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Self-driving cars are taking longer to hit roads than many experts predicted. Despite impressive progress in the field, (like trucks using self-driving features to move freight more efficiently, Waymo launching its robotaxi service for vetted riders in San Francisco, or Tesla rolling out version 10 of its full self-driving software), we’re a long way from ubiquitous Level 5 autonomy.

What if there was some sort of in-between, a workaround to give us a glimpse of a future where empty cars deftly navigate city streets? A Berlin-based startup called Vay has come up with just such a solution, and it is, in short, creative, unexpected—and sort of ingenious.

Rather than ceding full control of cars to software from the get-go, Vay plans to use human “teledrivers” to drive cars remotely. Sound a lot like a real-life video game? I thought so too—and in the most tangible of ways, it is. Teledrivers sit at stations that closely resemble an arcade game, complete with steering wheel, pedals, and monitors.

Of course, in crucial ways the teledriving doesn’t resemble an arcade game. Vay emphasizes that its system was built with safety front of mind, with extra precautions against the top four causes of accidents in urban areas: driving under the influence, speeding, distraction, and fatigue.

These days, distraction probably takes the cake, because let’s be honest, we all look at our phones while driving. Teledrivers, on the other hand, will be fully engaged with the driving environment (hopefully, their phones won’t even be within reach), and are vetted and trained by the company. The monitors they look at while operating a car also give them a 360-degree view around the car.

Here’s how Vay’s service will work for consumers. Using a smartphone app, you’ll hail a car, much like you would with Uber or Lyft—except the car will pull up empty (having navigated to your location via a teledriver), and you’ll get in and drive yourself to your destination. Upon arrival, you get out and get on your way, and the teledriver takes over again, driving the car to its next passenger.

Perhaps most intriguing of all, Vay claims its rides will cost just “a fraction” of what Uber and Lyft currently charge for rides. Between that and the added bonus of not having to make small talk with drivers or pool passengers (am I right, introverts?), Vay may really be onto something.

The company’s CEO, Thomas von der Ohe, has some experience with automation, having worked on Amazon’s Alexa and at Zoox, a robotaxi startup Amazon bought in 2020. Scaling up the level of automation is one of Vay’s goals, though it seems they won’t be in a huge hurry to do so, saying it will launch autonomous features gradually based on data gathered by teledriving, and that it believes “we will enter a decade of human-machine collaboration instead of directly reaching full autonomy.”

Again, they may be onto something. All the hype around self-driving cars has consumers eagerly anticipating their arrival, but between a complex regulatory environment, ongoing safety concerns, and the stark fact that exceeding or even matching the human brain’s ability to operate a vehicle is really, really hard, the “finish line” of Level 5 autonomy will likely remain elusive for years to come—if not a decade or more.

In the meantime, providing alternate solutions that help ease us into a driverless future, maybe while saving us money and making roads safer, seems like a good course of action.

Vay does have some big hurdles yet to clear.

For one, it will be interesting to see what sort of solutions the company devises for matching supply to demand; Uber and Lyft use surge pricing when ride requests outnumber drivers, and drivers can choose to go on duty at busy times when prices are high. In Vay’s case, the number of teledrivers sitting at their arcade-game-like stations at any given time will be fixed. The company will also have to get approvals from regulators in the cities where it plans to offer its servic...

Thanks to CRISPR, gene therapy and “designer babies” are now a reality. The gene editing Swiss army knife is one of the most impactful biomedical discoveries of the last decade. Now a new study suggests we’ve just begun dipping our toes into the CRISPR pond.

CRISPR-Cas9 comes from lowly origins. It was first discovered as a natural mechanism in bacteria and yeast cells to help fight off invading viruses. This led Dr. Feng Zhang, one of the pioneers of the technology, to ask: where did this system evolve from? Are there any other branches of the CRISPR family tree that we can also harness for gene editing?

In a new paper published last week in Science, Zhang’s team traced the origins of CRISPR to unveil a vast universe of potential gene editing tools. As “cousins” of CRISPR, these new proteins can readily snip targeted genes inside Petri dishes, similar to their famous relative.

But unlike previous CRISPR variants, these are an entirely new family line. Collectively dubbed OMEGA, they operate similarly to CRISPR. However, they use completely foreign “scissor” proteins, along with alien RNA guides previously unfamiliar to scientists.

What came as a total surprise was the abundance of these alternative systems. A big data search found over a million potential genetic sites that encode just one of these cousins, far more widespread “than previously suspected.” These newly-discovered classes of proteins have “strong potential for developing as biotechnologies,” the authors said.

In other words, the next gene editing wunderkind could be silently waiting inside another bacteria or algae, ready to be re-engineered to snip, edit, and alter our own genomes for the next genetic revolution.

The Many Variations of CRISPR

The first CRISPR system that came to fame was CRISPR-Cas9. The idea is simple but brilliant. Using a genetic vector—a round Trojan horse of sorts that delivers genes into cells—scientists can encode the two components for gene editing. One is a guide RNA, which directs the system to the target gene. The other is Cas9, the “scissors” that break the gene. Once a gene is snipped, it wants to heal. During this process it’s possible to insert new genetic code, delete old code, or shift the code in a way that inactivates subsequent genes.

Thanks to its relative simplicity, CRISPR didn’t just take off—it skyrocketed. Subsequent studies found variants optimized for slightly different tasks. For example, there are Cas9 varieties that have very low off-target activity or are smaller, making them easier to package and deliver into cells. Others include base editors, which swap a DNA letter without breaking the chain, or RNA editors, which edit RNA chains like a Word processor.

The burgeoning CRISPR pantheon was in part because of different Cas “scissor” proteins. Although thousands of variations exist, wrote Dr. Lucas Harrington at the University of California, Berkeley, who worked with CRISPR pioneer Dr. Jennifer Doudna, “gene editing experiments have largely focused on a small subset of representatives.” Scanning for new variants in nature, the team identified powerful new Cas proteins that retain their activity in high heat, and extremely compact ones that can sneak into nooks and crannies of the genome that otherwise block classic Cas proteins. The power of Cas variants persuaded scientists to artificially evolve new proteins with more optimized features.

But what if the secret to better gene editing tools isn’t just looking forward? What if it’s to peek back in time?

CRISPR Ancestors

The new study took this approach: scan through evolutionary history to trace the origins of CRISPR-Cas9.

Like tracing any family tree, it starts with knowing thyself. Cas9 belongs to a family called “RNA-guided nucleases.” Basically, these proteins can be shepherded by RNA guides, and they have the ability to cut genetic material.

Back in 2015, a study suggested one evolutionary root of Cas9. It’s weird: a bunch of “jumping genes,” or genetic com...

The world’s largest car manufacturer by volume has been sluggish in its efforts to electrify compared to competitors. But Toyota has just announced a huge investment in battery technology that may be a sign it’s shifting course.

Although Toyota’s Prius hybrid was the first electrified vehicle to really hit the mainstream, the company failed to capitalize on its early lead. It still doesn’t sell a fully electric vehicle in either the US or Japan, at a time when more or less every major automaker—from Volvo to Volkswagen—has at least one model powered by batteries alone.

The company seems to be belatedly joining the party after executives announced that it would invest $13.6 billion in battery technology over the next decade. This includes $9 billion to be spent on manufacturing, which will see it scale up to 10 battery production lines by 2025 and ultimately up to around 70.

During a press briefing, chief technology officer Masahiko Maeda said part of the company’s plan is to reduce the cost of batteries by 30 percent or more through innovations in materials and new designs. They are also working on ways to reduce the amount of energy the car draws from those batteries by 30 percent.

All of this follows from the company’s April announcement that it plans to release 70 electric cars around the world by 2025, suggesting that it’s finally joining the consensus among automakers that electric vehicles are the future.

But as noted by Green Car Reports, only 15 of those 70 cars will be fully electric, with the rest made up of hybrids or hydrogen vehicles, which the company has also been pushing for a number of years. In contrast, many competitors have announced plans to go fully electric in the coming decade.

Toyota’s reluctance to double down on electric vehicles is all the more confusing considering it is seen as a global leader in developing batteries for electric vehicles. It’s also a frontrunner in the quest to commercialize solid-state batteries, which could significantly increase energy density and therefore the range of electric vehicles.

The explanation seems to lie in the fact that, despite being an early leader in electric cars, Toyota considered electrification a stopgap until cars powered by hydrogen fuel cells could replace gasoline ones. While the company does sell one hydrogen-powered car, their expense and lack of fueling infrastructure means adoption is lagging.

Given that the reason for replacing gasoline vehicles is climate change, the fact that hydrogen still has a long way to go until it’s truly green suggests that a future for decarbonizing transport using fuel cells is still a distant dream.

Perhaps surprisingly for a company that led the initial charge to create a greener future for the car, Toyota has even been lobbying against the transition to electric vehicles, according to the New York Times.

While this is probably at least partly an effort to protect its investments in non-battery-focused transport technologies, the company’s argument is that a transition to electric vehicles as rapid as many are suggesting is not practical given the current state of the technology.

Last year, Toyota president Akio Toyoda claimed Japan would run out of electricity if it switched entirely to electric vehicles, unless it spent hundreds of billions of dollars on upgrading its power network. More recently, company director Shigeki Terashi said it was still too early to put all of our eggs in the electric vehicle basket.

So while this new battery investment will certainly be a major boon to efforts to electrify vehicles, it seems Toyota is still not fully on board with the electric vehicle revolution.

Image Credit: Toyota

Comparing brains to computers is a long and dearly held analogy in both neuroscience and computer science.

It’s not hard to see why.

Our brains can perform many of the tasks we want computers to handle with an easy, mysterious grace. So, it goes, understanding the inner workings of our minds can help us build better computers; and those computers can help us better understand our own minds. Also, if brains are like computers, knowing how much computation it takes them to do what they do can help us predict when machines will match minds.

Indeed, there’s already a productive flow of knowledge between the fields.

Deep learning, a powerful form of artificial intelligence, for example, is loosely modeled on the brain’s vast, layered networks of neurons.

You can think of each “node” in a deep neural network as an artificial neuron. Like neurons, nodes receive signals from other nodes connected to them and perform mathematical operations to transform input into output.

Depending on the signals a node receives, it may opt to send its own signal to all the nodes in its network. In this way, signals cascade through layer upon layer of nodes, progressively tuning and sharpening the algorithm.

The brain works like this too. But the keyword above is loosely.

Scientists know biological neurons are more complex than the artificial neurons employed in deep learning algorithms, but it’s an open question just how much more complex.

In a fascinating paper published recently in the journal Neuron, a team of researchers from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem tried to get us a little closer to an answer. While they expected the results would show biological neurons are more complex—they were surprised at just how much more complex they actually are.

In the study, the team found it took a five- to eight-layer neural network, or nearly 1,000 artificial neurons, to mimic the behavior of a single biological neuron from the brain’s cortex.

Though the researchers caution the results are an upper bound for complexity—as opposed to an exact measurement of it—they also believe their findings might help scientists further zero in on what exactly makes biological neurons so complex. And that knowledge, perhaps, can help engineers design even more capable neural networks and AI.

“[The result] forms a bridge from biological neurons to artificial neurons,” Andreas Tolias, a computational neuroscientist at Baylor College of Medicine, told Quanta last week.

Amazing Brains

Neurons are the cells that make up our brains. There are many different types of neurons, but generally, they have three parts: spindly, branching structures called dendrites, a cell body, and a root-like axon.

On one end, dendrites connect to a network of other neurons at junctures called synapses. At the other end, the axon forms synapses with a different population of neurons. Each cell receives electrochemical signals through its dendrites, filters those signals, and then selectively passes along its own signals (or spikes).

To computationally compare biological and artificial neurons, the team asked: How big of an artificial neural network would it take to simulate the behavior of a single biological neuron?

First, they built a model of a biological neuron (in this case, a pyramidal neuron from a rat’s cortex). The model used some 10,000 differential equations to simulate how and when the neuron would translate a series of input signals into a spike of its own.

They then fed inputs into their simulated neuron, recorded the outputs, and trained deep learning algorithms on all the data. Their goal? Find the algorithm that could most accurately approximate the model.

(Video: A model of a pyramidal neuron (left) receives signals through its dendritic branches. In this case, the signals provoke three spikes.)

They increased the number of layers in the algorithm until it was 99 percent accurate at predicting the simulated neuron’s output given a set of inputs. The sweet spot was at least five...

Global warming is a big challenge for warm-blooded animals, which must maintain a constant internal body temperature. As anyone who’s experienced heatstroke can tell you, our bodies become severely stressed when we overheat.

Animals are dealing with global warming in various ways. Some move to cooler areas, such as closer to the poles or to higher ground. Some change the timing of key life events such as breeding and migration, so they take place at cooler times. And others evolve to change their body size to cool down more quickly.

Our new research examined another way animal species cope with climate change: by changing the size of their ears, tails, beaks, and other appendages. We reviewed the published literature and found examples of animals increasing appendage size in parallel with climate change and associated temperature increases.

In doing so, we identified multiple examples of animals that are most likely “shape-shifters.” The pattern is widespread, and suggests climate warming may result in fundamental changes to animal form.

Adhering to Allen’s Rule

It’s well known that animals use their appendages to regulate their internal temperature. African elephants, for example, pump warm blood to their large ears, which they then flap to disperse heat. The beaks of birds perform a similar function—blood flow can be diverted to the bill when the bird is hot.

This means there are advantages to bigger appendages in warmer environments. In fact, as far back as the 1870s, American zoologist Joel Allen noted in colder climates, warm-blooded animals (also known as endotherms) tended to have smaller appendages, while those in warmer climates tend to have larger ones.

This pattern became known as Allen’s rule, which has since been supported by studies of birds and mammals.

Biological patterns such as Allen’s rule can also help make predictions about how animals will evolve as the climate warms. Our research set out to find examples of animal shape-shifting over the past century, consistent with climatic warming and Allen’s rule.

Which Animals Are Changing?

We found most documented examples of shape-shifting involve birds—specifically, increases in beak size.

This includes several species of Australian parrots. Studies show the beak size of gang-gang cockatoos and red-rumped parrots has increased by between four percent and ten percent since 1871.

Mammal appendages are also increasing in size. For example, in the masked shrew, tail and leg length have increased significantly since 1950. And in the great roundleaf bat, wing size increased by 1.64 percent over the same period.

The variety of examples indicates shape-shifting is happening in different types of appendages and in a variety of animals, in many parts of the world. But more studies are needed to determine which kinds of animals are most affected.

Other Uses of Appendages

Of course, animal appendages have uses far beyond regulating body temperature. This means scientists have sometimes focused on other reasons that might explain changes in animal body shape.

For example, studies have shown the average beak size of the Galapagos medium ground finch has changed over time in response to seed size, which is in turn influenced by rainfall. Our research examined previously collected data to determine if temperature also influenced changes in beak size of these finches.

These data do demonstrate rainfall (and, by extension, seed size) determines beak size. After drier summers, survival of small-beaked birds was reduced.

But we found clear evidence that birds with smaller beaks are also less likely to survive hotter summers. This effect on survival was stronger than that observed with rainfall. This tells us the role of temperature may be as important as other uses of appendages, such as feeding, in driving changes in appendage size.

Our research also suggests we can make some predictions about which species are most likely to change appendage size in response to increasing tempe...

A little over four years ago, the world’s first commercial plant for sucking carbon dioxide out of the air opened near Zurich, Switzerland. The plant was powered by a waste heat recovery facility, with giant fans pushing air through a filtration system that trapped the carbon. The carbon was then separated and sold to buyers, such as a greenhouse that used it to help grow vegetables. The plant ran as a three-year demonstration project, capturing an estimated 900 tons of CO2 (the equivalent to the annual emissions of 200 cars) per year.

This week, a plant about four times as large as the Zurich facility started operating in Iceland, joining 15 other direct air capture (DAC) plants that currently operate worldwide. According to the IEA, these plants collectively capture more than 9,000 tons of CO2 per year.

Christened Orca after the Icelandic word for energy, the new plant was built by Swiss company Climeworks in partnership with Icelandic carbon storage firm Carbfix. Orca is the largest of existing facilities of its type, able to capture 4,000 tons of carbon per year. That’s equal to the emissions of 790 cars.

The plant consists of eight “collector containers” each about the size and shape of a standard shipping container. Their fans run on energy from a nearby geothermal power plant, which was part of the reason this location made sense; Iceland has an abundance of geothermal energy, not to mention a subterranean geology that lends itself quite well to carbon sequestration. Orca was built on a lava plateau in the country’s southwest region.

This plant works a little differently than the Zurich plant, in that the captured carbon is liquefied then pumped underground into basalt caverns. Over time (less than two years, according to Carbfix’s website), it turns to stone.

One of the biggest issues with direct air capture is that it’s expensive, and this facility is no exception. Climeworks co-founder Christoph Gebald estimates it’s currently costing $600 to $800 to remove one metric ton of carbon. Costs would need to drop to around a sixth of this level for the company to make a profit. Gebald thinks Climeworks can get costs down to $200 to $300 per ton by 2030, and half that by 2040. The National Academy of Sciences estimated that once the cost of CO2 extraction gets below $100-150 per ton, the air-captured commodity will be economically competitive with traditionally-sourced oil.

The other problem that detractors of DAC cite is its energy usage relative to the amount of CO2 it’s capturing. These facilities use a lot of energy, and they’re not making a lot of difference. Granted, the energy they use will come from renewable sources, but we’re not yet to the point where that energy is unlimited or free. An IEA report from May of this year stated that to reach the carbon-neutral targets that have been set around the world, almost one billion metric tons of CO2 will need to be captured using DAC every year. Our current total of 9,000 tons is paltry in comparison.

But Climeworks and other companies working on DAC technology are optimistic, saying that automation and increases in energy efficiency will drive down costs. “This is a market that does not yet exist, but a market that urgently needs to be built,” Gebald said. “This plant that we have here is really the blueprint to further scale up and really industrialize.”

Image Credit: Climeworks

Between the grim outlook reported by the IPCC’s Sixth Assessment Report last month and frequent reports of extreme weather events all over the world, the climate crisis feels like it’s getting more dire by the week. Accordingly, calls for action are intensifying, and companies and governments are scrambling for solutions. Renewables are ramping up, innovative energy storage technologies are being brought to the table, and pledges to go carbon-neutral are piling up as fast as, well, carbon.

South Korea’s Hyundai Motor Group has joined the fray, but on a path that diverges a bit from the crowd; they’re going all-in on hydrogen. At the company’s aptly named Hydrogen Wave Forum this week, it unveiled multiple hydrogen-powered concept vehicles, as well as a strategy for building up its presence in the hydrogen space over the next few years (and decades).

The company unveiled a ground shipping concept it’s calling the Trailer Drone, which sits on a fuel-cell-powered chassis called the e-Bogie. The e-Bogies, named after the frames train cars sit on, have four-wheel independent steering that lets them move in ways normal cars and trucks can’t, like sideways (in crab fashion) or in circles. The modular e-Bogies can be combined to carry different-sized trailers, and can go an estimated 621 miles (1,000 kilometers) on a single fill-up. The system would be autonomous, and the concept doesn’t include a cab or seat for a human driver.

Hyundai also unveiled a hydrogen-powered concept sports car called the Vision FK. The car is a plug-in hybrid, meaning the fuel cell charges a traditional battery. The 500-kilowatt fuel cell gives the car the ability to go from 0 to 100 kilometers per hour in under 4 seconds. The carmaker didn’t give a timeline for when (or whether) the Vision FK would enter production, though.

Finally, Hyundai said it’s working on hydrogen-powered versions of its existing commercial vehicles, and plans to bring those to market by 2028.

Hyundai is by no means new to the hydrogen game; the company already has fuel-cell-powered trucks and buses on the roads, including its Xcient truck, which is in use in Switzerland, and its Elec City Fuel Cell bus, which is on roads in South Korea and being trialed in Germany.

One of the technology’s biggest detractors is none other than Elon Musk, who finds hydrogen fuel cells “extremely silly.” But Toyota would disagree with Musk’s take; the company is building a hydrogen-powered prototype city near the base of Mount Fuji called Woven City.

For its part, Hyundai is aiming to get its fuel cell powertrain to a point where it can compete cost-wise with electric vehicle batteries by 2030.

A study released earlier this year by McKinsey’s hydrogen council found that when you factor in the relative efficiencies of the power sources and lifetime costs of a truck, green hydrogen could reach cost parity with diesel by 2030. A paper published in Joule last month laid out a road map for building a green hydrogen economy.

Despite these promising outlooks, it’s still highly uncertain whether hydrogen will become a widespread, cost-effective energy source. But it seems we’re getting to a point where it’s worth looking into any option that could make the future of the planet look brighter than it does right now.

Image Credit: Hyundai

CRISPR has revolutionized genome engineering, but the size of its molecular gene-editing components has limited its therapeutic uses so far. Now, a trio of new research papers detail compact versions of the gene-editing tool that could significantly expand its applications.

While we’ve been able to edit genomes since the 1990s, the introduction of CRISPR in 2015 transformed the field thanks to its flexibility, simplicity, and efficiency. The technology is based on a rudimentary immune system found in microbes that combines genetic mugshots of viruses with an enzyme called Cas9 that hunts them down and chops up their DNA.

This system can be re-purposed by replacing the viral genetic code with whatever sequence you want to edit and precisely snipping the DNA at that location. One outstanding problem, however, is that the system’s large physical size makes it hard to deliver to cells effectively.

Adeno-associated viral vectors (AAVs)—which are small, non-pathogenic viruses that can be re-purposed to inject genetic code into cells—are the gold standard delivery system for in vivo gene therapies. They produce little immune response and have received FDA approval for therapeutic use, but their tiny size makes using them to deliver CRISPR tricky.

Now, however, three research papers published last week show that a family of tiny Cas proteins derived from archaea are small enough to fit in AAVs and can edit human DNA.

The most commonly used Cas9 protein comes from the Streptococcus pyogenes bacteria, which is 1,368 amino acids long. When combined with the RNA sequence needed to guide it to its target, that’s too big to fit in an AAV. And while you can deliver them separately this significantly reduces efficiency as you can’t guarantee every cell will receive both.

But there’s considerable diversity in the proteins used in natural CRISPR systems, so researchers have been screening the microbial world for smaller alternatives.

Two promising candidates are Cas9 proteins from Staphylococcus aureus and Streptococcus thermophilus, which are 1,053 and 1,121 amino acids long, respectively. Their relatively smaller size makes it possible to package them in an AAV along with their guide RNA.

That said, even these two smaller alternatives may not be small enough.

In recent years CRISPR’s capabilities have been expanded significantly, going from simply snipping a single gene to inserting genes, swapping DNA letters, or targeting multiple sites at once. All of this requires much more genetic material to be delivered into the cell, which rules out AAVs.

Yet another family of proteins known as Cas12f has garnered attention for their tiny proportions—generally between 400 and 700 amino acids—but it was not known whether they could be coaxed to work outside microbes.

That’s where last week’s papers, published in Nature Biotechnology and Nature Chemical Biology, come in. Scientists showed that proteins from this family could be packaged inside AAVs along with their guide RNA and delivered to human cells to make effective edits.

A third paper in Molecular Cell used protein engineering to transform a Cas12f protein that didn’t appear to work in mammalian cells into one that did. While the team didn’t actually test whether they could deliver the protein using AAVs, they showed it was small enough, even when combined with a variety of advanced tools like prime and base editors.

These breakthroughs could provide a significant boost to in vivo therapies. CRISPR delivered by lipid nanoparticles—the same mechanism used in mRNA vaccines—is already making its way into the clinic, but this approach is significantly less efficient than AAVs.

These are still very early stage studies though, and despite the promising editing performance, it will take a lot more research to properly characterize the capabilities and safety profiles of these new proteins. If they do turn out to be as effective as the original CRISPR system however, they could dramatically expand the...

Today, wireless charging is little more than a gimmick for high-end smartphones or pricey electric toothbrushes. But a new approach that can charge devices anywhere in a room could one day allow untethered factories where machinery is powered without cables.

As the number of gadgets we use has steadily grown, so too has the number of cables and chargers cluttering up our living spaces. This has spurred growing interest in wireless charging systems, but the distances they work over are very short, and they still have to be plugged into an outlet. So, ultimately, they make little difference.

Now though, researchers have devised a way to wirelessly power small electronic devices anywhere in a room. It requires a pretty hefty retrofit of the room itself, but the team says it could eventually be used to power everything from mobile robots in factories to medical implants in people.

“This really ups the power of the ubiquitous computing world,” Alanson Sample, from the University of Michigan, said in a press release. “You could put a computer in anything without ever having to worry about charging or plugging in.”

Efforts to beam power over longer distances have typically used microwaves to transmit it. But such approaches require large antennas and targeting systems. They also present risks for spaces where humans are present because microwaves can damage biological tissue.

Commercial wireless chargers instead rely on passing a current through a wire charging coil to create a magnetic field, which induces an electric current in a wire receiving coil installed in the device you want to charge. However, the approach only works over very short distances—roughly equal to the diameter of the charging coil.

The new approach, outlined in a paper in Nature Electronics, works on similar principles, but essentially turns the entire room into a giant magnetic charger, allowing any device within the room that has a receiving coil to draw power.

To build the system, Sample and colleagues from the University of Tokyo installed conductive aluminum panels in the room’s walls, floor, and ceiling and inserted a large copper pole in the middle of it. They then mounted devices, called lumped capacitors, in rows running horizontally through the middle of each panel and at the center of the pole.

When current passes through the panels, it’s channeled into the capacitors, generating magnetic fields that permeate the 100-square-foot room and deliver 50 watts of power to any devices in it.

Importantly, the capacitors also isolate potentially harmful electric fields within themselves. As a result, the team showed the system doesn’t exceed Federal Communications Commission (FCC) guidelines for electromagnetic energy exposure.

This is actually the second incarnation of this technology. Sample first introduced the idea in a 2017 paper in PLOS ONE while working for Disney. But the latest research solves a crucial limitation of the earlier work. Previously the system produced a single magnetic field that swirled in a circle around the central pole, resulting in dead spots in the corners of the square room. The new setup creates two simultaneous magnetic fields, one spinning around the pole and another concentrated near the walls themselves.

This way the researchers were able to achieve charging efficiency above 50 percent in 98 percent of the room compared to only 5.75 percent of the room for the previous iteration. They also found that if they only relied on the second magnetic field, they could remove the obstructive pole and still get reasonable charging in most of the room (apart from right at the center).

While that’s a significant improvement, it still means that on average 50 percent of the power coming out of the wall socket is wasted. Such low efficiencies are a common problem for wireless charging, as an investigation by OneZero found last year.

Given the small amount of power required to charge everyday devices it’s unlikely to have an especially n...

How rare is our solar system? In the 30 years or so since planets were first discovered orbiting stars other than our sun, we have found that planetary systems are common in the galaxy. However, many of them are quite different from the solar system we know.

The planets in our solar system revolve around the sun in stable and almost circular paths, which suggests the orbits have not changed much since the planets first formed. But many planetary systems orbiting around other stars have suffered from a very chaotic past.

The relatively calm history of our solar system has favored the flourishing of life here on Earth. In the search for alien worlds that may contain life, we can narrow down the targets if we have a way to identify systems that have had similarly peaceful pasts.

Our international team of astronomers has tackled this issue in research published in Nature Astronomy. We found that between 20 and 35 percent of sun-like stars eat their own planets, with the most likely figure being 27 percent.

This suggests at least a quarter of planetary systems orbiting stars similar to the sun have had a very chaotic and dynamic past.

Chaotic Histories and Binary Stars

Astronomers have seen several exoplanetary systems in which large or medium-sized planets have moved around significantly. The gravity of these migrating planets may also have perturbed the paths of the other planets or even pushed them into unstable orbits.

In most of these very dynamic systems, it is also likely some of the planets have fallen into the host star. However, we didn’t know how common these chaotic systems are relative to quieter systems like ours, whose orderly architecture has favored the flourishing of life on Earth.

Even with the most precise astronomical instruments available, it would be very hard to work this out by directly studying exoplanetary systems. Instead, we analyzed the chemical composition of stars in binary systems.

Binary systems are made up of two stars in orbit around one another. The two stars generally formed at the same time from the same gas, so we expect they should contain the same mix of elements.

However, if a planet falls into one of the two stars, it is dissolved in the star’s outer layer. This can modify the chemical composition of the star, which means we see more of the elements that form rocky planets, such as iron, than we otherwise would.

Traces of Rocky Planets

We inspected the chemical makeup of 107 binary systems composed of sun-like stars by analyzing the spectrum of light they produce. From this, we established how many of stars contained more planetary material than their companion star.

We also found three things that add up to unambiguous evidence that the chemical differences observed among binary pairs were caused by eating planets.

First, we found that stars with a thinner outer layer have a higher probability of being richer in iron than their companion. This is consistent with planet-eating, as when planetary material is diluted in a thinner out layer it makes a bigger change to the layer’s chemical composition.

Second, stars richer in iron and other rocky-planet elements also contain more lithium than their companions. Lithium is quickly destroyed in stars, while it is conserved in planets. So an anomalously high level of lithium in a star must have arrived after the star formed, which fits with the idea that the lithium was carried by a planet until it was eaten by the star.

Third, the stars containing more iron than their companion also contain more than similar stars in the galaxy. However, the same stars have standard abundances of carbon, which is a volatile element and for that reason is not carried by rocks. Therefore these stars have been chemically enriched by rocks, from planets or planetary material.

The Hunt for Earth 2.0

These results represent a breakthrough for stellar astrophysics and exoplanet exploration. Not only have we found that eating planets can change the chemical compositi...