Engineers at MIT, Nanyang Technological University, and several companies have developed a compact and inexpensive technology for detecting and measuring lead concentrations in water, potentially enabling a significant advance in tackling this persistent global health issue.

The World Health Organization estimates that 240 million people worldwide are exposed to drinking water that contains unsafe amounts of toxic lead, which can affect brain development in children, cause birth defects, and produce a variety of neurological, cardiac, and other damaging effects. In the United States alone, an estimated 10 million households still get drinking water delivered through lead pipes.

“It’s an unaddressed public health crisis that leads to over 1 million deaths annually,” says Jia Xu Brian Sia, an MIT postdoc and the senior author of the paper describing the new technology.

But testing for lead in water requires expensive, cumbersome equipment and typically requires days to get results. Or, it uses simple test strips that simply reveal a yes-or-no answer about the presence of lead but no information about its concentration. Current EPA regulations require drinking water to contain no more that 15 parts per billion of lead, a concentration so low it is difficult to detect.

The new system, which could be ready for commercial deployment within two or three years, could detect lead concentrations as low as 1 part per billion, with high accuracy, using a simple chip-based detector housed in a handheld device. The technology gives nearly instant quantitative measurements and requires just a droplet of water.

The findings are described in a paper appearing today in the journal Nature Communications, by Sia, MIT graduate student and lead author Luigi Ranno, Professor Juejun Hu, and 12 others at MIT and other institutions in academia and industry.

The team set out to find a simple detection method based on the use of photonic chips, which use light to perform measurements. The challenging part was finding a way to attach to the photonic chip surface certain ring-shaped molecules known as crown ethers, which can capture specific ions such as lead. After years of effort, they were able to achieve that attachment via a chemical process known as Fischer esterification. “That is one of the essential breakthroughs we have made in this technology,” Sia says.

In testing the new chip, the researchers showed that it can detect lead in water at concentrations as low as one part per billion. At much higher concentrations, which may be relevant for testing environmental contamination such as mine tailings, the accuracy is within 4 percent.

The device works in water with varying levels of acidity, ranging from pH values of 6 to 8, “which covers most environmental samples,” Sia says. They have tested the device with seawater as well as tap water, and verified the accuracy of the measurements.

In order to achieve such levels of accuracy, current testing requires a device called an inductive coupled plasma mass spectrometer. “These setups can be big and expensive,” Sia says. The sample processing can take days and requires experienced technical personnel.

While the new chip system they developed is “the core part of the innovation,” Ranno says, further work will be needed to develop this into an integrated, handheld device for practical use. “For making an actual product, you would need to package it into a usable form factor,” he explains. This would involve having a small chip-based laser coupled to the photonic chip. “It’s a matter of mechanical design, some optical design, some chemistry, and figuring out the supply chain,” he says. While that takes time, he says, the underlying concepts are straightforward.

The system can be adapted to detect other similar contaminants in water, including cadmium, copper, lithium, barium, cesium, and radium, Ranno says. The device could be used with simple cartridges that can be swapped out to detect different elements, each using slightly different crown ethers that can bind to a specific ion.

“There’s this problem that people don’t measure their water enough, especially in the developing countries,” Ranno says. “And that’s because they need to collect the water, prepare the sample, and bring it to these huge instruments that are extremely expensive.” Instead, “having this handheld device, something compact that even untrained personnel can just bring to the source for on-site monitoring, at low costs,” could make regular, ongoing widespread testing feasible.

Hu, who is the John F. Elliott Professor of Materials Science and Engineering, says, “I’m hoping this will be quickly implemented, so we can benefit human society. This is a good example of a technology coming from a lab innovation where it may actually make a very tangible impact on society, which is of course very fulfilling.”

“If this study can be extended to simultaneous detection of multiple metal elements, especially the presently concerning radioactive elements, its potential would be immense,” says Hou Wang, an associate professor of environmental science and engineering at Hunan University in China, who was not associated with this work.

Wang adds, “This research has engineered a sensor capable of instantaneously detecting lead concentration in water. This can be utilized in real-time to monitor the lead pollution concentration in wastewater discharged from industries such as battery manufacturing and lead smelting, facilitating the establishment of industrial wastewater monitoring systems. I think the innovative aspects and developmental potential of this research are quite commendable.”

Wang Qian, a principal research scientist at A*STAR’s Institute of Materials Research in Singapore, who also was not affiliated with this work, says, “The ability for the pervasive, portable, and quantitative detection of lead has proved to be challenging primarily due to cost concerns. This work demonstrates the potential to do so in a highly integrated form factor and is compatible with large-scale, low-cost manufacturing.”

The team included researchers at MIT, at Nanyang Technological University and Temasek Laboratories in Singapore, at the University of Southampton in the U.K., and at companies Fingate Technologies, in Singapore, and Vulcan Photonics, headquartered in Malaysia. The work used facilities at MIT.nano, the Harvard University Center for Nanoscale Systems, NTU’s Center for Micro- and Nano-Electronics, and the Nanyang Nanofabrication Center.

A toxin from one of the world’s most venomous animals could one day help treat diabetes and endocrine disorders. The toxin in snails called consomatin is similar to somatostatin in humans, a peptide hormone that regulates blood sugar. In cone snail venom, consomatin’s specific and long-lasting effects help the animal hunt its prey, but it could also lead to the development of better drugs for sometimes fatal diseases–if we can understand how it works. The findings are detailed in a study published August 20 in the journal Nature Communications.

Fine-tuned venoms

Scientists have previously experimented with using cone snail venoms for creating less addictive opioid alternatives and new diabetes treatments. In 2016, scientists unlocked the structure of a fast-acting insulin that the snails use to stun their prey; a similar structure could be used to create an insulin that works faster in humans. In the new study, consomatin also exhibited enough precision to target single types of molecules. Researchers hope that drugs could be developed with the same amount of precision.

“Venomous animals have, through evolution, fine-tuned venom components to hit a particular target in the prey and disrupt it,” study co-author and University of Utah biochemist Helena Safavi said in a statement. “If you take one individual component out of the venom mixture and look at how it disrupts normal physiology, that pathway is often really relevant in disease.” 

[Related: What is a toxin?]

The team looked at the human hormone somatostatin that prevents the levels of blood sugar in the body from rising to dangerously high levels. The cone snail toxin consomatin also keeps blood sugar levels from increasing, but uses that as a way to stun and kill its prey. However, the team found that consomatin is more chemically stable and longer-lasting than the human hormone. This makes it a particularly promising blueprint for new drugs and treatment. 

In the study, the team looked at one of the most toxic marine cone snail–the geography cone. They are found along reefs in the Pacific and Indo-Pacific, where the snails stun and eat small fish. The team measured how the cone snail’s consomatin interacts with somatostatin’s targets in human cells in a dish. They found that consomatin mingles with one of the same proteins that somatostatin does. While human somatostatin directly interacts with several proteins, consomatin only works with one. This fine-tuned targeting means that the cone snail toxin can affect blood sugar levels and hormones, but not hit the other molecules around it.

According to the team, the cone snail toxin can hit its targets even more precisely than most specific synthetic drugs designed to regulate hormone levels. However, in its current form, the consomatin’s effects on blood sugar could make it dangerous to use to treat diabetes in humans. Studying its structure could help researchers design drugs for endocrine disorders that have fewer side effects in the future.

Earth’s chemists

Consomatin and somatostatin share an evolutionary history. Over millions of years, the cone snail turned its own hormone into a weapon. Importantly, consomatin doesn’t work alone. A 2022 study found that cone snail venom also includes another toxin which resembles insulin. This lowers blood sugar levels so quickly that the cone snail’s prey becomes unresponsive. Consomatin will then keep blood sugar levels from recovering, and the prey will ultimately die. 

[Related: This cone snail’s deadly venom could hold the key to better pain meds.]

“Cone snails are just really good chemists,” study co-author and University of Utah postdoctoral researcher Ho Yan Yeung said in a statement. “We think the cone snail developed this highly selective toxin to work together with the insulin-like toxin to bring down blood glucose to a really low level.”

Since several parts of the cone snail’s venom target blood sugar regulation, the venom may have other molecules with similar functions, including regulating glucose properties. A better understanding of the process at the molecular level could then be used to design better medications. 

The post Precise, lethal sea snail toxin could one day lead to better medicines appeared first on Popular Science.

Kristy Murray was there at the very beginning. In 1999, the epidemiologist and tropical medicine expert, now a professor of pediatrics at Emory University, was part of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) team responding to the initial U.S. outbreak of West Nile virus in New York City. “It was my very first outbreak assignment,” Murray tells Popular Science. Thirty cases of unexplained encephalitis had been reported in the city, and it was up to Murray and her colleagues to figure out why. The cause was initially baffling. People had symptoms of paralysis, “which is very unusual to see in encephalitis,” she explains, and older adults comprised the majority of those worst off, despite viral paralysis often being most common in children. None of the patients had any relation or apparent connection to one another. 

To figure out what was happening, Murray says she and the rest of the CDC team acted as “disease detectives.” The first clue came from interviewing family members of those who were sick. “The one thing that kept coming up is that many of them were active, and spent a lot of time outside,” says Muray. From there, and through home visits, a CDC entomologist narrowed the potential sources down to Culex mosquitoes. More false leads and confusing test results finally gave way to a West Nile virus identification, after birds in the Bronx Zoo also began to fall ill with encephalitis. In total, the investigation took about three weeks, says Murray. 

[ Related: Can we prevent a bird flu pandemic in humans? ]

Though the initial mystery was resolved relatively quickly (“especially for 1999,” notes Murray), uncertainties surrounding West Nile have lingered. When and where the worst outbreaks will occur remains unpredictable. Exactly why some people have no symptoms, while other infections prove deadly is unclear. There’s still no available vaccine or proven treatment. 

It’s been 25 years since the mosquito borne virus was first found in the U.S.. In that quarter century, the disease has spread from New York City across all 48 contiguous states. “It’s everywhere–all over the map, literally,” says Murray. “There is no place in the [lower 48] where you can really hide from this pathogen.” Each year, 2024 included, West Nile virus cases are reported, with a peak between late July and October. Here’s what to know as this year’s season unfolds, what we still don’t know, and how experts recommend you protect yourself.

How does West Nile virus spread?

Birds are the primary host and reservoir for West Nile virus. The pathogen is mainly passed from host to host via mosquito bites. Culex mosquitos, a genus found worldwide and especially common in major cities, are the primary vector, transmitting the virus between birds or from birds to humans or horses. People and other mammals infected with the illness don’t produce a high enough concentration of viral particles to act as a reservoir and subsequently infect additional mosquitos. “Humans are what we call a dead end host,” says Gonzalo Vazquez-Propkopec, a disease ecologist and professor of environmental science at Emory University. Only a small proportion of cases are transferred between humans through blood transfusions and organ transplants. 

Yet though we can’t generally pass the virus on to each other, mosquitos do plenty of work to spread it themselves. “It’s the most widespread viral vector borne disease in the United States, without a doubt,” says Murray. “It far surpasses any other.” Other non-viral vector-borne illnesses, like tick-borne Lyme’s disease, may affect more people each year. But Lyme is a bacterial disease with an effective antibiotic treatment. There is no approved therapeutic for treating West Nile. 

Is 2024 a bad year for West Nile? 

The CDC tracks West Nile cases, along with other arthropod-borne illnesses, through ArboNET. As of August 13, the federal agency has confirmed 174 West Nile cases in 30 different states, with double digit numbers in Texas, Louisiana, Nebraska, Nevada, and Arizona. Of these, 113 have been “neuroinvasive,” or the more severe variant of infection that causes neurological symptoms like encephalitis (brain swelling), or meningitis, which is swelling of the membrane surrounding the brain. So far, eight of those reported cases have proved deadly. 

If you look at past years’ West Nile case numbers, fewer than 200 cases nationwide may not sound like much. However, it’s relatively early in the season and each confirmed case at this point likely represents many more hidden ones, says Murray. 

In general, cases are vastly underreported because many cases are asymptomatic and many symptomatic infections are mild and difficult to distinguish from other viral infections, she explains. Fever, a rash on the torso, fatigue, aches, and malaise are how the majority of symptomatic West Nile cases present. Often, those infected don’t seek any treatment or testing. A small proportion of infections, less than one percent, turn more serious, affecting the brain and nervous system and becoming “neuroinvasive.” These cases can be life threatening. Survivors of neuroinvasive illness often end up with lifelong disabilities, says Kiran Thakur, a neurology professor at Columbia University who studies neuroinfectious disease. 

Yet even those severe cases are undercounted because providers don’t always test and tests don’t always come back positive, she says. In 2022, 827 confirmed neuroinvasive cases were reported to the CDC, but the agency estimates that between 24,810 and 57,890 neuroinvasive infections occurred. Up to 15 percent of neuroinvasive cases are estimated to be fatal, notes Thakur.  

Delays in testing and reporting also mean that it takes time for the CDC to learn about a confirmed case. “There’s a lag in reporting cases, typically by about two weeks,” Murray says, and we’re just getting into the peak transmission time now. 

Given those caveats, “we are seeing a few more cases than we [usually] would at this time of year, and some earlier cases,” says Erin Staples, a physician and medical epidemiologist with CDC’s Division of Vector-Borne Diseases. The biggest wave of illness onset tends to come at the end of August and beginning of September, Staples says. 

However, that doesn’t mean we’re guaranteed to have a terrible West Nile season nationwide. Predicting how this year’s season will progress over the next couple of months “is very difficult,” Staples tells Popular Science. Trends can shift rapidly and lots of variables contribute to an outbreak’s severity. 

Year-to-year, West Nile levels and epicenters vary a lot. The virus may spike in the Northeast one season and then the Southwest the next. In 2003, there was a major outbreak, another came in 2012. As a result, experts consider it “cyclic”, peaking in waves that come about once a decade, says Vazquez-Prokopec. “It seems, roughly, that we’re due for another spike,” he adds. 

Climate and rainfall are important. Warm temperatures and the right level of moisture can contribute to a mosquito boom. Bird immunity levels also play a role, he says. If most birds in a region have antibodies and are avoiding illness in a given year, then there will also be fewer human cases, as the reservoir is smaller, Vazquez-Prokopec explains. “It’s a very complex cycle,” he adds– which makes accurate forecasting hard. 

Regardless of what unfolds in the next couple of months, Staples notes that right now is a critical time to take preventative measures. 

How can we manage West Nile virus?

Through surveillance of mosquito populations and birds, cities keep tabs on the viral threat year to year. In addition, many municipalities also treat for Culex mosquitos with pesticide sprays dispersed from fogging vehicles and by targeting the aquatic larvae. Mosquitoes need water to breed, so applying insecticide to drainage ditches and catchment basins can help reduce their populations without inadvertently killing beneficial insects like pollinators, says Vazquez-Prokopec. 

The CDC is researching preventative vaccines and antiviral treatments (and has been for years), says Staples–though the development process, which requires large scale human trials to prove efficacy, is challenging for such an unpredictable virus. A silver lining of the Covid-19 pandemic is that it made alternate pathways to FDA approval and licensure clearer, she adds. 

But in the meantime, without a vaccine or medication to rely on, iIndividual people can mitigate their own risk by eliminating sources of standing moisture around their homes (ex: emptying buckets and kiddie pools). Then, there’s behavioral interventions. 

“We have to exercise–not panic, but caution,” says Vazquez-Prokopec. Mosquitoes are more than a nuisance, they’re a public health problem, he says. So, he advises that people take earnest steps to avoid bites.

Insect repellents, specifically ones registered with the Environmental Protection Agency and recommended by the CDC, are a critical tool. Wearing loose fitting long sleeve shirts and pants helps to prevent bites as well. And people should be particularly mindful when going out around dusk and dawn when mosquitoes are most active. “I have a can of repellent by my front door and another by my back door, so I remember to [apply] before I walk outside,” says Staples.

[ Related: How to build a mosquito kill bucket ]

It’s still not completely understood why some people become very sick while others have asymptomatic infections. However, some trends are clear and certain groups are known to be more vulnerable to severe West Nile virus. People who are immunocompromised, including those who take medications for autoimmune diseases, should be more vigilant, says Staples. People over the age of 50 are also at higher risk, says Murray. Severe neuroinvasive illness is more commonly reported among men, though that could be because men share a higher level of other risk factors, like working outdoors or comorbidities such as diabetes, notes Thakur. And ultimately, anyone can end up with a severe case.

West Nile virus may be benign for most people, and the worst consequences may be rare, but preventative steps are simple and accessible. When the stakes are so high, it’s best to take the risk seriously, says Thakur. Plus, the same strategies for avoiding West Nile will also help to minimize exposure to other vector borne diseases like Dengue or Powassan, Staples adds. ” “Another great reason to use your repellent,” she says. 

Getting in the habit now will be good practice for our warming future, where we’ll all want to take biting bugs more seriously. Under climate change, mosquito seasons are likely to grow longer, and vector–borne illnesses, including West Nile, are set to spread into new regions where people have no prior exposure or immunity. As global warming progresses, “it’s a disease category I worry about a lot,” says Thakur.

The post West Nile Virus cases are on the rise again: How to protect yourself appeared first on Popular Science.

Withings ScanWatch Nova – where elegance and health tracking meet. Running review. by Paul E King first appeared on Pocketables.

With the world’s eyes on France for some reason this week, Withings has decided to get into the game by launching the Withings Health Games, a two- week challenge encouraging people to go for a medal in their health journey.

The games run until August 11, 2024 and pit Withings users against themselves (and possibly others) using an Acti-score… want a gold in dishwashing? Might be yours for the taking. Bronze in dog walking? You can do better.

Due to some other games going on in my life I managed to miss this announcement and the Withings games have been going on for a couple of days. So catch up!

The Withings Health Games should appear in your Withings app and probably require one of their amazing watches, which I highly recommend.

Want to feel like an organized sports professional? Participate in the Withings Health Games by Paul E King first appeared on Pocketables.

Enlarge / Hospital staff and community members held a protest in front of Carney Hospital in Boston on August 5 as Steward has announced it will close the hospital. "Ralph" refers to Steward's CEO, Ralph de la Torre, who owns a yacht. (credit: Getty | Suzanne Kreiter)

As the more than 30 hospitals in the Steward Health Care System scrounged for cash to cover supplies, shuttered pediatric and neonatal units, closed maternity wards, laid off hundreds of health care workers, and put patients in danger, the system paid out at least $250 million to its CEO and his companies, according to a report by The Wall Street Journal.

The newly revealed financial details bring yet more scrutiny to Steward CEO Ralph de la Torre, a Harvard University-trained cardiac surgeon who, in 2020, took over majority ownership of Steward from the private equity firm Cerberus. De la Torre and his companies were reportedly paid at least $250 million since that takeover. In May, Steward, which has hospitals in eight states, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy.

Critics—including members of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP)—allege that de la Torre and stripped the system's hospitals of assets, siphoned payments from them, and loaded them with debt, all while reaping huge payouts that made him obscenely wealthy.

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Enlarge (credit: Corey Gaskin)

Back in 2010, Gary Wolf, then the editor of Wired magazine, delivered a TED talk in Cannes called “the quantified self.” It was about what he termed a “new fad” among tech enthusiasts. These early adopters were using gadgets to monitor everything from their physiological data to their mood and even the number of nappies their children used.

Wolf acknowledged that these people were outliers—tech geeks fascinated by data—but their behavior has since permeated mainstream culture.

From the smartwatches that track our steps and heart rate, to the fitness bands that log sleep patterns and calories burned, these gadgets are now ubiquitous. Their popularity is emblematic of a modern obsession with quantification—the idea that if something isn’t logged, it doesn’t count.

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Neuralink's brain chip has been implanted into a second patient as part of early human trials, Elon Musk told podcast host Lex Fridman on Saturday. The company hasn't disclosed when the surgery took place or the name of the recipient, according to Reuters.

Musk said 400 of the electrodes on the second patient's brain are working out of 1,024 implanted. "I don't want to jinx it but it seems to have gone extremely well," he said. "There's a lot of signal, a lot of electrodes. It's working very well." 

The device allows patients with spinal cord injuries to play video games, use the internet and control electronic devices using their thoughts alone. In May, the company announced that it was "accepting applications for the second participant" in trials following FDA approval. 

The original Neuralink implant patient, Nolan Arbaugh, described the surgery as "super easy." In a demo, the company showed how Arbaugh was able to move a cursor around the screen of a laptop, pause an on-screen music device and play chess and Civilization VI.

Arbaugh himself participated in the marathon podcast with Musk and Fridman. He said that the device allows him to make anything happen on a computer screen just by thinking it, helping reduce his reliance on caregivers. 

However, problems cropped up shortly after his surgery when some of electrodes retracted from his brain. The issue was partly rectified later on by modifying the algorithm to make the implants more sensitive. Neuralink told the FDA that in a second procedure, it would place the implant’s threads deeper into the patient’s brain to prevent them from moving as much as they did in Arbaugh’s case.

Neuralink previously tested its implant in animals, including chimps, and some of those testing practices have been the subject of federal investigations. 

Despite those issues, the company said it had over 1,000 volunteers for its second surgical trial. Musk said he expects Neuralink to implant its chips in up to eight more patients by the end of 2024.  

Spending hours at a computer can be rough on your body. If your wrists, shoulders, neck or other areas have started complaining, you might want to get an ergonomic keyboard. The ergonomic design shifts the position of your arms and wrists, which, for some, can relieve tension and strain. After using a fully split keyboard for a number of months, I feel an improvement in my shoulder tension. But split boards come with a learning curve. Semi-split, or Alice boards, are easier to get used to while still opening up space between your elbows. Other factors, like tenting and a negative tilt can also address discomfort. Since there’s no single best ergonomic keyboard for everyone, this guide will help you decide which type of board might suit your needs.

What to look for in an ergonomic keyboard

Alice vs split

Most ergonomic keyboard layouts fall into two categories: Alice and split. The former is a single board with the two halves of the keys rotated about 30 degrees apart at the bottom. The separation forms an A-shaped space between the keys — which has nothing to do with why it’s called an Alice layout, it’s just a happy coincidence. This subtle tweak pushes your elbows away from your ribs while keeping a straight line from your forearm to your middle knuckle. Using one, I pretty instantly felt more open along the front side of my body. This layout more closely resembles a traditional keyboard, so it should be easier for most folks to get used to than a fully split option.

Speaking of, split boards break the keys into two separate parts you can position individually. You can put them shoulder distance apart, bring them closer together or angle them as much as feels comfortable. You can also put your mouse between the halves, which may feel like an easier trip for your cursor hand. Personally, I like being able to put my current snack between the two parts. I've also found that pairing a split keyboard with a good ergonomic mouse has helped me even more. 

Tenkeyless

You can find ergonomic keyboards with and without number pads. Not having those number keys on the right side lets you keep your mouse closer in, minimizing overall reach. But if you work with numbers a lot, you’ll likely want that pad included. Some programmable boards allow for the use of layers, which temporarily repurpose keys and can provide you with a ten-key option through clever remapping of letter keys.

Tenting and negative tilt

Tenting raises the middle of the keyboard up, so your hands move closer to a “handshake” position. Alice keyboards usually angle up towards the middle and always to a fixed degree, since the two sides are connected. Split boards often let you adjust the degree of tenting, going from flat to subtle to extreme lift.

You may have encountered keyboards with an optional lift at the back of the board, raising the top keys higher than the space bar. Every set of hands is different, but for most people, pulling the backs of the hands towards the forearms increases strain. Negative tilt has the opposite effect by sloping in the other direction, lowering the top number keys while raising the edge with the spacebar. Many Alice and some split keyboards offer an optional negative tilt. I found it was more comfortable to enable that feature when I’m standing, and I preferred to have the keys flat when sat at my desk.

Staggered vs columnar

This decision seems to be one of the more hotly-contested among ergo enthusiasts. A conventional keyboard has staggered keys, with each row slightly offset to the rows above and below it — so the A key is about halfway between the Q and W above it. This is a holdover from vintage mechanical typewriters, in which each press activated a hammer that smashed ink onto paper in the shape of a letter. To fit the hammers as close together as possible, while still allowing for finger pads, the keys were staggered.

Columnar or ortholinear keyboards stack the keys in orderly columns, often with rows that are not linear. Proponents claim this makes the keys easier to reach. Whether that’s true will be up to your fingers to decide, but I can say for certain that if you learned to type on a staggered keyboard, switching to a columnar layout is tough. It will take days, possibly weeks before you instinctively hit the C key. The N, M and B keys don’t fare much better.

Programmable keys

With a few exceptions, most ergonomic keyboards will work with PCs or Macs as a standard typing input, but the use of function and hot keys may require some remapping. It can be as easy as an onboard switch to toggle between Mac and PC layouts, or as involved as downloading software to change up the keys. Some boards even include (or let you buy) extra keycaps to change, say, the Mac’s Command and Option keys to PC’s Start and Alt buttons.

For some boards, remapping or programming keys is a crucial feature. Gaming peripherals have extra keys that you can set to execute a series of keystrokes with the push of a single button. Keyboards that work with layers, in which a single button can perform several functions, typically allow you to change what those are. Some ergo keyboards have non-standard layouts, like thumb clusters with multiple keys near the space bar that you operate with your thumb. You’ll also be able to program those.

Other considerations

Ergonomic keyboards come in mechanical, membrane, and scissor switch versions. Which works best for you is, again, up to your preference. I won’t get too deep into the particulars here, as we have an entire guide devoted to mechanical boards, but the short of it is that membrane and scissor switches are less customizable than mechanical and typically cheaper. Typing on them tends to be quieter and softer. Mechanical switches are more customizable, offer a more responsive typing experience and are usually pricier. 

You’ll also have the option of wired or wireless ergonomic boards. All other things being equal, wired models are less expensive. Competitive gamers who rely on split-second responses may prefer the zero-lag of wired keyboards. Wired models also never run out of battery life and have fewer connectivity issues. But wireless keyboards keep your desk less cluttered.

Some ergonomic keyboards come with permanent or removable wrist or palm rests, which can be cushioned or hard. This is another area where opinions diverge: proponents claim they help you maintain a neutral hand position, while detractors say they put pressure on the tendons in your wrist and can exacerbate conditions like carpal tunnel. Ideally, your palms should be resting, not your wrists, and you might find you like having that support or you may find the pressure uncomfortable. 

Photo by Amy Skorheim / Engadget

How we tested

All our guides begin with extensive research to figure out what’s out there and what’s worth testing. We consider brands with good reputations that we’ve heard good things about from colleagues and look at keyboard reviews in forums and other trusted publications. For this guide, I looked for keyboards with ergonomic features like tenting, split keys, palm support and so on. I also zeroed in on boards that didn’t require a deep amount of familiarity with the vast and exhaustive world of custom keyboards.

Once I settled on ten boards, I acquired them and used each one for anywhere from a few days to a few weeks. I tried out the remapping and macros software and considered the comfort, design, price and durability of each model before arriving at picks I think will work best for the most people out there.

Best ergonomic keyboards for 2024

Filmmaker David Lynch says his days of directing are essentially over because he cannot leave home, thanks to an emphysema diagnosis caused by a lifetime of smoking.

"I've gotten emphysema from smoking for so long, and so I'm homebound whether I like it or not. — Read the rest

The post David Lynch says his days of directing are over — loves smoking, "but in the end, it bit me" appeared first on Boing Boing.

Engineers at MIT, Nanyang Technological University, and several companies have developed a compact and inexpensive technology for detecting and measuring lead concentrations in water, potentially enabling a significant advance in tackling this persistent global health issue.

The World Health Organization estimates that 240 million people worldwide are exposed to drinking water that contains unsafe amounts of toxic lead, which can affect brain development in children, cause birth defects, and produce a variety of neurological, cardiac, and other damaging effects. In the United States alone, an estimated 10 million households still get drinking water delivered through lead pipes.

“It’s an unaddressed public health crisis that leads to over 1 million deaths annually,” says Jia Xu Brian Sia, an MIT postdoc and the senior author of the paper describing the new technology.

But testing for lead in water requires expensive, cumbersome equipment and typically requires days to get results. Or, it uses simple test strips that simply reveal a yes-or-no answer about the presence of lead but no information about its concentration. Current EPA regulations require drinking water to contain no more that 15 parts per billion of lead, a concentration so low it is difficult to detect.

The new system, which could be ready for commercial deployment within two or three years, could detect lead concentrations as low as 1 part per billion, with high accuracy, using a simple chip-based detector housed in a handheld device. The technology gives nearly instant quantitative measurements and requires just a droplet of water.

The findings are described in a paper appearing today in the journal Nature Communications, by Sia, MIT graduate student and lead author Luigi Ranno, Professor Juejun Hu, and 12 others at MIT and other institutions in academia and industry.

The team set out to find a simple detection method based on the use of photonic chips, which use light to perform measurements. The challenging part was finding a way to attach to the photonic chip surface certain ring-shaped molecules known as crown ethers, which can capture specific ions such as lead. After years of effort, they were able to achieve that attachment via a chemical process known as Fischer esterification. “That is one of the essential breakthroughs we have made in this technology,” Sia says.

In testing the new chip, the researchers showed that it can detect lead in water at concentrations as low as one part per billion. At much higher concentrations, which may be relevant for testing environmental contamination such as mine tailings, the accuracy is within 4 percent.

The device works in water with varying levels of acidity, ranging from pH values of 6 to 8, “which covers most environmental samples,” Sia says. They have tested the device with seawater as well as tap water, and verified the accuracy of the measurements.

In order to achieve such levels of accuracy, current testing requires a device called an inductive coupled plasma mass spectrometer. “These setups can be big and expensive,” Sia says. The sample processing can take days and requires experienced technical personnel.

While the new chip system they developed is “the core part of the innovation,” Ranno says, further work will be needed to develop this into an integrated, handheld device for practical use. “For making an actual product, you would need to package it into a usable form factor,” he explains. This would involve having a small chip-based laser coupled to the photonic chip. “It’s a matter of mechanical design, some optical design, some chemistry, and figuring out the supply chain,” he says. While that takes time, he says, the underlying concepts are straightforward.

The system can be adapted to detect other similar contaminants in water, including cadmium, copper, lithium, barium, cesium, and radium, Ranno says. The device could be used with simple cartridges that can be swapped out to detect different elements, each using slightly different crown ethers that can bind to a specific ion.

“There’s this problem that people don’t measure their water enough, especially in the developing countries,” Ranno says. “And that’s because they need to collect the water, prepare the sample, and bring it to these huge instruments that are extremely expensive.” Instead, “having this handheld device, something compact that even untrained personnel can just bring to the source for on-site monitoring, at low costs,” could make regular, ongoing widespread testing feasible.

Hu, who is the John F. Elliott Professor of Materials Science and Engineering, says, “I’m hoping this will be quickly implemented, so we can benefit human society. This is a good example of a technology coming from a lab innovation where it may actually make a very tangible impact on society, which is of course very fulfilling.”

“If this study can be extended to simultaneous detection of multiple metal elements, especially the presently concerning radioactive elements, its potential would be immense,” says Hou Wang, an associate professor of environmental science and engineering at Hunan University in China, who was not associated with this work.

Wang adds, “This research has engineered a sensor capable of instantaneously detecting lead concentration in water. This can be utilized in real-time to monitor the lead pollution concentration in wastewater discharged from industries such as battery manufacturing and lead smelting, facilitating the establishment of industrial wastewater monitoring systems. I think the innovative aspects and developmental potential of this research are quite commendable.”

Wang Qian, a principal research scientist at A*STAR’s Institute of Materials Research in Singapore, who also was not affiliated with this work, says, “The ability for the pervasive, portable, and quantitative detection of lead has proved to be challenging primarily due to cost concerns. This work demonstrates the potential to do so in a highly integrated form factor and is compatible with large-scale, low-cost manufacturing.”

The team included researchers at MIT, at Nanyang Technological University and Temasek Laboratories in Singapore, at the University of Southampton in the U.K., and at companies Fingate Technologies, in Singapore, and Vulcan Photonics, headquartered in Malaysia. The work used facilities at MIT.nano, the Harvard University Center for Nanoscale Systems, NTU’s Center for Micro- and Nano-Electronics, and the Nanyang Nanofabrication Center.

With the world’s eyes on France for some reason this week, Withings has decided to get into the game by launching the Withings Health Games, a two- week challenge encouraging people to go for a medal in their health journey.

The games run until August 11, 2024 and pit Withings users against themselves (and possibly others) using an Acti-score… want a gold in dishwashing? Might be yours for the taking. Bronze in dog walking? You can do better.

Due to some other games going on in my life I managed to miss this announcement and the Withings games have been going on for a couple of days. So catch up!

The Withings Health Games should appear in your Withings app and probably require one of their amazing watches, which I highly recommend.

Want to feel like an organized sports professional? Participate in the Withings Health Games by Paul E King first appeared on Pocketables.

If you consume social media, you may have heard: Seed oils are terrible for your health–even toxic! Cooking oils derived from seeds cause everything from heart disease to inflammation to fatigue to bad skin–according to a certain subset of Internet influencers. Yet contrary to the posts demonizing the common ingredients, a bevy of scientific research disagrees. Here’s how to understand the health “scare.” 

What are seed oils?

There’re many different types of plant-based cooking oils, but when people talk about seed oils, they’re often referencing a list of eight: Canola, corn, cottonseed, soybean, sunflower, safflower, grapeseed, and rice bran oils. (Note that things like olive, avocado, and coconut oil are absent from this list.) All of these eight oils contain fat and therefore fatty acids (an essential major nutrient group). And many (though not all) of these seed oils contain a relatively high proportion of omega-6 fatty acids.

A quick chemistry aside: fatty acids are the building blocks of triglycerides, or complete fat molecules. They are organic compounds made up of predominantly carbon and hydrogen chains with an acid group on the end. In saturated fats, every carbon except for the terminal ones have two hydrogens bonded to it. In unsaturated fats, some of those hydrogens are replaced with double bonds between adjacent carbons instead. Omega-6 fatty acids are unsaturated, and the first of those double bonds occurs at the 6th carbon from the end–hence the name.

There are multiple kinds of omega-6 compounds, but one particular type, called linoleic acid, is at the center of most of the scorn against seed soils. Linoleic acid is, again, an essential nutrient that our bodies need. We cannot synthesize it, and we need it to support healthy cell signaling, function, and immune systems.

But seed oil detractors argue that we are ingesting far too much linoleic acid, leading to the accumulation of byproducts like arachidonic acid, which they claim causes inflammation and also counteracts the benefits of eating omega-3 fatty acids. The domino impact of all of this, anti-seed oil advocates assert, is higher risk of diseases like type 2 diabetes, heart disease, and cancer. 

A kernel of truth

Inside the backlash against seed oils are a few kernels of truth. Eating fried and processed foods in excess is generally detrimental to your health. So if avoiding seed oils translates into eating fewer french fries and snack cakes, you might feel better. 

Plus, if you eat a typical western diet, you are probably at no risk of linoleic acid deficiency, and you likely ingest more omega-6 fatty acids than omega-3s. In recent decades the amount of linoleic acid in our diets has increased because many processed foods and restaurant meals are made with soy, sunflower, or safflower oils and animal feed now contains a lot of soy, which translates to more linoleic acid inside meat and dairy products, says Philip Calder, a nutrition scientist and professor at the University of Southampton in England. “Linoleic acid has permeated the food chain in the last 50 to 60 years,” he tells Popular Science. 

Additionally, Calder explains that there is “theoretical evidence” that linoleic acid can be partially converted into arachidonic acid, which is subsequently partially converted into compounds associated with inflammation. Additionally, omega-6s and omega-3s can compete for the same metabolic pathways. All those biological mechanisms exist in the human body. 

Yet here is where things get sticky: that theoretical argument doesn’t stack up to scientific observation. “That just really doesn’t happen in real life,” says Guy H. Johnson, a nutrition scientist and adjunct professor of food science and human nutrition at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. “If you’ve got enough omega-3, the inflammatory environment isn’t increased by omega-6s.”

What the research indicates

Calder agrees. “Most human studies either show there isn’t a relationship between linoleic acid intake and inflammation biomarkers, or that the relationship is the opposite to what you might think would happen. You see higher linoleic acid and higher arachidonic acid are associated with lower levels of inflammation biomarkers,” he says. He co-authored a 2018 review study assessing the published literature on inflammation and omega-6s and concluded as much. 

“We didn’t find anything that demonstrates there’s a harmful association between omega-6’s and inflammatory markers in humans,” he adds. A 2012 review co-authored by Johnson found the same thing.

Many other review studies and meta-analyses have come to similar conclusions, and additionally finding pluses where you might expect minuses. “Every time anybody looks at blood levels of omega-6s and health outcomes–and we’ve done this several times with thousands of people… you find that people with the highest levels of omega-6s have the best outcomes,” says William S. Harris, a professor at the University of South Dakota’s Sanford School of Medicine and president of the Fatty Acid Research Institute. 

Harris has co-authored multiple human cohort studies as well as large review papers assessing the impacts of omega-6 fatty acids on health. In a 2017 meta-analysis, he and his co-authors found that omega-6 consumption actually lowers risk of type 2 diabetes. In a 2020 review of 30 observational studies, Harris and his colleagues concluded that higher linoleic acid levels are associated with reduced risk of cardiovascular disease. 

In fact, higher linoleic acid intake is associated with lower risk of death from all causes including heart disease and cancer, according to another 2020 meta-analysis that assessed 38 different studies. I could keep linking studies–there are dozens of them, but you probably get the point. 

The way fatty acids and metabolic processes unfold in the body is complicated. “There’s a nuanced interplay between omega-6s, omega-3s, and a variety of other metabolites,” Harris says. The view that omega-3s are good and omega-6s are bad “is not true and is far too simplistic,” he adds. 

There are a couple of legitimate, contrary bits of research out there, say both Harris and Calder. Including two, often-cited papers published by lead author Christopher Ramsden, chief of the Lipid Peroxidation Unit in the National Institute on Aging. In these studies, Ramsden uncovered previously unpublished research from the late 1960’s and early ‘70’s wherein two groups of people fed a diet high in seed oils and margarine showed worse health outcomes. 

However, there are big caveats to these findings. For one, the study participants were fed much higher levels of omega-6-containing oils than is common in diets today, notes Harris. Plus many of the solid margarines the study used likely contained high amounts of trans fats, which are uniformly understood to be harmful to human health, says Calder.

Another concern that the seed oil skeptics cite is the use of hexane in production. “It’s true that hexane is used to extract vegetable oils from whatever their source is,” notes Johnson, who has written multiple health claim petitions on various oils. “But the product that consumers buy in the grocery store has no hexane in there at all. It’s gone,” he adds– removed during processing. 

All in all, the vast majority of scientific evidence indicates that cooking with omega-6 containing oils is harmless and probably good for you. 

So, what should you eat?

Given the above, it might sound like you start chugging safflower oil, but that’s not exactly the case. Since the western diet already includes so much omega-6, you’re probably covered. “We’re getting plenty of omega-6s. I’m not really advocating that people start supplementing their diet with omega-6,” says Harris. “But what I would say is efforts to reduce the intake of omega-6 are going to have an adverse effect on health,” he adds. This because less omega-6 means less of the observed protective benefits of linoleic acid, Harris explains. 

And it may also be that those seeking to swap out seed oils inadvertently end up swapping in less healthy alternatives. Often, influencers combine their disdain for seed oils with other health fads, like promoting the “carnivore diet,” anti-sunscreen sentiment, or even sometimes all three in one. This pile of misinformation would have viewers eschewing sun protection and vegetables, while chowing down on whole t-bone steaks and sticks of butter daily. Nothing in the vast amount of scientific research on human health and nutrition indicates any of the above is a good idea. 

Saturated fats may not be as harmful to heart health as once thought, but a diet very high in saturated fats and animal products can still raise your risk of high cholesterol and cardiovascular disease. And again, we already eat a lot of saturated fat. In order from most to least healthy in the context of the modern western diet, Calder says that omega-3s are the best option, omega-6s come second, and saturated fats are at the bottom of the pyramid of things you need to eat more of. 

Harris, too, recommends people try to eat more omega-3’s, particularly the kind found in seafood (seaweed and algae can provide a plant-based source for vegans and vegetarians). 

And broadly, the best path to a healthy diet is probably what you’d expect. A diet rich in fruits and vegetables, with whole grains and lots of fiber, is best, say Calder and Johnson. “It’s what your mother told you,” Johnson adds. Moving more and eating slightly less overall, are probably also good ideas for most Americans, notes Harris. “It’s not sexy, but that’s the way it is.” 

Finally, to stay your sharpest, be mindful of the health claims you see online. Always remember correlation doesn’t equal causation, one person’s experience is not equivalent to a robust scientific study, and there is no simple quick-fix for every health problem. “If it sounds too good or simple to be true, then it probably is,” says Johnson. 

The post What science actually says about seed oils appeared first on Popular Science.

An international team of scientists has developed a new family of compounds that can clear bacterial infections in mice. Some of these infections can result in serious “flesh-eating” illnesses. There are about 700 to 1,100 cases of flesh-eating illnesses every year in the United States. The new family of compounds could also represent the beginning of a new class of antibiotics and are described in a study published August 2 in the journal Science Advances.

Growing resistance

For decades, clinicians have been sounding the alarm about pathogens that are increasingly becoming more resistant to drugs currently available. This makes them more dangerous and according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), over 2.8 million antimicrobial-resistant infections occur in the US every year. More than 35,000 people die from these infections. To combat this, newer antimicrobial compounds will be needed to replace the ones that bacteria have become resistant to. 

Molecular microbiologists Scott Hultgren and Michael Caparon from Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis and chemist Fredrik Almqvist from the University of Umeå in Sweden collaborated on this new family of compounds called GmPcides. 

[Related: These flesh-eating bacteria are finding new beaches to call home.]

GmPcides work by targeting gram-positive bacteria. These types of bacteria can cause various drug-resistant staph infections, toxic shock syndrome, and other bacterial illnesses that can turn deadly. 

“All of the gram-positive bacteria that we’ve tested have been susceptible to that compound. That includes enterococci, staphylococci, streptococci, C. difficile, which are the major pathogenic bacteria types,” Caparon said in a statement. “The compounds have broad-spectrum activity against numerous bacteria.”

A ‘happy accident’

The new GmPcide compounds are based on a type of molecule called ring-fused 2-pyridone that was developed by what the team calls a happy accident. Caparon and Hultgren had asked Almqvist to develop a chemical compound that can prevent bacterial films from latching onto the surface of urethral catheters. These are a common cause of urinary tract infections in hospital settings. 

The resulting compound also had infection-fighting properties against multiple types of bacteria. Some of their earlier research showed that GmPcides can kill bacteria strains in petri dish experiments. 

In this new study, they took those petri dish experiments one step further by testing how compounds work on necrotizing soft-tissue infections. These fast-spreading infections usually involve multiple types of gram-positive bacteria. Necrotizing fasciitis–or flesh-eating disease–is the best known of these infections. It can rapidly damage tissue so severely that limb amputation is often necessary to control its spread. Roughly 20 percent of patients with flesh-eating disease die.

The team focused on one pathogen that is responsible for about 500,000 deaths every year–Streptococcus pyogenes. A group of mice was infected with S. pyogenes. One group was treated with GmPcide, while the other wasn’t. Those that received the GmPcide treatment fared better than the untreated mice in almost every metric. They lost less weight, had smaller ulcers, and fought off the infection faster. Damaged areas of skin also appeared to heal quicker post-infection.

While it is still not fully clear how GmPcides did all of this, a microscopic examination showed that the treatment has a significant effect on bacterial cell membranes. These are the outer wrapping of the microbes.

[Related: ‘Bacterial glitter’ shimmers without pigments.]

“One of the jobs of a membrane is to exclude material from the outside,” Caparon said. “We know that within five to ten minutes of treatment with GmPcide, the membranes start to become permeable and allow things that normally should be excluded to enter into the bacteria, which suggests that those membranes have been damaged.”

This can alter the bacteria’s own functions, including actions that damage the host and make the bacteria less effective at taking down the host’s immune response to infections. 

GmPcides also may be less likely to lead to drug-resistant strains. The experiments designed to create resistant bacteria found that very few cells can withstand treatment. This means they are less likely to pass on their advantages to the next generation of bacteria.

The road ahead

According to Caparon, there are still numerous steps before GmPcides will be available at your local pharmacy. The team has patented the compound used and licensed it to QureTech Bio, a company that Caparon, Hultgren and Almqvist have an ownership stake in. The license was contingent on the expectation that they will collaborate with a separate company that can manage the pharmaceutical development and clinical trials to bring it to market.

According to the team, the kind of collaborative science that created GmPcides will be needed to treat the problems like antimicrobial resistance.
“Bacterial infections of every type are an important health problem, and they are increasingly becoming multi-drug resistant and thus harder to treat,” Hultgren said in a statement. “Interdisciplinary science facilitates the integration of different fields of study that can lead to synergistic new ideas that have the potential to help patients.”

The post A breakthrough in fighting bacteria that causes ‘flesh-eating’ illness appeared first on Popular Science.

Enlarge (credit: Getty | Spauln)

The dose makes the medicine—and for many critical prescription drugs, the dose depends on a patient's body weight. Usually, this is not a problem; weight changes large enough to significantly affect dosages often occur gradually, over periods long enough for doctors to notice and adjust prescriptions. But, in the era of new weight loss drugs, that may no longer be the case.

In a cautionary tale published Monday in JAMA Internal Medicine, researchers at the University of Colorado reported the case of a man who lost nearly 30 percent of his body weight in a six-month period using a new weight loss drug. Then, he showed up at an emergency department with heart palpitations, excessive sweating, confusion, fever, and hand tremors. Tests indicated the man had atrial fibrillation, an irregular heart rhythm that can lead to heart failure and stroke without treatment.

The 62-year-old had no history of atrial fibrillation, but he had previously been diagnosed with obesity, Type 1 diabetes, and hypothyroidism (a condition in which the thyroid gland does not produce enough thyroid hormone). For his hypothyroidism, he took levothyroxine, a synthetic thyroid hormone that is dosed by weight.

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Engineers at MIT, Nanyang Technological University, and several companies have developed a compact and inexpensive technology for detecting and measuring lead concentrations in water, potentially enabling a significant advance in tackling this persistent global health issue.

The World Health Organization estimates that 240 million people worldwide are exposed to drinking water that contains unsafe amounts of toxic lead, which can affect brain development in children, cause birth defects, and produce a variety of neurological, cardiac, and other damaging effects. In the United States alone, an estimated 10 million households still get drinking water delivered through lead pipes.

“It’s an unaddressed public health crisis that leads to over 1 million deaths annually,” says Jia Xu Brian Sia, an MIT postdoc and the senior author of the paper describing the new technology.

But testing for lead in water requires expensive, cumbersome equipment and typically requires days to get results. Or, it uses simple test strips that simply reveal a yes-or-no answer about the presence of lead but no information about its concentration. Current EPA regulations require drinking water to contain no more that 15 parts per billion of lead, a concentration so low it is difficult to detect.

The new system, which could be ready for commercial deployment within two or three years, could detect lead concentrations as low as 1 part per billion, with high accuracy, using a simple chip-based detector housed in a handheld device. The technology gives nearly instant quantitative measurements and requires just a droplet of water.

The findings are described in a paper appearing today in the journal Nature Communications, by Sia, MIT graduate student and lead author Luigi Ranno, Professor Juejun Hu, and 12 others at MIT and other institutions in academia and industry.

The team set out to find a simple detection method based on the use of photonic chips, which use light to perform measurements. The challenging part was finding a way to attach to the photonic chip surface certain ring-shaped molecules known as crown ethers, which can capture specific ions such as lead. After years of effort, they were able to achieve that attachment via a chemical process known as Fischer esterification. “That is one of the essential breakthroughs we have made in this technology,” Sia says.

In testing the new chip, the researchers showed that it can detect lead in water at concentrations as low as one part per billion. At much higher concentrations, which may be relevant for testing environmental contamination such as mine tailings, the accuracy is within 4 percent.

The device works in water with varying levels of acidity, ranging from pH values of 6 to 8, “which covers most environmental samples,” Sia says. They have tested the device with seawater as well as tap water, and verified the accuracy of the measurements.

In order to achieve such levels of accuracy, current testing requires a device called an inductive coupled plasma mass spectrometer. “These setups can be big and expensive,” Sia says. The sample processing can take days and requires experienced technical personnel.

While the new chip system they developed is “the core part of the innovation,” Ranno says, further work will be needed to develop this into an integrated, handheld device for practical use. “For making an actual product, you would need to package it into a usable form factor,” he explains. This would involve having a small chip-based laser coupled to the photonic chip. “It’s a matter of mechanical design, some optical design, some chemistry, and figuring out the supply chain,” he says. While that takes time, he says, the underlying concepts are straightforward.

The system can be adapted to detect other similar contaminants in water, including cadmium, copper, lithium, barium, cesium, and radium, Ranno says. The device could be used with simple cartridges that can be swapped out to detect different elements, each using slightly different crown ethers that can bind to a specific ion.

“There’s this problem that people don’t measure their water enough, especially in the developing countries,” Ranno says. “And that’s because they need to collect the water, prepare the sample, and bring it to these huge instruments that are extremely expensive.” Instead, “having this handheld device, something compact that even untrained personnel can just bring to the source for on-site monitoring, at low costs,” could make regular, ongoing widespread testing feasible.

Hu, who is the John F. Elliott Professor of Materials Science and Engineering, says, “I’m hoping this will be quickly implemented, so we can benefit human society. This is a good example of a technology coming from a lab innovation where it may actually make a very tangible impact on society, which is of course very fulfilling.”

“If this study can be extended to simultaneous detection of multiple metal elements, especially the presently concerning radioactive elements, its potential would be immense,” says Hou Wang, an associate professor of environmental science and engineering at Hunan University in China, who was not associated with this work.

Wang adds, “This research has engineered a sensor capable of instantaneously detecting lead concentration in water. This can be utilized in real-time to monitor the lead pollution concentration in wastewater discharged from industries such as battery manufacturing and lead smelting, facilitating the establishment of industrial wastewater monitoring systems. I think the innovative aspects and developmental potential of this research are quite commendable.”

Wang Qian, a principal research scientist at A*STAR’s Institute of Materials Research in Singapore, who also was not affiliated with this work, says, “The ability for the pervasive, portable, and quantitative detection of lead has proved to be challenging primarily due to cost concerns. This work demonstrates the potential to do so in a highly integrated form factor and is compatible with large-scale, low-cost manufacturing.”

The team included researchers at MIT, at Nanyang Technological University and Temasek Laboratories in Singapore, at the University of Southampton in the U.K., and at companies Fingate Technologies, in Singapore, and Vulcan Photonics, headquartered in Malaysia. The work used facilities at MIT.nano, the Harvard University Center for Nanoscale Systems, NTU’s Center for Micro- and Nano-Electronics, and the Nanyang Nanofabrication Center.

With the world’s eyes on France for some reason this week, Withings has decided to get into the game by launching the Withings Health Games, a two- week challenge encouraging people to go for a medal in their health journey.

The games run until August 11, 2024 and pit Withings users against themselves (and possibly others) using an Acti-score… want a gold in dishwashing? Might be yours for the taking. Bronze in dog walking? You can do better.

Due to some other games going on in my life I managed to miss this announcement and the Withings games have been going on for a couple of days. So catch up!

The Withings Health Games should appear in your Withings app and probably require one of their amazing watches, which I highly recommend.

Want to feel like an organized sports professional? Participate in the Withings Health Games by Paul E King first appeared on Pocketables.

Enlarge (credit: Tony C. French/Getty)

A small study in Texas suggests that human bird flu cases are being missed on dairy farms where the H5N1 virus has taken off in cows, sparking an unprecedented nationwide outbreak.

The finding adds some data to what many experts have suspected amid the outbreak. But the authors of the study, led by researchers at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston, went further, stating bluntly why the US is failing to fully surveil, let alone contain, a virus with pandemic potential.

"Due to fears that research might damage dairy businesses, studies like this one have been few," the authors write in the topline summary of their study, which was posted online as a pre-print and had not been peer-reviewed.

Read 12 remaining paragraphs | Comments

An international team of scientists has developed a new family of compounds that can clear bacterial infections in mice. Some of these infections can result in serious “flesh-eating” illnesses. There are about 700 to 1,100 cases of flesh-eating illnesses every year in the United States. The new family of compounds could also represent the beginning of a new class of antibiotics and are described in a study published August 2 in the journal Science Advances.

Growing resistance

For decades, clinicians have been sounding the alarm about pathogens that are increasingly becoming more resistant to drugs currently available. This makes them more dangerous and according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), over 2.8 million antimicrobial-resistant infections occur in the US every year. More than 35,000 people die from these infections. To combat this, newer antimicrobial compounds will be needed to replace the ones that bacteria have become resistant to. 

Molecular microbiologists Scott Hultgren and Michael Caparon from Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis and chemist Fredrik Almqvist from the University of Umeå in Sweden collaborated on this new family of compounds called GmPcides. 

[Related: These flesh-eating bacteria are finding new beaches to call home.]

GmPcides work by targeting gram-positive bacteria. These types of bacteria can cause various drug-resistant staph infections, toxic shock syndrome, and other bacterial illnesses that can turn deadly. 

“All of the gram-positive bacteria that we’ve tested have been susceptible to that compound. That includes enterococci, staphylococci, streptococci, C. difficile, which are the major pathogenic bacteria types,” Caparon said in a statement. “The compounds have broad-spectrum activity against numerous bacteria.”

A ‘happy accident’

The new GmPcide compounds are based on a type of molecule called ring-fused 2-pyridone that was developed by what the team calls a happy accident. Caparon and Hultgren had asked Almqvist to develop a chemical compound that can prevent bacterial films from latching onto the surface of urethral catheters. These are a common cause of urinary tract infections in hospital settings. 

The resulting compound also had infection-fighting properties against multiple types of bacteria. Some of their earlier research showed that GmPcides can kill bacteria strains in petri dish experiments. 

In this new study, they took those petri dish experiments one step further by testing how compounds work on necrotizing soft-tissue infections. These fast-spreading infections usually involve multiple types of gram-positive bacteria. Necrotizing fasciitis–or flesh-eating disease–is the best known of these infections. It can rapidly damage tissue so severely that limb amputation is often necessary to control its spread. Roughly 20 percent of patients with flesh-eating disease die.

The team focused on one pathogen that is responsible for about 500,000 deaths every year–Streptococcus pyogenes. A group of mice was infected with S. pyogenes. One group was treated with GmPcide, while the other wasn’t. Those that received the GmPcide treatment fared better than the untreated mice in almost every metric. They lost less weight, had smaller ulcers, and fought off the infection faster. Damaged areas of skin also appeared to heal quicker post-infection.

While it is still not fully clear how GmPcides did all of this, a microscopic examination showed that the treatment has a significant effect on bacterial cell membranes. These are the outer wrapping of the microbes.

[Related: ‘Bacterial glitter’ shimmers without pigments.]

“One of the jobs of a membrane is to exclude material from the outside,” Caparon said. “We know that within five to ten minutes of treatment with GmPcide, the membranes start to become permeable and allow things that normally should be excluded to enter into the bacteria, which suggests that those membranes have been damaged.”

This can alter the bacteria’s own functions, including actions that damage the host and make the bacteria less effective at taking down the host’s immune response to infections. 

GmPcides also may be less likely to lead to drug-resistant strains. The experiments designed to create resistant bacteria found that very few cells can withstand treatment. This means they are less likely to pass on their advantages to the next generation of bacteria.

The road ahead

According to Caparon, there are still numerous steps before GmPcides will be available at your local pharmacy. The team has patented the compound used and licensed it to QureTech Bio, a company that Caparon, Hultgren and Almqvist have an ownership stake in. The license was contingent on the expectation that they will collaborate with a separate company that can manage the pharmaceutical development and clinical trials to bring it to market.

According to the team, the kind of collaborative science that created GmPcides will be needed to treat the problems like antimicrobial resistance.
“Bacterial infections of every type are an important health problem, and they are increasingly becoming multi-drug resistant and thus harder to treat,” Hultgren said in a statement. “Interdisciplinary science facilitates the integration of different fields of study that can lead to synergistic new ideas that have the potential to help patients.”

The post A breakthrough in fighting bacteria that causes ‘flesh-eating’ illness appeared first on Popular Science.

While humans won’t be regenerating entire limbs like sea stars, some new genetic work with fruit flies has yielded some surprising results. A team from the University of Tokyo found that certain genes from simple organisms that help them regenerate body parts and tissues can be transferred into other animals. These genes then suppressed an intestinal issue in the flies and could potentially reveal some new mechanisms for rejuvenation in more complex organisms. The findings are detailed in a study published August 1 in the journal BMC Biology.

[Related: These fingernail-sized jellyfish can regenerate tentacles—but how?]

Some animals including jellyfish and flatworms can regenerate their whole bodies. While scientists still don’t really know how, there are possibly specific genes that allow regeneration. These same genes may also maintain long-term stem cell functions.

Stem cells can divide and renew themselves over a long period of time and are kind of like a skeleton key. While they aren’t necessarily specialized, they can potentially become more specialized cells, including blood cells and brain cells, over time. Mammals and insects who have very limited regenerative skills may have lost these genes over the course of evolution. 

“It is unclear whether reintroducing these regeneration-associated genes in low regenerative animals could affect their regeneration and aging processes,” study co-author and University of Tokyo Graduate School of Pharmaceutical Sciences biologist Yuichiro Nakajima said in a statement.

In this new study, Nakajima and the team focused on the group of genes that is unique to animals with high regenerative capacity like flatworms. These genes are called HRJDs, or highly regenerative species-specific JmjC domain-encoding genes. They transferred the HRJDs into the fruit fly (Drosophila melanogaster) and tracked their health with a blue dye. They nicknamed the fly Smurf, thanks to this hue. 

Initially, they hoped that these HRJD-boosted fruit flies would regenerate tissue if injured. This didn’t happen. However, the team had a fruit fly intestine expert Hiroki Nagai onboard, who noticed something else. There were some novel phenotypes–or the characteristics like eye color or hair color that comes from a specific gene.  

“HRJDs promoted greater intestinal stem cell division, whilst also suppressing intestinal cells that were mis-differentiating, or going wrong in aged flies,” said Nakajima. 

This is different to how antibiotics may suppress the mis-differentiated intestinal cells, but suppress intestinal stem cell division. 

[Related: Hydras can regrow their heads. Scientists want to know how they do it.]

“For this reason, HRJDs had a measurable effect on the lifespans of fruit flies, which opens the door, or at least provides clues, for the development of new anti-aging strategies,” said  Nakajima. “After all, human and insect intestines have surprisingly much in common on a cellular level.”

Fruit flies are famous test subjects in biological research. They share 75 percent of the genes that cause diseases in humans, reproduce quickly, and their genetic code is fairly easy to change. However, even with their relatively short lives and rapid-fire reproduction and maturating rates, it still took about two months to study their full aging process. 

In future studies, the team would like to take a closer look at how HRJD’s work on a molecular level. 

“Details of the molecular workings of HRJDs are still unresolved. And it’s unclear whether they work alone or in combination with some other component,” said Nakajima. “Therefore, this is just the start of the journey, but we know now that our modified fruit flies can serve as a valuable resource to uncover unprecedented mechanisms of stem cell rejuvenation in the future. In humans, intestinal stem cells decrease in activity with age, so this research is a promising avenue for stem cell-based therapies.”

The post Swapping genes can help fruit flies regenerate cells appeared first on Popular Science.

It sounds a lot like you're dealing with burnout. One of the quickest recipes for burnout is putting all of the value on the results of the work rather than finding the work itself inherently rewarding - valuing the explicit reward instead of an implicit one. These two aren't always causal, which can result in this disjointed feeling and lack of motivation. Since you're not seeing any results from your work, it feels like a lot of wasted time and energy.

The quickest way to provide that explicit reward is to see players enjoying the results of your work. This doesn't have to be through a shipped game, it can be through your own personal projects as well. One of our Discord members enjoys posting his own personal playable game projects to our indie channel, where people can try them. These are not massively scoped games, but they are fun and the play testers do appreciate them. The feeling that your work is not wasted is important to getting validation that your efforts are worthwhile.

A longer-term solution to switch to implicit enjoyment of your work is to embrace a sense of detachment from the results of your work and focus on doing tasks that you enjoy doing for their own sake. I don't focus on what the results of my work will get me when I go into my job at all. I focus on the part of the work I find inherently rewarding and interesting - I treat my tasks like puzzles and I solve them. The feeling of solving a puzzle is rewarding and interesting to me on its own, I would feel good solving problems and puzzles all day long. The other stuff - the rewards for doing well at work and the promotions and whatever - are obviously important and there is some long-term meta-game strategy, but the day-to-day job satisfaction is entirely based on doing the things I find inherently engaging to begin with.

You might not find that to be the case (or even possible) in your current place of employment, or even in general. What is job satisfaction worth to you? Perhaps you could find a new employer that matches your needs better? It's difficult to say for sure. I also suggest talking to a therapist about this. Therapists are there to advocate for and provide context to you in the field of mental health. Pursuing a career that is more engaging is certainly a reasonable goal that a mental health professional should be able to assist with. A good mental health professional should certainly help you identify and work through the feelings of burnout you've expressed.

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Engineers at MIT, Nanyang Technological University, and several companies have developed a compact and inexpensive technology for detecting and measuring lead concentrations in water, potentially enabling a significant advance in tackling this persistent global health issue.

The World Health Organization estimates that 240 million people worldwide are exposed to drinking water that contains unsafe amounts of toxic lead, which can affect brain development in children, cause birth defects, and produce a variety of neurological, cardiac, and other damaging effects. In the United States alone, an estimated 10 million households still get drinking water delivered through lead pipes.

“It’s an unaddressed public health crisis that leads to over 1 million deaths annually,” says Jia Xu Brian Sia, an MIT postdoc and the senior author of the paper describing the new technology.

But testing for lead in water requires expensive, cumbersome equipment and typically requires days to get results. Or, it uses simple test strips that simply reveal a yes-or-no answer about the presence of lead but no information about its concentration. Current EPA regulations require drinking water to contain no more that 15 parts per billion of lead, a concentration so low it is difficult to detect.

The new system, which could be ready for commercial deployment within two or three years, could detect lead concentrations as low as 1 part per billion, with high accuracy, using a simple chip-based detector housed in a handheld device. The technology gives nearly instant quantitative measurements and requires just a droplet of water.

The findings are described in a paper appearing today in the journal Nature Communications, by Sia, MIT graduate student and lead author Luigi Ranno, Professor Juejun Hu, and 12 others at MIT and other institutions in academia and industry.

The team set out to find a simple detection method based on the use of photonic chips, which use light to perform measurements. The challenging part was finding a way to attach to the photonic chip surface certain ring-shaped molecules known as crown ethers, which can capture specific ions such as lead. After years of effort, they were able to achieve that attachment via a chemical process known as Fischer esterification. “That is one of the essential breakthroughs we have made in this technology,” Sia says.

In testing the new chip, the researchers showed that it can detect lead in water at concentrations as low as one part per billion. At much higher concentrations, which may be relevant for testing environmental contamination such as mine tailings, the accuracy is within 4 percent.

The device works in water with varying levels of acidity, ranging from pH values of 6 to 8, “which covers most environmental samples,” Sia says. They have tested the device with seawater as well as tap water, and verified the accuracy of the measurements.

In order to achieve such levels of accuracy, current testing requires a device called an inductive coupled plasma mass spectrometer. “These setups can be big and expensive,” Sia says. The sample processing can take days and requires experienced technical personnel.

While the new chip system they developed is “the core part of the innovation,” Ranno says, further work will be needed to develop this into an integrated, handheld device for practical use. “For making an actual product, you would need to package it into a usable form factor,” he explains. This would involve having a small chip-based laser coupled to the photonic chip. “It’s a matter of mechanical design, some optical design, some chemistry, and figuring out the supply chain,” he says. While that takes time, he says, the underlying concepts are straightforward.

The system can be adapted to detect other similar contaminants in water, including cadmium, copper, lithium, barium, cesium, and radium, Ranno says. The device could be used with simple cartridges that can be swapped out to detect different elements, each using slightly different crown ethers that can bind to a specific ion.

“There’s this problem that people don’t measure their water enough, especially in the developing countries,” Ranno says. “And that’s because they need to collect the water, prepare the sample, and bring it to these huge instruments that are extremely expensive.” Instead, “having this handheld device, something compact that even untrained personnel can just bring to the source for on-site monitoring, at low costs,” could make regular, ongoing widespread testing feasible.

Hu, who is the John F. Elliott Professor of Materials Science and Engineering, says, “I’m hoping this will be quickly implemented, so we can benefit human society. This is a good example of a technology coming from a lab innovation where it may actually make a very tangible impact on society, which is of course very fulfilling.”

“If this study can be extended to simultaneous detection of multiple metal elements, especially the presently concerning radioactive elements, its potential would be immense,” says Hou Wang, an associate professor of environmental science and engineering at Hunan University in China, who was not associated with this work.

Wang adds, “This research has engineered a sensor capable of instantaneously detecting lead concentration in water. This can be utilized in real-time to monitor the lead pollution concentration in wastewater discharged from industries such as battery manufacturing and lead smelting, facilitating the establishment of industrial wastewater monitoring systems. I think the innovative aspects and developmental potential of this research are quite commendable.”

Wang Qian, a principal research scientist at A*STAR’s Institute of Materials Research in Singapore, who also was not affiliated with this work, says, “The ability for the pervasive, portable, and quantitative detection of lead has proved to be challenging primarily due to cost concerns. This work demonstrates the potential to do so in a highly integrated form factor and is compatible with large-scale, low-cost manufacturing.”

The team included researchers at MIT, at Nanyang Technological University and Temasek Laboratories in Singapore, at the University of Southampton in the U.K., and at companies Fingate Technologies, in Singapore, and Vulcan Photonics, headquartered in Malaysia. The work used facilities at MIT.nano, the Harvard University Center for Nanoscale Systems, NTU’s Center for Micro- and Nano-Electronics, and the Nanyang Nanofabrication Center.

I’ve got a kid who’s got problems self regulating emotions. I could go into details but it boils down to hulk smash. One of the stories I do feel I can relate involves her first school kicking her out over 20 times (yes, illegal, I know now) as well as putting her with a teacher in a parking lot because the entire school could hear her screaming. Smart kid, emotional control lacking and at the age she’s at now it turning more self destructive.

But you rush to point out that an app isn’t a therapist and the two therapists who have tried and so far failed to help her control this agree. This is something we’re trying in addition.

I’m not sponsored by them, didn’t get the app for free, and expect nothing at the moment. Far as I know I have no PR ties with them but I have not investigated. We’re using it on a tablet I own and not a version they sell which based on reviews is not particularly good.

My wife bought it, or bought a subscription to it, I’m actually not sure at the moment how it works but we got a box with a pulse checking wristwatch and a squishy ball and some cards and basically I have no idea beyond that as once the app was up and going kiddo chugged along playing games and collecting items.

May 28, 2024

Day 1 has been uneventful other than my kid claims it’s her favorite game ever. Knowing her I suspect this was a ploy to just get screentime but we’ll see. Very little going on today to set her off.

I am of the idea this will not help personally. I would love to hold out hope an app could help but it seems a bit too simplistic of a solution.

Kid 1 who it was purchased for finds it neat, Kid 2 is going to try it later.

Kid 2 I decided to install it on a different tablet because part of Kid 1’s anger issues involve sharing her stuff, which I understand you give kid 2 anything and it comes back unpleasant. While Kid 1 has no issues letting her play and sharing the watch, the watchband they used almost caused a hulkout with Kid 1 attempting to help kid 2. Watch band is not multi-kid friendly.

May 31, 2024

At this point the two kids have fought over almost every aspect of this… who has the watchband, who has the best avatar, who played it first, and at least at the moment this has caused significantly more trouble than any gains. Some of this may be because we have one watch, but it reached the point I just had to tell the younger kid we got this for the older and in any cases all involved would probably rather Kid 1 use it.

June 1, 2024

After constant fighting both between the kids and with the watch to recognize and more trouble than it’s worth the tablet it was on was broken (appears to be stepped on) and that is that. I’m not getting another tablet to use it on, they are not using my tablet, and as such this is the end of the experiment.

I don’t think the tablet being stepped on was a result of Mightier, that probably was an accident. The kid who needs it doesn’t take care of her stuff so that’s simply the end as there will be no replacement.

I had it far shorter than I would have expected it to have any effect in, but what I did observe was a never level of fighting between my kids so there’s that. I would not have offered it to Kid 2 had I known the nonstop headache is was going to be.

Game looked cute

June 6, 2024

Evidently when my wife went to cancel the subscription they offered to send her a tablet it would work on for $10. She took the bait. We’re waiting on the tablet to arrive at this point.

While I am not sure if the game loss plays any factor in it or not, the amount of arguing has gone down markedly. We have also been taking them to activities any free time they have so that may be part of why it’s gone down though.

June 7, 2024

Tablet arrived yesterday – it’s an Android Go tablet slightly larger than the phones they have (that they don’t have this week(. I didn’t have anything to do with setting it up, my wife did, and then I noticed that all it would take is an accidental tap and they’re in her email.

Funny thing about the tablet is it does not have Mightier installed.

We are refraining from handing the tablet over until I remove my wife’s account and place the tablet under the control of one of the child accounts, which I will probably do later today. I would have today but forgot to bring it to work.

Tablet does not handle the USB-C chargers we use for all the phones… this does not bode well because the only tablets that don’t are pretty garbage. I will have to plug it in elsewhere, which yeah, something is cheap.

June 17, 2024

After removing Kim’s account and adding the kiddos we ran into a problem of it being unable to turn on location services, even though they were on. As this happened right after switching to a child’s managed account I found the location services in Family Link and enabled them for that device.

Finally with location services it was able to access Bluetooth and we went to try and play again and it refused to recognize her heart rate and at this point the frustration level was sufficient that stopping attempting to play this was necessitated.

I attempted later and managed to get my pulse picked up, we might give it another shot but honestly this is not working and it seems to mostly have the effect of making me increasingly annoyed.

Trying to play Mightier and a tablet branded Mighter and shipped by Mightier should not be a fight to get things working. Maybe a little note in the location permissions that if you’re on a child’s account you may need to modify some settings in Family Link… perhaps a warning to parents that whatever Google account you use is going to give your kid complete access to that account and maybe don’t use yours unless you want your kid to be in your email and with access to anything in the Play Store.

So, 10 days with not playing it since last update.

Starting Mightier with one of my kids, I’ll let you know how it goes here by Paul E King first appeared on Pocketables.

The upcoming Galaxy Ring is one of the most exciting products of the year for Samsung Health fans who have been waiting for a discreet and screen-free health and fitness tracker. But it is not a one-size-fits-all solution, and what will be the Ring's greatest quality in the eyes of some users could become its weakest point for others.

Some people love the idea of ditching the smartwatch in favor of a smart ring because Galaxy Watches have a few issues and UI design problems. These customers also hope that wearing a smart ring will free their wrists so they can once again wear their prized collection of classic and diverse analog watches, all without giving up health and fitness tracking through Samsung Health.

Galaxy Watches are sometimes sluggish, the UI doesn't seem greatly optimized for the circular screen, and battery life is decent but not stellar if you're using all the fitness and health trackers at once. Besides, smartwatches can sometimes look too toyish and cheap. Plus, having one more screen to worry about can add to the daily frustration.

Meanwhile, the Galaxy Ring is focused entirely on tracking the wearer's health, fitness, and sleep without any distractions. There are no extra bells and whistles, no apps to worry about, no screens to catch your eye, and no wristbands to discomfort you when you sleep.

So, what's even the point of wearing a Galaxy Watch anymore? Well, if you don't know, you'll want to hear this out.

Why you may want to wear a Watch instead of a Galaxy Ring

Assuming the Galaxy Ring and Galaxy Watches will have the same tracking capabilities, we narrowed it down to two main reasons why you might still prefer a Galaxy Watch over a Galaxy Ring, especially if you're new to Samsung Health and have to pick one device over the other but can't or don't want to have both:

• Music playback without a phone in your pocket.
• Live fitness monitoring when you work out.

If you enjoy the idea of leaving your phone at home when you go for a jog and listening to music in your earbuds, the Galaxy Watch will probably be the best way to go. Galaxy Ring specs are scarce as of now, but we're guessing it won't offer music playback capabilities through your Galaxy Buds.

As for the second reason, a watch might be a better fitness companion in high-intensity situations. You see, the Galaxy Ring will be able to record the wearer's health, fitness, and sleep data, but the primary way for users to check that recorded information is through the Samsung Health app on their phones. And that's not something you may want to do during a workout.

Because it doesn't have a screen, the Galaxy Ring doesn't have a way for you to check things like your heart rate, distance traveled, and reps live when you're out jogging or working out. You can't monitor any parameters during your active time. Or, at least, not conveniently without looking at your phone.

When wearing a Galaxy Watch, you can check those parameters at a glance from your wrist while you're being active. But at best, a Galaxy Ring will only post that information to the Samsung Health mobile app so you can consult it later, preferably after your fitness session.

Know what kind of fitness tracking experience you want

In conclusion, the Galaxy Ring might be the best wearable if you want to collect fitness and health data in the background and don't care about things like music playback and keeping an eye on your vitals when you're working out. Furthermore, it will probably be the best and least distracting device capable of tracking your sleep.

On the other hand, a Galaxy Watch will still be the superior fitness companion if you want to leave your phone at home when you go out running and want to play music in your headphones or track live health and fitness parameters from your wrist during those active moments.

Ideally, if you want to combine the best of all worlds and wear classic watches without abandoning Samsung Health, you'll probably want to use the Galaxy Ring at all times and pop the Galaxy Watch on your wrist only when you're working out. Then, once you're done, you can remove the Galaxy Watch or replace it with a classic timepiece but keep the Galaxy Ring on your finger for continuous background tracking.

If you have to choose between them, you'll have to figure out which aspects are more important to you. Would you prefer the comfortable and distraction-free background tracking of the Galaxy Ring? Or do you want to benefit from live fitness and health monitoring as you work out and smartphone-free music playback through your Watch and wireless headset?

The post Why you may want to wear a Galaxy Watch instead of a Ring appeared first on SamMobile.

Last month when Google introduced its new AI search tool, called AI Overviews, the company seemed confident that it had tested the tool sufficiently, noting in the announcement that “people have already used AI Overviews billions of times through our experiment in Search Labs.” The tool doesn’t just return links to Web pages, as in a typical Google search, but returns an answer that it has generated based on various sources, which it links to below the answer. But immediately after the launch users began posting examples of extremely wrong answers, including a pizza recipe that included glue and the interesting fact that a dog has played in the NBA.

Renée DiResta has been tracking online misinformation for many years as the technical research manager at Stanford’s Internet Observatory.

While the pizza recipe is unlikely to convince anyone to squeeze on the Elmer’s, not all of AI Overview’s extremely wrong answers are so obvious—and some have the potential to be quite harmful. Renée DiResta has been tracking online misinformation for many years as the technical research manager at Stanford’s Internet Observatory and has a new book out about the online propagandists who “turn lies into reality.” She has studied the spread of medical misinformation via social media, so IEEE Spectrum spoke to her about whether AI search is likely to bring an onslaught of erroneous medical advice to unwary users.

I know you’ve been tracking disinformation on the Web for many years. Do you expect the introduction of AI-augmented search tools like Google’s AI Overviews to make the situation worse or better?

Renée DiResta: It’s a really interesting question. There are a couple of policies that Google has had in place for a long time that appear to be in tension with what’s coming out of AI-generated search. That’s made me feel like part of this is Google trying to keep up with where the market has gone. There’s been an incredible acceleration in the release of generative AI tools, and we are seeing Big Tech incumbents trying to make sure that they stay competitive. I think that’s one of the things that’s happening here.

We have long known that hallucinations are a thing that happens with large language models. That’s not new. It’s the deployment of them in a search capacity that I think has been rushed and ill-considered because people expect search engines to give them authoritative information. That’s the expectation you have on search, whereas you might not have that expectation on social media.

There are plenty of examples of comically poor results from AI search, things like how many rocks we should eat per day [a response that was drawn for an Onion article]. But I’m wondering if we should be worried about more serious medical misinformation. I came across one blog post about Google’s AI Overviews responses about stem-cell treatments. The problem there seemed to be that the AI search tool was sourcing its answers from disreputable clinics that were offering unproven treatments. Have you seen other examples of that kind of thing?

DiResta: I have. It’s returning information synthesized from the data that it’s trained on. The problem is that it does not seem to be adhering to the same standards that have long gone into how Google thinks about returning search results for health information. So what I mean by that is Google has, for upwards of 10 years at this point, had a search policy called Your Money or Your Life. Are you familiar with that?

I don’t think so.

DiResta: Your Money or Your Life acknowledges that for queries related to finance and health, Google has a responsibility to hold search results to a very high standard of care, and it’s paramount to get the information correct. People are coming to Google with sensitive questions and they’re looking for information to make materially impactful decisions about their lives. They’re not there for entertainment when they’re asking a question about how to respond to a new cancer diagnosis, for example, or what sort of retirement plan they should be subscribing to. So you don’t want content farms and random Reddit posts and garbage to be the results that are returned. You want to have reputable search results.

That framework of Your Money or Your Life has informed Google’s work on these high-stakes topics for quite some time. And that’s why I think it’s disturbing for people to see the AI-generated search results regurgitating clearly wrong health information from low-quality sites that perhaps happened to be in the training data.

So it seems like AI overviews is not following that same policy—or that’s what it appears like from the outside?

DiResta: That’s how it appears from the outside. I don’t know how they’re thinking about it internally. But those screenshots you’re seeing—a lot of these instances are being traced back to an isolated social media post or a clinic that’s disreputable but exists—are out there on the Internet. It’s not simply making things up. But it’s also not returning what we would consider to be a high-quality result in formulating its response.

I saw that Google responded to some of the problems with a blog post saying that it is aware of these poor results and it’s trying to make improvements. And I can read you the one bullet point that addressed health. It said, “For topics like news and health, we already have strong guardrails in place. In the case of health, we launched additional triggering refinements to enhance our quality protections.” Do you know what that means?

DiResta: That blog posts is an explanation that [AI Overviews] isn’t simply hallucinating—the fact that it’s pointing to URLs is supposed to be a guardrail because that enables the user to go and follow the result to its source. This is a good thing. They should be including those sources for transparency and so that outsiders can review them. However, it is also a fair bit of onus to put on the audience, given the trust that Google has built up over time by returning high-quality results in its health information search rankings.

I know one topic that you’ve tracked over the years has been disinformation about vaccine safety. Have you seen any evidence of that kind of disinformation making its way into AI search?

DiResta: I haven’t, though I imagine outside research teams are now testing results to see what appears. Vaccines have been so much a focus of the conversation around health misinformation for quite some time, I imagine that Google has had people looking specifically at that topic in internal reviews, whereas some of these other topics might be less in the forefront of the minds of the quality teams that are tasked with checking if there are bad results being returned.

What do you think Google’s next moves should be to prevent medical misinformation in AI search?

DiResta: Google has a perfectly good policy to pursue. Your Money or Your Life is a solid ethical guideline to incorporate into this manifestation of the future of search. So it’s not that I think there’s a new and novel ethical grounding that needs to happen. I think it’s more ensuring that the ethical grounding that exists remains foundational to the new AI search tools.

The new plan to keep kids from drinking alcohol: Ban kids (and some adults) from buying drinks containing zero alcohol.

No, it doesn't make much sense.

But that's the argument being made by Molly A. Bowdring, a clinical psychologist at Stanford, who wrote this week in STAT that nonalcoholic drinks meant to resemble beer or cocktails are "a potential public health crisis."

The zero-proof beverage market includes brands like Athletic Brewing, by far the largest nonalcoholic beer brand, as well as a growing number of wine and spirits varieties. While nonalcoholic drinks still account for a tiny sliver of the overall beverage market, the rate of growth in recent years has been impressive—driven by consumers who are looking to enjoy a drink without getting drunk.

But won't someone think of the children, frets Bowdring. "While it's great that more people are taking to heart public health messages that reducing alcohol consumption can improve well-being and extend life, an important lesson from vaping as a replacement for cigarettes is being overlooked: What may be good for adults may be harmful to kids."

After contacting alcohol regulators in every U.S. state, she writes that she was shocked to find drinks that contain no alcohol are generally not subjected to limitations placed on drinks that do contain alcohol. Imagine that.

"Children and teens are, by and large, legally permitted to purchase non-alcoholic beverages. This is a huge liability," warns Bowdring. "The path from non-alcoholic beverage consumption to alcohol use among youths appears to be fairly direct….Among minors, consuming non-alcoholic beverages can socialize them to the drinking culture, with the beverages being perceived as cool, adult, and modern."

Goodness gracious, not that.

The logic here is seriously flawed in several ways. Most importantly, banning the sale of nonalcoholic drinks to individuals under 21—which includes a lot of adults, by the way—isn't going to make "drinking culture" seem much different. And even if it did, it is absolutely not the government's job to police what subcultures seem cool or interesting.

If there's a compelling reason for the state to prohibit the sale of alcohol to some individuals, it's on the grounds that consuming alcohol can increase the risk that they harm themselves or others. But kids are already prevented from legally purchasing or consuming alcohol—and someone who is purchasing or consuming a nonalcoholic drink is, by definition, not consuming alcohol in the first place!

Finally, Bowdring isn't arguing that kids who buy nonalcoholic drinks go on to become raging alcoholics or drunk drivers or anything dangerous like that. She's panicked over the possibility that they'll have an increased interest in drinking, period. But learning to drink socially and responsibly—which might include the consumption of nonalcoholic drinks at times—is a key part of being an adult.

This isn't an argument for banning video games because some kids who play video games will someday commit a school shooting. This is arguing for banning video games because some kids who play video games might someday drive a few miles per hour over the posted speed limit.

The post Will Banning Nonalcoholic Beer Save the Children? appeared first on Reason.com.

Engineers at MIT, Nanyang Technological University, and several companies have developed a compact and inexpensive technology for detecting and measuring lead concentrations in water, potentially enabling a significant advance in tackling this persistent global health issue.

The World Health Organization estimates that 240 million people worldwide are exposed to drinking water that contains unsafe amounts of toxic lead, which can affect brain development in children, cause birth defects, and produce a variety of neurological, cardiac, and other damaging effects. In the United States alone, an estimated 10 million households still get drinking water delivered through lead pipes.

“It’s an unaddressed public health crisis that leads to over 1 million deaths annually,” says Jia Xu Brian Sia, an MIT postdoc and the senior author of the paper describing the new technology.

But testing for lead in water requires expensive, cumbersome equipment and typically requires days to get results. Or, it uses simple test strips that simply reveal a yes-or-no answer about the presence of lead but no information about its concentration. Current EPA regulations require drinking water to contain no more that 15 parts per billion of lead, a concentration so low it is difficult to detect.

The new system, which could be ready for commercial deployment within two or three years, could detect lead concentrations as low as 1 part per billion, with high accuracy, using a simple chip-based detector housed in a handheld device. The technology gives nearly instant quantitative measurements and requires just a droplet of water.

The findings are described in a paper appearing today in the journal Nature Communications, by Sia, MIT graduate student and lead author Luigi Ranno, Professor Juejun Hu, and 12 others at MIT and other institutions in academia and industry.

The team set out to find a simple detection method based on the use of photonic chips, which use light to perform measurements. The challenging part was finding a way to attach to the photonic chip surface certain ring-shaped molecules known as crown ethers, which can capture specific ions such as lead. After years of effort, they were able to achieve that attachment via a chemical process known as Fischer esterification. “That is one of the essential breakthroughs we have made in this technology,” Sia says.

In testing the new chip, the researchers showed that it can detect lead in water at concentrations as low as one part per billion. At much higher concentrations, which may be relevant for testing environmental contamination such as mine tailings, the accuracy is within 4 percent.

The device works in water with varying levels of acidity, ranging from pH values of 6 to 8, “which covers most environmental samples,” Sia says. They have tested the device with seawater as well as tap water, and verified the accuracy of the measurements.

In order to achieve such levels of accuracy, current testing requires a device called an inductive coupled plasma mass spectrometer. “These setups can be big and expensive,” Sia says. The sample processing can take days and requires experienced technical personnel.

While the new chip system they developed is “the core part of the innovation,” Ranno says, further work will be needed to develop this into an integrated, handheld device for practical use. “For making an actual product, you would need to package it into a usable form factor,” he explains. This would involve having a small chip-based laser coupled to the photonic chip. “It’s a matter of mechanical design, some optical design, some chemistry, and figuring out the supply chain,” he says. While that takes time, he says, the underlying concepts are straightforward.

The system can be adapted to detect other similar contaminants in water, including cadmium, copper, lithium, barium, cesium, and radium, Ranno says. The device could be used with simple cartridges that can be swapped out to detect different elements, each using slightly different crown ethers that can bind to a specific ion.

“There’s this problem that people don’t measure their water enough, especially in the developing countries,” Ranno says. “And that’s because they need to collect the water, prepare the sample, and bring it to these huge instruments that are extremely expensive.” Instead, “having this handheld device, something compact that even untrained personnel can just bring to the source for on-site monitoring, at low costs,” could make regular, ongoing widespread testing feasible.

Hu, who is the John F. Elliott Professor of Materials Science and Engineering, says, “I’m hoping this will be quickly implemented, so we can benefit human society. This is a good example of a technology coming from a lab innovation where it may actually make a very tangible impact on society, which is of course very fulfilling.”

“If this study can be extended to simultaneous detection of multiple metal elements, especially the presently concerning radioactive elements, its potential would be immense,” says Hou Wang, an associate professor of environmental science and engineering at Hunan University in China, who was not associated with this work.

Wang adds, “This research has engineered a sensor capable of instantaneously detecting lead concentration in water. This can be utilized in real-time to monitor the lead pollution concentration in wastewater discharged from industries such as battery manufacturing and lead smelting, facilitating the establishment of industrial wastewater monitoring systems. I think the innovative aspects and developmental potential of this research are quite commendable.”

Wang Qian, a principal research scientist at A*STAR’s Institute of Materials Research in Singapore, who also was not affiliated with this work, says, “The ability for the pervasive, portable, and quantitative detection of lead has proved to be challenging primarily due to cost concerns. This work demonstrates the potential to do so in a highly integrated form factor and is compatible with large-scale, low-cost manufacturing.”

The team included researchers at MIT, at Nanyang Technological University and Temasek Laboratories in Singapore, at the University of Southampton in the U.K., and at companies Fingate Technologies, in Singapore, and Vulcan Photonics, headquartered in Malaysia. The work used facilities at MIT.nano, the Harvard University Center for Nanoscale Systems, NTU’s Center for Micro- and Nano-Electronics, and the Nanyang Nanofabrication Center.

I’ve got a kid who’s got problems self regulating emotions. I could go into details but it boils down to hulk smash. One of the stories I do feel I can relate involves her first school kicking her out over 20 times (yes, illegal, I know now) as well as putting her with a teacher in a parking lot because the entire school could hear her screaming. Smart kid, emotional control lacking and at the age she’s at now it turning more self destructive.

But you rush to point out that an app isn’t a therapist and the two therapists who have tried and so far failed to help her control this agree. This is something we’re trying in addition.

I’m not sponsored by them, didn’t get the app for free, and expect nothing at the moment. Far as I know I have no PR ties with them but I have not investigated. We’re using it on a tablet I own and not a version they sell which based on reviews is not particularly good.

My wife bought it, or bought a subscription to it, I’m actually not sure at the moment how it works but we got a box with a pulse checking wristwatch and a squishy ball and some cards and basically I have no idea beyond that as once the app was up and going kiddo chugged along playing games and collecting items.

May 28, 2024

Day 1 has been uneventful other than my kid claims it’s her favorite game ever. Knowing her I suspect this was a ploy to just get screentime but we’ll see. Very little going on today to set her off.

I am of the idea this will not help personally. I would love to hold out hope an app could help but it seems a bit too simplistic of a solution.

Kid 1 who it was purchased for finds it neat, Kid 2 is going to try it later.

Kid 2 I decided to install it on a different tablet because part of Kid 1’s anger issues involve sharing her stuff, which I understand you give kid 2 anything and it comes back unpleasant. While Kid 1 has no issues letting her play and sharing the watch, the watchband they used almost caused a hulkout with Kid 1 attempting to help kid 2. Watch band is not multi-kid friendly.

May 31, 2024

At this point the two kids have fought over almost every aspect of this… who has the watchband, who has the best avatar, who played it first, and at least at the moment this has caused significantly more trouble than any gains. Some of this may be because we have one watch, but it reached the point I just had to tell the younger kid we got this for the older and in any cases all involved would probably rather Kid 1 use it.

June 1, 2024

After constant fighting both between the kids and with the watch to recognize and more trouble than it’s worth the tablet it was on was broken (appears to be stepped on) and that is that. I’m not getting another tablet to use it on, they are not using my tablet, and as such this is the end of the experiment.

I don’t think the tablet being stepped on was a result of Mightier, that probably was an accident. The kid who needs it doesn’t take care of her stuff so that’s simply the end as there will be no replacement.

I had it far shorter than I would have expected it to have any effect in, but what I did observe was a never level of fighting between my kids so there’s that. I would not have offered it to Kid 2 had I known the nonstop headache is was going to be.

Game looked cute

June 6, 2024

Evidently when my wife went to cancel the subscription they offered to send her a tablet it would work on for $10. She took the bait. We’re waiting on the tablet to arrive at this point.

While I am not sure if the game loss plays any factor in it or not, the amount of arguing has gone down markedly. We have also been taking them to activities any free time they have so that may be part of why it’s gone down though.

June 7, 2024

Tablet arrived yesterday – it’s an Android Go tablet slightly larger than the phones they have (that they don’t have this week(. I didn’t have anything to do with setting it up, my wife did, and then I noticed that all it would take is an accidental tap and they’re in her email.

Funny thing about the tablet is it does not have Mightier installed.

We are refraining from handing the tablet over until I remove my wife’s account and place the tablet under the control of one of the child accounts, which I will probably do later today. I would have today but forgot to bring it to work.

Tablet does not handle the USB-C chargers we use for all the phones… this does not bode well because the only tablets that don’t are pretty garbage. I will have to plug it in elsewhere, which yeah, something is cheap.

Starting Mightier with one of my kids, I’ll let you know how it goes here by Paul E King first appeared on Pocketables.

As anyone who has traveled by plane in the last decade can attest, one of the few—perhaps only—things that make modern commercial flying tolerable is a strong onboard libation. For those lucky enough to travel internationally, the booze is sometimes even free. But could this last vestige of mile-high sanity be snatched from us like a water bottle at an airport security checkpoint? 

Newly released research argues that it should be. The study, published in Thorax by researchers from the Institute of Aerospace Medicine in Germany, concludes that in-flight alcohol can increase the risk of heart attack. While the topline conclusion sounds concerning and compelling, the research itself is less so. 

The researchers used a sampling of a mere 48 people between 18 and 40 years of age, half of whom slept in a sleep lab that mirrored normal on-ground conditions while the other half slept in a lab that simulated high-altitude cabin pressure. On the first night of the test, everyone was instructed to go to bed. On the second night, each group was given the assignment of drinking booze and then passing out. (How one qualifies to become a test subject for a study of this kind is unclear at the time of this writing). The researchers then monitored each group's heart rate and sleep patterns.

The results showed that those who consumed alcohol and slept in the high-altitude simulation experienced the most heightened heart rates and the lowest oxygen-blood levels while sleeping. The researchers conclude that those with existing cardiac and pulmonary conditions could be in danger—as well as those with sleep apnea and other respiratory ailments—but even healthy individuals were at risk.

"Even in young and healthy individuals, the combination of alcohol intake with sleeping under hypobaric conditions poses a considerable strain on the cardiac system and might lead to exacerbation of symptoms in patients with cardiac or pulmonary diseases," the researchers state. "Our findings strongly suggest that the inflight consumption of alcoholic beverages should be restricted."

One might be tempted to brush this off as merely the work of a few teetotalers from across the pond, but as students of the temperance movement know well, prohibitionary brush fires can start with the smallest of sparks. In fact, the in-flight booze ban movement has already begun to catch on in America. 

During the COVID pandemic, reports of unruly and intoxicated airplane passengers getting into physical altercations with flight attendants led several airlines to suspend their on-board alcohol service entirely. Despite this built-in market reaction—after all, no airline wants to be the arena for a drunken brawl in the clouds—numerous federal lawmakers inevitably joined the booze ban chorus.

Rep. Peter DeFazio (D–Ore.) called for a ban on to-go alcohol from airport bars in 2021 after he allegedly watched a fellow passenger order three shots of alcohol in a to-go cup from an airport bar and then board the plane. Sen. Ed Markey (D–Mass.), citing reports that anti-mask passengers were the ones creating the on-board ruckuses, went on record in support of banning the hard stuff at least temporarily.

The study claiming to show heart and other health risks will likely further embolden the no-alcohol-on-planes crowd. Lost in all of this is the reality that, as Rep. DeFazio's anecdote shows, many of the unruly passengers that caught media headlines involved those who were already intoxicated upon boarding the plane or brought their own alcohol on board.

Under Federal Aviation Administration regulations, it is already illegal for consumers to imbibe alcohol they bring onto a plane: "No person may drink any alcoholic beverage aboard an aircraft unless the certificate holder operating the aircraft has served that beverage to him." The rule goes on to state that airlines cannot permit already intoxicated passengers to board their planes or serve them more alcohol onboard. 

Therefore, a complete ban on in-flight alcohol would simply be another example of the government implementing more rules to address behavior that is largely already illegal. It also would clearly incentivize more passengers to sneak their own alcohol on board—something that already happened when airlines suspended alcohol service during the pandemic. It doesn't take a libertarian to understand that if you ban a legal product—like in-flight alcohol service—you will inevitably create a more robust black-market workaround. 

A better approach would be to allow airlines to continue selling and serving in-flight alcohol. Like servers at a bar, flight attendants can monitor how much alcohol each passenger has consumed, instead of supercharging an uncontrollable airborne BYOB free-for-all. As for potential health concerns, passengers should be empowered to make their own decisions based on knowing themselves best. Most people already do this in situations such as avoiding air travel after scuba diving or major surgery, and there is no reason they can't do the same in determining whether to drink before or during a flight.

Some clever travelers have pointed out that the above-mentioned FAA regulation merely says that a person cannot drink alcohol on an airplane unless it is served by airplane staff. This technically suggests that you can bring your own alcohol on board—as long as it's in a mini bottle—and simply ask your flight attendant to serve it. At least a few airlines appear to be open to this.  

Now might be the time to find one such airline, book a flight, and enjoy this Prohibition-era 12-Mile Limit cocktail in defiant—but technically still legal—protest:

Prohibition-Era 12-Mile Limit Cocktail

Ingredients:

• ½ oz rye whiskey
• ½ oz cognac
• ½ oz rum
• ½ oz grenadine (real grenadine, not red syrup)
• ½ oz lemon juice 
• Lemon wedges (for garnish)
• Ice

Instructions:

1. Obtain two mini bottles of liquor, each under the 3.4 oz TSA liquid carry-on limit.
2. Fill one mini bottle with ½ oz rye whiskey and ½ oz cognac, topped off with your favorite rum.
3. Fill the second mini bottle with ½ oz grenadine and ½ oz lemon juice. Store this bottle in the fridge until leaving for the airport.
4. Bring both mini bottles on board with you in your carry-on.
5. Ask your flight attendant to pour the contents of the liquor-filled bottle over a cup of ice.
6. Add the grenadine and lemon juice mixture to the cup.
7. Garnish with lemon wedges.
8. Stir with the provided plastic stirring stick.
9. Sit back, relax, and enjoy your cocktail (while you still can).

The post Oh God, What If Congress Bans Drinking on Airplanes? appeared first on Reason.com.

I remember being a kid and seeing my grandmother without her dentures for the first time. It was a harrowing experience. Now my dad has dentures so, genetically speaking, I’m several decades out from needing some myself. However, it’s possible that modern medicine will solve the issue of lost teeth by then, thanks to a new drug that's about to enter human trials.

The medicine quite literally regrows teeth and was developed by a team of Japanese researchers, as reported by New Atlas. The research has been led by Katsu Takahashi, head of dentistry and oral surgery at Kitano Hospital. The intravenous drug deactivates the uterine sensitization-associated gene-1 (USAG-1) protein that suppresses tooth growth. Blocking USAG-1 from interacting with other proteins triggers bone growth and, voila, you got yourself some brand-new chompers. Pretty cool, right?

Human trials start in September, but the drug has been highly successful when treating ferrets and mice and did its job with no serious side effects. Of course, the usual caveat applies. Humans are not mice or ferrets, though researchers seem confident that it’ll work on homo sapiens. This is due to a 97 percent similarity in how the USAG-1 protein works when comparing humans to other species.

September’s clinical trial will include adults who are missing at least one molar but there’s a secondary trial coming aimed at children aged two to seven. The kids in the second trial will all be missing at least four teeth due to congenital tooth deficiency. Finally, a third trial will focus on older adults who are missing “one to five permanent teeth due to environmental factors.”

Takahashi and his fellow researchers are so optimistic about this drug that they predict the medicine will be available for everyday consumers by 2030. So in six years we can throw our toothbrushes away and eat candy bars all day and all night without a care in the world (don’t actually do that.)

While this is the first drug that can fully regrow missing teeth, the science behind it builds on top of years of related research. Takahashi, after all, has been working on this since 2005. Recent advancements in the field include regenerative tooth fillings to repair diseased teeth and stem cell technology to regrow the dental tissue of children.

Engineers at MIT, Nanyang Technological University, and several companies have developed a compact and inexpensive technology for detecting and measuring lead concentrations in water, potentially enabling a significant advance in tackling this persistent global health issue.

The World Health Organization estimates that 240 million people worldwide are exposed to drinking water that contains unsafe amounts of toxic lead, which can affect brain development in children, cause birth defects, and produce a variety of neurological, cardiac, and other damaging effects. In the United States alone, an estimated 10 million households still get drinking water delivered through lead pipes.

“It’s an unaddressed public health crisis that leads to over 1 million deaths annually,” says Jia Xu Brian Sia, an MIT postdoc and the senior author of the paper describing the new technology.

But testing for lead in water requires expensive, cumbersome equipment and typically requires days to get results. Or, it uses simple test strips that simply reveal a yes-or-no answer about the presence of lead but no information about its concentration. Current EPA regulations require drinking water to contain no more that 15 parts per billion of lead, a concentration so low it is difficult to detect.

The new system, which could be ready for commercial deployment within two or three years, could detect lead concentrations as low as 1 part per billion, with high accuracy, using a simple chip-based detector housed in a handheld device. The technology gives nearly instant quantitative measurements and requires just a droplet of water.

The findings are described in a paper appearing today in the journal Nature Communications, by Sia, MIT graduate student and lead author Luigi Ranno, Professor Juejun Hu, and 12 others at MIT and other institutions in academia and industry.

The team set out to find a simple detection method based on the use of photonic chips, which use light to perform measurements. The challenging part was finding a way to attach to the photonic chip surface certain ring-shaped molecules known as crown ethers, which can capture specific ions such as lead. After years of effort, they were able to achieve that attachment via a chemical process known as Fischer esterification. “That is one of the essential breakthroughs we have made in this technology,” Sia says.

In testing the new chip, the researchers showed that it can detect lead in water at concentrations as low as one part per billion. At much higher concentrations, which may be relevant for testing environmental contamination such as mine tailings, the accuracy is within 4 percent.

The device works in water with varying levels of acidity, ranging from pH values of 6 to 8, “which covers most environmental samples,” Sia says. They have tested the device with seawater as well as tap water, and verified the accuracy of the measurements.

In order to achieve such levels of accuracy, current testing requires a device called an inductive coupled plasma mass spectrometer. “These setups can be big and expensive,” Sia says. The sample processing can take days and requires experienced technical personnel.

While the new chip system they developed is “the core part of the innovation,” Ranno says, further work will be needed to develop this into an integrated, handheld device for practical use. “For making an actual product, you would need to package it into a usable form factor,” he explains. This would involve having a small chip-based laser coupled to the photonic chip. “It’s a matter of mechanical design, some optical design, some chemistry, and figuring out the supply chain,” he says. While that takes time, he says, the underlying concepts are straightforward.

The system can be adapted to detect other similar contaminants in water, including cadmium, copper, lithium, barium, cesium, and radium, Ranno says. The device could be used with simple cartridges that can be swapped out to detect different elements, each using slightly different crown ethers that can bind to a specific ion.

“There’s this problem that people don’t measure their water enough, especially in the developing countries,” Ranno says. “And that’s because they need to collect the water, prepare the sample, and bring it to these huge instruments that are extremely expensive.” Instead, “having this handheld device, something compact that even untrained personnel can just bring to the source for on-site monitoring, at low costs,” could make regular, ongoing widespread testing feasible.

Hu, who is the John F. Elliott Professor of Materials Science and Engineering, says, “I’m hoping this will be quickly implemented, so we can benefit human society. This is a good example of a technology coming from a lab innovation where it may actually make a very tangible impact on society, which is of course very fulfilling.”

“If this study can be extended to simultaneous detection of multiple metal elements, especially the presently concerning radioactive elements, its potential would be immense,” says Hou Wang, an associate professor of environmental science and engineering at Hunan University in China, who was not associated with this work.

Wang adds, “This research has engineered a sensor capable of instantaneously detecting lead concentration in water. This can be utilized in real-time to monitor the lead pollution concentration in wastewater discharged from industries such as battery manufacturing and lead smelting, facilitating the establishment of industrial wastewater monitoring systems. I think the innovative aspects and developmental potential of this research are quite commendable.”

Wang Qian, a principal research scientist at A*STAR’s Institute of Materials Research in Singapore, who also was not affiliated with this work, says, “The ability for the pervasive, portable, and quantitative detection of lead has proved to be challenging primarily due to cost concerns. This work demonstrates the potential to do so in a highly integrated form factor and is compatible with large-scale, low-cost manufacturing.”

The team included researchers at MIT, at Nanyang Technological University and Temasek Laboratories in Singapore, at the University of Southampton in the U.K., and at companies Fingate Technologies, in Singapore, and Vulcan Photonics, headquartered in Malaysia. The work used facilities at MIT.nano, the Harvard University Center for Nanoscale Systems, NTU’s Center for Micro- and Nano-Electronics, and the Nanyang Nanofabrication Center.

I’ve got a kid who’s got problems self regulating emotions. I could go into details but it boils down to hulk smash. One of the stories I do feel I can relate involves her first school kicking her out over 20 times (yes, illegal, I know now) as well as putting her with a teacher in a parking lot because the entire school could hear her screaming. Smart kid, emotional control lacking and at the age she’s at now it turning more self destructive.

But you rush to point out that an app isn’t a therapist and the two therapists who have tried and so far failed to help her control this agree. This is something we’re trying in addition.

I’m not sponsored by them, didn’t get the app for free, and expect nothing at the moment. Far as I know I have no PR ties with them but I have not investigated. We’re using it on a tablet I own and not a version they sell which based on reviews is not particularly good.

My wife bought it, or bought a subscription to it, I’m actually not sure at the moment how it works but we got a box with a pulse checking wristwatch and a squishy ball and some cards and basically I have no idea beyond that as once the app was up and going kiddo chugged along playing games and collecting items.

May 28, 2024

Day 1 has been uneventful other than my kid claims it’s her favorite game ever. Knowing her I suspect this was a ploy to just get screentime but we’ll see. Very little going on today to set her off.

I am of the idea this will not help personally. I would love to hold out hope an app could help but it seems a bit too simplistic of a solution.

Kid 1 who it was purchased for finds it neat, Kid 2 is going to try it later.

Kid 2 I decided to install it on a different tablet because part of Kid 1’s anger issues involve sharing her stuff, which I understand you give kid 2 anything and it comes back unpleasant. While Kid 1 has no issues letting her play and sharing the watch, the watchband they used almost caused a hulkout with Kid 1 attempting to help kid 2. Watch band is not multi-kid friendly.

May 31, 2024

At this point the two kids have fought over almost every aspect of this… who has the watchband, who has the best avatar, who played it first, and at least at the moment this has caused significantly more trouble than any gains. Some of this may be because we have one watch, but it reached the point I just had to tell the younger kid we got this for the older and in any cases all involved would probably rather Kid 1 use it.

Starting Mightier with one of my kids, I’ll let you know how it goes here by Paul E King first appeared on Pocketables.

The mental-health app Woebot launched in 2017, back when “chatbot” wasn’t a familiar term and someone seeking a therapist could only imagine talking to a human being. Woebot was something exciting and new: a way for people to get on-demand mental-health support in the form of a responsive, empathic, AI-powered chatbot. Users found that the friendly robot avatar checked in on them every day, kept track of their progress, and was always available to talk something through.

Today, the situation is vastly different. Demand for mental-health services has surged while the supply of clinicians has stagnated. There are thousands of apps that offer automated support for mental health and wellness. And ChatGPT has helped millions of people experiment with conversational AI.

But even as the world has become fascinated with generative AI, people have also seen its downsides. As a company that relies on conversation, Woebot Health had to decide whether generative AI could make Woebot a better tool, or whether the technology was too dangerous to incorporate into our product.

Woebot is designed to have structured conversations through which it delivers evidence-based tools inspired by cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), a technique that aims to change behaviors and feelings. Throughout its history, Woebot Health has used technology from a subdiscipline of AI known as natural-language processing (NLP). The company has used AI artfully and by design—Woebot uses NLP only in the service of better understanding a user’s written texts so it can respond in the most appropriate way, thus encouraging users to engage more deeply with the process.

Woebot, which is currently available in the United States, is not a generative-AI chatbot like ChatGPT. The differences are clear in both the bot’s content and structure. Everything Woebot says has been written by conversational designers trained in evidence-based approaches who collaborate with clinical experts; ChatGPT generates all sorts of unpredictable statements, some of which are untrue. Woebot relies on a rules-based engine that resembles a decision tree of possible conversational paths; ChatGPT uses statistics to determine what its next words should be, given what has come before.

With ChatGPT, conversations about mental health ended quickly and did not allow a user to engage in the psychological processes of change.

The rules-based approach has served us well, protecting Woebot’s users from the types of chaotic conversations we observed from early generative chatbots. Prior to ChatGPT, open-ended conversations with generative chatbots were unsatisfying and easily derailed. One famous example is Microsoft’s Tay, a chatbot that was meant to appeal to millennials but turned lewd and racist in less than 24 hours.

But with the advent of ChatGPT in late 2022, we had to ask ourselves: Could the new large language models (LLMs) powering chatbots like ChatGPT help our company achieve its vision? Suddenly, hundreds of millions of users were having natural-sounding conversations with ChatGPT about anything and everything, including their emotions and mental health. Could this new breed of LLMs provide a viable generative-AI alternative to the rules-based approach Woebot has always used? The AI team at Woebot Health, including the authors of this article, were asked to find out.

Woebot, a mental-health chatbot, deploys concepts from cognitive behavioral therapy to help users. This demo shows how users interact with Woebot using a combination of multiple-choice responses and free-written text.

The Origin and Design of Woebot

Woebot got its start when the clinical research psychologist Alison Darcy, with support from the AI pioneer Andrew Ng, led the build of a prototype intended as an emotional support tool for young people. Darcy and another member of the founding team, Pierre Rappolt, took inspiration from video games as they looked for ways for the tool to deliver elements of CBT. Many of their prototypes contained interactive fiction elements, which then led Darcy to the chatbot paradigm. The first version of the chatbot was studied in a randomized control trial that offered mental-health support to college students. Based on the results, Darcy raised US $8 million from New Enterprise Associates and Andrew Ng’s AI Fund.

The Woebot app is intended to be an adjunct to human support, not a replacement for it. It was built according to a set of principles that we call Woebot’s core beliefs, which were shared on the day it launched. These tenets express a strong faith in humanity and in each person’s ability to change, choose, and grow. The app does not diagnose, it does not give medical advice, and it does not force its users into conversations. Instead, the app follows a Buddhist principle that’s prevalent in CBT of “sitting with open hands”—it extends invitations that the user can choose to accept, and it encourages process over results. Woebot facilitates a user’s growth by asking the right questions at optimal moments, and by engaging in a type of interactive self-help that can happen anywhere, anytime.

A Convenient Companion

Users interact with Woebot either by choosing prewritten responses or by typing in whatever text they’d like, which Woebot parses using AI techniques. Woebot deploys concepts from cognitive behavioral therapy to help users change their thought patterns. Here, it first asks a user to write down negative thoughts, then explains the cognitive distortions at work. Finally, Woebot invites the user to recast a negative statement in a positive way. (Not all exchanges are shown.)

These core beliefs strongly influenced both Woebot’s engineering architecture and its product-development process. Careful conversational design is crucial for ensuring that interactions conform to our principles. Test runs through a conversation are read aloud in “table reads,” and then revised to better express the core beliefs and flow more naturally. The user side of the conversation is a mix of multiple-choice responses and “free text,” or places where users can write whatever they wish.

Building an app that supports human health is a high-stakes endeavor, and we’ve taken extra care to adopt the best software-development practices. From the start, enabling content creators and clinicians to collaborate on product development required custom tools. An initial system using Google Sheets quickly became unscalable, and the engineering team replaced it with a proprietary Web-based “conversational management system” written in the JavaScript library React.

Within the system, members of the writing team can create content, play back that content in a preview mode, define routes between content modules, and find places for users to enter free text, which our AI system then parses. The result is a large rules-based tree of branching conversational routes, all organized within modules such as “social skills training” and “challenging thoughts.” These modules are translated from psychological mechanisms within CBT and other evidence-based techniques.

How Woebot Uses AI

While everything Woebot says is written by humans, NLP techniques are used to help understand the feelings and problems users are facing; then Woebot can offer the most appropriate modules from its deep bank of content. When users enter free text about their thoughts and feelings, we use NLP to parse these text inputs and route the user to the best response.

In Woebot’s early days, the engineering team used regular expressions, or “regexes,” to understand the intent behind these text inputs. Regexes are a text-processing method that relies on pattern matching within sequences of characters. Woebot’s regexes were quite complicated in some cases, and were used for everything from parsing simple yes/no responses to learning a user’s preferred nickname.

Later in Woebot’s development, the AI team replaced regexes with classifiers trained with supervised learning. The process for creating AI classifiers that comply with regulatory standards was involved—each classifier required months of effort. Typically, a team of internal-data labelers and content creators reviewed examples of user messages (with all personally identifiable information stripped out) taken from a specific point in the conversation. Once the data was placed into categories and labeled, classifiers were trained that could take new input text and place it into one of the existing categories.

This process was repeated many times, with the classifier repeatedly evaluated against a test dataset until its performance satisfied us. As a final step, the conversational-management system was updated to “call” these AI classifiers (essentially activating them) and then to route the user to the most appropriate content. For example, if a user wrote that he was feeling angry because he got in a fight with his mom, the system would classify this response as a relationship problem.

The technology behind these classifiers is constantly evolving. In the early days, the team used an open-source library for text classification called fastText, sometimes in combination with regular expressions. As AI continued to advance and new models became available, the team was able to train new models on the same labeled data for improvements in both accuracy and recall. For example, when the early transformer model BERT was released in October 2018, the team rigorously evaluated its performance against the fastText version. BERT was superior in both precision and recall for our use cases, and so the team replaced all fastText classifiers with BERT and launched the new models in January 2019. We immediately saw improvements in classification accuracy across the models.

Woebot and Large Language Models

When ChatGPT was released in November 2022, Woebot was more than 5 years old. The AI team faced the question of whether LLMs like ChatGPT could be used to meet Woebot’s design goals and enhance users’ experiences, putting them on a path to better mental health.

We were excited by the possibilities, because ChatGPT could carry on fluid and complex conversations about millions of topics, far more than we could ever include in a decision tree. However, we had also heard about troubling examples of chatbots providing responses that were decidedly not supportive, including advice on how to maintain and hide an eating disorder and guidance on methods of self-harm. In one tragic case in Belgium, a grieving widow accused a chatbot of being responsible for her husband’s suicide.

The first thing we did was try out ChatGPT ourselves, and we quickly became experts in prompt engineering. For example, we prompted ChatGPT to be supportive and played the roles of different types of users to explore the system’s strengths and shortcomings. We described how we were feeling, explained some problems we were facing, and even explicitly asked for help with depression or anxiety.

A few things stood out. First, ChatGPT quickly told us we needed to talk to someone else—a therapist or doctor. ChatGPT isn’t intended for medical use, so this default response was a sensible design decision by the chatbot’s makers. But it wasn’t very satisfying to constantly have our conversation aborted. Second, ChatGPT’s responses were often bulleted lists of encyclopedia-style answers. For example, it would list six actions that could be helpful for depression. We found that these lists of items told the user what to do but didn’t explain how to take these steps. Third, in general, the conversations ended quickly and did not allow a user to engage in the psychological processes of change.

It was clear to our team that an off-the-shelf LLM would not deliver the psychological experiences we were after. LLMs are based on reward models that value the delivery of correct answers; they aren’t given incentives to guide a user through the process of discovering those results themselves. Instead of “sitting with open hands,” the models make assumptions about what the user is saying to deliver a response with the highest assigned reward.

We had to decide whether generative AI could make Woebot a better tool, or whether the technology was too dangerous to incorporate into our product.

To see if LLMs could be used within a mental-health context, we investigated ways of expanding our proprietary conversational-management system. We looked into frameworks and open-source techniques for managing prompts and prompt chains—sequences of prompts that ask an LLM to achieve a task through multiple subtasks. In January of 2023, a platform called LangChain was gaining in popularity and offered techniques for calling multiple LLMs and managing prompt chains. However, LangChain lacked some features that we knew we needed: It didn’t provide a visual user interface like our proprietary system, and it didn’t provide a way to safeguard the interactions with the LLM. We needed a way to protect Woebot users from the common pitfalls of LLMs, including hallucinations (where the LLM says things that are plausible but untrue) and simply straying off topic.

Ultimately, we decided to expand our platform by implementing our own LLM prompt-execution engine, which gave us the ability to inject LLMs into certain parts of our existing rules-based system. The engine allows us to support concepts such as prompt chains while also providing integration with our existing conversational routing system and rules. As we developed the engine, we were fortunate to be invited into the beta programs of many new LLMs. Today, our prompt-execution engine can call more than a dozen different LLM models, including variously sized OpenAI models, Microsoft Azure versions of OpenAI models, Anthropic’s Claude, Google Bard (now Gemini), and open-source models running on the Amazon Bedrock platform, such as Meta’s Llama 2. We use this engine exclusively for exploratory research that’s been approved by an institutional review board, or IRB.

It took us about three months to develop the infrastructure and tooling support for LLMs. Our platform allows us to package features into different products and experiments, which in turn lets us maintain control over software versions and manage our research efforts while ensuring that our commercially deployed products are unaffected. We’re not using LLMs in any of our products; the LLM-enabled features can be used only in a version of Woebot for exploratory studies.

A Trial for an LLM-Augmented Woebot

We had some false starts in our development process. We first tried creating an experimental chatbot that was almost entirely powered by generative AI; that is, the chatbot directly used the text responses from the LLM. But we ran into a couple of problems. The first issue was that the LLMs were eager to demonstrate how smart and helpful they are! This eagerness was not always a strength, as it interfered with the user’s own process.

For example, the user might be doing a thought-challenging exercise, a common tool in CBT. If the user says, “I’m a bad mom,” a good next step in the exercise could be to ask if the user’s thought is an example of “labeling,” a cognitive distortion where we assign a negative label to ourselves or others. But LLMs were quick to skip ahead and demonstrate how to reframe this thought, saying something like “A kinder way to put this would be, ‘I don’t always make the best choices, but I love my child.’” CBT exercises like thought challenging are most helpful when the person does the work themselves, coming to their own conclusions and gradually changing their patterns of thinking.

A second difficulty with LLMs was in style matching. While social media is rife with examples of LLMs responding in a Shakespearean sonnet or a poem in the style of Dr. Seuss, this format flexibility didn’t extend to Woebot’s style. Woebot has a warm tone that has been refined for years by conversational designers and clinical experts. But even with careful instructions and prompts that included examples of Woebot’s tone, LLMs produced responses that didn’t “sound like Woebot,” maybe because a touch of humor was missing, or because the language wasn’t simple and clear.

The LLM-augmented Woebot was well-behaved, refusing to take inappropriate actions like diagnosing or offering medical advice.

However, LLMs truly shone on an emotional level. When coaxing someone to talk about their joys or challenges, LLMs crafted personalized responses that made people feel understood. Without generative AI, it’s impossible to respond in a novel way to every different situation, and the conversation feels predictably “robotic.”

We ultimately built an experimental chatbot that possessed a hybrid of generative AI and traditional NLP-based capabilities. In July 2023 we registered an IRB-approved clinical study to explore the potential of this LLM-Woebot hybrid, looking at satisfaction as well as exploratory outcomes like symptom changes and attitudes toward AI. We feel it’s important to study LLMs within controlled clinical studies due to their scientific rigor and safety protocols, such as adverse event monitoring. Our Build study included U.S. adults above the age of 18 who were fluent in English and who had neither a recent suicide attempt nor current suicidal ideation. The double-blind structure assigned one group of participants the LLM-augmented Woebot while a control group got the standard version; we then assessed user satisfaction after two weeks.

We built technical safeguards into the experimental Woebot to ensure that it wouldn’t say anything to users that was distressing or counter to the process. The safeguards tackled the problem on multiple levels. First, we used what engineers consider “best in class” LLMs that are less likely to produce hallucinations or offensive language. Second, our architecture included different validation steps surrounding the LLM; for example, we ensured that Woebot wouldn’t give an LLM-generated response to an off-topic statement or a mention of suicidal ideation (in that case, Woebot provided the phone number for a hotline). Finally, we wrapped users’ statements in our own careful prompts to elicit appropriate responses from the LLM, which Woebot would then convey to users. These prompts included both direct instructions such as “don’t provide medical advice” as well as examples of appropriate responses in challenging situations.

While this initial study was short—two weeks isn’t much time when it comes to psychotherapy—the results were encouraging. We found that users in the experimental and control groups expressed about equal satisfaction with Woebot, and both groups had fewer self-reported symptoms. What’s more, the LLM-augmented chatbot was well-behaved, refusing to take inappropriate actions like diagnosing or offering medical advice. It consistently responded appropriately when confronted with difficult topics like body image issues or substance use, with responses that provided empathy without endorsing maladaptive behaviors. With participant consent, we reviewed every transcript in its entirety and found no concerning LLM-generated utterances—no evidence that the LLM hallucinated or drifted off-topic in a problematic way. What’s more, users reported no device-related adverse events.

This study was just the first step in our journey to explore what’s possible for future versions of Woebot, and its results have emboldened us to continue testing LLMs in carefully controlled studies. We know from our prior research that Woebot users feel a bond with our bot. We’re excited about LLMs’ potential to add more empathy and personalization, and we think it’s possible to avoid the sometimes-scary pitfalls related to unfettered LLM chatbots.

We believe strongly that continued progress within the LLM research community will, over time, transform the way people interact with digital tools like Woebot. Our mission hasn’t changed: We’re committed to creating a world-class solution that helps people along their mental-health journeys. For anyone who wants to talk, we want the best possible version of Woebot to be there for them.

This article appears in the June 2024 print issue.

Disclaimers

The Woebot Health Platform is the foundational development platform where components are used for multiple types of products in different stages of development and enforced under different regulatory guidances.

Woebot for Mood & Anxiety (W-MA-00), Woebot for Mood & Anxiety (W-MA-01), and Build Study App (W-DISC-001) are investigational medical devices. They have not been evaluated, cleared, or approved by the FDA. Not for use outside an IRB-approved clinical trial.