Erin Biba

The Revolution in Prenatal Medicine

(From WIRED Magazine, Issue January 2013)

Candace Weiss didn’t know she had a family history of birth defects until she got pregnant with her daughter. That’s when she learned that her grandmother, at the age of 42, had given birth to a baby with Down syndrome. “That child died young,” she says. “But back in that time, they sent them away. She wasn’t even raised in the family.”

Weiss’ own child was born perfectly healthy. Not long after, she and her husband started trying for a second baby. But she had a miscarriage. And then another. The second miscarriage was the result of triploid syndrome—the fetus had three of every chromosome instead of the normal two. So when Weiss, a 32-year-old lawyer turned stay-at-home mom in Westchester, New York (her name has been changed for this story), got pregnant again, her doctors watched her closely. “We did a lot of ultrasounds,” she says. “Everything looked like it was going well.”

Many women with high-risk pregnancies (which also includes women over 35) elect to undergo amniocentesis or chorionic villus sampling—invasive procedures that check for chromosomal abnormalities but carry with them a risk of miscarriage. Weiss says there was “no way in hell” she was going to do that. She didn’t want to risk losing another baby. Well, said her doctor at her 10-week office visit, we’ve got this new test that checks for the most common chromosomal disorders (like Down syndrome). All it requires is a blood draw. And you can do it right now. The test was so new, in fact, that Weiss was one of the first patients in her doctor’s practice to have it.

A week or so later the doctor called. The baby had Down syndrome. “We were obviously shocked,” Weiss says. “Even the doctor was shocked.” Weiss then had a chorionic villus sampling performed, on the remote chance of a false positive. It confirmed the blood test result, but she and her husband were already resigned to what was to follow. She says she needed to talk through the decision to end the pregnancy, but her husband never had any doubt. “His coping mechanism was just to be done with it,” Weiss says. But for her, it was a bit different. “You hear this news and you make your decision. But meanwhile you’re still pregnant. I mean, I was still nauseous.”

Weiss terminated the pregnancy last fall at 12 and a half weeks. She and her husband hadn’t told very many people that she was pregnant, and the procedure at that stage is mercifully swift and relatively simple. Some women do not find out their babies have serious medical problems until much later in their pregnancies. At that point, many doctors don’t even perform abortions, obliging patients to travel to distant cities to get one. “It’s huge to know early on,” Weiss says. “Not that what we went through wasn’t heartbreaking, but we were able to put it behind us faster. We get to start over sooner.”

Before she knew about the blood test, Weiss—like hundreds of thousands of pregnant women each year—had been facing a complicated decision: Risk a perfectly healthy pregnancy to find out for sure if there’s something wrong with your child, or live with a degree of uncertainty. It’s a trade-off inherent in prenatal tests. Some are accurate—they can say for sure whether a child has a serious disorder—but may cause side effects; others are safer but give a more ambiguous level of information—all you get is the odds of whether or not the child has problems.

Yet plenty of patients today still go ahead with risky prenatal tests anyway. About 200,000 amniocenteses are performed in the US every year; the miscarriage rate for those is between 1 in 400 and 1 in 200. The miscarriage rate for chorionic villus sampling (CVS) is between 1 in 200 and 1 in 100, and it carries other risks, including infection and, in very rare cases, birth defects.

But with the advent of the kind of test Weiss took, which first hit the market in October 2011, there’s an option that’s about as accurate as amnio and CVS but as low-risk as a blood draw. Known as cell-free fetal DNA testing, it’s now offered by Sequenom, Verinata, and Ariosa Diagnostics. The new test is expected to upend how prenatal screening and diagnosis are done—as well as create a financial windfall for the labs that perform it. (Market research firm Frost & Sullivan estimates that revenue in the prenatal testing industry will grow to $1.6 billion by 2017, up from $1.3 billion in 2010.) For the most part, the tests offered by these companies check for only three of the most common chromosomal disorders, but that’s just the beginning. They presage a future when we can easily scan for a range of genetic defects, from the truly devastating to the not-so-serious, allowing parents and doctors to look past a baby’s organs, beyond its cells, and down into its very DNA. Based on a small sample of a woman’s blood, the cell-free fetal DNA test gives expectant mothers an earlier (and safer) look than ever at just who it is that’s growing inside them.

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What Happens When You Remove a Dam?

(From Popular Mechanics, 12/11/12)

On Election Day, residents of San Francisco turned down a ballot measure that asked if they wanted to drain one of the country’s most historic (and controversial) reservoirs and restore the Hetch Hetchy Valley in Yosemite National Park. The outcome was expected, but it was the latest in a political battle that has been raging for decades. Even as the dam was approved in 1913 to assist earthquake-ravaged San Francisco, environmentalists and nature lovers, who said the valley’s beauty surpassed even Yosemite Valley’s, were fighting its construction. 

Unlikely as it may be (San Francisco has to get its water from somewhere), the Hetch Hetchy Reservoir removal is an issue that its proponents promise to keep pressing, so it could continue to show up every voting season. Should the measure ever pass, California would have to figure out how to even do such a thing. How is a dam removed? What happens to the environment of an area, upstream and downstream, when the dam is gone? Can you restore a beautiful valley that’s been underwater for a century? 

Restoring a Valley

The removal of the Hetch Hetchy dam and reservoir isn’t even in the planning stages yet; the measure on November’s ballot simply asked voters to earmark money for research and design of a new water system to take the place of the reservoir. But proponents have already mapped out a plan to show how the valley’s renewal would work. 

First, the reservoir would have to be drained, a step that isn’t as difficult as it may seem. Because a reservoir’s job is to save fresh water during the rainy season for residents to use during the dry season, there is already a tunnel and series of aqueducts in place to let water flow downstream. In fact, 50 percent of the Tuolumne River (which is the source of the reservoir’s water) is diverted into the tunnel every year, after which the pipes are closed and the reservoir fills back up to capacity. To drain the reservoir, the Hetch Hetchy engineers would need to open the pipes—and leave them open until the water is gone. 

Mark Cederborg, an environmental restoration specialist and vice chairman of Restore Hetch Hetchy, the group that sponsored the bill, says the draining process would take about three years. There’s little concern about the downstream effects of releasing all the water, he argues. For one thing, the riverbed is already well-acclimated to the natural flow of water, which vary naturally throughout the year because of melting snowpack. For another, he says, there is a second reservoir called Don Pedro a few miles downstream from Hetch Hetchy that is six times larger and helps to regulate the water flow. 

If the valley is exposed to world again it will essentially be a blank canvas. “Most of the valley is under 300 feet of water,” Cederborg says. “There’s nothing growing down there. What’s potentially exciting is it would reveal waterfalls people wouldn’t know existed. The landform would get exposed, the river would flow through its historic channel, and you’d have a flat valley bottom that would be waiting to be seeded and begin growing again.” 

The valley would be covered in about two inches of sediment, which is unusual to Hetch Hetchy; many dams collect large amounts of sediment, however the Tuolumne riverbed is mostly granite and erodes slowly. But the restoration effort would have to begin quickly. There is concern that rainfall could create sediment runoff, as none of the ground would be anchored by the roots of plants and trees. “As you drain the reservoir you need to stabilize the valley floor and the river banks. Control erosion, re-vegetation, and the gradual process of habitat restoration,” Cederborg says. 

Some of this erosion control would take place naturally, but humans could speed the process by seeding the ground with local grasses. Within two years, he says, meadows and seedlings would appear. “It seems so final when you flood something,” he says. “But when you uncover it, it’s incredible how fast nature is capable of restoring itself. Some restoration projects that are five to 10 years old you’d never know they were inundated.”

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Essay: Gross National Product - In an increasingly hungry world, we need to get ready to eat bugs and drink urine.

(From WIRED Magazine, August 2012)

It’s only a matter of time before Earth’s growing population faces a critical shortage of potable water. Luckily, science has a foolproof solution. A process called reverse osmosis can convert wastewater into H₂0 that’s as pure as the distilled stuff—even cleaner than what we usually drink. There’s just one problem: persuading people to drink liquid that used to be urine. After all, humans tend to pooh-pooh (pun intended) anything they find disgusting.

That repulsion response evolved to help us avoid ingesting things that are potentially dangerous. (Rotten food grosses us out for a reason.) But if humanity is going to survive, we may have to learn to overcome the ick factor.

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Viruses From Outer Space: How Will Scientists Protect the Planet From Extraterrestrial Diseases?

(From TakePart.com, July 2012)

With the Curiosity rover due to touch down on Mars within weeks, eyes will be focused on the red planet—including those of NASA scientist Catharine Conley.

Conley is NASA’s Planetary Protection Officer, and her job is to ensure that astronauts and robots that leave our planet don’t bring back nasty extra-terrestrial bugs that could potentially wipe out life on Earth. Since man started blasting rockets into space, the problem of viruses and potentially hazardous forms of life hasn’t been relegated to Earth.

“We’re not going to be sending humans tomorrow,” she says, “but technology development takes a long time and we have to think about doing this now. I’m always monitoring technologies that are coming up and asking: can we adapt this technology to be used in spaceflight?”

Hers is a hefty task. NASA’s Office of Planetary Protection has been looking out for Earth’s safety since 1967, when the United Nations instituted the Outer Space Treaty. The treaty, which sets regulations for all countries participating in space programs, outlines rules for disinfection and quarantine of objects that enter space and subsequently return to Earth.

Now maintained and updated by the non-governmental group the International Council for Science, the treaty not only sets out regulations for protecting Earth but also for protecting other planets from contamination by humans.

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How the Lunar X Prize Is a Preview of the New Space Age

(For Popular Mechanics, July 2012)

Never mind the fact that the Google Lunar X Prize teams won’t launch their crafts until 2015. Those teams are already meeting extremely high demand for their still-hypothetical moon missions as different organizations lobby for space onboard. 

“Our first mission payload is oversubscribed and our second is fully subscribed,” said Alan Stern, director of the Florida Space Institute and chief scientist for the Google Moon Express team. “There are a number of market segments for commercial lunar travel.” 

Stern and his fellow X Prize teammates are hoping that the demand for access to their experimental lunar lander is a hint at things to come. At the recent SETIcon II conference, the entrepreneurs and scientists on hand say that the only way humanity is going to stay in space, especially with governments continuing to tighten the belt around their space agencies, is for commercial space companies to make a sustained profit. And the signs of change are already showing. 

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We Should Send Humans to Mars—but Not Let Them Land

(From Popular Mechanics, July 2012)

As humanity’s reach extends into the universe, there’s an ongoing argument among space exploration buffs: Should humans, or robots, explore the solar system and beyond? At the recent SETIcon II science and sci-fi conference, planetary scientists, a commercial space entrepreneur, and a veteran astronaut tackled the question. Surprisingly, they agreed that the best possible option is one that will never be a reality: sending humans to explore planets like Mars but not letting them put their feet on the ground. 

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Kepler Will Make Us All Planet Hunters

(From Popular Mechanics, July 2012)

For the past three years, there’s been only one NASA-owned device in hunting for Earth-like planets. The Kepler mission has allowed scientists to look at 170,000 stars. It has been responsible for changing our outlook about planets and planetary systems throughout the galaxy. 

At SETIcon II last month, a science and sci-fi gathering in Santa Clara, Calif., Kepler scientists and SETI astronomers said that the search for alien life relies on Kepler’s discoveries, and that citizen science can help keep the increasingly rare industry of planet hunting alive. 

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SIGHT UNSEEN: HOW ASTRONOMERS DISCOVER MASSIVE FAR-AWAY OBJECTS

(From Tested.com, July 2012)

Astrophysicists at Stanford recently announced they believe the universe is populated by hundreds of thousands of rogue planets. These Nomads were thrown out of their solar systems when they were formed and, with no sun to orbit, are left to roam the galaxy frozen and alone. The realization that these planets are so common is changing the way many think about the formation of planets and the makeup of matter in the universe. No one has ever seen one, but new technologies and telescopes being created over the next decade may change that.

Looking for Light

Though it’s true that no one has ever seen a Nomad directly, astronomers have been able to detect their existence. But how is that possible if these planets are so cold, dark, and far away? They use a technique called Gravitational Microlensing. Predicted by Einstein in the 1930s, it’s only in the last 20 years that sky watchers have been able to perfect the technique. Basically, astronomers are identifying Nomads by looking out for bursts of light. That may seem overly simplistic, but it works. When a planet-sized object passes between earth and a star — but isn’t close enough to the star to be in orbit around it — the planet will momentarily act as a lens, amplifying the star’s light, and appearing to us on earth as a short increased burst of light. (Sometimes even doubling the brightness for as much as two minutes.)

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NOMAD PLANETS AND THE PROBLEM WITH LOOKING AT SPACE

(From Tested.com, July 2012)

Here’s the thing about planets: nobody’s quite sure how to define them. The ancient Greeks named them, deciding they were “wandering stars,” which we later realized wasn’t accurate at all. Then we thought we might be able to define them by their size, but Pluto ruined that for everyone. Lately, they’ve been giving the name to bodies that are round and large enough to clear out any objects in their neighborhood. Notice how that definition doesn’t require orbiting a sun?

That’s because of a recently-named phenomenon called Nomad Planets — large round bodies that are free floating in the universe with no star system to call home. Science has had a vague idea about them for years (in the past they’ve been referred to as rogue or orphan planets), assuming they were a rarity — about 500 that they could sort of observe. Just another strange but possible outcome from the formation of a solar system.

But in March this year scientists at Stanford did a little math and determined their numbers probably aren’t in the hundreds but more like the hundreds of thousands. It was a revelation that, says the paper’s lead astrophysicist Louis Strigari, “changes how we view the formation of stars and planets.”

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Antbots to the Rescue!

(From Pacific Standard Magazine, June 7, 2012)

An army of insect-sized robot rescuers may some day help save lives after a disaster.

In the aftermath of a major disaster, the last thing you want to do is send first responders running into mounds of unstable, potentially dangerous rubble. But right now, if rescuers want to look for survivors, measure radiation levels, or just see what’s going on inside, they don’t have many other options. Nuno Martins, an associate professor of computer and electrical engineering, and his fellow researchers at the University of Maryland Robotics Center think the best way to solve this problem is with robots. Hundreds of tiny, ant-sized, autonomous, communicating robots.

Their project, funded by the National Science Foundation, aims to create a small army of extremely simple electronic search-bots that can climb in between tiny cracks, spread themselves out in a given area, and relay information back to a team of humans waiting safely outside. The bots will look for things like radiation levels, airborne toxins, life signs from survivors, and generally get the lay of the land. Then, depending on the distance between the reconnaissance bots and home base, they can use adapted wireless technology to send signals through relay bots that have placed themselves strategically to capture and resend information.

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Censored H5N1 Bird Flu Studies: Much Ado About Nothing?

(From TakePart.com, June 5, 2012)

You may have heard the hubbub surrounding two different studies on H5N1 —aka Bird Flu—recently conducted in Wisconsin and The Netherlands. The researchers in both cases put the virus through a series of mutations in order to better understand how it may eventually find itself in humans. The National Security Advisory Board for Biosecurity decided this was a potential boon to bioterrorism and recommended Science and Naturehold off publishing the papers.

After much arguing in the science community, Nature finally published the paper from the University of Wisconsin-Madison this May (the Netherlands study is currently going through edits at Science HQ).

The results were reassuring: While the researchers managed to learn quite a bit about Bird Flu and how it works, it’s clear the controversy was overblown and ultimately the public has little to fear from H5N1.

In fact, if you read the paper with a careful eye, you’ll see it does more to calm nerves about the potential spread of the virus than fear-mongering headlines would lead you to believe. TakePart asked Vincent Racaniello, a virologist in the Department of Microbiology and Immunology at Columbia University, to help us take a look at the study and understand the truth outside of the controversy:

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How Teeny, Tiny Transistors Are Born in a Near-Total Vacuum

(From WIRED Magazine, May 2012)

Nanotransistors just got a lot more nano. A new chip construction process cooked up by Applied Materials in Santa Clara creates transistors so small they can be measured in smatterings of atoms.

The company can now coax a few dozen of the little guys to assemble themselves into a base layer that helps control the flow of electricity on computer chips. The biggest development is the manufacturing process: Applied Materials devised a way to keep several interconnected manufacturing machines in a near-total vacuum—at this level, a single stray nanoparticle can ruin everything.

The other part of the breakthrough is making this base from hafnium (used also in nuclear control rods) instead of the standard silicon oxynitride, which is terrible at holding back electrons on a supersmall scale. (Gordon Moore himself has called this technique the biggest advancement in the field in 40 years—and it is likely to keep processors advancing on pace with his eponymous law for the foreseeable future.)

Applied Materials’ system means transistors can be about 22 nanometers wide, as opposed to the current standard of about 45 nanometers, resulting in smaller, cheaper computing devices. Here we explain how the shrinking happens.

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Tech Could Revolutionize Virus Detection

(From TakePart.com May 2012)

If you zoom in on the human body down to the molecular level you’ll see that all the bits and bobs that make us work obey the basic laws of physics. The same is true for every object and organism on Earth.

But when it comes to treating illness, the medical world doesn’t always look at the needs of a patient on such a tiny scale. Dr. Anita Goel—a physicistand a physician—is bringing her two areas of expertise together in the fight against disease.

“The same laws of physics that we use to understand the universe should be able to help us understand medicine,” Goel tells TakePart.

Her company, Nanobiosym is a center for research and development of technologies that fight disease with the help of physics and medicine together. Their first product, called Gene-RADAR, is a customizable virus-detection device that’s small enough to travel (about the size of a laptop) and fast enough to work anywhere on a moment’s notice.

Operating the device is simple: Drop a small sample of blood (or other body fluid) onto a disposable strip. Gene-RADAR then extracts the DNA and RNA present in the sample and looks to see if it matches the DNA and RNA of a virus. Goel and her company can program the gadget to look for a variety of diseases, so it can be customized to meet the needs of whoever is using it.

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Turn On, Code In, Drop Out: Tech Programmers Don’t Need College Diplomas

(Feature from GOOD Magazine, Issue 025/WINTER 2011 The Next Big Thing)

David King got his start as a professional programmer working odd jobs. He took on small software projects, set up networks, that sort of thing. For fun in his spare time he’d contribute to the open-source operating system FreeBSD—a pastime many developers consider the most thankless job ever. People started to notice. Eventually, King landed a gig with Reddit, the biggest social news site on the web. Now he’s one of six engineers at Hipmunk, a travel site with good buzz and $5 million in funding. He works with his friends, makes a good living, has equity. By all accounts, Dave King is the midst of an impressive career. He’s a successful developer. And, like many of his peers nowadays, he did it all without a college degree.

While there are a few high-level computer-science concepts that require a college education to master, King says, 90 percent of developers won’t use that knowledge in their day jobs. And yet a diploma is still the first thing recruiters at most large companies look for when hiring a programmer. “It can be very difficult to prove yourself to the people you want to work for without a degree,” King says. “You aren’t even given a chance.”

That process is fine for most industries—a Harvard-educated accountant is a lot more likely to be a good hire then a self-taught one. But programming isn’t accounting. It requires creative thinkers and problem solvers, people unlikely to thrive in the confines of a college classroom. So why do hiring managers apply traditional methods to a nontraditional job?

As programmers become the backbone of the business world and the tech industry embarks on a bubble-driven hiring blitz, that thinking is going to have to change. In many places, it already has.

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The Sweet Science of Sugar

(From WIRED Magazine, Issue 19.10)

Oh, sugar, we know how toxic you are, but you give us so much joy. The pleasure is simply a matter of sucrose hitting your tongue, right? Nope. A series of discoveries by researchers at the Monell Chemical Senses Center has shown that many of the taste receptors on your tongue are also present in your guts. You continue to taste sugar as it works its way through your body.

• Tongue
  Taste cells specialized to detect sweetness live on the tip, back, and sides of the tongue. When something sweet like sugar brushes past these cells’ receptors, they snap shut, ensnaring the goodies like a Venus flytrap. The sugar activates the taste cell, which sends a signal to a nearby nerve that transmits a message to your brain: “Yum!”
• Intestines
  As you digest sugar, enzymes break it down into glucose and fructose. In the small intestine, transporter proteins carry those molecules into the bloodstream. Researchers have discovered these same proteins in your tongue’s taste cells. And some of the taste cells on the tongue are present in the intestine. When they detect sugar, they send a message to your brain: “Yum!”
• Pancreas
  When the glucose and fructose in your blood hit your pancreas, they prompt proteins called K channels to close, releasing insulin into your bloodstream. Monell researchers have discovered these same proteins on your tongue. And another surprise find—even your pancreas has taste cells that send a final message to your brain: “Yum!”