Continue reading What $20 million means to both Tesla and Fisker

What $20 million means to both Tesla and Fisker originally appeared on Autoblog Green on Thu, 23 May 2013 19:14:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Twenty-five years ago, when Gregory Canyon was first proposed as a landfill site, I was in elementary school. A lot has happened in the intervening decades, and I’d like to think that I have evolved with the times: I now grow an urban garden, compost, and sort my trash.

What has changed about the ill-begotten proposal to make a dump of pristine Gregory Canyon? Nothing. The project’s proponents, Gregory Canyon Ltd., are still pushing to pile 30 million tons of garbage 500 feet high in undeveloped Gregory Canyon, imperil the San Luis Rey River, and desecrate Native American sacred sites.

It’s easy to grow weary in the middle of a long fight. The beauty and sanctity of Gregory Canyon itself help remind us what is at stake. Journalist and recent San Diego State University graduate, Ethan Orenstein put together a slideshow of pictures from the beloved Canyon.

Where are we in the struggle to stop the dump? Last month, NRDC submitted comments in opposition to Gregory Canyon Ltd.’s application to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers for a section 404 Clean Water Act permit to permanently discharge fill material into the San Luis Rey River. We await the Army Corps’ decision. As we explained in our comment letter, putting a landfill next to a river is not just an environmental disaster, it’s an anachronism. The landfill is a “vestige of a fading era." It’s not the 1980s, and I’m not the only one who has changed my personal waste management habits. Recycling, composting, and reuse rates have increased dramatically and continue to rise. It is a State of Californian goal, by law, to divert 75 percent of waste by 2020. We just don’t need this dump.

Over 300 people attended the Army Corps’ public hearing about the section 404 permit, including NRDC’s Damon Nagami, who testified at and blogged about the hearing. Several tribes have spoken out and written letters in opposition to the 404 permit, including: San Luis Rey Band of Mission Indians, Pechanga Band of Mission Indians, La Jolla Band of Luiseno Indians, Pinoleville Pomo Nation, Habematolel Pomo of Upper Lake, Karuk Tribe, Blue Lake Rancheria, Sycuan Band of Kumeyaay Indians, and the Southern California Tribal Chairmen’s Association.

In addition, over six hundred people signed a Pala Band of Mission Indians petition opposing the permit and stating that the dump is not in the public interest.

Bad ideas die hard. We’ve blogged about this dump once, twice, three times before, and the fight’s not over. Gregory Canyon Ltd. still needs several additional permits including from the San Diego Air Pollution Control District, from the San Diego Regional Water Quality Control Board, a construction permit for the bridge, various encroachment permits, a permit in accordance with the Bald and Golden Eagle Protection Act, and to complete consultation with U.S. Fish & Wildlife Services and to undergo review in accordance with the National Historic Preservation Act.

NRDC will continue to oppose the project, to speak out about the myriad of problems with the planned landfill, and to do everything we can to ensure that the dump dies.

And then, we will finally be able to say goodbye to a stinking era.

As a recent PhD, I can attest to the fact that many researchers first experience the iceberg as no more than an ice cube-sized annoyance impeding their work towards a Nobel Prize. Maybe the experimental instructions from a rival lab don’t quite seem to work. Maybe the data you’re trying to replicate for your homework assignment don’t add up, as UMass graduate student Thomas Herndon found. If a spreadsheet error that underpins sweeping global economic policy doesn’t convince you, here is some more evidence that we are already scraping the iceberg of a research and data reliability crisis.

All those life-saving cancer drugs? Drug makers Amgen and Bayer found that the majority of research behind them couldn’t be reproduced.

Amgen only able to reproduce 11% of landmark papers bit.ly/Hkk2MM ; Bayer had similar findings in NRDD last year bit.ly/Hkklav- Nature Rev Drug Disc (@NatRevDrugDisc) March 29, 2012

What about neutral reporting of scientific results? A number of pervasive sources of bias in the scientific literature have been discovered, such as selective reporting of positive results, data suppression, or academic competition and pressure to publish. The hunger for ever more novel and high-impact results that could lead to that coveted paper in a top-tier journal like Nature or Science is not dissimilar to the clickbait headlines and obsession with pageviews we see in modern journalism. (The long-form investigative story is experiencing a bit of a digital renaissance, so maybe that bodes well for the appreciation of “slow science.”)

Readers of the New York Times Magazine will recall last month’s profile of Diederik Stapel, prolific data falsifier and holder of the number-two spot in the list of authors with the most scientific paper retractions. ScienceIsBroken.org is a frank compendium of first-hand anecdotes from the lab frontlines (the tags #MyLabIsSoPoor and #OverlyHonestMethods reflect the dire straits of research funding and the corner-cutting that can result) and factoids that drive home just how tenuous many published scientific results are (“Only 0.1% of published exploratory research is estimated to be reproducible”). The provocative title of a 2005 essay by Stanford professor John Ioannidis sums it up: “Why Most Published Research Findings Are False.”

Interestingly, unlike in science where many results are interdependent and on-the-record, in big data accuracy is not as much of an issue. As my colleague Derrick Harris points out, for big data scientists the abilty to churn through huge amounts of data very quickly is actually more important than complete accuracy. One reason for this is that they're not dealing with, say, life-saving drug treatments, but with things like targeted advertising, where you don't have to be 100 percent accurate. Big data scientists would rather be pointed in the right general direction faster - and course-correct as they go – than have to wait to be pointed in the exact right direction. This kind of error-tolerance has insidiously crept into science, too.

Fraud (the principal cause of retractions, which are up roughly tenfold since 1975)  is not a new phenomenon, but digital manipulation and distribution tools have increased the spread and impact of science, both faulty and legitimate, beyond the confines of the ivory tower. Patients now look for new clinical trial data online in search of cures, and studies that are ultimately retracted (with a delay of 12 years, in the case of the infamous MMR vaccine study published in The Lancet) can persist in their effects on public health, and public opinion.

Even in fields that don't end up in the news or have direct medical impact, the effects of a retraction can be broad and disconcerting. When a lab at the Scripps Research Institute had to retract five papers because of a software error, hundreds of other researchers who based their work on those findings, and who used the same software, were affected. When the proverbial giants on whose shoulders scientists stand turn out to be a house of cards, years of effort can go down the drain.

For those providing the funding, like foundations and the federal government, events like this present a further justification to tighten the purse strings, and for the general public, they serve to deepen the distrust of science and increase the reluctance to support audacious (and economically and medically important) projects. This is not a PR crisis borne out of the actions of greedy charlatans or “nutty professors” – they are but a highly visible minority. The real problems for research reproducibility have to do with how we handle data, and are much more benign – and controllable.

As I reported last week, blind trust in black box scientific software is one part of the problem. Users of such software may not fully understand how the scientific sausage they end up with is made. Om has written about the deterministic influence big social data can have on people and businesses. As the velocity and volume of data have increased, the practices of science have struggled to keep pace. (I will discuss some potential solutions to the data-credibility problem in a separate post tomorrow.)

The question of whether the retraction and irreproducibility epidemic is spreading is akin to the debate over whether spiking autism or ADHD rates, for example, are real or the result of better diagnoses. The recent insight that retractions are correlated with impact factor (a measure of journal prestige derived from the number of citations papers in journals receive) seems to suggest that much of the most valued and publicized science could be less than trustworthy. (Retractions can result from innocuous omissions or malfunctioning equipment as well as more severe and willful acts like plagiarism or fraud.)

Some see the phenomenon not as an epidemic but as a rash, a sign that the research ecosystem is getting healthier and more transparent. Openness is indeed a much-touted solution to the woes of science, with even the White House mandating an open data policy for government agencies; the National Institutes of Health (the major biomedical research funder in the U.S.) and many foundations already require research they fund to be publicly accessible.

Efforts to combat seedy science are popping up at an almost viral pace. A new Center for Open Science has launched at the University of Virginia, and the twitterati of the ScienceOnline un-conference spearhead a number of initiatives to improve the practice, publishing and communication of science.

Culling the bird flu epidemic. Getty Images.

Many in these communities point to a broken incentive structure as the source of compromised science. Novel, “breakthrough” results are rewarded, though the foundation of science rests in the power of real physical phenomena to be experimentally replicated. If the best research – the real McCoys in a sea of trendy one-hit wonders – can be identified and rewarded, science, industry and the public stand to benefit. The challenge is finding predictors of high-quality research, beyond the traditional impact factor metric.

Much like scientists can rapidly sequence the genetic code of new influenza strains like H7N9, they are also starting to identify systemic frailties, attitudes and entrenched practices, and take measures to inoculate science against them. Stay tuned for tomorrow’s post, which will cover three remedies to tame the epidemic and revitalize reproducible research.

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Continue reading Zero gets electric motorcycles ready for police duty in Hong Kong

Zero gets electric motorcycles ready for police duty in Hong Kong originally appeared on Autoblog Green on Thu, 23 May 2013 18:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Yet that’s exactly what a group of researchers at the University of Illinois have created — a cradle that wraps around an iPhone and turns it into a biosensor that can detect, according to a university press release, “toxins, proteins, bacteria, viruses and other molecules.” Inside that cradle are about $200 worth of mirrors, lenses and a photonic crystal that the researchers claim can identify these substances as accurately as a $50,000 spectrophotometer in the lab.

The cradle is essentially there for support, though, while the phone’s camera and processor do the real work. With everything firmly aligned in front of the camera, a scientist would simply snaps a photo and the CPU processes the result. What it’s processing is the difference in wavelength that the photonic crystal, primed to react to a specific molecule, reflects. The team demonstrates the device and app in the video embedded below.

And if you’re into this type of mobile data collection, another group of University of Illinois researchers actually created a smartphone-powered water-pollution device called MoboSens

Like all things mobile or sensor, though — from SkinScan (now SkinVision) to health care apps like Ginger.io — the biggest value might come from data that has nothing to do with what the app is primarily measuring. Rather, when data about a certain condition, air quality or what have you is tagged with time and geodata, for example, it becomes the basis for mapping how situations are spreading or where there might be safe haven.

Imagine a team of scientists with iPhones dispersed throughout a city after a disaster, painting a real-time picture of what areas are most affected by a particular toxin (or maybe radiation). Taking a longer term approach, researchers could track how situations are evolving over time. Throw in even more data that smartphones are capable of detecting — temperature, ambient noise, vibration, etc. — and we might unlock entirely new ways to think about how diseases spread through the air or what conditions tend to favor the spread of foodborne bacteria.

In some ways, though, this is more than another cool thing you can do with a smartphone. It’s the furtherance of something we’ll discussing in depth at our Structure conference next month, which is how we rethink IT when computation and data are no longer bound within a single server or even the corporate network somewhere. The biological data this app will collect isn’t much use locked inside the phone; it needs a way to reliably and securely connect with other datasets and other services, likely distributed across the country or even the world. That’s where the real opportunity lies.

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Indoor farms need light—and a lot of it—to grow crops, but that energy adds up big time in terms of cost and environmental impact. A Pinkhouse is a new type of indoor farm that grows crops using pink-colored light. Rather than bathing plants with white light (which has all the colors of the spectrum), a Pinkhouse uses a mix of red and blue light. By not using all the other colors, indoor vertical farms can cut down on their power bill with low-energy LED lights that emit just the right shade of magenta.

Read the rest of Indoor Vertical Farm ‘Pinkhouses' Grow Plants Faster With Less Energy

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Read the rest of Clothing for Furniture: Sinje Ollen's Cozy Knits Give Old, Damaged Furnishings a Fresh New Life

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Tesla Motors just announced that it has repaid the entire $465 million loan that it received from the Department of Energy a full nine years early. The development makes Tesla the only US car company in history to have fully repaid loans received from the government.

Read the rest of Tesla Repays its Entire $465 Million Federal Loan Nine Years Early

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Read the rest of The Best Green Designs from ICFF 2013 Day One!

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Monsanto’s Bt corn was supposed to reduce pesticide use. The Environmental Protection Agency said as much when the corn, which is genetically modified to resist the crop-ravaging rootworm, debuted in 2003. Sure enough, as more farmers sowed their fields with Bt corn, fewer of them needed to spray pesticides to protect their crops. The share of U.S. corn acreage treated with insecticides fell from 25 percent in 2005 to 9 percent in 2010.

But now, Bt corn has become, basically, too successful: Rootworms are starting to develop immunity to this prevalent crop, driving farmers to return to insecticide use. The Wall Street Journal reports:

Syngenta, one of the world's largest pesticide makers, reported that sales of its major soil insecticide for corn, which is applied at planting time, more than doubled in 2012. Chief Financial Officer John Ramsay attributed the growth to "increased grower awareness" of rootworm resistance in the U.S. Insecticide sales in the first quarter climbed 5% to $480 million.

The frustrating part is that rootworms’ resistance to the Bt corn gene was entirely predictable - so predictable that some companies seized it as a financial opportunity:

American Vanguard bought a series of insecticide companies and technologies during the past decade, betting that insecticide demand would return as Bt corn started losing its effectiveness. In the past couple of years, that wager has paid off.

The Newport Beach, Calif., company reported that its soil-insecticide revenue jumped 50% in 2012, and company earnings climbed 70% as its stock price doubled. Its insecticide sales rose 41% in the first quarter to $79 million, with gains driven by corn insecticide.

Scientists say that so far, rootworms have only developed resistance to seeds engineered to include just one rootworm trait, and Monsanto says it plans to phase out that seed and replace it with a multiple-trait variety. But the EPA cautions that rootworms resistant to the first seed are more likely to develop resistance to other traits, too. And although Monsanto recommends crop rotation to “break the rootworm cycle,” historically high corn prices are driving more farmers to plant corn every year - and that has also increased the presence of other pests besides rootworm.

So let’s set aside, for the moment, the repetitious debates between pro- and anti-GMO contingents, and consider this simple fact: Bt corn’s success lasted all of seven or eight years before rootworm resistance popped up. The same cycle could easily repeat itself with other rootworm traits or with other pests altogether.

GMOs are supposed to make farmers’ volatile business a little more secure. But when their failure is so predictable that corporations like Vanguard can profitably bet on it, who’s really coming out on top?

RelayRides buys car-sharing competitor Wheelz for keyless technology originally appeared on Autoblog Green on Thu, 23 May 2013 16:03:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.