Another breastfeeding benefit: Preparing baby's belly for solid food

The moment of birth marks the beginning of a beautiful, lifelong relationship between a baby and the billions of microbes that will soon colonize his or her gastrointestinal tract.

In a study published today in Frontiers in Cellular and Infection Microbiology, researchers from the UNC School of Medicine and UNC College of Arts and Sciences found that a baby's diet during the first few months of life has a profound influence on the composition, diversity, and stability of the gut microbiome. These factors, in turn, influence the baby's ability to transition from milk to solid foods and may have long-term health effects.

"We found that babies who are fed only breast milk have microbial communities that seem more ready for the introduction of solid foods," said Andrea Azcarate-Peril, PhD, assistant professor in the department of cell biology and physiology and the study's senior author. "The transition to solids is much more dramatic for the microbiomes of babies that are not exclusively breastfed. We think the microbiomes of non-exclusively breastfed babies could contribute to more stomach aches and colic."

The discovery adds to the growing awareness that the gut microbiome plays a major role in helping us digest food and fight pathogens, among other functions.

"This study provides yet more support for recommendations by the World Health Organization and others to breastfeed exclusively during the first six months of life," said Amanda Thompson, PhD, associate professor in the department of anthropology, a Carolina Population Center faculty fellow, and the study's first author. "We can see from the data that including formula in an infant's diet does change the gut bacteria even if you are also breastfeeding. Exclusive breastfeeding seems to really smooth out the transition to solid foods."

For this study, the research team collected stool samples and information about the diets and health of nine babies as they grew from ages 2 weeks to 14 months. Applying genomic sequencing techniques to the stool samples, the scientists deduced the types and functions of the bacteria in the babies' gut microbiomes. The analysis revealed that during the first few months of life there were clear differences between the microbiomes of babies that were exclusively breastfed as compared to those fed both formula and breast milk. This finding is consistent with previous studies.

What surprised Thompson and Azcarate-Peril, who is the director of the UNC Microbiome Core Facility, was the drastic genetic differences in stool samples taken after babies began eating solid food. Researchers found differing amounts of about 20 bacterial enzymes in exclusively breastfed babies when compared to exclusively breastfed babies that received solid food. This indicated that some new bacterial species had entered the scene to help process the new food types. In babies fed both formula and breast milk -- and then introduced to solid foods -- the samples revealed about 230 enzymes, indicating a much more dramatic shift in microbial composition.

The microbiomes of exclusively breastfed babies tended to be less diverse and were dominated by Bifidobacterium, a type of bacteria considered beneficial for digestion. Babies fed a mixture of breast milk and formula had a lower proportion of Bifidobacterium.

The study suggests that the makeup of the microbiome can affect a baby's ability to digest food in the short term and potentially influence long-term health. Although microbiome research is still in its early stages, gut microbes are thought to potentially play a role in obesity, allergies, and gastrointestinal problems, such as irritable bowel syndrome.

"The study advances our understanding of how the gut microbiome develops early in life, which is clearly a really important time period for a person's current and future health," said Thompson.

The researchers also compared the microbiomes of babies that attended daycare to those that stayed in the home. Attending daycare was also associated with more diverse microbial communities overall, but feeding practices remained the most important factor influencing how the microbiome responded to the introduction of solid foods.

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The above story is based on materials provided by University of North Carolina School of Medicine . Note: Materials may be edited for content and length.

Microbiome linked to type 1 diabetes: Shift in microbiome species diversity prior to disease onset

In the largest longitudinal study of the microbiome to date, researchers from the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH), and the DIABIMMUNE Study Group have identified a connection between changes in gut microbiota and the onset of type 1 diabetes (T1D). The study, which followed infants who were genetically predisposed to the condition, found that onset for those who developed the disease was preceded by a drop in microbial diversity -- including a disproportional decrease in the number of species known to promote health in the gut. These findings, published by Cell, Host & Microbe, could help pave the way for microbial-based diagnostic and therapeutic options for those with T1D.

The human microbiome, which consists of the trillions of microorganisms (bacteria, viruses, and other assorted "bugs") that reside in our bodies, has become an area of growing interest to the medical community as researchers have begun to probe the role it plays in human health and disease. While most bugs in our microbiome are harmless, and even beneficial, changes in the microbiome (and in the interactions microbial species share with their human hosts) have been linked to various disease states, including diabetes and Inflammatory Bowel Disease (IBD).

To explore the possible connection between changes in the microbiome and type 1 diabetes, a team led by Ramnik Xavier, an Institute Member of the Broad and Chief of Gastroenterology at MGH, followed 33 infants (out of a much larger cohort of Finnish and Estonian children) who were genetically predisposed to T1D. From birth to age 3, the team regularly analyzed the subjects' stool samples, collecting data on the composition of their gut microbiome.

In the handful that developed T1D during this period, the team observed a 25% drop in community diversity (in other words, in the number of distinct species present in the microbiome) one year prior to the onset of the disease. They also noted that this population shift included a decrease in bacteria known to help regulate health in the gut, along with an increase in potentially harmful bacteria that are known to promote inflammation. The findings are further evidence of a previously identified link between inflammation of the gut and type 1 diabetes.

"We know from previous human studies that changes in gut bacterial composition correlate with the early development of type 1 diabetes, and that the interactions between bacterial networks may be a contributing factor in why some people at risk for the disease develop type 1 diabetes and others don't," said Jessica Dunne, Director of Discovery Research at JDRF, which funded the study. "This is the first study to show how specific changes in the microbiome are affecting the progression to symptomatic T1D."

Previous studies have shown that transferring microbiota from mice that were predisposed to autoimmune diabetes (the mouse equivalent of T1D) to mice that were not predisposed increased the prevalence of autoimmune diabetes in mice that were otherwise unlikely to develop the disease. Studies in humans have also shown an association between T1D and the bacterial composition of the gut. However, those studies were retrospective, meaning they were conducted after the patients developed the disease, making causality difficult to prove.

"This study is unique because we have taken a cohort of children at high risk of developing type 1 diabetes and then followed what changes in the microbiome tip the balance toward progression to the disease," Xavier said.

Aleksandar Kostic, a postdoctoral fellow in Xavier's lab and first author of the study, agreed, calling the study "a compelling piece of evidence pointing toward a direct role of the microbiome in type 1 diabetes."

Since the study also followed infants who did not ultimately develop type 1 diabetes, the researchers were also able to gain insights into the normal development of the microbiome during infancy. They found that, while the species of bacteria present in the gut microbiome vary greatly between individuals, the composition of the microbiome is generally stable within the individual over time.

Moreover, using metabolomic analysis (looking at the metabolites -- the tiny molecules produced during metabolism -- in subject stool samples), the researchers were also able to see that, while bacterial species varied between individuals, the biological functions served by the various species in the microbiome remained consistent over time, and from person to person.

"Whether the bacterial community is very small, as it is in early infancy, or if it's larger as it is later in life, the community is always serving the same major functions regardless of its composition. No matter which species are present, they encode the same major metabolic pathways, indicating that they're doing the same jobs," Kostic said.

By revealing patterns in the development of the microbiome in healthy individuals, and in those progressing toward T1D onset, the findings may ultimately have diagnostic or therapeutic implications. In terms of diagnostics, understanding how the microbiome shifts prior to the onset of disease could ultimately help clinicians spot early microbial features of T1D.

As for therapeutics, Xavier, who is also the Kurt Isselbacher Chair in Medicine at Harvard Medical School and Co-Director of the Center for Microbiome Informatics and Therapeutics at MIT, says that knowing which species are absent and which are flourishing in the gastrointestinal tract of children with T1D may help make it possible to slow progression of the disease after onset by revealing ways to manipulate the microbiome and, in turn, microbiome-induced immunoregulation.

The next step, he says, is to broaden the sample pool to determine what factors in the environment and in the microbiome might be making Finns -- who are at exceptionally high risk of T1D -- more predisposed to the disease than other populations. That includes revisiting the hygiene hypothesis, which holds that a lack of childhood exposure to microbiota and other potentially infectious agents may hinder the development of the immune system and increase susceptibility to immunological disorders.

The researchers are also examining the metagenomic data gathered in the study to determine what biological pathways the microbiota are acting upon -- or what metabolites they may be producing -- that could be contributing to disease.

The study was funded by JDRF and supported by the European Union Seventh Framework Programme and The Academy of Finland Centre of Excellence in Molecular Systems Immunology and Physiology Research.

Other researchers who worked on the study include: Dirk Gevers, Heli Siljander, Tommi Vatanen, Tuulia Hyötyläinen, Anu-Maaria Hämäläinen, Aleksandr Peet, Vallo Tillmann, Päivi Pöhö, Ismo Mattila, Harri Lähdesmäki, Eric A. Franzosa, Outi Vaarala, Marcus de Goffau, Hermie Harmsen, Jorma Ilonen, Suvi M. Virtanen, Clary Clish, Matej Orešič, Curtis Huttenhower, and the DIABIMMUNE Study Group under the leadership of Mikael Knip.

How RadioShack Helped Build Silicon Valley

RadioShack store in Chelsea in New York, Feb. 03, 2015. Richard Levine/Demotix/Corbis

Steve Wozniak still laughs telling the story of the TV jammer. He’d built a tiny transmitter that he concealed in his hand, and he took it down into the basement of Libby Hall at the University of Colorado in Boulder, where he was a freshman. Libby was where students would gather every night, around the only color television on campus. “I would jam the TV,” says Wozniak. “Then, a friend of mine would whack it, and it would go good. I would jam it again, fuzz up the picture. He’d whack the TV and it’d go good. Eventually, they stationed somebody next to that TV every night for weeks, and it was their job to fix the TV, adjust the tuning or whatever until it worked.”

Later, at school in Berkeley, he and Steve Jobs played more elaborate tricks: They’d convince their friends that the TV would only work if they pointed one arm pointed straight up, held a leg off the floor, or twisted their body into a pretzel. Once, Wozniak convinced his furious professors that another student was jamming all the TVs in their classroom by taking his finger of the transmitter right as the other guy left the room. “And the TAs pointed at him and said ‘there he goes.'”

When Woz first designed the jammer, the only part he had on hand was a tuning capacitor from an old transistor radio. So he went where he’d go whenever he needed something small and a little bit odd: RadioShack. “I walked there — it was a little bit of a long walk — and I looked at all the transistors they had.” He bought the highest-speed one he could find. “It worked out quite well,” says Wozniak. Except for the guy who picked the wrong day to leave class a few minutes early, anyway.

As RadioShack goes, so does a part of Silicon Valley’s history.

Today, RadioShack filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. It may live on in name, propped up by Sprint, but its original spirit is probably gone for good. As it goes, so goes one of the unsung heroes of a generation of tinkerers and builders, a key piece of the Silicon Valley tech-boom puzzle. Read about the biggest tech stories of the 20th century, and RadioShack keeps popping up: Long before he founded Netscape, Marc Andreessen learned to program tooling around on a TRS-80, one of the first affordable personal computers and one of the first devices RadioShack ever produced. Kevin Mitnick, the first hacker ever on the FBI’s most-wanted list, learned his trade on the demo models at RadioShack because he couldn’t afford a computer of his own. John Draper, the phone phreaker known as “Captain Crunch,” hacked his way into free long-distance calls using a Touch Tone dialer he bought from RadioShack.

Woz bought one too, and he says it cost him a fortune. He used it for the now-infamous Blue Box, which he and Steve Jobs used to make their own free calls without interference from Ma Bell. Without RadioShack, there’s no Blue Box. And as Woz tells it, without the Blue Box there’s no Apple.

There’d probably be no Dell, either. It was inside his local RadioShack that a high-school-age Michael Dell first began tinkering with computers, all while saving up to buy his own Apple II. Which, as he recalls in “Direct from Dell,” he promptly took apart. (Can’t do that at RadioShack.) His parents were furious, but putting the computer back together was the beginning of the business that was the beginning of Dell. That store was also where he discovered he could buy computer parts, put them together himself, and sell them cheaper by going straight to buyers.

RadioShack was much more than just a store.

In its heyday, RadioShack was so much more than a store — it was an art gallery, a museum, a school. “You didn’t really have really good electronics magazines full of what’s available,” Wozniak remembers. “You had a few catalogues that were full of things like walkie-talkies, but if you went down to RadioShack you could actually see something.” As a teenager he would walk into stores and soak up information, spending hours reading labels, memorizing prices and feature lists. It was inside those walls where so many watched the technological revolution unfold — and where they first jumped in.

The company’s downfall doesn’t just affect these builders, though, the teenagers like Woz who bought diodes by the bag. It means there’s no place for the fixers, either: people ready to pull up their sleeves and break out the tools when something breaks. Those were always the store’s primary customers, the ones who bought the newest thing and then came back when something broke.

RadioShack didn’t leave fixers; the fixers left RadioShack. Our TVs don’t come with vacuum tubes anymore, and woe to the enterprising owner who cracks open his flatscreen to fix a dead pixel. There’s nothing we can fix about our iPhones, really. An entire generation of inventors and innovators grew up taking things apart and putting them back together; now we tinker with apps and services, not the hardware that runs them. Code Academy is a more appropriate DIY shop these days, as hackers memorize CSS rows instead of soldering techniques.

Of course, you can’t say The Shack didn’t try to modernize. It shifted its focus dramatically in recent years, to “mobility” and selling high-end electronics. It just didn’t work; that was never what the company was known for. Maybe RadioShack’s biggest problem isn’t that it missed the maker movement or failed to see smartphones coming; maybe it’s that there’s just nothing to take apart anymore. RadioShack’s best idea was to be a tinkerer’s haven, and there aren’t enough tinkerers anymore.

Actually, no. That’s the second-biggest problem. Woz nails the biggest, even as he tries to lament the company’s loss. “I use RadioShack probably more than any other electronics store… aside from the internet.”

Drug-resistant bacteria lurk in subway stations, high school students discover

Forget the five-million plus commuters and untold number of rats -- many of the living things crowded into the New York City subway system are too small to see. An interest in the more menacing among these microbes led high school student Anya Dunaif, a participant in Rockefeller's Summer Science Research Program, to spend her vacation swabbing benches and turn styles beneath the city. Among her findings: bacteria impervious to two major antibiotics.

The samples she collected and cultured in five stations are a component of a city-scale environmental DNA sampling effort led by Chris Mason, an assistant professor at Weill Cornell Medical College with support from Rockefeller's Science Outreach program, as well as from numerous local, national and international collaborators. This project, called Pathomap, seeks to profile the city's microbial community, or microbiome, while also capturing DNA from other organisms, all of which could potentially be used to assess biological threats, including those to human health. The project's initial results are described in a paper published Wednesday (February 4) in Cell Systems.

With help from fellow high school student researcher Nell Kirchberger, Dunaif collected the bacteria on swabs and tested to see if they would grow in Petri dishes containing three commonly used antibiotics. Bacteria from five of the 18 swabs she tested grew in spite of the presence of either ampicillin or kanamycin, and in one case, both. None of the cultured bacteria appeared resistant to the third antibiotic, chloramphenicol.

Antibiotic resistance -- the ability of disease-causing bacteria to withstand compounds used to kill them off -- can make a once treatable infection more serious, even life threatening. A natural consequence of evolution, and the widespread use and misuse of antibiotics, resistance is increasing worldwide.

"Although I knew resistance is considered a serious threat to modern medicine, I went into this project not certain what to expect. I wasn't even sure we would see antibiotic-resistant bacteria, let alone multi-drug resistant bacteria," says Dunaif, a senior at St. Ann's School in Brooklyn. "Now we hope to build off the work I did over the summer by searching for more types of antibiotic resistance in more stations."

Joining her on the continuing search for drug-resistant bugs are Anya Auerbach, a senior at the Ethical Culture Fieldston School, and Will Lounsbery-Scaife, now a freshman at New York University. (Kirchberger has since returned to California.) Both took on their own projects over the summer, although their work was not included in the current Pathomap publication.

Now the three of them, with guidance from Jeanne Garbarino, director of Rockefeller's Science Outreach Program, are preparing a rigorous sampling protocol they plan to test at the Lexington Avenue/59th Street station, and getting ready to look for resistance against four additional antibiotics. As part of this contribution to Pathomap's ongoing work, they intend to use genetic sequencing and analysis provided by Weill Cornell Medical College to identify the resistance genes and the molecular pathways the microbes that contain them use to evade the drugs.

"There's no question, high school students can do legitimate primary research. If we are going to encourage critical thinking, which is important regardless of what you do in life, I think it is important to have them ask and attempt to answer open-ended questions," Garbarino says.

Lounsbery-Scaife spent his summer swabbing water fountains in Central Park. The sequencing results aren't complete yet, but the experience, he says, has given him a better understanding of the scientific process, not just the results.

"It has de-romanticized the whole process for me, but not in a bad way. I learned how slow and consistent you have to be throughout, writing everything down and doing everything exactly the same way. This might deter some people from wanting to do science, but for me, it just validates my interest in it," Lounsbery-Scaife says.

Auerbach, meanwhile, attempted to track microbes as they accumulated over time on Grand Central Station ticket machines. Her effort, which she says attracted a surprising lack of interest from subway riders, was unsuccessful because she couldn't get enough DNA. Nevertheless, she sees value in the disappointment.

"I was hoping to get something really cool and exciting and instead it was like, nope, we can't even sequence this. I did a lot of troubleshooting, and I am confident that if there was something there we would have gotten it," Auerbach says.

Auerbach's results are actually quite typical of research done even by professional scientists, Garbarino says. "Someone said to me when I was in grad school for every 99 failures there is one success. It's not about a grand slam every time you are up to bat, it's about strategy and working with your team to get someone to home plate. As our students learned, that may be slow and tedious at times, but it is gratifying nonetheless."

In addition to antibiotic-resistance, Pathomap's surveys also turned up fragments of DNA that correspond to well-known disease causing microbes, including plague and anthrax bacteria. However, the authors note, microbes that left behind this DNA do not appear to be causing widespread disease; instead they may simply represent normal inhabitants of urban infrastructure.

First map of New York City subway system microbes; DNA fragments associated with anthrax and Bubonic plague

The microbes that call the New York City subway system home are mostly harmless, but include samples of disease-causing bacteria that are resistant to drugs -- and even DNA fragments associated with anthrax and Bubonic plague -- according to a citywide microbiome map published today by Weill Cornell Medical College investigators.

The study, published in Cell Systems, demonstrates that it is possible and useful to develop a "pathogen map" -- dubbed a "PathoMap" -- of a city, with the heavily traveled subway a proxy for New York's population. It is a baseline assessment, and repeated sampling could be used for long-term, accurate disease surveillance, bioterrorism threat mitigation, and large scale health management for New York, says the study's senior investigator, Dr. Christopher E. Mason, an assistant professor in Weill Cornell's Department of Physiology and Biophysics and in the HRH Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Bin Abdulaziz Al-Saud Institute for Computational Biomedicine (ICB).

The PathoMap findings are generally reassuring, indicating no need to avoid the subway system or use protective gloves, Dr. Mason says. The majority of the 637 known bacterial, viral, fungal and animal species he and his co-authors detected were non-pathogenic and represent normal bacteria present on human skin and human body. Culture experiments revealed that all subway sites tested possess live bacteria.

Strikingly, about half of the sequences of DNA they collected could not be identified -- they did not match any organism known to the National Center for Biotechnology Information or the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. These represent organisms that New Yorkers touch every day, but were uncharacterized and undiscovered until this study. The findings underscore the vast potential for scientific exploration that is still largely untapped and yet right under scientists' fingertips.

"Our data show evidence that most bacteria in these densely populated, highly trafficked transit areas are neutral to human health, and much of it is commonly found on the skin or in the gastrointestinal tract," Dr. Mason says. "These bacteria may even be helpful, since they can out-compete any dangerous bacteria."

But the researchers also say that 12 percent of the bacteria species they sampled showed some association with disease. For example, live, antibiotic-resistant bacteria were present in 27 percent of the samples they collected. And they detected two samples with DNA fragments of Bacillus anthracis (anthrax), and three samples with a plasmid associated with Yersinia pestis (Bubonic plague) -- both at very low levels. Notably, the presence of these DNA fragments do not indicate that they are alive, and culture experiments showed no evidence of them being alive.

Yet these apparently virulent organisms are not linked to widespread sickness or disease, Dr. Mason says. "They are instead likely just the co-habitants of any shared urban infrastructure and city, but wider testing is needed to confirm this."

For example, there has not been a single reported case of the plague in New York City since the PathoMap project began in June 2013.

"Despite finding traces of pathogenic microbes, their presence isn't substantial enough to pose a threat to human health," Dr. Mason says. "The presence of these microbes and the lack of reported medical cases is truly a testament to our body's immune system, and our innate ability to continuously adapt to our environment.

"PathoMap also establishes the first baseline data for an entire city, revealing that low-levels of pathogens are typical of this environment," he adds. "While this is expected in rural environments, we've never seen these levels before in cities. We can now monitor for changes and potential threats to this balanced microbial ecosystem."

Jumping into the Unknown

Scientists now believe that the diversity of microorganisms that are present in, on and around humans comprise a significant component of overall health. In the average human, there are 10 times as many microbes as human cells, and products processed by these microbes comprise more than one-third of the active, small molecules in the bloodstream. This collective microbiome is seen to impact health by exacerbating or resisting infectious diseases, controlling obesity risk, and regulating metabolic rates. Yet there is very little known about the native microbial communities that surround people in streets, buildings or public transit areas.

In the study, the research team -- which includes investigators from five other New York City medical centers and others from around the country and internationally -- sought to define the microbiome in New York City's subway system, which in 2013 was used by an average of 5.5 million people per day, according to the city's Metropolitan Transportation Authority. Over the past 17 months, the team -- many of them student volunteers, medical students and graduate students -- used nylon swabs to collect, in triplicate, DNA from turnstiles, wooden and metal benches, stairway hand railings, trashcans, and kiosks in all open subway stations in 24 subway lines in five boroughs. The team also collected samples from the inside of trains, including seats, doors, poles and handrails. Investigators are currently analyzing additional samples collected during all four seasons to study the temporal dynamics of the microbiome.

The sample collectors were equipped with a mobile app built by the researchers, which allowed them to time stamp each of the samples, tag it using a global positioning system and log the data in real time. DNA from the microbes was sequenced using the most advanced research technology at the Weill Cornell Epigenomics Facility and the HudsonAlpha Institute for Biotechnology. They sequenced 1,457 samples out of more than 4,200 collected, and the results were analyzed in the ICB.

"We had our hypothesis about what's on the surfaces of the subway, which reflects a massive, diverse, busy metropolis, but we really had no idea what we would find," says co-lead author Ebrahim Afshinnekoo, a senior at Macaulay Honors College -Queens who starting working on the project as a Tri-Institutional Computational Biology and Medicine Summer Student in 2013.

The majority of the DNA from all the samples, 48.3 percent, did not match any known organism, "which underscores the vast wealth of unknown species that are ubiquitous in urban areas," Afshinnekoo says.

The most commonly found organism (46.9 percent) was bacteria. Despite some riders' fears of catching cold or flu from fellow straphangers, viruses were rare -- they made up .032 percent of the samples. However, some seasonal viruses are RNA viruses, not DNA viruses, and they would not be identified with the collection methods used in the study.

Of the known bacteria, the majority (57 percent) found on the surfaces of the subway have never been associated with human disease, whereas about 31 percent represented opportunistic bacteria that might pose health risks for immune-compromised, injured or disease-susceptible populations, researchers report. The remaining 12 percent have some evidence of pathogenicity.

They found that dozens of microbial species were unique to each area of the train, and that there is a significant range of microbial diversity across different subway lines. The Bronx was found to be the most diverse with the most number of species found, followed by Brooklyn, Manhattan and Queens. Staten Island was the least diverse.

"We built maps that detail what organisms are present in each area of the city, creating a molecular portrait of the metropolis," says co-lead author Dr. Cem Meydan, a postdoctoral associate at Weill Cornell Medical College.

Despite sampling surfaces of areas of high human traffic and contact, the researchers found that only an average of 0.2 percent of reads uniquely mapped to the human genome. Using tools like AncestryMapper and ADMIXTURE, the investigators took human alleles and recreated census data of a particular subway station or neighborhood. Their results showed that the trace levels of human DNA left of the surface of the subway can recapitulate the U.S. Census data. For example, a Hispanic area near Chinatown in Manhattan appeared to hold a strong mixture of Asian and Hispanic human genes. An area of North Harlem showed African and Hispanic genes, and an area of Brooklyn with a predominantly white population was predicted to be Finnish, British and Tuscan.

"This provides a forensic ability to learn about the ancestry of the people who transit a station," Dr. Mason says, "and it means the DNA people leave behind can reveal a clue as to the area's demographics."

The researchers also compared their microbial data with U.S. census data, as well as average ridership data from the MTA. They found a slightly positive correlation between these two variables and the population density of microbes on the subway, suggesting that the more people in an area, the more diverse the types of bacteria.

Efforts like PathoMap in New York can readily be applied to other cities to provide a new tool for disease and threat surveillance, Dr. Mason says. "With the further development of sequencing technologies, I believe having a live model tracking the levels of potential pathogens could be possible," he says. "I envision PathoMap to be the first step in that model."

Projects are already underway that build upon PathoMap's initial data and further the researchers' goal of investigating the microbiome of large, complex cities. Collaborators across the country have collected samples from airports, subways, transit hubs, taxis and public parks located in 14 states -- including New Jersey, Massachusetts, Maryland, Florida, Illinois, Texas and California. By sequencing the DNA of these samples, Dr. Mason hopes to create the first ever comparison of major cities in the nation that contextualizes urban and rural, high density and low density environments.

The Impact of Superstorm Sandy

The researchers also worked with the MTA to gain access to the South Ferry station that was completed submerged by Superstorm Sandy in 2012, and which was still closed during sampling. (The station reopened in April 2013.) Dr. Mason's team sampled the walls and floors of the station, and found 10 species of bacteria present that were found nowhere else in the system. Notably, all of the species are normally found in marine or aquatic environments.

"The walls of the subway still carry the echo of the hurricane, and you can see it in the microbiome," Dr. Mason noted. "The big questions are -- how long will it stay? How does this impact health and the design of the built environment of the subway? This is why we have kept sampling and swabbing since we started. The temporal dynamics are key."

The study was supported by the National Institutes of Health (F31GM111053), the Weill Cornell Clinical and Translational Science Center, the Pinkerton Foundation, the Vallee Foundation, the WorldQuant Foundation, the Epigenomics Core Facility at Weill Cornell, the HudsonAlpha Institute for Biotechnology, Illumina, Qiagen, and Indiegogo (for crowdfunding and crowdsourcing support).

Study co-authors include, from Weill Cornell Medical College, Shanin Chowdhury, Cem Meydan, Dyala Jaroudi, Collin Boyer, Nick Bernstein, Darryl Reeves, Jorge Gandara, Sagar Chhangawala, Sofia Ahsanuddin, Nell Kirchberger, Isaac Garcia, David Gandara, Amber Simmons, Yogesh Saletore, Noah Alexander, Priyanka Vijay, Elizabeth M. Hénaff, Paul Zumbo; Timothy Nessel, Bharathi Sundaresh, and Elizabeth Pereira from Cornell University; Sergios-Orestis Kolokotronis from Fordham University; Sean Dhanraj, Tanzina Nawrin, Theodore Muth, Elizabeth Alter and Gregory O'Mullan from City University of New York; Ellen Jorgensen from Genspace Community Laboratory; Julia Maritz, Katie Schneider, and Jane Carlton from New York University; Michael Walsh from the State University of New York, Downstate; Scott Tighe from the University of Vermont; Joel T. Dudley and Eric E. Schadt from the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai; Anya Dunaif and Jeanne Garbarino from Rockefeller University; Sean Ennis, Eoghan Ohalloran and Tiago R Magalhaes from the University of Ireland; Braden Boone, Angela L. Jones, and Shawn Levy from HudsonAlpha Institute for Biotechnology; and Robert J. Prill from the IBM Almaden Research Center.

Comcast Does It Again and Renames a Customer ‘SuperBitch’ Bauer

Toby Talbot/AP

Yesterday Mary Bauer received her Comcast bill in the mail. But the 63-year-old Chicago area resident says she’s not going to open it. That’s because someone at Comcast switched her name on the bill, addressing it instead to “SuperBitch Bauer.”

Bauer has been having problems with Comcast for months. As she related her story to Chicago’s WGN television station, she’s had a lot of service and billing issues. Technicians have been dispatched to her place a whopping 39 times, and she recently got into it with telephone support after her bills stopped arriving.

Whether that prompted the “SuperBitch” name change, Comcast doesn’t know. Comcast spokesman Jack Segal, told us that the company is “investigating this thoroughly, and we have reached out to our customer.”

Meanwhile, Bauer is understandably angry. “This is a disgrace to me,” she told WGN. “Why are they doing this to me? I pay my bills. I do not deserve this.”

Comcast employs about 130,000 people nationwide. This looks like the work of a lone smart-ass with little common sense, and not like it’s the result of corporate policy. But this isn’t the first time someone in the bowels of the company’s billing department has pulled such a stunt. Last month, the company changed another customer’s name to “Asshole” Brown, after he tried to cancel his cable package.

And a decade ago, another Chicago area customer found herself renamed “Bitch Dog” by the cable company.

Comcast Does It Again and Renames a Customer ‘SuperBitch’ Bauer

Toby Talbot/AP

Yesterday Mary Bauer received her Comcast bill in the mail. But the 63-year-old Chicago area resident says she’s not going to open it. That’s because someone at Comcast switched her name on the bill, addressing it instead to “SuperBitch Bauer.”

Bauer has been having problems with Comcast for months. As she related her story to Chicago’s WGN television station, she’s had a lot of service and billing issues. Technicians have been dispatched to her place a whopping 39 times, and she recently got into it with telephone support after her bills stopped arriving.

Whether that prompted the “SuperBitch” name change, Comcast doesn’t know. Comcast spokesman Jack Segal, told us that the company is “investigating this thoroughly, and we have reached out to our customer.”

Meanwhile, Bauer is understandably angry. “This is a disgrace to me,” she told WGN. “Why are they doing this to me? I pay my bills. I do not deserve this.”

Comcast employs about 130,000 people nationwide. This looks like the work of a lone smart-ass with little common sense, and not like it’s the result of corporate policy. But this isn’t the first time someone in the bowels of the company’s billing department has pulled such a stunt. Last month, the company changed another customer’s name to “Asshole” Brown, after he tried to cancel his cable package.

And a decade ago, another Chicago area customer found herself renamed “Bitch Dog” by the cable company.

Does the Future Hold an All-in-One Uber Gadget?

Victorinox

For over 2,000 years, advances in medicine, construction methods, transportation and utilities have grown at an extremely slow rate. It was not until we entered the technology era that all industries exploded at an exponential rate of developmental growth.

Currently, the average household in the United States owns five devices connected to the Internet via Wi-Fi, wired or cellular networks with more than six percent owning more than 15. Worldwide this means there are over 10 billion connected devices.

Today, consumers own phones, tablets, smart watches, smart glasses, fitness gadgets, and the list goes on and on. As technology advances, we have to wonder, will the number of devices we own increase or will it be reduced to a small number of devices that encompass all the others’ features?

Change Is Good

Many technological advancements make everyday life easier. Apple developed Siri for mobile devices so users no longer have to type to complete most tasks on their mobile device. Skype changed the way people hold conference calls with colleagues, allowing them to hold meetings via a mobile device or a computer. And rather than carrying around a portable cd player, music lovers can now listen to tunes on their phone.

Likewise, the tablet PC, allows users to complete task on a thin screen, replacing the bulk of a laptop. Now tablets are on their way out, replaced by “phablets” combining the functionality of a tablet into one device. All of these great products have contributed to reducing the effort to complete a task or by eliminating the need for multiple devices.

Future Vision

Nikola Tesla, one of the greatest minds in history, did a lot of great things for mankind. One of his possibly greatest achievements never saw the light of day. He designed and developed the Wardenclyffe Tower, which, according to him, was created to eventually wirelessly transmit free electricity over vast distances. Could this have eliminated the need for multiple charging cables and charging plugs for all of your portable devices?

On the flip side, technology advances have allowed for a plethora of additional devices available for us to use. We now have Google Glass, smart watches, smart rings, protective cell phone cases with built in photo printers and projection smart bracelets, where the phone screen is projected onto an arm and is used by hand and finger gestures.

We have gadgets to help people become more fit, such as fitness bands, and running shoe smart sensors that are synced to an app track distance and pace. Bluetooth heart rate monitors allow for real-time heart monitoring, and smart posture devices strapped around the mid-section detect slumping and send alerts via a mobile phone.

Inside Story

There are arguments on both sides of the debate about how technology and gadgets have become part of our lives, and now they may become part of our bodies. One controversial way to reduce the number of devices we carry is through implantable technology. This advanced technology was featured on an episode of Shark Tank where an inventor pitched an implantable Bluetooth microphone that is inserted under the skin just below the earlobe. Many laughed, but this type of technology is likely to be reality in the near future.

Just as many other developments in technology once seemed impossible or outrageous, implantable technology is on the horizon, and if and when it becomes widely accepted throughout North America and the rest of the world, people will adapt to this type of advancement, but until then society can expect that the number of devices and gadgets will increase.

Shane Broesky is co-founder and President of Färbe Technik and parent company iShopNation Corporation.

Say Goodbye to Privacy

opensourceway/Flickr

You’re probably about to lose something precious. Something you can’t see. Something you can’t touch, taste, or smell and probably don’t think about regularly. And yet when it’s gone, which I believe it will be soon, you may spend the rest of your life longing for it.

What you’re about to lose is your privacy.

Actually, it’s worse than that. You aren’t just going to lose your privacy, you’re going to have to watch the very concept of privacy be rewritten under your nose. That’s because while the Internet of Things (IoT) is going to add a lot to our lives, it’s probably going to take our privacy in payment, whether you want it to or not.

We shouldn’t be surprised that the IoT will change things, nor that the full impact is difficult to predict. Big changes brought on by technology are something we’ve seen plenty of times before. When the steam engine was first introduced in the 1800’s, no one could have foreseen the impact it would have on the way we think about everything from transportation, city design, even need for a standard “time” across the country.

Other changes have followed, driven by new technology – the internal combustion engine, flight, the integrated circuit, the Internet. All of these technological changes forced us to redefine how we think about our lives, what technology means to us. Over the years, these changes have created, and killed, entire industries. At each step, the impact of our technology arrived faster, and was more deeply felt.

Yet the Internet of Things won’t just change some particular aspects of our lives; it won’t affect say commerce, or industry, or politics. It will affect, shape, even redefine them all. At once. And, if the past is anything to go by, the changes will happen even more quickly than ever before.

Why? What makes the IoT so unique in the long history of technological change?

1. It is the aggregation of a large number of already disruptive technologies, and it combines the disruptive elements of those technologies in new ways, magnifying their effects. Smart tech, the Internet, social identity, big data, cloud, mobility, all these are affected by, and contribute to, the emerging IoT. It’s like putting gun powder, dynamite, nitroglycerine, and a bunch of road flares into a box and shaking them up. Something’s going to happen, and happen fast.

2. The IoT is pervasive in a way that nothing else has been, except possibly pottery and agriculture, and those two technologies *defined* human existence. The IoT will be *everywhere* which means that when the changes occur (and they will) those changes will impact everything, and everyone – there’s no ‘offline’ no ‘standby’ for the IoT. No one will be able to escape its impact, because you won’t *use* the IoT, you’ll live inside it – all day, every day.

3. As a society we’re addicted to tech in a way that no generation ever has been before and we already have the mindset – the Pavlovian response – to readily embrace this next generation of technology that IoT represents in an unquestioning manner. We rely on it for everything and we’ve been trained to expect technology to answer our every need, because no matter what the question – there’s an app for that. Yet, the most profound effect of all the ways in which the IoT changes our lives is that it will blur, to the point of invisibility, the concept of privacy. When we live in a world in which there are countless sensors and smart objects around us, all the time; when the clothes we wear, even things inside our bodies, are smart and connected, then the concept of “private” becomes far more ephemeral. What’s private? From whom? When?

As more and more information is gathered about us, constantly, so the concept of being offline, of being unavailable, or simply being alone, will recede. And as it goes, so will our control over the information gathered about us. Big data, especially, is going to make it hard to keep anything private – as more and more things gather increasing contextual information about our behavior, so the capability to analyze and predict, to seek out the identity of the people behind every action, will open very public windows into all our lives.

We may well be living in the last era of privacy – and standing on the brink of a post-privacy society. It’s not easy to imagine what that will be like. Perhaps in the end it will force us to face the deeper truths about human nature, that we are all much the same. Perhaps it will be an Orwellian nightmare in which governments spy on us constantly. Most probably, it will be a little of both.

The good news, however, is that we almost certainly won’t have to wait long to find out.

Geoff Webb is Director of Solution Strategy at NetIQ.

Awesome Curating App Perfectly Mashes Up Pinterest, Evernote, and Instagram

Meet Curator, an iPad app where creative professionals can save content like images and notes. Curator

Meet Curator, an iPad app where creative professionals can save content like images and notes.

Curator

Curator began like many apps do. Its founder, architect Daniel Nordh, was working on an iPad, realized a need for something (in this case, a digital pinboard to keep track of notes, photos, and rendering for projects), and couldn’t find one. So he made it himself. “I thought it was just an obvious idea, to seal my content together in one grid, and then move it around,” he says.

At the time, in 2012, Nordh worked for City Hall in London, advising design projects for public spaces. Nordh sat in a lot of meetings where laptops weren’t allowed, and you couldn’t be seen looking at your phone, since that’s rude. So he bought an iPad, which, thanks to the unobtrusive tablet shape, was more meeting-friendly. He liked it, but “was frustrated that content or things I saved were fragmented by different apps,” he says. “That wasn’t conducive to working on projects.”

Nordh built and designed Curator himself. The app, he says, is totally tailored to the iPad. It’s a super spare series of cells that, once you tap on them, let you retrieve images from Pinterest, Dropbox, Instagram, or notes and material from Evernote. (Or, you can just manually type in a new note.) The app is minimalist, and there’s not a whole lot to look at, because Curator is a support network for the user’s content. Everything else fades into the background, on purpose.

“It’s really your content you want to see,” Nordh says. As we become more mobile, and our files and ideas confusingly live in the cloud, or on another computer, or wherever, having a series of simple digital mood boards sounds like an appealing way to get organized. Plus, the iPad creates a unique opportunity to conjure up the tactility of a blank canvas that some designers might miss. “You wouldn’t have that feeling of touch, of moving between things very freely, on a desktop.”

Curator

Phrases like “saving content” inevitably call to mind Pinterest, which was the darling of the tech world in 2012, when Nordh started working on Curator. Like Pinterest, Curator is a grid, and like Pinterest, Curator lets you virtually stick a bunch of images together. But whereas Pinterest drives discovery, Curator drives careful selection. “We’re constantly drowning in new content, on Twitter and Facebook and Pinterest this feed keeps showing us new stuff. Often in the creative process it’s important to be very selective and just take things that matter.” It also drives work, by acting like a on-the-go storyboard for anyone planning or sequencing projects.

Plus, if you think about it, a creative director would never pull up Pinterest in a client meeting. “Your content should always be presentable,” Nordh says. “You have to pitch all the time as a creative.”

Hands On: Apple’s New ‘Photos for Mac’ Is a Vast Improvement Over iPhoto

Screenshot: WIRED

Onstage at WWDC last June, Apple demonstrated a new photo management and editing app called Photos for Mac. It was slated to debut with OS X Yosemite in early 2015, where it would replace iPhoto, the Mac desktop’s default consumer photo editing application, and also Aperture, Apple’s pro photo application for the Mac which the company has killed off.

So not only is Photos for Mac made to replace the two ends of Apple’s photo editing lineup—pro and consumer—it’s also built to create a more seamless workflow between your iPhone, your desktop, and your iCloud storage account. This is a Mac OS X app that looks and behaves very much like its iOS sibling. It’s key to Apple’s new strategy of cross-device unification, furthering the blending of mobile and desktop experiences promised with the tandem release of iOS 8 and Yosemite, as well as making one of the iPhone’s strongest selling points—the awesome camera—even stronger.

Photos for Mac is now available to developers as part of the seed of OS X 10.10.3, out today, and will ship to all Yosemite users as part of a free OS update (rather than an app install) later this spring.

I got the chance to go hands-on with the new desktop software and found that overall, Photos is a vast improvement over iPhoto, and the new editing tools make it extraordinarily easy to transform a photo from “OK” to “Wow.”

The first thing I noticed about Photos is how straightforward the interface is. It very much takes its cues stylistically from the iOS Photos app, especially in how it organizes your library. The app opens with all your shots grouped into Moments and Collections, just like in iOS. It’s a little obtuse, but think of it this way: Moments is the most granular, zoomed-in view, the one where your photos are organized by date and location. Collections is one level higher—your entire week-long vacation in Hawaii will be a Collection, for example, whereas a Moment would be photos shot at a specific beach over one afternoon during the trip. You can also zoom out even further to see your photos organized as tiny thumbnails in a year view, or view photos organized by what’s been shared, by album, or by project.

When you double-click a photo to open it, you can tap Edit in the upper right, to gain access to a variety of editing tools—just like in iOS. Here, Apple has bundled in the things you could do in iPhoto and Aperture, but in a more n00b-friendly way. For a one-click enhancement that generally makes colors more saturated, you can just click “Enhance.” I find this is mostly useful on photos that are a little washed out or over-exposed. The cropping tool has a neat Auto feature that automatically straightens out the photo based on the horizon line, and composes it according to the rule of thirds. Below that, you can tint a photo with the same set of filters you see in iOS.

“Adjustments” is where most of your familiar editing tools live. To start, Apple keeps the experience very simple. You’ve got three options: Light, Color, or Black & White. To adjust the photo, you simply drag a slider right or left on each of these options until the photo looks the way you want it to. There is also an “Auto” option for each of these settings. I threw the app a variety of different photos: an awkward selfie, a slightly overexposed landscape, a closeup of a goat’s face. For a good well-lit photo, the Auto settings barely change anything (as one would expect). But for a photo needing a little love, in every case I tried, simply tapping the Auto buttons in Adjustments made noticeable improvements to the images.

Screenshot: WIRED

“The eff!” some may say to this. “I want to adjust the exposure and highlights myself!” No problem. Click the arrow to the right of each of these headers to expose the more detailed adjustments you can make to a photo. There, you can either see how things like brightness and contrast are being adjusted as you slide that slider back and forth, or you can tweak a photo manually.

And next to the Adjustments header at the top of this menu, you can tap Add to reveal even more settings you can adjust, like sharpen, noise reduction, white balance, and levels. You can hide or expose these different settings as you choose.

As I mentioned, iCloud is a key part of the Photos experience. Using iCloud Photo Library, your photos are synced across your Apple devices—from phone to desktop to iPad—and any edits made on one device are synced to the others as well. As it is in other Apple-made apps like iTunes and its workplace tools, the iCloud syncing is entirely optional. But the syncing of photos across devices is a powerful feature for anyone who’s 100 percent bought in to the Apple hardware ecosystem. One note: While Apple is ceasing development of iPhoto, you can still use it if you choose. But edits that happen in iPhoto will stay in iPhoto, and edits done in Photos remain in Photos.

So what doesn’t Photos have? Photos does not have things like the granular Precision Brushes feature of Aperture. It does offer a retouching tool. Using that, you can adjust the size of the touch-up brush, but you don’t get to adjust the softness or the strength of this brush, or use the “Detect Edges” feature. As only an occasional Aperture user myself, I suspect there are other advanced adjustments professionals may notice missing, as well.

Advanced users, particularly those operating on 5K iMacs or Mac Pros, may be happier eventually switching to Adobe Lightroom—though most of them probably have done so already. But for most of us, particularly recent Mac converts and people who may not fancy themselves serious photographers, Photos is a welcomely humble way to approach image editing. It will be available free as part of an OS X Yosemite update this spring.

Correction 1:40 EST 2/5/2015 Original version misstated when Photos was expected to launch.

Does the Future Hold an All-in-One Uber Gadget?

Victorinox

For over 2,000 years, advances in medicine, construction methods, transportation and utilities have grown at an extremely slow rate. It was not until we entered the technology era that all industries exploded at an exponential rate of developmental growth.

Currently, the average household in the United States owns five devices connected to the Internet via Wi-Fi, wired or cellular networks with more than six percent owning more than 15. Worldwide this means there are over 10 billion connected devices.

Today, consumers own phones, tablets, smart watches, smart glasses, fitness gadgets, and the list goes on and on. As technology advances, we have to wonder, will the number of devices we own increase or will it be reduced to a small number of devices that encompass all the others’ features?

Change Is Good

Many technological advancements make everyday life easier. Apple developed Siri for mobile devices so users no longer have to type to complete most tasks on their mobile device. Skype changed the way people hold conference calls with colleagues, allowing them to hold meetings via a mobile device or a computer. And rather than carrying around a portable cd player, music lovers can now listen to tunes on their phone.

Likewise, the tablet PC, allows users to complete task on a thin screen, replacing the bulk of a laptop. Now tablets are on their way out, replaced by “phablets” combining the functionality of a tablet into one device. All of these great products have contributed to reducing the effort to complete a task or by eliminating the need for multiple devices.

Future Vision

Nikola Tesla, one of the greatest minds in history, did a lot of great things for mankind. One of his possibly greatest achievements never saw the light of day. He designed and developed the Wardenclyffe Tower, which, according to him, was created to eventually wirelessly transmit free electricity over vast distances. Could this have eliminated the need for multiple charging cables and charging plugs for all of your portable devices?

On the flip side, technology advances have allowed for a plethora of additional devices available for us to use. We now have Google Glass, smart watches, smart rings, protective cell phone cases with built in photo printers and projection smart bracelets, where the phone screen is projected onto an arm and is used by hand and finger gestures.

We have gadgets to help people become more fit, such as fitness bands, and running shoe smart sensors that are synced to an app track distance and pace. Bluetooth heart rate monitors allow for real-time heart monitoring, and smart posture devices strapped around the mid-section detect slumping and send alerts via a mobile phone.

Inside Story

There are arguments on both sides of the debate about how technology and gadgets have become part of our lives, and now they may become part of our bodies. One controversial way to reduce the number of devices we carry is through implantable technology. This advanced technology was featured on an episode of Shark Tank where an inventor pitched an implantable Bluetooth microphone that is inserted under the skin just below the earlobe. Many laughed, but this type of technology is likely to be reality in the near future.

Just as many other developments in technology once seemed impossible or outrageous, implantable technology is on the horizon, and if and when it becomes widely accepted throughout North America and the rest of the world, people will adapt to this type of advancement, but until then society can expect that the number of devices and gadgets will increase.

Shane Broesky is co-founder and President of Färbe Technik and parent company iShopNation Corporation.

Say Goodbye to Privacy

opensourceway/Flickr

You’re probably about to lose something precious. Something you can’t see. Something you can’t touch, taste, or smell and probably don’t think about regularly. And yet when it’s gone, which I believe it will be soon, you may spend the rest of your life longing for it.

What you’re about to lose is your privacy.

Actually, it’s worse than that. You aren’t just going to lose your privacy, you’re going to have to watch the very concept of privacy be rewritten under your nose. That’s because while the Internet of Things (IoT) is going to add a lot to our lives, it’s probably going to take our privacy in payment, whether you want it to or not.

We shouldn’t be surprised that the IoT will change things, nor that the full impact is difficult to predict. Big changes brought on by technology are something we’ve seen plenty of times before. When the steam engine was first introduced in the 1800’s, no one could have foreseen the impact it would have on the way we think about everything from transportation, city design, even need for a standard “time” across the country.

Other changes have followed, driven by new technology – the internal combustion engine, flight, the integrated circuit, the Internet. All of these technological changes forced us to redefine how we think about our lives, what technology means to us. Over the years, these changes have created, and killed, entire industries. At each step, the impact of our technology arrived faster, and was more deeply felt.

Yet the Internet of Things won’t just change some particular aspects of our lives; it won’t affect say commerce, or industry, or politics. It will affect, shape, even redefine them all. At once. And, if the past is anything to go by, the changes will happen even more quickly than ever before.

Why? What makes the IoT so unique in the long history of technological change?

1. It is the aggregation of a large number of already disruptive technologies, and it combines the disruptive elements of those technologies in new ways, magnifying their effects. Smart tech, the Internet, social identity, big data, cloud, mobility, all these are affected by, and contribute to, the emerging IoT. It’s like putting gun powder, dynamite, nitroglycerine, and a bunch of road flares into a box and shaking them up. Something’s going to happen, and happen fast.

2. The IoT is pervasive in a way that nothing else has been, except possibly pottery and agriculture, and those two technologies *defined* human existence. The IoT will be *everywhere* which means that when the changes occur (and they will) those changes will impact everything, and everyone – there’s no ‘offline’ no ‘standby’ for the IoT. No one will be able to escape its impact, because you won’t *use* the IoT, you’ll live inside it – all day, every day.

3. As a society we’re addicted to tech in a way that no generation ever has been before and we already have the mindset – the Pavlovian response – to readily embrace this next generation of technology that IoT represents in an unquestioning manner. We rely on it for everything and we’ve been trained to expect technology to answer our every need, because no matter what the question – there’s an app for that. Yet, the most profound effect of all the ways in which the IoT changes our lives is that it will blur, to the point of invisibility, the concept of privacy. When we live in a world in which there are countless sensors and smart objects around us, all the time; when the clothes we wear, even things inside our bodies, are smart and connected, then the concept of “private” becomes far more ephemeral. What’s private? From whom? When?

As more and more information is gathered about us, constantly, so the concept of being offline, of being unavailable, or simply being alone, will recede. And as it goes, so will our control over the information gathered about us. Big data, especially, is going to make it hard to keep anything private – as more and more things gather increasing contextual information about our behavior, so the capability to analyze and predict, to seek out the identity of the people behind every action, will open very public windows into all our lives.

We may well be living in the last era of privacy – and standing on the brink of a post-privacy society. It’s not easy to imagine what that will be like. Perhaps in the end it will force us to face the deeper truths about human nature, that we are all much the same. Perhaps it will be an Orwellian nightmare in which governments spy on us constantly. Most probably, it will be a little of both.

The good news, however, is that we almost certainly won’t have to wait long to find out.

Geoff Webb is Director of Solution Strategy at NetIQ.

Awesome Curating App Perfectly Mashes Up Pinterest, Evernote, and Instagram

Meet Curator, an iPad app where creative professionals can save content like images and notes. Curator

Meet Curator, an iPad app where creative professionals can save content like images and notes.

Curator

Curator began like many apps do. Its founder, architect Daniel Nordh, was working on an iPad, realized a need for something (in this case, a digital pinboard to keep track of notes, photos, and rendering for projects), and couldn’t find one. So he made it himself. “I thought it was just an obvious idea, to seal my content together in one grid, and then move it around,” he says.

At the time, in 2012, Nordh worked for City Hall in London, advising design projects for public spaces. Nordh sat in a lot of meetings where laptops weren’t allowed, and you couldn’t be seen looking at your phone, since that’s rude. So he bought an iPad, which, thanks to the unobtrusive tablet shape, was more meeting-friendly. He liked it, but “was frustrated that content or things I saved were fragmented by different apps,” he says. “That wasn’t conducive to working on projects.”

Nordh built and designed Curator himself. The app, he says, is totally tailored to the iPad. It’s a super spare series of cells that, once you tap on them, let you retrieve images from Pinterest, Dropbox, Instagram, or notes and material from Evernote. (Or, you can just manually type in a new note.) The app is minimalist, and there’s not a whole lot to look at, because Curator is a support network for the user’s content. Everything else fades into the background, on purpose.

“It’s really your content you want to see,” Nordh says. As we become more mobile, and our files and ideas confusingly live in the cloud, or on another computer, or wherever, having a series of simple digital mood boards sounds like an appealing way to get organized. Plus, the iPad creates a unique opportunity to conjure up the tactility of a blank canvas that some designers might miss. “You wouldn’t have that feeling of touch, of moving between things very freely, on a desktop.”

Curator

Phrases like “saving content” inevitably call to mind Pinterest, which was the darling of the tech world in 2012, when Nordh started working on Curator. Like Pinterest, Curator is a grid, and like Pinterest, Curator lets you virtually stick a bunch of images together. But whereas Pinterest drives discovery, Curator drives careful selection. “We’re constantly drowning in new content, on Twitter and Facebook and Pinterest this feed keeps showing us new stuff. Often in the creative process it’s important to be very selective and just take things that matter.” It also drives work, by acting like a on-the-go storyboard for anyone planning or sequencing projects.

Plus, if you think about it, a creative director would never pull up Pinterest in a client meeting. “Your content should always be presentable,” Nordh says. “You have to pitch all the time as a creative.”

First Look: Apple’s ‘Photos for Mac’ Simplifies Photo Editing and Syncing

Screenshot: WIRED

Onstage at WWDC last June, Apple demonstrated a new photo management and editing app called Photos for Mac. It was originally slated to debut with OS X Yosemite this past fall, where it would replace iPhoto, the Mac desktop’s default consumer photo editing application, and also Aperture, Apple’s pro photo application for the Mac which the company has killed off.

So not only is Photos for Mac made to replace the two ends of Apple’s photo editing lineup—pro and consumer—it’s also built to create a more seamless workflow between your iPhone, your desktop, and your iCloud storage account. This is a Mac OS X app that looks and behaves very much like its iOS sibling. It’s key to Apple’s new strategy of cross-device unification, furthering the blending of mobile and desktop experiences promised with the tandem release of iOS 8 and Yosemite, as well as making one of the iPhone’s strongest selling points—the awesome camera—even stronger.

But Photos for Mac didn’t make it into the final build of Yosemite. After a delay of several months, Photos for Mac is now available to developers as part of the seed of OS X 10.10.3, out today, and will ship to all Yosemite users as part of a free OS update (rather than an app install) later this spring.

I got the chance to go hands-on with the new desktop software and found that overall, Photos is a vast improvement over iPhoto, and the new editing tools make it extraordinarily easy to transform a photo from “OK” to “Wow.”

The first thing I noticed about Photos is how straightforward the interface is. It very much takes its cues stylistically from the iOS Photos app, especially in how it organizes your library. The app opens with all your shots grouped into Moments and Collections, just like in iOS. It’s a little obtuse, but think of it this way: Moments is the most granular, zoomed-in view, the one where your photos are organized by date and location. Collections is one level higher—your entire week-long vacation in Hawaii will be a Collection, for example, whereas a Moment would be photos shot at a specific beach over one afternoon during the trip. You can also zoom out even further to see your photos organized as tiny thumbnails in a year view, or view photos organized by what’s been shared, by album, or by project.

When you double-click a photo to open it, you can tap Edit in the upper right, to gain access to a variety of editing tools—just like in iOS. Here, Apple has bundled in the things you could do in iPhoto and Aperture, but in a more n00b-friendly way. For a one-click enhancement that generally makes colors more saturated, you can just click “Enhance.” I find this is mostly useful on photos that are a little washed out or over-exposed. The cropping tool has a neat Auto feature that automatically straightens out the photo based on the horizon line, and composes it according to the rule of thirds. Below that, you can tint a photo with the same set of filters you see in iOS.

“Adjustments” is where most of your familiar editing tools live. To start, Apple keeps the experience very simple. You’ve got three options: Light, Color, or Black & White. To adjust the photo, you simply drag a slider right or left on each of these options until the photo looks the way you want it to. There is also an “Auto” option for each of these settings. I threw the app a variety of different photos: an awkward selfie, a slightly overexposed landscape, a closeup of a goat’s face. For a good well-lit photo, the Auto settings barely change anything (as one would expect). But for a photo needing a little love, in every case I tried, simply tapping the Auto buttons in Adjustments made noticeable improvements to the images.

Screenshot: WIRED

“The eff!” some may say to this. “I want to adjust the exposure and highlights myself!” No problem. Click the arrow to the right of each of these headers to expose the more detailed adjustments you can make to a photo. There, you can either see how things like brightness and contrast are being adjusted as you slide that slider back and forth, or you can tweak a photo manually.

And next to the Adjustments header at the top of this menu, you can tap Add to reveal even more settings you can adjust, like sharpen, noise reduction, white balance, and levels. You can hide or expose these different settings as you choose.

As I mentioned, iCloud is a key part of the Photos experience. Using iCloud Photo Library, your photos are synced across your Apple devices—from phone to desktop to iPad—and any edits made on one device are synced to the others as well. As it is in other Apple-made apps like iTunes and its workplace tools, the iCloud syncing is entirely optional. But the syncing of photos across devices is a powerful feature for anyone who’s 100 percent bought in to the Apple hardware ecosystem. One note: While Apple is ceasing development of iPhoto, you can still use it if you choose. But edits that happen in iPhoto will stay in iPhoto, and edits done in Photos remain in Photos.

So what doesn’t Photos have? Photos does not have things like the granular Precision Brushes feature of Aperture. It does offer a retouching tool. Using that, you can adjust the size of the touch-up brush, but you don’t get to adjust the softness or the strength of this brush, or use the “Detect Edges” feature. As only an occasional Aperture user myself, I suspect there are other advanced adjustments professionals may notice missing, as well.

Advanced users, particularly those operating on 5K iMacs or Mac Pros, may be happier eventually switching to Adobe Lightroom—though most of them probably have done so already. But for most of us, particularly recent Mac converts and people who may not fancy themselves serious photographers, Photos is a welcomely humble way to approach image editing. It will be available free as part of an OS X Yosemite update this spring.

In Candid Mea Culpa, Twitter CEO Promises a War on Trolls

Twitter has been losing precious users to the abuse of trolls for years, and now CEO Dick Costolo says he’s not going to take it anymore.

In a candid memo to Twitter employees, obtained by The Verge, the company’s head honcho admitted that Twitter has “sucked” at dealing with harassment by trolls on the platform for years. Costolo took full responsibility for that fact and vowed to begin “kicking these people off right and left.”

“I’m frankly ashamed of how poorly we’ve dealt with this issue during my tenure as CEO,” he wrote. “It’s nobody else’s fault but mine, and it’s embarrassing.”

The apology was a direct response to another employee’s post on an internal Twitter forum. The post cited a recent story in The Guardian, by writer Lindy West, who has been repeatedly and brutally harassed on Twitter. One troll went so far as to create an account for her recently deceased father, which he used to torment West.

The Twitter employee excerpted a piece from West’s article in The Guardian, which read: “I’m aware that Twitter is well within its rights to let its platform be used as a vehicle for sexist and racist harassment. But, as a private company – just like a comedian mulling over a rape joke, or a troll looking for a target for his anger – it could choose not to. As a collective of human beings, it could choose to be better.”

That is what Costolo is now vowing to do. In some ways, this process has already begun. Earlier this year, Twitter began banning users who were sharing a video of journalist James Foley being beheaded by Islamic State militants. And, when Robin Williams’ daughter Zelda Williams, publicly announced she was leaving Twitter after being harassed in the aftermath of her father’s death, Twitter also promised to delete accounts that share images of the deceased upon the family’s request. Most recently, Twitter launched a tool in conjunction with a group called Women, Action, & Media, which will make it easier to report instances of harassment and get them resolved.

For Twitter, taking these steps to mitigate abuse is not just a nice thing to do. It’s a business imperative. Twitter needs more users. That fact is baked into every aspect of the company’s strategy, including its recent rollout of Instant Timelines, which aim to make Twitter easier to understand for new users by showing them relevant Tweets as soon as they sign up.

It’s also the driving force behind Twitter’s newly announced deal with Google, which will make Tweets visible in Google search results. The partnership will make it easier for everyday Google users—aka. pretty much everyone—to understand what Twitter is all about. All of it is in service of attracting more people to the platform and catching up to other social networks like Facebook, which have dwarfed Twitter, in terms of monthly active users.

As Twitter is doubling down on growing its base, it also makes sense to focus on retaining the users it already has. That means walking the fine line between making people feel safe on Twitter and staying true to Twitter’s history of minimal censorship.

Just how Twitter plans to do that is still unclear, but in a follow-up message to the internal forum, Costolo promised to ensure that “the people working night and day on this have the resources they need to address the issue, that there are clear lines of responsibility and accountability, and that we don’t equivocate in our decisions and choices.”

Here are Costolo’s responses in full:

On Mon, Feb 2, 2015 at 8:35 PM, Dick Costolo wrote:

We suck at dealing with abuse and trolls on the platform and we’ve sucked at it for years. It’s no secret and the rest of the world talks about it every day. We lose core user after core user by not addressing simple trolling issues that they face every day.

I’m frankly ashamed of how poorly we’ve dealt with this issue during my tenure as CEO. It’s absurd. There’s no excuse for it. I take full responsibility for not being more aggressive on this front. It’s nobody else’s fault but mine, and it’s embarrassing.

We’re going to start kicking these people off right and left and making sure that when they issue their ridiculous attacks, nobody hears them.

Everybody on the leadership team knows this is vital.

@dickc

On Tue, Feb 3, 2015 at 12:45 PM, Dick Costolo wrote:

Let me be very very clear about my response here. I take PERSONAL responsibility for our failure to deal with this as a company. I thought i did that in my note, so let me reiterate what I said, which is that I take personal responsibility for this. I specifically said “It’s nobody’s fault but mine”

We HAVE to be able to tell each other the truth, and the truth that everybody in the world knows is that we have not effectively dealt with this problem even remotely to the degree we should have by now, and that’s on me and nobody else. So now we’re going to fix it, and I’m going to take full responsibility for making sure that the people working night and day on this have the resources they need to address the issue, that there are clear lines of responsibility and accountability, and that we don’t equivocate in our decisions and choices.

Dick