Reuters has obtained a Treasury Department document that details giving intelligence agencies more access to financial information than ever before. Banks are already responsible for collecting and reporting information on suspicious transactions and passing that along to the FBI. Other intelligence agencies, though, like the CIA, have to specifically request that data on a case-by-case basis. The new Obama administration plan would change that, and instead give all U.S. intelligence agencies access to the same giant set of data the FBI already has.

Using financial records to catch criminals is an American tradition. Prohibition-era gangster Al Capone was famously caught for tax evasion after the Treasury Department pored over his financial records. The FBI has used financial data to track and freeze al Qaeda assets. The famous criminals caught or hindered this way are probably what the Obama administration wants people to have in mind when expanding access to this database.

The problem is that suspicious actions aren't the same thing as illegal actions, and while it's certainly unusual for someone to pay for something with $10,000 cash, it isn't inherently illegal, and there's a chance that something perfectly legal, just eccentric, gets flagged in this database. With just the FBI having access, that's a negligible risk, but with every intelligence agency working with the data, the chance of someone getting it wrong increases. This is always a problem when privacy protections are removed. Given past experience with over-broad and shared government lists of suspicious people, don't expect this to function smoothly.

Veronica Mars was a TV show that aired for two seasons on UPN and then a slightly truncated, slightly worse third season on the CW. It was about a plucky girl detective, played by Kristen Bell, solving various murders and rapes and thefts and all kinds of other adult things while navigating high school life in a Southern California town with a fierce economic divide. It was delightful! And then it was cancelled.

As one of those cult shows, like Freaks and Geeks or Firefly, that was cancelled entirely too soon, the cries for a movie, or for it to be picked up by another network, began immediately after cancellation. But the actors went on to other projects, the creator created something else, and that was that...until this morning, when the creator, Rob Thomas (I know. Not that one.), posted a Kickstarter page for a Veronica Mars movie, asking for a whopping $2 million.

It's an interesting case; it's one of the biggest Kickstarter projects ever (Googling around, it seems like certainly the largest film project in Kickstarter history, though it didn't ask for as much as the not-entirely-realistic Death Star). But compared to the other ones that really took off--the Pebble watch, the Ouya Android gaming system--this has the flavor of big corporate money around it. Those other projects are very independent, with the mythology of a few guys tinkering in a garage. But not this one!

The way it's set to work is that if the minimum of $2 million is met (and it will be, soon; at the time of writing, on the first day of funding, the project is well over $1.6 million), Warner Brothers will agree to distribute the movie, paying for that as well as marketing and advertising. The actors will work for cheap, so you're paying for equipment and set dressing and editing and that kind of thing.

The movie will certainly earn more than its $2 million minimum, but its momentum will soon slow down, leaving the creators with a doable but distinctly low-budget movie. What's novel here is that regular internet users are, in one way, taking the place of Hollywood investors; whereas some rich mogul-type might usually drop a million dollars into a movie like this, instead you can pay $35. On the other hand, you're not actually an investor; you will not make back any money on your investment. You might earn yourself a t-shirt, but that's not quite the same thing.

Unlike, say, the Double Fine adventure game (from the creators of cult classics like Grim Fandango), which had a similar flavor of crowd-funded cult classic, the Veronica Mars system will actually cost users more money than they'd normally pay. If you chip in $25 for a computer game, well, you'd probably have paid at least that much just to buy the game, which you're getting as a "prize" for chipping in to the Kickstarter. But for this movie, you have to chip in $35 before you get an actual copy of the movie (as well as a t-shirt), which is three times as much as you'd pay to see the movie or buy it on iTunes.

The Double Fine Kickstarter felt like a group effort to create something. Veronica Mars, much as I loved the series, feels like handing cash to a corporation.

When Google launched their #ifihadglass campaign asking users to apply for early access to the augmented reality device, tech aficionados and cutting-edge eyewear fashionistas exploded with ideas -- some annoying, some jokey, and some actually promising.

Steve McHugh, an engineer at the Boston-based e-commerce company Wayfair, posted this:

According to a new interview with BostInno, McHugh got the idea from a robotics class he took as a Master's student at Tufts University. For a group project, some of his classmates used an eye-tracking webcam to control an electric wheelchair. Depending on how precise Google's eye tracking technology is, McHugh thinks that by a wheelchair could be controlled by just staring at buttons on the interface for a specific amount of time. The user could ideally know exactly how fast they're going, whether there are potentially dangerous objects in their path and how much battery is left in the chair.

For a quadriplegic or paraplegic, being able to control a wheelchair's movements freely without arms would be life changing. Or, you know, we could just use it to dictate emails while walking.

[BostInno]

Existing helmets and mouthguards protect athletes' teeth and faces, but not their brains, according to a new international document.

That's one of several findings from the latest "Consensus Statement on Concussion in Sport," which was signed off by several major international sports organizations, as well as researchers from Australia, North America and Europe. Meant to summarize doctors' most up-to-date knowledge about concussions, the consensus statements-this is the fourth one since 2001-have guidelines for everybody from peewee players to weekend warriors to professional athletes.

There's no good clinical evidence that helmets and mouthguards prevent concussions, the consensus group, which gathered in Switzerland last November, found. Studies do show that the equipment protects from facial and head injuries, such as skull fractures, but players should be careful not to play more dangerously because they believe they're being protected from concussions, the group says.

Some sports should consider changing rules when there's clear-cut evidence that something in the sport causes many concussions, the statement says. The document offers soccer as an example, where arm-to-head contact accounts for half of concussions.

Any player diagnosed with a concussion shouldn't return to the field to play for the rest of the day, the statement recommends.

In general, these consensus statements are aimed doctors and other health professionals who may check up on athletes during or after games. This time, however, the authors also developed a guide for parents, coaches and other non-professionals to help them determine when a player should see a doctor.

"It's really important to recognize injury that might have occurred," Willem Meeuwisse, one of the document's authors and a physician specializing in sports at the Hotchkiss Brain Institute in Canada, tells Popular Science. "That's why we made this pocket guide."

The International Olympic Committee, FIFA, the International Equestrian Federation and the International Rugby Board all officially back the current Consensus Statement on Concussion on Sport. Those organizations underwrote the costs of bringing international scientists together for a conference in Switzerland last November to write the statement. They had no hand in policy, Meeuwisse says.

The NFL has not officially backed the statement, but Meeuwisse says he wouldn't yet expect it to, as the statement has just been published. In previous years, international sports organizations have taken the consensus statements and adapted them to the sports they specifically govern. Meeuwisse guesses that adoption process can take a year or two.

The British Journal of Sports Medicine is publishing the new consensus statement in its April issue. The statement is also available for free online.

To nobody's surprise, the Veronica Mars movie has continued to attract the interest of everyone with good taste in plucky teenage detectives and has been earning massive amounts of cash on Kickstarter all through the night. In the 15 hours since I wrote about this unusual Kickstarter (in that we're handing money to a huge corporation rather than independent creators), it's earned another million dollars, putting it over the top by a lot. Now it sits at over $2.6 million after just a day and a half, with 29 days to go. The creator, Rob Thomas, joked that Veronica's beloved dog Backup "won't survive unless we get $3M." Pretty sure Backup will be safe.

Today is Pi Day (the cool cousin of January 23's Pie Day) and, to celebrate, we've compiled 10 fun and easy pie-tin crafts from the Popular Science archives.

What do a hipster chandelier, an amateur telescope, and a living-room jet engine have in common? You can make each one with an ordinary pie tin!

Click here to enter the gallery

A version of this article originally appeared January 23, 2013.

The Higgs Boson really, really is the Higgs Boson.

At first, testing at the Large Hadron Collider revealed a particle that was likely the Higgs Boson, the theorized particle that gives the universe its mass. Then, more tests confirmed we were even more sure about it--there was a one-in-550 million chance it wasn't the Higgs. Now, after even more tests, it's been confirmed: beyond a shadow of a doubt, the particle uncovered is the Higgs.

So it's not surprising, given the odds we already had, that this has been announced. But it's still amazing! Although there's another slight caveat: this boson could be a particle described by the Standard Model, or another brand of Higgs boson described by other theories, although it's apparently leaning toward the SM variety. To find out, scientists will be monitoring how it decays, which means more tests. Because you can never test something like this enough.

[SPACE]

For the first time in more than two decades, the United States can put a "Made in the USA" stamp on non-weapons grade plutonium, Discovery News reports.

Plutonium-238 is an important fuel source for the radioisotope power systems that are used in spacecraft like the Mars Curiosity Rover and the New Horizon spacecraft that's on its way to Pluto. As plutonium-238 decays, it gives off enough heat to generate electricity and keep all the expensive parts of a spacecraft warm in the cold, dark nether regions of deep space.

Until 1988, the U.S. produced its plutonium-238 (not to be confused with plutonium-239, the isotope in nuclear weapons) as part of its Cold War nuclear shenanigans. After the Savannah River Site, a major contributor of plutonium-238, shut down because of environmental issues, we turned to Russia for our plutonium needs, but that supply has run out as well.

Since 2009, we've been wringing our hands over how to get enough of the fuel to power our future space exploration. Congress threw NASA $10 million of its requested $30 million budget to start production, but denied the Department of Energy's funding requests three years in a row.

In April, officials at the DOE finally announced production was underway, but getting supplies up to snuff could take up to eight years.

That process seems to be off to a good start, luckily. Jim Green, director of NASA's Planetary Science Division, announced at a Mars exploration planning meeting that the DOE has successfully generated plutonium at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, according to Discovery News.

Green said he expects a little more than three pounds of plutonium to be generated per year. New supplies of plutonium could be mixed with the small existing supply of U.S. plutonium to bring the depleted plutonium up to the necessary energy density.

[Discovery News]

Bald eagles, besides being majestic and graceful and standing for freedom and all that, have a pretty cool trick: they can scoop fish straight out of the water. Flying low, they extend their talons and grab the fish from below the surface, carrying it home for a triumphant feast. Now, scientists at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia have made a drone that can imitate this same feat. Watch it in action below:

The drone in question is a quadrotor, a UAV that flies with four spinning blades, like a helicopter. Scientists like quadrotors because they're stable in flight and can be easily modified. To make a quadrotor imitate an eagle, the scientists first studied how eagles catch their prey. Then, they attached a 3-D printed claw on a motorized leg to the bottom of a quadrotor.

The drone starts with the claw pointed forward, and keeps flying past the object as the claw latches onto its target and pivots backwards. That gives the claw extra time to make a secure grip, without compromising speed. New Scientist reports that the researchers had to develop some serious stabilization software to keep the drone flying with the added weight.

We've already seen quadrotors that can carry heavy payloads, perform light shows, and play catch. Imitating a bald eagle adds to an impressive suite of functions. In practice, a flying claw could at its most basic level get a Frisbee off a roof, and in more advanced applications pick up and retrieve tools from construction workers at elevation. Combined with those other capabilities (well, okay, not the light show), drones based off this technology could even be used for construction projects all on their own. When people talk about the inevitability of commercial drones, it's these capabilities that make them really promising. Plus, it's robot eagles. If Iron Man had a pet, it would be this.

[New Scientist]

Google just announced that it's killing Google Reader, the company's popular RSS-reading web application, despite the fact that it's far more popular than the still-extant Google Plus. Reader, like Gmail and Google Maps, has become the go-to service in its category; there are plenty of RSS reading mobile apps, or superpowered desktop software, but the simple, effective web-based reader is the domain of Google Reader. And now it's dead.

So, here's what to use instead:

The Easiest Transition

So you want to move on from Google Reader with the least possible fuss, eh? That means you're looking at a web-based RSS reader, one that can accept your Google Reader feeds before they no longer exist, one that has apps for your iPhone or Android phone and syncs between them seamlessly. Luckily this is not that hard to do; you can export your feeds from Google Reader and then import them with any of the services/apps on this list.

We hear good things about The Old Reader, which visually imitates Google Reader circa 2011, but without a mobile app, it's not a true solution. Our recommendation? NewsBlur, pictured at top. It's got nice apps for the web, Android, iPhone, and iPad, it looks sort of like Google Reader, albeit a slightly uglier/busier version, and it even has some cool bonus features, like the ability to see the original page rather than an extracted feed. It's free with some limits (though they're not very restrictive; you can get by with the free version pretty easily) or you can spring for the $1 per month premium version.

Mix It Up, Just A Little

If you're willing to try something a little bit--but just a little bit--different, we recommend Feedly. Feedly works the same way as Google Reader on the back end--it takes your feeds, syncs seamlessly with mobile apps, lets you share or save for offline reading. But it looks quite different from Google Reader; whereas Google's solution was panel-and-text-based, Feedly is visual, offering feeds and individual posts in the form of thumbnails. It's certainly pretty, but the new look won't be for every ex-Reader (Reader-er?): there's less info on the screen, which gives more weight to individual stories and makes it harder to skim. It's free on the web (with an excellent Chrome extension), Android, and iOS. Maybe the best part? Feedly is totally prepared for the demise of Reader, and has a system in place (cheekily called "Normandy") which makes it as easy as possible to shift your RSS life over to Feedly.

Go Desktop-Only

This would be a major shift; the beauty of Google Reader is that it syncs your feeds with any device you'd care to read them on, and moving to a non-web-based app introduces some complications into the mix. That said, there are benefits to moving out of the cloud, namely increased speed (because it downloads in the background) and storage for offline reading. Our favorite Windows app is that old warhorse, FeedDemon--it's been around forever, it's ugly but powerful and customizable as hell, it syncs with podcasts and lets you tag and share and search and institute alerts and about a billion other things.

For Mac, we recommend NetNewsWire, which is also made by NewsGator, the company behind FeedDemon. It's a little bit prettier than FeedDemon, and it has the added benefit of syncing with its own iPhone and iPad apps. If you're a Mac/iPhone user, the transition to using one of these apps is going to be much easier than if you use Windows or Android. FeedDemon and NetNewsWire are both free.

Go Mobile-Only

Or maybe you're on the other side: you only read RSS feeds when you're out and about, with your iPad or iPhone or Android device. Aren't you modern! There are lots of interesting readers out there for mobile that take advantage of those devices in cool ways, but for our money, the best is still Flipboard, that old stand-by. It's very different from Google Reader in appearance; it looks like a crazy futuristic magazine, and sucks in your Facebook and Twitter accounts in addition to RSS feeds. It's gorgeous and responsive and a pleasure to use, but setting it up won't be painless. Flipboard does sync with Google Reader, but it puts all of your feeds into one section, which isn't ideal. You'll have to add them individually. This sucks. But it really is a great reader.

In the same vein is Pulse, which is slightly less pretty but still pretty, and Reeder, which is functionally more similar to Google Reader but which I find kind of unintuitive and inefficiently designed.

No More Google Reader? Well, Screw RSS Then!

This is a reasonable thought! You can replace a lot of what was great about RSS with various Twitter work--creating lists for your favorite "feeds" (so you'd follow @PopSci instead of subscribing to PopSci's RSS feed) is a surprisingly adequate replacement. That's assuming you're constantly staring at Twitter, which I am, because I am a Cool Dude, but won't be quite for everyone. For news junkies, Twitter is definitely the fastest way to get news--but for more leisurely readers, maybe not. You can use Twitter in conjunction with Instapaper to save articles for later, offline reading--it takes a bit more effort, since you have to monitor Twitter, click a link to a page, and click the bookmarklet that'll sync it with Instapaper--but you're left with a pretty decent way to get to-the-minute news as well as longer, less timely stories. We recommend TweetDeck as the best power-user Twitter client, though it too will soon cease to exist.

On the last Sunday before this issue went to press, the lights went out at the Super Bowl. I sat there, gaping, with a drink in my hand, as the ads, the field, Phil Simms, and one of the biggest televised events went dark in front of 108 million viewers. And then I put down the drink and got on the phone.

The editors immediately went to work sorting things out. Was this a failure of Entergy, the local utility? Had the incredible power demands of the Super Bowl outstripped the rebuilt infrastructure of post-Katrina New Orleans? And was this the most damning evidence yet that the country needs the fabled smart grid we've been weighing all these years?

We interviewed everyone we could find who'd been affected by the loss of power and who might be able to explain it. We spoke with producers at CBS who had to suddenly sort out who in the stadium still had a working mike. We spoke with smart-grid experts at MIT. We interviewed Gus Lodato, owner of a restaurant in Queens, whose all-you-can-eat-and-drink deal went south on him when suddenly he had to hand out 35 more minutes' worth of booze and grub.

It was fitting that we learned the truth about the Super Bowl blackout while putting together this issue.Here's what we learned: The power loss was pretty normal, all things considered. A relay-the industrial equivalent of a circuit breaker-blew in the stadium. On Twitter, Entergy indelicately blamed the "customer's side" at first but later took responsibility for the problem. That's it. As far as we can tell at press time-even the most ardent advocates of remaking the country's electrical system told us this-no smart grid would have prevented it.

Most important, we got a solid refresher course in things like how circuit breakers work, how electricity flows from a utility to a customer, and how long it takes to power down and restart the thousands of halide lights it takes to illuminate a football field-the real-life, now-and-today mechanisms that keep a stadium running and our TVs on. I still believe that America is going to need a smart grid-and soon. But it was fitting that we learned the truth about the Super Bowl blackout while putting together our How It Works issue. In these pages, we decode the intricacies of beehives, earthquake simulators, and the world's most powerful spacecraft. Exciting, amazing stuff. But at the end of this particular scramble, we were reminded that it's our job to understand how the world actually works-not just how we think it does.

--Jacob Ward

jacob.ward@popsci.com | @_jacobward_

Go here to read the April issue of Popular Science.

In 1921, two scientists made the first modern loudspeaker out of magnets, wire, and paper. Now manufacturers use synthetic fibers and even ferrofluid. Why stop there? Your kitchen contains plenty of materials to build a functional woofer. A potato chip works as a sound-emitting diaphragm here, but other rigid foods work just as well.

Time: 5 to 10 minutes
Cost: A few bucks
Difficulty: 1/5

1) Gather the parts
25 feet of 30-gauge magnet wire
Two ¾-inch-diameter-by-¼-inch cylindrical refrigerator magnets
Two cardboard strips, ½ inch by 1.5 inches
A wooden cutting board or piece of particleboard
One 6-inch-long, ¾-inch-diameter dowel
Sandpaper
A hot-glue gun
Potato chips (thick-cut chips work best)

2) Build a voice coil
Wrap the magnet wire tightly around the dowel to make a ⅜-inch-tall coil, leaving 12 inches of wire on each end. Smear the coil with hot glue, let it cool, and slide the coil off the dowel. Sand an inch of paint off the wire's ends.

3) Assemble the speaker
Fold the cardboard strips into a Z shape. Hot-glue the magnets and strips to the particleboard, and then the coil to a chip. Next, glue a cardboard strip to each end of the chip while centering the coil over the magnet.

4) Rock out
Connect the sanded speaker wires to an amplified audio source, such as a home entertainment center (a portable player may lack enough power), and listen to the saltiest, crispiest music you've ever played.

Samsung is the world's biggest phonemaker, and the Galaxy S line is its flagship. It's not our favorite line--we found last year's model, the Galaxy S 3, to be overcomplicated on the software side and distinctly chintzy on the hardware side--but it sure does sell. Tonight Samsung will announce the Galaxy S 4 at Radio City Music Hall here in New York City, and we'll be there to cover it. In the meantime, here's what we're expecting.

More Plastic

All signs, including what appears to be a substantial leak to a Chinese blog, point to the S 4 being made of plastic, just like its predecessors in the Galaxy S line. This rankles us gadget bloggers, because we hate the plastic. We praise the aluminum cases on the iPhone 5 and HTC One. We marvel at the thick, lovely-feeling polycarbonate on the Nokia Lumia 900 (yes, polycarbonate is a plastic. But it's a better plastic.). We call the Galaxy S line cheap, and light, and plasticky, and we say it feels less than good in the hand. And Samsung sells about a billion of them anyway, because who cares what we think? Nobody. The new Galaxy S 4 will be made of plastic. White plastic and black plastic, probably.

More Faster

It will be faster than the last phone.

More Bigger

Again, people refuse to listen to gadget bloggers, who know what is best for them, and so they have embraced giant phones while we gnash our teeth. Rumors say the Galaxy S 4 will have a 5-inch screen. That is a lot of inches. The iPhone 5 has a 4-inch screen. The Lumia 900 has a 4.5-inch screen. The HTC One has a 4.7-inch screen. The only big-selling phone that's bigger than 5 inches is the Galaxy Note, which is big enough to serve three separate cheeses on its surface.

More Gestures

Rumors suggest Samsung has at least been working on a way to scroll a screen by tracking the movement of your eyes. Samsung has a strong track record of creating inventive, complicated, and not very practical ways to do things that are already easy to do. Why pinch-to-zoom when you can place two fingers on the screen and extend your arms like you're pushing a boulder up a hill? Why flick a touchscreen downwards when you can stare at a screen until your eyes water, willing it to recognize your bloodshot eyeballs and move the page? Apparently it will also be able to pause a video when you look away from the screen. This is an elaborate long-con designed to get all Galaxy S 4 owners to look so intently at their screen that they don't notice Samsung's goons picking their pockets. Don't fall for it.

That's it, really! More details tonight--the event starts at 7PM EST.

Scientists have taken cells from rhesus monkeys' skin, turned them into neural cells, then implanted them successfully into the monkeys' brains. After six months, the transplanted cells showed no scarring and looked healthy and normal-except that they glowed green, a characteristic the scientists added to the cells so they could find the cells later.

The feat is a basic step toward personalized stem cell therapies, in which people might get treated for diseases using their own healthy cells. Of course, a study in monkeys-and one that didn't cure any disease-is a long way from something your doctor could order. But that's the eventual aim of studies like this.

The research team, from the University of Wisconsin in Madison, first took skin samples from three rhesus monkeys. They used the famed Yamanaka cocktail to transform those skin cells into pluripotent stem cells, a kind of "blank slate" cell that's able to develop into any type of cell in the body. It was just the kind of experiment that Popular Science predicted would take off in 2013.

After making stem cells from skin cells, the Wisconsin team coaxed the stem cells into becoming something completely different: early-stage neural cells. At this point, the researchers implanted the cells back into the monkeys, in which they had artificially induced a Parkinson's-like disorder.

Once inside the monkey brains, the neural cells finished their maturation, got great jobs and their own apartments… I mean, they turned into specialized brain cells called neurons, astrocytes and oligodendrocytes. They didn't die, get rejected by the monkeys' brains as foreign, or appear cancerous, all of which have happened in some previous stem cell implant studies.

Although the new brain cells settled well into the monkeys' brains, there weren't enough of them to improve the monkeys' Parkinson's symptoms. The researchers will still have to see if they can implant cells that actually help with symptoms. And they'll need to keep checking on the monkeys' brains in the months and years to come, to make sure the implants don't cause problems later on.

The Wisconsin team published their work today in the journal Cell Reports.

[University of Wisconsin-Madison]

Cyber attacks are the top threat facing the United States, according to a report that the Director of National Intelligence published this week. That is new. Most national threats of yore implied some sort of physical damage--terrorism, weapons of mass destruction, nuclear warfare, and so on. Placing cyber attacks in the number one spot reveals a few things about how the nature of security has changed.

1. The trend is towards less dangerous threats./>

For much of the past decade, terrorism was widely believed to be the top threat facing the United States. Understandably so: The aughts opened with the most horrific terrorist attack on U.S. soil to date and saw dangerous radicals in Madrid, London, Mumbai, and elsewhere plant bombs or launch other smaller attacks. These are scary things, but such attacks are also rare and small-scale.

Cyber attacks, while potentially very disruptive to the economy or power grid, are unlikely to kill nearly as many people as terrorism. (Or, for that matter, be anywhere near as terrifying as the nuclear standoff that dominated much of the last century.) Fear of cyber attacks on critical infrastructure and military controls should encourage the United States to adopt better security measures, and to judge by the White House's recent cyber security initiative and the Pentagon vowing to launch cyber counter-attacks, it looks like we have some promising momentum. (Though, um, some recent announcements about weak cyber defenses and firing cyber defense inspectors show we still have a long way to go.)

Regardless: if we're to go by verified reports, the number of people killed by cyber attacks so far is exactly zero. Of course, it's possible that someday, cyber attacks could sabotage a computing system, causing a crash that kills people. But right now, when describing cyber attack casualties, we have to talk about it in hypothetical terms because there are no actual cases.

However new and scary this threat is portrayed cyber attacks alone won't kill anyone. For proof, watch this German telecom real-time map of ongoing cyber attacks for a few minutes and then note how many places attacked are suddenly reduced to post-apocalyptic wastelands. Keep this in mind the next time a politician warns about "cyber 9/11" or "cyber Pearl Harbor."

2. Cyber is very different from other threats, and needs to be treated accordingly.

We're used to thinking of security threats as things that go boom and end in dead bodies. The overwhelming majority of cyber attacks will instead look more like crime or spycraft. Cyber attacks are useful for getting at and stealing data, especially that held by governments or businesses. When cyber attacks do cause physical damage, it's so far been through industrial sabotage that breaks complicated machines. Attacks like this, focused on data stealing, financial meddling, or industrial sabotage are best dealt with law enforcement and intelligence agenices. LulzSec, a hacking group that brought sites offline throughout the summer of 2011, was compromised and later brought down by police tracking down one of their members in person and turning him into an informant. Zero Dark Thirty this isn't.

There is the potential for cyber attacks to be deadly, but the most likely way for that to happen is a cyber attack against critical infrastructure like powerplants, dam controls, pentagon computers as part of a broader attack by regular military forces. This isn't exactly new; disabling enemy equipment or intercepting enemy communications is as old as communication itself, and the Pentagon has already said it will treat such attacks as acts of war.

3. Cyber is a threat now because very few other things are.

Even at the height of a budget crisis and with automatic spending cuts in effect, the United States spends more on its military than the next nine biggest military spenders in the world. In terms of conventional military power, no nations come close to the United States. We are living in a largely unprecedented era of safety. Cyber attacks, like terrorist attacks before it, will cause some harm. But these are primarily attacks used by small militant groups or criminals, or even nations that cannot challenge the U.S. by conventional means. That is actually a good thing. Whenever I see a headline panicking about cyber war, it just reminds me that we live in an era where the risk of conventional war or nuclear war is negligible.

1. What do you get when you divide a Holstein's circumference by its diameter?

A: Cow pi!

Variations: What do you get when you divide a jack-o'-lantern's circumference by its diameter? What do you get when you divide green cheese's circumference by its diameter?

2. What do you get when you divide the sun's circumference by its diameter?

A: Pi in the sky.

3. √-1 2^3 Σ π ... And it was delicious.

4. You can't spell happiness... Without pi!

5.

This infographic, from the Iran Media Program and the design studio Hyperakt, charts how far up the food chain internet censorship goes in Iran. It all starts at the very top, with the Supreme Leader, and makes its way down to internet users and service providers. In between, note the presence of some government entities, like the Cyber Police, which monitors social networks for anti-Islamic activity, and the Iranian Cyber Army, a coalition of pro-government hackers that launches cyberattacks against opposition groups. Clearly, a lot of thought goes into keeping people in the dark.

Despite all that policing, 20 to 30 percent of people in the country are using technology to get around the firewall--and are breaking the law to do it--the infographic says. That might change soon: Google Reader gives many Iranians access to blocked websites, because it runs through Google servers, which are located in parts of the world that do not censor the internet. But now that Reader is toast, people in the country who want unfettered access to the web will have to find another way. And the Iranian government has put tremendous manpower into stopping that from happening.

[Hyperakt]

At a massive event at Radio City Music Hall, featuring a live orchestra and a simulcast on a huge billboard in Times Square, Samsung showed off its newest flagship smartphone, the Galaxy S 4, which is...not very interesting. But the Galaxy S line is enormously popular, with a huge advertising budget behind it, and this phone will probably also sell about a gazillion units. So, what's going on here?

The Galaxy S 4 continues Samsung's tradition of cramming as many new ideas as possible into a phone. And those ideas are sometimes interesting! Perhaps most futuristic is the visual tracking system allowing you to scroll and pause just with your eyes. While watching a movie, if you movie your gaze away from the screen, you'll automatically pause the movie. No multitasking allowed, decrees Samsung! Or you can scroll through lists and web pages just by looking down to the bottom of the page. This is definitely something new--no other phone has anything even resembling this. Whether anyone will use it, well, that's a different story.

It also detects touch-free motions--you can wave your hand over the phone in different ways to perform different functions, like answer the phone or move to a previously-used app.

Otherwise, it's mostly what you'd expect: a black or white plastic phone, very thin, very light, with a giant 5-inch screen (a 1080p resolution, at 441 PPI, which means this is a very pixel-dense screen in line with others from Apple, HTC, and Motorola). It looks more than anything like a Galaxy Note, with a single mechanical home button and a touch-sensitive back and menu button. Connectivity-wise, it's a 4G LTE phone, with Bluetooth 4.0, which is expected, and an infrared LED, so you can change channels with your phone. (To be fair, HTC's One, which was announced last month, also has an IR blaster.)

The camera is a 13MP shooter on the rear, with a 2MP sensor on the front. Interestingly, you can use both at the same time, giving you a kind of picture-in-picture of yourself within a picture of whatever you're shooting. There's also a feature that'll let you record audio along with a photo, giving kind of narrated photography.

[Note: at this point in Samsung's presentation, a small child came out and furiously tap-danced for about a minute.]

There are, because this is Samsung, many more camera features. That Air View feature lets you hover your finger over the screen for options. There's one that lets you erase unwanted items from photos. There's something called ChatOn, a video chat service, plus GroupPlay, which lets you share photos in a way that wasn't made totally clear, and a few other terms with unconventional (fun fact: this is called camel case!).

Samsung's also included something called S Translator, an on-the-fly translation app. This is something that's actually very exciting; we've been tracking the progress of the real-life Babelfish for a long time. It's a fantastically difficult thing to do, but we're excited to see how this one works. S Translator supports nine languages, and translates both text-to-speech and speech-to-text. So you can type "where is the bus station" into it and it'll translate that into Spanish or Mandarin or German, or you can have a friendly stranger who doesn't share your language speak Portuguese or Italian or Japanese into the phone and it'll turn it into English text. It also says it can translate images, so you can take a picture of a sign or menu and it'll translate it.

[At this point in the presentation, a Chinese man came out and said the word "shvitzing." The crowd laughed riotously.]

The phone includes temperature and humidity sensors. I'm not totally sure why; there is a feature, or system, or something, called S Health, which syncs with other accessories like a health-tracking wristband and scale. But if the phone is in your pocket or a bag, I'm not totally sure why it needs a temperature sensor; it's not like it's laying against your skin.

Samsung is also showing off something called HomeSync, which is basically a network-attached storage unit--a big hard drive that plugs in at home, which syncs all of your photos and videos and music out to a TV or to any of your phones.

Could you hold a cookie in your mouth for a minute without eating it, if you were promised something even more delicious in exchange for the wait? Most animals can't control their impulse to gobble up the food in front of them. Humans, primates and corvids (a family of hoarding birds such as crows and ravens that already save food for later) can all delay delicious gratification for a minute or longer, but most animals can't wait more than a second or two. New research from the University of Vienna suggests that cockatoos also can also be trained to resist instant gratification for something more tempting down the road.

A study on an Indonesian variety of parrot, the Goffin cockatoo, in Biology Letters this week is the first to show that a non-hoarding bird possesses a significant amount of self-control. Cockatoos have already shown themselves to be smart cookies, displaying mad dance skills and the ability to use tools.

A total of 14 cockatoos were trained to keep an inedible object in their mouth and return it to the researcher's hand in exchange for a preferred reward (a nut or a piece of meat). Next, the researcher held two hands out, one with an initial food item (a tasty pecan) and one with a greater reward, either more pecans or a more delicious cashew. The cockatoo had to pick up the initial item, while the reward hand stayed within sight but out of reach. After the delay, they could trade for the better food.

The Goffins weren't able to last the full five minutes that corvids are capable of, yet they were able to resist temptation for an impressive 80 seconds. Delayed gratification shows a higher level of cognition because it requires not only impulse control, but the ability to perform the cost-benefit analysis of is waiting worth it?

"While human infants or primates can hold the initial food in their hands, one should also consider that the birds were able to wait, although they had to hold the food in their beaks, directly against their taste organs while waiting," says Alice Auersperg of the Vienna Goffin Lab. "Imagine placing a cookie directly into a toddler's mouth and telling him/her, he/she will only receive a piece of chocolate if the cookie is not nibbled for over a minute."

Delayed gratification studies with human infants are complicated for other reasons. Famously, a psychology study in the 1970s promised children they could have two marshmallows if they could resist the temptation to eat the first one for fifteen minutes. Further analysis has suggested that strategic thinking rather than self-control may be at work: Children who don't trust that the second marshmallow will actually appear will eat the one marshmallow immediately rather than risk getting none at all.

That effect probably wasn't at work here with a group of lab-raised cockatoos. The Goffins were more interested in upgrading the quality of their treat, not the quantity, and had more impulse control when it came to exchanging for a better reward than for more of the initial reward.

"Like corvids and some primates, [Goffins] acted much like economic agents," the authors write, "flexibly trading-off between immediate and future benefits relative not only to the length of delay, but also to the difference in trade value between the currency and the item on auction."

[Nature World News]