Day: January 8, 2020

Spacecraft could fly to distant stars using sails with surfaces similar to those of CDs and DVDs to help them stay centered on laser beams, a new study finds.

Conventional rockets driven by chemical reactions are currently the dominant form of space propulsion. However, they are nowhere near efficient enough to reach another star within a human lifetime. For example, although Alpha Centauri is the nearest star system to Earth, it still lies about 4.37 light-years away, equal to more than 25.6 trillion miles (41.2 trillion kilometers), or more than 276,000 times the distance from Earth to the sun. It would take NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft, which launched in 1977 and reached interstellar space in 2012, about 75,000 years to reach Alpha Centauri if the probe were headed in the right direction (which it’s not).

As more e-scooters cruise through city streets, a growing number of their riders are ending their trip in the hospital. 

From 2017 to 2018, the number of emergency room injuries due to e-scooters rose from about 8,000 to 14,600, according to a new research report published in the journal JAMA Surgery. A third of the injuries in 2018 involved the head. For comparison, only about a sixth of hospitalized cyclists have head injuries.

E-Scooter Woes

It was a little surprising to see such a high proportion of e-scooter accident-related head injuries, say the authors, and it’s concerning. Head injuries are “the most important injury you want to prevent aside from death,” says Ben Breyer, a report co-author and urologist with the University of California, San Francisco. The results show how important it is for e-scooter riders to wear helmets — something not all local laws or e-scooter companies require.

The number of rides on this two-wheeled mode of transport more than doubled between 2017 and 2018 to about 84 million trips. Their popularity makes sense: The devices zip people around town and, for the many riders relying on a device offered by a short-term rental company, can be parked wherever is convenient. 

More motorized scooters on the streets has meant more injuries, however. In a study released late last year of 36 e-scooter riders that got into accidents, x-rays revealed broken bones and other trauma in 19 of them. Over the course of a year-long study ending in 2018, two southern California hospitals saw almost 250 e-scooter injuries, with 40 percent involving the head. Since much of this research involved cases near and around specific hospitals, Breyer — who also studies bike-related accidents — wanted a better sense of what national trends were. 

Watch Your Head

The new study, based on nationwide records of emergency room injury reports from 2014 to 2018, showed the number of e-scooter injuries increased year to year, with the largest jump from 2017 to 2018. Also in 2018, the most-injured age group shifted from those under 18 to riders between 18 and 34 years old. Across all four years of data, head injuries were the most common. Regardless of what part of the body took a hit, fractures were the most common type of injury, followed by contusions (bruising) and abrasions. Men accounted for about two-thirds of all cases, and the vast majority of recorded injuries came from urban hospitals. 

Breyer suspects that scooter riders might be more prone to head injury compared with cyclists partly due to posture: Standing upright on a scooter makes it harder to protect your head if you fall, compared to cyclists that are already in crouched positions. But more importantly, scooter riders don’t appear to be wearing helmets. Other e-scooter accident reports found only 2 to 4.4 percent of patients bothered with head gear. 

The way hospitals log their injury data prevented Breyer and his team from studying what kinds of head injuries physicians saw, or their severity. “While it could be minor and have no long term issues, sometimes they can be incredibly devastating and lead to long term disability,” Breyer says. 

E-scooter providers often suggest that riders wear a helmet and occasionally hand out protective gear, but company enforcement is spotty. Some rental services even show advertisements of riders without any protective gear on. Legal requirements are also inconsistent. For example, California e-scooterers over 18 are no longer required to wear helmets, and, while Atlanta has banned nighttime e-scooter use, the city still only suggests that riders use headgear.

At least one scooter company has offered discounts for riders who submit selfies showing them wearing a helmet, and Breyer thinks it would be great if scooter companies could offer rentable helmets as well. Though there might be some logistical issues to work out, “It would be an important safety step, and I would commend companies if they were working on it.”

Posted by

Shane McGlaun |

Wed, Jan 08, 2020 – 9:42 AM

In the past, we’ve seen keyboards that are protected on flat surfaces using a red outline of a traditional keyboard. Samsung has unveiled something at CES 2020 that is similar, but different at the same time. The new feature is called SelfieType.

SelfieType is software that uses the front-facing selfie cam or a smartphone, tablet, or laptop to create an invisible keyboard users can type on. The tech uses a proprietary AI engine that can analyze the finger movements and interpret them as a valid keypress.

The only issue we see is that you will need to be a touch typist to get any benefit from the feature. To use Samsung’s system, the front-facing camera only needs to be angled down towards the hands reports TechSpot.

The other issue that some users will have is that there is no haptic feedback. That means no vibration or sound when you press a key. Some may not find that an issue. It’s cool to have another alternative to type on your smartphone.

Progress isn’t always positive. Although the occupants of modern cars are undeniably safer in a crash than they would be in models just a few years old, that’s not true for people using Shank’s pony. Overall, fewer people died on America’s roads in 2018 (the last year for which full data is available) than the year before—some 36,600 in total. But concealed within that figure is a big rise in the number of pedestrians who were killed by drivers—6,283 in all, an increase of 3.4 percent on 2017.

Obviously there’s no single cause to which we can point. More than three-quarters of pedestrians were killed after dark, and a similar percentage were killed while crossing a road, but Americans’ antisocial love for big SUVs

needs reckoning with, too

. Obviously this is a problem we need to solve. Some US cities have adopted the

Vision Zero

project, although few have come anywhere near the

success of the Norwegians

when it comes to shrinking that body count. We could implement far stricter driver training and significantly beef up traffic law enforcement, but only the most naive optimists think there’s any actual possibility of that happening any time soon.

Pedestrian detection is increasingly a component of the advanced driver assistance systems that are fitted to some new cars, but independent testing suggests you probably don’t want to rely on these to save your life. Meanwhile, some are hoping that another technology can save us through deployment of what’s known as Vehicle-to-Pedestrian (V2P). V2P is related to the Vehicle-to-Vehicle communication protocol, a protocol that after 20 years has yet to be deployed and is now the subject of a bitter fight among regulators and interest groups over its allocated 5.9GHz bandwidth. But not all Vehicle-to-whatever communication needs to use dedicated short-range communications (DSRC); in the past we’ve reported on a compatible cellular approach, called C-V2X.

It’s this approach that some technology companies hope will make future years safer for those of us who walk places. At CES this year, Harman unveiled its new V2P system, which uses low latency 5G peer-to-peer signals to detect objects—or more specifically a smartphone (and therefore the person carrying it) in a vehicle’s path. And the pedestrian (or cyclist) also receives an alert—helpful for those 76 percent of pedestrian deaths that happen in low-light situations.

Similarly, the mapping company Here is collaborating with Verizon to do something similar with a Vehicle-to-Network system that leverages 5G (as well as Here’s HD maps and computer vision technology) to predict vehicle travel paths and then warn drivers of impending collisions.

Truth be told, none of this is particularly novel; in 2015

I saw demos of V2P technology at Mcity

, the University of Michigan’s outdoor research lab for new vehicle technologies. But it

might

finally be getting ready for the real world—a company called Savari announced at CES this week that its SmartCross V2P system is going to be deployed by the New York City Department of Transportation as part of that city’s Vision Zero. Savari’s app is integrated into NYCDOT’s traffic management system, and it says it “provides critical information regarding the intersection geometry and traffic light status to pedestrians who may otherwise be distracted,” as well as alerting V2X-enabled vehicles of their presence.

Of course, the simplest solution would be for everyone—drivers and pedestrians—to be alert to their surroundings and not buried in their phones while driving or walking. We can but hope.