Month: November 2018

Enlarge / Natural gas meters are fixed to the outside of residential townhouses and apartments (credit: Photo by Robert Nickelsberg/Getty Images)

Three natural gas distributors issued a report this week detailing plans to convert the UK's residential gas system to a hydrogen delivery system. UK firms Northern Gas Networks and Cadent, as well as Norwegian gas firm Equinor, wrote that the proposal (PDF) was technically feasible. They also suggested an initial roll-out of the program to 3.7 million homes and 400,000 businesses in Northern England could commence as soon as 2028.

"This project could represent the foundations of a deliverable, large-scale, deep decarbonization of heat policy for the UK government," the gas firms' report reads.

The plan calls for the conversion of residential natural gas pipes to higher-pressure pipes that can move hydrogen gas. Although hydrogen gas tends to be flammable at a wider range of temperatures than natural gas, the report states that "a 100 percent hydrogen gas grid represents an acceptable risk compared to the current natural gas grid."

Enlarge (credit: Wikimedia commons)

We remember things from our own first-person perspective, the way we experienced them. The hippocampus is the region where these egocentric, episodic memories are made. Yet the hippocampus also encodes spatial information in a decidedly non-egocentric manner, using place cells and grid cells to form a generalized map of the external environment. How does one region of the brain manage both of these?

James Knierim's lab at Hopkins has reconciled this seeming discrepancy in a manner Talmudic in its neatness: there's no contradiction! Egocentric spatial information is encoded by one population of neurons in the hippocampus, and allocentric spatial information is encoded by a different population of cells in the hippocampus. Voila, problem solved.

Neuroscientists like Knierim use the word "allocentric" to denote a way of coding spatial information that defines the location of an object relative to other objects, as opposed to relative to the self. (Psychologists use it to describe someone whose interest, attention, and actions are focused on others rather than themselves.) Either way, its opposite is egocentric: spatial information (and/or one's interest) with the self as the primary reference.

Enlarge (credit: Julie Doll, MSU/NSF KBS LTER Site)

This week, two anonymous sources told Reuters that the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is considering revising biofuel quotas downward after years of underperformance from the biofuel industry.

Biofuel, which is predominantly made from corn in the US, is a political minefield in the Trump Administration.

On the one hand, biofuel processors have enjoyed years of subsidies from the US federal government. The EPA mandates that oil refiners must mix a certain amount of biofuel into their gas and diesel before it is sold in the US, reasoning that cutting oil with biofuel reduces the carbon footprint of fossil fuel use. The quota also helps politicians curry favor with heavy corn-producing midwest states like Iowa, Nebraska, and Indiana, which supported Trump in the most recent presidential elections.

Enlarge / The DC Council meets at the John A. Wilson building. (credit: Wally Gobetz / Flickr)

Recently, I found a typo in the District of Columbia’s legal code and corrected it using GitHub. My feat highlights the groundbreaking way the District manages its legal code.

As a member of the DC Mayor’s Open Government Advisory Group, I was researching the law that establishes DC’s office of open government, which issues regulations and advisory opinions for the District’s open meetings law (OMA) and open records law (FOIA). The law was updated last month, and something seemed to have changed: there was no longer a reference to issuing advisory opinions for FOIA. Comparing the DC Code to the act that made the change, I noticed that something was amiss in section (d):

(credit: dccouncil.us)

(d) The Office of Open Government may issue advisory opinions on the implementation of subchapter I of Chapter 5 of Title 2.

It had a typo.

Halo 5 featured perhaps the series' most confounding campaign yet... but the online multiplayer still ruled. (credit: Microsoft / 343)

Tell Me a Story

(Or “The Play’s the Thing,” originally published on The Game Beat, April 28, 2017.)

If you are connected to video games professionally, you probably heard some sort of discussion over Ian Bogost’s provocatively headlined Atlantic piece "Video Games Are Better Without Stories." The actual piece is a bit more restrained than the headline implies, more arguing that games should get past the “cinema envy” that is driving a lot of linear character vignettes these days. The argument nonetheless got a bit of pushback from across the industry.

The whole brouhaha got me thinking about how we, as journalists and critics, handle the presence of story in games. It’s been said that a story in a video game is like a story in pornography—it doesn’t matter how good it is, but you notice if it isn’t there. That might be a bit glib, but it’s also probably true of the way most people play the most popular games these days. For a lot of players, the story is just meaningless context that can largely be ignored.

Enlarge / "A model brain atop a rocket symbolizes innovation, progress, and psychology topics." Thanks, Getty Images! (credit: Shana Novak / Getty Images)

Roland Barthes proclaimed the death of the author in 1967, arguing that once a text is produced, it is an independent entity to be interpreted and understood by the audience without the author’s intentions, idiosyncrasies, and personal history getting in the way.

The Journal of Controversial Ideas is Barthes’ idea made manifest—it proposes to allow academics to publish papers on controversial topics under a pseudonym. The hope is that this will allow researchers to write freely on controversial topics without the danger of social disapproval or threats. Thus the journal removes the author’s motivations, conflicts of interests, and worldview from the presentation of a potentially controversial idea. This proposal heralds the death of the academic author—and, unlike Barthes, we believe this is a bad thing.

A history of concealment

First, we need to distinguish between anonymous and pseudonymous authorship: a paper is anonymous when it does not list a name, and it is pseudonymous when it lists a name which is not the author’s given name. Both practices have long histories in academic research.

(credit: Liam Lanigan)

The communities of bacteria that live in our mouths have changed drastically since the Middle Ages, according to a new study of remains buried in a medieval Danish cemetery. And it turns out that some people may have been more predisposed to tooth and gum disease than others, thanks in part to the bacterial communities that lived in their mouths.

Ancient dental plaque

Biochemist Rosa Jersie-Christensen of the Novo Nordisk Foundation Center for Protein Research sampled hardened dental plaque, called calculus, from the skeletal remains of 21 Danish men who lived in the village of Tjærby between 1100 and 1450 CE. She and her colleagues chose men for the study because male immune systems tend to have stronger inflammatory responses, which would make it easier to find proteins associated with inflammation.

Overall, the men’s dental health wasn’t great—about what you might expect from a group of medieval villagers. All 21 showed some signs of gum disease, or periodontitis, along with at least minor cavities. Several had lost teeth sometime before their death.