Juan Manuel Chavez draws deep sweet sounds from a cello made from a battered empty oil can, a meat tenderizing tool and another gadget meant for making gnocchi. Aida Maribel Rios Bardados plays a violin ingeniously crafted from scraps of trash.

Juan Manuel and Aida Maribel play in the Landfill Harmonic Orchestra in Cateura, Paraguay, a deeply impoverished slum outside of Asuncion. About 20 youngsters, aged 11 to 19, play beautiful Mozart, Bach, Vivaldi, some contemporary Latin music and orchestral versions of Beatles songs on instruments made almost entirely with materials scavenged from the sprawling landfill where the people of Cateura live with the 1,500 tons of solid waste dumped every day. A Mother Jones article by Zaineb Mohammed tells the story. Watch an amazing Youtube video. See photos on Facebook.

The project was ignited when a local musician, Favio Chavez, brought a youth orchestra from a neighboring town to Cateura, hoping to distract kids from gangs and drugs. The young listeners were enthusiastic, but there was no money for instruments. "A community like Cateura is not a place to have a violin,” Chavez says in film clips about the orchestra. "In fact, a violin is worth more than a house here.”

Nicolas Gomez earns his living picking through garbage and he has a genius for building things. He and Chavez began experimenting with instruments that might be constructed through the exquisite recombination of bits and pieces discovered sifting through mountains of refuse. All kinds of discarded objects were transformed into wind and stringed instruments. Tin water pipes modified with buttons and bottle caps for keys and spoon and fork handles became saxophones. A water pipe with coins for keys became a flute. Percussion instruments were built for a hearing impaired child, who turned out to be a talented drummer. With Chavez directing, the young musicians flourished.

Alejandra Nash, an Asuncion native and film maker, learned about the orchestra four years ago and decided to produce a documentary. She and colleagues aim for a release in 2014.

Visit their Kickstarter page for more on the Landfill Harmonic. Nash launched the page in April asking $175,000 to fund the movie, and almost $200,000 has been raised. Extra funds will help finance a world tour for the young musicians. The orchestra has already performed in Brazil and Colombia, and has been invited to Europe, Japan, India and the US.

For James Gleick, the massive interconnectivity that kept Americans informed and misinformed on the Boston bombings, shootings, manhunt and capture of a suspect represents a "watershed for Total Noise" in a strange and unstable information ecosystem where reality and fiction intermingle.

In a New York magazine essay, Gleick describes the condition that late novelist David Foster Wallace called Total Noise: "the tsunami of available fact, context and perspective." Gleick is the author of Chaos: Making a New Science, which came out in 1987 and first made the principles and early development of chaos theory understandable to the general public. He is a prolific writer, whose 1999 book Faster: The Acceleration of Just About Everything (review), tells how we had even then undergone an informational and social phase change through the massive interconnections of people by way of modern technology. In his New York piece, he writes that with Twitter feeds burgeoning, microblogging, Instagram, "Internet vigilantes bleeding into the FBI's staggeringly complex" forensic video analysis, and crowdsourcing by social media users, the dividing line between cyberspace and the real world has vanished.

In her New York Times column, Maureen Dowd recalls when Gleick was her editor, and reports on a recent interview in which she asked him to reflect on how we can make sense of relentless waves of unorganized contradictory and changeable data. Gleick told her he followed Twitter on his iPhone during the Boston crisis, and added, "The Internet is messy, pointillist, noisy, often wrong. But if you had a visceral need for instantaneity, TV couldn't compete."

Gleick writes about the gaffs of TV news reporters and anchors who traded accuracy for speed, the blizzard of banal verbiage from commentators who had to fill time with no new information, and misleading bits bandied about when everyone is monitoring everyone else and "no one can bear to be left out." Reddit users named innocent people as suspects. Gleick says the best understanding of events was produced in newspaper stories written by reporters on the scene.

Dowd asked him about an incident in which the Syrian Electronic Army hacked the AP Twitter account and falsely reported that President Obama had been injured in White House explosions, causing a three minute $136 billion stock plunge. He notes hacking happens; and bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev is not the only one who has had real and fake Twitter accounts.

"There is no perfect trust in Cyberspace," Gleick told Dowd. "We have all these new channels and tools to understand the world as it happens, but there is no reliable algorithm for sorting through the morass. ...we have to invent a new personal methodology every day. And if we're waiting for things to settle down and become simple, that's never going to happen."

Why are one third of American children and adolescents obese or overweight? Recent research suggests multiple surprising causes such as plate size, a dearth of home cooking, environmental chemicals, and school schedules that keep teens from getting enough sleep.

A Scientific American story by Tara Haelle describes three studies that point to environmental factors, rather than genes or inactivity, as spurs to excess weight.

"We're raising our children in a world that is vastly different" from the world of 40 or 50 years ago, Yoni Freedhoff, an obesity doctor at the University of Ottawa told the magazine. He says obesity is the consequence of normal kids being raised in abnormal and unhealthy environments.

Jennifer Orlet Fisher, an associate professor of public health at Temple's Center for Obesity Research and Education, studied 42 second graders who served themselves in a buffet lunch line. She found that kids who had an adult dinner sized plate-10.25 inches in diameter-served themselves 90 calories more than kids who used a 7.25 inch plate. Kids with the big plates didn't always eat every bite, but they still ate far more than classmates with smaller plates. Today's dietary environment offers easy access to lots of tasty foods in big portions, Fisher says, adding, "To promote self-regulation you have to constrain the environment to make the healthy choice the easy choice."

Harvard Medical School Pediatrics Professor David Bickham led a study on the link between obesity and screen time, studying 921 teens who reported their use of TV, video games and computers. Bickam and colleagues found games and computer use had no impact on body mass index (BMI). But TV did. Three common theories say media fosters obesity because kids are influenced by advertising, they eat unconsciously, and they are not physically active while they are sitting in front of a screen. When kids watch TV, researchers found, their hands are free, and food ads stimulate desire to eat and high calorie consumption. Viewing healthy fruits and vegetables on the TV screens may not help. "Our hunger hormones have been honed after millions of years of dietary insecurity, so when we want to eat, we tend not to crave green leafy salads," Bickhamsaid. He emphasizes the relationship between TV and weight is calorie intake, not inactivity.

Another study that deemphasizes the role of inactivity in excess weight involved teenagers and sleep. Jonathan Mitchell, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Pennsylvania, and colleagues tracked sleep habits of 1,400 teens and found that less sleep translates into higher a BMI. Lack of sleep had a stronger influence on the weight of kids who were already obese. Tired, sleep-deprived kids maybe less active, he noted, but the observed link was not fully explained by inactivity. Earlier research has suggested sleep deprivation may disrupt the body's regulatory hormones, which control hunger and satiety. Freedhoff says "dozens and dozens" of environmental factors, including more fast food, sugary drinks, the ubiquity of vending machines and the tendency of adults to use food as pacification and reward all tend to make kids fatter.

The National Institutes of Environmental Health Sciences has reported that certain chemical exposures may be linked to obesity and diabetes. A study by Dr. Duk-Hee Lee showed that the risk of diabetes was not increased in overweight people with low exposures to persistent organic pollutants (POPs), which suggested to her that exposure to POPs could be an even better explanation for diabetes than obesity. Several researchers have explored associations between hormone altering environmental chemicals and childhood obesity.

As Freedhoff told the Scientific American, this problem requires collaboration. It will take efforts by whole communities including parents, schools, sports teams, and businesses to "redraft" the environment of children and families.

Networking and internet research help patients become increasingly involved in treatment of their illnesses, and people with Lou Gehrig’s disease are providing dramatic examples of medical autonomy. Many are making themselves guinea pigs to test unofficial treatments.

Lou Gehrig’s disease, also known as ALS for amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, is a degenerative disease that damages nerve cells in the brain and spinal cord and leads to loss of muscle control and eventual immobility. Life expectancy after diagnosis is only two to five yeas, and there is no known cure.

"Do It Yourself Medicine,” a story in TheScientist.com by Jef Akst tells the story of Eric Valor, a 42-year-old with advanced ALS who helped set up an independent drug trial for himself and other ALS sufferers. Although he needs a ventilator to breathe and cannot move any part of his body except his eyes and some facial muscles, he managed to use his eyes to research the web for information about a new drug and set up a website where he and fellow experimenters could report their data. Clinical trials for a new ALS drug NP001 developed by Neuraltus Pharmaceuticals, were to begin in 2010, but Valor’s debilitated physical condition made him ineligible. Developers hope the drug might slow progression of the disease, so to show any impact Valor couldn’t just stop getting worse. He’d have to start getting better, something not proven with any ALS drug.

Based on their research, Valor and others thought the drug contained 50 percent sodium chlorite, a chemical available online for about $50 a quart. He asked his mother to inject a dilute solution into his feeding tube. More than two dozen patients have done the same, and shared their experiences and data. They used a site at PatientsLikeMe, a company cofounded in 2004 by three MIT engineers, Benjamin and James Heywood and Jeff Cole. The Heywood family had spent years searching for anything that would extend and improve the life of a third brother who had ALS, and the experience inspired creation of a health sharing platform. The goal is to help patients manage their own care, and change the way industry conducts research.

According to a Wall Street Journal story by Amy Docker Marcus, many ALS patients concoct their own drugs because they feel they don’t have time to wait for clinical trials and FDA approval. They are also reluctant to risk getting placebos rather than the real thing in a clinical trail. Some medical authorities worry about that approach. Marcus quotes Jonathan D. Glass, professor of neurology at Emory University School of Medicine, who suggests research needs the rigors and controls set by the medical establishment. He worries that guinea pigs could hurt themselves, adding, "Who knows what they’re actually making in their kitchens?”

Neurologist and researcher Richard Bedlack, who directs the Duke University ALS Clinic, thinks greater patient involvement is a good thing. "There’s a new model of medicine, in my opinion,” he told TheScientist. "Once upon a time we had a very paternalistic system where patients would come…and doctors would ask all the questions and give all the answers. In the past decade, things have really shifted, almost to the other side, where a lot of medicine is autonomous now.”

Results from the independent sodium chlorite trials are equivocal. While some self-dosers reported improvement, a report published by PatientsLikeMe investigators found a potentially negative effect. Neuraltus researchers last October announced its drug showed progress, and it seeks a big-pharma partner for a Phase 3 clinical trial. Valor, for one, would like early access to the drug, and he sees no conflict in being both patient and researcher. "I just treat myself as another lab rat,” he said.

Drones have been in the news lately, and the next generation of drones may involve an even more controversial and exotic technology. They may be very tiny cyborgs.

Amit Lal, an engineer, Cornell professor and program manager for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) wrote a proposal for prospective researchers years ago suggesting if scientists could hack into insect bodies and control their movements, they’d have a real start on small scale flying machines. Michael Maharbiz at the University of California, Berkeley, took up the challenge. He and his team began researching the biology of the Mecynorrhina torquata, at 2-3 inches long, the world’s second largest flower beetle. Its hard shell and size make it capable of carrying a significant amount of cargo, including a "backpack” of electronic gear attached to its back with beeswax. Researchers wired the creature’s brain so it could be steered remotely, and loaded the backpack with a tiny battery, miniature radio receiver and a custom built circuit board.

Emily Anthes describes the race to create insect cyborgs in an article in The Guardian. She is also author of a new book, Frankenstein's Cat: Cuddling Up to Biotech's Brave New Beasts, which contains the story of DARPA’s quest. Anthes quotes Maharbiz as saying the beetlebots, which still haven’t been deployed in the field, will be able to provide intelligence in military operations and save lives in earthquakes by directing rescue teams to humans trapped in ruble. Critics have worried that cyborg beetles could be used to launch germ warfare or spy on civilians, but Maharbiz scoffs at such sinister suggestions. He is now working on a remote controlled cyborg fly, an even more difficult project because of its smaller size and weight. Such cyborg insects could fly into buildings and caves, alerting soldiers and distant observers to the presence of explosives and information to gauge whether human occupants were enemies or civilians.

Bioengineering has advanced dramatically since Dolly the Sheep was cloned in 1996. Listen to Anthes’s interview with Terri Gross on NPR's Fresh Air. Some wealthy people clone their pets-it’s six figures for a dog-and people can buy genetically modified bright colored fish that glow in the dark. But there are more serious endeavors. It’s no longer rare for a human to receive a valve from a pig heart. Scientists are now trying to grow pigs that will produce numerous whole organs for human transplants and goats injected with human genes that can produce protein rich milk with the antibiotic properties of human breast milk. Anthes describes how Chinese scientists are identifying the functions of each gene in the mouse genome by disabling one gene at a time and monitoring how the mutant mice develop. She told Gross that among the lab’s 45,000 mouse cages there are mice with cancer, male pattern baldness, obsessive compulsive disorder, and some that are only able to turn left. The discoveries could eventually help understand genes involved in human diseases and afflictions.

And the ethics of all this? Anthes concedes it’s complex. People might accept an experiment intended to treat cancer more readily than one to prevent baldness, says Anthes. Is it all right to risk harm to animals in the name of research? Unintended consequences can’t be ruled out in experimental work, Anthes says, so researchers have to worry. Scientists successfully engineered leaner, faster growing pigs, she notes, but the pigs were miserable with arthritis, eye problems and other health woes. In a New York Times essay, Anthes describes genetically modified salmon that grow faster because they’ve been engineered to carry the genes of another species, the ocean pout. It soon may be the first transgenic animal in the human food supply. While Anthes agrees with the need for painstaking evaluation, she hopes fear of genetic modification won’t prevent innovative scientific research with potential to help human health.

photo: male and female Mecynorrhina tortuata beetles