With its expanse of buildings and concrete, Mexico City may not look squishy—but it is. Ever since the Spanish conquistadors drained Lake Texcoco to make way for more urbanization, the land has been gradually compacting under the weight. It’s a phenomenon known as subsidence, and the result is grim: Mexico City is sinking up to 20 inches a year, unleashing havoc on its infrastructure.
That includes the city’s Metro system, the second-largest in North America after New York City’s. Now, satellites have allowed scientists to meticulously measure the rate of sinking across Mexico City, mapping where subsidence has the potential to damage railways. “When you’re here in the city, you get used to buildings being tilted a little,” says Dari?o Solano?Rojas, a remote-sensing scientist at the National Autonomous University of Mexico. “You can feel how the rails are wobbly. Riding the Metro in Mexico City feels weird. You don’t know if it’s dangerous or not—you feel like it’s dangerous, but you don’t have that certainty.”
In a recent study in the journal Scientific Reports, Solano?Rojas went in search of certainty. Using radar satellite data, he and his team measured how the elevation changed across the city between 2011 and 2020. Subsidence isn’t uniform; the rate depends on several factors. The most dramatic instances globally are due to the overextraction of groundwater: Pump enough liquid out and the ground collapses like an empty water bottle. That’s why Jakarta, Indonesia, is sinking up to 10 inches a year. Over in California’s San Joaquin Valley, the land has sunk as much as 28 feet in the past century, due to farmers pumping out too much groundwater.
A similar draining of aquifers is happening in Mexico City, which is gripped by a worsening water crisis. “The subsurface is like a sponge: We get the water out, and then it deforms, because it’s losing volume,” says Solano?Rojas. How much volume depends on the underlying sediment in a given part of the city—the ancient lake didn’t neatly layer equal proportions of clay and sand in every area. “That produces a lot of different behaviors on the surface,” Solano?Rojas adds.
Subsidence rates across Mexico City vary substantially, from 20 inches annually to not at all, where the city is built atop solid volcanic rock. This creates “differential subsidence,” where the land sinks differently not just square mile to square mile, or block to block, but square foot to square foot. If a road, railway, or building is sinking differently at one end than the other, it’ll destabilize.
On an early spring day in 1959, Edward Hunter testified before a US Senate subcommittee investigating “the effect of Red China Communes on the United States.” It was the kind of opportunity he relished. A war correspondent who had spent considerable time in Asia, Hunter had achieved brief media stardom in 1951 after his book Brain-Washing in Red China introduced a new concept to the American public: a supposedly scientific system for changing people’s minds, even making them love things they once hated.
But Hunter wasn’t just a reporter, objectively chronicling conditions in China. As he told the assembled senators, he was also an anticommunist activist who served as a propagandist for the OSS, or Office of Strategic Services—something that was considered normal and patriotic at the time. His reporting blurred the line between fact and political mythology.
Chinese reformists like Liang Qichao used the term xinao—a play on an older word, xixin, or “washing the heart”—in an attempt to bring ideas from Western science into Chinese philosophy
WIKIMEDIA COMMONS
When a senator asked about Hunter’s work for the OSS, the operative boasted that he was the first to “discover the technique of mind-attack” in mainland China, the first to use the word “brainwashing” in writing in any language, and “the first, except for the Chinese, to use the word in speech in any language.”
None of this was true. Other operatives associated with the OSS had used the word in reports before Hunter published articles about it. More important, as the University of Hong Kong legal scholar Ryan Mitchell has pointed out, the Chinese word Hunter used at the hearing—xinao (), translated as “wash brain”—has a long history going back to scientifically minded Chinese philosophers of the late 19th century, who used it to mean something more akin to enlightenment.
Yet Hunter’s sensational tales still became an important part of the disinformation and pseudoscience that fueled a “mind-control race” during the Cold War, much like the space race. Inspired by new studies on brain function, the US military and intelligence communities prepared themselves for a psychic war with the Soviet Union and China by spending millions of dollars on research into manipulating the human brain. But while the science never exactly panned out, residual beliefs fostered by this bizarre conflict continue to play a role in ideological and scientific debates to this day.
Coercive persuasion and pseudoscience
Ironically, “brainwashing” was not a widely used term among communists in China. The word xinao, Mitchell told me in an email, is actually a play on an older word, xixin, or washing the heart, which alludes to a Confucian and Buddhist ideal of self-awareness. In the late 1800s, Chinese reformists such as Liang Qichao began using xinao—replacing the character for “heart” with “brain”—in part because they were trying to modernize Chinese philosophy. “They were eager to receive and internalize as much as they could of Western science in general, and discourse about the brain as the seat of consciousness was just one aspect of that set of imported ideas,” Mitchell said.
For Liang and his circle, brainwashing wasn’t some kind of mind-wiping process. “It was a sort of notion of epistemic virtue,” Mitchell said, “or a personal duty to make oneself modern in order to behave properly in the modern world.”
Meanwhile, scientists outside China were investigating “brainwashing” in the sense we usually think of, with experiments into mind clearing and reprogramming. Some of the earliest research into the possibility began in the 1890s, when Ivan Pavlov, the Russian physiologist who had famously conditioned dogs to drool at the sound of a bell, worked on Soviet-funded projects to investigate how trauma could change animal behavior. He found that even the most well-conditioned dogs would forget their training after intensely stressful experiences such as nearly drowning, especially when those were combined with sleep deprivation and isolation. It seemed that Pavlov had hit upon a quick way to wipe animals’ memories. Scientists on both sides of the Iron Curtain subsequently wondered whether it might work on humans. And once memories were wiped, they wondered, could something else be installed their place?
During the 1949 show trial of the Hungarian anticommunist József Mindszenty, American officials worried that the Russians might have found the answer. A Catholic cardinal, Mindszenty had protested several government policies of the newly formed, Soviet-backed Hungarian People’s Republic. He was arrested and tortured, and he eventually made a series of outlandish confessions at trial: that he had conspired to steal the Hungarian crown jewels, start World War III, and make himself ruler of the world. In his book Dark Persuasion, Joel Dimsdale, a psychiatry professor at the University of California, San Diego, argues that the US intelligence community saw these implausible claims as confirmation that the Soviets had made some kind of scientific breakthrough that allowed them to control the human mind through coercive persuasion.
This question became more urgent when, in 1953, a handful of American POWs in China and Korea switched sides, and a Marine named Frank Schwable was quoted on Chinese radio validating the communist claim that the US was testing germ warfare in Asia. By this time, Hunter had already published a book about brainwashing in China, so the Western public quickly gravitated toward his explanation that the prisoners had been brainwashed, just like Mindszenty. People were terrified, and this was a reassuring explanation for how nice American GIs could go Red.
Edward Hunter, who claimed to have coined the term “brainwashing,” wrote a book that fueled paranoia about a “mind-control race” during the Cold War.
A pamphlet published in 1955, purported to be a translation of a work by the Russian secret police, claimed that the Soviets used drugs and psychology to control the masses and that Dianetics, a pseudoscience invented by Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard, could prevent brainwashing.
Over the following years, in the wake of the Korean War, “brainwashing” grew into a catchall explanation for any kind of radical or nonconformist behavior in the United States. Social scientists and politicians alike latched onto the idea. The Dutch psychologist Joost Meerloo warned that television was a brainwashing machine, for example, and the anticommunist educator J. Merrill Root claimed that high schools brainwashed kids into being weak-willed and vulnerable to communist influence. Meanwhile, popular movies like 1962’s The Manchurian Candidate, starring Frank Sinatra, offered thrilling tales of Chinese communists whose advanced psychological techniques turned unsuspecting American POWs into assassins.
For the military and intelligence communities, mind control hovered between myth and science. Nowhere is this more obvious than in the peculiar case of an anonymously published 1955 pamphlet called Brain-Washing: A Synthesis of the Russian Textbook on Psychopolitics, which purported to be a translation of work by the Soviet secret-police chief Lavrentiy Beria. Full of wild claims about how the Soviets used psychology and drugs to control the masses, the pamphlet has a peculiar section devoted to the ways that Dianetics—a pseudoscience invented by the founder of Scientology, L. Ron Hubbard—could prevent brainwashing. As a result, it is widely believed that Hubbard himself wrote the pamphlet as black propaganda, or propaganda that masquerades as something produced by a foreign adversary.
The 1962 film The Manchurian Candidate, starring Frank Sinatra, offered thrilling tales of Chinese communists whose advanced psychological techniques turned unsuspecting American POWs into assassins.
ALAMY
Still, US officials apparently took it seriously. David Seed, a cultural studies scholar at the University of Liverpool, plumbed the National Security Council papers at the Dwight D. Eisenhower Library, where he discovered that the NSC’s Operations Coordinating Board had analyzed the pamphlet as part of an investigation into enemy capabilities. A member of the board wrote that it might be “fake” but contained so much accurate information that it was clearly written by “experts.” When it came to brainwashing, government operatives made almost no distinction between black propaganda and so-called expertise.
This gobbledygook may also have struck the NSC investigator as legitimate because Hubbard borrowed lingo from the same sources as many scientists of the era. Hubbard chose the name Dianetics, for instance, specifically to evoke the computer scientist Norbert Wiener’s idea of cybernetics, an influential theory about information control systems that heavily informed both psychology and the burgeoning field of artificial intelligence. Cybernetics suggested that the brain functioned like a machine, with inputs and outputs, feedback and control. And if machines could be optimized, then why not brains?
An excuse for government abuse
The fantasy of brainwashing was always one of optimization. Military experts knew that adversaries could be broken with torture, but it took months and was often a violent, messy process. A fast, scientifically informed interrogation method would save time and could potentially be deployed on a mass scale. In 1953, that dream led the CIA to invest millions of dollars in MK-Ultra, a project that injected cash into university and research programs devoted to memory wiping, mind control, and “truth serum” drugs. Worried that their rivals in the Soviet Union and China were controlling people’s minds to spread communism throughout the world, the intelligence community was willing to try almost anything to fight back. No operation was too weird.
One of MK-Ultra’s most notorious projects was “Operation Midnight Climax” in San Francisco, where sex workers lured random American men to a safe house and dosed them with LSD while CIA agents covertly observed their behavior. At McGill University in Montreal, the CIA funded the work of the psychologist Donald Cameron, who used a combination of drugs and electroconvulsive therapy on patients with mental illness, attempting to erase and “repattern” their minds. Though many of his victims did wind up suffering from amnesia for years, Cameron never successfully injected new thoughts or memories. Marcia Holmes, a science historian who researched brainwashing for the Hidden Persuaders project at Birkbeck, University of London, told me that the CIA used Cameron’s data to develop new kinds of torture, which the US adopted as “enhanced interrogation” techniques in the wake of 9/11. “You could put a scientific spin on it and claim that’s why it worked,” she said. “But it always boiled down to medieval tactics that people knew from experience worked.”
Believed to be a victim of communist mind control, the American
POW Frank Schwable claimed on Chinese radio in 1953 that the US was testing germ warfare in Asia.
After being arrested and tortured, the Catholic cardinal and anticommunist
József Mindszenty made outlandish confessions
at trial, like that he had conspired to steal the Hungarian crown jewels.
MK-Ultra remained secret until the mid-1970s, when the US Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, commonly known as the Church Committee after its chair, Senator Frank Church, opened hearings into the long-running project. The shocking revelations that the CIA was drugging American citizens and paying for the torment of vulnerable Canadians changed the public’s understanding of mind control. “Brainwashing” came to seem less like a legitimate threat from overseas enemies and more like a ruse or excuse for almost any kind of bad behavior. When Patty Hearst, granddaughter of the newspaper publisher William Randolph Hearst, was put on trial in 1976 for robbing a bank after being kidnapped by the Symbionese Liberation Army, an American militant organization, the judge refused to believe experts who testified that she had been tortured and brainwashed by her captors. She was convicted and spent 22 months in jail. This marked the end of the nation’s infatuation with brainwashing, and experts began to debunk the idea that there was a scientific basis for mind control.
In publishing heiress Patty Hearst’s 1976 trial for bank robbery,
the judge refused to believe that she had been brainwashed as a victim of kidnapping.
GIFT OF TIME MAGAZINE
Still, the revelations about MK-Ultra led to new cultural myths. Communists were no longer the baddies—instead, people feared that the US government was trying to experiment on its citizens. Soon after the Church Committee hearings were over, the media was gripped by a crime story of epic proportions: nearly two dozen Black children had been murdered in Atlanta, and the police had no leads other than a vague idea that maybe it could be a serial killer. Wayne Williams, a Black man who was eventually convicted of two of the murders, claimed at various points that he had been trained by the CIA. This led to popular conspiracy theories that MK-Ultra had been experimenting on Black people in Atlanta.
Colin Dickey, author of Under the Eye of Power: How Fear of Secret Societies Shapes American Democracy, told me these conspiracy theories became “a way of making sense of an otherwise mystifying and terrifying reality, [which is that America is] a country where Black people are so disenfranchised that their murders aren’t noticed.” Dickey added that this MK-Ultra conspiracy theory “gave a shape to systemic racism,” placing blame for the Atlanta child murders on the US government. In the process, it also suggested that Black people had been brainwashed to kill each other.
No evidence ever surfaced that MK-Ultra was behind the children’s deaths, but the idea of brainwashing continues to be a powerful metaphor for the effects of systemic racism. It haunts contemporary Black horror films like Get Out, where white people take over Black people’s bodies through a fantastical version of hypnosis. And it provides the analytical substrate for the scathing indictment of racist marketing in the book Brainwashed: Challenging the Myth of Black Inferiority, by the Black advertising executive Tom Burrell. He argues that advertising has systematically pushed stereotypes of Black people as second-class citizens, instilling a “slave mindset” in Black audiences.
A social and political phenomenon
Today, even as the idea of brainwashing is often dismissed as pseudoscience, Americans are still spellbound by the idea that people we disagree with have been psychologically captured by our enemies. Right-wing pundits and politicians often attribute discussions of racism to infections by a “woke mind virus”—an idea that is a direct descendant of Cold War panics over communist brainwashing. Meanwhile, contemporary psychology researchers like UCSD’s Dimsdale fear that social media is now a vector for coercive persuasion, just as Meerloo worried about television’s mind-control powers in the 1950s.
Cutting-edge technology is also altering how we think about mind control. In a 2017 open letter published in Nature, an international group of researchers and ethicists warned that neurotechnologies like brain-computer interfaces “mean that we are on a path to a world in which it will be possible to decode people’s mental processes and directly manipulate the brain mechanisms underlying their intentions, emotions and decisions.” It sounds like MK-Ultra’s wish list. Hoping to head off a neuro-dystopia, the group outlined several key ways that companies and universities could guard against coercive uses of this technology in the future. They suggested that we need laws to prevent companies from spying on people’s private thoughts, for example, as well as regulations that bar anyone from using brain implants to change people’s personalities or make them more neurotypical.
Many neuroscientists feel that these concerns are overblown; one of them, the University of Maryland cognitive scientist R. Douglas Fields, summed up the naysayers’ position with a column in Quanta magazine arguing that the brain is more plastic than we realize, and that neurotech mind control will never be as simple as throwing a switch. Kathleen Taylor, another neuroscientist who studies brainwashing, takes a more measured view; in her book Brainwashing: The Science of Thought Control, she acknowledges that neurotech and drugs could change people’s thought processes but ultimately concludes that “brainwashing is above all a social and political phenomenon.”
Sidney Gottlieb was an American chemist and spymaster who in the 1950s headed the
Central Intelligence Agency’s mind-control program known as Project MK-Ultra.
COURTESY OF THE CIA
Perhaps that means the anonymous National Security Council examiner was right to call Hubbard’s black propaganda the work of an “expert.” If brainwashing is politics, then disinformation might be as effective (or ineffective) as a brain implant in changing someone’s mind. Still, scholars have learned that political efforts at mind control do not have predictable results. Online disinformation leads to what Juliette Kayyem, a former assistant secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, identifies as stochastic terrorism, or acts of violence that cannot be predicted precisely but can be analyzed statistically. She writes that stochastic terrorism is inspired by online rhetoric that demonizes groups of people, but it’s hard to know which people consuming that rhetoric will actually become terrorists, and which of them will just rage at their computer screens—the result of coercive persuasion that works on some targets and misses others.
American operatives may never have found the perfect system for brainwashing foreign adversaries or unsuspecting citizens, but the US managed to win the mind-control wars in one small way. Mitchell, the legal scholar at Hong Kong University, told me that the American definition of brainwashing, or xinao, is now the dominant way the word is used in modern Chinese speech. “People refer to aggressive advertising campaigns or earworm pop songs as having a xinao effect,” he said. The Chinese government, Mitchell added, uses the term exactly the way the US military did back in the 1950s. State media, for example, “described many Hong Kong protesters in 2019 as having undergone xinao by the West.”
Annalee Newitz is the author of Stories Are Weapons: Psychological Warfare and the American Mind, coming in June 2024.
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COLORADO SPRINGS, Co ?— Sierra Space unveiled a radical new concept for on-demand cargo delivery from Earth orbit. The company aims to land critical supplies anywhere on the planet within 90 minutes of when it was requested.
Sierra Space says the concept could enable soldiers on the battlefield or in remote areas to acquire much-needed supplies on quicker timescales, as they’d be far from traditional infrastructure used to transport goods on the ground. The Ghost orbital delivery platform could also aid first responders in disaster-stricken areas and bolster humanitarian efforts.
While several commercial launch providers, such as SpaceX and Rocket Lab, in addition to the U.S. military have been discussing using rockets to send cargo rapidly around the Earth, Sierra Space’s Ghost concept could allow payloads to land in areas without dedicated launch or landing facilities. It would be particularly useful for smaller payloads, therefore opening up radical new possibilities for civilian supply chains on top of military demands.
A Sierra Space Ghost test article at Space Florida’s Launch and Landing Facility (LLF) in Florida. (Image credit: Sierra Space)
According to a Sierra Space statement announcing the Ghost concept, the system would involve loading pre-determined supplies such as survival kits, an inflatable boat, rations and weaponry onto different "units." There units would then be launched into orbit.
The Ghost platform could then wait up to five years in orbit before any pre-loaded supplies are called down to Earth. Once materials must be delivered, first, a de-orbit motor would slow the satellite down enough for Earth’s gravity to begin pulling it towards the planet’s surface. The system’s thermal shield would meanwhile protect the payload from the upcoming intense heat of reentry.
Once safely within Earth’s atmosphere, the thermal shell would be discarded and the system’s soft-shell, umbrella-like parafoil would open. A steerable rudder on the parafoil can help guide the Ghost’s payload to within 300 feet (100 m) of its targeted landing spot, Sierra Space says.
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Sierra Space’s new "Axelerator technology" incubator helped the team develop a prototype of the Ghost system in just 90 days, according to the company’s statement.
In-flight photographs taken aboard a Sierra Space Ghost test article during the company’s February 2024 testing campaign. (Image credit: Sierra Space)
Space.com spoke with Sierra Space’s Erik Daehler, Vice President of Orbital Missions & Services, at Space Symposium to learn more about the new Ghost system. Daehler said that while the Ghost system can be scaled to different sizes, between 550 pounds and 1,750 pounds (250 kilograms and 750 kilograms) is the "sweet spot" in terms of cost versus the amount of returnable payload.
Each unit currently costs somewhere in the "tens of millions" of dollars to build, but Daehler said Sierra Space is working to bring that cost down to "single-digit millions."
A concept of operations showing the Sierra Space Ghost system as it unfolds its soft-material decelerator and reenters Earth’s atmosphere. (Image credit: Sierra Space)
When asked if the Ghost concept could be scaled up until its large enough to return something as massive as a module of the International Space Station (ISS), Daehler said a similar concept could possibly be used, but it would need to use slightly different design principles.
"As you think about cool things like an ISS segment, you can scale things designed in a similar way," Daehler said. "But you might look at a different structural way to build it nicely. So instead of doing a rigid structure like we did, which is super easy to build, you might do something inflatable."
"We think it’d be really cool to bring back something of our heritage like that," he continued. "We originally started designing this because our cargo modules were designed to burn up for our NASA missions to bring back trash. We’d like to eventually reuse them. So, we’re looking at that scalability; how do we bring back something much larger?"
A Sierra Space Ghost test article undergoing testing at Space Florida’s Launch and Landing Facility (LLF) in Florida. (Image credit: Sierra Space)
A test article of the Sierra Space Ghost delivery system was on display here at the 39th annual Space Symposium in Colorado Springs. The bottom of the test article was scuffed from having been test-dropped at Space Florida’s historic Launch and Landing Facility (LLF) in Florida, where NASA’s space shuttles once landed.
A Sierra Space Ghost prototype on display at Space Symposium in Colorado Springs, Colorado on April 10, 2024. (Image credit: Future/Brett Tingley)
During a testing campaign in February 2024, seven different test articles were dropped ?from a Sikorsky S-76 helicopter —? some with the system’s attached parachute, others with only the system’s soft-shell decelerator, and still others involving "terminal" drops of the cargo payload alone ?—? from altitudes between 2,000 feet (610 meters) and 4,000 feet (1,220 meters).
A Sierra Space Ghost prototype on display at Space Symposium in Colorado Springs, Colorado on April 10, 2024. (Image credit: Future/Brett Tingley)
Similar resupply concepts have been discussed for years, except those involving point-to-point rocket launches with reusable systems like SpaceX’s massive Starship vehicle. Just this year, the U.S. Air Force allocated $4 million in research funding to its Rocket Cargo Vanguard, or "Point-to-Point Delivery (P2PD)" program as it is now known. It’s a program that’s "focused on utilizing vehicles that traverse from or through space to transport DoD materiel anywhere around the world within tactically responsive timelines," according to Breaking Defense.
However, such a system would likely not be able to land anywhere it wants, as large rockets currently need dedicated landing infrastructure. A much smaller, more tactical concept like the Sierra Space Ghost system could enable pinpoint deliveries to austere, remote or contested areas without the need for landing pads.
Sierra Space has not yet announced a date by which it hopes to have the system in operation, but the company is moving forward with a testing program to further develop the Ghost concept and determine what infrastructure, communications systems and other architecture will be needed to turn it into a reality.
I’ve found myself at a loss for words when trying to explain the Humane AI Pin to my friends. The best description so far is that it’s a combination of a wearable Siri button with a camera and built-in projector that beams onto your palm. But each time I start explaining that, I get so caught up in pointing out its problems that I never really get to fully detail what the AI Pin can do. Or is meant to do, anyway.
Yet, words are crucial to the Humane AI experience. Your primary mode of interacting with the pin is through voice, accompanied by touch and gestures. Without speaking, your options are severely limited. The company describes the device as your “second brain,” but the combination of holding out my hand to see the projected screen, waving it around to navigate the interface and tapping my chest and waiting for an answer all just made me look really stupid. When I remember that I was actually eager to spend $700 of my own money to get a Humane AI Pin, not to mention shell out the required $24 a month for the AI and the company’s 4G service riding on T-Mobile’s network, I feel even sillier.
What is the Humane AI Pin?
In the company’s own words, the Humane AI Pin is the “first wearable device and software platform built to harness the full power of artificial intelligence.” If that doesn’t clear it up, well, I can’t blame you.
There are basically two parts to the device: the Pin and its magnetic attachment. The Pin is the main piece, which houses a touch-sensitive panel on its face, with a projector, camera, mic and speakers lining its top edge. It’s about the same size as an Apple Watch Ultra 2, both measuring about 44mm (1.73 inches) across. The Humane wearable is slightly squatter, though, with its 47.5mm (1.87 inches) height compared to the Watch Ultra’s 49mm (1.92 inches). It’s also half the weight of Apple’s smartwatch, at 34.2 grams (1.2 ounces).
Battery life has long been a key limiting factor in drone use. Although there are commercial models that can stay aloft for 45 minutes or longer on a single charge, being able to keep drones in the air for longer would be helpful for many purposes. Researchers at the University of Southern Denmark have been working on that issue for several years by developing drones that can recharge directly from power lines.
This time around, the scientists attached a gripper system to a Tarot 650 Sport drone, which they customized with a electric quadcopter propulsion system, an autopilot module and other components. When the drone’s systems detect that the battery is running low, the device employs its camera and millimeter-wave radar system to pinpoint the closest power line, as New Atlas notes.
The drone then flies up to the power line from underneath, using a pair of inward-sloping arms to guide the cable into the gripper. An inductive charger pulls current from the power line. When the battery is full, the gripper opens and the drone continues on its way.
At the outset, the idea is for drones that inspect power lines to use this charging system. The researchers first showed off a self-charging drone that tops up its battery from power lines in 2022. This time around, they improved the gripper system and demonstrated a real-world use case for the tech.
In a paper they’re presenting at next month’s IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, the team described the project as "to the best of our knowledge, a first-in-the-world system with the ability to sustain operation throughout many inspection/charging cycles powered by energy harvesting from power lines in a real outdoor environment." In arguably the most successful test, the drone stayed aloft for over two hours through five cycles of power line inspection and charging.
Drones have been used for years to monitor and inspect power lines. They’re particularly useful in remote areas, such as mountain tops, where examining power lines manually is a tough ask. Still, it’s hard not to feel a little uneasy about drones clamping onto power lines. If anything goes wrong and a drone somehow ends up damaging a power line, an entire region could lose electricity. Charging pads for drone exist and may be a safer option, but they’d require extra space for infrastructure.
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New research is the latest to suggest that sildenafil—the active ingredient in popular erectile dysfunction drug Viagra—might help fend off Alzheimer’s disease. The study found that people taking sildenafil were noticeably less likely to develop Alzheimer’s than similar patients not taking it. The results do not yet prove that the little blue pill is effective against the neurological disorder, however, and clinical trials will be needed to know for sure, the researchers say.
Giancarlo Esposito on Having His Own Action Figures
The study, published in the Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease, was led by scientists from the Cleveland Clinic. In 2021, the same team published a paper finding evidence in the lab and from insurance claims data that sildenafil could prevent or delay the onset of Alzheimer’s in older people—perhaps reducing risk by as much as 69%. Some researchers have questioned whether the study’s design was truly able to show a clear link between reduced Alzheimer’s and sildenafil use, however. The very next year, another study that examined Medicare data failed to find such a connection.
This debate isn’t over, though. This February, a third research team studied healthcare data from the UK and found a significant, if smaller, reduced risk of Alzheimer’s associated with sildenafil. And now the authors of the original study say they’ve uncovered more evidence to support the hypothesis.
This time around, the team analyzed claims data from two large patient databases. They compared patients taking sildenafil with patients taking one of four drugs commonly used to treat pulmonary hypertension, a type of high blood pressure affecting the lungs. While sildenafil is best known as an erectile dysfunction aid, it’s also approved and commonly used for this condition as well.
The team once again found that the patients on sildenafil were less likely to later be diagnosed with Alzheimer’s than the comparison groups, with a reduced risk ranging from 30% to 54%. They also conducted more lab experiments, testing sildenafil on neurons grown from the stem cells of Alzheimer’s patients. They found that the drug seemed to promote the growth of neurites (the projections that neurons use to communicate with each other) and reduced the accumulation of a potentially toxic form of tau protein (one of the two proteins thought responsible for causing Alzheimer’s)—a potential clue as to how sildenafil might actually lower Alzheimer’s risk.
“Our findings provide further weight to re-purposing this existing FDA-approved drug as a novel treatment for Alzheimer’s, which is in great need of new therapies,” said senior author Feixiong Cheng in a statement from the Cleveland Clinic.
The scientists are quick to caution that their research can’t show conclusively that sildenafil can prevent or delay Alzheimer’s. But they and other scientists say there’s been enough encouraging data collected to at least merit a larger-scale and more definitive test of this hypothesis.
“We believe our findings provide the evidence needed for clinical trials to further examine the potential effectiveness of sildenafil in patients with Alzheimer’s disease,” said Cheng.
A team of physicists and engineers at Princeton University built a twisting fusion reactor known as a stellarator that uses permanent magnets, showcasing a potentially cost-effective way of building the powerful machines. Their experiment, called MUSE, relies on 3D-printed and off-the-shelf parts.
Giancarlo Esposito on Having His Own Action Figures
Nuclear fusion, the reaction that powers stars like our Sun, produces huge amounts of energy by merging atoms (not to be confused with nuclear fission, which produces less energy by splitting atoms). Nuclear fission is the reaction at the core of modern nuclear reactors that power electric grids; scientists have yet to crack the code on nuclear fusion as an energy source. Even once that long-sought goal is reached, scaling the technology and making it commercially viable is its own beast.
Stellarators are cruller-shaped devices that contain high-temperature plasmas, which can bed tuned to foster the conditions for fusion reactions. They are similar to tokamaks, doughnut-shaped devices that run fusion reactions. Tokamaks rely on solenoids, which are magnets that carry electric current. MUSE is different.
“Using permanent magnets is a completely new way to design stellarators,” said Tony Qian, a physicist at Princeton University and lead author of two papers published in the Journal of Plasma Physics and Nuclear Fusion that describe the design of the MUSE experiment. “This technique allows us to test new plasma confinement ideas quickly and build new devices easily.”
Permanent magnets don’t need electric current to generate their magnet fields and can be purchased off-the-shelf. The MUSE experiment stuck such magnets onto a 3-D printed shell.
“I realized that even if they were situated alongside other magnets, rare-earth permanent magnets could generate and maintain the magnetic fields necessary to confine the plasma so fusion reactions can occur,” Michael Zarnstorff, a research scientist at the university’s Plasma Physics Laboratory and principal investigator of the MUSE project, in a press release. “That’s the property that makes this technique work.”
The LLNL breakthrough was done by shining powerful lasers at a pellet of atoms, a different process than the plasma-based fusion reactions that occur in tokamaks and stellarators. Little tweaks to the devices, like the implementation of permanent magnets in MUSE or an upgraded tungsten diverter in the KSTAR tokamak, make it easier for scientists to replicate the experimental setups and perform experiments at high temperatures for longer.
Taken together, these innovations will allow scientists to do more with the plasmas at their fingertips, and maybe—just maybe—reach the vaunted goal of usable and scalable fusion energy.
