L’evoluzione delle tecniche di posizionamento GNSS sta trasformando il lavoro di chi opera nei settori della

For the record: I certainly did not “plot” to access anyone’s phone and was unaware of the situation playing out.

Cardiac surgeons have discovered two novel techniques that may improve doctors’ ability to “reanimate” hearts after the death of a donor. In one procedure, which successfully saved the life of a 3-month-old child transplant recipient, oxygenated blood is pumped into an extracted heart while it rests on a surgical table, eventually causing it to “wake up” and beat again. The other technique involves flushing a cold solution of liquid and preservatives into a heart before surgeons remove it from the donor’s body. Both methods could potentially open up new, cost-effective approaches for recovering viable hearts from donors who have been declared dead.

Researchers involved in the procedures say that increased supply of usable hearts could lead to 100 more pediatric heart transplants per year in the U.S. alone. That would make a significant difference: an estimated 500 children in the U.S. die each year while waiting for a new heart. The procedures, conducted by surgeons from Duke and Vanbeliet University, were outlined in a pair of papers published this week in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM).

Successfully transplanting any organ is a complex procedure, but heart transplants are among the most challenging. Most hearts currently used in transplants come from donors who are declared brain dead but whose hearts are still beating. But there are far more people who need heart transplants than donors who fit that criteria. 

In 2020, researchers at NYU Langone attempted to address this shortage using an experimental technique called normothermic regional perfusion (NRP) on a patient whose family had withdrawn life support. That patient’s heart fell under a category doctors refer to as donation after circulator death (DCD). In this case, doctors used a machine to pump oxygenated blood back into the heart while it was still in the deceased patient’s body. The process succeeded, reanimating the heart and allowing it to be used in a transplant.

But while NRP has been shown to work in some cases, it has drawn scrutiny from ethicists and policy makers who fear the practice of reanimating a heart in a deceased person risks muddying the definition of death. Some hospitals actively prohibit doctors from performing NRP operations and the American College of Physicians (ACP) even released an official statement of concern saying the practice “raises ethical questions and concerns.” Other medical professionals have called it “creepy.” 

The new approaches outlined in (NEJM) this week attempt to side-step those ethical concerns in two unique ways.

The first procedure, performed by surgeons at Duke University, involved removing the tiny heart of a 1-month-old infant donor. It was then operated on outside the body on a surgical table. The process, completed in just under six minutes, involved pumping blood through a tube attached to the aorta. The blood was then drained from the heart via a vent and collected in a bag. 

That collected blood was reoxygenated and pumped back in. As soon as the heart began beating, the doctors placed it in cold static storage. From there, it was rushed to a transplant center, where it was successfully implanted into a 3-month-old recipient just around two hours later. That child, who is still living with the reanimated heart, was discharged from the hospital two months after the procedure. The heart, meanwhile, so far shows no signs of rejection or failure.

The second procedure aimed to address the challenge of using DCD hearts by preserving them with extreme cold. In this case, surgeons at Vanderbilt immediately filled the aorta of a deceased donor’s heart with an oxygenated fluid designed to keep it in a relaxed state. According to the paper, the fluid consists of a mixture of red blood cells, electrolytes, vitamins, and a cold preservative solution. These nutrients help replenish what may be lost during the “dying process” and protects the heart during transport. Unlike the first procedure, cold preservation here allows surgeons to transplant the donor heart into the recipient without ever needing to restart its function beforehand.

“We’re not reanimating the heart,” Vanderbilt University Medical Center cardiac surgeon Aaron Williams said in an interview with Science. “We’re resuscitating it.” 

Researchers involved in both studies say the new techniques may improve surgeons’ ability to successfully transplant hearts from DCD donors—without having to navigate the ethical complexities of reanimating the organ while still in the donor’s body. Though both procedures are still relatively nascent, Joseph Turek, one of the cardiac surgeons involved in the research from Duke, told Science he is optimistic the combined procedures could increase the pediatric heart transplant donor pool by up to 20 percent. 

The post Surgeons develop 2 ways to ‘restart’ hearts without a donor’s body appeared first on Popular Science.

Magellanic penguins (Spheniscus magellanicus) looking to save some energy on their 1,200-mile-long journeys may have tapped into using one of the ocean’s most dynamic forces for help. The sea birds can sense shifts in currents and use it to maximize their efficiency by alternating their travel routes. The findings are detailed in a study published July 17 in the open-access journal PLOS Biology.

“Magellanic penguins finding their way back to their nests from the open ocean subtly adjust their headings to exploit tidal currents, following paths that reduce energy costs while maintaining remarkable accuracy,” the study’s authors wrote in a statement. “Rather than swimming directly home, they drift laterally with the tides, balancing travel efficiency with opportunistic foraging along the way.”

Many animals have ways of using physics to their advantage while traveling. The famous “flying-V” formation in birds is believed to conserve energy and take advantage of a principle called drafting or slipstreaming. Also seen in human endurance sports like running and cycling, drafting can help athletes save time by following areas of low pressure created by the person ahead of them. 

Marine animals can use a similar principle, but in the water with currents. Plankton and jellyfish are basically drafting right along with the current instead of swimming in it. Bigger animals like sea turtles and humpback whales also use currents to assist on their epic journeys.

[ Related: Turtles and penguins have a swimming sweet spot that reduces drag. ]

Magellanic penguins appear to be doing something similar. The birds travel long distances without any visual landmarks to find food and then go back to their colonies to feed their chicks. They may be sensing current drifts–or how the current is affecting their path forward. These roughly 10-pound sea birds are found around the Falkland Islands along the southern tip of South America, but some have been spotted as far away as Brazil, New Zealand, and the Antarctic Peninsula. 

To see how penguins orient towards their colony and if they can sense current drifts researchers from the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior in Germany fitted 27 adult penguins at the San Lorenzo Magellanic penguin colony in Argentina with GPS and IMU loggers. IMU loggers measure forces around the body and movement. The team observed one foraging trip made by each penguin and then removed the devices. With the data, they analyzed the penguin’s dive profiles, directional headings, speeds, and durations, to model how the birds navigate under different current conditions.

They found that the penguins alternate between traveling in a direct route and going with the flow of the current. This flexibility can maximize their navigation efficiency. When in a calm current, the penguins maintained precise line-of-sight routes towards their colony. In stronger currents, the birds swam in the direction of the current flow. While swimming this way increased the travel distance, staying with the direction of the current saved some energy. Under strong currents, the penguins still generally aimed towards the colony, but may have altered their direction to compensate for the forces of the current. This suggests that the penguins are likely aware of the current drift in relation to their destination, even if the colony is out of sight. 

“Such behavior is consistent with effective navigation even when out of sight of land,” the authors added. “This central finding is a valuable contribution to our understanding of navigation ability in marine animals.”

This particular study only looked at 27 penguins, so more research, a larger sample size, and looking at other species could help us gain more insight into penguin navigation and how they get around the big blue. 

The post The clever way Magellanic penguins ride—and adjust to—ocean currents appeared first on Popular Science.

At the end of a long day, many of us humans unwind with an episode of a favorite TV show. If you’ve got a dog at home, you might have wondered if your beloved pet can do the same. Despite the modern proliferation of dog-centered TV programs, the answer is a little bit complicated, according to new research.

It turns out whether or not your dog enjoys time in front of the tube depends on both Fido’s individual temperament and what’s playing. Traits like excitability and anxiety level determine how pets engage with television, per a survey-based study published July 17 in the journal Scientific Reports. 

“Personality of the dog influences their viewing habits,” Jeffrey Katz, lead study author, psychology professor, and comparative cognition researcher at Auburn University in Alabama, tells Popular Science. He and his co-authors also found that the subject of a show plays a big role in canine engagement levels, with animal-centric content yielding a more enthusiastic response than footage of people. 

The findings build on our understanding of how our canine companions view the screen. In addition to offering insight into pet psychology, this line of research might even help veterinarians create standardized tests for dog vision.

[Related: Dogs really are communicating via button boards, new research suggests. ]

Katz and his colleagues collected their data through a digital survey, distributed via social media. They asked basic demographic questions, included standardized canine temperament and impulsivity scales, and devised their own spate of new questions all related to how dogs interact with TV. The novel question set is called the “Dog Television Viewing Scale” (DTVS), and prompts respondents to indicate how often (on a five point scale from “never” to “always”) their pet does things like pawing at the TV or growling in response to different categories of television sounds or visual stimuli on the screen. They specifically asked owners to consider content containing other dogs, non-dog household pets, non-household animals, humans, and inanimate objects like cars. Then, they pooled all of that data for assessment. 

Out of 513 complete responses, 453 were from pet owners who affirmed their dog watches TV. Across the dozens of questions, most dog owners indicated their pet responds to animal content, be it audio or video alone. Fewer people said that their dogs regularly reacted to non-animal content– cementing the idea that media representation matters, even for pets. Then, there were the personality trends. 

Owners who rated their dogs as more excitable were more likely to report their pups attempting to follow objects or animals off screen: pawing, searching, or scanning for what they see beyond the confines of the TV. Owners who described their pets as negatively reactive (akin to appearing more fearful or anxious) on one of the personality questionnaires were also significantly more likely to report that their dog responds to non-animal stimuli at higher rates. Things like doorbell sounds, car horns, or human faces more often triggered reactions in skittish pets. Factors like age, breed, and prior TV exposure didn’t stand out as major drivers of dog-TV habits. 

“I thought it was very well done,” Freya Mowat, a veterinary ophthalmologist at the University of Wisconsin who researches canine visual psychology but was not part of the new study team, tells Popular Science. In particular, Mowat notes that the statistical approach lends credibility and reduces the chance of inadvertent bias. Instead of imposing trends on the data or assessing one relationship at a time, Katz and his co-authors’ used a grouped analysis method that let the data sort itself out, revealing which factors were most responsible for influencing variability among the response population.

[ Related: A visit to dog college. ]

The new results are also closely aligned with a 2024 survey study conducted by Mowat and a separate group of dog researchers at the University of Wisconsin. That research included more than 1,000 responses and also specific video clips for owners to show their pets. It similarly reported that other animals (and specifically dogs) were the most attention-grabbing canine TV content. They also found slight trends related to breed and age. Sporting and herding-type dogs were overrepresented among the TV watchers and older dogs seemed less likely to frequently engage with television. 

Differences in sample size, survey questions, and analysis method could account for why the new research didn’t observe exactly the same trends. Fundamentally, they were approaching the mystery of dog TV watching from different perspectives and disciplines: vision vs. behavioral psychology, Mowat says. Nonetheless, “it was just sort of surprising or reassuring how similar some of the outcomes they got were,” she says. Clearly, for dogs, “animals are more interesting than people and inanimate objects.” 

Yet to resolve the discrepancies in the findings and iron out exactly what keeps canines tuned in, more research is needed, Mowat says. Both her and Katz’s labs have plans to continue pursuing the line of exploration, extending their work beyond surveys and into real-world experiments. Katz hopes to begin a citizen science endeavor, getting owners to record video of their dogs watching video so pet behaviors can be formally cataloged and classified. Initially, he’d thought that such tests could be used to select universally soothing videos for dogs. However, based on the highly individualized, temperament-based responses the animals seem to show in the survey data, he admits that seems less likely. 

“We wanted to come up with a more general set of stimuli that all dogs would like,” Katz says. Now, he thinks that would be a serious challenge, as personalities and dogs’ individual backgrounds get in the way. For anxious dogs, there may be no video stimuli that’s uniformly relaxing. For excitable dogs that are quick to bark, leaving a nature documentary running while you go to the grocery store could be more trouble than it’s worth. Determining what a dog might like to see on TV is “easy to do for individual dogs, but harder for groups,” he says. 

Mowat, meanwhile, is working towards a better method of testing dogs’ vision. Currently, she says strategies are crude and non-standard (like waving a hand in front of a dog’s face, or running a pet through a makeshift obstacle course). A set of finely tuned videos might better reveal how well aging pups can see. 

And all of the research helps chip away at the big question of what dogs experience looking at  human screens to begin with. Dog vision is different from our own. For one, canines only have two types of color receptors compared to primates’ three– this makes pups uniformly red-green colorbind. Additionally their visual “fusion rate” (essentially the threshold frequency at which a flickering light begins to look steady), is higher than ours, notes Mowat– so some video content may look like a series of flashing pictures instead of smooth video to a dog. Finally, dogs see in lower resolution than people do, because they have a lower density of photoreceptors, she says. Together, all of these factors mean TV tuned for human vision may not look as interesting to a pet. Yet still, our pets are paying attention. 

High contrast colors, animal content, nature sounds, and lots of movement may explain part of why. “What we’ve designed for our kids might actually be quite engaging– maybe not always good– but engaging for our animals,” Mowat says, whose 2024 work found that cartoons were surprisingly interesting to some dogs. 

But then, maybe there’s another factor at play. 

“They may actually be watching because we’re watching,” she suggests. “We’re sitting on the couch with them, and it’s an enjoyable, companion-level thing to do.” 

The post Science reveals dogs’ favorite type of TV appeared first on Popular Science.

The California Department of Transportation (Caltrans) has awarded a $14 million grant to the Santa Clara Valley Transportation Authority (VTA) for a 10-mile bike ‘superhighway’ that will connect Santa Clara and East San Jose.

As B. Sakura Cannestra explains in San Jose Spotlight, “The funding will go toward required environmental studies, which officials said could take about two years.” The project will feature a fully separated bikeway protected by concrete and landscaping and will fill a need for an east-west connection in the region. The project is expected to cost roughly $200 million.

Local businesses have expressed concern about the loss of parking along El Camino Real, but the project is supported by the Silicon Valley Central Chamber.

• Santa Clara
• San Jose
• valley transportation authority
• VTA
• Bike Lanes
• Bike Infrastructure
• Bikeways
• central bikeway
• Protected Bike Lanes

On the heels of anti-gentrification protests that highlighted growing frustration with foreign remote workers who are moving to some of the city’s most desirable neighborhoods, Mexico City Mayor Clara Brugada Molina announced a plan to invest over 600 million pesos ($31.8 million) in public housing, according to an article in Mexico News Daily.

The proposal to build or renovate 20,000 new rental units would close roughly half of the city’s housing deficit. “The program will prioritize vulnerable groups such as youths, the elderly, workers who commute to central areas, single mothers, families who do not own their own homes, those whose income is less than three times the minimum wage and those who have been evicted.”

The mayor said the developments would include childcare centers, laundromats, and other “care system” facilities. The city has already acquired 1,000 units for redevelopment and is developing four other buildings in “strategic” central locations.

• Mexico City
• Gentrification
• Housing Costs
• Remote Work

Although not all residents may understand their role, Chicago’s neighborhood roundabouts are an effective traffic calming measure.

Championed by Alderperson Mary Ann Smith in the 1990s, roundabouts are an effective way to slow traffic on neighborhood streets without forcing cars to come to a complete stop, explains Shawn Allee in an article for WBEZ Chicago.

“Most of Chicago’s traffic circles have been built by alderpeople who requested one via the aldermanic menu program, a discretionary budget reserved for infrastructure projects such as alley resurfacing, speed humps and various traffic calming devices.” According to Ald. Andre Vasquez, this process leads to a piecemeal approach that could leave out streets with the highest needs, and wants to see City Hall take a more active role in the installation of traffic circles.

• Chicago
• Roundabouts
• Traffic Circles
• Traffic Calming
• Road Safety

Lyft and Uber will begin using robotaxis in their rideshare fleets in Atlanta and Arlington, Texas, respectively, later this year, reports Dan Zukowski in Smart Cities Dive.

The autonomous vehicles are operated by May Mobility, and deployments will begin with ‘standby operators’ in the car. May currently operates fleets in Detroit, Grand Rapids, Minnesota, and Martinez, California and primarily serve older residents and people with mobility challenges. “The company says its AV technology can handle narrow city streets, provides more human-like maneuvering around obstacles like double-parked cars and delivers smoother accelerations and braking.”

Other self-driving car operators, such as Waymo and Cruise, have run into problems with regulators after their vehicles blocked emergency vehicles and, in one case, dragged and seriously injured a pedestrian. GM shut down its Cruise self-driving division at the end of 2024. In June, Tesla announced its plans to deploy self-driving taxis in Austin, where the city is barred by state law from regulating autonomous cars.

• Atlanta
• Arlington
• Robotaxis
• Autonomous Vehicles
• Self-Driving Cars
• Lyft
• Uber
• Ride Hailing