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At Your Service

Michael Rubenstein, Harvard University

How does one charge 1,000 robots? It would be a pain to plug them all in individually. Luckily, there's an easier way with Kilobots. These little robots have round bodies about the diameter of a quarter, with a metal spring on top and three thin metal legs. To charge them, you push them -- 10 at a time -- against a long charging rack. They all charge at once, as long as each has its spring top and two of its legs touching the rack. "It's kind of like a bumper car charging system," says Mike Rubenstein, who uses a long stick to corral his Kilobots.

Rubenstein is an engineer at Harvard University and a member of the team that invented Kilobots (kilo meaning 1,000). The Harvard team began building simple, cheap robots more than three years ago, with the idea that the machines could be part of a cooperative swarm. They thought about issues such as how to charge a lot of them at once. Now, the engineers have improved the hardware and written software that allows them to send a single command out to 1,024 Kilobots; and in response, the little bots will start shuffling into place to form any solid shape researchers request:

It's kinda creepy, until you realize it takes the robots 12 hours to make a shape. So they have their limitations.

That's not to downplay Rubenstein and his team's accomplishment. This is the first time anybody has been able to direct so many programmable robots at once. "They're definitely on a point on the frontier where nobody else is," Kevin Lynch, an engineer at Northwestern University who studies cooperative robots, tells Popular Science. Previous efforts used somewhere around 100 robots.

The Harvard work is part of a hot field in robotics. Basically, everyone in this field is trying to develop systems in which a large number of robots work together to accomplish a goal ("Robot swarm" is the popular term). The robots should be able to do so in response to just a few commands sent by one person. After that, the robots' own basic algorithms need to be able to dictate how they should act individually to get the big job done. It's maximum robot power with minimum human input.

Lynch offers an idea for what a cooperative robot system could do in the future. What if a person could send a single command to a fleet of drones to search a collapsed building for survivors? The drones could all enter at once, then use their algorithms to decide when to split up, to check different rooms, and to track which rooms have been checked already.

Kilobots Gathered in Programmed Shapes

Michael Rubenstein, Harvard University

The challenge in building such systems is that there's a limit to how complex each robot can be. For one thing, they must be cheap enough that someone could afford to own hundreds or thousands of them. The Kilobots cost about $14 in parts. Their only sensors are infrared ones that calculate the distance between themselves and their neighbors. That's why the robots always march at the edge of the group, as you can see in the video. They're keeping close to others because if they wander too far, they're blind, unable to see their surroundings or calculate their positions.

Yet swarm robots must also be able to create sophisticated larger effects with their own simple capabilities. "It's an interesting question of how do you go from a desired function -- like if you want them to flock in a particular way or form a particular shape -- how do you go from that to individual rules?" Rubenstein says. Coming up with those rules for the Kilobots, including rules for glitches such as a bot's motor failing, was a major part of the research effort.

Although the Kilobots' shapely 12-hour dances seem far from practical applications, Rubenstein says they could be a step toward robots that self-assemble into specialized shapes when needed. That kind of capability is especially of interest for doing projects in space. Engineers could send up parts of a larger satellite, for example, and count on the pieces to assemble themselves once they've been released into orbit. (Like Ikea furniture, but in space.) The smaller parts could be easier and cheaper to rocket into space than one large satellite.

Lynch adds that the Harvard work is basic research meant to push the field. "You can't say well what it's going to do for me tomorrow in a factory or how am I going to make money on this?" he says. "They're asking new questions that are important."

Rubenstein and his colleagues published their work yesterday in the journal Science.

Truvada Pills

Approximately 50,000 Americans will develop HIV this year. But since Truvada was approved as a PrEP in 2012, only 10,000 patients—or two percent of the 500,000 Americans identified as “high risk” by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)—have gotten a prescription for it.

Critics have vocalized concerns about side effects. “People have memories of what it was like to be treated with very high doses of drugs in the 1980s,” Grant says. “That lingers on even though HIV medication is much safer than it used to be.” In fact, Truvada has been used to help treat HIV for a decade. But, as with birth control in the 1960s, the concept of a pill regimen for safer sex was stigmatized, triggering a backlash against so-called “Truvada whores.”

So in May, the CDC laid out clear clinical guidelines: High-risk patients should take a daily pill and get an HIV test every three months. Truvada should supplement, not replace, condoms. Results from a 2012 trial showed that when participants took the pill every day, their risk of developing HIV was cut by 92 percent.

Some still balk at paying for preventative medication, though Truvada is covered by insurance. “Price is always an issue,” says Anthony S. Fauci, an immunologist at the National Institutes of Health. “But if you look at the cost of treatment when someone gets infected, it dwarfs the cost of prevention.” 

The next step is coming up with streamlined delivery methods, says Dawn Smith, an epidemiologist at the CDC. A weekly pill or monthly injection could minimize the hassle. And perhaps the stigma, too.

The History Of Safer Sex (The Short Version)

1939: Condoms, issued to soldiers in WWII, gain social ​acceptance.

1960: Oral birth control, a.k.a. “the pill,” hits the market.

1965: A landmark case expands access to contraceptives.

1981: The New York Times runs a story on “rare cancer” in homosexuals.

1984: Scientists identify human immunodeficiency virus (HIV).

1993: Hollywood explores the homophobia surrounding HIV and AIDS in Philadelphia.

1994: AIDS becomes the number one cause of death for Americans 25 to 44.

1996: Time magazine names HIV/AIDS researcher David Ho its “Man of the Year.”

2004: Truvada gets FDA approval for treatment of HIV and AIDS.

2013: The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation launches a competition for a better condom.

2014: Pill-takers proudly wear #TruvadaWhore T-shirts.

This article originally appeared in the September 2014 issue of Popular Science.

Detroit Flood.

On August 11, more than 4 inches of rain fell on Detroit in less than a day. Drivers abandoned their cars as many metro area highways turned into lakes.

The Detroit News

Six weeks worth of rain fell on greater Detroit on Monday, much of it during afternoon rush hour. Local drainage systems quickly topped out, and the deluge transformed highways into lakes studded with hundreds of stranded drivers and submerged cars. Flooded roads and highways in greater Detroit began to reopen on Wednesday, two days after the storm, according to The Wall Street Journal, but the cleanup and repair is likely to take months.

The flooding came about, most directly, due to very high humidity on Monday combined with a low pressure system from the southwest. The resulting storms moved so slowly (sometimes even reforming after initially raining themselves out) that the rain was concentrated across a small geographic area.

This is weather common to tropical regions of the world, not temperate Michigan. But it's in line with the National Climate Assessment, which found that over the past six decades incidents of extreme precipitation have increased across the continental U.S. due to human-propelled climate change. Rising temperatures increase the evaporation of water into vapor, and warmer air can take on greater amounts of water vapor than cooler. When all that vapor finally condenses into rain (or snow), there's more of it to dump onto the communities below.

This new normal of extreme precipitation is hitting Northeastern states the hardest, followed by the upper Midwest, as this map from Climate Central shows:

Extreme Precipitation in US Increasing

Data from the latest National Climate Assessment shows that brief, heavy downpours are increasing across the United States, with the Northeastern and Upper Midwestern states hardest hit.

Climate Central

There's another thing that's changed since the 1950s: the built environment. There is a lot more of it.

Officially Monday's rainfall in Detroit totaled 4.57 inches (some areas saw up to 6 inches), just missing the one-day rainfall record of 4.75 inches set in 1925. “But as bad as that Prohibition-era deluge must have been,” wrote WXYZ's Chris Edwards, “it fell on a city with a lot less paved area than we have now.”

Much of U.S. highway system was planned and built in the mid-20th century with historical rain and snow conditions in mind. Now these same systems are decades-old, under-maintained, and failing under the new normal we've created of extreme precipitation.

Much of Detroit's infrastructure is due for major renovation, replacement, or re-imagining. While many civic leaders and engineering visionaries imagine a bright future for the Motor City, in the present the city's near-bankruptcy has meant tens of millions of dollars in neglected maintenance on basic urban necessities like water mains, as Michigan Radio reported in February. 

But it's unfair to single out Detroit. Failing infrastructure and flash flooding are big problems are big problems across the U.S.

A day after the Michigan floods, these factors came together again in Tuesday's torrential downpours along the East Coast. A low pressure storm system crawling up the mid-Atlantic seaboard dropped several inches of rainfall within 24 hours on communities from Maryland to New York. A near-record 6.3 inches of rain fell at Baltimore-Washington International Airport –  trumped only by the amount of rain that fell during a 1933 hurricane, Climate Central reports. Some parts of greater Baltimore saw over 10 inches of rain before the storms moved off.

Baltimore Flooding

Sudden heavy rains swamped parts of the Baltimore area on August 12, including this parking lot at BWI Airport.

@1stChoiceWeathr on Twitter

By 9:30 am Wednesday, the system was moving over the New York City metro area. Long Island recorded 13.26 inches of rainfall in less than a day, according to the National Weather Service, breaking the New York state record set during Hurricane Irene in 2011. Severe roadway flooding trapped many drivers, and cut off parts of eastern Long Island from the rest of the state. 

Flooding on Long Island

On August 13, 2014, torrential early morning rainfall flooded roads and highways in Long Island, New York, turning this parking lot at the Long Island Rail Road station in Islip into a lake. Water quickly rose in many areas, closing roads and highways and breaking the state's record for rainfall in a 24-hour period.

MTA

By Wednesday night the storm system was hoving over southeastern Maine. Over 4 inches of rain fell on Portland between 9 and 11pm; by midnight the deluge officially hit a record-setting 6.44 inches, according to the Portland Press Herald. (By some unofficial weather radar estimates, it topped 8 inches.) Thousands lost power as streets and basements flooded all over southeastern Maine.

And just so the U.S. heartland doesn't feel left out, this video of flash-flooding in Kearney, Nebraska shows a 9-foot-high wall of storm water breaking through tall glass doors to engulf a hospital dining room:

Kearny historically has averaged barely two inches of precipitation per month. But from Friday into Saturday, as nearly 4 inches of rain poured down on Kearney over just a few hours, spurring floods that "overwhelmed the city's storm sewer system and broke through the two-story ground-to-ceiling windows of the dinining room at Good Samaritan's Central Cafe," reported the Omaha World-Herald. "The hospital basement flooded, and there was water damage in other portions of the main building."

On Facebook the hospital expressed relief that no one was injured in the flash flood:

NSA's Utah Data Center

A view of Monstermind's physical lair, photographed from an Electronic Frontier Foundation airship

Parker Higgins, Electronic Frontier Foundation

In the high desert near Bluffdale, Utah, there lurks a creature made entirely of zeroes and ones. Called "MonsterMind", the project is an automated cyber weapon, perched atop the data flows into the National Security Agency's Mission Data Repository. According to recent revelations from former government contractor and NSA leaker Edward Snowden, Monstermind is both tremendously powerful and easily fooled. Here's the skinny on the biggest revelation from Wired's recent profile of Snowden. Author James Bamford writes:

As described, MonsterMind is a brute force approach to covert cyber war embodied in one program. In order to function, it scans a huge amount of electronic communication, all passing through the 247 acre facility, and looks for attacks. That's the scary part. The dumb part is how it automatically decides where to strike back. Spoofing, as Snowden mentioned, is a relatively simple technique for hiding where an attack comes from. It's the online equivalent of throwing a pebble to distract the prison guard while the plucky protagonist runs away. 

Bamford describes this attack as Strangelovian, in reference to the Stanley Kubrick film about nuclear war. In the film, the Soviets develop a nuclear deterrent system that automatically attacks America if Russia gets hit first. The deterrent fails in part because the Americans didn't know about it, and the film ends with a montage of nuclear explosions, as an accidental American first strike triggers the apocalypse. The automatic strike-back mechanism and obscurity of Monstermind resemble this device, but the stakes are at least an order of magnitude less severe than all-out nuclear war.

Cyber attacks at present are mostly the theft of private data or bank information, with the occasional rare instance of actual industrial sabotage breaking a machine. None of this makes an automated strike-back system great, but it's still a far cry from the world-ending threat of thermonuclear war.

Read this and other revelations, including one about a contractor router that broke Syria's internet, at Wired.

The Bomb That Ends The World, Dr. Strangelove

Still image from Stanley Kubrick's Dr Strangelove or: How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Bomb.

Stanley Kubrick