Day: October 26, 2018

Pee contains some pretty amazing stuff. Scientists have known for nearly a decade that it’s possible to produce bricks from bacteria, sand, and urea—a chemical found in urine. Researchers have gone ahead and produced those bricks, now for the first time with human pee.

South African engineer Dyllon Randall from the University of Cape Town, who refers to urine as “the liquid gold of wastewater” due to its chemical contents, has been studying various uses for pee and its components. A graduate student in his lab, Suzanne Lambert, has now unveiled bricks about as strong as clay bricks, produced with human pee through a process called “microbial carbonate precipitation.” Basically, they begin with sand containing bacteria that produce an enzyme called urease. Urease eats the urea in the pee and produces calcium carbonate, gluing the sand in place.

But why pee bricks? According to the University of Cape Town press release, they’re better for the environment because they can be formed at room temperature. By contrast, kiln-fired bricks must be heated to 1,400 degrees Celsius and produce lots of carbon dioxide. Plus, it’s surely a better use for your pee than whatever you’re currently doing with it. 

We chatted with Lambert about what it’s like to make pee bricks.

Gizmodo: Where did you get this idea?

Suzanne Lambert: My supervisor came up with it while he was researching how to make fertilizers out of urine… But he found that the urea was not hydrolizing [breaking down with the help of water]. He was researching what to do with the urea and found a company that uses synthetic urea to produce bricks. So why not use the urea in urine to do the same thing?

G: How do you collect the urine?

SL: There’s a boys’ bathroom opposite the lab. We have a makeshift urinal—a can with a urinal attachment on top. You can detach the urinal to store the urine. I just asked the boys at the university to please donate to me.

G: And what’s the texture of the bricks like? Are they as strong as normal bricks?

SL: The texture is similar to normal bricks. They’re kind of grey. And they’re as strong as bricks. The last test I did, I brought them to 2.5 megapascals. There’s an undergraduate who’s been doing tests and he got one up to 5 megapascals. a clay brick can withstand around 3 megapascals. It’s pretty good. [Author’s note: A military submarine would need to withstand 5 megapascals at 500-meter depths.]

 
G: How does it get so solid?

SL: The idea is mimicking something that happens in nature. Let’s take the way coral is formed. Coral has bacteria on it. The bacteria produce an enzyme that makes a reaction to produce calcium carbonate. I grow bacteria and put it in a sand mixture then the bacteria colonizes within it when you pump the urine through. The bacteria produces an enzyme that converts the urea into carbonate and ammonia.

G: Do people think this is weird?

SL: Some people do. Mostly people are just interested. You can change people’s concept of waste and how we reuse our waste that would otherwise get incinerated in a wastewater treatment plant. It’s pretty great.

G: Do you think people will buy into this? How do you plan on changing their perceptions?

SL: First, these kind of things require putting an idea into people’s brains, and showing them that the bricks don’t smell. It’s an interesting process, and there are so many other applications of these bacteria. It could be cheaper than most methods today. Hopefully the need will supply the change. It may be a little while until it’s something that can be applied in our real world, but it’s not that far away. Maybe it can absorb some of the market. I’m not sure. You can only hope.

[University of Cape Town]

As part of its Snap Camera announcement, Snap Inc. has revealed a partnership with Twitch that will bring augmented reality Lenses to users of the video-streaming site. This will give Twitch streamers access to thousands of Snapchat-style selfie filters, including those made by Snap and independent Lens Studio creators. There’s no need for users to have a Snapchat account, though the company is hoping to drive Twitch viewers to its mobile app by letting them unlock Lenses that their favorite streamers are “wearing” during a stream. You just have to scan a Snapcode that shows up on the big screen.

For streamers, setting up the Snap Camera integration is fairly simple. All they have to do is download the standalone Snap Camera application, which works for Mac and Windows desktops, and then they’ll be able to choose a Lens to rock in their live session. Viewers will also be able to use Snapcodes to subscribe to channels, while streamers themselves can reward their fans with “bonus” and “thank you” Lenses that are being created as part of the partnership between Snap and Twitch.

In addition to that, Snap Camera is also going to give Twitch streamers access to filters designed for particular audiences, including fans of League of Legends, PUBG, World of Warcraft and Overwatch. The great thing about Snap’s Lens ecosystem is that users can create their own filters through the company’s Studio tool, which to date has been used to make over 250,000 filters. If you’re a Twitch streamer and would like to know how to start using the Snap Camera’s features, here’s a step-by-step guide that you can peruse.

There’s a lot of potential for other video-streaming services to use what Snap Camera has to offer, but Snap says that right now it is focused on ensuring that the Twitch integration is perfect. “We would love to see, as we launch [Snap Camera], if other video services out there find this to be valuable,” Eitan Pilipski, vice president of Camera Platform at Snap, told Engadget. “The community in Twitch is very unique. The streamer on Twitch [is] taking on a different persona or character, and we couldn’t think of a [more] fun way to give them another tool.”

via Engadget http://www.engadget.com

October 26, 2018 at 01:42PM

Tesla’s legal headaches aren’t over just because of its settlement with the SEC. The Wall Street Journal has learned that the FBI is stepping up an criminal investigation into whether or not Tesla “misstated” its Model 3 production capabilities and misled investors as far back as early 2017. The company had acknowledged a “voluntary request” for documents from the Justice Department on September 18th, but it now appears that investigators are concentrating on the Model 3 and escalating their efforts. They recently asked for testimony from former Tesla staff in the case, for instance.

Law enforcement is primarily concerned about the wide gap between Tesla’s early production promises and the cold reality. It had signaled plans to produce 5,000 Model 3s per week by the end of 2017 after announcing its earnings in February 2017 and reiterated those plans when production was imminent in July of that year, but it only made a total of 2,700 units that entire year. It wasn’t until July 2018, several months later, that Tesla started achieving that 5,000-per-week figure. The WSJ heard that the early production line didn’t even have a completed body shop until September 2017.

Tesla told Engadget in a statement about the prior document request and that said that it hadn’t received subpoenas, official requests for testimony or “any other formal process.” There hasn’t been a DOJ document request “for months,” it said. This doesn’t rule out the DOJ reaching out to individual staff, but the company itself wouldn’t have received anything. The automaker also stressed that it was “transparent” about the difficulties of improving manufacturing rates and that it set “truthful targets” that were neither unrealistic nor overly conservative. You can read the full statement below.

Whether or not anything comes from the investigation is unclear. To pursue a case, the FBI might have to show that Tesla knew it was unlikely to make its stated production goals. If there’s evidence Tesla was simply grappling with “difficulties that [it] did not foresee,” as the company said in a statement, the FBI’s investigation might amount to nothing. Whatever the outcome, this likely isn’t what Tesla wants to deal with right as it’s returning to profitability.

“Earlier this year, Tesla received a voluntary request for documents from the Department of Justice about its public guidance for the Model 3 ramp and we were cooperative in responding to it. We have not received a subpoena, a request for testimony, or any other formal process, and there have been no additional document requests about this from the Department of Justice for months.

“When we started the Model 3 production ramp, we were transparent about how difficult it would be, openly explaining that we would only be able to go as fast as our least lucky or least successful supplier, and that we were entering ‘production hell.’ Ultimately, given difficulties that we did not foresee in this first-of-its-kind production ramp, it took us six months longer than we expected to meet our 5,000 unit per week guidance. Tesla’s philosophy has always been to set truthful targets – not sandbagged targets that we would definitely exceed and not unrealistic targets that we could never meet. While Tesla gets criticized when it is delayed in reaching a goal, it should not be forgotten that Tesla has achieved many goals that were doubted by most. We are enormously proud of the efforts of the whole company in making it through this difficult ramp and getting us to volume production.”

via Engadget http://www.engadget.com

October 26, 2018 at 03:12PM

One month from today, Mars will welcome a new robotic resident that seeks to probe the planet’s innards.

NASA’s InSight lander is scheduled to touch down just north of the Martian equator on the afternoon of Nov. 26, bringing a nearly seven-month space trek to an end. InSight launched, along with the two tiny Mars Cube One (MarCO) cubesats, atop a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket from California’s Vandenberg Air Force Base on May 5. 

InSight’s entry, descent and landing sequence will be harrowing, as all Red Planet touchdown attempts are. [NASA’s InSight Mars Lander: 10 Surprising Facts]

The solar-powered spacecraft will barrel into the Martian atmosphere at 14,100 mph (22,700 km/h), then deploy a big parachute to slow its descent. As the lander nears the surface, it will pop free of its back shell and parachute, touching down softly with the aid of 12 descent engines about 6 minutes after getting its first taste of Mars’ air.

That touchdown will come on a high-elevation equatorial plain called Elysium Planitia, a mere 370 miles (600 kilometers) from Gale Crater, where NASA’s car-size Curiosity rover landed in August 2012.

Elysium Planitia is “as flat and boring a spot as any on Mars,” NASA officials wrote in a statement Wednesday (Oct. 24). And that’s why the InSight team chose to land there — for safety’s sake. 

At Elysium, “there’s less to crash into, fewer rocks to land on and lots of sunlight to power the spacecraft,” NASA officials added. “The fact that InSight doesn’t use much power and should have plenty of sunlight at Mars’ equator means it can provide lots of data for scientists to study.”

InSight won’t be investigating surface features, so the “boring” part is no drawback. The lander totes a burrowing heat probe and a suite of superprecise seismometers; observations by both instruments should reveal a great deal about the Red Planet’s internal structure and composition, mission team members have said.

In addition, InSight (whose name is short for “Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport”) will perform a radio-science experiment using its communications gear. This work will track the tiny wobbles of Mars’ rotational axis, revealing details about the size and composition of the planet’s core.

The various data gathered by the $850 million InSight mission over its roughly two Earth-years of operation should help scientists better understand how rocky planets form and evolve, NASA officials have said.

And about the MarCO twins: Those briefcase-size spacecraft are embarked on a demonstration mission, which aims to show that cubesats can indeed explore deep space. Things are going well so far. One of the twins recently beamed home a photo of Mars — the first Red Planet image ever captured by a cubesat.

The MarCO craft will also attempt to beam home to Earth data from InSight during the lander’s touchdown attempt on Nov. 26. But this is not a crucial responsibility for the duo; other NASA spacecraft, such as the venerable Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, will do this relay work as well.

Mike Wall’s book about the search for alien life, “Out There,” will be published on Nov. 13 by Grand Central Publishing. Follow him on Twitter @michaeldwall. Follow us @Spacedotcom or Facebook. Originally published on Space.com.

Antarctica has been really been letting its hair down lately. First, there was news of a haunting hum coming from one of its ice shelves. Then came the weirdo rectangular iceberg.

It’s enough to make you think aliens inhabit the Seventh Continent. But no, it’s just our freak show planet doing its thing. And people sure seem to have to enjoyed the latest spectacle, including the scientist who captured the viral images of the sheet cake-shaped floating hunk of ice.

“Everyone from cousin-in-laws to parents to a friend over in Europe has [messaged that they’ve] seen it,” Jeremy Harbeck, the NASA scientist who snapped the images, told Earther.

Harbeck is a senior scientist with NASA’s Operation IceBridge, a mission that flies instrument-laden planes to document the state of the ice at both poles. He told Earther he’s been on 62 IceBridge flights—most of them over the Arctic’s sea ice—so “I like to think I’ve seen a lot.”

But the tabular iceberg was a first for him, especially since most of his work is in the Arctic. There, you’ll find lots of sea ice but precious few icebergs, which tend to break off floating glaciers and ice shelves that are in shorter supply in the high Arctic than they are in Antarctica.

On the fateful day last week that he captured the tabular iceberg, he found himself looking out the window of the DC-8 that NASA flies over the Antarctic after a morning looking at inland valleys of the Antarctic peninsula. The plane had taken a turn to where the Larsen C ice shelf meets the sea, and Harbeck was hoping to catch a glimpse of the Delaware-sized ‘berg that fractured off shelf last July.

Harbeck said the shelf is also known for flexing in a way that calves icebergs with sharp angles and faces, but the one he captured is a particularly striking example. Even if he didn’t know it was destined for viral fame, he knew it was worth snapping a few photos.

“[It] was not a big one, not a small one, but the fact that it had a square end caught my eye,” he said. “It was pretty photogenic.”

The pictures are the public facing part of a much bigger mission to understand what’s happening to the planet’s overheating ice. Harbeck operates a camera onboard the plane that helps calibrate highly sensitive laser mapping equipment called lidar that can precisely measure elevation changes in ice. That data is, in turn, being used to ground-truth and conduct quality control of the data coming back from NASA’s recently-launched ICESat-2 satellite .

The satellite provides a 310-mile high view of ice at both poles and will help monitor the area and thickness of ice. The measurements are crucial for improving climate models and understanding how fast seas could rise as climate change melts ice on the land. It’s a big deal, and scientists are as hype about Harbeck’s work and the satellites as the internet has been about the freakberg.