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Two new methods for harvesting water offer potential solutions for addressing the commodity’s scarcity — even in a desert.

June 11, 2018, 1:45 pm
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Credit: Tao Zhang/Getty Images

As the planet warms and global populations boom, water is becoming a scarce commodity.

Now, two separate projects demonstrate new technology to more efficiently harvest water from air than previous attempts. One shows a low-tech method for squeezing droplets from dry, desert air, while the other uses an electrostatic charge to drastically improve the amount of water collected from humid air. Both aim to create low-cost sources of freshwater that could slack the thirst of humans, crops, and even power plants.

The first water harvester comes from a team at UC Berkeley that has devised a simple box-in-a-box system that works using ambient air temperature without the need for refrigeration. In experiments, the system was able to produce between 2 and 3 1/2 ounces of water per day. That may sound small, but this is bone-dry desert air with a relative humidity that ranges from 40 percent at night to 8 percent in the daytime. The researchers report their findings in journal Science Advances.

A critical component of this system is a kind of powder that consists of metal-organic frameworks, also called MOFs. These tiny, synthetic crystalline grains can be made from a variety of metal ions bound to short organic molecules. MOFs, which were invented decades ago by the research team’s leader, Omar Yaghi, are incredibly porous and have surface structures so intricate that if a gram of them were laid out flat, they would cover several football fields.

For this water harvester, the researchers tested two different MOFs — those made from zirconium and others made from aluminum. For the inner box, a two-foot-tall plastic container, the researchers arranged an inch-deep layer of MOFs near the very top. They placed that box inside a larger, plastic box that has a transparent top and sides.  

At night, the lid to the outer box was left open to allow air to permeate the bed of MOFs and their porous structure. During the day, the lid to the outer box was closed, trapping heat inside, which released water vapor trapped inside the MOF. The vapor clung to the inside of the large box, condensed and dripped to the bottom, where it was collected.

“It doesn’t require much energy to get the water out,” graduate student Eugene Kapustin told Seeker.

RELATED: This Portable Generator Produces Power and Clean Water From Human Waste

Making the current system bigger would offer one solution to collecting more water. But Kapustin said he and his team want to design more efficient MOFs to make the system smaller and portable. This summer, he and colleagues are testing a new design in California’s Death Valley.

“We think MOF based technology will be the only one that will produce actual water in arid regions of the world,” said Kapustin.

In very humid regions, fog collecting has become a popular way to capture water from the air. Typically, these systems are made of giant, passive mesh or nets, where water droplets cling, coalesce, and then stream down into buckets. But this method is quite inefficient, capturing just 1 to 3 percent of the water droplets in the air passing by.

A team at MIT, lead by associate professor of mechanical engineering Kripa Varanasi, has developed a way to increase the efficiency of fog collecting to nearly 99 percent. By emitting a pulse of electrically charged particles, or ions, into the air near the surface of a collector, which creates an electric field and also charges nearby water particles, compelling them toward the mesh of wires. In laboratory experiments the electrostatic charge in combination with a 2 inch by 2 inch mesh collected enough water droplets — created by a mist machine — to fill a 1 ounce beaker in 30 minutes. The team published their research in Science Advances.

Varanasi told Seeker he sees a couple of different applications for this technology and, to commercialize them, has started a company called Infinite Cooling, which recently won MIT's $100K Entrepreneurship Competition.

The first application focuses on power plant cooling towers that billow plumes of water vapor so dense they’re often mistaken for smoke. A 600 MW power plant operating at 55 percent capacity loses roughly 750 million gallons of water every year, said Varanasi. But a lightweight mesh dome fitted over the top of the tower could capture enough vapor to produce 150 million gallons of water.

“That’s a million dollars in savings for the plant,” said Varanasi.

RELATED: Drinking Water Database Reveals the Dirtiest — and Cleanest — Supplies in the US

Currently, the company is building a mesh dome over a geodesic frame for the cooling tower connected to MIT's Central Utility Plant, which generates 20 megawatts of energy for the campus. The dome should be installed by the end of the summer and Varanasi and his team will test its performance over the fall.

Since many power plants are located along coastlines in order to use seawater for cooling, Infinite Cooling’s technology could also be used to desalinate seawater. “The amount of energy we use is 50 times lower than reverse osmosis desalination,” said Varanasi. “We think this is the way to desalinate.”

Water is a crucial resource that everybody needs but nobody wants to pay for, said Varanasi. Instead of developing new membrane technology or filtration, he and his team want to focus on the nexus of energy and water to create an entirely new business.

“We want to disrupt the water market and address global water scarcity,” he said.

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Feelings of disgust serve an evolutionary purpose, protecting us from potential health threats.

June 12, 2018, 1:23 pm
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Credit: fhm via Getty Images

Val Curtis arguably has one of the world's most stomach-churning jobs. As director of the  Environmental Health Group at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, she investigates the emotion of disgust. Filthy bathrooms, urine-soaked city alleyways, and closeups of oozing lesions are all part of a typical day's work.

"I'm pretty inured to disgust," Curtis, who is the author of the book "Don't Look, Don't Touch, Don't Eat" (Chicago University Press, 2013), admitted to Seeker. "But like most people, I find excreta and bodily emanations pretty revolting."

Feelings of disgust turn out to facilitate infectious disease avoidance, according to new research conducted by Curtis and co-author Mícheál de Barra of Brunel University London. Their study, published in the Royal Society journal Philosophical Transactions B, strongly supports a theory holding that disgust functions to reduce contact with pathogens and parasites.

The scientists began their investigation by selecting a number of infectious diseases at random from a commonly referenced handbook concerning communicable disease epidemiology and control. Among those diseases, they extracted information about forms of transmission, such as via direct skin contact or airborne germs.

The researchers then generated a series of 75 scenarios that could, to varying degrees, mirror actual cues for those modes of disease transition. For example, exposure to bodily waste and other excretions was one of the identified infectious disease transmission routes. Their scenarios then included everything from seeing un-flushed excrement in a toilet to sitting next to someone on an airplane who is vomiting into a paper bag.

They also included some scenarios that might not seem so obviously off-putting. Since animals can be disease vectors, scenarios included imagining holding a "fat wriggling worm in your bare hands for 60 seconds," having a stray dog lick your face, and feeling a "hairless old cat" rubbing against your leg.

RELATED: Babies Appear to Understand Human Emotions at a Very Early Age

Still others concerned having "a woman with unkempt hair and disheveled clothes" sit beside you on a bus, "seeing an obese woman sunbathe" and "shaking hands with someone missing a thumb."

All of these scenarios were loaded into an online survey that was fully completed by 2,679 participants who were mostly from the US, UK, and Canada. For each survey entry, the participants were required to rate it on a spectrum with "no disgust" at one end and "extreme disgust" on the other.

The ratings showed that the scenarios most associated with sensorial cues for disease transmission routes were more often rated as being disgusting. The researchers further identified six basic types of disgust, based on the survey responses. They are disgust related to: hygiene, animals, sex, atypical appearances, lesions, and food.

Women were more likely than men to rate scenarios tied to all of these types as being disgusting. Women were also more often rated sex-related scenarios, such as seeing blisters or red dots on a partner's genitals, as being disgusting.

The survey respondents had to consciously consider each scenario, but if they were to have experienced these imagined instances in real life, their reactions would have occurred at both subconscious and conscious levels, Curtis suspects.

"All behavior is, to some extent, genetically programmed," she explained. "Our genetic makeup makes us enjoy the taste of sweetness and reject bitterness — somewhat modulated in later life by experience — for example. So, the sight or smell of feces produces a reaction that may happen before we are even conscious of it."

Disgust and fear can be interconnected, since both are adaptive systems that have evolved to enable avoidance of potential dangers.

"The point of these emotions is that they drive behavior, hence there is a physical and behavioral reaction," Curtis said. "There is also often a bodily reaction: The stomach churns in the expectation that it might need to eject something; the skin ‘crawls’ in expectation that one might need to scratch off a flea, for example."

Fleas themselves likely have their own evolved hygiene standards. Prior research has found that numerous animals behave in ways that may reduce their contact with harmful agents. Lobsters and mice, for example, avoid infected others. Nematodes and kangaroos steer clear of waste material. Birds and ants exhibit multiple hygienic behaviors.

Curtis, however, thinks it is unlikely that many non-human animals experience disgust as people do. She suspects that most of their disgust-related responses happen at a subconscious level.

A problem for humans is that our hardwiring for disease transmission cues may not always match real threats. Shaking hands with a person missing a thumb and viewing an obese individual sunbathing present no danger. Nevertheless, some people link such moments to feelings of disgust.

"In our evolutionary past, someone obese might be swollen up because of a disease, like filariasis," Curtis said. Filariasis is a parasitic disease caused by an infection with certain roundworms.

Nowadays, few people are overweight because of infectious illnesses, yet the past association may somehow be part of our genetic programming. "Disheveled" people, in turn, may be physically healthy, yet could elicit negative reactions for similar reasons.

RELATED: Storytelling Promoted Egalitarian Values Before the Advent of Religion

Humans may also view some perfectly fit animals as disgusting, simply because of similar long-held associations. A worm, for instance, "is a cue, looking a lot like a parasitic worm," Curtis said.

These mismatches between feelings of disgust and actual threats grow ever more complex when moral disgust is considered. The researchers did not tackle that loaded topic but theorize that moral disgust may have arisen as an extension of "hygiene disgust." Both forms can be affected by cultural factors.

The disgust system in humans is clearly imperfect, but it is at least useful to scientists in all of its respects.

"We need to understand how people respond to disease threats so that we can design programs to help people behave in ways that keep them safe from disease," Curtis said.

"So, for example, in another prior study where we wired up wash basins in public toilets in the UK, we found that people responded to messages such as ‘don’t take the toilet with you’ by washing their hands with soap more often," she continued. "In India the government very successfully uses disgust-based messaging to get people to build toilets."

She said that the disgust system also provides a great model for investigating other emotions with particular behavioral functions. Curtis shared that she and de Barra are now conducting these additional studies using similar methods in order to "pick these emotions apart."

A key to that ongoing effort, she said, is to consider what frequent related challenges early humans encountered.

"Evolution actually selects brains based on the behavior that helped our ancestors to survive and reproduce,” she said. Emotions are for behavior."

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Seeker's Bad Science podcast tackles the director’s eye-popping space epic.

June 12, 2018, 2:22 pm
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In 2014, director Christopher Nolan (The Dark Knight, Inception) released the hugely hyped space epic Interstellar. Set on (and off) a near-future Earth, the film imagines a scenario in which ecological degradation has turned the planet into a dying dustbowl that can no longer sustain human life.

In an effort to find a new home world for our species, what's left of NASA dispatches a team of astronauts to pilot their ship through a wormhole just past Saturn. After that, things get weird. Nolan's film is certainly ambitious. At nearly three hours running time, it takes viewers on an epic celestial scouting mission featuring interdimensional time warps and planet-spanning tsunamis. But how does the film hold up in regard to the actual science of space travel?

Interstellar gets a thorough cosmic dissection in the latest episode of Bad Science, Seeker's podcast dedicated to exploring the real scientific principles behind popular speculative fiction films. In this week's show, host Ethan Edenburg is joined by comedian Dan Levy and Varoujan Gorjian, research astronomer with NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

While it's generally acknowledged that the film's plot holes are bigger that its wormholes, Interstellar nevertheless takes its hard science seriously. The film covers a lot of territory, and the filmmakers famously collaborated with top researchers and astrophysicists on script details. All of which makes for one of the most delightfully nerdy Bad Science episodes so far.

“We've talked about Pacific Rim, we've talked about Harry and the Hendersons, these movies that are pretty simple as far as science is concerned,” says Edenburg.  “And then there's this, which feels like a behemoth that we could spend nine episodes on.”

Focusing on the core astrophysics behind the film's premise, guest scientist Gorjian provides a breakdown of the cosmic phenomenon known as the black hole.

“A black hole occurs when you have a lot of mass and a very little volume,” he says. “There are many ways to make a black hole, but the most common cause in our part of the universe is exploding stars.”

As Gorjian explains, the escape velocity required to pull away from a black hole is so titanic that it exceeds the speed of light.

“No light escapes it, it's black,” he says “If we could wave a wand and compress our sun to a sufficiently small size, it would become a black hole.”

RELATED: Robots Versus Monsters: The Real Science Behind Pacific Rim

Understanding the basics on black holes can help viewers appreciate the film's central premise of a wormhole, Gorjian says. In science fiction — and certain arcane branches of theoretical physics — wormholes are cosmic portals that fling matter and energy across vast distance of time and space.

“Wormholes, that was something that was conjectured by Einstein, originally,” Gorjian says. “He and another scientist named Rosen came up with the idea and it's technically called an Einstein-Rosen bridge.”

Tune in for this week's episode for more details on escape velocity, time dilation, and gravity wells. The knowledge may come in handy soon, too. In the last scenes of Interstellar, Nolan follows his blockbuster instincts and sets us up for a potential sequel. Might we suggest: Interstellar 2: Interstellarer. That thing will write itself!

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Physical states appear to shape emotions and cognition. Here’s why — along with a few steps on how to avoid becoming hangry.

June 13, 2018, 1:47 pm
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Credit: Image Source via Getty Images

Have you ever been grumpy, only to realize that you’re hungry?

Many people feel more irritable, annoyed, or negative when hungry — an experience colloquially called being “hangry.” The idea that hunger affects our feelings and behaviors is widespread — from advertisements to memes and merchandise. But surprisingly little research investigates how feeling hungry transforms into feeling hangry.

Psychologists have traditionally thought of hunger and emotions as separate, with hunger and other physical states as basic drives with different physiological and neural underpinnings from emotions. But growing scientific evidence suggests that your physical states can shape your emotions and cognition in surprising ways.

Prior studies show that hunger itself can influence mood, likely because it activates many of the same bodily systems, like the autonomic nervous system and hormones, that are involved in emotion. For example, when you’re hungry, your body releases a host of hormones including cortisol and adrenaline, often associated with stress. The result is that hunger, especially at greater intensity, can make you feel more tense, unpleasant, and primed for action — due to how these hormones make you feel.

But is feeling hangry just these hunger-induced feelings or is there more to it? This question inspired the studies that psychologist Kristen Lindquist and I conducted at UNC-Chapel Hill. We wanted to know whether hunger-induced feelings can transform how people experience their emotions and the world around them.

Negative situations set the scene for hanger
An idea in psychology known as affect-as-information theory holds that your mood can temporarily shape how you see the world. In this way, when you’re hungry, you may view things in a more negative light than when you’re not hungry. But here’s the twist.

People are most likely to be guided by their feelings when they’re not paying attention to them. This suggests that people may become hangry when they aren’t actively focused on their internal feelings, but instead wrapped up in the world around them, such as that terrible driver or that customer’s rude comment.

To test whether hungry people are more likely to become hangry in negative situations when they aren’t focused on their feelings, we designed three different studies. In the first two, run online with US adults, we asked people — some hungry, some full — to look at negative, positive, and neutral emotional images. Then they saw an ambiguous figure: a Chinese character or pictograph they’d never seen before. We asked participants whether they thought the pictograph meant something pleasant or unpleasant.

Credit: Jennifer MacCormack, CC BY-ND

Hungry people who saw negative images thought the pictographs meant something more unpleasant. However, hungry people’s ratings after positive or neutral emotional pictures were no different than the not-hungry people.

This suggests that the hangry bias doesn’t occur when people experience positive or even neutral situations. Instead, hunger only becomes relevant when people confront negative stimuli or situations. But why would hunger only matter in negative situations?

Affect-as-information theory also suggests that people are more likely to use their feelings as information about the world around them when those feelings match the situation they’re in. Hunger likely only becomes relevant in negative situations because hunger itself produces unpleasant feelings — making it easier to mistake the cause of those feelings to be the negative things around you, rather than your hunger.

Tuning in to your feelings
In the final study, we recreated in the laboratory a frustrating situation to test how hunger and awareness — or lack thereof — might cause hanger.

We assigned two random groups of undergraduate students to fast for at least five hours or eat a full meal before coming to our lab. There we assigned them to write a story that was meant either to direct their attention to emotional information, or to not focus on emotions at all. Then everyone did a long, tedious computer task. At the end of the task, we secretly programmed the computer to “crash.” The researcher blamed the participant for the computer malfunction and told them they’d have to redo the task once it was fixed.

It turned out that hungry people who hadn’t focused on feelings beforehand exhibited more signs of being hangry. They reported feeling more stressed, hateful, and other negative emotions and rated the researcher as being more “judgmental,” compared to full individuals and the hungry people who did write about emotions earlier.

These findings suggest that feeling hangry occurs when your hunger-induced negativity gets blamed on the external world around you. You think that person who cut you off on the road is the one who made you angry — not the fact that you’re ravenous. This seems to be a fairly unconscious process: People don’t even realize they’re making these attributions.

Our data suggest that paying attention to feelings may short circuit the hangry bias — and even help reduce hanger once you notice it.

Credit: Snickers

Although these studies provide a valuable glimpse into the ways that physical states, like hunger, can temporarily shape our feelings and behaviors, they are only a first step. For example, our studies only address hunger effects in healthy populations where individuals eat regularly. It would be interesting to look at how feeling hangry could change with long-term dieting or conditions like diabetes or eating disorders.

These studies alongside other emerging science suggest that our bodies can deeply shape how we think, feel and act — whether we realize it or not. We’re generally aware that emotions like feeling stressed can influence our health, but the reverse direction is also true. Our bodies and physical health have the power to shape our mental lives, coloring who we are and the way we experience the world around us.

Warding off hanger
Here are three pro tips to help keep your hunger from going full-blown hangry.

First, it may seem obvious, but pay more attention to your hunger. People vary a lot in how sensitive they are to hunger and other bodily cues. Maybe you don’t notice you’re hungry until you’re already ravenous. Plan ahead — carry healthy snacks, eat a protein-filled breakfast or lunch to give you lasting energy — and set yourself reminders to eat regularly. These basic precautions help prevent you from becoming overly hungry in the first place.

But what if you’re already super hungry and can’t eat right away? Our findings suggest people are more likely to be biased by hunger in negative situations. Maybe you’re stuck in bad traffic or you have a stressful deadline. In these cases, try to make your environment more pleasant. Listen to an amusing podcast while you drive. Put on pleasant music while you work. Do something to inject positivity into your experience.

Most importantly, your awareness can make all the difference. Yes, maybe you’re hungry and starting to feel road rage, overwhelmed with your task deadline, or wounded by your partner’s words. But amid the heat of those feelings, if you can, step back for a moment and notice your growling stomach. This could help you recognize that hunger is part of why you feel particularly upset. This awareness then gives you the power to still be you, even when you’re hungry.

Originally published at The Conversation. 

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A dust storm on the Red Planet has blanketed the solar-powered rover in darkness.

June 14, 2018, 2:28 pm
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Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS

A rover operating on the surface Mars for 14 years is not talking to Earth due to a severe dust storm. NASA says the rover, called Opportunity, will likely pull through, though, as soon as the skies above it clear.

The agency spoke about Opportunity’s mission in a press conference on June 13, expressing both anxiety over losing contact with the rover and the expectation that it will ultimately survive. Officials said Opportunity is in a deep sleep in order to save energy, but it should wake up once there's enough power available to do so.

Still, it has been a tough few days for the rover team.

"This team has a very strong bond with the rover. We have a very tight emotional connection with it, and we're concerned about it, obviously," John Callas, the project manager for Opportunity, said during the press briefing.

"The analogy I would use right now — you have a loved one in a coma, in the hospital. The doctors are telling you you've just got to give it time, and she'll wake up. All the vital signs are good, but it's just waiting it out. But if it's your 97-year-old grandmother, you're going to be very concerned," Callas said.

"By no means we're out of the woods here," he added. "The storm is very threatening. We don't know how long it will last, or what the environment will be when it clears. So yeah, we are all concerned, and we can see it in the team members."

Credit: NASA/JPL

The first indications of the dust storm came on May 30, when the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter spotted increases in atmospheric opacity, or how much incoming light the dust storm is blocking. Opportunity could see changes in the atmosphere as well from its vantage point on the surface.

By June 4, the Opportunity team decided to cease science operations in order to save on power. By then, energy production had already dropped by half to 345 watt-hours. Last they heard from the rover, production fell to around 22 watt-hours.

As the dust storm thickened, the Opportunity team took measures to reduce its power needs, including less frequent status updates. The last time they heard from the rover was on June 10, when it was recording an atmospheric opacity of 10.8 — a record high for measurements on Mars. From the rover's perspective, the sky was completely dark, Callas said.

Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/TAMU

NASA hasn't heard from the rover since. They expect the rover has gone to sleep and is in a low-power mode. It will remain in that state until the skies clear and its solar panels receive enough energy to charge its batteries. Providing the rover is healthy enough, it "will autonomously wake up and communicate with us," Callas said.

Based on the warming temperatures the dust storm produced, Opportunity should survive since it will be above the minimal temperature it needs to survive. "We're concerned, but we're hopeful that the storm will clear and the rover will begin to communicate with us," Callas added.

"Now that they updated the press release again, I can say I sat on console this morning and it was really hard not to cry when Opportunity didn't contact us," said Keri Bean, a science planner whose Twitter profile says she is in training to operate Mars rovers.

A former Mars rover driver, Scott Maxwell, listened to the press conference and had high praise for one of the engineers. "It should be said that one reason the batteries are doing so well is [Opportunity's] lead power engineer, Jennifer Herman," he said. "She, more than any other single person, is why we survived the 2007 storm, and she, more than any other single person, is why we're in such good shape for this storm."

The Opportunity rover was only designed to last 90 days when it landed on Mars in January 2004, so engineers remain impressed with its stamina. The batteries are still at 85 percent of their original strength and all of the instruments are working. In its years of operations, the rover has had some small mechanical issues, as well as difficulties with its flash memory, which lets the rover store information even when it is turned off.

The rover is already a veteran of one large dust storm in 2007, but it survived and continued crawling — covering more than the distance of a marathon since its landing. It has collected evidence of water on Mars and explored two large craters, called Victoria and Endeavour. It even escaped a dust trap, avoiding a fate that helped kill its twin rover, Spirit, in 2010.

NASA's thermal models for Opportunity suggest the rover will get no colder than minus 36 degrees Celsius (minus 33 degrees Fahrenheit), which is well above its allowable flight temperature of minus 40°C (minus 40°F)

"We think we can ride this out for a while," Callas said.

Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS

Another uncertainty is if Opportunity can maintain its mission clock, which lets the rover know what time it is and helps establish a regular communication schedule with a spacecraft that sends information back to Earth. If power levels fall too low to keep the clock, Opportunity will lose track of time and instead make periodic attempts to communicate while the sun is up.

NASA's other rover on the surface of Mars, Curiosity, is a plutonium-powered rover that shouldn't be affected by the dust storm. The dust is not nearly as thick in its region of Mars near Gale Crater. The agency expects the storm will clear before the InSight lander arrives in November, but even if the skies are dusty, the lander's instruments will allow it to touch down.

RELATED: NASA’s Curiosity Rover Detects Methane and Organic Material on Mars

Dust storms are a fairly frequent event on Mars, but scientists struggle to forecast their severity. Sometimes these storms are more localized, and sometimes they blanket the entire planet — as the Mariner 9 mission witnessed when it arrived in 1971. Back then, only the peaks of some volcanoes were visible above the dust.

NASA said it will need better forecasts of dust storms before sending human crews to Mars, which the agency may do after returning to the moon in the 2020s.

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Archaeologists have long wondered how the hats atop Easter Island’s iconic statues were put in place.

June 15, 2018, 9:04 am
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Credit: Jesse Kraft/EyeEm via Getty Images

Easter hats are nice. Easter Island hats, however, are a pain.

Carved from sharp volcanic rock and more than 700 years old, the stone formations can weigh upwards of 13 tons. Archaeologists have long wondered how these stone hats, which sit atop the heads of the famous Easter Island statues, were put into place with 13th-century technology.

Wonder no more. Using old-school archaeological techniques and cutting-edge 3D computer modeling, researchers have finally solved the mystery of the Easter Island hats. The short answer: Ropes and ramps. But the long answer has some interesting specifics.

Rapa Nui, or Easter Island, rises from the waves about 2,000 miles from Chile. The island's famous statues have been studied by various teams of archaeologists and geologists since the 18th century. Previous studies determined that the statues are made of from one quarry on the island, while the hats come from a different quarry, seven miles away on the other side of the island.

We know, more or less, how the statues were carved and transported. But those hats have been a matter of contention for several decades. Archaeological evidence shows that the hat structures were carved independently from the statues and somehow dropped into place atop the famous stone sentinels.

Previous theories suggested that the statues and the hats were fixed together before they were lifted in place, but later studies of other abandoned statues concluded this was not the case. Complicating the mystery, several unattached hats left around the island are much larger than those placed on statues.

Credit: Sean Hixon/Penn State

Using 3D modeling and hands-on analysis of the site materials, the new study concludes that the hat-donning technique was a multi-stage process.

"The best explanation for the transport of the pukao [hats] from the quarry is by rolling the raw material to the location of the moai [statues]," Carl P. Lipo, professor of anthropology at Binghamton University, said in a statement. "Once at the moai, the pukao were rolled up large ramps to the top of a standing statue using a parbuckling technique."

Parbuckling is an ancient and efficient technique for rolling cylindrical objects. The center of a long rope is fixed to the top of a ramp and the two trailing ends are wrapped around the cylinder to be moved. Workers atop the ramp then pull on the ropes to slowly roll the cylinder up.

The Easter Island technique likely involved a couple of extra steps, according to the research team. Once on top of the ramp, which was built adjacent to the statue, the hat was slowly rotated and tipped into place using wooden levers. The hat was also most likely modified before, during, and after the tipping process.

Credit: Sean Hixon/Penn State

That's the proposed theory, anyway, as published in the latest issue of the Journal of Archaeological Science.

"Lots of people have come up with ideas, but we are the first to come up with an idea that uses archaeological evidence," said Sean W. Hixon, Penn State graduate student in anthropology, in supplementary materials issued with the new research. The study was supported in part by the National Science Foundation.

The mystery of the Easter Island hats has been solved. Keep this one in your pocket for a breezy anecdote at your next cocktail party.

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Boeing's personal aircraft competition announces 10 prototype flying machines.

June 18, 2018, 9:04 am
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Boeing and a cabal of major aircraft industry players announced June 14 the first-phase winners of the ambitious GoFly Prize. Designed to jump-start the development of personal flying vehicles, the GoFly program is an X-Prize style competition with millions of dollars in funding at stake.

Initially announced in September of 2017, the GoFly Prize is a two-year, international effort to promote the speedy development of flying machines that are safe, compact, and (relatively) quiet. The ultimate goal is to design a personal flying device that can carry a single person 20 miles without refueling or recharging. Prototypes must also be able to achieve vertical — or “near vertical” — takeoff and landing capabilities for use in city environments.

It's a tall order, but according to GoFly representatives, the competition has received hundreds of submissions for prototype vehicles since the program launch. The 10 Phase I winners announced today will each receive $20,000 in additional funding and move on to Phase II of the contest.

While details and tech specs on the winning entries are sparse — proprietary information, you see — GoFly has released a batch of images featuring the 10 winning concept designs. The Phase I competitors include university research teams and start-ups from five countries — Japan, Latvia, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, and the United States.

Each of the proposed designs was evaluated by a panel of judges to determine the most likely to evolve into an actual flying machine. One interesting development: While science fiction visions of individual flying devices have usually pivoted on the old jetpack idea, none of the Phase I designs goes in that direction.

Instead, the prototype illustrations suggest the future is all about single-rider electric rotor-driven vehicles, sometimes called passenger drones. Click around online and you can find several flying machines of this variety already off the ground in labs and private airfields.

Here are the GoFly Prize Phase I winners, with descriptions provided by the design teams:

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New research provides further evidence that the human brain often just hears what it expects to hear.

June 19, 2018, 2:03 pm
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Credit: Jonathan Kirn/Getty Images

If you participated in the recent Laurel vs.Yanny viral phenomenon, then you already know that you can't always trust your ears. What you hear, when a certain word or phrase is uttered, isn't necessarily what the next person hears — or what the original speaker said.

According to a new neuroscience study published this week, we finally have a culprit for all the confusion. As usual, you can blame your brain — or a very specific part of it, anyway. The next time you mess up a song lyric, blame your left superior temporal sulcus.

The research, published in the journal Jneurosci, concludes that misperception of speech often results from a difference between what is said and what we expect to hear.

That's because the brain tends to use past experience when deciphering an ambiguous chunk of spoken language. If what was said sounds pretty close to something you've heard before, the brain will default to the more familiar reading when it translates linguistic input coming up through the ear canal.

To use a famous example from the realm of misheard lyrics: Jimi Hendrix's line “Excuse me while I kiss the sky” in his song “Purple Haze” is often misheard as “Excuse me while I kiss this guy.” That's because the brain is more familiar with the concept of kissing a guy rather than the sky.

This isn't just informed conjecture, either. The research team has hard data from brain scanning machines to back up the theory. Along with colleagues from the University of Cambridge and University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf in Germany, lead researchers Helen Blank and Matt Davis deployed functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to monitor the brain activity of volunteer listeners.

RELATED: Cognitive Hearing Aid Can Isolate a Single Voice in a Crowded Room

The research team presented participants with pairs of written and degraded spoken words that were either identical, clearly different, or similar-sounding. Reading and hearing similar sounding words — like kick followed by pick — led to frequent misperception.

The fMRI imaging found that the misperception was associated with reduced activity in the left superior temporal sulcus, the region of the brain responsible for processing speech sounds. The results provide new evidence for the theory of predictive coding, which suggests that a good deal of speech perception involves comparing what we hear with what we expect.

RELATED: Exploding Head Syndrome: Hearing Crashes and Seeing Bursts of Light During Sleep

These new findings could be used to improve treatment for age-related hearing loss and to better understand auditory hallucinations in disorders such as schizophrenia.

And in the meanwhile, they serve as a helpful reminder to not believe everything that you hear.

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Seeker's Bad Science podcast probes the science behind the popular sci-fi franchise.

June 21, 2018, 3:12 pm
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In 1993, director Steven Spielberg released the original Jurassic Park, adapting author Michael Crichton's popular novel about genetically resurrected dinosaurs run amok on an island theme park. Rampaging predators! Kids in peril! Laura Dern! Good times.

Jurassic Park has since become one of the busiest science fiction franchises of the 21st century. The latest installment in the series, Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, is slated for release this Friday. The films proceed from an area of scientific speculation that has long intrigued geneticists: Is it possible to resurrect extinct species by cloning their DNA?

In the latest episode of Bad Science, Seeker's podcast on science at the movies, host Ethan Edenburg explores the topic with this week's guests, comedian Scott Rogowsky of HQ Trivia and Dr. Alyssa Bell, paleontologist with Natural History Museum in Los Angeles.

In a funny, nostalgic and wide-ranging conversation, the three panelists cover both the science and the fiction of Jurassic Park — everything from genetic sequencing to dubious plot holes to the history of paleontology.

As Bell explains, the modern science of paleontology didn't start ramping up until the mid-1800s. But it turns out that we humans were into dinosaurs before that. Historical research from around the globe suggests that older civilizations were aware of dinosaurs through the fossil record.

“There's archaeological evidence that older cultures recognized that these bones were something special,” Bell says.

In one recent study, archaeologists found evidence of a Native American dwelling where the entire abode was built up and around a fossil of a giant dinosaur footprint.

As to the core question in the Jurassic Park franchise — Will we ever be able to really resurrect dinosaurs? — Bell is reluctantly pessimistic.

“The problem with dinosaur DNA is how old it is,” Bell says. “We're talking a minimum of 66 million years.”

Like all organic material, DNA decays. And that's the biggest impediment to developing real Jurassic Park technologies, Bell says. For modern genetic techniques to even have a shot at dinosaur DNA, we would need to retrieve and reassemble viable genetic code.

“The best we've done in terms of de-extinction is with the gastric-brooding frog,” he remarks, referring to an Australian animal that went extinct in the 1980s. In 2013, scientists were able to successfully clone embryos from tissue samples in an experiment called the Lazarus Project. While technically a success, the experiment didn't bode well for future cloning projects.

“The embryos lasted a few days, then they died,” Bell notes. “That's our greatest success story.”

Fans of the original Jurassic Park will remember that the dinosaur blood was preserved over the millions of years by mosquitoes encased in amber. Is that a possibility?

Unfortunately, no.

“Even in amber, it still decays,” Bell says. “Sixty-six million years is an insane amount of time.”

Tune in for this week's episode for more details on fossil excavation, genetic sequencing and some curious conjecture on the matter of brachiosaurus eggs.

 

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A little-understood set of volcanic eruptions three billion years ago may have changed the face of Mars forever.

June 21, 2018, 4:58 pm
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Credit: High Resolution Stereo Camera/European Space Agency

A little-understood set of volcanic eruptions three billion years ago may have changed the face of Mars forever. The eruptions threw gas into the atmosphere that changed the climate, and probably sent enough water aloft to cover Mars in an ocean more than four inches (nine centimeters) thick.

Today we can still see the remnants in Medusae Fossae, a huge deposit of soft rock that is about 20 percent the size of the United States. Before it eroded away over the eons, says a new study published in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets, it could have been as large as 50 percent of the size of the U.S.

But determining what volcano — or volcanoes — caused all the disruption is poorly understood. The plain is near three sets of volcanoes, including the mighty Tharsis plain that hosts Olympus Mons, which is the largest volcano in the solar system. Could Mars erupt with such force again?

One way to find out is to dig deep into the Martian crust, which NASA is just about to do. The space agency's InSight mission is on the way to Mars and should land there on Nov. 26. It will be the first mission to probe several meters into the crust, seeking evidence of active volcanoes. The mission will also carry a seismometer that will lie against the ground, looking for marsquakes.

Credit: MazzyBor, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons

"If the seismometer on InSight sees signatures of volcanic tremors or any seismic activity, the planet is still active," said study lead author Lujendra Ojha, a planetary scientist at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore who also has worked on the InSight mission. "In terms of the Medusae Fossae formation, though, it was 3 billion years ago and we can't learn much. But if parts of other regions on Mars are volcanic, we can find out."

Ojha's team isn't the first to wonder how Medusae Fossae formed. The formation is so massive that radar observations from the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico saw it from the ground in the 1960s, Ojha says. NASA's Mariner spacecraft was the first to see it from orbit.

The zone is the largest known volcanic deposit formed from explosions in the solar system. Ojha's team narrowed down the origins by studying the density of the region's rock using gravity data, and discovered that it is only two-thirds as dense compared to the rest of the Martian crust. Gravity data and radar observations also showed that there is no ice in the region that could be decreasing its densities.

Credit: High Resolution Stereo Camera/European Space Agency

Here's how the gravity data works: as a spacecraft orbits Mars, its orbit gets tugged from time to time by dense concentrations of mass below it. (A prominent example would be that Martian volcanic region, Tharsis, but smaller mass concentrations also exist.) As the spacecraft's orbit moves, its transmission time to Earth is ever-slightly affected. Scientists can then estimate mass concentrations by mapping the Doppler shift, or a change in the frequency of the radio waves sending the spacecraft's information to Earth.

Ojha's team did consider other ideas for the deposit. Some suggested that perhaps one volcanic eruption did all the work, but Ojha said it would have to a "diabolical volcano" because the eruption force would be at a magnitude of 11; the highest ever recorded on Earth is only an 8 or a 9.

Others thought the volcanic ash, which hardened into rock over the eons, was actually a dust deposit, but density and volume calculations show there would have to be enough dust deposited there to cover the entire surface of Mars in a layer of dust 10 meters (32 feet) deep. "There also would need to be a cementing agent so the dust particles are stuck to each other; you'd need water [deposit] after water after water to hold all this dust together," Ojha said.

Ojha's team has another paper coming out about the volcanic deposit that is currently under embargo. He also points out that studies of Medusae Fossae provide more information about an important transition time in Martian history, when the planet was losing its water and was undergoing massive volcanic eruptions. So expect to see more work here in the near future.
 

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New research suggests that LSD and similar drugs can help improve neural plasticity and potentially treat depression and anxiety.

June 25, 2018, 11:21 am
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Credit: Larry Mulvehill/Getty Images

A new molecular medicine study from the University of California concludes that psychedelic drugs like LSD are — as you might have expected — mind-altering.

It may seem like the kind of study that would appear in the Journal of Obvious Science, but there's a twist. According to the new data, psychedelics can be literally mind-altering, triggering physical changes to neurons and changing the very shape of the brain.

The research, which was published in the journal Cell, reveals that psychedelics can cause measurable changes to brain cells on the molecular level, making neurons more elastic and flexible. As a result, these neurons are able to reach out and connect with other adjacent neurons.

Considered against other research on the brain and behavior, the new study supports the increasingly persuasive idea that psychedelic drugs could be used to help fight anxiety, addiction, depression, and post-traumatic stress disorder.

RELATED: 75 Years After First LSD Trip, Psychedelic Science Is Making a Comeback

For several decades now, doctors have proceeded from the theory that many mood disorders — especially depression — stem from imbalanced brain chemistry. But more recent studies have uncovered evidence that depression is associated with certain kinds of physical atrophy in the brain's complex circuitry.

David E. Olson, the lead author of the new study, said in a statement that these brain changes also appear in cases of anxiety, addiction, and post-traumatic stress disorder.

“One of the hallmarks of depression is that the neurites in the prefrontal cortex — a key brain region that regulates emotion, mood, and anxiety — those neurites tend to shrivel up,” he said.

The new research shows that psychedelics have the ability to reverse this atrophy, opening new pathways and branching off new synapses. Psychedelics were also shown to increase both the density of dendritic spines and the density of synapses. Improved synaptic communication like this have been proven clinically effective in treating mood disorders.

RELATED: LSD Helps Explain How Our Brains Assign Meaning to Experience

So far, the UC-Davis team has only tested these effects of psychedelics on rats and flies. But previous experiments in both vertebrates and invertebrates show that psychedelics tend to produce similar effects across species. As such, research into psychedelic-induced brain changes could help future research identify future depression treatments.

The researchers said that they don't expect pure psychedelics to become a prescription option for depression or anxiety.

"But a compound inspired by psychedelics very well could,” Olsen noted.

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Experiments aboard the International Space Station will test a new method for dealing with space junk.

June 26, 2018, 1:07 pm
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Credit: Airbus

An experiment aboard the International Space Station could help engineers figure out how to one day take out the accumulating amount of trash in orbit.

Engineers will perform exercises later this year in which they will use cameras and laser guidance to capture objects with a harpoon and net attached to a spacecraft, called RemoveDEBRIS.

"Our experiments should start in September or October and they might last three or four months," principal investigator Guglielmo Aglietti told Seeker. Aglietti is director of the Surrey Space Center at the University of Surrey in the United Kingdom. The center is managing the mission and also constructed the microsatellites that RemoveDEBRIS will collect during the experiments.

Aglietti said the timing of the experiments is highly dependent on sufficient illumination from the sun.

Humans have been putting objects in orbit since 1957. That’s resulted in an estimated 500,000 pieces of debris circling Earth, including objects as large as dead satellites to ones as small as screws.

Because orbiting debris travels at high speed, it often poses a serious threat to operations in space. In 2009, the defunct Russian satellite Cosmos-2251 smashed into the operational Iridium 33 satellite. And engineers periodically adjust the orbit of the International Space Station in order to dodge space debris.

Credit: Airbus

Scientists have proposed several ideas for dealing with inoperative satellites, including refueling them, deploying garbage collecting robots, or even enveloping space junk with ultrathin sheets of solar-powered material that will burn up on reentry into Earth's atmosphere.

"We were searching for a test that was cost-effective," Aglietti said. "For example, you can fly to capture space debris using a robot arm. It's a good solution, but it is a more complex solution and more expensive."

A consortium of European companies are involved in the $17.5 million project, including Airbus, which developed the harpoon and net technology, and Surrey Satellite Technology Ltd., which worked on the avionics. Half of the funding for the experiments was provided by private-sector companies, with the European Commission covering the rest.

RELATED: How to Mitigate the Threat Space Junk on Mars Poses to Future Missions

Aglietti said the mission is intended as a proof of concept. The hope is that the industrial partners can then carry the concept forward for their own operational missions that would remove real-life space debris. There's no expected launch date for future missions.

RemoveDEBRIS was delivered to the ISS aboard the SpaceX CRS-14 launch on April 2.
 

Airbus
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Seeker's Bad Science podcast explores the science behind the 2009 reboot of the venerable sci-fi series.

June 26, 2018, 2:54 pm
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It's hard to believe that nearly a decade has passed since director J.J. Abrams delivered his hugely anticipated reboot of the Star Trek movie series. The 2009 film, titled simply Star Trek, was a massive commercial success and it introduced a new generation to the crew of the Starship Enterprise.

But how does the real science behind the movie hold up?

Pretty good, actually.

In the latest episode of Bad Science, Seeker's podcast on science versus fiction at the movies, host Ethan Edenburg goes where no one has gone before with an hour-long special on the 2009 reboot and the Star Trek universe in general.

Also pitching in for this week's show: Seeker's own science savant Trace Dominguez and Tammy Ma, experimental physicist with the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

The Star Trek franchise is particularly well-respected in the scientific community for getting its facts straight relative to the demands of Hollywood entertainment and speculative fiction. Apart from the hard physics of space travel and energy weapons, creator Gene Roddenberry's enduring vision regularly explores the topics of ethics in science, sociology, and anthropology.

Ma works with the most powerful lasers on the planet at her lab, located at Livermore's National Ignition Facility. The lasers operate at temperatures hotter than the sun’s core. Happily for everyone involved, these temperature flashes are extremely tiny and extremely brief. But still.

“On a daily basis we create the hottest place in the solar system,” Ma says. “We make miniature stars in the lab.”
In fact, several scenes from the film’s sequel Into Darkness were filmed at the National Ignition Facility.

“Our target chamber, where we do all our experiments, that was actually the warp core for the Starship Enterprise,” Ma says.

Dominquez and Ma also dig into some of the real-life challenges behind the core concept of the Star Trek franchise — traveling through space, exploring strange new worlds and seeking out new life and new civilizations. Discussion ranges from the possibility of fusion energy engines to the practical challenges of putting the International Space Station into orbit.

For hardcore fans of the 2009 film, the team also digs deep into script’s plot points — and plot holes. For instance, why does the villain Captain Nero need to drill down into the center of a planet to drop his artificial black hole bombs? And why does the future Earth of the Star Trek series lack any perimeter planetary defenses?

Tune into this week's episode for speculation on these enduring mysteries, plus more details on inertial fusion energy, particle physics, and Vulcan mind melds.

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In an effort to deal with its own waste management problems, China has limited imports of plastic and paper waste — and that’s having ripple effects across the globe.

June 27, 2018, 1:01 pm
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Credit: AAron Ontiveroz/The Denver Post via Getty Images

China’s decision to stop taking in much of the world’s scrap paper and plastics has left those wastes piling up worldwide, with ripple effects that can reach as far as your curbside bins.

From the late 1980s until 2016, China took in nearly half of the world’s plastic waste, with the European Union and the United States the leading exporters. But as its own population became more prosperous, the Chinese began to struggle with their own waste and pollution issues.

So in late 2017, Beijing decided it had had it up to here with your scrap and wasn’t going to take it anymore. Since January, that “National Sword” policy has banned imports of most commercial plastic scrap, such as bottles and packaging. And unless something changes, the world is likely to have big piles of polymer waste piling up for decades to come, according to a new study of the ban’s impact.

“We’re having a big domino effect, a big cascading effect globally from this,” said Amy Brooks, the study’s lead author. “There have been reports all over of plastic waste accumulating within the borders of countries that have been largely relying on exporting their waste to China.”

It’s bad enough that less than 10 percent of the world’s plastics have been recycled, as a 2017 study found. But using trade data from the United Nations, Brooks and her colleagues at the University of Georgia project that other countries will have to find someplace else for up to 111 million metric tons of plastic by 2030 — or make some changes in what we do with the stuff.

“The question is, what are we going to do with all that plastic now?” said Brooks, a Ph.D. candidate in engineering. “It’s definitely putting more pressure on landfills and recycling facilities to figure that out.”

RELATED: Struggling to Process Its Own Waste, China Bans Imports of Recyclables

Brooks said plastic imports increased China’s waste by about 10 to 13 percent. About 90 percent of the imports were single-use items like plastic bottles or food containers.

The plastic ban was accompanied by strict limits on paper, with the country refusing to accept shipments of newsprint or cardboard with more than 5 kilograms (11 pounds) per ton of other wastes mixed in. US recyclers say that’s an all-but-impossible standard to meet. Prices for the material have plunged and processing costs have gone up, according to the industry — and as a result, some of the paper and plastic Americans are trying to recycle are ending up in landfills.

Plastic in particular has ben difficult to manage, Marjorie Griek, executive director of the National Recycling Coalition, told Seeker.

“We here in this country kind of lost the capability to handle those materials because China was such a voracious consumer,” said Griek, whose Colorado-based organization represents small recyclers, local governments, and nonprofits. “Everyone said, ‘They’ll take it, they’ll pay us a good price, it doesn’t cost us much to get it there, and they’re really happy with it.’ So it’s a bit of a change for everyone in the industry to have to rethink this.”

Recyclers are seeking new overseas markets for the scrap they process, “but they’re certainly not going to consume what China consumes.”

That’s starting to hit the budgets of cities and counties that promote recycling as well. In El Paso, Texas, the company that handles the city’s recycling has asked the city council for a more than 50 percent increase in fees to cover their costs, said Kurt Fenstermacher, deputy director of the city’s Environmental Services Department.

The council has put off action on the request, which would raise the fees paid from about $75 to $115 a ton, Fenstermacher told Seeker. Instead, it’s trying to work with the recycler to help reduce its costs.

In a pilot program in several neighborhoods, city inspectors walk the streets ahead of the recycling trucks to inspect the blue recycling bins for non-recyclable items like plastic bags or trash, which can jam up equipment or force the processor to spit out otherwise-recyclable material. When they find them, they attach an “Oops tag” to the bin to remind the household what’s acceptable and what’s not.

“We see a lot of plastic bags and bagged material in the blue bins,” Fenstermacher said. “It’s down time for them, and every minute of production is important for them,” “We’re doing our part to try to keep that material flowing through their system as cleanly as we can.”

RELATED: A New Way of Making Plastic Could Help Boost Recycling

In Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, west of Philadelphia, between 20 and 40 percent of what ends up in curbside bins is non-recyclable trash, said Kathryn Sandoe, a spokeswoman for the Lancaster County Solid Waste Management Authority. That means the local recycling processor has found about a third of the material it takes in is no longer marketable.

“The financial impact at the household level will only be a few bucks a year,” Sandoe said. But for companies that collect and process recyclables, “This is a financial crisis for them. They’re losing a significant amount of money.”

Meanwhile, Griek said, materials piling up can become homes to critters like rats or mosquitoes, which carry disease. And plastic piled outside begins to degrade in the sun’s ultraviolet light, making it less valuable.

The Chinese ban has spurred a few companies to explore building new plastic recycling plants or expanding existing ones in the United States, she said. A few recyclers are rethinking the common “single-stream” practice of collecting all materials together, requiring households to separate plastic and paper from other materials like aluminum before putting them out to the curb. Others are hiring more people to sort collections.

Communities that have “dual-stream” programs where paper and other recyclables are separated end up with in cleaner, more valuable paper to recycle. But most infrastructure, starting with the trucks that collect the bins, is designed for single-stream programs, Sandoe said.

RELATED: Giant Larvaceans Sweep Up and Poop Out Plastic Waste in the Oceans

Brooks said much of the expected tonnage is likely to end up in developing countries that don’t have the recycling infrastructure that China built, raising the odds that it will end up in landfills there.

“I think this is kind of a wake-up call that we need domestic capabilities to manage our waste, and there probably needs to be an economic policy that drives that,” she said. Changing the types of plastics produced, finding new materials or promoting more multi-use items may help head off that wave of debris.

“It makes a difference when millions of people decide to use a recyclable water bottle or a reusable bag,” she said. “I think a combination of technology, a combination of policy and consumer behavior all work toward the common goal of reducing plastic in the environment.”  

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Citing social stigmatization around opioid use, patients are turning to electronic nerve stimulation, meditation, and medical marijuana.

June 27, 2018, 1:49 pm
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Credit: Liz O. Baylen/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images

A national survey released June 21 suggests that the opioid crisis is triggering a dilemma for those who live with chronic pain.
 
The dangers of opioid use — and the growing stigma around the medication — has prompted legitimate patients to look for other kinds of pain therapy, according to the study. But alternatives can be hard to find because the medical community has been relying on opioids for so long.
 
The survey suggests a kind of vicious catch-22 for those who need pain therapy, even if they don't have any abuse or addiction problems with opioids.
 
Conducted by the independent market research firm Vanson Bourne, the survey was commissioned by NeuroMetrix, a healthcare company that makes wearable devices to treat chronic pain, sleep disorders, and diabetes. The company also makes the digital device Quell, an over-the-counter wearable device that uses electric stimulation for treating chronic pain.
 
Clearly, NeuroMetrix has a stake in investigating market responses to alternative pain therapies. But the company has fully disclosed the survey's sponsorship and methodology — and the numbers reveal some interesting trends.
 
According to the survey, 84 percent of respondents — all of whom identified as chronic pain sufferers — believe that there is now a significant stigma around opioid use. Fifty percent said they felt personally stigmatized, and fifty percent also said they had lied in the past about their opioid use because of attitudes toward the drug. The study surveyed 1,500 adults in the United States between the ages 25 and 70.
 
RELATED: Opioid Overdoses in the US Rose 30 Percent in a Year
 
The respondents report that increasingly negative attitudes toward opioids have impacted their own treatment programs. Thirty-four percent of those surveyed said they have had to stop taking opioids because their doctors would no longer prescribe them.
 
“I think that the most significant finding is that the stigma around opioids and recent restrictions is affecting the care that chronic pain sufferers receive, forcing them to take care into their own hands, with 90 percent actively seeking new treatments,” said Frank McGillin of NeuroMetrix.
 
Of those alternative solutions, the survey identified the ten most common non-opioid treatment methods. Physical therapy was the most common, with 65 percent of respondents having undergone PT regimens. Forty-four percent said they have tried transcutaneous electrical nerve stimulation — like the Quell device — which send electrical currents across the surface of the skin to activate the underlying sensory nerves.
 
Thirty-two percent of respondents said they have tried herbal remedies or natural supplements, and 16 percent said they have used medical marijuana.
 
Other treatment methods include yoga/pilates/meditation (28 percent), acupuncture (21 percent), and cognitive behavioral therapy (16 percent).
 
McGillin said that he hopes the survey will help spur discussion about including the chronic pain patient in the national conversation taking place around the opioid crisis.
 
“There are 100 million Americans who have chronic pain and a significant number are being impacted by the opioid crisis, directly or indirectly,” he said. “We need to make sure that they have options to manage their pain so they can maintain or improve the quality of their lives.”

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It was a day loaded with emotions.

June 28, 2018, 4:14 am
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I was finally going to start the swim after so many years dreaming about it and 7 years of tumultuous preparations, I couldn’t be more excited about it. But it was also difficult to know that I was leaving my friends and family behind.
During the drive to the beach, my children and my wife didn’t say much, it was an intense quiet moment, no word could have made the situation less painful. Once we got to the beach it wasn’t our moment anymore, the press was present asking me questions and the local public and officials came to wish me a safe swim. I hugged my wife one last time, no words were exchanged, I asked Ana and Max, my children, to wait until I was ready in the water to join me and swim the first 50 meters with me. The water was cold, I wore a wetsuit but they did not. Max was a little hesitant at the beginning then he dove and lead Ana and me toward the open ocean. I had to grab his leg twice to put him in the right direction as he was swimming straight toward some big rocks. Once we were out I stopped them and the three of us hugged one last time. They turned around and I waited for them to reach the beach before swimming off.
That was it, I was on my own with my thoughts and swimming on top of my streamline that leads me in the right direction.
Within the first 30 minutes, I was back into my routine, keeping a steady pace, stretching my shoulders to glide as much as possible and focusing on my streamline. Already in the first hour, I was reliving the moment I spent on the beach few minutes before, everything happened so fast I wanted to remember and relive some moments that I didn’t have the time to enjoy.

In the second hour, the water temperature started to drop and it became uncomfortable as the day progressed.
In the fifth hour, my support RHIB got a call from Seeker to let us know that they had spotted a 5 foot long shark. They were sending out our medic Maks on a kayak to bring us our shark protection device. Before Maks got to us I saw a 3 foot long shark swimming right below me in the opposite direction. I stopped to look around but couldn’t see anything, I had limited visibility. Paul and Ty who were on the RHIB asked if I wanted to get out of the water but I decided it was safe to continue swimming so I just did.
Few moments later Maks joined us with the kayak and asked me few questions to access my state, he took my pulse and felt my hands and decide that I was getting cold and asked me to stop, he said “Ben it was a good day, you swam for 6 hours, it is good start, let’s not over do it”.
So I jumped in the RHIB and got back to Seeker to start my first night onboard. My stomach was a little upset and I could not hold much food at the beginning but it got better through out the night and wake up few times for a night snake.

Tomorrow will be another day.

Ben

Start position: 35°43.220N
Stop position: 140°52.208E
Start time: 09:00am local / 00:00 UTC
Stop time: 03:00pm local / 06:04 UTC
Duration: 06h04
Miles covered: approx 9.6nm

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The telescope will allow astronomers to study some of the earliest stars and galaxies in the universe, as well as hunt for alien life.

June 28, 2018, 12:48 pm
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Credit: Chris Gunn/NASA

NASA has delayed the launch of its huge, highly anticipated James Webb Space Telescope by another 10 months.

The liftoff of Webb, the successor to the agency's iconic Hubble Space Telescope, has been pushed back from May 2020 to March 2021, NASA officials announced June 27. The project's development cost has risen from $8 billion to $8.8 billion, and its total lifecycle price tag now stands at $9.66 billion, they added.

The rescheduling is the latest in a series of delays for Webb, which NASA had originally hoped to get off the ground way back in 2007. [Photo Tour: Building NASA's James Webb Space Telescope]

"We have to get this right here on the ground before we go to space," Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator of NASA's Science Mission Directorate, said during a news conference today. "And I just want to re-emphasize: Webb is worth the wait."

Rocky road for a complex observatory
Webb is a multipurpose observatory that will allow astronomers to study some of the first stars and galaxies in the universe, hunt for possible signs of life in the atmospheres of nearby alien planets, and do a variety of other high-profile work. Its primary mirror is 21.3 feet (6.5 meters) wide, compared to 7.8 feet (2.4 m) for that of Hubble.

"Webb is vital to the next generation of research beyond NASA's Hubble Space Telescope," NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine said in a statement. "It's going to do amazing things — things we've never been able to do before — as we peer into other galaxies and see light from the very dawn of time."

Credit: Northrop Grumman

Webb is optimized to view the heavens in infrared light, and its instruments must therefore be kept quite cool. So the telescope will sport a giant sunshield the size of a tennis court, which will unfold after Webb reaches its final destination, a gravitationally stable spot about 930,000 miles (1.5 million kilometers) from Earth.

The road to that destination has been quite bumpy to date. Webb is a very complex observatory that has proved difficult for primary contractor Northrop Grumman to build and test, as the repeated delays attest.

Until relatively recently, NASA had been targeting an October 2018 launch. In September of last year, however, NASA announced that spacecraft-integration issues had delayed the launch until spring 2019. Then, this past March, the agency pushed the scheduled liftoff date back again, to May 2020. More time was needed to test Webb's intricate systems and to deal with setbacks, such as small tears in the sunshield, NASA officials said at the time.

The agency also set up an independent review board (IRB) in March to monitor the observatory's progress and develop recommendations. The IRB submitted its report to NASA on May 31, and the agency wrapped up its response to that report June 26. (You can read both the report and NASA's response here.)

Going forward
The IRB traced the 29-month delay (from a targeted launch date of October 2018 to March 2021) to five factors: human error, "embedded problems," excessive optimism, systems complexity, and a lack of experience in key areas, such as sunshade development.

IRB Chairman Tom Young laid out some of the most significant human errors during today's news conference. Technicians used the wrong solvent to clean propulsion valves, employed improper wiring that caused excessive voltage to be applied to transducers, and improperly installed sunshield-cover fasteners ahead of a key test, he said.

"All simple fixes that were not implemented resulted in approximately a 1.5-year schedule delay, at a cost of about $600 million," said Young, the former director of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, and the former president and chief operating officer of aerospace company Martin Marietta, which merged with Lockheed Corporation in 1995, forming Lockheed Martin.

The IRB report was key in NASA's latest plan for Webb, agency officials said. Indeed, the review panel made 32 separate recommendations for the observatory's development going forward, 30 of which NASA fully agrees with, Zurbuchen said. The agency is still considering the other two, he added.

Crucially, the IRB did not recommend pulling the plug on the telescope.

"With all the factors that I've discussed considered, the IRB believes that JWST should continue, because of the compelling science, and because of JWST's national importance," Young said.  

The bump in the mission's development cost from $8 billion to $8.8 billion may complicate that vision, however. The former number was a cap imposed by Congress, meaning that Webb needs another signoff from Capitol Hill to proceed.

"We submit our final 'breach report' to Congress this week," NASA Associate Administrator Steve Jurczyk said during today's news conference. "And then, it is true that Congress will have to reauthorize Webb through this next cycle of appropriations."

Originally published on Space.com.

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Cannabidiol, a marijuana derivative, has proven effective in treating epilepsy.

June 28, 2018, 1:58 pm
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Credit: Stefan Wermuth/Bloomberg via Getty Images

The Food and Drug Administration on June 25 approved for the first time a drug made from cannabidiol (CBD), a molecule derived from the cannabis plant. The drug, Epidiolex, was approved for the treatment of two types of epilepsy, Dravet syndrome and Lennox-Gastaut syndrome, that have been resistant to treatment.

Well-designed clinical trials have shown that the Epidiolex product of CBD can be helpful in reducing or eliminating seizures in these epilepsy syndromes.

While medical marijuana supporters may cite the FDA approval of Epidiolex as evidence of the benefits of marijuana, it is not an endorsement of any CBD or cannabis product. This product differs from most other CBD products available in cannabis dispensaries in that it is a highly concentrated and purified pharmaceutical grade medicine. It is the only CBD product to receive FDA approval, at this time. Other pharmaceutical grade products may be developed and approved in the future. Additionally, this product could be approved by the FDA for other types of epilepsy or diseases.

The next step in the process of making this CBD product available is rescheduling by the Drug Enforcement Agency. Currently, CBD is a Schedule I drug, meaning that it has abuse potential and no proven medical use. As a Schedule I drug, CBD use is greatly restricted and controlled. Now that the FDA has approved a medical use, the DEA has 90 days to reschedule the drug, making it available for medical uses.

It is unclear at this time what the DEA will determine as an appropriate schedule for CBD. Once the DEA has rescheduled CBD, the Epidiolex product will be available for physicians to prescribe. While the current FDA approval of this CBD product is for two specific epilepsy syndromes, the FDA does not restrict its use only to epilepsy. Physicians will be able to legally prescribe this product for any use when they believe there is sufficient scientific evidence.

As a professor of pharmacy with a special interest in epilepsy, I find it important that CBD may be a new option for the treatment of epilepsy. This new use has led me to carefully study published literature on CBD and discuss it as an option with patients who have epilepsy. Additionally, I have been involved with the American Epilepsy Society’s ongoing review of CBD as a possible treatment for epilepsy. From this perspective, I believe that CBD may offer benefits for patients with some types of epilepsy and possibly other disorders.

No high, but healing?
The cannabis plant produces hundreds of different compounds, many of which have differing effects in the body. Tetrahydrocannabinol, or THC, is the substance that is most known for its psychoactive effects, or the “high” associated with marijuana.

However, there are many other substances from the cannabis plant that also produce effects in the body. Many of these differ from THC in that they are not psychoactive – and they do not produce a “high.” Cannabidiol, or CBD, is one of those substances.

Credit: Getty Images

Cannabidiol is a complex molecule that is produced by the cannabis plant. Cannabis has been proposed for centuries as a medicinal plant. Only recently has CBD been studied scientifically for various disorders.

Compared to THC, CBD works at different receptors in the brain and other parts of the body. In this way, CBD is very different from THC and may offer new mechanisms of treatment. For this reason, CBD has received a great amount of attention as a possible treatment for many different disorders.

CBD has been proposed as a cure or treatment for many disorders and diseases, including epilepsy, chronic pain, anxiety, multiple sclerosis, amyotropic lateral sclerosis (ALS or Lou Gehrig’s disease) and insomnia. Some of these uses are based on science, but others are proposed by advocates of CBD and medical marijuana. Several anecdotal reports, case reports, case series and small studies have reported on CBD for many of these disorders. Information from these reports is conflicting. Case reports, case series and small studies are considered insufficient evidence to prove or disprove the safety and efficacy of a drug or treatment. This is because these studies are usually unable to distinguish between the effect of a drug and a placebo effect, the patient thinking the drug is working when it really is not providing benefit.

However, there are two well-designed, large studies that indicate CBD is effective in the two different epilepsy syndromes. In these studies, about 40 percent of patients taking CBD had a significant reduction in specific types of seizures.

RELATED: Cannabis-Based Medicine Dramatically Reduces Epileptic Seizures

Epilepsy is the only disorder where there is solid scientific evidence demonstrating that CBD is safe and effective. This does not mean that CBD will not work for other disorders, but epilepsy is the only one where we have clear, well-documented evidence that CBD helps.

Results from these studies show that CBD does have side effects. The most common ones are drowsiness, nausea, intestinal cramping, bloating and diarrhea. More serious side effects can occur. In one of the studies in epilepsy, about 10 percent of patients taking CBD had an increase in laboratory tests of liver function. These tests commonly indicate damage to the liver. About 2-3 percent of patients taking CBD had to discontinue it due to large increases in certain liver enzymes in laboratory tests, showing possible liver damage.

We are also learning about drug interactions that occur with CBD. In these studies, CBD slowed the metabolism of several drugs that are commonly given to individuals with epilepsy. The interactions between CBD and other drugs patients were taking caused side effects. It is unclear if these side effects were due to CBD, the other drugs, or a combination. Doses of the other drugs were reduced, due to the interactions.

The mechanism for these interactions indicate that there are likely several other interactions between CBD and other common medications. Cannabidiol needs to be used cautiously in combination with other medications.

Issues beyond effectiveness
There are several other factors to consider in regards to CBD. Cannabidiol does not dissolve well in water. For this reason, oral products of CBD are made with an oil, often some type of vegetable oil. It is important that the right oil is used.

Also, less than 20 percent of an oral dose of CBD is absorbed. This makes it difficult to produce a CBD product where CBD is reliably and consistently absorbed.

RELATED: Cannabis Compound May Restore Learning and Memory in People With Schizophrenia

An FDA study of unregulated CBD products available on the market shows these products are frequently contaminated with things like pesticides, herbicides, fungus or bacteria. Additionally, the FDA found that over 50 percent of CBD products may not contain the amount of CBD on the label. This is especially true in states where CBD products are not regulated by the state. In 17 states where there is regulation, there is much better control on product quality and purity.

Finally, there are two pharmaceutical-grade CBD products that have been studied for production by a pharmaceutical company. One is Epidiolex, and the other is still being studied.

So far, the evidence is that CBD is safe and effective for specific epilepsy syndromes. There is insufficient scientific evidence to indicate whether it is effective or ineffective for other disorders. Information from well-designed studies do indicate that CBD causes important side effects and drug interactions that must be considered. Individuals who wish to use CBD should be managed and monitored by health care professionals familiar with its use.

This article originally appeared at The Conversation.

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The titanium microbots could one day provide a minimally invasive method for delivering therapies in humans.

June 29, 2018, 1:30 pm
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Credit: Li et al., Sci. Robot. 3, eaat8829 (2018)

Medical researchers in Hong Kong this week unveiled a drug delivery system in which microscopic robots crawl through arteries and veins carrying medicines to specific tissues in the body.

The tiny bots are inserted into the bloodstream with a syringe and directed by remote control using external magnetic fields. While similar microbot systems have been developed elsewhere, the new procedure is the first to deliver cells to a specific site and autonomously release their payload in living animals, according to a research team at City University of Hong Kong.

Although still in development, researchers said the technique could eventually be used in clinical applications for remote drug delivery or cell therapy in humans. The research was published June 27 in the journal Science Robotics.

Lead researcher Yunyang Li and colleagues first began developing the microbots by using computer models to see which shapes move most efficiently when navigating veins and arteries. They discovered that porous, burr-shaped bots did the best job at generating traction against blood vessel walls and dealing with the viscosity of different blood types.

The microbots were then designed and molded using 3D printing and coated with nickel to provide magnetism. An outer coating of titanium was also applied to improve biocompatibility.

In a series of tests, the microbots were injected into zebrafish embryos and guided to the desired target location using external electromagnetic coils. The bots were able to deliver their payload of therapeutic cells without harming the embryos.

In a subsequent set of tests, the researchers injected microbots carrying tagged fluorescent cells into mice. The target site later glowed with fluorescence, indicating that the cells were delivered to the proper location — and stayed where they were supposed to.

Credit: Li et al., Sci. Robot. 3, eaat8829 (2018)

Additional testing revealed that the system can be used to deliver embryonic stem cells and connective tissue cells.

The results suggest the technique could eventually be used to develop minimally invasive delivery methods for existing therapies in humans.

The team plans, according to press materials released in conjunction with their research results, to further refine the microbot system for eventual clinical applications. They hope to make future robots from fully biodegradable materials and to develop better imaging technology for tracking the lil' bots as they crawl through our plumbing.

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Our solar system’s first interstellar visitor was thought to be an asteroid, but is actually an ice and dust spewing comet.

July 2, 2018, 12:58 pm
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Credit: European Space Agency

The first known interstellar visitor just got a little weirder. New observations with the Hubble Space Telescope reveal that 'Oumuamua is actually an ice and dust spewing comet, instead of a rocky asteroid.

Astronomers made the discovery while trying to track the path of 'Oumuamua, including learning from what direction it came before whizzing through our solar system in October 2017. The object flew by Earth at a trajectory that is far above the flat plane of our solar system, where planets, moons, and other worlds tend to circle our sun. Its weird path, coupled with its high speed, led astronomers to conclude 'Oumuamua (pronounced oh-MOO-ah-MOO-ah) must be a visitor from another solar system.

The team used Hubble because it is above Earth's atmosphere, allowing it to observe faint objects, study co-author Karen Meech, a planetary astronomer at the Institute for Astronomy at the University of Hawaii, explained in an e-mail to Seeker.

"To our surprise, starting in November, our measurements started to show that 'Oumuamua was accelerating — in other words, its path was not controlled just by the gravity of the sun and planets. We explored many reasons for this and rejected all except one … that gas coming from 'Oumuamua was giving it an additional push."

This means that 'Oumuamua behaves more like a comet. The solar system has many types of small worlds in it, including asteroids and comets. Asteroids are generally either space rocks or loose rubble piles, while comets have ice in the interior and near their surface. When comets near the sun and sunlight makes the ice warmer, the ice changes into a gas and pushes against the comet.

Meech explained that this push can alter the comet's path through space. Warmer comets also emit a lot of gas and dust in a cloud that is called a coma. But when astronomers tried to find evidence of a coma around 'Oumuamua, their searches turned up empty. They theorize it is because 'Oumuamua is smaller, making the gas hard to detect, or that it lost most of its smaller-sized dust grains during its voyage. What remains are bigger dust grains, that are harder to push off the surface.

But the difficulty in making the observations, she explained, is 'Oumuamua is the first known interstellar visitor. There are no other objects like 'Oumuamua that scientists can compare it to — at least until we find another interstellar visitor.

The 'Oumuamua findings were published in the journal Nature. Marco Micheli of the European Space Agency lead the study.

Credit: European Space Agency

There are some things that we can say about 'Oumuamua compared to other comets, Meech said. At only 800 meters long (roughly half a mile), 'Oumuamua is quite small compared to a typical 2 kilometer (1.2 mile) or larger comet. 'Oumuamua is also cigar-shaped. That elongation is extreme, at a length to width ratio of about 10 to 1. In our own solar system, Meech explained, there are only a few objects that are more elongated than 5 to 1.

Another way in which ‘Oumuamua is comparable to a comet, Meech explained, is it reflects red light more efficiently than blue, just like organic-rich comets. Organic molecules are the building blocks of life, and include elements such as carbon. She cautioned, however, that other minerals can preferentially reflect red light. But given 'Oumuamua's comet-like behavior, scientists have a strong argument that its surface contains organics.

‘Oumuamua is quite far away now from our telescopes, making it difficult to do much more analysis. So astronomers continue to scan the skies in the hope of finding another interstellar visitor. Meech said astronomers are interested in learning more about the chemistry of ‘Oumuamua and similar objects, to learn what ingredients of life and planet-building are present in different solar systems.

RELATED: Interstellar Visitor's Icy Core May Be Coated by Organic Crust From Cosmic Rays

She praised the Panoramic Survey Telescope and Rapid Response System Telescope in Hawaii for finally being able to spot interstellar objects such as ‘Oumuamua, which were hard to see beforehand because they move very fast. "You need to be able to scan all of the sky frequently, and you need to be able to look for very faint objects. We have only had big surveys good at doing this very recently," Meech said.

Newer observatories will make the search for interstellar objects easier. The new Pan-STARRS2 telescope came online a few months ago with an even more powerful digital camera to take better pictures of the sky. Meech also said the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, with its 8-meter (26-foot) mirror, will be another excellent candidate for interstellar object searches when it sees first light in 2022.

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