(David Craig is a local innovator whom I met at an event a couple weeks ago, and he wowed me when we chatted about his newest project. I know I can’t stop singing the praises of DFC’s neighbourhood, but the news David related to me means my community is about to get even more exciting!)
 
Builder David Craig’s Talking Trees Earthship build is unfolding as part of North Frontenac’s “One Small Town” project — The first Canadian iteration of a utopian community planning initiative. 
 
While the town will — according to plans — feature a wellness centre, a wood shop specializing in canoes, and an apiary, The Talking Trees project will take care of the homes: each one built to the Earthship design.
 
The Earthship concept was invented in the 1970s by Michael Reynolds, an American architect who sought to create a home concept that would use indigenous or recycled materials, rely on passive solar energy or other naturally occurring energy sources, and adhere to principles of sustainable architecture.
 
Craig has modified the overall shape of the Earthship design, but retained key functional components, like a south-facing bank of windows to grow greenhouse plants for food and processing greywater, and a back wall made of rammed earth and recycled car tires, that acts as “thermal mass” to regulate internal temperature, no matter the conditions outside. Proponents tout Earthships as being so self-sufficient they are nearly “off the grid.” Which could be great for some homeowners!
 
“[Craig] said the owner of the home plays a big part in the design in terms of how many solar panels are used, size of the greenhouse and accoutrements as well as actual construction if desired but $150 per square foot is ‘middle ground’ building cost for these homes.
 
The actual plan for One Small Town is very much still in the planning stages but for Craig location, and/or construction of the other components (medical centre, electrical generating plant, aquaculture facility, apiary and wood products) is a non-issue. He’s ready to start building houses as soon as the land is secured and subdivided.” 
 
I love how, with this project, local people are coming together to realize an innovative, almost pie-in-the-sky dream, and using technology to bring our community back into sync with the land. We’ll see how funding and permit-acquiring go, and check back in with Talking Trees by the time they break ground in 2018!

Last month, American biohacker Tristan Roberts participated in a unique collaboration with Ascendance Biomedical on a new treatment for HIV. The collaboration was unprecedented not just in its approach, but its execution: Roberts voluntarily injected himself with Ascendance-provided components of a new gene therapy, over livestream. Roberts and the corporation hoped to find an ethical way to circumvent an extended testing and approval process that they both see as a roadblock to fast and cheap HIV and AIDS interventions.
 
This action has opened up a debate about the necessity of that approval process, and the future use of the blockchain for medical purposes. And, Roberts’ one-month results (which in true biohacker spirit he has transparently shared with the public) have just come in — which add a whole new dimension.
 
Roberts’ therapy involves plasmids, which are circular pieces of DNA that can self-replicate. In 2016, National Institute of Health scientists (unaffiliated with the Ascendance experiment) isolated from an HIV positive patient and antibody called N6, which proceeded to knock out a startling 98% of known HIV strains. The ultimate aim of the discoverers is to replicate enough N6 to transfer it into HIV positive patients, which will modify their own cells to start producing it, and will functionally cure them of HIV. (That is, to drop their viral load into undetectability) But this process is slow and expensive.
 
So Ascendance Biomedical and volunteer Roberts united to test both the therapy, and a new way to access it — through the blockchain. Says Ascendance Biomedical CEO Aaron Traywick:
 
“‘We’re basically working with a model that’s a replication of the FDA’s Compassionate Access Program. […]’

‘We make all our technology and all our treatments available to anyone who buys our Ethereum coins,’ Traywick explained. The purchase of a coin enters the buyer into a contract relationship with the company. Traywick says this means Ascendance ‘will provide to you at the cost of production and materials, the treatment for research purposes only and not for human consumption.’”
 
And this is the problem, according to medical ethicists. The standard approval and testing procedure, which Roberts, Ascendance Biomedical, and others who think like them see as an impediment, is a time-tested way of “lower[ing] the chances that people will be directly harmed by their ‘treatments,’ will end up wasting their time and energy on useful ‘cures,’ or [avoiding] helpful treatments while chasing a pie in the sky panacea.” 
 
But Roberts, in particular, is hoping his results will someday speak for themselves. So far, they haven’t quite: at the one-month mark (Nov. 15), Roberts’ viral load has increased. However, his count of CD4 cells (healthy immune cells whose destruction is a clear marker of unchecked HIV infection) has also risen. Roberts himself thinks it’s still to early to tell whether his results mean the therapy is working, but pledges to keep getting tested, and if his viral load continues edging upward, to attempt another dose of N6 by the end of the year. It seems that in both the medical and ethical aspects of this case, only time will show how things will shake out.
 

I’m grateful that DFC’s office is one where it’s easy to strike a work-life balance. I manage to indulge in one of my favourite hobbies — birdwatching — simply by looking out the office window!
 
It was after returning from one of these coffee break birding sessions that I came across some startling news from New Scientist. Researchers are concerned that singing behaviour by the females of some northern bird species (which is unusual — females are typically silent) is a change caused by global warming. Here I was, thinking that I had been observing something charming, rather than the fallout of a sinister planetary trend.
 
Scientists out of Ohio Wesleyan University looked to North America’s dark-eyed juncos  (which are officially migratory, but spend a lot of time in our neighbourhood in Southern Ontario) and set up an experiment within a wild population in San Diego, CA. They placed a caged female into their established territory to see if the females could be prodded into their atypical singing behaviour.
 
“In all, 17 females, along with 25 males, interacted with the caged females. Half the females dived and lunged at them, and a minority also performed aggressive tail-spreads not normally seen in females. Three of the females sang songs similar to those of males.

“The context in which the songs were observed – responding to a female intruder – suggests these songs have an aggressive, territorial function,” says [Dustin] Reichard [of Wesleyan’s Department of Zoology]. “But we can’t say whether female song is specific to female intruders without also measuring their response to male intruders.”
 
In addition to racking up “some of the first evidence that female song can be rapidly regained in a songbird species,” the scientists are extrapolating this territorial behaviour as a response to climate change. The junco community in the study stopped migrating 35 years ago, resulting in this defensive behaviour in females. As North America warms, the need to migrate to avoid inhospitable weather will further reduce, leading to bigger pockets of permanent junco populations. And females there will also be pressured to sing in order to hold onto their mates and their territory.
 
All this is very stressful to contemplate as I gaze out at the fall landscape around our office. I hope out biosphere is able to roll with the punches of climate change. Only time will tell – but I have a new thing to think about as I (attempt to!) decompress at the office.

As a dog owner, I know firsthand how wonderful it is to have a furry friend (or two) in your life. Dogs and cats have been living with and alongside humans for centuries — but sometimes, due to living space constraints or mobility issues, keeping a live pet is not an option. And, in finding tech workarounds, sometimes you end up with something really… weird.
 
Take Qoobo, a fuzzy “therapy robot” created by Yukai Engineering in Japan, and set to hit the market in 2018. Billed as “a tailed cushion that heals your heart,” it’s basically a tubby disc with a cat-like tail appendage that swipes back and forth when sensors detect a human petting it. Or, as Jezebel puts it, “an animatronic coonskin cap.”. Check out a video of it in action here.
 
Compared to other therapy robot animals on the market, like Hasbro’s Joy for All companion pets (a line of three, startlingly accurate cat robots), Qoobo is very minimalist. And for anyone who has a living animal in their life, it the whole thing is a bit strange and soulless.
 
However, for people without the space to keep or the resources to feed and clean up after a living animal, a robo-kitty could be a mental health godsend. The benefits of animal company to humans are well documented. There are many programs that bring living pups into senior care centres, among other places. And, when a person living with dementia needs a soothing animal friend at 3 a.m., having a robot in the facility is more convenient — and helps just as well — as the real thing.
 
While there is a time and place for robot pets, I’ll have to leave them for the time being to folks better suited to the lifestyle. I definitely have my hands full with my living fur balls!

‘Tis the season for the creepy, kooky, mysterious, and spooky — it’s Hallowe’en! Back in civilization, I used to love handing candy out to the neighbourhood kids; I think this year we’re going to have to be satisfied with dressing up the dogs.

But underneath the costumes and the sugar rushes, Hallowe’en has another purpose: it lets us confront scary and uncanny things in a healthy and fun way. In line with this theme was our look at the controversy around “space” burial. I’ve kept looking into the macabre nexus of death and tech, and, in the spirit of Hallowe’en, offer a look into a fascinating innovation just around the corner in Smiths Falls, ON.
 
A funeral company there is offering “green cremations” in the form of alkaline hydrolysis: instead of burning human remains, AquaGreen Dispositions dissolves them in a mix of potassium hydroxide and water, and then drains the result into the municipal wastewater system. For [60% water] thou art, and unto [water] shalt thou return! 
 
“The computerized Aquagreen Dispositions system takes less than two hours to dissolve most organic material.

Once the cycle is complete, the caustic fluid from the pressure vessel passes through two filters and on into the municipal sewer system, leaving only the skeleton behind.

Those bones, soft and wet from the alkaline hydrolysis process, are then dried in a convection oven, pressed into a fine white powder and finally returned to the loved one’s family to be scattered.”
 
Unlike standard burial, which leaches embalming chemicals into the earth; or traditional cremation, which involves burning of natural gas or propane, and releases carbon dioxide into the atmosphere alkaline hydrolysis purports to be “entirely green.” This is great news for consumers — and also the folks in the town’s wastewater treatment, who have been keeping an eye on the flow from AquaGreen’s facility and have given it a thorough thumbs-up for safety!
 
So this Hallowe’en, while I’m at home eating tiny chocolate bars and unsuccessfully trying to attach a Superman cape to Samson, I’ll be sparing a thought for the travellers to the undiscovered country, who are taking an unusual route via Smiths Falls.

This amazing story hits the sweet spot for me as both a now-grown kid science nerd and transplanted Michigander — I just had to share! 11-year-old Gitanjali Rao has been named the grand prize winner ($25,000!) of the 3M Young Scientist Challenge, for Tethys, a device she created that can quickly pick up on lead levels in water. She was inspired to do so by the contamination that has been plaguing the city of Flint, MI, and by an article on new technologies that she spotted on MIT’s website.

Tethys was devised as a low-cost, personal lead-testing device that uses carbon nanotube sensors. Connected to a user’s smartphone, it then shows the results of tested water within a proprietary app – faster than any other lead sensor on the market today.

The process this whiz-kid and the other finalists went through sounds fascinating. From 3M’s press release:

“During the past three months, Gitanjali and the other finalists had the exclusive opportunity to work directly with a 3M scientist to develop their innovations as part of a unique summer mentorship program. Gitanjali was paired with Dr. Kathleen Shafer, a 3M research specialist who develops new plastics technologies that have real-world applications in dentistry and other fields.
 
Each of the students collaborated with some of 3M’s leading scientists, who provided guidance as they worked through the scientific method to advance their ideas from a theoretical concept into a physical prototype. Together, the 3M mentors and finalists shared their passion for science, reviewed the scientific process and worked virtually through pre-assigned objectives[.]”

Rao hopes that her invention will help people like those in Flint take charge of their own lead exposure in a simple way. With bureaucracy at the centre of the Flint water crisis, grassroots action may prove the best way around it.

Ascension, a company out of the UK, is catching a bit of flak from geeks for misrepresenting its primary service: scattering human ashes in “space.” Unlike other existing companies, whose space burial services involve launching a sealed craft into orbit for later, earthly retrieval; or NASA, who piggybacked Eugene Shoemaker’s ashes on the deliberately crashed Lunar Prospector probe as the first (and currently only) burial on the moon, Ascension pledges to release your loved one’s ashes in space proper. The contentious issue is their precise definition of “space.”
 
The company claims it will take an ashes-bearing helium weather balloon up 35 kilometers, into the stratosphere. According to their website, this is well within “near space,” according to the definition that considers the Armstrong limit the border of our atmosphere. (The Armstrong limit is 19km up, and marks the point where protective suiting must be worn because the water in our bodies boils at our ambient temperature.)
 
But, experts don’t necessarily consider that far enough to be space. The most commonly accepted border between atmosphere and space is the Kármán line, which is located about 100km above the surface of the Earth, and well above the Armstrong line.
 
Ascension may be using a more romantic definition of where space starts for laypeople who just want a bit of Grandpa to join the constellations he loved so much. But, fudging aside, it may be better in the long run than sending Grandpa into the depths of space. Because then, he becomes debris.
 
“‘If ashes were scattered in orbit, which these are not, then they’d join the millions of tiny bits of space junk which are traveling at speeds of 7-8 km per second, [space archaeologist Alice Gorman of Flinders University (Australia)] said.

‘Junk this size causes damage to spacecraft by constant bombardment. Each impact is trivial but there’s a cumulative effect. Fortunately, in Low Earth Orbit, this stuff usually enters the Earth’s atmosphere quickly.’”
 
And burns up harmlessly.
 
So, while we don’t yet have the opportunity to mingle with the stars from whence we came, post-mortem, I think it’s a fair tradeoff to not accidentally take out the Soyuz. Besides, there are still so many intriguing options for burial on earth! There is still plenty of time to look to the skies.

I love stories of humans who have managed to develop a closer bond with the machines. The optimist in me believes wholeheartedly that humankind is that much closer to the Singularity every time a new prosthetic arm is developed! Which is why this piece by Finnish programmer Tuukka Ojala, over at the blog for Vincit, his software development company, is THE BEST.

Ojala, who is blind, describes the nuts and bolts of his working procedure. Most of his strategies offer an experience that seems closer to the way a computer might “think” than that of sighted monitor-and-mouse users. (In fact, he’s long used a screen reader that fires off what he’s working on at a staggering 450 words per minute!) Ojala says he is most at home on the command line, the most text-based basic access point to a computer’s programming. But unfortunately, too much of his working style is dictated by a lack of accessibility among his tools (which is a problem in the industry).

“[G]iven my love of the command line, why am I sticking with Windows, the operating system not known for its elegant command line tools? The answer is simple: Windows is the most accessible operating system there is. NVDA, my screen reader of choice is open source and maintained more actively than any other screen reader out there. If I had the choice I would use Mac OS since in my opinion it strikes a neat balance between usability and functionality. Unfortunately VoiceOver, the screen reader built in to Mac OS, suffers from long release cycles and general neglect, and its navigation models aren’t really compatible with my particular way of working. There’s also a screen reader for the Gnome desktop and, while excellently maintained for such a minor user base, there are still rough edges that make it unsuitable for my daily use. So, Windows it is.”

In addition to coding like a demon, Ojala has taken up the mantle of general accessibility consultant at his job: “Or police, [depending] on how you look at it.” He has ideas about how to make coding, and web pages in general, more accessible for users who are blind or visually impaired. I’m looking forward to reading more of his blog, for the inside scoop on accessibility, as well as the wonderful world of coding. (Singularity, here we come!)

As a woman in the technical field of computing (and having transitioned from a long career in the technical field of chemistry), I’ve come up against many insidious examples of sexism in my time. Oh, how often have I wanted to give the perpetrators their comeuppance — but been unable to without blowback! So I applaud in vicarious glee the ingenious solution a pair of L.A. artists cooked up.

Penelope Gazin and Kate Dwyer co-founded the online bizarre-art marketplace Witchsy. When developing the platform, they started detecting condescension and disrespect in emails from outside developers and designers, who were often male. Gazin and Dwyer had an inkling that these men were addressing them this way because they were young women jumping into a tech endeavor. So they invented a third, fictional cofounder, a man named (get this) “Keith Mann,” and started corresponding with troublesome contacts as him.

“‘It was like night and day,’ says Dwyer. ‘It would take me days to get a response, but Keith could not only get a response and a status update, but also be asked if he wanted anything else or if there was anything else that Keith needed help with.’

Dwyer and Gazin continued to deploy Keith regularly when interacting with outsiders and found that the change in tone wasn’t just an anomaly. In exchange after exchange, the perceived involvement of a man seemed to have an effect on people’s assumptions about Witchsy and colored how they interacted with the budding business. One developer in particular seemed to show more deference to Keith than he did to Dwyer or Gazin, right down to the basics of human interaction.

‘Whenever he spoke to Keith, he always addressed Keith by name,’ says Gazin. ‘Whenever he spoke to us, he never used our names.’”

There’s an awful lot of light being shined on sexism in tech industries these days. What Dwyer and Gazin have contributed to this conversation is concrete evidence of how ridiculous the sexist impulse is: all it took to get their correspondents to wise up was a man’s signature at the bottom of an email. Hopefully, their evidence will join the massed amount of other undeniable proof of the sneakiness of sexism, and help turn the tide. Until then, Dwyer and Gazin have said they have retired Keith — but still envision having to resort to him again.

While it seems that only the whiz-bang-iest robots in the field these days are the ones getting attention, they are also the most complicated. And, as we all know, the more complicated a thing is, the more opportunities it has to fail. This is especially true in robotics (DARPA competition blooper reel, anyone?). This has led some researchers to simplify their approaches; stripping away the human characteristics and the multipurpose appendages, to create robots that do one thing really well.
 
One such bot is the “Deformation-driven rolling robot with a soft outer shell,” invented by Yoichi Masuda and Masato Ishikawa of Osaka University, and presented in a paper at this year’s IEEE International Conference on Advanced Intelligent Mechatronics. Their robot is structured after one of our simplest machines, the wheel.

“Instead of motors and gears, however, the wheel surrounding this robot is made from a soft material that’s squished and stretched by a set of four wires connected to an inner core. It’s still mostly dependent on gravity to get around, as the robot is essentially repeatedly falling over as its changing shape makes it unstable. But that also greatly reduces the amount of power it needs to move.”
 
This robot might mark a trend among experts in the field, away from generality and into specificity of purpose. But this little rolly guy’s simplicity doesn’t mean it’s single-purpose: the interior can hold up to two 360° cameras and a multitude of sensors, and it could be sent into a warzone, an industrial accident, or a natural phenomenon like a volcano with equal impunity. It would be able to transmit a great deal of information about a situation before its destruction – which would not be a hardship because of its low cost and ease of building!
 
Though I’ll miss potentially having my own personal protocol droid hanging around, this robotics concept does seem far more practical, and possible. I like that the calming adage “simple is good” extends as far as the helper machines of the future. And I also like how it leaves room for us and our human intelligence: We have hope again of not being rendered obsolete!  (We’ll see how it goes…!).