Month: March 2018

Enlarge / Wind turbines at the Cedar Point Wind Energy Project in Limon, Colorado. (credit: Getty Images)

Former Vice President Dick Cheney once said that "Conservation may be a sign of personal virtue, but it is not a sufficient basis for a sound, comprehensive energy policy." But in the US, increased energy efficiency has helped drive a drop in total electricity use. That, combined with the rise of renewable power, caused the use of both coal and natural gas to decline last year.

The changes, according to the Energy Information Agency, are relatively small. Total electric generation last year was down 1.5 percent compared to the year before, a drop of 105,000 GigaWatt-hours. But both coal and natural gas saw declines that were even larger. Coal use was down by 2.5 percent, a smaller decline than it has seen in many recent years. But the numbers for its future aren't promising; no new coal plants were opened, and 6.3 Gigawatts of coal capacity were retired in 2017.

(credit: US EIA)

Continuing recent trends, 9.3GW of natural gas capacity were brought online, although that was partly offset by the retirement of 4.0GW of older gas plants. Despite the additional capacity, however, natural gas use was also down, dropping by nearly 8 percent.

Enlarge / The Magic Leap One is the first step to getting a billion people wearing AR glasses by 2025, according to Epic CEO Tim Sweeney.

SAN FRANCISCO—A little under three years ago, Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney predicted that augmented reality glasses (which layer virtual 3D images on top of your view of the real world) would completely replace all traditional screens in a ten-year timeframe. At the Game Developers Conference (GDC) this week, the head of the company behind the Unreal Engine and Fortnite said he still expects that to happen, predicting a billion users for such AR glasses by 2025.

"I expect this to eventually replace smartphones," Sweeney told Ars in an interview. "Walking around in real life, instead of watching people fiddling around with the cell phone in their pocket, you'll be watching them make gestures to interact with this [augmented reality] user interface."

It won't be an instant transition, of course. Sweeney suggested we could get to 10 million early adopters for AR glasses "in the next two or three years." From there, "you take, say, 10 million users and really astonish them and give them a product that's really amazing in order to get to 100 million users. Then you have to satisfy the 100 million users to get to a billion users and so on. It's going to deploy over time."

Enlarge / Transmission electron micrograph of multiple bacteriophages attached to a bacterial cell wall. (credit: Dr Graham Beards)

In 2012, a 76-year-old Connecticut doctor had surgery to repair a life-threatening bulge in his aortic arch—the hulking bend that hooks the massive artery around the heart, routing oxygenated blood both upward and downward. Surgeons successfully used a synthetic graft to shore up the vital conduit. But soon after, a tenacious film of drug-resistant Pseudomonas aeruginosa bacteria formed on the graft.

The doctor spent the next four years battling the infection, slipping in and out of the hospital. His surgeons and doctors at Yale deemed him too high risk for another operation and put him on mega-doses of antibiotics, prescribed indefinitely. The drugs couldn’t clear the infection, they merely knocked it back enough to keep it from killing him. But the chronic inflammation that ensued took its own toll. His team of doctors started to worry his immune system was chipping away at his aorta. With a bleak outlook, the man agreed in 2016 to an experimental treatment: a virus that researchers had fished out of a nearby pond.

The viral gamble paid off. The infection cleared and he went off antibiotics, according to a case study published recently by the Yale researchers and doctors in the journal of Evolution, Medicine, and Public Health.