Month: April 2019

Shopping carts are my greatest fear in supermarket parking lots. People leave them sitting around everywhere in precarious positions between cars or just in the middle of nowhere. My fear is that one of these shopping carts is going to end up smashing into my car, something I’ve seen happen to others but not myself yet.

Ford

of Europe has an idea (probably a very expensive idea) to make sure this kind of thing does not happen.

Let us introduce the Ford “self-braking trolley,” or shopping cart, as we’d call it here in America. Ford says it works similarly to its cars equipped with pre-collision assist technology. There’s a sensor on the shopping cart that scans the path ahead and will automatically apply the brakes if it senses an impending collision. This means that when a gust of wind starts pushing an abandoned cart toward your car in a parking lot, it would automatically come to a stop before denting your door.

Of course, the self-braking shopping cart has other benefits, as well. If a kid decides to race around with a cart and send it flying all over the store, the brakes could be applied before it ends up careening into shelves of groceries or any other precarious setup. The cart can also detect people, so any cart-to-shopper collisions would be averted.

This tech is part of Ford’s “Intervention Series,” which also includes neat stuff like the

noise-cancelling dog kennel

and

lane-keeping bed

. The shopping cart idea brings us closer to actual vehicle technology, though. It even has the Ford badge emblazoned onto the white and blue cart. Check out the video above to see it in action. We’re sure it’s prohibitively expensive tech for such a simple device, but it sure would alleviate some fears.

In recent years, scientists have started cautiously warning about the subtle harms that certain food additives might be causing in people. A new study out Wednesday suggests that the common food preservative propionate could be one of these additives to be worried about. In experiments in both mice and people, it found eating propionate could negatively affect metabolism, including raising resistance to insulin.

Propionate, or propionic acid, is a ubiquitous part of our world. It’s naturally produced by many bacteria, including those that live inside our gut and skin. It’s added to animal feed and human foods like cheese, baked goods, and artificial flavorings as a preservative. But though propionate is one of many additives on the Food and Drug Administration’s generally recognized as safe to eat (GRAS) list, there’s been some research indicating that propionate isn’t totally innocuous in the body.

In animals, for example, it’s thought that propionate can raise blood sugar levels via the liver, which converts glucose from non-carb sources of fuel. This ability is even used by species of plant-eating ruminants, like cows, to regulate healthy blood sugar levels. In humans, the relationship with propionate is more mysterious. Some studies have suggested that propionate and other short-chain fatty acids naturally produced by the body’s gut bacteria can actually help us maintain a healthy metabolism, suppress appetite, and reduce the risk of obesity. But other studies have suggested that people who have more propionate in their system are more likely to be obese.

To better get a handle on the short-term effects of propionate consumed from food, the authors of this current study, published in Science Translational Medicine, did feeding experiments with both mice and people. The human portion of the study was a randomized, placebo-controlled, double-blinded trial with 14 healthy volunteers.

“We verified that in mice, it does lead to a surge of blood glucose. But the most interesting thing we determined in these experiments is that a single dose of propionate can increase the hormones in the body that are designed to stimulate glucose production from the liver,” study author Gökhan S. Hotamışlıgil, director of the Sabri Ülker Center for Nutrient, Genetic and Metabolic Research at Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health, told Gizmodo. “There are times when that’s needed, like when you’re starving or have dangerously low blood sugar. But here, it was almost tricking the body into thinking that it needs to produce glucose when it doesn’t.”

And in people, these higher levels of hormones also seemed to cause insulin resistance, meaning their bodies didn’t respond as well to insulin’s signal to lower blood sugar. Over time, chronic insulin resistance is known to help contribute to type 2 diabetes and other metabolic disorders like obesity.

In the mouse experiments, mice that were fed low doses of propionate for long periods of time also gradually gained more weight than mice that did not consume propionate. But Hotamışlıgil and his team aren’t saying that their findings should immediately make someone avoid cheese and bread.

“We’re reluctant to make giant claims and recommendations right now,” he said. “This is a proof-of-principle study just illustrating that we can actually identify these molecules and study their biology, which will then stimulate further work.”

For now, Hotamışlıgil added, there needs to be more research deciphering how exactly propionate might be causing these metabolic changes. In people, for instance, they found evidence that propionate’s effects are happening via the brain and nervous system through the production of adrenaline rather than by directly influencing the digestive system or liver. That research will need to include human studies with lots more volunteers from different labs.

Regardless of what Hotamışlıgil and other scientists end up discovering about propionate, he sees a silver lining in studies like this that are trying to suss out the more nuanced nutritional effects of foods.

“I think in the 21st century, we can actually approach diet and nutrition and food with a very different lens than we did a century ago. Now we have tools that can let us study in detail, on a molecular level, not only the harmful things—because usually, people are interested in the harmful things—but the useful things in our food,” he said. “Some of those harmful things we can then very easily eliminate from our food preparation or reduce our exposure to, and that could have tremendous impacts on our health.”

Alphabet’s Project Wing has gained approval from the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to conduct commercial drone flights in Virginia.

The company, sometimes simply called Wing, has been conducting trials in the state since 2016, but the new FAA authorization will allow it to finally sell things like food or medicine ordered by consumers through the Wing app.

Wing received approval for commercial drone deliveries in Australia in a “world-first” earlier this month. The company has partnered with local fast food restaurants, cafes, and drugs stores to deliver goods to roughly 100 homes in the suburbs surrounding Australia’s capital city of Canberra. Wing says that they’ve conducted over 70,000 test flights and completed more than 3,000 home deliveries in Australia to date.

After day’s FAA Air Carrier Certification, Wing will be able to do the same thing in the U.S., though it’s not immediately clear which will be the company’s first delivery partners. Previous tests by Wing in Virginia included sending Chipotle burritos to students at Virginia Tech in a controlled environment, but the company will be reaching out to businesses in the Blacksburg and Christiansburg areas to show off the technology and “gather feedback,” according to the FAA in a statement emailed to Gizmodo. Wing says it hopes to start deliveries “later this year.”

Wing published a statement on Medium this morning explaining the potential benefits of drone delivery:

For communities across the country, this presents new opportunities. Goods like medicine or food can now be delivered faster by drone, giving families, shift workers, and other busy consumers more time to do the things that matter. Air delivery also provides greater autonomy to those who need assistance with mobility. Also, our all-electric drones will reduce traffic on our roads and pollution and carbon emissions in our skies.

Wing’s drones have evolved over the years, and the company boasts that they’re completely electric and zero emissions. Their current model of uncrewed aircraft takes off before it’s fitted with a delivery package, as you can see in the GIF below from Australia.

The biggest problem that still needs to be worked out is the noise generated by the aircraft. The drones can be quite loud as they buzz overhead in residential areas. The current models can fly as high as 400 feet and are guided by machine learning algorithms, according to the company. They have a top speed of 75 miles per hour.

Wing did not immediately respond to Gizmodo’s requests for comment.

Wing isn’t the only company that’s working on drone delivery, but it’s the first to actually get its commercial business off the ground. Amazon promised back in December of 2013 that drone deliveries were just five years away. It turns out that the tech giant was right, but they weren’t the company that would be doing it successfully. That being said, nationwide delivery via drone remains firmly in the future.

“This is an important step forward for the safe testing and integration of drones into our economy,” U.S. Secretary of Transportation Elaine L. Chao said in a statement emailed to Gizmodo. “Safety continues to be our Number One priority as this technology continues to develop and realize its full potential.”