Consumer Electronics News from Scientific American

Digital Revolution Pathologists are traditionally seen as being detached from everyday clinical practice, which explains why we were so pleasantly surprised when we came across the interesting article “ A Better Lens on Disease ,” by Mike May. Even before the digital revolution, pathologists had developed rudimentary ways (mainly photographs) to capture histological images and submit them to one another for a second opinion. Nowadays such a procedure is adopted usefully at small hospitals in developing countries to refer unusual or difficult cases to internationally recognized European or U.S. pathology departments.

With this final column I will transition Sustainable Developments from Scientific American to the home page of the Earth Institute ( www.earth.columbia.edu ). Although I will continue to contribute occasional essays to the magazine, I will use this last regular column to say thank you and take stock of the deepening crisis of sustainable development.

During the four years of this column, the world’s inability to face up to the reality of the growing environmental crisis has become even more palpable. Every major goal that international bodies have established for global environmental policy as of 2010 has been postponed, ignored or defeated. Sadly, this year will quite possibly become the warmest on record, yet another testimony to human-induced environmental catastrophes running out of control.

The middle-aged Internet ( ARPANET first went live more than 40 years ago ) could easily slide into complacency, but the National Science Foundation (NSF) might be staving this off with four multimillion-dollar grants that the agency has recently awarded. The Future Internet Architecture (FIA) research projects are expected to re-think the network from the ground up, taking into account emerging security concerns, the demand for greater bandwidth and the growth of mobile devices. [More]





A Little Flight Music: NASA Contest for Wake-Up Songs Prompts Astronauts to Recall Tuneful Highlights

As deejay gigs go this is a short one, but the audience is captive and the venue is very exclusive. With a recently announced contest , NASA has opened the door to the public to choose music to be played for astronauts during the final two scheduled space shuttle missions. Four winning songs will serve as wake-up music on the missions, currently pegged for November and February launches. [More]





100 Years Ago: Sleeping Sickness

SEPTEMBER 1960 EVOLUTION OF MAN-- “Mutation, sexual recombination and natural selection led to the emergence of Homo sapiens. The creatures that preceded him had already developed the rudiments of tool-using, toolmaking and cultural transmission. But the next evolutionary step was so great as to constitute a difference in kind from those before it. There now appeared an organism whose mastery of technology and of symbolic communication enabled it to create a supraorganic culture. Other organisms adapt to their environments by changing their genes in accordance with the demands of the surroundings. Man and man alone can also adapt by changing his environments to fit his genes. His genes enable him to invent new tools, to alter his opinions, his aims and his conduct, to acquire new knowledge and new wisdom. --Theo­do­s­ius Dobzhansky”

Wireless gadgets have changed the way nearly everyone communicates, but one group has benefited more than others: the deaf. For those who cannot make a voice call, texting and video, in particular, have not only opened them up to the hearing world and to each other, but also allowed them to use American Sign Language (ASL) , often their native language. [More]





Death to Humans! Visions of the Apocalypse in Movies and Literature

All things must come to an end, but we humans have an endless fascination with the inevitable. Our September 2010 special issue and our web exclusives explore some of those endings. Writers and filmmakers, of course, have been tackling apocalyptic themes for decades, at times using them to highlight emotional aspects of sacrifice, heroism and dedication, to varying degrees of success. [More]





Good Riddance: Human Creations the World Would Be Better Off Without (preview)

Daylight Savings Time  The extra hour of sunshine comes at a steep price Daylight savings time has marginally scientific origins: its inventor, New Zealand naturalist George Vernon Hudson, published two papers in the late 19th century arguing for a seasonal two-hour clock shift to “more fully utilize the long days of summer.” The primary appeal, though, has always been to save on energy costs, because extra daylight in the evening reduces the need for lighting. Germany instituted Sommerzeit (“summertime”) as a means to save coal during wartime, and by 1918 Europe, Russia and the U.S. had all followed suit. Clocks went back to normal in peacetime, until daylight savings was temporarily mandated again during World War II. In 1966 the U.S. Congress passed the Uniform Time Act, the first nonwartime implementation of the practice (although, technically, each state could decide whether to go along); daylight savings has since been extended as a response to energy shocks such as the oil embargo of the 1970s.

Researchers have been visiting locations in the western North Atlantic Ocean and Caribbean Sea for more than two decades to better understand the large patches of plastic that have formed there. Although the mysteries surrounding exactly how the plastic gets to these locations, where it comes from and what impact it's having on marine life remain unanswered, a team of scientists has now published perhaps the most analytical study of the patches to date based on data collected by research vessels over a 22-year period, between 1986 and 2008. [More]





Calendar: MIND events in September and October

SEPTEMBER

20 We often refer to a strong sexual attraction as animal magnetism, but arousal involves more than just base instinct. At the Mind Science lecture series , psychologist Stephanie Ortigue will describe how desire depends on complex mental processing. Her talk, “The Consciousness of Desire,” will reveal the brain regions associated with longing and how they are influenced by mirror neurons--brain cells that fire when we either perform or observe an action. [More]





Heady days of nanotech funding behind it, the U.S. faces big challenges

Nearly a decade after the U.S. launched its National Nanotechnology Initiative (NNI) , the program's $12 billion in funding has helped place the country at the head of the pack regarding the development of science and technology measured in billionths of meters . Yet, despite the U.S.'s unrivaled adeptness at patenting nanotech inventions, the country's lackluster track record of bringing nano-scale technology products to market leaves the door open for China, Russia and other tech-savvy countries to challenge U.S. nanotech supremacy, according to a new report by Boston's Lux Research . [More]





Down with Digital? New Circuit Design Promises to Take the Guesswork out of Probability Processing

Probability calculations are at the heart of the software most of us rely on daily, whether it is Amazon.com or iTunes recommending new products based on previous purchases, a spam filter weeding out junk e-mail or a credit card processing program searching for potentially fraudulent transactions. Making these applications faster and more accurate has generally meant throwing more number-crunching capacity at them, but one Cambridge, Mass.–based start-up claims to have developed a cheaper and more energy-efficient approach that eschews digital processing. [More]





Survey Probes Americans' Incorrect Opinions on Energy Efficiency

Quick - what's the most effective for you to save energy? If you're like many Americans, you'd say turn out the lights or turn up the AC's thermostat. And, like many Americans, you'd miss the mark.

Turns out, when figuring what we can do to go green, most of us overstate. We think about curtailment--unplugging appliances, driving less, turning off lights--when improving the efficiency of our cars, appliances and home would take the biggest chunk out of our energy footprint.

Imagine a modular solar array that you can install --without too much fear of electrocuting yourself--at a relatively low price. That's the vision of Chad Maglaque and Clarian Technologies , and one that hopes to become a reality by spring 2011. [More]





Volunteers' Idle Computer Time Turns Up a Celestial Oddball

A newfound stellar remnant some 17,000 light-years away is not your everyday pulsar. For starters, the hyperdense, swiftly pirouetting object appears to belong to a rare class known as disrupted recycled pulsars. Pulsars are so known because they rotate rapidly--this one spins more than 40 times a second--and give off a beam of radio waves that sweeps across the sky, much like a lighthouse. To an outside observer the radiation appears to pulse each time the beam points in the observer's direction. [More]





Automatic Auto: A Car That Drives Itself

In September a driverless Audi TTS will speed to the top of Colorado's Pikes Peak at just under 100 kilometers per hour--that's right, no driver. It is an early step toward a robo-car that can drive itself, perhaps better than you can. [More]





Plastic Surf: The Unhealthful Afterlife of Toys and Packaging (preview)

By now even schoolchildren know that the plastics we discard every year in the millions of tons persist in the environment for hundreds of years. And we have all heard of the horrors caused by such debris in the sea: fur seals entangled by nylon nets, sea otters choking on polyethylene six-pack rings, and plastic bags or toys stuck in the guts of sea turtles. This photograph, showing plastic fragments collected in just an hour at a cove near Gloucester, Mass., hints at a lesser-known but equally disturbing story: much smaller bits of plastic that are accumulating in oceans all over the world can potentially harm marine life and possibly even human health.

Although plastic does not get digested by microbes, as food and paper are, it does slowly “photodegrade”: ultraviolet light and heat from the sun increase its brittleness, causing it to weaken, crack and break up into smaller and smaller fragments. Indeed, a handful of sand or cup of seawater from nearly anywhere in the world will probably be peppered with microplastics--pieces that are tinier than a small pea and often invisible. Scientists fear the possible effects of this plastic confetti on zooplankton and other creatures at the base of the marine food web, which get consumed by larger organisms--turtles, fish, birds--and, ultimately, by us.

The forthcoming Chevy Volt and Nissan Leaf rely on lithium-ion battery packs, as do other contenders on the electric-car circuit. Yet perhaps mindful of a few highly publicized fires touched off by early lithium-ion power packs in laptops, are consumers assured that their car batteries will remain safe, even in an accident?

Much of the assurance falls under the purview of Sandia National Laboratories’ Battery Abuse Testing Laboratory, which has become the de facto automotive battery-testing shop in the U.S. The lab heats, shocks, punctures and crushes batteries to see how safe they would be in crashes and extreme operating conditions.

Your once reliable mobile phone suddenly freezes. The keypad no longer functions, and it cannot make or receive calls or text messages. You try to power off, but nothing happens. You remove the battery and reinsert it; the phone simply returns to its frozen state. Clearly, this is no ordinary glitch. Hours later you learn that yours is not an isolated problem: millions of other people also saw their phones suddenly, inexplicably, freeze.

This is one possible way that we might experience a large-scale hardware attack--one that is rooted in the increasingly sophisticated integrated circuits that serve as the brains of many of the devices we rely on every day. These circuits have become so complex that no single set of engineers can understand every piece of their design; instead teams of engineers on far-flung continents design parts of the chip, and it all comes together for the first time when the chip is printed onto silicon. The circuitry is so complex that exhaustive testing is impossible. Any bug placed in the chip’s code will go unnoticed until it is activated by some sort of trigger, such as a specific date and time--like the Trojan horse, it initiates its attack after it is safely inside the guts of the hardware.