What are the leading companies in virtual reality? – Verdict

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The leading companies in virtual reality are developing domain-specific tools for functions such as training, education, and data visualisation. At the same time, consumer-focused VR companies continue their search for the semi-mythical killer app that would make VR a mainstream hit. The market remains heavily gaming-oriented but is gaining traction in areas such as live streaming and social media.

Listed below are the leading companies in virtual reality, as identified by GlobalData.

Googles VR ambitions are changing from products to services. The smartphone-based Cardboard is losing out to untethered headsets. Google has also shut down its in-house VR development units, Jump and Spotlight Stories, and removed the Play Movies & TV app from Daydream. As a result, the Daydream View headset is struggling with lack of content. At its I/O 2019 event, the company announced that it would be shifting its focus from VR hardware to software (apps and games), expanding the coverage of Tilt Brush, YouTube VR, Google Street View, and other services.

Amazon positions itself as a VR service provider, rather than a device maker. In 2017, Amazon Web Services (AWS) launched Amazon Sumerian, a managed service that aims to help VR developers create VR, AR, and 3D apps and games. The service is integrated with other AWS services. Sumerian is compatible with a range of VR platforms including Oculus Go, HTC Vive, Google Daydream, and Lenovo Mirage. Amazon has also introduced VR shopping kiosks, and partnered with HTC to add Viveport apps and games to Amazons online store.

Facebook entered the VR market in 2014 with the acquisition of Oculus for $2bn. The companys VR portfolio includes PC-tethered headsets such as Oculus Rift and Rift S, and untethered headsets, Oculus Go and Quest. Content for these devices comes from the Oculus Store. In 2019, it acquired exclusive rights to the VR versions of popular Ubisoft games Assassins Creed and Splinter Cell. The companys expanding VR ecosystem also includes Oculus Medium, Oculus Venues, and Facebook Spaces.

HP introduced its second Windows VR headset, Reverb, in May 2019. The device features the Windows Mixed Reality platform and supports SteamVR and Viveport for content. Reverbs technical specifications put it ahead of Windows Mixed Reality headsets from Samsung and Acer. It offers 4K resolution, 114-degree FOV, improved pixel density, built-in spatial audio, on-ear headphones, and inside-out tracking.

At the time of writing, HTC sells four headsets (the Vive, Vive Pro, Vive Pro Eye, and Vive Focus), with a fifth (Vive Cosmos) expected to become available later in 2019. The companys subscription-based app store, Viveport, includes over 3,000 compatible apps. HTC also maintains a separate gaming subscription service, Viveport Arcade. At the headset level, the company has invested in areas such as visual quality, comfort, and experience. HTCs offering for enterprise users is based around the Vive Pro, Vive Pro Eye, and Vive Focus Plus headsets, and Vive Enterprise Solutions.

Microsofts Windows Mixed Reality platform is used in headsets from Samsung, Acer, Lenovo, and HP. These headsets are powered by content from the Microsoft Store and SteamVR and include universal apps such as the Microsoft Edge browser. Microsoft does not have a VR headset of its own, but is bundling the Oculus Rift S with its upcoming next-generation Xbox consoles.

Nvidia is a leader in the VR GPU market, with its GeForce RTX series used by Oculus and HTC in their headsets. The companys aim to develop a VR ecosystem is reflected in VRWorks. Nvidias neural network-powered Turing Chip, claims to deliver cinema-quality interactive experiences, while the company also promotes its Tesla T4 series inference chips as an accelerator for cloud-based VR initiatives. However, low-cost GPUs from AMD, and new GPUs arriving from Intel, Qualcomm, and ARM present significant competition for Nvidia.

Qualcomm is taking an aggressive approach to VR. It launched the XR1 chipset in 2018, claiming improved battery life and performance on VR headsets. Its 2019 Cloud AI 100 chipsets will also fuel the development of cloud-based VR services. At the Mobile World Congress 2019, Qualcomm announced the XR-optimised certification programme, which enables smartphones running on the Snapdragon 855 processor to access 5G-powered VR content. It also introduced the Boundless XR to develop standalone, wireless PC-connected VR headsets. The company is also exploring eye tracking technologies with Tobii.

Samsung launched the Gear VR, in collaboration with Oculus, in 2015. It shipped 7.8 million units by the end of 2018. Samsung competes with Googles Daydream View and Oculus Go, and has not updated the hardware since 2017. Samsungs S10 is compatible with the Gear VR, while its VR ambitions will be hit by the emergence of untethered headsets.

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Sony announced in March 2019 that it had sold a total of 4.2 million PSVR devices since it launched in 2016. The success of PSVR can be attributed to Sonys strong position in the gaming industry and its willingness to reduce prices to attract consumers. However, PSVR sales are still a fraction of the total PS4 installed base. Sony has announced the next-generation PlayStation to boost its VR offering.

Ubisoft is making significant moves in VR. It has given Facebook exclusive rights to put VR versions of Assassins Creed and Splinter Cell on its Oculus headsets. It also launched Assassins Creed themed VR escape rooms in more than 100 locations across the US and Europe. With new VR-supporting consoles scheduled to arrive in 2020, Ubisoft is looking to position itself as a leading VR game developer.

Unity is the most widely-used VR development platform. Unity offers 2D and 3D models, templates, SDKs, and VR tools for developers through the Unity Asset Store. The company supports leading VR devices and serves as an integrated platform for Apples ARKit and Googles ARCore.

Virtuix is best known for its Omni VR treadmill. The Omni uses a stationary platform to simulate motion, which makes it ideal for VR arcades and theme parks.. In 2018, Virtuix launched the VR Arena in Austin, Texas, which combines VR with esports. The VR Arena also incorporates social elements of modern gaming Virtuix also offers live streaming on Twitch.

Walt Disney holds a majority stake in streaming platform Hulu, which has a strong portfolio of premium VR content Disney Movies VR brings Pixar and Disney characters to life using VR, while Walt Disney Animation Studios is developing original VR films Disney has also demoed a VR game for Uber vehicles.

This is an edited extract from the Virtual Reality Thematic Research report produced by GlobalData Thematic Research.

GlobalData is this websites parent business intelligence company.

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What are the leading companies in virtual reality? - Verdict

The 5 Biggest Virtual And Augmented Reality Trends In 2020 Everyone Should Know About – Forbes

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2019 was a growth year for virtual and augmented reality (VR/AR) known collectively as extended reality (XR). The presence of these breakthrough technologies began to be felt far away from the fields of gaming and entertainment, where they first became popular.

The 5 Biggest Virtual And Augmented Reality Trends In 2020 Everyone Should Know About

Virtual reality where users wear a headset and are fully immersed in computer-generated environments has been developed to meet design, marketing, education, training, and retail needs. Augmented reality where computer images are superimposed onto the user's view of the real world, through a screen or headset is a more complex challenge, as it requires the software to "see" what is in front of it. But we're getting used to seeing it used for more than adding cartoon features to selfie pictures or spotting Pokemon in the wild.

With global spending on XR technology is forecast to increase by 78.5% next year compared to this year, both technologies will be key trends to watch out for in 2020. We are likely to see a whole load of exciting new hardware offering even greater immersion and realism, as well as innovative use cases as industry gets to grips with what it can do.

Industrial use outpaces gaming and entertainment

Most people's first experiences of VR and AR today are likely to be in gaming and entertainment. That's likely to change, as research shows that the development of enterprise XR solutions is overtaking that on consumer solutions. The 2020 XR Industry Insight report collated by VR Intelligence states that 65% of the AR companies surveyed said they are working on industrial applications, while just 37% working on consumer products and software.

This shouldnt be surprising although games made the headlines in recent years thanks to Pokemon Go and Facebook's Oculus Rift, the potential to boost productivity and safety using XR makes it an attractive proposition for industry. VR can be used to simulate working in dangerous environments or with expensive, easily damaged tools and equipment, without any of the risks. AR, on the other hand, can be used to relay essential information directly to the user about whatever happens to be in front of them reducing the time spent by engineers, technicians, or maintenance staff referring to manuals and looking up information online while on the job.

XR takes off in healthcare

The potential uses for these technologies in healthcare are obvious, and over 2020 we can expect to see many of these use cases transition from trials and pilots and gradually into general use. Virtual reality has already been adopted in therapy, where it is used to treat patients with phobias and anxiety disorders. Combined with biosensors that monitor physiological reactions like heart rate and perspiration, therapists can get a better understanding of how patients react to stressful situations in a safe, virtual environment. VR is also used to help people with autism develop social and communication skills, as well as to diagnose patients with visual or cognitive impairments, by tracking their eye movement.

The adoption of AR in healthcare is forecast to grow even more quickly with the value of the market increasing by 38% annually until 2025. AR can be used by surgeons both in the theater and in training to alert them to risks or hazards while they are working. One app which has been developed uses AR to guide users towards defibrillator devices, should they need one when they are out in public. Another one helps nurses to find patients veins and avoid accidentally sticking needles where they arent wanted. As these innovations and others like them lead to improved patient outcomes and reduced cost of treatment, they are likely to become increasingly widespread throughout 2020.

Headsets get smaller, more mobile and more powerful

One of the biggest limiting factors with current XR technology is the need for encumbering headsets and display units. This is more of a problem with VR, where the powerful processing hardware needed to generate the graphics is usually contained within the headset. However, hardware devices have started to trend towards being "untethered" For example, Facebook's Oculus headset initially needed to be connected to a powerful PC, but this year became available as the self-contained Oculus Quest version.

As well as more mobile, headsets will be able to generate increasingly realistic "worlds" for the VR user to explore as the devices are fitted with more and more powerful processors. While early VR worlds were clearly computer-generated using low-resolution polygons, the vistas available to us in 2020 will move closer to reality, allowing for more immersive experiences. Possibly the most anticipated breakthrough will be Apples forthcoming 8K combined VR/AR glasses that will not be tethered to a computer or phone. The consumer tech giant is hoping that it will be the one to breakXR into the mainstream with a high-end but affordable device, in the same way it did with the iPhone.

5G opens new possibilities for VR and AR

Super-fast mobile networks will further boost the potential of XR to strengthen its presence in entertainment and make further inroads into industry during 2020.

The potential for data transfer speeds of up to 3 gigabits per second by comparison, the average home broadband delivers well under 100 megabits per second means 5G should be fast enough to stream VR and AR data from the cloud. Rather than needing to be wired up to powerful PCs, or encumbered by on-board hardware, viewing devices will upload tracking data to data centers where the heavy processing will be done. The rendered images can be delivered back to the user in real-time thanks to the speed of 5G and other advanced networks.

Streaming VR has been possible in a limited way for a few years now Facebook lets you do it with your phone, but the experience is limited due to data transfer speeds and low on-device processing power. Combining it with the cloud and 5G technology means designers of VR and AR tools will be unencumbered by the need to deliver their experiences into a low-bandwidth, low-powered environment. The result will be cheaper headsets and viewing devices and more realistic VR simulations.

More of us will learn through VR and AR

Educational experiences in VR and AR will continue to become increasingly common throughout 2020. The immersive nature of VR means that pupils can engage with learning in fun new ways, and AR brings new flexibility to on-the-job training.

Already students can take a trip through time to visit the ancient Romans, or through space to experience conditions on other planets. But as the technology becomes moves away from niche and becomes part of the fabric of everyday education, were likely to see growth apart from simply providing "experiences," into solving problems with current education systems. Distance learners could be taught in VR classrooms, meaning they dont miss out on the benefits of learning in a collaborative environment, while AR training aids can ensure that access to the information needed to carry out a job is always on hand.

You might also be interested in some of the best examples of how AR is already being used in business, which I discuss in this video:

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The 5 Biggest Virtual And Augmented Reality Trends In 2020 Everyone Should Know About - Forbes

This Woman Is Changing The Therapy Industry With VR And AI – Forbes

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An interview with Veena Somready about her Journey to bring Neuro Rehab VRs technology to clinics around the US.

Veena Somareddy

In the US, it is estimated that the wait time for a physical therapy appointment is close to 30 days. When you finally arrive at the appointment, you will often see patients queued up to visit with a handful of physical therapists. At rehabilitation centers, physical therapy assistants often work closely with physical therapists to alleviate the burden of care.

For patients who have been through traumatic injury such as brain injury, the road to recovery can last months or years. This recovery process includes different types of therapies such as speech therapy, physical therapy, cognitive therapy, occupational therapy, etc.. Often, the long wait and long commute to different healthcare facilities can be just as difficult as the therapy itself.

After the long wait, when patients finally come face to face with a physical therapist, it takes a while to engage with the therapy that often push the patients to their physical limits. Physical therapists can spend a good portion of the time coaching patients to engage with the therapy so that progress can be made.

In the age of innovation, with a combination of virtual reality, artificial intelligence, and big data, Neuro Rehab VR is bringing new tools to hospitals, clinics, and rehabilitation centers around the US. These tools will transform the way patients engage in physical therapy, and how physical therapists manage the therapy sessions.

In the last two years, Neuro Rehab VR has grown from a small startup working with one clinic in Fort-Worth, Texas to an expanding startup that is FDA registered, providing a suite of virtual reality applications to physical therapists for clinics in seven states in the US.

This month, I had the great pleasure of sitting down with Veena Somready, cofounder of Neuro Rehab VR to find out more about her journey from being a researcher and a technologist to becoming one of the leading entrepreneurs who is bringing cutting-edge technology such as AI (Artificial Intelligence) and VR (Virtual Reality) into the healthcare industry.

What inspired you to start Neuro Rehab VR?

In 2017, I was a Ph.D. student, developing Virtual Reality simulation and training systems. My partner Bruce Conti, founder of the Neurological Recovery Center, found me through my research and contacted me. His son was recovering from a brain injury at the time. He wanted to see if there was a way that we could work together to develop tools for the Neurological Recovery Center. I was inspired by his sons story and decided to work with him on the project. Eventually, we started Neuro Rehab VR to develop a suite of products that will allow patients to engage in physical therapy inside the virtual reality environment.

Initially, it mustve been a difficult decision to drop out of your Ph.D. program to work on Neuro Rehab VR full-time. What were your deciding factors?

Initially, the clinic that we worked with inFort-Worth, Texas had an amazing team of therapists, assistants, nurses, and patients. They were all very excited to try the therapy tools that we developed. They gave us very useful and quick feedback on everything that we asked them to try.

By combining cognitive therapy and physical therapy together in our VR therapy applications, immediately, I saw an increased level of motivation and engagement in the patients therapy sessions. The progress these patients made using our applications was inspiring. With big data, I also saw how much the progress reports in our applications helped physical therapists manage their patient relationships.

I realized that we were creating useful tools for both patients and therapists. The motivation from being able to develop tools that had a huge impact made it easier for me to drop out of my PhD program to focus on Neuro Rehab VR full-time.

How does virtual reality physical therapy differ from traditional physical therapy?

Virtual reality physical therapy is used to supplement traditional physical therapy. Often, patients who are recovering from traumatic injuries have a mental barrier due to the internalization of their diagnosis. They often think that due to their diagnosis, they may not be able to perform certain functions. Physical therapists often spend a lot of time during therapy sessions to coach patients through such mental barriers.

Immersed in the virtual reality world, patients often lose their inhibitions quickly. Our virtual reality worlds are engaging and modeled after practical daily tasks such as going shopping in a supermarket, cooking, making the bed, etc.. Patients who think that they cant perform these actions in real life will often end up performing these actions in the virtual reality world.

At the same time, the immersion in the VR world allows the patients to focus on their therapy more than they would in real life. Without distractions, even patients with ADHD can concentrate during their entire therapy session.

By pushing through their own mental barriers and being more focused in their therapy sessions, patients often make more progress during their VR therapy sessions.

Why do you think physical therapists were quick to embrace Neuro Rehab VRs Virtual Reality therapy?

Physical therapists are amazingly creative people. They use many other tools, and equipment to do their job besides the tools that we provide them with. Our tools, such as data and reporting, help physical therapists to better manage their training sessions. They provide evidence of progress for evaluation and payment.

At the same time, our VR therapy applications provide therapists with additional ways to engage with their patients. Often, the physical therapists that we work with teach our engineers to think about physical therapy differently. In turn, our engineers can help to build tools to realize the physical therapists vision. From the beginning, because physical therapists were such an integral part of helping us develop our VR therapy applications, they had a natural motivation to use these VR therapy applications in their day-to-day work.

What challenges did you face in developing Neuro Rehab VRs suite of VR therapy applications?

The biggest challenge that we overcame was the User Interface. Tweaking the initial version of our applications and making the User Interface easy to use took a lot of iterations. Now, our applications take zero setup time. You simply turn on our application and you are good to go. We went through many iterations with physical therapists and watched them as they used our VR therapy applications. It took us almost a year to develop and refine our initial product.

Another challenge we had was to keep pace with the technology. VR technology is constantly changing. In a way, its good because it gives us new possibilities of improving our product. But, it is a big effort to keep up. For instance, recently, the new version of Oculus allowed us to create a completely portable system with just the headset and controller, without dependency on any other devices. This opened up new possibilities for us to market our product.

Whats the one lesson that you learned early that helped you grow Neuro Rehab VR?

From the beginning, we tried to instill communication into our companys culture. We asked our engineers to talk to physical therapists directly so that the design of the product is a team effort. Even now, many enhancements come directly from the conversations between the physical therapists and our engineers. We started with one therapy application. Now, we have eight therapy applications. As we expand to more clinics this year, we are mindful of keeping close relationships with the therapists who use our products.

What is your vision for the future of Neuro Rehab VR?

We hope to expand to cover more therapy areas such as occupational therapy, orthopedics, etc.. We also hope that more clinics will use our line of therapy products. We are going to have a focused period of development soon to rollout more enhancements for some of our products. But, after that, we want more people to gain access to our therapy products. We want to democratize the access to our products. People who want to use our products, who may not have insurance to pay for it, can still be able to gain access to our products.

If you had to identify one critical step that set you on the path to success, what would that be?

In the beginning, when we just started Neuro Rehab VR while I was still in my PhD program, I won this competition called the Big Idea Competition from UT Dallas. This opportunity allowed me to gain access to many mentors.

At that time, I was just a technologist. I did not have any business experience. But, I learned how to pitch, how to have a business sense around technology, and how to grow a business. Most importantly, I learned how the healthcare industry works. Having this background knowledge of the healthcare industry has been crucial for our companys success.

As a female entrepreneur, what is your one piece of advice youd like to give to upcoming female entrepreneurs in the innovation startup space?

Not to be disappointed by setbacks. There are always setbacks. Learn from every experience. Every time you are doing something thats out of your comfort zone, you are leveling up. Its such a good time to be a female entrepreneur and a technologist. There are so many opportunities out there because of the rapid growth of innovation.

Even though VC funding is still low for companies started by female founders, it is growing every year. There are many supportive organizations such as WXR, Backstage Capital, etc.. focused on supporting female entrepreneurs in the innovation startup space. For me, along the way, many mentors helped me connect to the right resources and set me on the right path to success. Some of these mentors are on our companys board today.

For a lot of first time founders, the steep learning curve can be a difficult challenge to overcome, how would you advise these first time founders?

Try to learn new skills. If you are on the business side, try to learn about technology. If you are a technologist, then learn about the business. For example, I had to read books about neuroscience, entrepreneurship, startups, etc.. There are a lot of resources out there to help you. You just have to reach for it.

In the beginning, you can make a lot of mistakes. These resources are out there to help you avoid some of these mistakes. Once you have this mindset, you will be more motivated to learn. For example, one of the biggest lessons I learned early was to give my MVP to our customers and have them try it out. This led to almost a year of refining our product before we put it on the market. By the time we rolled out our product, we knew the value we were creating for our customers.

As we progress in this age of innovation, the use cases of AI and VR will become more prevalent. Neuro Rehab VR is a pioneering company that is making the best use of AI, VR, and big data to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of the therapy industry. Veena Somreadys valuable experience can serve to inspire a generation of startup founders in this space.

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This Woman Is Changing The Therapy Industry With VR And AI - Forbes

Virtual reality headsets used to tackle child anxiety in hospitals – The National

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A virtual reality headset is helping children overcome their fear of hospitals.

Nervous children are fitted with the headset, ahead of a simple procedure, to watch a seven-minute film featuring Roomi, a doctor rabbit who treats patients in a virtual world.

The aim of the programme is to ease their hospital anxiety by showing children the simplicity of common medical procedures.

The clever technology was presented on the second day of Arab Health, the regions largest medical exhibition, in Dubai.

When children come into a hospital they are usually scared or frightened, that makes giving them certain medical treatments difficult, said Shauna Heller, project manager at Clay Park VR, a US company working on the project.

[This] makes it easier for nurses to take blood, provide a vaccine or put a limb into a cast.

Designers worked with doctors at Los Angeles Childrens Hospital to understand what procedures cause the most stress for children, and have created a world populated by characters with similar ailments.

Health companies Pharmatrade and SyMed are delivering the application to care networks across the region.

A follow-up mobile phone app uses AR technology to give children advice on how to care for their injury or illness, with the same cartoon character on hand to answer questions they may have.

Updated: January 29, 2020 05:03 PM

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Virtual reality headsets used to tackle child anxiety in hospitals - The National

Apple Reveal a Future Apple Pencil that delivers tactile feedback to users in a Real or Virtual World using a Headset – Patently Apple

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Today the US Patent & Trademark Office published a patent application from Apple that relates to a future version of Apple Pencil with a huge twist. On one hand the invention relates to delivering tactile feedback to a future version of Apple Pencil. On the other hand, Apple's engineers describe how an Apple Pencil could be used with a mixed reality headset for both augmented and virtual reality. Users will be able to write on virtual paper or have this Apple Pencil used as another tool interacting with virtual objects.

Haptics are used on a touch display found on an iPhone or iPad to convey a variety of different information to a user, such as information regarding one or more touch inputs that a user has provided such as alerts or status of the electronic device or one or more applications.

However, when using Apple Pencil, as it is today, the user misses out on feeling the particular haptic related to alerts and so forth.

In accordance with Apple's invention, improvements to Apple Pencil will be able to produce shear forces that act on a user to provide unique tactile sensations. For example, a shear device can be included at a grip region of a stylus to provide shear sensations at the user's hand (e.g., fingers). The sensation can be targeted directly to the user's hand, rather than generally across the entire stylus.

Augmented and Virtual Reality Application

Apple's patent takes an interesting twist at one point and notes that "Shear forces can be used with a virtual reality, augmented reality, or mixed reality system to simulate tactile sensations of interacting with physical objects even when no such objects are present.

More specifically, the invention at this point veers off and doesn't limit 'Shear Forces' to a future version of Apple Pencil.

Apple specifically states that "A touch-based input device in accordance with embodiments disclosed herein can include any device that is held, worn, or contacted by a user for providing input and/or receiving feedback. The touch-based input device can be used alone or in conjunction with another device."

For the sake of simplicity, "another device" is shown to be an iPad in patent FIG. 1 below as Apple's patent returns to non-virtual applications until we get to patent FIG. 6 further below.

In patent FIG. 2, Apple points us to the grip area of this future Apple Pencil and focuses on where the 'Shear' tactile forces will be delivered. In this one design, the shear feedback is delivered by vertical types of strips.

Beyond tactile haptic feedback, Apple notes that shear forces include unaligned forces that urge one part of the user's hand (e.g., finger) in one direction and another part of the user's hand in an opposite direction.

The shear feedback components include sliding elements #220 shown further below in patent FIG. 11. Apple clarifies that the grip region could actually take up 10% to 90% of the surface of the grip area, even though the patent figures limit the size of the shear feedback components/elements.

In patent FIG. 5 we see that this future version of the Apple Pencil will include an accelerometer #170, a gyroscope #172, and/or a compass #174. During use, the accelerometer can track and record acceleration of Apple Pencil. Acceleration can be measured in a three-dimensional (x, y, and z) coordinate system.

The haptic device #178 can be implemented as any suitable device configured to provide force feedback, vibratory feedback, tactile sensations, and the like.

Free Space Application

In Apple's patent FIG. 6 below Apple Pencil can be used to provide feedback during use in free space. For example, this future version of Apple Pencil can simulate tactile sensations that correspond to a user experience in a mixed reality system.

As shown in FIG. 6, Apple Pencil will be operated by a user in a manner that moves the Pencil through space. Each point in space corresponds to a point within a virtual environment of a mixed reality system.

A region #198 of space can correspond to a region of the virtual environment. For example, a virtual object can be rendered in the virtual environment and displayed or otherwise output for reference by the user. The display can include a headset, a head-up display, and/or an optical head-mounted display in communication with Apple Pencil.

A surface, volume, interior, or other portion of the virtual object can correspond to the location of the region #198 in space. Accordingly, when the future Apple Pencil is moved to the region in space, it is understood by the user to be positioned at the virtual object in the virtual environment.

In Apple's patent FIG. 9 above we're able to see the bridge segments #212 in the sliding elements #220 can be evenly distributed along a length of the user grip region. For example, the user grip region can present radial and/or bilateral symmetry.

In Apple's patent FIGS. 10 and 11 above, the future Apple Pencil can be used to provide feedback during use in free space. As shown in FIG. 10, the future Apple Pencil could be operated by a user in a manner that rotates through space.

Apple's patent application that was published today by the U.S. Patent Office was filed back in Q4 2018. Considering that this is a patent application, the timing of such a product to market is unknown at this time.

Apple's Inventors

Benjamin Jackson: Failure Analysis Engineer - iPad Tech Ops

David Bloom: Sr. Quality Assurance Manager in Portland, Oregon

Steven Taylor: Mechanical Design Engineer

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Apple Reveal a Future Apple Pencil that delivers tactile feedback to users in a Real or Virtual World using a Headset - Patently Apple

Virtual Reality and the Physical World Literally Collide in Hilarious Video – Comicbook.com

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Here's the thing about virtual reality that might not be immediately apparent: it can be a bit dangerous. Venturing out into a virtual experience itself isn't necessarily dangerous; it's virtual, after all. The problem is really when the virtual and physical worlds collide -- sometimes quite literally, as a recent video demonstrates.

Now, some important context is necessary first and foremost: many virtual reality headsets that allow for any significant movement require boundaries to be established. So, for example, if I plop on a virtual reality headset, one of the important steps is basically telling it where obstacles are by defining exactly how much free space there is to play around in. Anyone that's played around in VR is likely familiar with this setup.

This is all to say, it's still pretty dang funny to watch someone completely overestimate the amount of space they have and run face-first into a wall. You can check out exactly that in the video, shared on Reddit, below:

Thankfully, both the person wearing it and the Oculus Quest headset itself are fine. "He's fine," Reddit user amandasox8 later shared. "Quest still works. Minor scratch." There is also, apparently, a black mark on the wall. But considering the collision in the above video, that seems like a relatively small consequence.

The VR game being played here, according to other social media comments, is Crisis VRigade from developer Sumalab, and it puts players in the role of a SWAT member dealing with a hostage situation. Given the adrenaline likely involved in playing, maybe running into walls is more common than other VR games? Hard to say.

"Together with a SWAT team you will have to deal with the situation and take care of the terrorists who are robbing the bank," the game's official description reads in part. "Your mission is crystal clear: finish off all hostile elements and keep your teammates and hostages alive. Make your way through the bank to the safe where the terrorist have made a stronghold and threaten to kill the hostages if their demands are not met."

Have you ever had any trouble with virtual reality headsets like this? Or have you seen anyone having problems? Let us know in the comments, or hit me up directly on Twitter at @rollinbishop to talk all things gaming!

The Oculus Quest, among other virtual reality headsets, is currently available wherever such things are sold. You can check out all of our previous coverage of virtual reality right here.

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Virtual Reality and the Physical World Literally Collide in Hilarious Video - Comicbook.com

Brand new virtual reality centre set to open in Exeter very soon – Devon Live

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Exeter is getting a brand new virtual reality centre - letting you train as a Jedi or run away from zombies.

iVR is the latest facility to be added to popular destination iBounce trampoline park and iPlay soft play centre in Exeter, Marsh Barton.

VR, which stands for Virtual Reality, is an immersive gaming concept available for single or multiplayer use.

With a wide variety of games there is something suitable for everyone as the levels go from beginner to expert.

It's easily tailored to you based on your interests, which gives you a highly personalised experienced using the latest emerging gaming technology.

The new VR centre will cater for a range of ages and is even available for private hire of up to 12 people at a time. It's also very popular when it comes to team building and corporate activity (a fun and different office day out!)

Virtual experiences:

Training as aStar Wars Jedi. Repairing and defending theMillennium Falconfrom attack byImperial Stormtroopers.

Immersing yourself deep into the heart of aZombie Apocalypse,put yoursurvival skillsto the test inArizona Sunshine.

You can use yoursports skillsto climb all the way to the top of the leader board inVR Super Sport.

Or test your fear of heights and take theride of your lifeon one of their theme parkinspired attractions

Feeling brave? not one for those scared of heights, walk the plankfrom 80 storeys high.

With a wide range of games available it's offering a next level virtual reality experience for families, friends and colleagues.

Here at Devon Live we will be giving you an exclusive first look when they are open to test out their new studio, and having a look at all of the different games.

Visit their website for more information.

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Brand new virtual reality centre set to open in Exeter very soon - Devon Live

CURTAIN CALLS: ‘The Merry Wives of Windsor’ Feelin’ Groovy – Inside NoVA

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There is a tradition in Shakespeare lore that Elizabeth I, upon seeing a performance of Henry IV, Part I, so enjoyed the comical John Falstaff that she requested another play be written in which Sir John would fall in love. But a request from the queen means Kindly have it done in fourteen days. This may or may not be true, but it would explain the thin plot of The Merry Wives of Windsor in which the bumptious Falstaff does indeed fall in love with the money of the husbands of the Merry Wives.

Sometimes you just have to let a thing be what it is. The Merry Wives is, at best, a rom-com in which the greedy would-be swain is humiliated, goes in for a second try, is humiliated worse, is found out, and eventually repents. There are plenty of laughs along the way with the requisite feel-good comeuppance.

In that regard, Folgers production (the last at this location while a two-year renovation gets underway) satisfies what you come for. A tip-top cast does their job with sparkling timing and well-placed buffoonery. Where things get a little far out is in the concept.

Director Aaron Posner has an earnest and well-intentioned theory behind setting Merry Wives in 1972. Something about the Womens Lib movement, the social energy of the times, the general zeitgeist, I suppose. He even imagines that the play tells a little uncomfortable truth in its exposure of mortals flagrant flaws. I must have missed that part in my puzzlement over Tony Ciseks 1959-era House Beautiful inspired set (loved the Mondrian color-changing windows, whatever the point), the late 60s slogans, and the mish-mash of costumes and styles ranging from early 60s to mid 70s. And while its true that in 1972 many folks were still too stoned to know what year it was, a bit more clarity in setting and purpose would have been welcome here.

Nevertheless, we would still have the fabulous Brian Mani making a rollicking, lusty Falstaff with or without the psychedelic tie-dye shirt encompassing his enormous belly - a feature that is almost a character in its own right, so prominently does it figure. Sir John dreams big, and his armor-plated ego persuades him that he can court two married women with the same love letter, thus winning their affections and access to their husbands funds.

Mistress Ford (Ami Brabson) and Mistress Page (Regina Aquino) play him for the big fish he is with complications authored by the suspicious husband, Ford (in a splendid performance by understudy Ryan Sellers). Fearing cuckolding more than death, poor Mr. Ford disguises himself as Brook, a hopeless suitor of the virtuous Mrs. Ford and pays Falstaff to try to seduce her in order to find out if she can, in fact, be led astray.

Meanwhile, three hopeful swains vie for the hand of their lovely daughter, Anne Page (Linda Bard). The aptly named Abraham Slender (Brian Reisman) woos in an outfit that, even by Sixties standards, should be burned. The sympathetic Fenton (Dante Robert Rossi, who also plays Nym) seems a likelier choice, but still has to contend with the fieriest, funniest Frenchman, he of the hot blood and ready sword, Dr. Caius. Cody Nickell is a treasure in this role and makes all that time and place confusion irrelevant, so wickedly funny is his every appearance.

As an assistant to Dr. Caius, Mistress Quickly (played by the inimitable Kate Eastwood Norris) is one perfectly groomed nurse right out of a 1964 yearbook, topped off with an every-hair-in-place blonde flip. Shes also warm, and droll, and burdened with other peoples messages which put her in the line of fire. Sir Hugh Evans (Todd Scofield) unwisely asks her to support Slenders love suit, a proposition which presages an invitation to duel from the choleric Dr. Caius. Be not alarmed. This is a comedy, so no one dies.

There are a few moments when servants or messengers run in and out with urgent news and cant seem to resist acting out Every. Single. Word. complete with hand gestures and full body exclamations. Its not necessary. We get the gist.

Never let it be said that Mr. Posner didnt want his cast to have fun. The energy crackles, and references to songs of the time were like raindrops falling on my head. The most shameless of all these side doors from the script is delivered by Ford (as Mr. Brook) wearing his very best Rolling Stones shirt and complaining that he cant get no satisfaction. I blush to report it.

Trying to relate this two hours of whimsy to an era best remembered for demonstrations, civil rights marches, sit-ins, paisley bell-bottoms and horrified parents is iffy at best; the comic potential is realized, but the connection is a strain.

Maggie Lawrence is a member of the American Theatre Critics Association. She is a retired English and drama teacher.

WANT TO GO?

What: The Merry Wives of Windsor By Wm. Shakespeare

Where: Folger Shakespeare Library, 201 E. Capitol St. SE, Washington, D. C.

Call: (202) 544-7077 or visitwww.folger.edu/theatre

Playing through March 1

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CURTAIN CALLS: 'The Merry Wives of Windsor' Feelin' Groovy - Inside NoVA

Toss a Coin to Your Witcher, explained by a songwriter – Vox.com

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One of the most popular aspects of Netflixs incredibly popular fantasy series The Witcher is its viral hit song, Toss a Coin to Your Witcher. Sung by a troubadour named Jaskier in the shows second episode, the song has been earworming its way through the zeitgeist, expanding well beyond the reach of the show since it debuted on December 20.

Last week, after a strangely long delay, the song finally became available on Spotify and other streaming services, where it quickly drew attention for its catchy chorus and quirky lyrics all over again.

Even though its mostly a piece of lyrical nonsense based on the events of the shows second episode, Toss a Coin to Your Witcher has amassed legions of fans. In the month since it premiered, in fact, no fewer than four versions of it three different metal covers of the song, as well as the original soundtrack version have all charted in the UK. On YouTube, where all current uploads of the soundtrack are unofficial, the four most-watched versions of the song have a combined view count of more than 40 million.

If youve heard Toss a Coin to Your Witcher, youll know that its something of a many-headed hydra. The song has aspects of medieval instrumentation and classical song structure, as you might expect for a song appearing in a medieval fantasy show. But its also replete with pop movement and rhythm, and even has a dollop of musical theater stylization.

One reason for this jumble of influences is that the songs composers, Sonya Belousova and Giona Ostinelli, wanted to reflect the fusion of genres and aesthetic influences that comprise The Witcher itself. The show is based on a popular book series that later inspired a hit fantasy video game series, so its got a distinctive, game-influenced aesthetic but its also channeling everything from the epic feel of Game of Thrones to the tongue-in-cheek musical parody Galavant.

I confess that upon first hearing Toss a Coin to Your Witcher, I really, really didnt understand the appeal. In fact, I was jarred by the songs many discordant elements. So I decided to talk it over with Charlie Harding, a musicologist and co-host of Voxs Switched on Pop podcast, to get a sense of why so many people were so infatuated with this strange tune. And through our discussion, I realized that the parts of the song I was most baffled by actually were the key to its appeal.

At a glance, Toss a Coin is trying to have its cake and eat it: that is, it wants to be both an earnest song that fits diegetically within its weird fictional universe and a catchy meta-pop song. Its presentation is deeply earnest and straightforward, with actor Joey Batey singing along to an orchestral accompaniment that gets more and more sweepingly dramatic.

But its also replete with syncopation: Its words land on the off-beats, and it uses rhythms that didnt really exist in the historical medieval culture its attempting to channel. And in keeping with the scores of video games, where big, synthesized drum sections are a common feature, it also has a percussion-heavy backing track. Its the kind of thing you might expect to hear in a fantasy game soundtrack right when the fighting gets good but that isnt exactly what you might expect to hear from a song set within that game universes story.

Not only that, but the lyrics are deliberately tongue-in-cheek, with lines like he cant be bleat (a goat-related pun) and he thrust every elf far back on the shelf, a meta-joke that completely breaks the fourth wall.

Theres something almost like [an] uncanny valley in the way that [the song] borrows so fluidly between different styles that we expect to exist in very different media, like video games, musical pop, Renaissance music, all blurred together, Harding said. He pointed out that Batey also uses a style of singing thats closer to musical theater than to a folk/troubadour sound, which further creates a sense of disconnect between the songs many different elements.

Compare all this to a song like Game of Thrones The Rains of Castamere, which keeps to a clear folk aesthetic, both lyrically and musically: Its simple, using few instruments, with a naturalistic singer and a song that feels very balladic. The official soundtrack version of Rains of Castamere was also recorded by the well-known indie rock band the National, whose gritty folk influences naturally complement Game of Thrones aesthetic. So between the band and the show itself, there was an established milieu for how to hear the song. With a more hybrid-genre show like Witcher, that milieu doesnt quite exist.

Harding explains that these discordant elements are part of Toss a Coins basic appeal. I think its drawing on people who love video game scores and anybody thats played [something] like Diablo or World of Warcraft: Kings, he told me. The backing tracks of those games are all pseudo-medieval but are also very much contemporary music. ... And that sound has become the sound of any sort of video game music.

Harding told me the popularity of Toss a Coin to Your Witcher actually illustrates a larger point about pop culture which is that what we think of as pop music is in fact much, much larger than just whats topping Billboard at any given moment.

A lot of people will say all pop music sounds the same, and that usually whats happening on the Billboard [charts] will be the dominant sound currently, that sound would be trap music, he told me. But I actually believe that what is in the popular zeitgeist at any given moment is much broader, and includes whats happening in film scores, whats happening in video game music, whats happening with musicals.

We are comfortable with very different kinds of music given the context and space in which theyre played, Harding added. By experimenting with the boundaries between various musical genres and aesthetics, he explained, Toss a Coin to Your Witcher plays with the idea that were all comfortable with radically different musical styles given different contexts.

By playing with the context of all these different musical genres, and combining them with a catchy hook, Harding said, Toss a Coin ultimately becomes something you might stream in the background of your day.

The success of Toss a Coin also owes a lot to a genre you might not expect: musical theater. In fact, Toss a Coin is perhaps best thought of as a musical theater number because like many musicals, The Witcher employs a conceit in which the time period of its setting and the style of the production itself dont need to align.

Like when you listen to Grease, Harding noted. Grease is also not 1950s music.

Every musical has its own aesthetic rules that it needs to adhere to, and then it uses allusions to other styles to evoke another period, he explained. Like Phantom of the Opera evokes a baroque quality, even though it is thoroughly a contemporary 80s musical.

Toss a Coin also predominantly uses a traditional harmonic chord progression from the world of classical music. At the songs climax, around the words a friend of humanity, the song shifts to what musicians call a perfect cadence. Thats when a cadential chord progression emphasizes its crucial dominant chord a chord built from the fifth note in a typical scale before resolving to its home chord, or tonic chord. It sounds like this:

When we hear a dominant chord played in this context, our ears naturally want that chord to resolve back to the tonic chord, which is the root chord of the key. The power of the dominant chord and our need for it to resolve creates a progression of buildup, tension, and release.

When that cadence happens in a song thats written in a minor key, like Toss a Coin to Your Witcher, the effect is one of incredibly dramatic suspense. (In fact, such chords are often called suspended chords if they dont immediately get resolved.) Toss a Coin to Your Witcher all but overemphasizes its dominant chord. The result is a sound that not only creates high drama for the listener but also recalls the idea of a more classical structure. It adds a sense of tradition and even loftiness to the whole song, in keeping with the musical theater vibe.

And most importantly, Harding told me, that extra drama gives listeners the freedom to be sentimental a freedom pop music often denies them. It has this very revelrous sort of quality to it, he said. And I think that is the magical thing that musicals still allow for. In pop music, sentimentality is so scorned. Musicals, however, allow for embracing heightened emotions: They give you permission to wave your fist in the air.

So the next time you listen to Toss a Coin to Your Witcher, and you feel like joining the heightened revelry, you can participate with full awareness of what the song gets right and how the joy you get from hitting replay is really about so much more than just a catchy hook.

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Toss a Coin to Your Witcher, explained by a songwriter - Vox.com

Tradwives: the new trend for submissive women has a dark heart and history – The Guardian

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What exciting trends are happening in the matrimonial sector?Kara, by email

A thrilling new trend has emerged, and its as seismic as the New Look was in 40s fashion, or the emergence of Mediterranean cooking in 90s Britain: its called being a housewife.

Now you might think: Ummm, that doesnt sound THAT new to me. But all fashion trends are rehashes, and tradwife, as this one is dubbed, is housewife with a social media spin. Its like bringing back 90s style, but swapping that brown eyeliner for contouring makeup. Its just so much more zeitgeist, you see?

So a tradwife is a woman who doesnt work so as to look after their children, their husband, their home and then talk non-stop about how great this is on social media. Who knew being so traditional was also so modern? And so busy! Last week alone, there were interviews with tradwives in the Daily Mail, the Times and on the BBC, This Morning, Victoria Derbyshire and, for all I know, piped 24/7 across all channels. Im afraid that being both non-trad and a non-wife I am less plugged in than these women.

But I was especially taken with one trad wife. Her name is Alena Kate Pettitt, and in between showing TV crews how she lovingly irons her husbands shirt and shops for onions, Pettitt runs something called the Darling Academy, which is a newsletter and YouTube channel that celebrates British etiquette. Initially, I assumed this meant reviving all that mad Nancy Mitford U and non-U stuff, and, let me tell you, as an American wannabe snob, I am VERY down with that. But no, Pettitt is harnessing the best of what made Britain great, during that time when you could leave your front door open and know that you were safe, and you knew your strangers in the street.

Mmm, isnt it funny how whenever people evoke a specific time when Britain was great, the time they invariably evoke is their own childhood before they were aware of the pressures and anxieties of adulthood? And Ill be honest, every times Pettitt talks about her husband taking care of her, and that is pretty much her No 1 subject, she sounds more like shes talking about her father than her husband.

The tradwives have been keenly giving interviews about how they are the true feminists in choosing not to work, to which anyone with a modicum of knowledge about feminism would say: We gave women the choice thats the point! Bake banana bread until the sun comes up, if it makes you happy! Whether they are still the true feminists in suggesting that husbands must always come first if you want a happy marriage, as Pettitt has tweeted, feels more debatable. Also unacknowledged is that, as much as the tradwives think they are being renegade rebels by not working, their rebellion is based on their husband earning enough to support a whole household. Whoa there, little rebels!

But this isnt actually about fighting the system: this is about women fighting against their own insecurities about their lives. And because of these insecurities, they then insist they are the oppressed ones, the brave speakers of truth. In other words, its another pointless culture war to chuck on the teetering pile in between Spiked Online and Laurence Fox.

And its also about something else. Rather awkwardly for the British tradwives who like to suggest their movement is just about dressing in Cath Kidston and letting their husband choose where they are going on holiday in the US and elsewhere it is very much part of the alt-right movement. It is especially popular among white supremacists, who are extremely down with the message that white women should submit to their husband and focus on making as many white babies as possible. British tradwives insist this has nothing to do with them: Someone even said, this type of housewife was promoted by the Third Reich. And its like: Really?! I didnt even know that! Pettitt told the BBC, sitting underneath her union jack bunting, musing about how we dont even know the identity of our country right now.

Now look, clearly being a happy housewife does not mean you are a Nazi. But also, maybe its time to dial down a notch, tradwives, for your own sake? After all, if youre constantly posting videos to YouTube about how to press your husbands clothes, and talking to Phillip and Holly about how you love to flirt with your husband, how do you have time to do any tradwife-ing?

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Tradwives: the new trend for submissive women has a dark heart and history - The Guardian

Wilson Sporting Goods, MCM Worldwide, And The NFL Team Up To Create Exclusive Collector’s Edition Football For Super Bowl LIV – Yahoo Sports

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NEW YORK and CHICAGO, Jan. 28, 2020 /PRNewswire/ --Wilson Sporting Goods, the luxury travel and accessories brand, MCM Worldwide, and the National Football League (NFL) unveiled today a new collector's edition football exclusive for Super Bowl LIV in Miami, FL. This is the third product drop to emerge from the Wilson and MCM partnership, which started in 2018, and the collaboration's second limited-edition football with the NFL.

At the nexus of fashion and sport, Wilson, MCM Worldwide, and the NFL created a Limonta gold football to celebrate the 100th anniversary of professional football. Three panels of the football feature MCM's iconic Visetos design, and the main panel features the Wilson script logo and NFL's 100-year season logo. The ball is finished with sleek black laces.

"Our partnership with MCM celebrates the cultural phenomenon and energy of the sports lifestyle movement," said Amanda Lamb, Wilson's Global Marketing Director of Team Sports. "For Super Bowl LIV, we wanted to create a football that brought together the very best of Wilson, MCM, and the League. The result is a ball that is unlike anything football and fashion fans have seen before, and that celebrates the 100th anniversary of the game in style."

"We are excited to see our partnership with Wilson continue to evolve. This year we set out to create a truly unique, limited, collector's football to commemorate the NFL's 100th anniversary, and the result has exceeded expectations again," said Patrick Valeo, President of MCM Americas. "Sports and Football have created a natural platform for players to express their personal style and MCM is honored to have so many athletes representing and supporting the brand on and off the field."

The gold Wilson x MCM x NFL football debuts today at MCM's new Miami store. This limited-edition ball is also available on http://www.mcmworldwide.com. Wilson will feature this collector's edition football in its retail and experiential space within the NFL Experience at the Miami Beach Convention Center and on http://www.wilson.com. The ball retails for $349.99 (USD).

ABOUT WILSON SPORTING GOODS CO.

Chicago-based Wilson Sporting Goods Co., a subsidiary of Amer Sports, is the world's leading manufacturer of sports equipment, apparel, and accessories. As the official football of the NFL, the College Football Playoff, and more high school and youth teams than any other company, Wilson is the undisputed performance leader in football. Through its dedication to creating products that enable athletes at every level to perform at their best, Wilson has earned its place as a leader in sporting goods for over a century.

About MCM (Modern Creation Munchen)

MCM is a luxury lifestyle goods and accessories brand founded in 1976 with an attitude defined by the cultural Zeitgeist and its German heritage with a focus on functional innovation, including the use of cutting edge techniques. Today, through its association with music, art, travel and technology, MCM embodies the bold, rebellious and aspirational. Always with an eye on the disruptive, the driving force behind MCM centers on revolutionizing classic design with futuristic materials. Appealing to the 21st Century Global Nomad generation - dreamers, creatives and digital natives - MCM's millennial and Gen Z audience is genderless, ageless, empowered and unconstrained by rules and boundaries.

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MCM is currently distributed in 650 stores worldwide including Munich, Berlin, Zurich, London, Paris, New York, Hong Kong, Shanghai, Beijing, Seoul, Tokyo, Middle East and more. For further information about MCM: http://www.mcmworldwide.com.

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Wilson Sporting Goods, MCM Worldwide, And The NFL Team Up To Create Exclusive Collector's Edition Football For Super Bowl LIV - Yahoo Sports

A Podcast on Radical Women Unearths Rare Interviews With Alice Neel, Betye Saar, and More – Hyperallergic

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Helen Frankenthaler in her East 83rd Street and Third Avenue studio, New York, April 1964 ( J. Paul Getty Trust)

As the womens march headed into its forth year this month and recent exhibitions like Abortion Is Normal seize the zeitgeist of our current political moment, a chorus of female voices seems to be setting a defiant note for 2020. A new podcast produced by the Getty gives us the chance to listen to six iconic female artists from the 20th century: Alice Neel, Lee Krasner, Betye Saar, Helen Frankenthaler, Yoko Ono, and Eva Hesse. But as the episodes of the podcast, titled Recording Artists: Radical Women, progress, we quickly recognize a common thread of struggle in the stories of these artists.

Each of the artists featured in the podcast, hosted by the historian and curator Helen Molesworth, holds a significant yet disparate role in the history of contemporary art. Though the podcast struggles with the fact that many of these women are remembered in part because of the men they dated or married a roster that includes Jackson Pollack, Robert Motherwell, Clement Greenberg, John Lennon, and Tom Doyle the narrative of individual choice found in Radical Women contributes to its relatability today. Every feminist wave has been forced to confront the myriad of social restraints, requirements, and contradictions inherent in definitions of autonomy.

Even today, it remains extremely difficult for women to tell their own stories, and Radical Women is so compelling because much of its narrative comes from rare interviews with the artists themselves. For the podcast, Molesworth delved into the archives of the Getty Research Institute to highlight and curate a series of artist conversations recorded in the 1960s and 70s with historians Cindy Nemser and Barbara Rose. These interviews reflect a time when art and the country itself were in a state of flux, caught between the new feminist wave and an art world too comfortable devaluing female artists. The podcast is part revelation for the remarkable insight it provides, and part affirmation, as these six women recount all too familiar experiences as female artists.

Alice Neel, with her curmudgeonly tone and self-effacing humor, kicks off the series by saying, My mother used to say to me, I dont know what you expect to do, youre onlya girl. The oldest of the artists covered in the series, Neel was born at the turn of the century, and is celebrated today for her unapologetically honest portraits of friends, family, neighbors, and herself. Rebellious in the face of Abstract Expressionism, Minimalism, and Conceptual Art, Neel was committed to her figurative work, painting feminist subjects while utterly rejecting the idea that feminism or sex had anything to do with her painting.

I dont think the quality of being a good teacher or good artist has anything to do with sex. I think its just objective. You either are or you arent, she explains to Cindy Nemser in 1975. A common theme throughout the episodes is the hesitation these women felt at being described as female artists. Helen Frankenthaler also refuted the question of gender and the role it played in her work, mainly large-scale, colorful paintings made with her signature technique of pouring and staining. Writing to Nemser in 1970, Frankenthaler states, I am concerned primarily with Painting and not Painting by Women.

One of the more complicated and enlightening episodes seeks to reconcile Lee Krasners contributions as a first-wave Abstract Expressionist with her role as the wife and widow of Jackson Pollock. While understanding Krasner exclusively in her own right is admittedly very difficult in retrospect, the discussion around her artistic autonomy is undeniably relevant. But if you remember, my whole background is one where I dont have encouragement right from the beginning, she tells Rose.

Yoko Ono struggles with a similar story as both an artist associated with Fluxus and the avant-garde, as well as the wife and widow of John Lennon. Twelve years old when the bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Onocreated event scores like Grapefruit and performance pieces that were deeply inspired by both feminism and her pacifist ideology. In Cut Piece, first staged in 1964,Ono invited audience members to cut and keep a piece of her best suit with a pair of scissors as she sat perfectly still onstage,referencing her memories of war and refugees as well as the complicated dynamics of power and gender. At the preview for her solo exhibition at MoMA in 2015, I remember Ono telling a room full of young art writers to continue working even when it seems like no one will ever notice.

At 93, Betye Saar has become an icon, with a recent exhibition at MoMAand an ongoing show at LACMA, and yet her episode begins with a confession. It took a long time, even for me to say, I am an artist, she tells Nemser in 1975. An overlooked figure in many art history textbooks, the episode focusing on Saar highlights the role of Black artists during the Civil Rights movement and the Los Angeles community they created during the 1970s. Working with found objects and assemblage, Saar collected items imbued with racist imagery and mixed them together with personal snapshots and mystical talismans to create charged readymades.

The final episode in the series focuses on Eva Hesse, whose exciting artistic career was cut short by a tragic brain tumor at the age of 34. The episode uses an interview she gave with Nemser in 1970 just a few months before her death. With her work on endless rotation in the Chelsea galleries today, this was perhaps my favorite episode, as it frames Hesses quiet, thoughtful musings against her bold, almost affronting sculptures. All I wanted was to find my own scene, Hesse tells Nemser, my own world, my own inner peace or inner turmoil; but I wanted it to be mine.

In her conclusion to the podcast series,Molesworth states that the problem with being a female artist is that it both doesnt matter and it means everything at the same time, and that sentiment can be traced throughout the entire series. There is something unprecedented about hearing these women tell their own stories and something deeply saddening about the stories themselves. Perhaps, taking advice from the artists, the work they created and continue to create is a better way to understand the world as they experienced it, as it both personified and defied their era and expectations around their gender. As Eve Hesse states, the way to beat discrimination in art is by art. Excellence has no sex.

Recording Artists: Radical Women is available on the Getty website and other streaming services.

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A Podcast on Radical Women Unearths Rare Interviews With Alice Neel, Betye Saar, and More - Hyperallergic

Brighton, Bristol, York … city centres signal the end of the road for cars – The Guardian

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In a multi-storey car park in the centre of Brighton, Peter Willcocks on hand in a hi-vis jacket in case any motorists needed assistance had two short words in response to the councils plan to create a car-free zone by 2023.

Its crap, he said. This is a seaside town, it relies on visitors. If they ban cars, people wont come. It will really damage the towns economy. The car park was always busy, he added, although he personally hadnt driven a car for 25 years, preferring to use the excellent buses.

Traffic in Brighton was a big problem, said Victor Ribadulla, who drives his pizza trailer to the station forecourt every morning. There was no other way for him to run his business, he said: Of course I worry about pollution. But there are just so many things to worry about. Maybe the ban is a good idea who knows?

Brighton and Hove council hopes to give Ribadulla an answer by commissioning a major study on the impact of a car-free city centre. Last week, Labour, Green and Conservative councillors unanimously backed the measure proposed by their youngest colleague, 24-year-old Amy Heley.

It is the latest in a wave of initiatives over the past year by councils around the UK to cut congestion and air pollution, and to reclaim urban areas for pedestrians and cyclists. The trend has led some transport analysts to argue that the 2020s could herald an end to the supremacy of the motor car in the minds of the public and planners.

This month, Birmingham announced proposals to ban motorists from driving through the centre an extraordinary move from a conurbation which gave the world the phrase spaghetti junction to describe its complicated interchange of roads and flyovers and the ancient city of York said it planned to ban private vehicles within its medieval walls within three years.

Earlier initiatives from Bristol, Edinburgh and Manchester, among other places, include designating certain days as car-free, banning diesel vehicles, blocking off zones to traffic for certain hours of the day and imposing charges. There is no consensus we are in a time of experiments as we redefine what is important to our lives in cities and towns, said Peter Jones, professor of transport and sustainable development at University College London.

At a micro-level, a change in public mood is also evident. Last year, Walton Street in Oxford, a rat run for city drivers, was closed for repairs. Now, after some residents reported improvements in air quality, safety and noise, the council is consulting on whether to make the closure permanent. Hammersmith Bridge in west London was closed to vehicles indefinitely last April after critical faults were discovered. Instead of spending funds estimated at up to 120m on repairing the problems, some locals are campaigning for a pedestrian and cyclist-friendly garden bridge.

Many councils considering curbs on traffic are seeking ways to fulfil pledges to become carbon neutral against a backdrop of rising anxiety about the climate crisis and demands for action on individual, local, national and global levels.

There arent a huge amount of things a local authority can actually do but transport policy is one of the few areas where they have discretion, said Tim Schwanen, director of the transport studies unit at Oxford Universitys school of geography and the environment.

And, in terms of air quality hotspots, this kind of intervention really does have an effect. From a carbon point of view, its largely symbolic rather than making a material difference. But it may be a first step in helping to shift opinion.

The new trend was the beginning of a wider realisation of the folly of allowing free rein to the motor car in cities and towns, according to Christian Wolmar, a writer and broadcaster specialising in transport. At the beginning of the last century, cars were fairly marginal but by the 1920s they became dominant. Transport policy for the next 50 years was entirely oriented towards the facilitation of the movement of cars. Cycling was wiped out and pedestrians were mown down in their hundreds. Obstructing the highway became a criminal offence. Planners designed town centres around the car, incorporating ring roads and urban motorways, he said.

There was a turning point in the 1970s, when the newly formed Greater London council killed off a proposal for a motorway ring road inside London. We started to see bus lanes, traffic wardens, 20mph zones and the congestion charge in London. Now there is a zeitgeist around climate change and healthier living. Were winning some battles and losing others. But the war is still going on, Wolmar said.

The battles may be helped by a generational shift in attitudes. There are studies which show that millennials and Generation Z have shifted away from car use and car ownership, to the extent that some dont bother getting a driving licence, said Schwanen. Heley, the Green party Brighton councillor, said her peer group did not rely on cars: We cant afford them.

Some say that future generations will find it incomprehensible that individuals were once permitted to drive private cars into urban centres at will, just as todays young people are horrified that their parents could once smoke cigarettes on planes and in cinemas and restaurants.

But the issues are combustible, according to Schwanen: I often tell local politicians: if you want to kill your career, reduce parking. Transport is politically charged and while we are seeing an acceleration in plans and proposals, it will be even more interesting to see what actually gets implemented.

Developing such plans in a fast-changing society is challenging. Should private hire vehicles such as Uber be exempt? What about the growing number of delivery vehicles, bringing groceries and other goods to our front doors? Are electric cars permissible? Do car-free zones simply displace traffic elsewhere?

London pioneered the trend in the UK with the introduction of the congestion charge in 2003 and the ultra-low emission zone last year. Without doubt, were still leading the way in the UK, but its great to see this becoming a national conversation, said Will Norman, the capitals walking and cycling commissioner. For too long, London has been an outlier on this, but now other cities are stepping up. Central government now needs to catch up with what local authorities are doing.

In Brighton, Heley is delighted at the move towards a car-free city centre. Air pollution here is similar to central London. The seafront is like a motorway. And yet lots of young families move to Brighton because they want cleaner air beside the sea. I was sitting in meetings thinking, were talking about becoming net zero by 2030 but how are we actually going to achieve it unless we start doing things. I saw what other cities were doing and I thought, what are we waiting for?

Brighton, a city with a strong radical, green image, and the countrys only Green MP, should be at the forefront, but is actually behind a lot of UK cities its quite embarrassing. There would be a just transition to car-free, Heley added: Its not about shaming or punishing people. Measures such as park-and-ride schemes, cheaper bus fares and charging points for electric cars were needed alongside a ban.

Schwanen warned against a kickback if driving became woven into wider cultural wars such as those over veganism and flight-shaming. But Wolmar said that the British public was capable of big shifts in social attitudes look at smoking and gay marriage.

Everyone who works in transport policy knows what needs to be done. But you need the zeitgeist to change. And now it is changing.

Birmingham

The UKs largest council announced plans this month to ban private vehicles from driving through the city centre. Motorists would still be able to drive into the city, but would be prevented from crossing the city in a move to tackle air pollution and prioritise cycling, walking and public transport. Other measures include introducing car-sharing and 20mph limit in the city centre. The council has said that road transport accounts for a third of CO2 emissions in Birmingham.

York

The historic city aims to ban all non-essential private car journeys inside its medieval walls within three years to cut carbon emissions. Disabled drivers would be exempt. Many streets around the minster, above, are already pedestrianised. The city, which attracts almost 7 million tourists each year, aims to become carbon neutral by 2030.

Edinburgh

The Scottish capital is in the midst of an 18-month trial during which city centre streets are closed to traffic for several hours on the first Sunday of every month. It was the first UK city to join the Open Streets initiative to combat air pollution and reclaim city centres for pedestrians and cyclists.

Bristol

The city will become the first in the UK to ban privately owned diesel cars from its streets next year. It will prohibit such vehicles from entering a central zone from 7am until 3pm, or incur a fine. Taxis and emergency services will be exempt, and commercial vehicles will have to pay to enter the area.

Oxford

The city and county councils have proposed the UKs first zero emission zone in the city centre. Drivers of diesel and petrol vehicles will be charged 10 a day to enter the zone, increasing to 20 in December 2024. The penalty for not paying the charge will be 120. People living inside the zone will pay a discounted rate of 10%.

Glasgow

The city council has proposed limiting private vehicle access to George Square. Under the plans to be debated this week, two sides of the famous city centre plaza would be pedestrianised, and the other two restricted to public transport and cyclists.

Manchester

Mayor Andy Burnham and cycling and walking commissioner Chris Boardman have launched a five-year plan to increase daily walking trips by a third and double and double again cycling journeys by 2025. This isnt just about switching from cars to bikes and cutting harmful emissions its also about what we want our towns and cities to look like, and how we look after our public spaces, Burnham said last week.

Portsmouth

Plans have been unveiled for the UKs first car-free community. Planning permission has been sought for a new neighbourhood of 4,000 homes on the eastern side of Portsmouth harbour, with streets dedicated to pedestrians and cyclists, and vehicles confined to a vast underground car park. Portsmouth city council, which is backing the development, said it could be a beacon for the whole of Portsmouth and the rest of the country.

Cardiff

The city is planning to charge non-residents 2 to drive into the centre as part of 2bn transport vision to reduce congestion and improve air quality. Other measures include new tram/train routes, new park-and-ride sites, cheaper bus fares, more walking and cycling routes and an electric bike pilot scheme.

London

The capital pioneered the congestion charge in 2003 and it is now one of the largest in the world. In 2019 it introduced the 24-hour ultra-low emission zone, which will expand to cover all of Greater London next year. More than 27km of roads were closed on its annual car-free day last year. Mayor Sadiq Khan has said he wants 80% of all journeys in the capital to be made by walking, cycling or public transport by 2041, compared with 63% now.

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Brighton, Bristol, York ... city centres signal the end of the road for cars - The Guardian

Jeanine Cummins on American Dirt: I had, and still have, a lot of fear about being the person to tell this story – hotpress.com

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American Dirt is already shaping up to be one of the books of 2020. By setting out to humanise the plight of migrants crossing the US-Mexico border, author Jeanine Cummins has opened up a dialogue that has the potential to shape how people will vote in what promises to be a brutal Presidential election.

Timing is everything. American Dirt is Jeanine Cummins fourth novel and it has struck a chord like nothing she has ever written before.

In 2013, when I decided to write a book about migrants, I didnt expect people to care so deeply, Jeanine explains. That was way before the issue was in the national zeitgeist. But even since its become a hot button issue, the conversation tends to be incredibly superficial in the U.S. I didnt know if a novel about migrants would resonate so its tremendously gratifying to see the response. Resonate is putting it mildly. American Dirt has been greeted with international acclaim, including rave reviews from literary giants like Stephen King and Don Winslow. Lauded as a Grapes Of Wrath for the modern age, the gripping novel follows a middle-class Mexican woman and her son, who find themselves on the migrant trail to the US border, after surviving a massacre carried out by a local drug cartel.

Cummins begins the book with a letter to the reader. In 2017, a migrant died every twenty-one hours along the United States-Mexico border. That number does not include the many migrants who simply disappear each year. It is a shocking revelation. But, she adds, statistics cannot conjure individual human beings.

By telling the compelling story of mother-and-son protagonists Lydia and Luca, Cummins aims to humanise the migrant crisis for middle American readers. These characters happen to be Mexican and Central American, but the whole point of the book is that they could be anyone, she tells me. They could be from Syria or California or Australia. We could all find ourselves in Lydias shoes in these uncertain times.

Cummins observes that the conversation about immigration has been marked by a singular lack of humanity. Even in 2013, before Trump and the resurgence of casual racism, I had this sense of growing unease about how Latino people, and specifically Latino migrants, were being portrayed in the media and popular culture, she explains. "On the right, theres this insane caricature of the violent mob, like the narcos we see on Netflix scary people who are coming here to deal drugs, rape our women and steal our healthcare. Then, on the left, theres this equally simplistic and unrealistic characterisation of migrants as these impoverished, illiterate, rural people who need us to save them, because we have this saviour complex on the left. In neither narrative are we recognising that theyre actually just people. I felt there was an opening there to speak to the hearts of people, and remind them that migrants are just like them, she continues. They love their kids too.

The inspiration for the book came, in part at least, from personal experience. Jeanines husband, an Irish immigrant, lived undocumented in the US for years before they married. She is well aware that his experience was incredibly different to, and more privileged than, what people from Honduras or Guatemala, riding La Bestia (a treacherous migrant train journey) have to endure. But still...

He endured a decade of this terrifying situation of living as an undocumented person, she says. But he was a white undocumented person, a native English speaker, and he had all the privilege of being a member of arguably the most beloved immigrant group in this country. People here could not love the Irish more, which is kind of crazy when you look back a couple of generations, and see how reviled they were. This is all so short-sighted. Wre going to hate someone else next. It just happens to be the migrants at the southern border now.

It took five years for Cummins to research American Dirt. She travelled extensively on both sides of the US-Mexico border, visiting shelters for migrants, orphanages and desayunadores (breakfast soup kitchens).

I endeavoured to meet migrants, to understand the real conditions that theyre facing, Cummins says. But I was also there to meet the people who have given their lives to serving migrants and protecting vulnerable people on the borderlands.

Cummins engagement with the plight of migrants also stems from a lifelong interest in the universal nature of trauma. Her first book, A Rip In Heaven, told the story of her own familys tragedy. In 1991, a group of men raped her two cousins and beat her brother, before throwing them off a bridge into the Mississippi River. Her brother was the only survivor.

I wrote that book because I felt so angry that the story of my familys grief had been stolen by these men, she explains. They were convicted of their crimes and they were on death row and then, suddenly, everybody wanted to do a documentary on them, and give them a platform to proclaim their innocence. My cousins had been demoted to a footnote in that story.

There are so many violent, macho stories about narcos out there, she continues. Im interested in taking the story away from violent men and giving it to the women and children, and in telling the tale of what it feels like to be living in that trauma. Thats the unusual thing about this book. Thats why people are paying attention.

In an era in which identity politics are at the forefront of public discourse, however, Cummins decision to tell the story of the migrant trail has sparked criticism. In an authors note at the end of the novel, she remarks that she wished someone slightly browner would have written it.

I had, and still have, a lot of fear about being the person to tell this story, she tells me. Theres been plenty of debate about whether it was my right to do so. I identify as a Latina person, and Spanish was my first language. But my identity is something I have struggled with my entire life: Im not brown enough. And now, because of this book, Im being called to account for myself in ways that are impossible to do. I cannot change who I am. I am a person of Latino heritage, but Im also white. In some ways, I feel like Im marginalised from both ends.

Cummins agrees that there is a danger of fiction becoming horribly circumscribed by what one is allowed to write.

So many writers right now are afraid, she argues. This cancel culture thing is pervasive right now. If someone decides youre stepping out of your lane, the attack is coming. The tenor of that conversation is so vicious that people dont even want to risk it, because youre really sticking your neck out.

I understand where this movement comes from, and the need to be fiercely protective of representation, she continues. But when we chase white writers away from engaging with these topics, were just letting them off the hook. I deeply believe that every person in this country has a moral obligation to engage with these stories.

So, if I have a voice, and I can use that voice to try to spark a conversation in this country, that may open up a deeper dialogue in the middle-class populace, why not be a bridge in that way?

With American Dirt being published at the start of an election year, that conversation is likely to be timely.

Ive often said that the reason we cant get any traction when we talk about immigration in this country is because the language is so problematic, she notes. As soon as you open your mouth and choose your label, its like sticking a flag in the ground: migrants, aliens, undocumented, illegal. So, through the great magic of fiction, were stripping the labels off, and getting down to the intimate level of humanity.

Its a great moment for me as a writer, to know that, in an election year, book clubs will be sitting down to look at this book together, she smiles. A group of women, sitting around a dining room table in Kansas, who have probably never had this conversation before, can begin without having to choose a label. Its my tremendous hope that this story might render empathy in some readers who havent thought deeply about this before especially in an election year.

Because then we can then take that empathy to the ballot box.

American Dirt is out now.

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Jeanine Cummins on American Dirt: I had, and still have, a lot of fear about being the person to tell this story - hotpress.com

It’s Time to Bring the War Home Again – CounterPunch

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As the dust settles on Donald Trumps latest high octane game of chicken with the Islamic Republic, an eerie calm seems to have risen like fog from Soleimanis grave to take its place. But while the whole world exhales, war nerds like myself struggle like David Carradine to find the loop to loosen the belt around our throats. Thats because deep down in our wonky ill-nourished guts we know that this shit is far from over.

Unlike Trumps usual foreign policy impulses, that seem to be governed more by techno-Tourettes syndrome and penile insecurity than anything resembling a sane strategy, there is a very sick method to the madness when it comes to his dance with Iran, and thats because the clumsy footed fuck is dutifully following the same choreography as George W. Bush. The choreography of slow consistent escalation that can only end in the most devastating war the world has seen since the fall of Germanys Third Reich and the rise of Uncle Sams Fourth. Trump may be a pathologically unbalanced wild card on every issue from abortion to bathroom etiquette, but he still takes his marching orders from the same Zionist piggy bank as the neocons he won 2016 mocking.

Every step Trump has taken since entering the topographic maze of Pennsylvania Avenue has been tailor made to provoke Iran into the genre of open warfare they have masterfully avoided since their Reagan era bloodbath with Trumps Middle Eastern counterpart Saddam Hussein. The violation of the Nuclear Deal. The escalation of the Shia genocide in Yemen. The recognition of colonial Jerusalem. The build up of troops to fight our own former proxies in neighboring Iraq. The Gulf of Tonkin games in the Strait of Hormuz. And now the calculated cold blooded murder of Irans greatest strategist, the man who designed the Islamic Republics cagey Fourth Generation foreign policy which has made a fantastic fool of the nations most fearsome foes.

According to Iraqs embattled PM, Qassem Soleimani died on his way to peace talks with his Saudi adversaries that Trump himself encouraged. He was shot down in the most chickenshit cowardly ambush our government has thrown since J. Edna plied John Dillinger to the Biograph Theater with a whore in red. There is no going back from this one, kiddies. The dye is cast. The only question left worth asking now is what do we, the few proud anti-imperialists living in the belly of the beast, do about it? How do we prevent World War 3?

We certainly have the numbers on our side. Every poll from here to Sunday makes it abundantly clear that Americans are not willing to follow our fearless leader into the killing fields of Persia, not after the Iraq fiasco. So this should be easy, right? Wrong. Liberal democracy has been carefully constructed to be the most effective form of authoritarianism in the history of mankind. Thats because its a prison built out of mirages of myth and illusion, rather than the cold rebar enforced stucco of vulgar totalitarianism. Their is quite simply no need for bars once youve convinced a populace that safety and security only exists within the cozy confines of their cells.

One has to look no further than Trump himself, a man so vile to the very establishment he belongs to that a third Red Scare was needed just to keep him and his followers in line on the dogma of the New Cold War. But hes jumped through every hoop like a purebred Clintonian on Iran for the cold hard cash of men like Sheldon Adelson, men like the shadowy nameless creatures who have made the social democratic Donald, Bernie Sanders, the largest recipient of defense industry donations in 2020, even as the system hedges its bets by tossing tacks onto his campaign trail. The sad reality is that voting dont mean jack-shit when the banks own the ballots. To quote Neil Young .Were finally on our own.

So what do we do then, dearest motherfuckers? To be dangerously frank, whatever the fuck it takes. Thats how we pulled our troops from Indochina in the early Seventies. Sure, cunts like Ken Burns will have you believing it was the work of thoughtful politicians and banjo-strumming pacifists, but every successful social upheaval in history has been the beneficiary of a diversity of tactics. America didnt suddenly come to its senses on Vietnam, it was terrified that not leaving those jungles would mean losing control of the mothership.

Kids were clogging the Capitol streets with Vietcong flags and repurposed football helmets while whole platoons were turning their guns against the officer class and refusing to die for them or their stupid fucking war. Sure, the American public was gradually won over by the Quixotic non-violent street theatre of the Yippies, Woodstock and the McGovern campaign. But, as disturbing as it might sound, that public support had to be weaponized by the incendiary propaganda of the Weather Underground, Stonewall and the Days of Rage, creating a culture of near apocalyptic upheaval permeating every corner of the zeitgeist. Even then, it wasnt enough to end the slaughter. It simply forced Custer to take to the sky and blitz millions of yellow people charcoal black before starving them with near genocidal sanctions.

Judging by the statistics of the war machines own optics on the results of a hypothetical American ground invasion of Iran, Im willing to bet that this will be the likely strategy of todays blood thirsty mandarins. A devastating air war on Iranian infrastructure coupled with the kind of crippling sanctions were already seeing. The results will be genocidal. Iran wont exactly be conquered, it will simply be reduced to a garish and malleable slush of shattered dreams and mutilated viscera.

Its these kind of moral revelations, along with the fact that the Helter Skelter of the Summer of Hate broke far too many good eggs, that convinces me that the anti-imperialist movement in this country needs to do more than just tear a page from the SDS playbook, we need to write a whole new chapter. We need to take a page from the book of Soleimani and develop our own form of Fifth Generation Warfare. We need to use the theatre of the New Left without the careless body count. We need to bring the war home, but only the parts of it worth fighting. The civilian militias of Muqtada and Hezbollah. The popular occupations of enemy embassies by the rowdy youths of Bagdad. The regional drop-out autonomy of Rojava. Im not saying things wont get ugly. We must prepare ourselves for that eventuality. But we dont need to be the ones who make it ugly.

I guess it goes without saying that Ive always been a bit more Malcolm X than Martin Luther King, but lets face it, dearest motherfuckers, the war on Iran has already begun. We need to bring that war home to end it, but we need to fight it right. Its the only way well deserve to win.

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It's Time to Bring the War Home Again - CounterPunch

Scottish-Rwandan actor Ncuti Gatwa on his role in the hit Sex Education series – The National

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HOW does it feel to become famous overnight? Ncuti Gatwa is a good man to ask. Last year, the Rwandan-Scottish actor stepped on to a plane in New York in relative obscurity (I had 700 followers on Instagram) and by the time his flight landed in London eight hours later, that figure had leapt up by several hundred thousand.

While Gatwa, 27, was soaring somewhere high over the Atlantic, the debut series of Sex Education had begun streaming on Netflix. His character the ebullient, flamboyant and adorable Eric Effiong was an immediate hit with viewers.

Suddenly everyone wanted to know all about Gatwa. It was pretty instant, he reflects. In the weeks following, being out on the street and getting recognised and stopped was the weirdest experience of my life.

He breaks off into a belly laugh at the memory. Buying my pain aux raisins and someone wanting a selfie was so confusing. Fame is something I still havent got my head around. It will be quite a long process of trying to get used to it.

Nowhere, it seems, is safe from the adoring masses. The strangest place I have been recognised is a urinal, he says. I was like: Why are you talking to me now?. That is the weirdest thing, but the most uncomfortable is when you are on the street and someone just grabs you.

Obviously they recognise you, but you dont know them. Being grabbed randomly out of nowhere is quite scary. I am from Fife, so if you grab me randomly out of nowhere, it might not end well for you, he jokes. That is something I have had to get used to. Most people are very nice.

When Sex Education debuted last January, it generated a huge buzz largely through word-of-mouth and went on to become one of the most-streamed Netflix shows of the year, garnering more UK viewers than cult series such as The Umbrella Academy, You and Black Mirror.

Its easy to see why. The comedy-drama deftly taps into the zeitgeist of what it means to be a Gen Z teenager or young adult today (kudos to the shows creator Laurie Nunn, it bears all hallmarks of the way that the late John Hughes spoke to a Gen X audience in the 1980s with his coming-of-age epics Sixteen Candles and The Breakfast Club).

The cast is led by Asa Butterfield, known for his roles in The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, Hugo and Miss Peregrines Home for Peculiar Children. He plays socially awkward teen Otis Milburn, with Gillian Anderson of The X-Files and The Fall fame as his overbearing, sex therapist mother.

Otis is befriended by classmate Maeve Wiley a misfit bad-girl who, played by Emma Mackey, is whip-smart, savage and savvy and together they set up an ad-hoc sex therapy clinic giving relationship advice to their clueless peers.

Otiss best friend Eric (the delectable Gatwa) has his own gripping and powerful story arc, navigating life within the constraints of a strict, religious Ghanaian-Nigerian family, while exploring his identity as a gay, black teen.

Be it experiencing the perils of an overactive gag reflex (one memorable scene involves a banana) or an unexpected tryst with the resident school bully, the biggest joy is that Eric isnt relegated to the tired old cliche of a gay and/or black best friend straight from Central Casting.

He is a force of nature in his own right, something which has struck a chord among many viewers. I feel very honoured to play a character like Eric, who is gay, but his sexuality isnt his defining feature or used as comic relief, says Gatwa.

It is just who he is we are watching a young boy be who he is. That, I think, has had a bit of an impact in the gay community.

I get lots of messages from people who live all over the world, from places where being gay might be illegal or they might be killed and if their family knew, things would be bad for them. I get messages every day from people like that telling me how much the show and Eric has helped them.

It is important that we continue to keep telling stories from new perspectives and have proper representation on our screens, because it is educational and empowering.

Gatwa admits that the popularity of Sex Education, which has returned for a second series this month, was something he was unprepared for. Nor did the actor envisage becoming its breakout star.

No. Full stop. I didnt think it was going to take off in the way it did, he says. The show release had a good hype and I was waiting for the hype to die down. And it didnt. He laughs incredulously. It is fantastic being part of a show like this. It is something I am very, very proud of.

With time to take stock and reflect, Im curious to hear Gatwas take on why Sex Education has had such a far-reaching impact, amassing a loyal fanbase and the plaudits of TV critics alike.

I think people are drawn to the fact that it tackles issues in a way where we arent trying to preach to anyone or shame anybody, he asserts. We are just trying to show the world for what it is.

It is a show of its time as well. We are having a lot of conversations about diversity and inclusion. A couple of years ago we had the start of the #MeToo movement which was something that was very necessary.

We are challenging the way we think and interact with each other in our society. The world is having a real rethink about how we communicate and interact with each other. I think Sex Ed is a show that epitomises this moment that is happening in the world right now.

He pauses. Does that make sense? Or have I just waffled? Like much of what Gatwa says, his words provide illuminating insight. Thoughtful and articulate, he is not only an excellent spokesperson for the show, but one could argue, his generation.

Technically having been born in 1992 hes a millennial rather than Gen Z, although Gatwa makes a convincing teenager. Whats it like to rewind the clock a decade? The question prompts another guffaw of laughter. Im not going to lie. It is a weird frame of mind you have to put yourself in.

Stepping into the fictional Moordale Secondary School with its classrooms, echoing corridors and infamous toilet block the show is shot at the former University of South Wales campus at Caerleon on the outskirts of Newport definitely helps, he attests.

There are lockers around us, Ive got a backpack on and Im riding a bike, says Gatwa. You would be surprised how quickly you revert to being a kid again. All of us, the actors and crew, we become like big kids on set.

His own childhood was spent in Scotland. When he was two, Gatwas family left Rwanda as refugees, fleeing the genocide. He grew up in Oxgangs in the south-west of Edinburgh, and then, when he was 15, they moved to Dunfermline.

Arriving at a new secondary school, Gatwa found himself the target of bullies, who set up a racist social media page about him. It is a horrendous and incomprehensible scenario for any young person to experience, yet there is no lingering bitterness as he speaks.

Edinburgh is a city, so it was a little bit more multicultural, he recalls. It was easier in Edinburgh. Although growing up in Oxgangs wasnt always easy. Moving to Fife that is when it became a bit more of a problem.

Obviously, it wasnt nice. But it was one of those things I had always known, so I was almost desensitised to it. At the same time, my parents very much instilled a sense of pride within myself and about where I come from, so I was never too disheartened when I was going home.

Also, I know that Im pretty f***ing cool, says Gatwa, laughing to lighten the mood. Im pretty aware of that. I thought: You lot are going to like me eventually. When I moved to Dunfermline, it was the first time I realised how different I looked to everyone else who grew up around me.

That is where I learned about ignorance and hate. I think, for them, they had probably never seen a black person in their life. The way they behaved was something that is never excusable, but I feel like it was coming from a place of ignorance.

In the end, he did win them over, eventually becoming friends with his former bullies (the quote marks are insisted upon by Gatwa) and professes that he harbours no grudges.

Scotland will always be my home. It is where I am from and it is where I grew up. I love the warmth of Scottish people. When I think back on that time, I dont think horror and torment. It was a bit tricky but, ultimately, has made me a stronger person.

Its an admirable way to look at things. Not everyone would have his strength. When Gatwa describes himself as a Rwandan-Scotsman, the pride is palpable. Rwanda is the country that birthed me and Scotland is the country that raised me. They are both dear places in my heart.

When it came to a career, it is difficult to imagine he would have considered anything but acting. Yet, it took a little while, admits Gatwa, for the penny to drop that it could be a legitimate way to make a living.

I was a bit, um, highly spirited in school, he says, grasping for a diplomatic way to phrase his teenage jinks. My parents are both very academic and initially wanted me to follow an academic route. I thought about doing that, but it was not for me.

It got to the point where, really and truly, drama was the only subject I was turning up for. My teachers spotted that, and they saw how much I loved it. They said I should think about going to drama school, but I didnt think that was even a possibility.

I didnt really know that drama school was a thing. I certainly didnt think being a young, working-class, black Scottish person, that I could go on to be an actor and forge a successful career. The first time someone said it, I laughed.

But then they kept saying it. They told me about RSAMD [now the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland] in Glasgow. I went along, auditioned and they sent me my unconditional offer really quickly. I thought: This must be for me.

I love telling stories. Im a bit of a chatterbox as you can tell. The fact I have made my job something where I can use words, that is so cool to me. I took to it like a duck to water. I thought: This is amazing. I want to do this for the rest of my life.

Gatwa cut his teeth in theatre and after studying at the Royal Conservatoire went on to win a place on the graduate scheme at Dundee Rep where he performed in the acclaimed 2013 revival of David Greigs Victoria.

He later landed roles at the Shakespeares Globe theatre in London in A Midsummer Nights Dream and 946: The Amazing Story of Adolphus Tips.

His first TV appearance was in BBC Four sitcom Bob Servant. Gatwa played a customer queueing up at the bold Bobs burger van in Broughty Ferry. It was! he enthuses, when I remind him. Thank you! No one ever brings that up. I played: Burger Man No. 2.

It was my first time in front of a camera and getting a mic put on. I had one line. But it was such a fun day. I learned so much about the etiquette of being on set.

Gatwa also had a part as a police officer in Stonemouth, the BBC Scotland adaptation of the late Iain Bankss novel, which aired in 2015. It was great show and a great book, he says. That was another good learning opportunity for me being able to shoot in Scotland in a gripping drama.

Then came Sex Education. And his public profile exploded into the stratosphere. When we talk, Gatwa is in a London hotel amid the whirlwind that is the gargantuan Netflix publicity machine.

The conveyor belt interview scenario is never a great way to make a connection with an interview subject, yet with Gatwa the conversation flows easily. While fiercely private about his life off camera, he does touch briefly on his family and being the youngest of three children.

My dad works in churches he has always worked in churches. He is now a professor of theology in Rwanda and a minister. My mum works for our incredible, amazing and wonderful NHS.

What about childhood heroes? Who did Gatwa look up to or have posters of on his bedroom wall? Well, I didnt have posters of them on my wall because that would be weird, but my mum and dad were my heroes, he says, a smile in his voice.

When you are a child of immigrants, you see your parents struggle and everything they have to go through for you. My parents always made me feel very loved and never feel bad about anything, but I saw how hard they worked.

My mum, moving here, building everything she has, raising us three kids with no money, when she didnt know the language and culture. They were definitely my heroes growing up.

For those who fell in love with his on-screen alter ego Eric, theres plenty more to come in series two. Eric is a little bit more comfortable within himself and settled, says Gatwa. Not in a particularly overt type of way, but he is more grounded. And unapologetic as well.

He is continuing his journey of self-discovery, learning about what is important to him and how he wants to walk through this world. There are a few new characters that arrive into Moordale who are causing a stir. One of them catches his eye, so we will see what happens there.

Sex Education series two is available to watch on Netflix now

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Scottish-Rwandan actor Ncuti Gatwa on his role in the hit Sex Education series - The National

New nano-device eats the plaque that clogs arteries: On market this year – The New Daily

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A US researcher has filed a provisional patent for a nanoparticle device that apparently eats away from the inside out atherosclerotic plaques that cause heart attacks.

And the man behind the device expects to start marketing it for sale by the end of the year.

Dr Bryan Smith, associate professor of biomedical engineering at Michigan State University, in collaboration with scientists from Stanford University, has created what he calls a Trojan horse nanoparticle that can be directed to eat debris, reducing and stabilising plaque.

Plaque or fatty deposits are made up of cholesterol, a variety of fatty substances, cellular waste products, calcium and fibrin, a clotting factor in the blood.

Plaque causes lesions in the artery wall. Branching points and bends in the artery are especially prone to atherosclerotic lesion development.

But plaque buildup formally known as atherosclerosis isnt simply a matter of fat gathering into a lump that becomes a blockage.

In fact, it can be regarded as a chronic inflammatory condition.

Atherosclerosis depends on a complex relationship with an immune cell type called a macrophage. These are white blood cells formed in response to an infection or accumulating damaged or dead cells.

Pro-inflammatory macrophages play an important role in the initiation and the progression of the plaque.

Within a lesion, macrophages take up large amounts of cholesterol and this in turn exacerbates lesion formation and fat deposits.

Hence, macrophages promote formation of complicated and unstable plaques by maintaining a pro-inflammatory microenvironment.

At the same time, anti-inflammatory macrophages contribute to tissue repair and remodelling and plaque stabilisation.

The idea is that a solution containing the nanoparticles will be introduced to a patient intravenously, proceeding to flow through their bloodstream.

According to a statement from Michigan State University, the new nanoparticle contains single-walled carbon nanotubes that are loaded with an SHP1 inhibitor and this is directly targeted at pro-inflammatory macrophages that feature an SHP1 signalling pathway.

This pathway stops the macrophages from consuming apoptotic (dead) cells and cell debris, which actually make up the core of plaque deposits.

With the SHP1 pathway shut down, however, the macrophages are triggered to eat the plaque.

In other words, they cause the plaques to eat themselves from the inside out, thus reducing their size and stabilising their growth, the university says.

Dr Smith said future clinical trials on the nanoparticle are expected to reduce the risk of most types of heart attacks, with minimal side effects due to the unprecedented selectivity of the nano-drug.

We found we could stimulate the macrophages to selectively eat dead and dying cells these inflammatory cells are precursor cells to atherosclerosis that are part of the cause of heart attacks, Dr Smith said.

We could deliver a small molecule inside the macrophages to tell them to begin eating again.

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Beating the Heat in the Living Wings of Butterflies – Newswise

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Beating the Heat in the Living Wings of Butterflies

Columbia engineers and Harvard biologists discover that butterflies have specialized behaviors and wing scales to protect the living parts of their wings; nanostructures found in the wing scales could inspire the design of radiative-cooling materials to help manage excessive heat conditions; sensory network in the wings could inspire the design of advanced flying machines.

Newswise New York, NYJanuary 28, 2020A new study from Columbia Engineering and Harvard identified the critical physiological importance of suitable temperatures for butterfly wings to function properly, and discovered that the insects exquisitely regulate their wing temperatures through both structural and behavioral adaptations.

Contrary to common belief that butterfly wings consist primarily of lifeless membranes, the new study demonstrated that they contain a network of living cells whose function requires a constrained range of temperatures for optimal performance. Given their small thermal capacity, wings can overheat rapidly in the sun when butterflies cease flight, and they can cool down too much during flight in a cold environment. The study, published online today by Nature Communications, is the first to explore the implications of temperature in shaping the wing structure and behavior of butterflies.VIDEO: https://youtu.be/_J-uXQ6D8vQ

Butterfly wings are essentially vector light-detecting panels by which butterflies can accurately determine the intensity and direction of sunlight, and do this swiftly without using their eyes, says Nanfang Yu, associate professor of applied physics at Columbia Engineering and co-PI of the study.

The team, which was co-led by Naomi E. Pierce, Hessel Professor of Biology in the department of organismic and evolutionary biology, and Curator of Lepidoptera at the Museum of Comparative Zoology, Harvard, used their expertise in biology and optics to make a number of significant discoveries. By carefully removing the wing scales to enable them to peer into the interior of the wings, and by staining the neurons found within the wing, they found that butterfly wings are loaded with a network of mechanical and temperature sensors. The living tissues in the wings are actively supplied by circulatory and tracheal systems throughout the adult lifetimein the case of painted lady butterflies, for more than three weeks.

They also discovered a wing heart that beats a few dozen times per minute to facilitate the directional flow of insect blood or hemolymph through a scent pad or an androconial organ located on the wings of some species of butterflies.

Most of the research on butterfly wings has focused on colors used in signaling between individuals, says Pierce. This work shows that we should reconceptualize the butterfly wing as a dynamic, living structure rather than as a relatively inert membrane. Patterns observed on the wing may also be shaped in important ways by the need to modulate temperatures of living parts of the wing.

Yus lab designed a noninvasive technique based on infrared hyperspectral imaging, with each pixel of an image representing one infrared spectrum, that enabled them to makefor the first timeaccurate measurements of the temperature distributions over butterfly wings. This has been difficult to do until now, Pierce notes, because of the thinness and delicacy of butterfly wings.

This imaging technique enables us to examine physical adaptations that decouple the wings visible appearance from its thermodynamic properties, Yu adds. We discovered that diverse scale nanostructures and non-uniform cuticle thicknesses create a heterogeneous distribution of radiative coolingheat dissipation through thermal radiationthat selectively reduces the temperature of living structures such as wing veins and scent pads.

The effect of this regional and selective enhancement of thermal radiation was amply demonstrated in the teams thermodynamic experiments on butterfly wings. Experimental conditions that mimic the butterflies natural environment were created in Yus lab, and allowed the researchers to quantify the relative contributions of several environmental factors to the wing temperature. These included the intensity of sunlight, the temperature of the terrestrial environment, and the coldness of the sky, which can serve as an efficient heat sink of thermal radiation from heated wings. The team found that in all simulated environmental conditions, despite diverse visible colors and patterns, the areas of butterfly wings that contain live cells (wing veins and scent pads) are always cooler than the lifeless regions of the wing due to enhanced radiative cooling.

The nanostructures found in the wing scales could inspire the design of radiative-cooling materials to cope with excessive heat conditions, says Cheng-Chia Tsai, a PhD student in Yus group who was lead author of the study.

The researchers conducted a series of behavioral studies of living butterflies from six of the seven recognized butterfly families, to investigate responses to simulated sunlight applied to the wings. The team discovered that the insects use their wings to sense the direction and intensity of sunlightthe main source of warmth or overheatingand to respond with specialized behaviors to prevent overheating or overcooling of their wings. For example, all species studied exhibited a relatively constant trigger temperature of approximately 40oC (104oF), turning within a few seconds to avoid overheating of wings from a small light spot shone upon them.

Yu and Pierce are now conducting a large-scale systematic optical study of the lepidopteran collections in Harvards Museum of Comparative Zoology. These include thousands of individual specimens of hundreds of butterfly species across the entire phylogenetic tree, each specimen with full hyperspectral imaging data taken from the ultraviolet to the mid-infrared.

In 1863, Henry Walter Bates, an English naturalist and explorer, wrote about butterfly wings in his book The Naturalist on the River Amazons, On these expanded membranes Nature writes, as on a tablet, the story of the modifications of species Just like deciphering enigmatic symbols on a tablet, the team hopes to gain a comprehensive understanding of the wing coloration and pattern, which are the results of many (and often conflicting) biological and physical factors: sexual selection, warning coloration, mimicry, camouflage, and thermoregulation.

Each wing of a butterfly is equipped with a few dozen mechanical sensors that provide real-time feedback to enable complex flying patterns, Yu says. This is an inspiration for designing the wings of flying machines: perhaps wing design should not be solely based on considerations of flight dynamics, and wings designed as an integrated sensory-mechanical system could enable flying machines to perform better in complex aerodynamic conditions.

About the Study

The study is titled Physical and Behavioral Adaptations to Prevent Overheating of the Living Wings of Butterflies.

Authors are: Cheng-Chia Tsai 1; Richard A. Childers 2; Norman Nan Shi 1; Crystal Ren 1; Julianne N. Pelaez 2; Gary D. Bernard 3; Naomi E. Pierce 2, 4; and Nanfang Yu 1.1 Department of Applied Physics and Applied Mathematics, Columbia Engineering2 Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology, Harvard University3 Department of Electrical Engineering, University of Washington4 Museum of Comparative Zoology, Harvard University Currently at Department of Integrative Biology, University of California, Berkeley4 Currently at Western Digital

The study was supported by the National Science Foundation (no. PHY-1411445 awarded to N. Yu and N. Pierce, no. DEB-0447242 awarded to N. Pierce), and the Air Force Office of Scientific Research (no. FA9550-14-1-0389 through the Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative program and no. FA9550-16-1-0322 through the Defense University Research Instrumentation Program awarded to N. Yu). R. A. Childers was supported by the Graduate Research Fellowship Program of the National Science Foundation. Measurements were carried out in part at the Center for Functional Nanomaterials, Brookhaven National Laboratory, which is supported by the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Basic Energy Sciences, under contract DE-SC0012704.

The authors declare no competing interests.

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LINKS:Paper:https://nature.com/articles/s41467-020-14408-8DOI: 10.1038/s41467-020-14408-8VIDEO: https://youtu.be/_J-uXQ6D8vQhttp://engineering.columbia.edu/https://www.nature.com/ncomms/https://engineering.columbia.edu/faculty/nanfang-yuhttps://apam.columbia.edu/https://piercelab.oeb.harvard.edu/people/naomi-pierce

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Columbia Engineering

Columbia Engineering, based in New York City, is one of the top engineering schools in the U.S. and one of the oldest in the nation. Also known as The Fu Foundation School of Engineering and Applied Science, the School expands knowledge and advances technology through the pioneering research of its more than 220 faculty, while educating undergraduate and graduate students in a collaborative environment to become leaders informed by a firm foundation in engineering. The Schools faculty are at the center of the Universitys cross-disciplinary research, contributing to the Data Science Institute, Earth Institute, Zuckerman Mind Brain Behavior Institute, Precision Medicine Initiative, and the Columbia Nano Initiative. Guided by its strategic vision, Columbia Engineering for Humanity, the School aims to translate ideas into innovations that foster a sustainable, healthy, secure, connected, and creative humanity.

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Beating the Heat in the Living Wings of Butterflies - Newswise

Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur and Rice University sign memorandum – India Education Diary

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Kanpur: Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur (IITK) and Rice University signed a memorandum of understanding on 9th January 2020 at a historic event held at IITK. By signing the agreement, the two Universities agree to share resources and perform research in the development of energy solutions, materials and sustainable technologies and then expand to other areas.This is a key relationship in our new partnership strategy for international engagement and impact, said Rice University President Prof. David Leebron. India is one of our top priorities and IITK is widely acknowledged as one of the best universities in India. Were very excited about this pathbreaking collaboration to devise solutions to the energy and environmental challenges we face. he added.With the revolution in technological advances and world developing at a rapid rate, energy needs are going to be a significant challenge in the future. IIT Kanpur and Rice University, being at the forefront of cutting-edge research in energy solutions, are in an excellent position to be steering the path for international collaborative research in this area. We are especially thankful to Mr. Rahul Mehta, Mehta Family Foundation for his key role in bringing the two institutions together and making the collaboration a reality. said Prof. Karandikar, Director, IITK.Through this MoU, Rice University is the first US university to have a physical presence in India in the form of RiceIITK Research Center, located at IIT Kanpur. This center is expected to facilitate deeper levels of collaborations leading to exchange of knowledge and perspectives, enabling fertilization of ground-breaking ideas between the faculty members and researchers of Rice and IITK. This will create a fertile ground for both the institutes to undertake grand challenges in the area of sustainable energy and environment. In its initial phase, Centers research focus will be on designing and developing materials and processes for solar photovoltaics, energy storage, alternative fuels, electrocatalysis and water. Researchers on the two sides are expected to jointly supervise graduate students, publish high-impact joint research papers and garner funds from both federal agencies and industrial sponsors through joint research grants.

The Center will facilitate faculty, staff and student exchanges between the two institutes for promotion of joint research in the areas of energy, materials and sustainability. The collaboration will be fructified in a physical Rice-IITK Research Center, which will impart training to the students and researchers and conduct research in areas related to clean and sustainable energy technologies and practices in the early stage of its inception, with possibility of expansion into various other areas of not only science and engineering but also humanities. Both institutes shall appoint Faculty in-charges on each side for managing and coordinating Center activities. said Prof. Abhay Karandikar, Director, IITK.

This agreement today is the first of many we hope to support. This association has the potential to improve the quality, reach, and impact of both organizations. By bringing together two world class institutions as a team, they can accomplish deeper and more diverse solutions to problems in our world today. The Mehta Family Foundation is proud to support the creation of the Rice-IITK Research Center. We are honored to have been a part of crafting this relationship. said Mr. Rahul Mehta, CEO, Mehta Family Foundation.Rice-IITK research center will be a binding force between the two institutions, said Prof. Pulickel Ajayan, Rice University Faculty-in-Charge of the Center. IITK is a premier institution in India and very similar to Rice in size. This is a golden opportunity, something that weve always wanted to do with a partner in India that seems synergistic in many ways.For the first time, Rice faculty and students can spend substantial time at IITK. It will become their new home in India. They will become part of our family during their visit. We envisage that the deep relationship between IITK and Rice will become a benchmark for academic and research collaboration and partnerships. said Prof. Garg, Faculty-in-Charge of the Center.

The MoU with Rice is concurrent with the vision of IITK to liaise with selected top universities to enhance its global portfolio with an aim to conduct top quality research driven by exchanges between faculty members, researchers and students between the two institutes. said Prof. Joshi, Dean of International Relations, IITK.

The MoU was signed by Prof. Abhay Karandikar, Director, IITK, and Prof. Seiichi Matsuda, Interim Provost, Rice University. To signify the commitment from Rice University towards this partnership, Dean of the George R. Brown School of Engineering Prof. Reginald DesRoches; Vice President for Global and Digital Strategy Prof. Caroline Levander; Senior Fellow and Professor in the Practice Prof. Ed Emmett; Prof. Pulickel Ajayan, the Benjamin M. and Mary Greenwood Anderson Professor in Engineering and Chair, Department of Materials Science & Nano Engineering and Prof. Satish Nagarajaiah, Professor of Civil & Mechanical Engineering were present at the event.

From IIT Kanpur, Deputy Director Prof. Manindra Agrawal, Dean of Research & Development Prof. S. Ganesh, Dean of International Relations Prof. Yogesh Joshi, and Prof. Ashish Garg, Professor of Materials Science & Engineering were also present at this historic event.

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Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur and Rice University sign memorandum - India Education Diary

Team turns banana peels and other trash into ‘flash graphene’ – Futurity: Research News

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A new process can turn bulk quantities of just about any carbon source into valuable graphene flakes.

A banana peel, turned into graphene, could help facilitate a massive reduction of the environmental impact of concrete and other building materials.

This is a big deal, says James Tour, chair in chemistry as well as a professor of computer science and of materials science and nanoengineering at Rice University.

The world throws out 30% to 40% of all food, because it goes bad, and plastic waste is of worldwide concern. Weve already proven that any solid carbon-based matter, including mixed plastic waste and rubber tires, can be turned into graphene.

As reported in Nature, flash graphene is made in 10 milliseconds by heating carbon-containing materials to 3,000 Kelvin (about 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit). The source material can be nearly anything with carbon content. Food waste, plastic waste, petroleum coke, coal, wood clippings, and biochar are prime candidates, Tour says.

With the present commercial price of graphene being $67,000 to $200,000 per ton, the prospects for this process look superb, he says.

Tour says a concentration of as little as 0.1% of flash graphene in the cement used to bind concrete could lessen its massive environmental impact by a third. Cement production reportedly emits as much as 8% of human-made carbon dioxide every year.

By strengthening concrete with graphene, we could use less concrete for building, and it would cost less to manufacture and less to transport, he says.

Essentially, were trapping greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide and methane that waste food would have emitted in landfills. We are converting those carbons into graphene and adding that graphene to concrete, thereby lowering the amount of carbon dioxide generated in concrete manufacture. Its a win-win environmental scenario using graphene.

Turning trash to treasure is key to the circular economy, says co-corresponding author Rouzbeh Shahsavari, an adjunct assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering and of materials science and nanoengineering and president of C-Crete Technologies. Here, graphene acts both as a 2D template and a reinforcing agent that controls cement hydration and subsequent strength development.

In the past, Tour says, graphene has been too expensive to use in these applications. The flash process will greatly lessen the price while it helps us better manage waste.

With our method, that carbon becomes fixed, he says. It will not enter the air again.

The flash graphene process can convert that solid carbon into graphene for concrete, asphalt, buildings, cars, clothing, and more, Tour says.

Flash Joule heating for bulk graphene, which lead author Duy Luong, a graduate student, developed in the Tour lab, improves upon techniques like exfoliation from graphite and chemical vapor deposition on a metal foil that require much more effort and cost to produce just a little graphene.

Even better, the process produces turbostratic graphene, with misaligned layers that are easy to separate.

A-B stacked graphene from other processes, like exfoliation of graphite, is very hard to pull apart, Tour says. The layers adhere strongly together. But turbostratic graphene is much easier to work with because the adhesion between layers is much lower. They just come apart in solution or upon blending in composites.

Thats important, because now we can get each of these single-atomic layers to interact with a host composite, he says.

The lab notes that used coffee grounds transformed into pristine single-layer sheets of graphene.

Bulk composites of graphene with plastic, metals, plywood, concrete, and other building materials would be a major market for flash graphene, according to the researchers, who are already testing graphene-enhanced concrete and plastic.

The flash process happens in a custom-designed reactor that heats material quickly and emits all noncarbon elements as gas.

When this process is industrialized, elements like oxygen and nitrogen that exit the flash reactor can all be trapped as small molecules because they have value, Tour says.

He says the flash process produces very little excess heat, channeling almost all of its energy into the target.

You can put your finger right on the container a few seconds afterwards, Tour says. And keep in mind this is almost three times hotter than the chemical vapor deposition furnaces we formerly used to make graphene, but in the flash process the heat is concentrated in the carbon material and none in a surrounding reactor.

All the excess energy comes out as light, in a very bright flash, and because there arent any solvents, its a super clean process, he says.

Luong did not expect to find graphene when he fired up the first small-scale device to find new phases of material, beginning with a sample of carbon black.

This started when I took a look at a Science paper talking about flash Joule heating to make phase-changing nanoparticles of metals, he says. But Luong quickly realized the process produced nothing but high-quality graphene.

Atom-level simulations by coauthor Ksenia Bets confirmed that temperature is key to the materials rapid formation.

We essentially speed up the slow geological process by which carbon evolves into its ground state, graphite, she says. Greatly accelerated by a heat spike, it is also stopped at the right instant, at the graphene stage.

It is amazing how state-of-the-art computer simulations, notoriously slow for observing such kinetics, reveal the details of high temperature-modulated atomic movements and transformation, Bets says.

Tour hopes to produce a kilogram (2.2 pounds) a day of flash graphene within two years, starting with a project the Department of Energy recently funded to convert US-sourced coal.

This could provide an outlet for coal in large scale by converting it inexpensively into a much-higher-value building material, he says.

Additional coauthors are from Rice and C-Crete Technologies. The Air Force Office of Scientific Research and the National Science Foundation supported the research.

Source: Rice University

Original Study DOI: 10.1038/s41586-020-1938-0

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Team turns banana peels and other trash into 'flash graphene' - Futurity: Research News