Helen H. Moore's Blog, page 83
May 7, 2018
Applying Silicon Valley smarts to age-old diseases
AP Photo/Carlos Giusti
This article originally appeared on Kaiser Health News.
On the second floor of an infectious-disease research facility in this African capital, Dr. Joseph Kamgno, the country’s leading expert on parasitic roundworms, stood at his desk staring down at the black hard-shelled case that had just arrived from a bioengineering lab at the University of California-Berkeley.
The case contained what appeared to be three ordinary iPhones. But the California researchers believed these phones could do something extraordinary — help quell river blindness, the second-leading cause of preventable blindness in the world.
There is already an effective treatment, a medication that can kill the baby worms that cause the blindness. And when nearly everyone in a community takes the drug every year for a decade or so, it can eliminate the disease from the area.
But treating communities widely for river blindness is a risky proposition: The treatment can cause coma or death in a small segment of the population that harbors a different parasite — another worm known as Loa loa. That’s why large swaths of Sub-Saharan Africa have been denied treatment for nearly two decades — because the cure for river blindness for certain people can prove far worse than the disease.
And that’s where Silicon Valley technology comes in. The Berkeley researchers figured out that they could quickly determine who has the Loa loa worm using a smartphone, customized to work like a microscope. They could then skip the medication for those people and give it to everyone else. Kamgno, who received the latest version of the phones in 2016, dubbed the mobile microscopes “revolutionary.”
The gadgets, called LoaScopes, are part of a broader effort to harness technology and innovation in the U.S., including California’s Silicon Valley, to fight age-old diseases in the developing world.
Over the years, major California universities — UC-Berkeley, UC-Davis, UCLA — have built cellphone microscopes geared to look at other bloodborne diseases in Africa and Asia, such as malaria and tuberculosis. UC-San Francisco researchers are using satellite images on Google Earth Engine to construct real-time maps of breeding conditions for malaria that can help predict infection rates in rural villages.
Drones are being used to deliver medical supplies to remote villages in Rwanda, and digital “ledgers” built with blockchain software could be used to track vaccinations in newborns, said Zvika Krieger, technology and policy expert at the World Economic Forum Center for the Fourth Industrial Revolution.
To accomplish their missions, nongovernmental and civil society organizations “are flocking to Silicon Valley,” he said.
Mobile microscopes and wiggly worms
The LoaScope was created in UC-Berkeley’s Fletcher Lab, named after Daniel Fletcher, a wild-haired scientist who discovered 10 years ago the potential of cellphones as microscopes. Basically, the camera on the phone is positioned over a magnifying lens to capture a sample on a slide. Software can then analyze whatever is on the slide and transmit it to the cloud.
Standard light microscopes aren’t really mobile, and require electricity and a trained lab tech to operate. The mobile microscope is cheap, compact and can be used by anyone familiar with mobile phones, which are increasingly common around the world, even in remote villages.
The discovery spun off into a private business called CellScope, while Fletcher’s academic lab continued to research smartphones as microscopes for the university.
Several years ago, Fletcher and his team had never heard of river blindness and knew very little about neglected tropical diseases in general. The team eventually became part of a mobile phone revolution in the developing world, in which public health researchers were ratcheting up efforts to use these pocket computers to address health problems.
The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation have bankrolled the LoaScope project since its inception in 2011, spending more than $5 million to date.
River blindness, or onchocerciasis, is a nasty disease that has burdened Africa for as long as anyone can remember. The disease is spread by black flies, which drop off and pick up worms as they suck people’s blood. The symptoms — terrible itching, rotting skin and, after decades of infection, blindness — are caused by early stage worm larvae that flood the body after adult worms mate.
The river blindness medication, ivermectin, kills these baby worms effectively. But when a person harboring tens of thousands of Loa loa worms in each drop of blood takes ivermectin, all the baby worms die off in a sort of mass extinction, causing potentially lethal brain swelling.
Upsides and downsides
The small lab in Berkeley got involved with this complicated worm conundrum through a parasitic disease expert at the National Institutes of Health.
Dr. Thomas Nutman was tasked with finding a technology that could help solve the Loa loa problem. At first, he considered a project at UCLA in which a cellphone picture could be taken in the field, uploaded to the cloud and then analyzed by someone sitting at a computer in California.
It sounded good in theory, but because thousands of people had to be tested before treatment, Nutman needed answers on the spot. Recalling work by Fletcher and his team, Nutman hopped on a plane to the Bay Area to meet them.
Fletcher and scientist Mike D’Ambrosio knew they had the technology to see the worms — but figuring out how to see and count them in just a couple of minutes “seemed daunting.”
“That’s where we had the idea to use the motion of the worm as a way to see it,” D’Ambrosio said. Early stage Loa loa larvae thrash around in the blood more vigorously than other worms. So D’Ambrosio and his colleagues created an algorithm to identify Loa loa based on its motion.
The LoaScope is an iPhone that attaches to a plastic box made by a 3-D printer. A blood sample on a plastic tube is inserted into the black box, which contains optics and hardware. Press a button on the screen of the iPhone and it takes a video of the blood sample and runs the algorithm.
But relying on bioengineers in the tech-savvy San Francisco Bay Area to create a solution comes with downsides familiar to anyone who works there: shutdowns and updates.
Months before the latest device was scheduled to ship out, the company the scientists used to sync all their data gathered from the LoaScope to the cloud shut down, forcing a rewrite of the related software code. Then the hardware company that made an essential microcontroller board quit production.
“That is the cost we pay for trying to build something out of consumer-based electronics and using cloud software that is always changing,” said D’Ambrosio, who became the lead research scientist for the LoaScope project.
On the other hand, he added, “the benefit is enormous. We’re able to build these integrated devices that do amazing things” at low cost.
Another problem the scientists had was figuring out who would pay for the devices.
“The business side of it is very unclear,” Fletcher said. “Part of the problem is that there isn’t a market for neglected tropical diseases.”
The Gates Foundation doesn’t typically pay to implement projects on a global scale. However, the foundation is negotiating a deal for a company to manufacture 10,000 LoaScopes, Nutman said.
Back in Cameroon, Kamgno’s research findings, published in the New England Journal of Medicine in November, showed that the LoaScope allowed wide treatment with ivermectin, and produced no adverse reactions in formerly “off-limits” communities. Kamgno’s research team is now training local health workers to use the LoaScope, and other countries soon may follow.
“We were surprised and happy to see that after only two days of training, the local people were able to do the treatment in their own community,” said Kamgno. “Almost all the young people have cellphones, and they can understand the LoaScope so quickly.”
May 6, 2018
Embroidering electronics into the next generation of “smart” fabrics
AP
This article was originally published on The Conversation.
Archaeology reveals that humans started wearing clothes some 170,000 years ago, very close to the second-to-last ice age. Even now, though, most modern humans wear clothes that are only barely different from those earliest garments. But that’s about to change as flexible electronics are increasingly woven into what are being called “smart fabrics.”
Many of these are already available for purchase, such as leggings that provide gentle vibrations for easier yoga, T-shirts that track player performance and sports bras that monitor heart rate. Smart fabrics have potentially promising uses in health care (measuring patients’ heart rate and blood pressure), defense (monitoring soldiers’ health and activity levels), cars (adjusting seat temperatures to make passengers more comfortable) and even smart cities (letting signs communicate with passersby).
Ideally, the electronic components of these garments — sensors, antennas to transmit data and batteries to supply power — will be small, flexible and largely unnoticed by their wearers. That’s true today for sensors, many of which are even machine-washable. But most antennas and batteries are rigid and not waterproof, so they need to be detached from the clothing before washing it.
My work at the ElectroScience Laboratory of the Ohio State University aims to make antennas and power sources that are equally flexible and washable. Specifically, we’re embroidering electronics directly into fabrics using conductive threads, which we call “e-threads.”
Antenna embroidery
The e-threads we’re working with are bundles of twisted polymer filaments to provide strength, each with a metal-based coating to conduct electricity. The polymer core of each filament is typically made out of Kevlar or Zylon, while the surrounding coating is silver. Tens or even hundreds of these filaments are then twisted together to form a single e-thread that’s usually less than half a millimeter across.
These e-threads can be easily used with common commercial embroidery equipment — the same computer-connected stitching machines that people use every day to put their names on sports jackets and sweatshirts. The embroidered antennas are lightweight and just as good as their rigid copper counterparts, and can be as intricate as state-of-the-art printed circuit boards.
Our e-thread antennas can even be combined with regular threads in more complex designs, like integrating antennas into corporate logos or other designs. We’ve been able to embroider antennas on fabrics as thin as organza and as thick as Kevlar. Once embroidered, the wires can be connected to sensors and batteries by traditional soldering or flexible interconnections that plug components together.
So far, we’ve been able to create smart hats that read deep brain signals for patients with Parkinson’s or epilepsy. We have embroidered T-shirts with antennas that extend the range of Wi-Fi signals to the wearer’s mobile phone. We also made mats and bedsheets that monitor infants’ height to screen for a range of early childhood medical conditions. And we’ve made foldable antennas that measure how much a surface the fabric is on has bent or lifted.
Moving beyond the antenna
My lab is also working with other Ohio State researchers, including chemist Anne Co and physician Chandan Sen, to make flexible fabric-based miniature power generators.
We use a process much like inkjet printing to place alternating regions of silver and zinc dots on the fabric. When those metals come into contact with sweat, saline or even fluid discharges from wounds, silver acts as the positive electrode and zinc serves as the negative electrode — and electricity flows between them.
We have generated small amounts of electricity just by getting the fabric damp — without the need for any additional circuits or components. It’s a fully flexible, washable power source that can connect with other wearable electronics, eliminating the need for conventional batteries.
Both together and individually, these flexible, wearable electronics will transform clothing into connected, sensing, communicating devices that mesh well with the fabric of the interconnected 21st century.
Asimina Kiourti, Assistant Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, The Ohio State University
Researcher: Threat assessments crucial to prevent school shootings
Getty/fstop123
This article was originally published on The Conversation.
Editor’s note: This article was adapted from testimony the author gave on March 20, 2018 at a school safety forum convened on Capitol Hill by U.S. Rep. Bobby Scott (D-Va.) and House Democrats. The forum took place just hours after a student gunman was killed at Great Mills High School in Maryland after shooting and wounding two students there.
In the wake of the school shooting in Parkland, Florida, a wide variety of groups — from students to lawmakers — have been searching for ways to make U.S. schools and communities safer and prevent further shootings.
One of the best ways to make schools safer is to use threat assessments — a tool developed by law enforcement to protect public figures. In my opinion as one who has studied youth violence for 34 years — and as a forensic psychologist who has worked with many violent youth, including several who have committed shootings at school — I believe the time has come to use threat assessments to protect the nation’s schools.
Schools still relatively safe
The first thing to recognize is that violence in schools is just a small part of the larger problem of gun violence in American society. It would be a mistake, in my view, to focus only on schools and miss the bigger picture.
Children are exposed to violence in many other settings in their communities. Over the past 20 years, the United States has experienced an average of 22 students murdered at school each year. However, outside of schools, an average of 1,480 students are murdered annually. In other words, students are 67 times more likely to be murdered outside of school than at school.
There is understandable public alarm that there have been approximately 300 school shootings since the Sandy Hook shooting in 2012. However, according to CDC reports, there have been over 500,000 shootings outside of schools in those five years, or about 275 shootings every day, resulting in approximately 92 deaths and 183 injuries.
From this perspective, U.S. schools are much safer than the surrounding community. The nation does not have a school violence problem but a gun violence problem. What I would point out here is that there is a credible body of scientific research that we can reduce gun violence with reasonable gun laws.
Security expensive, ineffective
The nation’s response to gun violence is often an emotional reaction of increasing security and preparing for the next shooting, rather than supporting efforts to prevent gun violence. It has been reported that schools spent US$5 billion in security measures after the Sandy Hook shooting. Even if schools spend $5 billion more and could somehow make every school impregnable, that would stop only a small fraction of the shootings. For every shooting in a school, there are more than 1,600 shootings outside of school. Why would it make sense to spend billions to stop one-tenth of 1 percent and ignore the 99.9 percent of gun violence?
Prevention must start long before there is a gunman in the parking lot, and it requires, in my view, a three-tiered public health approach. The first tier is universal programs for everyone, such as improving school climate so that all children can succeed in school. Many of the mass shootings in schools and communities are committed by individuals who developed anger and resentment because of the bullying, harassment and discrimination they experienced at school. Schools should routinely measure and improve their school climate.
On the second tier, prevention means helping troubled young people who are at risk before they start down the pathway toward violence. Put an armed guard in a school and you might prevent one shooting in one building. Put a counselor or psychologist in a school and you have the potential to prevent shootings in any building anywhere in your community.
The third tier is to identify and intervene with students who are moving down a pathway toward violence, which brings me to threat assessment and how it works.
What makes threat assessment work
Threat assessment is a safe and effective way to help students who have themselves threatened violence. It is a systematic process of evaluation and intervention for persons who have made verbal or behavioral threats of violence against others.
Threat assessment was originally developed by law enforcement to protect public figures, such as the president of the United States and foreign leaders. It then expanded to business and is widely used by corporations to prevent workplace violence.
Twenty years ago, the FBI and Secret Service recommended that threat assessment be used in schools. After participating in the FBI study of school shootings in 1999, I became intrigued by this idea. My colleagues and I worked with a group of educators to develop a threat assessment model for schools.
Not assassins and terrorists
Over the past 17 years we have refined our model, published a detailed manual, disseminated it to thousands of schools and conducted 11 studies of its effects. One of our key lessons learned is that threat assessment is a good prevention strategy, but that the particular situation of each school needs to be taken into account.
The traditional law enforcement approach to threat assessment is focused on assassins and terrorists, but when it comes to schools, the focus is primarily on kids, who make threats frequently when they are angry, upset or just trying to gain some attention. In our first study, for example, we found that the age group that makes the most threats to kill are elementary school students.
In almost all cases, students need counseling and discipline, not criminal charges. In school threat assessment, you must be careful not to overreact to student threats. The process must be calibrated to deal with kids, not adults.
Evaluating the evidence
In four studies, we have found that fewer than 1 percent of students seen for a threat assessment carry out their threats. There have been fights, but none of the hundreds of threats to kill, shoot or seriously injure someone was carried out. Furthermore, three controlled studies found that schools using threat assessment had less student aggression, such as bullying and fighting, than schools that did not use threat assessment.
My conclusion is that the rush to increase security measures should not overshadow measures that have been proven to prevent violence.
In order to reduce gun violence in American communities and schools, policymakers and school leaders should adopt a threat assessment approach. This is a tool that, if properly adapted to the school setting, will not stigmatize or punish minor misbehavior but will allow schools to identify those students who are in need of mental health services and other support. And critically, in the small number of very serious threats, schools can recognize the danger, collaborate with law enforcement and keep schools safe.
Dewey Cornell, Forensic clinical psychologist and professor of education, University of Virginia
Each volcano has unique warning signs that eruption is imminent
AP Photo/Dario Lopez-Mills
This article was originally published on The Conversation.
How do volcanologists know what a volcano is going to do?
Each volcano, like each individual person, has its own unique “personality.” You may know, for example, that you can tease your brother mercilessly — up until the point where his eyebrows crease together because that means he’s going to blow his top. But do you know what it means if my eyebrows crease together? (It’s a surefire sign I’m thinking really hard.)
Similarly, one volcano might reveal an imminent eruption by a sudden increase in the frequency and strength of earthquakes located directly below it. A different volcano might not show an increase in earthquake strength but instead display an increase in elevation as magma swells beneath its surface — just as air filling a balloon causes it to increase in size.
The best way scientists can determine whether a volcano is about to erupt is to study its past behavior: How did this volcano act before it erupted last time? Our ability to predict eruptions is directly related to the amount of historic data we have for a given volcano.
For most of Earth’s active volcanoes, though, we don’t have detailed information. Mount Pinatubo, Philippines, for example, erupted catastrophically in 1991; before that, its most recent eruption was around 500 years earlier. Precursors at Mount Pinatubo included ash explosions at the summit, increases in the number of vents spewing hot gas, changes in the volcano’s shape and increases in both the frequency and size of earthquakes. Two months of increasing activity preceded the 1991 paroxysmal eruption.
In contrast, Mount St. Helens volcano in the U.S. is probably the most closely watched volcano on the planet. Decades of detailed observations allow geologists to make fairly precise predictions about Mount St. Helens: a specific pattern of earthquakes, for example, means that new lava will erupt within two weeks.
Kilauea volcano has been erupting since 1983, although there have been temporary pauses in its lava production. In these past 35 years, researchers have gotten familiar with how Kilauea behaves: we have satellite data, instruments that record earthquakes, others that show us how the ground is deforming because of magma pushing at it from below. Data are collected continuously – improving our ability to predict eruptions.
At Kilauea volcano now, lava beneath Kilauea’s summit is traveling underground several kilometers to the east, where it’s coming out of the ground in folks’ back yards. This has happened before: in 1983, lava from Kilauea destroyed a pleasant neighborhood. And it will happen again.
As technology advances, volcanologists and experts in collecting and interpreting satellite data (including remote-sensing scientists and geodesists) are improving our ability to predict eruptions. Now we can collect important information about volcano shape, temperature and changes in those parameters using satellites that provide the view from space. Satellites give volcanologists a good overall view of the volcano, but can’t supply human-scale details. Satellite orbits typically allow them to pass over a given volcano only once every week or two. We still require seismometers on the ground to detect and report earthquakes caused by magma moving beneath the volcano, but seismometers are too expensive to deploy and maintain everywhere.
Accurate predictions of volcanic eruptions — particularly the size of the eruption and whether the volcano will explode or generate lava flows — are essential for local authorities to make life-and-death decisions about people in the vicinity of an active volcano. If an evacuation is ordered and a volcano explodes, lives are saved. This happened in the 1991 Pinatubo eruption. If an evacuation is ordered and the volcano doesn’t explode, economic losses and human suffering can be catastrophic. This scenario played out in Mammoth Mountain, California, in 1984, where the local community lost millions of tourist dollars – and there was no eruption.
Mandatory evacuation of Leilani Estates & Lanipuna Gardens Subdivisions now in effect. https://t.co/qJtOVlYTyI
— COH Civil Defense (@CivilDefenseHI) May 4, 2018
To predict eruptions on the scale of hours, days or weeks, we need detailed information about each potentially threatening volcano. Without that, we are forced to make comparisons: will a volcano behave more like Mount St. Helens or Mount Pinatubo, for example? In other words, do creased eyebrows on someone you’ve just met (or, for example, increased seismicity) mean that person is about to blow its top or is just thinking really hard? More data, from more volcanoes, make for better comparisons, but nothing beats really getting to know the behavior of an individual volcano.
Tracy K.P. Gregg, Associate Professor of Geology, University at Buffalo, The State University of New York
Powerful investors push big companies to plan for climate change
This article was originally published by Scientific American.
Fortune 500 corporations like Chevron and Kinder Morgan are facing renewed pressure from climate-focused activist investors. This year some of the most powerful shareholders, which include giant mutual funds, are supporting the push for businesses to respond to climate change. And the prodding has had more effect than ever before.
The coming weeks are dubbed “proxy season” by corporate governance experts. Most publicly traded companies hold annual meetings in which shareholders, via nonbinding resolutions, signal their approval or dislike of proposed company policies. This year initiatives on climate change are among the most popular ballot items: Of the more than 420 shareholder resolutions initially proposed, about 20 percent focused on climate, tied for the largest of any proposal category, according to a report by the group Proxy Impact. Some reolutions ask companies to adopt greenhouse gas emission targets whereas others ask for reports on ways businesses could be affected by the Paris climate agreement’s global temperature goals.
Already, several companies have bowed to investor demands before votes are held. Why? Several major asset managers — like BlackRock and Vanguard Group — are now putting their heft behind climate resolutions, says Aaron Ziulkowski, a manager at Boston-based Walden Asset Management who works on shareholder engagement initiatives. It is a signal, he says, that Wall Street’s skepticism of climate science has dwindled: “It’s now widely recognized that climate change is a legitimate risk.” Still, some observers caution corporate reports do not equal policy changes.
Shareholder proposals are part of the process at publicly traded companies where activist investors jockey annually to exert pressure on everything from board oversight to policies dealing with guns, cybersecurity and gender discrimination. For years investors at these meetings have offered proposals based on climate change but lost when votes were tallied. Last year, however, momentum started to shift. Investors at Occidental Petroleum and ExxonMobil rebuked their respective corporate boards and voted to demand the companies produce reports on the business impacts of climate change. It marked the first time shareholders at major U.S. oil and gas producers backed such proposals, and corporate governance experts say the moves were game changers.
This year many companies are not waiting for ballot counts. So far about 20 climate-related resolutions have been withdrawn before a vote because agreements have been reached, according to a database compiled by Ceres, a nonprofit that tracks shareholder engagement and works with investors on sustainability issues. Nearly a dozen companies, Dominion Energy and Devon Energy among them, have agreed to produce reports on climate-related financial risks. Last year only one company, Xcel Energy, did anything like that. “The fact that there’s fewer proposals going to a vote and more agreements shows how serious the investor momentum is,” says Andrew Logan, director of oil and gas at Ceres.
Yet simple reports may not amount to much. Months after shareholders voted last year, Exxon released the asked-for document. Then some Exxon shareholders publicly criticized the oil and gas giant for concluding it faced no financial risk from the Paris accord. Others said the report was overly broad, relied on optimistic assumptions and failed to provide details on emissions.
But continued shareholder pressure can lead to actual changes in how a company does business, Logan says. He points to British-Dutch oil-and-gas giant Shell. In recent years growing investor alarm about climate change risks have led the company to sell off carbon-heavy oil sands assets. Last year shareholders voted — and the company agreed — to tie 10 percent of executive bonuses to cutting greenhouse gas emissions.
In the U.S., Logan says, investors are pushing for disclosures, for the most part, but that push still has an effect. The reports create competition within an industry, as companies vie with one another for investor dollars that go with the more aggressive climate-related plans. “Disclosure has real implications that these companies are going to have to follow through to actually mitigate risks,” Logan says. Investors at Chevron, for instance, are trying to get the company to address future changes to its portfolio, including expansion of renewable energy holdings. That proposal failed last year, but is up for a vote again at the end of May.
The follow-through may take longer than Logan envisions, however, says David Webber, a corporate governance expert and law professor at Boston University. It could take years and will require a sustained shareholder effort. “In the happiest version of the story companies will see the writing on the wall and take action on their own, but shareholders should be prepared to keep up the pressure,” he says. “These are long-term goals that may seem distant, and there’s no assurance they might be obtained. But people said that a few years ago about steps that have recently been accomplished with climate proposals. It’s important to take stock of the progress made so far.”
Scientists discover how to harness the power of quantum spookiness by entangling clouds of atoms
Getty/MarySan
This article was originally published on The Conversation.
From tunnelling through impenetrable barriers to being in two places at the same time, the quantum world of atoms and particles is famously bizarre. Yet the strange properties of quantum mechanics are not mathematical quirks — they are real effects that have been seen in laboratories over and over.
One of the most iconic features of quantum mechanics is “entanglement” — describing particles that are mysteriously linked regardless of how far away from each other they are. Now three independent European research groups have managed to entangle not just a pair of particles, but separated clouds of thousands of atoms. They’ve also found a way to harness their technological potential.
When particles are entangled they share properties in a way that makes them dependent on each other, even when they are separated by large distances. Einstein famously called entanglement “spooky action at a distance”, as altering one particle in an entangled pair affects its twin instantaneously — no matter how far away it is.
While entanglement may sound wacky, experiments have been able to show that it exists for many years now. It also has the potential to be exceptionally useful — particles linked in this way can be used to transfer a particle’s quantum state, such as spin, from one location to another immediately (teleportation). They can also help store a huge amount of information in a given volume (super-dense coding).
Along with this storage capacity, entanglement can also help link and combine the computing power of systems in different parts of the globe. It is easy to see how that makes it a crucial aspect of quantum computation. Another promising avenue is truly secure communications. That’s because any attempt to interfere with systems involving entangled particles immediately disrupts the entanglement, making it obvious that a message has been tampered with.
It is also possible to use entangled photons to enhance the resolution of imaging techniques. Researchers at the University of Waterloo are currently hoping to develop a quantum radar that may be capable of detecting stealth aircraft.
Delivering on the promises of entanglement-based technologies, however, is proving to be difficult. That’s because entanglement is a very fragile phenomenon. Experiments on entanglement typically produce individual pairs of particles. However, single particles are difficult to detect accurately and they are often lost or obscured by background noise. So the task of producing them in entangled states, manipulating them in the ways required for useful operations, and finally using them, is often daunting.
Quantum clouds
This is where the new research, published in three papers in Science (you can read them here, here and here), has made a significant breakthrough. Instead of taking single particles and entangling them one at a time, the researchers begin with an ultra-cold gas — a collection of thousands of atoms. These are cooled to within a hair’s breadth of absolute zero, the lowest temperature possible.
When confined in a small volume, atoms in such a cloud become indistinguishable from each other, forming a new state of matter known as a Bose-Einstein condensate. The atoms in the cloud now behave collectively — they are entangled. Scientists first discovered this state of matter in 1995, earning them the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2001. Although it has been known for some time that this method entangles thousands of atoms simultaneously, no one had demonstrated a technique to actually make use of it — until now.
The researchers behind the new study showed that you can split these clouds into groups and still preserve the quantum connection between the atoms inside. They did this by releasing the atoms from their confined space and using a laser to split it and measure the properties of distant parts of the expanded cloud.
The researchers speculate that the methods developed could be expanded to allow every atom from the cloud to be used independently — if this were achieved, then there would be huge benefits for quantum computing. In digital computing, information is processed as ones and zeros, binary digits (or bits). The analogue to these in quantum computing are known as qubits. The current record for producing qubits one-by-one in entangled states for ions (charged atoms) is just 20, so producing thousands of qubits simultaneously in a cloud like this would represent a huge advancement.
Another field that will benefit from this breakthrough is metrology, the science of ultra-precise measurements. When entanglement is established between two particles or systems, measurements made on one half reveal information about the other. This allows parameters to be measured with greater sensitivity than would otherwise be possible. Using entanglement in this way could improve the accuracy of atomic clocks and with it the global position system (GPS), or make more sensitive detectors for MRI machines, for example.
Understanding and harnessing quantum effects, such as entanglement, will allow new technologies to be developed that have capabilities beyond anything we possess today. This is why there is so much excitement behind research in the field of quantum technology and why the advancements made in this new research are so important.
Robert Young, Professor and Director of the Lancaster Quantum Technology Centre, Lancaster University
Millennial stress is financial and existential — but it’s OK to be broke and confused for a while
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Excerpted with permission from the “Millennial’s Guide to Changing the World: A New Generation’s Handbook to Being Yourself & Living with Purpose” by Alison Lea Sher. Copyright 2018 by Skyhorse Publishing, Inc.
“Make your life into brand.”
This was the advice of my graduation speaker at the mediocre liberal arts party school I attended. At the time, I wanted to vomit. Not because I had just popped and guzzled a bottle of champagne in the campus courtyard at 10 a.m., but because I was ready to go out and conquer the system, to offer it all my unique millennial gifts, and this woman was telling me to turn my life into a logo.
I had no idea that, in a few months, I’d be sobbing on a milk crate in the back room of a shitty food and beverage job, pleading to the cosmos to reveal to me the point of my existence.
I graduated in 2009. The economy had just crashed a year prior. Stock brokers were jumping out of the windows of Manhattan skyscrapers. Our own Great Depression was on. Mortgage-backed securities and collateralized debt obligations were not yet part of my vocabulary. All I knew was that something called the real estate bubble had burst. And so had my expectations. In typical, entitled millennial fashion, I had assumed the world was going to roll out a red carpet for me. And then I slowly began to realize that, in fact, the world disapproved of me, as a millennial.
I had no qualifications to do anything and just about zero life skills. I spent that summer pitching stories, working for free— thinking people were doing me a favor for giving me such wonderful opportunities—and binge drinking almost every night. And then I got my first job as a barista—the occupation de jour of millennial, misanthropic English majors. I worked three other side hustles, made roughly seven thousand dollars that year, and was lucky enough to be able to cash checks every month from my parents to pay the rent. I broke down twice from nervous exhaustion and contemplated becoming either a nun or a train hopper to avoid the responsibilities of a real world filled with mean people.
I wasn’t alone in this impasse of identity. Millennials suffer from high rates of apocalyptic anxiety and existential doom. This was only amplified during the Great Recession. According to a study by the American Psychological Association, we have the highest perceived amount of stress of any living generation. Our stress is existential, interpersonal, and also financial. Millennials feel so depressed about the future that it’s challenging for us to function day to day. We struggle with the idea that our entire value and worth are dependent on how well we perform in a toxic society. We’re constantly comparing our lives to others. We’ve been taught to pretend that we’re happy even when we’re not. And we don’t know what to do about the fact that we’re unhappy.
It’s a lot of work to build self-esteem, especially when you can’t stop thinking about how your hands are stained with blood and how every footstep contributes to the problems that will cause the human race to destroy ourselves. Pretty much everything we buy contributes to the enslavement of someone on the other side of the planet. Every year, our tax dollars subsidize dirty fossil fuels and wars in the Middle East. We may love going to the beach, but those sea levels are starting to rise as ice caps melt. The worst part of it all is that while we’re getting screwed over by a rigged system, we still need to write our authority figures thank you notes so can we use them on our resume as references in an increasingly competitive job market.
THE UNGLAMOROUS, PAINSTAKING PATH OF THE DREAMER
“Not losing hope in humanity has been my greatest challenge. Not losing hope in the face of how man treats man, believing that we can all be good and genuinely want happiness for each other.”
—Peter Meli, twenty-six, screenwriter
Young people usually first attempt to solve our identity crises by hinging it entirely on what we do—and whether or not we’re successful. But the truth is that many people succeed by failing—and failing a lot. I’ve had to learn that the strength of my sense of self relies more on my ability to fail and keep persevering than it does on the outcome of my efforts. Sometimes, allowing yourself to be average and to develop at your own timing is the healthiest approach if you want to succeed at anything in the world.
I’ve seen it with my peers time and again: so much of our self-image hangs on how powerful and influential we can be or whether we’re able to fulfill our childhood dreams. And we’re stressing ourselves out.
Like most creatively inclined millennials, Peter grew up dreaming of making a life in the arts. He was born with significant hearing loss, and his mother and speech therapists spent hundreds of hours teaching him how to speak. Unfortunately, we live in a world of ableism, where Peter’s schoolmates would make fun of him for wearing a hearing aid and being different. He desperately searched for someone to believe in him so he could believe in himself, and soon he found his gift when an English teacher told him he had a writing ability. He also began to excel at sports.
Peter was accepted into Dickinson College on a football scholarship that he later walked away from to study film at New York University. He says he felt torn between the two worlds of athletics and the arts. When he graduated from Tisch, he threw himself into writing his first screenplay, “Magda’s Last Words.” It is based on the diary entries of an old, tattered journal of a Holocaust survivor that his father stumbled across. Peter was transported into this world of history, violence, and redemption of the human spirit. Writing this manuscript was a way to give his life purpose.
“I want to feel like my place in the world is worth something,” he says. “Humans aren’t organisms randomly wandering around. We have to have a sense of meaning, and it has come from within. We wouldn’t be the most intelligent creatures on the planet if we weren’t meant to communicate who we are with the world.”
Years after completing “Magda’s Last Words,” Peter is still shopping it. Inside the pages are depictions of the Second World War. The narrative asks the kind of questions that tragedies like war bring up in the collective consciousness: Why are we here— to fight or to love? How do we deal with the aftermath of tragedy and brutality? Why do humans do horrendous things to each other?
For now, Peter makes his money working as a production assistant on movie and TV show sets in Los Angeles. He spends his time getting directors coffee and sweeping floors. He doesn’t find this work meaningful, but he’s positioning himself in the right kind of environments in order to make the connections so his voice can be heard. He knows he’s capable of doing more than mopping floors. But he’s grown content with working his way up. He sees companies chewing up young people and spitting them out, and he knows that he could become disposable like the others, but he’s holding on to his purpose for dear life. Peter says he’s following his dreams so he can one day teach his children to follow their own. It’s what life’s all about, he believes.
Peter has found something that he’s passionate about. He knows that his parents made certain sacrifices so he could do what he’s doing today—pursuing what he loves. Maybe the baby boomers “sold out” so millennials wouldn’t have to—and perhaps it’s not even about selling out; it’s about “buying in.”
IT’S OKAY . . . TO BE POOR, HORNY, AND CONFUSED
Your twenties just may be the most emotionally unstable period in your development. You may never be as poor as you are now; you may also never be hotter or hornier. You may never have to deal with more rejection in your life or be as simultaneously self-righteous and confused as you cobble together crumbs of personal achievement to form a veneer of competency to present to others. It’s also a time when you can focus on doing the kind of inner work that will turn you into the kind of person who can change the world.
This decade of life, the one that falls between adolescence and adulthood, is my current focus. Psychologists call this time period “emerging adulthood,” which spans the ages eighteen to twenty-nine (and sometimes later). It is defined by the joys and perils of personal freedom. We’re exploring identities and getting as many experiences as we can before we make big, committed choices about love and work. We’re discovering our interests, lifestyle preferences, and the many options that exist for us in this big, wide world.
Millennials are not afraid of change—whether it be our partners, career paths, or living situations. In fact, we often seek out change during this time when we have less obligations to others. We’re solo agents and can finally steer our own ships. We get to make our own decisions, and we also have to learn to meet our own needs. We get to envision what a worthy adult life might look like. And most of us believe that, one day, we will manifest it.
Jeffrey Jenson Arnett, PhD, a psychology professor at Clark University, was the first to propose that this demographic is unique from all other ages. He observed that young people are no longer quick to settle down. We aren’t teenagers anymore, but we aren’t acting like conventional adults either. We’re burning through jobs and locations and lovers, delaying duty and obligation, valuing our own liberties instead and learning experientially. We are spending more time in school and accumulating more debt. We’re loudly expressing ourselves through art, music, and other media. We are staying financially dependent on our parents for longer than ever. We are challenging the status quo. Arnett thinks that this prolonged adolescence is a natural evolutionary, adaptive response to social changes— increased demand for higher education, the advent of birth control, and economic competition.
This is a relatively new phenomenon. Young people didn’t act out like this until the 1950s, with the emergence of social liberalism. First, there were the Beatniks. Then, rock and roll. The hippie movement started in the sixties. Music and messages of anti-war, revolt, and love spread through TV and the radio. People were beginning to talk about the existence of a benevolent universal consciousness, outside of the construct of religion, an energetic reality of unity. Then there was disco in the seventies, hip hop in the eighties, and grunge in the nineties. Throughout these last five or six decades, it has been a rite of passage for young people to scream, “Screw constrictive and oppressive traditions! I shall not do what you tell me!” We’ve created our own subcultures that push people to their emotional edges. For decades now, the youth has created different collectives of artistic and spiritual resistance to the historical period of oppression we’re living in.
Arnett admits that his own emerging adulthood was filled with frowned-upon delays and fun-filled sidetracks such as hitchhiking, working as a musician, and traveling while earning his doctorate.
“I didn’t want to assume conventional adult roles,” Arnett says. “I knew the freedom I had was fleeting, and I was right. I think it’s wise for people to make use of it.”
His advice is to sow your wild oats before dropping anchor. Now Arnett has a family, a career, and a mortgage, but he got to it all in his own way, in his own divine timing. He can empathize with the subjects he studies.
Psychologists who study emerging adulthood say that this phase of life is characterized by instability, insecurity, a feeling of being in-between states, and extreme self-focus, all fueled by the ideation of multiple future possibilities. It’s also a time when more than half of us will suffer from anxiety and about a third us will be clinically depressed. According to a study by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA), between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five is when most people suffer from thoughts of suicide and will make a suicide attempt. Almost 9 percent of young people wish they were dead. The society we live in doesn’t prepare us well for life.
Then, a breakthrough happens. I’ve seen it. We find something—anything—and learn to take care of it. For Peter, it was a screenplay. For myself, it was writing a book, and, more important, learning how to take care of myself. To root down, so I can bear fruit; and to commit to life, because I (like you) have something of great value to contribute.
Bacteria may be powerful weapon against antibiotic resistance
Associated Press
This article was originally published on The Conversation.
When I was a child, my parents gave me a sweet pink syrup to destroy the bacteria causing my sore throat. That memory is a testament to the power of antibiotics. But, through my research as a microbiologist over the past few years, I’ve learned that not only are some microbes immune to antibiotics but they can actually “eat” these drugs, using them as a nutritious food to grow and multiply.
During the past decade, scientists have established that many soil-dwelling bacteria are able to resist and eat the antibiotics we depend upon to fight nasty infections. While this might feel like a rebuke from the world of microbes — a reminder that they can evolve to resist even our most powerful drugs — this is not all bad news.
My colleagues and I in the lab of Gautam Dantas have not only discovered how bacteria are able to eat the drugs that are supposed to kill them, but how this can be useful to people as well. We found we might someday be able to harness these antibiotic-munching microbes to clean up land and water contaminated with these medicines — a major cause of antibiotic-resistant superbugs.
Why antibiotics make a good snack
It may seem counterintuitive that microbes can eat the drugs that humans use to wipe them out. But from a bacterium’s perspective, antibiotics might be nothing more than a source of elements vital to life: carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen. Furthermore, most of the antibiotics your doctor prescribes are made by, or derived from, fungi and bacteria living in the soil. So it makes perfect sense that these benign earthy microorganisms snack on the carbon compounds made by their soil-dwelling neighbors.
For the past 10 years, scientists in the Dantas lab have been investigating how bacteria pull off this seemingly unlikely feat. Now we think we’ve cracked this mystery. We have identified a collection of genes encoding enzymes necessary for microbes to consume penicillin (which Alexander Fleming discovered in its naturally occurring form in 1928). We discovered that eating the drug is a two-step process in which the bacterium first disarms the antibiotic by breaking a piece called the “β-lactam warhead.” Without this, the remaining piece of penicillin is harmless and can be used as food, allowing the microbes to thrive in high concentrations of the drug. Second, the bacterium tears off a ring-shaped portion of the molecule and uses a dedicated family of enzymes to break it down further before eating the pieces.
Now that we understand which enzymes the bacteria use to disable the antibiotic, we can develop defense strategies and fight back. This is vital because antibiotic-resistant bacteria cause severe sickness in more than 2 million Americans, leading to more than 20,000 deaths annually. These infections are more difficult and more costly to treat because they require long stays in the hospital. Every year this leads to losses to the U.S. economy directly due to the costs of treatment (US$20 billion) and indirectly due to lost productivity ($35 billion).
Using microbes to eat contamination
Ultimately we hope that we may be able to use our findings to curb one of the chief causes of antibiotic resistance: contamination of land and water. These natural resources are polluted by sewage runoff from farms where the animals are fed antibiotics to fatten them up, and illegally dumped pharmaceutical waste or spills — particularly from bulk manufacturers in China and India. We believe we could remove these medicines through bio-remediation, which uses living organisms to clean up man-made messes.
While the bacteria that we identified in our study grew slowly when fed a diet of penicillin, we might be able to engineer new varieties that remove antibiotics more efficiently by speed-eating the drug. As a proof of concept, we cut and pasted genes from our soil microorganisms, as well as a previously discovered gene that we thought would have a similar function, into benign laboratory strains of E. coli bacteria and turned them into antibiotic-eating microbes.
Although this might sound simple, figuring out the genetic instructions for penicillin eating and inserting them into E. coli took several steps. First we sequenced the entire genetic content – the genomes – of all four of the penicillin-eating bacteria that Dr. Dantas discovered. This yielded a genetic roadmap of all the potential routes the bacteria could use to eat this antibiotic. By studying which genes were turned on by the bacteria while they ate penicillin, we learned which ones were most important.
To confirm that we had figured out the steps the microbes use to eat antibiotics, we broke these genes in one strain of the soil bacteria. This yielded mutants that were incapable of consuming penicillin, helping us to pinpoint which genes were needed to engineer E. coli to eat penicillin.
But the really interesting discovery was that penicillin eating requires two separate groups of genes to work together, beginning with an antibiotic resistance gene to break the toxic β-lactam warhead. Without this critical enzyme, the bacteria are unable to disarm the antibiotic, and without the enzyme responsible for removing the ring from penicillin, there is nothing to eat.
This suggests that we may be able to manufacture new strains of benign bacteria to remove antibiotics from the environment. This doesn’t mean that people can use antibiotics with impunity, but it might provide a safe way to curb the spread of antibiotic resistance in the future.
Terence Crofts, Post Doctoral Trainee of Molecular Microbiology, Washington University in St Louis
Meet the Shanghai woman who peddles a massive tower of Styrofoam from her bike
Noah Sheldon
There’s something so poignant, in a funny and sad way, about the image of Guo Jie, a poor, rural Chinese woman who transports an enormous pile of Styrofoam on her bicycle every day.
You can watch the full documentary "Styrofoam" on Salon Premium, our new ad-free, content-rich app. Here's how.
Director Noah Sheldon talked to Salon about Guo Jie and what he hoped to capture with her arresting image.
How did you discover your remarkable subject, Guo Jie?
Seven years ago, I was sitting with my wife and small daughter at a restaurant. It was about a week after we moved to Shanghai from New York, when we saw Guo Jie ride by. We were amazed. I grabbed my wife's brand new iPhone 4 and followed her down the street to a market where she was picking up boxes, and I asked her if I could film her with the iPhone. She seemed slightly amused but also a bit skeptical.
Years later, I decided I wanted to make a longer, more substantial film about her. My producer Jean Liu and I went around to where I had seen her and showed everyone at the market pictures of her. Even though she had been buying from that market for years, no one knew her name or how to get in touch with her. But she came by every other day. Jean decided to wait for her all day. When she found her again to make the film she was getting a parking ticket from the police so she wasn’t too interested in talking to us. To Guo Jie, her work may seem super necessary to provide basic income. What she doesn't see is just how novel and innovative her [business] model is.
In Shanghai it’s not uncommon to see trash collectors and their bikes piled high with cardboard, plastic bottles or Styrofoam. What really stood out about Guo Jie was how much bigger her bike was than anyone else’s and how methodically she’d arranged her boxes to fit as much on as possible. She’s extremely enterprising!
How did she respond to you wanting to film her?
When we found her again and she was getting the parking ticket, she wasn’t too interested in talking to us. I think after we’d gotten to know her and explained to her what filming would entail, she was mostly bemused and perplexed. To her, her life seems unbelievably pedestrian and ordinary, and she probably thought it would be the most uninteresting film ever made.
How many times a week does she make a trip like the one in the film? And could you quantify how much income Guo Jie makes from such a load?
She works every single day unless there are typhoon winds, and she usually manages one trip a day. She has two routes around the city and she alternates between them, one route per day. She wouldn’t explicitly tell us how much money she made but she buys the boxes for 0.5-1rmb a box and sells them for around 3rmb a box. She’s collecting over 300 boxes a day but this varies a lot according to season and of course sometimes she’s fined.
Can you describe the place where Guo Jie sells the Styrofoam? Did you consider including the selling process in the film?
Guo Jie sells the Styrofoam boxes by collecting from the fruit market and then selling to a wholesale fish market. They then fill the boxes with water to store their live fish. Guo Jie was adamant we didn’t bring cameras into the market as she didn’t want to spook her customers, so we couldn’t really include the selling process even if we wanted to.
Were the police or Chinese government aware of you filming, and if so, did they try to control your production?
We kept the production crew very small and local to Shanghai, so we didn’t really attract the attention of any authorities during the shoot. I also don’t think the film is particularly critical of policies implemented by the Chinese government. I really wanted to reflect Guo Jie’s personality in the tone of the film. She is extremely matter of fact and not at all self-pitying. The film aims to present Guo Jie’s reality as it is and how skillful she is at what she does. I don't think she is concerned that she might be part of a greater social trend or of the political climate around migrant workers. She just assesses her situation and figures out how to make the most of it.
Get a glimpse of the absurdity of the human condition and the hardship of one Chinese migrant worker with “Styrofoam,” streaming on Salon Premium, our new ad-free, content-rich app.
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May 5, 2018
How atmospheric dust might help cool the planet
AP/NASA
This article originally appeared on Massive.
As the earth continues to warm, it is becoming increasingly clear that we cannot ignore the possibilities of geoengineering, the branch of science that develops techniques to artificially cool the planet. Indeed, it may soon become necessary to take drastic action to prevent the worst effects of climate change. However, that doesn’t mean that geoengineering experiments should be undertaken without caution and care, because the underlying impact of those experiments could very well end up causing more harm than help.
Iron fertilization as a geoengineering method was mostly considered in the late 1990s to early 2000s, and as an idea, it came about because of a very fundamental oceanographic question: why do certain areas of the ocean have very low amounts of plankton, even when they have enough nutrients for those plankton to grow?
In most areas of the ocean, phytoplankton, the tiny plant-like creatures that produce most of the oxygen in the ocean (and about half of the oxygen on the planet), need only two things to grow: light and nutrients. But there are some areas of the ocean that contain high levels of nutrients and no phytoplankton, even during times of the year when light conditions are right. These regions, called high-nutrient, low-chlorophyll regions, puzzled oceanographers until 1990, when a scientist named John Martin proposed that iron might be the missing link.
The limits of iron
Iron is a micronutrient — living things don’t need a lot of it, but what they do need, they can’t do without. Places like the Southern Ocean, off the coast of Antarctica, have almost no iron at all. This is because iron is a terrestrial micronutrient, meaning it comes from the land. The most common sources of iron to the ocean are rivers and wind-blown dust from deserts. Antartica, covered in ice and isolated from other continents, has none of that. Martin proposed that that was why the phytoplankton weren’t growing. To prove it, scientists went out and conducted iron fertilization experiments by artificially adding iron to the ocean and see if the phytoplankton grew. Within a day of adding dissolved iron into the ocean, scientists observed a phytoplankton bloom.
That research was interesting and exciting, but the most exciting part for some people was an interesting link between phytoplankton and carbon dioxide. See, just like plants on land, phytoplankton are photosynthesizers. They use up carbon dioxide to create oxygen, and with so much open, iron-limited space in the Southern Ocean, oceanographic researchers across multiple institutions worldwide started to wonder if, with just enough iron, we could stop climate change completely.
It didn’t work out quite that nicely. Artificial iron fertilization was proven to be ineffective at removing carbon from the atmosphere. And over concerns, published in a letter to Science in 2008, that continuing to conduct these studies might harm the natural environment by allowing invasive species to grow or by altering the ecosystem in ways they couldn’t predict, the research was effectively halted. (Some continued under the table. In 2012, a US-based entrepreneur named Russ George defied an ocean-dumping moratorium, convincing the Haida Nation to conduct an iron fertilization project off the coast of British Columbia, Canada, to boost salmon populations, with the idea that salmon would feed off of the resulting phytoplankton bloom. According to Nature, scientists have seen no evidence that the scheme worked.)
Since 2008, there have been almost no papers talking about iron in the Southern Ocean affecting the climate. However, new research by Gary Shaffer, a researcher at the University of Magallanes in Punta Arenas, Chile, and Fabrice Lambert, an assistant professor at the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile, suggests that the question of iron isn’t fully closed. Their research, which is focused on atmospheric dust, a major source of oceanic iron, suggests that dust, and the iron in it, may have contributed to the onset of the ice ages. And understanding how the Earth has naturally cooled in the past, prior to human intervention, would allow us to better understand how Earth might cool in the future.
Simulating sun and iron
Ice ages are actually regular events. Over the past 800,000 years, we’ve had eight. To a certain extent, they can be explained by variations in Earth’s orbit. However, one curious thing about the past few ice ages is that our records show a decrease of carbon dioxide during them, contributing to global cooling via reflection, where dust particles in the atmosphere reflect incoming sunlight back out into space, and iron fertilization.
And while Antarctica is usually far away from any sources of dust, Shaffer and Lambert’s research, which combines records taken from dust measurements in ice cores over the past 300,000 years with temperature measurements calculated from those same ice cores in Greenland and Antarctica, shows that the amount of dust in the atmosphere increased greatly just before the start of the last three ice ages.
While they state that this effect is not strong enough to cause an ice age on its own, the correlation is compelling, and Shaffer and Lambert make a convincing case that dust in the atmosphere might have provided the final push into an ice age. Using computer model simulations, they tested both the effect of reflection of sunlight and iron fertilization, and both appeared significant. Their research suggests that iron fertilization may play a part in cooling the earth after all.
However, that still doesn’t mean that iron fertilization is the solution to climate change. Shaffer and Lambert’s work showed that iron can contribute to an ice age that’s already in development, not that it can start an ice age from scratch. The potential risks of artificial iron fertilization still need to be examined carefully before reopening the idea of using it for geoengineering so that we can fully understand the effects that this technique has on the natural environment and be prepared for any consequences that might result.
