If you've ever had the soul-crushing misfortune of hitting a bird while speeding down the road, you can at least take heart in the fact that some birds are, on the whole, getting better at dodging them. A new paper published today in the journal Current Biology theorizes that today's natural predators (like the Ford F-150) are causing birds to adapt.

Every year for the past 30 years, researchers have been acting like urban Darwins, observing cliff swallows in Nebraska and surveying how they die. The swallows often build nests under bridges or other well-trafficked areas and so, occasionally, get hit by cars. The researchers tracked birds who've died by car, and then compared them to birds who accidentally died some other way. They've found that, during the last three decades, the swallows have been dying less by car, and it's not caused by the number of birds in the area or number of cars on the road. Something else is up, the researchers surmised.

The roadkill surveys indicate it's the long-winged swallows who are getting hit by cars; the shorter-winged birds may be able to turn and take off faster than their counterparts, avoiding oncoming traffic. That means there's a natural selection process happening out on the road.

That's at least the idea, anyway. There are other factors the researchers point out--like the fact that swallows can learn from each other--that might also be contributing to swallows dying less. Regardless, they're somehow avoiding becoming roadkill.

The bottomest bottom of the ocean, nearly 11,000 meters (6.8 miles) down, is actually full of microbial life, a new study found.

An international team of marine scientists sent an autonomous instrument down to measure oxygen at the bottom of the Mariana Trench in the central western Pacific. The Mariana is the deepest known ocean trench. The researchers found unusually high rates of oxygen consumption, a sign of microbe metabolism. (Living microbes, like people, take in oxygen.)

The finding is surprising because it's hard to get enough food down so far. All bottom-dwellers depend on food that drifts down from the shallower parts of the sea. Only 1 or 2 percent of the organic stuff from the surface is supposed to make its way to depth of 3,700 meters, according to an explainer from Nature Geoscience.

Yet the Mariana Trench explorers found oxygen consumption rates that were twice as high as in a location about 60 kilometers away that was only 6,000 meters deep. They also pulled up some sediment from the Mariana Trench and found way more bacteria than in their 6,000-meter-deep location.

The trench probably isn't getting more organic stuff snowing down in it, Nature Geoscience reported. Instead, researchers measured the rate at which sediment was deposited in the trench and found that it was unusually high, which means the trench may be trapping an unusual amount food for its microbial denizens.

The activity in the trench is so high, it could actually be an important part of the planet's carbon cycling and climate. "The fact that large amounts of organic matter that contain the carbon accumulate and are focused in these trenches also means they play an important role in the removal of carbon from the ocean and the overlying atmosphere," Richard Turnewitsch, one of the Mariana Trench researchers and a member of the Scottish Association for Marine Science, told the BBC.

By the way, yes, the Mariana Trench is the same one that filmmaker James Cameron visited last year in a submarine. The Nature Geoscience explainer poked a bit of fun at Cameron for calling the trench a "sterile, almost desert-like place" (ah, science humor).

Turnewitsch and his colleagues published their work yesterday in Nature Geoscience.

[Nature Geoscience, BBC]

Peer 1 Hosting has been trying to explain what the Internet looks like since 2011, when they created an infographic map of the Internet showing networks and routing connections across the world. Now they've visualized the web in a zoomable Map of the Internet app for iPhone and Android that lets you explore connectivity in a more hands-on way.

Using data from CAIDA, The Cooperative Association for Internet Data Analysis, the app shows 22,961 autonomous system nodes and the 50,519 connection that link them, both from a global view and a network view. Exploring it is a little like being lost in space, surrounded by floating lights and colors.

You can search for particular companies or domains and perform traceroutes to see how data moves between them, or you can also watch the Internet evolve over time. A timeline at the bottom pinpoints important years in the history of the web, like the launch of Wikipedia or last year's SOPA blackout, and lets you explore how connectivity has increased over the years. Based on current data, they even predict what the Internet landscape will look like in 2020.

In the blog post announcing the app release, the company says they think of the map as "an educational tool that represents the Internet's evolution from 1994 to present day." Unless you already know a lot about networks and autonomous systems, it might more disorienting than educational, but at least it's fun to play with.

You can check out CNN Money's video overview for more:

[via Flowing Data]

A new machine can keep human livers warm and functioning outside the body for 24 hours before successfully transplanting them, a team of Oxford scientists announced last week. The breakthrough could double the number of livers available for transplant.

Livers are normally kept on ice to slow down their metabolism, a risky process that only buys doctors about 14 hours of time before they need to be transplanted. More than 2,000 livers are tossed every year because of oxygen deprivation or damage endured in the cold preservation process, according to the CEO of OrganOx, the company created around the new device. In the U.S. and Europe, there are about 30,000 patients awaiting new livers, many of whom will die before they can get one.

The machine, developed by biomedical engineering professor Constantin Coussios and Peter Friend of the Oxford Transplant Centre, keeps the liver alive at normal body temperature through perfusion, or supplying it with oxygenated red blood cells. While connected to the device, the liver regains its normal color and produces bile just like it would in the human body. The team has been working on the technology since 1994.

Two successful transplants at King's College Hospital in London last month indicate the device could become the go-to method for liver transplants, increasing the amount of time livers could be preserved for transport. The livers were only kept alive for 10 hours in those transplants, but the researchers say their other experiments have shown the machine to work for periods up to 24 hours.

Having a little wiggle room in the timeframe could allow doctors to assess how well the organ is working and maximize the likelihood of a successful transplant.

Coussios and Friend plan to run a pilot with 20 patients, and pending success, have the machine on the market by 2014.

[NBC News]

As much as we all wish the answer to any problem could be "eat more junk food," powering through an entire pint of Ben & Jerry's when you're in a bad mood won't help you feel better, according to research from Penn State University. It'll probably make you feel worse, actually. Shocker.

Researchers gave handheld computers to a group of 131 college-age women with high levels of concern about their weight and body shape and patterns of unhealthy eating -- but not eating disorders -- and had them self-report their moods and eating behavior several times a day. They found the subjects' bad moods worsened after bouts of "disordered eating patterns," like binge eating, loss of control over food intake or intake restriction.

Imagine that: For a bunch of young women who already have body image issues, going on a massive binge when they feel bad doesn't put them in a better mood. If they were feeling negative, their mood worsened significantly after a round of unhealthy eating. Positive feelings weren't affected by disordered eating, though: Good moods didn't change either before or after eating.

The scientists presented their findings at the American Psychosomatic Society conference in Miami last week. Joshua Smyth, a Penn State professor of biobehavioral health, pointed out that the study was unique in that it studied women in the course of their daily lives rather than in the laboratory, which could lead to better treatments for women with eating disorders and weight concerns. "The results from this study can help us to better understand the role mood may play in the development and maintenance of unhealthy eating, and weight-control behaviors," he said in a statement.

The next time you're feeling down, put away your tear-soaked pint of Chubby Hubby and perhaps try laughing alone with salad instead.

The following excerpt is from The Sinking of the Bounty: The True Story of a Tragic Shipwreck and its Aftermath by Matthew Shaer. The Sinking of the Bounty was released this month by The Atavist, a Brooklyn-based digital publisher. Multimedia versions of the e-book--along with Kindle, Kobo, and Nook editions--are available at The Atavist.--Eds

At two on Monday morning, the exhausted crew of the tall ship Bounty donned their bright-orange survival suits and lashed together a makeshift raft of emergency supplies. For hours, water had poured into the boat much faster than it could be pumped out, and in the engine room, the twin John Deeres were submerged. The 180-foot, full-rigged Bounty was now adrift-completely at the mercy of Superstorm Sandy.

Deckhand Josh Scornavacchi, 25, one of the youngest members of the 16-member crew, was still not convinced that the Bounty would have to be abandoned, but he knew it was better to be safe than sorry. The survival suits-what sailors call "Gumby suits," after the bulbous, ungainly form their wearers assume-were made of heavy neoprene. They would protect against both cold water and flame, in the unlikely event that electrical fires spread through the Bounty. Scornavacchi zipped the waterproof seal on the collar closed and attached a small rubberized plastic bag to his climbing harness with a carabiner. Inside the bag was his ID, a pocketknife-the essentials.

Topside, John Svendsen, the 41-year-old first mate, was waiting in the navigation shack, his Gumby suit only halfway zipped. He seemed to Scornavacchi to be much less concerned with his own safety than with the safety of the crew. He inspected each sailor carefully, like a commanding officer before a battle, tugging on straps, double-checking rescue lights, slapping shoulders and patting backs.

Scornavacchi thanked Svendsen, and joined deckhand Claudene Christian, 42, near the mizzen fife rail, which surrounded the aftermost mast. The clouds he could make out overhead in the darkness were low-bellied and full, and a strong wind blew across the deck. Christian was clearly scared but putting on a brave face for her friend, and she smiled brightly at Scornavacchi.

He looked up at the ghostly lights of the Coast Guard C-130 circling above him in the rain. Then he felt the deck lurch violently beneath him. The Bounty was once again leaning perilously over on her side. Bodies slid past him in the night, some silently and acquiescently, some with horrific screams, their hands desperately clawing for a handhold, a stray piece of rigging, anything at all.

He took a deep breath and jumped.

***

After receiving the OK from Svendsen, volunteer sailor Doug Faunt, a retired computer engineer from California, waddled sternward in his Gumby suit and lay down on the deck alongside deckhand Adam Prokosch, who had suffered a back injury. Prokosch's eyes were half-closed, and he had his hands crossed over his chest, kind of like a corpse.

The Bounty was heeling badly to starboard-40 degrees or more, Faunt guessed. He wasn't so much lying down as standing up now, with his feet on the railing, the sea frothing below him and lapping at his feet, the ship looming over him. The Coast Guard C-130 passed once overhead, the sound of its engines reduced by the storm to an insect-like whine. Gazing up, Faunt caught a glimpse of the big silvery wings of the plane, and the moon glowing faintly through the clouds, and then he was asleep.
That he was able to nod off on the deck of a doomed ship was a testament to the extent of his exhaustion. He had been working for 48 hours straight, give or take, many of them in the sweltering hell of the engine room. He was dehydrated, he was hungry, his joints ached and his lungs burned. He was strong, but he was also 66 years old, and he had his limits. Faunt later figured that he might have slept for an hour, but given the speed at which the Bounty rolled over, it was probably half that. When he opened his eyes again, the deck was fully vertical. He bent his knees and pushed off into the sea. The storm swallowed him whole.

Now commenced a jarring, vicious cycle. Faunt would push his way to the surface, and a wave would drive him back under like a hammer pounding the head of a nail. The Bounty's engines were submerged now, and there was plenty of diesel in the water. Faunt was an experienced diver, and he did his best not to open his mouth. But the strength of the ocean was stupendous, and he couldn't keep the salt water and diesel out of his throat. He spit out what he could and swallowed the rest.

/>

At irregular intervals, a body in a survival suit would float past him, and Faunt would holler and wave, but it was useless. Nobody could hear him, and he couldn't distinguish one sailor from another. Zipped into the Gumby suits, they all looked the same, cartoonish orange shapes silhouetted against the dark sea. He caught hold of a life preserver, but it appeared to be tethered to something-maybe to the ship itself, he thought. He was afraid she would plunge, and that he would plunge with her. So he let go.

What surprised Faunt-what he would often think about in the days to come, first back at the Coast Guard station, and then in his cluttered bedroom in Oakland-was the strange tenacity of the human brain. The brain, the mind, maybe the spirit-whatever you wanted to call it, the thing that did not allow Faunt to give up, even when he probably should have given up, dropping his hands and surrendering to the ocean. It simply never crossed his mind that he might be dying. The fact that it didn't, he figured, probably saved his damn life.

***

A sinking ship creates a funnel on the surface of the sea-planks of wood, life rafts, and human bodies can be sucked down behind her. From his training, Scornavacchi was familiar with this effect, and after jumping clear of the Bounty, he fought hard to get a safe distance away from her. But swimming in a Gumby suit is incredibly awkward, and his progress was maddeningly slow.

Everything he grabbed at-stray planking, strands of line-was ripped out of his hand. Gasping, his lungs filling with salt water, he fought his way back to the surface. There appeared to be no one left on board the Bounty, which had now fully capsized. Indeed, there appeared to be no one around at all. Before he could ponder the particulars of his plight, he was yanked underwater again by some invisible force.

In movies, sinking ships lurch through the deep like whales, their every contour visible to the camera. Scornavacchi could see nothing. It was dark enough on the surface, and an inky pitch underwater. But groping around with both hands, Scornavacchi did figure out what was pulling him down: some of the rigging had caught onto the small bag of essentials lashed to his harness. The weight of the ship pulling on him made it impossible to unhook the carabiner, and the bag was made of heavy-duty PVC plastic, which offered little hope of breaking.

He was going down-five feet, then ten, fifteen. He could feel himself starting to drown, losing the ability to think or use his muscles. His lungs were filling with seawater and diesel.
Just before the Bounty left New London, Scornavacchi's mother had fretted about the storm. "Mom, I'm not going to die," he had told her. Now here he was, about to break his promise. He was furious with himself. He thought about his 11-year-old brother, too, and of all the other people he would never see again. I'm sorry, he thought. I'm so sorry.

Matthew Shaer writes for New York Magazine, Fortune, and Harper's, among other publications. He tweets at @MatthewShaer.

One of the world's largest solar power plants opened this weekend in the oil-rich city of Abu Dhabi.

The 100-megawatt plant, called Shams 1, is a first step in a plan to make seven percent of Abu Dhabi's energy resources renewable, Sultan Ahmed Al Jaber, head of the Abu Dhabi Future Energy Company, said during a news conference. Abu Dhabi is part of the United Arab Emirates, which are famed for their oil wealth. The emirates rank 13th in the world for per capita GDP, a standing driven mostly by their oil exports.

The new plant includes a huge field of parabolic mirrors located in the desert about 74 miles (120 kilometers) south of Abu Dhabi. Shams 1 will serve 20,000 homes and cost an estimated $600 million to build, the BBC reported. Similar Shams 2 and Shams 3 plants are in the works, Clean Technica reported.

Shams 1 is a concentrated solar energy plant, which means its technology is a little different from the flat, black photovoltaic panels you might have seen on people's roofs. Shams 1's uses mirrors to concentrate the sun's energy to heat a fluid, which produces steam to turn turbines to make electricity.

Shams 1 isn't a perfectly efficient solution, however. The plant's process still requires some natural gas to "superheat" the fluid, Clean Technica reported. It also requires uses some energy in the form of brusher trucks that clean the mirrors of sand. Even in the middle of the desert, it's impossible to make a solar power station totally efficient.

Although there are certainly other solar plants in the world Shams 1's size or larger, the Abu Dhabi plant holds the title of the largest single concentrated solar energy plant. Other concentrated solar plants are connected with thermal power plants, IEEE Spectrum reported. There are also larger concentrated solar energy projects that are near completion, but aren't yet plugged into their local grids.

[BBC, Clean Technica, IEEE Spectrum]

At the Mayo Clinic, renowned for its expertise in cardiac care, a patient recently posed a question that apparently nobody had ever asked: Will the electronics in hybrid cars interfere with implanted cardiac devices? After a bunch of tests, the heart doctors found the answer is no.

A recently reported study is the first of its kind to address electromagnetic interference between implanted medical devices and electric or hybrid cars, according to the researchers. After the patient brought it up, doctors realized there were no studies that specifically addressed this question, explains Dr. Luis R. Scott, a cardiologist at Mayo Clinic's Arizona offices. So they created one.

The researchers worked with the Toyota Prius, the most common hybrid. Patients with implanted defibrillators or pacemakers were recruited to drive a Prius in different conditions, and to sit in various locations in the car. While the car was driving, the doctors tested the amount of electromagnetic interference emitted by the electronics, and measured this against the activity of the patients' existing implants. They found the devices were indeed exposed to electromagnetic fields inside the car, but the amount of interference wasn't worrisome, Scott said.

"Based on our study, we found no reason to be concerned about riding or driving a hybrid automobile," he said.

Ever cautious, however, the researchers note that the results are really only applicable to a Prius. Other cars have different electronics and could produce varying electromagnetic fields, which may or may not interfere with medical devices. The study was presented at the 2013 American College of Cardiology Annual Scientific Session in San Francisco.

The scourge of 21st century socializing is that text messages have approximately the same emotional capacity as a brick wall, and emoticons make you look like an overzealous 7th grader. When you say you're "fine," does that mean you're chipper or a little bit pissed off?

The solution: Send messages containing an avatar of yourself reading your text, set to the appropriate emotional register. Engineers at the University of Cambridge and Toshiba's Camridge Research Lab have created Zoe, a virtual talking head that can display a range of emotions and change its voice appropriately.

They used the face of British soap actress Zoe Lister, but one day you could upload your own face and voice to make your digital assistant look and talk just like you. It could also be used to help deaf or autistic children learn to lip read and read emotions.

Zoe has six basic emotions -- happy, sad, tender, angry, afraid and neutral -- that can be set at different levels. The pitch, speed and depth of the voice can also be adjusted to the user's preferences. The program that runs Zoe is only requires a few megabytes of storage, so it could easily run on a tablet or smartphone.

From the University of Cambridge statement:

When the researchers tested how well volunteers could identify Zoe's emotions based on both audio and video, the avatar's success rate (77 percent) scored higher than the actual actress (73 percent).

The talking head still has a tinge of the robotic to her voice, but in terms of expressing realistic human emotion, she's less creepy than FACE, the non-talking humanoid robot head that mimics human facial expressions, but maybe not as polite as the Actroid's new social robot. In terms of being able to express yourself over the chasm of digital distance, it's probably also a little more useful than a virtual hug. Think about it: Wouldn't Siri be better if she yelled at you in your own voice?

[via The Telegraph]

Kim Kardashian has gotten one. So, apparently, have other ladies in Miami.

A "blood facial" or "vampire facial" is a cosmetic procedure during which a doctor draws a couple vials of blood from your arm, centrifuges the blood to separate out the plasma and platelets from the red blood cells, and then adds the platelet-rich plasma back into your face. For extra absorption, the doctor pokes your face all over with a bunch of micro-needles before applying the plasma. Reminds me a little bit of making a Jell-O poke cake.

There's no evidence at all that this gory procedure works, and only the babiest starting evidence that injecting platelets into the skin works at all against the appearance of aging. But there probably is little harm, at least, to plasma injections because they deal with the patient's own body fluids, dermatologists say. The technologies dermatologists use for the facials are U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved for adding plasma to bone before orthopedic surgery... but not for wrinkle-busting.

The idea behind blood facials is that they infuse the skin with platelets, which contain growth factors, which in turn are known to be helpful in wound healing. Practitioners of related injections say the growth factors may stimulate new collagen growth in the face. Collagen is the protein in skin that keeps young'uns' cheeks firm and taut.

Whether that collagen growth really happens and helps, "nobody really knows," Patricia Farris, a cosmetic dermatologist with a practice in Louisiana, tells Popular Science. "I just think that it's a procedure you don't know all that much about. I think we need good studies to see if this is an appropriate use for this material."

"It's not something in mainstream cosmology or dermatology practice," she says later in our conversation. In her practice, she offers injections such as Botox and Restylane for smoothing wrinkles, she says, but not plasma injections.

Needling the skin always has the risk of infection, but Farris didn't think that would be a significant danger if people received the procedures from a dermatologist or plastic surgeon. She also doesn't think that getting your own plasma is likely to cause a problem, but she says that nobody has studied whether that's true.

Some dermatologists I talked with did offer plasma injections, but not exactly in the way Kardashian got hers. Anthony Sclafani, a facial plastic surgeon at the New York Ear and Eye Infirmary, performs single-needle injections for wrinkles and acne scars. Sclafani also authored one of the only actual studies about platelet-rich plasma for wrinkles, a small study of 15 people published last year. The study was supported by Aesthetic Factors, the Pennsylvania-based company that makes the technology for separating plasma from the blood in the doctor's office, a procedure that previously had to be done in labs.

Sclafani is enthusiastic about the injections for certain patients. "It's been terrific," he says. "It's not for everybody," he continues, saying that some patients don't see any difference from the treatment. For those for whom it works, it appears to last a long time. Sometimes patients come back in six to eight months to get further treatments done, Sclafani says.

Side effects he has seen include small bruises. Like Farris, he mentioned the potential danger of infection, but added he hadn't seen that in his own patients.

He's less enthused about the all-over needling that vampire facials require. "I wouldn't let anyone do that to me," he says. He doesn't believe micro-needles deliver the plasma properly into the skin.

Sclafani's injections are an off-label use of Selphyl, the Aesthetic Factors technology that separates plasma from the blood. Bruce Katz, another New York dermatologist who offers individual injections, uses a similar technology made by the Swiss company Regen Lab. Katz advertises "twilight plasma renewal treatment" on his website. His patients get about 20 injections at once in the face, neck and décolleté, he says.

No injectable platelet-rich plasma has FDA approval for aesthetic uses, Sclafani says. But doctors commonly-and are legally allowed to-use FDA-approved drugs and devices in a way for which the drug or device didn't earn FDA approval.

Both Sclafani and Katz say their typical treatment costs about $1,500, but the amount depends on how much a patient ends up using.

There are several prescription injections that are FDA-approved for temporarily improving wrinkles or padding the face to look younger. Some of the better-known names include Botox, Restylane and Juvederm, but there are lots of others. Sclafani and Katz say the reasons to use platelet-rich plasma instead of other injections is that the plasma is "natural" and doesn't carry the risk of allergy or rejection-because it's your own blood.

Google Maps' Street View has become more than just a way to find your way around or look at creepy images of your own house on the web. It's now a way to explore parts of the world most of us are way too lazy to visit. You can go to the Grand Canyon, or the Amazon rainforest, or see parts of North Korea. You can even explore inside offices and underwater.

Next stop on the tour: the tallest mountains on Earth. You can now scale Mt. Everest, Mt. Kilimanjaro, Russia's Mt. Elbrus and Argentina's Aconcagua without ever lacing up your hiking boots.

Unlike the Grand Canyon views, shot with Google's new Trekker backpack camera, the mountain views were shot with a tripod and a digital camera with a fisheye lens. Google Innovation Lab employee Dan Fredinburg told Mashable he got the idea to bring Google Maps to the Seven Summits (the highest mountains on each continent) while climbing Japan's Mt. Fuji.

You can see the full collection of photos from the summits and some surrounding attractions and read more about the team behind the Everest trip on the Google Maps blog.

[Mashable]

The Roku 3 is the best media streamer. The hardware's clean, the software's snappy, the app selection is second-to-none, and it's more stable than a sumo-wrestling elephant, which is a very stable elephant indeed. If you subscribe to Hulu and/or Netflix and/or Spotify and/or Rdio and/or you download a lot of video and/or you've gotten through legal or somewhat less than legal means a password to HBO Go, and you don't already have a way to watch or listen to those things on your TV, or if you have a way but it is awkward (like, you plug your laptop into a TV, or you transcode and AirPlay things to an AppleTV), buy a Roku 3. It rules.

What It Is

The Roku 3 is a tiny black square about the size of your palm. You plug an HDMI cord (not included) from your TV into the Roku, and then a power cord from the Roku into the wall. It has Ethernet and audio-out, too, though you probably won't need them. The remote it comes with is intriguing; it's shaped more like the old Nintendo Wii controller than anything else, and in fact it does have motion-sensing capabilities. You can use them to play a semi-awkward version of Angry Birds exactly once before realizing it's not that fun.

The remote is a bit different for the Roku 3; it now has a headphone jack and a volume control. Plug in headphones (these are included, though they are not great), and the audio will instantly shift from your speakers to your ears. Unplug and it shifts back. The volume control only works when headphones are plugged in, unfortunately, but otherwise this works perfectly. Want to watch Scott Pilgrim vs. The World at the (very high) volume that movie requires, but your apartment is made of cardboard or some lesser paper product and you don't want to wake your roommates? Plug 'er right in.

What It Does

It has lots of apps! You can get Netflix, Hulu Plus, Amazon, Crackle, HBO Go, Rdio, Spotify, Weather, Pandora, Vimeo, Flixster, Vudu, and many more. My favorite app is called Plex; it's a fork of Xbox Media Center, just like Boxee, and is perhaps the cleanest and simplest way to play downloaded videos on your TV. You download videos onto your computer (legally from Amazon, or, more likely, illegally from...anywhere) and Plex gets episode summaries and cover art and run-time and actor/director data from IMDb, transcodes them on the fly from whatever weird format you got them in, and plays them on your TV. The best part is that Plex organizes them super cleanly--you don't see a bunch of mess like "Justified.S04E08.720p.HDTV.x264-EVOLVE.mkv," you just see "TV Shows," then you select the nice cover art of Timothy Olyphant in a cowboy hat, then you select episode 8 and read the summary gathered from IMDb. It turns the mess that is BitTorrent into something as clean as Netflix.

How Good It Is

Roku has until now been strong on support--it's always had lots of apps--but kind of weak on hardware, usually releasing underpowered and sluggish boxes. Not anymore! The Roku 3 is much faster than before, hardly ever stuttering or lagging to keep up with my scrolling. It's immediately obvious that this is a zippier product than Roku's ever put out before. That's especially obvious with one of Roku's newest and best features, the universal search. Roku realizes that the box is kind of a repository for unrelated services, and that if you subscribe to a bunch of them, you care more about individual movies and shows than about whether it's on Hulu Plus or Amazon Prime. Universal search instantly looks through all of your installed services to find what you want, so if you want to watch Justified legally, rather than stealing it, you can just search in the universal search box on the Roku homescreen. It'll tell you that you can watch old seasons on Amazon Prime, or buy current-season episodes on Vudu or Amazon, then let you jump right to the season you want on the service you want. It works great, and the new, faster hardware lets the Roku 3 auto-fill its search results in real time so I don't have to type "It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia"--I can just type "it" and the show I'm looking for is the second result.

The homescreen has been redesigned; it's no longer an ugly horizontal-scrolling list of thumbnails. Now it's a grid of thumbnails! (Fine, this isn't a big deal.) The apps themselves haven't been updated for the newer, more powerful Roku--Hulu Plus's app in particular has always been kind of a pain to navigate, and while it's snappier now, it's still oddly laid-out.

There's also a mobile app for iPhone and Android. I wouldn't recommend it for general navigation; remotes are still best when you can feel buttons so you can look at the screen while navigating. But it's very good for text entry, since the Roku remote only has a directional pad and not a real keyboard.

What It's Bad At

It's not great for local content. It'll actually play a lot of stuff--there's a USB 3.0 slot on the side of the Roku that'll let you play back anything from JPEGs to MKVs--but the UI is pretty primitive, resembling a file browser more than the elegant media center solution that is Plex. If you're only doing local files, I'd recommend a Boxee Box or a Western Digital box.

Nobody seems to know why, and Roku isn't saying, but Roku does not have a YouTube app. It's weird! I don't find myself wanting to play YouTube videos that often, but you might, and considering Roku is one of only three devices to support HBO Go, it's weird that it doesn't support the biggest streaming video service in the world. It also doesn't have AirPlay, the magical way to beam videos and music from your iPhone or iPad to your TV. It should have AirPlay! That way you wouldn't need a YouTube app--you could just load a video on your iPhone and fling it up to the TV. It's also really the only thing the competing Apple TV has over the Roku. But that's kind of...it, as far as flaws go.

Buy One, Dummy

The only reason you should go with another streamer is if you exclusively watch videos purchased from iTunes. If you do that, you have an odd digital media strategy, and you should get an Apple TV. Everyone else, Roku.

There are cheaper Rokus than the Roku 3; the Roku LT is only $50, and it is also purple, which is nice and cheerful. But the Roku 3 only costs $100, which is not that much money, and the bump in processing power really does make a big difference. It's just that much more pleasurable to use--the older Rokus are sometimes frustrating, especially when scrolling through long lists of thumbnails, and the Roku 3 is snappy and loads pictures and lists instantly. It's great! And next time, Roku, add in AirPlay, please.

There's a conservation-biology rule of thumb that, for a species to survive for another century, it must have a stable population of about 5,000. Want to settle Mars? Bring 4,999 other unrelated humans with you and populate it.

And yet a recent study finds that the bog turtle--the rarest turtle in the continental US--could survive with only 40 members, including 15 breeding females. The study's authors want this to change how legislators protect flora and fauna. But will it be for the best?

The bog turtle is North America's smallest and rarest native turtle. It's primarily found in New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania, though there are isolated populations in North Carolina, and estimates of its population range from about 2,000 to 10,000, a loss in population of 80 percent in the past 30 years. George Amato, a conservation biologist at the American Museum of Natural History, told me that the turtle lives in a very specific and disappearing habitat called a fen. Fens are a particular kind of wetland, sort of but not quite like a marsh or a bog (yes, these are all different, ecologically speaking). The predominant theory about these turtles is that they used to be very widespread during the later part of the Late Glacial Maximum, about 10,000 years ago, when the ice sheets that covered North America began to melt. As they melted, they turned the land incredibly soggy, forming lots and lots of wetlands, including fens--a happy time for the bog turtle, which spends most of its time submerged in fen mud. But as the continent dried out and temperatures continued to rise, there were fewer and fewer fens, so now the bog turtle is patchily distributed in increasingly rare and specific environments. "As the temperature changed, that environment has become kind of a relic," says Amato. "They probably weren't isolated before, but they are now."

It's also a victim of the pet trade--Amato says that when the species was written about, biologists "wouldn't actually put the exact location of studied populations" in their articles, to keep collectors in the dark about where to find them. And, of course, there's encroaching human development and invasive species of plants which choke out its food sources.

It's estimated that there are about 570 populations of bog turtle in the world. The turtle is hardy and long-lived, but it doesn't travel, which makes it hard for populations to interact, and it's estimated that half of those populations aren't exactly "populations" in the way you might imagine--they consist of, well, one turtle. Only 15 of those populations consist of at least 50 turtles.

There's a significant effort on the part of legislators, conservationists, and zoos to boost the turtle's population. But this study, published in this month's issue of Conservation Biology, finds that as few as 15 breeding females (and about 25 males) could be enough to sustain the bog turtle's population for another 100 years. The bog turtle lives for decades--up to 50 years--and gives birth to one offspring per year with a nearly 33 percent chance of survival, which is quite high. That's a major shakeup to the idea that a given population needs thousands to survive.

When biologists want to get more precise than the 5,000-individuals rule, they can calculate a number called the Minimum Viable Population, or MVP, the result of computer simulations to figure out the lowest possible number of members of a species that would result in a 90-95 percent probability of survival after 100 years. The game is to balance the number of lost specimens (due to death or leaving the group) with the number of new specimens (being born or coming in from another group).

Those simulations take into account how long the species generally lives, how often it breeds, the size of the litter, and the probability of young surviving into breeding age. Then it adds in external sources of stress, which could include inbreeding, natural disasters, climate change, encroaching human development, poaching, or any other event that could have an impact on a population. You come up with a few hundred or thousand possibilities--what if the temperature rises 2 degrees, what if poachers snag one female from a population per year for the pet trade, what if it loses 7 percent of its habitat due to construction of some awful beige McMansion--and see how often the species will survive to see the year 2113. Weight them and average them and you've got your number. But these simulations are basically possible futures for the species, like a sci-fi writer discussing the near future. They're well-researched guesses, but they're guesses, and they're extremely important for deciding what kind of protection to give each species. According to George Amato, "there's been a lot of discussion [about MVPs]; it's a little controversial."

The bog turtle is highly protected, and any statement about its long-term survival will necessarily have an impact on how it's protected. Kevin Shoemaker, the author of the paper, told me that "the point I'd like to make is that in a larger context, these very small units are very, very important for conservation. We don't want to discount very small populations just because they're so small." Populations in the double-digits are sometimes seen as lost causes--but this study also indicates that maybe that's not the case. It takes issue with the problem that conservation resources are often shifted away from populations with numbers as small as the bog turtle's, when in fact, as Amato says, "protection of small and fragmented populations may constitute a viable conservation option for such species."

I spoke to Dr. Alison Whitlock of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to see about the legislative effects of the study. Under the Endangered Species Act, each threatened species is given a recovery coordinator--a kind of czar who's in charge of that species' well-being. Dr. Whitlock is that person for the bog turtle, and she was thrilled about this study. "This actually gives me more hope," she said, as soon as I asked her about the paper. "For those of us who've been working with bog turtles for years, we've had a gut feeling that they're holding on in these small populations, but they're still there and still worth saving."

The bog turtle is protected federally. If you're a developer in Pennsylvania or New York or wherever else, you have to take your prospective project to your individual state agency so they can check with Dr. Whitlock (or another expert) and make sure the project won't violate the federal protection. Each state can make their laws stricter than the federal law, but the federal law is the minimum. I was concerned that this study would have the reverse of its intended effect--that legislators would see that the MVP is only 40, and think, well, why are we wasting money on protecting this turtle when there are a couple thousand of them? "If people think that you can have stable populations of 40 organisms, I'd be really concerned if managers were thinking 'oh, then we shouldn't worry so much,'" says Amato. Shoemaker echoed the concern; "I definitely don't want to make it sound like a population of 40 individuals is all you need," he said.

But Dr. Whitlock thought that an unlikely scenario for the bog turtle. It's not up to local legislators; it's up to her, and people like her. It's a perfect argument for why top-down, federal mandates are so important. This is a very wonky situation, requiring quite a bit of knowledge of conservation biology and this species in particular, and local governments can't possibly be expected to have bog turtle experts on staff. Hell, I spoke to just about every bog turtle expert in the country while trying to figure out what's going on here, and discovered that there are like...four of them. And they're in charge, just the way they should be, even if they may not have as many resources as they'd like.

In fact, Dr. Whitlock believes that this study is going to have only positive effects on conservation efforts for the bog turtle. The federally mandated minimum conservation is not always ideal; Dr. Whitlock works for the government, and was not entirely willing to criticize her employer, but made it clear that the federal laws are only the bare minimum. With this extra data, she and other conservationists can go to the state agencies and make a stronger case than ever before. "Sometimes it's hard to go to the next step and argue for land preservation or resource protection," she said. "This gives us a little extra backing to not just protect but also restore."

Do you remember turning over rocks in your backyard, looking for tiny dark wriggling salamanders? Imagine that, but in the form of a very large robot, and you've got something close to the Salamandra Robotica II.

The Salamandra is the newest amphibious robot from the biorobotics department at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne. Biorobotics is a thriving subsection of the study and creation of robots; we've written before about all the ways the natural world inspires the way we create artificial items. The Salamandra is notable for being able to seamlessly transition from water to land, just like its real-life inspiration.

The Salamandra is constructed of a long chain of interconnected motors with four "legs" jutting out from the sides. Unlike mammals, whose legs tend to be underneath the torso, amphibians and reptiles tend to have legs that stick out from the side, keeping their center of gravity low to the ground. And the Salamandra does move in a way that's totally evocative of the salamander, especially in the water--the way it propels itself by whipping its torso from side to side is just like the way amphibians and aquatic lizards swim. That's also the way it "crawls"--the difference between crawling and walking seems to be that crawling is done on the belly, squirming back and forth, while walking is performed with the legs.

It's not totally clear why the team is working so hard to create a salamander-type robot; they speculate that it could be used to study locomotion systems, or possibly for search-and-rescue operations, though it doesn't seem as though the latter idea really played into the planning of the Salamandra. Still: cool robot! Check out a video of it in motion here.

Comet Pan-STARRS is visible in many parts of the U.S. around sunset, and it was at its peak brightness a few days ago when it made its closest pass to the sun. As they approach our star and warm up, dirty cosmic snowballs like Pan-STARRS grow bright tails, or comas, which are made of dust and ice particles that reflect light.

NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center stitched together some observations from the STEREO observatory, which watches the sun. The comet moved around the star from March 10 through 15 and gradually grew brighter.

In the video, Earth is the unmoving bright spot on the right, and the sun's light comes from the left. The swirly vapors on the left are coronal mass ejections. While it looks like one CME goes right past Pan-STARRS, it actually wasn't in the same plane, because the comet's tail didn't move as the CME went by.

Pan-STARRS is named for a synchronized wide-field telescope project developed at the University of Hawaii. Since it became operational in 2010, the first telescope in the system has discovered more than 345 near-Earth asteroids (including 29 potentially hazardous ones) and 19 previously unobserved comets-including the project's namesake. It will be visible in the western sky at dusk for a few more days.

The New York Times reports that ABC is working on a streaming video app for mobile devices, one that will allow you to watch ABC shows on your smartphone or tablet. The details haven't been confirmed, but if what the Times hears is true, this app will be...pretty bad. It's perhaps the clearest indication we've seen yet of a content provider digging in their heels and aligning themselves not with customers, not even with creators--but with cable companies.

The app is rumored to be a simple live stream of the ABC feed--"a live Internet stream of national and local programming." There's no mention of any time-shifting ability that'd let you watch a previously-aired show; the examples given rely on turning your mobile device into just another screen that can snag ABC. This is different from something like Hulu or Netflix, which both offer ABC content, because Hulu and Netflix offer on-demand content. This would be just as if you turned your TV to ABC. And on top of that, apparently you'd be required to have a current subscription to an approved cable service to even get that much.

This is like the least useful possible version of the phrase "ABC mobile app" that anyone could have come up with. It seems to be inspired by two services. The first is HBO Go, but HBO Go is, well, good. It has a deep catalog, so you can watch any of its stellar older series, it has apps for other devices like Roku and Xbox 360, it lets you watch the show you want when you want to watch it. It is a good service. The authentication, in which you have to register that you do in fact pay Time Warner, Comcast, Verizon, or whoever else for cable, that's a pain, but theoretically, you shouldn't be able to watch HBO shows unless you had cable anyway. That's the only way to get HBO shows! But not ABC.

ABC is a free broadcast network. If you live in America and you spring for a $20 digital antenna, you can get ABC for free. Let me say that again: ABC is free. It's ad-supported, and, of course, those ads will still be on your iPad, since all you're getting is a direct feed of the channel. Also, the rumored app has basically no features you'd want, so there's that.

The other service that comes to mind is Aereo, a small and lawsuit-plagued startup based in New York. Aereo has a warehouse with thousands of tiny antennas, then charges users a monthly fee to "rent" one. Then it beams broadcast TV to your computer or mobile device. But Aereo is a time-shifting concept as well--you can pause and rewind, save for later like a cloud-based DVR. ABC's service wouldn't let you do any of that.

What grates about this is the brazenness of ABC's desire to appear modern while in fact doing everything it can to avoid modernizing. To board members, it sounds great. ABC is with it! They get the internet! iPads! But in fact it's not modern at all; it's digging its fingernails ever harder into the gut of the old ways. ABC's reason for working on such a garbage project is simple: it wants to avoid rocking the boat. Ad revenues are far more lucrative in the live stream of ABC than in time-shifted on-demand services like Hulu. And ABC, don't forget, isn't ABC--it's the Disney-ABC Television Group, which also includes Lifetime, A&E, the Disney Channel, and more. The company needs to keep the cable companies happy and it needs to keep its local affiliates happy; that's where their money comes from. Requiring that only cable subscribers get access? That'll keep the cable companies happy.

Not the customers, though, because this isn't what customers want. The customers want time-shifting as well as the ability to watch on whatever screen they want. The customers want on-demand content, and most importantly, customers do not want to have free content restricted to people who pay for something else entirely.

The Times piece, despite all of this, is fawning. Here's a blurb:

If anyone has fear, awe, or any combination thereof, they will be knocked right over when I tell them about how raisins are actually just dried grapes, because this is the least "disruptive," least "innovative," and least risky move ABC could've possibly made.