BRIDGEPORT, Conn. — Connecticut lawmakers are wrestling with difficult issues — a budget deficit, assisted suicide, judicial reform.
But this legislative session, and for the previous two, one topic has enjoyed bipartisan support: .
In 2013, a well-regarded aviation publication surprised historians by declaring that Mr. Whitehead, a Bridgeport resident, had flown two years before Orville and Wilbur Wright skimmed the dunes of Kill Devil Hills in North Carolina in 1903.
“Justice Delayed Is Justice Denied,” read the headline in the publication, IHS Jane’s All the World’s Aircraft. “Whitehead has been shabbily treated by history,” it said.
Mr. Whitehead, a German immigrant, flew his own aircraft above Bridgeport and nearby Fairfield on Aug. 14, 1901, climbing 50 feet into the air and traveling more than a mile, according to the article, which was written by Paul Jackson, the editor of Jane’s.
Connecticut jumped at the chance to claim first-in-flight status, to the consternation of Ohio and North Carolina. The two states had long squabbled over which could claim the Wright brothers, who lived in but made their historic flight near .
Within months, Gov. Dannel P. Malloy, a Democrat, had signed changing the honorees of a state holiday called Powered Flight Day from the Wright brothers to Mr. Whitehead. Last spring, lawmakers passed that formally recognized Connecticut as first in flight. Two more measures honoring Mr. Whitehead, introduced this year by State Senator Kevin Kelly, a Republican, are pending. One calls for . The other designates Mr. Whitehead’s contraption as .
Not all agree with the rewriting of history. When the claim regarding Mr. Whitehead first surfaced, “Birthplace of Aviation” Ohio and “First in Flight” North Carolina joined forces against Connecticut, denouncing its law and, at a news conference in 2013, affirming the Wright brothers as modern aviation’s true pioneers.
“This is the first time North Carolina and Ohio have ever agreed on anything regarding the origin of flight,” State Representative Rick Perales of Ohio, a Republican, said in a recent telephone interview.
State Senator Bill Cook of North Carolina announced his solidarity with Mr. Perales. “The evidence is clear,” Mr. Cook, a Republican, . “There is no doubt about who performed the first powered flight.”
Mr. Whitehead has long had his supporters, as have others who claimed to precede the Wrights, and researchers have studied the Whitehead claim since at least the 1930s. In the mid-1980s, Connecticut officials asked the , which owns the Wright brothers’ plane, to hold a public hearing on the matter. No hearing was held.
Determined to prove that Mr. Whitehead’s plane could fly, a group led by a Connecticut teacher, Andy Kosch, built a replica and successfully flew it at Sikorsky Memorial Airport in Stratford in 1986, prompting a “60 Minutes” segment titled “”
Senator Kelly of Connecticut said the report by Jane’s All the World’s Aircraft had spurred the recent surge of bills related to Mr. Whitehead, and that he had introduced his measures to correct history.
Mr. Perales said he initially tried to ignore Connecticut’s claims. For the most part, aviation historians continue to recognize the Wright brothers’ primacy, noting that the Whitehead claim is less documented and lacks clear photographic evidence.
But the Wright brothers’ legacy is central to Ohio’s identity. “Everywhere you go there’s a Wright Brothers Avenue, a Wright Brothers Boulevard,” Mr. Perales said. “It’s part of who we are.”
So he introduced this year.
The measure asks Ohio lawmakers to repudiate the Connecticut claim. “Whereas the states of Ohio and North Carolina share and cherish the legacy of the Wright brothers,” it reads, “now therefore be it resolved, that Gustave Whitehead did not fly a powered, heavier than air machine of his own design on August 14, 1901, or on any other date.”
The resolution, which was unanimously approved by a legislative transportation committee on Tuesday, also encourages people everywhere to visit Wright-related landmarks in Ohio and North Carolina. An early draft invited Connecticut to learn the truth, Mr. Perales said, adding that it was deleted because it was “a bit inflammatory.”
North Carolina ratified on the matter 30 years ago, noting that Bridgeport was famous for “another great showman, promoter and circus man, P.T. Barnum, who said, ‘There’s a sucker born every minute.’ ”
The Wrights, the North Carolina bill said, had been recognized by the nation’s leaders, scholars, museums and “bright schoolchildren everywhere” as the first to fly.
That is indeed what Paulette Dobson, 26, learned in school. So when Ms. Dobson, a Bridgeport native, first saw a fountain downtown bearing the inscription “FIRST IN FLIGHT/Gustave Whitehead/Bridgeport, Connecticut,” she did a double take.
“I was like, ‘Really?’ I thought the Wright brothers were the first to fly,” she said. But the idea intrigued her, and she has followed the story.
Shortly after the Jane’s article appeared, the Smithsonian’s senior aviation curator, Tom Crouch, saying the Whitehead evidence did not withstand scrutiny.
The is exhibited in the National Air and Space Museum in Washington. The Smithsonian has called it one of its most significant items, and firmly endorses the Wrights as being first in the air.
“It’s not really the Wright brothers versus Gustave Whitehead,” Mr. Crouch said in a telephone interview. “It’s the question of whether Whitehead got off the ground before the Wright brothers did. I don’t think he did.”
Mr. Whitehead’s supporters say the Smithsonian’s opinion is colored by politics, and that its curators are bound by a contract that requires them to deny that anyone flew before the Wrights. Smithsonian representatives signed the contract in 1948 when the Wright estate agreed to sell the brothers’ flyer to the museum for a dollar.
For decades after the Wrights’ flight, the Smithsonian contended that its own former secretary, Samuel Langley, had succeeded before they did. Not until 1942 did the Smithsonian formally apologize to the brothers, according to a New York Times article that year with the headline “.”
That feud, and not reports about Mr. Whitehead, is why the Wrights’ lawyers insisted on such a , Mr. Crouch said.
As for Mr. Whitehead, an IHS Jane’s spokesman said in an emailed statement this month that the journal’s article “was intended to stimulate discussion about first in flight,” and “reflected Mr. Jackson’s opinion on the issue and not that of IHS Jane’s.” The publication said Mr. Jackson was unavailable to comment.
Mr. Malloy’s office declined to comment on legislation connected to Mr. Whitehead, but confirmed that on Aug. 14, Connecticut will celebrate Powered Flight Day in his honor.
An earlier version of a picture caption with this article misidentified the plane that aviation enthusiasts believe Gustave Whitehead flew in 1901. It was Plane No. 21, not 22.
MEXICO CITY — President and his top military commanders flew to a modest fishing village in ’s far northwest on Thursday and made a promise to protect a small porpoise called the vaquita that is on the edge of extinction.
Standing near the dock where the fishermen of the village, San Felipe, unload their catches of shrimp, corvina and sierra, Mr. Peña Nieto ordered the Mexican Navy to take charge of the effort to halt the illegal fishing that has reduced the number of vaquitas to fewer than 100.
The navy patrols — aided by two powerful new boats, along with light aircraft and drones — are part of a broad plan to save the elusive vaquita, the world’s smallest porpoise, which inhabits the northern reaches of the Gulf of California. The vaquita population has been declining for decades; they are vulnerable to the long, curtainlike gillnets set by local fishermen, which accidentally ensnare and kill them.
But the risk that the vaquita could disappear altogether has risen sharply in the past few years, driven by demand for another kind of fish.
The swim bladder of the totoaba, an endangered fish that is similar in size to the vaquita, is a delicacy in China. Over the past few years, local organized crime gangs have begun paying fishermen thousands of dollars to catch totoaba. As this illegal fishing soars, more vaquitas are dying in the gillnets set for totoaba.
Last month, the Mexican government announced that it would ban gillnets across 5,000 square miles of the upper Gulf of California for two years and compensating the fishermen. The two years will buy time while experts and local fishermen develop nets that are safe for vaquitas.
But conservationists, who welcomed the government’s plan, warn that the measures will fail without enforcement against totoaba fishing. Mexico’s poorly equipped environmental authorities have been no match for the fast boats and weapons guarding the totoaba trade.
Omar Vidal, the director of the World Wildlife Fund in Mexico, said the navy’s involvement was essential to making the plan work.
“I think this is our last opportunity,” Mr. Vidal said by telephone from San Felipe. “I have been studying the vaquita for half my life. I have worked with six different federal administrations. All of them have done something, but it has not been enough.”
Other measures are still needed. The totoaba bladders are smuggled across the border to California and then shipped to China, and Mr. Vidal said the American and Chinese governments needed to crack down on the illegal trade.
Marketing vaquita-safe shrimp to environmentally conscious consumers is the next part of the equation, he said, arguing that if consumers are willing to pay a premium for shrimp caught without risk to the vaquita, fishermen will be encouraged to adopt vaquita-safe nets.
CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — The SpaceX supply ship arrived at the International Space Station on Friday, delivering the world's first espresso machine designed exclusively for astronauts.
Italian astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti captured the Dragon capsule, which arrived three days after its Florida launch, with the help of a giant robot arm. The cargo carrier holds more than 4,000 pounds of much-needed groceries, experiments and equipment.
Success! is attached to deliver 2 tons of science & supplies for crew.
— NASA (@NASA)
Italy provided the espresso maker for Capt. Cristoforetti, who's been stuck with instant coffee since her mission began in November.
"It's been just amazing," Capt. Cristoforetti said after snaring the Dragon over the Pacific. "Lots of science and even coffee's in there, so that's pretty exciting."
Within two and a half hours of its capture, the Dragon was bolted securely to the space station.
The espresso machine is three months late because of the backlog created by last year's loss of a supply ship in a launch explosion. Much later and the espresso machine would have missed Capt. Cristoforetti, who returns home next month. She says she can't wait to try some space espresso.
The Dragon will remain at the orbiting lab until around May 21, when it will be released full of experiments and discarded equipment for return to Earth. It's the only supply ship capable of bringing items back.
Among the newly arrived research are experiments for American astronaut Scott Kelly, who is just a few weeks into a one-year mission, which will be a record for NASA.
SpaceX, meanwhile, released a video showing its first-stage booster landing on an ocean platform shortly after Tuesday's liftoff, then tipping over in flames. It was the California company's third attempt to fly a booster rocket to the platform stationed off Florida's northeastern coast.
SpaceX chief Elon Musk said the platform — dubbed "Just Read the Instructions" — endured just minor damage.
The next try will be in June on the next SpaceX supply run for NASA.
Mr. Musk, a billionaire entrepreneur who also runs the Tesla electric car maker, wants to reuse his rockets to bring down the cost of spaceflight.
Have you ever been walking down the street, minding your own business, when you suddenly run into a person, or a telephone pole? Maybe you were texting a friend or fantasizing about what you would have for lunch, but now you feel like an idiot.
A group of scientists thinks they might have the solution--just allow your legs to be remotely controlled as you're walking, and never have an inadvertent collision again.
In a new , Max Pfieffer, a scientist at the University of Hannover describes how he can control where people walk using a smartphone app as a joystick. The process starts by attaching electrodes to volunteer's legs along the thigh's . As the subject walks, another person with a smartphone can follow behind, sending tiny tingling electrical signals that contract the volunteer's leg muscles, causing them to turn right or left.
In a video made by the researchers, you can see the experiment in action, with people walking through a park, their paths remotely controlled by other people.
Pfieffer and his colleagues that the technology could be used for any number of purposes, from preventing someone engrossed in a game or book from colliding with something, to eventually guiding gamers through virtual reality environments, tourists around cities, or concert-goers to their seats.
If the idea of technology subtly signaling you to do something sounds familiar, that might be because the new does a similar thing, 'tapping' you on the wrist to let you know you have a message, reminder, or other notification that needs your attention. Is our future one where cars drive themselves, phones nudge us with reminders, and even our legs are guided by technology? Maybe, but we aren't there yet.
The cruise control experiment . For now, it still requires someone to follow closely behind the remote controlled person, issuing commands on a smartphone. In the future, Pfieffer hopes the tech might link to navigational systems or floorplans.
A screenshot from a YouTube video taken in the cave.
In a country as dry as Saudi Arabia, cool watering holes are a big attraction--drawing in locals, their graffiti, and their cameras. The latter two might be an annoyance for folks just looking to cool off, but for scientists in Europe, they can also be valuable data.
The BBC's Jonathan Amos that one scientist, from Germany, used more than 40 of one graffitied cave in Saudi Arabia to monitor the rising water in the cave.
By looking through the videos for particular graffiti spray painted on the walls in the cave (known as Dahl Hith or Ain Heet), Michelsen could monitor the water levels, looking for how much the water rose over certain graffiti marks over time. He figured out that the groundwater in the cave was rising at a rate of about 15 inches every month for the past two years. The most likely source for the extra water is probably treated wastewater from a nearby water treatment plant.
With the water rising so fast, Michelsen is concerned about the stability of the cave. The rocks that make up the cave are limestone and anhydrite, both of which are easily eroded by water. In fact, many limestone caves were formed by water slowly hollowing out the ground. Water rising in the cave could potentially weaken the rocks in the cave, creating a safety hazard. "There are blocks that come down from time to time," he tells BBC News. We actually gave the recommendation to the local ministry that they should close the cave. There are so many people in there, it's somewhat dangerous."
In 1998, Dr. Philip A. Starr started putting electrodes in people’s brains.
A neurosurgeon at the University of California, San Francisco, Dr. Starr was treating people with , which slowly destroys essential bits of brain tissue, robbing people of control of their bodies. At first, drugs had given his patients some relief, but now they needed more help.
After the surgery, Dr. Starr closed up his patients’ skulls and switched on the electrodes, releasing a steady buzz of electric pulses in their brains. For many patients, the effect was immediate.
“We have people who, when they’re not taking their meds, can be frozen,” said Dr. Starr. “When we turn on the stimulator, they start walking.”
First developed in the early 1990s, , or D.B.S., was approved by the Food and Drug Administration for treating Parkinson’s disease in 2002. Since its invention, about 100,000 people have received implants. While D.B.S. doesn’t halt Parkinson’s, it can turn back the clock a few years for many patients.
Yet despite its clear effectiveness, scientists like Dr. Starr have struggled to understand what D.B.S. actually does to the brain.
“We do D.B.S. because it works,” said Dr. Starr, “but we don’t really know how.”
In a recent experiment, Dr. Starr and his colleagues believe they found a clue. D.B.S. may counter Parkinson’s disease by .
The new research, published on Monday in Nature Neuroscience, may help scientists develop better treatments for Parkinson’s disease. It may also help researchers adapt D.B.S. for treatment of such brain disorders as depression and obsessive compulsive disorder.
To treat Parkinson’s disease, neurosurgeons insert electrodes into a region called the basal ganglia, near the base of the brain. The disease kills a small patch of neurons in the basal ganglia that normally produce a neurotransmitter called .
In the early days, some scientists thought that D.B.S. worked by shutting down neurons that were malfunctioning because of a lack of dopamine. But later experiments revealed this was not the case. So scientists began looking at other ways in which Parkinson’s disease changes the brain.
Among other things, the condition alters the brain’s electrical rhythm. The brain normally produces a set of electrical waves at different frequencies. One of these waves, called the beta rhythm, has a distinctively low frequency of between 13 and 30 cycles each second.
A number of studies suggest that the beta rhythm serves an important purpose: It keeps the different regions of the brain synchronized, like the sections of an orchestra.
Each time the brain reaches the crest of a beta rhythm, scientists have found, neurons get primed to send their signals. By coordinating these signals, the beta rhythm may keep distant regions of the brain on the same timetable.
“It makes communication more efficient,” said Coralie de Hemptinne, a post-doctoral researcher at the University of California, San Francisco, and co-author of the new study.
The strength of beta rhythms can also change, scientists have found, becoming stronger or weaker. The stronger beta rhythms get, the more overpowering they become, forcing more neurons to fire in unison. If beta rhythms become too strong, the regions of the brain may get stuck in a sort of neural lock-step, unable to disengage from one another to generate new signals.
“If you don’t have it, that’s bad, but if you have too much of it, that’s also bad,” said Bradley Voytek, a neuroscientist at the University of California, San Diego, who was not involved in the study.
To take a step or reach for a doorknob, the brain first generates commands in a region called the motor cortex. Before the motor cortex generates commands, scientists have found, its neurons become desynchronized. That shift may allow the motor cortex the freedom to produce new electronic messages.
When people get Parkinson’s disease, the synchronization of the beta rhythm becomes stronger throughout the brain. Dr. Starr and his colleagues wondered if this change might give rise to some of the symptoms of the disease.
To find out, the scientists planned out a series of experiments during surgeries to implant D.B.S. devices. They temporarily placed a strip of sensors on the motor cortex and eavesdropped on the signals coming from neurons in different parts of that region of the brain.
The scientists found that in people with Parkinson’s disease, parts of the motor cortex were more tightly synchronized than in people without the disease. This lockstep might help account for the problems people with Parkinson’s disease have with movement: Perhaps it’s hard for their brains to break out of synchronization and to generate a new pattern of signals that can start moving the body.
Dr. Starr and his colleagues suspected that D.B.S. affected this synchronization in people with Parkinson’s. In another round of surgeries, the scientists monitored the motor cortex before people’s implants were switched on, and then listened to it afterward.
They found that D.B.S. caused the motor cortex to become less synchronized.
Dr. Starr’s patients remained conscious during the surgery, so he and his colleagues were able to test their movements. The patients reached out to touch dots that appeared on a touch screen placed in front of them. Their motor cortex became less synchronized as their movements improved.
“Starr’s work is excellent,” said Michael S. Okun, a professor of neuroscience at University of Florida Health and the national medical director of the National Parkinson Foundation.
But while synchronization may well cause some Parkinson’s symptoms, he added, it probably doesn’t account for all of them: “A whole bunch of biology happens in Parkinson’s.”
Dr. Voytek said that the new study could lead to better implants. Current devices send out a constant buzz. It might be better to design implants that only deliver a pulse when the brain becomes too synchronized. “This is paving the way for smart neurotransmitters,” said Dr. Voytek.
The new research might also explain why D.B.S. is yielding some promising results as a treatment for conditions such as depression and obsessive compulsive disorder. Too much synchronization may be able to disrupt the brain in many ways — and D.B.S. may help break the pattern.
Studies of hunters and gatherers — and of chimpanzees, which are often used as stand-ins for human ancestors — have cast bigger, faster and more powerful males in the hunter role.
Now, a 10-year study of chimpanzees in shows females playing an unexpectedly big role in hunting and males, surprisingly, letting smaller and weaker hunters keep their prey.
The results do not overturn the idea of dominant male hunters, said Jill D. Pruetz of Iowa State University, who led the study. But they may offer a new frame of reference on hunting, tools and human evolution. “We need to broaden our perspective,” she said.
Among the 30 or so chimps Dr. Pruetz and her colleagues observed, called the Fongoli band, males caught 70 percent of the prey, mostly by chasing and running it down. But these chimps are very unusual in one respect. They are the only apes that regularly hunt other animals with tools — broken tree branches. And females do the majority of that hunting for small primates called bush babies.
Craig Stanford, an anthropologist at the University of Southern California who has written extensively on chimp hunting and human evolution, said the research was “really important” because it solidified the evidence for chimps hunting with tools, which Dr. Pruetz had reported in earlier papers.
It also clearly shows “the females are more involved than in other places,” he said, adding that it provides new evidence to already documented observations that female chimps are “much more avid tool users than males are.”
All chimpanzees eat a variety of plant and animal foods, including insects like termites. And all chimpanzees eat some other animals. The most familiar examples of chimpanzee hunting are bands of the apes chasing red colobus monkeys through the trees in the rain forests of East Africa.
In this kind of pursuit, the largest, strongest, fastest chimps dominate — and those are adult males. When females and smaller chimps do catch an animal, an adult male may simply take it away, although the meat is eventually shared. The theft rate in other groups of chimps is around 25 percent, Dr. Pruetz said. Those other chimps do not hunt with tools.
The Fongoli chimpanzees live in a mix of savanna and woodlands where prey is not as abundant as in rain forests. There are no red colobus monkeys, and although the chimps do hunt young vervet monkeys and baboons, the much smaller bush babies are their main prey.
Dr. Pruetz argues that less food may have prompted both technological and social innovation, resulting in new ways to hunt and new social interactions as well. Humans evolved in a similar environment, and, as she and her colleagues write in Royal Society Open Science, “tool-assisted hunting could have similarly been important for early hominins.”
The tools in question are broken branches that Dr. Pruetz calls jabbing tools. The season for bush baby hunting is June, when the temperature may be well over 100 and the humidity is suffocating. The Fongoli chimps find the bush babies in their dens in trees. Chimps will stab and poke one of the small animals, sometimes wounding but not impaling it, until it comes out of its hiding place. The chimps will grab it, Dr. Pruetz said, and immediately “bite the head off.”
Females, even those with infants, and juvenile chimps can do this kind of hunting. The process does not put a premium on speed and strength as the chase does, so big males do not have an advantage. But there is more than technique and technology involved. There is social change.
By and large, said Dr. Pruetz, the adult males, which could take away a kill, show a “respect of ownership.” Theft rates are only about 5 percent. The chimps she studies also have more mixed-sex social groups than chimp bands in East Africa.
Travis Pickering, an anthropologist at the University of Wisconsin, said that with less food available it seems that the Fongoli chimps, “have to be more inventive” and that “these hunting weapons even the playing field for non-adults and females.”
Early hominins may have been in a similar situation, he said. Hunting among human ancestors “very quickly became a male-dominated activity,” he said, but “female hominins could very well have been the inventors of weapons.”
When it comes to getting food, deciding who does what depends on definitions. Collecting insects, for example, is defined as gathering, not hunting. In the case of the bush babies, however, though they are small, they struggle and flee, and will bite. Any bite, no matter how small, can pose the danger of infection, so the pursuit of bush babies qualifies as hunting, Dr. Pruetz says, and Dr. Stanford and Dr. Pickering agree.
Two years ago, when Thomas Talhelm was a Fulbright scholar in Beijing, he built his own air purifier after growing concerned about the city’s notorious pollution. To test his handiwork, he spent about $260 for a portable device that counts tiny particles in the air.
“I always had the intuition that indoor air was cleaner than outdoor air, and that’s borne out in the data very clearly,” he said. Mr. Talhelm, who used a device made by a California company called Dylos, also noticed that cooking could cause indoor pollution to spike.
Mr. Talhelm went on to found an enterprise that helps residents of China build cheap, do-it-yourself air filters. Now, scientists and hobbyists like him are increasingly experimenting with personal devices, including air pollution monitors.
The reason is simple: In any city, the amount of pollution varies from one area to the next, so residents’ exposures can differ considerably. New devices are cheaper and more portable than big government monitors, and ultimately they could feed streams of information to interactive maps, helping people to know what streets or neighborhoods are especially polluted. But experts caution that the field is young and changing quickly, so the technology is not always reliable or user-friendly.
“Currently, the air pollution sensors are still expensive and not easy to use, so it limits the number of people that can use them,” Mark Nieuwenhuijsen, a research professor at the Center for Research in Environmental Epidemiology in Barcelona, Spain, said in an email. However, the technology is improving, he said, and in a few years, devices like smart watches could contain air pollution sensors.
While the monitors — which can cost hundreds or thousands of dollars — have yet to become a mass-market item, their use by researchers is proliferating. In 2012 and 2013, Dr. Nieuwenhuijsen and other researchers outfitted 54 schoolchildren in Barcelona with air pollution monitors. These monitors measured black carbon, which consists of small sooty particles released by diesel engines and other sources. The children experienced the highest levels of black carbon when they were commuting to and from school, according to the study, which was published this year in the journal Environmental Science and Technology. The lowest levels of pollution were at their homes.
In Hong Kong, where the dense population is exposed to high levels of vehicle exhaust, a British researcher, Benjamin Barratt of King’s College London, is using portable monitors to study how pollution affects people living in skyscrapers. His team is measuring pollution in the city’s street canyons — streets lined with tall buildings. The idea is to understand how pollution from traffic gets trapped in such passages and how that may affect people who live high in the buildings, as damaging particles are dispersed.
Interpreting the data can be challenging, which is a central reason, in addition to cost, why few nonscientists have invested in monitors so far. For some machines, “You have to do a fair amount of research on air quality to even begin to understand what these devices are telling you,” said Jennifer Gabrys, a researcher at Goldsmiths, University of London who has tested portable monitors for Citizen Sense, a European project studying the use of environmental monitors.
She took about 15 people on a walk through London in 2013 to use the air monitoring devices, and in some cases, she said, “We were really questioning the numbers we were getting.”
The readings from the portable machines sometimes differed from those by large official monitors nearby. Monitors may be more accurate, she said, when they are stable, as opposed to being moved around.
Monitors intended for use by ordinary citizens are starting to arrive. Last month, Airviz, a company spun off from Carnegie Mellon University in Pennsylvania, unveiled a device about the size of a fist that is designed to sit on a table and measure the fine particles in homes and to provide air quality information on an electronic display.
“You can look across the horizon, and you can see the haze, and you can tell it’s bad when it’s bad,” said Illah Nourbakhsh, a professor of robotics at Carnegie Mellon whose team developed the device, which is called Speck. “But in your home, there is no cheap way to know how bad it is.”
Professor Nourbakhsh’s research group buys tiny dust sensors that scatter light and measure the particle content by seeing how the light bounces off it. Such sensors are cheap but often inaccurate, he said, so researchers then must adjust the calibration on each sensor by comparing the data with that of an established, expensive machine and creating an algorithm to correct its idiosyncrasies.
“We’re compensating for a bad sensor with machine learning,” he said.
The researchers also added a tiny fan to ensure a steady supply of air. A display constantly updates the air quality reading, so users can see if the air in a home gets worse during cooking or other activities. The device, which costs $200, is sold out through April, and the company is ramping up to make 300 units a month, Professor Nourbakhsh said. He added that inquiries had arrived from as far afield as England, Germany and China. His group is moving to design a version that can be used outside.
So far, users say, small pollution-monitoring devices seem more successful at measuring how pollution increases or decreases day by day or hour by hour, and less attention should be paid to the exact numbers they give out.
Mr. Talhelm has tried out several monitors in Beijing, and he has been struck by how the count varies from day to day.
“I don’t recommend interpreting the numbers literally (e.g., ‘Oh, it’s 9 micrograms, so the air is safe!’), but relative changes are definitely meaningful,” he said in an email.
Current technologies also tend to be better at measuring small particles, than pollution in the form of gases, like nitrogen dioxide, researchers say. Gases are often measured by electrochemical sensors, in which the gas reacts at an electrode and an electric current results.
Ultimately, researchers hope that personal air pollution monitors, combined with the geographic data captured by cellphones, will lead to new pollution maps of big cities around the world. In September, Swedish researchers plan to start a project called Quantified Planet that will map air pollution measurements taken by individuals worldwide. Dr. Nieuwenhuijsen is also working on a project called CITI-SENSE that will map air pollution in eight European cities, aided by small-scale monitors.
But a few people are already using the devices to understand their own exposure. Richard Saint Cyr, a family physician in Beijing, spent about $400 a few years ago for a Dylos particle monitor to test how well the air purifiers in his home were working. Data from the machine recently “showed that my home’s indoor air still wasn’t clean enough, despite every room having famous-brand, imported (i.e. expensive) air purifiers,” he wrote in an email. He did more testing and ultimately switched to new types of purifiers for his home.
“I think the market for micro-air pollution monitors is going to explode in China and other polluted countries,” Dr. Saint Cyr said. “Hopefully they will continue to get cheaper and more accurate.”
Sometimes for fun I'll watch a movie, or if I'm feeling industrious maybe I'll knit a scarf. When you're a physicist at CERN, the things you do for fun are apparently a little more complex. Piotr Traczyk, for example, the data from the Higgs boson discovery seminar into music. The 4-lepton and gamma-gamma channel data were each mapped onto the major scale, creating a "sonification" for two different guitars. To make it a little more listenable, he also created some backing music to play beneath each guitar's solo shred. It is heavy metal, after all.
You can hear the fast descending nature of the gamma-gamma part, and the 4-lepton part, Traczy writes "I figured that the resulting melody, if played low, could have been a guitar riff in a wacky heavy-metal song." That part was performed on the , which Traczyk also created. The video performance took place in the CERN auditorium where the Higgs announcement was made, naturally.
Traczyk came up with the idea after working on the to celebrate CERN's 60th anniversary last year. For that, CERN engineers and physicists played a melody composed of five different experiment results.
A cargo ship carrying food, experiments and supplies, including an Italian espresso maker, to the International Space Station, lifted off Tuesday afternoon from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida.
However, an attempt by of Hawthorne, Calif., better known as SpaceX, to land the booster stage of the rocket on a floating platform fell short again. About 20 minutes after the launching, Elon Musk, SpaceX’s chief executive, delivered the mixed news via Twitter.
Ascent successful. Dragon enroute to Space Station. Rocket landed on droneship, but too hard for survival.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk)
The booster, or first stage, has nine engines and lifted the rocket from the launching pad through the first 2 minutes and 40 seconds of flight. Riding on top of the Falcon 9 was a capsule carrying about two tons of cargo.
With its fuel mostly expended, the first-stage then detached and fell away. The single engine on the second stage of the Falcon 9 ignited, and the cargo capsule continued its upward arc to orbit.
The first stage then performed a series of acrobatic maneuvers: flipping 180 degrees and reigniting its engines for half a minute as the onboard computer aimed it toward the 300-foot-by-170-foot platform, which SpaceX has playfully named “Just Read the Instructions.”
Two earlier landing attempts this year were encouraging failures. In January, the stage made it to the platform, but ran out of hydraulic fluid to move the grid fins, and .
SpaceX added hydraulic fluid to the rocket, but could not deploy the landing platform known as the “drone ship” because of 25-foot-high waves. The rocket stage still went through the motions of landing, but without the platform, it toppled over into the ocean.
On Tuesday, Mr. Musk did not provide details of why the landing was “too hard for survival” as he posted.
Looks like Falcon landed fine, but excess lateral velocity caused it to tip over post landing
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk)
The cargo capsule will arrive at the space station Friday morning. The cargo includes 1,100 pounds of food and supplies for the crew, 1,140 pounds of hardware, and 1,860 pounds of science experiments.
One experiment will examine how water shifts in astronauts’ bodies in the absence of gravity. The increase of pressure within their skulls could be what causes eyeballs to .
Mice are also on their way to the International Space Station to participate in a study tracking how much bone and muscle is lost in space. Scientists hope to gain knowledge that could be used for eventual long-duration space missions.
Miss today's launch? Want to see it again? Watch now. set to arrive at Fri.
This genre of logic puzzles is baffling in large part because people rarely act this way. The puzzles also have built-in assumptions — everyone is truthful, for instance and no one gets offended and walks off when strangers insist on making basic communication so complicated. Students who compete in math competitions are generally familiar with the conventions of logic puzzles, but people who have not taken a math class for more than a decade generally say, “Huh?”
This puzzle is particularly convoluted. Why don’t Albert and Bernard just blurt out what Cheryl has told them? Why is Cheryl so coy about revealing the month and day, but not year, of her birthday? What else is Cheryl trying to hide?
But if you are willing to play, here’s how the logic unwinds.
It helps to put the list of 10 dates into table form:
Now let’s examine what Albert and Bernard say. Albert goes first:
The first half of the sentence is obvious — Albert only knows the month, but not the day — but the second half is the first critical clue.
The initial reaction is, how could Bernard know? Cheryl only whispered the day, so how could he have more information than Albert? But if Cheryl had whispered “19,” then Bernard would indeed know the exact date — May 19 — because there is only one date with 19 in it. Similarly, if Cheryl had told Bernard, “18,” then Bernard would know Cheryl’s birthday was June 18.
Thus, for this statement by Albert to be true means that Cheryl did not say to Albert, “May” or “June.” (Again, for logic puzzles, the possibility that Albert is lying or confused is off the table.) Then Bernard replies:
So from Albert’s statement, Bernard now also knows that Cheryl’s birthday is not in May or June, eliminating half of the possibilities, leaving July 14, July 16, Aug. 14, Aug. 15 and Aug. 17. But Bernard now knows. If Cheryl had told him “14,” he would not know, because there would still be two possibilities: July 14 and Aug. 14. Thus we know the day is not the 14th.
Now there are only three possibilities left: July 16, Aug. 15 and Aug. 17. Albert again:
The same logical process again: For Albert to know, the month has to be July, because if Cheryl had told him, “August,” then he would still have two possibilities: Aug. 15 and Aug. 17.
Cheryl is a Cancer, which still does not explain her behavior.
In 1986, psychology professor Linda Camras took a leave of absence from DePaul University to have a baby. For eight weeks, she recorded her daughter’s every expression and what triggered it. “I did a lot of videotaping,” she says. It was the first real-world test of a 1970s theory: that by 2 months old, babies automatically smile, knit their brows, and contort their faces to show positive versus negative emotions, like joy or fear.
The idea had made sense to Camras--until she started studying her own baby. “I found a lot of things that didn’t fit into the theory,” she says. For instance, her baby raised her eyebrows in a classic expression of surprise when playing with a familiar toy.
A baby’s facial repertoire, Camras observed, can be somewhat messy. Only with age and feedback does “it get organized so that there’s a tighter link between the facial expression and the emotion,” she says.
Michael Lewis, who studies child development at Rutgers Robert Wood Johnson Medical School, says, “Most people agree that by 6 to 9 months, there are facial expressions of emotions.” But he believes it occurs even earlier. His lab found that when infants as young as 2 months old pulled a string that cued up pictures of smiling babies and Sesame Street music, their faces showed pleasure. Later, when the string was disabled, they showed anger and sadness.
Camras, however, isn’t sure these effects occur outside laboratory settings and questions the assumption that a baby’s face, unlike an adult’s, always reveals its inner state. “If your professor slips and falls, you try not to laugh, because it’s rude,” Camras says. “As adults, we can control our facial behavior, but we assume babies don’t do that.”
Have a question? Tweet your science questions and quandaries to @PopSci with the hashtag #AskAnything, or email us at AskAnything@popsci.com.
This article was originally published in the of Popular Science.
At Harvard, Church attacks many of the world's hardest problems with genome editing.
A few years ago, George Church was peer-reviewing a paper for the journal Science when he got an idea. The paper’s authors had encoded their names and a string of famous quotes into a bacterial genome to demonstrate the power and possibility of synthetic biology, the design and manufacture of DNA in a lab. Their encoding method was good. But Church, a genetics professor at Harvard Medical School, thought he could do better.
Sitting at his desk, in the space of a few minutes he wrote a computer program that translated his review from Roman letters into binary code and then into genetic code. He submitted the review to the journal’s editor, who couldn’t read it. The document contained only As, Ts, Cs, and Gs, shorthand for the nucleotides in DNA. The editor passed it along to the study’s authors. “At first, they had no idea what it said,” Church says, chuckling.
That should have been the end of it. The paper was published, and the stunt passed quickly into the stock of Church lore, in league with the time he lived for a year on nutrient broth from a lab vendor or the time he wore homemade blinders around the lab to make a statement about tunnel vision.
But Church wasn’t done. He wanted to see how far he could take his computer program, so he began looking for something else to code, something larger than a single review. He settled on his own book, Regenesis, which was about to be published. He spent a few days adapting the program he’d written and converted all 350 pages of text and photos into a string of As, Ts, Gs, and Cs. In the lab, he synthesized a strand of DNA to match the code, replicated it many times over, and dabbed a drop of the synthetic DNA onto a scrap of paper. The dot contained 70 billion copies of the book. It was no bigger than a period.
A few months later, Church took his experiment with him on The Colbert Report, pulling out the paper scrap--about the size and shape of a fortune cookie slip--for the world to see. Before he knew it, representatives of several companies tasked with archiving films and recordings were knocking on his office door.
“They said, ‘We want to do data storage,’ ” Church tells me. “I said, ‘You guys realize this is super academic, right? There’s no company or anything.’ And they said ‘Yeah sure, but data storage is a big problem.’ ”
With that, his parlor trick sprouted into a business. Members of Church’s lab are now scaling up the process in order to encode just about any form of media into DNA. If they succeed, they will have not only revolutionized data storage but ushered in what is perhaps biology’s most exciting era: the era when our capacity to manipulate the basic code of life dwarfs the capacity of even our most advanced computers.
Church tells the story pretty calmly, considering. We’re sitting in his office, a generous space tucked into the side pocket of a large lab, with windows that look down on Boston’s Longwood Avenue. He’s leaning back in his too-small office chair, stretching his legs out in front of him (he’s six-foot-five) and occasionally tugging at his Darwin-esque beard. He has blue eyes, a kind face, and an even voice, none of which betray the excitement or manic brilliance that one assumes must fuel such breakthroughs. If anything, he seems entertained. This is an amusing anecdote. The rest is an aside.
Church has already transformed biology once before. The DNA-sequencing technology he first devised in graduate school helped reduce the cost of whole-genome sequencing from billions of dollars to thousands. Scientists are now using it to investigate intractable diseases, such as cancer and schizophrenia, and doctors are beginning to use it to identify genetic mutations that cause rare--and, until now, undiagnosable--illnesses.
Amid the bays and bench tops that constitute Church’s laboratory, a litany of other revolutions are taking shape: His team of researchers is coaxing the woolly mammoth back from extinction by melding its genome to an elephant’s. They’re devising ways to inoculate mosquitoes (and, by extension, us) against malaria. And they’re designing tools to help physicists hunt down dark matter and to help neuroscientists map the human brain. Church has launched 15 bioengineering start-ups in the past decade and advises a number of others. More so than any other scientist in his field, he is helping to forge a new kind of biology, one less geared toward studying DNA than harnessing it for our own aims.
In the book that he encoded in DNA (which, incidentally, is also available printed and bound), he and his co-author, Ed Regis, envisioned the future this new biology could bring, one in which bacteria fuels cars and commercial jets and humans are immune to cancer. It may sound like science fiction, or at least like a litany of overhyped pipe dreams that science so often sells. But George Church’s pipe dreams have an uncanny record of becoming reality.
•••
For all his eccentricities, Church is an easy person to talk with. And yet such is his reputation for brilliance that people seem always to be apologizing to him for their own intellectual shortcomings. “I’m sorry if this sounds stupid,” people say. I caught a reporter doing it, and a CEO. Then, I did it too.
In fact, on my first visit to his office, I manage to completely embarrass myself. It’s early afternoon, and he’s invited me to sit in on a telephone interview with a radio reporter, before I tag along to some meetings. A handful of 3D-printed molecules are scattered across the big round table in the center of his office. He has been fidgeting with one--absentmindedly pulling it apart, between his thumb and forefingers before letting it snap back together--while he leans back in his chair and talks at the speakerphone. I pick up another molecule, one that looks identical to his but is not. Instead of snapping back together when I pull at it, it explodes.
Twelve plastic pentagons and one large white die go flying through the air. They skittle loudly across the table and roll onto the floor. Some of them land under Church’s desk. I am mortified. I scramble to gather all the pieces and reassemble them as quietly as possible, while he calmly continues to answer questions about genomic medicine.
When the phone call ends, I make sheepish apologies. “I thought by the way yours was snapping back together …” I say, trailing off into the ether.
George Church
Photos by Marius Bugge
Unfazed, he takes the two molecules, holds them side by side, and launches into a geometry lesson. They are both dodecadedrons, he explains--objects with 12 sides. He has rigged his with some putty to prevent the pieces from disassembling; mine has not been so rigged. It is also wrapped around a 20-sided die, or an icosahedron. “I found this die on the street,” he says. “I like it because it looks like the nuclear material of a virus.” He goes on to explain the significance of these shapes: Icosahedrons are among the most symmetrical structures in the natural world, he says. They also form the basis of viral symmetry. I pretend to understand, but my takeaway is simpler than he probably intends: George Church is the kind of guy who finds a 20-sided die and immediately thinks about the structure of viruses.
He has been tinkering like this--testing the ways in which the world around him does and does not fit together--for most of his life. When he was 10 years old, he began replicating the work of a botanist named Luther Burbank by grafting the branches of one fruit tree onto another in his backyard. As a teenager at Andover, a private school, he taught himself BASIC computer programming and then taught the school’s computer linear algebra. As an undergraduate at Duke University, he raced through the curriculum and simultaneously completed two bachelor’s degrees (in zoology and chemistry) in two years. As a graduate student there, he helped solve the structure of transfer RNA, which translates the nucleic acids of DNA into the amino acids of proteins. He spent so much time in the lab that Duke expelled him from its Ph.D. program for missing too many classes. Fortunately, Harvard took him in.
“It was pretty clear he was a different sort of bird right from the beginning,” says Gary Ruvkun, a Harvard geneticist and good friend of Church’s (the two attended graduate school together). “I still remember I would work late, and when I’d be leaving the lab at, like, 2 a.m., he’d be buzzing in on his bike, ready to start the day.”
It was at Harvard that Church met his future wife, a fellow graduate student named Ting Wu. He followed her across the country and back before the couple settled in Boston to grow their labs (both at Harvard) and their family (they have one daughter, now in her 20s). His wife, he says, is a much better geneticist than he. In fact, Church is fairly adamant that he’s not a scientist at all but an engineer who occasionally does some science.
Like an engineer, he tends to see the universe not as a disparate set of mysteries but as a machine with a vast array of buttons and levers, each begging to be pushed and pulled. “His approach to science is modeled after the home-brew computer clubs, where the computer revolution was started in basements and garages,” Ruvkun says. “He told me once that he’s more proud of his National Academy of Engineering membership than of his National Academy of Sciences one. Nobody else I know thinks that way.”
•••
Here’s how it goes in most academic laboratories: A scientist develops proficiency in a handful of techniques and uses those techniques to study a handful of closely related questions. That lab attracts students and junior researchers with narrowly aligned interests and experiences. The entire system tends toward specialization, so that, by and large, molecular biologists interested in immunology and experienced with mice go to one kind of lab and neuroscientists interested in the visual system and experienced with flies go to another. Expertise is cultivated and refined and, in some cases, hoarded like wartime food rations.
Church’s lab is the opposite. Rather than seeking homogeneity, he recruits as diverse a group as possible. Physicists and neuroscientists work alongside geneticists, engineers, and entrepreneurs. “The image for me is of poking deep holes all over the place, in the fabric of science and engineering,” he says. “As we probe each of those points, we get cross talk.”
The result is that his lab manages to be both one of Harvard’s top producers and a well-known receiving center for science’s misfit toys. There’s an artist encoding Wikipedia entries into apple genomes (to create a literal tree of knowledge) and an insurance industry refugee who fled his office job over a decade ago, worked several months for free while teaching himself biochemistry, and now serves as “co-head” of the lab. For a time, there was also a passenger-pigeon obsessive who had no advanced degree but had heard about Church’s mammoth de-extinction project and cold-called asking to participate; he has since gone on to lead the pigeon resurrection initiative out of a lab in California.
“We always joke that the only thing you need to do to join George’s lab is show up,” says Uri Laserson, a former student of Church’s and the co-founder of Good Start Genetics, a company that offers genetic screening for inherited diseases. “There is zero organization. His style is just to let things happen.” It’s a scrappy kind of place, Laserson says--a little bit sink-or-swim--but not in a bad way. “Mostly, you have the constant sense that exciting things are happening or are about to happen and if you miss out on it, you have only yourself to blame.”
The projects that emerge from this controlled chaos seem to fall along a continuum. At one end, the lab applies biology to very specific non-biological problems. Data storage is an example, but lately, members of Church’s lab have been using DNA to help physicists track dark matter, a mysterious substance that makes up some 27 percent of the known universe. At the other end of the continuum, Church’s team employs the tools of other sciences to solve the problems of biology. For example, the newly developed technique FISSEQ (fluorescent in situ sequencing) draws on a few different subsets of physics to help geneticists visualize gene expression in living cells. Before FISSEQ, scientists could measure just three or four genes at a time; now, they can measure thousands at once.
Genome Editing In Six Easy Steps
Popular Science
A tool called CRISPR could herald the start of a revolution in genetic engineering. But to understand why takes some doing. Bear with us. Modifying genes used to require a painstaking process: Scientists would kill a cell, extract the DNA, manipulate it, and then reinsert it. Several tools now provide a shortcut, and CRISPR is the most efficient. Its protein complex swaps a targeted genetic sequence with another, allowing scientists to engineer DNA in living cells with unprecedented speed. Using CRISPR, scientists could modify genes to prevent disease, slow aging, bring back extinct species, even develop new fuels. The possibilities are almost limitless.--Junnie Kwon
But it’s the projects in the middle of the continuum--biology-based solutions for biology-based problems--that tend to garner the most attention. Many of these involve CRISPR, a genome-editing tool derived from bacteria that uses an enzyme to excise specific nucleotide sequences and swap them with others. With it, scientists can alter multiple genes at once, without having to do the arduous work of extracting, isolating, and cloning the original genetic material and cross-breeding the resulting transgenic animals. A few other tools offer a similar shortcut, but CRISPR is much quicker. “It’s the fastest thing I’ve seen yet,” Church says. “It’s like you throw a piston into a car and it finds its way to the right place and swaps out with one of the other pistons--while the motor’s running.”
In January 2013, Church was one of the first to show that CRISPR could splice DNA in human cells. Since then, scientists have used it to correct a number of genetic problems, including certain forms of liver disease (in mice) and antibiotic resistance.
Church says CRISPR can address ecosystem-level issues as well. By circumventing the rules of sexual selection with live genome editing, CRISPR greatly increases the odds that a given gene will be passed from parent to offspring. The result is what scientists call a gene drive: That is, a gene is driven quickly through an entire wild population. Imagine that you insert a gene for malaria-resistance into a single mosquito and release that mosquito into the wild. You may eventually wipe out the disease altogether. Or imagine inserting a gene that renders an invasive species sterile. You could potentially rid an ecosystem of that species within a few generations.
CRISPR is also a key component of what may be the most high-profile of Church’s projects: de-extinction. When Stewart Brand, editor of the famed Whole Earth Catalog, hatched a plan to revive extinct species such as the woolly mammoth and the passenger pigeon, he turned to Church for the technology. Church devised an automated genome-engineering process (called the “evolution machine” by some) that enables researchers to meld together genomes from different species. His lab is now at work on a “cold-resistant elephant”--an elephant that has borrowed genes from the woolly mammoth so that it can thrive in colder environments. It could be possible to resurrect other species using the same approach, Church says. In fact, the possibilities are as limitless as our imaginations.
Whether that’s a promise or a peril depends on whose imagination we’re talking about.
•••
Before Church broke out the 70 billion copies of his book on The Colbert Report, the comedian asked him a question he gets a lot. “How do you think your work,” Colbert asked, “will eventually destroy all mankind?” The audience laughed riotously. “Do you think it’s going to be like a killer virus,” he asked, pausing to lean in and tap his fingers on the table. “Or more like a giant, mutant, killer squid man, who arises from the Pacific, between Easter Island and Chile, and feasts on our flesh?” Although it was a joke, the bit underscored a paradox that Church often faces in response to his work. On one side, there are skeptics who don’t believe the possibilities Church is peddling. On the other side, there are terrified believers who worry that it may be all too possible. Often, he alone stands in the middle.
Church tends to view this paradox through the same lens that he views most everything: as an engineering challenge. Take gene drives, for an example. Terrified believers worry about what could happen if a given gene drive has unintended effects. Say scientists introduce a gene that makes mosquitoes resistant to malaria, but that in turn causes an unexpected crash in the mosquito population that throws the ecosystem out of whack. Church’s response to such a disaster would be simply to deploy a reverse drive to try to undo the damage. Skeptics have a different set of concerns, namely that natural selection would just weed out the new gene over time, making gene drives unworthy of the effort and risk. To this, Church just says we could deploy the same drive periodically, making slight tweaks here and there.
To play either of these scenarios forward is to see the world through Church’s eyes: a place where DNA is the ultimate computer code and we are all computer programmers.
Of course, not all concerns are technical. Animal rights activists worry about a surge in animal experimentation now that CRISPR has made it easier than ever to create, for example, genetically modified monkeys. And corporate watchdogs have their own concerns about placing control of the human genome in the hands of private for-profit companies. It bears stating that Church works with a number of corporate sponsors, including Chevron, Procter & Gamble, and Merck.
Church makes no apologies for his entrepreneurship. He nearly always opens his lectures with a slide that displays all the logos of the companies he’s affiliated with. He agrees that there are risks involved in the work he does, but he does not think that vilifying corporations is the answer. “Industry is an essential part of what we do,” he says. “You can’t just hoard your ideas inside the ivory tower. You have to get them out into the world.”
Still, he takes safety concerns seriously. Last summer, Church and a few colleagues published two papers and one blog post on the same day, introducing the concept of gene drives and calling for “informed public discussion, regulatory review, and the establishment of guidelines for the safe development of the technology.” No one had actually made a gene drive yet, but Church wanted to get the ball rolling. “The important thing is to actually listen to the public’s concerns,” he says. “And then try to visualize things that can go wrong and think of ways to guard against them.”
To that end, he is devising new methods of biocontainment; the term normally refers to the physical safety measures (cabinets, hoods, isolation rooms) that laboratories use to prevent the escape of potentially dangerous organisms. In January, Church and members of his lab reported in the journal Nature that instead of relying on physical containment, they had managed to install protective measures within the microbial genome itself. They engineered a strain of bacteria that survives on a synthetic amino acid found only in the laboratory, not in nature.
And that’s how Church the engineer works. No obstacle is insurmountable. Technology moves toward greater efficiency and capacity, he says, not the reverse. And in any case, doubters come with the territory. “The World Wide Web went from zero to millions of web pages in a few years,” Church says. “Many revolutions look irrelevant just before they change everything swiftly.”
•••
The last time I chat with Church he is on a cellphone, walking from his office to a meeting down the street. The connection’s crackly, so I ask whether he’d prefer to talk later. “I like talking and walking,” he says. “It’s more productive than doing just one.”
I ask for an update, and he rattles off a string of developments. The company funding his data-storage project is planning to make a big announcement about his team’s latest advances. “We’ve scaled way up from the five megabyte book,” he says. He’s got a paper due out in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences about the DNA and dark matter project. His group has also completed the first successful gene drive, a small pilot study in yeast that proved that foreign genes introduced to cells in a lab can be passed on to--and spread throughout--a separate wild population.
I ask him which project he’s most excited about. He answers without hesitation: CRISPR. “I like exponential fields,” he says. “Right now, nothing is more exponential than that.”
Church has helped launch Editas Medicine, a biotech company aimed at harnessing CRISPR’s therapeutic potential. The idea is to develop a new class of CRISPR-based drugs that can “surgically repair” aberrant genes. Editas has plenty of financial and scientific backing, but it’s still in early days. More than most, Church knows that ideas can often be ahead of their time. On more than one occasion, he has had to shelve a project--low-cost gene sequencing, for one--until the rest of the world was ready for it. “People think it’s great to be ahead of your time,” he says. “But it can actually be quite painful.” We should all be grateful that’s never stopped him yet.
This article was originally published in the of Popular Science.
As editor in chief of Popular Science, I get asked a lot of questions. Some of them are reasonable: Why is the sky blue? (Molecules in the air scatter blue light more effectively than red.) Some of them are not: Why can’t I communicate with my cat? (Try listening.) But the most persistent question is, What does it take to become a great inventor?
My typical response: If I had that kind of lightning in a bottle, I’d be drinking it myself. Besides good timing and even better luck, it’s hard to pinpoint what makes certain inventors successful. They tend to be creative, exceptionally persistent, and tolerant of risk. But beyond that, they are just people, and people come in all stripes. Tesla and da Vinci were ingenious. Steve Jobs was fastidious and business-minded. Thomas Edison was ruthlessly pragmatic; he was said to have set quotas for himself--a small breakthrough every 10 days and a big one every six months.
The only thing that stands out about successful inventors is that they are exceptionally rare. And one of them is on this month.
In 2007, Bre Pettis, an artist and former schoolteacher, co-founded the hackerspace NYC Resistor. Its members wanted a 3D printer, but the technology, which had been around since the 1980s, was expensive and its application, almost exclusively industrial. A few hackers started working with open-source designs. Pettis partnered with two of them, and they debuted their first consumer product, the CupCake CNC, in 2009. The invention became a business, Industries, which Pettis sold four years later for around $400 million. He’s now on to his next project, Bold Machines, a 3D-printing workshop that helps artists and entrepreneurs transition quickly from rough ideas to working prototypes. “We basically accelerate the future,” Pettis says.
Every May, Popular Science publishes the , in which we celebrate the year’s best independent inventions--those scrappy creations born of a garage or workshop, not an industrial lab. Who better to help us assemble that list than Bre Pettis? Together, we dug up some extraordinary awardees, as , and Pettis shared his tips for aspiring inventors. He also graciously helped us 3D print the Popular Science logo on the cover and uploaded the design files to Thingiverse.com so that you can print it too.
No story about invention, however, would be complete without a caveat. Not all those featured will make it. Developing a successful prototype and developing a successful company are not necessarily the same skill. But all the ideas have tremendous potential, as do the inventors behind them. You never know. You just may see one of them on our cover one day.
Enjoy the .
A History Of Invention
Katie Peek/Popular Science
Popular Science has been covering innovation since the magazine's inception in 1872. Here's how often the word invention has appeared in our pages, either in articles or advertisements.
