How a console firmware update could make a small dent in our energy problem

Environmental groups often push for efficiency improvements in big energy hogs like cars and appliances. It’s viewed as a major way to reduce our collective energy use and carbon footprint. But a recent study argues a simple firmware update for current high definition video game consoles could provide a much easier way to chop off a small but significant portion of US residential energy usage.

The study, published by a team of Carnegie Mellon researchers in the latest issue of the journal Energy Efficiency, estimates that 100 million video game consoles sucked up nearly 16 terawatt-hours (TWh) of energy a year in the US in 2010. That’s roughly one percent of the total household energy consumption for the entire country, and nearly twice as much as all the electricity used by all homes in the state of Rhode Island.

The collective power draw for game consoles has gotten worse as those consoles have become more popular and more powerful over the years. The original PlayStation only drew a few Watts of power when being played, and the PlayStation 2 used about 79 Watts at launch (with subsequent hardware revisions becoming much more efficient). Launch units for the PlayStation 3, on the other hand, drew 180 Watts of power when playing games. That number has only come down to 100 Watts with the 2010 Slim revision.

The Xbox 360 is similarly power-hungry, using 172 Watts at launch and 94 Watts in its current Xbox 360 S incarnation. By comparison, the Wii consumes a mere 16 Watts when in active use, and a dedicated Blu-ray player draws only 20 or 30 Watts.

This increase in the consoles’ active power draw is significant in and of itself. But the real problem, according to the study, is the electricity console owners are wasting by leaving their systems idling on the dashboard menu in between play sessions. The PS3 and Xbox 360 are still drawing anywhere from 75 to 94 percent of their peak energy usage when they’re left idle like this. All that wasted electricity can add up for users that routinely decide not to turn their systems off. “For example,” the study points out, “an average user that never powers down a current model Xbox 360 will consume more than ten times the electricity as a similar user who always powers down the console after use.”

The key question, of course, is just how many people actually leave their systems running 24/7 like this in the real world. The study authors don’t attempt to determine a definitive answer. Rather, they assume that 30 percent of all console users don’t turn their systems off when they’re done. This may sound high, but it’s actually lower than the 50 percent assumption used by a similar Natural Resources Defense Council study from 2007. It also seems within the realm of reason to me, given how many of my Xbox Live friends list are listed as simply sitting on the dashboard for hours at a time at weird hours of the day.

Given that assumption, the study authors ran the numbers and found that about 68 percent of all the electricity being used by video game systems was being wasted on idle time in 2010. Console owners spent roughly $1.24 billion on that 10.8 TWh of wasted energy. The energy waste is still significant, in fact, even if you assume that only 10 percent of consoles are being left idle, rather than being turned off routinely after use.

Xbox 360 and PS3 owners could easily save a large portion of this money and energy by using the systems’ built-in automatic shutoff options, which can be set to turn the system off after as little as an hour of inactivity. These options are left off by default, though. The study assumes (rightly, I think) that few, if any, console owners are going to the trouble of digging through the menu to turn them on. If console makers were willing to push out a required firmware update that simply turned on such an automatic shutoff, the study estimates we could see a savings of 9.3 TWh of electricity usage every year, or $1.1 billion worth of energy spending. That’s not going to solve our dependence on coal power plants or anything, but it’s not nothing either.

The main hazard of flipping the auto-shutoff switch, of course, would be some unsuspecting gamers losing their unsaved progress when they leave their system unattended to go grab a quick bite to eat. The study authors concede that flipping the switch might be “a potential consumer relations hazard” for console makers, and one that could cause “pushback from consumers.” However, most games these days autosave your progress so frequently that any time lost to an inopportune shutdown would probably be minimal. Players that find the feature annoying could always turn it back off. Besides, no one said saving the environment was going to be painless.

When asked to respond to the study’s suggestion, Sony merely pointed out the PS3’s existing auto-shutoff options without directly addressing whether the company would consider updating the system’s firmware to turn them on by default. Nintendo refused to comment on the matter, and Microsoft has yet to respond. (Update: Microsoft gave Ars Technica the following statement after this story was originally published: “Xbox 360 already has a shutdown timer feature. We are always thinking of ways to achieve our sustainability goals and continue to improve upon our efforts. While we are committed to making progress on environmental concerns, we do not have any additional comment at this time.”)

It’s a shame the console makers aren’t more eager to act, because turning on these auto-shutoff features by default would be a relatively painless way to make a small but measurable impact on our collective household energy usage. “Almost all efficiency measures require years to implement on a large scale, as consumers purchase or install new technology, and most require consumers to make decisions comparing increased upfront costs with expected future savings,” the study authors write. Turning on the console’s auto-shutoff, on the other hand, “could be done with almost no upfront cost, no change in the quality and level of service provided to consumers, would have no adoption/implementation delay, and does not rely on any action or decision on the part of consumers.”

UPDATE: Since this article was first published, we’ve confirmed that new Xbox 360s currently default to shut off automatically after an hour of inactivity. The one-hour shutoff option was added to the system on top of an existing, non-default six-hour shutoff option last May, though it’s unclear whether it was set as a default for new systems at that time. Ars Technica regrets the error.

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Stem Cell Therapy Could Boost Kidney Transplant Success: Study

TUESDAY, March 20 (HealthDay News) — A novel technique that uses a kidney transplant recipient’s own stem cells may someday replace or reduce the initial use of anti-rejection medications, new research suggests.

Six months after receiving a kidney transplant, only about 8 percent of people given their own mesenchymal stem cells experienced rejection compared with almost 22 percent of people on the standard anti-rejection drugs, according to the study.

“Mesenchymal stem cells are stem cells that can be differentiated into a variety of cells,” explained Dr. Camillo Ricordi, study senior author and director of the Cell Transplant Center and Diabetes Research Institute at the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine.

“If you infuse mesenchymal stem cells at the time of the transplant, you could replace the use of powerful anti-rejection drugs, and maybe replace immunosuppressants altogether,” he said. This technique could be used in the transplantation of islet cells (in the pancreas) for people with type 1 diabetes, and for other organ transplants, such as the liver, he added.

The people given their own stem cells also had improved kidney function earlier after transplant, Ricordi said.

Results of the study appear in the March 21 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association.

One of the biggest remaining hurdles in organ transplantation remains the need for powerful anti-rejection and immune-suppressing medications after the transplant.

“Basically, the way we prevent kidney rejections is by putting you on very powerful anti-rejection drugs and immunosuppressive agents to prevent your cells from attacking the foreign organ,” said Dr. Robert Provenzano, chair of the department of nephrology, hypertension and transplantation at St. John Providence Health System in Detroit. “But, the current standard has some problems, like an increased risk of infections and the possibility of creating a cancer.”

The body’s immune system sends out surveillance cells to protect the body against foreign invaders, such as a bacteria, virus or, in this case, a new organ, Provenzano said. The current method of preventing these cells from attacking the new organ is essentially to destroy the surveillance cells. But mesenchymal cells can naturally suppress those surveillance cells so they don’t attack, he said.

To see if this suppression would be enough to prevent rejection, Ricordi and his colleagues, including researchers from Xiamen University in China, recruited 159 people with serious kidney disease who were on dialysis. They ranged in age from 18 to 61.

The study participants all had medically well-matched relatives willing to donate a kidney for transplant.

Each was randomly assigned to receive one of three treatments after transplant. One group got standard treatment with anti-rejection medication (induction therapy) and immune-suppressing medication known as calcineurin inhibitors (CNIs). Another group was infused with their own stem cells and the standard dose of CNIs, while the final group received stem cells plus a lower dose of CNIs (80 percent of the standard dose).

Survival rates for the patients and their new kidney were similar for all three groups at 13 to 30 months, the study found.

But before that, at six months, nearly 21.6 percent of those on standard therapy experienced rejection, compared with 7.5 percent of the stem cell plus standard CNIs, and 7.7 percent in the stem cell plus low-dose CNIs.

Both groups who received stem cells recovered kidney function faster than those on standard therapy. And at one year, the researchers found that the risk of opportunistic infections was reduced by nearly 60 percent in those who got the stem cell treatment.

Provenzano expressed enthusiasm for the new procedure. “I see this as the continued evolution of transplant medicine. It’s very exciting to be able to use your own natural cells instead of more toxic medications,” he said. He added that more studies are needed to confirm these findings and study long-term effects, but said “the data here appears promising.”

Some experts are less impressed. “This is a novel technique, but I don’t think it would be regarded as a significant step forward. It was only significant at six months,” said Dr. Glyn Morgan, the associate director of transplantation at NYU Langone Medical Center in New York City. And, he added, “It’s only a change in the induction protocol. Primary immunosuppressant agents are still used long term.”

Other researchers have also been testing the use of stem cells in transplants. The March 7 issue of Science Translational Medicine reported on an attempt to transfer stem cells from the donor to the transplant recipient before transplant, in an attempt to create a hybrid immune system that would accept the new organ. Five of eight patients studied haven’t needed medications to suppress their immune systems, according to the study.

Ricordi said perhaps a combination of stem cell therapies might lead to even more effective immune suppression.

More information

Learn more about the immune-suppressing medications used after a kidney transplant from the National Kidney Foundation.

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Stem cell therapy could repair some heart damage

Patients with advanced heart disease who received an experimental stem cell therapy showed slight improvements in blood pumping but no change in most of their symptoms, US researchers said Saturday.

Study authors described the trial as the largest to date to examine stem cell therapy as a route to repairing the heart in patients with chronic ischemic heart disease and left ventricular dysfunction.

Previous studies have established that the approach is safe in human patients, but none had examined how well it worked on a variety of heart ailments.

The clinical trial involved 92 patients, with an average age of 63, who were picked at random to get either a placebo or a series of injections of their own stem cells, taken from their bone marrow, into damaged areas of their hearts.

The patients — 82 of whom were men — all had chronic heart disease, along with either heart failure or angina or both, and their left ventricles were pumping at less than 45 percent of capacity.

None of the participants in the study were eligible for revascularization surgery, such as coronary bypass to restore blood flow, because their heart disease was so advanced.

Those who received the stem cell therapy saw a small but significant boost in the heart’s ability to pump blood, measuring the increase from the heart’s main pumping chamber at 2.7 percent more than placebo patients.

The treatment worked best in the youngest patients, those under 62, according to the analysis which was done after six months of treatment.

However, other factors showed no improvement — the heart’s maximum oxygen consumption did not change and the defects in the heart were not healed by the treatment — according to an analysis of the study in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

“This is the kind of information we need in order to move forward with the clinical use of stem cell therapy,” said lead investigator Emerson Perin, director of clinical research for cardiovascular medicine at the Texas Heart Institute.

Perin’s research, which was conducted between 2009 and 2011 across five US sites, was presented at the annual American College of Cardiology Conference in Chicago.

The technique involved taking bone marrow samples from the patients and processing the marrow to extract stem cells. Doctors then injected the cells via catheter into the heart’s left ventricle.

The injections, comprising some 100 million stem cells in all, were specifically targeted at damaged areas, identified by real-time electromechanical mapping of the heart.

“With this mapping procedure, we have a roadmap to the heart muscle,” said Perin in a statement released ahead of the presentation in Chicago.

“We’re very careful about where we inject the cells; electromechanical mapping allows us to target the cell injections to viable areas of the heart,” he added, describing the procedure as “relatively quick and painless.”

Heart disease is the leading killer in the United States, claiming nearly 600,000 lives per year, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

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Maths and Olympics: How fast could Usain Bolt run?

World record holder Usian Bolt of Jamaica listens to a reporter’s question after advancing in his men’s 100 meter heat at the Jamaican Athletics National Championship in Kingston, Jamaica June 26, 2009.

Credit: Reuters/Hans DerykBy Kate Kelland

LONDON | Fri Mar 30, 2012 1:03pm EDT

LONDON (Reuters) – Usain Bolt, already the world’s fastest man, could lop another 0.18 seconds off his 100 meter sprint world record even without running any faster. It’s just a question of getting a few conditions right – and doing the maths.

Luckily for the top Jamaican sprinter, John Barrow, a professor of mathematical sciences at Britain’s Cambridge University, has done the calculations for him.

He’s also done some serious sums on the triathlon – an event he describes as “crazily constructed” and “ridiculously biased” – and on high jumping, archery, rowing and 100 or so other sports he feels could do with a little more number crunching.

His mission, he says, is to enrich understanding of sport and enliven appreciation of maths. All at the same time.

“It’s about getting some perspective on how far there is to go,” Barrow told Reuters ahead of a series of talks on the maths behind the Olympics in Cambridge and in London, host city for the 2012 Games.

NEW RECORD COULD BE 9.40 SECONDS

With Bolt, the distance is set – at 100 meters – but there’s a lot that could be done with the timing, according to Barrow.

Having analyzed Bolt’s reaction times to the starting gun – which are generally slower than other leading sprinters and often much slower than the 0.1 seconds allowed – the mathematician says that’s where the first gain could be.

“The time that people record in the 100 meter sprint is the sum of two parts — one is the reaction time to the starting gun and the other is the actual running time,” Barrow said.

“So if Bolt could get his reaction time down to say 0.13 seconds, which is good but not exceptional, he’d make some improvement on his overall record time of 9.58. It may only be few hundredths of a second, but it’s certainly room for improvement.”

Barrow has also worked out the top wind speed Bolt would be allowed within Olympic rules to have helping him along – a maximum of 2 meters per second – and the optimum altitude at which he could race in thinner, and hence less resistant, air.

Adding them all together, Bolt could be looking at a new 100-metre world record of 9.4 seconds, without actually running any faster, Barrow said.

“The point I’m trying to make is that we’re not going to be reaching the limits of human speed anytime soon,” he said. “And there’s no reason to assume Bolt is going to be just shaving fractions of hundredths of seconds off each time. There’s scope for some quite big improvements.”

Besides Bolt, Barrow has also turned his mathematical mind to scores of others sports and is publishing his musings in a new book due out this week called “100 Essential Things You Didn’t Know You Didn’t Know About Sport”.

REDUCING ROWERS’ WIGGLE

For rowing he has devised a funky equation to help coaches place crew members in fours or eights in the best possible combination to minimize the boat’s “wiggle”, which Barrow says results from the boat being subjected to alternating sideways forces.

The equation is M = sF-(s+r)F-(S+2r)F+(s +3r)F = 0, and Barrow concludes that in a coxless four, the rowers at front and back should be have their oars to the right, while the two in the middle should have theirs to the left.

For an eight, he suggests the rowers sit in a pattern from stern to bow with their oars stuck out to the right, left, left, right, left, right, right, left to reduce the wiggle, and says he hopes one of the Olympic crews will put his theory into practice at London 2012.

Barrow also turns his attentions to the newest sport in the Olympic Games – the triathlon – which consists of a swim, a bike ride and a distance run.

Barrow wonders whether the relative lengths of the swim, ride and run stages are really fair. And after analyzing the results of women’s and men’s triathlon medal winners at the Beijing Olympics, he thinks not.

“As the rules stand, the winning man spent a mere 16.7 percent of this total time swimming, 28.3 percent of it running, 0.8 percent of it in transition (going from one sport to the next) and a whopping 54.2 percent of it cycling,” the mathematician writes in his book, concluding that this shows there is far too much emphasis put on cycling performance.

Asked what should be done about it, Barrow proposes what he calls an “equitempered triathlon”.

“If it was sensibly constructed there would be an equal amount of time on each of three sports,” he told Reuters. “That would be much fairer.”

(Reporting by Kate Kelland, editing by Paul Casciato)

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CHINA PBOC ZHOU : Still A Risk Global Economy Could Go Back Into Recession

04/03/2012 | 12:09am

People’s Bank of China Gov. Zhou Xiaochuan warned that the global economy hasn’t yet emerged from the financial crisis.

There are “new elements that could bring the global economy back into recession,” the central bank chief said in a panel discussion at the Boao Forum in the southern island province of Hainan.

Zhou didn’t elaborate on what those “new elements” might be.

-By Andrew Browne, The Wall Street Journal; 86-10-8400-7799; andrew.browne@wsj.com

04/02 – Communiqué de presse Paris Paris | 33 1 53 05 53 66 | Sophie Dufresne | sophie.dufresne@sothebys.com …04/02 – By Al Yoon Of UBS Securities plans to sell $412 million of commercial mortgage-backed securities supported by a…04/02 – PRESS RELEASE ___________________________________________________________ ________________ ____ 2 April 2012…04/02 – ABLYNX RECEIVES MILESTONE PAYMENT AS COLLABORATOR RECEIVES IND APPROVAL FOR A NANOBODY IN ONCOLOGY GHENT,…

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