Day: May 2, 2018

NASA is set to launch its next Mars lander, InSight, early Saturday morning. But something’s different about this launch. It’s taking place on the West Coast, at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California.

Rockets typically launch from NASA’s John F. Kennedy Space Center in Florida, where the Earth’s rotation can give them a velocity boost spaceward. But the InSight launch—the first inter-planetary launch from the US West Coast—wasn’t a scientific decision.

“It’s logistics,” Bruce Banerdt, InSight’s Principal Investigator, told Gizmodo. “It saves NASA money.”

The story goes as follows: part of InSight’s concept was to show that NASA could launch a budget interplanetary mission, said Banerdt. The lander itself has the same design as the 2007-2008 Phoenix lander. InSight’s cameras were leftovers sitting in inventory. The robotic arm that will be used to deploy its scientific instruments onto the Martian surface came from a scrapped project from 2000.

But Phoenix was designed to fly on a Delta II rocket, which United Launch Alliance will be retiring this year. InSight is instead launching on the smallest rocket NASA has available, the Atlas V-401, which is larger than the the Delta II. That means that the scientists have power to spare.

Rather than just waste that extra power, the InSight team decided to move the launch to Vandenberg on the West Coast. West Coast launches are typically reserved for missions that require our planet rotating beneath them, like Earth-mapping satellites or reconnaissance missions. It didn’t matter for InSight, so they chose Vandenberg to lighten the load off of Kennedy and allow West Coasters to experience an inter-planetary launch.

Or, as InSight scientist Mark Wallace tweeted in a thread explaining the specifics: “We’re going out of Vandenberg because we can!”

Cleaning and planetary protection processes not normally necessary for West Coast launches had to be added. But otherwise, “It’s a smooth transition to move these procedures from the East Coast,” said Banerdt.

The mission might use budget equipment, but its goals are ambitious. InSight will put a seismometer on the planet’s surface, and its heat transport probe will burrow 16 feet into the Red Planet. InSight’s goal is to record seismic activity—Marsquakes—to help understand how rocky planets evolve, and why our own planet somehow ended up with tectonic plates.

The InSight launch will happen on May 5 at the earliest, and we’ll continue covering it here. But the real fun starts in six months. That’s when InSight will need to safely land on Mars and use its robotic arm to deploy its instruments onto the surface. Said Banerdt: “There are a lot of exciting milestones coming up in this mission, even before the great science gets going.”

A new report out Tuesday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention highlights a scary reality: Diseases spread by six- and eight-legged bugs are becoming more common. And worse than that, health officials across the country seem woefully incapable of dealing with them.

The report’s authors looked at available data on vector-borne diseases collected through the National Notifiable Diseases Surveillance System from 2004 to 2016. In total, there were over 650,000 reported cases of 16 diseases, and diseases caused by mosquitoes, fleas, and tick bites had more than tripled during that time period. Ticks caused 77 percent of these cases, and the incidence of tickborne diseases more than doubled.

“These data indicate persistent, locality-specific risks and a rising threat from emerging vector-borne diseases, which have increasingly encumbered local and state health departments tasked with preventing, detecting, reporting, and controlling them,” the CDC authors wrote.

Lyme disease was by far the most common disease, accounting for 82 percent of all tickborne illness. But nine germs never before seen in the US were also detected. There were newly discovered diseases, such as the tickborne Heartland and Bourbon viruses. There were also previously known diseases that had never been documented in the US, such as cases of relapsing fever caused by the bacteria Borrelia miyamotoi. And there were diseases that had crossed country borders for the first time, such as local cases of the mosquitoborne Zika virus that plagued Puerto Rico in 2016.

The true toll of vector-borne disease is likely far higher than the official tally, the CDC authors noted. It’s estimated that Lyme disease alone infects 300,000 Americans annually, a number tenfold higher than the reported count. And for every reported serious case of West Nile Virus—the most common mosquitoborne disease in the US—that damages the nervous system, there are anywhere from 30 to 70 milder cases that go unnoticed. Based on that math, there might have actually been between 39,300 to 91,700 of these cases in 2016, compared to the 840 that were reported.

The report doesn’t detail any commonly cited reasons for the increase, most notably climate change, something the World Health Organization cites as a key driver of vector-borne disease. In an interview with the New York Times, lead author of the report and director of the vector-borne diseases division at the CDC, Lyle Peterson, repeatedly refused to point the finger at climate change, only going so far as to discuss the likely importance of warmer weather.

Under different circumstances, Peterson’s hesistance to mention climate change could be seen as nothing more than the actions of a typically cautious scientist. But given that the Trump administration and Trump himself have been reluctant to even utter the phrase, the implications are much more worrying. In a completely normal statement, Peterson went on to tell the Times that he was “not under any pressure to say anything or not say anything” about climate change.

Other scientists aren’t as reluctant to blame it, though.

“We know that poverty is a factor as well as shifts in human migration and transportation,” Peter Hotez, dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Texas’ Baylor University, told Gizmodo via email. “But also of great importance is climate change.”

Warmer seasons, for instance, expand the territory that troublesome tick and insect species can call home, as well as extend the time that humans come into contact with them. And extreme bursts of hot weather can provide the kindling for mosquitoborne outbreaks to spread further.

Hotez recently published a paper examining the rise of vector-borne diseases within Texas, including Zika, the fleaborne typhus, and Chagas disease, spread by a cousin of bed bugs known as the kissing bug. In it, he noted that by 2050, Texas is expected to spend 80 to 100 days blanketed in sweltering temperatures 95 degrees Fahrenheit and higher, compared to the 40 days a year seen over the previous three decades. That change, coupled with rising sea levels, is likely to contribute to the rise of these diseases.

“So I agree that climate change needs to be put out there as a major driver of vector-borne disease in the US just as it is in Southern Europe (return of malaria to Italy and Greece), schistosomiasis in Corsica, and West Nile Virus across Southern Europe,” said Hotez.

Of immediate concern, too, is the fact that few organizations and health officials have the tools needed to best combat these diseases. A recent national survey, cited by the CDC report, found that 84 percent of vector control organizations are lacking at least one of five essential aspects to their work, such as overall surveillance or ways to monitor growing resistance to pesticides.

[CDC via New York Times]

The walls of your house keep the roof up, give your family some privacy, and maybe provide a place to hang some art. But researchers at Disney and Carnegie Mellon University have come up with a way for walls to do more. A cheap paint treatment turns them into giant sensors, creating new ways to interact with a smart home by just walking around in it.

Unlike other methods of detecting the movement of people or objects in a room, Wall++ doesn’t need obtrusive cameras, bright projectors, or even garish tracking markers covering every last surface. It instead involves a unique paint treatment that even novice home decorators could apply.

A grid of diamonds is first created using conductive paint, and is then covered by another grid of very thin wires connecting them all together like nodes. A final layer of standard latex house paint hides everything underneath, and the researchers estimate the treatment costs about $20 per square meter, but could be even cheaper when mass produced.

The diamond and wire grid essentially create a very crude version of the capacitive touchscreens found on smartphones, tablets, smartwatches, and countless other pieces of tech. When your finger, which conducts electricity, makes contact with the screen, it changes the electrical charge on that specific area of the display, and the underlying hardware can use that change to pinpoint your finger’s position and movements.

The same thing happens with the grid of conductive diamonds painted on the Wall++ experiment. The approach is considerably cruder, which means it’s far less accurate than your smartphone’s touchscreen, but by monitoring the electrical charge across the diamonds as a human gets close to it, the wall, and accompanying custom software, can figure out the location of a person nearby with surprising accuracy.

Imagine just tapping anywhere on a wall to turn a light off in a room, or sliding your hand up it to turn up the thermostat. The functionality is not limited to human interactions, though. The wall treatment also works as a giant electromagnetic sensor, and is able to detect and differentiate appliances and electronics by the unique electromagnetic noise they produce.

And that’s just what a single Wall++ unit can do. Most rooms have at least three or four walls, and the possibilities get even more interesting when a space is completely surrounded with sensors. The same techniques that allow a single Wall++ to detect where a person is touching it, also allow multiple walls to detect electronics and appliances in a 3D space.

Did you remember to turn the TV off in the living room before you went to bed? Even if it’s a 40-year-old dumb CRT that’s not designed to play nice with a modern smarthome, the Wall++ could let you know if it’s still powered on or not. The days of misplacing your muted smartphone could also be a thing of the past. A single text message or call would generate electromagnetic noise allowing the walls of your home to tell you exactly where you forget it. The walls finally have ears, and maybe that’s not as scary as it seems.

[Disney Research]

Hulu subscribers are soon going to be able to watch their favorite shows offline. On Wednesday Hulu announced that the streaming service has plans to offer a new, “ad-supported downloadable content experience” sometime “during the 2018-19 upfront season.”

Subscribers will finally be able to watch programming without being tied to an internet connection, but Hulu doesn’t want to break up the relationship between you and your favorite advertisers. If you’re already paying $11.99 a month to watch The Handmaid’s Tale without commercials, it’s not clear if this offline mode also include ads. Presumably it won’t, but we’ve reached out to Hulu to clarify which subscription plans will see ads in offline viewing.

Offline viewing certainly isn’t a new feature to the world of streaming video. Netflix debuted this feature back in 2016 and so did Amazon back in 2015.

Hulu didn’t specify when, exactly, this feature will be arriving, but considering Hulu’s competition has offered it for years, hopefully it’ll offer it sooner than later.

[The Verge]