A Zero-Emissions City in the Desert

Last week, construction began on a huge renewable-energy and urban-planning experiment, and it will be funded by $120-a-barrel oil at an anticipated cost of $22 billion over about eight years. The Masdar Initiative, launched in 2006, is an ambitious project to build a city near Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates. It will house 50,000 people but will produce zero net carbon dioxide emissions and zero waste. Construction just began on the solar power plant that will power the city's construction, and later the city itself. And the first building to go up will be part of the new Masdar Institute of Science and Technology (MIST), a school put together largely with the help of MIT that will be devoted to developing technologies for environmentally sustainable cities.

One of the best things about the project--which I'll write about more in the coming days--is that it provides a much needed way to test ideas for renewable energy and efficiency at a large scale. The hope is that the technology tested here can be applied throughout the world.

But while the project will no doubt provide valuable insights, its location and the circumstances of its construction will limit its applicability. While the Abu Dhabi government won't be providing all of the $22 billion--it's calling on private investment with the hope that the project will be profitable--not every country can count on windfall profits to fund similar projects. What's more, the solutions developed for use in a hot, dry, sunny climate won't necessarily apply to places like, say, New England. Indeed, Gerard Evenden, a senior partner at Foster + Partners, the firm hired to plan the city, says it's essential that cities and buildings be custom-built with the location in mind to maximize efficiency.

Finally, what's to be done with cities that already exist? Many of the approaches to be taken at Masdar--such as controlling the orientation and length of the city streets and the height and construction materials of buildings--won't work with places like New York and Mexico City. This morning at a symposium dedicated to the collaboration between MIT and Masdar, Ernest Moniz, the director of the MIT Energy Initiative, said that a more challenging task is finding ways to retrofit existing systems.

Combining Research, Markets, and Money

At yesterday's Ideastream symposium, sponsored by MIT's Deshpande Center, researchers mingled with venture capitalists and investors. One panel featured big names in innovation discussing issues in funding and the necessity of cross-disciplinary studies.

The new Koch Institute was designed particularly for cross-disciplinary research, said director Tyler Jacks. It brings together key researchers in nanotechnology, biology, and infotechnology.

Ernest J. Moniz, director of the MIT Energy Initiative, emphasized that communication and collaboration are important not just across research fields, but also across nontechnical areas. "To have those technologies actually penetrate the market requires interface with management, social sciences, [and other fields]," he said. This is why integrating investors, startups, and venture capitalists with researchers is crucial, he added.

"The tonic for the struggle to achieve cross-disciplinary success is tapping into the young people," said Frank Moss, director of MIT's Media Lab. He remarked that the Koch Institute's plan of designing for physical proximity across disciplinary studies is what the Media Institute has strived for, with a minimal number of walls--and glass ones, at that. Such interdisciplinary focus has led the Bank of America to fund an upcoming Media Lab project looking at effective computing, economics, and media, said Moss. Big companies rarely fund basic research, he noted, but he believes that it's an early indicator of things to come: "I think over the next few years, we'll see the industry waking up and seeing [that] basic research is disappearing."

For a portion of the panel, Moniz and Jacks argued good-naturedly about funding difficulties. Jacks stated that energy research has an easier time getting funding, while Moniz countered that cancer--something that everyone is afraid of getting--would be more of a primary target for funding than energy issues are. "There's no more reliable enemy than death," quipped Moniz.

Contaminant in Blood Thinner Identified

An international team of researchers has identified the contaminant in a blood thinner called heparin that is thought to be responsible for the deaths of dozens of Americans.

The contaminant, known as oversulfated chondroitin sulfate (OSCS), could not be picked up using traditional tests, as its structure is very similar to that of heparin. The researchers found that OSCS causes two critical problems: low blood pressure and anaphylactic reactions. Their findings were published in the New England Journal of Medicine last week.

From the NEJM:

In January 2008, health authorities in the United States beganreceiving reports of clusters of acute hypersensitivity reactionsin patients undergoing dialysis that had been occurring sinceNovember 2007. Symptoms included hypotension, facial swelling,tachycardia, urticaria, and nausea. Although initial investigationsfocused on dialysis equipment, an investigation by the Centersfor Disease Control and Prevention identified the receipt ofheparin sodium for injection (1000 U per milliliter, in 10-mland 30-ml multidose vials), manufactured by Baxter Healthcare,as a common feature of the cases.¹ This finding led Baxter Healthcareto recall, on January 17, 2008, nine lots of heparin sodiumfor injection. As of April 13, 2008, there were 81 reports ofdeath that involved at least one sign or symptom of an allergicreaction or hypotension in patients receiving heparin sinceJanuary 1, 2007.

Ram Sasisekharan, a professor of biological engineering at MIT and the lead researcher on the project, says that the key to the team's approach was that it looked at heparin and the contaminant at a molecular level. Strong teamwork, he notes, was also important to the project. "A number of academic and industrial labs worked with me in close collaboration with the FDA. It was only through cooperation that we were able to accomplish this task of identifying the contaminant and assessing its biological activity in such a rapid fashion."

Internet Pop-Culture Memes

Friday, April 25, was the first of the two-day ROFLCon, an event featuring the people behind current memes of pop Internet culture. The conference, organized by Harvard students and taking place at MIT, was a high-energy crowd of mostly college-age attendees touting signature red ROFLCon lunch boxes.

A panel this afternoon looked at the current popularity of LOLCats, a website that lets users post cat photos paired with clever, referential captions written in a unique baby-talk-cum-text-messaging language. The language is supposed to represent how a cat would talk if it could (with poor grammar and misspellings). LOLSpeak has evolved since the website took off last year, with phrases such as "Facebook ur doin it wrong," "I can has cheezburger?" and the familiar "kthxbai!!!" becoming commonplace. The website was recently featured in Time magazine.

It's the first language that started out written, then became spoken, and it has attracted inquiring linguists, according to Ben Huh, CEO of the LOLCats website.

"It's an expression of the Internet through the actual construction of language," adds Martin Grondin of the spinoff LOLCats Bible.

Some of the phrasing becomes downright cryptic, especially for newcomers (a snarling ferret in a pot captioned "kreme uf angree suop" is "crème of angry soup"), but members of the LOLCats team, of which there are eight, are "fluent."

Panelists included those who did other spinoffs, including LOLTrek, the now-defunct LOLSecretz, and LOLCode. When asked about the future of LOLSpeak and Internet dialects, the panelists seemed to agree that words would get "dumber and shorter." Huh envisions Internet language becoming entirely referential and "all meta"; it would look like a secret language to those on the outside. To the newcomer on LOLCats, it might seem as though it's already here.

Genetic Non-Discrimination Act Finally Passes

After a tortuous 13-year journey, the Genetic Non-Discrimination Act (GINA) has finally passed. The bill will prevent discrimination from employers or insurance companies based on an individual's genetic makeup. Proponents, including genomics researchers and patient advocacy groups, say that the bill removes a major obstacle in the advance of personalized medicine.

According to the Associated Press (via the New York Times):

The bill, described by Sen. Edward Kennedy as ''the first major new civil rights bill of the new century,'' would bar health insurance companies from using genetic information to set premiums or determine enrollment eligibility. Similarly, employers could not use genetic information in hiring, firing or promotion decisions.

''For the first time we act to prevent discrimination before it has taken firm hold and that's why this legislation is unique and groundbreaking,'' said Sen. Olympia Snowe, R-Maine, who sponsored the Senate bill with Sens. Kennedy, D-Mass., and Mike Enzi, R-Wyo.

There are more than 1,100 genetic tests available today, she said, but these are ''absolutely useless'' if fear of discrimination discourages people from taking tests or participating in clinical trials.

Surveys have shown that genetic discrimination has been a major concern for the American public, especially when it comes to health insurance. In addition, scientists have reported that some people were afraid to participate in clinical trials that included genetic testing for this reason. (I faced this concern myself when writing a piece for Technology Review that involved taking a genetic test for diabetes risk.)

The bill was first introduced in 1995, before the completion of the human genome and when only a few genetic tests were available. It passed in the Senate twice, but was most recently held up by Senator Tom Coburn, who expressed concerns over lawsuits.

From the New York Times:

One of Senator Coburn's main concerns was that the bill might subject employers to civil rights lawsuits stemming from disputes over medical coverage. And employers that also finance their own health insurance, he said, might be sued twice. "We would have created a trial lawyers' bonanza," he said.

Lawmakers made small changes to the bill that assuaged these concerns.

From GenomeWeb Daily News:

"We believe the final draft of GINA should provide clarity to the health insurance industry, maintain the integrity of the underwriting process, and ensure accurate premium assessments," the senators stated in the letter.

Now, the lawmakers have agreed to a key compromise that would salve Coburn's concerns by adding language to create a "firewall" between the parts of the bill dealing with insurers and employers, an adjustment Coburn and the White House said was needed to protect them from some lawsuits, a source on Capitol Hill told GWDN today.

The agreement included other "minor" changes having to do with phrasing, according to the source, who asked to remain anonymous.

The approval is also a likely boon to personal genomics companies, such as Navigenics and 23andMe, which provide direct-to-consumer genetic testing assessing individuals' risk for disease.

More information:

Find H.R. 493 (GINA) on Thomas

U.S. Public Opinion on Uses of Genetic Information and Genetic Discrimination

Issue Brief: The Impact of Genetic Discrimination

Summary of a recent hearing on GINA by the House Energy and Commerce Committee's Subcommittee on Health

Yahoo Opens Wide

At the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco yesterday, Yahoo announced that it is completely redesigning the underlying structure of its services, including Flickr and Yahoo Mail. At the same time, it plans to reveal the technical aspects of this redesign so that programmers can build features on top of them and combine them in novel ways.

"We're in the process of rewiring Yahoo from the inside out and will open up all the assets of Yahoo to developers across the Web in a way we've never done before," said Ari Balogh, Yahoo's CTO, in a keynote.

One of the goals, said Balogh, is to make use of the social-network data that resides on the company's servers. "We're going to make the consumer experience at Yahoo social throughout," he said. For instance, instant-message capabilities could be incorporated with Flickr.

If any Web company has untapped stores of social data, it's Yahoo. Consider that the company has one of the most popular Web mail services. (We wrote about Yahoo's vision for a more powerful, social inbox here.) Nearly 100 million people use Yahoo Messenger. Flickr is one of the top photo-sharing sites on the Web. And Yahoo Answers, a question-and-answer service in which people pose questions that others answer, has been a huge recent hit. But until now, Yahoo has only flirted with the idea of unifying these services, the data, and the inherent social connections that exist within them.

Yahoo's new openness is surely exciting to many people who value open software. Indeed, open platforms invariably lead to innovations that are impossible for companies, often mired in bureaucracy, to produce on their own. To be sure, Yahoo has a history of embracing this sort of openness. According to Balogh, Yahoo claims 200,000 developers that already work on some of its services, some of which have been open for years. And Flickr is the second most popular Web service in the world to tinker around with (as measured by the number of times its application programming interface, or API, has been downloaded).

But I'm skeptical that Yahoo will be able to pull off a project of this scale. The company's massive layoffs and the buyout offer from Microsoft show that it's struggling. Yahoo may have great technologies, but it also has a habit of sitting on projects that are never released to the public. When contrasted with Google's constant flood of new software and services, Yahoo's sluggishness is shameful. At this point, it's unclear if the company will be able to manage a project with the complexity of connecting and opening all its Web services.

Another concern: a platform needs to be compelling for programmers, who are, as much as anyone, swayed by intangibles such as buzz. When Facebook opened its platform, programmers leaped at the chance to build applications, with hopes of riding on the coattails of the social-networking site's rising popularity. Yahoo will need to fight its image as an also-ran in order to court programmers who can make compelling new software. And it must also make its platform seamless and easy to use. Otherwise, Yahoo's act of opening up its services will look less like a bold business move and more like just another good intention.