Special to A.M. Costa Rica

The famous yigüirro that provides wake up calls

By the A.M. Costa Rica wire services

President Obama issues a joint statement with President Peña Nieto.

A team of engineers at Harvard University has taken cues from Nature to create the first robotic fly. The mechanical bug has become a platform for a suite of new high-tech integrated systems. 

A team of engineers designed a robot to do what a fly does naturally. The tiny machine is the size of a fat housefly. It’s agile and fast. Its miniature flapping wings allow it to hover in place and perform controlled flight maneuvers.

“It’s extremely important for us to think about this as a whole system and not just the sum of a bunch of individual parts," said  Robert Wood.

A Harvard engineering professor, Robert Wood, has been working on the robotic fly project for over a decade. A few years ago, his team at Harvard’s Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering got the go-ahead to start piecing together the components. 

“The added difficulty with a project like this is that literally none of those components are off the shelf, and so we have to develop them all from scratch," he said.

They engineered a propulsion system with wings, tiny actuators to drive the wings, and a mechanism to maintain proper wing alignment.

“The seemingly simple system which just flaps the wings has a number of interdependencies on the individual components, each of which individually has to perform well, but then has to be matched well to everything it’s connected to," said Wood.

The flight apparatus was integrated into a set of power, computation, sensing and control systems. Wood says the success of the project proves that the flying robot with these miniaturized components can be built and manufactured.
   
While this prototype robotic flyer is tethered to a small, off-board power source, the goal is eventually to make it autonomous, so that it might someday perform surveillance and data-gathering work at rescue sites, in farmers’ fields or on the battlefield. 

“Otherwise the fly is totally unconstrained. Basically it can take off, land and fly around," he said.

Wood says the design offers a new way to study flight mechanics and control at insect-scale. Yet, the power, sensing and computation technologies on board could have much broader applications. 

“You can start thinking about using them to answer open scientific questions, you know, to study biology in ways that would be difficult with the animals, but instead using these robots," he said. "So there’s a host of technologies and open interesting scientific questions that are really what drives us on a day to day basis.” 

Wood says that while he finds real flies to be annoying little bugs, curiosity and awe at their mechanics inspired his design.  He and his colleagues describe their work in an article in this week’s edition of the journal Science.


Sky searcher would track
asteroids on collision paths


Amateur and professional skywatchers all over the world send observations to the Minor Planet Center, which collects information about near-Earth objects. The clearinghouse is just one way people are working to protect the Earth from asteroid strikes. Scientists also are developing innovative ways to detect, deflect and possibly destroy dangerous asteroids in Earth's neighborhood.

It sounds like something out of a Hollywood blockbuster. But it's real, and, it's getting $5 million from the U.S. space agency.  

The Asteroid Terrestrial-Impact Last Alert System, ATLAS for short, is being developed with NASA support by a team of astronomers at the University of Hawaii. As the name implies, their goal is to find asteroids that are just about to make their final plunge and strike the planet.

ATLAS is envisioned as a network of as many as eight ground-based telescopes, armed with cameras, that would scan the visible sky twice each night. The aim is for ATLAS to provide at least a day's warning for an asteroid that could wipe out a town, a week for one that could devastate a city, or three weeks' notice for one that could wipe out a larger area. 

"We really aren't going to be able to deflect these asteroids as they're coming in on their last plunge. There's just no chance of that," said astronomer John Tonry, who leads the ATLAS project. "The thing that we can do is provide warning, and the thing that is remarkable about the warning we can provide for asteroid impact is that it's not like hurricanes or tsunamis or earthquakes. It's really accurate. We can say exactly where and when this thing is going to come down."   

ATLAS is designed for a shallow and wide search of the sky, which Tonry says would complement other projects that are searching deep into narrow slivers of sky to find objects still decades away.   

The system would be sensitive enough to spot a match flame from across the United States. Tonry says there would be a better-than-50/50 chance of providing a day's warning for an object like the meteor that exploded over Russia in February, if copies of ATLAS were spread around the world.  

"What we really want to do is get diversity around the planet," he said. "Hawaii can't see the southern sky, and if we really want to cover the whole sky, we need to get units in the southern hemisphere, like Australia or Chile or South Africa."  

Other scientists focus on space-based assets that aren't hindered by Earth's weather conditions, atmosphere or bright skies.

A former NASA astronaut, Ed Lu, heads a non-profit organization called the B612 Foundation. Earlier this year, he told lawmakers about efforts to privately raise $450 million to build and operate an infrared space telescope called Sentinel.  Lu says the goal is planetary defense.

"As Sentinel moves around the Sun, faster than the Earth does, it will scan Earth's orbit, so it's going to find about 100-times more asteroids than all other telescopes combined," he said.    

Detecting dangerous asteroids is one step. Aerospace researchers such as Brent Barbee, a flight dynamics engineer at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, focus on asteroid deflection.   

"If we know that the asteroid is coming, say, 20 years in advance, then that opens up a wide range of possibilities," he explained.  "In those cases we could conceivably knock the asteroid off course with a kinetic impactor spacecraft or we could gradually nudge it off course with a gravity tractor spacecraft, things like that." 

Such spacecraft would, theoretically, divert an asteroid. 

Barbee considers an even more dramatic scenario. He looks at very short warning-times, less than 10 years' notice of a major impact, and he researches the idea of quickly deploying a nuclear-armed, two-body vehicle to an incoming asteroid. 

"One part of the vehicle is a kinetic impactor that excavates a shallow crater on the surface of the asteroid, and the follower vehicle contains a nuclear explosive device that follows the lead impactor vehicle into that shallow crater and detonates the explosive device," he said.

The nuclear bomb would shatter the asteroid, and Barbee said simulations indicate that only a fraction of a percent of the original mass of the asteroid might hit the atmosphere.   

While pieces of the necessary technology do exist, Barbee says the guidance-navigation technologies needed to precisely strike the speeding asteroid are still under development.   

So, if there is a large, dangerous asteroid that is about to crash into our planet, earthlings might want to consider NASA chief Charles Bolden's advice.  He told lawmakers earlier this year, "the answer to you is, if it's coming in three weeks, pray."


Urban air pollution seen
as hardening the arteries


U.S. researchers say urban dwellers exposed to the highest levels of fine particulate air pollution had faster hardening of the arteries, putting them at increased risk of stroke, compared to people in less polluted sections of the same city.  The finding adds to a growing body of evidence that residing in polluted urban areas is a risk factor for cardiovascular disease.

Atherosclerosis, or hardening of the arteries, is a leading cause of death around the world.  It can cause stroke or death when a blood clot or piece of hardened plaque inside a blocked coronary artery breaks off and travels to the brain, cutting off blood flow.

To investigate the role of air pollution in the development of atherosclerosis, researchers followed a group of almost 5,400 adults in six metropolitan areas.  None of the participants was known to have heart disease.  They were part of a larger U.S. study called the Multi-Ethnic Study of Atherosclerosis and Air Pollution.

Between 2000 and 2005, researchers conducted two non-invasive ultrasound examinations on each participant, at intervals of three years, to measure the thickness of the subjects' carotid artery walls.  The carotid carries blood to the head, neck and brain.  Thickening of an arterial wall is a good indicator of atherosclerosis throughout the body, even in patients with no obvious symptoms of heart disease.

Analyzing the ultrasound results, researchers found a slight, but significant increase in the thickening of carotid artery walls among individuals who resided in high pollution areas compared to those in less polluted urban centers.  According to lead researcher Sara Adar, an epidemiologist at the University of Michigan School of Public Health, their findings corroborated earlier studies of the group.

“Based on another study that was done in the same cohort of people, they found that the amount of change that we saw for living in a high-pollution neighborhood versus living in a low pollution neighborhood would correspond to about a  2 percent increased risk of stroke," said Adar.

Fine particulate air pollution, the kind of black soot belched out by smoke stacks and the tailpipes of buses in many urban areas around the world, is widely believed to cause inflammation and oxidative stress that can contribute to heart disease.

Adar says people already are encouraged to stay indoors on days when pollution is particularly high.  But she says doctors should make a point of discussing the hazards of air pollution with their patients:

“So, just as they might ask somebody 'Do you smoke?' or think about if someone is obese,  how long someone has lived in a highly polluted environment might factor into a physician’s notion of whether or not somebody is at high or low risk for cardiovascular disease or heart disease," she said.

An article linking air pollution to accelerated hardening of the arteries is published in the journal PLoS Medicine. 


Saudi diplomat involved
in domestic servitude case


U.S. officials are investigating a report of human trafficking at a suburban Washington home owned by Saudi Arabia.
 
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement spokesman Brandon Montgomery says agents removed two possible victims of domestic servitude from a Saudi diplomat's home Tuesday in McLean, Virginia.
 
The State Department says two women from the Philippines who currently work at the Saudi Embassy in Washington, claim they were mistreated. U.S. authorities acted after a tip to a telephone hotline.
 
There was no word on an identity of the Saudi diplomat who lived there. The Saudi Embassy in Washington did not respond to requests for comment.
 
The case is being handled by Homeland Security Investigations, a unit within U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.


Ex-pope Benedict has returned
to his Vatican apartments


Former pope Benedict has moved back to the Vatican in an unprecedented arrangement that will see a ruling pontiff and his predecessor live side-by-side as neighbors in the tiny state.

Pope Francis welcomed Benedict Thursday outside his new retirement home, which is a converted monastery near St. Peter's Basilica. The two then went inside to pray together.

The low-key return for the 86-year-old pope emeritus was off-limits to all media except the Vatican's own media service, which announced that it would not provide expected video coverage of the event.

The former pontiff had looked extremely frail at his last public appearance in March when Francis visited him at the papal retreat south of Rome. Benedict had been living there since he stepped down Feb. 28 and became the first pontiff to do so in hundreds of years.

Vatican officials say Benedict is only suffering from the normal ailments of old age.

Despite having two men clothed in white now living at the Vatican, the papal apartments remain empty. Pope Francis has chosen to remain in the more modest accommodation of the Vatican's Casa Santa Marta hotel, which hosted the cardinals during the papal conclave that elected him.


Federal review sought
for big chemical facilities


Democratic lawmakers are seeking a federal review of security at industrial chemical facilities after the deadly explosion at a west Texas fertilizer plant in April. The blast killed 15 people and injured scores more.
   
U.S. Rep. Henry Waxman of California, ranking member of the Energy and Commerce Committee, and Bennie Thompson of Mississippi, his counterpart on the House Homeland Security Committee, asked President Barack Obama Thursday to set up an expert commission to assess security risks at chemical plants, refineries and related facilities.
   
Those committees have jurisdiction over the Chemical Facility Anti-Terrorism Standards program, a regulatory program for high-risk chemical facilities.
   
Waxman and Thompson cited a “distressing lack of progress” in securing such facilities since the program was established in 2007.
  
Recent reports by the inspector general of the Department of Homeland Security and the Government Accountability Office, Congress' investigative arm, have also found that the program is failing.
   
Since the April blast, it has been determined that the facility in Texas had never submitted required documentation under the standards program. But Homeland Security took no action and was unaware that the West plant had chemicals of concern at levels above the regulation threshold, the lawmakers noted.
   
“We ask you to consider steps that can be taken in response to the explosion to reduce the security risks of chemical plants, refineries, water treatment facilities, and other facilities holding large stores of industrial chemicals,” the lawmakers wrote to Obama.
   
Tuesday, U.S. Sen. Barbara Boxer, head of the Environment and Public Works Committee, said she plans a hearing soon on the Texas disaster and will probe for gaps in the enforcement of chemical safety laws.


U.S. officials are pressured
to institute pesticide ban


This is the time of year when farmers in the northern hemisphere count on bees and other insects to pollinate orchards, vegetables and berry fields. But what has the beekeeping world abuzz this season is the continuing phenomenon of mass honeybee deaths  and how governments on two continents are responding to them.
 
U.S. regulators on Thursday released a scientific report blaming the widespread decline of bees on the combined effects of parasites, viruses, bacteria, poor nutrition and chemical pesticides. For its part, the European Commission announced plans this week to impose a two-year moratorium beginning in December on the use of three popular pesticides judged to pose high risk to bees. Beekeepers and environmental groups are pushing governments in North America to go in that direction, too.
 
For the past decade, many beekeepers around the world have been plagued by unexplained die-offs in their hives. It recently happened to Mark Emrich, who raises bees on his small farm near Olympia, Washington.
 
“I was doing great until about five weeks ago,” he said. “Then I came down and opened up the hives and I had five dead boxes of bees. That was a huge hit."
 
He lost one third of his production.
 
"It is very hard to deal with bee losses. They are kind of like your little livestock and you try to really manage them and take care of them the best you can. When they die off, you feel that you've failed."
 
Emrich sports a bushy beard and a ball cap with the logo of the Washington State Beekeepers Association. He's the group's president. Even before the die-off in his hives, he was writing letters to government officials, asking that some potentially risky and widely used pesticides be pulled from store shelves.
 
While U.S. and Canadian environmental health agencies have both announced they will reevaluate the registration of pesticides in question, those processes are slated to take years. Emrich worries that mounting bee colony losses means he can't wait that long, so he and his fellow beekeepers are petitioning county and state governments, calling for local rules to restrict home and garden use of common bug killers, rose and flower treatments, and grub controls.
 
"We have people who are using it who don't understand all the implications, and the labeling is inadequate as far as what it actually will kill,” Emrich explained. “So basically, the idea is at least we'll get it out of the hands of the general public."
 
The insecticides in question belong to a class called neonicotinoids. "Neonics," for short, appear in more than a hundred different garden products sold under global brand names such as Bayer, Ortho and Scotts. While a range of studies have shown significant adverse effects on bees exposed to high doses in the lab, separate studies using more realistic field conditions show minimal harm or are inconclusive.
 
Pesticide makers argue that banning neonics would not save a single hive. Barb Glenn, who oversees science and regulatory affairs for the industry association CropLife America, pointed out, "If we use these products according to the label, then we don't see an effect on pollinators — or honey bees — that are contiguous to these fields where we're using these products."
 
Glenn says it is in her industry's best interest to safeguard bees because agriculture needs pollinators to thrive. In her view, many factors conspire against bee survival: diseases, parasites, the availability of habitat, the practices of the beekeeper, and their own nutrition.
 
“Pesticide use is also a part of that continuum," she added.
 
Glenn's list looks almost the same as ones compiled by independent researchers with Britain’s Insect Pollinators Initiative, and by scientists at Oregon and Washington state Universities.
 
WSU entomologist Steve Sheppard said a lot of new research is focusing on the pesticide angle.

"There's not a consensus I think in the scientific community that the levels that are found in agricultural crops, for example, have been directly linked to colony losses," he said. "But some countries — in Europe, for example — have taken a more prudent approach to not use those pesticides until they feel all of the data are in."
 
That's also the gist of a petition for rule making before the Washington State Department of Agriculture. The department's initial response was to ask all affected parties to send in their best science. The state plans to announce in early June whether it sees enough evidence to draft tighter rules for home and garden bug killers.
 
Meanwhile, a coalition of national environmental groups has sued the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to suspend registration of two neonic insecticides.

By the A.M. Costa Rica wire services

By the A.M. Costa Rica wire services