If you're looking for a distraction today, this new browser-plus-phone-based game from Google turns your smartphone into a controller and any website into a maze. Then you can sit at your desk and run a little marble around the maze on your computer screen. It's pretty satisfying.

You'll need a phone with either Android 4.0 or iOS 5, and you need to install Chrome both on your computer and your smartphone. Make sure you're signed into your Google account on both. Then visit this website and it'll take you through syncing your phone and computer.

The World Wide Maze, as the game's called, is a Chrome Experiment. Previous experiments, such as this Wizard of Oz game-slash-ad, have been cool, too. Happy playing.

My first smartphone was a BlackBerry Curve. I have nothing but fond memories of it--the speed and ease of typing on that keyboard, the battery that lasted for days and days, the indestructibility of the thing. I think a lot of people feel that way about BlackBerry. Which makes it all the harder, because if BlackBerry had released the brand-new Z10 even just two or three years ago, it might've had a fighting chance. I like the way it thinks about some things--the gestures are cool, the homescreen's great--and the hardware is excellent.

Here's the problem with it: the Z10 is a very promising first-generation device that won't sell, because it's competing with platforms with many years of development behind them, and it's released by a company without the size or the strength to stick around and make sure it gets to the point where it can compete. And that kind of sucks, because it would have been nice to see BlackBerry release something good, and also because the Z10 actually has some pretty cool ideas in it.

Software New

Okay, so, this is where the real meat of the phone is. I'm going to break it down item by item.

Buttons...Oh, Wait: There are no buttons. There are gestures, instead. Swipe up from below the screen to go "home," such as it is (more on that in a sec). Swipe from left to right to see options, sometimes. Swipe down from the top to see other options, also sometimes. On the "homescreen," swipe from left to right to get to BlackBerry Hub, which stores all of your emails, text messages, and various other notifications. When in any app, swipe up from the bottom and then, midway up the screen, swipe to the right, and you'll get to the Hub.

I don't mind the gestures; I think some of them are very smart, even. I like being about to get to my email from anywhere, instantly. And the gestures aren't hard, but they are also not intuitive at all. Hand the Z10 to someone and they'll have no idea how to do anything. Spend a minute or two reading that last paragraph out loud and they'll be fine, but I think that may already be too late for some prospective buyers. Why learn a new system when you're already familiar with Android and/or iOS?

Homescreen: The homescreen is great, because, well, there isn't one, really. Homescreens are relics; they are unnecessary homages to the old mode of computing, where you had files and folders on a desktop that served as your homebase. You do not really have files or folders anymore; you have apps. (Tinkerers will disagree with that, which is fine, but they are the minority.) Android totally missed the boat on this; it has never ceased to bug me that with Android you are forced to have multiple ways to do things. You hit the home button and you see apps. Hit the app drawer and you have some of the same apps again. This is dumb. iOS makes an attempt to modernize, with its homescreen serving as nothing more than an app launcher. Microsoft's Windows Phone is somewhere in the middle, with an app launcher in which the app icons also display extra info. But a list of icons isn't the only way to do it.

BlackBerry 10 does not have a homescreen at all. When you swipe up from the bottom of the screen (the "go home" gesture), you see a grid of thumbnails of your currently running apps. Tap to open, or tap the little "x" to close them. Swipe to the left to get to the BlackBerry Hub, or swipe to the right to get to a more familiar-looking app launcher, which looks like a BlackBerry-ified version of the iOS homescreen. I think this is excellent! It makes it very quick and efficient to really get things done, since you're not constantly popping in and out of a launcher that's of no use to you. I also like that it makes it simple to see what's going on on your phone--iOS and Windows Phone are both kind of inscrutable that way.

Sometimes the thumbnails of currently-running apps display other information--weather apps, for example, sometimes just show the temperature rather than a small thumbnail of the running app. It's nice, though it's not consistent among apps.

BlackBerry Hub: A totally unified inbox is kind of a cool idea (though of course you can swipe from left to right again, once you're in the Hub, to select which specific set of notifications you want to read). But in practice I pretty much never want to see my Twitter @ replies side-by-side with my work email. I also found it not very efficient to maintain. For one thing, if you like keeping your inboxes at zero, you'll have to clear some of them multiple times (in Twitter, for example, you'll read your @ replies, which marks them read on Twitter, but then you'll have to do that again in the Hub). Selecting multiple messages is kind of a pain, requiring several taps.

Keyboard: BlackBerry's name is based on its keyboards--the company thought its old hardware keyboards looked like the drupes of a blackberry. The company's tried to innovate with on-screen keyboards in the past, with the the-whole-screen-is-a-button BlackBerry Storm, to lousy results. So I'm very happy to report that the Z10's keyboard is not just the best on-screen keyboard BlackBerry's ever made--it's the best on-screen keyboard anyone's ever made. Better than Nokia's, better than Microsoft's, better than Android's, better than the million replacement keyboards for Android, even better than Apple's.

BlackBerry's keyboard has a silver bar in between each line of keys, which makes it much harder to hit a key on the wrong line. The keys are well-sized, well-shaped, and responsive, and the layout is immediately easy to grasp. But it's the autocomplete function that's unusual--it looks through your emails and text messages to figure out the words you like to type, and then offers suggestions based on the next letter. If you type "tra," and you talk about public transit a lot, the word "trains" would appear over the letter "i," and the word "transit" would appear over the letter "n." To fill in the word, you just flick the word upwards from the keyboard. It's a new technique for autocomplete, but I found it pretty useful, and more flexible than other systems which only suggest one word at a time. Some might see it as busy, though.

Apps: Ah. A problem. BlackBerry 10 is missing lots of key players here. I'm using a pre-release unit, so I'll assume that the developers who have committed to making apps actually will (even though some, like Amazon Kindle and Rdio, aren't done yet), but even so, there's no Instagram, YouTube, Netflix, Seamless, Spotify, IMDb, Gmail, Google Maps, Pandora, Shazam, or Hulu Plus. First-tier games like Angry Birds and Cut the Rope are there, but none of the more interesting ones you'd find on Android or iOS. The apps that are there tend to be decent--the Twitter app is better than Windows Phone's, for example, and I found a very nice podcast app--but there's no getting around the fact that the selection is limited. And a major exception to those "decent" apps is the default mapping app, which doesn't seem to use Google or Bing for its data. It has turn-by-turn navigation, but no public transit implementation at all; it doesn't even show subway stops on the map. It's very, very basic and years behind even Apple Maps.

Worse, the app situation could well stay inferior. BlackBerry 10 is going to have a hard time getting marketshare, and app developers demand a significant marketshare to make it worth their while to develop apps. Microsoft dealt with this problem by essentially bribing developers to make apps for Windows Phone, but BlackBerry doesn't have that kind of clout or money.

General Thoughts: The OS feels modern, for the most part, but some of the font and icon choices are aesthetically kind of dated (especially in the app launcher). There's some inconsistency with the back button, the extra settings you swipe in from the side, and the extra extra settings you swipe down from the top. On the homescreen, when you swipe down from the top, you see basic phone settings--Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, the alarm clock, a link to the full settings menu. This is great! But, it should be available no matter what you're doing, not just when you're on the homescreen. A personal pet peeve: in some apps, you can't see basic status items like the battery life or clock. The clock should always be visible!

Speed is also worth noting--BlackBerry 10 is a very snappy OS, rarely lagging or taking too long to do something. That's great, and no small feat--Windows Phone is still slow to open apps, and even Android had finger-detection problems until this year. BlackBerry 10 also never crashed on me, which is great.

Hardware Good

It looks, more than anything else, like a black iPhone 5. It's got a 4.2-inch screen--a very good size, I'd say, a good compromise between portability and visibility--that isn't the sharpest or the brightest on the market but which is at the high end on both counts. On the top is a power/hold button, inconveniently located in the middle of the edge so you can't reach it with your thumb. On the right edge are volume up/down buttons and a play/pause button, the latter of which is unusual and useful, and that's...it. There are no other buttons: no home, no back, no menu. More on that in the software section. On the left edge is a microUSB port for charging/syncing--that's the same port used by most Android and Windows phones, plus the Kindle and lots of other things--and a microHDMI for connecting to a TV.

The back is some kind of slightly cheap-feeling plasticky leather, with a chrome-colored plastic BlackBerry logo. The back is removable, so you can swap in a battery, SIM, or microSD slot, which is nice, I suppose, although the back plate is held on by those awful little plastic latches that feel like they're all going to break at once when you peel off the cover. Built in, the phone has 16GB of storage, though the microSD slot will let you add a lot more on the cheap, and it supports LTE networks from AT&T and, soon, T-Mobile. (When T-Mobile launches their LTE network, that is.)

The phone is pretty nice-looking overall. Not super premium-feeling like the aluminum iPhone 5 and HTC One, or hyper-thin like the Motorola Droid Razr, but nice--simple, modest, but sleek and thin and comfortable. It's about a million times nicer than the Samsung Galaxy line, that's for sure.

Camera: The Z10's camera is okay. In good light, it takes very nice photos--it's especially adept at macro shots--but has a lot of trouble in low-light, producing very little detail and a ton of noise. The interface also takes some getting used to; in every other phone camera, you tap the screen to focus, and then tap the shutter icon to take a picture. On the Z10, touching any part of the screen takes a picture, which meant I ended up with lots of out-of-focus shots before I adjusted.

Battery Life: Not great. LTE phones are generally pretty hard on a battery, but I found that with aggressive use, the Z10 had trouble making it through a whole day. It also seemed a bit slow to charge, compared to other phones. The Z10 has a replaceable battery, so you could theoretically have a second, charged battery in your bag for emergencies, though I don't know anyone who does that.

Oh, and it costs $200 with a contract. Like every other phone.

In Conclusion

I like the Z10, a lot more than I thought I would. It's a very nice phone, more impressive than any of the initial Windows Phones, even. I just can't think of a reason anyone would opt for the Z10 over the much more mature iOS and Android platforms. It's a sacrifice to give up on common, basic apps, on a good mapping solution, on software that's had time to iron out its kinks. But BlackBerry is late to the game, and the game is now only for giants--Apple, Google, and Microsoft. Sorry, buddy. It's just a little bit too late for you.

We've seen some cool ideas for self-driving cars, but it's complicated designing one that can work alongside other, human-driven vehicles. One way to get around that? Make a teeny, tiny car that's small enough to take to the sidewalks, squeezing through urban walkways instead of the road.

Unveiled Tuesday in Tsukuba, Japan, the Hitachi Robot for Personal Intelligent Transport System, or goofishly acronymed "Ropits," is a one-person vehicle designed to shepherd people with difficulty moving. It uses GPS and laser sensors to stay on course, and a gyro sensor to keep upright on un-even ground. That tech is especially important for a vehicle like this, since sidewalks and other pedestrian areas aren't as uniform as roads.

Sounds simple enough to operate, too. After hopping in, a passenger gives direction through a tablet PC that stores maps. Tap a point on the map, and Ropits zips off to destination.

But if you're not totally comfortable with the idea of having the car drive you instead of the other way around, Ropits also has a joystick that can be used to steer in emergencies.

[Tokyo Times]

Blinding when it originated, eons before any eyes would have set upon it, the afterglow of the Big Bang now surrounds us, filling the universe with a cold, faint glimmer. Tiny fluctuations in the temperature of this background radiation are a glimpse into our universal origins. They reveal the seeds of what would eventually grow into the universe as we know it today. A new map of this ancient light, unveiled today, redistributes the ingredients of our cosmos, which will rewrite countless cosmological equations.

The universe is 100 million years older than scientists had thought, originating 13.8 billion years ago. It also has a little more dark matter, a bit less dark energy and a tad more normal matter than originally thought, according to the new results. Here's the tally:

These numbers result from the first all-sky observations from the Planck space telescope, which is staring at the radiation. It is known as the cosmic microwave background. The microwave background is remarkably consistent across the entire sky, except for some tiny splotches. These are the echoes of sound waves, triggered by quantum fluctuations in matter in the nanoseconds after the universe was born. These fluctuations, which show up as patches of color in Planck's map, are the seeds of all the galaxies, stars and planets we have today.

"The variations tell us new things about what happened just 10 nano-nano-nano-nanoseconds after the Big Bang, when, in a gazillion times less time than it takes me to say this, the universe expanded by 100 trillion trillion times," explained Charles Lawrence, U.S. Planck project scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. "That tells us about everything in the universe."

Planck scientists also translated the telescope's findings into frequencies that we can hear. This tone represents primordial sound waves that traveled through the early universe, and were later "heard" by Planck.

"Just 10 nano-nano-nano-nanoseconds after the Big Bang, in a gazillion times less time than it takes me to say this, the universe expanded by 100 trillion trillion times."Like its predecessors, Planck has observed some weird aspects of these cosmic sound splotches. Cosmological theories hold that the sky is the same everywhere, assuming the universe expanded out in all directions with equal speed and force. But the light patterns are not symmetrical, meaning the universe is not, in fact, the same temperature everywhere. And there's a big cold spot in the middle, faintly resembling a big Atlantic Ocean between continents, that is bigger than expected. Why? Scientists don't know yet, and they may need some new physics to explain it.

"Our ultimate goal would be to construct a new model that predicts the anomalies and links them together. But these are early days; so far, we don't know whether this is possible and what type of new physics might be needed," George Efstathiou of the University of Cambridge, a Planck team member, said in a statement. "And that's exciting."

Earlier CMB measurements noticed some hints of this asymmetry, but it was largely ignored for a variety of reasons, noted Krzysztof Gorski, a Planck scientist at JPL.

"This feature is now proven real by Planck, and the shadows of doubt on that are fading," he said. "Perhaps we could say that our universe has thrown us a curveball, and it rarely fails to surprise us."

Along with refining the makeup of our universe, the Planck data tests some theories describing cosmic inflation, that dramatic expansion Lawrence mentioned. The new map suggests random processes were at play on quantum scales, which is interesting because it allows cosmologists to rule out some really complex inflation theories involving a "rigged" or organized universe. The early universe was considerably less rigged than several inflation theories would suggest, Planck showed. This was difficult to figure out without Planck's super-sensitivity.

"We're good at recognizing stripes, because stripes can jump out of the jungle and eat us. But we're not so good at recognizing randomness, because randomness doesn't eat us," as Lawrence put it. "We have to learn how to study randomness."

Planck is a space telescope launched in 2009 and named for German physicist Max Planck, who came up with quantum theory. It is a successor to the famed Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe, or WMAP, which created the first-ever map of the cosmic microwave background a few years ago. Planck is much more sensitive, scientists said.

"It's as if we've gone from a standard television to a high-definition television. New and important details have become crystal-clear," said Paul Hertz, director of astrophysics for NASA, which is a partner in the European Space Agency Planck project.

Complete results from Planck, which still is scanning the skies, will be released next year.

When astronaut James Lovell put his Apollo 13 Lunar Module Activation Checklist up for auction in Dallas last year, the artifact sold for a record $388,375 -- and got him in hot water with NASA, which said that he didn't have the right to sell it in the first place. Finally, in September, Congress passed a law granting astronauts from Mercury, Gemini and Apollo-era missions full rights over any artifacts they received.

On Monday, Bonhams auction house in New York is hosting the first sale of space-related artifacts since the law's passage. Up for auction is a deluge of memorabilia from the history of flight and space exploration, including signed photos, rocket engines, spacecraft models, even random space-suit parts. If you've got $70,000 to spare, you might consider putting in a bid on the Space Magna Carta, a certificate symbolizing the end of the space race, or perhaps a few relics from the first mission to the moon -- like a disc carrying messages of goodwill from Earth to our alien friends.

We collected a few of the most intriguing items below. You can check out the full catalog here.

Click here to enter the gallery

For the scientists and engineers working on NASA's Mars program, an upcoming alignment of the planets presages some possible good news. Thanks to the sun, it's spring break time.

Every 26 months or so, Mars and Earth are on opposite sides of the sun from each other, which means communications are lousy between the two planets. This is called a Mars solar conjunction. Basically what happens is the sun interrupts radio transmissions between Earth and the Mars rovers and orbiters. Data from the rovers might get corrupted as it travels past the sun, and likewise, commands from Earth could be hampered and misinterpreted by the Mars-based robots.

Each conjunction is different, with the planets in slightly different positions relative to the sun and each other, and with different levels of solar activity. This year at the conjunction's height, Mars will appear to be only 0.4 degrees from the sun, as viewed from Earth (which you should not do unless you have a solar telescope). Though that means the planet isn't totally blocked, it's happening while the sun is in the middle of a particularly active phase of its 11-year cycle, so increased flares and sunspots could be even more problematic for radio transmissions.

To prevent any problems, the science teams managing the Mars rovers Curiosity and Opportunity won't send any commands between April 9 and 26. The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter and Odyssey orbiter will also fall somewhat quiet, listening to the rovers and recording data to send back home later. By May 1, MRO could have accumulated about 40 gigabits of data from its own science instruments and about 12 gigabits of data from Curiosity, according to MRO's deputy mission manager, Reid Thomas of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

Opportunity will have about three weeks' worth of pre-programmed science tasks, which it will execute throughout the conjunction. Curiosity's managers will stop sending it any tasks between April 4 and May 1. But they'll still be able to check in with the rover, which will send beeps to Earth every day.

Meanwhile, it's a good opportunity for the science teams to catch up on sleep and even vacation, according to NASA.

Cyberspace makes for a strange battlefield. Attacks are launched from offices, combatants fight with keystrokes, and the targets are usually just information, financial data, and trade secrets. For the vast majority of cyber attacks, that is as big as the threat will be. The biggest exception: cyber attacks that become part of a larger war. When that happens, according to a set of proposed international rules commissioned by NATO and written in conjunction with the International Committee of the Red Cross and the US Cyber Command, even civilian hackers participating in the conflict can be targeted. By bombs and bullets.

That has generated lots of panicky headlinesacross the web, as you might imagine. The document, called the "Tallinn Manual on the International Law Applicable to Cyber Warfare", was written by 20 legal scholars and practitioners, and represents those experts' best reasoning at how current international law applies to cyber war. It covers everything from how to avoid civilian casualties to who's considered a combatant in a court of law. Here's the part folks are really riled up about:

That's legalese, and the sentences almost reads better backwards, so here it is in plain talk: Civilians, normally off-limits as targets in war, stop being off limits if they engage in cyber attacks. This rule explicitly carves out an exception to Geneva Convention rules against targeting civilians, noting that civilians engaged in cyber attacks are participating in the conflict, but hardly proper armed combatants. The Tallinn Manual goes on to specify that these civilians enjoy all the other protections of civilians, except the exemption from targeting.

Okay, great. So what does all this mean?

1. Not much, unless countries are actually at war.
There are circumstances where a cyber attack can constitute an act of war, but those attacks are clearly going to be different from the normal kind of data-targeting cyber attack. To constitute an act of war, the cyber attack probably has to kill someone, or cause a large and obvious infrastructure failure, like shutting down a power grid or breaking dam controls.

2. People who are fighting a war are legal targets in that war.
Perhaps the best way to explain the logic of the proposed rule is to look at drone pilots. Most of them, especially in the Air Force, fly their war machines from bases in the United States, usually the Nevada desert. Yet they are undeniably engaged in the war; it's hard to describe what they do as anything else, and they do so in uniform, meeting the standards of lawful combatants. The Department of Defense has acknowledged that . That means that if someone kills them in war, that person cannot be tried for war crimes.

The proposed rule on civilians engaged in cyber is a lot like that. Granted, these are civilians, not uniformed soldiers, so it's slightly different, but not by a lot. If there is a war on, and it involves civilians committing cyber attacks, those civilians can probably be targeted just as if they were actively fighting the war.

3. This is probably about China.
Last month, the New York Times revealed details about one of the Chinese Army's cyber units, including the unit's likely location in Shanghai. China is at the forefront of cyber attacks right now--an advantage that isn't likely to go away any time soon. To balance that out, and to deter cyber attacks, NATO's best bet is to establish rules where a crippling cyber attack is met with deadly force. The Tallinn rule is part of that.

4. The future of cyber war is just war.
Ultimately, shocking though the headlines might look, they could be just as accurately written as "people who launch deadly attacks in war are legal targets in war." That's not catchy, but it's just as accurate. By interpreting the laws of war for the 21st century, the Tallinn Manual just reinforces the fundamental standard of conflict: if an enemy is trying to kill people, it is okay to use force to stop him. Even if that enemy is a hacker.

If your desk isn't cluttered, you aren't doing your job. Gadget-building geeks know this adage well, thanks to resistors. The tiny components police electricity's flow, yet it can take dozens of kinds to perfect a circuit (such as to spin a motor at a precise speed). Electronics hobbyist George Graves knew devices called decade boxes allowed users to dial in different levels of resistance, but retail models seemed expensive and confusing. So Graves built his own with used parts. Now you can too.

1) Get eight decimal thumbwheel switches.

2) Collect nine identical resistors for each switch, from 1 ohm through 10 megohms. (E.g., nine 1-ohm resistors for the first, nine 10-ohm resistors for the next, and so on.)

3) Set aside one resistor in each set. Bend the leads of the other eight resistors to fit across sequentially numbered pins (e.g., from pins 1 to 2), solder them in place, and trim the leads (see inset).

4) Solder the unbent resistor onto pins 4 and 5 and a piece of wire from pin 9 to pin C. Mark each switch's magnitude.

5) Stack each switch in order (from high to low), slip a wire through each remaining pin, and solder all of the connections.

6) Secure one wire to the last open pin at the stack's top and another wire to its bottom. Connect each wire to a banana jack.

7) Wire the box into your circuit, dial in the value you need, and say good-bye to futile resistance.

Time: 5 hours
Cost: $25
Difficulty: 2/5

Click here to see a PDF of the full build instructions.

Click here to enter the gallery

Touchscreens treat all fleshy finger pads alike: Most detect a simple change in electrical current or in sound or light waves regardless of who is swiping. Researchers at Disney Research, Pittsburgh, have built a touchscreen that can discriminate between users. Every person's body has its own bone density, muscle mass, blood volume, and water content. The device, called Touché, sends a series of harmless currents through a user's body. Physiological differences produce differences in the body's impedance of that current. Touché measures this unique capacitive signature. Scientists could apply capacitive fingerprinting to any touchscreen, or to other ubiquitous objects, such as doorknobs and furniture, turning the world into an interactive device. Touché is still in development, and plans for commercialization, alas, are top secret.

A) INDIUM TIN OXIDE
Capacitive sensors found in most existing touchscreens, track pads, OLED displays, and other electronics use indium tin oxide (ITO) as an electrode. The conductive material transmits an electric current to a user's fingertips. ITO is also transparent, so light from the underlying LCD screen shines through.

B) SENSOR BOARD
The sensor board injects tiny electric currents into the ITO layer. When a user touches the screen (and thus the ITO layer), current flows from the sensor board through the ITO to the person's body. The sensor on the board measures the body's unique impedance at multiple frequencies. The most recent prototype takes up to a second to recalibrate for each new user. Once calibrated, it can recognize a familiar body in 500 milliseconds.

C) LCD PANEL
An LCD provides the touchscreen's graphical interface.

STATS

Scan Frequency Range: 1 kHz to 3.5 MHz
Scanning Rate: 33 times per second
Recognition Accuracy: 97.8 percent
Recognition Time: 500 ms

See the rest of the articles from our 2013 How It Works section here, and see all of our April issue here.

Is this what the Mars rovers of the future might look like?

Physicists at the Georgia Institute of Technology have tackled an unusual robot problem: How to walk across sand. There are plenty of mathematical models for how animals and machines move through air and water and over solid ground, the team wrote in a paper they published today in the journal Science. But, they wrote, research is just starting on the math of walking through sand, gravel, or any other "naturally occurring granular media of high sphericity and roundness."

Considering that sand is pretty common on Earth and other planets, the researchers decided to try to create better equations for beachside locomotion. They both built little legged robots and wrote the equations that describe the interactions between the robots' legs and different grainy media, including poppy seeds, tiny glass beads and actual sand from the outdoors. The equations could help others improve walking robots and planetary rovers, California Institute of Technology engineer Melany Hunt wrote in an essay in Science.

They also found the most efficient legs for sand-walking bots are C-shaped, with the curve of the C facing forward. The legs are a departure from the tracks that military tanks, construction equipment and other gravel-navigating vehicles have. Tracks have not worked as well as expected for smaller machines, such as Mars rovers, the Georgia Tech physicists wrote. Smaller vehicles' wheels end up curving the track substantially, reducing the tracks' performance.

Check out the C-legged robot scuttling its way across sand. Video courtesy of Chen Li, Tingnan Zhang and Daniel Goldman.

Welcome to round two of the world's nerdiest bracket! To recap: we've compiled a list of some of the strongest, fastest, and strangest landbots and sky drones around. Your job: vote for your favorites.

After a lively first round, in which you threw your voting power behind the likes of BigDog and the X-47B, (but shockingly managed to eliminate a taxidermied cat-turned-quadcopter and CanBot, a robot that masquerades as a tall boy), we've got 16 contenders left. If you need a quick guide to what's what, go here.

Polls close Monday, March 25, at 9 a.m. Check back later that day for the winners and the next round's matchups. We'll keep doing this until we've determined the greatest land robot/flying drone in all the internet. Only vote once per poll in each matchup, please. And play nice in the comments. Or don't.

Ready? Go!

Men are idiots. Hence the common chorus of "but using a condom doesn't feel good." (The fact that having AIDS and/or babies feels much worse seems to have escaped these folks.) To be fair: The condom is still fairly primitive; the use of latex was the last major innovation (sorry, Trojan, your "fire and ice" condoms are weird and don't count), and that was decades ago. This is 2013! We are developing invisibility cloaks! We have cars that drive themselves! We have a giant telescope that can see into the past! There have been attempts to modernize the condom, but none have gone into wide production. And that means our best tool to fight the spread of sexually-transmitted diseases basically the finger of a rubber glove.

As a product, the condom is almost exclusively great. Cheap, easily transported, sturdy, effective when used properly, widely available, easy to use, intuitive, requiring no particular medical knowledge or even advice, which can save literally millions of lives. But if nobody wants to use them, none of that matters.

And so the Gates Foundation has established a proposal: come up with a truly next-generation condom. That means a condom that's more enticing to use--it could preserve or even enhance pleasure, make it easier to use, have more appetizing packaging, or anything else that will get people to actually want to use condoms. The prize is $100,000, offered through the Grand Challenges in Global Health program. Read about it here.

If you pick up a British book, a few cultural differences might easily differentiate it from a member of the American canon -- a penchant for spelling words with an extra "u," an unfamiliar slang word...and perhaps the literary equivalent of a stiff upper lip. According to new research, over the last half a century, American writing has shown a significant uptick in emotional words compared books written by our friends across the pond.

A study published in PLOS ONE this week examined books from the last century in Google's Ngram Viewer, a database that visualizes the frequency of certain keywords in more than 5 million tomes, and found that since the mid-century, American and British word usage has diverged.

Tracing the usage of words that convey six moods (joy, surprise, anger, sadness, fear, disgust), the authors found that in general, words that indicate mood have decreased over time -- except fear, a mood that has been enjoying a resurgence since the 1970s. Usage of words that indicate positive and negative emotions also corresponded to larger historical trends. There was an increase in joy during the roaring '20s and the swinging '60s, for example, but a drop toward sadness in during World War II.

During the first half of the 20th century, British books were similar in emotional content -- or even a little more emotional -- than American books. But since 1960, American literature has had more and more emotional "mood" content than their British counterparts. The same trend was found in American and English usage of content-free words like "and," "but" and "the," suggesting that a larger stylistic difference has emerged.

In a statement from the University of Brisol, co-author Alex Bentley, a professor of archaeology and anthropology, explained one possible reason for the divergence:

However, the authors write that while the study certainly reflects a trend in published language, it's uncertain whether or not that trend is present in the population at large.

So it's possible we're not a complete emotional mess. We just want to read about people who are.

[via Nature]

I could only see about half of the massive orb, somewhere near 30 feet in diameter, that hung over the musicians. My view was blocked by one of the protruding boxes in the enormous, opulent Beaux Arts-style Howard Gilman Opera House at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Blue, green, purple, and red lasers stuttered and waved over the audience's heads. Giant disco balls hurled spots of light onto the Italianate ceiling high above. Seven, count them, seven trombonists bellowed out the low end. "Jupiter...is the loneliest planet" sang Sufjan Stevens, his mournful, breathy voice sharpened by a vocoder. Around the edge of the box, I could see Jupiter's famous "Great Red Spot" projected on the right half of the sphere. "This rules," I whispered to my friend.

Yesterday was the American premiere of "Planetarium," a performance piece based on our own solar system composed by indie music mainstays Sufjan Stevens and Bryce Dessner (of The National) and modern classical composer Nico Muhly. Stevens is perhaps best known for his two state-based albums, Michigan and Illinois--his music is a mix of lo-fi childlike sounds and grand instrumentation and ambition. He's the kind of guy who'd have a recorder player in an orchestra while performing a nine-minute piece about a midwestern town nobody's ever heard of. Dessner's group The National performs moody, melancholic music anchored by one of the rare baritone singers in rock. Nico Muhly has composed operas and choral pieces, but is probably best known for his work with indie bands like Grizzly Bear and Antony and the Johnsons.

"Planetarium" is a 60-minute presentation, with individual pieces focusing on each planet in our solar system (plus our moon, the sun, and Pluto. The composers say Pluto was included out of "pity."). The composition includes seven trombonists, a string quartet, and a drummer, with Nico Muhly on keyboards (at least three, a mix of acoustic piano and synths), Bryce Dessner on guitar, and Sufjan singing and doing various indistinct keyboard/computer bleep-bloop things.

A major part of the presentation is the orb, a gigantic spherical screen on which several projectors scattered around the auditorium beamed pretty colors and pictures. Sometimes the orb was literal; during "Mercury," the final piece performed that night, an actual NASA image of the closest planet to the sun was projected. But "Earth" was an array of late-1990s-looking undulating 3-D waves in blue and white, "Saturn" was abstract snippets of the planet's rings, and one of the planets, I'm not sure which, was looked like an eyeball, pupil and all. Least interesting was the visualizer effects that occasionally interrupted what was typically swirling, evocative colors.

Then there were the lights. Purples and blues scanned over the audience. Lasers did their laser thing. I was born after the laser-show craze; my knowledge of laser shows is mostly restricted to that one episode of Freaks and Geeks where Ken makes out with Tuba Girl. But they should come back! They are super cool!

The music is uneven, though that didn't bother me much; it sounds like late-period Sufjan Stevens, the Sufjan Stevens of The Age of Adz rather than Michigan, who is enamored with dissonant noises from computers more than the trills of piccolos and glockenspiels. This works, sometimes; the songs of the two gas giants, "Jupiter" and "Saturn," build to an astounding power, helped by the buzzy undertone of pretty much every trombonist in Brooklyn. They are as strong as any song on The Age of Adz, I'd say, with one hell of a hooky chorus. "Earth" is beautiful, though oddly unearthly, with heavily autotuned vocals and Bryce Dessner's bowed guitar. "Mercury" too is thoughtful and simple, not violent as you'd expect that planet of extremes to be. "Uranus" is cool and distant, appropriate for a planet about which we, really, know almost nothing. "Neptune" is mournful, its lyrics referencing "strange waters" and ending with the phrase "It's best if I drown." But many of the other planets are simply noise experiments, never congealing into songs. And it was sometimes hard to tell which planet was actually being serenaded, as their order did not seem to have anything to do with their location within our solar system.

It felt like we Brooklynites had tapped into something much grander than us.The lyrics are simplistic. Sufjan Stevens is a very specific kind of lyricist; he has written powerful and heartbreaking narratives, but they are of a type. At his best, like "Casimir Pulaski Day" from his album Illinois, he can capture a childlike tone better than any other lyricist out there--plainspoken observations, shock and wonder at how the approaching adult world works. But he can't really get beyond that, and it's sometimes to his detriment. "Mars" is about...the planet's namesake, the Roman god of war. "I am the god of war, I reside in every creature // Dispose of the future, or put away your sword," he sings. Not that I was expecting ruminations on the possibilities of ancient Martian floods, but still.

Sufjan, Dessner, and Muhly did not address the audience until the performance was nearly over. After the penultimate planet, "Earth," Muhly spoke--cheerful, humble, totally non-pretentious. This was a fun event, a goofy "let's put on a show" taken to a startlingly high level of professionalism. (The string quartet performed by themselves before the "Planetarium" performance; they were outrageously good, one of the best quartets I've ever seen.) "If you've been following along," said Muhly, "you know what's left. This is 'Mercury.'"

And by that time it no longer felt like an indie-rock-goes-classical experiment; it felt bigger, older. It felt like we Brooklynites had tapped into something much grander than us, some sort of, I don't know, almost Druidic worship of the planetary bodies. Let's all gather around and worship that which we can see in the heavens. Let's have beautiful music and beautiful visuals. Let's sit together in the dark and marvel at what's out there, what we can see and what we do not yet know.

After "Mercury" finished, the crowd got on its feet for a standing ovation. Sufjan and Dessner are both used to this; that means "we expect an encore." Encores are required these days, pretty much. But, um, we were out of planets. "It doesn't seem like the most likely encore situation," my friend said. But sure enough, out came the core group of the three composers. What could they have prepared? We were out of planets, but not out of near-space objects. I wondered what the final piece could be. "Europa"? "The Asteroid Belt"?

Instead, they played a delicate, autotuned rendition of "Somewhere Over the Rainbow." It was lovely.

"Planetarium" is playing all this weekend at BAM. An audio version may or may not be released.

About four years ago, Jake Stauch was in a neuroscience class at Duke, learning about an intriguing experiment. In it, subjects went through an fMRI while being shown photos of Godiva chocolates. A price accompanied the chocolates, and the subjects had to answer yes or no, would they buy this? Some of their neurons lit up like wildfire. Chances are, if Stauch was strapped into a machine, his brain would've flickered at the idea, too.

Stauch, a confirmed whiz who in high school got a perfect 2400 on his SAT while fighting bronchitis, was inspired. It was an innovative technique, reaching inside buyers' skulls to see what they thought before products even hit the shelves. So he started combing through something like 150 peer-reviewed neuroscience articles. A year later, he founded NeuroSpire, a Durham, North Carolina-based business that gives marketing companies everything they need to conduct their own brain scan-based marketing tests. "Somebody with no training whatsoever could be set up in minutes to run a brain imaging research study," he says. The guesswork of advertising is turned into numbers that purport to help companies get a window into consumers' heads: to see if They'll buy it, or They won't. That might help explain why ad agencies such as McKinney--which counts Samsung and Sherwin-Williams among its clients--have signed up for NeuroSpire, despite that the scientific merits of such services remain murky.

Neuromarketing is the science of determining what customers like not by asking them--ads work subconsciously, so what do consumers know about what they want?--but by hooking them up to a brain scanner and seeing exactly what the lizard-y parts of our brain are hungry for.

That field has exploded in recent years, growing even since Stauch, who dropped out of Duke in 2012 to focus on his business, founded NeuroSpire. Big corporations, after all, are interested in knowing if neuromarketing works and, if it does, how to take advantage of it. Google, Disney, and plenty of others have used neuromarketing, and the idea is still in its infancy. (One heavily cited study from 2007: "What is ‘neuromarketing'? A discussion and agenda for future research.")

But there are some problems: For one thing, academics and scientists still debate the merits of the science. In 2004, a Nature Neuroscience editorial called neuroscience-based marketing "a highly speculative investment" for companies. It went on:

One of the biggest problems is: how do you know that what you're measuring in a lab has any equivalent in the real world? Yes, a screen lit up when those subjects looked at pictures of Godiva chocolate, but that doesn't necessarily mean they'll go out in the world and buy Godiva chocolate.

Still plenty of companies are willing to suspend disbelief for what they see as a useful, quantitative approach to market testing. But then they often smack into another big problem: neuromarketing is almost prohibitively expensive to conduct unless you're a huge corporation with cash to burn. Your options are as follows: a.) buy equipment, potentially for thousands of dollars, and staff a technician who can run trials, or b.) hire a company to come in, set up the machinery, and conduct the research for thousands of dollars. If you're running a multi-million-dollar ad campaign that hinges on the thoughts of a few key demographics, maybe that's worth the expense. For most, especially with the science still in its early stages, it probably isn't.

That's where Stauch, 22, comes in. His startup turns neuromarketing into a DIY affair. How it works: A company or marketing firm buys an Emotiv EEG Neuroheadset-a popular open-source brain-scanning headset--that NeuroSpire pre-programs with a custom EEG test. (Stauch developed the test with a business partner in the Netherlands, Jeroen Kools.) Marketers stick the headset on a test subject and ask his opinion on the ad or packaging design in question. Lights on the headset flash when a good brain signal is being picked up.

During the test, the marketers can open a NeuroSpire application on just about any computer to see that the brain waves are in fact being picked up. But that's where their involvement ends. The raw data gets beamed back to Stauch and the NeuroSpire team for translation. Before getting crunched, the numbers look like a faulty GPS puked longitudes and latitudes onto an Excel document. NeuroSpire gives options after that: a company or agency can pay for anything from a "score" that shows how well the ad or design did to a full-blown 30-page report that includes second-by-second reactions.

Whichever option the marketers choose, they end up paying less than they would if they took a more traditional route. A single fMRI study might cost a company between $100,000 and $200,000. An EEG study might cost between $40,000 and $60,000. Because NeuroSpire eliminates the complicated equipment and staff required of standard neuromarketing tests, it can do an EEG test for about $5,000.

Getting the company off the ground wasn't easy. After a brief spell conducting traditional neuromarketing tests, NeuroSpire relaunched in the form in which it exists today. Stauch and his colleagues entered a start-up seed-funding contest called Start-Up Madness, which pits companies founded by graduates of ACC conference teams against each other. NeuroSpire won the contest, and got $5,000 in starter money.

After that, Stauch started cold-calling companies to give them the pitch. NeuroSpire didn't have a PR or official business arm, but before long, companies he hadn't already called started reaching out to him, about once a month at first, then more often.

The Durham, North Carolina-based ad agency McKinney has tried out NeuroSpire's service while working on campaigns for "a couple" of brands in different categories. Chris Walsh, vice president and director of consumer and business insight at McKinney, heard about NeuroSpire through a colleague, another Duke student, and started working with Stauch. Walsh and the McKinney team tested a campaign-they wouldn't say for which company--first through the headset, then a traditional survey, and later through an online survey. What they've found, in limited use, is that the results from NeuroSpire have matched up with results from the more traditional techniques. Either an ad is leaving an impression--"driving emotional responses," Walsh says--or it's not. And if it's not, McKinney has corrected course based on that information.

That still doesn't tell us if consumers then went out and bought whatever was being advertised. But such are the risks of marketing research. Surveys and focus groups alone have their own limitations. If the barrier to entry is low enough in neuromarketing, and the corporation looking for data is big enough, then it could be worthwhile for the corporation to take the chance anyway. That's what NeuroSpire represents: a chance for companies--even some smaller ones--to get in on the science of neuromarketing, shaky though it may be.

I asked Stauch, in a sort of acrobatic, confirm-or-deny FBI way, if I might see the brands NeuroSpire works with when I walk down the street. In other words, if we, the public, know them. He told me, "Yes. Definitely."

The brands are doing their best to get to know us, too.

Some 66 million years ago, a giant space object of some kind slammed into Earth right around the Yucatan peninsula. The resultant explosion sent debris high into the atmosphere; the dust resettled to earth newly enriched with the elements iridium and osmium--elements that are much more abundant in space than on Earth--and formed a thin layer in the rock strata now called the K-Pg boundary. A side effect of this violent impact was the extinction of most of the megafauna--dinosaurs, etc--living during that time. The impact site itself was discovered in 1978 by a geologist working for an oil company, but it wasn't until 1990 that the now-named Chicxulub crater was associated with the proposed impact that caused the mass extinctions. Since 1990, scientists have debated the nature of the rock that hit Earth--asteroid or comet? The scientists know generally how big the explosion would have had to be in order to create the fallout found in drill samples. Based on the size of the explosion and the amount of iridium and osmium deposited at the K-Pg boundary, the most common theory is that the impactor was carbonaceous asteroid about 13 kilometers across. But scientists from Darmouth College argue that the real culprit was a comet.

Presenting their findings at the 44th Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in Texas this week, Jason Moore explained two separate findings that lead to the team's conclusions. First, Moore and colleagues re-evaluated the iridium and osmium deposits at the K-Pa boundary. New data on those deposits indicate that the overall amount of space-derived iridium in the layer is lower than previously measured. As such, Moore and his colleagues concluded that the bolide -- the impactor -- was not 13 kilometers wide, because an asteroid that size would have left more iridium in the K-Pa boundary than what has been found. This by itself presents a problem, though: most asteroids are traveling too slowly for a smaller rock to generate the 3x10^23 J-giant boom that created Chicxulub crater. Comets, on the other hand, travel a lot faster than asteroids. A comet of 7 kilometers across traveling at typical comet velocities could release enough energy upon impact to create the crater and extinction event.

When Moore and colleagues looked at the catalogues of the currently known populations of asteroids and comets in the solar system, they found that some 99.99% of all impactor candidates with masses and velocities in the right ranges are comets. Obviously, this is only one study (or, well, two studies that lead to one conclusion), and Moore et al. are not the first scientists to suggest that T. rex was pwnd by a comet. But it's a pretty cool study and it certainly provides more fuel for those who are freaked out about the future of civilization: There are only about 2 million asteroids over one kilometer wide in the solar system; scientists estimate that there are up to a trillion comets out there. Given that the average comet is about the same size as the one that Moore et al. suggested hit Earth 66 million years ago, then maybe the worrywarts are on to something...