Month: June 2018

I stand in front of a lanky two-legged robot stomping along a treadmill. I watch, all impressed, until the researcher next to me tells me to trip it. The thing looks expensive, so I hesitate. Really, he tells me, it’s OK. And he probably knows better than I do, so I drag my boot along its shin like a good soccer trip.

The robot stammers, yet recovers. And then again, and again. No matter how much I pester it, the thing just keeps stomping. I keep feeling guilty.

Here in the Amber Lab at Caltech, they call this “disturbance testing,” not “assault,” which makes me feel a bit better. There’s a point to it, by the way: These researchers are doing everything they can to not just master robotic walking, but to prepare these machines for life in the real world.

But why robots with legs? What’s wrong with wheels? Nothing, except that truly useful robots will have to be able to tackle everything humans can. “That means we have to have walking robots that go on grass, on gravel, on snow, on ice,” says roboticist Aaron Ames, who runs Amber Lab—that stands for Advanced Mechanical Bipedal Experimental Robotics. “So how do we make that extension? How do we get robots to work in these very unstructured unknown environments?”

At its core, the work here is about developing the mathematics of bipedal locomotion. “Mathematically understand walking, and at a fundamental level you’re going to be able to not only walk, but walk efficiently, walk dynamically, and walk in a way that’s human-like in its simplicity and beauty,” says Ames.

The bipedal robots that walk this world are governed by the same basic mathematical functions. The robot that I tried to trip, it’s relatively simple—it’s attached to scaffolding, so it only has to worry about going forwards and backwards, not tipping side to side. What Ames and his team can do is test out some new algorithms here, optimize them, and then port them to a more complex robot. “We’re going to ultimately find that we’re missing something, so we go back to the simpler robot and we iterate,” says Ames.

Take jumping, for instance. Up against a wall in the Amber Lab is a robot that bounces up and down a scaffolding like a piston. “We start simple and we get it to hop,” says Ames. “And then when we understand that we can do things like graduate it to Cassie and make Cassie jump.”

Cassie, if you’re wondering, is a pair of robotic ostrich-looking legs that’ll set you back several hundred thousand dollars. It’s a research platform, so it’s relatively easy for scientists like Ames to fiddle with its code and pull new tricks. Over at the University of Michigan, for instance, they’ve been making Cassie walk through fire and ride a Segway, because why the hell not.

The Amber Lab, though, has figured out how to make Cassie jump. Which is way more difficult than it sounds. “You have to crouch down, you have to compress all those springs, you have to jump off,” says Ames. “You have this air time where you can’t interact with the world at all, and you have to land and then stick that landing.” The result is a robot with some serious velociraptor vibes, even if for our visit Cassie was having trouble sticking the landing. (See video at top.)

So, robots in this lab are jumping and stomping and surviving disturbance testing. Great for the robots—but also great for humans. Because Ames and his team are taking what they’re learning and applying it to a one-of-a-kind robotic prosthesis: Ampro. “All the things we’re shooting for in walking robots, we’re trying to achieve on prosthetics,” says Ames. “So we want efficient walking, efficient for the user as well as the device.”

Ampro’s efficiency comes from its clever interfacing with the user. The battery-powered prosthetic has a motor in the knee and in the ankle, which are paired with springs. It also uses a sensor that detects where the user is in their gait, and reacts accordingly, powering the motors to move the prosthesis in sync with the wearer.

Not only does that make for a more efficient movement, but a more dynamic, natural one as well. “You don’t want to have somebody that might be an amputee only walking around, right,” says Ames. “They should be able to restore more life function, like running, playing soccer, or jumping—all the things we’re working on here.” As they achieve a new behavior on a robot, they then translate that advance over to the prosthetic to improve the mobility of the user.

Developing biped robots isn’t just about developing biped robots, at least not in this lab. It’s about taking insights into locomotion and applying them to robotic mobility and human-robotic mobility. So what begins as a simple trip or a bounce or a leap, ends up as an algorithm that spreads across the robotic spectrum.

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Elizabeth Holmes founded Theranos in 2003 when she was 19 years old. At its height, the company reached a valuation of over $9 billion on the strength of its promise that it had revolutionized the blood-testing industry. Friday, an unraveling that began in October 2015 with a series of Wall Street Journal articles accelerated, as Holmes and her colleague Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani were indicted on multiple counts of fraud. Holmes has also stepped down as CEO.

The indictment, which comprises 11 counts, alleges that Theranos misled both investors—one of whom sent Theranos nearly $100 million in a single wire transfer October 31, 2014—and doctors and patients with its promises of a blood test that delivered quick results with a single finger-prick, rather than the more demanding requirements of conventional methods.

“Holmes and Balwani devised a scheme to defraud doctors and patients, through advertisements and marketing materials, through explicit and implicit claims concerning Theranos’s ability to provide accurate, fast, reliable, and cheap blood tests and test results, and through omissions concerning the limits of and problems with Theranos’s technologies,” the indictment reads.

This is not the first legal trouble Theranos has found itself in. The Securities and Exchange Commission filed a civil suit in March. Holmes and the company quickly settled those charges, though. Holmes paid a $500,000 fine, returned 18.9 million Theranos shares, and was barred from serving as an officer or director of a public company for the next decade.

These latest charges may not be so easily brushed aside. Both Holmes and Balwani, the company’s former president, reportedly face a maximum of 20 years in prison if convicted, as well as additional fines. The Department of Justice has also framed the case as a fight for the heart and soul of Silicon Valley.

“This district, led by Silicon Valley, is at the center of modern technological innovation and entrepreneurial spirit; capital investment makes that possible,” said FBI agent John F. Bennett, who led the investigation. “This office, along with our other law enforcement partners in the Bay Area, will vigorously investigate and prosecute those who do not play by the rules that make Silicon Valley work.”

The indictment itself also serves as a sort of CliffsNotes companion to the work of WSJ reporter John Carreyrou, who has spent the last several years reporting on Theranos, along the way unearthing its many alleged misdeeds. It traces Theranos’s pitch to investors and the medical community that it could get results in hours instead of days, as well as the fact that the proprietary device central to those claims “had accuracy and reliability issues, was slower than some competing devices, and could not compete with larger, conventional machines in high-throughput, or the simultaneous testing of blood from many patients.” To make up for those shortcomings, Theranos instead used the same commercial devices it had decried as obsolete to complete its testing.

Holmes has been held up as the ultimate symbol of Silicon Valley’s “fake it til you make it” culture, and for good reason. But the reason the Theranos saga has resonated so deeply, and that Holmes and Balwani face such serious charges now, is that the scandal also transcends the typical tech hype cycle. Theranos wasn’t promising a better juicer, or a shift in the human resources paradigm. It had a direct effect on medical diagnoses: The indictment alleges that Holmes and Balwani knowingly passed along test results that were inaccurate and unreliable. You can’t move fast and break things when those things are human lives.

In that sense, look at the Theranos indictment not as an opportunity to avenge the spirit of Silicon Valley, but to expose it. Let whatever reckoning Holmes and Balwani receive serve as an object lesson in irresponsible growth.

Until then? In a brief press release Friday, the company said that Holmes will stay on as the chair of the Theranos board.

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This story originally appeared on The New Republic and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Samantha Sieber’s grandfather had a traditional American burial. His body was embalmed, put in a metal casket, and laid to rest at a cemetery, where the grounds would be perpetually cared for. “It felt good to give him what he wanted,” said Sieber, who herself works in the funeral industry. But, she added, “I think my grandfather’s funeral is going to become extinct.”

In 2016, cremation became the most common method of body disposal in the US, overtaking entombment for the first time. This shift is often attributed to the high cost of traditional burial and the waning importance of religion. But experts also point to society’s changing views about how dead bodies should be disposed of. The spectrum of what’s morally acceptable is broadening, at the same time that the most common disposal methods are coming under scrutiny for their environmental impact. More than four million gallons of toxic embalming fluids and 20 million feet of wood are put in the ground in the US every year, while a single cremation emits as much carbon dioxide as a 1,000-mile car trip. Thus, the rise in America of “green burials,” where bodies are wrapped in biodegradable material and not embalmed.

Sieber is a part of this trend, but she doesn’t want a green burial. When she dies, she told me, she wants her body to be dunked in a high-pressure chamber filled with water and lye. That water will be heated to anywhere from 200 to 300 degrees, and in six to twelve hours her flesh, blood, and muscle will dissolve. When the water is drained, all that will remain in the tank are her bones and dental fillings. If her family desires, they can have her remains crushed into ash, to be displayed or buried or scattered.

This process is known colloquially as water cremation and scientifically as alkaline hydrolysis, or aquamation. It’s the most environmentally friendly method of death care, says Sieber, the vice president of research at Bio-Response Solutions. Founded by her father in 2006, the company manufactures aquamation equipment for funeral homes and crematories throughout North America. “This has no emissions, it’s greener, it’s a clean technology to work with,” Sieber said.

But Sieber may not get her wish of being aquamated when she dies. Only 15 states allow alkaline hydrolysis for human remains, and Indiana, where Sieber lives and where Bio-Response is based, is not one of them. Casket-makers and the Catholic Church are working to make sure it stays that way.

Alkaline hydrolysis was patented in the US in 1888, and the process hasn’t changed much since then. The body is submerged in a solution of about 95 percent water and 5 percent alkali—usually sodium hydroxide or potassium hydroxide. The liquid is heated and set at a high pressure to avoid boiling, causing the body to shed its proteins and fats. The decomposition creates a coffee-colored liquid, which contains amino acids, peptides, sugars, and salts. That liquid gets flushed down the drain, and treated like any other type of wastewater. Only bones and metal remain.

Alkaline hydrolysis was originally marketed as a way to rapidly decompose animal bodies and use their nutrients for fertilizer. It was later adopted by scientific labs to dispose of disease-contaminated bodies, like cow carcasses infected by mad cow disease in the 1990s. Its commercial use for animals began in the early 2000s, Seiber said, as grieving pet owners sought a sentimental disposal option that didn’t require an expensive burial or involve burning Fido to ashes.

In addition to its gentleness and cost (aquamation for dogs runs anywhere from $150 to $400, while cremation is around $100), veterinarians and pet funeral homes began to market aquamation’s environmental benefits. “Unlike cremation, there are no toxic emissions and no contribution to greenhouse gases,” wrote Jerry Shevik, owner of Peaceful Pets Aquamation in California. “It has a carbon footprint that is only one-tenth of what fire-based cremation produces.” Roughly the same is true for human aquamation, which, according to Staudt’s book, “requires about 90 kwh of electricity, resulting in one quarter the carbon emissions of cremation, consuming one-eighth the energy, while costing the consumer roughly the same amount as cremation.” Environmental issues can arise if the water poured down the drain after a liquid cremation has a pH level above local regulations. If that happens, however, funeral homes can easily treat the water with carbon dioxide before releasing it.

The growing use of aquamation for pets created more demand for human use. Minnesota was the first state to legalize alkaline hydrolysis for humans in 2003, and other states eventually followed. Oregon and Maine passed bills in 2009; Florida and Kansas in 2010. Ten more states followed, the most recent being California, which passed a bill last year officially deeming aquamation a type of cremation. Funeral homes will be allowed to offer it beginning in 2020.

Sieber’s business isn’t suffering from the fact that the process isn’t legal in every US state. “We’re selling at the pace we can grow right now,” she said. “It wouldn’t help us if every state was approved.”

But her family did suffer personally. In March of 2013, two of her grandparents died just one day apart from each other. Each had wanted to be aquamated. Sieber’s family had planned to use the closest funeral home that provided the service—a few hundred miles away, across the state border in Illinois. But the shock of losing two grandparents at once was too much to handle the logistics. “There was so much grief,” Sieber said. “We couldn’t get it done.”

Angered by their inability to fulfill their loved ones’ wishes, Sieber’s family launched a lobbying effort to get aquamation legalized in Indiana. And after more than a year and $40,000 spent, Sieber said they had gathered enough votes for a bill to pass. When their aquamation legalization bill came to the floor of the state House of Representatives, however, it was derailed by a gruesome speech by a lawmaker who also happened to be a casket-maker.

Representative Dick Hamm’s speech made national news that day, and not only because of his business interest in keeping human aquamation illegal in Indiana. “We’re going to put [dead bodies] in acid and just let them dissolve away and then we’re going to let them run down the drain out into the sewers and whatever,” Hamm said, comparing the process to “flushing” a loved one. This wasn’t accurate. Aquamation uses lye, not acid, and similar fluids are flushed down the drain during the embalming process. But Hamm’s hyperbole was effective. Though he was the only lawmaker to speak against the bill, it failed in a 34-59 vote.

The idea that aquamation is unnatural or gross or even immoral has impeded its adoption in other states. A bill to re-legalize it in New Hampshire, where it had been legal for two years before being repealed, was rejected in 2009 after lawmakers gave speeches similar to Hamm’s. “I don’t want to send a loved one to be used as fertilizer or sent down the drain to a sewer treatment plant,” Republican John Cebrowski said. His Republican colleague Mike Kappler added that “he didn’t want to drive by a sewage lagoon where a relative’s liquid remains would wind up.”

The Catholic Church of New Hampshire came out against that bill as well, and testified against later efforts to re-legalize aquamation in the state in 2013 and 2014. Each testimony said alkaline hydrolysis “fails to provide New Hampshire Citizens with the reverence and respect they should receive at the end of their lives.”

But those who choose aquamation for their loved ones overwhelmingly do so because they believe it’s a kinder way to treat a body, said Philip Olson, an assistant professor at Virginia Tech and a death studies expert. “Embalming is invasive and violent, and so is fire,” he said. But alkaline hydrolysis, he said, is more like a warm bath. “That’s becoming a more prominent value in American death care, the idea of gentleness,” he said. “That’s why we’ve seen such growth in the home funeral movement—the idea of using your hands is more intimate, of having contact with the body, not mediating your contact through instruments which are hard and cold.”

The environmental benefits of aquamation are less of a motivating factor. “We thought families would want this because it’s more eco-friendly,” Sieber said. “They like that, but it’s not why they’re choosing it.” That may be a good thing, because alkaline hydrolysis is not an environmental panacea. Its widespread adoption could increase production at industrial chlor-alkali plants, which are known to emit mercury and other pollutants. The process also uses about 300 gallons of water per body, or three times as much as the average person uses in a day. And while replacing cremation with aquamation would have some climate benefits, they wouldn’t be as huge as, say, getting rid of coal-fired power plants—which is perhaps why there are no large environmental advocacy campaigns to change the death care industry.

Olson sees a more existential value in greening up death care. “The funeral industry has always been about making your body immune to nature, preserving yourself in spite of it,” he said. Processes like aquamation require an acceptance of becoming part of it. “It’s new to think about bodies that way, as a kind of eco-product,” he said. “It demonstrates a shift in how people are thinking about our relationship to the natural world.” If more people respect the planet in death, it bodes well for how they’ll treat it while they’re still alive.

With summer upon us, you’re no doubt tending your garden. Which hopefully means you’re composting too.

Using food waste to enrich your soil benefits the earth in a number of ways, including reducing the use of chemical fertilizers and decreasing methane emissions in landfills. And while it’s difficult to recycle things like cans and plastics yourself, composting is something you can do at home pretty easily. Collect food scraps, add some water, stir the mix to provide oxygen, let it all sit long enough to decompose, and voila: Your plants have never been happier.

But not everyone has space for keeping a compost heap, and not everyone’s got a green thumb. Some cities have mandated composting services that collect food scraps from residents and do all the dirty work at a central facility. But until composting is mandated everywhere, you might have to get creative and team up with neighbors to make and share compost.

That’s something the team behind ShareWaste wants to facilitate. Launched in 2016, the app uses a digital map to connect individuals with food scraps to nearby neighbors who have a compost system like a heap or a bin. Users accepting compost scraps can mark their compost site on the map for other users to find. Nearly 6,000 users are currently signed up for ShareWaste across the globe.

To become a user, ShareWaste asks for an email address and a first name. Next, you can add your compost station to the map. Specify if you’d like scraps for garden compost or for a chicken run (many chicken owners use the birds to help process food and yard waste), and whether your operation is for an individual household or a larger community. On the map, sites are represented by three different icons: The chicken icon means a site that uses scraps to feed animals; the flower icon stands for a larger community garden compost; and the most common icon looks like your average wooden compost bin, representing home-run composts.

Clicking an icon shows you a bit more information about that specific site, like the first name of its user, what kind of scraps it takes, and its location. To protect user privacy, the exact address of the host is hidden, so users must message hosts through the app to arrange meeting times and drop-offs.

Compost World

Whether or not you’re dealing with compost, browsing the map is pretty cool. It gives you a little insight into grassroots waste management infrastructure, and tech trends across the globe. In the United States, I counted over 100 compost sites, mostly planted on the East Coast. Some of them are lone dots, but most are clumped together around cities. In Texas, there’s one in Dallas and five others clumped in neighboring towns less than 40 miles away. There aren’t any in New York City, and only one in San Francisco—cities with municipal composting programs in place. (The user behind that San Francisco Bay area site is named Doug. He hasn’t had much luck on ShareWaste, but he does have half a million worms and is currently experimenting with rabbit droppings.)

Head south to Latin America and you’ll see a mere two sites; one in Ecuador and one in Costa Rica, two countries known for their environmental conservation policies. In Africa, you can count four. But scroll over to the UK or the Eastern coast of Australia, and you’ll find heaps of heaps.

Dirt Down Under

ShareWaste was started after founders Eliska Bramborova and Tomas Brambora relocated from Prague to Sydney. They didn’t know anyone, and it’s never easy to meet your neighbors in a new city. Unless, that is, you start bringing them your food scraps.

With a growing pile of scraps, the couple took to a community Facebook page to see if they could find any takers. Within half an hour, they had found a place to bring their waste. Better yet, they got to know their neighbors.

Now they have three compost hosts. One of them, an American guy, occasionally gives them homemade kimchi when they drop off their scraps. In return, they bring him homemade jam. “You know,” says Bramborova, “there’s like, a little economy growing.”

The meetups can be educational too. When users drop off their scraps, they see first-hand the ways a person can compost from home. After enough visits, they might want to start their own garden or their own compost site. And since chickens are frequently the recipients of collected food scraps, people get to learn about keeping those too.

“It’s sustainability,” Bramborova says, “from the people’s side. Connecting communities and encouraging them to take steps (toward) a more sustainable home.”

Speaking of sustainability, the couple is searching for ways to keep their app alive. Managing the online community—not to mention a baby—takes all of their spare time. But Bramborova is optimistic they’ll find a business partner to ease the weight of running ShareWaste. Hopefully, it’s one who shares their vision of turning compost into community, or as Bramborova says, “waste into treasure.”

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With summer upon us, you’re no doubt tending your garden. Which hopefully means you’re composting too.

Using food waste to enrich your soil benefits the earth in a number of ways, including reducing the use of chemical fertilizers and decreasing methane emissions in landfills. And while it’s difficult to recycle things like cans and plastics yourself, composting is something you can do at home pretty easily. Collect food scraps, add some water, stir the mix to provide oxygen, let it all sit long enough to decompose, and voila: Your plants have never been happier.

But not everyone has space for keeping a compost heap, and not everyone’s got a green thumb. Some cities have mandated composting services that collect food scraps from residents and do all the dirty work at a central facility. But until composting is mandated everywhere, you might have to get creative and team up with neighbors to make and share compost.

That’s something the team behind ShareWaste wants to facilitate. Launched in 2016, the app uses a digital map to connect individuals with food scraps to nearby neighbors who have a compost system like a heap or a bin. Users accepting compost scraps can mark their compost site on the map for other users to find. Nearly 6,000 users are currently signed up for ShareWaste across the globe.

To become a user, ShareWaste asks for an email address and a first name. Next, you can add your compost station to the map. Specify if you’d like scraps for garden compost or for a chicken run (many chicken owners use the birds to help process food and yard waste), and whether your operation is for an individual household or a larger community. On the map, sites are represented by three different icons: The chicken icon means a site that uses scraps to feed animals; the flower icon stands for a larger community garden compost; and the most common icon looks like your average wooden compost bin, representing home-run composts.

Clicking an icon shows you a bit more information about that specific site, like the first name of its user, what kind of scraps it takes, and its location. To protect user privacy, the exact address of the host is hidden, so users must message hosts through the app to arrange meeting times and drop-offs.

Compost World

Whether or not you’re dealing with compost, browsing the map is pretty cool. It gives you a little insight into grassroots waste management infrastructure, and tech trends across the globe. In the United States, I counted over 100 compost sites, mostly planted on the East Coast. Some of them are lone dots, but most are clumped together around cities. In Texas, there’s one in Dallas and five others clumped in neighboring towns less than 40 miles away. There aren’t any in New York City, and only one in San Francisco—cities with municipal composting programs in place. (The user behind that San Francisco Bay area site is named Doug. He hasn’t had much luck on ShareWaste, but he does have half a million worms and is currently experimenting with rabbit droppings.)

Head south to Latin America and you’ll see a mere two sites; one in Ecuador and one in Costa Rica, two countries known for their environmental conservation policies. In Africa, you can count four. But scroll over to the UK or the Eastern coast of Australia, and you’ll find heaps of heaps.

Dirt Down Under

ShareWaste was started after founders Eliska Bramborova and Tomas Brambora relocated from Prague to Sydney. They didn’t know anyone, and it’s never easy to meet your neighbors in a new city. Unless, that is, you start bringing them your food scraps.

With a growing pile of scraps, the couple took to a community Facebook page to see if they could find any takers. Within half an hour, they had found a place to bring their waste. Better yet, they got to know their neighbors.

Now they have three compost hosts. One of them, an American guy, occasionally gives them homemade kimchi when they drop off their scraps. In return, they bring him homemade jam. “You know,” says Bramborova, “there’s like, a little economy growing.”

The meetups can be educational too. When users drop off their scraps, they see first-hand the ways a person can compost from home. After enough visits, they might want to start their own garden or their own compost site. And since chickens are frequently the recipients of collected food scraps, people get to learn about keeping those too.

“It’s sustainability,” Bramborova says, “from the people’s side. Connecting communities and encouraging them to take steps (toward) a more sustainable home.”

Speaking of sustainability, the couple is searching for ways to keep their app alive. Managing the online community—not to mention a baby—takes all of their spare time. But Bramborova is optimistic they’ll find a business partner to ease the weight of running ShareWaste. Hopefully, it’s one who shares their vision of turning compost into community, or as Bramborova says, “waste into treasure.”

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