6 Canadian women's soccer players removed from FIFA 16 video game

Six players from Canada's national women's soccer team will be removed from the new FIFA 16 video game days ahead of its general release, following a dispute with the National Collegiate Athletic Association.


The Canadian players who will be removed are Kadeisha Buchanan, Jessie Fleming, Ashley Lawrence, Janine Beckie, Rebecca Quinn and Sura Yekka.


Buchanan, 19, was a breakout star for Team Canada at this year's FIFA Women's World Cup, winning the organization's Best Young Player award for her performance during the event.


Six players from Mexico's team and one player from Spain's team will also be removed, bringing the total of axed players to 13. The collegiate players will be replaced in the game by women who have played for the national teams in question.

The game's publisher, Electronic Arts, said in a statement on Thursday that the U.S.-based National Collegiate Athletic Association "recently informed EA Sports" that these players' inclusion in the game would risk their eligibility for college athletics.


College athletes under the NCAA are compensated with sports scholarships, but cannot profit from their names and likenesses represented in merchandise or other media, including video games. If they do so, they risk losing their scholarships and their ability to play for their college teams.


All six Canadian players who were dropped from FIFA 16 play in the U.S. with NCAA Division 1 soccer teams.





The game, developed in a Vancouver studio, is the first in the FIFA series to include women players. Twelve national teams, including Canada, make their digital debut this year. Since launching in 1993, the FIFA games have sold more than 100 million copies worldwide.


EA said it does not agree with the NCAA's position, adding that "all rights were secured following standard protocol with national governing bodies and federations," and none of the players were going to be paid by EA for their inclusion in the game.


None of the six Canadian players have publicly commented on the situation.

When asked for comment specifically about the loss of Canadian players from a made-in-Canada video game, EA Vancouver said that the official statement "is the full extent of our comment" on the situation.


"Protecting the interests of our players in the long run is of paramount importance for us and while we are disappointed by the NCAA ruling and its impact on six of our athletes, Canada Soccer is supportive of EA Sports' resulting action to not include them in this year's game," the Canadian Soccer Association said on Friday.


The inclusion of women's teams has been a major focus in EA's promotion of FIFA 16, with women's players joining the men on the coveted cover art. Christine Sinclair will be on the cover in Canadian versions of the game, while Alex Morgan will be on the U.S. cover.

This isn't the first time EA has come into conflict with the NCAA about the inclusion of amateur players in its video games.







Christine Sinclair will appear on the Canadian cover art for FIFA 16. (EA Sports/The Canadian Press)




In July, a U.S. federal judge approved a $60-million settlement for college athletes in a class-action lawsuit filed against the NCAA and Electronics Arts.


The lawsuit was initiated by former Arizona State and Nebraska player Sam Keller, who argued that college athletes should be paid for their appearances in video games just like professional players are.


As a result of the settlement, EA Sports isn't allowed to make an NCAA video game without compensating the college athletes that appear in the game. But under the NCAA's rules, college athletes aren't allowed to profit from their inclusion in products like video games.


Thanks to this catch-22, EA chose to discontinue the NCAA Football series of games in 2013. It ended EA's 20-year run of making college football video games.


Comedian John Oliver lambasted the organization's treatment of its college athletes during this year's March Madness season on his HBO show Last Week Tonight.


"Athletes are paid in 'an education,' the only currency more difficult to spend than bitcoin," Oliver joked. He ended the segment with a spoof NCAA video game called "March Sadness 2015" where poverty-stricken college athletes fight to keep their sports scholarships while enduring verbal abuse from their coaches.


This hasn't affected the FIFA series before, since all men's players are professionals.


FIFA 16 is slated for general release for all major consoles, Windows PCs and mobile devices on Tuesday, but subscribers to the EA Access service have been able to play it since Thursday.

Ancient Asteroid Destroyer Finally Found, And It's a New Kind of Meteorite

For 50 years, scientists have wondered what annihilated the ancestor of L-chondrites, the roof-smashing, head-bonking meteorites that frequently pummel Earth.

Now, a new kind of meteorite discovered in a southern Sweden limestone quarry may finally solve the mystery, scientists report. The strange new rock may be the missing "other half" from one of the biggest interstellar collisions in a billion years.

"Something we didn't really know about before was flying around and crashed into the L-chondrites," said study co-author Gary Huss of the University of Hawaii at Manoa.

The space rock is a 470-million-year-old fossil meteorite first spotted three years ago by workers at Sweden's Thorsberg quarry, where stonecutters have an expert eye for extraterrestrial objects. Quarriers have plucked 101 fossil meteorites from the pit's ancient pink limestone in the last two decades. 

Researchers have nicknamed the new meteorite the "mysterious object" until its formal name is approved, said lead study author Birger Schmitz, of Lund University in Sweden and Chicago's Field Museum. It will likely be named for a nearby church, the Österplana, he said.

Mysterious find

Geochemically, the meteorite falls into a class called the primitive achondrites, and most resembles a rare group of achondrites called the winonaites. But small differences in certain elements in its chromite grains set the mysterious object apart from the winonaites, and its texture and exposure age distinguish the new meteorite from the other 49,000 or so meteorites found so far on Earth.

"It's a very, very strange and unusual find," Schmitz told Live Science's Our Amazing Planet.

The new meteorite was recently reported online in the journal Earth and Planetary Science Letters, and the study will appear in the journal's Aug. 15 print edition.

Until now, all of the quarry's fossil meteorites were L-chondrites. Schmitz, who has led the chondrite cataloging, admitted the rock hunt had become "quite boring."

But the rare find has not only revitalized interest in the quarry, it has also brought together the world's top meteorite experts for a global hunt through geologic time. Thanks to Schmitz's careful detective work on meteorites, scientists now know that each kind of meteorite leaves behind a unique calling card: tough minerals called spinels. Even if meteorites weather away, their spinels linger for hundreds of million of years in Earth rocks. Schmitz and his cohorts think they can pin down how many meteorites rained down on Earth in the past 2.5 billion years, as well as what kind fell, by extracting extraterrestrial spinels from sedimentary rocks. Their work may confirm suspicions that recent meteorite falls represent a mere fraction of the rocks drifting in space.

"I think our new finding adds to the understanding that the meteorites that come down on Earth today may not be entirely representative of what is out there," Schmitz said. "One thing our study shows is that we maybe don't know as much as we think we know about the solar system."

Ancient wreckage

The limestone quarry preserves the remnants of a cosmic cataclysm that took place 470 million years ago, during the Ordovician Period. Scientists think there was an enormous crash between two large bodies out in the asteroid belt. The crash blew apart two asteroids, or an asteroid and comet, slinging dust and debris toward Earth. One of the impactors was the source of all L-chondrite meteorites. But no one has ever found a piece of the rock that hit the L-chondrite parent, until now.

The Swedish meteorite's exposure age — the length of time it sailed through space — is the key to placing the fossil space rock at the scene of the crash. The meteorite zipped from the asteroid belt to Earth in just 1 million years. That's the same remarkably young exposure age as the L-chondrites recovered from the Thorsberg quarry, suggesting the rocks sprayed Earth in the same wave of space debris. 

Meteorite expert Tim Swindle, who was not involved in the study, praised the team's careful analysis and said it was unlikely that any other meteorite but an Ordovician fragment would have such a short exposure age. "Very, very few modern meteorites have exposure ages that low," said Swindle, a professor at the University of Arizona in Tucson. "Typically, it takes things longer to get here from the asteroid belt," he said. "It's a telling argument."

But because so little is left of the original meteorite — almost all its minerals have been altered to clay — Swindle thinks there's wiggle room for linking it to known classes of meteorite, instead of calling it a new find.

"I think it's entirely plausible [that it's a new kind of meteorite], and it's a great study, but that's not a guarantee they've got it right," Swindle said. "But if they didn't, it's because of new things we'll find out in future work, not because of their analysis."

The geochemical tests were performed on sand-sized chromite spinels, which confirmed the rock's extraterrestrial origin. The altered clay is also about 100,000 times richer in iridium than terrestrial rocks. Iridium is the element that marks the meteorite impact horizon when the dinosaurs went extinct.

Hunt for space history

Schmitz now plans to search for these strange achondrite spinels in the quarry sediments, as well as in other rocks of the same age around the world. Ordovician meteorite spinels from L-chondrites have been found in China, Russia and Sweden, and small micrometeorites have been discovered in Scotland and South America. Researchers think about 100 times as many meteorites fell on Earth during the Ordovician compared with today, but only about a dozen impact craters of the proper age have been identified.

A bigger quest is also in the works. Schmitz and his colleagues plan to dissolve tons of rock in acid in a global search for meteoritic spinel grains. This detective work will help researchers pin down the history of the asteroid belt and solar system. Spinels can provide an estimate of how many meteorites fell in the past, and what kind hit Earth. These tiny pieces of vanished meteorites may fill in missing history, because meteorite impact craters often vanish due to geologic forces.

"This can give you a ground truth for models for how the solar system may have evolved over time," said Gary Huss, a co-author on the Swedish meteorite study who will collaborate on the spinel search. "I think a lot of people have worried for some time that we don't really know what's going on in the asteroid belt."

New Camera Sensor Eliminates Need for Flash

No flash? No problem. A new imaging sensor could soon make it possible for photographers to take clear, sharp photos, even in dim lighting.

Created by a team of researchers at Nanyang Technological University (NTU) in Singapore, the new sensor is highly sensitive to both visible and infrared light, which means it could be used in everything from the family Nikon to surveillance and satellite cameras.

The sensor, which is 1,000 times more sensitive to light than the imaging sensors of most of today's cameras, gets this high photo response from its innovative structure.

It's made of graphene, a super strong carbon compound with a honeycomb structure that is as flexible as rubber, more conductive than silicon and which resists heat better than a diamond.

Graphene, which is a one atom-thick layer of the mineral graphite, has already earned a reputation as the building material of the future. Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov took home the Nobel Prize in physics in 2010 for their work with the compound.

The inventor of the new sensor, Wang Qijie, an assistant professor at NTU's School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, said this is the first time that a broad-spectrum, high photosensitive sensor has been made using pure graphene.

"We have shown that it is now possible to create cheap, sensitive and flexile sensors from graphene alone," said Wang. "We expect our innovation will have great impact not only on the consumer imaging industry, but also in satellite imaging and communication industries, as well as the mid-infrared applications."

Wang said the key to his new sensor is the use of "light-trapping" nanostructures that use graphene as a base. The nano structures hold onto light-generated electron particles for much longer than conventional sensors.

This results in a stronger than usual electric signal, which can be processed into an image, like a photograph captured by a digital camera.

Most of today's camera sensors use a complementary metal-oxide semiconductor as a base. But Wang said that his graphene base is far more effective, producing clearer, sharper photos.

And, according to Wang, he even took current manufacturing practices into account when designing this new sensor. In principle, the camera industry will be able to keep using the same process to make its sensors, but simply switch out the base materials for graphene.

If the industry chooses to adopt his design, Wang said it could lead to cheaper, lighter cameras with longer battery lives for all.

NHTSA advances with vehicle-to-vehicle technology

Early this year, the US Department of Transportation’s (DoT) National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) announced that it would begin steps to enable vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) technology, in a bid to prevent accidents. Now, the NHTSA has come one step closer to making V2V a reality.

The NHTSA has released an advanced notice of proposed rulemaking for the technology, as well as a supporting research report on V2V communications technology. The report covers key findings such as technical feasibility, privacy and security as well as estimates of costs and safety benefits.

The report details early estimates of the safety benefits of two features – Left Turn Assist (LTA) and Intersection Movement Assist (IMA) – which it states could prevent up to 592,000 crashes and save 1,083 lives per year.

LTA warns drivers not to turn left in front of another vehicle travelling in the opposite direction. Meanwhile, IMA informs drivers as to whether or not it's safe to enter an intersection. Other features of V2V technology could also help drivers to avoid dangers from forward collisions, blind spots, stop light/stop sign warnings and more.

The report will help the DoT and NHTSA gather significant backing from the public stakeholders as NHTSA works to deliver a Notice of Proposed Rule making by 2016.

"By warning drivers of imminent danger, V2V technology has the potential to dramatically improve highway safety," said NHTSA Deputy Administrator, David Friedman. "V2V technology is ready to move toward implementation and this report highlights the work NHTSA and DOT are doing to bring this technology and its great safety benefits into the nation’s light vehicle fleet."

V2V technology functions by allowing cars to trade basic vehicle and safety data, such as speed and positioning. It aims to provide both the vehicle and driver with a 360-degree awareness of the situation around them. V2V technology can even detect threats from hundreds of yards away, even when the vehicle in question cannot be seen.

The DoT has already tested V2V technology in the Ann Arbor region of Michigan, whereby 3,000 vehicles took to the road in what was the world’s biggest test of connected-vehicle communication technology.

Car manufacturers have caught on to the hype, too, with Mercedes, Volvo,Honda, and GM all having plans for V2V communications technology

Sugar Sweetens Battery Performance

Y-H Percival Zhang, chief science officer of Cell-Free Bio Innovations and an associate professor of biological systems engineering at Virginia Tech, contributed this article to Live Science's Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights. 

It might seem strange to use an ingredient found in cupcakes and cookies as an energy source, but most living cells break down sugar to produce energy. And, interestingly, the energy density of sugar is significantly higher than that of current lithium-ion batteries.

Recently, my colleagues and I successfully demonstrated the concept of a sugar bio battery that can completely convert the chemical energy in sugar substrates into electricity. 

Working under a Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) grant from the U.S. National Science Foundation, we reported the findings in the January 2014 issue of Nature Communications.

This breakthrough sugar-powered bio battery can achieve an energy-storage density of about 596 ampere-hours per kilogram (A-h/kg) — an order of magnitude higher than the 42 A-h/kg energy density of a typical lithium-ion battery. A sugar bio battery with such a high energy density could last at least ten times longer than existing lithium-ion batteries of the same weight. [Electric Bacteria Could Be Used for Bio-Battery ]

This nature-inspired bio battery is a type of enzymatic fuel cell (EFC) — an electro biochemical device that converts chemical energy from fuels such as starch and glycogen into electricity. While EFCs operate under the same general principles as traditional fuel cells, they use enzymes instead of noble-metal catalysts to oxidize their fuel. Enzymes allow for the use of more-complex fuels (such as glucose), and these more-complex fuels are what give EFCs their superior energy density. 

For example, the complex sugar hexose — upon complete oxidation — can release 24 electrons per glucose molecule during oxidation, whereas hydrogen (a fuel used in traditional fuel cells) releases only two electrons. Until now, however, EFCs have been limited to releasing just two to four electrons per glucose molecule.

As my colleague Zhiguang Zhu, a senior scientist at Cell-Free Bio Innovations, has said, our team is not the first to propose using sugar as the fuel in the bio battery. However, we are first to demonstrate the complete oxidation of the bio battery's sugar so we achieve a near-theoretical energy conversion yield that no one else has reported. 

For our battery, we constructed a synthetic catabolic pathway (a series of metabolic reactions that break down complex organic molecules) containing 13 enzymes to completely oxidize the glucose units of maltodextrin, yielding nearly 24 electrons per glucose molecule. 

We put specific thermo stable enzymes into one vessel to constitute a synthetic enzymatic pathway that can perform a cascade of biological reactions to completely "burn" the sugar, converting it into carbon dioxide, water and electricity.

Unlike natural catabolic pathways for the oxidation of glucose in cells, the designed synthetic pathway does not require costly and unstable cofactors, such as adenosine triphosphate (ATP, critical for energy processes in human cells), coenzyme A, or a cellular membrane. 

Instead, we used two redox enzymes that generate reduced nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide (NADH) from sugar metabolites. NADH, a reducing agent involved in redox reactions, is a natural electron mediator that carries electrons from one molecule to another. We also used ten other enzymes responsible for sustaining metabolic cycles and an additional enzyme that transfers electrons from NADH to the system's electrode. This new synthetic pathway enables the bio battery to extract the entire theoretical number of electrons per glucose unit and thereby use all the chemical energy in the sugar. This is a significant breakthrough.

In addition to its superior energy density, the sugar bio battery is also less costly than the lithium-ion battery, refillable, environmentally friendly, and nonflammable. While we continue to work on extending the lifetime, increasing the power density, and reducing the cost of electrode materials for such a battery, we hope that the rapidly growing appetite for powering portable electronic devices could well be met with this energy-dense sugar bio battery in the future.

CruiserBoard blends stand-up paddleboarding and sit-down kayaking

As popular and fast-growing a sport as stand-up paddle boarding has been, sometimes you just need to sit down and take a load off. A cross between a kayak and paddle board, the Cruiser Board is a sit-down, stand-up paddle board that gives paddlers more versatility than ever.

Its thermoplastic composite was developed for paddle board use by California-based Bounce Composites, and offers a mix of low weight, resiliency and durability. Cruiser Board has crafted that composite into a uniquely shaped craft with a cathedral hull, molded-in keel, and extra high sides.

The sides are designed to help keep the deck drier, and a deck pad provides stable footing. The concave deck is said to provide better stability by lowering the paddler's center of gravity, and it also helps prevent the paddle from rolling off should the rider place it down on the board.

While the Cruiser Board looks a bit different from other paddle boards on its own, it really separates itself with its removable folding chair. That chair gives the board a ride more like a high, sit-atop kayak, a design that's directed at anglers, beginners and others that may feel more comfortable in a seated position.

The chair's trucks slide into the board's dual rails, providing easy front-back adjustment and removal. Those tracks are also built to work with Scotty accessories, allowing the owner to customize his craft. When flipped up, the chair serves as a stabilizing support that the paddler can lean against.

Given that switching from seated to standing position entails completely different paddling dynamics, Cruiser Board includes an adjustable Transformer paddle that switches from a single-blade, T-handle paddle board paddle to a dual-blade kayak paddle.

Cruiser Board launched its sit-down, stand-up paddle board in March and has been touring water-sport and boat shows ever since. The board + paddle package is available for US$2,590.