New Fingerprinting Method Takes a Hard Look at Your Pores

Criminals might not get away so easily, thanks to a new fingerprinting method that may be faster and more reliable than traditional methods, researchers say.

The method images the sweat pores in a human hand using a polymer that glows fluorescent and changes color when it comes in contact with tiny droplets of water. Only a small fraction of the fingerprint is needed to identify an individual, according to the new study.

"The sensor technology developed in this study has the potential of serving as a new method for fingerprint analysis and for the clinical diagnosis of malfunctioning sweat pores," the researchers wrote in the study, detailed April 29 in the journal Nature Communications.

The idea of using sweat pores for fingerprinting isn't new, but this is the first time that fast, reliable and cheap methods have been available.

A team led by Jong-Man Kim, a chemical engineer at Hanyang University in South Korea, developed a new fingerprinting method that uses a simple color-changing polymer that can be deposited using an ink-jet printer. When a fingertip is pressed against it, the polymer changes color from blue to red and glows in the places where it comes into contact with sweat, producing a dotted pattern that constitutes a unique fingerprint.

Traditional fingerprinting, which captures the characteristic ridge patterns on the fingertip, requires a large area to produce a reliable print and is prone to error. In contrast, the sweat-pore method requires only a small fraction of the fingertip to match it to its owner and is more reliable, researchers said.

The new method could also be used to diagnose sweat-pore disorders, because it can distinguish functioning pores from nonfunctioning ones.

This article originally published at LiveScience

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Drone Shoots Epic Footage of SpaceX Rocket Launch and Controlled Landing

Elon Musk's space-faring company SpaceX has released the first test footage of its Falcon 9 Reusable (F9R) taking off, and making a controlled landing at the company's rocket-development facility in Texas.

The epic video gives us a 360-degree aerial view of the feat, thanks to the unique perspective of a camera-equipped drone.

The video, above, opens with the hexacopter drone already airborne, and swooping in to get a close-up view of the rocket as it begins to take off. After reaching a height of 250 meters (about 820 feet), the rocket hovers and then returns to earth.

The importance of the successful test was highlighted by the fact that Musk interrupted his Twitter stream of updates on the Friday SpaceX launch bound for the International Space Station to direct everyone's attention to the test footage.

The SpaceX controlled-descent tests are designed to aid the company in its efforts to make reusable rockets the norm, and therefore significantly bring down the cost of future space travel.

VIDEO: YouTube SPACEX

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Google Unveils Smart Contact Lens That Lets Diabetics Measure Their Glucose Levels

Google’s smart contact prototypes squeeze a glucose sensor, antenna, capacitor and chip between two contact lens layers, making a kind of electronics sandwich. A tiny hole on the eye side allows tear film, which contains glucose, to reach the sensor.

The integrated circuit is no larger than a piece of glitter, and its weight is undetectable on the tip of a finger. The sensor, which takes glucose readings twice a second, isn’t much bigger. And the antenna is thinner than a human hair.

The components sit on top of a thin plastic-like film that is made of a biocompatible material (Google doesn’t want to disclose exactly what material that is) that holds everything together like a fiberglass circuit board traditionally would.

Google’s smart lens broadcasts its readings through radio frequencies to an external monitoring device that a test subject carries with him or her. In turn, the device powers the mechanics of the lenses through those same radio frequencies.

Project lead Brian Otis mentioned that a later design might include a light source in the lens, which could indicate to the wearer whether glucose levels are high, medium or low — perhaps even when they close their eyes.

As Otis sees it, in some ways the smart contact lens is the flip side of Moore’s Law, where instead of adding capacity and speed to circuits, Google went small and low-power. The device still requires tens of thousands of transistors, but they are so tiny they can’t be seen.

“You can take a chip riding the freight train of Moore’s Law, with a number of transistors, and get rid of everything else — thin the chip down to make it as small as possible, try to get rid of all of the other external components that typically surround it, get rid of the rigid printed circuit board, and rethink the way that you put these systems together,” Otis said.

“That’s why this has been such an exciting project for me,” he added. “Being able to push those philosophies to the limit, while tackling something that could potentially be a huge benefit for people.”

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This Robotic Muscle Is 1,000 Times Stronger Than Yours

Researchers have developed a new robotic muscle that is 1,000 times stronger than a human's, thanks to a material with a wide range of properties.

Vanadium dioxide has been the belle of the ball in the materials world, prized for its ability to change size, shape and physical identity. Now, material enthusiasts can add muscle power to the list of those extraordinary attributes.

Led by Junqiao Wu, a physicist with joint appointments at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in the material-sciences division and University of California, Berkeley’s department of material science and engineering, a team of researchers demonstrated a micro-sized robotic muscle created from vanadium dioxide, according to robotic muscle is 1,000 times more powerful than a human muscle. It can catapult objects 50 times heavier than itself over distances five times its length — all within 60 milliseconds.

Vanadium dioxide is valuable because it is one of the few known materials that is both an insulator and a conductor. At low temperatures, vanadium dioxide acts as an insulator, but at 67 degrees Celsius (152 degrees Fahrenheit), the material abruptly becomes a conductor. What's more, vanadium dioxide crystals undergo a “temperature-driven structural phase transition” when warmed, rapidly contracting along one dimension, while expanding along the other two. All of this makes vanadium dioxide the perfect material for creating artificial muscles.

However, the device's appeal doesn't stop there. Because of its ability to “remotely detect a target and respond by reconfiguring itself to a different shape,” there’s potential to create larger systems of the vanadium dioxide muscles, according to the report.

“Multiple micro-muscles can be assembled into a micro-robotic system that simulates an active neuromuscular system,” Wu said. “This simulates living bodies where neurons sense and deliver stimuli to the muscles and the muscles provide motion.”

Image: Berkeley Lab

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Oculus VR’s New “Crystal Cove” Prototype is 2014's Best of CES winner

Virtual reality has captured the imagination of developers, consumers and businesses for decades, but most VR headsets produced so far have been notable more for their limitations than their capabilities. With its latest prototype, code-named "Crystal Cove," Oculus VR has taken a massive leap forward, eliminating the stomach-churning motion blur that has plagued previous generations of VR headsets, and adding sensors and a camera to track the position of both your head and body and provide more accurate simulated movement. With the latest Rift, Oculus has created a device that may usher in an era of truly immersive gaming and entertainment, and even create new opportunities for businesses to use virtual reality in everything from manufacturing to medical environments. Of all the exciting, innovative products we've seen at CES this year, the Oculus Rift "Crystal Cove" prototype is unquestionably the best of the best.

In its short history, Oculus has already gone from being a promising startup to becoming a market-moving creator of innovative technology. The first time we saw a version of the Rift, in mid-2012, Oculus had already raised more than $2 million on Kickstarter and caught the attention of legendary game developer John Carmack, who was so impressed with the company that he joined up as its CTO. In our first hands-on -- playing a Rift-optimized version of the Carmack classic Doom 3 -- we found ourselves "raving about it." Since then, Oculus has raised more than $90 million, grown to almost a hundred employees and has sold 50,000 units to developers. And, of course, the company has continued to refine the Rift, with every update dramatically improving the device.

The Crystal Cove version's 1080p OLED display is amazingly sharp and bright. However, what really sets it apart is its positional-tracking capabilities, accomplished thanks to an array of sensors mounted around the edges of the unit, which are monitored by an external camera. It's no longer just your head that controls movement; lean forward or back, and the virtual environment moves in sync, providing an unparalleled, fully immersive experience. Use the new Rift for a few minutes, and you may never want to take it off; at the very least, it may change the way you think about gaming, and make that 55-inch TV hooked up to your console feel small and constricting. When I tried it out here at CES, in an all-too-brief demo session, I didn't want to take it off, and only reluctantly returned it to the Oculus execs helping with the demo.

The Rift has broad applications beyond gaming, and Oculus VP Nate Mitchell tells us that the company has sold developer kits to companies in virtually every industry, from auto manufacturers to the movie business (and, yes, Mitchell admits that there are military applications for the technology). NASA is already using the Rift to create virtual tours of Mars and the International Space Station, and Mitchell points out that the Rift is getting a lot of interest from the training and educational communities. Virtual reality, says Mitchell, is a "new disruptive medium that can revolutionize the way we do a lot more than just games." Forbes is already referring to the way businesses are looking to capitalize on VR as the "Oculus Rift effect."

The biggest challenge for Oculus is getting the Rift in the hands of consumers, and the company remains quiet about a release date, with Mitchell saying only that "2014 is going to be a big year for VR." It already is, now that Oculus has started the year as the winner of the official Best of CES Award for 2014.

Image: Oculus VR

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NASA Space Telescope Spots 'Hand of God'

Religion and astronomy may not overlap often, but a new NASA X-ray image captures a celestial object that resembles the "Hand of God."

The hand was produced when a star exploded and ejected an enormous cloud of material, which NASA's Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array, or NuSTAR, glimpsed in high-energy X-rays, shown in blue in the photo. NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory had imaged the green and red parts previously, using lower-energy X-rays.

"NuSTAR's unique viewpoint, in seeing the highest-energy X-rays, is showing us well-studied objects and regions in a whole new light," NuSTAR principal investigator Fiona Harrison, of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, said in a statement.

The new image depicts a pulsar wind nebula, produced by the dense remnant of a star that exploded in a supernova. What's left behind is a pulsar, called PSR B1509-58 (B1509 for short), which spins around 7 times per second blowing a wind of particles into material ejected during the star's death throes.

As these particles interact with nearby magnetic fields, they produce an X-ray glow in the shape of a hand. (The pulsar is located near the bright white spot in the image but cannot be seen itself, NASA officials said.)

Scientists aren't sure whether the ejected material actually assumes the shape of a hand, or whether its interaction with the pulsar's particles is just making it appear that way.

"We don't know if the hand shape is an optical illusion," Hongjun An, of McGill University in Montreal, said in a statement. "With NuSTAR, the hand looks more like a fist, which is giving us some clues."

The red cloud appearing at the fingertips is a separate structure called RCW 89. The pulsar's wind may be heating the cloud to produce the low-energy X-ray glow, astronomers believe.

The X-ray energies seen by NuSTAR range from 7 to 25 kiloelectron volts, or keV, whereas the energies seen by Chandra range from 0.5 to 2 keV.

The Hand of God is an example of pareidolia, the psychological phenomenon of perceiving familiar shapes in random or vague images. Other common forms of pareidolia include seeing animals or faces in clouds, or the man in the moon. Despite its supernatural appearance, the Hand of God was produced by natural astrophysical phenomena.

Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech/McGill

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NASA shows off a squishy robot rover that could land on Titan

NASA likes to pack light for extraterrestrial visits, so it has been developing a tensegrity rover a rod-based robot that uses cable tension to absorb blows and roll around, rather than a bulky chassis. Thanks to the agency's demo for IEEE Spectrum, we now know what a prototype of the explorer, Super Ball Bot, looks like in action. While it's not very graceful with only some of its motors working, the vehicle has little trouble getting across a room by squishing itself. The clever design should come in handy for a potential mission to Saturn's moon Titan. Since the robot collapses into a smaller shape, NASA could pack multiple units into one spacecraft and study more of the moon's surface. It also wouldn't require the usual airbags or parachutes to land; a Super Ball Bot could fall from more than 62 miles above Titan without taking damage. Any interplanetary expedition is still years away, but it's already evident that future rovers could bear little in common with their modern-day equivalents.

You can hear SunSpiral and Agogino describe the basic approach and some of the work done so far in the video below.

As the video makes clear, there are still kinks to be worked out. The simulated ball bots perform much more smoothly than their real-world counterparts. But if all goes well, Titan might one day seen an armada of tumbleweed-like robotic explorers, hunting for evidence of life on the hazy moon. The approach, Agogino, says, “is unique. And it could be revolutionary.”

Image: NASA, IEEE Spectrum

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Your Wireless Router Could Be Murdering Your Houseplants

Are you slowly killing your houseplants? Probably. But there might be a reason other than neglect that they’re all yellow and wilting: your Wi-Fi router.

An experiment by a handful of high school students in Denmark has sparked some serious international interest in the scientific community.

Five ninth-grade girls at Hjallerup School in North Jutland, Denmark, noticed they had trouble concentrating after sleeping with their mobile phones at their bedsides. They tried to figure out why. The school obviously doesn’t have the equipment to test human brain waves, so the girls decided to do a more rudimentary experiment.

They placed six trays of garden cress seeds next to Wi-Fi routers that emitted roughly the same microwave radiation as a mobile phone. Then they placed six more trays of seeds in a separate room without routers. The girls controlled both environments for room temperature, sunlight and water.

After 12 days, they found the garden cress seeds in the router-less room had exploded into bushy greenery, while the seeds next to the Wi-Fi routers were brown, shriveled and even mutated. See for yourself:

Teacher Kim Horsevad told the Daily Dot that her students did the test twice with the same results. She was quick to point out that while the students did the experiment to test only one variable to the best of their ability, it is a high school experiment and this isn’t a professional study.

“Some of the local debate has been whether the effects were due the cress seeds drying up because of heat from the computers or Access Points used in the experiment, which is a suggestion I can thoroughly refute,” Horsevad said. “The pupils were painstakingly careful in keeping the conditions for both groups similar. The cress seeds in both groups were kept sufficiently moist during the whole experiment, and the temperature were controlled thermostatically. The computers were placed so that the heat would not affect the seeds, which was verified by temperature measurements. Still, there may be confounders which neither the pupils or I have been aware of, but I cannot imagine what they would be.”

She said the results are clearly dramatic and could trigger additional research. Two scientists, neuroscience professor Olle Johanssen at the Karolinska Institutet in Sweden and Dr. Andrew Goldsworthy at the Imperial College in London, have both expressed an interest in the experiment and may repeat it in a professional lab environment.

Perhaps coolest of all, the students were awarded for their work at the Danish national science fair.

Image: Chiot's Run

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Galaxy-Mapping GAIA Spacecraft Set for Launch Thursday

The Gaia mission, scheduled to launch Thursday morning (Dec. 19), could be a bonanza for discovering exoplanets, perhaps finding more than 2,500 new alien worlds, scientists suggest.

Designed and built by Astrium for the European Space Agency (ESA), the makers say the telescope is so sensitive that it could measure a person's thumbnail from the Moon, or to put it another way, detect the width of a human hair from 1,000km (620 miles) away

"It can do it with incredible accuracy. It's the biggest camera ever put into space," said Ralph Cordey, head of science and exploration at Astrium.

Gaia, a $1 billion (740 million euros) mission from the European Space Agency (ESA), aims to chart a 3D map of the Milky Way by surveying more than 1 billion stars, amounting to about 1 percent of the stars in the galaxy, using its billion-pixel camera. Its goal is to make the largest, most precise map of where Earth dwells by observing the position of each of these stars 70 times over five years.

To pinpoint the position of a star in 3D — a field known as astrometry — Gaia will measure the distance of the star from the sun. The satellite will do so by watching how its position shifts over time. As the Earth orbits the sun, the apparent positions of stars change with regard to each other due to how our viewpoint has moved, a phenomenon known as parallax.

Discovering a star's distance can narrow down many of its other details. For instance, the actual brightness of a star can only be determined by not only measuring how bright it appears but also how far away it lies and thus how distance might have dimmed its light. Once researchers know how bright a star actually is, they can determine how much fuel it must burn — that is, the star's mass. A star's brightness is also related to its width, and so discovering its brightness can help deduce its size. Knowing a star's mass and size then helps determine the strength of gravity on its surface.

Gaia will also scan the color of stars. This can help reveal details of their chemical makeup as well as its temperature, as the color of a star depends on its surface temperature. Knowing the brightness and color of a star can also help figure out its age and thus stage in its evolution. All in all, Gaia will help shed light on the composition, formation and evolution of the stars that make up the galaxy, researchers say.

Gaia will be most effective at detecting giant planets orbiting small stars. These planetary systems are prone to generating significant, noticeable wobbles in a star's position

Images: ESA/ATG medialab/ESO/S. Brunie

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NASA Plans to Put an 'Iron Man' Robot on Mars

NASA's Superhero Robot

At 6'2", 275 pounds, NASA's latest robot look like a decent football player, but Valkyrie could be earmarked for another human profession — astronaut.

The android — which was built to be a search-and-rescue bot — comes with sonar equipment, cameras embedded from head to feet and a giant backpack battery. Its arms, legs and hips aren't as flexible as a person's, but it moves in a similar fashion, which could be important for studying the limits of human motion on Mars.

"Likely NASA will send robots ahead of the astronauts to the [red] planet," Nicolaus Radford, head of the Dexterous Robotics Lab at NASA, said in a video about Valkyrie. "These robots will start preparing the way for the human explorers. And when the humans arrive, the robots and the humans will work together in conjunction."

Radford wants NASA's Mars-bound robots to help people build houses and lay the foundations of civilization on humanity's second planet, which means these android helpers are taking a big step up from their predecessors that were tasked with chores such as vacuuming.

Valkyrie, which looks so much like Iron Man it even has a glowing orb in its chest, will compete with other androids at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency's Robotics Challenge. The competition compares robots in categories such as strength and dexterity to determine which would be best to deploy in emergency situations that are too dangerous for people.

The competition looks stiff. DARPA's own robot, Atlas, shows an ability to avoid minor ground obstacles in this YouTube video, and has human-like details down to rotatable wrists. An android built by Team THOR (Tactical Hazardous Operations Robot) also demonstrates that its feet can adjust to changes on the ground.

None of these robots is likely to be the one that first visits Mars, but an advanced version of any of them could see the inside of a space shuttle in the not-too-distant future.

Image: YouTube, IEEE Spectrum

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Hijacking E. Coli to Brew Synthetic Fuel

Most of the biofuels on the market now fall into one of two categories: bio-alcohols, such as the ethanol made primarily from corn in the U.S., and biodiesels, which are made from fatty acids. Both are no more than additives in gas or diesel, unless an engine is specially designed to run on them. 

The next wave of alternative fuel hopefuls could be synthetic analogues—fuels created by genetically engineered bacteria, designed to be completely compatible with engines that run on fossil fuel. Today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers at the University of Exeter led by John Love announced that they've produced one such biofuel with plans to push toward commercial application. 

"Modern engines have coevolved with fossil fuels, and for an engine to function optimally, it needs high-quality fuel—fossil fuels offer that very high quality," Love tells PopMech. He says those biofuel additives hurt the fuel quality when added to gas, and so his research team set about to create a new synthetic fuel that could be just as good as petroleum-derived products and work with today's engines. "The challenge we faced," he says, "was finding a way to make the fuel that the retail industry needs biologically, rather than mining it from the ground." 

First the team looked for an organism that might produce the same molecules that give a fossil fuel its energy—specifically, alkanes or saturated hydrocarbons. Lots of animals produce alkanes that are similar to what's in petroleum, usually for waterproofing. But after nine years of what Love calls bioprospecting, the researchers had come up short. 

"Instead, we went the way of synthetic biology," Love says. "If nature hasn't designed such an organism, we can still design our process using parts designed by nature." 

Ultimately, Love's team hijacked the process of fat production in strains of E. coli. This microorganism gets a bad rap because some strains can cause food poisoning and sickness in humans, but more versions are harmless and part of the natural bacterial system that lives in our guts. Because E. coli is so common in humans, scientists know a lot about it, and because scientists know a lot about it, the bacteria is a good candidate for this type of genetic tinkering. 

By manipulating the natural metabolic system of the bacteria, tweaking up to 10 genes throughout the process, Love and colleagues converted bacterial food (usually sugar) into fat, which could then be engineered into alkane biofuel. "We were trying to specifically generate the molecules that the fuel industry needs," Love says, "and we have—albeit in a very small amount. At this point, it's just a proof of principle demonstration." 

For now Love's team intends to compare the molecules they produced with their natural counterparts. They then hope to make the production process more efficient at the cellular level and boost the energy content of the resulting fuel. "Luckily enough," Love says, "we've got some money to do that with." 

The researchers then must confront the issue that hounds every synthetic fuel researcher—scaling up. Numerous studies have outlined new ways to make new fuels in the lab, but it's an awfully tall order to imagine scaling up such a complicated chemical process to the level of our nationwide energy economy. Love says the next step after the basic research is a life-cycle analysis to see how efficient the production process is. Then a small demonstration plant—one producing hundreds, or perhaps thousands, of liters for several years—would precede a small, and then a full-scale, industrial plant. 

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5 Invasive Pests Lurking in Your Firewood

Asian Long-Horned Beetle

According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, this black and white beetle "has the potential to cause more damage than Dutch elm disease, chestnut blight, and gypsy moths combined, destroying millions of acres of America's treasured hardwoods, including national forests and backyard trees." Native to China and the Korea peninsula, the bug was first discovered in the U.S. in New York in 1996. It has since been detected in New Jersey, Massachusetts, Illinois, and Ohio, where it has cultivated a taste for maple trees and other hardwoods such as elm, birch, and willow. Transportation of untreated wood is the main way this beetle spreads, and no effective control measures exist.

Thousand Cankers Disease

When the walnut twig beetle expanded out of its native range in the Southwest and into Utah and Colorado, it brought along a deadly fungus. In black walnut trees, Geosmithia morbida causes an ugly infection characterized by dozens of small lesions that cluster together into larger cankers, killing the tree's vital cambium tissue, a layers of cells under the bark that helps the tree grow fatter, and eventually the tree itself. Since the 1990s, the fungus has become widespread throughout the American West and is now making its way toward the East Coast's extensive native walnut populations. Thousand Cankers Disease was detected in Tennessee in 2010 then in Virginia and Pennsylvania in 2011. The transportation of firewood that harbors the walnut twig beetle is at least partially to blame for the fungus' rapid spread.

Sudden Oak Death

Cankers caused by Sudden Oak Death bleed a horrifying black or dark reddish ooze. A water mold pathogen causes the disease, which has killed tens of thousands of trees since it was discovered in California in 1995. At least 75 plant species are susceptible to SOD, including a variety of oak trees, common shrubs such as lilac and rhododendron, as well as the giant redwood forests on the West Coast. The disease has yet to spread beyond California and Oregon. But experiments have shown that species on the East Coast would be susceptible as well, and there's no known cure.

Emerald Ash Borer

The emerald ash borer has destroyed more than 50 million ash trees in the U.S. in just the past decade. The beetle, native to Asia, probably arrived in North America in wood packing material. Since its discovery in Michigan in 2002, infestations have been found from Minnesota, Iowa, and Kansas in the heartland to Virginia and all the way up to New York. The broad distribution is largely due to the beetle's accidental transportation in logs and firewood.

Goldspotted Oak Borer

A native of southeastern Arizona, this insect was first spotted in California in 2004. Since then, the goldspotted oak borer has killed approximately 80,000 oak trees in San Diego County. The bug's larvae bore their way inside the bark where they munch on the cambium tissue, resulting in red staining, oozing cankers, and leaf loss. The tree dies within a few years of infection. Environmental scientists in California think GSOB came to the state within firewood from Arizona. "The key management strategy for preventing GSOB spread," they say, "is to stop the movement of infested oak firewood to non-infested areas."

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Unconventional Energy: The Good, the Bad, and the Unknown

As the world's easy-access oil supplies dry up, North America is increasingly turning to unconventional sources—such as drilling in the deep sea, mining oil sands, and using hydraulic fracturing (fracking) to recover oil and natural gas from shale deposits—to feed our cars and power plants. The unconventional hydrocarbon industry has been growing rapidly in recent years. Shale gas production in the Northeast United States is increasing by 25 percent each year, while shale oil production at the Bakken formation in North Dakota is increasing by 35 percent a year. 

Despite the rapid growth, many questions remain about the impact of these new extraction techniques on the environment, the economy, and human health. And as Popular Mechanics reported in a 2011 cover story, there's no clear-cut answer on whether these technologies are good or bad. This week, a panel of geologists and PM editor-in-chief Jim Meigs gathered to discuss the sustainability of unconventional energy extraction. 

"With fracking you have all sorts of really interesting, subtle, complicated issues that are legitimate and difficult to summarize in a fair way for the public," Meigs said at the seminar, which was hosted by Columbia University. There's plenty of good, bad, and unknowns: 

The Good


 Moving toward energy independence. The International Energy Agency (IEA) predicts that the U.S. could be 97 percent energy self-sufficient by 2035. Sarah Odland, a business manager in Columbia's Earth and Environmental Sciences department, says that shift toward energy independence will rely heavily on unconventional oil and gas extraction. Shale deposits in and around North Dakota may contain around 7.4 billion barrels of oil, according to a recent estimate from the USGS, while the Marcellus Shale alone—a huge formation beneath Pennsylvania and surrounding states—is thought to hold 262 trillion cubic feet of natural gas. 

The U.S. has only just begun to harness that buried energy, but natural gas is already helping to curb oil imports. Odland said that while the U.S. used to import two-thirds of the oil it consumed, that rate has decreased to a little over 50 percent in recent years thanks to unconventional hydrocarbons. According to the IEA, oil imports could drop below 30 percent by 2035. 

A greener alternative to coal. Natural gas is replacing coal in America's electric power plants. That's good for several reasons. For every unit of electricity produced, natural gas emits half the carbon emissions compared to coal. 

Anthony Yuen, an energy strategist with Citi Research, told the audience that, against all odds, carbon emissions from power plants have actually declined by 15 percent since 2007 just from switching to natural gas. Natural gas also emits dramatically fewer air pollutants. "Even aside from the mercury emissions, the nitrogen oxide and sulfur dioxide and particulates are responsible for somewhere around 10,000 deaths in the U.S.," Meigs told the audience. 

Job growth. Although employment was not a focus of the discussion, a report from the business analyst company IHS estimates that unconventional oil and natural gas will provide 2.5 million jobs in 2015 and 3.5 million by 2035. 

The Bad

Water quality. The controversial movie Gasland has a notorious segment in which a Colorado man lights his tap water on fire. It's a compelling scene, but contrary to the movie's suggestions, the cause has nothing to do with fracking. 

However, while concerns over groundwater contamination by fracking may be exaggerated in this case—and most of the drilling occurs at levels far below water aquifers—there are a few cases in which fracking fluids are suspected to have entered groundwater, such as in the area of Pavillion, Wyoming. The EPA says there are no confirmed cases of contamination. 

Higher prices. Unconventional hydrocarbons are more difficult and expensive to retrieve than the traditional stuff. While a typical barrel of OPEC oil has a break-even cost of $20, the same barrel would cost at least $50 if it were drilled offshore and $70 if it were extracted from oil sands. "It's the opposite of low-hanging fruit. We're now into the high-hanging fruit," Odland said. "We're moving down the efficiency curve, and up the price curve." 

Competition with renewables. Because it's cheaper, natural gas has put a dent in the growth of wind and solar power, says Peter Kelemen, a Columbia University geologist. 

Aesthetics. Oil extraction isn't pretty. And while that may seem somewhat trivial, environmental aesthetics can influence quality of life. "Ultimately, a lot of these questions won't be scientific questions," Meigs said. "They need to be informed by science, but they're ultimately political and aesthetic decisions. How many rigs do we want in the farms of Western New York?" 

The Unknown

How will we treat the wastewater? Wastewater production has increased dramatically as a result of fracking in the Marcellus shale. Drilling companies use a pressurized fluid to fracture layers of shale and force out natural gas. The fluid is comprised mostly of water and sand, but in some cases toxic additives including benzene and lead are added to enhance recovery. Fracking can also pull radioactive uranium out of the ground in small quantities. Because it can take 7 million gallons of fluid to frack a single well, that adds up to a lot of wastewater and a lot of nasty chemicals. 

Kelemen said wastewater treatment facilities can barely handle current volumes and will probably fall further behind—the industry is on track for a ten-fold increase in wastewater production over the next decade. Beyond the sheer volume, wastewater facilities are also ill-equipped to deal with several of the heavy metals and radionuclides in fracking fluid, Odland said. 

Another option is to inject the fluid from whence it came—into very deep wells. But this option comes with its fair share of risks: As PM reported in April, wastewater injection is suspected to cause small- to moderate-sized earthquakes. 

How much methane is released in the process? Methane, a potent greenhouse gas that traps 25 times more heat than CO2, escapes from natural gas wells in unknown quantities. Those methane leaks, which some activists say may be very large, could offset natural gas's role in cutting carbon dioxide emissions. Promisingly, a recent EPA reports that methane emissions from natural gas production dropped by more than 30 percent between 2007 and 2011. 

Can fracking be safe but still profitable? Kelemen pointed out that there are a number of ‘best practice' wells that prove "this process can be done in a much more environmentally friendly way than it started out. And the only question we might have is, Are best practices profitable?" 

Although so many unanswered questions remain, the industry continues to expand. Kelemen hopes scientists will continue to fill in the blanks, and that the government will do its job in protecting the people and the environment. "It's hard to underemphasize the essential role of an activist government in regulating this industry," he said. 

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