Risk of American ‘megadroughts’ for decades, NASA warns

On February 14, 2015 By A.P.In Climate Change, ScienceLeave a comment

There is no precedent in contemporary weather records for the kinds of droughts the country’s West will face, if greenhouse gas emissions stay on course, a NASA study said.

No precedent even in the past 1,000 years.

The feared droughts would cover most of the western half of the United States — the Central Plains and the Southwest.

Those regions have suffered severe drought in recent years. But it doesn’t compare in the slightest to the ‘megadroughts’ likely to hit them before the century is over due to global warming.
These will be epochal, worthy of a chapter in Earth’s natural history.

Even if emissions drop moderately, droughts in those regions will get much worse than they are now, NASA said.

The space agency’s study conjures visions of the sun scorching cracked earth that is baked dry of moisture for feet below the surface, across vast landscapes, for decades. Great lake reservoirs could dwindle to ponds, leaving cities to ration water to residents who haven’t fled east.

“Our projections for what we are seeing is that, with climate change, many of these types of droughts will likely last for 20, 30, even 40 years,” said NASA climate scientist Ben Cook.

That’s worse and longer than the historic Dust Bowl of the 1930s, when “black blizzards” — towering, blustery dust walls — buried Southern Plains homes, buggies and barns in dirt dunes.

It lasted about 10 years. Though long, it was within the framework of a contemporary natural drought.

To find something almost as extreme as what looms, one must go back to Medieval times.

Nestled in the shade of Southwestern mountain rock, earthen Ancestral Pueblo housing offers a foreshadowing. The tight, lively villages emptied out in the 13th century’s Great Drought that lasted more than 30 years.

No water. No crops. Starvation drove populations out to the east and south.

If NASA’s worst case scenario plays out, what’s to come could be worse.

Its computations are based on greenhouse gas emissions continuing on their current course. And they produce an 80% chance of at least one drought that could last for decades.

One “even exceeding the duration of the long term intense ‘megadroughts’ that characterized the really arid time period known as the Medieval Climate Anomaly,” Cook said.

That was a period of heightened global temperatures that lasted from about 1100 to 1300 — when those Ancestral Pueblos dispersed. Global average temperatures are already higher now than they were then, the study said.

The NASA team’s study was very data heavy.

It examined past wet and dry periods using tree rings going back 1,000 years and compared them with soil moisture from 17 climate models, NASA said in the study published in Science Advances.

Scientists used super computers to calculate the models forward along the lines of human induced global warming scenarios. The models all showed a much drier planet.

Some Southwestern areas that are currently drought-stricken are filling up with more people, creating more demand for water while reservoirs are already strained.

The predicted megadroughts will wrack water supplies much harder, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center said.

“These droughts really represent events that nobody in the history of the United States has ever had to deal with,” Cook said.

Compared with the last millennium, the dryness will be unprecedented. Adapting to it will be tough.

http://www.cnn.com/2015/02/14/us/nasa-study-western-megadrought/index.html

How Much Sleep Should You Get? New Recommendations Released

On February 8, 2015 By A.P.In Medicine, Sleep2 Comments

There are new recommendations for how much time people should spend snoozing.

The new guidelines, released by the National Sleep Foundation, include small changes to the recommended ranges for the amount of sleep that children and teens should get. Most of the new advice recommends wider sleep ranges than before. Now, there are also specific sleep ranges for young and older adults, as well as for middle-age adults. Previously, the National Sleep Foundation had a single sleep recommendation for all adults.

To come up with the recommendations, a panel of experts reviewed more than 300 scientific studies on sleep — including studies of the health effects of getting too little or too much sleep — that were published between 2004 and 2014. Here are the new recommended sleep duration ranges for each age group:

• Newborns (up to 3 months old): 14 to 17 hours a day. (Previously, the recommendation was 12 to 18 hours daily.)
• Infants (4 to 11 months): 12 to 15 hours. (Previously, the recommendation was 14 to 15 hours.)
• Toddlers (ages 1 to 2): 11 to 14 hours. (Previously, the recommendation was 12 to 14 hours.)
• Preschoolers (ages 3 to 5): 10 to 13 hours. (Previously, the recommendation was 11 to 13 hours.)
• School-age children (ages 6 to 13): 9 to 11 hours. (Previously, the recommendation was 10 to 11 hours.)
• Teenagers (ages 14 to 17): 8 to 10 hours. (Previously, the recommendation was 8.5 to 9.5 hours.)
• Younger adults (ages 18 to 25): 7 to 9 hours (new age category)
• Adults (ages 26 to 64): 7 to 9 hours (same recommendation as before)
• Older adults (ages 65 and older): 7 to 8 hours (new age category)

“The National Sleep Foundation Sleep Duration Recommendations will help individuals make sleep schedules that are within a healthy range. They also serve as a useful starting point for individuals to discuss their sleep with their health care providers,” David Cloud, CEO of the National Sleep Foundation, said in a statement.

The panel also acknowledged that some people may naturally sleep for shorter or longer periods than the recommendations call for, without experiencing adverse health consequences. For this reason, the recommendations also include sleep ranges that “may be appropriate for some individuals.”

For example, although the NSF recommends that adults ages 26 to 64 sleep 7 to 9 hours, it may be appropriate for some people to sleep for as little as 6 hours, or as long as 10 hours, the guidelines say.

However, “individuals with sleep durations far outside the normal range may be engaging in volitional sleep restriction, or have serious health problems,” the recommendations say.

Too little sleep has been linked with health problems, including obesity and high blood pressure, as well as decreased productivity and drowsy driving, the NSF says. Too much sleep has been linked with health conditions as well, including heart disease and premature death.

A full chart of the recommendations is available from the National Sleep Foundation. The guidelines were released yesterday Feb. 2, and were published in Sleep Health: The Official Journal of the National Sleep Foundation.

The National Sleep Foundation is a non-profit organization that advocates for sleep-related research and education. It accepts funding from corporations involved in healthcare and consumer products, but the organization says that it accepts such money only on an unrestricted basis, meaning the corporations giving the money do not influence the ideas and content published or promoted by the research.

http://www.livescience.com/49676-new-sleep-recommendations.html

Sperm whale poonado

On January 30, 2015 By A.P.In marine biology, Science, sperm whale, WhalesLeave a comment

ENCOUNTERING a mighty sperm whale is a magical experience. But in this case, it was tempered somewhat by a rarely seen defence mechanism: emergency defecation.

Sperm whales are the largest toothed predators in the world, so what have they got to be scared of? Here it was pesky divers buzzing around them, taking photos.

Canadian photographer Keri Wilk was sailing off the island of Dominica in the Caribbean, hoping to film these gargantuan creatures, when he spotted one and jumped in for some close-ups. The whale approached Wilk and his three colleagues, pointed downwards, and began to evacuate its bowels. To make matters worse, it then started to churn up the water. “Like a bus-sized blender, it very quickly and effectively dispersed its faecal matter into a cloud,” says Wilk.

Defensive defecation has been recorded in pygmy and dwarf sperm whales, which, as their names suggest, are diminutive compared with their cousins. But this is perhaps less surprising, given that they have natural predators. Wilk is unaware of any other reports of sperm whales’ emergency excretion.

Despite what you might think of being enveloped in what Wilk describes as a “poonado”, he cherishes the moment. “I’ve experienced lots of interesting natural phenomenon underwater, all over the world, but this is near the top of the list,” he says. “As long as you didn’t take your mask off, you couldn’t really smell anything. Taste is another matter…”

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg22530064.700-sperm-whales-emergency-evacuation-of-its-bowels.html#.VMtpm4dRGng

New research shows that listening to sad music helps stabilize mood

On January 25, 2015 By A.P.In mental health, music1 Comment

A new study published in the journal PLOS One and conducted by researchers at the Free University of Berlin in Germany found that listening to sad music evoked feelings of nostalgia, peacefulness, tenderness and wonder.

“For many individuals, listening to sad music can actually lead to beneficial emotional effects,” the researchers, led by psychologist Liila Taruffi, report. “Music-evoked sadness can be appreciated not only as an aesthetic, abstract reward, but [it] also plays a role in well-being, by providing consolation as well as regulating negative moods and emotions.”

Nostalgia was the most common emotion associated with listening to sad music, not surprisingly, since we know that listening to music can take you back to a time and place long ago.

The study also found that people tend to listen to sad music when they’re feeling sad themselves, though the music doesn’t make them sadder. Instead, it helps regulate their mood. Researchers conjecture that this information could be useful in understanding how music therapy helps treat certain conditions.

“Thus, from a therapeutic perspective, one could reasonably interpret a patient’s decision to select sad music as, apart from an aesthetic preference, an indicator of emotional distress. This might be useful especially in children or adults with autism spectrum disorder or alexithymic individuals, who have a reduced ability to express their emotions verbally,” the researchers said. “By ‘tuning’ their emotions with the ones expressed by the music, patients may feel heard and understood, even in the absence of a specific emotional vocabulary. This empathic connection between the music and the patient may help to relieve distress and to progress in therapy.”

http://www.mnn.com/lifestyle/arts-culture/stories/why-do-we-like-listening-to-sad-music

http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0110490

Protein That Can Edit Other Proteins Without DNA Blueprint Discovered

On January 4, 2015 By A.P.In DNA, gene, Kebmodee, protein, ScienceLeave a comment

In our cells, proteins are the tiny machines that do most of the work. And the instructions for making proteins — and for piecing together their building blocks, called amino acids — are laid out by DNA, then relayed through RNA. But now, researchers show for the first time that amino acids can be assembled by another protein — without genetic instructions. These surprising findings were published in Science this week.

If a cell is an automobile-making factory, then ribosomes are the machines on the protein assembly line that links together amino acids in an order specified by DNA and messenger RNA (mRNA), an intermediate template. If something goes awry and a ribosome stalls, the quality control team shows up to disassemble the ribosome, discard that bit of genetic blueprint, and recycle the partially-made protein.

Turns out, that assembly line can keep going even if it loses its genetic instructions, according to a large U.S. team led by University of Utah, University of California, San Francisco, and Stanford researchers. They discovered an unexpected mechanism of protein synthesis where a protein, and not the normal genetic blueprint, specifies which amino acids are added.

“In this case, we have a protein playing a role normally filled by mRNA,” UCSF’s Adam Frost says in a news release. “I love this story because it blurs the lines of what we thought proteins could do.”

Frost and colleagues found a never-before-seen role for one member of the quality control team: a protein named Rqc2, which helps recruit transfer RNA (tRNA) to sites of ribosomal breakdowns (tRNA is responsible for bringing amino acids to the protein assembly line). Before the incomplete protein gets recycled, Rqc2 prompts the stalled ribosomes to add two amino acids — alanine and threonine — over and over. And that’s because the Rqc2–ribosome complex binds tRNAs that carry those two specific amino acids. In the auto analogy, the assembly line keeps going despite having lost its instructions, picking up whatever it can and attaching it in no particular order: horn-wheel-wheel-horn-wheel-wheel-wheel-wheel-horn, for example.

Pictured above, Rqc2 (yellow) binds tRNAs (blue and teal), which add amino acids (bright sot in the middle) to a partially-made protein (green). The complex binds the ribosome (white). A truncated protein with a seemingly random sequence of alanines and threonines probably doesn’t work properly, and that tail could be a code that signals for the malformed protein to be destroyed.

http://www.iflscience.com/health-and-medicine/protein-directs-protein-synthesis-without-dna-blueprint

Thanks to Kebmodee for bringing this to the attention of the It’s Interesting community.

Mathematicians Make a Major Discovery About Prime Numbers

On January 1, 2015 By A.P.In Math, prime number, Science1 Comment

In May 2013, the mathematician Yitang Zhang launched what has proven to be a banner year and a half for the study of prime numbers, those numbers that aren’t divisible by any smaller number except 1. Zhang, of the University of New Hampshire, showed for the first time that even though primes get increasingly rare as you go further out along the number line, you will never stop finding pairs of primes that are a bounded distance apart — within 70 million, he proved. Dozens of mathematicians then put their heads together to improve on Zhang’s 70 million bound, bringing it down to 246 — within striking range of the celebrated twin primes conjecture, which posits that there are infinitely many pairs of primes that differ by only 2.

Now, mathematicians have made the first substantial progress in 76 years on the reverse question: How far apart can consecutive primes be? The average spacing between primes approaches infinity as you travel up the number line, but in any finite list of numbers, the biggest prime gap could be much larger than the average. No one has been able to establish how large these gaps can be.

“It’s a very obvious question, one of the first you might ever ask about primes,” said Andrew Granville, a number theorist at the University of Montreal. “But the answer has been more or less stuck for almost 80 years.”

This past August, two different groups of mathematicians released papers proving a long-standing conjecture by the mathematician Paul Erdős about how large prime gaps can get. The two teams have joined forces to strengthen their result on the spacing of primes still further, and expect to release a new paper later this month.

Erdős, who was one of the most prolific mathematicians of the 20th century, came up with hundreds of mathematics problems over his lifetime, and had a penchant for offering cash prizes for their solutions. Though these prizes were typically just $25, Erdős (“somewhat rashly,” as he later wrote) offered a $10,000 prize for the solution to his prime gaps conjecture — by far the largest prize he ever offered.

Erdős’ conjecture is based on a bizarre-looking bound for large prime gaps devised in 1938 by the Scottish mathematician Robert Alexander Rankin. For big enough numbers X, Rankin showed, the largest prime gap below X is at least

Number theory formulas are notorious for having many “logs” (short for the natural logarithm), said Terence Tao of the University of California, Los Angeles, who wrote one of the two new papers along with Kevin Ford of the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, Ben Green of the University of Oxford and Sergei Konyagin of the Steklov Mathematical Institute in Moscow. In fact, number theorists have a favorite joke, Tao said: What does a drowning number theorist say? “Log log log log … ”

Nevertheless, Rankin’s result is “a ridiculous formula, that you would never expect to show up naturally,” Tao said. “Everyone thought it would be improved on quickly, because it’s just so weird.” But Rankin’s formula resisted all but the most minor improvements for more than seven decades.

Many mathematicians believe that the true size of large prime gaps is probably considerably larger — more on the order of (log X)2, an idea first put forth by the Swedish mathematician Harald Cramér in 1936. Gaps of size (log X)2 are what would occur if the prime numbers behaved like a collection of random numbers, which in many respects they appear to do. But no one can come close to proving Cramér’s conjecture, Tao said. “We just don’t understand prime numbers very well.”

Erdős made a more modest conjecture: It should be possible, he said, to replace the 1/3 in Rankin’s formula by as large a number as you like, provided you go out far enough along the number line. That would mean that prime gaps can get much larger than in Rankin’s formula, though still smaller than in Cramér’s.

The two new proofs of Erdős’ conjecture are both based on a simple way to construct large prime gaps. A large prime gap is the same thing as a long list of non-prime, or “composite,” numbers between two prime numbers. Here’s one easy way to construct a list of, say, 100 composite numbers in a row: Start with the numbers 2, 3, 4, … , 101, and add to each of these the number 101 factorial (the product of the first 101 numbers, written 101!). The list then becomes 101! + 2, 101! + 3, 101! + 4, … , 101! + 101. Since 101! is divisible by all the numbers from 2 to 101, each of the numbers in the new list is composite: 101! + 2 is divisible by 2, 101! + 3 is divisible by 3, and so on. “All the proofs about large prime gaps use only slight variations on this high school construction,” said James Maynard of Oxford, who wrote the second of the two papers.

The composite numbers in the above list are enormous, since 101! has 160 digits. To improve on Rankin’s formula, mathematicians had to show that lists of composite numbers appear much earlier in the number line — that it’s possible to add a much smaller number to a list such as 2, 3, … , 101 and again get only composite numbers. Both teams did this by exploiting recent results — different ones in each case — about patterns in the spacing of prime numbers. In a nice twist, Maynard’s paper used tools that he developed last year to understand small gaps between primes.

The five researchers have now joined together to refine their new bound, and plan to release a preprint within a week or two which, Tao feels, pushes Rankin’s basic method as far as possible using currently available techniques.

The new work has no immediate applications, although understanding large prime gaps could ultimately have implications for cryptography algorithms. If there turn out to be longer prime-free stretches of numbers than even Cramér’s conjecture predicts, that could, in principle, spell trouble for cryptography algorithms that depend on finding large prime numbers, Maynard said. “If they got unlucky and started testing for primes at the beginning of a huge gap, the algorithm would take a very long time to run.”

Tao has a more personal motivation for studying prime gaps. “After a while, these things taunt you,” he said. “You’re supposed to be an expert on prime numbers, but there are these basic questions you can’t answer, even though people have thought about them for centuries.”

Erdős died in 1996, but Ronald Graham, a mathematician at the University of California, San Diego, who collaborated extensively with Erdős, has offered to make good on the $10,000 prize. Tao is toying with the idea of creating a new prize for anyone who makes a big enough improvement on the latest result, he said.

In 1985, Tao, then a 10-year-old prodigy, met Erdős at a math event. “He treated me as an equal,” recalled Tao, who in 2006 won a Fields Medal, widely seen as the highest honor in mathematics. “He talked very serious mathematics to me.” This is the first Erdős prize problem Tao has been able to solve, he said. “So that’s kind of cool.”

The recent progress in understanding both small and large prime gaps has spawned a generation of number theorists who feel that anything is possible, Granville said. “Back when I was growing up mathematically, we thought there were these eternal questions that we wouldn’t see answered until another era,” he said. “But I think attitudes have changed in the last year or two. There are a lot of young people who are much more ambitious than in the past, because they’ve seen that you can make massive breakthroughs.”

http://www.wired.com/2014/12/mathematicians-make-major-discovery-prime-numbers/?mbid=social_fb

New proof shows that it’s possible that the Big Bang created a parallel universe in which time runs backwards

On December 27, 2014December 27, 2014 By A.P.In Science, Space and Time3 Comments

By Gregory Walton

Radical new research led by a British scientist has suggested that there may be a second universe where time runs backwards.

The theoretical claims put forward in the Physical Review Letters journal could revolutionise the field of research into the origin and future of the universe.

In the paper titled ‘Identification of a Gravitational Arrow of Time’, an international team of world renowned scientists led by Oxfordshire-based Dr Julian Barbour challenge assumptions about the so called ‘arrow of time’.

The ‘arrow of time’ is the theory that time is symmetric and therefore time moves forward. They contend that there is no scientific reason that a mirror universe could not have been created where time moved in an distinct way from our own.

But in a quirk of science it is thought that if a parallel universe did exist where time moved backward, any sentient beings there would consider that time in our universe in fact moved backward.

The arrow of time is also known as the ‘one-way’ direction of time and was devised by a British scientist, Dr Arthur Eddington, in the twenties.

All of the laws of physics apply no matter which way time is moving and therefore there is no scientific impediment to such a parallel universe.

Dr. Barbour says: “Time is a mystery. Basically, all the known laws of physics look exactly the same whichever way time runs, and in the world in which we live in everything goes in one direction.”

“If you look at a simple model with a swarm of bees in the middle of the Big Bang but breaking up in either direction, then you would say there are two arrows of time, pointing in opposite direction from the swarm. One arrow would be forwards and one backwards.”

However Dr Barbour acknowledges that locating the ‘other’ universe in practical terms is an altogether different question.

“Our results are a proof of principle,” he said.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/science/science-news/11285605/Did-the-Big-Bang-create-a-parallel-universe-where-time-goes-backwards.html

New research suggests that memories may not be stored by synaptic connections between nerve cells

On December 26, 2014 By A.P.In Science, The Brain1 Comment

New research suggests that memories may not be stored by synaptic connections between neurons in the brain, but rather synapses may allow the expression of memories that are stored elsewhere in the neuron.

The revolutionary study by academics at the University of California has suggested for the first time that memories are not stored in synapses as previously thought. It is synapses, the connections between brain cells, that are destroyed by Alzheimer’s.

The breakthrough, reported in the highly regarded online journal eLife, could mean that it becomes possible to restore lost memories.

“Long-term memory is not stored at the synapse,” said David Glanzman, the study’s co-author and professor of integrative biology and physiology and of neurobiology at UCLA. “That’s a radical idea, but that’s where the evidence leads. The nervous system appears to be able to regenerate lost synaptic connections. If you can restore the synaptic connections, the memory will come back. It won’t be easy, but I believe it’s possible.”

Professor Glanzman’s team studied the marine snail Aplysia to understand the animal’s learning and memory functions. Glanzman was particularly interested in the Aplysia’s defensive reactions and the sensory and motor neurons responsible for its withdrawal response.

“If you train an animal on a task, inhibit its ability to produce proteins immediately after training, and then test it 24 hours later, the animal doesn’t remember the training,” said Prof. Glanzman. “However, if you train an animal, wait 24 hours, and then inject a protein synthesis inhibitor in its brain, the animal shows perfectly good memory 24 hours later. In other words, once memories are formed, if you temporarily disrupt protein synthesis, it doesn’t affect long-term memory. That’s true in the Aplysia and in human’s brains.”

As part of the test, the snails were given a number of electric shocks, which in themselves would not usually produce long-term memories. The team found that the memories they thought had been completely erased earlier in the experiment had returned, suggesting that synaptic connections that had previously been lost were apparently restored.

“That suggests that the memory is not in the synapses but somewhere else,” said Glanzman. “We think it’s in the nucleus of the neurons. We haven’t proved that, though.”

He added that the research could be a major breakthrough for Alzheimer’s sufferers as even though the disease destroys synapses in the brain, memories might not necessarily destroyed.

“As long as the neurons are still alive, the memory will still be there, which means you may be able to recover some of the lost memories in the early stages of Alzheimer’s,” said Prof Glanzman.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/science/11307411/Cure-for-memory-loss-could-be-on-the-horizon.html

‘Gecko Gloves’ by Stanford students will let you scale glass walls like Spider-Man

On December 24, 2014 By A.P.In Science, Stanford, TechnologyLeave a comment

You don’t have to be a superhero like Spider-Man to climb on walls. Researchers have developed “Gecko Gloves” that can help humans climb on glass walls.

The Gecko Gloves have been created by Elliot Hawkes, a mechanical engineering student at the Stanford University. The gloves have very similar scientific principles as found in the sticky toes of geckos.

Hawkes reveals that he is working with a group of engineers who are developing reusable and controllable adhesive materials that can bond with smooth surfaces such as glass, but also release with the use of minimal effort. With the help of the synthetic adhesive, Hawkes and his team created a device that can enable a person to climb on glass walls.

“It’s a lot of fun, but also a little weird, because it doesn’t feel like you should be gripping glass,” says Hawkes. “You keep expecting to slip off, and when you don’t, it surprises you. It’s pretty exhilarating.”

Hawkes explains that each gecko handheld pad is coated with 24 adhesive tiles. Each tile is covered with sawtooth-shape polymer structures, which measures about 100 micrometers long, or about the width of a normal human hair.

The handheld pads are also connected to degressive springs that become less stiff when the pad is stretched, which means that when the springs are pulled they apply similar force to the adhesive tiles and causes the sawtooth-like structure to flatten. When the load tension is released it reduces grip.

Some experts suggest that the Gecko Gloves can be applied in many fields. It can be used to manufacture robots, which carries glass panels. Mark Cutkosky, who is the senior author of the paper, suggests that they are also working on a project with the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), which will involve applying the Gecko Gloves to robotic arms of a spacecraft. With the help of the Gecko Gloves, the robotic arm will be able to catch hold of space debris like solar panels and fuel tanks and move it accordingly.

Researchers of the latest study suggest that previous work of gecko or synthetic adhesives showed that adhesive strength is reduced when size increases. However, in the Gecko Gloves, the springs make it possible to sustain the same adhesive power at all sizes ranging from a square millimeter to the size of a human hand.

The latest version of the Gecko Gloves can support around 200 pounds, or about 90 kilograms (kg). However, if the size is increased by 10 times it can support about 2,000 pounds, or 900 kg.

The research has been published in the journal Royal Society Interface.

http://www.techtimes.com/articles/22769/20141224/gecko-gloves-by-stanford-students-will-let-you-scale-glass-walls-want-to-be-spider-man.htm

Rapid-DNA technology that profiles DNA in about 90 minutes for law enforcement

On November 22, 2014 By A.P.In DNA, Kebmodee, ScienceLeave a comment

Rapid-DNA technology makes it easier than ever to grab and store your genetic profile. G-men, cops, and Homeland Security can’t wait to see it everywhere.

Robert Schueren shook my hand firmly, handed me his business card, and flipped it over, revealing a short list of letters and numbers. “Here is my DNA profile.” He smiled. “I have nothing to hide.” I had come to meet Schueren, the CEO of IntegenX, at his company’s headquarters in Pleasanton, California, to see its signature product: a machine the size of a large desktop printer that can unravel your genetic code in the time it takes to watch a movie.

Schueren grabbed a cotton swab and dropped it into a plastic cartridge. That’s what, say, a police officer would use to wipe the inside of your cheek to collect a DNA sample after an arrest, he explained. Other bits of material with traces of DNA on them, like cigarette butts or fabric, could work too. He inserted the cartridge into the machine and pressed a green button on its touch screen: “It’s that simple.” Ninety minutes later, the RapidHIT 200 would generate a DNA profile, check it against a database, and report on whether it found a match.

The RapidHIT represents a major technological leap—testing a DNA sample in a forensics lab normally takes at least two days. This has government agencies very excited. The Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Defense, and the Justice Department funded the initial research for “rapid DNA” technology, and after just a year on the market, the $250,000 RapidHIT is already being used in a few states, as well as China, Russia, Australia, and countries in Africa and Europe.

“We’re not always aware of how it’s being used,” Schueren said. “All we can say is that it’s used to give an accurate identification of an individual.” Civil liberties advocates worry that rapid DNA will spur new efforts by the FBI and police to collect ordinary citizens’ genetic code.

The US government will soon test the machine in refugee camps in Turkey and possibly Thailand on families seeking asylum in the United States, according to Chris Miles, manager of the Department of Homeland Security’s biometrics program. “We have all these families that claim they are related, but we don’t have any way to verify that,” he says. Miles says that rapid DNA testing will be voluntary, though refusing a test could cause an asylum application to be rejected.

Miles also says that federal immigration officials are interested in using rapid DNA to curb trafficking by ensuring that children entering the country are related to the adults with them. Jeff Heimburger, the vice president of marketing at IntegenX, says the government has also inquired about using rapid DNA to screen green-card applicants. (An Immigration and Customs Enforcement spokesman said he was not aware that the agency was pursuing the technology.)

Meanwhile, police have started using rapid DNA in Arizona, Florida, and South Carolina. In August, sheriffs in Columbia, South Carolina, used a RapidHIT to nab an attempted murder suspect. The machine’s speed provides a major “investigative lead,” said Vince Figarelli, superintendent of the Arizona Department of Public Safety crime lab, which is using a RapidHIT to compare DNA evidence from property crimes against the state’s database of 300,000 samples. Heimburger notes that the system can also prevent false arrests and wrongful convictions: “There is great value in finding out that somebody is not a suspect.”

But the technology is not a silver bullet for DNA evidence. The IntegenX executives brought up rape kits so often that it sounded like their product could make a serious dent in the backlog of half a million untested kits. Yet when I pressed Schueren on this, he conceded that the RapidHIT is not actually capable of processing rape kits since it can’t discern individual DNA in commingled bodily fluids.

Despite the new technology’s crime-solving potential, privacy advocates are wary of its spread. If rapid-DNA machines can be used in a refugee camp, “they can certainly be used in the back of a squad car,” says Jennifer Lynch, a senior staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. “I could see that happening in the future as the prices of these machines go down.”

Lynch is particularly concerned that law enforcement agencies will use the devices to scoop up and store ever more DNA profiles. Every state already has a forensic DNA database, and while these systems were initially set up to track convicted violent offenders, their collection thresholds have steadily broadened. Today, at least 28 include data from anyone arrested for certain felonies, even if they are not convicted; some store the DNA of people who have committed misdemeanors as well. The FBI’s National DNA Index System has more than 11 million profiles of offenders plus 2 million people who have been arrested but not necessarily convicted of a crime.

For its part, Homeland Security will not hang onto refugees’ DNA records, insists Miles. (“They aren’t criminals,” he pointed out.) However, undocumented immigrants in custody may be required to provide DNA samples, which are put in the FBI’s database. DHS documents obtained by the Electronic Frontier Foundation say there may even be a legal case for “mandating collection of DNA” from anyone granted legal status under a future immigration amnesty. (The documents also state that intelligence agencies and the military are interested in using rapid DNA to identify sex, race, and other factors the machines currently do not reveal.)

The FBI is the only federal agency allowed to keep a national DNA database. Currently, police must use a lab to upload genetic profiles to it. But that could change. The FBI’s website says it is eager to see rapid DNA in wide use and that it supports the “legislative changes necessary” to make that happen. IntegenX’s Heimburger says the FBI is almost finished working with members of Congress on a bill that would give “tens of thousands” of police stations rapid-DNA machines that could search the FBI’s system and add arrestees’ profiles to it. (The RapitHIT is already designed to do this.) IntegenX has spent $70,000 lobbying the FBI, DHS, and Congress over the last two years.

The FBI declined to comment, and Heimburger wouldn’t say which lawmakers might sponsor the bill. But some have already given rapid DNA their blessing. Rep. Eric Swalwell, a former prosecutor who represents the district where IntegenX is based, says he’d like to see the technology “put to use quickly to help law enforcement”—while protecting civil liberties. In March, he and seven other Democratic members of Congress, including progressive stalwart Rep. Barbara Lee of California, urged the FBI to assess rapid DNA’s “viability for broad deployment” in police departments across the country.