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Everything You Need To Know About The Piracy-Battling Copyright Alert System

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Ahoy, PiratesWikimedia Commons
US copyright holders like the RIAA and MPAA have a new weapon to battle piracy. Read on to find out what it is, how it works, and whether you should be scared to snag a torrent of this week's episode of Justified.

There's been a lot of discussion this week about the Copyright Alert System. It is a confusing thing! But if you like to steal things on the internet, or even if you don't, you should be aware of it, because this is the way copyright protection is going to work nationwide for the foreseeable future.

What Is It?

The Copyright Alert System, or CAS, is a system developed by internet service providers (ISPs include Comcast, Verizon, and Time Warner) and copyright holders (largely the Motion Picture Association of America, the Recording Industry Association of America, and the National Cable and Telecommunications Association, the trade organizations that represent the movie, music, and television industries, respectively) to battle online piracy. The approach to battling copyright infringement before now has been piecemeal and vague--sometimes you'd get a letter telling you to stop, sometimes you'd get sued for billions of dollars, and, usually, absolutely nothing would happen--and the CAS is an effort to standardize a response to piracy.

Is The Government Involved?


It's not a governmental effort; these are private companies changing their policies, so they don't actually need anyone's approval. But the White House has voiced its support anyway:
We believe that this agreement is a positive step and consistent with our strategy of encouraging voluntary efforts to strengthen online intellectual property enforcement and with our broader Internet policy principles, emphasizing privacy, free speech, competition and due process.

It was hammered out in 2011, but you're hearing about it lately because it's just gone into effect this month.

How Does It Work?

The internet providers and copyright holders have begun using peer-to-peer (P2P) surveillance methods to try to sniff out when copyrighted content is uploaded or shared illegally. A company called MarkMonitor has been contracted to join BitTorrent networks (the most common way to illegally share files) and search for the names of copyright-protected movies, music, and TV shows. The list of those names is provided by the MPAA, RIAA, and NCTA. When MarkMonitor finds a file in violation, they snag the IP address of the user who's sharing the file and send it off to that user's internet provider, who issues a series of escalating warnings.

Wait, They're Snooping? Is That Legal?

It doesn't break any federal laws, and the US government has already issued a statement of support, but there's a lot of concern about how this is done. MarkMonitor is owned by Thomson Reuters, a massive multinational corporation with major influence in the legal, financial, and media fields. There is supposed to be an "independent" auditor of MarkMonitor's peer-to-peer snooping, but the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an internet-freedom activist group that has vocally disapproved of the Copyright Alert System, discovered that the auditor is...not independent.

The auditor is Stroz Friedberg, a consultancy and lobbying firm that lobbied on behalf of the RIAA in Congress for five years, up until 2009. And the specifics of how MarkMonitor will actually be conducting the peer-to-peer snooping have all been redacted from a report released by the Center for Copyright Information, the private group that's sort of overseeing this whole system.

So, we have huge corporations paying other huge corporations to spy on our file-sharing networks, and possibly other things. But we don't know which other things, or how they're doing it, because that information has been redacted. And the company that's making sure this is all above-board is the RIAA's former lobbyist.

What Happens If I Get Caught Torrenting?

The CAS is commonly known as the "six strikes" system. Ars Technica got a look at one example of these, from Comcast (because the other internet providers declined to actually send examples). The CAS is supposed to be an "education" system rather than a punitive system, so the alerts are focused not on prosecuting but on information. They'll be sent to your default email address--in the case of Comcast, that means your comcast.net address, which I think few Comcast users actually check. You'll have to dismiss these alerts, until you get to about the fifth alert, which requires you to call the Comcast Security Assurance line and hear a speech about copyright violation.

At some point during these six alerts, probably around the fourth or fifth, your internet provider could begin taking action against you, though it won't be as severe as a lawsuit or even a shutdown or your service. Instead they'll likely begin "throttling" your connection, meaning your speeds will be drastically decreased, which is infuriating and will make it difficult to download all those 720p seasons of Breaking Bad.

The big fear of pirates, especially during the Napster era, was a massive lawsuit from the RIAA or MPAA--even if you won (and you might, because the laws are largely vague and inadequate to deal with the rapidly changing landscape of file-sharing), you'd have outrageous legal fees to deal with. And that era seems to be over; it's highly unlikely that anyone will be sued now that the CAS is the default copyright-protection strategy.

That said, due to the lack of transparency here, nobody really knows what happens when you get to a sixth alert. The copyright holders have said they are not interested in prosecution, but there's nothing legally stopping them from suing. But that's all speculation, because we have no idea what's at the end of this dark path.

What If I've Been Wrongly Accused?

Well, that sucks. You'll have to pay a $35 fee to appeal your warnings, and nobody seems to have any idea how the companies will go about clearing your name. Internet providers are not exactly known for being paragons of customer service, and it's anyone's guess as to how hard they'll work on a copyright infringement appeal.

Can I Get Around The CAS?

Probably! This is a tricky question to answer, because as we noted above, nobody knows exactly how MarkMonitor is going to be tracking down potential copyright violators. Not knowing their methods makes it difficult to know how to get around them. But a Comcast representative told Ars Technica that using a VPN, or virtual private network, will probably mask your activities from MarkMonitor--the exact quote is "I think you're right," so that's assuming the rep even knows what a VPN is. (They're private networks within the internet that have higher levels of encryption--anyone outside this "network" you've set up won't be able to see what's happening within it.) Most modern torrent clients, like µTorrent and Transmission, offer identity-masking features. This TorrentFreak guide on how to download torrents anonymously is a few years old, but the advice still works.




Did The U.S. Buy Its Moon Program From Yugoslavia?

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Apollo 17 Awaits Launch The trailer for a new film project asserts Saturn rockets, like this one, were mostly made in Yugoslavia. Photo credit to the Apollo Program, NASA
An attention-grabbing new "docudrama" puts forth a very unusual theory.


That whole getting to the moon thing? Actually Yugoslavian.

At least that's the thesis of a "docudrama" trailer that's been making the rounds, especially among Internet users in the Balkans. Yugoslavia sold an operational spaceflight program to the United States in 1961, just before President John F. Kennedy announced American plans to go to the moon, the video says. It's called "Houston, We Have a Problem!" and it's racked up more than 960,000 views on YouTube:

Radio Free Europe talked to a couple experts who were doubtful.

"There's a lot of coincidence in time, but just because two things sort of happened one after the other does not necessarily mean that there's causation involved. There's a very big stretch involved here," Bill Barry, NASA's chief historian, said.

While talking with Radio Free Europe, the video's director and principal writer seemed to both stand behind the work and distance themselves from it. There's "some dramatization and fiction," the writer, Bostjan Virc, said. And from director Ziga Virc: "80 or 90 percent of things" in the trailer are "actually more or less confirmed facts."

The film is slated to come out in 2013. More or less.

[Radio Free Europe]



Bats Build Mental Maps Of Their Surroundings And Remember Them For Future Flights

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Big Brown BatMatt Reinbold via Wikimedia Commons
Like people choosing which path to take from the grocery store, bats develop preferred routes and remember them.

Many species of bats use echolocation to orient themselves and to hunt their insect prey, but they also rely on a pretty detailed memory to find their way around, a new study suggests. Their seemingly erratic flight patterns are not erratic after all--they're following detailed internal maps. Let's call it batnav.

Jonathan Barchi and colleagues at Brown University wanted to figure out how bats seemingly remember complex flight patterns that take them through obstacles, dense clouds of other bats, and to feeding grounds far away from their cave dwellings. They send and receive calls at superfast speeds, but they also fly pretty quickly, so they don't have much time to orient themselves in a given location. Figuring they must be relying on prior knowledge of their surroundings, Barchi and fellow researchers set up a bat obstacle course and set some bats loose.

They worked with big brown bats, Eptesicus fuscus, a common species that live in caves and forage for insects. The team hung chains from the ceiling in a dark room, and embedded sensitive microphones in the walls to record the animals' ultrasonic calls. Then they released bats from specific locations, and reconstructed their paths using the microphone data.

After a couple of days of flights, the bats figured out preferred paths through the obstacles, the researchers found. Each bat found its own way--some looped in tight figure eight patterns, while others made wide lasso-like shapes, each according to its own preference. Then the team moved the bats' release spots, and found the bats would soon re-establish their preferred flight paths.

To test how well they could recall these patterns, the team put the bats on a month-long hiatus. The bats remembered the room and followed the same paths.

"We postulate that the development of stable flight paths allows bats to depend on their accumulated internal representation of a space, as well as on moment-to-moment echolocation, and to navigate within the space as a whole," the team writes in their new research paper.

These findings could have implications for the neural basis of spatial memory. Unlike rats, which can stop in unfamiliar surroundings and orient themselves, bats are constantly on the wing, moving away from any given location all of the time. Somehow their brains are able to keep up with their ever-changing surroundings, the Brown team says. Their paper appears in The Journal of Experimental Biology.

Could This App Treat Depression?

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BrainTracer Game PrototypeBrainTracer
A new company with a Harvard psychiatrist as inventor-in-residence says it's got the research to back up its claims.

Diego Pizzagalli spent a good chunk of 10 years at Harvard doing what most professors at elite institutions do: research. Specifically, research on depression. He's fMRI'd and EEG'd a lot of gray matter, but most of his work got stuck in the lab and never evolved into any real-world application. Then he developed something that was too good to let collect dust in the hallowed halls of academia: software that he says could help treat depression.

Now with the help of the Baltimore-based startup incubator Canterbury Road Partners, Pizzagalli is set to turn his lab invention into an app. MoodTune will be a series of simple games that when played regularly, can help treat depression, Pizzagalli and his colleagues say. Turn on the app for 15 minutes a day, play through some games, and maybe it could help. Maybe, they say, in some cases, it'd be all a depressed person would need. Could something that simple actually work?

* * *

Pizzagalli started working on depression in 1999 and released some of his most important papers in 2001. The papers focused on "biomarkers," signals of response in the brain to antidepressants and psychotherapy. Take a peek inside the brain, and you can see areas light up--or fail to light up--in response to treatments. Whether an area lights up or not predicts, with considerable accuracy, whether a treatment works, he says.

So, the thinking goes, what we if we illuminate those regions another way? The brain could readjust appropriately without the need for a pill. The anterior cingulate cortex is associated with depression and also works when snap decisions need to be made, Pizzagalli says, so perhaps having someone make snap decisions would help treat depression. He developed desktop software in his lab to test it out and was happy enough with the results to delve deeper into the technology.

Software like that could make for a "bottom-up" approach to depression treatment. It could "strengthen the circuitry" of the ruminative brain. It could break the cycle of dwelling seen in so many depressives. It could be the first treatment of its kind to go on the market. But to turn the research into anything tangible took some extracurricular assistance.

* * *

Universities are well-equipped to do research: they have large staffs, top-shelf gear, and the greatest minds in their fields in a condensed area. And after the research is done? Well, they still have large staffs, but that stops being an asset. Sean Pool, a general partner at Canterbury, put it like this: "By and large, universities are these massive, inertial bureaucracies." So why not take the inventors out of the Ivory Tower, team them up with entrepreneurs, have them form lean, Silicon Valleyish startups, and get their products to market faster?

There are plenty of 'health' apps out there that don't function much better than a placebo, if that--but Pizzagalli insist there's the science to back up BrainTracer.With Pizzagalli, Canterbury Road is doing precisely that. Pizzagalli originally approached Harvard about marketing the technology behind his research, but the process stalled until he moved to the university's McLean Hospital, where administration suggested he partner with Canterbury. Canterbury set up a venture company for his research (Venture Launch Team No. 1), offered the CEO position to Andre Konig, an "entrepreneur in residence" who's spent a decade working in consulting and more recently in private equity, and soon they had a name for the business (BrainTracer) and the prototype app (MoodTune). As for what Canterbury gets out of it? It holds a small stake in the venture.

Immediately, Konig and Pizzagalli got to work developing a business model, shopping around for investors, and designing a prototype. BrainTracer, if all goes according to plan, will launch its flagship app, MoodTune, by the end of spring. The idea is for Pizzagalli and other psychologists' research to create an app that can help combat depression. On its face, that doesn't sound like the most medically credible idea--there are plenty of "health" apps out there that don't function much better than a placebo, if that--but Pizzagalli insists there's science to back it up. BrainTracer officially launched Monday, but before the app is released, Pizzagalli and Konig will also send it through a medical trial to test for its effectiveness. The pair is hoping to snag an National Institute of Health grant for "cognitive training" software.

* * *

When MoodTune is out, this is how it'll work: You'll open the app and be directed to a simple game (there are "six or seven" games so far Konig says.) The images you see here are from the prototype, but the final version will probably be similar. Here's the example Pizzagalli gave of a game that could be used for a "workout." A face appears onscreen. The user--or patient, depending on your thoughts about the app--looks at the face as words flash above it: "Happy." "Happy." "Sad." "Happy." The user gets slammed with some serious cognitive dissonance as they try to reconcile the faces and words. After the user is done, he gets a review of his score for the game, as well as his overall progress in treatment.

An exercise like that can cause certain parts of the brain to work overtime, Pizzagalli says. It's enough, he says, to give certain parts of the brain a "tune-up" and enough, apparently, when done for 15 minutes every day, to counteract some of the symptoms of depression.

Pizzagalli and Konig aren't the only ones looking into similar "cognitive training" approaches in mental health. A 2003 study into cognitive training techniques in schizophrenia noted that the approach showed "effective components that hold promise for improving cognitive performance." Multiple studies in the Journal of the American Medical Association have found modest increases in brain function apparently spurred by cognitive training.

Still, the idea that brains can be successfully "trained" is more than a little controversial. Lumosity, a series of "brain training" software products, has been maligned for selling digital snake oil. The software is pitched as a set of simple games that can improve everything from memory to concentration (and that its games are backed up by neuroscience, too). When the consumer group Which? asked a panel of scientists to explain the effectiveness of neuro-gadgets, including Lumosity, the scientists concluded there was no evidence to back up the claims. At best, they said, the training would help about as much as a crossword puzzle or round of Space Invaders--nothing especially brain-empowering about it.

* * *

So what's different? Precision, for one, Pizzagalli says. Instead of trying to play the full court, they take a position: the app, unlike Lumosity, only focuses on depression. That focus gives it an edge. Pizzagalli is also shooting for openness. MoodTune will have a dashboard feature that can give the users more information about the app and updates on their progress. Users will also be able to respond to BrainTracer about the app, letting the team know how well it's working.

A 2003 study into cognitive training techniques in schizophrenia noted that the approach showed 'effective components that hold promise for improving cognitive performance.'Either way, expectations are at least a little tempered. The app, they say, could only work on its own for people on the margins of clinical depression, not meeting all the criteria to make it official but still exhibiting some of the symptoms. Modest gains are what the team is hoping for, but they're optimistic enough to have laid out a business model for the app. And if the technology isn't the same as Lumosity's, the tiered pricing model is at least similar. Pay for access for a few months with x dollars, or upgrade to a few more months for y dollars. For BrainTracer, that might mean tiers from $30 to $50 monthly.

That could make it cheaper than the cost of depression medication (and possibly more fun to take).

That's in the pro column. In the minus column, the question might eventually be: How do we sell this app? There are similar-sounding apps out there based on shaky science at best. On Google Play, for instance, you can download so-called "binaural beats," apps designed to alter one's state of mind. Need some creativity? Tap. How about just some relaxation? Tap-tap.

Apps like that don't have the science to back them up, and certainly didn't go through a trial process in line for an NIH grant, so there'll be some pressure for MoodTune to distinguish itself from them. The dashboard system in MoodTune could help out, Konig says. After each game, the users can have the science behind the game explained to them. That's something a lot of other apps can't offer--or at least can't offer as easily. They'll also be mostly marketing the app to institutional clients like government organizations, rather than just individuals, meaning the standard of proof for the app is higher but it'll reach more people once the bar is reached. (Along with investors, they're looking to the crowdfunding site Indiegogo to help pay for it.)

On the other hand, if there's a market for enhancing creativity, there's definitely a market for fighting depression. Tens of billions in productivity costs are lost every year to the illness, and fighting it is a multi-billion dollar industry itself. Plenty of people out there are willing to try out new treatments, whatever they look like.

Watch A Baby's Face Change Color With Her Tiny, Normally Invisible Pulse

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MIT's image amplification system makes imperceptible movements and color changes visible.

Last summer, a group of MIT scientists debuted a new video amplification algorithm that exaggerates slight changes in movement or color, like a magnifying glass for moving images. Since then, they've made the open-source code available and started allowing anyone to upload videos and see the effect for themselves. The New York Times got inside the lab to see what they project is doing in this video.

Scientists at the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) at MIT first presented "Eulerian video magnification" last year at SIGGRAPH, a computer graphics conference. Originally, the system -- which lets you identify from afar if a person is breathing, how fast their heart is beating and where blood is traveling in their body -- was designed to monitor the vital signs of neonatal infants without having to touch them.

It measures the color intensity of pixels and then amplifies any changes in that intensity, registering the slight reddening of your face in conjunction with your pulse, for example. You can apply the system to videos retroactively, to a scene from your favorite Batman movie, perhaps.

The researchers posted their code online in August, making it available for anyone to use for non-commercial purposes, though running the program was somewhat complicated. Now you can upload your own videos to the website for Quanta Research Cambridge, a CSAIL sponsor, and see the system work its magic.

[NYTimes]



FYI: Does Thinking Too Hard Wear You Out?

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Thought ExperimentGeorge Marks/Retrofile/Getty Images
If it does, it's all in your head.

The brain makes up about 1⁄50 of our body weight but consumes about one fifth of the oxygen we breathe. It's natural to assume that overtaxing the cerebrum would leave one feeling lethargic, but that's not quite true. The brain uses most of its energy just to maintain its baseline state; one tenth of our energy at rest goes to pumping sodium and potassium ions across brain-cell membranes, a simple process that keeps each neuron charged and ready. Specific mental activity, whether chatting with a friend or doing a crossword, does not suck up much extra energy.

That said, studies show that people do slow down after performing taxing mental tasks. One experiment, conducted by Samuele Marcora of the University of Kent, split subjects into two groups. Members of the first played a mentally challenging computer game. Those in the second group watched a documentary about trains or sports cars. Then everyone took an endurance test on an exercise bike. Marcora found that people who were "mentally exhausted" gave up pedaling more quickly than the documentary-watching controls. It was as if the heavy thinking had worn them out.

At the same time, Marcora found no correlation between the mental task and measures of their cardiovascular response, such as blood pressure, oxygen consumption, or cardiac output. In other words, the mental workout didn't seem to slow their bodies so much as it appeared to skew their perception of how hard a given physical task might be.

Have a burning science question you'd like to see answered in our FYI section? Email it to fyi@popsci.com.



Megapixels: A Wind Turbine That Can Power 6,000 Households

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Bigger, Better BladesCourtesy Siemens
The world's largest wind turbine has rotator blades the size of an Airbus.

Last fall in Østerild, Denmark, the German company Siemens built the world's largest wind turbine. Each of its three rotor blades measures 246 feet-nearly the wingspan of an Airbus A380. While most turbine manufacturers make blades in two separate pieces, from molds, Siemens casts them in one piece. Because the process eliminates the need for glue, the balsa-based blades are up to 20 percent lighter than traditional ones. The reduced weight helped make it possible to build longer blades, which capture more wind and therefore generate more power. The turbine produces up to six megawatts of electricity, enough to service 6,000 households, and Siemens will install 300 in the U.K. beginning this year.



Scientists Put A Working Eyeball On A Tadpole's Tail

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Tadpole With Grafted EyeDouglas J. Blackiston
It turns out we seriously underestimated the central nervous system.

It's hard to say what's crazier: the fact that Tufts University researchers spent a year cutting out the tiny eyeballs of tadpole embryos and sticking them back on to the tadpoles' tails, or: the fact that, when they hatched, a few of the tadpoles COULD ACTUALLY SEE OUT OF THE EYES ON THEIR TAILS.

As you know, this is not the way vision is supposed to work--your eyeballs are supposed to be connected to a big fat nerve that carries incoming signals back to your brain, which combines the information from both your eyes into a 3D picture of the world in front of you. Without that direct link to the brain, your eyeballs are useless.

At least, that's the way scientists have thought about it for the last several centuries. But over the past few decades, experiments in animals and humans have repeatedly shown that the central nervous system--including the brain and spinal cord--is a lot more flexible and adaptable than people used to think it was. If one part of the brain gets damaged, for instance, the information that used to flow to the damaged sector is often re-routed, and another part of the brain takes on the job of processing it.

So these newer findings got the Tufts University researchers wondering: could the optic nerve really be the only route for incoming visual signals? And could a different part of the nervous system, like the nerves further down the spinal cord, process those signals on their own, without help from the brain?

Tadpoles, they realized, would be a good way to test this question: they would perform surgery at a time when the tadpoles were still developing, so that the transplanted eyes would have time to put down nerve roots that could potentially hook up to the rest of the tadpoles' nervous systems.

The surgeries were painstaking, but the researchers were able to successfully graft eyeballs onto the tails of over 200 tadpole embryos:

When the altered tadpoles hatched, the researchers went to work testing their subjects' vision. Here's the Journal of Experimental Biology's description of the experiment:

They placed their amphibious subjects in a well where half of the dish was illuminated with red light and the other half with blue light, which they inverted at regular intervals. During training sessions, whenever the tadpoles ventured into areas bathed in red light they received a little warning zap of electricity. After a break the tadpoles were tested to see whether they had learnt to associate the red light with electrical punishment and whether they would stick to the blue side of the dish.

While the blind tadpoles never developed a preference for one side of the dish or the other, seven of the tadpoles with transplanted eyes learned to stay in the blue light, demonstrating that they could see through their grafted eyes.

The question was, why only seven?

The answer turned out to have something to do with how the donor eyes sprouted nerves after the transplants. Since they'd labeled the donor eyes with red fluorescent protein, the researchers were able to image the tadpoles and compare the growth of their nerves. In half the subjects, the nerves hadn't grown at all, and in about a quarter of the others, the nerves had grown, but they'd ended up in the tadpoles' stomachs:

But in the other quarter of the subjects--31 tadpoles in total--the nerves extended all the way to the animals' spinal cords; six of the seven seeing tadpoles belonged to this group:

The researchers' findings seem to indicate that the neurons in the spinal cord are capable of doing at least some of the tasks as the brain. If that's true, scientists could someday exploit the spinal cord's smarts for a number of medical treatments, like restoring movement to paralyzed limbs.




BeerSci: Is That Water In Your Pint Glass?

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Beersci LogoTodd Detwiler
Anheuser-Busch is being sued for watering down their beer, but there's a way to test for that.

I was going to write about hops and the people who crave them this week, but got distracted by the unfolding drama around AB-InBev. The booze giant has had a crappy run over the last few weeks: First its merger with Modelo was quashed by the Department of Justice on anti-monopoly grounds. And this week news broke that someone launched a class-action lawsuit against the company for watering down its beer. The basis of that lawsuit, as far as I can tell, rests on the claims from former Anheuser-Busch employees that the beer is diluted just before bottling, suggesting that there's less alcohol in the bottle/can than what is stated on the package.

My colleague Paul and I decided to run some tests this week on some of the beers named in the lawsuit -- Budweiser, Bud Ice and Hurricane -- to see if we could detect unusually low alcohol content. Paul has a refractometer, whereas Team BeerSci kicks it old school with a hydrometer. Beer people will already see the pitfalls of these approaches: One needs to know the pre-fermentation values (gravity or Brix) of the beer in order to figure out the eventual ABV. But putzing about on the Internet, at least in the case of the gravities, gives one a very general idea of what the original gravity of the King of Beers is supposed to be. The principle behind calculating ABV using density is pretty simple: solutions with a lot of sugar in it are denser than solutions that don't have a lot of sugar. So the brewer tests the density of the beer before adding yeast, then tests it again after fermentation is finished. By calculating how much sugar was metabolized by the yeast, one can roughly calculate the alcohol by volume.

Our estimates are close to what is stated on the can of Budweiser: depending on OG, we got ABVs of between 4.8 and 5.1%. That lower end does jibe with the lawsuit's claim that the beer is watered down by "three to eight percent" -- but as you can tell with the data spread, my numbers are not sturdy enough to be used in court for either side of the debate, and we didn't even both measuring the Bud Ice values. Happily for us (and, apparently, Anheuser-Busch), White Labs of San Diego also tested AB's beer, including Budweiser, Bud Light Lime and Michelob Ultra, right out of the packaging. White Labs, for those who aren't into brewing, is an independent company who sells yeast strains and a variety of analytical services to wine and beer makers. White Labs' method, which uses a precise near-infrared laser spectrometer to directly measure the amount of ethanol in a sample, is more precise than my kludgy hydrometer reading, and one doesn't need to know the starting gravity -- in fact they offer their testing services to microbreweries and home brewers so that everyone with $100 can test for what big breweries routinely do: chill haze, IBUs, ABV, turbidity, calorie content, etc. According to NPR (who commissioned the tests) and a White Labs analytical lab employee Kara Taylor, the Anheuser-Busch beers all had the proper amount of alcohol by volume. For example, cans of Budweiser say that the beer is 5% ABV; a can of it tested to be 4.99% ABV. Why the plaintiff's lawyers couldn't manage to pony up $100 of their own to get the offending beer tested before launching the lawsuit is beyond me and just about anyone else out there who knows a thing or two about brewing.

As for the idea of adding water to beer to "dilute" it -- that's a pretty typical practice even for homebrewers, and especially those who use all-extract or partial-mash recipes. It's simply more efficient, in time and energy costs, to boil smaller volumes of water. Our boil volumes are always around three gallons. After the boil is finished, but before we pitch the yeast, we add another two gallons of water to the fermenting bucket to bring the beer up to the final five-gallon volume. For larger breweries, more-concentrated worts and beers mean that one can brew a lot of strong beer, then dilute it to the proper ABV at bottling. This is especially useful in a beer like Budweiser (a light American lager that uses a lot of adjunct such as rice and corn), which doesn't have a whole lot of body or flavor to be ruined during dilution.

Out of curiosity, I tasted the Budweiser that didn't get used in our hydrometer test, as I haven't had the beer in many years -- certainly not since I started brewing again. The result: Sweet, faintly musty fizz water. If I were the type to file a class-action lawsuit, I'd be demanding to know where the hell the hops went.



I Didn't Like TED. Then I Got It

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TED welcome partyTED Conference

This was my first year at the cultural cartoon, crossroad of power, and factory of influence that is TED. I've spent my career following the rich and freewheeling through high-minded gatherings in the Bay Area, Aspen, New York, but this event, an invite-only affair lubricated by free artisanal coffee, a tasteful and jam-packed gift bag, and other high-value production details, plays by different rules.

Here are the broad strokes of TED. It launched in 1984 as a conference around Technology, Entertainment and Design, and has grown to include not just its two annual events (in Scotland and the United States), but a host of related events, including TEDx, self-organized versions of the main shindig. Each event centers on the speakers, who deliver, typically in 18 minutes, what the promotional literature describes as "the talk of their lives." You have to apply to attend the big annual events, and if you're accepted it then costs several thousand dollars to do so. (The one I attended, in Long Beach, California, costs $7500 per person. I was fortunate enough to receive a press pass.) Even watching the live event via web video will set you back $995.

I haven't been to the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, which costs tens of thousands of dollars, but I can say that this is nonetheless one of the world's more exclusive tickets. The ratio of tourists to thinkers at most big-name gatherings is usually pretty unfavorable. It tends to be yearners and marketers trying to get alongside the few notable attendees. And when the speakers wrap up, they tend to leave. Selfishly, I can usually find a few minutes to relax and rest my feet as a result, comforted by the knowledge that 80% of the people flowing past don't have stories or insights or contacts for me.

But here I am overwhelmed. It's an invite-only deal, and it's so expensive that no one is here to hunt for a job or to watch celebrities. (This is probably why I'm writing this a few feet from two Hollywood starlets, chatting happily with one another, free of autograph seekers or picture-takers.)

As a result, it's hard to sit down even for a few minutes at TED without feeling that I've wasted them. My job is about finding interesting people and getting stories out of them, and TED is an incredibly target-rich environment. (I'm forbidden to reveal their names, but I'll do my best to give you a sense of the place.) Every single person who walks past is notable for some reason or another. The badges we all wear carry our names and affiliations in helpfully enormous letters, legible at a distance. I feel like a blind person being shouted at. Literally, every badge within 20 feet of me makes me want to march over and say hi. Founder of world-famous design studio. CEO of massive software company. Hello, bestselling author.

The quick-hit format of TED struck me as a recipe for diluting good ideas such that they become unusable.It's always been my personal pressure valve, when I feel overmatched or overwhelmed, to dismiss the affair entirely. Whatever it was, I spent my first 24 hours of TED huddled in corners with various fellow journalists, puncturing the talks we'd just seen onstage for being dated, or unoriginal, or corny.

Based on what I'd seen of the TED talks online, it seemed impossible -perhaps even counterproductive-to try to jam academic research into 18 minutes. This is a risky thing to say, coming from the editor of a magazine that popularizes science and technology, but the quick-hit format of TED struck me as a recipe for diluting good ideas such that they become unusable. And from what I saw in person, a lot of these talks, billed as the big ideas of the day, are actually the big ideas of last week, or of a couple of years ago, with only the smallest updates attached. I tend to judge this stuff as I would a magazine assignment-does it have a news hook, and what is the intellectual stamp you're going to put on the subject?-and by those standards, few if any of these talks would have warranted a story contract.

Then, on the second morning, a young architect named Alastair Parvin got onstage to describe a problem. He pointed out that despite being at the bottom of his profession, he's nonetheless in the top 1.6% of the world's population. And his profession, by virtue of its business model and the service fees it needs to pull, can only really make money by serving the tiniest, wealthiest fraction of that 1.6%. How to design for 100% of the people, he asked?

This is not an original problem. As he talked, I wanted to explain to everyone around me that architecture has always struggled with it. At the turn of the 20th century, a new design tradition was born out of the socialist revolutions, based on the notion that architects should stop serving the whims of estate-owners, and should start serving the people. Modernism was the result. I crossed my arms.

But then he started to describe his project - a public database of building parts called Wikihouse. It does away with the high-priced services of an architect, reducing them to a modular set of pieces and plans that's equal parts open-source software and Ikea. You can even download plans for milling your own tools, and his system allows two unskilled amateurs to assemble a small house in less than a day, he said.

Again, I thought, this isn't entirely new. Habitat for Humanity put open-source plans into the world, and CAD software and milling hardware is a decade old. But my outrage was fading, and my arms uncrossed.

TED has figured out a formula for getting good ideas going.And that's when I realized that this is what TED is about. Even though at first glance it looks like a circus for amnesiac millionaires, repackaging old bromides amid the finery of the 1% of the 1%, the truth is that TED has figured out a formula for getting good ideas going. It brings speakers in who have a new solution-perhaps just a small but critical improvement on an existing solution-for big, classic problems. Those solutions typically stem from youth, or from new technology, or both. The speakers get to reach people with the power to back or publicize these new iterations. And it happens in an environment where that audience has the rare time and headspace to relax and absorb it, maybe even galvanized by real inspiration. And is it cheesy? Yes. Yes it is.

But the folks there are in the right frame of mind for cheesy. This is the other thing I began to realize, as I headed out into the sun for lunch. The people who go to TED are, indeed, very notable, and being very notable typically means being very busy. This is rare unstructured time for them. The reason the event works is that TED gives them all the opportunity to sit down, smoothie in hand, and shoot the breeze for a few minutes. Several attendees told me that they end up spending more time with people from their own cities at this event than they do when they're home.

What flows from that is a happy, unguarded vibe from pretty much everyone. I'm used to folks jockeying for social advantage and professional leverage at pretty much any event. They undercut one another, they name-drop, they get a little too drunk. But here there's an almost socialist vibe - we're all just here to hang out, it seems. One CEO of a powerful, influential startup incubator doffed his jacket and ate lunch crouched on the steps with me. When he discovered I'd forgotten my utensils, he handed his over to me, and went off to get another like a helpful dad at a picnic. When I asked a business strategist, a guy for whom this is an even more target-rich environment than it is for me, why he comes to TED, he honestly couldn't tell me. "It's just fun to spend time with all these cool people," he said. He'll undoubtedly emerge from this gathering with business cards and contacts, but from what I can tell that sort of thing will just happen by happy accident.

By the middle of day two I'd had happy run-ins with literally dozens of influential people, and found them friendly and receptive in a way I could never have hoped for in any other context. That, in my very new opinion, is why TED works. These are the big-time, heavy-duty makhers of the English-speaking world, and I'd much rather they get a nice coffee and hear from a well-intentioned young architect about the need to democratize design and construction, than just spend their lives in a boardroom. There was a real sense of the transmission of good ideas across the folks who really are in a position to put them into practice. I'm glad they spend this week insulated from the overwhelming pressures of the professional world, and are instead helpfully fooled, for a few crucial days, into opening their minds. Hell, that's what happened to me.

Jacob Ward is the editor-in-chief of Popular Science.



Insanely Life-Like Sculptures Of Giants And More Amazing Images From This Week

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Sculptures Of Giants Artist Ron Mueck created amazing sculptures like this for the Fondation Cartier Pour L'Art Contemporain, an exhibition in Paris. Fun and a little creepy. Kinda hard not to imagine them walking around when no one is looking. Ron Mueck via designboom
Plus a water-purifying billboard, landscape photos made from landfills, the most twee-tastic gadget ever, and more


Click to enter the gallery



Robot Of The Week: Artas Harvests Living Human Hairs, One By One

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Artas, the Hair RobotRestoration Robotics
Could you use a few thousand hairs? This robot can find them.

Artas is the first ever FDA-approved hair transplant robot, designed to accomplish the painstaking, yet technically difficult task of harvesting hundreds to thousands of individual hair follicles from a suitably lush patch of human skin.

Cosmetic surgeons can take the grafts and re-implant them in balding or bare areas. The implanted follicles connect back up with the blood supply and continue growing hairs as before.

Artas works by first taking precision 3-D images of the scalp and measuring the angle and depth of each hair follicle. Next, it goes in and punches individual hair follicles out of dense areas, leaving enough behind to keep those areas looking suitably hirsute:

Here's a closer look at how the dual-system needle works--the first needle goes in and makes a tiny incision, and then the second, hollow needle punches through and pulls out the follicle:

Artas is currently being used by about 20 surgeons in the U.S. and Canada. A spokesperson for Restoration Robotics, the company behind the robot, says it will soon be available in the U.K. and Korea.



Watch BigDog, Our Favorite Four-Legged Military Robot, Hurl A Cinder Block

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Playing fetch with BigDog just got a whole lot more fun. And destructive.

We've described Boston Dynamics' military-funded BigDog robot as a lot of non-canine things over the years. "The offspring of a bull and a spider," a "robot sherpa" and a "robot pack mule," for example.

The latest trick in the rough-terrain robot's bag is decidedly more dog-like: It's learned to play fetch. Except when you play fetch with BigDog, it's the one throwing. Large cinderblocks, to be precise.

Using a robotic arm where its head would be (making it look even more mule-like), it has added moving around heavy objects to its repertoire -- in addition to obeying voice commands, keeping its balance on slippery ice, traversing slippery and uneven terrain and carrying 340-pound loads. Like an actual animal, it uses the strength of its legs and torso to help power its motion (and trots around like a nervous warhorse). "This sort of dynamic, whole-body approach is routinely used by human athletes and animals, and will enhance the performance of advanced robots," according to Boston Dynamics.

If you skip to about :25, you can see it happen in dramatic black-and-white slow-mo, which, to be frank, is the ideal way to view army technology in action.

[BBC]



Let's Get Rid Of 16:9 Laptops Forever

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Chromebook Pixel's 3:2 ScreenStan Horaczek
This screen aspect ratio makes no sense. Embrace the squarer display!

The latest laptop to cross my review desk (it's just my regular desk, I don't have two desks) is the Chromebook Pixel, Google's ultra-premium new laptop, just released this week, which is a very curious device indeed. It's beautiful and well-made, but it runs Chrome OS, which, while surprisingly capable, is really nothing more than a web browser. It is a difficult thing to review because it's great, but wildly overpriced given its capabilities--the reviews of the Pixel tend to be glowing, until the last sentence, which is "Oh, and nobody should buy this laptop, because it costs $1,300 and can only run one program."

I'm not going to buy a Chromebook Pixel, but I absolutely hope that laptop manufacturers start taking a cue from one of the more unheralded innovations the Pixel brings to the table: its aspect ratio.

The standard aspect ratio for laptops these days is 16:9. (MacBooks are 16:10.) And that makes no sense, because 16:9 displays are exclusively designed for watching video.

Until 2009, personal displays were more square, with ratios around 4:3; wide displays could really only be found in movie theaters. But then came the dominance of digital video. DVDs were standardized at a 16:9 ratio. HDTVs soon followed, as did high-def television, streaming video, and Blu-ray. And our portable devices mimicked this, wanting to show off beautiful video now that it was available. Laptops, then smartphones and tablets all went 16:9. (Major exceptions being the iPhone, which until recently was 3:2, and the iPad, which is 4:3).

It makes sense that your HDTV has a 16:9 display. But your phone? When was the last time you watched a movie on your phone? I think a more square screen, like the Chromebook Pixel's 3:2, is a superior aspect ratio for laptops.

There was a time when we needed to use laptops to watch all of the online video content that's quickly taking over, like Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime, YouTube, and HBO Go. But not anymore! Now it's easy and cheap to beam that stuff up to a real TV--you can pick up a Roku for $50, and get access to all of that video content on the kind of screen that can really do it justice. And it's not like a squarer screen can't play video. Sam Biddle over at Gizmodo, though he makes other nice points, calls out the Pixel's screen's aspect ratio--but his only complaint is that videos will look "bad." And in fact they don't! There's a slight letterbox, sure, but it's hardly unwatchable, and it's not even unsightly. It's also not smaller; the Chromebook Pixel has just about the same display width as a 13-inch laptop, so videos aren't chopped smaller.

And don't forget what you gain here: video is a very minor part of what we do on our laptops. Web browsing, for example, is a far more common activity, and the taller display on the Pixel works perfectly with web pages--because they scroll up and down. You get 18 percent more vertical space in a 3:2 display than you would in a comparably wide 16:9 display. That means you can see more of the internet. You scroll less. It just makes sense. This holds true for editing documents and spreadsheets, viewing photos, and all kinds of other non-video-related things you do with your computer. Why are we designing our laptops around a relatively minor feature?

So, laptop makers: bring back the squarer screen. 16:9 is designed for watching videos, so let's keep that aspect ratio on those displays where we primarily watch videos. For our laptops, let's make sure the screen is designed to handle what we actually do with laptops.



A Police-Grade Booze Breathalyzer That Plugs Into Your Phone [Video]

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AlcohootDave Mosher
Blow into the device, and it displays your blood alcohol content on your iPhone.

To get drinkers to play it safe after a night out, three young entrepreneurs are banking on a police-grade breathalyzer that they call Alcohoot. The $99 device plugs into an iPhone and communicates with an app. After a gusty blow it logs and displays your blood alcohol content to within a hundredth of a percent. If you're above the legal limit, it helps you search for the nearest greasy spoon -- or a cab.

Alcohoot's founders gave us a demo on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange during the 2013 Kairos Global Summit recently. (Don't worry, boss -- no one blew above 0.00 percent.)




World's Sexiest Octopus Ostracized By Biologists

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Larger Pacific Striped OctopusRoy Caldwell
Due to its peculiar lifestyle and mating habits, the larger Pacific striped octopus has been largely ignored by scientists. It doesn't even have a Latin name.

In 1991, a biologist named Arcadio Rodaniche published a short abstract describing a new species of octopus he had discovered in Panama. This new octopus, Rodaniche claimed, had a lifestyle quite unlike any other species of its kind:

While the mating and breeding habits of most octopuses seem to be structured around the central fact that, given the opportunity, either of the two lovers might try to kill and eat the other, the larger Pacific striped octopus behaves as though no such danger exists: Instead of living alone, they'll often take on a den-mate, and even associate with a wider circle of up to 40 other octopuses. And when it comes time to mate, the two animals do not, like most other species, keep the other's mouth at the furthest possible distance, but come together in an intimate sucker-to-sucker embrace:

And while most female octopuses lay just one clutch of eggs and die as soon as the eggs hatch, the larger Pacific striped octopus broods several batches of babies throughout her lifetime.

Unfortunately, other biologists were not buying all these romantic details, and Rodaniche's manuscript was never published.

The larger Pacific striped octopus slipped back into obscurity for over two decades, until it was rediscovered last year.

Now, California biologists Richard Ross and Roy Caldwell are working on giving the larger Pacific striped octopus the full scientific treatment: they are writing up a species description and a paper about the LPSO's behaviors, and are trying to organize an expedition to go out and study the animal in its natural habitat.

According to a press release published on Ross's blog, Caldwell is quoted saying, "The Larger Pacific Striped Octopus is the most beautiful octopus I have ever seen."

Here's a video of a male LPSO changing color during an extra-sexy mating display for a female:

[via Scientific American]



This Week In The Future: The Grim Eater

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This Week In The Future, February 25-March 1, 2013Baarbarian
In the future, Death will know who stole his Cheetos.

Want to win this hellish Baarbarian illustration on a T-shirt? It's easy! The rules: Follow us on Twitter (we're @PopSci) and retweet our This Week in the Future tweet. One of those lucky retweeters will be chosen to receive a custom T-shirt with this week's Baarbarian illustration on it, thus making the winner the envy of friends, coworkers and everyone else with eyes. (Those who would rather not leave things to chance and just pony up some cash for the T-shirt can do that here.) The stories pictured herein:

And don't forget to check out our other favorite stories of the week:



A Bedazzled Drone Replica Asks Us To Ponder Deadly Strikes At Home

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Bedazzled Predator
The artists behind this 18-foot rhinestone- and sequin-encrusted Predator replica want to push audiences to think about the consequences of deadly drone strikes in places like Massachusetts.

An 18-foot rhinestone-covered Predator drone replica, in all its glittering glory, was unveiled today as part of a new art exhibit at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. "Home Drone" wants to push its audience to think about the consequences of deadly drone strikes -- not in far-flung regions of the world, but at home, in places like Massachusetts.

Heather Layton, the artist, hopes to foster a greater cultural understanding between the U.S. and Pakistan.

"If we can send missiles through the skies of an independent country with the explanation that we are only killing those who are planning to fight against us, what should prevent another country from sending unmanned aerial vehicles into United States airspace to kill those who might be planning to fight against them?" she asks.


Click here to enter the gallery

"After visiting Pakistan this topic became particularly important to us after we started to realize these drones are attacking people we now consider our friends," Layton said.

The sequins and rhinestones that cover the drone belie the fact that it's a killing machine. Layton and her collaborator, Brian Bailey, explain more of the project in this video:



A Clear Screen Cover That Charges Devices

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See-Through Solar Ubiquitous Energy president Miles Barr demonstrates his company's translucent solar coating. Fraunhofer USA
Juice your Kindle during a day in the park.


Could this be a window to eeeenfinite power? Maybe not quite, but it could be a cool way to extend the lifetime of your smartphone, tablet or e-reader.

A startup called Ubiquitous Energy has been showing prototypes of a translucent film that charges devices with solar energy. The idea is that in the future, the film could be built into device screens, passively juicing your Kindle anytime you read by a sunny window or in the park. It could even keep devices charged during trips to countries for which you don't have the right plugs.

It's not clear if the film, called ClearView Power, works quite that well just yet. It isn't a commercial product yet; Ubiquitous Energy has been showing it at tech shows such as the ARPA-E Energy Innovation Summit and the MIT Energy Conference.

The Boston-based startup, which is also developing films to harvest solar energy from windows, still needs to improve the transparency and efficiency of its translucent solar films, MIT Technology Review reported last month. The current ClearView Power devices "have a very light tint, barely noticeable on E Ink readers like the Kindle, although it'll take a bit more tinkering if Apple wants to get it into their Retina Displays," according to Fraunhofer, a European research institute that's supporting ClearView Power through its TechBridge program.

The film uses near-infrared light instead of visible light to generate electricity, which is key to its translucence. After all, if it used visible light, it would absorb visible light and people wouldn't be able to see through it. It works even in the shade, Fraunhofer reported, but it's much better outdoors than indoors.

[Fraunhofer USA, MIT Technology Review]



Researchers Create A 'Google Map' Of The Human Metabolism

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Mapping Human MetabolismRecon X
Never get lost in your own metabolic processes again!

An international team of researchers has debuted what they're calling a "Google map" of the human metabolism -- the most expansive virtual model of human metabolism to date, called Recon 2.

Metabolism, the blanket term for all the physical and chemical processes that your body employs to convert food into energy, plays an important role in health and disease. More comprehensive biological modeling of our metabolism can help us compute and predict how our bodies will respond to drugs, in addition to expanding our knowledge of the connection between our body's chemical interactions and a variety of diseases.

Multiple models of the human metabolism exist, but Recon 2 is so far the most comprehensive. While the human metabolic network isn't actually Google Maps' latest attempt at virtual tourism (color me disappointed), the comparison comes from Recon 2's capacity to incorporate many complex details from scientific literature and other models into a single interactive map. Recon 2 is an expansion of a prior model, Recon 1, which has been used in researching the molecular targets of cancer drugs and the affects of off-target drugs.

A statement from UC San Diego explains how the Recon 2 could be used in identifying metabolic pathways for drug delivery, using existing gene expression databases:

Recon 2 allows researchers to use this existing gene expression data and knowledge of the entire metabolic network to figure how certain drugs would affect specific metabolic pathways found to create the conditions for cancerous cell growth, for example. They could then conduct virtual experiments to see whether the drug can fix the metabolic imbalance causing the disease.

To better understand how metabolism plays a part in our health, the map provides an opportunity to both zoom in on the finer details of certain metabolic reactions and to gain a more comprehensive perspective and find patterns and relationships among pathways and processes.

"This is essential to understanding where and how specific metabolic pathways go off track to create disease," according to Bernhard Palsson, a professor of bioengineering at the University of California, San Diego. "It's like having the coordinates of all the cars in town, but no street map. Without this tool, we don't know why people are moving the way they are."

The researchers describe the map in a study published online this week in Nature Biotechnology.

The community-driven map was expanded at "reconstruction annotation jamborees," a series of meetings between researchers around the world, sort of like the international Boy Scouts of biomedicine. The participants consolidated data, established common standards, and simplified usability together as they expanded the network from 3,300 biochemical reactions to 7,400.

Ines Thiele, the lead author and a professor at the University of Iceland, says predictions based on Recon 2 have already been successfully used to diagnose some inherited metabolic diseases.

"I envision it being used to personalize diagnosis and treatment to meet the needs of individual patients," she said. She predicts that in the future, doctors could use virtual models of a patient's individual metabolism to more effectively treat diabetes, cancer and neurodegenerative diseases.

More jamborees may be in the works, since Recon 2 is far from a complete map. It only represents a fraction of the estimated 20,000 protein-coding genes in the human genome. As the paper mentions, "Such an increase in scope does not necessarily constitute an improvement in utility over the previous version: expanding the reconstruction to resolve existing gaps and dead-end metabolites may introduce additional gaps and dead ends elsewhere."

[Time.com]



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