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| CIOL (Chartered Institute of Linguists)

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It is the general view of neurolinguistic researchers that for most right-handed individuals, the left hemisphere of the brain controls the functions relating to grammar, vocabulary and literal meaning. The two major areas associated with language comprehension and speech production (Broca's area and Wernicke's area) are also located in the left hemisphere.

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You might remember a spate of news stories last year about Google Translate spitting out ominous chunks of religious prophecy when presented with nonsense words and phrases to translate. Clickbait sites suggested it might be a conspiracy, but no, it was just Google's machine learning systems getting confused and falling back on the data they were trained on: religious texts.

But as the head of Google Translate, Macduff Hughes, told The Verge recently, machine learning is what makes Google's ever-useful translation tools really sing. Free, easy, and instantaneous translation is one of those perks of 21st century living that many of us take for granted, but it wouldn't be possible without AI.

Free, easy, and instant translation is a perk of 21st century living

Back in 2016, Translate switched from a method known as statistical machine translation to one that leveraged machine learning, which Google called "neural machine translation." The old model translated text one word at a time, leading to plenty of mistakes, as the system failed to account for grammatical factors like verb tense and word order. But the new one translates sentence by sentence, which means it factors in this verbal context.

The result is language that is "more natural and more fluid," says Hughes, who promises that more improvements are coming, like translation that accounts for subtleties of tone (is the speaker being formal or slangy?) and that offers multiple options for wording.

Translate is also an unambiguously positive project for Google, something that, as others have noted, provides a bit of cover for the company's more controversial AI efforts, like its work with the military. Hughes explains why Google continues to back Translate, as well as how the company wants to tackle bias in its AI training data.
This interview has been edited for clarity One big update you made recently to Translate was offering gender-specific translations. What pushed you to do that?
That's two motivations coming together. One is a concern about social bias in all kinds of machine learning and AI products. This is something that Google and the whole industry have been getting concerned about; that machine learning services and products reflect the biases of the data they're trained on, which reflects societal biases, which reinforce and perhaps even amplifies those biases. We want, as a company, to be a leader in addressing those problems, and we know that Translate is a service that has this problem, particularly when it comes to male / female bias.

Translation models can learn (and replicate) biases present in language

The classic example in language is that a doctor is male and a nurse is female. If these biases exist in a language then a translation model will learn it and amplify it. If an occupation is [referred to as male] 60 to 70 percent of the time, for example, then a translation system might learn that and then present it as 100 percent male. We need to combat that.

And lot of users are learning languages; they want to understand the different ways they can express things and the nuances available. So we've known for a long time we've needed to be able to show multiple translation options and other details. This all came together in the gender project.

Because, if you look at the bias problem, there's no clear answer to what you can do about it. The answer is not to be 50 / 50 or random [when assigning genders in translation], but to give people more information. To just tell people there's more than one way to say this thing in this language, and here are the differences between them. There are a lot of cultural challenges, and linguistic challenges in translation, and we wanted to do something about the bias issue while making Translate itself more useful.

What problems are you going to tackle next then, in terms of both bias and nuance?

On the fairness and bias issue there are three big initiatives. One is just doing more of what we just launched. We have full sentence translation with genders, but only launched with Turkish to English. We want to improve the quality of that and expand to more languages. We did single word for some languages...

A second area is document translation. This is where there's bias, but it requires a very different response. For example if you take a Wikipedia article about a woman in another language and translate to English, most likely you will see a lot of pronouns in English with he and him. That happens because you will get a sentence that's translated in isolation, and the source language won't make clear the gender, and so more often than not you will get he / him added in as default. Now, that's a particularly offensive thing when you get it wrong, but the way to address that is completely different to what we launched last year. In this example it's possible to get the right answer simply from the context [of the rest of the document]. So that's a research and engineering problem to fix that.
Something curious that happened last year with Google Translate was people discovering that if you inputted nonsense words it would spit out snippets of religious text. It became a slightly viral phenomenon, with people projecting all sorts of bizarre interpretations onto it. What did you make of it all?
"The third area is addressing gender neutral language patterns."

The third area is addressing gender neutral language patterns. We're in the middle of a lot of cultural turbulence right now, not just in English but in many, many languages that are gendered. There are emerging movements around the world to create gender neutral language, and we get a lot of inquiries from users about when we are going to address that. The example often cited is the singular use of 'they' in English. It's increasingly common even if it's not actually accepted in textbooks and style guides, referring to someone by saying 'they are' as opposed to 'he is' or 'she is'. This is also happening in Spanish, French, many other languages. Really, the rules are changing so fast that even experts can't keep up.

I wasn't surprised it happened, but I was at the level of interest in people's response. [And at] the conspiracy type stuff, about Google encoding mysterious messages about secret religions, space aliens, and what have you. What it really illustrates, though, is a general problem with machine learning models, that when they get unexpected input they behave in unexpected ways. This is a problem we're addressing, so that if you have a nonsensical input, it won't produce sensicalinput.
That's fascinating. It reminds me of the influence of the King James Bible on English; how this translation from the 17th century is the source of so many phrases we use today. Do similar things happen with Google Translate? Are there any odd sources of phrasing in your training banks? So, Google Translate is particularly interesting as, at a time where AI is getting into trouble because of how and where it's being deployed, everyone agrees that translation is beneficial and relatively unproblematic. It's utopian, even. What do you think Google's motivation for funding translation is?
But why did it happen? I don't believe you ever offered an explanation on the record.

Usually it's because the language you're translating to had a lot of religious text in the training data. For every language pair we have, we train using whatever we can find on the world wide web. So the typical behavior of these models is that if it gets gibberish in, it picks out something that's common in the training data on the target side, and for many of these low-resource languages - where there's not a lot of text translated on the web for us to draw on - what is produced often happens to be religious.
Do you think that's possible, though, to solve translation? There was a recent article in The Atlantic by the famous professor of cognition, Douglas Hofstadter, pointing out the "shallowness" of Google Translate. What did you make of his critiques?
Squeeze Google Translate too hard and training data spills out

Some languages, the first translated material we found were translations of the Bible. We take whatever we can get and that's usually fine, but in a case where gibberish goes in, often this is the result. If the underlying translation data had been legal documents, the model would have produced legalese; if it was aircraft flight instruction manuals, it would have produced aircraft flight instructions.

Well, sometimes we get strange things coming from internet forums; like, sometimes slang from gaming forums or gaming sites. That can happen! With the larger languages we have more diverse training data, but yes, sometimes you get rather interesting slang from all corners of the internet. I'm afraid no specific examples come to mind right now...

We're a fairly idealist company and I think the Translate team has more than its fair share of idealists. We work hard to make sure what you said remains true, which is why it's important to fight bias and look for misused translation that could be harmful.

But why does Google invest in that? We get asked that a lot and the answer is easy. We say our mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible, and that 'universally accessible' part is very, very far from achieved. As long as most of the world cannot read the information online, it's not universally accessible. Google, to achieve its core mission, needs to solve translation, and I think the founders recognized that more than a decade ago.

It was fair and true what he pointed out. There are these issues. But they're not really at the forefront of our concern, because in reality they occur only a small percentage of the time in translations we see. When we look at typical texts that people try to translate, those aren't the big issues right now. But he's certainly right that to really solve translation and be able to translate at the level of a skilled professional whose knowledge about a domain and its linguistic issue, some major breakthroughs are needed. Just learning from examples of parallel text will not get you to those last few percentages of use cases.

It's been said for a long time that translation is an AI complete problem, meaning that to fully solve translation you need to fully solve AI. And I think that's true. But you can get to a very high percentage of problems solved, and we are filling out that space right now.

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Google's head of translation on fighting bias in language and why AI loves religious texts

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Free, easy, and instant translation is one of those perks of 21st century living that we often forget about. And if you live in the West, it's probably Google that provides this service. We interviewed the head of Google Translate, Macduff Hughes, to talk about translation, AI, bias, and more.

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Visual effects company MPC reveals modern movie magic

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Visual effects company MPC reveals modern movie magic

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Even the most ardent fan of Disney's 1967 classic The Jungle Book has to admit the 2016 reboot did an amazing job of transporting the familiar animated story into a live-action setting. In 2019, Disney plans to repeat the trick by retelling the story of The Lion King in a living, breathing Pride Lands, filled with plants and animals and trees so real you could almost reach out and touch them.

Except neither the jungle nor the Pride Lands, no matter how "real" they look, are real at all. The leaves, the trees, the waterfalls -- In The Jungle Book, all but the young man-cub Mowgli are digital apparitions, conjured with the cutting-edge movie magic of visual effects.

When thinking about movie effects, most people think of the term special effects. But special effects refers to things that are physically done on set while filming, as actors interact with animatronic puppets, miniature models or real explosions.

Visual effects, on the other hand, are effects applied to the movie after it's been filmed. In the past, we enjoyed Ray Harryhausen's stop-motion puppets; in the digital age, specialized animation software creates astonishingly lifelike computer-generated (CG) characters like Caesar in Planet of the Apes, Thanos in Avengers: Infinity War and the digitally created animal casts of The Jungle Book and The Lion King.

Even outside of the fantasy genre, visual effects are a huge part of the movie business. "The process of making a film is now very intertwined with visual effects," says Adam Valdez, who collected an Academy Award for visual effects for The Jungle Book on behalf of his team at effect house Moving Picture Company (MPC). "Even dramas and comedies, surprisingly enough, are starting to have a lot of visual effects work."

Modern blockbusters are filled with so many visual effects that each production usually spreads the work across multiple companies, like MPC, Industrial Light and Magic, Weta, Framestore and Digital Domain to name just a few. To see how these companies conjure and combine effects, I visited MPC's London studios to meet Valdez and Richard Stammers, another visual effects supervisor, and meet the animators who bring digital lions and tigers and bears to life while software developers build proprietary apps to accurately mimic the chaos and debris of explosions, tidal waves and spaceships crashing into skyscrapers.

Greenlight: Preproduction

The work for any film starts with preproduction. "Boringly enough, we start with money," Valdez says. "The cost of running this is very high. There are a lot of humans involved and a lot of computer power, so you need good planning and good structure to meet your crazy deadline."

In studios around the world, MPC has 18 different departments of digital experts who build virtual environments, research animal anatomy to animate characters from the inside out and combine digital elements with real footage to create a photo-realistic final image. A single film can employ hundreds of people for a couple of years to produce the finished shots, but even a smaller scene can involve months of work and dozens of artists. MPC labored for a year just to create a single character for Blade Runner 2049, Rachael, who was onscreen for less than 90 seconds.

Valdez says the solutions vary across each production, which filmmakers refer to as a "show."

"Every show seems to throw little curveballs and new ideas at us and we have to tailor our tools and our methodology to that specific project," he says. "It's never really assembly-line."

Visual effects considerations increasingly inform how even the film's physical sets are constructed and how the actors are filmed. In one scene in The Jungle Book, Mowgli walks along the gnarled branch of a tree while talking to the panther Bagheera. On the green-screen soundstage, the crew built and lit a lime-green Styrofoam model of the branch for the actor to walk along. His movements, his eye contact with Bagheera, and the lights and shadows all had to match the carefully planned digital elements that would be added later in the resulting footage.

It can be hard to imagine how a set will work if it only exists in the computer, so filmmakers are using the latest virtual reality technology to step inside their virtual locations. Steven Spielberg, for example, donned a VR headset to step inside the CG environments created for Ready Player One so he could work out the shots he wanted just like he would walking around a real soundstage.

Creating a CG environment can cost as much as building a real set, but the real work is in making a digital location look photo-realistic. "If it can be built for real, build it for real," Stammers says. "Because it'll look real."

The visual effects budget is better reserved for conjuring things that can't be done in real life. But this isn't limited to just fantastical contrivances like death-defying stunts, vast spaceships or talking tigers. Visual effects are increasingly employed for more prosaic purposes, like creating a scene that takes place at twilight -- hard to shoot in real life as you get only a short amount of actual twilight each day -- and painting out anachronistic features of a period film's location, like signs and aerials.

Ready for the close-up: Production

Once the preproduction plan is in place, principal photography begins. This is the traditional movie shoot, when walking, talking actors are filmed on real sets or against green-screen backdrops. This original footage is the starting point of the visual effects (VFX) team's workflow, known as the pipeline.

The visual effects supervisors from each company join the director, cinematographer and the rest of the crew on set. They must evaluate how each clean, unaltered shot -- known as a "plate" -- will go together with the digitally created elements that will be added later.

Collecting reference shots is also critical. When developing a digital creature, for example, the team will often photograph a puppet, known as a maquette, to see how the lighting plays across its angles and surfaces. They also photograph a silver ball that reflects the entire set in its shiny surface to record the position of the lights, and a chrome ball to record the intensity of the lights.

It's crucial that even the tiniest details of the digital elements match the real footage. To accurately re-create sets and locations later, the VFX team also scans the spaces using various techniques, including laser-pulsing lidar to measure distances and photogrammetry to map the space from photographs taken at different angles. "We tend to photograph everything around us because we never know exactly what we're going to have to re-create," Valdez says.

Other techniques include digital set extension, where a VFX team makes a small set appear bigger by adding a CG background, and performance capture, in which an actor dons a skin-tight outfit covered with tracking markers to act out a CG character's role. The VFX teams use the tracking markers as reference points to later animate the character over the actor's movements.

Despite all the planning, there still needs to be room for the actors and director to try different things on set, such as ad-libbing lines or adjusting their performance. What's important is that even when the creative process is a little loose, technical considerations like the actors' eyelines remain consistent. It may sound trivial, but such barely perceptible details are crucial to selling the illusion of fantastical images like a real person talking with an animal -- and if these details aren't right, viewers quickly notice something's off, even if they can't quite put a finger on what it might be.

In the end the VFX teams must find the delicate balance between looking photo-realistic and, well, looking cool. "You want an explosion that has some character," Valdez says. "It's not simple to both make it look realistic and control aesthetic aspects."

And cut: Postproduction

Even while principal photography is happening on set, the army of animators back at MPC is building CG characters and environments, known as assets.

When developing a digital character, the VFX team begins by rigging a digital skeleton with joints that flex realistically to make sure the CG character moves in a convincing way. They then model layers of muscle, skin and fur or hair as necessary. At each stage, a low-resolution version is animated in basic movements like walking and running to quickly check if it looks convincing. All of this work can take months, especially for characters who will have a lot of screen time. Animating hair or fur is particularly problematic, as each individual strand of hair is a piece of geometry in the software.

After shooting is finished, the VFX team sets about adjusting the footage. They might have to remove tracking markers, paint out crew members reflected in helmets and windows or add details such as flames, smoke or wildlife.

One of the first postproduction priorities is the matchmove process, which involves copying real camera movement for each shot into the computer. The goal: When the real camera pans across the actors standing on a green-screen set, the matchmove software matches the panning movement by sweeping across the digital backdrop in the same way.

"If the camera's handheld and moving around, then we have to copy that movement," Stammers says, wobbling his hand to mimic a roaming camera. "It's a very underrated but incredibly important part of the process."

Among the things that need to look real are elements like fire, smoke or clouds of dust, generated by specialised software algorithms. Many VFX companies develop their own software to simulate these natural phenomena. Among the proprietary software developed by MPC is Furtility, which simulates fur and fibre; Kali, which simulates destruction and crumpling wreckage; and Alice, which brings huge crowds of people to life.

When everybody is happy with the shots, it's time to create the final high-resolution version we'll see onscreen. Known as rendering, this process takes a huge amount of time and computing power to add all the detail required for cinema screens. "Rendering time is expensive," Stammers says. "You have to be quite frugal with how and when you use it. We have an enormous render farm -- it allows us thousands and thousands of render hours every night."

Because of the time and cost involved, only when everything is absolutely approved by the director will the shots be completely rendered. Stammers points to the hugely complex simulated waves for Ridley Scott's Egyptian epic Exodus: Gods and Kings, which had to go through multiple stages of rendering. "From the person setting off the first simulation to us getting the final render might be three to five days," he recalls. "So you've got to think about it like, 'Am I really, really sure?'"

That's a wrap

The final stage in the visual effects pipeline is the combination of all the elements, real and digital, to create the final shot. Stammers likens this crucial final process, known as compositing, to assembling a jigsaw puzzle. "You can make or break a shot in compositing," he says.

Compositors see whether the lighting on a character in the foreground truly matches the background, or whether their CG elements accurately match the real footage down to the imperfections of the camera lens. Fittingly, the rooms where MPC's compositing team works are sometimes kept in somber semidarkness so they can see the finished shots as the audience will see them.

Artists and compositors toiling away on shots from films are not the only people working at effects companies like MPC. The company also has a research and development team developing bespoke software, and a training academy teaching young animators how to create photo-realistic effects.

At the end of the pipeline is the big screen. It's there, in movie theaters and cinemas across the world, that filmgoers are dazzled by the real magic of visual effects: their power to make the unreal more real than ever.
This story appears in the Fall 2018 edition of CNET Magazine. For other magazine stories, click here.
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Visual effects company MPC reveals modern movie magic

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Even the most ardent fan of Disney's 1967 classic The Jungle Book has to admit the 2016 reboot did an amazing job of transporting the familiar animated story into a live-action setting.

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https://techcrunch.com/2018/10/22/the-future-of-photography-is-code/

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Artificial Intelligence and the future of smartphone photography

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Artificial Intelligence and the future of smartphone photography

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https://www.zdnet.com/article/artificial-intelligence-and-the-future-of-smartphone-photography/

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Someday Solar Energy Will Be Nearly Free

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Someday Solar Energy Will Be Nearly Free

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On April 22, 2019 - Earth Day - I decided to check out the California ISO's (CAISO) web page at 1:15 in the afternoon.Here's what I found:Total system demand was 22,107 megawatts (MW).That load was being served by 13,133 MW of renewables, including 1,657 MW of wind and an impressive 9,913 MW of solar energy.

These enormous amounts of renewables are increasingly becoming the norm in California, and while those numbers may raise some peoples' eyebrows, they don't surprise Thomas Buttgenbach, CEO of 8minutenergy.His company is the largest private developer of solar projects in the U.S., with a project portfolio of over 14,000 MW that includes the 800 MW Mount Signal project in California's Imperial Valley.
The Genesis of 8minutenergy
Buttgenbach, a German-born physicist didn't start out in renewable energy.He began his career in fusion technology but eventually left because he feared for its commercially viability.He then migrated to physics and astronomy, before working for McKinsey as a consultant in Europe and the U.S., then moving into large-scale real estate development and eventually into investment banking, which came to an end in the crash of 2008.

His is a resume perfectly tailored for utility-scale solar: A combination of backgrounds in fusion, astronomy, analytical consulting, real estate, and finance would ultimately appear to lead nowhere else but to a solar company.

The market bust of 2008 caused Buttgenbach to make a significant career shift, just as Germany was embarking on its national EnergieWende.He and former business partner Martin Hermann started 8minutenergy (eight minutes is the amount of time it takes for sunlight to reach the earth) at a time when prices of panels, racks, and inverters (as well as soft costs) were relatively high.However, the economies of scale in solar equipment manufacturing, driven initially by Germany - with other countries also jumping in over time - helped technologies to rapidly mature while supply chains simultaneously grew more efficient, so that today solar can deliver some of the cheapest electrons in the market.
Fossil-Fired Peaking Plants In A Losing Battle
Today, Buttgenbach is confident that costs will continue to decline so that even the eventual loss of the federal Investment Tax Credit will do little to slow down solar energy's long-term ascendance.Then if you add energy storage to the mix, he says, "you can now really solve a lot of problems," eventually eliminating the need to build new fossil-fueled generation.

In fact, Buttgenbach asserts that in America's sunniest climates, a combination of solar and storage today can supply electricity more cost-effectively than new gas-fired generation, including high efficiency natural gas combined-cycle plants.

The first fossil plants to lose in the competitive bidding processes will be the peaking plants in the southern and western states where there is a combination of optimal solar irradiance, access to grid interconnections, and land suitable for solar.In those locations, he declares, "It's not a question of if, but when."

Buttgenach sees the solar revolution as having various stages: the first stage is in markets with minimal solar penetration.There, it's a simple matter of solar dumping highly cost-effective electricity - at near zero marginal cost - into the grid.This eventually reduces the overall utilization of existing fossil plants and deteriorating economics, as they sell increasingly fewer megawatt-hours, with declining capacity factors eventually forcing plant retirements.

Buttgenbach says the next development in sunny areas is the rapid growth of solar plus storage facilities. With storage and smart inverters, the solar resource can be proactively manipulated, and operators can control how quickly the solar resources ramp up or down.With increasing amounts of energy storage, the California duck curve becomes less of an issue, and "you can cut the head, and in some cases the tail, off the duck" he says.
Different Applications For Different Environments And Use Cases
8minutenergy uses different solar technology for different applications, for two reasons.First, the company prefers to avoid the risk of being tied to any single company or technology in a rapidly evolving industry.Second, certain technologies are better suited for specific environments.For example, monocrystalline silicon works very well in the dry desert, but in a more humid environment with a different quality of light, thin film performs better."Every plant," Buttgenbach says "is designed for the location and specific characteristics of the site." Today, his company isn't building any projects under 200 MW.

Buttgenbach asserts that his company actively manages these facilities and drives its power plants much harder than most competitors, with a focus on the customer and the market context.It's not a one-size-fits-all approach.For example, if selling to a balancing authority concerned about power quality and overall grid conditions, the company will focus on issues such as stability, ramp rates, and overall power quality.In such cases, the company may invest more in smart inverters that can react quickly to frequency signals and manage voltage.

By contrast, when selling into a huge wholesale market like Texas, "you are purely looking at economics and where prices are best."There, customers are buying simply "because it is the cheapest form of generation today. That's when you see the hockey stick, and not a linear extrapolation...it gets bigger than anybody thought once you hit that technical inflection on the cost curve."
Integrating Increasing Amounts of Solar Into Power Grids
What about the question of reliability and the ability to produce during extended periods of clouds and precipitation?Buttgenbach comments that we haven't yet pushed the envelope of possibilities.First, he comments, solar is relatively easy to predict, so one can plan around its output, "I can tell you now within 1% how much output we will have on July 4 th.That's an accuracy that not even a gas turbine can offer.We are guaranteeing reliability at 99% and gas turbines would have a hard time with that."

Even on a cloudy day, he points out solar panels still produce power.And solar has gotten so cheap today that it's now in the $20 per MWh range, well below the cost of fossil-fired alternatives.This means,

you can easily oversize the solar plant and design the system in a way that even on a cloudy day you can serve your load simply by oversizing it.Then you add storage and you end up with a very cost-effective system that can easily handle any kind of weather impact.You know well in advance, and you can design around that.

Within a couple of decades, he predicts "we will integrate the grid around renewables...mostly solar because it's much easier from an engineering perspective to design around solar where you have high predictability."If one looks ahead 10 to 20 years, Butttgenbach projects, "solar generation becomes nearly free."As a result, it becomes economically beneficial to design the entire system around those cheap electrons.The focus then shifts to storage costs, though he notes, there will obviously be a transition period.

That's great for southern California and Texas, where there's plenty of solar fuel, but what about the northern climates?Buttgenbach responds with the query,

How many oranges do we grow in Michigan?The answer is none.We have a freeway system to bring them up there. Why can't we get transmission from Arizona to Michigan?...HVDC losses are only 1.5% over 1000 miles...The technology is there but it's hard right now for political reasons and the monopolies of lots of utilities.

A New Model Emerges
At the same time, he observes, as cost curves keep on coming down, the line of cost- effective solar plus storage replacing conventional generation will keep migrating northwards.

It won't take 50 years.It will probably be 10-20 years before that new gas plant in Michigan is no longer economical...This is happening all over the southern part of the U.S., and the Mason Dixon line is going to move up. It's a complete change on what's going on in energy markets and will fundamentally change the way we think about power.

When Buttgenbach peers into the future, he sees an analogy to the communications industry.These days with cellphones, he says

nobody cares about the minutes or gigabytes you use.We will see a similar transition- you will start paying for access to the grid and how big the pipe is.How many kilowatt-hours go through is less important, because the cost of incremental KWhs is close to zero and real costs are transmission and distribution and all the overhead. This fundamentally changes the way we think about power and makes clean reliable energy accessible to the entire population.

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CEO of 8minutenergy: Someday Solar Energy Will Be Nearly Free

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On April 22, 2019 - Earth Day - I decided to check out the California ISO's (CAISO) web page at 1:15 in the afternoon.Here's what I found:Total system demand was 22,107 megawatts (MW).That load was being served by 13,133 MW of renewables, including 1,657 MW of wind and an impressive 9,913 MW of solar energy.

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BECOME YOUR VERY OWN COACH WITH THESE 5 ATHLETIC GADGETS

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BECOME YOUR VERY OWN COACH WITH THESE 5 ATHLETIC GADGETS

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There was a time when your athletic coach showed up with a clipboard, a cigar, and an 8-cylinder burgundy Econoline.

Now, however, athletes can employ a variety of wearable body sensors to get useful coaching advice, as companion apps provide on-screen analysis for tracking and improving their progress. And if competitors want the valuable perspective of a human coach, these devices can also send daily workout information to a pro automatically.

To see what's possible, I teamed up with a few testers, and we instrumented ourselves with five devices all over the body. We tried out sensors that attach to the upper thigh, calf, and shoelaces, as well as inside a sneaker's sole. These various devices sense everything from muscle oxygen levels to foot asymmetries.

In our testing, these devices uncovered data that would certainly prove useful to both beginners and seasoned competitors. For instance, two of the hardest things for a beginning runner to learn are the correct pace and the proper form. (Experienced runners trying to gently ramp up their training could benefit from knowing these things too.) Some of these devices provided such information accurately.

Also, it was just damn cool for us exercise geeks to gather data traditionally only collected in clinics and laboratories with expensive, exhausting, and painful sessions. After two months of testing, we likely had more biometric data stored on a single phone than was kept on the entire 1976 Olympic track team-all with no coaches, clipboards, or sketchy vans.

Humon Hex

Cycling and running, at their most basic, involve mixing sugar and oxygen inside the muscle to release energy. When the muscle runs out of energy, that's when you bonk. Such a reductive description might take some of the romance out of a beautiful hill ride, but the sugar/oxygen equation makes this device from the Cambridge, Massachusetts startup Humon incredibly helpful for finding the perfect race pace.

The Humon Hex is an unusual sensor that straps around the upper thigh, like a bride's garter or those nasty self-torture devices in the Dan Browne novels. It shines powerful LED lights into the muscle tissue and tracks oxygen saturation there, displaying it as a percentage on a Garmin watch or on your phone's screen. The only way athletes usually get this data in real time is with an expensive lab test often involving continuous blood draws while exercising.

The Hex that was provided was a beta unit-when it comes out this summer, the price will be $295, and preorders are $195. The testers and I found it worked well, offering useful data about a runner or cyclist's body. (As a beta, it was also full of glitches.) The Hex's value is in showing trends, not data points. For instance, we had our test subject intentionally run 1,500 meters at a pace too fast for his fitness level. Athletes who push too hard typically go along feeling pretty good until they don't: the legs become heavy oaken timbers and the lungs feel like leaky fireplace bellows. Muscle oxygen heads steeply downward, presaging entry beyond what's called "lactate threshold," when the desire to keep running gives way to the desire to crumple into a ball.

During the second minute of this intentionally stressful run, the Hex reported a steep decline in O2. The companion app (iOS and Android) charts a summary of the run, showing the points where the runner was holding a sustainable pace, when a bonk was imminent, and when they were running at a good recovery pace. Knowing this, the runner could plan shorter repetitions at those higher, unsustainable paces, or maintain a slower pace for tempo workouts and intervals.

For the tricky work of understanding what hard exercise is doing deep inside the body in the heat of competition, Hex promises better reliability than heart rate monitors or other low-cost methods. The battery life of the leg sensor is generous, offering two full weeks of workouts without a charge. On the downside, the colorful screens of the beta software are too confusing to get useful real-time information at a glance-it's more useful for studying overall workout summaries. The app is also supposed to dole out personal advice, but this feature is not available yet.

Stryd

This small plastic nugget ($199) attaches to a runner's shoelaces and measures power-the number of watts the runner is outputting with every step. In our tests, we found the Stryd useful for figuring out the difficulty of a run, regardless of the surface or hills. The device also provided a test run for the track to create appropriate running zones for slow and fast workouts.

Once we had our zones, we found the sensor offered a simple way to stick to a specific intensity or effort level. Other methods have always been challenging for runners; pace varies too much depending on hills, and heart rate can be unreliable depending on outside temperature, hydration levels, or other body conditions (like hangovers). The Stryd displays data on Garmin, Suunto, and other watches, as well as the app on the phone screen.

Two years ago, I tested the previous version of Stryd's technology. The company has since added new data fields to help runners critique and improve their form. Among the new measures are "form power" and "leg spring stiffness." Form power describes how much energy the runner is putting into holding their form together in a run-it usually increases at the end of a race. The app also displays "leg spring stiffness", or the energy a runner can recycle with each stride. (In bad marathon performances, runners often start with a springy, bouncy stride and end 26 miles later in a flat shuffle.) In the app, Stryd offers workout plans to improve leg spring stiffness in races, providing guidance on such efforts core and leg strengthening exercises.

In our tests, we could see on the app's graphs how our tester's leg spring stiffness decreased while his form power increased as he fell apart in the last minute of a hard mile time trial. At that point, he said, he stopped paying attention to his form and just wanted to finish.

Kinematix Tune

Tune ($200) collects simple data about a runner's stride and offers clear advice on how to improve it. The device consists of an insole for your running shoe with four pressure sensors. Each time you land, the sensors measure what part of your foot strikes first, how long your foot remains on the ground, and when it leaves the ground for the next stride.

After a few runs, the Tune app shows in-depth form data about a runner's body and offers upper-body, core, and leg strength workouts to improve what it sees as deficiencies. It told our tester to do step raises, glute bridges, and sumo squats, offering great videos to help correct form. The device has weeks and weeks of battery life, though you have to carry your phone with you on the run to glean its insight. (There are apps for iOS and Android.)

Tune correctly diagnosed an imbalance to our tester's right foot in each stride. He had previously been to a kinesiology lab at the University of Massachusetts where a footwear researcher, using a force plate and video analysis, showed that his forefoot kind of stabs the ground with each stride. His left foot lands in a typical manner and elegantly rolls into the flight phase. Tune shows some of the same data. For a consumer device, this is certainly useful, though it's unclear whether the often reductive advice from Kinematix could fit all runners. For instance, the app often suggests switching gradually from a heel strike to a forefoot strike. The app points out, "Heel striking is not negative if your foot strike is close to your body or underneath your center of gravity." But it's tricky science and people shouldn't be making these decisions based on a simple app. One hopes that in wanting to help runners improve their form, Kinematix first does no harm.

RunScribe Pro

The testers and I ran for a few weeks with the RunScribe Pro ($199), a pair of foot pods you attach to your shoes. They promise to diagnose running form issues, but we found they weren't worth the hassle. The devices work much like the Kinematix Tune, but the data offered was much more obscure and was not placed in the context of how to fix the problem.

One feature we liked: The Pro is the only device that provides analysis in comparison with data from the crowd; in the same way it's always interesting to see the TurboTax visualizations of how your taxes compare with those of other Americans, it was nice to see a form comparison with thousands of other runners. It's interesting to learn, for instance, that compared with all other RunScribe customers, our tester had higher running efficiency and lower impact.

As with the Tune, our tester learned of a significant imbalance in his right foot while running. The RunScribe device, however, provided less context with its confusing array of charts and data points in the app. (There are apps for iOS and Android.)

BSX Insight

BSX Insight ($370 for the cycling version, $300 for running) takes oxygen saturation readings from a leg muscle to measure an athlete's fitness level. The basic science is similar to the Humon Hex, but the Insight takes data from a sleeve worn around the calf. And instead of offering real-time data, it leads the athlete through a self-test of running or biking through increasingly harder zones. After that, the app spits out a simple chart for one's workout zones. It does offer real-time feedback in terms of oxygen consumption and hemoglobin, but not in a way that we found easily understandable during a run.

Our tester went through the test workout, running at various paces with the calf-sleeve wrapped around his leg. The resulting chart in the app (iOS and Android versions are available) showed that he should try to complete conditioning runs at no faster than a 7:53 pace and tempo runs no faster than 6:23. In contrast, our tests using a heart rate strap showed that heart rate didn't offer personalized exercise zones with close to the same accuracy or detail.

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Become Your Very Own Coach With These 5 Athletic Gadgets

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There was a time when your athletic coach showed up with a clipboard, a cigar, and an 8-cylinder burgundy Econoline. Now, however, athletes can employ a variety of wearable body sensors to get useful coaching advice, as companion apps provide on-screen analysis for tracking and improving their progress.

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Adapted from The Unnatural World: The Race to Remake Civilization in Earth's Newest Age, by David Biello. Published by Scribner, a Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc. Copyright © 2016 by David Biello. Reprinted with permission.

The search is on for technologies that can pull carbon dioxide out of the air, thanks to a global push to limit such pollution and thus to limit global warming. The air we all breathe now boasts more than 400 parts per million of the colorless, odorless gas-more than at any point since Homo sapiens became a species.

To begin to slow or even reverse the rising concentration, new technology will be required, especially in a world in which entire governments continue to deny a global warming problem exists. There are a host of possibilities, from helping soils trap carbon to burying CO2 at sea, but a leading candidate to solve this carbon conundrum may be plastic.

Physicist Klaus Lackner at Arizona State University and his colleagues have stumbled upon a resin-typically used to purify water-that will greedily suck CO2 out of the air. When Lackner inserts a strip of plastic impregnated with particles of this resin, CO2 levels inside a test tank begin a steady march down.

A small prototype of an artificial tree that would use the resin to cleanse the sky sits atop a building on Arizona State campus in Phoenix. The plastic tree doesn't look much like vegetation: Thin strips of beige, wavy plastic stacked one atop another in a clear box hidden from the desert sun by a piece of plywood covered in a black cloth. In fact, the photovoltaic panel on a tall tripod standing beside this ungainly apparatus looks more like a tree. But the box shares one big thing in common with photosynthetic organisms, from a microscopic plankton to a towering redwood-it can suck CO2 out of the air.

The plastic tree is just one of a new wave of devices aimed at helping people get a handle on this outsized trash problem. Another prototype, this one using liquid chemicals instead of plastic, busily scours the air near Squamish, British Columbia, and yet another may soon cleanse the seemingly pristine mountain air of Switzerland.

And those are just the machines. A brewery for ethanol in Illinois could end up burying CO2, turning the manufacture of biofuel into a way to draw carbon out of the sky. Similar CO2-sucking biofuels could be made from everything from algae to kelp. Or people could use minerals that react with air to remove the gas.

Today the sky is an open sewer for such pollution. Smokestacks billow filth, tailpipes belch fumes, and all the while CO2 invisibly accumulates, warming the world. Burning fossil fuels, clearing forests, and plowing up grasslands have changed the composition of the air we all breathe.

Concentrations of carbon dioxide-the same molecule each of us exhales with every breath-have climbed from around 0.03 percent of the air in the sky to 0.04 percent over the last few centuries. That may not seem like much but a shift of 100 parts-per-million has been enough to raise global average temperatures by one degree Celsius already, with much more warming in store. And if geologic time is any guide, such a seemingly minute shift has been enough to change the Earth's climate from an ice age in which glaciers a mile thick cover the spot that presently hosts New York City, to the relatively balmy temperatures of today that allow a global capital to flourish seaside.

The ability of CO2 to trap heat has been known since the 19th century and rising levels of CO2 in the sky have been tracked since the 1950s. In 1992 the governments of the world agreed to do something about it but have spent the last several decades dithering and burning more and more fossil fuels rather than developing techniques and technologies to stop pollution and clean up the air.

As of now, civilization as a whole adds nearly 40 billion metric tons of CO2 to the air each year. Some of those molecules will still be in the air trapping heat more than 1,000 years from now-unless something is done to take them out.

Today, the ocean absorbs the bulk of the carbon liberated by people's penchant for fossil fuel burning. At the same time, trees and other plants have grown greener as a result of all that extra CO2. But the planet's plants may have peaked in their ability to absorb more CO2, and the more the oceans absorb the more acidic they get, which might be the worst impact of all that carbon trash.

Never one to think small, Lackner estimates that 10 million plastic trees could drop CO2 concentrations by 0.5 parts-per-million per year, putting the world on track to remove all the CO2 it has added over the course of the next few centuries. But to really think big and to counteract the 40 billion metric tons of CO2 dumped each year would require more like 100 million plastic trees. For comparison, people (and robots) make roughly 80 million cars per year presently.

Those 100 million plastic trees would also consume a lot of electricity and water, among other things, and that's if the resin works as well as hoped. Then there's the challenge of cost. An estimate from the American Physical Society suggests capturing CO2 from the air might cost roughly $600 per metric ton, which makes an artificial tree a luxury good if used to pull 1.5 trillion metric tons of greenhouse gas out of the atmosphere in order to reduce concentrations by 0.01 percent.

That deployment would just pick up the trash. All that carbon has to go somewhere. The best bet for disposal may be to bury it back underground just like all those fossil fuels. Or more energy can be applied to all that captured CO2 to transform it back into fuels like oil or ethanol-an opportunity to endlessly reuse and recycle the carbon if a cheap, abundant, clean energy source can be found and used.

The world needs people like Lackner to engineer through invention another Carboniferous period, a time hundreds of millions of years ago when swampy forests enabled vast amounts of carbon to be buried as the dirty black rock we now call coal. Our enterprising species dug up this coal-and oil and natural gas-and liberated the carbon inside by burning these fossil fuels. If this enterprising species doesn't clean up the resulting mess with technologies like plastic trees to pull carbon out of the air, we may find ourselves in an unhealthy Anthropocene with a climate too weird, wild and hot to handle.

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Adapted from The Unnatural World: The Race to Remake Civilization in Earth's Newest Age, by David Biello. Published by Scribner, a Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc. Copyright © 2016 by David Biello. Reprinted with permission.

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Could Air-Conditioning Fix Climate Change?

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Could Air-Conditioning Fix Climate Change?

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It is one of the great dilemmas of climate change: We take such comfort from air conditioning that worldwide energy consumption for that purpose has already tripled since 1990. It is on track to grow even faster through mid-century-and assuming fossil-fuel-fired power plants provide the electricity, that could cause enough carbon dioxide emissions to warm the planet by another deadly half-degree Celsius.

A paper published Tuesday in the Nature Communications proposes a partial remedy: Heating, ventilation and air conditioning (or HVAC) systems move a lot of air. They can replace the entire air volume in an office building five or 10 times an hour. Machines that capture carbon dioxide from the atmosphere-a developing fix for climate change-also depend on moving large volumes of air. So why not save energy by tacking the carbon capture machine onto the air conditioner?

This futuristic proposal, from a team led by chemical engineer Roland Dittmeyer at Germany's Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, goes even further. The researchers imagine a system of modular components, powered by renewable energy, that would not just extract carbon dioxide and water from the air. It would also convert them into hydrogen, and then use a multistep chemical process to transform that hydrogen into liquid hydrocarbon fuels. The result: "Personalized, localized and distributed, synthetic oil wells" in buildings or neighborhoods, the authors write. "The envisioned model of 'crowd oil' from solar refineries, akin to 'crowd electricity' from solar panels," would enable people "to take control and collectively manage global warming and climate change, rather than depending on the fossil power industrial behemoths."

The research group has already developed an experimental model that can complete several key steps of the process, Dittmeyer says, adding, "The plan in two or three years is to have the first experimental showcase where I can show you a bottle of hydrocarbon fuel from carbon dioxide captured in an air conditioning unit."

Neither Dittmeyer nor co-author Geoffrey Ozin, a chemical engineer at the University of Toronto, would predict how long it might take before building owners could purchase and install such units. But Ozin claims much of the necessary technology is already commercially available. He says the carbon capture equipment could come from a Swiss "direct air capture" company called Climeworks, and the electrolyzers to convert carbon dioxide and water into hydrogen are available from Siemens, Hydrogenics or other companies. "And you use Roland's amazing microstructure catalytic reactors, which convert the hydrogen and carbon dioxide into a synthetic fuel," he adds. Those reactors are being brought to market by the German company Ineratec, a spinoff from Dittmeyer's research. Because the system would rely on advanced forms of solar energy, Ozin thinks of the result as "photosynthetic buildings."

The authors calculate that applying this system to the HVAC in one of Europe's tallest skyscrapers, the MesseTurm, or Trade Fair Tower, in Frankfurt, would extract and convert enough carbon dioxide to yield at least 2,000 metric tons (660,000 U.S. gallons) of fuel a year. The office space in the entire city of Frankfurt could yield more than 370,000 tons (122 million gallons) annually, they say.

"This is a wonderful concept-it made my day," says David Keith, a Harvard professor of applied physics and public policy, who was not involved in the new paper. He suggests that the best use for the resulting fuels would be to "help solve two of our biggest energy challenges": providing a carbon-neutral fuel to fill the gaps left by intermittent renewables such as wind and solar power, and providing fuel for "the hard-to-electrify parts of transportation and industry," such as airplanes, large trucks and steel- or cement-making. Keith is already targeting some of these markets through Carbon Engineering, a company he founded focused on direct air capture of carbon dioxide for large-scale liquid fuel production. But he says he is "deeply skeptical" about doing it on a distributed building or neighborhood basis. "Economies of scale can't be wished away. There's a reason we have huge wind turbines," he says-and a reason we do not have backyard all-in-one pulp-and-paper mills for disposing of our yard wastes. He believes it is simply "faster and cheaper" to take carbon dioxide from the air and turn it into fuel "by doing it an appropriate scale."

Other scientists who were not involved in the new paper note two other potential problems. "The idea that Roland has presented is an interesting one," says Jennifer Wilcox, a chemical engineer at Worcester Institute of Technology, "but more vetting needs to be done in order to determine the true potential of the approach." While it seems to make sense to take advantage of the air movement already being generated by HVAC systems, Wilcox says, building and operating the necessary fans is not what makes direct air capture systems so expensive. "The dominant capital cost," she says, "is the solid adsorbent materials"-that is, substances to which the carbon dioxide adheres-and the main energy cost is the heat needed to recover the carbon dioxide from these materials afterward. Moreover, she contends that any available solar or other carbon-free power source would be put to better use in replacing fossil-fuel-fired power plants, to reduce the amount of carbon dioxide getting into the air in the first place.

"The idea of converting captured carbon into liquid fuel is persuasive," says Matthew J. Realff, a chemical engineer at Georgia Institute of Technology. "We have an enormous investment in our liquid fuel infrastructure, and using that has tremendous value. You wouldn't have to build a whole new infrastructure. But this concept of doing it at the household level is a little bit fantastical"-partly because the gases involved (carbon monoxide and hydrogen) are toxic and explosive. The process to convert them to a liquid fuel is well understood, Realff says, but it produces a range of products that now typically get separated out in massive refineries-requiring huge amounts of energy. "It's possible that it could be worked out at the scale that is being proposed," he adds. "But we haven't done it at this point, and it may not turn out to be the most effective way from an economic perspective." There is, however, an unexpected benefit of direct air capture of carbon dioxide, says Realff, and it could help stimulate market acceptance of the technology: One reason office buildings replace their air so frequently is simply to protect workers from elevated levels of carbon dioxide. His research suggests that capturing the carbon dioxide from the air stream may be one way to cut energy costs, by reducing the frequency of air changes.

Dittmeyer disputes the argument that thinking big is always better. He notes that small, modular plants are a trend in some areas of chemical engineering, "because they are more flexible and don't involve such a financial risk." He also anticipates that cost will become less of a barrier as governments face up to the urgency of achieving a climate solution, and as jurisdictions increasingly impose carbon taxes or mandate strict energy efficiency standards for buildings.

"Of course, it's a visionary perspective," he says, "it relies on this idea of a decentralized product empowering people, not leaving it to industry. Industrial players observe the situation, but as long as there is no profit in the short term, they won't do anything. If we have the technology that is safe and affordable, though maybe not as cheap, we can generate some momentum" among individuals, much as happened in the early stages of the solar industry. "And then I would expect the industrial parties to act, too."

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Could Air Conditioning Fix Climate Change?

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It is one of the great dilemmas of climate change: We take such comfort from air conditioning that worldwide energy consumption for that purpose has already tripled since 1990. It is on track to grow even faster through mid-century-and assuming fossil-fuel-fired power plants provide the electricity, that could cause enough carbon dioxide emissions to warm the planet by another deadly half-degree Celsius.

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Could a computer ever create better art than a human?

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Could a computer ever create better art than a human?

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Last year a portrait of Edmond Belamy sold for $432,000 (£337,000).

A bit steep, you might think, for a picture of someone you've never heard of. And you won't have heard of the artist either, as the picture was created by an algorithm drawing on a data set of 15,000 portraits painted between the 14th and 20th Centuries.

And to be honest, it's a bit rubbish.

The sale, which astonished auction house Christie's, raised many important questions. Can a computer, devoid of human emotion, ever be truly creative? Is this portrait really art? Does any of that matter if people are prepared to pay for it?

And as artificial intelligence evolves and eventually perhaps reaches or surpasses human level intelligence, what will this mean for human artists and the creative industries in general?

Algorithms have already created artworks, poems, and pieces of music, but are they merely mimicking rather than creating? Cognitive neuroscientist Romy Lorenz says a lot depends on how we define creativity.

If creativity means finding completely new ways to solve problems, then AI has already achieved that, she argues, citing Google's DeepMind subsidiary.

In 2017, one of DeepMind's AI programmes beat the world's number one player of Go, an ancient and highly complex Chinese board game, after apparently mastering creative new moves and innovative strategies within days.

"Google would say that was creativity - new ways of finding solutions that it was not taught," she says.

But is art more than just creative problem-solving?
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Games, particularly those which take place within virtual worlds, have been the perfect setting for AI to solve problems creatively.

But asking an algorithm to create without any human input at all actually yields quite boring results, argues New York-based professor of computer science, Julian Togelius.

He cites Kate Compton's "10,000 bowls of oatmeal" problem, which suggests that while algorithms can now create infinite worlds, these can be tedious for humans to play in.

An example, he suggests, was the hotly-anticipated release of space exploration game No Man's Sky, which offered 18 quintillion algorithmically-generated planets to explore.

"In No Man's Sky there are more places you could visit in a lifetime, with different flora and fauna. But that game has had mixed reviews - it's a technical masterpiece but it's not super interesting to play," he says.

"The question is, can your algorithm generate a world that has meaning to it, and that is particular to the player in terms of place or skill?

"These algorithms are amazing - they can do more and more. But there will always be things us humans want to put in. It's the power of the sensibility and intentionality of the human brain - that's what is hard [to recreate]."

Dr Lorenz points out that true artistic creativity differs from creative problem solving in that it requires a shift in perspective that machines do not appear to have the capacity for.

"Artistic creativity is about turning an introspective thought into a medium, whether it's a sculpture or a piece of music. It's about taking an abstract form and making it concrete.

"But AI has no internal world and it has no need to create its desires or fears."

So rather than letting AI take complete control, results seem to be far more fruitful when human artists work hand-in-hand with machines.

Musician and University of Sussex lecturer Dr Alice Eldridge suggests that we should treat AI as "just another tool that we have designed, like the wheel, or the combustion engine".

She has helped create a cello that uses a combination of acoustics, electrification and an adaptive algorithm that makes the instrument self-resonate; or essentially, play itself.

"With a classical cello you have to bring the instrument alive with a bow; a feedback cello is already singing, your job as a performer is to shape the sound - it's more like a dance than 'controlling' an instrument in the traditional way," she says.

"This creates a different way of thinking about, and designing our relationships with, musical instruments, and technology in general."

Mick Grierson, at the UAL Creative Computing Institute in London, believes advances in AI will "lead to better art, new types of artists and new mediums".

In 2016, Nordic band Sigur Rós used his software to create a constantly evolving version of one of their singles, which the band played on a 24-hour road trip around Iceland.

Individual musical elements of the song were fed through the software to make a song that, like a live performance, is subtly different with every repetition, and could respond to external prompts.

Innovative composer and producer Brian Eno, who has worked with Roxy Music, David Bowie and Coldplay amongst others, is also a big fan of using algorithms to create music that constantly changes.

Prof Grierson has also worked with Massive Attack on an AI reworking of their Mezzanine album, to mark its 20th anniversary. The album will be fed into a form of AI that teaches itself - a neural network - and visitors to an upcoming Barbican exhibition will be able to affect the resulting sound by their movements.

Massive Attack album stored in a painting using DNA

While AI could be seen as yet another threat to artists' livelihoods, he believes machines will never come close to competing.

"AI could be used to reduce human creativity by people who want to make money - but it's people [not technology] who are responsible for doing that.

"The technology is never going to be good enough to generate better culture than people who use it to create their own."
Follow Technology of Business editor Matthew Wall on Twitter and Facebooko

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Could a computer ever create better art than a human?

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Last year a portrait of Edmond Belamy sold for $432,000 (£337,000). A bit steep, you might think, for a picture of someone you've never heard of. And you won't have heard of the artist either, as the picture was created by an algorithm drawing on a data set of 15,000 portraits painted between the 14th and 20th Centuries.

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Folding smartphones

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Over the coming year, and beyond, we're going to see smartphone design as we know it evolve. Through the use of flexible screen technology, flexible batteries, and new ways of using established materials, the smartphone and tablet will become one. The end result is currently referred to as a folding smartphone, where a small, phone-sized device folds out to reveal a larger screen.

Many manufacturers are pushing to be among the first to launch one of these potentially groundbreaking products. We're excited about them, and we know you are too. Want to get ahead of the crowd and keep up to date with which companies are working on what?

We've pulled together all the announced folding smartphone plans, along with all the rumors.

Samsung has been working on a foldable smartphone for years, so when the Galaxy Fold was finally revealed at Galaxy Unpacked 2019, we were fairly sure we know what to expect.

But despite all the leaks and the rumors, Samsung's folding smartphone still blew us away. The style of fold is one of the most important parts of a folding smartphone, and Samsung has opted for a book-style fold, with a larger screen protected on the inside of the device. The Galaxy Fold has two AMOLED screens - the first, on the outside of the device, measures 4.6 inches, while the inside screen features a tablet-like 7.3-inch screen. A sophisticated hinge system ensures the device is able to fold and unfold quickly and easily.

The software is particularly impressive. The Galaxy Fold transfers your currently open apps onto the larger screen seamlessly - something Samsung calls app continuity - so you can instantly switch over to using Google Maps on a larger screen. That larger screen can also handle up to three simultaneous apps in split-screen, enabling an unprecedented level of multi-tasking. It comes with six cameras in total, and is powered by a 7nm processor, 12GB of RAM, 512GB of storage, and two batteries with a combined capacity of 4,380mAh.

Unfortunately, the price is very much at early-adopter levels - you're looking at a $1,980 price for the Galaxy Fold. However, it will also include 5G and LTE connections, making it a huge technological advancement for Samsung.

While Samsung may have beaten it to the punch, Huawei is hot on the Korean company's heels with the folding Huawei Mate X.

But while both phones fall under the folding phone "foldaphone" umbrella, the Mate X is definitely not a carbon copy of Samsung's Galaxy Fold. Instead of the Galaxy's inner book fold, the Mate X uses an outer fold that uses the smaller screen as part of the larger one. As such, there's technically only one screen here. But what a screen - despite the outer fold, there was no evidence of damage to the screen and no ripples, bumps, or imperfections.

The Falcon Hinge used in the Mate X is a mechanical one, and you'll need to push a button on the bar running down the side to open the device up. As such, it feels stiff in a high-quality way. For those of you worried about durability, Huawei claims the Mate X has been subjected to extensive drop-tests, and the screen has been tested to 100,000 folds. Unlike the Samsung Galaxy Fold, Huawei has let journalists take the Mate X in hand, which suggests Huawei's device may be closer to final than Samsung's, but time will tell on that front.

However, like the Galaxy Fold, the Mate X won't come cheap, and it's even more expensive than Samsung's phone. The Mate X looks to cost around $2,600. Like the Galaxy Fold, this is very much early adopter pricing, though the Mate X does also come with 5G support.

Despite being one of the few manufacturers with experience of flexible screens (the G Flex and the G Flex 2), LG hasn't gone for a traditional style of foldable phone. Instead, LG has revealed an accessory for the LG V50 ThinQ that allows you to attach a second screen, which can be folded into the device.

This second screen essentially functions as a cove case for the 5G-enabled LG V50 ThinQ, but instead of a front cover, it contains an additional 6.2-inch AMOLED screen. You'll be able to use this screen independently of the first, so you might be able to message someone while checking your position on Google Maps, watch Netflix while also checking social media, or even use it as a game controller, and the V50 will react intelligently to the presence of the second screen, allowing you to move apps over to it. It won't require any outside power either, as it's draw energy directly from the V50.

While it doesn't have the same "wow" factor as other folding phones, it still fulfills many of the same requirements. Pricing hasn't been announced yet, but we hope it comes cheaper than other folding phones.

While it wasn't able to show off any specific finalized devices, TCL (makers of Alcatel and BlackBerry phones) was able to show off some seriously impressive prototype foldable phones at MWC 2019. Using the company's DragonHinge, each of the prototypes seemed to show off a different way of folding a phone, from book-style folds like the Galaxy Fold to screens that folded up like a retro flip phone.

However, don't expect to see anything from TCL's subsidiaries any time soon - TCL claims it's going to take its time to produce a folding phone correctly, and isn't rushing to be first to market. Still, worth keeping an eye on.

Xiaomi hasn't come out and said it's making a folding smartphone, but it has shown off a prototype which may or may not be destined for public release in the future. The phone doesn't have a name or any firm specifications attached. The folding smartphone was shown in a video being used by Xiaomi CEO Lei Jun, and it showed a slightly different type of folding design to other concepts and prototypes we've seen. Exciting stuff, but not absolute evidence that a Xiaomi folding smartphone will come in the near future.

Oppo, which is in the midst of making itself better known around the world, apparently will bring a folding smartphone to Mobile World Congress 2019. This is information from the company itself, rather than an unsubstantiated rumor, which gives us hope the timeline is accurate. However, while it may show such a device at MWC, there's no guarantee it will be a device ready for sale.

The Royale Flexpai is more proof-of-concept than an everyday usable smartphone. The phone unfolds to show a 7.8-inch screen, has a pair of cameras, a Snapdragon processor, and special software too. Royale is an expert in flexible screen technology, which has enabled it to get a head start on much larger firms, but the current product still feels like an exciting prototype.

We've had the chance to play with the Royale Flexpai, and if you're tempted to try one out, a developer version can be purchased for around $1,300 online. We don't really recommend it, though, unless you're a keen software developer wanting to get started with apps suited to folding screens.

One of the juiciest rumors about folding smartphones comes with the Motorola name attached, as the famous brand may use the new design to resurrect the classic Razr name. The original Razr folded up like a flip phone, so the brand synergy is there, and Motorola executives have spoken about bringing the new tech together with the old name before.

Everything we think we know about the device comes from rumors. It may have a 7-inch screen when unfolded, a couple of cameras, and even an unusual triple-hinge layout. The announcement date, release, and price are all unknown.

Secretive Apple is unlikely to give anything about future plans away, but it's a solid bet the company is experimenting with different designs that may (or may not) eventually become an iPhone, iPad, or a new product entirely. So far, the only hint Apple is exploring foldable smartphones comes from patents for hinge designs, and folding mobile device screens. But patents do not always reflect products or technology planned for public release.

Google is working on a version of Android suited for use on foldable smartphones, and already produces the Google Pixel line of regular smartphones. It's not much of a stretch to imagine a folding Pixel phone in the future. However, given we're still waiting for a Pixel Watch, it may not be any time soon. Details have spread that Google is working on such a device, with evidence coming from patents and unsubstantiated rumors so far.

ZTE became something of a trailblazer with the launch of the Axon M - an actual folding smartphone - at the end of 2017, predating all the current hype by at least six months. No, it wasn't all that good, and the two separate displays hinged together didn't look as futuristic as the devices we're hearing about today, but it does fit the basic profile. Patents have been seen since from ZTE that show it may be working on a different model, potentially using what it learned from the Axon M on a more up-to-date version.

The ZTE Axon M remains one of the few foldable smartphones you can buy right now.

Proof that every company and its dog wants a piece of the foldable smartphone action is the news Energizer has one in its 2019 line-up. Better known for its batteries than its phones, Energizer says the foldable smartphone - along with 25 other devices - will be at Mobile World Congress. Nothing else is known about the device yet.

Microsoft has likely abandoned plans for a Surface Phone, but may be working on a hybrid phone/tablet/laptop known as the Andromeda, and it may have a folding chassis. The rumors point more to it being an evolution of the 2-in-1 laptop with additional phone features than a strict phone/tablet hybrid. Patents from Intel, which have been turned into renders, show what the device may look like. Intel doesn't produce hardware itself, but will make reference devices to help other manufacturers visualize what's possible.

We'll continue updating this piece as we learn more about folding smartphones.

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The folding smartphone revolution has begun. Here's what you need to know

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It's hard not to get excited about folding smartphones, as the designs promise to be radically different from the smartphones we carry around today. Many manufacturers are working on these designs, and we've gathered together all the ones we know about so far right here to make sure you're fully informed.

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The Hayabusa-2 spacecraft has sent back images of the crater made when it detonated an explosive charge next to the asteroid it is investigating.

On 5 April, the Japanese probe released a 14kg device packed with plastic explosive towards the asteroid Ryugu.

The blast drove a copper projectile into the surface, hoping to create a 10m-wide depression.

Scientists want to get a "fresh" sample of rock to help them better understand how Earth and the other planets formed.

Hayabusa-2 has now taken pictures of the area below where the "small carry-on impactor" (SCI) device was to have detonated, and identified a dark disturbance in which fresh material has been excavated from beneath the surface.

Japanese spacecraft 'bombs' asteroid

Image Copyright @haya2e_jaxa @haya2e_jaxa Report

Image Copyright @haya2e_jaxa @haya2e_jaxaReport

Scientists working on the Japanese Aerospace Agency (Jaxa) mission said the blast area on the surface measures about 20m in diameter - twice the size of the crater they expected to see.

The mission's official account tweeted: "We did not expect such a big alteration, so a lively debate has been initiated in the project!"

Because of the debris that would have been thrown up in this event, Hayabusa-2 manoeuvred itself before the detonation to the far side of 800m-wide Ryugu - out of harm's way and out of sight.

But the probe left a small camera behind called DCAM3 to observe the explosion.

Hayabusa-2 later returned to its "home position" about 20km above the asteroid's surface. From here, it conducted a search for the crater produced in the explosion.

In coming weeks, scientists will command the probe to descend into the crater to collect its fresh samples.

Because they will come from within the asteroid, they will be less altered by the harsh environment of space.

Bombardment with cosmic radiation over the aeons is thought to change the surfaces of these planetary building blocks.

Ryugu belongs to a particularly primitive type of space rock known as a C-type asteroid. It's a relic left over from the early days of our Solar System, and therefore records the conditions and chemistry of that time - some 4.5 billion years ago.

Follow Paul on Twitter.

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The Hayabusa-2 spacecraft has sent back images of the crater made when it detonated an explosive charge next to the asteroid it is investigating. On 5 April, the Japanese probe released a 14kg device packed with plastic explosive towards the asteroid Ryugu. The blast drove a copper projectile into the surface, hoping to create a 10m-wide depression.

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Artificial intelligence (AI) is expected to change the way the United States and other nations operate their nuclear command and control. For instance, a recent RAND report surveyed AI and nuclear security experts and notes that "AI is expected to become more widely used in aids to decisionmaking" in command-and-control platforms. The report also indicated the possibility that narrow AI could in the future act as a " trusted advisor " in nuclear command and control. In this article, I will examine the advice such an advisor might provide to decision-makers in a nuclear crisis, focusing on the possibility that an algorithm could offer compelling evidence that an incoming nuclear alert was a false alarm, thereby counseling restraint rather than confrontation.

Decision-makers who stand guard at the various levels of the nuclear weapons chain of command face two different forms of stress. The first form of stress is information overload, shortage of time, and chaos in the moment of a crisis. The second is more general, emerging from moral tradeoffs and the fear of causing loss of life on an immense scale. AI and big data analysis techniques have already been applied to address the first kind of stress. The current U.S. nuclear early warning system employs a " dual phenomenology" mechanism designed to ensure speed in detecting a threat and in streamlining information involved in the decision-making process. The early warning system employs advanced satellites and radars to confirm and track an enemy missile almost immediately after launch. In an actual nuclear attack, the various military and political personnel in the chain of command would be informed progressively as the threat is analyzed, until finally the president is notified. This structure substantially reduces information overload and chaos for decision-makers in a crisis.

However, as Richard Garwin writes, the system also reduces the role of the decision-maker "simply to endorse the claim of the sensors and the communication systems that a massive raid is indeed in progress." While the advanced technologies and data processing techniques used in the early warning system reduces the occurrence of false alerts, it does not completely eliminate the chances of one occurring. In order to address decision-makers' fear of inadvertently starting a nuclear war, future applications of AI to nuclear command and control should aspire to create an algorithm that could argue in the face of overwhelming fear of an impending attack that a nuclear launch isn't happening. Such an algorithm could verify the authenticity of an alert from other diverse perspectives, in addition to a purely technological analysis. Incorporating this element into the nuclear warning process could help to address the second form of stress, reassuring decision-makers that they are sanctioning a valid and justified course of action.
Command and Control During the Cold War: The Importance of Big Data
In the world of nuclear command and control, the pursuit of speed and analysis of big data is old news. In the early 1950s, before the advent of nuclear intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), the United States began developing the SAGE supercomputer. SAGE, which was built at approximately three times the cost of the Manhattan Project, was the quintessential big data processing machine. It used the fastest and most expensive computers at the time - the Whirlwind II (AN/FSQ-7) IBM mainframe computers - at each of 24 command centers to receive, sort, and process data from the many radars and sensors dedicated to identifying incoming Soviet bombers. The SAGE supercomputer then coordinated U.S. and Canadian aircraft and missiles to intercept those bombers. Its goal was to supplement "the fallible, comparatively slow-reacting mind and hand of man" in anticipating and defending against a nuclear bomber campaign.

The proliferation of ICBMs in the 1960s, however, made the SAGE command centers " extraordinarily vulnerable." The U.S. Air Force concluded that Soviet ICBMs could destroy "the SAGE system long before the first of their bombers crossed the Arctic Circle." In 1966, speaking at a congressional hearing, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara argued that "the elaborate defenses which we erected during the 1960s no longer retain their original importance. Today with no defense against the major threat, Soviet ICBMs, our anti-bomber defense alone would contribute very little..." The SAGE command centers were shut down.

McNamara formed a National Command and Control Task Force, informally referred to as the Partridge Commission, to study the problem of nuclear command and control in the early days of the ICBM era. The commission concluded "that the capabilities of US [nuclear] weapon systems had outstripped the ability to command and control them" using a decentralized military command and control structure. The commission recommended streamlining and centralizing command and control with much stronger civilian oversight. The commission also advocated the formation of the modern-day North American Aerospace Defense Command, better known as NORAD, with its advanced computer and communication systems, early warning satellites, and forward-placed radars designed to track any missile launch on the planet before it could reach the continental United States.

NORAD and its computer and communication systems were designed to resolve the stress from information overload by compartmentalizing and automating the process of evaluating a threat. Depending on its particular trajectory, an enemy nuclear missile may take anywhere between 35 minutes to just eight minutes to reach its target. When the launch of an enemy missile occurs, it is first picked up by early warning satellite sensors within seconds. The satellites track these missiles while the engines are still ignited. Once the missile comes over the horizon, forward-deployed radars independently track them. The data from the two systems is then assessed in the context of the prevailing geostrategic intelligence by NORAD. NORAD would then pass the assessment up the military and political chain of command. This sequence of steps ensures that senior decision-makers are not overwhelmed with information. By the time decision-makers are notified, the decision to retaliate to an apparent attack "must be made in minutes." Future advances in AI might only add incremental improvements to the speed and quality of information processing to this already advanced nuclear early warning system.
Using AI to Prevent Inadvertent Nuclear War
These advances in nuclear command and control still do not directly address the second form of stress, one that emerges from the fear of a nuclear war and the accompanying moral tradeoffs. How can AI mitigate this problem? History reminds us that technological sophistication cannot be relied upon to avert accidental nuclear confrontations. Rather, these confrontations have been prevented by individuals who, despite having state-of-the-art technology at their disposal, proffered alternate explanations for a nuclear warning alert. Operating under the most demanding conditions, they insisted on a " gut feeling " that evidence of an impending nuclear war alert was misleading. They chose to disregard established protocol, fearing that a wrong choice would lead to accidental nuclear war.

Consider for example a declassified President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board report investigating the decision by Leonard Perroots, a U.S. Air Force lieutenant general, not to respond to incoming nuclear alerts. The incident occurred in 1983 when NATO was conducting a large simulated nuclear war exercise code-named Able Archer. The report notes that Perroots' "recommendation, made in ignorance, not to raise US readiness in response" was "a fortuitous, if ill-informed, decision given the changed political environment at the time." The report also states:

the military officers in charge of the Able Archer exercise minimized this risk by doing nothing in the face of evidence that parts of the Soviet armed forces were moving to an unusual level of [nuclear] alert. But these officers acted correctly out of instinct, not informed guidance.

Perroots later complained in 1989, just before retiring as head of the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency, "that the U.S. intelligence community did not give adequate credence to the possibility that the United States and Soviet Union came unacceptably close to [accidental] nuclear war."

In the same year, Stanislav Petrov, a commanding officer involved in Soviet nuclear operations, also dismissed a nuclear alert from his country's early warning system. In the face of data and analysis that confirmed an incoming American missile salvo, Petrov decided the system was wrong. Petrov later said, "that day the satellites told us with the highest degree of certainty these rockets were on the way." Still, he decided to report the warning as a false alert. His decision was informed by fears that he "didn't want to be the one responsible for starting a third world war." Later recalling the incident, he said: "I had a funny feeling in my gut. I didn't want to make a mistake. I made a decision, and that was it. When people start a war, they don't start it with only five missiles." Both, Perroots and Petrov feared the moral consequences of a nuclear war, particularly one initiated accidentally. They distrusted the data and challenged protocol.
Conclusion
Fred Iklé once remarked, "if any witness should come here and tell you that a totally reliable and safe launch on warning posture can be designed and implemented that man is a fool." If that is true, how close can AI get us to reliable and safe nuclear command and control? AI-enabled systems may aspire to reduce some of the mechanical and human errors that have occurred in nuclear command and control. Prior instances of false alerts and failures in early warning systems should be used as a training dataset for an AI algorithm to develop benchmarks to quickly test the accuracy of an early warning alert. The goal of integrating AI into military systems should not be speed and accuracy alone. It should also be to help decision-makers exercise judgment and prudence to prevent inadvertent catastrophes.
Jaganath Sankaran is an assistant professor at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin. He can be reached at jaganath@austin.utexas.edu.
Image: North American Aerospace Defense Command photo

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A Different Use for Artificial Intelligence in Nuclear Weapons Command and Control

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Artificial intelligence (AI) is expected to change the way the United States and other nations operate their nuclear command and control. For instance, a recent RAND report surveyed AI and nuclear security experts and notes that "AI is expected to become more widely used in aids to decisionmaking" in command-and-control platforms. The report also indicated the possibility that narrow AI could in the future act as a " trusted advisor " in nuclear command and control.

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By: Dr. Pascale Michelon

First of all, what is cognition? Cognition has to do with how a person understands the world and acts in it. It is the set of mental abilities or processes that are part of nearly every human action while we are awake.

Cognitive abilities are brain-based skills we need to carry out any task from the simplest to the most complex. They have more to do with the mechanisms of how we learn, remember, problem-solve, and pay attention, rather than with any actual knowledge. For instance, answering the telephone involves perception (hearing the ring tone), decision taking (answering or not), motor skill (lifting the receiver), language skills (talking and understanding language), social skills (interpreting tone of voice and interacting properly with another human being).

Cognitive abilities or skills are supported by specific neuronal networks. For instance memory skills rely mainly on parts of the temporal lobes and parts of the frontal lobes (behind the forehead).

In the table below, you can browse through the main brain functions involved in cognition. You will also find brain teasers that will help you exercise the cognitive abilities described. I hope you enjoy it...and have fun!
COGNITIVE ABILITIES ARE BRAINS FUNCTIONS

Perception

Recognition and interpretation of sensory stimuli (smell, touch, hearing, etc.)

Brain teasers:

Attention

Ability to sustain concentration on a particular object, action, or thought, and ability to manage competing demands in our environment.
Brain challenges:

Short-term/ working memory (limited storage), and Long-term memory (unlimited storage).
Brain teaser:

Motor skills

Ability to mobilize our muscles and bodies, and ability to manipulate objects.

Brain challenges:

Tap your right hand on the table. At the same time, make a circular movement with your left hand (as if you were cleaning the table)

Do the same, switching hands

Skills allowing us to translate sounds into words and generate verbal output.

Brain teaser:

Visual and Spatial Processing

Ability to process incoming visual stimuli, to understand spatial relationship between objects, and to visualize images and scenarios.

Brain teaser:

Executive Functions

Abilities that enable goal-oriented behavior, such as the ability to plan, and execute a goal. These include:
Flexibility: the capacity for quickly switching to the appropriate mental mode.
Theory of mind: insight into other people's inner world, their plans, their likes and dislikes.
Anticipation: prediction based on pattern recognition.
Problem-solving: defining the problem in the right way to then generate solutions and pick the right one.
Decision making: the ability to make decisions based on problem-solving, on incomplete information and on emotions (ours and others').
Working Memory: the capacity to hold and manipulate information "on-line" in real time.
Emotional self-regulation: the ability to identify and manage one's own emotions for good performance.
Sequencing: the ability to break down complex actions into manageable units and prioritize them in the right order.
Inhibition: the ability to withstand distraction, and internal urges.Brain teasers:

COGNITIVE ABILITIES ARE NOT FIXED - WE CAN IMPROVE THEM VIA LIFESTYLE AND TARGETED PRACTICE

With age, some cognitive abilities tend to decline, especially the so-called executive functions, and those cognitive abilities that are not used regularly. Fortunately, growing evidence shows that decline can be delayed with appropriate lifestyle options and practices. Here are some resources to guide you as you look for ways to boost your cognitive functions:

Categories: Attention and ADD/ADHD, Cognitive Neuroscience, Health & Wellness, Peak Performance, Professional Development

Tags: Attention and ADD/ADHD, Brain-Coach, brain-improvement, Cognitive Neuroscience, cognitive-ability, Cognitive-Training, Executive-Functions, Mind-Fitness, Neuropsychology

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What are Cognitive Abilities and Skills, and How to Boost Them?

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By: Dr. Pascale Michelon First of all, what is cog­ni­tion? Cog­ni­tion has to do with how a per­son under­stands the world and acts in it. It is the set of men­tal abil­i­ties or process­es that are part of near­ly every human action while we are awake.

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https://greyartgallery.nyu.edu/exhibition/beautiful-brainthe-drawings-santiago-ramon-y-cajal/

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Santiago Ramón y Cajal (1852-1934) was a pioneering Spanish neuroanatomist who, over the course of five decades, combined cutting-edge scientific research with consummate draftsmanship to create groundbreaking drawings of the human brain and other nerve tissues. In 1906, Cajal was jointly awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his assertion that the brain is composed of individual neuron cells rather than a single continuous network. Confirmed by electron microscopy in the 1950s, Cajal's theories form the foundation of neuroscience today.

As a teenager, Cajal studied at a provincial art academy before acquiescing to his father's wishes and enrolling in medical school. His understanding of the persuasive power of images is revealed in the intricate drawings he created to introduce and circulate his revolutionary discoveries. In them, he illustrated the inner workings of the nervous system, the connection between the brain and the retina, and the development of a living, maturing brain over time. Working freehand, Cajal summarized what he saw under the microscope rather than making exact copies. In a single sketch, he combined observations he had made at different times or obtained using various methods, thus illustrating a larger hypothesis. As a result, Cajal's depictions often put forth basic principles or a series of events much more clearly than photographs.

Most of the eighty works featured here are on view for the first time outside his native Spain, and all are generously lent by the Instituto Cajal (CSIC), Madrid. While Cajal has not yet achieved the universal recognition of other 19th-century scientists such as Charles Darwin and Louis Pasteur, his impact has been just as momentous-so much so that his drawings are still in widespread use today, in classrooms, textbooks, lectures, conferences, and medical journals. As a testament to both Cajal's roots in earlier anatomical study and his enduring legacy, The Beautiful Brain also features historic medical volumes, a vintage microscope, and a selection of contemporary computer-aided images and video animations about the brain.

#BeautifulBrain

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The Beautiful Brain: The Drawings of Santiago Ramón y Cajal - Grey Gallery

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Santiago Ramón y Cajal (1852-1934) was a pioneering Spanish neuroanatomist who, over the course of five decades, combined cutting-edge scientific research with consummate draftsmanship to create groundbreaking drawings of the human brain and other nerve tissues. In 1906, Cajal was jointly awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his assertion that the brain ...

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Meteor showers bring moon geysers. A lunar orbiter spotted extra water around the moon when the moon passed through streams of cosmic dust that can cause meteor showers on Earth.

The water was probably released from lunar soil by tiny meteorite impacts, planetary scientist Mehdi Benna of NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., and colleagues report April 15 in in Nature Geoscience. Those random impacts suggest water is buried all over the moon, rather than isolated in freezing dark craters - and that the moon has been wet for billions of years.

Samples of lunar soil brought back by the Apollo astronauts suggested that the moon is bone dry. But in the last decade or so, several remote missions have found water deposits on the moon, including signs of frozen surface water in regions of permanent shadow near the poles ( SN: 10/24/09, p. 10).

"We knew there was water in the soil," Benna says. What scientists didn't know was how widespread that water was, or how long it had been there.

Benna and colleagues used observations from NASA's LADEE spacecraft, which collected data from lunar orbit from November 2013 to April 2014 ( SN Online: 4/18/14). LADEE's spectrometers detected dozens of sharp increases in the abundance of water molecules in the moon's exosphere, the tenuous atmosphere of gas molecules that clings to the moon. Twenty-nine of those measurements coincided with known streams of space dust.

When Earth passes through those streams, the dust burns up in the atmosphere, producing annual meteor showers like the Leonids and the Geminids. But because the moon has no true atmosphere, bits of dust from the same showers strike the moon's surface directly, stirring up what lies beneath.

Benna and colleagues calculated that only meteorites heavier than about 0.15 grams could have released the water. That means the top eight centimeters or so of lunar soil are indeed dry - smaller impacts would have released water if any was there. Beneath that dry coating is a global layer of hydrated soil, with water ice clinging to dust grains.

But the moon is by no means soggy. Squeezing half a ton of lunar soil would yield barely a small bottle of water, Benna says. "It's not a lot of water by any measure, but it's still water." And it's too much water to have arrived at the moon recently, he says. The moon may have held on to at least some of this water since the time of its formation ( SN: 4/15/17, p. 18).

Future studies could help figure out whether and how that water could be useful for human explorers.

The finding is "plausible and certainly provocative," says planetary scientist Erik Asphaug of the University of Arizona in Tucson. "It's the kind of paper that is good to see published so we can debate it."
Editor's note: This story was updated April 19, 2019, to clarify that LADEE collected data from lunar orbit from November 2013 to April 2014.

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Meteor showers bring moon geysers. A lunar orbiter spotted extra water around the moon when the moon passed through streams of cosmic dust that can cause meteor showers on Earth. The water was probably released from lunar soil by tiny meteorite impacts, planetary scientist Mehdi Benna of NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., and colleagues report April 15 in in Nature Geoscience.

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https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-47873592

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Astronomers have taken the first ever image of a black hole, which is located in a distant galaxy.

It measures 40 billion km across - three million times the size of the Earth - and has been described by scientists as "a monster".

The black hole is 500 million trillion km away and was photographed by a network of eight telescopes across the world.

Details have been published today in Astrophysical Journal Letters.

It was captured by the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT), a network of eight linked telescopes.

Prof Heino Falcke, of Radboud University in the Netherlands, who proposed the experiment, told BBC News that the black hole was found in a galaxy called M87.

"What we see is larger than the size of our entire Solar System," he said.

"It has a mass 6.5 billion times that of the Sun. And it is one of the heaviest black holes that we think exists. It is an absolute monster, the heavyweight champion of black holes in the Universe."

The image shows an intensely bright "ring of fire", as Prof Falcke describes it, surrounding a perfectly circular dark hole. The bright halo is caused by superheated gas falling into the hole. The light is brighter than all the billions of other stars in the galaxy combined - which is why it can be seen at such distance from Earth.

The edge of the dark circle at the centre is the point at which the gas enters the black hole, which is an object that has such a large gravitational pull, not even light can escape.

The image matches what theoretical physicists and indeed, Hollywood directors, imagined black holes would look like, according to Dr Ziri Younsi, of University College London - who is part of the EHT collaboration.

"Although they are relatively simple objects, black holes raise some of the most complex questions about the nature of space and time, and ultimately of our existence," he said.

"It is remarkable that the image we observe is so similar to that which we obtain from our theoretical calculations. So far, it looks like Einstein is correct once again."

But having the first image will enable researchers to learn more about these mysterious objects. They will be keen to look out for ways in which the black hole departs from what's expected in physics. No-one really knows how the bright ring around the hole is created. Even more intriguing is the question of what happens when an object falls into a black hole.

What is a black hole?

A black hole is a region of space from which nothing, not even light, can escape

Despite the name, they are not empty but instead consist of a huge amount of matter packed densely into a small area, giving it an immense gravitational pull

There is a region of space beyond the black hole called the event horizon. This is a "point of no return", beyond which it is impossible to escape the gravitational effects of the black hole

Prof Falcke had the idea for the project when he was a PhD student in 1993. At the time, no-one thought it was possible. But he was the first to realise that a certain type of radio emission would be generated close to and all around the black hole, which would be powerful enough to be detected by telescopes on Earth.

He also recalled reading a scientific paper from 1973 that suggested that because of their enormous gravity, black holes appear 2.5 times larger than they actually are.

These two factors suddenly made the seemingly impossible, possible. After arguing his case for 20 years, Prof Falcke persuaded the European Research Council to fund the project. The National Science Foundation and agencies in East Asia then joined in to bankroll the project to the tune of more than £40m.

It is an investment that has been vindicated with the publication of the image. Prof Falcke told me that he felt that "it's mission accomplished".

He said: "It has been a long journey, but this is what I wanted to see with my own eyes. I wanted to know is this real?"

No single telescope is powerful enough to image the black hole. So, in the biggest experiment of its kind, Prof Sheperd Doeleman of the Harvard-Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics led a project to set up a network of eight linked telescopes. Together, they form the Event Horizon Telescope and can be thought of as a planet-sized array of dishes.

Each is located high up at a variety of exotic sites, including on volcanoes in Hawaii and Mexico, mountains in Arizona and the Spanish Sierra Nevada, in the Atacama Desert of Chile, and in Antarctica.

A team of 200 scientists pointed the networked telescopes towards M87 and scanned its heart over a period of 10 days.

The information they gathered was too much to be sent across the internet. Instead, the data was stored on hundreds of hard drives that were flown to central processing centres in Boston, US, and Bonn, Germany, to assemble the information. Katie Bouman a PhD student at MIT developed an algorithm that pieced together the data from the EHT. Without her contribution the project would not have been possible. Prof Doeleman described the achievement as "an extraordinary scientific feat".

"We have achieved something presumed to be impossible just a generation ago," he said.

"Breakthroughs in technology, connections between the world's best radio observatories, and innovative algorithms all came together to open an entirely new window on black holes."

The team is also imaging the supermassive black hole at the centre of our own galaxy, the Milky Way.

Odd though it may sound, that is harder than getting an image from a distant galaxy 55 million light-years away. This is because, for some unknown reason, the "ring of fire" around the black hole at the heart of the Milky Way is smaller and dimmer.

How to see a Black Hole: The Universe's Greatest Mystery can be seen the UK at 21:00 on BBC Four on Wednesday 10 April.

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Astronomers have taken the first ever image of a black hole, which is located in a distant galaxy. It measures 40 billion km across - three million times the size of the Earth - and has been described by scientists as "a monster".

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Este es el texto sobre el biochip que les mostré en clase.

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Some of the deadliest cancers have mostly silent symptoms. By the time people go to their doctors because of worrisome changes, cancer may have already reached a late stage, giving physicians limited treatment options. Scientists are always looking for ways to detect cancer and other diseases through tests that show problems before outward signs appear.

Recently, a research team developed a biochip that detects disease biomarkers in the blood. Through a simple, quick test that analyzes bodily fluids, doctors get alerted to the presence of these biomarkers. Then, it's possible to avoid more complex methods of making diagnoses.

How Does It Function?

This biochip works through a pinprick test, which is good news for patients who hate more invasive methods of taking blood samples. The blood goes through a microfluidic channel and past a sensing platform. The platform features a coating of biological agents that bind with targeted disease biomarkers. When the chip finds those biomarkers, it triggers a tiny electrical circuit that confirms their presence.

Disease biomarkers are inside the blood plasma, so it's important to point out here that the microfluidic channel in the microchip separates the plasma from the whole blood. Plus, the biochip is a standalone device that analyzes blood in two minutes.

Superior Sensing Technology

The researchers discovered that gold nanoparticles enhanced the signal sensing capability of this diagnostic gadget. More specifically, they detect those disease biomarkers at the femto scale concentration. That's smaller than nano or pico scale, and 1,000 times tinier than current amounts picked up by sensing technologies.

A detailed research paper explains the worthiness of gold nanoparticles in a biochip to find cancer antigens. But, the team also clarified that the separation of the blood plasma is another aspect that substantially increases the accuracy of their test.

The test can currently measure the quantity and severity of cancer antigens in blood samples. Plans are underway to increase the applications for the biochip, making it able to look for more diseases.

Using the Technology for Further Medical Research

Bharath Babu Nunna was one of the paper's authors. He plans to expand the use of microfluidic platforms like this one but within organs on chips. They recreate the architecture and bodily functions of major organs on microchips. Each microchip includes a transparent, flexible polymer with microfluidic channels containing human cells. They could be alternatives to animal testing.

Nunna will use 3D printing to create the organs used for the chips, including the heart and liver. He will also integrate the biochip mentioned above to provide continuous monitoring.

Then, scientists can study the effects of drugs on those organs without risking human patients. Nunna and his colleagues believe this research could advance regenerative medicine and help address donor shortages when people need organs.

What Kind of Impact Will This Advancement Have?

The researchers behind this biochip project envision a future where people can go to their doctors and receive simple blood tests to check for diseases. Moreover, health professionals could process those samples in their offices without needing to rely on outside labs. Getting results quickly brings peace of mind to patients, and equips doctors to start treatments sooner.

Unfortunately, though, the health care structure in the United States has a long-time history of failures. Often, those problems mean that only people with adequate resources receive the health care they need. That reality may make it difficult for the biochip to gain widespread traction in the marketplace.

In 2004, an Illinois judge found that a county in the state violated the rights of Medicare-eligible kids to receive care. More specifically, they did not receive medically necessary care at the level provided to kids with private insurance.

There are also cases of people getting billed thousands of dollars for receiving minimal emergency room care or not getting seen by doctors at all. Many of them fear the potential costs and opt to decline treatment. According to findings from Bankrate, one in four Americans did not receive care because of the expenses. Even people with insurance complain that their deductibles are so high that it's not worth it to go to the doctor.

Patients also receive unexpected bills when discovering that their insurers paid for emergency room visits, but not the treatment provided there by out-of-network doctors. They often have no way of knowing whether the providers they see are in their insurance network, and even if such information were readily accessible, they might be too sick to obtain it.

Promising Progress

This biochip research undoubtedly represents progress for advanced disease detection. However, the health care system at large must make extensive functional and ethical improvements to increase access for everyone - not just the people who can afford it.
Written by Kayla Matthews, Productivity Bytes

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This New Biochip Can Detect Beginning Stages of Disease in Your Body

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Some of the deadliest cancers have mostly silent symptoms. By the time people go to their doctors because of worrisome changes, cancer may have already reached a late stage, giving physicians limited treatment options. Scientists are always looking for ways to detect cancer and other diseases through tests that show problems before outward signs appear.