Fake News is Spreading Thanks to Information Overload

<div class="related"></div>
<p>
 In the beginning, the internet was supposed to be the great equalizer, making knowledge accessible to everyone and giving all citizens a voice.
</p>
<p>
 Today, knowledge is more accessible, and more people have a voice, but it’s also increasingly hard to tell what’s real and what’s not.
</p>
<p>
 Blame social media. On networks like Facebook and Twitter, high- and low-quality information—read: accurate and inaccurate—have an equal chance of success, according to
 <a href="http://nature.com/articles/doi:10.1038/s41562-017-0132">
  a paper published today
 </a>
 by Diego F. M. Oliveira, Filippo Menczer, and a team of researchers.
</p>
<p>
 On social networks, they said, accuracy does not necessarily determine popularity. “Quality is not a necessary condition for virality,” Menczer said.
</p>
<p>
 Our ability to discriminate accurate information can be impeded by things like confirmation bias—where we are more likely to accept information if it matches our own beliefs—and popularity bias—where we view something as high quality because it is shared frequently.
</p>
<p>
 “Even when individual users can recognize and select quality information, the social media market rarely allows the best information to win the popularity contest,” Oliveira said.
</p>
<p>
 It’s a contest which is growing bigger by the day. According to a
 <a href="http://www.journalism.org/2016/05/26/news-use-across-social-media-platforms-2016/">
  2016 Pew Research Center report
 </a>
 , 62% of adults in the U.S. get news from social media sites, and 18% do so often. Nearly half the country uses Facebook as a news source in one form or another. People who use Facebook for news amount to 44% of the general population.
</p>
<div class="ad"></div>
<p>
 Despite the popularity of social media as a news source, not all popular content on these sites is high-quality, factual information. To see how low-quality information spread on these sites, Oliveira and Menczer’s paper,
 <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-017-0132">
  published in Nature Human Behavior
 </a>
 , simulated a large social media system. The authors assumed that users were able to discern good quality information—an ideal scenario for social media usage, though perhaps a bit optimistic. They gave each post a quality rating that stood for factors such as accuracy, trustworthiness, reliability, and relevance. By varying how many pieces of information were produced in the system and how many posts a user could look at before sharing, the team examined conditions under which quality information went viral.
</p>
<p>
 When they modeled the hypothetical scenario—in which all users can tell good information from bad—the networks struck a balance between quality and diversity of information. In other words, many people’s voices were heard and the overall accuracy of posts on the site remained high.
</p>
<p>
 But when they introduced real-world data and conditions into the model, the volume of posts skyrocketed. The diversity of voices increased, but the quality of popular posts declined. The team discovered that eventually there is “so much information out there that we just can’t keep up,” Menczer said. “It underlines the limits of social media as a platform for news.”
</p>
<h2>
 Challenges of Diversity
</h2>
<p>
 “The implication is that the sheer diversity of information can actually have a downside,” John Wihbey, a professor of journalism and new media who studies virality and information literacy at Northeastern University, said of the study’s findings.
</p>
<p>
 “One of the critiques of the era of mainstream media is that we artificially gate-keep, not letting enough diverse voices into the conversation,” he said. “While the critique of high-quality news producers may still be valid, it’s a more complicated picture than maybe we’ve understood. When you have actors with bad intentions who want to do propaganda, misinformation, or just silly stuff…flooding environments with all kinds of clickbait, it doesn’t improve the ecosystem.”
</p>
<p>
 In the past year, fake news has become a global phenomenon. Only 24% of respondents in the
 <a href="http://www.digitalnewsreport.org/survey/2017/overview-key-findings-2017/">
  Reuters Institute Digital News Report
 </a>
 for 2017 that think social media is successful at separating fact from fiction, compared with 40% of respondents who think the same of the news media. The problem appears to be particularly acute in the U.S. Out of 36 countries, the U.S. emerged as the second most polarized. People reported trusting their favored news sources more than the news media in general by a 15% margin.
</p>
<p>
 But that hasn’t spelled the end of the news media. Online news subscriptions have risen from 9% to 16% this year, and news donations have tripled, according to the recent Reuters report. People under 35 contributed significantly to this increase, as the percentage of 18–24 year olds paying for news increased from 4% in 2016 to 18% in 2017.
</p>
<p>
 There are also other signs that internet users and companies are recognizing the problem of fake news. In a study this winter,
 <a href="http://www.niemanlab.org/2017/02/reddits-rworldnews-community-used-a-series-of-nudges-to-push-users-to-fact-check-suspicious-news/">
  J. Nathan Matias and other researchers at MIT
 </a>
 worked with Reddit to combat fake news by encouraging users fact-check potentially misleading stories, which doubled the number of comments with links on average, suggesting the users were backing up their comments with sources.
 <a href="https://www.journalism.cuny.edu/2017/04/announcing-the-new-integrity-initiative/">
  CUNY Graduate School of Journalism
 </a>
 recently joined Facebook and organizations like the Knight Foundation to announce the News Integrity Initiative to combat fake news. And on a more extreme level, last week Filipino senator Joel Villanueva proposed a bill that would jail or fine people and companies that spread fake news.
</p>
<div class="newsletter"></div>
<p>
 For now, Oliveira and Menczer recommend that social media sites reduce information load by restricting the posts from automated bots, which can manipulate sites by producing high volumes of low quality or inaccurate information. “We’re finding very strong quantitative evidence that social bots are very effective at getting fake news to go viral,” said Menczer.
</p>
<p>
 The group is currently working on studying and detecting automated bots to learn how to filter them out (much like spam filters for email).
</p>
<p>
 While the Menczer and Oliveira say that social media sites bear the brunt of the responsibility for dealing with this issue, they do recommend that individuals carefully check the sources of information and avoid sharing content without some critical examination. They also say people should not unfollow or unfriend people who hold different opinions. “That leads to echo chambers, which make us more vulnerable to misinformation,” Oliveira said.
</p>
<p>
 Wihbey agrees that bots are a significant problem. If platforms like Facebook and Twitter are better able to crack down on bots, he said, the high-quality information would have a better chance at spreading. By sharing their data sets, Facebook and other platforms could help researchers understand the relationship between virality and accuracy of information, he said, an increasingly important relationship in our democracy.
</p>
<p>
 While Wihbey admits that there are times in which low-quality information can be fun and amusing, social platforms and systems should take a harder look at how their algorithms treat credible content.
</p>
<p>
 “We have to acknowledge the limits of social media” Menczer said.
</p>
<p>
 Photo credit:
 <a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/68532869@N08/17471462035/">
  Japanexperterna.se/Flickr (CC BY-SA)
 </a>
</p>

<p>We’re being overwhelmed by social media posts—and our judgement is suffering as a result.</p>

“Ape Who Went to College” Dies

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<div class="add-container clearfix" id="add-block-placer">
</div>
<p>
  Chantek, the beloved orangutan who was one of the first apes to learn sign language, has passed away at age 39.
 </p>
<p>
  Chantek rose to fame after “attending university,” living with anthropologist Lyn Miles at the University of Tennessee for nine years. Miles and other caretakers taught him over 150 words in American Sign Language, as well as important human skills like cleaning his room, using the bathroom, and directing a car route.
 </p>
<figure class="richtext-image full-width">
<img alt="" class="richtext-image full-width" src="https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/media/images/chantek-1.width-990_2IV9LbC.jpg"/>
<figcaption>39-year-old Chantek was known for having an engaging personality.
        
    </figcaption>
</figure>
<p>
  His tenacity for learning made him the star of a 2014 PBS documentary “
  <a href="http://www.pbs.org/video/my-wild-affair-ape-who-went-college-1/">
   The Ape Who Went to College
  </a>
  .” In many ways, Chantek was raised much like a human. In fact, he sometimes referred to himself as an “orangutan person.”
 </p>
<p>
  Chantek was among a special group of apes who knew ASL, including Koko, the gorilla, and Washoe, the chimpanzee.
 </p>
<p>
  The BBC described the friendly ape:
 </p>
<blockquote>
<p>
   Zoo Atlanta said that Chantek frequently used sign language to communicate with keepers but “he was shy about signing with individuals he did not know and often chose forms of communication which are more typical of orangutans, such as vocalisations and unique hand gestures”.
  </p>
<p>
   “Chantek will be deeply missed by his family here at Zoo Atlanta,” said Hayley Murphy, vice president of the zoo’s animal divisions.
  </p>
<p>
   “He had such a unique and engaging personality and special ways of relating to and communicating with those who knew him best. It has been our privilege to have had him with us for 20 years.”
  </p>
</blockquote>
<p>
  Orangutans typically live about 35-45 years in the wild. Chantek was born at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center in Georgia. He returned to the Atlanta Zoo to live out his later years with other orangutans, including his friends 34-year-old female Madu and playful 10-year-old male Dumadi. While the cause of death has not been announced, he was being treated for heart disease, a leading cause of death among captive orangutans.
 </p>
<p>
  Miles shared an example of his communication abilities
  <a href="http://www.bbc.com/news/av/uk-politics-40860444/he-asked-me-to-get-the-car-and-take-him-home">
   with the BBC
  </a>
  : “The last time I saw him not too long ago he asked me for meat cheese bread [a cheeseburger] and for me to get the car and take him home.”
 </p>
<div class="cove-box flex-video" data-cove-id="2365286726" data-cove-params="&amp;topbar=false">
</div>
<div class="inline-caption">
  Watch the incredible story of Chantek, the orangutan raised as a human child on an American university campus during the '70s and '80s.
 </div>
</section>
<p>
 Photo credit:
 <a href="https://twitter.com/ZooATL/status/894681378834571266">
  Zoo Atlanta / Twitter
 </a>
</p>

Sperm counts in men from North America, Europe, Australia, and New Zealand have dropped by over 50 percent over the past 40 years.

Sperm Count is Decreasing in Rich Nations—and No One Knows Why

<div class="related"></div>
<p>
 Over the past 40 years, sperm counts in men from North America, Europe, Australia, and New Zealand have dropped by over 50 percent, researchers announced on Tuesday.
</p>
<p>
 Researchers examined 7,500 studies conducted between 1973 and 2001. They selected 185 studies with consistent counting methods and performed analyses on data from almost 43,000 men.
</p>
<p>
 Their findings,
 <a href="http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/humupd/dmx022">
  released in
  <i>
   Human Reproduction Update
  </i>
</a>
 , showed that sperm concentration fell from 99 million per milliliter to 47.1 million per milliliter during the span of the study, indicating a 52.4% decline in sperm concentration and a 59.3% decline in total sperm count for men in these nations. What’s more, the scientists found that the decrease in sperm count is not slowing. As sperm counts have implications for morbidity and mortality, these results raise potential concerns for health and fertility.
</p>
<p>
 While previous studies on sperm count were criticized for not accounting for confounding variables like age, sexual activity, or infertility, this study used consistent sperm count methods and broad data sets from many locations to address these concerns.
</p>
<div class="ad"></div>
<p>
 The study did not directly address causes for the decline, though in interviews with
 <a href="https://www.newscientist.com/article/2141784-sperm-count-has-fallen-by-nearly-60-per-cent-in-richer-countries/#link_time=1501018098">
  New Scientist
 </a>
 , study author Shanna Swan of the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai indicated that since the decline occurred in these specific nations, there may be a causal relation with chemicals. The impact of chemicals, like phthalates that are often found in
 <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/12/well/eat/the-chemicals-in-your-mac-and-cheese.html?_r=1">
  food packaging and make their way into nearly every brand of macaroni and cheese
 </a>
 , has been called into question lately by data that suggests they may interfere with testosterone production and endocrine systems.
</p>
<p>
 Here’s Kate Kelland,
 <a href="https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/sperm-count-dropping-in-western-world/">
  reporting
 </a>
 for Scientific American:
</p>
<blockquote>
<p>
 “This study is an urgent wake-up call for researchers and health authorities around the world to investigate the causes of the sharp ongoing drop in sperm count,” said Hagai Levine, who co-led the work at the Hebrew University-Hadassah Braun School of Public Health and Community Medicine in Jerusalem.
</p>
<p>
 The analysis did not explore reasons for the decline, but researchers said falling sperm counts have previously been linked to various factors such as exposure to certain chemicals and pesticides, smoking, stress and obesity.
</p>
<p>
 This suggests measures of sperm quality may reflect the impact of modern living on male health and act as a “canary in the coal mine” signaling broader health risks, they said.
</p>
</blockquote>
<p>
 But it’s not all bad news—47.1 million sperm per milliliter is still well above the 15 million sperm threshold that is considered low from a fertility standpoint. The study revealed no clear decline in sperm count for men in South America, Asia, or Africa, but the authors note that far fewer studies have been conducted in these regions.
</p>
<p>
 For now, the question of what is causing sperm count decline is still open, but the evidence of the trend is increasingly apparent.
</p>
<div class="newsletter"></div>
<p>
 Image credit:
 <a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/82066314@N06/9233907080/">
  Iqbal Osman / (CC BY 2.0)
 </a>
</p>

<p>An obvious decrease in sperm count amongst richer nations is showing no sign of slowing. </p>

Scientists 'Teleport' Photons Into Space For the First Time

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<div class="add-container clearfix" id="add-block-placer">
</div>
<p>
  A
  <a href="https://arxiv.org/abs/1707.00934">
   team of researchers
  </a>
  set a record for quantum “teleportation” this week.
 </p>
<p>
  In a first, scientists “teleported” information from Earth to space over a distance of over 300 miles. Previous experiments had done the same
  <a href="http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/next/physics/scientists-generate-quantum-entanglement-in-space-for-the-first-time/">
   from space to Earth
  </a>
  and over shorter distances. Photon “teleportation” can enable long-range data encryption, and would be vital to a large-scale quantum computing network. But this doesn’t mean we’re ready to beam objects up to space.
 </p>
<p>
  This transfer relies on the principle of entanglement, by which two particles are connected (regardless of distance) in that measuring one correlates to the state of the other. Using entanglement, the quantum state of a particle can be transferred to another, so it essentially assumes the identity of the other particle, much as we envision physical teleportation.
 </p>
<figure class="richtext-image full-width">
<img alt="" class="richtext-image full-width" src="https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/media/images/iss-40_thunderheads_near_borneo.width-990_yPo2CjP.jpg"/>
<figcaption>Scientists sent information between a high-altitude ground station in Tibet and a satellite in space.
        
    </figcaption>
</figure>
<p>
<a href="http://www.bbc.com/news/av/science-environment-40573621/first-object-teleported-to-earth-s-orbit">
   In an interview with the BBC
  </a>
  , Oxford professor Ian Walmsley explained that the team communicated information by harnessing the laws of quantum mechanics. They transferred information from a photon on Earth to a second photon up in a satellite, but did not physically send the first photon anywhere.
 </p>
<p>
  Ryan Mandelbaum explains this phenomenon for
  <a href="https://gizmodo.com/scientists-teleport-a-particle-hundreds-of-miles-but-w-1796818859">
   Gizmodo
  </a>
  :
 </p>
<blockquote>
<p style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="color: #222222;">
    So, here’s a simplified version of quantum teleportation. Let’s say you take a red and a green ball, put each randomly into one of two bags, and hand one bag to a person on the ground, and another to a person at the satellite. But on the ground, there’s a second bag, containing another green ball that the folks on the ground want to “teleport” to the satellite, without anyone else knowing it was green. Quantum teleportation says that, with the entangled link already set up, the folks on the ground have only to open both of their bags, then call the satellite on the phone and say either “same” or “different.” If the ground observer opens both bags and sees both balls are green, she can just say “same” to the satellite. The satellite will then open his entangled bag, which has to have a red ball, which means the ground must have had the green ball in the entangled bag, and
    <span class="apple-converted-space">
</span>
<em>
     that
    </em>
<span class="apple-converted-space">
</span>
    means the secret ball had to be green.
   </span>
</p>
<p style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="color: #222222;">
    Thus, the state of the secret ball is “teleported” to the satellite.
   </span>
</p>
</blockquote>
<p>
  In previous attempts, achieving great distances was challenging. Entanglement is fragile and easily disrupted as photons interact with matter over longer distances. Scientists have tested models of a quantum network by transmitting information through optical fibers, but the team from University of Science and Technology of China led by Chao-Yang Lu demonstrated much greater distances by using the vacuum of space, which has few particles with which the entangled photons might interact.
 </p>
<p>
  Over the course of a month, the researchers sent millions of photons between the ground station and the Micius satellite, a sensitive photon receiver that reads information from photons on Earth. The ground station was placed at a high-altitude site in Tibet at over 13,000 feet above sea level to minimize disturbance from the atmosphere, which can disentangle photons. Over 900 of the transfers were successful. Based on satellite orbit, the photons were separated by between 310 and 870 miles.
 </p>
<p>
  The “teleportation” process transfers qubits, or quantum bits of information. A quantum network would use entangled photons to share information. Measuring their state—the data encoded in the photon—would immediately disturb them. Thus, any attempts to read or interfere with messages outside of the receiver would instantly be detected.
 </p>
<p>
  “This work establishes the first ground-to-satellite up-link for faithful and ultra-long-distance quantum teleportation, an essential step toward global-scale quantum internet,” the team wrote in this week’s paper.
 </p>
</section>
<p>
 Image credit: Expedition 40 crew member/NASA
</p>

Head of Michigan Health Department Is Charged in Flint Probe

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<div class="add-container clearfix" id="add-block-placer">
</div>
<p>
  Nick Lyon, head of the Michigan health department was charged with involuntary manslaughter Wednesday morning as part of an ongoing investigation into the Flint water crisis.
 </p>
<p>
  Lyon is accused of failing to notify residents of Flint of an outbreak of Legionnaires’ disease in the area between 2014–2015. Legionnaires’ is a type of bacterial pneumonia that experts have linked to contaminated water.
 </p>
<figure class="richtext-image full-width">
<img alt="" class="richtext-image full-width" src="https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/media/images/flint-water-tower.width-990_tRcULXi.jpg"/>
<figcaption>Flint water was contaminated with Legionnaires' bacteria in 2014-2015.
        
    </figcaption>
</figure>
<p>
  Lyon has admitted that he knew of the outbreak for months, as David Eggert of Associated Press reports:
 </p>
<blockquote>
<p>
   Lyon has admitted that he was aware of the Legionnaires’ outbreak for months but wanted to wait until investigators in the state Health and Human Services Department finished their own probe.
  </p>
<p>
   He told state lawmakers that experts likely wanted to “solve the problem” before they raised it with senior officials in the Snyder administration. The investigation, he said, “wasn’t one that was easily solved.”
  </p>
</blockquote>
<p>
  The outbreak began when the city’s water was drawn from the Flint River. Nearly 100 cases of Legionnaires’ were reported in Flint, resulting in 12 deaths over the two years. According to the AP, special agent Jeff Seipenko said that Lyon’s failure to act caused the death of at least one Flint resident—85-year-old Robert Skidmore.
 </p>
<p>
  While some public health officials first identified contaminated water as a potential cause of the spread of Legionnaires’ in 2014, state officials did not alert the public. In 2016, a CDC investigation revealed genetic links between bacteria in Flint water and patients in the area affected by Legionnaires’.
 </p>
<p>
  The city stopped using the Flint River as a source of drinking water in 2015 after the CDC found increased levels of lead in children’s blood. The toxic metal was leaching from city pipes due to the river water’s corrosive qualities. Based on the CDC report, 99,000 residents of Flint were directly impacted when the water source was changed from Lake Huron.
 </p>
<p>
  This ruling makes Lyon the most senior member of the state administration to be charged in the Flint probe. Eden Wells, the state’s chief medical officer was also charged with obstruction of justice and lying to the police after claiming a lack of knowledge of the epidemic.
 </p>
<div class="cove-box flex-video" data-cove-id="3001355667" data-cove-params="&amp;topbar=false">
</div>
<div class="inline-caption">
  NOVA investigates what happened in Flint, Michigan when local officials changed the city’s water source to save money, but overlooked a critical treatment process.
 </div>
</section>
<p>
 Photo credit: Caitlin Saks/WGBH
</p>

Can Cheap Computing Put the Internet Everywhere?

<div class="related"></div>
<p>
</p>
<p>
 It’s in your car. It’s in your home. Soon, it may monitor your digestive system.
</p>
<p>
 As our lives become increasingly surrounded by devices and objects that can communicate, collect, and transmit data, we’re brushing up against the advent of the so-called Internet of Things. Known as IoT in tech-speak, it promises to connect our refrigerators with our toasters, our lights with our thermostats, and our fitness monitors back with our refrigerators.
</p>
<p>
 Experts have high hopes for IoT. The consultancy
 <a href="http://fortune.com/2015/07/22/mckinsey-internet-of-things/">
  McKinsey
 </a>
 predicts it will drive $3.9–11.1 trillion of economic activity by 2025. For IoT to have that impact, though, it’ll have to be more than connected refrigerators and smart thermostats. The sensors and computers that will drive IoT will have to be in everything from streetlights to heartrate monitors to bottles of wine.
</p>
<p>
 To enable this kind of interconnectivity, computer chips will need to get cheap, fast. And they’ll need a reason for being. Up until now, IoT devices have been neither sufficiently ubiquitous or necessary to succeed.
</p>
<p>
 A company called ThinFilm hopes to change that with the opening of a new semiconductor plant in San Jose, California. ThinFilm thinks their new process could drop prices enough to usher in the IoT dream. While the plant still hosts the iconic “bunny suits” and enclosed rooms, ThinFilm is partially printing chips rather than fully etching them as most chips are today. The new process has been mooted and tested in labs for years, and a commercial version could produce chips that are significantly cheaper. Moving to roll-to-roll production could allow ThinFilm to make billions of these tiny devices, and it could allow a technology known as near-field communication, or NFC, to become ubiquitous.
</p>
<p>
 If ThinFilm’s roll printing process works, they could get there. It’s a big if, but the payoff could be big, both for the company and for the people who may need cheap chips. “New technology has to somehow introduce a new level of convenience at a new low cost,” says Woodward Yang, a professor of electrical engineering and computer science at Harvard University. “People don’t buy technology, people buy solutions.”
</p>
<p>
</p>
<div class="ad"></div>
<h2>
 Connecting Devices
</h2>
<p>
 Networks of everyday devices predate the concept of IoT by many decades. ATMs, one of the first examples of a connected device, were used as early at 1974. More recently, as chip costs have gone down, intelligent connected devices have become more common, starting with computers and moving into phones, speakers, and even headphones.
</p>
<p>
 In 2008,
 <a href="http://blogs.cisco.com/diversity/the-internet-of-things-infographic">
  networking company Cisco
 </a>
 estimated that there were more objects connected to the internet than humans on Earth. By 2020, analysts at the market research group Gartner predict that over 26 billion devices will be connected. But in order for IoT to truly take off, it needs to be more than just a simple chip in a card that unlocks your hotel room or scans you into your workplace.
</p>
<p>
 Cheap chips could push connected devices a bit further into our lives. It’s a problem that ThinFilm thinks it can fix. The new plant is currently producing chips on sheets of stainless steel, printing a portion of the devices instead of exclusively using traditional semiconductor fabrication methods that require many time-consuming steps and expensive equipment. Ultimately, they expect that partially printing chips will increase production volume.
</p>
<figure class="richtext-image full-width">
<img alt="" class="richtext-image full-width" src="https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/media/images/apple-payment-square-1.width-990_N3iJ4v8.jpg"/>
<figcaption>The most visible use of NFC is payment systems like Apple Pay and Samsung Pay.
        
    </figcaption>
</figure>
<p>
 The chips that ThinFilm is making are not the first ones in this space. Barcodes are cheap to print, and quick to read, operating as basic ID codes. Radio frequency identification (RFID) chips provide more information and can be updated—they work at broader ranges than static barcodes. ThinFilm is focusing on near-field communication (NFC) devices such as the ones that enable ApplePay and SamsungPay. These chips allow to devices to communicate at close ranges, usually within about 1.5–8 inches. NFC can operate more quickly and consume less energy than the connections which currently wirelessly connect your earbuds to your phone. RFID chips typically require a memory chip tag, reader, and antenna, while NFC has the reader and tag integrated. While RFID is a one-way communication system where data flows from tag to reader, NFC can be used for one- or two-way communication with peer-to-peer capabilities. Two-way communication allows us to share info and pair devices. So far, barcodes and RFID chips have had clear impacts for inventory and tracking applications, and while NFC has found some momentum in similar areas, it has yet to take off with consumers. “It’s an application looking for a market,” says Dean Freeman, a semiconductor expert at Gartner analytics.
</p>
<figure class="richtext-image full-width">
<img alt="" class="richtext-image full-width" src="https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/media/images/converted-speedtap.width-990_5CjXcwn.jpg"/>
<figcaption>ThinFilm is moving towards producing NFC chips using a roll-to-roll process.
        
    </figcaption>
</figure>
<p>
 If ThinFilm can increase volume, that would decrease the cost of each NFC device, potentially to a few pennies per chip, which is necessary for many potential applications to be successful. “If you’re going to compete against NFC silicon or RFID or silicon or barcodes, the way you do that is with cost, and the way you get cost is with volume,” Freeman says.
</p>
<p>
 A traditional silicon-based semiconductor manufacturing plant (known as a “fab”) produces chips on silicon wafers (usually around 2–12 inches in size). These wafers must be processed in various steps, and the development speed is limited by the number of wafers —“they’re processed essentially one wafer at a time,” says Matthew Bright, the senior director of product &amp; technical marketing at ThinFilm. The equipment in most fabs is extremely expensive, and starting a new facility can cost between $5–10 billion dollars.
</p>
<p>
</p>
<div class="newsletter"></div>
<p>
 In contrast, the new San Jose plant is currently producing chips on square sheets of metal, similar to foil. These stainless steel sheets, at about 12 inches per side, allow ThinFilm to make more integrated circuits at a time as they are able to print on larger areas that are not limited by individual wafer processing. Moving to sheets also means they can start printing directly onto product packages and labels at scale, rather than removing chips from wafers and attaching them. By printing the electronics directly onto labels, companies can ensure that the product is not tampered with, and that counterfeits cannot be given the same tags.
</p>
<figure class="richtext-image full-width">
<img alt="" class="richtext-image full-width" src="https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/media/images/os-r2r_4-1.width-990_olyC9iJ.jpg"/>
<figcaption>Printed roll-to-roll processes use metal foils instead of standard silicon wafers to produce NFC chips, like the ones shown here.
        
    </figcaption>
</figure>
<p>
 Presently, traditional wafer fabrication requires a series of up to 15 mask steps that take about one to two days each, resulting in a 30 day lead time for a typical NFC chip. Printed electronics offer the possibility of reducing that time to one to two days total, making it quicker and easier to design and produce new devices.
</p>
<p>
 The next step is to move to printing on rolls of about 220 yards in the next 12-18 months. Moving to a continuous sheet process will theoretically allow ThinFilm to increase production from around 24 million units per year to 5 billion NFC units per year. “They’re actually printing a semiconductor in volume, which no one has really done before,” Freeman says.
</p>
<p>
 For its part, ThinFilm says they do not intend or expect to replace the traditional semiconductor industry, and they do not view their work as competing head-to-head with established players like Intel or Samsung. For now they are relying on a hybrid process, where some steps are completed through printing, and others are done using standard techniques. Bright says their plan is “about complementing existing semiconductor manufacturing capacity so electronics can move into new market segments.”
</p>
<p>
 But some are still skeptical. Dr. Yang expressed concerns about the tradeoffs between cost and quality in the proposed devices. The process of printing chips requires expensive chemical inks and a level of printing precision that has historically been challenging to achieve, resulting in low quality devices.
</p>
<p>
 “Getting a fully printed process has been a challenge for the industry, one they are still trying to overcome,” Freeman says. To date, fully printed devices have not achieved the complexity of traditionally fabricated chips, and less complex options, like barcodes, can cost mere micro-cents. “No one has really been convinced that the electronics [created by printing] are anything to be happy about,” Yang says. Not to mention the fact that the chips used to create the IoT still require power sources—most lower energy ones use batteries which will quickly need to be replaced.
</p>
<h2>
 Cheaper Chips
</h2>
<p>
 ThinFilm says they are not currently focusing making their chips more complex, but cheaper. By decreasing the cost of NFC production, the company envisions incorporating small amounts of intelligence into billions of products, like the alarms and coffee makers mentioned earlier, or a pill case to confirm if you’ve taken your medication. On the device side, there’s some potential. The number of devices that are NFC enabled has doubled this year, and Apple recently announced that they will expand access to NFC chips in their phones to more third-party developers.
</p>
<p>
 For now, though, the uses haven’t been quite so, well, useful. The cost of ThinFilm’s NFC chips, about 25 cents, are prohibitively expensive for all but luxury goods like designer handbags or expensive alcohol. ThinFilm has run test campaigns with craft brewers like Coronado Brewers—a set of coasters embedded with data about the company—and with the distiller Johnnie Walker—to deliver two different messages depending on whether the bottle is open. They also tagged diamond certificates with NFC chips that, when scanned, informed consumers of the background of the particular gem they were considering. ThinFilm also has been producing anti-theft tags and temperature sensors that can store information on whether the product was within specified temperature ranges during its journey.
</p>
<figure class="richtext-image full-width">
<img alt="" class="richtext-image full-width" src="https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/media/images/16638202061_6b63d0b3f4_o.width-990_VG37HBd.jpg"/>
<figcaption>As IoT applications expand, NFC chips may become incorporated in household objects like medication bottles.
        
    </figcaption>
</figure>
<p>
 Beyond simply tagging goods you can buy in a store, IoT industry leaders have their sights set on hospitals, clinics, and other healthcare uses, where the difference between 10 cents and 50 cents is less significant—and might save someone a costly trip to a doctor, say if they are concerned that they accidentally took two doses of their medication and the pill case can confirm they did not. “We believe we’re going to see products in the human monitoring space—like the medical sector—with a decent penetration by 2020,” Marsh says.
</p>
<p>
 But even if manufacturers can make enough of these chips to put them in seemingly everything, including your pill case, IoT presents privacy concerns that have not been addressed. The real appeal of this technology lies in connecting various devices so that the data that has been collected there can work together. This rapidly brings us towards automation—where your blinds could react automatically to changes in sunlight. On some level, this introduces convenience, but it also brings up unsolved challenges that we may not be ready for. Objects that are connected to home networks and collect more and more data about our behavior in our homes and other personal environments raise concerns about data security and privacy. Beyond obvious privacy concerns, allowing companies to collect data about our actions, like monitoring what order we approach aisles in the grocery store, or how long we spend selecting a product, may eventually introduce a level of convenience for the consumer, but also allows the companies to determine behavioral models and increase revenues by finding specific ways to target consumers and optimize store layouts.
</p>
<p>
 We do not yet have systems to effectively and seamlessly integrate all of these devices, and when we do, they will be subject to many of the same privacy and governance issues as our other algorithmically-controlled platforms like Facebook.
</p>
<p>
 For now, these concerns remain more speculative than real since many of the proposed uses for IoT, like tracking goods or recognizing temperature changes, can be done passively in other, cheaper ways. “Who is going to pay 10 cents for an RFID tag for a 20 cent pack of gum? The places where this can go are pretty limited,” Yang says.
</p>
<p>
 Photo credits:
 <a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/134783492@N06/30672719763/i">
  Mybloodtypeiscoffee/Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 4.0)
 </a>
 , ThinFilm,
 <a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/martyhadding/16638202061/">
  Marty Hadding/Flickr (CC BY-NC 2.0)
 </a>
</p>

<p>To make the Internet of Things possible, computer chips will need to get cheap, fast.</p>

Alcohol May Boost Memory Formation After Learning

<section class="entry-content instapaper_body clearfix" itemprop="articleBody">
<div class="add-container clearfix" id="add-block-placer">
</div>
<p>
  Drinking may not be so bad for your memory after all.
 </p>
<p>
  In fact, a study released this week in
  <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-017-06305-w">
<em>
    Nature Scientific Reports
   </em>
</a>
  suggests that drinking alcohol right after learning something new might actually help your brain store that information more effectively than if you remained sober.
 </p>
<p>
  While previous studies have examined the role of alcohol in memory formation, this study was one of the first to test this outside of a lab setting. The team from the University of Exeter studied 88 adults between the ages of 18-53.  Participants were asked to conduct the study in their own homes, and half were told to drink as much as they wanted. The other half had to remain sober. The sober and drinking groups had similar backgrounds in terms of age, body mass index, typical drinking habits, and incidence of blackouts.
 </p>
<figure class="richtext-image full-width">
<img alt="" class="richtext-image full-width" src="https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/media/images/4873748610_9d69c16d52_o.width-990_O8V4seV.jpg"/>
<figcaption>Researchers compared the performance of adults who drank as much as they wanted and those who did not drink during the evening on specific memory tasks for words learned before the evening began.
        
    </figcaption>
</figure>
<p>
  For participants, the study started—sober—at 6 pm. They first listened to 24 words that seemed similar to real words, but had extra letters (like frenzylk). At 7 pm, they were asked to remember the words based on the first few letters (an example prompt was frenzy_ _).  Around 8 pm, for half of the participants, the drinking began. And drink they did. The average person consumed about six drinks worth of alcohol.
 </p>
<p>
  Two hours later, at 10 pm, participants were given a second, image-based task to test memory retention during drinking. They were shown 128 images and asked to categorize them as indoor or outdoor items. They were then presented with 192 images (some of which overlapped with the first 128), and asked whether each image was old (from the first set), similar (showed an old item in a new position), or new (had not appeared before).
 </p>
<p>
  The next morning, after a night of drinking, the participants who consumed more alcohol answered correctly more often for the first task than those who drank less. The scientists had hypothesized that the memory boost would occur because drinking alcohol blocked individuals’ ability to form new memories while imbibing, leaving more resources to encode memories developed before. Beth Mole described the results for
  <a href="https://arstechnica.com/science/2017/08/booze-boosts-the-brains-ability-to-remember-info-learned-before-drinking/">
   Ars Technica
  </a>
  :
 </p>
<blockquote>
<p>
   They were partly right. The drinkers did indeed perform better at the made-up word challenge. The sober group showed an ever-so-slight decline in remembering the words between the evening and morning tests. But the drinkers scored statistically significantly better the next morning than they did in the evening—not just the same as the evening. This hints at the idea that alcohol doesn’t simply help reduce forgetfulness; it may instead firm up freshly formed knowledge and enhance memory.
  </p>
<p>
   Still, the results of the image-based memory challenge were not so crystal clear. Drinkers didn’t do worse than the sober folks. They all did about the same in both evening and morning tests.
  </p>
</blockquote>
<p>
  If people who drank had scored worse on the image tests, the researchers would have had evidence to support their hypothesis that memory formation suffers while drinking, giving the brain time to consolidate older memories. That part, though, remains unsolved.
 </p>
<p>
  Originally, the team had hoped to conduct the tests in an even more realistic setting for binge drinking like bars or clubs, but the businesses weren’t keen on the idea. “The most available option was to test participants in their homes during a drinking session that preceded a night out,” the researchers wrote.
 </p>
<p>
  The team’s next experiments will explore how sleep may work together with alcohol to improve our memories. Alcohol, the researchers wrote, may boost the patterns in slow wave sleep—also known as deep sleep—that help us encode memories. If there is a link, it could explain the boozy memory boost and has been ignored by most other studies.
 </p>
</section>
<p>
 Photo credit:
 <a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/tegg/4873748610/">
  Pete Berlin / Flickr (CC BY-NC 2.0)
 </a>
</p>

Bianca Datta

Articles