Tag Archive : SCIENCE

Hurricanes Harvey and Irma left a hell of a mess—millions of tons of debris, much of it toxic. Houston officials said this week it will cost at least $200 million to dispose of 8 million cubic yards of storm debris. More than 100,000 homes in Houston are damaged. Irma caused billions of dollars of damage across the Caribbean and southeastern United States.

Wood, plaster, drywall, metal, oil, electronics—all of it waterlogged. Put it into unlined landfills and it can contaminate groundwater. The gypsum in drywall decomposes into hydrogen sulfide gas. And it might all get thrown away together anyway.

“No one is interested in separating garbage after a hurricane,” says Elena Craft, a senior scientist at the Environmental Defense Fund in Austin. “But there are real threats that exist from this process.”

Craft and other environmental advocates met with representatives of the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality this week to talk about debris disposal. “It sounded like [the state] was relying on landfill operators to be vigilant,” Craft says. “The state does not do the best job of active surveillance. It’s nice to think that everyone is doing the right thing, but sometimes they don’t.”

Case in point: Versailles, Louisiana. After Hurricane Katrina in 2005, Louisiana state environmental officials were so overwhelmed with construction debris that they opened up a new landfill next to the low-income Vietnamese community of Versailles. The dumping continued despite protests, and years later local residents found medical waste, oil cans, and electronics—stuff that was supposed to be sent to more protective sites. Chronicled in a PBS documentary, the Versailles landfill didn’t have a synthetic liner underneath or water-monitoring equipment.

Under the Obama administration, the EPA was working on a plan to incorporate climate change scenarios into planning for disposal of toxic material and protecting Superfund sites from big storms. “Increased frequency and intensity of extreme weather events may affect EPA’s capacity to manage debris and respond to emergencies,” the report stated. And last year, the Office of the Inspector General released a report that EPA officials didn’t have a good idea of what state officials were doing to prepare for post-disaster waste disposal.

A new post-hurricane analysis by the Union of Concerned Scientists shows 650 energy and industrial facilities in Texas flooded by Harvey, where toxic runoff could pose a risk to local residents.

What happens now in Florida and Texas will depend on the decisions that state officials make in the coming weeks. “What we saw during Hurricane Katrina was a lot of waivers issued by EPA and activity that was technically illegal,” says Adam Babich, professor of environmental law at Tulane University. The waivers are a legal way to allow state agencies to temporarily violate federal law without facing enforcement by the EPA.

Local officials could mix different kinds of waste without fear of prosecution for violating federal hazardous waste laws. That sometimes leads to long-term risk to nearby communities, Babich says. “Sometimes you have to do it in the face of an emergency,” he says. “Other times you are tying to do it faster than you would otherwise, or to save money. Where those lines are drawn is something we can debate.”

In Florida, state emergency officials are still working to restore power and other basic services to millions of people hit by the storm. As yet Florida officials haven't asked for a statewide waiver to allow solid waste facilities to accept waste categories outside of their permit, but they will consider waivers on a case by case basis, according to Sarah Shellabarger, a spokeswoman for the Florida Department of Environmental Protection in Tallahassee.

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Florida is asking residents to report storm debris to a graphic web portal that went up Friday showing reports from around the state. Marianna Huntley of Ormond Beach reported a "wrecked boat sitting upside down next to my dock leaking oil and fluids into the river" while other people reported smashed wooden piers, junked jet skis and "trees 60 to 80 feet long and as big around as car tires."

WIRED asked the EPA press office whether the agency plans to grant waivers to Texas and Florida on dumping rules, whether it has state debris response plans, and whether the agency is incorporating climate change into disaster preparedness. As of Friday afternoon, the agency had not responded.

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Predicting Hurricanes in High Definition

In the decade since Hurricane Katrina, tools for tracking and modeling powerful storms have grown in sophistication and detail.

During a recent Home Run Derby, Aaron Judge did something that no one thought was possible. He took a swing and hit a ball so hard that it collided with the ceiling at Marlins Park. The ball hit the ceiling about 170 feet above the ground. The height of the ceiling had been designed by engineers so that balls wouldn't hit it—but clearly, they can.

OK, I don't really want to talk about sports. I want to talk about physics. Just how would you even calculate the height of a baseball's trajectory? I'm not just going to show you how to do it, I'm going to let you do it too.

Force and Momentum

I'm going to start with the most important physics idea needed for the trajectory of a baseball: the momentum principle. This says that the total force on an object is equal to the time rate of change of the momentum. Momentum is the product of mass and velocity; both it and the force are vectors.

If you know the forces on an object, you can find its change in momentum. With the momentum, you get the velocity and then can find the new position. That's basically how it works.

Two Forces on a Baseball

After a baseball is hit by the bat, it only has two forces on it (OK, approximately two forces. The first is the gravitational force, a downward force that depends on the mass of the object and the value of the gravitational field (g = 9.8 N/kg). The second force on the ball is a little more complicated: It's the air resistance force.

Although you don't think about it much, you've felt this air resistance force before. When you stick your hand out of a moving window or when you ride on a bike you can feel the force as you move through the air. One of the simplest models for this force uses the following equation:

That might look complicated, but it's not too bad. The ρ is the density of air (about 1.2 kg/m³ in most cases). The cross sectional area of the object is A and C is the drag coefficient that depends on the shape of the object. Finally, there is the velocity. This model says that as the velocity increases, the air resistance also increases.

But you might notice one little problem with the above expression: It's not a vector. I left that part off for simplicity, but yes—air resistance is a vector. The direction of this force is always in the direction opposite of the velocity vector.

I can find the values of all of these parameters for air drag, and the mass and size of the ball are easily found online. For this calculation, I will use a drag coefficient of 0.3.

Calculating Trajectory

Isn't this a projectile motion problem? Couldn't you just use the kinematic equations to find the range of a ball after it was hit? Actually, no. This isn't projectile motion because we are including the drag force. Projectile motion problems have an object with the only force being the gravitational force—and this would be approximately true for baseballs at low speeds. We are clearly not dealing with low-speed balls.

You can't use the kinematic equations because those assume the acceleration is constant. However, as the ball slows down or changes direction the air resistance force also changes. With this non-constant acceleration, there is really only one option: Create a numerical solution.

In a numerical solution, we essentially cheat. Since the problem is that forces are not constant, we can pretend they are constant if we take just a tiny time interval (say 0.01 seconds). During this short time, the velocity and thus the air resistance won't change too much, so I could use the kinematic equations (for constant acceleration). This constant force approximation works—but it leaves us with another problem. If I want to calculate where the ball is after 1 second, I would need to do this calculation 100 times (100 x 0.01 = 1). And this is where the computer becomes useful (but not required).

If you want to go over the details of creating a numerical calculation, take a look at this post that models the motion of a spring. Otherwise, let's just jump right into the code. Notice that you can indeed change things in the code and run it again—that's the fun part. Just click the "play" to run it and the "pencil" to edit.

This code is written in Python. That means that the number sign (or as my kids call it, the hashtag) at the beginning of line makes it a comment that is ignored by the program. I added a bunch of comments to point out things that you might want to change (like the initial velocity and the launch angle). Go ahead, change something. You won't break it.

Homework

Since I gave you the numerical calculation, I also have to give you homework.

• Find a launch speed and angle that would produce a home run. You will need to find the home run distance for a particular park. Yes, you should probably find a way to include the height of the wall.
• What is the minimum launch speed that would hit the rafters for Marlins Park?
• For a given speed, what angle gives the maximum range? No, it's not 45 degrees—that's only for motion with no air resistance.
• What would happen if you increased the density of air by just a little bit? Does it make a huge difference?
• My calculation uses a drag coefficient of 0.3—but this is just an approximation. In fact, the drag coefficient changes with the velocity of the ball. See if you can modify the code to include a better drag coefficient. This site might be a good place to start to figure out how to change that coefficient.
• What about the Magnus force? This is another force due to the interaction between the air and a spinning object. See if you can add that force to the numerical calculation.

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The Future of the NFL Game Ball

A physics professor re-imagines the size and shape of an NFL football in an effort to optimize it for flight. It turns out a couple of small changes can add a whole lot of distance, but how would that change the way the game is played?

You don’t want to be among the first human cyborgs. Because doctors won’t be replacing all your limbs with super-strong robotic ones, and they won’t be giving you cameras for eyes. More than likely, they’ll be saving your life by wrapping your heart in a robot.

Today in the journal Science Robotics, researchers introduced a new kind of device to keep a heart pumping: It cradles the organ and uses a probe to anchor to the wall that separates the heart’s lower chambers. The robot can precisely manipulate a particular chamber, and that could lead to devices that let doctors assist a heart in its normal function instead of relying on a transplant. (Another sort of robotic heart announced earlier this year envelops the organ like a sleeve, but this new robot can work on a single diseased chamber.)

These days, doctors keep a heart pumping blood with something called a ventricular assist device. This is a pump external to the body that helps ferry blood around when the heart just can’t manage on its own. Problem is, because blood is flowing through machinery, the patient has to take blood thinners to make sure the works don’t get gummed up. And doctors don’t like putting people on blood thinners if they can avoid it.

This new robot is incorporated right into the heart, and acts to encourage the organ’s normal function. The bit that rests on the heart is a soft robot made of polymers, meaning it’s, well, soft, so it better conforms to the organ and doesn’t irritate the flesh. But it’s also soft in its operation: Instead of using traditional motors that are complicated and bulky, it’s pneumatically activated, which is a gentler way to manipulate the heart.

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The second bit of the robot is a rod that actually enters the heart and anchors to the wall that separates one ventricle from the other, known as a septum. A needle pierces the septum and a delivery shaft opens up an anchor on the other side of the wall like an umbrella. Then an operator places a disk on the other side to complete the anchor.

So in addition to the soft robot on the outside pumping the free wall of the ventricle, the shaft pulls the septum toward the wall, squeezing the ventricle to get blood flowing. Without pulling on the septum, the device wouldn’t really be replicating the beating of a heart. “The septum is very actively engaged in the ventricular contraction,” says study coauthor Nikolay Vasilyev, a scientist in the Department of Cardiac Surgery at Boston Children's Hospital. “When the heart contracts, it's not only the free walls that move. The septum thickens during the contraction and moves inward into the respective ventricle.”

By manipulating both the outside of the organ with a soft robot and tugging on the septum with a rod, this device helps the heart pump blood much more precisely than other devices: The system reads either the electrical signals from the heart or pressure changes within the ventricle to time its movements in concert with the normal operation of the organ.

The researchers have already shown the robot working in a live pig. The next step could be to actually implant the thing in an animal and stitch it up, then watch the robot work over the course of months.

“In terms of technological development, I believe we are almost at the stage where a large company or a pool of investors take this technology to the next level and make a product out of it,” says University of Leeds roboticist Pietro Valdastri, who was not involved in the study. “I frankly hope this is going to happen, as this technology looks pretty ready to me for this type of jump.”

Robots have already stolen our hearts. Now they're keeping them beating, too.

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If your homemade country loaf comes out of the oven shrunken and unfluffy, you may have neglected a central tenet of breadmaking: Hydrate the flour. When you knead the dough, you are massaging moisture into the wheat’s proteins, creating a matrix of gluten that traps gases so the bread can inflate from the inside. “The gluten structure is stretchy but impermeable,” says Nathan Myhrvold, the tech millionaire, chef, and creator of 2011’s six-volume science-of-cooking megawork, Modernist Cuisine. Now, Myhrvold and his team of food scientists and photographers are back with five more volumes, focused exclusively on bread.

The photos in the $625 labor of loaves, ­Modernist Bread, range from cross-sections of rising sourdough to artful, side-lit layers of injera. But so much about baking, as any practitioner worth their pinch of salt will tell you, takes place at the invisible-to-the-eye chemical level, and Myhrvold wanted to expose that hidden process.

For the image above, his crew rinsed a small ball of dough with water to wash away starch granules and water-soluble proteins, leaving behind a blob of near-pure gluten. Then, using a scanning electron microscope borrowed from Myhrvold’s company, Intellectual Ventures, they captured a slice of the gluten magnified to 734X, tweaking the contrast of the black-and-white image to give maximum visibility to the webby network at the heart of every perfectly quenched, ready-to-bake gob of pre-bread. As Myhrvold puts it, “That web makes wheat breads what they are.” Meaning: chewy, delicious, and upsetting to gluten-sensitive stomachs everywhere.

Satellites do an incredible job of mapping algal blooms, the green mats that spread over lakes and oceans during warm, nutrient-rich summers. But the hypnotic, swirling images from space can't tell if toxins are lurking in a carpet of cyanobacteria, threatening the safety of water.

Ecologists and hydrologists can test water's drinkability by boating through the blooms—though collecting samples off the side of a power boat is tricky and inconvenient. So this year, scientists are monitoring Lake Erie with a robot, 18 feet below the water’s surface.

The so-called Environmental Sample Processor, ESPniagara, sits on the floor of Lake Erie’s western basin. It collects algae from the surrounding water, analyzes microcystin (a small, circular liver-toxic protein), and uploads results for researchers at the end of every test. They're watching this toxin closely, because elevated levels of it could swiftly poison the water supply for humans and wildlife in the surrounding area.

A no-frills charm dominates the ESPniagara's aesthetic. “It kind of looks like a trash can,” says Tim Davis, a molecular ecologist at NOAA in Ann Arbor. Tentacles of clear plastic tubing for sample processing swirl around the lab-in-a-can’s lower half, while circuits and wiring snake between the components above. Those electronics and the machine’s batteries—400 D cell batteries power the unit—understandably need some protection to sit at the bottom of the lake. “The metal trashcan is essentially a pressure case that can withstand very, very high pressures, and essentially keeps it dry,” Davis says.

Staying dry isn’t the only requirement for the lab capsule. ESPniagara also needs to stay put, remain upright, and avoid sinking too deeply into the gunky mud. So NOAA recruited applied physicists at the University of Washington to design the 1,000-pound frame encasing the unit. By their calculations, even if Hurricane Sandy-level winds hit Michigan, the water sampling could continue. And at the lake’s surface, a round orange data buoy relays information from its tests via a cellular modem, like the one in your phone.

So far ESPniagara has been testing the water every other day. But as of August 1, with the risk of harmful blooms steadily rising, it began testing on a daily schedule. It pulls lake water in, concentrating algae cells onto a filter. When the filter is clogged with plenty of algae to measure, the biology begins.

While full-scale labs use temperature-controlled water baths, freezers, and centrifuges to run these kinds of experiments, the ESPniagara accomplishes the same tests with a few carefully formulated protocols. Each toxicity measurement happens within a quarter-sized puck that’s about an inch and a half tall.

To measure the algae’s microcystins, it’s important to know that the cyanobacteria hold most of their toxins inside their cells. “So in order to get accurate concentrations, you need to be able to break the cells open,” Davis says. A bit of methanol-Tween-20 (basically dish detergent) does the trick, along with some heat and pressure. And once the cells are cracked open to reveal all the toxins, the ESPniagara dots samples into a four-by-five grid for quantification.

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The toxin detection relies on antibodies that fluoresce when they’ve bound a specific substance. In this case, the antibodies that don’t bind a toxin light up, so brighter dots mean safer water. An internal camera photographs the test array, and at the end of this whole process—it takes roughly four hours—the data buoy sends off that photo. The results end up with collaborators all the way across the country, at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute servers. Then Davis and his team download them for their own analysis.

Once they've got toxicity data, they combine it with satellite measurements for algal biomass and hydrodynamic models of windspeed and current. That full picture tells them how toxic the bloom is, and where the toxins will end up next. Knowing that strong winds are about to send more toxins into the water supply, for example, helps treatment plants decide how to act. When more microcystins arrive, they’ll know to roll out extra filtration steps—like particle activated charcoal neutralization—to keep drinking water safe. It’s almost like the ESPniagara gives water treatment plants … extrasensory perception.

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Tap Water

You can't see it, but there's a lot going on inside a glass of tap water. The faucet aqua is essentially an invisible cocktail of sulfates, resins, varying levels of lead, and so much more. Find out what else is inside.

The opioid epidemic is ripping through America like a fire untamed. Blame big pharma, if you want. Blame cheap pain pills and cheaper heroin. Blame the mesolimbic reward system. Just don't wallow in it—the blame. Wallowing takes time, and with opioid abuse killing close to 100 Americans a day, time is in exceedingly short supply. “The number one question is, how do we get a better sense of what's going on in our communities in real-time," says Jeff Beeson, deputy director of the Washington/Baltimore High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area. Not a year from now. Not a month from now. Today.

So last year, the Washington/Baltimore HIDTA set out to create a tool that would give law enforcement and health officials the data they need to respond to the public health crisis as swiftly as possible. The result was a web app called ODMAP that combines street-level data with tools from Esri, the digital mapping company, to help public health officials, police departments, and first responders track and respond to overdoses in real time.

ODMAP's national scope distinguishes it from similar opioid-tracking apps. States across the US are racing to develop tools for managing the country's opioid crisis, and Indiana in particular has successfully tracked trends, collecting data from local agencies to build a statewide database of things like drug arrests, seizures, and administrations of the overdose-reversing drug naloxone. ODMAP takes a similar approach, but focuses on mapping overdoses, specifically—whether they're happening locally, two towns over, or several states away.

That's the kind of geospatial data that can help communities brace for overdoses before they happen. "You've seen those epidemiology maps where a disease spreads outward from an initial set of dots? We're seeing similar patterns on a daily basis with ODMAP," says Beeson. If ODMAP registers a spike in overdoses in Anne Arundel County, Maryland, the app immediately notifies public health officials in Berkeley County, West Virginia, 120 miles away. Why? Because in 8 to 10 hours, West Virginia's eastern panhandle is going to start seeing overdoses, too.

"A lot of these geographic correlations, we didn't know they existed until we started tracking overdoses with the app," Beeson says. By anticipating a ripple effect of overdoses, regional officials can warn their communities, notify hospitals, and ensure first responders have the naloxone they need to administer to overdose victims.

Meanwhile, the same data helps law enforcement officials double-check theories about the way drugs travel into and out of their jurisdictions. Take the relationship between Berkeley and Anne Arundel. Washington/Baltimore HIDTA had suspected a link for years, Beeson says, based on arrest data. "But if we pick someone up for trafficking in Baltimore, it's not like we know where that person's drugs are going. Now, we're basically tracking the drug. We're able to see it in black and white, as it spreads throughout a region." And the more data ODMAP collects, the more regional relationships health and law enforcement officials can confirm. "We've never had overdose data like this before—and we've never shared it with each other," Beeson says.

Health and law enforcement officials I spoke with about the tool say they like it because it's simple, powerful, and free. First responders at the scene of an overdose (Beeson says there are currently close to 1,000 registered nationwide) log in to ODMAP via a password-protected web portal. The interface lets these so-called Level I users specify whether the overdose was fatal, whether they administered naloxone, and, if they did, how much. That information, along with the time and location of the overdose, goes to ODMAP's central database. For first responders, that's all there is to it; the process takes seconds to complete and requires no personal information about the victim.

Police have additional, password-protected access to a form that lets them enter information like the victim's date of birth and overdose history; witness information; whether the victim overdosed on fentanyl, oxycodone, or some other narcotic; whether any drugs were found at the scene; even a photograph of the drugs' packaging. That information is stored on a separate database, to keep everything HIPAA compliant. If any of the data matches a previous overdose report, ODMAP will connect the reporting officers so they can coordinate.

Things get more interesting on ODMAP's backend, which is accessible to Level II user like sheriffs and public health chiefs. It requires a separate username and password and provides a bird's-eye view of overdose incidents at the national level. Every overdose appears on the map in the form of a color-coded blip. Accessing data for a state, county, or neighborhood is as simple as panning and zooming.

"It's like having real-time traffic data on Google Maps," says Aaron Kustermann, chief of intelligence for Illinois State Police, one of several organizations in the state that recently began using ODMAP. "Being able to monitor trends and see what's happening and compare with other areas? That's where the power is." Understanding where and how people are overdosing can take local health and law enforcement months to suss out. "With this tool, we can react in real time to a spike in fentanyl-related deaths, or purity-related deaths."

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Adoption will make or break this tool. "From a surveillance perspective, the more data you have on a given health issue the better," says Harvard University's John Brownstein, a computational epidemiologist who uses digital tools to map disease and drug abuse across populations. "Having direct data on overdoses is super exciting, but it's a crowdsourcing tool, so you want as much engagement as possible."

From the looks of it, ODMAP is spreading quickly. It launched on January 18th in just two West Virginia counties. Today, 70 counties across 19 states are actively contributing data to the system. Last week there were 16 states on board, and in the past few days, the number of health and law enforcement agencies using the program jumped from 168 to 186. The opioid crisis might be sweeping the country, but so, too, are the tools that could curb its spread.

“Ask any health or law enforcement agency in the country: We don’t have the time, and we don’t have the resources to sufficiently deal with the opioid crisis,” Beeson says. “We can’t throw money at it, and we can’t arrest our way out of it. But what we can do is use data and technology as a tool, to maximize what limited resources we have.”

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Why Banning Kratom May Make the Opioid Epidemic Even Worse

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CrisprCon is not a place where spandexed, beglittered, refrigerator drawer fans come together for an all-you-can-eat celebration of unwilted produce. No. Crispr-Cas9 (no E), if you haven’t been paying attention, is a precise gene editing tool that’s taken the world by storm, promising everything from healthier, hangover-free wine to cures for genetic diseases. Like, all of them. And CrisprCon is where people come not to ask how to do those things, but rather, should we? And also, who’s the we here?

On Wednesday and Thursday, the University of California, Berkeley welcomed about 300 people—scientists, CEOs, farmers, regulators, conservationists, and interested citizens—to its campus to take a hard look at the wünderenzyme known as Cas9. They discussed their greatest hopes and fears for the technology. There were no posters, no p-values; just a lot of real talk. You can bet it was the first Crispr conference to sandwich a Cargill executive between a septagenarian organic farmer and an environmental justice warrior. But the clashing views were a feature, not a bug. "When you feel yourself tightening up, that's when you're about to learn something," said moderator and Grist reporter, Nathanael Johnson.

Which, to be honest, was totally refreshing. Serious conversations about who should get to do what with Crispr have been largely confined to ivory towers and federal agencies. In February the National Academy of Sciences released a report with its first real guidelines for Crispr, and while it suggested limitations on certain applications—like germline modifications—it was largely silent on questions outside of scientific research. What sorts of economies will Crispr create; which ones will it destroy? What are the risks of using Crispr to save species that will otherwise go extinct? Who gets to decide if it’s worth it? And how important is it ensure everyone has equal access to the technology? Getting a diverse set of viewpoints on these questions was the explicit goal of CrisprCon

Why was that important? Greg Simon, director of the Biden Cancer Initiative and the conference’s keynote speaker, perhaps said it best: “Crispr is not a light on the nation, it’s a mirror.” In other words, it’s just another technology that’s only as good as the people using it.

Panel after panel took the stage (each one, notably, populated with women and people of color) and discussed how other then-cutting-edge technologies had failed in the past, and what history lessons Crispr users should not forget. In the field of conservation, one panel discussed, ecologists failed to see the ecosystem-wide effects of introduced species. As a result, cane toads, red foxes, and Asian carp created chaos in Australia and New Zealand. How do you prevent gene drives—a technique to spread a gene quickly through a wild population—from running similarly amok?

From the agricultural field, the lessons were less nebulous. First-generation genetically modified organisms failed to gain public support, said organic farmer Tom Willey, because they never moved agriculture in a more ecologically sustainable direction and it never enhanced the quality of food people actually ate. At least, noticeably so. Instead, most modifications were to commodity crops like corn and soy to improve their pest resistance or boost yields.] “It was a convenience item for farmers,” he said. “And a profit center for corporations.” In order for gene-edited foods to avoid the same fate, companies like Monsanto, Dupont Pioneer, and Cargill, who have already licensed Crispr technologies, will need to provide a more tangible value than corn you can spray the bejeezus out of. Like say, extra-nutritious tomatoes, or a wine with 10-times more heart-healthy resveratrol and fewer of the hangover-causing toxins.

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The presence of executives from each of these three companies signaled that they’re serious about not making the same mistakes they did in the ‘90s when GMOs first came to market. “Back then we were only talking to farmers,” said Neal Gutterson, vice president of R&D at Dupont Pioneer during a break between panels. “I can’t remember anyone going to anything like this or casting as wide a net in our discussions with the public.”

Of all the fields Crispr will touch, medicine is the one most primed for disruption. So it’s of great concern to conference-goers that Crispr doesn’t become a technology only for the haves and not the have-nots. Shakir Cannon, founder of the Minority Coalition for Precision Medicine, pointed out the myriad ways doctors and researchers have exploited people of color in the name of scientific advancement, while neglecting diseases that hit underserved communities the hardest. In a breakout session on Wednesday, Rachel Haurwitz—CEO of Caribou Biosciences, one of the big three Crispr companies—asked Cannon and his colleague, Michael Friend, how industry leaders could help make sure that doesn’t happen. “First, you have to build trust with communities,” said Friend, whose work focuses on sickle cell anemia. “But we think Crispr could be a real turning point.”

Still, CrisprCon was just more talk—which the field has seen a lot of recently. Crispr’s co-discoverer Jennifer Doudna has taken a step back this past year from her lab at Berkeley to travel the world and discuss the importance of coming to what she calls a “global consensus” on appropriate uses for gene editing technologies. And in her opening address on Wednesday, the standing-room-only auditorium heard a line she’s trotted out many times before. “I've never seen science move at the pace it’s moving right now,” Doudna said. “Which means we can’t put off these conversations." The conversations happening at CrisprCon were all the right ones. But action, whether in the form of regulations, laws, or other populist social contracts, still feels a long way off.

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Last August, Masahide Sasaki and his team instructed a satellite to shoot laser beams at a suburb of Tokyo. No, not like that. The laser beam, made of infrared light, was invisible to the human eye. By the time it had traveled through hundreds of miles of outer space and atmosphere, the light was harmless: It had spread out like a spotlight, about as wide as 10 soccer fields. Some of that light made its way into the end of a telescope, where it bounced off mirrors and flew through lenses and filters onto a photon-measuring detector.

Someday, Sasaki hopes, that light could be more than invisible wavelengths hitting a telescope—it could be encoded with information. Today, the radio waves beamed in satellite communications have limited bandwidth, which means they can’t transmit a lot of data at once. But if you can encode a message in infrared photons, you can transmit a million times more data per second, says Sasaki, a physicist at the National Institute of Information and Communications Technology in Japan.

For years, space scientists have proposed this kind of laser-beaming sat, which could make it possible to communicate with unmanned space rovers on faraway planets faster than radio waves allow. But laser light will die out as it travels 55 million miles to Mars—only a few photons might actually reach a receiver on a rover. So scientists first need to be able to read encoded information from a single quantum of light.

Capturing and reading individual photons from a satellite is a tough experiment that took Sasaki’s group seven years to pull off—and by then, someone else had already done it. Physicists in China published in Science last month that they’d managed an even more difficult version of the experiment, where their satellite beamed two photons to two different cities at the same time. But the Japanese group’s claim to fame, published in Nature Photonics, is that they did their experiment in a tiny satellite known as a microsatellite—a cube that weighs about 100 pounds, somewhere between the size of a microwave and a refrigerator. “The microsatellite weighs less than one-tenth of the Chinese satellite,” Sasaki says.

That weight difference also means it’s a lot cheaper to launch: you can launch a 100-pound satellite for about 2 million dollars, as opposed to hundreds of millions for larger satellites. That price point is appealing to a lot of companies. “Many companies that are not specialists in space technology can enter this new field,” Sasaki says.

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Sasaki’s group is working with a company in Japan that wants to launch a network of small sats. It wants to investigate laser communication as a technique for sending messages within its network, as well as a fringey encryption technique known as quantum cryptography to secure those messages. Sasaki won’t name the company, but it’s definitely not the only game in town: US company Planet launched 88 small satellites in February, though its focus is imaging, not communications. Japanese company Axelspace has also launched a few, with a grand plan of a network of 50. Even Canon has a 110-pounder up there right now, carrying photography system based on one of its DSLR cameras. In 10 years, Sasaki expects 4,000 of these tiny satellites will be in low Earth orbit, many of which might need secure communication technology.

All these companies are interested in launching small satellites because they’re cheap—and now that tech is finally small enough to fit on them (thanks, Moore’s law!) there’s not much holding them back. “You can actually start to do significant things in small satellites that you could only do before in a large satellite,” says Todd Harrison, a space security expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

The US military might, for example, be able to use a laser-beaming sat to communicate with drones, Harrison says. Military drones take lots of high-resolution photographs and need fast, secure data transmission. So you could launch a dedicated microsatellite for downloading and delivering drone data. Laser communication, unlike radio waves beamed from conventional satellites, delivers a targeted beam, which means it’s best used in a one-on-one setting.

These small satellites could also change military satellite networks, which consist of a handful of conventional large satellites. “We’re heavily dependent on each individual satellite,” says Harrison. “To make [the network] more resilient, instead of building a small number of large satellites, you could build a large number of small satellites.” Last week, The New York Times reported that the US government was planning to launch a fleet of small satellites to watch for North Korean missile tests.

Still, Sasaki’s communications tech is far from deployment. To send a message fast, they have to be able to detect as many photons as quickly as possible, and their group could only detect about one in every hundred million photons sent from the satellite. “This time, we decided to widen the laser beam to make the experiment more feasible,” Sasaki says. “But it’s kind of an embarrassing specification.” Right now, they can’t do their experiment in the daytime because the sunlight completely drowns out their tiny signal, even with filters. They’re planning to shrink the size of the laser beam so that more of it goes in the telescope. Then maybe they can send that good morning text to Mars.

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In October 2016, the organizers behind a microbiome conference sent promo materials to some prominent scientists. Elisabeth Bik was one of them. With nearly 12,000 followers, her tweets could help publicize their upcoming event in San Diego. But when she scanned the lineup, she noticed that almost every speaker was a man. Add more women, she suggested—or the conference should expect backlash.

She was right: Biologist Jonathan Eisen—“Guardian of Microbial Diversity,” his Twitter bio says—brought the biased list to the attention of his 46,000 followers with a blog post called "The White Men's Microbiome Congress." The organizers, Kisaco Research, added more female speakers before the conference convened and issued a penitent statement.

Bik, who runs the widely read Microbiome Digest, didn’t raise the alarm at the time. “They looked like they were going to do better," she says, "so I didn't want to make a big stink."

But last week she saw the latest speaker list for the Kisaco-organized European Microbiome Congress happening this November: same story. Eisen did, too.

In the past few months, two other high profile science conferences—Starmus and the World Science Festival—have also ignited internet ire for their lack of representation. And websites exist specifically to point out the most egregious examples: There’s Bias Watch Neuro, an All Male Panels Tumblr, and the hashtag #manel. The Gender Avengers, a community dedicated to hearing women's voices in public conversation, asks professionals to pledge not to serve on such panels.

Yes, it's 2017. Yes, this is still happening. “Women tell themselves, ‘Our generation is going to do better. When I'm in my 40s, I'll be the speaker,’” Bik says. “I thought that. It hasn't happened.”

Women have experienced underrepresentation over decades and in different departments of study. And it has real-world repercussions: Who enters science and who rises to the top of a field both have a dramatic impact on the type of research that gets done. But people like Bik, and the online communities around them, are working to make it better next time. Really.

Starmussed

Gender representation has been pretty imbalanced for the VIP-laden Starmus conference's six-year history, in part because organizers pride themselves on inviting fancy people of a specific sort. Nobel laureates, astronauts, Stephen Hawkings—all designations sooted with historical and cultural biases of their own.

Although Starmus still doesn’t have speaker stats to boast about—less than a quarter of main-stage speakers have been women—more female scientific stars appeared at the June meeting in Trondheim, Norway, than in the past. Still, “there got to be an undercurrent in the audience, when you see this stage full of men with a token woman or no one at all," says astronomer Jill Tarter, who has been the only woman on Starmus' board. "It just festered.”

The festering reached a fever pitch during a panel with seven men and zero women, after economist Christopher Pissarides confessed that he had changed Siri to a male voice. You know, because he trusts it more.

When question time came, Tarter commandeered the mic. “I’m wondering,” she said, “why after a beautiful, inspiring lecture by Jeffrey Sachs this morning about [how] we have to solve our problems globally—everybody needs to be in the game—why our very wise, knighted Nobel laureate found two opportunities on the stage of this conference to piss off half the world’s population?” After the session, young women mobbed Tarter with gratitude.

It's one thing to be a well-known scientist like Tarter, demanding attention at a microphone. But participants have stepped up too, as one audience member did at the World Science Festival in New York in June. There, theoretical physicist Veronika Hubeny found herself surrounded by six men, not given much opportunity to speak for the first hour. "We haven't heard enough from you," the moderator said, and started to ask her a question. But he then repeatedly talked over her to explain string theory (her field) instead of allowing her to answer.

After about three minutes of intermittent interruptions from the moderator, audience member Marilee Talkington shouted: “Let her speak, please!”

The room erupted into clapping and cheers—support that continued after Talkington recalled the account on Facebook. Thanks directed to Tarter multiplied online as well.

But so did the thousand discriminatory papercuts from speakers and organizers. Today, the public record of sexism, at Starmus and the World Science Festival and beyond, reaches past the physical conferences and their chronology—to the postdoc watching the livestream on lunch break, to the student who searches YouTube five years from now to learn about astronauts. Instead of inspiration, they can find a demonstration of just how steep the uphill battle is.

What Now?

The problems on display at science conferences aren't new. To some extent, they reflect the fundamental gender imbalance in science: The tenured scientific elite has higher male-to-female ratios than the ranks of postdocs and assistant professors. But speaker imbalance still often outstrips that within a field. Self-promotion may amplify the divide: Men on average are more likely to see and sell themselves as important figures (a tendency that shows up on paper, with men citing their own work 56 percent more than women).

So how do you get those numbers to change? If you talk to conference organizers, especially ones with a surfeit of men, they’ll often exclaim (as both Starmus and Microbiome Congress organizers did) that they invited more women. Those women just declined the opportunity! Here's why: They're busy. Conference organizers often have, in their heads, a list of Rock Star Female Scientists to scan through when they need some women. But those rock stars are already attending 55,000 conferences. “You have to invite more women than men because they're being stretched thin,” Bik says.

The good news is that pseudocelebrity scientists aren't the only ones who do robust research and speak comprehensibly. Finding other contributors isn't hard—it just requires looking to different sources.

Bik, for example, maintains a list of women in microbiology who would be happy to give a great keynote speech at your conference. The American Astronomical Society has a similar database. Organizers can also check out this Diversity Distribution Calculator to see how their meetings measure up.

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The field of microbiology also offers some hope. In 2011, women made up just 27 percent of the speakers at the American Society of Microbiology general meeting. By 2015, the society had bumped that up to nearly 50 percent. How? Researchers from Johns Hopkins University showed organizers numbers from their own meetings: When the committee in charge of speaker selection included at least one woman, sessions had 72 percent more female speakers and were 70 percent less likely to be only male. In response to this and other past-meeting data—and then a call to be better about avoiding all-male panels—conference conveners brought more women into the decision-making, and soon the number of women speaking nearly matched the number of men speaking.

Some conferences set out with the goal of gender parity, and then choose their speaker list accordingly. It requires planning, sure, but Twitter is here to keep scientists from stalling out in their search. The key? Just ask, like neurobiologist Leslie Voshall did a few days ago as she began to schedule talks for 2019.

If an organizer doesn't have enough reach of their own, they can solicit suggestions using hashtags such as #WomenInSTEM or search for lists of science-internet influencers such as the WomenTweetScienceToo rolodex, which popped up after Science put only four female scientists on its top 50 tweeters list. It has 316 badass, smart women who can write 140 informative characters or, you know, wow a weary audience at the 8 am plenary session.

Coordinators can also ping #BlackInSTEM and #QueerInSTEM for speaker suggestions. Because diversity isn't just about women. “Anybody who is a minority will feel the same,” Bik says. “They will look at the podium and wish there was someone there who looked like them.”

Thanks to the internet, there's really no excuse for that wish to go unfulfilled.

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Space is indifferent to your suffering. It doesn’t care that it’ll freeze you to death unless you’re wearing a fancy suit, or that even before freezing you’ll suffocate in its vacuum. And it certainly doesn’t care how difficult it is for humans to get stuff done in the void: practical things like screwing in bolts and drinking water and 3-D printing replacement parts.

But a company called Made in Space is indifferent to space’s indifference. In a first, it’s showed that it can 3-D print in a thermal vacuum chamber, which simulates the nastiness of space. It’s a milestone in the outfit’s ambitious Archinaut program, which hopes to launch a 3-D printer with robot arms into orbit. You know, to build things like satellites and telescopes and stuff.

This 3-D printer works like one you'd buy for yourself, extruding layer upon layer of polymer to build a structure. The difference being, this (deep breath…) Extended Structure Additive Manufacturing Machine is encased for thermal control, just like the components of a communications satellite would be to protect the electronics. “Our tactic has been, let's control the environment that's inside the printer, because we can't do anything about what's outside,” says Eric Joyce, project manager of Archinaut.

The challenge is that Archinaut will have to print out tubes far larger than itself—which means the machine needs an aperture to spit out its creations. But that would expose its insides to the freezing vacuum as it's printing. So Joyce and the team selected components that are low outgassing, meaning they don't lose material in a vacuum. "There's nothing proprietary in our selection process," Joyce says. "Just good engineering." If all goes according to plan, one day Archinaut's robotic arms will use machine vision to grab printed parts as they leave the machine, then piece them together into satellites or dishes.

There's one thing space does to make this job easier: Up there, Archinaut's printed structures would be able to grow to incredible size without collapsing into a cloud of space junk. That and individual rods can be extra long without snapping. On Thursday, Made in Space showed off a 100-foot, 20-pound beam the team had printed (though not in a vacuum), strung from the ceiling at its NASA Ames Research Center office. That’s the kind of scale we’re talking about here.

Why go to all this trouble for an orbital 3-D printer? Right now, the stuff we put into space is limited by the rockets we use to launch them. If you want to put a satellite in orbit, it has to be small enough to cram into the nose of a rocket. It also has to withstand the insane forces of the launch. And then there's the problem of weight: If your object is too massive, it'll never get into orbit. That and it'll cost you $10,000 or more a pound to get your goods on a rocket in the first place.

But if engineers could build satellites in orbit, they’d be free of size limitations. They could construct not only bigger satellites, but bigger telescopes as well. And the bigger your telescope, the more power you have to peer ever further into the cosmos.

Satellites and telescopes would be just the start for Archinaut. Made in Space was founded with the mission to promote space exploration. Because if humanity wants any hope of reaching Mars and beyond, it’s not going to be able to cram as much junk as it can in a rocket and shove off. Instead, astronauts could 3-D print supplies and structures in orbit, around Earth or the moon or even Mars. “You take different tools if you're going to go on a camping trip versus if you're going to go and settle the frontier, and space is no different,” says Andrew Rush, president and CEO of Made in Space.

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NASA is certainly on board. Made in Space is operating on a two-year, $20 million contract with the agency. And the company has already been 3-D printing on the International Space Station with a different device, learning how to tackle the problems of microgravity. The company’s next step is to further develop the robotic arms and pair them with the printer, then ideally start testing with NASA up in orbit.

That ain't going to be easy, though. On top of the team getting all the technology right, space is expensive. And NASA is, by necessity, an exceedingly cautious organization—it didn't put humans on the moon and house them in a $150 billion space station (in fairness to other nations, it's been a group funding effort) by being imprecise. But then again, it doesn't hand out $20 million to just anyone.

So one day, maybe Archinaut will graduate to the massive, on-demand structures humans will need to get off this rock. “We're going to need fairly complex, large, and capable systems for human exploration that we're going to use kind of over and over again,” says Steve Jurczyk, associate administrator of NASA’s Space Technology Mission Directorate. “The habitation systems and the transportation systems, we're going to stage them in lunar orbit. We're going to go to Mars orbital missions or landing missions, and then we're going to come back.”

Take that, space.

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