Discover magazine reports: For years, many artificial intelligence enthusiasts and researchers have promised that machine learning will change modern medicine. Thousands of algorithms have been developed to diagnose conditions like cancer, heart disease and psychiatric disorders. Now, algorithms are being trained to detect COVID-19 by recognizing patterns in CT scans and X-ray images of the lungs.

Many of these models aim to predict which patients will have the most severe outcomes and who will need a ventilator. The excitement is palpable; if these models are accurate, they could offer doctors a huge leg up in testing and treating patients with the coronavirus. But the allure of AI-aided medicine for the treatment of real COVID-19 patients appears far off. A group of statisticians around the world are concerned about the quality of the vast majority of machine learning models and the harm they may cause if hospitals adopt them any time soon.

So far, their reviews of COVID-19 machine learning models aren't good: They suffer from a serious lack of data and necessary expertise from a wide array of research fields. But the issues facing new COVID-19 algorithms aren't new at all: AI models in medical research have been deeply flawed for years...
"The main problems appear to be (perhaps unsurprisingly) a lack of necessary data, and not enough domain expertise," writes Slashdot reader shirappu: The leader of the above group of statisticians, Maarten van Smeden, pointed to a lack of collaboration between researchers as a road block in the way of developing truly accurate models. "You need expertise not only of the modeler," he said, "but you need statisticians, epidemiologists and clinicians to work together to make something that is actually useful."
One biostatistician has even been arguing that with many current AI models, medical researchers are using machine learning to "torture their data until it spits out a confession."

Saturday the Washington Post (in an article republished in Stars and Stripes) took a closer look at what's known as "superspreading events": Many scientists say such infection bursts — probably sparked by a single, highly infectious individual who may show no signs of illness and unwittingly share an enclosed space with many others — are driving the pandemic. They worry these cases, rather than routine transmission between one infected person and, say, two or three close contacts, are propelling case counts out of control...

Transmission, it turns out, is far more idiosyncratic than previously understood. Scientists say they believe it is dependent on such factors as an individual's infectivity, which can vary person to person by billions of virus particles, whether the particles are contained in large droplets that fall to the ground or in fine vapor that can float much further, and how much the air in a particular space circulates. Donald Milton, a professor of environmental health at the University of Maryland, and other experts have wondered if superspreading events could be the "Achilles' heel" of the virus. If we could pinpoint the conditions under which these clusters occur, Milton argued, we could lower the transmission rate enough to extinguish the spread. "If you could stop these events, you could stop the pandemic," Milton said. "You would crush the curve..."

Some people will not transmit the virus to anyone, contact tracing has shown, while others appear to spread the virus with great efficiency. Overall, researchers have estimated in recent studies that some 10 to 20 percent of the infected may be responsible for 80 percent of all cases... An infected person's viral load can impact how much they "shed"; the differences have been shown to be on a scale of billions of virus particles... A growing body of evidence suggests that SARS-CoV2, like other coronaviruses, expands in a community in fits and starts, rather than more evenly over space and time....

While it's often impossible to identify the person who triggered an outbreak, there have been some commonalities among those who have been pinpointed as the likely source in studies. They tend to be young. Asymptomatic. Social. Scientists suspect these "super-emitters" may have much higher levels of the virus in their bodies than others, or may release them by talking, shouting or singing in a different way from most people... In a study published in Emerging Infectious Diseases by Japan's Hitoshi Oshitani at Tohoku University of 22 superspreading individuals with the coronavirus, about half were under the age of 40, and 41 percent were experiencing no symptoms.

sciencehabit shares an article from Science magazine: Dogs are renowned for their world-class noses, but a new study suggests they may have an additional — albeit hidden — sensory talent: a magnetic compass. The sense appears to allow them to use Earth's magnetic field to calculate shortcuts in unfamiliar terrain. The finding is a first in dogs, says Catherine Lohmann, a biologist at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, who studies "magnetoreception" and navigation in turtles...

There were already hints that dogs — like many animals, and maybe even humans — can perceive Earth's magnetic field. In 2013, Hynek Burda, a sensory ecologist at the Czech University of Life Sciences Prague who has worked on magnetic reception for 3 decades, and colleagues showed dogs tend to orient themselves north-south while urinating or defecating. Because this behavior is involved in marking and recognizing territory, Burda reasoned the alignment helps dogs figure out the location relative to other spots.
Lohmann and a graduate student tracked the path of dogs on 233 separate trips spread out over three years: In 170 of these trips, the dogs stopped before they turned back and ran for about 20 meters along a north-south axis. When the animals did this, they tended to get back to the owner via a more direct route than when they didn't, the authors report in eLife...

Burda thinks the dogs run along a north-south axis to figure out which way they are. "It's the most plausible explanation," he says. Lohmann says the implication is that dogs can remember their previous heading and use the reference to the magnetic compass to figure out the most direct route home.

CNN shares some bad news. "After people are infected with the novel coronavirus, their natural immunity to the virus could decline within months, a new pre-print paper suggests." The paper was co-authored by 37 researchers from seven different institutions: The paper, released on the medical server medrxiv.org on Saturday and not yet published in a peer-reviewed medical journal, suggests that antibody responses may start to decline 20 to 30 days after Covid-19 symptoms emerge. Antibodies are the proteins the body makes to fight infection...

Since early on in the pandemic, the World Health Organization has warned that people who have had Covid-19 are not necessarily immune from getting the virus again. Yet the new study had some limitations, including that more research is needed to determine whether similar results would emerge among a larger group of patients and what data could show over longer periods of time when it comes to infection with the coronavirus...
"The report is the latest in a growing chain of evidence that immunity to COVID-19 is short-lived," reports the San Francisco Chronicle: A Chinese study published June 18 in the journal Nature Medicine also showed coronavirus antibodies taking a nosedive. The study of 74 patients, conducted by Chongqing Medical University, a branch of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, showed that more than 90% exhibited sharp declines in the number of antibodies within two to three months after infection... Studies of four seasonal coronaviruses that cause colds show that although people develop antibodies, the immune response declines over time and people become susceptible again. Scientists suspect that the severity of cold symptoms is reduced by previous infections.
The Chronicle reports this new information suggests two implications:

• "Waning antibodies affect vaccine development," said Shannon Bennett, the chief of science at San Francisco's California Academy of Sciences. "Where natural immunity doesn't really develop or last, then vaccine programs are not likely to be easily successful or achievable..."

• The Chronicle adds, "Whatever happens, epidemiologists hope the recent reports about antibody viability put to rest the concept embraced by many young people of herd immunity, where the disease can't find any more victims because so many people have survived infections and must be immune. 'This attitude that if I go out there and just get exposed — get it over with — then I'll be immune is a dangerous presumption,' Bennett said. Now more than ever."

Face masks "offer much more protection against coronavirus than many think," reports the Los Angeles Times. [Alternate version here ....] There's a common refrain that masks don't protect you; they protect other people from your own germs, which is especially important to keep unknowingly infected people from spreading the coronavirus. But now, there's mounting evidence that masks also protect you.

If you're unlucky enough to encounter an infectious person, wearing any kind of face covering will reduce the amount of virus that your body will take in. As it turns out, that's pretty important. Breathing in a small amount of virus may lead to no disease or far more mild infection. But inhaling a huge volume of virus particles can result in serious disease or death. That's the argument Dr. Monica Gandhi, UC San Francisco professor of medicine and medical director of the HIV Clinic at Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital, is making about why — if you do become infected with the virus — masking can still protect you from more severe disease...

She cited an outbreak at a seafood plant in Oregon where employees were given masks, and 95% of those who were infected were asymptomatic.... The protective effects are also seen in countries where masks are universally accepted for years, such as Taiwan, Thailand, South Korea and Singapore. "They have all seen cases as they opened ... but not deaths," Gandhi said.
"The emerging scientific data is clear: wearing a mask doesn't only protect others, it also significantly reduces your own risk of getting Coronavirus," one U.S. governor recently pointed out.

"So if you're a selfish bastard and wearing a mask to protect others isn't enough of a reason to do so, then maybe protecting yourself is?"

Engineers have developed a new type of hybrid solar energy converter, which uses energy from the Sun to create both electricity and steam. The device reportedly has high efficiency and runs at low cost, allowing industry to make use of a wider spectrum of solar energy. New Atlas reports: The device looks like a satellite dish, with a small device suspended over the center of a parabolic collector. The dish part is mirrored, and focuses the sun's rays onto the box in the middle. The bottom of this section contains multi-junction solar cells, which collect and convert visible and ultraviolet light into electricity. But the clever part is that these cells redirect the infrared light -- the heat energy -- to a separate thermal receiver, higher up in the device. This receiver is essentially a cup-shaped cavity surrounded by pressurized water, which captures the heat and turns into steam.

The team says that the total collection efficiency is 85.1 percent, meaning a very high amount of the Sun's energy is converted into either electricity or heat. The steam can be heated up to 248C (478F), which is a much higher temperature than many other thermal energy collectors. This means it's hot enough for many industrial processes, such as drying, curing, sterilizing, and pasteurizing. The other advantage is cost. The team reports that once scaled up, the hybrid device could run for as little as 3 cents per kilowatt hour. The research was published in the journal Cell Reports Physical Science.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Vox: There's an old truism in the business world: what gets measured gets managed. One of the challenges in managing the greenhouse gas emissions warming the atmosphere is that they aren't measured very well. The ultimate solution to this problem-- the killer app, as it were -- would be real-time tracking of all global greenhouse gases, verified by objective third parties, and available for free to the public. Now, a new alliance of climate research groups called the Climate TRACE (Tracking Real-Time Atmospheric Carbon Emissions) Coalition has launched an effort to make the vision a reality, and they're aiming to have it ready for COP26, the climate meetings in Glasgow, Scotland, in November 2021 (postponed from November 2020). If they pull it off, it could completely change the tenor and direction of international climate talks. It could also make it easier for the hundreds of companies, cities, counties, and states that have made ambitious climate commitments to reliably track their process.

In addition to [Al Gore, who had been looking for more reliable ways to track emissions] and WattTime, [which intends to create a public database that will track carbon emissions from all the world's large power plants using AI], the coalition now contains:

-Carbon Tracker uses machine learning and satellite data to predict the utilization of every power plant in the world;
-Earthrise Alliance aggregates and organizes publicly available environmental data into a format meaningful to journalists and researchers;
-CarbonPlan uses satellite data to track changes in aboveground biomass (especially forests) and the associated carbon emissions, down to a spatial resolution of 300 meters;
-Hudson Carbon uses satellite data to track changes in agricultural cover, cropping, and tilling, down to the level of the individual field, and compares that data against ground-level sensors;
-OceanMind uses onboard sensors to track the global movement of ships in real time and combines that with engine specs to extrapolate carbon emissions;
-Rocky Mountain Institute combines multiple sources of data to quantify methane emissions from oil and gas infrastructure;
-Hypervine uses spectroscopic imagery to track vehicle usage and blasting at quarries;
-Blue Sky Analytics uses near-infrared and shortwave infrared imagery from satellites to track fires.

The coalition will also be gathering data from a variety of other sources, from power grid data to fuel sales, sensor networks, and drones. Gore acknowledges that "this is a work in progress," but says the coalition is aiming big: "everything that can be known about where greenhouse gas emissions are coming from will be known, in near-real time."

schwit1 shares a report from UPI: Up to 75% of the coronavirus strains circulating in New York City in early March shared genetic similarities with those seen in Europe and other areas of North America, according to an analysis published Thursday by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The findings are significant, given that they are based on samples of the new coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2, collected from patients at five hospitals in the city selected intentionally because "of their high use" by people who are "self-identified Chinese speakers," the agency researchers said. "In retrospect, perhaps Trump should have shut down flights from Europe when he shut them down from China, but you can imagine the reaction if he had done so," adds Slashdot reader schwit1. Trump did restrict travel from Europe to the U.S. in early March, but at that point the virus was already spreading rapidly across the country.

The National Suicide Prevention Lifeline will be available for people in suicidal crisis under a new easier-to-remember phone number in two years. The Verge reports: On Thursday, the Federal Communications Commission voted unanimously to finalize 988 as the number Americans can call to be directed to the 24/7 National Suicide Prevention Lifeline hotline. As of right now, individuals in suicidal crisis can reach that hotline by dialing 1-800-273-8255 (TALK), but that number will be easier to remember once it transitions to its three-digit equivalent starting on July 16th, 2022. FCC Chairman Ajit Pai said in a statement on Thursday, "Establishing the easy-to-remember 988 as the '911' for suicide prevention and mental health services will make it easier for Americans in crisis to access the help they need."

As of right now, the national suicide hotline does not provide texting services. Democratic Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel took issue with the commission's decision not to include the ability to text the hotline in its rulemaking. "Voice service has its benefits, but it is not native for most young people," Rosenworcel said in a statement on Thursday. "So I regret today's decision is anchored in older technologies and takes a pass on developing texting capabilities with this three-digit hotline. We should have done so here."

The recent retraction of a research paper which claimed to find no link between police killings and the race of the victims was a story tailor-made for today's fights over cancel culture. From a report: First, the authors asked for the paper to be withdrawn, both because they'd been "careless when describing the inferences that could be made from our data" and because of how others had interpreted the work. (In particular they pointed to recent op-ed in The Wall Street Journal with the headline, "The Myth of Systemic Police Racism.") Then, after two days of predictable blowback from those decrying what they saw as left-wing censorship, the authors tried to clarify: "People were incorrectly concluding that we retracted due to either political pressure or the political views of those citing the paper," they wrote in an amended statement. No, the authors said, the real reason they retracted the paper was because it contained a serious mistake. In fact, that mistake -- a misstatement of its central finding -- had been caught soon after the paper's initial publication in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in July 2019, and was formally corrected in April of this year. At that point, the authors acknowledged their error -- sort of -- while insisting that their main conclusions held. That the eventual retraction came only after the paper became a flashpoint in the debate over race and policing in the wake of George Floyd's murder ... well, let's agree that the retraction happened.

[...] As we and others have written many times, peer review -- the way journals ask researchers to perform it, anyway -- is not designed to catch fraud. It's also vulnerable to rigging and doesn't go so well when done in haste. Editors and publishers tend to admit these problems only under duress -- i.e., when a well-publicized retraction happens -- and then hope that we believe their claims that such colossal blunders are somehow "the system is working the way it should." But their protestations only serve as an acknowledgement that the standard system doesn't work, and that we must instead rely upon the more informal sort of peer review that happens to a paper after it gets published. The internet has enabled such post-publication peer review, as it is known, to happen with more speed, on sites like PubPeer.com. In some cases, though -- as with the PNAS paper described above -- the resolution of this after-the-fact assessment comes much too late, after a mistaken claim has already made the rounds. So how might journals do things better? As Daniel Lakens, of Eindhoven University of Technology in the Netherlands, and his colleagues have argued, researchers should embrace a "Red Team challenge" approach to peer review. Just as software companies hire hackers to probe their products for potential gaps in the security, a journal might recruit a team of scientific devil's advocates: subject-matter specialists and methodologists who will look for "holes and errors in ongoing work and ... challenge dominant assumptions, with the goal of improving project quality," Lakens wrote in Nature recently. After all, he added, science is only as robust as the strongest critique it can handle.

California said public schools in the state's hardest hit counties won't be able to open for on-campus classes until the spread of the coronavirus in that area is contained. The order means that students in counties accounting for more than 70% of the state's population will likely switch to remote learning for the beginning of the school year. Bloomberg reports: "The virus will be with us for a year or more, and school districts must provide meaningful instruction in the midst of this pandemic," Governor Gavin Newsom said in a statement. "In California, health data will determine when a school can be physically open --- and when it must close -- but learning should never stop. Students, staff, and parents all prefer in-classroom instruction, but only if it can be done safely."

School districts in Los Angeles, San Diego and Sacramento had already decided they would offer remote learning only, despite calls by the Trump administration for classrooms to fully reopen. Schools located in counties that are on the state's virus monitoring list must not physically open for in-person instruction until their county has come off the list for 14 consecutive days. All staff and students in 3rd grade and above will be required to wear a mask or face covering. Students in 2nd grade and below are strongly encouraged to wear a face covering.

Russian state intelligence is hacking international research centers that are racing to develop a Covid-19 vaccine, the U.K., U.S. and Canadian governments said. From a report: It is unclear whether research facilities have been damaged or if the vaccine programs have been set back as a result of the hacks but officials warned that the cyber attacks are ongoing. In a dramatic statement on Thursday, Britain's National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) said vaccine and therapeutic sectors in multiple countries have been targeted by a group known as APT29, which it said is "almost certainly" part of Russian state intelligence. Security agencies in the U.S. and Canada later issued their own statements backing up the findings. "It is completely unacceptable that the Russian intelligence services are targeting those working to combat the coronavirus pandemic," British Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab said. "While others pursue their selfish interests with reckless behavior, the U.K. and its allies are getting on with the hard work of finding a vaccine and protecting global health."

India on Friday became the third country in the world to record more than one million coronavirus cases, behind only the United States and Brazil, as infections spread further out into the countryside and smaller towns. From a report: For India's population of around 1.3 billion, experts say a million cases are still low and the number will rise significantly in the coming months as testing is expanded. India recorded 34,956 new infections on Friday, taking the total so far to 1.004 million, with 25,602 deaths from COVID-19, federal health ministry data showed. That compares to some 3.6 million cases in the United States and 2 million in Brazil -- both countries with populations under 400 million.

Epidemiologists say India is still likely months away from hitting its peak of cases, suggesting the country's already overburdened healthcare system will come under further strain. "In the coming months, we are bound to see more and more cases, and that is the natural progression of any pandemic," said Giridhar Babu, epidemiologist at the nonprofit Public Health Foundation of India. "As we move forward, the goal has to be lower mortality... A critical challenge states will face is how to rationally allocate hospital beds," he said.

The launch of NASA's next flagship space telescope has been pushed back another seven months. Space.com reports: The liftoff of the $9.8 billion James Webb Space Telescope has been delayed from March 2021 until Oct. 31 of that year, NASA officials announced today (July 16), citing technical difficulties as well as complications imposed by the coronavirus pandemic. "Webb is the world's most complex space observatory, and our top science priority, and we've worked hard to keep progress moving during the pandemic," Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator of NASA's Science Mission Directorate, said in a statement. "The team continues to be focused on reaching milestones and arriving at the technical solutions that will see us through to this new launch date next year."

NASA officials attributed three months of this latest seven-month delay to the coronavirus pandemic, which forced many NASA centers to impose mandatory work-from-home orders. "Risk reduction" work on complex Webb tech, such as the observatory's huge, foldable sunshield, added two more months. The remaining two months were added for "schedule margin," giving the mission some breathing room on its long road to the launch pad. But the schedule slip won't increase the 13,670-lb. (6,200 kilograms) Webb's hefty price tag, mission team members said. "Based on current projections, the program expects to complete the remaining work within the new schedule without requiring additional funds," Gregory Robinson, NASA Webb program director at the agency's headquarters in Washington, D.C., said in the same statement.

The Trump administration is now ordering hospitals to send coronavirus patient data to a database in Washington, DC as part of a new initiative that may bypass the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), according to a report from The New York Times published on Tuesday. The Verge reports: As outlined in a document (PDF) posted to the website of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), hospitals are being ordered to send data directly to the administration, effective tomorrow, a move that has alarmed some within the CDC, according to The Times. The database that will collect and store the information is referred to in the document as HHS Protect, which was built in part by data mining and predictive analytics firm Palantir. The Silicon Valley company is known most for its controversial contract work with the US military and other clandestine government agencies as well as for being co-founded and initially funded by Trump ally Peter Thiel.

"A unique link will be sent to the hospital points of contact. This will direct the [point of care] to a hospital-specific secure form that can then be used to enter the necessary information. After completing the fields, click submit and confirm that the form has been successfully captured," reads the HHS instructions. "A confirmation email will be sent to you from the HHS Protect System. This method replaces the emailing of individual spreadsheets previously requested." While the White House's official reasoning is that this plan will help make data collection on the spread of COVID-19 more centralized and efficient, some current and former public health officials fear the bypassing of the CDC may be an effort to politicize the findings and cut experts out of the loop with regard to federal messaging and guidelines, The Times reports.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The New York Times: Researchers on Tuesday [reported in the journal Nature Communications] strong evidence that the coronavirus can be transmitted from a pregnant woman to a fetus. A baby born in a Paris hospital in March to a mother with Covid-19 tested positive for the virus and developed symptoms of inflammation in his brain, said Dr. Daniele De Luca, who led the research team and is chief of the division of pediatrics and neonatal critical care at Paris-Saclay University Hospitals. The baby, now more than 3 months old, recovered without treatment and is "very much improved, almost clinically normal," Dr. De Luca said, adding that the mother, who needed oxygen during the delivery, is healthy.

Dr. De Luca said the virus appeared to have been transmitted through the placenta of the 23-year-old mother. The testing indicated that "the virus reaches the placenta and replicates there," Dr. De Luca said. It can then be transmitted to a fetus, which "can get infected and have symptoms similar to adult Covid-19 patients." [Dr. Yoel Sadovsky, executive director of Magee-Womens Research Institute at the University of Pittsburgh] said, it is important to note that cases of possible coronavirus transmission in utero appear to be extremely rare. With other viruses, including Zika and rubella, placental infection and transmission is much more common, he said. With the coronavirus, he said, "we are trying to understand the opposite -- what underlies the relative protection of the fetus and the placenta?"

Another study published on Tuesday in eLife, an online research journal, may help answer that question. It found that while cells in the placenta had many of the receptor proteins that allow viruses to propagate, there was evidence of only "negligible" amounts of a key cell surface receptor and an enzyme that are known to be involved in allowing the coronavirus to enter cells and replicate. The study was led by Dr. Robert Romero, chief of the perinatology research branch at the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development.

Joseph R. Biden Jr. announced on Tuesday a new plan to spend $2 trillion over four years to significantly escalate the use of clean energy in the transportation, electricity and building sectors, part of a suite of sweeping proposals designed to create economic opportunities and build infrastructure while also tackling climate change. DogDude shares a report: In a speech in Wilmington, Del., Mr. Biden built on his plans, released last week, for reviving the economy in the wake of the coronavirus crisis, with a new focus on enhancing the nation's infrastructure and emphasizing the importance of putting the United States on a path to significantly cut fossil fuel emissions. "These are the most critical investments we can make for the long-term health and vitality of both the American economy and the physical health and safety of the American people," he said, repeatedly criticizing President Trump's leadership on issues including climate and the pandemic. "When Donald Trump thinks about climate change, the only word he can muster is 'hoax.' When I think about climate change, the word I think of is 'jobs.'"

The proposal is the second plank in Mr. Biden's economic recovery plan. His team sees an opportunity to take direct aim at Mr. Trump, who has struggled to deliver on his pledges to finance major improvements to American infrastructure. Republicans are sure to criticize the proposal as an attack on jobs in the energy sector -- but the plan will also test whether Mr. Biden has found a way to win over environmental activists and other progressives who have long been skeptical about the scope of his ambitions on climate. His plan outlines specific and aggressive targets, including achieving an emissions-free power sector by 2035 and upgrading four million buildings over four years to meet the highest standards for energy efficiency. The plan also calls for establishing an office of environmental and climate justice at the Department of Justice and developing a broad set of tools to address how "environmental policy decisions of the past have failed communities of color."

sciencehabit shares a report from Science Magazine: A pair of earthquakes that struck the remote California desert 1 year ago have raised the risk of 'the big one' hitting Southern California, according to a new study. The research finds that the 2019 Ridgecrest, California, quakes shifted underground stresses, making the San Andreas fault -- the state's longest and most dangerous fault -- three times more likely to rupture. U.S. Geological Survey estimates for the annual probability of an earthquake on this part of the San Andreas are about one-third of a percent -- equivalent to expecting a magnitude 7.8 every 300 years, on average. The new modeling triples that hazard to 1% per year -- or a big one every century. And if the Garlock actually does rupture, then the hazard really rises on the San Andreas, by a factor of 150: The probability of a big one rises to 50% in the following year. In principle, a Garlock earthquake could lead to rupture on the San Andreas in a matter of hours or days, much as the two Ridgecrest events came within a day or two. USGS regional scenarios anticipate 1,800 deaths and 50,000 injuries in the event of a major San Andreas earthquake. More than 3 million homes could be damaged, at a reconstruction cost of $289 billion. The study has been published in the Bulletin of the Seismological Society of America.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The New York Times: Researchers in Singapore have developed an apparatus that can be placed in a window to reduce incoming sound by 10 decibels. The system was created by a team of scientists, including Masaharu Nishimura, who came up with the basic concept, and Bhan Lam, a researcher at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. Their results were published on Thursday in Scientific Reports. The prototype is not yet the most practical device in real world conditions, but it points the way toward the development of technologies that may help ease the strain of noisy city living.

Borrowing from the same technological principles used in noise-canceling headphones, the team expanded the concept to fit an entire room by placing 24 small speakers in a window. The speakers emit sound waves that correspond to the incoming racket and neutralize it -- or, at least some of it. The system is based on the frequency of the sound waves and, for now, the optimal range is between 300 and 1,000 hertz. [...] The system uses a microphone outside the window to detect the repeating sound waves of the offending noise source, which is registered by a computer controller. That in turn deciphers the proper wave frequency needed to neutralize the sound, which is transmitted to the array of speakers on the inside of the window frame. The speakers then emit the proper "anti" waves, which cancel out the incoming waves, and there you have it: near blissful silence. Unfortunately, there are some limitations. The system works best from the types of steady noise sources found within the optimal frequency range and isn't great at neutralizing sporadic noises. Also, since human voices don't fit within most of that range, they won't be canceled out.

Engineers from Kenoteq are working to reinvent the humble clay-fired brick, which has remained largely the same for thousands of years and causes significant environmental problems. Not only are the majority of brick kilns required to produce bricks heated by fossil fuels, but the bricks that are made must be transported to construction sites, generating more carbon emissions. CNN reports: [Gabriela Medero, a professor of Geotechnical and Geoenvironmental Engineering at Scotland's Heriot-Watt University] joined forces with fellow engineer Sam Chapman and founded Kenoteq in 2009. The company's signature product is the K-Briq. Made from more than 90% construction waste, Medero says the K-Briq -- which does not need to be fired in a kiln -- produces less than a tenth of the carbon emissions of conventional bricks. With the company testing new machinery to start scaling up production, Medero hopes her bricks will help to build a more sustainable world.

To make it, construction and demolition waste including bricks, gravel, sand and plasterboard is crushed and mixed with water and a binder. The bricks are then pressed in customized molds. Tinted with recycled pigments, they can be made in any color. [...] Kenoteq currently operates one workshop in Edinburgh, which can produce three million K-Briqs a year. Medero is looking at scaling up -- but it's hard to create a revolution in construction. Over the next 18 months, Medero plans to get K-Briq machinery on-site at recycling plants. This will increase production while reducing transport-related emissions, she says, because trucks can collect K-Briqs when they drop off construction waste. "We need to have ways of building sustainably, with affordable, good quality materials that will last."