SUMMARY: There's a dire need to repair aging infrastructure in the U.S., and an innovative building material could be a game changer. Embedded with steel fibers, ultra-high performance concrete [UHPC] is about five to 10 times stronger than standard concrete -- and unaffordable for most government-funded projects. Special correspondent Cat Wise reports from Iowa on how researchers are working to bring costs down.
SUMMARY: In Delhi, India, the capital of the world's fastest growing economy, there's a towering symbol of the environmental cost of development; tons of festering, toxic trash, piled up 10 stories high, with more and more added every day. Efforts have been made to turn that trash into energy-producing fuel, but cultural hurdles remain. Special correspondent Fred de Sam Lazaro reports.
FRED DE SAM LAZARO (NewsHour): In India's capital, new housing sprawls as far as the eye can see, a symbol of the world's fastest growing major economy.
There also are towering symbols of the environmental cost of all this. Just look for the birds. Under thousands of hovering vultures are the city's landfills. This is one of three covering some 70 acres in a low-income area called Ghazipur.
I'm standing near the top of the Ghazipur landfill site, an accumulation by now of more than 10 million tons of waste. It's more than 10 stories high. Behind me, it towers over the surrounding skyline. And trucks are all around here, bringing in an additional 2,000 tons of unsorted garbage every day.
MAHESH BABU, Managing Director, IL & FS Company: You can't dump more in that mountain there.
FRED DE SAM LAZARO: Mahesh Babu heads an infrastructure company that's been contracted by Delhi's government to tackle a trash problem that he says is a crisis at many levels.
MAHESH BABU: Keep in mind Delhi is on the seismic zone. So, you are really…
FRED DE SAM LAZARO: If you had an earthquake here, God forbid.
MAHESH BABU: Yes. You have an earthquake, you will have that mound just sliding down.
FRED DE SAM LAZARO: And even without an earthquake, he says the festering garbage is toxic. Methane from the dump explodes daily in dozens of spontaneous fires that spew toxins into the air, while a stew of heavy metals and organic and inorganic pollutants washes into the soil when it rains and into Delhi's main river.
MAHESH BABU: Yes, the dark liquid right here is what we call leachate.
FRED DE SAM LAZARO: Babu showed me a sample of this so-called leachate.
MAHESH BABU: What we do is basically treat it, so that it removes all the toxic impurities.
FRED DE SAM LAZARO: But of the millions of tons that are not treated yet, this is the stuff that's going into the Yamuna River.
MAHESH BABU: Especially during monsoon.
SUMMARY: Carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is a major contributor to global warming. But what if there were a way to turn that gas into rock and store it safely, thousands of feet underground? One power plant in Iceland is attempting to do just that, through a process called “Carbfix.” Special correspondent Malcolm Brabant reports, in the first of his “Breakthrough” series.
MALCOLM BRABANT, Special correspondent: I'm standing about 1,000 feet up a volcano that last erupted about 2,000 years ago. The temperature underground here is about 620 degrees Fahrenheit. According to geologists, this volcano could blow at any time. But that could be any time within the next 1,000 years.
The process of turning carbon dioxide into rock is happening about 6,000 feet below my feet silently. But up here, you can really sense the visceral power of Mother Nature. The only sensation I can compare it to is being rather close to the launch of a space shuttle.
WOMAN: This is Hellisheidi geothermal power plant. The thermal energy is transported towards Reykjavik, where we heat our houses and take showers and so forth.
EDDA ARADOTTIR, CarbFix Project Director: So, as a byproduct of the ongoing energy production, geothermal gases like CO2 are emitted to the atmosphere. But we have been working towards reducing these emissions, capturing them and reinjecting them into the ground and turning them into rock.
MALCOLM BRABANT: The techniques pioneered here are said to be safer than the alternative of storing CO2 as a gas underground, with its expense and potential for leaks.
Under the right conditions, nature takes hundreds of years to transform CO2 into stone. What the scientists have done is to accelerate the process exponentially.
EDDA ARADOTTIR: This represents methods that can be used for fighting global warming and climate change. And to that respect, it's a powerful box.
So, this is calcium carbonate. And this is what the CO2 injected into the basalt turns into after the chemical reactions have occurred. This one is not representative of what we would see if we were to drill a core or dig a hole into the bedrock where we are injecting the CO2. Rather, we would see something like this, where we have the calcium carbonate in smaller particles.
Introducing EnChroma
EnChroma lenses look like ordinary tinted lenses, but when you look through them something amazing happens, your experience of color vision is fundamentally transformed. Colors appear more vibrant, saturated, full, and yet without compromising the accuracy or color balance of the scene. Colorful objects, such as flowers, colorful paint and fabrics, food, and traffic signs suddenly “pop” with a heightened purity and intensity. Experiences like a rainbow or a sunset, seen for the first time with EnChroma, are magically transformed beyond any rational description.
Of course, there is nothing actually magic in this — it’s all based on science and technology — that is, color vision science and optical technology.
Solving the Problem
In order to create our lens products, the EnChroma team first constructed a sophisticated computer model that is able to simulate perceptual aspects of color vision for any type and extent of color vision deficiency. Then we combined this analytic capability with a numerical optimization procedure to guarantee that our products provide the maximum possible performance for any given condition.
To create this model we utilized the latest research on the genetic basis of color blindness and the known spectral variations in anomalous photopigments, and then linked these into a model of color perception using our understanding of how neural signals are processed in the brain in accordance with a type of psychology called perceptual psychophysics. Perceptual psychophysics is the study of how physical stimuli are transformed to perceptual phenomena using our senses. With our model, we are able to simulate the color appearance of thousands of natural and man-made colors, and see exactly what happens to color perception when any given filter is placed in front of the visual system. This lets us test the performance of a design before we even make it.
In the second stage of creation, we set out to solve the general problem of optimal filter design using a mathematical technique called linear programming. Linear programs are a special class of algorithm for solving large-scale resource allocation problems. EnChroma created a (patent pending) method by which any well-formed optical filter design problem can be translated into the constraint and cost equations of a well-formed linear program. Our linear-program solver is able to sort through millions of possible filter designs in a just a few seconds in order to identify the unique optimal solution for any given problem.
The general class of filters that are designed by our method are called multi-notch filters, they contain one or more sharp “cutouts” in the visible spectrum. To make a lens that helps with red-green color blindness, the notch filtering occurs primarily in the spectral region corresponding to the maximum overlap between the red and green photopigments. Effectively, this drives a kind of wedge between the L-cone and M-cone signals, thus improving the separation of their signals and providing better color vision to the deficient observer. We don’t claim that this is a cure for color blindness — it is not a cure. Like any eyeglass product, it is an optical assistive device.
Symptoms and Causes of Color Blindness
A person with red-green color blindness (more accurately called color vision deficiency) experiences the world differently because their red and green photopigments have more overlap than normal. By overlap, we mean spectral overlap, which is related to how the photopigments absorb light. Let’s take a moment to understand how that happens:
The photopigments are the light-absorbing molecules found in the 6-7 million retinal cone cells of the eye. When these molecules absorb photons of certain wavelengths, they undergo a chemical transformation which causes the cone cell receptor to fire a nerve impulse. The photopigment molecule is then “re-set” and ready to absorb more photons.
Normally there are three distinct classes of cone cells: one class absorbs mainly red light (called the L-cones), another absorbs mainly green light (the M-cones), and another absorbs blue light (S-cones). But, in a person with red-green color blindness, one of those is anomalous. For example, the L-cone absorbs too much of the green light (a condition called a PROTAN deficiency), or the M-cone absorbs too much of the red light (DEUTAN “doo-tan” deficiency).
Returning to the subject of this spectral overlap: the situation is analogous to how two adjacent radio stations might bleed together (which is called “cross-talk”). It makes a mess of conflicting information, and the more the L-cone and M-cone signals overlap, the greater the confusion or extent of color vision deficiency. Can we correct for this problem somehow? Well, there is hope: the eye is fundamentally healthy, the neural wiring for processing color is intact and correct, and for the vast majority of cases (greater than 80% of red-green color blindness), the amount of overlap is less than 100%. (If there is 100% overlap, then there is no way to provide differential filtering.) Essentially, the system functions normally, but it’s getting bad data. The problem is in how the light is received, which is where the EnChroma lens comes into play.
SUMMARY: Medical researchers have discovered a gene that increases the risk of schizophrenia, a mental illness that afflicts more than two million Americans, sometimes causing delusions and hallucinations. Associate Professor of Genetics at Harvard University Steven McCarroll joins Alison Stewart to discuss the findings.
SUMMARY: CRISPR, a new method for editing genes, has been called a development that could revolutionize medicine. Cheaper and more precise than past gene editing, this promising tool has also raised concerns. Gwen Ifill talks to Jennifer Doudna of University of California, Berkeley and Paul Knoepfler of University of California, Davis.
GWEN IFILL (NewsHour): It’s been called the scientific breakthrough of the year, and a development that could revolutionize medicine. It’s all about a way of editing genes, known as CRISPR.
The new method allows scientists to snip out a faulty section of DNA and replace specific genes in living cells. Researchers have long edited genes in the lab, but CRISPR is cheaper, far more precise, and could even be used in DNA found in eggs and sperm.
It has lots of promise, but it has raised many concerns too.
We explore those questions with Jennifer Doudna, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, who helped develop this breakthrough, and Paul Knoepfler, a biologist and writer from at University of California, Davis.
Welcome to you both.
Jennifer Doudna, I’m going to start by just asking you to define in laywoman’s language gene editing and CRISPR.
JENNIFER DOUDNA, University of California, Berkeley: Well, I would say gene editing is a method of making very precise changes to the DNA in a cell, and the CRISPR methodology allows scientists to do that with just really unprecedented precision.
GWEN IFILL: So, there is a targeted, practical use for this?
JENNIFER DOUDNA: Indeed, actually many.
It’s a technology that operates in basically all types of cells and allows very precise changes to be made to the genetic code that allows scientists to do things like explore the function of genes and also, in principle, correct mutations that cause disease.
SUMMARY: For people with food allergies or sensitivities, the pleasure of dining out can be dampened by the stress of not knowing exactly what goes into what you're ordering. Now a San Francisco startup wants to take away the uncertainty with a small, portable gluten-detecting device. Special correspondent Cat Wise reports.
CAT WISE (NewsHour): Thirty-one-year-old Shireen Yates loves dining out with friends, but when she’s ordering, it’s often a stressful experience.
SHIREEN YATES, Co-Founder, 6SensorLabs: I would love the empanadas with black beans and plantains. Those are gluten-free, right?
WOMAN: Yes, everything is gluten-free.
CAT WISE: Yates says she suffers from severe gluten sensitivities, and she also has problems with soy, dairy and egg. Despite her best efforts to avoid those foods, she often finds herself in situations where she doesn’t know or trust what she’s told is in the food.
If she ingests even the smallest amount of the foods she has issues with, her health can be impacted for days. While in graduate school at MIT, Yates attended a friend’s wedding and had an unpleasant dining experience that sparked an idea.
SHIREEN YATES: This waitress comes by with these delicious looking appetizers, and I asked her, are these appetizers gluten-free? And she said, how allergic are you? I was probably really angry, angry. You know, just, like, starving. And I was like, why can’t I just test this? And that was that aha moment. I said, well, why not? How hard could that be? It’s hard.
(LAUGHTER)
CAT WISE: Three years later, after teaming up with Scott Sundvor, a fellow MIT grad who also has to avoid gluten due to a health condition, Yates is on the verge of turning that idea into a reality, with this small portable gluten detecting device called the Nima. Nima means fair and equitable in Farsi, Yates’ family’s native language.
JUDY WOODRUFF (NewsHour): Tonight, the “NewsHour” begins a new series on invention and innovation called Breakthroughs.
Over the coming months, we will explore the economic and social change invention generates both here and abroad, highlighting the passion of the inventors and the people who benefit from their creations.
The "NewsHour‘s" Cat Wise has our first report, which looks at a new device to stop uncontrolled bleeding on the battlefield and that may one day save the lives of civilians.
A warning: Some of the images may be disturbing to some viewers.
NARRATOR: The fight for terrain is up forward. Back here is the fight to save life.
CAT WISE (NewsHour): Throughout the history of war, from battles long ago to the recent conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, medics on the front lines have had one main goal, keep the injured alive until they can be safely evacuated to a treatment center.
While those killed in action since the beginning of the Iraq war are almost 90 percent fewer than during the Vietnam War, due in part to better medic training and faster evacuations, one of the biggest challenges medics still face is uncontrolled bleeding. It is the leading cause of preventable battlefield deaths.
And while tourniquets can be applied to certain extremity wounds, some areas of the body, like the armpit and pelvis, are difficult to compress. For those wounds, military medics have had to rely on a very simple tool.
JOHN STEINBAUGH, RevMedx: For centuries, everybody’s used gauze to stop bleeding. Back to the earliest times, you pack material into a wound, and attempt to put pressure on it.
CAT WISE: John Steinbaugh is a former Special Forces medic who served for more than twenty years in the Army. He was on the front lines in Iraq when calls for better equipment started going up the chain of command.
JOHN STEINBAUGH: Back in 2006-2007, at the height of the war, medics were getting fed up with the standard gauze. And we started seeing wounds that were much worse than what we were seeing at the beginning of the war. Medics were having more difficulties stopping the bleeding.
And the way the medics described the device they wanted was fix-a- flat. So if you think of your tire, you inject the fix-a-flat into your tire, it finds the escaping air, it plugs it, and done.
CAT WISE: So, Steinbaugh and a team of experts from the military and private sector got to work. Early ideas like inserting foam or gel into the wounds didn’t sufficiently stop the bleeding, but soon they stumbled on something that did work.
JOHN STEINBAUGH: We literally went to Williams-Sonoma, brought compressed sponges out of a kitchen store, loaded them in homemade syringes that we made, and put them in a model, and they expanded and worked.
