Two Bacteria in Colon, create Colon Cancer.

Colon cancer increasing in Millennials, and two bacteria strains might be why

Updated| Two species of bacteria work cooperatively to trigger colon cancer tumors, a study published Thursday reports. The finding, which surprised the researchers, could eventually lead to new avenues for treatment.

From article, (Two species of bacteria work cooperatively to trigger colon cancer tumors, a study published Thursday reports. The finding, which surprised the researchers, could eventually lead to new avenues for treatment. 

Most bacteria can't travel past the protective layer surrounding the colon. But these two species—Bacteroides fragilis and Escherichia coli—could bypass this guardian and reach the epithelial cells, where tumors typically originate. Sears suspected that the bacteria had a hand in turning those cells cancerous. 

To better understand the role of these bacteria species in colon cancer, Sears and colleagues examined colon tissue from six people with familial adenomatous polyposis, an inherited disorder in which polyps grow in the colon with a high risk of turning malignant. The researchers found that among the 500 types of bacteria known to live in the colon, B. fragilis and E. coli—the same species found in the prior study—were the most prevalent. 

 Sears has a theory about how these two species conspire to spur cancer: E. coli triggers genetic mutations and B. fragilis produces a toxin that promotes cancer. “It is the combination of these effects, requiring coexistence of these two bacteria, that creates the ‘perfect storm’ to drive colon cancer development,” Sears said in a statement. The study is published in the February issue of Science. 

In addition to studying human tissue, the researchers also looked at mice. They found that when the colons housed colonies of both bacterial species at once, the mice developed a large number of tumors. When one or neither species was present, the mice had few or no tumors. The finding reinforced the notion that the species work together to trigger colon cancer.)

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Fish Friendly Hydropower.

Fish-friendly whirlpool turbine makes hydropower green again

View Slideshow A company from Belgium wants to make hydropower green again. Turbulent's whirlpool turbine can be installed in most canals or rivers, harnessing flowing water to generate power for as many as 60 homes, according to Business Insider. The clean, fish-friendly energy source can operate at night and during the day.

From article, (Turbulent’s nature-inspired micro hydropower plant can deliver decentralized energy at low cost, according to the company’s website. Their technology works well in rural areas, as long as there’s a river nearby. The company says their turbines don’t harm the environment and are easy to install. Business Insider said the system can be installed in a week.

The whirlpool turbine makes use of small rapids or waterfalls to harness energy. The company digs up land near the water source to install a concrete basin. A generator and impeller goes inside the basin. Then a river wall is lifted so some of the river water will pour into the basin, getting the turbine going. Business Insider said in their video, “It produces limitless free energy as long as water is flowing” – if a river froze in the winter, production would could to a screeching halt.

Turbulent says the turbine possesses just a single moving part, so it can have a longer operating life and doesn’t require much maintenance. A self-cleaning screen captures large debris. The company says the life of the concrete basin is 100 years, and fish won’t be harmed in the turbine; a video Turbulent produced shows fish swimming freely through the basin and even the turbine.

 The company claims in a video that hydropower has become less sustainable over time, with high-pressure turbines and dams, and their goal is to make the energy source sustainable again. Unlike large dams, their low-pressure turbine requires a height difference of roughly five feet to function effectively.

Tested in rivers throughout Belgium, the device can be scaled up to generate 15, 30, and 100 kilowatts. Earlier this year, the company celebrated the official opening “of the first microcentral Turbulent in Chile.”)

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Missouri Dreams of Hyperloop.

Hyperloop Would Cross Entire State in 30 Minutes

Virgin Hyperloop One, the University of Missouri System, and engineering consulting company Black & Veatch are conducting a feasibility study to see if a 240-mile stretch of Interstate 70 could be home to one of the first North American Hyperloop systems. The effort is being championed by the Missouri Hyperloop Coalition, a public-private partnership that is trying to connect Kansas City, Columbia, and St.

 From article, (Virgin Hyperloop One, the University of Missouri System, and engineering consulting company Black & Veatch are conducting a feasibility study to see if a 240-mile stretch of Interstate 70 could be home to one of the first North American Hyperloop systems. 

The effort is being championed by the Missouri Hyperloop Coalition, a public-private partnership that is trying to connect Kansas City, Columbia, and St. Louis, Missouri with a high-speed Hyperloop system.

The feasibility study will look at the potential economic impact, and identify the next steps that the coalition needs to take in order to get the project off (or under) the ground. The study will also include the project’s estimated cost, as well as potential funding models for the extensive infrastructure project.

A hyperloop system would dramatically change the transport of goods and people between the highly trafficked corridor. Right now, if you left Kansas City and headed east, it would take you about 3.5 hours to get to St. Louis (about 27 hours by bicycle, and 89 hours if you were walking). With a hyperloop, it would take less than 30 minutes. According to the company, the route has the potential to give greater regional access to the five million residents in the three areas as well as attract new businesses to the area.

With Hyperloop's technology, passengers and cargo are loaded into a pod that accelerates gradually using electric propulsion in a low-pressure tube. The pods lift off of the track using magnetic levitation (or maglev technology) and travel at speeds of up to 640 mph.)

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Uber's dream of flying Taxis is not New, but the Technology is.

This is Uber's plan to deliver on flying 'cars'

elf-driving and electric flying cars are coming. What this means for our cities in the future is unclear, so I chatted with Uber Head of Policy of Autonomous Vehicles and Urban Aviation Justin Erlich to learn more.

From article, (As head of policy for that division, Erlich oversees essentially everything that’s not Uber’s main ride-hailing division. That includes self-driving cars, the division of Uber that had a major win in court yesterday following a settlement with Alphabet’s Waymo. Erlich is also in charge of policy for drones, freight and VTOL (vertical take off and landing).

The idea with Uber’s air travel, which may be referred to as UberAir, is to cover trips from one point of density to another, Erlich explained to me. The plan for now is to cover no more than 60 miles, which is due to the current limitations of batteries.

To get in your UberAir, you could enter in your destination and then the Uber app would tell you where the closest skyport is located. Then, you’d catch your UberAir to another place that is somewhat close to your final destination.

There are a couple of classic use cases, Erlich said. One is for super-commuting, like going from San Francisco to downtown San Jose. Instead of driving yourself, taking Caltrain or paying a bunch of money for an Uber car to take you all that way, you could hop in an UberAir, which would be a lot faster. Another use case is navigating in Los Angeles, which is a notoriously traffic-heavy city, from the airport to East Los Angeles.

Unlike Uber’s standard offering, UberAir will ideally be a totally shared experience. Part of that has to do with ensuring that the cost of UberAir will be affordable, Erlich said, and comparable to the prices Uber riders are already used to.

“Our hope and belief is that the time savings that you will get through air travel will incentivize people who might otherwise be used to the privacy of their own rides [being game] to share rides,” Erlich said. “If you ask about what’s the future of mobility — like when we have all these people wanting to move — we can think of these as packets of people and things moving in these really dense city areas. Everything will probably need to look like some form of fleets that are run by folks like Uber that are pooled with people sharing rides that are electric and eventually autonomous. I think that’s the sort of vision that we’re working towards both on the ground and in the air. And I think shared rides is a huge part of that."

Uber’s flying cars are a hybrid between a helicopter and an airplane, Erlich explained to me. I’m really pushing for the “flying car” terminology, but Erlich says it’s misleading and that we need to come up with a better way to describe them.

“It sounds awesome but it almost it conjures up an image of things taking off from the ground,” Erlich said. “And the technology there would be quite difficult and seems pretty far off, whereas I think a lot of these services will be moving from one rooftop to another.”

Instead of UberAir being a flying car, a helicopter or an airplane, you can think of it as a helicopter-airplane mashup, Erlich said. They will have fixed wings to help with gliding, similar to an airplane, to help it be more efficient and go faster. They will also have multiple rotors, while a helicopter has just one big fixed rotor and therefore one single point of failure, Erlich explained.

Those rotors, he added, will use distributed electric propulsion, which was invented by a NASA engineer, whom Uber has since hired. DEP helps to increase fuel efficiency, landing field length and performance handling while reducing emissions and noise. That means UberAir should theoretically be quieter and safer than a helicopter because of those multiple rotors and fixed wings.

“We can sort of imagine it is a much better, quieter, safer, more efficient helicopter.

Another part of the focus, Erlich says, is educating people around the benefits of urban air travel, how it’s potentially safer and how it’s not a new concept. In the 1960s and 1970s, there was a helicopter service between San Francisco and Oakland, operated by SFO Helicopter Airlines. At that point, however, it was expensive and not safe enough, Erlich said.

“But this idea of urban air travel isn’t actually as foreign as we might think,” Erlich said. “It just hasn’t happened recently. So part of it is around creating a discussion with communities about what the benefits are, why we think this is safer and getting them excited about what this could be.”)

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Highway for Trucks Only. Good idea? Or, waste of time?

No cars allowed: Georgia considers highway just for trucks

FILE - In this Aug. 24, 2016, file photo, truck and automobile traffic mix on Interstate 5, headed north through Fife, Wash., near the Port of Tacoma. President Donald Trump's plan to beef up the nation's infrastructure will contain a crater-sized hole when it's unveiled next month.

 From article, (Georgia transportation officials are exploring the idea of a separate highway for trucks only.

It would be the first highway of its kind in the United States, said John Hibbard, the Georgia Department of Transportation’s operations director.

WABE Radio reports that the toll-free highway would stretch 40 miles from metro Atlanta to Macon. It would give trucks their own separate roadway, which would have its own exits and entrances, Hibbard said.

State transportation officials say they expect truck traffic to double by 2040. The truck-only lanes have been proposed as a solution to reducing congestion for drivers of noncommercial vehicles on Georgia interstates.

Gov. Nathan Deal praised the truck-only highway during a recent Georgia Transportation Alliance meeting, calling it “an important part of what our future transportation system should and will look like.”

The project’s estimated cost of $1.8 billion is raising eyebrows, the radio station reported.

Georgia would ask for federal funds, but if the government doesn’t come through, Deal said the project could still move forward with state money, specifically because of the state’s Transportation Funding Act, passed in 2015. The act is paid for by an increase in fuel taxes.

The state transportation department’s study projects that the truck-only lanes would reduce delays on Interstate 75 North by 40 percent.

“I think it’s going to unclog a lot of the traffic,” said truck driver Afori Pugh. “Because these trucks are huge, we can’t move as fast as other people. They do not want to let you over.”

Pugh usually has 20,000 pounds of construction materials like steel in the back of his white flatbed truck.

Every few weeks, Pugh drives two hours from Marietta to Macon. He said it can be rough.

“You have a lot of people flipping the bird, cussing you out,” Pugh said. “But you just have to be patient and understand that they don’t understand this industry.”

When motorists cut in front of him to get by, there’s hardly any margin for error, he said.

“They don’t understand how much danger they’re in just by getting in front of you slamming on brakes,” Pugh said.)

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New UV Lamp, safe for Humans, kills Airborne Flu Viruses and other airborne microbes. Now we just need to get them into public places like Hospitals, Schools, Airports, Libraries, and Private places like Homes.

This UV Lamp Could Prevent the Flu Virus From Spreading in Public Places

According to a new study, continuous low doses of UV light can kill airborne flu viruses without hurting humans. Here's why that's good news

 From article, (Researchers have developed an ultraviolet (UV) lamp that kills the influenza virus but isn’t harmful to human skin or eyes, according to a new study in Scientific Reports. They hope the technology can be commercialized and marketed to prevent the spread of seasonal flu in public places, such as schools, hospitals, and airports.

“We’ve known for a century that UV light is extremely efficient at killing microbes, bacteria, and viruses,” says study leader David Brenner, director of the Center for Radiological Research at Columbia University Irving Medical Center. For that reason, UV devices are often used for sterilization — for medical equipment in hospitals, for example, or drinking water for backcountry campers.

But conventional germicidal lamps aren’t safe for humans to be around. With prolonged exposure, they can cause skin cancer and cataracts in the eyes. “So up until now, they’re only really practical when people aren’t around,” say Brenner. “You can sterilize a hospital room, but not when anyone’s inside.”

About five years ago, Brenner says, the Columbia team came up with a potential solution. Light on the far end of the UV-C spectrum, known as far-UVC, has very short wavelengths. The researchers suspected that it can penetrate and destroy microscopic bacteria and viruses, but can’t travel through the protective outer layers of human skin or eyes.

“We wanted to get all the benefits of UV light in terms of killing microbes, but none of the health hazards,” says Brenner. Earlier studies, on animals and humans, have shown that exposure to far-UVC light does indeed appear to be safe. “We haven’t seen any biological damage to skin cells or eye cells, whereas with conventional UV light we’ve always seen lots of biological damage,” he says. Previous research has also shown that far-UVC light can kill MRSA bacteria, a common cause of infections after surgery.

Now, Brenner and his colleagues have show that UVC light can effectively kill airborne influenza. In their new study, aerosolized particles of the H1N1 seasonal flu virus were released into a test chamber and exposed to very low doses of far-UVC light. The light inactivated the viruses with about the same efficiency as conventional germicidal UV light, while a control group of bacteria not exposed to light remained active.

“We think that this type of overhead light could be efficacious for basically any public setting,” says Brenner. “Think about doctor’s waiting rooms, schools, airports and airplanes—any place where there’s a likelihood for airborne viruses.” And unlike the flu vaccine, he says, far-UVC light is likely to be effective against all airborne microbes, including newly emerging virus strains.)

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