This Futuristic Cap Lets People With Paralysis Communicate

It’s a patient’s worst nightmare: They’re paralyzed from an accident or disease, and slowly, even the ability to signal by blinking is taken from them. It’s called total or complete “locked-in syndrome,” or LIS. Fortunately, researchers have a way to help patients with the syndrome “speak” again—by just thinking the words.

Total LIS is common among patients in late-stage Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS), a progressive motor neuron disease that takes away the body’s ability to move. Patients with this condition can’t speak, write, or blink to communicate their daily needs.

Image: The Wyss Center

According to a study published Tuesday in PLOS Biology, a brain-computer interface inside a cap was placed on the patient’s head, allowing him or her to answer yes or no questions by thinking the answers. The cap detects whether the patient is thinking yes or no by measuring changes in the brain’s blood oxygen levels.

A team of researchers from the US, Italy, Switzerland, Germany, and China tested the brain-computer interface on four ALS patients over the course of 40 tests. They asked easy questions with known answers to test if the interface was working. It produced the correct yes or no answer in 70 percent of the tests, according to a release.

Read More: Graphene Brain Implants Hold Promise for Treating Parkinson’s, Paralysis

Researchers also asked patients if they were happy, and the majority said they were. But quality of life could be improved if patients were able to tell caregivers how they’re feeling throughout the day, researchers said.

“If we could make this technique widely available, it could have a huge impact on the day-to-day life of people with completely locked-in syndrome,” said Niels Birbaumer, a study author at the Wyss Center for Bio and Neuroengineering in Geneva, Switzerland.

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Pipe Dreams: A Conversation with the Engineers at the Hyperloop Competition

Hyperloop will take one step forward from science fiction to working technology this weekend. 30 teams from universities across the world will compete this Sunday at SpaceX’s headquarters in Hawthorne, California, for the honor of creating the best hyperloop pod.

SpaceX CEO Elon Musk created the idea of hyperloop, a 745-mile-per-hour train-like transportation system, in an open sourced white paper in 2013. His vision was to create a way to get people from city to city twice as fast as an airplane. While SpaceX has said it won’t be pursuing hyperloop itself, the company created the Hyperloop Pod Competition and narrowed down teams through 2016.

The competition Sunday afternoon will be a major step in the future of hyperloop development, teams told Motherboard, and they’re excited to see how the technology evolves in the coming years.

I spoke with three team leaders to discuss the competition, their motivation, and their vision for the future of hyperloop.

MIT Hyperloop prepares their pod for a test run. Image: Meredith Rutland Bauer/Motherboard

Motherboard: How long did it take you to get here? Have you had to make any sacrifices in the process?
Tim Houter, team captain of Delft Hyperloop, from Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands: We started in June 2015, and we’ve done the design and manufacturing for prototyping in just one year. And what we gave up is that our team consists of part-time and full-time members, and the full-time members just put their studies on hold for the time that the project is going. But what you see is that you learn so much in such a project, we think way more than what’d you’d do in school, so we think it’s worth it.

John Mayo, project manager of MIT Hyperloop, from Massachusetts Institute of Technology: A lot of us couldn’t really do any other extra curricular activities. A lot of us are graduate students, so we pretty much did our research, classwork, and this. We have people putting in 30 hours a week … hundreds of thousands of man hours into this pod.

Duncan Adams, technical director of Badgerloop, from University of Wisconsin, Madison: It’s taken a very, very long time. A lot of our team members have sacrificed a lot for this project. I think we all would say it’s worth it. Most of the people here probably spend 60 to 80 hours a week on this project, and they still have to go to school. So that’s quite a bit of work, and we’ve been at it basically since this time last year with that workload. So it’s been quite crazy.

What do you think the hyperloop industry is going to look like after this competition is over and the information is open sourced?
Houter: I think the hyperloop industry will converge to something quite similar to the aerospace and railway industry. There will be a few worldwide, global players manufacturing hyperloop capsules, manufacturing the infrastructure and really getting commercial roots up and running.

Mayo: The technology that a lot of us are using is out there, but having it all packed together will really help. Some of the companies out there probably know most of the things we know. But I think it’ll help spread it to the public, for sure. It will help make the world aware that this is something we can do. It’s not just some pipe dream. It’s actually a physical thing that’s out there.

Adams: The hyperloop industry, it’s not really an industry yet, right? Some day, it will be. But I hope that next year, this competition and all the hyperloop competitions after this one will yield technologies that are fully scalable for a full-sized hyperloop.

SpaceX's hyperloop test chamber for Sunday's competition. Image: Meredith Rutland Bauer/Motherboard

What type of culture is being formed at this competition?
Houter: What we see is everyone is very open and helpful to each other. Everyone just wants to make the best out of it. Everything has to happen in a very short amount of time, so people are running short on resources. They ask other teams, "Hey, do you have this? Maybe we can borrow it." Everybody’s very open and willing to help other teams, and that creates a very nice atmosphere.

Adams: This is a really interesting culture. Everybody here is really excited about the project. Everybody here wants to invest in others’ success. I think that’s one thing we didn’t expect going in. When we went into this competition, we expected it to be kind of cut-throat and everybody to be like, "Let’s just make our pod work." But we’ve been lending stuff to other teams. They’ve been lending stuff to us. Everybody’s here to help eachother out and to help our pods succeed. It’s such a monumental task to even launch a pod that the culture of camaraderie here at the competition has been amazing.

What comes next?
Houter: I think a lot of hyperloop companies will pay a lot of attention to students who have participated in this competition. Maybe even some companies will arise out of this competition, so it’s definitely a great boost for all the hyperloop development.

Adams:In terms of the long term hyperloop industry, I hope it becomes a thing. I would actually like to take a hyperloop across the country. But it’s going to be a few years before that is even looking like a possibility.

from Pipe Dreams: A Conversation with the Engineers at the Hyperloop Competition

Flint Residents Are Not Ready to Trust the Government Again

The Associated Press reported this week that Flint, Michigan's water was finally found to be below federal lead standards and now safe to consume. But for Flint residents, there is still a long way to go before they trust the government again.

This past December, three years after Flint, Michigan, stopped getting clean water through their public water system, the GOP-led House of Representatives quietly closed the investigation into high levels of lead detected in Flint’s water supply in 2014, the Associated Press reported. This comes before any conclusions were made as to who should be held responsible for the crisis.

“It’s a slap in the face to the people of Flint to rush and close it when we didn’t really see any justice done,” Flint resident Lulu Brezzell told me. “At this point, it’s hard not to feel like we’ve been forgotten.”

Brezzell said her family still relies on bottled water for drinking and cooking because even though her tap water was recently declared lead-free, it still has a host of problems. She said her tap water smells like bleach, gives them headaches if they drink it and leaves rashes on their skin after a five-minute shower.

Read More: Flint Is Going Into Its Third Year Without Clean Water

Meanwhile, the end of the House’s yearlong investigation was capped with a final report that blamed the state environmental protection department and US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), which the committee had already stated in several hearings earlier in the investigation.

"The committee found significant problems at Michigan's Department of Environmental Quality and unacceptable delays in the Environmental Protection Agency's response to the crisis," wrote Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah). "The committee also found that the federal regulatory framework is so outdated that it sets up states to fail."

But this is not the whole picture. A separate civil lawsuit in Flint also accused engineering firm Lockwood, Andrews and Newnam and other related companies, and six Michigan state employees were criminally charged for negligence or altering data.

Flint’s water crisis began three years ago after local water officials decided to change the source of the area’s drinking water from Lake Huron to the Flint River. The river water was corrosive, and slowly ate away at the city’s old lead pipes. As a result, the corroded pipes leached high amounts of lead into the water, and flowed into people’s faucets.

Children in Flint began testing positive for lead, which can cause cognitive delays in developing brains, and the mayor of Flint declared a state of emergency in 2015. Since then, residents have been relying on bottled water for everyday needs—although lead levels have been decreasing recently in the city. As per the recent report, the lead levels have now dropped from 15 parts per billion to 12 parts per billion, comparable to other US cities.

Congress approved $170 million in funding in mid-December for the beleaguered Michigan city, but residents are still waiting to see the government take action. And now with a new administration in place, Flint residents are also concerned what a Donald Trump presidency will mean for access to clean water. Trump has emphatically denounced the EPA and said he wants to shut it down. Doing so could threaten implementation of the Clean Water Act and the Safe Drinking Water Act, both of which regulate the amount of lead allowed in drinking water.

Brezzell said the House’s investigation ended without closure—such as an effort to hold parties responsible for the water crisis accountable.

“I think that people outside of Flint aren’t aware that Flint is still an issue,” she said.

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Singapore Just Launched Its First Ever VR Arcade

Singapore just embraced the virtual reality revolution with a new VR arcade.

These arcades, which have started to spring up across the globe, offer virtual reality games for a one-time or hourly rate. Just like standard arcades, these gaming centers have first-person shooters and fighting rings, but they also offer more calm options—like 3D painting.

Roy Koo, Ignite VR founder, recently launched Singapore’s arcade. He told Singapore media network The New Paper he started the arcade to help more people experience virtual reality.

“What makes me most excited about virtual reality is that it actually makes you feel like you’re in another world, and inside this world, anything is possible” Koo said. His arcade has four stations for games where you can play as a soccer goalie, a restaurant cook and a professional boxer.

In Calgary, Canada, arcade Level1VR has two stations for virtual reality games ranging from zombie shooters to a Portal spin-off. The arcade branched off from a puzzle room, a popular entertainment venue among techies that puts a team into a room with complex puzzles and only one hour to complete them to escape.

Sphere Virtual Reality in Lima, Ohio, states they often get visitors of nearly every age—all the way up to seniors in nursing homes.

However, not all arcades can be expected to succeed at such a new form of technology. Immersion Arcade in Illinois, for example, shut down after a few months of operation, but new arcades continue to open across the globe.

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Ancient Humans to Blame for Killing Australia’s 1,000-Pound Kangaroos

If you think saber toothed tigers and woolly mammoths are cool, just think about what used to live in Australia 45,000 years ago: 1,000-pound kangaroos, 400-pound flightless birds, tortoises the size of Volkswagen Beetles and two-ton wombats.

Scientists have long debated what caused these giant creatures, called megafauna, to go extinct. Some suggested the slow progression of climate change over tens of thousands of years caused their demise as Australia went from being a continent of eucalyptus forests to the dry, arid plains we know today.

But new evidence bolsters the alternative theory that humans, not climate change, were responsible for the extinction of these species. A study published this week in Nature Communications suggests Australia’s giant animals went extinct over just a few thousand years—which is fast for well-established species like this.

Researchers said 85 percent of all animals larger than 100 pounds on the continent went extinct shortly after the arrival of humans 45,000 years ago.

"It's a region with some of the earliest evidence of humans on the continent, and where we would expect a lot of animals to have lived," University of Colorado at Boulder Professor Gifford Miller said in a release. They studied soil samples taken from the Indian Ocean off the coast of southwest Australia. "Because of the density of trees and shrubs, it could have been one of their last holdouts some 45,000 years ago. There is no evidence of significant climate change during the time of the megafauna extinction."

Researchers from Monash University in Australia and CU Boulder took soil core samples in Australia going back to 150,000 years ago. They focused in on the spores of the fungus Sporormiella that ate the poop of plant-eating mammals.

The study noted the fungus was abundant in the soil from 150,000 years ago until 45,000 years ago, when they “took a nosedive.” This suggests plant-eating mammals started dying out relatively quickly, especially the largest ones that would produce the most poop.

Since there was evidence from ocean soil samples of flourishing forests 45,000 years ago, climate change couldn’t have been the cause because the forests hadn’t started dying out yet. So humans, and their relentless march across the world, were the most likely cause.

"The results of this study are of significant interest across the archaeological and Earth science communities and to the general public who remain fascinated by the menagerie of now extinct giant animals that roamed the planet—and the cause of their extinction—as our own species began its persistent colonization of Earth," said Sander van der Kaars of Monash University in a release.

from Ancient Humans to Blame for Killing Australia’s 1,000-Pound Kangaroos

Food Stamp Recipients Significantly More Likely to Die Than the Average American

Food stamps have long been at the heart of a bitter political debate about the government’s role in social services and the underlying problems affecting low-income Americans and their wellbeing.

A new study sheds more light on that problem—and raises many new questions. Tufts University researchers found that food stamp recipients were twice as likely to die early than the average American. These recipients have incomes at 130 percent below the poverty line or more—a household of two would quality if they are making $1,736 a month or less combined.

The study, published this week in the American Journal for Public Health, said Americans enrolled in the US Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), aka food stamps, were significantly more likely to die of cardiovascular disease and were three times more likely to die of diabetes. The SNAP program serves 44.5 million people, according to a USDA budget summary.

The study comes after years of cuts to the SNAP program from a Republican-controlled Congress, and there’s a much greater threat to the budget this year. GOP legislators could push for major changes to the program this budget year, after the House Agriculture Committee released a report that considered some states’ eligibility requirements for SNAP benefits too loose, the Associated Press reported. Congress also cut $9 billion from SNAP in 2014.

The study authors warned readers not to confuse association with causation. "It is important to note that our study does not examine cause-and-effect and whether or not SNAP participation itself increases the risk of mortality," said Zach Conrad, former postdoctoral fellow in nutritional epidemiology at the Friedman School and corresponding author, said in a release.

They noted that even individuals who were eligible for SNAP benefits based on their income level who did not take the food stamps were more likely to die than an average person.

"Rather, our investigation demonstrates that Americans on SNAP are dying at higher rates, emphasizing the need for strong efforts to improve their health. It is plausible that these individuals, if they did not participate in SNAP, might have even worse health outcomes."

The study looked at 499,741 people at least 25 years old who completed the 2000 to 2009 National Health Interview Survey. Follow-ups were done that recorded whenever a respondent died and of what cause.

The authors suggested part of the problem could be that people with poor health are more apt to accept help from the government. They also noted SNAP participants tend to buy cheaper, less nutritious food, and efforts need to be made to encourage the consumption of more produce and less processed food.

"Compared with nonparticipants, SNAP participants are more likely to have children or other family members with developmental delays or functional limitations, and are more likely to report forgoing medical care because of financial hardship," the study stated.

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Climate Change Shut Down a Research Station in Antarctica, and Australia is Next

A British research station in the Antarctic will shut down for winter after a large crack appeared in a nearby ice shelf because of our warming climate.

The Halley VI research station will be relocated from the Brunt Ice Shelf to avoid any chance it could float away on an iceberg or fall into a chasm if a large section of ice breaks away, the British Antarctic Survey stated. Motherboard reported on the possibility of this happening over a year ago, and our climate conditions didn't change.

Read More: Britain Needs to Move Its Antarctic Base Because the Ice Shelf Is Cracking

While this research station was built to be moved, other research stations are also under the same threat. Polar ice has struggled to reform this winter amid warmer-than-average temperatures, making it difficult to conduct studies. Australia is considering moving its Mawson station after unprecedented ice buildup near the station has made supply delivery by boat “unsustainable” and supplies have had to be routinely flown in by helicopter, The Australian reported.

A notable trend of warmer temperatures have been recorded in Antarctica in general, especially along the Antarctic Peninsula, according to NASA. But some areas of the continent have seen more sea ice than usual, a result of changes in wind patterns.

"In the 2013-14 season, we couldn't get anywhere near Mawson due to the sea ice and we had to get fuel in there by helicopter which is inadequate for the long-term sustainability of the station," Rob Wooding, operations manager of the Australian Antarctic Division, told Phys.org, adding that the French and Japanese had similar problems with sea ice.

Luckily for the US, none of the American research stations on Antarctica are in jeopardy from ice-related issues, said National Science Foundation spokesman Peter West. The US runs three stations on or near the continent but one is on a volcanic island, one is 800 air miles inland and one is on Anvers Island, a mountainous part of the rocky Antarctic Peninsula.

The US’s Arctic research stations, mostly located in Alaska and Greenland, also don’t appear to be in danger as Arctic ice consistently melts away.

At least, not yet.

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Genetically Modified Mosquitoes Show Resistance to Dengue

A female Aedes aegyti mosquito filled with human blood. Image: U.S. Department of Agriculture/Flickr

Researchers have found a way to reduce how effectively mosquitoes can transmit dengue fever, at least in the lab—and their work could be a step toward stopping the spread of the disease, which infects about 390 million people every year and can, in rare cases, be deadly.

The dengue virus is spread by the Aedes aegypti mosquito when the insect takes a bloodmeal from an infected human host. The virus goes through several phases and eventually infects the mosquito’s salivary glands, which means the next person it bites will be exposed.

A recent study in PLOS Neglected Tropical Diseases looks at genetically modified mosquitoes that were designed to be resistant to the dengue virus—and it seems that these researchers’ methods worked.

Read More: Watch Genetically Modified Zika-Fighting Mosquitoes Released From a Van

An international team, based in the US, Singapore and Thailand, modified the molecular pathways inside about 400 Aedes aegypti mosquitoes to stop the spread of the virus to the insects’ salivary glands.

Usually, proteins called Dome and Hop turn on a specific signaling pathway, called JAK/STAT, that fights dengue inside the mosquito after it is infected. Researchers modified the Dome and Hop proteins to activate more quickly—right after the blood was ingested—to kickstart the anti-dengue system.

When they checked the modified mosquitoes after they had ingested infected mouse blood, the set with modified Dome proteins had 78 percent less copies of the virus than what was seen in an infected mosquito outside the lab. Another set, with modified Hop proteins, had 83 percent fewer copies of the virus—so the virus was still there, but it didn’t make as many viruses as it usually does to spread to the next host.

"It may be possible to achieve improved or total resistance to dengue and other viruses by expressing additional transgenes in multiple tissues that block the virus through different mechanisms," the researchers stated in a release.

About half of the world’s population is at risk of infection from dengue fever, according to the World Health Organization. The virus causes flu-like symptoms at first, but serious cases can cause a high fever, bleeding from the gums and extreme muscle or bone pain. There is a vaccine.

Aedes aegypti have been causing problems for much of the Americas, since that mosquito also spreads the Zika virus, which is similar to dengue. Elsewhere, researchers are attempting to release male mosquitoes that are genetically modified to produce non-viable in the Florida Keys to mate with local females—females are the only ones that bite—to help curb the virus’s spread.

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Hot Red Chili Peppers Are Associated With Living Longer, Study Suggests

If hot peppers make you feel like you’re dying, first drink some milk. Once your mouth cools, you’ll be glad to know hot red peppers might be associated with a longer life.

A study by University of Vermont researchers, which was published in PLoS ONE earlier this month, looked at a large-scale US health survey and compared mortality data and self-reported hot red chili consumption among its subjects—some 16,000 of them, followed for 23 years. Subjects who said they ate hot red chilis regularly happened to die less often from heart disease or stroke than comparable subjects who did not eat hot peppers.

“Because our study adds to the generalizability of previous findings, chili pepper—or even spicy food—consumption may become a dietary recommendation,” or could inspire future research into the association, said author and medical student Mustafa Chopan in a release. Consumption of red hot chili peppers was associated with a 13 percent reduction in overall mortality, they found.

A few caveats: The researchers noticed a statistically significant correlation between people who ate hot red chili peppers and people who were less likely to die from heart attacks and strokes, but they didn’t make definite claims that the chili peppers are the cause of a longer life. They even hedge their findings by stating that “the mechanism by which peppers could delay mortality is far from certain.” What’s more, the pepper-eating was self-reported.

But science is all about building up evidence, and this is only the second study to ever been done on hot peppers and longer life, according to the University of Vermont researchers. It’s just another step towards solving the puzzle.

Read More: What It’s Like To Lose Your Sense Of Taste And Smell

Chopan and University of Vermont Professor of Medicine Benjamin Littenberg reviewed data from the National Health and Nutritional Examination Survey, which assesses health and nutritional status using interviews and physical exams.

They found subjects who said they ate “hot red chili peppers” tended to have lower HDL cholesterol and total cholesterol, lower rates of hypertension, ate both more vegetables and meats than participants who did not eat chili peppers—but were also more likely to smoke and drink.

Adjusting for other factors, researchers still found a statistically significant connection between lower mortality and eating hot red peppers.

Another study done by Chinese researchers looked at the consumption of spicy food and how long about 487,000 people lived. That research, done over four years, found a relationship between living longer in general and eating spicy food.

The Vermont researchers raise the question of whether capsaicin, the compound that makes peppers hot, could be responsible. Capsaicin is thought to help with cellular and molecular processes that prevent obesity, help regulate blood flow and improve microbial gut health, they state.

The survey didn’t ask participants which type of chili peppers they ate, and there are five species of peppers, each with hot variants, including cayenne peppers, Tabasco peppers and Japanese peppers. Some websites claim there are nearly 100 types of hot peppers, including the hottest man made varieties that hurt significantly more than pepper spray. The survey question specifically asked about “red hot chili” peppers, so consumption of peppers like jalapeños may not have been factored in by participants, the study authors noted.

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Transportation Agencies Are Really Sick of People Stealing 420 Mile Markers

People keep stealing 420 mile markers on highways, and transportation authorities across the US don’t think it’s very funny.

People have reportedly stolen the highway signs in Colorado, Idaho and Washington, and the trend seems to be increasing in states where marijuana use has been legalized. And while Alaska is apparently spared from the 420 thievery, the Marijane Street sign in Anchorage gets stolen all the time, the Alaska Dispatch reported.

Colorado officials got so fed up with the problem that they replaced the sign with a 419.9 mile marker in 2014—now a local tourist attraction and the inspiration for a craft beer.

“Obviously people steal these signs,” Colorado Department of Transportation spokeswoman Amy Ford told the Denver Post. “In the past, if a sign was stolen too much, we wouldn’t replace it. This is sort of an innovative way for us to keep the sign there.”

In Idaho, officials also had to swap a 420 mile marker with a 419.9 sign in 2015 after multiple thefts along US Highway 95. While Idaho is known for its strict marijuana laws, sticky-fingered passersby apparently didn’t care.

"Having a sign removed from a highway is pretty rare," Adam Rush of the Idaho Transportation Department told the Associated Press. "In Idaho, people will shoot at them or write on them before stealing them completely. We spend more time mending signs than replacing them."

So far, the 420 sign on California’s Interstate 5 still exists, despite recent recreational weed legalization in the state. Maybe stoners will take the high road and let transportation workers tackle other problems.

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Are Ad-Blockers Saving Internet Users, or Ruining the Internet?

Ad-blockers may seem like an answer to an internet user’s prayers. No annoying pop-ups, no promos before videos and no concerns about accidentally clicking on a virus. But for ad-driven websites, they’re a revenue leech that needs to be pried off.

This is becoming one of the internet's biggest debates. More countries are cracking down on ad-blockers—the EU’s European Commission even proposed a rule this week that would allow media companies to ban users who use ad-blockers. The debate is no longer on the fringes with tech’s biggest names, including Facebook, weighing in.

“Ads support our mission of giving people the power to share and making the world more open and connected,” Facebook Vice President of Ads & Business Platform Andrew Bosworth said in an August announcement last year.

Image: Courtesy of Admiral

As of 2015, 500 million devices worldwide had an ad-blocker installed, including 181 million desktop users with an active ad-blocking plug-in or used a browser that automatically blocked ads, according to PageFair, an industry leader among advertising recovery—i.e. anti ad-block— companies.

That led to an estimated loss of billions of dollars among websites and online services that rely on advertisements for their primary source of revenue. Nearly every corner of the internet relies on advertising to avoid charging consumers—everything from music streaming to video hosting to news outlets.

So how do anti-ad-blocking tools work? First, these companies run analytics to help websites understand how much revenue is being lost to ad-blockers. Then the companies offer their customers tools that can ask users to accept advertisements, give online users a choice about which ads are removed or allow website users an ad-free experience if they pay a fee—depending on which anti-ad-blocking service used.

Image: Courtesy of PageFair

It is “really an access control system,” said Dan Rua, CEO of Admiral, which builds software to strip away ad-blockers. By giving users options and explaining the need for ads, consumers don’t feel like they’re being blindsided.

Getting around ad-blockers could open the dam for a lot of money, especially for struggling industries like free training (think sites like Coursera) and gaming websites. Facebook’s decision last year to create tamper-proof ads that can’t be removed by ad-blockers is expected to yield an additional $720 million this year in advertisement revenue for the social media giant, according to the PageFair analysis.

To see the whole problem, you have to look at how the internet is affected by ad-blockers, Rua said. It’s a matter of whether the internet can continue to remain free and open to anyone. “There’s billions being lost across the industry,” he said. “Nine out of 10 sites that people visit are free, and that’s only because of advertisements working.”

Different sections of the internet are affected more than others—for example, about half of the traffic to technology and gaming websites come from users with ad-blocking tools installed—but the big picture is startling, said Matthew Courtland, spokesman for PageFair.

“Adblock threatens the sustainability of the open web and internet as we know it,” he said. “If revenue is not flowing back to publishers, then the quality, diversity, and interesting content that makes the internet so wonderful will gradually die, and all that will be left will be a smaller number of publishers creating provocative ‘viral’ content for walled gardens.”

Image: Courtesy of Admiral

At the same time, ad-blocking businesses say they’re protecting the spirit of the open web by keeping power in users’ hands. By allowing companies to force ads on consumers, they’re breaking the spirit of the free internet, said Adblock Plus spokesman Ben Williams.

“When you try to wrestle the control out of the users’ hands, it is something that is anti-web,” he said.

Some users don’t even realize ad-blockers are installed on their devices since browsers like UC Browser, which is popular in China, come installed with ad-blocking software, according to PageFair. And others install it right away as a protection against malware.

“In essence, ad-block has become the new firewall or anti-virus,” Cortland said. “Creating a sustainable solution for ad-block means listening to and addressing these very real and valid security concerns.” He said PageFair doesn’t allow untrusted JavaScript to get through their entryways since they often harbor viruses.

On the other hand, Williams said partial ad-blocking, which is Adblock Plus’s primary model, is a more defensible way for companies to recoup revenue without stripping power from internet users.

“I think there are better ways to help publishers get lost revenue back,” he said. “You can actually work with ad blocking companies to show ads that users have approved, and doing so you work directly with users, so I think that’s a much more healthy and sustainable approach.”

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3D Printing Membranes Could Change Water Treatment As We Know It

3D printing has come a long way in the past few years. Printers that once could only produce thick plastic can now churn out flexible material, metal, and now even semi-permeable membranes.

Researchers at the University of Bath assessed 3D printers’ ability to work with membranes to evaluate the potential to 3D print membranes in the future, according to a study published online this week in the Journal of Membrane Science.

Membranes are useful in the water treatment industry for reverse osmosis treatment used in desalination and recycled water purification, among other uses. But creating one is particularly difficult, and they can usually only be built as a hollow tube or a flat membrane because of the setup of current manufacturing methods. 3D printing could change all of that.

"Although 3D printing technology is not quite well enough developed to yet produce large scale membranes that will be cost competitive with existing products, this work does signal what the future possibilities are with 3D printing,” said Darrell Patterson, director of the Centre for Advanced Separations Engineering at the University of Bath, in a release.

Read more: Self-Assembling Nanoparticles Offer Super-Efficient, Portable Water Desalination

This is the first time the properties of various 3D printing techniques have been assessed and compared to the tools needed to create membranes, according to a University of Bath release.

Patterson said complex porous structures, membranes that could be adapted to odd-shaped surfaces and “membranes based on nature” would all be possible with 3D printing. At least, it could be one day.

Membranes could also be used to remove chemicals from the air prior to it leaving a manufacturing area and chemicals from wastewater prior to the water leaving a facility—and are a lower-energy, lower-cost option to current technologies, the study stated.

And given concerns about water security, having a way to mass-produce reverse osmosis membranes for desalination and recycled water purification treatments is no small achievement. While this study only looks at what could be possible—and didn’t actually create huge membranes with 3D printers—we may have to wait a while.

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Scientists Are Peeling Back the Layers of the Zika Virus

As researchers fervently search for a vaccine for Zika, a virus that causes birth defects, a new study gives us a better look of what we’re dealing with.

Having a better idea of the structure of a virus will help other researchers understand its nuances as they work to create a vaccine and plan strategies to contain Zika, which began spreading across South America, Central America and the Caribbean in 2015. A study published this week in Nature Structural & Molecular Biology shows what an immature Zika virus looks like.

Researchers found the genome of the virus is cased inside multiple layers, including a lipid membrane, an envelope protein, a precursor membrane protein and a capsid protein. The capsid protein’s location was an especially important discovery, the study stated, because that protein is important in the process of creating more viruses.

Thick black arrows indicate the densities between the inner RNA core and the viral membrane in immature ZIKV. Image: Nature Structural and Molecular Biology

"I think these findings open the door to begin to explore the assembly process of the virus," said Richard Kuhn, director of the Purdue Institute of Inflammation, Immunology and Infectious Disease, in a release. "We see clear differences between the structure of the immature virus and the mature virus... We need to study what these changes are and why they occur."

Using cryo-electron microscopy, researchers looked at the virus at a resolution of 9 Ångstroms, about 1,000 times better resolution than a traditional light microscope can manage, the release states.

Zika is a flavivirus, and they are known to be enveloped viruses. Imagine an onion’s layers, and you have a rough picture of what the layering inside a flavivirus looks like. Other layers researchers mapped out are also important in understanding how the Zika virus works, such as the envelope protein, which helps the virus attach itself to a host cell to spread.

The immature Zika viruses tested were created by using mosquito cells that were infected by with the virus. The researchers prompted the viruses to replicate, and then took a look at the immature versions of the virus.

While mature viruses usually are responsible for causing the spread of a virus, understanding the virus at all stages is an important step toward creating a preventative medicine or cure, the study stated. Viruses in general are notoriously difficult to cure with medicine—everything from the flu to AIDS are viruses—and often the host has to wait for their body to fight off the virus, but vaccines that give the human host immunity are more common (hence flu shots). Of course, anti-viral medicines exist, but so far researchers have been more focused on creating a preventative vaccine.

Zika has been a persistent and misunderstood virus, but new research could herald a better way to stop it from harming more families.

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How AI That Mimics Flocking Birds Could Help Hybrid Cars Run Greener

Hybrid cars have long been hailed as a more eco-friendly vehicle option, and researchers are trying to make future hybrids even greener.

The answer potentially lies in helping cars learn their own habits and letting them adjust fuel sources on their own. Engineers from the University of California, Riverside have developed an algorithm they believe can be used in the computers of plug-in hybrid electric cars to reduce their fuel consumption by one-third, according to a study published this week in IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems.

The researchers used evolutionary algorithms based on flocking birds and swarming bees to help plug-in hybrid cars learn about the complexities of zipping around roads and highways. The idea is that the algorithm would allow the car to learn how to optimize energy efficiency based on individual driving history, as well as allow it to share that data with other cars online in its network.

While this study isn’t on the level of self-driving cars, vehicular science is one of the cutting-edge fields of the past few years. Between Google’s self-driving cars and Tesla’s all-electric models, the field is heating up with new inventions.

Plug-in hybrid electric cars usually run on stored electricity from battery packs and then default to fuel. But that method is notoriously inefficient, the study states, and it uses much less electricity to use battery power at various, more opportune times during the trip depending on the speed and other factors.

Read more: Why Electric Cars Are Ditching AM Radio

But switching back and forth between gas and battery power is difficult, and most hybrid cars don’t have the tech to make that happen. UCR researchers came up with an algorithm that they believe should make this system much easier.

"By mathematically modeling the energy saving processes that occur in nature, scientists have created algorithms that can be used to solve optimization problems in engineering," study author Xuewei Qi, a postdoctoral researcher at the Center for Environmental Research and Technology in UCR's Bourns College of Engineering said in a release. "We combined this approach with connected vehicle technology to achieve energy savings of more than 30 percent. We achieved this by considering the charging opportunities during the trip—something that is not possible with existing EMS (energy management systems)."

Researchers hope the algorithm could also decrease the amount of greenhouse gases cars emit. In other words, math inspired by nature could help us protect our natural resources. And that is pretty damn cool.

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All of Las Vegas’s City-Owned Buildings Now Run on Renewable Energy

Las Vegas is best known for its blinding neon signs and indulgent venues, but more recently the city government has set its sights on keeping the lights on in a more sustainable way.

Las Vegas’s city-owned buildings and other public infrastructure are now entirely powered by renewable energy as of December, including about 48,000 streetlamps, lights inside City Hall and power at city parks, Las Vegas spokesman Jace Radke said.

“The move to renewable energy has been seamless,” Mayor Carolyn G. Goodman said in a statement. “The city of Las Vegas has long been a leader in sustainability, and becoming the first large city in the country to rely on 100 percent renewable energy [for city-owned buildings] is an incredible accomplishment that sets a great example for our residents and businesses.”

Of course, the restaurants, casinos and homes in Las Vegas still mostly get their power from plants that run on traditional fossil fuels. Nevada as a whole relies heavily on gas and coal for its power generation—63.9 percent of its energy comes from petroleum, and 18.2 percent comes from coal. About 18 percent of the state’s energy comes from renewable sources like geothermal, solar and hydroelectric energy, according to Colorado State University/The Nature Conservancy’s energy tracking tool.

More cities are expected to jump on the renewable energy bandwagon, either entirely or to power their municipal-owned buildings, as a way to meet climate targets and to save money. Cities across the country, including Denver, Los Angeles and San Francisco, are studying how to move their residents, businesses and city buildings toward renewable energy, Sierra Club spokesman Shane Levy told Motherboard. St. Petersburg, Florida, was one of the most recent cities to jump into that initiative, becoming the first city in Florida to make a commitment to renewable energy.

National Renewable Energy Laboratory spokesman Eric O'Shaughnessy told Motherboard about 10 percent of cities in the US have an established renewable energy goal, and most cities that reach 100 percent renewable energy start the process by converting their city-owned operations to green power. He said the 10 percent figure is from a 2016 survey by the International City/County Management Association.

“There is a general consensus that cities are increasingly interested in renewable energy for both environmental and economic reasons, especially if you are working on the timeframe of several decades,” he said.

“Environmentally, going 100% renewable is a big step toward achieving sustainability goals. Economically, some cities have been able to actually save money by entering into long-term contracts for renewable energy that beat the rates they were previously paying for electricity.”

Las Vegas had been moving toward the goal by working with energy company NVEnergy, and when a large solar project was completed near Boulder City, the city was able to buy the rest of the energy it needed to run all city-owned buildings on renewable energy, the Las Vegas Review-Journal reported.

The switch to renewable energy cost the Las Vegas city government about $47 million, and it is expected save $5 million a year in energy bills due to the switch, Radke said.

“So it is a nine- to 10-year pay-back, which is really good,” he said.

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A Drug Meant for Alzheimer’s Treatment Regrows Human Teeth

Goodbye, cavities. So long, fillings and dental drills. You may soon be replaced by a tooth-growing drug.

Researchers at King’s College released a study today stating they’ve discovered a medicine that can prompt teeth to regrow over cavities or injuries. The study was published this week in Scientific Reports.

Researchers realized that an experimental Alzheimer’s drug called Tideglusib had the side effect of encouraging dentin growth, which is the bony part of the tooth made of calcified tissue. It makes up most of the tooth, just above the pulp but under the hard enamel.

The simplicity of the method means it could be used in a variety of dental settings and could be rolled out relatively easy, said study author Paul Sharpe, of King’s College London in a release. Tideglusib, used in clinical trials as a neurological drug as a way to encourage brain cell growth, encouraged the tooth to generate more stem cells and grow dentin over the exposed area, according to the report.

In Alzheimer’s clinical trials, the medicine is taken orally and is thought to fight against dementia-causing mutations. It hones in on tau proteins, which are found in neurons and other parts of the body. When applied to teeth, Tideglusib stops a form of tau protein from doing its job—to stop dentin production in the tooth.

Normally, a tooth would only grow a tiny layer of dentin over an injury—not nearly enough to save a tooth from needing to be drilled or removed to prevent infection. But when Tideglusib is applied to the injured spot on the tooth, it blocks the enzyme that usually stops dentin growth, glycogen synthase kinase (GSK-3), and the whole spot heals up by itself.

The King’s College researchers put the enzyme inhibitor on biodegradable collagen sponges, stuck them in subjects’ teeth where cavities had formed and found they healed up without the need for any drilling or filling.

“Using a drug that has already been tested in clinical trials for Alzheimer’s disease provides a real opportunity to get this dental treatment quickly into clinics,” Sharpe said in a release.

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100 Percent of Dutch Trains Now Run on Wind Energy

The Netherlands now runs all of its trains on wind energy, meeting a goal to transition to 100 percent renewable energy a year ahead of schedule.

All Dutch trains are electric, and new construction of several wind farms helped meet the country's goal to power all of their locomotives with the renewable energy on Jan. 1, 2017, Dutch news outlet RTL Z reported.

The Netherlands had been buying renewable energy from neighboring countries in the EU and using gas-powered plants to make up the difference, but the creation of additional wind farms meant it could produce all the energy necessary to power its train system independently.

Dutch train companies, especially industry leader NS, worked with power company Eneco to get the train systems on 75 percent wind power in 2016, and the 100 percent goal was set for 2018, but was met last week, according to Clean Technica.

US efforts to move toward renewable energy have intensified over the last few years, but they still lag far behind many European countries. About 20 million homes can currently be powered by the US’s wind turbines, according to the American Wind Energy Association. Texas, California and Iowa have the largest energy output from wind energy.

Video: Facebook

And while some of the US’s trains are fully electric, many still have diesel engines that produce electricity to move the train. So there’s still a long way to go to catch up with the Dutch.

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Rick Perry Has Resigned from the Board of the Dakota Access Pipeline Company

As Rick Perry awaits his confirmation hearing to become the Secretary of Energy, he has resigned from the board of the company that has been slated to build the controversial Dakota Access Pipeline, the Texas Tribune reported Thursday. The connection to a project he will have power over as energy secretary created a rocky start for Perry, the former governor of Texas.

Perry left the board of Energy Transfer Partners on Dec. 31, the Texas Tribune reported, and is expected to be confirmed as energy secretary within the next two weeks.

Meanwhile, the Dakota Access Pipeline’s stretch under Lake Oahe in North Dakota was postponed after the US Army Corps of Engineers decided a thorough environmental impact assessment needed to be completed. The decision to not grant a vital permit likely means the pipeline will have to be rerouted. The decision came after weeks of protesting by Native Americans and environmentalists who said the pipeline would be prone to oil spills that would contaminate local water supply.

Read More: The Standing Rock Water Protectors Aren't Leaving

But Republicans have promised to finish the pipeline under a Donald Trump administration, saying the pipeline meets state environmental regulations in the areas it crosses.

To make conflicts of interest even more obvious, Energy Transfer Partners CEO Kelcy Warren is a longtime donor to Perry’s campaigns.

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Reprogramming Organs Could Be the Future of Transplants

When waiting for an organ transplant, patients have a lot to worry about: whether the body will fight against the organ, the effects immunosuppressant drugs could have on their bodies, and the foods and activities they’ll have to give up.

Researchers are trying to change that by using a technique to fill a donor organ with a patient’s cells so that their bodies are more likely to accept the new organ instead of treating it like a foreign object. This would be welcome news for the 120,000 people on organ transplant waiting lists in the US alone.

Miromatrix Medical, a small business funded by the National Science Foundation, is testing out a method to strip existing cells from an organ—a process called perfusion decellularization—by pumping solution through blood vessels in the organ. After about two days, the organ is still structurally sound, but it doesn’t have any cells left inside and has turned stark white.

Then, when a patient has been selected for the transplant, the organ would be pumped full of the patient’s cells. Miromatrix Medical states they should incorporate into the organ and should be fully functional. By using an existing organ for the base, rather than 3D-printing an organ scaffold, it already has existing pathways for getting oxygen and nutrients where they need to go.

“People have been trying to create this ultimate goal, this panacea of a whole, functional organ,” but the field has struggled with getting nutrients into the organs to keep them alive, Dominique Seetapun, Miromatrix Medical senior project development scientist said in the company video.

Seetapun said the new technique is an improvement on previous methods that dipped organs in detergent solutions that often broke down the organ’s structures and led to complications when new cells were introduced.

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America’s First Full-Scale Hyperloop Test Is Happening in Las Vegas

Hyperloop One plans to run the world’s first full-size hyperloop test in Las Vegas in the early months of 2017. The full test will take place at Apex Industrial Park in northern Las Vegas, the Las Vegas Review-Journal reported this week.

Hyperloop’s promise of 1,100-kilometers-per-hour travel is shaping up to be one of the biggest possibilities for travel innovation this year. Several companies, including Elon Musk’s Hyperloop One, are setting their sights on establishing rail systems in Dubai, Russia and the US.

Read More: Inside Dubai's Quest to Build the First Hyperloop

Few partial tests of the hyperloop vacuum rail line have been done so far. Hyperloop One ran a test in May using just the rail and the sled that connects to the passenger or cargo pod. But this test will be the full gamut, including the iconic vacuum tube, that will propel a prototype about 500 meters down a track with magnetic levitation, the Review-Journal reported.

“It will levitate, catch the right speed and slow down,” Nick Earle, the company’s senior vice president of global field operations told the Review-Journal. “Then what we’ll do, is over the next few months extend that into a few kilometers.”

Hyperloop One has also set up tests in Dubai, and private space company Space X is hosting a hyperloop pod contest to push engineers to build the best pod possible for this burgeoning technology. The first set of the finals for that competition will be in late January in Southern California.

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