A New Generation of Green Wheels

A gallery of electric and hybrid vehicles on display at the  International Motor Show in Frankfurt, Germany.

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Prototype and production hybrids and electric cars debuted this week at the International Motor Show in Frankfurt, Germany. Car manufacturers showed off sportier designs—and some outlandish models.

The i8, shown here, is BMW's first plug-in hybrid sports car. It can reach 62 miles per hour in 4.6 seconds, has a top speed of 155 mph, and can achieve 87 miles per gallon. It weighs 3,200 pounds. A version of the car will probably be on sale by the end of 2013.

Credit: Internationale Automobil-Ausstellung

The Audi Urban concept car looks like a cross between a go-cart and a space capsule. The 1,058-pound electric car requires passengers to climb in through the top; it houses a 7.1-kilowatt-hour battery and takes about 17 seconds to get to 60 mph.

Credit: Internationale Automobil-Ausstellung

The RAK e (pronounced “Rack-ee”) has a lithium-ion battery that yields 62 miles per charge, and a top speed of 74 mph. The tiny two-seat design (reported weight is just 836 pounds) is targeted at young drivers.

Credit: Internationale Automobil-Ausstellung

The Ford Evos is not meant to go into production, but the company says the design will inform the development of future vehicles appearing as soon as 2012. 

The plug-in hybrid shows the potential for cars to connect to the cloud and use social-networking tools and other sources of information. Ford envisions future cars tapping into a user’s calendar and prepping the cabin with whatever music the user was previously listening to.

Credit: Ford

The Lexus 2013 GS450h hybrid sedan is a faster, more energy-efficient version of Lexus’s previous hybrid. It can reach 60 mph in 5.6 seconds, and the company touts its high-performance sports-car-like handling.

Credit: Lexus

VW’s Nils electric, a single-seat concept car, is an exercise in “micromobility.” The Nils, which can reach 60 mph in 11 seconds, has a top speed of 80 mph and a range of 40 miles. At 1,015 pounds, it has a 5.3k-watt-hour lithium-ion battery that can be charged in two hours. Backed by the German government, the model is aimed at individual commuters who travel a dozen or so miles to work.

Credit: Internationale Automobil-Ausstellung

The Mercedes and Daimler AG Smart was developed in collaboration with chemical company BASF. 

The electric concept car's transparent roof is made of solar panels that supply energy for climate control and the sound system. Plastic wheels make the car lighter, and organic light-emitting diodes (OLEDS) inside the car supply low-power energy. An infrared-reflective film material developed by BASF also helps keep the inside of the car cool.

Credit: Internationale Automobil-Ausstellung

Taking Touch beyond the Touch Screen

In touch: The spacecraft on this tablet's screen can be controlled by maneuvering the toy on the table next to it.
Credit: Credit: Intel

COMPUTING

Taking Touch beyond the Touch Screen

A prototype tablet can sense gestures, and objects placed next to it.

• BY DUNCAN GRAHAM-ROWE

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A tablet computer developed collaboratively by researchers at Intel, Microsoft, and the University of Washington can be controlled not only by swiping and pinching at the screen, but by touching any surface on which it is placed.

Finding new ways to interact with computers has become an important area of research among computer scientists, especially now that touch-screen smart phones and tablets have grown so popular. The project that produced the new device, called Portico, could eventually result in smart phones or tablets that take touch beyond the physical confines of the device.

"The idea is to allow the interactive space to go beyond the display space or screen space," says Jacob Wobbrock, an assistant professor at the University of Washington's Information School, in Seattle, who helped develop the system. This is achieved with two foldout cameras that sit above the display on either side, detecting and tracking motion around the screen. The system detects the height of objects and determines whether they are touching the surrounding surface by comparing the two views captured by the cameras. The approach make it possible to detect hand gestures as well as physical objects so that they can interact with the display, says Wobbrock.

In one demonstration, software tracks a small ball as it moves across the surface the tablet sits on. As the ball strikes the side of the tablet, a virtual ball appears on-screen following the same trajectory, as if the physical ball had entered the device. In this way the ball can be used to score on-screen goals. In another demonstration, the angle of a toy spaceship placed on the table next to the tablet controls the angle of a virtual spaceship onscreen, allowing the user to shoot down "asteroids."

Wobbrock says the same approach would work on smart phones and other pocket-sized devices. "As devices continue to shrink, they compromise the screen space. But with Portico you can reclaim the surrounding area for interactivity," he says.

With the tablet, Portico increases the usable area sixfold, says Daniel Avrahami a senior researcher at Intel Labs Seattle, who came up with the idea for Portico, and led its development, with help from Shahram Izadi at Microsoft Research in Cambridge, UK. For a 12-inch tablet, "that's the equivalent of a 26-inch screen," says Avrahami, who will present the work in October at the ACM User Interface, Software and Technology Symposium in Santa Barbara, California.

Eventually, says Wobbrock, it may be more practical, especially from a commercial standpoint, to use clip-on cameras instead of foldout ones, which tend to break more easily. But he also notes that the entire display might be replaced with a fold-up frame containing both cameras and a pico projector to produce the image on the surface below.

Eva Hornecker, a lecturer specializing in human-computer interaction at the University of Strathclyde, in Glasgow, Scotland, says there is growing interest in using cameras to detect hand gestures and objects among researchers.

"The problem with touch screens is you can't detect anything that's happening over the surface," Hornecker says. However, she notes that allowing interaction beyond the screen could introduce new challenges such as how to provide feedback so the user knows where the interactive area starts and ends.

How Pathogens Fight Drugs

Death on a chip: This microfluidics chip consists of over 1,000 chambers, with nutrients circulating along half of the perimeter (artificially colored yellow here) and an antibiotic solution circulating along the other half (colored red). The resulting gradient, from habitable to toxic, proves fertile ground for bacterial evolution.
Credit: Robert Austin and Quicen Zhang

BIOMEDICINE

How Pathogens Fight Drugs

"Death galaxy" chip shows bacteria evolve antibiotic resistance at a surprising pace.

• FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 23, 2011
• BY LAUREN GRAVITZ

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When attacked with antibiotics, bacteria can mutate rapidly in order to survive—it's what makes, for instance, the staph infection MRSA so dangerous. New research suggests that such bacterial evolution occurs even faster, and in a more predictable fashion, than anyone thought. Using a novel type of microfluidics chip, researchers have shown that bacteria can develop antibiotic resistance in less than 10 hours.

Rather than taking the conventional approach of testing the bacteria in a test tube, Robert Austin, a biophysicist at Princeton University, designed a microfluidics chip to simulate the complex chemical environments that bacteria experience in the real world. The chip contains over 1,000 tiny hexagonal chambers, each one a microhabitat connected to others by long, slim corridors. 

Austin flowed nutrients around one side of the chip and a solution of the antibiotic ciprofloxacin around the other. The solutions diffused into the inner hexagons through nano-sized slits, building a landscape of different ecologies. "I call it the 'death galaxy'—a galaxy of different environments designed to be very stressful," Austin says. "And the question is, if we apply very high levels of antibiotics to this funny world, would we see the rapid evolution of resistance?"

Austin and colleagues began to see resistant strains emerge within five hours. After 10 hours, the resistant strains  were populating even the most Cipro-saturated chambers.

The researchers also discovered that the evolution occurred predictably. Every time they ran the experiment, they got the same result, with the same four resistance-conferring mutations emerging over and over again. "It's surprising that it happens so quickly and in such a logical and repeatable manner," he says.

If Austin's chip can help researchers understand how bacteria develop resistance and predict the changes they will undergo, it could be invaluable in antibiotic development. Says Susan Rosenberg, a geneticist specializing in bacterial and cancer cell evolution at Baylor University, in Houston, "We're in an evolutionary arms race against pathogenic bacteria. But if we understand how they become resistant, we might think about designing smarter drugs, ones that attack the process of resistance acquisition instead of just changing antibiotics when resistance happens." 

Patterned evolution: Bacteria labeled with a green fluorescent protein were placed on the chip. As they evolved greater resistance to the antibiotic, they colonized outward, toward increasing concentrations of antibiotic and nutrient, in distinct patterns.
Credit: Robert Austin and Quicen Zhang

The chip has other potential applications as well. It might be used to improve strains of beneficial bacteria that degrade pollutants. Cancer research could likely make use of it too. Tumor cells can develop rapid resistance to chemotherapy, much as bacteria develop resistance to antibiotics. "The mechanism they've identified may also be a mechanism of change in cancer, and it could lead to tests to identify resistance before you even start administering drugs," says Anna Barker, director of Arizona State University's Transformative Healthcare Networks, who specializes in complex systems like cancer.

Cancer is indeed where Austin is headed next: he is already adapting his death galaxy for cancer cells. "Breast cancer and multiple myeloma are both existing in complex microenvironments," he says, "and my hope is that they might be most susceptible to my approach."

EU Is Overrating Biofuels Benefits

Feedstock: Rapeseed, which is commonly used to make biofuel in Europe.
Credit: Creative Commons from Felix Abraham.

ENERGY

EU Is Overrating Biofuels Benefits

New report suggests an error in estimates of greenhouse gas emissions.

• BY MIKE ORCUTT

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A scientific committee of the European Union has published a report arguing that EU policies favoring biofuels are based on a "serious" error in calculating the overall greenhouse gas emissions associated with the fuels. The result, says the committee, is an underestimation that could have "immense" climate-related consequences.

The policies, which include the EU's emissions trading system and renewable energy targets, do not adequately take into account the effects of land-use changes, the committee argues. It concludes that as a result, biofuels are often considered carbon-neutral when they may actually be adding carbon to the atmosphere.

Under the current rules, if an energy source is derived from plants, the greenhouse gas emissions from its combustion are considered equal to the carbon the plants took from the atmosphere as they grew, and thus do not count. Similar reasoning has led many governments around the world to view biofuels as carbon-neutral and to promote biofuel production and use in order to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. In recent years, however, many in the scientific community have disputed the premise, pointing out that it fails to take into account increases in emissions that result from changes in land use associated with growing crops for fuel.

Some of the current EU policies, in particular those aimed at encouraging the production and use of biofuels for transportation, do attempt to account for direct land-use changes. But this calculation "is highly uncertain and ends up being based on very coarse estimates," says John DeCicco, a senior lecturer at the University of Michigan, who studies energy use and transportation-related greenhouse gas emissions. Too often, the policies assume that simply planting biofuel crops will increase the amount of carbon absorbed from the atmosphere.

None of the EU policies count indirect land-use effects, which are often convoluted and hard to track. For instance, consider a wheat field that is converted to energy crops. Land elsewhere might in turn be converted into farmland to replace the wheat and meet demand for food—possibly through the clearing of more forest or grassland.

Ultimately, questions about how biofuels affect climate boil down to whether there is a net addition of biomass, and thus carbon absorption, says Timothy Searchinger, a lecturer on international public affairs at Princeton University whose work the EU committee cites in the new report. "If you want an excuse to ignore the carbon emitted from tailpipes, figure out if it was offset by something else," Searchinger says. "What happened to reduce the carbon in the air?"

A Quick Post-Surgical Wake-Up Call

Suddenly awake: The rats shown here are in a sealed chamber suffused with the anesthesia drug isoflurane, which normally keeps them immobile and unconscious. But a minute after an injection of methylphenidate (Ritalin), the animals are actively moving even as they continue to inhale isoflurane.

Credit: Ken Solt

BIOMEDICINE

A Quick Post-Surgical Wake-Up Call

Researchers find that giving rats the common stimulant Ritalin can revive them during general anesthesia.

• BY COURTNEY HUMPHRIES

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After they've undergone general anesthesia, patients typically experience hours of sleepiness, disorientation, and confusion. But perhaps patients could be quickly stimulated into alertness. That's the surprising suggestion of a new study in the October issue of Anesthesiology, which finds that, in rats, the common stimulant methylphenidate (Ritalin) can help speed recovery from general anesthesia.

The study showed that an injection of methylphenidate revives anesthetized animals faster than a saline injection, which was used as a control. In one experiment, rats were anesthetized in a chamber filled with the anesthetic gas isoflurane, and then, five minutes before the isoflurane treatment was discontinued, injected with methylphenidate. The researchers measured the time it took for the rats, which were lying on their backs, to right themselves. The animals receiving the stimulant roused themselves much faster than the control group.

The rats received the stimulant while still maintained on a dose of anesthetic sufficient to keep them unconscious so that the researchers could see whether the drug was actively inducing arousal rather than simply counteracting the effect of the anesthetic. At the highest tested dose, the rats began moving and twisting within 30 seconds, and exhibited alert behavior even while the anesthetic persisted.

Emery Brown, an anesthesiologist at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) and MIT, who led the study with Ken Solt, an anesthesiologist at MGH and Harvard Medical School, notes that while anesthesiologists use medication to put patients in a stable state similar to a coma, "we don't give you anything that brings you out of that state." He points out that recovery after many surgeries is fastest when patients get up, walk around, and breathe on their own as soon as possible. "If you can facilitate that [with a drug], you'd probably facilitate recovery," he says. The drug could also be used as an emergency treatment in the case of an anesthesia overdose, Brown says, and he speculates it might help people recover from comas.

"For the last 150-plus years, anesthesia has been reversed passively," says Max Kelz, an anesthesiologist at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine who was not involved in the study. "Having a way to actively antagonize the action of general anesthesia has merit." For instance, Kelz points out, after neurosurgery it can be difficult to distinguish post-anesthesia disorientation from a potential warning sign of a complication. The treatment could be especially useful for the subset of patients who wake up abnormally slowly from anesthesia. What's not clear, he says, is whether methylphenidate is a unique drug or whether any stimulant would have the same effect.

The researchers chose Ritalin because of its ability to inhibit neurons from sopping up the neurotransmitters dopamine and norepinephrine, allowing these neurotransmitters to remain longer in the synapses between neurons. Because the drug is already widely used to treat attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, the team hopes that it can be brought to human studies relatively easily.

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