Read more “World Leaders Have Decided: The Next Step in AI is Augmenting Humans”

https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2017/05/the-deadly-diseases-being-released-by-climate-change/

The deadly diseases being released as ice thaws

Global warming has begun re-exposing more familiar diseases that modern society thought it had eradicated.

Image: REUTERS/Andres Forza

11 May 2017

1. John McKennaFormative Content

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What would happen if we were suddenly exposed to deadly bacteria and viruses that have been absent for thousands of years? We may be about to find out.

Climate change is melting permafrost soils that have been solid for thousands of years, and as the soils melt they have the potential to release ancient viruses and bacteria that may be capable of springing back to life.

The most recent discovery of an ancient virus came when French and Russian scientists investigated a 30,000 year-old piece of Siberian permafrost.

In a paper published in 2014 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a team led by Jean-Michel Claverie of Aix-Marseille University revealed they had discovered a new “giant virus” that they named Pithovirus sibericum.

Giant viruses are so-called because they are much larger than traditional viruses. Pithovirus is the biggest ever found and measures 1,500 nanometres (billionths of a metre) across. That’s more than 10 times larger that the HIV virus.

What is more, after thawing the Pithovirus from its frozen state, Claverie and his team discovered that it was still infectious.

Fortunately, the virus’ targets are amoebae, and Pithovirus poses no danger to humans.

However, giant viruses can sometimes be harmful to people.

Nature magazine reports how in 2013 Christelle Desnues, a virologist at the French National Centre for Scientific Research in Marseilles, discovered signs that another giant virus, Marseillevirus, had infected an 11-month-old boy.

The virus was traced to one of the patient’s lymph nodes, which was then surgically removed.

In their paper, Claverie and his team warn that while Pithovirus is harmless to humans, the “revival of such an ancestral amoeba-infecting virus” suggests that “the thawing of permafrost either from global warming or industrial exploitation of circumpolar regions might not be exempt from future threats to human or animal health”.

Warming viruses

While global warming has yet to expose any ancient viruses harmful to humans, it has begun re-exposing more familiar diseases that modern society thought it had eradicated.

In August 2016, a 12 year-old boy in northern Russia was killed after being infected by Anthrax. The Anthrax outbreak, which saw up to 20 people hospitalised, was blamed on unusually warm weather in the arctic circle.

It is believed that a reindeer carcass infected with Anthrax was buried deep in the ice, but with temperatures reaching 35C in the Siberian tundra last summer, the carcass thawed and Anthrax spores were released.

Image: REUTERS/Ilya Naymushin

Up to 2,300 reindeer were killed as a result of the outbreak, and the entire reindeer herdsman community – of which the fatally infected boy was a member – had to be evacuated.

Average temperatures in Russia have increased by 0.43C in the past 10 years, but the rise has been more pronounced in areas of the far north, according Alexei Kokorin, head of WWF Russia’s climate and energy programme.

Speaking to The Guardian, Kokorin said the warmer climate has begun thawing the permafrost soil that covers much of Russia, including cemeteries and animal burial grounds. Thawing permafrost has also led to greater erosion of river banks where nomads often buried their dead, Kokorin said.

Anthrax may not be the only infectious disease lurking in the ice. In 2004, US researchers successfully revived the 1918 Spanish flu – which killed millions of people – from a fragment of a corpse’s lung frozen in the Alaska permafrost.

Scientists have also discovered DNA fragments of smallpox in the Siberian permafrost.

Bigger threats

While the risk of infectious diseases being released by thawing permafrost is real, scientists are at pains to point out that the chances of any future pandemic are incredibly low.

Speaking in Nature magazine on the discovery of Pithovirus, Curtis Suttle, a virologist at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, points out that people already inhale thousands of viruses every day, and swallow billions whenever they swim in the sea.

The idea that melting ice would release harmful viruses, and that those viruses would circulate extensively enough to affect human health, “stretches scientific rationality to the breaking point”, he said.

“I would be much more concerned about the hundreds of millions of people who will be displaced by rising sea levels.”

And rather than diseases being released by melting ice, some argue that as Earth warms northern countries will become more susceptible to outbreaks of “southern” diseases like malaria, cholera and dengue fever, as these pathogens thrive at warmer temperatures.

In warmer countries climate change is already having a devastating effect on people’s health. In central America incidences of chronic kidney disease are on the rise, and are being blamed on increased dehydration as hotter days become more frequent.

SMART DUST
Autonomous sensing and communication in a cubic millimeter

PI: Kris Pister
Co-investigators: Joe Kahn, Bernhard Boser
Subcontract: Steve Morris, MLB Co.

Supported by the DARPA/MTO MEMS program

This project finished in 2001, but many additional projects have grown out of it.  Among these are

• Berkeley Webs
• NEST
• Center for Embedded and Networked Sensing at UCLA

If you are interested in commercial applications, you should check out Crossbow Technologies and Dust Networks. (N.b. I have a financial interest in both!)

Quick progress update. Another update.
29 Palms demo of air-emplaced 1″ scale motes detecting vehicles.
Latest photos and press coverage.
My view of sensor networks in 2010.

The two figures above represent where we are and where we’d like to be.
On the left is where we hope to be in July of ’01 – a cubic millimeter device with a sensor, power supply, analog circuitry, bidirectional optical communication, and a programmable microprocessor.  Click on the figure to get more detail.
On the right is where we are now (July ’99) – a (currently) non-functional mote with a volume of about 100 cubic millimeters.  There are two silicon chips sitting on a type-5 hearing aid battery.  The right chip is a MEMS corner cube optical transmitter array – it works.  On the right is a CMOS ASIC with an optical receiver, charge pump, and simple digital controller – it doesn’t work (we violated some of the design rules in the 0.25 micron process, but the next one should work).

Projects

• Laser communication from a cubic millimeter
• Mote Delivery
  • Micro Air Vehicles
  • Micro Rockets
  • Silicon maple seeds and silicon dandelion seeds
• Sub-microWatt Electronics
• Power Sources
• Macro Motes (COTS Dust)

Accomplishments

• Using commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) components, we’ve built some really wonderful little “macro motes“.  Some the features:
  • temperature, humidity, barometric pressure, light intensity, tilt and vibration, and magnetic field sensors all in a cubic inch package, including the bi-directional radio, the microprocessor controller, and the battery!
  • 20 meter communication range
  • one week lifetime in continuous operation, 2 years with 1% duty cycling
• 21 km laser communication (Coit Tower and Twin Peaks in San Francisco to Cory Hall at UC Berkeley)
  • Using one of the micro-weather stations, we stripped off the radio and wired in a laser pointer.  This went to SF.  In my office at Cal we had a video camera hooked up to a frame grabber in my laptop.  The software looked for (and decoded) flashing lights in the image, and gave us the weather information 21 km away.
• Large angle MEMS beam-steering
  • The laser motes above need to be aimed.  We’ve made a sub-millimeter mirror coupled to two motors on the same silicon chip.  The motors can scan a reflected laser beam tens of degrees in either direction.
• Micro Air Vehicle endurance record
  • Sub-contractor Steve Morris of MLB Co has built an 8″ radio controlled plane which flys 60mph for 18 minutes and can carry a color video camera with a live video feed.
• Silicon maple seeds
  • Using a honeycombed layer of silicon only 0.1 mm thick we have made a 3×10 mm winglet.  With a cubic millimeter of silicon attached, these wings auto-rotate as they fall, just like a maple seed.  The next generation will have solar cells built right in. (ok this generation had the solar cells too, but they didn’t work!)

Applications
The science/engineering goal of the Smart Dust project is to demonstrate that a complete sensor/communication system can be integrated into a cubic millimeter package.  This involves both evolutionary and revolutionary advances in miniaturization, integration, and energy management.  We aren’t targeting any particular sensor, in fact there is no direct funding for sensor research in the project (but we’ve got quite a few to choose from based on a decade or two of outstanding MEMS work at Berkeley and elsewhere).
We’re funded by DARPA, so we will demonstrate Smart Dust with one or more applications of military relevance.  In addition, we’re pursuing several different applications with commercial importance, and we’ve got a long list of applications to work on if we only had the time.  Here’s a sampling of some possible applications, in no particular order:

• Defense-related sensor networks
  • battlefield surveillance, treaty monitoring, transportation monitoring, scud hunting, …
• Virtual keyboard
  • Glue a dust mote on each of your fingernails.  Accelerometers will sense the orientation and motion of each of your fingertips, and talk to the computer in your watch.  QWERTY is the first step to proving the concept, but you can imagine much more useful and creative ways to interface to your computer if it knows where your fingers are: sculpt 3D shapes in virtual clay, play  the piano, gesture in sign language and have to computer translate, …
  • Combined with a MEMS augmented-reality heads-up display, your entire computer I/O would be invisible to the people around you.  Couple that with wireless access and you need never be bored in a meeting again!  Surf the web while the boss rambles on and on.
• Inventory Control
  • The carton talks to the box, the box talks to the palette, the palette talks to the truck, and the truck talks to the warehouse, and the truck and the warehouse talk to the internet.  Know where your products are and what shape they’re in any time, anywhere.  Sort of like FedEx tracking on steroids for all products in your production stream from raw materials to delivered goods.
• Product quality monitoring
  • temperature, humidity monitoring of meat, produce, dairy products
    • Mom, don’t buy those Frosted Sugar Bombs, they sat in 80% humidity for two days, they won’t be crunchy!
  • impact, vibration, temp monitoring of consumer electronics
    • failure analysis and diagnostic information, e.g. monitoring vibration of bearings for frequency signatures indicating imminent failure (back up that hard drive now!)
• Smart office spaces
  • The Center for the Built Environment has fabulous plans for the office of the future in which environmental conditions are tailored to the desires of every individual.  Maybe soon we’ll all be wearing temperature, humidity, and environmental comfort sensors sewn into our clothes, continuously talking to our workspaces which will deliver conditions tailored to our needs.  No more fighting with your office mates over the thermostat.
• Interfaces for the Disabled (courtesy of Bryndis Tobin)
  • Bryndis sent me email with the following idea: put motes “on a quadriplegic’s face, to monitor blinking & facial twitches – and send them as commands to a wheelchair/computer/other device.”  This could be generalized to a whole family of interfaces for the disabled.  Thanks Bryndis!
• The dark side
  • Yes, personal privacy is getting harder and harder to come by.  Yes, you can hype Smart Dust as being great for big brother (thank you, New Scientist). Yawn.  Every technology has a dark side – deal with it. [this was my original comment on “dark side” issues, but it made a lot of people think that we weren’t thinking about these issues at all.  Not true.]
  • As an engineer, or a scientist, or a hair stylist, everyone needs to evaluate what they do in terms of its positive and negative effect.  If I thought that the negatives of working on this project were larger than or even comparable to the positives, I wouldn’t be working on it.  As it turns out, I think that the potential benefits of this technology far far outweigh the risks to personal privacy.

Environmental Impact
A lot of people seem to be worried about environmental impact.  Not to worry!  Even in my wildest imagination I don’t think that we’ll ever produce enough Smart Dust to bother anyone.  If Intel stopped producing Pentia and produced only Smart Dust, and you spread them evenly around the country, you’d get around one grain-of-sand sized mote per acre per year.  If by ill chance you did inhale one, it would be just like inhaling a gnat.  You’d cough it up post-haste. Unpleasant, but not very likely.
Consider the scale – if I make a million dust motes, they have a total volume of one liter.  Throwing a liter worth of batteries into the environment is certainly not going to help it, but in the big picture it probably doesn’t make it very high on the list of bad things to do to the planet.