New nationwide science-education standards are coming soon, and they'll include a lesson plan that should help the next generation of youngsters understand the world they will grow up in. These new standards will recommend that American students learn about climate change.

Some states already have climate change education plans, and national science literacy groups also publish lesson plans including climate change and what can be done to address it. But the new national guideline, under the purview of the Next Generation Science Standards, sets a course for schools across the country. It's the first major change to national science literacy policy in 15 years.

It may be just in time: Only 1 in 5 students says they understand climate change from what they've learned in school, according to an interview on NPR with Mark McCaffrey of the National Center for Science Education. Sometimes this is a result of students--or their school's curriculum--skipping Earth science in favor of biology, chemistry and physics. And sometimes this is the result of confusing lessons that try to teach both sides of the controversy. The problem is that there are not two sides. The scientific evidence is crystal clear. Climate change is real, it's happening now, and since kids in school today will eventually be adults who have to deal with it, they ought to learn about it.

The new standards are voluntary, but because they've been drafted by 26 states, educators hope that most states will adopt them. Tennessee and Louisiana are the only states to pass laws protecting teachers who question human-caused climate change, although climate deniers have lobbied lawmakers in many other states.

According to the National Research Council, which helped draft the new guidelines, the decision was always going one way. "There was never a debate about whether climate change would be in there," the NRC's Heidi Schweingruber told NPR. "It is a fundamental part of science, and so that's what our work is based on, the scientific consensus."

[NPR]

You should probably have a sense already of whether your Twitter account might get you in trouble at your job. Like, complaining about the stupidity of your boss on social media? Not the most excellent idea! But if for some reason you are just not a very reflective person, you can use FireMe! to figure out if your tweets are going to get you canned.

FireMe! mines Twitter (either your personal account or Twitter as a whole) for incriminating work-related tweets. So go to the site's homepage, and you'll see a public shaming of people tweeting things like: "My boss is an idiot," and "I hate my job." There's also subcategories you can look at. "Horrible Bosses," (standard hate) "Sexual Intercourse," (just use of the F-word, pretty much) and "Potential Killers" (people hopefully kidding about shooting their bosses) are included. If you enter your own personal Twitter account, it'll calculate your odds of getting fired if your boss sees your account.

But best of all, there's a leaderboard for All-Time Most Fireable Tweeters. Just be careful clicking on those. Some of the language coud get you in trouble at work.

[FireMe!]

In 2011, a series of earthquakes hit central Oklahoma, destroying six houses, damaging an additional 14, and bringing down a turret at the 700-student St. Gregory's University. Among the series was the largest earthquake ever recorded in the state of Oklahoma. And, some scientists say, the quakes may have included the largest earthquake ever triggered by the injection of wastewater from oil and gas drilling deep inside the Earth.

A team of U.S. geologists has published a paper in Geology that argues that wastewater injection triggered the magnitude 5.0 earthquake near Prague (pronounced with a long A), Oklahoma, on November 5, 2011. That quake then broke fault planes to the south, triggering more than 1,000 aftershocks, including a 5.7 quake November 6 and a 5.0 on November 8. "I think this should raise awareness for the potential for larger events that could be induced," Elizabeth Cochran, a geophysicist from the U.S. Geological Survey in California and one of the authors of the new paper, tells Popular Science.

The Oklahoma Geological Survey disagrees. The agency posted a statement on its website three days before the Geology publication, laying out its arguments for why survey scientists think those earthquakes were natural.

Meanwhile, the U.S. Geological Survey says evidence is mounting that the American Midwest and East have seen increasing seismic activity since 2009, alongside increased wastewater injection. The increased quakes are generally small, of magnitude 3, which don't cause damage but which people can feel. Cochran tells Popular Science that her team's findings of larger induced quakes call for increased monitoring of areas where drilling occurs. However, there are no federal or state laws requiring companies to assess an area for earthquake potential before injections--nor to hold companies liable for earthquakes that occur afterward.

The practice of wastewater injection has proliferated over the past 60 years in the U.S. because it is a relatively inexpensive, swift way to get rid of oil and gas drilling waste, ProPublica reported last September. There are about 144,000 such wells in the United States. They're classified in such a way that they're under less stringent regulation than waste wells from the pharmaceutical, chemical or other industries. The ProPublica report mainly pointed to the wells' potential to contaminate nearby water supplies, but recent geological studies suggest that earthquake potential could also be a greater problem than previously thought.

Geologists have agreed-upon criteria for deciding whether an earthquake was triggered by human activity. One of these criteria is proximity, and the Prague earthquakes fit the bill. The first quake occurred about 200 meters, or little more than a tenth of a mile, away from an active injection well.

Another indicator of triggering is if a quake occurs soon after some drilling activity, sometimes within 24 hours. The Prague quakes don't fit that second category, as wastewater injection began in the area decades ago, in 1955. Cochran and her team argue, however, that the quakes began now because the pumping pressure increased recently. Jean-Philippe Avouac, a geologist at the California Institute of Technology who was not involved in the paper, found their argument convincing. "They have a reasonable explanation for this delay," he tells Popular Science.

On the other hand, the Oklahoma Geological Survey argues that pumping pressure increased too long ago, in 2004. The survey also argues that a naturally induced 5.7 quake wouldn't be unheard of for the area, even if it is generally more seismically stable than, say, California.

"Because Oklahoma has naturally occurring earthquakes, we can start with the assumption that the earthquakes are natural and then when we have enough data, we can challenge that idea," says Oklahoma Geological Survey seismologist Austin Holland. "There's no data that really challenge the idea that the earthquakes are naturally occurring."

The Oklahoma Geological Survey has previously determined earthquakes were human-caused. Earlier in 2011, Holland determined that quakes of magnitude 1.0 to 2.8 in south central Oklahoma were triggered by the injection of fluid into the Earth for hydraulic fracturing. After two injecting sessions, however, the drilling company didn't need to inject any more fluid, so it stopped.

Whether or not the Prague quakes are ultimately determined to be human-triggered, geologists such as Bill Ellsworth of the U.S. Geological Survey and the folks on Cochran's team--including geologists from the University of Oklahoma and Columbia University--say the trend of increased earthquakes around wastewater injection wells is real. (U.S. Geological Survey studies have not linked hydraulic fracturing to the increased number of earthquakes.)

The geologists were reluctant to give their opinions on whether more regulation is warranted, however. Holland makes a cautious argument similar to what many geologists told me. "We're not a regulatory authority and I'd be stepping on someone's toes if I made any recommendations," he says, "but certainly there's room for improvement on existing regulations."

Electric solar sails use long metal tethers that conduct electricity and interact with solar wind ions and propel a spacecraft. Invented in 2006, the technology could allow us to sail through space cheaper and faster than ever before: One day, the European Union's ESAIL project could take us to Pluto in as little as five years.

But the technology is still working out some kinks. About half of all orbital tether tests have either failed to deploy or snapped under the impact of micrometeoroids, according to the European Space Agency. But now the agency is saying they've made an unsnappable tether for a solar sail, just in time for the April launch of ESTCube-1, Estonia's first satellite.

At only about half the width of a human hair, the tether is made of several aluminum wires interwoven so that even if one is cut, an electric charge can still run through it to create thrust. Within Earth's magnetic field, the system could be used as a braking system to take spacecraft out of low orbit.

A 10-meter long version will be tested as a deorbiting method on ESTCube-1, a student-built satellite project from the University of Tartu. A longer, 100-meter tether will be used on CubeSat Aalto-1, a Finnish student satellite scheduled to launch later next year, according to the ESA.

[ESA]

"Is this conversation unencrypted?" is going to be the new "Are you wearing a wire?"

Noting that communication technology has changed faster than the law, FBI general counsel Andrew Weissman said recently that the bureau wants to be able to monitor online chats as they happen.

Right now, the FBI can obtain electronic communications after the fact, but if they could snoop on people discussing illegal activity in a chat, they could catch criminals in the act.

A problem for the FBI is that most savvy criminals know to not discuss business over landline phones and other platforms that make it easy to get caught. Instead, like plenty of normal and totally not-criminal conversations, conversation has moved to online chats, text messaging, and cellphones. And the law hasn't kept up.

Wiretap law is still largely stuck in the early 1990s. The 1994 "Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act" was written with some knowledge of the internet, but this was well before Skype, widespread email, cloud computing, and gchat.

To catch up to all that technology, the FBI is working with other members of the intelligence community to propose new legal snooping rules by the end of the year, Weissman said at the National Press Club in Washington last week. Weissman mentioned not just the ability to watch Gchat in real-time, but also the chat function in online games like Scrabble, as well as online voice chat programs like Skype and cloud storage services like DropBox (a noted favorite of former CIA spymaster David Petraeus.)

It's a broad goal, and it's likely criminals will adapt faster than the FBI can catch them. Such is the history of crime. In the late 1980s, pagers and payphones revolutionized the drug trade, with the combination of anonymity, on-demand delivery, and an absence of recorded-transaction information. Police eventually caught on. Criminals moved on, using pre-paid and disposable "burner" cell phones for everything from drug sales to bomb detonators, until the law finally caught up to that, too.

The FBI's latest call for great legal power to spy on online chats as the happen is just a sign of the perpetual cat-and-mouse between police enforcing the law and criminals trying to dodge it. The next likely move for criminals (and other, totally legal private citizens uncomfortable with the idea of warrant-free chat monitoring): casual cryptography. Protocols for off-the-record chats already exist, and will ensure that conversations remain only between known parties, without someone else eavesdropping. What's this mean? Expect me in five years to be writing about how the FBI wants a legal backdoor around encrypted conversations. Oh, wait.

The specifics of how a single-celled organism called Tetrahymena thermophila gets it on has been a scientific mystery for more than 50 years. See, T. thermophila has seven sexes, and it can reproduce in 21 combinations. For sexy-time, each T. thermophila can mate with another T. thermophila that has any of the six other sexes. But with so many options, how do cells determine which sex their progeny will be?

New research published this week in PLOS Biology by biologists at the University of California, Santa Barbara, the Chinese Academy of Sciences and The J. Craig Venter Institute uncovers the mechanism behind the mystery. It has nothing whatsoever to do with with the sex of the parent cells. The progeny cell's sex is basically chosen at random.

The organism has two different nuclei: a germline nucleus that serves as a reservoir for genetic information to be passed on to progeny, and a somatic nucleus that expresses genes. In each cell, the germline nucleus contains incomplete genetic information for each mating type.

During fertilization, new germline and somatic nuclei form from genetic information of both parents. In the newly hatched somatic nucleus, the incomplete gene pairs from the germline nucleus rearrange to form one complete gene pair -- then delete the incomplete leftovers.

"It's completely random, as if they had a roulette wheel with six numbers and wherever the marble ends up is what they get. By chance, they may have the same mating type as the parents -- but it's only by chance," explains Eduardo Orias, a UCSD professor emeritus who has studied T. thermophila for more than 50 years. "It's a fascinating system."

T. thermophila is a useful model organism in biomedical research because it has about as many genes as humans, and many show similarities to the human genome in sequence and function. Understanding its reproductive processes better could someday have applications in the medical field, including in cancer treatment.

Caffeine. Like so many other wonderful compounds that provide a lift, buzz, high or other pleasant side effect, caffeine under certain circumstances is toxic. It's most certainly poisonous to humans in high amounts, but even small amounts of caffeine in a watershed can kill off native bacteria populations and can stunt the germination and growth of many plants--which is unfortunate, because caffeine is frequently found in the water around cities. It's also used to produce certain kinds of asthma medication, and that excess frequently makes its way into wastewater. Of course, nature has already come up with a solution to the problem in the form of Pseudomonas putida CBB5, a bacterial species that lives on caffeine. That's great, but scientists were eager to develop a more manageable system to remove caffeine from wastewater, so they harvested the genes that coded for the caffeine-metabolizing proteins in P. putida and put them into a much more amenable creature: Escherichia coli.

The group of researchers, who hail from University of Texas at Austin and University of Iowa, Iowa City, engineered the E. coli bacteria to not only metabolize caffeine, they created a bacterial strain that can't live without it. (I know the feeling.) Due to a quirk in its metabolism, the bacteria cannot synthesize DNA or RNA without caffeine, providing a useful "kill switch" for when decaffeination is complete. To test their bacterias' abilities to metabolize caffeine and their relative addictedness to the compound, the researchers then grew the transfected E. coli on a variety of growth media containing caffeinated beverages, including Coca-Cola, Diet Coke, Starbucks Espresso, Monster and Red Bull (brave, brave E. coli). They also used caffeine-free Coca Cola in the growth media, and found that the bacteria simply could not survive without a jolt of joe. Most interestingly, the researchers found that they could back-calculate the amount of caffeine in a given sample by measuring how well the bacterial cells grew in that medium, making the bacteria a useful biomonitor as well as clean-up crew.

Is it wrong that what I really want to do with this bacterial strain is play an awful practical joke on my caffeine-addicted colleagues? A bit of this strain in the morning coffee pot (provided someone can make the bacteria heat-tolerant with a nice extremophile gene) and then sit back and watch as sleep takes over.

It's happened to all of us: you're watching a TV show or movie, and an actor, one of those hundreds of actors who bounce around from supporting role to supporting role, pops up, as the doctor with a few lines, the doomed vacationer in a procedural, the cop who just can't let this hotshot play by his own rules any longer. Amazon's X-Ray feature makes figuring out the identity of that actor literally as easy as one tap. I sort of can't believe how well it works!

When you're watching any Amazon video--that means videos purchased a la carte from the iTunes-like Amazon Video Store, or the many videos available for free in the Netflix-like Amazon Prime Video area--you can simply tap the screen to display IMDb data. That'd be convenient enough, if it just gave you a quick link to the IMDb page for whatever you're watching. But it goes a step further: it actually maps exactly who's on the screen at that very moment.

In this episode of Justified pictured above (Amazon has exclusive streaming rights on Justified, which is just the best show), you can see that when you tap the screen, you get the pause menu with the bonus of a list of actors on the side. Here's what's cool: that list of actors changes dynamically depending on who's on screen! The only people in the list are the actors you can actually see, and it is remarkably accurate, even down to the minor characters in the background.

Amazon purchased IMDb, the Internet Movie Database, way back in 1998. IMDb is the repository of all film/television industry metadata--actors, directors, writers, various crew members. It is astoundingly deep; uncredited roles show up on IMDb, as do weird public access shows, the most minute parts in independent productions seen by a few dozen people. Amazon has been updating IMDb from its era as a simple collection of lists; it's not one of the best places to watch movie trailers, for example. But X-Ray is easily my favorite implementation of IMDb's huge amount of data.

X-Ray isn't compatible with every show, and it only works on the Kindle Fire tablet and, oddly, the Nintendo Wii U's Amazon app. Hopefully Amazon will expand it to the other apps, for Roku and Xbox 360 and iOS. But it's a really great differentiator for Amazon, compared to Netflix or Hulu Plus--it's integrated really well, and it's genuinely useful. You can try it out now if you've got a Kindle Fire or Wii U--no app download necessary.

The 21,000 residents of Namie-machi, Japan, haven't been able to return to their hometown since March 2011. The radiation there from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster is still too high. But now they, and the rest of the world, can take a virtual tour through the town's streets.

Google Maps, working with Namie-machi mayor Tamotsu Baba, drove Google Street View cars through the abandoned town this month. In a blog post, Baba explained why: "Many of the displaced townspeople have asked to see the current state of their city, and there are surely many people around the world who want a better sense of how the nuclear incident affected surrounding communities."

The post is well worth a read. You can start exploring the photos here. Google also hosts a website where Fukushima Prefecture residents can share their old photos and videos and outsiders may see before and after Street View imagery of affected places.

Since the day the Hubble Space Telescope blinked open and saw a blurry heavens, the world of telescope optics has revolved around double-checking every possible detail. To see clearly, a telescope's mirrors must be flawless, bending and reflecting photons with absolutely perfect accuracy. While working on ways to fix Hubble's poor vision, Dan Neal and his colleagues realized another optical system could benefit from perfectly designed corrective lenses: Our eyes.

Now a system designed to make sure Hubble doesn't happen again is being used to build better contact lenses, and to ensure more accurate laser surgery. It's one of many ways in which NASA technology spins off into new consumer products--but it's one of few that stems, at least in part, from one of the space agency's biggest blunders.

...

The Hubble Space Telescope, arguably the greatest observatory ever conceived, is one of the crowning achievements of modern science. But its first days in space were not exactly proud. Back in the 1980s, the company contracted to build Hubble's primary mirror didn't have a way to test its own testing equipment, and it was ultimately used improperly, resulting in a misshapen mirror.

The now-legendary saga stemmed from a positioning rod in a tool called a "null corrector," used to create an optical template, kind of like a map for how to grind the telescope's 96-inch primary mirror. Other tests were not considered accurate enough to measure the mirror's perfect angle, so mirror-maker Perkin Elmer Corp. set out to design a perfect null corrector. A rod in this null corrector was installed upside down, changing the angle at which its locator-beam reflected light. The rod looked like it was higher than it really was--objects in the mirror may be closer than they appear, if you will. When workers changed the mirror grinding to compensate for this, the result was a 1.3-millimeter error in the curvature of the mirror.

Hubble suffered from a spherical aberration, which means light reflecting off the edge of the mirror focuses on a different point from the light reflecting off its center. NASA engineers were able to figure out how it happened, and three years after Hubble's launch, spacewalking astronauts installed corrective optics that fixed the problem.

If you are putting a space telescope a million miles up, and will never see it again, it has to be right. The same is true for people. If you are doing laser surgery on someone, and you are working on their eye, it has to be right.
That won't be possible for Hubble's successor, the James Webb Space Telescope. Parked in a gravitational three-way among Earth, the moon and the sun, the JWST's perch 1 million miles from home will never be accessible for space-based repairs. It's got to be right the first time; it needs a perfect map for grinding a perfect mirror. That's where Dan Neal comes in.

The JWST is so big, its primary mirror is actually 18 separate beryllium hexagons that come together to form one big, shiny surface. Each segment was cast in a rough shape, machined and then ground to perfection. The segments start with a few thousandths of an inch of deviation, but must be ground to optical tolerances, with fractions of a micron in variation, Neal explained.

"There's a metrology gap. You can measure something larger with mechanical means, but when you need to get to 0.1 micron - that's going from 40 microns of error to 0.1," he said. "The measurement techniques don't exist for something in between, so we had to invent those."

/>

Neal is a research fellow at Abbott Medical Optics, and a former engineer at Sandia National Laboratories who worked on the Hubble corrective optics. He later cofounded a Sandia spinoff, WaveFront Sciences, which worked on optical measurement for silicon wafers, among other projects. The company became involved with JWST down a long line of subcontractors. (WaveFront was later purchased by Abbott.) During two years of engineering and testing, WaveFront engineers developed a measuring tool called an infrared Scanning Shack-Hartmann Sensor, which enables testing of the mirror's surface immediately after grinding.

The system sweeps an infrared laser across the entire surface of the mirror, taking snapshots in 3 by 4 centimeter patches. It captured a million points across the mirror's surface, resulting in a highly detailed map of where to grind and polish to perfect the mirror. Prior to this method, mirror makers would grind it to the best of their ability, polish it--which takes about a month--and test it, Neal said.

"If they found a bad spot, they would have to go back to grinding, take it all down, polish it again and re-test it. If they had to do that each time, it could literally take years to build these mirrors," he said.

The system was expert at measuring the rough mirror blanks, and Neal and his colleagues realized it could measure other rough optical surfaces, too.

...

Despite their smooth appearance, the surfaces of our eyes actually possess a rich topography, with dents, protrusions, corneal bulges and more. Ophthalmologists use wavefront sensors to measure these ocular aberrations, but it can take hours of painstaking work to account for them. That's important for procedures like fitting contact lenses--and mapping the eye's topography for laser surgery. The highly sensitive, accurate scanning technology developed for the JWST is a major improvement: it can scan the entire eye in seconds.

"There's a similarity and a difference between doing something for NASA, and doing something for medical patients. The similarity is, it has to be right," Neal said. "If you are putting a space telescope a million miles up, and will never see it again, it has to be right. The same is true for people. If you are doing laser surgery on someone, and you are working on their eye, it has to be right."

The difference? The eye is also a lens and a detector, an entire optical system all in one. The JWST scanner was only intended to look at the mirrors' surface, which you might compare to the cornea--the detectors are another thing entirely. Neal and other scientists at Abbott had to redesign the system to check the whole eye, tears and all.

"If you are going to do Lasik surgery or fit contacts, you have to measure through the entire optical system," he said.

/>

Using the same techniques, Abbott workers built a new system that can project a spot of near-infrared light onto the retina. The scattering of that light is collected by the lens and cornea, and the instrument, which analyzes the light, can measure that scattering. It even accounts for the eye's tear film, an ever-changing coating whose thickness is affected by everything from your level of hydration to the temperature in the room.

After more than six years of development, Abbott released its eye-mapping technology in 2012. The iDesign Advanced WaveScan Studio was approved for use in Europe last summer, and it's still waiting approval by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, Neal said. It creates a detailed map of the eye, accounting for nearsightedness, farsightedness, astigmatism and other issues. This information is transferred to the laser, which performs the surgical procedure.

Neal himself wears glasses, and suffered a detached retina several years ago that prevents him from using the technology himself. But his wife and son have had Lasik, and his son was involved in a clinical trial with iDesign, he said.

The next step is developing a sensor that can map the density of cataracts, and to improve cataract surgery, he said.

"We think we can use it for making a good measurement of the eye to plan for cataract surgery; all you are doing is picking the right lens. Once you pick the right lens, it's quite invasive to take it out," he said. "So again, you want to get it right the first time."

Could a computer program catch what a human psychiatrist can't? A new program called SimSensei, still in the early stages of development, logs people's subtle body language and fleeting facial expressions to help diagnose depression, the New Scientist reported.

The program even comes with an animated avatar who asks patients questions, "Hmms" at appropriates times, and guides the conversation according to patient's answers… all while tracking the patient's movements using Microsoft Kinect sensors and face recognition software.

Right now, a depression diagnosis depends on patients' answers to standard questionnaires. It doesn't take non-verbal cues into account, Stefan Scherer, SimSensei's lead developer and a researcher at the University of Southern California's Institute for Creative Technologies, told the New Scientist. That could lead to missed diagnoses.

SimSensei is one of several programs under development now that look to log the differences in how people with depression make eye contact, smile, shift in their chairs, and give off other small clues to their condition. The Association for Computing Machinery is even hosting a contest between the programs, to see which is best at picking out depressed patients among a database of videos of depressed and non-depressed people.

Watch SimSensei at work here:

[New Scientist]

In their recent consideration of the legality of same sex marriage, two members of the Supreme Court called into question whether or not the science exists demonstrating that these unions do not harm children. During oral arguments over whether or not to uphold the legality of California's Proposition 8, which codifies marriage as being only between one man and one woman, Justices Antonin Scalia and Anthony Kennedy both questioned whether or not science or "experts" had confirmed the harmlessness of same-sex marriage to children. Justice Samuel Alito then noted that same sex marriage was newer than cell phones or the Internet (transcript here).

Unless the ancient Greeks had cell phones and wireless, he's wrong on that. And based on that reasoning, it would have been just fine for a Supreme Court justice hearing Brown vs. the Board of Education in 1954 to point out that school desegregation was a concept newer even than television. Does that mean anything?

Solicitor General Donald Verrilli, presenting the case before the court, offered up another comparison:

Not all same-sex couples intend to have children; indeed, their alleged inability to have biological children as a couple is one argument frequently forwarded against recognizing their marriages, primarily by people who think marriage exists only for the purposes of pro-creation. So it's unclear how the effect of same-sex marriage on children is relevant to the question of how marriage should be defined.

What is clear is that the American Academy of Pediatrics has come out with a it's there.

First, some numbers. According to the AAP statement, same-sex couples in the U.S. are raising a total of 115,000 children; if you roll in households with a single gay or lesbian parent, this country has at least 2 million children being raised by non-heterosexual parents.

Two million children. And that doesn't even count children being raised by parents in an outwardly heternormative relationship but whose gender identities and sexual behaviors might not be so, well, hetero as presumed. Again, whether it's obvious or not, the sex or gender of the parent isn't inherently harmful to a child. It's how society reacts to it.

The science is there. Is the problem that some members of the Court just don't want to hear it?Guess what the science whose existence Scalia and Kennedy questioned has to say on the subject? The AAP--you know, the experts on children who also might not exist, according to the Supreme Court--says:

The reference they cite for that last statement is this one, which is unfortunately paywalled. However, it is a review of the available data and was published a year ago. In the abstract, the authors clearly state that:

This information has been available for almost a year. The AAP statement appeared online on March 20, days before the Supreme Court heard these arguments. The science is there. The experts had spoken. Is the problem that some members of the Court just don't want to hear it?

This article was republished with permission. Emily Willingham, co-founder and editor at DoubleXScience, is a science writer and compulsive biologist. You can find her on Twitter at @DoubleXSci or @ejwillingham.

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The people have spoken. The greatest landbot/ sky drone in all the internet is.... the X-47B!

The X-47B, the world's first autonomous warplane, crushed BigDog, Boston Dynamics's robotic pack mule, 63 percent to 37 percent, in the final round of our Land Robots Vs. Flying Drones March Madness bracket. Check out our 2012 magazine feature on the X-47B, and go here to review earlier rounds of the bracket. Oh, and thanks for playing! If you've got suggestions for next year's bracket, let us know in the comments.

Last year, a group of 35 meteorite samples was found in Morocco. One of them was this guy, a curiously green sample given the name NWA 7325. Further analysis indicates that its color isn't the only unusual thing about it--this meteorite isn't like any we've ever seen before.

NWA 7325 has a few very odd qualities. Its magnetic intensity is extremely low, for one thing, which has been an integral fact in figuring out just what the hell this thing is. Magnetic intensity is shared by rocks and the planet they originate from; Earth rocks have a magnetic intensity that can be tied to Earth, for example. This one's magnetic intensity is highly similar to that of Mercury, which was confirmed by Messenger, the spacecraft currently in orbit around the closest planet to the sun. There are some other clues; the meteorite is also very low in iron, like the planet, and it doesn't have any of the chemical signifiers that would identify it as, say, a Martian rock.

It's the first meteorite to be identified as coming from Mercury, or (as is possible, though not likely) a Mercury-like body. It's estimated that this meteorite (and the others found with it) are about 4.65 billion years old.

[via Space.com]

The market's ready for something that is not a gaming PC but can act like a gaming PC. The idea of a Steam Box, a small gadget that can play PC games on your TV through the game-downloading service Steam, has been tossed around, but nothing's come of it just yet. Why not? We have the technology to downsize a PC, right?

Enter the Razer Edge. It's a 10.1-inch-display Windows 8 tablet with the power to play pretty much whatever PC game you'd want. You can hook it up through your TV, attach a controller-like accessory to the sides to play it on your lap, or sit it up on a stand in front of you. No matter what, it works great! Before you drop the nearly $1,500 or $1,000 for one of the versions of it, though, you just have to decide exactly how you're planning on using it.

WHAT IT IS

Have you used a tablet? Well, it's that, first of all. It's comparable to the Microsoft Surface but a little thicker and heavier. You probably won't be able to easily hold it in one hand unless you are some kind of a giant. But it's a tablet that you can use to play the latest games without it exploding from overexertion. You can download games through services like Steam or Origin or anything else you might use on your PC, then play those games through a mouse and keyboard or, if the game you download supports it, a controller.

There are basically three ways to use it:

PLAYING THROUGH YOUR TV

This is what you want. Using an HDMI cable and a stand (sold separately for $99.99), you can turn on Steam's Big Picture option and connect to a controller, then play your game on the big screen. Voila: a console experience in tablet form.

If you want, of course, you don't have to go through a TV: you can just set the Edge down on the stand and play through a keyboard or controller. That's not a bad experience at all, even if it sort of feels like your PC just got compressed.

PLAYING THROUGH THE ATTACHABLE CONTROLLER

This is the most awkward way of playing it. If you shell out $250 for the Gamepad Controller, it becomes your controller and system all in one. But it's not exactly a comfortable experience. Even though the controller--a solidly built sheath with control sticks reminiscent of fighter pilot controls--works fine, and even comes with a spare battery built right into the back, it's tough to manage without balancing it on your knee. This made it difficult to do my usual sprawled-out, lying-on-my-back gaming position. I sat like a gentleman instead, with one leg draped over the other knee. Stop trying to fix my posture, Razer Edge.

USING IT AS A TABLET

If you're buying the Razer Edge, you're buying it for gaming. But it's fast enough that you'll have a fine tablet experience, too. You can stream a show on Netflix or do most anything else you'd want to do with your tablet, then download a game for your enjoyment. But again, it's a little on the heavy side, so don't expect to be exactly relaxed while you're watching Arrested Development.

GOOD STUFF

In general, it's just a good idea. PC and console gaming has never really been able to go fully portable. There have been some great portable systems, sure, but those have never had anywhere near the same power as a full-size gaming rig. This does it, and that's pretty amazing.

More importantly, it all comes together nicely. It's a big, beefy thing, but it works great as advertised--in whatever mode you're using it for--and if you're on the market for both a tablet and a PC, and have got the dough, then that makes this a no-brainer.

NOT-SO-GOOD STUFF

Battery life is... not the best. But understandably not the best, for the amount of power this thing has, at least. You can get a few hours out of it; enough for your commute before you plug it in somewhere. The display is also a tiny bit on the washed-out side, but, I'd say, not going to affect your gaming too much. Then there's the biggie: price. There are two models: a $1,449 and a $999, with two different processors (we tried out the more expensive Pro model).

I sort of question the portability of the Edge, too. Yes, I carried it around on the subway, which I couldn't do with a PC. But it's way too big to play anything comfortably in that situation.

SHOULD I BUY IT?

Look deep inside yourself and ask what you're going to use this for. Hint: You're probably not going to feel like carrying it everywhere with you. Which means it's going to stay in your house. Are you in the market for a tablet that you can stick in front of your TV or on your desk to play games on, then retire with before bed? Then yeah, sure, if you've got the cash. But if you have a PC and/or console that you're happy with, maybe reconsider.

That's not to say it's bad at all. It's great! It really feels like the future: one gadget that works as a gaming PC and tablet. And they both work great. You just need to be in the market for both before you sign up.

Call it hollow-hearted. Researchers have built a mimic of the outer capsule of the foot-and-mouth disease virus. Inside, where the virus' genetic material normally lives, is empty.

Such synthetic virus-like particles could go into a foot-and-mouth vaccine that's cheaper to make because it doesn't require the tight biosecurity that a factory that makes vaccines from live viruses needs, its creators say. The researchers have also built the virus mimic in such a way that it can stay out of a refrigerator for longer than current foot-and-mouth vaccines, so it could ship more easily around the world.

In the future, the same techniques could apply to vaccines to the polio virus, which belongs to a large group of viruses related to hoof-and-mouth, Andrew Macadam, a polio researcher at the U.K. National Institute for Biological Standards and Control, told the BBC. Polio vaccines are now made with either weakened or killed polio viruses. (The weakened type still carries a small risk of reverting to its original form and causing paralysis. That vaccine is no longer used in the U.S., but some other countries give it out because it doesn't require a highly trained medical professional to administer.)

The hollow virus works because its outside stimulates the immune system to create antibodies against it. Because it doesn't have any genetic material inside, however, it can't revert to an active form and replicate. The instructions for the virus' spread never exist, not even in the factory.

There's still plenty of testing to do before the newly created virus shell can be used as a vaccine, however. The empty virus' creators, a team of researchers from the U.K., have tested the synthetic virus in just eight cattle. Five of the cattle showed resistance to foot-and-mouth infection after getting immunized.

The U.K. might have particular interest in driving this research forward. Foot-and-mouth disease infects cows, pigs and sheep, giving the animals fevers and blisters and reducing the amount of milk they give. Their meat and milk are still technically safe to consume and the disease doesn't affect humans, but it can still hit farmers hard. In 2001, a foot-and-mouth outbreak in the U.K. cost farmers 8 billion British pounds (about $12 billion). North American has been free of foot-and-mouth disease for decades, but it's still rampant around the globe.

Read more about the synthetic foot-and-mouth capsule at PLOS Pathogens.