Elemental music: Interactive periodic table turns He, Fe, Ca into Do, Re, Mi

Hydrogen has a scale pattern; zinc "sounds like an angelic vocalist singing with vibrato."

JENNIFER OUELLETTE - 3/29/2023

 Graduate student W. Walker Smith converted the visible light given off by the elements into audio, creating unique, complex sounds for each one. His personal favorites are helium and zinc.

W. Walker Smith and Alain Barker

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We're all familiar with the elements of the periodic table, but have you ever wondered what hydrogen or zinc, for example, might sound like? W. Walker Smith, now a graduate student at Indiana University, combined his twin passions of chemistry and music to create what he calls a new audio-visual instrument to communicate the concepts of chemical spectroscopy.

Smith presented his data sonification project—which essentially transforms the visible spectra of the elements of the periodic table into sound—at a meeting of the American Chemical Society being held this week in Indianapolis, Indiana. Smith even featured audio clips of some of the elements, along with "compositions" featuring larger molecules, during a performance of his "The Sound of Molecules" show.

As an undergraduate, "I [earned] a dual degree in music composition and chemistry, so I was always looking for a way to turn my chemistry research into music," Smith said during a media briefing. "Eventually, I stumbled across the visible spectra of the elements and I was overwhelmed by how beautiful and different they all look. I thought it would be really cool to turn those visible spectra, those beautiful images, into sound."

Data sonification is not a new concept. For instance, in 2018, scientists transformed NASA's image of Mars rover Opportunity on its 5,000th sunrise on Mars into music. The particle physics data used to discover the Higgs boson, the echoes of a black hole as it devoured a star, and magnetometer readings from the Voyager mission have also been transposed into music. And several years ago, a project called LHCSound built a library of the “sounds” of a top quark jet and the Higgs boson, among others. The project hoped to develop sonification as a technique for analyzing the data from particle collisions so that physicists could “detect” subatomic particles by ear.

Markus Buehler's MIT lab famously mapped the molecular structure of proteins in spider silk threads onto musical theory to produce the "sound" of silk in hopes of establishing a radical new way to create designer proteins. The hierarchical elements of music composition (pitch, range, dynamics, tempo) are analogous to the hierarchical elements of protein structure. The lab even devised a way for humans to "enter" a 3D spider web and explore its structure both visually and aurally via a virtual reality setup. The ultimate aim is to learn to create similar synthetic spiderwebs and other structures that mimic the spider's process.

Several years later, Buehler's lab came up with an even more advanced system of making music out of a protein structure by computing the unique fingerprints of all the different secondary structures of proteins to make them audible via transposition—and then converting it back to create novel proteins never before seen in nature. The team also developed a free Android app called the Amino Acid Synthesizer so users could create their own protein "compositions" from the sounds of amino acids.

So Smith is in good company with his interactive periodic table project. All the elements release distinct wavelengths of light, depending on their electron energy levels, when stimulated by electricity or heat, and those chemical "fingerprints" make up the visible spectra at the heart of chemical spectroscopy. Smith translated those different frequencies of light into different pitches or musical notes using an instrument called the Light Soundinator 3000, scaling down those frequencies to be within the range of human hearing. He professed amazement at the sheer variety of sounds.

"Red light has the lowest frequency in the visible range, so it sounds like a lower musical pitch than violet," said Smith, demonstrating on a toy color-coded xylophone. "If we move from red all the way up to violet, the frequency of the light keeps getting higher, and so does the frequency of the sound. Violet is almost double the frequency of red light, so it actually sounds close to a musical octave." And while simpler spectra like hydrogen and helium, which only have a few lines in their spectra, sound like "vaguely musical" chords, elements with more complex spectra consisting of thousands of lines are dense and noisy, often sounding like "a cheesy horror movie effect," according to Smith.

His favorites: helium and zinc. "If you listen to the frequencies [of helium] one by one instead of all at once, you get an interesting scale pattern that I have used to make a couple of compositions, including a 'helium dance party,'" said Smith. As for zinc, "The first row of transition metals have very complex, dense grating sounds. But zinc, for whatever reason, despite having a large number of frequencies, sounds like an angelic vocalist singing with vibrato."

Smith is currently collaborating with the Wonder Lab Museum in Bloomington, Indiana, to develop a museum exhibit that would enable visitors to interact with the periodic table, listen to the laments, and make their own musical compositions from the various sounds. "The main thing I want to [convey] is that science and the arts aren't so different after all," he said. "Combining them can lead to new research questions, but also new ways to communicate and reach larger audiences."

Musical periodic table being built by turning chemical elements’ spectra into notes

BY REBECCA TRAGER

29 MARCH 2023

A researcher at Indiana University in the US, who just received a degree in music composition and chemistry, has turned elements’ spectra into haunting music.

W Walker Smith has built computer code to convert each element’s spectrum into a mixture of notes. He hopes that transforming the light into sound will make it easier to detect elemental differences, and also help to teach chemistry. Smith reported this first step toward creating an interactive, musical periodic table at the spring meeting of the American Chemical Society (ACS) on 26 March.

Previously, Smith converted the natural vibrations of molecules into a musical composition, and during that process he observed the spectra of elements. ‘I was always looking for a way to turn my chemistry research into music, eventually I stumbled across the visible spectra of the elements and I just was overwhelmed by how beautiful, gorgeous and how different they all look,’ he recalled during a briefing at the ACS meeting. ‘And I thought “Wow, it would be really cool to turn these beautiful spectra, these beautiful images, into sounds”.’

Every element gives off a unique set of wavelengths of light when excited, with brightness levels that are specific to each element – its spectrum. The wavelengths of light emitted by each element can be hard to differentiate from one another, however, especially for the transition metals because they can have thousands of individual colours. Smith hopes his work will provide a new way to interpret elements’ spectra.

Other scientists have turned chemistry into sound before. In 2019, researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology assigned each of the 20 common amino acids a note on the C minor scale to create a composition unique to each protein. In another instance, the brightest wavelengths in an element’s spectrum were assigned to single notes played on piano keys. But that method produced just a few sounds that didn’t reflect the multitude of different wavelengths that some elements emit, Smith said. So, he decided to create his computer code to allow these notes to be generated in real time, forming harmonies and beating patterns as they combined.

Simpler elements like hydrogen and helium sound like chords, while others have a more complex collection of noises. Calcium, for instance, sounds like bells chiming together, while zinc sounds ‘angelic’, according to Smith. His two favourites are zinc and helium, which he described as a ‘groovy, very fun’ scale pattern when listened to one-by-one instead of all at once.

Previous research from a team at Nova University Lisbon in Portugal has found sonification to be very effective at helping students with visual impairments to interpret spectroscopic data, Smith noted. ‘But I think this goes even beyond that, because even for students that don’t have visual impairments, we could still use this as an alternative or supplementary means of data analysis, and perhaps glean some more information, or different types of information, from this spectra using our ears in addition to our eyes,’ he added.

In terms of next steps for his project, Smith is currently working with the WonderLab Museum of Science, Health and Technology in Bloomington, Indiana to develop an interactive exhibit that would allow visitors to listen to elements and make their own music with them.

Reactor antineutrinos detected in pure water in an experimental first
28 Mar 2023

Reactor reactions: the SNO+ detector has seen antineutrinos from distant reactors when it was filled with pure water. (Courtesy: SNO+)

For the first time, pure water has been used to detect low-energy antineutrinos produced by nuclear reactors. The work was done by the international SNO+ collaboration and could lead to safe and affordable new ways to monitor nuclear reactors from a distance.

Situated 2 km underground near an active mine in Sudbury, Canada, the SNO+ detector is the successor to the earlier Sudbury Neutrino Observatory (SNO). In 2015, SNO’s director Art McDonald shared the Nobel Prize for Physics for the experiment’s discovery of neutrino oscillation – which suggests that neutrinos have tiny masses.

Neutrinos are difficult to detect because they rarely interact with matter. This is why neutrino detectors tend to be very large and are located underground – where background radiation is lower.

At the heart of SNO was a large sphere of ultra-pure heavy water in which energetic neutrinos from the Sun would very occasionally interact with the water. This produces a flash of radiation that can be detected.

Careful measurements

SNO is currently being upgraded as SNO+, and as part of the process ultra-pure normal water was temporarily used as the detection medium. This was replaced by a liquid scintillator in 2018, but not before the team was able to made a series of careful measurements. And these threw up a surprising result.

“We found our detector was performing beautifully, and that it might be possible to detect antineutrinos from distant nuclear reactors using pure water,” explains Mark Chen. He is the SNO+ director and is based at Queen’s University in Kingston, Canada. “Reactor antineutrinos have been detected using liquid scintillators in heavy water in the past, but using just pure water to detect them, especially from distant reactors, would be a first.”

It had been difficult to detect reactor antineutrinos in pure water because the particles have lower energies than solar neutrinos. This means that the detection signals are much fainter – and therefore are easily overwhelmed by background noise.

Lower background

As part of SNO+’s upgrades, the detector was fitted with a nitrogen cover gas system, which significantly lowered these background rates. This allowed the SNO+ collaboration to explore an alternative approach to detecting reactor antineutrinos.

The detection process involves a neutrino interacting with a proton, resulting in the creation of a positron and a neutron. The positron creates an immediate signal whereas the neutron can be absorbed sometime later by a hydrogen nucleus to create a delayed signal.

“What enabled SNO+ to accomplish this detection are very low backgrounds and excellent light collection, enabling a low energy detection threshold with good efficiency,” Chen explains. “It’s the latter – a consequence of the first two features – that enabled the observation of antineutrinos interacting in pure water.”

“Dozen or so event”

“As a result, we were able to identify a dozen or so events that could be attributed to interactions from antineutrinos in pure water,” says Chen. “It’s an interesting result because the reactors that produced those antineutrinos were hundreds of kilometres away.” The statistical significance of the antineutrino detection was 3.5σ, which is below the threshold of a discovery in particle physics (which is 5σ)

The result could have implications for the development of techniques used to monitor nuclear reactors. Recent proposals have suggested that antineutrino detection thresholds could be lowered by doping pure water with elements like chlorine or gadolinium – but now, the results from SNO+ show that these costly, potentially dangerous materials may not be necessary to achieve the same quality of results.

Although SNO+ can no longer make this type of measurement, the team hopes that other groups could soon develop new ways to monitor nuclear reactors using safe, inexpensive, and easily attainable materials, at distances that will no disrupt reactor operation.

The research is described in Physical Review Letters.

New neutrino detection method using water

by Nathi Magubane, University of Pennsylvania

A view inside the SNO detector when filled with water. In the background, there are 9,000

 photomultiplier tubes that detect photons, and the acrylic vessel that (now) holds liquid

 scintillator. The ropes that crisscross on the outside hold it down when the scintillator is 

added, to prevent it from floating upwards. The acrylic vessel is 12 m wide, which is about

 the length of three to four Olympic-sized swimming pools. The facility is located in 

SNOLAB, a research facility located 2km underground near Sudbury, Canada. 

Credit: SNO+ Collaboration

Research published in the journal Physical Review Letters conducted by an international team of scientists including Joshua Klein, the Edmund J. and Louise W. Kahn Term Professor in the School of Arts & Sciences, has resulted in a significant breakthrough in detecting neutrinos.

The international collaborative experiment known as Sudbury Neutrino Observation (SNO+), located in a mine in Sudbury, Ontario, roughly 240 km (about 149.13 mi) from the nearest nuclear reactor, has detected subatomic particles, known as antineutrinos, using pure water. Klein notes that prior experiments have done this with a liquid scintillator, an oil-like medium that produces a lot of light when charged particles like electrons or protons pass through it.

"Given that the detector needs to be 240km, about half the length of New York state, away from the reactor, large amounts of scintillator are needed, which can be very expensive," Klein says. "So, our work shows that very large detectors could be built to do this with just water."

What neutrinos and antineutrinos are and why you should care

Klein explains that neutrinos and antineutrinos are tiny subatomic particles that are the most abundant particles in the universe and considered fundamental building blocks of matter, but scientists have had difficulty detecting them due to their sparse interactions with other matter and because they cannot be shielded, meaning they can pass through any and everything. But that doesn't mean they're harmful or radioactive: Nearly 100 trillion neutrinos pass through our bodies every second without notice.

These properties, however, also make these elusive particles useful for understanding a range of physical phenomena, such as the formation of the universe and the study of distant astronomical objects, and they "have practical applications as they can be used to monitor nuclear reactors and potentially detect the clandestine nuclear activities," Klein says.

Where they come from

While neutrinos are typically produced by high energy reactions like nuclear reactions in stars, such as the fusion of hydrogen into helium in the sun wherein protons and other particles collide and release neutrinos as a byproduct, antineutrinos, Klein says, are usually produced artificially, "for instance, nuclear reactors, which, to split atomic nuclei, produce antineutrinos as a result of radioactive beta decay from the reaction," he says. "As such, nuclear reactors produce large amounts of antineutrinos and make them an ideal source for studying them."

Why this latest finding is a breakthrough

"So, monitoring reactors by measuring their antineutrinos tells us whether they are on or off," Klein says, "and perhaps even what nuclear fuel they are burning."

Klein explains that a reactor in a foreign country could therefore be monitored to see if that country is switching from a power-generating reactor to one that is making weapons-grade material. Making the assessment with water alone means an array of large but inexpensive reactors could be built to ensure that a country is adhering to its commitments in a nuclear weapons treaty, for example; it is a handle on ensuring nuclear nonproliferation.

Why this hasn't been done before

"Reactor antineutrinos are very low in energy, and thus a detector must be very clean from even trace amounts of radioactivity," Klein says. "In addition, the detector must be able to 'trigger' at a low enough threshold that the events can be detected."

He says that, for a reactor as far away as 240km, it's particularly important that the reactor contain at least 1,000 tons of water. SNO+ satisfied all these criteria.

Leading the charge

Klein credits his former trainees Tanner Kaptanglu and Logan Lebanowski for spearheading this effort. While the idea for this measurement formed part of Kaptanglu's doctoral thesis, Lebanowski, a former postdoctoral researcher, oversaw the operation.

"With our instrumentation group here, we designed and built all the data acquisition electronics and developed the detector 'trigger' system, which is what allowed SNO+ to have an energy threshold low enough to detect the reactor antineutrinos."

More information: A. Allega et al, Evidence of Antineutrinos from Distant Reactors Using Pure Water at SNO+, Physical Review Letters (2023). DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.130.091801

Journal information: Physical Review Letters 

Provided by University of Pennsylvania New measurements suggest 'antineutrino anomaly' fueled by modeling error

Ground-breaking 'antineutrino' detector requires pure water only

A team of scientists has devised a new technique to detect antineutrinos from a distance using little more than pure water.

Christopher McFadden
Created: Mar 29, 2023

A new Canadian detector can actually "see" antineutrinos.

A significant breakthrough in detecting subatomic particles known as antineutrinos has been achieved, according to recent research published in APS.

In the Sudbury Neutrino Observation (SNO+) experiment, an international group of scientists - including Joshua Klein, Edmund J., and Louise W. Kahn - working together in a mine in Sudbury, Ontario, found antineutrinos using pure water.

This is a groundbreaking achievement, as prior experiments have used a liquid scintillator, a costly medium due to the large amounts needed for detecting antineutrinos.
What are antineutrino and neutrinos?

Klein explains that neutrinos and antineutrinos are tiny subatomic particles and the most abundant particles in the universe. Yet, they have been challenging to detect due to their sparse interactions with other matter and because they cannot be shielded. But because of how they work, we can use them to learn about things like how the universe was made and how far away astronomical objects are.

Also, they can be used in the real world to watch over nuclear reactors and possibly learn about secret nuclear activities.

While neutrinos are produced by high-energy reactions like nuclear reactions in stars, antineutrinos are usually produced artificially by nuclear reactors. By measuring antineutrinos from reactors, scientists can tell if a reactor is on or off and maybe even what kind of nuclear fuel it is burning.

This method could help monitor a reactor in a foreign country and determine if the country is switching from a power-generating reactor to one making weapons-grade material.

However, reactor antineutrinos are low in energy, making it difficult to detect them. The detector must be clean from any trace amounts of radioactivity and have a low enough threshold to detect the events. Additionally, the reactor must contain at least 1,000 tons of water to monitor a reactor as far away as 149.13 miles (240 kilometers).



Klein says his former students Tanner Kaptanglu and Logan Lebanowski led the way. Kaptanglu's doctoral thesis was part of the idea for the measurement, and Lebanowski, who used to be a postdoctoral researcher, was in charge of the whole thing. The instrumentation group designed and built all the data acquisition electronics and developed the detector's trigger system, allowing SNO+ to have an energy threshold low enough to detect the reactor antineutrinos.

This breakthrough in detecting antineutrinos with just water could lead to large and inexpensive detectors, ensuring a country is adhering to its commitments in a nuclear weapons treaty and providing a handle on ensuring nuclear nonproliferation. This discovery also opens new ways to study and use these elusive particles in the real world.

You can read the study for yourself in the journal Physical Review Letters.

Study abstract:

"The SNO+ Collaboration reports the first evidence of reactor antineutrinos in a Cherenkov detector. The nearest nuclear reactors are located 240 km away in Ontario, Canada. This analysis uses events with energies lower than in any previous analysis with a large water Cherenkov detector. Two analytical methods are used to distinguish reactor antineutrinos from background events in 190 days of data and yield consistent evidence for antineutrinos with a combined significance of 3.5σ."

Searching for Habitable Planets at Alpha Centauri with the TOLIMAN Mission

We know about thousands of exoplanets by now. But it's still a mystery, whether there are planets in the Alpha Centauri binary system, which is just next door to us. My guest today, Professor Peter Tuthill, is the Mission Leader for the TOLIMAN Telescope mission, which is designed to find those answers.

00:00 Intro

01:29 Are there planets at Alpha Centauri

08:22 How can we know they are there

11:20 TOLIMAN Telescope

30:04 JWST experiments

37:34 Next big telescopes for planet hunting

48:38 Discovering many more exoplanets

51:50 Next generation of instruments

59:05 Outro

Katherine Bennell-Pegg: Australia’s First Female Astronaut | BTN High

ABC News In-depth
• Mar 28, 2023 

We meet the first Aussie woman who’ll represent our country and train as an astronaut at the European Space Agency, and find out what she hopes to achieve.

Mission Mars: Four humans to begin living on Mars from June 2023 | NASA

 

As scientists and engineers continue to develop the capability to send humans to Mars in the near future, four humans will live the dream this summer as they begin living on Mars. However, their Martian homes will be on Earth.

Meteorologist explains "light pillars" seen in Northern Colorado

Mexico’s army accused of withholding info on missing students

By AFP
Published April 1, 2023

Relatives of 43 Mexican students who disappeared in 2014 protest 

- Copyright AFP CLAUDIO CRUZ

An independent commission investigating the 2014 disappearance of 43 Mexican students has accused the armed forces of deliberately withholding information about the case.

Officially, cartel members killed the students and incinerated their remains. But exactly what happened to them has been hotly disputed.

In August, a government-backed truth commission branded the tragedy a “state crime”, and said the military shared responsibility — either directly or through negligence.

There was “an internal decision not to provide more information” about the incident, Carlos Beristain, a member of the Interdisciplinary Group of Independent Experts (GIEI), told reporters Friday.

He said the commission’s experts had seen a document from the General Staff of the Mexican Defense Secretariat with instructions “to give an agreed response”.

“That for us is not acceptable,” Beristain said, adding that witnesses had also informed the commission that intelligence documents were dispersed to various locations to hide them.

The GIEI, a body created in 2015 by an agreement between the Mexican government and the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR), has “renewed” elements of the investigation, said Colombian lawyer Angela Buitrago, also a member of the truth panel.

This means the prosecutor’s office could reactivate arrest warrants — which were canceled in September — against around 20 military personnel involved, Buitrago said.

She added that Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador has “directly requested a report”.

Initially, investigators said the students, who were en route to a demonstration in Mexico City, were detained by corrupt police and handed over to a drug cartel that mistook them for members of a rival gang.

An official report presented by the government in 2015 concluded that cartel members had killed the students and burned the remains at a garbage dump.

Only three victims have been identified.

The initial findings, which did not attribute responsibility to members of the armed forces, were rejected by relatives and independent experts.

Mexican authorities last month announced the arrest of nine Guerrero state police officers suspected of involvement in the disappearance, while the United States deported a former police officer also implicated in the disappearance in January.

Climate activists turn landmark Rome fountain black


By AFP
Published April 1, 2023

The protests in Italy are part of a series of actions across Europe to focus attention on climate change. - Copyright AFP CLAUDIO CRUZ

Climate activists in Italy turned a Baroque-style fountain at the foot of Rome’s Spanish Steps black on Saturday, in a protest they said evoked an “end of the world” scenario.

Three activists from the anti-climate change organisation Last Generation poured a vegetable-based carbon liquid into the landmark 17th-century fountain, known to Romans as La Barcaccia, before being escorted away by police.

The fountain, in the shape of a boat, was designed by famed Italian sculptor Pietro Bernini.

Popular tradition has it he was inspired by the discovery in 1598 of a boat in the square after it was washed inland by a flooding Tiber river, Last Generation said.

Turning the water black “foreshadows the ‘end of the world’ scenario we are heading for, as we increasingly step on the accelerator: drought alternating with devastating floods, which will put an end to life on Earth, along with heat waves,” it said in a statement.

Last Generation began carrying out peaceful but disruptive protests in Italy last year ahead of the general election, urging politicians from all parties to make climate change their priority.

The protests in Italy are part of a series of actions across Europe to focus attention on climate change.

Activists have thrown soup, cake, mashed potatoes or washable paint at heritage and culture sites and artworks in museums.

Syphilis cases in babies skyrocket in Canada amid healthcare failures

By Karen Graham
Published April 1, 2023

National Aboriginal Day in Canada on June 21, 2019. Indigenous people make up 5 percent of Canada's population. 

Credit - Dennis Jarvis from Halifax, Canada. CC SA 2.0.

The number of babies born with syphilis in Canada is rising at a far faster rate than in the United States or Europe.

Based on data presented by Health Canada, the incidence of early congenital syphilis was only 7 in 2017. But the numbers soared to 96 cases in 2021 – a 1,271 percent increase.

Health Canada defines early congenital syphilis as a laboratory-confirmed Treponema pallidum infection occurring within the first 2 years of birth. Babies with congenital syphilis are at higher risk of low birth weight, bone malformations, and sensory difficulties, according to the World Health Organization (WHO), reports Reuters.

While syphilis has made a global resurgence over the last five years, Canada is an outlier among wealthy nations in its rate of increase, yet congenital syphilis is easily preventable if an infected person gets access to penicillin during their pregnancy, according to CBC Canada News.

Among the G7 wealthier nations, only the United States had a higher incidence of syphilis at birth: 2,677 cases of congenital syphilis in the U.S. in 2021 for a population of 332 million, according to preliminary CDC data. Canada had 96 cases for a population of 38 million, according to Health Canada.

Public health researchers said people experiencing poverty, homelessness and drug use are more likely to get infected through unsafe sex. Those with inadequate access to the health system have the same risk, and they may pass the bacteria to their babies during pregnancy and birth.

“In high-income countries, you see it in pockets of disadvantaged populations. It’s a marker of inequality. It’s a marker of low-quality prenatal care,” Teodora Elvira Wi, who works in the WHO’s HIV, Hepatitis, and sexually transmitted infection program, told Reuters.

What sets Canada apart are its Indigenous populations who experience discrimination and often have poor access to health and social services, said Sean Rourke, a scientist with the Li Ka Shing Knowledge Institute at St. Michael’s Hospital in Toronto.

“It’s just the whole system, and all the things that we’ve done in bad ways not to support Indigenous communities,” he said.

Indigenous populations and substance abuse

Preliminary studies of 165 infants have found that at least two-thirds were born to women reporting a history of substance abuse. Nearly 45 percent of the women identified as Indigenous and another 40 percent had no ethnicity recorded. Indigenous people make up about five percent of the Canadian population, according to census data.

Public health researchers and clinicians said the rates of congenital syphilis began increasing before the pandemic and worsened as public health agencies diverted resources to COVID-19 testing and other pandemic-related health measures.

“All of the social circumstances that contributed to this have just gotten worse over the pandemic,” said Ameeta Singh, an infectious diseases specialist with an HIV/STI practice in Edmonton.

Susanne Nicolay, nurse lead at Wellness Wheel clinic in Regina, Saskatchewan, which serves Indigenous and vulnerable populations, said providers needed to do more to expand access to health care.

“The system always talks about patients that are hard to reach. But I think it’s health providers that are hard to reach,” she said.

Review: 3-D printing organs makes for an exciting new thriller

By Dr. Tim Sandle
Published April 1, 2023

At the military hospital in Zaporizhzhia, surgeons have been working around the clock to tend those wounded in the war - Copyright POOL/AFP Anthony Kwan

A 3D printer that replicates human organs appears closer to following new innovations with the technology. However, realising this remains a few years away (not least because of the challenges abound achieving biomimicry, vascularization and 3D anatomically-relevant biological structures). This has prevented the concept from being used in a thrilling way in a new novel.

This is one of the compelling, real-world premises underpinning a new book from Stephen Steele called The Organ Grinder Factor. The Organ Grinder Factor is a rapid-fire story about a pair of protagonists on a high stakes mission to save humanity from viruses and cancers, and what they find is a doctor in Israel conducting experiments with a 3D printer.

The book is set amid the horrors of child slavery in Africa and the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian conflict, The Organ Grinder Factor has a secondary mission for delivers food for thought among the action orientated narrative.

The story is an epic adventure involving the botanist and broke rancher Cyd Seeley and her partner, the recovering drug addict Dr. Alex Farmer. The characters are making their second appearance in Steele’s engrossing series.

As the attention grasping, riveting story begins with the two main protagonists – Alex and Cyd – on desperate search of a place to safely grow their Cannastar, a miracle cure for viruses that Big Pharm has made illegal.

They shipwreck off the west coast of Africa and wash ashore in the drug and war-torn nation of Guinea-Bissau. Forced to flee for their lives, they arrive in Senegal where they become involved in the country’s real-life child slavery problem and are nearly killed for their efforts.

They find refuge in Israel where they meet the inventor of the ‘Organ Grinder’, an appropriately named 3D printer that replaces damaged internal organs without the need for surgery.

This builds upon scientific study whereby scientists today have already been able to replicate human tissue with a 3D printer. This takes current advances with additive manufacturing and biological knowledge and transposes these to a new biotechnological level.

In the book, the experimental research is funded by a ruthless billionaire with a secret past who becomes Cyd and Alex’s investor in a vast new Cannastar plantation. Even in a technologically advanced society,the interests of big corporations and wealthy individuals influence the lives of ordinary people.

While living in Israel, Cyd is badly wounded in a rocket attack. Her only chance of survival is the Organ Grinder — which has never been tested on a human being. This makes for an exciting set piece.

Without giving any more of the plot away, The Organ Grinder Factor is the action-filled follow-up to Steele’s The Cannastar Factor, which introduced readers to Cyd and Alex and traced their desperate quest to grow Cannastar.

Book Three in the series, The Trouble with Miracles, has just been released and tells the story of a desperate race to keep the discovery of the ancient secret to fusion energy out of the wrong hands in an adventure that ranges from Chile’s high northern desert to the magic of Easter Island and its mysterious statues.

Right-wing video site Rumble grows, as does its misinformation

By AFP
PublishedApril 1, 2023

This illustration photo shows the icon for Rumble, a video sharing app that aims to go mainstream even as critics claim it has a massive amount of misinformation - 

Copyright AFP Fabrice COFFRINI

The video-sharing platform Rumble, flush with cash after a $400 million investment, is pushing toward its goal of becoming the YouTube for American conservatives, even as it faces criticism for allowing misinformation and conspiracy theories to proliferate.

Its monthly active user base rose to 80 million at the end of December, more than double the year-earlier figure, the company said on Thursday.

And although it posted a net loss of $11.4 million, annual revenues — mostly from advertising — quadrupled in the past 12 months to $39.3 million.

The growth puts Canada-based Rumble ahead of US social media rivals Parler and Gettr as it seeks to cement its role as the go-to platform for right-wing activists who claim they are “censored” by large tech firms for misinformation.

Backers include conservative investor Peter Thiel and Republican J.D. Vance, the recently elected US senator from Ohio. Last year’s cash infusion came as Rumble went public with a book value of $2 billion.

“It’s really the only place you can get true authenticity, period. You can’t get that anywhere else,” founder and chief executive Chris Pavlovski said of the platform after its earnings report.

But critics say Rumble’s rise has come with different, non-financial costs.

Although it promotes itself as a “neutral” platform, its limited content moderation offers a home to conspiracy theories about Covid-19, the 2020 election and more.

Rumble’s 2022 video “Died Suddenly” — based on the debunked premise that Covid-19 vaccines caused numerous deaths — was viewed nearly 18 million times. And a video dubbed “2,000 Mules,” promoting false claims of vote fraud in 2020, got more than two million views.

But Rumble knows and serves its users; the March 30 news of Donald Trump’s indictment saw the platform’s top results dominated by supporters of the former president.

Rumble hosts high-profile commentators who have faced bans or critical fact-checks on other platforms, including Donald Trump Jr, former White House aide Steve Bannon and Infowars founder Alex Jones. Comedian Russell Brand moved to Rumble after other platforms restricted his videos promoting Covid conspiracies and promoting unproven cures.

The company has launched a verification badge program, and insists it is about more than US politics; Rumble is moving into live sports such as skateboarding and UFC fighting, and it also features animal and family-friendly videos.

But for the most part, “they are leaning into the story of cancel culture,” says Megan Squire, a researcher with the Southern Poverty Law Center who studies online extremism.

“They are creating echo chambers where there is very little left-of-center content. It’s really gone to a right-wing slant,” she said.

– Dwarfed by YouTube –

Despite its fast growth, Rumble remains relatively small compared with Google-owned YouTube, which has an estimated more than two billion users worldwide.

A Pew Research Center report from December 2022 found that 20 percent of US adults had heard of Rumble but just two percent regularly got news from the platform. Three-fourths of Rumble users identified as Republican or Republican-leaning, Pew said.

NewsGuard, a media analytics platform that rates the credibility of news sites, reported last year that nearly half the search results on Rumble that related to the 2022 election came from sources rated as untrustworthy. It called the platform “hoax central.”

Rumble said it does have a moderation policy -– banning obscenity, stalking and doxing, or maliciously posting personal information –- while steering clear of anything that might curb “open discourse.”

But Ahmed Al-Rawi, a professor and director of the Disinformation Project at Canada’s Simon Fraser University, said the company is taking advantage of uncertainty in social media, with platforms struggling with rules on content moderation and deplatforming.

“Their business model is focused on getting more users and getting content to spread virally,” Al-Rawi said, noting that Rumble offers incentives to high-profile influencers who post first on its platform.

“This helps guarantee an audience to spread their ideas,” he added.

Samuel Woolley, a professor at the University of Texas Center for Media Engagement, said that while Rumble may never rival YouTube, it nonetheless has considerable influence, built on its “completely different news reality.”

“It fractures people’s understanding of news and information and creates a space in which empirical truth can be disputed without any substantive refutation,” Woolley said.

HOUSING IS A RIGHT
Squeezed by high costs, US tenants grapple with eviction

PROPERTY IS THEFT

By AFP
Published April 1, 2023

Laine Carolyn, shown here wiping her face during an interview at her Alexandria home, is among tenants in the United States confronting eviction risks in the face of high inflation - Copyright AFP Fabrice COFFRINI
Beiyi SEOW

For nearly eight years, driving for a ride-hailing platform and making deliveries helped Laine Carolyn pay her bills — but a sudden deterioration in health forced her to stop work and fall behind on rent.

Carolyn, 32, is among an increased number of US tenants confronting eviction risks in the face of high inflation, elevated rents and with the end of pandemic-era aid.

The country sees 3.6 million eviction cases filed in a typical year, said Peter Hepburn, associate director of Eviction Lab at Princeton University. But that number slowed to a trickle during the pandemic.

Now, with Covid-era legal protections and assistance lifted, it is surging again, Eviction Lab’s figures show.

At courthouses in Virginia, tenants living paycheck-to-paycheck told AFP how an unexpected accident or medical bill was enough to land them before a judge with an eviction filing.

Carolyn said she owes over $10,000 in rent and other fees. But she could not return to employment after being diagnosed with Graves’ disease and hospitalized last November.

“It was giving me double vision and it wasn’t safe for me to drive,” she said.

“There is brain fog, and it makes it almost impossible to think,” the Alexandria resident added.

Carolyn said that she cannot afford to appeal her eviction case, which requires her to repay her rent — so she is out of options. Now she is waiting for the axe to fall.


– ‘Steady increase’ –

There has been a “steady increase” in eviction filings over the last year, and nationwide numbers are now close to where they were before the pandemic, said Hepburn of Eviction Lab.

In the 10 states and 34 cities that the group tracks, the number of such cases filed rose from around 6,600 in April 2020 during the pandemic to over 96,800 in January.

Carolyn had worked out a payment plan with her landlord but it became increasingly hard to work as her health worsened: “I just couldn’t make enough money.”

“I managed to make $800 before I really got too sick to work. I had to choose between paying that towards rent or having food and some medicine,” she said.

“There is anger, there is frustration, there is guilt and even some shame that I probably shouldn’t be taking on because… I really am actually sick, and it’s something I gotta finish accepting,” she added.

Over a third of the US population rent their homes.

– Greater squeeze –

“We haven’t even seen a flattening out yet” after a dramatic rise in eviction filings, said Mary Horner, senior staff attorney at Legal Services of Northern Virginia (LSNV).

Some households were approved for rental assistance that never arrived as funding dried up, resulting in arrears of over $10,000.

But there are also many “who owe lower amounts, who simply cannot keep up with the increase in rents,” Horner said.

“Rents are a lot higher than they were. Inflation has made food more expensive… The money that families had before is just being stretched much more thinly,” she added.

In Richmond, Virginia, the situation is also grim with record-low vacancies and high rent increases, said Martin Wegbreit, litigation director at Central Virginia Legal Aid Society.

Richmond ranked second among large cities for eviction rates in 2016.

“It’s a perfect recipe for tenants being squeezed even more now than they were before the pandemic,” he added.

Yolanda Wilson, 45, said she had to get a new vehicle — which she needed for work — with money meant for rent after her car caught on fire.

The situation landed her with an eviction filing and some $2,900 to repay.

“Even if I have a plan (for repayment)… I feel anxious,” she said.

– Disproportionate hit –

Growth in rental prices has cooled but shelter costs still accounted for over 70 percent of the increase in consumer prices in February.

For many, the eviction process is traumatizing, said Horner of LSNV.

“Nearly all tenants are unrepresented… They don’t necessarily know what their rights are,” she said.

To appear in court, many have to take time off work, often bringing their children along as they lack childcare.

A 25-year-old tenant who gave her name only as Diamond returned to work shortly after having a baby in hopes of avoiding eviction.

“It’s stressful because I have a small child,” she told AFP. “Nobody wants to be out of a place to live.”

While President Joe Biden’s administration has announced actions to boost fairness in the rental market, it will take time for this to trickle down.

Black renters face greater risks, women are more likely to be listed as defendants and renters with children are at greatest risks of eviction, Hepburn noted.

“Economic factors go potentially a long way to explaining it, but we absolutely can’t eliminate the possibility that discrimination plays a part as well,” he said.

“When you’re filed against for eviction, that record follows you,” he added.

Barcode turns 50 but its days might be numbered
By AFP
PublishedApril 1, 2023

Barcodes have transformed supermarkets and allowed firms such as Russia's e-commerce company Wildberries to track goods - Copyright AFP/File Kirill KUDRYAVTSEV
Corentin DAUTREPPE, Emmanuelle BAILLON

The patch of irregular vertical lines that revolutionised checking out at the supermarket and facilitated the globalisation of retail is turning 50.

But as the barcode celebrates its birthday on Monday, its days might be numbered as it faces competition from the younger QR code, the information-filled squares used in smartphones.

The trademark beep as a product is scanned is heard about six billion times per day across the world as around 70,000 items are sold each second.

It has become so integrated in the shopping experience that it is easy to forget how much the technology revolutionised retail by speeding up the checkout process and giving retailers the ability to trace products and better manage inventory.

The barcode not only identifies a product, but “gives professionals in stores access to other functionalities”, said Laurence Vallana, head of France de SES-Imagotag, a company that specialises in electronic tagging.

– Chewing gum to fruit –

Barcodes were initially patented by Norman Joseph Woodland and Bernard Silver in the United States in 1952.

But it wasn’t until nearly two decades later, in 1971, that US engineer George Laurer perfected the technology and moves towards its commercialisation began.

On April 3, 1973 the standard to identify products was agreed by a number of large retailers and food companies. It later became known as EAN-13, which stands for European Article Number and the number of digits in the barcode.

The following year, on June 26 in the US state of Ohio, the first product was scanned: a pack of chewing gum that is now in the National Museum of American History in Washington.

Today, the non-governmental organisation Global Standard 1 manages the barcode system and counts about two million firms as members.

It provides companies with a unique “global trade item number” for each product, which is then translated into the barcode. Each firm must pay an annual fee based on their sales, up to nearly $5,000 per year.

– From bars to QRs –

But the humble barcode will soon give way to another standard developed by the organisation, said Renaud de Barbuat and Didier Veloso, the respective heads of GS1 Global and GS1 France.

The new standard, based on QR, or Quick Response code, will be introduced around 2027.

If barcodes have been compared to prison bars by critics of the over-commercialisation of society, the Chinese game Go with its white and black pieces on a square board was the inspiration for the QR code’s Japanese creator, Masahiro Hara.

Developed in 1994, QR codes can hold much more information as they are read both horizontally, like barcodes, and vertically.

Instead of having to search a database for information to go along with a product, the QR code can integrate information directly, such as the composition of the product and recycling instructions.

GS1 believes moving to the QR code format allows the sharing of far more information about products as well as content, enabling new uses that will be accessible to consumers as well as retailers.

As smartphones can read QR codes, they are an easy way to send people to websites to get additional information, leading to their widespread adoption by companies, artists and even museums. They are even used by payment systems.

But barcodes are likely to remain in place for years to come as the world gradually transitions to QR codes.