BBC Medical Science — Two British men who have been totally blind for many years have had part of their vision restored after surgery to fit pioneering eye implants. They are able to perceive light and even some shapes from the devices which were fitted behind the retina. The men are part of a clinical trial carried out at the Oxford Eye Hospital and King’s College Hospital in London. …

The wafer-thin, 3mm square microelectronic chip has 1,500 light-sensitive pixels which take over the function of the photoreceptor rods and cones. The surgery involves placing it behind the retina from where a fine cable runs to a control unit under the skin behind the ear. When light enters the eye and reaches the chip it stimulates the pixels which sends electronic signals to the optic nerve and from there to the brain. The chip can have its sensitivity altered via an external power unit which connects to the chip via a magnetic disc on the scalp.

Chris James from Wroughton in Wiltshire said there was a “magic moment” when the implant was switched on for the first time and he saw flashing lights – showing that the device was functional. “I am able to make out a curve or a straight line close-up but I find things at distance more difficult. It is still early days as I have to learn to interpret the signals being sent to my brain from the chip.” …

But in an unexpected development, the other British man to have the implant says he is now able to dream in colour for the first time in 25 years. Robin Millar says he is also able to stand in a room and detect light coming through windows.

Prof MacLaren said the results might not seem extraordinary to the sighted, but for a totally blind person to be able to orientate themselves in a room, and perhaps know where the doors and windows are, would be “extremely useful” and of practical help.

In 2010 a Finnish man who received the experimental chip was able to identify letters, but his implant worked only in a laboratory setting, whereas the British men’s devices are portable. The implant was developed by a German company, Retina Implant AG. (05/05/12)

More…

BBC Technology — Japan is switching off its last working nuclear reactor, as part of the safety drive since the March 2011 tsunami triggered a meltdown at the Fukushima plant. The third reactor at the Tomari plant, in Hokkaido prefecture, is shutting down for routine maintenance.

It leaves Japan without energy from atomic power for the first time for more than 40 years. Until last year, Japan got 30% of its power from nuclear energy.

Hundreds of people marched through Tokyo, waving banners to celebrate what they hope will be the end of nuclear power in Japan. Power shortages. Since the Fukushima disaster, all the country’s reactors have been shut down for routine maintenance. They must withstand tests against earthquakes and tsunamis, and local authorities must give their consent in order for plants to restart. … So far, none have.

Two reactors at the Ohi plant in western Japan have been declared safe. The government says they should be restarted to combat looming shortages. However, regional authorities would still have to give their approval. …

Businesses have warned of severe consequences for manufacturing if no nuclear plants are allowed to re-start. In the meantime, Japan has increased its fossil fuel imports, with electricity companies pressing old power plants into service. If the country can get through the steamy summer without blackouts, calls to make the nuclear shutdown permanent will get louder, our correspondent says.

The six-reactor Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant was badly damaged by the March 2011 earthquake and tsunami. Blasts occurred at four of the reactors after the cooling systems went offline, triggering radiation leaks and forcing the evacuation of thousands of people. (05/05/12)

More…

BBC Science — The researchers used a satellite laser to measure the thinning occurring on ice shelves – the floating tongues of ice that jut out from the land. The team’s analysis found the shelves’ shrinkage could not be attributed simply to warmer air temperatures. Rather, it is warm water getting under the floating ice to melt it from below. This is leading to a weakening of the shelves, permitting more and more ice to drain from the continent’s interior through tributary glaciers.

Previous studies have already indicated that warmer waters are being driven towards the continent by stronger westerly winds in the Southern Ocean. The researchers say the new understanding has major implications for their ability to reliably project future sea-level rises as a result of Antarctic ice loss. “What we realise now is that we’re looking at a very sensitive system,” Dr Hamish Pritchard, from the British Antarctic Survey (BAS), told BBC News. “Previously, you would have thought that we needed a lot of warming in the atmosphere to get a substantial loss of ice from Antarctica – because it’s such a cold place. But what we show is that that’s not necessary; you don’t need radical change. “All you need are quite subtle changes – such as a change in the winds – and that can produce effects at the edges of Antarctica that then lead to a loss of a lot of ice.”

The research is published in the journal Nature but has also been presented here at the European Geosciences Union (EGU) meeting in Vienna, Austria. Pritchard’s team used the laser altimeter on Nasa’s Icesat spacecraft to map the changing thickness in 54 ice shelves around Antarctica. The survey incorporated some 4.5 million data points between 2003 and 2008. The researchers draw on modelling work and information from a range of other studies to explain the thinning observed by Icesat.

Twenty of the shelves were assessed to be being melted from below by warm ocean currents. Most of the 20 are in West Antarctica, and show thinning up to seven metres per year. In every single case, the glaciers on land that feed into these shelves have recorded accelerated movement over the same period. This will have drained many billions more tonnes of ice into the ocean, contributing to sea level rise.

The explanation, simply put, is that the shelves no longer have the strength to impede glacier flow in the way they once did. “When ice shelves completely collapse – and we’ve seen that before – the grounded glaciers behind them will speed up; we know that,” explained co-author Helen Amanda Fricker of Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego, US. “But what this study is showing, which is very new, is that you don’t need to lose the shelf entirely for this to happen; just a reduction in the thickness of the ice shelf is enough to allow more of the grounded ice behind it to flow off the continent.”… (04/25/12)

More…

BBC Science — The carbon-based material graphene can help scientists study liquids more clearly with high-power microscopes. Details of the advance are reported in Science journal.

Graphene can form a clear “window” to see liquids at higher resolution than was previously possible using transmission electron microscopes. Liquids had been difficult to view at the same resolution as solids because these microscopes require the liquids to be encapsulated by some material.

Traditionally, silicon nitride or silicon oxide capsules, or liquid cells, have been used. But these are generally too thick to see through clearly. Now, Jong Min Yuk at the University of California, Berkeley, and colleagues have shown that pockets created by sheets of graphene can be used to study liquids at clear, atomic, resolution using transmission electron microscopes (TEMs).

The researchers used their new graphene-based liquid cell to study the formation of platinum nanocrystals in solution. With this technique, the team of scientists was able to observe new and unexpected stages of nanocrystal growth as it happened. They noted how the crystals selectively coalesced and modified their shape.

Graphene consists of a flat layer of carbon atoms tightly packed into a two-dimensional honeycomb arrangement. Because it is so thin, it is also practically transparent. The unusual electronic, mechanical and chemical properties of graphene at the molecular scale promise numerous applications. Its discoverers, Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov from Manchester University, were awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics in 2010.

The technique described by Mr Yuk and colleagues might enable scientists to study other physical, chemical, and biological phenomena that take place in liquids on the nanometre scale. “Their approach opens new domains of research in the physics and chemistry in the fluid phase in general,” said Christian Colliex, from the Universite Paris Sud in France, who was not involved with the research. (04/08/12)

More…

BBC Science — Richard Black writes: UK children are losing contact with nature at a “dramatic” rate, and their health and education are suffering, a National Trust report says.

Traffic, the lure of video screens and parental anxieties are conspiring to keep children indoors, it says.

Evidence suggests the problem is worse in the UK than other parts of Europe, and may help explain poor UK rankings in childhood satisfaction surveys. The trust is launching a consultation on tackling “nature deficit disorder”.

“This is about changing the way children grow up and see the world,” said Stephen Moss, the author, naturalist and former BBC Springwatch producer who wrote the Natural Childhood report for the National Trust.

“The natural world doesn’t come with an instruction leaflet, so it teaches you to use your creative imagination. When you build a den with your mates when you’re nine years old, you learn teamwork – you disagree with each other, you have arguments, you resolve them, you work together again – it’s like a team-building course, only you did it when you were nine.”

The trust argues, as have other bodies in previous years, that the growing dissociation of children from the natural world and internment in the “cotton wool culture” of indoor parental guidance impairs their capacity to learn through experience. It cites evidence showing that:

1) children learn more and behave better when lessons are conducted outdoors

2) symptoms of children diagnosed with ADHD improve when they are exposed to nature

3) children say their happiness depends more on having things to do outdoors more than owning technology.

Yet British parents feel more pressure to provide gadgets for their children than in other European countries. (04/02/12)

More…

Future Positive — Timothy Wilken, MD writes: Be Love, Do Good, Have Everything* is a phrase I put together. It was created after reading an analysis of being, doing, and having called The Order of Creation by the enlightenment teacher Ilchi Lee, he wrote the following in 2005:

The Order of Creation

After reading this, I realized that some people use a third order of creation.

DO→BE→HAVE, if I DO what my parents say, then I can BE accepted, and then I will HAVE Happiness.

After some reflection, I found myself in agreement with Lee’s recommended order: BE→DO→HAVE, but then I asked myself, could a universal formula be created that reflected co-operation and interdependence, and that also might inspire future humanity? After, further reflection I came up with the phrase: Be Love→Do Good→Have Everything. I have found it so appropriate that I use as part of my signature.

This phrase also seems to form the perfect strategy for following Jesus of Nazareth’s Golden Rule, and for participating in a synergic gift economy. (03/27/12)

More…

CommUnity of Minds – An excerpt from a new book by Maggie Koerth-Baker: First the bad news: over the next twenty years, the United States must cut 20 quadrillion BTUs from its annual consumption of fossil fuels, more than 25 percent of the energy currently being used. This is a matter of both economic and environmental necessity. The good news is that we have the technology to pull it off. But where should we start? What exactly needs to be done? How much will it cost? And won’t such a drastic reduction in energy use destroy the American way of life?

In Before the Lights Go Out, science blogger and journalist Maggie Koerth-Baker presents a comprehensive analysis of the ways in which America produces, distributes, and consumes energy. She explains how our current systems developed, points out their strengths and weaknesses, and offers candid assessments of the time, the difficulty, and the expense involved in making radical changes to the energy systems that have shaped our lives for a hundred years. And the new world that results will be neither business-as-usual nor a hippie utopia.

Drawing on more than two years of research and interviews with experts on everything from our electrical grid and electric cars to fracking and passive buildings, Koerth-Baker explains what we can do, what we can’t do, and why “the solution” is really a lot of solutions working together.

This isn’t about planting a tree, buying a Prius, and proving that you’re a good person. Economic and social incentives got us a country full of gas-guzzling cars, long commutes, inefficient houses, and coal-fired power plants in the middle of nowhere, and economics and incentives will build our new world. Ultimately, change is inevitable. If we don’t control it, it will control us.

Koerth-Baker argues that we’re not going to solve the energy problem by convincing everyone to live like it’s 1900—nobody wants to do that. Rather than reverting to the past, we will be building a future where we get energy from new places and use it in new ways and do more with less. But for all the new technology, we’ll still need coal-fired, nuclear, and natural gas–burning power plants—and we’ll still be pumping gasoline into our (far more fuel-efficient) cars for many decades to come.

She also looks at new battery technology, smart grids, decentralized generation, clean coal, and carbon sequestration—buzzwords now, but they’ll be a part of our everyday life soon.

Yes, solving the energy problem is more urgent than ever before. Yes, we have the technology to do that—and the results may surprise you. Before the Lights Go Out reveals what that will look like.

What you need to know now about America’s energy future

We all know America has an energy problem—even if we can’t all agree on what, specifically, the problem is. Rising costs, changing climate, peak oil, foreign oil, public safety—the issues are complicated, the solutions even more so. In Before the Lights Go Out, Maggie Koerth-Baker finally makes some sense out of the competing agendas and reveals the practical, multifaceted plan that will save America’s future.

“With spark and brilliance, Maggie Koerth-Baker reveals the thrumming, secretive inner workings of the U.S. energy grid. The wizard behind the curtain turns out to be a bunch of guys in light blue dress shirts, drinking RC Cola and sweating out a surplus that’s threatening to crash the western seaboard. Using the raw resources of carefully gathered facts and years of experience, Koerth-Baker builds a narrative that flows and illuminates like the river of electrons that I now understand to be electricity. In her capable and stylish telling, energy isn’t just policy and data; it’s people and history, happenstance and compromise. It’s a fine, cracking read.”—Mary Roach, author of Stiff and Packing for Mars

“Maggie Koerth-Baker is one of the most innovative science writers at work today. Rather than settling for cheap flash, she burrows deep into many of the biggest mysteries in science and technology and comes out with wonderfully clear explanations. In Before the Lights Go Out, she digs into perhaps the most puzzling—and urgent—stories of our time: Where are we going to get our energy from in future decades? Her investigations take us from the early days of firewood and coal to the cutting edge of smart grids and carbon capture, and leave us well-equipped to take on this great challenge of our civilization.”??—Carl Zimmer, contributing editor, Discover; author of Science Ink

“None of this stuff is, in and of itself, sustainable. Not coal, not nukes, not solar, not wind. But some combination of various systems, various compromises and improvements and treaties between mutual belligerents, taken together, hold out the promise of a world where we and our descendants continue to enjoy comfort and prosperity. This isn’t a book about turning down the thermostat in the winter and putting on a sweater: it’s a book about making houses that are better, that warm the rooms where people are and keep the heat in, and, in the process, cost us all less, reduce the pressure to secure oil through military adventurism, and begin to curb our atmospheric CO2 addiction. This is an optimistic book. Not a book that says it’ll all come out all right, but rather a book that says that it might come out all right. It’s a book we need to read.” —Cory Doctorow, author of Little Brother

Description from the Flap of the Hard Cover  Edition of a new book by Maggie Koerth-Baker. (03/15/12)

Read an Excerpt from the book…