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.”

Facebook Programs Computers to Describe Photos for The Blind

acebook is training its computers to become seeing-eye guides for blind and visually impaired people as they scroll through the pictures posted on the world's largest online social network.

The feature rolling out Tuesday on Facebook's iPhone and iPad apps interprets what's in a picture using a form of artificial intelligence that recognizes faces and objects. VoiceOver, a screen reader built into the software powering the iPhone and iPad, must be turned on for Facebook's photo descriptions to be read. For now, the feature will only be available in English.


Until now, people relying on screen readers on Facebook would only hear that a person had shared a photo without any elaboration.
The photo descriptions initially will be confined to a vocabulary of 100 words in a restriction that will prevent the computer from providing a lot of details. For instance, the automated voice may only tell a user that a photo features three people smiling outdoors without adding that the trio also has drinks in their hands. Or it may say the photo is of pizza without adding that there's pepperoni and olives on top of it.

Facebook is being careful with the technology, called "automatic alternative text," in an attempt to avoid making a mistake that offends its audience. Google learned the risks of automation last year when an image recognition feature in its Photos app labeled a black couple as gorillas, prompting the company to issue an apology.

Eventually, though, Facebook hopes to refine the technology so it provides more precise descriptions and even answers questions that a user might pose about a picture.

The vocabulary of Facebook's photo-recognition program includes "car," ''sky," ''dessert," ''baby," ''shoes," and, of course, "selfie."

Facebook also plans to turn on the technology for its Android app and make it available through Web browsers visiting its site.

The Menlo Park, California, company is trying to ensure the world's nearly 300 million blind and visually impaired people remain interested in its social network as a steadily increasing number of photos appear on its service. On an average day, Facebook said more than 2 billion photos are posted on its social network and other apps that it owns, a list that includes Messenger, Instagram and WhatsApp.

In a Tuesday post, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg hailed the photo description tool as "an important step towards making sure everyone has equal access to information and is included in the conversation."

Long-Term Drug Release

Researchers from MIT and Brigham and Women’s Hospital have designed a new type of pill that, once swallowed, can attach to the lining of the gastrointestinal tract and slowly release its contents. The tablet is engineered so that one side adheres to tissue, while the other repels food and liquids that would otherwise pull it away from the attachment site.

Such extended-release pills could be used to reduce the dosage frequency of some drugs, the researchers say. For example, antibiotics that normally have to be taken two or three times a day could be given just once, making it easier for patients to stick to their dosing schedule.



“This could be adapted to many drugs. Any drug that is dosed frequently could be amenable to this kind of system,” says Giovanni Traverso, a research affiliate at MIT’s Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research, a gastroenterologist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, and one of the senior authors of a paper describing the device in the April 6 issue of the journal Advanced Healthcare Materials.

Robert Langer, the David H. Koch Institute Professor and a member of the Koch Institute, is also a senior author of the paper. The paper’s lead author is Young-Ah Lucy Lee, a technical assistant at the Koch Institute.

Two faces


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Over the past several decades, Langer’s lab has developed many types of materials that can be implanted in the body or attached to the skin for long-term drug release. To achieve similar, long-term drug release in the gastrointestinal tract, the researchers focused on a type of material known as mucoadhesives, which can stick to the mucosal linings of organs such as the stomach.

Scientists have previously explored using this kind of material for drug delivery to the GI tract, but it has proven difficult because food and liquid in the stomach become stuck to the tablet, pulling it away from the tissue before it can deliver its entire drug payload.

“The challenge with mucoadhesives is that the GI tract is a very rough and abrasive environment,” says Lee, a 2014 Wellesley College graduate who began this project as her senior thesis.

To overcome this challenge, the researchers decided to create a dual-sided device, also called a Janus device after the two-faced Roman god. One side sticks to mucosal surfaces, while the other is omniphobic, meaning that it repels everything it encounters.

For the mucoadhesive side, the researchers used a commercially available polymer known as Carbopol, which is often used industrially as a stabilizing or thickening agent. The omniphobic side consists of cellulose acetate that the researchers textured so that its surface would mimic that of a lotus leaf, which has micro and nanoscale protrusions that make it extremely hydrophobic. They then fluorinated and lubricated the surface, making it repel nearly any material.

The researchers used a pill presser to combine the polymers into two-sided tablets, which can be formed in many shape and sizes. Drugs can be either embedded within the cellulose acetate layer or placed between the two layers.

Long-term attachment

Using intestinal tissue from pigs, the researchers tested three versions of the tablet — a dual-sided mucoadhesive tablet, a dual-sided omniphobic tablet, and the Janus version, with one mucoadhesive side and one omniphobic side.

To simulate the tumultuous environment of the GI tract, the researchers flowed a mix of food including liquids and small pieces of bread and rice along the tissue and then added the tablets. The dual-sided omniphobic tablet took less than 1 second to travel along the tissue, and the dual-sided mucoadhesive stuck to the tissue for only 7 seconds before being pulled off. The Janus version stayed attached for the length of the experiment, about 10 minutes.

Tejal Desai, a professor of bioengineering and therapeutic sciences at the University of California at San Francisco, says this approach could make it possible to deliver larger quantities of drugs through the GI tract.

“The ability to precisely engineer the adhesiveness of a particle opens up possibilities of designing particles to selectively adhere to specific regions of the GI tract, which in turn can increase the local or systemic concentrations of a particular drug,” says Desai, who was not involved in the work.

The researchers now plan to do further tests in animals to help them tune how long the tablets can stay attached, the rate at which drugs are released from the material, and the ability to target the material to specific sections of the GI tract.

In addition to delivering antibiotics, the two-sided material may help to simplify drug regimens for malaria or tuberculosis, among other diseases, Traverso says. The researchers may also further pursue the development of tablets with omniphobic coatings on both sides, which they believe could help patients who have trouble swallowing pills.

“There are certain medications that are known to get stuck, particularly in the esophagus. It causes this massive amount of inflammation because it gets stuck and it causes irritation,” Traverso says. “Texturing the surfaces really opens up a new way of thinking about controlling and tuning how these drug formulations travel.”

Hannibal's Route through the Alps Found via Ancient Dung?

Located 3,000 meters above sea level, Col de la Traversette pass is located in the Cottian Alps, near the French-Italian border. The terrain is treacherous and poses a challenge to any intrepid adventurer.

But imagine leading 30,000 men, 37 elephants, and more than 15,000 horses and mules on such a trek. With so many factors warranting consideration, the challenge only multiplies.

A team of international researchers believe storied Carthagininan general Hannibal utilized the pass on his journey to conquer the Romans—a task at which he ultimately failed.

The clues lie in the dirt and were left by the animals Hannibal brought on his journey.  




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“Controversy over the alpine route that Hannibal of Carthage followed from the Rhone Basin into Italia has raged amongst classicists and ancient historians for over two millennia,” the researchers wrote in their study published in Archaeometry. “The motivation for identifying the route taken by the Punic Army through the Alps lies in its potential for identifying sites of historical archaeological significance and for the resolution of one of history’s more enduring quandaries.”

Col de la Traversette was first proposed as a viable invasion route for Hannibal by Sir Gavin de Beer in 1974. However, the theory didn’t get much traction in academic circles, according to Queen’s University Belfast.

Using a variety of geophysical techniques, including microbial metagenome analysis and environmental chemistry, the team identified what they term as a “mass animal deposition” event, which disturbed the bedding and increased organic carbon. The occurrence can be dated to around 218 B.C.

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“The deposition lies within a churned-up mass from a 1-meter-thick alluvial mire, produced by the constant movement of thousands of animals and humans,” said Chris Allen, of the Queen’s University Belfast’s Institute for Global Food Security, in a statement. “Over 70 per cent of the microbes in horse manure are from a group known as the Clostridia … We found scientifically significant evidence of these same bugs in a genetic microbial signature precisely dating to the time of the Punic invasion.”

The research team included members from Ireland, Canada, France, the U.S., and Estonia.