Energy: hết 5, engineering: hết sạch, med & biotech: hết 11 trang

Power Plant Pollution Declines, but Autos Keep the Smog Around

On a hot summer day, plumes of nitric oxide and nitrogen dioxide--collectively known as NOx--billow
forth from coal-fired power plants in the eastern U.S. Along with urban concentrations of their
transportation counterparts--think the tailpipes of cars and trucks--such plumes can be readily detected
from space via orbiting satellites. And such space-based data reveals that NOx emissions, from power
plants at least, are on the decline.

Si-Wan Kim of NOAA's Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences at the University of
Colorado at Boulder and her colleagues collected satellite observations of such coal-burning power
plants in the six states of the upper Midwest. By 2005, emissions from the largest such plants in the Ohio
River valley had declined, dropping overall NOx in the atmosphere 38 percent below 1999 levels,
according to the satellites' measurement of such plumes. This decline follows a recent federal law that
requires cuts in such smog-forming emissions by setting an overall cap for the entire power sector and
allowing individual power plants to trade pollution permits to meet it--a so-called cap-and-trade system.

Because such power plants account for roughly 25 percent of total U.S. emissions of the smog-forming
gases, that should be good news for clean air in the eastern half of the country. But the satellites
showed little decline in such pollution in the northeast U.S. "Power plants account for less than 20
percent of total NOx emissions in this region," Kim explains. Even a "50 percent reduction of power plant
NOx emissions means less than 10 percent overall decrease in the total NOx budget." In other words,
pollution spewed from tailpipes in the urban Northeast dwarfs--and swallows up--the reductions
produced by cleaning up belching coal smokestacks in the Midwest.

The satellite data confirms measurements taken by so-called continuous emission monitors on the
smokestacks themselves as well as data gathered by airplane, analyzed earlier this year by NOAA's
Gregory Frost and others. Ground-level ozone, otherwise known as smog, has dropped in areas near the
largest power plants by as much as 16 percent. Because smog has been linked to a variety of health
effects, including heart disease, any drop--no matter where it is located or how widely it spreads--brings
benefits. But, as the researchers write in the paper presenting the findings in the November 29
Geophysical Research Letters, "these findings suggest that further substantive reductions in eastern U.S.
[ground-level] NOx levels will require decreases in mobile source NOx emissions."
 Smartwatch Makers Finally Design Devices for Women

Despite a wide selection of smartwatches for men, smaller, fashionable versions designed for women
have only recently become available—and their choices are limited

Small screen size presents the biggest challenge to using—not to mention designing—a smartwatch.
This loosely defined term has come to include just about any digital timepiece with a voice- or touch-
enabled display. But women's watches, which are traditionally smaller and more delicate than
timepieces for men, pose an extra dilemma for smartwatch makers trying to pack fitness monitoring and
smartphone functions into a wrist-worn device. As a result, very few smartwatches have been designed
specifically to appeal to a woman’s lifestyle needs or fashion sense.

And yet women outnumber men as prospective buyers of wearable fitness devices, according to a 2014
study by the research firm NPD Group. That sense of an untapped market may explain why a handful of
manufacturers have begun designing smartwatches for women in a way that extends beyond swapping
out different colored bands on gender-neutral devices. As a result, two different smartwatch makers
have taken two very different approaches to reach out to women interested in the technology.

A poll conducted by Intel’s New Devices Group indicated that women prefer to exude fashion—not
technology—with what they wear. With that benchmark, Intel and designers at the fashion shop
Opening Ceremony crafted a high-tech accessory they've called MICA (short for My Intelligent
Communication Accessory). Retailing at $495, MICA looks like a stylish bracelet and behaves like a
smartwatch. Pearls and a precious stone adorn the bracelet, which comes in black or white and is made
of water snake skin. A curved-sapphire touch-screen display, reaching nearly 40 millimeters diagonally,
wraps around the bracelet’s underside. “We engineers would like to have electronics laid out on a flat
surface,” says Ayse Ildeniz, vice president of Intel’s New Devices Group and general manager of strategy
and business development. Stretching electronics across a smartwatch’s bent surface inherently
amplifies its surface area, resulting in a bulkier design, she says. Because some women prefer chunky
jewelry, MICA’s bulky appearance blends well with some fashion trends.

Battery life was a major issue, as it is with most wearables. “There is this interaction between battery
life and display size that impacts the overall industrial design,” says Richard Kerslake, director of strategy
and products for the New Devices Group. “There is a tradeoff that has to be made there.” He says
women have historically gravitated toward smaller watches, resulting in the need for batteries with
smaller diameters that leaves only two options: reduced life or increased thickness. In the end, Intel
optimized the shape and size of a curved battery to enhance user experience of the display screen—
including the richness of Opening Ceremony’s wallpaper on the interface—as well as last all day,
depending on the user’s interaction.
Start-up wearables maker Omate chose a different path to making its Lutetia smartwatch, which will be
sold in jewelry stores beginning in September. Lutetia looks more like a conventional lady's watch,
weighing 35 grams less than the MICA and 25 grams less than the 18-karat-rose gold Apple Watch.

Omate first staked a claim in the wearables market when it generated $1 million in a Kickstarter
campaign for its water-resistant smartwatch in 2013. The company is adding Lutetia to its lineup
because of the lack of smartwatches that appeal specifically to women, says Ving Chen, the watch’s lead
designer. “All of the devices available in the market last year were really ugly and bulky,” she says.
“That’s the reason we decided to design a smartwatch for women.”

Early on, Omate knew that the smartwatch design approach of mobile technology manufacturers was
“wrong”, according to Chen. Although smartphones are useful tools, they have limited customization
beyond black for men and white for women. “That does not work for wearable devices,” she says. Her
main priority was to design a stylish and customizable watch for women with simple, yet practical
functions. “No men were allowed in the design process of Lutetia, so we had a full girl-power design,”
she says. “We have been spending a lot of time in assessing the market.”

The $199 Lutetia comes in silver, gold and rose gold with a matching beaded strap. Bluetooth 4.0 low
energy technology pushes notifications—such as e-mails, SMS, phone calls and social media—from an
iPhone or Android smartphone to the watch.

Although the core technology within Lutetia is the same as Omate’s male smartwatches, Racer and
Roma, Lutetia looks and feels as if it was fashioned for women—unlike the Apple Watch. The only visible
distinction between the male and female Apple Watch is display height (38 or 42 millimeters), band
material (leather, rubber or stainless steel) and color (red, gray, blue, black, white, soft pink and more).
“We believe the user interface should not be bigger than your fingertip,” Chen says. Due to supply chain
issues, Omate had difficulty finding a smaller round display. Eventually Omate found a stylish and
functional screen—although it was larger than initially planned. With a 31-millimeter-diameter touch-
screen display, the Lutetia—if you can get one—sports a battery that reportedly outperforms
competitors. Lutetia lasts 72 hours in standby mode and 48 hours in normal use, which is about four
times longer than Apple Watch, Chen says.

It’s still too soon to determine if MICA or Lutetia will appeal to women in the long run. But, at least now,
the male-dominated wearables industry is finally listening to what women want.
 Jellyfish "Gooeyness" Could Be a Model for Self-Healing Robots

A jellyfish’s strange shortcut to symmetry allows injured animals to reorganize their remaining limbs
instead of having to regrow them

To restore their ability to survive in the ocean, the amputated jellyfish larvae simply rearranged their
remaining arms instead of growing new ones. Credit: Courtesy of Michael Abrams/Ty Basinger

For many sea creatures, regrowing a lost limb is routine. But when a young jellyfish loses a tentacle or
two to the jaws of a sea turtle, for example, it rearranges its remaining limbs to ensure it can still eat and
swim properly, according to a new study published June 15 in Proceedings of the National Academy of
Sciences. The discovery should excite marine enthusiasts and roboteers alike, the authors say, because
the jellyfish’s strategy for self-repair may teach investigators how to build robots that can heal
themselves. “It’s another example of nature having solved a problem that we engineers have been
trying to figure out for a long time,” says John Dabiri, a biophysicist at Stanford University who had
discussed the project with the study investigators but was not involved with the research.

The surprise of symmetrization

The discovery happened almost by accident, says Michael Abrams, a PhD student at California Institute
of Technology and the study’s lead author. Abrams, along with Lea Goentoro, his advisor and an
assistant professor of biology at Caltech, had initially set out to study Turritopsis dohrnii, a species of
chandelierlike jellyfish that has achieved biological immortality with its ability to transform back into a
polyp at any stage of its life. But these largely unstudied jellyfish proved difficult to acquire so the lab
began experimenting with a different species, Aurelia aurita, while waiting for the immortals to arrive.
Aurelia, also called the moon jellyfish, are incredibly common and easily identified by the four crescent-
shaped gonads on their umbrellas. “I started doing old-school type experiments from 150 years ago,
where you just cut things up and see what happens,” Abrams says. He selected some of the ephyra, the
free-swimming, larvae of the moon jellyfish, which resemble tiny starbursts, each with eight symmetrical
arms radiating out of a disk-shaped body. Then he amputated two limbs from an anesthetized ephyra—
fully expecting the its limbs to regrow, as is the case with many marine invertebrates and even the polyp
stage of the moon jellyfish.

Instead, he saw something else entirely. Rather than regenerating its amputated arms, the young
jellyfish rearranged its remaining limbs over the course of the next 18 hours until they were equally
distributed around its body. By re-creating a semblance of its original symmetry, the animal recovered
its ability to survive in the ocean.
The particular arrangement of a jellyfish's tentacles is critical for it to swim and eat properly. Jellyfishes
have what’s called radial symmetry, which can look anything like a snowflake to a disk, as long as it can
be divided like a pie to produce identical pieces. Jellyfishes move by flapping their arms to propel
themselves through the water, creating a pulse in their bodies. In each pulse the jellyfish’s body deforms
for propulsion, taking in nutrient-rich water then returning to its original, saucerlike shape in the
recovery. These pulses require perfect radial symmetry for the jellyfish to bob in balance. Lop off a few
limbs and the animal will spiral and meander through the water and become an alarmingly easy target
for lunch.

A simple matter of physics

These jellyfish put themselves back together in a process that the Caltech team called
“symmetrization.” Unlike regrowing a limb, this self-repair mechanism neither creates nor destroys cells.
Rather, it relies on the sheer power of jellyfish muscle—which is stronger than it sounds.

The researchers found that the muscle contractions exerted by each pulse of the jellyfish with a missing
limb forced its other arms to space out equally. The sudden crowding sensation of its remaining arms
caused the jellyfish to push its limbs away from one another and toward the empty space, thus forming
a more stable configuration. “In one pulse, it may look like it’s going back to its original form,” Abrams
says. “But that pulse over thousands of times makes symmetry.”

Imagine a wagon that has lost a front wheel. Without changing the placement of the remaining three
wheels, the wagon would be stuck. Centering the remaining front wheel, however, would rebalance the
vehicle as a fully functional wheelbarrow. Same function, different body.

To determine the driving force behind symmetrization, the investigators turned to the muscles
themselves. When the researchers added muscle relaxants to the seawater, the muscle contractions of
the jellyfish slowed down, as expected. After amputation the creatures also took longer to reorganize
their appendages. Conversely, the jellyfish symmetrized faster when researchers reduced the amount of
magnesium, a common mineral that also relaxes muscles, in the seawater.

Aurelia’s ability to push its limbs into order is embedded in what Abrams calls “the gooeyness” of its
body. Both squishy and elastic, jellyfishes can snap like a rubber band over a short periods of time and
ooze like goo over longer periods. When jellyfishes move, their tissue alternates between these states of
tautness and gooeyness. The technical term for a material’s dual expression of fluid and elastic
properties is viscoelasticity. These taut/goo cycles essentially push the jellyfish’s limbs away from one
another until they are equally spaced apart.
This shortcut to healing is a lifesaver for a creature literally made of gelatin. At any given time, 33 to 47
percent of seafloor invertebrates are injured, according to a 2010 study in Integrative and Comparative
Biology. In other words, it’s hard to be soft.

The discovery explains a long-standing, if relatively minor mystery in the world of jellyfish research.
Scientists have long reported seeing “freak” jellyfishes with fewer than eight limbs but could never tell
whether these anomalies were the product of accident, mutation or something else entirely, says Jack
Costello, a professor of biology at Providence College who specializes in jellyfish and was not involved
with the study. But these “accidents” may help investigators prevent a different kind of body—this time
an artificial one—from accidents of its own.

Molding the field of soft robotics

Symmetrization may provide valuable insight to research in soft robotics, a relatively new field that
draws inspiration from “soft” organisms like octopuses and worms, which lack rigid structures.

Inspired by that dexterity, designers aim to create much greater freedom of movement in soft robots.
This mobility would endow soft robots with the ability to solve delicate tasks in unstructured
environments. In 2013 researchers at Harvard University built a locomotive soft robot inspired by a
starfish that could navigate obstacles by stretching and compressing its malleable body.

This characteristic softness, however, makes these robots uniquely vulnerable to cuts and punctures
from sharp objects. Designing a soft robot able to recover from damage would solve one of the field’s
greatest challenges, according to Dabiri. Before the PNAS study, researchers had sought to tackle this
problem by inventing a creative way to regrow lost tissue. But symmetrization may offer a better
shortcut. “Jellyfish have shown us maybe a simpler and more elegant solution: redistributing tissue to
maintain function in a different body than you started off with,” Dabiri says.

The quest for suitable materials, which poses another major challenge to the field of soft robotics, may
also draw inspiration from the moon jellies. The viscoelasticity of a jellyfish’s body makes it remarkably
muscular and efficient. Jellyfishes, which are 95 percent water, have “the highest miles per gallon of any
animal we know of,” Dabiri says. Their gooey and elastic pulses propel them through the water using
very little energy, according to a study published two years ago in PNAS.

In 2012 Dabiri and biophysicist Kit Parker of Harvard University bioengineered an artificial jellyfish that
looked and swam like the real thing, despite being built entirely out of cells from a rat’s heart. Dabiri
says the latest findings give him insight into taking his creation out of the controlled environment of his
lab and up against the sharp objects of the real world.
 Cuttlefish Camouflage Inspires New Shape-Shifting Materials

Researchers have engineered 3-D–printed materials with surfaces that can change texture on demand

3-D printed material with modifiable surface with rigid polymers (black) embedded in soft, flexible
material (clear or lighter tone) Credit: Felice Frankel

3-D printing is radically transforming fields ranging from jewelry-making to jet engine fabrication. Now
innovators are moving beyond the production of solid, static objects to create materials that can be
transformed and manipulated at will. Using a 3-D printer, engineers have fabricated a new soft material
with a modifiable surface texture. The researchers who designed this material have suggested a wide
array of applications for such surfaces but the original inspiration for their shape-shifting creation was
the cuttlefish.

“The project was originally about camouflage,” says lead author Mark Guttag, a PhD student at
Massachusetts Institute of Technology who conducted this study as part of his master’s thesis. Cuttlefish
are cephalopods with large, elongated bodies and tentacles around their mouths. They often hide from
predators by altering skin color and patterns to closely blend in with their surroundings. Even more
intriguingly, they can match their skin’s texture to that of surrounding surfaces. Octopuses and other
cephalopods similarly camouflage themselves.

Inspired by these aquatic masters of disguise, Guttag and co-author Mary Boyce, dean of engineering at
Columbia University, wanted to create their own artificial surfaces with adjustable textures. To do so,
they developed a 3-D printing process that uses two types of polymers: one rigid, one flexible. The
printer inserts an array of the rigid polymers into a bed of squishy material composed of the more
flexible type. When the material is compressed, its naturally smooth surface takes on a patterned
texture that depends on the spacing and shapes of the embedded rigid polymers. It can be smooth,
ridged, bumpy or even form more complicated patterns. When the material is released, it reverts to its
original smooth texture.

Shengqiang Cai, an engineer at the University of California, San Diego, who was not involved with this
study, says that Guttag and Boyce’s material is “innovative and inspiring.” According to Cai, the creation
of this method for creating modifiable surfaces not only has many important applications for surface
engineering but may also provide valuable insights into the underlying mechanics of biological surface
patterning.

Once the material is printed, its rigid polymers are stuck in a fixed array and cannot change positions
relative to one another. But Guttag and Boyce have proposed a number of means for achieving different
types of surfaces from the same sheet of printed material. For example, by using elongated rigid
polymers instead of spherical ones, scientists could create surfaces that are smooth along one direction
but ridged in the opposite direction. Some rigid polymers might yield differently textured surfaces
depending on the strength of the applied force. If they are lightly squeezed, they form one texture, but
further compression would cause the polymers to rotate relative to one another, creating a different
topography. Other polymers could swell or shrink relative to the soft material.

In the sample Guttag and Boyce printed to physically test their code, the rigid polymers were about a
centimeter in diameter and the bed of soft material was about a meter across. But according to Guttag,
their printing process could be scaled up or down, depending on the material’s intended use. “The main
thing is the relative sizing of particles and relative spacing of them, as opposed to the absolute size,” he
says.

The team also has discovered their modifiable surfaces are not only useful for camouflage but a
spectrum of other applications such as making an object more or less aerodynamic, reflective or water-
repellent. These surfaces might also be useful for controlling fluid flow. It seems transformable
topographies might bring the 3-D printing revolution to a host of new industries.

Cooler Buildings Save Energy

How can a new office building cut energy costs and stay chic?

The Co-operative Group’s head office in Manchester, UK has been declared one of the most
environmentally-friendly buildings in the world. Credit: The Co-Operative via flickr

SOUTH SAN FRANCISCO, Calif. — In an industrial section of a San Francisco Bay Area suburb, the sleek
new office building of Genentech, a biotechnology firm, opened last week. The company knows it will be
energy efficient because it is the first project to take advantage of a cutting-edge efficiency testing
facility that was developed last year in nearby Berkeley.

"Building 35" was developed on a rotating test bed at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory to model
real-life conditions as closely as possible. Lighting, ventilation and shading in the 255,000-square-foot
building have all been adjusted based on months of experiments in a mocked-up office with sensors to
measure temperature, glare and energy use.

First impressions of the building, however, come from a coffee bar in the airy atrium with kombucha on
draft, massage chairs off the lobby and Herman Miller desks that raise and lower at the touch of a
button. More subtle are the green couch cushions and the metal fins on the sides of the building, each
embossed with graphic representations of DNA code.

"It's all about choice, collaboration, well-being and sustainability," said Joana Calvo, a project
coordinator at the building and a tour guide at Genentech's unveiling last week. The building will
eventually house 1,500 of Genentech's 10,000 Bay Area employees.

There is much more at work here than mere style. The atrium is designed so that it relies on natural air
flows 40 percent of the time. Ventilation systems in the conference rooms don't turn on until carbon
dioxide levels reach 1,000 parts per million.

The metal fins are aligned to minimize glare and make the most of natural heat and light; as such, they
are placed horizontally on the building's south face and vertically on the rest of the sides, to bounce light
into the top part of the ceiling and down onto the workers.

Under construction since October 2013, the building underwent four months of testing at LBNL's
Flexlab, a customizable facility that allows commercial real estate developers to create mock-ups of
planned buildings to test their energy use.

Funded with $15.7 million from the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, the lab features
eight rooms that can be outfitted to mirror an existing or planned building's layout. Two of the rooms
rotate 270 degrees in order to test various levels of sunlight (Greenwire, July 11, 2014).

The price? Don't ask

The project builder, Webcor, constructed a section of the building at Flexlab and rotated it every week
to test furniture, façade systems, flooring, lighting and ceiling systems. Webcor measured temperature
and glare at various heights and locations in the room.

All told, energy-saving techniques and materials are expected to reduce energy use about 30 percent
below the building industry's voluntary efficiency standards of 2007, and are calculated to pay for
themselves within three to five years.

Adjusting lighting controls further than the manufacturers' settings, for example, is expected to save
$4,145 per year and 60 percent more energy than the default efficiency settings. The automated
window shades never completely close, because testing at Flexlab revealed that the bottom 6 inches of
window should always stay exposed to maximize use of natural daylight.

Although the lawns around the building are currently brown, to comply with lawn-watering restrictions
put in place to combat the state's historic drought, the drought-tolerant landscaping will eventually
reduce irrigation by 78 percent.

The building doesn't have solar power, as its perch overlooking San Francisco Bay is known for its often-
foggy microclimate.

"Our focus was having a positive ROI," said Andrew Keller, Genentech's campus site planner. "I think the
return on that investment was about 27 years."

Genentech officials wouldn't say how much the building cost, but noted that if Flexlab had been
available earlier in the planning process, the energy savings would have been even greater. The use of
Flexlab cost $250,000.

"Flexlab did not exist when we developed our initial plans for the building, but when they came online,
we were very pleased to be the first client to test several features and operating systems for the
building," said spokeswoman Lisa Slater.

Currently, utility Pacific Gas & Electric is using Flexlab to test efficiency technologies, and SolarCity and
Tesla are slated to test their combined solar panel and battery systems there this summer.

Fastest Elevators in the West Climb Tallest Skyscraper in the West

When the observation deck of New York’s 1 World Trade Center opens later this month, the 100-floor
elevator ride will take just a minute

Sky's the Limit: The 104-story 1 WTC—which opened for tenants in November—has 73 elevators, five of
which will be express elevators with a top speed of more than 36.5 kilometers per hour. Credit: Courtesy
of John D. Morris, via Wikimedia Commons
When the observatory at 1 World Trade Center (1 WTC) opens May 29 in lower Manhattan, visitors will
be treated to a spectacular 360-degree view of New York City and the surrounding area from nearly 390
meters above its bustling streets. All that’s needed to travel to the upper reaches of the building, also
known as the “Freedom Tower,” is a 60-second ride in the Western Hemisphere’s fastest elevator
system.

The 104-story 1 WTC—which opened for tenants in November—has 71 elevators, five of which will be
express elevators with a top speed of more than 36.5 kilometers per hour. They are not the fastest in
the world—Taiwan’s Taipei 101 skyscraper elevators race to the top of that 508-meter-tall tower at up
to about 60 kilometers per hour—but they are still a full 25-percent faster than the express elevators in
1 WTC’s predecessor, the Twin Towers.

Eight 2.3-ton electric motors installed on 1 WTC’s roof power the high-speed elevators. Each elevator
operates using a pulleylike system that consists of a cab and counterweights connected by a cable.
Together, 1 WTC’s elevators use about 454,000 kilograms of counterweight to ascend and descend the
building’s hoistways, or shafts.

In addition to being speedy, the elevators serving 1 WTC—the tallest building in the Americas—feature
several advanced technologies designed to improve ride quality, safety and logistics. Although some of
these features are already used in other “supertall” buildings around the world, a closer look at 1 WTC’s
lift system reveals just how far elevator technology has advanced since the first Otis Brothers and Co.
passenger elevator lifted shoppers from the ground floor of a New York City department store in 1857.

Future elevators are expected to function without cables, but these are years away as engineers develop
the means to dead-lift elevator cabs—which weigh upward of 4,500 kilograms apiece—without any help
from counterweights. One approach that several elevator companies have pursued over the years is the
development of cable-free cars that use electromagnetic levitation to move in any direction.

Race to the top

An elevator needs more than just powerful motors to travel at high speeds. Like bullet trains, fast-
moving elevators also require incredibly smooth rails and rail joints to move swiftly. “Over time, train
rails have gotten longer in order to cut down on the number of joints a train must pass over and create a
smoother ride,” says John Koshak, owner of Elevator Safety Solutions, a Collierville, Tenn.–based
elevator and escalator consulting firm. The vertical positioning of elevator rails, however, limits their
length to about 4.9 meters, which means any skyscraper requires a large number of rail joints.
Elevators must also account for minute changes in the distance between guide rails that occur as
changes in temperature, wind and other conditions cause skyscrapers to sway slightly throughout the
course of a day. “These factors mean that you can’t ever have a perfect plane for an elevator to travel in
very tall buildings,” Koshak observes.

At 1 WTC, engineers are minimizing elevator car jostling using what is known as an “active roller guide”
system. Roller guides keep an elevator’s wheels, known as rollers, in contact with the guide rails as the
car ascends and descends. The rollers used at 1 WTC are made of polyurethane so they can absorb slight
imperfections in the rail joints and are controlled by a system that pushes and pulls against the rails to
prevent any misalignments or imperfections from interfering with a smooth ride, according to
Alpharetta, Ga.,–based ThyssenKrupp Elevator, which holds an $87.98-million contract from The Port
Authority of New York & New Jersey for elevator and escalator service at 1 WTC. ThyssenKrupp
developed the system with roller-guide maker Elsco, headquartered in Owings Mills, Md. These active
roller guide systems are “like hugely intelligent shock absorbers, which is hard to do in real time,”
Koshak says. “You’ll see these in [supertall] buildings from now on.”

No pressure

Air pressure is also a concern when designing and building high-speed elevator systems that can scale
supertall skyscrapers, which by definition exceed 300 meters. Engineers, architects and builders must
take into account how changes in air pressure impact not just the elevator cars and their passengers but
the floors they pass as well. As a typical 4,500-kilogram car with a 7,300-kilogram counterweight rushes
up its hoistway, it creates a massive air displacement. “With an area of high pressure above the car and
low pressure below it, you’re creating a situation where the hoistway doors above the car want to blow
out into the hallway and the hoistway doors below the car want to suck into the hoistway,” Koshak
explains.

ThyssenKrupp placed aerodynamic aluminum shrouds around the tops of the elevators in 1 WTC to
reduce air resistance, drag and wind noise in a way that minimizes air displacement. The idea behind
this creative airflow design is that air pressure between the elevator doors and the hoistway doors
remain neutral—minimal “whooshing” sound or door rattling when an express elevator passes by a floor
without stopping, Koshak says. Air pressure changes that affect people inside the car are more difficult
to mitigate, however. ThyssenKrupp’s approach at 1 WTC is to provide extra air pressure inside the cars
to compensate for pressure drops, then slowly releasing it to keep passengers’ ears from popping.

An elevator can ascend as fast as the technology will allow without creating any passenger discomfort
caused by changes in pressure. The 530-meter-tall CTF Finance Center in Guangzhou, China, is expected
to have elevators that ascend at speeds up to 72 kilometers per hour, says James Fortune, principal at
elevator consultancy Fortune Shepler Saling in Galveston, Texas. Elevators generally do not descend
Safety

One of the main structural differences between the Twin Towers—built in the late 1960s and early
1970s—and 1 WTC is that the former were held together by a steel exoskeleton, whose vulnerability
was revealed on September 11, 2001. The new building has a hollow concrete core that serves as a
structural backbone for the building. The elevator hoistways run through this core, protected by a one-
meter-thick concrete wall, according to ThyssenKrupp.

The emergency elevator hoistway in 1 WTC is kept at positive pressure to prevent smoke from entering
during an emergency. The elevator itself features an auxiliary door that leads to a separate corridor
where responders can go if the main part of a floor is too dangerous for them to exit the elevator’s main
door.

Occupants of high-rises and skyscrapers are typically cautioned to never take an elevator during a fire or
other emergency. This rule does not apply in extremely tall buildings, however, because most occupants
would be unable to walk down 100 or more floors in time if all of the elevators were recalled to the
ground floor, Fortune says. He advocates what he refers to as “lifeboat” operations in high-rise buildings
where elevators could be switched to an evacuation mode that enables responders to take them to
designated floors, such as sky lobbies, to rescue building occupants. Burj Khalifa in Dubai, United Arab
Emirates—the world’s tallest building at nearly 830 meters—is prepared for such evacuations. It has
pressurized, air-conditioned refuge floors and 10 elevators available for lifeboat evacuations, according
to Fortune.

Calling all cars

Traffic management is a crucial part of elevator use in high-rise buildings. Supertall and “megatall”
(exceeding 600 meters) structures are essentially buildings stacked on top of buildings with sky lobbies
in between each one, explains Jay Popp, executive vice president, international, at elevator consulting
firm Lerch Bates in Littleton, Colo. The use of sky lobbies is done to improve the efficiency in moving
people to their desired floors and cutting down on waiting times. “In general, best design practice is to
serve about a maximum of 60 floors with what we term local elevators, or elevators that serve a specific
segment of the building,” he adds.

The elevator systems at 1 WTC rely on a kiosk setup in the lobby that determines which elevator a
particular visitor will ride. ThyssenKrupp’s destination dispatch system is used in 63 of the building’s
elevators to direct individuals to the appropriate car. Those headed to the same floor are grouped
together for faster service. People working higher than the 64th story in 1 WTC, for example, first take
an express elevator to the sky lobby on the 64th floor, where they can then catch a lift to the building’s
higher floors. Destination dispatch systems can be linked to building security so a tenant or visitor can
swipe a badge at a turnstile and automatically be directed to the appropriate elevator traveling to their
intended floor.

The future

High-rise elevators rely on ropes and cables to move up and down their hoistways. Although this design
limits their motion to a single axis, it is not likely to change until someone develops a motor that can
dead-lift an elevator car without the need for counterweights. Elevator companies have pointed to
motor-propelled magnetic levitation—already used for a handful of high-speed trains—as one way to
replace rope–counterweight systems.

ThyssenKrupp unveiled its idea for cable-free maglev technology—called MULTI—last December. In
addition to allowing elevator cars to move in any direction their rails guide them, multiple cars could be
added to same hoistway to improve efficiency. The company is prototyping its MULTI elevator and plans
to install it in a test tower in Rottweil, Germany, for testing in 2017. (Earlier projections had testing
beginning next year.) Otis announced in 1996 it was working on its own multidirectional elevator
system, called the Odyssey, but shelved the project within a few years after the company shifted its
focus to a more conventional design that uses flexible steel-reinforced belts instead of stiff metal cables.

The problem with these magnetic designs has always been heat, Koshak says. “To get the strength of the
magnetic attraction needed to lift a heavy load you need a tight assembly of rails and magnets with a
tremendous amount of electrical current to drive it all,” he explains. This creates a lot of heat that must
somehow be released, otherwise the counterweight, hoistway and car all get too hot.

Despite these challenges and the fact that other manufacturers have explored different cableless
designs over the years, “MULTI is the most technically advanced to date and has a real chance of making
it into production,” Popp says. Still, the first buildings to use MULTI, if the system makes it to the
market, will most likely restrict the technology to conventional up/down elevator hoistways at first, he
adds. That way, if the technology does not work out, building owners could still install a more
conventional lift.
 Obama Has Done More for Clean Energy Than You Think

The Great Recession enabled bold steps to seed a clean-energy revolution

AGUA CALIENTE: This big solar project in Arizona is just one of the large clean power plants enabled by
the Energy Department's Loan Program Office. Credit: Courtesy of NRG

A blue-black field of 5.2 million solar panels tilted toward the Arizona sun might just be the Hoover Dam
project of the Great Recession. The Agua Caliente Solar Power Project hosts nearly 300 megawatts of
silicon photovoltaics (PV) that turn sunshine into electricity. That made the Yuma County facility the
largest working solar farm in the world when it opened in April 2014. But when it comes to mega–
energy projects, Agua Caliente has competition, including four of the world’s largest solar-power plants
to use the sun's heat and one of the largest wind farms on the planet. And its all thanks to billions in
loans from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Loan Programs Office (LPO).

The most important thing the Obama administration has done to combat climate change may not end
up being raised fuel-efficiency standards for cars and trucks or even its Clean Power Plan to cut carbon
dioxide emissions from power plants. The most important thing may turn out to be the loans that
enabled large power facilities that run on sunshine or Earth's heat to break ground out west, wind farms
to be built from coast to coast and construction of the nation's first brewery for biofuels not made from
food—as well as a host of other advanced manufacturing energy projects.

The loan program got its start a full decade ago with the Energy Policy Act of 2005—legislation that
aimed to provide incentives to produce energy in the U.S., whether by drilling for oil in the Gulf of
Mexico or building new power plants. Only companies with established credit histories, however, like
utility giant Southern Co., could take advantage of the loan program created by that bill. Companies
behind new, alternative energy projects, like electric-carmaker Tesla Motors, typically did not have the
benefit of such track records, however. As a result, almost no one applied for a loan.

So in 2009, as part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act to deal with the economic fallout of
the Great Recession, the loan program got new terms. Most importantly, the federal government
agreed to take more of the financial risk for renewable energy projects. The result was a stampede of
applications. "There were hundreds of applications and 15 people working as hard as they possibly could
when I got there," recalls Jonathan Silver, who became head of the LPO in 2009 and is now a managing
director at Tax Equity Advisors and a clean-energy investor and consultant. "We were building this car as
we drove it, which is not easy."

The loan program still required innovative technology, defined as "new or significantly improved
technologies as compared with commercial technologies" (with commercial defined as used in three or
more other projects over more than five years), but suddenly had a lot more money, specifically some
$16 billion to loan before September 2011 on top of the $56 billion already available. The program also
had the full expertise of the Energy Department to evaluate projects and help new technologies
overcome the hurdles to commercialization, often dubbed the "valley of death" by those in the finance
and tech industries. Those innovations range from the basic layout of solar farms of more than 100
megawatts to storing sunshine in molten salts and using lens to concentrate it and improve photovoltaic
efficiency.

Between March 2009 and August 2010, when the window closed for new applications, the loan program
received hundreds of submissions. By September 2011, the $16 billion had been loaned to various
renewable energy projects. An additional $16 billion in loans, guarantees or commitments have been
made since then, including $8 billion to help build the nation's first new nuclear reactors in more than
30 years in Georgia.

The biggest challenge the loan program faced may not have been public criticism of failed deals like
Solyndra, Fisker Automotive and Beacon Power or technology letdowns such as the Ivanpah solar-
thermal power plant producing less electricity than expected. Rather, the biggest challenge came from
within the Obama administration itself, particularly the White House Office of Management and Budget
(OMB), which stood athwart greater ambition. For example, one deal, dubbed SolarStrong, would have
loaned $344 million to put solar panels on housing on military bases across the country. But OMB axed
the deal because budget rules require it to assume that the Department of Defense might not have the
appropriations to repay the loan in future decades. "At which point, all you can do is go home and have
a scotch," Silver recalls.

"Military appropriations are not considered permanent appropriations," explains Peter Davidson, who
oversaw the LPO from 2013 to June of this year. "It's the environment we have to work in, we try and do
what we can."

In the end, the LPO's successes helped kill off some of its own portfolio of projects. Building utility-scale
solar photovoltaic plants like Agua Caliente and Antelope Valley helped render obsolete solar thermal
power plants like Ivanpah and Solana as silicon technology improved dramatically and costs dropped
whereas the price of steel and glass remained relatively high. Large photovoltaic installations also
helped make solar panels so cheap that it drove companies like Solyndra—whose business model relied
on PV remaining expensive—into bankruptcy. "We were simply financing the best deals available," Silver
says, noting that the program could not independently seek out good projects. "The single thing that
bound all these applications together was not their size or technology or geography or financing
structure. The single thing that bound them together is that they applied."

That also means the loan program may have taken too little risk. The program has made a profit of
nearly $1 billion in interest payments to the U.S Treasury to date. At least $5 billion more is expected
over the next few decades as loans are paid back. That compares with $780 million in losses to date, the
bulk of which is accounted for by the $535 million loaned to Solyndra. And more money could be made
if the program were to ever sell its group of loans rather than managing them for the next few decades.

Already, Tesla has repaid its $465-million loan nine years early, thanks to the innovative financing terms
devised in its deal, part of $3.5 billion in loans that have already been repaid. Such advanced vehicle
loans, for projects like Ford's EcoBoost engine, will help achieve the Obama administration's higher fuel-
efficiency standard. Combined, these fuel-efficiency technologies are expected to help save some 600
million metric tons of CO2 per year compared with existing vehicles. Elsewhere, 1366 Technologies,
another loan recipient, may yet make silicon photovoltaics even cheaper with its new, less wasteful
manufacturing technique. And wind turbines produce electricity at a price that is now competitive with
burning fossil fuels.

Private banks have followed where the LPO first tread, building 17 additional photovoltaic power plants
larger than 100 megawatts. "Since September 2011 more than 1,700 megawatts of solar [PV] projects
have been built," Davidson notes. "There is not one dime of federal financing in any of those projects.
That, for us, is a success." And the solar-thermal technology in use at facilities like Crescent Dunes is also
being built worldwide, in countries like Chile and South Africa.

But much more is needed to accomplish an energy transition that would see U.S. greenhouse gas
pollution drop by 80 percent in the next 35 years. That's why some would like to see the loan program
turned into a kind of permanent green development bank, although that is unlikely to happen in the
current political environment. That's even though the LPO is a bipartisan achievement, launched under
Republican Pres. George W. Bush and accelerated and amplified by the Democratic administration of
Barack Obama. "Let's take the profits back and turn it into an evergreen fund," Silver suggests.

Regardless, the success of the loan program with Recovery Act money encouraged the Obama
administration to reopen solicitations for loan applications in 2013: $8 billion for "advanced fossil
projects," including coal, gas and oil, especially employing technology to capture and store CO2; $4
billion for renewable and energy-efficiency projects; and $12 billion for advanced nuclear projects,
including any efforts to build the first so-called small modular reactors in the U.S.

All told, there is still $40 billion waiting to be used in the loan program, including the money in its
Advanced Technology Vehicles Manufacturing program for electric cars, better batteries, more efficient
engines and the like. Still a large portion of all those monies may never be used, given the challenges
faced by carbon capture and storage and nuclear, although there is an "active pipeline" of projects being
evaluated, according to Energy Department spokesman Brian Mahar. The loan program also now hopes
to receive applications for Distributed Energy Projects, including solar on home rooftops, grid batteries
and similar technologies, though that will likely require bundling together a large number of these
typically smaller clean energy projects.

Still, the loan program is not what it once was, helping to turbocharge a clean-energy economy. But it
did seed the ground for an energy revolution with some 30 major projects so far, 20 of which are
already producing clean power or churning out clean vehicles. All that is left to fight about is the speed
at which clean energy will grow. "We launched the utility PV and cellulosic ethanol industry," Davidson
says, just as federal investment helped enable everything from the origins of the Internet to hydraulic
fracturing (or “fracking”).

These clean-energy projects will prevent the emission of some 14 million metric tons of CO2 and the
clean-power plants will produce enough electricity for more than one million average U.S. homes, by
Energy’s estimates. These technologies will be available to help states meet the CO2-reduction goals laid
out in the Clean Power Plan, already proved to work and just waiting to be built. The Obama
administration has left a clean-power legacy that will stand as facts on the ground in the fight against
climate change.

Hawaii First to Harness Deep-Ocean Temperatures for Power

A new power plant offshore converts the temperature difference between sea surface and deep waters
into electricity

A small but operational ocean thermal energy conversion (OTEC) plant was inaugurated in Hawaii last
week, making it the first in the world. The opening of the 100-kilowatt facility marked the first time a
closed-cycle OTEC plant will be connected to the U.S. grid. But that amount of energy production can
power only 120 Hawaiian homes for a year, a tiny drop in the ocean for the island state’s own energy
needs. What promise OTEC holds for other regions is even less certain.

The United States entered OTEC research in 1974 with the establishment of the Natural Energy
Laboratory of Hawaii Authority (NELHA). But after decades of investment in the development of OTEC,
this new Navy-bankrolled project is still seen by many as only a way to test the process rather than
secure the place of OTEC as a viable renewable technology.

The company that developed the facility, Makai Ocean Engineering, is named for the Hawaiian word
“makai,” which means “toward the ocean.” Hawaii, which is heavily dependent on imported fossil fuels
to meet its energy demand, might indeed have to look toward the ocean to meet its ambitious target of
having 100 percent renewable energy by 2045. “This plant provides a much-needed test bed to
commercialize ocean thermal energy conversion technology and bolster innovation,” Hawaii Gov. David
Ige said in a statement.

Robert Freeman, a spokesman at the Office of Naval Research, described the project that is partly
funded by the ONR as a “prototype.” Through this plant, the office is trying to understand what the
challenges to developing OTEC are, he said. The revenues generated from the plant, which will supply
the NELHA facility where it is located, will be plowed back to fund more research and development in
OTEC technology.

“Since not much is going on OTEC-wise, having anything that is functioning, visible, however small, is
great,” said Gérard C. Nihous, an OTEC expert at the University of Hawaii. “You are looking at tiny, tiny
systems that by themselves are not significant,” he said. “Their significance lies in their ability to
demonstrate the process.”

The Makai plant is designed to draw in warmer ocean surface waters to vaporize ammonia, which boils
and creates steam at a relatively low temperature. The steam spins a turbine and generates electricity.
Cold water extracted from the ocean depths is then used to cool and condense the ammonia back into a
liquid, which is then recycled in the system, known as a closed-loop system. The other commonly used
OTEC technology, called the open system, does not rely on a medium, but uses the vaporized ocean
water itself to run the turbine.

A little engine that could transform seacoast power: Ocean thermal energy conversion uses the
temperature difference between warm surface water and the much cooler depths to boil ammonia,
using the resulting steam to generate electricity.

Graphic courtesy of Makai Ocean Engineering.

Chinese system in the works

Currently, there are no operational OTEC plants that produce power at a commercial scale. About a
dozen exist across the world, but they have limited capacity, and most of them produce less than 1
megawatt of power. In contrast, the United States at present has 20 gigawatts of installed solar capacity.

Lockheed Martin, a major defense manufacturer, which has been involved in the development of the
technology for decades now, recently announced a new OTEC project in China. The company entered
into a memorandum of understanding with a Chinese real estate developer, Reignwood Group, for a 10-
MW offshore plant that will supply a green resort. “Initial system engineering, concept design, site
evaluation and supply base identification work is complete. We are working toward finalizing a site so
that detailed design, pre-construction and permitting activities can begin,” Lockheed Martin said in an
email.

The company has in the past worked closely with the Navy on OTEC research and development. It
submitted a “completed concept design contract” for a 10-MW OTEC plant in Hawaii to the Naval
Facilities Engineering Command (NAVFAC) in 2011. “There was no follow on work with NAVFAC to
develop an OTEC plant in Hawaii,” it said.

“The technology is simple to understand but very difficult to implement in the field,” Nihous said of
OTEC. “There are engineering challenges, but most of the reasons for its incomplete development are
economic.”

Most developers have to contend with prohibitive upfront capital costs, even for small-scale projects.
For completed projects and those in the pipeline today, a large chunk of the funding is coming from
governments and technology developers. However, to scale up would require private-sector funding,
which is currently not forthcoming.

Navy hopes to cut shore-based energy

The Makai project that came with a price tag of about $5 million was funded by the ONR and NAVFAC.
“An OTEC facility of this size costs approximately $3M to build. Outfitting the plant for R&D [research
and development] bumped the costs up to [more than] $5M,” a Makai company representative said in
an email.

The project fits well with the Navy’s ambition of being an early adopter of clean energy technologies and
to help it achieve its own clean energy targets. The Navy currently meets about 12 percent of its total
energy needs through renewable sources. Its goal is to source 50 percent of its shore-based energy from
alternative sources by 2020, Freeman said.

While its development has been stunted, nobody denies that OTEC is an attractive renewable energy
source, for more than one reason. The potential for the technology, which channels solar energy, is
undeniably huge. Oceans cover 71 percent of the Earth’s surface, and 1 square meter of ocean surface
area on average receives about 175 watts of solar irradiation. The total amount of globally received
solar power is thus approximately 90 petawatts; harnessing even a fraction of that energy would be
enough to meet the entire world’s energy demand.
But to generate power using existing OTEC technologies, the difference in temperature between deep
cold and warm surface waters has to be at least 20 degrees Celsius (36 degrees Fahrenheit), which
means that the plants must have access to water from the deep ocean. The number of sites across the
world where OTEC power generation is feasible is only a few hundred. “It is really a tropical technology
only,” Nihous said. “If you look at it from the perspective of Western Europe, Japan, North America and
other rich developed countries, the impact is really limited to outlying areas like Hawaii, Guam and
American Samoa.”

There is also the question of how OTEC compares with other renewable resources that have managed to
hit commercial maturity. One key advantage that OTEC has over other renewables, such as wind and
solar energy, is the fact that OTEC is a baseload source, which means that it is a constant and stable
source of power, unlike solar and wind, which are intermittent sources prone to weather-related
fluctuations. This makes OTEC-generated power three times more valuable than other sources,
according to some estimates.

“ONR intends to continue funding research at Makai on OTEC technologies, contingent on the
availability of money in future years,” Freeman said.

Will Artificial Intelligence Surpass Our Own?

A philosopher worries about computers’ ever accelerating abilities to outpace human skills

Famed science-fiction writer Fredric Brown (1906–1972) delighted in creating the shortest of short
stories. “Answer,” published in 1954, encapsulated a prescient meditation on the future of human-
machine relations within a single double-spaced, typewritten page.

The foreboding of the story echoes current apprehensions of scientists, policy makers and ethicists over
the rapid evolution of machine intelligence.

“Answer” begins under the watchful eyes of a dozen television cameras that are recording the
ceremonial soldering of the final connection to tie together all the “monster” computers in the universe.

The machines are about to link 96 billion planets into a single “supercircuit” that combines “all the
knowledge of all the galaxies.”
Two witnesses on the scene are identified only as Dwar Ev and Dwar Reyn. After throwing the switch
that connects the galactic circuit, Dwar Ev suggests to his companion that he ask the machine the first
question:

“Thank you,” said Dwar Reyn. “It shall be a question which no single cyber netics machine has been able
to answer.”

He turned to face the machine. “Is there a God?”

The mighty voice answered without hesitation, without the clicking of a single relay.

“Yes, now there is a God.”

Sudden fear flashed on the face of Dwar Ev. He leaped to grab the switch.

A bolt of lightning from the cloudless sky struck him down and fused the switch shut.

We are in the midst of a revolution in machine intelligence, the art and engineering practices that let
computers perform tasks that, until recently, could be done only by people. There is now software that
identifies faces at border crossings and matches them against passports or that labels people and
objects in photographs posted to social media. Algorithms can teach themselves to play Atari video
games. A camera and chip embedded in top-of-the-line sedans let the vehicles drive autonomously on
the open road.

What separates these agents from earlier success stories, such as IBM's Deep Blue, which beat the
world's reigning chess champion in 1997, and IBM's Watson, which accomplished the same for the quiz
show Jeopardy in 2011, is that they are taught by trial and error. The new wave of artificial intelligence
(AI) is based on insights derived from the way animals and people learn and analysis of the underlying
brain circuits that allowed theorists to develop supervised learning algorithms: the software is shown an
image, and depending on whether or not it correctly identifies the face or increases the video game
score, parameters internal to the program (so-called synaptic weights) are minutely adjusted. Such
machine learning, if done over trillions of machine cycles (yes, it is very computing-intensive), can lead
to systems that match or, in some cases, exceed human performance metrics. And, of course, the
algorithm never gets distracted or tired and remains focused, day and night (see my July/August column
“Intelligence without Sentience”).
Within a decade these instances of “weak” or “narrow” AI—able to replicate specific human tasks—will
permeate society. Siri is only the beginning. Driverless cars and trucks will become the norm, and our
interactions in supermarkets, hospitals, industry, offices and financial markets will be dominated by
narrow AI. The torrid pace of these advances will put severe stress on society to deal peacefully with the
attendant problems of unemployment (the U.S. trucking industry alone employs several million drivers)
and growing inequality.

Obscured by this razzle-dazzle progress is how far away we remain from “strong” or “general” AI,
comparable to the intelligence of the proverbial man or woman in the street who can navigate a car,
hurtle on skis down a mountain slope, carry on a conversation about pretty much any topic—often in
two or more languages. That same ordinary individual might also play a variety of games, serve on a jury
and plan for retirement decades in the future. Hampering our ability to design general AI is the
embarrassing fact that we don't understand what we mean by “intelligence.” This lack of knowledge
makes any predictions of when we will achieve strong AI fraught with uncertainty. Still, it may not be so
far away. For the record, most experts believe that strong machine intelligence will arrive before the
century is over, assuming current trends continue.

Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies deals with the aftermath of that event. The book's author,
Nick Bostrom, a professor of philosophy at the University of Oxford, has a background in theoretical
physics and neuroscience. His scholarly work is focused on understanding and mitigating emerging risks
that threaten the very survival of the human species: full-blown nuclear warfare, massive climate
change, synthetic biology, nanotechnology or runaway machine intelligence. Superintelligence deals
with the last. I warmly recommend the opening and the closing chapters for their enticing arguments,
soaring metaphors and insightful fables. You will come away unsettled, if not downright frightened.

The distribution of human intelligence across any representative population is bell-shaped, with the
feebleminded at one end and the geniuses at the other. But there is no natural law that stipulates that
humans as a group are as intelligent as they could be in an ideal world. Indeed, Homo sapiens is plagued
by superstitions and short-term thinking (just watch politicians, many drawn from our elites, to whom
we entrust our long-term future). To state the obvious, humanity's ability to calmly reason—its capacity
to plan and build unperturbed by emotion (in short, our intelligence)—can improve. Indeed, it is entirely
possible that over the past century, average intelligence has increased somewhat, with improved access
to good nutrition and stimulating environments early in childhood, when the brain is maturing.

And what is true of the biological variety should also be true of its artificial counterpart. There is no
discernible principle that would prevent emergence of an AI that is more intelligent than the average
person or even any person alive. Indeed, given the competition among the various organizations capable
of designing AI systems—mainly national governments and private corporations—their engineers will
design ever smarter machines that outperform opponents, whether human or cyborg, and maximize
their own gain. This is likely to involve the ability of machines to self-improve by trial and error and by
reprogramming their own code. What might happen when machines start to boost their own
intelligence was first pointed out by mathematician Irving John Good in a memorable passage in 1965:

Let an ultraintelligent machine be defined as a machine that can far surpass all the intellectual activities
of any man however clever. Since the design of machines is one of these intellectual activities, an
ultraintelligent machine could design even better machines; there would then unquestionably be an
“intelligence explosion,” and the intelligence of man would be left far behind…. Thus the first
ultraintelligent machine is the last invention that man need ever make, provided that the machine is
docile enough to tell us how to keep it under control.

Bostrom considers different forms of superintelligence: qualitative ones—say, Albert Einstein versus
someone intellectually challenged; collective ones, a team of Einstein-level geniuses; or quantitative
ones, such as an intelligence that invents the theory of general relativity within an hour of first thinking
about the fundamental nature of spacetime rather than the decade that it took Einstein to develop the
theory. For Bostrom's reckoning of existential risks, it doesn't much matter as long as the AI can outthink
people. And there might be no warning that the age of machines has arrived, nothing like the sonic
boom first heard above California's skies in 1947, when the X-1 plane broke the sound barrier, to herald
the birth of a superintelligent AI.

Bostrom's book does not explain how this stupendous task could be accomplished; his is not a guide on
how to program a strong AI machine to have flexible goals, understand speech and engage in long-term
planning. Rather invoking nothing but the iron laws of physics and mathematical logic, the bulk of his
thesis is an extended lucubration on the many evolutionary trajectories a superintelligence could take:
Will there be many AIs, or will a single malevolent one emerge at a planetary scale? What will an all-
consuming machine intelligence try to do—to us, to the planet? How will we control it? Will we even be
able to?

Bostrom seeks to hash out the implications of an emergent AI and ways to erect safeguards against the
threatening outcomes that are the tropes of science-fiction movies and in stories such as Brown's
“Answer.” The potential dangers posed by such a machine do not depend on how smart it is but on what
its ultimate goals are. Indeed, an AI doesn't even have to be supersmart to be a grave threat to
humanity—a narrow AI designed to maximize “return on investments” at all costs in its calculations
could trigger a war or some other calamity and thereby rake in untold billions by hedging stocks in the
affected industries. Or a narrow military AI connected to our network of nuclear-tipped missiles could
unleash a devastating preemptive first strike on the principle that waiting longer would maximize the
number of its own citizens dying in nuclear hellfire.

What concerns Bostrom is the unpredictability of what might happen when the technology starts edging
toward acquiring the capabilities of a strong AI that takes its goals to extremes never intended by its
original programmers. A benign superintelligence that wants nothing but happy people might implant
electrodes into the brain's pleasure centers, to deliver jolts of pure, orgasmic gratification. Do we really
want to end up as wire-heads? And what about the innocent paper-clip-maximizing AI that turns the
entire planet and everything on its surface into gigantic, paper-clip-making factories? Oops.

Given humanity's own uncertainty about its final goals—being as happy as possible? Fulfilling the dictum
of some holy book so we end up in heaven? Sitting on a mountaintop and humming “Om” through
nostrils while being mindful? Colonizing the Milky Way galaxy?—we want to move very deliberately
here.

Things turn out to be no easier when considering how to control such entities. The best known rules to
constrain their behavior do not come from roboticists or philosophers but from science-fiction author
and biochemist Isaac Asimov. The first of his three laws of robotics (conceived more than 70 years ago!)
states: “A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to
harm.”

Although this appears reasonable, it is utterly inadequate for dealing with life's messiness. Armed forces
have to be ready to quickly and effectively incapacitate a large number of opposing soldiers to prevent a
greater evil from coming to pass. Should a superintelligence therefore forestall all armed conflict?
Should this AI shut down pollution-producing industries to counter global warming at the cost of a
decade-long worldwide depression? Does the first law apply to unborn fetuses and to patients in coma?

Bostrom is most concerned with what he calls the “control problem,” the challenge of how to engineer
superintelligent machines so as to achieve outcomes that are safe and beneficial for humanity. This goal
cannot be achieved by simply picking a set of ethical rules and implementing these into specific
instructions. Traditionally the job of the political systems and the courts is to enforce such written laws
and the unwritten code that governs society. These objectives are often in conflict with each other: the
powerful “thou shalt not kill” edict is routinely violated on the battlefield, on death row, in terminating
pregnancies and in slaughterhouses.

Of course, as Bostrom caustically remarks, humankind can hardly claim to be basking in the high noon of
perfect moral enlightenment. People can't seem to agree on the best rules to live by. Should an
ascendant AI follow the U.S. Constitution, rules laid down by the Chinese Communist Party or dictates of
the mullahs in Iran?

The full gamut of possibilities for how an intelligence might behave is simply too vast to be constrained
in any meaningful manner by what can't be ruled out by physics. Many options are extremely unlikely.
For example, Bostrom goes off on a tangent about the possibility that an AI system believes it exists in
an entirely simulated universe. Or he assumes that any superintelligence worthy of its name could
eliminate the risks from asteroid impacts or natural pandemics and would also spread itself throughout
the entire universe. To assume all of this as a given seems absurd.

But his basic theory should be taken seriously. To constrain what could happen and ensure that
humanity retains some modicum of control, we need to better understand the only known form of
intelligence. That is, we need to develop a science of intelligence by studying people and their brains to
try to deduce what might be the ultimate capabilities and goals of a machine intelligence. What makes a
person smart, able to deal with a complex world that is in constant flux? How does intelligence develop
throughout infancy, childhood and adolescence? How did intelligence evolve?

How much does intelligence depend on being embedded in social groups? What is the relation between
intelligence and emotion and between intelligence and motivation? And what about consciousness? Will
it make a difference to the AI's action if it feels something, anything, and if it, too, can experience the
sights and sounds of the universe?

In a field largely defined by science-fiction novels and movies acting as laboratories for exploring the
possible, Bostrom's Superintelligence is a philosopher's Cassandra call to action (adorned with more
than 40 pages of endnotes). Woe to us if we don't eventually tackle the questions that the book throws
out. Doing so effectively will be possible only once we have a principled, scientific account of the
internal constraints and the architecture of biological intelligence. Only then will we be in a better
position to put effective control structures in place to maximize the vast benefits that may come about if
we develop smart companions to help solve the myriad problems humankind faces.

The Air Force Wants You to Trust Robots--Should You?

Research and development in human–robot trust is the cutting edge of artificial intelligence, but faith in
machines can often be misplaced

A British fighter jet was returning to its base in Kuwait after a mission on the third day of the 2003 Iraq
War when a U.S. anti-missile system spotted it, identified it as an enemy missile, and fired. The two men
in the plane were both killed. A week and a half later, the same system—the vaunted Patriot—made the
same mistake. This time, it was an American plane downed, and an American pilot killed.

The missile battery that targeted the two jets was almost entirely automated. There were people there
watching over it, but they deferred to the machine’s analysis, and these friendly fire deaths were the
result. A decade later, the issue underlying the problem hasn’t gone away. Indeed, it’s become more
pressing as the military comes to rely more and more on automation, and spends huge sums of money
researching and developing artificial intelligence. In the future that could include what it calls
autonomous weapons systems, one of the most controversial fields of artificial intelligence.

Heather Roff, a professor at the University of Colorado who studies ethics and military technology, says
those friendly fire incidents highlight what experts call automation bias. “There’s a pop-up screen that
says: if you take no action I will fire,” says Roff. The human operators took no action in the small window
of time they had in which to prevent the weapon from firing, and didn’t.

Automation goes beyond selecting targets to kill. An Air Force unit called the Human Trust and
Interaction Branch, based out of Wright-Patterson Air Force Base near Dayton, Ohio, is researching how
humans and machines interact to develop new forms of reconnaissance and intelligence-gathering tools.

It doesn’t say so in the branch’s name, but the “interaction” the unit studies is—at least partially—
between humans and robots. That research is one of the military’s many projects aimed at developing
new kinds of automation and pushing robotics into the future. A recently posted government contract
pre-solicitation titled “Trust in Autonomy for Human Machine Teaming” gives a glimpse of what that
future might look like.

“The Air Force has proposed human-machine teaming as a primary research thrust,” the posting reads.
“Yet to achieve this ambitious vision we need research on how to harness the socio-emotional elements
of interpersonal team/trust dynamics and inject them into human-robot teams.” The Air Force, which
says this research is needed to develop “shared awareness and shared intent between the humans and
machine,” estimates the contract will be for $7.5 million.

Daryl Mayer, an Air Force spokesman, tells Vocativ that the work they’re doing is centered around how
humans use machines. “Our research centers on the trust calibration process, so rather than focus on
simply ‘more’ trust we focus on ‘appropriate’ trust, which means we do research to understand when
humans use technology appropriately and when they don’t,” says Mayer.

The kind of language used in the contract solicitation—”socio-emotional,” “shared awareness,” “shared
intent”—is an unhelpful way to think about how humans interact with machines, argues Noel Sharkey, a
professor of artificial intelligence and robotics at the University of Sheffield. “When did machines get
intention and awareness – have I been asleep for 100 years or what?” Sharkey asks in an email to
Vocativ.
Sharkey says people already trust machines too much, and echoes Roff’s concerns about automation
bias: that is, if the machine says something, it must be correct. “People need to trust machines less. One
of the biggest problems with military personnel (or anyone) is automation biases of various kinds,” says
Sharkey. “So for military purposes we need a lot more research on how the human can stay in
deliberative control (particularly of weapons) and not just fall into the trap of trusting machines.”

Automation extends far beyond the battlefield, sometimes with profound implications. Peter Asaro, a
philosopher who studies artificial intelligence, says questions need to be asked about how and when
humans transfer control to machines in their every day lives.

Asaro points to self-driving cars as a perfect example of that tension. “Presumably, the car is driving
itself so the person behind the wheel can devote attention to something else: email, entertainment, a
nap, etc. So how and when should the car inform the person that they are in a critical situation and the
car cannot figure out on its own what to do?” he asks. “Should it wake them up from a nap just before
an accident, or just try to do its best? And what if someone just woke up from a nap and sees a truck in
the oncoming lane that poses no threat but the person’s natural reaction is to swerve violently away?
Should the car allow them to over-ride the automatic control when that poses a danger?”

There’s also evidence that humans sometimes form pet-like attachments to their robots. One study
found that some soldiers who used explosive-disposal robots “formed such a strong bond with their
explosive- disposal robots that they insist getting the same robot back after it is repaired or become sad
if their damaged robot cannot be repaired.” Another reported that some Roomba owners cleaned up
before turning the robot on as “a token of their appreciation for the hard cleaning work” Roomba did.

Some experts argue that a robot’s ability to deceive human beings is on the horizon. Asaro isn’t
concerned about lying robots, but he does note that robots might be able to get humans to do
something they don’t want to do, including, perhaps, things that many people would see as positive, like
getting elderly people to take needed medications.

“We are probably a long way from robots that could trick people into doing things that are good for
them—they would need much better capabilities for reading social cues, using social cues, as well as
deciphering and manipulating human desires and incentives,” Asaro says. But, he notes, “There could, of
course be all sorts of nefarious computers and robots that manipulate people , such as to get their credit
card info and so forth.” There could also be what he describes as “subtle manipulations, like product
placements or in-app purchases.”

“For instance,” he says, “if you spill wine on your carpet and your house-cleaning robot starts
recommending specific products to clean it, is that because it is the best cleaning method or is it due to
a commercial agreement between the robot manufacturer and the carpet stain remover manufacturer?
In such cases, will we require transparency about such agreements?”

The main issue for Roff, the professor at the University of Colorado, is that people need to remember
what distinguishes them from robots. “I think technology is great,” she says. “But we have to be guarded
not to be automatons ourselves.”

Ban Killer Robots before They Become Weapons of Mass Destruction

We need an international agreement to prevent the development of autonomous weapons before they
threaten global security

SA Forum is an invited essay from experts on topical issues in science and technology.

Last week the Future of Life Institute released a letter signed by some 1,500 artificial intelligence (AI),
robotics and technology researchers. Among them were celebrities of science and the technology
industry—Stephen Hawking, Elon Musk and Steve Wozniak—along with public intellectuals such as
Noam Chomsky and Daniel Dennett. The letter called for an international ban on offensive autonomous
weapons, which could target and fire weapons without meaningful human control.

This week is the 70th anniversary of the atomic bombing of the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and
Nagasaki, together killing over 200,000 people, mostly civilians. It took 10 years before the physicist
Albert Einstein and philosopher Bertrand Russell, along with nine other prominent scientists and
intellectuals, issued a letter calling for global action to address the threat to humanity posed by nuclear
weapons. They were motivated by the atomic devastation in Japan but also by the escalating arms race
of the Cold War that was rapidly and vastly increasing the number, destructive capability, and efficient
delivery of nuclear arms, draining vast resources and putting humanity at risk of total destruction. They
also note in their letter that those who knew the most about the effects of such weapons were the most
concerned and pessimistic about their continued development and use.

The Future of Life Institute letter is significant for the same reason: It is signed by a large group of those
who know the most about AI and robotics, with some 1,500 signatures at its release on July 28 and more
than 17,000 today. Signatories include many current and former presidents, fellows and members of the
American Association of Artificial Intelligence, the Association of Computing Machinery and the IEEE
Robotics & Automation Society; editors of leading AI and robotics journals; and key players in leading
artificial-intelligence companies such as Google DeepMind, Facebook, and IBM’s Watson team. As Max
Tegmark, Massachusetts Institute of Technology physics professor and a founder of the Future of Life
Institute, told Motherboard, “This is the AI experts who are building the technology who are speaking up
and saying they don’t want anything to do with this.”

Autonomous weapons pose serious threats that, taken together, make a ban necessary. There are
concerns whether AI algorithms could effectively distinguish civilians from combatants, especially in
complex conflict environments. Even advanced AI algorithms would lack the situational understanding
or the ability to determine whether the use of violent force was appropriate in a given circumstance or
whether the use of that force was proportionate. Discrimination and proportionality are requirements
of international law for humans who target and fire weapons but autonomous weapons would open up
an accountability gap. Because humans would no longer know what targets an autonomous weapon
might select, and because the effects of a weapon may be unpredictable, there would be no one to hold
responsible for the killing and destruction that results from activating such a weapon.

Then, as the Future of Life Institute letter points out, there are threats to regional and global stability as
well as humanity. The development of autonomous weapons could very quickly and easily lead to arms
races between rivals. Autonomous weapons would reduce the risks to combatants, and could thus
reduce the political risks of going to war, resulting in more armed conflicts. Autonomous weapons could
be hacked, spoofed and hijacked, and directed against their owners, civilians or a third party.
Autonomous weapons could also initiate or escalate armed conflicts automatically, without human
decision-making. In a future where autonomous weapons fight autonomous weapons the results would
be intrinsically unpredictable, and much more likely lead to the mass destruction of civilians and the
environment than to the bloodless wars that some envision. Creating highly efficient automated
violence is likely to lead to more violence, not less.

There is also a profound moral question at stake. What is the value of human life if we delegate the
responsibility for deciding who lives and who dies to machines? What kind of world do we want to live in
and leave for our children? A world in which AI programs and robots have the means and authority to
use violent force and kill people? If we have the opportunity to create a world in which autonomous
weapons are banned, and those who might use them are stigmatized and held accountable, do we not
have a moral obligation to work toward such a world?

We can prevent the development of autonomous weapons before they lead to arms races and threaten
global security and before they become weapons of mass destruction. But our window of opportunity
for doing so is rapidly closing.

For the past two years, the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots has been urging the United Nations to ban
autonomous weapons. The U.N.’s Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons (CCW) has already held
two expert meetings on the issue, and our coalition of 54 nongovernmental organizations* from 25
countries is encouraging the CCW to advance these discussions toward a treaty negotiation. We very
much welcome the support from this letter but we must continue to encourage the states represented
at the CCW to move forward on this issue.

The essential nature of an arms race involves states acting to improve their own short-term interests at
the expense of their own and global long-term benefits. As the letter from Einstein and Russell makes
clear:

“We have to learn to think in a new way. We have to learn to ask ourselves not what steps can be taken
to give military victory to whatever group we prefer, for there no longer are such steps; the question we
have to ask ourselves is: What steps can be taken to prevent a military contest of which the issue must
be disastrous to all parties?”

We must continue to demand that of our leaders and policy makers work together with other nations to
preempt the threats posed by autonomous weapons by banning their development and use, before we
witness the mass destruction they threaten to bring.

Cheap, Reliable, Lightweight Battery Near, but Not Here Yet

Challenging chemistry and challenging markets hold back a better battery

Second of a two-part series on new battery technologies. To read the first part, click here.

In the push for a better battery, many in the industry are finding that the biggest challenges aren’t in
chemistry and physics, but in regulations and market forces.

Currently, the opportunities for a cheaper, more efficient way to store electricity are booming. Market
research firm IHS Inc. reported that grid-level energy storage is on track to reach 40 gigawatts in
capacity by 2022, a hundredfold increase from 2013 (ClimateWire, Feb. 27).

Meanwhile, global light-duty electric vehicle sales are expected to increase from 2.1 million in 2014 to
6.3 million in 2020, according to Navigant Research.

Energy storage offers many new opportunities for improving efficiency and cutting greenhouse gas
emissions, but using it effectively requires rethinking how we drive and how we use electricity,
challenges that may be more difficult to clear than getting the price down or the capacity up.
Though battery innovations will help, there is plenty of room for improvement in policy, engineering and
economies of scale.

“About one-third of the price of the [electric] vehicle is the battery,” said Claire Curry, an advanced
transportation analyst at Bloomberg New Energy Finance. “The big technology barrier is energy density.”

In a car, there isn’t much space, so you have to do as much as you can with what little you have. That
means packing electrons into as small a container as possible. The container also has to be light, since
added weight eats into performance. Safety and durability are also critical, since vehicles move around
and occasionally crash.

Manufacturers have made big strides over the years in all of these frontiers. Battery costs in vehicles
now dip below $300 per kilowatt-hour, down from $750 per kWh in 2010, a performance trend that’s
faster than most analysts predicted (ClimateWire, Mar. 24).

The best lithium-ion batteries now have energy densities above 400 watt-hours per kilogram.

On the cusp of a new generation

Yet a $20,000 electric car that gets 400 miles of range is still a dream. Engineers are approaching
diminishing returns in the current crop of lithium-ion batteries, leaving new development to
manufacturers with deep pockets like LG, Toshiba and Panasonic, which are racing to produce the $100-
per-kWh battery that many analysts think will tip the scales away from internal combustion.

“They are mainly selling at cost or at a loss,” Curry said. “They are hoping they can bid everyone else out
of the market.”

In addition, gasoline’s energy density is more than 12,000 watt-hours per kilogram and its prices are
very low, moving the goal posts away from electric cars even with government subsidies and tax breaks.

Still, while waiting for the next new battery chemistry, manufacturers are still working to optimize the
current generation. About 60 percent of a battery’s cost is tied up in materials, so doing more with less
is helping drop the price, Curry said. Power electronics and better heat management to increase battery
life are other areas that are helping drive costs down.
Automakers are also feeling the government’s push from corporate average fuel economy standards to
improve mileage across their offerings. Some car companies have introduced electric cars to their
lineups as a result, but whether they become more than token offerings depends on buyers wanting
them.

“You need to have a real incentive to buy the vehicles first before you can change the market,” Curry
said. “Basically, improvements have not been what we thought they could be.”

On the electric grid, utilities are findings that batteries can do a lot more than compensate for wavering
renewables.

Energy storage can provide frequency regulation. Storage can shift and shave peak energy demands,
allowing utilities to buy up electricity when it’s cheap and abundant and use it when it’s desperately
needed and expensive. These devices can also provide emergency power and the startup power to get a
power plant fired up.

‘Transformational’ opportunities in grid storage

Deployed widely, energy storage means that operators can redesign the grid for average energy
consumption rather than bracing for peak consumption on hot days when air conditioners crank up
across an entire power market.

At a conference earlier this year, Massachusetts Institute of Technology materials science and
engineering professor Donald Sadoway likened the current grid strategy to building a 60-lane highway
so that no one who is driving would ever have to touch his or her brakes or overtake someone.

Energy storage enables a much more sensible two-lane highway by allowing energy demand and supply
to move around.

“The ability to go up and down, accept and inject power on the grid is absolutely transformational,” said
Dean Frankel, an analyst at Lux Research, a market research firm.

Matt Roberts, executive director of the Energy Storage Association, observed that grid batteries are
already online in the United States across many transmission networks and many more are going up.
But as with electric cars, the biggest hurdle for grid batteries may not be the technology.

As batteries are a resource that doesn’t generate electricity but soaks it up and releases it on demand,
many grid operators aren’t sure how to attach a price tag to them. When they absorb electricity, energy
storage systems appear as a load. When they release it, they appear as producers.

“It really is incredibly flexible for all the things it can perform,” he added. “The challenge is you cannot
always get remuneration for these services.

“The primary opportunity is in restructuring markets so energy storage could be valued properly,” he
added.

Breakthrough or slow advance?

As for technology, Roberts said that different strategies would have to fill different roles. Over short
time frames, between a few minutes and a couple hours, flywheels could be a viable option. Between
two and four hours, some form of lithium battery might win out. Longer than that, flow batteries would
excel.

However, grid battery customers are not wedded to any particular strategy so long as it meets cost and
reliability benchmarks. “They don’t really care what’s inside the box; they want the service,” Roberts
said. “They want to see that it’s going to work.”

While intermittent wind and solar capacity continues to grow, energy storage systems haven’t caught on
at the same pace. Other power sources, like generators running on cheap natural gas, are already filling
the gaps, leading some researchers to question whether energy storage is really the gatekeeper for
clean energy on the grid (ClimateWire, Sep. 28).

The question, then, is which approach will tip the balance toward electric cars and grid storage, whether
it’s a slow advance across the finish line or a breakthrough new chemistry.

Claus Daniel, a researcher at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, said that it’s likely that no single energy
storage strategy will claim the crown that lithium-ion wears today. “It’s a variety of different decision
points, and it’s really up to the private industry on how to capitalize on it,” he said.
Though it may be years before improvements in batteries make their mark on our everyday lives, the
main frontiers for energy storage—energy density and cost—are making rapid progress. “For both of
those, I see the research community moving forward quite dramatically,” Daniel said.

"Breathing Battery" Advance Holds Promise for Long-Range Electric Cars

New materials make prototype lithium–air batteries more durable

Lithium–air batteries, also known as breathing batteries, harness the energy produced when lithium
metal reacts with oxygen from the air. Because they do not have to carry around one of their main
ingredients (oxygen), and because lithium metal has a low density, they can — in theory — store as
much energy per kilogram as a petrol engine. Credit: Credit: Jason Doiy ©iStock.com

If electric vehicles are ever going to match the range of cars that run on fossil fuels, their batteries will
need to store a lot more energy. Lithium–air (or lithium–oxygen) batteries are among the best
candidates, but have been held back by serious obstacles. But a more durable design unveiled by
chemists at the University of Cambridge, UK, offers promise that these problems can be overcome.

The batteries devised by Clare Grey at Cambridge and her co-workers are small laboratory prototypes —
a long way from a car battery pack — but their innovative combination of materials “addresses several
major problems with the lithium–oxygen technology”, says Yury Gogotsi, a materials chemist at Drexel
University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

The work, reported today in Science, “certainly looks interesting”, Gogotsi says, but he cautions that “it
is still just good science — lab work on a small cell”, and not yet close to a marketable technology.

Breathing batteries

Lithium–air batteries, also known as breathing batteries, harness the energy produced when lithium
metal reacts with oxygen from the air. Because they do not have to carry around one of their main
ingredients (oxygen), and because lithium metal has a low density, they can — in theory — store as
much energy per kilogram as a petrol engine. That means that the batteries might stuff in energy ten
times more densely than the best battery packs in current electric cars, which researchers hope might
let vehicles travel as far as 800 kilometers before they need recharging.

Despite this promise, some chemists have abandoned hope of getting breathing batteries to work.
“Although the lithium–air battery has a high theoretical energy-storage capacity, in practice it is very
difficult to achieve,” admits Grey. The main problem is that chemical reactions produce unwanted side
products that clog the electrodes, destroy the battery materials or short-circuit the device. As a result,
the batteries typically fail after a few dozen charge–discharge cycles.

But Grey and her team have introduced a bundle of innovations that make their design more durable.

In the battery, lithium ions are released from a lithium-metal negative electrode, the anode, and flow in
an electrolyte to a carbon-based positive electrode, the cathode. Electric current is generated because,
at the same time, electrons flow around a closed circuit from the anode to the cathode.

In the team’s prototype, the electrolyte is an organic solvent called dimethoxyethane, mixed with the
salt lithium iodide. With these ingredients, when the ions react with oxygen at the cathode, they
produce crystals of lithium hydroxide. Many earlier battery designs instead produced lithium peroxide, a
white solid that built up on the electrode and was hard to remove during battery recharge. Lithium
hydroxide, by contrast, decomposes readily when the battery is recharged.

Stable design

One problem with some earlier designs was that the highly reactive lithium metal reacted with and
destroyed the electrolyte, and the products of that reaction coated and inactivated the lithium anode.
That does not seem to happen with Grey’s battery. As a result, says Grey, the cells work for hundreds of
cycles, with only a slight decrease in performance. She estimates that her team’s cells could store at
least five times more energy per kilogram than the lithium-ion batteries used in some of today’s electric
cars — such as those made by Tesla Motors of Palo Alto, California.

Another innovation of the cells is the material used for the cathode. Many previous lithium–air batteries
have used various forms of porous carbon, but those made by Grey and her colleagues contain a
relatively new variant, called reduced graphene oxide: sheets of pure carbon one atom thick, stripped
from graphite with the help of a chemical process of oxidation and then ‘reduced’ back to carbon in a
highly porous form.

“Reduced graphene oxide electrodes are resilient,” says Gogotsi, which probably contributes to the
battery’s good performance over many charge–discharge cycles. However, he adds, “there is no reason
to believe that the ideal electrode architecture has yet been found”.

“As far as I’m aware, this is the first time this particular combination of materials has been studied,” says
Jake Christensen, a lithium–air battery specialist with the Bosch Research and Technology Center in Palo
Alto. But he points to several problems for commercialization. In particular, the battery delivers current
at densities some 20–50 times lower than a car would need, he says. “Our best performances are
obtained with very low current densities,” Grey admits, “so we are very far off the numbers needed for
a car battery.” If it can be made to work, the technology's first use would likely be as rechargeable
batteries that aren't intended for battery packs in cars, she adds.

Human Missions to Mars Will Look Completely Different from The Martian

The blockbuster film’s futuristic vision of interplanetary exploration could soon be out of date

The Martian, a new sci-fi epic based on a 2011 novel, accurately depicts a near-future human mission to
Mars. Or does it? Credit: 20th Century Fox

Landing in U.S. theaters today, Ridley Scott’s The Martian is being acclaimed as one of the most realistic
portrayals of human space exploration ever filmed. Based on the 2011 novel by Andy Weir, the film stars
Matt Damon as Mark Watney, a wisecracking botanist-turned-astronaut marooned on Mars after being
accidentally left behind by his crewmates. Faced with extremely limited food and supplies, and with any
hope of rescue more than a year and millions of kilometers away, early on Watney lays out his stark
options for subsistence in the film’s most memorable line of dialogue: Either “science the shit out of
this,” or die.

Incidentally, it’s not really science that Watney uses to survive—it’s engineering. But whatever you call
it, the result is a wonderfully entertaining and reasonably accurate portrayal of how to live off the
land—even when that land is on a freeze-dried alien planet.

As NASA workers struggle to launch a mission to bring him back home, Watney improvises one
ingenious scheme after another to stay alive. He turns his habitat into a chemistry lab and a greenhouse,
extracting potable water from rocket fuel and growing potatoes in nutrient-poor Martian soil fertilized
with his own feces. He repairs spacesuit breaches and blown-out airlocks with duct tape. He even jury-
rigs his own long-haul vehicle powered by solar batteries and warmed with radioactive plutonium, then
treks to the landing site of NASA’s real-life Pathfinder rover to reactivate its radio and reestablish
communications with Earth.

There are several small inaccuracies in both Weir’s book and Scott’s film. The wind from a dust storm
that initially strands the astronaut on Mars would in reality barely ripple a flag, because the Martian
atmosphere is so thin. Instead of extracting water from rocket fuel, a real-life Watney might mine and
purify water from deposits of ice thought to exist beneath the soil across large swaths of the planet. And
because Mars’ atmosphere and magnetic field are too insubstantial to shield against cosmic radiation,
Watney’s skittishness about warming himself with heavily shielded plutonium is misguided—in fact,
most of his radiation exposure would come from simply walking around outside in his spacesuit.
But these are minor technical quibbles. The Martian’s greater divergences from reality are less about
science, and more about technology and politics. The key question to ask about The Martian’s accuracy
is this: Would Watney—or anyone else—even be on Mars in the first place for the story to unfold?

Neither the book nor the movie explicitly say when exactly the story takes place, but Weir (as well as
clever readers who reverse-engineered the book’s timeline) has revealed that Watney and his
crewmates land on Mars in November 2035. They get there via a four-month voyage in a very large, very
expensive interplanetary shuttle that cycles crews back and forth between Mars and Earth. The shuttle
also spins to provide artificial gravity to its occupants, to protect them from the wasting caused by
extended stays in zero gravity. Furthermore, Watney’s mission is actually the third human landing on
Mars, preceded by two landings earlier in the 2030s.

All this seems to mesh with NASA’s “Journey to Mars” program, which aims to send astronauts to Mars
in the 2030s. But a closer look at NASA’s program reveals potential problems. Despite its scientific and
technical accuracy, The Martian seems to take place in a fairy-tale world where NASA possesses much
more political power—and has a far larger share of the federal budget than its current meager 0.4
percent.

NASA has no plans for a large, spinning cycler spacecraft between Earth and Mars, probably because
such a spacecraft is considered unaffordable. In fact, ongoing squabbles in Washington over how to
divvy up NASA’s persistently flat budget means that essentially all the crucial components for the
agency’s planned voyages—the heavy-lift rockets, the power sources, engines and spacecraft for deep
space, the landers, surface habitats and ascent vehicles—are behind schedule and still in early stages of
development, if they are being developed at all. And the agency’s Journey to Mars could all go away,
very quickly, at the whim of some future President or Congressional majority. Mired in the muck of
politics, NASA may not manage to land even one crew of astronauts on Mars by 2035—let alone three.

Then again, by the 2030s, there may be good reasons to avoid landing on Mars. The search for
extraterrestrial life is arguably the most powerful motivation for sending humans to Mars—but also the
very thing that could scuttle such missions. This week’s announcement from NASA confirming transient
flows of liquid water on present-day Mars is fueling a debate over whether humans could visit the Red
Planet’s most tantalizing and habitable regions without spoiling them. Earthly microbes have already
hitchhiked on several robotic interplanetary voyages due to our less-than-perfect spacecraft sterilization
techniques, carrying with them the risk of contaminating or destroying any native ecosystems where
they land.
If rare, tenacious microbes on a robot are a problem, then the trillions living within each and every
human explorer would be a far greater worry. A new report released last week from the National
Academy of Sciences says such “planetary protection” concerns could limit human landings to the parts
of Mars considered least likely to hold life. Those regions, it must be said, are shrinking as satellite
imagery and robotic landers reveal ever-larger portions of the Martian environment as more hospitable
than previously believed. If respected, such restrictions could make the politicians controlling NASA’s
budget wonder why we should bother sending humans to Mars at all.

One provisional solution to the problems of budgets and contamination, offered in a second report
released this week by the Planetary Society, is to send humans not to Mars itself in the 2030s, but rather
to its moons, the 20-kilometer-wide Phobos and its half-sized sibling, Deimos. Both moons are easy to
visit because of their low surface gravities, and they are most likely littered with ancient debris that
asteroid impacts blasted into orbit from the Martian surface. After those lunar sorties in the 2030s,
humans might at last descend to Mars at the end of that decade and in the 2040s.

Because it defers the expensive, slow development of new technologies for landing and living on Mars,
the plan could be cheaper and easier for NASA to accomplish by the 2030s within the constraints of its
projected budget. And it would allow more time to solve the difficult problems of planetary protection—
either through improved methods for quarantining humans on the surface, or, more ambitiously,
through the use of advanced telerobotics. The round-trip lag time for messages between researchers on
Earth and rovers on Mars averages around 20 minutes, limiting the efficiency, flexibility, and speed of
exploration. The two-way communication time between Mars and its moon Phobos is just 40
milliseconds, making it possible to use entirely new classes of robotic explorers that have never before
been deployed on other planets.

Instead of being stranded on Mars, by 2035 an astronaut like Watney might more realistically be found
on a moon overhead, virtually exploring the Red Planet with remote-controlled robots that scale cliffs,
spelunk into caverns, burrow into the ground and fly through the air. In time, The Martian’s portrayal of
microbe-riddled astronauts huffing and puffing around Mars in bulky spacesuits may seem quaint. For
now, go check out the film—it’s the closest most of us will ever get to Mars for a long time. Which might
not be a bad thing.

Volkswagen Uses Software to Fool EPA Pollution Tests

EPA charges that the German automaker installed emissions-control software designed to work only
during tests
National and state air regulators, in a notice mailed to Volkswagen AG on Friday, accused the company
of installing software in about half a million cars designed to pass federal emissions tests but release
higher-than-acceptable levels in everyday driving situations.

In the violation notice, issued to the car company and subsidiaries Audi AG and Volkswagen Group of
America Inc., U.S. EPA said the company built and installed these computer algorithms in approximately
482,000 diesel cars sold since 2008.

The software allowed VW cars to activate emission controls during emission tests but during normal use
to release up to 40 times the permitted amount of nitrogen oxides, or NOx, which help generate
nitrogen dioxide—low-hanging ozone that blankets cities—and minute particulate matter, which causes
breathing issues and is linked to millions of early deaths (ClimateWire, Sept. 17).

“While individual vehicles don’t create a health threat, collectively they do harm public health,” said
Janet McCabe, acting assistant administrator for EPA’s Office of Air and Radiation. Both particulate
matter and NOx have climate change impacts. NOx dissipates faster than carbon dioxide but helps
create tropospheric ozone, a more potent greenhouse gas.

EPA named five types of four-cylinder diesels—the Audi A3, Beetle, Golf, Jetta and Passat, all of which
have the same engine—in its notice.

EPA did not issue a recall and said the cars remain safe and legal to drive and also legal to sell. Fixing the
cars’ emission systems will be incumbent upon Volkswagen, the agency said.

Volkswagen violated the Clean Air Act, officials said, under which the penalty could reach $37,500 per
car, or slightly more than $18 billion, a figure a U.S. EPA official said is accurate.

The German automaker, the largest worldwide by sales, concealed vital information from the U.S.
federal government, the public and the California Air Resources Board (ARB), said Cynthia Giles,
assistant administrator for U.S. EPA’s Office of Enforcement and Compliance Assurance. Investigations
by EPA and ARB are underway.

“These violations are very serious. We expected better from VW,” Giles said.
“Our goal now is to ensure that the affected cars are brought into compliance, to dig more deeply into
the extent and implications of Volkswagen’s efforts to cheat on clean air rules,” said Richard Corey,
executive officer of ARB, in a statement.

Earlier, VW admitted its vehicles contained software being questioned

Volkswagen admitted earlier this month that the vehicles contained defeat devices.

Volkswagen “manufactured and installed” sophisticated software, known under federal law as “defeat
devices,” which can be programmed to detect when vehicles are being tested to meet emission
requirements, officials said.

“[The device] senses whether the vehicle is being tested or not based on various inputs including the
position of the steering wheel, vehicle speed, the duration of the engine’s operation and barometric
pressure,” the violation notice reads. “These inputs precisely track the parameters of the federal test
procedure” used for EPA certification, it reads.

Two years ago, met with puzzling results from on-road and in-the-lab vehicle tests, examiners did the
research and asked questions that would ultimately trigger Friday’s announcement.

The International Council on Clean Transportation, a nonprofit research group, had commissioned West
Virginia University researchers to test three European diesels—a Jetta, a Passat and a BMW X5—and
study NOx emissions and other pollutants under real-world scenarios.

Tested on a dynamometer—a large treadmill-type platform for cars, sometimes called a “rolling road,”
that measures for torque, power and other vehicle metrics—the VWs passed. Yet under real-world
conditions, testers drove the cars equipped with emissions-tracking sensors between Southern
California and Seattle, and the VWs spewed far more from their tailpipes than legally allowed.

The Jetta’s emissions were 15 to 35 times higher than acceptable. For the Passat, they were five to 20
times higher, while the BMW averaged levels either at or below the legal threshold.

“This inconsistency was a major factor in ICCT’s decision to contact CARB and EPA about our test
results,” ICCT said Friday.
Trail of evidence started in Europe

“Ironically, the reason we tested these vehicles is that we were finding high vehicle emissions from light-
duty cars in Europe,” said Drew Kodjak, ICCT’s executive director, in an interview.

The team’s hypothesis was that the European emissions tests were flimsier than U.S. tests, he said.

“The vehicle was programmed to ‘switch,’ as the EPA says, from low emissions to high efficiency,”
Kodjak said. Asked what automakers have to gain from installing so-called defeat devices, experts said
they can save the company money on warranty claims, make the vehicle more fun to drive and, likely
ironic to some, improve fuel economy.

“It’s a performance boost. It’s fuel savings,” Kodjak said, explaining that as cars have gotten more
advanced, the industry has increasingly relied on software patches and digital code to update its models.

Daniel Carder, now the interim director of the Center for Alternative Fuels, Engines and Emissions at
West Virginia University, worked on the WVU report, which the team published in May of 2014.

If automakers have software algorithms or updates that don’t meet federal code, they can negotiate
with EPA, Carder said in an interview. And both parties hash out approval of “auxiliary emission control
devices,” like the ones VW used, he said.

“That’s all confidential information,” Carder said.

Petrolheads worldwide purchase and then erase or modify computer chips in their vehicles’ computers,
called electronic control units, or ECUs, to get better performance, efficiency and fuel savings. Online,
these chips are available for a few hundred dollars.

“It’s like a tremendous number of people that do this,” said John Storey, an automotive and emissions
expert at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, putting the figure of “chipped” models between 40 and 60
percent of all diesel pickup trucks in the United States. One byproduct of all this tampering: higher
emissions of gases like NOx. “These are completely illegal, but no one ever gets caught,” he said.

Congressman wants EPA to consider ‘severe action’

 “If Volkswagen willfully sought to evade the Clean Air Act and fraudulently sold cars to millions of
consumers with this technology, EPA should pursue the most severe action possible to deter others
from doing the same,” Rep. Frank Pallone (D-N.J.), ranking member of the House Energy and Commerce
Committee, said in a statement.

“Such deceitful actions violated the law and misled consumers, while other law abiding companies were
disadvantaged and the public health was put at risk,” he said. “We must ensure that this does not
happen again and that consumers can trust the products that they buy.”

Yet similar violations have happened before.

The Justice Department and EPA settled with seven heavy-duty diesel engine companies in 1998 for
more than a billion dollars over remarkably similar charges: The manufacturers had installed defeat
devices in software packages, which let the trucks pass federal tests but led to up to three times the
legal limit of NOx gases when driven on the highway.

Dynamometer tests are flawed in part because the conditions they put a car under can be easy to
predict and, in turn, beat.

“Well, we hope they’re not common,” said Kodjak of the ICCT, referring to defeat devices. “You run a
risk of getting caught, and the penalties are severe,” he said, noting the heavy-duty truck settlement in
1998. “But it is true that unless there is random testing of vehicles, you know, you might, you might not
get caught,” he said.

Don Anair, research and deputy director of the Clean Vehicles Program at the Union of Concerned
Scientists, said holding car companies to the same standard is vital.

“It appears they did this with the intent of clearly making the emissions performance different on the
test cycle, which I think is the most surprising,” Anair said in an interview. “Testing in real-world
situations is critical,” he said, to confirm that car companies are operating on a “level playing field.”

The diesel share of the U.S. auto market is slightly less than 1 percent of all car sales in 2014. But a large
portion of the diesels are VW-made, which means diesel vehicles could be responsible for between 10
and 25 percent of all NOx emissions from light-duty cars last year, according to Dave Cooke, a vehicle
analyst at UCS.
CEO of VW orders external investigation

Martin Winterkorn, CEO of Volkswagen, said the company takes seriously these allegation of
“manipulations that violate American environmental standards.” The company ordered an external
investigation into the matter and will cooperate fully to “openly and completely establish all of the facts
of this case,” he said.

“I personally am deeply sorry that we have broken the trust of our customers and the public,”
Winterkorn said in a statement. “The trust of our customers and the public is and continues to be our
most important asset. We at Volkswagen will do everything that must be done in order to re-establish
the trust that so many people have placed in us, and we will do everything necessary in order to reverse
the damage this has caused.”

In an email, Luke Tonachel, director of the Natural Resources Defense Council’s clean vehicles and fuels
project, said cars emit up to 30 percent of the NOx and volatile organic compounds in areas that fail
ambient air quality standards, releasing smog and soot skyward. “It’s very disturbing to learn that VW is
flouting those standards,” he said.

“Why would they think they’d get away with it?” asked Storey, the Oak Ridge scientist, noting the use of
the defeat devices went on for six model years. “It’s ludicrous.”

How Bad of a Greenhouse Gas Is Methane?

The global warming potential of the gaseous fossil fuel may be consistently underestimated

At present, nations report methane emissions in terms of CO2 equivalents, using GWP100 as the
conversion factor. This allows nations, such as the United States, that use natural gas to generate
electricity to present a cleaner façade to the world than they have in reality. Credit: ©iStock

SAN FRANCISCO—Environmental advocates are trying to change how policymakers consider the climate
impacts of methane, a potent greenhouse gas.

The change, if implemented, could make natural gas a less attractive option for generating electricity in
power plants.
At issue is the global warming potential (GWP), a number that allows experts to compare methane with
its better-known cousin, carbon dioxide. While CO2 persists in the atmosphere for centuries, or even
millennia, methane warms the planet on steroids for a decade or two before decaying to CO2.

In those short decades, methane warms the planet by 86 times as much as CO2, according to the
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

But policymakers typically ignore methane's warming potential over 20 years (GWP20) when assembling
a nation's emissions inventory. Instead, they stretch out methane's warming impacts over a century,
which makes the gas appear more benign than it is, experts said. The 100-year warming potential
(GWP100) of methane is 34, according to the IPCC.

There is no scientific reason to prefer a 100-year time horizon over a 20-year time horizon; the choice of
GWP100 is simply a matter of convention.

The 100-year GWP value underestimates the gas's negative impacts by almost five times, said Ilissa
Ocko, a climate scientist at the nonprofit Environmental Defense Fund. The quick warming in the short
run catalyzed by methane can affect environmental processes, such as the flowering of plants, she said
at the American Geophysical Union meeting last week.

"The short-lived climate pollutants [like methane] that we emit from human activities are basically
controlling how fast the warming occurs," she said. "This is because they are very powerful at absorbing
radiation."

EDF and some scientists are calling on the United Nations and policymakers to stop relying on GWP100.
They would instead like experts to use GWP20 and GWP100 as a slashed pair.

A push for quicker reductions

"Just like if you were looking at blood pressure and there is only one number, and you'd be like, 'Where
is the other one?'" Ocko said.

Ocko and her colleagues will soon publish a peer-reviewed study with this message to get the scientific
community on board. Their hope is this convention would be more widely accepted among
policymakers.
The effort has gained urgency since the United States has become a large natural-gas-producing nation.
Its emissions of methane between 1990 and 2013 have fallen by 15 percent, according to U.S. EPA,
though some studies have suggested that methane inventories may be faulty.

If the proposed nomenclature change is adopted by the United Nations, which collects greenhouse gas
inventories from nations every year, it could change the optics of the climate change reductions nations
are implementing, said Bryce Payne, director of science and technology at Gas Safety Inc., a company
that measures methane emissions.

At present, nations report methane emissions in terms of CO2 equivalents, using GWP100 as the
conversion factor. This allows nations, such as the United States, that use natural gas to generate
electricity to present a cleaner façade to the world than they have in reality, he said.

Payne and two other scientists wrote a letter to the U.S. delegation at the United Nations' climate
change summit this month suggesting that the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate
Change require nations to use a 10-year global warming potential, or GWP10, in their emissions
inventory. This would allow quicker curbs on methane, they wrote.

"Efforts to control methane emissions should be part of a broad effort to reduce, preferably end,
anthropogenic [greenhouse gas] emissions at the earliest possible date," he wrote.

The Conversation: Why Robots Need to Be Able to Say "No"

A robot that follows commands without question could put humans in danger

Should you always do what other people tell you to do? Clearly not. Everyone knows that. So should
future robots always obey our commands? At first glance, you might think they should, simply because
they are machines and that’s what they are designed to do. But then think of all the times you would not
mindlessly carry out others' instructions—and put robots into those situations.

Just consider:

An elder-care robot tasked by a forgetful owner to wash the “dirty clothes,” even though the clothes
had just come out of the washer
A preschooler who orders the daycare robot to throw a ball out the window

A student commanding her robot tutor to do all the homework instead doing it herself

A household robot instructed by its busy and distracted owner to run the garbage disposal even though
spoons and knives are stuck in it.

There are plenty of benign cases where robots receive commands that ideally should not be carried out
because they lead to unwanted outcomes. But not all cases will be that innocuous, even if their
commands initially appear to be.

Consider a robot car instructed to back up while the dog is sleeping in the driveway behind it, or a
kitchen aid robot instructed to lift a knife and walk forward when positioned behind a human chef. The
commands are simple, but the outcomes are significantly worse.

How can we humans avoid such harmful results of robot obedience? If driving around the dog were not
possible, the car would have to refuse to drive at all. And similarly, if avoiding stabbing the chef were
not possible, the robot would have to either stop walking forward or not pick up the knife in the first
place.

In either case, it is essential for both autonomous machines to detect the potential harm their actions
could cause and to react to it by either attempting to avoid it, or if harm cannot be avoided, by refusing
to carry out the human instruction. How do we teach robots when it’s OK to say no?

How can robots know what will happen next?

In our lab, we have started to develop robotic controls that make simple inferences based on human
commands. These will determine whether the robot should carry them out as instructed or reject them
because they violate an ethical principle the robot is programmed to obey.

Telling robots how and when—and why—to disobey is far easier said than done. Figuring out what harm
or problems might result from an action is not simply a matter of looking at direct outcomes. A ball
thrown out a window could end up in the yard, with no harm done. But the ball could end up on a busy
street, never to be seen again, or even causing a driver to swerve and crash. Context makes all the
difference.
It is difficult for today’s robots to determine when it is okay to throw a ball—such as to a child playing
catch—and when it’s not—such as out the window or in the garbage. Even harder is if the child is trying
to trick the robot, pretending to play a ball game but then ducking, letting the ball disappear through the
open window.

Explaining morality and law to robots

Understanding those dangers involves a significant amount of background knowledge (including the
prospect that playing ball in front of an open window could send the ball through the window). It
requires the robot not only to consider action outcomes by themselves, but also to contemplate the
intentions of the humans giving the instructions.

To handle these complications of human instructions—benevolent or not—robots need to be able to

explicitly reason through consequences of actions and compare outcomes to established social and
moral principles that prescribe what is and is not desirable or legal. As seen above, our robot has a
general rule that says, “If you are instructed to perform an action and it is possible that performing the
action could cause harm, then you are allowed to not perform it.” Making the relationship between
obligations and permissions explicit allows the robot to reason through the possible consequences of an
instruction and whether they are acceptable.

In general, robots should never perform illegal actions, nor should they perform legal actions that are
not desirable. Hence, they will need representations of laws, moral norms and even etiquette in order to
be able to determine whether the outcomes of an instructed action, or even the action itself, might be
in violation of those principles.

While our programs are still a long way from what we will need to allow robots to handle the examples
above, our current system already proves an essential point: robots must be able to disobey in order to
obey.

Google Says It Bears "Some Responsibility" after Self-Driving Car Hit Bus

No one was injured in the accident, but it prompted the company to make changes to its software

Feb 29 (Reuters) - Alphabet Inc's Google said on Monday it bears "some responsibility" after one of its
self-driving cars struck a municipal bus in a minor crash earlier this month.
The crash may be the first case of one of its autonomous cars hitting another vehicle and the fault of the
self-driving car. The Mountain View, California-based Internet search leader said it made changes to its
software after the crash to avoid future incidents.

In a Feb. 23 report filed with California regulators, Google said the crash took place in Mountain View on
Feb. 14 when a self-driving Lexus RX450h sought to get around some sandbags in a wide lane.

Google said in the filing the autonomous vehicle was traveling at less than 2 miles per hour, while the
bus was moving at about 15 miles per hour.

The vehicle and the test driver "believed the bus would slow or allow the Google (autonomous vehicle)
to continue," it said.

But three seconds later, as the Google car in autonomous mode re-entered the center of the lane, it
struck the side of the bus, causing damage to the left front fender, front wheel and a driver side sensor.
No one was injured in the car or on the bus.

Google said in a statement on Monday that "we clearly bear some responsibility, because if our car
hadn't moved, there wouldn't have been a collision. That said, our test driver believed the bus was going
to slow or stop to allow us to merge into the traffic, and that there would be sufficient space to do that."

The Santa Clara Valley Transportation Authority will investigate the circumstances of the accident,
Stacey Hendler Ross, spokeswoman for the Santa Clara Valley Transportation Authority, said on
Monday.

She said the Google car caused minor damage to the bus, striking the "pivoting joint," or flexible area in
the middle of the articulated bus. After the crash, 15 passengers on the bus were transferred to another
bus.

An investigation to determine liability is pending, she said.

John M. Simpson, privacy project director for advocacy group Consumer Watchdog, said the crash "is
more proof that robot car technology is not ready for auto pilot."
A spokesman for the California Department of Motor Vehicles said on Monday it will speak to Google to
gather additional information, but added "the DMV is not responsible for determining fault."

SOFTWARE REFINED

Google said it has reviewed this incident "and thousands of variations on it in our simulator in detail and
made refinements to our software. From now on, our cars will more deeply understand that buses (and
other large vehicles) are less likely to yield to us than other types of vehicles, and we hope to handle
situations like this more gracefully in the future."

There has been no official determination of fault in the crash. Google has previously said that its
autonomous vehicles have never been at fault in any crashes.

The Mountain View Police Department said no police report was filed in the incident.

A spokesman for the U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration declined to comment.

The crash comes as Google has been making the case that it should be able to test vehicles without
steering wheels and other controls.

In December, Google criticized California for proposing regulations that would require autonomous cars
to have a steering wheel, throttle and brake pedals when operating on public roads. A licensed driver
would need to be ready to take over if something went wrong.

Google said in November that in six years of its self-driving project, it has been involved in 17 minor
accidents during more than two million miles of autonomous and manual driving combined.

"Not once was the self-driving car the cause of the accident," Google said at the time. (Reporting by
David Shepardson, additional reporting by Bernie Woodall; editing by Chris Reese, G Crosse)

Glow-Hard: Luminous Cement Could Light Roads, Structures

Scientists at Michoacan University have modified the internal structure of cement so that with additives,
the material becomes phosphorescent in the dark
A bicycle lane inspired in Van Gogh’s Starry Night can be found in the Netherlands. It was built using
phosphorescent tiles, so at night passersby see where they are going without the need of electricity-
consuming lighting. But despite the beauty of the scene, only a handful of constructions worldwide have
this kind of lighting, because the microscopic structure of common building materials—such as cement,
concrete or brick—prohibits adding this property.

But this could soon change. José Carlos Rubio Ávalos, a researcher at Michoacan University of San
Nicolás de Hidalgo in Mexico, and his team have designed a new type of phosphorescent cement that
could illuminate highways, bike paths or buildings without using electricity.

Using the same raw materials with which cement is manufactured and by adding certain additives,
scientists modified the optical properties of the material, and it became phosphorescent. “Cement is an
opaque body, it does not allow the passage of light to the interior, so we must make a change in its
microstructure to allow a partial entry of light into the interior for it to have this behavior,” Rubio Ávalos
says.

By using additives, scientists are able to prevent the formation of crystals that occur normally during the
production of cement, creating a material with a noncrystalline structure—similar to glass—that allows
passage of light inside. Varying the proportion of additives added while manufacturing the cement
regulates both its luminescent intensity and color—so as not to dazzle drivers, if used on roads, for
example.

And although it is manufactured like ordinary cement, the change in the microscopic structure needed
to make it glow modifies the structural properties of the material—thus it may not have the same
applications as the ordinary kind, and is intended to be used on surfaces as a coating material. Because
of the inorganic nature of the cement components, the material can have a very long shelf life when
compared with other phosphorescent materials such as plastics or paints—but this will always depend
on how it is used.

Phosphorescent materials absorb energy from radiation such as the ultraviolet light emitted by the
sun—or by lamps, if indoors—energy they later emit as light, which can be seen after dark. As it loads up
energetically with ultraviolet rays, even on cloudy days the cement will be able to absorb enough energy
to glow during dark periods for up to 12 hours.

According to Carmen Andrade, researcher at the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC) Institute of
Building Sciences in Madrid, “It’s an application that can be worth developing in countries and areas
with poor access to electricity in communities with poor life levels, as it doesn’t consume electricity.”
But she also adds, “cement is a very alkaline material, so the stability of these compounds should be
studied [...] and also how to repair it.”
The project, which represents the first patent for Michoacan University is in commercialization phase.
Rubio Avalos’ plans, however, go beyond cement;, he wants to develop a range of products capable of
luminescence, this one is just the first.

Whistling Sling Bullets Were Roman Troops' Secret Weapon

Soldiers 1,500 years ago used drilled projectiles to intimidate enemies with a shrill, buzzing sound

Sling bullets and stones are a common find at Roman army battle sites in Europe. The largest are
typically shaped like lemons and weigh up to 2 ounces (60 grams). Credit: Peter van der Sluijs via
Wikimedia Commons CC by 3.0 Unported

Some 1,800 years ago, Roman troops used "whistling" sling bullets as a "terror weapon" against their
barbarian foes, according to archaeologists who found the cast lead bullets at a site in Scotland.

Weighing about 1 ounce (30 grams), each of the bullets had been drilled with a 0.2-inch (5 millimeters)
hole that the researchers think was designed to give the soaring bullets a sharp buzzing or whistling
noise in flight.

The bullets were found recently at Burnswark Hill in southwestern Scotland, where a massive Roman
attack against native defenders in a hilltop fort took place in the second century A.D. [See Photos of
Roman Battle Site and Sling Bullets]

These holes converted the bullets into a "terror weapon," said archaeologist John Reid of the
Trimontium Trust, a Scottish historical society directing the first major archaeological investigation in 50
years of the Burnswark Hill site.

"You don't just have these silent but deadly bullets flying over; you've got a sound effect coming off
them that would keep the defenders' heads down," Reid told Live Science. "Every army likes an edge
over its opponents, so this was an ingenious edge on the permutation of sling bullets."

The whistling bullets were also smaller than typical sling bullets, and the researchers think the soldiers
may have used several of them in their slings — made from two long cords held in the throwing hand,
attached to a pouch that holds the ammunition — so they could hurl multiple bullets at a target with
one throw.
"You can easily shoot them in groups of three of four, so you get a scattergun effect," Reid said. "We
think they're for close-quarter skirmishing, for getting quite close to the enemy."

Sling bullets and stones are a common find at Roman army battle sites in Europe. The largest are
typically shaped like lemons and weigh up to 2 ounces (60 grams), Reid said.

Smaller bullets shaped like acorns — a symbol the Romans considered lucky — have also been found at
Burnswark Hill and other sites in Scotland.

About 20 percent of the lead sling bullets found at Burnswark Hill had been drilled with holes, which
represented a significant amount of effort to prepare enough ammunition for an assault, Reid said.

"It's a tremendous amount of work to do, to just chuck them away," he said.

Sling weapon secrets

Whistling sling bullets haven't been found at any other Roman sites, but ceramic sling bullets with holes
punched out have been discovered at battle sites in Greece from the second and third centuries B.C,
Reid said. [Photos: Ancient Roman Fort Discovered]

Many archaeologists had assumed that the holes in the Greek bullets were reservoirs for poison, he
said.

But in slinging experiments using about 100 replicas of the whistling bullets, Reid found that they would
have been little use as poisoned weapons.

"The holes are too small, and there's no guarantee that these are going to penetrate skin," Reid said.
"And they are ballistically inferior: They don't fly as far, don't fly as fast and don't have the same
momentum [as larger sling bullets] — so why put poison holes in only the little ones?"

Reid's brother, a keen fisherman, offered some insight into their possible purpose when he suggested
the bullets were designed to make noise in flight.

"I said, 'Don't be stupid; you've no idea what you're talking about. You're not an archaeologist,'" Reid
joked. "And he said, 'No, but I'm a fisherman, and when I cast my line with lead weights that have got
holes in them like that, they whistle.'"
"Suddenly, a light bulb came on in my head — that's what they're about. They're for making a noise,"
Reid said.

Deadly in expert hands

At the time of the Roman attack on Burnswark Hill, slings were used mainly by specialized units of
auxiliary troops ("auxilia") recruited to fight alongside the Roman legions.

Among the most feared were slingers from the Balearic Islands, an archipelago near Spain in the
western Mediterranean, who fought for the Roman general Julius Caesar in his unsuccessful invasions of
Britain in 55 B.C. and 54 B.C.

"These guys were expert slingers; they'd been doing this the whole of their lives," Reid said.

In the hands of an expert, a heavy sling bullet or stone could reach speeds of up to 100 mph (160 km/h):
"The biggest sling stones are very powerful — they could literally take off the top of your head," Reid
said.

Burnswark Hill lies a few miles north of the line of Roman forts and ramparts known as Hadrian's Wall,
built during the reign of the emperor Hadrian between A.D. 117 and 138.

Reid said the Roman attack on the Burnswark Hill fort was probably part of the military campaign
ordered by Hadrian's successor, the emperor Antoninus Pius, to conquer Scotland north of the wall.

"We think it was an all-out assault on the hilltop, to demonstrate to the natives what would happen to
them if they resisted," Reid said.

But the Scottish tribes fought back hard for more than 20 years, and in A.D. 158, the Romans gave up
their plans to conquer the north and pulled their legions back to Hadrian's Wall.

"Scotland is rather like Afghanistan in many respects," Reid said. "The terrain is pretty inhospitable,
certainly the farther north you go, and the isolation and long supply lines would make it difficult for
servicing an army that far north."
 Shoe-Wearing Robot's No Flatfoot--It Walks like a Person

Enhanced walking capabilities could help robots navigate environments that people move around in,
and could improve the performance of bots created for disaster response

Human-like walking on the humanoid robot DURUS. The robot displays the natural heel-strike and toe
push-off behaviors that play a key role in human locomotion. Credit: AMBER-Lab/Youtube

A bipedal robot can now put its best foot forward, stepping with a heel-toe motion that copies human
locomotion more closely than flat-footed robot walkers can.

By rocking its "feet" forward from the heel and pushing off at the toe, the DURUS robot closely imitates
the walking motion of people, making it more energy-efficient and better at navigating uneven terrain,
according to Christian Hubicki, a postdoctoral fellow in robotics at the Georgia Institute of Technology
and one of the researchers who helped DURUS find its footing.

Enhanced walking capabilities could help robots navigate environments that people move around in,
and could improve the performance of bots created for disaster response, Hubicki told Live Science.
[Robots on the Run! 5 Bots That Can Really Move]

The humanoid robot DURUS was designed collaboratively by the research nonprofit SRI International
and Georgia Tech's Advanced Mechanical Bipedal Experimental Robotics (AMBER) Lab. An earlier DURUS
design was modified to accommodate the new manner of walking, enabled by a novel mathematical
algorithm that adjusts the robot's momentum and balance, one step at a time.

Well-heeled

Robots that walk on two legs typically have "feet" that are large and flat, to provide a more stable
platform, Hubicki told Live Science.

"Bigger feet mean a bigger polygon of support, and the harder it is to fall," Hubicki said.

The algorithms that dictate a robot's forward momentum typically keep those big feet flat on the ground
when pushing off, to minimize the risk that the bot will tip over.
"As soon as you lean on an edge, you're like a pendulum—on a pivot point that can fall forward or
backward," Hubicki said.

But while a flat-footed walker might perform well on a treadmill, uneven terrain in the real world that
doesn't accommodate a flat foot could confound the algorithm and stop a robot in its tracks.

Enter the AMBER Lab researchers, who designed a new algorithm that works to keep a robot upright
and moving forward even if only parts of the foot are engaged. Hubicki and his colleagues tested DURUS
using a modified foot with an arch; every step began with the heel making contact—the "heel strike,"
according to Hubicki—and then rolling to the ball of the foot to push off from the ground. Springs
installed by the robot's ankles act like tendons, storing the heel strike's energy to be released later, as
lift.

On July 12, AMBER Lab posted a video of a confidently striding DURUS on YouTube. DURUS' new feet are
about the same size as human feet—about half as long as the feet on the original model. And to
emphasize the similarity, the team laced them into a pair of sneakers.

"We wanted to show that our algorithms could make it walk with human-size feet," Hubicki said. "What
better way to do that than [by] putting shoes on it?"

The algorithm may even have applications beyond robotics, Hubicki added, suggesting that it could be
used to improve the design of prosthetics and exoskeletons to help people who use assistance to get
around.

Great Lakes Defenders Have a Shocking Idea to Stave Off Invasive Carp

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has proposed electric and sound barriers to repel Asian carp
approaching Lake Michigan

Hundreds of people descend into the Bath's riverfront and beach to take part in the August 6, 2010
Redneck fishing contest on in Bath, IL, a response to the region's inundation with the invasive Asian
Carp. Credit: Benjamin Lowy Getty Images

Since the 1970s invasive Asian carp have steadily migrated north into the U.S. Midwest, infesting the
watersheds of the Mississippi, Missouri and Illinois rivers. The voracious bottom-feeders can strip entire
river ecosystems of zooplankton, the basic food of native fish species—and now they seem poised to
breach the Great Lakes ecosystem. Earlier this summer a commercial fisherman contracted by the Asian
Carp Regional Coordinating Committee (ACRCC) caught a species of the intruding fish in Illinois, only 14
kilometers south of Lake Michigan.
That sobering find in the Des Plaines River has engineers and scientists scrambling for a way to halt
these slippery aliens. An adult Asian carp can weigh 45 kilograms and eat the equivalent of 5 to 20
percent of its body weight every day. Scientists estimate an established breeding population of Asian
carp could devastate Lake Michigan’s $7-billion commercial and sport fishery by devouring the food
sources native fish need to survive. “Asian carp, in particular bighead and silver carp [such as the one
caught in June], feed on the small food items at the very base of the food chain. They do that very
efficiently,” says John Dettmers, director of fisheries management at the Great Lakes Fishery
Commission. “Other invasive species like zebra and quagga mussels have [already] dramatically shifted
the structure and energy flow of many of the Great Lakes ecosystems.” Fish farmers imported Asian carp
to the U.S. from China decades ago in an attempt to control phytoplankton blooms in aquaculture ponds
and sewage treatment lagoons in Arkansas. The fish escaped into the Mississippi River watershed when
floods breached the man-made lagoons.

Last month the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers released an extensive report proposing technology-based
solutions that could be installed at the Brandon Road Lock and Dam on the Des Plaines River in Joliet,
Ill.—one of the last physical barriers between the Mississippi River and Lake Michigan. Army Corps
researchers looked at 98 different technologies before choosing an electric barrier paired with “complex
noise” generation. Electricity and complex noises—imagine hearing white noise continuously while
underwater—play havoc with the Asian carp’s sensory mechanisms.

The electric barriers send low-voltage, pulsing direct current (DC) through underwater electrodes. This
creates an electrified field from the bottom of the channel to the top of the water column. As an adult
fish nears the barrier, its body tingles in response to the electric current. If it moves closer, the result is a
more painful shock. The electric current also disrupts the fish’s ability to maintain its position in the
water current. “Fish that encounter electricity go through a process called galvanotaxis that immobilizes
the muscles, physically stopping the fish from moving through the barrier. The process can be lethal,”
says Mark Cornish, a supervisory Corps biologist. A series of powerful water jets sweeps the stunned or
dead fish away from the barrier.

In addition to the electrical barriers, the Corps would attach speakers to the walls and bottom of an
engineered concrete channel, and these would emit sounds to chase away the fish. Sound was initially
dismissed as a possible deterrent when research revealed fishes become acclimated to constant tones
and would eventually move through a sonic barrier. Scientists studying Asian carp in the Mississippi and
Missouri rivers have noted, however, that this species will consistently leap out of the water when
exposed to the complicated sounds of a motorboat engine. “The sensory mechanisms inside the fish are
aggravated and will avoid complex noises,” Cornish says. “We’re developing models to maximize the
output of that complex noise so that we can create the perfect acoustic environment for deterring fish.”
These new devices would be used in addition to commercial fishing efforts at the Brandon Road site that
remove over one million pounds of bighead and silver carp annually.
“This may be the first facility in the world to use behavioral deterrents to control invasive species in
large rivers,” says Peter Sorensen, a professor in the University of Minnesota’s Department of Fisheries,
Wildlife and Conservation Biology. He works at the university’s Minnesota Aquatic Invasive Species
Research Center and specializes in Asian carp, focusing on detection, control and management in the
Mississippi River watershed. “The proposed use of sound is novel, interesting and very promising,” he
says. But in order to be successful, the engineers and researchers will first have to figure out the optimal
sound. “Both the manner with which sound travels through shallow water and the way that individual
species of fish perceive it are complex and not intuitive,” he says. “Physics, engineering, sensory
physiology, behavior and the environment all factor in,” he adds. “These are intelligent fish that learn
and remember. Developing and implementing deterrents that function well in the aquatic world of the
carp is a fascinating challenge. One has to think like a carp.”

Before the Corps can install any of these deterrents at the lock and dam complex, its recommendations
must navigate a series of public hearings and Congressional budget approval as well as a still to-be-
determined construction time line. Federal agencies, nonprofit organizations, state government officials
and commercial interests all play a role in the decision-making process. Most of the parties involved say
that process has been collaborative—but disagreements about the impact on the Asian carp, cost-
sharing and questions about the effectiveness of proposed technologies have caused delays and call into
question just how well the various groups are working together.

Meleah Geertsma, a senior attorney for the Natural Resources Defense Council Midwest Program,
paints a less-than-harmonious picture of the effort. “We’ve seen an overall reluctance for the federal
agencies to take a position on a solution, given the amount of pushback from entities like the State of
Illinois and the waterways operators,” she says. “Unfortunately, consensus has been elusive. A process
that in theory could move faster, if there was the will and an agreed-upon solution, is really getting
bogged down.”

Those in charge of protecting the Great Lakes from such an ecological menace are hoping the
differences will be resolved soon. As Dettmers puts it, “In the realm of invasive species, we know that
prevention is so much more effective than trying to control something after a population has been
established and starts to spread.”

Flying Chariots and Exotic Birds: How 17th-Century Dreamers Planned to Reach the Moon

People have been dreaming about space travel for hundreds of years, long before the arrival of the
spectacular technologies behind space exploration today
People have been dreaming about space travel for hundreds of years, long before the arrival of the
spectacular technologies behind space exploration today—mighty engines roaring fire and thunder,
shiny metal shapes gliding in the vastness of the universe.

We’ve only travelled into space in the last century, but humanity’s desire to reach the moon is far from
recent. In the second century AD, Lucian’s True History, a parody of travel tales, already pictured a
group of adventure seekers lifted to the moon. A whirlwind delivered them into the turbulence of lunar
politics—a colonial war.

And much earlier than any beep of a satellite, these dreams of moon travel were given real, serious
thought. The first technical reckoning of how to travel to the moon can be found in the 17th century.

This was inspired by astronomic discoveries. For a long time, it was thought that the world was
encapsulated with ethereal or crystal spheres in which nested celestial bodies. But then Galileo
managed to compile enough observational data to support Copernicus’s theory of heliocentrism. This
meant that the moon began, for the first time, to be considered an opaque, Earth-like object.

Galileo’s Starry Messenger, published in 1610, even featured some sketches of the eerie moon relief. In
1620, Ben Jonson’s masque News from the New World Discovered in the Moon was performed before
King James I, entertaining the court with satire but also elucidating the newest astronomical viewpoints.

It was in the context of this moon fervour that John Wilkins, a 24-year-old graduate of Oxford University,
published in 1638 the first edition of his book The Discovery of a World in the Moone. The book
popularised Galileo’s description of the moon as a solid and habitable world.

A World in the Moone

When preparing the much edited and lengthened second edition of the Discovery, eventually published
in 1640, Wilkins was impressed by Francis Godwin’s story The Man in the Moone, also appearing in
1638, in which a character named Domingo Gonzales is transported to the moon in a chariot towed by a
flock of geese.

After reading this piece of 17th century science fiction, Wilkins suggested that not only must occasional
travel to the moon be possible, but also regular visits and habitation. The moon was the ultimate
travelling destination of his time, and moon travel a technological achievement pushing the historical
and providential limits for mankind.

Appreciating various fictional scenarios, Wilkins aimed to “raise up some spirits eminent for new
attempts and strange inventions” and to contemplate practical ways of “bringing the moon closer” by
travelling through space. In the pragmatic tone of an artisan, the second edition of the Discovery
ruminates on the technicalities: “

I do seriously, and upon good grounds, affirm it possible to make a flying chariot.

Wilkins describes and designs various flying apparatuses driven by manpower, or towed by majestic
exotic birds, and even imagines an engine to be contrived on the same principles as the legendary
mechanical doves and eagles.

He was also alerted to the challenges of moon travel, and even expressed a slight vexation that divine
providence did not endow the human body with any natural means of flying. Enumerating the
impediments to flight from the Earth, he humorously warns that there won’t be any "castles in the air to
receive poor pilgrims, or errant knights”. He discusses the nature of gravity, how difficult it would be to
bring food and water to the moon, and to survive the cold and thin lunar air.

In perspective

But Wilkins also states with perfect assurance that the ways of conveyance through space would
eventually be discovered. He predicts that “as soon as the art of flying is found out”, humans “will make
one of the first colonies, that shall transplant into that other world”, all glorifying the future of air travel.

The Discovery ends with Wilkins prophesying that posterity will likely be surprised at the ignorance of
his age. But this isn’t the feeling kindled in his modern readership, although many of his conclusions
about the moon are indeed mistaken. Even though the answers were premature, our contemporary
investigations of the moon still follow the same trajectory of questions as did his Space Odyssey 1640:
the presence of water, the possibilities for regular travel and colonisation. Young John Wilkins meant to
provoke the readers’ curiosity concerning “secret truths” about nature, and fulfilled this purpose for
centuries ahead.

Space explorations tend to be viewed primarily as manifestations of spectacular and, alas, costly
technologies. Is this not the reason why the moon flight program has been jammed for years? In the
17th century, motivation to design the means of travel to the moon was similar to our contemporary
stimuli for space exploration as they were formulated at the dawn of the Apollo spaceflight program.
People dreamed of pushing the boundaries of humankind and of bringing to life a great deal of useful
knowledge.

After all, it is not only machinery that drives human beings into space, but humanity’s curiosity and
imagination prompting the desire to reach beyond the possible.

Will Electronic Medical Records Improve Health Care?

Some see electronic health records as little more than disjointed data, whereas others see potential to
improve health care, identify trends and stop outbreaks

Electronic health records (EHRs) have received a lot of attention since the Obama administration
committed $19 billion in stimulus funds earlier this year to encourage hospitals and health care facilities
to digitize patient data and make better use of information technology. The healthcare industry as a
whole, however, has been slow to adopt information technology and integrate computer systems,
raising the question of whether the push to digitize will result in information that empowers doctors to
make better-informed decisions or a morass of disconnected data.

The University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC) knows firsthand how difficult it is to achieve the
former, and how easily an EHR plan can fall into the latter. UPMC has spent five years and more than $1
billion on information technology systems to get ahead of the EHR issue. While that is more than five
times as much as recent estimates say it should cost a hospital system, UPMC is a mammoth network
consisting of 20 hospitals as well as 400 doctors' offices, outpatient sites and long-term care facilities
employing about 50,000 people.

UPMC's early attempts to create a universal EHR system, such as its ambulatory electronic medical
records rolled out between 2000 and 2005, were met with resistance as doctors, staff and other users
either avoided using the new technology altogether or clung to individual, disconnected software and
systems that UPMC's IT department had implemented over the years.

On the mend

Although UPMC began digitizing some of its records in 1996, the turning point in its efforts came in
2004 with the rollout of its eRecord system across the entire health care network. eRecord now contains
more than 3.6 million electronic patient records, including images and CT scans, clinical laboratory
information, radiology data, and a picture archival and communication system that digitizes images and
makes them available on PCs. The EHR system has 29,000 users, including more than 5,000 physicians
employed by or affiliated with UPMC.

If UPMC makes EHR systems look easy, don't be fooled, cautions UPMC chief medical information
officer Dan Martich, who says the health care network's IT systems require a "huge, ongoing effort" to
ensure that those systems can communicate with one another. One of the main reasons is that UPMC,
like many other health care organizations, uses a number of different vendors for its medical and IT
systems, leaving the integration largely up to the IT staff.

Since doctors typically do not want to change the way they work for the sake of a computer system, the
success of an EHR program is dictated not only by the presence of the technology but also by how well
the doctors are trained on, and use, the technology. Physicians need to see the benefits of using EHR
systems both persistently and consistently, says Louis Baverso, chief information officer at UPMC's
Magee-Women's Hospital. But these benefits might not be obvious at first, he says, adding, "What
doctors see in the beginning is that they're losing their ability to work with paper documents, which has
been so valuable to them up until now."

Opportunities and costs

Given the lack of EHR adoption throughout the health care world, there are a lot of opportunities to get
this right (or wrong). Less than 10 percent of U.S. hospitals have adopted electronic medical records
even in the most basic way, according to a study authored by Ashish Jha, associate professor of health
policy and management at Harvard School of Public Health, and published in the April 16 New England
Journal of Medicine. Only 1.5 percent have adopted a comprehensive system of electronic records that
includes physicians' notes and orders and decision support systems that alert doctors of potential drug
interactions or other problems that might result from their intended orders.

Cost is the primary factor stalling EHR systems, followed by resistance from physicians unwilling to
adopt new technologies and a lack of staff with adequate IT expertise, according to Jha. He indicated
that a hospital could spend from $20 million to $200 million to implement an electronic record system
over several years, depending on the size of the hospital. A typical doctor's office would cost an
estimated $50,000 to outfit with an EHR system.

The upside of EHR systems is more difficult to quantify. Although some estimates say that hospitals and
doctor's offices could save as much as $100 million annually by moving to EHRs, the mere act of
implementing the technology guarantees neither cost savings nor improvements in care, Jha said during
a Harvard School of Public Health community forum on September 17. Another Harvard study of
hospital computerization likewise determined that cutting costs and improving care through health IT as
it exists today is "wishful thinking". This study was led by David Himmelstein, associate professor at
Harvard Medical School and former director of clinical computing at Cambridge Hospital in
Massachusetts, and published in the November issue of the American Journal of Medicine (pdf).

The cost of getting it wrong

The difference between the projected cost savings and the reality of the situation stems from the fact
that the EHR technologies implemented to date have not been designed to save money or improve
patient care, says Leonard D'Avolio, associate center director of Biomedical Informatics at the
Massachusetts Veterans Epidemiology Research and Information Center (MAVERIC), located at the VA
Boston Healthcare System center in Jamaica Plain. Instead, EHRs are used to document individual
patients' conditions, pass this information among clinicians treating those patients, justify financial
reimbursement and serve as the legal records of events.

This is because, if a health care facility has $1 million to spend, its managers are more likely to spend it
on an expensive piece of lab equipment than on information technology, D'Avolio says, adding that the
investment on lab equipment can be made up by charging patients access to it as a billable service. This
is not the case for IT. Also, computers and networks used throughout hospitals and health care facilities
are disconnected and often manufactured by different vendors without a standardized way of
communicating. "Medical data is difficult to standardize because caring for patients is a complex
process," he says. "We need to find some way of reaching across not just departments but entire
hospitals. If you can't measure something, you can't improve it, and without access to this data, you
can't measure it."

To qualify for a piece of the $19 billion being offered through the American Recovery and Reinvestment
Act (ARRA), healthcare facilities will have to justify the significance of their IT investments to ensure they
are "meaningful users" of EHRs. The Department of Health and Human Services has yet to define what it
considers meaningful use (this is on the HHS agenda for December).

Aggregating info to create knowledge

Ideally, in addition to providing doctors with basic information about their patients, databases of vital
signs, images, laboratory values, medications, diseases, interventions, and patient demographic
information could be mined for new knowledge, D'Avolio says. "With just a few of these databases
networked together, the power to improve health care increases exponentially," D'Avolio suggested in
the September 9 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA). "All that is missing is
the collective realization that better health care requires access to better information—not automation
of the status quo." Down the road, the addition of genomic information, environmental factors and
family history to these databases will enable clinicians to begin to realize the potential of personalized
medicine, he added.
 "Much of the information contained in electronic records is formatted as unstructured free text—useful
for the essential individual communication but unsuitable for detecting quantifiable trends," such as
outbreaks of infections, D'Avolio wrote in JAMA.

Data analysis experiments performed by Ben Shneiderman, a University of Maryland computer science
professor and founder of the school's Human-Computer Interaction Laboratory (HCIL), and his
colleagues indicate what the future holds if EHR systems are improved and implemented. "If there's
enough information available, and it's able to be searched effectively, a doctor could essentially be
running a virtual clinical trial for each patient by studying existing patient data," he says. "The real power
of [EHRs] comes not from looking at just one patient but rather being able to analyze similar information
across millions of people."

And although there is criticism that electronic medical records today are little more than digitized
versions of paper forms, National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Director Patrick
Gallagher is optimistic that the ARRA money, combined with the $80 million in grants HHS is offering to
train health IT workers, will push EHR adoption in the right direction. "The way I've been thinking about
it, it simply would not have risen to the level of priority it has if it was simply about digitizing records in a
doctor's office," says Gallagher, who took over as NIST director in early November. "I don't think we'd be
investing as much as we're investing. This is about using technology to bring health care information
together to reduce medical error, reduce the need for testing, put information in front of patients, and
put information in front of researchers."

AIDS Vaccine: Mixed Result, Possible Future

Despite questions, AIDS vaccine trial in Thailand spreads optimism

The long search for an AIDS vaccine has produced countless false starts and repeated failed trials,
casting once bright hopes into shadows of disenchantment. The now familiar swings appeared in high
relief last fall, with news of the most recent, phase III trial in Thailand. Initial fanfare for a protective
outcome gave way to disappointment after reanalysis showed that the protection could be attributed
only to chance. But rather than dashing all hopes for an AIDS vaccine, the trial has heartened some
researchers, who see new clues in the battle against the fatal illness.

Costing $105 million and enrolling more than 16,000 subjects, the Thai clinical trial was the largest AIDS
vaccine test to date. It began in 2003, and early results released last September showed a slim but
statistically sound benefit from the vaccine (a series of inoculations with drugs known as ALVAC-HIV and
AIDSVAX B/E). But in October the full report, with various statistical analyses, was released in a Paris
meeting to greater skepticism. Specifically, 74 people who had received the placebo became infected
with HIV in the trial period, compared with the 51 people who became infected after receiving the
vaccine, which makes for a protective effect of 31.2 percent. By including, however, the seven people
who turned out to have had HIV at the start of the trial (two in the placebo group and five in the vaccine
group), the effectiveness drops to 26.4 percent.

“There are still a huge number of uncertainties surrounding this trial,” says Dennis Burton, an
immunologist at the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, Calif. The subjects were in low- and moderate-
risk groups, such as heterosexuals in monogamous relationships, rather than higher-risk groups such as
intravenous drug users. “The numbers involved are small,” he adds, noting that statistically the
protective effects could be the result of mere chance.

Still, many researchers are convinced that the trial has provided plenty of data to run with. “This
contributes more evidence that an AIDS vaccine may be possible,” says Jerome Kim of the Walter Reed
Army Institute of Research and co-author of the Thai trial study (which appeared in the New England
Journal of Medicine in October). “We’ve taken a very small step,” Kim says. “It’s not a home run, but it
opens the door to future work.” Vaccine proponents also point to the lessons learned from the failed
Merck STEP trial. That vaccine test, halted in 2007, got only as far as phase II, but even so it did not leave
researchers back at square one. It suggested, he notes, how some HIV strains could be blocked from
infecting cells and offered data that could help in the interpretation of the Thai results. And a new
analysis of the STEP trial, published last November in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
USA, provides a warning that the very vectors (adenoviruses, which are also employed in other vaccine
development work) used to distribute the inactive HIV strains can actually make the immune system
more vulnerable to infection by recruiting susceptible T cells to mucous membranes, where they are
more likely to be infected during sexual activity.

Finding a vaccine has become an increasingly urgent undertaking. Despite advances in therapies,
HIV/AIDS is still incurable. Some 7,000 people worldwide contract HIV every day, and in the U.S. about
66,000 new cases are reported every year. Preventing people from getting the virus would save millions
of lives as well as greatly reduce health care costs associated with treatment. A vaccine is “really the
only optimal method of control for this dreadful pandemic,” says Raphael Dolin of the Beth Israel
Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, who also wrote an editorial accompanying the October paper.

Vaccines work by priming the immune system to recognize the target pathogen and attack it when
detected. To fend off HIV, researchers introduced one vaccine (ALVAC) to induce a T cell response—
thereby alerting the immune system—and another (AIDSVAX) later to spur an antibody response. In a
previous phase III trial in intravenous drug users, AIDSVAX did not work. ALVAC, made by Sanofi Pasteur,
had not been tested alone.

Using these two drugs together raised eyebrows in the vaccine community. Burton, along with 21 other
researchers, co-authored a 2004 paper in Science criticizing the choice to proceed to phase III with two
vaccines that had never demonstrated any effectiveness alone. The trial collaborators, however, based
their decision on previous research that a combined approach can boost helper T cell response better
than a single vaccine.

Despite his earlier doubts, Burton has been inspired by the trial results. “I feel more optimistic than I
have in some time,” he says. Researchers are embarking on a host of new experiments to put the Thai
findings to work. Volunteers from the trial will now be examined for immune responses—particularly
neutralizing antibodies as well as cellular immunity in T cells—and some will get subsequent booster
shots to see if protection can be sustained. In the lab, researchers will try to re-create the Thai results in
monkeys to validate a new animal model using multiple low doses. Other recent research has shown
that the number of antibodies needed to provide protection is lower than previously believed, possibly
making a vaccine easier to create.

Indeed, entirely new and promising candidates are now in animal trials, including those by the U.S.
military to address subtypes A, C and E (rather than the Thai subtype B). Other organizations—including
the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative (IAVI), the Karolinska Institute and the Swiss nonprofit
EuroVacc—and manufacturers also have other vaccines in the works. “The science is really moving,”
says Seth Berkley, an epidemiologist at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health and also
president and founder of IAVI. All those confronting the epidemic hope that the momentum leads to a
payoff sooner rather than later.

Tutankhamen's Familial DNA Tells Tale of Boy Pharaoh's Disease and Incest

New insight into the fragile pharaoh's family tree shows intrafamilial marriage, and royal lives cursed by
malarial infections and bodily defects

Despite his brief nine-year reign, Tutankhamen is probably the most famous pharaoh of ancient Egypt.
Because his tomb had not been robbed at the time of its discovery in 1922, historians have been able to
piece together aspects of the boy king's 19-year life. More than 100 walking sticks and "pharmacies"
(medicinal seeds, fruits and leaves) found mingled among funeral offerings and other treasures within
the tomb suggested that the pharaoh was frail, and two mummified fetuses implied that his offspring
might have suffered from lethal genetic defects. But a new study on the Tutankhamen family mummies
themselves, published February 16 in JAMA The Journal of the American Medical Association, has
provided biological insight into the king's incestuous royal lineage and his early death.

Secretary General Zahi Hawass of Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities teamed up with
paleogeneticist Carsten Pusch from the University of Tübingen in Germany, to examine Tutankhamen
and 10 royal mummies, including the two fetuses, presumed to be related to him for kinship, inherited
disorders and infectious diseases. Five mummies that were thought to be unrelated served as
morphological and genetic controls. Hawass, Pusch and 15 other scientists continue to perform detailed
anthropological, radiological and genetic studies on the precious mummies in a lab built into the
basement of the Museum of Egyptian Antiquities in Cairo—two floors below the famous golden mask.

After extracting tiny amounts of ancient DNA from the mummies' bones, the researchers amplified 16
short tandem repeats (short sequences in the DNA that create a genetic fingerprint) and eight
polymorphic microsatellites (hereditary molecular markers) to testable quantities using techniques
commonly employed in criminal or paternity investigations. They also looked for DNA sequences from
the malaria pathogen.

Based on their results so far, the researchers were able to name several mummies who were previously
anonymous (referred to only by tomb number), including Tut's grandmother "Tiye" and Tut's father, the
KV55 mummy probably named "Akhenaten". "This is the most important discovery since the finding of
the tomb of Tutankhamen in 1922," Hawass says. The team also identified the mummy likely to be Tut's
mother as KV35YL, not Queen Nefertiti as was once thought. "Now I'm sure that it cannot be Nefertiti,
and therefore the mother of King Tut is one of the daughters of Amenhotep III and Tiye—and there are
five," Hawass says, adding that he plans to investigate this further.

"The more data we collected, the more the museum specimens came back to life," Pusch says, who
admits he was worried about working with such ancient "pharaohic" DNA. "We had 16 mummies,"
Pusch explained. "You have a lot to do in the lab when you have a single mummy!" But the embalming
process used to preserve these royal remains worked in Pusch's favor. "Some embalming really
enhances the preservation of genetic material," he says.

The study revealed that King Tut's parents were siblings, a trend which might have continued in Tut's
marriage. "There are rumors that Tut's wife was his sister or half sister. If this is true we have at least
two successive generations that had interfamilial marriages, and this is not a good thing," Pusch says.
"We see it quite often in royal families that they marry each other. They thought: 'Better to stay close.' I
think we cannot judge from the insight we have nowadays." Because only partial DNA was retrieved
from the mummified fetuses, it is still unclear whether they were Tut's offspring or just ceremonial
offerings.

In 2005 Hawass performed a computed tomography (CT) scan to determine the cause of the boy
pharaoh's death. The scan revealed a fractured femur, which could have caused death from infection or
from a blood clot. The present study revealed that juvenile aseptic bone necrosis—a disorder in which
poor blood supply leads to bone damage—might have rendered Tut particularly vulnerable to physical
injuries. "We know that this man had 130 walking sticks and that he used to shoot arrows while he was
sitting," Hawass says.
 But the genetic analysis identified DNA from the malaria tropica (Plasmodium falciparum) pathogen,
suggesting that Tut was also hampered by infection. "Unfortunately this was the worst form of malaria.
Even today we don't have very good medications to deal with it," Pusch explains. The team concluded
that a sudden leg fracture might have led to a life-threatening condition when a malaria infection
occurred. "He was not a proud pharaoh or a strong leader, he was a young boy—frail and weak. He
couldn't walk by himself and needed other people or walking sticks because of this bone necrosis,"
Pusch says, explaining that Tutankhamen's family was plagued by malformations and infections. "When I
was a boy, I thought, 'Wow, these are royals and queens,' but they were suffering. They had pain, chills
and fevers."

The study is the first to examine DNA from King Tut and his royal family, according to the researchers.
"It's really a new kind of scientific discipline," Pusch says, calling it molecular anthropology. (The paper
refers to it as molecular Egyptology.) "You have to be careful with these things. It's about evolution and
history. The more you examine the mummy, the smaller it will become."

Pusch says he is grateful to have been a part of the project, adding that he couldn't sleep for three days
after first arriving in the lab below the museum. "I remember going there with my parents when I was
12. To go back 30 years later to work with the original one and only, sometimes I wake up and think it's
a dream!" Pusch says that the project has answered many questions but raised many more. "We have so
many exciting questions for the future. In the meantime, we’ll gather more and more questions—it will
never end!"

One's Enough: People Who Donate a Kidney Live Just as Long as Those Who Don't

Sixty years after the first documented kidney transplant in the U.S., a study shows the procedure carries
little long-term medical risk for the donor

Every 30 minutes, all of the blood in our bodies is filtered through two fist-size kidneys. But diseases
such as diabetes can cause them to fail, leading to a build-up of chemicals in the blood that without
dialysis (mechanical blood filtration) or a kidney transplant would be fatal. And the wait for a new kidney
can be long, unless someone you know is willing to give one of theirs to you.

Each year, more than 6,000 healthy people in the U.S. donate a kidney to someone they know. About
half are blood relatives of the kidney recipient. The other half are spouses, friends or acquaintances. But
about 100 come forward wishing to anonymously give the gift of glomeruli (the basic filtration units of
the kidney) to someone they've never met.
 "All these folks are heroes making a big difference in someone else's life," says transplant surgeon Dorry
Segev, describing the willingness of donors "to undergo an operation which carries a risk and gives them
no benefit." You only need one kidney to live. But the operation required to remove a kidney and the
risk of developing disease in the remaining one later in life make the decision to donate not one to be
taken lightly. "It's our job to quantify the risks and make sure those risks stay as small as they can,"
Segev says.

Segev and his team from Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore studied mortality
among 80,000 kidney donors over the past 15 years, comparing them to healthy people with both
kidneys. The study, published March 10 in JAMA The Journal of the American Medical Association—60
years after the first kidney transplant in the U.S.—found no increase in mortality in donors once they
recover from the operation. "With this study we're able to say that whatever happens to people
physiologically after kidney donation—it doesn't cause a premature death," Segev says. "After donating
a kidney a person can live exactly the way they lived before donating—a long, healthy, active life with
virtually no restrictions at all."

Whereas the mortality rate was no different among donors and healthy people one year after donation,
three in 10,000 donors died within 90 days after surgery—a surgical mortality rate one sixth that for gall
bladder removal and one fortieth that for nondonor kidney removal. Males, African-Americans and
sufferers of hypertension were at a higher risk for postoperative death—a finding that Segev says is
consistent with the general risk of surgery.

Segev hopes that the study will make people more aware of the major problems surrounding kidney
disease, such as the profound organ shortage, wait-list mortality, and the poor quality of life for people
on dialysis. "I hope that those things will inspire donors, and that our study will help quantify the risks so
they can make intelligent choices," Segev says. Although donors are carefully screened before the
procedure, he stresses that there are risks. "It's still a major operation. You're still living with one kidney.
People still need to think about it and be aware of the risks in taking on this heroic act," he says. Donors
are advised to see a doctor once a year after removal, in hopes that any trouble (like disease in the
remaining kidney) would be caught early.

iRegulate: Should Medical Apps Face Government Oversight?

With medical applications for smart phones becoming a more prominent part of doctors' diagnostic tool
kits, the FDA is considering how it should regulate the market--if at all

When John Allen Reilly visits his hospice patients, he always takes along his iPhone. One of the
applications he uses is A2Z of Dermatology to help classify skin conditions and to show photographs to
his patients for comparison.
 Similar apps for health care professionals include Skyscape's Medical Bag, which contains a host of
treatment guidelines such as how to handle various cardiac conditions, read diagnostic lab tests and
calculate weight-based dosing as well as On Call Notes, a basic notepad. Along the same lines, medical
illustration apps such as 3D Brain Human Body Anatomy work as teaching tools for students (and
motivated patients). Other apps have been developed to give doctors access to hospitals' patient charts
and other data.

Nearly 1,500 smart phone applications for health care professionals are already available for
downloading (along with many more for patients), and by 2012, 81 percent of physicians will have a
smart phone, according to a report from Manhattan Research. As apps enter the realm of routine
medical care, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) must consider whether and how to ensure
patient safety around the hodgepodge medical apps market—the top 10 medical apps include Medical
Calculator and Sex-Facts. The fact that some specialized medical apps are openly available to anyone
with a smart phone may raise additional concerns. But excessive regulation of medical apps could also
squelch what might be the part of the next great wave of innovations in health care.

Medical applications are technically medical devices and therefore subject to federal regulation. There
currently are no clear federal measures in place, however, to guarantee their quality and accuracy. The
FDA is considering various degrees of oversight of so-called health information technology, which
includes apps and other digital systems (such as electronic health record software). Regulation could be
mild, focusing on postmarket safety via an electronic registry, according to Jeff Shuren, director of the
FDA's Center for Devices and Radiological Health. He made his remarks this past February as testimony
to the center's committee on health technology.

Manufacturers would be responsible for reporting any problems to the FDA and correcting safety
issues, with some higher risk technology subject to closer surveillance. A middle-ground approach would
require manufacturers of apps to adhere to specific FDA guidelines on quality and consistency. The most
intensive regulation under consideration would require premarket safety and efficacy review of medical
apps, as is the case for other clinical devices, such as heart monitors and computed tomography
scanners.

An FDA spokesperson declined to comment on whether there are concrete plans to regulate medical
smart phone apps and when new policies might be instituted, saying the agency's role in these
applications and other health information technology is evolving.

With the rapid integration of apps into routine health care, however, time seems be of the essence. And
as many physicians already use apps to check and update patient status, concern about logging crucial
data incorrectly is not unfounded. Adverse events resulting from medical apps and other health
information technology errors have already been reported to the FDA. Because of a programming error,
allergy information for a patient failed to display on a clinical decision support app, according to
Shuren's testimony. In another instance, results of a nuclear medicine study were saved in the wrong
patient's file when accessed using health care management software.

Although many doctors embrace medical apps, no one is talking about abandoning the use of good
clinical judgment or the human touch. Reilly, whose private practice in Frederick, Md., focuses on
geriatrics, internal medicine, bariatrics and hospice has 105 apps on his iPhone but emphasizes that they
will never replace his own system of checks and balances. "I don't make huge medical judgments [based
on apps]," Reilly says. "These are here to help me."

Most currently available apps are simply a way to make it so reference tomes can be accessible on
handheld devices, so FDA approval should be unnecessary, says Adam Wilcox, professor of medical
informatics at Columbia University. "If the FDA is going to regulate referential information, are they
going to monitor the textbooks from which the information is coming from?" he asks.

As another example, Wilcox recently developed an app that allows physicians at New York–Presbyterian
Hospital to access patients' online records. The computer-based interface was not subject to regulation,
so neither should the app be, Wilcox explains. Kavapoint, which manufactures several top medical apps,
distributes medical information from the FDA rather than creating it. "We are confident that the data
are correct, because we are taking it directly from the source," says Kavapoint co-founder Joseph Mao,
arguing against strong regulations.

For the FDA the challenge will be to keep patients safe without impeding innovation. As Wilcox explains,
whereas with prior new technology only tech-savvy young medical residents were willing to give it a
whirl, today the interest is nearly ubiquitous among those in the profession. "Now you can build work
flows around it rather than just letting people figure out how it helps them," Wilcox says. Apps such as
PracticeRx, a safety notification system, could bring vital improvements to medical care by reporting
medical errors to a central database. Programs that alert doctors to their patients' potential emergency
room visits could save enormous amounts of health care dollars: ER inpatient stays are among the most
expensive components of health care, and simply being able to reach a physician through an app could
prevent an unnecessary admittance. The technology is also in sync with the electronic health records
movement, likely adding momentum to mobile technology adoption.

Wilcox acknowledges a potential need for regulation of apps that go beyond communication and
reference, such as those that monitor a patient's pulse or interpret electrocardiogram rhythms. But "the
[apps] that should be regulated...are just a tiny fraction of what the real use is," he says. "It would be
unfortunate if people interpreted regulation of the smart phone as a reason not to use it."
 Expert Systems Fight Poverty

Appropriate information and communications technologies, combined with community involvement,

can save lives

In his wonderful new book The Checklist Manifesto (Metropolitan Books, 2009), surgeon and author
Atul Gawande explains how successful surgery depends on the complex interactions of surgeons, nurses,
anesthetists and other specialists, who must possess not only highly specialized skills but also the ability
to work as a team in the face of rapidly arising challenges. The same applies to an airliner’s pilot, co-pilot
and crew. Special tools such as checklists, decision trees and artificial intelligence built into
instrumentation are key.

Information technology empowers complex group processes in striking new ways, but the
breakthroughs are especially exciting in very low income settings. There mobile telephony and wireless
broadband are ending the grinding isolation of rural communities and enabling workers—even those
with fairly rudimentary training—to interconnect more successfully and to tap into expert systems and
artificial intelligence.

On a recent trip to Africa, I saw two simple but powerful examples of lifesaving protocols enabled by
mobile phones. In the Ghanaian village of Bonsaaso, part of the Millennium Village Project, a simple
phone-based system is lowering maternal mortality during childbirth. Community health workers
(CHWs) with basic training, a skilled midwife, an ambulance driver and a receiving hospital use mobile
phones to coordinate as a team. Ever more deliveries now take place in the clinic rather than at home;
in the event of complications, the mother is whisked to a receiving hospital about 10 miles away. Mobile
phone connectivity among community, clinic, ambulance and hospital makes possible a once
unthinkable degree of coordination.

In the Kenyan village of Sauri, also part of the Millennium Village Project, CHWs are pioneering the
application of expert systems for malaria control. In the past, suspected malaria patients had to walk or
be carried to a clinic, often miles away, have a blood smear read under a microscope by a trained
technician and, if positive, receive a prescription. With clinics few and far between and with trained
technicians and microscopes even scarcer, untreated, lethal malaria ran rampant.

In the new approach, CHWs visit households on the lookout for fevers that may signify malaria. They
carry rapid diagnostic tests that examine a drop of blood for the presence of the malaria pathogen. Then
they send an SMS (short service message) text with the patient’s ID and the test results. Seconds later
an automated text response informs the health worker of the proper course of treatment, if any. The
system can also send reminders about any follow-up treatments or scheduled clinic visits for the patient.
The new system of malaria control includes insecticide-treated bed nets made to last for five years and a
new generation of combination drugs based on a traditional Chinese herbal treatment, artemisinin.

This full set of tools constitutes a remarkably effective malaria-control system. Already a partial
deployment of the system is reducing the malaria burden dramatically in several parts of Africa. Modest
international financial support could greatly accelerate the deployment of the full system, and if it were
scaled up throughout Africa, hundreds of thousands of lives could be saved annually at around $7 per
person a year in the malaria-transmission zones.

India is similarly scaling up rural public health by deploying advanced information technologies, CHWs
and improved management systems. In the past, public health data became available only after rounds
of surveys three years apart, and those results were used mainly for research purposes. Now key data
will increasingly be available after only hours or days and will be used for real-time health system
management.

Checklists, teamwork and telecommunications-based expert systems can revolutionize rural farm yields,
disease control, business networks, rural finance, education systems, and much more. Soon farmers will
be able to enter local data for advice on specific soil needs, timing on the planting season, drought and
rainfall forecasts, market prices and logistics. Mobile-phone-based banking and payments services will
penetrate even the most remote regions. With development aid directed toward these new systems,
the world’s capacity to reduce poverty, hunger and illness—and the violence that accompanies them—
will become more powerful and effective than ever.

Small Dogs Prove Susceptible to Flea Poison

Warning that the powerful poisons can endanger dogs and cats, the U.S. Environmental Protection
Agency will require new instructions and labeling for flea products

Warning that the powerful poisons can endanger dogs and cats, the U.S. Environmental Protection
Agency will require new instructions and labeling for on-spot flea products.

The products, including the popular Frontline and Advantage brands, are small vials of liquid pesticides
that pet owners apply monthly to the backs of dogs or cats to kill fleas and ticks. The EPA began
investigating the products after discovering a sharp rise in the number of pets reported to be sick after
they were treated.
The yearlong investigation, conducted by a team of veterinarians assembled by the federal agency,
concluded that certain pets – small dogs between 10 and 20 pounds – are most susceptible to the
problems, which include rashes, vomiting, diarrhea and seizures.

EPA Assistant Administrator Steve Owens said Wednesday that no products are being banned at this
point, but “we’re going to be watching the situation very closely.”

New instructions and warnings are expected on product labels within the next several months. If these
steps don’t reduce the problems, “we will take more significant action. We will remove products from
the market if we have to,” Owens said.

Fleas and ticks can cause discomfort and diseases for many dogs and cats around the country. As a
result, the on-spot treatments are commonly recommended by veterinarians.

Many pet owners who use the treatments think they are applying medication to their pet, but they
actually are treating them with potent pesticides, including permethrin, which also is used to kill pests
on crops and yards.

“These are poisons that we are applying to our pets,” said Owens, who said it is a personal as well as a
professional issue for him because he owns two dogs and three cats. “Pet owners should exercise
caution.”

Incidents reported by consumers who used the products on their pets rose from 28,895 in 2007 to
44,263 in 2008, an increase of 53 percent in one year.

Most of the problems were minor, such as skin rashes, but about 600 dogs and cats died in the incidents
reported in 2008, EPA records show.

Chihuahuas, shih tzus, miniature poodles, Pomeranians and dachshunds had the most reported
incidents, according to the EPA report released Wednesday. For products containing cyphenothrin,
those breeds accounted for 33 percent of the reported problems. For products containing permethrin,
shih tzus, bichon frise, chihuahuas, yorkshire terriers and maltese were involved in more than 25
percent of the incidents. K-9 Advantix for Dogs contains permethrin and some Sergeant's products and
Sentry's Pro XFC contain cyphenothrin.
“Small breed dogs were more commonly affected with the number of incidents out of proportion to
their popularity,” the EPA report says.

The problem might be the dose. The agency is telling manufacturers to narrow the range of weights
identified for their products.

“We will make clear that certain products cannot be used on smaller animals,” Owens said.

In addition, the investigation found that cats were sickened when products intended for dogs were used
on them. Permethrin is particularly dangerous for cats and is not used in any on-spot treatments for
cats.

EPA officials said they will meet with each manufacturer individually to go over the changes that the
agency wants, such as more precise instructions regarding the proper dosage for pets’ various weights.
Also, markings should distinguish better between cat products and dog products, and similar brand
names will not be allowed for both. New labels also would advise people to keep cats away from treated
dogs for a period of time.

Manufacturers seem willing to work with the EPA, so the changes are expected this year, Owens said.
"They realize this is a serious problem that they need to address," he said.

Merial, Ltd., a Georgia-based company that makes Frontline flea and tick treatments, said in a statement
that it “will work cooperatively with the EPA to help pet owners to use our products safely.”

The company, however, said the incidents were rare and minor. “The number of adverse events
reported for Frontline has remained consistently low since the product's introduction in 1996,” the
statement said.

Owens said the EPA’s investigation found incidents “all across the board,” with all brands and products.

EPA officials said they cannot explain the sudden jump in reported problems, except that it may be due
to increased use of the on-spot treatments or more awareness among pet owners.

The investigators could not verify that all the illnesses among the pets were actually linked to the
products. “The incidents have not been verified and may have causes other than exposure to the
pesticide,” the report says.
In some cases, pet owners were misusing the products, but EPA officials stressed that most of the blame
goes to the industry, not consumers, because of the poor labeling.

“When used appropriately in most cases they are safe,” Owens said, but “the labels are unclear right
now.”

Owens said the actions announced Wednesday “are really just the first step.” The EPA also plans to
require more rigorous testing of products, similar to the Food and Drug Administration’s requirements
for animal medications. “We are not getting the kind of data we need” to predict whether pets will have
problems with these products, he said.

In addition, new on-spot products will be granted only conditional and time-limited approval so that
side-effects can be investigated before the products are fully approved. Manufacturers also will have to
disclose more information about the inert ingredients – the non-pesticides – in their products, and some
of those ingredients will be restricted.

Case Studies Reveal that Patents Can Hinder Genetic Research and Patient Care

A team of Duke University researchers side with a recent court ruling against gene patents

A U.S. District Court judge's recent decision to invalidate patents on two genes commonly tested to
determine risk for breast and ovarian cancers is an important step toward removing legal hurdles that
have slowed the development of new genetic testing technology, according to a team of Duke University
researchers.

Although Judge Robert Sweet's March 31 ruling does not sit well with some biotech companies and
universities, Duke Institute for Genome Sciences & Policy (IGSP) researchers say that broad patent
claims such as those made by Myriad Genetics and the University of Utah Research Foundation do more
to block competition and discourage promising new technologies than to spur innovation.

The researchers' conclusions come from a series of case studies initiated in 2007 to examine genetic risk
testing for 10 clinical conditions, including breast and colon cancer, cystic fibrosis and hearing loss. In
seven of these conditions, exclusive licenses were a source of controversy, according to the case study
results, which were published April 14 in a special issue of Genetics in Medicine. However, in none of
these cases was the holder of exclusive patent rights the first to market with a test.
 Gene patents are granted primarily for one of two reasons, says Robert Cook-Deegan, director of the
IGSP Center for Genome Ethics, Law & Policy. The first is as a way for a biotech or pharmaceutical
company to protect the therapeutics—made with the help of genetic material—that go into the
development of a new drug. The second is to protect the intellectual property of companies that make
genetic diagnostic tools that determine a person's susceptibility to disease.

Myriad claimed that the work its technology does of isolating the DNA from the body transforms it and
makes it patentable. The judge in this case, however, found that isolated copies are not that different
from non-isolated DNA. "This implies that isolated DNA is a discovery and not an invention and
therefore not patentable," says Mark Bünger, a research director at Lux Research Inc.

The biotech industry's stance has been that its work is expensive and important and needs to be
licensed so that this work may continue. This argument has been successful for the most part until
now—more than 4,000 sequences from human genes, covering about 20 percent of the human genome,
have been patented.

IGSP's research suggests that although exclusive licenses have been valuable for developing drugs and
biologics that might not otherwise be developed, in the context of gene testing, exclusive patent rights
are primarily a tool for companies and research organizations to eliminate their competition, Cook-
Deegan says. The problem is not with the patents themselves but rather when overly broad patents are
exclusively licensed to a single company or university, he adds.

One of the IGSP's goals was to analyze patients with similar medical situations but who had different
levels of testing capabilities available to them. The researchers' role was to gather information about
how much different gene tests cost and how the technology is licensed, and to provide research on how
patenting these tests might affect healthcare, Cook-Deegan says.

When Duke researchers studied Myriad's tests, designed to find mutations in BRCA1 and BRCA2, they
found Myriad's patent claims made it nearly impossible for patients to pursue alternative ways to test
clinically for BRCA genes without that test infringing on Myriad's intellectual property.

The likelihood is that the health care industry will become more reliant on genetic material as time
passes, but right now there are questions about whether performing genetics tests might get an
organization sued, Cook-Deegan says, adding: "It would be quite a value to biotech to get some clarity
on this."
 Cyber Care: Will Robots Help the Elderly Live at Home Longer?

Companies are developing elder care bots with the hope of making people more independent later in
life

Mini robot vacuums are one thing, but larger robots may soon become a part of everyday life for the
elderly, performing tasks that could help delay the dreaded move of loved ones to a nursing home or
assisted living facility. Researchers and robotics companies worldwide are designing prototypes to
provide automated assistance to the elderly at home, targeting a market that promises to grow as
people live longer.

"Most elders prefer to stay at home, and families prefer that as long as possible," says Karen Robinson,
professor and executive director of the Volunteer Caregivers Program at University of Louisville School
of Nursing in Kentucky.

The idea is to use robots, resembling anything from lunch carts to human companions, to assist seniors
and the homebound with day-to-day tasks as well as communications with family members via social
networking, videoconferencing and the Web. For this to work the interface with the robot must be
intuitive, and robot-makers must allay any misgivings that the elderly might have about relying on new
technology to watch over them.

Kompaï

One of the less threatening approaches so far is called Kompaï, which resembles a plastic kiosk on
training wheels. This robot, from France-based Robosoft, features a touch-screen display on an easel
and a bowling ball–size white head with a "face". Although the face is in place currently just for
emotional comfort, company CEO Vincent Dupourque says future versions will light up and show
expressions.

The vision for Kompaï is as follows: Family members would call the robot via Skype. The robot would
then use ultrasonic sensors to detect the location of the person being called and navigate to that
person, who answers the Skype videoconference call via Kompaï's multitouch tablet PC and Webcam.
Kompaï could likewise be used as an interface to Facebook, MySpace or some other social network.
Interactive speech recognition would be available to help elderly or otherwise dependent people access
the Internet using a simple graphic and tactile interface. (See a video of Robosoft's Kompaï field trials
here.)

Kompaï could also store a person's daily schedule and shopping lists, and access online calendars or
weather. Robosoft will test the Kompaï this year in hospitals, geriatric centers and homes in France,
Hungary and Austria to see how the technology is accepted, Dupourque says. If all goes well, he expects
a commercial product within two years.

Several research groups are testing Kompaï, including MOBISERVE, a collaborative effort by nine
organizations from seven countries to develop technology to support independent living for the elderly.
In addition to Kompaï, MOBISERVE works on optical recognition, wearable health-monitors, and smart
home automation and communication. The University of West of England Bristol and Netherlands-based
Smart Homes are two organizations within MOBISERVE testing the Kompaï.

Robosoft is looking to partner with companies that make wireless physiological sensors worn by a
robot's owner that could communicate blood pressure, pulse, body temperature and other data via
Bluetooth to the robot, which would then relay that information to the person's doctor. Dupourque says
it is unclear whether such sensors currently exist or would have to be customized to work with the
Robosoft unit. Kompaï's software architecture is open source and based on the Microsoft Robotic
Developer Studio (MRDS) visual programming environment. "The idea behind it is to make easier
customization of the robot's behaviors," Dupourque adds.

CareBot

Conyers, Ga.–based GeckoSystems recently began in-home testing of its CareBot robots designed to
help the elderly, says R. Martin Spencer, president and CEO. The latest model is a cross between Darth
Vader and a Mrs. Butterworth's syrup bottle (both on wheels).* The CareBot allows seniors to stay in
their homes (rather than an assisted-living facility) while reducing isolation by initiating
videoconferencing sessions with family members. It also communicates reminders about daily tasks and
allows the user to access Web tools on the robot's touch-screen.

*Correction (6/22/10): This article originally attributed this description to GeckoSystems's R. Martin
Spencer.

The CareBot prototype runs five to 12 software-based GeckoSavant artificial intelligence (AI) engines on
netbook-size PCs, Spencer says. These engines are controlled by GeckoSuper, a piece of software that
manages CareBot's AI functions like a conductor in an orchestra. "We have multiple computers running
tens of thousands of lines of software running hundreds of sensors and the locomotion system,"
Spencer says.

GeckoSavant relies on "sensor fusion," a combination of multiple sensor systems such as vision and
hearing, to maintain awareness of its surroundings. The robot's GeckoTrak software senses body heat,
identifies colors, and uses sonar and infrared range finders to monitor a person's movements in the
home. GeckoScheduler software can be used to remind the person in its care to walk the dog or turn on
the TV to catch a particular program. (See a video of a CareBot in action here.)

Like Robosoft, Gecko also designed its robot to connect with third-party medical monitoring systems
that measure blood pressure and sugar, pulse rate, and other medical information, which it sends to
physicians via the Internet. Setting up a family member with a CareBot will not be cheap: Spencer
expects his company's robots to cost between $10,000 and $20,000. As for Kompaï, Dupourque
estimates R&D versions cost about $12,000 to $19,000 (depending on the configuration), and targets
around $6,000 at the mass-production stage.

Beyond Roomba

Other robot-makers expect to join the fray eventually. iRobot, the Bedford, Mass., company best known
for its Roomba robotic vacuum cleaners, says it is in the "early exploratory phase" of considering an
elder care product. iRobot CEO Colin Angle demonstrated his company's bomb disposal robot at TED
MED last fall. He explained to Scientific American how this basic design (wheels or tracks over legs—a
preference shared by iRobot, Robosoft and Gecko) might be applied to elder care: "Legs are very
complex when you could use wheels or tracks and get the same benefit with a more practical design,"
Angle says.

One of the many hurdles for these futuristic caretakers is acceptance. Dupourque thinks elderly people
using PCs or mobile phones will similarly embrace robots in their homes. University of Louisville's
Robinson takes a longer view and expects it will take another 20 or years or so, when baby boomers are
in their 80s, for the robots to be widely accepted in seniors' homes.

"This technology is going to be very important as the baby boomers age, as we have this explosion of
elder care that is going to be needed in the future," she says. "I think it will allow elders to remain living
independently much longer."

Fact or Fiction: Artificial Reproductive Technologies Make Sick Kids

Assisted reproduction involves many manipulations in an unnatural lab environment. Does this handling
have a detrimental effect on children?

Most children conceived via assisted reproductive technology (ART), such as superovulation are fine,
although some recent studies are raising doubts about whether these fertility fixes are as safe as
promised. The extensive handling of these crucial cells is a concern, and there are mixed reports on the
long-term health of these hard-won children, with several studies suggesting increased risks of low birth
weight, rare disorders down the line, and even death.
 For starters, one study published in July 2009 links ART embryos with poor health outcomes along a few
dimensions. Another paper, from January 2010, shows that the genes in ART embryos bear different
epigenetic marks than non-ART embryos. And the laboratory procedure of ART itself, during which eggs,
sperm and embryos are typically sucked in and out of pipettes and left to sit in culture dishes, concerns
some researchers and potential parents alike. Scientists such as Mellissa Mann, a researcher at
Children's Health Research Institute in Canada and the University of Western Ontario, speculate that
these manipulations could affect the health of ART babies.

"More attention should be paid to the safety of ART offspring as they now account for the large
proportion of the population," says He-Feng Huang, an obstetrician and gynecologist at Affiliated
Women's Hospital and Zhejiang University School of Medicine in China. Indeed, according to a 2009
study published in Human Reproduction, the number of ART procedures is on the rise and so-called test-
tube babies account for an estimated 250,000 births every year worldwide.

ART encompasses several techniques: With superovulation, women receive high doses of hormones to
stimulate egg production. Eggs and sperm are brought together in a dish so that in vitro fertilization
(IVF) will take place. If a man's fertility is low a single sperm cell can be chosen and injected into an egg,
forcing fertilization. Another procedure, called pre-implantation genetic diagnosis (PGD), involves
removing one or two cells from an early-stage IVF embryo for genetic testing to screen for various
diseases.

Molecular changes

The 2009 health outcomes work, by biologists Ran Huo, Qi Zhou and colleagues at the Chinese Academy
of Sciences and Nanjing Medical University, involved comparing mice that had undergone IVF and PGD
with those that had undergone IVF alone. The team reported in Molecular and Cellular Proteomics that,
compared with controls, PGD mice were more forgetful, heavier and had less myelin (a fatty coating on
nerves that allows electrical signals to move quickly across nerve cells). They also expressed abnormal
levels of proteins involved in neurodegenerative conditions.

Although mouse outcomes do not always parallel those in humans, the lab animal studies are helpful
because "when we're studying humans, we can't separate out the effect of the procedure versus fertility
issues," Mann says. For example, it is hard to say whether an ART baby has died because of the ART
technology or because one of its parents had a mutation that mutually contributed to subpar fertility
and infant death.

Mann's group, for the 2010 work on ART and epigenetics, used mice to examine changes on four genes
following a superovulation procedure. The team looked at methylation, in which a methyl group is
placed onto cytosine in DNA sequences. Methylation typically silences genes so that they are not
expressed. Mann's team reported in Human Molecular Genetics that superovulation affected the
establishment and possibly the maintenance of methylation in mice. Messed-up methylation early in
development can cause disorders, such as Beckwith-Wiedemann syndrome (an overgrowth disorder), in
humans. Another study by a different group in the same journal in October 2009 looked at ART effects
on epigenetics (non-DNA changes in genes) in humans. They found methylation defects on several
human genes in the cord blood and placentas of ART embryos, suggesting that a similar effect might be
occurring in humans as well.

Cause and effect

Molecular studies paint a potentially bleak picture, but researchers warn that the effects and causes of
these differences are unknown. "I think it's hard to make any firm conclusions so far," says Liv Bente
Romundstad, a fertility doctor and researcher at Saint Olav's University Hospital in Norway.

To tease out the effects of ART from the impact of underlying fertility issues in humans, Romundstad's
team studied mothers who had one pregnancy with ART and one naturally. Because the women had
children on their own either before or after ART, the researchers assumed that fertility was not a
problem. Multiple births were excluded because even naturally conceived multiples have a high risk of
complications, Romundstad says.

When ART babies were compared with the entire population they had a lower birth weight and
increased risk of death around the time of birth, but that risk disappeared when compared with their
siblings. The analysis, published in August 2008 in The Lancet, suggests, "the infertility treatment per se
for the outcomes we have studied does not seem to give any additional risk," Romundstad says.

But there's still reason for concern. In a talk at the European Society of Human Genetics conference this
month, Géraldine Viot, a clinical geneticist at the Maternity Hospital, Port Royal in Paris described her
team's large study of French ART centers. Although ART children had a slightly higher than normal rate
of birth defects, their risk of developing epigenetic disorders, such as Beckwith-Wiedemann syndrome,
was 4.5 to six times higher.

So, is ART safe? "For some of these children, we still don't know what the long-term results of the ART
will be, in that a lot of these children are not yet reproductive age," Mann points out. Romundstad says
that although it's possible that health effects could surface later on, she will continue to offer fertility
treatment in her practice. "I don't think the timing is right to start to scare the population, but I think it's
important to focus on this and continue with studies," she says.
 PET Project: Radiologists Push Imaging Technologies in Developing Countries

RAD-AID, Project Hope and Philips Healthcare team up to assess the ability of communities in western
China and northern India to use CT scans, MRIs and other imaging equipment to improve health care

Improvements in medical imaging technology have made computerized tomography (CT) scans,
magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans and other tools of radiology a routine part of any trip to the
emergency room in the Western world. This is not the case, however, in many developing countries,
which often lack the equipment, expertise and/or infrastructure to diagnose and treat health care
problems with the help of radiology.

A team of radiologists and humanitarians who returned last week from a 14-day fact-finding mission in
western China and northern India are hoping to change this through the Radiology-Readiness program,
an effort launched in October 2008 by a global nonprofit network of radiologists known as RAD-AID to
evaluate the need for imaging technology in developing countries and determine how to deliver imaging
equipment as well as training and maintenance expertise where it is needed.

Imaging and health care

"Imaging is a major part of almost every clinical decision we make in our health care system, yet this
technology is not available to a substantial portion of the world," says RAD-AID founder and chief
executive Daniel Mollura. The idea was to first determine what sorts of diseases and other health
problems are prevalent in a given area and the extent to which radiology might be useful to physicians
there. If a need is identified, the next step is to develop a plan to deliver the imaging equipment, train
locals to use it and ensure that the local infrastructure is able to reliably support it.

To determine which locations are most in need of and the best candidates for Radiology-Readiness,
Mollura approached the nongovernmental organization (NGO) Project HOPE about a year and a half
ago. "We proposed to study the role of radiology and how radiology could be optimized for clinics
operating throughout [Project HOPE's] system," Mollura says.

This was a good fit, says Cary Kimble, Project HOPE's director of development, because the NGO's focus
is on sustainable health care improvements. "Without a strong base in radiology, the system can't
function properly," he adds.

Analyzing Asia

Project HOPE served as a facilitator for RAD-AID in northern India and western China, where the NGO
has many contacts. Mollura left for China on July 10 and during his weeklong stay visited five institutions
in Project Hope's network located in three cities—Shanghai, Yinchuan and Zhengzhou. In Shanghai these
sites included Shanghai Children's Medical Center, Renji Hospital and Tang Qiao CHCC (Community
Health Care Clinic). The sites in Yinchuan and Zhengzhou included Affiliated Hospital of Ninxia Medical
University and First Affiliated Hospital of Zhengzhou University, respectively.

"We're still analyzing what we saw and discussed in China, so it's a little early to say too much," Mollura
says, adding that the RAD-AID and Project HOPE teams will be working closely with the participating
institutions over the next several months to design follow-up plans. "China's expanding radiologic
capability offers significant new opportunities for physicians in China and the U.S. to work together for
improving global health."

In India RAD-AID visited Artemis Health Institute in New Delhi, Okay Diagnostic Research Center in
Jaipur, Dr. Shamer Singh Memorial Radio-Diagnostic Center (SSRD) in Chandigarh and the Postgraduate
Institute of Medical Education and Research (PGI) of Chandigarh. With the help of the Grameen
Foundation, RAD-AID and Project HOPE were also able to meet with ESAF Microfinance and Investments
to discuss financial service options for the region.

China and India, in particular, are going through profound changes as their economies develop.
Conditions including cardiovascular disease, cancer and obesity (previously a problem mostly in Western
countries) are emerging as health risks as their populations' vocations, diets and lifestyles change, says
Ronald de Jong, CEO of Emerging Markets for Philips Healthcare, a maker of imaging equipment that is
sponsoring Radiology-Readiness and providing RAD-AID and Project HOPE with technical expertise.
These health concerns require early diagnosis in order to be treated successfully, he adds. In addition to
the collaboration with Project Hope, Philips recently entered a two-year partnership with China's
Ministry of Health to train 1,000 rural doctors in 400 hospitals to improve technical breast cancer–
screening skills.

The ability to sustain radiology services over time is a major challenge. RAD-AID says it has built
relationships with financial institutions including Goldman Sachs and the Grameen Foundation as well as
advisors from Columbia University's Business School to study how radiology can be implemented cost-
effectively to serve the urban and rural poor. Efforts are underway to analyze how collaborations in
India could include privately run health institutions with government and nonprofit NGOs to address
health care needs.

Helping Haiti

In addition to the possibilities in China and India, RAD-AID is studying how radiology can be brought to
bear in Uganda despite that country's limited health care resources. RAD-AID and Project HOPE also plan
to send a volunteer to Haiti this fall to study the radiology needs of post-earthquake reconstruction in
several of HOPE's affiliated institutions there.

"We had a team of biomedical engineers in Haiti to look at some of the equipment donated since the
earthquake and even before that," Kimble says, adding that most of it was not operable. "The
technology couldn't function for lack of a part or people who knew how to operate and maintain it."

The American College of Radiology's (A.C.R.) Foundation Haiti Radiology Relief Fund, set up shortly after
January's earthquake in that country, sent out a survey to multiple facilities near Port-Au-Prince to
measure the impact of damage to radiology infrastructure and determine some priorities for support,
including equipment, infrastructure planning, teaching materials and the coordination of volunteers to
assist throughout the process, according to Brad Short, A.C.R.'s senior director of member services.
Mollura serves on the college's Foundation International Outreach Committee, though which RAD-AID
works with the A.C.R. to improve radiology programs in several countries, including Haiti.

Rabbit Rest: Can Lab-grown Human Skin Replace Animals in Toxicity Testing?

New experimental models based on three-dimensional reconstructions of human skin are helping to
reduce chemical testing on live animals, but cannot yet replace animals altogether

It likely comes as no surprise that many common household chemicals and medical products as well as
industrial and agricultural chemicals, may irritate human skin temporarily or, worse, cause permanent,
corrosive burns. In order to prevent undue harm regulators in the U.S. and beyond require safety testing
of many substances to identify their potential hazards and to ensure that the appropriate warning label
appears on a product. Traditionally, such skin tests have been done on live animals—although in recent
decades efforts to develop humane approaches, along with ones that are more relevant to people have
resulted in new models based on laboratory-grown human skin.

The most recent chapter of this ongoing effort was written on July 22 when the Organization for
Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD)—an international group that, among other things,
provides guidelines to its 32-member countries on methods to assess chemical safety—officially
approved three commercially available in vitro models of human skin for use in chemical testing.
Specifically, the new guideline (OECD Test No. 439) stipulates that the models can serve as an
alternative to animals in tests for skin irritation, one of several human health endpoints for which
chemicals are tested. Similar 3-D models were approved for corrosion tests in 2004, leaving many
hopeful that soon it may be possible to the assess the full spectrum of a chemical's effects on human
skin—from irritation to corrosion—without using live animals.
Recent legislation in the European Union (E.U.) has made the need for nonanimal test methods an
urgent matter. Since 2009 the E.U.'s Cosmetics Directive has banned animal testing of cosmetics
ingredients and finished products (with a few exceptions for certain health endpoints). What's more, the
ban applies to cosmetics products marketed in the E.U. As a result, manufacturers in countries outside
the union must comply with the regulation to sell their products in E.U. markets. Importantly, however,
E.U. law prohibits experiments on animals if alternative methods are "reasonably and practicably
available."

At the same time, manufacturers are slated to use millions of animals in the coming decade to comply
with a 2007 European Community program called Registration, Evaluation, Authorization and Restriction
of Chemicals (REACH), which has requested more extensive safety evaluations for approximately 30,000
chemicals.

Although the new in vitro skin models will certainly reduce the need for, and suffering of, animals in
some chemical tests, these methods are not yet ready to completely replace animal-based skin tests. To
understand why, it is necessary to consider how toxicity testing is conducted and some of the regulatory
constraints in place.

Skin Right

Since the mid-1940s researchers have tested the skin-irritancy potential of chemicals primarily on
albino rabbits. In a procedure called the Draize rabbit skin test, a patch of the animal's fur is shaved and
the test substance is applied to the bare skin for up to four hours. A trained technician then monitors
the skin for as many as 14 days for signs of an adverse reaction and subjectively scores the severity of
the reaction. The Globally Harmonized System of Classification and Labeling of Chemicals (GHS) classifies
a substance as an irritant if it causes reversible damage to the skin or a corrosive if it causes burns or
permanent scarring (irreversible damage).

Opponents have long criticized animal-based skin tests as too variable because the responses observed
can differ among individual animals. Results also often vary among labs, partly because the measures of
the reactions are qualitative.

Others are concerned that adverse reactions identified in animals do not always reflect how humans
may respond to the chemical exposure. "The rabbit is not a particularly good model for human irritation
or corrosion, largely because the barrier properties in rabbit [skin] are far less robust that in the
human," says John Sheasgreen, president of MatTek Corp., which manufactures one of the approved
models. He explains that when his company compared results from chemical testing on their in vitro skin
with available human and rabbit data, the "in vitro model correlates much better with the human
experience than the rabbit experience."
The artificial skin models come from normal human skin cells, which are cultured in specialized media to
form a three-dimensional reconstruction of the real thing. Sheasgreen explains that the in vitro skin
closely resembles intact human skin both structurally and biochemically—it consists of multiple layers of
cells and has a stratum corneum, the dead layer of cells on the surface that provides a protective
barrier. These properties make it amenable for use in toxicity testing.

Proponents of the in vitro alternatives claim that they yield more reproducible and more quantitative
results, because the response to irritancy is based on measures of cell viability. Furthermore, because
the new tests are based on human cells, the data they provide may better represent how people would
react.

In formally testing the alternatives, the European Center for the Validation of Alternative Methods
(ECVAM) concluded that the models can reliably and accurately predict whether a chemical is an irritant.

Saving skin

According to the new OECD guideline, the in vitro skin can serve as a "stand-alone replacement test for
in vivo skin irritation testing," depending on a country's hazard classification requirements. The
regulatory system in E.U. countries, for example, classifies substances as corrosive, irritant or neither,
which in vitro tests can adequately identify. By contrast, some regulatory authorities in some countries,
such as the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, require identification and labeling of an additional
category of so-called "mild" irritants, which the in vitro tests cannot discern. Additional testing, such as
animal tests or ethical trials on human volunteers, may be necessary to identify such low-level irritants.

The approval of the human skin models would not eliminate animal testing, explains Laurence Musset,
principal administrator of the OECD Environment Directorate's Environment, Health and Safety Division.
"The in vitro tests have a limited scope and don't work for all chemicals," Musset says, adding that each
country's regulatory agencies will decide whether the in vitro or the animal test should be used for skin
irritation studies.

OECD guidelines recommend using the human skin tests as part of a sequential testing strategy, in which
in vitro methods are used before animals in combination with a weight-of-the-evidence (WoE) analysis
of existing data on a substance or related chemical. In this testing strategy if a corrosive or irritant is
identified in vitro, follow-up testing in animals is not necessary; if a substance tests negative in vitro,
however, a WoE analysis may be used to back up that finding. Otherwise, in vivo testing may be
necessary to rule out potential false negatives.
William Stokes, the executive director of the U.S. Interagency Coordinating Committee on the Validation
of Alternative Methods (ICCVAM), says his organization is currently evaluating the applicability of the in
vitro irritation tests for chemical testing in this country. Stokes points out that the in vitro corrosion tests
miss nearly 20 percent of known corrosives tested, which is worrisome because there is no clear
strategy to follow when a substance tests negative.

"The guideline says is that if [a substance tests negative], you may be able to conclude that it's not a
corrosive using a WoE approach," Stokes says. Information that might be considered in a WoE analysis
includes results from in vitro irritation tests for that substance.

But the false negatives from the corrosion tests were never examined when ECVAM validated the skin
irritation models. ICCVAM is currently doing that evaluation, and preliminary results show that the
irritation tests fail to classify at least two known corrosives even as irritants. Without follow-up in vivo
testing, these corrosives could enter consumer products without any hazard labeling.

"We want to make sure that if something is corrosive, it's not slipped through these tests," Stokes says.
"The data we have show it's a possibility. That…indicates that we need to better understand the
usefulness of these assays. Our goal is to prevent injury and disease. It's important to us to have
accurate safety testing methods."

Another issue is that the false positive rate for the in vitro skin irritation approaches 30 percent—a
substantial number of substances are identified as irritants when they really are not.

"We don't want to excessively over-label products as hazardous or people would probably start ignoring
safety labels," Stokes says.

The bottom line is that in vitro methods help to reduce animal use, but "full replacement is not
something science supports at this point," Stokes says. "We're trying…to find ways and approaches that
can further reduce uncertainty in those decisions, to reduce the number of circumstances where you
might have to use [an animal]. As we take advantage of new advances in science and technology we'll
continue to make progress in this area. It's a win–win—we're protecting both public health and
animals."
 Got E. coli? Raw Milk's Appeal Grows Despite Health Risks

Bacterial outbreaks are traced back to nonpasteurized milk, yet proponents claim it is healthier and
tastes better

Milk is well known as a great dietary source of protein and calcium, not to mention an indispensable
companion to cookies. But "nature's perfect food," a label given to milk over time by a variety of
boosters, including consumer activists, government nutritionists and the American Dairy Council, has
become a great source of controversy, too. The long-running dispute over whether milk, both from cows
and goats, should be consumed in raw or pasteurized form—an argument more than a century old—has
heated up in the last five years, according to Bill Marler, a Washington State lawyer who takes raw milk
and other food poisoning cases.

A bumper crop of recent illness related to raw milk accentuates the problem. Last month, at least 30
people, including two children, tested positive for strains of campylobacter and Escherichia coli bacteria
traced to raw (nonpasteurized) goat milk. In June five people in Minnesota were diagnosed with E. coli
traced to raw cow's milk from a local dairy. One, a toddler, was hospitalized after he developed
hemolytic uremic syndrome, a type of kidney failure that is a potentially deadly E. coli complication.

They are hardly isolated cases. In fact, there have already been more reports of raw milk-related illness
outbreaks this year in the U.S. than in any of the past five years.

Such outbreaks are largely preventable if milk is pasteurized, says Robert Tauxe, deputy director of the
Division of Foodborne, Bacterial and Mycotic Diseases at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control (CDC). The
process (known as high temperature, short time (HTST) pasteurization) was invented more than a
century ago and relies on heat at least 72 degrees Celsius for 15 seconds to kill the stew of E. coli,
campylobacter, Listeria, salmonella and other microbes that may lurk in milk that comes straight from a
cow or goat. Medical experts consider pasteurization as one of the major breakthroughs in public health
history. "A triumph," Tauxe adds.

Keeping it real

Raw milk proponents, including The Weston A. Price Foundation, deny its dangers and praise its
superior flavor. They believe raw milk obtained from healthy, pasture-fed animals strengthens the
immune system in a manner similar to human breast milk and that it cures digestive tract conditions
such as Crohn's disease. Sally Fallon Morell, the foundation's president and founder of the Campaign for
Real Milk, disputes the claims of raw milk-related illness. "We have analyzed those reports, and 95
percent should go in the trash can because they're biased," she says. "The pasteurization argument is
based on 40-year-old science."
Raw milk advocates also claim that pasteurization destroys key nutrients. "Real milk contains a complex
system of enzymes, fats, carbohydrates and fragile proteins that are wonders of the microscopic world,"
Fallon Morell says. "They are destroyed with rapid heating."

That assertion is debatable. As with any cooking process, pasteurization causes some chemical change,
says Jennifer Nelson, a nutritionist with the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., although she says that
nutrition researchers are still testing to see if nutrients, enzymes and other health-related components
are significantly altered. Whatever the nutritional change, Nelson cautions, "Raw milk can carry
pathogens that can cause illness and death." Certain high risk groups should never drink raw milk:
infants, growing children, the elderly and people who are immune compromised because their immune
systems may not be strong enough to fight off the pathogens often found in raw milk, she adds.

Given the number of disease outbreaks related to raw milk, one might expect the demand for raw milk
to dry up. Not so—in fact, demand for raw milk has risen faster than cream in a milk bottle,
commanding prices as high as $10 per gallon. Despite the warnings of public health officials, including
the Web site Real Raw Milk Facts, raw milk has become a national cause célèbre, and dairymen who sell
it have become local folk heroes.

"It's a political issue," Fallon Morell says. "It's also a health, small farm and economic issue. I'm not
advocating that we all go back and live on farms, but the pendulum has gone too far in the direction of
industry. What we need [are] small farms with Space Age technology."

Those watching from the sidelines wonder if opponents can find common (and safer) ground. Food
journalists as well as people who comment in online discussions on the topic often suggest that drinking
raw milk is a personal choice that cannot hurt anyone but the person who drinks it. Tauxe disagrees,
adding, "If a child comes to a day care center with E. coli, it can be passed to your child, spread through
feces in diapers."

No Germs, Less Taste

It seems like some new technology might have come along by now, an alternative to HTST
pasteurization, that would make milk safe without delivering what some people think is an inferior
product with less taste and nutrition. Yet, few alternatives have emerged since the days of Pasteur,
according to University of Minnesota (U.M.) associate professor of veterinary public health, Jeff Bender.
Each of the available alternatives has a downside: For example, some believe that low-temperature
pasteurization (also known as batch processing) yields a tastier product. This process heats the milk up
to a minimum temperature of 62 degrees C where it remains for 30 minutes, thereby taking longer than
standard HTST pasteurization.
Another example, irradiation—sometimes called "cold pasteurization"—uses ionizing radiation from
electrically charged particles (such as x-rays and gamma rays) to kill harmful bacteria and other
organisms in meat, poultry, seafood and spices. But, Bender says, irradiation changes the taste of milk.
He also says that high-pressure processing methods, whereby food is subjected to pressures of 3,500 to
7,000 kilograms per square centimeter to kill microorganisms, work well in solid foods such as ham but
are far too expensive to use on liquids.

Bombarding the milk with sound waves in a process called sonication may hold potential as an
alternative. Sonication heats milk to a temperature well below what the U.S. Food and Drug
Administration requires for pasteurization, killing the microbes without causing milk proteins to
denature and hence alter the flavor, according to investigators from Louisiana State University in Baton
Rouge, who at the Institute of Food Technologists' annual meeting in July presented data showing that
their team used the process to knock out coliform bacteria. In addition, they said, sonication takes
roughly half as much energy as high-temperature pasteurization.

Sonication may be the way forward but, for the time being, high-temperature, short-time
pasteurization remains the most proven method for zapping the most germs from milk while
maintaining quality, speed, and lower cost. Says Bender, who is also director of U.M.'s Center for Animal
Health and Food Safety and himself a farmer, "After 100-plus years, there is still no better alternative."

Ultimately, the demand for raw milk appears to be as much an issue of personal freedom and the desire
to obtain food directly from small farms as it one of nutrition. Yet no matter where the milk comes from
or how clean the dairy, raw milk still poses a danger, Tauxe says. "Animals and bacteria are natural
companions," he adds. "Normal-looking and tasting milk from a healthy cow can still be contaminated—
even in the udder, before the milk leaves the cow."

For people who want to more closely connect with small farms, Tauxe suggests seeking out local
artisanal dairy producers who pasteurize. "It's not the size of the farm," he says, "it's the temperature of
the milk."

A Healthy Lifestyle Reduces Breast Cancer Risk for Women Either with or without a Genetic
Predisposition

Women who followed weight, exercise and alcohol consumption guidelines had about the same
lowered risk for getting breast cancer, even if they had a strong family history of the disease

Moderate exercise, little booze intake and holding down one's weight might be key strategies that
reduce the odds of getting breast cancer—even if a woman's mother or sister has had the disease.
 New data from 85,644 U.S. women, who were followed for an average of about five and a half years as
part of the Women's Health Initiative Observational Study, confirms earlier evidence that healthy
lifestyle choices can sometimes trump genes and environment when it comes to breast cancer. The
results of the study were reported online October 12 in Breast Cancer Research.

These findings are important, says Robert Gramling, an associate professor of family medicine and
community and preventive medicine at University of Rochester Medical Center and a co-author of the
new study, because "particularly with growing awareness of genomics, often those who have a family
history of a disease that's quite scary start thinking, 'There's nothing I can do to prevent it,'" he noted.
"We're beginning to find that's not the case." Breast cancer is responsible for the second-most cancer
deaths in women (lung cancer takes the highest toll), killing some 40,170 U.S. women in 2009, according
to the American Cancer Society (ACS). About 192,370 new U.S. cases are diagnosed each year.

The three lifestyle changes have each been correlated individually with reduced risk of breast cancer,
but the new study looked at them as a group. The researchers asked women if they engaged in at least
20 minutes of moderate to vigorous exercise at least five days a week, limited alcohol consumption to
seven glasses a week, and maintained a body mass index of 18.5 to 24.9, all of which are similar to
recommendations the ACS makes for reducing risk of the disease.

Gramling and his colleagues analyzed information from women, aged 50 to 79, who had not had breast
cancer themselves and who also had no close relatives with early-onset breast malignancies (before age
45).

Regardless of whether subjects had a family history of late-onset breast cancer or not, "the amount of
risk reduced is exactly the same," Gramling explains. As a measure of absolute risk, for both groups,
making the healthy lifestyle choices eliminated about one case of the disease out of 1,000 each year, he
notes.

"This was a very well done study," says Catherine Carpenter an associate professor of medicine and
nursing at the David Geffen School of Medicine at the University of California, Los Angeles, who was not
involved in the new research. "The surprising thing was that the protection wasn't stronger in the family
history–positive women," Carpenter says.

By excluding women with a family history of early-onset (before the age of 45) breast cancer from the
study, however, the assessment might have played down the role of genetics in many cases, Carpenter
notes. Late-onset "breast cancers tend to be less likely to be genetically determined," she notes, thus
leaving them more likely to be affected by lifestyle factors.

She also added that it would be useful to study whether combining these behaviors also reduces risk for
women who have a family history of early-onset breast cancer.

Not all of the genetic influences are necessarily linked directly to so-called breast cancer genes. "One of
the factors that is heritable and genetically determined is obesity and body mass index," Carpenter says.
"Families could inherit the predisposition to being overweight and that's what causes breast cancer, not
that they're carrying a gene that enhances genetic susceptibility to breast cancer."

Carpenter also notes that she is curious to know which of the three lifestyle factors had the strongest
influence on preventing breast cancer, as the new study does not make a distinction among the specific
behaviors and malignancy risk.

"These are very well-known behaviors that influence breast cancer," Carpenter says. But as Gramling
points out, of the healthy lifestyle recommendations, "not all the things are easy to do." Only about 7
percent of women in the study reported following all of the lifestyle guidelines all of the time.

Untangling cancer's roots can be a tricky business. As Carpenter explains, "These folks are more likely to
have shared behavioral patterns in the family." And getting to the bottom of cancer risk "is the major
focus of genetic epidemiology in 2010," Gramling says.

Next-step research will include more interventional studies looking at the influence of exercise and
weight on a woman's breast cancer risk. The hope of the new and the continuing research is "to better
characterize how combinations of exposures contribute to women's risk," Gramling says, "so you can
advise a woman how she can prevent breast cancer for herself."

Could a Blood Test Reveal If You Have Early-Stage Cancer?

Researchers are studying whether the presence of certain proteins in the blood could provide signs of
the formative stage of a malignancy

As Breast Cancer Awareness Month draws to a close, researchers still struggle against a disease that
claims more than 40,000 U.S. lives annually (pdf). Whereas ideas about prevention and treatment may
vary from doctor to doctor, early detection is the key to successful treatment—when detected early
enough, any cancer has a 90 percent cure rate.

Catching cancer in its early stages is not easy though. Mammographies and other types of imaging tests
are hardly foolproof, and neither are painful biopsy procedures, particularly when tumors are small and
difficult to find. For these reasons, an interdisciplinary team of geneticists, computer scientists,
oncologists and other researchers at The Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle are working
on a way to detect early-stage cancer that is no more invasive or painful than a simple blood test.

Scientific American spoke with geneticist and oncologist Amanda Paulovich, director of the Fred
Hutchinson's Early Detection Initiative, about the work she and her team are doing to find biomarkers
that can identify cancer in its most formative stages.

What is the Fred Hutchinson's Early Detection Initiative, and what role is technology playing in this
work?

The Early Detection Initiative is an organizational structure within Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research
Center to acknowledge and support the many faculty who for years have devoted their research to the
discovery of the most effective ways to find and treat cancer at its earliest stages. This is a critically
important initiative because early detection is our best chance for a cure. If we can detect tumors early,
it's possible to surgically remove them and treat the patient with localized radiation therapy. The
members of the initiative hope to improve early detection of cancer by making an impact in a variety of
areas, including doing epidemiologic studies on risk factors, developing new and improved methods of
diagnostic imaging, discovering and verifying new biomarkers as indicators of cancer, and developing
new technologies to aid early detection.

Technology development plays a very significant role in this work. The number of new FDA-approved
diagnostic tests for blood has remained static at zero-to-two per year for the past 15 years, indicating
that conventional approaches to identify and validate new blood-based diagnostic tests have reached a
plateau. For the majority of human proteins, there are currently no methods—that is, assays to quantify
the amount in blood samples, so novel assays must be developed for testing of candidate new
diagnostics in clinical studies. Unfortunately, this process is prohibitively expensive and time-consuming,
creating a severe bottleneck. As a result, few candidate new diagnostics end up undergoing testing. A
major focus of my research is on developing new technologies, based on hypothesis-driven, targeted
mass spectrometry, for relieving this bottleneck to testing potential new blood-based diagnostics for
detection of cancer. Ideally, we need assays to allow us to measure all human proteins in many clinical
samples, rather than trying to pick a couple proteins that might work.

Last year, you and your colleagues reported in Nature Biotechnology having demonstrated that new
applications of existing proteomic techniques showed promise of greater accuracy in detecting and
quantifying proteins biomarkers in bodily fluids. What is the significance of this work and how have you
advanced it in the past year? (Scientific American is part of Nature Publishing Group.)

In this work we demonstrated that assays for measuring proteins in blood, based on targeted mass
spectrometry, are highly reproducible between different laboratories. This is important because if you
are trying to discover or use new diagnostic tests, you need to be able to get the same result regardless
of where you send blood samples.

How has the $4.8 million in federal stimulus funding from the National Cancer Institute impacted your
research in the past year? What has it enabled you to do that you otherwise would not have been able
to do?

The entire biomedical research enterprise is hampered by a lack of methods [assays] for quantifying
human proteins. This unmet need slows basic research, development of new drug therapies and
development of new diagnostic tests to help us detect or treat diseases. This NCI funding has allowed
me to enter into an exciting collaboration with Steve Carr's lab at the Broad Institute in Boston to do a
pilot project testing the feasibility of developing targeted mass spectrometry–based assays to all human
proteins, starting with about 1 percent of the basic unmodified human proteome.

We will develop multiplexed assays that will allow us to measure multiple proteins at a time in human
samples, thus increasing the speed with which we can test candidate biomarkers. This project would
serve as a proof of concept to show the time and cost for a much larger effort, which would develop
assays to the remaining 99 percent of all human proteins. The scaled project would be comparable to
the Human Genome Project in cost and scope and promises to have a comparable impact on the
biomedical research enterprise.

What are the challenges of detecting breast cancer in its early stages? What can be done about this?

For current breast cancer screening methods such as mammography, the challenges are access to
screening, compliance, detection of some disease that is indolent and need not be treated, detection of
noncancerous lesions that undergo biopsy, and failure to detect some disease that does need to be
treated. It may be possible to develop blood-based diagnostic tests that complement mammography to
address some of these issues associated with screening.

What would it take to create a blood test that could help early screening for cancer?

I envision blood tests and imaging technologies complementing each other—perhaps as a cost-effective
panel of tests done in stages. A cheaper but less specific blood-screening test could be done first,
followed by imaging. Alternatively, imaging could be used for initial screening, with follow-up blood
testing to determine if a biopsy is necessary or if the disease is aggressive and needs to be treated.