Coffitivity is a website with a ten-minute, looping recording of ambient noise in a coffeeshop. According to a paper in the Journal of Consumer Research, background noise can have a positive effect on "creative cognition," which correlates roughly to creativity. As the classic creative-type white noise element is background noise from a coffeeshop, Coffitivity provides a recorded clip you can listen to wherever you want. (You can read a snippet of the paper investigating the intersection of noise and creativity here.) As writing blogposts about websites is, in a very loose sense, a creative task, I fired up Coffitivity while writing this post to see how it works.

12:30: I do not write well with distractions. I am wildly inefficient when working from home, because my home is full of fun. I used to write all of my college papers in my school's music library, because for two years it was under construction and the study areas were bare cement floors and walls. If there had been a literal prison cell with a desk and a chair, I'd have used that. But research suggests it might help, so here I am, trying it.

12:32: Sounds like a coffeeshop. There's a bunch of people chatting, some sliverware clinking together. I can't really hear any specific conversation--that's probably a good thing, since I'd obviously prefer to eavesdrop on strangers than do the work for which I am paid. Note: the website has cartoons with the word "EURIKA!" written on them. This is not how you spell "eureka" and it seems like somebody should have caught the typo? Or is it a reference I don't get?

12:35: Pretty sure I just heard a sheep. Or maybe someone imitating a sheep. In what kind of weird coffeeshop was this recorded? Is there a coffeeshop with a sheep in it somewhere? Where is this sheep, I want to drink coffee near it.

12:36: Talked to my friend Lindsey Weber, who is a very good entertainment blogger and often works from coffeeshops. She says: "There's nothing more depressing then being fooled into thinking that there's coffee nearby when there actually isn't."

12:37: I made myself a coffee. It was free. Already I'm saving money by listening to coffeeshop noises on a pair of headphones at my desk.

12:40: It just looped! And, like, not elegantly. Like I could totally tell when it looped. It's only 10 minutes, too; I think I would get in a habit of counting my days in 10-minute blocks, which seems stressful and not conducive to my creative cognition.

12:42: Got distracted and started looking at Wikipedia articles about sheep. Remembered that when I was a kid I thought goats and sheep were the same animal, just that goats were male and sheep were female. I'm not sure when I realized this wasn't true but it might have been around the first time I saw goat milk.

12:44: THERE'S THE SHEEP AGAIN! It comes in at around 4:00 if you guys are curious.

12:49: Just spent 5 minutes reading about different breeds of sheep. There are a lot of breeds of sheep. Early research suggests the Jacob sheep is one of the coolest sheeps.

12:51: Starting to get kind of soothing! I work for 10 minutes and then listen for the sheep and then work for 10 more minutes with small breaks for wondering whether a coffeeshop with a sheep in it could be a successful business. I think probably it could, everyone loves sheep, right?

12:55: Nobody's asked me what I'm listening to, yet. I think I'd probably lie.

12:56: Is the spelling weird on the name of the service, too? Shouldn't it be "Coffeetivity"? Not that it's a great name anyway but like if you're combining "coffee" with "productivity" I'm not sure how you end up with "Coffitivity." It sounds like a service for building coffins more efficiently.

12:57: Gonna wrap up this post.

Conclusion: Actually not bad for productivity! Better than white noise, and better than music, which sometimes gives me trouble because I start typing the lyrics to whatever I'm listening to in the middle of posts about bionic kneecaps or whatever.

It's not clear how (or even if) Coffitivity will ever make money from this. And I wish the clip was longer--an hour or two would be preferable. But, I finished this post, so, I guess it works, at least a little!

An Ohio man has been charged for shooting a robot.

Michael Blevins was charged with vandalism of government property, after drunkenly firing at a police robot in his house. Perhaps what's more interesting is that the police used a robot at all.

On February 23, police responded to a call that 62-year-old Blevins was making threats and had fired a gun in his home, the local Chillicothe Gazette reports. When police arrived, Blevins refused to answer the door.

After verbal negotiations failed, police sent two robots into Belvins' house instead of human officers because they believed Blevins had a lot of firearms. Blevins allegedly shot the larger of the two robots with a pistol.

Police eventually arrested Blevins, whom they reported as being highly intoxicated, and searched his house with a warrant. They found two AK-47-style rifles and a 75-round ammunition drum, which is illegal to own in Ohio.

It is not uncommon for police to send robots, instead of humans, into dangerous situations, as the artificial intelligence blog Singularity Hub points out. We found several examples just over the past year:

Last March, a SWAT team sent a robot into a Utah home when a shooter inside refused to come out. The man, 25, surrendered upon seeing the robot, KSL TV reported.

In September, a Michigan standoff included dozens of exchanged shots and robots sent in to determine the shooter's location.

Just days before the Blevins incident, San Diego police used robots to determine the exact location of a shooter in an apartment.

Or check out this weirdly silent video of a robot rolling into an Oklahoma City standoff scene last August.

In our quick search, however, Blevins was the only person who actually bothered to shoot the entering robots.

Business Insider also wrote about this case, saying, "Michael Blevins is likely just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to armed confrontations between man and law enforcement bot" and "Blevins is likely to be in a long line of libertarian 'folk heroes' who take up arms against perceived robotic intrusion." We're not so sure. So far, at least, robots seem just like a new tool for these standoff situations. They're not exactly Robocops replacing real officers. The humans are still outside, so it seems pretty futile to shoot the robot, and the charges against Blevins reflect that. They're just some expensive government property.

If you condensed all 200,000 years of humanity's existence into a one hour-long video and then played it back, you would have to wait 58 minutes for people to build their first city-like habitat--a honeycomb-like mud-brick town of 5,000 in present-day Turkey.

Half a minute later, you'd see another city, in Iraq, surge to 50,000 people, and 45 seconds after that, Egypt's Alexandria would swell by another factor of ten, to 500,000. With just two seconds to go in the movie, London's population would skyrocket to 5 million--another order of magnitude--just as all the rest of the developed world began to erupt in a frenzy of urbanization. During the last half of the last second, the developing world would follow.

Today, for the first time in human history, more than half the world's population makes its home in an urban environment, compared to just 13% in 1900. That trend is expected to continue, with some 70% of humans residing in cities by 2050.

Arguably, if we're going to make a radical, sudden change in something as significant as our native habitat, it's worth thinking a bit about what we want our new/future digs to be like. To that end, researchers in Iceland recently conducted a study to find out how different kinds of streetscapes--tall vs. short, monotonous vs. varied--affect people's state of mind.

Research blogger Christian Jarrett explains the study like this:

The study participants rated dozens of streetscape images. The three below show the images ranked as least (left), average (middle), and most (right) restorative:

On the one hand, there's nothing very surprising about the idea that it's hard to relax and rejuvenate at the bottom of a concrete canyon. From that angle, the study's results seem to indicate that humanity will be fighting an uphill battle for its sanity for decades, or centuries, to come. But I think this study also shows us the other side of the coin: for the first time in our species' existence, we are free to shape our physical landscape any way we want. With a bit of thought and planning, it seems we ought to come up with something good.

Brain-computer interfaces that can translate thoughts into actions will change how stroke patients, paraplegics and other people with limited mobility interact with their surroundings. But so far, these devices have involved bulky corded equipment inside research labs, requiring patients to be tethered to a computer. Now researchers at Brown University have built the first wireless version. Like a cellphone embedded in the brain, their new implantable brain sensor can relay broadband signals in real time from up to 100 neurons.

The 2.2-inch devices have been implanted in the heads of three pigs and three rhesus monkeys for about 16 months now, and are providing rich detail on the inner workings of the animals' brains. The electronics are far more complex than those in a cell phone, yet they use a minuscule amount of power, said Arto Nurmikko, professor of engineering at Brown who oversaw the device's invention.

"Listening to brain signals and transmitting them requires a very specific type of electronic circuitry. It's very different from what you and I are using right now talking to each other," he told me (over the phone). "We have to be ready to capture all sorts of points of finesse in that neural code, and that requires really tailor-made microelectronics."

So far, the devices captured neural activity while the animals performed several activities, such as turning their heads or touching an apple. It enables the animals to move around freely, which allows researchers to capture plenty of neurological data in real time.

The heart of the system is a pill-sized electrode chip implanted on the cortex. Signals from a cluster of neurons are sent to a titanium box containing a processor, lithium-ion battery, and wireless radio and infrared transmitters. The device is recharged through wireless induction, and consumes fewer than 100 milliwatts of power, which Nurmikko described as a key breakthrough. It takes a couple hours to charge, during which time the pigs' and monkeys' skin got pretty warm, so the team poured cold saline over their heads to keep them comfortable.

The device transmits data at 24 Mbps using microwave frequencies at 3.2 and 3.8 Ghz. The entire thing is hermetically sealed and body-proof, and much more complex than the pacemaker, the first electrical device installed in humans.

"The device sits in a relatively corrosive environment, which is what our body and brain liquids are--seawater-like," Nurmikko said. "It has to be stable, measured in what could be ultimately decades of human use."

And that is the end goal, according to the team. This device isn't approved for use in human clinical trials, but it was designed with that in mind. Nurmikko and fellow researchers are working with the BrainGate research team, a consortium of several neurologists and neurosurgeons working on implantable neural interfaces. The monkey and swine research will go a long way toward approving future human research, Nurmikko said.

"For us on the scientific level, this is certainly an important milestone, but in the same breath, I must say these types of milestones will take a considerable amount of extra effort to translate them into human use," Nurmikko said. "Whether it will happen or not will depend on many things--perhaps less so on the technology, which we feel now is quite demonstrably safe."

A paper describing the new device is published in the Journal of Neural Engineering.

Scientists are pretty confident Europa is home to a vast subterranean ocean, but could it have any water on its surface? According to a new study, maybe yes. That's big news for anyone hoping to send a robotic explorer to the icy moon. And it could be big news for anyone interested in the possibility of life on that Jovian satellite.

Salty water from Europa's 60-mile-thick ocean makes its way to the surface somehow through cracks in its ice sheet, according to new research. Once it's there, it is exposed to sulfur from the neighboring moon Io, Jupiter's largest. Magnesium chloride in the water interacts with the sulfur and produces magnesium sulfate, according to an analysis by astronomers Mike Brown of Caltech and Kevin Hand of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

Brown and Hand looked at spectrometer data from the Keck II Telescope on Mauna Kea and noticed a signal that looked like a form of magnesium sulfate, called epsomite. Then, in Hand's lab, they tested various salts and other chemicals to compare signals--they looked at everything from table salt to Drano, according to JPL. The signals matched magnesium sulfate.

This is interesting because it shows that Europa has some kind of chemical activity and energy transfer at its surface, the astronomers note in a new paper. That's important for life-hunters because any alien creatures living on the frigid moon would need an energy source--the sun is far too dim at that distance to really do anything.

This is also important for possible future visits, because it means scientists could sample Europa's ocean without having to drill through its ice sheet. The new paper was accepted for publication in the Astronomical Journal.

[NASA]

Though smartphone technology has evolved to be able to treat your depression and drive your robot, one basic function -- typing -- can still be a total pain. Stabbing at your tiny touchscreen keyboard with club thumbs doesn't make for an effective texting method. Computer scientists at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany felt they could design a better way to type using gesture control.

Enter "airwriting," a system currently in development to turn the movements you make as you write in the air into typed letters.

A thin, glove-like wristband is equipped with acceleration sensors and gyroscopes like those already found in a cell phone. It recognizes handwriting movements and transmits them to a computer with a wireless signal. It can distinguish between when you're actually trying to write, versus when you're cooking or doing laundry, the researchers say -- in case you were planning on cooking while wearing your high-tech handwriting gloves.

The setup sounds like a more specialized incarnation of MYO, another recently announced wristband-operated gesture control system that aims to allow you control anything digital with a simple muscle movement.

The handwriting recognition system works using statistical models for every letter of the alphabet and can adapt to different individual writing styles. It currently recognizes 8,000 words and the differences between capital and lowercase letters, so it can properly convey how excited you are about airwriting.

When it adapts to a user's handwriting, the system has an error rate of only 3 percent, according to inventor Christoph Amma, a doctoral student at KIT. For a new user it has an 11 percent error rate.

The project just received a Google Faculty Research Award for $81,000, which the researchers hope will allow them to make the device more comfortable to wear. They're also planning on integrating the system into a smartphone so that you could wave your phone around to type instead of using a wristband or a keyboard (texting in public might get dangerous, though). It's unclear when it will be made available commercially.

Of course, it seems pretty tiring to have to wave your hand around in the air for as long as it takes to write out a message, and handwriting is slower than typing anyway. But it could be a blessing for those of us whose fat fingers just weren't made for tiny smartphone keyboards. Plus, it's harder to spill coffee on your wristband than a keyboard.

Roku just announced the company's newest flagship media player, the Roku 3. Roku is one of our favorite, most indispensable little gadgets--a hockey-puck-sized gadget that plugs into your TV and gives you great, easy access to Netflix, Hulu Plus, Amazon Instant Video, Spotify, Rdio, HBO Go, MLB TV, Flickr, Plex, and a few hundred other apps. It's by far the easiest and most fool-proof way to get streaming content on your TV.

The newest version addresses a few of the issues we had with the device. Compared to a Boxee Box or Apple TV, Roku has always been underpowered and its interface has always taken simplicity to an extreme--sometimes it's not very efficient, and it's not the most attractive interface out there. The new box comes with an improved processor, which should help it deal with more intense tasks like beaming high-def content from a computer, and a new interface, which looks a bit more grid-like and certainly prettier than before.

The remote also gets an upgrade; the Roku 3, like the Roku 2 XS before it, will come with a motion-sensing controller sort of like the Nintendo Wii's, which is used for (very awkward) rounds of Angry Birds. But the new remote also has volume controls (which is welcome for folks who rely heavily on the Roku) and, in a very cool little touch, a headphone jack, so you can listen in bed without having to string a headphone cable all the way from your TV or stereo. It'll retain the HDMI, Ethernet, USB, and microSD slot, though it seems to do away with the old Roku's A/V-out jack.

The Roku 3 will sell for $100, starting this April. But the older Roku 2 models, which are significantly cheaper (the very competent Roku LT costs only $50), will get the new interface as well, so no need for older owners to feel neglected.

In 1690, British explorers at the Falkland Islands questioned how a wolf made its way almost 300 miles from the Argentinian shore to the isolated islands. In 1834, on his famous Beagle voyage, Charles Darwin asked the same question. Now a team of researchers say they've figured out how the now-extinct species managed the trip: it skated over.

To figure it out, a University of Adelaide team did some DNA digging. First they tested tissue samples from the skull of a wolf Darwin himself (!) collected and samples from a recently uncovered wolf specimen in New Zealand. They also looked at six specimens from a related species--the almost-wolf Dusicyon avus--to determine when, exactly, the Falkland wolf diverged genetically. DNA testing seemed to show the two split ways about 16,000 years ago.

Other studies that relied on museum specimens, the researchers say, didn't use Dusicyon avus, and suggested the Falkland wolf diverged millions of years ago, colonizing the islands about 330,000 years ago. That opened up the mystery to interpretation: Did humans bring it over? Did it make a raft or something? Did it, like, swim?

Researchers had a little epiphany looking at submarine terraces, which showed that the Last Glacial Maximum--a climate period characterized by low sea levels about 18,000-plus years ago--could've provided the perfect route for the wolves to cross. A narrow strait was formed during the time, and the wolves could've made their way over while chasing after food. No cute little wolf ice skates, unfortunately, but still pretty amazing.

John Anderton is the chief of a special police unit in Washington, D.C. This particular morning, he bursts into a suburban house moments before Howard Marks, in a state of frenzied rage, is about to plunge a pair of scissors into the torso of his wife, whom he found in bed with another man. For Anderton, it is just another day preventing capital crimes. "By mandate of the District of Columbia Precrime Division," he recites, "I'm placing you under arrest for the future murder of Sarah Marks, that was to take place today...."

Other cops start restraining Marks, who screams, "I did not do anything!" The opening scene of the film Minority Report depicts a society in which predictions seem so accurate that the police arrest individuals for crimes before they are committed. People are imprisoned not for what they did, but for what they are foreseen to do, even though they never actually commit the crime. The movie attributes this prescient and preemptive law enforcement to the visions of three clairvoyants, not to data analysis. But the unsettling future Minority Report portrays is one that unchecked big-data analysis threatens to bring about, in which judgments of culpability are based on individualized predictions of future behavior.

Of course, big data is on track to bring countless benefits to society. It will be a cornerstone for improving everything from healthcare to education. We will count on it to address global challenges, be it climate change or poverty. And that is to say nothing about how business can tap big data, and the gains for our economies. The benefits are just as outsized as the datasets. Yet we need to be conscious of the dark side of big data too.

Already we see the seedlings of Minority Report-style predictions penalizing people. Already we see the seedlings of Minority Report-style predictions penalizing people. Parole boards in more than half of all U.S. states use predictions founded on data analysis as a factor in deciding whether to release somebody from prison or to keep him incarcerated. A growing number of places in the United States -- from precincts in Los Angeles to cities like Richmond, Virginia -- employ "predictive policing": using big-data analysis to select what streets, groups, and individuals to subject to extra scrutiny, simply because an algorithm pointed to them as more likely to commit crime.

But it certainly won't stop there. These systems will seek to prevent crimes by predicting, eventually down to the level of individuals, who might commit them. This points toward using big data for a novel purpose: to prevent crime from happening.

A research project under the U.S. Department of Homeland Security called FAST (Future Attribute Screening Technology) tries to identify potential terrorists by monitoring individuals' vital signs, body language, and other physiological patterns. The idea is that surveilling people's behavior may detect their intent to do harm. in tests, the system was 70 percent accurate, according to the DHS. (What this means is unclear; were research subjects instructed to pretend to be terrorists to see if their "malintent" was spotted?) Though these systems seem embryonic, the point is that law enforcement takes them very seriously.

Stopping a crime from happening sounds like an enticing prospect. Isn't preventing infractions before they take place far better than penalizing the perpetrators afterwards? Wouldn't forestalling crimes benefit not just those who might have been victimized by them, but society as a whole?

But it's a perilous path to take. If through big data we predict who may commit a future crime, we may not be content with simply preventing the crime from happening; we are likely to want to punish the probable perpetrator as well. That is only logical. If we just step in and intervene to stop the illicit act from taking place, the putative perpetrator may try again with impunity. In contrast, by using big data to hold him responsible for his (future) acts, we may deter him and others.

To accuse a person of some possible future behavior is to undermine the very foundation of justice.Today's forecasts of likely behavior -- found in things like insurance premiums or credit scores -- usually rely on a handful of factors that are based on a mental model of the issue at hand (that is, previous health problems or loan repayment history). Basically, it's profiling -- deciding how to treat individuals based on a characteristic they share with a certain group. With big data we hope to identify specific individuals rather than groups; this liberates us from profiling's shortcoming of making every predicted suspect a case of guilt by association.

The promise of big data is that we do what we've been doing all along -- profiling -- but make it better, less discriminatory, and more individualized. That sounds acceptable if the aim is simply to prevent unwanted actions. But it becomes very dangerous if we use big-data predictions to decide whether somebody is culpable and ought to be punished for behavior that has not yet happened.

/>

The very idea of penalizing based on propensities is nauseating. To accuse a person of some possible future behavior is to undermine the very foundation of justice: that one must have done something before we can hold him accountable for it. After all, thinking bad things is not illegal, doing them is. It also negates the idea of the presumption of innocence, the principle upon which our legal system, as well as our sense of fairness, is based. And if we hold people responsible for predicted future acts, ones they may never commit, we also deny that humans have a capacity for moral choice.

In the big-data era we will have to expand our understanding of justice.The important point here is not simply one of policing. The danger is much broader than criminal justice; it covers all areas of society, all instances of human judgment in which big-data predictions are used to decide whether people are culpable for future acts or not. Those include everything from a company's decision to dismiss an employee, to a doctor denying a patient surgery, to a spouse filing for divorce.

Perhaps with such a system society would be safer or more efficient, but an essential part of what makes us human -- our ability to choose the actions we take and be held accountable for them -- would be destroyed. Big data would have become a tool to collectivize human choice and abandon free will in our society. And even if a person isn't thrown into a chic, night club-like standing prison as in the film Minority Report, the affect may look like a penalty nonetheless. A teenager visited by a social worker for having the propensity to shoplift will feel stigmatized in the eyes of others -- and his own.

In the big-data era we will have to expand our understanding of justice, and require that it include safeguards for human agency as much as we currently protect procedural fairness. without such safeguards the very idea of justice may be utterly undermined.

By guaranteeing human agency, we ensure that government judgments of our behavior are based on real actions, not simply on big-data analysis. Thus government must only hold us responsible for our past actions, not for statistical predictions of future ones. And when the state judges previous actions, it should be prevented from relying solely on big data. And companies should make their big data activities open to scrutiny if it leads to substantial harm to many.

A fundamental pillar of big-data governance must be a guarantee that we will continue to judge people by considering their personal responsibility and their actual behavior, not by "objectively" crunching data to determine whether they're likely wrongdoers. Only that way will we treat them as human beings: as people who have the freedom to choose their actions and the right to be judged by them.

This article was excerpted with permission fromBig Data: A Revolution That Will Transform How We Live, Work, and Think(Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2013). Viktor Mayer-Schönberger is a professor of Internet governance and regulation at the Oxford Internet Institute in the UK. Kenneth Cukier is the data editor of The Economist

Yesterday morning, an Alitalia pilot reported seeing a remote-controlled aircraft near New York's JFK airport, where he was landing. The drone was flying about 4 to 5 miles west of the airport at an altitude of about 1,750 feet, and it came within just 200 feet of the Alitalia plane, the pilot said. The Federal Aviation Administration is investigating the incident, and the FBI announced that it is looking for information leading to the drone operator. But was it legal?

Domestic drones are not regulated.
Law is slow to catch up to new technology, so drones are not currently regulated in U.S. air space. The FAA is in the process of picking drone-testing sites, which will be used to help develop domestic drone rules. Until then, unmanned aircraft are governed by model airplane rules, and model airplane rules are pretty lax.

Older laws for model aircraft forbade flying anything above 400 feet. This is still a recognized guideline by the Academy of Model Aeronautics, the lobbyist group that represents model aircraft hobbyists, but the height ceiling hasn't been on the books since at least 2012. Instead, unmanned, remotely piloted aircraft have to be visible to the naked eye, which might mean just a couple hundred feet in cloudy weather or much further than the recommended 400 feet in good weather. (Visual range notwithstanding, 1,750 feet of altitude is well beyond the reach of most commercially available model aircraft.)

While the 2012 act re-authorizing the FAA removed the height ceiling for model aircraft, it was very clear about boundaries around an airport. Flying a drone within 5 miles of an airport requires notifying that airport; otherwise, you risk prosecution. Initial reports place the drone at 4 to 5 miles away from the airport, which means it isn't clear whether this drone broke that rule or not. If the drone flew closer than that, and did so without notifying air traffic control, it would've been illegal.

The construction of the drone, however, is very likely to have been totally legal. Described as a 3-foot-wide black quadrotor it probably falls under existing construction guidelines. Model aircraft regulations let you fly anything under 55 pounds, and following AMA guidelines, everything, from absolute altitude to size to any sensors a drone might have on board, is legal.

Finally, there's H. R. 658, SEC. 336, (a)4. This part of the 2012 FAA reauthorization states explicitly flying a model aircraft is legal only if "the aircraft is operated in a manner that does not interfere with and gives way to any manned aircraft." Flying within 200 feet of an airliner definitely, absolutely, in no uncertain terms violates that law, so let's just say this is very illegal.

Should the incident worry us?
Probably. Think about your last driving commute, and how many near-accidents happened. Now imagine that in three dimensions, with some vehicles as small as a frisbee and others as large as a 747 zooming around side by side. In 2009, US Airways flight 1549 made a crash landing in the Hudson river after geese knocked out both engines. It's incredibly unlikely that model airplanes will regularly pose as great a threat as geese, but the introduction of a whole new category of aircraft to the skies will make things a lot more crowded. With luck, research, and due diligence the FAA testing process and authorization for drone use will clear this out. Until then, we're stuck with the increasingly outdated model airplane laws we have.

It looks like Archbishop Angelo Scola is a top pick among Vatican-watchers for the next pope. Wanna bet on it?

Now you can (But only if you're not American; betting on the pope is illegal in the United States because it's considered an election). AJ, an analyst at a healthcare company, has written some code that automatically scrapes odds that different papal candidates will win the Catholic Church's authoritative position. The odds come from a "prominent bookkeeper," AJ writes, and they're updated hourly.

Right now, AJ's bookie's top pick is Cardinal Peter Turkson of Ghana. If chosen, Turkson would be the first African pope in a very long time.

Not all bookies agree, of course (though Turkson is high on many lists). Oddschecker compiles the numbers from 13 bookkeepers and places Archbishop Angelo Scola of Italy on top.

Betting on the pope has a long history, which the New York Times' FiveThirtyEight blog recounts. In 1591, Pope Gregory XIV had to forbid Catholics from betting on who would be pope or how long his term would be.

Irish bookmaker Paddy Power expects this selection's betting to reach $7 million, ABC News reported. When Pope Benedict XVI was chosen, Paddy Power made $1.3 million.

AJ's code is publicly available on Github, and statistician David Smith made this neat little application that lets you see the most likely candidates for pope for up to 15 candidates.

Click here for some other examples of algorithms getting offensive.

Just because you can use an algorithm to make slogans doesn't mean they'll turn out the way you'd hoped.

That's a lesson Solid Gold Bomb, a retailer selling through Amazon, learned when offensive T-shirts were discovered on its sales page this week. The shirts were "parodies" of the "keep calm and carry on" slogan that's been trendy for a few years. Except these versions had some offensive, misogynistic taglines: "Keep Calm And Rape Off." "Keep Calm And Knife Her." The shirts have since been pulled from the store.

Who the hell thought those shirts were a good idea?

Actually, it wasn't a who. It was an algorithm designed to mix-and-match adjectives and verbs with the slogan in hopes that it might find a winner. The shirt designs were automatically generated and posted to Amazon's UK page. If anyone was looking for a certain design--"Keep Calm And Dance Off," maybe--Solid Gold Bomb would have it printed up on demand and dropped at his or her doorstep.

Solid Gold Bomb CEO and founder Michael Fowler, writing on Sold Gold Bomb's website, explained.

So words like "rape" and "knife" and "hit" apparently got mixed up in the algorithmic soup and spat out the offensive T-shirt designs. Which also means, yes, Fowler let the offending words slip past. To his credit, he apologized for that oversight instead of completely placing the fault on the algorithm.

All of that makes it sound like algorithms are a terrible business investment. They're still too dumb to pick out what consumers want, and some of the results are at worst offensive and at best ridiculous. Algorithmic clothing site Idakoos is one of our favorites; "Kiss Me I'm An Agronomist." is silly, but "I Love Motionless Girls" is a little more sinister.

What the people behind these companies understand is they don't need algorithms that consistently produce winners; they only need algorithms that randomly produce one or two winners, or several thousands shirts that get bought one or two times. The overhead for projects like this is tiny: no people in a room bouncing around shirt ideas, and no risk of printing thousands of shirts that'll never be sold, since these shirts aren't printed until somebody buys them. Just an algorithm blindly bumping into walls and maybe getting lucky.

And the thing is, these spammy bots eventually will get smarter. They'll be able to factor in which items are selling best and adjust accordingly, making rational decisions for the market. But for at least a little while longer, it's going to take a human hand to correct for any egregious mistakes.

There's plenty of evidence that repeated head hits in football-even if they don't quite cause concussions-are associated with neurological problems later in life. Yet what exactly happens in the years between a hit and the appearance of symptoms such as memory loss and depression? What exactly causes the symptoms, and how might medicine prevent them?

One group of researchers has a new idea. Sub-concussive jostling to the brain could lead to a series of events that ends with cells in the immune system attacking the brain, says Jeffrey Bazarian, a physician at the University of Rochester Medical Center and a co-author on a new study about brain injury as an autoimmune response.

The study was preliminary and wasn't set up to prove that immune cells are harming the brain. Instead, it found evidence that's one step short of proof. The data "don't really prove causality, so that's why more work needs to be done, but I still think it's provocative," Bazarian tells Popular Science.

If brain injuries really do cause this terrible immune response, that means scientists could create a pill or vaccine to prevent it. "We could talk about, 'How do we block this part of the immune response with some kind of immune suppressant?'" Bazarian says.

Here's how Bazarian and his colleagues' idea goes. After a head hit, even if it doesn't result in a concussion, the blood-brain barrier that separates the brain from the rest of the circulatory system opens up, releasing a brain protein called S100B into the blood. High levels of S100B in the blood are already known as marker for head injury; in Europe, emergency rooms give head injury patients S100B tests to decide whether they need a CAT scan.

Bazarian and his team found that at the same time there's all this S100B in the blood, the body also makes antibodies against the protein, which is normally found surrounding the brain but not in the blood. "So it looks like the body makes an antibody against a protein it's not used to seeing," Bazarian says.

That sets the body up so that the next time a head hit disturbs the blood-brain barrier, S100B antibodies in blood may pass through the barrier and attach to brain cells.

Bazarian calls this last part "speculation." Among the evidence he's found is that heightened antibody levels correspond to problematic brain scans and poorer performance on a cognitive test among the football players he and his colleagues studied. The researchers got their data from 67 University of Rochester and Cleveland Clinic football players who volunteered for detailed monitoring before and after games. None of the players the researchers studied had full-on concussions.

"I liked it that they concentrated on sub-concussive because that's what we need to know about. Because as they said, in a season, you might get a thousand of these," says Sue Griffin, a biologist who studies immune response in Alzheimer's disease at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences. Griffin was not involved in Bazarian's study. That lighter head hits might lead to a damaging immune response is "a possibility," she says. "It needs to be investigated and they did a good job here."

Griffin doesn't happen to agree that the long-term symptoms of head hits are likely caused by an immune response. Studies of the brains of deceased professional football players with depressive or Alzheimer's-like symptoms don't seem to have undergone "wholesale systemic immune attack of the brain," she says. Yet the study gathered good data and should be followed up, she says.

Other ideas scientist have about what's so damaging about head hits include actual injury to the cells of the brain just from impact. Griffin is working on the idea that brain proteins sent to repair neurons after a hit stress the neurons over the long run.

Bazarian and his colleagues published their paper today in the journal PLOS ONE.

If you want to check out the best from the States or even Japan--get your eyes on a new Caddy, a new Corvette--the American auto shows are great. But if you want the most bonkers supercars Europe has to offer, you've got to go to Geneva. Heavily represented so far is Italy, with Lamborghini and Ferrari both showing off some insane new rides.

First up: Lamborghini's new Veneno. According to Jalopnik, this bonkers car, all angles and vents and Italian flag detailing, has a 750-horsepower V12 engine capable of taking the Veneno from 0-62 in under 3 seconds. It'll also cost $4.6 million, of course, but hell, nobody could afford the Countach, the Veneno's spiritual ancestor, either. That's kind of the charm! Here's another picture:

(And Lambo, by the way, I'd be happy to test-drive this at your convenience. The last car I owned was a 1993 Nissan Sentra and I've been riding a $120, 30-year-old bike for the last five years so I'm pretty sure I am your target market. I just hope it has great airbags.)

Of course, perhaps you're more of a Ferrari acolyte. And that's fine too, because the Geneva Auto Show brought a new delightful supercar from Maranello as well! It's called the LaFerrari. Seriously. Not the "Ferrari LaFerrari," just "LaFerrari." You know, like Seal, or Madonna. In addition to having no make in its name, it also doesn't really have seats; there are two seat-like indentations carved into the interior in which lucky rich folks can sit, but no seats in the traditional sense.

It's also a hybrid, unlike Lamborghini's Veneno. It's got 950 horsepower, but only 789 of that comes from the 6.3-liter V12 engine. It'll also reach 62 mph in less than 3 seconds, thanks to its low curb weight of only 2,800 pounds. Price hasn't been announced, but it's expected to cost around $1 million. Cheap, right? You'll have to move fast to snag one, though, since less than 500 of them are being made. Read more about the LaFerrari here.

This article originally ran November 15, 2012. We've dusted it off to celebrate the four-year anniversary of Kepler's lift off.--Eds

This week NASA announced its planet-hunter, the Kepler Space Telescope, just completed its primary mission. It's far from retired--Kepler got a nice long extension back in April, so it will keep staring at distant stars for up to four more years--but it's still a milestone for NASA and the planet-hunting community. To celebrate its next step, we're taking a look at some of Kepler's greatest hits so far.

Click to launch the photo gallery

Since its launch in early 2009, the space telescope has found a treasure trove of new worlds orbiting distant stars, suggesting that planets are plentiful in our galaxy and maybe the universe. It has found so many planets, they're practically garden variety--really a shocking thing when you sit and think about it. But it should not be this way. Exoplanets are awesome!

The space telescope is orbiting the sun, trailing behind Earth. It was designed to look for other Earths, and it hasn't found one yet--but it has come very close, as you can see in our slideshow.

"The initial discoveries of the Kepler mission indicate at least a third of the stars have planets and the number of planets in our galaxy must number in the billions," said William Borucki, Kepler's principal investigator at NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif. "The planets of greatest interest are other Earths, and these could already be in the data awaiting analysis. Kepler's most exciting results are yet to come."

Click here to see some of the best we've seen so far.