Inflatable High Altitude Wind Turbine May Produce Double the Power at Half the Cost

© Altaeros Energies
The test of a scaled-down prototype of a new type of floating wind turbine that uses a helium-filled shell demonstrated that it not only works as planned, but that it can also produce twice the power of turbines mounted at conventional tower height.

During the test, the Altaeros Airborne Wind Turbine (AWT) was able to climb to 350 feet high, generate considerable power, and then land in an automated cycle. The device uses a helium-filled, inflatable shell to enable it to ascend to high altitudes, which give it access to stronger and more consistent winds than tower-mounted turbines, and the generated power is sent to the ground via tethers, which also hold the device steady

"For decades, wind turbines have required cranes and huge towers to lift a few hundred feet off the ground where winds can be slow and gusty. We are excited to demonstrate that modern inflatable materials can lift wind turbines into more powerful winds almost everywhere—with a platform that is cost competitive and easy to setup from a shipping container." - - Ben Glass, Altaeros CEO

The company says their product could reduce energy costs by up to 65% by harnessing those high altitude winds, and due to the unique design, installation time can be reduced from weeks to just days. The AWT is expected to need only minimal maintenance once installed, and could replace diesel generators at remote sites. Long-term plans to scale up the device for offshore deployment could reduce costs in the offshore wind market.

Altaeros Energies, formed out of MIT, won the 2011 ConocoPhillips Energy Prize, and has also received funding from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the California Energy Commission, and the Maine Technology Institute.

The Miracle Drug That Kills All Cancers

It sounds like science fiction, but researchers have discovered a single drug that they think can shrink, or even completely cure, all human tumours. But how does a drug like that work, and when will it be available?

An article in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science explains that a new treatment — based on an antibody that blocks a “do not eat” signal normally displayed on tumour cells — helps persuade the immune system to destroy the cancer cells. To date, it’s been shown to shrink or cure human breast, ovary, colon, bladder, brain, liver and prostate tumours that have been transplanted into mice.

The treatment targets and blocks a protein called CD47, a marker that tells the immune system to not kill healthy blood cells. But cancers use the same protein to avoid being destroyed by the body, too — so by strategically blocking the protein, it’s possible to use one antibody to kill all types of cancer tumours.

Over the past few years the technique has been applied to treating lymphomas and leukaemia, but this latest research suggests it could be used on all types of cancers. Irving Weissman, one of the researchers, explains to Science:

“What we’ve shown is that CD47 isn’t just important on leukemias and lymphomas. It’s on every single human primary tumour that we tested… We showed that even after the tumour has taken hold, the antibody can either cure the tumour or slow its growth and prevent metastasis.”

Even though some normal, healthy cells are attacked as a result of blocking CD47, the researchers found this was short-lived and negligible compared to the effects on the tumour.

Sadly, it will be some time before such a drug makes it to clinical practice. But with the researchers having just received a $US20 million grant to move the findings from mouse studies to human safety tests, you can expect progress to be as quick as possible. [PNAS via Science]

Image: Trif/Shutterstock

Global Warming Close to Becoming Irreversible

 By Nina Chestney

LONDON (Reuters) - The world is close to reaching tipping points that will make it irreversibly hotter, making this decade critical in efforts to contain global warming, scientists warned on Monday.

Scientific estimates differ but the world's temperature looks set to rise by six degrees Celsius by 2100 if greenhouse gas emissions are allowed to rise uncontrollably.

As emissions grow, scientists say the world is close to reaching thresholds beyond which the effects on the global climate will be irreversible, such as the melting of polar ice sheets and loss of rainforests.

"This is the critical decade. If we don't get the curves turned around this decade we will cross those lines," said Will Steffen, executive director of the Australian National University's climate change institute, speaking at a conference in London.

Despite this sense of urgency, a new global climate treaty forcing the world's biggest polluters, such as the United States and China, to curb emissions will only be agreed on by 2015 - to enter into force in 2020.

"We are on the cusp of some big changes," said Steffen. "We can ... cap temperature rise at two degrees, or cross the threshold beyond which the system shifts to a much hotter state."

TIPPING POINTS

For ice sheets - huge refrigerators that slow down the warming of the planet - the tipping point has probably already been passed, Steffen said. The West Antarctic ice sheet has shrunk over the last decade and the Greenland ice sheet has lost around 200 cubic km (48 cubic miles) a year since the 1990s.

Most climate estimates agree the Amazon rainforest will get drier as the planet warms. Mass tree deaths caused by drought have raised fears it is on the verge of a tipping point, when it will stop absorbing emissions and add to them instead.

Around 1.6 billion tonnes of carbon were lost in 2005 from the rainforest and 2.2 billion tonnes in 2010, which has undone about 10 years of carbon sink activity, Steffen said.

One of the most worrying and unknown thresholds is the Siberian permafrost, which stores frozen carbon in the soil away from the atmosphere.

"There is about 1,600 billion tonnes of carbon there - about twice the amount in the atmosphere today - and the northern high latitudes are experiencing the most severe temperature change of any part of the planet," he said.

In a worst case scenario, 30 to 63 billion tonnes of carbon a year could be released by 2040, rising to 232 to 380 billion tonnes by 2100. This compares to around 10 billion tonnes of CO2 released by fossil fuel use each year.

Increased CO2 in the atmosphere has also turned oceans more acidic as they absorb it. In the past 200 years, ocean acidification has happened at a speed not seen for around 60 million years, said Carol Turley at Plymouth Marine Laboratory.

This threatens coral reef development and could lead to the extinction of some species within decades, as well as to an increase in the number of predators.

As leading scientists, policy-makers and environment groups gathered at the "Planet Under Pressure" conference in London, opinions differed on what action to take this decade.

London School of Economics professor Anthony Giddens favors focusing on the fossil fuel industry, seeing as renewables only make up 1 percent of the global energy mix.

"We have enormous inertia within the world economy and should make much more effort to close down coal-fired power stations," he said.

Oil giant Royal Dutch Shell favours working on technologies leading to negative emissions in the long run, like carbon capture on biomass and in land use, said Jeremy Bentham, the firm's vice president of global business environment.

The conference runs through Thursday.

(Editing by Alessandra Rizzo)

Ability to Learn Is Affected by the Timing of Sleep

  

Sleep has many functions—including facilitating learning.

Now a study finds that when we acquire new information, and how soon we sleep after that may affect our retention of the info. That’s according to research in the journal Public Library of Science One.

Scientists had more than 200 subjects memorize related words like “fire and smoke,” or unrelated word pairs like “insect and truth.” Some studied the words at 9 am, others at 9pm.

The researchers tested the subjects’ ability to remember the pairs after 30 minutes, 12 hours or 24 hours.

Sleep had little effect on the ability to recall related words. But subjects who slept between tests were significantly better at remembering the unrelated words than those who got no shuteye.

Here is the most interesting finding: In the 24-hour retest—where all subjects had a full night of sleep—those participants who went to bed shortly after learning the words did much better than those who went through an entire day before sleeping.

And this leg up in memory was maintained on subsequent days. So if you need to remember something, try reviewing those notes just before bedtime. Instead of watching that rerun of Seinfeld you already have memorized.

—Christie Nicholson

The Future Of The Virtual Personal Assistant (TechCrunch)

Editor’s Note: Norman Winarsky is the Vice President of Ventures andBill Mark is the Vice President of the Information Computing Sciences Division at renowned research and technology development organization,SRI International. Norman and Bill helped found the Siri venture, of which Norman was also a Board member.

Since its launch in the iPhone 4S, Siri has become a phenomenon, and for good reason. Siri is a revolutionary consumer software product based on breakthroughs in speech and artificial intelligence technology.

Siri has appeared extensively in the media as a new consumer phenomenon, including Dilbert and Jon Stewart. In November, Eric Schmidt testified to the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee that Siri was potentially a major threat to Google. Siri has even been the major part of an episode of the sitcom “Big Bang Theory” on CBS and the subject of numerous parody Tumblr and Twitter accounts.

Without a doubt, Siri was a great achievement for Apple and Steve Jobs, helping to introduce virtual personal assistants to millions of consumers, and changing forever the way we view our smartphones. The team also brilliantly designed Siri to go beyond being a mere tool, giving it a personality, and human-like interaction characteristics.

Do you like me, Siri? Where can I bury a body, Siri?

There is no doubt in our minds that Apple will continue to advance the Siri, technology, and will create new breakthroughs in the virtual personal assistant (VPA) category overall. For example, it’s clear that Apple is capable of making a Siri API for application developers in the near term, enabling hundreds of thousands of applications to access their own assistant. Soon it will become de rigueur for all applications to offer spoken interaction and meaningful delegation. In fact, we consumers will be surprised and disappointed if or when they don’t.

Beyond the laudatory comments and requisite speculation, and because of our central role in creating Siri, we at SRI are often asked – what’s next?

As we always respond — Siri is just the first step in realizing the ultimate virtual personal assistant vision. This post first outlines what we think Siri’s legacy will be, and then gives the broad strokes of what will mark the next phase(s) of VPA innovation.

To start, Siri’s greatest effect will be the entirely new industry that it is creating before our eyes. At SRI, we see VPA technology as an essential element of future products in areas ranging from smart TVs, to health care assistance, to virtual tutors in education, and more. VPA is not just a fad, or a trend. It is in many ways the destiny of computing and a decades-long project, or more. As we speak, SRI is spinning out three new startups that are underwritten by the VPA paradigm and our related R&D. They are already VC-funded and preparing their first products for wide use. We think we’ve only seen the tip of the iceberg.

Technologically speaking, Siri’s true impact is seen in the new bar it set for what we call “practical natural language understanding.” Using speech instead of keyboards to communicate with computers is an old dream, but it took more than thirty years to achieve the robustness and performance needed to make speech systems practical for consumers.

Developing software for limited-vocabulary and spoken language recognition was the first step, and we are all familiar with call center applications that marked the first efforts in this arena. However, developing software to enable computers to respond reliably to a broad range of spoken input is much more challenging. Siri required not just speech recognition, but also understanding of natural language, context, and ultimately, reasoning (itself the domain of most artificial intelligence research today.)

Post-Siri, new speech-enhanced artificial intelligence research continues to be subject of enormous investment at SRI and elsewhere, most notably by the U.S. Department of Defense, which is anxious to increase the performance of personnel dealing with complex systems across a wide array of use cases.

So with those forthcoming advancements in mind (which SRI cannot discuss in detail, unfortunately), what’s indeed next for VPA technology? What glimpses of the future can we nonetheless share?

We can tell you this — the next-generation VPA will enable you to have a much deeper relationship with your assistant. Siri has a conversational interface today, but these intercations seldom last more than one or two utterances. Tomorrow’s VPA conversations will be about more complex tasks with multiple steps and more nuance (exploring healthcare alternatives, planning a vacation, and buying clothes, to name a few scenarios.)

This next wave of VPAs will be also able to maintain the context of the conversation for long periods of time, reason with clarity about what you discuss, provide answers to your questions, execute tasks for you, and all along the way learn from you and noticeably improve with use. The experience will be more will be personalized that what you experience with Siri today, and it will have greater depth. VPA’s will also be more proactive, constantly discovering things that you might care about and even starting conversations with you about what they find.

Let’s illustrate these new VPA capabilities with a conversation between a real person named Lisa, and a virtual personal shopping assistant named Nina, with Lisa wanting to buy a purse:

Lisa: “Nina, I need a new purse.”
Nina: “Great! Do you want to buy something from Michael Kors like you did last time?”
Lisa: “Well, I’d like Michael Kors, but I don’t want to spend more than $400.”
Nina: “Last time you bought your Michael Kors purse from Nordstrom. Nordstrom has a Michael Kors sale right now…here are some purses you might like.”
Lisa: “I like the chocolate brown one, at $329. Is that the best price you found?”
Nina: “I saw a couple of offers at $310 from other retailers, but their return policy isn’t as generous as Nordstrom’s.”
Lisa” “Okay, let’s go with Nordstrom”.

The important part about this conversation is that it is natural, real, and helpful. Lisa is getting what she wants from Nina, an assistant that is familiar with her purchase history and the stores that she prefers.

Lisa expects Nina to know all about shopping, and to use that knowledge to help select just the right item, at a good price. Her virtual personal assistant will also learn from this conversation, and maintain the history and context for follow-on conversations, as well as future purchases.

That last point bears emphasis. As the VPA learns, it will become more and more valuable. This kind of capability is often invoked, but seldom delivered. “Learning in the wild” is another old dream that is only now starting to come true. The truly adaptive VPA is the ultimate “sticky” application.

And of course, Lisa likewise trusts the VPA more and more as Nina demonstrates increasing competence. That trust applies not only to personalized, accurate information delivery, but also the protection of personal information. For any VPA, trust – especially vis-a-vis security and privacy — will be a central requirement, and the next generation of VPA offerings will be graded on a steep curve.

It all sounds pretty good, right?

Luckily, a VPA that can interact with me with such great depth and nuance is not merely a science fiction. SRI is building these capabilities today. We and our research partners are dedicating immense time and resources to making this future come true.

VPA is about augmenting humans in ways old and new – so that we can be our best selves, and accomplish more with less. At SRI, the theme of human augmentation goes back to the days of Doug Engelbart, inventor of the mouse, and pioneer of human-computer interaction. Doug’s quote from his 1962 article captures it well:

By ‘augmenting human intellect’ we mean increasing the capability of a man to approach a complex problem situation, to gain comprehension to suit his particular needs, and to derive solutions to problems.

We believe that VPA represents a new and especially productive vein of progress. VPA is the most elegant and effective way we have figured out yet for humans and machines to interact. We think that it will revolutionize the way we think about machines, just as Engelbart’s vision did with the “mother of all demos” nearly 50 years ago.

The Ballooning Brain: Defective Genes May Explain Uncontrolled Brain Growth in Autism

Autistic children's brains may grow too big, too soon. A new study links this unusual growth to abnormal gene activity that fails to prune unnecessary neural connections

By Ferris Jabr  | March 22, 2012 |

BOUNTIFUL BRAINS: Eric Courchesne's studies suggest that autistic brains brim with too many neurons for their own good.Image: FR86, iStockphoto

As a baby grows inside the womb, its brain does not simply expand like a dehydrated sponge dropped in water. Early brain development is an elaborate procession. Every minute some 250,000 neurons bloom, squirming past one another like so many schoolchildren rushing to their seats at the sound of the bell. Each neuron grows a long root at one end and a crown of branches at the other, linking itself to fellow cells near and far. By the end of the second trimester, neurons in the baby's brain have formed trillions of connections, many of which will not survive into adulthood—the least traveled paths will eventually wither.

Sometimes, the developing brain blunders, resulting in "neuro-developmental disorders," such as autism. But exactly why or how early cellular mistakes cause autism has eluded medical science. Now, Eric Courchesne of the University of California, San Diego, thinks he has linked atypicalgene activity to excessive growth in the autistic brain. With the new data, he has started to trace a cascade of genetic and cellular changes that he thinks define autism. Although intrigued by Courchesne's work, other researchers caution that explosive neural growth is not necessarily a defining feature of all autistic brains.

Since 1998 Courchesne has been searching autistic brains for unusual structural features. His studies suggest that while in the womb, the autistic brain sprouts an excess of neurons and continues to balloon during the first five years of life, as all those extra neurons grow larger and form connections. Sometime after age four or five, Courchesne has also found, autistic brains actually start to lose neural connections, faster than typical brains.

In a study published November 2011 in JAMA, The Journal of the American Medical Association, Courchesne reported that children with autism have 67 percent more neurons in their prefrontal cortex (PFC) than typical children. Located in the area of the brain just behind the eyes, the PFC is responsible for what psychologists call "executive functions"—high-level thinking, such as planning ahead, inhibiting impulses and directing attention. In his 2011 study Courchesne sliced up brain tissue from six autistic children and seven typical children who had passed away and counted the number of cell bodies in the sections to estimate the total number of neurons in their PFCs.

Now, Courchesne and his colleagues have analyzed DNA and RNA in 33 cubes of brain tissue from people who passed away, 15 of whom were autistic (nine children and six adults) and 18 who had typical brains (seven children and 11 adults). Looking at the order of DNA's building blocks reveals whether individual genes have mutations; measuring levels of RNA indicates how often those genes were translated into proteins. Such gene expression, Courchesne and his colleagues found, varied between autistic and typical brains. In brain tissue from both autistic children and autistic adults, genes coding for proteins that identify and repair mistakes in DNA were expressed at unusually low levels. Additionally, all autistic brains demonstrated unusual activity levels for genes that determine when neurons grow and die and how newborn neurons migrate during early development. Some genes involved in immune responses, cell-to-cell communication and tissue repair, however, were expressed at unusual levels in adult autistic brains, but not in autistic children's brains. The results appear in the March 22 issue of PLoS Genetics.

By combining his new findings with his earlier discoveries, Courchesne has started to construct a kind of timeline of autism in the brain. Perhaps, as the brain of a future autistic child develops in the womb, something—an inherited mutation or an environmental factor like a virus, toxin or hormone—muffles the expression of genes coding for proteins that usually fix mistakes in sequences of DNA. Errors accumulate. The genetic systems controlling the growth of new neurons go haywire, and brain cells divide much more frequently than usual, accounting for the excess neurons found in the PFC of autistic children. Between birth and age five, the extra neurons in the autistic brain grow physically larger and form more connections than in a typical child's brain. Unused connections are not pruned away as they should be. Later, in adolescence and adulthood, the immune system reacts against the brain's overzealous growth, which might explain the unusual levels of immune genes Courchesne found in his new study and why, in earlier work, he had discovered that when autistic children become teenagers, some brain regions actually start shrinking compared with typical brains.

Not all researchers, however, accept that the patterns of brain growth Courchesne has discovered are relevant to everyone with autism. Nicholas Lange, a biostatistician in the psychiatry department at Harvard Medical School, says that Courchesne analyzed too few samples in his new study to generalize the results to the larger autistic community. Some researchers have surfaced evidence that around 15 percent of autistic children have smaller than usual heads, a condition known as microcephaly, which indicates an abnormally small brain. David Amaral of the University of California, Davis, has previously told reporters that in an unpublished neuroimaging study, he found that only about 11 of 114 autistic children had unusually large brains. Other researchers point out that, in his research with tissue samples from brain banks, Courchesne fails to compare the number of neurons in the cerebral cortex with other parts of the brain—it remains unclear why only the PFC would explode in growth.

But acquiring enough preserved tissue from brain banks to conduct meaningful studies is no easy task—they are incredibly coveted resources, and Courchesne's new study relies on a respectable sample. Looking at gene expression in postmortem brain tissue offers insights into the biology of autism that neuroimaging studies and analysis of DNA and RNA in blood cannot provide because different cell types express different sets of genes. Courchesne's newest findings at least partially echo earlier research by Daniel Geschwind of the University of California, Los Angeles, who also linked autism to unusual activity of genes that control immune responses and how neurons organize themselves in the developing brain. Although Courchesne's concept of autistic brain development is far from flawless or complete, it remains one of the most cohesive theories offered so far—one that suggests the possibility of treatment as well. If scientists definitively link autism to a characteristic sequence of changes in gene expression and unusual neural growth, then it becomes possible to target and reverse any one of the thousands of steps in that sequence.

"Each individual autistic person likely has their own specific profile of dysregulated [sic] genes," Courchesne says, "which means that autism is a very complicated problem. But it's now knowable. We are getting at core knowledge. If we confirm that the starting point is gene activity, we can do something about it, because gene activity can be modified."

You should rub honey on your everywhere

Honey is awesome. I’ve found its best consumed when combined with nougat and wrapped in dark chocolate but I digress.

Indulge me while I digress my way to diabetes

Honey also has some pretty amazing properties including it being broadly antimicrobial and seemingly able to promote healing. My Nan would always give me a spoonful of honey alongside other meds when I had colds and flus but as you can see below it can have pretty amazing results on far more serious injuries.

Before and after shot of topical honey treatment for 3 weeks. You're welcome. Adapted from Efem (1988)

Honey’s healing powers can be summarised into 5 main ingredients and activities of the components of honey;

1. Hydrogen peroxide – Honey contains an enzyme called glucose oxidase which breaks down glucose sugars and generates hydrogen peroxide, a kind of bleach, when there is free water available. In case you missed the antimicrobial component it was friggin BLEACH IN YOUR HONEY. I can feel you wondering why bee’s bleach there own food supply and it turns out that is very simple. Any available water can cause the honey to spoil so the presence of glucose oxidase in the honey is an inbuilt anti-spoiling mechanism, pretty smart huh?
2. Sugar – Having said what I did above there is very little water because of the vast quantity of sugar dissolved into honey. The lack of free water makes it very difficult for bacteria to survive.
3. Methylglyoxal or MGO – This compound is an incredibly interesting and powerful antibacterial compound but it is only found in certain natural honeys like Manuka honey from New Zealand but can be made in artificial greenhouses as well. This is the stuff that is making honey a very interesting topical salve in medical honey treatments such as MediHoney.
4. Bee Defensin 1 – Bee Defensin is an antimicrobial peptide (AMP) that for a long time was thought to be exclusively found in the Royal Jelly. But fairly recent discoveries have found it in the honey, but more on AMPs in a second.
5. Acidity – Finally, honey is reasonably acidic and remains so even when diluted holding a pH of approximately 3.5. Nothing that likes eating you particularly likes living in acid so this property is very important.

No single property is more important than the others and the multifactorial nature of honey’s activities is probably the key to its amazing antimicrobial nature. Having said this, Bee Defensin 1 and other identified AMPs in honey such as Apidaecin may have much more interesting roles that are only recently being uncovered.

Typically defensins interact with the bacterial membrane and do…..

Apidaecins work differently however and instead have been tracked into the microbial cytoplasm where they have been observed to bind the protein called DnaK which is involved in helping the bacterial cell handle stress (not the hard day at the office kind, the my environment is trying to tear me apart kind). By binding and inactivating DnaK bacterial cells cannot respond to very hostile and stressful environment completely and as a result they die, making apidaecins a very interesting and attractive target for drug development and structural biology.

Interestingly, apidaecins seem to also have the ability to alter the host immune system by changing chemotaxis, apoptosis, cytokine/chemokine production, antigen presentation and the Th1/Th2 balance.

Some recent work backs up this suggestion by testing the insect apidaecin’s effect in a mammalian system. While apidaecin is insect derived it appears to sufficiently similar to AMPs in humans that is can modify the activity of our immune system. When macrophages in particular were incubated with apidaecin they started pumping out chemokines and cytokines that promote increased antimicrobial activity in these cells. Additionally when these cells were stimulated with apidaecins and lipopolysaccharide (a potent immune system antagonist found on the surface of many bacterial cells) apidaecion seemed to counter some of the pro-inflammatory effect suggesting it can both promote and regulate the response to microbes.

While only preliminary it seems honey and it’s various components might have more secrets to unveil which will further develop our understanding of the anti-microbial nature of this environmental product and at the same time its pro-immune responses elicited when we use it.

Tavano, R., Segat, D., Gobbo, M., & Papini, E. (2011). The Honeybee Antimicrobial Peptide Apidaecin Differentially Immunomodulates Human Macrophages, Monocytes and Dendritic Cells Journal of Innate Immunity, 3 (6), 614-622 DOI:10.1159/000327839
Kwakman, P., te Velde, A., de Boer, L., Speijer, D., Vandenbroucke-Grauls, C., & Zaat, S. (2010). How honey kills bacteria The FASEB Journal, 24 (7), 2576-2582 DOI: 10.1096/fj.09-150789