired users through yoga workouts. For standing poses, users get step-by-step verbal instructions and real-time feedback on how they can adjust their bodies for proper form. For sitting or lying poses—positions that are more difficult for the Kinect’s computer vision system to follow—users rely on audio instructions only. “My system isn’t necessarily intended to be used as the only exercise tool for the rest of their lives, but it is a way to kind of propel [blind users] to do more activity,” Rector says, adding that in testing, several users expressed interest in adding different exercise regimens since beginning Eyes-Free Yoga. “They use it as a starting point.” http://www.technologyreview.com/news/542426/fitness-technology-that-helps-the-blind-get-moving/

1366 Bets on Silicon Wafer Innovation with New Solar Plant

 

New method for making silicon wafers enables 1366 Technologies to survive and expand By Richard Martin on October 14, 2015   Why It Matters Declines in component prices are making solar power nearly as cheap as coal-fired plants. 1366 CEO Frank van Mierlo presents New York governor Andrew Cuomo with a custom silicon wafer at an event announcing the company’s plans to build a commercial-scale factory in Genesee County. Solar wafer maker 1366 Technologies has survived the carnage in the U.S. solar manufacturing industry over the last five years. Now the company, which uses a novel technology for making the silicon wafers used in most solar cells, is embarking on its next phase, building a large manufacturing plant in upstate New York (see “Solar Survivor”). Founded by MIT professor Ely Sachs in 2008, the startup said last week that it will build its first commercial-scale factory in Genesee County, near Rochester. The plant will cost around $100 million and will initially produce about 50 million wafers annually, equivalent to 250 megawatts of power-generation capacity. Eventually, says CEO Frank van Mierlo, 1366 (which is named for the “solar constant,” the amount of solar energy that reaches Earth, in watts per square meter) hopes to reach three gigawatts of annual production at the Genesee plant, supplying silicon wafers to a solar industry that’s growing rapidly in North America, Europe, and the developing world. The Massachusetts-based company says it was lured to New York, as opposed to building in China, through a combination of state incentives, access to cheap hydro power, and the desire to make its products in the United States. The booming market for residential solar and the rising demand from developing countries including India, which has committed to building 100 gigawatts of solar capacity in the next seven years, is driving a comeback for solar manufacturing in the U.S. (see “India’s Energy Crisis”). SolarCity’s planned factory, also being built in upstate New York, will have a gigawatt of production capacity when fully operational at the beginning of 2017 (see “Paying for Solar Power”). Last month, the U.S. unit of China-based Seraphim Solar Manufacturing said it will open a new solar factory in Jackson, Mississippi, that will reach one gigawatt of capacity by 2018. In Hillsboro, Oregon, SolarWorld Americas is spending $10 million to expand its factory, currently the largest solar PV production facility in the Western Hemisphere. A 1366 technician works in a lab at the company’s Bedford, Massachusetts, demonstration facility. Conventional factories produce silicon wafers via a multistep process of sawing, polishing, and slicing that wastes close to half of the silicon. Led by Sachs, who stepped aside as the company’s chief technology officer earlier this year, 1366’s team of several dozen engineers devised a way to make wafers directly from molten silicon, producing wafers for half the cost of traditional methods and dramatically reducing the amount of wasted silicon. The 1366 process also uses one-third the energy to produce each wafer. While the concept of producing wafers from molten silicon is not original to 1366, the company is the first to develop a production technology that can be expanded to commercial scale. In addition to a loan guarantee of $150 million from the U.S. Department of Energy that was made in 2011, the company will receive about $97 million in grants and tax incentives from the state of New York. Van Mierlo says 1366 has binding agreements for 60 percent of the plant’s production; he won’t name customers but says they are concentrated mostly China and Taiwan. However, 1366 still has to raise additional funds to build the Genesee facility. Van Mierlo says that “90 percent of that is secured at this point,” and that discussions are underway for the remaining $10 million. The state investment is part of New York governor Andrew Cuomo’s strategy of turning upstate New York into a major manufacturing hub for the solar industry. The state is investing $750 million to build the SolarCity plant, which it will lease back to the Silicon Valley company, essentially for free. Cuomo, who attended the 1366 launch event on November 7, called the 1366 announcement “a game changer” for New York’s tech sector and the U.S. solar industry. The track record of solar manufacturing companies built largely on public funding is not encouraging. But 1366 has survived so far in part because of its frugality. “The first line in a Dutch cookbook,” says van Mierlo, a U.S. citizen who was born in the Netherlands, “is ‘borrow an egg.’”   http://www.technologyreview.com/news/542416/1366-bets-on-silicon-wafer-innovation-with-new-solar-plant/

Biggest elephant killed in Africa for almost 30 years brings back memories of Cecil the lion

 

It was shot on October 8 in a private hunting concession bordering Gonarezhou by a hunter who paid $60,000 (£39,000) for a permit to land a large bull elephant and was accompanied by a local, experienced professional hunter celebrated by the hunting community for finding his clients large elephants. The German national, who the hunt’s organisers have refused to name, had travelled to Zimbabwe to conduct a 21-day game hunt including the Big Five of elephants, leopards, lions, buffalo and rhinoceros. The kill was celebrated in hunting forums around the world, where it was suggested he might have been the biggest elephant killed in Africa for almost 30 years. Conservationists and photographic safari operators in the area expressed their outrage on Thursday night, saying the animal was one of a kind and should have been preserved for all to see. Anthony Kaschula, who operates a photographic safari firm in Gonarezhou, posted pictures of the hunt on Facebook, said the elephant had never been seen in the area before but would have been celebrated by visitors and locals alike. Largest elephant Shot in the Last 50 years, this old bull aged 60plus has tusks 122 pounds heavy Lucky hunter and zimbabwean guide hunt booked through take aim safaris website Posted by Game Animals of the Past and Present on  Tuesday, 13 October 2015 “We have no control over poaching but we do have control over hunting policy that should acknowledge that animals such as this one are of far more value alive (to both hunters and non-hunters) than dead,” he wrote. “Individual elephants such as these should be accorded their true value as a National Heritage and should be off limits to hunting. In this case, we have collectively failed to ensure that legislation is not in place to help safeguard such magnificent animals.” Unlike Cecil, the black-maned lion beloved by tourists who was shot by American dentist Walter Palmer in Hwange National Park using a bow and arrow in July, the animal’s origin was not immediately known. It was speculated that he might have come up from South Africa, since there is no border between the Kruger National Park and Gonarezhou, which form part of the Great Limpopo Transfrontier Park created by former South African president Nelson Mandela. Some suggested that the elephant might be a massive bull called Nkombo, who was a satellite collared elephant from the Kruger who lost his collar in 2014. Nkombo was however spotted in the Kruger on October 3, making it unlikely that he would have completed a journey of several hundred miles in five days. William Mabasa, of South Africa’s National Parks, said Kruger’s elephant experts were looking into the case. “If this elephant came up from the Kruger, he would have had to go through all the communities on the edge of Gonarezhou and someone would have seen him. It’s not possible.” Louis Muller, chairman of the Zimbabwe Professional Hunters & Guides Association, said the hunter had only realised how large the “tusker” was once he had been shot. "He told me when he and his client were stalking this elephant he saw the tusks were big but did not realize just how big until afterwards and he saw them close. He is going back to see if he can find the lower jaw and bring it back so we can accurately age this elephant,” he told The Telegraph. "We checked everywhere and this elephant has never been seen before, not in Zimbabwe nor Kruger. We would have known it because its tusks are huge. There have been five or six giant tuskers shot in the last year or so, and we knew all of them, but none as big as this one.” He said his organisation had suggested that unique elephants should be collared to protect them from hunting. “We have suggested before to all concerned parties that each elephant area should collar a few with biggest tusks, so that we do not shoot them,” he said. "Nobody responded to our suggestion last year. We believe this might now be taken seriously.” The man who helped arrange the hunt, who did not want to be named, defended his client. “This was a legal hunt and the client did nothing wrong,” he said. “We hunters have thick skins and we know what the greenies will say. This elephant was probably 60 years old and had spread its seed many many times over.” He said his organisation paid as much as 70 per cent of its hunting fees back to the local community and observed quotas for animals. “This is good for Zimbabwe and good for local people,” he said. “It’s not uncommon for hunters to spend $100,000 (£64,551) each trip.” Meanwhile Zimbabwe National Parks has called for stiffer penalties for poachers following the discovery on Tuesday of 26 more elephant carcasses that died of cyanide poisoning at two different locations in the Hwange National Park. Cyanide poisoning is a growing problem in the country since a mass poisoning in October 2013 resulted in up to 100 deaths. The 26 elephants were discovered by rangers following another discovery last week of 14 other elephants, also poisoned to death by cyanide.   http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/africaandindianocean/zimbabwe/11934535/Huge-tusked-African-elephant-killed-by-german-hunter-in-Zimbabwe.html

Empresa lança software pioneiro para 'piloto automático' em carro elétrico

 

Dave Lee Repórter de Tecnologia da BBC News Há 53 minutos Image caption Dois modelos fabricados pela Tesla contarão com o novo software A fabricante americana de carros elétricos Tesla lançou uma atualização para o software de seus veículos que possibilita que os carros tenham um modo "piloto automático". O carro não será totalmente independente, mas o novo software faz com que carro Model S e o novo Model X possam "automaticamente se orientar por uma estrada, mudar de pista e ajustar a velocidade em resposta ao trânsito" à sua volta. O presidente da Tesla, Elon Musk, afirmou que o modo piloto automático foi criado para aumentar a confiança do motorista. Mas Musk acrescentou que os motoristas que adotarem o novo software, disponibilizado na América do Norte a partir desta quinta-feira, devem ser cautelosos no uso do programa. "Esperamos que (o carro) não atropele pedestres. (O software) Deve lidar bem com eles", afirmou Musk para jornalistas. O presidente da Tesla já esclareceu que, se o carro se envolver em um acidente, o motorista ainda será responsabilizado. "O motorista não pode abdicar da responsabilidade. Isto virá em algum momento no futuro", disse. As informações sobre o uso do novo software em outras regiões do mundo serão atualizadas nas próximas semanas, dependendo de aprovação e regulamentação local. Câmeras e sensores Image caption O piloto automático combina sensores, câmeras e mapas para determinar a posição do carro (Imagem: Tesla/Divulgação) O novo software da Tesla usa uma combinação de câmeras, radares, sensores e dados de mapeamento para determinar a posição do carro e como deve ser a navegação. Leia também: Empresa promete 'revolução' com baterias para residências Quando o carro tiver chegado ao destino, poderá escanear o espaço disponível e estacionar sozinho. Diferente dos projetos do Google, que visam um veículo totalmente autônomo, o plano da Tesla é gradualmente fazer com que o software assuma funções que antes eram do motorista. Atualmente existem limitações ao software que, segundo Musk, serão resolvidas. "Se há muita neve será mais difícil o sistema funcionar, então é melhor ter cautela. Essencialmente é como uma pessoa - como uma pessoa pode descobrir que rota deve pegar. Com o tempo, será melhor que uma pessoa", disse. "No longo prazo será muito melhor que uma pessoa. Nunca fica cansado, nunca bebe nada, nunca está discutindo com outra pessoa dentro do carro. Não tem distrações." Outros fabricantes de carro, como a BMW e a Volvo, também estão desenvolvendo e implementado funções que concedem graus de autonomia a seus carros. E o carro totalmente automatizado da Google já percorreu mais de 1,6 milhão de quilômetros, a maior parte na Califórnia. Leia também: Google vai virar montadora e fabricar carro que dirige sozinho   http://www.bbc.com/portuguese/noticias/2015/10/151015_piloto_automatico_tesla_fn

Pinterest trabalha para transformar a audiência em receita

 

Pinterest: o crescimento maior está fora dos Estados Unidos São Paulo — Os fãs de redes sociais podem até fazer questão de postar no Facebook a notícia de que vão se casar ou vão fazer o aniversário do filho. Mas é em outra rede, o Pinterest, que muitos deles buscam inspiração para a festa. A especialidade do Pinterest é o conteúdo visual. À medida que navegam, os usuá­rios guardam imagens em seu perfil. Pode ser a fotografia de um evento, de um destino turístico, de uma roupa diferente, de uma pintura ou até a capa de um livro. A cada dia são incluídos 14 milhões de novos links — chamados de pins (alfinetes). Ao todo, o site tem uma biblioteca de 50 bilhões de pins. “O que é especial sobre o Pinterest é que todo o conteúdo passou pela escolha de uma pessoa, não de um algoritmo. Por isso, muita gente gosta de buscar inspiração nele quando está planejando um evento ou a mudança da decoração da casa”, afirma Debra Aho Williamson, analista de marketing digital e mídias sociais da consultoria eMarketer, com sede em Nova York. Entre as redes sociais, o Facebook é o único que ainda mantém o modelo que deu origem a esse segmento. É um espaço em que as pessoas têm um perfil para publicar o que quiserem e para se conectar com amigos e familiares. Com quase 1 bilhão e meio de usuários, o site é líder disparado em audiência. O segundo pelotão de redes sociais é formado por plataformas que fizeram sucesso exatamente porque passaram a oferecer serviços especializados — do Instagram, que reúne as fotos tiradas por seus usuários, ao Twitter, que atua­liza informações de forma instantânea. Nesse grupo, o Pinterest tem sido um destaque. Há três anos, só perde para o Instagram em termos de aumento do número de usuários em todo o mundo. No mesmo período, foi o que apresentou o maior ritmo de crescimento no Brasil. Quase 15% dos usuários de internet brasileiros uti­lizam o Pinterest — sete vezes mais do que em 2012 —, nível próximo ao do LinkedIn (18%), de acordo com a consultoria GlobalWebIndex, com sede em Londres. “O crescimento está alinhado a uma tendência de diversificação das redes sociais”, diz Jason Mander, ­presidente da GlobalWebIndex. Os números comprovam o sucesso do Pinterest? Depende do indicador que se olhe. Do ponto de vista de audiência, o site vem crescendo acima da média e está no seleto grupo das seis maiores redes sociais de usuários, à frente do LinkedIn. Isso se traduz numa estimativa elevada de seu valor de mercado, na casa dos 11 bilhões de dólares, de acordo com a última rodada de investimentos. É um número que impressiona — mas é o mais baixo na comparação com as demais redes sociais. O valor do Facebook é de 256 bilhões de dólares;o do Instagram, 35 bilhões; o do LinkedIn, 24 bilhões; e o do Twitter, 16 bilhões. A menor avaliação se explica: o Pinterest é a única das grandes redes sociais que ainda não provou ter um modelo de negócios sustentável. O site começou a vender anúncios somente no ano passado e apenas nos Estados Unidos. Não divulga o faturamento, mas a estimativa da empresa de investimentos americana Wedbush Securities é que deva chegar a 500 milhões de dólares em 2016, menos de um quinto da previsão para o Twitter. A estratégia global do Pinterest tem sido atrair cada vez mais empresas, especialmente varejistas que vendem produtos relacionados às suas categorias mais populares, como decoração, moda e saúde. “As pessoas buscam imagens de coisas que têm interesse em comprar, praticar ou fazer. Se conseguir aproveitar isso, o site pode ganhar muito dinheiro”, diz Williamson, da eMarketer. A marca mais popular no Pinterest hoje é a loja de departamentos americana Nordstrom. Seu perfil tem 4,4 milhões de seguidores e é usado para divulgar fotos de produtos. As roupas e os objetos de decoração mais populares na rede social são marcados com um logotipo do Pinterest nas lojas físicas. No Brasil, as grandes varejistas ainda têm uma presença tímida na rede social das imagens. Entre elas, os perfis mais populares são o da Lojas Renner e o da C&A, do segmento de moda, e o da Tok&Stok, de móveis e decoração. Mas, juntas, não chegam a 13 000 seguidores. A experiência de maior impacto, por enquanto, tem sido a de empresas menores, como a Elo7, site de venda de objetos de decoração e artesanato. É a marca brasileira mais popular, com 80 000 seguidores. “O Pinterest é uma das redes sociais que mais mandam visitantes para nossa plataforma de vendas ”, diz Carlos Curioni, presidente do Elo7. Diferentemente de pequenas empresas, as redes têm uma estratégia de divulgação multifacetada — e ainda não viram no Pinterest um canal atraente. A audiência global de 100 milhões de pessoas do Pinterest impressiona, mas, de acordo com a consultoria Comscore, sua taxa de visitas é a mais baixa entre as grandes redes sociais. Nesse quesito, o Brasil não é diferente. Em média, cada usuário brasileiro visita o Pinterest 2,8 vezes por mês — no Twitter, o número é de 4,6; no Facebook, de quase 20. Um dos principais desafios do Pinterest hoje é aumentar o engajamento, especialmente em países fora dos Estados Unidos, que representam 45% da audiência. No Brasil, o site abriu um escritório e tem adaptado o mecanismo de buscas para o português para dar mais relevância ao conteúdo local. Que ninguém duvide: o Pinterest quer ficar bem na foto.   http://exame.abril.com.br/revista-exame/edicoes/1099/noticias/pinterest-trabalha-para-transformar-a-audiencia-em-receita

Test Facility Begins Capturing Carbon from Air

 

Pilot plant in Canada tries to demonstrate carbon capture on an industrial scale. By Richard Martin on October 9, 2015   Why It Matters Direct-air carbon capture could lead to carbon-neutral transportation fuels. Carbon Engineering’s air contactor passes ambient air through liquid to produce a carbon dioxide-rich solution. On Friday a group of government officials, environmentalists, and local bigwigs gathered in the coastal town of Squamish, British Columbia, about an hour north of Vancouver, to mark the onset of what could one day be a new industry: creating carbon-neutral transportation fuel made from carbon dioxide captured from air. The company that built the plant, Carbon Engineering, was founded by a Canadian scientist named David Keith. A Harvard professor of applied physics, Keith has made headlines before for his outspoken advocacy for more research into geoengineering (specifically, seeding the lower stratosphere with sulfuric acid to reflect sunlight and cool the planet). With the carbon capture venture, though, Keith is being careful not to overhype his company’s technology: while Carbon Engineering’s process should be able to strip carbon dioxide out of the air at a rate of around one ton per day, Keith emphasizes that it’s not designed for or capable of measurably reducing the greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Rather, the motivation is to produce fuels for transportation applications, such as jet aircraft and heavy-duty trucks and buses. The process uses a large wall of fans, known as a contactor, to push air through a liquid that reacts with the CO2. That carbon dioxide-rich solution is then put through several processing steps to create a purified stream of CO2 gas and the liquid that is returned to the contactor. Keith and his team have cleverly combined industrial processes that are already in use in existing industries, for instance in paper mills. “This is not new technology,” says Keith. It’s also only half the process needed to actually make fuel. The recovered CO2 must then be combined with hydrogen to make hydrocarbon fuels. Supported by funding from British Columbia’s provincial government, Carbon Engineering plans to install an electrolyzer to split water to obtain hydrogen that it will then use to supply fuel for BC Transit buses. That’s at least a year down the road. A component is delivered to the pilot plant site in Squamish, British Columbia. The full system is relatively energy-intensive, which means that cheap, low-carbon power generation, most likely from solar power, will eventually be needed to make the energy economics work. Carbon Engineering, which has been funded by a series of investors including Bill Gates, is one of several companies, including the German firm Climeworks, working on carbon capture systems. (Most of them employ systems in which the CO2 is absorbed by a solid, rather than a liquid.) In the past these technologies have been touted as having the potential to significantly reduce the total amount of carbon in the atmosphere, thus slowing down global climate change. For now that’s a pipe dream; for one thing, as with systems that capture carbon from the smokestacks of fossil fuel power plants, it’s simply too expensive for the massive scale-up that would be required. What’s more, the systems require much energy to operate. An active market for fuels made with air-captured CO2 would go a long way toward making the economics work out, at least for small-scale systems. Burning the fuel made in this way would, of course, release carbon, but unlike the combustion of fossil fuels it would not add to the total amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. The cost of producing fuel at the Squamish pilot plant, once it’s fully operational, will be much higher than that of conventional fuels, but Keith says that, once the process is scaled up using solar power, he hopes to produce fuel for $1 a liter. (Jet fuel currently sells for around 37 cents per liter; diesel, for just under $1 per liter.) That could happen in a few years, or it might never happen; but the plant opening in Squamish will begin testing the possibility. “This whole topic has been polarized more than anything else I’ve worked on,” Keith says. “I hope we can move to a world where people treat this like a normal technology. It’s not a silver bullet, but it’s not B.S. either.”   http://www.technologyreview.com/news/542226/test-facility-begins-capturing-carbon-from-air/

Brain structure generates pockets of sleep within the brain

 

MIT neuroscientists have discovered a brain circuit that can trigger small regions of the brain to fall asleep or become less alert, while the rest of the brain remains awake. Credit: Illustration by Jose-Luis Olivares/MIT Sleep is usually considered an all-or-nothing state: The brain is either entirely awake or entirely asleep. However, MIT neuroscientists have discovered a brain circuit that can trigger small regions of the brain to fall asleep or become less alert, while the rest of the brain remains awake. This circuit originates in a brain structure known as the thalamic reticular nucleus (TRN), which relays signals to the thalamus and then the brain's cortex, inducing pockets of the slow, oscillating brain waves characteristic of deep sleep. Slow oscillations also occur during coma and general anesthesia, and are associated with decreased arousal. With enough TRN activity, these waves can take over the entire brain. The researchers believe the TRN may help the brain consolidate new memories by coordinating slow waves between different parts of the brain, allowing them to share information more easily. "During sleep, maybe specific brain regions have slow waves at the same time because they need to exchange information with each other, whereas other ones don't," says Laura Lewis, a research affiliate in MIT's Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences and one of the lead authors of the new study, which appears in the journal eLife. The TRN may also be responsible for what happens in the brain when sleep-deprived people experience brief sensations of "zoning out" while struggling to stay awake, the researchers say. The paper's other first author is Jakob Voigts, an MIT graduate student in brain and cognitive sciences. Senior authors are Emery Brown, the Edward Hood Taplin Professor of Medical Engineering and Computational Neuroscience at MIT and an anesthesiologist at Massachusetts General Hospital, and Michael Halassa, an assistant professor at New York University. Other authors are MIT research affiliate Francisco Flores and Matthew Wilson, the Sherman Fairchild Professor in Neurobiology and a member of MIT's Picower Institute for Learning and Memory. Local control Until now, most sleep research has focused on global control of sleep, which occurs when the entire brain is awash in slow waves -- oscillations of brain activity created when sets of neurons are silenced for brief periods. However, recent studies have shown that sleep-deprived animals can exhibit slow waves in parts of their brain while they are still awake, suggesting that the brain can also control alertness at a local level. The MIT team began its investigation of local control of alertness or drowsiness with the TRN because its physical location makes it perfectly positioned to play a role in sleep, Lewis says. The TRN surrounds the thalamus like a shell and can act as a gatekeeper for sensory information entering the thalamus, which then sends information to the cortex for further processing. Using optogenetics, a technique that allows scientists to stimulate or silence neurons with light, the researchers found that if they weakly stimulated the TRN in awake mice, slow waves appeared in a small part of the cortex. With more stimulation, the entire cortex showed slow waves. "We also found that when you induce these slow waves across the cortex, animals start to behaviorally act like they're drowsy. They'll stop moving around, their muscle tone will go down," Lewis says. The researchers believe the TRN fine-tunes the brain's control over local brain regions, enhancing or reducing slow waves in certain regions so those areas can communicate with each other, or inducing some areas to become less alert when the brain is very drowsy. This may explain what happens in humans when they are sleep-deprived and momentarily zone out without really falling asleep. "I'm inclined to think that happens because the brain begins to transition into sleep, and some local brain regions become drowsy even if you force yourself to stay awake," Lewis says. Natural sleep and general anesthesia Understanding how the brain controls arousal could help researchers design new sleep and anesthetic drugs that create a state more similar to natural sleep. Stimulating the TRN can induce deep, non-REM-like sleep states, and previous research by Brown and colleagues uncovered a circuit that turns on REM sleep. Brown adds, "The TRN is rich in synapses -- connections in the brain -- that release the inhibitory neurotransmitter GABA. Therefore, the TRN is almost certainly a site of action of many anesthetic drugs, given that a large classes of them act at these synapses and produce slow waves as one of their characteristic features." Previous work by Lewis and colleagues has shown that unlike the slow waves of sleep, the slow waves under general anesthesia are not coordinated, suggesting a mechanism for why these drugs impair information exchange in the brain and produce unconsciousness.   http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/10/151013182735.htm

A New Way to Fight Aging in the Brain

 

For the first time, scientists can take skin cells from people of various ages and transform them into brain cells reflecting the ages of their donors. By Faye Flam on October 9, 2015 Why It Matters Aging is the number-one risk factor for Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s diseases. Studying how living human brain cells age could speed the development of treatments for disease and cognitive decline. Scientists created these aging human brain cells not from old brains but from the skin cells of older people. Our brain cells change with age: various genes become more or less active, the membrane that holds the nucleus together starts to degenerate, and molecules that in young cells are neatly compartmentalized become scattered and disorganized. Now scientists have found a way to transform ordinary skin cells into living cultures of aging human neurons—test beds for ways we might reverse these effects of time. In the past, scientists have created neurons in a dish using stem-cell technology, but those efforts produced the equivalent of embryonic neurons. Jerome Mertens of the Salk Institute for Biological Studies and his colleagues took skin cells from donors of different ages and transformed them into neurons that retained the effects of aging. This technique opens up new avenues for studying aging, age-associated diseases, and the possibility that drugs might stave off what was once inevitable. “These results are obviously going to have an impact,” says John Gearhart, director of the Institute for Regenerative Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, who was not part of the study. The results will not only advance research into aging, he says, but could aid in the continued quest to create new cells to repair or replace damaged organs. Gearhart says that the new findings address a major problem in his field. There are several ways to force cells to switch from one type to another, but scientists haven’t been sure how the neurons made from a skin cell differ from the neurons that develop normally in people’s brains. The earliest method for reprogramming cells set the aging clock back to zero, he says, because the skin cells first had to be turned into a type of stem cell similar to those in early embryos. Mertens and his colleagues tried a newer technique, first developed at Stanford University, in which a series of biochemical tweaks switched skin cells directly into brain cells. What nobody knew, says Mertens, was how the cells created by this more direct route differed from the ones that had been first returned to an embryonic state. Were they making baby neurons or ones that reflected the ages of the donors? To find out, he and his colleagues collected skin cells from 19 people of different ages from infancy to 89, turned them directly into brain cells, and compared them with cells obtained from autopsies of people at different ages. They found that the transformed neurons carried certain telltale signs of aging in proportion to the age of the donors. Indeed, he says, they found that skin cells from older people could be turned into the equivalent of neurons from older people. They published their results in the latest issue of the journal Cell Stem Cell. The older neurons show different patterns of gene activation, says Martens. Age also disrupts what’s called compartmentalization—the ordered way in which some proteins stay confined to the nucleus of cells and others to the surrounding cytoplasm. Martens says the membrane separating the nucleus from the rest of the cell starts to fail, so as our cells age, more proteins end up in the wrong place. He’s eager to understand how this process affects the way our brains age and our susceptibility to diseases such as ALS and Alzheimer’s. The cell-transforming technique might also be expanded to produce three-dimensional structures called organoids, he says, which can be used as models of human organs.   http://www.technologyreview.com/news/542336/a-new-way-to-fight-aging-in-the-brain/