California Lawmaker Wants to Allow Supervised Heroin Use

A lawmaker wants to allow California addicts to use heroin, crack and other drugs at supervised facilities to cut down on overdoses, joining several U.S. cities considering establishing the nation's first legal drug-injection sites.

The proposal introduced Tuesday comes as San Francisco, Seattle, New York City and Ithaca, New York, weigh ordinances to set up the facilities, citing the success of a site operating in Canada since 2003.

But law enforcement has opposed the move in California, saying it will worsen addiction. And lawmakers seemed reluctant to support it, postponing a committee vote.
Though federal authorities have taken a hands-off approach to states' legalization of marijuana, it's not clear how they would respond to facilities permitting users to shoot up hard drugs.


The bill from Democratic Assemblywoman Susan Talamantes Eggman would make it legal for local and state health departments to allow the use of controlled substances in clinics that would offer medical intervention.
Supporters say the facilities would reduce deaths and transmissions of HIV and hepatitis C.

"Addiction is a health care issue, and I think it's high time we started treating it as a public health issue, versus a criminal issue," Eggman said. "This bill is one step to be able to address the heroin addiction and epidemic of overdoses that we're having in our country."

Advocates of drug policy reform point to the success of North America's only supervised injection facility, established 13 years ago in Vancouver, British Columbia.

Canadian Sen. Larry Campbell, who helped establish the facility as Vancouver mayor, joined Eggman in Sacramento to support her proposal. He said the Vancouver program has reduced the number of overdoses in the city and moved drug use out of the public eye.

"The drug is illegal, but the person who's using that drug is suffering from a recognized medical disease," Campbell said. "What this does is simply treat the addiction, keep somebody alive and keep them off the streets."

The Canadian facility, which has overseen more than 2 million injections, costs $2 million a year to run, he said. In 2003, it saved the state $1.5 million in health care costs, largely due to decreased emergency room visits.

The California measure faces strong opposition from sheriffs and police chiefs concerned the facilities would encourage drug use.

"This sends entirely the wrong message regarding drug use and likely creates civil liability issues for participating governments and officials," said Asha Harris, spokeswoman for the California State Sheriffs' Association.

The supervised consumption sites would violate federal law banning certain controlled substances such as heroin, U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration spokesman Michael Shavers said. There is no official guidance from the agency on the facilities.

The "DEA focuses its resources on criminal distributors and not individual users; our focus is on eliminating the suppliers, the distributors, the larger controlled substance providers," Shavers said.

Eggman said she has not reached out to the agency about her proposal.

Republican Assemblyman Tom Lackey echoed law enforcement concerns and said California should consider how to control addiction to opioids and other prescription medications before moving toward such facilities.

"We need to discourage people, but we also need to help them," said Lackey, a 28-year veteran of the California Highway Patrol. "But I just can't support this because there's a number of problems at this stage.

"I don't think we're quite ready for this step," he said.

At least 87 drug consumption facilities existed in 58 cities around the world in 2012, according to researchers Eberhard Schatz of the Correlation Network and Marie Nougier of the International Drug Policy Consortium, citing the most recent data available.

Using Colloids to Build Complex Structures

Manufacturers produce high-end technology mostly top-down with large machinery, but small particles are able to build structures by themselves from the bottom up. A major challenge is that these particles easily clump together. Leiden physicist Daniela Kraft has developed a method to use this phenomenon to her advantage. Publication in ACS Nano.
Building blocks
Smaller computer chips, narrow sound boxes, miniature cameras; we keep aiming for smaller and more complex technology, to carry with us or to use for surgery. At the same time, it gets increasingly hard to build a complex structure on an even smaller scale. Wouldn’t it be much more convenient to build structures bottom-up, starting from tiny building blocks? That is exactly the idea within the research group of Leiden physicist Daniela Kraft. She is working on a method to build structures from colloids— particles that are larger than nanoparticles but too small to see with the naked eye. And the fun part is that colloids operate completely on their own, as independent building blocks.


Chunks
This field of research is still in its early stages, but Kraft and her PhD student Vera Meester have now made a giant leap forward by developing a method to use a large barrier to their advantage. ‘Colloids have a strong tendency to clump together,’ says Kraft. ‘Normally speaking that is bad news, but we let them go ahead and make sure that they rearrange into a desired structure afterwards.’

Control

They control the building process by adding salt or oil to the colloidal solution at specific times. This enables them to control the attractive Van der Waals forces and the surface tension. Under the influence of these forces, the randomly shaped chunks swell and reconfigure in a specific way. The type and concentration of salt and oil determine which structures the colloids form. By testing different combinations, Kraft now knows how to create a number of basic structures, from a simple dumb-bell shape to a pentagonal dipyramid. ‘Theoreticians have already predicted what kind of useful larger structures we can build with these basic building blocks, but in practice you never know what is actually going to happen.’

Medical robots

Once physicists have obtained sufficient knowledge on how to command colloids to build specific structures, they will bypass the limit that manufacturers approach from their top-down approach by going the other way: bottom-up. In this way they’ll be able to fabricate miniature devices that are out of reach for the conventional industry. Kraft: ‘In the future we might build tiny light switches, or medical robots. Because we work bottom-up, we won’t be limited with respect to complexity, materials or length scales.’

Metal Foam Obliterates Bullets—and That's Just the Beginning

Composite metal foams (CMFs) are tough enough to turn an armor-piercing bullet into dust on impact. Given that these foams are also lighter than metal plating, the material has obvious implications for creating new types of body and vehicle armor – and that’s just the beginning of its potential uses.
Afsaneh Rabiei, a professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at NC State, has spent years developing CMFs and investigating their unusual properties. The video seen here shows a composite armor made out of her composite metal foams. The bullet in the video is a 7.62 x 63 millimeter M2 armor piercing projectile, which was fired according to the standard testing procedures established by the National Institute of Justice (NIJ). And the results were dramatic. (See video below).



“We could stop the bullet at a total thickness of less than an inch, while the indentation on the back was less than 8 millimeters,” Rabiei said. “To put that in context, the NIJ standard allows up to 44 millimeters indentation in the back of an armor.” The results of that study were published in 2015.
But there are many applications that require a material to be more than just incredibly light and strong. For example, applications from space exploration to shipping nuclear waste require a material to be not only light and strong, but also capable of withstanding extremely high temperatures and blocking radiation.

Last year, with support from the Department of Energy’s Office of Nuclear Energy, Rabiei showed that CMFs are very effective at shielding X-rays, gamma rays and neutron radiation. And earlier this year, Rabiei published work demonstrating that these metal foams handle fire and heat twice as well as the plain metals they are made of.

Now that these CMFs are becoming well understood, there could be a wide array of technologies that make use of this light, tough material. Armor, if you’ll forgive th

In These Microbes, Iron Works Like Oxygen

A pair of papers from a UW–Madison geoscience lab shed light on a curious group of bacteria that use iron in much the same way that animals use oxygen: to soak up electrons during biochemical reactions. When organisms—whether bacteria or animal—oxidize carbohydrates, electrons must go somewhere.

The studies can shed some light on the perennial question of how life arose, but they also have slightly more practical applications in the search for life in space, said senior author Eric Roden, a professor of geoscience at UW–Madison.
Animals use oxygen and "reduce" it to produce water, but some bacteria use iron that is deficient in electrons, reducing it to a more electron-rich form of the element. Ironically, electron-rich forms of iron can also supply electrons in the opposite "oxidation" reaction, in which the bacteria literally "eat" the iron to get energy.


Iron is the fourth-most abundant element on the planet, and because free oxygen is scarce underwater and underground, bacteria have "thought up," or evolved, a different solution: moving electrons to iron while metabolizing organic matter.

These bacteria "eat organic matter like we do," says Roden. "We pass electrons from organic matter to oxygen. Some of these bacteria use iron oxide as their electron acceptor. On the flip side, some other microbes receive electrons donated by other iron compounds. In both cases, the electron transfer is essential to their energy cycles."

Virtual Reality as Pain Management?

Virtual reality (VR) technology has long been studied for its potential analgesic effect. Studies have been produced regarding its usage in the dentist chair to reduce pain and anxiety, and to reduce pain while dressing the wounds of burn victims.  
Publishing in the Royal Society Open Science, York St. John University researchers have found that auditory simulation is a key component to increasing VR’s pain management capabilities.
In the study, the researchers outfitted 32 healthy adults with an Oculus Rift headset and asked them to play the racing game “Radial-G.” While playing, the players’ hands were submerged in a container of water, the temperature of which was 32 Fahrenheit.



With the head-mounted display and sound, participants kept their hand in water for an average 79 seconds. Without the sound, they kept their hand submerged for an average 56 seconds. With no virtual reality or sound, the average submersion time was 30 seconds.“The inclusion of sound alongside the VR game is likely to have been more … demanding than both aspects in isolation, thereby leading to less attentional resources that could be allocated to the pain stimulus,” the researchers wrote. “This is consistent with the finding that sound on its own also increased pain tolerance, but not to the same extent.”

With only sound, participants kept their hands in the cold water for an average 40 seconds.

Houman Danesh, the director of integrative pain management at Mount Sinai Hospital, told MIT Technology Review that mind distractions like VR do result in people feeling less pain. However, with the limited scope of York St. John University’s study, he’s unsure if the results will transfer to patients with different kinds of pain.

“We need to be careful not to draw too many conclusions from a relatively small, lab-based study on healthy individuals,” wrote Edmund Keogh, of the University of Bath’ Department of Psychology, in The Conversation. “After all, the level of pain experienced was relatively mild, controllable and less threatening than the pain experienced by those in an actual clinical setting.”

Moving forward, the York St. John University researchers suggest future studies differentiate the types of sounds that are most effective at distracting from pain.

NASA Tests Slimmer, Fuel-Efficient Airplane Wing

A new project from NASA and aircraft manufacturing company Boeing could have a big impact on commercial air flight. Both organizations are working on a thinner, longer wing aimed at reducing the weight of an aircraft.
Engineers are using aerodynamic computer models to test this prototype, according to a NASA blog post. A key component of the wing is a brace (also known as a truss).
The researchers are using these schematics to see how air flows around the wing allowing improvements if they notice any areas that would raise the difficulty of getting a plane off the ground followed by a wind-tunnel experiment to see how it would perform in flight.
Popular Science added that a brace can add more drag to an aircraft upon liftoff if not designed effectively, which is why the scientists will analyze these test results and make adjustments where needed.

However, early projections indicate this wing will, “reduce both fuel burn and carbon emissions by at least 50 percent over current technology transport aircraft, and by 4 to 8 percent compared to equivalent advanced technology conventional configurations with unbraced wings, “explained NASA.
This invention is part of NASA’s Advanced Air Transport Technology project, but no deadline has been set for a completed model.
NASA is working on other next-gen aircraft projects as well. The agency awarded a grant to Lockheed Martin last month to build a silent, supersonic jet.

Becoming Crystal Clear

Using state-of-the-art theoretical methods, UCSB researchers have identified a specific type of defect in the atomic structure of a light-emitting diode (LED) that results in less efficient performance. The characterization of these point defects could result in the fabrication of even more efficient, longer lasting LED lighting.

“Techniques are available to assess whether such defects are present in the LED materials and they can be used to improve the quality of the material,” said materials professor Chris Van de Walle, whose research group carried out the work.
In the world of high-efficiency solid-state lighting, not all LEDs are alike. As the technology is utilized in a more diverse array of applications — including search and rescue, water purification and safety illumination, in addition to their many residential, industrial and decorative uses — reliability and efficiency are top priorities. Performance, in turn, is heavily reliant on the quality of the semiconductor material at the atomic level.
“In an LED, electrons are injected from one side, holes from the other,” explained Van de Walle. As they travel across the crystal lattice of the semiconductor — in this case gallium-nitride-based material — the meeting of electrons and holes (the absence of electrons) is what is responsible for the light that is emitted by the diode: As electron meets hole, it transitions to a lower state of energy, releasing a photon along the way.

Occasionally, however, the charge carriers meet and do not emit light, resulting in the so-called Shockley-Read-Hall (SRH) recombination. According to the researchers, the charge carriers are captured at defects in the lattice where they combine, but without emitting light.

The defects identified involve complexes of gallium vacancies with oxygen and hydrogen. “These defects had been previously observed in nitride semiconductors, but until now, their detrimental effects were not understood,” explained lead author Cyrus Dreyer, who performed many of the calculations on the paper.

“It was the combination of the intuition that we have developed over many years of studying point defects with these new theoretical capabilities that enabled this breakthrough,” said Van de Walle, who credits co-author Audrius Alkauskas with the development of a theoretical formalism necessary to calculate the rate at which defects capture electrons and holes.

The method lends itself to future work identifying other defects and mechanisms by which SRH recombination occurs, said Van de Walle.

“These gallium vacancy complexes are surely not the only defects that are detrimental,” he said. “Now that we have the methodology in place, we are actively investigating other potential defects to assess their impact on nonradiative recombination.”