will rely on a precise 3D scan of the route, which Siemens calls “connected awareness of the car’s own position.” This means the car will not be scouting its way through the haybales as it goes along, but instead relying on a pre-programmed setup. It’s all very fancy, and it will be interesting to see if the Mustang gets it right, but the Robocar is different in its approach.
The Robocar has 360-degree vision thanks to a wide range of sensors, and it reportedly cannot rely on
trees disrupting the coverage. Besides, even cellphone coverage in the UK is sometimes notoriously spotty, so we don’t blame engineers for wanting to make the car as well aware of its surroundings as possible, especially on the narrow Goodwood track. And while the Mustang will have a person behind the wheel, ready to take over if something goes haywire, the Robocar isn’t even designed to have a person onboard.
The Robocar has four electric motors for a combined power output of more than 500 horsepower, and its brain consists of a Nvidia Drive PX 2 computer processing data provided by lidar, radar, ultrasonic and camera sensors as well as GPS. When the Robocar officially completes the 1.16-mile hillclimb, it will be the first autonomous racing vehicle to have done so.
In the early 1960s, Aston Martin built just 75 of its dapper DB4GT racecars. Constructed largely by hand in a tractor factory, the cars were winners on the track but also imperfect products of the era. Using modern modeling and assembly methods to correct the quirks of the past, engineers at present-day Aston knew they could reincarnate the iconic machine and make it even better than it was. During a yearlong development process, they 3D-scanned eight original cars to create a digital model from which they would replicate and perfect every piece of the roaring coupe. Here are some of the tweaks the company made on its Bond-worthy whip.
Straightened frame
During scanning, Aston discovered a slight twist in the handmade chassis, which could foul up crucial factors like wheel alignment. The problem likely stemmed from a kink in the original pattern, known as a jig, that workers used to form its shape. Engineers measured the new jig by laser, so it, and thus the chassis, is straight to a fraction of a millimeter.
Stricter safety
Features meant to keep drivers alive have improved markedly since the late ’50s, when racers had only seat belts to protect them. The new DB4 isn’t street legal, but to ensure that it’s not a deathtrap on the racing circuit, Aston added lifesavers such as a fire-extinguisher system, a five-point harness, and a burly steel roll cage.
Well-tailored body
The original DB4 builders cut aluminum body panels by hand, so they didn’t fit perfectly together. The edges of doors and hoods could vary in size and shape, leaving large gaps between panels. For the new version, a press stamps out the pieces and then shapes them against custom molds to create uniform parts that workers then wrap around the chassis.
Stronger engine
Engineers used a CT scanner to peek inside an original motor, and found density variations in the aluminum, a byproduct of letting the blocks cool unevenly in the open air after casting. Today, forgers chill the engines in a climate-controlled facility so the metal’s structure remains consistent. That refinement, and others, boosted the car’s horsepower from 266 up to 302.
This article was originally published in the Summer 2018 Life/Death issue of Popular Science.
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You might associate honeybees and bumblebees with their cute, fuzzy shape and seemingly aimless interest in flowers. But beneath the yellow-and-black (mostly) stripes lies an incredible mind. A new study pooled evidence from 23 studies of honeybees and bumblebees: its conclusions, which build on years of bee research, point to the fact that levels of pesticides currently considered safe to use may still have a big effect on bee colony survival.
Although they might look simple, “bees have a very difficult job,” says study author Harry Siviter, a graduate student at Royal Holloway University of London. To efficiently find and collect food to bring back to the hive, worker bees have to quickly learn to recognize (and then memorize) the most effective foraging routes, he says. To top it off, the routes change with the seasons and with other factors. Honey bees even remember which flowers they’ve visited recently, so they don’t waste time going there again.
All of this takes a good memory and an ability to learn—things that many lab studies have observed in honey bees using the “proboscis extension assay.” When a bee comes near the scent of sugary, delicious nectar, it starts to stick its tongue out. In experiments, researchers exposed bees to pesticides and then watched what they did when prompted to forage, looking to see when—and whether—they stuck their tongues out. Siviter and his colleagues took the data of 23 of these studies and performed a large-scale analysis of the results.
They found that doses of pesticides that are the equivalent of what a bee might encounter in a field “had significant negative effects on learning and memory.” That was true both when bees were suddenly exposed to a lot of pesticide, and when they got a little bit over a long time. It was also true regardless of whether the bees were exposed to neonicotinoids, a class of pesticides that has been around since the 1990s and is being increasingly regulated today, or other pesticides.
Current pesticide regulations are geared toward making sure they aren’t used at levels that kill bees. But these currently legal amounts apparently make the worker bees dumber, which could have effects for species survival. “Regulation and policy should move toward addressing the sub-lethal effects of pesticides,” Siviter says.
The other question these findings implicitly raise is how these pesticides affect less-studied types of bee. Bees don’t all live collectively, University of Guelph scientist Elizabeth Bates told Popular Science in an interview. “Many wild bees do not live in colonies,” she says, “and if their learning or memory are affected, there are no other bees to help out or pick up the slack.”
At the end of the day, Ohio State University entomologist Reed Johnson told Popular Science in an email interview, the question is: “Can pesticides ever be used safely around bees?” This study, which in one sense has the strength of 23 studies’ worth of evidence, “suggests that the answer is ‘no,’” he wrote.
The follow-up question goes deep into one of our most fundamental needs—food. Pesticides are an essential part of large-scale industrial agriculture, and some amount of honeybee exposure is inevitable. The question, then—which hasn’t been answered by regulation to date, Johnson says—is how much harm to bees is acceptable.
As ever, more research is needed. But this study is worth paying attention to, University of Ottawa bee conservationist Jeremy Kerr told Popular Science. Its conclusions are based on evidence from over 100 individual experiments included in the 23 studies, he says, lending their findings weight. “The lesson that emerges is that honeybees begin to lose their ability to learn and to remember when they are exposed to neonicotinoids,” he writes.
The power of this paper is that it shows “a consensus of knowledge” on this question, he wrote. That result is something pesticide policy-makers could pay attention to. “With restrictions on neonicotinoids increasing globally, many will be looking to alternative chemicals for crop protection,” Bates says. It’s important to think about what those chemicals might be doing to the bees.
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ARM, the incredibly successful developer of CPU designs, appears to be getting a little nervous about an open-source rival that’s gaining traction. At the end of June, ARM launched a website outlining why it’s better than its competitor’s offerings and it quickly blew up in its face. Realizing the site was a bad look, ARM has now taken it down.
For the uninitiated, ARM Holdings designs various architectures and cores that it licenses to major chipmakers around the world. Its tech can be found in over 100 billion chips manufactured by huge names like Apple and Nvidia as well as many other lesser-known players in the low-power market. If ARM is Windows, you can think of RISC-V as an early Linux. Like ARM, it’s an architecture based on reduced instruction set computing (RISC), but it’s free to use and open to anyone to contribute or modify. While ARM has been around since 1991, RISC-V just got started in 2010 but it’s gaining a lot of ground and ARM’s pitiful website could easily be seen as a legitimizing moment for the tech.
The site riscv-basics is now offline but an archived version is still available. It outlines five basic points for why someone might still consider paying ARM instead of going with the free option. Some of the issues it raises have validity, but it’s so low-information that it’s hard to give ARM much credit. According to the Register, the attack campaign quickly backfired despite the fact that it barely made a blip on the mainstream radar.
Various members of the tech industry and employees at ARM cried foul, saying the site amounted to punching down and that it sends an anti-open-source message. Surely, the Softbank-owned company itself isn’t particularly friendly to open-source developers but that doesn’t mean its employees don’t know the value such a community provides for the whole industry. From a business perspective, however, the site could be perceived as ARM acknowledging that RISC-V is now a legitimate rival that must be crushed.
We reached out to ARM for comment on why it published the site in the first place and what prompted its shuttering and got the following statement:
“Our intention in creating a web page to offer key considerations around commercial RISC-V based products was to inform a lively industry debate. Regretfully, the result was something different, a page that wasn’t in line with Arm’s collaborative culture, so we’ve taken it down. Indeed, many of our own people also told us they didn’t like it. One thing to clear up immediately is we absolutely did not want to give the impression we were attacking open source as we are highly committed supporters of open source communities in many different areas.”
As far as sparking a discussion goes, you could say the site was a success. We now have an excuse to discuss Western Digital’s decision last December to use the RISC-V processor architecture in its products going forward; we can discuss Intel investing in a commercial RISC-V startup called SiFive; we can discuss NVIDIA using RISC-V in its next-gen GPU microcontroller. Above all, we can discuss investors taking notice of the increased acceptance of the open-source tech and its possible repercussions on supply chains across the industry.
The Register does a good job of running down the issues with each of ARM’s individual claims about RISC-V on its now-defunct website, but the biggest takeaway is that these bullet points mostly seem designed to reassure shareholders that ARM’s business still has a purpose. Western Digital might find RISC-V to be a perfectly suitable option for the controllers in its drives, but that doesn’t mean that Apple is going to walk away from ARM-based chips.
Still, RISC-V could develop into a legitimate competitor and ARM’s attempt to spread doubts about the tech has only prompted supporters to launch sites with counter-arguments and to feel a newly emboldened sense of purpose. How’d that work out for Microsoft’s war on Linux?
A digitally colorized transmission electron microscopic (TEM) image of herpes virus particles. Image: Dr. John Hierholzer; F. A. Murphy (CDC)
For decades, the idea that a bacteria or virus could help cause Alzheimer’s disease was dismissed as a fringe theory. But not so much anymore. On Wednesday, a team of researchers from Harvard Medical School reported in the journal Neuron the latest bit of evidence suggesting herpesviruses can spark the cascade of events that leads to Alzheimer’s disease, a fatal form of dementia that afflicts at least 5 million Americans.
The researchers studied how neurons in mice responded to the presence of herpes simplex 1 (HSV-1), the virus that causes cold sores. In a separate experiment involving a 3D model of the human brain grown in a dish, they also studied human herpesvirus 6 (HHV-6), the germ responsible for causing the childhood skin disease roseola. These viruses are usually caught early on in life and stay dormant somewhere in the body, but as we age, they almost always migrate up to the brain.
Some of the mice used in the experiment were genetically bred to have neurons that could create the human version of amyloid beta (or amyloid-?). Amyloid-? is a protein normally produced in the brain. But in Alzheimer’s patients, it clumps together to form the plaques that are thought by many experts to slowly destroy the brain. Many scientists had long assumed that amyloid-? was essentially a waste product, with no meaningful purpose. But the researchers had earlier shown that amyloid-? might actually serve as a first line of defense against fungal and bacterial infection.
In the current study, both viruses seemed to provoke an identical reaction. The mice’s brains grew new deposits of amyloid-? plaques practically “overnight,” according to senior author Rudy Tanzi, a geneticist specializing in the brain at Massachusetts General Hospital as well as Harvard Medical School. And the mice bred with these human-like neurons were able to better fend off brain infection than mice without them. The same effects were also seen in the petri dish.
“The seeding of amyloid is what causes the deposition of plaque,” Tanzi said, “and herpesviruses and other microbes can rapidly seed amyloid-?.”
The study is the second in recent weeks to support the role of viruses in Alzheimer’s disease. That first study, also published in Neuron and led by researchers from the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, found evidence that certain herpesviruses are more abundantly found in the brains of people who died with Alzheimer’s; it also suggested that genes belonging to these viruses directly interact with human genes that raise the risk of the disease.
The timing is no accident, Tanzi said. His team has corresponded with the Mount Sinai team for years, and they had originally planned to release their results at the same time (both will be published in the same print July edition of the journal). It was the Mount Sinai team, Tanzi notes, that suggested the Harvard team look at HHV-6 as well as HSV-1 in their experiments, since that was the virus they had started to zero in on in their work.
While Tanzi and his team acknowledge the long-ignored work by other researchers supporting the viral hypothesis of Alzheimer’s, as it’s known, he said their research takes things in a slightly different direction. It’s an attempt to reconcile various theories about what causes Alzheimer’s.
Supporters of the viral theory have often speculated that germs such as HSV-1—the most commonly blamed culprit—directly goad the brain into spiraling out of control through inflammation, with amyloid-? only being a bystander. But in Tanzi’s version, amyloid-? still is the key cog behind the disease. Neurons use the protein to either kill or safely trap viral or bacterial particles in a “nano-net,” as Tanzi put it. But in Alzheimer’s disease, the process goes off the rails, leading to the uncontrolled buildup of plaques. From there, Tanzi’s work has shown, the plaques trigger the production of tangles—clumps of another brain protein called tau seen in the later stages of Alzheimer’s—which together then trigger chronic inflammation. All of these moving parts align to wither the brain, eventually causing death.
In this scenario, it’s not so much the germ, but the immune system that’s at fault. “The microbes are the prequel to the amyloid hypothesis,” Tanzi said.
Viruses are only one of the things that could set off Alzheimer’s, he pointed out. The same sort of seeding might happen in people whose genes cause them to make too much amyloid-?, in the absence of infection. And genetics might help explain why only some people’s infections cause the brain to start producing amyloid-? en masse. “Just having the virus isn’t enough,” Tanzi said.
But given the widespread failure of Alzheimer’s treatments that have focused on stopping amyloid-? production, the viral link provides a new, clear direction for future clinical trials: Preventative antimicrobial drugs or vaccines that can stop these germs from ever reaching the brain in the first place. Some recent, if observational research (meaning, not controlled trials) has already suggested that these drugs can lower the risk of dementia.
These sorts of definitive studies are likely still a while away, but there’s certainly a change in the headwinds.
“I think we’ve gotten past the point where this idea is ridiculed, but some might be still violently opposing it,” Tanzi said, referring to the 19th century German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer’s maxim about the three stages of truth (first ridicule, then violent opposition, and finally acceptance as self-evident).
The buck probably won’t stop with herpes either. Tanzi and his team are already at work conducting research on how the bacteria living in the brain could contribute to Alzheimer’s. Tanzi is also part of a research project that is attempting to map out the living microbial universe, or microbiome, of the brain, and how it might influence our mental and physical health.
“Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg Testifies At House Hearing”Photo: Getty
Facebook is apologizing after its algorithms tagged 65,000 Russian users as “interested in treason.” Facebook algorithmically tags users based on their behavior, making it easier for advertisers to target people interested in specific topics. In this case, however, the tag “treason” may have put users under the threat of government intervention. Facebook says it has since removed the interest category.
“Treason was included as a category, given its historical significance. Given it’s an illegal activity, we’ve removed it as an interest category,” a Facebook spokesperson told the Guardian.
Automated profiling is useful when you’re an orange juice vendor looking for people who say they like orange juice, but a landmark 2016 report from ProPublica found that many of the interests Facebook links to users aren’t self-selected. Facebook records your behavior, then makes inferences on who you may be or what you might like, including your race, gender, sexuality, and religion. As an example, Facebook wouldn’t explicitly ask a user in the profile section whether they are an East Coast liberal or a Southern conservative, but it knows if you live on the east coast versus the south, if you completed high school or college, and, of course, it can make sharp inferences based on “Likes” and whether you, say, clicked an ad for “Defend 2A” versus “March For Our Lives.”
In the case of Facebook’s “treason” label, it would be shockingly feasible to unmask some of these users without access to Facebook’s internal data, as the Guardian’s write-up explains. Advertisers need only create ads targeted specifically to people selected as having that interest, and then attempt to keep track of whoever clicked through.
Let’s be clear: Facebook is an automated profiling machine that synthesizes the enormous amounts of behavior data we create as we click, share, and friend other users. Advertisers can tap into that machine whenever they want, for the right price, and governments can request data. Overall, Facebook hands data over about 75% of the time, according to its 2018 Transparency Report.
“Officially, the internet is not censored in Russia,” Mette Skak, an authority on Russia, told the Guardian. “However, these methods, which Facebook has probably unwittingly given the Russian authorities, make it much easier for governmental agencies to systematically track persons marked as potential traitors.”
When I reported on Facebook’s hidden profiles two years ago, I asked readers to send in the interests Facebook had assigned to them. One journalist found that Facebook had marked him as interested in Hezbollah, a terrorist group. What happens when information like that, absurd and erroneous as it is, ends up in the hands of repressive regimes? It’s bad enough in the hands of advertisers.
Facebook is currently fighting off a civil rights suit from housing advocates, who say advertisers used the hidden profiles to exclude housing ads from Hispanics or disabled people. The reasoning is simple: Advertisers could show housing ads to everyone except those interested in “Disability.gov,” “wheelchairs,” or “English as a second language,” “Telemundo,” etc.
Facebook knows. It knows things users provide willingly, and it knows things that users were never asked (and thus, couldn’t refuse). Facebook doesn’t have to ask and in fact, even if you don’t have Facebook it may still know who you are. All of this is useful when targeting orange juice enthusiasts, but it also means oppressive governments across the world have the means to identify or interrogate users based on concealed algorithms. A tool that makes life easier for advertisers can also do the same for authoritarians.
Maurice Ricci, a French entrepreneur and founder of engineering and technology consulting firm Akka Technologies has just pitches his ‘Link & Fly’ (not to be confused with Link & Park) concept for train/plane cabin-like tubes that can be loaded with passengers at a neighborhood station, then railed to the airport, where modular wings will be attached, and the plane take to the skies. I don’t know about you, but personally I’m not thrilled about the idea of flying in a plane with wings made to come off.
With Akka’s futuristic concept, passengers would board a train-like tube at a neighborhood station and have their retinas scanned for security during the ride to the airport. Wings would then be attached to the pod for take-off.
Ricci estimates at least thirty minutes could be saved during each airport turnaround, and increase short flight rotations like that from Paris to Toulouse (approximately an hour and 15 minute flight) from 7 to 9 per day. Will it ever actually happen? Maybe. Will it happen in our lifetime? *eying the sky for nukes* Possibly. Will I ever ride one unless there’s free Wi-Fi and every single seat is an ejector seat? Absolutely not.
Keep going for a video of the concept.
Thanks to Thaylor H, who agrees if there’s any train that should be able to fly, it’s the Hogwarts Express.
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