Engineers at the University of California, Berkeley, have developed a new neurostimulator that can listen to and stimulate electric current in the brain at the same time, potentially delivering fine-tuned treatments for patients with diseases like epilepsy and Parkinson's. Science Daily reports: The device, named the WAND, works like a "pacemaker for the brain," monitoring the brain's electrical activity and delivering electrical stimulation if it detects something amiss. These devices can be extremely effective at preventing debilitating tremors or seizures in patients with a variety of neurological conditions. But the electrical signatures that precede a seizure or tremor can be extremely subtle, and the frequency and strength of electrical stimulation required to prevent them is equally touchy. It can take years of small adjustments by doctors before the devices provide optimal treatment.

WAND, which stands for wireless artifact-free neuromodulation device, is both wireless and autonomous, meaning that once it learns to recognize the signs of tremor or seizure, it can adjust the stimulation parameters on its own to prevent the unwanted movements. And because it is closed-loop -- meaning it can stimulate and record simultaneously -- it can adjust these parameters in real-time. WAND can record electrical activity over 128 channels, or from 128 points in the brain, compared to eight channels in other closed-loop systems. To demonstrate the device, the team used WAND to recognize and delay specific arm movements in rhesus macaques. The device is described in a study that appeared in Nature Biomedical Engineering.

A federal district court has ruled that the state of Oregon illegally infringed on a man's First Amendment rights for fining him $500 because he wrote "I am an engineer" in a 2014 email to the state's Engineering Board. The court ruled that the provision in the law he broke is unconstitutional, which opens the door for people in the state to legally call themselves "engineers." Motherboard reports: This dystopian saga dates back to 2013, when Mats Jarlstrom's wife, while driving, was caught by a red light camera near their home in Beaverton, Oregon. Rather than pay the red light camera fine, Jarlstrom, an electrical engineer, spent months researching the specifics of yellow light timing and red light cameras, and learned that his wife had likely been ticketed for running a yellow light. Jarlstrom began sharing his findings on his personal website, at conferences, and even got featured on 60 Minutes. He also wrote several emails to the Oregon Board of Engineers explaining what he had found. In the email, he noted that he was an "engineer."

Rather than looking into whether traffic light timing should be changed, however, the board sent Jarlstrom a warning -- and then a $500 fine for the crime of "practicing engineering without being registered." Jarlstrom had violated one of Oregon's "Title Laws," which states that "no persons may ... hold themselves out as an 'engineer'" unless they are an "individual who is registered in this state and holds a valid certificate to practice engineering in this state." Jarlstrom has a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering and spent his career working in electronics, but wasn't board certified. He sued the state's engineering board and, last week, a U.S. District Court judge for the District of Oregon ruled that the state's law is unconstitutional. The judge wrote: "The statutes prohibit truthfully describing oneself as an 'engineer,' in any context. This restriction clearly controls and suppresses protected speech, and enforcement of the statute against protected speech is not a hypothetical threat. The term 'engineer,' standing alone, is neither actually nor inherently misleading. Courts have long recognized that the term 'engineer' has a generic meaning separate from 'professional engineer' and that the term has enjoyed 'widespread usage in job titles in our society to describe positions which require no professional training.'"

"The judge ordered that the word 'engineer' be struck from Oregon's law, which is 'substantially overbroad in violation of the First Amendment' and specifically noted that Jarlstrom may describe himself publicly and privately using the word 'engineer' and that he may continue to talk about traffic light timing publicly," reports Motherboard.

A fifth of Earth's geologic history might have vanished because planet-wide glaciers buried the evidence. From a report: The Grand Canyon is a gigantic geological library, with rocky layers that tell much of the story of Earth's history. Curiously though, a sizeable layer representing anywhere from 250 million years to 1.2 billion years is missing. Known as the Great Unconformity, this massive temporal gap can be found not just in this famous crevasse, but in places all over the world. In one layer, you have the Cambrian period, which started roughly 540 million years ago and left behind sedimentary rocks packed with the fossils of complex, multicellular life. Directly below, you have fossil-free crystalline basement rock, which formed about a billion or more years ago.

So where did all the rock that belongs in between these time periods go? Using multiple lines of evidence, an international team of geoscientists reckons that the thief was Snowball Earth, a hypothesized time when much, if not all, of the planet was covered in ice. According to the team, at intervals within those billion or so years, up to a third of Earth's crust was sawn off by Snowball Earth's roaming glaciers and their erosive capabilities. The resulting sediment was dumped into the slush-covered oceans, where it was then sucked into the mantle by subducting tectonic plates.

Effectively, in many locations, Earth buried the evidence of about a fifth of its geological history, the team argued this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The notion is elegant but provocative, and the authors themselves predict that some geoscientists will express skepticism. "I think, though, we have extraordinary evidence to support that extraordinary claim," says study leader C. Brenhin Keller, a postdoctoral fellow at the Berkeley Geochronology Center.

A Chinese space probe successfully touched down on the far side of the moon on Thursday, China's space agency said, hailing the event as a historic first and a major achievement for the country's space program. From a report: The Chang'e-4 lunar probe, launched in December, made the "soft landing" at 0226 GMT and transmitted the first-ever "close range" image of the far side of the moon, the China National Space Administration said. The moon is tidally locked to Earth, rotating at the same rate as it orbits our planet, so most of the far side -- or "dark side" -- is never visible to us. Previous spacecraft have seen the far side, but none has landed on it. The landing "lifted the mysterious veil" of the far side of the moon and "opened a new chapter in human lunar exploration", the agency said in a statement on its website, which included a wide-angle color picture of a crater from the moon's surface.

A research group in Japan has developed an inexpensive, large-scale and flexible thermoelectric generator (FlexTEG) that has high mechanical reliability and can convert heat into electricity efficiently. The findings are published in the journal Advanced Materials Technologies. From a report: Thermoelectric conversion is one of the most attractive techniques for converting low-temperature (150C or lower) waste heat into electric power. However, widespread adoption of this technology has been hampered by a lack of suitable packaging techniques for thermoelectric generation modules that can operate in the 100-150C range. In addition, the production cost of modules for generating power at room temperature was prohibitive.

In the present study, scientists at Osaka University, Japan, have developed a method to manufacture thermoelectric generation modules in a cost-efficient manner while preserving the conversion efficiency of the modules. They mounted small thermoelectric semiconductor chips on a flexible substrate and were able to achieve reliable and stable adhesion of the electrical contacts between the chips and the flexible substrate. They called their invention FlexTEG.

An anonymous reader shares a report: An innovation at Caltech allows scientists to play a virtual "tic-tac-toe" game with individual strands of DNA, providing a new way to experiment with DNA sequencing and create custom patterns. According to ArsTechnica, the technique was dubbed "DNA Origami [paper; PDF]" by its creator Lulu Qian and is considered by Caltech fellows to be a "huge advancement" in the field of nanotechnology (manipulation of particles on a minute, atomic scale).

NASA received a critical signal from one of its most distant spacecrafts this morning, confirming that the vehicle has just flown by a tiny frozen rock in the outer reaches of the Solar System. From a report: That space probe, named New Horizons, has now made history. Currently located more than 4 billion miles from Earth, the spacecraft has now whizzed past the most distant -- and most primitive -- object that's ever been visited by humanity. "We have a healthy spacecraft," Alice Bowman, the mission operations manager for the New Horizons mission, said after confirming the feat. "We've just accomplished the most distant flyby."

"It's a flyby that's been over a decade in the making, too. Launched in 2006, New Horizons famously passed by Pluto in 2015, becoming the first mission to ever reach the dwarf planet. But ever since that flyby, New Horizons has kept on speeding through the Solar System, in order to meet up with this new object, nicknamed Ultima Thule.

Mark Zuckerberg and his pediatrician wife Priscilla Chan have sold close to 30 million shares of Facebook to fund an ambitious biomedical research project, called the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI), with a goal of curing all disease within a generation. A less publicized component of that US$5 billion program includes work on brain-machine interfaces, devices that essentially translate thoughts into commands. From a report: One recent project is a wireless brain implant that can record, stimulate and disrupt the movement of a monkey in real time. In a paper published in the highly cited scientific journal Nature on Monday, researchers detail a wireless brain device implanted in a primate that records, stimulates, and modifies its brain activity in real time, sensing a normal movement and stopping it immediately. Those researchers are part of the Chan Zuckerberg Biohub, a non-profit medical research group within the CZI. Scientists refer to the interference as "therapy" because it is designed to be used to treat diseases like epilepsy or Parkinson's by stopping a seizure or other disruptive motion just as it starts.

"Our device is able to monitor the primate's brain while it's providing the therapy so you know exactly what's happening," Rikky Muller, a co-author of the new study, told Business Insider. A professor of computer science and engineering at the University of California, Berkeley, Muller is also a Biohub investigator. The applications of brain-machine interfaces are far-reaching: while some researchers focus on using them to help assist people with spinal cord injuries or other illnesses that affect movement, others aim to see them transform how everyone interacts with laptops and smartphones. Both a division at Facebook formerly called Building 8 as well as an Elon Musk-founded company called Neuralink have said they are working on the latter.

Late last week, a team of about 50 scientists, drillers, and support staff successfully punched through nearly 4,000 feet of ice to access an Antarctic subglacial lake for just the second time in human history. From a report: On Friday, the Subglacial Antarctic Lakes Scientific Access (SALSA) team announced they'd reached Lake Mercer after melting their way through an enormous frozen river with a high-pressure, hot-water drill. The multi-year effort to tap into the subglacial lake -- one of approximately 400 scientists have detected across Antarctica -- offers a rare opportunity to study the biology and chemistry of the most isolated ecosystems on Earth. The only other subglacial lake humans have drilled into -- nearby Lake Whillans, sampled in 2013 -- demonstrated that these extreme environments can play host to diverse microbial life. Naturally, scientists are stoked to see what they'll find lurking in Lake Mercer's icy waters. "We don't know what we'll find," John Priscu, a biogeochemist at Montana State University and chief scientist for SALSA, told Earther via satellite phone from the SALSA drill camp on the Whillans Ice Plain. "We're just learning, it's only the second time that this has been done."

Russell Lewis, writing for NPR: When Nancy Grace Roman was a child, her favorite object to draw was the moon. Her mother used to take her on walks under the nighttime sky and show her constellations, or point out the colorful swirls of the aurora. Roman loved to look up at the stars and imagine. Eventually, her passion for stargazing blossomed into a career as a renowned astronomer. Roman was one of the first female executives at NASA, where she served as the agency's first chief of astronomy. Known as the "Mother of Hubble," for her role in making the Hubble Space Telescope a reality, Roman worked at NASA for nearly two decades. She died on Dec. 25 at the age of 93.

Roman fought to earn her place in a field dominated by men, paving the path for future female scientists. She was born in Nashville, Tenn. in 1925 and organized an astronomy club in fifth grade. She attended high school in Baltimore, where she requested to take a second year of algebra instead of a fifth year of Latin. When she made the appeal, she recounted in a 2017 interview with NPR that the guidance counselor wasn't supportive of her dream to become a scientist.

Her efforts helped lead to the creation of the Hubble Space Telescope. In her role at NASA, Roman developed and planned the Hubble Space Telescope, which is famous for its stunning images of space. Because of the Hubble Space Telescope, scientists have been able to collect data and gain insight into even the most remote galaxies of the universe. The success of the project led to future space telescopes. Roman's work, however, reached far beyond just the Hubble Space Telescope. In an interview with NASA, Roman once stated that one of the highlights of her career was when she discovered the first indication that common stars were not all the same age.

schwit1 shares a report: Another year, another reason to take the promises of residential home batteries with a grain of salt. This month, a group of researchers from the University of California San Diego (UCSD) published a paper in Environmental Science and Technology reporting that there are very few cases in which operating a residential home battery reduces overall emissions -- assuming that households are economically rational and trying to minimize costs.

Of course, if the battery is only discharged during periods of peak emissions and only charged when fossil fuel use is low, then a household might reduce emissions. But across 16 representative regions, operating a battery this way ended up being costly. "There may be good reasons to decentralize the grid through ubiquitous installation of small RES [Residential Energy Storage], but cost-effective emissions control is not one of them at the moment," the researchers write.

NASA's New Horizons spacecraft will visit a tiny and mysterious object in the Kuiper belt on Tuesday, seeking clues to the formation of our cosmic neighborhood. From a report: In June 1983, newspaper headlines declared that NASA's Pioneer 10 spacecraft had left the solar system, crossing beyond the orbit of Neptune. It was the common view of the time: All of the solar system's big, interesting things -- the sun and the nine planets -- were behind Pioneer 10. Thirty-five years later, the Kuiper belt -- the region Pioneer 10 was just entering -- and the spaces beyond are perhaps the most fascinating parts of the solar system. In their vast, icy reaches are clues about how the sun and planets, including ours, coalesced out of gas and dust 4.5 billion years ago. Even farther out might be bodies the size of Mars or Earth, or even a larger one some astronomers call Planet Nine, and technological advances could usher in a new age of planetary discovery.

On Tuesday, New Horizons, the NASA spacecraft that snapped spectacular photographs of Pluto in 2015, will provide humanity with a close-up of one of these mysterious, distant and tiny icy worlds. Its target of exploration is believed to be just 12 to 22 miles wide, known as 2014 MU69 -- its designation in the International Astronomical Union's catalog of worlds -- or Ultima Thule, the nickname bestowed upon it by the New Horizons team. This will be the farthest object ever visited by a spacecraft. New Horizons will speed past Ultima Thule at 31,500 miles per hour and pass within 2,200 miles of the surface. What the probe finds could reveal much about the earliest days of the solar system and what else lies in the Kuiper belt.

The Trump administration announced on Friday a plan designed to make it easier for coal-fired power plants, after nearly a decade of restrictions, to release into the atmosphere more mercury and other pollutants linked to developmental disorders and respiratory illnesses [Editor's note: the link may be paywalled; alternative source]. From a report: The limits on mercury, set in 2011, were the first federal standards to restrict some of the most hazardous pollutants emitted by coal plants and were considered one of former President Barack Obama's signature environmental achievements. Since then, scientists have said, mercury pollution from power plants has declined more than 80 percent nationwide. President Trump's new proposal does not repeal the regulation, known as the Mercury and Air Toxics Standards, but it would lay the groundwork for doing so by weakening a key legal justification for the measure. The long-term impact would be significant: It would weaken the ability of the E.P.A. to impose new regulations in the future by adjusting the way the agency measures the benefits of curbing pollutants, giving less weight to the potential health gains.

In announcing the proposed rule, the Environmental Protection Agency said in a statement that the cost of cutting mercury from power plants "dwarfs" the monetary benefits. The proposal, which the acting E.P.A. administrator, Andrew Wheeler, signed on Thursday, is expected to appear in the federal register in the coming weeks. The public will have 60 days to comment on it before a final rule is issued. [...] Reworking the mercury rule, which the E.P.A. considers the priciest clean air regulation ever put forth in terms of annual cost to industry, would represent a victory for the coal industry, and in particular for Robert E. Murray, an important former client of Mr. Wheeler's from his days as a lobbyist.

A gene editing technique has been used to produce asexual rice, which could carry traits such as high yields and drought resistance. From a report: After more than 20 years of theorizing about it, scientists have tweaked a hybrid variety of rice so that some of the plants produce cloned seeds. No plant sex necessary. The feat, described earlier this month in Nature, is encouraging for efforts to feed an increasingly crowded world. Crossing two good varieties of grain can make one fabulous one, combining the best versions of genes to give crops desirable traits such as higher yields. But such hybrid grain marvels often don't pass along those coveted genetic qualities to all seeds during reproduction. So farmers who want consistently higher yields have to pay for new hybrid seeds every year.

This new lab version of hybrid rice would preserve those qualities through self-cloning, says study coauthor Venkatesan Sundaresan, a plant geneticist at the University of California, Davis. Though 400 kinds of plants, including some blackberries and citruses, have developed self-cloning seeds naturally, re-creating those pathways in crop plants has "been harder than anyone expected," Sundaresan says. He and his colleagues got the idea for the new research while studying "how a fertilized egg becomes a zygote, this magical cell that regenerates an entire organism," as Sundaresan puts it. The researchers discovered that modifying two sets of genes caused the japonica rice hybrid called Kitaake to clone its own seeds. First the team found that in a fertilized plant egg, only the male version of a gene called BABY BOOM1 found in sperm triggered the development of a seed embryo. So the scientists inserted a genetic starter switch, called a promoter, that let the female version of the same gene do the same job. No male would be necessary to trigger an embryo's development.

French tech company Sigfox has developed a bite-size tracker that can be inserted into the horns of rhinos to help conservationists monitor and protect the endangered species. From a report: With the dramatic decline of animal species in the past century mostly due to poaching and urban expansion, wildlife organizations have turned to technology to help safeguard species being pushed towards extinction. The global number of rhinos dwindled to about 20,000 a decade ago due to relentless poaching, though they have rebounded to about 29,000 thanks to conservation efforts. Cameras, infrared and motion sensors, electronic bracelets and drones have been used over the years to protect endangered species, but have at times been limited by vast distances and limited resources in the countries concerned. Sigfox, known for building networks that link objects to the internet, has developed sensors able to give the exact location of rhinos using the firm's network over a longer period of time. [...] The sensors can alert park rangers when rhinos approach an area identified as particularly dangerous due to previous instances of poaching. Combined with other warning sensors, they can be used to get rescue teams to the location in real time.

Researchers have developed an artificial intelligence system that can automatically differentiate between different types of cancer cells and their sensitivity to radiotherapy. From a report: A team of researchers in Japan have devised an artificial intelligence (AI) system that can identify different types of cancer cells using microscopy images. Their method can also be used to determine whether the cancer cells are sensitive to radiotherapy. The researchers reported their findings in the journal Cancer Research. In cancer patients, there can be tremendous variation in the types of cancer cells in a single tumor. Identifying the specific cell types present in tumors can be very useful when choosing the most effective treatment. However, making accurate assessments of cell types is time consuming and often hampered by human error and the limits of human sight. To overcome these challenges, scientists led by Professor Hideshi Ishii of Osaka University, Japan, have developed an AI system that can identify different types of cancer cells from microscopy images, achieving higher accuracy than human judgement.

Scientists in Hong Kong, the Philippines and Guam have found that whale shark tourism in Tan-awan, Oslob, the Philippines, has led to degradation of the local coral reef ecosystem. They reported their findings in Environmental Management. From a report: Oslob, a small municipality on the south coast of Cebu, the Philippines, has become a domestic and international tourism hotspot since 2011, attracting over 300,000 visitors to the village of Tan-awan in 2015. The mass tourism phenomenon is fueled by the year-round presence of whale sharks along the local shallow reef. This unusual aggregation is maintained by the local tourism association feeding the whale sharks with up to 50 tons of shrimps annually.

In this study, scientists from the University of Hong Kong (HKU), the University of Guam, and the Large Marine Vertebrates Research Institute Philippines (LAMAVE) have demonstrated that whale shark tourism has had a detrimental effect on the local reef ecosystem off the coast of Tan-awan. They found that Tan-awan had higher macroalgae and lower coral density, as well as a less diverse coral community dominated by weedy corals and stress-tolerant corals, in comparison to a reference site further south of the coast.

[...] The researchers added that reef degradation in Tan-awan requires immediate attention, given that reef health underpins the ecosystem services afforded to the local communities, including the important tourism sector. As whale shark tourism is projected to grow continuously in the foreseeable future, the research team urges the need for local authorities to implement proper management strategies to mitigate the problems and risks associated with the rapid tourism development.

No one told them to look for the Earth. It was Christmas Eve 1968 and the first manned mission to the moon had reached its destination. As Apollo 8 slipped into lunar orbit the crew prepared to read passages of Genesis for a TV broadcast to the world. But as the command module came around on its fourth lap, there it was visible through the window -- a bright blue and white bauble suspended in the black above the relentless grey of the moon. The Guardian: Before that moment 50 years ago, no one had seen an earthrise. The sight sent Bill Anders, the mission photographer, scrambling for his camera. He slapped a 70mm colour roll into the Hasselblad, set the focus to infinity, and started shooting though the telephoto lens. What he captured became one of the most influential images in history. A driving force of the environmental movement, the picture, which became known as Earthrise, showed the world as a singular, fragile, oasis.

On previous laps Anders had snapped the far side of the moon for the geologists and the near side of it for Apollo's landing site planners. "It didn't take long for the moon to become boring. It was like dirty beach sand," Anders told the Guardian. "Then we suddenly saw this object called Earth. It was the only colour in the universe." Apollo 8 launched from the Kennedy Space Centre in Florida on 21 December 1968. The enormous Saturn V rocket, more than 110 metres tall, had flown only twice before and never with a crew. But on that day the rocket performed. Tucked inside the command module, Anders, Frank Borman and James Lovell looped the planet twice before the third stage blasted them onwards to the moon. They arrived nearly three days later, completed 10 lunar orbits, and headed home for a splashdown in the north Pacific.

Earthrise did not have an immediate impact. Its philosophical significance sunk in over years, after Nasa put it on a stamp, and Time and Life magazine highlighted it as an era-defining image. "It gained this iconic status," Anders said. "People realised that we lived on this fragile planet and that we needed to take care of it." The shot did more than boost the environmental movement. Even Anders, who calls himself "an arch cold war warrior," felt it held a message for humanity. "This is the only home we have and yet we're busy shooting at each other, threatening nuclear war, and wearing suicide vests," he said. "It amazes me." Further reading: Wired.

President Donald Trump last week signed legislation ramping up quantum computing research and development. From a report: The National Quantum Initiative Act (H.R. 6227) authorizes $1.2 billion over five years for federal activities aimed at boosting investment in quantum information science, or QIS, and supporting a quantum-smart workforce. The law also establishes a National Quantum Coordination Office, calls for the development of a five-year strategic plan and establishes an advisory committee to advise the White House on issues relating to quantum computing. "This next great technological revolution has far-reaching implications for job creation, economic growth and national security," Michael Kratsios, deputy assistant to the president for technology policy, said in a White House statement. "We look forward to building upon efforts to support the quantum-smart workforce of the future and engage with government, academic and private-sector leaders to advance QIS."

[...] Earlier this month, a report from the National Academies of Science said there is an urgent need to develop "post-quantum" encryption protocols in order to protect commerce and national security. QIS research could also produce new types of quantum processors, sensors, navigation tools and security systems. The challenges could bring about "new approaches to understanding materials, chemistry and even gravity through quantum information theory," according to a White House strategy paper issued in September.

One of the first men to orbit the Moon has told BBC Radio 5 Live that it's "stupid" to plan human missions to Mars. Bill Anders, lunar module pilot of Apollo 8, the first human spaceflight to leave Earth's orbit, said sending crews to Mars was "almost ridiculous". From a report: NASA is currently planning new human missions to the Moon. It wants to learn the skills and develop the technology to enable a future human landing on Mars. NASA was approached for a response to Anders' comments, but hasn't responded.

Anders, 85, said he's a "big supporter" of the "remarkable" unmanned programmes, "mainly because they're much cheaper". But he says the public support simply isn't there to fund vastly more expensive human missions. "What's the imperative? What's pushing us to go to Mars?" he said, adding "I don't think the public is that interested". Meanwhile, robotic probes are still exploring Mars. Last month, the InSight lander, which will sample the planet's interior, successfully touched down at Elysium Planitia. Further reading: Bill Nye: We Are Not Going To Live on Mars, Let Alone Turn It Into Earth.