Cool STEM News:

Team links gut bacteria to neurodegenerative diseases | Futurity (01:09)

• Researchers have established a link between specific gut bacteria species and physical manifestations of neurodegenerative diseases.
• Scientists looked in an unexpected place: the digestive tract of a tiny, translucent worm called Caenorhabditis elegans.
  • Non-hazardous, non-infectious, non-pathogenic, non-parasitic organism. 
  • Small, growing to about 1 mm in length and lives in the soil
  • They are a lot like us humans—they have intestines and muscles and nerves, but instead of being composed of billions of cells, each organ is just a handful of cells.
• “Looking at the microbiome is a relatively new approach to investigating what causes neurodegenerative diseases. In this study, we were able to show that specific species of bacteria play a role in the development of these conditions,”  said co-author assistant professor Daniel Czyz (/CHEZ/)
• He also continues by saying that this study helps shed light on why patients with these diseases (i.e. Parkinson’s or Alzheimer’s) have a lack of “good” bacteria.
• All neurodegenerative diseases can be traced to problems with the way proteins are handled in the body.
  • Proteins are misfolded and they accumulate causing them to interfere with cellular function leading to neurodegenerative disorders.
• The researchers wanted to know if introducing certain bacteria into the worms would be followed by protein aggregation in the worms’ tissues. 
• That is in fact what they observed. According to Czyz (/CHEZ/), “worms colonized by certain bacteria species were lit up with [protein] aggregates that were toxic to tissues, while those colonized by the control bacteria were not.”
• The offspring of affected worms also showed increased protein aggregation.
  • They never encountered the bacteria originally associated with the condition.
• Researchers tested the worms by how much they would wiggle off a “pick” (i.e. thing you would pick them up with.)
  • Healthy: Would wiggle free. Unhealthy: Would stay on the pick.
• Currently, in Czyz’s lab, they are testing hundreds of strains of bacteria found in the human gut to see how they affect protein accumulation in C. elegans.

Australia’s First Working Solar Panel Recycling Plant Is Up and Running  | Interesting Engineering (07:30)

• According to a Renew Economy post, Australia’s first solar panel recycling facility run by  Lotus Energy is up and running in Thomastown, Melbourne.
  • Claims to recycle 100 percent of end-of-life solar PV modules using no chemicals.

• According to an Australian National University (ANU) report, renewable energy in Australia is growing at a per capita rate ten times faster than the world average, meaning it will form a testing ground for new solar panel recycling methods.
  • In 2018, they produced 220 watts per person per year
• Why is this recycling plant important? The social panel’s waste!
  • From Discover Magazine’s article Solar Panel Waste: The Dark Side of Clean Energy 
    • Most solar recycling plants simply remove the valuable silver and copper from the cells and then recycle the contaminated glass and plastic casing by burning them in cement ovens.
      • The process is costly and time-consuming. Cheaper to just dump in a landfill.
    • Issues that come with the heavy metals in solar panels (namely lead and cadmium) that can leach out getting into the environment, which would be bad!
      • Lead is commonly known to impair brain development in children
      • Cadmium is a carcinogen.
    • It is projected that there will be 80 million tons of solar waste by 2050.
• Video of the recycling process here!

This tech can see inside fruit so we know exactly when it will be ripe | Fast Company (13:24)

• When a shipment of avocados arrives at an importer in the Netherlands, each fruit goes down a conveyor belt and two things happen.
  1. A machine applies an invisible, edible coating to help the avocado last longer.
  2. Next, the machine uses hyperspectral imaging to look inside the fruit without removing the peel.
     • Collects hundreds of images at different wavelengths for the same spatial area
     • Measures the continuous spectrum of the light for each pixel of the scene with fine wavelength resolution, not only in the visible but also in the near-infrared.
• “This technology gives us the ability to see things about fruits and vegetables that you just couldn’t see before with the naked eye,” says James Rogers, CEO of Apeel, the California-based company that makes the technology. 
• The equipment bounces light off a piece of fruit and some of that light goes inside the fruit.
• From that process, it is possible to gather data on exactly how ripe and fresh it is. Allowing distributors to make decisions about how long it will last and where it should be delivered.
• Rogers goes on to talk about the variables that go into the ripeness of produce and how utilizing measurements adds more predictability to the process, “ [It] is a function of the weather … It’s a function of the growing environment. It’s a function of how it was handled. You introduce all this additional variability into something that was already variable. And so being able to take a measurement of individual pieces of produce, and know exactly what’s going on with that piece of fruit or vegetable, adds a level of predictability and quality assurance to the supply chain which is not a staple of the food system today.”
• This new imaging also yields other data, including the nutritional content, which varies from one avocado to the next. 
• The company is rolling the new feature out across all of its equipment, and some customers are already using it, such as Nature’s Pride, the largest avocado importer in Europe. 
• We could finally have accurate expiration dates for produce! Woo!

Researchers Have Developed Road Chargers For EVs | Jalopnik (18:49)

• A big barrier for EVs is the charging, which was showcased in a study by UC Davis: Roughly 1 in 5 California electric/hybrid owners switch back to gasoline vehicles.
  • All due to the convenience of pumping up gas.
  • Good video on this topic: The Electric Vehicle Charging Problem | YouTube
• Researchers out of Cornell University have been developing a solution to battery range and charging availability. 
  • Technology that would allow drivers to charge their electric vehicle while they are in motion. 
• Khurram Afridi, an associate professor of electrical and computer engineering at Cornell, talked with Business Insider about this technology:
  • “Highways would have a charging lane, sort of like a high occupancy lane … If you were running out of battery you would move into the charging lane. It would be able to identify which car went into the lane and it would later send you a bill.”
• Afridi’s technology would embed special metal plates in the road that are connected to a powerline and a high-frequency inverter. 
• The plates will create alternating electric fields that attract and repel a pair of matching plates attached to the bottom of the EV.
• Afridi’s team has already made several advances and can power vehicles with up to 18 centimeters of clearance from the road, which accounts for most EVs.
• Additionally, they created technology that allows the vehicle to gain full power when passing over the charging plates (which would be embedded several meters apart) even if they are not fully aligned.
• The major issue would be the major change of infrastructure required for this technology. 
  • IT would require a massive overhaul of major US roadways.
  • Afridi told Insider one approach would be to electrify busy highways and major cities first.

Neural implant lets paralyzed person type by imagining writing | ArsTechnica (29:14)

• Using an implant, a paralyzed individual managed to type out roughly 90 characters per minute simply by imagining that he was writing those characters out by hand.
• Somewhere in our writing thought process, we form the intention of using a specific character, and using an implant to track this intention could potentially work.
• Researchers placed two implants in the premotor cortex of a paralyzed person. This area is thought to be involved in forming the intentions to perform movements.
  • Roughly 200 electrodes in the participant’s premotor cortex. 
• Catching these intentions is much more likely to produce a clear signal than catching the movements themselves.
• The researchers performed a principal component analysis (PCA), which identified the features of the neural recordings that differed the most when various letters were imagined. 
  • In basic terms, PCA projects higher dimensional data into a lower dimension by combining correlated features into new features.
• They took these recordings and converted them into a two-dimensional plot.
• When “writing” a single character the activity in the brain clusters together signaling what the researchers needed to key into when deciphering signals from the implant.
• Overall, the researchers found they could decipher the appropriate character with an accuracy of a bit over 94 percent
  • However, the system required a relatively slow analysis after the neural data was recorded.
• This is where a trained recurrent neural network algorithm came into play to try to speed up the process. 
  • Estimate the probability of a signal corresponding to each letter.
• The algorithm worked well, with only a lag of roughly half a second to go from thinking to displaying it. 
• The participant was able to produce about 90 characters per minute, easily topping the previous record for implant-driven typing, which was about 25 characters per minute.
  • Done with prepared sentences.
  • Error rates w/ autocorrect was 1%.
• When the system went to free-form writing the speed dropped to 75 characters a minute.
  • Error rates w/ autocorrect was 2%.